the parish

Pentecostal Boys Aren't Like Holden Caulfield, Part Four

2009-12-17T15:57:30-06:00

Hell is an ever-present reality in the conceptual sense for fundamentalist Christians, like pentecostals. Whether or not it is in fact a reality is another matter, and one beyond the task of reason--near death experiences and testimonies of ecstatic experiences notwithstanding. However, in the Assemblies of God churches of my youth, as well as a small, generic Protestant congregation we attended on base while my father was stationed in Japan, the pastors and evangelists dedicated a disproportionate amount of time to the discussion of hell and its torments, as well as editorializing about who belonged there.

This was long before my interest in philosophy, rhetoric and reason had given me the tools to parse the message. I had never heard of Zoroaster and his dualist cosmology, nor had it occurred to me that the Old Testament was silent about hell.

Authority functions differently than pastors claim in “Bible-based churches.” Allegedly, the Bible is the sole authority, and the voice of the pastor becomes the mediator of the message, and thanks mostly to the Holy Spirit, the message is inspired and therefore trustworthy. Even pastors who encourage their congregations to “search the Scriptures like the Bereans” don’t typically hold out the possibility that they could be wrong.

I am sure there are humble preachers out there, but the preachers of pentecostalism saved their humility for other topics, famously letting children and teens preach because the Word was so clear a child could proclaim it. Humility in preaching the Word was confused with being wishy-washy or being afraid to proclaim the whole gospel. They seemed to lack a fundamental ability to discern between what the Bible actually says and their expositions of what it says. An annotated Bible based on the preaching of pentecostal pastors would need to be twice its current length; the notes would be near endless, but the pastors I grew up around didn’t think of their sermonizing as annotations of the text.

From that perspective it’s one short step from the Bible as authority to the pastor as de facto authority with the unconscious collusion of the congregation, all agreeing that their congregation follows the Bible. This is not to say that these people participated in usurping the authority of Scripture willfully; rather, they assumed they were faithful before the Word. There is no delusion like one based on a sacred text. If obedience to the text as the voice of God is misdirected, then there is virtually no way to convince the adherents that they are in error. The request to rethink the position immediately becomes a request to hear God differently. It calls the text and the voice of God into question, thereby creating a debate about Biblical authority rather than a theological discussion about doctrine.

This process is followed repeatedly in fundamentalist churches to the point where minor points of doctrine become integral to what it means to be a Christian. If you drink, you’re not a Christian. If you don’t speak in tongues, you’re not saved. If you’re not fully immersed, you haven’t been baptized. And, back to the current point, if you don’t believe in hell, you aren’t being faithful to the demands of the gospel, especially in proclaiming it to the lost.

Pentecostal Boys Aren't Like Holden Caulfield, Part Three

2009-12-15T23:56:23-06:00

I need to move forward before I go back to Denver because I want to address heaven and hell first, as they represent the carrot and stick of theism, both metaphorically and literally. We moved to Oregon on New Year’s day 1980. My father was retiring from the Army, so my mother took the opportunity to demand we move to Salem, Ore., to be near one of her older sisters. She came from a family of seven siblings; in fact, her mother lost triplets, preventing the family from becoming a major league sports franchise. Her father had abandoned the family when my mother was about six-years old, and she wouldn’t see him again until he was on his death bed in Phoenix, Ariz., while we were living in Denver.

The things we don’t know as kids are amazing; family secrets have a way of shaping our lives even when we are unaware of them, and had the family sat down as a group before the move, and had our mother said, “Look, kids, we’re moving to Oregon so I can be near my sister, but you need to know your father has already fucked my niece once, and it’s likely he’ll do it again, which will, of course, precipitate an emotional breakdown on my part,” we would have said, “Meh.”

The trip to Oregon was relatively uneventful. We saw how beautiful Utah and Idaho can be, and we were completely besotted with the beauty of the Cascade Mountains. For a family who had spent five years in the Rockies, that was a surprise. The waterfalls, dense forest, and milder climate of Oregon seemed to offer some promise. We were just exchanging younger, rockier mountains for older, gentler mountains, with the ocean tossed in as a bonus.

Salem sits in northwestern Oregon, in the middle of the Willamette Valley. It’s a short drive to Portland, the mountains, and the ocean. For outdoor types like our family, it seemed the perfect destination. My father had already secured a job at the state mental hospital, and we enrolled in high school for the spring semester of the 1980 school year. My older brother had some girl problems with a deacon’s daughter before we left Denver, so he had gone to live with my paternal grandfather in Seminole, Okla., to finish his senior year of high school. He would follow after graduation and attend the University of Oregon.

My younger brother and I were miserable. We’d left “serious” girlfriends behind, and fashions, not being as uniformly dictated by national television programming in those days, were vastly different between a mid-American metropolis like Denver and the provincial regions of the West Coast, which is to say we’d have fit in better in Southern California than in northern Oregon. Oregonians are averse to outsiders; I always suspected it was because of their inferiority complex related to their neighbors to the south. Whatever the cause, our depression related to losing hot, sexually-available girlfriends, changing schools, growing tension between the parents, living with our aunt and uncle, and looking like we were five years ahead or five years behind the fashion climate combined with the provincial aloofness of Oregonians was causing us to avoid all contact with the new school and the new church.

The net result was that we ditched school nearly every day. At one parent-teacher conference my world history teacher told my mother he thought a desk in his class was named “Greg Horton” because a person never sat in it. We got out of my mom’s car before the bell, walked the length of the main hallway at McNary High School, pushed open the back door, crossed the practice fields, and climbed the back fence to escape school. Our parents, for whatever reason, did not overreact. Years of reflection about their response, or non-response, has caused me to believe it was due to their growing obsession with the extra-marital affair that was about to happen. For my father, it was a chance to renew a relationship with his sister-in-law’s daughter, one that began shortly after Vietnam, and would end in insanity (for two people), divorce, and shame. For my mother, it was surely the proximate cause for her descent into madness and the genesis of all that would follow. My brother and I were just swept along, in spite of believing as teens often do that we were immune to the world of our parents, except when their world impacted ours, as it did one night, a night that disabused me of the notion that hell was someplace besides here.

Pentecostal Boys Aren't Like Holden Caulfield, Part Two

2009-12-14T21:47:47-06:00

The evangelist finished his pitch, and invited Cathy, the soloist, up to sing. The band kicked in but Cathy waited for the evangelist to finish his pitch. "I'm going to stand right here while Cathy sings," he said. "I'm going to wait for you to come meet me at the altar. I want to pray for you, with you. I want you to come let Jesus have that thing you're carrying. Some of you have never received the baptism in the Holy Ghost. Your pastor is here to pray with you about that. There are other leaders down here. Young people, we have these fine Bible college students down here to meet you. It wasn't that long ago that they shared the same struggles you're facing. Jesus freed them. He can free you, too. Don't wait. Tonight is the night of the Lord's visitation. Won't you come? Cathy..."

She started to sing, and she could sing. Some voices have a timbre to them that reaches into a place inside you and strums your emotions like the voice is a hand playing an instrument. Cathy's voice was one of those: full of earnestness, yearning, passion and a lamentation tinged with hope. Her effect on a congregation was mathematically predictable. Less than three verses in someone would be crying. On the first repetition of the song, someone would be blubbering. Before she reached the end of the first repetition, someone would start the high, keening wail that outsiders mistakenly assume is tongues. It is not; it is a kind of religious pathology, a mark of an unstable mind given free reign to seek catharsis in an environment where psychological excess is a mark of the Holy Ghost's presence. The actual tongues almost never started until Cathy slowed things down and waited for something to happen. It was usually a musical interlude wherein the instruments played softly and Cathy prayed even more softly some Pentecostal mantra: "Come, Jesus," or "We love you, Jesus."

When she did slow things down, the evangelist, who had been praying for a couple we all assumed was having marriage problems, raised the microphone and started phase two of the altar call. Phase two is only necessary when a particular demographic is missing from the altar area--young people, in this case--or when he thinks enough people haven't come forward. That night it was a combination of the two. He went after backsliders first and saved his big guns for young people.

"Teenagers, you're sitting out there ashamed to come forward. You're thinking to yourself, 'What will people say about me? What will they wonder about my sins?' I'm telling you tonight that you better worry about what God thinks about you. You'll not be standing before these people on judgment day. They'll be in line with you. On that day, all our sins will be displayed and God will ask you one question: 'Did you accept my Son as your personal savior?' Many of you are feeling confident about your answer. 'Preacher, we've been to the altar. We've prayed a prayer. We're saved.' But you'll go home and take the Lord's name in vain. You'll swear, fornicate, smoke, go to the movies...do you want Jesus to return when you're sitting in a theater watching an R-rated movie? Do you want to break your Savior's heart? He will deny he ever knew you on that day. The Bible says it. If you're not walking in holiness, you never knew the Lord..."

And on and on, until every possible teenage sin was covered. Tentatively, one by one, all my friends got up and crept to the altar. I wasn't feeling it though. No tears. No strong pull to go forward. No guilt even. Where had the guilt gone, the guilt I carried into the service with me? Most likely it was drowned in my annoyance at the length of the revival, the evangelist's heavy-handed preaching, and my fixation on the youth intern. She was praying with people at the front. I watched as she placed a hand on kids' shoulders, closed her eyes, lifted her face and prayed. She repeated the technique with each young person. The evangelist noticed me watching her, looking both unrepentant and frankly lustful. He launched into phase three.

Phase three is the closer. End times talk. Missing the Rapture. Tribulation. Death. Mark of the Beast. If you don't repent tonight and the Rapture happens, you're stuck here. No family to support and encourage you. No Holy Ghost to strengthen you. Only the relentless forces of the Antichrist tracking you down, getting you ready for the guillotine. Five or so minutes into phase three, I relented. I summoned up some fake tears and made my way to the altar. I was not going to be the only one to resist the Holy Ghost. This is absurd, of course. I was only going down to the altar to shut the evangelist up and to have the intern put her hands on me. I was too young to know the difference between zeal and insanity, but she was about to demonstrate it for me.

I knelt at the wooden altar, the varnish dulled by decades of penitents' elbows and foreheads. I made a vee with my arm and rested my head on my forearm. I pretended to pray while stealing the occasional glance out of the corner of my eye, searching for the intern. It's difficult to explain how confusing these altar times can be. All the shit that has been stuffed down a kid since birth combined with the theatrics of the evangelist and some of the more demonstrative prayer partners added to the tongues, crying, wailing, keening, and music, make for a psychotropic stew in which nearly anything is believable. Of course God moves in your life; of course God performs miracles; of course God gives the gift of tongues; of course the evangelist can read your fucking mind. It's too much to call the Assemblies of God a cult in 197_, but it's fair to call them cultic.

I continued to fake prayer for several minutes with no response from the intern. A couple of adults prayed for me, flare prayers for strength against temptation, courage in the face of opposition at school, and the ability to believe God loved me. That last one stung a little, and I shed a genuine tear just as Intern Girl knelt beside me. I knew it was her because I could smell her shampoo: green apples and soapy freshness--the same every night. With absolutely no introduction she started yelling. Not prayer yellling. Yelling.

"Lift up your eyes! The heavens are open and Jesus is coming! Tarry not! Look up! Look now! See your salvation riding the clouds of glory!"

I looked up. Of course I did. What the hell else was I supposed to do? She was hot; I was pentecostal; the Rapture was happening and I was thinking about her tits, the right of which was pressed to my left shoulder, and the swell of which I could just feel through her soft sweater. Without much thought, I began to repent, aloud, of my sins. I need to emphasize aloud. In my mind, the Rapture really was happening. This hot, single, never to be seen again intern and Bible college nutjob was for one brief moment Gabriel's trumpet. In that instant I believed like I had never believed before, and the urgency was crushing. The repentance was cathartic and loud. Really loud.

Only later when my friends told me did I know that her shouting had caused the entire congregation to grow silent and stare at what was unfolding between us. In other words, no music, tongues, crying, wailing, or keening to drown out the breviary of sins I listed in my penitence. While I'm certain I maintained the presence of mind not to mention masturbation, I'm equally certain that I did list lust, dirty magazines, and spying on the girl next door when she sunbathed.

So much for realized eschatology, and I would like to emphasize that a fundamentalist hermeneutic doesn't exactly prepare a kid to understand metaphor when he hears it, especially from a hot, crazy girl with her tits pressed against him. Sex and death. Isn't that the old idea of what's always on our minds? Unfortunately, for pentecostal kids there is no death; rather, there is an eternity spent in one place or another: fully aware, fully alive, fully in pain, or fully experiencing the presence of God, whatever the hell that means. I didn't want to go to hell, but I've come to believe that I don't want to go to heaven either, and the more I think about both places, the less probable they seem.

Pentecostal Boys Aren't Like Holden Caulfield, Part One

2009-12-12T15:59:01-06:00

For regular readers I'm offering this experiment. People have been on me forever to write a book length work. I typically tell myself that I have little solid to say; it's all so nebulous and transient. As a genuine skeptic, I rarely settle on something as True. While working on my graduate thesis I did manage to write a book length argument about ecclesiology, but much of what went into it started here on this blog. It seems fitting that I put something else out here. I'm convinced that Wittgenstein was right in his assumption that the work of philosophy is clarification, not system-building. I'm not offering a system, and I'm probably obscuring more than I'm clarifying, but I am sticking part of myself out here. My fascination has always been the nexus of faith and belief and the nexus of faith and culture. This is an experiment to talk myself through both. I have written parts of this before in the form of a memoir I used to dream about doing, but now I loathe memoirs and for the life of me can't figure out why anyone wants to read a book about my life, except for the story about the guy who fucked the goat. The title is drawn from that memoir, and I'm sure perceptive readers will find the irony. I don't want to murder people with chapter-length posts, so I'm breaking them down into smaller pieces. If I knew how to hide part of the post, I'd do that. If anyone knows, tell me please. I don't even know how often I'll post these, but feedback is always welcome.

Another night, another dream about my family being executed with a guillotine. I woke and prayed. When the time came, I would not renounce Christ; therefore, my family would be executed one by one as I watched. It would be a tremendous burden to bear, but my Sunday School teacher assured me that it was one that many young men and women would be asked to carry. It never occurred to me that four of five of our family were Christian, so at best four of us would watch our father and husband be beheaded, probably with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He'd take one last drag as the blade whispered toward him...

Such are the dreams of an adolescent in the Assemblies of God in the mid-1970s. End time theology was the pornography of Pentecostal theology. It was lascivious, graphic, and violent, filled with whores and sinners and the wrath of God. The Revelation was a gory graphic novel with a naked, scarlet whore riding an immense beast (surely there is some sexual imagery somewhere in John's drug-fogged religious ecstasy). The numbers, images, and symbols were interpreted and reinterpreted as preacher after preacher got things wrong. Every year we learned a new end times calendar, with a few consistent signs of the times carried over from the previous calendar: the temple being rebuilt in Jerusalem, a one-world government, a world leader grievously wounded and miraculously healed. All ciphers in the imagination of a 12-year old, but told with wild-eyed zeal and impossibly specific detail by old, tired Pentecostal preachers who could only get a preaching hard-on for Sunday night services if they got to speak about the death of sinners in the hands of the angry god of the Pentecostals. Sinners being the people who got to fornicate and smoke and drink with impunity while these men of God labored in the Lord's vineyard for a widow's mite and a shitty parsonage. Very few sermons preached on envying the sins of the heathen in those days.

My disillusionment with Pentecostalism—not the same as my disillusionment with Christianity—came at the age of 12, probably shortly after the dreams of guillotine death started shortening my nights. Our youth group had been forced to endure a showing of A Thief in the Night, a horrific little independent film that most Southern Baptist and Pentecostal kids who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s were made to sit through so as to understand the coming persecution for those unlucky or unholy enough to miss the Rapture.

The Rapture is, in some theologies, the beginning of the end. Jesus will return, but not all the way to earth, to take his faithful believers out of the earth so that the Tribulation can begin. (There were two other strains of Pentecostal theology: one had Jesus showing up 3 1/2 years into the Tribulation; the other, for genuine masochists, insisted Jesus would wait until his church had endured the entirety of the Tribulation.) We were sternly warned that missing the Rapture would cause us to endure the Tribulation without benefit of the Holy Ghost's guidance.

As a Pentecostal cripple--one who cannot speak in tongues--I wasn't altogether sure what the Holy Ghost had been doing for me anyway, but the prospect sounded so bleak, especially the guillotine part, that I decided I would learn to watch for signs of Jesus' imminent return. It was more important to me to watch for signs of the end rather than repent because the events occurred the same summer I discovered Penthouse and pot, so I was adamant that I get laid and stoned regularly right up until the Rapture.

A dumpster in an industrial park near our Aurora, Colo., home yielded the greatest find of my young life: a bundle of dirty magazines. I had done my share of kissing and tit grabbing, but I had never seen girls do what the models in Penthouse did. I hid two of the best issues under my mattress and passed the others along to a friend who lived on the same street. He rewarded me with a few bong hits. It was the greatest summer of my young life, and it would be made better by the presence of two sixteen year old girls who allowed my friend and me to experiment on their naked bodies.

In one summer I managed to transgress nearly every sin my Sunday School teacher had warned me to avoid, and while I was enjoying myself to a greater degree than I thought possible (sin has consequences, I'd always been told), the guilt was building. The combination of ends times sermons, sex, alcohol, and pot led to a cathartic moment at the altar during a revival near the end of summer. Rather than make me a better Pentecostal, the revival proved to be my first step away from the church's suffocating paternalism.

Revivals were odd affairs in Pentecostal circles. An itinerant minister was invited to a local church to preach a series of sermons over three or four evenings. He typically had a wife who could sing or play the piano, and occasionally, if we were really fortunate, a hot daughter who also sang. Each service ended with an emotionally manipulative plea to come to the altar to recommit or be saved. It was axiomatic among revivalists that humans, even those as holy as Pentecostals, were in a near perpetual state of unrepented sin; this state was called backslidden in the parlance of Pentecostalism. The purpose of the revival was ostensibly to get people saved; these men called themselves evangelists, and as part of the Apostle Paul's five-fold ministry in Ephesians, they were the vocational clergy assigned the task of spreading the Gospel.

In fifteen years of Pentecostal revivals I can remember very few actual unsaved persons in the church. The crowd was usually composed of the faithful 20, that twenty percent of any church who actually make the organization work. The faithful 20 would bring their families, of course, so there was always an unusually large number of teens and children in the services, and no one but no one makes better fodder for evangelistic manipulation than hormonal teens.

Rare was the evangelist who was so incompetent that he couldn't bring a handful of teens to the altar weeping over their transgressions: said trangressions usually consisting of lying, swearing, masturbating, lusting, or not wanting to go to church. Each sin was made to seem a personal affront to God himself and we were far too young to wonder over the petty nature of a God who worried about teenagers diddling themselves. This was years before evangelicals got on the social concern bandwagon and pointed out that God was probably more concerned about poverty, starvation, malaria, and AIDS than he was about the means by which a teenager masturbated. A bit of theological common sense only 1,950 years in the making. Never assume the Church can't learn her lessons.

During the climatic service of that particular summer revival, the evangelist took I Thessalonians 4:15-18 as his text.

For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. 16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore comfort one another with these words.

He was particularly concerned with verses 17 and 18, and his sermon was intended to comfort us. You know there's a catch, right? There is nearly always a catch in theologies of grace, else all theologies of grace would lead inexorably to universalism. Pentecostalism, except in the very rare case of megachurch pastor Carlton Pearson, never embraces universalism. It is counter-intuitive that people should suffer in the service of God only to see the heathens, homosexuals, and whores also arrive in paradise having suffered nothing but the consequences of their sinful choices. And while fundamentalists can embrace counter-intuitive pseudo-rationality when it works in their favor, it is dismissed as heretical when it does not.

The catch was that we had to be one of the "one another" if we were to derive comfort from the words. The "one another" was, of course, the believing church. Yes, the qualifier is necessary. Nearly every denomination believes that local churches are composed of a mixture of true believers and reprobates. In some cases, they believe entire churches and denominations are reprobate. So it was possible, indeed likely, that our little Assembly of God church in Aurora, Colo., was infested with hypocrites, liars, adulterers, and those just going through the motions, those who, the pastor said rather distastefully, believe they can lead a good enough life to get into heaven. Ah yes, the horror of that idea. Living a good life cannot matter in the theology of grace; only a gift freely received qualifies one for salvation. The tortured justification that buttressed the Assemblies' insistence that we were then obligated to live a holy life will be addressed in Chapter #, Salvation by Magic.

The evangelist's job that night was to ensure that we were all part of that happy company who would be whisked off the earth into space somewhere when Jesus returned and the trumpet sounded. His sermon took the typical trajectory of revival sermons: here is the standard, you are failing to keep it, you need grace, come to the altar and get it. I was bored. He didn't have a hot daughter, and his wife was a polyester-clad behemoth with a beehive hairdo sprayed into submission with White Rain. It was a long night, including two or three songs by the evangelist and his wife. Near the end of his sermon he asked our very own choir soloist to come lead the congregation in Climbing up the Mountain. Years later I realized that our pastor had fed information to the evangelist about which song we did congregationally that brought the glory down.

My skeptical father made a promise to my committed older brother once upon a time that he would come hear my brother, who is very talented, sing in church. He kept that promise the summer before the decisive revival. My father was raised by two lapsed Methodists; he was principally raised in his grandmother's diner with oil field workers, smokers, gamblers, and small town whores. He had no serious religious commitments, and the few he possessed as a young man died a short, brutal death in Vietnam. As such, he was the perfect skeptic to observe a Pentecostal music service as a genuine outsider.

Serendipitously, I was the only one in the car with him after the service at which he heard my brother sing. The choir had performed two numbers that night as well, concluding with His Eye is on the Sparrow and Climbing up the Mountain.

Predictably, the shouting, crying, glossolalia, and swooning started near the end of the second number.

"What did you think of the music?" I asked him.

"Hypnotic," he replied.

"Huh?"

"The repetition creates a mass hypnosis," he explained. "That's why they sing the songs over and over. The repetition, the swaying, the clapping in time, all of those things help create a mass hypnotic effect. The idea is to build people's expectations up to a fever pitch."

I was 11. I had no idea what he was saying, but it was the first time I had ever heard an explanation for Pentecostal experience that didn't involve some variation of "the Holy Ghost moved tonight." Years later it makes sense to me that people work themselves into a frenzy of expectation--whether or not it's hypnotic is probably moot--and an emotional catharsis must follow. The catharsis is predicated on learned behavior and an expectation that people will behave in ways that are consistent with the categories through which they've been taught to view the world. That means Pentecostals will shout, cry, speak in tongues, and fall down. White Baptists will cry. Black Baptists will act like Pentecostals, except for the tongues. Episcopalians will no doubt have some sort of transcendent aesthetic moment. Presbyterians and Lutherans are probably hopeless.

My father's words were not in my mind the night of the revival though. What was in my mind, more properly who, was one of our new youth volunteers. She was interning from Southwestern Assemblies of God Bible College (now university) in Waxahachie, Tex., and I was completely smitten. In all likelihood I had not thought of her in the same ways I thought about the sixteen-year olds on my street; it wasn't as if she was going to strip, lay naked on the bed, and invite me to do whatever I wanted. My thoughts were probably actually a little more pure. Not for the last time in my life, I probably saw some sort of salvation in her, some way to actually be good: a woman virtuous enough to act as savior. Yes, I was a tortured mess of mixed categories, lust, guilt, skepticism, hedonism, and desire: I was fucked up.

Her name is lost to memory. She was only with us for about a month, and I never spoke to her again after the revival. She was the cause of my first and last experience with realized eschatology and the cause of my first major religious disillusionment. Until that night I had functioned under the assumption that what I'd been taught was true; I was simply rejecting it in favor of sin. She helped me see that it was entirely possible the whole system was wrong—utterly, full of shit wrong.

Tweedy on Wilco

2009-12-12T08:18:32-06:00

The British newspaper The Independent has published an interview with Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, as well as some thoughts on one of my favorite albums of '09, Wilco (the album). It's a short, personal piece, but it provided some insight into why I love Sunken Treasure way more than the band's adaptation of those songs. Hearing Tweedy perform them with simplicity in very small venues helped the music make sense for me. It was only after I heard those renditions that I was able to go back and appreciate YHF and some of the live numbers in which it seems the band is trying unsuccessfully to merge music with a steel smelter.

The Proposed Five Proofs (Aquinas) Drinking Game

2009-12-08T11:07:20-06:00

For those of you who aren't my "friends" on facebook, I posted yesterday that I was teaching through Aquinas's five proofs for the existence of God last night. Leighton suggested it become a drinking game. JJ jumped in and agreed. After some initial hand-wringing over what it would look like, Leighton has proposed some initial rules based on an internet discussion with someone who apparently thinks Scholastic philosophy is somehow immune to infinite regress and a priori assumptions about god's existence. As one of my more perceptive students mentioned last night, even if we assumed the five proofs somehow proved (in the empirical sense, not the logical sense) god's existence, it would still leave us with the question of "what flavor of god?" It may get you to deism, but it sure doesn't get you to Christ crucified. I'm no Dawkins fan, as his brand of fundamentalism seems as wrong-headed as that of the creationists, but he makes some insightful (and funny) points about the proofs in spite of some mischaracterizations. The first three are in fact essentially the same argument. The fourth is ridiculous, even when god is assumed to be non-physical. Dawkins wonders if he could be the stinkiest, which relies on corporeality, but I wonder if he could be the laziest, dumbest, most distant, most inscrutable, most evil, etc., all of which don't rely on physical existence. The fifth, as Leighton points out relies on "teleological handwaving," or as he puts it by analogy: "invok(ing) Paley's 'Watch lying in the woods is obviously designed' argument and conclude that trees in a forest, their example of non-design in the first analogy, are now clearly and obviously designed." I'm posting his entire recommendation below, including his typically insightful observations about the five proofs. Feel free to make suggestions, and when we all manage finally to get together at a bar somewhere in Colorado, I hope, we'll play the game whilst ganging up on some emergent theist who is unfortunate enough to engage Leighton and JJ in an argument at the same time. Here you go:

You could have rules such as these (I'm a low-mass light drinker, so suggestions/corrections on the amount of alcohol involved are more than welcome), and it could generalize to an Apologetics Drinking Game:... See More

Every time someone uses a disputed text as an unquestionable authority: take a shot.
Every time someone says something is "obvious" when nobody else had ever heard such a thing before: take a shot.
Every time someone makes an argument based on allegedly "common sense" or "self-evident" physics or biology that hasn't been mainstream in more than three centuries: take a shot.
Every time someone makes a cognitive error in set theory (e.g. assuming that every set must have a maximum element inside the set): take two shots--one for the error and one for being enough of a math geek to notice.
Every time someone says "This is what everyone means when they say 'X,'" when virtually nobody means that when they say 'X': take two shots.
Every time someone begs the question in a forehead-slappingly obvious way (e.g. There must have been a first cause because otherwise there wouldn't have been a first cause, and that would be absurd!): take two shots--three if the claimant is indignant when caled on his/her shenanigans.
Teleological handwaving (e.g. archers shoot arrows therefore God): two shots. Take two more shots if they also invoke Paley's "Watch lying in the woods is obviously designed" argument and conclude that trees in a forest, their example of non-design in the first analogy, are now clearly and obviously designed.
Have a chaser glass of beer every time someone finishes a sentence with "...as I have demonstrated," when (s)he has done nothing of the sort.

Paste's Pretty Good Books of the Decade, and a Few Excellent Ones

2009-12-04T17:13:42-06:00

Paste Magazine released best of the decade lists in their last issue, including the "20 Best Books of the Decade." I read someone's post on a message board somewhere that suggested they call it "20 Books We Read this Decade." Funny, but a little unfair. Some of the best (and who knows what the criteria are) books of the decade are on the list, including what may in fact be the best book at the number one spot: Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I want to admit they probably got that one right, and the top 5 overall isn't bad, as it includes The Road and Gilead. Putting A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at the 2 spot seems a bit much. Eggers is brilliant, but this book was more a novelty than what the title implied, and although Eggers was being ironic, people actually acted as if the title was a descriptor. The most egregious top five entry is Middlesex at the number 5 spot. I read every Pulitzer from the decade and this had to be the weakest of the lot. Why not include The Known World if you're going for a Pulitzer winner? A much better book and a much better story. However, Paste has never been known for their conventional choices, not that that's a bad thing.

The second five includes a book on my "to read" list this winter break: The Book Thief. I have it on good authority that it's excellent, and I'm happy to see YA books included on the list. What's troubling about the second five is the inclusion of Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Dear acquisition editors and authors: I'm completely worn out with memoirs. Completely. Tell a fuckin' story and get out of your own goddamn head. Sick of it. Ok. David Foster Wallace is in the ten spot, and he probably should be higher than that, but at least he's there and at least they didn't choose Infinite Jest.

Thrilled to see Klosterman and Sedaris in the second ten. Love that McEwan is there as well, and Gladwell, and Fast Food Nation. I think they missed on the Harry Potter choice. I still maintain that The Prisoner of Azkaban is the best of the series, mainly for the story, tight writing, and great characters. They chose Order of the Phoenix which is fine; I'm just glad they included Rowling. What in the name of Ahura Mazda is Blue Like Jazz doing on anyone's top 20 list?! This schlock, though popular, hardly qualifies as good. I reviewed it extensively when I first read it, and I don't want to rehash it here, but seriously, shitty metaphors designed to bring me around to Campus Crusade's way of thinking equals a best book of the decade? Dear Paste, you were too long in your stash that night. Next time choose shrooms; at least the choice will be interesting.

The two books I didn't see on the list, either of which could easily have replaced Donald Miller's (and let's face it, they should have), are Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. Apparently the editors at Paste didn't bother to read two of the best fictional meditations on ethics and mythmaking of the past decade. Apparently they were too busy reading Miller's extended sermon and trite nonsense, which also managed to glorify Mark Driscoll. That alone should keep the book off any list, except maybe the top ten misogynist-loving books of the decade. Let me be clear: I know millions of people read it, but that doesn't make it good. It makes it popular. One would think that a magazine with a mission to get good music in front of consumers would understand the difference between popular and good. Alas.

Jesus Never Hugged Nobody Like That...

2009-12-03T23:32:53-06:00

Umm, yeah...speechless. Watch it to the end for the line for which this post is named. Thanks, J-Fo, for confirming what I already believed about Christian rap and youth ministry in general.

Some Help for the Religiously Lost

2009-11-30T14:18:59-06:00

Hmm...which one am I?

A Thanksgiving Non Sequitur and Genuine Gratitude

2009-11-26T10:06:24-06:00

Speaking to a "spiritual but not religious" acquaintance of the syncretist variety this week (and I loathe both those categories, mainly for their utter banality):

Me: Have a good Thanksgiving.

Sync: I don't believe in Jesus.

Me: Thanksgiving isn't a Jesus holiday.

Sync: It's all about God, so I don't celebrate it.

Me: Sigh

As ridiculous as the association was--as if only Christians can be thankful--it did cause me to think about Thanksgiving as a secularist. I read once, and you'll forgive my aging memory because I can't recall which Christian apologist wrote it, that atheists must be sad around the holidays because they have no one toward whom to direct their gratitude. I stopped praying a few years ago, so Thanksgiving isn't a chance for me to thank god for my "blessings," but it is a chance for me to reflect on gratitude, and I think I've come up with a solution to avoid the annual sadness predicted by Christian apologists.

I'm not a political conservative because I don't believe that a true meritocracy actually exists. We all get where we are in life with the help of those around us. Some of us have more help than others, and I'm happy to acknowledge that some work harder than others, take more responsibility, have more emotional and intellectual intelligence, etc. There are variables that make it impossible for some folks to succeed at a level that would make them financially comfortable. That makes me closer to a liberal than a conservative, and I'm comfortable with that. I used to think of my intellectual capacity as a gift from god; these days I tend to think of it as good genes and a random mutation of sorts (and I know that's not the actual use of the phrase in evolution, so piss off). That doesn't mean I can't be grateful for the people in my life who have made it possible for me to succeed.

My theist friends who have any sense at all recognize that with an inscrutable god as a starting point, the only way to make this god plain to people around them is to act in ways consistent with how they believe their god to function: love the unlovable, be generous, forgive, live peaceably, practice kindness, honor your commitments, avoid extremes in vices, and basically, don't be a dick. In other words, act as if you are the character of that god in-fleshed. What that means practically is that people form a network of help, grace, and love, bettering the world not through some nebulous idea like "blessings from god," but through tangible, immanent, sweat and blood actions. This need not be a theological assumption. My story includes people of all and no faiths who have, for whatever reason, helped me get to where I am. Here's the short list:

My wife who believed in me, allowed me to pursue my dreams, and somehow thinks I'm wonderful. James Jennings (RIP), who taught me how to be a writer. Harvey Simpson, who was the first chaplain I ever met who embraced intellect and love, and swore that if there was a god, he loved everyone the same. My father, who worked multiple jobs, endured Vietnam (costing himself a portion of his sanity), and loved his kids and their friends as best he could. My mother, who truly did lose her sanity trying to love her children into adulthood. My daughter, who had the grace to forgive me. My theist friends who didn't walk away from me when I walked away from their faith. My teachers who recognized my abilities and encouraged them, including Steve Green, who, in spite of his obvious flaws, taught me the language of philosophy and theology. To Bobby and Tamie Ross, who gave me my start as a religion writer. To Susan Grossman and Rob Collins, Gazette editors who recognized my abilities and were patient with my development as a journalist with no journalism training. Chris Querry, who helped me get started as a professor. John Inglett, who gave me my first professor job outside the Christian school circuit. My brothers, who gave so generously to get me back on my feet after prison. My friends, who love me in spite of myself, which is to say in spite of my propensity to be a clueless, self-indulgent fuck-up a good part of my life. That's the short list, and I'm grateful to all on the short and the long list. It's you I'm thanking today. Maybe there is a god, and maybe she has helped in ways I can't see yet. If it turns out there is, I'll thank her when I see her.