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| "Because of the Christian concern with doctrine, Protestant fundamentalism had set out in a different direction from the other movements we have considered. The Jewish and Muslim emphasis on practice had meant that fundamentalists in these faiths had turned the myths of their traditions into ideologies. Some of their worst excesses had come about because they had tried to realize these mythologies literally in the practical world of affairs. They had sought to meet the modern criterion of efficiency, in which a "truth" had to work effectively in order to be taken seriously. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists had turned their mythoi into pragmatic logoi designed to achieve a practical result.
Protestant fundamentalists had perverted myth in a different way. They had turned the Christian myths into scientific facts, and had created a hybrid that was neither good science nor good religion. This had run counter to the whole tradition of spirituality and had involved great strain, since religious truth is not rational in nature and cannot be proved scientifically. Because Protestant fundamentalists tended to overlook the intuitive and the mystical, they had also lost touch with the unconscious, deeper impulses of the personality. As a result, American revivalism had sometimes been anarchic and neurotic."
Karen Armstrong, The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism (pg. 355)
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| [tap, tap, tap] Is this thing on?
Wow, xanga. It's like... rediscovering the Trixie Belden series or finding a photo from 4-H days. Not that xanga use is that old, granted.
A brief update is always good. Keep in touch. That kind of thing.
Well, let's see... I am now convinced that all people should learn a second language. The moral of that untold story is: "Pick something good to give a persuasive speech on." If you're like me. You may very well be like my classmate, who gave a persuasive speech on why everybody should get tested for HIV/AIDS, and yet personally has no intention of doing so. In that case, don't worry about picking a good speech subject.
Reading Lolita In Tehran is an enlightening book, though it helps if you are somewhat familiar with classic literature before reading it. By classic literature, I mean books like Pride and Prejudice and Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading and Daisy Miller type classics, and by somewhat familiar, I mean that you know the basic plots of these stories. If you don't, Ms. Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita...) will explain the plot, but you will feel like an outsider. It is enlightening in respect to life for a modern, intellectual woman in Iran, and the way she and many other women viewed the regime. It is one-sided, of course, and nobody pretends it isn't, but a reader can forget such things... and so, as a follow-up book, The Battle For God by Karen Armstrong is a great read. Not just on its own terms, which are that it's a well-paced, broadly-historical book tracing the history of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and that it treats reactions and movements with goodly equality (defining both their strengths and weaknesses, their truths and falsehoods, the sense they make to themselves and the nonsense they make to others), but also on the term of a look at Iran from the regime's perspective. There's also something eerily familiar in reading about the struggles of British colonisation of various Middle East countries in light of today's political context.
I recently discovered several things: first, that there is a philosophy group that meets at a local deli downtown the first Saturday of every month to discuss whatever their fancy turns to that day; second, that Western Washington University gives its students JSTOR access (coulda used that last quarter for the research paper!); third, that ADHD makes more sense from a behavioral standpoint than from a neurological standpoint; fourth, that people have an uncanny ability to overlook the racist overtones of their own prejudices while being wildly sensitive to the offensive statements of others; fifth, that cherry trees blossom earlier here than in Japan; sixth, that the sense of time gets wildly screwy over spring break; seventh, that I might be considered a liberal; eighth, that people are slightly confused about the real dangers of cell phone use while driving; and ninth, that xanga is still here. ^__^
Off to make pies. In the meantime, pay your dental bill - it makes your dental office manager happy.
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| Okay, all my faithful - and even unfaithful - readers:
I am conducting a formal survey through this blog. 2 questions, very easy. 1. Do you use your cell phone while driving? 2. If you had to use a headset, or a speakerphone setting with a dash-mount, or some other hands-free setup, would your conversations be
a) longer / more frequent?
b) shorter / less frequent?
c) stay the same as now?
If you could include your gender and your age range in your answer, that would be lovely. If you'd rather not, don't worry about it. Age ranges would be divided as: (under 18), (18-25), (25-35), and (over 35). | | |
| Not to poke fun at the Gideons, but I’m going to poke fun at
the Gideons.
The Gideons are the people who are dedicated to putting out
as many copies of the Bible as possible, so they can be found and read by
whoever might conceivably be changed by reading one. Our church officially supports them, which
means we have a couple Gideons in our membership, we contribute money to them,
and in return, we get a speaker once in a while to come and plug for them
again.
One might wonder why they come to plug for money they’re
already getting, but let it be known they’re also plugging for individual
donations in the forms of memorials or such, and for additional professionals
to join them.
What I find amusing about them is the stories these speakers
will always relate to the audience. The
point (I presume) is to prove to us the amazing work that is being accomplished
through the efforts of passive churchgoers such as ourselves, and of course, a
few stats and a few juicy stories are great PR for any organization. But the last set of stories I heard opened
with this one:
“’I’m going to kill him!
I am going to kill him!’ said the man as he drove down the
country road in [insert South American country here]. He was on his way to murder a man. He was so filled with anger that he couldn’t
think straight. He would go straight to
the man’s house and [insert method of killing here].
Eventually, it got late, and the man stopped at a motel for
the night. But he was so angry he
couldn’t sleep. Suddenly, he felt a
great weight on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. He opened the nightstand drawer and found a
Bible, and he began to read. He read all
night long and as he read, one verse kept jumping out at him. Suddenly he could not kill the man. He knelt and prayed.
In the morning, the hotel staff found the Bible, opened to
Romans 12:19, and a note, which
read, “This book saved two lives: the life of my enemy, and mine.”
Romans 12:19 says
this: “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, I will repay.”’
I had great fun driving trucks through the holes in this
story (or pitching camels through them, depending on your vernacular). It’s not that the story isn’t true; it’s that
there’s so little possible verification that we can’t prove that 99% of it wasn't
fabrica… embellished. If the man didn’t
write the whole story and send it in to Reader's Digest/Gideons Int'l, how do we know what happened before or after the
note-writing? Maybe he wasn’t heading to
kill the guy. You’d think raging killers
would drive straight through the night anyway, instead of pulling off for a
snooze.
Or maybe he left the
motel and changed his mind again and killed the guy after all.
How do we know that Romans 12:19
was the verse that he was so struck by?
Most Bibles (except maybe the ones in REALLY big print for visually-challenged people) lay open with a good four chapters worth on any two pages. Who’s to say he wasn’t struck by Romans 13:4
– “He does not bear the sword for nothing”?
We could just as easily hypothesize that the man had been subjected to
grievous injustice and was off to put a little piece of South
America to rights, and received divine inspiration from that
verse. Or maybe he was captured by
Romans 10:9 – “May their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block and
a retribution for them.” And he was
inspired to change from bludgeoning the guy to poisoning his food.
How do we know he had a great weight on his chest? That wasn't in the note. And whatever happened to said weight? Chest pains and trouble breathing is one sign
of a heart attack. Maybe he actually
died there in the motel room, but the maids didn’t want to report it. Or maybe they were so used to death that they
found the note more interesting than the body.
Who turned in the note to the Gideons? Did the man mail it anonymously from the next
post office drop? Did the maids? Or did they not really clean the room and the
next guest, coincidentally a Gideon, found the paper himself?
What if the whole thing was a hoax, and the guy was
immensely bored and figured he’d put an original twist on the death threat type
note? What if he never intended to kill
anyone at all? What if there was no
motel involved, no Bible, and no maids?
Why tell a story with so little possible backing?
I propose a different story:
A group of female Gideons go into a medical office
suite. They head to one office and offer
the receptionist a half-dozen Gideon New Testaments. The receptionist politely declines. The Gideonettes insist. The receptionist states that most of the
staff is Christian and has their own copies.
The Gideonettes suggest she could pass them out to patients and leave
the half-dozen on the windowsill. The receptionist,
not knowing what to do with them, puts them on a bottom shelf in the front
office. Several months later, they get
moved to the break room and put in a cupboard.
Several months after that, the employees rediscover them while
cleaning out the cupboards, and toss them in the trash.
Or how about this one:
A Gideon goes to his dentist for a regular checkup. At one point, while waiting for the doctor,
he decides to give a Bible to the assistant in the room with him. She accepts it. Two weeks later, his wife comes in for an
appointment and offers one to her assistant – who happens to be the same
assistant as before. The assistant ends
up with two Bibles, which she doesn’t keep, and wonders aloud to her coworker
if she looks especially sinful.
Granted, these stories don’t inspire generous giving quite the
same way the first one does. But I’d be
awfully curious to know what the ratio of boring stories to inspiring stories
is. And, out of the over-one-bajillion Bibles
that the Gideons distribute every year, how many of them are ever cracked
open. And how many end up in the
garbage.
…. and whether the people who threw them away had lightning
strike them every year for the next seven years…. | | |
| Informal to-do list
(conveniently superimposed on the Christmas season)
(which results in the appearance of a Christmas wish-list - but is not)
-- Sleep in. (check)
-- Go see "Kite Runner"
-- And read the book
And speaking of books and movies.... no, I'm not really done with that list, I just got distracted.
"The Golden Compass" came out this weekend, and the advertising is getting to me. Not the official trailer/poster advertising, either. Of the available exposures, I've now experienced the email warning, the casual conversation disapproval, the conservative movie review condemnation, the pastoral disapprobation, the individual disinterest, the professorial endorsement, and the news media interview. And I flipped through the book in Borders, which isn't to say I read it as much as that I got an overview of Pullman's selected vocabulary.
After listening to this overwhelmingly negative flow of information, I'm almost sold on reading it.
That worked out well, didn't it? :P
Somebody put a dish of chocolate-covered raisins on my desk. That does not work out well. Especially before breakfast.
One other sidenote: one of the blogs I subscribe to, jesuscreed.org, had a post up the other day asking for people to state who they planned to vote for and why. Barack Obama had a lot of support, and I found it interesting how many people referenced his style of faith in their choice:
" Obama and Clinton both have qualities that make them well-suited for the position and both seem to have a thoughtful approach."
" I would possibly vote for him because he seems genuinely honest and trustworthy."
" Obama is a figure people can be excited in how he shows potential of uniting divisions between parties."
"Barack Obama is by far the most theologically sophisticated candidate around in American politics."
"...he reflects a complex understanding of how theology interacts with
politics and what it is like to maintain and encourage more belief,
more faith, but to interact within a democratic pluralism."
"To me, Obama represents the best qualities of a follower of Jesus, AS A POLITICIAN."
"Even where I disagree with him, I feel that he has genuinely thought
through the issues and has come to reasoned, nuanced conclusions. Furthermore, I think he is willing to listen and partner with the other side to look for the best possible solution."
"Obama, by a mile. He genuinely respects people who disagree with him..."
"I really appreciate the absence of “easy answers” in his comments, his
appreciation for ambiguity, and the ease with which he talks to people
from a variety of backgrounds. It always seems as though his comments
come from a surplus of thought..."
"I also like the fact that he came to the Christian faith as an adult
after struggling honestly with doubt and has lived out his faith in
doing community development work."
"In addition, he claims to be a person of genuine faith, without using
his faith as a political tool (unlike a certain president)."
"Obama seems the most candid and least packaged. I like his genuine and open spiritual journey..."
"I like Obama for a number of reasons, and hope he can be not only a
strong leader but one who helps Americans in the true tradition which
makes America America- not some theocracy, by the way."
"...someone who is willing to converse and not just attack."
" because he has faith talk but not the kind Bush has exemplified for eight years..."
Granted, this is not a national poll. The readers of that blog are, by and large, Christians, so that's going to affect their reasonings. But they do represent a variety of denominations within Christianity (including a Mennonite who also voiced support of Obama, even though Mennonites don't vote). Whether or not those factors surface again in the voting booth, I'm pleased with the ideal people are referring to here: pluralism and respect; complexity instead of simplicity; diversity in the middle of unity. Huckabee appears to be pretty popular too, but in my opinion, we need to preserve the nuances that make us us, instead of Turkey... or Iran.
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