"Kitten" Riot get sentenced

Well, it's finally happened.  The ladies from "Kitten" riot, that Russian punk band, have been sentenced for hooliganism.  Two years, they got, for hooliganism, on account of being hooligans.  For those of you who don't know what's going on with this, here's a quick refresher course.

Mm hmm. So, they've been sentenced, and will likely be going to jail for a couple of years.  And the majority of discussion that I'm hearing is about how freedom of speech is being set back decades in Russia, and about how church and state should separate.  I'll deal with each of these things in turn.

Firstly, vis-a-vis freedom of speech, and my support of it.  I am very in favor of freedom of speech, including speech that I don't like.  And this was speech that I wasn't really on board with.  I'm not a real fan of their music (really, Pastor Jim doesn't care for punk music.  I'll give that a second to sink in).  I was also a little perturbed by their lyrics for the song, which I won't repeat here, by virtue of this being a sanctified blog.  But if you want to find them, or an english version of them, it's out there.

Happy to give you the video in Russian.  It doesn't take long, does it?  Not a super long concert that gets them arrested and carried away.  But you can see from the second it gets going, that people want it to stop.  The good staff of the cathedral are not interested in this concert proceeding, and seek to have it grind to a halt. And they try to stop them from playing.

And I don't believe that their free speech was violated by this.

I'll explain myself.  I'm in favor of "Kitten" riot being allowed to say what they like.  They can be as anti-Putin, or as anti-church, or any mixture of the two as they like.  I don't care for it, but I wouldn't say that they shouldn't be allowed to say what they like.  Of course they should.  But I'm not in favor of them commandeering the cathedral to make their point.  However valid of a point it may be.

It reminds me of graffiti in a way.  Graffiti in this area is largely illegal, even though it happens all the time.  If you get caught 'tagging,' you can face some penalties or other.  And why might that be?  Doesn't that violate your freedom of expression as well?  Isn't telling people what they can and cannot spraypaint a violation of their rights?  Not at all.  If you want to Banksy yourself up, and put street art up all over the place, then you have some choices - get the permission of the people who own the wall that you're about to repurpose, or second, build your own wall, and illustrate that.  Otherwise, what you're doing is ruining something that someone else has paid money for, something that doesn't belong to you.  And that's not okay.  In the same way that you'd resent someone coming into your home and writing their name all over your kitchen walls.  You'd likely claim 'hey, that's mine!  Get off!"  It's the same thing, just with an increased sense of justification.

Can you write what you like?  Absolutely.  Can you write what you like even though I disagree with it?  Sure!  Can you write what you like all over stuff that isn't yours?  I'd say no.

The principle carries over to staging a punk rock protest in a cathedral.  If the people who own and operate and administrate the cathedral don't want you having a  protest there, then you probably shouldn't.  It's not yours.  If you would have asked, they would have said no, and they clearly wanted you out of there from the second you started.  You can say what you like, but not wherever you like.

Which brings me to my second point.  Separation of church and state.  Happily enough, this story about the conviction of "Kitten riot" comes on the same day that the CBC is running a story about Kelowna mulling over flying a pro-choice flag from city hall.

One of the commenters had this to say:

Public institutions have a mandate to serve the public, 

and refrain from pandering to special interests. 

Private citizens have the right to live their lives according to their 

own conscience. They may not hijack public offices for personal propaganda.

Fly your flag, fly it in the face of the truth. Religion does not belong anywhere near politics.

The poster in question would like religion and politics to stay far far apart from each other.  Okay.  But does that idea go both ways.  I have been told many times (over the internet), that I am free to be as religious as I like, as long as I don't force my beliefs down anyone else's throat, which usually means that I can be religious as long as I don't talk about it outside of home or church.

Ah.  If we believe in a separation of church and state, that means that political buildings should be neutral in regards to faith, and religious buildings should be neutral in regards to politics.  It cuts both ways.  I would imagine that were I to break into the house of commons and start conducting a full liturgy, I would be asked to leave very quickly (in this country, I might not be arrested, though I might if I refused to leave).  You may very well agree with the sentiments behind the punk band's song, and support them in their efforts, but is this what the church is for?  

I for one, and quite in favor of separation of church and state, mainly because the marriage of the two creates a horrible, moribund church.  It's funny that most atheists that I meet are very in favor of the separation of church and state, when in reality, they might want to consider being pro union of church and state, the Christian church at least.  Further to my point, check out these nations with established churches:

Weekly church attendance statistics

Country	Attendance (%)	Country	Attendance (%)	Country	Attendance (%)	Country	Attendance (%)
Austria	18% [8]	Belgium	7% [9]	Canada	20%[10]	Denmark	3% [8]
Cyprus	25% [8]	Czech Republic	11% [8]	Estonia	4% [8]	Finland	5% [8]
France	12% [11]	Greece	27% [8]	Hungary	12% [8]	Iceland	10% [12]
Ireland	46% [13]	Italy	31% [8]	Latvia	7% [8]	Lithuania	14% [8]
Malta	75% [8]	Norway	3% [14]	Poland	63% [8]	Portugal	29% [8]
Slovakia	33% [8]	Slovenia	18% [8]	Spain	21% [8]	Sweden	5% [8]
United Kingdom	14% [15]	United States	43%[16]

The UK has an established church, as does Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, and Greece.  So does Malta, which seems to be bucking the curve.  Oh dear.  Canada does not, and nor does the United States.  And the United States is the shining star of separation of church and state, and the originator of having such a thing be in a constitution.  They say that government should make no law establishing or favoring one religion over another. And so the individual men and women of that nation have had to shoulder the burden of their belief on their own. And you know what?  it's worked out pretty well for them.  Sitting back and waiting for the state to run your church, having them operate them through tax dollars, only creates in the Christian a sense that this isn't something that they actually need to work on for themselves.  

It reminds me so much of the story of Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode his ass into town.  And everyone there was tossing down their cloaks on the road, and waving palm branches, and shouting loud hosannas in a public space.  Almost like a pro-Jesus protest.  And when they did have this annoyingly loud pro-Jesus protest, they were urged to shut it by the local temple authorities, who told him "Teacher, order your disciples to stop."  And Jesus replied with the salient quote:

"I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."  (Luke 19:39-40)

Lots of people want to remove government endorsement of religion, which I get.  But then that places it in the hands of the people, and they may very well be MORE vocal, MORE committed, and MORE enthralled than those who are in power, and who have to worry about votes.  You put that responsibility into the hands of the people, and like in the United States, they may very well take it seriously.

So, to recap.  I am in favor of separation of church and state, and I think it makes both things better.  Lashing your church wagon to the state donkey only really ends up in disastrous results, usually for both.  I am in favor of free speech, and I acknowledge that it's the offensive speech that needs to be protected.  Nobody needs to protect the freedom to say that puppies are cute, or that sunny days make for better baseball.  You need to protect the right to say stuff you don't like.  However, I am not in favor of using a church as a staging area without permission.  Ask nicely, and if they say no, then go elsewheres, in the same way that you would if a group came to your home and asked to perform a black mass, or a Christian prayer service. You may be fine with it, but you'd probably like to be asked.

I am in no way a legal expert, though, so I don't dare comment on legal proceedings, especially in Russia.  But I don't think they should be jailed for any longer than they already have been.  

An original spin on original sin.

I baptized a baby on Sunday.


She was a nice baby, too.  Scarlett was her name.  She was very sweet, smiled, didn't fuss about too badly, and the whole experience was lovely.

I baptized a baby on the tenth, as well.  His name was Linken, and he was perfectly charming as well. A nice kid.

Neither of them asked to be baptized, neither of them were able to speak for themselves, and neither will remember it.

So what the heck was I playing at?

You see, there's a question rolling around with infant baptism: what the heck are we doing baptizing people to forgive their sins, when they're about eight months old?  What possible sins have they committed in that time?

It's not just that they haven't had the time to commit sins, eight months is a while, to be sure, and I could find all sorts of sins to commit in that time, but it's that in those first months, you as a human being, are actually incapable of getting up to any antics.  Luke, my youngest son, is five months old, and all he can do is roll over, smile, laugh, eat, and void his warranty.  That's it.  And I wouldn't describe any of those things as overly sinful.  Bruce, our eldest son, now he's a different story.  This blog is not anywhere near long enough to catalogue all the stuff he does / can do, as he's three years old, and incredibly capable.  But with the capacity to do more right, comes the capability to do more wrong.  He can give us sweet cuddles, or he can give me a kick in the shins.  He can tell us that he loves us, or he can lie to our faces.  With any increase in capability, comes an increase in the ability to use this stuff for good, or for evil.  Now, our opinion on the sinfulness of babies is akin to our opinion on our own sinfulness, and it is how we view ourselves so favourably.

The saying goes that if you want to seem slimmer, your best bet is to hang out with people a lot heavier than you.  And if you want to seem moral, your best bet is to make a comparative with people who are less morally upright than yourself.  Simple enough.  The first comparison, obviously, is Hitler.  We all know that Hitler was a bad dude, and that he did a great number of things that were completely inexcusable, and horrifically evil.  He also had the ability to do these things.  He, and other dictators like him, tend to be corrupt.  They tend to be evil.  They tend to be catastrophic disasters, even though they may very well have entered into office with the best of intentions.

The other saying, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, is extremely true, not because there is anything inherently corrupting about power.  It's what it does to you as a person.  All of a sudden, the normal rules melt away, and you now have to run the nation on your own honor system.  It's different in a country like Canada, in which there are various checks and balances to power, which makes sense, because we want to avoid giving some madman the right to run the nation into the ground. But a great many countries don't work like that, and folks who take power in Haiti, or in Banoi, or whatever, usually end up causing no end of trouble, because when the rules are gone, and the police work for you, and you make the rules from now on, what do you do, and whose interest do you act in?

Usually, it ends up being your own.  Most of us are nice enough folks, because we don't have the ability to re-write the laws to suit us.  Most of us would assume that if we did take power, we'd pursue causes of justice and righteousness, and make the world a better place.  And so did every other dictator, like ever.  Nobody runs for office based on a policy of cronyism and corruption, of murder of people they don't like, of stacking bodies up like cordwood.  But it happens.  When the rules are gone, and replaced by your rules, they may not end up being as just as you might think they would be.

But for a moment, forget about that.  You're never going to be in that situation.  Odds are, you won't even be elected to municipal alderman, much less dictator of a banana republic.  Think then, for a moment, about how you feel about those people who live around you, and the other drivers on the road, and you'll know that you would make a whole bunch of things illegal.  Things that pretty much benefit you.  It's like that conundrum on the game show Survivor, in which a contestant wins a car, and they can decide to either keep the car, or by giving it up, give a car to every other contestant.  Of course, each contestant who isn't in the position knows exactly what they'd do, and that is to share it with everyone else.  Of course.  But it's easy to make these decisions if you can't do anything about it either way.

And that's where babies are.  They can't really be good or bad.  They can be annoying, they can be smiley, they can be sweet.  But if you know anything about children, you know that as soon as they work out how to lie, how to disobey, how to deceive, how to be basically dreadful, they probably will. Yes, they'll be likely to do nice things too, but they'll do a whole bunch of junk that you won't like.  And that propensity only increases, that as they grow in years, and in ability. They can do more, good or ill.

That's what we are like too.  We think of ourselves as being basically good, and so does everyone else. But if that was the case, if we were all as good as though we were, then things like the Vancouver riots and looting wouldn't happen.  And the riots are a very good example to use, because those are ordinary people who all of a sudden had the rules melt away.  You reach critical mass, and you realize that the police can't / won't stop you.  So what do you do?  Most of those folks were presumably regular people, who thought of themselves as okay people, pretty good.  But when the rules vanish, what do they turn into?

The argument is that they get caught up in the moment, which I'll believe, but why is there that inclination to turn to violence and looting when others are doing likewise?  Why do the ostensibly normal folks not just leave when the riot starts?  Why do they get caught up in it?  Well, it's that same inclination that children have, that we all have.  It's easy for us, sitting at home in Regina or wherever, to cluck our thick tongues and suggest oh so very delicately that we would NEVER do such a thing, but if someone smashed a Sears window open and you know nobody was going to stop you from doing anything you wanted, and the police were just going to stand there and watch, what would you do?

Mac should be arrested for bringing his guns to this riot.

What would you do?

Your original sin is the part of you that is corrupt.  In comics, it's the devil that sits on your shoulder.  It's the voice in the back of your head, heck, in the front of your head, that tells you to run in and take what isn't yours.  That tells you to lie to protect yourself.  That tells you to cut in line ahead of someone who isn't paying attention, that tells you 'finders keepers' when you find something that you could easily return.  That's your sinful nature, and that's original sin.  Do children have it, yes they do.  And you will find that as they grow, they likely need to be taught how to be good.  They probably don't need to be taught to be bad.  And like with any addiction, with any crushing personality flaw, the first issue is recognizing that it exists.  If you ignore it forever, if you say to yourself that there is no such thing as a corruption of yourself, and that you're a pretty great human being always, if you pretend the devil on your shoulder just isn't there, it's not as though he shuts up.  You just hear his words without seeing him.  If you confront these flaws, if you deal with them, if you grapple with them for what they are, then you realize that when you're faced with a shattered window, and the possibility of free jeans, that nagging voice that tells you to take them is wrong.  It's part of you, but it's the part of you that's broken.  When we ask for forgiveness of sins, especially for babies who don't have sins of commission, we're asking for God to heal broken hearts and spirits, and to draw us to himself even though we are broken and corrupt.  And he does.

He died not just for what you do, but for who you are, your flaws and corruptions, the parts of you that you hate, he died for all of that.  For what you do, and for the part of you that makes you likely to riot, or to be a jerk.  That's original sin, and that's what Christ died for.

PJ.

A thousandfold

Hi folks.

If I'm right, this time next week, this humble blog will have a thousand views. I'm  surprised at who reads this thing, actually - different from whom I'd expected!

In the spirit of milestones, here are some fun facts about readership:

Best fake reader: trollface.ru. Russian rage trollface comics. no jokes.
Best real reader: You. Reading this right now. You're awesome.
Most popular post: Star wars. By far.
Least popular post: Andrew and cold sores. Strangely, people not jumping all over that one.
Best google search leading here: "Dennis Chupik".
Worst google search leading here: "helmet with crest" or maybe "angry black wolf"

I'd say the biggest spike in readership came on the day that I published the post about Dennis Chupik and Atheists for Jesus.  That post, perhaps more than any other, got people reading right away.  And there's a pretty good reason for that.  What we're getting into is something that I view as being akin to the console wars that were going on when I was growing up.  For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's like this - You begged and pleaded with your parents to buy you a video game console.  They eventually caved, and bought one.  But they weren't going to buy two.  You had to pick one, and stick with it.  Now, that means that you made the call for the Nintendo Entertainment System over the Sega Genesis.  Well and good.  But what that also meant was that you'd backed a horse.  And you needed to convince yourself that the horse you backed is the absolute best.  God forbid that you make the wrong choice in the console race.  And that's where, to a large extent, the current fanboyism comes from.  It's not about the consoles, never was.  It's about our desperate desire to be right, to have made the right call, to have backed the right horse, because God forbid we be mistaken, and have to admit that we were wrong.

Is this possible?

Most religious / anti-religious texts are like this too.  They don't go out of their way to convert, they do their best to solidify.  When I read through "The God Delusion," I was struck by the way the writing assumed the idea that God was made up was a given.  It certainly made no effort to try to convince me of that fact, or to try to offer up a whole bunch of compelling arguments for the lack of existence of God or whatever.  It was mainly just trying to solidify a position that I didn't hold, which might be partially why I didn't find it to be overly compelling.  Same thing with God is not Great, or the End of Faith.

Okay, great.  So I didn't find the books by atheists for atheists to be overly convincing, mainly because I don't fit into their target market.  But it takes some reminding to those of us who are in the Christian camp to recall that Not everyone is a Christian.  We do a lot of talking in what I call 'Churchineese,' that is, using words like 'justified' or 'sanctified' or 'righteous,' and we forget that people who are outside the church don't necessarily use that kind of language.  Or at least in the same way.  Those of us who are churchgoers tend to react to people who aren't churchgoers with one main reaction 'You DON'T go to CHURCH?'

But we need to remember that our position is more than just telling other Christians how great Christianity is.  Hooray.  In order for this to work long term, you need to do something very important, something you may never have done in your whole life ever.

You need to wrestle with what you believe.

It's like a console war in which you have to back a side, but then sit down and look at what you've chosen.  You have to work with it, to find out WHY you believe what you believe.  In the Bible, it takes the form of Genesis 32:

²⁴ Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him 

until daybreak. ²⁵ When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, 

he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of Jacob’s thigh 

was dislocated while he wrestled with him. ²⁶ Then he said, 

“Let me go, for the dawn is breaking.” 

But he said, “ I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 

²⁷ So he said to him, “What is your name?” 

And he said, “Jacob.” ²⁸  

He said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but^[a]Israel; 

for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.” 

²⁹ Then Jacob asked him and said, “Please tell me your name.” 

But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” 

And he blessed him there. ³⁰ So Jacob named the place ^[b]Peniel, for he said,

 “ I have seen God face to face, yet my ^[c]life has been preserved.” 

³¹ Now the sun rose upon him just as he crossed over

Penuel, and he was limping on his thigh. 

³² Therefore, to this day the sons of Israel do not eat 

the sinew of the hip which is on the socket of the thigh, 

because he touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the hip.

How often do we as people wrestle with our positions?  It's usually a matter of hearing what you want to hear, and being confirmed and supported in that.  The books we read, the media we subscribe to, our podcasts, our radio stations, our polemics, they mostly all back up what we already think is true and right.  The greater task is to grab what you believe, and say "Why."  Wrestle with God.  If you do it right, it should change you, as it did Jacob.  If you don't grapple with what you believe every once in a while, if you don't challenge yourself on what you believe, you may find that you fall into the same routine as the rest of the world - reading and paying attention to stuff that tells you that you're terrific, and that's all.  Gotta move past that.  Know what you believe in, and then you can better communicate it to others, who may never have heard about it, or may be tired of it, bored of it, may not believe in it at all.  See it from their point of view.  Wrestle with it.  

PJ.

The inevitable boredom of bread

I mentioned on Sunday that one of my favorite smells in the entire world is fresh baked bread.  It's awesome. It's so awesome that I own two breadmakers, for the express purpose of baking bread, for the express purpose of being able to smell it when it's baking.  It's amazing, and is probably the greatest scent of all time.  Yes, even better than puppy breath.

Now, there's something fairly unique about scents.  After a while, you stop being able to smell them.  As I said on Sunday, the way your senses work is that they require essentially constant stimulation to keep on working.  Here's a fun experiment you can do at home, whilst you read this blog.  Take the index finger of your right hand, and place it on the back of your left hand.  Okay.  Remove said finger.  Now take the index finger of your right hand, and move it back and forth between your knuckles and your wrist. What you should have noticed, if your body works properly, is that you will have felt the finger resting on the back of your hand only for a fraction of a second, then your body sort of forgets about it.  The but if you get constant stimulus, then you feel it a whole lot more.

That constant stimulus is what we crave as people.  It's so true, I can't even overstate it.  We need something happening all the time.  These days, we've all got fantastical computers working in our pockets, a million channels, twitter, blogs, youtube, and a hundred thousand distractions.  All the time. And it never stops.  Now, this isn't a bad thing, but we crave this novelty to the point where the novelty is all that counts. The entire advertising industry is dedicated to telling you why you should be dissatisfied with your life.  Your life as it is, says the advertising industry, is simply no life at all.  If you only owned this one product, subscribed to this one service, used this one thing, then, THEN you'd have a life.  You'd smile and laugh and eat chicken with your family around the dinner table.

Fine.  Except it's not true.  And you know it's not true. And you know it's not true based on personal experience.  You know that the last tablet or phone or tv or car or whatever that you purchased didn't actually change your life completely the way it promised to .  Instead, your life turned into your life, plus a tablet.  Or a tv, or a moustache, or whatever.

Point being, this constant stimulus that we're looking for, it fails to genuinely satisfy.  Even though you think it will.  You're as convinced as I am that the novelty of a thing equals its superiority.  But the joke's on us, because the novelty of a thing is actually to its detriment.  Because the things that change your life are the things that aren't new or novel.

Now, you know this to be true.  The new, the novel, it has a way of exciting your senses, of making you feel alive.  It has a way of making your heart beat a little bit faster, precisely because it is new. But once you take it home, make it your own, it won't do that anymore.  I can promise you that.  We expect it to, though.  We expect to make this new thing part of our lives, and expect it to give us those familiar heart palpitations always.  And then it stubbornly refuses to. It becomes old, it becomes outdated, or worst of all, it becomes familiar. Now, I've been around churches long enough to know that people do the same thing there. They go to the church that give them the thrill, the promise of excitement, the novelty.  Or even more so, people follow the faith that gave them that novelty, that promise of new and exciting things.  But there's a fatal flaw built into all of this - you're still you, even with the novelty.

You know what changes you, what brings long term happiness - your relationships, your talents, your desires, your loves.  These things bring and breed happiness.  Your novelty doesn't.  It makes your heart go pitty pat, but doesn't change you at all.  The stuff that changes you long term is the stuff that makes you who you are.  And as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another, according to proverbs 27:17.  The brief flash in the pan romances, the affairs, the dalliances with this and that, doesn't do much for you.  It's in the daily practice, the daily observances, the daily relationships, the daily involvement, that's what changes you.  That's what makes the difference between just you with a new ipod, versus you as a changed person.

This holds doubly and triply true for church.  You may feel as though your faith has gotten cold.  There's no excitement anymore, there's no thrill, nothing new.  You and God have gotten into a bit of a routine, and it's business as usual.  Ho hum.  You may be tempted to find that new thing, because the smell of fresh baked bread can't even be detected anymore.  Well, just because you've gotten tired of it, doesn't mean it's not there, or that it doesn't do what it promises to do anymore.  The children of Israel in the desert were fed with manna, which they loved at first because it kept them alive, but got a little tired of after a short while, because it was dull.  Jesus posited himself as the living bread from heaven, which sounded great, until people started getting sick of the same old thing.

People like us.

Ask yourself when you got tired of the whole God thing.  The whole God thing that started with such promise, and then turned into routine, and emptiness.  Ask yourself when it was that you stopped being able to smell the fresh baked bread in your own house because it got to be too familiar.  Ask yourself when dinner became a grind, and you wanted some novel food.  Ask yourself when your relationship with your spouse stopped being fireworks and lavender, and became notes on the fridge to pick up milk.  This happens.  This happens all the time.  The real skill and expertise is not in chasing the thrill, because that'll disappear with a new partner / food / tablet computer eventually too. The real skill and expertise is finding ways to continue to be thrilled and excited by what you have, rather than what you don't.  It's a monumental task, because it requires you to throw off the weight of the entire advertising industry, and stand alone, saying "this isn't something new or novel.  This is my spouse / God / church / and what matters in not finding a new thing to disappoint me, but to work with what I have, and to let it change me."  It's not the easiest thing in the world, but easy is flitting around from flower to flower.  It's not easy, precisely because it's worth doing.

PJ