Religion, Violence, Spirituality and People

I don’t have time to reflect much on these two quotes, both of which I stumbled upon this week (well, I walked carefully into the Stackhouse quote, having decided to watch Q&A because of his appearance on it, and, though I did stumble upon the Reza Aslan quote today [I spotted a link to the video on Facebook], I’d actually seen and very much enjoyed the interview last year some time, and I’m pretty sure there were no stumbles involved in that experience either. I don’t want to seem too clumsy. I’m really quite good at not falling over), so I’ll quickly pop them here and then dash away again.

The first quote is by Reza Aslan, made during an interview on CNN. Aslan was asked, “Does Islam promote violence?” He replied:

Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace, Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you’re a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism is going to be violent. There are marauding Buddhist monks in Myanmar slaughtering women and children – does Buddhism promote violence? Of course not! People are violent or peaceful, and that depends on their politics, their social world, the way that they see their communities, the way that they see themselves.

And on Q&A this week, John Stackhouse* responded to the question, “Does religion create conflict rather than peace?” by saying:

…what is, of course, striking about spirituality is how it fits the temper of the time. Religion is something given to us. Some imam, some rabbi, some priest tells us what to do. There’s a historical tradition. You kind of take it or leave it, whereas spirituality, it can be what you like, it can be as powerful as a life shaping force. It can be a tingle in my toes when I look at the sunset. So it really does suit us in as much as we want it to be suited and part of our lifestyle. So as to whether it, in fact, encourages violence or peace, of course, it’s up to the individual. It’s entirely up to you.

Actually, now that I’ve read those two quotes one after the other, I’m reminded of something Rachel Held Evans writes in A Year of Biblical Womanhood:

For those who count the Bible as sacred, interpretation is not a matter of whether to pick and choose, but how to pick and choose. We are all selective. We all wrestle with how to interpret and apply the Bible to our lives. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Are we reading with the prejudice of love or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? …

This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, what does it say?, but what am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”

If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.

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* I haven’t heard John Stackhouse’s name for an awfully long time, but seeing him pop up on the Q&A panel this week reminded me of the mind-blowing, world-tipping effect that reading Finally Feminist had on me, and of the fact that he once took the time to reply very kindly to an email I wrote to him.

Biology | Medicine for Mo | Update

I’ve started my fourth class: Biological and Developmental Psychology. Oh man. I can’t believe people warned me about having to do statistics, but no one mentioned biology. BIOLOGY. Aaargh. Give me numbers anyday, at least they don’t mess with my head while I’m learning about them (unlike neuroanatomy; I’m using my brain to learn about brains – like, whoa, man). Here’s a picture of my textbook, with all of the concepts I’m still unclear about, despite having read each of these paragraphs approximately 17 times, circled in red:

In other news, have I told you yet that my medication is awesome? Last time I mentioned my meds I think I was a month into the new ones and they hadn’t started working their magic, but now they’re working their magic. I feel normal and content. Normal and content feel amazing.

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Hazel’s a month away from turning two, and Mo’s a month and a few weeks away from turning five. Hazel has a cold, and instead of sleeping a lot, like normal sick people do, she’s waking multiple times during the night and having stupidly short naps during the day. Mo had the flu last week, and was so sick he refused to eat any sweet foods, which had me convinced he was dying (he said no to a biscuit! He never says no to a biscuit!). When he’s well he sometimes tells me he’s feeling sick and needs some medicine (by which he means Panadol), and I tell him that Panadol’s not for feeling sick, it’s for pain, and he replies, “My arm hurts…?” and I tell him he’s not getting medicine. He thinks Panadol’s like any other sugary treat he craves, except special-er thanks to its rare appearances.

Then last week, when he actually needed Panadol, he didn’t want to take it – it was too sweet. The doctor also prescribed a cherry-flavoured syrup, which smelt like red Starburst lollies and made me want to drink some for myself (YUM!), but, according to Mo, it was too sweet, too, and each time he saw see it coming he’d flip out. For his last dose, Alan and I belted out, “Here’s to Moses, he’s true blue,” and after our “Drink it down! down! down! down!” Alan said, “If singing drinking songs to your kids is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.”

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As for Alan, he’s started his own business, which was a decision I was on board with until he actually resigned from his job, at which point, fearing bankruptcy, homelessness, or, at the very least, a curtailing of my café-going habits, I completely flipped out (Mo and I have a lot in common). Anyway, it’s been going for about 6 weeks now, and there’s too much work rather than not enough, which is nice, even though it means he now spends most of his free time in front of his laptop trying to get everything done. (He also paces the bedroom/his office speaking importantly on the phone in his deep, ocker man-voice, reserved for male tradesmen, drillers, and other engineers: “Orright, no worries, mite. Yip, that’s foin. Orright. Boi, mite.”)

His website’s here, but it’s not yet finished, and I told him I wasn’t going to link to it on my blog until he expanded the picture to include the bottom of the clover and removed that awful blue bar across it, but apparently he has “more important things to do” and obviously knew I’d give up eventually and just post it. Well played, husband.

Olive Kitteridge | Lolita | Linguistics

I finished reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout today, and have since added it (in imaginary pen) to my imaginary ‘Favourite Books Ever’ list. Oh man, I loved this book. It reminded me of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, although it’s possible the two had nothing in common except for the fact that I seriously loved that short story, too (also they’re both written by women, and feature two-word titles. And their first and surnames include the same vowels! I’m giving up now). Strout’s book is made up of chapters offering small glimpses into various peoples’ lives, with the character of Olive Kitteridge and the town in which she lives as the common threads that run through each and tie them all together in one perfect novel; sometimes Olive is the main character in the chapter, and sometimes she’s not. 

In my review of The Descendants, I wrote that the movie was “funny and painful and heartwarming and heartbreaking all in one, as life tends to be,” and although it must appear terribly lazy copying descriptions from previous blog posts, this one fits so well I‘m just going to go ahead and do it. Here’s one of my favourite quotes from the book:

There were days – she could remember this – when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.

This book is a rare 5-out-of-5er. I loved it.

I borrowed Olive Kitteridge because I spotted it displayed on a rack at the library and recognised the title, having heard about the HBO miniseries. I was on the lookout for another novel to read because I started on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (thanks to Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales’ repeated recommendations of it on their [hilarious, wonderful] podcast Chat 10 Looks 3) and realised I probably wouldn’t make it all the way through (it makes me feel ill. I don’t think I can cope with illness for 330 more pages, brilliant though it may be). I’m disappointed, because this is the opening of the book:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Is that last one not the best sentence you’ve ever read in your entire life? I KNOW. Alas: reading a man speak about his attraction to pre-pubescent girls is too nauseating for me to fully appreciate whatever linguistic awesomeness Nabokov has up his sleeve in the pages following the first 30 (which is as far as I made it). I’m (grumpily) giving up.

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Speaking of linguistics and tongue-tapping, I’ve been noticing the way some people say ‘thr’ with a tap, as in (for ‘three’) th-[tap]-ree. Some people tap for other ‘thr’ words, too, like ‘through’. I don’t tap. I find it much harder to include a tap than to just put the ‘th’ and the ‘ree’ right next to each other. Here’s an audio file to demonstrate the difference, just because I can: 


 
The lecturer for my last class regularly tapped for ‘thr’ words (being Statistics, she said ‘three’ quite a bit), and since then I’ve heard it everywhere. It’s like I’ve grown a ‘thr-tap’ radar.