Category: Life

“Let me be clear, I am Muslim not because I think Islam is ‘truer’ than other religions (it isn’t), but because Islam provides me with the ‘language’ I feel most comfortable with in expressing my faith. It provides me with certain symbols and metaphors for thinking about God that I find useful in making sense of the universe and my place in it.”

Reza Aslan

This quote encapsulates some of what I’ve been thinking about lately. I no longer identify as Christian but I’m not anti-religious either. I don’t practice the religion but I see enough good people practicing it in its multiplicity of forms to respect that it does good in this world.

In this middle state I’m realizing that my years in church as a youth is baked into my mental DNA. One good thing about growing up a hardcore fundamentalist is that it’s almost impossible to slip a biblical reference past me that I wouldn’t catch.

However, I’m coming to a nascent theory that every religion has two “books”, the texts that are held up as sacred and the interpretive lens that is used to read these sacred texts. I’ve shed the Calvinist Reformed Baptist lens years ago, even though I’m still deconstructing some lingering subconscious moods and stereotypes.

But I’m also starting to realize coming that I most likely won’t ever be not-Christian. It’s not that I intend to return to church or participate in its rituals, and I’ve definitely shed the interpretive lens of one radical sect within the religion, but this constant reading of the Bible for my first twenty years means that this book is still a major part of how I see the world. A few months ago I read the Daodejing and Zhuangzi but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was still approaching it from a Christian perspective.

I’ve heard there is a Jesuit saying “give me a child till he is seven and we’ll have him for life.” Maybe that makes me one of those despised “nominal Christians” from the pulpits of my youth, but here I am.

Summer does not feel like the right time to shop for Christmas, but August is only a few months away from the holidays.

Aside from picking stuff up from sales, my main christmas presents are boardgames and books.

Books are a dime a dozen (actually 50 cents a pop at the local library) so I got plenty of those ready for the holidays, but we do have limited shelf space so I need to be careful with my game purchases.

It seems that I need to do a purge of my wishlist on boardgamegeek, but more importantly, I need to rank my games by age, so I can buy the appropriate games at the right time.

That is still easy while the kids are young, but once they hit the 10+ range, the whole world of gaming opens up to them. At that time, I just need to be judicious.

Not an easy thing in this hobby.

Or maybe it will be easier because honestly, my whole collection is geared to big kids, so I really don’t have to buy anything at that point.

Then again, I don’t “have to” anything at this point either.

The other day, a friend posted a link to an interesting article about privilege, or more correctly a chronological list of the racial crud that this author has dealt with over the years. In the ensuing conversation, one person pushed back hard against the concept of “privilege” and this was my response.

Privilege is an odd concept because everyone has certain advantages and disadvantages in life due to family circumstances, luck, health, etc. Further confounding the discussion, people who talk about privilege often focus on their single variable and don’t acknowledge the holistic circumstance that surrounds each individual’s upbringing. 

However, it is still true that being white affords someone more advantages than disadvantages. A single racial advantage will not counterbalance all the other disadvantages one race is granted at birth or the winds of fate, but to say that race is not a factor in society is being willfully blind.

Even apart from outright racial discrimination, there is a lot of mental drag that one deals solely because that person is a minority. I’m not saying some other white guy’s life was automatically easier, but on this particular issue they didn’t have to deal with the constant feeling of “otherness” and “not belonging” solely because of their skin color. This is white privilege.

To be clear, I think we call it “white” privilege because people of European descent are the dominant race in our country. I suspect other nations of have similar dynamics with different skin colors or using other criteria altogether. This is a societal issue, and each of us needs to do our part as individual actors to push this society forward, and acknowledging the problem is the first step.

I went into the weekend with moderate plans. Tidy up the bedrooms, the kids’ play area, and my own desk.

For once I made it.

There was plenty more to be done, but I did play a lot with the kids.

Once in a while, I will guess “enough” correctly.