If prayer can be what people need it to be...

by Luther Reads

After a deliciously satisfying Thanksgiving dinner, I sat mostly quiet as my Christian family discussed the role or prayer in their lives. Every single person had a different idea about how to pray and what those prayers actually do. To my understanding, the nature of prayer hasn't changed for thousands of years and it's one of the most talked about aspects of the Christian walk, so I was baffled by the disagreement.

I asked if this lack of consensus or clarity was problematic to anyone, but they all just respected each other's perspective. There was a genuine sense that each person has to view prayer in the way that works best for them, and I realized that perhaps the lack of widespread dogma about prayer is what makes it so powerful. Hmmm...

Christians also disagree about the Bible, prophecy, miracles, and all the other ingredients of Christianity. And by-and-large, this is all... okay. Even the very nature of God hasn't been nailed down (see what I did there?). Each Christian is entitled to believe about God what they need, and outside of the most intolerant corrodoors of Christendom, again, this is... okay.

So, I too have accepted a belief about the nature of God, based on who I am and what I need God to be in my life: nonexistent.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads marked himself safe from 2020

Where did my sister go?

 My sister died on January 19, 2007, but before she did, most of who she was left her body. I don't remember getting the call from my father that Lisa had gotten sick, had a heart attack, and been dead for 8 minutes before doctors brought her back, but remember the utter despair in his voice when he called me 3 months later to tell me that she had finally passed on. I never ever want to hear that kind of grief in another person's voice again, but I'm sure I will at some point again in my life. That's just life.

But, where did my sister actually go when she left, came back, and left for good again? I don't believe in heaven, so I don't think she is there. My father and nephews believe that's where she is, so I try hard to not bring the issue up with them. I don't think Lisa is in heaven, but I also don't think she no longer exists. Certainly she lives on in the people who remember her, but I think there's more to her now that she's dead than just memories.

For a long time after her death I believed and was scared she'd show up in some tangible capacity. Seeing my dead sister would be an incredible joy, until I realized that seeing a dead person meant that spiritual world did in fact exist and logically contained all the nightmarish things humans can conceive. There's comfort in this kind of intangible ambiguity.

Will I ever see/recognize my sister again? I see her in my children at times, my dad as well, but it's never even close to her whole self. I often times wonder what restrictions on communing with the living might there be on the other side? What are the dead allowed to know about the living? What understanding do we gain being dead that might compel us to leave loved ones behind and never speak with them as we used to again?

I just want an explanation that satisfies, which, I know, is an incredibly petulant thing to want. But for fuck's sake, my sister died suddenly and way too early in life. I miss her so much that I get triggered into wracking sobs when a young Black woman dies of an illness in almost any movie. Thirteen years later I'm still just as devastated by the loss of the relationship we were building once the 23 years that separated us was beginning to erode. I got a legit beef with the universe.

So where did Lisa go? Why did she leave a small fraction of herself behind before taking it with her? What does it mean to be reduced to just your basic software as a human and why is witnessing that part 1000x worse than burying a loved one? I miss you so much Lisa that I'm crying as I write this. I hope you're well wherever you are. Drop me a line if you can, but only if all the scary shit we living think exists  in the spiritual world doesn't actually exist. I love you more than I ever told you when you were alive.  

Extraordinary Claims

by Luther Reads

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

The priest claims to own one car, and the bartender believes him. The minister claims to own four cars, but the bartender is skeptical until the minister brandishes a photograph of himself standing in front of a house and four cars. The rabbi then pulls out a photograph of himself standing in front of 400 cars and claims to own them all, but the bartender says, "You're gonna need more than a picture of yourself with 400 cars to convince me that they're all yours."

If you're expecting a punch line, there isn't one. So in a way, the joke's on you :)

The story is instead a parable meant to illustrate that extraordinary claims warrant extraordinary proof. Believing that a person owns one car requires almost no proof because it's an ordinary claim. But owning 400 cars is an extraordinary claim that warrants a far different level of proof.

I was told two extraordinary claims in my youth.

1. The Earth rotates around the sun, a belief known as heliocentrism. This is such a ridiculous claim because I can literally see the sun moving through the sky every day. The sun appears to move, not us. But yet I was told otherwise.

2. Two thousand years ago, the creator of the universe was born to a virgin, with himself as the father, and the subsequent brutal murder of this offspring allowed him to invite those of us who believe this story to come live with him for eternity with no more death or sadness.

Now what if, in a shocking twist, the bartender then claims to own four million cars, and all the other customers in the bar attest to it. And so do all the people walking down the street in front of the bar, and all the people in all the other bars along that street.

This is what it's like to be raised as a heliocentric Christian. Everyone around me believed that the Earth rotates around the sun, and that Jesus was born of a virgin and died for our sins. So as a child, I accepted both ideas.

But I also did something even more harmful, and this is the role of indoctrination. After hearing these claims so many times from so many people that I loved and trusted, I accepted the claims as being... ordinary. And ordinary claims only warrant ordinary proof.

But heliocentrism and Christianity are both very, very, very extraordinary claims. And I've found extraordinary proof for one but not the other.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads is a poet who's never actually written a poem.

Should Black People Forgive Amy Cooper for Calling 9-1-1 on a Black Man Who Told Her To Leash Her Dog?

by Luther Reads

Nah.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads agrees with the definition for "forgive" that G**gle displayed, which was "to stop feeling angry or resentful toward someone for an offense, flaw, or mistake." And no, I don't have a good reason for not naming G**gle directly. Fuck 'em! That's why.

Metaphorically Speaking

by Luther Reads

"When I was a kid, I thought quicksand would be a much bigger problem."

That's the text of a meme that comically rings true to me and so many others who grew up in the 80s and 90s. It was the TV shows, right? Quicksand was everywhere, and I watched with great concern, hoping to learn what to do and what not to do in preparation for the inevitable day when I would have to be rescued, or rescue someone else, from quicksand.

Fast forward 30 years, and I haven't come across any quicksand. Sadly, I probably never will. But I now accept that the quicksand was a metaphor for the very real struggles that we face in life. Quicksand can come out of nowhere, just like so many of life's problems. You need help from a friend to get out of quicksand. Need I say more?

These are just some of the many lessons that quicksand, as a metaphor, can help us to understand.

Oh, the stories in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible are also metaphors.

*cue the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song*

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About the Author:

Luther Reads doesn't like long walks on the beach. He likes swimming in the fucking ocean that's literally right there!

Atheists, Christians, Foxholes, and Pandemics

by Luther Reads

Let me set the scene:

It's March 2020, and we're in the middle of a global pandemic. Apparently, somebody in Wuhan, China got too close to an animal carrying something called a "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" virus, and two months later we're all at risk of getting Dat Rona virus.

The NBA has canceled its season over concerns about spreading the coronavirus. Colleges and universities have cancelled classes. Governors have closed public schools for weeks. Travel bans are being put in place. Cruise ships are not being allowed to dock. Self quarantining is a thing. People are emptying grocery stores of Lysol wipes and, oddly enough, toilet paper.

Churches are even closing their doors. Remember all those old sayings about "corporate" prayer and forsaking not the gathering of the saints? I guess they didn't mean during a pandemic. The Catholic church is abandoning the use of holy water. Yes, the holy water that priests pray over. Yes, the holy water that symbolizes the protection of Jesus Christ. I guess it can't protect against a pandemic.

But you know what isn't closing and what isn't canceled? The science labs that are working on cures, vaccines, and tests for the coronavirus. I used to hear that there are no Atheists in a foxhole. The assertion being that when bullets are flying, everybody prays to someone. Well, I wonder if there are any Christians during a global pandemic. The assertion being that... well, you get it.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads builds robots. He doesn't want his robots to take anyone's job, but he knows this is unavoidable. Yet he toils on. He is very human in this regard -- a walking contradiction.

"I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual"

by Luther Reads

A few years ago, church goers openly mocked the non church goers who said, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." The church goers thought that phrase was an excuse to be lazy and stay home from church. But now the phrase isn't being ridiculed because so many people finally realize that churches are problematic for a lot of people.

More and more people see the deep flaws baked into the church hierarchy and structure, so much so that calling a Christian "religious" is like cursing them out. The rampant pettiness, cliquishness, legalism, and judgementalism among religious people has become too much. People backstabbing each other for positions, mismanagement of funds, abuse of power, misinterpretation of scripture, false spiritualism, etc, etc, and another etc. A thousand et ceteras, actually. Church folk be trippin!

A pastor friend of mine once defended this kind of behavior by saying that churches are still full of humans. He said, "People accept that kind of behavior at their job, but are shocked and disappointed to see it at church even though we're all still human." I thought the purpose of Christianity, and therefore church, is to make better humans out of us. So if church folk don't behave any better than the people at my job, I'd say that's a poor advertisement for attending church. But I digress.

Here's what I don't understand about the "spiritual" people, because many of them still read the Bible and pray to Jesus. Who do they think wrote the Bible? Who do they think compiled the Old and New Testament? Who do they think controlled the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus for thousands of years? The church! The religious people. The backstabbers, abusers, and misinterpretors. If the church's hierarchy is problematic now, then it was problematic back then. Ain't nothing changed. Jewish leadership compiled the Old Testament, and Catholic leadership compiled the New Testament.

"But God!" they say. Most Bible readers believe that God intervened in the development of scripture to keep it free from humanity's foolishness. Okay, so is God still doing that? Because I can write my own interpretation of the Bible, sell it on Amazon, and God won't stop me. The Quran and Book of Mormon are both attributed to God and he didn't stop them. Christians believe that free will was given to all humans, even the religious people who wrote and translated Bibles, and shaped the story of Jesus. Any biases, selfishness, and pettiness that they harbored went right into the Bible.

But don't take my word for it, read the book for yourself. From rampant chauvinism and patriarchy to the burning alive of non believers, it's all in there and it's quite messy. But above all else, it's predictably very human.

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About the Author:

Luther Reads has recently come to terms with the staying power of the Oxford comma.