Church Blog Down

After spending most of Monday putting up my new blog about my new church, I have destroyed it. The reason I put it up at all is that there's sort of a policy against flogging dead horses. The problem is, I always think the horse is viable. So I thought this would be a good way to lay off the priests and get my frustrations out in the open. But after a nap, I realized that I didn't want to do this. It's kind of like when my little brother and I went to school together. He was in the first grade, and I was in the fifth. At home, we would terrorize each other no end, but when we got on that bus, Chris sat with me. And I wouldn't have let anyone mess with him. So while I may disagree with some things about my church, it's my church, and I don't want to knock it. It makes me feel good, not that you could tell it so far. I've cursed (f word, which I'm not sure is permissible on the blogs) at a priest in an e-mail, and Sunday I had another sort of meltdown. Unexpectedly, I burst into tears and neither love nor Valium could make it stop. My best friend is dying, and I don't have a spare. But that's a lot of what drove me to church. If it's a psychological crutch, then I sure as hell need one. I need a psychological Jazzy Chair. So all you Zen people out there, lay off me. I'm an emotional time bomb.

It's going to be a long time. I'm running out of people to lose.

Episcopalian Underground

My new blog dealing with my tentative steps into the Episcopal Church -- actually, any church -- is up. I think the first entry will be the longest, so bear with me. It's not like you've had to read anything I've written since May. B)

All my heathen friends, do bear with me. I mean, they still might throw me out. There's hope for me yet.

I'm Back . . .

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Things have piled up, and I’ve let my responsibilities to friends and even myself slide. Loads of illnesses, crises, and just plain laziness have kept me away.

I’ve started attending church, a local Episcopal church, after about twenty-five years away. I grew up in the Methodist Church but left once I got too big for my parents to drag, and haven’t been back except for weddings and funerals – and few of them. Maybe not even a few – I went to my brother’s wedding in 1995 and my maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1998. I refuse to go to any of my parents’ weddings (there have been three, I think) on the excuse that I didn’t go to the one where they married each other. That’s not really the reason. I’m suspicious of anything that requires new clothes, to paraphrase Thoreau. The church I’m going to now has no dress code, so I can get away with jeans and t-shirts. Perfect.

My mother is married to a Lutheran minister, so naturally she wants me to find a Lutheran church. I don’t think they’re quite as gay-friendly as the Episcopalians, and, in any case, they’ve got prayer books, too, so I might just as well learn the ways of the Episcopalians as the Lutherans. At least the church I’m attending is gay-friendly without being a gay church.

I’m still baffled as to when to stand up, sit down, and find my place in either the prayer book or the hymnal, but I’ll learn. I’m starting a new blog devoted strictly to church questions, debates, and what-not, so I’ll leave that for now and give you the link once I have a post on it.

The great news is that Kaye is finished teaching! All she has to do is give two exams, grade them, and post the grades. She should be done for real by Thursday, at the latest, although she doesn’t officially retire until September 1st as there is some rule somewhere that you can only retire on the 1st of a month. (I assume months where the 1st falls on a weekend let you retire on the 2nd or 3rd.) We’re both looking forward to her well-earned freedom after teaching for some forty years. She’s been at NCSU since 1970.

Hope everyone (and everybody’s cat) is well. See you in the funny papers.

Desecration of Peace

When we got up this morning, barely realizing that it was Easter, but for the mention from my mother and Yvonne, a very loud grease-removal truck pulled up at the manhole in front of our house.  Kaye went out to ask if there was an emergency, figuring a city that closes the liquor stores on the non-existent holiday of Easter Monday would not violate the peace of Easter morning for no good reason.  No, they said.  Apparently they de-grease the sewers every Sunday morning.  Then the kids next door were hunting for eggs in the back yard, arguing over which egg was whose.  I guess because I don’t have kids, it’s interesting to me how worked up they can get over what seems like nothing to me.  I mean, their arguments can escalate to the point that you’d have to have wrecked my car or something for me to get that upset, and I have a temper.  All is peaceful now, anyway.  My brother and I had the decency to yell at each other indoors (“Mom, Chris is looking at me!” or “She rode in the front seat last time!”), not that it would matter, since for most of our childhood (all but two years with the two of us), we lived out in the middle of nowhere. 

Would that every argument were so mild.  If all the people intent on blowing other people to smithereens could just agree to play in different sandboxes . . . but I guess which sandbox is whose is the source of much of the trouble.  There are enough sandboxes to go around.

The American concept that we know best and are the natural arbiters of other countries’ internal or international disputes is another embarrassing and disappointing issue altogether.  We have a very big sandbox and ought to appreciate that, and the fact that we don’t have suicide bombers going on here.  I am sad and angry about the events of September 11, 2001, but the destruction we’ve wrought is just that – it hasn’t rebuilt the twin towers or brought back the victims; it’s simply created more.

I just wish people could work out their violence during childhood, in harmless disputes.  If that were so, the screaming kids would be a blessing.

Beware the Ides

Beware the Ides of March. Since it’s March 15th, I wanted to remind anyone who could possibly forget to be extra careful today. Whether you’re standing in line at Starbucks, blogging or working on an assembly line, you don’t want to get stabbed in the toga. It’s seriously dangerous. Well, once it was.

I am amused and annoyed that I have been pegged for a Jesus freak just for standing up for theists and agnostics and admitting that my cultural background was Christian, so that’s what I have in my mind. I keep getting all these “Dear friend in Christ” e-mails. Probably shouldn’t have put my e-mail on the page, but I like to live on the edge. Anyway, anybody out there who’s thinking of addressing me in such a manner, please know that you will be promptly marked as junk mail, and I will never hear from you again. I am not passing out Bibles, becoming a brickyard preacher (at NCSU, we had a lot of them, having a brickyard), financially supporting your Jesus project or anything else. It is not my mission in life.

Discussion is fine, though. Just don’t call me your “friend in Christ.” It gives me hives.

The Seven Deadly Sins Revisited

Thomas’ blog alerted me to the seven new deadly sins. In grad school, I was playing at being a Medievalist (and did my thesis on the afterlife), so the seven deadly sins have been in my head for a while now. Well, I can always get six of them. I have to sit around and wait for God to tell me the one I’m forgetting – it’s never the same one. (I used to have my students come up with the seven dwarves just to see why I needed a prop to remind me. My students seemed to think I should know these things.) Anyway, the seven deadly sins are:

• Pride
• Greed
• Lust
• Envy
• Wrath
• Sloth
• Gluttony

Notice that the first five are all sins of the soul. It’s a sin to lust after someone but not to transfer that sin into action. This might lead to some “I’ve already done it in my head; why not do it in my bed?” thinking, but, presumably, if you manage to avoid lust, you won’t be committing any sexual misdeeds.

The new “deadly sins” (I’m choking a bit as I’m typing this – hard to take seriously) are:

• Pollution
• Genetic engineering
• Obscene riches
• Drug abuse
• Abortion
• Social injustice
• Pedophilia

At least one of these is ridiculous: if you are committing pedophilia, you’re already committing lust of some sort, so that’s repetitious.

All are societal issues. Time was, religion was between man and God, not man and mankind. Oh, I know the “Do unto others . . .” and the ten commandments, but, really, if you get your head on straight (“do unto others”), you’ll be trying to do what you think is right (given that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, you’ll fail). It seems to me that my religious beliefs are between me and God, not me and the EPA. Presumably, I’ll do the right thing.

And I think genetic engineering is the right thing, if used properly. I also think abortion is regrettable but the best option in some situations. What constitutes “obscene” riches is anybody’s guess, but at least I don’t have to worry about that one.

Also, it occurs to me that Arlo is in for some seriously hard time in Purgatory, what with that Alice's Restaurant incident of being a litterbug. While littering is a bad thing, for God's sake, it's not a deadly sin!

Social injustice needs to be defined a bit more. Am I at the giving or receiving end? Probably both, but social injustice tends to be a societal problem, not an individual one, and we can't help being a part of an imperfect society. Does this new "deadly sin" suggest that we are all tainted? Then why point it out? It's just not an individual issue.

I remember something about the body being a temple of God, but drug use (by which I'm assuming the reporter meant drug abuse) can be caused by a variety of things, often started relatively innocently -- a prescription taken as directed? a joint given to you by an uncle when you're a teenager? And what constitutes drugs that can be mortally abused? Do alcohol and tobacco count? How about coffee? Why are some drugs okay and others not? Again, this is a societal issue.

The first seven deadly sins make sense, maybe because they aren’t so picayune and getting between me and God. Luckily, I’m not Catholic. I’m not anything but a hopeful agnostic of the Christian variety. But maybe the Church should stick to matters of faith and trust God to guide the individual conscience. I'm reminded of Jesus' saying that people should "[r]ender to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." (Mark 12:17, KJV) While I don't expect everyone to listen to Jesus, I would expect it of the Church!

Do unto others before they do unto you?

I’ve just finished reading Panzram: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long. It’s about a serial killer, rapist (mostly of men and boys), arsonist, thief, batterer, and conspirator (albeit largely failed). I’m sure I’ve left something out. I’m interested in what makes people do such evil (and often just plain weird) things. This book bothered me from the start, though, and I almost stopped reading it. The thing was, I felt empathy for the serial killer, and that’s a scary thought. Usually I’m a mix of sadness and perverse amusement at what lengths people will go to to hurt people for no reason. People can be very creative in their meanness. But this guy was abused, neglected, raped, and in reform school (a century ago) by the time he was eleven, where the abuse and neglect were carried to new heights while the rape continued. So he became a rapist, a random serial killer who hated mankind (including himself) and felt no remorse for what he’d done. I guess my empathy would end there. I’d feel remorse. But I can understand his wanting to get revenge, I guess. I made a lot of promises to myself when I was little – not that I would go on a killing spree or anything, but just that I would remember what happened then when I grew up. I have a reputation in my family for one who holds a grudge. It’s true. I promised a little girl I would remember her.

I forced myself to finish the book despite my discomfort. What I am coming out of this book with is the message that “[d]o unto others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31, KJV) is not so much a rule that Christians (and humane people in general) should live by but one that anyone with common sense should live by out of self-preservation if not humanity. I don’t know what a modern psychiatrist or FBI criminologist would make of Carl Panzram, but I suspect that if he’d been treated better earlier in his crime spree (which began with public drunkenness at the age of eight), he wouldn’t have been the monster he became. So whether you want Jesus to love you, to be a humane individual, or just look out for number one, you ought to be kind to people. Not a new idea, but I’m glad I finished the book.

When he finally gets hanged (not a spoiler, as it’s in the introduction), he says something to his hangman that I think is a wonderful, if nasty, expression of the individual: “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around!” You have to admire his spunk, if not his actions.

I’m not so worried about my occasional empathy with the guy anymore. He had a far rougher childhood than mine. He just never forgot what people had done to him. I must stress that I don’t approve of or empathize with his actions, just to get that straight. I simply have a sadness not just for Panzram’s victims but for himself.

The Existence of God

I got a response from the writer of the piece I cited in my last blog entry, which is posted under “The Illusion of Free Will,” and I would urge people to read it in its entirety. But here are some of my responses:

****I hope my blog entry didn't stereotype all Christians as "idiotic, bigoted, closed-minded [people]." ***

You didn’t say that Christians per se were stupid, but it felt a little like I was on the dumb end of the spectrum just because I chose to believe in God, something that’s necessary to Christianity. Incidentally, I’m more interested in Christ as a role model than as the purported “Son of God” – in the broader scheme of the Bible, he’s an essential part of the mythology; setting aside the issue of his divinity (especially as his being more divine than the rest of us), he’s a pretty good role model with a few questionable actions. It’s too bad I can’t ask him, for example, why he mouthed off at his mother when he was just twelve (“How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?” Luke 2:49 KJV). My answer is that he was a twelve-year-old boy in a patriarchal society that thought adulthood came on at age thirteen.

***Your experience with [Kaye] covers many years of daily contact - sight, touch, communication. She [is] a physical reality in your life. God, if such a being exists, is an invisible, supernatural entity. Could you explain what your experience with [Kaye] and your experience with God have in common and how you can reason God into existence?***

What do we know about reality? We are limited by our experiences. I’ve had some experiences that no one else has had – some of these are labeled “hallucinations.” If I had the same kind of contact with God that I have with Kaye, you’d write me off as a lunatic. So it’s a no-win situation for me. Some things can be proven through reason. Faith is what you have when you can’t prove something through reason. You choose to have it or you choose not to. I choose to believe that there are things out there that I don’t know about. Although I don’t think it much matters which philosophy or religion you have, as long as you don’t use it to excuse your bad behavior, I chose Christianity because I understand the mythology, having been brought up with it. Yes, I consider it a mythology – but the ties between mythology and history can be delicate.

The thing that frustrates me is atheists' unwillingness to acknowledge that atheism is itself a belief system. It’s the agnostics who honestly say they don’t know. You can’t prove God does or doesn’t exist, so whether you opt for atheism or some religion, you’re making a leap of faith. Atheists have faith that God doesn’t exist. They don’t know.

Ultimately, though, to answer your question, I don’t think you can reason God into existence. Once, I had to have reasons for everything. I still want them. But I accept the fact that some things just are. So I didn’t and can’t reason God into existence. I just chose to take a leap of faith. I still know I might be wrong.

***Atheism isn't a belief system. It is an absence of belief in any kind of god. And it doesn't take faith, because faith is the choice to actively believe something without any verifiable proof of its reality.***

Sure it is. It’s not a lack of belief. It’s a belief that God doesn’t exist. I suppose what I am is not so much a believer as a hopeful agnostic. Agnostics are the ones who don’t believe in something because they don’t know it exists. Atheists are sure it doesn’t exist. That’s a belief.

***You can't prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does or doesn't exist. But do you have to exercise faith not to believe in its existence? No, because there's no reason to believe. So it is with atheism. No faith is needed because atheists don't think there's any good reason for belief in God.***

When there is scientific evidence about something, such as evolution, I believe it’s true. It’s hard for me to know it’s true, because English and Computer Science don’t really give me the tools to understand the raw data. I have to have faith that the experts in the relevant fields know what they’re talking about and are telling us the truth; for example, I don’t think “Creationism” should be taught in schools because I think it’s nuts, whereas evolution makes sense. I don’t think evolution and the existence of God are mutually exclusive. I just don’t think I see the whole picture. I’m pretty smart, but I don’t know as much as I once thought I did. When I was eight, I was an atheist because there were no dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible.

No sensible person can believe in the Bible – the first two chapters of Genesis are mutually exclusive. The Bible is not evidence of God; it’s a story of a culture. It’s a pretty good story, and it’s important because it has, for good or ill, influenced Western culture and continues to do so.