Cymbals

Weddings and funerals have a way of making you think.  And feel.  Last week, a cousin of mine (not the one who was getting married), was trying to make polite conversation with me over dinner.  How he did this was, he acceptingly said "So...you're an atheist now?"

            I was immediately annoyed.  I mean, I thought, why would I write the songs, the blogs and the books, if I had simply lost faith in God and walked away from a "path of faith"?  Why would I bother with any of it?  Wouldn't I have long ago moved on to gambling addictions, cocaine and whores?  How could anyone even skim part of my blog and conclude that I didn't believe in God, rather than what I felt was that obvious fact that I am someone who is seeking a deeper, more authentic, less self-deluding and soul-killing approach to Him?

           So I got a second opinion from a person who is more adept than I am playing the 'getting along with others' social game.  (To whit, anyone other than me). "Can you believe someone could read my blog and think I was an atheist?" I asked, innocently, confident in the reply being a soothing one. 

            The answer was immediate: "Yes.  Because you're always pissed about Christian things on there."

          I had been looking for something more along the lines of "What?!  Ridiculous! The very reason you write about Christian things is because, as a Christian, you feel so strongly about them!"
        And it was easy to be self-justifying and self-righteous inside, at that point.  Oh yeah, some people were clearly still way back at not being able to tell the difference between Jesus Christ: the Word, the Son of the Living God, and our, frankly, pretty pathetic church stuff.  People clearly can't "hear sound doctrine" anymore.  People only want to hear smooth things, "uplifting" things, "encouraging" things only.  "Positive" things. Nothing that re-examines our assumptions and practice and suggests that just maybe we might need to rethink, refeel and retool some of it.  And I believe that all of this is true.  I really do.  But...

         Still, it really made me think. I don't mind a bit if people view me as a perpetually dissatisfied, self-centred, bitter Christian.  That's their thing.  But an atheist savagely attacking Christianity and God's work on Earth?  That latter thing is not anything I want to get used to, the way I'm used to (bored of) the former.

      And, then yesterday I was at my cousin's wedding. And the same cousin who'd politely and non-judgementally brought up my supposed atheism, stood up and read the bible passage he'd been asked to read at our cousin's wedding.

            It's an old familiar one. You know it, no doubt (even if you're an embittered atheist, savagely attacking Christianity and God's work on Earth.)  The one about how, even if you as a Christian could speak with the languages of angels, and speak mighty words of prophecy and do all manner of miracles, if you don't have (show) love, then you're like...

             Well, let's talk for a moment about what you're like.  Growing up in our King James Only bible studies, we read the one part of that passage as:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Now, first of all, we weren't overly clear on the fact that charity might actually mean being nice to one another.  Warm.  Accepting.  Tolerant.  Even (especially?) if we felt the other person was wrong about something.  
       In fact, while This Wicked World around us was, we felt, preaching a dangerous gospel of "tolerance" which would bring it to absolute ruin, we didn't really connect that tolerance is a lower standard than the one we're called to.  We're asked, not to tolerate difference, but to love people.  Tolerance is just love, with less effort.  A manners-deep semblance of it.  Love is something people need to feel, or else it isn't working.  
          I guess growing up, I seldom felt love.  Some of us have the kinds of rubber hearts it kind of just bounces off.  And the more people I meet who can make me feel liked, accepted, appreciated and so on, the more I see how that might be supposed to work, in a more functional person.  
       (At the time of writing this, my Mom emails a response to me sending her a picture of we cousins at the wedding.  She says I'm certainly a handsome fellow.  And I'm standing between my younger, taller, slimmer, chiselled blond cousins.  The championship swing dancer and the male model/fireman (yes), both with tiny waists, and truly massive shoulders and arms, as well as many inches of height on me.  And my tall, blond cousin the high-powered corporate lawyer.  And my other cousin who seems to have extra muscles no one else has, on his compactly dense form.  I'm older than any of them.  But Mom says I'm handsome.  Exactly the kind of love certain folks like me are likely to dismiss as deluded.  We're silly like that about love. And just as silly about being able to show it to others.)

          Another problem understanding that bible verse growing up was that "sounding brass" or a "tinkling cymbal" sounded really nice to me.  Musical instruments.  We weren't allowed those in our church.  There were no cymbals in there, tinkling melodiously or otherwise.  No organ, piano or guitar either.  I played trumpet at school, sounding that brass every week joyfully, and I loved when drummers did drum solos, hitting the crap out of the cymbals.

          But this is a perfect example of where, given the translation process, the intended meaning might have been lost, across the millennia, cultures and hemispheres.  Other translations say things like:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I ever really understood (and, more importantly, felt) what that verse is probably trying to say.  If you're trying to talk, and the person can't discern any love that you may or may not have for him or her at all; then to them, they hear not words, but an annoying noise.

       At the wedding, at that point, hearing my cousin's deep, resonant voice declaim this bible passage, I was, in the parlance of modern church folk, "convicted."

     Why can't people hear that am a Christian?  Simple: because I don't know how to show people I love them.  (Or anything, maybe.)

       You don't get frustrated with people and stuff you don't care or think about.  I write because I care.  But I have to accept that I have been the blog equivalent of a cymbal being bashed with a rock beside the head of someone who is trying to carry on dinner conversation.  Or like Moses whacking a rock he was supposed to speak to.  I can tell you I care, but if I can't make you feel it, then to you I'm just noise.

Book

It's been mooted before on here and suggested to me: Why not write a book that's a "Best Of" this blog?  Not fiction.  Not the personal stuff.  The thinking.
      I've toyed with that, and learned some things.

      Books are different.

     For one thing, they're meant to be read as one thing, and there's meant to be "flow" throughout.  They shouldn't repeat themselves.  They shouldn't say things they've already said adequately. They shouldn't feel repetitive.  They shouldn't be redundant. They shouldn't say things over and over.

      Blog aren't like that.

     They're supposed to be read, each post in isolation, in no particular order.  If you share a post with someone who's not read anything else, it should still make perfect sense and not require the reader to have read anything else.  Blog posts are supposed to be standalone. In order for that to work, they may require one to re-establish something that shows up elsewhere in other posts.

     For that reason, just cutting and pasting the best (theological, not personal) blog posts (something I tried, in order to see what that gave me) results in something that repeats itself way too much. And never seems to arrive anywhere.  Something I have been accused of, personally, as a Christian and human being. I am not my blog, but for many, my blog is the only way they know me.  And if my Internet presence/persona is taken as "the real me"?  Heaven help me.
    In fact, a Christian woman I know told me that the question of "So, what do YOU do, as a Christian?" or "How would you characterize your faith" or "Where is YOUR walk with the Lord?" is still an open one.  I have mainly written stuff which deconstructs the past, rather than talking about my present or future.  How 90s of me.

     Luckily, being a high school English teacher, I know that threes are magic, and that stories normally have three main parts: 

1. setup, 

2. first attempts and added complications, 

3. resolution.  

And I know that, even if I'm not writing a fictional story, that this structure is how we package ideas up so people can take them in.  Now one problem I have, if I am writing about spiritual stuff, is that if all is going well, I have not arrived yet.  Because I am not done learning. And there is no final resolution, so long as I live and learn.

    But still, I cut and pasted a whole bunch of "good" blog entries from the past five or ten years, and had a look at what could be made of them all.  What I found was that the individual blog posts, instead of being sortable into those three acts, and copy and pastable into the appropriate "acts" of the book (setup, additional complication or resultion), usually each post tried to follow all three steps, with varying degrees of success.

     A few posts had the full deal, explaining what my roots are and the challenges seen in them, moving on to thoughts related to the process of working through that stuff, and then to some kind of "So I have arrived here" place.  Most were more messy, and started with the past, but then finished, leaving me still very much in the "muddling through it still" middle.  And some were just the past and what that was like, without necessarily explaining why it was bad in any great detail, or what would be better.

    But I've been messing with it, like a kid picking at a scab.  Doing a lot of changing verb tenses (the first two acts should mainly be in past tense (however the blog post was written originally).  I've been removing introductory bits that are no longer necessary, as the first act stuff has already been gone over beforehand.  And I'm writing a lot of "between" bits, and bits that add shape to it and try to make the bits call, one to another, as if the various bits "know" the other bits have already happened, or are about to happen still.  And almost I am persuaded to write a whole book and let people see it.  It's mainly an editing job now.

     I don't know if anyone would ever want to read such a thing.  In the past, I have told the story of my wrestling with my church culture in individual blog posts.  In cartoons and videos and fiction.  What I want to do now is write a book which focuses less on what happened to me, and more on our culture, as experienced by people like me, and what we eventually had to do to move past some of it, once we'd begun to have problems with some of it. 
    Obviously, it would still have a significant amount of subjectivity, coming from the fact that it's me who experienced it all, in that place and time, and who had the problems with it that I did.  But I want to broaden the scope of the thing as much as I can, anyway.

     I want to conclude things.  To talk about what we claimed, and where that went wrong.  To talk about intentions vs. execution.  To talk about human religious systems in general, and how Christians lose sight of grace and mercy, forgiveness and love, in favour of correction, control and judgement ("light").  How we read the bible and talked about it so much, but managed to lose all that good stuff.

    It's hard, in many odd ways. And I can't imagine anyone would read it.  But I think I'll do it anyway.

LEAKED! : Star Trek 3 Plot (created by the team who brought us Fast & Furious 6)

LEAKED: The Plot of Star Trek 3, directed by Fast and Furious 6 director Justin Lin and written by Fast and Furious writer Chris Morgan
      In 2286, an unimaginably large, computer-generated, spiky-spike-with-spikes probe hurtles through space at unimaginable speeds, sending out an indecipherable signal and dramatically exploding all planets it passes. The planets collapse dramatically onscreen each time before exploding, debris from buildings, bridges and other computer-generated frou-fra falling in 3D toward the viewers for the entire first fifteen minutes of the film. A Godzilla-like creature makes a brief cameo, getting crushed by an enormous bridge which falls very slowly in 3D toward the viewers.
      As the probe approaches the comparatively minuscule Earth, its signal disables the global power grid and generates planetary storms, creating catastrophic earthquakes, sun-blocking cloud cover and sending an EMP pulse that wipes out all electronics, bringing civilization to a standstill. Right before the EMP pulse, Starfleet Command revives Khan, who is the only man able to get to the message centre in time, where, after a cross-city parkour run, Khan sends out a planetary distress call and warns starships not to approach Earth, before the pulse hits, killing all the staff in the building, including Khan, who dies on his knees, shouting “Kiiiiirk!” to the heavens.
      On the distant starship Enterprise, hearing Starfleet's warning, including the shouted “Kiiiirk!”, Kirk is contacted by “Old Kirk” (William Shatner) from the alternate timeline in which he resides, and together they determine that the probe's signal matches the buzzing of extinct honey bees, and that the object will destroy every molecule in this universe, and all conceivable universes, until its call is answered.
      Engaging in a daring obstacle course race around a joint fleet of Klingon, Romulan, Andorian, Tellarite and Vulcan warships all trying to block the Enterprise from reaching the Sun and changing history, the crew uses the Enterprise to travel back in time via a slingshot maneuver around the Sun, planning to return with a bee to answer the alien signal.
      Arriving in 2015, the crew finds the maneuver has drained most of the Enterprise’s power, leaving it with enough power to operate for only an action-packed 24 hour period before it will no longer be able to return them back to their own time zone. In addition, the ship’s central operating system bluescreens, and will not boot, much to Scotty and Chekov’s amusingly accented chagrin.
      While the clock ticks down the hours, hiding their ship using its cloaking device a half mile above New York's Central Park, the crew split up to accomplish several tasks: Captain James T. Kirk and Spock attempt to locate honey bees in Central Park, while Scott, and McCoy need to obtain plans and materials for constructing a bee hive for the return trip. Uhura, Sulu and Chekov are tasked with finding a way to reboot the ship’s crashed operating system. It involves a high-speed parkour chase, ending up with them sneaking into Apple and rappelling down inside Steve Jobs’ old office, which has been preserved intact, since his death.
      Failing to find any bees in Central Park, Kirk and Spock discover a pair of bees—"George" and "Gracie"—in the care of Dr. Gillian Taylor (played by Taylor Swift) at the Bee Institute in Manhattan, a museum dedicated to the study of bees, and learn the bees will soon be released into the wild. Kirk attempts to learn the tracking frequency for the bees from Taylor, but she refuses to cooperate. Spock then seduces Dr. Taylor, and gets the tracking information from her after a prolonged night of aggressive Vulcan lovemaking which McCoy warns, threatens to give Dr. Taylor permanent brain damage. “I’m a doctor, not a five-dollar Harlem pimp, Spock!” McCoy growls. Uhura is deeply jealous of Spock's attention to Dr. Taylor, but as she has dumped Spock in the opening act of the film, she feels she can only complain amusingly. For his part, Spock can only explain the logic of his actions.
      After a hugely destructive street chase on high-speed motor scooters through a crowded Asian market, Scott, McCoy, and Sulu trade Markus Perrson, the creator of Minecraft, the formula for a plasma-powered quantum hard drive, in exchange for him designing a beehive in Minecraft to show them how it should be made. Amusingly, Perrson is killed in Minecraft by creepers while finishing the Minecraft beehive. He also provides some plywood to build the bee hive.
      Meanwhile, Uhura and Chekov locate Stephen Hawking, who finds a way to connect an iPhone 6 power cable to the Enterprise’s central processing unit, allowing them to upload the Enterprise’s entire computer matrix to the iCloud, then download it again, and pilot the ship entirely using an iPhone app Chekov and Uhura design. While installing the app to run the ship, their presence at Apple is discovered by a security guard played by Patton Oswalt. Sulu flees back to the Enterprise with the iPhone 6, in a high speed motorcycle chase culminating in him jumping his cycle off Manhattan bridge over a pursuing helicopter, which explodes while Sulu is airborne. The iPhone 6 appears somewhat damaged by the explosion, but Sulu reaches the Enterprise and waves at it wildly until he is beamed inside.
      Uhura, barricading herself inside Steve Job’s office, then manages to Facetime Sulu, using Steve Jobs’ iPad, and directs Sulu through the necessary steps of plugging the cable of the damaged but still functional iPhone into the Enterprise main computer, starting up the app, and beaming Uhura back.
      As the app only allows one transporter beaming at a time, Chekov is injured after a prolonged car chase through the streets of New York City involving him stealing and hotwiring the latest Dodge Challenger model, belonging, amusingly, to a mafia don, and racing it through the Bronx, wildly and ineptly seeking to evade a fleet of pursuing mafia sportcars. Chris Rock wakes up from the back seat, in which he has been sleeping, in time to offer some very unhelpful advice as Chekov learns to drive in the 21st century. Chris Rock, playing a character named John Christopher says things like "You from Russia AND the future?  Damn!"
   After a prolonged chase and a dramatic crash, Chekov is arrested by the NYPD for reckless driving and, given his stated birth year, not being old enough to hold a license, and is in danger of being locked up in Bellvue. Kirk, McCoy, and Dr. Taylor rescue him from the mental hospital, explaining lamely that Chekov has ADHD and simply needs his Ritalin. They all return to the ship, in order to have Chekov work with Uhura and fully reinstall the Enterprise’s operating system from the iPhone 6, which flickers ominously, as faulty iPhones which are about to cut out tend to do.
      Spock and Dr. Taylor make love one more time, for no logical reason.  When Dr. Taylor learns that Spock will be leaving her, she writes a catchy, angry pop song about it to express her disappointment and chagrin. She is in the middle of singing it to Spock when she receives a text from an enamoured work colleague played by Justin Timberlake, letting her know that the bees have been released from the museum early, without her knowledge. She tricks Spock in order to board the Enterprise with him, bringing her guitar with her.
      Operating the ship from the damaged but still functional iPhone 6, Spock flies the ship to an idyllic meadow where Malsanti employees are about to spray insecticide, which will kill George and Gracie. Spock scares away the Malsanti employees by decloaking the Enterprise as it hovers above them, firing several photon torpedoes into the field, leaving it a smoking wasteland. Spock then checks with an enraged, ranting Mr. Scott, and is relieved to find Scott has managed to transport the bees aboard the Enterprise, despite the torpedo bombardment, at the last moment. “Old Spock” contacts young Spock to deliver an important moral lesson about the environment and eating organic food that has been sprayed only with organic pesticides, with several veiled references to “Star Trek: The Voyage Home” in it.
      After transporting the bees aboard the Enterprise and installing them in the beehive Scott and his alien sidekick have constructed from the plywood they have acquired from Markus Perrson, the crew returns to the future with Dr. Taylor. The slingshot around the sun is complicated by a travelling asteroid belt which necessitates them navigating a daring high speed obstacle course through it in order to reach the Sun to begin with. On approaching Earth, the ship loses power and crashes into the Hudson River, parachuting the beehive out of the Enterprise on the way down. The parachute snags on the torch of the Statue of Liberty, which causes the bees to buzz loudly as the beehive swings precariously the the Torch. The probe picks up the bee's buzzing and reverses its climatic effects on Earth, stops sending repeated EMP waves, and returns to the depths of space.
      Chekov is then able to save the dramatically leaking, powered-down Enterprise by rebooting its operating system from the depths of the Hudson, using the barely-functioning iPhone 6, which stops working for good once this app has been used. The ship lights up, surfacing dramatically from the river under a full moon, as the lights of New York City come back on, one building at a time.
      The Enterprise crew are put on trial in the One Galactic Trade Center (which is roughly twice the height of the 21st century's One World Trade Center, but in the same location) to answer charges of meddling in the space-time continuum. (The head judge is played by former Doctor Who actor David Tennant.) All charges against the Enterprise crew are dropped; however, as punishment for disobeying a superior officer, Spock is demoted to the rank of Commander. The crew departs on their ship, the newly christened USS Enterprise (iNCC-1701S), and leaves on a new mission, which is teased during the closing credits. 
      A being claiming to be God (played by Oprah Winfrey) is wreaking havoc across the galaxy and the Enterprise is being sent to investigate. (Michael Bay has been signed to direct the sequel)

Self-Punishment

There is a tradition, mainly in extremist branches of the Roman Catholic, but certainly not removed from the weekly routines of recent popes, of self-punishment.  Starting out with simple things like sleep deprivation and fasting, and moving up through wearing painful things, whipping one's self, all the way to the point of fifteen or twenty minute sessions of public self-crucifixion. It's all intended as pious activity.

   There are videos all over YouTube of Christians, mainly in the Philippines, walking down the streets whipping themselves bloody, and being publicly crucified (with actual nails, after being swabbed with rubbing alcohol first) for whatever portion of an hour they choose.  They get tons of views, too.

Why Punish Yourself?

The reasoning behind these acts varies.  Some people feel they are choosing to suffer for their own sins, and thereby somehow retroactively lightening the load of suffering, back through time, to Jesus on the cross.  (They're doing it to give Jesus a break.)

     Others feel like the key thing to understanding and emulating Jesus doesn't involve his ability to listen, to help, to care, to save and to love, but mostly fact that he was willing to suffer.  That's what they find most helpful about him.  (They're suffering to feel like they are demonstrating a key character trait of the Lord.)

    Others feel like doing this keeps them from sinning more, somehow.  Still others feel like wilfully suffering encourages God to take their prayers more seriously than He otherwise would. (They're doing it to get God to do what they want.) 

     All of this can be seen in a less dramatic way in the yearly routine most Catholics (and some Protestants in churches which maintain this practice) go through of sacrificing something they love, to God, for Lent, and then often overindulging when at last they can enjoy that thing once again.  Chocolate, Facebook, TV, whatever.  Something enjoyable.  Sacrificed to God, who hates enjoyment, apparently, and loves people who sacrifice it better than people who don't. (They're trying to make God happy.)

    This tradition of sacrifice and self-punishment is far older than Roman Catholicism, of course.  Innumerable ancient religions involved cutting one's self with knives, fasting, sleep deprivation, ritualistic tattoos, facial branding and scarring, and even the sacrifice of one's own children.  This was to do things like ensure a drought stops and the rain returns.  Or a battle goes their way.  Or just because. (They were doing it as a success strategy.)
     It is in human nature to try to better things, to redress the indulgences of the past, by present sacrifice.  Like ill-gotten past joy can be paid for by present misery.

Self-Punishment In My Own Culture

Now, all this dramatic stuff is not the sort of thing that Christians in my faith tradition were likely to do in quite this way.  We Christians didn't even fast, really, for the most part.  Not in my circles.  (I realize, of course, that many human beings use fasting, not to punish themselves, but as a focusing, contemplative, thoughts-clearing thing.)

   But we had our own version of walking down the street, self-humiliated, bleeding publicly on YouTube from our own self-inflicted whippings.  We did private shame and self-loathing. Self-hating. Seeing as "idols" anything that made us happy.  The spiritual or psychological equivalent of crucifying ourselves for our own sins.  Just as if we didn't need Jesus.  (Or Satan.  We became our own accuser, our own enemy, our own nemesis. Wherever we turned, there we were, accusing, saying we didn't deserve kindness or to be happy, and that we deserved to be abandoned and judged and punished.)

     And it didn't really matter to us that God clearly didn't want to do this to us Himself.  That He was trying to bless us and teach us about the world.  That He sent His Son to deal with all of the problematic stuff, and that it's dealt with, wholly, in a way we can't really add to or "help with."  Still, we were determined to pay.

     There was no good word that someone could say to us, no kindness shown that we couldn't ruin for ourselves, like a high school bully, preying on whatever it was that would be valuable to us. Shattering our own peace of mind. Because we didn't deserve it.  Because the act of self-bullying was somehow thought to be virtuous and not only worthwhile, but necessary. (We were trying to do a good thing by bullying ourselves.)

     And there was such fear about ever ceasing punishing and bullying and shaming ourselves...  Surely if we foolishly abandoned our shame obligations, and the focus on how bad we were, and what we'd done, then what we might still do would certainly outshine our past sins a thousand-fold.  Surely if we just lived the lives God gives us daily, and enjoyed compliments and kindnesses and whatever blessing God sent, everything would then go to crap?  Surely the healthy, proper, safe response to joyful things is shame and distrust?  Feelings of unworthiness?  If we didn't go around shaming ourselves, we'd sin.  We'd sin big. We were endlessly interested in the idea of exactly how, and how big we'd sin, if only we let go of our salvific shame for a sec.
       We had a terror of ever ceasing to carry around the great burden of our past missteps and indulgences, and our present, secret flawed nature.  It was like we thought if we didn't carry all of that, it would fall to the street like a stray turd, and someone might call out after us, asking "Hey! Is that yours?"
         Yet we knew right well that Jesus has asked to be the bearer of our culpability, God has accepted this offer, and we can't both carry it ourselves, and let him bear it for us too.

I Think We Had It Wrong

I think we were wrong about all of that.  And I think that kind of stuff makes us embrace a bloody, dark, idolatrous pre-Christian time, and puts us in a place where God Himself has trouble making a good difference in our lives.  I don't think Jesus died so we could shoulder a cross of fear and personal shame.  There's a cross alright.  But I think the cross we shoulder is a very different one:

     It's a cross of shame and distrust that human religious systems, including evangelical Christianity, put upon us.  And just like with Jesus, the Pharisees intend one outcome, and God uses the cross to the opposite effect.  For us, the cross of rejection by human religious systems is the cross our own acts of piety get nailed to.  It's the cross where our need to seem pious to others hangs its head and dies.  Carrying it down the street as disciples of most offensive of all doctrines, the idea that "prodigals such as we" are nowadays favoured sons and daughters, and not through our own wisdom, choices or efforts but through Christ's.  And that we remain saved from our sin no matter what we do.

     We are associated with the troubling doctrine that we just don't really need human religious figures as much as they need us to need them.  We have God.  And He's cool with us.  A pope, a bishop, a priest?  Has really nothing much to offer us.  We have Jesus.  And yes, if we don't keep Lent, don't chastise ourselves daily about our past (forgiven) sins, or the weak, twisted, dark bits of our present psyches, don't do purification rituals, and mumble our prayers over and over and over to God?  Well, He's our Father.  He has good, rather than evil, intentions toward us. Are we scared to open up and let Him shine light into our darkest recesses?  Well, according to the bible, He lives in there. Is in there right now.  Too late to try to keep Him out.  He's in there.  Spring cleaning.

   In our society, our sacrifices aren't going to involve loss of life and health, usually.  Our sacrifices are going to involve walking alone, misunderstood.  Being cut off and cut out.  Being a pariah.  Walking the shame walk.  Living outside the approval, status and support systems we're supposed to need so badly.  To live each day, judged and warned against by religious folk who don't like how we are living.  Shunned by them.  Especially by the most Pharisee of our brothers and sisters. They're going to try to give us what they gave Jesus at every step of his path.  The more we act like him, the more those who are most like the Pharisees will treat us the way their spiritual ancestors treated him.

Allowing Ourselves To Be Blessed

But it's not going to be all sacrifice.  There's rejoicing in heaven over us already.  There's good stuff coming our way all the time.  Wine to be drank.  Sunshine to hit our skin.  Scenery to take in.  Music to hear.  Food to enjoy.  People to love.  There are no good things that do not come from God.  If a thing is good, then it's coming from Him.

     This is not to say that there aren't ways to overindulge, or disrespect, hoard or otherwise act stupidly and nastily about blessing.  But I don't think sacrificing all of it all  of the time is what God wants when He's trying to bless us.

     We live in a society of comfort.  We don't know much about sacrifice.  Yet somehow, we Christians are also raising kids to not know how to receive blessing graciously, gratefully and passionately either.  Not knowing how to take compliments, not knowing how to embrace pleasure without shame, not knowing how to just walk around without feeling like we need to apologize to anyone who's got a complaint of any kind.

     That's the best way to recognize the simple fact that the Bureaucracy of Hell forms the infrastructure of our society: no matter what, we lose and suffer and it's all our fault.  If that's the infrastructure of your home, your church, your week, then you need to turn to God for something better.  To beat that, somehow.

     Or you could shave a tonsure on your scalp, and get out the whips and hairshirts, the nails and rubbing alcohol. It's really up to you.

Oh No! I'm Getting Things Wrong Again!

I've had a couple of conversations with Christian people lately.  And what they'd told me is that I'm messing up.  I'm perhaps hamfisted, unsubtle, and bull-in-china-shop, with little evidence of doing sufficient good to warrant the hurt caused. I'm definitely narrow in my focus, and needing a perspective and attitude adjustment.

     And when this has been shared, I've found myself filling with doubt.  A coldness rushing over me, shame closing over my head and panic.  I was letting myself be assessed by other human beings, who don't really see as much good in what I'm doing as maybe I do.  I'm assuming they know better, because they have an outside perspective on me, which I can never have. I'm caring more what they think than what God might be doing.

     And what happened when I got more of that this evening, was at first I got grim and cold and closed, but then I realized that I do not serve people.  And yes, they're right of course.  I'm getting things wrong.  I'm not doing as well as I sometimes might hope or think I am.

     And I thought of kids who are afraid to write on the blackboard/whiteboard, for fear of spelling something wrong, or of having messy writing.  Of kids who are afraid to speak up, for fear of saying something wrong.  And I remembered how I would always rather some kid write or speak something wrong, than the kids not speak or write anything at all.

     I am not a father, so I don't get that little glimpse into what being God might be sort of like.  All I've got is that I'm a teacher.  And I used that.  I realized that I get to get things wrong.  And I felt the warmth and the ease and looseness pour back in.  I relaxed and opened up.  Things could get in and out again.
     It's not like it's wonderful to get things wrong, but it's inevitable, and God plans for it and works with it.  Delights to, actually. And doing nothing, while being filled with fear and shame are far worse mistakes than doing something and getting it a bit wrong, then retooling it and reworking it and rethinking stuff and making eventual progress.

    Ironically, it takes an odd laying aside of pride and dignity to be willing to put it out there and get stuff wrong.  doesn't matter if you're about to sing a song, do a dance, skate, give a pie, release a book, read a poem or whatever.  And you have to be ready for people to then think you're arrogant and audacious for putting anything out there to begin with.

     Hello.  I'm going to keep saying and doing things.  And I'm going to be getting stuff wrong.  Maybe a lot.  We're all going to have to learn to live with that.  I will listen.  But I will not stop.

"Wraithing"

I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy every few years since I was a little kid.  And I've been an avid follower of all the extra behind-the-scenes information about exactly how they made the movie adaptations, with a particular interest in what story they thought they were telling.  On the DVD extras, this one man kept making the most interesting points about Tolkien as a person.  Since I first sat down to the watch the extended Fellowship of the Ring DVD with all the extras, I've been seeing Tom Shippey, author of J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, talking about Tolkien and I've been impressed by the insights in his points.

    The older I get, the harder time I have getting drawn into new things.  Music, books, television, movies, whatever.  And I find that in the information age, I can get an almost limitless supply of information surrounding the old stuff I already like. I watch every interview or documentary about favourite books, movies, albums and TV shows.  So I bought the Kindle version of Tom Shippey's book.  Pretty into it.

    The idea that is interesting me right now is something Shippey termed "wraithing."  He explained that he feels the very best, most lasting, most widely read and quotable books of the twentieth century, are George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and Tolkien's writing, along with people like Kurt (Slaughterhouse Five) Vonnegut and Joseph (Catch 22) Heller.  He feels that these books, more than any others, are quintessentially twentieth century.  He says that the reason why these books were so ground-breaking is that these men had first-hand experience of the new realities of war and abuses of government power that heralded the twentieth century.  He says that as a result, they chose to (needed to, really) create works of imaginative fiction to try to solidify the new stuff that was going on all around them.  To make portraits of it so it could be clearly looked at for the first time.  Because they needed new ways of viewing courage, honour and evil and corruption and tyranny.  Nothing quite like what they were now seeing had ever happened in the world, and had, consequently, never been written about before.

    Tolkien's really frightening evil characters, Shippey argues, are "emptied" figures, barely corporeal at all, faceless, heartless and cold.  They are shadow.  He talks about Gollum, Denethor, the Nazgul, and Sauron (and even Frodo and Bilbo) as beings that were once genuine, vibrant, fully-realized people.  Walking around, knowing how to respond with joy to nature, to food and drink and music and the company of others.  But then, somehow getting drawn into something that subsumed/consumed them.  Hollowed them out.  Made them at first empty shells, and eventually, wraiths.  Barely there at all.  Never dying, never living.  Feeling like butter scraped over too much bread.  Forgetting what strawberries tasted like.  Hiding from the sun. Ceasing to be themselves.  Being placeholders.  Empty spaces with nothing really to offer to the world but resentful, jealous, toxic, destructive malice.

    Giving all there is of themselves to a cause, an agenda, a goal, an ideology, until there is no "them" left to give, and no longer any "them" left to be.

    I never gave my identity and my life to follow Hitler or Stalin, of course.  But I do know a bit about being asked to sacrifice everyone I was or would ever be, to a system.  To a religious collective.  To a job, also.  Or to a cause.  I know that feeling of being used up.  Of no longer being full of whatever it is that is supposed to make me be myself.  Of feeling hollow. With nothing but a thin, sour, cold venom flowing in my veins, some days.  Spattering venom everywhere I go, because love's not going in, and not flowing out.  Walking around and having jokes and sunsets and food and music kinda go past me. Over my head.  Heart tightly closed.  Alone.  Forgetting what I even like to do. Leaving poison footprints.

    I think it's a real danger for working people.  Working middle-aged people especially. Forgetting who you once were and becoming a Gollum. A mini-Sauron.  A driven, desperate, hateful Denethor.  All the while giving very sensible, logical, knowledgeable Saruman-style reasons why there's no other path to take.  Why nothing else is possible or important.  Why you're just being sensible.  Why there are, really, no other choices but self-abnegation.

    Sometimes I feel very, very used up.  It's not something that gets better with age.  And that's when I have to remember what makes me most myself.  I was raised to sacrifice who I was, because who I was, was "bad."  Well Tolkien and Lewis and Orwell all knew that there's something worse than being full of yourself and self-centred and arrogant: not being yourself.  Being an empty, sour shell, shambling around in the shadows, just like you were still a person.

    In times like these, it's important to remember what and who makes me myself. And to reach out and recharge.

Faust

You see it all over still; the "theology" that no doubt most people think we Christians believe: 

Satan is in hell.  And he wants to negotiate with you and have you "sell your soul" to him, so you'll end up in hell, having enjoyed musical talent, beauty, or something like that, in your earthly life.   

You see this on Supernatural, Constantine and all the rest.  Retelling Faust, the story of a man who makes a deal with the devil: he will spend eternity in hell, so long as he gets wealth and knowledge and wisdom and power on earth.  Like souls are currency, rather than being us.

  Because music, joy, beauty, sex, food, drink, dancing and the rest?  God wouldn't just give us all of that, would He?  You'd have to buy it, wouldn't you?  From Satan?  God's not like that, is He?  Surely you'd have to sacrifice it all if you wanted His approval?

The World, As Depicted in the Bible

Now, obviously all this is deeply unscriptural.  It's coming from Faust, after all, rather than the bible.  It's coming from simpler, stupider stories.  Stories that Harry Potter-burning fundamentalists seem to believe, rather than the bible itself.

    Because in the bible, the devil's not in hell.  He's why the world's like it is, like it's always been.  America didn't used to be Christian, but now "they're ruining it."  It is under Satan's government as it was from the very beginning, just like the rest of the world.  He's ruling it.  Running it.  Structuring it.  Managing it.  Presiding over a network of systems that makes sure that Murphy's Law is the universal law of a human life, and that no good deed goes long unpunished.  Making sure genocides happen.  Systematically facilitating rape and silencing victims.  Making sure child porn and molestation are covered up.  These aren't failures of the system.  They are built into the system.  The system has built-in refuges and loop-holes for exploitative people.  For rapists, molesters, extortioners and others of that ilk. And that's by design, if not human design.  This is a world where the scum rises to the top, rather than the virtuous, honest, giving and principled.  A world where the only way to think you've conclusively, finally won is to lie and cheat and backstab others.
     All this while doing only as much, and the precise kinds of, good required to glue a good veneer onto yourself and pretend you're solid oak right down to your core.  To justify your having more power than the rest of the world.  A world where no one wins for long.  A world where not even the most powerful men and women are really in control, aware of, or in charge of it all.  A world where atheist, Muslim and "Fundamentalist" Christian ideologies all work seamlessly together to serve to make the exploitation and oppression of millions possible.

   This is the world depicted in the bible.  A messed up world.  A not-okay world.  A world that does not reward virtue.  Not a world where everything's more or less okay, and most of us are going to heaven unless we sell our souls to the devil.  Because we're fine, right?  Doing great? Everything is awesome?
  Nope.  The bible, in fact, depicts a world where everyone's FUBAR, eventually, deep enough down, and we are going to hell as defective projects unless we reach out to Jesus, who is reaching out to us as we dance drunkenly on the edge of the abyss, as whitegurl as we can.

   Because the simple fact is, if we're at all honest and self-aware, we know that every one of us is imperfect and messed up.  The oak is just a veneer.  And we're so certain that God can't and doesn't want to simply work with us to help with that.  So, instead of letting God perfect us and help us grow, we'd rather resent Him for recognizing our imperfections and flaws and general neurotic psychoses at all, and for then taking steps to save us.  (How rude.  Why can't He accept us being messed up, and just tell us we're very, very special and leave us like that?)

   We'd rather go through the world, telling ourselves we're pretty much as good as it gets, more or less.  That we couldn't be and don't need to be much better than we are.  Don't need to be more whole, deep down.  More inspired, enlightened and wise.  We'd rather use the religions we create, in order to feel righter and better than everyone else, than have to actually reach out to God, sans religion and certainty and dogma. Reach out to God Who wants to work with us to make us better, throughout our lives.  Who wants to make us more, rather than just watch us suppress and hide our inadequacies, flaws, weaknesses and darkness.
     Because we've all got darkness.  And we protect it, rather than allowing light to be shined into it.  We're all like that.  We don't want upgrades, though we need them.  Badly.  We're determined to fruitlessly keep trying to run Windows 95 on our iPhone 7.  Rather than download the latest OS for free.  Because saying "No" always feels like we're in control and making cautious choices.  Even if it's all we have ever learned to say, and isn't therefore, a choice at all.

    The bible paints a series of pictures of a world that's filled with men and women trying pretty hard, yet perpetually creating miniature hells on earth for themselves and everyone around them, on a daily basis; leaving God little choice but to send them to the huge incinerator for defective beings, originally created to display pictures of Who God is and what good looks like.  We were created in His image.  We are daily giving a very false picture of what goodness, and mercy, hope, love, faith and joy and all the other good things that exist only in and through God, really look like.  We are ensuring we have to be rejects, rather than refurbished products.  We are choosing annihilation over rebirth.  And we'd rather people tell us we're no worse than anyone else.  That we're fine.  Normal. Okay.  Maybe even special.  So long as we don't need to actually grow or think about various troubling realities.

   And we live in our communities, and we know that every week children are being neglected, abused and molested here, women are getting raped, people are dying from addictive substances sold to them, and old people are being shut away and neglected, abused and molested.  We know all of this is happening.  So we donate money to shelters for cats and dogs, and stop eating refined sugar.  And we feel a bit better about ourselves, and tell ourselves our world's getting better all the time. Everything is awesome.
  And in our movies and in all of our stories, we want to believe we're safe, and where we live is okay. And for us, a horror story is that something evil escapes from hell into our safe, normal world.  And wrecks it.  Which, we tell ourselves, is fiction.

    Fact is, there is nothing evil in existence that is not already in our world right now.  It's all happening within a short drive of where we sit right now.  And people are gaining money and power through supplying and enacting it.  There is nothing evil that does not already have seeds planted in us right now.  And the whole system is designed to be the natural habitat of that human-germinated evil.

Faust and Jesus

But the Faust myth persists.  A man wants musical talent, so he sells his soul to the devil, who sends a customer service representative up from hell (which is apparently a terribly well organized institution where devils punish sinners for sinning?!) to sign all the papers.  And hell then faithfully provides creativity and soul to the man's music, which is something God could apparently never do.  

    Well really, you don't get music with soul by selling yours.  You get music with soul by having soul.  By being deep and aware and able to touch and be touched by life and love and others.  Because all good stuff comes only from God.  If it's good, you know it didn't come from hell. (Nothing "comes from" hell. Not a thing.  Not even bats fly out of there, all album covers to the contrary.)  Hell is nothing more than an incinerator for defective stuff.
    The devil doesn't have the best tunes.  He has none at all.  Not even elevator music.  In fact, he's got no capacity to emote, feel empathy, reflect good, compose or create anything whatsoever.  These are human traits that are reflections of God, who is love.

   I think the popularity of the Faust myth comes from a childish view of the temptation of Jesus, in the wilderness, by Satan.  But it's getting several things wrong: Satan's not in hell, in that story.  Has never been there.  Is ruling the earth, as he's done from the beginning.  And has no talent or beauty or creativity to offer Jesus.  All he's got to offer, in fact, is status and power.  And to sell it properly, he needs Jesus to doubt.  Or get impatient.

    And Jesus is getting tempted, not to sell his soul to the devil, or spend an eternity in hell, but to not act like himself.  To lose sight of his goal.  To forget what he's achieving.  To cut corners.  To betray his life path.  (Which is, admittedly, a much more important life path than mine.  I'm never going to be offered so much as the office of mayor of a small town, if only I were to give up my life path.) 

   So, Jesus isn't being tempted to "sell his soul."  He's being asked to submit or defer to Satan, who was lord of this world and the governments in it then as he is now.  Satan is clearly deeply bugged by a guy who goes around dissing his religious figures and government officials.  Who walks the streets spouting God-grade wisdom, free, from the streets and hillsides, to illiterate nobodies who haven't earned it in any way.  Illiterate nobodies who then get internally free from Satan's power just by listening.  That's not how it's supposed to go.  You're supposed to have to pay for that.  And it's supposed to need repeated resubscribing and additional fees.

   In the story, Jesus has been fasting for a month.  And Satan's trying to make him eat something.  He's not offering to give him a recording contract.  He's not even holding a cheeseburger.  He's trying to get Jesus to make himself some bread.  And he's trying to quote the bible and get Jesus to do what he says, now that he's "proved it" with scripture.  People love to try to control each other with scripture.  And he's offering to let Jesus rule over kingdoms of the world, as a gift from Satan, CEO of this world.  He's offering the Son of God... political power?  In exchange for bowing down to Satan.  (And Jesus was, in a very real way, here to eventually replace Satan.  As the ruler of the world.)

    This is really, really dumb.  Jesus didn't fall for it for a moment.  Yet still the Faust/Tommy Johnson/Robert Johnson myth persists.  A talentless hack whom the Creator didn't choose to give any creativity or talent to, sells his soul to the devil to be able to write music with so much soul in it, that he can become rich and famous.
     The fact is, Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson were both given profound musical talent by God Himself.  But they knew no one would believe or be interested in that. 
    "How did you learn to play guitar in such a unique, soulful, beautiful way?  I've not heard anything like it before..." 
    "Oh, I sold my soul to the devil to learn how to play like this." 
     Dumb.

You're FUBAR, I'm FUBAR?

And today, it struck me: what is the corollary myth that we Christians have been telling our teenagers for centuries?  This one: a man, whom the Creator is going to send to hell for enjoying himself, sells his soul to Jesus, to pay for his salvation.  In Faust, he'd accept an afterlife of misery and suffering, to pay for a life filled with pleasure and joy.  This "Christian" version tells of a man who accepts a life filled with boredom, misery, tedium and suffering (having sacrificed all pleasure and joy) as payment for an afterlife which is, at best, safe.  As depicted in Sunday School and movies, it is boring as hell.  Empty white rooms.  Sappy music.

    Is this the message of the bible?  Sell your dreams of being creative, of enjoying music, of dancing and celebration with others, and maybe you'll get to spend Eternity in the Great Waiting Room in the Sky?

    That's not the bible.  The bible says something very different.  In the bible, there is drinking, eating, song and partying with friends.  And I believe the bible.  It has a much deeper and more mysterious story going on.  And it's good news and concerns a free gift, rather than a bargain or contract.  And the God of the bible is the source of the joyful stuff, not a being who demands it be sacrificed to "pay" for blessing.  The God of the bible has a problem with waste, excess and missing the value in good things, rather than with the enjoying of said good things.  The God of the bible has as much problem with a wedding reception running out of wine, as with a drunkard in the gutter, drinking away his kids' dinner money.

     Despite being tempted with lesser things, Jesus kept on his life path.  He sacrificed joy and power and comfort and safety and longevity for us.  He gave his life.  That's all done, long ago.  And it's a gift.  And like all gifts, if you have to buy it or earn it, it's not really a gift.  And he did it to reconnect us to God, to arrange it so we're fine by God.  We're not perfect, but instead of being defective products, giving the world a very insulting image of who God is, in our function as Images of God, we're children.  Wayward children.  With whom God is nonetheless willing to work.  The working with us of Whom will only display more of His good: Forgiveness.  Mercy.  Grace.  Kindness. Sacrifice.  Patience.  We get to be vehicles for the world to see what all of those look like.

   But we're not innocent like in the Garden anymore, nor can we get there, or raise children to be that.  The train's sailed on that one.  But we're back in the same relationship of getting to walk around with God, knowing He wants us to experience all the good stuff He put in the world, all the joy and pleasure and worth and excellence.  To bask in what He Created.  We get to soak that in, with Him.  He did not put beauty in the world so we could turn our eyes away from looking at it, and warn of the dangers of it, in order to please Him, the Author of it. Turning away from joyful, excellent things is not a gratitude response.  And it doesn't "buy" us anything with He who make it.  It's certainly not sane.

   We get to explore it all.  We get to ask Him what He was thinking, making all that stuff.  But He mostly wants us to just interact with it all, rather than talk about and analyze it.  And although in some ways, things haven't even begun to get good, because we ain't seen nothing yet, and live in a world that is (still) ruled by Satan, whose central motive is to prove once and for all that we human beings all suck and should be burned?  The tide has, nevertheless, irrevocably turned.

    Jesus lived a human life.  Was there ever an incorruptible human?  Yes.  Jesus.  Just as there was a Noah, a Lot, a Rahab, there was a Jesus.  The Pharisees failed to make Jesus join their ranks and preach a less honest, less spiritual, far more pious, image-focused message.  And they alike failed to threaten him into silence. And their attempts to get him killed only resulted in millennia of Jesus stories and songs and lives touched by an important idea: Maybe, to be good and pleasing to God, you should actually avoid being a religious douchebag, rather than parade around like one, without even realizing how embarrassed you should be.  That maybe you should embrace a life of learning and growing, rather than one calculated to try to showcase your splendiforousness as a finished, exemplary Spiritual Entity with correct doctrine.  That you should have more the attitude of the returned prodigal, rather than the finger-pointing, whiningly obedient, nitpicking elder brother, whose heart had none of the love his father's clearly did. Who didn't know how to celebrate with others, when it was time.

A Choice

I think we have a choice:

To put out the idea that we're more or less Right.  That we've arrived.  That we're the Special Ones.  

or 

To embrace the idea that we're just people on the path.  Following the way.  Following Jesus.  Not there yet.  Not "right."  Excited to see what's coming.  A bit scared.  But not up on our raised pulpit/platform, waving our bible around like it exists mainly to certify our rightness.  Ours and that of the traditions we have made into idols which block our view of God.  Not needing to have all the answers.  Not needing to use social media to broadcast our disgust at there being people in the world who actually sin and don't want us judging them for it.  Not needing to have our pronouncements proclaimed "infallible."  Not needing to punish people for disagreeing with our dogma.  Not settling for "tolerance" when forgiveness, kindness and love are the actual Christ-grade virtues.

"But what about if we mess up, even once we are following Jesus? What then?  Don't we have to resolve and vow and exert a huge amount of our own flawed, human willpower to try to be blessed and kept in the Christian faith?"

   Certain kinds of people feel terribly unsettled unless that topic is addressed immediately.  Won't God remove blessing from us if we screw up?  If we don't walk worthy of our calling, won't God smack us?
    Maybe.  Maybe not.  We get to mess up.  Good thing.  Because we do.  And it doesn't even threaten the loss of our relationship with God.  He's not going to stop accepting us, and working with us, because we made bad choices.  He's going to, in fact, work with us more.  Maybe "harder."  So there's that.

    But we really want something, anything, to depend on our success. On us.  We want to be important. (We want, truth be told, everything to depend on our choices.)

God's Motives, As A Character

I'm a high school teacher.  I teach kids.
    If they behave, that is.  If they swear at me, or threaten me, or anyone else, or break stuff, they get kicked out.  No more lessons for them.  At least for a couple of school days.

   God's not like that.  God does not "expel" children.  Because He's not fair.  It's a good thing, too.  God doesn't punish every time He "ought" to.  And He rewards and blesses and is great to us, because He feels like it, and not only when we've "earned" it.  In fact, because we can't earn any of that, every time we think we are "owed" something, and are upset because He's not doing what we ask, we're being stupid. Childish.

   I think God's much more interested in making His children into more inspired, creative, wise, strong, insightful, strong, healthy, balanced beings.  I think the jobs and cars and money and romances and kids and stuff are just toys we want for Christmas from Santa.  And I think He's often willing to give that stuff, even if we don't ask for it.  I think He's more concerned with our education and our maturation than with what we want for Christmas, though.  But He really does make the best Christmas pies, cakes and cookies.

Read It

I could quote several pages of scripture here, to "make this point."  I could copy and paste them, after googling them, without even half looking at them. But I won't.  In fact, I will instead encourage you to do something fewer and fewer people do anymore: 

    read the whole thing.

 I am speaking from the lifelong experience of what I believe is an actual relationship, an actual give and take, with an actual God who is an actual person.  With feelings and responses and longings.  With humour, temper and hurt feelings and sorrow. Insane to think like that, I know.  And I also don't lift a finger to justify the existence of God, so don't ask me to.  He justifies my existence. 

    Read the bible. You'll see all of that.  Sometimes in terrible, naked honesty.  Can you believe God would allow Himself to be depicted with His feelings hurt, clearly having a temper tantrum?  Can you believe God would allow Himself to be depicted changing His mind?  Believe it.  Read it. Don't argue.  Just have a look.  Deal with what it says, and don't waste time trying to make it unsay what's clearly in there, so you can pretend the bible is more religious, more devout and more simple than it is.  And don't waste time attacking people who believe differently from you.

    And read Faust, too. And Paradise Lost.  And Dante's Inferno/Divine Comedy.  They're hilariously clueless.  Creating all kinds of far-fetched, non-bible characters and places and stuff because they can't believe what the original actual is and says, nor do they find it sufficiently dramatic.  Cluelessly providing something a little more explicable, simple and comforting: The devil is in hell right now.  The world, and the people in it, are more or less okay, rather than remaining clearly FUBAR, generation after generation, country by country, century after century.  Imagine if the devil got out of hell (because someone played Dungeons & Dragons) and started to take over the world and make it run according to his own plans?!  What would that be like?  The world being ruled and run by forces that are parasitical, destructive, tyrannical, controlling and without mercy?!  Forces which don't even have our own interests at heart?  Forces which don't care for the weak?

   We haven't even done two decades of this century, and how many things should we already be apologizing for?  As a race of people, if not as images of who God really is and what good looks like?   (Oh, all that stuff was those other humans, was it?)
   But read those stories and delight in the clownish theology, the mixed motives, the tales of people who have to sell their souls to buy creativity from the destroyer, and then get thrown in the incinerator for it; of a being who wants to "purchase" souls rather than destroy the world and every single life and instant of joy in it, on a moment by moment basis, as well as an eternal one.  Of a world where you can buy creativity from the destroyer and accuser, rather than have it built in by the Creator.  Of a world where you can get good stuff, from the Evil One.  Where you can get insight from Darkness and learn the truth, from the Lord of Lies.  Where, if you're having fun, you're probably enjoying something evil, rather than simply living the life God gave you, and responding appropriately and sanely to things in it.  Music, beauty, food, drink, sex, sports, stories, nature.

    I know a lot of people who can't believe the bible, who can believe horror movies.  At least for an hour.