God and Country Index

God and Country

Explaining the wow

My partner Eric Olsen, proprietor and Dear Leader of Blogcritics was chatting religion with me once, and said something that indicated he got me. "Al, you're very religious. You just don't happen to believe." Exactly. I was ordained in the Universal Life Church many years ago, and in my own way take that mission fairly seriously. Without going too far into it, I would describe myself specifically as a minister rather than as a preacher, though.

Also though, I would be loathe to describe myself as "spiritual" rather than religious. That strikes me as a cheap and cheesy way of puffing up one's own ego. It would just seem petty and dumb to treat the mysteries of life as merely an excuse to stroke my petty vanity. That's what my blog is for.

So where does that leave a minister without faith, a non-spiritual religious non-believing doubting Thomas? Damned if I know, frankly. Still I'm constantly struck by these things outside the world of our day to day material existence, a complicated and mysterious "wow" I often feel.

Here then are some of my modest efforts towards getting a grip on some little corner of this, my attempts at grappling with morality, responsibility ("Thou art God" as Valentine Michael Smith would say) and explaining the "wow."

Brother Eugene Kemple - Model Christian

I Was a Teenage Cult Leader

Al's Got a Message From God

Anthony Flew Accepts God?!

Dr Gene Scott 1929 -2005

Ptolemy, Manbearpig, Global Warming and Epistemological Humility

God loves ugly people

I shot a family member today

Priests, thugs, and eight circuit mammalian biology

Mel Gibson, Christians and Jews

Gimme that old time religion

The Miracle of Fatima

Judge forbids Wiccan parents from teaching "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals"

San Francisco Board of Supervisors vs the First Amendment

Doing your Godly duty: Cats need killed

Torture is bad, m'kay? Still...

BATF Lambs of God

Five Blind Men and an Elephant - the Discordian version

KY jelly for the Baptists?

Gratitude

Fit to Meet My Maker

A Satanic photo gallery

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In 1986 and 1987 I wrote a weekly column for the Ball State Daily News, the student paper. I called it God and Country. I wrote in character as a fundamentalist Christian, based on the frequently repeated and explicit premise that if you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of a living God, you have to say certain things based on what is actually in the book. Words have meanings.

Now, I want to be straight. I wasn't trying to play gotcha, taking a single verse or turn of phrase and twisting it all out of proportion just to make Christians look silly. No, I wanted to get at real, basic issues about men and women, and authority and all those big things. What does the Bible really mean based on just what it says? Give some room for not necessarily taking absolutely every comment literally, but some patterns of meaning become pretty clear. They meant SOMETHING when they wrote the books.

I generated rather a furor. The Daily News apparently got literally thousands of letters, pre email actual letters mostly hand delivered to the office. Perhaps as many as 20% were positive. Others were less than kind. In fairness to my critics, they just had the columns to judge, without benefit of any explanatory note such as you're getting here. The editors for some reason never clear denied my proposal from the beginning to put a little box with a brief explanatory disclaimer. Then finally Robyn Rogers, the less than genius student editor, made a lame explanation that "Barger is NOT SERIOUS." I sure got her words shoved up in me. Yet I was- although perhaps in a somewhat backwards way- perfectly serious.

I ended up publishing seven action packed columns before being very publicly fired, and formally denounced in print by Ball State University President John Worthen, who wrote that my column was "not in keeping with the ideals and goals to which Ball State University aspires." As you might imagine, that Worthen column rates as perhaps the single greatest honor of my college career.

This phenomenon was the centerpiece of my higher education, so I got a million stories to tell about this stuff. Let's just get up the basic documents. I've re-typed them rather than make you read them from microfilmed copies. For historical continuity, I've retained the editor-composed headlines.

Column 1: Alcohol puts conscience on holiday

Column 2: Christians who believe in Biblical truth must also believe in women's inferiority

Column 3: Beliefs should be followed or rejected

Column 4: Empirical arguments only lead to breakdown of faith

Column 5: Government ordained by God

Column 6: Freedom to do good greater than political freedom

Column 7: True Christians shouldn't support Christ's enemies Second thoughts on Christians and Jews

Letters to the editor about God and Country

Anti-Al editorial cartoon

Daily News editors explain Al

Brother Al live

Brother Al fired