Da will of dumbasses

It has been a minor theme of this blog that the people who don't think like I do still deserve, for pragmatic reasons, respect, and for theological reasons, love. I am currently straining against both resolutions.

Electing Donald Trump to be president of the United States was a poor choice. This was not an election period with an excellent alternative, but nearly any of them would have been better choices than the one our electorate made.

I am told that evangelical Christians were a great help in putting Mr. Trump into office, and it is difficult to understand how someone who professes to follow Jesus could make such a decision. I have been able to empathize, if not agree with, many decisions that evangelicals as a body appear to make.

But this is an order of magnitude larger. Revulsion at Hillary Clinton is not an acceptable reason to choose Moloch as your king.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, you have made a poor choice, and explaining how and why does not seem to matter to your exuberance, if you were even to listen. You rejoice like the Israelites throwing together their gold to make a fertility idol the moment Moses heads up the mountain.

I don't know who our Moses is in this scenario. It seems to have been a while since we had a trustworthy national leader appointed by God. But I know exactly who the orangey-golden calf is.

===

From a pace back, this is not the express elevator to Hell. Existing American institutions are resilient and carry potent inertia. For instance, if the soon-to-come power does "cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities"... well, first of all I'm not even sure what that means. But if it is as draconian as it is meant to sound, I do not imagine that the federal government will even function if it cuts off six of the ten most populous cities in the US, and Washington D.C. Will we stop paying senators, our most august federal employees in a sanctuary city? Trump (i.e. Pence) will have to find a loophole to pretend that enforcing that section of his "contract with the American Voter" was taken away from him. I'm confident one has already been prepared.

And roughly 50% of the population is stricken by this turn of events. And a fair number of the people who made it happen—from the top down—woke up queasy on November 9. That's also a fair amount of resistance in the gears.

However, though not a freight elevator, this shift in governance is a steep path to ever-more naked plutocracy, convincing cross-country truckers that estate taxes are meaningful issues in their lives, and that unemployed Rust Belt residents will somehow find Health Savings Accounts to be helpful without income to save.

And that's terrible because it makes our job harder: to tell people the good news; to show a way to freedom from silly, inconsequential shit; to grow toward a real life with God.

And it's additionally depressing because the people who are supposed to be doing this are the ones making it harder to do.

Brother and sisters, I love you, but you are dumbasses. I want to speak to you in grace and truth, but you are deaf and dumb asses. I will not give up on you, but I need to part ways with you, because you are so far into the weeds that I am losing sight of your heads in the tall, thorny grass. Please come back before you are choked out!

Existentialism and Theology, c. 1996

Here's a thing I wrote in what I think is 1996. I found it on a pile of papers after we moved and I realized that I don't need to keep it in paper form any more.

I learned this from my college philosophy professor, Dr. Sansom. Like an interesting piece of coral someone gave me, I take the idea out sometimes and look at it again.

Existentialism asks questions. Theology provides answers. But the answers are worthless until the questions are asked. The fact that Jesus loves you does not answer anything for you until you care enough to ask about it.

Advent Abdication 2015

Wrong species, wrong side of the fence.

Church in my life, in many ways, has been a disappointment.

I don't seem to be giving up on Jesus. As I get older and more experienced, I am ever more deeply committed. But churches, oh boy, if only I could do without them.

Somewhere in the distant past, I got the idea that church was where you went to get loved and accepted. Over and over (with a couple of notable exceptions) church has been instead where I've gone to get marginalized and blown off.

I'm weird and needy. I get that. But that's kind of Jesus's niche, right? He didn't come for the well people, right?

We're going to try somewhere new tomorrow, for the first Sunday of Advent. And it occurred to me tonight to try something new too: to just not try to find friends at church. To not hope for acceptance or love by the people I meet there.

That doesn't sound like a winning move, but at least it's different. Different than smiling and shaking hands and trying to remember names and going to activities with hope of making connection and still getting blank looks and uncomfortable silences after months of effort.

Starting tomorrow, I'll go to meet God. Frankly, he's challenge enough. I'll make relationships if they come. But I won't hunt for acceptance and friendship. Just be cool with what is, not stricken by what I don't get.

Seems paradoxical to try this tack on the very first day of the season of expectant waiting. But in here, it seems like a new direction. Let's try it and see what happens.

Lent 2015: time-wasting

This Lent I have set myself the quixotic sacrifice of time-wasting.

It's sort of hard to know what's wasting time and what's fiddling. Sometimes reading a comic book is wasting time, and sometimes it's productive stimulation and sometimes it's research.

But as a concrete expression, I have barred myself from my ipad. No dinky time waster games for 40+ days. No reddit on the tablet.

I can still waste time on my desktop, and I do. Or even on a couple of analog time wasters I've got here. But when I find myself wandering that direction, I am at least aware of it and try to veer back in the direction of doing something instead of nothing.

At the Ash Wednesday worship we went to, it was impressed on me that the vice, the thing you give up for Lent, is not the point. You walk around and you're like "I'm giving up hooch for Lent." But that's not the deal.

The deal is that when your vice is gone, you've kicked your own crutch away. The vice was covering over a hole and now you have an obvious hole in you. 

Depending on how long you've had that cover-up there, you might not even know what's living in that hole these days. Maybe it's just an emptiness. Or maybe it contains things you put in there because you didn't want to have to look at them any more. And now you're looking at them. For 40 days.

But that's not the point either! The real point is that God is there to help you fill up the hole. The point is more God. And the by-product is a wholer, holier you when you two are done with that.

For me, living in a brand new city strips even more away, because I have a lot of free time. Which means a lot of opportunity to waste time. Which means a lot of opportunity to stare into the hole and asking God what kind of spackle this thing is going to take.

Restless and deprived of my usual consciousness salves, it's been grim so far. I've been reading a book on the Holy Spirit which isn't grabbing me. Tonight I finished a book of Robert Howard's Solomon Kane stories, which has actually been more productive. (Solomon Kane—worst Puritan ever or pure psychotic?)

But I'm hopeful about what things will look like come resurrection day. The antsier I feel now, the more I hope for an epiphanic payout. A lasting change instead of the returning tide of mild hedonism.

Lent reflections 2013

Lent again, and I'm running at it with the usual half-hearted enthusiasm. I keep wanting religion to mean things. Sometimes it does! But other times it unrolls like a rug and then lies very still like a rug.

This year I wanted to give something up, but I didn't want to give up something that would be, like, hard.

Last year for Lent, M and I tried over the top -- all juice. It was too crazy too much too fast, skipping straight from Burger King to beet juice. We would up retreating to "no processed foods" by Easter.

This year I just didn't want so much work in my suffering. So I found a thing I do a lot, that I like a lot, but that I can stop without pangs.

I'm not eating out. This Lent, everything has to come from the grocery store and be prepared by someone I didn't pay to cook for me.

It's just the right amount of sacrifice. I hope. It requires me to think about food, reflect on my choices, but doesn't seriously deprive me. (Now that I've written that down, it sounds like the biggest softball I could find. Sacrifice without deprivation? Balls to the motherfuckin' walls, Quick!)

Still, it is having an effect. With a serendipity I'll call grace, I started tracking what I eat on an app (myfitnesspal, available for download on your fancyphone of choice). I don't do it every day, and I don't do a crack job of tracking when I do. But the crux is that it creates pauses to think about what I'm shoving in my Doritos-hole all day long and to have different thoughts besides, "More horsemeat."

I'll probably be a few pounds lighter come Easter 2013, but weight loss is a pleasant side effect. What I really want is a religious observance that doesn't lie like a rug, but flies like a carpet. I want God to show me something amazing that irrevocably cuts through fear and complacency.

It sounds like I'm asking for a lot in exchange for not much. If I was serious about this shit, I'd go get imprisoned or beaten, right? But God's economy is not tit for tat. God is always operating on a different scale than humans. We're commemorating a messiah back from the dead! That's kind of a big deal. I've got to come to the table, but I can't be expected to bet real money there, you know?

Given that state of things, I think I can ask for fireworks even if my chief contribution is a wet match. But I'm afraid I won't get them. Or I'm afraid I'll be too stupid to know how to follow up even if I do. Those are the two main outcomes of religion in my life thus far: disappointed or dumbfounded.

I keep showing up though. Trying is better than not trying. 

in re: New Year's Resolutions

My pastor said something a couple years ago that stuck with me:

"Jesus is not particularly interested in your self-improvement schemes."

Epiphany

At cell before Christmas, one of our hosts, Rachel, prepared a thoughtful activity for us about hope.

She had purchased glass ball Christmas ornaments and decorative strands. Then she printed out strips of green and red paper with hopes on them.

There were a variety of different ones, at different levels of thought and inclusion. It was hard to fill out. It's work to think about and name your hopes. I spent most of the evening on it, off and on.

After I got home, I dropped my ornament on the floor, and the glass ball broke. I was left with a loose handful of hopes.

So I won't be hanging that on our tree next year. Instead, I'm going to put them here at QT so they'll be visible all year long.

These are the strips:

• This Christmas season, I hope... to shake this low-grade depression sooner rather than later.
• For myself, I hope... to have the same job this time next year. To become the person I was made to be.
• For my family, I hope... for wisdom and care about money and things.
• For my neighborhood, I hope... for fewer helicopter flyovers. For more community.
• For this world, I hope... that the protests of 2011 effect real, permanent change for the better, and don't spin out, run out, or get bought out.
• May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. Romans 15:13

Vatican astronomer speaks out

This has been making the rounds recently. I usually avoid that, but I like this one.

The pope's astronomer, Brother Guy J. Consolmagno (wikipedia), made statements lately revealing once again that he is basically a cool dude. (In support, observe that the man looks like a cross between Stephen King and Jason Blood.)

Brother Consolmagno drops a smattering of choice ideas and statements in this short Guardian article which I will let you read on your own time.

The clever soundbite, which is seriously not even the lede, concerned Stephen Hawking's recent pronouncements regarding God's role in creation:

"Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist."

Closing my eyes

I'm done using the words "see" and "listen" to describe attempts to interact with God. I get mad that God won't participate in the literal, empirical senses of those words, and that Christendom bent them for me through careless overuse.

God doesn't "talk" to me. I suspect God communicates with me, but he's never said a word to me in the common, concrete understanding of what "words" are. So I'm taking time off from that particular metaphor.

I've long been a reader of Real Live Preacher, a pastor at a small Baptist church nearabouts San Antonio, Texas. (His blog link is also in my sidebar.) Very recently, RLP left the pastorate. He's never been an orthodox pastor, but he wrote something that I'm not sure he could say occupying the pulpit. Goes like this:

I’m 48 years old. I have been a Christian since I was 9. I’ve been to seminary. I’ve been a conservative, then a liberal, then kind of a conservative again, then even more of a liberal, and finally I don’t know if there’s a label that even fits me. I’ve been all over the map. I’ve been looking for God in the scriptures, in the heavens, in the world, in my mind, and in thousands of conversations with as many people.
And I don’t know anything about God.
I don’t mean that in the good way, like when people say that someone is wise because he admits that he doesn’t know something. No. Seriously. I just don’t know shit about God. Period.
I don’t know if God exists or not.
I don’t know what the Bible says about God. The more I read and study those books, the more confused I become.
I don’t know how much God cares about how we live our lives.
I don’t know if God answers prayers or what it would even mean for a prayer to be answered.
I don’t know how we should worship God. I don’t know if sticking to ancient traditions is good because they have survived some kind of religious natural selection process, or if we should just sit in silence like the Quakers. Maybe we should get guitars and cookies and sing prayers that 5-year-olds can understand. I don’t know.
I just don’t know.

I've been down a less rigorous road than his, and he's farther along. But I can see him from here. And I mean "see" in a metaphorical sense.

I've recently signed on for a pretty advanced leadership gig in my church, Circle of Hope. I'm on the Compassion Core Team, which is part of the higher leadership function of our whole group. I was chosen because I've been around for a while, and keep showing up, and, at just the right time, demonstrated a bias for action over slacking.

I'm also about to become a cell leader in the next few months. My leader, Brian, picked me because of what he called my "flirtations with atheism." He's done the reading and the thinking and the reasoning and the guesswork just like me. And he says that the thinking is good, but that in spiritual matters, you learn by doing. I think I believe him.

It seems propitious for my investment in my church to crank up as my skepticism waxes. I'm expectantly interested in seeing what happens. In the literal and figurative senses.

Trust in the Lord

I am told that God loves us, and rescues us from our sins and enemies.

But God also leaves us to suffer the consequences of our insistent foolishness, and to suffer other people's foolish consequences as well.

This is one reason why I don't trust God. Even when I ask him to save me, he might not. How can I trust that?

Two Gen Con stories

When Gen Con was still in Milwaukee, the local Christian evangelists took to the streets to save souls through signs and pointed questions and pestering. I never scorned them -- they're brothers in Christ, even if they're from a branch of the family I don't talk to much. But as a gamer, I could see their tactics were poor.

I felt bad just ignoring them, so I would acknowledge them when I passed, which was usually the opening they wanted.

Except I don't need re-saving. I was exactly the person they didn't want to talk to. Yet somehow, that never seemed acceptable to them. I got into some strange conversations with evangelicals looking for something to convert rather than someone to love.
Story 1
A guy with long, stringy hair a beard, a baseball cap. Pictures and scripture painted on his truck. A sign condemning sinners stands in the street, next to the sidewalk. It was the day before the con started; all of us were still getting warmed up. A friend and I were walking back from Kinko's to the convention center.

"Do you know what you have to do to be saved?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?" I asked him, confused.
"I do, I want to know if you do."
"What do you say it is?" (Jesus judo ends theological arguments way faster.)
"Don't you know?"
"Yeah, but I want to know what you say."

We did that routine two more times before he revealed,

"Read the Bible every day!"
"That's not it," I said. "You have to believe in Jesus to be saved. That's what the Bible says."

He was indignant. My friend was already half a block ahead of me, so I left to catch up. I saw the dude later in the convention, but I crossed the street because I didn't want to talk to him again.

Story 2
As I walked by a man with a sign and a Christian t-shirt, I said hello.

He asked me if I knew what would happen to me if I died that night. A classic hard-sell evangelical opener, one I've never used myself, because it's such a theological crotch kick.

I actually had somewhere to be, and was with friends again, so I didn't stop to talk. We had this whole conversation while I was on the move.

"Yes," I said, walking by him. "I'll go to Heaven."

"Well let me ask you something else," he said as I walked on, looking back. "Will you go to Heaven if you commit suicide?"

This is the Catholic test. If you think Catholics aren't real, true Christians, you can sometimes lure the confused (I mean, open) ones into a conversation this way.

"Yes." I said louder, because I was farther down the block now.

That's right!" he shouted.

"I know!" I shouted back.

Jesus and D&D

Every once in a while someone in my extended circle puts together the idea that I'm a Christian and a professional D&D writer and asks my advice on how I resolve conflict in those two things. The true, but uninformative answer is that there is no conflict, and now would you like some pie?

I don't usually give that answer, because it's not really the question being asked. The real question is, "I'm intellectually stuck between my religion and my joy. Can you get me unstuck?"

I usually can't, because that's between you and God, friend. But sometimes I can offer some helpful ideas the person hasn't come up with on his own. (It's always a dude.) Here are anonymized excerpts from what I wrote the other night to a friend who asked me that question:

Whenever I've talked with people about this kind of stuff, one of the primary things I try to get across is that God is the main thing. There's nothing particularly satanic about D&D/fantasy/speculative thinking, but if it's getting in the way of God, then God gets to win. I've talked to people who have a lot personally invested in D&D, and who, in conversations with family members, try to "win" their point. That's a tenuous place to even start, much less finish. God must be the main thing you're trying to get to, or else you're going to spin out on some useless tangent.

I find this to be true for me, and I suspect for you as well: There is something true and deep that fantasy sparks in you. Like pretty much everything in a world bent with original sin, it isn't inherently evil. Football, sailing, welding, D&D -- anything can be twisted toward evil if you go that way with it. It can also be straightened to bring out love and truth.

But since fantasy has particular meaning to you, it's more likely to do you good or ill than say, welding. Especially if it's affected you deeply enough that you've ever struggled with it.

Therefore, removing it from your life might protect you from harm. But it also walls off the potential good that could come. Which is more important to you? To God?

These are not rhetorical questions, and you might find they have different answers at different times. God might want you to back off from something at some point to protect you, but that doesn't mean God always wants that. That's why we have a new covenant. Jesus lets us replace law with relationship.

As a result, categorically eliminating things that have potential to be spiritually destructive becomes problematic. It creates a religion that forces you into a tiny, contorted shape.

Instead, look to a living, interactive God for answers, rather than a set of principles designed to protect you from evil. From this perspective, the way forward becomes: Spend as much time as you can going toward God, and as little time as you can trying to get away from evil.

The essential problem I have with the sorts of ideas concerned Christians typically espouse here is that they focus on the evil. That's not an inherently bad goal, but evil is a vanishingly small blot in the infinite light of God. If you're spending much energy on evil -- sensing it, fighting it, escaping it, protecting others from it -- you've started in the wrong place. You start from God. Then you depend on God to tell you if evil is going to be a problem. You don't need to suss it out yourself. God is the one in charge. Your job is to love on God.

God makes all things good. God will pull truth and love out of whatever you're in. There is nothing too "evil" for God to redeem; even genuinely evil things (without the irony quotes) can be redeemed.

If what you're doing wanders into sin territory, the Spirit will convict you about that. In the meantime, ferreting out sin is not your job.Your job is to love on God. Wherever you are, whatever you're into, count on God to make it good. Because He will. He does. All the time.

I'll end with scripture, since that's one of the means we're supposed to use to make sure we're not kidding ourselves with trumped up ideas. Philippians 4:8 says, "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

If D&D points you toward true, noble, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy things, then think about D&D. If it does not, follow the thing that does point you toward those. Do not spend any more time on Satan than you must. God is sovereign, and knows what you need. Pay attention to God, and you will be steered well.

Interestingly, the real problem between Jesus and D&D -- which no one has ever asked me about -- is the idea that you solve problems and advance in the world by slaying your opposition. That methodology is wildly unChristlike. Killing your enemy is exactly the opposite of what Jesus said to do. It has no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. A major premise of the game is a lie.

But it's a fun lie, so I keep playing.

Cash for your gas guzzler

Mildly annoyed by this "clunkers" bill the House passed.

The Short Version:

Under the House bill, car owners could get a voucher worth $3,500 if they traded in a vehicle getting 18 miles per gallon or less for one getting at least 22 miles per gallon. The value of the voucher would grow to $4,500 if the mileage of the new car is 10 mpg higher than the old vehicle. The miles per gallon figures are listed on the window sticker.

I spent some time ranting about this and erased it all.

My first reaction is to rail at the perceived injustice. I've driven the same subcompact 30+ mpg car for 10 years without so much as a firm handshake of gratitude. Now suddenly, anyone who drove a 8 mpg behemoth for less time gets cash to upgrade.

I want a reward! I was community-minded when there was little incentive. I want others punished! They need to live with the consequences of their hubris.

But that's pride and greed doing the talking.

I'm trying to learn to be on the side of grace. I want to smile when good is done, no matter why. I've received good things. Why would I want good denied to anyone else?

For those of you playing along at home, this is transformation by the renewing of my mind. And it's surprisingly tricky.

Religion in the cold months

I’ve been on the outs with God since Christmas. At the Christmas Eve service, there was a lot of talk about faith, and I remember thinking, “You know, I just don’t have that much faith. I don’t think I believe in this.” I find Jesus annoyingly unknowable for the living incarnation of God -- the ostensibly accessible member of the Godhead.

I’m journeyman-level at Jesus worship by now, so I’ve had enough experience not to get thrown by this. Crises of faith aren’t cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank.

I felt relieved to admit it. As a journeyman follower, I also know by now to follow the relieved feelings. It’s a signal that I’ve been over-trying somewhere; taking it easy is probably a better path.

So I haven’t been working at being spiritual for the last few weeks. I haven’t wanted to go to public meeting or cell group, and sometimes we/I go anyway, but sometimes it doesn’t happen. You know, okay.

A frequent bugbear in my spirituality is the seeming arbitrariness of prayer. Sometimes God grants you your requests, and sometimes God does not, and sometimes there is a silent void that does not appear to acknowledge that you said anything, or that there is a you even making requests. It’s that last one that gets me.

Our heat has been on the fritz for... well, since we’ve owned the house. This winter, the furnace has added a twist by working only intermittently. The heating guy comes out at least once a week to tinker with it, but nothing sticks. Money saved on gas bills is literal cold comfort.

I just bundled up and stuck it out at home today. I don’t like it, but I can distract myself. However, M’s cell has been meeting at our house lately, and a 50 degree living room is poor hosting material.

I took Autumn for a walk before cell group started, and while I was out I didn’t choose to pray. But I thought about praying. I thought that if I were to pray, I would pray for the heat to come on at our house, so M’s cell could meet there, and she could enjoy a warm house.

When I got home, several people were in the living room, and M informed me that the heat had come on. It just started working again. Like it does sometimes.

There’s no moral here. Just another small point of reference in trying to figure out how to live with and worship a God who claims to be love, yet seems to act arbitrarily. I want to understand. I do not want to reject, or to shrug and accept. I want to understand.

Grognardia: Implicit Christianity in D&D

James Maliszewski writes Grognardia, a blog of ruminations on old school D&D in our new school times. The audience for this blog is focused like a laser, and those who find it interesting find it riveting.

I don't have that much love for original D&D. I never played it. I don't even like AD&D much. It's sprawling and occasionally contradictory, and the famed Gygaxian prose is nothing I've ever found quaintly endearing. There is something exhilarating about the spirit of the thing though, in the game's pulp origins and its seminal pastiche. Modern RPGs echo that spirit, but have meandered far from it.

This is what James attempts to articulate, in a smarter, more engaging, and kinder attempt than anyone else I've seen. Even if you disagree, it's clear that James is trying to communicate something, rather than rant.

Here's a fantastic recent entry on the implicit Christianity of early D&D, demonstrating yet again that anyone who thinks D&D interferes with Jesus is just not paying attention:

...I am now more firmly convinced than ever that early gaming, far from being "pagan," was in fact shot through with Christian belief, practice, and lore. It was always a kind of "fairytale Christianity" broadly consonant with American generic Protestantism rather than anything more muscular,...

As James alludes, early D&D -- really, any version of D&D -- has no interest in presenting Christ accurately. But the basic Christian-esque assumptions of early D&D are embarrassingly plain. How could anyone with a genuine interest in Jesus dwell on the lurid demon pictures and miss the Christian imagery? This is not a rhetorical question.

Note, that the Christ himself is not represented. He's too hi-res to appear accurately in the 9-bit morality of D&D. But he is there, as every other good and true idea the game addresses. And of course he's present among the players, where the real action is.

Advent 2008

Advent for us is more involved this year than last year, when the observance sputtered and died just out of the driveway.

This year, M and I are getting up a little earlier in the morning to read and contemplate scripture for the Advent season. No lightning bolts this year either, but I'm glad we're doing it.

This year, Circle is focusing more on Christ coming to the city (Philadelphia if you're local), rather than coming to Earth or humanity or you in particular.

The picture is from a Flickr set. Our friend, Ben, took pictures of lil' Mary and Joseph in various photogenic locales around the city. (Note that "photogenic" does not necessarily equal "pretty".)

In our small group this week, we talked about how celebrating Advent, especially for a bunch of American Protestants, isn't in our traditional bag of tricks. Some of us are wrestling with making it feel/seem meaningful.

Especially after last year's experience, the best comment I have about the whole thing so far -- God is not your monkey. He wants to give you good things, and he cares very much, but he doesn't flip when you clap. Sometimes you show up and you pray and ask and cry and flail, and God does not seem to do anything.

That doesn't mean he's not doing anything -- which can be frustrating and suspicious. Those feelings, they are also part of the waiting.

I suspect we'll be plenty happy when Jesus does come back. Even if you're not a Christ follower, when the living embodiment of mercy and just plain give-a-damn shows up and says, "Okay, that's a wrap, everybody!", that's going to be a good day. Until then, it's not time yet. I don't know why. I wish I did. Oh God, I wish I did. I want to know why more than I want to know when.

Instead, I get to wait with everybody else. There's no musical number at the end of Advent telling you it's winding up. We might blow right on through Christmas and New Year's and next Arbor Day, and still not get a sense of doneness. Advent is the time we make a point to remember that we're waiting, not a signal to stop waiting.

Drop Your Religion

There are only a few messages of wisdom in the world. I'm not careful enough to have categorized or listed them. Maybe I could try.

One of them is, "Stop looking so hard, and you'll find what you seek."

The bulk of our effort is trying to find inventive ways to tell these few, basic things to each other. Sometimes it's like we're in an arms race; people try to stem their openness to truth, while other people create new ways to slip truth by, around, through. Once a teller is successful, the listeners learn to defend against that avenue for next time, even as they offer genuine thanks for this time.

So this is pretty good, and you'd probably be better off having read it. It starts:

There is only one righteous way for you to be saved if you’ve spent too much time in the Church. You must lay your religion down. Lay it down hard. Drop it. Leave it on the trail and walk away from it. And you have to mean it. You can’t fake this. You have to renounce religion and leave it for good. As far as you know, you’ll never pick it up again.

Thanks, rlp.

The Book of Kell(er')s

Tim Keller has been turning up in my field of vision a lot lately.

My friend, Scott, sent me a link to an hour-long video of Tim Keller giving a talk at Google's home office about why God is more likely than not-God. He's also pushing his book, The Reason for God, and he makes a damn good case.

While his thinking is persuasive, what I found most appealing was his ability to be kind and gentle while displaying cirque-level mental agility.

The guy can think. He can think with you, and he can think with you while you're attacking him. During the Q&A portion of the talk, people came out of the audience attempting to tear down his ideas, and Keller listened to them and reasoned with them while they mocked his point.

Intelligent, educated people rarely display humility; the least wise of them actively eschew it. It's edifying to watch someone model humility while keeping pace with Google engineers. In an hour of impressive speaking, this is the part of Tim Keller that I find most fascinating.

The hour passes quickly. It was a good investment for me, maybe for you too.

Link to YouTube video.

Killing the Buddha

I found somebody doing the thinking about religion and journalism. His name is Jeff Sharlet. He co-founded a site called Killing the Buddha, which I have known about for years, and sort of drifts in and out of my awareness.

KtB publishes articles and essays about people grappling with religion, any religion. I've found it interesting, but I've never been able to really feel it for a couple of reasons. Often at KtB, they're speaking not just a different language but an idiolect: trying to communicate something so personal and pre-verbal that it just doesn't come across.

But also because I have always operated under the assumption that I'm missing something when it comes to religion. I'm frequently dissatisfied with my religion and the intersection of religions, and bewildered by faith (including why I have it at all). But I've concluded I believe in a God who is fundamentally bigger than me and acting my best interests.

It isn't that I don't question or doubt; it is that when I question or doubt, the first place I look is inside. What am I missing? If I'm operating under the premise that God is omnipotent and loving, then I must assume his shit is together. The wild card is my reason and perception.

Intellectually, I've been down the road where God doesn't match that premise, and that road leads to heat death. So I don't spend a lot of time there. As far as I can tell, either Jesus is as advertised, or existence is meaningless. I know! So absolute! But there it is.

So reading a bunch of essays about how confusing religions are, I mean, I feel you brother, but you know, order up some fear and trembling and get to work on that.

Anyway, KtB is worth looking at. And Jeff Sharlet's other site, The Revealer, is the whole reason I'm writing this post. From the About Us section:

The Revealer is a daily review of religion in the news and the news about religion. We're not so much nonpartisan as polypartisan -- interested in all sides, disdainful of dualistic arguments, and enamored of free speech as a first principle.... We begin with three basic premises: 1. Belief matters, whether or not you believe. Politics, pop culture, high art, NASCAR -- everything in this world is infused with concerns about the next. As journalists, as scholars, and as ordinary folks, we cannot afford to ignore the role of religious belief in shaping our lives. 2. The press all too frequently fails to acknowledge religion, categorizing it as either innocuous spirituality or dangerous fanaticism, when more often it's both and inbetween and just plain other. 3. We deserve and need better coverage of religion. Sharper thinking. Deeper history. Thicker description. Basic theology. Real storytelling.

This is a big step in the direction I'm looking. Not afraid of religion in news media, but not prostrate before sectarian interests.