Mia Fioritto’s Weblog
Archive for February, 2008
February 28, 2008 at 10:21 am · Filed under General
Last night, I had the strangest dream…
I dreamt that a loud cooing noise, like a pigeon kept waking me up. After waking up several times and getting pretty agitated, I went to the window to see what was making such an annoying noise. After rattling the blinds a few times and banging on the window, I came face to face with a very angry owl. Now at this point in the dream the owl looked pretty normal, but the angrier it got, the wider it’s eyes became and their pupils shrank into cat-like slits. As it’s eyes merged into one very angry eye it dive bombed me, and that, of course, is when I woke up.
The owl went away, but the cooing did not.
(Seriously, there are pigeons roosting outside our house…I am going crazy.)
February 6, 2008 at 11:31 am · Filed under General
Elizabeth’s response to my post, On Faith, Fear and Public Discourse, left us with these questions:
“…would it not be an easier tolerance to just stay away from those subjects? Not have the conversations that you know will not end in consensus? Or, conversely, if everyone knows going in to the discussion that no consensus will be reached, why do we get upset when consensus isn’t reached?”
Which got me thinking about why people feel so compelled to talk about their beliefs, whether it is their belief in God or in the New York Giants. I see it two ways:
1. I talk about my faith because it is the most important and most wonderful thing in my life. Because it is so wonderful, I really, really want everyone in my life to experience the joy it brings.
2. Belief is about how we experience life rather than how we analyze it. As Elizabeth put it, you don’t believe or disbelieve in the existence of God based on some rational argument. In your experience, God is there or He isn’t. Telling someone that the life they are living isn’t real is absolutely aggravating. I mean, it’s like telling them they don’t exist. We assert our beliefs because it is our way of saying, “here I am, I am real, and this is who I am.” When you cross the line between knowledge and experience, telling a person what is real or right becomes a direct comment on who they are–and that is tough to swallow no matter how nicely it is said.
February 5, 2008 at 10:52 am · Filed under General
I think that what all of this really comes down to is that perhaps we have let ourselves fixate too much as a society on this nebulous idea of cultural tolerance when, really, God has given us all of the information we need to create ’safe spaces’.
“You don’t stop thinking just because you believe in God–you just start thinking differently.”
Namely, you start to see the world from the perspective of its creator, and when you do that you cannot possible doubt that all of God’s creation, no matter how wrong or depraved, should and must be loved. Not tolerated, loved.
As Christians, we need to fully grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” and then do our very best to love people with Christ’s love, not our own limited imitation of it.
February 4, 2008 at 4:55 pm · Filed under General, Personal reflection
Ryan posted recently on the heavy handed and pervasive criticism a good number of people seem to have of subjectivity, specifically when it stems from personal faith. One of the main goals of a liberal arts education is to give students the information and reasoning skills they need to recognize the impact society has on our interpretation of ‘the facts’. The goal being to empower us to think, to create, and to live independently–intentionally choosing how we see and react to the world . If people cannot separate what is real from what they are told is real, they have no autonomy. Indeed, this is why a genuinely free press is so important to a functioning democracy. In order for the government to be truly representative, its constituents must be given the opportunity and the means to decide for themselves what is good and right and just.
Unfortunately, many times in the past, religion has been leveraged to manipulate the masses, so to speak, and the gospel has been used as propaganda to promote unspeakable acts. And so, people are afraid of religion. I say that what we should be afraid of is not religion, but the selfish and sometimes hateful desires and impulses we discover in ourselves and in others when we feel un-reproachable–unstoppable. For some, violence creates a sense of control, for others, religion provides this sense of power. This is why people are abused. This how genocide begins.
Some might say that if religion is used to justify these acts, than it should be simply be done away with. They’re wrong. If it isn’t religion, it’s politics. If it isn’t politics, it’s race. If it isn’t race, it’s gender. People will always find a way to justify their actions and to come out on top. Yes, religion causes people to put their belief in and obedience to God before others, but the result of this is not mindlessness or selfishness. Religion has been successfully used to manipulate people because they were already mindless or selfish; it does not create these qualities.
You don’t stop thinking just because you believe in God–you just start thinking differently. Asking someone to leave their faith at the door, whether that faith is in Christ or Buddah or capitalism, is an impossible request with dubious motivations. I have learned that the more adamant a person is about cultural tolerance, the more likely it is that they fear cultural difference.
It’s time that Christians stopped apologizing for the state of man and started showing the world the transforming power of Christ.
February 3, 2008 at 1:02 am · Filed under General
An excerpt from my personal statement:
“Living compassionately is harder than one might think, largely because in the course of our lives many of the people we impact are seemingly unconnected to us. I am fascinated by the legal system because it brings to light these unseen connections. Jane Addams said that “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” I completely agree with Ms. Addams and believe that the role of the legal system in actualizing “our common life” is absolutely crucial to ‘securing the good’ for society. Recognizing this relationship between law and social change as an undergraduate stopped me in my tracks and took me down a path I had never imagined traveling.”
…that path being law school, of course. I promise to write a real post soon…apologies to all for my negligence.
