tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19211551980920135672024-03-21T23:19:06.632+02:00extremitiesMusings on culture, religion, art and science.andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.comBlogger157125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-8502240893791692132016-11-08T07:13:00.001+02:002016-11-08T07:18:26.063+02:00For HillaryTomorrow, I go to vote for Hillary. I encourage you to do the same. I'm a policy wonk (it's my actual degree, after all), and I like getting into the weeds, but there hasn't been much point this year. Where should any comparison begin? Trump has no policies, not in the traditional sense--he riffs around with language until he finds a crowd-pleaser, then wails away. Truth, intentions, facts, analysis--these things are lost in primate dominance rituals wrapped in verbal affect and white nationalism. There <i>is </i>no policy, and in any case a discussion of his few horrifying and impractical proposals misses the point.<br />
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This is no mere disagreement about the details and philosophies of governance, no common dispute--however heated, however bitter, however one-sided--about whose policies will truly help the nation. One can say of Romney, of McCain, of Bush, that they at least had ideas, and least believed--or convincingly pretended to believe--that those ideas were correct, and would be to the betterment of the country. Naturally I hold them disastrously incorrect; but to be incorrect one must at least hold an idea. Trump is not even wrong. His candidacy has obliterated policy, and reduced tomorrow's choice to a single question: the survival of our constitutional republic, and of its ideals.</div>
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In the last week we learn that his campaign staff took away the keys to his Twitter account--the Android has fallen silent. This is astonishing. His own handlers realize that he cannot be trusted with social media--yet they, and the leadership of his party, propose he be given the nuclear codes. This cannot be forgiven. Here is a man who believes climate change to be a Chinese hoax; who mocks the disabled; who assaults women and brags about it; who pays no taxes; who stiffs and ruins those who work for him, and invest in him; who retweets white nationalists and has encouraged and enabled a racist resurgence; who incites violence against minorities, his opponents, and protesters at his rallies; who attacks gold start families; who paints immigrants and refugees as terrorists and rapists; who praises brutal dictators as strong; who has committed these sins and others beyond enumeration. What more can be said? He is an existential threat to our nation and the world; he has wrought incalculable damage already; and he must not be President.</div>
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There is only one candidate who can defeat him. Make no mistake, either Trump or Clinton will win this election. There is no politician in living memory for whom I would not vote under these circumstances. Not Cruz, not Romney, not McCain, not the Shrub himself. As it happens, we have a candidate who surpasses any of those. Clinton is a dedicated public servant, a workhorse who knows her policy cold. Her scandals are the inventions of the right-wing fever swamp that culminated in Trump; her mistakes are real; her lapses in judgment irritating but not more so than any public figure of such long service; and along the axis of her every fault, Trump is worse. Besides this, she is a fundamentally decent and dedicated human being for all that the Trumpettes accuse her of murdering babies, checking email, and practicing witchcraft. She will do well, and better as we hold her to account. I would have voted for anyone in the Democratic primary over whatever hairball the Republicans coughed up; I would have voted for Bush himself to stop Trump; but I am proud to vote for Hillary Clinton. I am proud to be a part of electing the first woman President. I am proud to continue Obama's legacy.</div>
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Against this we have only the "third" parties. They are unserious. They have brave slogans and no details, but more tellingly they have no coalitions. In a democracy, power comes from coalitions. Coalitions require compromise. In their special snowflake purity, they have disdained compromise--and with it coalitions, and with them power. You can never get everything you want in a democracy, there is always the messy give-and-take. The third parties are nothing more than a way to pretend otherwise while getting nothing. To turn up one's nose at the lesser evil is to choose the greater, as Nader proved in 2000, and they may stamp their feet and indignantly deny it, and complain that they are tired of hearing it, but they have yet to explain how, in a winner-take-all system with geographic representation, a third party vote will accomplish anything other than marginally decreasing the odds of victory for the major party with whom you most closely align.</div>
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These are our choices, and there is only one. Tomorrow we vote. I'm with her.</div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-80581569458780826262016-08-03T08:54:00.002+03:002016-08-03T08:54:40.086+03:00Post-fact Taxes<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="djvuc" data-offset-key="brpi4-0-0">
So I saw <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154363524521115&set=a.406389191114.196847.551906114&type=3&theater">a little conservative rant about tax plans going around</a>, and ... well, take a look:<div class="_1mf _1mj" data-offset-key="brpi4-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px; position: relative; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIxlBzwQ_YVZBDy47Ks9uWpyUPPX9lZOXZUI3ftlheqEZF1aKWDpgPzr5A7QDDjVMUnWj595p9d0tol6Wh_-PjfwkC-zL-19puP1Er-6IpVCP5DsZiO-729bCXEaOMpXndhjRvvk1fbmot/s1600/tax+plan+meme.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIxlBzwQ_YVZBDy47Ks9uWpyUPPX9lZOXZUI3ftlheqEZF1aKWDpgPzr5A7QDDjVMUnWj595p9d0tol6Wh_-PjfwkC-zL-19puP1Er-6IpVCP5DsZiO-729bCXEaOMpXndhjRvvk1fbmot/s320/tax+plan+meme.png" width="320" /></a></div>
It's a little hard to read, so here's the text:</div>
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<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">I compared Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's tax plan to see how it would effect me as a middle class tax payer. Here's the break down assuming I can get my deductions to bring me down to $75,300 of taxable income.</span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Hillary Clinton places that salary in a 25% tax bracket (married filing jointly) which translates to me paying around $724.00 in fed tax a paycheck. That's around $1,448.00 a month or $18,825.00 per year in fed taxes (my salary is divided over 26 pay periods).</span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Donald Trump places that salary in a 10% tax bracket which translates to me paying around $290 in fed tax a paycheck. That's around $580 a month or $7,530.00 per year in fed taxes.<br /> </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Donald Trump's tax plan would put an extra $434.00 a paycheck in my pocket every paycheck. That's about $868.00 a month or $11,284.00 per year in extra money.<br /> </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">If I were to invest that $434 each paycheck into a mutual fund with an average interest rate of %10 I would have....almost 2 million dollars when I retire in 30 years.....</span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">Think about that when you consider who you are going to vote for in November. An extra $870 a month can go an extremely long distance in most people's households.</span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">You can check Clintons tax plan here<br /> </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><a href="http://taxfoundation.org/article/details-and-analysis-hillary-clinton-s-tax-proposals">http://taxfoundation.org/article/details-and-analysis-hillary-clinton-s-tax-proposals</a></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">And Trumps tax plan here<br /> </span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;"><a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/tax-reform">https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/tax-reform</a></span></blockquote>
1) Comparing an independent analysis of your opponent to your guy's campaign propaganda is neither honest nor likely to yield insight. <br /><br />2) "$18,825.00 per year in fed taxes"<br />That is not how tax brackets work. You aren't taxed 25% per year on the whole thing; income in a certain bracket is taxed on the rate for that bracket. Dude just multiplied 75,300 by .25. (In fairness, he makes the same mistake calculating his taxes under Trump.)<br /><br />3) "Hillary Clinton places that salary in a 25% tax bracket (married filing jointly)"<br />Actually, the link that the gentleman provides states that Hillary Clinton places that salary in a 15% tax bracket.<br /><br />4) Errors 2&3 together have led him to overstate his tax burden under Clinton's plan by more than 80%. Doing the actual calculation, a married-filing-jointly with $75,300 under Hillary's plan would pay:<br />10% on the first $18,550 = $1,855<br />15% on the next $56,750 = $8,512.50<br />For a total of: $10,367.50.<br /><br />If it were just the reading comprehension error and not knowing how tax brackets work, I would be inclined to ascribe it to error rather than malice, but the campaign-propaganda-to-independent-analysis comparison hints at a more deliberate attempt to deceive--if only to deceive himself.<br /><br />Also 'effect' in the first sentence should be 'affect' so there's that, too.<br /><br />This dreck has been shared 126,000 times. Gaze upon my works, ye elitists, and despair.</div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-15902813122472505132016-05-29T04:11:00.001+03:002016-05-29T04:17:18.068+03:00Feminism at the MoviesThere's a new Ghostbusters trailer. It's all women, so of course a bunch of MRAs are screaming about icky girls ruining their (apparently ongoing) childhoods. But they seem to have picked a much softer target than Mad Max: the trailer gives every indication that we're in for another boring retread by a studio out of ideas and looking to cash in on nostalgia. Am I seriously going to have to go see <i>this</i> to piss them off? Even from an SJW perspective, I can't have been the only one bothered by the portrayal of the black girl, right? The white girls got to be "funny", smart, proactive--and the black girl got to be ... the stereotype of a loud black girl. Yet many SJW types seem excited by it for some reason? Sigh. Equal and opposite to the tendency to dislike things just because they don't conform your agenda is the tendency to like things just because they DO--and if you doubt me, google 'Kirk Cameron'.<br />
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While we're on the subject of retreads and social themes in movies, I finally saw the new Star Wars. It wasn't perfect ... but I liked it. I liked it a lot better than any of the prequels, including Revenge of the Sith (formerly known as 'the good one'). It was an actual goddam Star Wars movie. True, as someone said, it felt like a cross between a reboot and an homage by someone who wasn't clear on the difference between a reboot and an homage. But when I saw that stormtrooper refuse to fire on innocent villagers, and then come back to his ship and pull off his helmet an emotional wreck, I cared about what happened to that stormtrooper. And when we met Rey, and saw her hard scavenging life, and saw her stick up for a droid, I cared about what happened to Rey. And that right there is far more than can be said for the prequels, where the only caring-for was a carry-over from the original trilogy.<br />
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The only thing that really <i>bugged</i> me was Finn. One, he's black. Not 'black in a leading role', not 'black in Star Wars', but 'black <i>in</i> <i>the <strike>Empire</strike></i> <i>First Order.</i>' The Empire was species-ist, sexist, and racist--wall-to-wall white dudes oppressing a gender-, color-, and species-diverse Rebellion (by the third movie, anyway). Changing that fundamental dynamic requires more explanation than "none whatsoever."<br />
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Two: Finn is conversant; funny; quick on his feet; lies to impress a girl; convinces a skeptical third party to go along (and how refreshing to see a movie where the guy admits to a lie because it's the right thing to do rather than being found out!); and is generally a fun, charismatic character. This is a bit odd for someone trained from birth in a program of combat drills and indoctrination so thoroughgoing that <i>he didn't even have a name.</i> But boom!--he defects, and then he's more or less a normal guy. Shouldn't he be a bit more ... <i>damaged</i>? Like, Kurt-Russell-in-Soldier-level damaged?<br />
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But ah well. It was good stuff--compelling characters, beautiful effects--and I'll definitely be seeing it again.andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-32411785434598370872016-02-28T20:09:00.002+02:002016-02-28T20:10:18.470+02:00True ReligionSaw this video on a friend's wall:<br />
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/talkislam/videos/927607720663026/">https://www.facebook.com/talkislam/videos/927607720663026/</a><br />
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Sorry for the lack of embed, but it's on Facebook. In it, a Muslim tells us that the extremists are not of true Islam. I know where he's coming from, but ...<br />
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I was raised in a nasty version of Christianity, and as I got older and found a voice to fire back, I was largely met with the Christian version of this guy: people who simply deny that the violent, the abusers, the guilters, the terrorists are "real Christians". Those infinitely more interested in defending the good name of the tribe than in listening to its victims. Not one of us, not my problem, they say, and cherry pick some verse or another to back up their position.<br />
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In other words, they make the very same argument--cherry picked scripture and all!--that the extremists made about them for, oh, I don't know, <i>the entirety of my childhood</i>. Now who's right, exactly? Yeah, sure enough, the nice ones are right--the Bible really does say, "Do unto others." But hey, look at that! The nasty ones are right, too--the Bible really does say to kill the gays and breathes nary a word of condemnation for the slave trade it established. <br />
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So long as the 'good' ones continue to proclaim the book in which the bad stuff is written, and the epistemology of blind faith and revelation which leads to it, any argument just boils to down "Nuh uh YOU'RE wrong." I suppose it's true that the good ones do less damage, but they cover for the bad ones. Keep telling people that "God" can speak to them and sure enough "God" will keep telling people some really nasty shit--and what do you say in return, having once told them to follow that voice against the world? Proclaim as the perfect source of all morality a book that will not suffer a woman to teach--are you then innocent when others discriminate against women on its basis?<br />
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I'm not as intimately familiar with Islam as with Christianity, but in this at least they are precisely analogous.andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-36868748919614886122015-06-29T10:24:00.000+03:002015-06-29T11:04:16.203+03:00Poor Wayfaring Dreher<p dir="ltr">"<a href="http://time.com/3938050/orthodox-christians-must-now-learn-to-live-as-exiles-in-our-own-country/">Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now," writes Dreher,</a> implying that Orthodox Christians in America had been looking to the Republican Party to save them.</p>
<p dir="ltr">From the perspective of an Orthodox Christian, I can imagine no stronger indictment of "Orthodox Christianity" than that such a thing could be thought, written--apparently in all seriousness--and then published by a major news organization without anyone thinking anything of it.  One traditionally thinks of Orthodox Christians, in America or otherwise, as turning to Jesus to save them, but in my four years an atheist I seem to have fallen behind the times.  Like the Israelites of old, <a href="http://biblehub.com/isaiah/36-6.htm">they have turned to Egypt for their succor and found it a staff of crushed reed</a>, an "ally" who only ever intended to use and betray.</p>
<p dir="ltr">But now, deprived of both their asserted "right" to bend the law in service of their oppression and of any knowledge of what their sacred text actually says about marriage (virgin-saving and polygamy both come to mind), they find themselves cast adrift, exiles in a cruel, debauched world which crucified their very Lord.</p>
<p dir="ltr">In the mouths of the overweight majority of the richest and most powerful nation that ever existed, the persecution narrative becomes a marvelous emetic.  Christians <i>must</i> paint themselves as victims--as the outcast, the persecuted, those despised of the world.  Jesus promised his followers that they would be exiles; at least some of these lily-white Republican stooges have read those passages, and the implications lay buried in their collective subconscious like a stinger.  If we're not being persecuted, <i>then we're not followers of Christ</i>, and Dreher's jawdroppingly un-self-aware whinge is but the latest pearl to grow from that sand-grain abyss.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Middle-aged white dudes wrapping themselves in the shawl of misery and LARP-ing out 'Poor Wayfaring Stranger' would be <i>hilarious</i> were the underlying terror less heartfelt, and that terror would be pitiable were it not for the suffering they inflict on others to assuage it.  Make no mistake: Team Evil does not consist solely of knuckle-dragging bigots justifying their inborn hatred with a few clobber passages, nor does the remainder consist entirely of decent people who just can't square the good they want to do with the evil that the Bible commands.  Beneath and woven through them both is fear--fear at the juxtaposition of their station and their beliefs, a fear so profound that in their desperation they latched onto something <i>this stupid</i> in order to wish it away.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This is as charitable a picture as I am able to paint of those now falling onto their carefully positioned fainting couches, and it is dredged from my own experience at considerable emotional expense.  Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps he is not tormented by his faith into tormenting others.  But being as how his politics and beliefs <i>have</i> tormented others, eliminating fear reduces the field of explanations to malice and stupidity. If you look at this great milestone towards the end of oppression, violence, and hate, and all you've got is "Woe is me!" then you're either a horrible person or you're really fucking dumb.</p>
<p dir="ltr">And whatever else he is, Dreher isn't dumb.</p>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-76759447464758101472015-06-18T08:13:00.000+03:002015-06-18T08:29:33.248+03:00Picking a TranslationThe first thing you notice when sitting down to read "the" Quran is the same thing you notice when sitting down to read "the" Bible: there's no such thing, at least for those of us not sufficiently versed in ancient languages to crack open the original. I expected to have to choose a translation, but I didn't expect to have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_the_Quran">57* translations** to choose from</a>.<br />
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When I was on the mission field, it was a common complaint that despite the dozens--hundreds--of translations of the Bible into English, we were wasting resources adding more and more and more when so many languages didn't even have one translation. These days I'm more inclined to suggest that if not one of a hundred extant translations lives up to your expectations, then perhaps the problem lies with your expectations. Perfection is a heavy burden for a text to bear.<br />
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Still, I want to give this thing a fair shake, not stumble into the Islamic equivalent of The Message. I called up the local mosque and was directed to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Quran_(Hilali-Khan)">The Noble Quran</a>***, a Saudi-backed translation billed as the most widely disseminated. It's also been slammed as the most extremist, interpolating the text with parenthetical additions consisting of medieval screeds and polemics on modern Middle Eastern politics. In <a href="http://www.noblequran.com/translation/surah1.html">the very first Surah</a> we find denigration of "those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews)", whose crooked ways are contrasted with the straight ones that we should be following.<br />
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Well if I wanted to hear about a people being under God's wrath by virtue of birth, <a href="http://www.nobeliefs.com/luther.htm">I'd go read Luther</a>. <i>This </i>is the most widely disseminated version? The go-to answer for the first Mosque on google that picked up the phone? Yikes.<br />
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Understand, I'm not saying this is any worse for Islam than the "kill the gays" bits of the Bible are for Christians. But I'm sort of <i>used to</i> the Christian Bible saying kill the gays, and I'm not really<i> used to</i> anyone who's trying for respectability just out and ranting about The Jews in public. This is part of the problem with Western perception of Islam. Christianity's sins--textual and practical--have become the wallpaper, whereas the casual Western observer of Islam can find much that, in its newness, still shocks. This is not an argument for the normalization of Islam, though--it's a call to bring the hammer down on Christianity. If the gays came out with a book that said to kill the Christians, you'd better believe they'd be taken to task for it, and rightly so--but no such accounting is demanded of those that cleave to the Bible.<br />
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At any rate I'll do one better for Islamic PR than it just did for itself and avoid that particular text.<br />
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I find myself drawn to the descriptions of two versions: <i><a href="http://www.muslim.org/english-quran/quran.htm">The Holy Qu'ran</a></i> by Muhammed 'Ali, the favored text of the Nation of Islam, and copiously footnoted, whose anti-miraculism might prove something of a counter-measure to normal dialectic of "The fact that we now know what it says is wrong isn't sufficient grounds to claim that's not what it means." The other, <a href="http://www.meforum.org/717/assessing-english-translations-of-the-quran">alleged to be accurate, beautiful, and free of prejudice</a>, is Arberry's <a href="http://www.iqbalcyberlibrary.net/pdf/QA.pdf" style="font-style: italic;">The Koran Interpreted</a><i>.</i> Both texts are available for free online at the links that I've provided.<br />
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I plan, at least at first, to read the text in both translations, and at the very least skim the footnotes, before recording my reactions. We'll see how it goes. The whole endeavor is very much a work in progress, so please bear with.<br />
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*Counting (and perhaps miscounting) only direct-to-English translations.<br />
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**I'm also aware of the Islamic tradition that no true translation of the Quran is actually possible. This is correct, but trivial--I'm a former professional translator, and I can safely report that no "true" translation of anything is possible. All translations are paraphrase--though some are more paraphrase than others--and they all make tradeoffs between rhythm, poetry, connotation, references, double-meanings, idiom, readability, and grammatical construction. Even reading in the original, the translation from the page to the mind is problematic: no two people will come away with exactly the same impressions of a text's "true" meaning. That said, the text consists of words, and those words have meanings, and anyone who insists otherwise is selling something.<br />
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***<a href="http://www.noblequran.com/translation/">Text available here</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://reasondecrystallized.blogspot.com/2015/06/reading-quran-intro.html">< Previous</a>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-37978550268569466262015-06-11T07:11:00.001+03:002015-06-18T08:17:30.760+03:00Reading the Quran, IntroA nonbeliever was once traveling through Northern Ireland back when the Northern Irelanders were slaughtering each other for being the wrong sort of follower of the Prince of Peace. He was stopped at a roadblock by unknown assailants: "Are you Protestant or Catholic?" came the menacing question.<br />
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"I'm an atheist," he replied.<br />
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Undeterred, the questioner demanded: "Well are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?"<br />
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I never really believed in Vishnu. I didn't agonize for years about reconciling Vishnu with what I could observe to be true. I wasn't mind-fucked by Vishnu's followers and indoctrination. I don't feel an urgent need for atonement through opposition to the sins of Vishnu's tribe, as I was never a participant. Of course Vishnu isn't real, and of course bad things are bad things whether it's Hindus or Christians or atheists doing them. But Vishnu isn't near to my heart in that Morgul-blade sort of way that Southern Baptist Jesus still is. I am very much a Protestant atheist.<br />
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That personal history informs my encounters with other faiths. When all you have is a rage-fired hate-crossbow, every problem looks like a zombie, and while I never really expect to like what I see when I look at religion, the itchy trigger finger can make an honest examination difficult. Here we have the indoctrination of children, the unsupported truth claims, and the harmful and antiquated morality propped up by the arrogated word of the divine; there we see the social circles so beloved of its members and so oblivious and sickeningly hurtful to those excluded; and finally we are reminded of the good commandments, and asked not to notice that they are supported by the same epistemology which upholds the bad.<br />
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How shall we react?<br />
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But the attempt should nonetheless be made. So, I'm going to read the Quran. It's an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a while now: to have an honest encounter--including an honest accounting for my history and viewpoint, which you're currently reading--with the "sacred" texts, and to set down my thoughts and reactions. I've just recently started a new job, so I have no idea what kind of posting schedule I'll be able to manage, but I'll strive for regularity and at least weekly updates.<br />
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So with all that out of the way, stay tuned for more.<br />
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<a href="http://reasondecrystallized.blogspot.com/2015/06/picking-translation.html">Next ></a></div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-21216195583627691402015-05-22T19:07:00.000+03:002015-05-22T19:07:39.466+03:00Better a millstone ...It seems that a self-righteous pack of libelous discrimination advocates are in fact sex criminals. But that snarky sentence doesn't really capture the horror of the thing. What's worse, <a href="http://theblazingcenter.com/2015/05/josh-duggar-and-broken-heroes.html">Josh Duggar is already being referred to as a broken hero</a>, as if anyone who worked for the FRC was ever anything but a villain.<br /><br />Let us speak plainly.<br /><br />Josh Duggar was evil through and through; the only thing that we found out today was that he was evil in one more way--and what a way!--than we thought. He's vile "moralist" known primarily for lying about gay people in order to deny them rights, and now we find out he's a sex criminal to boot.<br /><br />Josh Duggar's entire life was premised around being better than gays (he worked for the FRC fer chrissakes!), and now that he's fallen we find Christianity teaching us that we're no better than him? This is a vile, anti-human preachment.<br /><br />This article, like Josh's "statement", displays zero--ZERO--empathy for his victims, either of his political stances or of his unpardonable crimes, instead spending its moral energy equating doubting God and consensual sex with murder. The utter warping of the moral compass displayed not only by this family but by their defenders and commentators should be sufficient in itself, apart from any other evidence, to convince one absolutely that Christianity is a festering malignancy on the soul of humanity that it is the duty of all those who seek the good to excise.<br /><br />There is no hell hot enough, nor eternity long enough, for those who do this to children, and for those who cover for them. Child molestation, and aiding and abetting it, is the vilest act that anyone can commit, and the juxtaposition with their stuck-up moralizing is galling beyond what mortal tongues can convey.<br /><br />These are deeply evil people and I'm truly sorry that the consequences of their evil will not be more dire--for them. For their victims, of course, it is already quite dire enough.<br /><div>
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andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-75133949907036204542015-04-03T22:28:00.000+03:002015-04-03T22:28:33.282+03:00The Church of Harvey Fierstein<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-D9xeOleFP8" width="560"></iframe><br />
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I'm a bit late to the pile-on, but this is too awesome not to share.<br />
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Plus ... it's not really hypothetical. I have personally been in that exact situation (well, a close analog anyway).<br />
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Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria have long denied Evangelicals many basic rights and privileges on the basis of their religious convictions. Seen it myself.<br />
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Then I got back to the States and--whoops!--the only difference between the godly remnant Evangelicals and the oppressive 'form-of-religion-but-denying-the-power-thereof' Orthodox was the extent and geographic distribution of their worldly power. Seeing my people doing to others what I had labelled persecution when done to us was a shock not easily recovered from, but one which would do a world of good to a very great number of people.<br />
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And which, let us add, I should dearly love to personally administer.andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-21515076422162626192015-02-13T00:16:00.000+02:002015-02-13T00:16:35.237+02:00Chapel HillOn Tuesday this week, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/muslim-student-shootings-north-carolina.html?_r=0">an atheist gunned down three Muslims in Chapel Hill</a>.<br />
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Apparently I must begin by saying that I disapprove of murder; I would go so far as to say that I disapprove of nearly all violence, with about the only exception being in defense against the violent. This was a despicable act.<br />
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But let us note, in passing, the rank hypocrisy of a society in which three Muslims can go on a mass-murder spree in France while screaming vengeance for the prophet and a veritable tidal wave of commentary will deny any connection to religion, but if just one of a depressingly long list of '<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/02/11/a-random-collection-of-shootings-over-parking-spaces-and-what-they-tell-us-about-violence-and-beliefs/">Murkan parking disputes gone bad</a> features an atheist as a perpetrator, then it's crisis time for the entire movement. Where is your Aslan, now? Oh that's right, <a href="https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/565670175476035584">retweeting Dawkins-bashing, 'atheists have no grounds for morality'-regurgitating pablum that wanks itself silly with delight that atheism is a faith, and its adherents no more righteous than those of any other</a>.<br />
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Go fuck yourself, Lion-boy. On a somewhat lighter note, you also have articles like: <a href="https://khabaristantimes.com/world/moderate-atheists-claim-anti-theist-chappel-hill-killer-took-the-god-delusion-out-of-context/">Moderate atheists claim anti-theist Chapel Hill killer took The God Delusion ‘out of context</a>. Which ... I do think this is funny, but there's two key differences: 1) atheists, moderate or otherwise, don't revere 'The God Delusion' as a Holy Book, and 2) 'The God Delusion' doesn't actually say to go kill the believers. Contrast the believers who <i>really do</i> revere a Holy Book, which <i>really does</i> say all the nasty things that their extremists get off on.<br />
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The reaction in the atheist community has been a bit mixed; you've got the aforementioned, 'People shooting people over parking spots is totally a thing (U!S!A! U!S!A!), what on earth can you extrapolate from the minor statistical anomaly of both perpetrator and victim holding opposed minority viewpoints on religion?' On the other end, you've got <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/heinous/2015/02/11/chapel-hill-shooting/">Heina relating her experience as a Muslim/ex-Muslim having to disavow terrorist attacks to her own similarities with Hicks</a> and <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/11/own-it/">PZ advising us to own it</a>, reiterating his familiar point that atheist must go beyond disbelief in one particular truth-claim<br />
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Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, was <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/02/12/atheist-politician-among-others-speaks-out-against-chapel-hill-murders-during-press-conference/">Hemant's reaction</a>, which I might summarize as 'Yeah, this isn't our fault, but since he was one of ours we need to nut up, condemn violence, and stand in solidarity with a grieving community.'<br />
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As for myself, my first instinct is the vociferous denial that this had aught to do with me; my second instinct is to mistrust the first--reflexive defense of tribe and self against any criticism removes the corrective mechanism for actual errors. I accept that a healthy contempt and criticism of bad ideas can bleed over into animus towards and dehumanization of those that hold them. If this contributed to Hick's actions, then that is deeply regrettable. But on current evidence, the incident looks like the power to take a life corrupted an ammosexual who was only incidentally atheistic. We all have moments where we get so mad we can't see straight. The difference between the "normals" and the gun-fondlers is that the latter are vastly more likely to be in possession of human killing devices when that occurs. <br /><br />
This verdict is defeasible by further evidence. For now, though, I condemn this senseless and despicable act, and my heart goes out to the family and friends of the victims.andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-50522243386284514572015-02-04T13:04:00.001+02:002015-02-04T13:04:18.882+02:00The Thousand Natural Shocks That Movements Are Heir To<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identity-politics" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s long been known that</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal.” Sadly, I have failed my fellow white men, and my ideas about this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I’ve been talking about--political correctness, language policing, the idea and abuse of limiting expression so as not to cause offense--still bear the stamp of their lowly origin.</span></div>
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<a href="http://reasondecrystallized.blogspot.com/2015/02/chait-and-savage-round-2.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I touched on this last time</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but to put the thing succinctly, if I took kindly to people martyring the weak to justify their strictures on my pleasures and free expression, I’d have stayed a Southern Baptist.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So I’m biased. I’ve watched a collective in-group bend over, spread wide its hairy asscheeks, and devour its own head in a </span><a href="http://southpark.cc.com/clips/153512/intero-rectogestion" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cartman-esque inversion of an ouroboros</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I’ve seen </span><a href="http://reasondecrystallized.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-love-baby-jesus-more-than-you.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grand Loyalty Oath Crusades</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> play out in real time. Maybe that makes me twitchy, jumping at shadows and reimagining the cannibalistic terrors of the </span><a href="http://imb.org/updates/storyview.aspx?StoryID=544#.VNG1nmjF-b8" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rankinid Inquisition</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in every mild critique. But maybe living through that shit taught me to recognize its nascent form in other contexts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s never imagine I’m against the goals of the Left. Quite the contrary, it does the soul good to challenge and upend unjust power structures, to restore dignity to victims, to end discrimination and the casual bigotry embedded in language and humor. But the movement that does these things is still a movement, susceptible to the thousand natural shocks that movements are heir to. Intent isn’t any more magical for tribes than for individuals. I work for a major humanitarian organization, and I assure you that righteous goals are no inoculation against the everyday headaches and inefficiencies of any large institution. Social movements are no different.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every principle will bend back round and up its own ass if you take it far enough--every movement can go overboard, and I want us to remember that. The </span><a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=LGBTQAIPS" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">LGBTQAIPS</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> acronym slipped into self-parody somewhere between the sixth letter and the ninth, and I want us to acknowledge that. I want us to shoot for the balance point of justice, and not for the far end of the scales to balance out the injustice on the other side. I want us to remember that any set of norms or rules runs the danger of becoming more about the rules themselves than about the goals they sought to achieve, no matter how noble those goals are. I want us to regard ostentatious virtue as automatically suspect, if not actually unvirtuous. I want us to think long and hard about any attempt to police tribal boundaries (especially by excommunication), because such attempts are all too often a pretext for advancing one’s own tribal position. I want us to have the common sense to recall that people being people, they will--consciously or not--tweak, bend, short-circuit, and otherwise game any system of rewards and punishments, no matter what behavior it actually meant to encourage.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So that’s what’s wrong, and that’s what I want, and that’s what Chait ought to have written, if he had had a more compelling insight into the problem and more useful life experiences with which to analogize. Exceptions abound, and there’s no clear line or any method other than to be intelligent. I wish I had a more satisfying ending than “Our standards of goodness lend themselves to dick-measuring, rewards-gaming, and status-seeking just as much as anyone else’s,” but since we seem to have forgotten that, it’ll have to do.</span></div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-48781040673983853422015-02-01T07:48:00.000+02:002015-02-01T07:48:15.734+02:00Chait and Savage, round 2<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Revolutions devour their own. I mentioned last time “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the irresistible temptation to be holier than your peers--to lay the costliest and most splendid sacrifice on the altar of tribal allegiance.” One of the quickest ways to do that is to pick some established figure and denounce their holiness as less splendid than your own. Emperor, many a trve kvlt metaller informs us, sold out--and by this sign we understand that the speaker has not. Al Mohler, </span><a href="http://brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/a-quick-note-to-dr-albert-mohler.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">claims at least one conservative </span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">commentator, has been “pandering to the homosexual lobby,” and this serves to declare that speaker would never. The OBU professor who so gently warned us of the sexual content in a book, thundered my classmates, should have selected a book without any such content. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford retained too many mental cobwebs of pre-Ingsoc thought, according to those who profited by denouncing them, and so conspired with Eurasia.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And Dan Savage is a </span><a href="http://feminspire.com/a-letter-to-activist-dan-savage-who-continues-to-bully-my-trans-sibling/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bullying transphobic bigot</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who </span><a href="http://beyoungandshutup.com/2013/12/04/capital-d-for-douchebag-dan-savage/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">erases bi- and a-sexuals</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here’s where the tricky part comes in: you can criticize someone without doing this. You can also do this with accurate criticisms. Many people accuse their critics of this to deflect accurate criticism, and all those who do it reply that they are “just” concerned about policing the going virtue paradigm, and certainly not the pecking order and boundaries of the in-group. There can even be a revolution that’s basically in the right, yet is still subject to this tendency. There is no bright line. It’s a smell test, and your mileage may vary, but I’m catching a whiff of something--perhaps in the subtle distinction between ‘inadvertently says things alleged to be bigoted’ and ‘is a bigot’.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mileage varies at least in part by one’s own tribal affiliations. I jump down people’s throats for repeating hackneyed apologetical slurs re: atheists, and after critical self-evaluation I don’t </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">think</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I’m status-jockeying. But I’m not nearly so prepared to recognize--or object to--a genuine slur against trans folk or bisexuals, much less to extrapolate remarks into a pattern of bigotry. For example, he got criticized </span><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/bisexuals/Content?oid=8743322" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for saying</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: “Many adult gays and lesbians identified as bi for a few shining moments during our adolescences and coming-out processes. … This can lead adult gays and lesbians—myself included—to doubt the professed sexual identities of bisexual teenagers. … a bi-identified 36-year-old is likelier to be bisexual than a bi-identified 16-year-old, and I resent being asked to pretend not to know it.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To me, this is uncontroversial. Dan himself did it. My brother did it. They’re hardly alone--of all the under-20’s who I ever knew to be bi, exactly 1 (of those I kept up with) still identifies as such. He’s not even talking about actual bi people, he’s talking about the fact that a sizeable chunk of young gay people lie about being bi. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t fucking get it</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--but then, I’m not bi, maybe this is … a thing? Or sounds too much like a thing for comfort? But not one of the people I’ve heard mention this has arsed themselves to explain it, they all just link to it: ‘an enlightened person such as I shouldn’t even have to explain to an enlightened person such as you what’s wrong with it--I mean, you are enlightened, aren’t you?’</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So with Dan, sometimes I’m genuinely unsure what point his critics are trying to make; sometimes, he really does say quite mean things (for instance fat-shaming); sometimes … well, let’s put it this way. If you’re going to storm out of a lecture over “the t-</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: line-through; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">word</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> slur”, </span><a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/06/07/about-that-hate-crime-i-committed-at-university-of-chicago" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">does your </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">non-trans</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> friend then get to use “the i-slur” in front of whatever other trans-folk might be in the room without utterly demolishing your case</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Look, I realize: I’ve got a lot of baggage on this one. Language policing was a part of my complete breakfast of emotional-bleeding-over-into-physical abuse. I’ve been slapped for saying “dang”, and the attitudes had so thoroughly osmosed into me that I literally cried for half an hour the first time I ever said ‘crap’ in public--before I was even scolded. Language policing is a trigger for me, and I don’t mean that as a cutesy </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reductio</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I mean it literally--my first response to </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">anyone</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who tells me what I can’t say is blind rage and a stream of profanity. Outside the actual abuse, in the church culture I grew up with, such games were nothing more than ways to out-holy your peers. Offense has since become an integral value to me. As a metalhead, I listen to offensive music; as first a liberal in a conservative school and later an atheist in a religious world, my personal ideology and criticisms of majority delusion have been slammed as offensive more times than I can count--the “precious widdle fee-fees” defense invoked upon an Everest of bullshit, and never by those who could offer a coherent rejoinder. ‘You’re not allowed to say that!’ is a contraction of “You’re right and I’m helpless to dispute it!”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And Dan, it strikes me, probably feels the same way. The times he grew up in, and the battles he’s fought, have made him a pugnacious, self-confident fighter unapologetically asserting his own view against the sex-negative, homophobic consensus that dismissed him as offensive. That’s what you </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to be if you’re going to fight that battle. … and that’s maybe not the bestest place from which to evaluate whether you’ve </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">actually</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> hurt someone you shouldn’t have.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which brings us back to the smell test. And the question of </span><a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/01/28/what-exactly-do-you-want-jonathan-chait/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what exactly I want</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which I’ll tackle next time.</span></div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-30397463943851591312015-01-29T13:54:00.000+02:002015-01-29T20:56:39.879+02:00I Love the Baby Jesus More than You<div style="align: center; width: 560;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I grew up Southern Baptist. I went to a Southern Baptist university. One of the things I rebelled against--and one of the reasons that I swear so much these days--was the constant nonstop language and tone policing. To be sure, it was wrapped up in virtue words. It was done in the name of our weaker brothers and sisters, who we might cause to stumble. It was done for purity, for holiness, for the Baby Fuckin' Jesus. We even had trigger warnings--though we didn't call them that--on any literature that might cause lustful thoughts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here I was, a legal adult and budding metalhead who had just completed his acquisition of Suffocation’s back catalog, and here was some bunny-eyed administrator taking me gently by the hand and explaining in a worried voice about how I might want to skip certain passages of this book because my fledgling faith couldn’t handle it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s fair to say I was peeved. ‘It’s just an Orwellian method of thought-policing by controlling language, perpetuated by its memetic justifications and the irresistible temptation to be holier than your peers--to lay the costliest and most splendid sacrifice on the altar of tribal allegiance!’ I ranted. As Joseph Heller described it:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s all have a great guffaw at the silliness of the Southern Baptists, shall we? I could use a good guffaw, and they certainly deserve it. (Let’s also never forget that, having been indoctrinated as children in the stated justifications for this system, and having repeated them so often through the years, lots of folks have come to really believe them.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So with that insight fixed firmly in our minds, let’s go have a read from <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/heinous/2015/01/28/dan-savage/" style="text-decoration: none;">someone I normally link to with a great deal of admiration, and of whom I'm still a fan despite this disagreement</a>. And let’s have another read, <a href="http://feminspire.com/a-letter-to-activist-dan-savage-who-continues-to-bully-my-trans-sibling/" style="text-decoration: none;">A Letter to “Activist” Dan Savage, Who Continues to Bully My Trans Sibling</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OO7qIIaaGIM?start=151" width="560"></iframe><br /></span>
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Also I've been meaning to post that video.</span><br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I write all this in the shadow of <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.html">Chait's piece on political correctness</a>. I linked it, with a brief caveat, as it addressed an issue I think important, but the more I think about it, the more it strikes me as a mess. It careens back and forth between an odd history of the PC movement, mentions of execrable descents into violence and intimidation ostensibly in its name but clearly at odds with its tenets, some weird Marxist/liberal distinctions and some weirder criticisms. Students protesting campus speakers? Please. Granted the very limited number of speaker slots (especially for big events like Commencement), and the fact that many speakers also command high honorariums, students are entirely within their rights to be pissed that a year's worth of tuition and a huge-ass megaphone were handed over to someone they hate. It's not like anyone had a problem when a bunch of us UofM types protested Cantor (<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/10/31/357525/protesters-interrupt-cantor-speech-in-michigan/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">oh you betcha I was there</a>--and no we didn't "interrupt" him go fuck yourself whoever wrote that headline). While we can certainly debate who ought to make the cut and why, the idea of having a cut is one imposed by necessity, so why shouldn't students have a say?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What bugs me about the whole thing--and what Chait stubbornly refused to lay his finger on--is that any focus on public virtue runs the risk of becoming a focus on the public. It's a terribly subtle shift from being praised for a genuine desire to do right by one's weaker brothers and sisters to ostentatious jockeying for in-group status--and policing the boundaries of the group against outsiders--via extravagant displays of self-abnegating commitment. Surely I'm not alone in picking up the vibe?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course I really do believe in the stated goals of the P.C. movement--some virtue words really are virtuous. But the dick-measuring undercurrent is unmistakably there. Since Chait picks on UofM, and since I went there for grad school, it's fair to report that I have seen, on the campus shuttle, a t-shirt whose ginormous lettering announced that "I LOVE THE BABY JESUS MORE THAN YOU."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lol just kidding. It actually said "'THEY' IS MY PRONOUN." But the message is essentially the same.</span></div>
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andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-58871811227880423982015-01-14T21:38:00.000+02:002015-01-14T21:47:03.384+02:00Talking Down to the Terrorists (Charlie Hebdo pt 1)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I had a debate a while back about whether or not atheism is a religion; my interlocutor took the side of Kent Hovind and Conservapedia in insisting that it is, and that therefore I’m religious. Invalidating someone’s choices and narrative for cheap rhetorical points is par for the course in such discussions, and unfortunately the R-worders are at it again. This time, they insist--in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings--that terrorism really has very little to do with religion.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apparently to finally be acknowledged as non-religious I'd have to shoot up a building full of people in the name of religion. I'm not quite that desperate, but I now have the dubious honor of an irritating commonality with the terrorists: liberal religionists talk down to us. They know better than we do who we really are, and why we really do what we do.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are a multitude of factors behind many terrorist acts--Western imperialist bullshit has long fertilized the ground in which the seeds of extremism grow. But imperialism doesn’t just mean dropping bombs, it also means thinking that we know other people better than they do, and refusing to listen to them. When white Christians in Ireland bombed each other for years, did well-meaning liberals take them by the hand, give a patronizing little smile, and explain why they were </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> fighting? When Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller over abortion, did we hear a chorus of voices echoing, “Now, now, we all know better than </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Are white Christian terrorists really so much more articulate than brown Muslim terrorists?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Admittedly, the account that they give of themselves names one of my personal favorite bugbears as the culprit, which doesn’t incline me to critical reflection. It’s axiomatic that beliefs have consequences, and that beliefs like jihad, martyrdom, and thoughtcrime will have bad consequences. The terrorists professed such beliefs and acted upon them, and while that’s not case closed exactly, it’s the necessary opening deposition.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I realize that it’s ultimately necessary to complicate this narrative, and we might even come to disagree, albeit with a great deal of effort. But instead of engagement we get dismissals, and the dismissals have been just that: dismissals. Incidental dependent clauses blithely asserting the contrary with all the intellectual heft of Dick Cheney’s “greeted as liberators”.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course not all religion advocates terrorism. Most of it, in fact, does not, and you’d be a fool to say otherwise. But this curious assertion that a system of morality inculcated by childhood indoctrination, forbidding criticism and justifying itself on the arrogated word of the divine, could never go this badly awry? Please. That is no less foolish. I know from the painful personal experience of having marched in pro-life rallies, stridently opposed civil rights, and attempted to vote for the Shrub (and failed due to a registration mistake) just what religion can accomplish. No thinking person should be surprised that a more virulent form--especially combined with disaffection or mental illness--could do far worse.</span></div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-82814732373604333802014-11-24T11:46:00.000+02:002014-11-24T11:49:26.702+02:00Growing Up in Missions, Memoir Project Excerpt 4: Our New Computer<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">When we announced our call to missions, a wealthy family in the Morristown Church gifted us our first computer: a 486 dream machine with a 33MHz clock speed, 2 megs of RAM, DOS 6.0 as the primary operating system with a bonus of the most impressive Windows 3.1. Its 200MB hard disk came preloaded with the very latest and greatest in gaming technology: a lot of Shareware, to be sure, but a complete </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Wolfenstein 3-D</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;"> (which we deleted due to violence), and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Carmen Sandiego</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">, and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Castle of the Winds, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">an addictive little Roguelike (which we deleted because witchcraft).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">It also had </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">Monkey Island, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">which also had witchcraft, but it’s a puzzle-based adventure game. We had never encountered the genre before, and at ages 5, 9, and 11 we were so bad at it that it took us well over year of intermittent playing to actually get to the witchcraft-y bits. By that time we were already in Bulgaria and Mom and Dad had stopped noticing anything that didn’t impinge on their ministry directly. Even so, it required some soul-searching. There’s a voodoo priestess who has a fortune-telling shop on the town’s main street; inside is a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle that you need to zipline over to another island where you would then touch a fearsome parrot to prove your bravery to Meathook before he would join your crew. We didn’t know all that at the time, but we had been </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic;">everywhere</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;"> else, and a friend finally told us that the missing piece to the puzzle was indeed in The International House of Mojo.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">This was a grave moral dilemma. On the one hand, you want to beat the game. On the other, this is Voodoo—and divination! These are evil spirits we’re talking about, here. Guybrush Threepwood stood staring at that door for a long, long time as the inner struggle raged, and then—a brilliant compromise. We would go in, grab the chicken, get out as quickly as possible, pray forgiveness, and save the game. Then, on any subsequent playthroughs, we would play through right up till the spot that the plot forced you to put your immortal soul in danger, and from there just load the save on the other side.</span><br />
<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt;">It was decided. With hearts pounding, we began the clicking: “Open” “Door”. The interminable load … We were in! Our eyes scanned the darkened room, where pixelated skeletons lurked in the corners, illuminated only by the ghastly green light of the priestess's cauldron ... there! “Pick Up” “Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle” “Open” “Door” … and we were out. We could breathe again. We prayed forgiveness, just in case, and immediately created the brand new save file, kept sacrosanct for any future use.</span>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-72033574593473640722014-11-19T09:58:00.000+02:002014-11-19T10:35:51.908+02:00Google is your FriendOh, Reza ... why do you get under my skin so? Is it the smug confidence with which you play the reasonable, sophisticated believer talking down to me from out your ass? Is it that exact mix of well-researched points delivered in polished phrases and "the first damned link on google lists a bunch of people who said what you just claimed no one ever said"-level stupid?<br />
<br />
Whatever the reason, <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/reza-aslan-trashes-biblical-literalism-the-gospels-are-absolutely-replete-with-errors/">here we go again</a>:<br />
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[D]o you think that the Church fathers who in the 4th century decided to put both Matthew and Luke in the canonized New Testament didn’t bother to read them first? They didn’t notice that they have different dates for Jesus’ birth? They didn’t notice that the gospel of John absolutely contradicts the entire timeline of Matthew, Mark, and Luke? They didn’t notice that there are two completely different genealogies for Jesus in Matthew and Luke? Of course they did! They didn’t care, because at no point did they ever think that what they were reading was literally true.</blockquote>
Either you're lying, or you don't know the first damned thing about this question--as in, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_Jesus#Levirate_Marriage">you literally did not google this</a>. Did not type the words "genealogy of Jesus" into the internets. Did not click on the first thing to come down the tubes. Did not give it a quick once-over. Did not encounter the 3rd century references to Levirate marriages as a means of reconciling both genealogies as literally true. Did not discover Augustine's initial objections to the faith (4th century) on the grounds of the impossibility of it being literally true. Did not learn of Augustine's propagation of the adoption theory for reconciling both accounts as literally true.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Literally. Did. Not. Google. This.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
This is creationist-level stupid. Demonstrably, verifiably, empirically, embarrassingly, and categorically <i>false</i>. Aslan does for church history what Ken Ham does for biology: doctrinal denial of known facts, with just enough truth mixed in to make the pill go down easy. But then, you're talking about someone who says that:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We think that truth and fact mean the same thing. Indeed, science tells us, ‘that which is true is that which can be factually verified.’ But that’s not what the ancient mind thought. They were not as interested in the facts of Jesus’ life as they were in the truth revealed by Jesus’ life. When they constructed these stories about Jesus, and I mean that quite literally, they constructed these stories. If you asked them, ‘Did this really happen?’ they wouldn’t even understand the question. What do you mean did this really happen? You’re missing the point!</blockquote>
<div>
Uh huh. Perhaps if we take Aslan's statement that "at no point did they ever think that what they were reading was literally true" and ask, "Did that really happen?" then he, too, might misunderstand the question and accuse us of missing the point. But we didn't even need to go to wikipedia to know this is horseshit: we could have just read the Bible--specifically, 1 Corinthians 15: "if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ ... if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain [and] we are of all men most miserable."</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
If only Reza had been around to set him right.</div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-30742862401133217492014-11-09T06:21:00.001+02:002014-11-09T06:31:44.240+02:00A Depressing Coda on #GamerGate<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/rr2JPjhtGZA" width="560"></iframe>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, not #GamerGate--the movement and the ideas can go to hell--but the sort of gamer that comprises it. The thing that I’m going to say is that they’re pathetic, basement dwelling virgins. The sympathetic part is that that’s a low kind of place to be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are guys that by-and-large haven’t had any female attention in years. Most of them tried real hard at one point, failed, tried again, failed again, and at the end of the trying and the failing either gave the whole thing up in triage or else ran out of people to try with. Without commenting on the accuracy of the impression, this <i>is </i>the impression.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiecWjV2Uz7b4n74Oa2To7r4nh6-9-VRWNUMvUy3WsT4YbEeHRhx4joFi2OFPvL6lFY3s2kBXsne4uDoVITUhoD9agHlvIjsRorg35cb6J7HfuD42MJwr7tT5fqFchc9QkQLoqYFa9agXcG/s1600/42e4776c0b0e5d6588312ff2076c83c6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiecWjV2Uz7b4n74Oa2To7r4nh6-9-VRWNUMvUy3WsT4YbEeHRhx4joFi2OFPvL6lFY3s2kBXsne4uDoVITUhoD9agHlvIjsRorg35cb6J7HfuD42MJwr7tT5fqFchc9QkQLoqYFa9agXcG/s1600/42e4776c0b0e5d6588312ff2076c83c6.jpg" height="320" width="232" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you tell a guy with that kind of self-image about--let's say--the damage that male notions of attractiveness are doing to women, you won’t get a good response. It would be like explaining to some poor redneck who just lost his job, his dog, and his trailer about white privilege. At best, you might wind up with a blank stare; more likely, you'll get an inchoate snarl about the damage that female notions of attractiveness have done to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">him</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Without commenting on the accuracy of the gut response, this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>is </i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the gut response.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I know this because, having once had that impression, I still retain that gut response. A friend of mine recently posted the image at right of Amanda and her hairy legs; the first damn thought in my head was, “I should totally support this, for the sake of all the girls who overlooked </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>my</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">departures </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from conventional attractiveness ... oh wait there weren't any. People who lose the genetic lottery or flout the rules aren't found attractive the end.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” In the context of talking about weight loss, Andrew Sullivan linked to <a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/10/ask-polly-am-i-shallow.html">this article</a>. The gist is that a girl turned down an unattractive guy; now he's finishing law school, slimmed down, and dating someone more attractive than her. My gut reaction? <i>The first thing</i> that my brain contributed to the conversation?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/of1bVlo_5Y4" width="560"></iframe><br />
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not the word "justice," not the thought "justice"--literally that clip. As before, I'm </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>reporting</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> my reaction, not defending it</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But it </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>was</i> my reaction.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm not entirely sure how to fix this. As a brain-having person and self-styled feminist I absolutely get the harm that negative, stereotyped, and objectified portrayals can do. And I get that we should accept and value everyone no matter their gender or orientation or attractiveness. And I've still got that raw, ex-basement-dwelling-virgin part that responds, "You first."</span></div>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-32999896860359106432014-10-15T12:46:00.000+03:002014-10-15T12:48:44.151+03:00Twittering<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Reading through <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a>. Much of it disturbingly familiar and deeply personal.<br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522304774746931200">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Most apostates have been hurt--BADLY--by religion, whether in staying or in leaving. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522307064664948736">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Hearing it defended is akin to hearing the defense of any other abuser. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522307575887704064">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
It makes us a little snarly, b/c ur defending the very thing that lied to us, threatened us, badgered us, harmed us. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522308094693744640">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
"Moderate" religion continues to spend more energy correcting&dismissing injured critics than correcting abuses. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522308774527524864">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
But let a big smiley face on TV say 'all is well', and we are 'venomous' 'fanatics' 'trolls' for disagreeing. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522311561848029184">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Want to see the true face of religion? Try to leave it. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522319983171616769">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
If that doesn't convince you that it has to go, then "you will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.' <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/anapostatesexperience?src=hash">#anapostatesexperience</a><br />
— Andrew Ridgway (@decrystallized) <a href="https://twitter.com/decrystallized/status/522320205759139840">October 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-57145144900552087852014-10-13T22:09:00.000+03:002014-10-13T22:09:37.591+03:00A Deeper Criticism of the Maher-Harris/Affleck-Aslan Debate<div class="tr_bq">
First, the obvious:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNXeltlW7P-F7sFOC8TQvBYgUqKc2wW2vx4kkV_0OYD6cwm_A9cAkKFSPj6QywK5-bdXze2niD3faRi7aOiBhdLkDu-EbZkkhjeSAvz94tv6Gg0Rx4PwXX9WMHujEUwRsCgBqS9AYWG0nz/s1600/10452373_10154713871395228_1155101597434417710_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNXeltlW7P-F7sFOC8TQvBYgUqKc2wW2vx4kkV_0OYD6cwm_A9cAkKFSPj6QywK5-bdXze2niD3faRi7aOiBhdLkDu-EbZkkhjeSAvz94tv6Gg0Rx4PwXX9WMHujEUwRsCgBqS9AYWG0nz/s1600/10452373_10154713871395228_1155101597434417710_n.jpg" height="268" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">*kawf*</td></tr>
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Now that we're all done wetting ourselves and googling Dogma clips (which I note in passing may be the greatest Christian movie ever made), the beef. The debate consisted of four men--all rich, three white--spouting off about Islam. We can talk about what each of them got right and wrong--Affleck doesn't seem to know anything; Maher's not exactly a paragon of feminism, himself; Harris is largely on-target; Aslan is an apologist and shares the <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/07/scholarly-misrepresentation/">prerequisite difficulties with honesty</a> inherent <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/10/05/reza-aslan-is-wrong-about-islam-and-this-is-why/">to that profession.</a> While <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/opinion/bill-maher-isnt-the-only-one-who-misunderstands-religion.html?_r=0">his New York Times article</a> admits that "people of faith are far too eager to distance themselves from extremists
in their community, often denying that religious violence has any
religious motivation whatsoever", it steadfastly refuses to draw any conclusions whatsoever from this "savagery and ... religious bigotry", instead claiming that "People
of faith insert their values into their Scriptures ... scripture is meaningless without interpretation". The ability of the violent and bigoted to find such easy, plain-meaning-of-the-text, "thus saith the LAWD" justifications in scripture is apparently not an issue that others claiming allegiance to said texts need address. As I told the door-knocking proselytizers the other day: "I'm an apostate, and the Bible says I should be killed. That fact tends to color my perception of the rest of the things it says--and of the people who quote it."<br />
<br />
But I digress.<br />
<br />
What's missing from the discussion are the voices of women. The voices of victims. The voices of apostates living under death threats from followers of the religion of peace. Let's correct that--in my own, small, maybe-five-people-will-read-this sort of way. First, we have Heina Dadabhoy, '<a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/heinous/2014/10/06/bill-maher-ben-affleck/">Bill Maher / Sam Harris vs. Ben Affleck / Reza Aslan: I Choose Neither</a>':<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I would be remiss if I were to continue without a reminder that more nuanced discussions and arguments about this very topic have happened and will continue to happen among people far more qualified to talk about the issue. As the participants aren’t famous white men making soundbite-ready generalizations on network television, you probably won’t hear about them and most people will continue to not care about them.<br />...<br />I disagree with both the racialized criticism of the Maher/Harris types and the gloves-on “Not All Muslims” tactics of the Aslan/Affleck types. The former reinforce the kind of generalizations that make my life as a non-white person of Muslim background more difficult in the Western world, since racist bigots who target me hardly pause to ask me if I’m an apostate before they harm me. The latter overemphasize the “nicer” Muslims and parts of Islam in a misguided attempt to respect collective beliefs in a way that harms individuals.<br /><br />Racism that calls itself criticism of religion or racism that hobbles efforts to extend human rights to all people in all cultures? I pick neither.</blockquote>
Taslima Nasreen's '<a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/taslima/2014/09/14/gun-in-one-hand-quran-in-the-other/">Gun in One Hand, Quran in the Other</a>':<br />
<blockquote>
ISIS will not be destroyed if you do not allow critical scrutiny of Islam, if you do not stop brainwashing children with Islam, if you do not stop building Quranic schools, and if you do not abolish sharia laws.</blockquote>
Sadaf Ali <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/09/ben-affleck-you-are-not-helping/">guest-blogs</a> for PZ Myers: <br />
<blockquote>
I have a personal appeal to Ben Affleck, after his participation on Bill Maher’s show, because it is attitudes like his that have historically made little to no room for ex-Muslims, secular, reformists, liberal or progressive Muslims to own a dialogue that is supposed to be ours to discuss.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...</blockquote>
<blockquote>
One: Muslim is not a race. Two: Islam is an ideology. Three: Islamophobia is not real. Four: Anti-Muslim bigotry is.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The Middle-East and Central Asia is comprised of several ethnic and cultural identities with a range of religious affiliations (and like in my case, no religious affiliation at all). In the same way one conflates the criticism of Islam as a racial issue – i.e. treating all Muslims as one and the same – Affleck himself is treating all of the Middle-East and Central Asia, where the US intervenes often, as a monolithic race of people.<br />...<br />When bombs drop and when bullets fly, how does one know the religion of a target or civilian? I am an Afghan Tajik and I am an atheist. Afghanistan and Iraq consist of Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists, Zoroastrians, Bah’ais, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and more. So, chances are, not every person that has been a victim of these conflicts are Muslim. Shame on you, Ben. It is people like you who are complicit in denying our diversity.<br /><br />Affleck uses the death and suffering of my peoples as a tool to suffocate the discourse of Islam and as an Afghan-Canadian, I am upset by this. How dare you? Islam as an ideology is not flawless. No ideology is. Much in the same way Affleck played a part in the film ‘Dogma’ to satirize or criticize Christianity, others are allowed to criticize Islam. Furthermore, Islamists must be confronted. Those who preach the death of apostates and LGBTQ peoples, and seek the inequality of genders and wish to marginalize minorities must be condemned.</blockquote>
andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-77785816987515609282014-09-29T21:40:00.000+03:002014-09-29T21:53:31.311+03:00Karen Armstrong on 'The Myth of Religious Violence'It's not every day <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/-sp-karen-armstrong-religious-violence-myth-secular">you see an article</a> decry colonialism while praising western leaders for their pronouncements on the true nature of Islam. Take a moment to savor that contradiction before moving on. I find it instructive. We aren't really objecting to westerners telling other people what their religion 'really' is, we're just using that objection as a cover to put forward our own preferred definition.<br />
<br />
For myself, during my years as a liberal Christian, what I was mainly clinging to were the fuzzy godfeels--not the vomit-inducing praise-and-worship 'feel the spirit!', but other ideas, such as justice, correction for the evils of this world, and an elision of my own mortality. To maintain these fuzzy godfeels, I had to distance myself from this extremist elements--my personal pleasure in religion is greatly diminished by coming at that price!--usually by denying that the evils of religion were both necessary and endemic. This was true in the epistemological sense, as well: if the methodologies of faith and revelation could lead to such horrors and not just to my happy place, then I had built my house upon the sands.<br />
<br />
A further bit of personal history: I know Baptist pastors who have been brutally savaged by mobs led by Orthodox priests screaming about the one true religion. Those priests seemed to think it was about religion. And the mob seemed to think it was about religion. And the victims seemed to think it was about religion. And I, simpleminded, colonial atheist that I am, look at that and go, 'Huh! Maybe this was about religion!'<br />
<br />
Enter Karen Armstrong to set everybody straight.<br />
<br />
I guess I could fisk the rest of it--"it came about that we in the west developed our view of religion as a purely private pursuit, essentially separate from all other human activities, and especially distinct from politics." To paraphrase CS Lewis on toothache, ten minutes of Southern Baptist preaching will cure of you of all that romantic claptrap. "The words in other languages that we translate as “religion” invariably refer to something vaguer, larger and more inclusive." Not since ol' Ronnie Raygun claimed Russian had no word for freedom has a stupider claim been made about the contents of foreign languages. Or perhaps you'd like to claim Bulgaria, and the <i>Eastern</i> Orthodox Church, as Western? Thus sending everything you've said about 'western' religion tumbling into incoherence? There are even a few valid points, like 'secular is not automatically good', or 'religion properly understood is a totalizing ideology that seeks to dominate every aspect of personal and public life', but these are ultimately incidental.<br />
<br />
Karen Armstrong drives me batty, because she refuses to engage either with the strong forms of her stated opponents' arguments, or with the actual words of actual religious people by which they themselves describe their beliefs and motivations, and because she refuses to say what she really thinks, or why. What's the topic sentence of this essay? What thesis is she defending--or attacking? I have literally hurt my brain thinking about this, and the best I can do is "the most caricatured and overstated version of the link between religion and violence is overstated." The second-best--"secularization won't necessarily fix the problems of the Middle East"--is also a no-brainer, but completely belies the serious article promised by that fine-sounding title. Also conspicuously absent is a cogent definition of a 'secular' or any proposed alternative. Sure there are problems with secularism--yeah, we know that secular governments are themselves often repressive, and we know religions violently oppose changes to the social order, a point which seems out of place in an article entitled 'The Myth of Religious Violence'--but <i>there's nothing better</i>. Having been a religious minority in a non-secular country, I can say with some authority that decrying secularism as I understand the term positively <i>reeks</i> of privilege. Let her spend some time as a Druze in Palestine, or an evangelical in Bulgaria, and then we'll have a nice long chat about <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/09/29/you-dont-have-any-baptist-ministers-going-on-jihad/">the desirability of secular government</a> and the true nature of religion.<br />
<br />
I understand why Obama and Cameron (and Bush and Blair before them) have to say the things they have to say, but I keep waiting for the moderates to seriously take on the serious versions of the religious violence argument, to wit, that beliefs influence action and that beliefs such as: 1) God gave me ALL the land; 2) martyrdom = VIRGINS; 3) infidel-killing is part of god's plan; and 4) heretical ideas and sinful actions will bring about an infinite bad, so nearly any finite bad is justified--even merciful!--in stamping them out--will tend to promote violence, curtail freedom, and stunt negotiations and compromise. I wait in vain.andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-34866484361222992172014-09-22T19:41:00.000+03:002014-09-22T22:10:28.593+03:00Growing up in Missions, Memoir Project Excerpt 3: Arriving<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The political situation settled down, the best-we-could-do language lessons around Grandma’s table came to an end, and we got ready to fly. All our stuff that wasn’t stored, sold, or crated went into oversized suitcases and heavy-duty gray-blue footlockers. We got on the plane and headed over the ocean--it was a big 747, and in those pre-9/11 days, the Air France stewardesses woke me up and took me upstairs to see the cockpit. “How neat!” said Dad.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-749d6fe1-9e3d-2f81-c2aa-078ee8751545" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We landed in Paris for a twelve-hour layover--I’ve since been back to Charles De Gaulle and hated it, but at the time it was too big and too much on too little sleep to form anything like an opinion of the structure as such. Architecture aside, the experience was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">amazing</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Barely had we gotten off the plane when we saw a Givenchy billboard, a blue-tinted artsy thing in which the model held up a bottle of perfume next to her naked breast. Welcome to Europe! My passport received its first stamp, which I looked at with great admiration. As we wandered through the place debating a course of action, we got to stand behind police lines and watch airport security destroy someone’s unattended luggage with a heavy blast cover and some kind of small detonation, and across from the detonation? Another Givenchy billboard.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From bombs to breasts the airport was amazing, but my first encounter with jetlag wasn’t going well. The original plan had been to get a hotel room, leave our stuff there, and spend a few hours in Paris. The first two bits went all right, but when it came time to leave, everyone was asleep, and even making it back to the airport on time was a struggle.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We flew in dress clothes. I’ve since learned that this custom was a carryover from the days when flying was a luxurious experience reserved for the upper class. By the time we flew, the back end of a 747 was about as far from that as you can get without sleeping in the luggage bin. At first I just accepted that you flew in dress clothes because you flew in dress clothes. Later in my teens I rebelled against it and demanded a reason; Mother replied, in so many words, that this way if the plane went down I wouldn’t die looking like a plebe. I envisioned the charred ashes of my corpse in the mangled remains of an airplane and tried, not to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">care</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> whether there were buttons melted into the blackened ruin of my shirt, but to imagine what it might be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to care about such a thing. Couldn’t quite manage it, funnily enough.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the time Bulgaria was a cash-based economy. There were no personal checks, no one knew what travelers’ checks were, not a single establishment in the whole of the country accepted credit cards, attempts to describe ATMs were met with blank stares. Wire transfers from the West were a tortuous affair, in-country transfers between competing banks were often impossible, and even at the bank where we eventually settled, the simplest transactions were a bureaucratic nightmare of running back and forth between various counters, windows, and cashiers to dot all the i’s on triplicate authorization forms.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These two asides intersected with the story at hand when Z and I found that certain pockets of our nice flying clothes were sewn shut. We felt them, puzzled, worried. “Mom there’s something in my pocket!” said Zachary.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Shhht!” came the replied, in wide-eyed, panicky anger, as if that wouldn’t draw </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">way</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> more attention.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Mom I think it’s--”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“SHHHT!” louder this time, eyes opened wider, head quivering.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They had sewn thousands of dollars in crisp new hundreds into our pockets. Welcome to missions! You are now a helpmeet to your parents’ calling; your identity, time, social life, personal space, and possessions are now irrelevant, and just forget about trifles like “right to be told what’s going on around you” or “input,” let alone “consent.” If Mom and Dad need you to smuggle currency, then smuggle currency you shall, and it’ll be a funny story to share with their supporters in the decades to come. “Hey kids! Remember that time when we first came to Bulgaria and you found the money in your pockets! *Snrk*!” A day of awakenings: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">I saw my first tit AND played currency-mule for Jesus. At least it was sewn pockets and not condoms up the ass.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was a long flight in the dark from Paris to Sofia, and mostly empty. In one lucid interval between naps I moved to the front of the plane, ahead of my brothers, so that I would be the first one across the border and the first Southern Baptist MK in Bulgaria. The plane touched down close to midnight on the second night of our trip. Passport control is a blur--I vaguely recall trying to be the first one through here, as well, but couldn’t tell you if I succeeded. We got to the luggage carousels, and James Duke met us. James was the pastor of the International Baptist Church in Sofia, a heavy-set, 6’3” Texan in a trenchcoat who had the habit of flashing his American passport amidst a torrent of thick Southern banter to circumvent whatever rules he found inconvenient, such as ‘wait for passengers on the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> side of customs.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our luggage didn’t come. And didn’t come. And didn’t come. It was getting close to two o’clock, and I was staring around the dingy room reading and rereading the Cyrillic signs. Паспорт контрол. Obvious enough. Митница, said another--’Customs’ read the English above it. Мит-нит-са, I sounded it out to myself (not entirely correctly), trying to remember it. “Can you read them?” asked James. I nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “It’s a good start.” Through the occasional openings of the clouded glass doors we caught glimpses of the rest of the welcoming party: a middle-aged American woman of the Southern variety--big brown hair, affectionate and hospitable--Audrey Duke, James’ wife. Teodor Angelov, a darker-skinned man with a large stomach and average height, bald on top but with ample grey hair in the back and sides and the deep brown Byzantine eyes so typical of the country--pastor of the Sofia Baptist Church and President of the Bulgarian Baptist Union. Ani Angelova, his wife, almost as tall as he was, with her shock of short, thick black hair and pale, severe, almost Russian face.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We made inquiries about the luggage--it was coming, it wasn’t coming; it was on the plane, it wasn’t on the plane. James spoke no Bulgarian, we spoke even less, and what few of the hired-under-communism customer “service” folks who were still around at two in the morning were neither knowledgeable, helpful, or particularly versed in English. The carousels stopped; still nothing.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Around 2:30 or so the problem was discovered: the unloading crew had thought that our footlockers were some kind of shipment rather than luggage, and hadn’t sent them up the conveyor belt. The carousel kicked back on (we were the last flight in that night) and up they came, at last. We stepped through the doors to customs like caravaners with our baggage train, finally met the rest of the welcomers, loaded everything in the Baptist Union van and took off.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sofia was a city at night--sulphur-vapor lamps turning empty streets orange and gray. I’ve no head for directions and was half-asleep, but I learned the layout in the years to follow, and we went straight through the middle from the south-eastern airport to our apartment in the west-southwest, about a block back from Стамболийски where the 10 tram used to run. At the time it was a blur--a random parade of turns past the ugly, rectangular Communist architecture that was still utterly new to me.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We made it “home” at last, staggered in the front door, and piled in the elevator. It wasn’t big enough for all of us, the single, exposed light bulb was forty watts if that, and there were no inner doors. No. Inner. Doors. I was twelve years old, it was three o’clock in the morning on the second night of my first intercontinental flight, I had just moved to Eastern Europe (in 1994, mind you!), and there were </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">no inner doors</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on the elevator. The push-to-open doors to each floor ambled lazily by as we ascended, separated by concrete slabs. You could just reach out and touch it! You could drag your finger along it! You could get your finger </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">caught</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in something! Of all the things I had seen since liftoff, that was the detail that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">broke my mind</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I extrapolate that Dad, Teo, James, and the Baptist Union driver must have brought up the baggage, and I must have gone to bed at some point, but my memories of the evening end with staring bug-eyed out the open nope-totally-not-a-door-here of the elevator as the wall rolled slowly past.</span>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-36927542742102795482014-09-09T22:15:00.000+03:002014-09-09T22:49:35.714+03:00Dear Frustrated Parent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoQhyphenhyphenb83ewBR0erP3rLpI1c-sIQA2GWYe8BHzK2JZfhwmQ-xuV964YUALdSINW5BE_J-vwHRLPgwkK4PQ8QdGJ-TpqJ7AYlNaHu-mWrE2zxXJYyH4JEQb1SJ-I7Uy8F_GwSggiM5vH1fI/s1600/core.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoQhyphenhyphenb83ewBR0erP3rLpI1c-sIQA2GWYe8BHzK2JZfhwmQ-xuV964YUALdSINW5BE_J-vwHRLPgwkK4PQ8QdGJ-TpqJ7AYlNaHu-mWrE2zxXJYyH4JEQb1SJ-I7Uy8F_GwSggiM5vH1fI/s1600/core.jpg" height="640" width="499" /></a></div>
<br />
Dear Frustrated Parent,<br />
<br />
Feel bad. I have a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English, and five seconds is three too many. However, if you actually read the problem (see? English Degree!), what is asked of you is to <i>spot the mistake</i>, and then verbalize what the person did right and how to fix the mistake. For example:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Dear Jack,<br />
To subtract 316 from another number, you need to jump back three hundreds, <i>one ten</i>, and six ones. You got the 'hundreds' and the 'ones', but you forgot the 'tens'. Just remember it next time and you'll be fine!<br />
Sincerely,<br />
Someone Who Read the Problem and Can Count</blockquote>
You don't get to tout your calculus credentials if you can't tell the difference between '306' and '316' on a number line. But this is a very well-constructed problem: children are not asked to display the mere technical mastery of mechanically producing the right answer, they are asked spot how that process can go awry, and to verbalize their understanding of the conception and the mistake. Good, good stuff.<br />
<br />
Now: ignoring the fact that <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/about-that-common-core-math-problem-making-the-rounds-on-facebook/">this has nothing to do with Common Core</a>, and ignoring the fact that our parent's frustration mostly stems from lack of reading comprehension, the 'new method' <i>is</i> more or less how I taught myself to do math in my head when I abandoned the clunky, overcomplicated, counterintuitive bullshit they taught me in school in favor of something that not only made more sense to me, but that was faster, more likely to be correct, and generally wrong by a smaller margin when I screwed up. Sure, the old way looks simple in those neat little lines the way that you write it out. But let's try a different problem. Let's say, 426 - 327.<br />
<br />
First do it my way. We start by taking away three hundreds, 4 - 3 = 1, leaving us 126 - 27. Then we take away twenty, 2 - 2 = 0, leaving us 106 - 7. Then we take away seven: count back six to 100, then count back 1 more to 99. 426 - 327 = 99. This is an intuitive, left-to-right approach, like the way that we read, and it consists of two one-digit subtractions and one counting back: three operations, and as errors are more likely to compound the further into the problem we get, we're more likely to get an error in the 'ones' column than the 'tens' or 'hundreds'.<br />
<br />
Now let's try it your way:<br />
<br />
426<br />
-327<br />
-------<br />
XXX<br />
<br />
6 is less than 7 so we have to borrow:<br />
<br />
4(2-1)(16)<br />
-327<br />
-------<br />
XXX<br />
<br />
16 minus 7 is 9, so:<br />
<br />
4(1)(16)<br />
-327<br />
-----------<br />
XX9<br />
<br />
So, 1 minus 2 ... whoops have to borrow again!<br />
<br />
(4-1)(11)(16)<br />
-327<br />
---------<br />
XX9<br />
<br />
11 minus 2 is 9, so:<br />
<br />
(3)(11)(16)<br />
-327<br />
--------<br />
X99<br />
<br />
and three minus three is 0, so ...<br />
(3)(11)(16)<br />
-327<br />
--------<br />
099<br />
<br />
Thus we have: two multi-digit subtractions, one single-digit subtraction, and two complicated borrowing operations, all going in a counterintuitive, right-left direction, with the hundreds column coming last, meaning that compounded errors will have a vastly greater effect on the magnitude of any wrong answer. Got all that, kids? In the real world, simplification is valued over complication---this might be why it takes you more than twice as long as me to do arithmetic. I certainly hope that wouldn't result in my termination, but if one of my engineers couldn't figure out a number line--or understand a word problem, or spot the difference between 306 and 316--it certainly would result in his!<br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
Bemused English Majorandrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-52496219158756668892014-09-03T20:45:00.000+03:002014-09-03T20:45:06.754+03:00Growing up in Missions, Memoir Project Excerpt 2<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When my parents went to the States to fundraise, they would leave me to hold down the fort in Sofia. On one such parental trip, my cell phone rang--an odd occurrence. It was Petko, who had semi-officially taken over the Rakovitsa church after Ivan got kicked out for accepting bribes from political figures (a car and perhaps a keyboard from the King’s party) to sway the congregation their way.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-9d6019b4-3c95-b9bd-3133-fcb492b9eb17" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Andrew!” he began, out of breath, and then proceeded to tell me the story of a child. A recent birth from a couple in their church had come with severe complications, and the child had had one operation and was waiting on a second, but needed some special medicine not available in Bulgaria and my parents were in the States so couldn’t they please do something to help?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As far as I got, it was spinal bifada, and possibly hydrocephaly. Petko didn’t actually say the words for either of those conditions, it just sounded like it based on the description, which came to me via the telephone game: the doctor to the couple in their second language, they to Petko in everyone’s native language, then finally Petko to me in his and my second language on a cell with a bad connection.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It caught me by surprise, but I thought to ask: what is this medicine that they need? “It’s one of four things,” he replied in a rush. “Any of them will do--I’ll send you the names!”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Really? I thought. Fucking </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The doctor can think of four separate things that will work and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">none</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of them are available? It’s not the nineties anymore, you can get stuff, and if there’s four </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">different</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> things that work then surely he can think of a fifth that they actually have in-country rather than pulling the asshole move of telling poverty-stricken gypsies from a small-town ghetto that their mortally ill child desperately needs something from abroad. “Okay”, I said, “look--there’s a couple issues here. America isn’t like Bulgaria. You can’t just go to the drug store and buy whatever you want. I don’t know what these are, but they might not be available in America (he had mentioned they were French), and if they are my parents might not be able to buy them. Also: America has funny rules about what you as a private citizen can ship (thanks, Canadian Internet pills!) and it’s not actually legal to ship a lot of medicines. They’re also travelling and I don’t know when they’ll be able to get to this, but even if they drop what they’re doing and go to a drugstore tomorrow, and even if the drugstore has these meds, and even if it’s legal to buy them, and even if it’s legal to ship them, then it will still take time to get here and be really expensive--”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“We’ll pay whatever they spend!”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“--Yes, but there’s still the time--”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Whenever they can!”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“--Listen! Your best bet is to go back to the doctor--or to go to a different doctor!--and to ask him for something that is available in-country. Got that? If it’s as urgent as you’re making it sound, then shipping from the States isn’t the best option even if it’s possible. You need to go to the doctor and demand something that’s available here.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yes!”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Got that?”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yes!”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Okay, I’m sorry that--”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“We’re counting on you, Andrew!” he said as he hung up, his voice actually sighing in gratitude and relief. Fuck me, how do I always get involved in this shit? You’re counting on me. Great. Try </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">listening </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to me instead. Now I was actually kinda proud of that response, because I had gotten this out-of-the-blue phonecall with the breathless insinuation that I was all that stood between a newborn babe and certain death, and had still managed to tell them the best thing that I could have told them.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well I wrote the parents, and they didn’t write back. They were travelling, and between the nonstop running about and the staying with older friends who only sorta knew how the wifi worked and the schmoozing and their own medical stuff, they almost never checked their email while in the States. It was too early their time to call, and their weird schedule also meant that they had a knack for either not charging their phone or for turning it off and forgetting it. I eventually got in touch and they promised to look into it, but couldn’t promise much. In the meantime I took the list down to my pharmacy and asked the girl if she had ever heard of any of them; she gave me the sort of look normally reserved for elderly relatives’ Facebook politicking; I took this as a ‘no’ and made some face-saving remark as I headed out the door. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For the next week Petko called me nearly nonstop: “I’ve passed along the message, there’s nothing else I can do, I’ll call you as soon as … yes, I have your number … the one you’re calling me from right now, I can see it if I pull the phone away from my ear … look the best thing really is to go back to that doctor, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or to a different one</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and to--”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“We’re counting on you, Andrew!” *click*</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I eventually found out what the “medicine” actually was: a dietary supplement/super-power formula, basically to fatten the kid up for the next operation. Mindboggling: all the kid needed was nutrition, and the doctor tells these panicking, uneducated parents that only this stupid French formula will work? And they go out of their minds--and nearly drive me out of mine--trying to find it? Truly his dickery knows no bounds, and this was compounded by the Bulgarian attitude towards medicine. It’s not like the States, where people go off their antibiotics the first afternoon they perk up. No, in Bulgaria, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you have to take the medicine</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Even if it’s two weeks later and it was an antihistamine and you’re no longer stuffed up, the doctor said ‘Take it!’ and buddy you gotta take it. So when the doctor pulled this French bullshit? That was the sole possible and magically efficacious cure for their dying child.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After about a week M&D called up to say that they were heading back to Tennessee, and they would try to work something out with [a doctor friend] to see if she could get access to this stuff and possibly ship it over. By that time I was thoroughly disillusioned with the whole affair--not only in my own power to actually obtain the “medicine” in question, but in the likelihood that doing so would actually affect the situation in any way. Still, it was something.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then the next day Petko called and said the kid died. So … nevermind, I guess. “But thank you for your help,” he added. Sure. Lay it on. Why not.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The parents called back to confirm something-or-other about the situation: “The kid died, so … don’t worry about it,” I said.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Oh,” they said.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then we proceeded to the next item of business.</span>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-28352737584223200162014-08-04T23:23:00.004+03:002014-08-04T23:27:55.790+03:00Growing up in Missions, Memoir Project Excerpt 1<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[When we first came to Bulgaria], policemen could stop you on the street and demand to see your documents--foreigners were even easier to spot in those days than now--then keep you standing there forever. Well, until you bribed them or it finally sank in that you weren’t going to. This got worse when we got a car. Because of the weird rules regarding foreigners owning cars (among other things, the car had to be owned by a business and bear special blue license plates that practically screamed “Pull me over!”), we actually purchased the van through the Baptist Union. Marginally less conspicuous, but when you </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">were </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pulled over, and the cops realized that you were foreigners </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Baptists, then things could get ugly.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-fab8df13-a2b1-d851-7c7d-c116ae660bb5" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like pedestrians, drivers could be pulled over for document checks--the cop would step out into traffic with his little shiny red ‘МВР’ lollipop and flag you down. You stopped the car, he came up, “The documents, if you please.” In fairness, sometimes (read: quite often) Dad really had done something bad, and Bulgaria was more or less the car-theft capital of Europe at the time</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. But more often they were looking for bribes, or power-tripping, and on more than one occasion detained us for hours after seeing that the car was owned by the Baptist Union.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s hard to say where the truth of the matter lay. Sometimes it was obvious, like when they would say “Baptist” or see a missionary visa immediately prior to losing their shit. Other times? Does he get off on being an asshole? Is it merely that westerners are famous the world over for greasing the palms of the local constabulary? Or are they persecuting the followers of Christ just as He warned us that they would?</span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jesus said, “</span><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.”</span><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In John he expands on the subject more at length: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> And check it out: we were meeting lots of people who had suffered for the faith, and we were suffering for ours! Proof positive that we were on the side of the angels, co-participants in the suffering of Jesus for which our heavenly reward would be great.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t get me wrong, sitting in the car for two hours in the heat while a policeman sat flipping through the various documents--car registration (in the name of the Baptist Union, which started all the trouble), our passports, official notarized letter from the Baptist Union granting us the right to drive the car, our visas, notarized copies of the registration of the Baptist Union proving that it was a real legal entity, driver’s licenses (American and International), proof of civil liability insurance, etc.--sucked. But the idea of the thing? That was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">awesome</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">--I was so fucking proud of that you wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t wait to tell all the kids back home, and on furlough that story was a real crowd-pleaser, let me tell ya’. I had actually suffered for my faith, how cool was that?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christians love to suffer. By which I don’t mean that Christians actually love to actually suffer--the American ones in particular are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">huge</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> babies about it--but Jesus taught that his followers would be a persecuted minority, a gathering of outcasts and the despised. The world’s attacks and contempt were a sign of God’s special favor: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “</span><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,”</span><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and so forth. Problem is, in America Christians are the overweight majority of the richest and most powerful nation that ever was.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The dichotomy makes them kinda batty. Insofar as Christianity is or ever was mythology, the dominant mythos is that of the chosen few defying Satan with the truth: even at the cost of their lives, even though the Devil brought to bear all the powers and principalities of this world--which were under his control, natch--to rail and threaten and silence them, for he despises to hear the truth. The heroes of the church are martyrs. The masses looked on and were converted</span><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Satan looked on raged at the reminder of his coming ignominious defeat, and God looked on and was pleased--He even gave them special robes in Heaven, and His final plans await the full tally of their numbers being achieved</span><span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fdfeff; color: #001320; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now what the hell do you do with that story once <i>you </i>get the power? The gate’s not so narrow when eighty-odd-percent of your countrymen claim to have found it. On the one hand, having got it, they’re happy enough doing the natural thing and yanking its levers against their own perceived enemies. On the other, they’re still shoehorning everything into the only myth they know while desperately trying to convince themselves of their own oppressed status. If Jesus promised His followers that they would be persecuted, then the thought of not being persecuted is too terrible to contemplate. Thus, with Heaven’s favor on the line, “Gay marriage is persecution of Christians!”</span>andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1921155198092013567.post-6555331699802721162014-07-01T01:05:00.003+03:002014-07-01T01:06:17.887+03:00An Invitation, in Light of Recent Supreme Court Decisions<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3f4549; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 15px; padding: 0px;">
Hi, my name is Andrew, and I'd like to talk to you a minute about the First Church of FSM, Piratist. We Pastafarians have long believed that global warming has been caused by a lack of pirates, and, along with our sister organization The Swedish Piracy Church, have done our best to prevent it despite government persecution.</div>
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This recent Supreme Court case, however, gives us hope. In order to more closely comply with the decision, we have now changed our official doctrine--yes, His Noodly Appendage hath reach down and touched us, and we have a new revelation. Copyright law is an abortifacient, and it is not the government's place to say "that [our] religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial." Be it known, be it proclaimed, blessed be the Grater of the Mooncheese.</div>
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I invite all citizens of goodwill to join us in body and spirit, wallet and swarm. Save the planet. Stop abortions. Keep up with Game of Thrones. Join the First Church of FSM, Piratist, today.</div>
<br />andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06240845688616411868noreply@blogger.com0