TQ: Religion in Four Points

My answer to this week's meme from Mark.

1. What was your very first relgious experience that you can remember.
Anyone who answers Baptism, or equivalent for other faiths, will be sacked.

Baptism. Well, actually, that might be quite true, if I was a Baptist. Aside from being ornery, that would depend. Do you mean the first religious ritual I participated in in a meaningful way? I guess that would probably be a Christmas Eve or Good Friday service at some point; the candle light and darkness probably caught my attention in such a service long before regular Sunday services meant much.

2. What was the one event in your life where you made the conscience decision to explore your faith because you wanted too, not because someone told you too.

I don't think I've spent a lot of time not exploring my faith since Confirmation, which was probably the last time I was semi-forced to explore it (though after awhile that too was something I enjoyed). I'm just a curious guy, I suppose.

3. Was there ever a time in your life when you questioned if you had it right? If yes, what was that event?

Sure. Lots of times there are little nagging doubts, although not significant ones. Probably the last really significant time was one Easter evening a few years back — a dark cloud of doubt came over me, but only for the evening. Over the last few years I've picked up what a friend and mentor of mine calls the “nonchalance of faith,” I think. I don't generally question whether my basic beliefs about God are right, even if I question and explore some of the specific doctrines.

4. What is your biggest pet peeve with “religous” folk? General answers please, nothing personal or specific.

I think I most dislike what I'd call an overly strong air of “religiousness.” I become disturbed by people that always seem to jam a bunch of pious sounding words in their phrases (especially when it comes to group prayer) — it seems to me usually these people only sound “highly religious” and that they lack the substance of faith. Often they are self-serving too; for example, using the phrase “it's not about us, it's about God” to a complaint often means “I don't care if you disagree with this, I'm right” or “I know I'm stepping on you, but you should 'turn the other cheek.'” I should be careful here, because I'm sure I've been guilty of this too, but this would be my biggest pet peeve of those who are “religious” (be they actually believers or just people joining the “Sunday morning social club”).

Among believers, I would say my biggest pet peeve is anti-intellectualism. Christians are so worried that scholars are out to destroy the church (which may be true of some, but certainly not all), that many opt to basically reject any attempt to facilitate a dialogue or synergy between intellectual, secular pursuits and faith. In not so many words, the rule is that faith must either dominate the other pursuits (hence “fixing” the results because the answer is already known and thus no investigation ought to be done) or the other scholarly tasks should be forgotten altogether. This is hogwash. That's not to say that the Bible is not the final authority, but if it is truly correct (and I believe that it is), we do not need to force everything else to affirm it. We should simply accept that eventually mutual affirmation will come about without any need of us “helping God win.”

I believe that lack of faith in the idea that fully independent means will eventually corroborate God's Truth (or at least never contradict it) has much to do with the modern caricature of Christians as lemmings without curiosity. If at times we were willing to honestly say, “Such and such is a mystery, and while we cannot explain how this works in God's plan right now, at least it encourages us to dig further into understanding God,” I think the world would gain a much greater respect for the Church in a way that is good. That is, it would not be the church compromising to the world, but rather the world seeing that yes, they too can become Christians without taking their minds off at the door to faith.

Note: I don't direct this at any of my blog readers. Really.

Note: The questions on this page written by Mark are governed by the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license. I believe my responses are allowed under fair use and therefore are not licensed under the Creative Commons license (I don't want people messing with adapting my personal opinions, thank you very much).

Ding Dong the Wiz was Here...

Last Friday, I made the annual pilgrimage to St. Louis's municipal outdoor theater, the Muny, to see the Wizard of Oz. I wasn't quite sure what to expect in a musical drawing off of the 1939 MGM film, but I did expect to see something fairly good. The movie, I think most people will agree, belongs to that mystical canon known as The Classics ™. When filmography is looked back on much as literature is now, Oz will surely hold a spot in the realm of film-ature.

To me, that made it harder to imagine as a live performance work. While many musicals go the opposite direction from play to film, or films move from dramas to live musicals, it seems a bit less common for a musical film to move to the stage. As far as I can tell, while other stage adaptations of the story have existed, the MGM film has claim to a different sound track, one that this play used. And, for that matter, used very well.

The main characters in this production all seemed to have had spots on the Muny roster from last year (and, in particular, from the two plays I saw: Jesus Christ Superstar and Mame). While they were up against difficult acts from the original, they did a great job with all of the songs, keeping the flavor close to the movie without seeming like they were merely providing stale imitations.

The sets were well thought out, as always, and I was pleased to see that they managed one of the most memorable parts (at least for me): Miss Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West flies at the beginning while riding on her bicycle. There were some changes to get the work on stage, for example, pyrotechnics were the preferred means of dramatic entrances or exits, and I would say those alterations were really great. Because they weren't used entirely consistently, the fireworks' shooting up managed to add surprise to several scenes.

Probably the one who really stole the show was none other than Toto, Dorothy's dog. This was one well trained pooch, barking at just the right times, tolerating lots of commotion and just acting rather adorable (and I'm not even fond of dogs, typically). He got a very healthy applause at the end.

As a whole, I'd say the Wizard was not as good as the Music Man or Jesus Christ Superstar at the Muny, but it was well worth seeing, and, if it were still possible, I would say you should go see it.

Rating: ***1/2

The Road of Life...

Before going to the Muny last Friday, I traded in my Jeep Grand Cherokee. My aunt had sold it for a good price when she was getting ready to trade up to a new Jeep a number of years back, but it was starting to exhibit some problems, such as a shifter that was sticking, some odd noises in the engine and plummeting fuel economy. It still had some trade-in value — though not much — so I decided it was a good time to take advantage of that.

I was going to say what I traded up to, but that wouldn't be any fun, now would it? Instead, I'll offer 10 asisaid points, toward the next iteration of the Challenge (coming soon), to the poster who can guess correctly what I traded my trusty Jeep in for. If you can guess the right color, I'll also offer 10 points. If you can guess both correctly together, I'll give you 10 extra points for a total of 30.

Blog Spam I Don't Understand

A couple of days ago, asisaid was hit by blog spam (something unusual for my blog, for whatever reason). Most of it was at least semi-explicit, but it also had a peculiar quality to it: none of it seemed to actually point to anything. Several of them seemed to include phone numbers, but with the wrong number of digits. When I looked in my database, the poster left neither an e-mail nor a web site in the contact information. This left me wondering: why spam a blog if you don't even link to a product or service?

Is this just the twenty first century equivalent of graffiti?

Water, Water Everywhere

“When it rains, it pours.” After essentially no rain in weeks (other than a small drizzle last week), a big thunderstorm passed through tonight. I had just headed out for a short drive over to and around Creve Coeur park — about the only decent outdoor activity with the 100+ degree Fahrenheit temperatures —when a bit of a storm started to appear on the northern horizon. I tried to go around it, but given that I needed to head back north to go home, that didn't work so well.

I was on the river bottoms in St. Louis County, but went up and around to try another approach. When I came back down, what I would say were straight line winds (based on later examination of area damage) were stirring up gravel, debris and dust — not the kind of stuff I wanted to drive my car through. So, I made a u-turn, went back up the hill and holed up under the shelter of a Philips 66 at Hog Hollow Rd. and Olive Blvd. in case it hailed. I spent about an hour there, watching the front come in, the rain pour like crazy and the power go on and off. I switched between XM's Instant Traffic and Weather and KMOX (“the Voice of St. Louis”) trying to find out how the storm was doing, but I think for the most part they were taken aback by the intesity of this storm as much as I was. The KMOX news editor didn't even have time to prepare for the hourly local news because he was too busy reporting on this storm.

The poor station attendant at the gas station kept having to turn people away from the gas pumps since they apparently take 10 minutes to start up, and the power wouldn't stay on for more than 10 minutes at a time. One fellow stood there for probably 30 minutes trying to finish filling his tank before giving up. One time that the power was on long enough for the registers to work, I went in and bought a bottle of water to drink. The sirens went off, but I never heard on the radio where the tornado was.

Back home, the storm has definitely left its mark on the subdivision, taking down large parts of trees, siding, and so on. Traffic lights are on the fritz and power is still out to several hundred thousand homes (especially on the St. Louis side, it seems). Apparently, part of the roof on Lambert-St. Louis International Airport's one concourse blew off and was laying on several lanes of I-70.

This was suppose to be just a small storm for those of us north of the city, I was told. Conversely, another storm system coming in tomorrow afternoon is suppose to be severe. I think I'll try to avoid that one.

Need a MacBook Pro? Sure you do.

Well, I'm pretty good on computers right now, but if you need one, CNET found quite a bargain on a MacBook Pro at Amazon.com. The system, a base model MacBook Pro (which isn't exactly a “base model” by any other metric), is only $1,650 after a $150 rebate.

While that's not exactly cheap, it puts the MacBook Pro within $150 of a Black MacBook, and while the premium MacBook has a faster processor, the MBP adds a dedicated video card, a larger screen, an ExpressCard slot, a lighted keyboard and other goodies worth considering.

Just an FYI.

More SAFARI Fixes

Just a heads up: I've corrected a bug on the “Recent Comments” page that caused the entries to be semi-randomly sorted. With this fix, the latest comments are again placed at the top of the page.

The road to 3G SAFARI is progressing! Let me know if you see any bugs. For those of you who read Ed's blog, I'm hoping to get this and some other fixes deployed there very soon.

Jordan

I've not posted much in the way of poetry on here recently, so to remedy that, here is a fun little poem from my metaphysical poet “friend,” George Herbert. There is something melancholy about Herbert's lyrics, especially when you compare them to the lines of fellow metaphysician, John Donne, but that is not to complain so much as to observe.

JORDAN. (I)

WHO sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse ? Is there in truth no beautie ?
Is all good structure in a winding stair ?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair ?

Is it not verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines ?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves ?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes ?

Shepherds are honest people ; let them sing :
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime :
I envie no mans nightingale or spring ;
Nor let them punish me with losse of ryme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.

Sorry for the Delay

I think the heat is getting to me. After meeting with a client today early in the day, I had very little spunk to do the other things I wanted to do. I ended up going for a short ride and eating an ice cream cone. Talk about hectic!

According to my car's thermometer, it reached over 100 degrees today — I'm not sure what the official temperature count was. I'll just say it was hot, and by all indications, there is plenty more of that coming up over the next few days.

Muny and Other Exciting Stuff

Today, I took the day off and yet it was packed full trying to do various things, finally topped off with a delicious “cherry” of going to the Muny. Unfortunately, I'm far too tired to talk about that just now, so I guess I'll just not say any more right now.

Hopefully I'll push myself to do a review of the Muny production the Wizard of Oz tomorrow.