Pan-Blog #1: Religious Experience

I am embarrassed to say that the most meaningful experiences of my Christian life are incredibly difficult to recall. More than anything else, two things stand out from the first 22 years of my life: my absolutely certainty of the truth of Christianity and my deeply felt emotions regarding that truth.

During high school and college, I prided myself on knowing more about Christianity than most of the people around me, often including the adults and teachers in my life. My faith was rational, based on everything I had ever read and been told about the world. I loved reading the Bible and theology, and especially loved reading literature and works of philosophy through the lens of Christian belief. Towards the end of my faith and the beginning of my parents' separation and divorce, I recall giving my father a book by some leading evangelical (maybe John Piper?) to help him through the time of crisis. (A year later, in a similarly misguided attempt, I gave him A Very Short Introduction to Atheism.) I was sure enough - and evangelical enough - in my beliefs that it had cost me several friendships.

Equally important, though, were the emotional ties I had to my beliefs: most importantly through music. I have always loved music, and having been brought up as a Christian, I also loved hymns and many worship songs. There are still few pleasures greater to me than experiencing good pieces of music, sometimes even hymns. At one point in my life, I viewed those experiences as a direct connection to God, and I have never felt the complete and utter joy of worship in any other setting. I am sure I never will again.

Besides a few sessions at Christ In Youth conferences or chapel in college, my most vivid experience of this kind was completely alone at the house where I grew up during my senior year in high school. I was playing some of my usual classical pieces on the piano, and that day was playing particularly well. I played for hours and for about ten minutes felt absolutely certain that I was experiencing a small part of what it must be like in heaven. I felt as though I were literally in God's physical presence, playing for him, and he was pleased by me. It was possibly the happiest I've ever felt.

Looking back I do miss those experiences. The terrifying lows and highs of Christianity made me feel alive in a way that I don't feel now. My complete certainty that I was being rational in my beliefs gave me confidence and comfort intellectually, and my emotions, hopes and desires were all satisfied by those same beliefs. Whether or not I decide that no longer having those intense experiences is a good thing is beside the point since I can't imagine a time in the future where I will once again have them. While I can honestly say I am glad I have chosen more rational beliefs over Christianity, I would be lying if I said I traded up from the spiritual experiences I had.

An Inconvenient Truth

Why do people keep saying this movie is good? It's not. It's not even really a movie. If Al Gore doing voiceovers on his own slideshow is good filmmaking, I have to reconsider what I know. I don't deny that he is presenting important information, but he doesn't present it in a compelling way (which he could have done by having this movie look like a movie), he doesn't present possible solutions (unless you count the one-liners fading in during the credits), he doesn't give viewers the benefit of the doubt where comprehension and levels of knowledge are concerned (maybe this was on purpose) and he doesn't present his facts in ways that make it clear that what's happening on the charts and graphs and in his slide photographs, is bad.

Am I awful for thinking so? I recently overheard some of the higher-ups where I work considering showing this movie here for all the employees. If even I think that sounds really patronizing, what would the outspoken, figures-of-the-community, Republicans think?

Yes, it's sad to think of a polar bear drowning because the icebergs he thought would be there, weren't (in fact, it was really sad to watch a polar bear die on the "Planet Earth" series). But a poorly rendered computer graphic animation of that happening doesn't convince me to stop driving my new H3. Have so many people lost their minds, or do that many people just not know what good documentary filmmaking looks like? Why was this movie made? It can't be to convince people, because that would mean Al Gore didn't consult people who actually know how to persaude other people to do things through a medium like film, which I really don't want to believe because he seems smarter than that. Even though I like the guy, I may have to conclude (siding with a large group of people with whom I'd rather not be identified) that it was in hopes of a successful presidential campaign.

Thoughts?

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

If you were ever thinking you might watch this movie, please spare yourself. While I can appreciate in theory the idea that a movie made today is paying homage to some old style of filmmaking (in this case film noir mixed with moster movies), in reality bad movies made in the 50's without the benefit of today's computer graphics really are just as bad with the computer graphics. Besides the fact that the filmmakers were obviously in love with their particular style of animation, lighting and staging, the acting and storyline are purposefully weak, which serves no other purpose than to make this movie completely unwatchable.

Just in case you were wondering.

Really?

Is it scary that 44% of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead in the next 50 years?

Yes. Yes it is.

Huh?

I blame growing up as an evangelical Christian for my having only recently begun coming up with interesting questions. Until my senior year of college, I never had an original thought in my life, or at least never an honestly curious one. In hindsight I was never truly curious until I lost religion for two reasons: I already knew the real answer to every unanswerable question (that God knows the answer even if I don't) and the importance of this life paled in comparison to the one I anticipated after death. It was always a wonder to me that the best students in my philosophy classes were usually the ones who didn't really believe in God, but I couldn't even ask the obvious question about that: Why?

There is absolutely no way to honestly evaluate the ideas of philosophers or the world around us if we wholeheartedly embrace a belief system like Christianity. Such beliefs leave no room for weighty questions; not only are these questions discouraged, but most believers lose the desire even to ask them, having replaced a thirst for knowledge with the peace that passes understanding.

As I prepare to go to grad school, I continually worry that I won't have anything to write. How do people come up with ideas for papers? After reading something, how do you know what questions to ask? And I do still often read without having any ideas about what I'm reading, which I realize probably isn't the best way to go about things. If anyone has any suggestions about how to become a better critical reader, I'd appreciate them.

Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors made several critics' "Worst of 2006" lists. It really wasn't all that bad, but since it's actually a memoir, and one that starts out telling us that that we'll only believe the story is true because no one could possibly make it up - which is true - it came across as silly and melodramatic, often in parts that were supposed to be important and poignant. I should have just read the book, which everyone says is pretty entertaining.

I just had to pull out one line that for no apparent reason struck me as hilarious. Dr. Finch, played by a bearded, glasses-wearing Brian Cox, opens the door to his masturbatorium (what it sounds like) to find his daughter (played by Gwenyth Paltrow) lying on his chaise, covered by a blanket. When Dr. Finch shows his disapproval, she defends herself, saying she was just taking a nap. Dr. Finch, incredulous, says loudly, "Naps? This is no place for naps!"

This is not a recommendation of this movie, but a possible recommendation for the book, which I haven't read.

Little Children

Note: Spoiler below

Before I saw it, Little Children seemed like the kind of movie where I'm supposed to be impressed by the sophistication of beautiful, suburbanite postcollegiates with too much time on their hands, having affairs and feeling very put upon by the world. But the characters quickly started looking like people I might know. People whose lives were outwardly mundane had personal dramas so intense I thought through the whole movie that someone would die a horrible death in the end, probably a child. Having seen it, I wish someone would have told me that's not the case; it would have made what did happen carry its own weight instead of a false sense of impending doom.

I wage a debate now and then with thecrazydreamer about free will versus determinism. I wholeheartedly believe in both, while he tends to feel that determinism is not only wrong but a harmful way to look at things. Little Children is full of people who believe they have come to this point in their lives unwillingly, that they have been unwitting participants in the sabotage of their own identities: a pedophile blames his mother; Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson) blame their spouses and children.

My basic belief is that we cannot do other than what we do; our lives could never have been different. But only from an omniscient point of view. Someone who knew everything that went into every decision and action could accurately predict what would happen next; since it isn't possible for us to know what will happen, to our minds we act with complete free will. I can do anything physically possible in the next moments, even if it runs entirely contradictory to my character, because free will exists in my lack of knowledge about the past and future.

Acknowledging that I am who I have become through my own decisions is empowering. It can turn a life that seems suffocating into a life of newly realized purpose. Little Children is a clear call to personal responsibility: either realize your complicity in who you have become and feel the full weight and importance of human existence, or fail to admit or realize you're guilty for your own actions and live impotently, lacking that existential knowledge and feeling of importance.

Name That Blog

I've never liked my screen name. I made it in high school in a rush to be able to use AOL Instant Messenger, scrambling to find something that I could make into a name. The Neverending Story seemed a good place to find such a thing, and while that part isn't embarrassing (although some people probably think it should be), what it says to everyone else definitely is. I'm not interested in my dreams or anyone else's, I don't believe in dream interpretation as anything meaningful, and I'm not a hope-for-rainbows-and-unicorns sort of gal, which is what I imagine those who see the name imagine.

Naming things is too hard, which is the main reason I'll never have a baby. That and because they poop and I have to clean it up.

Old School

I picked up Old School around a year ago and put it down about fifty pages in. Books about boys in school always seemed to draw too heavily on Salinger, but it was helpful to start reading Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim to see that Salinger himself drew from a larger tradition of "university" novels, and to remember (duh) that no one ever writes anything truly original. In the autobiographical novel Old School Tobias Wolff explores this concept of of influence through the life of a boy on scholarship at a prestigious boarding school.

As the narrator shares the moments he feels shaped him into a writer, he reveals the dangers inherent in telling stories as they suggest themselves in life and writing. When writing a novel, I hear it's helpful to do character sketches that include a lot of backstory you won't put into the book. The more you know your characters, the easier it is to know what they will do and say. But applying the same idea to the people around us can be detrimental to our relationships. I've written recently about how reading widens our circles of acquaintance and helps us better understand those around us, but even we don't know ourselves completely. The stories we invent for those around us are incomplete and may often distort their true character.

If you have a friend with a secret and read a book about a person who shares the same secret, taking the character's thoughts and motivations as your friend's has complications: predicting their behavior can bring disappointment or may simply prevent you from getting to know the "real" person. In Old School, the narrator finds out that he shares a secret with his roommate, Bill: they're both Jewish. At their WASPy institution, that tidbit could mean social ostracism and both boys work hard to conceal it. While divulging their shared heritage to each other could bring the boys together, the narrator chooses not to reveal his background, turning what could have been a close friendship turns into estrangement when the narrator not only keeps quiet about his own story but parasitically takes on what he perceives to be Bill's story. The narrator was raised Catholic and is only Jewish by way of his mother whereas Bill actually goes to synagogue and is Jewish culturally; the narrator adopts an attitude of alienation and ostracism that are not his to adopt. (This is a comment I have seen made in movies and books by other Jewish people. Memorably, it was in a "Seinfeld" episode where a character wants to become Jewish just so he can tell Jewish jokes.)

Taking someone else's story for your own can be just as destructive as mistakenly telling their story. The misuse of story can destroy a relationship, but it can also damage self-knowledge. If instead of examining your motivations, actions and decisions through the lense of your beliefs and philosophy you take too literally the paths of characters in your life or in books, you risk stunting personal growth.

Ultimately, I think this is more of an adolescent problem, and this plays out in the book as well (to a certain extent; the narrator's sense of self is still questionable in the end). For lack of experience, teenagers have to have something to model their behavior on, and from my memory I know that I patterned heated conversations on TV shows and emulated the feelings of those around me when dealing with my parents. Until I turned inward to assess myself and my desires I took for granted that every person patterns her behavior on others. I think it's an important stage in development to pass from seeing the protagonists of every book as yourself to seeing them as beings all their own.

Music

I've had trouble with music lately. Of the hundreds of songs I love, not one has seemed worth listening to for the last year or so, which has been really difficult. I've been listening to audio books instead, which has sort of filled the gap. I've gone through times like this before, where I just won't listen to anything at all for a long time.

But now it's coming back.

The song that's doing it is so sad, but such is my penchant. "Between the Bars," by Elliott Smith. Even if I don't share the hopelessness of the song, its clarity makes it easy to connect with. Lyrics usually look pretty cheesy when written out, so I'll spare you, but if you don't know this song, you should listen to it several times in a row (it's only a couple minutes long) and pay attention to the words. I often have a problem with "emotional" music because it's usually not honest, but it's obvious to me that Elliott Smith meant the things he sang.