Or, the $7 entry.

In this post:

Atheism. Or gnosticism. Or Something.

Lots of words about nothing.

The Best Valentine

A sincere gift from a sincere little kid.

Corporate Show Goodness

Piccies!

Meme, meme, meme.

Responses to the previous entry's meme.

Richard Dawkins Eat Your Heart Out

I'm struggling.

I grew up in a pretty normal (read: boring) home. Mom was a receptionist at Mercy Urbandale Clinic, dad was an auto mechanic. We lived in a little house in Grimes, in a pretty tame suburban neighborhood with lots of other kids my age for friends. I have very fond memories of running around in our combined backyards, jumping over the fence that separated our houses from the city maintenance buildings and discovering a huge yard full of old oil barrels, scrap wood, and bricks and building a huge fort out of them, filling the swimming pool on hot days and climbing the huge trees by the creek.

My family went to church.

I was vaguely aware that most of the other people on our street didn't - but it didn't bother at all. In fact, it never even crossed my mind as I was growing up. We went to First Church, a pretty darn standard and boring non-denominational, mostly-traditional church. And I was raised my whole life to believe that there was God, this sort of...all-powerful being who hung around in heaven that you were supposed to have some sort of personal relationship with, but He was so distant. So difficult to feel and see and touch that the admonishment that I was supposed to have a "personal relationship" with Him always rang of empty and meaningless Christian-ese. I could lay on a blanket in my backyard and watch a meteor shower, and feel something, some overwhelming sense of awe, or go traipsing about in Margo-Frankel woods near Ankeny and have my breath taken away by the beauty of nature - but when I went to church, I didn't feel that. This is not to say I didn't feel Him. He was there at church camp during the singing. He was there the summer mom had her surgery and we spent the whole of our summer vacation in the hospital while she nearly died on the operating table when a surgeon accidentally sliced open some apparently important internal tubing. He was at Acquire the Fire. I was doing His work when, at age seven, I tried to convince one of my friends that I was an angel so that he would accept God into his heart.

And the entire time, I never questioned His existence. Onnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent invisible man? No prob. Created the whole of the uni/multi-verse in seven days? Okay.

And this could be increasingly hard to swallow.

Looking back, I realize now that the only thing I felt at Acquire the Fire and singing at church camp and praying for mom was, most of the time, warm, cascading sensations of religious emotion. Despite what Christian leaders everywhere try to feed me, I've never truly felt felt that God was just a big 'ol friend, not exactly existing within the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation but present just the same. In fact, recently, some blasphemous thoughts have flitted through my conscientious.

Is God...real?

This thought crossed my mind when I met Emily, and then I went to work for a church. And I saw firsthand God's people when they weren't on stage. I saw them during their day-to-day existence. I saw a pastor ask for an family's financial giving records so they would know how much they gave, and hence how to deal with a complaint. I saw them chew out each other over such critical items such as...choir risers. I ordered $450 microphones in the midst of a church financial crisis - because that was the "mic that [the Fellowship Church pastor] Ed Young uses". I watched a board of directors approve firing an employee - on the word of one person because he started a business on the side. Pastors promoted their own CDs in church and misrepresented the source of the music.

We order these microphones and moving lights and spend $600k on a new campus in Ankeny, and then pass the offering plate every week and ask for more.

These are not isolated incidents. And I have a feeling that every church employee everywhere has the same problem of seeing how Christians really act when they're not singing "Amazing Grace" from the front of the church and they despise it. Christians are just as bad as the rest of us. We're a bunch of hypocritical, back-stabbing heathen, except that we go to church once a week and pretend to be perfect little angels.

This is why I like the people at Celebrate Recovery so much. Every week - these people, young, old, from all walks of live, get up in front of their peers and announce, "I'm %name%, and I'm a recovering alcoholic.". Or drug addict, or compulsive gambler, or whatever. The people there are real, in a way many of the people - and indeed, some of church's leaders - aren't.

But I digress.

That Christians are a bunch of wankers isn't the point of this entry. The point is, if I don't feel God, if I don't see any evidence of His existence, if the people who profess to follow His commands and obey His words are just as twisted and misshapen and crooked as the rest of us, why would I want any part of the...movement...that is Christianity?

And don't point to creation, or the human body, or any of the natural wonders that we see around as evidence of His existence. When it comes down to it, the natural data is ambiguous. I do not and will not and cannot accept the theory of evolution; it takes far more faith for me to believe that we evolved from simian roots than to believe that a creator's hand was at work in The Beginning. But why could it not just as easily have been Buddha, or The Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the hot chick sitting across from me here in O'Hare International? Sadly, the truth is that our knowledge and ability to obtain knowledge and probably all future knowledge regarding the age and origins of the universe will be nothing better than educated guesses.

The truth is - Christianity is a faith. It takes faith to believe that the entire Really Big Place That We Live In was created in seven days, or, hell, even in an instant from some weird "primeval atom".

My faith wanes at times. Perhaps I should go back to Acquire The Fire.

Elise's Valentine

The following scene happened the Sunday before Valentine's Day. I was walking down one of the church's hallway's after Celebrate Recovery, headed to my office to make some copies of a CD.

Elise's mom (EM): Hey, Sparky! Me (S): Yes? EM: My daughter has something for you. S: Oh? EM: Yeah. (I walk to the children's room, where a small, highly excitable little girl bounces over to me and hands me a pink sheet of paper, pic here.) S: Uh, thanks? Elise (E): I love you, Sparky! (Hugs Sparky) S: Er, I love you too. EM: She spent like fourty-five minutes making that for you. S: That's creepy. Should I be creeped out? EM: (laughs) If she was twelve, maybe. But she's four. S: (To Elise) We've got to find you some new friends.

Elise's valentine was probably the nicest thing anybody has ever spent fourty-five minutes making for me. In the words of :

(9:08:57 PM) Me: It has like a million hand-drawn hearts on it. She spent like 45 minutes making it, according to her mom. (9:09:22 PM) Pixel: Wow. (9:09:28 PM) Me: I am, apparently, popular with the under-two-feet tall demographic. (9:10:49 PM) Pixel: You inspire attention spans!

Corporate Show

Piccies from my latest corporate show: Here, we have the lighting consoles. The closest one is the moving light console, and the furthest was for the conventionals. In this shot, a sea of plebeians ogle power they will never have. And in this photographic representation, we see a few of my traveling companions. From left to right: Eric, Chris, and Pope.

Responses to the last entry's meme.

Filip: 1) Belgium? Where's that? 2) I'm not entirely sure what you haven't tried, so I challenge you to try the David Crowder Band's Illuminate and tell me what you think of the musical style. (I'm relatively certain you won't enjoy the lyrics. :P ) 3) A rich mahogany. 4) Your thoughtfulness in political matters, and relatively centrist views. (For a Belgian.) 5) Getting a random IM from you in class at DMACC. Wondering who the heck you were and why you talked so funny. 6) A clownfish. 7) Do you feel that minors of non-European descent are over-represented in Belgian crime statistics?

Exit, stage left Sparks