Put your Hans behind your Bach.
Yesterday evening my neighbor was cleaning both inside and outside her place to prepare for a visit from a friend. Her motivation to clean must have been contagious. I spent my morning dusting, vacuuming, doing laundry, sweeping my porch, scooping cat feces from my front yard, and organizing my bookcases.
After completing that last task, I discovered that I was out of room, which means I either need to thin out my personal library a bit or buy another bookcase. I had to stack some books horizontally atop my upright books. It doesn't look bad, though.
It's a good thing my new year's resolution was to use the libraries a bit more and bookstores a bit less. Lately I've been going to the Pima County Public Library a lot, even though the University of Arizona Main Library has a better collection and lends books out for a lot longer. I think the more limited selection and more limited loan time at the Pima County Public Library motivates me to check out only what I'm going to read right away and to read it within a reasonable time.
The University of Arizona Main Library has the opposite effect. Knowing that I have six months for anything I check out (unless it's recalled by another patron), I check out books that clutter my bedroom for months until I finally get around to reading them. Sometimes, months later, they don't interest me as much as they did when I first checked them out, but I make myself read them out of guilt: I've had them this long, so it would be wrong of me to return them unread. I know it's irrational. No one will know or care whether I've read them, but I feel the guilt anyway. Is this what it's like to be a hardcore Christian?
The Pima County Public Library also has fluffier reading. Although I often savor reading something as dense as Chomsky, sometimes I'd rather read political writing that's more like a friend's rant than a professor's lecture.
Every once in a blue moon, I don't want to read at all, but just stare at the TV. I checked out a DVD called ACLU Freedom Files during one of my last stops at the Public Library. It was a TV show at one time, with each episode focusing on a different category of legal topics. Some episodes were better than others. The one that struck me as most interesting was the one on religious freedom. I was surprised that most of the episode had nothing to do with discrimination against Muslims, Hindus, or adherents of any other non-Eastern religion--or for that matter, atheists or agnostics. With the exception of a brief discussion of a Native American whose religious rights were trampled in prison, the episode was about discrimination against Christians. There was a case of a public school that, knowing that it couldn't promote religion, went overboard and kept a student from expressing her faith in a yearbook ad. There was another case of a white kid who opted for a Christian recovery camp when he was sentenced for drug possession; then he whined when he discovered that they were misrepresenting themselves when they said they were non-denominational.
But my favorite part of the episode--and one that I wish I could make people in the Christian right watch--was a case of Christians harassing other Christians. In this case (if I can remember correctly after a couple of weeks), there was a public school where the separation of church and state was toppled by the Christian majority. Most of them were Christians (Baptists, I think) who believed that once you are baptized, you're guaranteed a spot in heaven. You can molest children, steal from your neighbor, and drink yourself stupid on a regular basis, but because you've been baptized, God has accepted you no matter what. When these particular Christians realized that one Christian in their school didn't hold that belief (that even after baptism, if you want to go to heaven, you have to refrain from molesting children, stealing from your neighbor, and drinking yourself stupid on a regular basis), they started to harass him. It was a case of Christians discriminating against other Christians. Well, I can't remember everything that happened, but suffice it to say that Christians can be pretty nasty about expressing their theological differences. (When this sort of thing happens in the Middle East, we assume it characterizes entire nations. Why have a single standard when you can enjoy a double standard?)
If I could magically get everyone in the Christian right to watch the show, I would hope that two things make it through their thick skulls: (1) that perhaps they should stop demonizing the ACLU, an organization that has come to the defense of Christians more than once; and (2) that unless and until they can all agree with each other theologically, the separation of church and state is actually the best thing that could happen to them. Unfortunately, I lack that kind of magic, so I'll have to leave the Christian right to wallow in their vacuous bigotry.
After completing that last task, I discovered that I was out of room, which means I either need to thin out my personal library a bit or buy another bookcase. I had to stack some books horizontally atop my upright books. It doesn't look bad, though.
It's a good thing my new year's resolution was to use the libraries a bit more and bookstores a bit less. Lately I've been going to the Pima County Public Library a lot, even though the University of Arizona Main Library has a better collection and lends books out for a lot longer. I think the more limited selection and more limited loan time at the Pima County Public Library motivates me to check out only what I'm going to read right away and to read it within a reasonable time.
The University of Arizona Main Library has the opposite effect. Knowing that I have six months for anything I check out (unless it's recalled by another patron), I check out books that clutter my bedroom for months until I finally get around to reading them. Sometimes, months later, they don't interest me as much as they did when I first checked them out, but I make myself read them out of guilt: I've had them this long, so it would be wrong of me to return them unread. I know it's irrational. No one will know or care whether I've read them, but I feel the guilt anyway. Is this what it's like to be a hardcore Christian?
The Pima County Public Library also has fluffier reading. Although I often savor reading something as dense as Chomsky, sometimes I'd rather read political writing that's more like a friend's rant than a professor's lecture.
Every once in a blue moon, I don't want to read at all, but just stare at the TV. I checked out a DVD called ACLU Freedom Files during one of my last stops at the Public Library. It was a TV show at one time, with each episode focusing on a different category of legal topics. Some episodes were better than others. The one that struck me as most interesting was the one on religious freedom. I was surprised that most of the episode had nothing to do with discrimination against Muslims, Hindus, or adherents of any other non-Eastern religion--or for that matter, atheists or agnostics. With the exception of a brief discussion of a Native American whose religious rights were trampled in prison, the episode was about discrimination against Christians. There was a case of a public school that, knowing that it couldn't promote religion, went overboard and kept a student from expressing her faith in a yearbook ad. There was another case of a white kid who opted for a Christian recovery camp when he was sentenced for drug possession; then he whined when he discovered that they were misrepresenting themselves when they said they were non-denominational.
But my favorite part of the episode--and one that I wish I could make people in the Christian right watch--was a case of Christians harassing other Christians. In this case (if I can remember correctly after a couple of weeks), there was a public school where the separation of church and state was toppled by the Christian majority. Most of them were Christians (Baptists, I think) who believed that once you are baptized, you're guaranteed a spot in heaven. You can molest children, steal from your neighbor, and drink yourself stupid on a regular basis, but because you've been baptized, God has accepted you no matter what. When these particular Christians realized that one Christian in their school didn't hold that belief (that even after baptism, if you want to go to heaven, you have to refrain from molesting children, stealing from your neighbor, and drinking yourself stupid on a regular basis), they started to harass him. It was a case of Christians discriminating against other Christians. Well, I can't remember everything that happened, but suffice it to say that Christians can be pretty nasty about expressing their theological differences. (When this sort of thing happens in the Middle East, we assume it characterizes entire nations. Why have a single standard when you can enjoy a double standard?)
If I could magically get everyone in the Christian right to watch the show, I would hope that two things make it through their thick skulls: (1) that perhaps they should stop demonizing the ACLU, an organization that has come to the defense of Christians more than once; and (2) that unless and until they can all agree with each other theologically, the separation of church and state is actually the best thing that could happen to them. Unfortunately, I lack that kind of magic, so I'll have to leave the Christian right to wallow in their vacuous bigotry.