First, to anyone, you should know your audience. I know both of you. That allows me to fearlessly let loose my sometimes bitter thoughts without fear of righteous reprisal. So, I shall let loose.
When you are trying to advertise a Christian radio station, and your tag line is something about “without the embarrassing language…” ect, you probably shouldn’t put it on in the middle of the Friends episode where the words “He goes down for a long time,” and “That’ll teach you to lick my muffin,” are part of the opening sequence. Like I said, know your audience.
Since I’m a purveyor of that embarrassing language, I feel that the friendly Christian commercial sets itself against me, and brings with it plenty of questions about what’s embarrassing, and why shouldn’t families interact with this stuff? My blog is definitely not PG in nature, but this is because I think that life is not PG in nature. I’m not a parent, nor do I know if or when I ever will be one, so my basis for the following statements is rather unstable ground, but I think a good deal of parents wish to simply protect their children from the horrors of reality. I don’t know if I’m against that, but any child that does not grow up aware of the power and frightening nature of what happens outside of their home is simply asking to be in trouble from said imposed naivetee. I’m too tired of the balance buzzword to explain that there must be… but point being, if all that you can do is keep your child from hearing the word damn or hell on the radio (since they’re not supposed to have shit and fuck yet), then you need to re-evaluate what you’re trying to protect and why. There is evil out in the world, and there is evil in each one of us, and I think that evil would laugh at the thought of being connected to a few words that have to do with excrement or sex or whatever. Like I said, I’m not a parent yet, and I want my children, if there ever be any, to not live spewing words that are coarse and unkept for lack of other specific vocabulary. But this is not even my most stirring idea after watching this commercial (that really is just a sanatized version of what else is out there, but so much in the Christian culture is and can only be that).
Is Jesus on the cross, the entire idea of my last post, embarrassing? Would the language that we’d have to use to describe this idea embarrassing? Is it “family friendly”? I had a friend tell me a guy she was “witnessing to” had said he thought the God of the Bible was made up to make people feel good, and was, at the foundation, a fairy tale. I wanted to ask what Bible he had read. I think it’s not the same one that most conservative evangelicals seem to be reading either, or at least, not without a dozen explanations for what happened to make you not think about what was really happening. If the Bible says anything, it keeps saying that humanity is pretty much doomed to destroy itself, and somehow God figures out how to save people and promises to fix everything - in the end. But I see the earth flooded, peoples enslaved and slaughtered, children killed for wrongs their parents committed, and this stuff is all by divine order, not to mention all the things that are just people killing, raping, and stealing from one another. What pleasant God is this?
I don’t have forever to type like I would wish, but the conclusion I have come to, maybe just moments ago, maybe a while back and I forgot until rehashing these things, is that our ability to judge what God does by our own standards is rather moot in nature. God never told us that we’d live here on earth without pain (not even Adam and Eve were told that, though I was brought up believing, in essence, that neither had any pain receptors in their entire body until they sinned), and that all would be fair in our minds and the resolution to the conflict that we created would be to our liking. Jesus was mercilessly hung on a cross by our ancestors, and I’m sure we’d do it again even though we think ourselves reasonable and humane. This is not the God of giving us happy feelings, not at least without ignoring what has happened. There was a fairy-tale God that I knew once, and I got mad at him and he didn’t come fix the world to my liking, so he vanished in my imagination. Now God, the creator of the universe, the I am whose place I try to constantlytake, does not let me stay in a childish mindset about who he is compared to who I think he should be.
I really thought I wouldn’t be just talking about God and Jesus on here, but evidently both, or he, or whatever, is/are on my mind. I wonder about mystery and knowledge walking hand-in-hand, how our culture and civilization has set them up as enemies, and how they have come together as newlyweds in my mind as of late. That’s just to say, mystery, the mystery of why with God, the mystery of embarassing and family friendliness and the mystery of my embittered feelings towards a sanatized Christianity that would paint Jesus pretty colors so the children they’re trying to protect wouldn’t see his totured body…. I need to not be bitter anymore. Luckily, one of those things that God seems to constantly impart to me is forgiveness, and so that’s what I need to do. But that doesn’t make it okay to ignore the dicotomy between Jesus and the people that bear his name, even when it’s me.