Belief, faith, and the church

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Over the years, from time to time, I’ve surprised people when they find out that not only was I raised in a Christian family, but I still count many of my core beliefs as Christian. Apparently, I don’t “come across that way,” as one friend put it in high school. My primary color scheme is generally black. I listen to a lot of dark music. I’ve always run around with the alternative/gothic crowd. One of my favorite artists is H. R. Giger who’s work is extremely dark and disturbing. I have never had any problems with people believing in ghosts, magic (or majick), Gaea, or any form of “paganism” (popularly described as anything that’s not one of the major forms of religion).

On top of it all, I count my beliefs as mine, and other people’s beliefs as theirs. If they want to talk about it fine — but I’m not about to attempt to convince them that I’m “right” and they’re “wrong”, and I expect the same respect from them.

At the same time, while the base of my personal belief system is rooted in the Christian church (specifically, the Episcopal church), I certainly have my times when I struggle with it. The existance of any type of god is not always something that’s easy to hold on to, when faced with the things that go on in the world all the time. Some days I see sunbeams cutting through trees and making the golds and reds of the fallen leaves glow against the mossy ground, and it’s hard not to believe in God. I have a friend studying massage therapy and kinesthesiology, and for her, the more she learns about how the body works, how all the systems interact with each other to keep us moving, it convinces her more and more that there must be an intelligence behind it all, and helps to keep her faith in God intact. At other times, I see the atrocities committed by man upon other men, upon the world we live on, and find it very hard to believe that there can be anything “keeping an eye on us.”

It’s all part. It happens. It’s how you deal with it, and what decisions you come to, that help make up who you are — and I personally think that there aren’t necessarily any “right” or “wrong” answers to any of it.

Trains of thought like that are part of what makes finding a weblog like Real Live Preacher such a joy. Written by a Protestant minister in Texas, it’s not what most people would come to expect when reading something written from a religious point of view — funny, sometimes profane, full of both faith and doubt, very honest, and a joy to read.

I received an email from someone puzzled about the grief I experienced when I gave up on God. This person felt liberated when she left Christianity.

I understand how some would feel that way. Many of you only know Christianity from bad books, TV preachers, and the people who watch them. If that were all I knew of Christianity I would celebrate my liberation from it all the days of my life.

But I was exposed early to the real stuff — Top Shelf Christianity — Deep and Old Christianity. This kind is practiced by people who work until they stink and take life in great draughts. Their hands are as rough as their hides, and they DO their faith in secret, hiding their good works in obedience to Christ. They know how to love and be loved in return. Their laughter is loud and has its roots in joy.

These Christians don’t want your money and they don’t advertise. You will only find them if you MUST find them. These are the ones who took me to Mexico as a boy and showed me pain and joy. They hid nothing from me.

I was also blessed by being exposed to the right kind of Christian thinkers. C.S Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkein. Frederick Buechner, Carlyle Marney, and Thomas Merton. Will Campbell who wrote “Brother to a Dragonfly” and Eberhard Arnold. Frederick Dale Bruner and Martin Luther King Jr.

You did understand there was more to this than religious TV and the drivel they sell in those awful Christian bookstores, right? After all, Christianity didn’t sustain itself for twenty centuries by shitting Hallmark cards before a live studio audience.

Many thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Don’t fly pregnant

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This story will probably be all over the ‘net in a day or two, if it isn’t already, but it’s something that really needs to be read to be believed. A husband and his pregnant wife were attempting to fly out of Portland to go to a friend’s wedding when they were both pulled off for extra “security screening”…

After some more grumbling on my part they eventually finished with me and I went to retrieve our luggage from the x-ray machine. Upon returning I found my wife sitting in a chair, crying. Mary rarely cries, and certainly not in public. When I asked her what was the matter, she tried to quell her tears and sobbed, “I’m sorry…it’s…they touched my breasts…and…” That’s all I heard. I marched up to the woman who’d been examining her and shouted, “What did you do to her?” Later I found out that in addition to touching her swollen breasts — to protect the American citizenry — the employee had asked that she lift up her shirt. Not behind a screen, not off to the side — no, right there, directly in front of the hundred or so passengers standing in line. And for you women who’ve been pregnant and worn maternity pants, you know how ridiculous those things look. “I felt like a clown,” my wife told me later. “On display for all these people, with the cotton panel on my pants and my stomach sticking out. When I sat down I just lost my composure and began to cry. That’s when you walked up.”

Of course when I say she “told me later,” it’s because she wasn’t able to tell me at the time, because as soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry. As they led me away and she ran alongside, I implored her to calm down, to think of the baby, promising her that everything would turn out all right. She faded into the distance and I was shoved into an elevator, a cop holding each arm. After making me face the corner, the head honcho told that I was under arrest and that I wouldn’t be flying that day — that I was in fact a “menace.”

It’s no longer a “what if” scenario — these things are happening, all over the place, every day. Some are getting reported, many more are not. And as the author of the piece says, it’s probably too late to stop it at this point, though not too late to make our indignation known.

There are plenty of stories like this these days. I don’t know how many I’ve read where the writer describes some breach of civil liberties by employees of the state, then wraps it all up with a dire warning about what we as a nation are becoming, and how if we don’t put an end to it now, then we’re in for heaps of trouble. Well you know what? Nothing’s going to stop the inevitable. There’s no policy change that’s going to save us. There’s no election that’s going to put a halt to the onslaught of tyranny. It’s here already — this country has changed for the worse and will continue to change for the worse. There is now a division between the citizenry and the state. When that state is used as a tool against me, there is no longer any reason why I should owe any allegiance to that state.

Brrrrrr

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Well, I made it up. Very thankfully, no repeat of the near-death experience I had last time I flew up. A bit of turbulence, but now that I’m in the habit of popping a couple Sominex before the flight takes off, I was tranquilized enough that I didn’t start to panic.

Officially, it’s 21 degrees here in Anchorage. Unfortunately, the side of town that my parents live on is always colder than the “official” record — and their thermometer in the front yard is reading 8 degrees below zero at the moment. Yikes.

Heading north

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In just about an hour, I’ll be catching a bus to the airport, and heading up to Alaska to spend the next week with my family in Anchorage! Should be a lot of fun. No clue how much I’ll be tossing stuff up onto the page here while I’m there, so if things are a bit slow for the next week…well, that’s why.

In case I’m not back before then — have a good Christmas season, everyone!

Bye-bye Sen. Lott!

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While he stopped short of resigning from the Senate, Trent Lott has stepped down as Majority Leader.

Bowing to harsh criticism from fellow senators and the Bush White House, Trent Lott resigned as Senate Republican leader Friday after colleagues worried about the repercussions of his racially insensitive remarks openly lined up behind Sen. Bill Frist.

“In the interest of pursuing the best possible agenda for the future of our country, I will not seek to remain as majority leader of the United States Senate for the 108th Congress, effective Jan. 6, 2003,” said Lott, whose fall was historically unprecedented on Capitol Hill.

michaelhanscom.com

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As a followup to my “Own yourself” post, I’m now the proud owner of www.michaelhanscom.com. It’s not active yet, but once everything propagates through the ‘net, that address should automatically redirect straight to www.djwudi.com. It’s a start, until I figure out if I want to do anything else with it.

I’ve also changed my displayed name on this site from ‘djwudi’ to ‘Michael Hanscom’. After a few Google crawls through the site, I should have fairly firmly entrenched my real identity upon the ‘net at large.

In theory, at least. ;)

The Two Towers

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Just got back from seeing Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Oh my lord.

At this point, if Peter Jackson doesn’t get some sort of special achievement Oscar after Return of the King is released, I’ll be quite surprised and dissapointed. Fellowship of the Ring was an excellent film, and a masterful job of adapting what was for years considered an “unfilmable” literary work to the screen — but the possibility was there that that could have been a fluke. Here, Jackson had the task of following up the blockbuster success of LotR:FotR with a “middle movie” that had neither a definite beginning nor end to its story. While because of that LotR:TTT admittedly cannot stand entirely on its own as a single entity (and I would hate to be someone in the unenviable position of attempting to watch LotR:TTT without having first watched LotR:FotR), as the second chapter in an epic saga, it is far and away an absolutely incredible achievement.

More thoughts follow — not entirely spoiler-free, though, click through at your own risk….

Read more

Own yourself

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An excellent article from Anil Dash on some of the side effects of Google’s ability to find anything — and anyone.

Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren’t technologically savvy don’t realize that statements don’t fade away or remain in confidence on the web; The things we say only get louder and more widely known, unless they’re completely trivial.

We’re all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that’s on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project. But this faded as celebrity culture grew and as individuals are increasingly marketed as brands, even products.

Google’s ability to track people down often can be truly amazing, though admittedly, it does pretty much require you to have a somewhat unusual name or e-mail address to use for the search. For instance, Googling for ‘michael hanscom‘ does find me, but not until the sixth link, and even then it’s just my name buried within Phil‘s FOAF file. However, Googling for my online pseudonym of ‘djwudi‘ brings up link after link related to me, either posts here on my site, or comments I’ve left in various other places around the web.

What to do about this ability to be ‘found’ on the ‘net? Well, the best things to do may just be to accept that nothing you put on the web is truly private, and become active in taking control of what information is out there, as much as possible.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

To that end, I think I’ll be picking up www.michaelhanscom.com soon, most likely pointing it here. Comments to other sites, where previously I’d use ‘djwudi’, I’ll probably start using my real name now. As long as I’m me, in a world where incredible amounts of information can be found with just a few clicks of a mouse, I might as well take control of who I am.

Well, of course!

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Lott said he would survive any challenge to his post as majority leader, and Tuesday he picked up the support of a few GOP senators, including Alaska’s Ted Stevens, who vowed to “defend my friend.” Others who have voiced support for Lott include Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Michael DeWine of Ohio.

The comments from Stevens, the second-most senior Republican senator, were one of the strongest endorsements of Lott since he set off a political firestorm when he praised Thurmond’s unsuccessful presidential bid at a birthday party December 5. Praise of that campaign drew condemnation — from President Bush and others — because Thurmond ran on a segregationist platform.

Stevens said he believes Lott meant the comments as praise for Thurmond as a military man and longtime Senate colleague — not praise for his past segregationist ways. He said Lott’s comments have been blown “out of proportion.”

From CNN.com, “Lott vows to fight for leadership job”

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Sen. Stevens’ turn the Senatorial spot over to someone else — though that’s not likely to happen until he dies. Ah, well.