211. plash

This week and next I am working at a risk management and reinsurance company in Minneapolis through a temp agency. It’s been a bit of an adventure figuring out what exactly I’ll be doing, because at first it seemed that they thought I was an idiot or something. Then they discovered that I had print experience, scanning, proficiency in Microsoft Office, mail room, etc.

Essentially, I’m working with a four-person temp team that the company I’m working for has outsourced a lot of their office support needs to.

Mostly, it’s a lot of waiting around for a project to come up. On my first day, the girl I’m filling in for basically told me to bring a book. Thankfully, today I was doing mail runs (and scoping out cute males around the office–I’ve a crush on the cute guy who sits around the corner), which mostly involves doing a walk-around of both floors to check designated drop trays for any out-going mail.

For my first two days there while I was “training” (i.e., they were figuring out what I was going to be doing), I basically hung out at the front desk with the receptionist. She’s an early-middle-aged Latina with, as I soon discovered, a pretty massive inferiority complex. In the few days I’ve known her, it’s made me wonder how irritating I come across when I give in to negative thinking. She’s also one of those individuals of a certain age where you keep your head down, do your job, watch the clock, and check off the days until retirement.

Let’s call her “Paulita.”

To her credit, Paulita has been working on expanding her mind through reading and exploration of history (she calls it “research”); and she is curious about many things. However, we had a conversation yesterday morning that tested the limits of my tact and incredulity.

Even though it’s technically not allowed, she goes on the Internet to read articles and look things up. For example, yesterday afternoon we were talking about the Civil War and a visit she had to the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. In that conversation, we learned that Lee married the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, George Washington’s wife. The relation is through her son from her first marriage to Daniel Custis, who died in 1757.

Ah, Wikipedia.

Yesterday morning, while Paulita was on break, I found an article from LiveScience.com on Google News: 3,300-Year-Old Tomb with Pyramid Entrance Discovered in Egypt. She’d mentioned a fascination with ancient Egypt the day before, so I showed it to her when she got back. She mentioned something about wondering if the pyramids were built before or after Stonehenge, and I recalled learning that the very earliest of the Egyptian pyramids (c. 2,670 BCE) were built around the same time as construction on the Salisbury plain began. The circular bank and ditch enclosure of Stonehenge were first excavated around 3,100 BCE, whereas the stone rings weren’t erected until around 2,600 BCE. The Pyramids of Giza were built during the Egyptian 4th Dynasty (c. 2613 to 2494 BCE).

(I looked up all these dates just now. Don’t worry, memory usually prevents me from going full-scale nerd most of the time.)

During all this, Paulita mentioned “Biblical times” at several points, most confusingly in reference to Stonehenge. I’m assuming she was using this phrase to mean “ancient,” but at this point my brain started going into damage control mode. When I mentioned that this kind of building was going on all over Europe around this time in the Neolithic period, that it wasn’t just Egypt, she seemed slightly perplexed.

“But, how is that possible?” she asked. “When God confused the languages and spread everyone out to different parts of the world, how could there have been time for them to have built Stonehenge?”

… big eyes.

“Um… what was that?” I asked, trying to sound as if she’d used a Spanish phrase that I hadn’t caught.

“In Genesis,” she replied. “Have you read the Bible? The Tower of Babel? Men wanted to build a tower to reach to the heavens so they could become like God, and God confused their language so that they couldn’t understand each other and finish building it?”

It was at this point that a sort of United Nations general assembly popped up in my mind. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be “that” kind of atheist and tell her outright that the Bible is a book of myths that never actually happened. On the other hand, I totally wanted to be “that” kind of atheist who tells a well-meaning Christian lady that her holy book is a collection of myths that never actually happened.

Finally, I said, “Oh, yes. That. I was raised Christian” (here she made a gesture as if to say, Then you know all about it!) “… but, you know, there’s nothing in the historical record that I know of that mentions anything like that.”

Her eyes widened a little. “Oh,” she said, sounding dubious but intrigued.

I tried to steer the conversation towards some of the reading I’ve been doing lately about human evolution; about evolutionary differences between Europeans and Africans; how one group of Homo sapiens went south and developed darker skin to cope with the sun, and another went north and developed lighter skin to cope with lack of sun. Their languages evolved differently with them, depending on where they went and how cut off they were from other tribes. And during the Neolithic period, humans started settling down, building huge stone monuments like the Pyramids and Stonehenge as community gathering places to mark transitions in life– birth to death.

This is obviously a condensed version of a lightly meandering conversation that was interrupted by co-worker and the phone ringing. But hearing Paulita attempting to cross-reference history with events in the Bible was… jarring.

It was a stark reminder to me that almost half of Americans still believe that the Bible is real history, and actually happened.

I just…

… can’t…

… mind…

… stuck…

… snrgsflmsnojrssss…

141. gambit

I really shouldn’t give these people any more attention than they’re already getting, but I have an overwhelming urge to smack that smug little beatific smile off of Kalley Yanta’s face (the friendly face of fascism—every regime has one), and this question has been coming up a lot lately: “Is it true that Minnesota’s marriage law has no rational basis and only exists because of moral animosity toward gays and lesbians?”

The answer is yes.

Thus far, no sufficiently convincing argument has been brought forward by conservatives to prove that homosexuality is unnatural or harmful to society. The studies that they cite are decades old, and carried out by biased individuals who often have a religious agenda to support. Just recently, Robert Spitzer, one of the original proponents of clinical study into reparative therapy, recanted his 2001 paper that lent so much credibility afforded to the ex-gay movement. He has apologized for the harm his work has done to the GLBT community, though it will be interesting to see what move he makes next.

In the video, Yanta claims that Federal Judge Vaughn Walker’s verdict in the Proposition 8 trial was unprecedented, and that “no other federal judge has ever reached such a radical conclusion” (and unsurprisingly casts doubt on his verdict since he’s a gay man himself and obviously can’t reach a fair decision). Which is probably what they were saying about the 1967 Supreme Court ruling on Loving versus Virginia, which effectively overturned the nation’s anti-miscegenation laws and finally opened the door for inter-racial marriage, a concept which was as irrational to legislate against as same-sex marriage is today. To prohibit two human beings from being together based on something as arbitrary as the color of their skin or their sex when doing so doesn’t harm anyone isn’t rational.

Research is rather showing that homosexuality is likely congenital, like left-handedness. While probably not genetic—it’s dubious that scientists will ever find that elusive “gay gene”—those of us who are gay likely acquire our orientation the same way that heterosexuals inherit theirs. But that’s not where conservatives start. In order to continue their campaign of hatred and bigotry they have to begin with the premise that homosexuality is a choice, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. The Mormon Church issued a statement recently that it will continue to use the findings in Robert Spitzer’s 2001 study, though Spitzer himself has recanted it. Though there’s doubtless confirmation bias happening on each side, it falls to the anti-gay crowd to produce any credible, rational evidence that homosexuality is errant, detrimental or morally wrong.

Faith is by very definition irrational. Merriam-Webster defines faith as:

2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2): complete trust

3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs.

 

The Bible itself defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith does not demand proof and rather demands absolute acceptance on little to no evidence. The current traditional reading of the Bible claims that homosexuality is an abomination to God, even though there are hundreds of other practices that are also banned (e.g., tattoos, eating shellfish, blending cloth, haircuts, etc), and despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is detrimental.

So we’re currently at an impasse between Christians who insist that homosexuality is an abomination based on what their Bible says and the scientific community that has found nothing wrong with it. Yanta claims that banning same-sex marriage “is not only rational, but is in the common good.” I’ll let “rational” slip by for now, but by “common good” she evidently means the “Christian good.” No one else benefits from these discriminatory laws except for religious conservatives who are seeking to protect the status quo and enshrine their irrational, dogmatic beliefs.

It ignores the fact that, according to the Bible itself, the definition of marriage has included…

According to the Christian Bible, monogamous, heterosexual marriage was rare in the patriarchal ancient Middle East, and it’s surprisingly silent about such modes as polygamy. You’d think that if God had intended for “One Man One Woman” that he would’ve been a little more more explicit about that, so we have to assume that since men like Abraham, Isaac, David and Solomon all had multiple wives, and that since it was acceptable for women to be forced to marry their rapists that there’s more than one way to be married.

Wait—but that was a different time! That was an acceptable cultural practice back then, but we have different standards now!

Bullshit. Either the Bible is true for all peoples in all times, or it’s just another book that we can either disregard like all the others or glean what wisdom we can from it and chuck the rest. One can’t keep moving the goalposts and expect to maintain credibility.

But as to the claim that there is no animosity towards gays and lesbians in the fight to define marriage as being between one man and one woman, it’s preposterous. Lurking beneath those polished, fresh-faced veneers are fearful, intolerant bigots who think that gay people are icky. They attempt to justify their prejudice by validating it a matter of faith (which requires no proof or evidence), which is a direct violation of the Separation of Church and State. While they decry government interference in their religious practice, they think nothing of forcing their beliefs on everyone else and enshrining them into law, then cry discrimination and persecution when the secular community objects. As a friend of mine wrote me in an email the other day, “I believe in moral absolutes so I want Christians to be in control.” There it is.

The GLBT community may not have an absolute right to same-sex marriage, but neither are there grounds to ban it either in context of a civil government.

93. sisyphus

Quick aside here from NaNoWriMo.

My friend Jenny just posted a link to an article on Ye Olde Facebook that was posted by Rachel Held Evans entitled “A Non-Zero-Sum Conversation Between the Traditional Church and the Gay Community“, which I guess is a re-post of an article written by a guy named Richard Beck. I thought about commenting but then decided to write my own quick rebuttal before plunging back into the writing fray.

For those who don’t care to read or explore either of these authors or their articles, let me sum up briefly. The thrust of the piece is that the gay community and the trad Christian community have mutually compatible interests in promoting acceptance, even in the face of fundamental differences in belief. “Both groups share a mutual concern in treating others with respect, love and dignity,” Beck writes. “We share an interest in the Golden Rule. We both want to be treated well.” He also rightly observes that trad Christians have an obligation as Christians to display kindness, hospitality and generosity – three things that the church lacks in spades.

He continues:

“The game isn’t zero-sum; it’s non-zero-sum. Fighting doesn’t have to be the only thing we have in common. There are significant areas of mutual concern, locations where we can drop our fists and partner together on important Kingdom work . . . Imagine how the conversation would change between the traditional Christian and gay communities if traditional Christian communities became, say, known for their guardian angel and anti-bullying programs and initiatives, often partnering with local gay advocacy groups to get this work done.”

This is a lovely, Utopian image where everyone gets along and is able to put aside their differences and work together to build a world based on peace and love. It’s a sentiment that many of my Christian friends express (including my two best friends, Mark and Emily) in their continuing work in building a church that fosters such a worldview, and is open to discussion and bridging that conversation with the trad Christian church in bringing about real and tangible change in how Christians and gay (and really anyone who is of a non-believing persuasion–Jews, Muslims, atheists, Hindus, etc.).

Well, forgive me for not jumping on the hippie bandwagon (to be sarcastic for just a moment) but I have experienced first-hand the “openness” of the fundamentalist church. And I can say that without hesitation that my friends will be fighting an uphill battle both ways to start that conversation; and maybe that says something of their love for people, and their willingness to not give up.

The problem with the trad Christian community and why I think this Utopian world will never come about is that their beliefs about the Bible and about this world will always prevent this. It’s why Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, James Dobson, Peter LaBarbera and the rest of the anti-gay crowd can say the things they do and still sleep at night. They honestly believe that they are doing homosexuals a favor by “proclaiming the Truth” (and yes, I am using the capital T there purposefully) in order to free them from their “lifestyle of sexual bondage,” which I think was something like the phrase Bachmann used once.

Underlying their actions is the fundamental Christian belief that this world is not all there is, and that a better world awaits those who love and follow Jesus after death. Amongst the Evangelicals is the additional caveat that you have to “proclaim him as your Lord and Savior.” Just try doing a search for “how to become a Christian.”

“If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” – Romans 10:9 (NASB)

It’s this eschatology that allows them to believe that the only thing that matters is getting to the right side in the afterlife. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS EXCEPT FOR JESUS. That “nothing else” includes sexual orientation, because obviously God created us all with a heterosexual orientation–right? So what does it matter if you have to live 70 years in total misery or loneliness if at the end of all that you have an eternity with Jesus?

[hold for laughs]

It’s this view that will not allow any sort of conversation between gays and trad Christians, and I don’t know that Richard Beck or Rachel Held Evans really understand that. I have the sense that they grew up in much more generous Christian denominations that were more life-affirming and dignity-affording. Then again, maybe they do and like the pacifist protesters getting beaten down in the film Gandhi they know what they’re in for.

All I know is that until trad Christians back down from their position of biblical literalism and inerrancy, there can be no conversation, for to even back down would be to waver in devotion to the Word and to God, which means jeopardizing their eternal security. My own parents would rather hold to that notion: that if I continue to “live as a homosexual” that I will one day suffer an eternity in hell while they enjoy a blessed eternity with Je-sus. (No, my parents are not Southern televangelists, but it’s fun to make them sound like they are.

It was partly because of this that I became an atheist in the first place (and I’ll be devoting my 100th blog entry to the reasons why I am an atheist). Jesus supposedly stood for love, affording dignity to all persons and speaking out against hypocrisy. And yet his followers resemble more the men who allegedly put him to death, and are putting gays to death every day in one form or another. They will continue to fight against gay marriage and equal rights for gays. They will oppose anti-bullying measures because it “encourages the proliferation and tolerance of homosexuality in schools.” They will rail against the teaching of evolution, ignoring all evidence that contradicts and disproves creationism.

Because the bible told them so.

72. blessing

This morning I was listening to This American Life from 29 July, a show in two acts about thugs and various kinds of thuggery. In the first act, a man in Egypt is subjected to the nightmare of beatings, torture, false imprisonment and then charged with being a thug, all because he wasn’t going along with the military coup before and during the ousting of Hosni Mubarak.

In the second act, a social worker fights to redeem a young man who enters the criminal justice system who she is determined to save and believes in against all evidence to the contrary. As the story goes, he is eventually connected to a horrific murder, goes to prison, escapes, and kills two more people before he is finally caught and sentence to death row. Through it all, the woman maintains his innocence—until he finally confesses to the murder he was originally accused of, as well as another murder that he was never suspected of, because “he found God . . . and needed to atone for what he’d done.”

Later on, she goes to visit him in the maximum security prison where he will eventually face execution. He began to change, the story went, one day while flipping through the trial documents.

He looked at the photo of his victim, the girl he killed, alive and beautiful. Then he held it side-by-side with her autopsy photo and thought, I did that. He pauses and puts a hand over his face, as if he’s collecting himself enough to continue. But watching Kenneth relive this is like watching a bad play. The words are disconnected from his gestures. He makes a show of weeping, lowering his eyes, shaking his head, and covering his face with his arms. When he looks up again, I don’t see any tears.

The crime for which he went to prison involved robbing two female university students, then later kidnapping them, taking them out into the middle of nowhere and shooting both of them. One girl died; another survived and managed to get to help. “He went back, he said, let them beg for their lives, and shot them, over and over.”

Then the victims of his prison break. A farmer, the one with the truck, was trying to run away when Kenneth gunned him down. And finally, this. After the car chase in Missouri, state troopers made Kenneth walk over and look at the lifeless body of the delivery driver, thinking Kenneth would be remorseful. Instead, Kenneth says all he saw was the man who got in the way of his escape, and he spit on the body.

In one of the earlier episodes of the fourth season of Torchwood: Miracle Day, a child molester and murderer (Bill Pullman in a fantastic change of role for him) is executed by lethal injection, but due to The Blessing (the event by which everyone in the world stops dying) occurring just before his execution is carried out, he survives and is released since he cannot be tried or executed for the same crime twice. In the second episode, he is confronted during a TV interview à la 60 Minutes with the image of the girl he brutally killed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, weeping, tears welling up in his eyes.

“What good is ‘sorry,’ Mr Danes?” the interviewer scoffs. “Is it going to do anything for Mrs Cabina every morning when she wakes up?”

What is it about “finding God” that is supposed to engender sympathy or forgiveness for even the most savage of criminals? As if praying a prayer erases a multitude of wrongs – if not on earth then in heaven. This is one of my primary objections to Christianity: that you could savagely murder a room full of people and then have a pang of conscience, ask for God’s forgiveness, be rightly executed for your crime, and go straight to heaven to be with Jesus for all eternity without a blemish on your soul. Because Jesus paid it all.

Quick primer in atonement theology. There are two main schools of thought here:

• The Christus Victor, or ransom, theory: Humanity is enslaved to Satan on account of the Fall, wherein Adam and Eve imputed Original Sin to all their descendants. The best analogy here is in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Edmund betrays his brother and sisters to the White Witch (the Satan figure in Narnia) and becomes her slave since every traitor is her lawful prey. To save him from death, Aslan (the Christ figure) dies in his place, but because of the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, “when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table [i.e., the Cross] would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
• The Penal substitution, or satisfaction, theory: Same premise as Christus victor; but here, God is the Righteous Judge and humanity is the Wretched Criminal. “Sin” is the inexorable debt to be repaid to God for Man’s rebellion against him, and Man is automatically found guilty by God, the only perfect being in existence; and so he is condemned to be separated from God for all eternity in Hell (e.g., life in prison). But Jesus, the perfect sinless Son of God (don’t get me started on trinitarian theology), is sent to serve that sentence and is born the God-man and executed, thus fulfilling the conditions of the sentence. And God declares the debt as having been paid in full.

Richard Dawkins responded to the theology of atonement, how Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Crucifixion, and Original Sin in an interview with Howard Conder this past March. Dawkins said: “The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his Son tortured to death as a scapegoat is, surely from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them?

“If there’s something I can’t stand about Christianity, it’s this obnoxious doctrine of Original Sin, which I think is actually a hideous, and demeaning and a vengeful doctrine. It’s the idea that one can be absolved; that a sin by somebody else has to be paid for by a different person, which is a horrible idea.

“It would be persuasive if the judge said, you’re forgiven. That would be great. That would the kind of thing one could empathize with. But that’s not what he said. He said, ‘Okay, we’re going to hang somebody else for your crime’.

“I think it’s a horrible idea that – given that the judge is all-powerful; given that the judge has the power to forgive if he wants to – the only way he can do it is to sacrifice his son. I mean, what an incredibly unpleasant way to do it, given that you have the power to forgive, that you are all-powerful!”

So what’s so wrong with a murderer (or anyone else for that matter—liar, adulterer, thief, homosexual, or whatever else you call a “sin”) being forgiven and getting off scot-free? Or with Jesus paying your sin-debt for you? It’s precisely that—you get off scot-free. And let’s say that the people you killed weren’t Christians. Let’s say you tortured them—horribly—before you then murdered them, had that pang of conscience later after you realized what you did, prayed “the prayer” and were “saved.” The problem is that you sent however many into an eternity in hell (because they weren’t “saved”) while you yourself skip out of jail into a blissful eternity in heaven and Jesus pays the $200.

What kind of a theology is this? To borrow from Julia Sweeney Letting Go of God, it would be as though Hitler had a “come to Jesus” moment right before he died. According to atonement theology, if he was truly sincere, no one would sit him down and say, “You fucked up, buddy! Now you’re going to spend an eternity in hell!” Quite the opposite. His sin of having murdered millions of people (among other things) would be expunged, paid for on the Cross by Jesus.

Supposing an inmate who suffocated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz ran into the man responsible for their death in heaven? Or Susie Cabina running into Oswald Danes who raped and murdered her as a 12-year-old? Or Cecil Boren or Dominique Hurd meeting Kenneth Williams (the kid from the This American Life story earlier)? Or conversely, any of them going to hell and learning that their murderer had been pardoned by God?

Now, it may be fair to say that I just don’t like this arrangement because I don’t think it’s just. God sees all sins as equal, and if a sinner truly repents, who are we to begrudge God for granting pardon since we are just as guilty as the murderer? Does that make me the Unmerciful Servant whose debt the king forgave? Or a grumbling vineyard worker who resented the owner for paying those who showed up at the last shift the same as those who had worked all day? Possibly—to both.

However, as to the question of whether a murderer who “found God” should be worthy of our forgiveness, I say the only person who can truly forgive the wrong is the victim him or herself.

In Tony Kushner’s play Perestroika, Ethel Rosenberg returns to haunt Roy Cohn, who effectively killed her by pulling strings with the presiding judge to get a death sentence. As Roy lies dying of AIDS, Ethel stands at his bedside.

I decided to come here so I could see could I forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly I have born my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needle-sharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June Nineteen. It burns acid green.

I came to forgive but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ’cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you couldn’t ever defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: Better he had never lived at all.

In the scene that follows, Roy feigns reverting to a childlike state, calling for his mother, begging her to sing to him. At first, Ethel is bitter, angry, and refuses, but finally relents when he persists. She sings him an old Yiddish song, “Shteit a bocher.” Then, once she thinks he’s dead and turns to go, he suddenly sits up and exclaims, “I can’t believe you fell for that ma stuff, I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I WIN!” After which he actually dies.

Towards the end of the play, Ethel returns in a final gesture of forgiveness to help Louis say Kaddish over Roy. They end with the blessing, “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya-aseh sholom olenu v’al col Yisroel v’imru omain. You sonofabitch.” The Hebrew translates to, “He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace upon us and upon all Israel; and say, ‘Amen’.”

So in the end, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, a God who pardons the unpardonable and allows his son to be tortured to death for our sins is utterly offensive. On the other hand, what are the limits of forgiveness in light of eternity? What is the extent of forgiveness? And what is the extent of retribution?

Many friends of mine say that the criminal justice system should be restorative instead of merely punitive—that the purpose should be to eventually restore an individual to right standing in society (provided that there is no danger posed to society). But to what extent can a debt be considered “paid”? Does such a person deserve to walk free, or receive our collective forgiveness?

68. blinding

I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head

I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow
– Arcade Fire, “My body is a cage” (from Neon Bible)

---

Yesterday afternoon I came across an article on the Huffington Post by David Lose entitled “Adam, Eve & the Bible.” He starts out by comparing the Biblical story to the legend of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or Paul Revere warning the colonists (or the British, depending on whose history you listen to), then launching into discussion on Scriptural authority, problems with the Bible read as a historical or scientific text, and fundamentalist insecurity about the veracity of the Bible and of truth in religious belief.

NPR even aired a story on August 9th about evangelicals questioning the existence of the Biblical famous first couple (leave it to NPR to find evangelicals willing to admit to that on record). According to Scripture, all of humanity descended from one literal man and one literal woman in the Garden of Eden. However, as Dennis Venema, a professor at Trinity University, is quoted in the article, “that would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years.” There is too much genetic variation in the human genome today for that to be true. It’s even more ludicrous if you ascribe, as evangelicals do, to a “young earth” theory (i.e., that the earth is 6 to 10,000 thousand years old).

I was taught Young Earth Creationism growing up and believed it for a long time—until I heard and was convinced by Richard Dawkins. Evolution was touted as thought rebellion against God, a rejection of Biblical teaching on the origins of the universe, the earth and man. In 5th grade, my Sunday school teacher at the time was a colleague of Australian creationist Ken Ham (whose famous one-liner response to evolution is “How do you know? Were you there? Do you know someone who was?”) and had arranged for him to come to my church to do a seminar on Creationism. I had flashbacks recently after seeing a video of school children at his Creation Museum, who were about my age when I saw Ken Ham. When asked how they knew Creationism was true, most of the kids stumbled back with canned-like responses such as, “Because it’s in the Bible” or “My parents told me,” reflecting a lack of intellectual and critical foundation in Christian fundamentalist thought.

One curious aspect of the article was when Venema was later quoted as saying, “There is nothing to be alarmed about. It’s actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world — and from a Christian perspective, that’s an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence.”

This seems like an odd thing to say, partly because of the weight Evangelicals place on the reliability of the Bible, but also since the Genesis story was a point of departure for me from Christianity. For me, the similarities between the Biblical creation story and early Mesopotamian accounts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were too close for comfort, so it’s likely that in forming his creation story, the author of Genesis drew from that or even earlier legends to write his own, with Yahweh at its center.

The Bible hangs upon the premise that humanity fell from grace as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, leading to Christ being enfleshed in order to take our place to suffer God’s wrath. The theology of the Apostle Paul, which forms the bedrock of theology in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant faiths, is built on this premise. (That alone could take up a whole post, but I’m trying to keep this as close to 1,000 words as possible.)

I can see how there might not be much to worry about if the first few chapters of Genesis are a metaphor for the creation of the world—or, as David Lose put it, “The story of Eden is the history of humanity writ small.” The Bible was written by a Bronze-age people that didn’t have or expect solid scientific evidence. Lose writes that the Bible “is a collection of testimony, confessions of faith made by persons so gripped by their experiences of God they had to share them using whatever literary and cultural devices were at hand.” Why should we saddle an ancient text with modern expectations?

It would be one thing if this were just personal belief. However, from this story of Adam and Eve sprang an institution that is responsible for the torture, oppression, abuse and slaughter of millions based on an imperialist theology and eschatology (the same could be said too for Islam, or any other belief system). It had better be more than a story since billions of people have based and are basing their lives on it, and millions have led lives of misery for the sake of “Christ and his kingdom.” And, as my last article discusses, a radical, conservative interpretation of God and the Bible is currently being used to shape political policy, with tangible effects. So if it’s just myth, somebody has a lot of explaining to do.

At this point I’m asking myself, “Self, why are you making a big deal of this? So what if it’s true or not? Even if it’s not true in the literal sense, it’s still true psychologically, in the way that other stories are ‘true’.” After all, what’s wrong with a God creating the universe (or setting evolution in motion and letting it play out), or even Jesus dying for our sins?

Because as nice as those stories are, inherent to belief in religion is a certain amount of willful blindfolding that must be done in order to maintain that belief. You must be willing to accept certain precepts on faith alone, such as the claim that Jesus was the Son of God—or that God even exists—in the face of a lack of evidence or even to the contrary. It’s likely that there was a man in Judea in the 1st century C.E. named Yeshua; that he taught some really radical things; and that the Jewish religious leaders had him executed, but no genuine proof he truly performed miracles or physically rose from the dead. His followers certainly believed he was who he claimed to be—though as Robert Parsig writes (as quoted by Dawkins), “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”

I consider myself a naturalist and a secular humanist. While I acknowledge the possibility and likelihood of a “god,” that which is “true” must be quantifiable by what we see and observe in the known world and universe. Science tells us that humanity could not have sprung from two original humans on the basis of the genome, so if the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, the rest of the Bible probably is too. What science is showing us through its evidential work is that humanity probably evolved over millions of years, gradually developing the tools and skills for survival, including language and consciousness.

So I would put it to you, dear reader: Where do we draw the line between artifice and delusion? Is a belief in a transcendent reality (and a transcendent deity) incompatible with the pursuit of reason and rationality? And if not, does it matter which system of belief you follow so long as it brings you closer to that “inner spark of divine light”?

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References

Arcade Fire (2007). My body is a cage. On Neon Bible [CD] Durham: Merge.
Hagerty, B. (9 August 2011) Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.
Lose, D. (17 August 2011) Adam, Eve & the Bible.

58. truth

Where does our story begin today?

It begins with me waking up at 6am with my best friend at the Hotel Minneapolis, where I stayed the night because I was in no state to drive. She’s been staying in Rochester with her dad for the next few weeks and came up to Minneapolis with another friend of her’s from Iowa. She just left her husband and decided to get some room to breathe, decompress and put some distance between her and her husband. So the three of us had dinner last night and then crashed in their room.

The sad thing is that they’ve been married eleven years, and have tried to do everything to make things work. Even sadder is the fact that up until last week, when she left, he thought things were at least starting to get better, though the truth was that she was the one doing all the work and the changing, and was emotionally drained from trying to keep him happy. She hadn’t realized how unhappy she was or how bad things had gotten until another friend of her’s asked point blank why she was still with her husband. So, last Wednesday, we spent most of the day while he was at work packing up her things and moving her out.

The hardest thing about ending a relationship is often the fear of letting go of the idea of what it was, of losing everything that was good about it, and of that part of your identity dying, especially if the relationship lasted several years. Like, eleven years.

Or twenty.

In my last entry, I described the awfulness that ensued on my birthday that led to the loss of a good friend and my faith in God. Frankly, the whole business with Seth was only the final blow that knocked me off the fence and into facing the truth of my situation, which is that I’d basically been holding into a faith for the sake of being with him. He and some other friends are in the process of starting a church geared towards those who have been hurt or rejected by the Church, including GLBT Christians and those who are interested in the Christian faith but haven’t been afforded a place in the community. But the result of that conversation on my birthday made me realize that I haven’t been a Christian for a long time—possibly ever.

Driving back to my house this morning, I realized that this whole thing has felt like the death of a twenty-year-long relationship. At the age of eight I began to identify as a Christian, and since then the church has been my community. My whole identity has been wrapped up in the reality of God, of theology, and of a Judeo-Christian morality and ethic. My decisions have been made based on whether what I’m doing is the will of God, or whether a given activity or project would glorify God. It took me nearly ten years to finally come out because of what the Bible taught about homosexuality. So to turn around after nearly twenty years of living with this feels like the end of a marriage that hasn’t been working for a long time, and the children are all out of the house now and we’re trying to find a reason to stay together.

This honestly wasn’t a huge surprise. As early as 2006 I was beginning to question the validity of the Bible, whether it was true and if it mattered whether it’s true (and if it wasn’t true, what that meant), and really wasn’t finding satisfactory answers to these questions in my Christian community. In fact, quite the opposite. “Down that dangerous road lies emptiness and misery,” was the general response. So I shut up because it was easier than enduring the looks and the remonstrations about “enduring to the end” and “praying for faith.” When I came out, I started with the Bible and seeing what it really had to say about gays, because what God had to say about this was important and I wasn’t satisfied with the idea that I was broken or that God had given me these desires only to bury them. That’s a whole other post, but what I found wasn’t assuring, though not in the way I feared. I realized what a malleable and flimsy thing translation was, and how every Biblical translator has an agenda that works its way into the text. So how could I really believe anything that it had to say?

A few months ago while temping I listened to the This American Life episode “Godless America,” in which Julia Sweeney tells the story of her journey from being a committed Catholic to atheism, which is an excerpt from her show “Letting Go of God.” I’d heard the This American Life story a while ago, and at the time felt rather superior to her story. I went to a Christian liberal arts college; had a degree in Biblical and theological studies; studied and discussed theology; and had been going to church all my life and had even studied other worldviews in depth and was convinced in the rightness of Christianity. It offered all the answers to life’s persistent questions. Atheism was the ultimate cop-out, a failure to deal with layers of complexity, rejecting God rather than face the questions.

But if I had to be honest, in that smugness was also fear—fear that maybe there was something to her experience and what she was saying. I’d grown up my whole life with God, with Him being there, listening to and watching over me, and the idea of Not-God was, well, unsettling. It meant turning my back on everything I’d ever believed and been taught by my family, in my many years of Christian education, and by the Church. It meant that everything in life is just coincidence; that we’re here by chance and there’s no one minding the store. It meant that everyone at my church was essentially believing a myth; that there was no one looking out for or listening to people unjustly thrown in prison, or being tortured, or suffering. Worse, it also meant that this is all there is—that there is no afterlife, no Eternal Life, no salvation.

So on my birthday, Seth rebuffing me for the final time was the last straw. Since there wasn’t a future with him, there was no reason to call myself a Christian anymore since I was staying in it for him, which is a terrible reason to do anything. I felt like Anna Kendrick’s character in Up In The Air, having relocated her entire life to Omaha for a guy who ultimately dumps her by text message, and feeling completely adrift; or like George Clooney’s character in the same film, thinking he’d finally found the woman of his dreams and that this new vision of his life was actually going to work, and showing up at her door to surprise her—only to discover that she was married, with children.

One of the big things I’ve lost since leaving the church is the community. For as long as I can remember, the church has provided a central locus that gave shape and direction to my life, from the AWANA program as a kid, to youth group as a teenager, to adult choir and orchestra in church, to weddings, funerals and everything in between. It was a way to commemorate and ritualize the important moments in life, like chapter breaks in a novel that organize an otherwise an uninterrupted and nebulous blur of days and years and shifting memories. There really isn’t another community that offers that kind of stability—but that isn’t a good reason to accept an entire belief system, is it?

A few days ago I did some searching on agnostic groups that might exist in my area, and came across another site that I’d heard about, again, on This American Life—Meetup.com, a site that exists to bring together different groups of people interested in the same things. There was a group called “Former Fundamentalists” that met for coffee on Sunday mornings, so I decided to check it out this morning. That ended up not happening as I got completely lost due to some poor directions and ended up giving up and going to Caribou instead to write about this whole misadventure.

While driving over to find the little coffee shop, I started thinking about this new direction in my life. I’m always suspicious about my own motives, and have been questioning whether I’m choosing agnosticism for the right reasons—and mainly whether it’s because of Seth, the guy I’ve been foolishly in love with for the last year. After all, it’s equally absurd to reject a belief system because a man done you wrong as it is to stay in it for him. There, in my living room, getting ready to go out and meet up with these fellow agnostics and former fundamentalists, I had to admit to myself that, yes, I had decided to reject Christianity because of him; that I was angry at him, and am still angry at the institution of the church itself; and that I hadn’t found a church that was both accepting of gays and lesbians and also rigorous and uncompromising in its approach to faith and theology.

There’s also the fact that I really liked the church that Seth and my friends were putting together, and was really excited that it might be a place I could finally belong to. However, he was to be the senior pastor, and seeing as I still have and probably always will have feelings for him, I could never go there while he’s a mainstay. Seeing him hurts too much. But that’s life. An added bonus is that my dating pool is that much bigger for dating other agnostics and “nones” (as they’re called).

Sometimes it’s the right move to leave a relationship if it’s abusive or unhealthy, or if it was disingenuous to begin with. But what if you realize that you were the problem to begin with, or even that maybe you’ve been letting other voices alter and shade your perceptions of that relationship, making it appear worse than it ever was?

Le sigh. The pursuit of truth is neither an easy nor a comfortable road.