Can Christians Say "Fuck You"?

Can Christians say "Fuck you?"

Serious question.

Sometimes people say things and the most appropriate response is, "I reject every morsel of everything you have just stated on every level, spiritual, grammatical, biological, political, logical, fantastical, present, past and future, sexual, platonic, in black and white and in color, reincarnated and quantum. I reject the polite version and the prison slang version. I reject the nuance, the interpretation, the meaty substance and the shadow of what you have just said. I reject the diet version and the full-fat version, the WASP and the multiculti versions. If you are even thinking about attempting to argue with me, stop, because I will flatten you."

And the short version of that is, "Fuck you."

Can Christians say "Fuck you," and if we can't, what ought we say? 

Confession: I do say "Fuck you."

Another confession: I struggle not to, and most times I win. And I struggle because I'm a Christian and I don't feel I should say it. 

Your thoughts? 

"In the Land of Blue Burqas" by Kate McCord Book Review

In "Land of the Blue Burqas" American aid worker Kate McCord (a protective pseudonym) describes Afghanistan as a country built around hating and destroying female human life, a society not very loving of male humans, either. McCord was in Afghanistan to provide Afghans with necessary skills they lack: literacy, business acumen and health services (86). She lived in Afghanistan for five years, speaking Dari, a local language, and wearing Afghan clothes. Her insights are penetrating, valuable, and politically incorrect.

Afghans are not allowed to know the truth of either Judaism or Christianity. Possession of a bible can get them killed. Afghans, like other Muslims, say they believe in Jesus, but they reject the Jesus of the New Testament and believe in an invented Jesus who never died on a cross, will return with a sword and decapitate Christians (66).

McCord introduces her Afghan interlocutors to the historical Jesus of the New Testament. Jesus astounds Afghans. They are totally unused to wisdom, compassion, and love as attributes of God. When McCord manages to explain Jesus to a group of Afghans, one states, "You have a beautiful God" (118). Two Afghan women, following Christian teaching, pray to forgive men who had violated them (137, 143). One Afghan woman's entire life improves when, with Christian teaching, she learns to be grateful (255). These are the most moving passages in the book.

An Afghan woman must end her friendship with McCord because no good Muslim would marry her four daughters if their mother befriended a Christian (168). Even when, at her own expense, McCord attempts to rescue an unwanted female child from parents who are quite consciously starving their own daughter to death, the parents will not allow McCord to rescue their daughter (281).

After years of her selfless development work in Afghanistan, Afghans still wanted to murder McCord. "We are not Muslims if we allow you to live here." If McCord's Christian example caused Muslims to reject Islam, "we must kill you" (196-7). After five years of work, feeding widows and orphans (290), McCord was forced to leave Afghanistan.

McCord outlines with crystalline clarity why Afghanistan is such a destructive place for women and girls, but for men and boys, too. Afghans have built a spiritual and mental prison camp around rigid worship of an unloving and irrational God. The religious worldview of Afghans creates a tense, grim reality.

Afghans do not say, nor do they believe, that God loves them, or that God is love (105 - 6). In contrast to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Allah is not the "father" of children he loves (242-3). To Afghans, the idea of God as a father is blasphemy.

Afghans pray a prepared script in Arabic – a foreign language they do not understand – five times a day. Prayer as Christians understand it is strange to them. Going to God in one's own language, in one's own spontaneous words, is unacceptable. God does not care about the details of human lives and doesn't want to hear about them in prayer (251- 2). Afghans understand their faith as ordering them to be unrelentingly violent: "In Islam, if anyone insults or hurts you, you must respond with ten times the force" (157).

Reading the Koran in Arabic, which Afghans do not speak or understand, is a magical process. Muslims gain "sawah" heavenly credit deposits – from reading words they don't understand (228). An Afghan who translated the Koran into Dari, the local language, was jailed. Only mullahs or otherwise authorized personnel may write out verses from the Koran (232).

Muslims gain sawah from fasting during Ramadan. If a woman is menstruating, she is unclean; Allah will not accept her prayers or her fast. She must wait till menstruation is done and fast. Older women fast many days to compensate for lost sawah. Otherwise, they may not be able to enter heaven.

Muslims will kill all Jews. Rocks and trees will warn Muslims that Jews are hiding behind them because "even the natural world is against the Jews." Jews are "beyond redemption…even if they convert to Islam, still they cannot be saved…God has ordered the nation of Islam to annihilate the Jews" (66-7). Jews changed the Torah; nothing in it is true (69). During Friday prayer, Muslims pray to convert or kill non-Muslims (75). Afghans describe Americans as "black hearted, evil, and cruel" (13).

Gender apartheid is absolute in Afghanistan. Women don't go to mosques. McCord knew hundreds of women; none had set foot in a mosque in their adult lives. Women are virtual prisoners in their homes. Afghan men know exactly what heaven will be like. Men will be issued seventy virgins who regain their virginity even after penetration. There will be delicious food (23). Afghan women receive no such promises of heaven (24). Women use no names; only title as "mother of" or "wife of" this or that male, who does have a name.

When asked, "What was the happiest day of your life?" Afghan men often answer with the day they acquired their first wife. When asked "What is the saddest day of your life?" Afghan women often answer, "The day I married my husband" (37). Afghan women say of one man taking many wives, "We hate it" (48).

Following the example of Mohammed, who married his favorite wife, Aisha, when he was over fifty and Aisha was six, men often marry children. Afghan girls are often married off between 11 and 13. Sex is required even of pre-pubescent wives. A mother calls her own twenty-year-old daughter "old and ugly." This twenty-year-old had already been pregnant four times. "A girl is most beautiful at 13 and should be married then" (51).

Any woman who travels anywhere beyond her gate on her own, without a male chaperone, is "unclean" because "the nature of woman is crooked always" (176- 7). If a woman's voice is heard by a man to whom she is not related, he will have to rape her, and it will be her fault. She must be punished (182).

Muslims who do study Western ways in order to advance their own nations must not internalize any Western values, which are all evil. All Christians are evil (189). One student reports, "I will learn English and I will teach infidels to be Muslims" (194).

Again, the insights this book offers are brave and clear. For all that, I cannot recommend this book. It desperately needed editing. It is thuddingly repetitious. Too, McCord's commitment to a bogus anonymity – she provides enough detail to identify herself to anyone who knew her – dulls her accounts.

I Would Prefer a Dignified Death to a Life As a Hostage in Silence: Afghan Woman Poet

In Afghanistan, many consider poetry a sin. And yet Afghan women are writing poetry, in secret. 

From the BBC:

"When we recite our poems, we remove our pain," says Seeta Habibi, Country Director for the Afghan Women's Writing Project, a group established with the help of writers living in the United States.

"We talk to the paper with our pen and we fight for our rights on paper," she explains. "Someday we hope we will win."

Threats from the Taliban in the west of Afghanistan forced Ms Habibi, the only female journalist in her province, to leave her home.

Karima Shabrang faced a similar fate in her village in the remote northern province of Badakhshan. Local elders condemned her as a bad moral influence for her romantic laments of love and loss.

"They said I should be got rid of. They meant I should be killed," she recalls in the simple mud brick home in the poor suburbs of Kabul where she now lives with two brothers who came to her rescue.

Full story here.

"The Fifth Estate" Intriguing, Fun, Shallow

Everyone seems to be mad at this movie because everyone who talks about it comes to it with a strong opinion about Julian Assange, and they wanted the film to depict him as a savior or a monster. I didn't have those preconceptions and I enjoyed the film from the opening title sequence. That sequence depicts hands carving hieroglyphics in Ancient Egypt, illuminated manuscripts, the first printing press, newspapers, computers – the myriad ways humans communicate. It's a title sequence Frank Capra would love.

I found "The Fifth Estate" intriguing, fun, and moving. Benedict Cumberbatch is very good as Assange. The movie wants you to be impressed by him at first, but slowly to see his feet of clay, and Cumberbatch does that job. Daniel Bruhl plays Daniel Domscheit Berg, Assange's partner. Bruhl expresses disappointed hero worship very well. Assange is invited to Berg's home for dinner, and he disrespects Berg's polite parents. That intimate, believable scene makes you hate Assange in a way that his secret-releasing shenanigans might not.

"The Fifth Estate" struggles, as all computer-related films do, to depict life on a computer. It creates a fake office with the sky as ceiling where Assange's "volunteers" work. Assange describes his submission process at Wikileaks and pages appear onscreen. These visual flourishes are fun.

The movie is interesting and fast-moving but not very deep. There are very big questions at play here and "The Fifth Estate" does not engage them deeply. Laura Linney plays Sarah, an American agent whose contact, Tarek, is endangered by Assange's revelations. There is some tension as Tarek flees Libya. Will he get out before Assange outs him, or will he and his family be captured and perhaps tortured by their oppressive government?

Perhaps if "The Fifth Estate" had been more art than docudrama it could have gone deeper. Imagine a conversation between Sarah and Assange. One could argue for the importance, both strategic and humanitarian, of state secrets, and the other could argue against. Other questions – aren't secrets inevitable? Accept it: there is stuff you are simply never going to know.

And, in the end, what difference did Assange make? The US is still in Afghanistan. Guantanamo still operates. People will pay more attention to Miley Cyrus twerking than to documents about torture in a Third World nation. Someone said once of the Cambodian genocide that no one will ever read all the documents the Khmer Rouge amassed. No one cares enough to do so.

Laura Linney is every bit the actor that Benedict Cumberbatch is. I'd love to have heard these two characters have this conversation.

The White Iris Story

Photo by poet Charles Fishman 

My Facebook friend, the poet Charles Fishman, has posted several photographs of white irises on Facebook this fall.

Every time he posts one, I think of the white iris story.

It happened in 1995, a bit less than a year after my father died.

My father and I were not close.

I was an abused kid, and I was not wanted.

***

I had gotten accepted to graduate school at UC Berkeley. After a lifetime of feeling the worthless outsider, I felt I had finally found my niche. I took the GREs – the graduate record examination – and scored in the 97^thpercentile. Before that I had really thought I was mentally retarded. I'm not; I'm dyslexic. But when you are an abused kid and everyone around you tells you how stupid you are because you are slow to learn to read and write, and reading and writing remain hard for you, you believe "you're stupid / slow / special / different / worthless."

My sister threw a party for my mother's birthday and invited everyone in our family. I was told to come on a given day. I didn't own a car. I arranged a ride. I got all dressed up. I was feeling a bit awkward, as I always do when I am attempting to wear fancy clothes. I was excited to see cousins and relatives I hadn't seen in years. I was honored finally to be invited to my sister's house. I got out of my friend's car and began to walk up her driveway. Her husband stepped out of his front door, walked toward me and said, "Ha, ha, ha. The party was yesterday."

My friend drove me to my mother's house. She was still partying with her sister, who was still in town. I walked into the house, looked at my mother and screamed, "How could you do that to me?"

I saw my father in his favorite, comfortable chair. He was reading the newspaper. There was no way he would have been in on the trick. He didn't have that kind of malice. Had he known, though, I'm not at all sure he would have stopped it.

That's the last time I saw him alive.

***

Just telling that part of the story, the part I just told, above, cost me more emotional pain than I want to feel in a single day.

To continue.

***

I went off to grad school. Got my MA at UC Berkeley. Moved on to IU Bloomington, Indiana, to get my PhD.

My sister phoned my first semester there. She told me that my father was dying, but that I should not return, because no one wanted me around.

The professor I was working for also did not want me to leave. She said that she was about to host an academic conference. She said she needed me to type up the program. She said if I left she'd make me regret it.

I did leave. My father died just as my train was pulling into Penn Station. No one did want me around. My aunt encouraged my mother to beat me at the funeral. I stayed to watch my father interned in the same plot as my brother Phil. Then I left.

My boss did harass me upon my return to Indiana University. Deans on campus asked me to testify against my boss. They labeled my boss "a sociopath" and felt that I would be the best person to put up against her.

In the middle of my testimony against the miscreant professor, my ear began making odd noises, and I began vomiting uncontrollably. I didn't realize it at the time, but my inner ear had burst, perhaps from the stress.

I would spend the next six years chronically ill, lose my life savings, and go deaf in one ear. I have since been operated on in a pro bono surgery by Dr. Richard T Miyamoto, thanks to the intervention of State Senator Vi Simpson's legislative aid, Rick Gudal. At the time, though, all I knew was that I could not stop vomiting, and I was having trouble staying upright

***

I was renting a room in a house. My landlady's stuff was in most of the house; my stuff was in my room. We shared common areas: living room, kitchen, and a landline phone.

One day I felt the vertigo coming on, and I lay down on a couch.
Suddenly I saw complete and total blackness. It wasn't the normal thing one sees when one closes one's eyes: streaks of grey and black, blobs and floaters. It was complete blackness.

From this blackness, my father approached me. I could see his entire form walking toward me.

I saw my arm reaching forward into the blackness, toward my father.

I was about to hand him something. I could see it vividly. It appeared in my vision without anything else: a translucent, ghostly white iris on a completely black background. This image was so stark and powerful it shook me. I handed my father the iris, he disappeared, the waking "dream" ended.

I was very confused. I'm more of a wildflower person, than an aficionado of garden flowers. I associated no garden flowers with my father. I could associate no significant mythology with irises. There were no personal stories attached; no memories; nothing. Yet the image itself was so powerful -- the white of the iris so striking, and the background so relentlessly featureless and black, I couldn't release it.

I called my friend and rabbi, Laurence Skopitz in Rochester, NY. (I'm Catholic, but my Rabbi was a Jew). I asked him: "Do you know of any mythology connected with white irises?"

"No," he said.

Okay, I thought, I'll just forget it.

Then, a couple of weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, Rabbi Skopitz called me. I picked up the phone, said "Hi," and walked into the living room to sit down. My landlady had left a book on the coffee table.

My Rabbi asked, "Have you figured out what that dream meant?"

At that very moment, I opened up the picture book my landlady had left on the coffee table. I opened to a page that was identical to the vision: a translucent, ghostly white iris on a totally black background. The caption said, "The name of this flower is 'immortality.'"

I gasped.

My Rabbi said, "What? What?"

***

Now, I know what you're thinking -- I had seen this photo, this book, before, and just forgotten it. Sorry -- I'm a PhD and published scholar – I obsessively remember where I see things, pages, books, authors, publishers, so I can exploit them later in my research and writing.

This story is beyond an explanation, for me.
I told this story online back in 1998. One online reader immediately posted, "You're not done yet. Research the folk meaning of the iris."

I went to the Monroe County Public Library and I found a couple of books about flowers and folklore.

One book said, "The iris was the messenger between the living and the dead, especially in those situations where the love was difficult to communicate."

Imagine a Society Where Judy Garland Is Seen As an Evil Whore Who Deserves to be Raped

Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow 

Aretha Franklin 

Maria Callas

Ella Fitzgerald

Edith Piaf

Janka Guzova 

Imagine a society where Judy Garland would be assessed as an evil whore who deserved to be raped. Or Edith Piaf or Maria Callas or Ella Fitzgerald.

Imagine Afghanistan:

"If a woman sings and a man hears her, he will think her voice is beautiful and will lust after her. Maybe he will be on the street separated by the wall or in a neighbor's walled courtyard. Maybe he will never see the woman who sings, but he hears her voice. If that happens, he will want her. It's her fault. She has sinned. She made him want her. The sin is hers. She will be punished. That's why a woman should never sing, even in her own walled courtyard."

The above quote was spoken by a Muslim Afghan woman. She is quoted in "In the Land of the Blue Burqas" by Kate McCord.

From a Muslim website: "It is gravely sinful for women to go out with bare head, hair, arms, and legs, to let their voice be heard by men."

According to this website, every time a woman allows a man to whom she is not related to hear her voice, she sins.

Interrogating Jesus about Baby Hope, Facebook, and Suffering

Watchers in the Night Thomas Blackshear 

NY Daily News front page from 1991, when Baby Hope was first found. 

In 1991, construction workers found the body of a child in an ice chest by the side of New York's Henry Hudson Parkway. She was four years old. She was malnourished. She had been raped before her death. Her body was badly decomposed.

I was abused as a kid. The stories of child abuse that hit the news rivet me. I note and remember children's names and what was done to them. I remember where they were.

I do this because I pray for them. I want to be with them, as it were, as they suffer, even though I will never meet them, even if they are passed away. I say their names as I pray. As I pray, I imagine myself standing next to them as they suffer. I do this because I don't want them to suffer alone.

When I prayed for Baby Hope, I imagined myself inside the ice chest with her. It was horrible.

Police today announced that they have found her killer, and for the first time, they have a name for her. She was Angelica Castillo. Her cousin, Conrado Juarez, thirty years old at the time, held a pillow over her head while he was raping and suffocating her.

From CNN:

"When the girl went motionless … he summoned his sister from another room. It was the sister who told Juarez to get rid of the body and who provided the cooler. He then 'folded the girl in half,' tied her, placed her in a garbage bag inside the cooler and placed soda cans on top of her body … Juarez and his sister hailed a cab to Manhattan, dropped the cooler off in a wooded area near the parkway, and then went their separate ways." Source

Angelica's parents never reported her as missing. The police had no idea who she was.

Again, from CNN:

"Detectives, each year, on the anniversary of the discovery of her body, would canvass nearby neighborhoods, handing out fliers and asking people for information. Who was the girl? Who was her family? Who killed her?"

Apparently this year's manhunt turned up the tip that brought Conrado Juarez to justice.

"The girl was laid to rest in a donated plot, buried in a white dress bought by a detective's wife, with a tombstone paid for by detectives. 'Because we care' is the inscription at the bottom of the tombstone." - CNN

***

Baby Hope's entire life sounds like a slice of hell. Malnourished. Parents who cared so little for her they never reported her missing; they did nothing to protect her from the evil relatives with whom she lived.

Why did Baby Hope have to live a life of nothing but suffering?

Free will. That's one answer to the question of suffering. God allows us free will.

My New Age friends say that Baby Hope chose this life. She learned something, and she taught something, by her suffering and death.

Hinduism says that Baby Hope was atoning for bad deeds in a past life. Reincarnation will provide her with a happier life next time.

I am a Christian, and so I ask Jesus. Why did Baby Hope have to live a life of nothing but suffering?

Mia Farrow said something once about having had polio as a child. She said that she suffered a lot, and that that suffering taught her. She said that though her later life was happy and lucky, she was always aware that someone, somewhere was suffering. That awareness is what drew her to humanitarian work.

Facebook is a slideshow of people's lives. Some people are so lucky, so blessed. In their lives, they experience joy, satisfaction, pleasure. Baby Hope experienced rejection, chaos, abuse and terror, and then she died.

Why, Jesus?

I don't know.

My Catholic friends would say that my looking for an answer I can't find is the "dark night of the soul." Maybe so.

But this next fact is as amazing to me as Baby Hope's biography is bleak: total strangers cared.

Total strangers devoted twenty-two years to searching for Baby Hope's killer.

Total strangers donated a dress to Baby Hope for her internment. Donated a plot and a tombstone. Engraved the words: "Because we care."

More often than not, dead baby girls mean nothing outside of the Judeo-Christian world. In some times and places, not only could you kill your daughter, you were required to. Read the very excellent book "Bare Branches" about female infanticide.

I believe that total strangers cared about a girl they never met because their lives were touched by the teachings of Jesus Christ, in whom there is no male and no female; touched by the heritage of Jewish tradition. In Talmudic commentary on God's creation of Adam, the rabbis say that to save one life is to save the entire world. Historian Rodney Stark attributes the rise of Early Christianity to Christianity's refusal to accept the Pagan world's comfort with female infanticide and a denigration of women that cut women's lives short.

***

So, yesterday was my birthday.

Some dumb part of me always hopes, every year, that someone will notice that it is my birthday, and … do some birthday thing. A present. A cake. A candle.

I spent yesterday as I spend every day, looking for jobs I'll never get, and trying to publish writing that no one will ever read.

I'm going to do a blog post someday on aloneness. It's a big side effect of poverty. When I wasn't so poor, I did have friends.

So around midday I just couldn't hold back the tears any more. I was so wishing someone would notice it was my birthday. I was having a shouting match with God inside my head.

In the middle of that shouting match, I ran down to get the mail, and found a card, and a present, from a man I've known for – what – thirty years. Who, I think, has never remembered my birthday.

Totally unexpected.

It's those moments. Those moments when the very thing you think is impossible – that someone might care that it was my birthday – peaks at you. That keep you believing.

I should add that my friend who remembered my birthday is an atheist. God bless him.

It's not the misery of this world that amazes me the most. It's those moments of light.