The GirlAlive Blog

Who will pick up the slack when the church fails?

I was raised a Republican and a Christian, as are many Americans. When I would ask questions like, “Why don’t the Republicans support social services for the poor, when Jesus spent so much time helping the poor?” I was given answers that, at the time, made sense to me. I was told that Republicans did not want the government serving the poor because that was the church’s job. You get a better society when people have to give to charity voluntarily to help others rather than just taxing them.

In theory, this sounds great. But let me tell you a story. In 2001 I lost my job. I was living alone in Seattle and my closest family was 1600 miles away. After I had been unemployed for about 6 months, I was diagnosed with a huge ovarian tumor which may or may not be malignant – they couldn’t tell until they took it out. I was scheduled for surgery in the first week of August.

A few weeks before my surgery I got a letter from my health insurance company saying that I owed them about $600 in back payments on my COBRA coverage and if I didn’t pay it immediately, my insurance would end July 31. So if I didn’t find $600 ASAP I would have a choice between cancelling the surgery or ending up in about $35,000 of medical debt.

I mentioned this financial problem at my usual Thursday night Bible study. They prayed for me and, unbeknownst to me, one of the leaders of the group went to the pastor and told him about my need, which he then referred to his “benevolence committee.”

The next Sunday I was pulled aside after the service and brought into a dark back room with 3 members of this committee. (Keep in mind that I didn’t ask for their help – someone else had asked on my behalf.) They interrogated me for about half an hour. They demanded to know how many jobs I had applied for and where, and if I was applying for low-level jobs and if I was registered with any temp agencies, and how many and which ones. I was in tears by the time they were done making me feel like a failure as a human being. I lived all alone 1600 miles from everyone who cared about me. OF COURSE I WAS LOOKING FOR A JOB. I HAD NO ONE.

At the end of the meeting they reluctantly agreed to pay my COBRA bill (and absolutely not a cent more) if I brought the bill to the church office and they would write a check directly to the insurance company.

This kind of cold and stingy treatment would be understandable if I was a stranger wandering in off the street asking for help. I had attended this church for three years. I had been on mission trips with them. I was a member of a small group. Even when I was earning near minimum wage and barely getting by, I still tithed 10%. And this is how they treated me, when I hadn’t even asked them for money. Someone else did.

This is how churches treat their members: like con artists who are trying to rip them off. Imagine if you are poor and hungry and not a member of a church. Who will help you then? If churches won’t even help the people that they supposedly trust, why would they ever help the poor that they don’t know?

I believe that this is what has happened to churches because they associate themselves with the Republican party. They have allowed the money-worshipping capitalist doctrine of their chosen political party to infect the church, completely ignoring the actions and teachings of Christ. They have been told over and over that people are poor because they are not working hard enough or not trying hard enough. That’s how they treat people. If they really lived by the Bible, they would know that people are often poor by no fault of their own, because we live in a broken and fallen world.

As I’ve grown older and had some time away from the US to really examine what both sides are saying, I cannot support the Republican party. (I’m not really a Democrat either – I think both parties are beyond corrupt.) They have adopted Christian rhetoric only when it suits them, and they have attached themselves to anti-abortion causes only to lure believers into a party that, at its core, represents greed and violence. The Bible says that you cannot serve both God and money. More and more I believe that you really cannot serve both God and pure capitalism.

So I guess this is me, formally renouncing the Republican party.

I’ll throw a few links here at the bottom. Most of them will be from my Tumblr.

Financial Sector Profits Roar Back
A History of Bank Mergers in America
Abortion Tactics and Conflicted Moral Ambivalence
Everything summed up in three graphs
Corporate Tax Dodgers

“You look like you could be from Proctor”

In 2000 I went to Russia on a missionary trip with my church at the time, City Calvary Chapel (from Seattle). I was sick through most of the trip because of undiagnosed chronic stomach problems. Because of that, I was left in Moscow for several days while the rest of my group went on to Ryazan.

A few days later I joined the group in Ryazan and a man walked up to me and said, “You look like you could be from Proctor.” That man was Loren Harrison. He was from Duluth and had been told that a girl from Proctor (a suburb of Duluth) was part of our group from Seattle. He was kind and generous and in every way an example of a great Christian man. I found out that he went to the same church in Duluth as my parents, but didn’t really know them (it was a large church).

When I went back to Duluth for Christmas later that year I was able to introduce my parents to Loren, and also meet Loren’s wife and kids. My parents became fast friends with Loren and his family. In the intervening years, he has done missionary work all over Africa.

Loren suffered from a ruptured brain aneurysm earlier this week. He was airlifted to a hospital with skilled neurosurgeons in Minneapolis, but in spite of their best efforts, he never regained consciousness and passed away yesterday. He was 50 years old.

Loren loved helping people and did missionary work all over the world. He never saw an “us” and “them”, but understood that there are only different faces of “us”. Please pray for his family and friends as we are all struggling with losing someone so suddenly and so young. The world is a worse place with Loren no longer in it.

Explaining gay rights to Christians

I haven’t posted here in a while because I’ve been hanging around more on Tumblr and Twitter since I’ve been busy with work. For all of you who have completely dropped the ball by not following me on Tumblr, here’s a recent post from there, in honor of Gay Pride month. (I may post here more after my job is done next month.)

I was raised a fairly strict Baptist. I am still a Christian. So I understand why so many Christians are against gay rights. (I happen to disagree.) I also know that most non-Christians are arguing with them wrong.

The first, and often only, scripture passage that most non-Christians know about homosexuality from the Bible is in Leviticus, and it is easily shot down with the argument that “Leviticus bans tattoos, certain haircuts and mixed fiber clothing, and you don’t follow any of those.”

The problem with that argument is that it shows a basic misunderstanding of Christian doctrine. Christians do not follow the law of the Old Testament in Leviticus. Those laws were abolished by Jesus, and the only ones that stand are the ones that are repeated in the New Testament.

You need to stop arguing with Leviticus and start arguing with the New Testament books of I Timothy and Corinthians, where the writers speak out against a sin that has been translated in some Bibles as “homosexuals” but was, in the original Greek, arsenokoitai meaning ”for them that defile themselves with mankind”.

That word is the key to understanding why I call myself a Christian, and I still believe in gay rights. The translation of that word is extremely unclear. It may be referring to pedophiles, or rent boys, or pimps. But it almost certainly does not refer to a consensual, loving relationship between adults of the same gender.

For that matter, even the word “sodomy” from the Bible should not be applied to gay sex. If you read the story of Sodom, the people they accused of what was called sodomy were not gay people. They were violent rapists that wanted to rape the men only after they had been told they couldn’t rape the women.

I do not personally believe that the Bible forbids a loving consensual relationship between people of the same sex. It forbids rape and prostitution, whether straight or gay. But it says nothing that leaves me believing that my gay friends are any worse sinners than any of the rest of us.

Losing my patience.

This is going to be another one of those blog posts that’s all serious and will probably offend people all over the place. And I don’t care.

Between the US Civil War and the 60’s (maybe 70’s, maybe 80’s maybe even until now) large groups of Christians in the south used the Old Testament as an excuse for racism. They would point to verses about not mixing goats with sheep and say that it proves blacks and whites shouldn’t mix. It was a load of crap when they came up with it, and it is still a load of crap. If you’re a Christian, Jesus erased those old laws with his death, and you’re completely ignoring the main things Jesus taught. There is no excuse for hate.

These days, Christians mostly agree that racism is wrong and horrible and against God. But at the same time, they have made plenty of excuses for new types of hate. Just the other day I heard a gay man say on Tumblr to one of my Tumblr friends, “I think you’re cool and we have a lot in common. Too bad you’re a Christian so we can’t be friends.” This is what the gay community thinks of Christians. You have made them your enemies. How is that showing them the love of God?

In the last few weeks Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Billy Lucas and Cody J. Barker are just a few of the gay teenagers who have killed themselves because they were being harassed over their sexuality. Children in America are dying because Christians have decided to keep making excuses for hating them. Christians are the ones who have pushed the hardest to make excuses to avoid gay people and treat them as less than humans. This is not acceptable.

Christians are the first in line to be outraged about the death of unborn children. “Who knows what those babies would have grown up to be?” Fair enough. But who knows what Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Billy Lucas and Cody J. Barker would have grown up to be? Where is your outrage over their untimely deaths?

One of my Christian friends used to watch Buffy with me a lot. She complained once about how she didn’t like how they made Willow gay and didn’t want to see that. I kindly pointed out that Buffy’s relationship with Spike was just as sinful, since they were not married, and he was a demon, but she wasn’t outraged about that. If your outrage about one form of sin is notably greater than your outrage over other sin, you are not filled with righteous anger. You are filled with hate.

I have a lot of gay friends. I think that’s what most Christians are missing. They focus so much on the “gay” part that they never fully recognize that they are people too. My gay friends are not on an evil quest to destroy families and society. They are regular normal people who just want to love and be loved like everyone else.

I am a Christian, and I love God, and I can’t see how treating any group of people as less than human is anywhere near doing God’s will. Jesus said to love your neighbor as your self. The message of Jesus is that people will want to be Christians when they see God’s love in you. How much of God’s love are you showing the gay community? Why are you forcing them to be second class citizens, unable to marry or serve in the military because of your beliefs?

I just have to say that lately, I see more love and caring among the gay community than I do among the Christian community. I think that Christians using the Bible as an excuse for hate, whether in the form of racism or homophobia, is the main reason for the recent rising levels of atheism. So my message to Christians is to please, in the name of God, knock it off. Some people are gay. Get over it.

Book Review: The Throne, The Lamb and The Dragon

My computer died. Completely. I blame Windows Vista 100%. It is crap. So I’m working from my tiny netbook for the forseeable future.

A few weeks ago I offered to write whatever anyone wants me to write (and the offer still stands – leave suggestions in the comments). My sister-in-law Jaime requested that I review the book “The Throne, The Lamb & The Dragon” by Paul Spilsbury. Since she even offered to buy the book and have it sent to me, how could I refuse? Free book.

So she sent me the book and I read it. And then I put off writing the review for a long time because it’s tricky. So here I go.

The sub-title of the book is “A Reader’s Guide to the Book of Revelation”. Therein lies the trickiness. The book of Revelation is the Marmite of the Bible. Most Christians either love it or hate it. They either are obsessed with interpreting every word and phrase and trying to apply the prophecies to everything around them, or they pretty much read it when they have to at church and otherwise ignore it, finding it incomprensible. I’m much more the latter group.

I’ve always had problems “getting into” Revelation because I was raised in Baptist churches that had some very definite ideas about what it all meant, and I was always a little skeptical of their interpretations. I never believed that whatever Democrat is popular this week must be the Anti-Christ. I never believed that credit cards were the number of the beast. I just wasn’t buying the paranoid theories. I mean, this book is 2000 years old, and it only started making sense now? I don’t think so.

I get the feeling that the Paul Spilsbury was plagued by the same doubts, but unlike me, he decided to go digging deeper to find out what it all meant. He analyses Revelation in light of the type of literary form used, and in light of similar documents of the time and what he comes up with is quite interesting. If I had to sum up his findings in one sentence, I’d say, “Don’t be so darned literal.”

One of the points that he makes that is likely causing the most havoc among churches is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in the Rapture. The Rapture is the belief among (mostly American) evangelicals that at some point Jesus will return and steal away all of his followers to heaven so that they don’t have to go through some really nasty hard times on earth known as The Tribulation. The way Spilsbury interprets things, there is no Great Tribulation coming because we are already living in it. And he kind of makes sense here. The Tribulation in Revelation is the period of time between the opening of the First Seal and the triumphant return of Christ. The opening of the First Seal in earth time would have been when Jesus ascended to heaven, so that makes the Tribulation now and for the last two thousand years.

I’m not going to try to make any claims about whether Spilsbury is completely right or wrong. But for me, he has made Revelation a lot more useful. It isn’t as much a puzzle about how to survive the end of the world as it is a guide to living in the world now, not much different from the other letters in the New Testament.

I think that this book is worth reading, if only for making you think. The one part that stood out to me was the section on the Mark of the Beast. That’s the whole thing where you’ll be marked with a number and without it you won’t be able to participate in any commerce. What if we stop viewing it as a literal number and a literal mark and look at it as an attitude? The true Mark of the Beast is an attitude of acceptance of evil. In order to participate in commerce in the world today, you have to be okay with accepting a certain amount of cruelty, corruption and greed. And that is far more insidious than credit cards or social security numbers. Who made your shoes? Who grew your sugar? Were they paid for their work? How much does that Wal-Mart price cut cost your soul? Who do you work for? What is their agenda? Are they really making people’s lives better or just making their wallets lighter?

I have to agree with Paul Spilsbury that a less literal interpretation of Revelation is necessary to really understand why it was written and for whom. I haven’t decided if I agree with every interpretation he makes, but I certainly didn’t see anything in this book that conflicts with what I know about who God is.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

I’m giving you fair warning right now that there are people who will find this blog post offensive. Probably offensive enough that they’ll threaten to kill me.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -First Amendment of the US Constitution

If you are a fundamentalist Muslim and you believe that viewing depictions of the prophet Mohammed is a sin, please scroll carefully because I have no intention of forcing anyone to do anything they believe to be a sin. There will be a drawing of Mohammed below and if you believe that viewing such things is wrong, please don’t look at it. Maybe it is a drawing of your prophet. Maybe it’s just a guy named Mohammed. It’s hard to tell, since half the Muslim men on earth seem to be named Mohammed.

In the last couple years, cartoonists in the Netherlands and Sweden have had death threats against them, and even have had their houses firebombed and have generally been terrorized by Muslims who are offended that they drew pictures of Mohammed. Most recently, an episode of South Park was censored into meaninglessness because Trey Parker and Matt Stone depicted Mohammed. Even though they didn’t really. He was in a bear suit or in a trailer the whole time. It was censored because Comedy Central recieved death threats from Muslims.

Where does this come from? I’m not even sure. The Quran does not forbid depictions of Mohammed. This is a rule that was brought in later, probably around the 16th century. Until that time it was common for Muslim artists to draw full depictions of Mohammed and it was no big deal. Then sometime in the 16th or 17th century they decided that drawing pictures of the Prophet was wrong. It was originally supposed to be to prevent idolatry, but the spirit of this rule seems to have been completely lost to those who follow it to the letter.

Now the entire Western world is being bullied into following this debatable rule of Islam, whether we are Muslim or not. They argue that we are not respecting their religion. I would argue that freedom of speech requires that we be allowed to be disrespectful. Trey Parker and Matt Stone frequently depict Jesus (who is my own savior whom I love) as a dimwitted cable access show host. And whether I am offended or not, I would not deny them the right to depict Jesus any way they want to. Because how people depict Jesus does not change who Jesus is. Yeah, South Park is disrespectful and blasphemous. They offend everyone. But so far, the only people who think it’s okay to kill someone for being offensive are the Muslims.

This is not okay. Grown-ups use words to work out their differences. They debate ideas and try to understand each other. They do not scream insults and threaten violence, which has been the overall most common response from Muslims to the movement on the internet to have an Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. I’m sick of living in a world where adults think it’s okay to act like bratty toddlers in the name of religion.

Europeans fought and died during the Reformation because the Catholic church forced people to be Catholic or die. Then some governments became Protestant and killed people for being Catholic. Out of this mess, America was born with the core belief that no government has a right to tell its citizens what religion to follow. We fought hard to create a society where people can live in peace, knowing that their religion is a protected personal choice.

There are a lot of things that non-Christians do that I find offensive. Using God’s name as a swear word is offensive to me. I find smug and condescending athiests who are constantly trying to convert everyone to athiesm offensive. I find Westboro Baptist Church offensive. There is nothing about the KKK which is not offensive. But there is no law that says that Americans are protected from having their feelings hurt. Hurt feelings are the problem solely of the victim of the offense, not the offender. As one of my freedom-loving friends said, “That’s why it’s called ‘taking offense’ and not ‘having offense forced on you.’” I may feel offended by these people. I may even occasionally harbor hatred of their actions. I may believe that they’re going to hell for their actions. But I still defend their right to be stupid and offensive. They have every right to offend me and hurt my feelings. They even have the right to insult my God. My God is a grown-up and He can handle it.

That is why I’m drawing a picture of Mohammed. If you don’t want to see my drawing, I warned you at the top of this post, and you have no one to blame but yourself for seeing it. I am not a Muslim, and I will not be bullied into following your religion. It’s not about hating Muslims because I don’t. It’s about freedom. And if you cannot handle this kind of freedom, maybe living in America and Western Europe is not for you.

.

.

Picture below.

.

.

I’m posting this 2 days before the Draw Mohammed Day to give other people a chance to think about how important freedom is, and maybe give them a chance to take a stand. (And the main largest Facebook group about Draw Mohammed Day has degenerated into a lot of crying Muslims and very happy trolls. If you go there, be prepared to have to ignore morons of every type and variety. Some of the smaller ones are a bit more rational.)

(By the way, the llama’s name is French. If you understand that reference, DFTBA!)

Note: On 20 May Facebook removed this picture from my account as “offensive” and violating their terms, yet they refuse to tell me in what way it violated anything. It does not attack a group or individual. It promotes peace.