I had the day off to visit the chiropractor regarding my headaches and discovered the return of an old acquaintance from 2000.

That was the year I was struck by a drunk driver and thrown off from my motorcycle while it was stopped at a traffic light. For the most part the injuries have subsided but every now and then a reminder from that time returns in the form of neck pains, headaches, numbness in the arms, random pain. They gave me money in the settlement but I would rather have never been there in the first place and avoided all of this.

Anyway, it looks like aspirin and ice packs on the neck with special exercises for a while to get all of this under control. It also means an extra wide strap for my mandolin and a reminder for me every time I look at a motorcycle with that old familiar longing.

The day after Christmas I began to have headaches, migraine type headaches, and off and on they’ve been with me since then with the added touch of nausea and dizziness. At first I thought it was about a change in diet and then perhaps about a side affect of medication. Not so, apparently, as I’ve made the investigatory changes and the headaches continue. Tomorrow I’ll be off from work and visiting various medical folks to check up on things.

This is not the first time I’ve had a series of headaches. In 2000 I was on a motorcycle at a stop light and a drunken driver hit me and sent me to the pavement. On occasion after that I’ve had times when a cluster of headaches has hit and I either ride it out or go to the chiropractor and get my neck adjusted. Perhaps this is another of these times.

Regardless tomorrow will be a day of rest, a sabbath for someone who should probably have a few more of them. I need it to find out what’s making my head hurt and get some rest.

These are the images, published some time ago in Denmark that have spawned riots around the world and have at least one person in Canada brought before a “human rights tribunal” in Alberta for publishing them. People have died because of these images. In some places in the world I could be killed simply for posting them.

Christians around the world, of course, will be suprised at how tame these pictures actually are compared to the constant barrage of pornographic images of Christ and Christianity regularly presented in all kinds of media and sometimes supported by government agencies funding the “arts”. Caricatures of Christians, obscene works of art based on Christian themes, jokes and put downs directed at things we as Christians hold sacred are more common then ever and in certain parts of our culture are considered evidence of spohistication and educated cynicism.

So why did I post those pictures?

I don’t hate Muslims. I disagree with some of the claims of Islam but I don’t hate those who practice the faith and have interacted with Muslims all my life without incident. I plan to keep it that way. This is America and people have the right to practice any religion or none and to convince others, if they can, to do the same. This is how it should be in all the world.

And part of that freedom is that sometimes faith is ridiculed and people and things close to us are held up to critique and mockery. I don’t enjoy it when people say ridiculous things about Jesus and make fun of my Savior. It hurts. But the freedom that allows this to happen is still important. For every unkind word said about Jesus I can counter because I have the freedom to speak a rebuttal. Freedom is messy sometimes, rough and tumble, and people and feeling get damaged. Outrages happen and we all, in some ways, have to swallow and take it for the sake of the larger principle. Frankly, as well, there are times when our critics are actually more honest about us then we are and their arrows stick in us because they reflect a truth we’d rather not see. But even if they’re just malicious fools I’d still rather put up with them and preserve basic freedom then live in a world where only one idea was allowed and all dissent was crushed. After all, no one is ever in charge of anything forever, and today’s emperor is tomorrow’s slave.

Now I would like to speak to those who are Muslim and may view this blog from places around the world. You may be very offended by those pictures or you may care less. But to be in a free society means that you’ll sometimes have to face uncomfortable things. Freedom comes with the risk of being offended, sometimes daily, and sometimes by people who are just doing it because they get their kicks that way.

But it’s still good to be free. We have discovered in this country that faith unconstrained by the state is actually deeper and more fervent then faith coerced by the authorities or maintained by social fear. People in this country, with all its faults, still have the right to choose their belief and because they do its often more precious to them because it belongs to them by a commitment of their will.

Yet in some places in the world there are people who want to control you, to gain power and influence by pandering to your basest fears, by exagerating and demagoguing and playing your emotions so they will have what they crave. It happens everywhere, even among Christians, but right now in the Islamic world they have, in some places, tremendous authority. They want to rule you and use your faith as a tool to bend you towards their dreams. And you have a choice to make.

If you are confident in your faith and its values then all the critique in the world, whether justified or not, won’t make a difference, in fact it can’t make a difference. You may not like the pictures I’ve posted any more than I would enjoy looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary covered with feces but the truth is that such a thing has no effect on my faith, not even a bit, and never will, and I refuse to give power to any man who would use such a thing for his own aggrandizement.

If you truly believe that Mohammed was a prophet of God then what difference does what some person puts in a paper make in relation to that belief? Does it change it? Is he less of who you believe he is simply because somebody drew a cartoon image of him? Is the deepest belief of your heart so flimsy that one man in Denmark can unsettle it? What could that man do that would threaten God? And what idolatry is it to give him that power by virtue of your response?

The truth is that you and I and every person of faith can choose what we do when faced with provocative, even offensive, words, images, and ideas directed at us and at our God. And when you or I or anyone else succumbs to violence we reveal that our faith is shallow, our belief brittle, and our actions unworthy of the higher good we claim to seek in our faith. In fact the person who makes such scandalous things actually achieves victory because of our reaction.

Right now its a pretty chaotic world out there and we’re in desperate need of clearer and calmer heads to keep us from turning our earth into a never ending conflagration. We will probably never agree on the details of theology, but if we do agree, whatever faith we have, to not give way to our darker sides, even if provoked, we will go a long way towards making the peace and sending those whould manipulate us for their own ends into history’s rubbish.

From the Greek Archdiocese, a list of resources for people seeking help dealing with pornography.

My “other” work, as it were, is in the health care field providing services to seniors in an assisted living setting. It’s a largely matriarchal culture and so the odd male working in my field gets some real insight into the lives of women as we spend the greater portion of our day in and among them.

Now I may be getting skewed feedback but it seems like its an emotional, physical, and spiritual minefield out there for the single woman living in this time and place. The need seems to have remained the same over time, to be authentically loved and give love in return. The achieving of that ideal, though, seems ever more elusive because the rules have changed and women seem to be getting the short end of it.

I wonder about the cause of it all sometimes. Is it feminism gone awry? Moral decline leading to an “everyone for themselves” attitude that leaves women more vulnerable? Some other thing that I can’t possibly know because I’m a male? I wish I knew for sure.

What seems to be happening, though, at least from my point of view is a kind of “Hugh Hefner has hijacked the women’s movement” sort of thing. Let me explain. It seems like today’s women have been indoctrinated into the idea that sluttiness is part of being equal with men. Casual sex, with all its potential physical, emotional, and spiritual harms, seems to be part of the required items women must carry in their portfolio. Now please understand that casual sex is dangerous for men as well, but men don’t get pregnant, and men give more than they get with women in the STD arena, and let’s not even get into heartbreak.

Women are looking for real love but the prevailing cultural ethos of easy sexuality and its demands that women emulate all of their male counterparts worst attributes in this makes war against that basic hunger. Putting out is expected and right now there are millions of women all over the country on their backs hoping that the guy on top of them may the one, or perhaps they’ve already just given up and hope he’s good for whatever they need for the moment. The result always seems to be the same, women growing cynical and bitter about men, the natural and created complement of the genders poisoned by repeated let downs. Women who want to love men and be loved by them start to think of them as jerks looking for nothing more than a place to get off.

We, and especially women, have been lied to. We’ve been given an image of our sexuality and how we are to relate to each other as men and women that is literally killing us body and soul. The bill of goods we’ve been sold has not produced what we deeply desire, true love and has given us a hellish oversupply of what we do not need, heartache, loneliness, illness, and just plain messed up lives.

What to do?

At this point I suppose the reader is looking for a brief lecture on a return to Christian values in love and marriage. That would be a good place to get to, the destination of it all. But I think first a revolution is in order, a revolution led by women. Behind the scenes, out of the sex obsessed media’s eye there are growing number of women who realize that something is dreadfully wrong and in their pain are having their eyes opened to the great lies of our time. Somewhere along the line those small fires will kindle into a conflagration and more and more women, even if its just for the sake of avoiding disease and emotional destruction, will begin to say “I want love, the real thing, the kind that respects my dignity and reflects more of the great human desire for two souls merging and a whole lot less of our society’s vision of two people bumping in the night. I want someone to know me in every real sense before they “know” me in the Biblical one. I want men to see me for everything I am and not just as the life support system for my genitals. And I’m not going to be lied to again.”

And when women want, yes even demand something better and refuse to accept anything less men will follow. We may howl and protest at the dying of a falsehood that allowed us easy access to unconditional orgasms via women conditioned to believe that being a whore was being liberated, but we will follow. When women in large numbers demand higher standards from men they will get them.

You see men desire real love as well. We, too, are caught up in the endless cycle of one nighters, victims of the cynicism and jaded reflexes that so characterize the relationships between the sexes. We may not know because we’ve bought into the whole thing even more then most women have, but somewhere inside of us we know something is really messed up about the way things are and we need some help, your help, finding our way back.

“Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.” – The New Name, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917

This is why you should read Chesterton, if you haven’t already.

From Canada’s National Post.

An article on Christianity, Islam, and Britain.