Universalism

I was linkhopping, as you do, and saw this entry about this guy who has got a bunch of fundamentalists in a twist because he's written a book presumably preaching a message of Universalism.

And, I think, maybe, this has given me a balm for my mind that I wasn't entirely aware that I needed.

See, since American Unitarian Universalism has stopped defining itself as a Christian church (and by Christian, I don't mean to say that they were operating in a creedal or dogmatic way, but more in a sense of shared context, there's been some question as to what the shared context that we have is. (Or, okay, maybe other people haven't felt that there's been that seeking, but even in the materials presented to visitors, I get a subtext of a seeking for community definition.) I mean, there are the seven principles, but they're a very short statement on which to build a religious community.

For a lot of UUs and a lot of congregations, the context found has been social justice.

And, don't get me wrong, I think social justice is good, but there's been, for me, individually, a sort of tumble of thoughts along the lines: I want to go to church to be a better person; people who are better than me do social justice work, so even if I'm not "feeling it" I should get involved (on a "fake it until you make it" theory); but how does doing social justice actually make me the sort of person who internally has right thoughts and feelings and defaults to right actions, which is what I want to go to church for?; so maybe I should do some reading or study or meditation to get those right thoughts/feelings/actions going; at which point, spurred by my new right thoughts, I will "feel it" and naturally leap into social justice work; except that I deeply suspect that my urge to study instead of do work is a combination of laziness and missing taking classes.

At which my point my brain sort of retreats from the whirl of thoughts in a tizzy and I pull out a romance novel on my phone.

But this video, and the Universalist impulse in general short circuits my tizzy, because if I believe in Universalism [not in the sense of believing in an awesome afterlife (I tend to come down on Dead is Dead, and if you remember lights or something while your heart stopped, this is lingering electrical noise, not another plane of existence) but more in the sense that everyone deserves Heaven on Earth or a good life in the Here & Now] then it is my responsibility to make that happen, because clearly the universe does not arrange itself in such a fashion by happenstance: witness everything ever everywhere. And the important part for me isn't that I didn't think working for social justice was good before, but it makes me feel a theological basis for doing things in a way that I didn't feel connected to before.

Also, the video is pretty and I think it uses Explosions in the Sky for the soundtrack.

Book won in contest review: Sinful Harvest

From time to time, collectives of book writers organize blog tours, and often in the blog tours, an author will give away copies of their books. I won Anitra Lynn McLeod's Sinful Harvest, and I've been chewing over it for a while.

1) The consensual, personal sex in the book is very hot. The writing combines evocative description of physical sensations with a very solid grounding in the emotional perspectives and histories of the protagonist, so that you get a sense of why these scenarios are hot for them, and, in turn, hot for you as a reader.

2) The worldbuilding is not very good. Now, this is the third book in a series which I have never read before, so it's possible that all of the heavy lifting was done in the previous two books. I find that doubtful, though. The culture the book is set in is one which appears to be religiously dominated, with a religion whose major deity requires sexual worship and where reaching adulthood is signaled by a ritual deflowering by venerated Harvesters, but which is also very sex-negative and regards sex between the Harvesters at the wrong time as sinful and sex between post-pubescent, un-Harvested adults as sinful as well. It is not clear to me how those things are related, why sex is wrong for those people when sex is clearly a tool of worship. It doesn't seem like sexual purity is a controlling proxy for property ownership, it doesn't seem like sex itself is seen as having magical properties of some kind. Except that, actually, three-quarters of the way through the book it's established that the gods actually do exist and can enter the minds of regular human beings. However, despite the fact that gods can interact with humans, they appear to do it sufficiently rarely that (a) human beings are largely ignorant/uncaring about the reactions of gods to their behavior but (b) not shocked when one of those rare takeovers begin.

Also, this world is a backwater in the galaxy, where interstellar flight is commerce and interstellar travel takes place. I can't figure out why we bother to have interstellar contact for the purposes of this series. At least in book three, the wider galaxy is mostly just a place where the hero could run away to and escape his responsibilities before the start of the book. I don't have a clear idea of what the difference between a backwater planet and a sophisticated one is, and why the world where the story takes place is a backwater, if most planets are backwaters with just a few being central planets, or if it's unusual to have a hick planet.

Finally, the gods interact with the sex-negative culture such that there are several non-consensual sex acts depicted, and these are not hot, largely because the empathy with the protagonists was written sufficiently strongly that I empathize with their horror instead of enjoying a rape fantasy or rapist fantasy. And this made me grumpy while reading, because I couldn't figure out why the book I was reading had this deeply sex-negative thread in it. I kept reading to the end, hoping I would figure out what about the story lead to this structure, but it never resolved in a way that I found coherent.

Overall, this had some good porn, but I didn't enjoy it as either a romance or a science-fiction novel. :(