Political rant...

I just had my windshield replaced, and got a free lecture included on how liberals are the problem with politics because all they do is badmouth republicans. I sat there nodding my head and going "uh-huh," and "ok" for the entire time not once daring to point out that he was merely badmouthing liberals.

I want to give the guy a fair shot. His opinions are extensively researched, and he tries to back them up as much as possible, and I respect that. But I have trouble with someone that stands so firmly on opinions of right and wrong that he views other peoples opinions automatically as unresearched and ignorant.

Mind you, this all was said after I admitted my own liberal bias. But what could I really say about it all? I mean, my opinions are ignorant, based merely on emotion and not scientifically researched (he's an intelligent design guy to boot).

What disappointed me I have to say was my own reluctance to step forward with my opinion. In the end, he was right. I sat and listened to him give his own reasons for his own opinion, and never backed up any of my own. In fact, I remained mostly silent. I remained silent while he claimed that the homosexual community is "in his face" about their rights. I remained silent as he explained to me that every other news station in the world (he also knew I was a journalist) is liberally biased, except for Fox News. I remained silent as he took values that I held strongly and accused them of being unresearched and unscientific. I remained silent as he badmouthed science teachers (my wife will be one soon).

So I had a chance today to try and put my money where my mouth is, and say, at the very least, "I don't agree." And I sat instead and nodded my head and listened. It's easy for me to excuse this behavior as my being a silent observer. My job, I could argue, is to merely observe, and learn. But my values tell me that we have a big problem with talking to each other in this world. We sit on one side of the fence and defend ourselves by speaking ill of the other side. My silent observer excuse is just that, an excuse, and excuse that covers up my own fear of stepping out, taking a risk, and standing firmly on a subject.

As we talked, I will admit I tried to defend my career choices a little bit. I told him that I felt that if I had an opinion, that I should have the confidence that the people of America are smart enough that when they see the evidence, they will agree. The job of a journalist is to present the information, and leave it to the readers/viewers to make up their own mind. He and I agree on this it seems.

"You should be a conservative," he said to me after this. I got his respect apparently; he'd like to read some of my writing. My entirely biased hope is that he will walk away remembering that he had respect for a liberal with liberal opinions.

The bipolar nature of the world (politically and religiously) is damaging us all, and it's easy for me to stick with the liberal camp, but in the end we are all far too different to base everything in the world on a binary doctrine. Right, wrong, left, right, sacred, abomination etc etc etc.

The other side of the fence

As public policy and the media would have you believe, there are two factions of Christianity. One follows closely with scripture, and is in general socially conservative. The other does not take the Bible literally, and is in general socially liberal. Or if we wanted to put it in crudely generalized terms, one group lines up for Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and the other will line up for The Da Vinci Code once it comes out.

The division is difficult for many people who do not fit with one assumption or the other. The vast array of beliefs, let me rephrase that, the vast network of beliefs is far too complicated to be put in the same two-camp terms to which our political system is restricted. There are far to many factors involved when talking about religion and faith. There is traditional and orthodox liturgy, versus contemporary liturgy. There is a literal approach to scripture, an interpretive approach, a historical approach and there's even the lets-just-not-approach-it-at-all method of which many of us have at one time or another dabbled. A system of beliefs is as complicated and diverse as individual personalities, to view these things as partisan, or polarized in any way is largely destructive to communities of faith.

My wife, Megan, is in a masters program for education. Part of her program involves a diversity encounter in which students study and expose themselves to groups with which they are not necessarily familiar or comfortable. Megan's group chose conservative Christians, which I think was incredibly wise considering her desire to be a science teacher, and the issues of religion that relate. So with that we headed off to a local Four Square Church.

I must confess that my liberal, scripturally interpretive, fundamentalist fearing, historical Jesus studying and traditionally liturgical, smells and bells Anglican background was terrified. Here I was heading into what I expected to be a fundamentalist, altar calling, pop song singing, Jesus Christ praising, arms in the air waving four Square Church (oh yeah, and a partridge in a pear tree). My mind swam with all types of assumptions and predictions. Would they do an altar call? Would someone invite me to let Jesus into my heart? Would this church be full of teenagers like that movie, Saved and would someone look at my and know psychically that I was obviously a heathen and needed to intervene on my soul's behalf?

With that we head into the church. And on a few of the above-mentioned points, I was right. The church was all about the J-man, and many of them waved their arms in the air. They did sing pop songs, in fact they had a full pop band, drums and all (man we never had drums at the Episcopal church!). But they didn't do an altar call, nor did anyone look at me with suspicious eyes, and there was most definitely no assumption that I was a heathen.

The sermon, I must confess, was ok. I had expected a lot of talk about putting your faith in Jesus, and how Jesus would make everything ok, and while there was a small element of that, the sermon was largely about being satisfied. The guest preacher talked about Americans, and how we eat until we are full, over full in fact, we eat until we can't eat anymore, but the French, as a chef explained to him, eat until they are satisfied, and no more. It's a sermon that, minus the discussion of God and Jesus, could have been plopped into any political discussion about globalization and America as a superpower without anyone flinching.

We are, sadly, a world at war. And being a world at war there is the constant assumption of two sides: the allies, and the enemy. I have found that this spreads throughout society, and is not limited to the two countries in battle. The right versus the left, the church versus the state, the religious versus the non-religious, democrats and republicans, and I could go on and on and on. But when it gets down to it, most people don't lie on one side or the other, but lie where their heart is most content. Despite the extremist groups that take the media microphone, most people are just plain folks trying to get by in the world. What I learned at this Four Square Church is that although it's not my style, and our beliefs seem very different, I believe strongly that we are all more alike than we are different.

Weekly foundations

Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the loss we receive when we don't have a faith community, and this notion has lingered in my head a while longer than I really expected it to, and here's why. Currently, my wife and I do not have a community with strong attachments. We recently moved from our community in Seattle to study at the University of Oregon in Eugene. We left our friends, most of our family, and our church.

We had found a church that had space for just what I was discussing yesterday, it was a safe place, with a strong community in which I could walk in and say "Y'know, I have no idea what the hell is going on here," and I would be met with nods of head, and support. Here in Eugene, we have not yet found a community, church or otherwise, we can call home.

Now every word of encouragement from a professor or classmate, I hang on to and treasure deeply. Another student in my cohort said "It's just all so noisy" referring to the day-to-day juggle of class work, internships, new friends and coworkers. I heard this and fought back tears I know will come gushing once I've found that safe place.

Once a week in Seattle, we knew we could come and see people we cared about, and follow a little bit of ritual that would help us restart our week. Here in the midst of work, classes, studying and internships one day looks vastly different from the next, abandoning any discernable pattern. Weekends come along, and we're more sleep hungry than we are community hungry, and being the introverts we are, surrounded by new faces every single day, we take the sleep. What we lose is the foundation, the stability of something that happens with consistency, something we can depend on.

This is why we build connections, make communities. People need patterns, something they can depend on, and without them we struggle. By myself, I know I could get by doing what I am doing with my life, but it's not something I would ever choose. A friend said to me that his philosophy in life was based on the idea that we're all here to hang out and talk with each other. And with all my introspective naval gazing I've never come up with a reason for us to be here on this planet sounder than that (although I would probably amend it with a few things about being nice to each other and not killing each other). That's what communities offer, and more and more I see how necessary it is and how it stabilizes us.

I'll end with another quote that may say all of this better than I can, this time by Brian Andreas: "There are things you do because they feel right, and they make no sense, and they make no money, and it may be the real reason we are all here: to love each other, and to eat each other's cooking, and say it was good."

Person of faith? Or faithfully agnostic? Pt 2

I ran across a quote in a book by Gordon Kaufman called In The Beginning... Creativity which relates nicely to Wednesday's post on faith and agnosticism.

"I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I cannot speak to the context of this thought, and what it says to me may be as far from Wittgenstein's intention as it can get, but it says a great deal from my point of view. It's almost a mantra for us faithful agnostics. Those of us who have strayed from traditional belief systems with the strong conviction that belief systems are inherently flawed, but still view things in terms of "faith" or "spirit."

I embrace the notion of being faithfully agnostic because I've learned that I do not have any other option. I, and I believe many others are as well, am incapable of looking at something without thinking of it terms of my own faith. What is missing for these people is a place to practice faith that is based more on question and mystery than it is on conscious deity. The end result is that one can't turn their back on the church or other faith organizations without a certain amount of loss.

Churches, all churches, offer something to their congregation, and people attend a particular church depending on their need. Many need the comfort of a cosmic plan, the idea that someone is watching our back, others need the comfort of community, of belonging to a group, still others wish to be challenged on how to live their life and think about it in terms of spirituality and faith. Often, however, we find that many churches offer an answer to loneliness, or the promise that Jesus will take care of their problems, and those problems will be solved once someone really places all their faith in Jesus.

This is a comfort I can relate to. I wish I could feel like someone else is guiding me through my life and helping me deal with the day to day, but I don't believe that is the case. I don't believe that, and I experience a small death of a god I grew up to believe in. I did not fully give up on this god until adulthood, but I had an experience that left me questioning the nature of prayer, and the protective god at a very young age.

We had a series of Christian cassette tapes when I lived in Oklahoma, called Psalty the Singing Songbook. It was about a giant, blue, walking and talking hymnal that had adventures with kids singing songs and solving their problems through prayer (but most often it was figured out through teamwork, but I digress). In one instance they sang a song about praying, and a boy gave a little story about how he had lost his baseball and he tried to find it, but couldn't. So he got on his knees and prayed, and when he opened his eyes his baseball was right in front of him.

Well, I didn't have a baseball, but I did have a dollar coin that I got at a coin show. My family has a history of collecting coins, and this one lived in my pocket for a long time so I could show it off, and inevitably, it was lost. I searched, and I was incredibly frustrated by this, and in a moment of desperation I remembered that song. So I got down on my knees and prayed, in a location where I thought the coin might be lost, and where god could most easily direct my sight to find it. And when I opened my eyes... no coin. So I tried it again, and again, and again, and each moment the idea that god would take care of my problems died just a little bit more.

When realizing that in many senses, we really are alone, we almost want that promise that faith organizations (it's not limited to Christianity...) make, to follow this simple plan, and you're life will be ok, and for so many we find that all these organizations can do is wrap the same empty box in different paper. So where are the communities of people that don't claim to have the answers, the people that can't give us the comfort of an all seeing deity, but of a community that all has the same problems in life and the same questions of why we're all here.

I can't word it better than Wes Nisker's quote in the July/August issue of Utne who says "Just imagine how good it would feel if we all got together once in a while in large public gatherings and admitted that we don't know why we are alive, that nobody knows for sure if there's a higher being who created us, and that nobody really knows what the hell's going on here."

It's comforting isn't it? It's a comfort and support from real people, and a comfort that doesn't come with empty promises. It's a comfort that actually can offer the feeling that we aren't alone, but it's not because of a distant, untouchable deity, but from the power and support of community.

I'm so freaking sick of the Da Vinci Code!!!!!

I have had my copy of The Da Vinci Code sitting on my shelf for well over two years. It remains there unread in hopes that I can read it without people asking "Well? What did you think?" My desire is to get by without having to discuss whether or not I thought elements of the book were in fact true or not, and with the upcoming movie it'll be years before that happens. The real surprise for many involved in the Da Vinci Code Cult (DVCC?) is that I plan to sit down and read it at face value, with the presumption that it is, by and large, a piece of fiction.

Now before you click the "comment" button explaining how Dan Brown himself stands by many of the ideas printed in the book, citing Holy Blood, Holy Grail... I'm well aware, but I have to ask at what point this book reached the second-coming-of-jesus level that it seems to have. I exaggerate you say?

A New York Times article, found here, talks about "those millions of people worldwide who devoured the book and made it, some claim, the most successful book in history after the Bible."
I've gotta stop here and repeat a that last piece just so it sinks in...
"the most successful book in history after the Bible."

Who ARE these people? Where do they live? And can we please sit down over coffee and talk about this???
I'm not offended in defense of the Bible here, but I question how seriously people take a novel, yes a NOVEL. I'm reluctant to make comparisons to the Harry Potter phenomenon, but it's not far off.

Equally exasperating are the groups in direct opposition of the book. They're coming from a different angle, but guilty of the same crime, taking a piece of literature way more seriously than necessary. See the same article as list above for more details on this.

Apparently groups in opposition to the book are lobbying Sony Films to omit or "soften" parts of the story for its film adaptation. Which begs the question, at what point did disagreeing factions become taboo? Christianity itself is a mess of disagreement and denominational splits. So why does one group have the right to come out and ask another to "soften" their statements?

The Da Vinci Code has a strong following of people searching for the historical Jesus, which studies archeological evidence as much as it studies scripture, so what's the problem with a fictional book (all together now everyone FICTIONAL) telling a story about this study? To me this is akin to an atheist asking Mel Gibson to soften the idea of Jesus being the son of god, since, y'know, atheists don't believe in a god.

Believe me when I say, I'm not in opposition of people finding important pieces of their faith in unusual places, even fictional books, I find it all the time, and as I will often touch on here at Discord/Harmony, it's a very important and life giving aspect of my spirituality to use non scriptural art as a way of understanding god, but loosely based spirituality, or even theology in a fiction book is no replacement for studied scholarship. Nor is it deserving of the frighteningly large cult following that it has accrued.

In the end this is not at all unlike the opposition of the aforementioned child wizard series when it first came out. I was working at a bookstore when the boom hit, and, much like The Da Vinci Code, a series of books, both favorable and not, came out dissecting what this series means to the religious community.

My favorite title: What's A Christian To Do With Harry Potter?

The answer: Just read it, nothing more.

Person of faith? Or faithfully agnostic?

Last night a good friend called me with a theological question on his mind. He called me "being a person of faith, or someone who respects agnostic debate" (my apologies if I've quoted this incorrectly.)

The question on his mind wasn't what troubled me about the conversation, but the fact that he called me "a person of faith." Frankly, I'm not sure if I can live up to the expectations and assumptions that come with those words. It leaves me wondering what being "a person of faith" means, and whether that's really an appropriate term for me.

In the defense of my friend, he knows me to be someone that thinks about theology and spirituality quite a bit. He also knows about my involvement with churches and faith communities, and knows the books I've read, as he's been forced to read just a few of them. And I'd have to agree, that if I was in his shoes I would think that "a person of faith" might be the right way to put it. So why does it leave a lurching feeling in my stomach when I think about it?

Part of the answer lies in the general public view of faith. Today the term "Christian" means many things to many people, but a look at the news often presents Christianity as a hardlined political force bent on influencing public policy. Last years election is real strong evidence for that. But it doesn't account for the diverse community that does not fit with these assumptions. I'm thinking directly of State Senator Frank Morse in Oregon. The man calls himself a Christian, and a Republican no less, yet he not only supported, but helped sponsor a bill that would legalize same sex civil unions in Oregon. The extremely conservative factions of Christianity have attacked him for his stance, which put him in an intersting position, and allowed him to use his own faith as his reason for supporting the bill. The convictions of faith are so fluid and confusing that two opposing groups can cite the same faith as the groundwork for their beliefs, and come to drastically different conclusions.

That may be one reason for my churning stomach when someone used "faith" in a sentence directly related to me, but there's more to it than that. The very idea, the notion of faith, be it christian, buddhist, jewish, muslin, whatever, the very notion assumes the idea that the individual places some hope, some idea on greater power. Suddenly my convictions stand on shaky ground. Professing beliefs that I'm not ready, or even equipped to prove or support leaves me incredibly uncomfortable. And yet, merely professing an intellectual agnosticism doesn't really fit my own world view.

I do not take comfort in an all knowing being looking over me and loving me, but I have a tremendous amount invested in the questions of the universe. I put a great deal of stock in the questions, so much so that I almost place my faith in them. I get through life, hanging on to the questions, leaving me not merely agnostic, nor intellectually spiritual.
My conclusion has led me to embrace the term "faithfully agnostic."

Day 1

Dear Readers,

This begins the day I finally succumbed to the crazy world of weblogs, or as you wacky internet kids call them, blogs.
I'm a writer that bounces between Eugene, Ore. and Seattle, Wash. This website will serve as an outlet for some of my writing that currently doesn't have a place to be printed; mostly thoughts on theology and this wacky world we live in.
Please feel free to respond to anything you see here. I welcome discussions and debates. I want to hear what you think about my comments printed here, and hopefully it will spawn an ongoing discussion.
If you're so moved, you can find some of my writing at the following websites:

Nada Mucho An online music magazine based in Seattle.
Gullible Info A fantastic website that tirelessly researches fascinating information and brings five 100% true facts to you everyday!
The Daily Emerald The University of Oregon student newspaper, for which I occasionally do freelance work.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sincerely yours,
Aaron