Maybe I’m too empathic but I read a bunch of blogs and books by solidly conservative Christians, then a bunch of stuff by liberal Christians, and I agree with most of the viewpoints and their respective justifications. To put it another way, I find that I fully agree with many opposing viewpoints within the Christian world.

I know it’s a paradox to think like this, but after all, love (which is the very nature of God, although God’s idea of love is often contrary to our ideas of what the love of God should look like) is the most paradoxical thing ever. It’s like Calvinism vs. Arminianism.

In general, opposing viewpoints within Christian theology seem this way: One side puts the defense of truth above all. The other side puts love above all. Both sides have lots of Bible passages to point to. Both sides can dissect the text and individual words in the original language to make it mean what they want it to mean. Both sides have intellectuals, scholars, pastors, enough wood pulp to choke a million hedgehogs, enough hot air to fly to the moon and back. And I see all this, and reflect that this is why we can’t get along. The problem is that people are arguing about the nature of God. The problem is that we can only know so much at one time. I think it’s the same situation that scientists experience when they are forced to choose between observing one or the other variable, but not both at the same time, since that is not possible. It just isn’t possible to see the whole. We only see one part, and then the other.

What is God to us, really? What exactly does God mean when he says this and that in the Bible? It’s as if the serpent in the garden is whispering, “Did God really say…?” It’s as if the church is a bunch of blind men trying to come to conclusions about an elephant that no one of them can fully comprehend.

This is why we attend different worship services. This is why we pretend to be separate, avoiding one another, acting as if we don’t care about each other, because it’s easier to pretend that we are a part of a little group of fake people who all agree with everything that everybody else agrees with even if it is only for the sake of faking love, that is, creating the appearance of peaceful interpersonal relations. when we all know that isn’t the case at all. We simply prefer to do our arguing behind walls and closed doors, out of sight of the masses, or even of our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. The politics of the Christian church have become a battleground for proud people to assert their power over other people. Bullies abound in the absence of faith, and money screams to be heard and will not be ignored. Hence the rise of the absurdity known as the “megachurch” and the abomination known as the “prosperity gospel”.

Everybody wants to believe that “indulgences” really do work! I’ll put money in a plate, sign up to give away my life savings, anything at all if only I don’t have to read the Bible for myself and have a personal intimate relationship with Jesus because I’m not willing to make myself that vulnerable to God’s criticism. So I’ll let the hotshot preachers figure it out and I’ll take their word for it and I’ll put my money in the plate and God will understand and He will bless me. (sarcasm)

Reading the Bible is so much fun! I love contemplating the mysteries of my Creator and Savior and learning more about God! I think I’ve learned more practical knowledge in the past few weeks by reading the Bible ravenously than I have from attending many many Sunday School classes and Bible studies and “self-help” sorts of studies held in church buildings. As I read the Bible I understood more fully the nature of God and salvation, and my faith increased and I wanted to read the Bible more, and God and Jesus have begun to make their home in my mind as the most real of all possible realities, not an America-shaped Jesus, but the Jesus of the Bible, the one who doesn’t need us to defend him with “reason” or “logic” because his word cuts sharper than a sword. He is the one who dies for His friends whom He loves more than His own life. And the moral is this: we remember what we want to remember, and going to a stable of race horses every Sunday doesn’t make you a race horse.

I can’t emphasize this enough. If you want to have a reason to believe in God and Jesus and all that, then read the Bible and ask God to help you understand it. Read and read and read. No, seriously. Christian music, no matter how pious it makes you feel or how trendy the lyrics are, is not going to cut it. Music is nice. Social networking is nice. Technology is nice. A lot of nice things interfere with the silent contemplation that is so vital to reading and understanding God’s Word. Read Christian books and blogs. Stuff your mind with the Word of God and the things of this earth will begin to look strangely dim when compared to the glory of God.

I see not hellfire, but an all consuming fire– the earth and the heavens awash in flame, the elements melting.

And to think, that so many Christians buy into the latest conference, or study, or retreat, or series of speakers, and think that God is gonna work in their lives because they spent a lot of money and parked their car in a crowded lot and sat in a stadium or stood up singing the songs. Of course God is gonna work wherever His Word is proclaimed, even if it is at a conference or seminar– but why not read the Bible for yourself at every opportunity? If you need a practical reason to do so, remember that it will save you money in the long run– money that would otherwise go to maintenance of buildings and paying middlemen who peddle messages for profit.

Salesmen aren’t only in it for the money, you know. They’re also in it for the thrill they get when they rip someone off. When you measure your eternal worth in dollars and cents and technological wonders, you tend to believe that you need an accountant to figure it out for you.

How much better it would be, I think, if we could talk honestly about our differences, as if they really mattered, and still show that we have the capacity to love one another as if the differences didn’t matter, because God drew us out of the world to Himself and who knows why He did that?

They lived so close to death, in those barbaric days of gladiators and slaves pit to fight wild beasts for the entertainment of the leering masses, ravenous for violence, and Caesar like a crown of gluttony atop the whole stinking pile of human corpses. That’s your human world for you. Everything made by humans is built atop someone else’s dead body. One faction asserting triumph and power over another. One denomination fighting to wipe all others off the map. And they still wonder why old people make the decisions that send youths to their deaths in foreign lands?

They did explain one thing– NPCs and I assume the real people as well sleep in dorms at night. I guess they didn’t pay as much attention to it as I would have liked. Angel’s room is the only one that gets any attention at all throughout the series.

Episode 12 ended in a philosophical conversation in a room lined with stacks of computers and monitors that immediately reminded me of the latter episodes of Serial Experiments Lain. Apparently, the world is Matrix-esque, but we should have already guessed that from the many 0′s and 1′s that flutter about whenever something created by a computer program receives interference from the real world. It reminded me of Neo talking/interfacing with the Deux Ex Machine.

As I kind of expected, the creator of everything– actually, it is more accurate to say “the creator of the program that allows for the modification and control of everything in the world” (aka god-powers)– is somebody whose name is now forgotten who had some kind of a personal problem (involving love, it sounds like) and as a result programmed the world in an attempt to ensure that this problem would never happen again. But it did, and that’s what he could not have foreseen. To me, it’s kind of a cop-out to say that God set the world in motion then left it for sunnier shores. It’s kind of disappointing because in the end Yuri didn’t get to meet with God… she only got to meet with the avatar that God left behind, the NPC guardian of the computer systems designed to destroy the persistence of love, because if love were allowed to persist, the world would become an eternal paradise for all.

In a way, the creator of the Angel program was the same as Yuri, a person who hated the system because it was unfair, a person who hated God (if He even existed) for making the system in that way. But Yuri, when confronted with the choice of taking control of the world and taking the throne of “God”, chose a different path. She chose to honor the trust of her friends by killing “God”. This involved destroying the computers that held the modification program, thus ensuring that the world would forever be unchained from those limitations.

The Christian imagery was really heavy. The topic of rebirth comes up– how one wishes to be reborn so that one might experience life afresh with a different, better attitude — but along with rebirth comes the realization that you will never be “yourself” again. Instead you will blossom into somebody else, somebody who may turn out very differently from the “you” you are comfortable with, the “you” that you now know. In much the same way, I note that Christians believe the Kingdom of Heaven is already here (in the flesh, so to speak), like leafy tendrils sprouting up from the ground that have yet to bud and blossom, like a bit of yeast that is currently being mixed into the giant lump of bread dough that is our world, and when the yeast is fully integrated into the dough… the bread will rise, and the rise will be rapid, and the change that has been happening slowly for hundreds of years now will suddenly be apparent to all. In the same way that trumpets announce the arrival of a king, the world will announce the fact that God is back on earth, and this time to stay, to live with humanity forever. If God is good and love (and He is) then God will grant us the desires of our hearts, but if we are reborn into his chosen family, our hearts’ desires will naturally be different from the ones we had before. True happiness is found in proper relationship with God. When the relationship is one of indifference, God lets us have our desires… and what we want leads to death because our hearts are deceitful and selfish, and God is not. God can’t accept people who refuse to always love. I praise God that when he looks at me he sees the sacrifice of Jesus, who was perfect.

Yuri lets go of her hatred of God, and when she does so, she finds herself in an astonishingly good dream from which she wakes up, reborn, in a sunny room in the school hospital bed with her friends standing watch over her.

More than you'll ever know, Mugi.

Problem is, the talent show takes place right after finals. Is it possible for Yui to both study and practice guitar? Of course not! But with the help of friends, anything is possible.

This explains so much.

Yui plans to put on a solo performance at the talent show. Azusa offers to help Yui out. Azusa creates a strict daily schedule for Yui to follow, and even helps Yui study for her finals.

That's because you are a very strange person, Ui.

With a plan and structure to her life, Yui is now able to succeed both musically and in her studies. She protests the lack of “snack time” on the schedule Azusa made, but manages to get around that limitation because granny keeps giving tasty food to her.

Azusa demands decisiveness.

Yui is reminded of what the granny told her.

It's what old people like.

FUWA FUWA ENKA VERSION!

Yui is confident that Azusa can do enka too! But it doesn't work.

One of the most awesome moments this season is Yui and Azusa singing “Fuwa Fuwa Time” enka (“old person”) style. Now I want to hear the whole song sung that way.

The rules, Sawa-chan. Do you really have to ask?

The beautiful Sawako-sensei suffers from sugar withdrawal because the daily tea parties stopped being held with the onset of finals season. She begs for a revival of the time-honored tradition, and is rejected.

LOL

They have a short comedy routine as a lead-up to the music. Azusa is the smart, sensible one, and Yui is the opposite. Wait… they aren’t acting, they’re just being their normal selves! The audience (which includes Sawa-chan wearing the biggest sun hat ever, probably to protect her delicate and blemish-prone complexion) eats it up and laughs as if they were getting paid to laugh on cue.

Everything ends happily, that is, with lots of food for Yui, Azusa, Ui, and the granny to eat.

I didn’t have enough time, is my protest, and besides that, I didn’t have a clue as to what I was supposed to do. It’s kind of difficult to do something that will make you happy if you’ve never found happiness in the doing of anything.

“Oh, the hymns of angels, suffering over the stench of the twenty-first century…” – from I Went Over The Edge Of The World by Kevin Max

Angel Beats is a peculiar anime. On the surface it’s as if somebody took a handful of overused character types and personality traits, threw them in a blender, and poured them out into a Bundt pan and tossed it into the oven. In a mediocre oven– that is, the hands of mediocre artists– this sort of material would make for a season of cheap time-filler. But in the hands of Jun Maeda (writer of plot and composer of music for Key visual novels; also my personal hero) every cliche has its proper place. I can’t properly explain it, but it works.

Maybe it’s the way that death and pain is portrayed as random rather than rational, as brutal instead of incidental (as in a Hollywood “action movie”), as a personal affront that occupies the mind and forces one to take action regardless of whether that action is right or wrong. Maybe it’s the way that people respawn after they suffer and die, forced to return to the same sucky world that they had been in before. Maybe it’s all the weird stuff left unexplained, such as where the NPCs go when they aren’t taking classes at school, or how in the heck the real people learn to create items and weapons out of dirt and air, or how Angel ever got to be Student Council President when she can’t communicate clearly to save her own life. Maybe it’s the way that Haruhi-clone Yuri yearns to see God. Maybe it’s the way that Angel was just a convenient target for all the rage that Yuri and the others were stoking over having been taken out of the world in such an unjust manner and put into such an obviously unjust world. But what if the injustice was the result of the real people who were put into it? Then that means God isn’t the reason for the injustice. We who live are all to blame. If God won’t preserve justice, then this unbearable task falls upon our shoulders. Of course we cry out to God, but if he doesn’t reply, then what are we to assume? That God doesn’t exist? We want God to exist, because we want justice to exist and since we are incapable of guaranteeing justice, we need somebody with the power of God to grant us justice. If justice doesn’t exist, then we don’t need God.

You see, if the world is inherently meaningless, then our desire for justice is also just that. Meaningless. But if there is meaning to the world, if justice is desirable and good, then injustice must be fought against in the hope of achieving justice. Yuri and her battlefront want to achieve justice. They can’t go back to the lives they once lived in the real world. If God exists, Yuri wants to put him on the witness stand for questioning. How could you let this happen? How could you just sit back and let us suffer like this? We’re fighting for justice because you aren’t. If only you would show yourself to be real…

It is because evil persists that we realize that inside of ourselves, we desire justice. We want good to win out against evil. In a perfect world, perhaps we would never have these thoughts. We would take it for granted that justice exists. But because we have to fight for it, we treasure it more and more. Because we see that we are incapable of achieving true justice, we yearn for a God who can save us from our own ineptitude. And so we suffer just as our parents and their parents suffered. And if God doesn’t intervene, our children and their children will also suffer. And every individual has to decide, what am I here for?

The characters in Angel Beats! stand on the threshold of obliteration. When one achieves his personal goal for happiness, he vanishes from the world, never to respawn. But what happens then? Is it really so great for individuals to pursue their own happiness, if it means that they don’t get to live and work and play alongside the same people that they’re used to? If happiness means you have to leave, then is happiness really worth having? For some (such as the original leader of GirlsDeMo) it is completely worth it, but maybe that’s because in the real world, they could never find happiness in the group or the family, but only in individual, personal expression.

One thing Jun Maeda always manages to dredge up from our collective memories is the feeling of the drudgery of classroom education. Watching the clock tick seconds by, waiting for the end of the hour or the day, trying to stay awake as the teacher drones. Even if those days are spent in the most tedious and humble of tasks (taking classes) is it worth it not because of the task itself but because the time was spent with the same people every day?

Where does the value of a life come from? Angel Beats! seems to ask. Is it from the people who are your friends, or is it from seeing justice fulfilled? One can fight forever chasing after spectral enemies in hopes that this time, this one will turn out to be the real enemy… but in the end, you’re still just fighting spectres. You’re not actually accomplishing anything no matter how long and hard you fight. To put an end to the painful memories of a previous life… to see those who did you harm punished. And even if life itself turns out to be a second chance to live, do you let that opportunity go to waste because you’re too busy chasing spectres and you don’t want to ever give that up because if you do, you’re admitting that you can’t achieve justice and that is the worst of all possible fates for you, the victim of injustice.

A scapegoat runs into the wilderness, never to be seen again.

This is quite possibly the best episode of anime I’ve ever watched in which the entire premise was the forced humiliation of a character by her so-called friends. Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I skipped blogging about Ep. 6 of K-ON!!, my reasons can be summed up as follows: “Girl loves Gitah. Wherever she goes, Gitah is sure to follow.”

Well, this episode is not about guitar crushes. It’s about girl crushes. No, really. Family-friendly Kyoto Animation pretty much snuggles right up to the line that separates “normal” from “yuri”. Quite possibly, this episode is also a subtle commentary on the obsession of anime fans for any sort of merchandise with a moe-moe character slapped on it.

Not suspicious! These two are not suspicious! There is nothing about their appearance that would suggest that they are actually stalkers!

I guess I should summarize the plot for you.

In what amounts to nothing less than a brilliant retcon (look it up if you have to; I’ll wait) we learn via flashbacks that during the previous school year Mio felt as if she was being stalked… meaning that she had a stalker… after her.

I suppose the kind word would be “secret admirer” but that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in the episode so there.

Her fellow K-ON members are of no help, so Mio meets with the Student Council President (new character, name Megumi) for the first time. The Student Council President agrees to take care of Mio’s concern about the unknown stalker. Mio questions how come the Student Council President seems to know so much about her and the Light Music Club. One slip-up leads to another. When a Mio Akiyama Fan Club Membership Card slips out of Prez’s pocket, the gig is up.

Turns out that the Student Council President with the wise, caring image is actually the founder and President of the Mio Akiyama Fan Club and that she was stalking Mio because she was sad that she was going to graduate and wouldn’t be able to see Mio anymore. (Reminds me a bit of Sawa-chan-sensei and her crazy self that she keeps under wraps.)

The phrase “Mio-tan” comes up…

THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE A

Meh. Enough plot summary. Suffice it to say we get treated to every running joke in the K-ON!! book. Mugi comes through with the biggest cake ever (with strawberries, of course.) Yui slaps Mio stickers on otherwise ordinary wooden backscratchers and declares them to be Very Good. Ritsu and Yui scare, shock, numb, and otherwise stun Mio with scary imagery and strange tasks. Azusa is Azusa, incredulous at the antics of her seniors.

When Mugi gets sparkly, wonders are sure to soon appear. Mio knows this, and shudders.

The Light Music Club hosts a tea party for the members of the Mio Akiyama Fan Club. As might be expected, Mio had nothing to do with the planning of this event in which she was to be the main attraction/victim.

John Owen probably didn't have this in mind when he wrote to Christians about the mortification of the self.

More like, "I can't form guitar chords with my fingers but I can still make jokes that fall flat..."

Jun Suzuki’s fingers freeze up when she tries to make guitar chords. That’s probably a reason why she plays the electric bass in the jazz ensemble club.

When it comes to eating donuts, Jun takes the cake.

Party at Ui’s house! Actually, it’s a sleepover. It’s not exactly a pity party for the juniors who have been left behind by their seniors who are off having fun on their school trip, but it’s not much of a party either. It’s rainy outside which means that there isn’t anything to do but stay inside.

Jun brings over a massive box full of donuts, only to have her triumphant feelings crushed when Azusa arrives with sushi.

Jun’s way of getting the most bang for her buck is to take a bite out of each donut. A predictably annoyed Azusa questions Jun about her culinary practices. Azusa then eats one of the partially-eaten donuts.

Poofy bed hair on a rainy day. It's enough to make one go back to bed.

The next day is rainy and poofy, as evinced by Jun’s unruly hair.

Jun spends all morning reading a baseball manga and only stops because she couldn’t find the next volume of the series. After sitting around for a while at Ui’s place, they get bored (and Jun promptly falls asleep). Azusa wants to go somewhere, anywhere, and do something!

Next we see of them they’re at the batting cages (!) Ui struggles with hitting the baseball until she overhears a father instructing his son in how to hit a baseball. The next pitch she hits for a home run. Her prize is a giant plush turtle, which reminds Azusa that she forgot to feed Ton-chan. Oh noes!

Ton-chan is nice to look at.

They go to school in the rain and discover that Ton-chan is okay and as cute as ever! In the room Jun discovers the volume of the manga that she had been missing. She immediately begins to read it.

Next, the trio decide to form their own temporary K-On with Ui on keyboard and Jun on bass. They play a song. Folks, this is what slice of life is all about.

By sunset the sun comes out and everything is wonderful again.

Please don't miss your stop!

Jun takes a bus home and her friends say goodbye to her but she seems overly absorbed in reading manga. She might lose her friends…

Episode 5 gives us a new perspective on the whole school music club experience by focusing on the juniors who didn’t go on the school trip. The events of this episode are concurrent with those of Episode 4, and there’s a fair bit of crossover commentary as Yui and friends send cell phone snapshots to Ui and Azusa.