The Slacktiverse

Board Business, March 31, 2011

Don't forget to send in items that you want included in this weekend's This week in The Slacktiverse. The three sections of the weekend post are:

The Blogaround
Any denizen of the Slacktiverse who has posted an article to their own website during since the previous weekend post is invited to send a short summary of that article along with its permalink to TBAT. That summary and link will be included in the next weekend blogaround. This will help to keep members of our community aware of the many excellent websites hosters by other members.

In Case You Missed This
Readers of The Slacktiverse can send short summaries of, and permalinks to, articles that they feel might be of interest to other readers.

Things You Can Do
Anyone who knows of a worthy cause or important petition should send a short description of the petition/cause along with its url to TBAT.

Please email all submissions to slackmods at gmail dot com.

The following petition is in response to a situation where time is of the essence.

TW: Rape, sexual violence, torture.

Last Saturday, a young woman lawyer named Iman al-Obeidi burst into a Tripoli hotel and pleaded with foreign journalists for help, showing bruises and crying that she had just been gang-raped by 15 of Qaddafi's men. She screamed as she was dragged away by Libyan agents and has not been seen since......Qaddafi will ignore most international outrage, but he listened to the Turkish government when they asked him to release foreign journalists. Let's urgently raise a massive global call to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to help save Iman. [Avaaz.com]

Click here to sign the petition that will be sent to the Turkish government.

Ongoing Board Business

TBAT would like to thank all the people who have submitted articles and encourages posters who are interesting in contributing regularly or irregularly to send in  material. Having a number of articles that are ready for publication allows TBAT to maximize the variety of opinions as well as be responsive to "real-world" events and concerns.

TBAT encourages both those who wish to contribute regularly or irregularly to send in material.

 

About the sidebar.

TBAT continues working quietly to rearrange and "clean up" the sidebar by moving items around, changing fonts/font sizes and culling out "dead" links as well as links that are duplicated on the Patheos Slacktivist website.

In order to make this site more useful to its current readers TBAT will begin April 4 2011 to remove some of the sidebar links that are live and not duplicated on the Patheos website. We encourage people to bookmark, in their own browsers, links which are of particular interest to them.

After April 10 2011 TBAT will begin to add to the sidebar links to the websites of Slacktiverse readers and posters. We remind readers who wish to have their website included on the new blogroll to indicate their desire to be included by posting the address of their website as a comment in response to The Geography of The Slacktiverse, part 1 post on FAQ website.

 

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)

Pensées

Many of my more interesting anecdotes regarding religious discussion include my mother. This is because she's one of the only people I've ever been able to disagree with who hasn't become impassioned to the point of verbal abuse. We don't see eye to eye, and we certainly fight, but being a generally kind and open-minded sort of person she does a rather admirable job of listening to my point of view.

About a million years ago (or maybe ten or so, if you want to get technical) I was in college and didn't have a working vehicle. She would drive me to class in the morning and then back home again in the afternoon. My schedule at the time was mostly filled with basic philosophy and comparative religion courses, and we'd chat about whatever was going on in my courses as we made our way up the winding roads of the Texas hill country. It was a Spring semester which meant the bluebonnets were in bloom at the time, and my mother and I had finally reached a kind of understanding that I was no longer a child and she was no longer the-boss-of-me. Those car rides are some of my most cherished memories of our relationship.

One conversation that jumps out, however, as not being all wildflowers and country roads came after on of my philosophy classes had an overview of Pascal's Wager.

I'd read it before and was surprised to find that so had she, although she didn't know what it was called. She'd been exposed to a sort of weird paraphrase for the purpose of evangelism. I sort of brushed past it, calling it silly or stupid. I pointed some of the various flaws and counter-arguments we'd learned, and then dismissed it as a ridiculous thing to believe or argue. My mother got quiet.

Then she got mad.

The conversation exploded in that way that only mother/daughter fights can. She had used the argument when witnessing (proselytizing, for the uninitiated), and anything that gets someone into heaven is a Good Thing, and it makes more sense to hedge your bets, and anyway it's not really hedging your bets it's just making the smart choice! And on and on her defensiveness grew until we weren't really arguing about anything relevant.

To this day I'm not sure she'd remember it, and I really don't know if she even still thinks faith founded on this early example of probability is worthwhile or attractive.

My perspective on and appreciation of Pascal's Pensées has become more nuanced as I've gotten older. I still think the notion of living one's life or basing one's faith on a risk versus gain assessment for the afterlife is silly. It doesn't matter if I'm wrong because I've hedged my bets! How can that possibly be fulfilling, or even sincere?

Still, it's something I think about from time to time--what if I'm wrong? What if I'm wrong about my beliefs, The Bible, God, Jesus, the disciples and apostles, words, stories, psalms, parables, all of it. What then?

It's a healthy notion to reflect on, from time to time, if you're a person of faith.

Last night, driving home and thinking idly about my mother and the fight we had so long ago, it occurred to me that I've reached a point at which it doesn't matter. It's not that it doesn't matter if I'm wrong because I'll be the beneficiary of some cosmic reward if I'm right and the alternative is nothing. The reason it doesn't matter is that my beliefs don't cause me to do, say, or think terrible things.

I have no animosity towards anyone for what God they choose to worship (if any), where they live, how they pray (if they do), or who they love. I don't suspect that any of my neighbors are secretly engaging in sexual relationships I might disapprove of. I don't get angry at the notion that the people I interact with are making choices that may not be right for me or my life. I don't resist or begrudge the progression of scientific inquiry and discovery.

I do not scream or fight or mourn or wail or reject the gifts of truth, beauty, freedom, curiosity, generosity or love. I recognized the aspects of my beliefs that brought me harm, and brought harm to the people around me and to my relationship with them, with myself, and with god.

And then I let them go.

I excised them from my heart and from my life, and realized instantly that they had never really served me at all. These doctrines of suspicion, resentment, ignorance, regression, and control that I'd grown up with had only ever wounded my capacity to love others or myself, and by extension--God.


If I'm wrong about the things I draw from Christianity it doesn't matter - not because I've hedged my bets for an eternal reward, but because the things I draw from it now don't prevent me from embracing peace, compassion, or discovery.

I spent a great deal of my childhood feeling ashamed and afraid of parts of myself, which translated to how I treated others. I was ashamed of my emotions and attraction towards other women. I was afraid that my interest in science was somehow misguided. My faith felt like a burden, weighing me down as I tread water in my life, drowning in all of the shoulds and shouldn'ts and can'ts and don'ts and wrongs and bads and dirtys.

I was unable and eventually unwilling to destroy the parts of myself that years of evangelical indoctrination had convinced me were somehow broken. It took time, and a lot of anger and pain, but I rejected those parts of modern Christianity. In fact, for a time I rejected the whole of Christianity.

Then one day I picked it up again, and brushed it off. I looked at it through the lens of historical context. I looked at it through the lens of paganism. I looked at it through the lens of agnostic deism. I looked at it through the lens of human sexuality. I looked at it through the lens of feminism. I looked at it through the lens of secular humanism, science, and atheism. I looked at it through the lens of Buddhism. I looked at it through the lens of art and storytelling.

I looked at it through the lens of my life.

I looked at it through the lens of Jesus' words.

And I realized, through all of those lenses the particles of fear, resentment, anger, ignorance, defensiveness and malice look so, so small. And I brushed them away.

What remained has only been enriched by such a variety of perspectives.


--cephalopod ____________________________________________________________________________

 

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

At Patheos: TF: The President's Plane Is Missing

Fred's new Left Behind post is up at Patheos.

Excerpt:

"[Jenkins] doesn’t take us to the Oval Office or to the famed White House Situation Room, but to a nondescript hotel room in Jerusalem, where the American President Gerald Fitzhugh is staying before the Great-Tribulation-inaugurating treaty-signing, an event at which he will, apparently, be little more than a spectator. 

Sitting there in the hotel, the sidelined and impotent Fitzhugh fumes about his suddenly marginal role in world events. He launches into a monologue expressing his frustration with this newfound powerlessness and irrelevance in the New World Order. We readers are privy to this scene because Fitzhugh decided he needed an audience before whom he could express his most private thoughts and fears, and because the president decided the most appropriate audience for such candid, unguarded statements would be a prominent member of the press."[by Fred Clark, TF: The President's Plane Is Missing, March 28, 2011, posted at Patheos.com]

 

Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.

Confessions of an unlikely Anglican

The faith I grew up with was very clear about the trappings of Anglicanism: they were wrong.

Pomp and circumstance, you see, was wrong.
Grandly wearing robes to proclaim how holy you were was wrong.
Incense was imposing irrelevant ritual on approaching God, and was wrong.
In fact, all irrelevant ritual was wrong. (And all ritual was irrelevant.)
And clearly, set prayers from a prayer book were stale, meaningless, inhibiting communication with God… and wrong, too.
Kneeling down to pray? Also wrong.
In fact, traditional styles of prayer were best avoided altogether. Real prayer should be spontaneous, from the heart, and preferably wordless. This demonstrated how close to God you were. *

I was very sure of myself.


Trying to get close to God, under the circumstances, was entirely a matter of trying to feel close to God – preferably by closing my eyes and conjuring up the feeling from nowhere. This, in my experience, was rather like trying to become a die-hard football fan by sitting in a dark room and telling myself that football was my favourite sport.

Feelings can’t survive wholly independent of actions. They fade and die. And, when your faith is entirely about feelings, faith dies along with them.


Thankfully, when I was fifteen I encountered two very sensible people: a pastor at my church, and a high school drama teacher. They both told me the same thing, in different ways.

“We’re not just souls, drifting through space; we’re physical bodies, too. And what your body does affects your soul.”

“Try scowling at someone and talking in a happy voice. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Smiling helps you feel happy. Tensing your muscles helps you feel stressed. Kneeling down helps you to surrender yourself.”

“If you’re going to act an emotion, you’ve got to put all of yourself into it.”

“God created us to be physical. He wants us to be that way.”

This was when I started realising that maybe Anglicans weren’t boring people who preferred meaningless rituals to encountering God.


I have learnt, very slowly, that my soul is affected by my body. That external manifestations of worship aren’t a distraction; they’re a necessity.

When I worship, I kneel down, raise my hands over my head, fall flat on my face, and sit huddled and still. I light candles, read daily prayers straight from the prayer book, pause at the door of sanctuaries, and do almost everything else I can think of.

It doesn’t inhibit my faith – it feeds it.


I have always believed that God existed, but for a long time I was stuck, emotionlessly wishing I could create the perfect emotional reaction to him, so that I could prove to myself that I really had a relationship with him.

Oddly, it was when I stopped seeing my feelings as the primary point of my worship that the feelings started returning.


_____________________
* Possibly this is not what my church meant to convey to me – but it’s certainly what I thought they meant, at the time.


--Deird

 

 

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

This week in The Slacktiverse, March 27 2011

The community voted for a "new content" schedule of M/W/F. TBAT will try to limit any "board business" to posts on Tuesday and Thursday. It is likely that in the future there will be weeks with no "board business" posts at all.

The weekend post will neither be content nor "about the board." Instead we hope to use a regular weekend post to allow members of the community (readers, commentators and writers alike) to communicate important information to other members of the community.

Each weekend post will have three sections; The blogaround, In case you missed it, and Things you can do.

 

The Blogaround

Any denizen of the Slacktiverse who has posted an article to their own website during since the previous weekend post is invited to send a short summary of that article along with its permalink to TBAT. That summary and link will be included in the next weekend blogaround. This will help to keep members of our community aware of the many excellent websites hosters by other members.

 

This week's Blogaround:

This week, Literata wrote a three-part series that takes Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog as a starting point for examining ethics, health care, social policy, and compassion fatigue, especially in light of a new study which reveals startling disparities in the diabetes rate on a county-by-county basis:

Act I: Dr. Horrible

Act II: The Diabetes Belt is for Superheroes!

Act III: Paging Nurse Empathy

__________

Ana Mardoll added a new post to her on going deconstruction of the first Twilight book.

What’s a small town school to do when presented with a newly enrolled and hopelessly lost big city girl? Why, direct her to the pre-printed stack of school maps and hope for the best, of course! In this week’s Twilight, Unisex Raincoats and White Bread, read along as a nervous Bella Swan attempts to calm her fears by comparing her “translucent” white skin to the “porcelain” white skin of her classmates, and insisting to her new friends that her mother is “part albino”.

__________

 Ruby took a short break from Soon to review another Christian youth film.  Second Glance is an homage to It's a Wonderful Life, in which high school student Dan fears that he is too much of a nice guy, and is missing out on all the fun.  So, he wishes he had never been a Christian.  God grants his wish, and in Part 3 of her review, [Second Glance: Part 3] Ruby and her heathen brother Angus learn that nonbelievers cheat on their girlfriends, drive teachers to leave their jobs, and throw really tame parties.

Readers who missed the first two reviews can first catch up by reading Second Glance: Part 1 and Second Glance: Part 2.

 

In Case You Missed This

Readers of The Slacktiverse can send short summaries of, and permalinks to, articles that they feel might be of interest to other readers.

    

    

This week's In case you missed this

 

TW: violence, sexual violence, rape culture, racism, classism

Roxane Gay's article The Careless Language of Sexual Violence is especially interesting given the responses among our commentators to a New York Times article about the gang rape of a female child. Gay writes:

[w]e live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days, like today, where I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. It is nothing less than horrifying to realize we live in a culture where the “paper of record” can write an article that comes off as sympathetic to eighteen rapists while encouraging victim blaming.

EduSolidarity:

In light of the pushback against teachers unions in specific and collective bargaining in general going on in this country, last week a bunch of teachers came together to write about why they support unions. Over a hundred teachers wrote and its worth reading at least a few of their articles just because they have so many different perspectives on the values of and issues with unions.

     

Things You Can Do

Anyone who knows of a worthy cause or important petition should send a short description of the petition/cause along with its url to TBAT.

 

   

This week's Things you can do

     

TW: violence, sexual violence, rape culture, racism, classism

‘Corrective rape’, the vicious practice ofraping lesbians to ‘cure’ their sexuality, is becoming a crisis in South Africa. Activists on the ground are risking their lives to stop this brutal crime and have got the government's attention. Let's support them -- a global outcry now could force the government to take concrete and urgent action.  Sign the petition and send it to friends!

    

   

Apple's ethical policy has been much discussed recently especially in light of several gay unfriendly apps. There is also a petition asking them to ensure conflict-free goods.

______________________________________________________

     

   

Since denizens of The Slacktiverse have not had a chance to send in links throughout the last week TBAT will be happy (this time only!) to add additional links to this post if they are sent to us before Tuesday noon GMT.

Good Girls Tell Lies: Internalized Misogyny in Twilight

TBAT is pleased to present the first Slacktiverse Special

There’s a chance you’ve heard of “Twilight” – Stephenie Meyer’s four-book series on sparkly vampires have won multiple awards including the 2008 British Book Award for “Children’s Book of the Year” and the 2009 Kids’ Choice Award for “Favorite Book”. As of this time last year, the series had sold over 100 million copies worldwide, and has resulted in a series of movie spin-offs. * And if you’re a dedicated book shopper you can also blame the popularity of “Twilight” for the glut of new YA paranormal literature that is now being published by the bucket-load in the hopes that lightning will strike twice.

 

What’s fascinating about this level of popularity is that the plot in “Twilight” is actually fairly simple – the series revolves around a love triangle between an ordinary teenage girl and the two paranormal men who love her: a pale 104-year-old vampire masquerading as a high school teenager and a swarthy Native American werewolf with fiery skin and a fiery temper.

 

There’s very little to be had in “Twilight” besides the love triangle – this isn’t an action-packed series like “The Hunger Games”, it’s not a religious commentary like “His Dark Materials”, and it’s not as concerned with the paranormal elements in the story as is, say, “The Spiderwick Chronicles” or “Sisters of the Moon”. Yet, despite the sparse plot and characterization, “Twilight” continues to be massively popular – the books, movies, and spin-off novellas still sell astonishingly well, even six years after the first run in 2005. The fans aren’t all YA girls, either – demographically speaking, women of all ages are ardent fans of the series (including my 60-year-old mother-in-law), and I myself can claim a teenage step-son who attends the movies with only token protests.

 

Now, I’m particularly fond of literary deconstruction, especially of popular series – I feel that it’s important to take a long look at a phenomenon like “Twilight” and tease apart what the narrative means to us and about us as a society. What’s awkward about deconstructing “Twilight”, though, is that unlike, say, the “Left Behind” series (an example taken completely and totally at random**), there’s not a significant body of readers that claims “Twilight” as a life guide to be followed – if evangelical works like “Left Behind” are seen as proscriptive by their readers, then we can safely say that works like “Twilight” are generally seen as descriptive by their readers. Most readers take “Twilight” as fluff literature only – and may actively resent the implication that by enjoying a popular series, they are somehow participating in something Bad.

 

I’m sympathetic to that viewpoint – a deconstruction of a popular series needn’t be about how the readers are bad for enjoying it. So while I think we have a responsibility to ourselves to look at popular literature as Serious Business and examine what the underlying assumptions and themes in that literature say about society in general, I would never presume to say that enjoying “Twilight” as a series says something about a reader in particular.

 

And having now said that, there’s a lot to be said about the themes within “Twilight”. The series has been accused of racism, as the lovely heroine wavers indecisively between her two suitors: one calm, cool, controlled, and marble-white; the other testy, aggressive, emotional, and dark-skinned. The series has also been accused of sexism, as almost all of the women in the book have very few interests outside the home – women are defined almost completely in terms of the men around them. These issues become even more complex when taking into account Stephenie Meyer’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – LDS doctrine on the place of women*** and non-white peoples**** in the church has historically been complicated, to say the least. All these issues are things that I think can and do deserve to be discussed (and I try to do so to the best of my poor abilities), even if the discussion makes us uncomfortable. Especially if the discussion makes us uncomfortable.

 

However, one issue that stands out to me more than any other issue in “Twilight” is that of deception. That might not seem very important – deception is a respected staple of YA literature because it allows the scrappy protagonists a chance to duck away from prying adult eyes in order to have adventures. And I would be the last person on earth to tell you that deception is some sort of categorical “sin” – I learned a long time ago that it’s rarely worthwhile to anyone for me to say exactly what’s on my mind. Judicious, thoughtful, and minimal use of deception can prevent strife, defuse arguments, and soothe hurt feelings. By contrast, though, excessive deception can utterly wreck people and relationships, and it is this sort of deception that frustrates and fascinates me as I work through “Twilight”.

 

The first few pages of “Twilight” are literally covered with deceptions. The novel opens with protagonist Bella Swan as she prepares to leave her mother in Phoenix, Arizona to move in with her father in Forks, Washington. This move represents a major sacrifice for Bella – she has always made it clear that she hates Forks – but she wants to provide space for her newly remarried mother. What’s astonishing about this actually-not-uncommon situation is the way in which is it utterly characterized by silence, lies, and deception. Bella’s mother knows why Bella is moving, and pleads with her to stay, but it’s clear to both Bella and the reader that she doesn’t really mean it. Bella insists, over and over again, that she wants to go, that the experience will be good for her, but both women know this is a lie. Bella’s father – who has been rung up out of the blue and told to air out Bella’s room – doesn’t have the first clue why his emotionally distant daughter would suddenly want to live in a town she has previously refused to even visit… and he doesn’t feel the desire to ask. To paraphrase one of my previous posts

I find this setup frustrating because neither Bella nor Renee have actually broached the topic in plain English and discussed the situation like adults. What's worse is that Charlie is completely in the dark about Bella's motivations. Charlie doesn't need to be confused about this situation, and if he is to have any kind of meaningful relationship with Bella, he shouldn't be forced into continuing that state of confusion. Charlie's interpretation of Bella's decision will completely color all his interactions with her over the next several months, and thus it's important that he start with the correct interpretation of the situation.

In a healthy family, Bella's sudden and completely uncharacteristic decision to move to a place she openly hates would have triggered an avalanche of discussions within the family from either side: Is she unhappy with school? Does she dislike Phil, or has he hurt her in any way? Has her relationship with her mother become strained as a result of her new marriage? Of course, Bella reassures the reader that none of those things are true, but it's telling that neither of her parents even bother to ask about these things.

This theme of lies and deception doesn’t begin and end as a simple literary device to propel Bella towards the plot as quickly as possible – almost as soon as Bella steps off the plane, she will start lying to her mother, her father, her classmates, and her many, many suitors. From within the preponderance of lies and deceptions, there starts to arise a disturbing trend: the apparent belief within the text that Bella should be doing all this lying.

 

You see, when Bella lies, it’s almost always in order to get what she wants without having to plainly say what she wants. The fact that Bella’s lies are often burdensome and painful to her makes a degree of sense from a characterization perspective – it may not be the best choice to protect your family from difficult truths with pleasant lies, but it’s certainly a realistic choice. However, that reasoning starts to fracture when non-paranormal boys start pursuing Bella and we see her desperately lying to them in repeated and vain attempts to deflect their unwanted attentions rather than plainly and firmly saying, “No.” She has travel plans! She has to stay home and study! She has to wash her hair that weekend!

 

What’s noteworthy about this is that Bella has no reason to lie to these boys. She doesn’t care about their feelings, she’s not friends with them in any meaningful way, and she doesn’t even want to be friends with them – she doesn’t anticipate a single consequence to a plain rejection that she wouldn’t otherwise welcome. Furthermore, she’s well aware that her evasions will clearly not solve the issue, so she additionally works tirelessly to try to shift their attentions onto other classmates. Bella isn’t a matchmaker and doesn’t take any pleasure at all in these machinations – she just wants to be left alone and the only apparent route that she can see towards this goal is to work constantly to “avoid” and/or “fix” the situation without ever once so much as hinting at the truth: that she’s just not that into them.

 

When we see Bella’s lies in this light – as painful and burdensome lies that she feels compelled to tell to near-strangers rather than be honest about her own wants and needs – then all her other lies start to sharply refocus into something disturbing. Maybe Bella doesn’t lie to her parents because she’s a normal girl who doesn’t want them to worry, or because she’s a manipulative girl interested in getting her own way – maybe her lies and silence (as well as her parents’ curious disinterest in talking to her) are indicative of a family environment where “good daughters” don’t express wants beyond what has been planned for them. Maybe Bella doesn’t lie to her paranormal suitors because she fears hurting them or because she’s trying to avoid rejection – maybe she feels shamed into denying that she even has desires and plans. Suddenly, these deceptions aren’t healthy, judicious choices that Bella makes in service to an end-goal – they’re an unhealthy, forced behavior that attempts to somehow reconcile a contradiction between Bella’s internal desires and her “appropriate” external behavior.

 

Stephenie Meyer has dismissed feminist criticism of “Twilight” by saying that the fact that Bella exercises “choice” throughout the novels reflects the foundation of modern feminism*. However, it seems to me that the “feminism” that “Twilight” offers us is a very poor one indeed. The Feminism of Twilight is that you CAN have your choice and follow your dreams – as long as your choice is shrouded in subterfuge.

 

The Feminism of “Twilight” seems to be that you can choose to not date a boy you’re not interested in… but you’d better expend a lot of time and effort into making sure you don’t hurt his feelings with a plain rejection. You can choose a different path from what your parents want for you… but it’s best not to sit down and discuss it with them because that will hurt their fantasy of you as their precious little girl. You can choose to plan ahead for sex, er, vampirism, but you’d better keep those desires and plans to yourself or your boyfriend may think you’re slutty. Choice is great, after all, but you wouldn’t want a reputation as a stuck-up, disobedient, slutty girl… would you?

 

Of course, the major problem with this is that a worldview that gives girls “choice” but expects them to be secretive and ashamed of exercising it isn’t healthy. It’s exhausting for the girls as they constantly work to maintain the perfect appearance of fulfilling the expectations laid on them by their peers, parents, and lovers. Furthermore, it’s dangerous – when you can’t safely own and express your desires, then you also can’t receive valuable feedback and advice. A system that allows “choice” only when it’s accompanied by deception and shame destroys families, ruins relationships, and tears apart girls – and yet it’s this system that I feel “Twilight” encourages for our young women. I don’t blame Stephenie Meyer for this, but I do blame the environment that raised her (and, for that matter, the rest of us) to believe that the only way she can have her cake is if she eats it after all the guests have left.

 

--Ana Mardoll

 
Visit Ana's website to read more of her analysis of the Twilight books
___________________________________________________________

* Source

** I may have mentioned before that I’m a huge fan of Fred Clark’s “Left Behind” deconstructions and those posts were a strong inspiration for my starting a “Twilight” series.

*** Source

**** Source

 

 

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Board Business, March 24, 2011

TBAT would like to thank all the people who have submitted articles and encourages posters who are interesting in contributing regularly or irregularly to send in  material. Having a number of articles that are ready for publication allows TBAT to maximize the variety of opinions as well as be responsive to "real-world" events and concerns.

 

About the sidebar.

TBAT have been working quietly to rearrange and "clean up" the sidebar by moving items around, changing fonts/font sizes and culling out "dead" links as well as links that are duplicated on the Patheos Slacktivist website.

In order to make this site more useful to its current readers TBAT will begin April 4 2011 to remove some of the sidebar links that are live and not duplicated on the Patheos website.

At the same time TBAT will add to the sidebar links to the websites of Slacktiverse readers and posters. Readers who wish to have their website included on the new blogroll should indicate their desire to be included by posting the address of their website as a comment in response to The Geography of The Slacktiverse, part 1 post on FAQ website.

 

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)

Wait, so that was a cult?

I wasn't very happy when I wandered into the gift shop. I was eighteen years old, nearing the end of my school years, and suffering from the kind of identity crisis that introspective teenagers can get themselves into. I didn't like who I was but felt stuck with it; I was having trouble making decisions about my future; I was in various degrees of crisis with the people around me. Not thinking very highly of myself I had limited faith in my ability to fix any of my problems, but I knew things couldn't go on like this. Something had to change.

When I picked up the pink leaflet advertising a meditation class, I was reaching for something. I'd tried a bit of meditation from a book and it had given me some kind of peace for a few moments; being an identity-panicked teenager, the fact that alternative lifestyles were in fashion among my peers but that nobody had tried meditation was not an insignificant factor. But it wasn't the casual interest of an experience seeker or a confident woman; it was the desperate grab of a girl who needed something and couldn't think of anything else. Before I ever attended a class, I was committed.

What I didn't know at the time was that the leaflets weren't left there by some visiting advertiser. The shop and the classes were run by the same organisation - the same organisation that ran cafes, a publisher, and numerous other 'right livelhood' business with a turnover of several million pounds a year. I'd walked into a small branch of something bigger, wealthier and more powerful that I could have guessed from that cheap little flier. Since then the organisation has changed its name, and perhaps its practises as well, but in 1995 it was calling itself the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the FWBO for short. A nicely reassuring, mainstream-sounding name. It was two years before the Guardian article came out that talked of misogyny, sexual abuse and suicide.

At the time it surfaced, I was a regular attendee. Did it make me leave the movement? It did not.

That was just one centre that went a bit wrong, I was told. The woman who told me was a nice person: she'd been kind to me, and indeed was kind to everyone, and she spoke as one who knew and trusted that things weren't like that here. The story didn't seem to match my experience; nobody had sexually abused me. And besides, she was a 'member' of the Western Buddhist Order, an insider with a Buddhist name, while I was just a 'friend', a drop-in - and the Order was pretty clear that just visiting the classes (and paying £3.50 for each), going on retreats (and paying a few hundred pounds for a week, less if it was a 'working' retreat where you repainted the shrine room or dug rocks from the ground to smooth it over for a lawn) and meditating daily (or almost daily, and feeling guilty about the missed days) didn't make you a member. She was, I wasn't. So I assumed she knew what she was talking about. It didn't stop me coming.

Neither did the other discussions I heard rumbling around over the dinner table on retreats. There was talk of how the founders saw men as spiritually superior to women - and since the retreats were single-sex, that meant us, all the women round the table. One woman - a 'mitra', a sort of half-member - said that her revelation was this: enlightenment was so worth having that even putting up with subordination was worthwhile. I wasn't sure I bought this, because it didn't seem to address the point: my discomfort was not with subordinate status (after all, it was a hierarchical place anyway), it was that I simply didn't believe that women were less than men and felt that saying they were was a grave moral failing, one that called a person's spiritual judgement into question.

But I let it go. I'd never met the founder, and in an organisation this size I probably never would. For me, it was about the people at my local centre and the people I met on retreat. These were nice people, kind, thoughtful, dedicated and not at all exploitative, and none of the men treated the women disrespectfully that I could see. It raised some doubts about the founder, but it wasn't about him, or not for me. I stayed.

When I left, it wasn't an abrupt break. It was a gradual drift, largely triggered by reasons that lay me open to charges of being a spiritual shopper, a casual consumer - but which were actually nagging doubts, little breaths of discomfort that, now I had a new life and felt better about myself, I didn't have to suppress to stay on the life raft. I went to university and the Cambridge centre was a long, dark walk away from my room, and I didn't much like the people there. One man - an Order member - asked me how many breaths I could count in a meditation before I lost track, as if we were talking about how much I could bench press. And this was an Order member? This centre didn't seem worth the walk; I liked my new friends better than him. I started writing on arts retreats run by the organisation, and found that this was my real passion - and the fact that the founder's poetry was much studied and admired by followers despite being pretty poor stuff was something I saw much more of than I saw misogyny or sexual abuse. I wanted things that the Order spoke rather sneeringly of: a family, heterosexual relationships, some experience of the world before I gave it up. 

Little things. Or big ones, perhaps, glimpsed through little moments. Doubtful values. Claims to be the exclusive source of fulfillment that didn't tally with reality. Pressure to conform with rigid lifestyle mandates. 

Writing this article, I wanted to type the words 'They didn't hurt me.' And I think the experience did me more good than harm. I grew in confidence. I deepened my sense of beauty, vitality, being present in the world. I learned I could write. I started to find a self. These are not small things. This place that had hurt other people was, for me, the soil in which a seed of joy started to grow. I'm a happy person, and it was in that cult that I started to become so.

But there were other moments. Crying fits I couldn't explain. Guilt at being unable to sustain perfect 'mindfulness' every waking second. A sense of shallowness because I was who I was: a girl who didn't want a monastic life. Even now, when I hear the word 'Buddhism', I don't feel a sense of peace: I feel constriction, uncertainty. Fear. 

And then there's the fact that I gave money to an organisation that, by all accounts, did other people some very serious damage.

Like the Westerner I am, I exercised consumer choice. I took the good and left the bad, as far as I could, on the shelf; I walked away when I found more attractive options. Eventually. 

But I know what it is to feel the pressure to choose between believing someone you trust - or want to - and having your emotional lifebelt rupture. I know how easy it is to miss the glaringly obvious when you're looking at it from below. I know what it is about cults, bad religions: the followers are much better people than the leaders. The followers I knew were idealists, aspirers, people seeking a life of morality and integrity and insight. They were lovely people ... and they were the ones I actually spent time around. Their loveliness stood between me and the dark shadow of the movement, and for a long time I couldn't see over it. 

I was young and naive, but I was also mobile: university changed my circumstances completely, in a way that often isn't available to people in doubtful movements. I was passionate about the movement, but peripheral to it: no authority figure particularly wanted me for anything, so the pressure on me came solely from the environment and not from direct personal relationships. I was lucky: I wasn't important to them. 

I'm in no position to judge anyone for staying in a dark faith. 

From the outside, it's obvious: the leader is a bad person saying bad things. Who but a bad person would follow such a teacher? But from the inside... 

People talk of the six blind men trying to learn what an elephant is: it's a rope, it's a trunk, it's a wall. It's an image often used for different understandings of the divine. But it's an image for understanding cults, too. It wasn't a cult to me. It was a rope. I held on, and it pulled me to a new place. And then I let go, and landed safely. 

I think sometimes of the people I knew back then. I hope they're all right. 

    

--Kit Whitfield

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

At Patheos: TF: What if that was me?

Fred's new Left Behind post is up at Patheos.

Excerpt:

So bracket all of the ethical, logical and theological atrocities of this plot. Look past all those nagging concerns about physics, human nature and continuity. Just go with the story we are given. There’s enough raw material here for a few dozen epic disaster movies by the likes of Roland Emmerich or Jerry Bruckheimer. Sure, those directors may be hacks (fabulously wealthy hacks), but they know how to tell a disaster-movie story. When they destroy the earth every summer at a theater near you, they know enough not to make it boring.

....

I think there’s a connection here between LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins’ failure of story-telling and the appalling ethical failures of their characters. Both of these can be traced back to the refusal or the inability to ask that question, “What if that was me?” Because they never ask that question, the authors can’t be relied on to give us an exciting story that invites us into it any more than their characters can be relied on to give a rip about plane-crash victims or about their suddenly childless neighbors. Never asking that question is hostile to readers in terms of both ethics and story-telling, both character and plot.[by Fred Clark, TF:What if that was me, March 21, 2011, posted at Patheos.com]

Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.

 

 

Charles Bonnet Syndrome

 

Disclaimer: 'RTCs' in this post does not refer to all Christians, all Evangelicals or all readers of LaHaye and Jenkins, but rather to the Platonic 'dear reader' that the Left Behind books seem to be addressing.The abbreviation was coined by Fred Clark in his posts analysing the books to describe the distinction they appear to make between 'left behind' Christians, who weren't Christian enough to get Raptured, and the real, true Christians who disappear at the beginning of the story.

 

Fred Clark and those of us who read and comment on his columns often struggle to understand the mindset of "RTCs", "Real True Christians" like those portrayed in the Left Behind books. These attempts are many and various, but I don't think this one has occurred to anyone else so far.

There is a common, but not well-known, neurological condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome.  It describes visual hallucinations suffered by visually impaired or late-blinded people. More than ten percent of people with severe to complete visual loss experience these hallucinations, but fewer than one percent tell their doctors or other caregivers about them, because they're afraid--sometimes justifiably--of being thought to be insane.

Just for the record: Charles Bonnet Syndrome is not a form of mental illness. It's a disorder of the brain's visual processing system (about which more later). Unlike, say, schizophrenic "voices," the images produced in CBS, though they can be very vivid and startling, are not emotion-laden or connected with the viewer in any way. You may see faces, but they're not the faces of anyone you've ever met; you may see people walking around, but they're not talking to you or even paying attention to you. They are merely abstract visual images.

CBS apparently happens when the brain's visual processing systems become starved for input. These neural circuits then basically begin making stuff up. The resulting images can be simple geometric shapes, miniature visual copies of objects seen at some time in the past, faces (often with distortions such as huge teeth or eyes) or entire scenes of rooms full of costumed people moving about.  It's an interesting phenomenon. You can find out more about it in this excellent talk by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

So what does all this have to do with people like LaHaye and Jenkins and their fans?

I think there's an analogy between RTCs and Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients.

What if the sometimes bizarre beliefs of the RTCs--the reliance on "magic words" rather than compassion, justice and mercy; the belief that the President of the U.S. can simultaneously be a Muslim, an Atheist and the follower of a radical Black Protestant minister; the understanding of the Bible as a message to 21st Century Americans rather than Bronze Age-to-first-century Jews--what if these beliefs are being generated by minds starved of "real input" in the form of grasping how the world and people actually work?

Bear with me here.

It doesn't take many pages of Left Behind to convince you that its authors have no idea what makes people tick in real life. In the absence of this understanding, they have to substitute something else. Pretty much any narrative will do. The economy is controlled by Jewish Bankers.  Brown people are planning to take over the world. America is persecuted by people who hate our freedom. Pick one. Preferably one that makes you look good.

Likewise, if you have no framework for understanding things like evolution, or plate tectonics, or human physiology, you can interpret AIDS, earthquakes and heart attacks as the Judgment of God on people who are insufficiently like you. 

In all seriousness: the human brain is, among other things, a machine for recognizing and generating patterns. If there's not a pattern detectable in the environment, it will supply one itself. (Remember the Face on Mars?)

I think it's worth considering that this sort of pattern-generation in the absence of real data is at work in generating the RTC world view. At the very least, it is a more charitable comparison than the frequently-made charge of mental illness. And it suggests that the problem need not be intractable.

We've all heard stories of people who changed their  beliefs when confronted at close quarters with facts that did not fit into that belief system. My gay son is a good, respectful, compassionate kid: is he really going to hell? My black (Muslim, female, transsexual) co-worker shows up on time, gets the job done, and doesn't give me any flak, unlike some others I could name--is he or she really some kind of hostile alien?

Those pink giraffes that I see when I get up in the middle of the night disappear when I turn on the bathroom light--maybe they're not really there.

--Lila

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.