It's almost exactly midnight, as I ascend the stairs from the chaplain's office, emerging from the stony corridors of the Bingham basement into the chill nip of a late night in late autumn.
Freshmen, bundled in their brought-from-home best estimation of cold-weather garb, march past me in twos and threes down the flagstones from Durfee to Vanderbilt Hall; I turn in the opposite direction, tracing a beeline toward the High Street gate.
My steps - steady, circumscribed - trudge through the crunchy grass. My sneakers sink into mounds of leaves, impeding my footswings; rebelling against their feather-light bondage, I kick up, watching my reverse footprints swirling through the air, past my knees. My steps shorten, grow taller, until I am goose-stepping awkwardly, kicking up phantom soccer balls, watching the remnants of foliage envelop me, a torrent of sensation: crunching, yielding, bits floating into my hair and eyes and between my teeth.
I push through the final mound of leaves on the dark green quad, and I'm laughing to myself, a child blissfully alone in my own head. To my left, a Yale security officer watches me, grinning; I throw up a hand towards him, inviting him in.
He: "I've been wanting to do that all night."
I: "I love the autumn here."
As I pound the red button beside the High Street gate - a button that was not here when I arrived in this city - and the magnetic gate clicks unlocked, I chance on the uncomfortable realization that this is my last autumn in this city. As I pass through the quietly chilled night, I consider briefly the fleeting thought that I could call my friends, other church members, invite them to Old Campus, to laugh with me and throw the brown and red snowflakes of autumn at one another in large, embracing armfuls.
It's about five minutes after midnight, though, on a late night in late autumn; I tell myself, it would be unkind to bestir those whose time is better or necessarily spent elsewhere. Not to mention, I've been away from home for exactly twenty four hours, and I'm looking forward to sitting on my futon, drinking some orange soda, and watching downloaded TV shows. I trudge home through the flat streets.
That said, I am very glad that I can be a child, truly a child as even perhaps I never was in my younger years, kicking up my heels, stomping through the leaves.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
A thought
Arrogance has been on my mind a lot, recently.
I've been perusing some of the writings of Canadian Skeptic James Randi, listening to recordings of the aggressive Atheist debate of Richard Dawkins, and reading through weblogs self-identified with the freethought and Brights movements, in addition to exploring conversation with quite radically anti-religious persons (dialogue being altogether too bilateral a label for what I've experienced).
The standard rhetorical aesthetic of such fora of discussion seem to be a self-righteous anti-religiosity; transcending the boundaries of cheerily areligious belief, the new wave in modern atheism seems to have a bitterly antagonistic bent towards religion, a condescending, sneering sort of spite directed towards the faithful. In such systems, characterizations of theist beliefs often involves words and phrases such as the following: "magic," "imaginary friend," "arbitrary," "unfounded," &c.
Such discussions, and their underpinnings, truly sadden me for two reasons: (I) First, and primarily, as one who believes - intimately, personally - in the being of a loving, wonderful, perfectly fulfilling God who has created and does sustain all of existence, it saddens me that there are people who would so decisively and boldly cut away the possibility of a relationship with that loving God. All rhetorical flourishes aside, the loss of an inexhaustible source of infinite care and grace, even if only metaphysically so, seems as though it ought to bring grief in some degree.
For this reason, I don't feel quite the same way for those atheists who renounce God, but do so with a sense of the loss of the sweetness of what could have been: I can empathize with the humanness of loudly pronouncing, God is not; but, whispering, if only he were. But the point of view that I have recently encountered - rare, I think, in my postmodern surroundings - and that which has been grieving me, is the outright arrogant proclamation: God is not, and it's damn finer than if he were!
If God is not truth, but tale, might we at least admit the beauty of the story‽
(II), such discussions do elicit a fair degree of nervousness in myself: how much of such militant and callous opposition to the very concept of God is social karma for the past wrongs of "Christianity" [the sum of Christians-in-name] (or Christianity [the sum of Christians-in-truth, putatively distinct])? Was there an era - or manifold periods? - in Christian history where theologians, being found bearing the greater weight of authority in their respective societies, were found so overbearing, cocky, swaggering in their clerical roles, that they thus disparaged those honest dissenters in their midst?
Do I? Regularly, I'm sure. How often, in my own unthinking stagger through life, have I hurt, damaged, even spited others, and all while proclaiming, in my best Christian guise, to be an earthly representative of the all-loving Heavenly Father? Of course, I've spoken faithful testimony of being a "broken human being," to being a "sinner in constant need of grace". But has my life born witness to these truths? Or has my life reflected a know-it-all, condescending, self-proselytizing wretch content and happy to sow self-glorifying pride?
A thought.
[edit: 3:35 PM] And, to make it explicitly clear: The arrogance to which I'm referring does not fall exclusively within the atheist camp. My attention has been drawn, increasingly, to my own personal arrogance, theological, intellectual, and otherwise in nature, the pervasive reality of which is pretty challenging and self-perception-shattering (or perhaps, better put, is spurring me on towards redrawing my self-perception).
I've been perusing some of the writings of Canadian Skeptic James Randi, listening to recordings of the aggressive Atheist debate of Richard Dawkins, and reading through weblogs self-identified with the freethought and Brights movements, in addition to exploring conversation with quite radically anti-religious persons (dialogue being altogether too bilateral a label for what I've experienced).
The standard rhetorical aesthetic of such fora of discussion seem to be a self-righteous anti-religiosity; transcending the boundaries of cheerily areligious belief, the new wave in modern atheism seems to have a bitterly antagonistic bent towards religion, a condescending, sneering sort of spite directed towards the faithful. In such systems, characterizations of theist beliefs often involves words and phrases such as the following: "magic," "imaginary friend," "arbitrary," "unfounded," &c.
Such discussions, and their underpinnings, truly sadden me for two reasons: (I) First, and primarily, as one who believes - intimately, personally - in the being of a loving, wonderful, perfectly fulfilling God who has created and does sustain all of existence, it saddens me that there are people who would so decisively and boldly cut away the possibility of a relationship with that loving God. All rhetorical flourishes aside, the loss of an inexhaustible source of infinite care and grace, even if only metaphysically so, seems as though it ought to bring grief in some degree.
For this reason, I don't feel quite the same way for those atheists who renounce God, but do so with a sense of the loss of the sweetness of what could have been: I can empathize with the humanness of loudly pronouncing, God is not; but, whispering, if only he were. But the point of view that I have recently encountered - rare, I think, in my postmodern surroundings - and that which has been grieving me, is the outright arrogant proclamation: God is not, and it's damn finer than if he were!
If God is not truth, but tale, might we at least admit the beauty of the story‽
(II), such discussions do elicit a fair degree of nervousness in myself: how much of such militant and callous opposition to the very concept of God is social karma for the past wrongs of "Christianity" [the sum of Christians-in-name] (or Christianity [the sum of Christians-in-truth, putatively distinct])? Was there an era - or manifold periods? - in Christian history where theologians, being found bearing the greater weight of authority in their respective societies, were found so overbearing, cocky, swaggering in their clerical roles, that they thus disparaged those honest dissenters in their midst?
Do I? Regularly, I'm sure. How often, in my own unthinking stagger through life, have I hurt, damaged, even spited others, and all while proclaiming, in my best Christian guise, to be an earthly representative of the all-loving Heavenly Father? Of course, I've spoken faithful testimony of being a "broken human being," to being a "sinner in constant need of grace". But has my life born witness to these truths? Or has my life reflected a know-it-all, condescending, self-proselytizing wretch content and happy to sow self-glorifying pride?
A thought.
[edit: 3:35 PM] And, to make it explicitly clear: The arrogance to which I'm referring does not fall exclusively within the atheist camp. My attention has been drawn, increasingly, to my own personal arrogance, theological, intellectual, and otherwise in nature, the pervasive reality of which is pretty challenging and self-perception-shattering (or perhaps, better put, is spurring me on towards redrawing my self-perception).
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