What I Am Giving Up For Lent

Wednesday, March 1, next week marks the beginning of Lent. It is the 40 day period before the Feast of Easter, symbolizing both Jesus’ 40 day prayer journey in the desert before the start of his earthly ministry and our own faith journeys. It is a time for us to reflect on our lives, both the past year and our lives as a whole, think of the ways we have followed the example of Jesus, and think of areas where we need improvement. Requirements of fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and abstaining from meat on these days and the other Fridays of Lent (Church Laws, not Divine Laws, and as such changeable) are ways in which we show communion with our fellow Christian pilgrims. I will try to do better this year, though it is hard at Happy Hour on Fridays, with tasty chicken wings tempting me!

Along with this, we are called to show our devotion in other ways. In the past, many people usually did this by giving something up for Lent, whether it be ice cream, junk food, television, as a way of showing solidarity, and a willingness to put more focus on Christ during Lent. A more recent practice has been, instead of giving something up, to do something a little extra for Lent.

I thought about trying to become a daily Mass goer during Lent, but with work, I do not have the time. And, daily Mass is something I could have easily done in grad school, when there were about eight masses available each day for me to attend, but I was too damn lazy. I could make my Lenten goal to pass my Comprehensive Exams, however, (1) that is more than a Lenten Goal, and (2) I take my Comps March 16 and 17, so there is still plenty of Lent left after that. I could give up drinking for Lent…no freaking way! When I finish my comps on St. Paddy’s Day morning, I am getting so blitzed. Plus, with March Madness and all, there are too many party dates.

Instead of giving something up or doing something extra, this Lent I am going to have a change in attitude. My life is going good right now. I have a good social circle (even if many of my friends are spread out over the East coast and beyond), a great family, a job that I love. I am moving out into my own place in less than a month. My life really is great. The only thing holding me down is that I let myself fret over the fact that I am single. Well, for Lent, I am not going to worry about women. It’s kind of like baseball. When I always worried about how well I was doing, I did bad, made an error, struck out, popped up, etc. When I didn’t give a shit, and just relaxed, treated it as a game, I did fine. Keep on reading to find out why I am making this change in my attitude for Lent…

I always tried to figure out “why don’t I have a girlfriend? Why don’t women like me?” I have halfway figured it out. Yeah, this is the old clichéd “defining moment” or “moment of realization” that you always see in literature. Like, Buddha all of a sudden reaching Nirvana, St. Augustine having his conversion in the garden. Whether in real life these things are gradual and just become “quick defining moments” for literary effect, I don’t know.

My first realization is figuring out why people date each other. For the majority of people, it is a combination of looks and personality. There are some people who only care about looks (these people are shallow) and some people who only care about personality (these people are dating saints or something). Most of us, when we date someone, it is because we like the person’s personality, and also like the person’s looks.

A few quick realizations to start: When person A dates person B, A likes B’s personality and looks. If person A does not want to date person B, it is because either (1) A is not physically attracted to B, (2) A is not really into B’s personality, or (3) A does not like B’s personality nor looks.

Step 1 to finding out which of the two is my problem: examine my personality. I am smart, funny, fun to be around, women really like hanging out with me and spending time with me. No, I am not the “playa” type, but I also am not the boring “nice” guy who kisses up to women, worships the ground they walk on, and are dull and wussy. I am a good flirt and tease, and am a good time. Yeah, I can be a little annoying at times, but I am never boring. I am always interesting. Okay, enough bragging about myself.

(quick sidenote: I have no sympathy for “nice” guys who whine about how women go for jerks. Unless these “nice” guys are willing to date the nice woman over the pretty woman, they have no argument.)

So, there is no way any woman would ever reject me based on personality. This leaves 2 options:

Option 1: Since women like my personality, I may be single because of my looks. I have no pretensions about myself. I neither assume that women are or expect women to be physically attracted to me. I do not think of myself as good looking, or ugly, or average. I do not think of myself at all. I am straight, and attracted to women. Whether or not I am attractive is something for women to judge (and gay guys, I suppose. They can judge my looks if they want, as long as they don’t hit on me). So, what I’m getting at is, I would not date a woman that I am not physically attractive to, so I would neither expect nor want a woman who is not physically attracted to me to date me.

Option 2: I know that women like my personality. It may be possible that women do like my looks and my initial hypothesis (people date based on looks and personality) is wrong. Obviously, there are some people out there who date based on money, fame, power, or some combination of these. And, I am not rich, I am not famous, I do not have GW Bush power or anything like that. Again, like the handful of people who care about just looks, or just personality, there are a handful who care about only things like wealth, fame, status. I would not want to date these type of women anyways.

So, it is possible that women look for a third thing on top of looks and personality when it comes to dating. They may like a man’s looks and personality and still not want to date him. If so, they are pickier than me when it comes to dating. All I ask for is looks and personality.

Besides, I have almost figured things out:
(1) women date men (and vice versa) because they like the other person’s personality and looks
(2) women like my personality
(3) I am single
Therefore:
(4) Two possibilities remain: (a) women do not like my looks or (b) women like my looks, but are pickier than me and care about more than just personality and looks.

Point Break LIVE! the stage version of the Keanu/Swayze Classic

As those of you who are regular readers of my blog know, I have a certain affinity for Keanu Reeves films. So bad, yet so entertaining! I particularly enjoy his cult classic Point Break (see my movie review on it: http://spidgetales.blogspot.com/2005/09/keanu-reeves-best-bad-actor.html ), where Patrick Swayze put on the performance of his lifetime, Gary Busey put on his ultimate caricature of self performance, and Keanu Reeves put on his ultimate wooden performance. As if the movie itself is not enough, I recently learned that their is a stage version of this classic.

At Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, from February 10 through February 25, "Point Break LIVE!, the abusrdist stage adaptation of the 1992 Keanu Reeves extreme-sport blockbuster" will be showing for an exclusive one month engagement. A real stage actor will be playing the part of Patrick Swayze's character Bodhi Sattva, and, presumable other actors will play the parts of the ensemble. However, the lead role, the character of Johnny Utah, played in the movie by Keanu Reeves, will be played by a member of the audience selected at random each night, and he will perform his part by reading off cue cards.

To see the online add for the play, click here: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showCode=POI . You just can't make this stuff up :-).

What Does It Mean To Be A Christian?

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

“Whatever you do for the least of these, that you did unto me.” Matt 25:40

What does it mean to be a Christian? The answer to this question has traditionally always been a balancing act between believing the right things and acting the right way. It is a balance between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Actually, it is not so much a balancing act but a recognition that to truly be orthodox, to truly show right belief towards and regarding God, it is necessary to show correct orthopraxy, to act justly and mercifully towards others. I think every Christian would agree this analysis. And, most Christians would probably agree on what it means to behave correctly in relation to others, showing love, compassion, and charity, even if most Christians recognize that they are not always good at following through on it. The debate comes up in the area of orthodoxy. Not all people who call themselves Christians agree on what it means to show right belief.

An interesting case study is that of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. The beliefs he holds and claims he makes are neither new nor unique. There are many people out there who hold similar beliefs. What makes the case of Bishop Spong unique is that he claims to be a Christian, and continues to hold a place of leadership in a Christian Church while holding beliefs that, while shared by many others, cause most other adherents, out of honesty with themselves, to refrain from calling themselves “Christian.” Below is his basic claim for a new “Reformation” in spirit with Martin Luther, however, as he claims, more radical than Luther.

http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/jsspong/reform.html
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium

Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. This is a bold claim and, as such, demands an explanation. In other writings, Spong claims that we need to find some place between Theism and Atheism. He is no longer capable of believing in an all-powerful and all-loving God, so he cannot hold to Theism. He does not like the meaninglessness of Atheism, either, so he is hiding out somewhere in the middle. Is it really possible to hide out in the middle? Remember, this is different than Agnosticism, the claim that one does not know or cannot know if God does not exist. This is saying that there is some sort of “God” or “God-ness” or “God-essence” that is not really real, but also isn’t completely fictional either. God is real for Spong kind of like how Santa Claus is “real” for the editor of the New York Sun who wrote that letter to Virginia. God is the best part of ourselves, or something like that.

Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. This claim works IF claim number one is true. Yet, Spong has not proven claim one. All he has done is assert a belief in it.

The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense. Yes, evolution shows us that we developed from lower life forms. We have developed intellectually and technologically. However, morally, we are no better and no worse than our predecessors. We are good sometimes, and bad sometimes, just like people in the past. We may be better as far as sexism and racism, but we kill more people in wars, and people are just as lonely as they were in the past, and, maybe even more so, being trapped in our rooms with computers, cell-phones, yet less real interaction. The biblical story does not say that the world was aesthetically perfect, it just says that God did not make us as sinners. Sin was a free choice made by us. There is evil in the world. Whose fault is it, God’s, or our own from abuse of free will? The dogma of Original Sin simply teaches that sin is our own fault, not God’s.

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. What Spong is saying is that, since, biologically speaking, a person needs a male sperm and female ovum to meet to be conceived, a virgin birth (without IVF or some other form of modern technology that did not exist 2000 years ago) is not possible. True enough. However, the Christian story is not denying that sperm and egg uniting is the normal way of giving birth. The Christian story says that a miracle happened, a suspension of the laws of nature. Jesus has only one human parent because of miraculous, divine intervention. And, Spong disbelieves this because of his fifth point, which comes next.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. Spong says that we know “know” miracle cannot happen because of what we have learned from the Enlightenment and modern science. Whether or not miracles do happen is a matter of faith. But, that they can happen has not, and cannot, be disproved (or proved) by science. The rules of mathematics are absolute. 1 +1 must by definition always and everywhere equal 2 (Even if we substitute a different number or word for 2, 1+1 will always equal whatever symbol is there for 2). The laws of science, however, are dependent on where we are. We fall when we jump off a building because of how gravity affects us on earth. If we jumped in space, we would not fall; we would float. A miracle, by definition, is simply a suspension of the regular laws of science. Normally, water does not just turn into wine. But, is it impossible that it could happen? Science cannot disprove it. However, if one, like Spong, gives up belief in a Theistic God, it is understandable why he would give up belief in miracles.

The rest of my critique of Spong to come later…

The Facebook Princess

This story has been written to death, and is so 2 months ago, however, I did not hear about it until this past weekend, and, maybe it has been written about too much, but I haven't written about it yet. I am referring, of course, to the legend of the Facebook Princess.

The story began back in the fall, when ABC was televising a Florida St. college football game. During football telecasts, the camera will occasionally pan into the crowd, giving viewers a glimpse of the enthusiastic student body. After about a two second close-up of a group of Florida St. girls who called themselves the FSU Cowgirls, Brent Musberger, ABC's announcer, made a joke about how thousands of teenage boys will now be applying for admission to Florida St.

The girls were wearing cowboy hats, really short jean shorts, and basically bikini tops. Based on their two seconds of air time, college students (probably male) across the country searched for the girls on Facebook, and found out who the main girl was. She quickly became the most famous person on Facebook, receiving over 16,000 friend requests! (No, I have not sent a friend request to her. I do not send requests to people I don't know. Every person on my Facebook friendlist I know personally. Although, if she was to write me and request to add me as a friend, I suppose I would oblige her request.)

The Facebook Princess has parlayed her two seconds of national tv screentime into a pretty damn good fifteen minutes of fame. Sports Illustrated's webpage ran an article about her, which is how I first learned about the incident this past weekend, even though the story has been going strong for about two or three months( click here to read it, it's fairly short: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/sioncampus/02/09/cowgirl.fsu/index.html ). A college senior now, she will be appearing in Maxim and Playboy soon, as well. And, she even seems like a pretty cool and interesting girl, too. She has a sense of humor. When asked if her you know whats are real, she said "of course, they are real. Real expensive."

I am not going to reveal her name here. You can figure it out on your own with a little Google or Yahoo search, if it's that important to you. The last thing I will leave you with is the link to her facebook pics: http://fsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=70103&page=1&l=7920d&id=5226986 .

Dick Cheney, American Sportsman

I was going to comment on Dick Cheney's little hunting incident, but John Nichols of The Nation says everything that needs to be said. click here http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15 , or read below:

Sure, it's been fun joking about the fact that Dick Cheney obtained five -- count them, five -- deferments to avoid serving in the military during the Vietnam War. Sure, its been amusing to recount his limp claim that the man who served as George Bush I's Secretary of Defense had "other priorities" than taking up arms in defense of his country. Sure, it was a laugh when the chief cheerleader for the war in Iraq mocked John Kerry for having actually carried a weapon in a time of war.
But it is time to stop laughing at Dick Cheney's expense.
Now that the vice president has accidentally shot and wounded a companion on a quail hunt at the elite Texas ranch where rich men play with guns -- spraying his 78-year-old victim, er, friend, in the face and chest with shotgun pellets and sending the man to the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital -- it has become clear that Cheney was doing the country a service when he avoided service.
Despite the best efforts of Cheney's apologists to have it otherwise, the man the vice president misstook for a quail, millionaire attorney Harry Whittington, was in plain sight, wearing a bright orange vest at the time the vice president blasted him.
U.S. troops had enough problems in Vietnam without letting a trigger-happy incompetent like Dick Cheney start shooting things up from behind the lines.
Those deferments were well and wisely issued.

Exegesis Vs. Eisegesis

One of the areas of theology, of course, is Biblical Studies. And, one of the fancy terms used is exegesis, which people who search for the author’s meaning use when they want to sound smart. Exegesis is analyzing the meaning of the text, and figuring out what the author is trying to say, what the author’s message is. One of the problems with many biblical literary critics (and, I would imagine, of literary critics in general) is that instead of doing exegesis, many do eisegesis. An exegete reads out the inherent meaning and message in a text. An eisegete reads his own meaning, emotions, and political motivations, into the text. The appeal of eisegesis is obvious, especially when it comes to literary classics. “If this text is a classic, then of course the author must agree with me and share my viewpoints!”

In the story of Cain and Abel, God banishes Cain as a punishment for killing his brother Abel. However, he also places a mark on Cain so that no one else will kill or harm him. The message in this story is that, even though sin demands punishment and justice, we are not to exact revenge on a sinner. No matter how heinous the crime, a criminal, a sinner, never loses his human dignity. He deserves punishment, but his life still has value.

An eisegete would go beyond this analysis and interpret this story as a condemnation of capital punishment. The problem with this is that one would be reading too much into the text. It is not realistic to look at an author who wrote around 500 BC as sharing one’s modern day liberal sensitivities.

Another story that is used to support modern agendas is the parable of the talents. Jesus told of a rich man who loaned money to three servants. Two of the servants invested their share, and made a profit. The other one buried his share, then brought that same share back. The two who invested were given even more, but the one who buried his treasure had the little he had taken from him. Many neo-cons like to use this story to show that Jesus was a Capitalist and loved the free market. But, that is reading one’s own opinion into the text. All this text is saying is that we each have gifts and talents that we are given by God, and we are called to use our gifts.

I honestly do not think that most eisegetes really believe that the ancient authors shared their modern viewpoints. In fact, I think many modern eisegetes are snobs. They begin by neither doing exegesis nor eisegesis. They do not care what the ancient authors really had to say. They do not ask the question “what message is the author trying to get across?” Instead, they ask, “what does the text say about the author’s biases and prejudices?” Instead of, for example, commenting on what a biblical author is saying about human relationships or our relationship with God, they would hit upon a trivial point, such as the ancient author’s use of “man” or “mankind” for “human” or “humanity” and point out the author’s “patriarchal bias.” From there, they would then do eisegesis as a way to “save” or “rescue” the ancient author from his “bigoted” ways and give him a modern, sensitive, viewpoint, and adopt the few salvageable points of the ancient text for “progressive” purposes.

Worst Song of All Time

I think it's time to figure out the worst song of all time. I don't mean worst song in a "100 worst songs you love to hate" or bad songs that you enjoy, or any guity pleasure variety. I am not talking about songs like Journey's Don't Stop Believing or Mr. Mister's Broken Wings. Those songs are bad, but they are enjoyable. I'm talking worst song of all time bad. To be worst song of all time, it is not enough for the song to be bad. It has to be bad beyond "guilty pleasure" level. It can't be a bad song that you enjoy. It also can't be just a bad song that you don't enjoy, but one that you can turn off, and "whew, it's gone!" It has to be bad, not fun to listen to, and a song that gets stuck in your head in spite all that.

Nominee number one is that Do You Believe in Life After Love song by Cher. I heard it as I was flipping through radio stations driving to work this morning. My reflexes were quicker than usual and I managed to change stations after "do you be--". I listened to about three more songs on my way to work on different stations, yet here I am, hearing Cher blaring away between my ears, inside my head. Will you please go away!?

Give me your nominees for worst song of all time. This will be like the razzies for music, except not just one year, but of all time.