McViking.Org

I’ve remarked before that I would gladly attend seminary if I thought they were in the business of admitting atheists. It’s still true. I find theological issues fascinating; often even more fascinating than questions of “mainstream philosophy”. I think that’s probably because “mainstream philosophy” isn’t very mainstream. Almost nobody professes any knowledge of or interest in philosophy. But a majority of our society identifies as religious — despite knowing almost nothing of the Bible and nothing at all about theology. So I almost never turn down the chance for a theological discussion when one comes my way.
Lately, I’ve been corresponding with a friend who has the dual distinction of being a terrific thinker and rhetorician as well as a devout Christian — a combination sadly rare amongst people I encounter these days. She is also, thankfully, not too afraid to talk about it. She sent me the summary of her Bible study last week, a discussion about the “kingdom of God”, and how it relates to the idea of community. Basically, it was an effort to equivocate the two as something existing in the present, manifest in the hearts of Christians participating in the community of faith. My response got much longer than I intended, and is reproduced below:
OK, a few quick initial thoughts on what I’ve seen from you thus far:
First, you start off by wanting to talk about the “community of God”. Failing any good texts for that, you instead move on to “kingdom of God”, and talk about that instead. Fair enough. But then you want too easily to go back and apply lessons learned back to the concept of “community of God”. And I wonder if you can really do that. It may be splitting linguistic hairs, but you’re already splitting linguistic hairs by dwelling so seriously on the present tense of the verb “is” in the book of Matthew. So I feel that it’s only right and fair to point out that “community” and “kingdom” mean two very different things. I daresay that’s especially true when you’re talking about Jesus addressing an assembled Jewish audience living beneath a Roman occupation army. Here you have a people who left slavery under an Egyptian Pharaoh, established their own kingdom with their own proud history of kings, and were now living once again kingless under a foreign military power. So when Jesus talks to the assembled Jews about the “kingdom of God” (and let’s not forget that he was spitefully mocked as “king of the Jews” during his execution), it seems unfair to equivocate that with the “community of God” as embodied by the early Christian church — a decidedly kingless and underground anarchic collective. I think that, at least to a Jew speaking to a Jewish audience, “kingdom of God” would have meant something very specific, probably implying a militaristic hierarchy as they had in the past. It’s hard to imagine the Jews understanding it differently, anyway. So while understanding the kingdom of heaven to be manifest in the vessels of human interaction (a la “community”) may be convenient after the fact, I don’t think I buy it on the face of things — at least not in the context of the passage from which you’re working. It needs a richer explanation that takes into account the actual historical/Biblical circumstances. Kingdom and community are perhaps not at all the same thing in a biblical context, and their differences are bound to be interesting.
Which brings me to my second point of skepticism — I’m instantly suspicious of an exegetical “close reading” of the New Testament gospel. While certainly the tenets of Christianity rest on the spirit and in some cases the letter of the New Testament texts, I have serious doubts that drawing theological conclusions from things like English verb tenses has significant value. Let’s not forget that the New Testament wasn’t written in English. I’m told that Biblical Hebrew has only two verb tenses; Greek has something like seven , but they don’t quite correspond to the English tenses; I don’t know anything at all about Aramaic. So are you sure that you’re willing to hang matters of theological consequence on things like verb tenses translated into English in the seventeenth century by forty-seven different scribes working by committee under the oversight of King James — who, it might be added, certainly had his own vested interest in how the “kingdom of God” might be interpreted, and its possible effects on the kingdom of man? (Perhaps you aren’t working from the King James here, but the question is valid for any other translation, as well. Comparing the validity of translations, especially with regard to the political interests of the translation’s benefactor, is itself an interesting and complex topic…)
I am not, of course, trying to discourage you from seeking answers to the particular issues in front of you. On the contrary, I’m trying to encourage you to seek more interesting answers — answers that take the historical facts of the church into account, and don’t simply approach 2,000 year old orations as if they were uttered last week in modern English. I think you’ll find that the community of God is quite a bit richer in detail than the abstract divine mystery manifest in human vessels at which you hint.
Whew. That’s more than I meant to say. I’ll admit that I find the topic fascinating — although undoubtedly for different reasons than you. Press on with it, and tell me to shut up when necessary

I may be an atheist, but hopefully it can at least be said that I’m an atheist interested in helping to turn the Christian faith in America away from the profit-driven killing machine that it’s become, and back into something of which Augustine or Jesus himself could actually be proud…

OK, there’s not actually any stress. But it is the day after my birthday — I’m 29 years old, and feeling tougher than ever. Happy birthday to me.
I’ve started to get a bit more comfortable in my post-travel Blacksburg life. The first week was kind of hard. I felt like I wasn’t ready to be back, wasn’t supposed to be back, and everybody kept asking me why I was back already. Fortunately, that part is pretty well past. Now I can finally get around to the business of just being back, and figuring out what to do about that.
This month, I’ve been staying in The House of the Blissfully Engaged and Their Cat, which has been working out pretty well. I can’t help but feel like That Guy Who Comes Home Drunk Long After They’ve Gone To Bed And Passes Out On The Spare Bed, but that’s probably because that’s pretty much what I am. But they’ve been tolerant of me, I’ve been washing my dishes and not leaving my underwear around the house, and things seem to be going smoothly. In another two weeks, I’ll have a home again and will actually be able to take a few things out of storage, which should make life simpler, and should help me to feel a bit more like I live here again. If nothing else, I’ll be able to get mail again.
In any case, yesterday was indeed my birthday, and a fine birthday it was. I had almost forgotten about it this year. Usually I’m reminded of my birthday by the cards and phone calls that start coming about a week before the event, but since I have no permanent address and only just got a phone last week, there was little warning until somebody said a few days ago, “Hey, isn’t your birthday on Tuesday?” to which I responded, “Crap. Yeah, I guess it is.” So there wasn’t a party per se this year. At least not yet. Instead, I spent the day canoing on the New River with a good friend and a bottle of warm red wine. Getting slowly drunk in the hot sun while floating lazily through a millions-of-years-old gorge was about the best birthday present I could imagine.
The second best birthday present I could imagine, though, I also got, courtesy of Mary D: A TV-B-Gone. The inventor of this device should, in my opinion, be given a Nobel Peace Prize. The device is billed as “useful electronics for a better world”, and I believe it to be just that. For the unintiated: the TV-B-Gone is a universal remote control with just one button: OFF. Its beautiful little microchip brain contains a database of infrared commands to turn off nearly any make of television in North America. If you’re like me, this solves one of the greatest nusiances in going out to bars — the ubiquitous glow of televisions that hardly anybody is actually watching, but distracts everybody from actually looking much at one another. TV-B-Gone solves this problem at the touch of a button. From their web site:

Q. Why?
A. Because a tv that is powered on is like second-hand smoke. Why should you be exposed to tv just because someone else is addicted to it?

I gave my TV-B-Gone a try just minutes after receiving it. I was out for birthday beers with some friends at The Rivermill, and the wall behind us was dominated by one of those e-fucking-normous plasma screen monstrosities showing the NBA finals or something. I casually reached into my pocket, fished out my keychain, and pushed that beautiful, beautiful OFF button, causing the commotion and noise of the basketball game to instantly wink out of existence. The effect on the startled doorman was profound. He lept into action, immediately re-igniting the TV, and then ran back to the bar to fetch the remote control in case such “malfunctions” were to re-occur. So I took my TV-B-Gone to the back of the bar, and started winking out televisions near the pool tables, where nobody seemed the least bit bothered by it. We briefly debated whether we could get thrown out of the bar for turning off televisions, and decided that we probably could. Which, if you’re going to get thrown out of a bar, is probably the single greatest way that I could imagine to do it.
So I look forward to many pleasant 29-year-old evenings of television-free bars. Thank you, Cornfield Electronics. Western civilization may yet be saved.

Well, it’s been over a year in the making now, but The Empties finally have a 3 song demo ready. After much recording, re-recording, aquiring new equipment, recording again, re-mixing, starting over, and interminable tweaking, we finally have something that we are proud to say sounds sort of like us on a good day. The next phase in our plan for world domination should involve giving the CD to some local bars and begging for a chance to earn some beer money. Here’s hoping we’ll see you soon in a honky-tonk in your neighborhood.

Somehow I managed to get through an entire summer vacation without taking a single picture. I’m not entirely sure why that happened. I guess since I’ve been to the same lake for three years in a row with most of the same people, there isn’t much new worth photographing. Too easy to just look at last year’s photos and pretend that they’re from this year.
I did, however, record an acoustic version of “ The End Is Near“, one of the songs that I wrote for The Empties. It’s pretty low tech, as I didn’t have much gear with me. While I like some of the banjo bits, the recording as a whole makes me want to buy a compressor and noise gate. So it goes on my musical wish list, along with a fiddle and a tremolo pedal…

I am now really and truly on summer vacation. The full magnitude of what this means hasn’t set in quite yet (and I suspect it won’t until next week, when my life actually settles down a bit.) A few people have suggested that with no job and no classes all summer, I will get bored. These are obviously individuals with an over-developed sense of duty. Boredom is the very least of my concerns this summer.
Vacation started with quite a bang. Immediately after turning in final grades for my students, I drove to PA to meet up with Andy, and rode with him down to a Les Savy Fav show at the 9:30 club in D.C. LSF were opening for The Faint, whom we didn’t even stick around to see. (80s synth pop is BAD. Naughty little indie rockers! Put away those “vintage” Popples t-shirts and go to your rooms to think about what you’ve done.) Les Savy Fav were decent, but my enjoyment of the show was tempered by two things: 1) I hate the 9:30 club. Too big, too crowded. 2) Too many people in front of me standing with folded arms, waiting for The Faint and insufficiently appreciating LSF. This means that not only did I not get to rock as hard as desired, but the pictures that I took are not nearly as close-up as usual.
The rest of the weekend was spent in the mountains of PA, throwing a bachelor party for Dave . We had a good time, consumed mass quantities, sat around a bonfire, and brought him back with all of his teeth (as requested). Mission successful.
Project for this week is to throw a birthday party for myself and Jarred on Wednesday night. I’m hoping to get some decent blackmail photos from that event…