I’m So Tired of This July 18, 2008

Lately there’s been some political bashing going on facebook that I’m pretty tired of hearing.  It’s probably well-known that I’m “liberal” or whatever the hell that means.  I’m really not that liberal, but since I support Obama, I’m freaking public enemy #1 of most of the people who go to Evangelical Institution and claim to be my “friend.”  I’m not just talking facebook friend here, I’m talking people that I have gotten to know over the past few years and who are more than just acquaintances.  I’ve had discussions with these people, I’ve invited these people to events, I’ve gone through really harrowing times with some of these people.  What bothers me the most is that each and every one of these people claim to be Christians.  They can keep reifying those stereotypes if they want to.

I want to make it clear that I’m not calling myself the “victim” here, because there really is no victim, just some political differences.  I’m not suffering because of what they’re doing, but I am highly annoyed, and honestly, a little surprised.  Maybe this speaks to my naivete about human nature (I always seem to think that people are much better than they are, and I expect people to act with a certain dignity, even if I don’t always fit the bill.)  I guess I just expect these people to be civil.  I would hope that in the past, if I have had problems with people that are as shallow as political differences that I have at least been civil to them.  I may have been unable to understand them, and I may have been privately (sometimes publicly) pissed, but I hope that I haven’t taken it out on them in a vitriolic way.  I recently failed at this goal for myself.  I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I started putting angry comments on a facebook wall.  It began when someone was mocking my facebook political views and it ended when they accused me of having my “panties in a twist.”  I just wanted them to “leave me the hell alone.”

There is one thing that I understand about things like facebook, and this blog (which is why I choose to remain anonymous): it’s a public forum, and I can only expect my views, or, for that matter, anything I put up, to be criticized.  I don’t mind criticism.  I like it most of the time, because it helps me to develop what I believe more fully and it helps me to better communicate what I believe.  But this recent criticism differs from the ideal for public discourse about beliefs:  it is not civil and it is not constructive.

It’s really just harassment,  unwarranted harassment at that.  It happens when someone looks at my facebook wall and sees that I support Obama or really dislike McCain, or am a vegetarian, or even put up a facebook note about a button which was, admittedly, an overreaction which I corrected.  When people see these things, their first reaction is to pounce.  I’ve gotten quite a few comments that were just plain mean and didn’t do anything to challenge me or to start productive conversation.  The only goal seemed to be to piss me off and bully me.  My question is: why do these people think it is necessary to do this?  I don’t really know.  And the only reason I can think of is that they a) have nothing better to do than find people with different viewpoints and harass them; b) are just ugly people lacking compassion or at least civility; c) think that harassment is an effective tool at beating people down who hold different viewpoints; d) genuinely lack understanding of what constitutes civil public debate.  The funny thing is that the majority of these people were former debaters with me, and we lived by the understanding that debate rounds included nothing personal and that ad-hom arguments or ones lacking nuances didn’t get as much mileage as the ones that were reasonable, measured, and evidenced.  Perhaps they forgot.  If this isn’t true, let me know.  I’d like to understand why.

Really, what this harassment achieves is intimidation.  The end of it is that the person on the receiving end doesn’t feel free to voice viewpoints because he/she knows that in the future, nothing productive will come out of it, and no debate will happen.  This is what leads me to believe that the people who engage in this type of public discourse want the other person to be silenced because the harasser doesn’t agree with them.  In the end, civil public debate dies, and the definition of public discourse becomes one of intimidation and domination.  Nobody wins, except maybe the harasser.  He/she gets to feel in control and self-righteous and gets to have a little power trip.  His/her viewpoint, though, doesn’t become anymore valid or right.

I went through my phase of berating and disparaging other people.  This seemed to be the vogue when I was on the debate team.  We didn’t seem to get the core concept of the activity we were participating in.  Then I grew up.

Honestly, I’m glad to be done with this school.  I met very few people who had the mental capacity to understand how civil debate works.  The rest just engaged in name calling and an ignorant level of argument.  The impression I got was that they were afraid of what was different and that they were too lazy to think about it more than the shallow level of their debate showed.  Life after Evangelical Institution probably won’t be much different, but I hope that as people mature, they can understand how to argue and at least attempt to understand, perhaps even sympathize with, viewpoints that are different than their own.

All I’m saying is that I welcome challenges to my beliefs.  I did post them publicly, after all, and so I can’t expect everyone to agree with me and to co-exist in a bucolic world because I ask them to.  I do expect, though, that challenges be reasonable and productive, and that people engage me in a way that is constructive.  I would hope that there could be a mutual respect between two people who have reached their own conclusions about the world around them.

Maybe I hope for too much.

My Life Takes a Turn for the Better June 10, 2008

Finally, finally, something good has happened.  I got a new job at the library of Evangelical Institution.  One of my friends who works there told me about a job opening and personally recommended me.  I went in this morning to fill out an application and to have an interview.  They asked me how much I knew about libraries and such, and I told them I was an English major, which lit up my interviewer’s face and pretty much guaranteed me the job, apparently.  Tonight, when I got home after 9 hours of truck at Corporate Crap, I had good news when I opened my email and found that I had been hired.  Although the job pays 20 cents less per hour than my current job at Corporate Crap, it has a fixed schedule, which means that I can keep the job at CC as a side job.  I’ll still be making more because I have a guaranteed 40 hours per week.  Plus I don’t have to work on Sundays and I get every other weekend off.  The other perfect thing is that the job is temporary, and it ends right before I move.  I can call the restaurant I was interviewing at and tell them that there’s no longer a need for the 2nd interview they had scheduled me for.  It was rather funny when I interviewed there, because the interviewer asked me what area of English I was interested in:

Me: “Modern British literature.”
Interviewer: “Oh, literature.  British?  Seems rather dull.”
Me: ”I find it to be really interesting.”

So having the job at the library is perfecto.  Plus, it seems that I’ll get to read most of the day anyway, since the library is pretty dead this time of year.

Finally, something good happens.

When You’re Money’s Gone, and You’re Drunk as Hell June 4, 2008

Corporate Crap continues to schedule me for only 16 hours a week.  This is bad for multiple reasons.  One is that I can’t pay my bills as it is, so if they cut my hours, I’ll be even more screwed.  Two is that the $700 that I owe Evangelical Institution is legit.  And I owe it by June 30th.  They tell me that they won’t set up a payment plan because the deadline for setting one up was April 20.  I tell them that I didn’t know that I owed anyone that much until the beginning of May.  I might have to put all of it on a credit card.  All I have to say is this: fuckers.  Subsequently I have done two things: I have looked for another job and I have put myself in the mindset that I can’t spend money on anything other than absolute necessities.  I immediately broke that rule by buying 8 episodes of The Tudors on Amazon Unbox which I spent last night and today watching.  If I shouldn’t spend money on gas, and I can’t really go anywhere without spending money, I’ll just stay home and spend money.  Makes sense, right?  I was ultra-lazy today because I got up at 2pm because I was up til 4 am last night watching The Tudors.  I should’ve just read a damn book.  I tried that also today, but I just fell asleep.  I also took a bath, which is something I haven’t done in a while.  The damn tub was really annoying becuase the stopper doesn’t work very well.  It kept leaking and I kept having to fill it up.  I could go out and buy a stopper, but that involves MONEY.  Water is free.  Anyway, the bath was relaxing.

Having super-bad money issues like this and being faced with 16-hour work weeks is way too much to deal with.  It makes me shut down and do things like watch The Tudors all day long.  I can think about someone else’s drama instead of my own.  The most troubling thing is that I shut down when things like this happen instead of taking initiative and going out and doing something about it.  Granted, I did go job hunting, but you’d think that something of this type of urgency would inspire some action appropriate to the level of urgency.  But that doesn’t happen with me, and I hate myself for it.

Trying to Find Direction in the Post-”insert-word-here” World March 23, 2008

I have been going to an Episcopalian church every Sunday for the past few months.  This confession of sorts has elicited worried remarks from my mother, who is very wary of anything liturgical.  I’m not sure she knows why.  She grew up in a non-religious household and was saved after her mother died and became part of the Mennonite Church.  Later, after I was born, she and my father became part of a nondenominational church.  Therefore, I grew up in a church which lacked tradition.  The closest thing we had to tradition was having a missions festival every April.  I grew up in what could be described as the most disconnected church body that is possible.  Their doctrine was fine, and I probably still agree with most of it.  I’m actually still a member of this church; I became one when I was baptized when I was 16.  But doctrine is not the foremost problem of my current religious life.  Sure, doctrine forms the basis for the problems that I face, but it is not the foremost problem.  Protestant religions of all denominations share the same basic beliefs: the physical and historical death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the belief that the Bible is the word of God and is at least authoritative (if not inerrant), that God created the world by his own hand, that salvation is for those who believe in Christ, etc.  The difference is in the emphasis of these shared truths.  Also in the experience of salvation.  So, despite all of these shared beliefs, why is it that my mother becomes worried for me when I tell her that I am going to an Episcopalian Church?  Why is she afraid of liturgy?  Why do I think that Episcopalians think me odd when I tell them that I go to Evangelical Institution and not Secular Woman’s College?  Why are Evangelical Churches so ugly?

I think this has a lot to do with how they look at the self.

I don’t know much about the Evangelical tradition in an academic sense.  I don’t know much about its history or reasons for existence.  I do know my own experience within the Evangelical Church, both in my nondenominational church growing up and my experience at Evangelical Institution, the bastion of the Evangelical movement within the past 30 years.  While I do not think that personal experience or small and personal encounters with other Christians should determine my beliefs in God, I do think they determine my religious experience, and thus, the church tradition I choose to align myself with.  For example, I would not reject a belief in God based on a specific church (not Church, capital “C”) or a specific person or specific life experiences.  I believe deeply in certain transcendent truths which mean more to me than experiences.  But I would reject certain ways of believing based on experiences with a church and its members and leaders because the Church is part of the religious experience.  What I see on a day-to-day basis affects how I experience religion, and the way I choose to worship is part of my religion.  Thus, there are certain truths that unite the Church, but the experiences are widely different and the emphasis placed on each is different.  I don’t think that certain ways are more right or wrong than another (I don’t think that Catholics aren’t true Christians, as many Evangelicals seem to believe; I remember a missionary coming to my church to explain how to evangelize Catholics, which now strikes me as very odd and divisive) but I do think that emphasizing religion one way or another can be harmful to the religious experiences of many Christians, causing them to leave the church.  I don’t think that I can say with any authority here how things should be done, but I can say how they could be done.

My own experience with Evangelicalism has been both ardent and cynical.  Growing up, I was a “good little Christian” girl, and I was pretty conservative in my religious practice.  At least Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on a “personal relationship with Christ” and its insistence on the God-You bubble, can be beneficial for teenagers, who are trying to forge their own path through everything anyway.  But once you get past that teenage fervor, what is there to lean on?  If the self loses its faith and passion, what do you have to lean on?  Of course there is the rest of the Evangelical Church, but it seems that this church is just a bunch of selves getting together with each other, and so there’s still not much to go back on.  The other thing that Evangelicals seem to hold onto is the “reasonability” of their faith.  They all need a reasonable explanation for what they believe.  I think this has something to do with the reactionary nature of Evangelicalism.  The “Culture Wars” and whatnot.  This also has a lot to do with the extreme focus on the self and the independence that Evangelicalism has.  We have the Bible, but interpretations of that text can differ from generation to generation.  This focus on the self has a lot to do with the scorn of liturgy and tradition.  The reason why my mom is afraid of tradition and liturgy is because she thinks that it steals the self-determination from religion, as if reciting liturgy is something that will prevent me from thinking on my own and make my religion become  routine rather than meaningful.  I’ll answer this shortly.  The other problem I have with Evangelicalism is its insistence on pulpit politics.  I don’t think that my worship experience in the Church should be muddled and adulturated by discussions of politics.  Yes, my political decisions should be based on my religious beliefs, but my pastor shouldn’t be the one who is telling me who I should vote for.  Those three things are the main problems I have with Evangelicalism as it exists today: its reactionary nature, its extreme emphasis on the self (which causes the reaction), and its insistence on telling me who to vote for.  These things may work fine for other people (mainly the people of my parents’ generation), but they don’t work for me, and I suspect, many other people who are also struggling religiously.

The lack of tradition in the Evangelical Church is frightening to me.  Growing up in a nondenominational church, I knew absolutely nothing about Church tradition, which forms the basis for the beliefs of Christianity.  I had no clue why, during lent, there are crosses with purple cloths draped on them which turn white on Easter.  I had no clue what all those weird letters on banners in front of the Church are or what they mean.  I didn’t know any creeds.  I knew hymns, but they were largely replaced by sappy choruses by the time I was a teenager.  But my understanding of this lack of knowledge didn’t come about until I came to Evangelical Institution (EI), where I saw many of these things and started learning about them.  I was out of the nondenominational bubble which took pride in its independence from every single tradition that ever existed.  I’m not kidding about that.  Symbols and traditions that exist in other churches were not found in mine growing up.  You can’t learn about these things from the Bible.  So, I came to EI and was confronted with tons of experiences that I was not prepared for, because my church based everything on the self.  So when I started having problems, I reacted to those by distancing myself from the church and becoming cynical about it.  I had nothing to fall back on.  But now I realize how incredibly important these traditions are.  I don’t think that knowing what the color purple means will somehow prevent me from rejecting Christianity, but the way of religious experience which emphasizes traditions and symbols allows the individual Christian to cope when there are questions.  It also adds to the richness and meaning of the religious experience.  I remember that, after communion every first Sunday of the month, everyone in our church joined hands and sang the third stanza of “How Great Thou Art.”  The beautiful organ swell of the music and the human contact and sense of something bigger than myself always made me cry.  Every single time it happened.  It was the same every single time, but each time it made me cry.  Each time was meaningful to me.  When they stopped doing that, I felt a loss.  I’m sure that if that could happen again, I would still cry.  There was no other tradition in our church. 

When I go to the Episcopalian Church, I feel both bewilderment and a sense of belonging.  I feel bewilderment because there are so many things that happen which I don’t know the meaning of.  People wear robes and they say things every week that everyone except me seems to know.  Luckily, I know the Lord’s Prayer, but that’s about it (although I am learning).  People kneel on little benches that unfold from the bottom of the pew.  There are symbols all over the place that I don’t know about.  But in this way, I feel belonging because of these routines.  They are deeply meaningful, even because of their mystery to me.  I know that people have recited these prayers and sang these songs for hundreds, even thousands of years before me.  And in that recitation, their truth is confirmed.  And every week, the priest says the same things, which remind of what it means to be a Christian every week.  I don’t have to rely on myself for everything, because I have time-confirmed tradition to remind me that I am not the only one who is having these struggles and that I am not the only one who has been a Christian. 

There Are Times When I Think Eugenics Would be a Good Thing March 6, 2008

I hate being in public spaces with stupid people.  Most of the time when I hear people saying moronic things, I want to either slap them across the face or yell at them and tell them never to speak again.  But alas, I am too nice or at least timid to do or say such things, so I just sit there and get angrier and occasionally direct angry faces in the stupid person’s direction.  I’ve been told my stare has powerful qualities, but most of the time the stupid people are too busy spouting off idiocy to notice.

 Evangelical Institution has masses and masses of stupid people.  I was on the campus-run bus line today and overheard two horrible conversations.  One was from a rather fat and ugly guy in glasses with a beard who, as I overheard him saying in a very loud, stupid voice, is a Communications major.  He was talking about how he wants to write a book by the “Common Man.”  According to him, his book would not even be original: he would just take a book by an “educated, learned” person and reinterpret it so that the “Common Man” would understand.  It would be his very own interpretation and he apparently doesn’t care if he is right or if no one agrees with him.  Who needs those educated people, right?  They’re just pompous windbags (much like this stupid person who was speaking) with nothing to say to the common folk.  Why not take some Derrida and make it his own?

The worst thing about the asinine conversations of stupid people is that they always think they need to talk as loud as they possibly can so that everyone in the room/bus/store can hear their brilliance and dedication to higher thought.  I swear that the volume is directly proportionate to the stupidity of the speaker.  You could even chart a z-line which would indicate the level of religiousity of the speaker.  Most stupid people at Evangelical Institution are some kind of major which involves religion.  Bonus points for being in seminary or other graduate institution related to religion.  I would rate the above stupid person among the highest echelons of stupidity based on his volume and the fact that he is applying to Evangelical Institution’s seminary if “nothing else works out.”

Now I must listen to possibly the most stupid professor who was ever given a doctorate degree.