time wasting

I haven't even gotten out of my PJs yet, which is kinda weird since I'm normally out on the bike with T. in the morning. But with A. sick, R. has been taking him to preschool and today they went up to drop T. with B. and R. went to the CSA and Costco. A. is asleep again, so I'm just wasting time online and watching TV and reading a book. The book is good -- I should have it done in a day or so and it'll be fun to review.

The TV is The Dish, and they just mentioned Aniston's Pumas (a movie -- about a 30 something woman, which given that it is in pre-production right now, is a little annoying. Aniston is a few months older than me. What is that, thirty-ten?), Cox's Cougar Town (a television show) and made a joke about Lisa Kudrow's web series _The Horny Ocelot_. While I was attempting to figure out if the first two listed were real (or just fictional, as the third one is -- I hope), I stumbled across stories about a return of V.

Eeeek. Do you think they'll finally explain what happened with Elizabeth, Kyle and the Leader?

_Good Book_, David Plotz (kindle)

David Plotz read the (Hebrew/Jewish) Bible (Tanakh) and blogged about it for Slate. Plotz is married to Hanna Rosin, incidentally, who I have mentioned previously:

http://walkitout.livejournal.com/230359.html

and who is responsible for a really reprehensible piece about breastfeeding recently which I think I refrained from getting into. I'm not _that_ impressed by the capacity of journalists to produce really well thought out arguments in book form, and while I don't _think_ I'd previously read Plotz, his wife has in no way changed my opinion of journalists as a group. (Yes, there are exceptions.)

I do like it when someone decides to pick up the Bible (in whichever form), read it in translation and produce an extensive commentary on what they think of what they read. That's a book review. I like book reviews. I liked it when Ken Smith did it in _Ken's Guide to the Bible_. I liked the chunk of _Nobody's Business if You Do_, where Peter McWilliams explored what the Bible actually says on the subject of consensual crimes. It is not surprising that I found a lot to like in Plotz.

_Good Book_ is a book-by-book summary of the contents of the Hebrew Bible, and he picked reasonable translations: the JPS (cause it's good, and he's Jewish -- these are my suppositions as to why he picked these versions), the NRSV (cause it's good), the NIV (cause that's what all the evangelicals use) and the King James (because how can you not?). He doesn't spend a lot of time on translational issues, but does mention them on occasion (notably, how tough it is to translate chunks of Job, and how different it is from version to version). He displays appropriate outrage at the stories he hadn't ever heard of (or the parts of stories that conveniently get left out): Lot offering up his daughters, his daughters later getting him drunk and raping him, how that origins explanation is extremely insulting to neighbors of Israel at the time, the whole Dinah thing, Esther asking for another day to go kill off the Hamanites, etc.

I liked that Plotz pointed out instances where he had epiphanies connecting common practices in Judaism (blessing his sons) to particular passages in the Bible. I don't know these, because I don't know the daily life and practice of Jews in any real detail. I can appreciate how getting to know the sources added a richness to these practices and that he valued that.

Plotz came to the Bible and agnostic and didn't leave it believing in God. He was appalled by what he found in the Bible, and, judging by the end of the book, he expects to spend the rest of his life wrestling with the difficulties of the stories, morality, theology, etc. he found in the Bible. He was (understandably) dissatisfied by the responses he received from Christians and Jews when he described the difficulty he had with the material, but did appear to adopt the perspective of a woman rabbi he spoke to.

There are some weird flaws in the book. For example, he really hammers on Sarah for kicking out Hagar and Ishmael, but he neither addresses why Sarah did that (because Ishmael was torturing Isaac, and Hagar had picked on Sarah when Hagar had a son and Sarah did not), nor does he address how the Bible depicts Hagar and Ishmael's being exiled as an important step in fulfilling God's promise to make Ishmael the father of twelve princes and a great nation. Maybe the lapse was the result of editing the blog to fit into a book? I don't know, but that pissed me off -- even before I went and found the passages I remembered.

One of the nicest things in the book is that while he mentions the begats (and why they are there), he doesn't act like they're somehow impossible to get through. And best of all, he points out how friggin' sleep inducing a lot of the psalms are -- and how incredibly weird some of them are. I don't agree with many, perhaps most, of the things he decided to like and why he liked them. But I did like the approach he took and, for the most part, I respect how he implemented.

The trip to the Holy Land was worth the pages.

Should you read it? If you haven't ever read something like this, I still think _Ken's Guide to the Bible_ is better. But this is closer to a commentary. It's probably worth your time.

people haven't read Ruth and Esther?

Honestly?

Okay, there is no excuse on the planet for that. There are Bibles everywhere. If you've never read Ruth and Esther (the only two books in the Bible named for women), go get yourself a Bible (I don't much care which) and read them. They are short. They are punchy. They survive rereading very well (and while the morality in each is questionable, not nearly as bad as most urban fantasy). I used to read them during meetings at the Kingdom Hall when I found the speaker too boring to live. My parents apparently concluded that it wasn't good form to beat a child for reading the Bible in church, even if she wasn't following along properly.

Go. Now. And then tell me what you think of them. Seriously! Won't take but a half hour.

_Losing My Religion_, William Lobdell (kindle)

Subtitled: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace

There's a genre of books (and other "testimony") which go something like this: I didn't believe in God or Jesus. I was a Bad Person. I drank too much. I screwed around. My parents tried to raise me right but it didn't take. I mocked believers. Then, a crisis happened, and I started to question everything. I went to the Bible, and the evidence, and I started to realize that that's where everything was made clear and I was Saved by Jesus and you can be too.

Occasionally, someone goes and dismantles an individual instance of this genre, pointing out that the author was pretty damn religious all along, not the skeptic they claimed to be (because they usually make a point of their unbeliever-ness and then the conversion process), etc.

Obviously, with a title like this book, you know that Lobdell, at the end of the book, isn't going to be a Believer any more. But the beginning of the book is very much in line with that genre so beloved by a fairly naive type of Christian, whether Born Again, Evangelical, Fundamentalist or Other. So much so, in fact, that I went and double-checked to make sure I hadn't inadvertently bought the wrong book. But no.

Lobdell starts out going to church with his parents, waiting until he's old enough to quit, which his siblings do before him. He becomes a journalist, gets married, splits up, knocks up another woman, gets divorced, drinks and sleeps around, then settles down to raise The Boy with The Wife, but knows he's a totally fucked up mess and unloads it on a friend who points him at the Mariners megachurch. From there, he gets hooked into one of the Family's offshoots (Thousand Pines) and cleans up his act. The Wife sticks it out with him, they have three more kids, they "graduate" from Mariners' Seeker services to a Presbyterian Church and Lobdell works his way into being the religion reporter for the LA Times and turns that into a meaningful, well-paid position. Initially, it's a ra ra thing, reporting on individuals from a variety of faiths who stand out for their devotion, holiness and great goodness. Over time, however, he starts to talk about ex-Mormons and their bad treatment in Utah, the burgeoning Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal, corruption and evil doings by Benny Hinn and the Crouches at TBN, etc. His wife, born Catholic, sort of would like them both to be Catholic, so as all this is rolling along, he's in the process of converting to Catholicism so they can be _really_ married, instead of being fake married and guilty of adultery. The Boston Globe articles and the work he's doing for the LA Times, however, are really making him feel bad and he doesn't want to be seen to be siding with the bad guys so he temporarily delays his initiation into the Catholic Church, a cusp which becomes his long, slow slide out of Christianity and religion and faith and belief in God and so forth.

It's a well-told tale, covering the contents of many of his columns in conjunction with the development of his own spiritual life and family life and psychological health and well-being. It's annoying that Lobdell's faith in God is so personal, so black and white and so interventionist. No such faith can possibly withstand any detailed encounter with reality, and while Lobdell is no rigorous thinker, he's a little too inquisitive to maintain that kind of faith. Well, he might have been able to compartmentalize it and keep it safe, but writing a religion column week-in and week-out with actual journalistic integrity (I know, I am having trouble believing I wrote that, too, but there's a lot of evidence that Lobdell has journalistic integrity) was really asking for trouble. And then on top of it, his faith was incredibly bookish from start to finish -- that never turns out well.

There are some interesting aspects to the story. First, there's a recognition in the story that he has a god-shaped hole, and after failing to fill it with screwy relationships and alcohol, he tries god. Go him. That supplies enough self-help that, in conjunction with a reasonable marriage and what appear to be fairly non-toxic parenting of their children, heal a lot of his childhood wounds that led to the god-sized hole. He gets regular exercise, has a larger social circle, finds meaning in work -- all the stuff that makes for a healthy, well-adjusted life. Second, there is enough detail supplied that it is utterly clear that Lobdell is the sucker born every minute. Even after revelation after revelation, he never seems to get any clarity on how scary Mormon parenting practices are, or why temple marriages have such a low divorce rate (that's not success, buddy, trust me) or what he perceives as really great Mormon kids are just disasters on a scale that make him seem really quite well off -- even _before_ he got god, much less his long-term healing that led to his ability to un-get god. He dismisses as paranoia the fears sources have regarding TBN. I'd kinda like to know _why_ he thought it was just paranoia. Third, and I think this is perhaps the best aspect of the book, while Lobdell is yet another hate-to-use-the-term-agnostic (right up there with people who won't identify as feminist), he is quite fearless (at least in print -- he's quite an anxious person by self-report) in describing his life as an unbeliever as rewarding, satisfying and joyful.

It was the realization that there are as many good people outside of Religion as inside that eroded Lobdell's faith permanently, a realization I have complete sympathy for. But it is not clear that Lobdell reached a related conclusion: there are more very bad people using religion as justification or cover for their actions than there are very bad people operating completely outside religion. And while it's all well and good for his Presbyterian pastor to point out that all those Catholic Clergy abusers were likely once abused themselves, this fails to get to the meat of the nut: if there really is a God, a Prime Mover, then God is the abuser who started this chain of evil, and God is therefore responsible for the latter day outcomes. (And any Christian having trouble with this could use a short course in all those verses, OT and NT, about bashing babies onto rocks.)

I'm glad Lobdell's marriage and family relationships (mostly) survive this roller coaster of belief and unbelief. It is a testimony (ha!) to the value of communication that by constantly discussing what he was thinking about and learning (on the job) with his wife, they stayed in step with each other, rather than being split apart by differing opinion. I could well imagine it could have gone very differently if he had concealed the gory details he was learning from abuse survivors from his born-Catholic wife while he was in the process of converting.

Lobdell serves as a nice counterpoint to Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris.

I picked this up for the kindle around the time I got Prothero's _Religious Literacy_ and Plotz' _Good Book_. I tried Prothero first, which was unfortunate; I didn't even attempt the others for months and they are both far superior. Prothero advocates teaching religion in schools. Lobdell and Plotz both depict, in very, very different ways, adults past school age learning about religion and wrestling with large philosophical questions based on holy writ and communities of believers. Where Prothero is advocating a shallow, meaningless exercise, Plotz and Lobdell show in detail how one can learn about, think about, and act on religious ideas -- and how belief or unbelief is sort of orthagonal, in the end, to the process. I don't know whether any of these three would serve the purpose they were recommended for (inoculating people against the dangers of religion), but Lobdell is definitely worth your time, Plotz is probably worth your time, and Prothero is annoyingly useless. IMO, of course. I mean, this is my _blog_.

wouldn't it make more sense if...

I got to thinking, after reading Plotz and Lobdell.

Pedophilia is built into the Bible. Specifically, in Ezekiel 16.

http://www.calvincrc.org/sermons/topics/ezekiel/ezek16.html

And wouldn't that whole Jesus-died-for-x's-sins make more sense if x was God than us? I mean, who kept screwing around with humanity in a really vicious and immoral way? If you accept the Trinity, and that God came to Earth as a man to die for us all, and through suffering would come salvation, maybe what that _really_ was was God saying, wow, I've really put you all through it. And I'm probably going to keep doing it, too. So, to show you I really love you, I'll put myself through it as well. You know, do unto others.

Heck, maybe He gets off on it.

Mind you, I've never accepted the Trinity, so this doesn't help me any, because it's just God killing someone else in some creepy moral/ethical/theological system that doesn't make any sense. At least in urban fantasy it isn't _expected_ to make sense.