Why Do *You* Believe In God?

It's interesting to me that several people – both Christian and non-Christian – have told me recently that they believe in God because of the natural world or because of existence itself. It interests me because that is absolutely not why I myself believe in God.

Let me state off the bat that I mean no value judgment: I don't think one reason for believing in God is somehow more or less valid than another. (Frankly, I think all God-belief is to some extent irrational – that's why it demands the logic-defying leap we call “faith.”) Everything that follows is my own personal belief, feeling, and experience, and I hope it doesn't come across as denying or discrediting anyone else's belief, feeling, or experience of God.

As a matter of fact, I think it is monumentally important to give credit to other people's experience of God most especially when it differs from your own. If you declare your own experience of God to be the only true or valid one, you are confining God to your tiny mind-box and denying the vast, multifaceted, ineffable divine. Giving ear and credence to experiences of God that differ from your own is a matter of humility, of recognizing that God is much much bigger than you are, of acknowledging the divine mystery that God is able to bring billions of unique human individuals into unity without erasing our individuality.

I am rather overwhelmingly preoccupied with the concept of a unity that does not erase individuality – in fact I'm convinced that it is the foundational philosophical conundrum of our time – and that is why I am so interested in ideas about God that do not resonate with me personally. Natural beauty, clearly, is a powerful witness of God to many people; which makes me wonder, why is it not one for me?

For a start, I think, it's because of the emphasis on science throughout my childhood. As far back as I can remember, my brothers and I were encouraged to be interested evolution and natural history and astronomy. Even though I did grow up going to church as well, I never saw God as a necessary factor in the natural world. My schema of the origins and development of the universe was complete in itself; your cosmological argument never made a great deal of sense to me.

Moreover, I am not a big nature person. Like, it's pretty and all, but that's about as far as it goes for me. I'm the world's biggest townie: a picture of the New York skyline makes my heart leap into my throat in a way that, say, one of Everest just doesn't. The closest I get to a religious experience in nature is when I look up at the night sky (somewhere out there an alternate universe version of me is a very happy astrophysicist). I have seen many a breathtaking sunset or waterfall in my lifetime, but those are not the things that stay with me. Maybe my childhood, surrounded by some of the most astonishing natural beauty on the planet, caused me to take it for granted.

The moments that do stay with me – the things I absolutely cannot take for granted – are the ones that give me what I lacked in childhood: namely, friendship. The natural world may not speak to me of God's goodness and love, but I find that goodness and love attested to in overwhelming abundance every time another human invites me to spend time with em, tells me ey cares about me, demonstrates that ey values my presence in eir life.

Creative and artistic works also bear witness to me of God. A book I love so much it hurts; a favorite TV show; “Spirit of Radio” or a Brandenburg Concerto – I can't not believe in God when I experience these things.

And yet, though friendship and creativity both witness to me of God, neither of them is the reason I believe in God. The reason, I'm afraid, is very much a product of my time among the evangelicals, and it comes down to this:

sola Jesu.

I believe in God through and because of (to, for, by, with, from, in, on) Jesus Christ. I can't go into detail, because my relationship with him is very very personal, but to me he is the grounding of everything. Throughout all of my consideration of lofty theological conundrums; in all of the ways that my first year of graduate theological studies has exploded my every attempt at understanding God into a million pieces; whenever I am so lost in deconstruction and postmodernism that I don't know which way is up – it all, in the end, brings me back to him.

If it wasn't for Jesus – for his life as recorded in the Gospels, for the countless theological and creative works interpreting that life, for the transformative encounter I had with him four years ago (whilst reading a passage in Mere Christianity on, of all things, penal substitution!) – I would still be an atheist-leaning agnostic, finding meaning in friendship and in creativity, but not God as such. He is the logic-defying leap for me, the inexplicable that transfigures “meaning” into “God.”

You Self-Identify Wrong

A friend recently sent me this talk by Daniel Dennett, “How To Tell You're An Atheist.” Dennett is, I think it's fair to say, the least obnoxious of your Four Horsemen of New Atheism, and the talk is pretty interesting, especially at the bookends: the phenomenon of closet-atheist clergy is enormously fascinating, as is the observation that religious creeds must tend to impenetrability if they're to survive.

However, the talk's very title telegraphs something that thoroughly infuriates me about New Atheism, and that is its evangelical fervor. I realize I run the risk of making a false equivalency here, so let me state forthrightly that I absolutely do not think that New Atheists and the Christian right are like totally the same and both sides are as bad as each other and the truth lies in the fuzzy-wuzzy middle. The fact that the United States (where much of this discourse is taking place) is a Christian supremacist society means that the dynamics at play when an atheist speaks are very different than when a Christian speaks, even if they're saying the same thing. They're coming from different places, they got there in different ways, they have diametrically opposed agendas; but the fundagelical and the atheist telling me I'm not really a Christian are both very wrong.

The intense hostility of much of US culture toward atheists is pretty mystifying for us godless-commie-Europeans, but it certainly exists, and it completely explains the forcefulness of some American atheists. When you're a marginalized group trying to assert yourself to a dominant culture that would prefer to pretend you don't exist, you have to be loud and proud, and if you bruise the delicate fee-fees of your oppressors, well, cry me a frickin' river. I get that. But the marginalization of non-believers in the US really isn't exactly the same as other axes of marginalization and oppression, because belief (or lack thereof) is, as Dennett points out in that speech, entirely internal. His suggestion that Christians who help the poor are closet atheists is breathtakingly cynical (and that's coming from a thoroughgoing cynic), but his point stands: no matter what someone says and does, we can't know what they truly do or don't believe. Dennett's theory is that, for an awful lot of people, their behavior and their beliefs do not align. Christianity, on his reading, is teeming with closet atheists for whom the social consequences of admitting their lack of faith are just too high.

Now, I sympathize with the goal of making it socially acceptable to be openly atheist. Frankly, I find it nonsensical that it's not acceptable here. But I have a lot less sympathy for the accusation of widespread bad faith or false consciousness – for the practice of telling self-identified Christians that, if they're thinking people or not fully orthodox or lefties, they're probably not really Christians.

Since Dennett himself uses the analogy of gayness (which is totally not in any way a cheap shot or a false equivalency), let's roll with that. I am a queer person, and if I'm perfectly honest straightness baffles me. On a gut level it weirds me out and repels me, and, though I'm surrounded by self-identified straight people, I just don't get why anyone would be straight.

I could make the argument that they shouldn't be. I could say that, once upon a time, I thought I must be straight too, before I knew it was possible to be anything else; that I understand the fear of social consequences that keeps people closeted; that probably there are tons of straight-identified people who are really secret queers, but they're too uninformed or afraid to admit that they're anything other than straight.

To some extent, I think this is true (though the numbers are probably fewer than I'd like them to be), just as it's true of closet-atheist Christians. But that doesn't mean I think it's right to second-guess all straight people, to tell them their identity as a straight person is a lie (at best to everyone around them, at worst to themselves as well), to redefine the parameters of straightness so as to exclude a lot of straight-identified people (because I understand straightness better than they do? because I know them better than they know themselves? because I've put a lot of thought into this whole issue, and the fact that they still call themselves straight proves that they haven't?). My goal might be the noble one of encouraging self-actualization and greater self-understanding, but this tactic sucks. It's aggressive, it's arrogant, it's domineering, and it's hierarchical.

Saying “if you call yourself straight, but you've ever thought about kissing someone of the same gender as you, then you're actually a big flaming 'mo” isn't helpful. For straight people who are not ready to think deeply about sexuality, that statement sounds like a threat. For straight people who have thought deeply about sexuality, it's insulting and delegitimizes their process. Either way, it's accusing straight people of a false consciousness and co-opting their identity.

Of course, if your ultimate concern is swelling the ranks of people you can call queer, then I suppose this is the optimal tactic. But if your ultimate concern is giving people the tools for greater self-awareness, better critical thinking, and a richer engagement with the world and people around them, then you're better off sticking to education. Despite his title and some of his more condescending moments, Dennett does recognize this in that speech, and that is why I have more respect for him than for Dawkins et al.

By all means, be as loud and proud an atheist as you want. God (or whoever) knows the world needs more thinking people who will stand up boldly for what they (don't) believe in. People need to encounter others who think and live differently than they do. It's the only way to learn and grow as a person.

Tell me how you self-identify, what you think and believe, and why; I need to hear it. Just don't fucking tell me what I am.

A Very Glee Blog Post

Regular readers and personal friends will know that I like watching Glee almost as much as I like complaining about Glee. There's just so much to complain about! Lately all my thoughts on Glee have been channeled to my best gals Emily and Erica at the awesome GleeKast, thus depriving my lovely readers of many wise insights and/or fangirly squees (unless you listen to GleeKast, which you should, because it is, as I said, awesome).

My love for Glee is like the Grateful Dead's back catalog: vast, inexplicable, and deeply confusing. Each episode entertains and delights me; each episode offends and annoys me – and my feelings about the show in any given week tilt with the balance of these two axes. Even the better episodes always have a number of elements that need fixing, and the worst ones are downright unpleasant to watch. Nevertheless, Glee has a genuine wildness at its heart, a disconnect from reality and a compelling originality that maintains its status as appointment viewing.

Last time I blogged about the most annoying show on TV was in November. At that time, Glee was really getting on my tits. The ten episodes of Glee's second season that aired before Christmas included the delights of “Duets” and the uneven pleasures of “Grilled Cheesus”, “The Substitute”, and “Furt”, but there was also a slew of truly awful episodes: “Britney/Brittany”, “The Rocky Horror Glee Show”, and “A Very Glee Christmas”. In 2011, the good/bad balance has been more to the positive side, with lots to enjoy about “Silly Love Songs” and “Blame It on the Alcohol”, while “Sexy” and “Original Song” featured enough fanservice to counteract their problematic parts.

My assessment of TV's finest musical dramedy depends not only on my aesthetic response to each episode, though, but also on how much it offends me politically. From the outset, Glee declared its political intent: it was to be an all-inclusive rainbow story of diversity, embracing the bullied, the outcast, and the marginalized kids – per its tagline, it's “for the underdog in all of us”. How it's actually handled diversity, however, has varied wildly.

First, the evidence for the prosecution:

Example 1 – Blaine thinks he might be bisexual. I think there is a chance for the show to offer a thoughtful, nuanced story about adolescent insecurity regarding sex and sexual identity. We actually get a flip resolution and an apparent reinforcement of Kurt's biphobia (“Bisexual is a term that gay guys in high school use when they wanna hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change”). N.B. I still hold out hope for a slightly different exploration of adolescent sexual insecurity now that Blurt is a real, honest-to-God thing.

Example 2 – Mercedes. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes. For God's sake, Glee writers, can't you give poor Amber Riley something to do? If you need some lessons in writing for a woman of color, I'm sure the writers of Community would be able to school you; perhaps in exchange for a nice ratings-boosting in-show plug. When Mercedes told Mr. Schue, in “Original Song”, that her song was good, and he said it wasn't regionals material, I felt that his comment bore the unspoken subtext “because it doesn't foreground the white kids”. Note also the near-total silence of Tina and Mike Chang this season. For a show that started out trading on its Benetton-ad diversity, Glee is really quite amazingly racist.

Example 3 – Quinn gets a personality transplant every five minutes. One day she's the closest thing New Directions has to a feminist; the next all she wants is to be prom queen. And there's the whole virgin-whore thing, where every female character is one or the other; the way a male character can lose his virginity (and even regret it, as Finn and Artie both do) without suffering in any discernible way, but when Quinn loses it she has to go through the oldest punishment in the book to earn her way back to (pseudo-)virgin status; the way, as The Funny Feminist points out, the hetero relationships are focalized through the male party. Sometimes I think that Glee just hates women.

Example 4 – the kicker; in my opinion, the absolute worst thing that has ever happened on Glee. I speak, of course, of Cyborg Artie in “A Very Glee Christmas”. A lot of PWD (that's people with disabilities to you non-PC brigade) find the casting of able-bodied Kevin McHale to play wheelchair-using Artie deeply problematic, because so few parts are available to actors with disabilities (google “crip drag”, y'all). The storyline with Artie's robot legs was the nadir of this show's neverending parade of offensiveness: “Hey, kids using wheelchairs, if your gym teacher is a gazillionaire, then maybe one day you too can walk again like a REAL BOY! It’s a ~*~Christmas miracle~*~”... I hope I don't have to explain why this is so very, very offensive. (If I do, then seriously, google “crip drag” and get self-educating.) The prosecution rests.

None of these things are defensible, of course, so the defense counsel can only hope to outweigh them with counterexamples. Step up:

Counterexample 1 – Coach Bieste becomes a BAMF. As you know, her treatment in “Never Been Kissed” turned my stomach, and since then the writers have wisely stepped back from the 40-year-old virgin territory. For a moment in “Blame It on the Alcohol”, I was terrified that they were going to go there, which would have undermined a truly awesome sequence of her and Will having a buds' night out at the roadhouse (Patrick Swayze sadly too deceased to cameo). At this point, their friendship is almost the only thing I like about Will. Long may it continue.

Counterexample 2 – Lauren Zizes. Oh, she is wonderful. A character who was initially nothing more than a delivery service for mean-spirited and offensive jokes (the AV nerd is fat! The fat girl is always eating! Ha ha!) has transcended this role to become one of my favorite characters in the whole ensemble. Lauren doesn't buy into society's prescriptions for women's body-image; she knows she's beautiful; she doesn't truck with standard Glee self-congratulatory footling around minority characters, telling Puck to cram it when he's being offensive; and, hell, I know a woman doesn't need a hot guy to validate her, but I really do love the Zizes/Puckerman pairing. They're just such a fun couple.

Counterexample 3 – Burt and Kurt's father-son relationship goes from strength to strength. Their every interaction nails it so hard that it's almost as if they've been airlifted in from a different show, one that values things like consistency and believability. The After-School-Special aspect of Glee has been handled really quite well lately, from the Kurt/Karofsky business to a teen-drinking episode that was reasonably realistic and not too preachy. Despite its frequently cartoonish nature, Glee has an ability to totally commit to its PSA-like aspects, with an endearing, My So-Called Life-ish earnestness.

Counterexample 4 – you knew this was coming! Brittana. Santittany. Whatever you choose to call them, they are another terrific instance of Glee's capacity to flesh out one-joke stereotypes far beyond what anyone could have predicted, into one of the best things about the show. Objectivity will never be a part of this for me, because I've been shipping this portmanteau with every atom of my being ever since that first fateful one-liner back in December '09, but I am super-chuffed with how this storyline is unfolding so far. We're not getting straightforward fanservice (well, except where body-shots are concerned); we are getting a long-term story arc, deep emotional truth, and one heck of a lot of processing. Could it get any more lesbian than that? The defense rests.

Noble internauts, fellow Gleeks, you are the jury. What is your verdict?

Fall TV

I love the fall TV season. The buzz and anticipation surrounding new shows; the looking forward to returning favorites; the obsessive comparing of personal and critical reactions to the major pilots – it’s all very intense, very geeky, and a lot of fun.

The disappointments are as much a part of it as the good stuff. There’s the inevitable batch of cringeworthy sitcoms, few of which are likely to see in the new year; the critically acclaimed but entirely unwatched show that gets canceled after two episodes (farewell, Lone Star; we hardly knew ye); the new show from Arrested Development alumni, which never had a chance of living up to the weight of expectations; the turgid sci-fi drama you wanted to like, but just couldn’t.

This is a period of ups and downs, of surprise delights and unforeseen let-downs, a time when all the new shows are in fierce contest for a voice and an audience. In a few weeks, we’ll know for certain which nonessential shows we should drop from our overcrowded viewing schedule, which sleeper hits turn out to be unexpectedly enchanting, and which worlds cancelation or quality decline will make us regret falling in love with; a year from now, many of the titles we discuss will provoke nary a flicker of recognition. But for now, we’ll have our fun.

Fall 2010 is not looking like an especially memorable season so far. Compared with last year – which brought us a unique dramedy in the ubiquitous Glee, an old-fashioned sitcom with a contemporary twist in Modern Family, and the absolutely terrific Community – the new crop of shows looks pretty unexciting. Apart from Boardwalk Empire and the late lamented Lone Star, nothing has really gotten the critical saliva gushing, and the majority of the new shows can be described as nothing more flattering than “watchable”.

In terms of diversity on television, however, a couple of potentially quite exciting things are happening. While Glee, Modern Family, and Community were and remain self-conscious about the diversity of their respective ensemble casts, they still have a tendency to foreground the straight white people and give their minority characters short shrift: Glee’s main character is straight white Rachel, Community’s is straight white Jeff, and Modern Family is just now starting to address the problems in its portrayal of its gay couple.

Now, Undercovers gives us a main couple of characters who are both non-white and happily married. Mike & Molly is a surprisingly funny sitcom about two overweight people, who are (for the most part) portrayed as sympathetic and complex human beings, not just walking slapstick factories. It’s not that much to go on, but it gives me hope because both these shows are offering something that the rest simply aren’t. An action-adventure series whose leads happen to be African-American? A show – ANY show – whose main characters are plus-sized? In a country where ethnic minorities constitute over a third of the population, obese people are almost as many, and the demographics in TV shows are obscenely skewed toward thin white people, every step in the right direction is something to be celebrated.