The Last Shall be First to Leave

Taking a few moments from their 30-year-old discussion on whether women are capable of being spiritual leaders (currently, women's ordination is viewed as a "mistake" by the General Conference, because people with penises are always pointing forward), the Seventh-Day Adventist church recently decided it was time to revise their position on homosexuality.  They are very proud to announce that they have changed one adjective in describing the brokenness of homosexuals to be slightly less condescending and caustic.  They have decided not to describe homosexuality as a "disorder" and instead label it a "disturbance" (like we're the dark side of the force).  The statement now reads:

Homosexuality is a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world.

Yes, thank you for stating your prejudice in slightly less inflammatory terms.  They also are now willing to refer to the homosexual as "loved by God" instead of just a "children of God", although there's only a hair's difference between those two statements and "homosexuals exist", because Adventists believe God loves everybody.  They are now also excited to announce that they have taken the great risk of including compassion in the closing statement, which now reads:

As His disciples, Seventh-day Adventists endeavor to follow the Lord’s instruction and example, living a life of Christ-like compassion and faithfulness.

Which is a funny cap to put on a public statement about how there's totally a splinter in that other guy's eye, because that's what Jesus would have done.  Made sure you knew you were broken, and needed to  grovel before him before he would allow you into his community.  My favorite are the quotes from the committee members.  First, the old inspirational hymn, "we are good, and are persecuted":

The institutions of marriage and family are under attack.

Somehow, they are under attack.  We'll get back to you on just exactly how straight christians are going to be prevented from marrying whomever they choose in their churches any day now.  Followed by the response to a committee member suggesting they eliminate the "disturbance" line:

Though many of us have family members who are homosexual, we understand the thought process, we still embrace them, we still love them, we still care for them.  However, as a church, we must take a stand for what is right. 

What could be more right than declaring that two men loving each other above all else has no historical or biblical precedent (*cough*  *cough* David and Jonathan *cough*).  But especially the line, "we understand the thought process," because no, they don't.  They certainly think they do.  In the Adventist world, not living according to the cherry-picked "rules" found in the bible means living "apart from God" and it is their contention that no one can live happily apart from God.  And not just the gays, anyone living outside of Adventism is considered fallen, led astray by the devil, and doomed to a live of darkness and depression unless they submit to divine authority, by casting all notions of self aside, and instead living by their very poorly argued and maintained rule system.  So, if you're gay, you're not playing by their rules, and are by default living outside of their rule-system, and therefore must be unhappy. Because only living by the rules makes you happy  Ipso facto.

Except, they're so busy running gay people out of their congregations, they never let them stick around to see that that's not exactly true.  Nor do they every seem to notice that there are a wide variety of people leading happy, moral lives outside of their church.  And if they'd actually deign to talk to gay people, they might hear how happy dating the gender they're attracted to actually makes them.  Even then, in my experience, they don't really hear gay people (or me) when they say that kind of thing.  That there's nothing inherently unhappy about being gay.  It's kind of great!  It's just as great to find a fulfilling, exciting homosexual relationship, as it is to find a fulfilling heterosexual relationship.  But, since that can't be true according to their belief system, the average Adventist is still likely to believe you are either deluding yourself at best, or led astray by Satan and soon the other shoe will drop or in the worst-case, that you are an agent of the devil, actively seeking to undermine God's Holy Authoritarian Bureaucracy.  Knock, knock.  Who's there?  Gays out to destroy your marriage by being happy.

So no, they don't understand the thought process, otherwise they could not say it is not "right" that gays be in happy marriages of their own.  For one thing, you'll notice they don't specifically state just HOW marriage is under attack by gay people.  Will straight people leave the institution of marriage in disgust if gays do it too?  Is marriage really a form of group think?  Are most married people looking around to see how other marriages are doing it and modifying their own accordingly?  Do polygamists ruin it for everybody?  Why or why not?  Are marriages more concerned with people outside the marriage or more concerned with the people within it?  What does it mean to not be in the "right" marriage?  What specific harm does two dudes hitching up cause your community?  What great evil comes from two men declaring their life-long commitment to each other?  They do not say.  It is just "understood" that first gays marry, then ???, then the church and marriages everywhere are poisoned forever.  Exactly how, is left as an exercise for the bigoted reader.  How gay marriage hurts marriage more than divorce and infidelity is left as upper level Cognitive Dissonance Jujitsu, for the advanced irrationalist.

Look, I have no interest or investment anymore in the acceptance or approval of the Adventist community.  Not only would they NOT have me, as a openly and unrepentant homosexual who will just not stop loving other men (and all the horrors increased tenderness brings), but I don't believe in any of the 28 fundamental beliefs anymore, and I have no interest in being part of an institution that insists you abandon the empirical evidence of your life experiences and your critical thinking when it conflicts with poorly interpreted, and cherry-picked biblical passages.  And I don't see what hope their is for an institution that still thinks it's a mistake to have women as leaders (because they can't bring themselves to see them as equal).  But as someone who's still deprogramming myself from a lot of the terrible ideas I was told as a kid, and has a large amount of friends and family who still consider themselves Adventist, this shit drives me crazy.  The truth is, I've found substantially more acceptance and compassion outside of the church than within it.  Ironically, I see Adventists chafing under a poorly maintained rule system as pretty unhappy people.  My parents are currently having a very hard time because their religion insists I'm a bad person, even though that dramatically conflicts with their experience with me.

And what's especially frustrating about all of it, is it doesn't need to be this way, even from within their system.  They allow every other open sinner among them.  They allow people with anger problems, with gossip problems, with forgiveness problems, with compassion problems (clearly), with fidelity problems to sit among them every week in the pews without complaint.  Even from the viewpoint of "homosexuality is a sin", what is the logic of excluding the gays, while allowing the meat-eating, jewelry-wearing, freely divorcing remnant to remain?  They either believe in the power of Holy Spirit to change lives, to cure anger problems, eating problems, pride problems and "gay problems," or they don't. And they shouldn't believe in ex-gay therapy, of course, God continues to choose to not cure even those desperately trying to be straight, and even ex-gay organizations are admitting that now.

 Personally, I think they exclude gays because having happy, committed homosexuals week after week in their congregations, would show the "gays are inherently depraved and unhappy" rhetoric to be a lie.  They can't allow gays to exist among them, because they have no confidence that any of their rhetoric around homosexuality is even remotely true (quite rightly, considering they don't actually take the experience and knowledge of gay people into account).  White people can't tell black people what their experience as black people is, men can't tell women what their experience as women is, the religious can't tell the non-religious what their experience is, and straight-people CERTAINLY can't tell people what their experience as gay people is.  The only way any of those groups get to know what the other group's actual experience is is to interact with them and listen to them and BELIEVE them when they relate those things.  And until the Adventist church is wiling to put their belief system where their mouth is, and let their rhetoric stand against actual contact and socialization with Adventist gay people, they don't know SHIT about homosexuality and should not claim to.

Or would socializing and making friends with people their community normally shuns and looks down upon be too un-Jesus-like?  Ah, modern christianity:  followers of Jesus, as is comfortable and convenient.

New Blogs for Everyone!

Considering whether I should start a new blog for Adventist stuff, or just keep it here, and start labeling things.  Should blogs be focused and topic-driven?  Written with intent for a specific audience, or written in one place, hoping the multitudes within me don't overwhelm the casual reader?  Am I even going for a readership?  I am not sure I know.

I suspect I'll just write more about it here, and label accordingly, and y'all can skip my cranky rants about my childhood religion if you like.  Still, there's an OCD part of me that wants blogs to more or less be focused by topic, so the reading experience is somewhat cohesive.  However, I concede that it's annoying to try and keep up with "which blog I am updating now."

All of this is simply to say:  incoming rant about the Adventist churches new position on "teh gay." soon.  Finally got around to reading the actual news report, and: what the actual fuck.  Nothing too surprising, but Jesus, do they not resemble Jesus.

Bull in a China Shop

Existentially and economically speaking, shit is fucked up and bullshit and I know that to be true.

Shit is not fucked up cataclysmically just yet, but naggingly so nonetheless.  I was trained to be good, to be fair, to do no harm, to help the less fortunate, and conserve natural resources, but society has made being bad just so EASY.  Not in a seductively evil way, of course, I'm not sold on being overtly evil, I'm sold on being sold.  I'm encouraged to make the purchases right for ME, and not ask any pesky questions about what happens behind the scenes to make such bargains possible.  For the most part, because I don't have the time to comprehensively research the business practices of every corporation I buy from (in other words, I am lazy), I choose not to know.

Except I do know, don't I?  A bunch of earnest, persistent reporters have taken great pains to point out for many years that the phone I bought so cheaply was made possible by work conditions in another country that I would consider immoral in mine.  Because when we told corporations that they couldn't treat workers as slave labor, they simply took production to a country where the slave labor would be done by people less like us, whose plight would be less immediate, using workers with less recourse and fewer champions to fight for them.  And not just my phone, but all of my electronics.  And not just my electronics but my clothes.  And not just my clothes, but my coffee.  And not just my coffee, but my chocolate.  And not just my chocolate, but much of my food.   All relying in part, somewhere down the line, on cheap labor, with unsafe business practices, with some form of human misery meted out on the assumption that the #1 priority in the world today is to make sure the citizens of the western world get their goods as cheaply as possible.  And if that leaves foreign children or undocumented workers minus a few fingers due to unsafe-but-cheap working conditions, so be it.  

I don't really like where that leaves me ethically.  I know I am perfectly in my rights to continue, as I always have, politely ignoring the dubious business ethics of the modern age, and just take my cheap crap and go home.  It's what most everyone else does, after all.  Ideally, my culture's expression of common will and priorities in the form of self-government would have watchdogs to prevent against those kinds of abuses, but I know corporations have been busy for many years defanging government oversight and have been otherwise successful in defining profit as the ultimate good, no matter the human cost for far too many people.  I know there is much good mixed in with the bad, and that combined with the size of the problem, learned helplessness and general apathy means it's fairly unlikely that we'll rise up en masse against the injustices of the age, in a way that would effectively change anything.  For one thing, where would we start?  Nobody seems to care anymore if 100,000 are out in the streets protesting something.  Occupy only got people's attention once they made a nuisance of themselves on public land.  But even though I know all these things, I find this state of affairs a little soul-crushing.  It is hard to think of myself as a good person, when I enable bad things, however structurally built into my daily existence, and however little direct responsibility I hold for any of it.

And, on top of all that, no matter who is president next year, my vote enables someone to use drones to kill innocent people, and I have no real choice in the matter.  The "adults" have decided innocent people need to die to feed combat terrorism, and that's that.  The problems in our political system is a whole other ball of wax of course.  So much corruption, stagnation and stupidity it's hard to know where to start.  All of which I am unable to separate my vote from.  Which is not to say I cannot do some good with my vote, just that I can't keep it pure.  I enable some bad along with some good.  Which does not make me feel great either.

None of which is to say this registers very highly on a day-to-day basis.  I am not constantly wracked with over-whelming guilt about the things I buy.  But it's always there, and it always bothers me at least a little bit, and I wish I were smart enough to figure where one would even start to try and fix any of it.  And it's not to say we're all monsters, or it's all hopeless, or we all should envision ourselves as constantly covered in the blood of a million small children.  I know people taking advantage of other people is just a part of life and I can't be responsible for other people's bad behavior.  I just wish going to the store didn't feel so much like enabling it.  And I wish it didn't feel like I have to choose between fighting an endless war against unethical consumerism and living my life.

I will let you all know if I discover the magic bullet to the world's ethical problems and how to avoid the myriad systems that taint me by association.  I am not optimistic about my chances of doing so.  In the meantime, I may look here from time to time.  It seems like a start.

Your Vote is a Mess

I will now utter the words that make me hate the future:  I got into a political debate on twitter a few times this week.  Both because we don't know how to debate effectively in this country, and twitter fails so spectacularly as a debate venue for any meaningful thought.  So I'm going to explain myself in this blog post and let the subject drop, because I know who I'm voting for and I know why, and I want to have some sort of rebuttal to the odd liberal slacktivism that always seems to crop up in the last month of an election.  And I'm tired of getting into arguments on twitter about it.  I will understand if some readers find this too tedious to wade through.

Am I being too harsh when I declare it slacktivism?  Maybe.  I just think real political change takes consistent, boring, hard grass roots work and you can't just throw a protest vote at the last minute for president and expect any sort of lasting change.  It's like trying to catapult yourself to the top of the mountain and hoping to plant the flag as you fly by, instead of just building a solid, stable platform to get yourself there.   I firmly believe that if you want the american public to seriously consider a green (or any 3rd) party candidate as an alternative to the existing two behemoths, you're going to need to show first that they are capable of working within the existing structure.  This means they're going to need to see that party working for them at the city, state and congressional level before they even begin to trust that they can get things done at the presidential level.  As much as I like Jill Stein's platform, the Green party has been a spectacular failure for 20 years at building a local ground game, gaining influence in local and state politics and building name recognition.  And trying to bypass all of that with accumulating enough protest votes to sneak in a quick, bloodless decapitation just seems like slacktivism to me.  It's a seductive idea because it's easy, not because it's effective.  You can't start an effective 3rd party from the top down, you have to start at the bottom and do the work.  Presidents are typically picked from people who've worked many years as an effective state or national politician of some sort.  Until the green party has one who can claim the same credentials, and the same levels of support, they're just not going to get anywhere.  There isn't a shortcut to the top.  That idea is too good to be true.

I've also seen the, "the Democrats will never pull to the left unless we punish them by voting for a third party" argument.  Bullshit.  We did this dance in 2000.  I'm not sure Nader voters can make the argument that George W. Bush ushered in a new liberal paradise or a more liberal democratic party.  If anything, there's been a huge backlash in people willing to vote third party, if it means we get another Bush.  I think both the Tea Party and Occupy have both proved that you CAN shift the existing monoliths to the left or the right, but they both did that from within the party, not by sabotaging the party more in favor of their policies than not in general elections.  Occupy didn't push Obama far enough to the left for your tastes?  Then you'll have to try harder in the next 4 years, eh?  In the meantime, I fail to see what publicly shivving the only viable candidate closest to your goals a month before the election achieves.  Sinking Obama from the left will really only give progressives the opportunity to smugly intone "And THAT'S what you get for not being progressive enough!" while they enjoy all the liberal freedoms Romney will undoubtedly rain down upon them for their progressive purity.  "Cutting off your nose to spite your face" is a thing people actually do.  It's a thing to watch out for in ourselves.

And then there's the old, "they're both the same, it's all fucked up, I'm above it."  Again, bullshit.  Politics is messy. Every time you vote, you vote for policies you want, and policies you don't want.  Political groups, especially the Democrats, are built by building coalitions with people who agree on many things, but not everything.  Your vote is never now, and will never be, for a candidate that reflects your political views 100% down the line.  And especially in this country, you don't get to vote for either of the existing parties without voting for some pretty icky things.  And I'm not sure why anyone would suddenly think that they deserve this privilege above anyone else.  Ask gays, African-Americans and women how long it took them to get the changes they wanted and how many times it took voting for candidates that had other policies they weren't exactly in love with.  Why do you think your fight for a better government should be any easier than theirs?  And, as mentioned above, no one has built a viable 3rd party option yet nor has shown how they're using Jill Stein vote this election to launch one.  But none of this means the two existing parties are the same.

For you, in particular, they might be relatively the same.  If you're not gay, and don't need some basic human rights recognized, they're both the same.  If you're not a woman, and don't need some basic protections on when you get to make your own health decisions and when you don't, they're both the same.  If you don't really care about the state of the health care system, they're both the same.  Because there's only one party talking about gay rights, about contraception rights, about abortion rights, about trying to make the health care system better, and it's not Republicans.  It's not even on their agenda, and if it is, it's to tear down rights I feel are important.  Their explicit policies with regards to health care was to change nothing.  If Obama hadn't been elected, they wouldn't have even talked about it.  They don't even recognize that there was a problem.  And on the other issues, they're actively trying to time travel back to the 50s and demonize gay marriage, restrict abortion AND, mind-mindbogglingly, contraception and their science committee members think science is the work of Satan.  And since I have some skin in the game on the gay rights issue, you're going to have to forgive me if I can't bring myself to vote against my best interests, by voting for anyone but Obama.  Who is, again, the only pro-gay rights option that has any chance of affecting my life in a material way.  Especially given that Romney is not exactly neutral on these topics.  He will actively try and move things the other way.  And really, the side that thinks science is satan's work or equal to your emotional instincts in terms of merit are JUST the same as Democrats?  Please.

Economically, it's more of a mixed bag of course.  Even so, the Republicans remain batshit insane on the idea that tax breaks for the wealthy lead magically to job creation.  And only one party shits on the poor for being poor at every available opportunity, and has policies it would like to implement to punish them for their 'laziness'.  Are they both substantially more corrupt than I'd like them to be? Absolutely.  Wall Street has a strangle-hold on both.  But one of them is enthusiastically planning on doubling down on the practices that nearly destroyed us and one seems like it maybe could be convinced to be less crazy economically if its base pushed them that way.  I make no apology for voting for someone who at least might be convinced, cajoled or bullied by his base to see things my way.  The two parties aren't great economically, but are still not "the same."  Voting defensively is not the same things as being mind-controlled by the two-party system.  Obama, at the beginning of his term, said, "if you want more liberal policies, you have to give me political cover in the base to do that."  He's right.  Maybe we should start doing that?

Foreign policy-wise?  The only difference I can detect is Romney would really love to drop some bombs on Iran, and so would his base.  Drone assassinations suck, but since they poll over 60% in terms of popularity, we're getting the assassinations we deserve.  We're getting drones regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that.  And we're backing israel mindlessly regardless, and that sucks, but I can't do anything about that.  I DO think that invading Iran would be worse than not invading Iran and continuing sanctions.  and I DO prefer someone relatively calm-headed like Obama, with a base that pushes for peace as commander-in-chief instead of a wish-wash like Romney in charge, with a base that will be chanting "push the button!  push the button!  Show them how strong we are!" at every hint of conflict.  So again, I vote conservatively (by voting for Obama), because it seems flat out immoral to stack the immorality and carnage of war with Iran on top of the existing immorality and carnage of drone warfare.  And we aren't getting a president who will stop all foreign aggression this year.  So I vote for the less bad, because it seems so MUCH less bad.

Of course, this only matters in swing states.  And if you would have normally voted for Obama, but are voting Green in protest, then you ARE helping Romney.  But even there, I fail to see how spoiling the election for Obama from the left, gets the left further.  "I enabled a Romney win, ???, Liberal Paradise!" is just not a winning argument to me, and I have yet to see a ??? that's anything but hand-waving and fairy dust.  Your vote is a mess.  It will be a mess morally so long as western culture is a mess morally.  It will be frustratingly binary until the hippies in occupy or their supporters get to filling city councils, mayorships  state legislatures and governorships with 3rd party politicians, so americans have a broader pool to pick from when picking experienced politicians for president.  And in the meantime, the policy differences between my two choices DO matter.  In the end, I choose to vote for a guy who will move it an inch in my direction, rather than 6 inches the other way OR has zero chance of moving it all in the next 4 years.  I don't really lose sleep over that decision.  My idealism and my pragmatism are NOT mutually exclusive.

Signal Boosting

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. 

Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch - the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the crimes and cruelties it has persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand. In Scotland the parson killed the witch after the magistrate had pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature proposed to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the statute book, it was the parson who came imploring, with tears and imprecations, that they be suffered to stand. 

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

 -- Mark Twain, Bible Teaching and Religious Practice

Wow, this essay from Mark Twain was fucking beautiful.  Where was I educated, that I'm only just now reading this?  I'm tempted to assume my mostly-Adventist education neglected a few crucial tomes that are critical of the christian faith.  In any case, it is becoming increasingly clear that I have a lot of educating myself to make up for both my upbringing (to some degree) and my last 15 years of intellectual laziness (to a much larger degree).  I have a growing list of homework, and Mark Twain's essays have just now rocketed to the top of the list.

The more I learn, the humbler I get.  Every big thought that I think can change the world has already been said by someone smarter than me, decades ago.  It's astonishing to me how much good and reasonable thinking back in the day has either been ignored or forgotten.  In any case, it doesn't matter if I said it first (he said to his inner 5-year-old), what matters is I use my very small megaphone to amplify good and important ideas as best I can.  And the congregation said, "well duh."

Status report - Habit

*static, crackling*

*click, click*

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

  - Habit, William James, 1887

The above is very insightful.  I'm sure this is something many of you have known for a long time, but I am just starting to understand.  I've been railing against habit my whole life like it's a kind of death,  and it's made me miserable, frankly, for exactly the reasons expressed above.  I routinely agonize over things like bed time, clothing choice, and food.  In truth, I think I've been conflating habit in general with habits other people have tried to foist upon me.  Interesting to think that if my habits are mine and intentional, it might actually free me up to do other things.  As my dad would say, "Well, huh."