What does it mean to blaspheme?

I don't like the word blaspheme.  In general I feel too committed to honoring how other people experience or don't experience sacredness to want to criticize people just because they are different than me.  Words that are that loaded with judgement tend to exclude any possibility that sharing or respect can occur.  No matter how bad something is that you are criticizing, when you start making it about whether its wrong to have the wrong take on God people who disagree with you only a bit are automatically unwelcome.  When I used the word in my previous post it kind of surprised me how angry I felt.  So I wanted to define the word.

I don't care about whether the symbols of sacredness evolve.  I don't care that much if they stay the same.  When you think about how much the ways people think about sacredness it would be almost impossible for symbols to stay the same.  Even if they are represented or performed in the same way they will be understood differently by different groups through time.  I appreciate the beauty of how people encounter what they find sacred.  I find people very frustrating in where they find sacredness.  Pick almost any group and there will be losts to disagree with or agree with, admire or dislike etc about how they encounter the most important things in their life.  Those kinds of disagreements don't tend to bother me at a general level.

But what does bother me is when representation of love are perverted into representations of hatred and fear.  Using torture as a baptism defiles the idea of baptism.  Its kind of the same kind of disgusting as turning a cross into a swastika or turning Easter into an excuse to indulge in antisemitism.  When you take away the parts of something that were tied to love and focus on the parts that are tied to evil then you have committed an evil against the sense of sacredness and the people who honor those ideas.  That is what blaspheme means to me.

God and Country

I grew up on the idea that the US is somehow extra special in God's plan for the world.  I read material claiming that the US somehow was spotless from imperialism, was a land of perfect freedom, that the USA was in some sense a Christian nation where the truth's of God could be favored over other belief systems, and that the USA had some kind of special role to play in bringing about the events leading to the end of the world.  As I became more mature and my understanding deepened  I understood that the United States history cannot be understood properly while ignoring its imperialistic past, that the USA is more important as a place where some ideals of freedom were formed as opposed to where they were first or best realized, that calls for running the government as a "Christian Nation" often are intended to be acted out in violations of the freedoms of those who were not Christians or whose version of Christianity differed from those in power, and that the end of the world predictions I heard in Sunday had often more to do with patriotism than with scriptures.

But, despite all of that the idea of the US being somehow special in God's plan just seemed like a harmless extension of patriotim that could be winked at.

Now I find the whole package kind of frighteningly unnerving.  In all the history classes I had taken up to date I had never understood the religious nature of the world wars.  I had assumed that Europe had secularized because of the trauma of the religious wars of the reformation.  I hadn't realized that it took a lot longer than this.  I hadn't realized that state religions had flourished in much of Europe until the world wars.  I hadn't realized that so many of the state religions had rallied for God and Country- to the point of preaching death to the enemy and often participating either actively or compliantly with the state brutality encouraged by Nazism.  Being in a religion doesn't make you a good person even if it gives you a narrative to explain how and why you want to be one.  After seeing so much killing done in the name of God and Country it makes sense for Europe to back away from state religions just as it backed away from the hyper nationalism of fascism.

But just how did these religious leaders justify to themselves the violence that they condoned?  It made so much more sense when I watched a video of some of them explaining what happened online.



In this film, it is explained how Hitler combined a sense of love of God and country together in a toxic mass of glorified nonsense.  German Christians who experienced his masterful rhetoric often would have viewed that the Nazi party acting through a militant Germany was God's answer to the Godless Atheists of Communism.  It was all part of God's plan for saving the world from the evils of the last days.  But evil is perfectly capable of acting through a theistic Hitler as through an atheistic Stalin.

So why does that matter regarding the USA?  I watched another video



In this video, Billy Graham argues that a militant United States is God's answer to the evils of godless communism, but only if it purifies itself through purer conversion to Christ.  One might argue that surely Hitler and the Christians who followed him were wrong and Billy Graham was right?  I'd argue that the Lutherans who followed Hitler and the Billy Graham's of the world aren't any more right or wrong than each other.  They were both expression a by then traditional form of patriotism by mixing up God in their own political and military goals.  The Lutherans following Hitler were simply unlucky that the traditional association of God and country turned out so sour for them because Hitler was a man of profoundly evil assumptions about the world.  But you might argue that in the US we aren't that depraved and that we would never allow our sense of destiny to override our sense of morality.  To that I'd say watch this clip



When a popular politician who was close to being vice president blasphemously suggests that the US should use water boarding to "baptize terrorists" and the crowd cheers at the idea- we aren't any inherently better than the Croatian Catholics who shocked even the Nazis by their brutality in massacring people whose religion they disagreed with.  We're simply lucky we haven't had a political leader elected who actually asked us to do such things on such a scale and instead get off easy with just a few incidents of Muslim prisoners raped and at least one tortured to death in US prisons.  We aren't magically moral because of our country or our God- but when we link God and Country too closely in our minds we risk assuming that we are and that all our actions are justified because of it.

The Reformation, and poetry

I've been taking a class on the history of Christianity this semester.  The author of the textbook has done a marvelous job presenting many of the different social movements and the people in history in a very sympathetic light so that I keep reading about a change in history and thinking "Yes Yes that addressed the problems of that era.  I so deeply agree or sympathize with what this person does" and then find myself turning around and saying "That was really sick.  There is so much wrong with what just happened there.  I could never accept that action or that opinion."  The experiments of human society are messy and unpleasant much of the time.  But I can' reject them because I'm human and my own world is subject to the same human imperfections.  This experience of relearning about the reformation led to my writing this poem.

Blood

The past is covered in blood.
Food robbed from the hungry
Water taken from the thirsty.
Quarrels broken into pools of blood.

I must escape this pool of blood
Restore food to the hungry
Give water to the thirsty,
And mend the wounds with the gift of my blood.

Sick of gore, the red sunrise beckons.
Come eat without price
Come drink without money,
Come cleanse your soul from blood.

The red mirage transforms to blood
The people are hungry
The children are thirsty,
And through my veins, flows blood.

What do you think, when there's nothing to think about...

Years ago I used to listen to what my family called "Boo tapes."  It was a bunch of audio dramatizations about the scriptures where a talking dog and a tree house full of kids act out and reimagine different stories.  One song that touched me deeply was talking about what must have Moroni spent his time thinking about after everyone that he knew was dead.  It suggested there were many awesome wonders of the world to contemplate and asserted that what you think about when there's nothing to think about defined who you were.  I don't like short cuts to defining yourself or other people, but it is hard to figure out how to handle those times when the emptiness just seems to want to fill up everything.

I'm socially isolated enough and have been socially isolated for long enough that I simply don't handle feeling alone very well.  I get lonely feeling pretty quickly and depression can follow as well, making it difficult to function.  Sometimes things are better or worse at work but it has not been uncommon over the last few months that I've been unable to find a way to consistently interact with anyone that I know.  When I'm dealing with an unstable group of strangers you might say that the engines in my mind that deal with socializing more or less freeze up like a car with no oil in it.  It takes me a long time to be able to function with a group of people, even when I do know them.  When I get home from work its not necessarily much better.  My wife has trouble getting proper sleep with the kids waking up during the night or trying to wake up absurdly early in the morning.  So she's typically about ready to fall asleep somewhere between 8:30-9:30 PM.  I don't get off work till 10 PM and probably won't get home till 10:30ish.  When school is going full swing we see each other during the days mostly for meal times.  Since dishes are hard to do with little boys trying to help sometimes doing the dishes falls to me after I get home from work.  I need to find ways to relax, detox all that work stress, clean up any perishables that might have gotten left out, and make a dent in dishes.

That's a lot of time spent alone.

Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I watch movies, sometimes I listen to audiobooks.  To me, music can be a great way to do an emotional stretching exercise.  I can let the emotions of the music move me around and help get me unstuck from a negative mindset.  Movies are about social interactions between people.  If I'm having loneliness caused depression setting in watching people interact socially in a movie can be a painful reminder of the social skill sets that I don't have.  So I haven't done as many movies recently.  I only sometimes have a good audio book on hand and they are a life saver when I have them.

Mostly these days I have listened to podcasts.  I had decided that many ways in which I viewed the world were just fundamentally wrong and I started information binging to try to help myself sort the world back out again.  On some subjects there are many people who are more than willing to give you hours upon hours of time listening to them babble on about just about any subject you can imagine.  When trying to redefine how I understood the world made me feel alone in even more ways than normal those talking heads in my earphones were a life saver.  At least someone else understood the sorts of questions I was dealing with and I could listen in as they discussed all sorts of research and thinking on the subject that I simply didn't have the time to do.

I could still spend hours upon hours listening to those, but there is a problem.  I've come to a new more or less stable outlook on life.  I'm not driven as much now to answer every new question and examine every new angle on those subjects anymore.  This is good in many ways.  You can only spend so much time staring down the uncertainty of the world without it taking a severe toll on you.  But in the meantime, what do I do now for all those hours that I still am spending alone?  The podcasts no longer meet a deep need for me.  I'm typically too out of sorts to spend the time on homework.  Movies are fun, but I honestly can't enjoy watching them properly late at night like this.  It simply doesn't work.  I could just read books, but paper books are often so enthralling for me that if they were worth it from the stress management perspective I'll end up not being able to sleep because I won't be able to tear myself away from the story. 

I need a better way to not be alone when I'm alone. Unfortunately there is no easy out for an issue like this.  Life is boring sometimes.  When there is nothing to think about you still have to go on thinking.  It's just life.

I love home made pasta

So Bonnie Jean and I purchased a pasta maker to help reduce the amount of money we spend on pasta.  I tend to take pasta to work on a regular basis as my lunch, so even though it isn't all that expensive its still something we were buying all the time.  The basic recipie we were working with turned out so well that I decided I wanted to get a pasta cookbook to help us learn all the other crazy fun ways we could use the machine.  We've gotten one cookbook so far that focuses on how to make the pasta itself and we might get another focusing on how to use the pasta in recipies or how to make sauces to go with it.  It's been a blast.

So far we've made a
basic fettuchini
half whole wheat half white flour pasta
        Either of the above altered by adding in basil, marjoram, or Garam Masalla
Lemon pepper pasta
         served with either a dijon chicken or with a pecan/garlic/olive oil/bread crumb sauce
Lime pepper pasta
         Serviced with basil avacado sauce or with sun dried tomato pesto
Chocolate Pasta
          Served with mole on top
Spinach raviolis with a filling made of feta, ricotta, breadcrumbs, onion, and spices

All of these attempts have been smashing successes.  We also used the chocolate pasta to make a chocolate/strawberry lasagna, but that needs some more work still to get it right.

The lemon pepper and lime pepper doughs are surprisingly strong.  As in strong enough that if you eat them straight the aftertaste will leave your mouth burning.  But just combining it with another sauce mellows it out and still leaves a strong citrus flavor behind.

It does take some time to make these dishes.  If I'm not helping Bonnie Jean will normally make up the noodles the night before for dishes.  But they are also fairly cheap.  For the every day pasta that I will still take to work, the 50% whole wheat dough tastes worlds better than any store bought whole wheat pasta I've ever had.  I love getting to experiment with new cooking techniques and foods.  Even if it weren't going to be so much cheaper, the 60$ or so we spent on the pasta maker was well spent.

The Willard Bay Oil Spill and Interstate Pipeline Safety Regulations

This is an essay I wrote on as part of applying for a scholarship that came through.  500$ free for pretty much just reading the newspaper.  Thing is the essay itself didn't seem like that much of something special to me.  But I guess the people who award scholarships liked it.  I just thought I'd celebrate the scholarship by blogging the essay.

Within the past three years there have been three oil spills in Utah.  The most recent oil spill happened near Willard Bay in March 2013.  This spill received attention in part because of the dramatic story of a beaver dam stopping an oil spill from seriously contaminating a wildlife preserve.  But it also received attention because, unlike some of the earlier oil spills which happened as a result of difficult to prevent accidents such as a downed power falling on top of an oil pipeline, the Willard Bay spill happened as a result of lax safety oversight.  Federal law puts the regulation of interstate pipelines under the jurisdiction of the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.  This administration has a limited ability to perform safety inspections because it only has 120 inspectors covering 2.6 million miles of pipeline across the entire nation, about 6,000 of them in Utah.  Most states do not suffer greatly from this lack of inspectors because the law allows the administration to delegate much of its responsibilities to state governments.  As a result most states use their own inspectors and funding from a federal matching program to inspect interstate pipelines.  Utah had not done this, leaving all inspection work to the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration instead.  Because of limited resources the pipeline was not properly monitored or repaired and a lengthwise seam on the 60 year old pipe ruptured.  Chevron spent $21.5 million in cleanup efforts before agreeing to a court settlement to pay the Utah government another $5.35 million in various fees and payments.  Governor Herbert has promised that the state will take a more active role in ensuring the safety of these pipelines by working through the Departments of Commerce and Environmental Quality, but did not propose any new legislation.  Representative Brian King in the Utah state legislature proposed looking into legislation to toughen penalties on oil spills.  In response to previous oil spills Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker proposed advocating for more tough compliance measures, but did not advocate for change during the following legislative session and complained that the Department of Environmental Quality told him that enforcement measures weren't possible.  To date, the only clear response that has happened to improve interstate pipeline safety in Utah is that Chevron paid a large settlement and spent a large sum of money before that on cleanup efforts that may encourage them to be more careful with other pipelines they operate.  As time passes and the matter is considered by the government, it will become more likely that the Utah government may take more authority over regulating these interstate pipelines, especially if significant oil spills continue to happen at a rate of about once a year as they have been over the last three years.

References:

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57275295-78/bay-chevron-willard-settlement.html.csp

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/54883167-78/pipeline-safety-pipelines-report.html.csp

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56323703-78/pipeline-utah-safety-state.html.csp

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56075172-90/spill-state-pipeline-bay.html.csp

Advice regarding emotions and relationships

Every once in a while it happens- someone asks me for advice about a situation defined by its emotions or about relationships.  Sometimes it happens in more formal ways- like when our married student ward asked my wife and I to teach the marriage and family relationships class.  Sometimes it is more informal like a friend at work asking if I could think of anything better that they might have done in a frustrating situation with their girlfriend.  I appreciate the trust people extend to me when this happens.  But it honestly feels just a little odd.  Because, I honestly struggle with emotions and relationships.  I feel like a blind man being asked how to see.

When Bonnie Jean and I were engaged, I was off trying to sell alarm systems with about as much skill as a plumber that had never owned a wrench.  Life was getting pretty frustrating and I was talking with Bonnie Jean on the phone about how I was feeling.  There were all these components to how I was feeling and I couldn't figure it out why I should be feeling that particular set of emotional and physical sensations or what they meant.  Bonnie Jean finally said "it sounds like your depressed."  Then everything clicked, depression was what I was feeling, how amazingly good it was to finally be able to put a word to how I was feeling.  I had been feeling depressed for several weeks before finally figuring out exactly what was going on.  This is not the only time in my life when there has been a substantial time lag between the onset of depression and realizing that it happened.  Its just the sort of thing that happens to me from time to time.

And as far as relationships go... well, lets just say that I can sit next to someone at work for hours without talking to them or even realizing if they stay put or get up and leave.  There's a strong chance that I won't ever talk to them at all.  Engaging with random strangers in a social manner takes a certain amount of courage, mental effort, and sometimes a measure of desperation.  Basic skills of managing the image I portray of myself to other people are difficult for me to manage, and avoiding giving offense and overcoming hostility that can come from small offenses can be an exhausting effort for me.  Making and keeping friends can be hard.  I still think its a small miracle that Bonnie Jean and I met and got married in the first place.  There are so many things that other people can do by feel that I do by thinking about them.

But maybe that explains a little bit of why people ask for advice sometimes.  Maybe the way I spend time thinking through these things gives me a fresh perspective that is unique to others when they hear it.  So instead of the blind man describing the elephant I'm the blind man with x ray vision trying to describe an elephant.  Or maybe just occasionally I earn up enough good will and trust that people value what I think and feel regardless of whether they think I really have any answers.  I don't know.  I do enjoy feeling trusted though.  It makes it seem as if I've established a real connection with another human being.  And with how isolating the world can be, knowing those connections are there matters a great deal.