Ministry of Love

It always comes back to Weschler. It’s crazy. I forget how much I love how he writes, then something happens and I say, “Oh. That’s right.” I finished Klosterman’s IV yesterday, so I needed a new book to read. Since I linked to Weschler yesterday I realized that now is probably a good time to get around to reading Calamities of Exile. He calls the book “three nonfiction novellas.” Each novella is a different story about someone who tried to fight a totalitarian regime and was forced to go elsewhere as thanks for their troubles. I haven’t even made it past the Preface. I already love the book. That’s what Weschler does to me. I hit on a particular paragraph and had to stop, think, associate.

It is not within the compass of this preface to posit some vast unified (totalizing) field theory of totalitarianism; in fact, it is the essence of my approach to insist, rather, on the revelatory aspect of the specific, the particular, the quirkily individual. One might note, however, how in all three of the totalitarian situation surveyed in the text – Iraq’s, Czechoslovakia’s, and South Africa’s – the regime’s dominance depended, paradoxically, on both the atomization and the homogenization of the subjugated population. Dictators want their subjects both to surrender all sense of themselves into the national (or class) mass and, simultaneously, to experience themselves, qua individuals, as utterly alone, cut off, both endlessly suspect and unendingly suspicious of everyone else. Pithed, in short, of even the fantasy, let alone possibility, of any sort of independent agency. In a sense, the regime intends that its subjects experience themselves as exiles in their own homes – isolate, ineffectual, and utterly contingent. For the conditions of actual exile ordinarily dictates a similar sort of double movement in the victims, towards simultaneous atomization and homogenization and this wearing down of the potential for agency. Edges get shaved away and subjectivity is continuously shorn until individuals experience themselves as little more than abject objects, tossed by a cruel and senseless fate.

I suppose it would insult my usual crowd of witnesses if I were to stop here and point out that in talking about corrupted, totalitarian, earthly regimes Weschler reminded me of my own time under the thrall of the heavenly regime. It’s especially true now that I live in exile from those with whom I grew up and, in many cases, still love and miss. It really is a form of exile, one that’s easy enough to return from. All I have to do is take the route of Winston Smith. I just have to accept that 2 + 2 = 5. It’s simple, really. It’s the way the attempts at evangelism I occasionally receive end. “We’re not going to try to make you come back,” they say, “But if you decide you want to you’re always welcome.” But it’s the cost. It’s always the cost. I gradually learned to look around and see twos and more twos and make fours. Somehow, though, I was supposed to add another element that I see nowhere in the equation and come up with a five. What’s the element? Subjugation. Homogenization. So much of my church experience was ritual. There was a ritual for everything, even as they tried to say it wasn’t. Liturgy and ritual were the place for the high church, or the liberal church. The church that wasn’t really a church. Still, there was ritual. Our personalized prayers always sounded the same. There was that which was acceptable to bring up before the congregation. There was that which was unacceptable, dirty, shameful. In making sure everyone saw the same things as acceptable the group defined itself. We sang songs of praise and worship, engaging in a congregational orgasm of praise to join together, hands lifted high, eyes closed except when opened to sneak a peek to see if everyone else was experiencing the same thing. There was power there. We called it the power of the holy spirit. But I’ve felt that same power outside the church. It’s the power I’ve felt when amongst any group of humans united for just a moment in common cause, common purpose. I’ve felt it equally when at church singing “As the Deer” and when at the Vic singing “The Green and Red of Mayo.” Still, it’s supposed to be special. It’s supposed to be a feeling we can only receive in church. It’s supposed to be heaven. But all that is needed to create that feeling is humans. Together. United in purpose and vibrating the room with the power of common cause and shared experience. Still, it’s supposed to be something different, something special with Christians. In that those who go to church are homogenized. That’s the purpose of all ritual, after all. It creates cohesiveness, group consciousness. It creates a place of comfort, a special place. Once in the place of ritual and warmth the desire to stay is powerful. The idea of leaving – worse, the idea of being sent away – is intolerable. It’s terrifying. Ritual is a drug. The homogeneity of the group is something to be sought after. Loss of the group results in a jones, a withdrawal. Still, there are those, even within the church, within the culture as a whole, who don’t actually understand why the homogenization is happening, what it’s all about. They’re generally easy to pick out. They’re usually the ones who are honest. See, there are things that Christians just don’t admit they struggle with. Various things involving sex are usually the last things to come up, whether it’s about homosexual urges, going too far on last night’s date, or masturbation. Those things don’t get discussed much. But there are other weird ones. Doubt rarely gets discussed. Fears about not evangelizing enough don’t come up, but I know lots of people have them. There are others, but, really, it’s been a while. Perhaps someone else can think of something. The fact is that the specific sins that don’t get discussed really don’t matter. What matters is that they don’t get discussed. What matters is that sometimes people do decide to discuss them. Most of the time they’re brought up by someone new or someone who usually hangs around the outskirts of the group and says little. Most of the time when the unspoken and unspeakable sins are brought up everyone else backs away. They don’t want to think of their own sins. They certainly don’t want to admit them. So the individual suffers in silence while trying to fit in with the group. In the act of ritual atomization gives way to homogeneity for a bit, but the doubts are always there. The doubts always creep back in. It’s possible that when you see a group of Christians joined together in praise every one of them is thinking, “If only they knew.” Because it the group truly knew what was in the heart of the individual then the individual would surely be ostracized. This isn’t to say that every single moment of a church service, every word of a praise chorus, is the masquerade of the poseur. Most of the people in that group are actively looking for that moment of homogeneity, that moment when the doubts can be sublimated in to the orgiastic ritual of worship. I think almost everyone in those places is looking for the transcendent. The problem is that they’re looking for a way to cure the sins they wouldn’t have otherwise known they have. Even Paul admitted that without the Law he wouldn’t have known how to sin. When that comes up in church it’s generally used to damn the system of the Law and elevate the forgiveness of Christ. That, I’d assume, was Paul’s original intent. In truth, though, that realization damns the whole system. For what is the Biblical law but a list of often arbitrary rules? And what law do we need beyond “Don’t be an asshole?” What does god care if we do so because it respects the deity, the nation, or the other? In calling each other “brother” and “sister” Christians often condemn each other to exile. It’s the nagging, lonely exile of the one who is not an expatriate but not really a part of the group. The worst part is, though, that there is no Big Brother forcing conformity on all the Winston Smiths. There is only O’Brien acting as an agent, bowing to the will of the constructed party head. Everyone in the church is an O’Brien. Everyone in the church is a Winston Smith. They are the thought police and the criminals, the sheep and the wolves. They atomize and homogenize. In the end everyone chases everyone else away. In the end everyone becomes an exile. I am an exile. I have always been an exile. At least now I get to be honest about it. I can take control of my life, my destiny, my thoughts. In exile I’ve found freedom. Yet there are those who try to convince me it’s punishment. Two plus two makes four. Big Brother is blind, deaf, and mute.

Nothing is Lost to Memory

Can you walk a smithereen Can you walk a smithereen Closer to me? Could you love a thimbleful Could you love a thimbleful Harder for me? --The Waterboys, “The Charlatan’s Lament” I’m apparently still not quite done with Critical Mass. I guess that’s okay. It’s my blog, after all. Besides, things still come up that remind me of my time in church. That will probably happen forever. I spent about a year going to one particular InterVarsity Bible study out at school. One night I walked in with a CD of Pearl Jam tracks I’d made for one of my friends who didn’t know Pearl Jam from a hole in the ground and had recently decided that was something he should change. I’d had a particular Pearl Jam drive mix and he asked for a copy of it. I walked in that night, plopped the CD down on his lap, then went and sat on one of the couches next to a girl who was, shall we say, sheltered, and proceeded to explain to my friend how the CD I’d made him was different from my Pearl Jam drive. Mostly I’d picked different bootleg tracks that I’d gotten and liked more since/realized were better than the ones in the original. I’d also cut out a song or two. I explained the reason for this quite simply: “I cut out [I dunno, a song] so that I could put ‘Fuck Me in the Brain’ so you could have your very own copy of the shoe rant.”* Now, you know how people say, “I wish I could have seen the look on your face,” after something crazy happens? My buddy still insists that I missed out. See, the couches were shaped like a U. He was sitting on the couch that formed the bottom. I was sitting on the far end of one of the other couches. One of the girls in the group was sitting on the other end of my couch and looking directly at my buddy when I said, “Fuck.” The thing is, I didn’t actually need to see her face to know how she responded. The body language was astounding. Her entire body tensed up like I’d just dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. We still laugh about it. And neither one of us can figure out how it is that a four-letter word could freak someone out who’d spent three and a half years at a public university. Another night I walked in to that Bible study after my buddy had apparently had a really bad day. One of the other girls in the group kept doing the, “C’mon, smile,” thing and trying to force him to feel better. It annoyed me. These, and so many others, I suppose, are memories of an enforced orthodoxy in to which I never fit. I was reminded of it last week when I saw this Chris Hedges article at Truthdig. Lawrence Weschler handled the topic in his usual spectacular way here and here. I suppose it’s something I’m forced to come to terms with. Everything is a story. No stories are intrinsically good or bad. Some are more or less entertaining. Some are more or less correct. Some are more or less accurate. But as far as value judgments go we have nothing to go on. All stories are useful in some way, shape, or form, and being useful all stories are morally and truthfully neutral. So why do we relentlessly focus on certain stories? Why do we lend more weight to some stories than we do to others? Why is it that for the first twenty-five years of my life I was constantly told that there was a story about a Jewish guy who lived two thousand years ago that I had to base my entire existence upon? Why is it that the story of the Jewish guy then had so much piled atop it that I wasn’t allowed to say, “Fuck,” and my friend wasn’t allowed to be unhappy at a Bible study? Ultimately, why is it that the people who think have to be outcasts? It’s the same story over and over and over again, too. There are those who want conformity, and it doesn’t matter whether they do it in the name of god, the party, or the company. Dress codes and bright, smiling faces are all that matters. Unquestioning obedience is all that counts. But why should we care? What does conformity get anybody? Ask somebody to love you That takes a lot of nerve Ask somebody to love you You’ve got a lot of nerve --Paul Simon, “Look at That” The thing is, I don’t think anybody ever seriously questions the notion that god is love and that it makes perfect sense to have a god who demands love and worship. At least, the people who stay in church don’t question it. Because that question breaks faith. I think about it this way. It’s like Paul Simon says… No. It’s not. I think I just got the song. I’ve always taken that statement as a negative, like, “You come in here, you ask me to love you? You got a lot of nerve, punk.” But that’s not it at all. The question is, “Do you love me?” The more important question is, “Will you love me?” That does take a lot of nerve. A lot more nerve than, say, “Love me or else.” That’s not love. That’s abuse. See, the entire Christian story is one sided. God doesn’t ask, god demands. And if the answer is, “No,” then it doesn’t matter why. The only response is damnation. That’s not love. There’s not a single thing about that that gets within a mile of love. That’s the thing about enforced conformity as a whole. There is no risk on the side of the powerful. They’re not asking for assistance or support, they’re asking for unquestioning obedience and anyone who disagrees can go rot in the fucking cold. That’s the opposite of love. It’s actually, I think, why all my stories of leaving Christianity seemed to loop back around to Her. It’s why I needed my breakthrough from last Tuesday to really see it. I asked, “Will you love me?” and the answer was, “No.” See, she said she loved me. She also said that she could stop loving me at any point and I’d never know it until she was gone. That was the exact same tension I lived with in my life under god. It’s the same tension I think a lot of the believers I hung out with lived under and, for the most part, still live under. A simple word like “fuck” was dangerous. Being unhappy was dangerous. It was somehow the sort of thing that would cause god to withdraw, take away that protection, make the loved in to the hated. And I think that for all her insistence that she believed in a god of love, she was actually in worse shape than I was. Her dad, after all, was a pastor. Questions, open rebellion, would cause a loss of love, not just from the heavenly parent but the earthly parent. So in being constantly prepared to leave me she was simply mimicking the possibility of the withdrawal of god’s love. It was easier to lose me, to hurt me, than to risk the loss she’d experience on the other end. Now I feel kind of bad for her. But mostly I’m still glad she’s not around anymore. It’s not worth it. She’s not worth it. Really, nothing’s worth that. Why would anyone want to live their life that way? I tried it for years and I still don’t understand it. But the crazy thing is, sometimes I still think it would be easier. Go back to church, play the role, meet someone, start a family. It’s all so simple, it’s so much easier than the life I lead now. But, of course, the only thing I’d have to offer in that case is deceit. To ask somebody to love you takes a lot of nerve. To ask somebody to love a lie that you call you is monstrous. ------------------------------ *The shoe rant was one of the best things to ever get recorded at a concert. It was from back before Pearl Jam became the biggest act on the planet. They were opening for someone or other and in the middle of the show someone threw a shoe at Eddie. He proceeded to stop and say, “Me and Jeff, we’re gonna go to the front gate and when you guys leave we’re going to beat the shit out of every one we see without a shoe.” This was the beginning of an epic, impromptu, five minute clothing drive in which Eddie tried to get people to throw shoes and clothes on stage. My buddy and I regularly said, “Shoe the shoeless!” to each other after the “Fuck Me in the Brain Incident.”

Shout it from the Rooftops

I think I owe Linda a thank you note. Perhaps a fruit basket, too. There are many storytellers I like. There are a few I’m not so fond of. There are also a few I have a tremendous amount of respect for. Linda’s in that third category. I was at Guild tonight. For the first time ever I told two stories. We’ve got the Fox Valley Folk and Storytelling Festival coming up and this time, dammit, I’m going to try to get my ghost story out there. So I told that right off the bat. I was flat and kind of slow. It occurred to me immediately afterwards that one of the main differences between storytelling and the variety of public speaking I’m best at is one of pacing. I was going to be a pastor, after all. I was also thinking of being a teacher and am still thinking of being a professor. These days I have to give webinars, too. All of those varieties of public speaking are about pacing. You need to be deliberate, focused on getting the information across above all else. Storytelling is different. Storytelling is performance and the teller needs to convey mood, setting, place. I told a heavily modified version of my new story at the end of the meeting. I’m attempting to do something I haven’t done so far and tell a story with funny elements. There’s a lot of humor and anachronism on the front end, but then it downshifts and becomes serious. There’s a point to the story, after all. Generally I stick with a single mood. Even that can be trouble for me, since I’ve tended to tell stories in much the same way I’d offer a history lecture. Actually, that’s not wholly accurate. I think I’ve tended to tell stories like I’d give a sermon. Either way, I got done with my new story and Linda gave me a piece of advice she said she hadn’t been prepared to hear when she got it. “We want to see you out there,” she said. “It seems like only the story is there and you’re not.” I couldn’t fully process it when Linda offered her feedback, but that was exactly what I needed to hear. In fact, that’s what I’ve been needing to hear for the last year and a half or so. I can mark the time from the first occurrence of the “Loco to Stay Sane” tag on this here blog. For the last year and a half I’ve been trying to find my voice. I don’t think I fully realized what that means until tonight. I also don’t think I’d really given myself permission to do so. See, growing up in the fundamentalist circles I had to forever attempt to subjugate myself to god. Everything was supposed to be done looking to the place where Paul said he must diminish that Jesus might increase. Having no self-image was the ultimate goal. I suddenly realized tonight that the attitude of my church also informed everything about my relationships with women. The two I wrote about on Monday completely illustrate the point. Both of those relationships were all about her. The first girl was shallow, manipulative, and selfish. She still is. That’s why nine years on she still thinks that she can email me and I’ll drop everything and, um, make her life better or something. I don’t know. I don’t care. But she doesn’t realize that because in her bizarre little world I still give a shit about her. In truth, I never really did. But that’s neither here nor there. The second was selfish and manipulative, but not necessarily in the same way. Everything was about her and she expected me to drop what I was doing if she was in trouble or needed something. Meanwhile, I don’t think I ever trusted her to do the same for me. She was certainly more than happy to keep jerking me around at the end of her string. And if anything went wrong it was my fault. Period. Full stop. As long as she thought I was working on being a good little Christian she supported me. The farther I traveled away and the more I developed my own thoughts and attitudes and the more questions I asked the less satisfied she was with me. This brings me to god. I was supposed to cast off everything about myself in some attempt to become “like Jesus,” whatever the fuck that means. Any time something good happened it was the work of god. Any time something bad happened it was because I wasn’t doing things right. Or the devil, I guess. My theoretical chosen profession of pastor was interesting. Sure, there are plenty of people who do it because they want the influence or the power. But the ideal, and one which I strove to achieve, was this weird little prayer about allowing god to speak through me. I knew plenty of pastors and lay leaders who would pray for that particular skill. So the idea was that anything good that came out of my mouth was the work of the holy spirit. Anything bad was either Satan getting in the way or my own pride keeping me from letting god do the anointing thing. I wasn’t supposed to develop my own voice back when I was in church. I was supposed to let some other voice speak through me. I wasn’t supposed to develop my own voice in my relationships, either. I was just supposed to say, “Yes, dear.” I guess I wasn’t quite through with the Critical Mass posts on Monday. Honestly, that doesn’t surprise me. I think I need to make that obvious mental break so I can step back, look at the situation and realize, “Oh, shit, that’s what this all meant.” I actually think I still have one more to go, although it wasn’t exactly on the same lines as the previous Critical Mass posts, anyway. But that’s for tomorrow or Thursday. Tonight I took a step I didn’t realize I had to take. Hearing someone say they want to see me, want to know that I’m invested, that I care, that it’s not just words to me, but something that matters, is kind of a big deal. Hearing people say that they want to hear my voice, not just my story, matters deeply. I still occasionally hear from people I used to go to church with. That’s become kind of a strange issue on occasion on the blog itself. It specifically comes up with jessa, who pretty much approached me in all the ways I’d say were wrong about a year ago. But I didn’t get mad at her then and I’ve always had a hard time figuring out why. Like I said, I still occasionally hear from people I used to go to church with. I generally intentionally ignore them. I couldn’t have explained why until now, and I certainly couldn’t have explained how their approach to me differs from the one jessa used, especially since she used many of the same words and phrases. I understand why that is now. Jessa never made any assumptions when she contacted me. The people I ignore try to get me to tell the story they want to hear in the voice they expect to hear. In fact, most of the time they make assumptions and spin their version of my story from their set of assumptions so I feel perfectly fine allowing them to just talk to the version of me that exists in their head while I go do things I actually care about. That, too, is a part of finding my own voice. I think there’s this weird, default assumption that I want to proselytize in the name of atheism or skepticism or something. It’s like they’re daring me to hand out free thinker tracts or something. I don’t care. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m just telling my story. I’m just trying to find my voice. I think I took a big step towards that today. Perhaps it’s the most important step. I can’t find anything until I’ve given myself permission to do so. See, that’s the thing, too. It’s not like Linda had to give me permission. She just had to voice a desire to hear me. It was entirely up to me to say to myself, “This is okay. This is good. You need to make sure everyone can hear your voice.” It’s a good place to be. It certainly beats being back where I was.

Sleeping Dogs

All I know is this time around Not gonna be the one taking you back All I know is this time around Not gonna be the one not gonna be the one All I know is this time around Not gonna give you a second chance All I know is this time around Not gonna be the one not gonna be the one --Lovehammers, “Black Angel (Not Gonna be the One)”* It happened somewhere in the neighborhood of eight years ago. I’m pretty sure it was late spring or early summer of 2001. The only thing I really know is that Stephen Jay Gould was still alive. And it came a bit after I dumped my first girlfriend. It was also a Wednesday. These might seem like oddly specific details. And they kind of are, but not really. See, in the fall of 2000 she’d gone off to college and met another guy. I was still sticking around Wheaton, doing the townie and community college thing, I guess, and helping my church rebuild the college program. We met on Wednesday nights for Bible study in the basement of one of the guys in the group. I made it every week. But I hadn’t wanted to make it that particular week. Stephen Jay Gould was giving a lecture at the College of DuPage. I heard about it too late to get a ticket. Chances are that I would have enjoyed that lecture, too. I knew nothing of the concept of the Non-Overlapping Magesteria at the time, but Gould probably would not have offended the sensibilities that led me to Bible studies on Wednesday nights. Really, all I knew about Stephen Jay Gould was that if he was in town giving a lecture, you go. It would have been late spring. That Wednesday was one of the first times, possibly the first time, I’d seen her since I found out that she’d met another guy at college and hadn’t exactly told me. It was one of the first times I’d seen her since my friend who introduced us told me that she’d told him we’d broken up and messed around with him. Truthfully, instead of going to Bible study that Wednesday night I should have just gone home when I found out there was no Stephen Jay Gould ticket to be had. See, that night after Bible study we had a good heart-to-heart and I forgave her. I shouldn’t have. It’s not that I have anything against forgiveness. I’m a fan. It’s that she told me the reason she messed around with me and with my friend was that she loved both of us and didn’t know what to do. She told me the reason she started hanging out with that other guy was because she loved him. To my credit, I think I knew it was a load of bullshit at the time. I certainly believe it now. I guess it helps that every year since then she’s tried to get back in touch with me during the spring. She’s tried to tell me she’s sorry, that she still knows me better than anyone, that she still loves me. This last time around I tried to end it for good. I figured that after she told me she understood me, that she’s moved more towards where I am from a philosophical perspective, that it would really cut her off at the knees to point out that I’m an extremely socially liberal atheist these days. I probably should have told her I was an alcoholic who has sired many illegitimate children. At least that would have been more fun for me, since I would have been able to make up ever more ridiculous stories to see what she would buy in her quest to get me to decide she’s again worth my time. She still claims to love me. This is after nine years in which I gave her no reason to think I cared and a failed marriage on her part. Truth is, she uses love in much the same way certain guys will tell a girl they love her just to get in her pants. She may or may not want in my pants, but this time she certainly seemed to offer that option. What she really wants is something other than sex, though. She wants control. Not even necessarily of me, but of someone, and for some reason once a year she gets it in her head that I’m going to let her manipulate me this time around in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It was about five years between the night I didn’t hear Stephen Jay Gould talk and the next time a woman told me she loved me. I was talking to the one I’ve immortalized on these pages as Her and it pretty much came out of nowhere. I believed she did at the time. Hell, I believe it now. But that use of the word “love” wasn’t the one that stuck with me. It came towards the end, that time I was pretty sure things weren’t going to work out but still didn’t want to admit it. She’d just hurt me quite badly. When I didn’t take it well she refused to admit that anything was wrong. In fact, she pretty much insisted that everything she’d said was correct, but it didn’t matter, because she loved me and wasn’t that enough? It wasn’t. “I love you, but you’re not good enough,” is never an appropriate expression of love. The first one only loved me as long as she thought she could use that word to get something from me. The last one only loved me as long as I continued to be what she thought I was. Part of the reason it took me so long to find someone else to use that word around me after I dropped the first one was because I’d lost interest in the idea of finding love. Switching from manipulative love to conditional love hasn’t exactly helped.** Meanwhile, though, it should be absolutely no shock to anyone that my experiences being “loved” by members of the female gender had a large effect on my ability to handle the church’s “love.” I put the word love in quotes there for what may or may not be obvious reasons. I’ll argue to my dying day if I have to (and I hope I don’t) that the first girl never actually loved me. I believe the second one did. But I also believe that conditional love isn’t ultimately worth all that much. And the sort of unconditional love that’s supposed to make a general judgmentalness okay isn’t worth much of anything, either. I would hope that through all my Critical Mass posts it’s become relatively obvious that my experiences with the “love” of god and most of my fellow Christians were of conditional, judgmental forms of love. Honestly, I’d rather not belabor the point any more than I already have. Besides, it’s hard to explain how the love of god is judgmental. It’s all subjective. All I know is that there is no such thing as the unconditional love of god. Everything came with conditions. You had to believe the right dogmas, say the right things in Bible study, avoid asking all the questions that were too dangerous. All I have is my strange collection of analogies. They are strange, too, like writing fiction where I’m the main character and the events actually happened. But I only tell the stories that can’t hurt me anymore, so by the time they make it here it’s almost like they happened to someone else who I vaguely recall knowing quite well. The truth is, though, that the fictions have a strange effect. I mostly don’t think about Her until She becomes a useful narrative device for spinning these tales of why I left the church. Which means, in all honesty, she’s now outlived her usefulness to me. That seems like a horrible thing to say, but I can’t come up with any better way of communicating the idea. I have the Critical Mass posts. I have This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, Part 6. I don’t know what else I can possibly say on the subject. It’s time to let sleeping dogs lie. The story has been told, all else is commentary. I’ve drifted a bit in the original goals of this blog. That’s fine, though. I did mostly want to write about history, since I missed it quite a bit more than I’d thought. Gradually, though, it became the story of my own history. But there’s a point when I get beyond the idea of “searching the past to understand the future” and simply wallow in what was, what wasn’t, and what might have been. I don’t know what that admission means for this blog. Religion still fascinates me, but I think I’m going to start writing about it from more of a historical perspective. There is much to discuss about the Documentary Hypothesis and the formulation of the Gospels. There is also quite a bit to be said about the early history of the church and Bible itself as a historical document. And there will be After the Flood for the foreseeable future… So I don’t think I’m going to stop talking about religion. I think I will offer fewer and fewer stories about my own experiences, however. Christianity is like a bad relationship. I can only live in the memories for so long before I absolutely have to move on for the sake of my sanity and my happiness. The truth is that I don’t necessarily identify myself as an atheist or a former Christian or anything like that. I did for a while I was adjusting. And I’d say that I no longer have any god belief and am, by default, an atheist. But in terms of self-identification I’m more likely to say I’m a Peacemakers fan than an atheist these days. I’m also probably going to tell you I’m a historian before much of anything else. In the short term, too, I still want to discuss the aftermath of the Four Days in July, the Gettysburg Address, and the Lost Cause Myth… And if you, dear reader, don’t like that, well, too bad. I’m not your monkey. And I’m guessing that you’re not an organ grinder, anyway… --------------------------------- *Which was, in the most ironic possible way, immediately followed by U2’s “All I Want is You” on Winamp. **I think there’s also a strange answer in there to the whole “nice guys finish last” thing. See, the first time around I allowed myself to be manipulated, so she walked all over me. The second time around I was so terrified of losing her that I never stood up for myself and was more than willing to assume that any problems in the relationship were primarily my fault. I was still thinking that months later. I didn’t want to hurt anyone and basically always tried to not lose her. In trying not to lose her I stopped challenging her and probably basically stopped being interesting. Moreover, though, I got so worried about her damned self-manufactured abandonment complex and trying to make sure that I wasn’t the next one who hurt her that it never occurred to me that I was hurting myself. I couldn’t allow myself to leave, couldn’t allow myself to think about leaving, so I never did. And through it all, even long after it was over, I kept trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, how I could have done better. It never occurred to me that the fact she never accepted any responsibility and got pissed at me when I dared suggest she’d done something wrong or had done something to hurt me was a pretty good indication that I should have turned on my heels and walked away. But I didn’t. I did something much worse, something much dumber. Whenever she’d say something like that and piss me off I’d attempt to pull the whole, “I’m leaving this time, no, I really mean it.” It’s a game. It’s a stupid game, one that I hope I never play again. It just made me look like a sap and it never had the desired effect of getting her to run after me. Most of the time I’d just turn around and go back when I realized she hadn’t moved. There are power dynamics in a relationship. Any time two or more people are involved in things there will be. I’d never argue that one gender or the other has to have all the power, nor would I argue that there should necessarily be someone who is in charge and someone who isn’t. What I do think, though, is that any relationship should have a free will component. Either person should be allowed and able to walk away at any point and the reaction of the other to the attempt to leave should say everything about the relationship. You can’t turn walking away in to a game or a passive-aggressive attempt to get the other person to offer some sort of Shakespearian monologue about how wonderful you are. But if one person starts to take the other for granted, the one who is being taken for granted should absolutely be able to stand up for him- or herself. And if the other person says, “Fine, leave,” ( and actually means it) well, chances are they weren’t worth the effort, anyway. I think, too, that countless stories like this explain how “the nice guy” becomes “the bitter guy.” My goal is to not be the bitter guy. Life’s too short to live angry and it’s certainly too short to be spent hating some random ex. She has no place in my life and the memories of her have no place beyond their ability to teach me what to look for and what to avoid. Period. End of discussion.

Leaving

Here we go again, we fight Then we make up It’s no way to live life Time to let it go, say goodnight For tonight, and the rest of our lives One last time down this road I’m driving you home Better off on your own – alone Each mile a memory – of better days --Lovehammers, “Driving Blind” I found a new god at about 10:30 last Saturday night. Shocking, I know. You all thought I was dedicated to that whole atheism thing. But, hey, I was just waiting to find something to believe in. My new god is Marty Casey, lead singer of the Lovehammers (and, sadly, probably best known as the runner up on Rock Star: INXS). There was a sooper seekrit Lovehammers show at the Double Door on Saturday and I heard about it from a friend. So I decided to go. Oddly enough, I’ve known about the Lovehammers for a few years and liked them pretty much from the first instant I heard any of their songs, but I was never completely sold, this in spite of the fact that Saturday was the third time I’ve seen them this year. I’m nothing if not cautious. Either way, the Double Door is one of my favorite Chicago venues, even though I walked in there on my birthday, asked for a Goose Island 312 and a shot of Maker’s and was charged thirteen %$#!ing dollars. It’s now the only place in the world I’ve ever consumed Old Milwaukee, Busch, or Natty Light, but that’s neither here nor there. Either way, El Aiche, as they were known that night, were an opening act, so their set was about fifty minutes long. A few songs in they started on “Straight as an Arrow,” which is my favorite Lovehammers song. Marty hopped off the stage and in to the crowd. I was only about five feet from the stage and he ended up about arm’s length from me and kinda stared at me as I was singing along. I was pretty much thinking, “Why the fuck is Marty Casey staring at me?” The thing is, the dude is intense. Scott Lucas is about the only guy I’ve ever seen who is as intense while on stage as Marty Casey, but Scott Lucas has never actually stared directly at me from two feet away. Scott Lucas has also never stuck a mic in my face and let me bust out two lines of “Straight as an Arrow.” So I think Scott Lucas is probably a much smarter individual than Marty Casey. But it’s all relative… I’m just telling that story because I can. A few minutes later I figured out the thing I’ve never been able to place about Marty Casey. I touched on it briefly back here, but I’ve noticed that he has an interesting presence while on stage. What I finally figured out is this: Marty Casey is the closest I’ve ever come to a rock god. There’s a certain presence that one needs to project in order to be a rock god, a certain ineffable…something. Marty Casey has that. He’s also a really nice guy. I met him after the show and he was incredibly gracious. A few weeks earlier they’d opened for the Wallflowers at the Taste and a buddy of mine saw them. He texted me and told me that if I met Marty I was to deliver a message: the Wallflowers should have opened for the Lovehammers. I said that to Marty and he laughed, said it was really cool to have a chance to open for the Wallflowers. “Yeah, but the Wallflowers haven’t done anything important for, like, twelve years.” “We’ve never done anything important,” was his reply. I stopped at my friend’s place after the show, since it was on my way home and everything. The friend in question may or may not have been my most common Anonymous, who may or may not live with Fiat Lex. But you didn’t hear that from me. Either way, I mentioned my decision to make Marty Casey my new god and that he was incredibly gracious. Fiat responded, “Well, wouldn’t you want your god to be incredibly gracious?” It was then that I realized that even though he possesses absolutely no supernatural powers and isn’t even the front man for my favorite Chicago band (it’s going to take way more than three stellar albums and a couple sweet shows to overtake Scott Lucas. Me and Local H have history…), Marty Casey is a totally better option for godhood than, y’know, god. At least the one I knew. Besides, I have faith in Marty Casey and the Lovehammers. I got an autographed copy of the new album, Heavy Crown, in the mail on Tuesday. There’s no way I pre-ordered that album after December 15th of last year.* I actually forgot I’d ordered it at all. But I ordered it without hearing a note, since the album hadn’t even been made yet, only on the promise that I’d get it and it would be good. It wasn’t even named Heavy Crown at the time. It was called Let Me Out. Kinda like Idlewild’s Post Electric Blues. Hebrews 11 tells us, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The Lovehammers promised me that if I sent them 15 dollars they’d put it towards making a kick-ass new album, then they’d sign it and send it to me. Of course, “kick ass” is subjective, but I chose to be a fan of the Lovehammers because they’ve made kick ass music in the first place. And you know what they eventually did? They sent me an album. They didn’t sent me an old tire and say, “Well, it looks kind of like a CD, maybe you just need to understand our mysterious ways. That tire will be better for you, anyway. I actually think that also means that Marty Casey is more trustworthy than the god I was supposed to place all my trust in. Of course there’s absolutely no reason you should make Marty Casey your god. You also shouldn’t believe I’ve made him mine. You should, however, send the Lovehammers money so they can keep making awesome albums and showing up at random shows disguised as El Aiche. You’ll also be helping make my life slightly better, so, y’know, I’ll consider it a personal favor… Oddly enough, this whole thing was really just a long introduction to a short idea (and a shameless plug for the Lovehammers). I was reading this post over at On Leaving Fundamentalist Christianity, um, last week, maybe. It struck me as being absolutely accurate. There are so many people who think you have to find something new to believe in so that you can stop believing in something else. I don’t recall ever getting told I’d left Christianity to go believe in something else, but my mom has given me the old, “You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for everything.” In truth, quitting religion is scary. Part of the reason I have a hard time defining what happened is because there aren’t any words for it. I didn’t convert from or to anything, since there was no conscious choice on my part to say, “I used to believe in [this], now I believe in [that].” I just realized it was all a pack of lies. I didn’t know what that meant to my life, though. I had to make it up on my own. Christian apologists try to control the conversation in this case. We’re told that science is just another belief system. We’re told that atheism and agnosticism are just other religions. I bought that argument exactly once. It shouldn’t be surprising that she was the one that made it. That’s the interesting thing about realizing that my attempts to hold on to her and hold on to religion were intertwined. As much as I was willing to argue with her, I wanted to agree with her, I wanted her to be right. Because some part of me thought that if I could just agree with her I could hold on to her. I think she believed I’d leave her. In fact, I can pretty much say I know she believed that. I think, too, that she decided if I could leave religion behind I’d most certainly ditch her. She didn’t trust people. She didn’t trust me. It’s too bad, too. I mean, in the end I’m absolutely better off where I am. I would have replaced her in my life by now if certain things had happened at slightly different times. I met two great women, but I met one last May when I was still too close, still too bitter, and still too angry about being unemployed. I met the other a bit later, then spent six months coming up with excuses only to end up waiting too long. Shit happens, I guess. Sometimes the right things happen at the wrong time. The world just works that way. Technically speaking, I did walk away from her. But I only did so long after it became obvious that things weren’t working and she had absolutely no interest in trying any more. I didn’t walk away because I’d found someone else. I walked away because I had no other options. It’s kind of the same thing that happened with religion. The funny thing is that I’m still far more conflicted over what happened between me and her than anything that happened with god. Yet she thought I’d just get up and leave her behind with no regrets. The thing is, though, no one can know what's going to happen next. "Driving Blind," the song I started this post with, ends with the singer changing his mind and deciding to fight for that relationship one more time. So I don't know what's going to happen next. Something tells me that I'm not likely to try to ever get her back. Something tells me I won't make Marty Casey my new god. I think both those scenarios are more likely than me going back to the church I used to know, however. ---------------------- *I just checked my Gmail account. October 9, 2008. That has to be some sort of record for the amount of time between purchase and delivery of a physical good. Also, go buy Heavy Crown. If you don't happen to be able to find a copy nearby, I'm told there's this thing called iTunes that's very popular with the kids. Amazon's probably better, though, since Apple isn't involved in any way, shape, or form.

Put My Last Quarter On, We'll Play "Authority Song"

It’s funny how things dovetail. I realized at some point yesterday or today that the tail-end of my last AtF entry, the Bruce Droppings post I linked to on Monday, and On Ugliness were all taking me in the same direction. I don’t know that I have some big, unexpected truth to offer, but I do have the opportunity to attempt to communicate my moment of crystal clarity. Of course the message always gets muddled somewhere between the mind and the page. Which is kind of the point of this entire post. One of the first stories I came up with for storytelling remains, and probably will remain, at least for a while, my favorite. I’ve spent a lot of time working on it, trying to understand why I tell it. For me the central conflict of the story is built around the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness. I put it in the standard fairy tale setting with knights and monsters and happy kingdoms and princesses and happily-ever-afters specifically so I could draw out that distinction. Last year I told the story at the Fox Valley Folk Festival and Jim Decker, one of my favorite storytellers, commented that he liked the way the little boy grew up to become a knight and there’s a message there that anyone can become anything. I’d never even thought about that. I was so focused on my central message and making sure that the point got across that I never even noticed that. The little boy grew up to be a knight because he needed to. The story didn’t work any other way. I told another story that weekend that was an attempt to bring the old Hero’s Journey in to a modern, mundane setting. I populated the story with re-imagined stock characters. Afterwards my mother asked me which people in my life I’d written in to the story. The answer was none, but it’s more complicated than that, since my life dictated the things I would find interesting and, on some level, the people I’ve met in my life have become stock characters in my own myth. Jim Decker wasn’t wrong to see the message he saw in my first story. My mother wasn’t wrong to see people from my past in my second. I’d intended neither, but that doesn’t mean those things weren’t there. It brought home a deeply important point to me. Once the story has left my mouth or my word processor it isn’t mine any more. It’s yours. But it also belongs to the person next to you, and the person who heard it last week, and the person who will hear it tomorrow. The interesting thing is that sometimes, in some ways, you might be that person in each case. I know that if I hear a story two or three times or read a book I’ve already read I accept it in different ways each time. My world changes in between encounters. My life moves on between meetings. Sometimes a book or story I hated becomes a favorite. Sometimes I see a favorite again and wonder, “Why did I ever like that?” Sometimes I just hear one part I never paid attention to in a new way. Honestly, that’s what I love about writing and storytelling. It may be the closest thing we have to a fixed point of reference in this world. At least, as far as the mind is concerned. Going back and revisiting a beloved old book time and again is a wonderful thing to do. The story changes just a little bit every time because we change just a little bit in between times. I was just discovering the music of Matt Nathanson at a time when I met someone I thought would be special. We had one of those cliché nights when we ended up sitting and talking about the world until, like, five in the morning. Before I met her I didn’t know that was possible. Afterwards I wondered how I could have ever doubted it. I drove home with the sun rising in my rear view mirror listening to Nathanson’s “Pretty the World” and I knew right then and there that I’d never be able to hear that song without thinking of her. At the time I assumed there would be nothing bad there. It’s what happens when we hit those initial throes of something that may or may not be love. I think 90% of all songs are written about either that feeling or the one that comes at the opposite side. You know, the part that I eventually hit, the part that means I hear “Pretty the World” and mostly think about how everything I thought that morning a few years ago was wrong. It’s weird, too, because the biggest problem is separating that euphoria from the shit that came later, that made giving up and breaking up inevitable and desirable. So she’s a part of my story, too. And every time I encounter her, whether it’s a physical encounter or a memory brought on by a Matt Nathanson song I realize that the story has changed. I’ve grown up, I’ve moved on except in those moments where the memories become too strong and I forget why it didn’t work, forget why I walked away that last time, forget that even though I’ll always love her I’ll probably never be able to like or respect her again. In truth I took too long to recover. I always do. I love without shame, without question, without doubt. I’ve never done anything I truly believed in with half measures. Life is too short to hold yourself back from something that might truly be worthwhile. But that attitude also means that trying again is scary for me. It’s extraordinarily easy to get hurt. And she hurt me over and over and over again. The worst thing about it is that she probably never knew, since I think she was just looking for excuses to say I’d hurt her, I’d leave her, so she had to get out before that ever happened. That’s why I can’t respect her any more. She couldn’t take chances, she couldn’t take a risk. She kept me at arm’s length, never offered me her heart even though I think she knew I’d given her mine. The reason I’ve taken so long to heal is because I had to figure out how to get over my hurt without changing. Because, honestly, that’s who I want to be. I’m working on a storytelling concert called “No More Fairy Tales” about my realization that there’s no such thing as a “happily ever after.” Yet I still think there’s one out there for me and woe to anyone who stands in my way. You can’t tell me who to be. I am contradictory, but I like it. I allow myself to be hurt, but I can’t fathom living my life any other way. I have spent my entire life reading all of the rules, knowing that I’m not special, but still believing I can break them. I’m not talking about the laws of the land. I’m talking about all those stupid rules that say people won’t like you if you do this, that, or the other thing. I’m talking about all those stupid rules that say you have to behave this particular way to get a second date. I’ve gotten my ass kicked time and again. I haven’t been on a second date in over a year. I’ve completely blown it with a couple of great girls and backed away slowly from a couple of girls who terrified me. That’s life. I could change how I do things and I might have a higher success rate. But I won’t get what I want. So I am content to live the life I’m leading, knowing that tomorrow things might change. And you can tell me what you think I’m doing wrong, you can tell me what I should change, but I won’t listen. It’s my life. That, ultimately, is why I left Christianity. Well, it’s yet another in the long list of reasons. I realized that the Bible is no more of an authority on how I should live my life than the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Theogony of Hesiod. Sure, there’s plenty in the Bible that actually counts as pretty damn good advice and I’ll often be reminded of Bible verses as I go through my day. I think in some ways I understand the Bible better now than I ever did when I was planning on becoming a professional Christian. And I think the reason for that is because now I just see it as a book with some good ideas, some bad ideas, and some absolutely abhorrent ideas. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others better than yourselves? Good idea. Stone everyone who doesn’t agree with you? Abhorrent idea. You get the picture. The fact is that I can, and probably soon will, sit here and explain exactly why the Bible is a lousy authority from a scholarly perspective. But for the moment that’s not what’s on my mind. Right now I’m just thinking of the story. Right now I’m just thinking of my story, of Jim Decker saying he likes the way my story lets people know they can grow up to be anything, of my immediate response that I’d never even thought of that. What is the Bible, really, if it’s not a collection of stories? What were those storytellers really trying to tell their audience when they put it all down in writing? What are Christians in the 21st Century getting wrong every time they sit down for church or Bible study by sitting down and assuming the Bible was written with them in mind? The pastors and apologists I knew always got around that by saying that god speaks directly to people through the Bible. The interesting thing is that god seemed to say different things to different people. Yet this old book that condoned some of the worst of the bronze and iron age philosophies was supposed to be a valid tool in the 21st Century and we were supposed to take the entire thing as an authority. Except, you know, those things that weren’t convenient. But the people who found different things to not be convenient probably weren’t real Christians. Something was wrong with the entire premise. I finally realized the only true response to the conundrum was to stop taking the book as an authority on much of anything. Yet people keep quoting Bible verses at me like that's all that it will take to change my mind. Screw that.

On Ugliness

The words have meanings, Readers have writers It’s not the consequence they have It’s bigger than the monuments we have And yet you call yourself a heartbreaker --Idlewild, “Readers & Writers” Every once in a while Bono says something profound. Chuck Klosterman was there to record one of those profound statements. “The job of art,” Bono said in an interview, “Is to chase away ugliness.” I like this idea, mostly because I’m ugly, but I have some art to help chase that away. I don’t mean that I’m ugly in the sense that no one should ever want to look at my disgusting, misshapen features. I’m ugly in the way everyone is ugly. I’m ugly in that way that makes me human. We’re trapped in these bodies, forever imprisoned by the very thing that allows us to survive. We’re limited in what we can know by what we can see, smell, touch, feel, hear. And all those things we experience are filtered through an imperfect brain that’s always coloring our experiences according to that which we, as observers, bring with us in to the picture. And this is how I know that I am ugly. I allow my selfishness to overtake the needs of others. In my pettiness I’d rather see someone I don’t like suffer than do what I need to make myself better, since schadenfreude is so much easier than self-improvement. I’d rather find external factors to blame than figure out what I’ve done wrong in those recurring situations I wander in to that always end with a failure on my part. I’m ugly. I’m human. Sometimes that means the same exact thing. I’m also fascinated by ugliness. I have a copy of Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness sitting on my coffee table. His On Beauty held no particular appeal to me. I haven’t really read it. I think as much as anything I wanted to add it to my impressive collection of coffee table books. It sits alongside my hardcover edition of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (which, to be fair, I have read. It started my love affair with all things Weschler), my Illustrated Anthology of Myth and Story, and a few interesting old books I’ve picked up that add a certain gravitas to the room due to their beat-up covers and yellowed pages. It’s a bit of pride. It’s an especially ironic bit of pride when you consider that very few people actually visit. And most of them aren’t going to be impressed by my books. They’ve known me for too long to notice. That, too, is a bit of ugliness. I like to think of myself as humble. I like to think of myself as modest. But if I’m honest I don’t think I am. I’m fully capable of arrogance, of a cruel disregard for the people around me. So in that, I’m ugly. But I have art. And art can chase away the ugliness. This may be my one saving grace. It’s also why I’m far more interested in On Ugliness than I’ll ever be in On Beauty. What better way to chase away the ugliness than to expose it for all to see, to bring it out of its hidden, dark places, display it, and say, “This is a part of life, too?” That, too, is why the more I look back on my days as a fundie I realize that I lived a pretty artless existence. Ugliness wasn’t allowed. It’s not that we had to cover it up. Although most of the time that was a good idea. It’s that we weren’t allowed to acknowledge ugliness for what it was: a part of life. That feeling of schadenfreude when you see someone you don’t like get knocked down a peg or two? That’s the Devil or the weak flesh taking over and a sign that you need more Jesus. Lose your job or a loved one? That’s a sign that god is working to make you a better person/give you great gifts through some unimaginable, Rube Goldberg-esque mechanism that will only become apparent after you’ve gone through it all and can look back on everything and make all the necessary connections guided by hindsight. It’s why the Christian sub-culture is so vapid, so devoid of artistic, well, anything. No one is allowed to talk about anything other than how friggin’ great god is. So we end up with vapid Christian pop and Thomas Kinkade and weird, creepy pictures of Jesus holding passed-out dudes in suggestive poses. Ugliness was something to be avoided, something to be ignored. We were supposed to deny our own ugliness, say it was something outside ourselves, something other, something inhuman. But ugliness isn’t inhuman. It may be the most human thing there is. Without ugliness how can we possibly admire beauty? Without ugliness why would we need art to chase it away? Without ugliness how can we grow, learn, find the beauty in ourselves or others? How can we chart the course of our lives without understanding that there’s good and bad and ugly and beautiful and it’s all okay because it’s all a part of who we are? In truth it’s the ugliness that makes the beauty worthwhile. So any planned world that was created without the base, the ugly, the gross, would have been planned incorrectly. We need loss to know what it’s like to win. We need to chance failure in order to win the greatest prizes. See, this is what I’ve gradually come to realize. Humans, I believe, are extraordinarily good at getting what they think they deserve. Back in my church days I thought that all I deserved was whatever god saw fit to give me. So I didn’t really do anything to make my life in to what I wanted it to be. I wasn’t a big fan of myself in the first place, so when it was constantly reinforced that I was worthless because I made the mistake of being born a human, I simply accepted my lot in life. It’s what I was. Why bother to try to make it more? I’ve moved forward since then, but something has been holding me back. It’s something I’m only now starting to understand. See, in the end there was Her. I used to think that there was nothing I could do in my life that would be better than getting, well, her. She was better than I’d ever expected to get. So when she said that she thought I was too good for her I assumed she was lying. I assumed she was setting me up for the Seinfeld moment, the, “It’s not you, it’s me.” I think, though, in the end I was wrong. After a fashion, at least. I don’t think she thought she was better than me. I think she grew disappointed with me. Disillusioned, even. She told me once that she didn’t believe people were capable of changing the world. It’s weird, she had a much more positive view of god than I did and was a much bigger misanthrope. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that isn’t weird. Maybe that’s normal. Maybe the god in whom we both believed and humanity are compared as a zero-sum calculation and for one to increase the other must decrease. She told me once that she didn’t believe people were capable of changing the world. But she then told me that I had changed her mind. She thought that I could. I didn’t know why she would believe that. I still couldn’t begin to tell you. And that, I think, is why she stopped believing in me, stopped loving me. She wanted me to re-make the world. All I wanted to do was help make hers. Somehow that wasn’t enough for her even if it was everything for me. Because I can’t change the world, at least not in any intentional way. There lies madness, misdirection, and control. All I have is what little art I can muster to chase the ugliness away. I love the Idlewild lyrics I put at the top of this post. Words have meaning. Readers have writers. It seems…possessive. It seems belittling. You, because you are reading these words, somehow possess me. It almost removes the writer from the equation. I’m just a prop, a go-between from the meaning of the words to the mind of the reader. And I’m perfectly okay with that. In fact, I love the idea. My goal as a writer and storyteller is to make the individual in to the universal. I write about me, but I know full well that the only reason I matter to anyone out there when I tell these stories is because everyone can see some part of themselves in what I have to say. That’s why I can’t change the world. I can’t tell you who to be. I can only try to tell you who you are. And with that tiny bit of art hopefully we’ll chase the ugliness away. Ultimately that’s why I left religion. I still want to change the world. I just have no urge to make it in my or anybody else’s image. What do I know from beauty, after all? I work with ugliness. The strange thing is that now, even though I haven’t actually spoken to her in a long time and don’t know that there’s anything I even want to say to her, some tiny little part of me still hopes that one day she sees, that one day she understands. Because of all the people I know who need that little bit of art to chase the ugliness away, she needs it the most. Anyone who says they hate people is really saying that they hate themselves. And no one should have to carry around that kind of ugliness.

Tales of a Ninth Grade Nothing

So there was actual thought behind this post. I was reading Klosterman’s explanation of why he doesn’t like soccer and he got to the point where he said that in high school those kids can just get away with shopping at Hot Topic and being punks and I suddenly realized, “Or they go to church!” Then I realized that if I was going to write a post comparing Christianity to soccer I’d probably piss a bunch of people off. I decided to embrace the possible controversy. After all, I’ve had a few Christian trolls. I haven’t yet gotten a football hooligan. This blog could use some more hooliganism… Either way, like I said, there is actual thought behind the parallel I drew. I wasn’t just pulling something out of my ass to get everybody mad. I swear. The fact is, picking church due to holding the status of “outcast” isn’t actually too far-fetched. I strongly suspect that it’s what I did even though I probably never would have guessed so at the time. But the shoe fits. See, I wasn’t one of the cool kids by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t think that I was ever particularly bullied, but that may well be because I was bigger than the rest of the kids and didn’t go to schools where fighting was particularly common. I was, however, the fat, hyperactive, socially maladjusted nerd. I, uh, I got made fun of a lot. I also didn’t get invited to parties. Ever. In seventh grade, however, I started going to my church’s junior high youth group. I’d been looking forward to it, since my older sister thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I loved it. I don’t recall being singled out and made fun of. I don’t know that I was “cool” there, but I don’t really recall there being the same hierarchy at youth group that I would have found at school. More importantly, though, were the adult leaders. They were the volunteers, who ranged from college kids to parents of junior highers, who lead the small groups and were pretty much the engine that kept the entire thing running. They treated me with respect and I felt like an adult. I felt like somebody when I was in youth group. The thing about junior highers is that they’re both incredibly intelligent and really dumb. I remember one night I was riding shotgun in a rented 15 passenger van while the youth group leader drove and I explained to him how helicopters fly. He told me that he’d always thought they could only fly close to the ground so they could push against it. I explained how the air coming off the helicopters is, for all intents and purposes, pushing against the air beneath it, so as long as there is adequate force coming from the blades and the air is dense enough, the helicopter can fly at any height.* For years after he’d remind me of this conversation when I ran in to him. But for all of the random bits of knowledge that your average thirteen or fourteen year-old possesses (or thinks he or she possesses), they lack certain necessary faculties. Abstract thinking simply isn’t that big of a deal to your average junior high school student. The upshot is that they’re easy to lie to, whether you do so intentionally or not. If one authority figure, say a science teacher, tells them that the universe popped in to existence 13.7 billion years ago one day, then another authority figure, such as a pastor, tells them that god created the universe in 4004 BCE on a Tuesday, they’ll believe both. They won’t do so because they’re intentionally creating cognitive dissonance. There isn’t any. They’re believing the authority and the fact that two equally valid authorities say two wildly different things isn’t necessarily going to be met with anything closely resembling critical evaluation. This is why, even if they don’t admit it or even know it themselves, churches try to get kids in the door and try to create fun youth groups. My old youth group leader knew less about science than I did when I was in junior high but it didn’t matter. He was awesome (and anybody who tells me different now will get punched in the nose, so don’t try it). And he was still an authority, as were the various other adults who populated my youth group world. For me this would create a mentally dangerous dichotomy. I had my school world and my church world. I was comparatively lucky, though. A lot of the kids in my church world went to private Christian schools or were home schooled, so they didn’t have the external authority figures to create in their minds equally valid opposing facts and ideas. After my freshman year in high school my parents decided to leave the church I grew up in and my older sister started trying to avoid church altogether. I wanted nothing more than to stay in that church, however. I know exactly why. I’d just gotten back from the high school’s summer missions trip when I learned that my parents were leaving. The summer missions trip is, ostensibly, designed to give people who otherwise just go to school or go to their jobs a taste of the missions field. You get a group together and head to some place where people need to have houses built for them or something and go do “the Lord’s work.” Before the group goes, though, it engages in a couple months of intense prep work and team building. During the missions trip itself the actual work kind of takes a back seat to the nightly worship and sharing times. After the group gets back there’s a celebration and a few parties and the people who were on the site together probably end up reminiscing about the events of that particular summer for years after. It is, in effect, a big group-building exercise. “The Lord’s work” even seemed to take second billing to the spiritual growth of the people doing the work and the events that were specifically designed to bring the group together. Interestingly enough, the group tends to get involved in making sure that the experience is good. Those who were on, say, the trip in 2006 and 2007 try to make the trip in 2008 just as awesome and help those who weren’t on any before realize how cool the whole missions trip thing is. This, at least for my particular youth group, is then carried even farther forward than throughout high school. People who went on the trips as students tended to come back and do a trip or two as adult leaders, even if they didn’t work with the youth group during the year. The experiences of togetherness on missions trips are special. They’re also, I now realize, completely manufactured. Enough people are bought in to the idea that they make it special. It worked for me. I wanted to stay at my church even when my family was leaving. I stuck around through high school (even though I only went on the missions trips my freshman and senior years). Then I did five years at my church after I graduated. I spent a year helping to build the college ministry, which was practically nonexistent my senior year of high school, then I went back and spent four years working with my old junior high youth group while alternating between working full time and going to community college. During my time as a junior high youth group leader I’m pretty sure I did it all wrong. My first year there I was kind of the enforcer. It was actually my job to make sure that the kids weren’t sneaking out and I was damn good at it. I pretty much knew exactly where the kids would be if they weren’t in the main room during the meeting. The interesting thing is, though, that I got in to the habit of sitting down and talking to them. See, I remembered the adult leaders from when I was a junior higher. I was one of the kids who was always involved, always trying to make a good impression, whatever, so nobody had to chase me around. But I remembered that the adult leaders seemed to care. So I focused more on trying to care about “my kids” than I did on making sure that they were in the meeting. And I thought of them as “my kids.”** I knew the outcasts. See, this was something I hadn’t picked up on my first time through junior high. I was an outcast in school but I wasn’t in youth group because I played all the games and tried to do everything right. There were still outcasts, though. They were the ones who didn’t want to be there, who only showed up at church because their parents made them go. They didn’t care. So even though I did care I somehow figured out that they didn’t want to sit there and hear about the Bible all night. So I didn’t talk about it. I talked about what they wanted to talk about. Meanwhile, when I was doing my thing as a small group leader I tried my hardest to teach the kids how to think for themselves. I refused to feed them answers and encouraged them to try to build on one realization with another. I was, in short, teaching them critical thinking skills and to not expect me to be an authority. I don’t think I was supposed to do that. The thing is, I was pretty highly regarded as a youth group leader. The kids loved me, the other adult leaders respected me. And I spent the better part of four years with the nagging feeling that I wasn’t doing it right. There was this idea that we could only do what we were doing “with god’s help.” So there had to be a lot of prayer and admission that we just didn’t know how to do anything without god, um, doing it for us, I guess. Yet I pretty much felt like I was doing everything "under my own power" (which, for the record, is a bit of Christianese). I made it through just fine. Meanwhile, though, there was a group of people I spent a lot of time hanging out with. We were working with the junior highers and heavily involved with the college ministry, so it was kind of a default thing. I thought they were my close friends since I was around them pretty much all the time. Then it gradually started to occur to me that I never hung out with them outside of church-related things or those times when we’d get done with church stuff and say, “Hey, let’s go eat.” I knew that they hung out with each other when I wasn’t around, but I never seemed to get the memo. I carried that confusion forward with me to WIU. When I finally got around to getting my ass out to college to finish my degree I was older than almost everyone else, but still too young to be a “non-traditional” student. I’d also spent the last five years hanging out with people who were younger than me and was mostly in 3- and 400 level courses, so I adjusted to college well enough. But I still had a lot more experience than most of the people around me. That’s why I had no problems making an impression on the local InterVarsity chapter. I knew what I was doing, I was planning to go in to ministry, anyway, and I spoke with a certain degree of authority. These things brought with them a certain level of in-built respect and the position of Outreach Coordinator for the chapter during my second year out there. This time around it didn’t take me anywhere close to as much time to realize that everyone seemed to hang out and I never seemed to get the memo. I also rapidly developed a certain level of disgust for the way the IV organization as a whole worked and wasn’t a big fan of the way that the local chapter worked. It’s not to say that everything was terrible. I met one of my best friends (who has also left religion after his own journey) in the group and I still keep in touch with an occasionally hang out with a couple other people from those days. But it wasn’t hard for me to realize that I wanted nothing to do with InterVarsity. I left and spent the rest of my time at WIU hanging out with other people who didn’t piss me off. Now, this is the part where I’m sure would-be evangelists would say, “See, you were just around the wrong kinds of Christians. You should come to my church.” Because, see, it can’t possibly be an issue that I realized that thought Christianity was stupid. It can’t possibly be that I know how to separate “bad Christians” from “Christianity.” It can’t be that once I realized I wasn’t getting the friendship and togetherness thing I was supposed to get from church I started asking, “So why am I bothering to keep doing this?” and couldn’t come up with a good answer. I still had one more summer and one more semester to go at WIU after my abortive InterVarsity experience. I decided I needed to try something different. So that summer I started going to a completely different church that one of my friends from high school attended. A couple weeks in to that experience I met Her. The following semester I realized that the pastor of the church I’d been attending out at school was losing his mind (no, seriously, but that’s a completely different story), so I started going to a different church, but barely, since I managed to find excuses to head back to Chicago every other weekend to, y’know, see Her. I was disillusioned with religion at the time, but I had every reason to want to make it work. I was still planning on going to Seminary. I knew that if I stopped going to church I’d lose any chance I had to keep Her around. More importantly, though, even after everything I’d been through I still wanted to believe. I was 25 and had never known any other life than the one I was living. So I went back and spent the second half of the school year working with my old junior high youth group. It wasn’t the same. I knew I was faking it, but I’d done it so well and for so long that I don’t think anyone noticed. There was no more comfort in church. Even though I was actually often hanging out with old friends they usually didn’t feel like friends. I was a stranger in a place I’d once called home. It wasn’t the world outside that was changing. It was me. At the end of that year I left my old church entirely. But even then I wasn’t going to stop going to church. I started going to my parents’ Presbyterian church (where they don’t teach the Bible). I no longer had any interest in Seminary or volunteering with youth groups or any of that. And it wasn’t that I was burned out on church. It’s that everything I’d been through up until that point had pointed to a single, inescapable conclusion: there is no god. Or, at least, there is no god in any sense that’s in any way related to what I’d learned in church. Since this post is inextricably related to my On Hell post and is, in and of itself, not the end of the story, I’m going to add a new label. I’ll call it “Critical Mass.” I don’t promise that I’ll cover topics I haven’t already covered before, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to cover them in a completely different way than I would have in the past. And there are still a couple more things I want to talk about that are at least tangentially related. So, y’know… -------------------------------- *Although, now that I think about this, the explanation is fundamentally flawed. The rotating blades of the helicopter create lift in much the same way that the wings of an airplane create lift, by forcing air to move more quickly over the top surface than it does over the bottom. The creation of down force is more or less negligible. The salient point remains, namely that the helicopter blades aren’t acting against the ground in any way, shape or form and are, in fact, creating interactions solely between air and, um, air. However, in my defense, I was 13 at the time and I’ve since become a historian. Although, ironically, it was a book called Chickenhawk, written by a Vietnam War Huey pilot, that gave me the necessary knowledge of how a collective works to realize I was wrong. **All my junior highers were “my kids,” not just the outcasts.

On Hell...

My appreciation for and hatred of Chuck Klosterman continues apace. But I’m making my peace with it, so I’ve got that going for me. I’m reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs right now and, much like Killing Yourself to Live, it makes me want to write long, pretentious, self-aware essays. Of course I did that before I ever read any of Klosterman’s work. I’m just aware of it now. So I guess it’s kind of postmodern… I feel like starting this post thusly: I should really be sleeping, but instead I’m writing. I’ve moved from my couch to my bed, which sleep experts tell me is a terrible idea. So I’m sitting on the left side. It’s a queen-size and it’s never occupied by more than me, but still I sleep on the right side only, as if I’m waiting for the occupant of the left to come home from a weekend out of town. Right now I’m not technically writing in my bed. I’m writing in someone else’s bed. I just don’t know who that is. But I won’t start it that way. That’d be self-aware, pseudo-hip, pretentious, and not particularly good writing…* Anyway… Over the course of the weekend I met two girls. One of them has a boyfriend with whom I share a name. The other one may or may not have been single. I find them both fascinating at the moment and, to be perfectly honest, some tiny little part of my brain hopes that I never see either one again, never get to know anything else about them. It’s weird, I suppose. I mean, it’s not like I have anything against either one of them, nor would I expect to. But lack of information can be far, far better than actual information. Sometimes the mystery makes people more interesting than they actually are. Sometimes it simply makes the universe more interesting than it actually is. There seems to be a critical mass of information on any given subject. When you hit that critical mass you have to reject the object of which you have just learned or you have to accept it for what it is. Either way you have to learn to move on with your life. We hit that critical mass with people. It’s most obvious in romantic relationships. I’ve decided in the past that I was in love with someone, that my life would be forfeit without that person in it. I like to believe that I’ve been that person for at least one person in my life. But here I am, sitting on the left side of my bed because there’s no one to occupy it instead. There isn’t even a lamp over here, or a second night stand. It’s just empty space. I’m okay with that. So far anybody I’ve met who I thought would occupy this half has ended up reaching that critical mass of knowledge with me or I with her and we’ve gone our separate ways. It might have taken longer for one side or the other, because it always does, but it’s been okay in the end. That’s how the world works. One of the things that I have a hard time understanding is how I can explain to people why I’m no longer a Christian. It seems a lot of people assume there was a specific moment where I said, “Nope, can’t do it anymore.” Most of the people I went to or would have probably gone to church with seem content to assume that there was a single moment wherein I got really really really really hurt and mad at god and just walked away. Non-Christians, at least of the sort who were never really committed to the whole church thing, don’t necessarily seem to think that, but there’s still a weird undercurrent where they seem to think one day I had an (anti-)epiphany and, hey, no more religion. The truth is that there simply wasn’t a point where it all changed. I hit that point of critical mass and it became inevitable I’d leave, but it was far from instantaneous. I went through life gathering information and experiences and one day the neat little puzzle Christianity had so kindly put together for me didn’t fit together any more. One of those places of extreme difficulty was the entire concept of Hell. Slacktivist really describes the main issue best, so I’ll just summarize. Basically, hell comes up all of three times in the Bible. By which I mean the Christian Bible. There are a couple references to Sheol in the Jewish Bible, but out of all of those passages about all that other stuff the eternal punishment thing barely comes in to play. Yet the Christianity with which I grew up made its entire theology about avoiding hell and trying to convince everyone in the pews to try to convince everyone they knew to avoid it, too. It never really added up, especially when you actually approach the Bible and see what it has to say about avoiding the place. And that message is far different from any message I got from the pulpit on Sunday mornings. See, the conventional Christian message is that you have to pray “The Sinner’s Prayer” and “accept Jesus in to your heart.” The more I read the Bible, though, the more I realized that no one ever said “The Sinner’s Prayer.” I started to wonder if anybody who got preached to in the Book of Acts actually managed to make it to heaven. Then I thought about the societal Christianity in the Medieval period and realized that the vast majority of the people there would have called themselves Christians and never made it in to heaven according to the system in place at my church. Then I started paying attention to what Jesus actually said about who goes where. Matthew 25:33-36 says, “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’” Jesus never said, “You didn’t pray the Sinner’s Prayer.” He said, “You didn’t help the people who needed it.” Yet this is the source (I’d assume) of the works v. faith argument. Honestly, too, I think it was a license to be lazy. See, if all you have to do is pray a prayer and you’re good, you never have to be uncomfortable. You never have to put yourself out and try to change the world. You can just, as people I knew did, sit back and wait for the Second Coming. Thing is, though, I don’t think the vast majority of Christians actually believe in hell. Well, they don’t believe in hell as a punishment for the unbelievers. Honestly, I think hell is just a thing that gets thrown out to keep the faithful in line. I was constantly worried that I was going to do something so horrible that it would get me sent to hell. Well, maybe not constantly, but it came up on a regular basis. I regularly got, “You’re not good enough because of [this], [this], and [that] and god’s pissed,” messages. I don’t claim that my anecdotes count as data, but it sure seems that more time was spent trying to rile up the faithful to keep them acting properly than actually getting them to go do some outreach. Eventually I realized it was all bullshit. It seemed that Paul was the one who tried to bring in the weird concept of holding to a specific belief. But then James said that true religion was to look after widows and orphans in their distress. Meanwhile, Jesus divided the sheep and the goats according to which ones helped the poor and, in general, had compassion. The Bible doesn’t present the pat explanations of how to get saved that the churches I used to attend would have us believe. I think that for most people in the pews those oversimplified and inhuman answers were profoundly uncomfortable, too. It seems far more likely that if there is a Jesus and he judges the quick and the dead he’d be far more interested in how you respond to John Scalzi’s essay on Being Poor than how you respond to the Bridge Diagram. If that’s the case, I actually have very few problems with Jesus and religion in general. Of course that was only one aspect of my reaction to the critical mass of questions. I suppose it’s probably about time to get to a couple posts I promised a long, long time ago… -------------------------------- *I hate myself for everything I did here.