A Fusillade at the Christian Right

I suppose I would say first that I don’t think there should be a Christian Right. I think religion is a terrible thing to mix with politics – neither side comes out of this clean. Once a candidate becomes a Christian candidate, everything done by him or under him is linked to Christianity. You know what Christians seem like to the rest of the world right now? Opinionated, intrusive, war-like people who know that everybody else is wrong. Strangely, everything that comes out of America is also associated with Christianity, so along with these traits, people (in the Middle East, particularly) link Christianity with pornography, alcohol, and sacrilege of all types. Advertising ourselves as a Christian nation pulls everything within our nation under the Christian banner, and I find that appalling.

Nor do the politicians come out of this easily, necessarily. If a candidate admits his faith, he has to battle with people who want to put him in the same camp as Westboro Baptist Church (known and vilified for its outspoken stance that “God hates fags”), or as the people who think evolution should be banned from schools. Frankly, I don’t care if the politicians make it out easily or not, but I would like it if these sections of Christianity could stay out of the press for a whole week.

I find it mortifying that the same Christian Right who purports to stand for freedom, democracy, and the “American way” wishes to stifle all opposing voices so that it can form a homogeneous voting bloc with which all must assimilate. The group that wants personal freedom to own guns wants to eliminate the freedom to disagree. [It just occurred to me that those two desires are particularly creepy when put together – who would disagree with the barrel of a shotgun?] But seriously – how can you support freedom of speech in one way (I think of the Right’s disdain for “political correctness”) and at the same time wish to forbid speech acts like flag burning, or, yes, even disagreeing with the president? How can you claim free speech as the basis for allowing the Ten Commandments while trying to ban talk of evolution?

The Christian body is diverse – that’s why it’s a body, and not a colony of single-celled organisms in a Petri dish. The Christian Right does not allow for this in the slightest: the topics of interest are established (abortion, public prayer, taxes – wait, what do taxes have to do with Christianity?), and the others discarded. If you have an interest in using government aid to help house and educate the poor, or to develop the ailing arts, you have no place in the Christian Right, and by their logic, no place in Christianity. Because a true Christian would value lower taxes. (Here’s a sobering verse: Proverbs 22:16 – “He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth and he who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty.”).

The conflation of faith with politics, the idea that a belief in one area equates certain beliefs in the other, is as dangerous as it is ubiquitous. Even the president of my own educational institution does it. And believe me – that makes me angry. What follows is an excerpt from the CCU Profile section, “Greetings From the President”:

"Colorado Christian University is very different from the typical American university. We hold tightly to traditional values and high academic standards. We strive to impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, and other such causes that preserve and promote high moral and ethical standards." (italics mine)

Regardless of what I personally believe about these issues, I believe it is a terrible thing that our president (a former congressman, incidentally) felt the need to pin down a list of “Christian” stances, and then, of all things, to use our university to support a political platform. How can the leader of a university – supposedly a marketplace of ideas, a center for debate and critical discussion – declare what the body stands for? This is an abuse of the faith, an abuse of the institution, and a crime against the American political system. I might even extend that accusation to the Christian Right.

My own stances on conservative issues are very mixed. Sometimes I even agree with the Christian Right. But the day I let Dr. Dobson read my Bible for me and then tell me how Jesus wants me to vote is the day that...

A loss of words, a loss of respect for the scientific community

I learned a strange thing today: apparently, genes can be patented. According to an article in the New York Times (contributed, incidentally, by Michael Crichton), about one fifth of all the genes in your body are privately owned by scientists and research institutes. If any other scientists want to do research on these genes, they must pay a royalty to the patent holder. You can’t even donate some of these genes for study without permission.

This inhibits research, it inhibits the development of treatments and accurate genetic testing, and it can raise the cost of treatment prohibitively. And you know why I find this issue particularly galling? Because the companies own pathogens as well, including Hepatitis C. And my mother and I have Hepatitis C.

Just last year, my mother and I finished a forty-eight week treatment study for the disease. We took several pills a day, and every week injected a solution into the skin on our stomachs. Every evening after I’d given myself the shot, I would experience headaches, chills, aching, and sometimes a fever to boot. Other, more constant side-effects included a loss of attention span, loss of energy, some depression, some emotional lability. And in the end, the treatment was unsuccessful, both for my mother and myself – within weeks of stopping treatment, the virus was back to full levels in both of us.

“The owner of the genome for Hepatitis C is paid millions by researchers to study this disease. Not surprisingly, many other researchers choose to study something less expensive,” Crichton writes. Right now, I know of only one available medical treatment for Hep C – the one that didn’t work. Efforts to produce a newer, more promising treatment have been severely hampered and long postponed, and people like me are left just waiting, trying to take care of our livers by other means.

I can think of no more odious way of amassing wealth than from a disease affecting millions of people. There are people who donate most of their income to ending diseases around the world (multi-billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett come to mind), and there are those who ensure that certain diseases remain by charging people to study them.

I’m at a loss. This is absurd.

Of Orchestras and Pathology

My initial response to the comment on my last post is to say, petulantly, that yes, an orchestra is better than an ensemble because there are more people playing. And if "extreme relationality" is the sort of pathology that the term sounds like, I want it. Being involved with a number of people does make one a more complex person.

I don't intend to discount the value of having a select number of particularly close friends, and developing those relationships over time. That's exactly what I'm missing: relationships that could have been more fully developed. But if I were given the choice of having either A: a small group of close friends, or B: a slightly larger group of close friends, with another ring of friends slightly less close, and another ring of friends slightly less close than that, I would not hesitate to choose B. There is a limit to the relationships one can earnestly commit to, but I am interested in being always at that limit, and nudging it back at all times. I enjoy my time to myself, mind you, but that is another matter.

If I were to go back to that music metaphor, I would say that if you have an orchestra, you can pare it down to a select group when necessary, but if you only have a small group, you can't just grow an instant-orchestra. We could even get extravagant with our metaphor here and say we'd like a piano concerto, where one instrument carries the theme, but couldn't do so without all the others.

Who am I when I'm alone? Well, who is alone? Who is not either receiving communication from an absent other, via music, literature, photo, video, or another form of art? Or perhaps they are themselves communicating to an absent other, as I am now. [No, I wouldn't classify these as the most full types of relationships, but they are relationships]. And there is God, the eternal point of reference. Perhaps it is cheap to invoke the divine in debate. Oh well. But I could say that when I am alone, I am volcanic potential; I am churning waters. I may boil and empty myself into nothingness, or I may surge onto another, and be struck by their own overflow in turns.

Lost Selves

I tend to subscribe to a relational, interpersonal theory of identity - the idea that how I relate to you is, in some ways, the definition of who I am. You and your history strike against me and my history, and what arises between the two of us is who I am and who you are, whether spiteful, grateful, quiet, thoughtful, or mischievous, whether friend or son or something else. If I think, in the solitude of my own mind, that I am a wise man, yet I give those around me foolish advice, the fact that I give bad advice supersedes the fact that I think of myself as a wise man - what occurs between two people is more important than what occurs in the mind of one alone.

I'm not satisfied with that summary of it - not even sure to what degree I agree with it. Perhaps I can clarify further: I am not solely my thought life or my group of ideas; I am my unique interaction with unique others. Thus, to some degree, anybody I've ever interacted with knows me; I can't put on a false self because to put on a false self is to adopt that self as part of my own. I suppose, then, that I am ingratiating, that I am also sly and evasive, that I am forthright and honest and dour, yet humorous. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." There is a different me for every different you out there, a me that could develop through time and continued relation, or a me that could be cut short and lost.

I have returned from a semester abroad, during which I lived in a house with some twenty-six others, each enrolled in the program, each, by the end, a true friend of mine. Each, in a very real way, a facet of myself, a person who reflected me back to myself in a way that none other ever has or will. I hope that I was as much for each of them. I am now sharing an apartment with one other, and three friends live down the way. And I don't get out much. So my regular, daily identities have shrunk from twenty-six to four, and I feel the void. I feel like an amputee.

I realize how selfish this sounds - that I would like all my friends to return so that I can be a full, twenty-six sided person again. But I state things in this way to emphasize their significance, to say firmly that they were not ephemeral collections of molecules and bodily systems with whom I cohabited for a few months and then departed from; no, getting to know each of those people, and many others, was like being born, coming into existence - and the separation is like death. Not the death of a separate thing, of a man in the news, but a true, internal, personal death.

How was my time at Oxford? I was born in innumerable ways, and on December 9th, much of me died. Perhaps more accurately, they were put to rest - these selves of mine did not cease to exist, but they ceased to develop, they ceased to bear fruit. They are an indelible part of me. I try to keep up those relationships, I do try, and there are some that I trust will last.

It should also be noted that this feeling applies to all of the stillborn friendships in my past, and that I bring it up now only because of the scale of the event. Even if the event is two months past, and I'm the only one still griping about it.

Whatever sense of loss clings to me, I would never assert that it was greater than what I gained from these people. Please do not think me ungrateful - I would break myself again for a similar experience. But I doubt it would hurt any less the second time around.

Cold Eyes, Closed Hands

Cold Eyes, Closed Hands

What sleep we breathe and love we spend
To feel our voices home again;
These ships that pass in thunder winds
Return to spirits waning thin.

And out from each a finger flies
And darts to where another lies -
Each gapes and hopes to recognize
The touch of one upon their eyes.

But few are they so keen of sense
Can drop their sheathing sorrowments
And grasp a stranger’s soul intent
To make for both a recompense.

Whenver I post anything up here - whether it is a piece of creative work or just a thought process for the day - I'm looking for criticism and insight. If something strikes you as strong or poor, I'd love to hear why. If you think something could have been done better, or if you disagree, tell me. I do love to hear the sound of my own voice, but that's not why I post - I post to hear other people's. After I hear my own. Which is sweet and soothing.