Fifty Shades of Russell Brand
Today the weird rash my son had all over his body yesterday turned into the oh-my-gosh-it's-creeping-toward-his-eyes! rash that had us pulling him out of school and, long-story-antihistamine, he's fine.
He's fine, but my fine intentions of blitzing through a ton of work today are not, having been kneed in a bend-over spot and then spanked into a corner by the circumchances of parenting.
Ergo, I wish today only to point out that I've been noticing a lot of my Christian-people-friends posting to Facebook that clip I shared a few days ago where Russell Brand went OFF on pornography.
That's not surprising, since the things Brand had to say were the sort of things that'd sit well not only with someone who's read a bunch of the research done on the effects of pornography on the human mind, but also to someone with a more traditional view of human sexuality than is currently in vogue.
What is also not surprising (and the reason I'm saying this) is that most of these Christian "Russell-Brand-re-postings" came with a header or tagline saying something about how they absolutely could not be-lieve that Russell Brand would have said something of the sort (And at 1:32 he just blew my mind!!!)! The implication being that someone like Brand (liberal, Hollywood, pinko-commie, etc.) should never have something—anything—to say that one should perhaps listen to.
I do NOT want to discourage anyone from sharing something great that they heard from someone they formerly/mostly disagreed with. I think it's a huge step in the direction of not-being-a-circled-up-jerk. A step toward recognizing that truth is truth is truth, wherever you may find it.
Seriously, though.
You gotta agree it's at least a little bit sad that folks act all surprised about this, like their pet pig just sat down at the piano and started banging out some delicate Chopin. Isn't that a little, I dunno, racist against actors, or liberals, or long-haired bearded-people, or whomever it is that you've decided is outside the Circle-of-Truth in which you happen to live and move and have your being.
Nobody's ever just ONE thing.
We're all a whole lot of things, all at once, and we miss out on so much of the diverse awesomeness available to us if we insist on putting everybody else into neat little boxes all the time. I certainly don't want to think of every Republican I meet as a small-minded, bigot-science-hater with a raging lust for money.
I don't want to put anybody in a box, ever. And the surprise over Brand's (I think wise) words smacks of a truth-elitist snobbery that basically just sucks. It smells of self-righteousness—a sort of noxious skin-rash creeping up and over the eyes, blotting out the possibility for further truth-seeing.
Let's take our anti-self-righteousness-histamines, people.
Let's forget to remember to be right all the time, and instead learn to really, really listen.
It's very ironic that the truth is, in my opinion, that a lot of the things you'll hear Russel Brand talk about on his YouTube channel are actually much closer to the gospel of Jesus than you are likely to hear in most churches. While pastors in evangelical churches are reminding us again and again how very disappointed Jesus is in us for not reading our bibles enough or not praying enough or not wearing the right kind of bathing suit, Brand is often straight up preaching the way of Jesus (knowingly or not) by reminding us to care about inequality, and why violence is never the answer and that power structures are nearly always about crushing our humanity, reminding us that it's up to us to care about these things and to try not to participate in the hate that's suffocating us. People are surprised because they've grown accustomed to the spoon-fed nonsense that passes for Christian thought.
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