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[trinityvixen]

I just found out that Sarah Palin attends an Assembly of God church. I am now more terrified of the McCain-Palin ticket than ever.

Okay, maybe I'm just reacting unduly. It's entirely possible that the one Assembly of God church service I attended (!) was an anomaly. The people weren't like threatening me with hellfire or anything (though they wanted my contact information with a zeal not matched by Army recruiters), but their service was the kind of kook-encouraging stuff for which my liberal Lutheran upbringing (and the more strict Catholic background of my two friends) had not prepared me. People called out in the middle of service. There were more prayers spoken aloud than kept quiet, many of which seemed a skosh too personal. Jesus was their best friend. He was like AWESOME, so let's talk and talk about how great he is. The service lasted two hours.

I'm very possibly overreacting. Very possibly. Not probably, but possibly. Of all the services in different churches that I've been to, that one was the scariest for the depth of honest-but-appearing-psychotic devotion. The baht mitvahs I attended were a tad boring, though I loved the music. (Very beautiful, lyrical, completely unsingable for me.) The one prayer service I attended at a mosque was very rote, but I liked the prayer leader's half-singing call to prayer. (I was also crying a lot because it was a funeral service as well.) I have never had cause to attend a Catholic service. (I am, however, Lutheran, which is supposed to be as close to Catholic as possible, given that Martin Luther had no interest in forming his own church and only really wanted to reform Catholicism.)

Yeah, okay, no thanks. I already know how crazy Alaskans are. Look, no offense, it's a frequently lovable sort of crazy, but people who get days off school because of sun and who don't see said sun for six or more months in a year ARE FRIGGIN NUTS. I've been there, I met some Alaskans, they seemed plenty nice, but even they admit that they're batshit. One of them a heart attack away from the presidency? No thank you.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Actually, it sounds a lot like the services at, oh, an evangelical Black church, such as the infamous one in Chicago that your presidential candidate attends. I agree that evangelical church services are nutty (But I grew up in a stricter-leaning conservative synagogue. I was annoyed when my synagogue took the radical step of having a violinist accompany Kol Nidre, the extremely beautiful prayer that begins Yom Kippur and reads like a legal document. As a further side note, it makes perfect sense that Jews are lawyers when our holiest prayers appear to be written by modern contract lawyers who need to include 50 synonyms to cover all their bases.)

Um, I got off on a tangent there. Anyways, how people worship doesn't particularly bother me; what they believe might. Somehow, I expect that you wouldn't be voting for Palin even if she were a member of your church, given her extreme pro-life views and membership in Feminists for Life.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Question: have you attended a church service at any evangelical black church? I had thought to comment that, for some, this sort of thing is the norm, including black churches, but I took it out because while that's what we are shown, I don't have the experience of attending a service to see what it's like when you are there. It's entirely possible that it's the same exactly uncomfortable thing as I experienced at the Assembly of God church. But as I don't know that and cannot even make a comparison of anecdotes, I won't say it. I would think anyone who does is speaking rather hastily and generalizing very greatly.

In general, I feel that you can't judge the service without being in it. I feel this is true of most occasions, events, speeches, comments, etc. We tend to cherry-pick lines out and use it to create or destroy the speaker. When those lines are in context, they are never as bad or as good as the sound bite made it seem. So that is why I only comment on the services I attended which, unlike political rallies, have the added personal element of individuals seeking higher power-style enlightenment. Being there, there is a mood that film cannot capture and which people who quote the speech always manage to retardedly deconstruct or misconstrue.

There is also a difference in what the pastor/priest does and what the congregants do. Just saying. I wouldn't want a radical priest for VP any more than I would want a radical congregant. The clip I linked to shows what this one radical congregant feels like. That's scary enough.

No, I wouldn't vote for Palin. She's Alaskan. I have a raging intolerance of Alaskans. /faux bias. No, really, she's an anti-choicer who is a member of a faux-feminist cause that pretends to support women while undermining their autonomy. (You can't support women if you agree that the government gets to dictate what medical health they're allowed to have.)

Also, the term "pro-life" is bullshit. It implies that people who have this belief are positive about life when they consistently vote to make the lives of women worse. They are anti-choice. They vote to force pregnancies even in the most critical cases (mother's health? not worth spit) and they do nothing to help once they've forced a fetus-turned-to-born baby onto the world. Pro-suffering, more like.

How 'bout these?

[avram]

Anti-abortion rights.
Anti-reproductive freedom.
Pro-reproductive slavery.
Fetus fetishism.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Have you attended a church service at any evangelical black church?

No, but I've seen the videos of Trinity's services. I'm told from representatives of that religious community that Trinity is not unusual. Yes, it's hard to judge without being there, but in a connected world, that's what you do. And the videos do show what the congregants are doing as well as Wright's diatribes. I have better things to do with my Sunday mornings than visit churches I don't care about, such as sleep.

Anyways, my point was that I don't find the character of the services to disqualify congregants from elected office; but the beliefs might. It would not bother me less if Obama had sat in a pew for 20 years calmly listening to quiet, forceful, academic sermons on the evils of America and white people. It's the substance that bothers me, not the style.

Re: How 'bout these?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

All of those would be accurate, and, therefore, unpopular with the people who hold those beliefs. Because it would deny them the chance for self-denial about the fact that they hold an inherently ugly position.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

And the beliefs of Sarah Palin? Where she declares the Iraq War as being "a task from god"? That substance is hunky-dory?

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

I do not like Sarah Palin, and I do not like John McCain. Every day, something new comes out that just makes a person gawk. Now, I have known plenty of wonderful people who have attended all kinds of churches and such - and many are perfectly nice people who do not condemn people for thinking differently. I have been to a pretty crazy service - and i don't know exactly what church it was because I was young, but it was a bunch of very angry and hate-filled white people who were all about hellfire and brimstone and how you had to think exactly like them OR ELSE - and they talked about how terrible other people were. I thought this was an AoG, but I might have mis-remembered. I have also been, many times, to Southern Baptist and other evangelical "black" churches - and the thing is, that those people were always very nice to me, and always treated me like they were pleased to meet a new person and that my having a different upbringing or belief system was okay - and they were so happy that I was interested in seeing what they were all about, and they invited me to their homes for dinner, and never once tried to tell me I was going to hell or tried to convert me.

I was rather peeved today to see This video of McCain being an asshole while suggesting his wife participate in a "beauty contest" where the contestants have such things as a wet t-shirt contest and a pickle fellating contest. Guh. And if he has no problem standing next to his wife chuckling while a crowd is chanting "show us your boobs" then I am even more shocked by his choice in running mate.

And I think that Palin is a royally evil bitch. She betrays her own gender. She also seriously pisses me off from an environmental standpoint. And the way the far right is trying to spin her to make her seem like some miraculous wonder woman? DISGUSTING!

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

To me? Yes, assuming she means it metaphorically (all indications are that she does.) If she actually believes God talks to her personally, I might have a problem with that. I take it as unobjectionable and typical that evangelical Christians will use, with the same meaning, "a task from God" where I would say, "a task that we must, for good and moral reasons, do."

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I have been to a quasi-charismatic service at a traditionally black church, and it's nowhere near as creepy as her wing of AofG or the unaffiliated megachurches.

To give you an idea, excepting Pentecostal churches, at even TBC's known for their choirs and spirit, the calling back is just that, call and response (like the Ashrei or (very similarly) the overproduced Musaf Amidah my family's temple got into).

There's a difference, both stylistically and theologically, between prayers inspired by the divine from people who feel they are filled by "spirit", and prayers believed to be an actual response to the touch of good, and people who believe they, personally, are being caused to respond and act in certain ways. Among the many differences, the former allows one to believe that oneself is a member of a community, their house of worship a member of a community of such houses, and that their is no monopoly on style of prayer. The latter holds, as AofG/"Unaffiliated Evangelical" do, that anyone who prays or feels at all differently, has no relationship with God at all.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Baht Mitzvah: About 53 cents, American.

[fairest.livejournal.com]

Also, the term "pro-life" is bullshit.

I agree; I hate this terminology. I am perfectly in favor of life while being vehemently pro-choice.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Apologies, I haven't had cause to spell that since I was 13.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Ah, but there is a difference from saying "God gave us this task" if what she meant was "our faith calls us to do this." In the former, she presumes--whether she claims direct instruction or not--to speak for God, whereas the latter she takes her understanding of God and teachings of her church to emphasize what they, the congregation, should do. No one speaks for God, and everyone who infers that he/she does without immediately correcting his/herself and making sure that leap of hubris was understood to be misspoken is to be watched carefully (or avoided all together if possible).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's simple maths when you come down to it. Your average anti-choicer wants to take away money to help support poor women with children by slashing welfare, medicaid, and other public support programs. Well, that's fine--would they then allow women to abort so they don't need these programs? No. How about giving them access and information and even providing birth control? No. Could we teach them how to masturbate, since they can't have sex? No.

By the average anti-choicer's reckoning, anyone who doesn't want to have children shouldn't have sex (married or no because you better believe that married people aren't exempt from the no bc/no abortion/no welfare mandate). If they came right out and admitted that, people would finally see this for the house of horseshit it is.

[avram]

Thirteen-year-olds are a superstitious and cowardly lot....

Re: How 'bout these?

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

Don't forget wannabe book banner.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

You're forgetting this country was founded by people who thought that dancing was a mortal sin worthy of eternal damnation...

...i.e. most of the public that votes for these folks thinks that yeah, women shouldn't have any kind of sex outside of marriage. Within marriage it might be okay to enjoy it (say the progressive ones), but not too much, because then our girls might have sex, and our nation's glory rests on the intact hymens of our youth.

(Remember those Promise Party proms, where daddy takes his daughters and gets their chastity belts fitted?)

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

See I'm less concerned about her preacher, and more concerned about:

-creationism taught as a science
-her hypocrisy on earmarks (she was for the bridge before she was against it)
-the ethics investigation
-The ludicrous suggestion that even though female Hillary supporters disagree with her on every single policy issue, they should vote for her because it was all about having a woman in office

Re: How 'bout these?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You know about her line-item veto of finances for a home that helps shelter pregnant teenagers...

[happyelfling.livejournal.com]

well, i could make a thoughtful political comment about palin or something, OR i could just say that i met this Alaskan once at a bar, and she was CRAZY! true story.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, on that last one, a lot of women are balking at his choosing a woman for the vice presidential nomination because they suspect that that is why he chose her. So long as she was shooting double-Xes, she was good. I'm really surprised and impressed that the public at large doesn't seem to be fooled.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Alaskans are fun crazy, some of them. Like the guys jet-skiing at 10 pm at night because it was still light enough out in July to do so. Why not?

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

yeah... they're not at all the same thing... I would have never thought of the comparison on my own... wow...

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

Um, the style is most of every human interaction that isn't on two-dimensions. It's the difference between personal empowerment and mindless repressed fear. It's the basic concept behind metaphor. Denying it's impact is a great way to convince yourself of things that didn't actually happen.