Why a Whitworth Student Might Reject Christianity
There are a number of draws to a non-religious stance. Obviously, students can easily reject Christianity in favor of other religions, but I want to delve into the agnostic/atheistic/naturalist alternative.
Positivity I disagree with the very first premise of Core 350: that we live in a broken world. So in the first 5 minutes of class, I – and I’m not the only one – felt disconnected. Is the world imperfect? Sure – but not because it was once good and then broke. It’s because we live in a world of challenges and we constantly strive to make it a better and better place. Fallenness, sinfulness, Armageddon? These are delusions from an atheistic/naturalistic perspective. As college students and recent grads, we can be optimistic. There’s plenty of time for pessimism when we’re old.
Responsibility No one is guiding your life. There is no ultimate place in the cosmic storyline, no fate, no one holding your hand and helping you make the right decisions. It’s scary at first. But instead of wondering “What is someone else’s purpose for me?” you get to ask “What will lead me to a fulfilling life? What am I passionate about?”
Avoiding Distasteful People With the exception of a few bad historical characters, the worst atheists are people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. What’s wrong with them? They are wickedly smart and they can be insulting to religious people. Well whoop-dee-do! Compared with some of the unsavory religious people out there – Bush, Cheney, Bin Laden – those guys aren’t such bad company. It’s much easier to criticize the “God Hates Fags” church when you’re actually on the other side of the fence, and that can be an appealing and morally soothing perspective.
Moral Sense Ever feel bad about people being punished for “crimes” that don’t have any victims? Like homosexuality? Or not hearing the gospel? All the questions that begin with “How could God-” are easily answered from an atheistic perspective. All the atheist has to figure out is “What on earth is morality, and where does ethics come from?” And sure, that can be challenging. But rather than thinking of what we need to do to please a watchful deity in the sky, we think about how to make the world a better place. All we humans have is each other, and the world is a tough place. If we figure out a way to get along we have the best chance to succeed. Oftentimes, religious dogma is no help at all.
No Dogma or Rituals All the Creeds and This-We-Believes go away. No more reconciling ancient manuscripts with scientific understanding. No more arguments about which sects truly understand which sacraments the best. No more praying to the right saint. Nothing binds an atheist to a particular, unified set of beliefs. Nothing tears them apart and causes strife over interpretations or practices. Isn’t that nice?
A Lot of Tough Questions Start to Make Sense Why does the human eye have a blind spot? A vestigial tail? Why the billions of years of cosmic evolution leading up to the infinitesimal existence of the human species? Advances in neuroscience and psychology provide so many answers to so many questions. And that is not to say that atheism does not create its own difficult questions, but, generally speaking, the explanations all occur within the realm of the natural world. It makes everything seem less complex – at least to someone who holds that perspective, like me.
That’s all I can think of at this point. Anyone have any to add?
You wouldn’t know
In the massive discussion of the Vagina Monologues below, Dr. McPherson raised an interesting matter. Since him and I were both of male gender, were we really qualified to judge The Vagina Monologues as a play?
It’s that implied question of criticism that permeates academia: the question of how important identity and experience are when we are judging our surroundings.
Can I talk about black issues if I’m white? Can I talk about gay issues if I’m straight? Can I talk about the AARP if I’m twenty-three? Can an old pretentious guy like A.O. Scott judge a movie like “Space Chimps,” if he’s *clearly* not the intended audience?
A large part of this goes back the notion of identity. To many in academia, ‘Identity’ — a few pieces of census data — are the most important part about who you are.
If I’m black, my entire life is consumed with my blackness. If I’m gay, my entire essence is gay. Not only that, but it immediately makes me an unassailable expert on these topics…right?
This is the same type of thinking that leads a person who took a two-week trip to South America to believe he or she automatically knows more about how to solve South American problems than a person who’s been deeply studying the issues for years, but has never shelled out the $400 for a round trip ticket to go.
Experience, in this mindset, trumps everything.
To me, such thinking shuts down debate. It’s a matter of Ethos trumping Logos - “Why should I have to explain myself to you. I just KNOW. I am, after all, an expert.”
There are several fallacies inherent in that thinking.
First is the notion that there’s a complete unity of experience within a certain demographic. To do so ignores the fact that we’re not just the part of one demographic.
We’re a part of multiple ones: wealth, class, religion, race, gender, philosophy, region, entertainment exposure.
Second is the fallacy that experience always leads to equal conclusions.
People with the exact same experiences can often come to multiple conclusions. I can find Whitworthian women who found The Vagina Monologues compelling, and some who find it pretentious and silly, and still others who find it horrifying…but there’s a bigger philosophical aspect here.
The notion that our beliefs, our actions, and our creed are our everything is the sum total of nature and nurture. We are the effect of a cause. The world is the stimulus, and we are the mindless response.
From a purely naturalist perspective, that’s the only way to look at the world. Of course, with this philosophy there’s no such thing as morality. With no such thing as “choice” we can no more blame a serial killer for serial killing than we can blame a rock from falling when dropped. It’s the result of immutable scientific laws. (Of course, so is our outrage)
I however believe in free will, which by its very nature is an unscientific, downright magical belief. It’s a belief that we can, somehow, defy the laws of cause and affect. That we can come to conclusion ourselves.
Thus, I believe that we can break free of the philosophy of our surroundings and experience. We are not lashed to the mast of our identity.
Otherwise, of course, the whole effort of seeking knowledge and truth is utterly pointless.
And even if our identities make up the majority of who we are, unique the perspective we bring to an argument is just as valuable. I bring a dude’s perspective to judging the Vagina Monologues. Sure, I’m not Ensler’s intended audience, but what makes my perspective any less valuable, or even correct, because of the inherent fact that I’m male?
I don’t have personal experience with many of the issues involved, but because of that, I can analyze in a different way. Personal experience can taint and bias one’s perspective – as well as crystallize it.
The “You wouldn’t know – you wouldn’t understand-” belief is a common one – no, an understandable one. But that doesn’t mean you should stop trying to teach me or help me understand. And I’ll help you understand my perspective as well.
That, not the competition to whose backstory is more pertinent to the topic, is more important. Where we should go and who you should become is always more important to talk about than who you are or where you’ve been.
“Write something clever,” part One
I have learned the secret to writing.
Would you like me to share it?
Cool! Me too!
It’s to take a stab at what you want to say, without worrying how people will recieve it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good or a bad stab – you can parry, you can thrust. You can flourish, you can strike. The important part is that you’re stabbing. You’ve gotta stab with all your worth, with whatever you’ve got in your possession.
If you’ve gotta use the awkward lance of Rhetorical Analysis, so be it. Don’t try and wield it like the sharp edged sword of satire; that just leaves mangled and bent phrases on the wayside. And yes, you’ll have your favorites. Perhaps you enjoy the nunchucks of comedy, or the scalpel of piercing wit.
Me? I love the trident of extended metaphors. Obviously.
But the most important part is to take a stab.
And strike true, my friends. You can parry, you can thrust. You can flourish, you can chop. The important part is that you’re stabbing. But swing with your beliefs, not those of others. Swing with your own might.
Because only you understand your feelings, and only with them can you back up your points.
It’s the passion that adds power to each stroke of the keys and swing of the sword. It’s the passion that gives rise to inertia, and inertia is your friend. It’s more than your friend.
Not quite your lover, more of a literary “FWB”. You want to cuddle it, support it, make sure it stays as long as possible. Because, without inertia giving you the writer’s breakfast in bed, the rest will be a long and arduous struggle. Inertia’s younger sister can also be used in a pinch. In fact, when Inertia’s gone, she’s all you’ve got. Yes, that perky 10 year old, Persistence. The one that says “You got an idea yet? You got an idea yet? Come on, keep on trying!” over and over and over until her nasally voice grates on your very soul, trying your pa…
Well – You know what I mean, don’t you, Forum community?
Trust me when I say inertia is always a better choice.
So now you’re done.
You’re ready to write Shakespeare, right?
No.
This is how to converse with friends, argue a point, chat with that pretty girl. It’s not so much writing as it is how to weave words.
The biggest problem is not what to say, it’s how to start. It’s working up the courage, gulping down the fear, throwing asde the doubt, and hanging on for dear life as you ride the roller coaster called Life.
Flying is merely the art of learning to throw yourself at the ground…and miss!
There comes a time in every epic friendship when things go badly.
I don’t mean the silly squabbles about what to do once you finally decide to hang out Friday night, or whether that one movie really did deserve to win the Oscar for “Best Picture”.
No, I’m talking about a REAL disagreement. Raised voices, maybe some tears, and a cooling period will occur before both the parties involved can talk to each other in a civil manner again.To be honest, it’s always a little frightening the first time it happens – at least for me. I seem to have a secret hope, no matter how many times it’s proven wrong, that with this person, we won’t disagree. Or, if we do, we’ll settle it quickly and it won’t stretch out into an actual fight. Of course, it never happens, or, if it does, I realize that the friendship has become shallow. Not having dared to risk it on the rocks of talking about anything important, or showing enough of myself that things turn serious, my friend and I no longer connect.
It seems that, the closer I get to someone, the more inevitable it is that we will eventually fight, and fight quite badly. There is something that touches both of us deeply enough that it is worth risking the friendship to speak of.
I don’t mean that there is a conscious decision – a realization that what happens next is going to drive all parties involved to fury. I just mean that things happen when people get really close. Bad things.
Someone will say something uncalled for. The other person says something equally awful back. And before we know it, we’ve just had a fight that could sever me from the other person forever. If both of us hold a grudge, the bitterness will grow. And that’s when the choice comes. Is this person worth enough to me to work through this fight, and become better friends because of it? Am I going to allow simple, stupid human nature to prevent me from getting to know someone who, really, is one of the most awesome people I have ever met?
Hopefully, the answer is no. Any good friendship has scars. Any relationship worth holding on to isn’t pretty. But the point of scars is not to show pain, it is to show healing.
There was once a wound, yes.
But it’s better now.
WE’RE better now.
Dear G-Unit
Introducing Whitworth’s only advice column, written by a Whitworth student, for other Whitworth students! For your edification, amusement, & pleasure: it’s Dear G-Unit!
Dear G-Unit: I’m writing you today because I feel my parents are starting to like my roomate better than me. The first thing they always ask when they call is “And how is *roommate name witheld to protect the innocent* doing?”. They give him care packages, and they lavish him with compliments when they see him. What can I do to reassert… ahem… “parental focus” back on to moi?
Belittled in BJ
Hi BB! Wow, how insensitive. I suggest getting new parents….No, wait, that’s not cost-effective. Never mind. Um. Let’s see.
I assume you have already tried standard techniques like whining on the phone. It’s time to get drastic. Stage a crisis.
I’ll go ahead & assume you’re a freshman, because, after all, Baldwin-Jenkins is a freshman-only dorm. It is a well known fact (at least to us upperclassmen) that most freshman are more concerned with friends then they are with grades. Plan carefully. Begin mentioning the names of friends that you are hanging out with (make up names if you have no friends or your friends hate you and refuse to hang out with you). Begin mentioning these names at an exponentially increasing rate. Eventually, if they are the kind of parents I think they are (by which I mean, parents who like to see some evidence that you are putting all that money they are forking out for tuition to practical use), they will begin to ask about homework, classes, and grades. Downplay the grades, at first. Mention classes, but when they ask how said classes are going, mumble and change the subject. Mention tests but then don’t mention your final grade. Et cetera. Eventually they will catch on, being the savvy adults they are, and demand proof. Proof of grades. Proof of success. Proof that you are not on academic probation. At this point, break down. Begin to sob. Tell them about how much time you have been spending with your friends, instead of poring over your homework. Tell them the love of your friends is only a poor, shabby substitute for their love. And beg them to fly up/down/over and visit you next weekend. And they, sobbing by now as well, will proceed to do exactly as you ask.
I know, I know, I’m a genius. You don’t have to tell me.
Dear G-Unit: I just starting dating this AMAZING girl from Warren. I think she may be the one. We agree on everything; from how it is TOTALLY wrong to call people gay as an insult, to that apples are the best fruit! My question is: how do I tell when we’re annoying people? We really love each other and like holding hands and kissing and being all ridiculous, but even so, I don’t want to be THAT couple, who totally alienates everyone they meet just because they are just so SO.
Warren Peace
I’ll try to make this quick and painless for both of us, Tolstoy: I’m afraid you already are that couple. The ones making goo-goo eyes at each other across their Saga tables. The ones constantly referencing stupid inside jokes that nobody else gets, even if we cared to try and figure them out. The ones walking each other home in the Loop, shrieking loudly at 3 AM. The ones breaking the ‘quiet’ rule in the back shelves of the libraries.I have three words for you and your girlfriend: GET. A. LIFE. I know, I know, you are SOOOOOOOO IN LUV, and you NEVER want to be apart and you ALWAYS want to be together and you are TOTALLY ring-by-spring-ing, but my point stands. The relationship will die (I know, I know, HEAVEN FORBID OMG) without space. You need space, especially if you are seriously considering getting married and aren’t just flinging that around like so many Whitworth couples do. By space, I mean time apart, and having things you enjoy doing WITHOUT the other attached to your hip.
And, are you annoying your friends (really the only ‘people’ who matter)? I don’t know. I am not your friends. Perhaps you should, you know, ask them.
Dear G-Unit: Recently this really awesome band came to visit Whitworth. They played the HUB multipurpose room. Me and a couple friends started dancing. We just couldn’t help it. The music was so good! It was really awkward though, because it’s like the band on stage, and then that little square of light, and then everything else is dark. And there were, seriously, like four of us dancing, and everyone else just outside in the dark, standing still, maybe swaying a little, all spooky like. How lame! How can I get people to join in the fun next time?
I’ll March to the Beat of Any Drummer with a Good Bass Line
Well, I.M.B.A.D.G.B.L., all I can tell ya is to lead by example. Whitworthians are a little, how do you say, challenged in the R&B department. Trust me, get em a little excited, or, just, you know, turn ALL the lights off (Warren Rave, I’m talking to you), and they go absolutely nuts. Try not to stare at them, though. I know, I know, that dance move was out of style when your granddad was a kid, but progress is progress. You have to do the Running Man before you can waltz, as they say.
If you’d like some words of wisdom from the most straight up G advice columnist this side of Seattle, shoot an email at dearg-unit@live.com, and you could see yourself in print! Er, type! Er…Whitworth Forum post! Yeah, that one.
25 Things about Whitworth
You saw it on your friend’s note on Facebook. You might have seen it parodied in Time Magazine. You might not have a Facebook.
Regardless, here it is: Everyone’s least favorite favorite meme: with a twist:
25 Things Gabrielle Vaughn Loves and Hates About Whitworth
1. My favorite theatre major said [a really bad word] (I edit myself for Daniel Walters’ grandma’s sake) really loud in Saga-I-mean-Sodexo at 6:45 PM, Thursday, April 1st.
2. I play Dungeons and Dragons with a group in Hendrick Hall. The security people leave the lights on in Hendrick Hall for us from after classes leave the hall until about midnight. Sometimes the security people stop by mid-session & tell us stories about epic things that happened in their high school/college/insert time period label here sessions.
3. Very few people commit the egregrious sin of PDA on the Whitworth Campus. Those who do, do it with passion (find the pun, it’s not very hard [if you noticed the pun between these parentheses, you're a perv (if you noticed the double puns, email me, I think we'd like each other)]).
4. Percentagely speaking, everyone at Whitworth loves Facebook.
5. Those who don’t love Facebook have really interesting reasons why the heck not.
6. Go to the Whitworth Coffee Shop alone sometime. Say hello to the inevitable fifteen people there that you know/took a class with/took a class from/have about .2390572938456 degrees of separation from. Take a moment to mourn Stan’s loss to the Whitworth community. And then sit down. And people-watch/listen. People talk about EVERYTHING in the Coffee Shop. It is one of (surprisingly numerous) places on campus where Whitworth’s diversity of psyche can be clearly seen. I have heard/participated in any number of conversations there. I have had conversations planning road trips where people felt free to lean over and suggest places to go (incidentally, Julia, Powell’s was amazing, as promised). I have heard intense debates between conservative professors and liberal students (and vice versa [Whitworth's subtitle should be vice versa]). I have interviewed Bill Robinson (no, he’s not an unusually lifelike hologram) for the Whitworthian. I have seen first dates there. I have experienced a first date there. I have had people meet me and my boyfriend six months later and say, “Oh! You’re that couple I saw that one time doing that one thing!”
7. I have sat with a Theology major in one of the larger dorms on campus and listened to him rant about how very, very, wrong evolution was as a concept, knowing that several dorm floors away, someone was pushing the Everclear a little farther behind the Whitworth-approved Mountain Dew in the minifridge. The contrast in personalities amazes me.
8. I, who grew up a flaming Southern Baptist, have been taught the beauty of Roman Catholicism by simply watching other people love it.
9. I sat in a lecture with close to fifty other people. The lecture concerned Chaucer and Sex. Maybe a third of the student audience were English majors. The professors there (some of the legends, Doug Sugano, Corliss Slack, Arlin Migliazzo) expressed amazement at the amount of people there. I was fresh out of high school. I hadn’t even declared my major yet. I was struck speechless that a) not only were there people who CHOSE to take English class, but b) they were taking time out of their social life (AND MANY OF THEM WEREN’T EVEN MAJORING IN ENGLISH!) to listen to a professor who didn’t teach at their school lecture about the blatant sexuality in a piece that is bandied about by at least as many people as have seen A Knight’s Tale!
10. I have gone on a roadtrip with an opinion columnist thinking about transferring to a college back home and a girl who carried her Canon camera on every beach we visited who is giving serious thought to transferring to Seattle Pacific University. I was taking a trip driving the car, in a rainstorm, on a curvy mountain road. I was distracting them and myself from the bad weather and dangerous conditions by telling them stories about my other friends (sounds dangerous – actually helps me focus & drive better – ). I found myself telling them about the horrible things that a high school friend of mine had gone through while I was simultaneously experiencing my freshman year at Whitworth. I had never talked to anyone about the experiences before. Because it was a road trip and I had just spent two days camping on the Oregon coast with these girls and listening to the amateur photographer playing folk songs on her fiddle for us in the dark while our campfire burned, I forged ahead. ….Not to put too fine a point on it, but I found myself trying to drive and sob at the same time. Without expressing any (justified) concern for her life at all, the opinions columnist gently offered to drive the car (which is owned by the amateur photographer). And I let her. And instead of doing what MOST people would do, which is let the change in drivers allow the mood to lapse and the crying and sharing stop, the opinions columnist hugged me as we passed each other on the way to changing seats, and once everyone was settled and we were on the road again, the amateur photographer started encouraging me to finish the story, “because it’s important to get these things out.”
11. Stewart is the dorm known for being attractively sketch, having sewer problems of mythic proportions, and testing the patience of the surrounding residential neighborhoods every year with the Stewart Lawn Dance (Save a horse, ride a cowboy!) But Stewart is also the dorm whose front lawn was featured in the ‘07/’08 school year, as a photography student took pictures of the four seasons in action from his dorm window. Stewart also vies with BJ for my personal title of “most flags displayed on dorm windows” (Colorado seems to have the most state pride, flag-wise).
12. Whitworth is obsessed with good art, even if half the campus doesn’t know it. There is a 3-D art sculpture in the HUB right now. It’s triangular & made out of broken mirrors. There are small-sized advertisements for REALLY INTERESTING events on the Whitworth campus stuck to it. You should go see it. The sculpture, I mean. And the interesting events. The HUB’s a pretty good thing to see too, while you’re out seeing things because some girl on the Internet told you to (protip: there are no girls on the Internet).
13. Whitworth is a campus that simultaneously has art students paying their way through college who really, really try to make a show called “Free Beer,” and who write very contained opinion columns when their idea is turned down….and conservative students from California whose fathers are millionaire businessmen who go to Hosanna every Tuesday night, rain or shine (or April snow).
14. While we’re on that topic, I love the glow of Whitworth’s lights in December/January when they are mere halos through fogs of snow, low-lying clouds, or other inclement weather. But I’m a little bemused by the beauty of an inch of snowfall when it comes on April Fool’s day (you see what God did there?).
15. I have a really skinny friend who lives in Arend and sometimes forgets to eat. He has ADD and sometimes gets really caught up in checking websites and doing homework and talking to friends and he…just…forgets…to eat. One day he fainted in front of his roommate (who I later heard threaten him: “If you ever do that again I will strangle you myself!”). It’s been roughly six months since that incident, and he’ll still meet people in Arend or associated with Arend (you know, dating some of Arend’s infamous geeks or the like) who, after a while, will suddenly look intensely focused, then surprised, and go, “Oh! You’re that guy that fainted!” They will then look suddenly concerned, put a hand on his shoulder, and ask sincerely, “Are you doing okay?”
16. I once brought a plate of cookies to Whitworth for the express purpose of sharing them with my boyfriend and inadvertently invited three computer science majors over to chillax in a tiny Keola room (that’s right, Village pride) and have some cookies as well. This is how it went. I was in charge of the cookies, sitting in the one chair in the room, simultaneously trying to listen to everyone talk and finish painting my Dungeons and Dragons figurine. My boyfriend kind of pressed himself against the wall and watched everything (I may or may not have invited those guys over while my boy was in the shower, I’m not sure – IT’S ALL A BLUR TO ME NOW -). One friend argued, cookie in hand, his theory about why women shouldn’t play World of Warcraft. The other friend argued with the first friend that he didn’t think ANYONE should play World of Warcraft, because it does all the imaginative work for you (that was the first time I’d met this guy face-to-face). And the last friend was curled up on my boyfriend’s bed, having kidnapped my boyfriend’s copy of Watchmen to reread.
17. In the last month before the ‘07-’08 school year was over, a group of us took to the back 40 one night. Those who played instruments were encouraged to bring them. We went down to Pirate’s Cove. The boy who played bagpipes was heckled until he got up on stage and played for us. Several others had particular pieces of poetry memorized and got up on stage and recited them for the group. One boy did all the voices and motions of the “Bring out yer dead!” scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail fame. Another performed some obscure speech by some crazy English revolutionary, in a funny accent (he’s talented with those). Then we walked in large circles around campus, singing shreds of songs that we all knew (The Beatles proved popular as the large majority knew at least a chorus’ worth of lyrics) as well as showtunes…..Incidentally, the boy who played the bagpipes still practices near Pirate’s Cove in the back 40 now and again. He prefers to practice in daylight, but often plays at night, lit by a bare lightbulb, surrounded by cigarette butts and dead pizza boxes.
18. If you are that rare creature, a sophomore or freshman who lives off-campus, most of Whitworth’s dorms and The Coffee Shop are a great place to just get away from it all. Take a book, take some coffee, take your laptop, take your sheet music & practice on the pianos that are in every single dorm (Thank you, to whoever’s idea that was). Any of the above, or your own idea, works. I especially recommend the big dorms for lounge-hopping, like Arend or Warren, but also spent about an hour in Schumacher last year when it was still girly and it worked pretty well. Haven’t been back in The Shoe since it changed gender, but I hear good things!
19. Whitworth lives in Spokane, a city that has a heartbreaking handfulsworth of metropolitan area centered around the Spokane River Falls and miles and miles and miles of condominiums and housing development. It takes a village to raise some beauty…
20. Three words: The Garland District. I don’t care when you go or where you go or what time of the day you go, just go. There’s Garland’s Dollar Theatre. There’s an excellent used-book store, I visited once and at the counter the owner looked through my selections and randomly started muttering, “That’s too much” and marking things down (which ended up really good because I was in a book glut mood and bought waaaaaaaay too much stuff that trip). There are about five semi-famous greasy-spoon restaurants (The Milk Bottle has Doug Sugano’s personal recommendation, if that means anything to you – plus the door is in the middle of a 15 foot milk bottle sculpture and there are lots of black and white pictures over the counter inside – what more do you need?). The Blue Door Theatre does cheap-ish but REALLY EXCELLENT improv every weekend or so and they need bigger audiences. GO SEE. REPORT BACK.
21. If you’re the occasional Whitworth student who actually has money, get yourself to the Spokane Civic Theatre. Two years ago they sent a Sondheim Musical (Assassins, for those literate in Sondheim Speak) to AACTFest in Charlotte, North Carolina. Why do I know this? Because I attended middle school and high school at Northwest Christian in town, and was in every musical from 7th-12th grade, and the theatre teacher graduated from Whitworth College. He played The Balladeer in that production of Assassins and as a person is why I attended Whitworth and plan to again.
22. Don’t be fooled by Whitworth’s white-bread exterior. It’s not all rich kids attending on their parent’s money. It’s also kids who cut and alcoholics and kids who love premarital sex and kids who write poems and kids who write worship songs and kids who wish…that…someone…would…just…react. Whitworth is like that crazy bread that Costco sells sometimes that looks nice and easily edible until you open it up and realize all the nuts in the inside. (”Everything is edible. People are edible, but that is cannibalism my dear children, which is in fact frowned upon in most countries [Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka, Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory].)
23. Whitworth is a boy who’s never known a kiss listening to his friend describe how much she misses sex in all its flavors.
24. Whitworth is a girl in a skirt hanging out with a group of boys, saying to one of them, “Stop being such a boy,” and having another boy twitch as in irritation and say, “As a boy I take offense to that,” and having the girl lean and say into his ear, “As a girl to a boy you know I’m right. Sometimes you have to realize that cliches are true, so you can transcend them.”
25. Whitworth is the marriage of the sacred and the profane.
The Catholic Mystique
No one will deny that there are some blatant biases on the Whitworth campus. Some get talked about more than others. There’s probably been more discussion about the bias against gays at Whitworth than there has been about the bias against, say, smokers. On the whole, though, most biases seem allowed at least a modicum of dialogue. There is one in particular, though, that I haven’t seen discussed in a public forum at all.
That, my friends, is the bias against Catholics.
Before you deny having any idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll admit it’s not just Whitworth. I’ve grown up going to various private schools. It’s always very heavily emphasized that there is no denominational favoritism. Yet, strangely, Catholics always seem to get left out from under this tolerance umbrella. “We’re all a big, happy family….except for the Catholics. They’re weird.” There is a similar attitude at Whitworth. Presbyterian-oriented as it is, I’ve never heard of any of my multidenominational friends have to deal with being told they’re “not really Christians,” having the tenets of their beliefs dismissed as being “outdated,” or having a sin committed by a miniscule amount of people associated with their denomination thrown in their faces over and over again. Except Catholics. Why is this?
There may be several reasons. America itself isn’t exactly geared toward Catholic friendliness, having been founded by low-church Puritans. And Catholic theology doesn’t really mesh well with our modern sensibilities. Nobody really listens to their parents anymore, so the idea of listening to some old guy in Rome who wears a funny hat is really out there. Accountability isn’t real big either. It’s a lot easier to just quietly whisper to a conveniently invisible and rather quiet God the fact that you totally blew it on keeping your relationship with your girlfriend pure for the third weekend in a row than it is to confess to a respectable priest you really admire, who’s probably going to give you a good telling off. But since when were our religious beliefs supposed to conform to what was fashionable, or even what was easy?
Then there’s the fact that Catholics and Protestants are supposed to be mortal enemies, religiously speaking – Protestants did split from the Catholic Church after all. Yes? So? One of the reasons there are so many varying Protestant denominations is splintering of the original movement away from Catholicism. Yet the only denomination that constantly has the others at its throat is Catholicism. Why?
Finally, I’ll address the issue I’m sure everyone has had in mind since I the word “Catholic” came up. Pedophile priests. Everyone knows priests are just a bunch of dirty old men, right? Ever since the abuse scandal broke in 2002, the Catholic Church has been up to its ears in bad press. And rightly so! Any organization that allowed such horrendous goings-on to fly under the radar for so many years should be inundated with nay-sayers! Except that a look at the statistics yields something odd. There are 11,000 cases of abuse by about 4,000 priests and deacons in the U.S. since 1950, about 4% out of the total amount of priests in the U.S. That’s five decades. Comparatively, 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from ONE DECADE —1991-2000. So where is all the outrage about pedophile teachers?
In my admittedly limited experience at Whitworth, I’ve found it to be a friendly environment without outright hostility. It’s that lurking under the surface that I’m worried about. Hopefully I’ve given everyone some things to ponder. And next time you feel like telling your buddy that absolutely hilarious priest joke you heard the other day…maybe you won’t.
The Depressing Use of Pascal’s Wager in Core 350
Those who have gone through the Core program at Whitworth are probably at least familiar with the name Blaise Pascal. The man’s risk/benefit analysis has been used to encourage the doubtful to believe in God’s existence, because the risk of not believing in God is greater than the risk of believing in God and being wrong. Or so the claim goes.
It is usually diagrammed thus:
Students in Core today were told to envision global climate change the same way – considering the risk/benefit analysis of believing global warming is a real phenomenon. It’s stupid, and I’ll explain why.
There are four options from this angle. Just like in the four boxes above.
1. You don’t believe in global warming, and global warming is false.
2. You believe in global warming, and global warming is false.
3. You believe in global warming, and global warming is true
4. You don’t believe in global warming, and global warming is true.
Logically, we are told, the first option is not that bad – you drive your hummer, the earth thrives. The second option is also pretty decent – you try to conserve the environment, but it doesn’t really help much. Maybe it’s a slight inconvenience. The third option is helpful – you try to save the planet, and in so doing, you save humanity! The fourth option, of course, is very bad – you harm the environment, and due to your contributions, the planet goes kaput.
This is all very well and good, but Pascal’s Wager A) is stupid if you use it the way people usually do, and B) does not apply if you use it correctly.
A) Here’s how it’s stupid: Try the same exercise, but take any life-threatening story you read in one of those grocery store checkout magazines about killer pterodactyl zombies or something (as a side note – I couldn’t remember the name of that magazine, so I did a quick google search for “Jesus, prophecy, aliens” and was taken aback by the number of legitimate, serious Christian websites that popped up).
1. The pterodactyl zombies exist, but you don’t believe in them
2. The pterodactyl zombies don’t exist, and you don’t believe in them
3. The pterodactyl zombies exist, and you believe in them
4. The pterodactyl zombies don’t exist, and you believe in them
By the same risk/benefit analysis, it’s pretty obvious that you’re better off believing the pterodactyl zombies exist. It’s safer.
The truth is, though, you can’t make something true (like global warming) just by considering which options are the most risky.
The same, by the way, is true of the God/not God argument – with an infinite number of possible gods (including the Almighty God of Cheese, who punishes those who don’t eat their daily amount of dairy product), Pascal’s Wager becomes much more lively! It almost becomes better not to believe in any gods, for the sake of not angering all the myriad of other possible gods by accident, if you pick the wrong one.
Catholic Church announces 7 new deadly sins; Fincher, Freeman and Pitt gear up for sequel talks
In an announcement that feels like an Onion headline reject, the Catholic Church has revealed a list of seven additional “mortal sins” created to keep pace with the modern world’s wickedness. The Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, broke the story and the list, which includes (in layman’s terms):
- Polluting
- Genetic engineering
- Obscene riches
- Taking & dealing drugs
- Abortion
- Pedophilia
- Causing social injustice
Pardon my cynicism, but this list reads like the output of a particularly rushed and inept Core 350 discussion group. “Oh, oh, don’t forget section B of the scenario! His Holiness will totally ding us five points if we leave out stem cells.” “Right, right… Which issue of the KJV Researcher was that again?”
I don’t disagree with the relative seriousness of most of the issues on here — no one is going to argue against the inclusion of pedophilia on the list, for example. (Please, no NAMBLA apologists.) But… isn’t all of this sort of covered already? I mean, obscene riches? Awesome, your thesaurus has an entry for greed. Barring genetic engineering, these aren’t exactly new innovations in modern sinning. And speaking of genetic engineering, we owe our earliest understanding of the genetic process itself to Catholic priest Gregor Mendel. Modern genetic engineering is merely Mendel’s treatise “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” (or, in the much more fun original German, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden) writ large.
But getting back on track, for those of us who can’t quite remember who Kevin Spacey killed when or for what, here are the original “Seven Deadly Sins” as established by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century — along with their original prescribed punishments, courtesy the Times of London:
- Pride: Broken on the wheel
- Envy: Put in freezing water
- Gluttony: Forced to eat rats, toads, and snakes
- Lust: Smothered in fire and brimstone
- Anger: Dismembered alive
- Greed: Put in cauldrons of boiling oil
- Sloth: Thrown in snake pits
I’ve been having a lot of conversations about the nuts and bolts of humor lately, and a core element of its DNA is specificity. That, and the comedy rule of threes. But boy, oh, boy, is this new list a specificity goldmine. Social injustice? Pollution? Come on, Catholic Church, you used to be a badass.
In interviews about this new development, Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti has been quoted in multiple articles as stating that 60 percent of Catholics in Italy don’t go to confession. Is this all a plan to guilt-trip the priesthood back into job security, or is spelling everything out like this truly necessary for today’s modern Catholic?
Election 2008’s forgotten topic
Let me preface this by saying that I have a vested interest in the topic. I am going to be in Whitworth’s Master in Teaching program next year, and hoping to become a high school teacher shortly thereafter.
For my Essay Writing class, we were told to find quotations about something that was interesting to us personally, so I selected education. I was searching for quotes and ideas from the presidential candidates because I thought they would have something interesting to say, when I discovered something truly disheartening.
Education is the forgotten topic in the 2008 election.
What follows is based on quotes, because that was the purpose of my assigment. And yes, I realize that it may be categorized as a rant, but something has to be said. And if you have links to the candidates’ complete, detailed education plans, please post them in the comments.