Blue Like Donald Miller

It’s gotta be hard, being a writer and needing to eat.  I can’t imagine the pressure one might feel if the lively hood of your life depended upon book sales.  I can just imagine myself writing and then rewriting a single sentence believing that my next car payment depended on it, and if I chose the wrong line then my car will be taken away from me.  Sound paranoid?  Sure..  but I’m guessing it’s not as far from the truth as you might think.  This is probably the only legitimate reason I can think right now that makes me feel less disappointed with Don Miller right now.  I guess I wouldn’t feel more than ambivalent about the guy if it weren’t for the fact that he’s been one of the few authors that has been able to grab my attention long enough to speak to me on a meaningful level.

He’s a good writer for sure.  I had a friend once give him the greatest of compliments when he said that he said, “Don Miller writes books the way I would write them if I could write good.”  Though my friend losses points for grammar it’s not a bad compliment.  I can grant that it’s entirely possible that my general disappointment comes from other sources right now, but I can safely say that even if I wasn’t feeling generally let down by friends and family right now I would most likely be pretty disturbed by that I saw when I looked on his blog site here.

Demographic research?  Advertising kits?  What the hell?  This sort of thing is not new to the motivational speaker world, or religion for that matter, but it certainly feels slimy coming from Don Miller.  In his books he talks about the nature of marketing how it’s more designed to sell you insecurities than products.  I couldn’t agree more.  He talks about how contrived it feels to sit in a church and notice how the music and lights are timed perfectly to illicit emotion and how it all feels so plastic.  You would assume that someone who professes these kinds sentiments wouldn’t try to market themselves in similar ways.

That’s the crazy thing about all this.  A large reason Don Miller has done pretty well for himself is largely due to the fact that his notoriety was spread via word of mouth.  I myself bought 10 copies and gave them out at a community center group book meeting that I lead because I thought that people probably wouldn’t get a chance otherwise.  Those people then gave copies of their friends when they were done.  Christian markets didn’t want to touch him at first, neither did anyone else it seemed.  Now that he’s all over the book shelves of B&N it looks as if he’s fallen victim to the marketing monster that is the business of religion.  But then again I guess it’s easy to judge when you aren’t a writer and your paycheck doesn’t depend on you going along with things that you don’t believe in.

National ‘Moron Burn A Koran’ Day!

I don’ think I could think of anything more petty and petulant than National Burn A Koran Day if  I tried.  Occult leader Terry Jones must have mixed some pretty strong Kool-Aid to get his congregation to go along with this nonsense.  The real kicker to me is that his line of thinking (much like the terrorists of 9/11) is in complete conflict with his own religious text; the Bible.

Paul had plenty to say about living quietly amongst unbelievers to gain their respect in order to win converts to Jesus.  Somehow I doubt that going on television and exclaiming to world that it is evil and wrong, as if your beliefs are bases on anything other than faith, or that you somehow merited your own salvation, (Ephesians 2:8) you wretch of sinner… and then inciting violence by burning something that the world considers sacred wouldn’t be what Thessalonians was talking about.

Fanatical Christians aren’t the only ones alone in this category.  In the Koran in the book of Sura chapter 40 there are several specific rules regarding jihad which include but are not limited to: fasting and the abstinence from alcohol 7 days prior to jihad, no killing of women or children, no attacking an unarmed man, no destroying a tree with at least one green leaf left, etc…  The attacks of 9/11 and almost all terrorist attacks in the last century have violated almost every one of these rules.

It’s annoying to me that even though I am a non-believer in the gospels or the Koran, I am far more aware of the Bible and Koran than the vast majority of Christians and Muslims that I come across on a day-to-day basis.  The older I get the more I have a sneaking suspicion that his is very telling about the true nature of religion as a whole.  It’s doesn’t inspire the deep self-reflection and education that it proposes to value, but rather creates followers who are intellectually enslaved, insecure, and emotionally stunted who would do anything on the promise of divine deliverance from their own self-created hell.

The the narrowly religious are not thinkers, they are sheep that feel that feel they just need to be told what to do, because they lack the creativity to live life apart from what someone else dictates.  I know that may sound harsh, but what if you love your family you must call them out.  I may not be a Christian or a Muslim, but the human race is my family, Bible misinterpreting  fanatics and genocidal morons alike.

Calculating Infinity…

Back in college I had a bit of a hick-up, a very expensive one to say the least.  It was my senior year and I was writing my senior thesis paper partially inspired by Jeremy Campbell’s book; Grammatical Man.  The reason this hick-up was so costly is because it caused my to spiral deep into depression and I ended up taking an incomplete for that semester.  fours years later I still have to finish my college education.  The reasons for my ever-increasing anxiety and depression were and are quiet complicated, and was quite hard for me to swallow, but I feel as though now I am finally honest enough to deal with it.

It isn’t as simple as saying it all boils down to math, but on the other hand it isn’t that much more complicated either.  Grammatical Man is a very special book.  The book outlines the rise of information theory, it’s cosmical mysteriousness, and why properly understanding it is crucial for societal advancement.  It talks about how we handle information, what it is, and how it is elemental in a very underestimated way in how it influences a wide variety of things ranging from language, art, dance, physics, biology, and math.  Without it we never would have developed algorithms, morse-code, T.V.’s, computers, and A.I…  It talks specifically about how we learn language during infancy, how it is unnatural, and how it is really evolutionarily impossible  yet how it happens anyway.  For this reason it has really bugged evolutionary theorists to this day.

The reason for my depression and how it relates to all this is simple; you can’t prove the God of the Bible.  I was annoyingly zealous to my professors for sure, constantly undermining their assumptions and very modern predetermined ideas.  I was taught to be this way at my international prep school growing up in Japan.  Our teachers and parents where all very paranoid that we’d just believe whatever we were told in college.  Unfortunate for them, teaching kids to think can backfire on you.  It backfired on me too.  I was trying to prove the existence of the God of the Bible.  Notwithstanding the resurrection contradictions, I had no idea just how much of a bad idea this was going to be when I started writing my paper.  I thought I could piggy back on Jeremy Campbell’s work and somehow convince the world of its folly and even ontologically prove the existence of God through ridiculously convoluted syllogisms.   I thought because it makes sense to say that absolute truth exists, logically, that this would mean that the idea of a omniscient-infallible God, like the one Bible proposes, would have to exist.

What I didn’t realize is that in order for the existence of absolute truth to be meaningful information, you would have to already have a complete understanding of absolute truth for it to even be meaningful information.  Absolute ‘Truth’ (or information) is meaningless without an absolute vantage point of understanding it.  Since none of do have that luxury, it is meaningless to talk about except to say that it is meaningless to talk about.  We only have enough information to know that we don’t have all the information.  Sounds as equally obvious as ironic right?  Even talking about an absolute or infinite God in terms of numbers, everything has to be included in the scale of infinity.  All negative numbers, positive, real, and imaginary are all included.  This is to say that God IS EVERYTHING, mathematically that is.  So it makes less sense to call God infinite if He/She/It is not both good and evil, loving and ambivalent, kind and cruel.  It certainly makes existential sense that God would be this way being that he lets some live in the lap if luxury while others and starve and die, while some loose loved ones while others don’t seems to appreciate those they have.

So all this is to say, I think I am going to finish that paper now..

I’m Right Here

Traditionally, you could not have said that I was someone who lived in the moment.  Growing up during my formative years  in Japan when my father was a missionary I spent a lot of time on the train with my head in the clouds and my heart in a ditch.  I rode it an hour each direction going and coming home from school and during this time I bathed in the gravity and weight of missionary evangelism and how I was going to save the world.  I spent a good many train rides reading Ecclesiastes, trying to understand my mothers depression that stemmed from her abusive childhood, (her father was a drunk and physically abusive) all the while trying to deal with the reality of being a pubescent 13-year-old and all that goes along with that.  Needless to say my heart has always been a little heavy.  Growing up the son of a minister you are always painfully aware of very adult problems both in your own family and that of other members of the church.  College and moving back to the US proved to be no less of a somber and heavy experience for me as well.

Now, however, for the first time in my life I feel like I’m really starting to live in the moment.  I’ve been so concerned in the past with the weight of ‘Gods purpose and mission’ growing up and in college that frankly, I feel like I skipped over a good many of fun and exciting years.  It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed a good many number of experiences and lived life when I was a Christian, it’s just that now I feel like when I have a truly good or simply enjoyable experience; it sticks.

The stars seem brighter now, my food tastes better, simple walks through the park seem more memorable, and time with my family is paramount.  Before it felt like I was pushing through life to achieve ‘Gods will’ in proving to the world it’s counterfeit beliefs and then trying to supernaturally reveal Gods intended purpose for is all.  I realize now how pompous it all sounds, but then I felt like the world rested on my shoulders and it was up to me (through the power of God) to save it.

My sister who loves me to death told my wife the other day that it makes her sad that I’m happy now as an unbeliever, that she would rather me be unhappy and be ‘saved’ than burn in hell and be happy about it.  I don’t fault her too bad for it though, because it’s not her speaking really, but the invalidating nature of religion.

Child-like Faith Indeed

I was standing outside pacing around for about an hour now.  I’m pushing an empty swing on the swing-set in the backyard in futile restlessness.  It is humid and my minutes were starting to get expensively low but I’m having the kinda of conversation that you can’t just walk out on.  My sister and I have been going at it for a while now, going back and forth and in circles.  She’s a pretty smart person so naturally I’m getting more and more frustrated by her unwillingness to see things from a different perspective.

She’s a Christian, just like everyone else in my family professes, that is except for me.  She’s throwing out lines and clichés that I’ve heard my whole life that churches teach you say when trouble-shooting and conversation with an unbeliever.  Though it’s frustrating to have a parrot  conversation that changes topics quickly and often I am sticking out, for her.  Now I’m being asked to defend my thoughts and doubt for the 8th consecutive time this week and it’s starting to get old.

The real kicker comes however when she tells me with an air of slight condescension that she “just has childlike faith” and that she can’t relate to feeling like she needs to understand a God, and that she is okay with believing in something that is bigger than herself.  I love my sister, but what a ton of laughable crap.

It is truly convenient that Christian culture, by and large, seems to have no problem with capitalizing on all sorts of media forms that have to do with gaining and greater understanding of the Bible to make a profit.  It is truly convenient that even my sister will attend Sunday school for adults before going to worship, and will even attend conferences to further this sort of ‘education’.  It’s convenient because this concept of continual education only appears to applicable when everything is peachy and easy-going but when something goes bad, you just need to all of a sudden shut down your mental faculties and revert to this notion of “child-like faith.”  Not just that, but if you claim to have no faith in the God of the Bible, then you must automatically be arrogant and proud for not automatically believing that the “something bigger” has to be the God of Christianity.  Here is yet another example in my family lately of masked passive aggression.

It’s ironic; that her assertion doesn’t appear to come across as anything other than pompous and self-righteous while she is very mistakenly attempting to mask her words with child-like humility.  This is probably not what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the innocent trust of “little ones.”

A Flimsy Bet.

I recently had a very heartbreaking conversation.  It was between my father and myself.  It was hard to hear what he had to say, but this time I didn’t buckle under the verbal beating I took.  It has been a big step for me; sticking up for myself even if it meant breaking my father’s heart.  It’s understandable though, why he has been so upset.  He’s a pastor after all, a Southern Baptist one at that, and he’s also been a missionary of 13 years in one of the hardest to evangelize places on planet earth: Tokyo, Japan.  I have just conceded the fact to him that I really can’t in good conscience say that I believe in Christianity any more.

The conversation all started over a completely separate matter in which is now paling in consideration between my mom and myself.  We too had just had a rather inhospitable conversation over some entirely different issue.  She has never really been that found of my wife and was badmouthing her to me and thinking that this behavior was somehow okay.  She was trying to justify  telling me that she “didn’t care how I feel” and how “she didn’t care if she offends me”  about the things that she was saying and how she would always tell you the ‘Truth’ because, well, she loves me just so darn much.  I responded by warning her not confuse her wanting to tell me whatever she wanted regardless of my feelings, or anyone else’s, with virtue.  Then she hung up on me.   Now my father is telling how I am becoming a hateful and bitter person, that he is ashamed of my behavior, and that my doubts must be the result of some sin in my life.  He says I’m bitter and he is telling me that my unbelief can only be the result of sin, and cannot be because of anything else.  He is telling me that I am just bitter because of certain hardships my wife and I have undergone during the past two years and how I need to press through to be “better” and have more faith.  He says I am turning my back in God because of this.

He’s not entirely wrong.  On an emotional level, I really doubt that God (or at least the God of Christianity) really cares about what happens to me or anyone at all.  At least no more than he cares if a lion kills a baby gazelle, or as much as a he cares about the rampant flooding in pakistan that is killing thousands of children right now.  I’d like to believe in this idea of God that is there, and would die for my sins and take a personal interest in my life.  It certainly would make things quite a bit more reassuring, but I can’t buy it.  I’ve weighed the evidence and counted the cost and I am certainly not betting on it anymore.

What he’s wrong about is about me being bitter, I’m not bitter.  It would be completely pointless to be bitter about something or towards something that is apparently ambivalent towards me.  He’s not entirely right either, obviously, because the real reason that I don’t buy into Christianity is the Bible.  The Bible doesn’t add up.  More to the point, it doesn’t add up at the most crucial and important point for Christianity: the resurrection.  It’s not that the accounts don’t just not add up, they outright contradict each other.  The women who were there, (sometimes just Mary Magdalene, sometimes Mary mother of James, other times Salome) the men at the tomb are inconsistent (or angels it says, though mark calls him a single young man in white and not an angel but in Luke it says two men) the order of events telling the disciples about what they had seen, (in Luke they leave having spoken to angels first and then the women tell Peter and the disciples, but in John they leave not having talked to anyone and only see Jesus and the angels after Peter runs to the tomb and leaves), the women hold on the Jesus seems acceptable to Jesus in Matthew being that he doesn’t rebuke them for it, but is strictly prohibits it in John (because of Jesus saying that he hadn’t returned to the father yet).  The Bible even admits in most translations that the ending to Mark has been tampered with and inserts a small disclaimer in its resurrection chapter)  In short, they can’t be reconciled; not by any stretch of the imagination.   The gospel of Luke says that the accounts are historical eyewitness accounts and should be treated like court testimonials, unfortunately they are different stories, wither want to admit it or not, the evidence is there and it is incontrovertible.

I would be fine with this whole ordeal if my father was saying that he understood why I had my doubts, that it all boiled down to faith and would encourage me and tell me how to seek God in fellowship or worship or something like that.  Instead however it feels like I am being shamed and outed because of my honest admission that the Bible doesn’t make sense.  You would hope that Christianity would create more secure, less easily threatened believers if it were true.  Christian apologists like Norman Geisler and Ravi Zacharias who are largely considered the forefront apologists will back me up in saying that Christianity stands and falls on the resurrection. So why am I being considered bitter for my disbelief?  I think this is quite telling about the true nature of what faith means for those who are so easily threatened by the opinions of those who disagree.  I love my parents but their reaction in disappointing to me.  I’m not bitter towards them, I just can’t assign myself to something and bet everything in my life on such a flimsy bet anymore.