Everything You Knew is Wrong

Whoa, WordPress.com went to the 2.5 layouts! Trippy.

I’ve been working on other, worldly projects, so I haven’t updated this blog in some time. Lately I’ve been slammed by Google Image Search hits, looking at a post that I wrote last year, which I guess is nice. I never really had an intended audience for this blog, so maybe people looking for pictures of a certain cathedral can be my core audience. No fights in the combox that way.

By not updating, I guess I missed my chance to run for the Cannonball awards. In the heretic category, naturally–agnosticism is a heresy. Sorta.

I am still attending Mass sporadically. I haven’t been to confession and thus not to communion, since there’s something very wrong in principle with receiving sacraments when I don’t believe in them.  Or am not sure that I believe in them.

I still love Catholic liturgy, culture, and moral theology, as I did even as an out-and-out atheist.  I’m just not where I stand theologically on the question of whether there is a God, of whether there is a personal God (a very key distinction) and whether that God left messages for humanity, then a message made flesh, with the Hebrews, a somewhat obscure if centrally located tribe of people.

That’s where I stand.

I can’t comment on the Off the Record blog, see.  So I’ll comment here.

Honestly, I’m stumped here. I cannot fathom how any intelligent human being would suggest that children trained to abstain from sexual activity are more likely to contract STDs than those who are trained to believe that from the time of adolescence forward, sexual activity is healthy, pleasant, and more or less inevitable. 

Just because you train children to do something doesn’t mean that they actually do it.  “Abstinence” to most teens means sticking to oral and anal sex.  And nobody uses protection for oral sex.

I’d like to live in that ideal world where people don’t have lots of unprotected random sex, but none of us does.

I sure as hell didn’t go to high school there.

Oh noes! The atheists and antitheists have wandered to the Curt Jester entry on homophobia! Look how ~*~*edgy*~*~ and rebellious they are, spelling “God” in lower case!  My poor brainwashed mind can’t handle their crushing wave of logic.

This natural fertility stuff is all right, but I miss having a shorter, less brutal period and no three-day crying jags beforehand.

Don’t miss the migraines and expelling huge blood clots, though.

The parish where I grew up and performed as a folk mass guitarist for four years, which is an eco-church office away from turning into a certain fictional parish, is starting Eucharistic Adoration.  Considering that I had never even heard of Adoration until I was in my mid-twenties, and attended this parish regularly from 1984 to 2004….well.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK—IT’S A HEAVEN OF A TOWN!

Daily Show writer Rob Kutner, with a lot of time on his hands these days, wrote up an itinerary for the Holy Father’s upcoming visit to New York City. It starts by mentioning that the visit occurs in the “sweet spot between tax time and Passover, so all of the Jews are busy.” It goes downhill from there–I don’t think I cracked a smile during the whole thing.

This is a SPECTACULAR spewing of bitterness, right here.

Last week, I was taking an evening nap after work. As I lay there, I had a vision. My heart and chest burned, at first with pain, and then with this sort of almost-unbearable orgasmic radiance that centered in my chest and radiated outward from there. I struggled to adjust my position or to make it go away, but it wouldn’t stop. My eyes were closed, but my field of vision filled with flames, and a loud insistent voice repeated over and over while the words appeared in flaming letters in front of me, “Numbers 119. Numbers 119.”

“All RIGHT!” I remember thinking. “I’ll LOOK it up in the Bible. I just want this to stop. I’m afraid.”

The vision and strange feeling stopped. Shortly after that….I woke up, finding myself lying on my stomach in the same position I had been during the vision, with my arms slightly asleep. I shook it off and decided that I had just had a terrifyingly vivid dream. A dream where I had the sort of strong, life-altering spiritual experience that so many people crave…but that I crave particularly right now.

Later that night, I pulled my Bible off the shelf so I could look up the passage that had been seared into my brain during the dream. Of course, if you know Scripture better than I do, you know that there is no Numbers 119. Numbers 1:19 and 11:9 are not terribly moving passages. Or passages of any interest at all to someone in spiritual crisis.

If God is out to prove Himself to me, making sense might help. Or maybe I really did have that vision, and the lack of logical sense was the message. Seems roundabout.

My subconscious likes to mess with me in these ways, and my subconscious is also a particularly pissed-off atheist.