Tuesdays with Abhorrent Fiends vol. 49: My kingdom for a chair!

And evolving from the sea
Would not be too much time for me
To walk beside you in the sun

~the Pixies

Please, I ask indulgence of all my readers, you in particular--who will in due course be identified. Kind of.

I was going to post a long, involved, reasonable-sounding follow-up to my last post, but fuck it. Those sorts of things never, ever, ever have their intended effect, and besides, about two-thirds of the way through I realized I didn't even know what my intended effect was.

From time to time lately I have been depressed. Mostly, this is because I have been unable to find gainful employment that gets me out of the apartment and makes me feel useful. There are also other reasons, some involving my being unable to magically fix Dave's depression or magically bring my father back from the dead. One of the reasons I have lately been depressed, however, I intend to address right now. And see what happens.

People (or, at least, this particular person whom I allegedly am at the moment) write complicated, long-winded analyses of religious viewpoints for at least one of three reasons:

1. To convince themselves of the correctness of their current viewpoint, of which they are then unsure,
2. To convince people of the opposing viewpoint of the correctness of theirs, or
3. To inform third parties, not otherwise involved in the discussion, of their (the author's) understanding of the terms of the dispute between the two viewpoints.

#2 does not happen. It never works. Ever, ever, ever. People change their beliefs only when they, themselves, confront a situation in their lives for which their current belief set is incapable of providing them with the appropriate transformations to effectively confront. If an argument presented in such a way ever did sway somebody, it was because they already experienced a crisis for which their current belief set was insufficient and was looking to add in new parts anyway. So I am not going to become a Christian because of logical debates, nor is a certain particular loved one of mine going to become a non-Christian of any stripe because of logical debates. We'd just sit there, either at our respective keyboards or on our respective couches, flapping our fingers and/or gums until we became blue in the hands and/or face, without accomplishing anything other than carpal tunnel and/or anoxia. As long as our respective belief sets are getting the job done for us, we are not going to commit any of our precious, precious mana to any others, and all the appendage-flapping in the world isn't going to change that one jot or tittle. I am totally fine with that, and differences of opinion even on matters of such great importance should not be an impediment to loving relationships between people who have gone through hell and high water together.

And Christianity itself isn't especially the problem. Belief sets, in and of themselves, never are. One of the things I believe is that virtually any belief set can be employed to produce virtually any mental/emotional state, depending on the goals, opinions, and available personality energies employed by the individual believer. So it is neither my goal to deconvert, nor to be deconverted.

"What, then," I ask myself, "o mighty analyzer of many motives, is your motivation? What exactly is it that you are trying to accomplish?"

I want to understand. I want to understand what happened that caused you (yes, you!) to believe as you believe, hoping somehow that offering a step-by-step account of how I came to believe as I believe might make it a fair trade. I want a step-by-step breakdown of the process that led, either from inactive disbelief through inactive belief to active belief, or from some other point A to some other point B. Because I Do Not Get It. I was blind or stupid or not paying attention or all wrapped up in selfish concerns and somehow, somewhere along the line I missed something very important that was happening inside you.

Was there anything I could have done, at any point, to make your search for a more effective belief set easier or more pleasant? Did you attempt to consult me and have me blow you off because I was selfish and stupid? Or did you consciously decide not to consult me, either because it was a matter too private to get a sororial second opinion on, or for some other reason that seemed sensible to you at the time? Did it sneak up on you overnight, as un-analyzed emotions boiled up out of the back of your brain and made a de facto decision for you? Or did it happen slowly, under the light of day, as you took out certain key experiences and emotional states one by one and riffled through possible belief sets to see which one provided the transformations which would make all of them bearable?

I realize this is not, possibly, the best place for this sort of discussion. Especially considering the fact that whatever your thoughts and feelings on the subject have been, you have not shared them with me yet for one reason or another. Maybe it's all too raw and bloody in there and you still don't want to think about it consciously. Or maybe my judgment is compromised, I'm an unreliable confidant, and so you didn't think it was worth explaining to me because of how I would react. Perhaps there is some completely different reason. Such as the fact that I have not, until now, come out and asked in a plain and simple manner. If you would rather respond by email than by comment, which hangs out here on the internet where as many as a half-dozen people might possibly take the time to read it, that's cool.

But I am going nuts over here trying to figure out what the blazes is going on with you. And I am tired of taking the oblique approach. Well, yes, this still counts as an oblique approach. Cowardly, even. Of all my vices, I've lived with the awareness of that one the longest. I'm not cowardly as often or to the extent I used to be, or even in quite the same ways all the time. But the basic broad yellow streak is still etched across my soul. And rather than have you throw a small piece of furniture in my general direction (well do I remember the discussion in which you explained that you were not actually throwing it at me, just trying to startle some kind of non-zombie-like reaction out of me!), I would rather experience any of the just rewards of my cowardice out here on the internet, where I feel more at home.

Dammit, woman, I have been a fear zombie and a guilt zombie and a shame zombie, sometimes concurrently, other times consecutively. I flatter myself I can recognize the signs. You have turned yourself into some kind of a zombie. And I do not like it. I miss you, miss watching you live life as your most excellent, feisty, sarcastic, uppity self. The you who is always in charge of her own thoughts and feelings and has an opinion on everything. An opinion which is absolutely right at all times, even if it has recently changed in response to newly available data. I do not recognize this mousy, retiring head-in-the-intoxicating-sands-of-fictional-realities person, except in the memory of my own shameful past. And I do not like it. I did not like being it and I do not like seeing it!

Even in your response to my last post, I did not get a single one of YOUR opinions, nor any idea of what led you to them. Merely the opinions of Christian orthodoxy, which of late you apparently espouse, for reasons which utterly mystify me. I myself am undoubtedly to blame for having framed the discussion in terms of generalities and hypotheticals and other such cowardly evasions. So I was not, previously, asking for your opinions. Just kind of hoping that you would be so good as to volunteer some, given a non-threatening context.

Which is why I am now throwing a piece of rhetorical furniture in your general direction! I am not obliquely referring to matters on which you may or may not possess an individudal opinion; I am asking for your freaking opinion! Because I desperately want to know it!