Stumbling Toward God?

In spite of the fact that the trailers for this movie seemed specifically designed to make it look HORRIBLE, I watched it purely on faith in the reputation of the film makers. However, for the first twenty minutes or so, I was afraid that I had made a terrible mistake. The story was slow, the villain did not seem archetypically villainous enough and most importantly, the songs were weak-sauce. And what is all this crap about sunlight and flowers? Where are the radishes?

Once the story got moving though, it did get a lot better. I was a little confused because I could have sworn that Chuck was supposed to be in this movie, even though the male lead looked quite a bit like that dude who was on one of the seasons of “24” that I actually watched, now on “Haven”. (Not that I expect anyone else to have ever heard of that show.) In any case, I thought that the heroine’s face was astoundingly expressive, and the movie is practically worth seeing on that reason alone.

Spoiler alert: the prince does not go blind in the end. That may have something to do with the fact that there was actually no prince at all. Did the writers even read the reference story? Although, you can not really blame them. In this post-feminist world, could they really have a story about a girl marrying a prince? Who would get excited about that in 2011? Ahem.

So overall, pretty decent. Not the instant classic like so many of its predecessors, but certainly not immediately disposable like its contemporaries.

I spend a lot of time alone in my house doing absolutely nothing remotely of value to anyone. A lot of time. I thought it would be nice if I had some sense of purpose that I was working toward; whether for good or evil, either one would be an improvement at this point.

So I started with evil, because I assume it would be easier, and I am a path-of-least-resistance kind of guy. The quintessential evil plan, obviously, is to take over the world. I do not want to do that, that sounds really stressful. So, a lesser evil scheme then. For that I need a better definition of what exactly is evil.

After some thought, I decided that evil is based on power. But did not Jesus say that “the love of money is the root of all evil”? Yet, when the Devil was cast out of Heaven, it had nothing to do with money and everything to do with power, much as I hate to contradict Jesus. It turns out that A) it was NOT Jesus, but rather Paul who made that statement in 1 Timothy 6:10, and B) newer translations add in “… all kinds of evil,” which in a strictly literal reading is the same thing, but really has a more general connotation of “a lot of evil” and not, in fact, ALL evil.  I do not disagree with the sentiment of modified statement, however, after doing a [very] little research with a Greek concordance, I am not convinced that the addition is justified.

It is not my place to say what Paul did or did not mean. Regardless, money is not power, however money does represent power (among other things). Therefore, I feel justified in saying that the love of power is the root of all evil.

Thus, for my evil scheme, I would need to exert power. Unfortunately (or not, depending on your perspective) I could not think of anyone over whom I actually wanted power. So it seems that evil is just not my thing.

Then I thought, if I could be doing good, but choose not to, is that not also evil? That suggests somehow that not using power that I already have is evil. That contradicts everything which I have said so far.

Also, I do really like to win at board games.

I had a dream that a guy that I know and I both started renting rooms from a girl that I know. She had a house that she had been living in alone, but with the economy and all, she now felt the need to take on boarders. [This is not remotely accurate in real life by the way. As long as I have know her she has lived in apartments with roommates.] So, I was moving in and arranging my room which was a problem, because it so happens that the places where I have lived for the last ten years or so were already furnished and I do not actually own any bedroom furniture. I just had my air mattress and then everything else I own was just in stacks around the room. I became concerned that this would diminish her good opinion of me. With her already having to deal with the stress of going from living alone to living with two GUYS (which is already a big no-no among some Christians), I thought the idea of me basically living on the floor would be too much.

Perhaps this was a foolish concern, I do not know. It never even came up in the dream, because shortly after moving in, I discovered that at the same time every night, if I was standing in the hallway, the door to my room would open and a ghost would emerge. It looked like the kind of thing children make for Halloween out of a tissue stuffed with a wad of something and tied off to divide the head and flowing ghosty body. Only this was the size of a person. And real. Frankly, the very existence of a ghost in your room somewhat overshadows however silly it may or may not look. I somewhat lucky though, because in my other friend’s new room appeared what I would best describe as a “ravenous hell-hound”, which although it posed no physical threat, being a ghost and all, it still looked terrifying, and it would pounce and maul other smaller ghost-animals, leaving mangled ghost-corpses in the hallway and kitchen.

Our hostess happened to be away on a camping trip or something when we discovered this. When she returned, we had the obligatory what-the-hell-why-didn’t-you-tell-us-the-house-was-HAUNTED conversation. Her bedroom was upstairs, and it too had some kind of apparition that would appear every night, but she was somewhat in denial and when confronted had a guilty “I was hoping if I didn’t say anything you wouldn’t notice” attitude, having actually been previously unaware of the ghosts that we encountered downstairs.

There was a mystery to be solved about the exact hour the ghosts would appear and the connection between them in order to put them to rest, but unfortunately, the dream did not last that long.

I happened across this article yesterday. You can read it or not. The gist of it is that some Harvard guys did a survey where they asked people their religious beliefs and then gave them a quiz of trick questions. The example given was:

“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The “intuitive” answer of “10 cents” is incorrect. However, they found that intuitive people were one and a half times more likely to believe in God compared with reflective people who thought about it and came up with the correct answer. [Speaking of intuitive verses reflective, I for one tripped all over what exactly they meant by “one and a half times more likely.”]

When I read the question, my immediate thought was, “10 cents”, then I quickly reconsidered and realized that that was incorrect, but I did not want to bother actually working out the correct answer . Which is a fascinatingly accurate analogy for my own belief in God.

In a prior post, I said some unkind things about Christians, and I wanted to follow up with a post on what I hate about atheists, but my heart just has not been in it, and I have avoided the topic for several weeks. I actually had a lot of specifics in mind, but ultimately I am just going to say that I find the arrogance and bitterness of militant atheists (that is, atheists that want you to also be an atheist) to be off-putting, and quite frankly, if being right means being like them then I would rather be wrong.

I understand that that is not a rational argument, but it is what I have.

Instead I will share a thought that I had with no real conclusion: The Bible was obviously written (or at least, written down) by literate people in a time when literacy was far from the norm. Education and intelligence are not the same thing, of course, but there is some correlation there. So, while the skeptic might conclude that the greatest supporters of the Bible are not necessarily the finest minds of today, it would be a mistake to assume that held true throughout history. Basically, what I am saying is that there is a high chance that the authors of the Bible were smarter than you or me.

I am a person that values privacy. That should not come as a surprise to anyone, I think? It is perhaps odd that I choose to reveal personal thoughts to the world via this blog then, but I think that more often than not, I am generally so vague in the specific personal details that one would not actually know what I am talking about unless they already knew what I was talking about.

One of my FB friends posted an article about the latest round of changes to that site and, of course, the privacy concerns that always accompany that. One of their friends then expressed a lack of concern because their life is “BORING!” [emphasis original].

This is not the first time that I have encountered this attitude, and I never know how to respond. Yet this particular example was so concise in wording that it made me realize something. The fact is that NOT everyone leads such a boring life, and no one should have to worry about choosing between a life that is boring or a life that is scrutinized. It does not matter who is doing the monitoring; be it Facebook, Google, Apple, the U.S. government, the Chinese government… The complacency of people who do not think that they are “interesting” enough to have a problem ruins it for everyone.

I had several topics in mind to talk about this week, but I also had a busy week and I am pushing all of those ideas aside in the 11tth hour in favor of this one.

For some reason, at some point within the last few days I remembered that I once had a post entitled Swallow. I could not remember what the post itself was about, I only recalled that the title was essentially a random word completely unrelated to the topic that I never-the-less thought created an appropriate mood for what I was discussing.

“Swallow” can mean many things. Most commonly, after you chew, you swallow. It could also be a perhaps involuntary reaction when one suddenly becomes nervous. Metaphorically, it can mean to “suck it up”; your pride for instance. Unfortunately, I can not ignore that it also has a certain sexual connotation. Or maybe it refers to a kind of bird.

I can safely say that none of these were what I had in mind when I wrote it. To be perfectly honest, I believe that I was thinking of the Bush song Swallowed, which I also happen to have no idea of what it is about, because that dude simply does not enunciate well. However, it does have an overall bleak tone to it, which is really all that I was interested in at the time.

The important thing to remember is that it was a random word unrelated to the post topic. Also, thinking about it reminded me of a certain person, but I did not know why. It turns out that I actually mentioned that person in that post, though cryptically as always. So on some level, I guess I did remember what that post was about.

In what I was almost about to write when I sat down at my computer tonight, I was going to refer to the board game “Loaded Questions”, which I know that I have mentioned in the past. I searched the blog to find exactly where and what I had said previously, and surprisingly, that very post was the only result. (Although, I feel that I must have talked about the game elsewhere, but perhaps did not specifically mention by name.)

Curiously, earlier today I was thinking about how I never had an actual email signature, as in something that gets automatically appended to the end of each email sent, but I did used to have a certain sign off technique where I would end with some phrase with all the words run together with no spaces.  I do not remember how or why I started that, but I must have kept it up for a good ten years or so before one day I simply decided, “You know what, I don’t want to do that anymore.” However, I thought it might be a fun throwback to end a blog post like that one of these days, you know, for the fans. Yet it turns out, I did that exact thing in that same damn post.

So it is either a massive multi-level coincidence, or there is something about that particular post that is weighing heavily on my subconscious. So I thought, what the heck, why don’t we all give it a read?

Speaking of post titles and coincidences, anyone else notice how many of my recent entries all begin with the letter ‘F’? Totally unintentional. I had already titled this post before I noticed. Weird.

I tried to post this on fb a while ago, but I was having trouble editing to fit the character limits. The vigilant might have seen some of this in your news feed for three minutes a month ago.

In conversation, I mentioned to someone that I had taken a couple of physics classes at a community college who then asked, “Why did you stop?” I was stumped by this and admitted that I did not know.

Now, anyone familiar with my situation might recognize that the question itself was flawed. The fact is, if you take enough classes then they eventually give you a piece of paper that says that you do not have to go anymore. That explains why I *did* stop, but does not address why I *wanted* to stop, which is essentially what I was being asked. I still do not know the answer.

As I recall, this came up when I was asked if I knew anything about sound waves and I boasted that I knew “a lot” about sound waves. From an objective viewpoint, it is quite curious that when questioned further, I went with “a couple of classes at community college” and not “I have a degree in electrical engineering.”

Of course, the explanation for that is that I have spent the last few years trying to forget that the whole university thing ever happened. But again, what I can not answer is “Why?”

There is something very wrong in my head. A block, a disconnect, something that just is not right. And I have no idea what to do about it.

There were several incidences of me being hypocritical in my previous post. There were going to be even more, but I did not manage to fit in all of the things that I was thinking about last week. Yet it started me thinking about what hypocrisy really is, or more accurately, what it is not.

According to Merriam-Webster, hypocrisy is: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion.

This is actually a little bit different from my working definition. I think of hypocrisy as saying one thing but doing the opposite; specifically, condemning others for things that you also do yourself. The difference between the dictionary definition and mine is that theirs seems to mean an intentional deceit, whereas my definition could in some cases be interpreted as arrogant yet not dishonest. “It is O.K. for me to do that, but you can’t.”

If I criticize the actions and traits of others that I also despise about myself, should that be considered hypocritical? To me it just seems consistent, even if not particularly helpful. Or a situation that seems to come up often with political and public figures: if someone criticizes or condemns something with which they are (or have been) involved, is that hypocritical? Their opponents are always quick to claim so, but consider it like this: a smoker who tells others not to smoke might seem hypocritical, yet the very fact that they do it, they know that it is wrong, but they can not stop, actually makes their opinion more valuable.

If I do something and it turns out badly, then it seems reasonable for me to advise, possibly even demand, that others not do that. However, it is not always so clear cut. A particular decision yields some benefits and some disadvantages. Maybe you even readily admit that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits, yet you can not fully bring yourself to give up those benefits, so you find yourself trapped in that particular course of action. Weak… yes; lazy… perhaps. But is it hypocritical?

I was listening to Christian radio last week (because: Surprise! I still listen to Christian radio sometimes) and the DJ was reading a “letter” that he had received from a young girl (I have to assume that it was really an email, if we accept the premise that little girls actually send messages to radio DJs at all) whom, as I recall, was wheelchair bound for an unspecified reason. I do not recall how much was in the original letter and how much was his own commentary, but the gist of it was that “the world” convinces you that you have no value if you do not fit into a particular mold, but God/Jesus/The Bible/The Church (whatever the term used was) says that you do have value even if you do not fit the mold.

At that moment I almost wanted to pull the car over and throw everything down. I finally had the answer for which I had been searching for eight years:

Christians spend a lot of time talking about nonsense with no basis in reality.

What church was this guy talking about? Oh, I buy that the church will accept you if you do not fit into society’s mold. In fact, they probably will NOT take you if you do fit in to society’s mold (at least their interpretation of it). But you still have to fit into the church’s mold. I can not even say how many people were, for lack of a better phrase, “forced out” of my church group precisely because they did not fit the mold. No one would admit that, of course. In fact, I have no doubt that if you asked anyone involved in any of these incidents, they would genuinely claim they bent over backwards trying to accommodate the person, but that it just did not work out. Of course it did not. Because they did not fit the mold. There is nothing to be done.

I know, I know. Maybe I just went to a bad church. That is a very real possibility. Hell, I felt compelled to lie to almost everyone that I knew for years and years as a condition of attendance, so I am not exactly what you would call “objective” in these matters.

Last weekend I went to a certain local establishment with a friend. I recalled that the previous time that we had been there, we had been accompanied by a third person. I do not want to go into details, but let me summarize by saying that the individual in question spent an unpleasantly long time arguing against a comment that I had made about a specific socioeconomic matter. Yet I remained unconvinced by his arguments, and more annoyingly, completely unsuccessful in my attempts to shift the conversation to another topic.

Some people just really like to argue. I do not understand where that comes from, but I know that is is there. I do not care for arguments and debates. If in the right mood, I do like to try to understand other people’s point of view, but if and when I do bother to state my opinion on anything [like, on a blog maybe?] I do not generally spend additional effort trying to convince someone who strongly disagrees with me that they are wrong. (Alright, I admit that sometimes I can not resist a good sarcastic jab just to mess with someone’s perceptions every now and then, but that is the extent of it.)

Anyway, I was out with my friend again and wouldn’t you know it, this very same guy shows up again. He and my friend proceed to get into a lengthy debate about faith. I am ashamed to say that I pretty much hung my friend out to dry on that one by not saying anything the entire time. I could point out that this man was really an acquaintance of my friend in the first place and I had only ever seen him three or four times, and also that it was my friend’s fault for encouraging him in the first place. Yet still, are not conversations about faith and doubt kind of “my thing”? Not that day. Not with that guy. For one thing, they were not even talking about theology exactly, merely discussing hypotheticals. It seems silly to criticize, given that my post just a couple of weeks ago was one giant “what if”, but I did not see the value in what they were discussing. I could not even confidently predict a likely outcome in the real world of the scenarios they were debating, let alone offer any conclusions about what that outcome may or may not say about God.

A different friend recently wrote a lengthy post; the first part was an anecdote about the struggles of a certain individual whom she had known at some point in the past, and the second part was about what God showed my friend through that experience. It was the sort of thing that you can not argue on facts. That is, I suppose that you could argue the details of the story, and I recognize that there is a slight possibility that the entire thing was invented for a school assignment, but I think that it actually was a true event. However, you can not argue the second part (which is really the whole point of the post) on facts simply because there are no facts. Here is what God showed you? Here is what you feel about this and that? That’s… nice.

I certainly would not say that feelings have no value, but they are not evidence. A feeling can be a good starting point, but if that is all you ever have then… it simply is not enough. [Hold on a moment, the kettle is calling. “Yes? This whole post, you say? No? The entire BLOG‽ Well that’s disappointing.”]

In my bolded statement above, “nonsense” is the wrong word. Nonsense has no meaning, no value, and is possibly even made up on the spot. Christianity is none of those things. No, the word that I wanted is “fiction.” Fiction can be entirely self-consistent and even remarkably accurate to real life, either by intention or coincidence. That does not make it true. On a practical level, I find that Christianity largely amounts to empty platitudes and unprovable assertions. It sounds good. Consistent even. And if it gives some people hope and strength, then good for them. For me, at the end of the day, at the end of eight years of days, it is not enough.

If there is one simple thing that I should have asked my contrary acquaintance above, and perhaps my friend can use this in a future encounter, it would be this: Who would you say has a better knowledge and understanding of whom? Is it my knowledge of God, or His knowledge of me? Presuming that the answer to that is self-evident, therefore if God thus far has not revealed Himself in a way that I am able to comprehend… why is that my fault?