Today's Summary:
We our initial discussion today centered around entitlement, privilege, and tribalism. James brought up this TED talk. We talked a bit about the kind of mindset that people enter into when they enter into the anonymity of being part of a crowd or a team. Ann pointed out that this famous experiment has been banned (? I can't remember if you said "banned" or if it just wouldn't be acceptable in today's society.) Steve brought up Lies My Teacher Told Me, and the idea that public school was essentially design to turn children into productive cogs in a machine. I talked a little bit about the fact that education is becoming more of a reinforcement about the entitlement that comes with money and the competitive aspects of a zero sum society.
At this, James brought up a topic that a lot of people in our group have probably had to deal with: whether or not to accept anything from religious organizations at work. James presented several of his own thoughts on the topic, each of which we discussed in some detail.
1) Religious organizations making donations to places of work often make the assumption that everyone there is Christian. It's an errant assumption or, if you prefer, an attempted negation of the identity of those who are unlike what the church members see as their "tribe."
2) Slimy feeling for accepting something from a group whose *ahem* philosophical inclinations do not match our own - if it was the NRA, would you take the food? What about the Westboro Baptist church?
3) Take advantage or a stand for yourself - if no one can start a conversation with you about the food because you're in a secure area and there is no "prayer card" or whatever to add strings to the meal, what's the harm in taking advantage of a bunch of people who are clearly not interested in maintaining equity in the world anyway? Or would it be better to stay true to ourselves in such a case - don't take food from a church because it is not something that we agree with?
4) Bait - does it seem like a person is participating as prey in a predatory activity? Does it seem like the normalization of an activity that should be in no way normal? Churches use bait all over the place - Charles pointed out that many Christians became that way, either first or second hand, because of predatory churches in the developing world. "Come to our meeting; we have food." Or, as I liked to put it, everyone is being baited into Christianity with the use of bait-after-death.
Ann continued our discussion by bringing up another local concern: a church meeting being held in a public school gym - it's apparently being rented by the group, but run by adults (please correct me if my notes are wrong). We talked about that kind of thing in a professional setting - whether a person is working in the public or private sector. While we are often, if not always, well within our rights to take issue with this sort of thing, it might not be a hill worth dying on, so to speak. We shared anecdotes of people losing out professionally and even at the high school level (This sounded like what we talked about, but I'm not entirely sure that it's the same). Subjective attacks can be really, really difficult to combat - once our colleagues decide that they don't like our faces because of our beliefs, it can be a short trip out the door. Economic reprisals are surprisingly, insanely easy for Christian colleagues to use against us in the sense that we can easily be professionally undermined, simply for not believing what the rest of the "tribe" believes.
We talked about how, as people get farther along in their careers, they become less and less interested in "playing nice" or *ahem* "caring about our jobs." Again, we come back to the debate over whether its important to not allow the normalization of prejudice against us in the workplace or to not have to worry about our career because of what we believe.
Ann told us an anecdote about the entitlement of some preachers who deigned it necessary to knock on her door at 8:30 one evening. The conversation wended toward, "Well, what are you going to do when you die?"
Ann: "Be dead!"
This turned our discussion to the insanity that surrounds funerals and death - Charles talked about the Egyptians imagining that their rulers would continue to need food and other comforts after dying. We talked about the whole industry surrounding the treatment of corpses - which is antithetical toward a lot of Christianity anyway. Why does a body need to be sealed in a leak proof tomb if the soul is going to heaven? What if there is a resurrection and the bodies are sealed under six feet of dirt in a coffin, inside of a metal container? Would this complicate a zombie apocalypse? Obviously, we went a little ad absurdum with this, but zombies are written into Christianity from the get-go. After all, what would you call a group of people beyond death, who have no free will? Does that mean that heaven is full of zombies? After all, heaven wouldn't have any evil in it, right? Soooooo... will-less post-death corpses, right? There are some great takes on heaven - Twain and Dar Williams.
Charles brought up the man who asked Jesus for a seat next to him in his kingdom - (James or John, I think?) It does seem a lot like heaven's just an extended church session. Yikes. I jokingly added that in the time period when Jesus was living, the idea of having a chair may have been very, very attractive - even just having the ability to sit around at leisure may have been blissful at the time it was written. Dunno. Wasn't there.
We talked a bit more about the many faces of YHWH, El, and, eventually, Kal El and Jor El
Steve brought up a book that Lyn has spoken of many times: The Chalice and the Blade. I'm probably adding that and, maybe, Stargate - according to Joe and James (I saw the original, but never the tv show), which is about the USAF killing alien gods - to my queue of Things to Check Out.
Next Time:
I won't be around on the 15th or the 29th. If someone has a topic, that'd be awesome (let me know, and I'll e-mail everyone). If not, by all means, get together and be a community. I plan to have a topic for the 22nd, but I'll update you about that soon! Have a great week! See everyone as soon as I can! Have an awesome week!
