Confessions of a Preacher's Kid

Morality sans faith

2011-06-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

~~Quick~~As usual, not-so-quick context: for my capstone class, I had to write a paper about my career choices and such, and being at a Christian University, many of the questions I was supposed to answer revolved around God, God's "calling" for my life, and such things. I decided, as I have as of late, that I don't want to pretend that I have an active faith or even know what God is all about, because there's no reason to, and it's counterproductive anyway. So I began to answer the pertinent questions thus:

The question of how God fits into all of this is a very complicated one for me, personally. Or, conversely, it could be framed as a very simple one, depending on how you ask it. As far as I am certain, and as far as my conscious decisions are concerned, God has not really had any effect on my decisions or career choices thus far.

I haven't posted here in forever, mostly because I've been really busy with school and just life in general (and because I have a Tumblr now to fire of shorter thoughts before they're gathered into a long-winded post here). Since this essay turned out to be a good thinking/writing out of my current position (or lack of position) on God, faith, and the surrounding matters, I thought I'd post the relevant parts here. The contents also partially explains my lack of writing here. A significant reason is that I've been busy, and my mind has been very full dealing with other things in my life, pushing less critical things like this to the back burner. But part of the reason it's not so critical at this point, and another reason that I haven't been dealing with such things, is because I've kind of reached an end of sorts. I've more or less been here for a while now, and I talked about it in my last post. But I've reached somewhere that I am pretty comfortable in, personally, at least, and it's a place that doesn't involve God, except peripherally, because of those around me. I'm not opposed to the idea of God, or Christianity (although I'm very opposed to many expressions of Christianity I've witnessed), or theism in general, and I'm open to faith if that's where I end up. But right now, I just don't have any reason to go there, I don't have any need for a divine being or any reason to go seeking after one. It's an interesting place to be, especially when I'm surrounded by Christians and people who are varying degrees of concerned with my eternal destiny, and what they see as a revocation of my faith. In reality, I have simply acknowledged that as far as I'm aware, I have at no point in my life had any more than a façade of a faith, designed to fulfill expectations and act like I was supposed to. When I went looking for something beyond that, the only things I found that made sense and resonated with me personally had no need for God to get involved. So that's where I ended up.

Anyway, as tends to happen when I sit down and write, that was a longer digression than I was intending. And I'll digress just a little more before getting to my essay, by way of introduction to what I actually wrote about: many (probably most) Christians rely on their faith and God as the source of their morality, and to a great degree, meaning, ambitions and motivations. As a result, many assume that non-theists, with this source of all morality and meaning ripped out of their lives, have no moral structure and no meaning in their life. I've heard this kind of rhetoric repeatedly from Christians who just don't understand that God and faith are not the only valid source of morality and meaning. There has recently been an effort by atheists to counter this notion, including billboards asserting that you can be "good without God." I'm a huge fan of this effort, but it has ruffled a lot of Christians' feathers, to the point that many of the billboards have been vandalized in various ways. I sort of understand (but disagree with) the opposition, and am severely disappointed by (but unfortunately not surprised by) the vandalism. But anyway, that's another topic, I have an essay to excerpt from. Maybe more on that later. What now follows is an excerpt of my career essay that does a decent job of detailing what my morals, ambitions, motivations, and goals are in the absence of faith. Because I do, in fact, have a decent moral framework that is not dependent on God any kind of faith. Anyway, slightly-edited-excerpt time:

To answer whether or not I see God's direction in my career path, what talents God has given me, and how I see myself serving God in my career, my answers are, simplistically, "no", "none", and "not", respectively.

Of course, it is a little bit more complex than that. My parents, for one, would certainly argue that God has given me these talents, whether I acknowledge it or not, and that God has been guiding my career path, and indeed life, regardless of whether I acknowledge God or not. And if God does indeed exist, and is something similar to the Christian God, that would be true. Additionally, I don't pretend to know for sure whether or not there is a God, and whether or not he or she has done these things in my life. But none of my conscious motivation or decisions have really taken that into account. What has affected my decisions significantly is my personal beliefs and morals, which are certainly influenced by my Christian upbringing, and still bear significant resemblance to generic Judeo-Christian morality. But prior to coming to college, and processing through significant discussion and 40,000 words of blogging, my motivations for such morals were solely out of conformance to my upbringing. That base has now shifted to a vague moral humanist kind of foundation, built on a basic belief in common human dignity and human rights, and some sense of the ubiquitous Golden Rule – things that are hardly exclusive to Christianity, or even theology. But that is from whence my motivations stem.

As for God's role in my life? As far as I can tell, and as far as I'm concerned, my talents and aptitudes are a result of genetics, upbringing, opportunity, and generally, the great cosmic dice of stochasticity. I realize that I am insanely privileged to have drawn the metaphorical lot that I have – a heterosexual, cisgendered, white, middle-class American male attending a private university with talents and skills that I was given the opportunity to build, take advantage of, and expand upon, and ones that, with the aforementioned education, usually result in a solidly upper-middle-class starting wage. My consciousness of this privilege, along with my other beliefs, motivate my desire to use those skills and resources, within and beyond my career, to advocate for minorities, support those fighting for human equality whenever I can, and work to end oppression, discrimination, and economic disparity where I can. This can include something as simple as contributing monetarily to organizations and efforts that do this work, as well as things like using my skills for things like building a website for Haven, working for organizations like Agros International, and getting directly involved myself in advocacy and assistance.

So these are the things that influence my day-to-day and long-term choices, rather than morals and mandates stemming from God or a Christian worldview. And these are the things that will continue to motivate my life, regardless of where my faith, or lack thereof, ends up landing. Any faith I ultimately embrace will necessarily be very concerned with these kinds of priorities, and the root motivation will likely be bolstered by whatever theology I may end up with. My career path decisions thus far have largely been motivated by opportunity and alignment with my skill and talents. As I mentioned above, I am very fortunate that those things line up with a career that is in demand and well-compensated. These motivations are influenced by my moral framework and beliefs – working for Agros, for instance, was an excellent pairing of my passions and skills with my beliefs. And beyond that, my greater vocation – what I do with my time and other resources outside of my job – will be greatly influenced by that as well.

So briefly, I see myself not so much serving a God that I don't understand or believe in as much as I see myself serving a humanity that I see very clearly all around me – working, as best I can, to make the world a better place for everyone, especially those less privileged than myself. I am in a good position to do so largely because of the talents, skills, and aptitudes that I ended up with through a combination of nature, nurture, and luck, and I intend to use that position to work for the bettering of the world in general. That is my service, my motivation, and my career plan.

Some responses to my update

2011-03-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

As often happens when I say things (especially since these cross-post to Facebook), people responded. My last post generated intriguing and particularly wide-ranging responses, so as often happens, I'm writing a response post, because any response comment would just be an endless, impossibly thin column, and it separates original responses from any responses to the response, so it's better for everyone.

So! First of all, a few specific responses, moving into some more general response, with specificity sprinkled liberally throughout.

Tyler surmised that I don't like Dawkins and Falwell because they are "confrontational." That isn't quite right. I don't dislike Dawkins and Falwell simply because they are confrontational. I dislike them because they are dismissive, angry, and publicly and shamelessly place people who don't think like them almost at some lower level of humanity. Both of them horribly distort and misuse their belief systems, or at least how I believe their belief systems should treat other people. Central to my belief, regardless of whether I believe in God, is the humanity of humanity - that we are all people, all worthy of equal respect and dignity, and should be treated as such, with respect and deference. It's moral humanism on one side, a more social justice Christianity on the other, and the Golden Rule no matter where you come from.

And I'm not really irritated by people trying to convert me - mostly just amused, actually. Because I've been there, done that, heard all the reasons and arguments, hell, advocated most of them. I highly doubt anyone trying to convert me is going to tell me anything new, and no one thus far has. That doesn't mean I know everything - I certainly don't. But anyone who is trying to convert me isn't likely to tell me anything I don't. And it is true that the people who have been most influential in me not just throwing the baby out with the (pretty damn brackish) bathwater are mainly those around me who are confident in their faith and make no attempt to convert me - only understand me better, if I ask them about things. These are people who have years of experience on me, people who I know think hard and critically about their faith, and admittedly many of whom share the same periphery that I do. Many of these are professors at SPU, and are a large reason I am thankful for my experience here.

And as for Danny's (intentional or not) pointing at the historic witness of Jesus. That is something I need to look at more, which is an interesting challenge. There is, of course, the Bible, and books like Case for Christ (which I read back in the day), but those are, for very good reasons, pretty one-sided. We did base our calendar around the guy and swear by him, but that's because we're Western culture, which is increasingly becoming Global culture. The Arab world had their own calendar and swears, before the world became standardized on Western culture. Christianity did spread, but much of that spread (Constantine, the Holy Roman Empire) were not reasons that I can exactly get behind. So there's that. But I do need to have a good idea of what to do with Jesus existing historically regardless of where I end up, which I don't really right now.

Which kind of brings me to the central issue - whether or not an "intellectual conversion" is at all possible, at least for me. Danny separated "faith" from "relationship with God", and I don't think that's a meaningful distinction for me. I spent the first twenty or so years of my life doing Christianity just fine, purportedly even believing in it, whatever that means absent a relationship. I certainly adhered to all the principles, argued for them, and was ready to tell others why what they thought was wrong if it didn't match my perspective. But that all fell apart when that faith's foundations crumbled. That faith was based on things like opposition to evolution, the evils of the world, fear and avoidance of Hell, conservatism, and a whole lot of really terrible analogies. My faith was defined by what it was not - it was not tainted by liberalism, it was not doing bad things, it was not going to Hell, and significantly, it was not really questionable, because it was not wrong. Obviously, things kind of fell apart when I realized that evolution was science, liberalism wasn't all hell and brimstone and really at the core is being more concerned about people, Christianity isn't primarily about getting a ticket to heaven, and the world isn't going to corrupt me if I don't shut it out. I suppose it did corrupt my conservative evangelical Christianity pretty thoroughly, but that's not nearly a bad thing.

So I've done a faith about knowing, about arguments, about being convinced. They ended up being really bad arguments. And maybe there are good arguments out there, but I still am repulsed by the idea of someone having to convince me that there is a God. Especially when so many have failed, and have presented pretty poor excuses for arguments. And Christians seems predisposed to arguments that include "Christianity is right" as an assumption somewhere, even though they don't realize it. But even if there were good arguments - if "faith" is separate from (or at least not a result of) "relationship with God" - I don't think it's a faith that I want. It feels like a very empty faith, a meaningless faith, and if this faith is going to have a significant effect in my life, be reason for doing things, that's not what I'm looking for.

I'm not sure what I am looking for. If anyone else is involved, I think it is more of someone introducing me to God than convincing me of God - but that's complicated because God isn't corporeal, and it sounds annoying to boot. I'm not trying to make God into anything specific, or put God in a box, or really require anything of God - except that God shows up in some recognizable fashion. Not in the fact that my life has been pretty good thus far, or that something unlikely (but still feasibly possible) thing happened. Nothing that proves to me that God is there. Matt, I agree that any experience used to prove God's existence is pretty questionable. And experience isn't reliable, but it's all we've got, really. If the only time I experience God is while I'm getting a root canal, it's unlikely that I'm going to do much with that. But even if I initially experience God while getting a root canal, but then continue to be able to communicate and experience going forward? That may be something different. I'm not sure. I think I agree with your and Danny's consensus though.

The point being, if I'm going to have faith, I want it to be based on knowing that God is there. That can only come through first-person experience, like Kristen's that I mentioned in my previous post. And whenever I talk to someone and we're past any proving or arguments or such, it always comes down to that. It was a similar situation whenever Becky and I really talked about it. They just know that God exists, and have some kind of relationship with God. They don't have any arguments or reasons that convinced them. They have supportive evidence, but none that makes any sense without the experience of God existing.

And I don't really have anything that I want God to be. I have a lot of ideas of what I don't want God to be that mostly boil down to "hypocritical". And I suppose, with that, some basic parameters - just and loving for starters. And pride is certainly a factor. It's always a factor. I'm human, perhaps more prideful than most. But I also don't want "pride" to be an excuse to dismiss my ability to know anything, or be confident in anything. Because I don't think it's prideful to think that modern science, for instance, knows a lot about how the world works. Not everything, not enough to rule out God (which is probably impossible anyway), but a lot. Certainly a lot more than 2000 years ago. "Pride" is too often used to just dismiss anything the dismisser doesn't like. I'm not in any way accusing you of doing so, Evan - I actually very much appreciated your thought. I just don't really know how to not be prideful, but at the same time have a faith that is rational and reasonable and has intellectual integrity. I suppose maybe I don't trust God enough to be that - I spent too long believing that God hates science and evolution and thinks reason is dangerous, primarily a tool of humanity to explain God away. I'll have to think about that one. Thanks.

And Nicki, you just posted, but your post lines up nicely with what I was going to wrap up with anyway, so here goes! One of the big problems with most reasons I'm given to believe is that I'm perfectly content, right now at least, to live without God. I don't need a God to explain how I got here, why the world works. I don't need a God to motivate me to be good to my fellow human beings, to follow the Golden Rule. To take the relationship analogy perhaps a bit far, I'm happily single as far as God goes. I wouldn't mind a relationship. It might well make my life better and fuller. But I don't need that for anything. Perhaps that's the wrong attitude to take - but if I were to pursue God as if I wanted God more than anything, I would have to do a lot of playacting, and I've done quite enough of that in my life already.

And for the record, I do go to church. Not really for any terribly spiritual reasons, and certainly because of a certain amount of momentum, and a touch of expectations. But primarily, at my home church, there are good people who care about me, and many of whom are some of those good examples above, who are confident and thoughtful in their faith, but don't try to push that on me. Sometimes I go to other churches, many of which remind me that not everyone is doing things horribly wrong. Some (Quest, for example) are doing very good things. Yet others remind me that, yes, some people still are using Christianity in ways that I find repulsive. I limit my visits to such places, but even at some places, there are kernels of right.

I'm not sure how to actively put myself out there without presuming things that I don't believe. I'm open, I'm even willing to do a little investigation, if from a noncommittal perspective - reading the Bible not as a book of my faith, but as the book of Christianity. But much beyond that - actively seeking - ends up requiring too much pretension and acting. Again with the likely inappropriate extension of the relationship analogy: actively seeking out a relationship, as if you desperately need one, is a bad idea. I'd much rather run into someone, at the Teacup, downtown, at a bookstore, on the bus, and have things go from there. That's a little harder with God, since God has no corporeal presence, but if I continue on through life, open to the idea of a relationship with God, and God is around and interested, I'm betting I'll run into God sometime along the way.

I get annoyed very quickly with Jesus-is-My-Boyfriend-type things, and painting God as a romantic relationship, but I think the analogy works okay here. It's true of any relationship, romantic or otherwise. If I'm not interested, closed off to new relationships, it's unlikely I'll start any. But if I'm open, but not actively looking, I'll probably run across some. Some friendships and/or relationships I run into will greatly interest me, and I'll pursue them. But looking for relationship for the sake of being in relationship isn't what I want to do - in personal relationships or God ones.

So, to exit the relationship analogy, which has been stretched quite enough. I'm quite content right now to be a moral humanist. I don't need God to fill any holes in my life, which I don't think should be God's function anyway. I have a basis for morality (common human dignity, basically), an explanation (enough, anyway) for how the world got here and how we work (science), and meaning in life (making the world a better place for those who surround and will follow me, and enjoying the time I have). I'm not opposed to God showing up, or having a relationship with God. But it's not really something I need to sustain me. If God exists and is a relational God, I'd be quite interested in getting to know him, her, or it. But I have no reason to assume that is the case, so I'm going to have to run into God somehow - in a way that I recognize - to get that started. Which, I suppose, is what I'm waiting around for.

Thanks, all, for your input - it's got me thinking, and I probably didn't address everyone's points in here, but rest assured I read them and will mull them over, because they are all great thoughts. And I would be glad to talk with any of you about such things - I always love fleshing things out in person.

A brief update on faith, theism, God, and me

2011-03-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

It's been far too long since I've posted here, I've been busy with all kinds of life things, and have been spending more time over on Tumblr as well. But I just posted over there something that would make just as much sense here, that kind of explains why I haven't been posting as much here. So here goes.

I have been reading a thus-far intriguing book called Cloud Atlas, but I left it in the library yesterday and it hasn't showed up in their lost and found yet. So I resorted to reading the other book that has been langushing in my laptop bag for far too long, ever since my father read it and gave it to me. Said book is There Is A God by Anthony Flew, supposedly "the world's most notorious atheist," who I had never heard of. After reading, evidently he was a lot bigger among philosophers in the 60's, 70's, and 80's than he is these days, which would explain my ignorance of him, but I still think the claim is a bit reaching. In 2004, he apparently came out as believing in God, and some atheists got pissed, and religious people all over got really excited.

Now I'm a little underwhelmed by all of this, because he's only a deist, and doesn't even believe in the afterlife, which makes it a rather Pyhrric victory for Christians, I would think. And some of the endorsement quotes were less than heartening. Francis Collins crows that "Flew's colleagues in the church of fundamentalist atheism will be scandalized," the Denver Post calls it an "Intellectual conversion of great significance," and I've been highly disappointed and extremely skeptical of "intellectual conversions." But I've nonetheless made it through half of the preface and the introduction and two and a half chapters thus far.

I gave up halfway through the introduction, because I decided that its author, Roy Abraham Varghese, is, or at least comes across as, a pompous ass who gleefully delights in pointing out the apparently hilarious failures of atheism. Of what I read, he spent about a third of it quoting the likes of Richard Dawkins and another promoting Flew to almost godlike status in his philosophical brilliance (without, of course, mentioning that he's a deist at best). It's full of gleeful dismissal, and absolutely maddening to read. And I've long held that if someone gets to hold out Dawkins as an example of reasoned, respectful atheism, I get to pull out people like the late Jerry Falwell and James Dobson as examples of reasoned, respectful Christianity. From what I know of him, Dawkins is as bitter and gleefully dismissive as Varghese, and I want nothing do do with him.

So I gave up on the preface, hoping that Flew himself, having been an atheist for fifty years, would have some semblance of respect for the position. I haven't been disappointed - he hasn't made me want to throw the book across the bus yet, for instance, and has been very respectful of both sides thus far. But he also has spent three chapters talking very dryly about the various philosophical papers and debates he's been involved in, how he chummed with C.S. Lewis, and his various schoolings and romantic endeavors. I suppose this is kind of an autobiography, but it's been a dull, frustrating, mildly but not egregiously self-important one. Certainly not raising himself nearly to the importance that Varghese did in the preface, or I would no longer be reading this book.

The first chapter was interesting, in that he discussed his upbringing, which was rather similar to mine - a preacher's kid who did all the right things mainly to fulfill expectations but never had any heart or real interest in it, faced questions that he was in no way equipped to handle, and gave up. I haven't been quite as conclusive as he was, but the similar background will hopefully be beneficial. But after that, as I said, a bunch of paper titles and summaries, and name dropping, and not much substance. There was a brief dismissal of determinism that I found altogether dissatisfying (because I have thought about these things) and he called the basic "first cause" argument "formidable," (I don't think throwing God in as yet another proximate cause really helps anything, no matter how much you pretend God magically gets to be not proximate), but that's about it.

But he promises to actually get to the challenging and arguments for God in the next seven chapters, so hopefully there will be things of substance in there. But I admit that I highly doubt Flew will be successful in doing anything but frustrating me with mischaracterizations or improper dismissals, because so-called "intellectual conversions" have always left me wholly wanting and completely unconvinced.

In fact, I don't think anything is going to happen on the faith front until God decides to show up. That might sound a little defeatist or apathetic, but I don't really have any good reasons to have faith, and I don't understand reasons for faith other than "God exists, so we should get to know him/her/it." Trying to argue God into existence or threaten me with consequences if I don't believe isn't going to cut it. And really, I'm jealous of those who have experienced God, and I don't think it's fair that I haven't. I'm not opposed to the idea at all, and I'm not opposed to theism. But I just don't have any good reasons - making my family comfortable is not sufficient reason to lie about my motivations for everything in life and basic beliefs.

Earlier, Kristen posted a section of her admissions essay, which contained this brief excerpt:

It was at this retreat that everything changed. While my friends raised their hands fervently in praise during worship and knelt piously in the aisles for the altar call, I sat in the back, scornful and skeptical. And God, with a gentle persistence I would learn to recognize and appreciate in coming years, showed up. It is difficult to describe this experience fully, as I suspect words could never do it justice; however, in that time, God was there. God was real. We sat together for the remainder of the service, at which point God obligingly moved on and I was left joyously pondering my newfound revelation. I still lacked understanding, but this experience provided me with a basic foundation of faith from which I could begin to seek.

And I was jealous. Because at this point, I'm not even that scornful or skeptical. Just a little cynical, but that's mostly at Mars Hill and the like. Why doesn't God bother to just show up? If God exists, why does ze insist on sitting back on the sidelines, watching me flail around, being offered pathetic, circular, and in general unsatisfying arguments for zer existence, witnessing all kinds of miscarriage of Christianity and Jesus' stated goals?

And it's that, really, that has been why I haven't really posted here. I haven't really gone anywhere spiritually recently. I've cut out all of the parts of Christianity that I found unnecessary, hurtful, and problematic, I have a fairly coherent Christian theology, at least for all the peripheral stuff, that I would be willing to adopt. But I don't have any good reason to embrace theism, much less Christianity. And I don't think that's something that can be argued or reasoned, I think it's something that can be experienced. Because all of this God-talk, all of theology, doesn't really make sense if you don't have a relationship with God. And I don't, and I don't know how to. And as the omnipotent, invisible, imperceptible being, I think it's kind of God's job to reveal Godself to me, because I can't hop over into whatever ethereal realm God resides in, and all attempts to pray or read the Bible just end up with me talking to myself and getting mad at how the church has misused Scripture.

So until that revelation happens, I doubt I'll be convinced. I'll read the book, I'll continue discussions with my father and others who care about me, I'll keep my options open, but I can't think of anything that would convince me. It's not for lack of trying, it's not because I just haven't heard your awesome argument. It's because arguments aren't what I'm looking for.

Theology, one word at a time

2010-07-18T01:55:00.000-07:00

We are often asked to describe something - our life, our ambitions, ourselves - in a limited number of words. Sometimes one, sometimes two, maybe three. Ernest Hemingway is famous for his six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never used," and the idea has inspired many similar efforts across literature and the internet. This interest in distilling something - ourselves, a story - into its smallest possible form is strong and widespread, because it requires every word to count - discarding only the most essential of essentials, to arrive at the purest essence of its subject. Pondering this, I thought it would be interesting to write my theology in one word, then two, then three, and so on, as a unique (and hopefully helpful) way of expressing the most important aspects of my faith, and going outward from there. Each summary must stand on its own, without its surroundings, and be true to my beliefs. The first word is easy, since I've titled my creed of sorts a "Theology of Love." So I'll start there. This, I hope, will be a work in progress, hopefully improving (and not just growing) as I go. Getting too long may start getting unweildly and not as useful, but thus far, figuring out what one word needs to be added is hard. We'll see.

Love.
Love everyone.
God is love.
Love God, all humanity.
Love your neighbor above yourself.
Always share God's love. By example.
Love everyone perfectly. Any failure is sin.

Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (and me)

2010-07-08T23:06:00.001-07:00

This is cross-posted from my Tumblr, because it ended up being substantial enough to justify its own blog post.

I believe that there simply isn't definitive enough Biblical mandate against committed homosexual relationships to justify anything less than embracing our homosexual brothers and sisters as God created them, and loving them for who they are, and that there certainly isn't enough to justify excluding or condemning them. I don't see sexuality as any different at the core than the issues of female clergy, abolition of slavery, or interracial marriage. There is at least some scripture - applicable today or not - that can be interpreted as contradicting all of the above. But there's a consensus on the last two, and generally at least extradenominational tolerance of the first, that just doesn't exist for sexuality yet.

The few scriptures on the issue are at best not definitive, and as I read them either ambiguous or not applicable. Taken against the central mandate of love, considering the integral part of a person that sexuality is and the witness of my gay and lesbian friends and acquaintances, Christian and non-Christian, I can't in good conscience condemn them for being born gay. I am, in fact, convicted to love and embrace them and their sexuality. Such action is doubly needed precisely because of the fear, condemnation, anger, and doublespeak directed at them by much of the church. As a result of this, gay and lesbian Christians are too often alienated and distant from the church, Christianity, and Christ, for reasons that I believe are invalid.

In light of the Presbyterian general assembly voting earlier today to allow non-celibate gay clergy, I was asked on Facebook why I was in favor of the vote. That's what I came up with, plus a little expansion.

It's certainly not the entirety of my views, and doesn't have the specifics. My final essay for one of my classes, while somewhat dry, has more of them. But it's a good summary and gist, which I think is helpful.

In regards to the assembly, they later voted to not discuss or vote on any changes to the definition of marriage, which was another of the proposals, and the gay clergy has to be approved by the churches (which a similar proposal failed at two years ago), but it's a step forward. Objections or reconsiderations of the non-discussion vote are still theoretically possible, but there aren't any indicators of if that will happen.

Letting Go

2010-06-27T00:57:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've been feeling stuck. I began this endeavor by dismantling the religion I inherited, discarding the parts that were inconsistent, or flew in the face of my experience, my relationships, or my reason. This left the remains of my inherited theology on the floor in pieces, largely because that worldview was very monolithic - it came as a package, questioned either as whole or not at all (as always, I've got another blog post about that). What I've picked up so far is, in a word, love.

Love for others, a respect for the world we live in, an obligation to care for those who need it, a mandate to put others before yourself. All of this comprises a huge part of what Jesus had to say while he was on this earth. But when I try to take this and set it up as my theology and continue as a Christian, I run into a problem.

Namely that being a Christian, at least to pretty much everyone who cares whether I call myself a Christian, isn't about that. At least, that's what it appears to me. Don't get me wrong - it's a very important part of being Christian. It's what you do as a Christian. It's what Christ calls us to do, what God demands of us. I've got that part down.

But it's not what determines your status as a Christian. What makes you a Christian (where I come from, anyway) is having a ticket to heaven. Because you can very well do all of those things I mentioned and not believe in God - I know, because that's functionally what I'm doing. So what makes me think I am a Christian?

I don't know. As I try to put together any coherent vision of salvation, it crumbles when I realize, for instance, that I don't really believe in Hell. And it's not helped by the fact that to this day, I still have no conception of what it really means to "believe in God" or "accept Jesus" or even "pray". I know what all of that looks like from the outside, and I know how to "do" it. But there's no soul to it - no meaning, no actual understanding. It's like a life-size model car, that by all appearances is just like all the other cars, but has no engine, no drivetrain, nothing that makes a car a car. A fantastic illustration of this is the cargo cults left behind by World War II.

The upshot of this is that what tenets of theology, what faith that I do have, if you can call it faith, are things that are supposed to be the result, but I don't have any of the motivations or underlying beliefs that are supposed to produce that result. I have built motivations and support for that result, independent of faith, divinity, God, or religion, on a very humanist basic conception of common human dignity. So when I go to try to figure out what to do with God, it's all just theology and salvation, and I keep running into things and people that tell me I'm wrong, I can't have arrived at this conclusion the way I did, my motivations are invalid, I just don't understand. They say that because of that lack of understanding, my wrong motivations, I don't see that homosexuality is a sin, people like me are going to Hell because I didn't go about it the right way, I can't just ignore that, I'm veering off of the highway of Christianity and getting lost in the woods, I don't love Jesus, I'm losing my faith, that's a slippery slope, and by the way evolution smells funny.

The problem is, for those kinds of purposes, I don't claim to be a Christian. In reality, I never really have been, and I've come to terms with that. I can't veer out of what I'm not in. And trying to jump into that kind of (part of?) Christianity is exactly where I don't want to go, because I've been there, and it blew up in my face. But every time I try to approach God or spirituality, all of that flares up again, because it's the only way I know how to try to deal with God. And it's all hollow, and has no significance or meaning to me, and again, much of it flies up against what I do know and believe, and I can't put together a coherent theology, because I do too many things "wrong". It's a problem.

I've talked to my girlfriend about this, as she has a much different relationship with God - one that is grown out of herself, her own experiences and beliefs, and not encumbered by all of the trappings that I run into. Her advice was basically to decide what you're going to do - find some way to figure out how God fits into this, or strike out as a secular moral humanist - and do it. If I'm going include God, do just that - and eschew the rest of it.

And as I sit here, with all of the text and processing above, that sounds like a very good option. So I'm going to try it. Bascially, saying "God, this love stuff? I'm trackin'. Love my neighbors? Care for the least of these? All of the beatitudes? I can get on board with that. The rest of this mangled wreck that is my dismantled religion, from which I've salvaged those precious few tenets? Not so much, and I don't care. It's behind me now, and I'm starting over with nothing but love."

That sounds good. Am I personally capable of doing that? Maybe so. Am I allowed to do that? Frankly, I don't really care. It's a struggle as much with my own internalized religion as it is with any external opinions or forces. And I'm fairly confident that if I am able to do it, it will only be if I refuse to be held to that scaffolded religion that I came out of, refuse to be questioned by it, and stop trying to reconcile it. That may (and probably does) come across as arrogant, dismissive, wrong, horrible, even sinful and blasphemous. But that's not my intention. I simply don't see any other way to move forward, because the more I look at it, the more I realize that what I'm doing isn't working, and I don't see a way to make it work.

I think I'm to the point where I simply can't fit the pieces of my former worldview back together, because it's broken, it's missing huge portions, and it was never intended to be taken as anything but a whole anyway. I have to, as David Bazan so eloquently put it, "let go of what I know and honor what exists." In fact, that song (Bearing Witness) keeps getting more accurate in describing what I'm dealing with that I'm just going to paste the lyrics in here, to finish out this post.

I clung to miracles I have not seen
From ancient autographs I can not read
And though I've repented I'm still tempted I admit
But it's not what bearing witness is

Too full of prophecy and fear to see
The revelation right in front of me
So sick and tired of trying to make the pieces fit
Because it's not what bearing witness is

When the gap between
What I hoped would be
And what is makes me weep for my kids
I take a cleansing breath and make a positive confession
But is that what bearing witness is

Though it may alienate your family
And blur the lines of your identity
Let go of what you know and honor what exists
Son, that's what bearing witness is
Daughter, that's what bearing witness is

Listen to it, it's good stuff, and pretty much sums it up better than I ever could.

Pre-emptive reponse note:I know there are those who will read this and end up with the reaction that I am falling away from the faith, I'm giving up, I'm being pulled in by the deception of the world or Satan or Seattle or gnosticism. For the first couple, I can say that I'm not. This is the only way I can see forward, and trying to put pieces together that are horribly broken and were never meant to fit without the whole anyway is futile. To the last point? If you want to think that, you can. You could be right. And if you are, and if God really cares enough about all of the periphery and structure that I'm putting behind me, you can trust that he'll confront me with it eventually. But pointing out where I'm stepping outside the bounds of Christianity, or where the Bible says I'm wrong, simply isn't going to be helpful or useful. Because it's me and love, trying to find this God that everyone keeps talking about, and that's it.

I do plan to be reading the Bible on the way, but being very aware that I've been trained well in how to read the Bible "right," and am aware of how that colors, frames, and distorts what God is actually trying to say. One thing I have learned is that Biblical literalism, and many understandings of inerrancy, get in the way of understanding what the Bible actually is trying to say, and I intend to read it with that in mind.

While I was typing this post, TweetDeck popped up Roger Ebert's latest tweet: "If a good man is refused heaven and a bad one let in because of a technicality in church law, that doesn't speak well of God." Appropriate.

Germany, Capitalism, Immigration, Sodom, and our "Christian Nation"

2010-06-15T18:38:00.001-07:00

I've long been aware that the reason Sodom was in such trouble with God had little do to with their homosexual relations and a lot to do with their vicious inhospitality, but the other day, I came across a good summary of scripture, Jewish writings, and historical documents that bear that out. I posted it on my tumblr and Facebook, the latter of which resulted in the following question:

"Why the cheap shot at Arizonans? Especially given the fact that the controversial law is essentially equivalent to a federal law already on the books?"

And I had to admit, the cheap shot at Arizona was somewhat unfair. I was going to add a disclaimer that I'm still a keeping a careful eye on the Arizona law, and don't condemn it as strongly as many do, which is true, and which I did.

And to answer the question, I wrote this blog post. Because I want to be clear, and the issue at hand is much bigger than a law that Arizona passed. In fact, I would be glad to generalize my criticism to the country in general, and have amended my Tumblr post accordingly. So, my answer:

I was referring not solely to the new law, but to the general attitude it belies and embodies: protecting our country's precious and supposedly self-earned resources from invaders from neighboring nation - the assumption that what we have earned is solely our own, and we have no obligation to share it with others or care for the stranger, because we earned all that we have.

As Josephus wrote:

"They no more remembered the benefits that they had received from [God], hated foreigners and declined all intercourse with others"

And the rabbi at the bottom:

"The men of Sodom had no consideration for the honour of their Owner by not distributing food to the wayfarer and stranger, but they even fenced in all the trees on top above their fruit so that so that they should not be seized; not even by the bird of heaven"

We, neither as a country nor as the state of Arizona, have obviously not quite gone to this extreme. But Sodom is a cautionary extreme - a parable of sorts - that cautions against the rugged and jealous individualism and entitlement that was exemplified, and which is prevalent in modern America to a great extent.

In my opinion, if we are to be a "Christian nation," we cannot stand for this conception that what we earn is our own, that we deserve all that we have, firstly because it is patently false, on an individual and national level, and secondly because Scripture strongly condemns it.

That doesn't necessarily make for good business, and it doesn't work well if you run a nation that prides itself in its power, independence, and economic status, but that doesn't mean Scripture is wrong.

I believe that Christians should be intensely focused on caring for the poor, sick, and needy, with less concern for yourself than for your neighbor. You don't have to believe that we need to do this as a nation, but I don't see how you can call it a Christian nation if you don't.

I recently came across an article about Germany's capitalism, which I don't know anything about besides this article, but from what I read seems more in line with being a Christian nation that practices capitalism than our dear old US of A. They have an extensive social safety net, much more so than the US. And it's expensive, but that's an expense that Germany is willing to bear.

The conservative concern with big government, overspending, and general ineptitude is a valid one, and one that I don't dismiss. But personally, I would prefer to have a country that overspends and is inefficient, but has an effective safety net for our citizens (as a start) and welcomes immigrants as those see how our country treats its citizens and want to join it. This is a better end goal, I believe, than one that is fiscally sound and has all its books balanced, but leaves people to fend for themselves, asserting that they should just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, regardless of their family or environment, and looks upon immigrants as a drain on our economy that we deal with by making them jump through a long process of hoops, and then hunts down the ones that fail to jump through all the hoops.

I realize that there are many immigrants that are here as drug mules and part of the narcotics trade, and those that are violent offenders. But I believe that those issues should be dealt with by dealing with those issues - not by cracking down on all immigrants, regardless of their involvement with the drug trade or violent tendencies, who didn't manage to make it through the immigration process. I don't have any personal experience with it, but the accounts that I've seen and the huge berth of attorneys who specialize solely in immigration issues testify to a long, arduous, and overcomplicated system that is broken in many ways.

A defense of social constructivism

2010-06-13T04:24:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote an essay for one of my classes, and this paragraph turned out particularly well, something that even my professor pointed out, so I thought I would post it here, since it's very relevant to my struggles with faith and morality, as I find myself functionally being more of a moral humanist than anything else.

The idea that morality is built up from society, tradition, and experience of humanity over time seems much more appropriate than an absolute but obfuscated rulebook being handed down as the foundation of morality. I don't see why there is implicit authority in imposing a morality from a religion, whose particular conception of morality tends to change over time as the rest of culture and humanity change, despite supposedly being handed as absolute from on high. If God were a being that interacted with the world in direct, clear, and universally recognizable ways, there would be a good reason for religion to have a special claim on morality. But in this world, there is at best indirect, abstract, uncertain interaction between the divine and humanity. So to the questions often posed to those who assert morality without God — "By what authority do you enforce human dignity? Who gives you the right to say that I have to respect the dignity of my fellow humans?" — I reply that dignity is endowed simply by being human and sharing residence of this world, and I don't believe that pointing at tradition and religion endows Chrisitans with any special authority on the issue, when I have no basis for attributing any authority to a particular understanding of God and, most importantly, don't believe such an authority is necessary to give humans humanity.

The audacity of the homosexual lifestyle

2010-06-08T00:36:00.000-07:00

Recently, one of my friends posted a link to an an article about a fairly typical Christian response to the growing prevalence of homosexuality in our culture, especially television, which is seen as an assault on good Christian heternormativity. When posted on Facebook, my friends were surprised by it. I was not. In fact, when I heard that there were openly gay characters on Glee that were being portrayed as (of all things) normal, the first thing I thought of was of the condemnation that Christians would undoubtedly heap upon it. This, in long, is, as best as I can tell from years of observation, why:

If you know that the gays are not only openly and boldly sinning (or at least misguided, see: Glee), but doing their best to convince, or even worse subtly suggest (again, see: Glee) to poor children suffering from same-sex attraction that their feelings are not evil, sinful, and unhealthy, as God and you well know (and as God lays out in thousands of verses...oh wait, that's loving your fellow humans and caring for the poor).

These gays, and their evil depraved liberal compatriots are trying to push onto their young, impressionable minds that it's not only okay, but perhaps even something to be celebrated and embraced. They're trying to take this depravity and ickiness and turn it into something...acceptable. And you can't have that, because then these children might go as far as to not believe that they are depraved and sinful, and refuse to go to the psychological manhandling that is ex-gay camp, and turn out to be normal, healthy, well-adjusted homosexuals. And if too many kids end up doing that, instead of being repressed, shamed, and pushed to the margins of society, then what will happen to the examples to point to to prove your point?

What of those who have destroyed families by coming to terms with their repressed sexuality halfway through a false marriage? What of the youth who are having sex without guidelines, because they are already completely outside of their rigid Christian morality anyway? We can't have all these Neil Patrick Harrises prancing around. If everyone ends up appearing normal by all appearances, and even good, even decent faithful Christian God-fearing homosexuals, who will you point to to demonstrate the depravity? How will you preserve the holy heteronormativity?

What examples will you use to paint these individuals as outside of God's ideal with a wide brush, like singles, and women, and blacks? Or not the last one any more...Christianity has figured that one out. Get with the program. And women are mostly okay these days, as long as they don't get to heady about it, and depending on who you ask.

You can't.

And that's the problem.

It may just be that I have spent too much time trying to deny to myself that these viewpoints exist and are widespread, only to be proved wrong, time and time again. But I was not surprised by this. Not in the least. Dismayed? Re-disappointed? Annoyed? Yes. But not surprised.

And I know many people who fall within my wide caricature here, including my own family (hi, Dad!) and friends. And I am well aware that not every Christian who is against homosexuality believes all of this. I know that I am myself painting a wide brush, and being overly general and vindictive. Which is because all of this sounds pretty ridiculous to me and you, but if you insert at the base of it a solid, sincere, God-fearing, honest-to-goodness conviction that homosexuality is evil, not God's intention, a perversion of humanity by the world, and all of this is just the devil, speaking to me, the producers of Glee, directly or indirectly by the liberal establishment, the media, and shows like Glee, most of it makes sense. And I almost understand that, in my rational mind. But the way I put it , it sounds ugly and crazy, because if you don't have that conviction, it is ugly. Ugly, petty, and wrong.

I don't have that conviction.

And I don't think there is anything - not in the Bible, not in rhetoric, not in my family, not in pity or prayer - that will change that.

The wonderful (and heck, the so-so, if there are any) gay people that I know and love, who have struggled with Christianity, struggled with their families, their community, and themsevles, and ultimately concluded that there is nothing broken within them, that it is the world and their religion that is broken, are a testimony. A frighteningly unassailable testimony. And it'll take more than fearmongering and prooftexting to change that.

Many of those (my father) who I think of most when I go off like this are wonderful people. Sincere, God-fearing, loving, beautiful people. And they don't necessarily campaign against homosexuality. My parents, and 67% of my home county, voted against it. And flinch at, and probably comment on, the pervasive homosexuality (and therefore immorality) in television, the media, and the world. The motivation for their beliefs and actions are rooted in a deep love for, conviction from, and belief in God. And to them, the above is biased and inflammatory, but under all the rhetoric, necessary and true. I think. Because you, I, Seattle, liberals, are decieved by this culture, by shows like Glee, by the world, by Satan himself, perhaps. God is looking down on us, shaking his head sadly, because we are being decieved by moral relativism, and we don't even know it.

Much like, to me, the religious right is holding to "tradition" when it needs to be reconsidered. Subscribing to rules when it is justice and people that need to be seen and considered. And being tricked into holding to lines and pillars of tradition, because they are safer and easier than progress. And God is looking down on them, shaking his head sadly, because they are being decieved into excluding and casting out his beloved, and they don't even know it.

That's the world I live in. It's messy, the lines I've painted are anything but firm or entirely fair, and I don't know what to do with it all the time.

So this?

This did not surprise me.

It Passed!

2010-03-22T00:58:00.000-07:00

I've been twittering a good bit tonight about the healthcare bill that is on its way to Obama's desk. I haven't talked about such things much here, but providing decent healthcare as a basic right is something that is very much in line with Jesus' calling to care for the sick and needy, I believe. And due to the huge amount of fearmongering and politicking surrounding this bill, I decided to sit down and read the thing. Or at least a summary of the thing over at THOMAS - still no small feat, at over 20,000 words. But I read through it - skimming when it started getting into technicalities here and there. I'm not nearly a lawyer, but from what I understood, here's my overall summary of it:

Unsurprisingly, there was no dictated communist takeover of the country's healthcare system. What was there was the expansion of Medicaid to all the poor - the most important part of the bill for me. I wasn't sure, because it was a relatively short section. But Title II expands coverage to everyone below 133% of the poverty line, mandating it by 2014 and allowing it as soon as April 1 of this year. Previously getting Medicaid required you to be disabled, pregnant, or a child, with a few other qualifications. This bill removes those requirements. The bill also established a lot of basic requirements for health insurance - regulation of the insurance industry and of insurance plans to ensure that everyone (for some definition of everyone) has a given basic level of health coverage, and sets requirements for individuals to purchase coverage. It also, as promised, sets up a healthcare exchange that is kind of a central repository for insurance plans, monitored by the government. These were obviously the meat of the bill - health coverage standards, the individual mandate, and the insurance exchange - so they're in there for sure. There were also several sections that worked towards making information about doctors, healthcare plans, hospital ratings, and the like more available and open to the public. Additionally, there were many things to improve the existing programs, adding checks and requirements, and Title V added lots of funding to encourage students to go through medical school - loan forgiveness, additional loans, money to schools. These are all good things in my mind.

There was also a lot of fluffy language - requirements for things to be planned, "senses of the Senate," advising people to do this and that. I'm assuming this is pretty standard in politics, but it would be better without it.

Obviously, there was a lot more in there than that, but that's the quick version. I also took some notes of a few sections I found interesting or pertinent given everything that's been thrown around, that I've listed below:

Abortion, as I read it, is basically up to states, but there is no federal funding for abortion (Sec. 1303)
In addition to the expansion of Medicaid, people below 400% of the poverty line get special tax breaks for healthcare coverage (Sec. 1402)
The bill forbids discrimination against hospitals that don't participate in assisted suicide (Sec. 1553)
Coverage for anti-smoking medications is added to Medicaid (Sec. 2502)
There is funding for sex ed, both abstinence and contraception, with a special mention/funding of abstinence education (Sec. 2952 and 2953)
An Office of Women's Health is established in several departments (Sec. 3509)
If I'm reading it right, a federal mandate similar to the one in King County for restaurants to post calories and other nutritional information on their menus (Sec. 4205)
Special assistance for pregnant teens (Sec. 10212)
Employees at free clinics are protected under malpractice laws as if they were employees of Public Health Services (Sec. 10608)

For a more informed overview of the healthcare bill, check out PolitiFact's take, The New York Times' summary, or FactCheck's summary of recent arguments. But overall, I'm glad this thing finally passed, despite all the fearmongering, confusion, and deception that did its best to bring it down. Healthcare should be a basic right, all the more if you are concerned with the welfare of the least of these.

A Theology of Love

2010-03-21T02:34:00.000-07:00

"A theology of love." This post has been cooking for a long time. I've had that title in mind for months now. I've tried to start this post several times - I have drafts from ten months ago, four months ago, and a few in between. And as I look back, I think I've tried to make it too complicated. So here goes.

My theology is this: God is Love.

There's a lot packed in that sentence - firstly, for me to have a theology that I can actually believe in is a big step. It's been a long process. See my prelude for the "quick" version, and the rest of this blog for the long version. And as for the theology, it's more than just three words. But it can be summed up in those three words.

To elaborate a little, I believe that the very essence of God is Love. And I mean essence in the most literal sense possible: containing God's characteristic properties in concentrated form. An extract that has the fundamental properties of a substance in concentrated form. Looking at the various definitions, essence is actually an excellent word. The most important ingredient; the crucial element. The inherent, unchanging nature of a thing. The basic, real, and invariable nature of a thing or its significant individual feature or features. All of these definitions get at the relationship between God and Love. Basically, they are one and the same. Now, this isn't anything too radical - I'm pretty sure I'm on fairly solid theological ground so far. But where this begins to differ from a lot of theology is that I believe that Love is everything. I saved one of the definitions to illustrate this: Love is the intrinsic or indispensable properties that serve to characterize or identify God. I like that one. How do you characterize or identify God? Love. Take anything, and ask of it - is there Love? If not, I seriously question if it is of God, or represents God faithfully. I intend on taking this to its fullest extent possible - which has some interesting implications that I'll outline below. But I think I still have pretty good support. After all, a great man once said:

"By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."
-Jesus (John 13:35)

But first, how did this come about? Well, during my deconstruction phase, I was looking at the things that are wrong with the Church (and this country, and society in general) - of which there are many - I kept coming back to what I call the "summing up" passages. There are several places in scripture "sums up" the Bible, the nature of Christianity, into a short space. They are arguably some of the most famous passages in the Bible. The Golden Rule. The Greatest Commandment. For example:

"This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."
-Jesus (John 15:12-13)

"And [Jesus] said to [the lawyer], "What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?"
And [the lawyer] answered, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.' And He said to him, 'You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.'"
-Jesus and the Lawyer (Luke 10:25-37)

"If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing."
-Paul (1 Corinthians 13:2-3)

"But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love." -Paul (1 Corinthians 13:13)

"The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love."
-John the Apostle (1 John 4:8)

"God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him."
-John the Apostle (1 John 4:16)

Half the beatitudes are about loving your enemies. And so I thought about it, and when it came time to form some kind of positive theology, I realized this was it. Love. But when it comes to forming a whole theology, most people add more to it. And indeed, I'm sure most reactions to my theology thus far are something along the lines of "That's all well and good, but it's simplistic. It sounds nice, but what about sin? What about the hard stuff? You can't just go around just believing in love. It's more complicated than that."

And with that, I tentatively and respectively disagree. And not just flippantly. Because I've thought about this. Because Christians tend to focus on either sin or love, neglecting the other. Neither is correct. God doesn't wander around the universe, looking for things people are doing wrong, punishing them for it, making sure they stay in line. Neither does he traipse around the heavens, throwing out platitudes and packets of happy, telling everyone that it's okay, he loves them anyway, just do better next time. I know this. But after some consideration, I realized that the important concept of sin actually fits right into my theology of love - with a little bit of a perspective shift.

For that, I'll take a little sidetrip. The Law. All good Christians know that God came to fulfill it, not abolish it. But do we really understand what that means? I didn't. The way I used it, and heard it used, it basically meant that Christians could still use the Old Testament to back up their opinions if the New Testament wasn't good enough. But I think I actually get it now. And that, by the way, is not what it means.

When Jesus showed up, the religious leaders of the time had taken the Law of the Old Testament, codified it, and written up hundreds upon hundreds of very specific rules that dictated exactly what you could and could not do, when. From what I've read of the New Testament, Jesus wasn't a huge fan of these Lawkeepers. Many of his strongest words were reserved for the Pharisees and Sadducees (he called them "vipers" and "white-washed tombs" for example). The intention of these groups was to make sure that the Law was followed down to the letter, and no one stepped outside of the lines defined by their interpretation of the Law. Their intentions were noble enough - they wanted people to follow God's Law. But Jesus did not like what they were doing. He didn't like them checking up on everyone, making sure that people were doing it right, punishing the slightest deviation from their rules. Of course this isn't because was an anarchist. The lawkeepers were doing it wrong. They focused on the letter of the law, counting steps on Sabbaths. Jesus deliberately disobeyed their precepts! He healed on the Sabbath just to see what they would do. He had his disciples pick grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wanted to show people that the letter of the law is not what mattered. What matters is the spirit of the law. God is hardly offended that Jesus healed people on the Sabbath. The point of the Sabbath is to relax, take a day off from the ever-increasing distractions of our world, and focus on God. Rigidifying the spirit of the law kills it. Cementing God's will into a set of precepts renders it useless. My point is, the lawkeepers had it so backwards! I believe this is true in a very large, very overarching sense, and have written a whole post on just this. In fact, read that post, you'll get a better idea of where I'm coming from. But to sum up: humans like rules because they're easy, clear cut, don't require thought, and most significantly, are easy to find people breaking. God doesn't like rules, and just wants us to follow his will. Unfortunately, humans aren't very good at that, and he reluctantly set forth precepts to help us figure it out. They're imperfect, which is why he sent Jesus to fix things. To fulfill the law. To quote my other post, God basically said, "These rules are annoying, and not really what I want. I'm going to send Jesus down to fulfill the law so we don't have all these obnoxious rules. The humans will figure it out, and be much happier. They'll see." Unfortunately, we didn't get it, killed Jesus, and resumed telling each other exactly what rules we were breaking.

So that said, I believe that the idea of a simple precept, a single concept, being the core and source of all divine law, is pretty valid. And from what I remember, the simplest, most commonly-agreed upon definition of sin is "going against the nature of God." The nature of God, of course, is Love. If sin is going against Love, what more is sin than an absence of perfect love? And this is a beautifully unifying idea. We wouldn't have to worry about loving too much, or failing to call people on sin. Telling people that their sinning would just be admonishing them to more perfectly love God, others, or themselves. Loving people would, in and of itself, be striving to not sin. This sounds like a cop-out, but in reality, it is extremely, even impossibly, difficult. Rules are way easier. We have to love completely and truly. Oftentimes, this means calling out people when they are being unloving towards our fellow human beings. That's called sin. And that is my theology of sin.

And that is my Theology of Love. Love. Always. Period. Which doesn't just mean being nice. It means putting all the six billion other people in the world before yourself, defending them from injustice, hate, and corruption, and being absolutely loving to those around you - even those that annoy you and hurt you and are wrong. That's hard. But no one said Christianity was easy. In fact, Christ often said it was downright hard.

Before I end, a quick note on salvation. I will take a whole note to explain it more fully, but briefly: the evangelical movement seems to be preoccupied with Romans 10:9-10 and Acts 16:31. "If you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved." and "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved". It is where the "saved" language comes from - you "become a Christian" when you are "saved" by saying your salvation prayer. This doesn't really follow from my Theology of Love - it doesn't contradict it, but it's kind if anticlimactic, to say the least. Instead, I focus on two different passages. The end of Matthew 25, and the end of the Sermon on the Mount. In these, Jesus says that those who do "the will of [His] Father" and those who care for "the least of these" will inherit eternal life, and those who do not will be rejected and cast into the eternal fire. That is my standard for salvation - faith is a necessary component, but without love, without caring for others, without doing the will of the Father, it is nothing. It is dead, as James put it. Does a dead faith still get you a golden ticket into heaven? I don't have an answer to that - but it doesn't matter, because I intend to follow Jesus' mandate of love.

Tim Timmerman

2010-03-20T13:11:00.001-07:00

So this fall, my brother went of to GFU, and I was rather surprised to find out that they, generally considered more conservative than my own SPU, had an openly gay professor: Tim Timmerman, an art prof. I was pretty excited about this, and was even more excited when I found out he was going to speak at chapel about homosexuality. I was a little wary when my brother sent me the link on iTunes U with the comment "Let me know what you think...I'm interested :P" and even more wary when my father (who I don't exactly see eye-to-eye with on this issue) forwarded it to me with the subject "A good message from GFU". So today, I finally found time to sit down and watch it (after a brief run-in with iTunes that I got around with Boris Fritscher's iTunes store alternative). I'll kinda-sorta liveblog it after the fact, as I'm watching it. So, here goes:

He introduces the talk by stating that he understands he is talking about people people know, or are, or are related to, and also notes that he himself has struggled with homosexuality. He also made an interesting comment that he believes that what the church does in the next ten years with this issue is crucial for the direction of the church - something I tend to believe as well. Then he starts out by dividing the church into two caricatures. He clearly denotes them as caricatures, but still, they are so hugely caricatured...it's not a good start. One is highly homophobic, very non-confrontational, telling them to be quiet, holding the Bible up as a shield between them and the gay germs (I'm not kidding, he included "we think you might be contagious"). The other is very sappy, concerned with wronging the gays, saying they're sorry, telling them they're okay, to "go settle down in a gay marriage and do whatever you do there" to but shoving them out the door with a "God bless you" because they don't want to deal with them. He (obviously) condemns both of these approaches as being "from the pit of hell" because they're very passive.

Now, I'm sure there are plenty of churches that are like this. And maybe it's just because I'm in Seattle, where churches mostly simply can't ignore or brush away the issue because we have the second-highest percentage of LGBT individuals in the nation, right behind San Fran. But most of the churches I'm familiar with don't come close to either of these camps. I'll summarize some of my experiences, with generalities, but not caricatures. My home church and my current church up here (both relatively small, conservative congregations) largely ignore the issue, at least publically, as far as I have seen. There might be a reference in a sermon to the sinfulness of homosexuality. I seem to remember my home church noting that it's not the gravest of all sins as well. But mostly, it's just not dealt with, because it doesn't have to be. Gay members are either pretty quiet, taking their struggle outside of the public sphere of the church, or leave altogether. Then there are the churches with more public faces. These, in Seattle at least, can't afford to not deal with the issue, and can't afford to fit into one of Timmerman's caricatures. They generally fall along a spectrum, illustrated by a few examples: some either publically ridicule and/or condemn homosexuality (e.g. Mars Hill), some see homosexuality as a sin but embrace homosexuals as sinners like the rest of us (I believe Seattle Vineyard), some publically admit that it's a difficult issue, and not one that they can settle easily (e.g. Quest), others are open-and-affirming (e.g. St. James', St. Mark's, Wallingford UMC). Nowhere have I seen a church that is described by his caricatures. So, with that said, we'll see what he proposes.

He correctly notes that both of his examples are "totally passive," avoiding involvement, saying "be well, be warm, and be on your way." He accuses the church of exchanging the first passive response for the second. Again, being a resident of Seattle, I want to stand up and offer any of my local churches as a counterexample - for better or for worse - as most of them are anything but passive. Open and affirming churches - the forefront of the pro-homosexual movement within the church - are hardly "blithely blessing" their gay brothers and sisters and being absent in their lives.

It was good to hear that he is more worried about the passive church than about condemning homosexuality. And he clearly noted that no one chooses homosexuality (but with a cheap shot at the absurdity of gays wanting to choose "hairy guys" over "lovely women" - what about the women who choose the disgusting "hairy guys" over the beautiful "lovely women"?). He then terms homosexuality as having "higher same-sex needs" and "deep needs for their own gender" and says that this won't be fulfilled by "having sex with the same gender" - which it won't, of course, any more than "higher opposite-sex needs" will be fulfilled by "having sex with the opposite gender." He then cites that he knows hundreds of gay men who have been in committed gay relationships, and came back to him feeling "less of a man" for it. He then clarifies that he met these men via his involvement with "People Can Change" - from the appearances, a pretty stock, if loving, ex-gay program - this isn't just a random sampling of the gay community.

He then starts talking about the "gay identity" being a lie, and seems to mix up gender identity with sexual identity. Where you are on the scale of "manliness" or masculinity doesn't strictly correspond to where you are on the sexual orientation scale. He also says that "sodomy" historically referred to anything from man-on-man sex to oral or anal, regardless of who was involved - basically anything outside the norm. He gives a bunch of negative examples and statistics to show that the "gay lifestyle" is basically poisonous, that gay relationships fall apart more often than straight ones. I don't have the time or energy at the moment to find the studies that contradict this claim, other than the study I'm immediately familiar with that lesbian couples, at least, are better parents, but I think that comparing gay relationships, which are just now being seen as acceptable in some places, to straight relationships, which are part of the nuclear family woven into our culture, is hardly fair. Opponents will say that that's gay relationships aren't okay, but that's not my point. My point is, regardless of absolute acceptability, relationships, especially marriage, are not an island. It's well-known that without the support of their community, marriages are much more likely to fall apart, and straight relationships have default cultural support, while gay relationships don't. I'm not proposing that that's the whole story, but I do think it's a contributing factor.

Continuing.

Tim has moved onto homosexuality in childhood, in absence of relationships or a "gay lifestyle", blaming homosexuality on childhood problems - certainly not a negligible phenomenon, but I don't think it explains all of homosexuality. He then quoted James 1:26-27 ("pure and undefiled religion"), which caught me off-guard as it's one of my favorite verses, and said that these homosexuals are "orphans," orphaned from their masculine identity. He gives the example of St. Gregory of Nyssa as a strong, non-sexual male friendship that fulfills the "God-given need for someone to walk with us in this life" and gives the example of "wedded friendships" and "covenant brotherhoods" in the early church, where men vowed themselves to each other, which basically from his description sounds like marriage without the sex. I'm not really sure what to do with that - where does it cross from being friendship to being same-sex attraction? When they start having sex? How do we map that to our culture today? I don't terribly understand it, so I'll leave it for now. But it's interesting.

He also called the church out on its focus on marriage, and largely ignoring and even shunning singleness - the classic problem of "singles groups" being matchmaking services. Bravo for that - I've always been kind of confused about that, especially with what Paul had to say about marriage. He closed with some advice, on how to deal with the young men who didn't have good relationships with their fathers.

In summary, it was a decent message - I don't want to strangle Tim like I do most of the times I watch a Mark Driscoll sermon. He didn't further reinforce his caricatures of the church, and just kind of let them lie, which was good. But he seemed to be focused on one specific cause and expression of homosexuality, and a very specific "gay lifestyle" of promiscuity and noncommittal relationships, as if there was a "straight lifestyle" that was universally monogamous. He focused on men needing same-sex relation on a non-sexual, heterosexual level and turning to homosexuality to get that, emphasizing the difference between same-sex needs and sexual desires, the former of which can be fulfilled by friendship. I'm not denying that - that may sometimes be the case - but I don't believe it covers all of homosexuality. Additionally, he didn't mention lesbians at all - maybe that wasn't the point of his talk, maybe he doesn't have experience with them, but they are also very present, and don't fit into the nice box of homosexuality that he made, and seems to assume takes care of the problem. Basically, he may be write for some gay men, but I don't think simply putting all homosexuals (gays and lesbians) in his box will work.

If you want to watch Timmerman's talk, you can grab it via iTunes, or via Boris Fritscher's iTunes browser like I did, if you don't have iTunes, and don't want to download all of its 90MB heft.

A Prelude

2009-08-29T01:54:00.000-07:00

I've been chewing on a post I'll call "A Theology of Love" for a while. This post is not that, because I don't think I'm quite ready to write it yet, but in any case, that's not what this post is about. This is a meta-post, if you will. A post about the post I have yet to write.

Over the last few years, I've done a lot of wrestling. That wrestling is largely chronicled in this blog, so if you want to read about what led up to this point, it's all there. But the relatively, but definitely not absolutely short version is thus:

As a preacher's kid, by the time I was at the point where I might start to make my faith my own, I already had a lot of expectations as to what my faith was supposed to be, and what my faith was supposed to do. If I had started questioning or doubting, it would have been some significant boat-rocking - there were a lot of people watching me, expecting me to be what I wasn't yet. So I learned to playact. And I got really good at it. Now a lot of this process was subconscious, but I believe it to be pretty accurate. I'm not saying it's anyone's fault, and I obviously have a big part in it. But whatever the reason, by the time I headed off to college, I was an excellent doer of church. To borrow a phrase from my new friend and author of Stuff Christian Culture Likes, I was really good at "doing things and avoiding true relationship." And also had no personal faith whatsoever. I don't believe that to be an exaggeration.

Then I showed up at SPU. In comparison to my middle school (which is where I formed/was handed most of my good Christian Conservative beliefs), SPU is pretty liberal. Granted, their social policies are somewhat stringent (no alcohol or sex), but they teach evolution and have several Catholic faculty, and profs have told me that America was definitively not founded on Christianity. All of this contributed to the realization that there was a duality in my beliefs: the Christianity that I was raised with and professed, and what actually made sense to me. The latter, of course, was what I actually believed and based my decisions off of, especially now that I was free of expectations. This set off a long process of deconstructing my worldview that I was given, and building up, bit by bit, one that was I could honestly say I held. This involved throwing off ideas that were not essentially Christian, and problematic to my worldview, such as Creationism or American Sovereignty. I kept a tent, as Descartes would say, of basic Christian morality (which I do adhere to), but did a lot of stripping my worldview down to the core. Some great books such as Mere Christianity, Pagan Christianity? and Language of God were very helpful in not only distinguishing the core from the periphery, but also in reassuring me that I'm not crazy, and that I'm probably not on my way to Hell.

Now all of this deconstruction caused much strife in my family, my friends back home, and many people who care about me. Many feared (and may still fear) that I am "straying from the faith", that I'm suffering in "my walk", or I'm drifting away from Christ, or am being deceived by the world. Now, I can't say for sure on the latter, but the rest could not be farther from the truth. I am just now truthfully, sincerely approaching faith and Christ for the first time. Up to this point, I have had no faith to stray from, no walk to suffer, and no relationship with Christ (on my part, anwyay) to drift from.

That brings us to today. At this point, most of my deconstruction is done. I've cleared out a huge portion of the periphery that was standing between me and a genuine faith. Depending on who you ask, I may be a bad Christian now, but frankly, they can believe that if they want. I'm done arguing. So now I've found myself asking: what now? What do I do with this? I know pretty well what I don't believe, but what do I replace that with?

That's what I've been wrestling with for the past few months. I've had some fantastic people that have helped me with this - first and foremost my girlfriend, who is an incredible blessing and a fantastic co-conspirator, and is constantly wrestling with me, keeping me accountable, questioning alongside me, offering a refreshing perspective on things, and most of all, setting an example of what it means to truly, deeply love people. My father, the preacher of "Confessions of a Preacher's Kid," has also been very open to my questions and struggles, is more like myself than I had imagined, and has been very honest about what he has been wrestling with. John Chase, my former college group leader, former pastor, and always friend, has been a great "elder" to talk to and bounce things off of. I've had some good conversations with Nancy Smith, my Mom's college friend who has also gone fairly liberal, but has a solid faith and asks me tough questions, but is confident in my search regardless of my answers. UScholars has been an incredibly helpful experience as well. And I've also read some books that have helped steer me towards something that I can actually believe, instead of steering me away from things that I don't. First and foremost, Shane Claiborne's raw, honest testimony of a man living out the words of Christ - not the words of Christianity - in Irresistible Revolution has had a profound effect in focusing my thoughts, and is basically the mainfesto for my life. I also came across an excellent little book called Stories of Emergence that has some excellent thoughts by real people. And recently A.J. Jacobs' Year of Living Biblically was surprisingly insightful in getting down to the reasons and meaning of religion and belief.

So after all this talking, reading, and thinking, where am I headed? I'm still not exactly sure, but I do know this. It will be a theology of love. Period. This is the prelude for the yet-to-be-written manifesto, if you will, of that theology. But basically, it is this: God is Love. Again, period. It is a theology of reaching out, of loving people, regardless of who they are or what they believe. A theology of helping the poor and the widowed, of sharing your wealth, your life, yourself with others. Of loving your neighbor as yourself, and doing unto others better than you would have them do unto you. Of accepting people as they are, without judgement, and loving them where they are at. Of forgiveness, of not holding wrongs. Of defending the downtrodden, and questioning and fighting anything that devalues another human being. How exactly that meshes with Christianity I am still hashing out, and will elaborate on later. I'm still pretty clueless as to what it really means to do things like put your faith in God, ask Christ to forgive your sins, or be in a relationship with the divine. But seeing as how this idea of love is pretty much what Christ did, I think I'm on the right track. Because last I checked, Christianity pretty much means be as much like Christ as humanly possible, and then some. This is common knowledge, but it is surprising - and heartbreaking - how often it is lost by the wayside by peripheral, insignificant squabbling. One of the reasons my father understands where I'm coming from is that he wrote his thesis on how ludicrous it was that churches split over millenialism. We don't really do that today, but there are a multitude of issues that are just as arbitrary, and just as divisive. My goal is to shout at these debates, STOP! Please, stop! This is destructive, stupid, wrong, and, as far as I can tell sinful. Please, love people. Be Christlike. Stop fighting each other, and instead together fight homelessness, genocide, injustice, human rights abuse, slavery. And individually, fight loneliness, discrimination, and apathy. Society today needs us. Not to protect it from the gays, the liberals, or the ecofreaks. Not to rescue it the humanists, the atheists, the Mormons, or the Catholics. Not even to save it from the Christians or the conservatives or capitalism. Instead, society needs love. It needs people who care, both for and about their fellow human. People who love others, for no other reason than the fact that they, too, are human. People who work to relieve the suffering with which this world is rife. In short, it needs Christ. In person-sized serving sizes known as "Christians."

That is what I believe. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, the hard part: doing it.

Here goes nothing. Or maybe, just maybe, everything.

Devotions

2009-08-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

I apologize. This is not a positive post. I really did intend to change my ways, and still do, but this is a necessary exception.

It strikes me that "devotions" is a significantly different word than "devotion". The latter is outright allegiance to something or someone, throwing yourself completely and wholly into something, almost with abandon. It's living, breathing, active, dynamic by nature. You can't be passively devoted to something.

The former, on the other hand, is maybe reading a scripture passage, and definitely reading a usually far-fetched illustration or story that attempts to make the scripture passage things like "cool" or "relevant" or "funny", usually creating characters that are laughably unreal or reprinting stories from Christian humor books. (Example: "Jennifer likes a guy at her school named Ryan. She talks and thinks about him constantly. Her friends think she's psycho because everything is always about Ryan, Ryan, Ryan!") This is usually followed by filling in (or answering orally) the same questions as everyone else and perhaps "discussing" it afterwards. This usually consists of the "group leader" reading the questions out loud, looking around at a bunch of blank stares, perhaps some canned answers that kids remember hearing in Sunday school, and then suggesting the "correct" answers.

I thought maybe I was exaggerating a little bit, but read the Sample Text from Youth Specialties, from this promo text: "You'll love the exciting look and feel of this Bible. The page-by-page bursts of surprising facts, cool graphics, crazy humor, and radical ideas to chew on—and apply." It even has 22 full-color pages!

...

Really?

22 full-color pages? Crazy humor? Cool graphics? Ideas to chew on? THIS is what is going to encourage me to devote my life, radically and completely, to the man whose prophet dressed in camelskin and ate locusts? The man that demanded I give up my wealth, my shiny things, and love people radically? THIS is going to shake up my world, cause me to question everything I find important?

No. This is a spiritual vita-gummy. It gives me my daily dose of scripture, tries to force me to regurgitate the correct answers, and throws in pretty pictures to make it less painful.

I would cite more examples of how ludicrous, and surfacey these "devotionals" are, but that would just cause more frustration. Just check out more examples of these sugar-coated booster pills that think rewriting the Bible to dub Jeremiah "Jer" and give the Isrealites "relevant" phrases like "sooo negative" and "lighten up" is the ticket to fostering devotion.

This post was started because I walked through campus today, and there were all these kids, presumably from some Bible camp thing, scattered about the lawns, all doing their individual devotions and prayer, like good little Bible camp kids. It brought back memories of the many devotions I forged through at Bible camp, and while Bible camp was fun*, we'll just say it wasn't because of the devotionals.

So what do I suggest? I don't have a cure-all, a one-shot solution. But I can suggest a mindset. Children, youth, Christians - they're not a market to target. They're not a demographic to satisfy. Physical age is somewhat related to emotional maturity, but has zero correlation to spiritual maturity. None. I know there are plenty of people younger than me that are significantly more spiritually mature, and there are lots of people way older than me that are still babes in Christ. Jesus can't be packaged. He wasn't meant to be made "cool" or "relevant". He's not your handy phrasebook to help you out of tough situations.

Christianity is a way of life, a frame of mind, not a bunch of right answers. Growth is accomplished by asking hard questions (the ones that aren't in the devotional books), loving people, living out Christ.

Devotions are a lot like the educational system. Both of them give kids the right answers, assume that people at the same age are at the same level, and largely treat children as a large, homogeneous group. Both work very well to equip kids with the right answers, and infuse in them the correct groupthink, make sure they know how to toe the party line. And neither work very well for those kids who think outside the box, who want to learn things, who can never get enough, who are always curious. I can comfortably say that the majority of learning I have done has occurred outside of, or in spite of, the classroom. Not all - classes like math, English, History gave me some tools to work with. But most of my learning took place either outside of those classes, or in homeschool. I am incredibly grateful for my five years of homeschooling. Individual attention, varying education according to a specific child's needs, makes all the difference. Maybe that's what we need - more spiritual homeschooling. I still don't know how I'm going to raise my kids. As I've said before, they screw everything up. And despite all my anger, annoyance, and skepticism, I am very grateful for how I was raised, cheesy devotionals, camps, and all. I ended up where I am, which I'm okay with. But it's been a hard and painful journey. I'm sure I've hurt, and continue to hurt, the people that raised me, primarily my parents. And I apologize, but I don't know how else to do this. And that's what I hope to avoid. I look back at everything in my spiritual past, and realize that it did get me to a point where at 18, when I realized I had no personal faith or devotion whatsoever (despite dozens of devotionals), I had something to work from. But I wonder if it could be better. If I could somehow avoid that breaking point, that pain, that confusion. My parents are anything but failures - they have been supportive, loving, and gave me the equipment I'm working with now. But it's only natural that I want to do better, right? I can at least try, and hope that when my kids grow up, they'll at least have as good of a foundation as my parents gave me.

*Except for AWANA Scholarship Camp. That place was run like a military operation. Patriotic songs played over the PA system for call to Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, no kidding. Eugh. Oddly enough, those are the only devotionals I specifically remember, mostly because I colored in the Apostle Paul with highlighter.

Loving Illegal Immigrants

2009-07-27T02:42:00.001-07:00

This blog, so far, has been a lot of negative. What I don't like about the church, what makes me angry, and what was wrong about my views up to this point. I want to change that, and have a couple of posts started, but tonight I got an anti-illegal-immigrant e-mail forward which is well documented on Snopes to be entirely false and pointless, as most forwards are.

However, with a passage such as this:

We further demand that there not be any amnesty given to illegals, NO free services, no funding, no payments to and for illegal immigrants. We are fed up with the lack of action about this matter and are tired of paying for services to illegals.

I realized that the 970 people who signed the petition anyway were probably very angry at these illegal immigrants, and a good many of them (judging by certain members of my extended family) probably read the e-mail, muttered something about the damn Mexicans sending our country to hell in a handbasket, and forwarded it on after "signing" it.

This, at first, made me angry. But as I started to write a response, it mostly made me sad. Sad that these 970 largely normal people, most of whom I'm sure lead normal lives and don't normally going around being racists and bigots, would sign their name on such a spiteful, hateful e-mail, and forward it on. Sad that they don't see the humanity of the illegal immigrants they are ready to send back to Mexico. And sad that, since I got the e-mail from someone I knew from a Christian camp, and more generally since this tends to be a position of the religious right, that this is how Jesus was being represented to the illegal immigrants. I did my best to be loving, and not snarky or mean. I have a hard time doing that, especially on the internet, but I tried. So this is the response I wrote.

Hi.

You probably don't know me, but I just wanted to say something. In short, it's just not that simple. At length:

Before you get upset about social security being taken away by illegals, and "demand that there not be any amnesty given to illegal aliens, NO free services, no funding, no payments to and for illegal immigrants," I just want to remind you that these "illegal immigrants" are people. They are people with lives, families and names, just like you and everyone at your workplace, school, or church. Some of them are grumpy, some of them are friendly, some of them are mean, and a good many of them are the nicest people you'll ever meet. Just like every other group of people that ever existed. I'd advise getting to know an "illegal" or two.

Secondly, you are all (unless there are Native Americans on the list) "illegal immigrants." Some more than others, some more "legal" than others due to whatever laws happened to be in place when your ancestors came to America, but 99% (it really is 99%, I checked) of Americans immigrated here form somewhere - be it the original colonists, or any of the massive immigrations that have taken place over the years.

So, what does that mean? Illegal immigrants, like all people, live here and contribute to our economy - they have jobs, they work hard, they pay into social security, they get involved in their community. One of the reasons we have so many "illegal" immigrants is that our legal immigration system is broken. It often takes years, and is incredibly difficult for immigrants that want to get legal status to do so. For many, it's not worth the effort, especially since it also takes significant financial investment in lawyers, paperwork, and fees, and they're already having a hard enough time making a living as is.

It's easy enough to call foul because someone you know supposedly got their job stolen by a damn Mexican, but it's harder to do so when you realize that damn Mexican actually is a person, and even harder if you know them. Maybe her name is Diane Batista, the mother of a two-year-old whose husband lived in the US for four years, paying medicare, social security, and even getting a tax ID, but was denied a waiver request, and can't reapply for ten years. Or J.R. Gonzalez, who was brought to the US when he was 8 months old, is now 34 with two kids, and found out his mother just never filed the paperwork to make him a legal immigrant. Perhaps his name is Jesus Manuel Cordova, who saved a 9-year-old's life. For every story of someone's job being "stolen", there is a story of the system miserably failing good people.

I'm not claiming that illegal immigrants aren't a problem. Yes, some of them form gangs. Some of them are lazy. Some of them are annoying. However, all of these also apply to black people. And white people. And Native American people. Last time I checked, deporting black people back to Africa, whites to Europe, or Native Americans reservations, or cutting them off from our economy, wasn't a viable way of dealing with them. Making it easier to become legal for those who want to, solving problems that are actually problems (gangs, violence, underhanded business practices), and generally treating them like people, is.

So, to review:

Immigrants are people, just like you and me
We are all immigrants of some kind
Many of them are good, caring people who work hard
Many of them are illegal simply because it's difficult and expensive to be "legal"
Our immigration system is badly broken
There are also bad, grumpy, and annoying immigrants - and also bad, grumpy, and annoying Americans, and coworkers, and schoolmates, and church members.

These are all reasons to not hate "illegal aliens", and maybe think twice before proposing shipping them all back to where they came from. Even if you don't agree with that, consider that this particular e-mail is entirely false.

There is no such law being passed. Illegal aliens, in fact, are not able to collect social security. In fact, illegal aliens leaving would actually be worse for Social Security, because many of them (remember, they have jobs and families like you, I, and your neighbor) pay into it, and can't collect from it, to the tune of $7 billion, according to Social Security officials themselves.

The fact that near 1,000 signatures has been gathered, to protest a law that is not being considered, and a law that would be entirely redundant anyway if it were, indicates another problem: this petition is irrelevant anyway, and highly ineffectual. Yes, there are 1,000 names, but if not one of them checked to see if such a law is even being debated, they mean little.

Please, stop forwarding these pointless, hurtful, and fearmongering e-mails.

And if you don't read any of this, at least consider the words etched into the Statue of Liberty, one of the most recognizable symbols of this country, a beacon of hope and freedom originally intended to be called "Mother of Exiles":

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

This is the spirit our country was founded on. A great country, welcoming those that are oppressed, unwanted, and devastated by war, poverty, famine, and economic misfortune in their home countries to find refuge in our shores. This petition, and the spirit that comes with it, is a far cry from the very reason for which this country began.

And next time, please use snopes:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/petition.asp

Thank you for your time.

Joel Bradshaw

P.S. If you feel you have been informed, calmed, or at all bettered by this e-mail, by all means find this e-mail as was originally sent to you and hit a reply-all to forward this on to the people that sent it to you. But since this is a calm, practical e-mail that actually looks at the issues at hand, doesn't try to stir up fear and irrational hatred, and is in the wrong target demographic anyway, I don't expect too much. But thanks anyway. If I make one person re-think, just a little, their position regarding the 4% of this country that don't have paperwork saying they are citizens, my work has been worth it.

The problem with focusing on eternity

2009-06-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Today I was reading Shane Claiborne's Irresistible Revolution, and came across this quote:

Few people are interested in a religion that has nothing to say to the world and offers them only life after death, when what people are really wondering is whether there is life before death.

Shane has a way with words, and he succinctly expressed something that I had been mulling in my mind - there is a fundamental problem with the salvation/eternity-centric faith that is so prevalent. I know that in theory (I have a blog post coming on those two words, and will link it when it's done) the eternity-centric faith isn't solely eternity-centric, and offers more than just life after death, but in reality, that's not what comes across.

If we place our focus on "getting saved" and "making it to heaven" then we miss out on the vast majority of Jesus' ministry. As Shane again points out:

And yet I am convinced that Jesus came not just to prepare us to die but to teach us how to live. Otherwise, much of Jesus’ wisdom would prove quite unnecessary for the afterlife. After all, how hard could it be to love our enemies in heaven? And the kingdom that Jesus speaks so much about is not just something we hope for after we die but is something we are to incarnate now. Jesus says the kingdom is "within us," "among us," "at hand," and we are to pray that it comes "on earth as it is in heaven."

This is exacerbated by the sense that the world is evil, ruled by Satan, and a trial we have to wait out. "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through" may make a great old hymn, but ignores a big chunk of Jesus' life, which was helping and loving people in this world, and making this world better.

I was looking for the lyrics and came across a blog post that exemplified the mindset that is so depressing to me:

My son, a mortal creation like myself, has started the adventure of this short life. For a few years we will suffer together under the various afflictions of our current human condition, and then, eventually, we may both enjoy eternal love and fellowship beyond this world.

Now, I'm not sure if that is an outlier in her thoughts, but it does frame the problem pretty well. If this world is just something to suffer through, longing for our eternity, we aren't likely to try to make it better.

Shane quotes Rich Mullins, from an address he made at his college chapel:

You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too...[pause in awkward silence]...But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.

Obviously eternity and "getting saved" are important, but they should not be the focus. Living out Christ, being his love, should be the focus. And that's a focus I can get behind.

The Money God

2009-06-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

Today I got TweetDeck set up via Adobe Air on my Ubuntu Linux, and up on it popped a tweet linking to a post on the Mars Hill Blog titled "Death to the Money God". That is what this post is about.

During the last three years, I have come to dislike, to put it nicely, the idea of churches having budgets. And having just finished Pagan Christianity?, I had even more reason to dislike it, and some additional reason to boot. Obviously, this is tightly connected to the idea of tithing, and the "Money God" (aka Mammon) that this blog post over at Mars Hill was about. You can read it yourself, but it was a pretty stock "you should tithe because God says to" kind of message that comes around every year about this time. In particular, Pastor Jamie recounts a story of him as a youngun, giving $10 a week to church and feeling good, and then being convicted to give more. He (yes, I checked my gender pronouns) also noted that Christians need "encouragement, instruction, rebuke, or in some cases even assistance" when it comes to tithing, citing 2 Corinthians 8-9.

Now, I have a few problems with this. Don't get me wrong - I'm not against tithing, or giving money, and I am not denying that Mammon is a big problem. In fact, the problem of Mammon is one of the reasons I so strongly disagree with a "Christian America" and most American Christianity. Any true Christianity is antithetical to capitalism - it shouldn't fit well in America. But that's beside the point. The point is, the idea that assistance is an afterthought is highly disturbing. Now admittedly, as one of my profs used to say, I'm not a theologian, but I read all the way through 2 Corinthians 8-9, and (admittedly with some background from Pagan Christianity), this is what I saw:

The church in Macedonia, entirely on their own, gave, even in poverty, to serve the saints (that's other believers) - vv. 3-4
Paul encouraged the Corinthians to finish what they had started a year back, seeing the example of Macedonia, and give to their bretheren - vv. 6-7, 10-11
Paul says that the giving is so that "at the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need," referring to the Corinthians sharing their bounty with the other Christians - v. 14
Starting in Chapter 9, Paul says he wants to ensure that the Corinthians make good on the intentions Paul has been bragging on to the Macedonians, to avoid making either Paul or the Corinthians liars. - vv. 2-5
The purpose of the gift is "supplying the needs of God's people" and giving "thanks to God" - v. 12
Other people will thank God for the generosity of the Corinthians - v. 13

Now, I see a couple themes in this passage:

Paul is very careful to emphasize that giving is not to be coerced or proscribed - repeated phrases like "Entirely on their own", "I am not commanding you", "sincerity of your love", "here is my advice", "your eager willingness", "if the willingness is there", "a generous gift, not as one grudgingly given", "what he has decided in his heart", "God loves a cheerful giver", "your generosity in sharing" clearly show that giving is the result of an internal desire, not external pressure.
In the case of the Corinthians, Paul is largely encouraging them to make good on a specific promise to help a specific church - parts like "bring also to completion", "no need for me to write to you", "I know of your eagerness to help", "finish the arrangements for the generous gift you had promised", show that it is a planned gift that simply has to be followed up on, not a continual plea for funds.

The passage, as far as I can see, leaves little room for any kind of scriptural support for continual maintenance, or base salary for the apostles, or anything that is such a huge part of the church budget today. In fact, it leaves little room for any kind of "budget" at all - all the giving here is from church to church - one church that is blessed helping another in need. Indeed, in summing up, Paul writes:

Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, as it is written: "He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little." (8:13-15)

Whatever "tithing" is present in the original church was to directly help other Christians in times of need, and there seems to be no concept of a budget or ongoing support costs.

It is because of this - the idea that the very purpose of tithes is to help our bretheren in need - that phrases like "in some cases even assistance" are alarming to me. And even if that was simply a bad choice of words by Pastor Jamie, we can look at the numbers. Of the $12 million budget [PDF] that Mars Hill plans to work with this year, a solid half of it goes to staff, another $2 million to facilities, and over a million to operations. In fact, I made a nice pie chart, which wasn't supplied in the budget: The chart makes the last explanatory note painfully clear: "Staffing and facilities expenses for Mars Hill Church account for 72% of our total budget." They include a parenthetical statement that is supposed to make me feel better: "The norm for churches is 70-80%." The idea that on an optimistic average, 30% of what I give to a church actually goes to those in need is not comforting in the least.

In addition to the numbers above, Mars Hill has another $25 million in land, equipment, and furniture, most of which is used probably a couple days out of the week. I assume Mars Hill uses its facilities more than the average church, but it seems to me, and always has, that sinking so much of the money that could be going to those in need into a building that's used, save a small bit of office space, for a few hours a week (perhaps a few days a week in the best case) isn't the best stewardship of the offerings of the body. The entire purpose of tithes under the new covenant should be to help others in need - especially Christians. It is not to pay rent, or salary a leader, or buy flowers or communion crackers. In general, using only 20% of the offering to actually directly help people is apalling when you step back and look at it. It is to me at least.

I believe, in fact, that if the tithe was actually going to people in need, getting people to tithe wouldn't be such an issue. I, at least, am discouraged when 70-80% of the money I am giving is going straight into just keeping the church running. I believe that people will be much more apt to give if their money is actually going to people, instead of paying the bills.

In the organic church, without a pastor or building, there is no salary or rent payment that needs to be supported by the tithe. Everything the body gives could go to helping fellow believers, or reaching out to those around us. As Paul says, giving out of our bounty to help those who are in need, that when we are in need, we can humbly rely on the Christians around us to support us in that need. If it sounds communist, that's because it is. Christianity is very communist in nature - the good, pure kind of communism. Neither Christianity or communism work as government, because you can't force people to care for each other. But in a community where people care for one another, and strive to help each other, it works wonderfully. That's what Christianity, in its true form, is.

A few cleanup items. As to the pattern of tithing in the Old Testament, tithes went to support the Levites - the priesthood class that was forbidden from having any kind of income for themselves, to support the festivals, and to help the poor and widowed. Today, and in the New Testament, that priest class has been superseded by the priesthood of all believers, headed by Christ himself - the only hierarchy is that of Christ over all believers, and Christ definitely doesn't need a salary. We also don't have any ritual festivals - we do have Christmas and Easter, and if the body wants to pitch in to throw a party for those, that would be fine with me.

You might protest that the clergy needs to be paid, they need to make a living, we need to pay for the building, none of this translates into today's society. But all those problems are a direct cause of the advent of the church building and the clergy/laity split, both largely thrust upon us by Constantine, and carried on by momentum and the ferocious power of tradition. If we didn't have a building, and truly operated as a living body, a priesthood of all believers, none of this would be necessary.

Also, in their followup "Two Weeks Left to Make Budget" post, Mars Hill mentioned the "biblical model of cheerful, regular, and sacrificial giving." Many people will try to take 1 Corinthians 16:1-2 as mandating a regular, weekly tithe. This passage, however, also seems to be referring to a special, pre-arranged gift (probably the same one mentioned again in his next letter), and the weekly tithe is simply a matter of logistics - instead of worrying about having one lump sum when Paul shows up, make sure to be setting aside a little at a time so there will be something to take to the Christians in need when Paul gets there. It's hardly a mandate, or even reccomendation for a weekly tithe of 10% of your income.

Am I saying that Mars Hill hasn't done anything good with their money? Of course not. Could they be using it better? Probably, but not dramatically, at least in their current form. Should Christians give? Of course. That is very biblical. Should they be obligated to pay rent and salaries to keep the institutional church running? Currently, maybe. My problems with the church always come down to the fact that you can't change things instantly. I acknowledge that the current model, however suboptimal, must be supported due to the millions upon millions of participants involved, and tithing to the building is one necessary support structure. But going forward, I can, and will, do things differently. And if as a community of Christians we work to move towards it, we can become a more vibrant body that better does the work we are mandated to do.

Thoughts on Homosexuality, Christianity, and the like

2009-04-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I took part in the Day of Silence on campus, and during the debriefing session, we were asked by the administration not to serve communion. They gave some cover reason that really didn't make much sense, unless of course they were trying to make everyone happy by washing their hands of the gay community. I have, and have had, an immense amount of respect for Dr. Neuhouser for unashamedly supporting Haven and furthering the conversation about homosexuality and Christianity.
Then, later that night, I went to XY, basically a "Let's Talk About Sex" for guys (which has been a long time coming, by the way). The speakers were Shawn "Papa Shawn" Whitney, student counselor and former Hill RLC, and Dr. Rick Steele, professor of Theology and the man who told me I ticked him off by sleeping too much in his class. During the question and answer time, there was a question (submitted anonymously) along the lines of, "I am a gay Christian, and I want out. How do I rid myself of this, and am I destined to a life of celibacy?" Both speakers were initially just silent - which I appreciated, as a kneejerk reaction of "go to an ex-gay clinic" isn't terribly helpful, in my opinion. And then Dr. Steele took the card, read it over again, asked for clarification, let out a long, pained, struggling sigh, and said, highly, powerfully emotional yet very firm, this (as best I can remember):

What we can't do is make the Bible say that homosexuality is OK. I've seen it, it's crap exegesis. But what I can say, is that when I see a homosexual couple that is wholly loving, committed, and in every way, except perhaps the physical aspect, the very picture of a holy and godly relationship, and then there is a heterosexual couple that is screwing up their relationship, and screwing anyone they can, the idea that the homosexual couple is somehow less of a couple than the heterosexual couple is absurd, and hurtful, and wrong. Which plugs go in which holes is not nearly as important as the relationship, the devotion, the commitment.

As far as I could tell, I was the only one that Amened his answer, but in that moment, Dr. Steele gained so incredibly much respect in my eyes. It was obvious that this was not something he took lightly, not something he had a quick answer for, something that he had thought, studied, prayed, and struggled over intensely. It wasn't a pat, surface "love the sinner, hate the sin", "accepting of the person but not affirming the lifestyle" easy answer that either only makes those who have already otherized the LGBTQ community happy, or doesn't fully answer the question, depending on who is saying it. This answer was the raw, real, powerful, and genuine result of a man who knows what he's talking about really wrestling with the issue. He then went off on a tangent discussing celibacy, and that it is not necessarily the cursed life that it is assumed to be, but only if you are called to it - which he has no way of knowing one way or the other, after which a former homosexual (is that a PC enough term for ex-gay?) went ballistic, making sure that we all knew that HOMOSEXUALITY WAS DIRECTLY FROM SATAN, AND IT IS AN ABOMINATION, AND A PERVERSION, UTTER PERVERSION AND FILTH AND PERVERSION and then went on to shout about how in High School, he had lustful desires for men, and just had sex all over the place, men, women, anyone he could, just sex all over the place, lust lust lust...and it hurt my heart. As he kept preaching, it became clear that his perversion was not (primarily?) homosexuality - it was lust. Pure, unbridled lust. Which is destructive, and a perversion, and hurtful. But the fact that he bludgeoned everyone over the head with his personal struggles with lust, after Dr. Steele had so carefully, lovingly, truthfully and insightfully poured out his soul on the quite separate issue of homosexuality, made my heart sink. It didn't even make me angry - it just made me deeply sad. One careful step forward, and then we go tumbling back down the hill.
This reactionary, angry, shouting, otherizing approach to homosexuality is deeply harmful, and I have severe doubts that it will ever solve anything. Yes, I'm sure that guy has a very personal, convicting, deep story that I'm trampling all over, and I'm not thinking of his feelings. But the post that inspired me today, over on pastor Eugene Cho's blog, has a couple tragic, convicting, deep stories to consider for anyone who dares use the heartstring defense against the LGBTQ community, or dares to raise up anger against the evildoers. And I refuse to play that game - I am emphatic that emotional appeals aren't effective in actually solving anything, and there is just as much emotional charge on one side as the other. The facts are that the appalling suicide rates, homeless rates, and dropout rates of LGBTQ youth is a rousing sign that we as a nation are sorely in need of a fresh set of eyes on the matter. We are urgently in need of reconciliation - a word that SPU is strangely fond of, considering their response to Haven. It's all well and good until it comes against the massive hatred and fear of the LGBTQ community among Christians, and then it all falls apart. And really, I can't blame the administration too much - they rely on this community for donations to keep this school going, to send students their way, and it probably would be suicidal to be more openly approving of the LGBTQ community. That sucks, and it's wrong, but it's the reality. Because change doesn't happen from the top down. It never has, and it never will. It starts with hearts, and gradually works its way up. And that is where I am hopeful. Because people like Dr. Neuhouser, Dr. Steele, everyone who participated in the Day of Silence, and the many students on campus that support Haven, are thinking, praying, wrestling, and most importantly, changing hearts. We will get there, I truly believe. It will take a while, it may even take a whole new generation of open hearts. But I am hopeful.

Go Iowa!

2009-04-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

The other day, my girlfriend was reading for one of her classes about Brazil, where they have several tiers of marriage, and religious marriage is left up to the religious organizations, and the government just deals with civil marriages. Call me a crazy liberal, brainwashed by living in Seattle for these three years, but this is my ideal system for the US - one where the government doesn't have anything to do with marriage, and people can get married if they want, in a religious organization, without any legal implications. This sort of exists in the US with civil unions, but it's far from actually implemented, and there is still a huge stigma to civil unions. I know Brazil doesn't allow gay civil unioning, but the system would allow for it in the US.
Then today, I was reading through an an opinion piece about an over-the-top cheesy anti-gay ad, and it alluded to the actual filing from the Iowa decision to allow gay marriage. It included this section, written by judge Mark S. Cady, evidently a Republican nominee:

I. Religious Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage. Now that we have addressed and rejected each specific interest advanced by the County to justify the classification drawn under the statute, we consider the reason for the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from civil marriage left unspoken by the County: religious opposition to same-sex marriage. The County’s silence reflects, we believe, its understanding this reason cannot, under our Iowa Constitution, be used to justify a ban on same-sex marriage.
While unexpressed, religious sentiment most likely motivates many, if not most, opponents of same-sex civil marriage and perhaps even shapes the views of those people who may accept gay and lesbian unions but find the notion of same-sex marriage unsettling. Consequently, we address the religious undercurrent propelling the same-sex marriage debate as a means to fully explain our rationale for rejecting the dual-gender requirement of the marriage statute.
It is quite understandable that religiously motivated opposition to same-sex civil marriage shapes the basis for legal opposition to same-sex marriage, even if only indirectly. Religious objections to same-sex marriage are supported by thousands of years of tradition and biblical interpretation. The belief that the “sanctity of marriage” would be undermined by the inclusion of gay and lesbian couples bears a striking conceptual resemblance to the expressed secular rationale for maintaining the tradition of marriage as a union between dual-gender couples, but better identifies the source of the opposition. Whether expressly or impliedly, much of society rejects same-sex marriage due to sincere, deeply ingrained— even fundamental—religious belief.
Yet, such views are not the only religious views of marriage. As demonstrated by amicus groups, other equally sincere groups and people in a survey in the Des Moines Register in 2008 found 28.1% of individuals surveyed supported same-sex marriage, 2% opposed same-sex marriage but supported civil unions, and thirty-two percent of respondents opposed both same-sex marriage and civil unions. The Des Moines Register survey is consistent with a national survey by the PEW Research Center in 2003. This PEW survey found that fifty-nine percent of Americans oppose same-sex marriage, and thirty-two percent favor same-sex marriage. However, opposition to same-sex marriage jumped to eighty percent for people “with a high level of religious commitment,” with only twelve percent of such people in favor of same-sex marriage. Iowa and around the nation have strong religious views that yield the opposite conclusion.
This contrast of opinions in our society largely explains the absence of any religion-based rationale to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s same-sex marriage ban. Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring government avoids them. See Iowa Const. art. I, § 3 (“The general assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . .”). The statute at issue in this case does not prescribe a definition of marriage for religious institutions. Instead, the statute declares, “Marriage is a civil contract” and then regulates that civil contract. Iowa Code § 595A.1. Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with civil marriage.
We, of course, have a constitutional mandate to protect the free exercise of religion in Iowa, which includes the freedom of a religious organization to define marriages it solemnizes as unions between a man and a woman. See Iowa Const. art. I, § 3 (“The general assembly shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise [of religion] . . . .”). This mission to protect religious freedom is consistent with our task to prevent government from endorsing any religious view. State government can have no religious views, either directly or indirectly, expressed through its legislation. [Knowlton v. Baumhover, 182 Iowa 691, 710, 166 N.W. 202, 208 (1918)]. This proposition is the essence of the separation of church and state. As a result, civil marriage must be judged under our constitutional standards of equal protection and not under religious doctrines or the religious views of individuals. This approach does not disrespect or denigrate the religious views of many Iowans who may strongly believe in marriage as a dual-gender union, but considers, as we must, only the constitutional rights of all people, as expressed by the promise of equal protection for all. We are not permitted to do less and would damage our constitution immeasurably by trying to do more.
The only legitimate inquiry we can make is whether [the statute] is constitutional. If it is not, its virtues . . . cannot save it; if it is, its faults cannot be invoked to accomplish its destruction. If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.
In the final analysis, we give respect to the views of all Iowans on the issue of same-sex marriage—religious or otherwise—by giving respect to our constitutional principles. These principles require that the state recognize both opposite-sex and same-sex civil marriage. Religious doctrine and views contrary to this principle of law are unaffected, and people can continue to associate with the religion that best reflects their views. A religious denomination can still define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and a marriage ceremony performed by a minister, priest, rabbi, or other person ordained or designated as a leader of the person’s religious faith does not lose its meaning as a sacrament or other religious institution. The sanctity of all religious marriages celebrated in the future will have the same meaning as those celebrated in the past. The only difference is civil marriage will now take on a new meaning that reflects a more complete understanding of equal protection of the law. This result is what our constitution requires.

All I can say is, wow. That is one powerful piece of writing, coming from a state on the fringes of the Bible belt. No east or west coast crazies involved here, this is coming the heart of the country. And it is long overdue.

Tradition Sucks.

2009-04-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

"Hey, when I showed up, I didn't go about using big words or religious terminology. I didn't pretend to be more educated or have special insight when I told you about my experience with God. It was my goal to know of nothing except Jesus Christ, crucified, when I was with you guys. I was weak and afraid. Very afraid. My thoughts, my message weren't from a high vernacular, not set in persuasion or wisdom. They were a demonstration of the Holy Spirit's raw power, so that you can have faith because of God and his power, not me or any other man."
--1 Corinthians 2:1-5, paraphrased

Just so you know that I'm not completely off my rocker with my (admittely biased) paraphrasing, here's the NIV:
"When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power."

I finally am reading the rest of Pagan Christianity, and will move immediately onto Reimagining Church after this. It's a good sign when books like this have you straight up read some scripture, and this one stood out to me. A few choice quotes from this chapter, with my thoughts: "The sermon creates an excessive and pathological dependence on the clergy. The semon make the preacher the religious specialist—the only one having anything worthy to say. Everyone else is treated as a second-class Christian—a silent pew warmer. (While this is not usually voiced, it is the unspoken reality.)"
Not only is that a doozy of a first sentence ("excessive and pathological dependence"), it's a good one. I find, as I read this and as I consider my experience on my own, that that last parenthetical phrase is anything but unimportant. It instead describes the church I know all to often. "Bad" things are often not voiced, or even vocally denied or condemned, but in reality are all too true and present. Things like this class system, the idea that the pastor is above everyone and the focus of Christianity (have you ever seen a church? The chapter on architecture was fascinating), the concept of love the sinner, hate the sin, the idea that works are a necessary result of "faith", the ridiculous obsession with wealth and prosperity. But those are getting into other issues. Back to the topic at hand:
"It [the sermon] has become so entrenched in the Christian mind that most Bible-believing pastors and laymen fail to see that they are affirming and perpetuating an unscriptural practice out of sheer tradition. The sermon has become permanently embedded in a complex organizational structure that is far removed from first-century church life." And a quote from David C. Norrington, author of To Preach or Not to Preach: "The sermon is, in practice, beyond criticism. It has become an end in itself, sacred—the product of a distorted reverence for 'the tradition of the elders'...it seems strangely inconsistent that those who are most disposed to claim that the Bible is the Word of God, the 'supreme guide in all matters of faith and practice' are amongst the first to reject biblical methods in favor of the 'broken cisterns' of their fathers (Jeremiah 2:13)."

The power of tradition is intimidating, and overwhelming. It is not always bad, but can often perpetuate bad practice. Tradition is the only reason that a majority of Christians (by my estimation, anyway) will tell you that people laughed at Noah, there was no rain before the flood, there were three wise men that showed up when Jesus was born, and Jesus had a whip when he chased the sellers out of the temple. None of these have the slightest shred, however, of Scriptural evidence. It is also the reason that some churches (like mine) have sacred communion tables, polyester choir robes, and yes, the sacred sermon (which every church that I've been to has). And it's not a good reason. There are many reasons that the sermon as it stands is a bad idea. And you should read Pagan Christianity. Because it's really, really good.

I Hate All Your Show

2009-03-02T01:51:00.000-08:00

I was catching up on my feeds, when I came across this post over at the Holy Heteroclite, which is a re-post of part of a post elsewhere, which I will in turn partially reproduce here. It's a list of vocabulary that doesn't mean what it used to:

WORD	MISUSE	USED TO MEAN
church	building, organization	gathering of friends
worship	religious concert & lecture	a life poured out, as a sacrifice
saved	guilt free pass	salvaged and put back to hard work
truth	proposition, world view	a person--Jesus
christian	religious conservative	one who loves & suffers like Jesus
preach	religious lecture	announce on the street
ministry	professional religious program	serving like a slave
apostle	spiritual superstar	expendable messenger
prophet	dead, lacking diplomacy	listens to God
pastor	religious CEO	smelly sheep tender
love	feeling or mood	sacrificial, tender care acted out

Too often a very accurate list, that I have seen in action.

Additionally, in following some links, I rediscovered Jon Foreman's song, "I Hate All Your Show" - there's a post with lyrics and a video elsewhere, I won't repeat it here. But it is an excellent song - check it out and ponder it.

I know constantly and exclusively saying what's wrong with the church and Christians isn't the way to fix things, and is easy to do. But whatever my faith ends up looking like, it will hopefully be one of doing, being, and relationships. And, most difficult for someone with pride issues like me, humility and subservience. We'll see how that goes.

Instant gratification, Christianity, America, and kids, the last of which screws everything up.

2009-02-12T06:45:00.000-08:00

So, I'm reading about the traditional Creationist view of instant, exclusively-God origins versus the theistic evolution view of gradual, God-initiated origins. The author is a theistic evolutionist (my term, not his, I'm generalizing here), and he was talking about how the introduction of the "human element" (perhaps the "soul" if you will) that enables mankind to use language and indulge in religious practices among other things was a gradual process, which subtly grates against the idea that we are specially designed by God to be unique and especially in God's image. It's not an absolute contradiction, but there is some discomfort.

Also, this was going to be a shorter post, because I'm doing my UScholars reading for tomorrow, it's almost 5am, and I work in three hours. But now I probably just won't sleep...anyway, that's beside the point.

I got to thinking about this gradual vs instant thing, and realized that this "instant gratification" creation that I grew up with was similar to another element of theology that I grew up with - "instant gratification" salvation. This is the idea of the sinner's prayer - that you're not a Christian until you say it, and once you say it, you're in. If you press hard enough, it becomes more elaborate, and it ends up being less black and white, but regardless, that's what I gleaned from my spiritual upbringing, since I didn't ask too many questions before I left home, for reasons far too numerous and loaded for this note. If you haven't read my other notes, and are confused or have questions, read them, or my snazzy new blog, which has them all nicely gathered. Anyway, the comfort in this black/white view, and the reason it's so prevalent, I think, is that it's easy - you don't have to worry about whether you're going to heaven or not, there's no uncertainty - you're either in or out. And as a bonus, it's really easy to get in - all you have to do is say the right words. Basically, as long as you involve Jesus, the fact that you're a sinner, and repentance, you're good.

Except if you don't really mean it. Or you're too young to understand fully. Or is that covered under some underage clause? And if it is, do you have to re-commit once you're old enough? Or does it just kind of transfer over?
What if you say it when you're four in the guest bedroom, following after your father so you can get to heaven, and then never actually follow up later in life?
What if you do follow up later in life, but realize that you're not entirely hunky-dory with everything you were raised with, and so you don't explicitly re-commit the same way?
Are you still in?
Do you get to go to heaven?
Or are you going to burn in hell for eternity?
And what's with this intense focus on heaven and hell, anyway? Isn't Christianity about more than some giant, supernatural Admiral's Club?

As you can tell, this is something I've struggled with, pretty hard. For more on that, again see my other notes (or, again, my blog). Strangely enough, though, I have largely settled on a more gradual, evolutionary, if you will, kind of salvation. That you're judged not on where you are on a journey, but where you're headed - not on whether or not you've crossed some fairly arbitrary line. Spiritual growth is not linear. The idea that it's a black and white, in-or-out scenario just doesn't sit well with me. That may seem like a cop-out, but I don't see any resolution unless you just don't ask questions, which just isn't an option for me. I think the seeming cop-out is a result of a misplaced focus on heaven and hell, as I alluded to earlier, and a result of a larger, more general tendency to want this instant-gratification spirituality.

It shows up in young-earth Creationism, salvation, churchgoing, Biblical literalism, and all kinds of places in the faith that I cobbled together during my first 18 years. Which makes sense, seeing as how I grew up in America, which is a very instant-gratification society.

But I don't think it's that easy. The Bible came way before we had any significant idea of how the world we live in came to be, and most of it was written thousands of years before modern science was even a twinkle in Francis Bacon's eye. Salvation, under much scrutiny, isn't a simple in/out affair. A lot of these things are not explicitly said (although some are), and some are even specifically contested (going to church doesn't make you a Christian), but they are nonetheless prevalent in mainstream American Christianity.

I think this is because Americans are lazy. Christianity does as much for you as you put into it, I would argue - not in a literal works sense, but in the sense that if I just, say, go to church, show up to youth group, memorize some scripture and the right answers to all the questions, sing some songs, go on missions, and believe what everyone tells me, It's not going to do a damn thing.

Sidenote for those who are shocked and/or offended: I considered stronger phrases, but settled on that. Swearing is another thing that I've come to see as less black and white. Swearing up and down, just because you stubbed your toe, or because you are late to work, is dumb, and rude. If used very sparingly, however, it can then indicate intense passion and emphasis about things you really care about. Using big words instead just seems to pretentious to me, and using a thesaurus doesn't make you intelligent. I use language *extremely* sparingly, because there are few things that I am *extremely* passionate about, and I don't want to dilute their power of emphasis by using them for lesser things, like a lot of people do. This, however, is one of the few worthy subjects.

Anyway...in case you didn't get my drift, that's pretty much what I did. And it gave me a fantastic moral foundation and a pretty good starting point, but it could have been so much more, and it wasn't. Additionally, I now have to sort through 18 years of accumulated theology to figure out what is actually essential, what is negotiable, and what is unnecessary. Because with everything I've been told spiritually in the past, there is no way that it is 100% rock-solid, necessary theology.

It's a sad statement that I was able to, as a preacher's kid, even, make it through my childhood on cruise control theologically and spiritually. It is largely my fault, but my job was made a lot easier by the fact that in America particularly (the rest of the Western world to a lesser degree), "Christianity" is easy. Really easy. Like, braindead simple. It's arguable that you would have to almost make an effort to not be a "Christian."

Now, is everyone who calls himself a Christian really a Christian? Most assuredly not. 84% (or whatever statistic you quote) of people in America claim to be Christian, but far, far less than that are active Christians. I don't think I would even categorize myself in the latter category, at this point, or any other in my life.

So what is my point? What is the solution? Should Christianity be harder?

Yes. I think so. Christianity should be hard. It should be intellectually challenging, emotionally challenging, and spiritually challenging. Now for some devil's advocate Q&A that I've done for myself, that might mitigate some kickback, or at least explain where I'm coming from:

Q: Wouldn't that result in less Christians?
A: Most definitely.

Q: Is that a bad thing?
A: No. It would get rid of the massive amounts of chaff that show up in church on Sundays and don't do much else. And before you get all up in my grill about calling anyone chaff, I'm not. Whether you're chaff or not isn't my call.

Q: But what about those people who do become Christians simply by going to church? Wouldn't they just be "chaff" and never become Christians?
A: This isn't an easy one, but it's helpful to do a miniature paradigm shift. I like to think that people become Christians by seeing and witnessing other Christians in real life, and are then educated and ministered to by church. Church should not, in my opinion, be an evangelism center. For those that need it, there are rallies, Billy Graham style. But the way that people become Christians should be through existing Christians, living their lives, and sharing their joy. Church does not necessarily a Christian make, and, I think, is hard-pressed to a Christian make alone.
Now, I've heard tell of people becoming devout Christians because someone told them they were going to Hell. I'm sure there are devout Christians who started out just going to church. I would like to think that if there were more sincere Christians and less chaff Christians, those people would find Christianity without church. If not, then those are very different people than I am, and I don't pretend to understand them.

Q: But wouldn't it still result in a net loss of "real" Christians, if there was less of the Christian atmosphere?
A: Maybe, maybe not. Firstly, if you define "real" Christians as "people that are going to heaven," you're missing my point. I bet there will be people not in Heaven that a lot of people think should be, and probably people in Heaven that a lot of people think shouldn't be. The point being, Christians as whole, I think, would be more devout and less hypocritical. They would drive less people away, but also bring less people in. But of these less people, a much larger portion would actually be legitimate Christians. So where do the numbers land? I don't know. And I don't really care. Christianity shouldn't be a numbers game, and trying to make in into one royally screws everything up.

I think that's about all the Q/As that I can think of at the moment.

Now a quick rejoinder: all this is great for adults, but kids throw a huge wrench into the works. As having kids becomes less of a nebulous, distant event, and more of a palatable, possible happening, I've been considering how in the world I'm going to raise them. And although I've done a lot of thinking, and settled a good bit for myself, I haven't a clue how I'm going to raise my kids. I want them to have a strong moral foundation like I did, but don't want them to be able to coast like I did. How does one do that? Go to church yourselves, and start bringing them when they start asking questions? Raise them in the church and make them ask questions? Say to heck with it, and hope they figure it out? I haven't the foggiest. And as I've mentioned before, I'm grateful for the way my parents raised me - it's working out in the end, and it definitely gave me a good start. But if possible, I want to avoid the late start. The typical thought is that kids just can't understand such things until they're old, so you have to spoon-feed them until they're "old enough." But why, when we stop spoon-feeding them food, can't we stop spoon-feeding them theology? What is "old enough" anyway? Does spoon-feeding them long-term mess things up down the road, when you stop? Is the lack of understanding because of nature - the inherent capabilities of kids, or is it a circular nurture thing - because we spoon-feed them, they can't understand?

I don't know.

And I won't, until I'm a parent, and even then, I probably won't know until after I've gone too far to change course.

Being a parent sounds really, really hard, and I've heard it's a thankless job.

So to my parents: Thank you. Immensely, and truly. I know you did your best, and I appreciate it. Truly, and a lot. It did incredible things for me. The fact that I'm not copying it verbatim is anything but a slam on how you raised me. It is instead my own best effort, different because I'm coming from a different place than you were when you were raising kids, and trying to copy your methods when I'm a different person would most definitely mess everything up. Hopefully, my kids will turn out at least close to as well as I did. Which is scary, but it's the best I can do.

Here goes nothing.

The Calf Path

2008-12-29T12:36:00.001-08:00

One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged, and turned, and bent about
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because 'twas such a crooked path.
But still they followed—do not laugh—
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked,
Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare;
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah! Many things this tale might teach—
But I am not ordained to preach.

—Sam Walter Foss

How I can vote for Obama the Baby Killer

2008-10-26T00:10:00.000-07:00

If you don't feel like reading all of this, at least read "The Good Part" (below)

This coming November 4, less than two weeks away, I fully intend to cast my vote for Barack Obama as president of the United States.

This doesn't sit too well with a lot of the people around me, particularly those back home and in my family.

The most mentioned issue, of course, is abortion, mostly in the vein of "how can you vote for a baby killer?" I regularly get anti-Obama emails from my aunt, the most recent of which included yet another youtube video. It's a video that compares McCain and Obama's stances on abortion. It's nothing new - I've been emailed a few such videos.

So, the question remains - how can I vote for someone who ruthlessly murders the fetuses so prominently displayed in said video?

My answer is twofold. Firstly, I will say that I don't totally agree with Obama on abortion. He is a bit far left of me. But abortion is not my issue, for a few reasons. I believe that unless you are running for office, you will never 100% agree with a candidate. And even then you will probably have to make some compromises to pander to your base. There are many other reasons that I am voting for Obama, and abortion is one issue that I disagree with among many that I agree with.

Secondly, I am personally conflicted about what laws should be made around abortion. Personally, I think abortions are a terrible thing, and should never be necessary. But one of the reasons I am more liberal that I was raised to be is that I am vehemently against legislating Christian morals. That's what the Church of England did, it's what the Pharisees did, and it's what the Religious Right is trying to do. The first eventually resulted in the country we now call the United States.

The second is what Jesus spent a good part of his ministry railing against.

THE GOOD PART

In fact, the very end of the above-mentioned video is why I decided to write this note. It used the imagery from the Passion of the Christ of Jesus drawing a line in the sand, presumably to invoke battle imagery - "This is the line, cross it and be with us or stay there and prepare for war" kind of thinking. The use of this particular imagery (from the biblical passage in Luke 8) struck me for two reasons.

First, Jesus was doing anything but when he was drawing that line (or whatever he was doing in the sand, we don't actually know). He was defending an adulterer, of all things, from the Pharisees! I would assume that to many of the Religious Right, their ideal America would involve outlawing adultery. But here we have Jesus, telling the Pharisees (who did just that) that it's not their place to judge. The famous "let him who is sinless cast the first stone" passage. And then, when he had the chance, did he condemn her? No - in fact, the Bible says, "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin." He put the responsibility for her actions right back where they belong - on her, not on the law. If Jesus were in politics today, I can't help but think he would get pounded for "promoting adultery" and "endorsing infidelity" for his stance.

Second, the Religious Right often uses the abortion issue to try to corner people like me - the "how can you vote for a baby killer" question. Strangely, right there in the black and white of scripture, was this:

They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.

The Pharisees were trying to pick something that Jesus couldn't possibly object to - she was an Adulterer, for goodness' sake! - and get him on their side. They were taking a single issue and setting it up in black and white, trying to corner him into either condemning or commending her actions.

Jesus' response is a good summary of how I can vote for Obama. I don't want to misappropriate Jesus for my cause. I don't know what Jesus would do about abortion if he were running for president, although I tend to agree with Huckabee. But it helps elucidate my position. I don't think it's the place of the government to go legislating religion - as my other notes have said at length. Change on issues like abortion and gay marriage doesn't come from the outside by the government - it comes from the inside, on a personal level. That's what the church does. The government simply can't, and trying to force the church's job onto the government's shoulders is just asking for trouble.

Holding...

2008-08-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

So, for the past couple years, I've pretty much been rethinking everything. And I've done a lot of thinking - a lot of talking, reading, some more thinking. And I'm not nearly done yet.
But I did just recently finish Mere Christianity, one of the books on the long list of books to read. Next up I think is Waking the Dead, although I don't know if I'll be in the right place to read it, but I suppose I'll check it out anyway.

Cause see, here's the problem.

So I came into college, and like most of the rest of the world, realized that I have no freaking clue why I believe what I supposedly believed. I don't know how my experience compares to others, but I basically was play-acting up until that point, which made me pretty good at appearing Christian, but it didn't make me one any more than we can resurrect Hamlet from the dead by putting on a play.

So I looked at what I supposedly believed in, and realized I had all kinds of problems with it. Mostly related to me being fiercely and primarily logical.

And over the past couple years, I've mostly dealt with the problems I had. I've realized that the Focus on the Family brand of Christianity that I was raised in is most definitely not for me, but (most importantly) that's okay. It may be okay for some people - and those people just tend to frustrate me, but that's beside the point - but I needed something else.

Now I'm at the point where I have pretty much built something, a framework, or at least a vague idea of a faith that I could believe in, that I don't think is heretical. There's not a lot of solid points yet, because I haven't really done anything with it. But most likely, it wouldn't involve young-earth creationism, would be terrified of legislating morality, would realize that we aren't a Christian nation, and would have its feet firmly planted on this earth.

But now what?

Mere Christianity was a great book, and there were a lot of things I liked about it. Surprisingly enough, I enjoyed (and I think benefited from) the second half more than the first, which surprised me. When he prefaced it by saying basically that these are Christian issues, I thought since that's not where I am, they wouldn't apply. But what it ended up doing is either confirming my restructuring, validating what I had come up with, or making me slightly uncomfortable and pointing out possible problems with my framework. And it made me think.

The first half was mostly (as far as I remember, it was a while ago) semi-logically ramping up to a reason for God existing. As I had been told previously, it was more of a literary, sociological-type argument, which wasn't terribly gripping to me, and definitely didn't make me a convert on the spot. Sorry, all.

And that's where the problem is - I have this framework that I could probably work with, and plenty of knowledge of how it's supposed to work from my eighteen years of play-acting, but am sitting here without a reason.

Is there a reason for that? A reason for not finding a reason? I don't know. One of the things that I've wondered when pondering this, and something that came up a lot reading Lewis, was pride. In fact, Lewis says the following:
"The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind."

Dang.

Well, I was going to separate the Mere Christianity insights into a different note, but I'm leading into them, so I might as well go into it now. I'm going to kind of go backwards, because it works best that way.

The chapter "Nice People or New Men" had a lot of things that caught my eye. To start the context, I'll just quote him:
"There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so."

Of the two categories, I would obviously fit better into the latter. Later in the chapter, he elaborates on the vast array of Christians there are, and the vast array of backgrounds from which people come to Christianity. And I spotted myself. Right in the middle of the chapter, he says:
"Now quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger [to being rich and finding happiness through wealth]. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. 'Why drag God into it?' you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easy to you . You are not one of those wretched creatures who is always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness."
I'm not bragging or being all self-righteous and crap (that's not the kind of pride I'm worried about) - I love the parenthetical "between ourselves" that Lewis added - but after looking up dipsomania (turns out I'm not an alcoholic), that's pretty much where I am. Which, as it turns out, isn't exactly the best of circumstances. On the next page he writes:
"There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us. If you are a nice person -- if virtue comes easily to you -- beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God's gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee."
And this is where we find the rub. Because one thing I've never liked about the whole Christianity thing is the distinct lack of personal achievement, as I see it. Everything is from God, nothing is us, we have to be eternally grateful to him, we're nothing. I know that's a pretty pessimistic and negative view of it, but I'm an engineer. I'm an ENTP. I find my worth in what I do, what I produce, the things that I create. That's what I strive for, that's what I enjoy. Also, I see my supposed saintly behavior as simply the best way to get along with people. Heaven knows that I've been doing it for years now, and it's been pretty successful in making my life happy and generally good.

This is where I see my pride, where Lewis pokes me a bit. Or a lot. Because I don't want to attribute everything I am, everything I've done to God. I've done a lot of it myself, dangit. And so I'm at a bit of an impasse - I don't have a good enough reason to make that leap, to sacrifice my accomplishments and pride and attribute it to some greater being that I've never seen, heard, touched, or felt, physically or otherwise.

And I'm not sure how far I have to go - I know that some people (such as the aforementioned Focus on the Family types) tend to attribute EVERYTHING to God. I got an A on a test? Thanks, God. I manage to somehow survive the harrowing drive to and from work every day, just like thousands upon thousands of others, Christian and non-Christian alike? God must be protecting me.
Obviously, that annoys me. I hope it's just an extreme, opposite of attributing everything to ourselves, and isn't how it's actually supposed to work. Because I need a reason to live, to do things, and if it's not even my doing, why do it?

So that's my hang-up. I don't want to give up myself, my pride, without a good reason. He sums up the difficulty well in a previous chapter:
"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self -- all your wishes and lamentations -- to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is remain what we call 'ourselves', to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be 'good'. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way -- centred on money or pleasure or ambition -- and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exaclty what Christ warned us you could not do."
There was a lot more after that, but I won't just go quote the whole book. That little section reminded me of the parable of the young ruler, a story I had always just looked at and thought about how giving away all your money wasn't a great idea. But that's not the point of the parable, I realized. Money isn't my vice - it's not my centre, like it was for the young ruler. My vice is ambition - I shudder much more at the thought of giving up all of my accomplishment, my inventiveness, my engineeringness, than I do at giving up money. That was a new thought for me.

Lewis had a few words of encouragement even for me though. For one, he followed up the above-quoted description of myself (the dipsomania one) with this:
"Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are 'rich' in this sense to enter the Kingdom."
Okay, not the most encouraging passage, but to me it says that there may indeed be a point where I see a reason. Sure, it may be painful, but it'll be a reason. Cause I'm don't like this limbo place I'm in right now.

And a more wholly positive remark that I saw myself in was a few chapters back, as follows:
"When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realizes that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going - provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents - the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him than it ever was before."
I honestly see myself in that position - I'm not doing this whole thing to just rebel or be annoying or because it's the hip thing to do. I think that I honestly am questioning all this because I need to.

After all that, where am I left? Still pretty much in limbo. Because I could just throw my arms up and be a Christian full-on, but why? I'm pretty content with where I am, and where I'm headed. I don't see any sore lack of fulfillment in my life, or a big hole. And yeah, I know, that's what Lewis said I'd say. But remember, I can't just take Lewis' word as gospel. If I did, I would have to take Stephen Hawking and Tom Robbins and all the other atheist writers out there as gospel, too, which obviously wouldn't get me very far. I have to have a reason, so I can explain myself to the rest of the world.

And as of yet, I don't.

So I'm holding. Waiting for a collapse of my self-image, for my world to come crashing down on me? Maybe. In any case, that turning point hasn't come yet. I keep filling in holes in my framework, my ideas, my understanding, but nothing conclusive.

Yay.

Disclaimer:
I don't write these things because I want advice. The reason I write them is partially to keep those who are wondering where I am informed, and partially to force myself to dump what I'm thinking on a page, because I have to think about it that way. I doubt that a one-off comment on my note will have much of an effect on me in the long run, and I won't be offended in the least if you don't comment. If you want to chat with me, do so. I'm on IM and Facebook pretty often, and will be back at school pretty soon. I don't mean any offense or to be bristly, I'm just saving you some effort.

So I've been reading Mere Christianity...

2008-07-15T14:53:00.000-07:00

And am enjoying it...it's a really good book, and has made me think a lot, and confirmed some things that I've been thinking. I'll probably write a few notes about it, but I wanted to let this quote pretty much speak for itself. While he is talking about divorce in the UK in the 1950s, I think it is very relevant, and has many similarities to gay marriage in America today. It stood out to me particularly because the last couple sentences are the exact same conclusion I have been coming to with gay marriage and the church. At any rate, it is definitely something to think about (emphasis mine):

"Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question - how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not."

The only thing I want to say is that while 75% of America does claim to be Christian, that number has been in decline, and it seems to me that most of them do little more than go to church on Sunday anyway. In any event, I still think it's relevant.

Prayer

2008-07-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

Dear God,
Thank you for today, and that we could have a good time [at work, at school, around the house].
I pray that you would help us to get good sleep tonight, so we can be ready for tomorrow, and that we can have a good time tomorrow [at work, at school, around the house].
I pray for [whoever is sick/away/needs prayer], that you would bless them and [help them get better/keep them safe/be with them].
Also I pray for [some event in the near future], that you would help that to go well, and that things will come together for that.
And I pray that you would help us to be like [insert biblical figure from the reading tonight], and that we could learn from [whatever said biblical figure did] and [do whatever they did].
And thank you for sending your son to die for us.
In the name of your son,
Amen.

Now, to start out, I apologize if putting all that, in that manner, in a Facebook note offends anyone. But I came to the conclusion that it's no worse than the reason I'm writing this note.

So for the first time in a while since I've been home, I was part of the devotion time at my house. And once again, what's up above is what happened. Slight variations, my dad's included more fancy words, my little brother's less, my Mom's more concern for others. But the same basic formula.

That's what prayer was to me for 18 years. And I know I do a lot of complaining and such in these notes, so I'll try to restrain myself. Or at least spin it in a positive light.

So I was sitting there, half-listening to the same thing I heard repeatedly for the majority of my childhood, and I thought about how I was going to do this thing when it was my turn.

First of all, "Dear God"? Really? That's for letters. And last I checked, prayer was "talking to God." None of this letter stuff. And I thought about it, and whether I'm talking to my principal, my girlfriend, or my brother, I'll start with "Hey." It'll have different tones, but it'll be there. So "Hey, God". That works better.

And today? Tonight? Tomorrow? All this immediate, "me" stuff. God may care about what happens to me and all. Maybe it's just my self-sufficient nature, but I don't want to have to ask God specifically every day to help me have a good day and a good sleep. I'm already getting crappy sleep because I'm staying up writing this note. That's my fault, I'll deal with it. So none of this day-to-day stuff for me.

Praying for others? I can do that. Especially when I can't actually do anything for them myself. We'll keep that on the list. I still don't like the generic, blanket statements, but that's okay.

So what's that leave me...if I were actually talking to God, I'd thank him for my job and such, because I'm pretty lucky/blessed to have them. So we'll do that.

Okay, my turn.

Hey God.
Thanks for my job with Kinetic, cause it's a good job, and it makes things a lot easier.
And for the Falcon job, cause that's really cool, and has worked out really well.
And I pray for Becky, that you would keep her safe in India. I know she's having a great time, and so thanks for your hand in that.
Also, thanks that Elise has found a great guy, and that that's worked out well. And thanks that they get to come back to SPU, and I pray that you'd help Grant with finances and such, so that he can come, cause that'd be great.
Amen.

Too familiar

2008-05-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

For you say, 'I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.' You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.
Revelation 3:17-18

Mark 7:6-8

2008-04-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

And he said to them, "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
'This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.'
You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men."

Rules

2008-04-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

Humans like rules. God doesn't.

That's something I've noticed, and it kind of came to light in a discussion at college group the other night.

It sounds counterintuitive - we hate rules, we want to do what we want, not what anyone tells us to. But when I look at the old testament, and the new testament, and what the majority (or at least the vocal minority) of American Christians today have set up as Christianity, that's what I see.

God didn't want rules. Initially, he had one - don't touch the tree. That was it. But then Humans had to go and screw everything up. Throughout the Old Testament, we had all these rules and stuff, and despite all the Isrealites' whining, it worked pretty well - they had all these sacrifices and stuff, and they, on the whole, got along with God when all was said and done.

And then God was all like, "Okay, these rules are annoying, and not really what I want. I'm going to send Jesus down to fulfill the law so we don't have all these obnoxious rules. The humans will figure it out, and be much happier. They'll see."

So Christ came down, fulfilled the law, told the Pharisees and Sadducees that all their ideas were the worst idea since Noah let the mosquitoes live on the Ark, and told the people what God was *really* about - loving your neighbor, helping others, letting God's love shine through you. It was great.

So what about Christianity today? Well, the way I see it, a large part of Christianity has done what is to be expected - put rules in place, because rules are comfortable. We have all these rules and guidelines and expectations about what it takes to be a Christian, a good Christian. It makes it easier to count people in or out, put them in a box.

Where this really manifests itself is in salvation - Evangelical Christianity seems obsessed with the sinner's prayer, assigning it as the rule for when you're saved. It's comfortable, it's easy, it's human. Say the right words, and you get into heaven.

But I don't think that's how God intended it. Finding God, following God, seeking God, is a journey. Being on that Journey is what being a Christian should be. Paving the road and adding a gate at some arbitrary point that divides the Christians from the non-Christians doesn't make sense.

It makes it easy to have assurance of salvation, but it doesn't work. At least it didn't for me. So I think that we need to stop being so focused on the rules, as uncomfortable as that may be, and jump into a journey.

I don't know where I'll end up, or what I even think about Heaven and Hell. But I'm beginning a journey, and that's good enough for me. It's the best I can do, because I can't just say some prayer and not mean it. That just doesn't work for me.

So I'm permanently seeking.

If this doesn't make total sense, it's because I'm about to fall asleep. Perhaps I'll read it over after my nap.

A response to the responses

2008-02-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

Many of my friends responded to my previous note on Facebook, with all kinds of concerns, admonitions, and encouragements.

And it's 8:22am, I'm working at the polling place in Northgate with nothing to do because we get about five people an hour, and I only help the disabled voters with the AVU, of which we've had a grand total of 0.

Plus, I forgot my copy of Brothers Karamazov at school, so I can't read that until I go down to the library during lunch and pick a copy up.

So...some clarifications, thanks, and responses, in general. I'll start with a general overview, and then some individual responses.
The first response is that I would love to go to Gwinn or coffee (or better, tea) with any of you guys, or stop by for a chat sometime, and I'll do my best to do so - talking to people is how I figure things out, alongside writing things out, so if I don't get back to you soon, be sure to hunt me down, because I really do want to talk to you guys.

In general...some clarifications as to what my feelings are, what I'm thinking, and what the general tone of the note was, or should have been, after some more thinking. Some of my note was stream-of-consiousness style, which is unfiltered and may be more extreme than what I actually settle on after thinking about it, so I may have seemed angrier or more distressed than I was. Basically, I'm very type-B, so I don't get too stressed out or angry about much of anything.

As far as being a bad Christian, I didn't mean to imply that I was terribly distressed about it and think I'm a horrible person that's going to hell. It was just a statement that if I'm going to be a Christian, I actually have to start putting some effort into it, which I haven't. It was looking forward to improvement, not looking back at failure. So don't worry about me in that respect - as far as I'm concerned, I've only been a Christian nominally for the past 19 years, so I can only improve - lukewarm Christians are the worst, says God. The fact that I actually care and am giving my faith serious consideration is an improvement.

Also, the "box" isn't as big a deal as I may have made it out to be. It's certainly not going to prevent me from doing anything that I want to, like being a Christian. I'm also not really angry at anyone in particular, mostly just frustrated by it. And I certainly DON'T think that I have to conform to the package to call myself a Christian. As I have said before, if that was the case, I couldn't be a Christian. It's just kind of annoying and frustrating, but I can deal with it.

The reference to various atrocities by the church throughout history wasn't to rip on the church, or discredit Christianity, or anything like that. Mostly, I wanted to point out the dangers of the church being over-involved in the government - it's always led to bad things, and I don't like the idea that America should be a Christian country, because it's not, and shouldn't be. There are a lot of Christians here, but there are also a lot of non-Christians. Our country was founded on religious freedom, and codifying Christian morals into law just doesn't make sense to me. Another thing that I wanted to point out is that just because the loudest Christians say something, doesn't mean it is critical to the faith.

And about Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll. As I said, I went there for the first time in a long time. I'm not saying that I agree with everything he says, or even everything Mars Hill believes (in fact I know I don't), but I do agree with him for the most part on the subject of how men should treat women.
I know there was a whole hullabaloo last year about Driscoll being a chauvinist and all. I admit, I haven't actually seen that sermon, I plan to do so and get back to you on that. But here's my position, from what I have heard, and what I think. From what I've heard, he was grossly misrepresented. Just because he detests feminists (who also drive me nuts, by the way), doesn't mean he detests females. In fact, the primary concern of mine (and I'm pretty sure Driscoll's) is that we as men need to respect women, put them before ourselves. It's not about patronizing them, it's about loving and respecting them. If you as a woman have a problem with that, I'm sorry, I'm going to annoy you.
But to be clear - I'm not declaring myself a Mars Hillian, or hanging on every word that comes from Driscoll's mouth. It's just that in this specific case, his views lined up with mine, and it got me thinking. That's all.

A little more generally, I don't have a grudge against anyone specific. I am extremely grateful to my parents for raising me like they did - I can't imagine where I would be if they didn't raise me in a Christian home, instilling the morals and education in me that they did. Just because I don't agree with them on some things doesn't mean I'm dismissing them. I am frustrated with Focus on the Family, and the various other Christian organizations, but moreso at the environment that they have created. I don't think they're terrible people, or that they're really stupid. What they're doing works for them, but it doesn't for me - I think Christianity is big enough for the both of us, when the things that are different are the fringes, the package, that isn't important to salvation.

So basically, a summary of what I want to say to everyone...I am probably not as angry as I seem. None of this is going to keep me from being who I want to be, be that a Christian, a democrat, or what have you. And I still am not entirely sure where I land - I just know that a lot of what I believe is Christian, and a lot of the problems I have with Christianity are not with issues that are critical to the faith. Christianity is one of the things that I'm trying to reconcile in my life with what I believe, so we'll see where that leads me.

And to those who are concerned about me, I know you guys love me and care about me which is why you respond. So don't be offended by this, but I don't need a sermon at this point. I've had plenty of sermons in my life, I know the Christian line. I would love to have a chat with all of you - don't get me wrong. But it would be just that - a chat, a discussion, an exchange. At this point, I'm not looking for a mentor. I need to make this decision for myself, and I'm still nowhere near settled in a path to need a mentor at this point. I don't need to, or plan to, agree with you guys on everything, and that's just fine with me. I'd love to answer your questions, and hear what you guys have to say, and discuss things with you, and go back and forth, bounce things off. I love you guys, and look forward to our chats - my schedule is on my Facebook :)

Note: The original note included some further individual responses to the original Facebook note, if you want to check them out.

2008-02-17T19:41:00.000-08:00

Page length: Three and a half pages single-spaced
Writing time: A good hour and a half
Reading time: About 10 minutes, give or take

Okay, so this note is about a lot. It's about the following:
Mars Hill
Christians
Christianity
My life
Fundamentalism
My parents
Geeks
Logic
Government
Politics
History
William Tyndale
...and more.

I don't know how to fit it all into a title, so for now, it's blank, and it might stay that way.

As a sort of introduction after writing this note, I'll give you a little heads-up. This is mostly about what I've decided, with some ranting. Now, the ranting is actually important to me, and I think you should read it too, because it will help you understand why I'm where I'm at. But I've marked the rant sections off, so if you just want to read about what happened tonight, you can do that. Cheers.

I don't know where to start, so I suppose I'll start at the beginning. Sort of.
So today, I was planning to go to Quest at 11:00, but my body decided that it would rather sleep. So then I was talking to August at lunch, and she mentioned that she was going to Mars Hill, and the subject (dating) sounded like it would be interesting and a fun one, so I decided to come along.
And it was fun...and then it was like bam, things are happening in my head and yes this is exactly where I am and wait a minute why am I having so many problems with Christianity and then oh yeah that's why and then dangit that makes me angry oh yeah there's a sermon going on...man, that really connects with me like 100% and he's talking about me except for the "Christian" part that I'm unsure of...now why am I unsure of that again? Oh yeah, because too many Christians are stupid and obnoxious and fundamentalist and focus on the family and frick what do I do with this...
And so on. For an hour and a half. Call it a God thing, I'll probably do that when I've figured out my life. But being there called into stark contrast why I:
a) Am so freaking annoyed and disconnected with Christianity
yet
b) Don't want to throw it out completely.

(Rant...)

Firstly, you should watch this sermon. Because it is awesome, and 100% true and what you need to hear. (edit: okay, changed the link to actually point to the right sermon...it's up now, btw)
Now, what I got out of it isn't why you should watch it. You should watch it because it's true, and too many women have an incredibly wrong idea of what men should be like, and how they as women should be treated by men, and too many men have a horribly skewed and wrong idea of what women should be, and how they should treat them. But that's the subject of another note.

(End rant.)

The reason that it meant so much to me is this. As he was sermoning (I can make up that word, I'm a PK), it was resonating with me. I was hearing every word he said about everything, and it fit in exactly with what I thought, and what I was passionate about, and what made me so mad about males in relationships screwing up women, and women not holding males to the standard that we need to be held to, and everything. Everything he said fit in exactly to what I aspire to be as a man and a husband in the future. Except for the part about being a Christian, because I'm not sure where I am in that. And I cringed a bit when he said not to date non-Christians, because everything else he was describing was what I wanted in a relationship, what I wanted in a wife. If women that I were interested in followed that rule, I may miss out.

And so I thought, why? If this is where I'm at, if it fits so well, why can't I be a Christian? If the things that are coming out of this guy's mouth as the model of a good, healthy, Christian relationship are exactly what I strive for, why shouldn't I just be a Christian? And I thought about morals in general, and I had known for a while that I think the Christian moral system is by far the best way to live overall. Regardless of where I end up, I know that I want to raise my kids in the Christian moral system, because that's how I was raised, and I am eternally grateful to my parents for raising me that way. So what's the problem?

Christians. Now, I know when I say that, many of you are going to think of the quote (like I did) at the beginning of a DC Talk song, that goes like this:
"One of the greatest sources of atheism is Christians--people who acknowledge Jesus with their mouths and deny him by their lifestyles."
Now, that's not my problem. The hypocrisy does drive people away, and is a problem for sure, but it's not my problem. My problem is the idea that Christianity comes with a package. I was taught in 8th grade (I went to a Christian school) that my worldview should be defined - not even just shaped, but defined, created, even - by my religion. That means 7-day creation, that means gays are the scourge of the earth, that means Harry Potter is the work of the devil. It means that George Bush is the best thing to happen to this country in a long time just because he's a Christian, Democrats are evil because they don't believe that this is a Christian country and as such abortion and homosexuality and other such non-Christian things should be entirely illegal, and everything I do has to come directly from God and my love for Jesus, and if not, it's frivolous, if not worse.

Now, some of that is extreme, and exaggerated. But I won't apologize for it, because that's the box I get put in when I say I'm a Christian. In America, Focus on the Family, the Religious Right, the Conservative Christian movement has defined Christianity for us.

I don't fit in that box.

At all.

I would die.

Which is why I have such a problem with calling myself a Christian. Because with that comes the assumption that I believe all the rest of that. Which I don't.

So where does that leave me? I'm pretty sure Christianity is the moral system that I adhere to and believe in. And I kind of think that's the main function of a religion. Sociopolitically and in matters of science, I'm not a Christian. Not a Christian as far as America, and perhaps my family, hometown, and church, are concerned anyway.

But I think that's okay. Because I don't believe that being a Christian really means that you have to accept the whole package. And you know why? Because over the years, the package has changed. Three, four centuries ago, the package included believing that the universe rotated around the earth and that the Bible belonged in only Latin. But the core has stayed the same. The Christianity that I think I adhere to is that core, and not the package.

(Rant...)

And just to make sure that my contention is fully known - I've heard random things about how history is a conspiracy to make Christanity look bad, and the church didn't really prosecute Galielo and such.

But I'm pretty sure that William Tyndale was burned at the stake because he translated the Bible into English. Christians hold it up as a story of martyrdom and heroism. But it's never mentioned that the church killed him. THAT WAS THE PACKAGE. In 1535, the package included burning people who translated the Bible into English. No Christian today would agree with that. If they did, they would be shunned and ridiculed. So if today the package is Young-earth Creationism, and being a Republican, who says that I have to adhere to that? It's the ones that didn't adhere to it - say, William Tyndale - that are often hailed as heroes, for righting the Church that had gone horribly wrong.

Oh, by the way, another thing - people will argue that that wasn't the church, but the government. That because the Church and the government were one and the same, it was corrupted, and therefore not really the Church.

And yet these same people want to legislate morality. They want to make sure that Christian moral code gets codified into American legal code. They insist that this is a Christian country, founded on Christian ideals, and it should stay that way. Well I've got news - power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Religion and government don't mix. This has been proved over and over and over again throughout history! Whenever Christianity gets its way, and takes over the goverment, BAD THINGS HAPPEN. Inquisitions, Crusades, persecution. America CAME INTO BEING BECAUSE THE GOVERMENT WAS CHRISTIAN. The pilgrims left because the goverment defined a religion.

So why, in heaven's name, are we trying to create that again? Why are we trying to get our country to be a Christian nation? That's what our founding fathers were trying to avoid! It's the job of the church to define people's religion, and it is lazy, irresponsible, and dangerous shoving that responsibility onto the government.

(End rant.)

So...where does that leave me? Well, I think this is kind of where it leaves me. I'm not sure about any of them, but it's where I think I'm headed.

Christian.
Evolutionist.
Democrat.

Why? Well, here's what I'm sure of:

Geek.
Realist.
Man.
Somewhat cynical.
Fiercely logical.

That's what they come out of. Now, I'm a bad Christian. I play heathen, and skip church occasionally. I hardly ever read my Bible. I don't pray, except for other people. I don't go to Group, or Chapel. I don't have a relationship with God, or Jesus, and have never felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.

But I think that God put me where I needed to be tonight. Working through my friends, my sleeping through Quest, he made sure I ended up where I needed to be.

Now, I don't feel that way. And it feels weird to say that, it feels like a cop-out, like I'm a Christian that just uses God to explain everything, and cares only about loving Jesus and couldn't care less about the rest of the world. And that annoys me.

But it makes sense. Facts:
1. If I'm supposed to be a Christian, God would probably try his best to get me there.
2. I haven't been to Mars Hill since at least spring quarter last year
3. I had no intention to go to Mars Hill tonight, and was in fact planning to go to Quest at 11:00
4. The sermon happened to be related to something I am particularly passionate about*
5. I have been thinking about this stuff a lot lately.

That all seems to me that God made sure that I was there tonight. But only logically, only because it makes sense.

So, I think I'm a Christian. At the core. But not a normal Christian. I don't know what to do with that, because I'm a bad Christian, and fixing that involves a lot of things that annoy me about Christianity and Christians. So we'll see how it works out. And I'm hardly settled. But I'm headed in a direction. And that's good.

*By the way, Mark did an awful lot of saying exactly what I say and stuff that I really, really, really care about a lot when I say it. In fact, men not being men and women being okay with it is one of the two occasions in my whole life that I have used a profanity, because I am so passionate about it.

If I had been born in India... (WICAMSWIBAGJCLG)

2008-01-20T05:35:00.000-08:00

...I would have ended up in hell.
("Where I currently am in my search for what I believe about God, Jesus, Christianity, and life in general", pronounced "Wick-cam-swib-bag-jick-lig")

Perhaps a little explanation is in order. But first, some introduction. And if you're wondering how I got this far, and you really have a lot of time, read my previous posts about my journey thus far.
But in brief, I'm in college. As a direct result thereof, I have been looking at me, my life, my beliefs, and basically everything.
I've had a lot of discussions with a lot of people with a lot of different beliefs, and not a lot of sleep. And I've read some, experienced a lot. Most importantly, I've looked at life from a perspective other than the Family Life, very conservative, George-Bush-is-the-best-thing-to-happen-to-this-country-since-sliced-bread kind of worldview that I was raised in, and it's been a very eye-opening experience.

Oh, by the way, this is going to be a long note. Printed out, it would be more than two full pages, single-spaced, 10pt font. This is my disclaimer. I apologize, but that's how I write, and I've promised to keep it short, but it's never worked. I write sort of stream-of-consciousness, but it's a stream of condensed, debated, discussed, and processed consciousness. This is mainly for myself, because when I have to write or tell others what I'm thinking, I have to process it too. It also serves as a kind of update for a few friends, especially some of those with whom I've had discussions on the subject, who are curious as to where I am in my quest. And since you're on Facebook, you probably are looking for a good way to waste time anyway. But if not, that's entirely fine. I won't be offended or sad if you don't read or comment on my note. Honestly, I won't - as I said, it's mostly for myself processing. That said, I can continue. Come with if you like, but seriously, no pressure, cause I hate guilt trips, even if they're not really guilt trips.

Now, about my intro. In all the discussions, all the observation, but not so much the sleep, it's all kind of boiled down to a few points that are really the root of why I am not content with where I am, and certainly not where I was two years ago. So, this note will serve as a mental, spiritual, philosophical, metaphysical waypoint. A "Where I currently am in my search for what I believe about God, Jesus, Christianity, and life in general", if you will.
This note is about the two basic reasons that I am questioning things. My first contention is in the title: If I had been born in India, I would have been on my way to hell if I had done nothing else different for my first 18 years. Okay, obviously, I would have to do some things different, but the core of what I did, which is accept my family's theology/worldview as undoubtedly the way to go.
Let me tell you a little story, about me in an alternate reality, from the Christian worldview.
In this alternate reality, I am born (as the average person) in India. I'm a good Hindu, go to church/mass/large-gathering-of-believers regularly, meditate as is expected. I go through the motions of being a Hindu so that I can avoid being a newt in my next life. I die a Hindu, hoping to re-emerge as a human in a better social position, possibly a cow, or maybe, just maybe, reach Nirvana (or whatever it is - I guess Nirvana is Bhuddism). Instead, I end up in Hell, burning for eternity, simply because I didn't question how I was raised. Not just question whether I thought that Vishnu had green or blue skin, or whether I wanted to vote for Hanji Kujima or Gaali Bussimon in the upcoming elections. Question whether the very basics of how I was raised were even correct, whether everything that I've been taught was right or not. That kind of questioning.
Now, that story sounds ridiculous to me, and probably most of the people reading this note. But if you just replace Hinduism with Christianity, that's the story of my life up to college, to some extent midway through high school, if I had continued on the track I was on. That's a little disconcerting to me.*
The only reason that the Hindu scenario seems so ridiculous is that we are in the Western world, which is composed of mainly a) Christian-based worldviews or b) Rationalist, atheisitc-type worldviews, neither of which are very friendly to Hinduism. If we were in India, it would sound perfectly normal, and to deviate from it would be unheard of and perhaps dangerous. Now the situation isn't quite as extreme for Christianity in the US, but in my home, and my hometown, rejecting the faith that I was raised with, or even really seriously questioning it, is pretty taboo, and would make life very uncomfortable and stressful as far as can tell. But that is exactly what I would need to do if I were a Hindu. So that's what I'm doing.
My parents, of course, want me to end up a Christian. Which is possibly going to be the end result, albeit not quite of the same variety. But I can't guarantee that, because If I did, I would end up in Hell in the Hindu scenario. If anyone can come up with a good reason that I shouldn't do this, I'd love to hear it. But until then, I'm forging on.

My second problem is myself. I am extremely logical, to a fault. My emotions have very little control of my life and what I do on a daily basis. I feel like a little history is in order, and I'll do my best to keep it short, but we all know what that means.
I haven't had a lot of overt tragedy in my life. I've been blessed/lucky/fortunate for the most part. The only people that have died that have been close to me at all were my dad's father when I was pretty young, my dad's grandparents (I didn't know my mom's) when I was older, and a kid in my high school. The first two I knew but only saw once a year or so, and the third I didn't know very well. My life has been pretty stable, so I haven't known a lot of emotional turmoil.
There, that wasn't too much history. That was actually pretty good. So I haven't had too many compelling reasons to be emotional in my life. But in my discussions, most significantly Kristen, I realized that up until college, I didn't emotionally invest in people very much at all. I had friends, plenty of them, but I didn't really connect with them on any significant level. They were people that I would laugh with, study with, watch movies with. Not people that I would confide in with anything, or call up when I was going through a hard time, or was, say, questioning my faith.
This level of disconnect didn't just stop at my friends either. Even my parents, my youth minister, or just about anyone in my small town were part of the disconnect. If anyone was a friend in the sense that I now realize exists, it would be my brother, and even him I barely discussed things with. I guess it's kind of an instinctual defense mechanism, not wanting things to be uncomfortable, or perhaps not deeming it worth it to put in the time and effort required to form and maintain the friendships. I don't know whether my logical nature is a result or a cause, or a little of both. But the truth is, that's how it ended up. And I am now a very logical being, who is trying to figure out how to do this emotional thing.
My emotions, however, still have very little influence on my decisions. This whole investing in people thing led to, and allowed, what is undoubtedly and truly the single most emotional event of my life, but it was still brought about mostly by logical reasoning. In fact, my emotions were mostly opposing my logic, and they most definitely were not happy after the fact. I'll probably write another note in investing in people, since the detail is not relevant to this note. Suffice to say that my emotions, while I am now more aware of them, still have little influence in my decisions.
I am also an engineer at heart. Deep at heart. Like, the very core of my being kind of heart. I simply must know how things work, and how things got here, and why things are the way they are, especially for things where a) I care about them and b) Where they come from impacts my life. My faith is no different. I know how I got to where I am today, but it's by following a script. And last I checked, George Clooney didn't get rich robbing a casino by simply reading through Ocean's Eleven. I'm not okay with that. Take the script away, and I have no clue why I am where I am. Ocean's Eleven may be feasible, and it's based on real places, real methods. But that doesn't mean I (or George Clooney) could do it. Similarly, my Christianity I was raised with is based on its fair share of facts and evidence - my logical nature made sure of that. But could I have gotten there without having another option?** This is kind of the summary of my second contention. By the time I began to think about questioning where I was, I was already firmly in a Christian home, community, and church. It would have been extremely uncomfortable and stressful and generally bad news if I had seriously questioned things at that point. So I can't say that I am a Christian of my own volition, because I'm not. I have reasons and evidence, yes, but people have reasons and evidence for being Hindus, Mormons, and Evolutionists*** too, and according to the worldview I was raised in, they're screwed, not to mention wrong.
So I don't have a good reason for how I got to be a Christian - I can't explain why I am one past "that's what I was raised as, and I didn't see any reasons to switch that were worth the turmoil and terrible discomfort it would have caused." That's not good enough for me. If I was a Hindu, I would have had to have been approached by a missionary, listened to what he said, had some incredibly, irrevocably good reasons to believe what he said, and followed him. I would have an excellent reason for why I believed, and it wouldn't have been because he had a good powerpoint, or because he made me feel good inside.
That's one of the problems for me - the reason a lot of people become Christians is becuase they feel empty, or lonely, or they are hurting, or something else emotional. A good way to illustrate this is actually the reason that I got around to writing this note. I saw one of those facebook flyers put out by some Christian self-help site, and read the article. It said things like:
"I felt empty. Later in high school the emptiness grew and my curiosity grew to find something, anything to satisfy me. First I turned to petty things, like stealing cigarettes from my abusive uncle. But that wasn't strong enough to distract me from life and fill that emptiness. I wouldn't give up that easily...It was simply something to fill up the emptiness I felt in my life. When I was sad, when I had a bad day, I could simply go into my room, shut the doors, and feel better again."
This has never been the reason for me doing anything, except maybe sleeping or being grouchy. And believe it or not, say I'm in denial or I am filling the mysterious and vague "emptiness" with other things, but I don't feel particularly empty. And remember, that's a feeling. Those don't hold a lot of sway in my decisions. They are, as I said, vague and indefinite. If I'm going to base my whole life on something, it's going to be something solid, something that makes sense, something that I can explain. Note some wishy-washy, mishety-mush vague "emptiness." And that's why I'm on this quest. I currently don't have a good reason to be a Christian. My only reasons would be that it's comfortable, or that it's how I was raised. As I said, I have reasons, but none of them are close to good enough for my satisfaction, and they definitely didn't lead me there - they were after-the-fact to support where I already was.
Progress isn't made by explaining where we already are. I just made a random connection to my UScholars class, where we're talking about Bacon (Francis Bacon, not the meat), and it makes a good way to end this note (whew!). So here's a story to finish it up:
Basically, Bacon was fed up with everyone simply rehashing and explaining Plato and Aristotle, who were terribly wrong about most of what they said about science, but were regarded at the time as unquestionable and pure fact. Bacon said that we needed to get back to observation, not cloud our minds with what we've been taught, with what we "know", because what they "knew" back then was based on entirely ridiculous and faulty sources (unless you want to insist that planets orbit in circles simply because they are circles, and it is in their nature to move in circles).
My situation is a lot like Bacon's, I just realized. I am not okay with simply building off of, or explaining, what I already "know" as far as my beliefs go. I need to go back to observation, go back to the basics, and build from there, or I won't be satisfied, and therefore won't truly believe it. Bacon started the scientific revolution, and basically made it possible for us to live in the world we live in today. Hopefully my quest will have positive, if not history-changing, results as well.

Footnotes! (Because they were too long and would have just made things more confusing and interrupted my train of thought):
*Now don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking my upbringing. This isn't a rebellion against the chains that I was bound with as a child. I am very pleased with the person that I am today, and am incredibly grateful for how my family raised me. When it comes down to it, I don't think I would change anything major about how I was raised. But now I'm not there anymore. My family has done their job, and now what I believe is up to me.
**And this is where the analogy ends. I hate it when people use analogies and try to over-apply them, so I'm not. I'm not trying to prove anything by my analogy, or convince you of anything at all. It's a tool to illustrate and explain what I'm saying. See my other notes for why this is an issue for me.
***By the way, I'm not discounting evolution. This remark is mainly from the perspective of the worldview I was raised in.

Why I'm glad I was home this summer

2007-09-05T01:05:00.000-07:00

...in regards to my figuring out my life.

Edit: Geez this turned out long. Sorry all, you don't have to read it all. The first two, the two before and after "AUGH!", and the last two paragraphs are the important parts ;)

So, for the most part, being home is difficult, for reasons all too familiar to anyone who's gone through similar stuffs. There was a "me" back home that I was, and kept up appearances as, and now all of a sudden I don't want to have to be that anymore, because I'm not...anyway, I've covered this before. Basically, I decided that this summer, it wasn't worth the upset, or possibly screwing up my brothers, to make a big deal of it. After an initial discussion with my parents, which was good, I reverted to the me of the past eighteen years. I've had a lot of practice, so it's not difficult.

But that's all why it was bad - recently I've realized that there has been a very positive side to being home this summer. It allowed me to look at what I've been living - what I've been taught, what I've assumed, what I've known - from an entirely new perspective. All of a sudden, what I'm being told, what I've been taught, isn't necessarily right, or isn't necessarily the only thing out there. From that perspective, call it criticism, call it skepticism, call it cynicism, whatever - it's not taking things at face value any more. I've been collecting a few tidbits of things about the religion that I've been raised in that don't make sense, and figuring out what I think of them. So here's a few.

Last Sunday, as I was listening to my Dad's sermon, I noticed a few instances of a phenomenon all too common in my world - glib statements that a good Christian should nod in agreement to, but that in reality hold no water, or don't make sense. Here's the examples I jotted down, and my (mental) response:

"There are two kinds of religions - religions from God, and religions from man." (with the implication, of course, that Christianity is the only religion from God, and therefore is the correct one).
Yeah? So what - we have a religion from God. Well so do the Jews, and the Mormons, and the Muslims (where did Muhammad get his ideas? Yeah.). There are a lot of religions that claim to be directly inspired from some deity.

That's the problem with a lot of these statements - they're circular. They assume that Christianity is correct, and that everything else is false - which is absurd, if I'm trying to figure out whether I'm in the right place or not. "Well of course you are...you're a Christian!" Yeah, but what if I wasn't? What if I was born into a Muslim family, or a Mormon family? I would be hearing the exact same arguments, but as far as my world is concerned, I would be dead wrong. It's ridiculous.

Okay, next statement - here's one that is typical of any kind of statistic - it's pointless, but the speaker is trying to make a point with it.
"There are more Christians being persecuted in this century than in any other century in history (gasp!)" Okay, I don't know the exact statistic, but it sure seems to me that since there are exponentially more people, and therefore exponentially more Christians, in the world in this century than in any other century...of course there are more being persecuted. Not to make light of persecution, by the way. It's just the statistic I heard.

Oh, another classic. The horrid analogies that are supposed to make a point, but don't come close to panning out. VERY often used to defend the "Christians are so closed-minded saying that Jesus is the only way" thing. I'm not saying that that's wrong, I'm just saying that as far as I've heard, the reponses to such an argument are pathetic. Here's the analogy from the sermon last Sunday (paraphrased):
"It's like getting all in a tizzy because Qwest insists that you HAVE to call 555-5555 to talk to your friend. How dare they! It's so closed minded of them!" (laughter - how absurd, those stupid non-Christians, questioning Jesus being the only way. That'll show them)
Augh, I hate these analogies particularly. The situations don't even come close to being comprable. One is a man-made system, built in a way that we fully understand, built by humans, for humans. There are patents, blueprints, documentation on how it works and why it works, and no one claims that it works any other way. The other is a system that, as far as cold hard facts go, we haven't the foggiest how it works. There are no patents, no commonly-agreed-upon documentation on how it works. Sure, there's the Bible, but there's also the Quaran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, etc. And they all disagree.
Also - imagine if someone were to be ridiculous enough to claim that I was being stuffy, old-fashioned, ignorant, and closed-headed saying that I had to call 202-456-1414 to reach the White house. They may insist that I could just as well call (206) 283-5300 and I'd still end up in the same place. They might even insist that calling the 202 number wouldn't work! This of course, is similar to a Muslim saying that it's ridiculous for me to trust in my Christian God for salvation, and Allah is where it's at. However, the funny thing being, I can just call (206) 283-5300 and get the Pizza Hut down the road, and prove to the aforementioned buffoon that it indeed does _not_ get me to the white house. With the Muslim, however, things aren't so easy. I can't just convert to Islam, blow myself up, end up in Hell, and come back and say "See? Your way doesn't work!" No. It doesn't work that way. And that's the failure of the analogies that various sources keep trying to present. In the real world, I can just prove it. There are defined ways things work. I can try it. That's not how it works in the spiritual world. A better analogy would be Alaska airlines saying that their flight was the only way to get to Tampa. Except that you can check it out, and see that either their flight *is* the only way to Tampa, or it isn't. Can't do that with salvation. Dang.

A similar case is "well if a doctor told you that you would die unless you took this medicine, you would be a fool to say 'what? You are so closed-minded! Insisting that I take _this_ medicine, how ridiculous.' to which the doctor replies, 'But you'll die otherwise'" and so on. Obviously, the medicine is salvation, dying is Hell. I remember hearing this bit on a radio commercial by LifeLine Pro.
It doesn't work because of a similar idea - the Doctor tells you this because others have had the same thing, taken the same medicine, and it worked. He's got documentation and records to prove it. It's well tested - that's what the FDA is for. Also, you'd check with other doctors, get a second opinion, to make sure the first doctor isn't ripping you off. There aren't a host of other doctors telling you that THEIR medication will work, and his will kill you. There's a consensus, based on tested fact.
If it hasn't been tested, you're going to be wary, you're going to ask around, and you're going to go for it only if there are no other less risky options. You can't just go around trying various methods of salvation, seeing if they work or not. It's a riduculous idea.

These little quips may get a chuckle out of most Christians, and they think "geez, what an idiot...rejecting the medicine that will save his life". But they don't think about if it even comes close to making sense IF YOU DON'T ASSUME THAT CHRISTANITY IS CORRECT.

AUGH!
If these arguments are supposed to be to help convince me that Christianity is the right way, they've failed miserably. They make the base assumption that Christianity is correct, and all other religions are bogus, which if I'm trying to decide where I stand, doesn't help me a bit.

Oh, one last quick one from devotions tonight. The last paragraph, after talking about sharing Jesus with your friends, "Keep your mind open...to Jesus" (ellipsis mine). That's such a ridiculous statement. It's like scientists saying "Keep your mind open...to the flat-earth theory" or "Keep your mind open...to the universe roating around the earth". Keeping your mind open to one specific option kind of defeats the point...I suppose it makes sense in my case - as I realize the failings of the system I've grown up in, don't reject Christianity altogether just because I disagree with some of the religion I've grown up with. But in the context it was presented, it doesn't make any sense.

I know I've selected just a sampling of the arguments for Christianity, but they're representative of so much of the arguments I've grown up with. And looking at the environment/religion that I've grown up with from a critical, skeptical perspective, has been good - I've been able to see that there are problems with the way I've been raised, and that no specific denomination or Christian group is "right".

This all may come off as a bit bitter/dismissive. It's not...too much. I'm a little riled up at how weak and pointless the arguments that so many Christians - and Christian organizations - put forward are. But really, I'm just putting things down that I needed to get down somewhere. And it's late, so I may read through this later and write an amendment/clarification or something. But right now I need to sleep.

An Introduction

2007-09-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

So, I've kind of decided that notes like these [and now this blog] are a good way to put down where I'm at and what I'm thinking as I figure out my life, especially in relation to the spiritual dimension. This is for a few reasons - firstly, if I have to spell out what I'm thinking, whether by writing it down, typing it up, or talking it out, I end up figuring a lot more out than I have just mulling it over. I suppose it's part of how I process stuff. Also, it'll provide a record for me to look at and, when the time comes, for my parents to look at. In addition, some of you that I've talked to on various occasions may want to know how I'm doing, and this is a good way to do so.

So...here goes. This first note (actually, there's a prelude below in case you didn't read it already) will be a brief history of my life as relevant to my spiritual journey, if you want to call it that. Note that "brief" is a relevant term, my summaries never end up being all that short.

So...relevant things...let's see. First and foremost, I'm a PK. That's preacher's kid for the unenlightened. Now, I'm not writing these to whine about how being a PK has been tough, and you should all feel sorry for me. It just has a lot of bearing on how I was raised, and how I see (saw) things. What does PK mean in my case? It means that as far as I can remember (since I was 3) my father has been a pastor at Chehalis First Christian Church, a non-denominational, rather conservative congregation. Basically, Chuck Colson, Focus on the Family, very traditional church. We still sing hymns (which I actually do have a special spot in my heart for), although several years back we got a projector and started singing more contemporary songs in addition to hymns. It's an older congregation of about 100, the median age is probably...ehh, late 50s/early 60s or so. A few years back, we hired our first real youth minister.

So that's my church in a nutshell. My schooling is the second major factor in my views. I attended Centralia Christian School for preschool and kindergarten, and then was homeschooled for grades 1-5 (awesome experience by the way, I owe my mother a lot for the excellent education I got in those years). I went back to CCS when my youngest brother reached schooling age, and went into 6th grade. The Christian education I recieved there was similar in ideology to that of my church - very Bible-based, Christian worldview kind of stuff. Once again, focus on the family, Harry Potter is the devil.

The biggest factor, of course, is my parents. Which is very similar to my school/church, because of course my father was the pastor, so no surprise there. I'm sure I'll get into more specifics in further notes, but basically it's the same kind of thing. A few more tidbits: Bush is the best thing to happen to this country since sliced bread, and Al Gore winning the election would have been a sign of the end times. No kidding. Butt, frick, screw, crap, sucks are all definitely not allowed. Oh, also - devotions every night, prayer at every meal. More on that later, I'm sure.

Oh yeah. SPU. Well, you'll notice a pattern in the first three influences. Yeah, they're all the same. And I don't think I'm exaggerating the similarities too badly, anyway. SPU was different, way different. The professors, the people I talked to late at night and into the wee hours of the morning, the ideas floating about at SPU - were different. But still Christian. Just not my Christian. Or should I say, my parent's Christian. Combine that with not having the careful eye of my parents, and my community at large (being the son of a pastor, two chaplains, and a teacher lead to a lot of people who know you in a small town) to make sure I don't stray from the path of "correct" Christianity, and all of a sudden, I have a lot to think about.

Ergo the notes.
And the thinking.
Bring it on.

Standing on the edge of everything I've never been before

2007-08-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write this note for a while, but never got around to it. So here goes. As many of you know, I've been kind of figuring out my life recently, being away from my former life for nine months and all. And I was listening to Switchfoot the other day, and I realized that On Fire really seemed to describe where I'm at. So that's how this thing's gonna go down.

They tell you where you need to go

They tell you when you'll need to leave

They tell you what you need to know

They tell you who you need to be

Yeah, this is kind of my life to this point. Not exactly explicitly, but it's always been there - the expectation of what I was supposed to be. As a preacher's kid, as a good Christian kid, as a Bradshaw. My family is very conservative - like, really conservative - and there's a very specific set of things that I am supposed to know, a specific image of who I'm supposed to be. And I am really good at faking it. I've had 18 years of practice, and I can be a good Christian if I want to, on the outside.

But everything inside you knows

There's more than what you've heard

There's so much more than empty conversations

Filled with empty words

This is kind of what I've hit in the past year - as I go on, I've been realizing more and more that my whole life has been empty conversations, empty words - I've thought about it, and it's true. There's nothing behind my act, no sincerity, no real relationship or belief.

And you're on fire

When He's near you

You're on fire

When He speaks

You're on fire

Burning at these mysteries

This being the part that is a bit iffy - I'm not. Not yet. Not on fire, not feeling near at all. Not hearing anything. Because like I said - I haven't had anything for 18 years, it's not just gonna start now.

Give me one more time around

Give me one more chance to see

Give me everything You are

Give me one more chance to be... (near You)

I see this as my second chance. The first time, I screwed it up big time. So now I get a second try, without the expectations, without the pressure, without the disappointment if I don't come out quite like I'm "supposed" to.
This time around, it's looking better. First time, around, I didn't really have anyone to confide in, to talk about my spiritual life. For the first, oh, 14 years or so, we didn't even have a youth minister, and that person sure wasn't going to be my dad. No offense, he's a great guy - and I really respect him, especially after talking to him recently. But I need someone outside the family, someone that's not my father and my pastor, someone to talk to that won't pass judgement, that won't be disappointed in me if I tell them all this. And this time around, I think I've found that place at Bethany Pres, possibly Quest. John Chase is an amazing guy - and I'm very thankful for him. I've talked to him a few times, and I hope to to so more this coming year, because I'll need it. I've also got a few friends that I can confide in, that are great to talk to and talk things out, because that's how I figure things out - if I have to explain it verbally, I'll come out with a lot better understanding of what I'm actually thinking in the end.

Cause everything inside me looks like

Everything I hate

You are the hope I have for change

You are the only chance I'll take

Yeah, I guess I've kind of already covered this...but something I just thought of - I hate it when people are fake. Besides the whole religion thing, I try my best to be who I actually am, and cut the fake crap. Turns out in probably the most significant area of my life, I'm a fake of the worst kind. Dang.

When I'm on fire

When You're near me

I'm on fire

When You speak

And I'm on fire

Burning at these mysteries

These mysteries...

I'm standing on the edge of me [x3]

I'm standing on the edge of everything I've never been before.

And i've been standing on the edge of me

Standing on the edge

Yeah. This is a powerful image that very aptly describes where I am. I imagine myself, on a cliff, with everything I've ever been, the me part, behind me. And down below is everything else - everything I've never been before. Just ready to discover all that stuff down there. I love that line - everything I've never been before - so true. Because down there is sincerity, real belief, real relationship, actually having a faith - everything that I have never had, but appeared to.

And I'm on fire

When You're near me

I'm on fire

When You speak

(Yea) I'm on fire

Burning at these mysteries... these mysteries... these mysteries

Ah you're the mystery

You're the mystery

Yeah. Mystery is right. The other difficulty in this is that I am very type B, and very thinking-oriented, go figure. For the Jung/Myers-Briggs people out there, I'm an ENTP. Basically, I have a very hard time being emotionally connected with much of anything. I'm a cynic, and as horrible as it sounds, I haven't ever really felt for all those kids in Africa, or South America, or whatever exotic destination. Yeah, it's a bummer that they're stuck there, and it sucks, but I don't have any kind of emotional connnection. In addition, I'm logical to a fault. The combination of the two makes figuring out this faith thing kind of difficult. I can't just feel it, that doesn't work for me. I have to know it, I have to understand it.

So yeah...this isn't a call for help. I don't want everyone to try to 'fix' me now. Because that won't help, I promise. I've been 'fixed' for 18 years, and this is how I ended up. It's my turn to figure out how this thing we call faith works, and I'm gonna have to figure it out myself. I'll talk to others, I'll get counsel or whatever you call it - but on my own terms. I have the feeling I'll end up with a rather different view than my parents on a lot of stuff, but that's what college is for - for defining yourself. Right?