Category Archives: Religion

A little Friday irreverence – Mr. Deity

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You won’t often find me linking to internet video because I don’t watch much of it. But if it were all this funny—luckily it’s not—I’d get no work done at all.

This is some of the absolutely funniest stuff I’ve ever seen in my life. “Swear by mr.deity.”

To my friends who don’t appreciate religious humor, well, don’t watch it.

mr.deity

I think Episode 7 (Mr. Deity & the Tour de Hell) may be my favorite, although they all have moments of brilliance. All I’m saying is adulterers deserve the Hokey Pokey.

There’s even a free podcast available via the iTunes store or a RSS feed available.

Check it out. Absolutely brilliant!

Originally found at sivacracy.net

Movies, movies, movies

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I have been watching a couple movies during this break. Maybe I could be doing more productive things, but my mind also needs a break, time to do some leisurely processing in the background. So movies it is.

I have mentioned some of them already, but would like to flesh them out with wsome mini-reviews.

Friday, I watched Steamboy. It was OK, but ambivalent on “science” in the end. [Should rightly be applied science and, thus, technology, though. The movie referred to it as "science."] Set mostly in England, and particularly London during the Great Exhibition of 1851—Crystal Palace and all—steam was king and “science” was ascendant. Science was portrayed as the means of helping humanity or as a highly dangerous way to make more powerful and efficient weapons of war to be sold to the highest bidders. The latter way was winning. Motives in the movie were rarely this simplistic, but this simplistic dichotomy was nonetheless explicitly set up for the”purpose” of science. It was an entertaining movie, well done in many ways; I just feel cheated by its vague and simplistic stand on one of the supreme (and complex) moral issues of all of human history.

Sunday, I watched The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. This was a good, but odd movie. I’m not sure what I felt about this movie; may have to watch it again some day. It is very complex morally. In the end, it is hard to embrace any of the characters. In this sense, it is a vastly human movie. I do not necessarily require “clean and tidy” movies, but this one seemed to be pushing at the edges of “clean and tidy” for me. But then life is rarely clean and tidy, either.

Kingdom of Heaven was watched over Sunday and Monday. While a visually lush movie (Ridley Scott), this just did not resonate much with me. There is a fair amount of character development, and almost everyone learns some hard lessons, but they do little for the characters or the film, in the end. I did find the premise interesting, and it’s a timely topic. I just wanted more. Maybe it was supposed to be representative of the time and not judge that time morally, but we need nuanced discussion and views in these matters today and not simply lush, big budget, films that have no real statement to make. Yes, it seems I am expecting too much of mass entertainment.

Monday I watched Adaptation. I really don’t know what to say about this one. Not really very good, nor recommended.

I watched Paradise Now on Tuesday. My comments are at the LibraryTavern post that caused me to put it on my list, assuming Liz approves my comment. Recommended, but (for me) lacking.

Word Wars (Scrabble) is a pretty good documentary, but knowing words just as objects and combinations of specific numbers of letters on lists is a seriously bad “word issue” to have, IMHO. I’ve enjoyed some Scrabble in my day, but that is a wrong reason (and way) to know words. It seems to me that that would be (is) a good use of computing technology; we humans ought to know words in the sense that computers cannot. The people in this movie are all characters, full of real quirks, predilections, and motives. I watched this Wednesday.

After Word Wars, I watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had already seen this but wanted some mindless entertainment for one of my movie slots where I wasn’t prepared to really concentrate. Not really a good movie at all, but it has its moments. Really, read the books, or any other format in which you prefer some version of the story.

Yesterday, I watched Junebug, Sirens, and Napoleon Dynamite. I feel that all of these were oversold to me, but in vastly different ways. They weren’t bad movies, and for what I paid were worth it, but … I got nothing else either.

Still to watch:

Maria Full of Grace. I need to watch this today so I can return it before 9 PM.

Spellbound (1999 National Spelling Bee). More folks with word issues. I have until tomorrow for this one.

Religion vs. Spirituality

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The Solitary Monk
You are influenced 84% of the time by Spiritual callings and 46% of the time by Religous beliefs!
You have a firm understanding of the beliefs and workings of the universe. You also agree with some religous practices and traditions. You are often upset by the Occasional and tend to dislike the Religous Leader.
My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 99% on Spiritual
free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 99% on Religous

Link: The Spiritual vs. Religous Test written by leoofthewest on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Found at The Itinerant Librarian.

Reasonably accurate I guess, but based on just a few questions, some of which had no good answer for me. I assume I answered one question slightly different than Angel, since our scores are so close. But, that I expected.

Teach your children…

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[Title courtesy of CSNY]

I had some wonderful discussions with my daughter today.  Issues she is having with her mother came up and, thus, we got into parenting.  Seems Mary (the ex) is sorry about some of the things we did or did not do as parents. 

With Sara graduating from college soon and entering "the real world" (her term, not mine.  I used to use it, but no more.) we talked a bit about her losing the support of her friends; the people she has relied on the most over the last 4 years.  She brought up how she is a bit scared of losing this support group, but that one thing she has learned is that she is good at quickly making friends, so she can deal with it.

I mentioned that the frequent moving was one of my parental concerns over the years, but that I had always consoled myself (and tried to console Mary) that it made the kids good at quickly making friends, and learning that often in life the "good ones" do move on. 

See, Mary grew up in the same house until she graduated from high school and left to become "surrogate" mom to her eldest brother’s 3 kids at the ripe age of 18.  I moved a few times as a kid, but the main formative years were spent in one location.  Either way, we both grew up in safe, secure neighborhoods surrounded by people who would look out for us in one manner or another.  We were able to roam reasonably freely and widely, and got the lay of the land for miles around.  It was a very stable and steady influence.  My kids did not have that in any sense.  Mary and I often worried about the effects of constant moving on them, considering that our childhood and adolescence were vastly different.

This discussion with my "baby" girl really heartened me.  She is happy with what she learned from the frequent moving.  She does not regret that she did not have a (geographically) steady life.  She had plenty of close friends who did, and they often discuss such things.  She figures why regret what she didn’t have since she can’t even begin to imagine what that would have been like. 

Both of the kids learned to make friends quickly and, often, deeply.  They have learned to value those friendships no matter how long they may have together (geographically).  Another thing they both, thankfully, learned was to be good judges of character.  Making deep friendships quickly with the wrong sorts, which was an equally plausible outcome, would not have been a good.  But we all got lucky on that one, I guess.

Sara and I discussed a few other things about what Mary and I did "right" and "wrong" in our child-rearing.  The main thing was that Sara is generally happy with what we managed to do despite ourselves (my words, not hers).  Have I ever mentioned how much I love this kid, and how very, very proud I am of her?

One thing that came up, due to one of Mary’s regret, is her (Sara’s) religious upbringing or, more accurately, lack thereof.  Mary was raised Catholic, but wasn’t really practicing when I met her.  I was raised Southern Baptist and have been agnostic since long before I met Mary.  So we just kind of avoided any specific religious "training" of our children.  We figured they could choose when they were ready.  We were happy to let them go to church with friends, and so on. 

Sara’s regret is definitely not that we didn’t indoctrinate her into some belief, but that we didn’t give her a broader cultural understanding of various religions.  Her most critical "complaint" is that she has no cultural grounding in the literature of the Bible.  She does not get cultural Biblical references.  Her other "complaint" was that being at a school with many, and having many friends who are, Jews she knew nothing about Judaism.

Now, I agreed with her that on this count we "failed" her.  I couldn’t have fully done so back then.  But, and Sara does realize this, we were in no good position to provide that sort of education.  What the heck did white, middle class, Midwestern  kids who were born around 1960 know about Judaism?  Other than over 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, we had no cultural or societal references.  I don’t know about Mary, but if I knew any Jewish folks I did not know it.  I certainly did not know any practicing Jews.  Nor did I see them in my neighborhood or schools.

As for the Bible and cultural references, well, I was not in the right place mentally, nor was I properly educated at the time, to realize the vast amount of Biblical cultural references, nor to respect the Bible for the great literature that it is.  Heck, as recently as my divorce (1999) I still did not.  But I quickly "got religion" as they say.  I got a Bible or 2 in the divorce and immediately donated them to the library. Or maybe I threw them away.  I honestly don’t remember. 

But after a few years at an institution of higher learning and embarking on a quality liberal arts education I came to realize the value of the Bible as a reference source and as the great literature and guide to living that it is.  I also learned some honest history of its coming to be, which further cemented its value on those counts into my mind while simultaneously cementing the belief that it cannot be the word of God.  I quickly rectified the lapse in my collection and bought a good (used) KJV Bible complete with concordance.   And it gets used on occasion.  I would also, someday, like to re-read much of it as the great literature that it is. 

[On a side note, related to my comments on surveys from Tues night, I recently saw a survey from some Christian organization that was basing claims on how overwhelmingly Christian the US is based on the number of Bibles owned.  What a completely stupid claim!  Anyone who tried to imply anything based on my owning a Bible, other than that I own a Bible, is a complete moron.  The fact that I do reflects absolutely nothing about my religion, my religiosity, my spirituality, or anything else, other than I own one.  It would be like claiming that anyone who owns Marx is a communist, or that anyone who owns Mein Kampf is a nazi.  Simply ridiculous!  Oh, yeah.  Idiots do make those claims though.  <sigh>  An interesting thought, though, is that it is often the same sort of people making those claims who want to make claims based on my owning a Bible.  Hmmm!]

Anyway, we were not prepared in many ways to give our children the broad cultural education in religion that they deserved.  Now, Sara has rectified some of that on her own.  She took a comparative religion class in college, and she took at least one class in Japanese religions, or maybe just Shintoism.  But I do feel the pain of failure in her lack of cultural references to the Bible.  She does realize that she does have some control in that she could, and should, invest the time to read it on her own.

So, all in all, I left with my heart singing after talking with my beloved daughter today.  We mostly did OK, even better than OK.  She is an incredible young adult and I could not be more proud of her.  By the way, for many, many years I gave all child-rearing credit to Mary.  She was, thankfully, a stay-at-home mom and she did an incredible job!  I still give her much credit, but I now [and my children make sure of it] take some of the credit.

Sara is confident.  But not in some stupid "false confidence" [see my comments here] that is claimed for the rest of her generation.  Yes, she and her older brother were much more constricted than their mother and I were.  Yes, they had bike helmets….  But they were both challenged.  They both were in gifted programs.  They took AP classes and tests.  They were challenged.  They DID NOT get gold stars because ALL the kids did.  They were taught to challenge themselves, and they learned that failure, sometimes deep and painful and possibly with serious consequences, happens to us all when we chase our dreams, or even just the object of our immediate attention. 

Neither she, nor her brother, are some stupid list of what their generation supposedly is.  In some ways, yes.  In many ways, not at all.  And some of those yeses, well, you need to know their history because it matters.  All that crap about growing up completely wired, playing games, blah blah.  Yes, they both play video games, now.  But neither one of them started playing these games until late in high school.  And so on.

Is there any question as to why I get so offended by all of the pop sociology that passes for gen-gens?  [Thanks again, Walt!  By the way, did you take it out of your post?  I wanted to link for attributional purposes but I couldn't find it, even with Ctrl-F.]  ["Gen-gens, generational generalizations.  Walt Crawford.]

And lest anyone wonder, I so very deeply love, and am proud to the depths of my soul of, my son.  But for vastly different reasons.  And while my daughter and I may be at the top of our relationship "game," and my son and I may be near the bottom (but recovering) of ours, that has absolutely no effect on how much I love, or am proud of, him.  I only wish he’d believe that.  Or maybe I should say feel it.  I know all about the disconnect between knowing, believing and feeling [See very end of post.].  They all have their places, but often in personal relationships the feeling is vastly more important.  Hopefully all three are present simultaneously, but if I had to choose one, sign me up for the emotion.

Who could have guessed that the hour and a half spent with my daughter could have mattered so much.  For once that stupid phrase, "quality time", also part of her and her brother’s generations, actually meant something.  Quality time indeed!  And now I’m sitting here in a bar trying not to cry, but not really caring if I do.  Sometimes my heart simply breaks from the sheer amount of love I have for (adult) children.

Original sin causes dinosaurs to become carnivores

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Hehehe.  Now I’m really cracking up!  I’m about to write a post about how "The Fall of Man" led to dinosaurs becoming carnivores but first I check my stats and what do I find?  Someone found a post of mine with a misspelling of ‘apple’ so I go to fix it and what is it called?  Eating apples? 

Mmm…apples…Fall of Man.  My life doesn’t get any tastier or funnier than some of the strange synchronicities that crop up.

As a budding cataloger I follow AUTOCAT.  It is frequently enlightening, often educational, sometimes boring, and more often than you might think it is downright entertaining.

Lately there has been a thread about how to classify the book, Dinosaurs by Design by Duane T. Gish, et al. [Or for those who prefer the Amazon version so they can see the cover and read the crazy reviews.]  Actually, I’m not really sure why it’s coming up now as it was published in 1992.  Maybe it’s been reissued with all the new ‘interest’ in intelligent design?

Anyway….  The thread has been all of the above, except boring.  But today it got downright hysterical.  And I am not picking on what the poster said here, but on the book’s ideas.  A lot of comments got tossed around although most people had never seen the book, but today we finally got a description of the content:

The book explained such things as:  1) How the biblical "Fall of Man" (i.e., the first sin that was committed in the Garden of Eden) caused most dinosaurs to become carnivorous (according to this book, all dinosaurs were herbivorous prior to the Fall).

This shit even made my Mom laugh on her birthday!  Happy Birthday Mom!  There is far more by the way, but seeing as I shouldn’t cite without permission I’ll leave it at that.  Suffice it to say—fire-breathing dragons, dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and man’s sin caused those poor innocent herbivorous dinosaurs to become nasty evil meat-eaters—I have got to get my hands on this book.  Matter-of-fact, I’m predicting the circulation of this little gem is going to go way up as catalogers all over the nation have to take a look at it now.  I hear it has great pictures too!

OK, if you are religious then I apologize if I offend you hereafter.  But, personally, I find the concepts of "The Fall of Man" and of "Original Sin" to be utterly absurd.  And yes, I’ve read just enough Kierkegaard to know that the absurd bit might ought to be enough to make me sit up and take notice.  But, nah.

And yes, I was born and bred a dutiful little Christian and have even been born again, as they say.  But that was a long time ago and I’m still no younger.  But you see, since then I’ve seen some of the world, done a little reading and learning on my own, learned some of the history of the church and of the Bible, learned a little history period.  And I am sorry, but I see little of the Christian God in the Old Testament and certainly not in that ridiculous concept of orginal sin.  In fact, I see little of the Christian God anywhere in the world, but that could simply be humankind’s fault and not God’s.  But no matter, it still doesn’t square.  In so many ways it doesn’t square.

Now I have no problems with Christians.  Some of my best friends and family are Christians.  But I have a massive problem with most people who go about their life like everything’s fine in the world and know that they are saved because their aesthetic appreciation of Christianity tells them they are fine.  In the meantime they support some of the most evil people doing some of the most evil things ever done in the name of God and capitalism. And that, my friends, is a pretty big list to top.

Me.  I’ll just keep eating apples.  Pray for my soul if you like.  But I’d prefer it if we all actually act as if our souls mattered.  All souls.

i did not design this game
i did not name the stakes
i just happen to like apples
and i am not afraid of snakes

Ani DiFranco.  "ADAM AND EVE."  DILATE.

Hehehe.  Fall of Man causes dinosaurs to become evil meat-eaters.  Can it get any funnier?

One of two acceptable answers

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You fit in with:
HumanismYour ideals mostly resemble that of a Humanist. Although you do not have a lot of faith, you are devoted to making this world better, in the short time that you have to live. Humanists do not generally believe in an afterlife, and therefore, are committed to making the world a better place for themselves and future generations.

20% scientific.
40% reason-oriented.
Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Found via Angel

What other answer could there be when attending a library history conference on the effects of war, revolution and social change on libraries?

Confessor or confessor?

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It looks like I struck out on a ‘definitive’ (pun intended) explication of ‘confessor.’

It seems that ‘confessor’ is used for both the one confessing, as in the normal use of the -or in English, and as the one, usually a priest, to whom confession is made.  I discovered this Sunday evening when I was replying to a comment by Angel at my "Librarianship as Penance?" post.  What, I asked, is up with that?

My initial foray for an answer is at my post, "Dictionary Day, now this is a holiday that I can get behind."  Feel free to take a look, I’ll wait.  I initially looked in the OED online to verify that it was used in both ways.  I looked at etymologies, first uses (descriptive), and spellings.  Unless I’m missing something in some Latin tense that isn’t fully explained, I don’t see why it is used both ways.

So Wednesday I hit the main reference room, the LIS Library, the Modern Languages Library, and then the History and Philosophy (Religion) Library.

But first, here is what I found in the main reference room.  I began with verifying what I found in the online OED with the print version.  I decided to check ‘confessee’ and discovered the following:

confessee  rare.  [f. CONFESS v. + -EE]
a. One who is confessed (by a priest).    b. One to whom confession is made.  (Ambiguous and to be avoided.)
[OK, do they mean these uses are ambiguous, or their definition is, or both?]

1601 F. GODWIN Bps. Eng. 377 Either the Confessor, or the Confessee, or the reporter, lied I doubt not. 1839 J. ROGERS Antipopopr. xiv. §1. 305 Confessor and confitent, or rather confessee and confesser commonly in private.

confesser  [f. CONFESS v. + -ER]  One who confesses or makes confession.

1836-46 in SMART Walker’s Dict. 1839 [see prec.].
[Again, kind of ambiguous.]

I then looked in:

Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed.  Rev. Walter W. Skeat.   Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1898

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.  C.T. Onions, ed.  Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1966

Origins: a Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed.  Eric Partridge  New York : Macmillan, 1966

confess, confession, confessional (adj., n), confessor.
‘To confess‘ derives, via OF-F, from LL confessāre, from L confess-, s of confessus, pp of confitēri, to confess,…

confessor, adopted by OF (whence the F confesseur), passes into E.

OF Old French / F French / LL Late Latin (c A.D. 180-600) / L Latin / s stem / pp past participle

Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English  Laurence Urdang, ed.  Detroit, MI : Gale Research Company, 1982

1273 -or  A noun-forming word-final element, derived through Middle English -or, -our and Old French -eor, -eur from the Latin agentive suffix -or, -ator, used to denote ‘a person or thing that performs and action’ specified by the combining root: councillor, sailor, elevator.  Related forms: -ors (plural).

1274  -or  A noun-forming word-final element, derived through Middle English -or, -our and Old French -eor, -eur from the Latin abstract-noun-forming suffix -or, used in combinations denoting ‘an action, state, condition, result, quality, or characteristic’ specified by the combining root: labor, candor, misdemeanor.  Also, -our (British). Related forms: -ors (plural). [I don't think this applies here, but wanted to be inclusive.]

I also looked in several other "standard" unabridged dictionaries.  None gave me any insight.  So I headed off to the LIS Library to ask my friends their recommendations on which "experts" to go bug.  I went on my merry way to the English Library but decided to bypass it based on staffing and headed to the Modern Languages Library.  There I talked with a nice gentleman librarian with some sort of British Empire accent.  We decided that I had tried all of the standard routes and that it is probably some combination of my two theses (I’m getting there!) or in other words, an accident of language.  He suggested I go talk to the religious folks over in History and Philosophy so off I trundled.  Luckily, all of these libraries are in the Main Library Building.  A staffer there helped me but did much of the same sort of work I had already done, although I’m happy to let someone verify I’m not missing something obvious or even not so obvious.  Again, we decided on some sort of sociological, accident of language answer.

This is not the answer I want.  But seeing as it is human language, there may well be no "definitive" answer.

But before I give you my "answers," if anyone has any other ideas or, better yet, "the answer," please feel free to let me know.  Also, if anyone can think of any other words in English that use the same word form of the -ee and -or family to designate the doer and recipient of an action, please let me know.

I am (currently) left with a sociological/accident of language answer, for which I have no real evidence.  So, yes, I’m guessing.

The earliest sense in English per the OED, is "One who avows his religion in the face of danger, and adheres to it under persecution and torture, but does not suffer martyrdom; spec. one who has been recognized by the church in this character."  The first recorded use of this sense, is c1000.  This is also the first English usage.  King Edward the Confessor fits this sense.

Then, (prior to) a1300 we get the first usage of the more general sense of "One who makes confession or public acknowledgement or avowal of anything" (OED).

And then in 1340 we get this use, "One who hears confessions: a priest who hears confession of sin, prescribes penance, and grants absolution; the private spiritual director of a king or other great personage" and this note, from the OED:  [In med.L. better confessarius; but confessor in this sense is quoted by Du Cange from Walafrid Strabo (ob. 849).]

That note may be the one clue that I (or the others I consulted) am unable to interpret.

So my first idea is that both uses come from different word forms in Latin.  The first use had a few hundred years to make its way from Latin to Late Latin to Old French and Middle English and get vernacularized from the more narrow technical meaning to the more general meaning.  Then the Church decided to use another but related Latin word form, to which they were theoretically much closer as Latin scholars, which ended up as "the same word," or word form, in English and French.  Accident of history.

My second idea is that the Church decided 300+ years later to use the same technical word to also refer to the one confessed to.  The Church was still fairly strong in the 1300s and could well have imposed a 2nd use of the word on the faithful.  Sociological explanation.

And that, my friends, is the best I’ve been able to come up with for now.

Librarianship as Penance?

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I have a confession to make.

I was a bad person earlier in life.

My first full-time job was on a nuclear missile site in West Germany at the height of the Cold War (1978-1981).  I then spent over 20 years in the Army.  I voted straight ticket Republican for years in my own self-interest.  I took the easy road and rarely questioned my larger role and responsibilties to the world-at-large.  This could be teased apart in more detail, but it only becomes more damning to do so.  And what is really at issue is that I do it for myself, and not publicly.

The other night after our oncampus day for my distance ed class, the instructors and about half of the class went out for dinner.  It was quite an enjoyable time.  At some point in a conversation with another student, one who is becoming a librarian to leave her long-term employment in a job of personally (to her) questionable merit, I mentioned that one of my hopes in becoming a librarian was that I might do some good to offset the harm that I had done through earlier choices.

Another student across the table said, "Wow! I never thought of librarianship as penance before!"

Well, neither had I, nor do I, nor my other conversational partner.  What she, and I, think is that we are making a moral choice now, hopefully to offset previous choices.  [All future comments are only in reference to my thoughts, not my fellow student's.]

Is this penance?  I don’t think so, but let’s take a look.

penance n. 1 an act of self-punishment as reparation for guilt. 2 a (esp. in the RC and Orthodox Church) a sacrament including confesson of and absolution for a sin. b a penalty imposed esp. by a priest, or undertaken voluntarily, for a sin. (The Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Am I engaged in self-punishment?  Certainly not.  Do I believe librarianship is a punishment?  Definitely not.  Do I believe that I sinned?  No, not in a religious sense.  There are no priests involved either.  And most importantly, whatever good I may end up doing as a librarian can in no way be absolution for my previous way of engaging, or not engaging, with the world.

I was raised as a Southern Baptist, so I have no well-defined sense of penance and absolution anyway.  What I have is only a sort of anthropological acquaintance with the concepts.

I also most certainly do not believe that being a librarian is in any way inherently morally good or even better than what I did before.  One can be a librarian and still not engage with the world, or even be heinously evil, especially in someone else’s eyes.

What I meant was that what I want to do, and be, as a librarian will equate to a much more positively moral choice, for me, than my choices earlier in life.  The same goes for my other dinner partner, I believe.  It is not being a librarian that will make a difference in our lives or in the world, but who we will be, and what we will do, as a librarian that will make the difference.

While some jobs may damn your soul, I do not believe that any job or profession will save your soul—neither in the here-and-now nor in the afterlife.

I cannot change my previous impact on the world.  I can only try to somewhat make up for it.  Atone maybe, in the sense of "make amends for."  And, of course, change my behavior now and in the future.

For those who may have decided to judge me negatively based on the context I set at the beginning, please be aware that it is highly unlikely that you might judge me more harshly than I myself have and do.  But to help you set any perceived moral indignation aside, please be aware that our government and the U.S. Army own me for another 18+ years.

That is a thought that daily terrifies me!  This fact should be very evident from many of my prior posts when coupled with the knowledge that I am an owned person.  E.g., see:

A Soldier Returns From Iraq  30 Jan 05
The criminals we call our leaders  30 Jan 05
I know I will take some flak for this one…  1 Feb 05  "Sometimes, unfortunately, other things, such as this, speak to me.  I used to try and ignore them.  I no longer can."
What does "Support the Troops" mean? 25 Mar 05
Melissa says "I Wish This Fit On A Car Bumper."  26 Mar 05
The story that I could not tell for Storytelling  26 Mar 05
The world is falling apart and America leads the charge…  27 May o5
‘Army of One’ to even more lies  5 Jun 05
No Child Left Behind…by the Military  3 Jul 05
Happy Independence Day  3 Jul 05
Bless you Dorothea and everyone else who has someone they care about deployed  5 Jul 05
My country ’tis of thee  5 Jul 05
True Patriots Act  13 Jul 05
Recruiting Command asks for my help  18 Jul 05
Returning troops and mental health  31 Jul 05
An Open Letter to the American Legion  1 Sep 05

That is most, but certainly not all, of my posts about the military.  The fact that I could be forced to again work for the people who use and abuse those trying to honorably serve their country is a terrifying thought to me.  Maybe I deserve it for my prior behavior.  But then I do not believe in "Just World Theory," nor many other similar sorts of theories, religious or secular.

Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA have conducted surveys to examine the characteristics of people with strong beliefs in a just world. They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward  underprivileged groups. To a lesser but still significant degree, the believers in a just world tend to "feel less of a need to engage in activities to change society or to alleviate plight of social victims."

Ironically, then, the belief in a just world may take the place of a genuine commitment to justice. For some people, it is simply easier to assume that forces beyond their control mete out justice. When that occurs, the result may be the abdication of personal responsibility, acquiescence in the face of suffering and misfortune, and indifference towards injustice. Taken to the extreme, indifference can result in the institutionalization of injustice. Still, the need to believe that the world is just can also be a positive force. The altruism of volunteers and of heroes who risk their lives to help strangers in need is a result of people trying to restore justice to insure that the world remains just.

I do not believe that the world is just.  Not by any stretch!  What I do believe is that the world ought to be just, the human/social parts of the world anyway.  Do I believe that it is possible to achieve?  No, not really.  Do I believe that we ought to try to the best of our abilities as humans?  Most certainly.

And that is where the librarianship comes in for me.  It is a means to a possible end.  It is not a given in that it alone will do nothing towards me reaching my goal.  I must remain present and committed to my goal of being a better human being and working towards a world that is more just.  For me, being a librarian will give me a better chance at staying the course towards that goal than many other occupational choices I might make.

Librarianship as penance? Not likely.

You got to smile and turn the other cheek

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Well, it seems it’s "Save the Heathen College Kids Day" again here at UIUC.  As I walked in this morning I was assaulted about every 10 feet by a gaggle of pasty, old, white men trying to hand me a mini-NKJV New Testament.

Makes. Me. Want. To. Scream!  I worked long and hard to become the proud heathen that I am.  Do not try to screw that up for me, OK?

"You’ve got smile and turn the other check. So today you might be dying…." is playing in the headphones.  Bless you Traffic.

If you bastards want to be helpful and "save" some folks, put the Bibles away, hop on a bus or train and go help some people who need it right now.  You know what, forget that.  Those folks have already suffered enough at the hands of people like you.  Save all the money from those damn ugly ass green Bibles that are just going to end up in the trash and give it to the Red Cross or some agency that will do some real good right now.

"Someone is laughing, while someone is crying…."

Update 9 Sep 05:

Bless my wonderful and beautiful friends!  And thank you!  I feel pleasantly chastised now.  I don’t know if that is even possible, but it must be, because I do.

To the Gideons, I offer my sincere apologies.  This was never about you really, but more about my (highly confused) feelings lately.

I do think some constructive criticism was trying to be contained in the gist of this post.  It just got lost in the reaction.  I do think there are more constructive ways to be helpful and do the Lord’s work in America right now though.  I do stand by that.

And just to clarify, I was pleasant to everyone who tried to hand me a New Testament.  I smiled, said "No Thank You," and kept on my way.  Because (a) that is how I was raised and, (b) that is the kind of person I want to be and, (c) somewhere down inside I knew it wasn’t them who were really causing me to want to scream.

So thank you again my dear and wonderfully wise women friends!  Without your feedback this would not have been quite the learning moment that it was.  And to the Gideons, I offer my heartfelt apologies.

It must be all the childhood drugs

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…that is, those the doctors fed my mother before I was born so that I had to be placed in an incubator for several days (I was born on time, just a bit too high for a newborn).  Or maybe it was the fact that they couldn’t get me to church until the eighth day—cause something has made much of what I see in this country truly incomprehensible to me.

There are so many examples lately, or even over the years, but I really can’t fathom how the people of this country put up with crap like the Karl Rove fiasco.  Why does he still have a job?  It simply doesn’t matter if he technically committed a crime or not. 

Or stuff like this:

one god, two standards at Night Light.  From the WaPO yesterday:

The state suspended the licenses of two church-affiliated day care
centers where children allegedly were sexually molested, forced to eat
worms and pick each other’s noses during employee-led games of "Truth
or Dare."

The former director of the day care centers, Joshua Palin, 25, has been charged with molesting 10 children, some of them during what investigators said were twisted games of Truth or Dare. He is the son of the affiliated church’s pastor.

Yes, non-religious people commit these sorts of heinous crimes too.  But, and this is a mighty big but, the Christian right doesn’t emit a peep when it is one of their own.  Why is that?

Sure is amazing the level of crime that a good, upstanding, Christian white boy (or girl) can get away with in this country.