E-mails

I really get irritated when an acquaintance forwards stupid emails. I don’t say that, of course. I just delete them. They won’t understand. That’s why I’m posting here with this community.
It’s frustrating to read that people think we need “GOD back in our lives and in school!” That’s why we have so much violence, so many problems. (Never mind the example we set as adults or how we’ve desensitized our kids to violence via movies, television and music.) We’ve “failed to understand” that we need God!  Not: We, as parents or as a society, failed to teach or reach our kids. Not: How can we fix this. Instead: Allow us to mindlessly chant and worship and impotent God. Can I say the f-word now?
Why can’t people connect the dots? If your God is so wonderful, why does he allow your kids to be killed? Why not just kill the nonbelievers or the people who have kicked God out of the classroom? God is in Christian schools and those kids are not exempt from heartbreak and tragedies. God is in your churches and bad things happen. Priests molest. Children get cancer. People steal. Couples cheat, even those who have been married in your churches. If God’s presence matters, shouldn’t we see some sort of correlation. Hello?
I’m not going to berate the people who send me “Wonderful and meaningful poem and understanding of what realy needs to be done, GOD back in our lives and in school!” (Their bad grammar, not mine.) They are obviously buried under years of bullshit. As long as we keep God out of schools (well, as best we can), I won’t begrudge people for wishing, for wanting less violence. But you’d think at some point, they’d go “hmmmmm.” This God thing isn’t working. What can we do?

 

Good Friday

I’ve told my kids to say no to a lot of things that might hurt them. I never thought about this.

Yesterday, as soon as I saw my 14-year-old, he immediately tells me about a video one of his teammates at school played for him and a friend. Kids see a lot of sh*t on-line and on their smart phones (though mine still does not have a smart phone), so you know they get exposed to a wider range of things at an earlier age than we did.

This video was different. It was a snuff video, and I honestly didn’t know a video of this sort could be accessed on-line. Naive, I guess. I thought they were illegal. I’m writing this now so you can forewarn your children, if you don’t know, and save them the horror of seeing man at his most evil. The kids call it “three men and a hammer,” but the killers are also referred to as the Dnepropetrovsk maniacs. Tell your kids if someone wants them to watch, say no thanks. Or, if your kid is like mine, you ask, “Do you want those images forever stuck in your memory? What do you think you should say?”

My son was disturbed by it. Throughout the rest of the day, he kept returning to the same questions: Why would “those guys” do something like that? Why do people murder? He said he couldn’t get the awful images out of his head. “It’s not like when you watch a movie. This was real. This guy was really being killed.” He told me it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. His friend, who my son had never seen get upset, was troubled by it, too.  This was a good thing: the more kids disturbed by evil, the better.

How do you explain wickedness when you have no devil to pin the blame on? I remember asking a college professor about the problem of evil, and he told me that evil was a necessary contrast to know good. This might be true, but it still is not an answer to the fundamental question of why evil exists. If you’re Christian, how do explain that those three guys, given the chance to repent and accept Jesus as their savior, will be saved by God? Just like that. Or, if man is created in God’s image, what does that say about man’s creator? I know, some will say that’s a simplistic way of looking at God, but it seems to me, if it’s a simple question, there must be a simple answer. (Mine would be, it’s yet another nail in God’s coffin.)

As in an earlier post, when bad things happen, you have to tell kids that bad occurrences are few and far between, that most people do not harm others. It’s important for kids to know that evil is a choice. They can always choose to do the right thing. A campaign at Northern Illinois University showed that college students who thought their peers drank in moderation, drank less, too. Rather than tell kids that binge drinking is the norm and that they should avoid it, researchers presented students with evidence (and made it known on campus through a campaign) that most of the students drank 5 drinks or fewer at parties. (Still seems like a lot of drinks to me—I’d be hugging the porcelain goddess at that point.) This idea has other applications. If we tell our children most people do the right thing, perhaps we can raise the next generation to believe that they live in a world where most people choose good, and maybe the world will become that. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. (I say this as Kim Jong Un is throwing a hissy.) But if you have a better suggestion, I will follow.

And so, on Good Friday, we are reminded that people, for thousands of years, have ganged up on and killed a lone man or woman. Where someone had the power to step in and stay, stop, no one did.

As much as things change, they stay the same.

Jesus Was Dirty

In a post today,  ”Jesus was a dirty, dirty God,” on CNN’s Belief Blog, the author (Johnnie Moore) writes that Jesus was a lot like you and me. He went to the bathroom, he ate, he slept, he got sick. He was smelly and dirty and sarcastic. He had a shady reputation.

Jesus was born into a time of super-human gods. So how did he go from the average Joe to Jesus?

The average man could relate to him. And the time was right. In a time when Gods were housed in temples and they had powers that humans did not, Jesus was a guy who talked to the poor, the hungry, the disenfranchised. He was in the right place at the right time.

This is a true story: My great-grandfather was very sick when he was a child. After a long illness, he fell into a coma. When he was six years old, his relatives declared him dead. He was prepared for burial (in Italy, in those days, there was a viewing in the home). His family came to say their good-byes. An aunt bent down to kiss him on his bed. She felt a faint breath on her cheek. My great-grandfather lived. It was a miracle.

Of course, you and I know that someone had declared him dead when he was not really dead. But the folks of that time believed it to be nothing short of a miracle. Maybe he would have been declared a god had Jesus not already been declared a god nearly two-thousand years before.

Not everyone believed that Jesus was the son of God. Johnnie Moore writes that,

He [Jesus] also knew what it was like to have his message rejected and how it felt to be misunderstood. Jesus was regarded with such little significance in his hometown that one of his critics once remarked sardonically, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” Jesus eventually had to move to different city (Capernaum) because his teachings so infuriated the people living in his hometown that they drove him out of Nazareth and even tried to throw him off a cliff.

So, some people thought Jesus was a visionary, and some people thought he was a fake. How many times has that happened throughout history? Isn’t that how the Mormon religion was born? Isn’t that how psychics and mediums get their followers?

Humans are hard-wired with a desire to live. Grasping for God gives us hope that, when circumstances are out of our control, we will still carry on. There is no proof that Jesus was divine. Yes, we have stories, fables, that we hold as “truth.” Yet history has given us many fables, some of which we choose to label as “fairy tales.” The difference is that Jesus was relatable, and people needed a deity they could understand, one they could talk to, one that they did not fear.

They still do.

Jesus happened to come along at the right time, with the right message. His life became legend. The reality of the man is no doubt different from the legend. Many people needed a Jesus.

The Hypocrisy of Christmas

It’s the reason for the season. Or, so the neon sign says in my neighbor’s yard. Ironically, also in his yard is a large figure of Santa with his reindeer. So the reason is? Santa and his magical reindeer? Consumerism?

We have real issues with Christmas in this country. On one hand, we shop, shop, shop buying meaningless stuff for family and friends who already have too much stuff, while on the other hand, we insist that the 25th of December is a religious holiday. If we are celebrating the birth of Christ, why do we even ask for gifts? Why do we encourage our children to ask for stuff for themselves when we are celebrating the birth of Jesus? Why do we pile meaningless stuff under the tree and pretend that Santa brought them? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say that God brought the gifts?

This holiday is just a guise, of course. It is about us. We are the reason for the season.

Of course, we could buy gifts for Jesus’ birthday, but where would he wear that tie?

And in just a few days….

The tragedy in Newtown is already out of the headlines, fading from memory. The stores are packed with Christmas shoppers.  Parents are eager to leave their children with sitters for a night out.

This is the fate of every tragedy, every death. The rest of us go on. And when nature one day turns and rids the planet of the human species, the rest will go on….

11 Days Before Christmas

Has anyone read the “11 Days Before Christmas” poem written by Cameo Smith? If not, click on the link in the last sentence, and it will take you there. The author, no doubt, was trying to infuse comfort into a very tragic day. But her poem shows our nation’s religiocentricism: if any of those children did not believe in Jesus Christ, if any of those children were Jews, Muslims, Atheists, then they did not go to God’s house.

I understand why people want to bring God in to help explain a tragedy, but I think it is a cowardly approach. Rather than take a difficult look at why this happened and how we can prevent it, we defer responsibility to God.  We “told” God to go away; we don’t “allow” him in schools. Never mind that this imaginary person that is supposed to be almighty has allowed murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind. Does. This. Make. Sense?

Sure, people should be allowed to write their poems and hold their religious beliefs, but they should not abduct common sense nor prevent us from looking at the real issues. Tragedies don’t happen because we run superstition and imaginary people out of our educational system.

We are the problem, and only we can be the solution.