interesting point

As the presidential race has been playing, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been touting her experience as a governor as a reason to vote for the Republican ticket.

In contrast, she points out that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has been running on his roots as a community organizer. While he's been a U.S. senator for two years, he has no experience as an executive, and this makes him unqualified.

Someone recently made an intriguing observation, though: Jesus was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor.

Which of those two do you have a higher opinion of?

phone conversation

Me: What's happening with your father? I was really sorry to hear.

Anthony: So was I. What do you mean?

Me: You told me he was terminal.

Anthony: I did?

Me: You said when I called that we couldn't talk right then because you were talking with your mom and your father was dying.

Anthony: No, I said I was on the other line with my mom, and that my phone was dying.

Me: Oh. (pause) Well, I'm glad your father is feeling better.

Anthony: Yes, it was a close thing, but we're all relieved it's worked out so well. He'll never know what you did for him.

mccain campaign sets controls over media access to sarah palin

I'm getting really disappointed in John McCain. For someone who claims not to be a regular Republican, he sure is acting like one.

It's been an increasingly trope of the Republican Party since the days of Richard Nixon to complain that the media have it in for them. We can argue and debate how much merit there is to accusations of liberal media bias, but it seems there are times conservatives like to trot this out because they don't like being caught unprepared.

For a political party that claims people need to stop blaming outside forces for their failures and find success through hard work, the GOP does like to blame negative perceptions on the news media.

Case in point: The McCain campaign has announced that Alaska Gov. and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin will no longer answer questions from reporters "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference." Gov. Palin apparently has made it a practice in the past not to talk to just any media, but only to those who put her in a favorable light.

It's not a liberal bias that makes Gov. Palin look unprepared for the big time. It's the fact that she's unprepard to answer even basic questions, even when someone like Katie Couric throws her a bunch of softballs.

The governor's answers in her interviews have shown a lack of depth and understanding and a ready defensiveness that are enough to make anyone question her fitness for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency, should McCain win and something happen to him.

Limiting press access to Palin to strictly favorable outlets disturbs me. While McCain talks about straight talk and bringing us together, actions such as this contribute to further polarizing the nation by encouraging a divide in how we get our information.

Our nation doesn't need conservative media and liberal media, we need news media, period. We also need politicians who aren't so afraid of the public that they feel a need to control how they appear in the media.

But that control is exactly what McCain is aiming for. So much for straight talk.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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hemingway, bush, and really bad books

I was up late two nights ago, when to my surprise I started getting IM's. I should explain that it's a given that I don't get IM's; I'm over 30. No one instant messages me — or almost no one. It was a friend of mine from one of those places God Hath Forgot, one who has developed a razor wit and a great deal of artistic skill. For the sake of this transcript, I shall call her by her Indian name, Walks in the Rain

On New Orleans legacy of President Bush
Dave: Natasha's brother Kevin lives in New Orleans. He and his wife were told "Evacuate or have ID with you so we know whose body it is."
WitR: I guess they weren't taking any chances after Katrina
Dave: Can't blame them. That'll be an albatross around Bush's neck about as long as Iraq will be. Twin failures.
WitR: is there room for another albatross around his neck? he's got a flock already
Dave: It depends. How many arrows does he have in that damn crossbow of his anyway?
WitR: secretly Cheney is his living quiver. That's why he always looks so uncomfortable.
Dave: Ah. The old +5 Quiver of Cheney. Guaranteed to hit an albatross at every turn.
WitR: if not quail.
Dave: And I guess that makes the GOP the crew of dead souls manning the ship.
(Clearly Cheney has a cursed -5 shotgun of birding)

On Samuel Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and other great literature
WitR: I have not read the poem since ninth grade and just barely remember that the crew is dead
Dave: For shame. I read the book just a few months ago to my kids.
WitR: well, i tend to forget things that i associate with ernest hemingway and my ex's music collection
Dave: You associate "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" with Hemingway!?
I think I'm going to be sick, just imagining how Hemingway would tell the story.
WitR: no, i associate everything i was forced to read for school with ernest hemingway
Dave: "The ancient mariner had been wounded in the war, and had never been able to have sex since."
It was assigned in freshman lit. I enjoyed it anyway.
"her hair was black, her lips were red, her skin was white as leprosy"
WitR: "There was a man. He shot a bird. Everyone died. The wind was cold."
you realize that i had more than one book assigned by hemingway, and yet we never got around to discussing his BLATANTLY obvious misogynistic issues
Dave: Well, you did go to a Christian high school. Misogyny is a fabrication of feminazis, don't you know.
WitR: no, really! we like women! we just don't think they should do anything that doesn't involve uteruses.
Dave: Unless their husbands or fathers tell them to.

On the coherency of the Inernet and those who write therein:
Dave: OK, I just read so-and-so's post. I can't tell if he's agreeing with you or dismissing your post as the first wave of analyseing (sic) Palin, or fluf. (sic)
His creative spelling doesn't make him easier to understand.
WitR: i can deal with creative spelling because my college roommate had a learning disability. It's the creative syntax and punctuation that throws me off.
Dave: If it were just creative spelling, I could manage. But he's got the syntax and punctuation too -- not to mention unclear and underdeveloped thoughts -- and the total leaves me at a loss.
WitR: I think he may just be a malfunctioning turing program
Dave: On the other hand, his "be-bop" post makes perfect sense.
WitR: maybe the closer he gets to agreeing with me, the better he writes
Dave: Doubtless that's true of us all.
The Buddha himself gained enlightenment, started agreeing with you, and wrote flawlessly.
WitR: i think if i'm the pinnacle of human development, someone is playing a serious prank on humanity
Dave: This is revelation to you?
WitR: merely stating the obvious for the elucidation of humankind
it's Zen
for my next trick i will clap one hand

On the latest attempts at the Great End-Times novel:
WitR: http://www.arrivaloftheprince.com <-- egads="" horrible.="" looks="" p="" this="">Dave: Wow. How on earth do you find these things?
WitR: facebook sidebar ad, actually. god only knows why it showed up for me, usually i get olivia cruises and photography classes
Dave: You realize I have to buy you a copy of the book for Christmas now. Along with "The Eye of Argon."
WitR: do it, and i'll send your daughters a starter beading kit
Davw: We'll add the beading kit to all the other beading kits they have. You'll have to do better than that to threaten me.
WitR: curses. foiled again. st. bernard puppy?
Dave: Evangeline's allergic to dogs. Sorry. "it was inconceivable, but it was becoming clear that the earth's rotation was inexplicably slowing down" It's that whole lost day with Joshua all over again! Thank God NASA already has it figured out. "What happens if it keeps slowing down?" asked the President.
WitR: i like how the Senate chaplain is now in high-level security briefings
Dave: Good to know that Bush is still at the helm when Armageddon comes. "Doctor Wang removed a pipe from his coat pocket and began to fumble with it. He could not conceal the fact that his hands were shaking" Oh, thank God, it;s just his hands shaking. For a moment I thought he was going to get footloose.
WitR: oh man. read the page on lucifer's DNA it involves Nephilim, naturally
Dave: Of course. I hadn't realized it, but that whole tradition has roots in the book of Enoch. Pullman drew on a lot of that for "His Dark Materials."
WitR: carey builds on a lot of angelology for the kushiel series, actually more of an alternate-universe setup there
Dave: Where's the page on Lucifer's DNA?
WitR: http://www.arrivaloftheprince.com/luciferDNA.htm
Dave: I have to say, so far it looks better than "Left Behind."
WitR: that's about like saying that Wendy's is better than McDonalds
Dave: I didn't say it was high praise.
WitR: honestly, reading the setup, it COULD be interesting, in THEORY, but sadly, the fact that the author is a Christian totally blows its chances of doing so
Dave: His explanation of the book and Uizhun-Tabriz actually is pretty interesting. Too bad he didn't write the book that well. I hate to agree, but you're right.
WitR: http://www.arrivaloftheprince.com/StoneTablets.htm
Dave: The only good writers in the Christian market are all dead.
WitR: that's because no living author with a sense of decency would be caught dead in the Christian market if they're any good at all they have a major market presence anyway
Dave: "The deciphered message of this tablet is: 14q43 215860406 215882973" My life has been transformed.
WitR: yes! now you know God's mastercard number.
Dave: Alas, they won't accept the cattle on a thousand hills down at the supermarket.
WitR: yeah, but think of the amazon bill you could run up with it
Dave: Adds a whole new meaning to "Forgive us our debts," doesn't it?
WitR: indeed, though you have to wonder what God's credit score would be satan's is obviously 666 so given numerology, that would make jesus' a respectable 777
Dave: In this economy, it's probably dropped. Although Satan probably qualifies for a Bush tax cut. Jesus, being working class, it SOOL, being as he's a shameless grifter and leech on the welfare state. I bet his credit rating is in tatters.
WitR: well, i'd imagine rather that he has little to no credit history, never having the wherewithal to apply for any
Dave: Where have you been the last twelve months? That's no impediment to getting financing.
WitR: yeah, but whenever he applies for a mortgage he keeps getting denied when he uses a house in Heaven as collateral >>#That Lucifer was a mortal—and therefore had DNA. This fact is also in the Bible.<< Of course! I totally learned about Lucifer's DNA in sunday school.
Dave: Sure. It's right before the passage that talks about the collapse of the vapor canopy sending all the animals into the first-ever hibernative state.
Surely you remember that.
WitR: unfortunately there actually was a vapor canopy entry in the world history / bible class i took in high school
Dave: Well of course there was. You didn't think I was writing that by accident, did you?

'Liberal media bias' and other tired shibboleths

Allow me to say that I have grown weary of hearing about liberal media bias every time Sarah Palin comes across poorly in the press.

This has come up most recently in a political discussion on a religion and humor forum I frequent. An acquaintance of mine known as RBP recently complained that the coverage of former Democratic candidate Jon Edwards' affair in the press was delayed and sorely lacking, Coverage of the teenage pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has been extensive and immediate. It's a double standard obviously. (You may read RBP's comments here, if you like, along with the entire discussion.)

Now I will grant that the coverage of Bristol Palin's teen pregnancy has been overdone. She's not running for vice president; her mother is.

But not newsworthy? Sarah Palin has been running in part on her supposedly superior family values, including an opposition to safe sex education, which does lead to a reduction to teen pregnancy. The contrast is worth noting.

As for Edwards, I don't know how much the news media knew before he finally admitted to the extramarital affair, but let's be fair. Saying that legitimate news media failed to cover something reported in The National Enquirer is rather like taking them to task for failing to cover Bat Boy.

Edwards is a public person, but at the time the Enquirer broke the news, he was not a presidential candidate nor even particularly clearly a favorite for vice president. I'm not sure what public good was neglected in this case. And again, The Enquirer is hardly a font of credible journalism. Perhaps the respectable news media should be all over the impending Bush divorce that the tabloids have been reporting?

Let's look at other high-level affairs and how the news media have covered them.

Not that many years ago the press dug into the story of Clinton's affair with such thoroughness that not only were there stories on how many news outlets were covering Zippergate, there were news stories about many news outlets were covering the coverage of Zippergate. Was that a liberal bias at work, or a conservative bias? Or was it merely pandering to the baser appetites of the public for salacious details about our leaders?

For that matter, John Kerry didn't even have an affair in 2004, but the media still dug into the private life of one of his campaign staffers and made her life a living hell.

Gary Bauer took the unusual step of holding a news conference during Primary 2000 to announce that he wasn't having an affair with his staffers, and was pretty much given a free pass. I mean, really, there's not much of a better way to draw attention to a potential impropriety than to insist that it's not what people think, especially when no one publicly is thinking it.

From I have been told by other journalists, the word around Washington, D.C., during the presidency of George H.W. Bush is that he also was having an affair. I recall no coverage of this at the time. Further liberal bias at work?

I know that "liberal media bias" is an important shibboleth within conservative culture, but let's be fair. Repeat it enough, start assuming it from the get-go, and dang if you won't find boatloads of evidence of it. The New York Times could say that President Bush walks on water, and the response would be "Those dirty liberals are suggesting Bush thinks he's above the law of gravity!"

There are plenty of other reasonable explanations why the Edwards affair wasn't aired immediately, and the Palin situation was. Let's be reasonable, and stop blaming news we don't like on a liberal media bias.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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that empty feeling

La knabinoj are at school today.

 

For Evangeline, this is a return. She has finished third grade and embarked on a journey through fourth. She was a little nervous when we walked there this morning. It's a new grade, a new classroom, and a change from the summer, where she's been free of the artificial strictures of a school environment for two months.

 

For Rachel, it's a new world. She's visited the charter school many times, helping out as I volunteered in a class, and so she knows her teacher and many of her classmates as well. She was more excited than nervous, although one of the new classmates succeeded in making her feel nervous by invading her personal space almost as soon as she was through the door and asking her questions in a loud voice.

 

And me, I'm feeling a little discombobulated myself. I've been a stay-at-home dad for four years now. I taught each of my girls how to read, write and do basic math, and I've scheduled much of my life around them and their needs during that time, particularly this past summer. To the extent that one person can define another, their lives have defined mine for four years now, particularly Rachel for the last two.

 

And now they're somewhere else, and I'm left alone in the house to look for a job and work on my writing.

 

I'm going to be inconsolable when they go away to college.

the problem with teaching children

The problem with teaching children is that they learn, and often it is not convenient for us that they do so.

I have been teaching the girls for some time now that it's important to conserve. Turn off the lights when you're not using them, take shorter showers, reduce what you use, reuse it in new and interesting ways, recycle things, and compost. You can call it being green, living in the balance, or living sustainably, but it boils down to common sense. It saves money and natural resources.

So tonight as we walked past the neighbor's house, the girls stopped to look at what he's throwing out. It's an old vanity sink, sans the sink. Nice, solid wood. There were a few holes where the pipes went, but for the most part it's pretty decent wood. My daughters saw potential at once.

"You know, dad," the younger child says. "You could make a dollhouse with this wood."

I have to stop teaching my kids things.

reuse: plastic cereal bags

I don't know if they're microwave safe, but the plastic bags that cereal comes in, inside the boxes, make a great substitute for waxed paper.

We had a get-together here at the house on Saturday, where I grilled some burgers. When I made the patties, I laid them between layers of a bag we had finished all the Cheerios in just a couple days earlier. I had pulled the bag apart at its seams, and cut it into quarters, so it was perfect for layering. Make four burgers, slap down a sheet of the bag, make four more burgers, and so on.

No need to buy waxed paper, no need to buy paper towels. I already owned the bags and had no other use for them, so this was ideal. I saved the money and threw out something I would have thrown out anyway, after getting one more use from it.

It feels like a win-win to me.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Niven and Pournelle: 'Inferno'

I just finished re-reading "Inferno" for what is probably the seventh or eighth time. Not the one by Dante Alighieri, the hauntingly beautiful first installment in "The Divine Comedy." This was the retelling, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The book would have benefitted from another draft. Because the narrator is a sci-fi writer, much of the book is dominated by sci-fi talk, as he tries to find scientic explanations for everything he encounters on his journey through hell. And because this is a Niven book, it's chock-full of sly and not-so-subtle references to his other works. Those things get a little distracting.

But I keep reading and re-reading the book. I've read it more times than I have read Dante's classic -- which, in all fairness to me, was among the books stolen from me when I left Haiti -- and more times even than I've read T.H. White's "The Sword in the Stone." Probably the only book I've read more is "The Lord of the Rings." Maybe. ("Inferno" clocks in at 237 pages. Tolkien's masterpiece is well over a thousand.)

Part of the appeal is that it is an easy read. Give me an uninterrupted afternoon, and I'll plow through "Inferno" in a couple hours. It's harder to do that with Ursula LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea" series, and impossible with "The Nibelungenleid," even setting aside matters of length. They just have more going on.

Undeniably, I also get a perverse kick out of seeing whom Niven and Journelle have placed among the ranks of the damned. There's Himuralabima, who invented bureaucracy; one of Niven's own fictional characters, from "A Time out of Mind"; Niven and Pournelle themselves, amalgamated in the main character, a science fiction writer named Allen Carpentier; and historical American figures like Billy the Kid, among others.

There's also just enough information given in a few cases to identify other real people who were alive at the time of the book's publication, such as Kurt Vonnegut and L. Rob Hubbard.

Part of the pleasure clearly lies in the funereal beauty that Dante gave his hell. Yes, this comes through despite Niven and Pournelle's attempts to put it in science fiction parlance, like describing the plains of Judecca as frozen nitrogen, suggesting that Minos' extensible tail relies on hyperspatial conduits, or putting a collapsed singularity near Satan's navel.

The book suffers from those touches but it positively flourishes when Niven and Pournelle stay true to the idea of Dante's work, or even embellish it. The pit of flatterers, where sinners trod around in human excrement, becomes obscenely appropriate, as we find that the excrement comes out of their mouths whenever they speak.

Similar innovations lie in the Ninth Circle of hell, where Dante depicted traitors frozen in ice. Here Carpentier discovers politicians imprisoned for betraying their own consciences for the sake of party loyalty, Earlier in the journey through hell he encountered violent wasters.

In Dante's time, these were people who ostentatiously destroyed objects of great value in order to display their wealth and in hell were chased by mad dogs. In Niven and Pournelle's novel, this presumed antiquated sin is committed by real estate developers who are chased by bulldozers.

Much of the appeal, though, lies in Carpentier's outrage at a pervasive sense of injustice. The eternal punishments of hell, he feels, are too much, too late. What purpose does such unending torment serve? We incarcerate criminals for a few years, maybe even for many years, if their crimes were heinous and they lack the money to hire a good lawyer. But sooner or later, they complete their sentence, they qualify for parole, or they die. At some point, each of them is done and free to leave, if nowhere else, then at least to the final peace of the grave.

But hell? Nothing doing. Day and night, year after year, the torment of the damned continues. Dante depicts homosexuals tormented in a desert where fire falls from the sky like snowflakes, religious schismatics are cut in half, and violent wasters are pursued by mad dogs. In hell the violent are trapped in a river of boiling blood, and traitors are frozen in ice. Judas himself is one of three sinners condemned to be chewed upon by one of Satan's three mouths for all eternity.

That's Dante's imagery, of course, but he didn't make it up ex nihilo. The doctrine of hell predated him by hundreds of years, and while he may have embellished it, Christians have subscribed to a belief in hell since the days of Rome.

And I don't know of many Christians who don't find it at least a little problematic to think that the nice God we sing pretty songs to on Sunday could insist on torturing billions of people for all eternity. Even those who resist saying so, usually will admit to difficulty when pressed, though they'll always insist that God is just in all he does.

And God is just, being God and all. May God be true and everyone a liar -- but hell still seems harsh when you get down to it. Are the joys of heaven possible only if the damned writhe in eternal torment? Is there some sort of balance, and the Nine Worlds will come crashing down if the fire is quenched and the worm ceases to gnaw?

Does hell exist so the elect can feel safe from people who hurt them in this life? If so, it's going to make heaven a lonely place if that's the case, since everyone hurts someone.

This struggle, which is at the heart and soul of Niven and Pournelle's "Inferno," truly gets going once Carpentier pushes his guide into the Pit of the Evil Counselors. Carpentier is struck by remorse. He identifies increasingly not just with the plight of the damned but also with the sins that put them there, and he discovers an interesting doctrine of hell; namely, that it's the hotbox God uses to get our attention when all else has failed. The worse we've sinned, the greater the heat, in hopes that something will get through to us.

(If you've read "The Divine Comedy," you'll recall that Virgil led Dante on his journey through the nine circles of hell, through their very center, thus to Purgatory and onward to Heaven, where Beatrice took over. Niven and Pournelle jumped to the logical conclusion that Dante's path shows the way for all the damned to leave hell, making it in essence a zeroth level of Purgatory and creating a universalist view of the afterlife that makes fundamentalists run screaming for the door.)

In the end, "Inferno" moves from being merely an updated vision of Dante's work, to a commentary on the work and even on the doctrine of hell itself. I have no answers myself, just questions that echo in my own soul when I read this book, and that itself is a triumph of sorts, and why I keep reading this book.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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This is why I support Barack Obama (and why you should too)

I can't speak for anyone else and why she's so taken with Barack Obama, but here are a few of the things that I like:

1. He has a track record of working for the dispossessed in inner-city Chicago.
2. He has a proven history of working with people from both sides of the aisle. I've noticed that he hasn't engaged in any of the personal attacks that have come from the Republican corner. Character assassination becomes no one, and it is especially not desired in a president.
3. He actually listens to advisers when they tell him things contrary to what he thinks.
4. He realizes that our nation has lost a lot of international standing in the past eight years and that the old days are over. We can no longer get what we want because we're America.
5. It's true he opposed the surge in Iraq, which Sen. McCain supported and which apparently has quelled a lot of the unrest there. On the other hand, he also didn't support invading a sovereign nation without provocation, plunging an entire country into chaos, and destabilizing the entire region.*
6. Obama favors moving the United States to greater energy independence. This is a matter of national security, as well as environmental security, and industrial and economic well-being. Remember, he has called for developing a Green Belt here in America, developing sustainable industry to take the place of the Rust Belt that languished and fell apart under the efforts set up by the Reagan and subsequent administrations of "Let businesses go and they'll do what's best." (Which they did -- for the bottom line, which involved moving outside the U.S. and laying off thousands of workers.)
7. As thrilled as I am that the Republicans finally have nominated a woman for the vice presidency, let me point out that should anything happen to Obama, Biden has a strong political resume and presumably would make a viable replacement. Palin's resume is too thin to say the same should anything happen to McCain.

On those things that may concern others:

1. He is not a Muslim. Even if he were, that is neither cause for alarm, nor even for concern. If this is a concern, please get over it.
2. Yes, he is black. That is an asset. Our past 43 presidents have all come from positions of power, wealth, influence and uncounted privilege, and to some extent that's had to affect foreign policy. Obama has had to deal with the downside of America. He's been subject to racism, he's had to prove his worth time and again, and he's done it. In fact, he just recently paid off his college loans. Do you really think that a man who's had to prove himself so many times is just going to assume that the world will do what we wants, should he become president?
3. Also true, his experience at the national level is limited. The issue here isn't experience as much as it is wisdom and willingness to listen to qualified advisers. Obama has plenty of experience at organizing people, building consensus, and getting things done in an above-board manner.
   
   Are people that different at the world stage? Small-minded people remain small-minded whether they work at the city clerk's office, the foreign consulate, or the Grand Assembly. Obama knows how to connect with people, just like George W, Bush doesn't and Ronald Reagan did. Bush also has had great advisers, like Colin Powell, but he doesn't know how to connect with people, and he's ignored advisers when he disagrees with them. Look how that's turned out.
4. Yes, he's "liberal." I wish I knew what people meant by that these days, though, because it seems to an empty pejorative any more. Bush is billed as a conservative, even though he's gone on runaway spending sprees without a plan on how to pay for them, and he's engaged in nation-building of the worst possible sort.
   
   And my mother, God bless her, criticizes Obama for being liberal and yet she's voiced support in the past for abortion and physician-assisted suicide while laying claim to being a conservative. (On the former, at least, she agrees with Obama's stated position, if not McCain's, and Obama's position anyway is "We all want fewer of them, so let's work together.")

* Edited to add: Actually, he voted against funding for the troop when there was no timeline set for their withdrawal. McCain also voted against funding, when there was a timeline attached. Therefore it is just as accurate to say that McCain voted against the surge. And in any event, the real successes there seem to have flowed from the Sunni tribal leaders who have broken with the insurgency and with al Qaeda in Iraq, and not from any increase in U.S. troops.

On the Metropolitan Community Church and being different

If you hang out in some evangelical circles and the Metropolitan Community Church comes up, you'll probably hear it dismissed as a false church, or at best as a church that has it all wrong on matters of sin.

For those who have never heard of it, the MCC is a Protestant denomination that identifies itself with the gay, lesbian and transgendered Christian community. It's a place for people who are outcast because of their sexuality or gender identity can find shelter from the storm and be welcome.

My friend Shelly, who is transgendered, visited one on Sunday morning that is local to her. I've never been to one, but I like what she has to say:

I also remember when younger all the hostility aimed at Metropolitan Community Church and the "gay Christians" who obviously were so deluded, as they were described in my evangelical circles. When I was there, all I heard was people who put God first and considered themselves humbly and really sought to be Christlike and accepting of wherever God put them. It didn't sound any different in terms of "kingdom living" than the conservatives who had good hearts, despite any theological differences.

I think the MCC church, however, understands suffering and sacrifice in ways that I never quite felt like the middle-class white evangelicals do. When you're found yourself rejected and abused and put down because of who you are and feel you can't change, when you feel constantly excluded because of what you've determined after years is your identity, you either become insanely bitter or you learn how to minister to the broken-hearted and hurting without judgment. These people were not bitter; they really found joy in knowing God.

This is a church that does sound like it has something real to offer even us straight folks -- if we're willing to listen.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The first chills of autumn come in summer

Life comes in stages, not all of them pleasant.

Ten to fifteen years ago everyone I knew was getting married. The year Natasha and I tied the knot, there were three other couples we were friends with who made it official.

The weddings were followed within a few years by a prolonged slew of babies. My brother Herb and his wife, Pam, had a son. Natasha and I followed less than a year later with Evangeline. Then Ward and his wife, Rhoda, had a daughter. All told there are five little Learnlings running around right now, though the youngest is 5.

Last year I noticed a number of my friends were separating and getting divorced. The marriages that were pledged to last the rest of their lives were coming crashing down around them, and one by one, they were deciding to leave.

And now, while it is still summer, I can feel the first chill of autumn as wind stirs in the leaves overhead.

I buried an aunt last year, followed by an uncle. We buried Natasha's mother this summer, taken by an early frost. Now I have another aunt in Georgia who has been given two to eight weeks to live.

And my own parents, who at 68 have had good innings, are no longer as young as they once were. They're both slowing down, and though they've been there my whole life, it's increasingly plain to see that they won't be there forever.

The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, and as the day ends, all slips into darkness. This too is meaningless.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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beautiful explanation of death

A terminally ill man had been visiting his pastor. As he was preparing to leave, he turned to his pastor and said, "Pastor, I am afraid to die. Tell me what lies on the other side."

Very quietly, the pastor said, "I don't know."

"You don't know?" the man asked incredulously. "You're a Christian man, you're a preacher. Don't you know what is on the other side?"

The pastor had been holding the handle of the door to his study. From the other side of the door came a sound of scratching and whining, and as he opened the door, a dog sprang into the room and leaped on him with an eager show of gladness.

Turning to his parishoner as the dog ran to the center of the room and stood by the nice new ottoman, the pastor said, "Did you notice my dog? He's never been in this room before. He didn't know what was inside. He knew nothing except that his master was here, and when the door opened, he sprang in without fear. I know little of what is on the other side of death, but I do know one thing: I know my master is there, and that is enough."

And then he kicked the dog for piddling on the furniture.

May today there be peas within you,
And lettuce and watercress too.
May you trust God that you are exactly
Where you are meant to be,
Unless you're in Harrisburg, or
Just outside Augusta, Georgia,
In which case you're probably screwed.
I believe that friends are quiet angels
Who quietly bear us along when our wings
Have trouble remembering how to fly.
(So please don't drop me. It's a long way down.)

Inconstant faith

My experience with evangelicals is that there is a game of Pretend afoot, that the faith has been largely consistent from the time of Abraham down to the present.

Clearly there is some truth to this, but let's not kid ourselves. Our interpretation of Scripture, our concepts of morality and justice, and many of our doctrines have changed, sometimes drastically over the past two millennia. Not only do we like to believe that extrabiblical concepts like capitalism and democracy were important to ancient Jews and ancient Christians, but we also have changed our understanding the Bible itself.

Honest faith must also admit honest doubt, and honest doubts need to be acknowledged and explored. God is big enough to handle tough questions, and it's not as though he's surprised when we ask them. Refusing to voice them leaves us with unresolved questions and a lingering, festering suspicion that we've been sold a bill of goods.

Satan's one example. Popular Christian culture has a lot to say about the rebellion in heaven, the way the highest of all the angels led a rebellion that ended with a third of the angels cast into hell and becoming demons. This is a great story, and I love it as much as the nice guy, but it's not exactly in the Bible. It's older than John Milton and "Paradise Lost," but as far as I can tell, the story first gained traction a few centuries after the canon was complete.

The gospel presentation has changed too. These dates we share the gospel by describing how all have sinned against God, putting us under sentence of death because God is holy and cannot abide the presence of sin or sinful people. The good news is that Christ stepped in and took that punishment in our place, satisfying God's need for justice, so that we can be spared the pains of hell as long as we accept Jesus as our personal savior.

That's quite a bit different from the older doctrine of Christus Victor, and also differs quite significantly from the first recorded creed "If you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. For it is with the heart that you believe and are justified, and with the mouth that you confess and are saved" (1 Corinthians 10:9-10).

Unlike our modern gospel presentation, which requires personal confession of sin, there's nothing in that creed about confessing sin. It's all about confessing Jesus' sovereignty and resurrection. See the difference?

There's also the matter of sexual mores and morality. For centuries, the Christian concept of marriage looked radically different from our Western norm of getting married in church before having sex. In older times, couples would cohabitate and have children before getting their union blessed by the a priest, sometimes years later. The church in some parts of Christian Europe even recognized trial marriages that aren't that different from today's practice of premarital cohabitation.

Nowadays it's heterosexual married families ûber alles. The insistence on marriage-vows-first very well may be closer to what God desires, but I don't think we're kidding anyone but ourselves when we claim that the way we do things now in the West is how they've always been done or properly should be done always.

And so it is with hell. When Jesus talks about hell, he's describing the city dump outside Jerusalem. When we talk about hell with its picturesque and exquisitely grotesque torments for the dammed that go on day and night without stop, we're influenced by the Dante's hauntingly beautiful poetry in "The Divine Comedy."

We owe it to ourselves to do better than supporting a folk version of Christianity. It's essential to chase down the original meaning and intent of the Scriptures. Scrape away the barnacles and see what the hull of the ship is like underneath.

What does the Bible really say about hell, about heaven, about demons, about Jesus, and about even itself?

One quick example of how hell has been developed, away from the biblical teaching. Matthew 25 shows the exalted Son of Man judging the nations, and separating them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. To the goats, the wicked, he says, "Depart from me into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels."

The funny thing is, the audience to that particular speech was a group of people who clearly believed in him. They recognized the Lord when they saw him, and asked in bewilderment, "But did we not heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons in your name?" If the term Christian has any meaning in the context of that parable, this group was in like Flynn.

Or there's the servant -- not an enemy, but a servant -- whose talent of gold is taken away and given to another; the servant whose debt was forgiven and then was beaten and thrown into prison. I've never heard these understood as anything but metaphors for hell, and yet the people being thrown there are all servants of the king/master/lord, thereby marking them as people whom today we would identity as Christians. So who is hell for?

Quite often, the Bible does not say what we have been taught to think it does, and though the investigation often leaves me with more questions than answers, I find that I prefer the uncertainty of faith to the cold hard certainty of what I was once taught to settle for.

We've been playing this game of Let's Pretend for far too long. Isn't it time to rediscover for ourselves what the Bible really says, and let that shape our faith?



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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hell just froze over

Despite my earlier kvetching, I have beaten the system at its own game once again.

The cutoff date for first grade in our school district is Oct. 15. In order to begin first grade, you had to have been born at least six years ago by Oct. 15. If you were later than that, you need to wait until next year before you can enroll. Rachel was born Oct. 30, too late for this year.

Well, despite being born two weeks too late to enter first grade this year, Rachel has been approved for first grade this year, owing to her course of education at home the past year. This comes despite the many assurances I have received over the years that no one ever gets an exception from a school district's cutoff date, not never, not no how.

Teachers and administrators alike at the charter school are amazed that I pulled it off.

That fluttering sound you hear is pigs flying.

my neural synapses fuse

At the library today as I practiced language skills with the girls, I managed not only to be outdone by the girls but also to lose what meager skills I have in any language.

After we returned the books that were due today, Evangeline and I started practicing our Esperanto. It works like this: I read her a word, and she gives me the Esperanto equivelant. Then I use the word in a sentence, and she has to translate the sentence. If I ask her a question, she has to answer me in Esperanto. (This has all sorts of insidious purposes. Besides teaching her the language, I pass on subversive ideas, like Bonaj demandoj ne havas facilajn respondojn. "Good questions don't have easy answers.")

So we're on a roll, going back and forth, and then suddenly Rachel interjects a translation on her own. An accurate one.

I have given her virtually no instruction in Esperanto. She's drilled me on some of my vocabulary, and she's heard me make simple requests in Esperanto, but otherwise it's stuff she's overheard me explaining to her fratino or she's picked up from our impromptu conversations.

So my brain pops the clutch over that one. I wrestle it back into gear, and then suddenly Evangeline starts correcting my grammar. "You forgot to add the -N!" she wails. (It's true. I keep forgetting to add the -N for the accusative case.)

Then I realize that while I'm using words I've learned from the more advanced lessons that Evangeline hasn't reached, she is having no trouble following me. Demandi is an infinitive; theoretically, all Evangeline should know is the verb forms. In practice, she's already converted it into a noun, demando/n, and doing the same with other verbs.

I used to be ahead of her, mostly because I am the teacher, and so I need to understand it if I'm going to teach her. I now realize that my vocabulary is slightly larger, probably because I'm already bilingual and know a smattering of French and Spanish to boot, but she is rapidly eclipsing whatever advantage I have. Her brain is wired right now for language acquisition, while for me it's work.

So much work that my language center finally seized up and stopped working completely. We were having a little back-and-forth in Esperanto when I said, "Jodia estas los compleanos de your grandfather."

The girls looked at me like I made no sense. Which I didn't -- in four different languages. I had mashed them all together into one coherent statement that made sense only to me.

rolling my chronometer upward

Today, August 24, is my birthday. I am turning 38. I therefore am inviting everyone who reads this blog to join in celebrating this annual event in the manner that seems most appropriate.
Some suggestions:

1. Go on a pub crawl in my honor.
2. Visit the library and lose yourself in a dozen good books.
3. Go see "The Dark Knight."
4. Take up either suborbital skydiving, or parasailing in the upper Jovian atmosphere.
5. Write a letter to George W, Bush, asking if there is any loose change under the White House sofa cushions that you can have.
6. Rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
7. Put on patriotic costume, and go out and fight crime.
8. Make "Hussein" your middle name.
9. Sit on a Whoopee Cushion during silent prayer at church.
10. While out in public, turn to an unsuspecting member of the opposite sex and say, very loudly, "Motel room? Why do you want me to go to a motel room with you?"

Please note that Suggestion 10 also has a comical effect during silent prayer at church, but is likely to have you ejected from the service.

'the gameplayers of zan'

It took about 400 pages, but I finally am hooked on "The Gameplayers of Zan."

This is the second of M.C. Foster's books about the ler, the artificially evolved new humans of "Warriors of the New Dawn." I've been reading it a book club I've started among friends, and it has been nothing but awful. There is some interesting world-building behind this book, but the author's attempts at building at atmosphere of suspense and mystery fall woefully short.

If you have never heard of the ler, they are a new race of humans created by attempts to push human evolution artificially. The new humans have two thumbs and one finger on each hand, and supposedly are faster, deadlier and more intelligent than traditional humans.

The book is supposed to be something of suspense. Regular humans are suspicious of the ler, and the suspicion centers around zan, a game that supposedly is a big deal in ler society. Except we're never given the impression that is. The book instead follows an investiation by one ler into the death of another, and it's a tedious investigation that involves a lot of walking, discussion and a number of flashbacks that say nothing.

Foster needed to work on his pacing (and his dialogue) a bit more. Only two -- two! -- scenes piqued my interest for the entire first 400 hundred pages, and they weren't enough on their own to keep me going. I would have quit if it hadn't been for the book club and sheer stubborness.

I'm on Page 406 right now; the human agencies have just figured out what the game is about, and they are about to take action to take over the ler reservation. It's a lousy place to stop, but it's 1:12 a.m., and I need to.

I haven't read prose this turgid since I was a newspaper editor. The book finally has my interest now that the nature of the game has been revealed, but it comes far too late in the book to justify the commitment. I will never read the other ler books.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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stinking bueraucrats

I'm the process of trying to get Rachel properly into first grade at school.

She misses the cutoff date in our district by two weeks, so ordinarily she would be starting kindergarten in a few weeks. Ordinarily, except I homeschooled her for kindergarten, and basically got her to the level where academically she's ready to start second grade.

I did this with Evangeline three years ago, explained everything nicely to the superintendent's office, and got a letter from them essentially saying, "Hey, no problem. We'll put her in our system as a first-grader." I gave that to the charter school, and bang! zoom! she was in. No problem, right?

Not this year. This year I sent a letter and got a phone call from the superintendent saying he needed more information about the course of study we used before he could approve such an exception. So I wrote him a detailed letter explaining what material I used to teach Rachel to read, how I taught her to tell time and count change, what math books I used, and made up a checklist showing her levels of progress and achievement for kindergarten throughout the year. I e-mailed it to him as requested, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Today I took a printout of the e-mail and its attachments to his office and gave them to his secretary. She was really nice; we chatted a bit, and it turns out she knows my name, and has seen the letter herself. She stamped the correspondence as received, and added a Post It note saying that I needed a response from him. (As I myself had indicated in each letter I have sent him.)

School starts in two weeks and I can't get a letter from this guy saying that Rachel is OK for first grade. Fortunately I've talked with the education directors at the charter school so they know that Rachel already is at or past a first-grade level in her subjects, so she can be educated accordingly. (At least we hope. I have fears that they won't know what to do with her, either. That was a problem Evangeline had three years ago.)

So what accounts for the foot-dragging this time around at the superintendent's office? Two things. For starters, relations between the charter school and the local district have soured somewhat over funding issues. Secondly, I'm beginning my third year on the charter school board of trustees. My name goes out on all the school's official correspondence, so the superintendent knows who I am, and he knows I'm not just a parent in the crowd.

I hope he surprises me and gives me that letter, but I have a sneaking suspicion he's going to drag his feet into the school year if he can.

recycled crafts

We've already used broken plates and pottery to decorate our mailbox post. The girls even made our house number from pieces of broken plate. We'll be decorating a planter that way some time soon. (It's simple: You take broken coffee mugs or plates, and affix them to the post or other surface with the same adhesive you use for doing a ceramic surface on your sink. They sell the adhesive at home improvement stores, even the big, ugly, useless ones.)

I'm nearly finished with a rag rug made entirely from old pants of mine that had become indecent. (You stich 2-inch-wide strips together into three long strands, and then you braid them together to make a rope, then use carpet thread to stitch it together.)

My mother has taken a bunch of old T-shirts of mine that have outlived their usefulness as T-shirts, and is in the process of making them into a quilt. The quilt, when it is finished, will be something that we can use for years to come to keep ourselves warm.

These are all things we can do fairly cheaply, getting extra use out of things that once we would have thrown into the garbage. In every case mentioned so far, we're getting years of extra use out of the original items by changing what we use them for. If we do a good enough job at them, these can even be gifts with a personal touch for friends and relatives.

Here's a new one I want to try tomorrow: Making patterns and shapes from old crayons. The girls have plenty of these from trips to restaurants, where they routinely give children cheap crayons that break as soon as they're used for more than 30 seconds. I also seem to remember that you can make crayons into candles.

And I have a ton of old socks that I can't use. They have holes, they're stretched out, and they lost their mates, but mostly they have holes in the heels. So, here's an idea I have for those: another quilt, a patchwork that I make myself by sewing the socks together as I go. I don't know if that would be thick enough, or if I'd need bunting or whatever it's called, but as long as the socks are clean, it's not a bad idea. And again, it adds years of life to the material. Or I can get the girls to make sock puppets. Either way, it reduces our waste, makes something useful from something that has lost its usefulness, and it teachs the girl actual skills, unlike most of what passes for crafts these days. ("Let's glue stuff together and color with markers!" Bleah.)

Bit by bit, I want to cut into the trash we produce. A private school I visited Wednesday, one with LEEDS platinum certification, has set the goal of eliminating all trash within three years. Everything on site will be recycled, composted, or reused in some way so that it doesn't end up moldering in a landfill. That's an impressive goal, and one I want to emulate here at the house.

We already recycle plenty, and we compost a great deal too, but I really like the idea of finding crafty ways to turn trash into something that we can use and appreciate for years to come.