Invoking GOD

*cough* I should probably just warn you up front that if you believe God interferes in the minutiae of every day life, I am likely to offend you. Please, consider yourself offended and don't read any further.

On Monday night I watched part of the Oregon/Auburn game, then took my bath and wrote, then watched the fourth quarter. It was SO CLOSE. Oregon made a touchdown with only a few minutes left to tie the game... And then the damn Auburn whatevertheyares made a field goal in the last 2 seconds. LITERALLY: TWO FREAKING SECONDS. I was SO SAD.


And then the coach gets on (I was watching ESPN online) and starts talking about GOD DID THIS.


And here my rant will begin.


DOES THIS A$$HAT THINK GOD LIKES AUBURN ALABAMA BETTER THAN FREAKING OREGON? Clearly he has never BEEN to Oregon!  I mean no disrespect for my BELOVED friends in the south (and especially not adored Alabaman Leigh, though I know Leigh was rooting for Oregon), but THIS IS OREGON! The best state there IS!

besides THAT

DOES THIS JERK THINK GOD WATCHES AMERICAN FOOTBALL? GOD, if he has any taste at ALL is watching Australian Rules Football and rooting (and I mean rooting in the Australian sense of the word) for the Adelaide Crows! (But seriously... do we WANT a God distracted by sports?) I mean maybe if Auburn were playing Hell's Devils or something... But these are the Oregon DUCKS!

And then a player comes on saying the SAME FREAKING THING!


So I will declare it now, I am NOT reelecting God if he is interfering in College Sports. He DOES NOT have my vote next election.


I'm not formally religious (as you may have guessed) but I am generally respectfully at peace with other people believing what they do, but this week:


-A congresswoman was SHOT and—what 9? people KILLED because a mentally ill nut was channeling Sarah Palin (whether he was aware of it or not)

-A friend lost an extended family member to SIDS

-Australia is flooding and our friend Al has two daughters STRANDED there (though thankfully safe)

-There are clashes killing people in Sudan.

Do we honestly think God is worried about a freaking college football game?

NOW: If you feel called to invoke God as an explanation for something in the future, I give you this warning:

Take a look at who LOSES. Do you REALLY think God would pick sides that way? Good versus evil, fine—attribute away... sports? Not so much. (I would even venture to claim he stays out of war, but I won't mock you for disagreeing here--I just happen to agree with the quote that God is on the side of the heaviest artillery)

Look at the scale. Is this thing you are attributing about WORTHY? You think God would BOTHER?

And... in the case of grief... do you think the invocation HELPS? I will admit that when a person is old, saying he or she was called to God probably comforts more than it offends, but a CHILD? I'd say you have a better than even chance that saying it was God's will is going to HURT a lot more than it HELPS.


In your BOOKS?

Yeah... wanna know the biggest thing that bugs me in a novel that didn't before I started writing? Deus ex machina: God out of the Machine... a miraculous save that could not possibly have been predicted by the first 400 pages of your book. NEVER do this. I will rip it apart in review *coughTwilightcough* (I refer here to the flight to Phoenix attack save thing *rolls eyes*  OUT. OF. NOWHERE.

I don't mind at ALL books about faith... losing and refinding... faith sustaining... but it better not have a bunch of horrid stuff then suddenly some miracle change of heart makes it all better again (unless it is an addiction story, but I don't really read those because the ending STILL bugs me, even if I can believe it in that case and only that case)

A book is SO MUCH better if the pieces are all there to pull together at the end... if the answer was there all the time, if only our hero could see it or use it or access it... If that FINDING requires God, you have my blessing... if God actually solves the problem? not so much.


Okay... so my apologies for the offense... this just really bugged the heck out of me, as you probably can tell...




Text content all generated by ME, Hart Johnson, not meant to offend, though I'm sure I will.
Oregon hearthbreak photo from msn.com/photoblog
God


Twilight Cover from Twilight
This blog first appeared at Confessions of a Watery Tart  
if you see it elsewhere, I am okay with that, but please credit me if you share, and please come by the REAL place to say hi...

Calling All Fairies!!!

The Tart has a wish list of thing I’d like to be able to do. You might be just the person who can grant it!!! Seriously! You’d be… like MAGIC! The Tart wants to know HOW TO… 1) Have my siggie in blog comments be a link to HERE. A few of you do this. I’ve seen it. Come on… grant my wish!!! 2) Figure out how to post links off to the side of my blog, preferably categorically--I’ve seen then with “writing blogs”, “animal blogs”--you know what I’m talking about… How do I DO that? I want to promote the blogs I love, but I don’t know how!!! 3) Design a website without learning a ton of code. Is there a downloadable software or something that can give me a tool kit to pick and choose? The Tart NEEDS… 4) A literary agent. So if you’re a literary agent, or know one, or have one… call me… strike that… email. 5) A publishing contract so I can quit my day job. So if you are a publisher… you know where I am. 6) Financial security so I can give up my day job and just WRITE! And while I’m at it (and because seven is the most magically powerful number, the Tart requests… 7) World Peace. Friday Hodge Podge Confident you’re going to heaven? Worried about your pets after the Rapture? (am I the only one who can’t think of that word without hearing Blondie sing it?) I’ve got a solution for you. eternal earthbound pets I’m not altogether confident I could enjoy a heaven that had a “No Dogs Allowed” sign, and I’m sure that perfection we attain would get rid of the cat allergies, so I’m not at all in favor of the no pets rule but I’m sure that’s just me. Kreativ Moi! And I am such a scatterbrained goofball sometimes, that I missed this from Tuesday, but I am HONORED, and would like to thank Patricia Patricia Stoltey. I am working on my awards! Speaking of awards… also working on the LAPDANCE Awards… Joris is the BEST -- they are HOT and everybody will want one! *dishes smooches to Joris before he reminds me I’m old enough to be his mother*

Life Lessons Suck

Warning to religiously rigid and happy people. This may not be for you. Strike that. Life Lessons suck the big wobbly sausage [/gratuitous Python reference] I remember in my religiously curious phase, before I decided that all of them that had stuck around for any length of time had some merit, and therefore, none of them took precedence, which again preceded figuring out what made sense to me personally… but I digress… in my religiously curious phase I read that Buddhists, because of the belief in reincarnation, believed before we were born we picked the life lessons we would learn. You know… until this point, I had thought that the Buddhists had it all going on. They were about compassion and tolerance--ideas that really still seem the height of spirituality to me. I was all over it. But you know what? I’ve learned some life lessons I’d just prefer not to know. I have some wisdom I would gladly trade over to ignorance on the matters… As much as I’d like Shiva to dance upon ignorance, I’d prefer to have some ignorance in certain domains. But if you gotta know, you gotta know… sort of. Except I didn’t have to know… until I knew… now I’m stuck knowing. I think what I want is for everybody else to behave rationally and be enlightened, and allow me to be ignorant. I don’t want to know that some people, no matter how well intentioned, are too dysfunctional to interact with (you knew we’d get to my mother, didn’t you?) I don’t want to know the lengths an addict will go to, even if they love you. I don’t want to know know the consequences of self-destructive behavior or the feeling that the only way to save a friend’s life is to have them arrested. I want it to go away. But I do know. Our pain is our strength. I’ve been writing a lot lately, but it is raw, painful, mother tension. Oddly, CONFLUENCE has some maternal tension, and things weren’t even that tense then… But they are now, and so I write. The current stuff will probably need years of cardboard box therapy before I am ready to revise it, but it is real. And what is wisdom worth, if we can’t share it. Maybe some of you can be wise without plotting straight jackets for your mothers. I can only hope. (The trolls were at St. Mungo’s Museum of Religion in Glasgow. It tickled me to see them in that setting, so I include them here…)

Naked World Domination Tour

I’ve been leading a movement for a couple years now to get everybody to just lighten up and take their clothes off. It is about silliness and fun, but there is an underlying theory that it is hard for people to be mean to each other when everybody is naked. That’s what I want… a world of NICE people! Doesn’t that sound appealing?

Oh, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean people can’t be a little naughty too... A pudding fight, making those men held in the dungeon dance like I like, lots of innuendo and fun. My kind of world.

One of the components though, of this naked haven, is an unspoken anti-material vent. You see disrobing is symbolic of letting go of the stuff for the sake of stuff. Why worry about who has more toys (we should all be SHARING the toys, ne?)

Ironically though, in all my super-silliness with the somewhat serious underpinning, I’ve made a friend via Facebook, with another writer doing the social networking thing. She is part of a more serious movement with some of these same underlying goals… a world where people treat each other with respect and kindness… a world that puts humanity, spirituality, experiences, and relationships before STUFF.

She is older than me… an authentic hippy, rather than the variety that stems from going to college in Eugene, Oregon. And the ideas she presents will probably be completely foreign to the subset of you based in the Midwest (the hippies in Ann Arbor drive SUVs). But in summary, there is a movement to make the world better through our combined energies.

It is not inconsistent with ANY religion—can be thought of as prayer, or not, depending on your vent. In the sixties they called it the age of Aquarius, because planetarily, that is what is happening, but what it MEANS is ‘think good things’. Spend some time envisioning the world as it OUGHT to be. Meditate, pray, commune with nature… however it is you touch your spirituality. Think of a world of reduced greed, an earth recovering from how hard we’ve been on it, societies that put people first, especially the future people, for whom we are only the earth’s stewards.

I want to share Marian’s blogs with you, in case you want to read in far more detail than I could accurately give:

http://siderealview.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/the-spiritual-route-ey-used-to-call-it-the-road-less-travelled/
http://youngbloodblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/entering-the-infinity-gate/

So everybody… think happy things! That, and some naked happy dancing, and all will be okay!

Holy Hand Grenade!

Religion can be a very touchy topic because people hold their beliefs… well, religiously… I am wondering… and perhaps working through my thoughts, on religion in literature here. Before I get into it, I should probably say I respect anyone who holds sincerely to any set of beliefs that does not harm others and is not practiced in judgmental ways (anyone gets holier than thou, though, and all bets are off). I respect it even MORE if people have done some questioning and searching and by that ARRIVED at (or confirmed) their faith. But I am not one. One what? One anything. My spiritual beliefs are very personal and it was my own journey that got me here and organized religion isn’t part of the place I arrived. I am skeptical of group-think and deeply suspicious of any faith that believes they are right and everybody else is wrong. So that is where I am coming from. That said, I LOVE literature that does some questioning of the status quo, whether the conclusion is faith or doubt. Poisonwood Bible is one of my favorite examples of this, a missionary family in the Congo… the primary message is of errors in translation. What works for some may not make any sense at all to others. I loved DiVinci Code that looked into secret sects and strange practices and the roles played by those who had an agenda in defining history. Religion and conspiracy theory make brilliant bedfellows. But where is the line? Who does a writer risk alienating. Both of the above books found huge readerships, but I suspect the former and know the latter had protests from devout groups. How large are those groups and does the controversy hurt or help in the long-run. In my journalism program we learned in the end any publicity is good publicity because it makes people remember and want to know. My first memory of Harry Potter was the supposed controversy from religious protesters. It made me want to read them, to be honest (and having read them, made me believe those nuts miss the whole point of literature—I know for a fact there are a lot of religious people who LOVE those books, because they are classic good vs. evil books based in fantasy, so it really WAS only a subset of nuts). I can’t stomach ‘inspirational’ literature, and I think there is a lot of ‘Christian lit’ that has no real plot because the only point is ‘saved by faith’. I very strongly believe a religious experience is not an adequate substitution for a conclusion. That said, literature about real life that ignores the role religion plays for many people can feel hollow. It’s a reality in many people’s lives and so to write multidimensional people, we can’t ignore it. With CONFLUENCE religion is important to the setting because I have a town somewhat split between the scientific and religious factions (demonstrated in stem cell controversy). It was useful to me to create tension and plays a role in where the story goes. It may rub the extremely religious the wrong way, but it was an important element to the mood of the story. So how do we walk the line? Are there differences by genre? Seems to me romance and mystery can ignore the subject. Are there clichés to avoid? Are there risks I’m not seeing? I would really love to hear what people have to think on the subject.