Evil Eye. Oral. Or written, even.

I've been in a foul mood recently, something my poor boyfriend has put up with amazingly patiently, and usually I am not a great believer in slagging people off, but when it gets to the point where THEY. ARE. JUST. BEGGING. FOR. IT., it's really hard to restrain myself. And more often than not I feel bad because it is a really naughty thing to do, but my tolerance does have limits. Maybe because I'm getting old. Maybe because I am getting to the point where I'm losing hope.
Let's say, I can tolerate them if they are far away from me, and I get agitated if I have to be around them... I'd rather, for the sake of my own sanity, surround myself with nice and pleasant people. It makes me a nicer person, too, and I usually haven't got a problem being nice. I actually enjoy it. Yet I am here bitching my head off.
Well, they may have taught us differently in Bible School, the whole shebang about that it's easy to love those loveable and that true saintliness lies in loving the unlovable, but to be honest, I have never applied for the saint job, and I personally am favouring the verse that mentions the not throwing your pearls to swines and wasting your energy on things that aren't worth the effort.
So here I am, kind of handing out verbal nominations for the Darwin Awards, or more like, I wish some people qualified for them, i.e. removed themselves from the gene pool to do mankind a favour.

Stupid people get my goat, usually. I don't mean ordinary stupid people. I mean people so absolutely idiotic and self-absorbed and irresponsible and retarded that I want to bang my head against a wall until I am no longer capable of perceiving them.

To go or not to go - the church dilemma

Last summer, my "ex-husband" Johannes, who I hadn't seen in years, came over to visit, and we had an absolute blast. I know Johannes back from the days when I lived in the "convent" (me working for the magazine, him doing his civil service at the mission centre). Being friends with the civil service guys kept me sane, because they weren't so over-the-top religious and holier-than-thou like the bible students, teachers and missionaries, who would even turn their farts into hymns if they could. We did what we could to not go stir crazy in the village; our parties were legendary.
So even though we attended the obligatory bible and prayer meetings, the lads never seemed massively bible-bashing... and Johannes never seemed much the type who was very vocal about his religion. It sometimes makes me forget that he actually is religious, to the point where I was almost flabbergasted when he told me on Sunday that he hadn't been to church in ages, and I almost felt like I owed him an explanation why I hadn't. Isn't it funny how our behaviour is shaped by those who surround us? Even weirder, how much of a behavioural trap is created when different people meet, who know different sides of us, to the point where they would probably define us in different ways, and how you suddenly feel that acting in character with one person makes you act out of character with another? I have been around my current (non-religious) friends for so long that I am just not used to being my convent self anymore. It feels like putting on an old dress which is yellowed by age and a tad too small.

The reason why I haven't gone to church in years is quite simple. Church congregations make me angry. I dunno why, I think I have just developed an allergic reaction to religious communities. I have been looking around to find a church to feel home in, and none of them felt like IBC in Berlin, with Scott Hinton as our pastor, who was a legend and who was one of the very few pastors I ever knew who didn't talk out of his arse. Who could accept me for who I was, no matter what I said or did. Who I could tell that I wanted my mother dead at a time when I was terrified of her nasty plots, without having him going all sanctimonious on my ass.

Most - well, all the other churches I have been to, with rare exceptions, were places where people put on a religious facade, but essentially didn't give a crap about others, where I saw a lot of religious hubbub but felt about as welcome as in the schoolyard of my junior high. Where attending felt like nothing but going through the motions, like something I did because I felt obliged to, if not guilty about if I didn't show. And it didn't take long for me to realise what damage it actually did to my faith. In quite simple terms, if I had continued going to church, I would have lost my faith.

Years and years ago, when I spend nights crying myself to sleep because I felt that very core of mine was dying, and I was afraid to lose it, I made a pact with God. I cannot tell you how terrifying that was, when you're so indoctrinated that you believe any straying to the left or right will send you straight to hell. When in your mind this is a real possibility. But when you feel you are going to go there anyway, just a little sooner, because you've begun to crack under the pressure.
It was probably more a conversion than the night I said the sinner's prayer. Then, I handed myself over to guidance the way the church offered it, but this time, it was a complete leap of faith. That pact was about that I was going to go my own way, and have whatever notion of God existed, lead me. It would mean relying on my instincts, and my conscience, and not on the contradictory and simplistic doctrine that was spoon-fed to us and felt like the spiritual equivalent to something they would have fed you in Victorian orphanages. It would mean falling, messing up, possibly not being a religious role model, but at least always knowing that I believe what I do for the right reasons, and not because some religious community peer-pressured me into it. I'd know that the faith I'd have would be the faith I'd asked God for, and was willing to receive at that point in time, and all I'd know would be something I had learned in my heart, not just head knowledge that means nothing to me. It would perhaps be a dirtier faith in "their" terms, a more sullied, impure one, but at least it would be mine, and I wouldn't be lying to myself or act contrary to my beliefs.
And to be honest, I have never looked back. I have moved far away from the evangelical roots I have, and I have allowed myself to be open enough to learn about the divine from all sorts of sources, by recognising it for what it is, and not rejecting it just because it has a non-evangelical label attached to it.

But getting to the peace of mind was hard. It took me ages to rid myself of the sense of guilt, the feeling that I had committed an unforgivable sin by rejecting the church and its doctrines just due to their nature, because for too long it has been drummed into me that belief in church equals the belief in God - the only acceptable belief.

But when Johannes mentioned that, that twinge of guilt returned... just because of to the context in which I got to know him. And I suppose I tried to justify it again to myself.
I thought about what that particular word actually means. Gottesdienst. Directly translated, it means "god service". In which way, actually? Us serving God? Or God serving us?
I don't think God needs us to serve him. I don't think he needs us at all. I don't see him as an entity that has the need to be worshipped, to fulfil an egotistic need. Maybe God needs us in the way we need our own children, not in the sense of them ensuring our survival, but because they're the object of our love, and without them this love would be unchanneled, empty and frustrated, or not even existent... maybe loving children makes us more of what we are. We were created out of love, and perhaps our existence created a need in God. Of course you want your children to love you. But then again, would you want this love to be expressed in a doctrinal way? Would you want to force them to love you, or to show something that resembles love but is, in the end, only an act?

What is the point of us going to a service if God can be with us wherever we are? Would you summon your kids into the lounge and say, right, it's Sunday morning, show daddy some love? Isn't it more natural to love your dad in a thousand different ways? Quietly, when you walk next to him, not having to say a word, talking to him like a normal person, laughing, joking, crying? Does it have to be in Christian speak, in lame pathos that sounds fake and put on?

I don't think God has an ego in the human sense. If our ultimate goal is to be like him, and to dissolve our ego, which is a granite pillar of self-hood preventing us from melting and blending into that Ocean that is God-hood, then surely creating a barrier of falseness and pretension, of distancing worship, of rituals, of anger-creating guilt, can't be the way forward.

Out of his Head

So Brian "Head" Welch converted. I can virtually hear the fundies break out in what they call praise and jubilation, another “closet Satanist” in their trap, another score for Jesus.
I have no problem with people finding a spiritual path that they find suitable, but why do they have to propagate themselves like this? Of course, they claim it is “for the glory of God”, but come on, who are they kidding? So Brian Welch went from cool to another Jesus wannabe – what is with this cover picture??! I mean, the audacity to portray yourself as Jesus, and pulling the old “humbled and contrite” face, when the whole photo session to achieve this cover was to display him in a certain light. Would Jesus do a photo session and write books about himself? Nothing has changed… just the target audience.This is what winds me up so much about evangelical culture, this whole pretension to be all for God’s glory, when it is blatantly about PR for the self. If at least they were honest about it, it would be less annoying.

The sad thing, now that he is converted, his music has blatantly turned crap. Christian rock. It’s like a job requirement to suck.

Postmodern postmodernism

So I started this discussion group on myspace called "The Postevangelicals and other reluctant believers". It's targeted at people who once used to be fundamentalists but have become disillusioned and outgrown their former evangelical views. In other words, a postevangelical, by the definition that Dave Tomlinson coined in his book, is someone who is anything but fundamentalist. You could even say that postevangelicals are religious people who have accepted the inevitability of postmodernism.

And now this guy posts a request on the discussion board, in this group, of all places: a Christian filmmaker wanting to interview fundamentalist Christians.

Ironic, if it wasn't so ironic.

*slowly bangs head against wall*

Quote of the day

"A morality that attempts to please God without attending to its effects on the human beings that God loves may ultimately do more harm than those moral visions that claim no truck with the Almighty, but which nevertheless achieve the work of the Kingdom. In this era of global relations, God may be theologically outsourcing the pursuit of justice, truth and goodness to those without religious portfolio who are willing to do the work."

- Michael Eric Dyson

Quote of the day

This is the reason why I'm a mystic... someone who cannot find and connect to God in a sermon, a book, even the bible, through someone else's view and stories... I can only truly find him through intuition and experience. Only your own experience can be relied upon if you want God to root himself into your soul. Everything else is just theory... babble.

"Talk of spirituality is often like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps: Unless you already understand, the words are of little help, but once you understand, the words are unnecessary."
- Daniel A. Helminak

1 Corinthians 13:12 (New Living Translation)

"Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely."

No chance for us heathen mingers

I just found a link on Bad Christian's website, to a Christian guy "cyberwhoring himself" on his website. I think I have seen a German version of this before, but I daresay, that guy was so outrageously stupid, it must have been a piss-take. (Here is another one for those of you capable of the Teutonic tongue.) But knowing the views of some fundagelicals (i.e. evangelical gestapo), this fella actually seems for real. Now, the thing that makes me giggle is not the dating request per se; it's the requirements he puts out for potential ladies. Read it and tremble in fear/hysteria.
I especially like how he keeps misspelling 'adultery', like he is too afraid to look at the word to correct it.

Still, have to say though - if he wants to beat Antipornguy, he has a lot more work to do.

P.S.: Sadly, Antipornguy's website seems to have gone to data heaven. If any of you can find it anywhere, let me know. Otherwise, we still have Antipornguy's blog. Which is just about as amusing.

The Sin of Eve, according to the Christian Taliban

When I established in a test a while ago that I am a bad Christian, I automatically signed up for a newsletter (those sly fundie fuckers!) that is now regularly bombarding my inbox with the e-equivalent of a mad, yet highly entertaining screaming town square preacher.
I told Jun about it, and as he is having too much fun with winding up fundamentalists, he looked into it properly and has established a woman called Ingrid Schlueter as first his, then my favourite columnist. Holy shit, I kid you not, that woman is the human equivalent of a bad case of Hirschsprung's Disease (i.e. she is so full of shit she should have died of it by now) - my my aren't we educational today!
And to make the fun complete, she now has her own blog. Which is so unreal it is almost satirical.
This woman is a bitter old ho who is so tense that if you stick some coal up her arse, you have a diamond in two weeks (thanks to Ferris Bueller for this gem of a metaphor), and quite obviously - I never thought I would say it - in desperate need for a good shag.

Anyways, in the light of recent events, I thought I give you a sweet sample of one of my favourites, which also illustrates quite clearly one of the reasons why I completely dissociated myself from the freakin evangelicals.

Enjoy "Dressing Modestly in the Midst of Babylon".
I have no words to respond to this pile of shit. I left her a comment, but - surprise! - it needs to be approved first. I left my email address, too, and look forward to some hate mail. Maybe I post some here.

The taste of hierophany

"What's clarity like?
Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math
problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a
heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is
twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite
sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this
sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though
day-to-day twentieth century living had become an almost unsolvable algebraic equation. This is why Richard drank. This is why my old friends used to spend
their lives getting blitzed on everything from cough syrup to crystal meth.
Anything to make that sloggy buzz make a retreat."
- Jared in Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland.

Once more, Coupland has sent my mind reeling. He sets something off in me that equally feeds me and makes me want to scream in frustration, because I feel on the verge of seeing the mystery of life with that clarity, but the buzz in my mind is too loud. This is the reason why I wrote my dissertation on him. This is exactly how I feel. This is why I am into mysticism rather than pure theology-by-the-book. This is what I think is behind the bible verse of 1 Corinthians 13:12: "Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known."
This clarity is what I have so rarely, for just a few seconds, but it makes me realise that the search is not in vain.
This is what happens sometimes when I drink. This is why I drink before exams. This is why one of my friends said he does drugs - to enable him to understand things he otherwise couldn't. It clears my mind by killing the buzz, by straightening out the thoughts that are wildly tangled in my head, into coherence.

Sometimes I feel that all the answers to life are in my head already, but they are a tangled-up mess I cannot make sense of to save my life, that I cannot get undone. I only see scraps and pieces that reveal merely that they are part of something greater, but I am missing too many pieces to see or even guess the whole thing, and even if I had them all, I would spend a lifetime - hell, a billion lifetimes - putting them together, into the one big epiphany that only God has the mental capacity for. It drives me nuts, I feel I can figure it out if I just think hard enough, think long enough, until it makes my head hurt.

It will be so multi-layered, so complex and yet so simple, a knowledge that is in all of us already, but that we have lost growing up. It will be so simple that we will slap our foreheads and go "of course!" (or "DUH!" in valley girl talk).

Yet - no simple answers, when in writing, suffice. The truth is not theory, and cannot be reduced to an axiom on paper. The truth can only come via life, alive. Simple textbook answers only frustrate. The answers are simple when they reveal themselves to you, but mindblowingly complex when you try to write them down.
It would be like trying to write EVERYTHING. Everything there is. In a way that makes it all fit together.
Coupland strikes that chord with me, he makes me feel like what I feel is real, is an almost collective experience of sensing the truth, faint but real, like a far distant, barely audible hum.
He may not give me answers. But he keeps making me look. He is a priest of and to my kind.

add: Losing my religion

I just can't get over it.

What boggles my mind is:

If the police finds pictures of children being molested on your computer, you get arrested. Fair enough and well done.
What I don't get is how people like those wankers today can happily hand out pictures of mutilated babies to people in the street, and not get arrested? Just because they justify it with religious freedom? Just because they have a religious point to make?
How can anyone use pictures of babies that are torn to shreds to advertise something? Especially to advertise their belief system???

HOW FUCKIN SICK IS THAT?

What's gonna be next?

Are we gonna get pamphlets with graphic pictures showing women being gang-raped? Of people getting murdered and beaten to death? Just so a fact is rubbed into our face that we have known for bloody ages, namely that the world can be a sick place? And basically getting the suggestion that these things happen because people don't share the beliefs of those fundie assholes? Which means pretty much everyone except them?

What do they think they can accomplish that way?

I don't get it. It doesn't make sense.

I guess Milla hit the nail on the head when she said:

"They think shocking people is the only way. They are blinded by the light."

Losing my religion

Right. I am SO PISSED OFF.

Laura, Adam, Jo, Badar and I went out to the town centre of Bournemouth to have lunch and do some shopping. We walked around the square, and there was this guy singing who was really good, and then we noticed this group of people standing further away with signs, and one guy was shouting something through a megaphone.
We walked a bit closer, and I realised it was some bible thumper meeting, and the guy was hollering something bible-thumpery.
I've gotta say first, I am probably what people would call a Christian, even though I'd rather drop that kind of label. I used to be evangelical simply because that was the part of Christendom I got in touch with first. But that is long time gone. I moved on to being post-evangelical, which is now drifting towards what one could call mysticism with elements of sufism, but I am reluctant to say that because it's just another way of labelling.

But even during my evangelical days I was totally turned off by bible-bashing street preachers using coercion and guilt trips to convert people. It is cheap manipulation which has nothing - NOTHING - to do with genuine, positive, healthy faith, and I clearly distance myself from groups practicing this.

Anyways, I find bible thumpers quite amusing. I like watching them and seeing their self-righteous expressions, and I know the mindset so well that I can read off their faces what they are thinking about the people around them: it's a mix of condescending pity and binary thinking, considering all of them enemies/brainwashed by the enemy/blind fools who need to be led to the light/conversion objects, you name it.

So I stood there with Laura, wondering which group that was, when this preacher-looking bloke came up to me.
He hollered something at me in a really thick accent, so I had to ask him twice to repeat himself, and finally understood that he said: "I bet you don't see this every day."
"Sure as hell not!" I said, absentmindedly taking the little pamphlet he was handing me and looking at it to see who I was dealing with. I was smiling and making a lighthearted comment to Laura, and unsuspectingly opened the pamphlet to have a look inside.

I didn't really grasp what I saw at first. And then my heart stopped. I could feel the blood draining from my head.
What I stared at in shocked disbelief was the picture of what was probably an aborted baby lying on a white blanket, covered in blood, with its head torn off, lying at an odd angle to the body, seeming to be attached to it by nothing than a shred of skin.
I never even got to see the rest of the pamphlet. I heard myself burst out "Oh my god that's sick!", before I slammed it right back into the preacher's hand. "You can have that back, man! What's wrong with you??!"

The preacher looked at me like he had no idea why I was freakin out, and an old lady smiled at me like I was an idiot and said, with a mildly warning tone in her voice: "Jesus is the only way!"
I didn't even know what to say. My head swam, and I just walked off, with Laura in tow.
"That's why I hate those bastards!", I hissed. I could feel the fury rise inside me. Poor Laura probably had no idea what was going on, and I hope she is spared that kind of bullshit.

We went to the Moon to have lunch, but I felt totally knocked out of my mind. I couldn't get that horrendous picture out of my mind, the way the preacher handed me that pamphlet, knowing its content full well but acting like it is the most normal thing in the world. I suppose their twisted idea of faith justifies stuff like that. It just totally shook me up.

For God's sake, there were children out there, everywhere! Those religious maniacs go on talking about God's love and the necessity of purity and whatnot, and they pass out pictures sporting mutilated babies. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE????

WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY THINKING???? WHO THE HELL DO THEY THINK THEY CAN CONVERT WITH THIS BULLSHIT??? SHOCK THEM INTO BELIEF???

Today a fundamentalist group called "Christian voice" made me feel ashamed to be a Christian.
And it reassured me that leaving the church, leaving the Christian subculture and doing my "walk with God", to use an evangelical phrase, on my own, far away from any notion of brainwash and manipulation, was the right decision.

Kryptonite

After a talk with a friend of mine last night, I have been thinking. About my faith, about the things I do and that I sometimes do, inspite of my beliefs, inspite of what I want to be like, inspite of what I idealise.
I have for so long tried to understand the essence of my faith, the why and how, the very foundation in me that led me to faith, because I need to know that in order to justify it.
Faith needs to have a reason to be real, and to this day I find it so hard to name, to describe that inner connection I have to it.

This is the big philosophical question.
Do you accept yourself the way you are, even if you are rotten, or do you seek to become something other, something less rotten, therefore ostracizing the part in you that needs bettering, even though that is an intrinsic part of who you are. I found that living in that all-Christian community, with the constant in-the-face reminder how sinful we are - even though with the disclaimer that Jesus loves us, but still, he loves us inspite of ourselves. Say preachers. If Jesus only loves me because it is his nature to love, and not because he has found some value in me, if he only loves me because he loves to love, not because there is something love-worthy in me - how am I supposed to feel anything but self-hatred, because I am constantly reminded that I am not good enough? Is that how Jesus would really treat me?

Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing Jesus... I am merely chewing on the messages that have been given to me for so long from pulpits and whatnot. I have begun to question how much I know of the actual Jesus, and how much have been phrases beaten into me in the churches...

It's been eating me up. Keeping up the smiley Christian face, not being allowed to acknowledge the ugliness in me that is so much part of me. How can I face it, how can I go to the root of the problem, if I have to repress it in order to be a good Christian?
I need to vomit it out, get the poison out of my system to become receptive for the real thing. And that is one reason why I have this blog.
This is me, uncensored. With all the ugliness. I hope it will change, but only God can change it. I don't even know what to change into because I don't know what true goodness looks like.
But I don't think self-hatred induced by guilt trips about my sinfulness is the solution. Self-hatred causes self-destruction, and the destruction of others. Is self-hatred the way, when self-hatred, practiced in order to find the motivation to better yourself, kills that very motivation because it makes you believe you are worthless?

I need to find a purer form of faith, not one rigid with dogma, blocking me from my journey of understanding the divine. I need to have a faith that allows me to love myself, to become receptive for love, and to have love heal and wipe out the ugly things. I need to be allowed to acknowledge who I am first, free of guilt, so I can love myself. That's why I left church.
Some say that God loves me because of what I could be. Is that unconditional love? That's not what I am, though. If not even God can find me lovable the way I am now, with all my ugliness, how can he expect me to love myself?
Did they make a mistake in defining God's love? Or does God really "love" like that?
I don't believe them anymore. I am away from the church so God can speak for himself. So I can know what I learn about God comes from him directly, and not through the mincer of the church.

The only times I had peace with God was when I had peace with myself. When I let go of worrying about who I am. It's then when I stop messing around with what God is trying to do in me, that the changes come quietly, but then they are for real.
I am not pretending anymore. All I can do is to show what I am truest at this moment.
All I can say is, being human, uncensored, can be an ugly experience. I acknowledge it, but I don't hate myself for it. Not anymore.

Uh, dammit, am I making sense at all?

"People think that because I'm attracted to people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr or even my faith, my belief in Christ, that I am therefore some kind of hero or man of God or peacemaker. One of the reasons I'm attracted to these people is that I'm the very person who would not turn the other cheek. I grew up with a violence in me and it's still in me, and I despise it."

U2's Bono