The Giant's Drink

[giantsdrink-blog]

I am more than my relationship with Wheaton

I attended Wheaton College (IL) from 1998 to 2002 and worked there until 2004.  What I didn’t fully realize about society is there are certain worth making entities one has to anchor them self to in order to be accepted by most people.  For me Wheaton College was that worth making entity (It’s the same way you’ll see schools like Colombia University advertising that they are in the city of New York).  Because I have multiple disabilities and am on the autistic spectrum, anchoring myself to worth making entities was even more important than a regular person because as a person with a disability you have zero worth in this culture (certainly in Christian culture anyway).  It’s almost like that one guy who got sucked out the back door of a plane and they found him holding on to a beam of the outside of the plane for dear life and he wouldn’t let go even after the plane landed and stopped.

The people at Wheaton that I had the deepest relationships with dropped out of my life when I was no longer anchored to any worth making entities.  Once I lost my job at Wheaton I never found a real one and ended up fighting for scraps on the informal economy.  Because these relationships didn’t get replaced I found it impossible to extricate myself from Wheaton.  I haven’t fully done so even now and it’s been over 11 years since I left there.

My Wheaton degree has done nothing for me vocationally because any good it could have done gets canceled out by disability based prejudice.  Because of my upbringing and Wheaton experience I still think I’m going to go to hell for thinking for myself.  And the people who could hook me up with a job have dropped out of my life because I don’t have one.

[giantsdrink-blog]

Questioning

I am a 2002 Computer Science Wheaton College alumnus.  I believe the discipline of questioning is antithetical to the Christian faith and certainly antithetical to Evangelicalism.  A few questions below:

Is the truth ultimately unknowable because the people who start to know it die suddenly, ensuring it remains secret (the same way people who see God die)?

If God is truly love, why are those at the margins who are generally hypersensitive to love (the mentally ill, autistics) often unable to build an image of him in their heads that helps them function?

Why is despair considered a sin?  Does this lay the blame on the person who has the inability to tease hope out of the ethereal.. which is basically telling them they're culpable for their depression.

Is it disingenuous to bless factory farmed meat as praying over something acquired under such unjust circumstances sounds hypocritical?

Do demons really speak Latin?

Why isn't withholding pain treatment a crime?  If the justice system was truly based on preventing people from suffering wouldn't it be?

How is believing in a god who says what we say he says any different than just cutting out the middle man and telling us what to believe but being honest enough about it admit it's just coming from you?

If pain is truly God's megaphone, why, when he uses it on you, does it scare so many people in your life away?

Why does one have to give a reason for why they would want to meet someone but none for why they would want to buy something?

...and there’s more at the Uncomfortable Questions Subreddit

[giantsdrink-blog]

In celebration of Michigan State making the final four I give you Tom Izzo’s alma matter’s fight song (Iron Mountain High School).  It’s just MIDI, not a real recording but it should do.

[giantsdrink-blog]

reaching out and social class

Perhaps one of the most insidious ways class manifests itself is in the media's romanticizing of reaching out for help.  When the rich reach out for mental health help often they get what they need.  When the poor do it they usually get nothing.  Of course the poor have no voice so when they speak about about their failures in reaching out their words fall on deaf ears.

[giantsdrink-blog]

Think Different

There was a student at Wheaton College (IL) who thought different and got an apple for it.  He was a student asking a question about why gays were unfairly singled out on campus.  His advocacy efforts were not fruitless.  After a pretty subdued response, a fellow student threw an apple at him.

[giantsdrink-blog]

More on Vulnerability

There is a bitter irony in that encouraging people to be vulnerable actually creates a more mistrusting population.  This is because people who bare their souls to the first person willing to listen are more likely to get burned and become mistrusting.  The people who are guarded and then only confide in people who have earned their trust are less likely to get burned.

I am on the autistic spectrum so have a hard time ascertaining who to put my trust in and this has come back to bite me.  I tend to trust my head more than my heart (because in the past I got burned for trusting me heart) but trusting my head hasn't worked either.

[giantsdrink-blog]

Scary Close is Scary for a Reason

I read and enjoyed Blue Like Jazz for its authenticity.  Now Donald Miller is releasing a book on vulnerability called Scary Close.  While I respect the sentiment in Christian and secular circles that people should be vulnerable it's not a level playing field.

Some people have little to lose by being vulnerable while others could lose everything.  I have bipolar disorder.  If I was outed I'd probably lose my job as I am contract and have no disability protections (and protections often don't guarantee you won't get fired anyway).

In the past I've confided in people my suicidal feelings and they've often turned against me.  One girl even told me she was scared of me and I should never contact her again.  This is not something that will end up in a Christian book simply because the people who fail don't get book deals.

People are getting less trusting.  According to an Atlantic Monthly article:

In 1985, when the General Social Survey polled Americans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.

People aren't stupid.  Everyone is born trusting, mistrust is learned.  People aren't mistrustful out of some irrational fear, they are mistrustful because there aren't many people worth putting one's trust in.

In the end you're only as safe as the character of the company you keep.

[giantsdrink-blog]

[giantsdrink-blog]

Source

[giantsdrink-blog]

more poetry

when you hold the most power you take the fall when things go wrong so goes with the president so goes with God

i'm not going to believe in the power of prayer until people treat me based on the prayers that are going to work instead of the ones that have

you pay for suffering in the most devestating currency imaginable friends

[giantsdrink-blog]

Missing my Xanga and listening to The White Stripes

[giantsdrink-blog]

The culmination of denying company to those who have fallen from grace occurs in heaven when those in grace have their memories wiped clean of those who have fallen from it.

[giantsdrink-blog]

"social anxiety disorder" is often just an astroturfing way of saying snub sensitivity

[giantsdrink-blog]

Trouble Tones

I think it's easier to be an attractive woman or a rich/attractive man.  You don't have to deal with most of society's trouble tones (trouble tones are beeping machines at fast-food restaurants make when something is out of whack in their computer brains).  You have more effort to devote to just being you.  I've found as I've descended lower and lower in society there are more trouble tones coming from everywhere.  And it has eaten away at me, if there were less of these tones, or I was better at playing mind games to not make them reverberate so much more of me would show to the world.

[giantsdrink-blog]

i believe in the same things you do, I just believe in them naked and perhaps inside-out

[giantsdrink-blog]

The Broken Thread of Culture

Arnold Toynbee, whose monumental work A Study of History has been a major inspiration to this blog’s project, proposed that civilizations on the way to history’s compost heap always fail in the same general way. The most important factor that makes a rising civilization work, he suggested, is mimesis—the universal human habit by which people imitate the behavior and attitudes of those they admire. As long as the political class of a civilization can inspire admiration and affection from those below it, the civilization thrives, because the shared sense of values and purpose generated by mimesis keeps the pressures of competing class interests from tearing it apart.

Civilizations fail, in turn, because their political classes lose the ability to inspire mimesis, and this happens in turn because members of the elite become so fixated on maintaining their own power and privilege that they stop doing an adequate job of addressing the problems facing their society.  As those problems spin further and further out of control, the political class loses the ability to inspire and settles instead for the ability to dominate. Outside the political class and its hangers-on, in turn, more and more of the population becomes what Toynbee calls an internal proletariat, an increasingly sullen underclass that still provides the political class with its cannon fodder and labor force but no longer sees anything to admire or emulate in those who order it around.

[giantsdrink-blog]

Wheaton College Becomes a Tool of the Far Right Obama-Haters and Seals the Fate of the Evangelical Community’s Reputation for a Generation Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2014/07/wheaton-college-becomes-a-tool-of-the-far-right-obama-haters-and-seals-the-fate-of-the-evangelical-communitys-reputation-for-a-generation/#ixzz36VZekfbE