Stuff du jour

The Dallas Cowboys Blues

You know the Dallas Cowboys have the blues when...

There is more action on the sidelines than on the football field.

Your # 2 receiver thinks he's #1 and your #1 receiver plays like he's #2.

You long for the glory days of Barry Switzer and Jessica Simpson.

Your offensive coordinator (and future annointed head coach) passes when he should run and runs when he should pass.

Half of your team spends more time at Ghost bar than on the gridiron.

You ALWAYS run on first down, and every defense knows this.

The only textbook tackles come from your kicker.

Number 11 talks copious smack during the week but cannot catch a ball on Sunday.

The best coach on your coaching staff gets shoved—yes, physically shoved—by your star cornerback!!!

Your quarterback is an emotional rollercoaster.

You're leading your division but your season is landing with a thud.

Your eek out a win against the Washington Redskins by the hair of your chinny chin chin.

Ugh...

p.s. Now we know why Jerry Jones built that retractable roof in Dallas...to let out the Cowboy's shtank

The Best Burgers I Ever Ate

A brief excursus away from the world of theology and anti-theology, and into the glorious world of meat:

My wife, Christa, hates meat, but I've brought her around on eggs (which, I know, is not a meat, but it's progress just the same) and some forms of andouille sausage that are innocent-looking and not festooned around an omelet like cheap Christmas lights or a jumble of bloody worms that grew up on the south side of Chicago.

Okay, now that I've officially shot this blog entry in the foot, I'm about to blog about my favorite burger joints. Some are more greasy than others. But all are good. Vegans and vegetarians and carniphobias (is that even a word?), feel free to skip this blog entry.

1. The Burger House, a.k.a. Burger House, a.k.a. Jack's Burger House, a.k.a. Jack's in Dallas, Texas. 

This greasy spoon will knock your socks off. It's oxygen to the alpha males that run around Highland Park, and their bimbo counterparts, and their children, and pretty much everyone else in the great state of Tejas. In the wrenched-out-of-their-context words of Tina Turner (yes, this is a first, quoting Ms. Turner), it's "simply the best." I grab on every time I go home. Sometimes a baker's dozen.

2. Las Vegas Strip Burger

Right across from the Wynn Hotel on the Las Vegas strip. Get the one with bacon and chili. It will blow your mind.

Bonus: It's right next to the mall, so you can easily coax your sweetheart there with the promise of fun and retail merrymaking. 

3. IN 'N' OUT Burger

The only chain in this entry. The fries aren't the best (after Burger House, what is?) but the cheeseburger is sublime and transcendent and all of that, probably the third best burger west of the Mississippi. And they're all over California, so that's just a bonus.

4. Annie's in Dinkytown

Yes, there will be plenty of snow on the patio when you eat there. And, yes, you'll have to crunch your way through the frozen tundra of Minnesota snow to get there from your car, which is by now in a near-death state from the cold and which may or may not start when you get back to it.

But...their burgers will warm your belly. And their fries are not half-bad, too. And their banana 
milkshakes are like an anesthesia, they will put you under. Count to ten...one, two, and you're out. This is good as it will help you not feel the cold on your way back through the glacier that is under your car, the near-dead one that may or may not start when you turn the key.

And, no, you won't get out of Annie's without consuming a hundred thousand calories. 

But...yes, Bob Dylan used to play in that area once upon a time, circa 1960, where chances are he lifted someone's wallet exactly where your car—the one that still won't start when you turn the key—now resides in the snow.

5. The swimming pool on top of the Four Seasons, Beverly Hills, California.

The only reason I know this is because my wife is a beautiful, supercool movie critic who gets to interview movie stars in L.A. on a regular basis, and sometimes I tag along. We once saw Snoop Dog in the elevator, who looked surprisingly more thuggish than in his videos. And Tom Hanks, who looked not thuggish at all.

But on this particular day, Christa and I were sitting out by the pool, and I ordered a Kobe cheeseburger. The sun was out. To our right was Sean Bean (Aragon's cousin from the first Lord of the Rings...the one who tries to steal Frodo's ring, but dies), smoking up a storm and sipping a Heineken. To our left was Enrique Iglesias (you can't make this stuff up), who was basking in the cool shade of a cabana tent, a stoic poker face hiding behind Italian sunglasses. 

Sandwiched (oh, yes, pun very much intended) midway in between Mr. Bean and Mr. Iglesias was my thick Kobe cheeseburger, in all of its cheeseburger glory, looking all royal with the pickle and thick fries that walked out of a country club somewhere.

Wow! That's all I can say. It's one of the few meals that will ever make it into my diary.

(For the record, I ordered my Kobe cheeseburger a full ten minutes before Senor Iglesias even walked into his cabana, much less before he ordered his frou frou plate of whatever it was. He sauntered in with his Italian sunglasses and ordered his food much later than I did...and, get this, he got his his order way before I got mine. I'm still not happy about that. At the time, I was quite pissed (not in the English way)—ask Christa—but my earth-shattering cheeseburger and those crunchy french fries more than made up for this snub by the servers.

So, doth endeth my blog entry on burgers.

Here is a list of working titles for future entries, in no particular order:

Proof and the Burger House Challenge

Juliet, Naked and the New Atheists

Yes, but...

Yes, if...

Yes, and...

Hades and Chekhov's Gun

Science and the Claim for Objectivity

This list may change, though. Probably will.

Snakes, Snails and Puppy Dog Tails (and Flowers, too)...

The way that some of the new atheists yammer on about the sheer devilry of the phenomenon of faith, you'd think that the lion's share of the population of humanity—and Christians in particular—are no more than throwaway bubblegum on the bottom of the world's shoe; or detritus on the underbelly of the cosmos, a mammalian relic of the Dark Ages, etc.

Et cetera, ad hominem.

So here's a worthy question: Why are these guys so angry? Where does all of this deep-seated hostility come from? From whence does this lava flow? I mean, Richard Dawkins writes as if his firstborn son was kidnapped by thuggish Cardinals at the behest of the Pope. Sam Harris has an under-the-surface steam that could launder a knock-off Armani suit. And poor Christopher Hitchens woke up on the wrong side of a volcano. 

Maybe a better question is this: Is there any legitimacy for such animus?

Yes, this is a better question. One that we should be asking. And as a fan of history in general and church history in particular, I can vouch (along with many others who have vouched) that there is legitimacy for such a question. And ultimately my answer to the above question is twofold, with a couple of caveats.

Answer: Yes, if...; Answer: Yes, but..,

I look forward to fleshing out these answers as well as these significant caveats in future blog entries. Now we have time for a just a cursory treatment of the "yes." It should go without saying that if we picked up the massive rock of church history and looked under it with a critical eye, we would find many snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, as it were; scum and scorpions, algae, bits of skulls and bones without a cross, gold bullion and crushed diamonds that were used for power as well as acquisition; barbaric instruments wielded for torture, not to mention copious blood stains that were spilled in the name of Christ. Yes, we believers have a checkered and bloodthirsty history. Anyone who denies that is caught up in an airbrush society, and prefers plastic surgery to historical truth. After all, you can't put history under the knife. Well, you can, but...

So, we all know that we believers have a fair amount of historical baggage in our lineage, and if we are serious about fidelity to historical truth, we will confess as much and own up to it. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Catholic priests who cannot (or would not) keep their pants zipped. Salem Witch trials that were obtuse at best and diabolical at worst. For anyone with an eye and a little cash and proximity to a used bookstore, there is plenty of blood and murder in the pages of church history that would make Napoleon blush. (note: I don't know of any theist worth his or her salt that will not concede this point)

And this, of course—this bloated underbelly of history full of flies and intestines—is precisely where the new atheists hang their hat.

And from a persuasive and rhetorical standpoint, it's the smart thing to do. Why wouldn't they hang their hat there? Why not go for the jugular? If I were an atheist attempting to win the hearts and minds of the populace, I'd probably do the same thing. If I were on a mission to debunk Christianity and the ethos of all faiths everywhere, I'd camp out in those historical weak spots, too, and hammer away at them incessantly; which, as it happens, is exactly what these gentlemen do. These guys ain't dumb.

So...fair enough. I'll grant you the jugular. I'll grant you some of the ammo. And I'll even grant you the rhetorical Chinese water torture (i.e. the drip, drip, drip of the above historical weak points) as the savvy thing to do from a persuasive standpoint. But—and this is a massive, elephantine "but"—this is not a full-blooded treatment of history so much as demagoguery; this is only part of the story. Yes, only part of the story. A sliver of a slice of the wonderful narrative of history. In future blog entries I will argue that to zoom in on the above historical weak spots without regard to the rest of the story amounts to nothing more than a one-dimensional view of history.

One-dimensional, as in less than three. This is the opposite of historical airbrush; it's historical cherry-picking. 

There is plenty of work to be done here. David Bentley Hart has done some good work in this regard; Alistar McGrath as well, in addition to others.

So, as we wrap up this entry, let's recap the above question and subsequent answers, which will be addressed more fully in future blog thingamajigs:

Question: Is there any legitimacy to the volcanic anger that has erupted (from the new atheists, or anti-theists) in response to church history? 

Answer: Yes, if...

Answer: Yes, but...

Oh, and I just thought of a third: Yes, and...

Sufficient to say, there is a subtlety to history that is essential if we are to get any kind of a sense of it. And, yes, there are plenty of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails in our history; blood and skulls as well. Yet there are flowers, too. Hospitals and leper colonies, drug clinics, orphanages, food pantries (I just spoke with two founders of food pantries today who spend their lives feeding the hungry in the inner city), and campaigns that eschew violence, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and fight for the rights of the alien and the oppressed all over the world. These examples abound throughout the trajectory (or arc, or wingspan, or juggernaut, or whatever metaphor you use) of history.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more. And don't be duped by random, rotten cherries. That selective diet would make anyone cranky and bent out of shape...

Hey Rich, Chris and Sam...

This trio of “new” athiests are clever, but not as clever as they think they are. I respect the “old” atheists more, if only because they didn’t make boneheaded statements like this:

 C.S. Lewis was daft and dreary.  Augustine was an “earth-centered” ignoramus.   St. Paul was a bully.

 And these are some of the more sanguine pot shots. I’ll return to some of these misguided and ultimately disrespectful attacks later. For now, it is enough to say that many of the writers dubbed as the “new” atheists—men like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the always-snotty Christopher Hitchens—seem to revel in warped caricatures and rhetorical sound-bytes as they lampoon a one-dimensional enemy of their own design that is part construct, part scattershot historical fact, part phantasm, and wholly made of straw.    

And this too: Many of them are simply recycling old ink from the likes of Bertrand Russell—an intelligent man who actually saw fit to contribute something to the sum total of human knowledge in the realm of logic and philosophy, if not in the realm of metaphysics. 

These new atheists wouldn’t be so newsworthy if they weren’t so pompous and smug and condescending. And, as it happens, influential. 

In light of that, I’m toying with the idea of a new blog series. Something like a response; a friendly spar in cyberspace, a blow-by-blow rejoinder to some of these clownish arguments and scrambled logic that often emanates from this core school of hostility.  So…I haven’t blogged in a while. Slammed at work and doing other things. I’ve been doing research in my spare time, though. I’ve been reading guys like Harris and Hitchens and Dawkins and Russell, among others. And I must say that these gentlemen have pumped new lifeblood into my faith. So, for that, I thank you. In a strange and twisted way these writers are edifying to my faith. It’s weird, but sometimes I get more edified reading these “new” atheists, what with their historical cherry picking and all (mucho scribbles in the margins of their pages) than I do reading many pop evangelical Christians with their soap and sap and antisceptic gobbledegook. Not that I’m not an evangelical (I am, unabashedly so), but… 

Well, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m into swill. 

 In any case, that’s the plan: The idea is not to lampoon the lampooners so much as to attempt to absorb some of the sucker punches that have been thrown our way, and maybe throw a couple back in their direction. After all, rough-and-tumble persiflage is the name of the game, right? Surely that would be more interesting for them (hypothetically speaking) than the lame straw men they kick around. It can’t be much fun trouncing a punching bag. 

Sidenote: I have friends who are atheists. I like them (hence, the friendship) as well as respect them (also hence the friendship). They know that I think no less of them for their beliefs. They also know that I have a right to challenge those beliefs in the give-and-take of conversation, as they do mine. This blog series is not directed toward them at all. 

So for now, stay tuned...

 

A Gifted Gabber

Here's a plug for my favorite evangelical with the gift of gab: 

Matt Chandler is his name, and you can google him or grab a sermon download at: www.thevillagechurch.net.

Podcast, too.

Lots of stuff on YouTube as well. Matt Chandler is his name.

Matt. Chandler. Matt Chandler.

Check him out!!!

Rock 'n' Roll Time Jump

In the spirit of playful anarchy and magical rock ‘n‘ roll, here are a few bands I would see if space and time (not to mention gobs of cash) were like soft, preternatural putty in the palm of my hand:

1. The Replacements in their rabble-rousing heyday. Anywhere. Mid-eighties. Those were the days when a thankless shove from Paul Westerberg was like being kissed by the Pope. Authentic raw blabber and non-linear bass lines pulsating off sticky floors. This was post-punk brilliance at its finest, and the overrated Wilco should thank their lucky stars Westerberg ever breathed into a microphone, probably with bad breath.

2. The Beatles. The Cavern, 1962. Nothing like seeing a chubby John Lennon sweating like a pig. And the cherubic cheeks of Paul McCartney through the smoke of English fags (i.e. cigarettes) and mindless donnybrooks in this raucous Liverpool pub. This was long before Paul became a poet laureate and John a skeletal waif with the crazy wife.

3. U2 in Ireland, circa 1981. Well before I proposed to Christa in Chicago before the Vertigo tour in 2005 (I had to upstage Bono somehow) U2 was already big, way too big; they're bloated now, on a global scale, and the poor Irish leperchaun thinks he’s Robin Hood or Ghandi or something. Of course, he is, but it would be nice to see the spotlight shine on an earlier incarnation of this singular munchkin—the chubby one with the bleeding heart and Napoleonic streak, full of pluck and megalomania, gabbing up a storm about the mystical and the mundane and how famous U2 would be someday. Those were the days when you could enjoy an earthquake of rock ‘n‘ roll without having to save political prisoners with your cell phone.

4. Bob Dylan. Anywhere in Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1961. This would be the chubby (are you sensing a theme here?) baby-faced, homeless urchin with the corduroy cap and Woody Guthrie husk on his voice, cadging money with a paper cup in Washington Square Park, or the Gaslight, or sleeping on Dave Van Ronk’s couch. These were the pre-genius days, pre-psychotropic drugs, pre-ranconteur days, when Zimmerman was just another wandering pudknocker on the streets of New York, just as likely to sing you a folk song as to pick your pocket. He was also a natural salesman—he could sell a dead cat to your grandmother and you’d thank him for it. Oh, to have one's wallet stolen by Dylan in exchange for a folk song and a dead cat! 

   (photo: the little urchin in the flesh, probably wondering what kind of goodies are in his photographer's wallet)

5. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in some gritty honkeytonk in Austin. While we're at it, we'll go ahead and throw Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash in the mix. Must be a Saturday night deep in the heart of Texas. They will not sing "The Highwayman" in this scenario, though. 

6. A folk/blues songwriter-in-the-round campfire session with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Muddy Waters in Mississippi. Again, I don’t really care where this would take place. Lucinda Williams can sit in too.  It would be an honor if Ella Fitzgerald would also grace us with her presence with "strange fruit hanging from the trees," perhaps through the flames of a dancing campfire. Michelle Shocked can come too. Shawn Colvin, I wouldn't be bummed if you happened to be there with your acoustic Martin D-28 as well.

7. Bob Marley and his funky son, Ziggy in Jamaica. I’ll pass on the grass, though.

8. A gyrating Mick Jagger doing his wild and interpretive dance of St. Augustine’s “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee” (i.e. “I can’t get no satisfaction”). I love it when rock stars, or philosophers for that matter (please see Sarte and Ecclesiastes), preach the Gospel without even knowing it.

  (St. Augustine in deep thought: this would be the moral high point of this particular blog.

  (St. Mick in hypnotic snake-dance mode. He looks too zonked-out to be satisfied.)

9. Ryan Adams, any time when he doesn’t walk offstage in one of his bratty, primadonna, Westerberg wannabe, hey-look-at-me, mercurial mood swings; especially after only forty-five minutes of rifling through obscure songs, like he did when Christa, Casey (Christa’s brother) and I saw him in Minneapolis last year at the State Theatre. This was our birthday present for Casey and all we got was musical swill and a swift exit. There’s a reason you’re last on my list, oh bratty one.

So that’s all for now for my musical utopia scenario thingy.

Next on the blog docket….more funky G.R.E. words, my favorite Bible character of the moment (it changes all the time), 2nd Timothy and the prison epistles, and anything else that strikes me as blog-worthy way up here in cold and snowy and always-wintery St. Paul.

Insights From the Land of G.R.E.

In my quest to knock the stuffing out of the G.R.E. (Gargantuan Rectal Exam) rather than the other way around, I’ve been studying lots of words—words, words and more words: dry root words in dead languages, sexy French words, barbaric German words, old English words that have moth balls all around them, Slavic words that make you want to toss back the vodka (fond memories from living in Russia) and fiesty Greek words that make you want to swim in the blue Aegean sea and then ride a sweaty donkey up a volcanic island in the sun and then shower with Irish soap.

All in all, I’ve had a blast studying all of these words.

I’ve found that some words are sexier than others. And some words sound flamboyant but in reality denote something boring. Take the word “jejune” for example. Sounds very Euro-chic, right? It sounds like this word should be dressed up in white go-go boots and a baby doll dress and smoking a cigarrette in some pulsating nightclub at 2:00 a.m., doesn’t it? Not so. Jejune means boring, blah, dull, vanilla, as in “My…these stale crackers are so jejune.” The sound of the word totally belies its literal meaning. It’s a syntactical tease, promising a brilliant star but delivering a drab pebble. I find this odd and it makes me angry.

Second, some words are good but you could get your arse kicked at a party if you use them. Or at least your friends probably wouldn’t want to be your friends any longer if you dropped an “appellation” instead of “name,” or a “salubrious” instead of a “healthy,” or if you casually mentioned that your jello is looking especially protean this evening (i.e. amorphous and wiggly); and this goes double if you’re experiencing a dash of dyspepsia from a deleterious substance in your lobster, or if your puerile cat has necromorphous tendencies, or if your nom de plum  for your smashing new novel is Sebastian Tiger.

(That’s actually not a bad pen name, Sebastian Tiger. Hmmmm. I've got dibs on it now.)

The flip side is true as well I suppose. If another person at a party or a gathering casually mentions that "the pith of Einstein's theory of relativity was obviously outside of Newton's bailiwick" (I've actually been at "parties" like these), or that their brand new spanking BMW outside is a donatia mortis causa, or that they once had an incandescent metanoia (i.e. spiritual conversion), or that they currently struggle with papaphobia or necromancy or necrophilia, or any of the necros for that matter, then it’s time to leave for several reasons that go beyond mere word choice. At best your party could potentially upshift to a massive ministry opportunity. At worst you should be prized from such a bedraggled and fustian scene.

Some words are sheer fun because they sound so graphic and edgy (i.e. titillate, asinine, pusillanimous) yet they’re so...um...in the dictionary. (I used to throw these in my theology papers just for fun). Other words seem clinical and harmless, but they’re pottymouth and supremely naughty (no examples here).

I was struck by how many words—an army, really—there are to denote trickery or missing the mark of truth: dissemble, dupe, blandish, inveigle, cozen, chicanery, legerdemain, bilk, canard, skullduggery (please nobody take that word…that’s my favorite new word), causuistry, specious, meretricious, verisimilitude and I’m sure there are many others but these are the ones I remember.    

I love the word splenetic and I don’t know why.

Some words are like clouds that float above you way up in the sky as they slowly move past wherever you are—amporphous blobs of syntax. You’re not sure what they mean because they’re always changing shape and people sometimes misuse them and then you wonder if they know they’re misusing them or perhaps they’re adding their own subtle twist to a secondary definition—or maybe you missed out on that memo that said “diaphanous” means glorious and vague instead of thin and flimsy...or maybe you should quit reading the New Yorker altogether. That magazine kind of sucks anyway.

I also love the words sodden and slugabed. Desuetude is currently in a state of desuetude, though, it has to go; it’s so jejune and all.

And don’t forget: You can be demotic without being demonic, you can be imperious without being impervious; heck, you can even be quixotic without being quotidian…but you cannot (and I can’t stress this enough) simultaneously have simian cheekbones and an aquiline nose and a bovine jaw. People need to get that into their human skulls. Maybe I’ll work that into my G.R.E. essay. 

What else? I’ve got to go to work at my non-sinecure position at a bank. So this is my penultimate sentence.

And this is my valedictory paragraph...so long.

Blessed are the Meddlers

Check out my baby's book, Blessed Are the Meddlers. It's a humdinger, and my standards are fairly high when it comes to novels.

She’s out west of the Mississippi and somewhere south of purgatory (i.e. Colorado Springs) promoting her phenomenal book, Blessed Are the Meddlers, to all who will come and listen.

Here’s a copy of the thing:

(An impish Wynona Rider lookalike—perfect for the slighty mischevious Sydney)

And since I wrote her official bio (yes, the one about the loquacious author who loves to talk talk talk but who is also literary enough to write write write—a rare combination in any solar system), it’s no secret that I’m a proud fan of her work. Her wholesome-yet- flirty heroine, Sydney, deserves to be on the silver screen in the following cities: L.A., Chicago, London, Moscow, Coca-Cola, Dallas, Bucksnort, Paris, Rekjavik, Seattle, Irkutsk, Abilene, St. Paul, Nashville, Glascow, Scranton and a whole host of other cities and towns that show sparkling and wholesome films.

Of course the rights need to be optioned first. In the meantime, buy this book for your daughter. Two for your cousins. Five for a rainy day. A baker’s dozen for all of your lovelorn, cynical friends who are sick and tired of dating Joe the Plumber (no offense, Joe, I think you’re way cool, but I’m a guy) again and again and again and again and again. 

(Blog intermission: Poor Joe, he’s being lionized and lampooned all over the country, and now I’m riding the plumber wave all the way to Amazon.com and back again on behalf of a worthy book, down the swirling vortex of an Ohio toilet and sideways through a pipe and up and into the belly of your local water cooler scuttlebutt, just in time for the weekend zeitgeist. I repent in dust and toiletries.)

I have no idea what any of that meant.

As I was saying, buy a whole bunch of books (i.e. Blessed Are the Meddlers books) for a whole bunch of people. You’ll find a good friend in Sydney and a unique literary voice in Christa.

And if you happen to be aimlessly wandering around south of purgatory, stop by your local Barnes & Nobles. It's Saturday (as in tomorrow, the 18th) @ Barnes & Noble (across from Citadel Mall) 2:00 pm in Colorado Springs and on Sunday 19th (as in day after tomorrow) @ Barnes & Noble 2:00 pm in Littleton, Colorado.

So get your weekend arse out there and say hello and buy a book or twenty-seven thousand.

* Postscript: It's been several days since I first published this blog, and I must say that I don't like the way Joe the Plumber has been pilloried by the press. For the record I think he's a stand up guy. I like him a lot. So, please forget the above implication that he's a lumbering Neanderthal. In other words, if you're a single gal, then please go getcha some of that. Make posthaste and date Joe the Plumber!!! You can thank me later.

 

Skullduggery and Stuff

So it’s been ages and ages since I’ve last blogged. I know: Sue me. And if you’re a Scientologist with a litigious trigger finger, please don’t take me literally.

Since I’ve last splashed around in the blogosphere, I’ve been consumed with work, G.R.E. prep, work, more work and re-runs of Felicity...pre-sophomore haircut:

Christa and I absolutely love this show. It’s a humdinger! I’m man enough to admit this. In any case, J.J. Abrams had to start somewhere before his hit Lost series, didn’t he? It’s not nearly as girly as Gilmore Girls, which I was also man enough to watch all seven seasons.

And hey!!!…before you write me off as some kind of a cultural lightweight, I also loved the bloody horsehead scene in the Godfather, as well as the dead-monkey vignette in Sunset Boulevard, which could very well be my favorite movie of all time, as well as basically anything with blood and a bang-up script. I hate Scorcese’s films, though. Way too long. But we’re wandering way off our designated topic for this fine evening: What can the Church learn from Scientology?

If this is your first visit to this blog, then I encourage you to go back and peruse some of my past blogs on my first-hand adventures with this skullduggery of a cult. These blogs may or may not freak you out. I hope they do, though, at least to the extent that you never visit their church. You’ll be glad you didn’t.

In any case, there’s everything in them from skyscrapers to pixie dust to a veritable cat-fight. I recently re-read these blogs and laughed out loud a few times (I love it when I crack myself up); yet shortly thereafter I had a horrifying thought that sent a horrid, Halloween chill up my spine: What if some innocent reader mistook my tone of levity for fun and games, and decided to visit a Scientology church just for a trick or a treat, or for a laugh, or a titillating story to tell for Hallow's Eve.

Please don’t. This is a serious cult. Again, the word skullduggery comes to mind. Suffice it to say, these people get inside your head. I failed to mention earlier that I had wacky dreams for at least a week after we visited this epicenter of madness. These dreams were more disturbing and bizarre than a Yoko Ono art exhibit during her psychotropic years.

And this leads me to my chief thesis in my final analysis of this cult: Scientology wields power in proportion to how broken a person is. Let me repeat this assertion of mine. Scientology wields power in proportion to how broken you are. And by that I mean this: If a person is self-sufficient and autonomous, then L. Ron Hubbard’s zany cosmology and fey explications of human existence have little effect. This is why the Scientology-sponsored film Battlefield Earth starring John Travolta sold approximately seventeen tickets. It was nonsensical and most people knew it. Yet this is also why Lucy (she's the motherly tour guide who showed Christa and I around the Minneapolis church) did not sit us down and give us popcorn and show us Battlefield Earth. She simply steered every portion of our conversation back to Dianetics—Hubbard’s popular book that has sold a gazillion copies.

She knew what she was doing. What is the origin of evil? Read Dianetics. Where does mankind come from? Read Dianetics. What did Hubbard think about Jesus or the God hypothesis? Oh, read Dianetics. It’s all in Dianetics.

So, back to my thesis, my broken thesis.

Scientology preys on broken people. Many of them creative types. This is what their notorious e-meter is all about. Hook them up and get them talking about their deepest fears and wounds. Use these fears and wounds to sell them “auditing” sessions. And then further use these fears and wounds as formidable weapons in case these broken people decide to leave, wallets in tow. 

That’s what Scientology is ultimately about. It’s about lucre, plain and simple.

As far as the broken aspect is concerned, thankfully, God broke me a long time ago. He really broke me and then He really filled me up with Himself. God absolutely broke me and He absolutely filled me up with Jesus. This is me being neither proud nor humble—it’s the truth. The process was painful but the result was nothing less than salvation in every sense of the word. 

My only point is this: Had Lucy or Lady Clarity gotten to me before Jesus did, then I might be slavishly following the wild imagination of a sci-fi writer whose bronze bust looks like a dead fish.

Thankfully I’m not.

As far as what the Church can learn from Scientology, I had this rather sanctimonious essay in mind about the Church paying more attention to broken people—i.e., the outcast, the disenfranchised, etc. And while of course I believe that, I’ve suddenly turned sour to the idea of holding up Scientology as a paragon of virtue (albeit analogically), or in anything more than an opaque light.

Amen. No more blogs on Scientology. I’m through with this skullduggery (in case you haven't figured it out, I love this word...so apropos). I’m now eager to blog about topics that are less greasy and way more noble, like the monstrous genius of Felicity...pre sophomore haircut of course.

Thanks for reading. Till Iggy pops....

A Chat With L. Ron Hubbard

So it was time to make like Tom and cruise.

We’d had enough of being zapped with electricity, interminable videos, pristine teeth, mythological pixies and vanishing tour guides.

Add to that one unforgettable conversational ice-breaker (i.e. “I’m clear!!!”) and the writing was clearly on the wall.

And the writing read something like this:

MAKE LIKE TOM AND CRUISE!!!

NOW!

So we did. Yet not before I sauntered over to the bust of L. Ron Hubbard to take another look. It intrigued me to no end. Here was this metallic bust of the founder of Scientology; even though it was eye-level, it seemed to loom over the entire center like a cheap golden calf, only it was bronze. And instead of a calf there was this odd cranium of a man looking quite befuddled and serious.  His lips were stuck out and it looked like he was in deep thought, or worse…a cadaver working up the courage to lean in for a frozen kiss.

I took a step back in case this was for real.

How diminutive! How bronze! How odd! I was struck by how cheap-looking the entire statue was. I knocked on Hubbard’s skull: Clunk, clunk, clunk. It was hollow inside. This looked like something that could be on sale at the Dollar Store.

I contemplated the contemplative guru. I desperately wanted to ask him some questions, such as: Did you really believe all of the sci-fi stuff that you wrote about? Did you really believe that Jesus was a false dream implanted in our minds by an evil galactic warlord named Xenu? Billions of years ago? Did you really espouse a philosophy of love and “fair game” (i.e. a vindictive call for violence to all enemies of Scientology—especially non-sympathetic journalists…bloggers?) in the same breath? Did you really plan to court Hollywood for their money in exchange for stroking their egos by calling them (i.e. OT level 5) “a cut above man”?

I wanted to whisper in his ear: You hoodwinked all of these good people. You bilked millions of people out of their savings. You suckered poor Lucy—sweet Lucy—into devoting her life to your cause. Your cocksure prose penetrated deep into the psyche of Lady Clarity, seducing her with your zany cosmology and grandiloquent style, which groomed her overweening pride and deluded her into thinking that she was some earth goddess who could float in and out of other people’s conversations. You kickstarted a cult that has crawled all over the planet, raised all sorts of hell and mayhem, and all you got was this lousy bronze bust. I’m not sure exactly where you are, but wherever you are I’m sure it’s exactly where you need to be. Tell Joseph Smith I said “hello.”

So I was through hypothetically tough-talking a dead bust.

Now it was indeed time to cruise. So we did. We said goodby to Lady Clarity and Lucy (we found her hiding in a cubicle) and the nice receptionist. As we walked toward the door I waved goodbye to Lady Clarity.

She waved back to me with the curious expression of a loving mother and a jealous, neurotic ex-girlfriend.

(for the record, this is not Lady Clarity. Only my interpretation of her farewell wave, which left an indelible impression on my soul)

As we opened the jingly door to leave, we heard a soft and soothing “Au Revoir” waft into our eardrums.

Did someone just say goodbye to us in French, or was that just our imagination???

In any case, we walked outside into the night sky. Gone was the apocalyptic, Bloody Mary sunset. The stars were out in full force, and the moon looked like a sliver of a hangnail over a Minneapolis skyscraper. And even though it was now dark, we experienced the strange phenomenon of blinking wildly, as if we’d just walked out of a dark movie theatre into the blinding sunlight.

Our conversation as we walked on the sidewalk went something like this:

“Wow!”
“Wow!
“That was…”
“Wow!”
“Totally!”
“That was…"
"Wow!"
“Did you see how…”
“Totally!”
“And then she…”
“Totally!”
“And then..”
“Wow!”
“Wow!”
“That was…”
“Wow!”
"Wow!"
"I should blog about that..."

"Totally."

THE END

Stay tuned for the final installment on this whatever-you-call-it series: “What Can the Church Learn from Scientology?”