MSU English 212

As of yet, I have not posted ideas or experiences concerning the biblical portion of this class(aside from Frye notes). Having read Mila 18(Leon Uris) and reread Ishmael(Daniel Quinn) this last week, I'm feeling the need to express. Let me go get my soap box.

Don't be offended. But if you are, it's nothing personal.

My experiences with christianity and most christians have led me into viewing both this specific religions religious institutions and their practitioners as largely a waste. My earliest experiences with christianity(beyond being baptised) were of church. My earliest memory in a church was of one around the corner from where we lived when my parents moved to NYC. We lived on what was then a crack street. I guess you could call this a crack church. My memory is of feeling bored and antcy while sitting on the bench next to my mother. I saw some kids in a nearby row making paper airplanes. I thought I'd give it a try. Those kids were a little older than me and they could tear paper into better squares for airplanes than I could. I distinctly remember how my hands couldn't tear the paper along straight lines. The paper tore so easily. I made a few folds and thought my airplane might work but I figured I should show it to my mother first. She was really mad at me, and not for ignoring the sermon(lecture). No one had ever explained to me that bibles were important and that it's paper you don't use to make paper airplanes.

I have always enjoyed paper airplanes. My mom used to work in a building at Columbia University with a huge rotundum(think big round room). My dad and I would make paper airplanes and throw them off the second story to see how they would fly while waiting for my mom to finish with work. The transition from flat into 3 dimensional, from useless to productive, this was fascinating to me. How can I ask for more in life than the gift to create something that is out of something that is not? This is very much how literature works. Flat paper with print on it means nothing until we breath life into it, through the physical(paper airplanes) or the imaginative(reading). My first memory of a church is of this imagination process, as I was capable of expressing to my fullest, being shut down. I'm sure I was punished in some idiotic fassion(my parents have never been as creative as me). My imagination had been stomped on and this has remained the main theme of christianity in my life.

Kindergarden found me in a church school. I was in the last grade. My memories of this year are somewhat fragment. Only the interesting ones have survived with all the details intact. I remember accidentaly stapling a piece of paper to my finger and running around the room screaming wildly in terror while avoiding the scary adults chasing me. I didn't know they only wanted to help. I can lead a pretty good chase. Haven't you ever wondered what a staple in the fleshy meaty part of your thumb would feel like? In restrospect, it's only worth it if people chase you because you can wave your arms and the paper makes cool motions in the air while you run.

The next 8 years I would spend at another church-type school. But it was a big one. Apparently, cathedrals are bigger and somehow more important than regular churches. I guess any building can become a church if you consecrate it. Cathedrals have stricter archatectural, social, or religious rules. I don't know why they're more important but they just are. I haven't figured that one out yet. By now I had also started reading actual books. Barensteine Bear books were wonderful. Once the magic of literature was unlocked to me, I read every day. Over and over and over I would read those Barensteine Bear books. Even if I was reading a book I had previously read 50 times, each time I read those books was important. Each time was fresh. Each time held something new for me. Somewhere in a combination of words and pictures was a limmitless universe I can still enter today. It is the limmitless universe of the Barensteine Bears. I would even read at night. My parents would want time at night to unwind from their busy hectic days and put me to bed, in part, to get some quiet. So I'd demand the hall light be kept on "to keep away the monsters"(which still periodicly show up) and read by that. It would hurt to read at night so I'd rotate my reading by keeping one eye shut. This is why today I wear glasses and the perscription for my eyes is uneven. Every time I see or wear my glasses, I am connected with my love for reading. While typing this sentance right now, I've removed my glasses and the blury text appearing on the computer screen can, with some imagination, be turned into words from one of my favorite Barensteine Bears books. Once it's with you, it never leaves. It's not even a heart beat away. It IS your heart beat. Note: Draw a connection between growth in reading, growth in religious institution, paper is the binding agent.

This new grade school of mine has been strongest academic environment I've ever encountered. Most of the college professors I've had in my 6 years at MSU present about as much information as I would recieve in my gradeschool classes. ex: 7th grade text books. My 7th grade grammer book was Comptons College Grammer Book. My 7th grade Latin text book, Jenny Year 1, is far more advanced than any other language text book I've used. My 7th grade Math course covered precalc(same as my math core math 151). My 7th grade French text book, Bienvenue, well, at least they used an updated version when I took French 1 as a freshman here. Same text book, wow. So in this highly structured and academicly intense environment was a breeding ground for critical thinking and individual expression. I won't go into the social elements of the school, but if you're curious just ask me where some of my classmates ended up.

By 3rd grade I'd read everything on my parents book shelf except their copies of the bible. The bible appeared to me as obtuse, obscure, and obfuscated(note: latin prefix O or OB, from or away from). To me, the reading was as flat as the paper it was printed on. My parents were sending me to sunday school where I would ask the teacher impossible questions. "If god is all powerful, could god make a pizza so big that even god couldn't eat it? If god couldn't eat the pizza, then he couldn't be all powerful. If god couldn't make the pizza, then he couldn't be all powerful." Honestly, I was an ass about it. But at least I was smart. The woman teaching the class couldn't hold a normal conversation with me if I asked her about anything other than christianity. So instead of doing reading homework for sunday school, I would read novels off my parents book shelf(sometimes for the second or third time). My behavoir hasn't really changed. Even now, I'd rather read my own books than the books teachers tell me I need to read(although sometimes those ones end up being good too).

Now, during all of this, it's important to factor in my yearly trips back to Montana for the summers. I would play in my grandmothers garden, soak in my other grandmothers hot tub, and play with cousins. They would also take me to church. This is where I gloss over 10 years of aggrivation. Gradualy, they've accepted that I'm not going to be christian and no amount of mistreatment will inspire me to do so. I am not a perfect little catholic grandchild. But it's ok, I've been writen off because they have plenty of other catholic grandchildren(NOTE: this is only one of my sets of grandparents, the others are well meaning and I think only now have begun to come into their prime).

Eventualy, I would go spend my afternoons outdoors in a park instead of inside their church. I breathed the air. I felt the flowers. I tasted the sweet grass on the wind. I climbed trees. I rolled rocks. I watched birds. I raced against myself in every compatition. I was alive. I have never been alive inside of a church, paper airplanes or otherwise. They are a physical box around the imagination I am dying to express daily. The paint on their walls never changes. The ornamentation hanging from the walls and ceilings never changes. I had twice weekly classes in the cathedral which were always the same thing. "How many different devices for world domination can I assemble out of the items in my pocket?" It got to the point where I would save interesting things from throughout the day with strong amounts of anticipation for using them. Pen Cap = 7 minutes. Pocket Lint = 4 minutes. Large Eraser = 6 minutes. Paper Clip = 9 minutes. Combine these elements together and a form of imaginative fussion takes place. More time can be spent with them together in combination than their total time as individual elements. This was how my imagination expressed itself. I didn't have grass to run around in or trees to climb up. I had a chair to sit in.

My highly academic environment and highly surpressive of my imagination religious environment changed when I went to highschool. I went to one of the top public highschools in the nation and was tortured with their appathetic attempt at learning. Academics had surpased christianity as the main torment and hindrence of my education. I read books for English class which I had previously read in 5th grade. Math and Science were all areas I had covered previously. When we say highschool is hell, my experience of highschool time was that it was never ending. Those were the longest 50 minute classes of my life. My academic inspiration has suffered ever since. While the academics sucked, I was at least free of the bonds of christianity.

By now, a very clear distinction has been formed between christianity and other religions. While I was still in NYC, every year my family went to sader with our good friends. Judaism, as a religion, is less about "we believe" and more about "we remember". This is strikingly different from christianity. The inside of the mosque on 96th street and 1st avenue is the largest physical piece of art ever to touch my mind and heart. I understand about "the power of Islam". One of my good friends from gradeschool, her father died of cancer the other year. It is one of the most wrong things I've ever seen. The best way to learn about suffering, in it's entirety and how to circumvent it, is with the teachings of Buddah. The way christianity deals with life and death is simply not good enough for me. Christianity is the religion most lacking which I have come into contact with and, for the first time in this journal entry, has been capitolized only because it is at the beginning of a sentance.

Ishmael and Mila 18 deal with the ideas of agriculture and the nazi's as representative of an unstopable force which only ends by destroying itself. This unstopable force is in actuality an idea. The idea that we can control our lives and the lives of the others around us, that we can and should control what lives and what dies, is the single most frightening idea of mass distribution in the history of our species. More so than any other major religion, christianity appears to perpetuate this idea. Ethnocentrism, cultural domination, and human/animal exploitation exist because of this idea. Every form of poverty existing in the world today can give its thanks to this idea. The upwards trickle of dollars we see in every developed country, where money goes from the working to the rich while widening the gap between the two, exists because of this idea. Every political system on the planet is supported by this idea. Major religions work as an impotent stopgap for surpressing the awful results of this idea. It is intended to provide a controlled system for the management of this idea and with its reliance on humans it is subject to the failings of humans. The most terrifying thing about religions is that they support this idea and, because their support and justification are printed onto paper, we lend them an unreasonable amount of faith.

We are faced with an impossible situation. Our world, it's countries, it's politics, it's people, it's major religions all run parallel with this line of reasoning, that humans are the pinnicle of achievement and, as such, are beyond the existing laws for everything else. We are so peak, we can superimpose our own laws over the naturaly existing ones. And we are so ignorant we expect this to work. This cycle cannot perpetuate itself indefinatly with success. This is the impossible situation we face. Somehow, we must step outside of that cycle. We will not create an impossible solution through the use of dogma or ignorance. Only by exercising our imaginations, by making them fly, can we develope paterns which will survive and thrive under the tyrany of the mass belief of "right". We need environments and institutions which support criticle thinking and imagination, not environments and institutions supporting mass excremental thought.

At the beginning of this lengthy post, I said "most christians". I've met some who, through an extrodonairy act of humility and submission, do not see themselves as gods gift to the Earth. They are simply here, for the time being. They have no fetish for controling every single life system on Earth and no enforced apathy or ignorance about perpetuating these ideas. They've been grounded in their belief system and are unquestioning. I'm not sure if it was their individual nature, that they were more compassionate, patient and sincere than others, or if they were simply ideal models of christians, the type of person churches try to create. I lean towards individual nature. I've met plenty of people who tell me I'm going to their hell because I don't believe in their god. Oddly, when I ask them "oh, which religion are you?" I never hear "Judaism" or "Islam" or "Buddhist" or "Hindi" etc... I don't think anyone else has seen the irony that I already AM living in their hell. This world is falling appart at the seems from the thoughts and attitudes that people like that hold dear and close. I wake up, go about my day, and go to sleep and this idea is always there. That time sense of hell, the unending, my experience in highschool, its like that every day. And it's all because of that little idea about controlling life.




I haven't edited anything above. I'll give myself a day or two and reread it. My guess is there are probably some pretty large gaps that need filling and questions that need answering. Feel free to inquire further into my ramblings...

-Edit-
i changed my mind. i don't really want to add to what i've said. it captures more of my spirit and less of my thought. for that reason, i don't want to change it. not yet...