The Flu and Religion: Offensive?!

I saw a story in the paper yesterday that had an Israeli official calling for the Swine Flu to be called the Mexican Flu, because the reference to pigs was offensive.

Yeah. "We find pigs unclean, so you shouldn't call it that."

Instead of working on a cure, working on containing a disease...we're worried about ignorant people thinking getting the flu will somehow mean they have unclean pork germs in them.

Maybe twisting the thinking a little more would mean that if God didn't want you to worry about it, you won't get infected...so the stigma or offense you feel for having the affliction is part of His punishment.

Just a thought.

An Exercise in Logic and Proof

My wife is more religious than I am. Not to the point where she recoils and hisses like a vampire when confronted by something erotic, for example, but she generally goes along with the whole idea of a God and a Christian denomination's ideas of truth.

I, on the other hand, don't.

In our very rare conversations about religion she had said of me that (to paraphrase) no matter what evidence she presented, I'd have an excuse not to believe it, so it does no good to discuss it.

I on the other hand see it as arguing over something that has no foundation on which to believe, and that the idea of me having an excuse not to believe the reasons I'm presented with are actually nothing more than turning the tables on the other person's inability to present such reasonable proof. What am I talking about? This excellent essay by Carl Sagan explains it quite clearly. She accused me of always having an excuse...I say it's the other way around. The essay is very short and lays out the issue in a simple manner.

I realize this isn't going to make any difference; people will believe what they want to believe and they'll always find a reason to cling to those beliefs. What it came down to for me was whether I could accept living with ideas that I had concluded were not supported, essentially living a lie. If I couldn't reconcile the ideas presented to me from the Christian religion...or any other religion...with the voice of reason in my head and experiences in life, then I simply cannot bring myself to follow the belief system imposed by those religions.

Character

Character is what you do when you know no one is looking.

Most people at some point in their lives encounter a situation where something is going on that is ethically or morally wrong, but in speaking up you can put your job or friendships in danger, or at the very least make you unpopular with people that can make your life hell.

My wife was recently in that kind of situation. This isn't a post about what had happened; it isn't my place, despite how very hard it is for me not to try to get the word out there at how outrageous the situation was.

This is about choices we make in that kind of situation. She chose to speak out. She didn't scream it from the top of the hills but she did do something that could make her unpopular with certain people in a position to make her life more difficult.

She chose to do what is right.

She could have stayed quiet, she could have rationalized away what had happened to help her sleep at night. But she actually chose to do something to try to right a wrong.

And I couldn't be more proud of her for it.

Religulous

A few nights ago I watched the Bill Maher movie "Religulous", his effort to sell the idea of doubt in established Christian religions.

I actually watched it twice; I didn't think my wife, a Christian, would want to watch a movie whose basic premise is that Christianity is based on fairy tales. After she got home I mentioned that I watched it so she wouldn't need to see it and she told me she wanted to see it. Surprise!

So I re-watched it since it was still in the DVD player.

The movie is basically a series of encounters with various religious settings in which Maher would ask reasonable (and inflammatory) questions of the faithful. These encounters include a "truck stop chapel", a Jesusland amusement park, the "creationist museum", and a jewish institute of science and some Hebrew word I can't recall, among others. Surprisingly the only places that apparently kicked him out were the property in front of a Mormon temple and the Vatican.

Maher made great pains to point out what he finds to be the absurd elements of the Christian religion. He found people who thought the Scientologists and their billion-year-old Thetan boogymen to be crazy while the same people thought talking snakes were fine. He highlighted tools that observing Jews use to jump through loopholes in their laws over the sabbath (self dialing telephones? Air powered wheelchairs?) because, according to them, if the lawgiver is infallible and there are loopholes, then He put them in there for a reason, such as letting them find ways around the laws.

Bill would point out fallacies of reasoning and bring up points such as how oddly similar the story of Jesus is to various deities that predate Jesus, such as the Egyptian Horus and the god Mithras. Every interview seemed to end up with an uneasy silence or two before a (usually) amicable parting; he even got a hug from a minister of a church for "ex-homosexuals" (the minister himself was a reformed homosexual married to a reformed lesbian).

The subjects in the movie never moved from their previous stance on religion, but this film did end up acting as a vehicle for voicing Bill Maher's idea that he doesn't have the answers but the people peddling religion will tell you they do have the answers, and they don't. This isn't a movie that will sway anyone away from their beliefs because faith inherently is unreasonable; as Bill pointed out, there's a cognitive dissonance where other people's ideas make them crazy (Thetans!) while the Christian belief in talking snakes and Great Flood waters and talking bushes on fire are perfectly reasonable, as is buying various inventions meant to keep you from breaking Jewish laws such as the phone that is perpectually dialing all the numbers and you stick a pencil into a hole to prevent it from dialing a button thus circumventing some rule about doing work that would prevent you from dialing a button.

If you're not religious this movie is a great high-altitude overview of some of the more insane ideas that people accept as truth despite being insane ideas. If you are religious, you will probably find elements that are amusing about other religions, but may get offended when your own personal faith is criticized in Maher's tornado-like swath of critiques. He doesn't perform his trademark humor; he simply asks questions worded in a way that almost dares the people he's talking to to not see what he sees as the silliness in their beliefs.

Religulous is entertaining for non-religious people and may be slightly amusing for people who do subscribe to a particular sect. I enjoyed it. My wife didn't protest too loudly. I can't wait to see another of Maher's documentaries.

On Character

I said I've been using this blog as an outlet; creative outlet, a way to express my worries, things in my life, things that other people probably don't care about but I just wanted to try getting out of my head.

Recently I had a bit of a character lesson about my children. See, we think that the older one has a problem with selfishness.

I have a seventeen year old stepdaughter and a four year old son. That daughter didn't say much of anything leading up to the surgery. No questions. No, "good luck". Nothing. My son had no idea what was going on...I felt he was too young to fully understand, so I thought we'd just deal with his questions as he had them. I left Monday afternoon for the hotel and Tuesday had the surgery.

My wife checked her email and had a message from my boss asking how I was doing. In it he said he had asked my daughter when he saw her in passing during the day and she had said, "I don't know."

Originally my parents were going to bring my son and my stepdaughter up on Wednesday night to visit me. They came up with my son. My daughter decided she wanted to go hang out at her boyfriend's house and watch a movie and play a video game.

My wife had a text message arrive from the daughter on Thursday asking how I was doing. This was the day before I was to be discharged...and the first time she asked how I was.

On the Monday after Easter my wife had gone on an appointment an hour away from the house. The daughter decided she wanted to hang out at her boyfriend's house for the day, since she had school off. I was home alone most of the day.

Then I got a phone call from my wife...she had a flat tire and was letting me know she was running even farther behind schedule. I couldn't drive. I didn't have a car anyway...my daughter had the second car. My wife would be able to change the tire, but it was another emotional punch making me feel useless as I currently am...but self pity is for another time.

My wife called my stepdaughter and her boyfriend, a jock-built treestump that for his faults isn't the worst choice in the world for the daughter to be dating. But my daughter told my wife that they had "just sat down for dinner at Olive Garden". My wife was quite irate that she hadn't told her where she was going other than the boyfriend's house...this was a deal that they had between them that she'd let her know where she'd be in case there was a problem.

At any rate, I had the phone call about the tire, and waited about half an hour before I was about to redial her to check up on her. She was stranded by the freeway where every year a number of people are killed by motorists whizzing by as she'd be working on the car; I was quite anxious to hear from her again. Just as I was about to dial the phone rang. She was okay. A state trooper and another gentleman stopped and assisted just after she got the nuts loosened on the tire and had started getting the vehicle jacked into the air.

After her adventures she got home and told me the daughter had never called again. Never bothered to check whether she was okay, if the car was running again, nothing.

I called my father. Because of schedules I wouldn't be able to get the car into the shop to plug the tire for awhile, and my wife is leaving Wednesday until Sunday on a trip. That meant the family car may be driven by the daughter and we wanted a spare tire available for her, just in case something happened. My parents watch my son overnight Monday into Tuesday so Grandma can visit with her grandson for awhile and also save a little on daycare costs. I called, and my son answered the phone.

"Hello," he said in his hesitant but developing big-boy phone voice.
"Hey, dude!" I said.
"Oh hi Daddy I'm having a fun time how's your boo boo Daddy?"

I was surprised. He asked about my surgical wound? It's been a couple days since he asked, again, to see my boo boo under the shirt. I told him I was doing a little better. When my father got on the phone I asked him who put him up to asking.

"No one. He did it on his own."

My own son asked about how I was doing. My daughter hasn't said much at all.

She then called that night (still Monday) to say she had missed her ride to acting lessons and she decided to go to her boyfriend's house. "Don't you have your ride's phone number?" "No." "Did you tell him you were going this week?" "No." She didn't see a problem with this. Her acting classes, half paid by her, are supposed to help her in the career she insists she wants to break into. She can't be bothered to cover her bases to make sure she makes it there in time for her ride to take her, or if she were running behind be able to contact him and beg for five more minutes until she arrives at the rendezvous point.

My wife had words with her that night. She told her how selfish she has been, how she couldn't be bothered to ask how I was doing after having a rough time after the surgery. How irresponsible she's been about making sure she'd get to lessons on time. How I help keep the house over her head, how she doesn't mind having our food, our money, our help...all in exchange for taking out trash, keeping her room organized (which has been another problem), and for now, dishes and general pickup duty as needed since I can't get around very well.

This morning she had to get a ride to school from her boyfriend. My wife was taking a half-day from work to drive to my doctor's appointment and then after school was picking up my parent's car from the shop, and the daughter was to drive home the family vehicle. I realized that nothing my wife said made any difference to her. She left this morning without so much as a "good luck."

My four year old son had more concern for my condition than my 17 year old daughter.

I know this paints a negative picture of her. She sounds like some street hooligan, a rebellious teen that is out running around at all hours and probably a road to get pregnant by the time she's 18 and strung out on drugs by the time she's 20. But she's not. For the most part, when she's told to do something, very specifically, she'll do it. A general directive such as, "Pick up your room", usually yields a room with two or three things moved to another shelf but still would have crap strewn about the floor and her claiming not to know what else to clean up, simultaneously giving a blank look I've come to call "teentard", complete with a blank stare.

But when she's told to get the trash taken out she'll do it. Told to help the little guy pick up his trains, she does it. She doesn't stay out late; she normally stays close to her curfew. She doesn't argue much unless confronted about something she neglected to do. She gets decent grades in school; not top-tier academics, but not in the bottom either. Since my operation she's spent only the two days with her boyfriend at his house; we just wished she had priorities shifted slightly more towards concern for her stepfather and his health instead of sitting and watching a movie and playing a video game.

Part of me wonders if she just plain doesn't give a rat's arse about me. I'm just a supply of food and shelter and a car to borrow. But that's making it too personal. My wife thinks she's just plain self-centered and selfish.

My wife tried to raise the stepdaughter to be independant, to not rely on others for emotional support. I married my wife when the daughter was barely 12 years old, so most of her personality had been set; she was a good kid, overall well behaved. But now it seems that she was raised to be so independant that she primarily cares about herself. Most teenagers do that to some degree; most people in general display selfishness to some degree. But here I was nervous as hell about this operation, bleeding out the night after the operation, the person that gives her a home and food and even a car to tool around in, and she couldn't ask me how I was until two days after the operation? She sends over one hundred text messages on her cell phone a day, and while it's still a social faux-pas to say something personal over a text message, she couldn't even have sent one text message to me to wish me well or ask if I was still alive.

I'm disappointed in her. I never dreamed I'd feel so disappointed simply because my four-year-old showed more concern for me with a simple question on the phone than my seventeen year old, who is more than old enough to comprehend some of the dangers of this surgery and difficulties I'm facing.

I will say that at least I'm not angry with her. Only disappointed at this point. But que sera, sera...