Religion as Victim
Where would religion (specifically, Christianity) be without its perpetual ability to victimize itself?
What if Christianity – all of the sudden! – was at the top of it all? Would it still be able to function? Would it even need to exist?
Contemporary religion has survived by always being against everything else. Its masochistic tendencies have rendered it useless on its own. It needs a battle. It needs to have its back against the wall.
Its ability to make every little occurrence or happening look like an Attack On Religion is one of its few well-articulated virtues. Christianity grew out of the need to rally together true victims: victims of real oppression, not “victims” of a no-prayer-in-schools-&-no-”in-God-we-trust” court ruling.
American Christians aren’t victims. They are antagonists.
Now, don’t get me wrong- there are real, honest-to-God victims out there. Many of them are even Christian victims. (Many more of them are victims of Christianity, but thats another conversation…). But these victims can only dream of living in America. Compared to their Hell, America is Heaven!
So, why do we who have more freedoms (religious and otherwise) and privileges than Anywhere else in the world find it so irresistible to whine and bemoan our “secularizing” nation?
The more freedom we are granted, the more freedom we demand.
The mammoth scope of our “religious freedom” is so far-reaching and all-accepting that Christians are forced to scream about the intricacies and fine-print.
We never appreciate what we have. We can’t even see it. We’re blinded by our unrighteous outrage (and the idea that because God created the world to serve Him, the world should then fulfill its destiny by serving Christianity’s every whim and want).
Where did this obscene arrogance come from?! To call it delusional would be an understatement – Its a god-killing fantasy about a world addicted to… them.
Updates
so, i’ve updated the About the Author page, as well as my What I’m Reading and What I’m Listening To lists.
David Foster Wallace, dead at 46
Author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion. Roughly two hours ago, his wife found him at home, an apparent suicide by hanging. According to the NY Review of Books, his works had given us “a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.”
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” –Infinite Jest
And, I think, his greatest contribution to the contemporary literary world was his palpable frustration and vehement rebuttals of our current writers’ (i.e. Dave Eggers, The Believer, David Sedaris, etc.) obsession with irony:
“[It] tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’” –E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
let’s see how elegant this universe really is…
The collider is the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date. It rests 300 feet beneath the Swiss-French border and is 16.8 miles long.
The New York Times states CERN’s aspirations thusly: “Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.”
Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescopeof inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.
Check out these sites for more info:
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
One last word (or warning?): Some theorists are worried that the scientists at CERN have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Over the past three years, they have filed many lawsuits against CERN – all of which have been dismissed.
ORANJE & Chris Magee
ORANJE WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 20th 8pm-2am
“indulge WHERE: 2323 N. Illinois St., Indianapolis, IN
your WHO: Anyone Age 21+
senses” COST: $20
ORANJE, described as “an interactive experience of music and art,” will feature 43 artists and 26 musicians. There will also be a Fashion Lounge, hosted by Savvy Salon.
AND, Chris Magee, a good friend and sometimes roommate of mine, will be exhibiting some of his pieces at the event! These are some of his past works:
Sketch on Gold Gesso
Graphite, Powdered Charcoal, Powedered NuPastel, White Gesso over Gold Gesso, on Birch.
This piece was part of the Independent Music & Arts Festival at the Harrison Center for the Arts.
One of the pieces that Magee submitted for ORANJE
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