There was one other pastor who didn’t make it in to any of the stories I told in yesterday’s post. The story about him didn’t fit, but that’s because it was probably more important than any. At least, it was more important than any of yesterday’s stories in relation to my thoughts on Atheism+. I learned one of the absolute most important lessons I’ve ever learned because of him. Notice that I don’t say I learned it from him, however.
He had been my high school pastor. In that role he was at least as important as all the other pastors, and more important than a few of them combined. He was, after all, the pastor who presided over my haven during my rocky high school years. That’s kind of a big deal, especially for someone who had every intention of becoming a pastor. There were three pastors I modeled my theoretical future pastorhood after and he was the first.
I have very little respect for him these days. Part of that is because I kept track of some of his thinking after I left Christianity and, well, he was well on his way to becoming a caricature of a right wing Christian blowhard. But the first hit came when I was in college.
He gave a message at my college group’s Sunday morning service. The subject was abortion. The takeaway was that anyone who wasn’t doing everything in their power to stop abortion was a terrible Christian.
I actually called him out on it via an email exchange over the next week. My argument wasn’t, I admit, that abortion was a thing that should be a choice made by a woman or anything. My argument was that not everyone could focus entirely on abortion and to belittle their faith based on his preferred goals was wrong. Interestingly enough, he agreed with me. Further, he actually walked it back the next week.
It’s a respectable thing, really. Credit where due and all.
My problem here isn’t that he said something that I disagreed with. The problem isn’t even that my disagreement was (for a certain technical value of the idea) correct. The problem is that I shouldn’t have had to question him at all.
---------------------------
I have a good friend with whom I grew up in the church. As hard as it might be to believe, he was even further inside the bubble than I was. We went to the same church, but he was home schooled by a massively overprotective mother. I, at least, went to public schools and had parents who pretty much insisted that I get my butt kicked by reality as often as possible.
My friend was brilliant. Well, he still is. He was on the verge of going to Wheaton College, the Harvard of Midwestern Christian colleges, but decided at the last minute to go with his other option. That option? Stanford. Yeah, that Stanford.
He adjusted better than I thought he would and never actually came back from the West Coast, other than to visit. I’ve only seen him a few times since we graduated from high school, but every time I have it’s been like we last hung out last week. He was in town this week and I had dinner with him and his wife, who I met exactly once before and might have said one or two things to. We sat for three hours, a good chunk of which was spent reminiscing about the mutual weirdness of the shared moments of our childhood at the Bible Church. His wife shook her head on several occasions and said she’d never understand where her husband came from.
My friend left the church we grew up in and its attendant bubble, but he never actually left the church. He’s now one of those liberal Christians who thinks that the Bible instructs believers to care about the unfortunate and try to make the world a better place for everyone, regardless of tribal affiliation. He’s told me that he sometimes thinks that he gets along better with the people he knows who are atheists than he does with the people who remained in the church bubble.
He knows as well as anyone can where I stand on issues of faith. Still, I found myself dancing around the issue with his wife. Her response to the whole thing was to shrug.
I realized, probably for the first time, that worrying about religious affiliation and establishing appropriately church bona fides is profoundly weird.
-----------------------
I’ve gotten reasonably comfortable with making new friends in the last three years. I made basically none when I lived in Brookfield, where I sat alone and nursed my pain over losing all that I left behind between 2006 and 2008.
When I moved back to Wheaton in 2011 it was as someone who was aware of the baggage that came with living in the home of Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center. I was also, however, someone who had spent the last year and a half in Texas becoming truly comfortable with who I was and what I believed. I’d also gotten out of the habit of starting introductions with beliefs. I had no idea what the majority of the people I knew in Texas did with their Sunday mornings and I was okay with that.
That particular attitude came back to Wheaton with me. I made some new friends and didn’t know what stock, if any, they placed in religious belief. It came up in conversation once and I responded, reflexively, with, “I’m an atheist.” The guy who’d asked said, “Cool, so am I.” So did the cute redhead across the table.[1] Every once in a while I mention something about who I was in the before time, the long-long ago. The people who have met me since 2008 are always shocked by the revelation that I was once a wannabe uber-Evangelical with intentions pointed firmly at seminary and pastorhood.
Once the shock wears off and a few follow-up questions come up the whole thing is just kind of dropped. It doesn’t really matter. This is because most people don’t really care too much about the religious preferences of their friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Other things matter more.
--------------------------
I’m a writer, storyteller, and historian. I’m a beer snob. I’m a dog lover. I’m a homeowner. I’m a business analyst. I’m a White Sox fan. Every once in a while I offer the exasperated admission that I’m basically a goddamn yuppie.[2]
All of these things tend to come up before religious belief.
It’s becoming genuinely weird to me that they wouldn’t.
--------------------------
Choosing your friends and allies based on religious belief is a limiting factor. It’s better to work with people who have a similar vision but a dissimilar belief structure than to duplicate efforts. I got to see way too much of that in my time in Evangelical Christianity. We had actual, serious conversations about whether or not Catholics were true Christians. We didn’t trust Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Methodists. This diluted the ability of my church to do things that required people outside its own doors.
More than that, though, it kept the focus on the exact wrong thing. We were worried more about purity than purpose. We had to make sure no one would question our dedication to proper Christianity before we could reach out to other churches or ministries in the area.
I thought I’d left that behind when I left Evangelical Christianity.
--------------------------
This also limits that which can be accomplished. Saying, “I will only work with people who agree with me on X, Y, and Z offers the assumption that X, Y, and Z are the only thing that matters. Even if X, Y, and Z are a big deal in absolute terms, some people simply don’t see X, Y, and Z as being their primary concern, or they agree about X, Y, and Z but disagree that X, Y, and Z follow logically or are even remotely implied by Belief A.
From a strategic point you’re losing allies when you do that. Sure, some of those allies probably aren’t worth having around, anyway. That’s not always the case, however.
You’re also setting up denominations. I cannot stress enough how much I think PZ Myers has a cult of personality. The horde over at Pharyngula might not see things that way, but that’s primarily because of a problem that I call “internet self-selection.” I’ll have to explain that later, though, as I'm running overlong as it is.
For now all I’ll say is that PZ Myers cares far more about the purity of the people he chooses to work with than he does about the goals he wishes to achieve. He’s welcome to pull shit like that, I suppose. I’m not the boss of him, after all. All I know is that I’ve seen purity cults before and no good comes from that sort of thinking.
The sad thing is that I think he genuinely believes that he’s doing the right thing by selling Atheism+ as an exclusionary movement. I think that he sees it as being a way to keep the misogynistic fuckwads out and doesn’t look at it as anything more than that. If the world worked in such a way that there were only two types of people he’d be correct. That’s not how things work at all, though.
----------------------
Also, too, I note that it pretty much sets up a black and white, right and wrong, you’re either for me or against me scenario. If I disagree with PZ Myers on this I must, by definition, be objectively pro-misogynistic fuckwads.
This, ultimately, is why I’m viscerally against this sort of tactic and sales strategy. I’m against it because I’ve fucking lived it. I’m tired of jackasses with an outsized sense of their importance telling me what I have to believe in order to be considered acceptable to them. I didn’t buy it when I was told I had to fight tooth and nail against abortion to be a Christian. I’m not going to buy it when I’m told that I have to agree that atheism offers a logical progression towards a comprehensive moral system on which I must sign off.
It doesn’t matter that I agree with everything I’ve seen as a tenet of Atheism+. I don’t fucking agree with the sales pitch. I don’t fucking agree with the blackmail.
I’m over that bullshit.
-----------------------
[1]Said cute redhead and I also bonded over Matt Nathanson. Sadly, I lacked the ability to actually make anything come of that.
[2]So, just a bit south of Wheaton is the city of Naperville. Naperville is basically the suburban hell that TV and movie people visualize when they have to send people to a suburban hell. It’s all people with BMW’s, trendy restaurants, and McMansions. I have a visceral hatred for Naperville and do everything in my power to not hang out in downtown Naperville.
About two months ago I was in downtown Naperville with my dad and bro-in-law. I made a disparaging remark about the place and my bro-in-law asked why I hated Naperville. I said that if was full of trendy bullshit and people who had more money than sense. He pointed out that I like crazy food and craft beer, have disposable income, and drive a newish import sedan (although I will argue this point, since my car is a freaking 2010 Mazda 6. Ain’t nobody ever gotten laid because he rolled in a 2010 Mazda 6). As such, I was the exact demographic that Naperville seeks to entice.
I replied, “So that means I’m a yuppie, doesn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Damn. I’m a fucking yuppie.”
This doesn’t change the fact that I hate Naperville, though. A few weeks ago Wheaton hosted the second annual Wheaton Ale Fest. I was hanging out there with some friends, a few of whom live in Naperville. I mentioned something about how I couldn’t stand Naperville.
The response I go was, “Oh, because you live in Wheaton, where the old money is? Where people show they’re sensible by driving ten year-old cars?”
Aaaaand, fuck. I can’t win. But at least I don’t drive a BMW.
He had been my high school pastor. In that role he was at least as important as all the other pastors, and more important than a few of them combined. He was, after all, the pastor who presided over my haven during my rocky high school years. That’s kind of a big deal, especially for someone who had every intention of becoming a pastor. There were three pastors I modeled my theoretical future pastorhood after and he was the first.
I have very little respect for him these days. Part of that is because I kept track of some of his thinking after I left Christianity and, well, he was well on his way to becoming a caricature of a right wing Christian blowhard. But the first hit came when I was in college.
He gave a message at my college group’s Sunday morning service. The subject was abortion. The takeaway was that anyone who wasn’t doing everything in their power to stop abortion was a terrible Christian.
I actually called him out on it via an email exchange over the next week. My argument wasn’t, I admit, that abortion was a thing that should be a choice made by a woman or anything. My argument was that not everyone could focus entirely on abortion and to belittle their faith based on his preferred goals was wrong. Interestingly enough, he agreed with me. Further, he actually walked it back the next week.
It’s a respectable thing, really. Credit where due and all.
My problem here isn’t that he said something that I disagreed with. The problem isn’t even that my disagreement was (for a certain technical value of the idea) correct. The problem is that I shouldn’t have had to question him at all.
---------------------------
I have a good friend with whom I grew up in the church. As hard as it might be to believe, he was even further inside the bubble than I was. We went to the same church, but he was home schooled by a massively overprotective mother. I, at least, went to public schools and had parents who pretty much insisted that I get my butt kicked by reality as often as possible.
My friend was brilliant. Well, he still is. He was on the verge of going to Wheaton College, the Harvard of Midwestern Christian colleges, but decided at the last minute to go with his other option. That option? Stanford. Yeah, that Stanford.
He adjusted better than I thought he would and never actually came back from the West Coast, other than to visit. I’ve only seen him a few times since we graduated from high school, but every time I have it’s been like we last hung out last week. He was in town this week and I had dinner with him and his wife, who I met exactly once before and might have said one or two things to. We sat for three hours, a good chunk of which was spent reminiscing about the mutual weirdness of the shared moments of our childhood at the Bible Church. His wife shook her head on several occasions and said she’d never understand where her husband came from.
My friend left the church we grew up in and its attendant bubble, but he never actually left the church. He’s now one of those liberal Christians who thinks that the Bible instructs believers to care about the unfortunate and try to make the world a better place for everyone, regardless of tribal affiliation. He’s told me that he sometimes thinks that he gets along better with the people he knows who are atheists than he does with the people who remained in the church bubble.
He knows as well as anyone can where I stand on issues of faith. Still, I found myself dancing around the issue with his wife. Her response to the whole thing was to shrug.
I realized, probably for the first time, that worrying about religious affiliation and establishing appropriately church bona fides is profoundly weird.
-----------------------
I’ve gotten reasonably comfortable with making new friends in the last three years. I made basically none when I lived in Brookfield, where I sat alone and nursed my pain over losing all that I left behind between 2006 and 2008.
When I moved back to Wheaton in 2011 it was as someone who was aware of the baggage that came with living in the home of Wheaton College and the Billy Graham Center. I was also, however, someone who had spent the last year and a half in Texas becoming truly comfortable with who I was and what I believed. I’d also gotten out of the habit of starting introductions with beliefs. I had no idea what the majority of the people I knew in Texas did with their Sunday mornings and I was okay with that.
That particular attitude came back to Wheaton with me. I made some new friends and didn’t know what stock, if any, they placed in religious belief. It came up in conversation once and I responded, reflexively, with, “I’m an atheist.” The guy who’d asked said, “Cool, so am I.” So did the cute redhead across the table.[1] Every once in a while I mention something about who I was in the before time, the long-long ago. The people who have met me since 2008 are always shocked by the revelation that I was once a wannabe uber-Evangelical with intentions pointed firmly at seminary and pastorhood.
Once the shock wears off and a few follow-up questions come up the whole thing is just kind of dropped. It doesn’t really matter. This is because most people don’t really care too much about the religious preferences of their friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Other things matter more.
--------------------------
I’m a writer, storyteller, and historian. I’m a beer snob. I’m a dog lover. I’m a homeowner. I’m a business analyst. I’m a White Sox fan. Every once in a while I offer the exasperated admission that I’m basically a goddamn yuppie.[2]
All of these things tend to come up before religious belief.
It’s becoming genuinely weird to me that they wouldn’t.
--------------------------
Choosing your friends and allies based on religious belief is a limiting factor. It’s better to work with people who have a similar vision but a dissimilar belief structure than to duplicate efforts. I got to see way too much of that in my time in Evangelical Christianity. We had actual, serious conversations about whether or not Catholics were true Christians. We didn’t trust Presbyterians, Lutherans, or Methodists. This diluted the ability of my church to do things that required people outside its own doors.
More than that, though, it kept the focus on the exact wrong thing. We were worried more about purity than purpose. We had to make sure no one would question our dedication to proper Christianity before we could reach out to other churches or ministries in the area.
I thought I’d left that behind when I left Evangelical Christianity.
--------------------------
This also limits that which can be accomplished. Saying, “I will only work with people who agree with me on X, Y, and Z offers the assumption that X, Y, and Z are the only thing that matters. Even if X, Y, and Z are a big deal in absolute terms, some people simply don’t see X, Y, and Z as being their primary concern, or they agree about X, Y, and Z but disagree that X, Y, and Z follow logically or are even remotely implied by Belief A.
From a strategic point you’re losing allies when you do that. Sure, some of those allies probably aren’t worth having around, anyway. That’s not always the case, however.
You’re also setting up denominations. I cannot stress enough how much I think PZ Myers has a cult of personality. The horde over at Pharyngula might not see things that way, but that’s primarily because of a problem that I call “internet self-selection.” I’ll have to explain that later, though, as I'm running overlong as it is.
For now all I’ll say is that PZ Myers cares far more about the purity of the people he chooses to work with than he does about the goals he wishes to achieve. He’s welcome to pull shit like that, I suppose. I’m not the boss of him, after all. All I know is that I’ve seen purity cults before and no good comes from that sort of thinking.
The sad thing is that I think he genuinely believes that he’s doing the right thing by selling Atheism+ as an exclusionary movement. I think that he sees it as being a way to keep the misogynistic fuckwads out and doesn’t look at it as anything more than that. If the world worked in such a way that there were only two types of people he’d be correct. That’s not how things work at all, though.
----------------------
Also, too, I note that it pretty much sets up a black and white, right and wrong, you’re either for me or against me scenario. If I disagree with PZ Myers on this I must, by definition, be objectively pro-misogynistic fuckwads.
This, ultimately, is why I’m viscerally against this sort of tactic and sales strategy. I’m against it because I’ve fucking lived it. I’m tired of jackasses with an outsized sense of their importance telling me what I have to believe in order to be considered acceptable to them. I didn’t buy it when I was told I had to fight tooth and nail against abortion to be a Christian. I’m not going to buy it when I’m told that I have to agree that atheism offers a logical progression towards a comprehensive moral system on which I must sign off.
It doesn’t matter that I agree with everything I’ve seen as a tenet of Atheism+. I don’t fucking agree with the sales pitch. I don’t fucking agree with the blackmail.
I’m over that bullshit.
-----------------------
[1]Said cute redhead and I also bonded over Matt Nathanson. Sadly, I lacked the ability to actually make anything come of that.
[2]So, just a bit south of Wheaton is the city of Naperville. Naperville is basically the suburban hell that TV and movie people visualize when they have to send people to a suburban hell. It’s all people with BMW’s, trendy restaurants, and McMansions. I have a visceral hatred for Naperville and do everything in my power to not hang out in downtown Naperville.
About two months ago I was in downtown Naperville with my dad and bro-in-law. I made a disparaging remark about the place and my bro-in-law asked why I hated Naperville. I said that if was full of trendy bullshit and people who had more money than sense. He pointed out that I like crazy food and craft beer, have disposable income, and drive a newish import sedan (although I will argue this point, since my car is a freaking 2010 Mazda 6. Ain’t nobody ever gotten laid because he rolled in a 2010 Mazda 6). As such, I was the exact demographic that Naperville seeks to entice.
I replied, “So that means I’m a yuppie, doesn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Damn. I’m a fucking yuppie.”
This doesn’t change the fact that I hate Naperville, though. A few weeks ago Wheaton hosted the second annual Wheaton Ale Fest. I was hanging out there with some friends, a few of whom live in Naperville. I mentioned something about how I couldn’t stand Naperville.
The response I go was, “Oh, because you live in Wheaton, where the old money is? Where people show they’re sensible by driving ten year-old cars?”
Aaaaand, fuck. I can’t win. But at least I don’t drive a BMW.
Yeah, there's no winning the yuptopia game. My husband works in Newport Beach, CA, which has a vibe that blends yuppie and old money in a perfectly horrid way. He was steering our sensibly six-year-old Ford among all the aggressively styled and aggressively driven new BMW's and Audi's, griping about their misguided town and complete lack of individuality, when he stopped short with the thought: What do I have against people who live in Newport Beach?
They are, after all, our friends and coworkers. Just people trying to live and make a living. Sure, we would never live there because the yards aren't big enough for my garden, the neighbors would never tolerate our machine tools, and there's nowhere affordable to keep a horse. But trail riding, welding, and gardening, aren't everyone's cup of tea. We aren't country snobs; we live in an old downtown area ourselves. What is it about NB, where every square inch is landscaped or paved so there's never any dust and your car never gets dirty, and the homeowner societies tell you what color to paint your trim and how many rose bushes to plant in the front yard, that we look down on them for living there, while they doubtless look down on us for preferring to live in what local yuppies call the "Valley of the Dirt People"?
Are we really such unhappy people that we can't enjoy the diversity of our differing lifestyles? Oh, wait, it was the putrid uniformity of the NB yuppie lifestyle that got us here in the first place. Ouch, my head hurts. Can I just hate them, without having to hate me too?
Posted by: Janet | 08/31/2012 at 11:50 AM
5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet
how the divine pen of Michel N. crushed the international atheist movement
skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18660
youtube.com/watch?v=s3lwG4MytSI
one applicant right here...
get the POINT, Randi....
for lies on top of lies
youtube.com/watch?v=bbmXpNEFipE
do you think you can threaten my right to FREE SPEECH?
what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….
Not Dennis Markuze - but a FAN!
youtube.com/watch?v=nvatDdOWcLw&lc
you're not the center of the universe!
youtube.com/watch?v=3yRpSNIOwA4
a dishonest liar
____
youtube.com/watch?v=ruQFh_TkPto
WHINE WHINE WHINE
Posted by: dmarx | 08/31/2012 at 11:53 AM
5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet
how the divine pen of Michel N. crushed the international atheist movement
skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18660
youtube.com/watch?v=s3lwG4MytSI
one applicant right here...
get the POINT, Randi....
for lies on top of lies
youtube.com/watch?v=bbmXpNEFipE
do you think you can threaten my right to FREE SPEECH?
what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….
Not Dennis Markuze - but a FAN!
youtube.com/watch?v=nvatDdOWcLw&lc
you're not the center of the universe!
youtube.com/watch?v=3yRpSNIOwA4
a dishonest liar
____
youtube.com/watch?v=ruQFh_TkPto
WHINE WHINE WHINE
Posted by: Justo Xjustice | 08/31/2012 at 11:54 AM
Ooh, it's double-spaced so we can write in our grammatical corrections. Where to begin?
Posted by: Janet | 08/31/2012 at 12:50 PM
Nowhere. That's Dennis Markuze, and he's both off his meds and violating the terms of his parole or whatever the term is. I've got his IP addresses, so I shall be blocking him.
Posted by: Geds | 08/31/2012 at 01:06 PM