Slow Internet blues.

The trials of getting some decent-speed Internet in Vacaville.

Currently I’m at the Vacaville Library using some high-speed Internet on my laptop, because Mom’s house has dialup. AT&T has not made it out to her neighborhood yet. The theory is that once a new neighborhood gets built nearby—her house has been on the edge of town for the past 20 years, and the edge is finally moving outward—service will have to be extended to that neighborhood, meaning that it will finally be extended to her neighborhood.

Meanwhile the neighbors have high-speed Internet. They were willing to splurge for Comcast. Mom won’t, ’cause she won’t pay for television, and has never had cable TV. For years Vacaville pulled in broadcast signals from both Sacramento and San Francisco; and now that all the TV signals are digital, she’s getting 25 channels from Sacramento alone and doesn’t see the point of cable. And I didn’t either… when I had high-speed Internet; who needs to subscribe to FX, fr’instance, when you can watch Rescue Me on Hulu.com? But at Mom’s, there’s no point in even looking at Hulu, ’cause you can’t watch video at 3kbps.

I know the neighbors have high-speed because my laptop can pull in all their wifi signals. Of course, the signals are all password-blocked, but I can see their routers’ names.

When the routers first went online, they weren’t originally password-blocked. I took advantage of this to check email. I didn’t do much else; I deliberately avoided any bandwidth-hogging activities. You do that, and people will start to notice, “Man, the Internet is slow today. What gives?” If it’s regularly annoying enough, they start to ask around. A friend suggests they change their router’s password; they respond, “What password?” and the friend replies, “Well there’s your problem right there,” and BAM: it’s blocked the very same day.

I didn’t learn this from the bandwidth thief’s point of view; I learned it from the router owner’s point of view. I have no problem providing the neighbors with free Internet provided they keep it reasonable. But not all of them are reasonable. Like the weird guy two doors down who likes to upload videos of him ranting about the government. Or the weird couple two doors down who like to pirate Japanese “tentacle romances,” which actually have nothing at all to do with romance, but I won’t get into that. Suffice to say some folks abuse others’ goodwill, and when their abuse means that I get skippy video, I block off their abuse. Wish there were a way to give limited free Internet to the neighbors, but I’m not that tech-savvy.

Eh. So last time I visited Mom, I found that she had a new router in the neighborhood, and while she was willing to put up with the phone’s bandwidth, I was able to read Google News from the bathroom. (I used to joke years ago, “Computers will never replace newspapers; you can’t take a computer to the can with you.” I violate that prediction all the time now.)

My brother Chad was surfing the ’net slow-style and I decided to be helpful: “You know there’s an open router in the neighborhood?”

He didn’t know what that meant.

I showed him on Mom’s computer. Technically it’s my computer, but I left it at her house to use, which is why it can do all the things I want it to… which is more than Mom knows how to do with it anyway. Anyway, I had installed a wireless card in it, so I showed him how to tap the signal.

“But,” I told Chad, “you don’t want to overdo it on the bandwidth. Otherwise they’ll figure out you’re hogging it and put a password on their router.”

That was February. This week, as I was flipping open my laptop to check email and Facebook, Mom commented, “By the way, your brother overdid it on the bandwidth.” And sure enough, the neighbor’s signal was blocked.

I don’t blame the neighbor. I don’t entirely blame Chad either, because any number of other neighbors might have been slurping up bandwidth. It’s how life works: give ’em an inch and they’ll steal your yardstick.

I tried using Mom’s dialup Internet. Facebook is appallingly slow. Monday night, Chad got a copy of Star Trek from the Redbox and said, “You want to watch it?” Mom opted out because she was going to use the Internet—and spent two hours on Facebook while Chad and I watched the movie. Two hours. She wasn’t even playing video games. That’s just two hours posting stuff.

I can believe it, ’cause it’s just that slow. Click and wait, click and wait. It reminds me of the early ’90s. Remember the early ’90s? That's the decade my mom’s house is stuck in. The only sign it’s not is that you have to use digital tuners to watch TV.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. I have to use the TV in order to watch television. (This is such a privileged lame-ass complaint. I’m totally aware that it is. It’s like rappers who complain that their $50,000 champagne isn’t chilled properly. I’m gonna rant about it anyway.) On the Internet, you know of course that you can watch a program whenever you like; that instead of 12 minutes of commercials you only have to put up with 2 to 3 minutes; that you can pause it and go to the bathroom, or grab a water from the fridge, or go make potato curry with steamed rice. And, unlike the not-at-all-flat-screen-TV, you can watch your shows in widescreen instead of having the sides chopped off. Why the networks broadcast the shows with chopped sides, instead of letterboxing them, I’ve no idea. I just find it annoying.

Well, the “other thing” is really minor, ’cause it is only TV after all. And my gripes just go to show you how extremely spoiled I am after years of high-speed Internet. But it’s the 21st century. We’re living in the damn future. There’s no excuse for AT&T not broadcasting a low-cost 4G wireless signal all over California, for anyone to access on their wristwatches if they so choose. The fact that there’s a section of a modern city that can’t get DSL for less than $80 is inexcusable. But that’s Mom’s situation. Yeesh.

Discrepancies in the bible shouldn’t freak you out this much.

If comparing the differences in the bible freaks you out, you’ve got a seriously wrong idea about what makes the bible perfect.

I originally posted this on my devotional blog, but then I thought better of it. It’s a rant that had nothing to do with the passage I was analyzing. It’s more to do with the folks who are weirded out by the fact that I’m doing gospel synopses.

A synopsis, for you newbies, is a comparison of two books from the bible that line up. The gospels, fr’instance, announce the triumph of Jesus over sin—that’s literally what an εὐαγγέλιον/evanghélion is—and in so doing they sometimes tell the exact same stories, with minor differences. A synopsis lines up the stories and compares the similarities and differences. That’s what I’ve been doing in my devotional blog lately: a synopsis of the gospels. You can do this with the gospels, with certain stories in Kings and Chronicles, or parts where Isaiah quotes Kings, or any other passage where the books line up.

I don’t do comments on that blog either; if people want to talk to me, I have email. So I get email. Sometimes very nervous email.

Most of it comes out of a misunderstanding about what verbal inspiration is. That’s another theology term for you newbies. The “verbal inspiration of the scriptures” is the belief that God didn’t just inspire the bible; He inspired every single word of the bible. I actually do believe that. The folks emailing me are a bit worried that I don’t… and a bit worried that I’m using the synopses to show that I don’t.

In my most recent post, I’ve displayed Matthew and Luke’s versions of how the prophet John reacted to certain folks in his crowd. Once you see it, you might notice how most of it matches word-for-word. Where it matches—if your web browser can understand XML code—I’ve colored the text purple. Where it doesn’t match, it’s still black. So you can see how where it matches… and where it doesn’t.

It’s the “doesn’t” part that makes people nervous. I’ll get to that in a moment. First I’ll explain why it matches in the first place.

The reason there are four gospels is because a lot of different guys wrote gospels, and the ancient Church considered four of them to be accurate accounts of Jesus. The others, not so much. Frequently the first three—Matthew, Mark, Luke—line up, and from time to time, they line up word-for-word. The most popular theory is that Matthew and Luke are quoting Mark. In other cases, Matthew and Luke line up word-for-word in a story Mark doesn’t have. In those cases, the most popular theory is that they’re quoting someone else… but we don’t know who that is. Could be a lost gospel (and wouldn’t that be popular with the wackjob crowd); could be a collection of oral stories, which would explain the lack of document. Scholars have gone so far as to make up a name for it: die Logienquelle, or Quelle for short, or Q for even shorter. If you ever hear someone refer to “the lost gospel of Q,” or “the lost document of Q,” or “Well, according to Q…” they’re not talking about a character from the James Bond movies, or from Star Trek: The Next Generation. They’re talking about the guy that Matthew and Luke appear to have quoted a lot, but Mark and John didn’t.

We have no idea whether Q existed. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable. So you’ll find a lot of scholars refer to Q every time Matthew and Luke line up. A lot of us just do it automatically, whether we believe in Q or not: “Q” has largely become shorthand for “Matthew-Luke parallels.”

Now, all this that I’ve just related bugs the hell out of some Christians. They believe in verbal inspiration, same as I do. They just happen to believe certain things about verbal inspiration that have nothing to do with it… but they think it does.

First of all, there’s the wrong idea of what “inspired” means.

To inspire literally means “to breathe in,” and that’s the word we use to translate θεόπνευστος/theónefstos, the word Paul uses in 1 Timothy 3.16 to describe the scriptures. The NIV translates it as if it’s θεός-πνέυστος/theós-néfstos, “God-breathed,” which gives you a slightly better idea of who’s doing the inspiring.

God breathes in, and people create as a result. God does stuff in our lives, and we humans are so jazzed about the experience that it stirs us to write it down. In the case of the ancient writings, they’ve become books of the bible. In the case of current writings, we don’t add them to the bible—it’s impractical, and would involve endless debate—so we just consider the canon of books in the bible to be closed, and debate whether or not a book is any good in our spare time.

This is not how many Christians believe inspiration works. To them, “God-breathed” means “God-whispered.” They believe—I’m not kidding—that God dictated the very words of the bible to its authors, or the Holy Spirit commandeered their lips or hands like a puppeteer, and in this way He got them to write exactly what He wanted. They sometimes make it sound more mystical than that, but that’s essentially what they’re saying. In this way we have a nice reliable bible, with no unreliable, sloppy, emotion-driven, sin-addled humans getting in its way.

What about the parts of the gospels that don’t line up word-for-word? What about textual variants? What about (gasp) errors? Well, these folks don’t believe in any such things; they’re all works of the devil, or can be explained away with complex reasoning.

The trouble is that the way they actually do deal with these discrepancies results in one of two possibilities:

1. The Martin Luther error. When Matthew and Luke don’t line up, you choose one book over the other. Either Matthew is more valid because he quoted more Old Testament, or because the Sermon on the Mount is so well arranged, or because you think it was originally written in Aramaic and that somehow makes it better; or Luke is more valid because he’s a better writer, or more thorough, or wrote Acts or something. Whatever justifies that personal preference.

   Then you display that preference… but you carefully avoid ever saying that you display that preference, because you don’t want to sound prejudiced against any part of the bible. You might write about the parallel stories in Matthew and Luke, and compare similarities, but when it comes to interpretation time, a Matthew fan will ditch any conclusions that might be taken from the Luke version, and only go with the Matthew conclusions.

   I call this “the Martin Luther error” because this is how Luther dealt with the discrepancies he felt he saw between Romans and James. Consequently he ditched James. At least Luther was honest enough to admit it; today’s Christians would never.

2. The Josh McDowell error. When Matthew and Luke don’t line up, blame the scholar who points this out. Accuse him of trying to undermine the bible like those Europeans, and lead Christians astray with all that skepticism.

Where’d this God-dictated-the-bible theory come from? That’d be 2 Esdras 14. Nearly every Christian (except for the Ethiopian Orthodox) considers 2 Esdras to be uninspired apocrypha, mainly because of wacky stories like this one: In it, God has Ezra drink a magic fire-colored potion (14.39) and as a result he’s able to dictate the entire bible, plus the Mishna, to five scribes who were suddenly able to write an unfamiliar alphabet—94 books over 40 days of nonstop dictation.

Dictation is not inspiration. Inspiration creates. It doesn’t just regurgitate. Yeah, the Spirit can inspire us to remember scriptures, but the scriptures He has us repeat bring life. The scriptures we cough up on our own have all sorts of effects: some good, some not so much. Look at a few chat rooms if you don’t believe me.

Inspiration means that humans were involved in the process of making scripture. And it was God’s idea to do it this way. It bugs people because it means composing the bible was a lot messier than they would like it to be; it doesn’t have the sterile alien perfection that they tend to associate with God. Which is kinda demented, considering what great lengths God went to in order to not be alien, but to be one of us. It’s taking the one thing that He considered most important—His beloved Son—and saying, “What, You want humans involved? Screw that. Just give me cold, hard dictation. Give me the Law. I can handle the Law.”

Verbal inspiration means that every word of the bible was inspired by God. No more, no less. Adding how God inspired every word becomes really problematic when your view of it is based on your prejudices against humans.

And, for that matter, an unrealistic paranoia against discrepancies. Part of the reason we have four gospels instead of one is, I believe, to make this point: It’s okay that the stories don’t match.

Christians are free to disagree, and free to be different from one another. What you’re seeing in a synopsis is a nice obvious example of this. Matthew has his point of view; Mark, Luke, and John have theirs. Sometimes they all see things the same. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re close enough to one another that it’s best to focus our attention on the similarities. Other times, the differences are meant to make us recognize an issue is complex, and needs to be looked at from many perspectives.

That’s how humans work. That’s reality. And God arranged for it to be put in the bible. It shouldn’t freak you out; it should make you appreciate that while some humans prefer to answer the world’s problems with snappy clichés, the bible was written for everyone, including those of us who realize that there are more points of view in the world than one.

The other thing—which I admit bothers me too—is that if the Q hypothesis is true, it means someone wrote a gospel and it’s been lost to history. Well, might be lost to history; might not, ’cause if Matthew and Luke quoted the whole of it, then we already have the entire Q document in our bibles.

But here’s the disturbing possibility: that maybe not all of the Q document was inspired. The reason we don’t have it is because Matthew and Luke only quoted the valid parts of it, and discarded the rest because it was goofy, superstitious, dumb, or heretical. Okay, so what does that say about the sources of inspired scripture? Can you actually take the inspired bible from parts of uninspired heretic literature?

Well… yeah, you probably can. Prophets have good days and bad. On King David’s good days, every psalm that came out of his mouth was golden. On his bad days, he was climbing on Bathsheba and plotting to murder Nabal and pretending to be nuts for the king of Gath. God used imperfect people to write the bible. The Q document, if it existed, isn’t in our bibles because it likely had problems that were resolved by two Spirit-inspired guys, Matthew and Luke, editing the problems out of it.

Ultimately this all comes down to faith in the Holy Spirit, and faith in His process of getting us the bible. If you have faith, you’re not gonna freak out about every little oddity you find in the scriptures. If you don’t, you’re gonna be paranoid that every little oddity undermines the whole thing, because your faith isn’t in God; it’s in the book. And when someone like me does something as simple as put the bible into columns to compare the similarities, you’re gonna freak out because I’ve made obvious what you’d rather not think about: You’ve got a false belief about what makes the bible perfect… and it’s so false that, without even trying, my blog is exposing it.

Relax, folks. Trust God.

The anointed pastor versus the talented pastor.

A lot of Christians use “anointed” to mean “really, really talented.” That’s not what it means.

Last Thursday, Ted Haggard held a prayer gathering at his house, in part to pray, and in part to announce he’s planning to develop a church from the group.

Haggard, if you’ve been following the news, is the former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Col., and the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals. In November 2006 he resigned from both after by a male prostitute claimed he sold drugs to, and had sex with, Haggard. Haggard admitted to the drugs but, technically, not the sex; he admitted to being a less-than-faithful husband, and admitted being attracted to men, but that was as far as he’d go.

Regardless, the scandal was enough to make him leave his positions and “go through reconciliation.” This is, as I wrote back in 2006, Protestant-speak for penance; instead of rosaries, Protestants go through therapy. Haggard’s plan was to collect a Dream Team of high-profile Evangelicals to serve as his counselors, go to a few meetings, have them sign off on his miraculous, Spirit-led rehabilitation, and go back to pastoring.

I was gonna say, “I’m a Christian, so of course I believe in forgiveness,” but sad to say not every Christian does; for most of us forgiveness is conditional. Haggard was only gonna get forgiven if he fulfilled the terms of his rehabilitation. He hasn’t. He’s been to counseling meetings, but his mentors reported that he hasn’t been to all of them. For a brief time, when he was suffering some financial difficulty—the economy sucks, you know, and if you’re used to a celebrity pastor’s income, it’s hard to adjust—he tried to raise funds missionary-style, which his mentors pointed out was technically illegal because he wasn’t a missionary. The dude just wants to be back in the pulpit really, really bad. I can’t say I blame him. It’s what he’s used to, comfortable with, and feels he’s good at. And it’s obviously not hard for him to get followers.

I was also gonna say, “It’s what he’s anointed to do,” but I’m not entirely sure about that.

Christians use “anointed” in different ways. For some of us it means nothing more than “talented.” That’s the problem.

Properly, anointed means that God chose you—which we humans represent by physically anointing them; that is, putting oil on the anointee’s head. You don’t physically need to; it doesn’t appear Jesus was ever anointed with oil, but He is the Messiah, which literally means “anointee,” anyway. The important thing is not whether you had an anointing ceremony, but whether God picked you, and others can recognize that God picked you.

How do we know God picked you? Well, outside of the Holy Spirit informing us through prophecy that God picked you… we sorta look for talent.

The thinking is that if God meant for you to be a pastor, He would have made you capable of doing the job. You’d be a people person. You’d be capable of public speaking; hopefully even good at it. You’d know how Christianity works, and how to read a bible, so that you can lead people to Jesus and disciple them. You’d be good at encouragement. You’d have the sufficient administrative skills to run a proper 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation—that is, unless you want the IRS to start taxing your church. You’d be able to fulfill Paul’s requirements for bishops and deacons, and your denomination’s and elders’ requirements for theology and education. You’d be a prophet—unless your church doesn’t believe prophecy is for today. You’d encourage supernatural moves of God among the people—unless your church doesn’t believe in such things. You’d be able to perform exorcisms—unless your church thinks demonic activity is just a superstitious way of saying psychological problems, and in that case you’d know enough to counsel or to refer people. You’d be, if Roman Catholic, celibate; or you’d be, if Fundamentalist, married, with a wife who’s totally willing to work as an unpaid deacon without the title.

The catch is that you can be many of these things to a church… and not have God’s anointing. I could be a brilliant public speaker, a good administrator, a Spirit-filled man who discerns and prophesies and prays and loves everyone… and the only thing God ever meant for me to be is a layman.

Why? Well, it’s fairly obvious: Power corrupts. Pastors have a fair amount of power in the church. Certain congregationalist churches do their darnedest to limit that power as much as they can by putting everything in the hands of the deacons—as if power won’t corrupt the deacons just as much as it could corrupt the pastor.

Pastors’ jobs are to lead the church in what God expects of them. Consequently, the church looks up to them. This can be a problem when pastors stop pointing to God, and start playing God. And it’s ridiculously easy to do; just tell the folks, “God wants this to be done” because you want it to be done, and rationalize this by believing that God gave you the idea to do it, and the tenacity to carry it out. Never wonder whether that tenacity is really just your own stubbornness, and the idea is really just a product of your own brain; after all, it sounds good, and it might even do good, and since God is good, it must be God, yeah?

I have seen what can happen when a talented but unanointed man runs a church. There’s always something profoundly wrong with the church. You can’t always identify it, ’cause most Christians really don’t know how to discern it. The devil or “the world” are the usual scapegoats. Really, the church is in such great turmoil because Jesus is fighting with the schmuck who took His church over; He wants the reins back. Sometimes the schmuck is the pastor, and sometimes it’s the deacons, and sometimes it’s disgruntled folks in the congregation who really just want their church to be a country club or political group, disguised as a church. I’ve seen all these types.

Now, when everyone’s agreed—when the pastor wants a political group, and the church does too—everything works nice and smoothly, provided their politics are all the same. But unless the pastor is really authoritarian, they aren’t. That’s why at such churches, there’s legalism out the ying-yang. The country club churches, on the other hand, are legalist in the other extreme: All opinions are to be stifled, and no one within the church is to be spoken out against, no matter what unChristian behavior they’re engaged in. Unless, of course, they’re not wanted.

In those churches, talent trumps anointing, because anointed pastors tend to actually obey the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit tends to point people to Jesus. An anointed pastor will play merry hell with a country club church or a political church, or any church where Jesus is not the focal point.

An anointed pastor doesn’t necessarily have any talent. But such pastors know where they can find it within their churches, and can encourage it out of the people. They recognize that in the process of pointing people to Jesus, thy have to get out of the way.

That’s why I wonder about Haggard.

Let’s assume that Haggard is an anointed pastor. That is, believe it or don’t, the actual premise I’m working from. ’Cause everyone makes mistakes, and when you’re in charge your mistakes tend to be exponentially bigger. If Haggard were only abusing caffeine, and using his personal charisma to charm the ladies of his congregation, that’d be no different than most pastors. Instead it was meth and mouth-sex with a man-whore, or so it’s alleged. Same sin, greater degree.

Let’s escalate this to King David type levels. David, if you know your bible, impregnated the wife of one of his soldiers, and when the soldier wouldn’t unwittingly have sex with her in order to cover up the paternity, David had him killed in battle. Any pastor that was caught in a murder/adultery scenario wouldn’t just be defrocked; he’d be imprisoned, and most of his congregation would for years afterwards claimed that they never really followed him, or that, like Lou Sheldon, they always knew there was something funny about him. Or King Uzziah levels: Uzziah tried to take over the high priest’s job once.

Both these guys were anointed kings. Both these guys suffered consequences for their actions—David’s mistress lost the baby and David nearly got overthrown in a coup d’état; Uzziah got a raging case of leprosy. Yet they didn’t lose their jobs. Power corrupted them, yet they were still God’s anointed kings, and held that job regardless.

It is entirely possible that Haggard is not anointed; just talented. Personableness and ability go a very long way in our culture. People are entirely willing to forgive you anything just because you have it.

I never understood what this meant until I met former state Assembly speaker (and later, San Francisco mayor) Willie Brown. It was when I was at Sac State in 1990. I was, at the time, a knee-jerk Republican, and not a fan. I had a bumper sticker glued to my State Hornet desk that was in favor of Proposition 140’s term limits—Brown had been in the Assembly since 1964, and the bumper sticker actually had a circle with a line through Brown’s face.

But while I was at the state capitol for a class assignment, I met Brown, briefly. He stopped by the press box and said hello to a few reporters he knew, shook a few hands, and then proceeded to tell an obscene joke. The reporters laughed. “That’s Willie for ya,” one of them said later.

Up to that point I had wondered how Brown got away with as much as he did. (To be fair, a lot of that “getting away with stuff” was partisan nitpicking, but that’s who I was back then.) There, I saw it in person: He‘s one of those guys that, when you meet him, you automatically like him. It’s not rational. It’s just the way he is. And because you like him so much, you’ll let him get away with anything.

I’ve since met various people who have this trait. These are the folks where you wonder why the hell people vote for them, or put them in charge of anything, or hire them over others. Their wives don’t leave them when they cheat on them; their business partners say nice things about them when they defraud them; their kids forgive them time and again for disappointing them. They are blessed—or cursed—with an overabundance of charisma. Sort of a secular anointing, so to speak.

And Haggard may have this trait. People are willing to forgive him, not because they’re actually being good Christians and practicing grace, and certainly not because Haggard has fulfilled all the expectations of his penance. They’ve forgiven him because “it’s Ted. You know Ted. He’s such a nice guy; such an anointed guy. God has big plans for him, and I want to be on board when God does them.”

Really, Christians should forgive everyone as if they have personal charisma like this. But forgiveness does not mean ignoring the circumstances that incubated the sin.

Ted Haggard’s problem was, as I’ve said before, a lack of accountability: He hid a compartment of his life from others, specifically so that he could sin in it. God, who wants the Christian life to be holistic and integral, doesn’t put up with such behavior for long, which is why Christian leaders who try to pull such stunts regularly get caught and create scandals. The solution to the problem was supposed to be accountability—to Haggard’s mentors—but that didn’t last very long. And now, Haggard is attempting to start a new church, separate from his last church, separate from any denomination, separate, once again, from accountability. Not that being unaccountable has worked for him in the past, but just as he’s used to being a pastor, he’s also used to answering to no one. (Except God. Hopefully.)

If God’s anointed him, then he should be a pastor. But it appears he should be a pastor in a church where the folks are watching him like a hawk. Betcha it won’t turn out that way. It’ll be another corporate-model church where the pastor runs everything and the elders are there for oversight; the oversight being an occasional question of “How’re things doing?” in passing, and little more. And Haggard might have been shamed enough to never try drugs and gay sex again… or he might take closer precautions to ensure that no one ever, ever find out his secret life. I hope not. We’ll see.

Using Google’s suggestions to find what people want to know about God.

You’d be surprised at what you can find through Google. Not the search results; the searches themselves.

Google, as you might have discovered, has a new feature where the search box will guess what it is you’re trying to search for. You type in the first few letters; it gives you ten guesses, based on what other people have been searching for lately.

I guess reporters and bloggers have noticed lately that some of the guesses to the stuff they’ve typed in have just been bizarre. I certainly have. I was looking up “Herod Antipas” for my devotional blog—I was trying to nail some dates down—and my usual tendency, when computers guess what I’m looking for, is to pick one of the guesses; iTunes works that way, as does Spotlight, which is my Mac’s search feature. So I typed in three letters—H-E-R—and looked at the top ten.

No dice. But two of the top ten guesses had to do with herpes.

That’s an illustration, by the way. Don’t bother clicking on anything.

My thought, of course, was, “Are there really that many people who are suffering from, or think they have, herpes?” ’Cause like I said, these guesses are based on what people have recently been searching for. The top ten searches in the world that begin with H-E-R include two for herpes. More for hermaphrodites; I wonder how much of that is innocent research. (I know far too many twisted people, I suppose.)

So the articles are essentially about how, once you type in the beginnings of various questions, you can usually find something warped in your top ten. For fun, I asked Google a few. Starting with “Does it…”

Here we have song lyrics, or illegal downloads, of songs by the band “Does It Offend You, Yeah?” (which I have to put in quotes because the question mark really futzes with sentence structure). But next, we have concerns about whether sex—or hymen-breaking, anyway—hurts. More than likely inputted by kids, whose parents won’t tell them anything, or they’re too embarrassed to go to parents. But Google will give you whatever you want, and it’s nice and anonymous. Well, sorta anonymous. Check out your Web History sometime; you’ll be surprised what they know about you.

Next, “How can…”

Further confirming my theory that there are a lot of kids using Google for sex information. How can you tell virginity; how can you tell if someone likes you; how can you get body hair to look presentable; how you can pregnant or lose weight or detect truthfulness. Google is raising the world’s kids, folks.

Next, “Can I get…”

With lots of questions about how one can get pregnant, and a kinda horrifying “Can I get AIDS from swimming with black people?” Yes, the number ten question in America beginning with “Can I get…” is that one. Good Lord.

Anyway, you can spend all day on Google looking for inappropriate things that people have looked up, and lots of bloggers have. Josh Levin and Michael Agger did on Slate. Ryan Tate did on Gawker. Leila Brillson did on Switched. Barb Dybwad did on Mashable. And don’t forget GeekPadShow’s top 15 list of funny ones. (No, I don’t read all these blogs; I read Slate and found the others from there.) It’s only a matter of time before there’s a website dedicated to wacky search suggestions… and only a matter of time before someone decides they want to make a movie of that website.

Of the blogs I do read, one of the discussions on one of them has been about Christian apologetics, and whether that particular practice actually answers any of the real questions Christians have. One gentleman was skeptical that such questions exist; he was pretty sure that the apologists have covered everything. Me, I’m sure the apologists have answered a lot of people’s questions about whether God is real, whether Jesus is historical, whether the bible is valid, and whether miracles take place. But not necessarily to everyone’s satisfaction.

Plus, like the kids with their sex questions, people might have questions that they’re too anxious to put to fellow Christians. They might be afraid of criticism, or a backlash, or ridicule, or whatever. I dunno.

But for curiosity’s sake, I put a few terms into the Magic 8-Ball that is the Google search box, and tried to see what people have been anonymously asking about these things.

First of all, “Is Jesus…”

To be fair, probably a lot of the queries have been put in by Christians who want to study apologetics. They want to know how to answer the question, “Is Jesus God?” and are looking for a good reply. Thankfully, most of the sites Google comes up with are Christian, though there is an LDS site in there. I’m not too worried about the Christian presence on the Internet to answer the important questions.

But I was kinda curious what answers you’d get if you were wondering if Jesus is black. Number one is Wikipedia, but that’s ’cause the Christian sites are either non-committal (“Does it matter?”) or affirmative (“Yes He is; we can prove it; we have pictures!”) or nuts. Satire site Landover Baptist is in the top ten results, and as expected, they voted no. Well, anyway…

The top questions about what God can do is the old standby about whether He’s so Almighty that He can do the impossible. The others are common Christian questions, such as whether He can change His mind, whether He sins or lies or forgives or helps or saves marriages; stuff that you should be able to ask fellow Christians, but their fairly predictable answers of “Yes” just aren’t gonna deal with your worry to the degree that you’d like them to.

The top questions about what God will do has to do with forgiveness. There is, I’ve found, a lot more doubt about the level of God’s forgiveness than most Christians will ever admit. Christians pay a lot of lip service to God’s forgiveness, but our own lack of it gives people the impression that God makes exceptions to His forgiveness—like illicit sex, murder, divorce, large quantities of sin, and the like.

There’s also doubt, you notice, on whether God helps people or answers prayer. Again, your average Christian answers “Yes” but they tend to stick caveats into whether God will answer your particular prayer—and more often than not, those caveats have to do with whether the praying people are behaving themselves. If you’re sinning, the theory is that God won’t answer your prayer till you shape up; the only exception is the sinner’s prayer, and that’s the only prayer a sinner can make that gets through to God. Kinda stupid, but we Christians can be kinda stupid.

The rest, you notice, are about video games. Priorities, you know.

The top questions about what God has done have to do with the all-too-common human feeling of abandonment. (Although “Has God Done Anything for You” is a song, so not all those searches reflect this.) But people want to know—is He there, is He listening, can He talk, has He given up, has He abandoned or forgotten us, has He quit, does He care? And there’s one question about whether He’s eternal.

This just goes to show how we Christians suck at demonstrating the love of God to the degree that it’s obvious, and He’s obvious, to all.

“Is God…?” gets similar answers. They want to know if He’s there and real, whether He’s dead or an alien, and whether He can do anything. (And some folks are wondering about Godzilla. Yeesh.)

Admittedly this is nowhere close to being scientific. Not every question about God begins with a verb. But it’s kinda enlightening as to what some folks in our world are thinking. And if you want to fiddle around with Google and see if you can find enough of these to write a nice moving sermon—or to plagiarize yourself a nice profound blog entry—go for it.

Eggplant Buffalo Mozzarella, and my family’s take on my cooking.

Funny thing is, I talk about cooking a lot, but my cooking makes my family nervous.

Somehow I have developed this reputation with my family of being an unreliable cook. Not a bad cook… but their first response, whenever I make something, is to say, “What’s in this?… How’d you make it?… Okay…” and then cautiously taste it. Or not.

Consequently I don’t cook for them very often. I’ve cooked around them a whole bunch of times. When I last lived with Mom she tended to do most of the cooking just because she would get home from work and start cooking, whereas I only cook when I’m hungry… and by the time I had thought to prepare something, Mom had already made enough for four. When people do that, it is really easy to get into the habit of just letting them do that. But I never expected or demanded it. If she wasn’t cooking, then I was, or my brother was, or my sister was. But whenever I cooked, my brother and sister would do the usual: “What’s in this?… How’d you make it?…”

“He puts tuna in spaghetti,” would be my sister Kerry’s excuse for this behavior.

Yes. I like to experiment with food. I have found that I like some of my experiments quite a lot. Tuna doesn’t work at all well with my current recipe for marinara sauce, but it worked just fine with my previous recipe (tomato paste, cooking wine, water, olive oil, garlic powder, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, oregano, salt; heat & stir).

Kerry was particularly horrified once when my spaghetti sauce contained some meat she didn’t recognize, which turned out to be cooked peeled shrimp. She hated shrimp, or so she claimed. She had a prejudice against seafood at that time; she assumed she hated all of it, though she made an exception for tuna. But not for my tuna spaghetti, and especially not shrimp spaghetti. I maintain that she was enjoying it just fine until she found out I had put shrimp in it; she maintains that she did not and never did. I think she’s just sticking with a variation of the story that makes her sound more put-upon. Nothing like a fun anecdote about your brother the crazy cook.

Anyway. I have made various things since, for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and Passover dinners, and not once in all those times have folks found my creations to be subpar or inedible. But once you get a reputation, however undeserved, it sorta sticks in you, like a hood ornament in a bike messenger.

Funny thing is, since my roommates have never heard any of the griping from my family, and since they‘ve actually seen me in action, they’ve come to the conclusion that I am a brilliant cook. Which I’m not; I’m just okay. I like my cooking, anyway. Two of them don’t cook and don’t know any better. Two do, and know that I’m willing to try things they aren’t, and figure that’s a mark of brilliance. Ech; it could be a mark of insanity too, you know. That’s the conclusion my family came to long ago.

As I said, I’m willing to try things others aren’t. Mainly that’s because people assume cooking is like chemistry: make a mistake in the formula, or the recipe and the food is ruined. That’s only true for baking. Once it goes in the stove, it had better be mixed right or it’ll go wrong. Everything else—everything that goes on the griddle, on the barbecue, in the pan, in the pot, or even in the microwave, is constantly adjustable. You can turn up or down the heat; you can add more water or drain it; you can add more ingredients or not; you can stop the process or keep going.

Or, in my case, you can make substitutions. Not even the ingredients are fixed quantities. If I want to replace eggs and sugar with applesauce, I can. If I want to replace honey with grape jam, I can. If I swap a bell pepper with onions and Tapatio, I can live with that. If you can’t, you probably don’t enjoy cooking very much; or you see it as a process whereby you get the exact same item every time you make it. Me, I like variety. If I want sameness, I’ll go to McDonald’s. (But I rarely go to McDonald’s.)

Today I had half an eggplant in the fridge and decided to make eggplant Parmesan. I don’t have any Parmesan cheese in the fridge. (My roommates technically don’t either. They have that awful three-cheese grated blend that tastes like Parmesan only after you’ve left it in the freezer for six months to suck most of the flavor out of it, then replaced the lack of flavor with salt and soy.) I do, on the other hand, have some Italian buffalo mozzarella… don’t knock it; it was on sale. Tastes like cow mozzarella.

Kent’s Eggplant Parmesan Buffalo Mozzarella.

First, you need marinara sauce. When I make sauce, I make enough for about six meals, and I had about four meals’ worth in the fridge. Now I have two. You don’t have to make your own sauce. You can buy a can or jar of the stuff. Just make sure it’s a chunky kind. A liquidy kind will get boring really fast. Unless you like boring. Many do.

If you would rather have chicken Parmesan, you can buy pre-baked breaded chicken or chicken nuggets, and skip the next steps. But if you’re a purist—and how you know you’re a purist is if you, like me, made your own sauce—then make your chicken the same way you prepare the eggplant.

Slice the eggplant. Traditionally it’s sliced into big flat circles, but you don’t have to be so particular; cubes are fine. Then bread it. I use egg and flour and matzo farfel (dip in egg, then roll in the flour/farfel mix), but you can use bread crumbs or cracker crumbs or Shake ’n Bake or stuffing mix. Whatever floats your boat. Then fry it in olive oil or butter or pan spray. I have this trans-fat-free margarine that I use for a lot of things. I can believe it’s not butter; but it works for me.

There are two ways of doing eggplant Parmesan. The traditional way is to put marinara sauce, the breaded eggplant, and lots of Parmesan into a casserole dish and bake it casserole-style. The way restaurants do it—’cause Americans like their eggplant (or chicken) crispy—is to prepare the breaded eggplant (or chicken), then dump Parmesan and marinara on it. Whatever works for you. I wanted it casserole style, but rather than cook it in the oven, I nuked it in the microwave for 10 minutes. Baking would have taken longer, and made it just as soggy. It actually wasn’t that soggy either.

I made layers in the dish: Sauce on bottom, then eggplant, cheese, more eggplant, more sauce; then did it again. (Small dish.)

Half an eggplant serves three, provided you have side dishes. I didn’t bother to make any.

Thanksgiving is coming, and naturally I am gonna make something, though more than likely it will be one of our usual family-tradition entrées that everyone is okay with me doing ’cause I shouldn’t screw it up too much. Though I may make a dessert that no one but me will eat… which is fine with me; more for me.

I am tempted to make homemade cranberry jam. Considering that cranberry sauce can be found for less than a dollar, it may not be very economical to splurge on a pound of cranberries and a pound of sugar, but you see, the quality of the homemade jam will make everyone wonder why they ever bothered purchasing that canned crap.

So if I make a dessert too, it will be something cranberry-related. Jam can be made on Wednesday, so as to not occupy the stove when everyone else is at it… and to give me some leeway in case I burn anything. One never knows.

Plans, plans. I have enough things on my plate this week anyway.

Atheists are jerks. So are we when we adopt their tactics.

I don’t use any apologetics techniques when I talk with atheists. Maybe that’s why my “tactics” impress people.

Frequently I read other blogs, and from time to time I comment on them. I don’t do it a lot; I tend to save comments for people who know me, like the folks on Facebook. That’s because I have found, from my time on Xanga, that some folks are hugely annoyed when you make comments about the stuff they write, and they don’t recognize you or know you or even want any input.

On the other hand, there are many who so desperately want a response, any response, that they go bonkers when you don’t comment on their blogs. A lot of the folks I used to synchroblog with dropped out of the group simply because they weren’t getting the responses, or the level of responses, they wanted. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t inspired enough by what they wrote to post anything—and this is no slight against their writing ability; it either means that I agreed with them, but not wholeheartedly, or that I disagreed with them, but didn’t think it was worth debating… or that I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, ’cause the stuff that works them into a lather does nothing for me.

I’ll admit it if no one else will: Comments, like blogs, are primarily self-centered. We write and maintain blogs because we think our little opinions are important enough to broadcast to the world via the Internet. We pitch our two cents onto others’ blogs for much the same reason. Some folks only read certain blogs because that blog—unlike their own—has a wider audience for their witty remarks, and lets them comment with impunity. If bloggers won’t let them ride their coattails, the commenters will go away and won’t return. (Much like a lot of my regular readers after I turned the comments off.)

From time to time someone will refer to something I’ve written, and in order to know what they’re talking about—’cause they might be quoting me wrong, or I what I wrote might be wrong, or it might even be that I don’t believe that anymore—I look it up on my blogs. The trouble is that not everything I’ve written is here. I’ve got stuff floating around the ether in all sorts of places. Fewer places now that Yahoo took GeoCities down; but I’ve got comments on sites I forgot I posted to, and quotes from sites I don’t recognize at all. (I’m just glad people attributed my stuff properly and didn’t just plagiarize it outright.)

A fan referred recently to a “debate” I had with some atheists. I didn’t remember staging any such thing, but it wasn’t staged; it just sorta happened on the Internet Monk’s website two years ago. He was writing about the movie The Golden Compass, which I watched last year and found deathly boring. His point was that the author of the book series wrote them to promote atheism, and how he wasn’t freaked out over the idea of an atheism-supporting children’s movie in the theaters because we shouldn’t fear the atheist perspective; it’s intellectually bankrupt, and children won’t be tempted away from Jesus by it if they’ve heard Jesus properly. What’s more, atheists are quick to call us Christians on it when we don’t present Jesus properly: Because they can’t really counter true Christianity, they pick away at the false, fraudulent, or ill-practiced Christianity. They keep us honest. They’re useful in that, I suppose.

I added a comment, pointing out that atheism is largely based on a personal animosity towards God rather than an intellectual argument. And, admittedly, Christianity is the same way: It’s based on the love of God rather than an intellectual argument. Neither side is going to sway the other through logic. Especially when atheists tend to—in my experience anyway—behave like utter jerks towards theists.

Yeah, the same can be said of us Christians. But I find it’s much more true of atheists. They aren’t hampered by Jesus’s command to love your enemies, so they tend to tear into Christians like roosters in a cockfight. Occasionally you get a polite one, but that’s just because they’re better at hiding the hostility, or disguising it as a sense of humor.

So I encouraged the Internet Monk to let his kids see atheists in action. “Nothing will turn them off to the philosophy more than the lack of grace in its practitioners,” I said.

Well, you realize that if atheists were to read that statement, they wouldn’t take it lying down. And thus began the “debate,” as my correspondent called it. Which I’ve included below.

WeeMaryAnne. Pardon me, but your comment is enough to make a cat laugh. Atheists don’t have any “personal animosity towards god.” They don’t believe in any god to begin with. It’s impossible to dislike something that’s not even there.

And I think you’ll need to define what you mean by “grace” before accusing someone like, say, Daniel Dennett of lacking same.

 

Ray. This is a paraphrase of something wiser men than I have said, but it says something important that religious people don’t seem to understand: atheism is nothing more and nothing less than not having a belief in any gods. They hold no personal animosity for your god any more than they have a personal animosity towards invisible pink unicorns.

Christians are almost as atheistic as atheists are… atheists just happen to believe in one fewer god.

There have been tens of thousands of gods people have believed in over the course of human history, and you only believe in one of them.

If you’re interesting in having an open mind, try this experiment: list at least 5 logical reasons why you don’t believe in Thor, the Norse God of Thunder.

I’d be very surprised if an atheist would make a significantly different list for why they don’t believe in the god of the Abrahamic tradition.

 

Me. If it’s impossible to dislike something that’s “not even there,” why is it that any atheist’s subsequent discussion about God automatically consists of condescending ridicule?

Any atheist. Even the nice ones. None of them are willing to civilly accept the theist’s point of view simply for the sake of argument. All of them have to start bashing God and those who believe in Him, either overtly or subtly. They may not even be aware they’re doing it, but the animosity is pretty obvious, particularly to those who happen to love God. It’s exactly like you’re picking on my dad.

If it was nothing more than an intellectual affirmation, there wouldn’t be any of this hostility. But there is, so it’s there. Any theist can see it.

As for Ray’s five reasons why I don’t believe in Thor (other than in the comic books)—

1. Thor hasn’t spoken to me, then later confirmed he spoke to me through an unrelated Thor-follower.
2. Thor hasn’t told me something would happen before it happened, and had it come true in great detail. (And no self-fulfilling prophecy either.)
3. Thor hasn’t inspired prophets to tell me anything that uniquely related to my life.
4. Thor hasn’t healed my relatives of illness in a way that doctors can’t adequately explain, and only minutes after my prayers were offered to him.
5. I haven’t found Thor’s teachings, when properly followed, to be eminently practical.

However, all of these things have happened to me with Jesus.

 

WeeMaryAnne. If I “civilly accept” your point of view, then why would we even be arguing at all? It’s not rude to point out the lack of evidence to support your assertions; there’s nothing uncivil about calling nonsense nonsense. If you don’t like to hear it, that’s your concern, not mine.

 

Demeus. Often times in order to point out fallacies in the concept of God, atheists have to argue to believers from the standpoint of God’s existence being true, simply because many believers cannot accept any other world view. It’s not hatred of God (which is a totally meaningless concept to an actual atheist) its simply begging the question of God’s existence in order to show logical weaknesses in a believer’s idea of God.

 

Me. But you see, my belief in God does not stem from a logical basis. It stems from an experiential one.

If I were to reduce my relationship with my U.S. Senator to a logical basis, then of course she doesn’t exist. Most of her policies and practices don’t trickle down to me. Those few that do can be explained away. I don’t deduce her existence logically. Why would I? Should I? …If others tell me she exists, I could choose to believe them or not, and they’ll think me either nuts or overly skeptical if I don’t. And if I ridicule them for believing in any such thing as a Senator, or tried to “enlighten” them by pointing out some logical proofs for the non-existence of my Senator… well, that’s how Christians feel when atheists tear into us.

No, it’s not rude to point out a lack of evidence. But my beef is with the condescending, ridiculing way in which this lack of evidence is presented. Usually with an attitude of, “You silly theist, you’re still living in the Dark Ages; come join us in the Enlightenment, where we believe in science and progress and moving beyond your ridiculous superstitions and blinking fear of a wrathful god.” As if I don’t believe in science and progress, or as if I believed in superstitions and a wrathful God. If that’s what an atheist thinks God is, I can understand rejecting that idea. Myself, I can’t claim to have God figured out so well.

 

WeeMaryAnne. Very well, you’ve experienced something you call god. That’s nice for you, but meaningless to me. If you were a small child then I might indulge your belief (temporarily), but since you’re not then it would be the height, or rather the depth, of condescension to pretend along with you for even a moment.

So you see, I do indeed make a distinction between K.W. the person, who is worthy of respect simply by virtue of being human, and K.W.’s professed beliefs, which are unsupported by any evidence or convincing argument and therefore do not merit such respect.

And just to make myself clear: I do not think that god is wrathful. I do not think that god is, period.

Finally, I’m still interested to hear your definition of the quality of grace.

 

Me. You forget how closely people identify with their beliefs. If beliefs aren’t considered worthy of respect, how much respect can one have for the person that holds them? One can claim to respect me but not my beliefs, but that claim rings a bit hollow when one mocks me through my beliefs. (“If you were a small child I might indulge your belief…” implies theism is only for children and the mentally deficient, as I must be to hold such ideas. You see?)

The trouble is that the people on this site don’t know me. My claims are only as valid as I am. If you don’t know how valid I am, I can understand a certain degree of skepticism. What I don’t understand is dismissal. Even with those whose posts get completely obnoxious, we must differentiate between the writer and the idea, otherwise we call that an ad hominem logical fallacy. If you knew me, saw my lifestyle, and noticed how my theism was an integral part of it, you might understand it better. But all I am right here is words on a website.

I don’t understand what is meant by “the quality of grace.” I’m just going off the usual dictionary definition of grace. I’m not in the redefinition business. (Nor am I implying anyone else is.)

 

WeeMaryAnne. Okay, that’s a fair point about how people identify with their beliefs; however, it doesn’t necessarily hold. This atheist generally laughs when told that atheism is an untenable position. I don’t feel personally attacked or denigrated. Whether this is mostly a difference in attitude, or whether I’m simply more confident in holding a position with evidence to support it, I can’t tell.

I do feel personally affronted when threatened with some form of punishment, either temporal or spiritual, for having the effrontery to disagree with the majority. I get that a lot and I have no patience with it. Yes, I know that’s not the position you’re taking here; I refer to it for the sake of contrast. Sorry for the digression.

The quality of grace—you accused atheist writers of being graceless. If you’ve heard Daniel Dennett speak (for example), you might wish to revise that opinion. The man is a combination of Everybody’s Favorite Teacher and Everybody’s Favorite Uncle. And in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins writes to his late friend, “Douglas, I miss you,” and you can actually feel a lump in your throat as he adds exactly why he misses him.

However you define grace, it must include this, no?

 

Ray. Re: your 5 reasons for not believing in Thor. Allow me to confirm that those 5 reasons are perfectly applicable to my non-belief in Y-VH (see, I even respect your feelings about that name).

I accept that you believe you’ve had these experiences, but allow me further indulgence:

1. Have you actually heard a god’s voice in your head, and if so, how do you know his or her identity?
2. I’ll accept your story for a moment, but how do you know that wasn’t Thor? And to question your story for a moment, how well do you understand the statistics of coincidence?
3. Again, how do you know that? Maybe it was Y-VH, maybe it was Thor, maybe those prophets were motivated to lie for some reason, or perhaps they were just delusional and/or speaking from logical observations about the world as though they were inspired. I’m not saying any of those things are true, just curious how you know.
4. I repeat my questions for #2, and add a question about the statistics of spontaneous remission of diseases.
5. Do you even know the teachings of Thor? If not, certainly it’s practical not to anger the gods, and him in particular… why… you might get hit by lightning! Haven’t you heard his wrath every time a thunderstorm comes through? There are a lot of sinners out there, and almost no one believes in him any more… that’d sure annoy me if I were a god. Why, I might even be motivated to strike down dozens or even hundreds of people a year for their insolence. Of course, if I had any mercy or kindness in me at all I wouldn’t strike down millions a year even if they were all guilty… so the statistics of death by lightning seem perfectly reasonable to me. Or, at least, more reasonable than concluding Y-VH is omnipotent and infinitely merciful.

 

Me: Two responses—

WeeMaryAnne: Threatening atheists with hellfire is an all-too-common Christian response, and just as graceless as accusing Christians of stupidity. I’m fully aware that theists can be obnoxious. I believe when they behave that way it’s a sign they believe in God rather than know God. Those of us who know God can’t behave that way for very long without God calling us on our bad behavior.

I didn’t accuse atheist writers of being graceless; it was actually a blanket statement made about any and every atheist. Probably a bit unfair, since I can’t claim to know for certain that there is no such thing as a kind atheist. I can only believe there is no such thing, and make lots of logical arguments to prove it; and when you try to offer evidence to the contrary I can simply fall back on my original assumption: “Atheists are rude. Period.” But I don’t wish to be closed-minded about it. Possibly you’re right. It’s just that every time I see atheists debate Christians, or debate an atheist myself, their disdain comes out.

Ray: I don’t mind you spelling out YHVH. I don’t think He minds either. Again, I’m not superstitious. I’ll try to answer your questions briefly.

1. Yes. His behavior and statements are consistent with the historic Christian understanding of God; and since I’m not the only one who hears Him, I can compare experiences with other Christians.
2. I never took Statistics. I do know that when you get too many coincidences on top of one another, it’s no coincidence. When I or others are given information we shouldn’t know, it’s pretty convincing proof. Besides which, God doesn’t tell me stuff I want to hear; He frequently tells me stuff I don’t want to hear. He’s correcting me, you see. He’s making me behave. Thor was never much interested in morality.
3. To be fair, I don’t know whether Thor inspired anyone to write anything; like you, I don’t believe in Thor, and don’t worry about him. If he were real I expect he would have pitched a fit about the Christianization of Scandinavia and fought it harder. My belief in God has to do with God’s actions, and I can’t say I’ve experienced any of Thor’s.
4. I don’t believe in spontaneous remission of diseases; I believe in cause and effect. “Spontaneous remission” is another way of saying “I don’t know why this happened.” Maybe an immune system rallied; maybe a cure was effected; maybe the disease mutated into something that couldn’t spread further; I have no idea and neither do the doctors. I think it’s reasonable to believe that if a disease disappears instantly it’s due to some outside agency, and if it wasn’t the doctor or the white blood cells that leaves God. Unless one rejects a belief in God, in which case one is stuck with a blind faith in “spontaneity.”
5. Thor actually taught nothing. Thorism is not a philosophical religion, but religious feudalism: “Thor is mighty. Worship Thor or Thor will strike you down,” bundled with stories of Thor’s strength. If you’re familiar with the bible, you’ll note God didn’t smite anyone unless their behavior was destroying others, and much more often than not He forgave. (It looks like there’s a lot of smiting because the 50-, 100-, and 400-year intervals between smitings aren’t so well catalogued. The bible, unfortunately, doesn’t spend a lot of time chronicling when people behaved themselves. Great literature is borne of conflict, you’ll remember.) You’ll also note that God has little to do with the weather (except to stop it, as Jesus did a few times). A lot of the misconceptions about God have to do with mixing pagan views of God with Christian ones, and like I said, I don’t believe in that god either.

They didn’t make any further comments, so I suppose that’s as far as the “debate” goes.

My correspondent was really impressed by my “tactics,” as he put it: that instead of going through the usual apologist’s smorgasbord of logical proofs for the existence of God, I did an end-run around all that and talked about my personal experiences with Him, which the atheists really couldn’t debate at all.

First of all, it was not my intention to get in an atheist-versus-Christian debate. I was making a comment. True, a provocative one, but I don’t do passive-agressive provocation. That is, if I want people to respond to something I say, I flat out ask for responses. When I wrote for newspapers, I included phone numbers; when I blog, I include my email address. If it’s someone else’s blog… well, I have no business taking over their blog to start my debate. Unless it’s with them, and even then, I don’t want a debate; I just want to ask them why they’ve come to the conclusion they have, or point out that they’re wrong, and if it turns into a debate, that’s sorta on them. I have better things to do than to go back to someone else’s blog on a regular basis, and see how someone responded to my comment, and compose answers. I already get plenty of email like that.

It became a debate only because the atheists decided to make typical atheist statements. They make the same mistake Christian apologists do: They try to argue from logic.

Now, humans aren”t logical. I say this all the time. We don’t make decisions based on logic; we make them based on emotion, and ex post facto justify the emotional decision with logic. I don’t believe in Jesus because I examined every human religion and concluded that Christianity was the most logically consistent; I believe in Jesus because my mom introduced me to Him when I was four years old. The person who comes to Christ through logical deduction is extremely rare. We certainly don’t see any such people in the bible.

Yet somehow apologists have convinced us that the way to defend Jesus and Christianity is through logic. Why? Well, because they’re making the inaccurate assumption that people will be receptive to logic. Unbelievers regularly claim that their nonbelief is entirely the result of logic. Apologists have taken them at their word. They shouldn’t have. The atheists were lying. Logically concluding there’s no God sounds much more noble than being pissed at Christians behaving badly, and therefore concluding our religion is a sham. There are some honest atheists who admit their search for logic came as the result of Christians behaving badly; but it’s true in every case: The logic always came second. The annoyance at God, or Christians, or any sort of theism, always came first. Then the logic necessary to dismiss God. Then, since there was no God to begin with, any animosity towards God must not have ever been real, because God wasn’t real. See how easy denial can be once you apply logic to it?

Apologists claim we have to learn logical arguments because everyone will respect logic. That’s ridiculous. No one, except certain mathematicians and scientists, respects logic in and of itself. People will only respect logic if it leads to a conclusion that they already embrace. Otherwise they’ll think there’s a flaw someplace, and will search like mad to find that flaw. And that’s why logic doesn’t work in apologetics: Humans aren’t logical.

If you don’t have logic, what then do you have? Emotion, of course; but while everyone follows their own emotions (or “trusts their instinct,” “follows their gut,” “knows it in their knower,” “feels it in their bones”) they’re not gonna follow mine unless they know me well enough to trust me, or are willing to “follow their heart”—again with the emotion—and trust me despite not knowing me. That’s not gonna happen. I have no chance at talking them into Christianity, much less out of atheism. I have no solid relationship to start from. I have, actually, a damaged one; I am pro-God, they are anti-God, and I’ve already insulted them by stating a reality that they much prefer to deny.

So we can’t debate. So I didn’t try.

What you see in my responses are not “tactics,” because I had no goal to convert any of these folks. I expressed my personal, subjective opinion. I didn’t switch to an objective opinion and fight ’em with logic, because that’s an apologetics tactic, and won’t work anyway.

Instead, I stuck to what I know. I stuck to personal experiences. True, they can’t verify my experiences; they have to take or leave them. But they were gonna do that anyway if I tried to use logic. And logic answers are ultimately weak, flabby answers. There’s no relationship with God in them. Consequently there’s very little love, which is why most apologists tend to turn into the very sort of condescending a--holes that I was complaining the atheists are.

I recommended to my correspondent—and I recommend to everyone—that we not debate atheists. There’s no point. You want them to turn to Jesus, you need to be Jesus to them, and convince them by clearly demonstrating His presence in your life. If they see Jesus in you they really can’t deny Him. But if all you have for them is logic, they can bat that away like a cat smacking string.

There are reasons to be vegetarian. PETA’s reasons suck, though.

Animal abuse and being a carnivore are not the same thing. That is, unless you’re eating a live animal, which I personally can’t approve of.

Back in 1997 I was a vegetarian for six months. Not a vegan; I still ate dairy products, though being a little bit lactose-intolerant, I didn’t eat a lot of them. And I didn’t make the bizarre decision that fish and eggs don’t count. Meat is meat. I went without meat.

This wasn’t an experiment, though it sure felt like one. It was when I was first doing long-term fasts: diet soda for six months, no caffeine for six months, and now no meat. Much as I like the occasional hamburger, I figured I could go without meat for a while.

And ordinarily it would have been a breeze, but I was going to Bethany College at the time, and eating at Café Bethany. The cooks typically made a vegetarian entrée for the few vegetarians on campus, but more often than not the vegetarian alternative was a variant of the main course, without meat. If the main course was hot dogs, the vegetarian course was soy dogs. These were bright pink sausage-shaped atrocities that, despite a hot dog really having no texture, still managed to get the texture wrong. They tasted like a large, moist Bac-O-Bit. Ever eaten those things? I suspect they were invented by masochistic vegetarians who wanted to punish themselves for desiring meat. Anyway, I and the other meat-shunners were forced to deal with lots of poorly made alternatives, frequently featuring soy or eggplant or eggs (“What do you mean, eggs are meat?”) by cooks who wouldn’t eat the stuff either. That, or eat lots of stuff from the salad bar.

Going without meat temporarily makes you somewhat sympathetic to those who go without it permanently. Because not all of them are doing it for dumbass reasons. Valid reasons include being allergic, religious convictions, and dietary concerns.

There are quite a few vegetarians in the United States—in a 2006 poll it was calculated about 6.7 percent of us, or roughly 19 million Americans, are vegetarian. Only 1.4 percent are vegan. They’re not a big group, but they can be a noisy group. Particularly when there isn’t enough cheese pizza to go around, so you have to resort to picking the pepperoni slices off the other pizzas.

Most of the vegetarians I know have problems with the way meat is raised and harvested. I don’t blame them for being repulsed by that. I’ve seen the videos of how factory farms treat their animals. But I’ve also seen how proper slaughterhouses work, and how ethical ranchers behave. Food animals should be provided with care, good treatment, and as happy a life as they can have. It’s the least they’re owed.

I mentioned dumbass reasons, and among those reasons I include the thinking that we shouldn’t eat animals because some of them are mistreated. Following that logic, we shouldn’t hire employees because some of them are mistreated; or we shouldn’t raise children because some of them are mistreated. It’s only a valid reason for not mistreating animals. If you think of eating an animal as mistreatment, I think you’re forgetting: The animal is dead. (Or should be.) You can’t mistreat the dead. You can kill it wrong, or horribly; you shouldn’t. But once it is dead, it is entirely beyond caring. I wouldn’t care if someone ate me, after I die; not that I approve of cannibalism, or think it okay, but being dead, I would be beyond caring. My family might have a problem with it… or, if we were trapped in the Andes after a plane crash, they might not. Point being, I wouldn’t consider it mistreatment. I only would if we were hacking bits off me while I’m still alive.

Chew on this.

This argument is the main one that PETA makes in favor of vegetarianism. PETA is the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, although they’re really better known for convincing naïve models and actresses to show their naked asses for in support of vegetarianism. To me, highlighting animal abuse by encouraging guys to spank the monkey sounds like a mixed message.

They have a video, which I’ve included here: “Chew on This: 30 Reasons to Go Vegetarian.”

1. Because heart disease begins in childhood. That’s not a reason.
2. Because a vegetarian diet reverses heart disease. Okay, there’s a reason. Why didn’t you say you were gonna break your reasons in half and claim you had more of them?

   As I said, diet is a valid reason to be a vegetarian. If you want to decrease your chances of heart disease, you need to avoid the tremendous amounts of meat and dairy that the average American eats. Moderation will decrease your chances of heart disease just as effectively, but most people don’t realize “moderate” means “a pound of meat a week,” and would go bonkers eating any less than a pound of meat per meal. And that includes afternoon and midnight snacks.

3. Because eating meat and dairy makes you fat. I have known chunky vegans and skinny carnivores. I find corn syrup and vegetable shortening tend to bulk Americans up a lot more than meat and dairy does, and if you’re the sort that gorges yourself on hamburgers, you’re just as likely to gorge yourself on veggie stir-fry.
4. Because you shouldn’t have to lie to your kids about the food that you eat. The video here displays a few bits from PETA’s vast library of egregious factory farming practices. If you’ve ever watched one, it’ll turn your stomach. It’s similar stuff to what Upton Sinclair described in The Jungle (only people don’t read nowadays, hence the videos). The implication is that all meat is got this way, and anyone who says otherwise is lying—to themselves, or to their kids. I have seen different, and know better.
5. Because in every package of chicken, there’s a little poop. That’s why you wash your chicken! But since vegetarians don’t prepare chicken, I suppose I shouldn’t expect them to know this.
6. Because meat is filthy and bloody. Again: vegans don’t know how to prepare meat. You wash and drain it. This should be obvious; you do wash potatoes and mushrooms, right? (Please tell me you do.)
7. Because it isn’t fair. And not eating meat will make it fair? Not eating meat means food animals will have to go into the woods and fend for themselves. Consequently they’ll have lives just as short, only more pain-filled and horrific, as every predator in nature goes after them. And that pain and horror is in comparison with a factory farm. Ranches are paradise by comparison.
8. Because no living creature wants to see her family slaughtered. True. That’s why PETA, when it slaughters animals—sorry, “euthanizes the suffering victims of animal abuse”—takes the animals into separate rooms so they can die alone, with privacy and dignity. Right? Oh, they don’t? They only do that when it’s practical? Oh. Oh well. Never mind.

   Practicing what you preach aside, animals are only traumatized by the slaughter of other animals when it’s not a quick, discreet, and painless slaughter. They only freak out when they hear other animals suffer. Otherwise, they don’t even know what’s going on. The solution to this problem is ethical slaughterhouse practices. But PETA doesn’t believe any slaughtering is ethical. The only time you can kill an animal is to end its suffering… and when you have no intention of eating it later.

9. Eating meat can cause impotence. And eating soy can cause male lactation. But both are only true when you overdo it. Moderation, folks. Pulling out arguments that are only valid when people are gluttons makes you look like you can only make your case when you stretch the truth.
10. Because mad cow disease is in the U.S. Yes, it is. Which is really an argument against eating one particular kind of meat, or eating it raw.
11. Because it’s violence you can stop. Hardly. You know who a company listens to least? Non-customers. They listen to customers. If you’re a meat-eater—a big meat-eater—and you won’t do business with a factory farm because of their unethical practices, they will actually change their practices to accommodate you, because they want your business. They’re not gonna get a dime from vegetarians, and they’re not gonna lose all that much money—or sleep—over any new-found convictions you might have against eating meat. Demand for cheap meat is still insanely high, which is why they’re constantly trying to buy more land and build more plants.
12. Because no one should have to make a living by killing. PETA means killing animals. Plants and fungus, they’re okay with. All humans kill; animals eat living things, or formerly living things, in order to live. PETA draws the line at animals. They’ll kill all the plants they like.

    This reason is called “begging the question”—where you take the conclusion that you’re hoping to make, and use it as one of the arguments you use to make it. It’s saying, “Here are 30 reasons why killing animals is bad. Number 12: Killing animals is bad.” They do that a lot, in this list. This one is just the most obvious example.

    But PETA isn’t trying to appeal to logic. They want you to watch the videos of suffering animals and think, “How horrible. I’ll never eat meat again. Maybe that will magically stop the suffering.”

13. Because it takes a small person to beat a defenseless animal… and here’s where you watch a video clip of someone kicking a pig. Watch the pig suffer. How horrible! Then the announcer says, “…and an even smaller person to eat it. Oh, snap… you eat those pigs. Now you’re supposed to feel guilt by unwitting consent.

    The animal-abuse argument comes up a lot in the later points. I am absolutely agreed that animal abuse is wrong. Unethical factory farms and unethical ranchers will do all sorts of horrible things to animals, and should rightly be prosecuted for it. We do have laws against such things.

    But animal mistreatment and eating an animal are two different things, as I said above. How the animal was killed is a big deal. How the animal was treated while alive is a big deal. These are things that carnivores should care about.

    Part of the reason we don’t is because PETA, and groups like them, have successfully managed to equate two things that are entirely different. As a result, some carnivores think that animal abuse is part of how we slaughter animals. They think animal suffering is simply a step in the process. And it absolutely isn’t.

    If PETA wants to break into factories and videotape all the horrors and get people prosecuted for it, that is fine by me. I wish they would spend more time trying to publicize a list of factories that do evil crap like this, rather than trying to get supermodels to wear nothing but lettuce, or protesting Kentucky Fried Chicken. But they really can’t see the difference.

14. Because no animal deserves to die for your tastebuds. Here’s an interesting idea: the thought that a death might be deserved. Does any animal deserve to die? Well yes; if it sins. For us it would depend on the egregiousness of the sin. If it ate your tulips, no; if it ate your sister, maybe.

    But everyone dies. Does everyone deserve to die? (In Christian theology, yes, but I’m not talking about that right now.) And let’s extend that to every living thing in the universe: As far as we can tell, everything dies. Every animal dies. Are all those deaths deserved? Are any of them? Most of us would probably conclude no. Accidents, fr’instance, are usually undeserved. Same with illness. Or if a predator catches and kills you.

    In this sense, “undeserved” doesn’t mean “You didn’t deserve it” so much as it means “This has nothing to do with whether one deserves it.” If I catch a cold, I don’t deserve to die of it, but only because the situation has nothing to do with what I deserve or don’t. Sometimes people die of colds. That’s part of the universe we live in.

    And sometimes predators catch prey. And sometimes humans are the predators, and our method of catching prey has evolved into domesticated animals raised on ranches, where we breed them into something easy to get lots of meat from. Do they deserve it? Nah. Deserving has nothing to do with it.

    Otherwise the only animals we’d eat would be for vengeance, and there’s something profoundly wrong with that idea.

15. Because the grain used to feed them could feed them. The second “them” would be hungry children. The reason children go hungry have nothing to do with food shortages; it has everything to do with politics and inefficient food distribution. We have more than enough to feed animals and hungry children—and to feed the animals to the hungry children. Except I suspect PETA would be okay with just giving kids the grass and alfalfa. (What, did you think cows and sheep eat wheat and rice?)
16. Did you know more than half of all water used in the U.S. goes to raising animals for food? Nah, but it doesn’t surprise me. Still, we’re not suffering from a lack of water. (Except for the San Joaquin Valley, whose water was turned off in order to preserve the Delta smelt, a federally protected fish; consequently a lot of crops, which could have fed thousands of vegetarians, are lost. All to defend some animals that we don’t eat. Oddly, I bet PETA approves.)
17. You can’t eat meat and call yourself an environmentalist. Not sure why not. Millions of Americans do. You could reduce your carbon footprint significantly by raising your own chickens, which produce a lot more food faster and more efficiently than an acre of crops. Or mowing your grass with goats… whose population you could control by eating them.
18. Because they’re defenseless. They’re really not. Chickens peck, pigs bite, sheep and goats butt, cows trample, bulls gore. Of course, in comparison with a gun or machete, that’s nothing, but still.
19. Because when animals feel pain, they scream too. So don’t hurt them.
20. Because they don’t wanna die. Few animals do. Of course, this hasn’t stopped PETA from euthanizing lots of suffering animals. Really, for PETA, it all comes down to whether you’re gonna eat them afterwards.
21. Because they feal fear. So don’t scare them.
22. Because no matter how you slice it, it’s still flesh. Kind of a weird argument: “Don’t eat meat because… it’s meat. Eww.” You’re not gonna win a carnivore over with that one.
23. Because commerce is no excuse for murder. Well, we’ve not established that butchering animals is murder, but if you want to jump forward to that idea without arguing it out, let’s stop and talk about it, shall we?

    Murder is a legal term. It’s is the unlawful, premeditated killing of one human by another. You can use it to refer to animals; you can prosecute people for unlawfully and premeditatively killing animals. The catch is that these can’t be your animals, and you can’t torture them to death. But if you want to euthanize your cat, you can; and if you want to kill your turkey, you can; and if you want to slaughter your goats, you can. Legally, it’s not murder, no matter what we call it.

    PETA can call butchering murder, and does. Likewise, I can call euthanization murder, and call PETA murderers for doing it. We might each personally believe we’re right to use that word, but legally, neither of us has a leg to stand on. And we might be using the word mostly so that we can get a reaction out of people who aren’t used to thinking of such things as “murder.” But legally, they’re not. The difference is that I admit it.

    Commerce is no excuse for murder, provided actual murder is taking place. It’s not. Legally, a factory farm can do all sorts of things to its animals. That this is legal doesn’t make it right; but I should point out that a lot of the things PETA shows them doing on their videos are not legal, and those factories should be prosecuted for it. A better statement would be “We’re just gonna eat them later” is no excuse for animal abuse. PETA just prefers that word “murder.”

24. Even prisons aren’t this crowded. This shown with a cage overpacked with chickens. See my carnivorism-isn’t-abuse argument.
25. Because this is not what wings are for. With a photo of uncooked chicken wings. See, you gotta show the food as unappetizing if you’re gonna make your point. The breaded, Buffalo-sauced kind wouldn’t do so well.
26. Because everyone wants to be free. Followed by photos of free-range chickens and cattle. (Which, I might point out, are still ranch animals. They’re still gonna be eaten.) Yeah, freedom is every creature’s natural state. I don’t want to deny animals freedom. But that includes if an animal wants to eat another animal.
27. Because eating fish doesn’t make you a vegetarian. True. But I fail to understand how that’s a reason to become a vegetarian. If you love fish, it isn’t gonna get you to quit and become a real vegetarian.

    You know, in some of these “reasons,” it seems the PETA folks have simply forgotten that they’re trying to make pro-vegetarian arguments, and are simply giving their positions. Which is fine, but it’s sort of a waste of their own time. There are much better arguments for vegetarianism. I might offer them another time. But not now. I’m in the middle of a list, you know.

28. Because might doesn’t make right. Their context (in the video) is an animal abuser dropping stuff on a pig’s head.
29. Because you know this is wrong. In reference to the dude dropping stuff on the pig.
30. Because you know this is wrong. In reference to someone de-beaking a bird. When you run out of arguments, just show lots of animal abuse and say, “Bad, bad, bad.”

Let me jump back to that “Might doesn’t make right” though. You could take this argument and expand it into a very good case for vegetarianism. Which is this:

We humans are on top of the food chain. We can, if we like, eat pretty much any animal in creation. Some of us are actually crazy enough to try it. But why put our intellectual effort into that—into eating any animal we like—and why not put it into eliminating the need to do that?

In the small scale, animals are an efficient food source. On a large scale, they’re really not. The massive demand for meat from a largely urban population has caused meat producers to switch from a ranch model to a factory farm model—where animal abuse is rampant, where the animals are poorly treated and unhealthy, and where the meat is of inferior quality. Obviously this is an unsatisfactory answer to the demand, and the only reason it goes on is because a lot of the abuses are covered up.

Wouldn’t it be easier, in the long run, if these factories switched, from processing animals into meat, to processing vegetables into meat substitutes? Less overhead, less waste, fewer investigations, more variety, more profit? The only catch is that you have to create more of a demand for meat substitutes; the way to do it is that it has to taste better than meat. Don’t tell me that can’t be done. We can do whatever we set our minds to.

The biggest problem with being a vegetarian is that the folks who were cooking for me didn’t know what they were doing. That’s most of the problem with vegetarian food: Carnivores aren’t making it for themselves. They don’t intend to eat it later, so it’s of inferior quality. Likewise, vegetarians don’t make recipes designed to appeal to carnivores—or they use awful meat substitutes that neither person cares to eat.

If you can make it so that meat is redundant, people will choose vegetarianism for the convenience, health, and taste benefits. That will go a lot farther than PETA’s isn’t-animal-abuse-bad arguments. So long that PETA sticks to these tactics—and the naked models, which really aren’t converting anyone except desperate guys who think vegetarianism might get them a date—the only thing that’s gonna cause an increase in vegetarianism would be the meat-producing industry’s own stupidity. And they’ve been pretty stupid lately.

In case you’re wondering: Yes, I still eat meat. Not much. Not often. I still won’t eat pork or shellfish. I’m not planning to go back to full-on vegetarianism. I’m not seeking converts; I’m not legalistic about my food choices, unlike most of the vegetarians I know. I wish those folks would come up with their own arguments for vegetarianism, instead of pointing people to PETA’s foolishness. Unless they’re fools themselves, which is a whole other rant.