Bogosity

Dear readers (if there are any of you left), I believe the time has come for me to thank you for your patronage of this blog and take my final bows. I’ve decided to focus my energy on other things and I’ve been finding less and less energy for this blogging gig of late.

I started writing this blog in January 2005, probably as a new years resolution. I remember at the time, I wanted to get really serious about my religion, start reading the bible daily, saying morning and evening prayer and also letting the world know about something exciting that I had found: a way of expressing Christianity in social justice, compassion for others and peaceful meditation. I thought that people ‘out there’, especially the left wing blogging community might be interested to hear an alternative to the usual right wing bigotry that seems to be associated with Christianity (I was wrong about that: a great many non-Christian bloggers prefer Christians to be complete arse-holes as it makes them an easy target)

The name Bogosity was to remind me not to take myself too seriously and also to suggest that I would be critically examining my faith to eliminate the bogus stuff that I felt resulted from my time as an evangelical.

My first posts were just reflections on the daily readings and I wrote many of them while at work, first thing in the morning. I would read the morning prayer before work and then think about the blog on the way to work and write it over my morning coffee.

At this time, I was going through a period of searching in life, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was disappointed with my engineering career, and at the same time had dropped out of the evangelicalism that I was into and somehow ended up in a liberal church and really digging it. I had dreams of becoming my own version of the messiah, God’s gift to something or other if I could just figure out the right cause that suited me. I was also gearing up to become a father and really didn’t have the foggiest what that would mean. At that stage, Bogosity was almost therapeutic: my place to nut things out and get inspired.

By 2006, I had decided that the answer to my questions of career and spirituality were to become a priest. At the same time, I was starting to ask myself some tough questions about my own beliefs. I was reading a lot about Christianity on the web, a lot of criticisms and a lot of things from atheists. The new atheist movement was gaining momentum as atheists started to become pro-active about opposing religions in the context of the ongoing ‘war on terror’. As an newly enrolled theology student, I was also starting down that road of deconstructing my faith in order to understand what I believed and why.

Bogosity jumped the shark sometime about the beginning of 2007 / end of 2006 when I basically admitted that I’d lost my faith and sunk pretty low when it came to my feelings towards the church, other Christians and God. I was pretty over trying to find religious things to blog about and probably should have wound things up back in June but I had invested so much in this blog that I felt I had to reinvent it and keep it going.

I know over the three years of writing here, I’ve shot my mouth off more than a few times and probably revealed some less flattering things about myself: my self righteousness, arrogance and insensitivity towards others at times. I hope that I have also written the occasional uplifting thing – I know I mostly enjoyed writing and reading my blog and that’s probably what counts the most.

Right now, I’m pretty tied up with being a dad, being a homeowner and seeing the good side of being an embedded programmer. I guess I’m pretty content and maybe the busyness is a big part of that. I’m still practicing Christianity but I suppose I’m pretty resolved on all that as well – to be happy to not know answers to many things and to not let other people define what it means for me.

So without further a due, I bring this blog to a close, thank you all once again for reading and I invite you to visit me at Smithology for engineering, sci-fi and other nerdiness. Oh and don’t forget to checkout the tumblog Bogosities

Late last year, Sol, Steph and I went to the Wiggles concert with a couple of friends. It was totally awesome! I know the Wiggles are a kids show and everything but I’ve always appreciated that they are a real band that play instruments (though not much on stage these days), write their own songs and put interesting things in their music. I like the arrangements they come up with for their songs, especially places where Murray sneaks in a bit of fuzz guitar.

On stage they had lots of fun, keeping themselves entertained with some ad lib bits and pieces between songs. The show itself was really well produced. They tour with The Wiggly Dancers who are entertaining to watch and do some acrobatic stuff at times.

A friend told me earlier last year that the Wiggles without Greg is like Guns ‘n’ Roses without Slash but while we miss Greg, we think Sam carries his own part really well and while the vibe of the Wiggles has definitely changed, they haven’t lost “it”.

After the show, Sol insisted that we get some merchandise and we picked up the latest Wiggles DVD Pop go the Wiggles. Of course we had to also watch it when we got home and I think it is one of their stronger DVDs although I think there is only one original song on there. The other hour of music is the Wiggles renderings of nursery rhymes, old and new with Wiggles style pop and period costumes. Lots of fun for us adults too. MY favorite moment being when Murray kind of teleports into the middle of See-saw Margereedaw in some kind of psychedelic get-up and a flying V guitar.

Did you ever play that “team building” game where you have to pretend that you’re on the Titanic and the lifeboat can’t take your whole group so you have to decide who to leave behind? I think the supposed point of that exercise is that everyone has valuable attributes and that you can never easily pick someone to leave behind. In reality, I think it is often the case that there are a few obvious non-performers in the group as well as the obvious alpha people who would never be considered to stay behind except when it is their own heroic suggestion.

This hierarchical thinking seems to be built into the way we relate as humans. At two separate family Christmas gatherings I observed a similar scenario to the one in the Titanic game where instead of a lifeboat, it was an outdoor table and there was not enough chairs for everyone. On both occasions, I heard pointed whisperings about children taking spots at the table while adults were standing.

This made me question the way that we form hierarchies in families and the conflicts that arise as family members jostle for positions. These conflicts seem to come to the forefront at times like Christmas where there are often physical symbols of ones place in the family: the roles we fall into as we work together to make the event happen. I remember one Christmas where Steph was told that she was no longer going to pick up the prawns from the seafood markets on Christmas morning because the older siblings didn’t trust us to keep them on ice the whole way. This change of roles seemed to be more about some kind of competition for hierarchical advantage than it did about the actual freshness of the prawns. The older sister who took over the role seemed to be trying to get some kind of status hike on the other siblings at Steph’s expense – or that’s how we interpreted it.

I was reminded again of the Christmas story and the teachings of Jesus: but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant Matthew 20.25-28, also his acceptance of children and his own lowly birth. It seems that a big part of Jesus’ teaching was the idea that we should actively challenge hierarchies or at least change the way that we think about hierarchies and the way power over others is used.

I was just reading about a family who went through the most awful trauma. After being forced to travel by foot for several days, while the wife was heavily pregnant, they were unable to access accommodation and the woman was forced to give birth in very unsanitary conditions and in utter disgrace. One is reminded of the case of the woman who was left to miscarry in a toilet in a hospital this year or of the conditions that aboriginals are living in up north.

I’m not sure how out of the ordinary it was that Jesus was born in a stable and put to sleep in a food trough. Maybe it was actually a better situation than a noisy crowded inn where perhaps there would have been no privacy whatsoever. We often vilify the innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away at the door, forgetting that the he offered what he did have: the stable. On the other hand, there was a whole bunch of people in that inn who decided that their needs were greater than the needs of a woman giving birth or perhaps they just thought that this woman was of no consequence. Maybe they let it be somebody else’s problem.

I’ve been putting myself in the shoes of those people who were safely accommodated in the inn on that night of Jesus’ birth. They had their own problems, their own crises perhaps and then they were confronted by this family in need. It seems to me that the message in this story is the compassion that God has for the lowest and most oppressed in society. We are not supposed to be letting people give birth in stables, we are not supposed to be leaving our indigenous population to rot in their communities and we are not supposed to have people who are homeless even though they have full-time employment because the cost of accommodation is too high (story).

I’m very much like the people in the inn on the night of Jesus birth. No matter what excuses I find, the upshot of my actions is that I’m not doing anything to help (well I voted for a political party that I thought would help but that cost me nothing). The problems are too big and too much for me to deal with. I have my own problems so I just get on with looking after my own family and the rest of the world can look after itself.

Jesus taught that “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what good is it if a man gains the whole world yet loses his life” Matthew 16.24-26. My last thoughts on Christmas relate to this: Christmas is a time for us to be reminded not to lose our souls. We are reminded to give, to love and to reach out to the rest of humanity and especially to those who are on the lowest rungs of society.

Did I mention yet that we’re having another baby? Over the last few weeks or so we’ve been processing the reality of having our second baby now that the twelve week probation period has finished. On the topic of the twelve week thing, we actually don’t care about it but observed it this time around because last time when we told people before the twelve weeks, some of them got all weird about it.

Speaking of last time, that’s what we’ve been thinking about a lot: last time. The pregnancy has dredged up a few issues that we are a bit afraid of facing again the second time around. There were some things during the first year of Sol’s life that we never really solved but just endured our way through. This time around, it’s a bit worse looking forward to some of the hard times we went through. While we’re not worried about the technical stuff anymore: we’re confident we’ll know what we’re doing when it comes to eating, sleeping and changing nappies, we’re not so sure about how we (er I mean Steph) will cope with the isolation, lack of support and depression.

One of the worst things about the first year of Sol’s life was the feeling of being alone. The change of lifestyle was such a shock to us, we didn’t know what hit us: lack of sleep, wall to wall baby chores, not feeling like we could leave the house. Steph had depression though we didn’t recognise what it was. I didn’t feel like any of my friends could understand what we were going through. Steph’s family demonstrated very thoroughly that they couldn’t understand what we were going through and were one of the reasons that we felt ashamed that we were not having the most wonderful and glorious time of our lives.

Having said that, Sol brought us a lot of joy. I don’t want to confuse some of the things we were going through with all the good stuff that was happening at the same time. I remember how I could just sit and stare at him and marvel at what he was. I loved to listen to the sounds he made, especially when he would get a bit of a chatter going on about a topic that will always remain a mystery.

Some of the steps we took to come out of the bad space we were in as parents was for Steph to join a community group or two where she could meet some other mums. While she was afraid that the groups would be full of vacuous designer mums, she discovered at at least a few intelligent mums through one of the groups she was at. We also had to learn how to ask for help from our friends (though we are still not good at that). It helped along the way that we were able to reconnect with friends who had toddlers and babies so that towards the end of Sol’s first year, we had managed to reconfigure our lives and gather the support we needed.

It was also a help for Steph to go back to work part time so that she could get some time to think about something other than being a mum.

What will it look like when number two baby comes along now that Sol is a toddler who likes to push the boundaries of bad behaviour and now that we have moved to the suburbs, once again in a place where we aren’t close to our support networks? From my point of view, I just want to be happy about our new baby and forget about all this stuff. On the other hand, I don’t want to dismiss these fears. It’s much better to tackle these things and find some faith that it will all work out than to hide it all behind white picket fences and manicured lawns like so many of us do.

Impressions from my first day on the new job.

I feel a bit like a hermit crab changing shells today. There is that time of transitions between jobs where you feel vulnerable and unanchored.

Up at 6:15 for start of 1h 20m commute at 7:15, lift to Darra, train then bus from city. Thinking of Paul Kelly lyrics I was sucked into a subway like an ant into it’s hill. Walked into the industrial section, uncut grass, stained paint on buildings, sun glaring off hard surfaces, a smelly creek, shrill beep of trucks reversing, a forklift engine whining as the driver abuses it across a carpark, junk stacked against a chainlink fence topped by barbed wire.

Into my new office (have decided not to publish the name), past the empty reception desk and straight upstairs. Say hello to the new coworkers: a few polite jokes. Tour of the facilities: grey carpet, everything’s pretty new, not too cheap but fairly generic furnishings. Workmen are “open planning” the space, there is hammering and power tools.

Coffee machine produces an acceptable flat white (for free!) and I sit down to try out the new DELL laptop 2GHz, 130GB HD, 2Gb RAM. It seems that DELL has somehow achieved the design aesthetic of turning an exciting computer into a shapeless grey boredom box. Even the DELL Win XP install has sucked all the life out of the desktop theme, replacing it with a rainy day blue steel backdrop that makes Marvin the paranoid android seem like a cheerleader in comparison.

Some readers might get the false impression that I’m depressed about all of this but that is just not the case. I know I’ve just described a whole bunch of depressing and uninspiring impressions, but I’m actually just reveling in it. There is an aesthetic to all of this that I’ve somehow actually missed! Coming here is like coming home in some ways, after two and a half years at UQ being pampered on campus with coffee shops and bright happy personalities, I’ve returned to my roots and while I can see it for what it is, I’m not scared of being here because I know that I have friends here, that I will make more friends here and that I’m about to do some awesome shit-hot work on some obscure piece of hardware and software that nobody will probably even hear of or ever understand.

And I’m going to get paid well for it. Which is really good because we’re having another baby in May.

Our ethics and values in todays society are mostly a bit muddy but maybe they are getting clearer.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why it is that you have certain ethics and values? I mean sometimes being a “good” person can get in the way. Have you ever just thought hang it all, I’m going to just be a complete arsehole and not care about anyone else until I’ve got what I want. What difference would it make? Will you be struck by lightning? Why do you bother with this whole concept of being good or nice anyway? Maybe you already don’t and are living a happy life just looking after number one. I mean morality is all relative, nobody has the absolute authority on right and wrong anymore – as long as I’m not hurting anyone (within reason: sometimes just existing means hurting someone) pretty much anything I do should be ok.

Many of us might feel that our values are central to who we are as human beings. Beyond all other forms of pleasure and gratification is the need to identify ourselves in a positive way. Many of us link this to happiness, the delayed gratification that comes from being at peace, at finding harmony with ourselves and others.

Ok, the scientists among us might put forward the theory that we have ethics or morals or values because our evolutionary path has made us into social creatures. We are nice to each other so that we can form a society which enables us to survive more strongly: i.e. the less social amongst us died out through natural selection. Over millions of years, our genome has been shaped by the environment to choose a humanity that has a sense of morality.

But as our societies become more global, we are rejecting tribalism and nationalism and we have become more aware that we all share the same humanity. There is a growing set of values within secularism which feels the need to protect the poor, to lift up all of humanity and find the answers to our problems on a global scale.

I think I agree with the scientists to some extent on the idea of evolution affecting our values but why does evolution have to be something that happened millions of years ago? Maybe our values are not some outmoded and superseded evolutionary sidetrack, maybe our values are the future of our evolutionary path.

Perhaps the early Christians were thinking this too as they started their radical outward looking faith that embraced all of humanity, constructing their liturgy: We are the body of Christ, for we all share in the one bread. May the peace of the Lord be always with you.

And also with you.