zoomtarded

So at the start of the week I had to go to Norn Iron again. Man I hate that place. It is filled with all the things I hate. Murder, for example. Crude language. A distinct metric measurement deficit. Sure, you think I am going over the top on this Norn Iron animus for your amusement. But where else are football jerseys a major political statement? I was invited by the pleasant, terrifically handsome bunch of people that make up the Queens University Belfast Christian Union, or QUBCU if you prefer awkward acronyms to address their masses on evangelism. It always surprises me when people invite me to talk about real-life Christian issues. In my mind, I’m the guy you call in when you want someone to waffle on noisily about some abstract theological point. In the mirror, I’m like a cut-rate Pete Rollins. In reality, I am a Christian who doesn’t sweat (visibly) when speaking in public and so I end up trying to pretend that I know about evangelism.

This is something I excel at you see, as I spend my working life convincing my boss that I know things about evangelism too. Evangelism is a nasty word. I am made to feel like some kind of bully if I am honest and tell new people that I am an evangelist. Maybe that is just the homunculus Freud in the centre of my brain activating my guilt over the lives I have distorted with my clever arguments and listening ear. But I think I am on firm ground holding that many people are deeply suspicious of any kind of evangelism. My dear and very stylish friend Stig studied marketing and so he spent four years defending himself and his course at parties from uninformed accusations that he and his subject were pure evil transformed into human form and study notes respectively. That is what you get for hanging around with college students but what they were really aggressive about was not “marketing” which is a surely benign activity but successful marketing that approaches the form of evangelism. They realise that in some sense, Vodafone’s non-stop trendy music ads work on them. They get their hooks into you and you end up having a bit of your brain colonised by the red apostrophe. They hated marketing and Stig the marketeer not because of any thought through consideration of advertising’s evil or Stig’s dreadful odour but because they are epistemologically inclined to distrust any attempts to modify belief systems.

That was a clever way of saying that folk don’t like it when people launch assaults on how they view the world.

I’m verbally processing here, killing time while Neuro talks to her mom on the phone, enjoying Cake (why aren’t Cake superstars on a level with the Shins?) so forgive me if I am talking crap. Be gentle to me in the comments section. But the reason I was invited to Queens in a grand-universe-fate-providence sense was to try and stop the raw material of this fear. It is in places like Belfast where the Christian sub-culture is larger and more aggressive than any other culture that evangelism starts to get a bad name. Christians probably should never work out of positions of power (again, off the top of my head opinion) but the sheer critical mass of God-botherers in one city encourages an attitude towards evangelism that can be totally devoid of love, irony, listening or humility.

So The 3rd K and me drove up and talked about sex and God and girls, had dinner with Sam and then delivered our spiel. I only broke one flip chart, stood on one piece of musical equipment and I didn’t swear. So I did a good job. Unlike the last time I talked to Christian Union students in Norn Iron, I was not publicly called a heretic by a minister of a mainline Protestant denomination. No public condemnations has to be considered positive.

I am sorry I didn’t know about the exhibit in the Waterfront from the Ikon lads featuring their “Heresy Monopoly”- I wouldn’t have missed it (Ta to Johnny Baker for the link and pic):

It wasn’t all good news. I failed to fit this sentence into the talk: “The muscular German cyborg dude dances with French Canadians”.

More Nonsense Links
I know why you come to Zoomtard. It is because I am so cool. So cool because I share with you a website consisting of photos of Soviet calculators. As my good friend Jurg would say, in a butchered Russian accents, Classnya Popka!

I like it when people agree with me! Joel Johnson is a bigwig in the internet-gadget-journalism cartel (who also control the flow of water in the southern hemisphere) and here he rants at idiots who buy crap like iPods that lock you into preposterous licensing commitments. If you don’t have an i-River from 2001 I won’t be your friend anymore.

I think I love Scot Adams. This blog post shows why.

After killing Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre fled to Canada and got a job as a emergency-line operator. This game is addictive. And finally for those of you who enjoy laughing, a David Sedaris article in the New Yorker.

Your Correspondent, His kisses make Judas seem sincere

So there have been many notable things written and undoubtedly missspeled in Irish papers over the last couple of weeks. Nothing tops this letter submitted to the Times of London by Wicklow resident, Frank Schnittger, regarding the opening of Croke Park to rugby and soccer and the imminent arrival of the English team.

Ireland may well be missing Brian O’Driscoll as well as Shane Horgan and don’t have the resources in depth to overcome such losses. However neither will England have the armoured cars and machine guns they had the last time they entered Croke Park!

It is a darn sight better that controversy machine Kevin Myers who had a rant (registration required) at an Anglican Bishop who is using U2 songs as the basis for a Pentecost service. The Bishop of Grantham, Tim Ellis, announced that he was trying a new liturgical track and that the pews would be removed as people were invited into a service based around U2’s extensive collection of Christian songs.

Myers has a go at Ellis and indeed Paige Blair (who he correctly identifies as the key figure in the U2-as-liturgy movement. I initially made the claim that it was Beth Maynard (Thanks to Ms. Maynard for correcting me.)). He accuses them of being:

Ignorant of Christian theology, ignorant of the meaning of the Eucharist, ignorant of the Bible and of the great music of the church

Sure. Since Bishops and Priests are often much less invested in these areas than say, newspaper columnists. The best part of the article is how this experiment somehow lets us empathise with “Muslim loonies”. Terrorism as a protest at the mis-use of Where The Streets Have No Name? That is an innovative slant on it.

For those of you who don’t attend the same church as me and missed the Bill Hybels interview with Bono we showed a few weeks ago and still don’t understand why Christians seem intent to call U2 songs like “Grace”, “Wake Up Dead Man”, “Yahweh” and “40” liturgical, maybe you’ll find this 1982 interview with Contemporary Christian Music Magazine illuminating.

You will be glad to hear that I am not one of those authors who write naked. Often.

Your Correspondent, He had to steal away cos the time seemed right

On Authority
This idea of what Christians mean when they say the Bible is their authority is actually very interesting. Maybe I am just flogging a dead horse and if I am, tell me in the comments. I am big enough to take the criticism. Jimlad. I’m looking at you.

It is a crazy claim to make. That God inspired a book and that it takes the form of some laws, lots of stories and some very erotic poetry. One of the things people have to understand about the claim is the difference between us Catholics and us Protestants. I am a Prodolic. Raised Catholic. Living as a Presbie. The lads in Rome think that authority comes in the form of Scripture and tradition. I ain’t going to work out the exact specification of how that works because they themselves are confused about it at the moment. But as someone (*cough* Tom Wright *cough*) wrote in a book I read recently, when you claim that there are two authorities, you change the meaning of the word authority. There are folk in Utah who claim to have two wives, but that is a categorically different term from the one I use when I complain that my wife keeps leaving me alone at night to go hang out with her friends who don’t have lisps.

Wives come in ones, otherwise they become something considerably less interesting. Authorities come in ones, otherwise they just become guiding voices.

Claiming tradition (which means the practice of Christians down through the ages) is authority is like a soldier who receiving his orders in the mail mistakes the the postman for his commanding officer.

On Literality
Another question that people ask alot is whether I believe the Bible is literally true. Literal, originally, (literally!) means the “sense of the letter”. So ask me if I read the Bible literally. Go on ask me.

Yes! Of course I do. Well I try to. I mean, that is what the game is all about- understanding the original meaning of Scripture and I do my best.

When it says that Solomon built the temple, I read that to mean Solomon built the temple. That is what it means to communicate right? When the Bible says some lad wants to wander in the fragrant gardens of his beloved I take that to mean something a little more, meaningful. When the Psalms say God has smoke coming out of his nostrils, I usually don’t take that to mean God is a dragon. Don’t be silly! God didn’t even make dragons! He left that to us. But just because I believe that “metaphorically”, to use the language of the average Freddy Sceptic, doesn’t mean I don’t believe its true. For something to be an effective metaphor, it has to map on to reality. Thus some no name poet talks about digging for potatoes being the same as coming to terms with his identity as a poet and that makes sense to us. If Shay Heaney had talked about potato digging as an illustration of a business phone call then we wouldn’t have his hung his poster on our teenaged walls.

We all did that, right?

Thus, when Hosea tells us that God thinks we are all adulterous fiends, he doesn’t mean for us to think we married the Big Fella one drunken night in Vegas and can’t remember it. He is telling the truth though. Truth so profound one has to resort to poetics to get it across.

Literal is not the opposite of metaphorical. I have made this point often before on Zoomtard. When Robbie Keane “literally cannons the ball into the back of the net” we are speaking literally in metaphorical terms. He did score a goal. But the ball moved very fast. Talking about the event in the terms of a physics textbook, “rapid velocity propelled the inflated sphere into the commonly agreed target” doesn’t do justice to the dramatic context of an international soccer match. When people ask about the literality of the Bible they think they are asking whether or not the Bible can be taken seriously. When I say often one must read it metaphorically they hear me say the Bible is a load of fairy tales. But that is not the case. The most potent moments in our life must be described in terms of poetry, story, drama. Reductionism won’t do.

Your Correspondent, Touring Europe with his musical rendition of My Left Foot

There was a little flurry of activity around our tiny dark, dusty cupboard of the internet a few weeks back when the Nerdlingers (Jaybercrow, Peebles, Bob and me) blogged boringly about the Bible and what authority it might have. Because I was reading a book about homosexuality in the church (yawn) I started reading Tom Wright’s little book explaining his views on the topic. Oh what a book it is!

At one point he is talking about the vexed issue of how we split the bits of the Old Testament we don’t live out anymore away from the bits we do. Dave and I were just chatting about this last week. (Dave actually gave me book in the first place; thanks Dave!) Wright talks about the continuity and discontuity of the OT laws. He says that which is left behind is that which was pointing to Jesus and fulfilled by Him. Obvious examples include the Jewish keeping of the Sabbath. Its a quick way of describing the solution but one of the masterly things Wright does is bring the best possible illustration to you so you can grasp the complex idea (really that is what the 5-Act debate was all about, an illustration). (Well, an illustration grown up into a model, but…)

Here is what Wright says about the discontinuity and continuity issue:

When travellers set sail across a vast ocean and finally arrive on the distant shore, they leave the ship behind and continue over land, not because the ship was no good, or because their voyage had been misguided, but precisely because both ship and voyage had accomplished their purpose. During the new, dry-land stage of their journey, the travellers remain- and in this illustration must never forget that they remain- the people who made that voyage in that ship.

Now us nerdlingers can take a moment to compose ourselves in the face of our inadequacy. Why can’t we write the way Wright writes? Eh?

Nightmare Where A Knife Bearing Pregnant Lady Screams At You
Over the weekend we watched Last Kiss. Just like in his last terifically successful indie flick aimed at 20-somethings, Zach Braff plays on stereotypes. In Garden State it was the fancifully unreal Natalie Portman character. Here it is four friends in their late 20s right out of a militant feminists’ attack on maxim mag readership. I’m not in my late 20s yet but if all my male friends far exceed these characters in maturity and vision, then I conclude he may be cutting his characters out of cereal boxes.

The whole movie rests on a faulty premise. I guess when you are dealing with matters of the heart, illogic does not lead to incoherency. Braff’s character is concerned that his life is too stable, that there will be no more surprises, that its all planned out. An unplanned pregnancy precipitates this crisis.

Thankfully there is a character written who is mature enough to see through this navel gazing and set the young man back on track. Its Tom Wilkinson playing the father of his girlfriend. In the great scene of the movie and in one of the best lines of recent times he says, “What you feel only matters to you. It’s what you do for those you say you love that counts.” Damn straight. Amen. Preach it brutha! And so on and so forth. The movie is worth it just for that.

If I were a badly disciplined blogger I might jump off here to some meditations on how marriage is the great adventure offered to humankind or to thoughts on how we all desperately long for home in a way more profound than Dr Scrubs can yet articulate but you know I’d never do that you you, don’t you?

Don’t you?

Your Correspondent, Lead singer of Captain Downer and the Buzzkills