My rainy day craft box

After fifteen years of trying, this morning I finally succeeded in defining myself religiously.

I am a Christian who likes to do the religious equivalent of the Buffalo Bill "Silence of the Lambs" dance in front of the spiritual mirror in full pagan drag

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I have a fascination with lunar/fertility goddesses that's going to get me into trouble some day.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14021621/teenage_holy_war/1

Most of you (and most people who've already posted it on livejournal,) will sneer at this and shake your head in sorrow, bewliderment, and anger. For me... well, what can I say? I spent my teen years going to these kind of things. I'm not the same person I was then. I don't view God the way most of Christian America views Him. But things like this... I remember and I know what the kids there are going through.

I'd like to add this statement. Rolling Stone loves to look down its nose whenever it talks about anything relating to Christianity or any thing relating to morality. As a magazine they're entertaining, but they should never be mistaken for objective journalism.

As a Christian I do believe the world is a place full of evil. And I do believe that if there are things in your life that are having a negative effect on you, you should give them up. Those are messages that have always been central to Christianity and that people don't like to hear. The man running the event in the article might be a zealot with delusions of demagoguery, but in that if nothing else, I feel he is correct. His definition of a Christian and some of his statistics are another matter...

What I don't believe is right is for people to decide they are sinning when they enjoy A&W root beer just because somebody on a stage told them that everything outside the boundaries they establish as being safe is bad and evil. If God wants you to get something out of your life, He'll get it out. And He doesn't need a headbanging light show to do it. It's too easy to mistake a perceived authority as the voice of God and there are too many people too eager to do it.

I had a point I was going to make but I'm tired and my train of thought is wandering. A few years ago I felt it I was following God's wishes when I gave up L5R for while due to the fact that I couldn't control my temper when I lost a game. I took a long step back and now I enjoy the game without being an obnoxious ass. I just saw the effect on my own life and relationships and did what I felt the right or godly thing to do would be. It's that easy. That's all you have to do. And that's why people who arbitrarily give up things on another's say-so are so often bitterly disappointed in the results they achieve.

Posted by someone in christianity:

( Cut for those uninterested in Xian spirituality )

He calls it "God's will." What about the lousy, inedible pizza his company makes? Is that also "God's will?"

Call me a liberal Christian and a Universalist if you will, but I choose to believe in a God who wants me to have good pizza.

Moving on to the article, I hate to say it, but while his model society is puritanical, it's not unconstitutional. Nowhere in the United States Constitution are you guaranteed the right to birth control, pornography, or even an abortion. Now if he attempts to create legal statutes against such things in this town, then yes, he will be in trouble and can look forward to a long future of court rulings (assuming this town has a court,) being overturned by higher courts. Based purely on what the article says, however, it looks like this is a town where such goods and services will simply be unavailable, not outlawed.

How is it different from, say, pharmacists who refuse to fill perscriptions for birth control pills on religious grounds? (a practice I do not agree with) Because those individuals are attempting to force their values on the larger society. This looks like a place where people of a particular conviction can retreat from society to practice their belief. And that's nothing new in this country. Amish and Mennonite communities are noteworthy for their lack of birth control, pornography, and abortion clinics, and everybody loves them. I guess there's a double standard for the mean ol' Catholics, however.

This isn't a town I would want to live in, but if people make a choice to live there, (and in doing so, are aware they are giving up other choices willingly,) then they should be allowed to do so.

Wow. Interesting discussions the last few days. It honestly got me to do something I've been toying with for a long time and make a religion-only filter. I have a lot of thoughts on Christianity that sort of whirl around my head in essay form and I'd like to start sharing them, but I've been hesitant to do so. Hence, I'm saying to heck with it and just making a filter for that kind of thing. I might actually make it an entirely seperate journal, but it will depend on how committed I stay to the idea of actually making such posts. Anyway, please comment if you want to be on the filter.

...it's more or less exactly how I feel.

http://www.jesuswouldbeashamedofyou.com/

First posted by catlin

I don't often talk about books that I read here because no one here has read them and no one cares. But every now and then a book affects me enough to make it worth it. I just finished reading Them by Joyce Carol Oates. I make a point to read a "literary" novel every once and a while to keep my horizons broadened and I read a few pages of this one over at A&A's one day and wanted to know more.

All I can say is I cannot remember the last time a novel plunged me into a mood this black. If you want to read a book where, for 478 pages not one person has anything good ever happen to them or ever does anything nice for another person, then this is it. By that I don't mean to say it's a bad book. If it were a bad book I could dismiss it. But it's not. It's an amazing piece of literature and it's a book that makes you face everything about mankind that you'd rather not think about. I just barely keep those thoughts at bay much of the time as it is, so this novel's really done a number on me.

Right, so yeah. Enough of that. The play nearly met with disaster last night when our Lysander was in a car accident. I guess he has diabetes and passed out behind the wheel. He was unhurt and made it to rehearsal for the final act. Glad it wasn't worse.

I think another thing that's got me down is that LJ as a whole seems to be in one of its periodic upswings where everyone is venting their spleens of how Christians are the Bad Guys, or more often and even worse, the Stupid Guys. I don't know about you, but I would much rather be the Bad Guy then the Stupid Guy. And it's troubling because when you're raised a Christian, you get taught all your life that you're one of the Good Guys. Then you get out to find that no one sees you as the Good Guys; that you're viewed with suspicion at best, or at your best moments, as well-intentioned but clumsy children who don't know their own strength and "don't know any better." And it's not like we shouldn't see it coming. Christ said no servant is greater than his master, that the world will hate you because it first hated Him. But no one ever really prepares you for how to deal with that, day after day, year after year, for the rest of your life. Because that is what it means to follow Him.

Follow Him... yes, that is what I do. Haven't followed the other Christians for about ten years now and still fiercely hesitant to do so. Yet I still feel this overwhelming need to protect them, to speak up for them when no one else will. Because that's what Good Guys do for people, even Bad Guys and, as much as it may pain us, Stupid Guys.

Maybe I need to just not care as much.

Last night Mel and I talked about how people tend to focus on the negative in their journals and that's not what I want to do, so I'll conclude by focusing on the positives. I have love, I have friends old and new, I have roleplaying games, I have acting, I have writing, and a woman who makes wonderful tacos. Her tacos are fucking metal \m/ \m/ Put in that perspective, all the bleak prose and the snarky hatred of the computer world don't really amount to jack squat. And our Shakespearean comedy did not become a tragedy in the very real sense when it very easily could have.

For a fun time, try walking around a grocery store at night still wearing your costume from Shakespeare while the piped-in muzak is Avril Lavigne sneering about how "she don't wanna read Billy Shakespeare." I think it was Avril anyway. Sounded like her voice and the lyrics bore the sparking resonnance typically seen when her two brain-atoms collide inside the vacuum of her skull.