Shit on a stick, did I ever have a hard time with that last post. Trying to convert the text into something my blog would accept took forever.
But I persevered, mainly because I thought this piece was so astonishing. The actual text goes on for ten pages or so, and covers most of the Bible, even the Old Testament, in which the "teacher" says all the little Hebrew boys were being slain because "those Hebrews were just breeding like rabbits".
This thing reeks of fundamentalism, not to mention racism, with even the most innocent act (knitting!) dragged in to illustrate scriptural precepts. The thing that astonishes me is how long I fell for this. I was "in" this milieu for something like fifteen years before I came to realize that somewhere along the way, it had come to mean almost nothing to me.
It wasn't so much scripture, which can be interesting if contradictory (as is Jesus). It was the people trying to convey the messages. Hardly anyone I encountered in all that time seemed to have anything more than a superficial knowledge of what this was all about.
You see, the old-time message behind the Bible is that we're basically no goddamn good, if you'll pardon the language. We're selfish and hard-hearted and besides that, we have sex! We have sex. Do you know what people actually do when they have sex? And they enjoy it. Could it be worse?
So it's very important either to not have sex, or, if we do have it, not to enjoy it due to guilt, shame and a smothering feeling of sin that will never go away.
We were always controlled by guilt, not to mention shame and a sense of fundamental unworthiness and irredeemable filth that could "only" be cleansed by Jesus. Trouble was, we had to keep doing this over and over and over again, pretty much every Sunday.
We never quite "got there," as if the goal was to become some saintly figure that no one else would be able to stand. We always had to go against, against, against our true nature, or God wouldn't love us any more. Certainly, the pecksniffs at church wouldn't - that is, if they ever loved us in the first place.
So. We have the Biblical teddy bear sweater, and later on in the 10 or 12 pages of this drivel she uses the term "bear" in the most groaningly punning way. We "bear with" our sorrows, etc. I have to say, though, that though I may just try that little knitting pattern, I found her theology not so much unbearable as a complete sack of shit.
