Listing books.

“So you’re a reader,” she said. “What have you read this year?”

I have no idea how many books I’ve read this year.

Currently I'm in the middle of another Benjamin Franklin biography, another Sinclair Lewis novel, 12 books on small groups that my pastor lent me, and volume 2 of A Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica (which is occasionally annoying to read because the writer’s an anti-Semite, so sometimes you gotta ignore his conclusions because of his prejudices). And because of yesterday’s rant I'm now re-reading The Celestial Hierarchy.

That’s this week. That’s apart from scripture and the newspapers and Yahoo news and blogs. And none of them, I should point out, have anything to do with my studies… which really isn’t anything to brag about. I need to get to reading that stuff.

I read very fast and I have a retention level of more than 75 percent. It’s not a photographic memory, despite what Mom tells everyone; it’s just a very good one.

And my reading speed is highly annoying to most people. I think I already mentioned how my sister is annoyed whenever I completely read one of her books before she can get past the introduction. But there are others.

I used to have a roommate who was also a Bible/Theology major and we were both taking most of the same classes. At the beginning of each semester we’d buy our textbooks; and I would read them. He would take them to class, but some wouldn’t ever get read. Others would—if there were test questions from them. I read ’em because I paid for them and I wanted to know if they would be useful at all—and if they weren’t, I could sell them back quickly. Which I sometimes did. Got full price!

So, come midterms or finals, my roommate would finally crack the textbooks and read it in order to find test answers. Meanwhile, I’d be doing something else—reading for fun, or writing obnoxious posts on the Bethany Online system, or putting together the ultimate Monty Python and the Holy Grail homepage (which the school took off its servers once they discovered the Castle Anthrax scene.

“What are the three types of ecclesiastical authority?” he’d ask, or some other ecclesialogical test question.

Without looking up, I’d tell him.

“I hate you,” he’d respond.

“Read the book,” I’d shoot back.

He was reading the book. Right then. But sometimes I forget others don’t have my retention level, and I can be a little too obnoxious or condescending about it. I've been working on that.

Some people say geniuses are snotty. Okay, that’s fair. Some of us mean to be snotty, too; we suck at other things and we feel the need to remind everyone we do excel in some things, just to keep some sort of societal balance. In my case, I didn’t consider that others struggle at things I find easy, and I’d become unrealistically impatient with them. It actually wasn't until I started teaching that I realized I had to cut this evil crap out.

But this is why I can’t put together a booklist. Ask me to list something more realistic, like how many different kinds of coffee I currently own. Simple: Trader Joe’s French Roast, Gevalia’s Antiguan, and Gevalia’s Espresso Roast. There. Easy.

Don't 𝘥𝘰 that!

Some evil bastard emailed me recently, and I’ll cut ’n paste it here:

Dude! I LOVED the poem on your web site. That was pure genius. I e-mailed it to thirty people I know, they’ll totally love it cuz we've all had awful youth pastors like that before.

And I hope those awful youth pastors totally messed you up in advance retaliation for spreading spam on the internet.

I do not write things so that people can clog others’ email boxes. I know Blogger gives you the ability to forward my posts to other people, and one or two I could sorta understand (though you’re more likely to alienate people with my writings than amuse them), but thirty? The poem wasn’t that good.

As a spam-hater myself, do this at least: Tell people, “Hey, I read a poem about youth pastors that might amuse you.” Then give a hotlink. Then write whatever else you were gonna write. Give them the option to read it, or not. Stop raping their mailboxes with crap—especially my crap.

Devilish misinformation.

There are a lot of myths about the devil. What do we actually know from scripture?

Four times this week, I have had to listen to the same old myth that the devil used to be the heavenly choir leader before it fell.

I don’t know where this myth came from. I haven’t yet tracked it down. I’ve heard it a lot since the mid-’90s. I suspect it’s related to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchy, in which he puts angels into nine categories, or “choirs,” grouped into three “hierarchies.” Others since him have rearranged the categories, but they still used that word “choir” for them. And the devil was supposedly one of the cherubs, so it’d be in that choir. But by “choir” Dionysius didn’t necessarily mean “a group of singers.” All angels sing. He spent more time talking about cherubs’ pursuit of wisdom.

Nonetheless, I’ve heard over and over again that Satan’s job in heaven was to be the worship leader. Then it fell. Now it takes advantage of its abilities in its former job by tricking us humans into to corrupting music. (Some have even specifically pointed out rock music as a tool of the devil; Bill Gothard is notorious for preaching that rock’s backbeat is inherently anti-natural because it runs contrary to a heartbeat, and that’s why rock is evil.)

So what’s the scriptural basis for any of this stuff? There isn’t any. All this stuff is Christian mythology and unproven hypotheses.

What was the devil’s heavenly job? For crying out loud, look at its name. Satan means “accuser, opposer, adversary, slanderer.” When it’s referred to by name in scripture, what’s it doing? Accusing.

Obnoxious things on weblogs.

And now, a brief list of things on people’s weblogs that annoy me. If you wonder why I never read your site anymore, even when I have time to kill (which doesn’t happen much anymore), then take note of the following offenses.

1. Whiny entries. But you knew that already. That’s nothing new.
2. Obnoxious background music. When I am on the internet I am usually listening to music on iTunes. If I access a site that has obnoxious background music, in order to turn off the background music I have to turn off the sound… which means no more of my music on iTunes. (Currently I'm getting around that by listening to iTunes on my other computer. Sometimes it’s nice to work on two computers at once.) And because I use Safari as a browser, WMA music files for some reason cause Windows Media Player to open and your page to go blank. So it’s your own fault if I never post comments on your site anymore.
3. Videos. Too much bandwidth for too little substance. Instead of waiting the 20 seconds necessary to wait for the video download, I’ll just visit another site.
4. Giant photos. If your camera can take 5 megapixel pictures, they need reducing before you post them on your blog. And by reducing, I mean actually physically reducing the image into a smaller-size file that doesn’t take minutes to download. I don’t always have broadband, and even then, sometimes I don’t always have patience.
5. Stupid photos. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, stop posting photos of you and all your buds posing together. In these cases, a picture isn’t worth ten thousand words. It’s worth a caption: “I had lunch with Binky, Fredo, Alfalfa, and Hyman at Jamba Juice. We all wore matching sunglasses. It was so amusing. We annoyed unsuspecting passers-by with our girlish giggling, and occasionally we’d look over our shades at people, simultaneously, as if that was cool.” On second thought, keep it and your photo to yourself. Especially the 5 megapixel photos.
6. Obfuscating background images. Your favorite Van Gogh painting is not the easiest backdrop for 10 point dark blue text. I can’t read the damn stuff. So I won’t.
7. When I go to your site to see what you’re thinking, and instead of telling me what you’re thinking you post another frigging quiz result which has determined which Disney princess you are, which O.C. cast member you are, what color goes best with your politics, what your randomly-generated Russian name is, or which demon might be the best one to possess your eternal soul. I would guess on the last one that it would be Tedium, the patron devil of boring blog posts.
8. Entire passages of scripture; whole pop or worship songs; or someone else’s poem. Holy Moses, I know it meant something to you; but chances are I know that chapter/song/poem already and don’t need to see it repeated, no matter how much it made your soul cry out. Tell you what: Try linking to the page of some other sucker who actually printed it out, and spend your time on stuff you composed.
9. Begging for responses, email, Xanga eprops, and crap like that. Get a life.
10. People who post one-liners and think that’ll do. Yeah. It’ll do the job of driving me away. Good job. You didn’t need my sarcasm anyway.
11. People who can’t write in complete words. It’s bad enough that these yammering fools write in sentence fragments, but they can’t even write whole words without sounding like a 13-year-old girl who’s been listening to too much hip-hop. “Yo, wazzup? I luv my nu site! U rock!” Obviously we’re not dealing with a touch-typer.
12. PeOpLe WhO LiKe tO aLtErNaTe CaPiTaLs AnD LoWeRcAsE. Again, not touch-typers.
13. You update your blog once every other month. Then, the instant you update it, you want to know why I haven’t read your latest post. Here's why: I can take my time to read your current one. It’s gonna be there for the next two months, ’cause you won't be adding to it until then. Honestly… if you post any less than weekly, don’t bother with a weblog. You obviously don’t have enough to say.
14. Conversely, you update your blog two to five times a day and want to know why I didn’t read the third post last Friday. Okay, I update my blog a lot. But I never order people to read it. If you read it, great. If you don’t… exactly how are you reading this? …Never mind. If you can’t keep up with my regular ranting, relax. I’m not assigning homework or giving tests on it. In fact, I’m often surprised to discover that some of the people I’d never guess were readers actually read every entry… and sadly, when I discover this, I lose a lot of respect for them. Honestly, who has time to read all my babbling? So because I don’t care if you read every entry, I don’t think much of those who demand I read all their entries. I have a life, thank you.
15. Quotes. I’m not talking about entertaining quips by famous people, like

    “Of course I’m drunk, you idiot. I'm a journalist.” —Hunter S. Thompson

    I’m talking about full-on block quotes from some obscure book that you feel you have to quote in order to make your point. Y’know, if you didn't make your point with your arguments, quoting some other idiot isn’t gonna convince me anything other than that you don’t know what you’re talking about, even if the other idiot does.

Well, so much for a brief list.

Having read 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢 𝘝𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘪 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘦...

I hang around with too many literary types. They read pop fiction, then want to know my take on it, and I have to gripe at them that I tend to read history and philosophy and don't have time for pop fiction… and then it leaks out that I just read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, whereupon they exclaim, “Aha! You do read fiction!“ and then I have to explain the difference between classical and pop, and… sometimes it’s just easier to read the bloody pop.

Fine. Have it your way. I blew four hours of my life reading The Da Vinci Code. Are you happy now?

Unfortunately, when one reads a book of this type, and one happens to also be a Christian, the inevitable is gonna come up: “What’d you think of the premise?”

The premise is that a Harvard professor and a French cryptologist have to solve a murder mystery, which at the same time is wrapped up in the secret of where the Holy Grail is hidden. Yet the Grail, according to the book, is not a cup. “Holy Grail” is a mistranslation of “Holy Blood,” so the Grail is actually written records proving that Jesus has direct descendants, through his wife Mary Magdalene, that exist to this day, descended through the Merovingian kings of France, hidden by the Knights Templar. Supposedly both the book’s murder victim and Leonardo da Vinci were grand masters of an organization holding the Catholic Church hostage with this secret; and now the Church wants it destroyed. And if I say much more I’ll ruin the ending.

A lot of this Jesus/Mary love child stuff can be found in Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, (which I’ve read; which is stupid) and there’s no end to the speculation about what secrets the Templars discovered in Jerusalem during the Crusades. Conspiracy theories about the Templars go way back. This is nothing I haven’t heard before. The only difference between then and now is that the theories are in a popular novel.

There were conspiracy theorists about the Kennedy assassination long before Oliver Stone’s JFK came out; the movie just gave them credibility because it was so well-made. Same deal with The Da Vinci Code. It’s actually a pretty good book. So people might read the book and start taking them seriously, just as people started believing Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy after JFK came out. People don’t bother to sift through the evidence as to what is fact and what is fiction after they see it in pop fiction. They just enjoy the fiction… and in order to enjoy the fiction, they suspend disbelief… and after the fiction’s over, they’ve suspended disbelief just long enough to actually accept the fictional conspiracy theory as plausible.

An ode, in honor of my lousy Youth Pastors.

Sometimes I write poetry. Not often, but sometimes.

(Fictional dad, by the way.)

I was all of eleven when Father sat down

And directed me right to his side,

And the gloom in his eyes had awakened my fear

That I’d sinned—he was after my hide.

“No it’s not that,” he said, “but whatever that was—

Well, we’ll talk about that once again.

No, it’s something more difficult I must discuss

Since you’re now at an age over ten.

In this next year, you’ll go into (gasp) junior high

And the misery found in those grades,

And you’ll look to the church for what comfort you can—

But you’ll only find sports and charades.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Well you see,” said my dad,

“In the sixth grade you’re known as a Youth,

Not a child, so no Sunday school class anymore.

And so now I must tell you the truth.

Son, a Youth is distracted by things of this world;

What is ‘cool,’ what is ‘with it,’ or ‘now.’

So the church needs a specialist to get them back,

And so this was our plan as to how.

“First, we parents abandoned our leadership roles

Because children don’t see us as ‘cool.’

And since that is their standard for leadership, we

Have adopted this ‘cool’ as our rule.

But we learned that they just won’t accept us as cool.

This is odd, and we can’t figure why.

We said all the same slang and we wore the same clothes!

Yet the Youth think it’s odd, or a lie.

So the church sought a person authentically cool—

One the Youth would accept and obey—

So we got a Youth Pastor to shepherd the Youth,

And instruct them to go the right way.

First he tries to determine what’s ‘cool’ with our kids,

Then he tailors himself to the fad.

In this way, he’ll distract them back into the church!

—But my son, his theology’s bad.

See, in order to get someone Youth will accept,

We acquired a Pastor so young

That he’s barely emerged from his own Youth himself,

And he’s lacking in wisdom. And dumb.

His poor brain has been crammed with theology from

All those schools he’s just come from, and so

He’s learned all the historical paths Christians took,

But he hasn’t a clue where to go.

In this state, he is hardly a leader of men—

He’s half heretic, to tell the truth—

There are so many ways he is too immature—

So we put him in charge of the Youth.

“Now my son, you know more than the average kid,

So I must warn you way in advance

Of the sort of Youth Pastor we’ve hired to lead.

He’s a risk, but we’re taking this chance.

See, the first one we had was a bit of a nut—

He drove thirty kids out with his ways!

He said, ‘If you’re halfhearted, you’re going to hell!’

Half the Youth Group was gone in ten days.

Well, the next one we got would take in any freak—

Even kids who came in from the slums!

He was hired to take care of our kids, not them!

Now he's gone, serving meals to those bums.

The Youth Pastor last year was an… int’resting guy.

His defect was that he was too wise.

He got picked as head pastor in some other church.

We can’t hold on to quality guys.

Now the current Youth Pastor is not like the rest.

Sure, his reasoning isn’t quite sound,

But the elders got tir’d of debating the rest,

And this guy—we can push him around!

So sometimes he might tell you you’re going to hell,

Or he’ll frighten you so you’ll obey.

He might frappé the culture with things of the Lord.

Just watch out for the things that he’ll say!

If you have any questions, please go to your mom

Or to me; we will both help you out.

If you don't find us ‘cool’ enough, we understand—

That is why our church hired this lout.”

“I don’t get it,” I told him. “Have you put my Youth

In the hands of a heretic, Dad?

For if he’s as defective as you say he is,

The results can be nothing but bad!”

“It was not my idea," said Father to me.

“But I think I can yet see God’s plan.

Every Youth must determine for him or herself—

In the most honest way that they can—

Whether they’ll remain Christian, or they’ll turn away.

And the thing that provokes them the best

Is the garbage this Youth Pastor feeds them each week.

It’s the ultimate form of a test.

In this way, they can figure out God for themselves

And maturity will have been won!

—Or they’ll chuck the whole system as stupid and weird.

But that’s one fewer hypocrite, son.”

I somehow yet survived the Youth Group in my teens,

As the Youth Pastors came, and moved on,

Though some lessons they taught might send them to the stake

If they’d taught them in 1301.

In the end, it turned out like my Dad has foreseen:

Many Youths walked away from the flock,

And a few realized God is here nonetheless,

And that Jesus is always our rock.

But what always nags at me is one little thing:

Is this really the best Youth can get?

Are Youth doomed to follow each flake, loon, or nut

Who’s not ready to lead adults yet?

There has got to be better than this for our Youth,

For our Youth, after all, are the church.

It’s not will be, but are. This the adults ignore,

And abandon their Youth in the lurch.

Now, to all the exceptions: God bless you. You’re great.

And to all the good leaders: Fight on!

And to everyone else, Please consider this fact:

Why are so many former Youth gone?

Amusing comic strip: Canary flavor.

Garfield, by Jim Davis, 1/31/2005