Dear Ms. Kidman

[Apparently, eligible men are not beating down Nicole Kidman's door. She seems to think that maybe her two children (9 and 11 years old) are part of the problem.]

Well, Ms. Kidman, I may be poor, unfamous (or perhaps infamous, depending on who you ask), and about a decade younger than you are, but I have always thought you were pretty darned wonderful. What’s cooler than a lady with brains and looks (not to mention a stellar career)? I don’t know exactly how celebrity life works. Is it like fairy tales where you have to be a prince to marry a princess? Or can unknowns like me find love with famous folk like yourself? Do I have to be, in the words of Derek Zoolander, “really, really ridiculously good-looking”? Because–sorry to let you down–I’m actually just really, really ridiculously average-looking. However, I do have a brain between my ears, and I’m a pretty interesting guy. And I find really intelligent women just about irresistible.

So… I may not be beating down your door Ms. Kidman, but that’s only because I don’t know where your door is, and I’m not the stalking type. Drop a line sometime.

Being Human vs. Being Christian

Glenn of Fully Devoted has commented on my post The Final Authority. Here’s what he says:

For me the question is this — where is the offensiveness in your relationships with those who do not accept Christianity coming from? Is it the “offense of the gospel” IE: people just refuse to accept that Jesus is in fact the only way to God — or is it your approach? What I believe may offend you — how I live out my faith and try to share it doesn’t need to.

Well, the point of that post was this: If you are a Christian, what you believe and how you live are inseparable. Your scriptures and historical creeds beseech you to put the concerns of your gospel foremost in your lives, and part of that means putting the concerns of your gospel foremost in my life, too.

You may not personally be a jerk (in fact, a lot of the Christians I know are very nice people), but your faith requires you (1) to view me through a particular filter (i.e., as an outsider–a catch-all term I’ll use to encompass terms so various as “heretic,” “sinner,” and “unsaved,” among others), and (2) to do everything you can to neutralize my outsider status, mainly by working, with whatever methods, to fit me with a similar filter (i.e., “convert” me, “win” my soul, or whatever your preferred terminology is). That’s just your Great Commission. You are allegedly an emissary of God, as well as a missionary of your gospel (which means, as I once explained to some fourth graders, that your job is to make more Christians).

There are lots of techniques for doing this. One of the popular ones these days is being a “living witness,” or something along those lines. (Correct me if my terminology is wrong or out of date.) This does not involve active proselytization, but means you’re just supposed to live in such a way that I will look at your life and say, in effect, “I wants to get me some o’ dat!” (As an Important Person reminded me recently, this is an old technique. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary.”) A lot of Christians seem to think this passive, living witness kind of thing will win them personality points with we outsiders. Well, so long as being a living witness just means that you’re friendly, responsible, reliable, and a good citizen, that’s all well and good. But that’s problematic, because as far as I’m concerned, if you’re just behaving well, you’re no testament to your faith or your God. You’re just a great person. Unfortunately, Francis seems to have forgotten, or never realized in the first place, that the Christian faith is a thing that is utterly dependent on words and ideas. You cannot express your faith without words or ideas. These things are absolutely necessary. No matter how much you think that living according to the precepts of your gospel is going to portray to me the content of those precepts (which is essentially logos, or words and ideas), it just isn’t gonna happen. But you and I will get along splendidly.

So, sooner or later, the explicit content of your religion has to be presented to me, the outsider. If not, you are not doing as your God has commanded. This is bound to irk me, because despite the fact that you and I have been getting along splendidly as just plain human beings, this revelation of your gospel will also be a revelation to me that perhaps you really don’t care so much for me as a human being as you care for me as a potential carrier of your religion (i.e., another insider). For those of us on the outside, this is one of the creepiest things about Christianity. Here are these people who are by all appearances completely normal. They eat, sleep, and shop just like we do. But there will always be that moment when apparently it isn’t good enough for us to simply be another person to them; we must also have the same metaphysical outlook. To be quite honest, having a Christian suddenly reveal this odd barrier can be quite disconcerting. It’s like they’re putting up a glass wall between us and telling us that the only way we can really connect is if we will agree to recite this weird string of words (either a “sinner’s prayer” or a “creed”). Worse, when someone you love does this, the emotional pain can be almost unbearable.

The weird thing about Christianity is that it mainly exists as words, ideas, text, and philosophical abstractions. I don’t mean things like churches, Christian stores, or Christian literature, and all those tangible trappings. I mean the essence of the faith. Christianity is words. This makes sense, of course, considering that you believe in a God who created the universe with words, and your fourth gospel equates your savior with logos, or words and ideas. But here in the everyday world, it’s weird. Because people can recite words without actually meaning them. Lots of people do, in fact, especially in the more liturgical branches of the church. Some people just say the words because they always have, or to appease a spouse or loved one, or because they reap some benefit from the poetic cadences. What I’m getting at is that Christianity is essentially a shared linguistic interface. I could break down that imaginary glass wall just by talking like a Christian. All I have to do is address my existential concerns to this being called “God,” and express the events in my life in terms of the Christian metanarrative. Nobody would be the wiser. Except me.

This is where the “offense” part comes in. Why should I have to perform these vocal and linguistic patterns, adjust my language to have a theological slant, and participate in rituals, ceremonies, and traditions designed to reinforce and perpetuate these patterns? Further more, why should you as a Christian see me as an outsider, or even less as a person (as I know some Christians do, even ones who are related to me), simply because I refuse to be complicit in your linguistic and philosophical system?

You may argue that the linguistic and philosophical system I describe is just a man-made superstructure over the deeper, more natural state of humans as creatures fundamentally connected to God, as many Christians have. But if that’s the case, then why isn’t my existence as a human who refuses to have a theological, linguistic, philosophical, metaphysical structure recognized as the more natural way to live? Why am I chastised, ostracized, or otherwise alienated because I don’t want to participate in what I see as a silly, made-up falsehood? Ultimately, if reality is the same for everyone, I am living under the same divinity that you call “God,” except I choose not to address that divinity as anything other than the entities by which it manifests itself to me in the natural, tangible experience of my day-to-day life. Perhaps the only difference between you and I is that you project a human-like personality on whatever is “out there,” while I do not. An atheist denies theism, which is theology, which is a human attempt to put a human face on what is fundamentally not human. What is offensive to me about Christianity (and about any other religion that bothers to look down on me for being an atheist) is that most Christians refuse to recognize that my perception of my own existence is not that I am fundamentally disconnected from ultimate reality because I have no theology, but that I am more closely connected to ultimate reality by having removed theology from my life. This is how I see things, and how I most comfortably exist.

In my opinion, religious and theological belief systems are nothing more than self-perpetuating idea systems (or “memeplexes,” as Richard Dawkins calls them) that prey on the tendency of the human mind to find patterns in its environment. People want to see simplified order. They want to see something that makes sense. “God” is an anthropomorphized simplification of a reality so complex that it is beyond our ability to comprehend. Would I like the universe to be as simple as a personality to which I might appeal regarding my existential concerns? Certainly! But I don’t believe the universe is quite that simple. Hence, I am an atheist.

Unfortunately, however, Christianity, as a category, is not built on shared humanity, but on shared theology. So even though we all have to live within the same universe, and relate and respond to the same existential circumstances, Christianity asserts that only those people who have the proper ideas about that universe are in the correct relationship with it, while the rest of us are not. That is what offends me. No other animals are expected to uphold a particular theology–simply living is enough for them. But people, according to Christianity, are expected not only to live, but to assent to certain mental propositions that are, on the whole, unnecessary to existence. (I know this because I do not make such assent, and yet I continue to exist quite normally.)

This is the paradox in Francis of Assisi, and in Christians who assume they are being Christians as “living witnesses,” without actually pushing the logical content of their religion. Yes, simply living rightly is the best you can do. However, that does not make you a Christian, because it does not clearly delineate your theological category. It only makes you a human being. And that, after all, is not so bad. It just isn’t Christianity.

Music, to Soothe the Wild Beasts

Several years ago, I stepped off a platform with a degree in music. Worthless piece of paper, really, because I have no desire to be a professional musician, to teach music, or to do anything besides play the piano for myself in the wee hours of the morning. By all accounts, I am a very talented musician, and even a pretty good teacher. But I’m just not interested in that line of work. Must be crazy.

However, I am a big proponent of music education, especially for elementary students. I think singing, reading music, and playing at least one musical instrument (even if it’s just the recorder) ought to be requirements for all kids. Not only do these skills enhance basic thinking skills, especially in math and logical reasoning, but they offer emotional and psychological benefits, too. Singing in choirs and playing in ensembles also give students an opportunity to experience team participation without the violence, high-strung emotions, and sheer competitiveness of sports. (And, as they get older, music students can even participate in things like marching bands which, despite their bad reputation as nerd farms, are actually pretty darned physical, and good exercise, to boot.) Anybody who has been part of a music program, done the work, participated, and been through tense rehearsals with stressed out friends and directors can tell you that music will create social bonds that last a lifetime. To this day I have many fond memories of scores of people with whom I have rehearsed and performed. Occasionally I meet them, and the old bond is still there. Music is great that way.

But living in a society of idiots, as we do, music often seems to hit the chopping block much too prematurely. Nobody ever thinks about cutting expensive sports programs and funneling those kids into choirs or dance groups (you may laugh, but even the most macho and hard-nosed have been known to really enjoy these “sissy” activities). Nobody ever seems to notice how parents at sporting events are easily riled, while parents at musical events, on the whole, are far more peaceful and civilized. Sure, those are generalizations, but I think it’s more valid to come to those particular conclusions than it would be to say that music parents are more boisterous than sports parents. Just think about it, please.

So it is in Fresno, the lame city down the road from my own humble domicile. (“Don’t trash Fresno. Fresno es tu casa.” No lie. They have signs everywhere that say that. When you have to remind people not to trash their own city, things are getting pretty bad. I won’t even comment on the bilingual thing. Compare with the state of Pennsylvania, which I recently visited, where the corresponding adverts said something like “Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful.” World of difference.) Recently, the Fresno Unified School District decided that their elementary music program is just too expensive. Hence, it has been eliminated for the 2004-5 school year. Naturally, there has been much public outrage, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and a consistent trickle of letters to the editor in the Fresno Bee.

In fact, there’s one today. (How’s that for a pretty long lead-in to the thing that actually inspired a blog post?)

Here is the letter by Sandra Bolster, an elementary music teacher in Fresno:

The chief financial officer of the Fresno Unified School District, Paul Disario, says that filling vacant administrative positions is essential, while at the same time recommending the layoff of countless teachers and the elimination of the elementary music program.

This sort of thinking exemplifies what is wrong with the current budget fiasco that demonstrates that Fresno Unified administrators are deemed essential when teachers are expendable. Mr. Disario and Superintendent Santiago Wood need to come to my schools and explain this to my students, who are confused about why they cannot come to my music classes next year, because they just don’t understand why I won’t be there to teach them.

Well, Ms. Bolster is absolutely right about one thing: maintaining a whole bunch of administrators at the expense of teachers in the trenches is educationally irresponsible. It may make business sense, and it may make administrative sense, considering all the paperwork educators have to do these days. (Find some teachers and ask them how much time they actually get to teach, and to explore their own curiosity in order to improve themselves as teachers.) But it does not make educational sense to fire teachers in order to keep some expensive desk jockeys down at the central office.

However, there is something in Ms. Bolster’s letter that really, really irks me. Here it is:

[These administrators] need to come to my schools and explain this to my students, who are confused about why they cannot come to my music classes next year, because they just don’t understand why I won’t be there to teach them. [emphasis added]

Did you see that? Did you catch it? That’s what I call a Pathetic Emotional Appealâ„¢. What she’s basically saying, if you take her words at face value, is that if little children can’t understand the machinations of the district, then the district shouldn’t do that. This, of course, is not what she means (I hope), because that kind of thinking is ridiculous.

Unfortunately, this kind of ridiculous thinking is rampant amongst educators. Everything is always “for the children.” But let me clarify something for you, and for the educators: Sometimes children are wonderful, and sometimes they are beastly little monsters. Either way, most of them are going to grow up and be put in charge of our society. We have a responsibility as adults to care for them, to protect them, to raise them up to be good citizens, and to educate them with the knowledge they will need to succeed. I love children. I think they are some of the most amazing things on the planet. I love to watch children learn, and see those imaginary light bulbs blink on over their heads when they have an epiphany. I remember some of those epiphanies from my own childhood. Children are great.

But we need to be honest with ourselves. Childhood cannot and should not be romanticized. Many (if not most) children have difficult lives. Unfortunately, we adults like to assume that children’s problems are not very important. In some sense, this is true. Kids’ problems are usually things that we adults have solved and long since stopped worrying about. But we forget what it was like to be six years old and terrified that mommy might die at any moment! Regardless of how silly that kind of thought sounds to your adult mind, it can have substantial gravity in the mind of a six-year-old. Most adults, though, would rather just ignore the inner lives of children, and then pander to whatever activities will make the little ones seem happy and content, so that we can go on with our own lives. That kind of thinking, I believe, is at the root of a lot of these “for the children” kinds of appeals. We need to keep music education “for the children” because they like it, and because we don’t feel like explaining politics and economics to them. That would just be too hard for our busy, adult brains.

No, education is not “for the children.” Education is for all of us. Education is for the health of our society, our very civilization! Education is not about “empowering” children, or about giving them “skills.” Education is about taking little Homo sapiens, which are genetically equivalent to creatures who lived tens of thousands of years ago, and figuring out how to integrate them into a complicated, modern, technological society where almost nothing comes naturally. If children don’t understand something, it is our fault, as a society, as a civilization. We cannot motivate ourselves by what we perceive as the emotional needs of children. If cutting music education is a bad thing (and it most certainly is), then we have a responsibility to articulate why that is without falling back on Pathetic Emotional Appealsâ„¢. And I have a feeling that a lot of music teachers are more concerned about their own employment than they are about the children, which is perfectly natural and acceptable, in my opinion. They should just admit it openly, though. (For instance, why can’t Ms. Bolster go down to her schools and explain this issue to the students herself? Why is she trying to pass that responsibility to the administrators? Oh, I see, because she’s no longer employed to deal with the students. See how much she cares?)

But then we need to sit down with children and explain to them this strange adult world where we can’t always get what we want. Where sometimes children don’t get to have music teachers, and sometimes music teachers don’t get to have the jobs they want, and sometimes money takes precedence over desires and emotions. Everything can (and should) be a learning experience for children, even when we cut their music programs.

Finally, we need to admit that while it may be nice for everyone to moan and complain that the children are getting the raw end of the deal, the real reason their music program has been cut is because we adults, all of us, collectively, as a society, a civilization even, are too lazy and too concerned with our own petty lives to provide them with an education that will leave them as enriched as we ourselves are when they march across that platform someday to shake the hand of some smarmy administrator and receive that long-sought high school diploma, all to the pathetic strains of an electronically reproduced recording of some long-lost musicians playing Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”–because the district wouldn’t fork over the money to teach the kids to play it themselves.

By the Numbers

(Author’s Note: Considering the amount of Serious Pontificating that goes on here, I thought I’d lighten the load today with some frivolity. Enjoy.)

I have just escaped from my local Borders. Luckily, I’m only $1.78 poorer than I was this morning. Yes, that’s what it costs for 12 ounces (or, if you take your free refill–I didn’t–24 ounces) of dark, delicious Italian roast coffee. Lovely. Could have brewed it cheaper myself at home of course, but it’s always more fun to have your coffee handed to you by a pretty girl. Even when you’re so poor that $1.78 sounds like a lot of money. (Hooray for hormones, those thieving little beggars.)

Most of my time there was spent reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which I covered a scant seventy pages over the course of two hours. I say “scant” because the book is 478 pages long, which means I only read about 14.6% of it at the dismal rate of 7.3%, or 35 pages, per hour. Since I am exactly halfway finished, that means I’ll need to find about seven more hours to finish this one up, or quit reading it so slowly. (Trust me, if you had several stacks of extremely interesting but nevertheless unread books lying around your house, you would be just as coldly calculating as I am.)

The problem (or perhaps joy) with Bryson’s book is that it’s chock full of interesting tidbits. For instance, here’s one that struck me this morning. It comes from page 182 (hardback edition–paperback comes out in August, I think):

Thanks to Global Positioning Systems we can see that Europe and North America are parting at about the speed a fingernail grows–roughly two yards in a human lifetime.

Strangely enough, the thing in that sentence that made me stop reading and ponder its significance (while using the opportunity of looking up from my book to take a gander at the various females arrayed around the cafe) was not the fact that we humans have devised a technology that can measure the movement of continents down to the speed at which fingernails grow. That’s all well and good, but sitting there in Borders I found myself staring at my thumbnail and thinking, “Two yards? Just two yards? That’s all I get?”

Two yards are equal to 72 inches. My thumbnail is 5/8 of an inch long and, according to my observations last year as I watched an injury grow out, it takes about six months to fully re-grow itself. If the two-yard estimate is accurate, then I only get about 115 cycles for that thumbnail. If each one of those cycles takes six months, I’m looking at about 57 and a half years on this earth!

This, of course, is the problem with applying averages and estimates to individuals. Who knows, though? Maybe I will actually die halfway through my 57th year. Maybe I have finally stumbled onto the one infallible way to predict the length of one’s life–measure the growth rate of your fingernails. Remember, there’s no getting past two yards!

But getting back to Bryson’s book, this is just the sort of thing a person like myself is wont to do: Stop at every odd fact and process it for a while (which is also a good opportunity, like I said, to take my eyes off the book and apply them to the charms of a female). Then, in further wastage of time, I find myself blogging on these insignificant details. Here is where the Life of the Mind is not so cool. With only 24 hours in a day, six to eight of them spent sleeping, and another six to eight spent working, that only leaves eight to twelve hours every day to read, write, and think. This, of course, does not count things like driving (during which one may think, but not read or write), eating (during which one may read or think, but not write), or watching The Simpsons (during which one may laugh). Life is hard, isn’t it?

Which reminds me of that cup of coffee. Here I am complaining about handing over $1.78 (which, where I live, would take at last 15.8 minutes of work at a minimum wage job to finance–and that’s not counting taxes or other paycheck withholdings, so you’re looking at probably 20 minutes doing whatever you get paid to do at your lame minimum wage job, just so you can sit down with a bunch of other overworked, overweight, and highly-indebted SUV-driving Americans to drink a beverage whose raw ingredient was picked by a bunch of scandalously poor brown-skinned people in some country you couldn’t even find on a map–fortunately, I get paid more than minimum wage), and moaning over having only 24 hours in a day (and perhaps only 57.6 years in my life, which comes to 504,888 hours, including a few leap days, depending on how fast my fingernails are growing) even though nobody gets any more or less than that (unless they’re traveling near the speed of light, which is impossible anyway), and pouring all these thoughts into an expensive piece of luxuriously brilliant Apple hardware that was purchased on credit (and still languishing on the credit card, I might add), so that they can be published on a vast, worldwide computer network so people as far away as perhaps Korea (I’m in California) can read them.

On second thought, life isn’t hard. It’s just ridiculous.

Like the Horse and Carriage?

Marriage has been in the news lately, mostly concerning the movement for legalizing homosexual marriage. This morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, I heard Scott Simon discuss the issue with American University law professor Nancy Polikoff.

After establishing the issues in good journalistic fashion, Scott Simon kicked off the meat of the discussion with this statement:

“Some people believe the marital relationship is the building block of society.”

That’s really the core of this issue, for both sides of the debate. People have evolved in an odd way. We tend to mate for life, though some of us have more of a proclivity for this kind of behavior than others. (The difference might be genetic.) So these monogamous relationships are very important to us, and constitute a major portion of our individual experiences in the social sphere. Building blocks of society? Perhaps.

However, about marriage, Polikoff says, “I would eliminate the word,” and replace it with something like “economically intertwined relationship.” Sounds like fun. (This is one of the problems of trying to be progressive in a world where all our common language and rhetoric was established by a previous age, whose views and ideals don’t exactly coincide with our own. When we want to change or adjust something, we’re stuck with these cumbersome phrases.) What she’s getting at, I think, is the fact that those relationships I called “monogamous” in the previous paragraph are not necessarily marital relationships in the traditional sense. People might derive love and companionship and comfort from all manner of relationships, and Polikoff gives examples: sibling/sibling, parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, friend/friend, and so on. All of these pairings can be found in our society, where people live together and are dependent on one another, both psychologically and economically, without being marital or sexual.

In other words, Polikoff is arguing that marriage itself is the problem, and not whether it’s between one man and one woman, or one man and one man, or one woman and one woman. Polikoff is hoping to shift our views so that we can recognize the human practice of pair-bonding from outside the narrow realm of simply sexual or procreative relationships, and see that people do in fact engage in “economically intertwined relationships” by many different means. Those people, she contends, should all be subject to the same benefits and recognition from the government (which is to say, we the people), so far as taxes and social security and insurance and all those goodies are concerned.

It’s not that there’s no place for old fashioned heterosexual marriage. There is. (I hope to find myself in it someday, regardless of how bleak and lame are my prospects just this moment.) Rather, says Polikoff,

“My quarrel is not with commitment and it’s not with religion, it’s with the state saying that one type of relationship gets all the benefits and obligations that society wishes to confer on it and no other type of relationship is able to do that. The statement to unmarried people that they live inferior lives, that the kind of families they have, that what matters to them in their life is not as valuable as those people who are married is a bad social statement.”

Absolutely. Single people, how many of you have ever felt–even just a little bit–that your community values you less than married people? Okay, you can put down your hands and get down off your chairs. Stay single too long in our society and people look at you funny. First they berate you for not finding that special someone. Then they get quiet for a while. And then, when you get close to thirty, they start hinting that maybe you’ve got some psychological problems. “Maybe you’re just not cut out for marriage,” they say, perhaps not realizing how condescending that sounds. Not cut out? Trust me, I know what it’s like to be single, and I know what it’s like to love and yearn and long for a companion. But just because it’s something I really want does not mean it’s something I am incomplete without.

The homosexual marriage issue has annoyed me right from the start. First I thought, Why should the heterosexuals care what the homosexuals do? Then I thought, Why should the homosexuals want to get themselves married? They’ll just get divorced like all the heterosexuals, and leave broken families in their wake. But this morning, listening to NPR, it hit me what’s really been annoying me: Why should marriage be some kind of special status anyway? Why should married people get benefits? Why should the marriage relationship be treated so special, socially and economically? Certainly, a marriage is a precious thing, but it ought to be precious at the level of the people involved. Marriage, The Abstract Ideaâ„¢ is not what makes a relationship valuable–it’s the people involved. Those people are valuable and special before they get married, and that’s what brings value to their marriage. Marriage itself does not confer value on the people who get married.

So I say let marriage fall by the wayside, politically. You want to get married? Get married. Do it on your own terms, get it blessed by your religious leaders, or by your family, or by Mickey Mouse. I don’t care. But the government shouldn’t be in the marriage business. The government should be in the people business. Which people? We the people.

No Choice?

Jin at What If I Stumble has posted Ragamuffin Gospel in response to my treatise, The Final Authority. Here is his summary of the latter:

theomorph seems to be saying that, “If you don’t want to be a jerk about your beliefs, you have to give up the belief that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and that nobody can come to the Father except through him.”

Well then. It seems that, by theomorph’s definition of “jerk,” orthodox Christians have no choice but to be “jerks about [their] beliefs.”

Well, sorta. Christians have plenty of choice about whether they’re going to be jerks. The point was that if they’re not being “jerks” about their faith (i.e., pushing it on the world like we’re all on a sinking ship and they have the only lifeboat), then they ought to be honest with themselves and admit one of two things: either (1) they are not being true to their religion, or (2) they are significantly altering the nature of their faith as has been received in their scriptures and historical creeds.

Would that keep them from being “orthodox Christians” (small o)? Depends on who you ask. I have known lots of Christians who have no problem with the kind of faith I described in The Final Authority: one “that is decidedly immanent, human-centered, and outward-reaching, rather than transcendent and god-centered.” To them, this is “orthodox,” and they will defend that perspective quite vigorously. But ask your average evangelical and they’ll probably say that kind of Christianity is “liberal,” “watered down,” or even “false.”

There are many different kinds of Christians. Some of them are extraordinarily intolerant, and others of them are almost indistinguishable from the most liberal atheists. There was even a “death of god” movement amongst Christian theologians in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement first hit the popular consciousness in 1963 with the release of Bishop John Robinson’s book Honest to God, in which he spoke of moving beyond theism while remaining Christian. How exactly that works, I’m still not sure. When I moved beyond theism, I wasn’t really interested in remaining Christian, as the rituals and scriptures of Christianity were designed to uphold a theistic view of the world.

Meanwhile, since the late 1970s there has been an upsurge in conservative Christianity, especially here in the United States. At the same time in the southern hemisphere, an extremely conservative and pentecostal form of Christianity has been on the rise, and many in the church predict that before this century is out, the power structure of Christianity will have shifted away from the West and into Africa.

My point in mentioning all of these is that the kind of evangelical Christianity espoused by middle class Americans is not the only version of Christianity, and Christians have lots of choices for how they want to believe and behave, and theology seems to be almost infinitely mutable to suit their desires. What does it mean to be an “orthodox Christian”? From the global perspective, almost nothing. The only thing that links many Christians is simply the fact that they call themselves “Christian.”

As for me, however, when I discovered the almost ludicrous breadth of Christianity, I decided it would be much simpler to just be honest and be myself. How do I align myself now? I am a human being, member of the species Homo sapiens, resident of planet Earth. Hi there, how are ya?

The Final Authority

In his comment on my post Only One World, Jin said, “I’d like to think that I, myself, gave up The Final Authority posturing a while ago.”

Well, Jin, I commend your sentiments. Giving up the hyper-authoritative posture is an admirable goal. However, I’m not sure it’s possible to do that and remain Christian according to most of your religion’s traditional history.

Lots of people disagree with me on this (and vehemently so), but I don’t see how one can subscribe to the Christian worldview without feeling some kind of security in the authority of that position. Furthermore, so long as you feel security in the authority and veracity of your belief system, I don’t know how you’re going to give up that “Final Authority” posture without giving up the core tenets of that system.

The Christian religion is structured around a simple proposition: God created the universe and rules everything in it. Everything else comes from or is connected to that core belief. You can quibble about predestination or freewill, argue over the nature of salvation, and debate the trinity, but if you are a Christian, there is no questioning the centrality and sovereignty of your God.

Once you have that sovereign God idea, the next thing you have to do is establish the relationship between humans and God. This is where you’re going to hit a major snag if you don’t want to sound like some hyper-authoritative jerk. If you truly believe, along with the Westminster Shorter Catechism that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” then you consequently must believe that those people who, like me, do not glorify God and enjoy him must be in some kind of faulty relationship with God. The catechism says nothing about “The Christian’s chief end,” but is quite clear about Man’s chief end. (Apologies for the sexist language–I’m just working with the source material as-is.)

Or, if instead of the WSC you prefer the Nicene creed, then you “believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen,” and that he, as incarnated in Jesus, “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Again, your beliefs necessarily encompass not just yourself, but everyone else, too. That is, you are basically required to believe that people like me still fall under the judgment of God, even if we don’t believe in him. That’s pretty authoritative.

On top of all that, as a Christian, you are required to let me know about all of this:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Matthew 28:19-20)

Not that I’m trying to push you into being a jerk about your faith. I just mean to point out that Christianity is by nature authoritative, and its adherents are required to be emissaries of that authority. So there’s a problem with being a tolerant Christian, because tolerance of other beliefs is not built in to Christianity. Once you become tolerant, you are really dethroning the authority of your religion, and you are either no longer a Christian as Christianity has long been intended, or you have drastically altered the shape of your religion. Of course, theology has always been historically conditioned, responding to the challenges of each different age, so I won’t fault you if you choose the route of theological innovator. There’s a long and glorious tradition there. (Recall, however, that theological innovation is the reason why we have Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant branches of the church.)

However, if you decide to become a tolerant Christian, then you can no longer really buy into all the old dogmas about God being sovereign over the entire universe. You must accept Buddhists and Hindus and Atheists, too. Then you are left with a faith that is decidedly immanent, human-centered, and outward-reaching, rather than transcendent and god-centered. Religious tolerance requires that you see all human beings on an equal footing in the same universe, each of us answering the same questions in different ways. Surely you know these famous three questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Every person grapples with these questions to some degree, even atheists. If you are going to be tolerant, then the people and their questions are central to your religion, and “God” must be whatever they find in the answers. This is sometimes called the “all roads lead to god” theory.

Ultimately, however, we must be honest and admit to ourselves that the purpose of tolerance is that we, as human beings, the silly monkeys who have to live together, prefer peaceable relations to conflicting ones. Most of us would rather live in harmony with our neighbors than in strife. I know I certainly would.

The interesting thing about religious tolerance is that it tends to show up in places where religious diversity is greatest. For instance, in the colonial United States. Early on, different religious groups clustered together in mostly homogenous communities. There were Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Anglicans, Mennonites, Huguenots, Moravians, and others. At first, they mostly kept to themselves. But as commerce spread between them, and people migrated, and communities became more diverse, tensions arose, especially when states had “established” religions. For instance, in Massachusetts, the Congregational church was the “established” church, meaning it received financial support from the public coffers. Naturally, other groups weren’t too fond of this idea, especially the Baptists (who were often instrumental in establishing early forms of the religious freedoms we enjoy today in the United States). Eventually, people decided that they would prefer to get along with one another and live in harmony, while still disagreeing about religious matters, rather than maintain established state religions. Hence, our Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to establish a religion.

Establishing religious freedom and tolerance is a very pragmatic move. It demonstrates that people, even when they are deeply concerned with their religious beliefs, are still willing to work together and compromise when it comes to day-to-day life. To me, that’s a powerful statement about the potential of the human race.

Is it possible to believe that your religion is The Be All and End All of metaphysical systems, while still accepting that other people have different beliefs you will not forcibly infringe? I don’t think so. I think that religious tolerance requires the breaking down of the universally authoritative aspect of belief. Hence, if you want to be tolerant, and you don’t want to be a jerk about your beliefs, and you don’t want to have that annoying Final Authority posture, you really do have to give up something central to your religion.

Terminal Existentialism

On NPR’s Wait Wait–Don’t Tell Me! there is an occasional gag that, so far as I can tell, began when Roger Ebert was a guest, here awhile back. During his appearance (can one really have an “appearance” on radio?), Ebert complained about how many movie trailer narrations begin with the words “In a world…” Of course, after hearing that, I couldn’t help but notice all those trailers. Meanwhile, it seems that Peter Sagal can’t help but sneak those three magical words into Wait Wait whenever he can.

Hence, with so many movies allegedly happening in some kind of a world, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Spielberg’s latest, The Terminal, is decidedly not “in a world.” Rather, it is stridently out of a world. Sure, there’s a “setting” and a fabulous airport set, but none of that really matters, because The Terminal isn’t about the terminal–it’s about the silly monkeys who inhabit the terminal, the ones we call “human.”

See, throughout The Terminal the world keeps trying to poke into the narrative, but it never manages to succeed. Instead, we get a fantastical scenario that isn’t quite real (even though it’s based on a true story) because it refuses to let the world drag it down. Here are people effectively stripped of history and context (even while history and context are ever present in their lives–at least through television news and jokes about the Department of Homeland Security), but retaining their barriers, their differences, and their opposing goals. Laws fail, language fails, love fails, but somehow the silly monkeys keep on keepin’ on. Ultimately, they aren’t really going anywhere, and nothing really changes, and the whole thing winds up a lot like that other big Tom Hanks picture, Castaway: Man is stranded, Man waits, Man is released, and somewhere in the stranding, waiting, and releasing, Man improves himself toward an uncertain and perhaps frivolous end. These are existentialist movies, meditations on the meaning of humanity as a thing that, despite all reason, seems to float above the terrestrial plane, entirely lacking in any real purpose outside of that we give it ourselves.

The Terminal offers only the most tenuous backstory for Viktor Navorski. He is a foreigner. He speaks very little English. He loves his homeland. He isn’t married. He seems to have a talent for manual labor and construction. He falls in love with a beautiful woman. He has an odd motivation that carries him through the story, but it’s ultimately just a MacGuffin. (Do follow that link to see what a MacGuffin is, if you don’t already know.)

I’m a big fan of MacGuffin-driven films. The MacGuffin is a fictional narrative technique that, simply and systematically, brings a level of verisimilitude that can’t otherwise be achieved by artificial inventiveness. That’s because life itself is a MacGuffin, a drive for survival that makes our existence possible and brings it fatal tension at the same time. Why are we here? To survive. But that isn’t the real meaning of our lives. Meaning is what we create in the finite burst that comes between birth and death, just as Viktor Navorski builds meaning for himself in The Terminal. What else can one do while waiting? What else is there besides waiting? Paradoxically, we create meaning for ourselves precisely because our lives have no meaning, because all we’re really doing is just waiting. The meaning is the MacGuffin. It is everything and nothing all at once. Wrap your brain around that. Trust me, it really isn’t depressing.

The “human experience” is weird. Here we are, these sentient monkeys, basically just riding along on a jumble of DNA, a collection of genes that really only care about replicating themselves. But somehow, in the process, we wound up in this byproduct bubble of consciousness that really doesn’t mean anything. No one intended this, but here we are, stuck in the course of human events, just like Viktor Navorski is stuck in the terminal at JFK International Airport. Every day, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder over hill after hill, he fills out forms and hopes that just maybe he’ll get a favorable result. No luck. But while Viktor is stuck in the terminal, he does other things, too. He creates something beautiful, he falls in love, he saves a man’s life, he helps his friends, and he ends up beloved by almost all. Admirable achievements for someone stuck in a meaningless feedback loop.

Viktor’s situation is not so different from our own. He is pulled out of the world, out of a story, out of a context, out of reality, out of everything–and still he goes on! This is where the true nature of humanity shows itself, when we are divorced from narrative, when we are left to our own designs, when all the forward thrust of our lives is taken away. Human life is not a story. There is no “metanarrative” to guide us. The world is not a stage, and we are not players, and there is no playwright. We are just intelligent, sentient, hairless monkeys, trapped not “In a world” but out of it, the only creatures on the planet to watch television and read books and paint paintings, the only ones who dream up “metanarratives” and religions for ourselves. Face it–we are the weirdos of Earth. We are free agents, culture machines, conducting ridiculously silly transactions of art and beauty and love and aesthetics. The universe is our cave, and we have endless amounts of paint to splash around. We might as well have a good time while we’re at it.

Only One World

Howdy, Christians. I know you’re out there, reading this blog. Some of you are even commenting on it. So far I have been called “thought-provoking” and even “pleasant.” Thank you, really. I do try. The thought-provoking part comes pretty easily, as I have always had a rather twisted view of the world, but the pleasant part is harder, of course, but just as important. Plenty of people on both sides of the fence, believers or not, spend way too much time posturing themselves as The Final Authority on whatever matter. The result looks something like gang warfare, with people puffing their chests at each other like animals, then hurling, instead of rocks or bullets, “logical” formulations regarding this or that highly emotionally charged issue.

Certainly, I think religious belief is misdirected and a tragic misuse of resources. Yes, I think a whole lot of religious people are just plain jerks. Absolutely, I am an atheist with no interest in reclaiming the Christian heritage into which I was born and by which I was raised. But even as I shake my head at religion, I cannot ignore all the people who perpetuate it. Here is where things get tricky, my Christian friends, so try to hang with what I’m saying. Maybe I think your beliefs are totally looney, but I cannot and will not deny your right to have them, because I know that inside those praying, worshipping, Bible-toting bodies, you’re basically just like me. We live in the same world, with the same basic needs (as the California 4th grade science curriculum puts it, the five basic needs of animals are oxygen, water, food, shelter, and an environment).

Having atheists and theists in the same world–as neighbors and coworkers and friends and fellow community members–can be tricky. Sometimes it seems like we’re in different worlds. But we’re all responding to the same stimuli. We all need each other, we all have to worry about our inner lives and about our behavior around others, and we all have to learn how to exist in a world where we would like nothing more than to relax and take it easy, but where circumstances just won’t allow it. We all have emotions and stress, we all fall in love and get angry. Most of us enjoy ice cream now and then, and time with (well-behaved) children. But some of us believe that the whole scheme of life locks into a theological over-story (or “metanarrative,” if you prefer), while others of us have no such belief, and take the world and our lives in it as accidents of the most glorious kind.

Then there’s the afterlife. Some people think I am going to hell. I know that for a fact. It’s a curious thing to me, since, as a non-believer, I am not afraid of hell or any other afterlife, so the stress is all on their side. They can worry all they want about my eternal soul, but I don’t even believe I have one, so I don’t see what good it does them. I guess they could try to convince me that I have a soul, but that’s going to be pretty tough, as no one has yet devised a way to detect souls and thereby prove their existence.

Some people have claimed that people like me don’t even exist. That’s a fun one, when some smart-guy Joe Christian comes up to me and tries to prove that I don’t really think what I say I think, and must be some kind of liar. “You’re not an atheist, because by throwing out god as your ultimate authority, you replace him yourself and become your own god, so you don’t really not believe in god, because you believe yourself to be like god.” Well, there is some level of truth in that, from a purely immanent perspective. When I tossed out my faith in god, all those functions that god once allegedly performed for me–giving love and comfort and guidance all that jazz–I had to start doing for myself. (Turns out it was easier to be my own god than to keep weeping on my knees for some other god to get his act together and help me out. Moral of the story: get your own act together.) However, even as an atheist, I do not see myself at the top of existence, as the final authority or arbiter on anything. Just like you Christians, I am subject to powers greater than myself, from the federal government to the weather and beyond.

We really have a lot in common, actually, believers and non-believers. Nobody wants to say it, though, because if we did that, then everyone would have to pull back from the conflict and admit that we’re really just perpetuating a false dichotomy in the human experience. Yes, a false dichotomy. We all get sick, we all pay bills, we all eat food, we all get horny, we all get sad sometimes, we all have problems, we all make problems, and so on, ad infinitum. There is no measurable difference of humanity between believers and non-believers.

Sure, we disagree on stuff. I think “under God” doesn’t belong in the Pledge of Allegiance, that abortion ought to be legal and regulated (to keep it safe, because people are going to do it anyway), that human cloning is not evil, that stem cells are not human beings (look at the pictures, people–they’re just clumps of cells), that prayer does not belong in schools or in civic rituals, that homosexuals should be allowed to get married, and that religion is a massive waste of time and money.

But that’s just politics. In the real world, if my Christian neighbor needs help, I’m not an atheist and he’s not a Christian–we’re just people. Sometimes I think Christians forget that, especially when they’re trying extra hard not to. You know, when they go out doing good deeds for people, and trying to help in the community–except they just can’t manage to do it without adding a promo spot for their god or their denomination or their particular take on the metaphysics of existence. A good deed is nice, and helping people is wonderful, but when you come to me with kindness and then take the opportunity to remind me that you’re some kind of emissary from your god, you only drive home the fact that you’re not acting out of goodwill for humanity, but out of service to the Idea of your religion. You aren’t serving me–you’re serving your beliefs. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant by the foot washing thing.

So, Christian friends. Let the dialogue continue.

Chuck on the Run

Chuck Colson is terrified by homosexual marriage. Over the last several days, he has tried to make a case for why letting gays and lesbians marry each other can only lead to doom and destruction for American society.

First, he brought up the Netherlands, where homosexual marriage is legal. But now, apparently, people just aren’t getting married at all. He calls this “the Dutch Disaster,” and claims that when “People stop getting married, … children suffer.” How does that work exactly? He doesn’t say. So far as I can tell, it’s just another use of that lame and disingenuous technique that opposes something “for the children.” Because if you put children in the middle of a problem, you can pull at people’s heartstrings and make them do whatever you want–even if it’s irrational–”for the children.” People do this all the time. Don’t clean up the environment because it’s the right thing to do–do it for the children. Don’t enforce traffic laws because it’s the right thing to do–do it for the children. Don’t lift sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq when proper conditions have been met–do it for the children. Et cetera. It’s an argumentative technique that completely avoids the issues by appealing to people’s emotions. In short, it’s pathetic. If Mr. Colson doesn’t like homosexual marriage, then he needs to attack it on its own terms, and not as yet another problem “for the children.” He needs to explain what exactly is so horrible about letting homosexuals choose partners, stay with them the rest of their lives, and receive the same political recognition as heterosexual life partners.

But that’s not what he wants to do, because after lamenting “the Dutch Disaster,” Colson decided to link homosexual marriage with terrorism, saying “If we legitimize same-sex unions, we will make ourselves even more of a target for terrorists.” Well, sure, radical Islam hates homosexuality, but it also hates capitalism and our secular form of government. Are we going to give up capitalism and secular government, too, just because they make us targets of terrorism? If Colson was being honest, he wouldn’t be opposing homosexual marriage on the grounds that radical Islam hates it, but on the grounds that he himself hates it. He doesn’t really want us to capitulate to the demands of the terrorists, and he doesn’t really want to admit that their goals are pretty darn similar to his goals: destroy all secular government and set up a theocracy. Except he isn’t blowing anybody up or cutting off any heads.

Continuing with the ridiculous arguments, Colson today compares his struggle against homosexual marriage with the abolitionists’ struggle against slavery. This is another pathetic persuasive technique: align yourself with a historical movement, even if the comparison is spurious, and let the moral weight of that movement lend itself to your own.

Gay marriage is not slavery. Gay marriage is nothing like slavery. Gay marriage is, quite simply, an equal political recognition for all pairs of people who have chosen for themselves to so entwine their lives that they prefer to be seen for some purposes in the eyes of the law as a single unit. That’s all marriage is for anyone, even heterosexuals. People who love each other want their love to be communally recognized. That’s why marriage exists. If there was no marriage, humans would still pair-bond for life, I am quite sure. But marriage offers them the opportunity to have their relationships officially recognized by the rest of the community. Slavery, however, is a system whereby human beings are held in absolute bondage by other human beings, utterly destroying the lives of the slaves by removing their dignity. Homosexual marriage doesn’t remove dignity. It does precisely the opposite and confers dignity (although against the wishes of people like Mr. Colson, who would rather confer indignity on gays and lesbians). The two things could not be more different.

I personally think homosexuality is weird. I can’t imagine wanting to spend my life pair-bonded and married with another person of my sex. But I see no reason why people shouldn’t be allowed to build long-term, monogamous relationships with whomever they choose, regardless of their sex.

Will allowing homosexual marriage make me less likely to marry someone? No! There are plenty of other factors that make me less likely to marry someone, but the fact that other people engage in homosexual marriage is not one of them.

Do I fear that allowing homosexual marriage will make us a greater target of terrorists? That is just ridiculous. Weren’t we already a big enough target on September 11, 2001? There’s no going back.

Is homosexual marriage analogous to slavery? Only in that Christians claim to hate them both (even though plenty of Christians throughout history have actively supported slavery). But Christians have done a poor job of explaining why homosexuality is evil. All they’ve managed to do is make the viability marriage contingent on the ability of the partners to reproduce sexually, which not only makes homosexual marriage undesirable, but doesn’t exactly get me all hot and heavy over heterosexual marriage, either. You mean if I get married, I have to have kids, simply because the plumbing is in place? And if the plumbing is not in place, I’m not allowed to get married? By that logic, people who are incapable of reproducing should not be allowed to marry, even if they’re heterosexuals.

Yes, to most heterosexuals, homosexuality is weird and strange and a little disgusting. But that doesn’t mean we can’t admit that homosexuals still prefer their way of life, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t allow them to have it. Homosexuality is not going to destroy our civilization. People who no longer think or read or discuss important ideas will destroy our civilization. You want to save civilization? Stop fighting the homosexuals and start fighting the entertainment industry (which is not interested in thinking about anything), the hip-hop movement (which is only interested in the activities of the autonomic nervous system, sometimes called the “Three F’s”–fight, flight, and reproduction), the gang movement (which is violent, tribal, and territorial by nature and utterly antithetical to the ideals of civilization), the high levels of racism in our society (and not just in “whites”). Saving civilization is a difficult job, and Christians are fighting all the wrong battles.