One more year, one less store

I often don’t understand why people think they can get away with some of the stuff they try. The contraception mandate that’s going into effect tomorrow has provided a slew of those. Religious organizations I can understand, though I’m still a little divided even in those cases (because lets face it, when you start exerting that sort of control over your members you’re shifting from ‘church’ to ‘cult’). Secular wings of religious organisations are more iffy, because as bad as it is to dictate what members of your own church do, it’s worse to try and dictate what people outside of your church do.

And then I hear that Hobby Lobby is about to be ‘fined into oblivion’ over this. Yup, starting tomorrow they will be hit with fines of $1.3 million a day for failure to comply with the new law. On one hand, I can almost respect that sort of dedication to a cause. But lets look at the facts here.

1) HL is not in any way, shape or form a religious organisation. Its owners may be religious, but that does not make it religious any more than my being Catholic makes my car Catholic.
2) Related to point #1, their employees are from any number of religious persuasions, including those belonging to none at all. If an employee has a problem with contraception, they don’t have to use it even if it’s covered, but those who don’t are being denied something they’re legally entitled to based on a dogma they don’t follow.
3) That $1.3 million figure represents 13,000 (Edit: fixed my math) employees would would find themselves out of work should HL indeed be ‘fined into oblivion’. Because the economy isn’t bad enough, I guess.

I don’t know how likely point #3 is, as I have no idea what HL’s finances look like. Part of me hopes they can absorb the loss. The economy doesn’t need more people out of work, the employees certainly don’t need to be out of work, and maybe that money could go to something more worthwhile than the bottom line. (Though either way, the employees are getting shorted in some manner). And it’s not exactly news that the owners base some of its policies on their religious beliefs. So if it does go under I won’t exactly miss it. Still, I’d rather they just fulfilled their legal obligations in the first place.

Praise God and He’ll objectify you!

Today I got introduced to the ‘pumpkin gospel’, and I can’t get this disturbing image out of my head. For context, here’s the version I got:

A 10-year-old little girl was asked by a classmate, “What is it like to be a Christian?”

I’m going to pause right here just to point out that there isn’t really a ‘right’ answer to this question. Different people are going to answer it differently, and while many of them might think that their answer is the right one, everyone experiences Christianity in different ways and their answer will reflect that. The following certainly isn’t how I’d answer this question!

Moving on.

The girl replied, “It’s like being a pumpkin. God picks you from the patch, brings you in, and washes all the dirt off of you. Then he cuts off the top and scoops out all the yucky stuff. He removes the seeds of doubt, hate, greed, etc., and then he carves you a new smiling face and puts His light inside of you to shine for all the world to see.”

I started getting disturbed when I got to cutting the top off, but after reading it over there’s more here that bugs me–mainly the lack of agency that is given. You don’t become a better person, you are made into what He wants you to be. Maybe it’s because my background is specifically Catholic, which tends to have a greater emphasis on works than Protestant denominations, but I can’t help but feel that this is a bit of a cop-out. You are not the one who is putting any effort in becoming this smiling light the world will see. Not that I can’t see the appeal of such an approach, it’s the point I’m missing.

The other thing that bugs me is this image of ‘hollowing out’ the person. I can’t help but see that as a destructive approach. God remove the bad parts of you rather than making the bad parts better. He makes you less than you were and makes you a vessel for showcasing His glory. It makes it sound like being a Christian is about letting yourself be used for another being’s ends rather than finding ways to make your own life better, or about doing good in the world. I realise that this is an allegory, and a condensed version of it at that, but it does tie in with what I’ve read from others about how some of the more conservative Christian circles are all about looking good on the surface while ignoring the substance of people and relationships, giving an image of a God who doesn’t care about you, just about how He looks.

All in all, I’m left with an image of hollow people wearing Stepford smiles and jagged cuts in their skulls, and that’s just creepy.

Blind, brittle, broken faith

There’s an odd tendency within many Christian communities to shield themselves–and more importantly, their children–from outside influences. They reaffirm their faith by dealing only with other people who believe as they do, which makes sense in a way, because if you never heard a dissenting opinion you will likely never question that faith–at most, questions will lead to rationalisations of what one already believes. So one’s faith will become increasingly unwavering.

The problem with such things is the same as the goal–an unyielding faith.  It can be hard to damage something that won’t bend, but when it does occur, it can shatter spectacularly. I don’t say this as an abstract, because I’ve experienced that shattering myself.  While my hometown was not reclusive by any means, it was overwhelmingly Christian and for many years I didn’t know that a person could be anything else (I knew Dad didn’t go to church, but I never considered what that might imply about his actual beliefs).

That lasted until age ten. At that point evolution was first introduced to me as a concept, and the first time that it was suggested to me that the Bible could be anything other than a literal account of the past. Since I trusted my teachers to teach me the truth (we weren’t exactly an observant family, and by that time church had no impact on my life beyond the faith it instilled in me), I believed them, and as I suggested above, my faith shattered at that instant, rendering me athiest for a period.

There are a number of issues with not questioning the belief system that is handed out to you. One is that you can be easily misled, because you trust you authority figure so implicitly. In many communities, it can also lead to a person being unable to make decisions, because so much of their life is dictated to them. But what stands out for me is that such a faith is never tested. I tend to liken it to building a bridge–if no one ever crosses it, then it will never fail to hold them. I don’t really see the point of such a construct. Today, I have faith again, but it is not the blind, unquestioning faith I had as a child.  I question it.  I test it against new concepts. Where it proves to be weak, I find ways to strengthen it, which can be a rationalisation (adding more supports) or a change of view (altering the design). This means that I don’t need to avoid outside influence, because it is outside influence that made it what it is, and it is ready to withstand other concepts. Many people use only the first method, sometimes using one support to hold up many concepts, making failure to hold more likely if that support is compromised.

My faith today is made strong by questioning it.  Instead of avoiding other concepts, I embrace them and use them to refine my beliefs and values. For me, the end result of an unquestioning faith was atheism, and that defeats the whole purpose of having faith at all.