Unhelpful

A week or so ago, I was thinking about a particularly amusing XKCD strip about Google search results in relation to a rather silly story about the Vatican suggesting that people consider give up text messaging for Lent.  This made me curious as to what the best hit for the phrase “Gave up x for Lent” where x is some traditional Lenten sacrifice, or an ironic statement about Lent, or just some terribly random thing.  I aimed for the funny, but actually ended up surprising myself.  Just a note, I searched for “gave up x for Lent” rather than “give up x for Lent” because I figured out of the two phrasings, the former was more likely to be a real (if funny) circumstance, or at least an honest observation, where as the latter would be slightly more likely to be someone trying to make a funny suggestion.

We’ll skip the lecture on the scientific approach to irony here.

Starting with the classics here, without much surprise.

More classics, but from my amazingly scientific poll, murder is easier to give up for 40 days than beating one’s wife.

The notion of “secular music” has always bothered me.  It passively carries this idea that there are two kinds of music; the Christian kind God likes (which is presumably gospel music praising Jesus as if one is a dog humping the leg of the almighty, and so-called “Christian Rock”) and the secular kind the Devil likes (which is everything that isn’t about God and Jesus, or if it is about God and Jesus, was created by a band who didn’t mean it enough for it to be “real” devotional music).  When you get into Christian rock genres, it gets really funny, particularly when the desired genre the group is playing in is a very aggressive one (Christian death metal and Christian black metal come to mind); the lyrics that you can’t understand are about how Christ is a great guy.  You can’t understand them still, but at least you know they’re praising Jesus, so that makes it acceptable.

Enter Whitehouse and Blackhouse.  Whitehouse is an extreme industrial noise group, and if that isn’t familiar territory to you, and you’re having visions of a Nine Inch Nails video, you’re on the wrong track.  Whitehouse is industrial noise in the original Throbbing Gristle sense of the phrase, often more accurately described as power electronics, and definitely not dance music.  This is a cult group that has limited appeal, and is comfortable with that fact.  They probably sell 2,000 albums in a good year.

All of this presumably sounded really good to a certain Christian who decided to form his own band, and wear his noise flag proudly, calling himself Blackhouse.  This is the same idea as Whitehouse but presumably whose unintelligible vocals are less about violence and abuse, and instead are more about Jesus and Jesus.  And hope.  What do you get when you have a niche band band modeled after a niche band who sells a few thousand albums a year?  Ironically, what you get is extremely good.  I also would have accepted “sales figures in the dozens in a good year”.

Straightforward modern popular devotional music, however, has a specific audience in mind.  This isn’t like the days of the master composers of the Baroque period where their audience was so predominantly Christian that the question as to whether it was Christian music wasn’t just an intellectual diversion, it didn’t even make sense in the historical context to ask the question in the first place.  These are the days when Christian music means commercial music marketed to a Christian audience.  Like any other kind of music with a public following, it is a commercial, financial endeavor, as well as an artistic one.  It’s one thing, however, to have a Gospel band whose variety of music doesn’t really exist outside a devotional context—there aren’t any Gospel albums that aren’t about faith and spirituality, after all—and it is quite another to specifically brand your music as being just like {rock|heavy metal|boy bands|insert genre here} but different because you are talking about Jesus and are therefore more acceptable to your audience and more typically, your audience’s parents who might be concerned with the drugs and sex antics of secular rock stars.  After all, Christian rockers just don’t do that.  It’s crass market manipulation at best.

I’m going to borrow a few lines from the Flaming Lips when they were at their weirdest.  “This man came up to me just the other day / he asked me if I’d been born again / I told him I didn’t think I had / that I had been rejected / but I think hell’s got all the good bands anyway”

Back to the matter at hand…

Growing up in Michigan, the typical word for a non-specific cola was “pop”.  It’s one of those words that really marks your speech.  The next biggest speech markers for this area of Michigan (this is southern Michigan, not the Upper Peninsula, whose caricatured speech I have never heard natively, and I can only assume is gross exaggeration) is probably the unstressed vowel sound (phonetically marked by a schwa symbol, ə) in the word “to”, which ends up sounding like a quickly spoken “tuh” or “teh”.  To put it another way, “We went tə the store.”  It’s usually very subtle.

“Pop”, however, is the big one, which if you can get over it, you’ve pretty much got your neutral “newscaster English” delivery.  It’s compounded by the fact that there are a lot other regional speeches severely marked by their words for non-specific colas.  When I first left Michigan during my service with the Air Force, I went briefly to Texas and Mississippi, and then longer-term to England.  “Pop” immediately sounds like an affectation in that context, which is particularly funny because it’s not affectation, and the best way to get over it is to use “soda” or “cola” which is a very conscious affectation itself.  Best of all, one can just avoid the non-specific form and just refer specifically to a Coke…

…unless you’re in the American Deep South.  Then you’re using the non-specific form, which is ambiguous unless you’re particularly good at speaking with a capital letter.

One of the more common Lenten sacrifices is the eating of meat.  In modern times, this almost always means mutton and beef, often pork, and almost never includes fish and shellfish.  This is where things get very dicey for anyone looking for even a modicum of consistency.  During the turn of the 7th century, Pope Gregory I declared laurices to a marine species, and therefore acceptable for consumption during Lent.  Though it may come as a shock to modern anti-abortion Catholics, a laurice is a rabbit either removed from its mother’s body as a foetus, or a very-newly-born pup.  Like all human endeavors, religion is satisfyingly full of ironies.  In Scandinavia and Germany, beaver tails were also considered fish, possibly on the merits of the fact that they look a bit like a flatfish, but more likely as a compromise to keep Lenten observance a fast rather than an exercise in starvation.

As superficially funny as the idea of giving up religion for Lent is, there’s really something to it.  Lenten observance is one of the most transparently extra-Biblical practices that still holds sway with many Protestants and most Catholics.  Unlike the problem of theodicy, it doesn’t take logic or even a familiarity with the norms of rhetoric to see through to how Lent isn’t a practice ordained by the New Testament Bible, but is a function of human tradition.  Sadly, however, when you give up science for Lent, you still have to pay your utility bills and put gas in your tank, because the physical world doesn’t run on faith.  Try using it to move a mountain all you want.

Seriously, Catholic schoolgirls?  Bravo, we salute your continued dedication to making the internet a little hotter.

X.  Do you see what I did there?

Until there’s yet another ridiculous news story about the latest buyout offer Yahoo’s founder has turned down, I resolve to forget Yahoo exists.  This is a very easy resolution, since it’s pretty much my default state; the only place I see Yahoo is in search engine results for Associated Press stories (which you can get anywhere), or on the default pages of some of my customers’ browsers at their offices.  They were once the leaders of the mediated search market, and now, they’re Google for those people who aren’t computer savvy enough to know that there is more than one search engine, or that you can change your browser’s start page.  Nobody has to “give up” Yahoo, because even people who use it don’t find it compelling.  And they’re certainly not using it as source material for any search engine related commentary.

That this is where I would end up is probably as obvious to most readers as it was to me.  What I found genuinely surprising is that so many other people ended up here, too.  It’s kind of sad that it takes something as patently ridiculous as Lent for people to realize that Christianity and the Catholic church are such fallible (and failed) institutions.  All this is right there for anyone to read, and they don’t need to take Richard Dawkins’ or Thomas Paine’s word for it.  They just have to read the document itself, and its flaws and its humanity are on display without mediation.  All it takes is the realization that you can’t justify the document with itself, which is to say, you can’t use the circular argument “The Bible is the word of God.  I know that God exists because it’s in the Bible”, as that is a meaningless statement.  Faith is always a distant kin to fact, and those people who actually do believe they have physically seen or heard God in their own life (and I mean literally, not in some pseudo Protestant hippy pantheist “he is everywhere and he loves you” pap) don’t hear God speaking from a burning bush or shouting out of their radio and then proclaim the strength of their faith as the source of their knowledge; they don’t need it when they have “real” evidence.  Be it the burning bush, the radio, the fossils of human footprints near dinosaur remains (however incorrectly interpreted), numerology (the Number of the Beast as applying to pretty much every US and Soviet and Russian leader since Richard Nixon) or the image of Christ on a piece of toast; faith is always trumped by evidence, except for those poor souls (read: the vast majority of believers) who only have their faith. Fortunately for the faithful, those who do have evidence are generally insane, and they should be grateful to lack first-hand “evidence” in particular.

Unfortunately for the faithful, once you play in the realm of evidence, religion is in a pitched battle:  and losing.

Give up your faith for Lent.