My year of 2 winters

Global warming sucks ass.  This year, it robbed me of one of my favourite things in the world - Winter.  Oh we had some cold days, even a couple of cold weeks, but all in all it just didn't feel like much of a Winter.  It also ended really abruptly, I was wearing a jacket one week and shorts the next.  Just like that, winter was over before I had the time to really savour it.

However, all was not lost since this year I'm getting a second chance.  This year, I get to have a proper Winter in the USA!  So on 22 November I got to say "Yo home, smell you later!", boarded a plane and left sunny South Africa for the snowy hills of Reno, Nevada.  So far it's been a blast and I'll try to blog my journey as best I can since I would always want to cherish the memory but I'm never going to get into scrapbooking.

So whenever I get a moment I'll take a minute and tell you all about how my life got flipped turned upside down!

How Francis Chan converted me to Paganism

Francis Chan

So the other day I watched a free online premier for a new Christian video series called BASIC.  Sadly the free, full length video is no longer available but you won't have to simply take my word regarding the content as I did find a copy of the audio here.  The first thing that struck me was how incredibly alike this video seemed to the NOOMA series by Rob Bell.  The similarities soon became even stronger and I started to suspect that the presenter of this series, Francis Chan, was a really big Rob Bell fan because he was downright channeling the man.  In all fairness, I probably can't judge since I've only seen the one video but to me it seemed that Francis here would like nothing better than to find Rob and skin him so that he may wear him and be him!

Anyway, apart from that it wasn't bad.  The theme of this particular video was "follow Jesus" and it made some very good points, for instance that we needn't debate how to follow Jesus since it should be obvious - just look at what He told you to do and then do it.  But then, about 8 minutes in, things got iffy.  The conversation turned from "how do we follow Jesus?" to "why should I follow Jesus?"  The first answer he offered basically came down to "Because it's totally a privilege that Jesus even lets you follow Him so you should, like, totally do it!".  Somehow I doubt that would convince a skeptic.  He probably guessed as much because then he sheds his Rob Bell impression completely and tells you that you need to follow Jesus because Jesus is one scary dude!

Here is why Francis says he follows Jesus, because Jesus promised to return one day and judge the earth and according to the Book of Revelation, this judgement is going to be pants pissingly terrifying (I may be paraphrasing here).  To illustrate, he quotes from Revelation 6:15-17:

"Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

He points out that Jesus often spoke of Hell - more often that He did of Heaven - and concludes that you should follow Jesus because He is a powerful Being and you want to be on His side because you wouldn't like Jesus when He gets angry!  So really, according to this video it's a case of follow Jesus or else!

This was a moment of epiphany for me!  He was completely right, I was using all the wrong criteria in deciding what to believe and who to follow.  Obviously one should follow the one that scares you the most.  

Therefore, thanks to Francis Chan, I now follow Xipe Totec! I'm a little confused as to why I seem to be the only one though, Pastor Chan made a good argument though for some odd reason he claims that he is following Jesus because "what other choice do I have?"  Seriously?  Have you even looked at some of the other deities out there?  Did Pastor Francis even consider deities like Set or Kali?  I did and there sure are plenty of powerful beings out there you don't want to be on the wrong side of!  In the end I settled on Xipe Totec because honestly, just look at the guy!  He invented war!  Jesus wants you to give Him your heart (metaphorically) - Xipe Totec literally wants you to give him (the still beating) hearts of other humans!  Jesus wore a robe, Xipe Totec wears flayed human skin* - you tell me who you find more fearsome.  I just hope my new lord will forgive me for not offering him any freshly removed human hearts, flayed skin and human blood as sacrifice.  Sacrificial pyramids just take time to build thats all.  Perhaps I should have started with arrow sacrifice or a fire pit instead...

"Our lord the flayed one"

 I must admit though, sometimes I do lie awake at night wondering if I made the right choice.  Especially when I consider the incredibly cruel punishments Zeus enjoys dispensing.  Don't get me wrong, hellfire is very scary!  Somehow having a a giant bird eat out your liver every day for all eternity sounds worse!  I guess it's because the flames of Hell just never end, its the same thing for every second of eternity.  But when you are chained to the rock waiting for the bird to come for your freshly regenerated liver those few hours of dread filled near normalcy just sounds even more excruciating somehow...

*Funny enough, according to Wiki, it seems both could heal you if you touched it.

The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking

So while reading up a bit on Rev Schuller for my previous blog post I noticed a lot of online Christian sources blasting him for preaching a gospel of positive thinking.  At first I didn’t think too much of it, since that’s the kind of short hand many Christian groups sometimes use to indicate that a preacher isn’t anti-gay and pro-hellfire enough for their liking.  However when I finally got to the bottom of his Wiki page I noticed that they actually meant that quite literally – the power of positive thinking was his message.  Just look at the titles of some of the books he authored:

Way To The Good Life (1963)
Move Ahead With Possibility Thinking (1967)
Self-Love (1975)
You Can Be The Person You Want To Be (1976)
Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (1982)
Living Positively One Day At A Time (1986)
Success is never ending, failure is never final (1990)

If I threw in a couple of titles by self esteem/positive thinking gurus like Tony Robbins would you be able to tell?  (Just FYI, I didn’t.  Those are all from the good reverend).  There is nothing in there that even seems Christian for goodness sake!  The message is clear – if you want a good life you need good self esteem and a positive attitude.  Of course when you take in the reality of the Crystal Cathedral’s $43 million debt a very different message becomes apparent – positive thinking cannot save you.

Look, I won’t claim that positive thinking is completely useless since it demonstrably isn’t.  It makes sense that a positive person would be more likely to be looking for opportunities and would be more likely to actually pursue the ones they find.  In a way, positive people can create their own luck by finding and making good use of all the opportunities a pessimist might overlook or choose not to make use of.  However, that is where it ends.  No amount of positive thinking can control the universe.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what the positive thinking preachers would like you to believe.  Whether they dress it up in the Christian language of Rev Schuller or in the pseudo-scientific language of “The Secret”, in the end the message is still that you can bend the world to your will purely by thinking really positively.  The big problem with that idea is that the universe couldn’t care less what you thought.




The thing about reality is that it doesn’t require you to believe in it, doesn’t need you to approve of it and it doesn’t want you to like it.  It just is and wishing really hard will never change that.  That is why all the positive thinking in the world won’t prevent disasters (manmade and natural) from bringing destruction to your life.  Despite what you may have been told, no amount of positive thinking can cure cancer and other terminal illnesses*.  Unfair as it may seem to our tender sensibilities, a bitter and cynical person may survive the dread disease that a happy, positive person succumbs to.  It happens every day.  You can’t wish your way out of a bad situation.  Some things will always be outside your control and others are the inevitable results of the choices we make.  For instance if you eat more calories than you use you will gain weight.  Likewise, if you spend more than you earn you will go into debt, as the good folks over at the Crystal Cathedral so beautifully demonstrated.  Positive thinking cannot and does not make your debt disappear.  Happy thoughts cannot create money out of thin air.   

Seems to me that while positive thinking can do some good, it is just as likely to actually make things much, much worse.  Let’s say you start experiencing some worrisome physical symptoms.  A realistic thing to do would be to have it checked out, right?  You never know, it may be serious.  A positive thinker on the other hand may decide that going to a doctor is just too pessimistic and instead try to wish themselves better.  If something is in fact seriously wrong, who do you think has a better chance of getting treatment in time?  Now think about the positive folks over at the Crystal Cathedral.  A less positive group of people may have realized they needed to seriously re-evaluate their spending habits after the first couple of million dollars worth of debt.  Not them!  Seems they felt confident just going on with spending money they didn’t have and just believing that things would work themselves out.  After all, aren’t things supposed to all work out in the end?  Well no, no they aren’t.  Truth is, there is no realistic reason why things have to work out for the best for anyone.  Wishes are no match for reality and if you persist in a harmful pattern of behavior then all the positive thinking in the world won’t change the inevitable consequences of your actions.  Miracles don’t have to happen but reality always does.


Here we are, stuck in a big universe that seems indifferent at best to our personal happiness.  So of course we would all be drawn to the idea that we are in fact not completely out of control, that there is some magical way we can control our reality.  No such way actually exists but of course that has never stopped people from selling programs and "principles" for those desperate for some form of control.  Sadly, those are all illusions and nothing more.  There is no way to actually make yourself rich or thin or healthy or happy simply by wishing really hard or being really really positive about things.  We all have to play the cards we are dealt, that is reality.  If having a positive attitude helps you make the best of the reality you've been given then great, do not stop.  Just don't get carried away and start thinking you can alter reality through happy thoughts and wishful thinking.  Some things will forever be out of your control and anyone telling you different probably has a book they would like to sell you.

* The clinical studies done on the subject show very clearly that attitude has no influnece on survival when it comes to serious ilnesses like cancer. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there have been studies showing that pessimists cope really well with cancer.  In fact, according to at least one researcher I could find, the whole positive thinking movement can do more harm than good for cancer patients.  Jimmie Holland, MD, psychiatrist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center coined the term "the tyranny of positive thinking" to describe the belief.
"The idea that we can control illness and death with our minds appeals to our deepest yearnings, but it just isn't so," she tells WebMD. "It is so sad that cancer patients are made to believe that if they aren't doing well it is somehow their own fault because they aren't positive enough."

Obscene Christians in a time of suffering

If you have watched any Christian television at some point in your life you may be familiar with this building:

This is the world famous "Crystal Cathedral" in Orange County, California. The prominent architect Philip Johnson designed the main sanctuary building, which was constructed using over 10,000 rectangular panes of glass and its sanctuary seats 2,736 persons.  I think it would be fair to say that you would be hard pressed to find another church like it.  It may not have as much gold and famous art but it somehow manages to outshine the most opulent Cathedrals of the Catholic Church.

Somehow it manages to look even bigger from the inside

Now my parents were kind of big fans (some members of my family still are) so I've had to sit through quite a few episodes of "The Hour of Power" which usually turned out to be far more bland than the name suggested.  Now the founding pastor of this megalithic mega church is this guy:

Rev. Robert H. Schuller 

Just to make it interesting I should point out that the good Reverend here wrote the following book (among many others):

Amazon still has a few copies! Buy now!

Chew on that fact for a moment.  Now try to comprehend the following.  The Chrystal Cathedral is in debt.  Lots of debt.  How much debt?  Well it depends on who you ask but Wiki & others tend to put it at over $40 million.  That's a 4 followed by seven zeros.  In US dollars, not Zimbabwean dollars.  I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it would be a lot of debt for a small country, never mind a single church!  Now let's say you are the Reverend Schuller.  What do you tell your congregation?  Do you say "I'm sorry, we've clearly made some terrible mistakes and we will work hard to get out of this mess?"  Turns out that no, instead you go before your congregation and say:

"I need more help from you," Schuller said, according to the Orange County Register. "If you are a tither, become a double-tither. If you are not a tither, become a tither. This ministry has earned your trust. This ministry has earned your help."

Yep, he wants you to give a lot more money to him because "This ministry has earned your trust".  Dude!  Like WTF?!  You say the words but I don't think you understand the sentence you are using.  Ending up in tens of millions of dollars worth of debt is the opposite of earning someones trust.  When someone is in so much debt that Oprah herself could not bail them out then who in their right mind would trust them with any of their money?  Yet this guy wants people to give double and triple the amounts they usually would.  During one of the worst recessions in recent history.  Thousands are unemployed, houses are being foreclosed on faster than the banks can fill in the paperwork but apparently the trustworthy place to put the little money you have left is in a giant Xmas tree ornament/church.  What??!

Theology vs Truthiness

In my previous blog I illustrated that claiming having lustful thoughts are exactly the same as being an adulterer is not only stupid, it destroys the entire Christian faith.  Now you may have read that and thought to yourself, "Well hold on, that may be a well reasoned argument* but that doesn't change what it says right there in the Bible."  You would be correct of course, it certainly does look like Jesus was agreeing with Christine O'Donnell when you read the passage in question.  But is that really all there is to it?

The answer is that no, there is actually a lot more to it.  Many Evangelical Christians prefer to use the Steven Colbert approach to Bible reading.  It's a lot easier to just believe what your gut tells you ought to be true and forgo all the hard work of exegesis, understanding context and looking at the bigger picture.  The problem is that this doesn't always lead you to truth.  You are far more likely to end up with "truthiness".  Just because it feels true that doesn't mean it is true no matter how convinced you may be that the feeling in your gut is actually the Holy Spirit.  See the Bible wasn't written for any of us.  Every Biblical author wrote at a specific point in time and space and addressed the work to a primary audience with a specific background, language and culture.  If you aren't willing to understand Scripture the way the original recipients understood it then you may be better off not studying it at all.

In this specific passage in Matthew we don't have an English speaking Caucasian pastor addressing a western mega church.  Instead we have a First Century Jewish Rabbi addressing a group of Jews seeking religious instruction.  Rabbis were not only people who taught you what God commanded (the Torah laws) but also tried to show people how living according to God's commandments was supposed to look practically (called halakhah, "the path that one walks").  So then we find Jesus in Matthew 5 using a rabbinic practice called "putting a fence around the Torah" (Mishnah, Pirke Avot 1:1).  See, the rabbis reasoned that since small missteps can (not inevitably though often enough) lead to the actual breaking of Torah law, the best solution was to give rulings that prevented people from even coming close to breaking the actual Law.  For instance, one such ruling taught people not to handle tools on the Sabbath lest the temptation to work became too strong.  (I have never struggled with that particular temptation myself but you can see the principle at work here. ) In short the idea was that if you never took the first step towards the slippery slope, the chances of you actually slipping were nullified.

Lest ye doubt me, here are some examples of the same practice by other rabbis, bearing a rather striking resemblance to Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount:

"He who violates, 'Love your neighbour as yourself', will ultimately violate, 'You shall not hate your brother in your heart', and 'You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge', until in the end he will come to shedding blood" (From a Rabbinical commentary dating around 200 to 300 AD)
The train of thought is pretty clear here.  While only murdering your neighbour is actually against the law, the rabbinic restrictions are there to keep you from ever going down the path that could possibly lead to murder in the first place.  Best to stay as far away as possible from small sins lest they lead to big ones.

They also - just like Jesus - seemed to come out very harshly against relatively mild transgressions like gossiping and humiliating someone in public.
"To which is gossip more similar, robbery or murder?"
"Murder, because robbers can always give back what they have stolen but gossips can never repair the damage they've done"
"... one should rather fling himself into a fiery furnace than humiliate someone in public." (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59a.)

[Interested in learning more about the Jesus as a Rabbi?  My source here is "Sitting at the feet of Rabbi Jesus" by Spangler and Tverberg.  Its an accessable and easy read that does a great job at exploring the Jewishness of Jesus]

Actually I just realised that I'm wasting energy even explaining this.  Firstly, no one actually leveled any such criticisms at me.  Then again, there are probably not a lot of Biblical literalists who would regularly read a heretic's blog.  Secondly - and this is the big one - no one actually believes that claim, not for a second.  Oh they would say they do, but they don't.  If you asked Christine O'Donnell or Ray Comfort (or anyone who regularly speaks to Christian teens) if they believed that lustful thoughts were the same as adultery in the eyes of God they would reply without hesitation that yes they do believe that because that is what the Bible teaches.  But they lie.  They may not realise that they are lying but actions speak louder than words and no one lives as if they actually believe that.  Think about it, let's say you are totally committed to Biblical Literalism and you find out your pastor/spouse had a sexual relationship outside marriage last week Tuesday.  You would be upset right?  You would be asking for a resignation/divorce immediately.  Now what if you found out that last week Tuesday your pastor/spouse saw an attractive person and had a quick sexual thought about them, what would your reaction be then?  The same?  Somehow I doubt it.


*In my head you are very well mannered and courteous, whoever you are. 

Getting Stuck in a Pumpkin or How To Destroy Christianity through Biblical literalism

Up until very recently, very few people outside the United States had even heard of the state of Delaware.  Then Christine O’Donnell came along and changed all that thanks to a seemingly endless stream of clips of her making statements that make Sarah Palin look like a reasoned intellectual.  Now there have been a couple of doozies but arguably the most famous is the one of her arguing against masturbation, claiming that based on the Bible it was the same as committing adultery.

The strange thing is that this is probably the least crazy of her statements.  A very large subsection of Evangelical Christians would tell you the exact same thing – especially if you’re a teen at a Christian Youth Camp.  Many Christians would tell you that Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:28 – “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." should be interpreted literally and therefore it’s a sin to even fantasize about another person.  I bought into this too as a teen and suffered endless guilt for being normal.  Eventually I figured out a loophole for myself.  Since the verse specifically mentioned “adultery” I would therefore be OK as long as I never fantasized about a married person.  I still recall the sad day that all my Sarah Michelle Gellar posters had to come down because she got married...  But I digress.  I mentioned this in an earlier post on the Ten Commandments but this literal interpretation is a vital weapon in the evangelism arsenal of groups like Way of the Master.  To recap, their method of evangelism typically goes as follows:

• Ask the target if he/she considers themselves to be a good person.
• When they answer “yes”, test them against the Ten Commandments (aka God’s rules for being good enough to make it into Heaven.)
• When they do well on this test (and they tend to since most people aren’t adulterous, thieving murderers), go “Oh Snap!  But what about thought crime?”
• Then convince them that since God counts sinful thoughts the same as sinful deeds, they are horrible, evil people deserving of an eternity of torture.

Now this approach is surprisingly effective at making converts but it does have a rather severe flaw built in.  See, while it can convert you, it cannot convert you to Christianity.  This is because if the premise of this method – that God punishes thought crime – is true then Christianity is false.  Don’t believe me?  Let me show you how a literal interpretation of Matthew 5 utterly destroys the Christian religion in just a 3 easy steps:

1. If you take Matt 5:28 to mean that lust in your heart is literally the same as adultery in the eyes of God then it follows that anger must literally be the same as murder to God, according to Matt 5:21-22.
2. Now then the Bible records several instances of Jesus being angry (Mark 3:2-7; John 2.13-22; Matt 23:13-36).  Therefore Jesus must have been guilty of several instances of murder in the eyes of God.
3. Therefore His execution would have been just and He could not have been the sinless Lamb of God who bore our sins in our stead and impugned his perfect, sinless life to us. 

Presto, the entire Christian faith is invalid, all because you just had to have the thought crime stick to beat people with!  Thing is, you don’t need the weapons of guilt and shame to win converts – you would be hard pressed to find examples of anyone in the Bible doing that and Christianity somehow spread just fine back then.  However, some people just can’t do without it.  They have to make people feel as rotten about themselves as possible, they have to make them feel ashamed and since people are rarely as evil as they need them to be, they need thought crime to do it.  They never stop to think of the logical consequences, they just have to have guilt as a weapon.  It reminds me of how baboons get trapped.

See a popular way to trap a baboon is to anchor a pumpkin securely to the ground and to then make a hole in it just large enough for the baboon to squeeze his hand through.  When a baboon then reaches inside and grabs a handful of tasty pumpkin flesh he can’t pull his stuffed fist back out of the hole and so becomes stuck.  The thing is, the baboon can be free at any time, he just needs to let go of the stuff in his hand, yet they never think that far.

It’s exactly the same with many Evangelicals.  There is a world of freedom out there but they cannot enter into it because they are stuck holding on to the notion that God will damn you for your emotions and thoughts.  Even though it traps them in a religion that cannot – by their own rules – exist.

Lazy Language

For sale here

I’m trying to make healthier eating choices lately and since I’m going off meds for a month starting today, I need to make healthier choices than ever.  It’s not easy though, I like good food.  On the one hand both my father and paternal grandfather died of heart attacks but on the other hand I don’t want to live in a world without delicious bacon!  So I’m trying to find a good balance between eating well and eating healthy only to find that the marketing department of every food manufacturer is trying to make that as hard as possible.  Worst part is that they are using my own laziness to do it!

Here’s the thing about shortcuts – we can’t live without them.  We need shortcuts.  Sure, its lazy but can we live any other way?  If we had to do life Ent style and take endless hours to ponder every decision in detail civilization as we know it would grind to a halt.  It’s a good idea to carefully consider some things of course, but who has the time to carefully consider everything?  That’s why we have clichés and stereotypes, for better or worse they’re real timesavers!  Unfortunately, advertisers figured this out a long time ago and have been using it against us ever since.

Fat free tea.  Because apparently that was a problem that needed solving.  

Obviously they can’t tell a bald faced lie about their products because that’s the kind of thing leaves them drowning in lawsuits.  However it’s not illegal to tell the truth about your product, even if it’s a very creative truth.  For instance, a few years ago a couple of sunflower oil manufacturers advertised that their products had 0% cholesterol.  This was technically true but only because cholesterol is an animal product and you were never going to find it in a plant product anyway!  Most of the time it seems they just let us do the heavy lifting ourselves.  By just using a few “shortcut” words, we jump to our own conclusions and they don’t have to go making too many claims that need factual backing.  These are words that make you instinctively assume something good (about their product) or bad (about a competitor) when in fact these words are actually quite neutral.  They can mean something good or bad but over time we have associated some with good things and other with bad.  Some examples would be words like:

Traditional.  Ahh yes, you see the word “traditional” and you immediately assume this product is just filled with the goodness and wholesomeness of the good old days.  Just hearing the word brings to mind your grandma’s kitchen – which is probably the intention!  But wait a second, who said “traditional” was the same as “good”?  The word “tradition” only refers to “a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting”.  In other words it’s simply a way of doing things that’s been around for a while.  That doesn’t necessarily make it bad but it certainly doesn’t make it good and it definitely doesn’t make it the best way.  If you go back a 100 years you would find that people were probably doing the best they could with the knowledge and technology they had, but you wouldn't assume they were doing it better than we currently do in any field - except apparently with food.  For instance the traditional way of traveling between continents was by using a ship.  These days we travel by airplane.  Now is traveling the traditional way bad?  No, certainly not.  However it’s definitely by no means better than the modern form!  Just because something is older does not make it better.  If you find a 200 year old recipe for lemonade that includes 2 cups of badger urine, would you choose that over a different brand simply because it’s “traditional”?

Sometimes "Traditional" is just another word for "pain in the ass"

Natural.  If you see that a product is “natural” then you know it’s good for you because everything from nature is good for you right?  Well no, no it’s not.  Lots of things from nature are terrible for you!  Some of the most poisonous thing in the world are 100% natural.  The thing is that while there certainly are a whole lot of wholesome things in nature, you will find that nature can be pretty vindictive too.  Plants actually produce their own pesticides to ward off bugs, so odds are that the totally organic broccoli you bought from that hippie at the farmers market is probably still full of pesticides.

Chemicals.  Grrr, argh, chemicals bad!!  No one would want chemicals added to their food right?  You probably wouldn’t like it if I added 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol to your juice would you?  How about if I added some extra Vitamin C, would that be OK?  Sure, no one would object to that, even though Vitamin C and 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol (or L-ascorbic acid for short) is exactly the same thing.  Think back to your basic chemistry classes for a second.  Everything is made of chemicals.  Your body is full of chemicals and so is everything you eat.  Water, air, carrot juice, rump steak – all made up of chemicals.  There are good chemicals and bad chemicals so to simply and reflexively consider the word “chemical” equal to “toxic waste” is just lazy thinking

Di-hydrogen monoxide - it kills thousands of people each year!!!

Processed.  Again, here is a word that we associate with bad, plastic food almost immediately.  Sometimes that is most definitely the case (looking at you processed cheese).  However, the term “processed” when applied to food simply means that the food has gone through some kind of process.  If it was sliced, peeled, dried or even just washed it’s technically processed.  Therefore if you want your carrot “unprocessed” then you better have it fresh from the ground, dirt and all.

I hate having to be so on guard when I’m grocery shopping, but these people leave me no choice.  Bastards.  They are forcing me to confront my shortcuts!  Not cool guys!  Now I have to judge every product on its individual merits!

So these are some examples of lazy language I have come across so far.  Does anyone else have some more for me?