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.

Depression

I think this post may stray away from the general topic of this blog but it's my blog and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression in the 7th grade. I spent a short time with a councilor and then was taken to a psychiatrist. The difference between the two, for those of you who are unaware, is that a councilor or psychologist is just someone who you talk to and helps you work through whatever the situation may be with you. A psychiatrist on the other hand, deals mainly with prescribing medicines (something a psychologist is not able to do). Ideally, someone in therapy responds better when both methods are used. Anyways, I was put on anti-depressant and sent on my way. It worked... for a little bit but I took it anyways up until my senior year of high school. I started on 50mg of it and by the time I took myself of I was up to 250mg plus 10mg of Prozac. Nice little cocktail.

Now I know, after years of the same battle, that I won't ever actually kill myself. For the most part, everything's under control. I tried medicine again last year when I did happen to hit a very hard low but once again, I haven't found any that are really effective and don't fuck with my ability to sleep. Every once in awhile, on days like today, I just get... bummed. I am, just as the word describes, depressed. Yet, I often wondered if I've been misdiagnosed. OCD and Bi-Polar disorder run in my family, not clinical depression. Certainly doesn't mean that I couldn't be the first but I do notice that I do go through intense highs and lows. I notice the lows more because its debilitating. I can't work, study, think, or do anything but lay in bed when it's at its worse. The aforementioned very hard low was just that. I couldn't get myself out of bed in the morning any more. Now, I certainly don't enjoy going to class or work but I am normally self motivated enough to drag my ass out of bed anyways and go. Last year was the only serious time that I actually considering institutionalized. At the end of it all, I had dropped half my course load and forced myself to finish the semester with what was absolutely essential to my degree.

How did this work with being a Christian, a Catholic at that? I blamed myself. I was sensible enough to know that being a Christian doesn't mean you are constantly happy. Sounds stupid, but I've heard that one quite a bit. However, when I was depressed, I would always jump to the conclusion that it was because something was wrong with my relationship with god. My last two statements contradict. How could I accept that Christianity did not equal constant happiness and yet feel as if my depression was brought on by offending god? It's the difference between intellectual assent and practice, like ideal culture and real culture. What you say and what you do are not always consistent.

I often prayed and begged for this "weakness" to be removed and when it remained either it was because of my own sin or it was to be my thorn, the thing that makes me rely on god, rely on faith.

From 2 Corinthians ^"7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. ⁸Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. ^10"

^{What kind of god intentionally makes someone weak, allows people to be tormented, just to make himself look good, to show his own power? Why would an almighty God need for people to suffer in order for him to do his work? Wouldn't be a better display of mercy and power to remove such an illness?}

Gah.. this is just another reason why I despise this kind of self-depreciating thinking. The Bible, with all it's murders, genocide, racism, and sexism, not only in it's content, but often commanded or enacted by god himself has no value for human life. Humans are to grovel at the feet of this almighty, merciless dictator, born into a losing cosmic battle and having no internal worth but worth only in their service to the deity.

A god who slaughters the first born child of every non Jewish family is not a god of love
A god who condones genocide, commands the death of entire people is not a god of love
A god who commands petty crimes to be punished by death is not a god of love
A god who willing kills his own son to cover someone else's ass is not a god of love
A god who drowns the entire population of the earth except for a single family is not a god of love
A god who endorses racism, sexism, and slavery is not a god of love