“Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.” – a desperate father

Thomas.  The Apostle Thomas.  Doubting Thomas.  I don’t think that there’s anyone else in the Bible who’s gotten such an undeserved bum rap from the Church through the ages.

For my own self, I find it easier to identify with Thomas and Peter than with James or John.  Men whose foibles and flaws are displayed for all of history to witness, for all of us to see and analyze through the ages.  For all of us to pass judgment on.

Look, here’s the deal: we’ve been living comfortably with the Resurrection for close to two thousand years now, and by golly, we’ve just gotten too used to the idea.  We look at Peter when he denied knowing Christ and think I’d have stood up for Him.  We see Thomas, standing firm in his unbelief at the news of their risen Master and think I’d have believed them.  After seeing Jesus do all the things that He did, I’d believe that He’d come back.  We’re all more than confident these days that Jesus could come bodily back from the dead; we don’t want to trust Him with our finances, our jobs, our children, our relationships, or many other aspects of our day to day lives, but by golly, He is risen!

Let’s look at it from Thomas’s perspective for just a moment.  He’s just spent the better part of three years following this guy around.  A fella who’s proven himself more powerful than disease, wiser than the most learned religious authorities, and who seems to regard physics only circumstantially.  He becomes more than a man to them, he becomes: Him.

I’ve grown up capitalizing my pronouns in regards to the Godhead.  I know of some Christians who don’t understand why, who don’t get it, some with some pretty good reasons as to why it’s not really necessary, but I keep doing it.  Why?  I suppose that to me it’s one more confession to the world about who Christ is.  It’s a subtle way that I can claim in this age of skepticism that Jesus is in fact . . . well, actually, I’m getting ahead of myself here.  We’re talking about Thomas.  I promise I’ll finish this thought, though, just bear with me.

In one of the made-for-TV movies about Jesus that came out a few years ago, Thomas was portrayed as a skeptical man, a man whose mouth was always set somewhere between mild anger and annoyance.  He was unconvinced about following this Jesus guy until Jesus healed a man in front of him.  Of course, even then, he seemed to be hanging around just to finally be able to say “Aha!” when something finally, inevitably went wrong.  In reality, we know very little about most of the Apostles from the actual Scriptures.  Tradition and some semi-reliable apocryphal sources hold more information, but the Inspired Word of God is sparing with its information.  But we do see one thing, one little thing, that I believe gives us a valuable insight into Thomas’s character, and it’s well before the Resurrection.

When Jesus was told that His friend Lazarus was sick He stayed where He was for two days, then told His apostles that they were going back to Judea.  They pointed out to Him, quite prudently as far as they were concerned, I’m sure, that the last time they’d been there, the Jews tried to stone Jesus.  Just a little thing.  Yeah, sure, Big Guy, you can turn water to wine and make blind men see, but c’mon, you’ve got bad P.R. in Judea.

All of them except for one.  “Then Thomas, who is called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with Him.’”  (John 11:16 NKJV)

I tend to think that Thomas was a pragmatist.  That somewhere along the line of following Jesus he came to the conclusion that this guy was the One that they’d been waiting for.  Not that he was the only one who had come to this conclusion (Luke 9:20), but nevertheless, he had come to believe it.  And then, a wrench was thrown into the works: Jesus was dead.

So how would a pragmatic man deal with this sort of thing? I think Thomas came more or less to the conclusion that he’d simply backed the wrong guy.  I mean, healing people and is a neat trick, and it’d probably be easy enough to apply the technique to one’s self, but you probably need to be alive to do it.  And so now what?

Hope is a funny thing.  All of us can carry it about in our hearts if we so choose.  It carries us through the hard times and it always bounces back from injury. Always.  It just comes down to this: are we going to pick it back up and put it in our hearts again?  If we do, it can just be ripped out again.  Thomas, still smarting from his recent injury, hears the words of his friends that the Master is alive and reacts, well, pragmatically.

The man was dead; Thomas, like many of the others, knew that.  They’d seen him die, they’d seen the body.  They’d buried him.  Hope if you want to, but I won’t believe it unless I know that it’s really Him.

There’s really a lot that the Bible doesn’t tell us, but as far as we know the other Apostles never told Jesus what Thomas’s criteria were for his belief, yet nevertheless  “Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.’”  (John 20:27 NKJV)

At church last night we talked about this passage as I told some friends of what I was planning to write about for this article.  They both disagreed with me about what happened next, and I guess we won’t know until we can meet Thomas and ask him for ourselves, but I like to think that Thomas never did put his hand in the wounds.  That the the Man he saw standing before him, telling Thomas things that by all rights He shouldn’t know, was enough when you came right down to it.  But what we do know is what Thomas did next, and it was something that none of the other Apostles had ever done before.  And it was quite pragmatic, really.

“And Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” (John 20:28 NKJV)

Sure, people had respected Jesus; Peter had even acknowledged that He’d been sent by God, but no one, no one, save for Jesus Himself (John 8:58), had ever actually said that Jesus was God before.  That was blasphemy.  Unless, of course, it was true.

We serve a living Savior!  Thanks be to God for that, for a dead miracle man does no more good, but a risen Messiah has conquered death—and since He’s promised to take us with Him, what other response could we have?  There can then be only one proper answer when they say to us “He is risen!”

He is risen, indeed!

“What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.” - Joss Whedon, “Let’s Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death”

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne, “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions”

“See it written on the grave; every woman has a name” - Alice Cooper, “Every Woman has a Name”

Two years ago today seventeen year old Du’a Khalil Aswad was murdered in Iraq in an “honor killing”.  The rationale behind such killings is that a family member, notably they are almost always female, has brought such shame to the family, that only their death will satisfy the need for “justice”.  In Du’a Khalil’s case her crime was to fall in love, allegedly, with someone of another faith.  It was about a month later when Whedon found out about the story, wrote a blog entry about it, and this article was e-mailed to me.  The next day, I wrote these words:

Are we so self-absorbed that we think we can’t do anything about those problems elsewhere and so we don’t try? Will the Republicans say that we should go in, take over, and covert them to Americanism? Will the Democrats say that it’s their culture and not our place to say anything about their own internal affairs?

Well I say that we are Christians, and the suffering of others, their oppression by government, family, or religion is.

Our.

Business.

Our support can be financial, it could be as simple as raising awareness and presenting a viable course of action, but we’ve been operating too long under two major false pretenses. The first being that those outside of Christ aren’t really our concern; that we need to worry about the affairs of the Church and the Church alone. How can we worry about a girl who committed no crime being brutally murdered by her own family when we’re fighting for the right to pray in our public schools? How indeed?

The other false pretense is that we need not worry so much about these social injustices, and simply convert the people to Christianity and then everything will be fine for them. (Actually, we don’t want them to become Christians so much as we want them to become 21st century American Protestants, but that’s another rant.) Christians have a long and violent history, and even the great heroes of the faith like Martin Luther and John Calvin have more than a little blood on their hands. And even if you don’t believe me about them, need I bring up the Crusades?

Today, many of us in the Church are beginning to realize that our great-great-grandchildren may not be alive to see the return of Christ, and that ideas like the one in the old song line that says “this world is not my home, I’m just passing through” may in fact have helped foster a mentality that keeps us from actually looking at this world as something worth saving?

I was angry then.  I’m angry now.

I’m angry at a world that’s so very broken.  I’m angry that so often things like these get ignored for smaller problems that are closer to home.  I’m angry because sometimes I go days or weeks and don’t think about this sort of thing at all.

Whedon wrote in his posting that “it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself”.  He’s on to something, but he’s not entirely right.  Of course, Whedon doesn’t believe in a loving, compassionate God, as I do.  That great God wants nothing more than to save us from ourselves.  He became one of us to do it and in the process He had a few pointed things to say about loving others, about going to the aid of the suffering and the oppressed.  That’s the real problem: it’s not enough to save us, God wants us to become more like Him.  If salvation were His only concern, then Christ wouldn’t have had to live a live with us and among us.  He would have simply had to come down, prick His finger, and say “My blood has saved you.  My grace is sufficient for you.”  But He didn’t do that.

Nope.  While we’re all in a titter about Jesus dying for us, He’s over there trying to tell us that we need to live for Him.  More than simply converting people, God wants us to go to them and act unto them as He would.  That’s a pretty tall order.  No wonder modern Christians are more concerned with passing oppressive legislation, getting music videos on MTV, and strong-arming biology teachers to teach questionable science than we are with actually following God’s path for our lives.  It’s easier to rail against the world, claiming to be the oppressed ones than it is to empathize with the oppressed and show them the compassion that God wishes us to show them.  But there is hope.  While Whedon was wrong about one conclusion in his article, he comes to another later that resonates with Truth: “I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.”

Well I do have faith in humanity.  I have faith in it because Jesus thought it worth saving.  He thought it valuable enough to spend more than thirty years as a living, breathing mortal Who taught us that loving one another like we ought to love ourselves was a commandment second only to loving God.  The fact that we can fall so far and still recognize such evils for what they are is proof, in my mind anyway, that God isn’t done with us yet.  The first step in turning one’s life over to God’s grace is repentance, and the best definition of repentence that I’ve ever heard is this: to look at sin the way that God looks at it.  God looked at our sin, at our world, and then He went into it as humbly as He could have done.  He did this because He believed that not only were we worth saving for the hereafter, but like Whedon He believed that the here and now was also worth doing something about.  The Gospel of Christ is just as much sociological as it is spiritual.  Jesus went into the world to seek and to save the lost.

Let us go and do likewise.

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. ” - C.S. Lewis

“Another sleepy Sunday safe within the walls
Outside a dying world in desperation calls
But no one hears the cries or knows what they’re about
The doors are locked within, or is it from without
Looking through rose-colored stained glass windows
Never allowing the world to come in
Seeing no evil and feeling no pain
And making the light as it comes from within
So dim” - Petra, “Rose-Colored Stained Glass Windows”

Years ago, during the Jesus movement of the 1960’s musicians like Larry Norman stood on street corners and played rock music in an attempt to reach out to people who might otherwise ignore a Gospel Message.  Norman deliberately wrote many of his songs so that each verse contained a self-contained message so that if a person only stopped to listen for a minute or two, they’d still get the point.  In those days, most wester protestants still considered rock music to be inherently evil.  They believed that the beat itself somehow “fed the flesh” and awakened in people a greater propensity for sinning, so musicians like Norman almost never played thier music to audiences in churches.

This was in fact, more often that not, fine with them.  As Norman himself once said: “The churches weren’t going to accept me looking like a street person with long hair and faded jeans. They did not like the music I was recording. And I had no desire to preach the gospel to the converted.”  Fast forward to 2008 and it’s amazing how things have changed.

I don’t have an exact figure, and I’m not really interested in looking for one right now so if somebody wants to hunt it down and let me know, feel free, but I do know that the Contemporary Christian Music industry (that’s a key word, there) is a multi-billion dollar per year industry.  Where churches once wouldn’t allow people with certain hairstyles in the door for services, some are now designing facilities with the idea of holding rock concerts in them in mind.  What was once a tool to spread the message of Christ’s love to a disaffected generation is now a vehicle for Christians to entertain themselves.  Safely.

That’s the part that get’s me to wondering.  Safety.  I regularly attend a fundraiser for a ranch that takes in abused and neglected boys.  To raise funds, the ranch brings in comedians to a local church.  We get a couple of hours of entertainment and the boys get to keep eating and not get rained on.  Works out pretty good for everybody concerned.  A while back at one of these events, one of the promoters mentioned that since the comedians they bring in are always “clean” (i.e. no profanity, no explicit talk about sex, etc.) that their event was “safe” for the whole family.  I got to wondering just what is so dangerous about profanity and sex.  Why are Christians afraid of these things?  The last time I checked, the phrase “fear not” was in the Bible a lot, and yet we still treat sex and profanity as if they are somehow inherently harmful to us.  (Kind of like the beat of rock music.)

Well, if you’re in that crowd, then I have some good news for you.  Inspired by the success of the console games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the people over at Digital Praise have come up with Guitar Praise, a game so similar in look and style to Guitar Hero that I wonder if there were any copyright issues that needed to be resolved.

Now, I do have a problem with the very concept of the game, and we’ll get to that in a bit, but what really bothers me is the is how the makers of the game seem to have chosen lyrical content (read cliched, spoon-fed spirituality) over musical substance.  Now, to be sure, as little as fifteen years ago the differences in production quality between Christain rock music and its mainstream counterpart were readily obvious.  These days, however, many Christian musicians spend just as much recording an album as any mainstream artist.  The videos, artwork, and live shows are all nearly indistinguishable from any other artist on the surface.  The difference, as proponents of Gospel themed rock told those disapproving church members of a few decades ago, was in the lyrics.

The musical line-up for Guitar Praise certainly makes no apologies for the beliefs of its contributors.  No, instead one could not help be be certain that they are playing a game with a distinclty Christian agenda.  And I’m not so sure that this is a good thing.

One thing that I am certain will be brought up is that you can/shoud/don’t-love-Jesus-enough-if-you-don’t invite your unchurched friends to play Guitar Praise with you.  Now, imagine the average junior high schooler, picking up a very familiar controller and expecting to get something cool, and instead getting “There You Go“  by Caedmon’s Call.  “There You Go” is not a bad song, lyrically or musically, but it is not one that I’d chose as an example in the best of guitar-driven rock in the Christian music field.  The part that bothers me here is not the songs and artists that were chosen, but rather the ones that have been left out.  Phil Keaggy is widely regarded by other guitarists as one of the best in the world, indeed one of the best in the last several decades.  Some of his songs are a bit blase musically, but his rock instrumentals are second to none.  (And if you don’t believe me, go get ahold of his album 220 and fire up the tracks “Animal”, “The Great Escape”, or “Stomp”.)  Yet there is not a single song by Keaggy on this list.  Nor is there anything by the 77’s, Lost Dogs, Betrayal, Angelica, Daniel Amos, Aleixa, Ghoti Hook, Johnny Q. Public, Grammatrain, Atomic Opera, Deliverance, One Bad Pig, Lanny Cordolla, Chasing Furies, MxPx, or even Third Day.  All of these bands have above average guitar work, and I dare say better guitar work that at least half of the songs included with the game, so why were they left off?  I honestly don’t know why.  I can’t fathom why the developers of this game would think that songs with strong guitar parts ought to be left off, while songs where the guitar isn’t even really the primary instrument should be included.

This is the problem when we let the message take precedence over the medium: if the medium is supposed to lower defensive barriers, to make the listener, who might otherwise be hostile to the message, take note of what is being said, then bringing the medium up to top-notch quality must be the primary concern.  If I convince a friend of mine to come with me to a concert because I want him to get kamikazeed by the Gospel, then I’d better make sure the music is up to snuff, or all he’ll be thinking all night is how lame the band is.  Likewise, if people, especially young people, are going to be playing this game with their friends, I think its important that the music be of such a high quality, that their main concern won’t be “what song is this, ive never heard it before”, but rather “this is one sweet song, how come I’ve never heard it before”.

This cannot happen so long as we insist that the message take precedence over the music.  That may be true from a theological perspective, but from a relational standpoint it is much easier to surprise somebody with the fact that the blistering guitar solo they just played was written by a Christian.

There’s still one more thing that I need to address.  I said earlier that I had a problem with this game in and of itself.  The problem is this: why do we need to make a Christian version of Guitar Hero just as we have done with with everything else?  Why is the modern church more content with hiding out within its own walls?  Why do we not remember the days when the local church was a cornerstone of the community?  This website is called Cultural Christianity for a reason.  It is because I believe that Jesus said “go therefore into the world” for a reason.  He doesn’t want us to bring people to Him, but instead asks us to take Him to people.  To do this we need to be members of society.  Not just residents, but people who are pillars of their communities.  People that others wave to when they pass by.  People live their lives in such a way that others begin to see Jesus in the mediocrity of the every day.

It’s a lot easier to tell people about Christianity than it is to show it to them, but I have a notion that God made it that way on purpose.

Not having a lot of space for frivolities, they focused on the staples: meats, fresh vegetables, spices, herbs, pasta, beer.  The end result being that I usually got out of there with only what I came in for, and not an armload of ingredients that I didn’t need or really even want.  But, in the end, they just couldn’t compete with the big stores.

It’s not that I hate the big store, I don’t, they have their place, but small stores like this one give communities character.  Big stores are focused only on profit.  They don’t care about people, because there are always more.  Maybe they’ll give some time, some money, some attention to some community cause, but the love isn’t there.

I loved this store, and I’m going to miss it.

* 100 points to whoever gets the reference.

“All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc., are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true.” - Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Well I got me a taste of the hideous waste
That was built around the worship of my beautiful face
And now I bow before the wrinkles and the lines
I’d love to leave behind, leave behind

Well I’d made some promises I did not keep
So I thought that I’d pretend
That I said them in my sleep
But now I can’t afford to buy back all the time
The precious time
When all the talk was cheap and all the
Words were mine” - 7 & 7 is - “L’Orbis/Jack Spoiler“

A colleague of mine in student ministry (the founder of that website over there in my link section) asked this question on his blog: Is Oprah Dangerous? Well Adam, you asked for a response, so here’s mine: The short answer is “yes”. The long, more detailed answer is “not really”.

Since Adam’s question is coming from a theological perspective, it is with a theological perspective that I must answer him. In the end nothing is really threatening to the Gospel of Christ itself: not The DaVinci Code, not The Golden Compass (in book or movie form) or its sequels, not same-sex marriage, Democrats in elected office, or the Old Earth Creationism. God is eternal, as is His Kingdom and nothing will ever stop that from being true. With that in mind, we have nothing to fear from Ms Winfrey, but this does not mean that her statements and theology should be taken lightly.

The danger about Oprah’s statements is that they have the ring of truth about them. That’s because many of them contain a good bit of truth, but then bring the seeker to a conclusion that is ultimately false. I think many Christians could benefit from thinking of the Kingdom of God not as some place that we’ll get to after we’ve “done our time” with the sinners on planet earth, but rather as something that we carry with us, and build in the here and now. We could also benefit from the mentality that are are many diverse ways to live in this world; indeed many good and right ways to live as Christians in this world. And we could also benefit from not obsessing overmuch concerning the rather violent and gruesome image of the Cross. (And, yes, I’m well aware of the cross up there at the top of the page. It’s not that we should forget the Crucifixion, but rather we must also remember that Jesus lived a full life as a human being and His work on the Cross was only one part of His mission here.)

But Oprah falls into the (really rather old) lie of “if we believe it hard enough, it’ll be true”. Objective, external truth exists and is the same whether we like it or not, believe in it or not, or even know about it or not; it’s simply true. But this is not to say that Christians cannot learn anything from Oprah, here, I believe that we most certainly can.

I alluded earlier to the concept that there are many diverse ways to walk the path of life that leads to Christ, and I hold true to this idea. I think many modern American protestants don’t really want to see people around the world convert to Christianity, but rather convert to modern American protestantism. This is not only unrealistic, but also inconsiderate. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if Jesus was hanging around down here and heard some of the things that today’s Christian leaders attach His Name to, He’d say something like “that’s really not what I was talking about, you know”. In fact Jesus made His statements, spoke His parables, and performed His miracles to a culture that is so far removed from our that you and I would find it quite alien. And while we can learn about history, and ancient Jewish culture, and thus gain a better idea of what Jesus was talking about; we’d still view the Gospel as 21st century Americans. The problem with this is obvious: neither Jesus nor any of the Apostles were 21st century Americans. When we bring modern perspectives to and ancient story, we have lost something.

Oprah didn’t like the idea of God being jealous, despite the fact that in the Bible, He clearly states that He is. The problem here, is that Oprah was reacting like (da-da-daa-daaaa!) a modern American to an ancient story. According to Uncle Webster, jealousy can be defined as:

1 a: intolerant of rivalry or unfaithfulness b: disposed to suspect rivalry or unfaithfulness

2: hostile toward a rival or one believed to enjoy an advantage

3: vigilant in guarding a possession <new colonies were jealous of their new independence — Scott Buchanan>

zeal: ˈzēl

noun

eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something

(Again, Webster’s.)

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” - Tom Clancy

It’s not really fair of me to compare this year’s The Incredible Hulk to Ang Lee’s 2003 film which was simply titled Hulk. It’s not fair, but I nevertheless found myself comparing them throughout the new film.

It’s only fair to point out that I’m one of the seven people not directly involved with making the film that actually liked the 2003 version. I found the rather lyrical visual style engaging, I enjoyed finally watching a comic book movie that looked like a comic book. Maybe that was why I was able to more readily accept that films rather cartoony looking Hulk more than I was able to accept this new one, which just didn’t look natural . . . or at least he didn’t look as natural as a nine foot tall green monster can.

Edward Norton is a fine actor, and given his performances in Fight Club, Primal Fear, and American History X the role of Bruce Banner would seem to have been tailor-made for him. But as Banner, Norton fizzles. How can a man who has mastered the art of dramatic duality fall so flat in this, the best distillation of that concept since The Strange Case of Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde? How indeed? Nevertheless, fall flat he does, or at the very least, his considerable talent was squandered by an inattentive production and writing team.

This is not to say that the film was bad; it had great effects, paid plenty of homage to the source material, while still retaining its own identity, and unlike Lee’s film, the phrase “Hulk SMASH!” did indeed find its way into the dialog.

If the movie was missing something then, it was missing believability. Not in the basic science (which is Happy Meal science, anyway) behind the premise of the series, but in the characters. I had a hard time believing in Liv Tyler as a scientist (and I still think that Jennifer Connelly made a way cuter Betty Ross, by the by). I had a hard time believing anybody, even a career special ops soldier like Blonsky (Tim Roth), would want to do to themselves what they saw in Banner. (And, yes, I know people do things just as crazy in real life, but the film didn’t give me any good reason to believe that Blonsky would.) And I had a hard time believing that the Hulk was really very incredible.

The Hulk is supposed to be an enormous three-year-old boy throwing a temper tantrum. This one just seemed kind of annoyed.  In the end, so was I.

“You can’t minister to people at a distance, you need to get right down in the cheeseburgers with them. If you’re going to reach out to the homosexuals, you need to be there with them, making friends with them, loving them, without contributing or endorsing it. You’re just there. That’s where Jesus went. He would hang with people like that and be Himself. That was the difference. Rather than getting all absorbed, He always stood apart because He was Himself in that environment, in love. I think that’s what attracted all the sinners to Him. He was going to tell them the truth, He wasn’t going to insult or hurt them . . .

We just insult God’s intelligence to think that we’re the arbiters of all this good and bad taste. I think Christians in this country are really hung up on a lot of things, because it makes life easy and manageable.” - Michael Roe, “The Cream Rises”

News story, make sure you listen to the media file found in the middle of the article.

You listened to the file, right?  Because it’s the first line in there that really made me want to blog about this.  Using the appeal to fear is nothing new from the Religious Right which wants nothing less than freedom and equality for all, so long as it follows conservative Christian guidelines.  The article made me think that they were overreacting, using some purple prose, maybe, but nothing really out of the ordinary.  But then I went back, read it again, and this time I listened to that file.  And this time, I had also just finished listening to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s short story Elites on Escape Pod.

I suppose that appealing to a mother’s protective instinct is likely nothing new either, especially for an organization so overtly manipulative as Focus on the Family, but still, it bothered me.  Aside from the fact that in our post-Columbine nation a grown man (in a dress or not) isn’t very likely to be able to simply walk into a school unchallenged, simply because a man does choose to wear women’s clothing does not make him a sexual predator and it is irresponsible of Focus on the Family to imply that it does.  The fact that most transvestites are heterosexual seems to have escaped Dr. Dobson and his organization.   The fact that most homosexuals are appalled at the actions of groups like NAMBLA seems to have escaped them as well.  In fact a lot seems to have escaped them.  Bruce Hausknecht, a judicial analyst for Focus on the Family, had this to say in the article:

“With SB 200, we no longer have two ’sexes’.  We enter a brave new world with a myriad of ’sexual orientations.’ This bill, unfortunately, is in keeping with a national effort by ‘transgender’ advocacy organizations to accomplish an open-bathroom policy.”

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Bruce, but we already have a myriad of sexual orientations.  Aside from heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals, we also have transvestites, hermaphrodites, and transgenders.  Of course, the last of these is purely a societal view, and groups like Focus on the Family like to believe that anybody who does not fall strictly into the first has some sort of disease.  And then we wonder why people seem to despise Christians.

It is in that light that I wish to pose this question to Focus on the Family (though even if I e-mailed it directly to them I wouldn’t expect and actual answer): just what facilities would you expect a hermaphrodite to use?  If a person has genitalia from both sexes, which restroom should they then choose?  Should they simply hold it until they got home or explode since they don’t fall into one of two generally useful but not entirely inclusive categories?

A different and better question that needs to be asked is precisely how this “tramples religious freedoms”.  It’s a question I’ve asked of some of my more theologically conservative friends, and I’ve yet to come across a reasonable answer.  This fearful attitude that the world is only one bit of legislation away from crushing the Church needs to go away.  For good.  After all, more so than this law, that attitude is unbiblical.

I love science fiction.  Reading it, writing it, watching it.  It doesn’t even always have to be very good; I just love science fiction.  But to come to a place where they hold competitions on people in Stormtrooper armor . . . well, that’s something else.  I took a break today, as I mentioned in the previous post, to get away from the chaos a bit.  As I was walking back to the con site, I was accosted and forced at spear point (I wil maintain this lie until my death) by Indiana Jim, Scott Breakall, his wife and a few others to go to a showing of the new Indiana Jones movie.  It’s funny, when Chris invited me to this con, I was afraid that he’d end up being super busy and I’d be stuck wandering around alone, knowing nobody.  However within hours of meeting many members of the podcasting community (or as they call themselves, the Tribe), I felt accepted and even liked.  Now I’m being spontaneously invited to movies.

Last night, I was sitting in the bar, engaged in a conversation with Nobilis about theology and fast food (though not at the same time).  I sat in on panels this weekend about lasers, religion, space exploration, and more and have found this community to be open, engaging, and intelligent.  Finances dictate that I will not likely be able to attend very many cons for the foreseeable future, which is too bad; I like this community, and I want to continue to be a part of it.

But I know I’ll have to go back soon.  The power of the nerd compels me.

Either that, or I’ve just gotten lazy again.

So now, for the first time since about 5 this morning, it’s quiet where I am.

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it’s because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that’s the most revolutionary insight of all. - Erica Jong

So I give my new blog this pretentious name and promise blogtrocities in the name of faith, and what do we have so far: an intro, snark, and a recipe. Well my dear readers, all three of you, I have a bit to say on a topic theological and will now share my disjointed thoughts with you.

This topic came up recently in a forum for student ministers that I post on fairly regularly. The subject was on the fairly new policy of some schools to allow co-ed dorm rooms. I’m a pretty easy going guy, I think, and while I wouldn’t want my (theoretical) children to live in a room with a member of the opposite sex, I’m not dead-set against this rule as some are.

As a person who works in student ministry, particularly in the high school and junior high school ages, I don’t much care for it when people refer to teenagers as “kids”. Sometime after World War I, we decided, as a society, to give young people a sort of extended grace period in their transitions from youth to adulthood. Like all changes, there were some trade-offs in this, some good, some less so, but as a whole, I believe that it’s better for young people to have more time to figure out what it is that they’re supposed to do with their lives while we as a society have the capacity to allow them to do so. What this essentially means is that teenagers are not adults (as they essentially used to be little more than a century ago), nor are they children (as many still seem to insist that they are). So what are they? Something in between, and thusly should they be treated. The problem is this: so long as we tell teenagers to act like adults, but expect them to act like children, we’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. Ask any psychiatrist, drill sergeant, or leader of people and they will tell you that people have a tendency to become what those most influential in their lives expect them to become. So that’s my stance on the issue, okay? We all clear on that? Good, because the next thought should come to you very naturally: if high schoolers aren’t kids, then college students sure as hell aren’t. And frankly, it’s high time that we stopped treating them as such.

If you asked me if I thought that Christianity, as Jesus taught it, was good and true, I’d answer “yes” without hesitation. If you asked me If I thought whether what the average Western culture Christian church practiced was good and true, there’d be a lot more hesitation, and the “yes” would likely be some time in coming. Don’t get me wrong, the Christian church has done quite a bit for the benefit of society (the abolishment of slavery in Western cultures, the social elevation of women from property to citizens, and appropriately for this essay, the concept of higher education among those things), but here in America at least, we still have a very Puritanical view of sex. (Much more so that the Puritans, in fact, but that’s another rant.) And modern Western Evangelicals in particular have an almost jihad-like fervor to force these views on the general population, whether the general population wants/needs them or not.

While I believe that the Gospel is good and true, as I said before, one of the major factors that I see in the teachings of Christ is that you must come to Him yourself, and more to the point, Jesus taught that no amount of legal adherence could save a soul. No, the work of Christ is about wiling submission, and if a person does not decide themselves to acknowledge the deity of Christ, then no amount of rule following is going to make them change their mind. When the voters of Michigan decided a few years ago to legally define marriage as a union between “one man and one woman” there was not a surge of homosexual individuals who said “well, shoot, now I can’t marry my lover; I guess I’d better become a Christian”. People are not convinced to look into Christianity by being forced to follow our rules, they are drawn to Christ when they see those of us who claim to follow Him demonstrate His love and compassion for the hurting.

In the midst of all of these arguments, somebody pipes up with the comment that even if no sexual relationship is going on between the students, this is still the “appearance of evil”. For those of you not fluent in Christianese, the bit of doctrine alluded to comes from a single verse: 1 Thessalonians 5:22 which says, conveniently, “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” There. That’s nice, isn’t it? One small problem, it’s only the King James Version that uses the word “appearance” in the passage in question.

The King James Version of the Bible is pleasant to read aloud, but in terms of textual accuracy, translational reliability, and simple cultural relatability, it’s a mess. I checked several other translations (notably the NIV, the NKJV, and the NASB), and the result is the same: the passage tells the reader to simply abstain from evil itself, not its appearance.

As usual, I am predicting that I’ll need to clarify here what I’m not saying here. I am not saying that it’s a good idea for Christians to simply not care about how we are perceived by society, but if we are concerned about not appearing evil, then being involved in a sexual relationship is pretty far down on the average person’s list of what evil looks like. If we wish to avoid the appearance of evil, then I have a suggestion: the next time you’re thinking of how to deal with a particular issue, don’t think of it as an issue, but think instead about dealing with a single individual.

Individuals have a way of mucking up our pre-conceived notions. If instead of saying that X is bad, we ask ourselves “How would Jesus deal with a person involved in X”, or even better, “How would Jesus want me to deal with a person involved in X?” The answers that we would arrive at would often fly in the face of the way that we actually behave. Jesus advocated and demonstrated compassion and mercy in dealing with sinners and the people whom He had the least patience with were the religious muckity mucks who were full of themselves and thought they had it all together.

If we wish to know Him and make Him better known (and in the process, appear less evil, even appear good), then we must do the same.

And about the cheese measurements: yes, those are ounces by weight. Trusting volumetric measurements of cheese is risky business, so I recommend going by weight whenever possible. It’s how you will find cheese in all of my recipes (and yes, there will be more to come), and by gummy, it’s how you should measure it at home.

It is okay to drive over 7 mph in the rain.

Really, it is.

Love,

Bryan