Yesterday, while I took Rosita for a walk, I saw a sign through a church window that grabbed my attention. And it prompted the following rant.
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I'm not a confident person. I can deal with that. This plan to limit my use of social media is one part of me trying to increase/improve my sense of self-confidence.
This lack of self-confidence can have some serious negative effects: it makes me unnecessarily stress out about my upcoming research project for my Master's in Education degree; it makes me frightened about self-promoting my own music. There are countless ways that I don't feel adequate. A lack of self-confidence was rather useful being raised in the church. I could always come across as "humble" because I had no self-confidence. This misreading of the nature of both humility and confidence served me well in the church context because I didn't have an ego to "get past" in order to "serve." But with relationships, my lack of self-confidence has always been a problem. I squandered many dates by "not stepping up" to the next level, whatevertheheck that might have been at that time. I avoided dates and girlfriends in the name of my lack of self-confidence. And when I would enter relationships, I'd fall into a seemingly unique hole: I'd be so afraid of objectifying a woman that I would essentially act asexually. I'd feel like any sexual suggestion or idea would essentially make me into a sexist pig who couldn't see past a woman's body. And this still carries on to today in some aspects; I still fear coming off as a "bro" if I make a comment about a woman's appearance. This is good for avoiding making sexist remarks; this is bad for acknowledging a woman's sexuality or acknowledging the time and money women put in to their appearance.
For the embedded episode of This Week In Blackness Prime above, the discussion starts at 42:28.
For the purpose of this weblog, I'd like to highlight the following explanation, starting at 54:20 in the TWIB Prime podcast embedded above.
or, in reference to the tweet that they refer to in the show,
I'd never thought about it that way. That might be helpful. At those times when my partner[s] have agency over themselves, I need to acknowledge and encourage that agency in any way I can. The question might be, "Do I have the self-confidence to accurately encourage that agency in my relationships?" and "What would that look like?"
Now I just need to talk to my wife about it and see what she thinks.
Last night, while I walked the dog, a guy pulled over near me, rolled down his window, and told me "Jesus Loves You." I didn't feel like engaging in the conversation at all—I was far more interested in continuing walking the dog—but it did cause a few reflections about my years as an evangelical. Here are some of the things I was thinking, as I posted them to Twitter.
30 second snippets are not the best way to get an idea across, but I don't feel that my reflections are YouTube-worthy at the moment.
Here are a couple other related reflections:
The further I get from Christianity, the more ridiculous and offensive the message becomes. I once thought I'd continue to be interested in Christian thought, but it grows more banal by the day.
And I'm thankful for the distance. I listen to podcasts. Today I heard the argument from context on two different shows: The Halli Casser-Jayne Show and Dogma Debate. The Halli Casser-Jayne Show featured an interview with Mubin Shaikh, apparently a "former militant jihadi turned undercover agent" who argued that the militants in ISIS/ISIL have taken sections of Muslim holy texts out of context in order to move their Islamic State forward. Starting around the 15:00 mark, Mubin speaks,
It goes on. He insults those who "misunderstand," who do "superficial shallow readings," and "ignore contexts." It's some classic "No True Scotsman" stuff. In effect, he's saying "They get it all wrong because they hold to an ideology that doesn't respect context." Later in the evening, while walking the dog, I was listening to Dogma Debate. A pastor claimed that we need to appreciate "context" in order to understand God's orders in order to understand the creation myth and whatnot. Starting around the 59 minute mark, the pastor says,
I heard arguments like this a lot growing up. "You need to take the Bible in context" is how I usually heard it, and there was never any need to have discussions like this if there wasn't some serious logical or ethical confusion. This discussion took place after reading about Yahweh's many murders and massacres and whatnot. Always, when God acted like a jerk, or humans got credit for unethical behavior, somebody would say "You have to take it in context."
There are a few problems with the argument from context.
Really, that's the crux of it. No god worth worshipping would leave it up to us to interpret so many layers of context. A worship-worthy god would just tell us. Gods who can't take "context" into account aren't worthy of praise. The argument from context should always be a red flag: it always attempts to justify bad behavior or incompetence. I can't think of any other purpose for the technique. I recently listened through the entire "Satanic Panic" episode of The Thinking Atheist. I enjoyed it because it brought back a lot of memories. Although I was pretty young when the Satanic Panic was actually taking place, I saw a lot of the aftermath. By the time I grew aware of it, most of the popular materials were dated and cheesy. The Thinking Atheist recently posted an entire episode based on the era. Of course, these sorts of fears and interests haven't disappeared. It's not exceptionally difficult to find remnants of the "Panic" on the Internet. YouTube has become a wonderful archive of all the ephemeral kitsch that should have disappeared long ago.
Each preacher would focus on something different: some would discuss Marilyn Manson's sensibilities; some would focus on backwards masking; some would focus on the "primitive" backbeat; some would focus on the unholy lives of rock and roll musicians. And there's always the famous Chick Tract where Satan assumes the role of a manager for a rock band and indoctrinates them into Satanism. Every once in awhile, a preacher gets up there and rants against rock and roll. There are websites that have been up since the early days of the Internet that explain the horrors of rock and roll. Like this one. But rock and roll stays rocking and evolves into other wild and crazy genres. They can't win. I mean, there's always something horrible to suggest about every genre of music. Although heavy metal and rock and roll are easy targets, as a teenager, I bought a record of meditative Orthodox chants and my mother expressed concern that we didn't know what they were saying or who they were praising; I've also heard that chanting puts you into a state that opens you to possession by demons and spirits. In other words, if you want it, Satan's gonna' find his way into everything if you let him go there. Besides, wouldn't it be fun to sing a bunch of songs in the tune of old hymns, while uttering utter obscenity and blasphemy? I'd love to do that, but I doubt I'll ever burn my precious time on something so self-indulgent. There's enough bloodlust and praise of human sacrifice in old hymns that I don't need to parody them. In the meantime, let's rock! |
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April 2023
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