Yes, I would. In this space, there is very little that I’ll refuse to post. In the current climate, in the name of inclusion and diversity, there are some who only include those who give the right signals. You have to be downtrodden in some way. Brown, female, poor, a victim of something. Everybody else is on the outs. So, a blog like this, that is so contentious, would be easily tagged as one that is intolerant of anyone not sharing harmonious signals with its author. Only fifty-something WASP’s can post/comment here, no?
No. In fact, IMHO, one of the weaknesses of this blog is that it is just my voice with a smattering of comments from my aunt and a few others. I don’t want to be the only odd one here. There needs to be more odd ones adding their voice to this space. By now, with over 200 posts, I should be a known entity. So, if you have hovered the mouse button over the comment button and held off, stop that. Comment, contact me for an account. I’ll let you add your voice here, promise.
Now, I have boundaries. Boundaries are good. I draw the line at harm. For me, there is a difference between, “your ideas are stupid,” and “you are stupid.” “Your ideas are stupid” will likely get approved and posted. “You are stupid” will never get beyond the moderation queue. Also, any form of threat of harm is likely to not get approved.
SPAM. SPAM is a fact of life in this first-world, 247365 Interweb world we’ve made for ourselves. SPAM is the noise drowning out the signals we want to hear. I’d say 99.999% of what arrives as comments or requests for membership is bot-generated SPAM. This means that if you are a real human with a real comment my first reflex will be to dump your comment as SPAM. Sorry, confirmation bias and all. I do want more comments from more humans. But my apologies for making it a bit hard to get my attention and not get dumped as SPAM.
Next, I also have an opinion I take great delight in posting. I am a reborn Christian who grew up in the Presbyterian Church. Jesus is the solid rock on which I stand. I say that many of the precepts of the current popular orthodoxy are wrong. That does make me a hater to some. So be it. If only guys like me feel at home here I’ve failed the purpose of this space.
Love cross-dressing in goth drag accessorized by Satanic symbols and want to blog about it? Submit it. It has a shot at getting approved. Want to blog about the challenges of being gay in fly-over country? Full of righteous indignation at the crap people eat and their general sloth? A member of the alt-right who believes Constantine should have never become Christian? That . . . actually I’d like to see and post. Pentecostal Christian who is hard at work preparing for the Rapture that is going to happen right about . . . now? Leftie college kid who thinks I ought to be imprisoned and this site shut down? Maybe. Let me see what the leftie college kid has to say. Girl with boy trouble? Boy with girl trouble? A couple nuts wondering where the passion went? Yep.
What makes freedom is the freedom to be an ass. As long as we are only free to color inside the lines and only with approved crayons & paper of the orthodox colors, we are not truly free. Us, the malcontents, are the canaries in the mine. As long as we are here, free to be who we are, the country is probably safe. Once those who cower in their safe-spaces in college libraries carefully controlling who is allowed in and what can be said/thought succeed in expanding their control to more of society we will lose our democracy. You need us, the troublemakers. And . . . think about it. Bloody dictators have done *everything* possible through history to shut us up/stop us. That went well.
So, this space needs more odd folk posting more blog posts and comments. It will be a better site once I am able to attract more voices to it. If you have ever thought that maybe you could be a blogger and want a place to try it out, here is good.
Ok, 400 or so words in. About half-way for the length I’ve been aiming for. And, right about here I need to turn the topic back to ExploringGod. This week was the big ugly question, “Is There a God?” I’m a smart-mouthed, asshat cab driver and damned Yankee. My expertise here is rather plebeian. So, like most of my posts, I’m going to forge ahead knowing full-well that the ratio of bullsh*t to credibility leans heavily toward bullsh*t. Do I believe there is a God? Yes. A specific God named הוה, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified by Pontius Pilate, and raised from the dead on the third day. An no-account Nazarene carpenter who was martyred by the Romans at the behest of leading Rabbis in Palestine.
Why? Why would I believe that a wretched carpenter from Nazarene who spoke blasphemy could be the Messiah spoken of in the prophetic texts of the תוֹרָה? Jesus of Nazareth was either a lying crackpot or he was telling the truth. I’m not the first to say that. C.S. Lewis said it famously in his, “The Problem of Pain“. I, like many, land on the hypothesis that Jesus was telling the truth. Everything about Jesus and his believers is bonkers. It is flatly absurd. All of us who dutifully spend Sunday mornings in worship should own the possibility that what we are doing is insane. Yet we do it in faith of things unseen which have no basis in science or Socratic logic.
When I survey my life and the world I live in absurdity seems more rational than clinging to an exegesis rooted in Pythagorean geometry and fervant faith in Aristotle and Socrates. The more of physics that is published the more it seems that something must have designed this shit-show. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. There is hunger in places where the wealthy have an obscene net worth. Todd White prays over a too-short leg and the leg grows and the man is healed. A man misses his train, decides to wait out the day for the next one, and is within earshot of a revival where they are praying for healing. The man is Muslim and deaf. He is shocked that he can hear the preacher and the crowd. He makes his way to the microphone and tells the preacher he has been healed of his deafness. Crazy shit has happened all the way through history since Jesus was crucified. It is all absurd and yet . . .
So, sign me up for those who see the insanity of faith in Christ and want more of that. It is nuts and it is true. The idea of God is absurd. A diety that can count the pimples on my ass? A diety that would bother? Nuts. The Bible as a piece of rhetoric is ridiculous. It contradicts itself, it makes absurd claims about the diety of a Nazarene Carpenter, it has laws that nobody pays much mind to, has a creation story which is fantastically cray cray, you know how this goes. I love it.
The one thing Jesus has that I’ve not found elsewhere is grace and mercy. God said to me that history wasn’t destiny, that I could change for the better, and that by letting die those things which kept me from him I could live. After a lifetime of hearing that I was a near-do-well, would never amount to anything, that was an absurdity I was hungry for. There is a God and he is awesome.