Why There Is No Hope For Your "Christian" Friends

One of the most constant and consistent frustrations of those opposing Trump is with his supporters, especially with -- and this is most of them -- "Christians." The disbelief that non-Christians have with "Christians" who support Trump is completely justified, but discussions about the lack of compassion from "Christians" is for some other time. This time let's deal with the dismissal of facts and reality by "Christians" in their rabid defense of Trump and the things he's doing.

So let's deal with a hard truth:

There is no hope for your "Christian" friends, and it is a waste of your time trying to talk to them or convince them of anything fact-based or anything having to do with actual reality, even when it comes to things that might be directly affecting them (like the ACA) in the very near future.

Well, that's kind of doom and gloom, isn't it?

Maybe, but it's the truth, and here's why:

From childhood, "Christians" grow up being taught to ignore science, history, and archaeology for the greater truth that the Bible contains. See, sometimes what's in the Bible comes into direct conflict with the reality of the world. In those situations, "Christians" are taught that the Bible is always right and science is always wrong. Always. The Bible is infallible after all, so any fact that goes against something in the Bible is always suspect. It is only a "fact," meaning it is some piece of some liberal conspiracy to undermine the Church.

Let me give you a couple of real world examples that I dealt with over and over again as I was growing up.

See, dinosaurs were my first love. I spent a good 10 years of my life planning to be a paleontologist when I grew up (which is a story for another time). By the time I was four (yes, I said four), I was already neck deep in textbooks about dinosaurs (not little kid books but actual science books about dinosaurs and paleontology). To put it another way: Science was my thing. However, dinosaurs don't fit well within the "Christian" mythos. I mean, where are they even mentioned in the Bible? And how do they fit into that whole seven-day creation myth? "Christians" will go through all sorts of mental contortions to explain all of those very real bones sitting in museums.

Explanation one:

When God created the Earth, he created it with the fossils already in the ground. There were no actual dinosaurs, God just made giant bones and stuck them in the ground.

What the fuck?

Yeah, even as a kid, that was kind of my mental response even though I had no clue about the word "fuck."

I mean, why? Why would God, any god, do something like that? Just to fuck with us? I actually had to have a discussion with my mom about this when I was... oh, I don't know, maybe 12 or 14. Her question to me was, Is it possible? Is it possible that God could have just put the bones in the ground?

How do you answer something like that? Of course, it's possible. But why? I told her it didn't make any sense logically that God would do something like that.

And she said something like, Maybe God did it as a puzzle for us to figure out.

What the fuck?

Look, this wasn't my mom talking. She didn't come up with these ideas on her own. It was some unit or something they were doing in Sunday school and, since it was about dinosaurs, she wanted to talk to me about it. And it wasn't just from my mom I head this theory. But, you know, when it came from the Church, she wasn't ever much for questioning it. This was about as close as she ever got to doing that.

So, yeah, if it was a puzzle, how do you even figure that out? What, then, is the puzzle? If you come up with answers that the "puzzle" would lead you to -- that dinosaurs ruled the world for millions of years then died suddenly -- you are completely wrong. That doesn't make any sense, that God would deliberately mislead us like that, not to mention that there are no clues at all that God had just stuck bones in the ground, so you could never come to that knowledge from the "puzzle."

So she said, "It could be a test?" Like a test of our faith. To see if we would believe that they had been real when what we should be doing was immediately grasping that God had stuck bones in the ground even more proving that He is God.

A trick, then, I said. You're saying that God is trying to trick us. That's mean.

The conversation ended when I said I didn't believe in a God who would make bones and stick them in the ground for no logical reason. It was either stupid or mean. Then I walked away.

We never talked about it again, but that was how I dealt with that particular scenario any other time I heard it mentioned.

Explanation two:
Man and the dinosaurs lived simultaneously upon the Earth. Yes, despite any archaeological evidence, man and dinosaurs coexisted. Some people even believe that Noah had dinosaurs on the ark and that he saved them from the flood... just so that they could all go extinct some time just after that.

One of my youth pastors when I was in high school believed this, that Noah loaded the ark with dinosaurs. Baby dinosaurs where the really big ones were involved. We had... disagreements... about this frequently. So much so, in fact, that he did two separate units about Creationism (in the same year!) with the whole dinosaur/human coexistence as the central point. For one of them, he brought in some outside "expert" on the issue who had a film and various "proofs" that dinosaurs lived with men. The most famous of these being this fossil of a dinosaur footprint with a man's footprint within it. That was the proof.
[If you're interested, this is known as the Paluxy dinosaur/man track controversy and has been debunked by science, though there are still plenty of young-Earth Creationists who believe in the coexistence of man and dinosaur.]

Mostly, "Christians" tend to ignore the dinosaur question or take up the more liberal view that maybe the word "day" where it's used in the creation myth didn't mean a literal 24-hour day.

The point, though, is that "Christians" are taught from a young age to ignore empirical evidence when it contradicts the Bible and that they will fabricate all sorts of stories to get around conflicts.

AND they think they are smarter than you while doing it, because, in the end, they believe that their "foolishness" is greater than your "wisdom":

I Corinthians 1:27 -- But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise...

I Corinthians 1:19-20 -- For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

I Corinthians 3:18-20 -- If any of you thinks he is wise in this age, he should become a fool, so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written, "He catches the wise in their craftiness." And again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile."

These are not the only examples of this kind of philosophy from the Bible, so you might be able to understand why some of these people espouse the view that you don't need to have "any learning but what's in the Bible," something I've been told numerous times by numerous people all the way into my 20s when I was going to college. There's a reason why they pride themselves on their ignorance; it's because they've been raised to believe it's a virtue.

Their ignorance makes them "smarter" than you, and you're just not going to talk those people out of that. You can't argue with stupid, especially when it believes it's pulling the wool over your eyes.

Growing Up In the race Divide (part 5e)

This post is not specifically about racism, but it would hardly be fair to not tell how it all ended.

After the church made the decision to merge, I went into damage control mode in order to protect my youth group. I mean, I knew I wasn't going to have a job anymore once all the merger stuff happened, but I wanted to make sure my kids were taken care of.

Wait, let me back up a step:
What they tried to tell me (and kept telling me over the few months that all the legal stuff for the merger took place) is that I would be necessary through the merger and beyond; they would need me to help integrate the two groups of kids. "Don't worry; you're not going to lose your job." But I knew that was bullshit. Not that it mattered. There was no way I was transferring to the other church.

We set up some joint events between the two youth groups... you know, so they could get to know each other. Yeah, it sounds like it would be such a great idea. Except, well, the other group, being the teenagers of upper middle- and lower upper-class parents were completely dismissive of my group. And my group tried. I had a couple of very outgoing kids, and they walked right up to some of the other teens to introduce themselves, and the kids from the other group would just turn and walk away without saying anything. Basically, at each event we had set up, my group got shunned by the other group. And their youth pastor did nothing about it. Each event, within 20-30 minutes, my kids were saying to me, "We don't want to be here. They won't talk to us."

And here's the complication:
I spent a few years working as a substitute teacher during this time (because I wasn't on staff at the church, just an hourly worker), so I knew a lot of the kids in the other youth group. I was a well-liked sub. In fact, I was the favorite sub of at least two schools because, as the administrators said, I was one of the very rare subs who was liked by both the students and the teachers. So I knew the kids in this other group, and they already knew that they liked me. Many of them liked me more than their own youth pastor (who, honestly, wasn't a lot of fun).

At the very first joint event we went to, a social event at their youth center, within 10 minutes of us being there, a girl from the other group, a girl that I knew, walked over to me where I was standing with a couple of my kids and said to me, in front of them, "Why are you hanging out with these losers? Come hang out with us; we're better." After I recovered from my disbelief, I made it clear that my kids were not losers, and I wasn't going to have anyone talking that way.

Yes, the other pastor and I had a discussion, though it was less discussing and more me just telling him like it was. This guy who was a decade older than me. But he didn't argue. It also didn't change anything.

Which mostly brings us up to the week of the merger. There was a last Sunday at the church I grew up in; that was the day they announced the merger was official and that the next Sunday would be at the other church. The other church was supposed to send one of their buses around to pick up my kids for the Sunday morning youth stuff on that first Sunday. That was the only thing I was concerned with.

Now, you have to understand that on the Sunday of the announcement, the last Sunday in our building, they were still telling me, "We need you. We need you." Technically, we didn't become part of the other church until midnight, so Monday. Monday afternoon, I got a call, a call I was expecting, "We just wanted to let you know that your services are no longer required." That's pretty close to the exact wording, "Your services are no longer required."

I called everyone I knew that week, everyone with any power to affect the first Sunday of joint services, to make sure that they picked up my kids. "Yes, yes. It's all fine. We'll pick them up." Sunday morning came. My parents and brother went to church. I was somewhat livid over that fact. My mom, I suppose, was trying to keep her job. At least, at the time she was. They went; I stayed home. Sometime around mid-morning, I got the first call, "No one picked me up."

"No one picked me up."

"No one picked us up."

"What do we do?"

"What do I do?"

It's what I knew was going to happen. I was full of rage and tears, and there was nothing I could do about it. Again, on the Monday, because I had made some calls on Sunday knowing I wouldn't be able to get anyone, I got a call, "We've decided that it's not cost effective to pick up your kids. You'll have to find some other place for them to go."

And I did try. But these kids had just had their home ripped away from them, and for some of them, my group was almost literally their home. The only place they felt safe. Including the kid I had to kick out of service about once a month whom I never expected to keep coming back, the kid who, when picked up by the cops one night, had them bring him to me, not his parents, and who did, always, keep coming back. And their home was just... gone. Because it wasn't "cost effective."

Of the three dozen kids, only three of them allowed me to get them situated in another group. My old youth pastor's group at the church he'd moved to when I was graduating from high school. Just three. The rest... just quit church.

What they learned was that churches couldn't be trusted. Churches were full of hypocrites. Churches only wanted you if you had money and wore the right clothes. The people in churches were worse than the people not in churches so why bother to go. There was no, "They will know you are Christians by your love."

Now, it's easy to say at this point, "Well, that was just a bad church," but I  have worked with and in a substantial number of churches across three states, and they were all essentially the same. Except one. That one was a church composed of homeless people and existed through donations to keep it running. "Keep it running" meant enough money to pay to rent the space they used on Sunday nights and to feed the homeless people who came. Yes, they came to eat, but they also listened while they were there. There was no salary for the pastor or any staff or deacons. Just some people who volunteered to help make sure people were getting fed.

All of the other churches where very much about looking the part if you wanted to attend. The right color skin (white or, maybe, slightly "tanned" (meaning there might be someone of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, but there were no black people)), the right kind of clothes, and, most importantly, the right kind of money. You know the focus is wrong when, during a social event, the pastor turns to you and says, "Hey, by the way, how much are you tithing, right now?" [True story.]

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5b)

Note: Go back and read the last entry in this series before reading this one.

So...
There I was, all of 20 years old, officially the unofficial youth pastor (or unofficially the official youth pastor; it's hard to know which) at my first night of youth group, and I had two kids. Middle schoolers whom I didn't know from Adam.

Initially, I couldn't even find them, because they weren't where they were supposed to be. They were down in the game room. You might think, "well, what else would you expect from middle schoolers," but that they were middle schoolers wasn't the reason. The reason they were down in the game room was because it had been weeks, at least, since they'd had any kind of teaching or, even, a leader down in the youth area. Basically, they just came each week to hang out because it was better than being at home. [And, man, I don't even know how to feel about that. I didn't then, and I still don't now. Just... how horrible is that, to have a home life that is so unenjoyable that you would rather come and just be ignored at church with nothing to do than to stay at home (because, sometimes, it was only one of them there).]

Now... You might think that the problem here was that the youth group was practically non-existent (however, we did have a few more, maybe 10 (including the two from Wednesdays), that would come on Sunday mornings, kids who had to come because their parents made them), and that was a problem, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem was that I didn't have any of the prejudices held by the church at large and didn't care about the "acceptability" of the teenagers who came.

So let me give you some history:
My church was started as a mission of another church around 1915. At the time it was founded, the neighborhood it was planted in was a fairly well-to-do, up-and-coming middle class neighborhood. Big Southern houses and all of that. I think it probably reached its peak in the 50s and, by the 70s, was on a steep decline. The "founding fathers" of my church had all lived in the area around the church when it started; by the 80s, all of their families (and, yes, there were old men in the church, deacons and such, who had grown up in it) had moved to the outskirts of town to get away from "urban blight." [The actual definition of that term has to do with buildings (and that was true: once stately homes in the area around the church were falling into disrepair), but, when they talked about it in my church, it had to do with people.]

As the members moved farther away from the church, fewer and fewer people from the actual neighborhood around the church attended it. So, where it had once been a church that people walked to on Sunday morning, it had become a church that people drove to. And, sure, that's how churches are now (and were in the 80s), but churches didn't start out that way. Protestant churches in the US, I mean. But I digress... The point is that the church was still a mostly upper middle class/lower upper class congregation when I walked down the steps to the youth room in 1990. The people in the mile or so radius around the church weren't welcome there, and they knew it. [Which isn't to say that anyone would have been turned away (despite the fact that we had "guards" at the doors), but no one from that area, having come to the church once, would have ever come back.]

The real problem, I suppose, was that the church hired the wrong guy when they hired me. I mean, they didn't hire someone who was going to play their game. I'm sure they thought they had, but they should have known; I'd given them plenty of clues. The biggest one was that I refused to be a ministerial student despite the fact that they tried to bribe me to do it then tried to extort me to do it. They were very disappointed that I was majoring in English (so was my college faculty, except for the English department, who had tried to coerce (force) me into math). But those are other stories. I think they forgot that, although I grew up in the church, I was not ever one of them. I was part of the "hired help," and my family was, at best, lower middle class (and I'm not sure we were always that).

However, with their stated desire of hiring someone to revitalize the youth group, they definitely hired the right guy, and that's what I set out to do. [The issue here is that their stated goal was incomplete. It should have been "to revitalize the youth group with 'our kind of people.'"] And I did it by focusing on the neighborhood around the church. Because why? They were kids, and that's what I was there to do: minister to kids. I didn't care if they were rich or poor or black or white or, probably, even if they had been Martian, but I never had a green-skinned kid show up, so I guess we'll never know about that.

To make a long story short, we'll just say that I succeeded. Within a year, I was running over 30 kids on Wednesday nights and, by the end of two years, more than 50. Most of those kids were from lower income homes, and more than a dozen of them were black. Almost none of these kids had parents who went to the church. Or any church. And, now, we arrive at the problem: I thought I was doing a good thing. The right thing. But I was causing some problems higher up the food chain; I just didn't know about them.
Yet.

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 5a)

I was 15 when I started working at my church. It started out with small tasks, I suppose you'd say. I'd help in the kitchen, which was an easy job to get because, well, my mom was the cook, so, if they were shorthanded and needed someone to do the dishes or something, I'd get drafted. I mowed lawns for the building superintendent. Sometimes, I got the oh-so-fun job of cleaning the bathrooms. Things like that.

But I was good with kids so, somewhere in there, I transitioned to working in the various children's programs, and I spent the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school (when I was 16) working in the gym assisting the recreation director with all of the summer programs, including the ones for teenagers, which meant I was in charge of my friends. It wasn't a big deal. I mean, I never had to go get someone higher up to enforce the rules because people wouldn't listen to me. Not even when I was in charge of adults during the evening programs. And, as time went on, I was left in charge more and more often.

During my junior year of high school, the recreation director left to go somewhere else. The church didn't hire a new one; they just put me in charge of the recreation programs. Nominally, I was under the auspices of the youth director, but, really, it was just me. Basically, he just had to sign off on whatever it was I wanted to do, but he never said no. [This was a good deal for the church, by the way. We were in a decline, at the time, and they replaced a salaried staff member with an hourly worker. A minimum wage hourly worker, at that. I'm sure they pocketed at least $25,000 off of the deal.]

During my senior year of high school, I started teaching Sunday school. Not to little kids, to my own age group. Sometimes, I also taught on Wednesday nights, too, to the whole youth group. And, sometimes, I taught the college group on Sunday nights. These teaching gigs were not because they didn't have anyone else to do it. They were because the youth director acknowledged that I was the most qualified. To put this in context, any time there was a disagreement about anything in the Bible between my youth director (who also taught Latin, so a smart guy) and myself, when we got into it and did the research, he always had to come tell me that I was right. [This is not me bragging. This is me giving you the necessary contextual background to understand what's coming up.] The only thing he didn't fully concede to me was our disagreement on Revelation to which he said, "I'm not saying that you're right, but I am saying that I was wrong."

All of that to say that I was fairly integral to the running of things "downstairs" (where the youth stuff was located) well before I graduated from high school. But, then, I graduated from high school, and, then, I went away to college. During the summer after my graduation before I left, the youth pastor quit. It was very sudden, but he got a (much) better offer from another church in the city and, basically, just walked out the door. Sure, he gave, like, the standard two weeks notice, but that doesn't mean much in church work. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed at him for bailing, and we didn't exactly part on the best of terms.

Now, let's jump ahead a couple of years.

Where I went to college, although in another state, was only about an hour away from home. My mom didn't much like having me out of the house, but freshmen were required to live on campus, so that's what I did. As soon as I became a sophomore, though, she started urging me to move back home and commute to school. The thing that decided me to do that was that opportunity to become the acting youth director at my church, the church I had mostly not been to for the past couple of years (other than the summer between my freshman and sophomore years). Hmm... maybe "acting" is not quite the word I want. Technically, there was a youth director, but they had rolled a whole bunch of stuff up into one position, so he was about six different things: youth, recreation, college/career, education, and... well, I can't remember what else. At any rate, he wasn't much interested in teaching the youth, so he offered me a spot under him in which I would be over the youth (and, mostly, the recreation) program. I was still not on staff, though, and still being paid by the hour. [Yes, it's like the crummy deals that authors take from traditional publishers when they are first starting out because 1. they don't know any better and 2. they are just happy to be being published.]

Just to make this point clear, when I left to go away to college not quite two years prior to that first Wednesday night I walked down into the youth room to teach, we had been running 40-50 teens on a Wednesday night. But I and the youth pastor had both left at the same time, and he had been replaced with a guy who felt like the teenagers were a burden and didn't really want to have anything to do with them. I knew there had been deterioration, but, still, I wasn't expecting the sight I was greeted with: two kids. Two. Both of them middle schoolers. I didn't even know who they were.
Well, then.

[So, yeah, I know that this doesn't seem to fit into this series, but, trust me, it does. Just come back next week.]

Existentially Cranky (an IWSG post)

Some time ago, my wife referred to me as "existenially cranky." I, um, well, I couldn't argue with her. In fact, I just kind of looked at her, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, I guess so." It's hard to argue with the truth.

I suppose most people would take that statement as an insult, but she didn't mean it that way, and I didn't take it that way. The truth is, that is kind of how I experience existence. Not that I'm cranky, not really; it's more that I approach almost everything from a standpoint of being dissatisfied. And not really being dissatisfied, just seeing the flaws in things, which is not really about seeing the flaws but about seeing how things could be made better.

Unfortunately, that extends to human behavior as well, a thing which is often the root of my crankiness. And, actually, when it's about human behavior, it may well be crankiness.

So here's a short example:
Many years ago, I worked as a youth pastor. At some event or other, one of the kids (one of the girls, actually) got in trouble for something (no, I don't remember). Her father got upset that she got in trouble and complained to the pastor and, thus, there had to be a meeting. You know, because how dare I discipline his daughter for something that was clearly unacceptable behavior. During the meeting, I explained how the behavioral expectations had been very plainly (multiple times) laid out and how she had been aware of the behavioral expectations. His response to that was to say to me something along the lines of, "Well, you can't expect teenagers to follow those kinds of rules."

I have to say, his attitude made me mad. And I expressed it. Very matter-of-factly, I said, "Yes, I can. I certainly can. Every other teenager there was able to follow the rules [which, really, were very simple], so I certainly can expect them to follow the rules."

His response? "Yes, but..." blah blah blah about how his kid was "special" and shouldn't have to follow the rules. Those rules were there for all of the other kids. I shouldn't have those same expectations of his daughter. At which point I had to explain that, yes, with that attitude, there is no way to expect better behavior from his daughter, because it is only through expecting better behavior that we get better behavior. He left unconvinced. I didn't apologize.

This attitude, the attitude of being "special," is one of the reasons that it annoys me so much when people disobey traffic laws. Did you know that studies show that that is the #1 reason people speed and break traffic laws? It's because they feel "special." No, seriously. Studies show that people who, say, speed believe that the speed limit was established for other people, people that don't drive as well as they do (and no one drives as well as they do). Therefore, they have a special exception to not have to follow the speed limit.

The problem is that being a good driver is like having a good sense of humor: Everyone believes they have one. Or being smart, because everyone thinks they're smart. It's all those other people that are just of average intelligence.

Yeah, this kind of stuff really does make me cranky, because so much of it is founded on the ways we lie to ourselves. I suppose that's how a lot of people are able to live with themselves, but I'm often struck by how much of the bad behavior that exists exists only because we don't expect better of ourselves.

Lately, I've been very struck by this same kind of attitude in relation to blogging. In this other forum that I'm involved with, there is the frequent question by people of "how do I get more traffic to my blog?" 1. Because, yes, someone can ask the question one day and two days later someone else will ask the same question (pay attention, maybe?). 2. It doesn't matter how many times you say "be involved and visit other blogs," etc, the response is inevitably "I don't have time for that." Well, you know, I don't have time for it, either, but I do it.

[And in this particular corner of the blog world, it also extends to "buy my book," "review my book," "support my book" frequently by people who never do the same for anyone else. Never.]

Basically, there's this attitude of "I should get to be the 'special' one and have everyone else do for me without doing anything back, and, man, that attitude does just make me cranky. I'm sorry, but, if you're not Neil Gaiman, you don't get to have thousands of followers of your blog without being involved. Or, maybe, John Scalzi, but Scalzi is involved. I don't know if he visits blogs, but he supports authors in a lot of ways he doesn't have to.

So what I'm saying is this: if you want people to support you, quit asking; go support some other people. I can guarantee you, if you do it sincerely and consistently, people will notice. I mean, I notice when someone has reviewed (or even rated) something of mine, and those people get more of my time when I'm doing something to support other bloggers/writers. If you put a new book out, I'll probably buy it (unless I just can't afford to at that moment); that doesn't take any time or much effort. If you've reviewed something of mine, your stuff gets higher on my list of things to do, not because of trading favors or anything like that, but, if you've supported me, I want to support you. [Which does not mean a "good" review, but it does mean an honest review.] If I had more time to read, I'd review more stuff, but I do always have something "indie" that I'm reading, and I review everything I read.

I'm not saying that visiting blogs and commenting and reading and reviewing are miracle cures to traffic woes, but it's where you start. I mean, I don't care how brilliant your blog is, if I stop by there consistently and comment and you never visit me back, I'm probably going to quit coming around. Unless you're just that brilliant. Or Neil Gaiman. Or John Scalzi. Because, and let's just face it, you're not that special. Neither am I. But, then, that's why you see me visiting and commenting.

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm insecure that my existential crankiness drives people away. Actually, my demand (because it is kind of a demand) that people do better, be better, think better (think at all) that stems from existential crankiness drives people away. It does drive people away, which makes me more cranky. But someone has to expect better behavior, right?

This post has been brought to you in part by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG.