Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity, by Diannna Anderson

Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity by Dianna Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wished I could have read this book when I was in ninth grade (which was over 50 years ago).

I approached this book as something of an outsider.  I left the church and Christianity, indeed 50 years ago, over shame and guilt about sexuality.  I was forced to go to Lutheran Catechism.  Sex and purity was mentioned but not hammered into our heads like the evangelical purity culture.  But none the less there was a tremendous emphasis on SIN!  SIN!   SIN!.   Unlike the narrator in Grapes of Wrath who said after a traveling preacher had attempted to save his soul:

 "Wisht I knowed what all the sins was, so I could do ’em."

I really had no desire to do any of the sins except that one that a young lad wants to do with a young lady.  I was pretty good on the 10 commandments.  Well most of them anyhow, but I burnt (as St Paul said) with a desire for loving sexual union with a woman.  I was also pathologically shy so the actual chances of me committing such a sin was almost nil,  but the Lutherans had me covered on that.  Yes, there are three ways to sin, by: thought, word, and deed.   The deeds (other than those of a solitary nature...which will also earn you a free trip across the River Styx) I was good on.  Even by word I didn't do too bad. There was no use of a pimply faced, skinny, awkward  dwebe like me making any claims of getting laid...I had a red V painted on my forehead.  To even remark on the desire to do so would start a bunch of stories...everyone in 8th and 9th grades was getting laid except me.  I knew it was 99% bullshit but still these guys were convincing bullshitters because they had the muscles to back up their claims against 98 pound weakling doubters like me.

That leaves thought.  Oh my yes, I entertained many an impure thought and after a time quit asking for forgiveness.   Repent and promise that I would not do that again?  Hell I was lusting in church.   I remember of praying about it...nothing, well that is because I was not genuine or some how not good enough.

Then one day I got pissed off and said enough.   I didn't feel this way when I was 9 years old.  Prior to puberty, girls were fascinating but I wasn't damning myself to hell over them. I couldn't help the eroticism that burned within me.  I didn't ask for it, and I was sick and tired of feeling guilt and shame over it...especially considering I wasn't even getting laid.  I quit the church and have never since asked for forgiveness of my many impure thoughts.

That was child's play compared to the situation that Anderson describes.   I have to admire her courage to stand up against her culture and protest.  She makes some excellent points in the book especially about God not shaming us.  I was a little disappointed in the later chapters which seemed a bit general, diaphanous, and repetitious.  She wants us to do a lot of "honoring."  It got trite after a while.   Never the less, this was a very good book and one that I think would be helpful to those who have endured the difficulties and shame of the purity culture.


View all my reviews

Links:

For those who actually want to read a review of the book instead of my tales of personal, teenage, marinated in sin, sexual angst,  here is an excellent article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/christian-feminist/386609/

Here is the article written by the author noted in the above article:

http://www.thefrisky.com/2014-09-09/girl-talk-what-losing-my-virginity-taught-me-about-faith/

Author's website and blog:  http://diannaeanderson.net/blog 

The Pi Moment 3/14/15 9:26:53 And No Google Doodle! Heresy!

The Pi Day 2010 Google Doodle
Image Credit:  Google

Pi = 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510...

Today is the most accurate Pi Day we will have in this century.  3/14/15 and Google chooses to ignore the day.  Some people's children!  As such, in honor of the day I dragged out the Doodle from 2010 which as far as I know was no great shakes of a day for Pi, so why a Doodle in 2010 but not in 2015 when it is really cool.  But what is really cool today is that if you measure time with a 12 hour clock (verses 24 hour clock),  you will have two very accurate Pi moments, seconds actually:

3/14/15 9:26:53  AM & PM

It doesn't work with a 24 hour clock because technically the morning is 3 14 15 09 26 53 and the evening would be 3 14 15 21 26 53.  Of course we are also dropping the 20 in 2015.  We feel justified in do so, simply because we are alive right now and we want to celebrate the day and to hell the inconvenient 2000 years that throws the number out of whack.  This alludes to the fact that while we may take pride that we are witness to a once a century event, we should mourn that we missed the really big Pi Day which would have been

 March 14, 1592 with Pi seconds at 6:53:58.  

That one was pretty big.  The next time you will be able to do that is March 14, 15926 (13,911 years from now, alas).  But take heart that Pi Day will only have Pi minutes, not Pi seconds:

3/14/15926 5:35

The next digit is 8.  The biggest second you can have is 59 (60 if you cheat).  So looking at the string of numbers we will not be able to have another Pi second (with a full year like what happened in 1592) until:

March 14, 1,592,653,589,793 2:38:46

That is a whopping 1.59 trillion years into the future.  My guess is no one will be around to notice.  Anyhow can you see what I mean about mourning the loss of 1592?  It was a great year for Pi.  I wonder did anyone notice?

EDIT 3/15/15:  Taking a second look at this I just realized that there is a slight flaw in my logic.  I am accepting single digit hours, but not minutes or seconds.   But doing an image search of digital watches, I find that unless in 24 hour format, most watches display  h:mm:ss for single digit hours and hh:mm:ss for 10 thru 12.   None display single digit minutes or seconds.  The single digit minutes and seconds are always preceded by a zero. So going by standard time format my claim still holds true.

EDIT 3/20/15, ERROR CORRECTION On the date 1.59 trillion date, incredibly I somehow missed a digit in the original post and had a date 159 billion years in the future.  How exactly I did that when I copied an pasted the number is beyond me.  In any event the date has been corrected.  It was only 1.433 trillion year error.

Another thing that should be noted is that once you can get the digits of Pi to line up to a second in the 12 hour digital clock format  _h:mm:ss format, then the remainder of your Pi moment is simply a decimal fraction that theoretically will go out to an infinite number of digits.  So to tell exactly what time our Pi moment occurred we would need a clock with an infinite number of digits.  However, in a practical sense,  our universe has a limit on how short you can slice time.  It is known as Planck Time and represents the time it takes light in a vacuum to travel one Planck length.  In some circles it is known as a jiffy.    1 jiffy = 1 Planck Time = 5.39 X 10^-44 second.  Hence any digits finer than a jiffy are meaningless.  Think of a jiffy being the fastest tick in time allowed in our universe.  So our moment has to be a bit slower or it is literally out of this world.  So our real Pi moment has to be at least equal to or a bazzilionth of a second longer than longer than 1 plank time.   To put that in context, think of having a stop watch that could measure microseconds (millionths of a second).  So you could see an event, start the watch, see a second event and stop the watch.  So theoretically you could tell how many microseconds the event lasted.   The only problem is that the response time of your nervous system probably limits the accuracy to hundreds of a second.  So if your event took 0.215,435 seconds, all you can say is that it took about .21 seconds.  The 5,435 microseconds would be meaningless accuracy.  

Image Credit: Wikipedia
"Pi pie2" by GJ - Pi_pie2.jpg. Licensed under
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons -
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Pi_pie2.jpg#/media/File:Pi_pie2.jpg

So what exactly is Pi?  It is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter which always works out to 3.14159....   So roll a toy wheel, 1 inch in diameter, exactly one revolution and the center of that wheel would move 3.14159... inches across the floor.  Roll any wheel of any size and it will always roll 3.14159 times the length of the diameter.  There is a cute animated graphic of this at Wikipedia. To me, being somewhat of a mathematical nit wit, that seems very odd.  But the circumference of any circle is always Pi times the diameter.  Very convenient but also very odd.  

Pi has another very odd property.  You can never quite calculate the exact value of Pi.  It is irrational and the decimal value goes forever in a non-repeating sequence. 

In my working life, I used Pi probably twice a day in some calculation or other on a slow day.  Round things seem to be favored in the industry in which I worked.   Here is a trick that I used quite often.  I was responsible for a bunch of facilities with miles of pipe.  Repairs or modifications required ordering new pipe.  Measuring pipe diameters of installed pipe is a bit tricky.  If it is small diameter you can use calipers, but as the diameter increases soon the jaws of the caliper no longer reach the sides of  the pipe.  You can eyeball it but there is a much simple way.  Use a flexible tape or just a piece of string to measure the circumference of the pipe and then divide the length by Pi.  Voila! Pipe size?  Not quite!  Pipe sizes in North America below 14 inch pipe are weird.  You must consult a nominal pipe size table such as this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_Pipe_Size

For example you measure a pipe and the circumference is, what a coincidence, 3.14 inches.  You do the math and  that yields a diameter of about 1 inch.  Common sense would dictate you have 1 inch pipe. Wrong!  Looking at the table at the above site yields that the nominal pipe size of 3/4 inch has an actual outer diameter of 1.05 inches.  One inch nominal pipe is actually 1.32 inches in diameter. 

All you ever wanted to know about pipe but were afraid to ask.  

Have a Happy Pi Day and a Pi moment this evening.  

LINKS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day




EDIT 3/20/15:  The Internet never fails to delight.  Have you ever wondered what is the one millionth digit of Pi after the decimal point?  Burning question I know.  Well now you can find out at:

ONE MILLION DIGITS OF PI at Pi Day.Org


After holding the page down button for several minutes, I watched 999,999 digits go whizzing by and as a public service,  the answer to the question (in case you are ever on Jeopardy),  the millionth digit after the decimal point in Pi?

What is 1 Alec.


Here are the first and last lines of Pi taken out to one million decimal places:



3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582... lots and lots of digits...

346460422090106105779458151 ...and that’s one million digits of Pi after the decimal point!


According to Wikipedia, as of October 2014 Pi has been calculated out to 13,300,000,000,000 decimal places.

    

  

Virtual Alert

My good Blogger friend Alicia published a post about her brothers being in the Marine Corps and having rifles.

Blogger, Titere con Bonete, My Stupid Little Brothers

Being a veteran (USAF) I touched an M-16 not quite as often as a crescent wrench or soldering iron, but yeah I shot an M-16.  So I felt the need to comment, which turned rather lengthy and I figured what hell I am going to publish it at my blog too.

A real M-16
Image Credit: Wikipedia, "M16A1 brimob" by User:Dragunova - Personal photo.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M16A1_brimob.jpg#/media/File:M16A1_brimob.jpg

I was in the Air Force and of course we are bigger on airplanes than rifles. So while I didn't have a rifle, I did have about 100 F-4 Phantoms that I worked on.  

My contact with rifles was somewhat laughable. Once a year I had to qualify with a M-16 (on the grounds of what now is Victorville Federal Penitentiary), so I touched an M-16 all of four times in my service career.  

At my base in California, I was on the alert roster which I qualified for by principally being not married. We were the forward tactical warriors (well that might be a tad strong term for an airplane repairman) who could at a moment's notice run out to the flight line with our tool boxes and duffle bags ready to go and board a C-130 and fly to any trouble spot in the world, commandeer a hunk of straight highway, and convert it into a operational tactical fighter base within 72 hours. Wow! I would have liked to see that happen. Well that was the theory anyhow. From a practical stand point it meant that once a year always on a Saturday morning, the siren would go off on the base at 0500 and we would muster to the pre-arranged rallying areas on the flight line. Here we would be issued an "M-16" and assigned a C-130 tail number that we were to fly out on. 

A Virtual M-16

The weapon was sort of a virtual M-16, actually it was a piece of oak tag with a number and a string on it, and you dare not lose it. If you lost this piece of paper, it was the equivalent of losing your weapon and you would be punished for it. Yet curiously we were not allowed to tie the tag on to our uniform (the equivalent of carrying an actual rifle with a should strap). That would be cheating and a violation of the uniform. So you folded the paper M-16 and put it in your fatigue shirt's pocket...which thoughtfully had a button specifically designed to help you retain your virtual M-16. When ordered "airman present your weapon for inspection" you unbuttoned your shirt pocket and gave the inquiring zebra the piece of paper. But also don't forget and let the bastard walk off with it. That would get you in trouble too. As valuable as this training is, it seemed to me that the Air Force could have afforded to buy some Daisy air rifles and just made sure they didn't give us any BBs. We would have shot our eyes out. 

So we would then commence waiting for the C-130s to land. The base logistic folks would drive all the equipment for fixing the aircraft out to the loading locations with fork trucks. Each 130 would carry so much equipment and so many troops. So we would wait and wait and wait and then wait some more. At some point a bagged lunch was provided, we were not allowed to leave. Then suddenly a zebra with a bull horn would call out a tail number. All the guys with that tail number would march out with their tool box and duffle bags (and of course their M-16) to the aircraft which would be sitting next to the equipment that it was supposed to take. 

A Real C-130  (perhaps a bit newer)
Image Credit:  Wikipedia

The aircraft were difficult to see, because they were virtual too. We had no idea that they had landed and were being refueled and loaded while we were waiting. So you would march out to a bunch of palleted equipment and check in with the crew chief of the C-130. He was real but an actor. Crew chiefs tend to be sergeants or staff sergeants (3 or 4 stripes) these guys were zebras and super zebras (6 to 8 stripes) chosen for their prickliness--yes the things on cactus and whatever else comes to mind. You had to check in with them, show your dog tags--military ID, open your tool box (it better have tools in it) and they would kick your duffle bag and it better be heavy and not filled with fluffed up newspapers. You also had to present your M-16 for inspection. They being super zebras would also take an opportunity to check your uniform, haircut, beard, shoe shine, and general espirit de corps (of which I thoroughly lacked--excuse me while I gag on the chicken shit...not to mention that the base laundry didn't always get the crease through the star on the chevrons on your sleeve--sometimes missing the chevrons altogether which would elicit a comment from the zebra which I parried back by showing the laundry ticket safety pinned to the inside of my shirt. That put them in a bit of a quandary, the base laundry employed moonlighting NCOs and we peasants were encouraged to use it. A lot guys didn't want to spend the money and the laundry was a bit heavy on the starch. I hated ironing, to me it was a bargain, and I loved when one of these many striped idiots commented on my creases and I could flash the laundry tag at them.)  

The sleeve crease was supposed to
split the star. 

Then we would mill around for an hour or so, then get ordered back to the rallying points. After all the virtual C-130s were loaded and crewed by the make believe crew chiefs, the virtual planes would all virtually take off to the wild blue yonder. Then around 1300 to 1500 hours the siren would sound again, just a short blast this time. We would check in again at our rallying point, surrender our weapons, and leave. The zebras would all head over to the NCO club and make up for lost time--nobody got drunk on the night before an alert, and life went on. It was a boring long day, ah but we demonstrated we were ready.  

Fleet Of Tactical Air Command virtual C-130s transporting
 the valorous 35th TAC Fighter Wing on Alert 1972.
Image Credit: Wikipedia

Theoretically, no one was supposed to know about the alerts. They were supposed to be a surprise. It could be real, you could theoretically be flying out. The entire base knew about it at least a day in advance. Your shop chief got you clued in that you will have your ass on the flight line at 0500 in the morning and you will not be a source of embarrassment to him...(be sober, shaved, have your dog tags and ID, have real tools in your tool box and real clothes in your duffle bag, and don't lose your weapon).