Chris Honeycutt Archives - Page 3 of 3

Religion compare and contrast, and Old Silvertooth

Maybe I could have been one of Gladys Knight’s Pips.

Chris, with whom I have been having an interesting dialogue on Facebook about human nature, wants to know:

What do you think about other religions? Is it just “different strokes for different folks,” or are some religions better than others, or a mix? Where do you think other religions belong in Christianity?

A lot of how I view other religions is based on the bias I have seen within Christianity, including by myself. When I was growing up, I wouldn’t say anything, but I thought those Catholics who had “dirt” on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday looked silly. As a bit of cosmic comeuppance, in my last two (Protestant) churches, we now apply ashes on our foreheads on the first day of Lent.

I recall the first time I was allowed to take Communion at a Roman Catholic Church, on some important anniversary of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany, back in the 1990s. Interestingly, some of my Protestant friends refused to take the Eucharist because of being denied for so long, which I thought was CRAZY; they let you in, you gotta walk through the door.

Did I ever tell you about the Coptic who told me I was going to hell because Protestants didn’t believe in literal transubstantiation?

So I have enough problem sorting out my own religion that the assessment of other faiths tends to be secondary considerations.

For instance, the Texas Republican platform condemns homosexuality and invokes God. People are boycotting Oreo cookies because the brand is “violating God’s law.” I disagree with these “thought” processes, of course, but it remains my struggle to find common ground with other Christians, first and foremost, if possible. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, Mohandas K. Gandhi said he’d consider becoming a Christian if he had ever met one.

All of that said, I’m also influenced greatly by the Baha’i faith, the religion of a former Significant Other. Basically, it said that many of the major religious leaders, such as Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, and Zoroaster, were part of a “progressive revelation”, with Christianity revealed for the city-state, Islam for the nation-state, and Baha’ism for the world-state. I never embraced it, but I accepted it as a way to respect other faiths.

Now from a purely comfort level, there seem to be far fewer jerks who claim to be Buddhists, for instance, than jerks purporting to be Christians or Muslims. And there are commonalities in many religions that suggest that at least PARTS of their doctrines are universal. Doesn’t everyone have some variation on the Golden Rule? I will admit, too, that I’m really not all that into proselytizing, at least by words.

When you fantasized about running away as a kid (I assume most people did), what did you fantasize about doing?

I liked watching or playing baseball. Or maybe I could have been one of Gladys Knight’s Pips.

If money were no issue – you were set for life, although you couldn’t just give it all away – what would you be doing?

I would get on trains and go to every Major League Baseball ballpark pretty much every season. I’d go see lots of live theater and a lot of movies in the colder part of the year, especially in New York City and in my region. I’d go visit friends. I’d read a lot more, write more. I’d love to have a companion with whom I could play racquetball wherever I went.

***
Steve writes:

Not sure if this is the appropriate post to put this on, but how did you chip your sister’s tooth?

Oh, THAT.

When I was a kid, I was a bit of a loner, even in my own family structure. I liked to read in my tiny little room or play with my baseball cards. I played with my sisters, too, who were 16 months, and five years younger than I – mostly kickball or with their dolls – but I needed my own time.

The middle child sometimes would bug me. She knew about the parents’ “no hitting girls” rule, and she took advantage by poking me. I’d do my Garbo best: “I vant to be alone!” But eventually, I’d go chase her away.

On one of these occasions, when I was about 10 or 11, I was trying to catch her – wasn’t sure what I’d do if I did, since I couldn’t hit her – and I stepped on the back of her bathrobe. She went straight down, hit the floor, and started crying loudly. She had chipped one of her front top, permanent teeth.

Ultimately, the dental folks put some silver-gray epoxy on it. The specifics of it now escape me, but what was clear is that she had this discolored item right in the middle of her mouth for months. People would say to her, “Hi, yo, Silver!” or “Old Silvertooth.” She was mortified.

The good outcomes (for me) were these: I didn’t get in trouble, presumably because my narrative rang true to my parents; and my sister left me alone for quite a while. More bizarre to me is that my sister had, apparently for years, until I corrected her in the past few months, attributed her ugly silver tooth to actions taken by our baby sister rather than by me.

Obama v. Romney

Sometimes I want to just take on the system, sometimes I want to write in quiet contemplation; much of the time, I worry about the fate of the planet.

Answering more Ask Roger Anything questions:

Tom the Mayor, who I know personally, pondered:
Here is a hard one Roger! Who do you think will win the presidential election?

I went to 270towin.com. The map there suggests that Obama has 217 likely electoral votes, and Romney with 191 electoral votes, with 130 electoral votes listed as a tossup. Three states in that latter category are hugely important – Florida (29), Pennsylvania (20), and Ohio (18). I suspect that whoever wins at least 2 out of 3 will probably win the White House.

Some statistical piece – I can’t find it presently – states that the Republicans were far better controlling the argument in the media than the Democrats regarding the presentation of the healthcare law dubbed Obamacare. The GOP was able to stay on message, using the same keywords, while the Dems were more diffuse. This tends to be true on other issues as well.

I mention this because, even when the Democrats have good issues, they don’t seem to be able to capitalize on them. Obama’s support of gay marriage can’t really help him much; those supporters weren’t going to Romney. Obama’s announcement that he wouldn’t go after illegal immigrants who were brought to the US by their parents might have been popular with some Hispanics, but Republicans managed to turn it into a Constitutional overreach by the President.

FOX News blamed Obama for rising gas prices, and incorrectly predicted worse. Now that they are actually falling, FN notes that they are signs of a “looming global economic crisis.” Ya can’t win. And people with selective memory recall that Obama’s to blame for all of it.

Now, I think that Romney has been amazingly non-specific about what he would DO as President on many issues, save for building that pipeline. But if the economy is still weak – and the Dow Jones lost 250 points the day you posted the question…

If the election were held today, I think Romney wins. Of course, the election is NOT today, so things could change. I’m not optimistic about Obama’s chances at this moment.

Tom also asked:
Did you get the new Paul McCartney Album? What do you think of it?

I assume you are referring to Kisses on the Bottom, rather than the reissue of Ram. In general, the less I knew the song, the more I liked it. I don’t need another version of It’s Only a Paper Moon or I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter, and I don’t think Sir Paul added much to those. But I liked tunes such as My Very Good Friend the Milkman, Get Yourself Another Fool, and The Inch Worm, plus a couple of original songs. I think my decision to buy a Macca album depends on the reviews.

BTW, there are nice Coverville podcasts for Paul McCartney and for Brian Wilson/the Beach Boys that you might want to check out; for the latter, I made a couple of requests that were played.
***
Chris from Off the Shore of Orion wonders:

Is there a limit on the number?

Yes, no more than 37 at a time. So you’re safe – so far…

What historical figure do you most identify with?

Oh, it varies, depending on the issue, and my mood: Nat Turner, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson. Sometimes I want to just take on the system, sometimes I want to write in quiet contemplation; much of the time, I worry about the fate of the planet.

Something at work reminded me of this: when I was 9 or 10 and wanted to wrap presents, I would get the Sunday funnies from the newspaper and use those. I would be severely mocked, even/especially by my own family. These days, what I did is considered environmentally cool, but then as doofy, a word one of my sisters used A LOT in describing me.

Who do you think was the most evil person who ever lived?

Oh, there are so many. The obvious ones such as Genghis Khan or Hitler.
So, I’ll pick US President Andrew Jackson, whose support of slavery, and especially his Indian removal policy should get him removed from the US $20 bill.

What’s the most heartbreaking novel you’ve ever read?

A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. That said, I don’t read a lot of fiction these days. I was very affected by Maus by Art Spiegelman. I had actually met him a couple of times before that book was released. He was publishing this eclectic, oversized magazine called RAW; boy, I wish I had kept those.

You can’t get to heaven on a pair of skates

In my less holy days, my conclusion might have been, “well, if THINKING them is the same as DOING them, you might as well just DO them; same penalty, after all.”

“…’cause you’ll roll, right past those Pearly Gates.” Old song that popped into my head.

So Chris Honeycutt found my villainous thoughts totally inadequate; I’m unsurprisingly all right with that, and she came up with her own here and here and here. My, she’s thought about this a LOT, it would seem.

But in between, she poses this question: Can you be a good Christian and fantasize about being a villain? In the main, I totally agree with her that “we should want to be Christlike, but in reality, we’re, well… not.
“Story is good, IMHO, for exploring those un-Christlike qualities that we possess. If we don’t face them as a reality, we can become repressed. And while suppression (holding back emotion and thought until an appropriate time and expressing them in appropriate ways) is good, repression (trying to hold back emotion forever until we blow like a tea kettle) is very bad.”

Yes, that’s why I read Tea Party blogs, to understand how the minds of people not like me think.

And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any less-than-ideal thoughts of my own regarding others now and then. It was that I never really identified with a particular archetype or methodology. Moreover, I just find my own failing less reprehensible than sad. What can I say?

I’d long wondered about those quotes attributed to Jesus, that if you think evil thoughts, it’s the same as doing so. For instance, in Matthew 5:28 “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Now in my less holy days, my conclusion might have been, “well, if THINKING them is the same as DOING them, you might as well just DO them; the same penalty, after all.” My approach these days is more nuanced.

In any case, I was watching Easter Sunday’s This Week on ABC News. Jake Tapper interviewed Rick Warren of the huge Saddleback church. He shared the fact that dogs and even cats go to heaven. He managed to sound like a politician when he talked about J-O-B-S. But Warren also complained about how magazines exploit Christmas and Easter with religious covers:

JAKE TAPPER: This week’s “Newsweek” magazine, which has a very provocative cover, has a different perspective on what ails America’s religious communities, under the headline “Forget the Church, Follow Jesus,” Andrew Sullivan argues that American Christianity is in a crisis, it’s too focused on politics and policy, too little on spirituality… So what is your reaction to this line of criticism from people who like faith but don’t like religion?
WARREN: Sure. Well, first place, let me give a little personal gripe. I think it’s disingenuous that magazines like “Newsweek” know that their circulation goes up at Christmas and Easter if they put a spiritual issue on the cover, but it’s always bait-and-switch. They never tell the stories, never tell the stories of what the good — what good the church is doing. Never. It’s always some obscure scholar, who’s debating something that kind of supposedly disproves this or that, or Andrew Sullivan — I don’t consider Andrew Sullivan to be a religious authority, okay?
And so it is — they know they’re going to make money, every time you put Jesus on the cover of a magazine, it skyrockets. You go do the history. “Time” magazine, “Life” magazine, “U.S. News and World Report,” those are always the best issues. So they make money on it, but then it’s a bait and switch, and it’s always a disappointment. And I wish they would have a little bit more integrity than that, and tell the other side of the story, maybe just occasionally.

While his premise may be technically true, it’s not Time’s or Newsweek’s job to promote Christianity. On Easter Sunday in my church, we said, “Christ is risen indeed.” We said that last year and we’ll probably say that next year. The magazines’ job is to find a different spin. I didn’t see the Newsweek article, but I did read Heaven Can’t Wait By Jon Meacham, the cover story in TIME. And I found this interesting:

“Yet we don’t necessarily agree on what heaven is. There is, of course, the familiar image… But there is also the competing view of scholars… What if Christianity is not about enduring this sinful, fallen world in search of a reward of eternal rest? What if the authors of the New Testament were actually talking about a bodily resurrection in which God brings together the heavens and the earth in a wholly new, wholly redeemed creation? As more voices preach a view that’s at odds with the pearly gates (but supported, they note, by Scripture), faithful followers must decide which approach they believe in.

“It’s a distinction with some very worldly implications. If heaven is seen as life’s ultimate reward, then one’s vision of paradise shapes how one lives. It is an essential tenet of Christian faith, of course, to love one’s neighbor. But if you believe the world will be destroyed at the last day while the blessed look down from a disembodied heaven, then you are most likely going to view the things of this world in a different light than someone who believes there will be a bodily resurrection on an earth that is to be, in the words of a great hymn, ‘our eternal home.’ Accepting the latter can mean different priorities, conceivably putting issues like saving the environment up there with saving souls.”

So I hope the “secular” press keeps observing the sacred world with a journalist’s eye, rather than a believer’s.

Not a villainous bone in my body

The real problem is that I think about this far too literally. I might want to have the power of Galactus, but the notion that I could consume whole worlds, and the souls therein is so awful to contemplate.

Hi, Chris-

Recently came across your blog, and I really have been enjoying it, especially your Holy Week post, which was sacrilegious, but funny. I added the blog to my blogroll, which, BTW, was my old blog for five years. (Oh, and to others who might want to be added – please let me know.)

I’ve enjoyed the fact that you’ve been going to other blogs I enjoy, such as Byzantium Shores, even when I disagree with you.

But I am having a bear of a time answering your questions:

Can we do another one?

Well, theoretically, yes.

How about what VILLAIN would you most like to be? Or bad guy, evil spirit, etc. Also, what’s the coolest villain, etc.? (Might not be the same; they’re definitely not for me.)

So the real problem is that I think about this far too literally. I might want to have the power of Galactus, but the notion that I could consume whole worlds, and the souls therein is so awful to contemplate. I believe I thought Goldfinger was COOL when I was a kid, but then later felt that suffocation is a lousy way to die.

The only “villains” I ever was drawn to were either silly and not all that harmful, such as Superman’s foe, Mister Mxyzptlk, or the ones that aren’t really evil (Robin Hood, Zorro), or ones who are conflicted (the Hulk, Batman’s Two-Face).

That said, I always was interested in Loki, Thor’s half-brother, at least from the period I was reading comic books, through 1994; I mention this only because characters evolve and I haven’t kept track of him in almost two decades. I think it’s the family dynamic as much as the villain himself that intrigued me.

The Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s arch-rival, as a villain, didn’t interest me as much as the fact that Norman, and then later Harry Osborn were known to Peter Parker, even if Peter didn’t know the man behind the mask at the time.

So, villainy doesn’t interest me that much, except in context. That’s as good as I can answer this question, I’m afraid.

Hey, maybe YOU can answer this question in YOUR blog, Chris. Or anyone else can, for that matter.

A Question of Murder

We have video games, which are as theoretically violent as the drones our government uses for real.

Chris Honeycutt, who interviewed me for the NYADP Journal, noted I wrote about Into the Abyss, about homicide and the death penalty, notes:

That’s the end I started from on the anti-death penalty work. I was more interested in crime and killers than just about anything else. Particularly their psychology: everybody covets. Everybody gets angry. Everybody has moments of blind rage. But some people are missing that fundamental “wall” in their mind that says “Don’t physically hurt someone.”

It’s lead me to other questions: if a man can hit someone out of rage, not in a sporting way or in a fight but just out of nowhere slug someone, is that on the continuum?

What about Matthew Perry, who apparently killed three people because he wanted a car? We’ve all wanted things; what drives someone to kill to take it?

On the other hand, Charles Manson at his trial brought up that in reality, he was no worse than the generals leading the war in Vietnam. He never raised a gun, just gave an order. Is the government that different when it says “Wow, I really want that oil…”?

I don’t have any answers to any of it and I’ve studied it quite a bit.

So I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts.

I hadn’t considered it until now, but, early on, most of the people I had heard of who was murdered, I had NO idea who the murderers were. Some you may have heard of: Emmett Till, the four girls in a Birmingham church, the three civil rights workers in Mississippi.

But others perhaps not: William Moore of Binghamton, NY, the namesake of the Congress of Racial Equality chapter in my hometown – William L. Moore chapter of CORE, to which my father belonged. And stuck in my mind, Viola Liuzzo, described as a “Detroit housewife”. I remember being specifically surprised by her death in 1965. I didn’t know the code in the segregated South would allow them to murder a white woman.

As for the murderers I did know about, I followed them with zeal. When excerpts of the Warren Commission Report, about the JFK assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald, came out in the local newspaper, I clipped the articles out and put them in a binder, which I may still have in the attic.

Generally, though, I was more interested in the mass murders. Charles Whitman, as I noted, really terrified me. I was also bewildered by Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Stranger, and by Richard Speck, killer of eight student nurses in Chicago. (Sidebar: the Simon & Garfunkel song, “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News” incorrectly notes nine dead student nurses; in fact, the ninth nurse hid under a bed and survived.)

After that, only certain cases really caught my attention: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Timothy McVeigh, for three. I even watched the TV movie about Bundy, starring Mark Harmon. There just became too many of the mass murderers; the guy who killed his family while dressed as Santa Claus in the past year or two – couldn’t name him. The difference is that, in the early days, I could assume that these people were just pathological or crazy; now, they seem too frequent to write off so cavalierly.

So, in answer to your question, yes, I think anger and rage are on the continuum of violence. And it seems that there just is more rage out there, not just on the road and on the job, but at things such as kids’ sporting events. It’s tied to an odd sense of “fairness”; it’s not “fair” that my kid isn’t playing? It seems that the immediate gratification of computers and the like may have made us way too impatient when they take more than a few seconds, yet information a decade or two earlier would have taken several minutes or perhaps several hours to find.

Who would kill for a car or a pair of sneakers or because someone dropped a pass in a cricket match? Is it an odd sense of entitlement? Perhaps. There have always been pathological folks; In Cold Blood was written a half-century ago.

I do think war plays into it. We in the US have been fighting the “war on terror” for over a decade, with no end in sight. We have video games, which are as theoretically violent as the drones our government uses for real; I wonder if the lines get blurred for some. Of course, we have often seen the increased violence of those in the war zone – from William Calley at My Lai, VietNam to a soldier in Afghanistan ON HIS FOURTH TOUR OF DUTY killing civilian women and children in their sleep. The violence comes home; see the number of suicides, homicides and addictions in our returning vets. The ones giving the orders have a huge responsibility. That’s why I find chicken hawks, those who would offer up American soldiers for our next folly, when they’ve never served themselves, to be generally contemptible.

But “the state” also promulgates violence on the homefront with overreaction to protest that, we are constantly told, is what the folks abroad, ironically, are fighting to let us do. Of course, there has long been the state-sponsored terror of people, even their own nationals. Yet it’s always easier, it seems, to somehow make people “the other” by ethnicity or religion; you can’t underestimate the impact of the tribe.

So my short answer: I don’t really have any answers either.