I promised I would come back to this thought and it has taken until now to get the chance.
I love the history of philosophy. If I had a Mulligan at life, I think I would choose philosophy as a major. Of course the crux of the study of philosophy is the study of the history thereof. You can't speculate about the big questions without first building on the backs of others and avoiding asking the same questions that others have already answered.
So, back to the boob thing. On the Discovery Channel was another hillbilly program, this one on drilling for oil in your backyard. I've seen one episode and like I was saying, I focused on the superstition in general and two Christian drillers specifically. One, a Baptist church, believed that God spoke to them that they were going to strike oil and get rich. But God made a mistake in His message and they struck (equally as valuable) water.
The second was a lady who God had spoken to and Jesus was going to show her where to drill to strike oil, so that she could get a boob job . . . and a new butt.
When I see things that are so wrong and I can't just shake my head and walk away, I must dwell for a while. My mind attempts to build handles around the whole cultural phenomenon that sets up such crazy ideas so I can grasp what is going on here.
I love intelligence. I love highbrow things. I don't know what my own IQ is, but it isn't extra-ordinary. I'm probably below average in language skills . . . maybe math. So, I don't think that this is any type of arrogance to say I love to listen to people who think.
Superstition drives me crazy. I am bombarded by superstition everyday because I work in health care, and I was bombarded with superstition when I was an evangelical . . . even more so. But ignorance and superstition are usually choices one makes. To think that Jesus wants you to find oil (and the superstition that He spoke to you in a cloud) is a moral choice, yet I don't blame the hillbilly folks. I will remind you that I'm speaking of them from the inside because I am a hillbilly.
But let me drift back to the philosophical roots to the "boob job for Jesus" mentality for a moment. I sincerely think that if you map out the rise of the Bible belt, along the ridges and rivers that the old Methodist circuit riders rode, a couple of hundred years ago, you would see the outline of the territory where this choice of ignorance is playing out in today's world.
Not all parts of the country are this way. You might fight someone one in Boston wanting to drill for oil because Jesus told them they would find it so they could buy new boobs . . . but not as likely as in eastern Kentucky. Now the Jersey Shores is a different story but they think that Jesus (maybe Mary) wants them to have new Boobs for a different reason.
But when the Gospel entered the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee (my home state) it didn't come in with a simple purity but is was wrapped in layers of baggage. One of those concepts (and the theme to this whole blog) is that this world is not as important as the next. That Heaven was the purpose of all that is . . . not art or complex music. Sure, the hillbilly tunes have great value in expressing the heart. But I say this music flourished in spite of the dualism that penetrated the area, not because of it.
I can remember growing up and people talking about "learning" as a bad thing. "He's done got too much of that dag gone learning to do any body a damn bit of good. They ought to just take that boy out back and shoot him fer he is good for nothing." That was the view of college educated people rather than those that worked in the mines.
So when you believe that this world is superfluous at best, nothing matters here. Sure make some money. Buy some tacky things. A house make of plastic that looks like stone is just as good as one of those stone houses that has stood in Italy for 800 years. Jesus is coming back any day so it doesn't matter if the plastic oxidizes and warps under the sun after a couple of years.
The Gospel here also becomes so narcissistic that it is like a beautiful mountain lake that, through acid rain, becomes so corrosive that only bacteria can live in it. Maybe what John and Charlie Wesley thought of when they considered a deeply personal religion, was a good thing in the beginning. They were reacting to the horrible religious wars of Europe, where large, deeply thinking, institutions were slaughtering one another in cold blood.
But when, over time, the personal gospel becomes so personal . . . you don't wear a cross around your neck anymore, you wear a tiny capsule around your neck and God lives inside it. He becomes your personal charm, your genie. Maybe like the cat in Men in Black, with a whole universe in a capsule on its collar. It is this type of God that fits comfortable in the hills where we were taught that this world was insignificant. Where we were taught that learning things was bad. And were we imagined a God that is so much our servant that, not only is He in the business of making us rich, but He makes us rich to buy new boobs to try and fill that insatiable longing for a "proper" body image.
After all why would God be interested in saving the children being slaughtered in Syria, or those buried beneath the tornado, or under an Iranian earthquake? Why would God be interested in answering the aspirations of a lost generation? Aren't my boobs (speaking theoretically here) more important?
I love the history of philosophy. If I had a Mulligan at life, I think I would choose philosophy as a major. Of course the crux of the study of philosophy is the study of the history thereof. You can't speculate about the big questions without first building on the backs of others and avoiding asking the same questions that others have already answered.
So, back to the boob thing. On the Discovery Channel was another hillbilly program, this one on drilling for oil in your backyard. I've seen one episode and like I was saying, I focused on the superstition in general and two Christian drillers specifically. One, a Baptist church, believed that God spoke to them that they were going to strike oil and get rich. But God made a mistake in His message and they struck (equally as valuable) water.
The second was a lady who God had spoken to and Jesus was going to show her where to drill to strike oil, so that she could get a boob job . . . and a new butt.
When I see things that are so wrong and I can't just shake my head and walk away, I must dwell for a while. My mind attempts to build handles around the whole cultural phenomenon that sets up such crazy ideas so I can grasp what is going on here.
I love intelligence. I love highbrow things. I don't know what my own IQ is, but it isn't extra-ordinary. I'm probably below average in language skills . . . maybe math. So, I don't think that this is any type of arrogance to say I love to listen to people who think.
Superstition drives me crazy. I am bombarded by superstition everyday because I work in health care, and I was bombarded with superstition when I was an evangelical . . . even more so. But ignorance and superstition are usually choices one makes. To think that Jesus wants you to find oil (and the superstition that He spoke to you in a cloud) is a moral choice, yet I don't blame the hillbilly folks. I will remind you that I'm speaking of them from the inside because I am a hillbilly.
But let me drift back to the philosophical roots to the "boob job for Jesus" mentality for a moment. I sincerely think that if you map out the rise of the Bible belt, along the ridges and rivers that the old Methodist circuit riders rode, a couple of hundred years ago, you would see the outline of the territory where this choice of ignorance is playing out in today's world.
Not all parts of the country are this way. You might fight someone one in Boston wanting to drill for oil because Jesus told them they would find it so they could buy new boobs . . . but not as likely as in eastern Kentucky. Now the Jersey Shores is a different story but they think that Jesus (maybe Mary) wants them to have new Boobs for a different reason.
But when the Gospel entered the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee (my home state) it didn't come in with a simple purity but is was wrapped in layers of baggage. One of those concepts (and the theme to this whole blog) is that this world is not as important as the next. That Heaven was the purpose of all that is . . . not art or complex music. Sure, the hillbilly tunes have great value in expressing the heart. But I say this music flourished in spite of the dualism that penetrated the area, not because of it.
I can remember growing up and people talking about "learning" as a bad thing. "He's done got too much of that dag gone learning to do any body a damn bit of good. They ought to just take that boy out back and shoot him fer he is good for nothing." That was the view of college educated people rather than those that worked in the mines.
So when you believe that this world is superfluous at best, nothing matters here. Sure make some money. Buy some tacky things. A house make of plastic that looks like stone is just as good as one of those stone houses that has stood in Italy for 800 years. Jesus is coming back any day so it doesn't matter if the plastic oxidizes and warps under the sun after a couple of years.
The Gospel here also becomes so narcissistic that it is like a beautiful mountain lake that, through acid rain, becomes so corrosive that only bacteria can live in it. Maybe what John and Charlie Wesley thought of when they considered a deeply personal religion, was a good thing in the beginning. They were reacting to the horrible religious wars of Europe, where large, deeply thinking, institutions were slaughtering one another in cold blood.
But when, over time, the personal gospel becomes so personal . . . you don't wear a cross around your neck anymore, you wear a tiny capsule around your neck and God lives inside it. He becomes your personal charm, your genie. Maybe like the cat in Men in Black, with a whole universe in a capsule on its collar. It is this type of God that fits comfortable in the hills where we were taught that this world was insignificant. Where we were taught that learning things was bad. And were we imagined a God that is so much our servant that, not only is He in the business of making us rich, but He makes us rich to buy new boobs to try and fill that insatiable longing for a "proper" body image.
After all why would God be interested in saving the children being slaughtered in Syria, or those buried beneath the tornado, or under an Iranian earthquake? Why would God be interested in answering the aspirations of a lost generation? Aren't my boobs (speaking theoretically here) more important?
2 comments:
But when the Gospel entered the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee (my home state) it didn't come in with a simple purity but is was wrapped in layers of baggage.
In a long-ago comment thread at Internet Monk, someone wrote that in "the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee" the highest complement you could use to describe a preacher was "He has NO book larnin', and He Is LOUD!"
Long-time lurker, first time commenter. You triggered some childhood memories with this:
I can remember growing up and people talking about "learning" as a bad thing. "He's done got too much of that dag gone learning to do any body a damn bit of good. They ought to just take that boy out back and shoot him fer he is good for nothing." That was the view of college educated people rather than those that worked in the mines.
I lived in southeast Kentucky until my mid-teens. My parents tell me I tested with a genius IQ when I was five. I was a very smart kid...and I was teased, ridiculed and beaten up...sometimes by my relatives...because all that "book larnin'" didn't leave room for "common sense". I had uncles tell me I'd never amount to anything, aunts who told me wanting to be a scientist was wanting to serve the devil, and by cousins that only queers like to read.
One of the best things that ever happened in my life was when our family moved away.
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