As one of the victims of dysfunctional families, I'm none too sure I want to read this thread, much less post to it, but there are some points that seem to want making. This may duplicate other posts; when I haven't been ignoring the thread outright, I've been skimming, and may have missed others saying the same things. (Some of it may sound like an attack. It's not meant to be, but I find I can't distance myself from this enough to achieve objectiveness.)
Why the particular pseudonym? Because growing up, I discovered that the way to survive was to simply not be there as completely as possible, to have no wants, to make no demands, to do nothing. This was the surest way to win approval, or, at the least, to avoid being hurt.
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"You are precious and loved".
This reads to me like the writer Has No Clue. I am not "precious and loved". I am worthless and unwanted. My parents made this clear to me as I was growing up. Being told I am "precious and loved" by someone who has never met me grates as much as "family comes first". I'm sure that pedantic peasant had good intentions in saying them (and I'm glad that other people actually appreciated them), but for me, they appear to dismiss as irrelevant all the pain and personal experience I've had which prove otherwise.
(The iconic example: My mother took me to a school for emotionally disturbed children "just for running some tests". She lied. I was left there, forcibly restrained by staff members as I watched her drive off without me.)
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On family: As far as I'm concerned, I don't have one. I have people who happen to be genetically related, but they're not family. (I can make sense of my childhood only by assuming that my parents didn't love me. [Suffice it to say that I don't claim they're bad people, only ones overwhelmed by problems of their own.] I credit them with doing what they saw as their duty as parents, and even with trying to do their best at it, but that's a very different thing.)
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On forgiving: These are the words that made forgiving make sense to me (from A Pretty Good Person by Lewis Smedes):
For every person who loses control to his or her rambunctious passions, there are a hundred who lose control to the unfair wounds they did not deserve to feel. Someone they trusted betrayed them. Someone they loved brutalized them. Someone they depended on left them dangling alone. They feel deeply hurt. But it is not only the hurt that they remember. It is the feeling of outrage at being wronged. Hurt and wronged, the memory is like a videotape permanently installed in our minds. We cannot turn it on, we cannot turn it off. We are condemned to let it play its wretched reruns inside our minds at its own whim. Our bitter memory of wrongful pain takes over control.
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The only way back to control over our painful memories is the way of forgiveness. When we forgive we surrender our basic human right to get even with the person who hurt us. But this surrender is not a defeat. It is the ultimate win. When we forgive an ancient wrong, we set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner we set free is us. When we forgive we dance again to the melody of healing. When we forgive we reclaim control of our lives from the slavery of a hurting memory.
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As long as you do not forgive, you are lashed to a pain you did not have coming in the first place. Now then, suppose that the only way to be fair to yourself is to forgive the person who was so unfair to you? He does not deserve to be forgiven. Of course not. But what do you deserve? Where is the fairness in being handcuffed to an escalator of unfair pain?
(Google uncovered this item by Smedes, also on forgiving.)
You overlooked "if anyone appears to be tying his girlfriend to the sprinkler head, please stop him before he causes serious hydrological problems."
Nancy Lebovitz,
Example&!, that's my universe you're talking about wanting to go away. It's not just hubris to think God will be more or less satisfied with you, it's hubris to want the the rug pulled out from everyone else.
Sorry, didn't mean it that way! I'm not done yet either! I want the ride to go on too. Look back at the context, I was mostly wishing for Him to hurry up when I thought there was a good chance that we'd all be plunged into mindboggling amounts of post-nuclear-war suffering.
Fortunately, while God listens to me, He's under no obligation to follow my directions. (Thank Goodness!) I'm quite clear that my desires are motivated by monsterous selfishness, and that is a bad thing, and I am really quite sorry about it. He'll pull the plug when He's ready, on His schedule, and I expect that since He has a history of taking everyone's best interests to heart, He'll do it when it makes sense. (I realize that many would debate wether history really shows Him taking everyone's best interests at heart, but that's too big a bit to tackle in the time I have left. Call it an assumption of faith.)
The fact that I will one day see Him face to face makes me nervous, is all.
I'll be logging off for several days, so I won't have the opportunity to fully dig into all this stuff, or clarify points. It's bad form to cut and run like this, in one of these discussions. My intent wasn't to offend you Nancy, and I hope you will accept my apology.
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for the curious, my name is based on the form Yotsuba&!.
Vicki wrote
I'm not a Christian, but my understanding of the Christian theory of the end times is "no man knows the hour," that people should live as though it might be ten minutes from now, or ten thousand years. Can someone here confirm this, or explain where I've gone wrong?
Yes, you are correct!
Martin Luther, when asked, "what would you do if you knew Christ was coming tomorrow?" reportedly said "I would plant an apple tree." When asked why, he said, "because I was going to do that anyway."* In other words, preparing good things for future generations that may not come to be is the right thing to do, and doing the right thing isn't something to be put off.
There's a whole thread of pro-environmental Christian theology that's based around the notion that it is a moral good to take care of the planet we live on, and it's quite consistent with end times theology. The fact that there are ChristianFundamentalists that have lost sight of that...irks me.
The ChristianFundamentalist groups get hung up on the details of how it happens, much to their sorrow. Basically, take a book of coded allegories written when people tended to get tortured and killed for their beliefs (Revelation), and then mix in mindless literalism, and you get ChristianFundamentalist end times stuff. Left Behind and whatnot. The fact that much of our present sorrow in these United States is due to poor lit crit skills and bad readings of relatively clear texts AND we are now discussing it on MakingLight is what I would call a cruel irony.
*Hey, Greg London, Christians have koans too, just longer, and poorly worded.
Jenny, mid thread, wrote,
I was particularly struck by a point which Karen Armstrong makes in the first article: that, although one tends to imagine fundamentalists as insisting on rigidly traditional forms of religious thinking, in fact the theologies of modern fundamentalist movements are often distinguished by being wildly heterodox.
Indeed! Speaking as a member of a mainstream (presbyterian) Christian denomination, I can testify that ChristianFundamentalism is an abberration. Aberration in the sense of being deviant*. Those folks are warping and bending Scripture away from the common, historical understanding of the church. And we really, really, don't like it.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Lutherans, Catholics, Anglicans, and many Methodists are pretty annoyed too.
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*and unfocused, and disordered, and departing from the norms (of Scripture and tradition), and an imperfect image (of the Word), and apparent displacement of the position of a celestial body. (They misrepresent Our God's position on things!) But you can call them deviants. Deviants! I tell you, deviants!
Thank you for the answer, Patrick. I meant no criticism.
I get it. "Clueles Goobers" is an intentional rorschach. Like Patrick said, it stands in for "the stupidity of the masses." The masses always equal $TheOther - if you are liberal, stupid conservatives, if you are conservative, stupid $OtherRacePeople. So he's appealing to the worst in all of us. Nice.
Okay, rant on now - this attitude Patrick explained:
You can't get a cup of coffee in a con suite, or spend five minutes in an internet cafe, without overhearing somebody rhapsodizing about the stupidity of the masses.
True. (Slashdot, passim)
... First, there's almost always a sadistic, dominationist glee in demonstrating that other people deserve nothing from the speaker.
What I call conservative liberalism. Even those who believe that it is wrong to deny social goods to people of $OtherRace cheerfully discuss denying social goods to people of $OtherPhilosophy or $OtherReligion.
Second, the argument, such as it is, almost always hinges on some survey showing that a majority of those questioned had been soft-headed enough to believe a lie they'd been told by someone in authority.
Oh, this burns me up something fierce. Usually when I figure out that I belong to that group. Let me be specific: I am a politically liberal person who belongs to a theologically conservative group, a Christian. The fact that some Christians believe weird stuff or believe not-weird stuff but can't explain it worth a damn AND that means you think people like me are dumb - well, that bugs me.
Let me give an example. (Erik, this is not meant as a personal attack.):
"I live in a country where a large fraction of the population ferverntly belives that we are in the end times, whatever that means."
This is a variation on the "this group believes something incomprehnsible and is therefore dumb." Yes, a lot of people who have that belief also believe deplorable things, or do deplorable things. I use deplorable advisedly, it harms us to confuse stupid beliefs with evil behavior.
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Incidentally, I'll tell you what that belief is about. Due to certain givens, it would be plausible for a Christian to conclude that Jesus is going to show up and pull the plug real soon now. I would welcome that, albeit with some hesitations.* Christian theology is full of inner urgings that your life and what you do with it is significant and full of meaning precisely because the clock is running out. It's kind of a mainstay of Christian theology.
Naturally, being human we screwed it up.** It's noticeable from the beginning. Paul writes a short letter to a church in Thessonolaica and says "Jesus is coming real soon now." Those guys promptly sit on their asses and do nothing. Paul then has to write another letter telling them to get off their asses and live their lives intelligently.
Today's crop of Christian conservatives believe a highly detailed, specialized version of the end times stuff, which to explain adequately would take another 2k words. The short version is that some of them have come to quite unholy conclusions about what they can/should do because of the immanent return of Christ. This is deplorable, but not stupid.
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*I was much more keen on the idea back when I thought it reasonable that the Cold War would wax hot, and that I would be wandering a cold, ashen, wasteland dying of radiation poisoning. Now I think about my hubris in the way I live my life and think it would be shockingly embarassing to talk to Jesus face to face.
**Its another mainstay of Christian theology that humans aren't stupid, we're selfish, and stubbornly do things that are selfish even in the face of evidence that it will harm us. Possibly the only common point between fiscal conservatives and theological conservatives, and expains why some Christians are fooled into thinking that the Republicans are on their side.
I thought it was a silly piece. It is a pretty good example of the 'libertarian flipside' though - the sneaking suspicion that the world would be a more consistent place if it really was ruled with an iron hand.
...And therefore is used in proofs that most conspiracy theories are incorrect - real conspiracies would get results.
Hum. The more I think about it the less funny I think it is. I guess this is precisely the kind of thinking you'd want people to engage in if you wanted people to go along with restricted civil liberties, isn't it: That conspiracies would have to be efficient, and therefore don't exist.* That really efficient top down control could just fix things, darnit, even if it was done by 'bad guys.'
Sometimes I have a hard time figuring out how on earth Patrick gets so bent out of shape over things. This (like the Obama piece) require a fair amount of mental backtracking and reasoning for me to get there. These pieces start with a conclusion of moral outrage, and I have to work backwards from the pieces to figure out what's going on. This is intentional?
*They probably do, but they suffer from bad managment, just like everything else. Which should be fodder for great cartoons.
It's ridiculously easy to catch a bad plagiarist. The ones who use Google, for instance, and incorporate enough of the text verbatim that one can locate the specific web sites used.
It's ridiculously easy to catch the naive writer who plagiarizes, because there are startling gaps in style and tone.
It's ridiculously easy when you recognize the source. You know the person plagiarized because you've read the original. This happens often enough in the upper class courses for English majors in most schools that there are two or three faculty that everyone consults when the paper is just a bit too good for the writer in question. The local expert is typically someone who's been teaching the course for years, is a bibliophile, and knows the field. Quite often, the expert can identify the passage, and you've got a case.
But unless the student admits plagiarizing, you pretty much have to produce a source. There's just too much plagiarism on campus for the authorities to deal with--hundreds of cases, every semester, in addition to the cheating and other criminal infractions. And then the parents often enter the fray waving litigious threats.
Think about it this way. Only the bad plagiarists are caught. The good ones continue merrily plagiarizing their way through university, on to an advanced degree, and then become tenured faculty, plagiarizing their graduate students' research.
Really. We've got at least three like that at where I teach. One of them is a repeat offender, disciplined by faculty peers, and, incidentally, the winner of several departmental honors.
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