The Ryno Pen

You can put your holy books down for just a moment while I do my customary Long Ramble Before Even Looking Remotely Like Getting To The Point. I have come to rant.
I’ve seen the situation again and again in computing: the fubar caused by total or partial Absence Of Reasoning. It isn’t much point blaming the manual, when the problem is due to:
(a) Reading some of it, interpreting that small portion as justification for whatever you were intending to do anyway (or in some cases just opening the book as if Clue might transfer by magic) ; or
(b) Listening to somebody who claims to have read the manual and tells you to do something likely to wind up in a fubar-fraught situation.

NB: In the above passage, the word “read” implies the act of putting text in front of eyes. No claim is made that literacy is necessarily present, neither is any presumption of comprehension or memory implied.

This guy’s LJ post shows what can happen when Absence Of Reasoning strikes. It ain’t pretty.

I’ve seen the same thing myself: a Great Legal Mind in another Gov Dept decided that the small plastic thing was not floppy, nor for that matter was it disk-like, and proceeded to strip off the outers and poke the little mylar roundy-bit into the 3.5″ drive. Thank St Isidore he wasn’t one of my lusers. (Of course the guys in my department didn’t have a backup of the munged data: gluteals were kicked.)

A little reading, a question, or even a Stop And Look At What I’m Doing may have helped in both situations. Beyond any Big Book Of How It Should Be Done there is (or ought to be) some innate common sense, despite the influence of culture to suppress or extinguish it.

A guide to anti-censorware published on BoingBoing, for example, might show a user how to break the acceptable usage rules of their place of employment, educational institution, or even country of residence. Okay, it’s an enabler, just like Sandra in the next cubicle giving you her password, or the bloke who tells you everybody is [whatever]-ing, and nobody does anything.

It doesn’t change the situation or the consequences one bit.

So we get to religion. You don’t have to believe to cry foul on hypocrisy, but to be a believer and fail to cry it; that takes either monumental stupidity or a conscience of no worth to your god or gods.

I can’t speak with any authority on Islam, but there appears to be some fairly severe cognitive dissonance associated with the idea of a “religion of peace” advocating the death of noncombatant third parties. (Then again, one could say the same thing about “security contractors” who do their own adaptive version of the same atrocity, without the sincerity of suicide.)

But, hey, I can pick up the Christian book (and read it as an entirety, cross-referencing and checking the original languages), and if Christianity is about emulating Jesus Christ, I really have to wonder. Is the bloke in the next desk, or somebody, passing the wrong signals to a whole bunch of people too stupid/scared/proud/whatever to RTFM?

Jesus didn’t say “make everybody behave in a certain way, regardless of what they believe”. Nor did he say any of his followers should set about white-anting secular political and professional groups, astroturfing media, and doing all the rest of the world’s dirty business the world’s way.

Those who go and and push things along for God; are they doing the same as Peter giving Malchus a quick Vincent Van Gogh job? Such presumption and impetuousness earned a reprimand.

For that matter, let those with a bit of scholarship look at the Jewish church structure of Jesus’ day, and the Christian church described in the book of Acts. Now look at the hierarchical structure of any big church, whether long-established or as recently-spawned as Hillsong. It does seem to be Pharisees as far as the eye can see.

And it is not literally fundamentalism that’s doing the damage. It’s the various lumps who sit there on their collective fundament and let the Nice Pastor, or whoever, get on with their extra-doctrinal activities.

Who said it would be a good idea to divide up some married couples in a certain AOG congregation and, ahem, “minister to” the wives? It was allowed to happen, I know some of those directly effected, and furthermore the minister was not disciplined. (The church organisation disciplined him years later for getting his fingers into the funds, but that is different, of course.)

There’s the numerous kid-fiddlers, money-grabbers, tax-dodgers, and the funny folk who Don’t Vote, but spend thousands of untraceable and probably untaxed (now Jesus DID say to pay your taxes, guys!) dollars trying to persuade those who DO vote, to vote conservative.

Late Edit: For Australian readers, Monday 14 October’s Four Corners (ABC-TV) has an Exclusive Brethren feature that may prove to be an eye-opener.

Later Edit: Exclusive Brethren ex-member reveals that large sums of money are smuggled internationally for political purposes.

Various little non-canonical differences like the wave of second-time baptisms, prosperity doctrine, and the Seriously Heavy Stuff like those latter day Malchus-whackers who want to fiddle with God’s alarm clock.

(The following Tubey clip is 9:57 long and scary!)

Does it sound a bit selfish, a bit fuck-my-neighbour-just-let-me-into-heaven-now? Yeah, looks that way to me. But then, I’m the kind of person who’d drop out of ministry college because of what I saw as masturbation-by-worship being a major focus.There’s a name for this “take over everything and run it in God’s name, our way” movement. Dominionism. It’s pretty well-entrenched in the USA, it’s getting the ear of both major party leaderships in Australian national politics, and it’s bound to be happening in your area too. A good starting point for dominionism discussion is here: the emphasis is not on denying or applauding any faith (or absence thereof), but on the creep of dominionism itself.29 October – 02 November is Christian-Fascism Awareness Week. I’ll try to post the rest of my church leaving stuff then.The last word goes to Tim Krieder of The Pain webcomic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 3:16 am and is filed under charismatic churches, ex-charismatic, ex-church, exclusive brethren, fundamentalism, hillsong, rant, religion, spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.