A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

What the fuck?

I saw this bumper sticker on the way back from Hickory yesterday.  I love being back home.   

Walking by my brother Jordan’s bedroom today,  I hear my little sister Julie exclaim "Joseph still doesn’t like eggs!" and then uproarious laughter from the both of them.  What the crap?  I walk in, demanding an answer to this confusing mockery.  She shows me a "Baby’s First Seven Years" book that my parents kept of me.  Besides room for banal preferences like the above, it also contains gross memorabilia like my baby hair and one of the most predictive early utterances I’ve ever heard.  If you could look inside my brain now, and catalogue the single most uttered sentence to my inner self, this would have to be it. 

Baby’s First Sentence: "I Hate That."

Actually, I’m not sure if he could add anything to this.  It’s a near perfect circle of self-parodying genius.  If you have not seen the new R Kelly "urban opera" that is "Trapped in the Closet", you’re living only one third of the life you could be living.  With a press release comparing him to Beethoven (no joke), R has some pretty big shoes to fill.  And like the naughty wayward puppy he is, he fills those shoes with shit.  Five speak-singing, completely artless songs of shit.  Yes, for his first single, R releases a five-part melodramatic opus that tediously recounts one silly, sinful night in the life of the urine-obsessed superstar.  But if I can’t admire his craft, I have to admire his craftiness.  He has concocted a vaccine against satire by plugging every hole and filling every crack* with confusing mediocrity.  It really sounds like he dictated what actually happened to him the night before (with a couple cheesy embellishments) into his Sidekick on the way to the studio.  I mean, the improv songs on Whose Line Is It Anyway have more melody than this. 

But what could you expect from an album whose title (TP3 Reloaded) makes an oddly dated reference to both the Terminator and Matrix franchises for no good reason?  Why didn’t he just call it Yeah, Baby!, and be done with it?  While this artistic misstep isn’t as funny as Garth Brook’s Chris Gaines stunt, or as disappointing as Eminem’s last MJ-taunting album, it will still be surprising if Kelly can bounce back from this.  But then again, he did get away with urinating on the chest of a 14 year old girl on tape, so what the fuck do I know?

*Certainly, puns intended. 

Odd timing coming off both the Roe v. Wade and religion posts, but here’s a choice cut from a obscure Christian artist named Lil’ Markie off his self-titled debut/finale.  Utilizing a voice that is equal parts Grover, Alvin the Chipmunk, and Homesar, Diary of An Unborn Child will take you places you never knew you didn’t want to go.  The real fun begins around around 3:06 in.  Edifying/terrifying.
via showandtellmusic.com

I was thinking…..

Scientology and its beliefs are the new one stop shop for easy, lazy laughs.  I, of course, count myself in the party of the guilty.  And surely it deserves every moment of harsh ridicule it receives – and maybe even some serious legal and financial investigation by the government. So no, if you know me, you know I’m not going to ask for less derision – just a widening and redirection of the net. 

A cult, as it has often been pointed out, is sometimes just a church with insufficient financial holdings.* Case in point: could someone please tell me any way in which the beliefs of a devout Catholic are less laughable than those of a Scientologist?  Sure, dead aliens inhabiting our souls is a riot, but is the concept of transubstantiation** any less comically morbid?  “Shh….don’t tell anyone, but Jesus is hiding in this biscuit! Let’s hurry up and eat em b/f he gets away.  Also, say this gobbledygook while we do it.” Does anyone – seriously ANYONE – believe that crap when they’re in Communion? True, Scientology is more modern in its weirdness – hence the imagery of men in white lab coats that the name conjures up.  It’s innovatively idiotic, yes, but I don’t think objectively more stupid.  It’s just less dusty. 

Time, tradition, and popularity can give the most laughably lunatic ideas the sheen of respectability.  But longevity and popularity don’t automatically equal objective truth, and just as often as not, there is an inverse relationship.   Even more unnerving, the weight of convention gives them imperviousness to (deserved) criticism that results in a de-facto discrimination against the secular.  I have long said that we will have a black quadriplegic transvestite as president before we’ll ever see an avowed atheist take the oath.  Ignoring the retarded ramblings of conservative pundits who claim persecution of Christians in a country in which they hold a crushing majority, open secularism is the quickest way to obscurity in American life.  The new McCarthyism transcends politics, to the heart of your personal beliefs and genetics (I can’t figure out if liberals, atheists, or gays are the new Jews.  But the Nazis did have labels for them all). “Have you now or ever been an unbeliever?” will be the new litmus test of public life. 

Of course, I don’t believe we should have a free-for-all on believers.  Nor do I even pretend to have all the answers.  I stopped being an evangelic atheist a long time ago, and frankly, I’m a little offended sometimes at the smug dismissals of any kind of religious devotion I hear a lot in the artsy-fartsy circles I run in.  My girlfriend, soon to be wife, is going into seminary this year, and I think it’s a fantastic, admirable decision.*** But her type of faith is radically different from mainstream Christianity, and would probably be considered another heresy of its own if she freely expressed her tenets to most so-called Christians.  Her faith isn’t about exclusion, phony piety, or delusional supernaturalism.  It’s about using the revolutionarily altruistic teachings of Christ to combat the strong’s never-ending war on the weak.****

However……

I don’t see the use in maintaining embarrassingly antiquated notions of creation or godhood in a modern institution, unless they’re explicitly labeled as instructive myths or fables or what have you.  I think it’s dangerous, honestly.  I think when you allow primitive notions of magic and mysticism to rest alongside valuable and time-tested moral teachings, you’re asking for trouble.  Not to mention diluting the message of the institution.  Weakening the brand, in the popular consumerist vernacular.  When you allow those (really) secondary points in, the tendency is for them to dominate because they’re more viscerally appealing.  It becomes about escapism, back-patting, and getting your Puritan exclusionist jollies on – instead of the much more challenging morality of compassion and devotion that should be the bible’s primary message.  And then the disturbingly anachronistic aspects like burkas and the creationist war on the Enlightenment and gay people.  Etcetera, etcetera. 

Institutions have to grow or they die. Government has had to do it.  I’m sure most Republican congressmen would love to bring back the concept of the divine right of kings, but it ain’t coming back (yet).  We’ve evolved.  And if people who care about the church want to it become something other than the spiritual arm of the government, a serious dialogue is in order.  I think going to church, supposedly literally drinking the blood of Jesus, listening to the Sermon on the Mount, and then going to work the next day at a high-tech computer facility creates a dangerous cognitive dissonance.  Not to mention a false equivalence and unnecessary competition between truths that aren’t even trying to answer the same questions.  Time to evolve, people, as Hicks put it.  I’m not religious, but I know we might be fucked without it.  Every single major progressive movement grew out of the church, and liberalism has been hurting without it.  America and the church are both kind of a sad joke right now, but maybe saving one will help us save the other.  (I’d like to hear a Christian’s perspective on this, btw).   

*I know, there are real cults, like Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate, et al.  But I was taught in Southern Baptist Sunday School that Jehovah’s Witness and the Mormon church were dangerous cults, too.  The word is used indiscriminately.  And yeah, Scientologists have been accused of kidnapping, brainwashing,etc.  But the head of their church never presided over a massive, decades long cover up of the rape of hundreds of little boys, did he?

**David Hume:  “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”   In other words, everything humans ever witnessed with their senses is the evidence against miracles.  Damn.

*** That’s two instances in one week in which I’ve praised my girlfriend in my blog.  You are allowed to gag now.

****There are of course, some thinkers, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche chief among them, who say that religion is more of a tool of corrupt power than a antidote to it.  And given the history of the church, it’s hard to disagree.  But this is obviously an inevitable perversion of Jesus’s clear intent.  The latter two, in the manifestation of Stalinism and Nazism, got an ironic, posthumous taste of what it feels like to have your words perverted for horrific ends. 

Hope you ladies did everything you were going to do with your vaginas because the government will own them soon enough.  It’s going to get ugly.