Intermission

It has been quite a long time since I've updated. I don't think that I have any readers here so I guess its o.k.

My main reason for having been absent for so long was a major upheaval in my personal life which I believe has settled itself back down. There are two things that I shall address in this post: seeing Hitchens debate against D'Souza and, of course, the Catholic Church and its many recent hiccups.

First and foremost, I had the up most privilege of seeing Christopher Hitchens debate against Denish D'Souza and please forgive me if I misspell that name; I can barely pronounce and yes while I have the wealth of the internet sitting right before me... I don't feel like looking it up...

Anyways, what I found interesting about seeing the debate was not the debate itself but I will have to begin with that. I felt that the points made by D'Souza were full of holes and when brought to the next step were easily dismissed. I was disappointed to hear him repeat arguments that have already been dealt with by individuals such as Dawkins with the most disappointing argument being "well, most of the world believes in god, so you should too!" I mean, really? Truth is truth even if no one believes it and lies are lies even when everyone believes it. He's asking people to base their lives on popular opinion? Seriously? My other biggest problem with him is how ethnocentric he was. He really took the stance that western culture and westernization of the world is making every thing evil oh and Islam's the devil. He had no problem relating Islam to terrorism but when talking about evil committed by other religious groups it was "oh well... their motivations are political." He sighted the Catholic/ Protestant war in Ireland as purely political and the conflict over Kashmir as political as well. These two conflicts in particular certainly do have large complex political elements over them but the religions of the respected groups of people do play significantly into them and especially the roots of the conflicts. The conflict over Palestine and the Gaze strip was another he mention as being "just about the land." There is undeniably a religious element to that conflict as well as political.

Hitchens did well but... I don't know how to explain this but I didn't leave feeling he had satisfactorily refuted the main point. I felt like he picked certain parts of the arguments and focused on them rather than the whole argument itself. I certainly know he has the capacity to do so and I wonder if the reason why he didn't had to do with the time limits given.

The most interesting was the audience. I know the purpose of a formal debate really isn't to change the minds of the audience so it's not surprising that people left with the same views they came with. The audience itself was mixed, not just atheists but not just religious people either and of course there were those who troll in real life and heckled Hitchens and even D'Souza had a heckler. The biggest impression I got was the each side had felt they had one. Those rooting for D'Souza seemed to feel he had made well reasoned arguments in favor of religion, particularly conservative Catholicism, while those of us rooting for Hitchens felt the exact same way about the points he made. It's fascinating how this can happen, how people can attend the same event and have totally different ideas about the result. I really got the impression that both sides looked at each other and went "how can you still think the way you think? Didn't you just hear him completely blow your worldview out of the water?" There really isn't much you can convince people of. People change their minds on their own efforts. This seems like such an obvious observation but we put so much time and energy into changing people's minds about things they have already deemed true.

Everyone has heard about the Catholic Church and the scandal involving priest and little boys, something the Church really has a problem keeping under control. I fully, fully believe that every single one of those priests needs to be defrocked and handed over to the authorities for criminal prosecution. I find it saddening that the Catholic Church, in being so hostile about this matter and not doing what needs to be done, is making it hard for members of the clergy who legitimately care about their parishes. I wouldn't consider myself a friend of religion and I don't encourage people to participate but I do recognize that there are religious people in the world that want to do good and to affect lives in a positive manner and the actions of the Church are causing distrust against people who legitimately want to help others. Not all priests are pedophiles and now decent, albeit deluded, individuals are taking the flack for another's crimes and ineffectiveness of an organization that thought they are apart of it, they have no real control over it.

The Catholic Church is an enigma. When it comes to sex, they are archaic in what they teach their congregations and while if you do something so natural as masturbate or something healthy like use birth control, you have to go to confession and its a big deal yadda yadda but when their clergy steps out of line, its a big cover up. I think out of the various Christian denominations, the Catholic church has become the most progressive in its approach towards science as a whole, especially with its positive stance on evolution which I (unlike Dawkins) am honestly impressed with. I just don't understand how the church can be progressive when it comes to evolutionary theory and so ass backwards when it comes to sex. It's really like they are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "I can't hear you."

Witness

I always walk past the free speech zone on my way to class. It's more of a curse than anything but I don't really feel like making a circumference around my classroom building in order to avoid a dozen fliers shoved under my nose, a sacrifice that must be made in the interest of time. Need less to say I am a complete master of avoidance, having done the job of passing propaganda myself plenty of times, I know how to look uninterested. On rare occasions, I stop and listen.

On such a recent occasion, I passed by a man surrounded by people and a few microphones punctuating a semicircle. I stopped and listened. I saw the book in his hand, the arrogance in his face and knew his purpose and message far before the first words struck my ear.

It wasn't the usual hell-fire and damnation. He had to have been a campus minister. Their PR tactics are more crowd friendly. He had been arguing with people in the crowd about religion but, by the time I arrived, he took an intermission for the university students to declare for themselves the difference Christ had made in their lives. The students parade themselves to the front of the semicircle, holding cardboard signs, one side reflecting a former existence and the opposite declaring a counter existence. I was on drugs. Now I'm high on Jesus. Cliche. My only thoughts were you don't need god for this. You don't need an invisible deity who's only spoken through a book from the bronze age to validate your existence.

I found myself glad to freed from the trap that there was something inherently wrong with me that the only way to fix it was to telepathically communicate with an almighty sky god and to deny myself this that and the other. I can value and accept myself from within myself, not without. Not through other people. Not through a god. I think it was this sign that stood out to me the most and contrasted so deeply within me. She claimed that she was looking for other people's approval but now she has the approval of god. But what of herself? Does she like herself, accept herself for who she is?

The speaker kept asking if any of those people's witness spoke out to us. So this was his tactic. Rather than trying to reason, he would appeal to emotions, to people hurts and sorrows, their sense of worth and self-being.

He resumed debating after a time. His biggest issue was the idea of personal morality. Morality is based on culture, what is in the best benefit of the culture and the survival of our species. He brought up Hitler and genocide and I couldn't help myself.

"If you want to talk about genocide, look at all the people god in the Bible killed!"

He turned and looked at me, smirking, and asked what I had said.

"Look at all the people god killed in the bible-"

He began talking again ("god killed them for their wickedness!") and turned away.

"LET ME FINISH!" My pet-peeve is being interrupted.

He turned back, surprise, an arrogant smile sliding into place, "I thought you were done."

"You will know when I'm done when I stop talking." I felt like a bad-ass, a stone cold bitch. I'm not very outspoken normally. "God commanded the Hebrews to kill all of the people in the 'promise land' simply because they didn't believe in the same god."

"No he didn't!"

Are you fucking kidding me? Me and another guy shouted at him to look it up in Joshua but he had already finished with us. He didn't want to deal with the vicious god of the Old Testament, only the soft and gentle Jesus of modern American Christianity. As a Christian, I had always wondered about this strange dichotomy between the god of the bible, Jesus of the New Testament and the Christian religion so prevalent in our society. The focus was so much on what Jesus could do for you. Jesus came into my life and ever thing is fucking peachy. I've read the entirety of the bible several times and the focus always seemed to be more on giving up for god. Give up your time, your money, your bodily desires, and your entire life for god. Sure, you'll get something back. Heaven mainly, but also peace, joy, discernment, and a whole harvest of intangibles. What I read in the Bible was about life being a struggle and what I heard from pastors and followers alike was about the shit Jesus would do for us.

At least when the other guys come to campus, the ones who tell everyone they're going to hell for some trivial thing or another, they're being true to religion.