Sometimes you have to wonder where some of our everyday expressions come from.

Why on earth, for example, would anyone coin an expression like “throwing the baby out with the bathwater?” Is this a widespread problem? Was this warning handed down after an epidemic of careless mothers launching infants out the window as they emptied their wash basins?

Regardless of its origins, the phrase gives me pause after the hearty discussion in Chimes lately about what discernment has to do with football. Some of the responses have shown concern about “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” In one’s zeal to highlight all the problematic aspects of how we tend to watch football, the thinking goes, one endangers the feasibility of watching football altogether.

This should maintain a great distance from the truth. Discernment should lead us to a purer sports viewing experience, not none at all. The problem is not anything inherent to the act of watching a football game. Granted, too much TV at the expense of exercise, household tasks or marital communication is obviously riddled with peril, but this has to do with the amount of watching, not watching itself.

Similarly, what I’m most interested in exploring is the way we watch – which, I’ve insisted, too often involves occupying a parallel universe.

We Reformed folk should have this down by now – it’s not culture itself that’s the problem, but whether we, through culture, glorify God. One of the letters to the editor last week had it right – sitting on the couch with the game on need not automatically make us zombies, or “sponges,” as the letter put it. The only problem is when it does.

But to refrain from watching football (or any sport) completely is to miss out on some of the culture’s finest pageantry. Forgive me for romanticizing it, but this is the last issue before Thanksgiving, when football fills our nostrils as warmly as holiday kitchen aromas.

Football is an art form, in a sense, a way of filling physical space with something organic and colorful. Watching a play break from its neatly ordered rows to a random scattering of players is a display of human ingenuity and invention. I mean, in what other setting would so many large, introverted millionaires dress in costumes and collide at full speed, and wouldn’t something be lost if they didn’t?

As renowned sportswriter Frank Deford asked when he came to Calvin for last year’s January Series, who’s to say that anthropologists centuries down the road won’t consider a Barry Sanders run, a Michael Jordan dunk, a Tiger Woods tee shot right up there along with all the great art of our era? Shouldn’t they?

There is also no denying the important function football viewing can play in the relationships of men. Here again, last week’s letter writer was right on – one of the most unifying things among a group of males is a communal football viewing experience. Males aren’t known, archetypically, for their knack for relating to each other with much depth or intimacy. Football is a catalyst of sorts.

I see no inconsistency in talking about the beauty of football – its art, its spontaneity, its role in male relationships – and our current discussion about keeping an eye and ear open for the messages in which football on TV is marinated.

But I understand the defense mechanisms in faithful viewers when such criticisms arise. The problem here is the residue of religious tradition that is fixated on taboos, on do’s and don’t’s.

Taboos give us the impression that certain activities – watching an R or NC-17 movie, drinking alcohol – are wrong in themselves, and others – reading a book, going to church – are incapable of any harm. Thus speaking negatively about an activity is quickly translated as a taboo against it.

This flies in the face of what discernment is all about. Football, odd as it sounds, is part of humans’ fulfillment of the cultural mandate. So the question, as with all culture in a fallen world, is how to find the good and how to find the bad. Discernment, you might say, has to do with throwing out the bathwater and hanging on to the baby.