So, if you know me you know I’m an avid follower of all things Tim Tebow. My family are die-hard Gator fans and I’m always interested in keeping tabs on who both the self-proclaimed and unintentional “faces” of the Western church are from year to year. I think Tebow falls under the latter moniker of accidental spokesman, but I certainly think he’s a better media focal point for Christendom then, say, Pat Robertson or Westboro Baptist. However, the meat of his attention isn’t his alleged virginity or his family’s mission work. For better or worse, Tebow would still be anonymous if he wasn’t a damn good football player with a style all his own.

So, with all his talent and the public nature of his faith, we’ve seen a perfect storm of praises and jabs aimed not at his skill but at the idea of his Christianity. When he does well, evangelicals praise G-d and atheists commend his athleticism. When he does poorly, evangelicals remain silent and atheists tease about how Jesus must have let him down.

I guess the reason I’m bringing it up at all is that I feel SO sorry for the dude. I think it sucks that people on both sides of the theological table have projected the belief that “G-d wins football games” onto him. As if the kid sits in his room at night and prays for a “W” until he sweats blood.

I’ve got news for you all and I bet Tebow would agree:
JESUS DOESN’T WIN GAMES FOR PEOPLE

If you believe (or if you believe that I believe) that G-d mystically and miraculously orchestrates the outcome of some fucking game, you must be out of your right mind! If the LORD G-D was in the habit of usurping human decision and error by miraculously determining the outcome of things, I think the situation in Uganda would be a little less bleak, don’t you? Do people really think that G-d grants them a win on game day or pulls that SUV up to their drive way?

Successful athletes draw from a well of confidence and courage to get themselves up off the couch everyday and go after what they want in life. Some players draw on their belief in Allah, some draw on their belief in themselves, and Tebow draws on his belief in Jesus. It doesn’t mean that Jesus has anything to do with the outcome of the game or that the validity of the Hebrew G-D is determined by the success of those who pray to Him. It just means that when Tim Tebow feels like he can’t go out on that field, he prays for strength to do the thing that he’s suited to do. I don’t sit around and pray that Jesus will make me a successful comic book writer, I pray that I can have the strength and confidence to start putting words on the page because I feel like it’s what I’m meant to do. I may fail, but that has no reflection on the fact that my faith gave me the strength to try.

Just like it’s barbaric to think “Oh, Brady, you lost that game so you’re not a man” or “Matt, you’re sales are down, you’re not a person” it’s also ridiculous to assume that just because the Broncos lose and their QB draws from his faith that “oh, Broncos lose, Jesus sucks”.

Below is a re-post from the guitarist of one of my favorite hardcore bands, 108.
Vic is a musician and devotee of KRSNA (Krishna).
This faith continues to intrigue me because I see SO many paralells between the way that Vic talks about his understanding of KRSNA and the Vedas and the way I understand Christ and the Gospel. The two aren’t totally congruent, but I still feel really enriched by reading about Dicara’s faith.

Visit his blog at http://vicd108.wordpress.com

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How do you explain Krsna Consciousness to people with no idea what it is?

About 15 minutes ago a respectable friend of mine told me that he is going to a university to explain Krsna-Consciousness to a group of students with little to no prior exposure to it or even to global religions. He asked for my suggestion on a class outline. Here is what I came up with.

1) What is the meaning of life?

Let them offer suggestions.

Then say “Raso Vai Sah” and “Ananda Moya Abhyasat” and explain that Vedic wisdom says that the meaning of life is to relish joy and bliss – to be happy.

Suggest that the validity of this answer is self-evident.

2) Explain the 4 goals of life, as different milestones or facets of understanding how to attain that goal.

Kama – happiness through sensations, Artha – happiness through security (to stabilize our ability to enjoy quality sensations), Dharma – happiness through morality (to cooperate with one another so that no one wants, and thus no one steals our enjoyable sensations), and Moksha – happiness through enlightenment (to attain an enjoyable sensation beyond the confinement of this world, i.e. time).

3) Explain the 5th goals of life, Prema.

After exploring all 4 goals we evolve to understand that joy does not come by having enjoyment, rather it comes by giving enjoyment. Prema means, love, and love is the desire to give enjoyment to the beloved.

4) Explain the proper vishaya for prema.

Once we understand love it also has to evolve to find the most joyous and blissful person to love (“Vishaya”). First we will love a limited person, but (a) that excludes other persons, and (b) that person is temporary and (c) that person has faults. Eventually to fully realize the meaning of life we seek love of God.

5) Explain the 5 stages of love of God.

At first love of god is merely an awestruck wonder at God’s position – shanta rasa. Then it can evolve to actually interacting with that awe-inspiring and worshipable being – dasya rasa.

These are the common conceptions of God, but beyond that are secret conceptions that are rare. The 3rd stage is where love of Godhead evolves so that we interact with Godhead without the limitations imposed on the relationship as a result of God beings so, “God-like” and imposing. This is Sakhya Rasa.

It can evolve beyond that so that the love intensifies so much that one expresses superiority to the beloved and takes care of him like a parent takes care of a child. This is Vatsalya Rasa.

It can finally evolve to the most intimate state, in which there are no limitations whatsoever on the intimacy of one’s joyous blissful loving relationship with God. This is romantic divine love – the sweetest bliss – therefore called Madhurya Rasa.

Mention that there are further evolutions within that category beyond the scope of current discussion.

6) Name the Vishaya.

There are various forms of Godhead to reciprocate with various people in various relationships. But the higher three relationships become more exclusively focused on the original, intimate form of Godhead known as Krsna, the “all attractive.” Krsna is Godhead at his most open and intimate.

7) Now the sadhya (goal) as been explained, so next explain the sadhana (means to achieve it): Nothing but love creates love. Therefore to attain divine love one needs only to practice it. (sadhana-bhakti-yoga).

The practice mainly centers on Sravana-Kirtana-Smarana: hearing about the beloved, and speaking about the beloved – with the effect of remembering the beloved.

There are many ways of doing this, but extra emphasis is given on the most effective way: nama-sankirtana – coming together with others who desire to love Krsna and together singing and listening to songs about Krsna, especially about his sweet name.

There is one particular Mantra, the “maha-mantra” especially suited and empowered for this practice:

Hare Krsna, Hare Krsna
Krsna Krsna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Rama Rama, Hare Hare

I scribbled this out during church one day:

One day you will come to a crossroads. At this point you will find a shocking disparity between what you’ve learned with your mind and what you know with your heart. This disparity exists for all of us but is easily subverted. At some point, this disparity becomes impossible for us to ignore. When you come to that convergence, the questions that theology and faith pose will become suddenly very important. The reason I participate actively in my faith now is so that when I come to that crossroads I’ll be prepared to travel it with both an educated mind as well as an informed heart.

This does not mean that faith of any kind is easy, just as a college course that’s worth taking is not easy. It also does not mean that one morning you decide what direction you’ll take on that crossroads and hold to it the rest of your time on earth. Faith is ever changing, ever difficult. It is a turbulent relationship with a Lover who knows you fully but whom you can never fully figure out. It’s the kind of relationship full of good days and bad days and fights and make-ups that is, in the end, the only kind of relationship worth having.

Here was my response:

I will be so bold as to assert that I can sum up World Religions in a single sentence: World Religion is the attempt to reconcile “truth” with “Truth”.

            Every religion we’ve study seems to be on a search to take what they feel is right or good, and reconcile it with a force greater then themselves. It’s the search for where our feelings come from. It’s the journey we go on to find out, not what a star is made of, but what exists in between stars. It’s the acknowledgment that nothingness is still something, and that the end of our empirical knowledge of the true workings of the universe is also the beginning of our journey to the divine. In the words of Socrates “all I know is that I know nothing”.

            To clarify, “truth” is the correspondence between object and thing. The fact that correspondence requires an interaction designates “truth” as a relationship. Something may be true from one point of view that is not from another. If I’m looking from the west wing of a building into a parking lot, I see five cars. If you are looking from the east you may only see four or you may see six. The fact that we are in different places does not make one of us a liar, it simply means that we see things differently from our various perspectives and that what is true for you is not for me. Truth, with a capital “T”, is the man in the helicopter who can see all possible parking lots and can definitively tell us how many, what color, and what model cars there are in the entire city. So, as you see by the expansion of this metaphor, my assertion that major world religions attempt to reconcile what they see with what they cannot see (but submit to the idea that there is One who can) is very convincing.

            A common misconception of World Religions is that they are separate. I would posit that, in this day and age, they are parallel paths to the same destination. In antiquity, when there existed true polytheism on a mass scale (Norse and Greek/Roman mythology) there also existed true division between regional worships. However, suggesting that the idea of Brahma can really put Hinduism out of the polytheist family, we now exist in a world where the remaining popular beliefs are all on a search for a reunification with one god. This is essentially the same goal. I suspect that it would have been vastly more difficult to find common threads between Judaism and Norse belief than it is to find, for instance, commonalities between Christianity and Hinduism.

            Thus, in some ways, our operational definition of religion as “providing social unity and a personal sense of salvation” both works and doesn’t. Traditionally, this was thought to mean that it brought unity to your specific society. However, as an example from my own faith, Christ discouraged this idea in an attempt at global, rather than local, unity. Jesus said in Matthew chapter 10 

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. ³⁵ For I have come to turn
   ” ‘a man against his father,
      a daughter against her mother,
   a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -
    ³⁶a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

           Out of context this seems to be Jesus’ call for the end of social unity. However, when looking at the wider context of His life through the Gospels, we see the larger picture. In Matthew Chapter 12, Christ’s disciples inform him that his family would like to see him. Christ then rejects the center of the social structure, the blood family, and says that whosoever does the will of G-d are his family. In this, Christ is calling for the destruction of communal religious unity and suggesting that we may all be brothers and sisters under the Will of G-d. It’s also worth noting that this directly confounds the Moral Majority’s claim that the American family is the bedrock of our society.

            This can also be seen in other major religions. Jews have taken to accepting converts and also are active in various forms of interfaith council. Even the Hasidic Rabbi who spoke with us in class seemed to have a very accepting notion of others faiths, even those that seemed to confound his own. Hindus have always been of the mind that we are all Brahma and it could be argued that the pluralization of World Religion(s) is but maya (the ego, which deludes us into thinking that we are separate). Buddhism has proven time and again that it embraces all faiths and requires only a cognizance of the noble paths. Even Islam recognizes its Western brethren as “people of the book” and has the faction of Sufism which mingles in Eastern faith. No matter where you go, if you can possibly sift out all of the power-struggles, land grabbing, and political posturing that taints the faiths of the world, we’ll see that we are ever working toward turning World Religions into it’s singular form, World Religion.

            At the risk of being short winded I think that the above is the best way for me to describe World Religion. We could spend volumes going over each belief system and it’s thoughts and practices. This is worth doing, just as one cannot decide that 3 + 3 = 6 and that is the only way to get to six. We must realize that you can also divide, multiply, fraction, and otherwise cross-quantify six. The answer is always the same, but the methods are the beauty, not the conflict, of the problem.

An interesting write-up in Christian magazine Relevant about the emotional dangers of the prevalent Romantic Comedy genre and it’s effects on our perceptions of real relationships. In a world where divorce is the norm, those of us who think marriage is a good idea need to start looking for some answers.

Writer Joel NaSmith says this:

There’s certainly a war against the prevalence of visual pornography in many corners of our society—especially in the Christian culture. There is an attempt to expose pornography for its promotion of unrealistic sexual expectations and exploitation of human sexuality. And that attempt is a very necessary one.

But what about the unhealthy emotional and relational expectations portrayed in so much of our media? Is there really much of a difference in the hyperbolized sexual imagery of typical pornography and the hyperbolized momentary emotional high felt in a romance film or romantic comedy that sends us looking for a “love” that doesn’t exist?

I heard an interview on NPR with a female author named Elizabeth Gilbert. She was talking about the proliferation of the “Soul Mate Complex” in our modern culture and how the film Jerry Maguire served to reinforce it with the now illustrious line, “You complete me.”

I think this article takes a chip out of a major societal dam.

The presumably harmful aspect of pornography for the consumer* is the accumulation of unrealistic sexual expectations for their romantic and sexual partners, especially as it pertains to a long-term relationship. The same can be said for the consumer of the Rom Com. It works to generate unrealistic expectations in us about what a love relationship could and should be. 

as an example from the article:

As a result, we’re taught to crave the moment of romantic ecstasy or to live for the wedding day. We’re raised to think these are the real stories of love and relationship, and we’re confused when they are so few and far between that we aren’t sustained. So we turn back to that which led us to believe in this fantasy all along. And we’re left with an old woman sitting alone, in her love seat, in front of the television watching her “stories.”

Kids eventually understand that pumpkins don’t turn to glass carriages and Fairy Godmothers don’t grant wishes, but many girls never grow out of the idea that one day they will be rescued from reality by some magic and a fictitious prince. And little boys never live up to the fantasy of the mind or that they’re supposed to be that prince and that their spouse is an all-fulfilling princess.

I think this idea has special connotations for the Christian church. We need to stop battling things like pornography based solely on some misguided sense of morality and righteousness and start battling the larger social epidemic; addiction to fantasy. The Ten Commandments don’t say “Though shalt not visit Suicide Girls”, it says “though shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”. The warning here isn’t just about the base act of lust which occurs in an instant. The real affront is imagining yourself with something that isn’t yours, then eventually convincing yourself that you deserve that thing. That is covetous.

This is right at the heart of the issue. Watching “Twilight” or some porno isn’t the issue in and of itself, it’s the fact that those things eventually lead us to wish our wife had sex a certain way or to question our husband’s commitment because he’s never lied awake all night just to hear us breath. 

*for the creator the side-effects can range from sex slavery to financial dependence on acts stemming from psychological disrepair. Also, pornography often has a connotation of dominance and objectification that can be FAR more dangerous than any Rom Com.