A brief foray into politics ...

Chuck Norris says McCain is too old

NAVASOTA, TEXAS -- Campaigning for Mike Huckabee, actor Chuck Norris said Sunday that Sen. John McCain is too old to handle the pressures of being president. "I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president
would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency," Norris said. At 67, he is four years younger than McCain, who will be 72 in August.

Wow, that's totally not funny. I don't get it ... But then, "Contrary to popular belief, America is not a democracy, it is a Chucktatorship" is not really funny either ... although "There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live" explains Huckabee's thoughts on intelligent design ...

Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Recently, NPR's This American Life did a piece on the misunderstandings that arise when ignorant Americans attempt to engage with the Muslim world, especially when that world is in our world. Which it is.

Shouting Across the Divide - This American Life

“A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians. This and other stories of what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire."

Pay special attention to Act I, "One of These Things is Not Like the Other" for a very very clear example of why we keep religion out of school. And, for those keeping score, the gotdang candy cane does NOT symbolize how Jesus' blood saves all believers. It's also a very clear example of what little monsters children are, especially if their parents are big monsters-in-the-closet. Closet monsters are people who hide their monsterness -- bigotry, superiority, self-righteousness that excludes anyone who isn't like them -- behind the thin plywood door of well-meaning, well-bred bullshit. When I was a kid, I got harassed every December 7 because I had the audacity to be Japanese. Which, by the way, sucked because it was my mom's birthday. So imagine, if you will, 12 years of playground bullying and desperate explanations on how I and my family were NOT the enemy in a war that had ended 30 years before but somehow was still being fought in the minds of those around me. And afterward, cake and presents and hugs for my Japanese mom. September 11 is the new Pearl Harbor Day, in which American Muslim kids across the country get to go through what I went through, except there's still a war going on. Which means that 50 years from now, their kids will still be fighting that battle on the playgrounds.

I'm going to go all theological on you and point this out: When the lawyer asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied with the story of the Good Samaritan. The point of that story was this: You do not have neighbors until you become a neighbor yourself. The neighbor to the wounded man was the one who treated him with mercy. So. Who are our neighbors? It's not up to those who are different in our communities to prove that they're "harmless" or "worthy" to be our neighbors. God calls us to treat those around us with mercy and love, to build a community, to neighbor to others. It starts with us. If you have kids, teach them this lesson well. Come September 11 and December 7, hope that they'll be be good neighbors.

Follow the link ...

Is God our cosmic bellhop or our king?

I have to admit, I don't care for "king," but this is the first time the word has been made palatable to me, as far as Christian vocabulary goes.

Discuss ...

Dear God ...

I've been tapped to write a prayer for an upcoming special service, and I'm rather freaked out about it.

I'm not a prayer. Rather, I'm not a pray-er. I don't pray. Growing up Catholic under the guidance of a converted-from-Buddhism parent who more enthusiastic than precise, I never got the knack of extemporaneous praying. All our prayers were contained in the handy-dandy little prayerbook Fr. Whatsisname had given to us upon First Communion. I can Hail Mary and Act of Contrition with the best of them, but that's recitation at worst and meditation at best. I personally gave up praying when I realized that I was either asking for shit, or thanking God for shit in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with admiration. As Shug Avery says, "More than anything God love admiration. ... I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it."

Recently, while on an educational trip with some classmates from seminary, I was asked to pray before we set out on our journey one morning. No way, I said. We had a very very wild driver, and the last thing I wanted to do was be the one who said the prayer that didn't bless us properly enough to get us home in one piece. Not that that's how prayer works, but that was in my head. I don't believe in voodoo, either, but I'll be respectful to the voodoo mistress, lest I wake up turned into a bat or something some morning. Probably the closest I've gotten to actually worded prayer was the other day when we came out of the mall to find that one of our tires had gone flat. We got the car all jacked up and the spare was ready, but the tire would not come off the car. I made a small appeal to the tire-changing kami, but you know, there are a million million kami, and it's quite possible I got my divinity wires crossed and sent my appeal to the wrong one, maybe the "I want to walk around in Wal-Mart for four hours" kami. Which is what we ended up doing.

Anyway, I've been asked to take part in this service and to write a prayer based on a passage in Acts. I take the business of prayer very seriously and am trying to create something authentic. I'm grasping the concept that there is a structure to a good prayer, some imagery and careful choice of words, much like poetry or headline writing. Doing a Google search on "how to write a prayer" has been of NO help ("You just talk to God, that's a prayer." Yes, well, I know, but public prayer is equal parts theater and theology. It's the theater part that's got me stymied.). This being my first, I haven't gotten the knack yet, and I'm borrowing, splicing and crafting together pieces of prayers that I like, and hopefully it'll turn out.

By the way, I just read The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, the best book I've read in ages. Coming from a Dust Bowl state, I've always been really interested in Dust Bowl history but could never find a good book about it. Most of the books I've ever been able to find are children's books, and why IS that? I'd like to make this assigned reading to anyone who thinks that human-caused climate change is a hoax. Which, ironically, are a lot of people who live in Dust Bowl areas.

Morning at the Homeless ministry: a haiku

Convoy of hybrids
delivers meals, compassion.
Christian love on wheels.

Survey says

From BeliefNet:
Survey: 'Unchurched' Americans say Church is 'Full of Hypocrites'

OK, no great shocker there. Maybe a "Wait, if you're not there, how do you know?" query. Although I was "unchurched" for 15 years for that very reason. That, and a preference for sleeping in after working until 1 a.m. on Saturday nights. Yes, working, not partying.

But then we hit this graf:

Researchers, affiliated with the Southern Baptists' LifeWay Christian Resources, defined "unchurched" as Christians who haven't attended church in six months as well as non-Christians such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.

... and we go "Huh?" If your religious tradition doesn't actually have a church, can you really be unchurched? Could perhaps they choose a better word for non-Christians so they don't actually fulfill the unchurched view of Christians being 'judgmental and hypocritical'? Un-templed? Non-churched? Simply lapsed? Nonpracticing?

Sometimes I "attend" UCC services in Second Life, but I haven't in about a month, so if I keep that up will my avatar be virtually unchurched in five months?

I'm soaking up some of my Intro to Theology texts before school begins at the end of the month, and they stress that the importance of Christian life is found in community, so being "churched" does seem to be a fairly important deal. However, I think I've accomplished the same deep fellowship at the bar over cheese fries and coin $2.50 pitchers, and I wonder where the "church" part comes in. A modern take, if you will, on the meal in Emmaus, as there's a starchy main course and plenty of realization that the stranger in front of you might be the gal with the answers. So was I in church when I was unchurched?

What, then, is church? Church is never the building, as pretty as we make them, and it cannot be just the 11-to-noon-on-Sundays hour, which is still a fairly segregated hour. Do we take church with us or do we leave it behind to be picked up later? Is it the declaration of your religious affiliation that is church? The friends you make and family you create who share that burning need to orient themselves and the world to a new vision of how things really are or should be? Or is it just the world, as imperfect as it is, and all the lives you touch as you go through, trying to love a lot and harm as little as you can?

Are there walls, or just places where the light leaks in? Is it divided by time, or can the words on a page written millenia ago that let a reader commune with an author be one of the bridges that transcend the clock?

So I guess my original question is, is being "unchurched" a relavant state or just a judgment call?

Highway to Heaven

A friend of mine clued me to this story the other day:


Texas ministry sees I-35 as holy highway

Some believe I-35 might be shorthand that links the interstate to Isaiah 35:8 of the Bible: "And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not pass over it, and fools shall not err therein."

... So ... basically, the road to heaven is constantly under construction and features the occasional porn shop and casino in border areas. Got it.

This, by the way, is as clear as I can figure to be an example of eisegesis that I've ever been able to find.


If you're a fan of NPR, head on over to the Diane Rehm Show to listen to this morning's discussion about the debate between teaching evolution and creationism. The show was prompted by the statement last week by the National Academy of Sciences that urged the teaching of evolution as a basic bedrock foundation of scientific principle, rather than teaching creationism/intelligent design instead or offering up both evolution and creationism and letting the kiddos decide between the two.


Firstly, kudos for the Academy for calling this what it is, creationism, and not intelligent design. I often joke about how NOT-intelligent the design of the world is (Have you seen that March of the Penguins movie? I used to like penguins until I saw it; now I think those are the creatures most horrifically enslaved to an inefficient genetic compulsion I've ever seen. Granted, it's kept them going for all these thousands of years, but man, yikes. When and if their climate changes, they're all screwed, them and the poor polar bears. Yes, we lament only the cute and cuddly seeming), but a recent viewing of a NOVA documentary on the Dover, Pa., case really gave me a good view of how intelligent design is an evolution (pun intended) of creationism with a shiny new gloss.


What I found most interesting about the creationism supporter on the Diane Rehm show was his insistence that his arguments weren't based in the Bible, but he took issue with how "materialism" (not the Brittney Spears-worshipping kind, but the kind that's based in the material of the world, he says) removes the ultimate purpose from human existence. Which, really, isn't a religious issue at all, but a worldview issue. Actually, that kind of anthrocentric worldview to me sounds vaguely like human-worship; that is, it says that we're so very important that we were created for some special purpose, and any idea that says we're just here through random chance reduces us to nothing more special an aemoeba. Which is impossible because humans are too important to be the same as aemoeba.

I rather find the concept of human existence in the world -- and hell, aemoeba existence, too -- as a product of random mutation rather awesome (not in the same vein as "these earrings are awesome!" but "That f-5 tornado bearing down on my house strikes awe in my heart"), moreso than that of some creator who has designed us for some purpose. Out of all the billions upon billions squared possibilities in the universe, there you are, just you, a unique person. Sit back for a second an appreciate that as a miracle, one that's reduced to the mundane by the fact that there are 6 billion and counting miracles walking the earth.

Admittedly, that sounds a bit like human worshipping, too, but with a different focus, one on being rather than goal, purpose or ultimate accomplishment. Very much like how the concept of God's grace was described to me, that we receive it not because of anything we do or even believe or join, but because we are.

Comic book scribe extraordinaire Alan Moore said it better than I did more than 20 years ago in his Watchmen series, about when the whole creationism mess was first rearing its ugly head:

Doctor Manhattan: Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless
generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so
specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.

Laurie Juspeczyk: But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!

Dr. Manhattan: Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.