Life Sucks Sometimes

I'm sad.

31 year old woman lying on the ground: unconscious, not breathing.

6 year old daughter crying as she watches mommy die.

Mommy's partner crying as he tries to perform CPR and keep her alive.

"The patient had suffered a sudden huge and unrecoverable bleed into the brain. She would never wake up"

That's it. Life over. Thirty one years old with a six year old daughter. Completely out of the blue.

Life sucks sometimes.

I think I'm gonna cry.

Ehrman and Inerrancy

Bart Ehrman, Professor of New Testament at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, has been buzzing about the blogosphere as of late. I refer specifically to the following posts on blogs I frequently visit:

Maggi Dawn - When God Vanishes (II)
Scott Adams (the author of 'Dilbert') - Uh-Oh
AKMA - That's "A. K. M. Adam," Not "Scott Adams"

See also this Washington Post article which gives Ehrman's biographical background.

(The current post is also an indirect response to my good buddy Dan's reflections on the Bible.)

I find a lot of similarity between myself and Professor Ehrman. Like him, I also had a 'born-again' experience and joined the evangelical Church. Like him, I was indoctrinated in a fundamentalist style Church. And like him, I came up against major challenges when I began to academically study Christianity.

However, unlike Ehrman, I have yet to completely abandon Christian faith - at least not yet. Granted, it took him quite some time to come to realize he was a full blown agnostic. But still, I don't think I'll ever completely reject Christianity. I have come to realize that there are other ways of being Christian than I had once thought. Reading the blogs of others who have also gone through these struggles and yet held onto a Christian faith--however radically reconstructed--has shown me that there isn't just "fundamentalist evangelical" and "agnostic".

I like how Maggi Dawn puts it:

I was once a "born again" believer, and it was in part the recognition of endless intellectual dishonesty, both in biblical interpretation and in church practice, that led me to re-conceive my own faith. For me, though, the end result (so far at any rate) has not been the loss of faith, but a radical reconstruction of it. If, like Ehrman, my faith had depended on the inerrancy of the "original texts" of the Bible, I guess I would have lost my faith too.

Regulars to my blog will by now know that I do not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible (see Biblical Inerrancy). Yet I once was an inerrantist. In my first year of university, I tried desperately to hold on to the doctrine of inerrancy. I read all sorts of attempts to justify and support biblical inerrancy. But my scientific mind squashed those attempts. Saying that the Bible is a human text--written by regular human beings--makes much greater sense of the data (in this case, the Bible itself) than saying that it is a Divine text, revealed to the various authors by God. And so by the time second year began, I had let go of biblical inerrancy.

But I am still here. While Ehrman decided to call it quits, I decided to stick with it and see what I could do. I rebuilt my castle (see Building Castles - Part I and Part II).

I fear for those around me who hold to biblical inerrancy. I fear that someday their bubble might collapse - that reality might catch up to them. And I fear that, like Ehrman, they will give up on their faith. False dichotomies abound: it's either all completely true, or it's all completely false (see the related Slippery Slope). That's how a lot of people think, I'm afraid.

Cheers.

Good Friday Reflection

A great reflection on Good Friday by Maggi Dawn. An excerpt:

For those who enjoy a degree of certainty in their faith, maybe Good Friday and Holy Saturday don't really "bite" - they are more about anticipation than devastation. But those of us who live with a fragemented faith, a faith that has had too many holes punctured in it, too much damage ever to recover a naive certainty, there is something reassuring about the rise and fall of the Church seasons. It's a relief to be honest, to acknowledge the disappearance of God and the uncertainty of the outcome.

That's not to say that there is no hope of the resurrection. But that hope doesn't forestall the depth of blackness that can descend even upon people of faith. And the recollection that the Easter faith was born in the darkness is, perhaps, a reason to hold on and not to give up.

Have a blessed Easter-time,
Kev

A Little Health Tip, Thanks Prince Charles

The good Prince has some splendid health advice:

In an interview with Men's Health magazine, which specializes in advice on building muscle and flattening stomachs, the heir to the British throne discussed his sometimes controversial ideas about health and spirituality. Asked how men could be encouraged to pay more attention to their health, Charles said: "Via the ladies, I'd have thought. It's funny, the influence that women can have on getting us men sorted out is enormous,"

I tell you, the man is so right.

Amen, Prince Charles, Amen.

A Little (True) Humour

Sometimes humour is the best way to get a point across.

A few snippets from a recent post by Slacktivist on a major evangelical youth rally in San Francisco.

The "spiritual warfare" metaphor was once a good one. St. Paul used it well, as did John Bunyan. But overuse and misuse have long since corrupted this metaphor, devaluing its currency to cliche status.
...
From the bogus "War on Christmas" to the fetishistic devotion to Ten Commandments markers, this territory-marking has become an obsession for many of the alleged followers of Christ. "They'll know we are Christians by our love" apparently proved too difficult, so instead we've settled for "They'll know we are Christians by our bullying dominance of the public square."

Stop it. Just stop. Stop pissing on trees. Stop "reclaiming America for Christ." Christ already has a kingdom, an upside-down, mustard-seed kingdom without a flag. And while you people are so busy trying to create an alternative kingdom called "Christian America," the prostitutes and tax collectors and Samaritans are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. And so are a lot of those couples who got married there at City Hall.
...
And the bottom line here is this: $55 for two days in San Francisco is a good deal.

That $55 includes concert tickets. More importantly, it also includes two days away from home. In San Francisco. And more than likely it also includes a longish bus or van ride, possibly in the dark, with the girls from the youth group. That may amount to little more than surreptitious hand-holding, but don't knock it. For an evangelical teenager, a bit of surreptitious hand-holding on the church bus may amount to the high point of the school year.

Ahahah. Awesome!

Busted

So there we were, in the library. Chatting, studying.

All of a sudden, Ren reaches across my shoulder and picks up a long, blonde, piece of hair.

She looks at me in terror.

I tell her it was from the wild, passionate sex I had with some blonde girl last night after I dropped her off at home.

Then I start laughing - hard.

At this point I'm thinking of all the dumb movies where the girlfriend finds another girl's hair on the guy's clothes. Now, if you knew as I did how incredibly far I was from snuggling with some random blonde girl, you would also be laughing - hard.

Ren gets all upset and demands I tell her where the hair came from. Who was I seeing! What was I doing?

I don't think she was pleased.

Maybe cuz I was laughing uncontrollably. In a library.

Sorry Ren, you got me.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Finding Flow

Came across this neat article by Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "flow". He was the former head of the Psychology deparment at the University of Chicago, and the concept of flow is one of his main contributions to the field.

It's a long article, well worth the read. But here are a few snippets I particularly enjoyed:

These exceptional moments are what I have called "flow" experiences. The metaphor of flow is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as "being in the zone," religious mystics as being in "ecstasy," artists and musicians as "aesthetic rapture." It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life.
...
Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses. It is easy to enter flow in games such as chess, tennis, or poker, because they have goals and rules that make it possible for the player to act without questioning what should be done, and how. For the duration of the game the player lives in a self-contained universe where everything is black and white. The same clarity of goals is present if you perform a religious ritual, play a musical piece, weave a rug, write a computer program, climb a mountain, or perform surgery. In contrast to normal life, these "flow activities" allow a person to focus on goals that are clear and compatible, and provide immediate feedback.

Flow also happens when a person's skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable, so it acts as a magnet for learning new skills and increasing challenges. If challenges are too low, one gets back to flow by increasing them. If challenges are too great, one can return to the flow state by learning new skills.
...
Leisure time in our society is occupied by three major sorts of activities: media consumption, conversation, and active leisure--such as hobbies, making music, going to restaurants and movies, sports, and exercise. Not all of these free-time activities are the same in their potential for flow. For example, U.S. teenagers experience flow about 13 percent of the time that they spend watching television, 34 percent of the time they do hobbies, and 44 percent of the time they are involved in sports and games. Yet these same teenagers spend at least four times more of their free hours watching TV than doing hobbies or sports. Similar ratios are true for adults.

Why would we spend four times more of our free time doing something that has less than half the chance of making us feel good? Each of the flow-producing activities requires an initial investment of attention before it begins to be enjoyable. If a person is too tired, anxious, or lacks the discipline to overcome that initial obstacle, he or she will have to settle for something that, although less enjoyable, is more accessible.

(Hat tip to Maggi Dawn)

Cheers