Tag: christianity

In which I contain multitudes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting3 Comments

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I have always been very ambivalent about Santa Claus.  Hell, as a non-Christian I’m ambivalent enough about Christmas, so the idea that I’m compounding celebrating a holiday that’s supposed to be about the birth of a divine being who I don’t believe in with lying to my kid about a white dude who drops presents down the chimney just hasn’t ever sat well with me.  I don’t like lying to my son– and yes, I think telling your kids about Santa is lying to them, unless you also want to explain why Santa seems to like wealthy white kids more than everybody else.  But I’m not so opposed to the idea of Santa Claus that I’m stomping on it, so to speak.  The position my wife and I have evolved over the years is that we simply don’t talk about Santa.  My mom can tell the boy whatever she likes; he can absorb whatever messages about Santa he wants from the wider culture.  Hell, I’ll even read A Visit from St. Nicholas to him on Christmas Eve if he wants, like my parents used to do with me.  I let him read Captain Underpants and don’t make a big stink about him not being real; why should Santa be any different?  My policy has simply been to neither confirm nor deny, and I don’t write “from Santa” on presents that we bought him– the “from” tag on all his presents is just left blank.  He hasn’t seemed to notice that Santa seems to think he lives at his Grandma’s house.  And we’ve never done the “go to the mall and sit on Santa’s lap” thing either.  Which, honestly, as I’m typing this, I gotta admit I regret just a little bit.

So last week he told my wife that one of the kids in his class was telling everyone that Santa wasn’t real.  My wife, caught by surprise, fell back on our usual “What do you think?” shtick and eventually he dropped it, or so we thought.  This morning, as we were getting in the car to go to school, he ambushed me with the same question, and seemed frustrated that I reacted the same way.  He is 6, and in kindergarten, just so you can properly contextualize this if you’d like.

And then he said something that really caught me by surprise, which was that he thought that this other kid was “ruining Christmas” and “taking all the fun out of everything” by telling the other kids that Santa wasn’t real.  I pushed back on this as gently as I could– if Santa wasn’t real, does that mean that the tree and the lights and the presents and the cookies and the family stuff weren’t fun anymore?  Surely the fat white guy isn’t the most important part, right?  He didn’t answer, but I could see him thinking about it.

And then my reaction surprised me, because I found myself more than a little bit pissed at this kid, and by extension this kid’s parents.  I think the family in question is at least nominally Muslim, as I’m pretty sure they’re ethnically Pakistani, but at any rate they’re from that area (the boy may or may not have been born here; I’m certain the parents weren’t) and while in general they’ve struck me as more or less secular people they’re definitely from an area where Christianity isn’t the majority religion.  So, okay, your kid got raised with no Santa.  You told him the truth.  Cool.  But maybe you go ahead and make sure your kid knows that showing everyone else the light isn’t so much the way to go?  My son is friends with this kid, and he’s visibly upset with him for, again, “ruining Christmas.”  And if my son decides that the boy is right about that, then I’m going to have a talk with him about not screwing the shit up for the other kids.

And I gotta admit, I’m thisclose to dropping an email to either my kid’s teacher or this other family (our school makes sure everyone has everyone else’s emails) and in the most polite way I can manage to phrase it suggesting that they tell this other kid to knock it off.

That’s probably in utter contradiction to everything in the first couple of paragraphs.  Do I care?  I dunno.  I care enough that I wrote this to try and hash it out in my head, and I probably need to be talked out of contacting any of the other adults involved– which, again, I promise I’d do politely.

“Eventually ruining Christmas for him was my job, dammit” is not the most persuasive line of argument, after all.

Blech.  Parenting is stupid.

In lieu of anything else to say

On By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

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I haven’t been getting a ton of comments lately, so I’m kinda hoping everybody pitches in for this one, since as an atheist I’m not really qualified to comment on it.  Help me out, I’m confused.

A spot of context, in case you don’t recall: the local AAA baseball team is the South Bend Cubs.  I have been to a couple of games but I can’t name a single player.  (Actually, I can’t name a single active baseball player at any level, but that’s not entirely relevant.)

There is a church near my home that I drive by every day on my way to and from work.  Hell, it’s on a main thoroughfare, so I probably drive past it something like 70% of the time I leave my house.  And there’s a big sign out in front of the church– wood, attached to what appear to be 12 x 12 beams, so they intend for it to be at least semi permanent– that declares the place the “church home” of the South Bend Cubs, including using their logo, which something makes me doubt they got permission for.  The sign specifically names two players and their numbers; I don’t know if any more than those two attend that church and I’m not sure that two players really constitute an official team endorsement either.

So here’s the question: there have to be some at least moderately religious people who read this blog.  Assuming you were already Catholic, is there any universe where this sort of “rub elbows with very minor local celebrities” advertisement might entice you to check a church out?  And, as a secondary question, am I right in feeling that calling these two players out and yelling HEY THIS IS WHERE YOU CAN FIND THESE GUYS ON SUNDAY MORNING to literally everyone who drives by is kind of rude?

Syria and the limits of my knowledge

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

SIRIA_-_TURCHIA_-_RUSSIA_-_pace_paese.jpgI’ve kinda had my head in the ground for the last couple of days; I’m sort of still there, as it’s taken me a good five or six minutes just to write this sentence.  It’s been a shitty few days to be an American, or at least to be a sane one.

(It’s been a worse few days to be a Syrian; I hope that I didn’t need to clarify that, but I’m going to anyway.)

I’ve been very clear here on multiple occasions about how I feel about how this country should treat Syrian refugees.  What I’ve been less clear on– in fact, I don’t know that I’ve really addressed it at all– is how we should treat Syria.  There’s a good reason for that; I know when I’m in over my fucking head, and this is absolutely one of those times.  Even before we get into “Should America take a side in the Syrian civil war?” there is the very important “Can America do anything about the Syrian civil war?”  There is also the minor fact that the Russians are involved and anything we do with Syria runs the risk of provoking Russia, which is something I suspect all of us would like to avoid.

I don’t know what to do about this, except for the part that is both relatively uncomplicated and morally clear: we should accept every refugee from this conflict that we possibly can.  Period.  I don’t have the tiniest idea what the hell to do about the rest of it.  I don’t feel bad about that.  I’m a fucking furniture salesman from Indiana.  There are people for whom figuring this shit out is their jobs.

Which, speaking of that: another thing I am absolutely certain of is that none of the gang of scam artists, poltroons and quarterwits currently occupying the White House have the vaguest fucking clue what to do, and I don’t trust them even the tiniest little bit to get any aspect of this shit right.  Barack Obama went to Congress to authorize military action and they turned him down; the shitgibbon fires fifty Tomahawk missiles at an airport, warning the Syrians and the Russians first but not bothering to notify Congress, and somehow fails to even disable the airport.

That is a failure of such epic proportions that it simply had to be intentional.  The point was to make a bunch of noise and waste a bunch of money but not to actually do anything worthwhile.  I suspect when Obama asked for Congress to authorize military action this was not what he had in mind.  Was what he wanted the right thing to do?  I have no idea.  I know that I trust Obama’s judgment infinitely more than I do the shitgibbon’s.  But that doesn’t mean he was right either.  For all I know there may very well be no way to cut this particular Gordian knot.

Fuck ’em for the stolen Supreme Court seat, too.  Which doesn’t really fit in this post but I’m including it anyway because it’s my blog.

On refugees and Christianity, again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics9 Comments
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On the right, Rouwaida Hanoun, a Syrian five-year-old who is, as far as I know, still alive.  On the left, Anne Frank, who is not.

There are– it is horrifying to think, but it is true– people who believe that the orange fascist currently occupying the White House is a Christian.  Many of these people are the same people who believed Barack Obama to not be a Christian, so it’s immediately and apparently clear that when they say “Christianity,” what they mean is “White supremacy,” and they have little to no idea of what Jesus actually preached, what he might have believed, or– rather importantly– what he looked like.

I noticed this morning that the post I wrote about refugees last year is spiking in page views again, which is not surprising.  The monster in the White House has chosen to ban desperately frightened and endangered people– the “least among us” who Jesus spoke of– from our country, has deliberately decided to let children die rather than incur even the slightest risk to people who look like him.  He has, of course, excluded his business partners from these calculations; if  you are wealthy enough for him to have business dealings with, you are a Person, of course; Rouwaida Hanoun is not.  When I wrote the post last year we had a President who, while he made bad decisions in any number of ways, I believed fundamentally cared about people.

Unfortunately, that is no longer remotely true, and the man who was trying to keep Syrian refugees out of my state at the time is now Vice President.  Most of the time, I have trouble believing our current President is actually human.  It takes every bit of moral strength I have to recognize that the demented narcissist in the White House deserves as much compassion and dignity as anyone else by simple virtue of having been born a person.  Somebody or something fucked this man up; I don’t believe he was born this awful.

But that’s beside the point.  When I wrote that post last year, I was trying to be nice and trying to be the voice of reason.  You may recognize the tone; I use it around here from time to time when I’m writing something I want to be taken more seriously than usual.  At this point, I’m going to take a different tack: if you don’t think these people should be allowed into the country, if you think refugees (and people with green cards!  People who have been here, and are now separated from their families simply by virtue of having been somewhere else when the ban went into effect!) should be banned from the United States simply because of their religion, you’re a fucking monster.  You’re not a Christian.  Christ himself would rebuke you– he already has, in fact, in clear terms in the Bible you claim to believe is divinely inspired and true in its every word.

You are a bad person if you agree with this ban.  You are a racist and a monster and a coward and every bit as much of a piece of shit as the people trying to keep the Jews out of the country in the 1940s were. You are the exact same people saying the exact same things for the exact same reasons, only with “Jew” crossed out and “Muslim” written in.  And while I don’t want this to be true and I try to be a better person, I really wish there was a Hell so I could see the look on your face when you end up there. Because Jesus has been clear on your responsibilities in this matter.  If you’re not a Christian, you don’t have to follow Jesus.  I certainly don’t.  But he was perfectly clear on this, and you are the bad guys.  

As I was writing this, word came through Twitter that the ACLU has won a stay against this executive order, which is good, as it was wildly illegal from the start.  I set up recurring monthly donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood today.  You should too.

Ugh

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics8 Comments

As we were drifting off toward sleep last night, I remarked to my wife that it had been something very close to a perfect day.  We’d gotten a major project done in the house, had pizza for dinner (there are times when pizza is the best food; last night was one of them), gotten some landscaping done outside, had some cuddle time on the couch with the boy, and spent a pleasant half-hour or so sitting outside and enjoying a summer breeze in the shade on our back porch.

The moment lasted for, well, a moment, before I remembered that the day had started with her telling me not to look at the news until I was more awake, and that fifty people had been gunned down in Orlando, the second time in less than a week that the phrase “murdered in Orlando” had made national news.

This shit happens every week by now, right?  It’s like a ritual; I always hear about these things on Twitter first, and it’s always something slightly opaque, so there’s that few moments of oh I wonder where and how many this time before I find out.  It’s almost always a white guy doing the shooting.  Sometimes it’s not.

I’m at the point where I want the Second Amendment repealed.  Period.  It’s been made obsolete by technology in a way that no other part of the Bill of Rights has, and it needs to go.  But I really don’t want to write a gun post, and I’m even less interested in policing comments about a gun post.  But I do want to make one specific, and probably unnecessary, point about this specific atrocity.

Here’s Omar Mateen:

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The majority of the pictures of him I’ve seen are selfies.  In a lot of ways this guy seems to have been as American as they come (he was born here, after all) and I suspect that the NYPD gear is going to end up being overlooked more than perhaps it should be.  Reports are contradictory on how much of a role Islam played in his life; his father claims religion had nothing to do with it, and his ex-wife, who had to be “rescued” from him by her family, also says that he wasn’t radicalized at all at the time of their divorce in 2011.  But that was five years ago; five years is a long time.

Donald Trump is yip-yapping about “radical Islamic terrorism,” and there’s more fooferall about whether Obama should have used that phrase, or whether Hillary did, and what it means that Hillary Said It but Obama Didn’t, and a whole bunch of nonsense.

I’d like to submit here that it doesn’t really matter all that goddamn much whether this dude was a radical Muslim or not, because the way things stand right now in the US there is no goddamn daylight at all between “radical Muslims” and conservative Christians on the issue of the gay community.(*)  When a leading Republican candidate for President is introduced to a cheering crowd by a pastor minutes after that same pastor calls for the execution of gay people, I don’t want to hear shit about Islamic terrorism.  Republican legislatures across the country have spent most of the last couple of months wetting their pants about whether trans people should be able to pee in public restrooms or not.  Out gay people are in danger in this country every time they leave their homes.  I don’t wanna hear shit about Islamic terrorism when we have an entire political party gleefully making the lives of gay people as miserable as they possibly can every chance they get right here in the United States.  It’s just not relevant.  I don’t care what this guy’s religion was.  He was a homophobe.  That’s the relevant variant of asshole we’re dealing with here, and it’s the only one that matters.

(Two side tangents: 1) I also don’t give a damn about his little 911 call before he drove off to kill people.  I can call 911 and proclaim myself a member of the Harlem Globetrotters right before I go shoot some folks; that doesn’t mean Big Easy and Flight Time are gonna know who the hell I am.  2) Yes, I know about this guy.  I’m not going to talk about him because the case appears to be getting murkier by the minute, and I’m already speculating enough right now.)

Actually, one more thing: it’s interesting to see signs of Mateen starting to get the “mentally ill” edit, which is normally reserved for white people and certainly not for Muslims.  Mental illness is a dodge of the real issue, as usual; a mentally ill and homophobic Omar Mateen who does not have access to a weapon that can shoot a hundred people in a matter of minutes is substantially less dangerous than a healthy and homophobic Mateen who does.

(*) There are so many acronyms.  I feel like “queer” is better as a single umbrella term but “queer” still feels like at least half a slur to me sometimes so I don’t like using it; I’m hoping we can agree that I’m trying to write in good faith here and leave it alone?  I really do hope that at one of the Gay Agenda meetings at some point they sit down and decide on one acronym.  I like QUILTBAG because it’s fun to say, but as a straight cis dude I don’t really get a vote.

In which my diamond shoes are too tight

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized7 Comments

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Damn post is wrecking my graphs.

It is Monday, which makes me feel like the traffic on the Syria post has got to slow down today, but the numbers so far show me differently.  On Saturday, I had 200 pageviews when I woke up in the morning and 500 by noon; on Sunday, 500 when I woke up and 1000 by just after noon, and today I had a thousand by 8:00 in the morning.  It’s 8:44 as I’m typing this.   That picture’s less than five minutes old and it’s 50 hits out of date already.

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This may end up too small to read, but look at that nonsense.  That 468 hourly high is after I went to bed, and I went to bed around 10:30, which means we had like ten straight hours of 350-400 hits per hour yesterday.  There should be a lull in the bell curve around midafternoon, and it ain’t there.  And that early-morning dip is probably still around 100-15o an hour.

The goddamn thing’s gonna catch and pass the Snowpiercer post today.  In six days.  Insanity.

I keep waiting for a troll invasion; I’ve stomped on one post where the person referred to “unvetted” refugees, demonstrating clearly that he had no idea how the refugee process actually works at all, and there have been a couple that I’ve laid a stinkeye on but have left alone.  I’ve made one alteration to the text where a mistake was pointed out and left another alone although I probably ought to edit it a bit.  I’m considering turning off comments today just because I legitimately have a shitton to do (this is my only day without the boy all week) and I don’t know how much time I have to wait for the racist hordes to land on my head.

Another interesting fact: Facebook continues to be just about the sole source for referrers.  You’d think that someone in there somewhere would have dumped the thing onto Zite or StumbleUpon or Reddit or something, but so far this is a Facebook party.  Which could be why I’m not seeing too many trolls; maybe they’re all staying on FB and yelling at people there.  Who knows.

(8:56 AM:  1318 views, meaning the post got 116 views in the less than fifteen minutes it took to write this.)

REBLOG: Freeing Christians From Americhristianity

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

An outstanding post. Give it a read.

It continues (morning blogwanking)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Uncategorized8 Comments

Yesterday was the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog, including the time where I was Freshly Pressed:

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You’ll note that I had more individual visitors than I had pageviews the day before, and I’m pretty sure the day before was the 2nd or 3rd best day I’ve ever had.  That’s pretty impressive.  As of now, 8:17, I’ve already got 160 views, so thus far the pace hasn’t slowed down any.  And check this out:

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That’s all time ranked posts, using the old stats editor.  Leaving out the home page and the “About” page, which aren’t posts, that means that a post I wrote less than 48 hours ago is now the 7th highest-traffic post I’ve ever written.

Dag.

I don’t think it’s going to catch the Snowpiercer post, which has five times as many hits as its closest competitor, but it’ll be really interesting to see how far it gets before interest fizzles out.  Another interesting detail: right now, traffic appears to be driven almost exclusively by Facebook referrals.  As of this second the page has been shared on FB 759 times and 31 on Twitter, but I got 671 referrals from FB yesterday and only 13 from Twitter. Not one click through StumbleUpon, Reddit, Tumblr, or any of the other usual suspects.  My autoshare on FB has reached 907 people and the Tumblr share doesn’t have a single note on it.  Less than ten from Google +, which I think is funny, since those might be my first G+ referrals ever.

I’m actually kind of scared to see what will happen if Reddit gets ahold of the post.  Which I suppose you can take as an invitation if you’re a Redditor.

Still no trolls, either.  Amazing.

Now (again) if I can just get these people to buy books.  🙂