Monday, September 30, 2013

Guest Speaker

These are my prepared remark (which may be subject to revision) if I am ever invited to speak at my old college.

*****

Hey, how are you all doing today at the start of a new quarter?  Good?  Good.  Do they still take attendance to make sure you actually go to religious talks?  Well, that's good too.  It's wonderful to live in a system with such faith in the transformational nature of its fundamental ideas and practice, is it not?  I kid, I kid.  Well, I probably don't actually.  You should ask them why the daily practice of your religion is assumed to be so unappealing sometime.  Or better yet, ask yourself.  Either way, it seems like it would be better to ask yourself why it is necessary to corral an entire generation into actually practicing the religion that has theoretically been the center of your lives since you were children and is theoretically supposed to be the center once you are pushed out into the world without RAs and deans to check on your daily practice.  I mean, if you're going through the motions of a religious practice you don't find meaningful, would not both parties be served by that feedback?  You might be better off finding a practice that DOES mean something and your school might have to ask themselves why a religion defined as universally transformative doesn't seem to grab anyone anymore?  Or is this just me reading into something that isn't there?  Just me?  Okay.  What do I know anyway?  I'm just some guy.

*coughs*  But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.  Well, it is, in a way, but I didn't mean to start with such a cold slap to the face.  "You're doing you religion wrong!" I say.  "Well, thanks for being such a gracious guest," you might reply.  I should be gracious.  I want to be gracious.  But I admit I find it challenging.  Not very long ago I once sat where you sat, and I admit some elements of the school system frustrated me then too.  Well, when I say not that long ago, I mean 15 years, which isn't long ago for me, but is probably considerably longer for you when viewed from the slo-time field all youth are trapped in.  This is just an illusion of course, soon enough time will start slipping faster and faster until you want to grab the edges of your time bubble and beg it to slow down.  But you won't be able to grab hold to anything, just metaphorical air, and before you know it, you'll be 35, on the verge of the first of many happy mid-life crises and wondering how you got to be 40 pounds heavier and so far off track of the life you were expected to have.  And, if you're sitting in that pew and buried as deeply in the closet as I was at your age, you'll be emerging from said closet as well, blinking in the light of a new and confusing dawn, wondering how the hell you would do something as damaging and hurtful to yourself as pretending to be something you're not, for people who don't know what they're talking about for all these years.  As a side note, to anyone who IS gay and closeted and terrified and feeling trapped, there are more like you than you know, and if you email me at the address I asked to be put in the program today, I can introduce you to other Adventists who find themselves stuck in the same situation.  Ya'll would not believe how many gay Adventists there are out there struggling to reconcile being gay and being Adventist.  I don't know if you've noticed so far, but accepting the openly gay into the church has been kind of a hard sell so far.

But where were we?  Oh yes, the closet.  How could a good Adventist boy like me get trapped in such an unhappy place?  I know it must seem like the fault of the devil, or some-such, but it is really that hard to believe?  Growing up in this church, on what day are you told you are first a sinner?  It is the day you are born, is it not?  I mean sure, we look like innocent babies, mostly interested in warmth and milk, but what we really are, are desperate, born sinners with a crippling milk addiction.  That is the proper frame, is it not?  We are born to do bad things, and constantly tempted to do bad things, and it is only by the grace of Jesus that we are forgiven, and momentarily granted the relief that comes from knowing we are good to get into heaven.  Right up until our next sin.  Which might be tomorrow.  Or maybe it's now, as any of a million unclean thoughts flits its way through your head as some dinosaur from the distant past drones on and on about something or other in an assembly you don't really want to be at.  Really, you think of me as a dinosaur? Honestly kids, I'm only 37.

My point, so bluntly made, is that this religion teaches you, from day one, to hate yourself for being a sinner.  They never use quite those words, but the net effect of what you are taught is to believe, in the deepest core of your being, that you are WRONG and you'll have to be killed for being so awful, and the only way to remove this feeling is to beg an authority figure for a hit of sweet, temporary bliss in the form of forgiveness of real, deadly sin.  Deadly, because God'll kill you if you don't get right.  If you don't go through the motions, if you don't fall into line, if you don't go to worship 5 days a week, if you eat pork, if you wear jewelry, if you swim on a Saturday, if you do anything more heretical than clap awkwardly at a concert, if you think lustful thoughts when your crush walks into a room, if you're a dude and you want to kiss a dude, and if you think those things and do those things without forgiveness, without throwing yourself on the mercy of the court daily, you're gonna die.  And your parents are going to cry, and you're going to burn forever.

And I'm sorry, but the people you love are lying to you about all of this, all of these reasons to hate yourself.  Although don't be too mad, most of them are just repeating the lie their fathers told them.  The first lie is that you're wrong from the day you're born.   The second is that your have to grovel in despair over crimes both real and imagined, before authority, human or heavenly, to feel right. To be good.  I do not mean to imply we are all born good either, of course.  We are born to make mistakes.  We are born to be selfish, we are born to be compassionate, we are born in the tension between our darker desires and the better angels of our nature and living with other people born the same way.  So yes to be a jerk is in our nature, but so is being kind.  Isn't it weird that someone would tell you to focus solely on the one, and not the other?

The first lie is that making a mistake damns you for all eternity.  The second lie, is only authority can forgive a mistake.  In my experience, on a practical level, the first person to forgive after a mistake is yourself.  The second is whoever else your mistake might have harmed.  And then you clean up your mess, attempt to repair any damaged relationships, and then learn from what you did wrong.  And then doing it all over again when you fall down again.  Phenomenal cosmic powers are typically not a necessary part of that equation.

 The first and second lie, is that your mistakes are not just mistakes, they are violations on a universal level that will destroy you and everyone you know if the correct rituals are not followed.  They are an exaggeration of natural human behavior around making, correcting and forgiving mistakes.  They are normal guilt and empathy turned into an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The third lie is a contradiction.  The third lie is that all sinners are equally sinful and all sins can be forgiven and that some sinners are more sinful than others and not all sins can be forgiven.  The third lie is that Jesus loves you, except when you're WRONG and then he has to hate you, and that you can be welcome in a church full of sinners, except as a sinner, you are not welcome.  The third lie is that your body is a temple, and you must tend it, and it's okay if you don't tend it really.  The third lie is that all are sinners are welcome children of God but that only the gluttons, the liars, the gossips are children of God.  The third lie is that the holy spirit will guide you in telling you which sins are worse than others, which mistakes are sins and which are not, and that you never need to be taught the difference between your ingrown, emotional and cultural biases and the influence of the holy spirit.  The third lie is that only God can judge and that the church and the elders and the rest of you have to do some supplementary judging in the meantime.

It is not hard to go into the the closet, when you are told you're wrong every day.  It is not hard to go into the closet when you are told again and again that all sins are equal, but some sins are worse than others.  It is not a big step from, "I'd better not tell anyone I had a pork sandwich last night," to "I'm a guy and I'd better not tell anybody I wanted to kiss that handsome guy last night."  It is not unreasonable to hide, when you know your sin is one that God may forgive, but no one else in your community will.  It is not unreasonable to despair, when your entire community is governed by rules which humans must necessarily break in the course of being human, and that the rules your nature makes you prone to break will be punished, and the rules their nature makes them prone to break will not be.

 "Oh Betty, you shameless gossip, Jesus loves you, give us a hug."

"Oh H, you shameful faggot, Jesus isn't about loving other men, you gotta get out of here."

It's not hard to lose passion for your religion, when you people say "Jesus loves you" in a way that clearly means, "Jesus only loves people like me."

I would assert today, that the reason you need an attendance system to keep young people in a spiritual practice day-to-day, is that there is a core contradiction between the message of Jesus and the behavior of the church.  Your mouth says, "yes, come, there is love and room for all." and your hands say, "Well, except for the gays, and other unclean.  Hanging out with you freaks may have been fine for Jesus, but it won't fly here."

And so rather than admit that the church may have some work to do in reconciling its practice and structure with the message and behavior of Jesus (or may, in fact, be irredeemably broken as long as those who are in charge remain in charge), and rather than admit that there are things in your church that do not make sense, and preaches a lot of mixed messages which cannot all simultaneously be true, which leads to genuine confusion and unhappiness in the lives of its members unless they just stop thinking about it and go with the flow,we all smile and nod and go through the motions, pretending nothing is wrong.   And those of you with the socially acceptable sins can stay and worship, and those of us who have to hide more of ourselves than we're comfortable with, slowly fade away until it feels like we can breathe again.

I went into the closet for the same reason young Adventists fall away from the church every generation:  They can't reconcile what they were taught with their actual lived experience of the world, but they're not ready to alienate their friends and family.  So they and I smile and wave while slowly backing away.  And, if they're anything like me, they don't return because they find more beauty, truth and love outside of the Adventist church than they ever found within it.  No, the devil did not make me say that.

So, in closing, before I am chased out of here with pitchforks and torches, I would like to encourage you NOT to fade away from the church.  I encourage you to run way from it as fast as you can.  If this church embodies everything that is good about the world, then I encourage you to practice it whole-heartedly.  Conversely, if the practice and teaching of this church don't resonate with you, please don't fade away.  Please RUN AWAY towards something better.  There's no reward and quite a bit of pain in pretending to believe something you do not, and pretending to be something you are not for years and decades at a time.  There's no virtue in practicing something you believe to be a lie.  It doesn't matter what your parents say, it doesn't matter what the church says, if you don't want to be here, if this is not who you are, if you can't be who you are, and love the consenting adult you love and still be accepted as fully human and loved as the next person in this community . . . then you have to go.  Run fast.  Run far.  Run hard.  Keep searching.  But get away.  Get some space to breathe and be yourself.  I promise you there are more beautiful and wonderful and truthful things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Adventist philosophy.

For instance, they have a fancier hand-clap out there that they call "dancing."  It's pretty great.

Friday, September 20, 2013

The Gay book of Revelations, ch. 18

1:  After this I saw another angel, coming down the cosmic runway.  He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his fabulous splendor and glitter.

2:  With a mighty voice he shouted:  "Fallen!  Fallen! is the First Church of Babylon the Great!  He has become a dwelling for unhappy christians and a haunt for culturally acceptable but impure spirits, a haunt for every unclean thought against people who are different, a haunt for every unclean and detestable behavior that does not challenge the cultural biases of his congregation."

3:  "For all the denominations have drunk the maddening wine of his dissonance.  The kings of earth committed violence with him, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from his excessive and hypocritical luxuries."

4:  Then I heard another voice from the runway say:  "Come out of him, my beautiful gay children, so that you will not share in his sins because they have made you hate yourself, so that you will not receive his plagues of the mind and spirit that he would inflict upon you to keep you chained."

5:  For his sins are piled up to the runway, and a beautiful, androgynous god has remembered his crimes.

6.  As for you, my children, give back to him, that which he has not given;  pay him back double in love for the evil he has done.  Pour him a double portion from your own cup.

7.  Give him as much love and kindness as the torment and grief he gave you and the glory and luxury he gave himself.  In his heart he boasts, 'I sit enthroned as king.  I am not widower, I will never mourn and my beliefs and my kingdom shall last forever.'

8.  Therefore, in one day his plagues will overtake him:  dead to change, mourning difference, and in a famine of kindness.  He will be consumed by the fires he set to burn out the impure, forgetting his own impurity.  For mighty and wise is the Fabulous, Androgynous Lord God of the universe who judges him, and allows him to sink under the weight of the chains he has bound himself with.

9.  When the kings of earth who committed violence with him and shared his undeserved luxury see the smoke of his self-inflicted burns, and the bubbles marking his drowning, they will weep and mourn over him, and in fear for themselves.

10.  Terrified at his torment, they will stand far off and cry:  "Woe!  Woe to you, great church, you mighty sanctuary of Babylon!  In one hour your doom has come!  And how far can ours be behind, without you to sanction our rule and our violence with the authority of divine right?"

11.  The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over him because no one buys their shit anymore --

12.  Racks and racks of gaudy jewelry, ill-fitting clothes, every sort of phallus substitute made of wood, ivory, bronze, iron, rubber, ceramic and marble;

13.  racks of addictive and nutrition-less foods, dvds and books promoting divisive, legalistic and hateful thoughts, distractions from any real experience, confirmation of any bias through advertising and consumption, cattle and sheep and horses and pigs confined in misery and filth before slaughtered and packaged, and human beings hired and fired and sold as slaves.

14.  They will say, "the privilege you longed for is gone from you.  All your luxury and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered."

15.  The merchants who sold these things and gained their wealth from him will stand far off, terrified at his torment.  They will weep and mourn and release commercials identifying themselves as victims and advertising commemorative coins in honor of this tragedy.

16.  And cry out:  "Woe!  Woe to you, great Church, dressed in fine suits, black and pin-striped, and glittering with fine watches and expensive and stylish shoes.

17.  "In one hour, such great wealth has been brought to ruin!"  Every armchair warrior, and all who travel by television and internet, the radio and blog hosts, and all who earn their living from the grift and the cult of personality, will stand far off.

18.  When they see the smoke of his burning and the ripples marking his watery grave they will tweet, "Was there ever a church like this great church?"

19.  They will make sad animated gifs, and with weeping, moaning and sad-face emoticons cry out:  "Woe!  Woe to you, great church, where all who had shows on the air and blogs on the net became rich through his wealth, and his divisiveness, and his comforting confirmation biases and his cognitive dissonance!  In one, commercial-free hour, he has been brought to ruin!"

20.  Rejoice over him, you heathens!  Rejoice you children of the androgynous God!  Rejoice, gay apostles and prophets!  For our androgynous God has allowed him to judge himself, with the judgement he imposed upon you.

21.  Then a mighty drag queen picked up an SUV the size of a boulder and threw it into the sea, and said:  "With a fucking quickness, the great church of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again."

22.  The music of panflutists, identity rock and painfully repressed people will never be heard in you again.  No wage slavery and intellectual poverty will every be found in you again.  The pounding drumbeat of conformity will never be found in you again.

23.  The light of false hope and conditional love, will never shine in you again.  The voice of the pastor saying "grooms are like this and brides are like this," will never be found again.  Your merchants were the world's worst and most self-important people.  By your magic spell, all the nations of western civilization were led astray.

24.  In him was found the blood of prophets, and androgynous God's wholly different, wholly human and wholly loved, and holy queer people, of all queers who have been slaughtered upon the earth.

ch. 19

1.  After this I heard what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in the heavens, from the cosmic runway and beyond, shouting:  "At long-fucking-last!  Cleverness, compassion and justice belong to our wholly beautiful and androgynous God.

2.  For helpful and just are her actions, and incisive and true are his words.  She has condemned the great charlatan who corrupted the earth by his violence and smallness and bigotry and selfishness.  He has avenged on him the blood of his beautiful, wanted, necessary and loved children.

3.  And again they shouted:  "At-long-fucking-last!  We are as free and as human as the rest of you and exist without shame or punishment for loving one another.  And the church that punished love in the name of love, sinks downward, forever and ever, under the weight of it's own hypocrisy and dissonance and shame."

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Love in a time of fandom

I find myself more and more wanting to write that star wars/wolverine mash-up.  I call it:  Operation Mega-mash.  I think I can fit elements of Star Wars, x-men, Doctor who, stargate, firefly, star trek and maybe sliders into a coherent, if terrible story.  It will be the most beautiful train wreck you can't look away from.  Spoilers:  Wolverine pisses off jabba, is hunted by Boba Fett, who is an agent for the confederate government, who are controlled by goa'uld brain slugs created by the daleks.  Wolverine steals the doctor's companion and the ultimate villain turns out to be Q, or maybe tremaine, who, as so aptly pointed out by futurama, is just an intemperate fanboy with godlike powers.  So it ALL MAKES SENSE.

Monday, September 09, 2013

Undead Posts

Every time Gabe says another stupid thing, this dickwolves post gets a few hits (750 to date!).  I remain happy about my decision to stop paying much attention to them.  I haven't missed their comics, I haven't missed their insular, persecuted worldview, I haven't missed their inability to empathize with people unlike themselves unless people are shaking them furiously and figuratively yelling, "what's wrong with you?"

Some of the best aspects of the gaming community come from Penny Arcade, especially Child's Play, although I have small issues with that as well, which I will probably anger people by going into later.  Unfortunately, some of the worst elements of gaming culture come from penny arcade and fans.  Like instituting a no "booth babes" policy so women feel more welcome, but going out of their way to market and wear ostensibly pro-rape shirts that are hard to explain and expecting people to get over it because a gamer bro's freedom to say and do offensive shit and still be lauded and loved must never be questioned.

Look, I play a shit ton of games.  I've had my consciousness so far into Eorzea for the last few weeks I'm lost track of which body is my real body (Oh right, this fat one).  It's as legit a hobby for winding down/relaxing as sports or movie watching, obviously.

But I don't call my self a gamer because I don't think rape jokes are by default hilarious and necessary for perfect human freedom.

I don't call myself a gamer because it is about the least challenging thing I do every day.  I'd rather be known as a scientist, since that's my actual job, and because it's genuinely challenging.  It's like calling yourself a "book colorer" because you passionately love coloring books and have since you were a kid.  "I color inside the lines really well, I think it's really matured as a  medium." you tell people at parties moments before they drift off to talk to someone who does something actually challenging or meaningful with their lives.  I mean, at least people who knit can make you a sweater.  

Largely, I don't call myself a gamer because I don't want to be associated with or represented by gaming culture, and the nastier elements of Penny Arcade.  Especially the parts that think rape is just a harmless, funny joke that guys must be free to make at any time, and simultaneously what they will threaten you with if you are a woman and have the temerity to point out that those type of guys don't exactly making "gaming culture" a welcome environment.  I mean, guys who defend Penny Arcade under the banner "Team Rape" making people uncomfortable?  Unpossible.  Unless you hate freedom.

I don't call myself a gamer because I'm interested in associating with people who have a broader world view beyond constant, defensive justification of their own hobbies who don't freak out at the merest hint of disapproval regarding offensive behavior or someone reporting that their lived experience is different somehow.  And frankly, I'm tired of associating with immature dudes who can't handle their shit and have zero skills for coping with life outside the bro-verse.


Tuesday, September 03, 2013

Now Kiss

Do any sports fans ship their favorite athletes in slash fiction?  Or is that just something us nerd types are prone to do?  I mean geek fandom is becoming this giant mish-mash where everyone metaphorically grabs their favorite universes, mashes them together and says, "Kiss!  Kiss!  You love each other!" until Wolverine is a bounty hunter in Jabba's palace who flies the Serenity on smuggling missions out of Mos Eisley.  Maybe sports fans are just content to leave it at fantasy football seasons, and keep their erotic shipping way down in the depths of their most secret desires.  Unless fantasy football has more erotic/relationship content than I've been led to believe.

Asking for a friend.