03.30.05
Posted in faith at 3:17 pm by
I just can’t NOT post this from Benjamin:
So let’s say that you’re walking around the Church and you find yourself in that hallway that everyone knows about but nobody ever really talks about; that dreary passage that the janitor never seems to get too, where the lights don’t work real well and the wallpaper’s long since gone out of style.
And let’s say you open up the first door that you come to and you find it’s full of lepers, lepers lepers everywhere and not a drop to drink, all of them picking and scratching at their sores while they go on and on about how much God must hate terrible sinning leperousy lepers like themselves. Over in the corner you see George who runs the PowerPoint on Sunday mornings, and he’s saying something like “I love the naked boobies and the hot teen lesbians too much for God to ever love me” and that’s maybe more than you really wanted to know about George, but it just gets better because look! There’s Nancy the church secretary and she’s all “God could never love me because I’ve had an orgasm” and now you’re all LALALALALA because you didn’t ever want to hear those words coming out of a seventy-five year old woman. It’s pretty hard to get a word in edgewise what with all the wailing and gnashing and pretty soon you give up and head further down the hallway.
There’s another door along the way and the people behind it are surprisingly quite, given that they’re, you know, whores. Lot’s of quiet murmuring and sentences that end in “I’d like to, but”, “it’s just not realistic” or “well, I know that Jesus said it was a sin, but he didn’t have to live with her!”. Everyone’s really polite but you don’t dare let them start talking because you can’t get them to shut up. One of the ushers is in here and once he recognized you he started going on and on and on and it wasn’t until he’d been at it for twenty minutes that you realized that when he said “I’m just trying to do what’s best for my family” what he really meant was “All those folks with funny names started moving into the neighborhood”. The Excuse/Asshole ratio isn’t looking good and you know it’s time to bug out when Mark the keyboardist starts explaining why he thinks it’s all right that he bought a Lexus last year.
There’s one last door at the end of the hall and behind it you find Satan! Maybe you’re like me and don’t really believe in Satan but we sort of need him to advance the plot so here he is! You ask him what he’s wearing a toga for because you’d always pictured him as a Banana Republic sort of guy but it turns out he’s playing dress up – he’s the Ghost of Good Friday Past. While you’re trying to figure out what he means by this, Nancy sticks her head in the door. Before she can say anything, Old Scratch just nods and winks and she leaves as quickly as she came (so to speak), and he (the devil) tells you they love it when he agrees with them. Agrees with them? Oh yes, they all want to know if they’re still just lepers and whores and the Devil is always on hand to reassure them that nothing’s changed. They don’t like that part much, but at least they can tell themselves that they were right all along, and everybody likes to be right, even if they don’t really like what they’re right about.
So now you’re all “Check the date Holmes!” because Good Friday is so two days ago and it’s Easter now and none of this woe is me shit’s going to cut the mustard anymore. You’re running back down the hall, telling the whores that Christ may have died for their 401k, but he sure as the fuck didn’t rise for it, and you’re grabbing lepers by their sackcloth and telling them to cowboy up and confess already so they can get on with the business of the Kingdom.
Because He’s Risen goddamnit – And just because we’ve got to live in this Good Friday world doesn’t mean we need to act as though we like it.
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Posted in grad school at 12:20 am by
You know that feeling you get when you’ve just mentally exerted yourself past all safe standards for thinking? I’ve got that feeling. I’m not sure how you all should feel that what I do when I just need to turn my brain off is blog. Let’s just hope this is isn’t what happens unconciously most of the time (me blogging without thinking.)
So, anyhow, I’m spent. Unfortunately, I’ve got about another 25 or so pages of manuscript to crank out by next Thursday. Needless to say, I’ll be busy for the next week / weekend. I’m not sure I’ll be good for much during that time (though if anybody is looking for a treatise on the Heuristic-Systematic Model of Social Information Processing…I could probably help you out.)
I think that I’m in what I’ll likely look back at as one of the defining moments of graduate school. One of those moments I’ll think of (maybe even fondly) and remember, “Wow, I really kicked ass and took names on those projects.” Of course, any time you have the propensity to ‘kick ass and take names’ you also have the propensity to fall flat on your ass while your classmates call you names (oh, the horrible childhood memories of my junior high classmates calling me ‘Bran-dumb’…those fuckers…I never really got over that.)
Anyway, this is probably one of those defining moments for me. And, like I was saying, in any defining moment there is a do or die mentality. I’ve found that I go into survival mode. It’s kind of like academic hibernation. Most of my body functions shut down (I haven’t had a good BM in days), I sleep less, I eat less, and (this is the kicker) I actually use my time efficiently. I am in gear.
Unfortunately, this being ‘in gear’ has some negative ramifications. I’m not very nice right now, for one. It probably sucks to be my wife during this time–I’m working on making it suck less to be my wife, but it probably isn’t really pleasant right now. I guess, the downside is really that I get pretty anti-social. I think I get more sensitive too, any little thing can send me into spirals of self doubt.
Shit. Wasn’t that last paragraph cheery? Yeah, I thought so.
I guess there’s no real moral to this blog entry. It doesn’t really fit with the theme of this blog–though, I guess I did swear; there must be some redeeming value, then.
I don’t know. It’s just one of those days, I guess. Hopefully, I get some manuscript nailed down tomorrow and I emerge a happier bad Christian on the other side of the sunrise.
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03.29.05
Posted in life, grad school at 5:59 pm by
For the next few days, I’m going to be a bit spotty with posting. School is eating me alive right now…stay tuned though…I’ll be back.
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03.28.05
Posted in faith at 12:19 pm by
Pastor Bill was preaching this Sunday (yesterday) and he raised an interesting point. I found it fascinating, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. But first, it seems as though a little context is called for:
Matthew 28: 8-10
8So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
Pastor Bill brought up an interesting point. You see women’s testimony didn’t really hold much water in Jesus’ day. Pastor Bill cited Josephus (a historian from around the time of Jesus). He wrote about legal statutes regarding the treatment of the testimony of women. I’m paraphrasing here, but the jist was this, Women can’t be trusted because they are the ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’ sex.
Indubitably, Jesus knew this. Yet, with this understanding of the law, culture, and mores of his day he instructed the instruments of his ressurection to be women. Jesus recognized that women were seen as untrustworthy, but he bucked the system.
Of course, as Jesus probably well knew, his disciples didn’t really trust these women–their words were to them like ‘nonsense.’
Still, the fact remains that despite the women’s unlikely status as messengers of the good news, as bringers of truth, Jesus entrusted THEM with the message. Jesus saw the system and saw that it was sinful, and behaved in ways appropriate and just and right–despite being in a ‘man’s’ world.
Jesus Christ, the feminist.
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03.25.05
Posted in email me at 2:25 pm by
brandon@badchristian.com
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03.24.05
Posted in politics, culture at 10:26 pm by
This via James and Dan Gillmor.
Dear loved-ones,
I make the following statement in a sound state of mind and of my own volition:
If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc.
However….
If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death.
Read more…
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Posted in politics at 10:08 pm by
Liberal people say this: :crazy: about conservatives.
Conservative people do this: :lalala: or this: 
in response.
Both conservatives and liberals think this: :-/ or this: |-| about moderates.
None of these things are very nice.
Why such a disconnect? Do conservative or liberal schemata defy all logic? How is it possible to miss eachother so blatantly, yet seemingly unintentionally?
Strange.
Discuss.
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Posted in life at 11:29 am by
Okay friends, I’ll let the cat out of the bag. We’re going back to the Carribean again this summer. If you were counting, that makes three trips in three short–but wonderful–years of marriage. I think you could call us junkies.
Lest you think that the Bad Christian household is ‘made of money’ allow me to explain. We’ve never actually paid for our lodging. The first trip was our honeymoon. We were given a generous gift of a week in a timeshare condo in St. Maarten. We stayed at the Flamingo Beach Resort. St. Maarten was probably our favourite trip thus far. The food on the island is unbelievable and if you have a rental car you can pretty safely go wherever you want and get there within an hour. It’s a small island, but lovely.
The next trip was to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic. I used the hotel points and airline miles that I’d amassed at my job as a travelling salesperson of college educations to get us a free trip. We stayed at the Hamaca Coral Resort in Boca Chica. The Dominican isn’t St. Maarten, by any means. However, it was a great time.
Our upcoming trip was offered to us by the generous donation of my in-laws. We’ll be flying to the Turks and Caicos and staying on the island of Providenciales (aka Provo) for a week. We’ll stay at Beaches - Turks and Caicos. It sounds like a heavenly way to unwind from what has proven a long, hard year for Jen and I.
Anyway, believe it or not, all that was introduction. Here’s my beef.
Travelocity.
The folks at Delta cancelled the flight that I purchased. Should be no big deal, right? Right. Riiiight. It was a big deal. At 2:42 yesterday I got an email that said that I needed to call Travelocity right away, my flight reservation had changed. Turns out that my flight from Lansing to Cinncinati had been cancelled. However, I had been booked on a new flight.
So, I call Travelocity. Turns out the flight that I’d been booked on left lansing at 9:06 pm. This was problematic as my scheduled flight from Cinncinati to Atlanta left at 8:45pm. This is called a misconnect. The first gentleman I spoke with was certain that I needed to send my paper tickets back to the main Travelocity office in San Antonio so that I could be issued new tickets. I was assured that nothing could be done until I sent those paper tickets back. To accomplish the information transfer described above took around 20 minutes (most of that spent on hold.)
Well, I didn’t just want a paper ticket that would misconnect me, so I called travelocity back. This time I spoke with a woman named Jennifer. Nice woman. She informed me that the fellow I’d just spoken with for the past 20 minutes was, in fact, dead wrong about sending my paper tickets back. All I needed to do was show up at the airport. Great, I thought, now all we needed to do was deal with the misconnect.
Jennifer informed me that she would call Delta and set up a new flight for me. She put me on hold.
I don’t know if any of you have ever been on hold with Travelocity.com, but if you have been, you’re probably aware that their hold music is the sort that makes people go postal. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been on hold for, oh, say 10 or 15 minutes–but after 35 minutes of hold music I was about ready to start killing things.
At 40 minutes Jennifer came back on the line and informed me that the Delta representative was in on our call and would assist me. Great. Now something is going to happen, I thought. Well, long story short, the Delta agent (after about 15 minutes of misunderstanding after misunderstanding) fixed my flight.
I’m very grateful to these two women–Jennifer and the Delta representative. However, their employer, Travelocity, should be ashamed of itself. First of all, they should be properly trained so that they can deal with easy to fix problems–like mine–in something under the hour and a half that it took for them to figure out my minor problem.
I have a lot of sympathy for Jennifer. She was most likely working in India–where Travelocity has outsourced it’s call center. That means that she was dealing with ornery Americans for her shift which probably went from something like Midnight to 10am, her time.
I don’t really like dealing with pissy Americans ever! Imagine doing that on the night-shift. Regardless of her kind service, I’ll probably refrain from working with Travelocity again. Too many stories of nightmares out there for me.
I guess those were some pretty disjointed thoughts. I’ll try to come up with something more thought provoking and groundbreaking soon. But, until then, thanks for listening.
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03.23.05
Posted in politics at 3:05 pm by
Short thought today. Many conservative governmental officials are up in arms about the barbarism of Terri Schiavo starving to death. Frankly, I agree. It’s a pretty crappy way to die. (The Schiavo case is one in which I think that what our legal system should decide is not what probably SHOULD happen.)
Tis’ funny that they’ve chosen Terri Schiavo, though. I mean, people starve to death all the time. Why are we in an uproar now? If I were a parent who was being forced to choose between medicine for my children or food for my children, I’d probably be a little bit miffed that Dubya is willing to pull an all-nighter to save Terri Schiavo’s life, but when it comes to masses of the poverty stricken…all they get is budget cuts to social programs.
Now, I understand the ’supply side economics’ (read: trickle down economics) argument. Basically, capitalism–or so the argument goes–will save the day…eventually. Maybe the current administration is right, maybe supply-side economics will work. It just seems a bit slow of a solution for an administration that’s willing to drop everything to save the life of one woman.
Not that Ms. Schiavo’s life is any less important than the lives of any others…but it’s certainly not MORE important, either.
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03.22.05
Posted in politics, culture at 4:44 pm by
Seems like just about everyone in the whole wide blogosphere has taken their turn sharing an opinion on the Schiavo case. I figured, what the heck, I might just as well throw my two cents into the mix too, right?
The issue is pretty simple for me. The issue at hand has been colluded by a number of facts floating around, but quite simply it comes down to this. The Schaivo case, in my opinion, is not about the right to live or the right to die. That may not sound very kind, but I think it’s true.
If this case was about the ‘right to die or the right to live’ it wouldn’t have needed a family in turmoil. Let’s face it, had Terri Schaivo’s parents agreed with her husband, Terri Schiavo would’ve died years ago. Her feeding tube would’ve been removed, and no illegal act would’ve been committed.
What is on trial in this case, in my opinion, is not the right to live or the right to die, but rather what is on trial is the issue of the sanctity of marriage. What floors me about this case is that the one person who took a vow to love Terri Schiavo and know her inside and out is now being told that he knows less about the wishes of Terri Schiavo than her parents.
I just can’t get around the fact that when married a son and a daughter leave their parents. Michael Schiavo shared secrets with his wife, had deep talks with her, loved her, cared for her, stood by her side during a horrific life threatening accident, and–I would argue–has continued to stand by her side. If her parents agreed with him, Terri would be gone.
If we’re going to trust ANYONE to know Terri Schiavo’s wishes–it better be Michael Schiavo.
Now, I don’t want to turn Mr. Schiavo into some sort of angel; frankly, he’s probably not. But, when it comes down to it, claiming that Terri Schiavo’s parents knew Terri’s wishes better than her husband seems a little farfetched. And, really, isn’t that what this whole debacle is about, knowing Terri’s wishes?
Who knows them best? Who knows for sure. But if government is about to legislate that her family takes precedent over her husband…well…let’s just say that for a conservative party that holds the “sanctity of the institution of marriage” on such a damn high pedestal–this action is a little two-faced.
But then again, who does that REALLY surpise.
NOTE: Because it was lacking in clarity, the author of this post has taken artistic priviledge of editing his thoughts.
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