John Shore

Archive for February 2008

Atheists of America Agree: Christianity Makes Eminent Rational Sense!

In Atheists, Christianity, Religion on February 29, 2008 at 6:53 pm

As I’m sure my readers will agree, in my last post, There’s No Arguing It: We Can’t KNOW If There’s a God or Not, I conclusively proved that it is exactly as reasonable to think that there is a God as it is to think there’s not. Not one of the 50 or so people who commented on that post questioned the validity of that assertion. (I’m kidding. I actually think Atheists of America have taken out a hit on me.)

Now watch how easily — nay, how inevitably — one must move from the understanding that there’s at least a 50/50 chance of a God existing, to the conclusion that Christianity is the greatest religion in the history of people yearning for spiritual succor.

My blog posts are always too long, so I’m going to keep brief the logical steps from Probable God to Christ. Those steps are:

1. There’s a 50% chance that God is real (which has already been proven).

2. If there’s a God, then God created everything, including humans.

3. If God created humans, God must love humans, because who doesn’t love what they create?

4. God loving humans means God longs to express his love to humans, because it is the nature of love to express itself.

5. God is prohibited from in any direct or overt manner conveying to humans his love for them, because if he objectified himself in the way that would necessitate – if he just appeared to people, and told them that he loved them — then he would ruin their lives by obliterating their free will, by robbing of them their right to choose for themselves whether or not to believe in him. (For more about this particular dynamic, please see my, Why Doesn’t God Just Prove He Exists?) It is precisely God’s love for people (that is, for the qualilty that most wholly defines people, which is their free will) that stops God from proving to people that he loves them as much as he does.

6. People feel guilty all the time for the stupid, petty, selfish, greedy, ego-driven things they do. Feeling guilty is a necessary result of free will, since free will means that in life one is bound to make stupid, petty, selfish, greedy, ego-driven choices.

7. God hates it that people suffer from guilt. And he certainly understands that feeling guilty and feeling unlovable are intimately connected. He also hates it that people’s lives are defined by fear (which they must be, since no one knows what happens to them after they die).

8. God wanted a way to prove his love for people, relieve them of their guilt, and put to rest their fears about their ultimate fate.

9. Becoming the mortal known to history as Jesus Christ is how God accomplished all three of those things — and how he did it all without compromising anyone’s free will. He proved his love for people by becoming a human, taking into his body all the guilt all people ever had or would experience, and then slaughtered that guilt into oblivion. And he put to rest people’s fears about their ultimate fate by explicitly promising everlasting life to anyone who believed in him (which, remember, he had to make part of the deal in order to leave in tact people’s free will). God spent 2,000 years telling everyone he was going to come to earth to do exactly what he did; he did it; and then he went back from whence he’d come.

10. Before finally taking his bodily leave of us, God installed within every human the whole of himself, in the form of the Holy Spirit. All anyone has to do to awaken and access that Holy Spirit is believe that that’s possible, and ask for it. God never enters where he’s not first asked.

And thus, in 10 E-Z Steps, do we have positive, irrefutable prove that believing in the reality of the Christian story makes at least as much sense as not believing in it.

God—>creation—>humans—>love of humans—>respecting humans’ free will—>wanting to relieve humans’ guilt and fear—>Jesus—>Holy Spirit.

See, atheists? We’re at least as rational as you!

And I know you agree! Which is so great!!

There’s No Arguing It: We Can’t KNOW If There’s a God or Not

In Religion on February 28, 2008 at 6:52 am

As we all know, the answer to the question of whether or not there’s a God can generate lots o’ debate. (As they did/are in my last two posts, An Atheist Asks: Why Did Christ Have to Sacrifice Himself to Himself? and Inquiring Atheists Want to Know: What, Exactly, Was the Sacrifice Jesus Made?) So I thought I’d say this:

The answer to the question of whether or not there’s a God can only be yes or no, right? Either some Divine Intelligence created and sustains our world and us, or Nature Alone exists.

Passions aside, there is no way of knowing — in any sort of objective, empirically verifiable way — which of those two is true. Anyone who claims there is a way to positively know whether or not there’s a God must be understood to have at some point become irrational. (No offense, fellow Christians, but we must acknowledge that the Bible isn’t proof  that our God exists. The Bible is an informing affirmation of the God in which we believe. I think we’d all do very well to remember that feeling certain that something is true doesn’t make it so.)

Because the chances of God existing or not are even either way, and because none of us can know which of those two choices is the correct one, choosing one must make exactly as much sense as choosing the other. It’s a 50-50, binary option. You could be right either way. Same as flipping a coin. Could be heads. Could be tails.

Could be a God. Could be no God. Could be complex and coincidental mechanics; could be intelligent design.

Can we at least agree that it’s just as reasonable to choose to think there is a God as it is to choose to think there isn’t?  Since we can’t know, and the chances are the same either way? Please understand that I’m not talking about any particular God, now — not the specific God of the Christians, Jews, Muslims, or anyone else. I’m only talking about God generally.

Before dealing with the validity of any one God, can we at least agree that choosing to think there’s a God is just as rational as choosing to think there’s none? Because if we can’t all agree on something that basic, and that obviously true, then I think we should be too embarrassed to talk about anything at all.

So can we at least start with that? Wouldn’t that be nice? And sane?

Inquiring Atheists Want to Know: What, Exactly, Was the Sacrifice Jesus Made?

In Christianity, Jesus, Religion on February 26, 2008 at 5:22 pm

In the comments section of my last post (An Atheist Asks: Why Did Christ Have to Sacrifice Himself To Himself?), any number of atheists and/or agnostics raised the same question: What, exactly, was the sacrifice Jesus made? One put it exactly that way. Another asked, “This is what baffles me most about Christians: The Great Sacrifice.” Another wrote: “I am attracted to the Beatitudes and the concept that God is Love, both themes that seem to me utterly inconsistent with a God who demands sacrifices of anything or anyone living.”

I figured that what they were all basically asking was, “What, exactly, is the atonement?” So that’s the question I promised I’d answer.

As many of my regular readers know, I wrote a book called “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang: Why I Do the Things I Do,” by God, as told to John Shore. In that (very short) book, I have God himself directly answering eight or nine of the most commonly heard objections to, or questions about, Christianity. (A few such questions are: “I just don’t believe in God, period.”; “If you [God] really exist, why don’t you prove it?”; and ”What’s the deal with evil, anyway? Why does a God who is all-powerful and all-compassionate allow evil to exist? He either wills evil to exist — which makes him despicable — or he’s powerless to stop it, which makes him uninspiringly weak, to say the least. Both bite. What’s up?”) One of the questions I have God address in that book is: “What’s the whole ‘Atonement’ thing actually mean?”

Below is part of how, in Penguins, I have God answer that question. I’m going to use that answer here, because … well, I think it’s about as good an answer as I can write. (Note: If you’re a Christian who’s offended by the literary conceit in Penguins of putting words into the mouth of God, please bear in mind that I didn’t write this book for Christians; I wrote it for non-Christians, who of course aren’t likely to share such squeamishness. Please also remember that in The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a’ Kempis also put words into the mouth of God, and for 500 years Christians considered that book nearly a second Bible. Thanks.)

So here’s some of what “God,” in Penguins, has to say when he is asked what the whole “Atonement” thing actually means:

The At One-ment (Hey! I’m Hooked on Phonics!™ Wait—no I’m not) refers to that act in which I allowed myself to get brutally murdered so that all humans could be forever cleansed of the guilt associated with the things they do or think that do not, shall we say, represent their finest moments.

I let myself be tortured to death so that you could live free of pain.

But, hey, no pressure or anything. I don’t want you worrying about it. I was glad to do it. Seriously. No problem. It was a Friday. I really didn’t have all that much to do but hang around anyway. …

Still, there was a job to do, and I was the man to do it. And so I did: The “it” in “It is finished” refers to the establishment of the means by which all people, forever, could have access to real and lasting salvation. I know I just said this, but if anything in the universe bears repeating, it’s that what my dying on the cross secured was the means by which, from that point on, all human beings could have rinsed from their hearts and minds their guilt (however “naturally” they acquired it), which, without my divine intervention, must otherwise fester inside of them, where at best it severely undermines the quality of their lives, and at worst compels them to contribute to that wretched, twisted cause that seeks to drag all of humankind down into the pits of degradation.

Do you see? I won the battle between good and evil by paying, in full, with my body, any and all karmic debt that might ever be incurred by anyone doing evil.

You might owe the phone company, the electric company, the credit card company, and your landlord. But you don’t owe me, or the world, anything. I’ve already totaled you out.

I’ve already atoned for your sins.

Which means that you and I, forever, are copacetic.

As long as you believe in me, that is. As long as you believe that as the Christ I took human form and stepped into human history for the specific purpose of removing from all people—by which I most definitely and forever mean from you personally — the debt incurred by any and all sin.

Believe that, and it’s all about you and me, friend.

Don’t, and you’re on your own.

But you believe it. You have to. Cuz you know who’s on your side, don’t you? You know who’s got you covered, don’t you?You’re feeling the love. You know you are. C’mon. Admit it. Who loves you? Who? Who cares about you? Who gave his all so you could delight in life instead of being bogged down by true existential angst?

Who’s your daddy?

That’s right: Me. The Father. Jesus. The Holy Ghost.

Us.

I.

And what do really good fathers do? That’s right: They fork over the big bucks to cover the cost of every single thing their kids could ever think of doing.

Do you really wonder why such infinite numbers of people have always signed on for Team Jesus? Do you really think they’re all just lazy, shallow simpletons?

Well, they’re not. What they are is debt-free. Which is to say that, spiritually speaking, they’re forgiven.

Forgiven!

By God Almighty!

Forever!

Man, I just don’t know what else you could possibly want from me.

–from Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang, copyright 2005 by John Shore

An Atheist Asks: Why Did Christ Have to Sacrifice Himself to Himself?

In Christianity, Jesus, Religion on February 25, 2008 at 12:00 pm

In the comments section of my recent post, God is Love, Christ is Pain, a respectful and thoughtful atheist reader asked me why God had to sacrifice himself in order to forgive us. “If a god who is omnipotent wanted to forgive us,” he wrote, “couldn’t he just forgive us, and make it so we never forget? Why sacrifice himself to himself?”

My response was this: ”By dying as he did, Christ knew that he would be creating an image of that act that was so vivid, and so visceral, that it would forever last in people’s minds, hearts and imaginations. God couldn’t ‘just’ forgive us — without getting personally involved, without in every last possible sense of the phrase bringing it down to our level, without his very graphic mortal expiration on the cross — because he knew that wouldn’t stick. He knew that people tend to forget; that we naturally get so focused on their own lives that the reality of God — which is, after all, a fairly nebulous concept — tends to slip first from our minds, and then from their hearts. Jesus didn’t want that to happen. He wanted people to remember what he had done for them. So he made the means by which we are eternally forgiven as real for us as he possibly good — and that meant availing himself of the sheer, raw, dramatic magnitude of the crucifixion.

“Jesus didn’t sacrifice himself for his sake. He did it for ours. And so he made sure to do it in a manner that we’d never be able to forget. What Jesus did on the cross was compassionate, mercy, and love of the highest possible order. And we haven’t forgotten it yet.”

I now find that I want to add something to that answer, and figured I’d do it here. That something is this:

Jesus knew that people would always know that he knew that he was God. Time and again, he either flat-out says, or heavily implies that he is, in fact God; like, for instance, at John 10:30, when he says “I and the Father are one.” So there’s no question that Jesus knew he was God. How could God not know his own nature?

Now I’m no theologian — and I’m certainly not offering here anything having anything whatsoever to do with any Official Doctrine that I know of — but it seems to me that if Jesus knew he was God, and he knew we knew he knew he was God, then he also knew that a lot of us wouldn’t be able to help but think that, in a way we very definitely don’t, he had it made.

Jeus was God. It doesn’t get any better than that. And he knew he was God. He knew his story was going to end well. He knew that when his adventure here on earth was over, he was going back to heaven to take his place at the right hand of the Father. There’s no way that’s not a wonderful place to be.

None of us are quite that lucky, are we? We can say that we do, but the bottom line is that we don’t have anywhere near the assurance about our ultimate fate as Jesus had about his. It’s not possible that we could.

What Jesus wants, though, if for us to fully understand the complete depth of his identification with us. And that, I think, is why he let himself die on the cross in the horrible fashion that he did. Because he knew that we would always understand how terribly, terribly real that was. God or not, he got beaten. He knew that we would forever after that understand that he did become one of us. He did suffer the worst any of us could. That, too, is not in question.

And he didn’t even leave it at that. He actually gave us every last indication that when his final moment came — when his pain and suffering had reached its terrible crescendo — his identity with us was absolute and complete. We know that as he was dying, Jesus felt himself no more a God than we do. That, I think, is the sheer, knee-buckling power of his finally crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We know Jesus was God because he defied death. And we know he was mortal because of the way he died.

He did it. His point got across. It stuck. It’s as real now as the moment that our great hero, exhausted, breathed, “It is finished.”

(The follow-up post to this post — which I wrote in response to some of the very good questions raised in the lively comments section below — is Inquiring Atheists Want to Know: What, Exactly, Was the Sacrifice Jesus Made?)

Presidential Trivia!

In Politics on February 22, 2008 at 7:34 am

rlederer.jpg

 

This, ladies and germs, is the one and only Dr. Richard Lederer, dressed as formally as he knows how.

Lately (with How To Observe Presidents Day: Don’t Work, and How To Get Over The Post-Presidents Day Blues) we’ve have been talking trivially about presidents. Now let’s talk about presidential trivia! And who better to bring into that conversaton than esteemed best-selling author Richard Lederer, who, as it happens, just published a book that … well, looks like this:

pres-trivia-cover-02.jpg

 

How cool is that timing?

Please find below but a taste of the content of Presidential Trivia, which Rich was kind enough to send me when I wrote and asked him for it. (Rich and I are friends, see. As I feel like I bore you with about four times a blog, we have a book out that we co-wrote called Comma Sense, the Amazon page of which is here. [I also once wrote/excerpted a truly hilarious bit about Comma Sense in When Punctuation Goes Really, Really Wrong. ] If anyone cares to know how I, a total nobody, came to co-author a book with the Total Somebody who is Dr. Richard Lederer, lemme know, and I’ll do Le blog de’ post about it.)

And now, from Presidential Trivia, I am pleased to bring you:

 

Q. What two presidents died on the very same day?
A. Our second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, political rivals, then friends, both died on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

As Jefferson lay weak and dying in his home in Montecello on the evening of July 3, he whispered, “Is this the Fourth?” To quiet the former president, his young lawyer-friend, Nicholas Trist, answered, “Yes.” Jefferson fell asleep with a smile. His heart continued to beat until the bells and fireworks of the Fourth rang out and exploded the next day.

At dawn of that same day, Adams was dying in his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. A servant asked the fading Adams, “Do you know what day it is?” “Oh yes,” responded the lion in winter. “It is the glorious Fourth of July.” He then lapsed into a stupor but awakened in the afternoon and sighed feebly, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He ceased to breathe around sunset, about six hours after Jefferson.

 

Q. Who was the first president born in a hospital?
A. On October 1, 1924, Jimmy Carter became the first president born in a hospital. All previous presidents were born at home.

 

Q. What is “Tecumseh’s Curse”?
A. Seven presidents elected in years that end with a zero (intervals of 20 years) died in office –William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, Abraham Lincoln (1860), James A. Garfield (1880), William McKinley (1900), Warren G. Harding (1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940), and John F. Kennedy (1960).

First noted in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not book published in 1934, this string of untimely presidential deaths is variously known as the curse of Tippecanoe, the zero-year curse, the 20-year curse, and Tecumseh’s curse, Tecumseh being the Native American chief defeated by William Henry Harrison at the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980 and shot by John Hinckley, Jr., almost continued the deadly sequence but survived and broke the curse. Reagan was the only sitting president to survive a bullet wound.

 

Q. Who was the youngest man ever to have served as president of the United States?
A. If your answer is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, you’re not quite correct. Kennedy was, at the age of forty-three, the youngest man ever to have been elected president, but Theodore Roosevelt became president at forty-two, when William McKinley was assassinated. When TR’s second term was over, he was still only fifty years old, making him the youngest ex-president.

 

Q. Now that you know the identity of our youngest president, who was our oldest president?
A. The average age at which America’s presidents have taken office is fifty-four. Ronald Reagan became president at sixty-nine, older than anyone else, and left office at seventy-eight. Before Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower had been the only president to reach the age of seventy while in office. William Henry Harrison attained the office at the age of sixty-eight but died only a month later.

When Ronald Reagan died at the age of 93 years and 120 days, he was our longest-lived president. But, on November 12, 2006, Gerald Ford surpassed that record and lived another month and a half. Amazingly, our third longest-lived president is John Adams, who was born in 1735 and who lived for 90 years and 8 months, followed by Herbert Hoover, 90 years and 2 months.

 

And now some stuff from the section of Presidential Trivia entitled “Our Literary Presidents”:

During the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, James Michener, author of Hawaii, The Source,and other mega-sellers, was invited to a celebrity dinner at the White House. Michener declined to attend and explained: “Dear Mr. President: I received your invitation three days after I had agreed to speak a few words at a dinner honoring the wonderful high school teacher who taught me how to write. I know you will not miss me at your dinner, but she might at hers.” Michener received a handwritten reply from the understanding Ike: “In his lifetime a man lives under fifteen or sixteen presidents, but a really fine teacher comes into his life but rarely. Go and speak at your teacher’s dinner.”

 

Perhaps the most iconic tale of presidential virtue is that of young George Washington admitting to his father that he chopped down a cherry tree in the family garden: “I cannot tell a lie, father, you know I cannot tell a lie! I did cut it with my little hatchet.” This episode, which lives on in almost every grammar school across our fair land, is in fact almost certainly fiction. The story was made up out of whole cloth by Parson Mason Locke Weems in his biography The Life, Death, and Memorable Actions of George Washington, published immediately after the president’s death.

 

One of the best known of American poems begins:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
  The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won.

In this poem by Walt Whitman, the captain is Abraham Lincoln.

 

Ulysses S. Grant claimed to smoke seven to 10 cigars a day. When word got out of the president’s love of stogies, people sent him more than 10,000 boxes of cigars. Grant finished his 200,000-word Memoirs only a few days before his death from throat cancer, so he never saw the work published. Grant’s cancer and the forfeiture of his military pension when he became president bankrupted his family, but his popular autobiography ultimately brought in $500,000 for his family.

Personal Memoirs: Ulysses S. Grant remains one of the finest accounts of the Civil War ever written. Grant’s book was published with the help of his friend Mark Twain in 1885, the same year that Twain came out with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

 

Herbert Hoover wrote approximately 16 books, including one called Fishing for Fun and to Wash Your Soul. John F. Kennedy is the only president to receive the Pulitzer Prize – for his book Profiles in Courage.But it is Jimmy Carter who is our most writerly president, having authored about 20 books, many of which have been best sellers. Carter wrote most of his books after his presidency and some with his wife Rosalynn as co-author. In 2003, Carter authored the novel The Hornet’s Nest, a fictional story of the Revolutionary War in the South. Carter remains the only president to have written a novel.

How To Get Over The Post-Presidents Day Blues

In HowTo, Politics on February 20, 2008 at 8:17 am

800px-washington_crossing_the_delaware0001.jpg

Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutze (1816 - 1868). Most of these guys were probably already tired of Presidents Day, but you know you’ll never be.

 

The banners have come down; the red, white, and blue bunting put away; the top hats returned to storage. No more reinacting the famous cherry tree incident. No more sonorous recitations of the Gettysburg address. No more good reasons to say “blue bunting.” No more pretending your couch is a boat while you and your friends pose in a Washington Crossing the Delaware tableau.

It’s over, man. Let it go. There’s nothing to do now but wait until next year’s Presidents Day season. (If you care to — and haven’t read it yet — please see yesterday’s How To Observe Presidents Day: Don’t Work.)

To help you ease back into regular life, why not think about the Presidential situation today?  It is election season, after all. Barack Obama makes it easy enough to think of Abraham Lincoln, doesn’t he? Lincoln was a statesman lawyer from Illinois; Obama is a statesmen lawyer from Illinois. Lincoln was thin; Obama is thin. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation; Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii.

And the similarities between George Washington and Hillary Clinton are almost too obvious to mention. They both have big, yellowish, immobile hair. Washington’s on the $1 bill; Hillary has a husband named Bill. George Washington had wooden teeth. Hillary Clinton also has wooden teeth.

No, that’s awful. I’m sorry. Of course Hillary Clinton doesn’t have wooden teeth. I’m sure she has normal teeth.

And splinters in her tongue.

Sorry! That’s terrible. I need to figure out what’s wrong with me.

In the meantime, though, I, like you, will be avidly awaiting the next Presidents Day. Between then and now, I suppose there’s little for any of us to do but bust out a $20 bill, stare at it, and try to remember whether or not Benjamin Franklin was ever actually elected president.

Actually, if you really do want something fun and Presidentialish to do, you cannot go wrong reading Presidential Trivia, the latest book by language guru Richard Lederer (with whom I co-wrote Comma Sense.)

Also, I want to sincerely thank the great folks who left all the wonderful comments on my last two posts. These last two days I’ve been terribly busy, and so haven’t had proper time to respond to or even acknowledge those comments. But please know that, as always, I definitely read and appreciate every single one of them.

How To Observe Presidents Day: Don’t Work. Beyond That, I’m Not Sure.

In HowTo on February 18, 2008 at 7:46 am

Is it just me, or is Presidents Day easily the least emotionally inspiring of our holidays? Oh, sure, I always choke up a little whenever I or my wife get paid for not going to work. That’s a beautiful, even inspiring thing. But beyond that, I’m not even sure what Presidents Day is. I know that when I was a kid, the point of Presidents Day was to sit in class, stare at a colorful cut-out head of George Washington’s profile, and try not to make fun of his hair. Why, I wondered, did men in those days wear old lady wigs? Did all the men do it, or just the presidents? Did we used to elect presidents who dressed like women? We only had his head to stare at, but I assumed George Washington also wore a dress. What else could I think? It’s not like he was gonna wear that hair with a suit. And this was in the late sixties, so I always had to picture our first president in a mini-skirt. With a kicky little hand purse.

Later, we had to stare at the head of George Washington and Abe Lincoln, and think about how great it was that they were born. But that always brought to mind a baby with Abe Lincoln’s face, and forget that. So then I would wonder when white wigs for men went out of fashion, and top hats and crazy Amish beards became the rage. What a weird switch. I knew it was better than the lady hair with the beard, though. No question there.

Anyway, to this day I don’t really get Presidents Day. I don’t know if it’s for George Washington’s birthday, or Abe Lincoln’s birthday, or for the birthday of all Presidents, or what. So what I do, is make a point of at least thinking about how cool it is that George Washington didn’t lie about cutting down that cherry tree.

“Yeah, I did it,” I imagine him boldly proclaiming. “Now can you help me with my mascara?”

No. But then I think about Abe Lincoln, living in a log cabin, reading at night by firelight. When I was a kid, I learned that Abe Lincoln learned to write by writing with burned sticks on the back of a shovel. And I used to think, “I can’t believe they kept a shovel in their living room. Were they digging holes right there in their house? How cool! I wish we could keep a shovel in our living room.” Then I used to think how there was no way a teacher could object if I turned in a homework assignment on the back of a shovel. “But Lincoln did it,” I’d say. “Don’t you want me to be a great as Abe Lincoln?”

Anyway, I think the main thing about Presidents Day is to remember that on this day, we should all take a one or five dollar bill, stare at George Washington or Abe Lincoln’s face, and reflect upon how great it is to live in a country where you can get paid for not going to work. If getting paid without working doesn’t say “President,” I just don’t know what does.

How to Make Money Writing For Single Atheists With iPhones Who Hate Dieting Christian Homosexuals Who Love Britney Spears

In Food, Health, HowTo, Religion, entertainment, technology on February 16, 2008 at 12:11 pm

Cool. That should bump up my page views.

(Oh, no. At first doing that seemed so funny — but now I sense its Impending Obnoxiousness. Because you know people really will open this post — and then go, “Oh, wow. Now I so hate this guy.” And I hate it when people hate me. Not because I have any psychotic desire to be loved by everyone, but because I so care about people that it causes me pain when they’re wrong. And not loving me is about as wrong as wrong gets. What’s not to love about me? I … I … I’m pretty tall, which can be darn handy in a high-shelved room, let me tell you. And in the front of my hair I have a balding pattern that many children find delightfully hilarious. And … um … I’m easily amused, so around me just about anyone feels Majorly Entertaining.

Man. That’s a pretty thin list of appealing qualities. Maybe I should … buy a mini-toupee. A toupatch. Anyway, if you were lured here unfairly, please allow me to point you to one of my Actual Posts, which I promise will be funny and assuage your resentment at being cyber-duped. [Try my very recent, Totally A-OK Funny, or Unacceptably Un-Christian? YOU Be the Judge!, if you will.  How To Be Unemployed is pretty yukkalable. Less funny but surprisingly popular was/is How To Make a Living Writing. My most popular post to date is Six Tests to Determine If He's Mr. Right. One of my personal favorites is The Story of My Life. And I'll shut-up now.]

To my regular readers: Um … please consider continuing to not hate me. To my fellow WordPressers: I’ll let you know if:  a) view-wise, this Actually Worked, and b) If the people who run WordPress decide they’ve finally had enough of my grinning mug.)

Totally A-OK Funny, or Unacceptably Un-Christian? YOU Be the Judge!

In Religion on February 14, 2008 at 10:00 am

(Okay, remember how I was telling you [in, I think, How To Make a Living Writing, Part Two] that I used to have to write for gnarly free tabloids that I called “street rags”? Having it be Valentine’s Day reminded me of the piece below, which I once wrote for one such magazine’s “Love Issue.” If as the Christian Writer I have now officially become I tried to publish this sort of thing today, God himself would probably reach out of the sky and poke me in the eye. Or crack up and pat me on the head. Who knows? I don’t — but you might. Is the piece below Funny and Totally Acceptable, or Puerile and Unacceptably Un-Christian? You be the judge!)

 

My Essay for “The Love Issue” of  [Street Rag Quarterly]

People always say that love is mysterious. But I disagree. I think love is obnoxious. It’s as rude and invasive as a tapeworm. And, like having a tapeworm, being in love makes you spend a lot of time in the bathroom, crying.

Of course, there’s also much to be said in favor of love. And Shakespeare, as everyone knows, said most of it. Who can forget the Bard’s inspiring words, “Forsooth, mine own blinded love-seared crimson muscle-pump! Be still, internal idiot! Blast thee for thine heavenly, thrice-cursed flannigenans, ‘ere by my failieth gruen beaierurnaut yon glibbet! Dringlie-yay, dringlie-yay! Mort!”

But that’s Shakespeare. He was a genius. The rest of us just have to struggle along as best we can.

Speaking of sex. When it comes to love, sex can get very confusing. Especially for men. For women, there’s nothing at all confusing about the proper relationship between love and sex: They belong together, period. Men aren’t so sure. Men live with the conviction that there’s a whole universe of stuff about sex that’s a whole lot ruder than women understand.

They’re wrong about that, of course. Women are perfectly aware of how rude sex is to men. And they want it stopped. Right now.

But asking a man to stop being rude about sex is like asking a bear to stop being hairy about its body. It’s just not in the cards. To men, sex is rude. You take the rudeness out of sex, and men start shrugging and wondering what’s on TV.

So, that’s a problem .

If anyone out there knows the solution to this problem — if anyone can or has figured out how to make men and women think of sex in the same way — please send that answer directly to our office, care of me. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

One thing I’ve learned in my many years of getting wrong just about everything having to do with romance, sex, and love, is that women don’t think sex is as funny as men do. To men, sex is a fantastic, never-ending source of first-rate yukkels. There’s so precious little about sex that isn’t funny, is why. Unless you’re a woman. Then you probably don’t find sex all that hilarious. At least, not in a good way. A woman laughing during sex is rarely, if ever, a thing to be desired. It usually means that she’s either spontaneously reacting to the existential irony of her current mortification, or she’s got one eye on a Will Ferrell movie. Either way, once she bursts out laughing, it’s time for her lover to excuse himself, leave, and not come back until he’s an enlightened swami who no longer cares if his sexual technique inspired hilarity. (Which, by the way, is the only attitude with which to approach Swami Sex.)

Of course, it’s completely understandable why women take sex and romance a lot more seriously than men. After all, a man who has just had sex is very often compelled to eat a ham sandwich and watch TV.  On the other hand, a woman who has just had sex is very often compelled to have a baby. And while it certainly can be difficult to get the perfect amount of mustard on a ham sandwich, the two really don’t compare in Total Hassle. So a woman has to be careful. She can’t afford to sleep with a man who won’t take seriously his responsibility to stay with her, and start feeding her ham sandwiches.

And through all of this, of course, men are fighting their apparently Genetic Propensity to wander. But (hopefully), they don’t wander. Instead, they incessantly switch TV channels, are chronically incapable of making up their minds, and die some four years earlier than women due to the stressfulness of always having to hide one’s porno collection. [Note to Christian readers: Not that Christian men ever buy, look at, or hide pornography! I know they don't! They don't! There's no question about that!  How could there be? ] 

But at least we get paid more at our jobs. And it’s a good thing we do, too. Porno isn’t cheap. Unless you get involved with those giant wire bins that adult “bookstores” always have near the cash registers. But somehow bargain porno always seems so …

Wait. Where was I?

Oh, right. Romance.

Ah, romance. Nothing says “romance!” like a big bouquet of flowers that live for about three days before they die and start attracting gnats and then smell worse than death.

Um.

Unless you sprinkle that white Prolong-A-Stalk stuff they give you into the flower water.

Then you can get, like, a whole week of not-dead-seeming flowers.

My poor wife. I’ve been married to her for quite some time now. And not a day goes by that I don’t, at least once and acutely, feel extremely sorry for her.

I’m Now The Kind of Person I Usually Have Issues With

In Family, Religion on February 13, 2008 at 10:22 am

I’m about to become a teacher. Talk about karma. (By which I refer to my last post, “Life. Death. Pretending You’re a Crosswalk Guard.“)

Anyway, here are Le’ Facts de’ Grunt on this class I’ll be teaching:

What: Lenten study series

When: Every Wednesday night, from Feb. 13 through March 12, from 7-8 p.m. (Service at 6; dinner at 6:30; class at 7.)

Where: St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Del Mar, CA. (From some pretty funny “How rich are they in Del Mar?” jokes, see, “My Lenten Story Remains Untold. Thanks, Starbucks.“) St. Peter’s is at 14th Street and Coat Highway 101 in Del Mar. (It’s actually a block up 14th off the 101.)

Why: Because “Father Frank,” St. Peter’s interim rector, called and asked me to. I’m just that easy.

How: Me, in front of people, talking. (And totally open to anyone eager to prove themselves teacher’s pet. In that respect I’m also shamelessly easy.)

What, redux: Below is the official Class Description for the series. If you are anywhere near Del Mar, and would like to come hear me yap teach, please do. Everyone, and especially me, will be thrilled you did. Thanks.

Anyway, here’s my official Class Description:

Because Lent and Easter are grounded in the dynamic of Christ leaving one life behind and manifesting into a new one, Lent has always been a time for Christians to review their past and recommit themselves to God. So I’d like to use our Lenten study series as a means by which each of us can explore not only who we have been up to this point in our lives, but how having been that person has (whether we’ve known it or not) perfectly prepared us to now become the person we’d most like to be.

The idea is that throughout our lives God has been using our lives to turn us into someone prepared to enter into a full relationship with him. That’s what God wants; that’s what we want; that’s what every moment of every day of our lives we and God have been working on.

I’d like this class to help us see and understand exactly how and why that’s true.

In order to provide a means by which anyone might fruitfully and systematically analyze their own past (and thereby appreciate the potential of their future), we will spend our time together looking at the five primary roles that most of us have spent at least the first half of our lives “playing” and fulfilling. Those five roles are Super Overall Person, Child, Spouse/Mate, Parent, and Provider.

First, under “Good Riddance,” we’ll look at the aspects of the role we’re then considering that often prove less than entirely healthy for us — that, as we move on to the second half of our lives, we would do well to identify, and then jettison.

Next, under “Pure Gold,” we’ll take stock of those aspects of that life’s role that in their fulfilling typically have proven good and healthy for us: that tended to ennoble us, strengthen us, make us better, wiser, more pleasing to God. This is the stuff about that role which we should hold onto and build upon as we move into the second half of our lives.

Under “Movin’ On,” we’ll consider how we might use the best of what that role taught us–the “Pure Gold” we just identified — to fashion for ourselves the kind of spiritual and emotional life that we (and God) have long intended us to have.

Finally, under “Things To Do,” we’ll offer suggestions and exercises designed to enhance our experience and appreciation of what that role has and can now mean to us.

In the final of our five classes we will look back, and see how the primary lesson we learned by fulfilling each of our life’s roles not only can but are meant to combine within us to give us virtually everything we need to finally become the person we’ve always wanted to be.

A real person of God must be in full possession of five very distinct qualities, qualities so precious, and so hard to come by, that they can only be acquired through long, hard experience. Everyone who’s ever been or tried to be a Super Person, Child, Mate, Parent, and Provider does posses those five qualities. This class is intended to not just show but to prove why and how that’s true for each and every one of us.

This class is based on Midlife Manual for Men: Finding Significance in the Second Half, a book I co-authored with best-selling author Stephen Arterburn. It is just out from Bethany House Publishers; it is their lead title for the season.