What is a blue fluffy cotton ball?

I have told many people that I am a blue fluffy cotton ball, but I haven't explained how that came to be many times. The story involves three people, but I am only certain about the identities of two of them. The third one was a resident of Loop Floor, who I will identify as E for the purposes of this story, although that may indicate the wrong person. The other characters are me (J) and someone I won't name (R). The setting is Loop Kitchen, early September 1999, sometime in the early evening. E and I were sitting at the tables in the middle of the room facing the wall with the mirror, and under the mirror there was a table on which somebody had left some junk they were throwing out with a note saying that anybody could take whatever they wanted.

R: (walks in and looks at the table)

R: What's that?

E: It's just some useless junk that somebody is getting rid of. I don't know why they didn't just throw it out.

R: (walks over to table, looks through the things, and picks up a bag of cotton balls and a cardboard rectangle with the center removed)

R: This isn't just junk. I can make abstract art out of it.

E: And what's that supposed to be?

R: It represents how we are all trapped by the rules of society, like how these cotton balls are trapped in this bag. And I have a frame for it.

J: Oh yeah, that makes sense. I'm the little blue cotton ball right there.

R: (looks at the bag of cotton balls. Looks confused and looks more closely)

R: There are no blue cotton balls in there.

J: I know, I escaped.

So that's how I became a little blue cotton ball. But that quickly morphed into a blue fluffy cotton ball, because it sounds better.


Also, when I say cotton ball here, I mean little pompoms, which are fluffy balls made out of cotton. I don't mean the things that are generally called cotton balls, which are almost always white and used by small children to make clouds. Sorry, I'm a rocket scientist, not an artist. How am I supposed to know the proper names for these things?

What? You are/aren't Jewish?

Every now and then, somebody will ask me about my religion. Normally this happens when someone finds out that I'm not Jewish, or when they find out I go to synagogue fairly regularly instead of church. I normally say it's complicated, because it actually is.

First, a bit of background. I come from a very religious Christian family. How religious? Here is my mom's website. Notice how she writes bible study books. We went to mass basically every week when I was growing up and had bible study most nights. I've read the bible all the way through multiple times. When I went off to college, I continued going to mass every week even though almost nobody at MIT was religious in any way. When I started dating my first girlfriend at MIT, we spent the day talking until I ended what was up to that time the happiest day of my life so that I would not miss the last mass of the day (at 5pm). This background is the reason that people are surprised that I now go to synagogue instead of church and celebrate almost all of the Jewish holidays.

In the more recent past, I went to Friday night services at MIT Hillel basically every week for about 5 years. I went regularly enough that most new people didn't realize I wasn't Jewish for at least a few months. I've been almost counted for minyan many times. People would talk about how Jews shouldn't even date non-Jews right in front of Mira and I and then get embarrassed when someone reminded them that I am not Jewish. I've been complimented on how well I can read Hebrew and I once organized Reform services over the summer. More recently we started going to an actual synagogue. After a little while, they started asking us if we wanted to have any of the various parts in the service, and it took a few more months before the people in charge of that managed to remember that I am not Jewish before offering me a part (which only Jews can actually do). This is the source of people that are surprised when they find out I'm not Jewish.

The story of how I changed my religious practices is not actually very interesting and I don't remember it well enough to tell it properly anyway. The end result though is that I am a Celtic Christian that goes to synagogue.

There are only two large groups of people that I am aware of that converted to Christianity without having their lives threatened: the first Christians and the Irish (many individuals converted freely, but I mean processes of entire cultures converting). One result of this is that Christianity in Ireland was separate from Christianity in mainland Europe for several centuries. It also peacefully coexisted with Celtic paganism for several hundred years. It also means that Celtic Christianity was established and outside the Catholic church when the Catholic church was first corrupted (the early corruption of the Catholic church has mostly been corrected, and I do not consider the modern Catholic church to be particularly bad - but the Church does not have a history that it can be proud of).

Some people think that the separation of church and state is important for political reasons. Many of my atheist friends seem to be concerned about what religious leaders will do to a government. It is a valid concern, but it is nothing compared to what giving religious leaders political power does to the religion. Once the bishop of Rome became one of the most powerful politicians in Europe, while simultaneously being one of the few positions that was theoretically open to anybody, power hungry idiots started trying to get as high up in the church as possible. These are not the people that I want leading my religion. People whose primary motivation is acquiring power over others don't tend to have morals that I agree with.

One particular argument between the Celtic church and the Catholic church was the split between Pelagian Christianity and Augustinian Christianity. Pelagius argued that people are not inherently good or evil, and that their actions determine whether they are good or bad. He argued that people learn to sin because they are raised in a society full of sin, and that ultimately people are responsible for their own actions. Augustine argued that people are inherently evil and that we can only avoid sinning because every now and then the grace of God will shine upon us and allow us to do the right thing. A consequence of this is that people can't prevent themselves from sinning and are sort of not responsible for their own actions - bad things happen to people because God is punishing them, and good things happen to other people because God has decided to reward them. This was a popular idea in Rome, where the rich bishops were surrounded by people suffering from poverty. The Irish mostly did not have people living in poverty (except for some of the crazy monks that wanted to) because they had support structures in place to provide for those who needed support.

Pelagius's teachings were declared heretical by the Catholic church (thouch interestingly, Pelagius himself was never officially declared a heretic), with the stated reason being that in Pelagian Christianity, God is, strictly speaking, not necessary. In Augustinian Christianity, God is necessary to provide some support to people so that they can occasionally be good and Jesus is necessary to provide a mechanism for people to be forgiven for the sins that they will commit. Pelagian Christianity teaches that people are responsible for their own actions, and while God may provide assistance and guidance that encourages people to be good, it is ultimately their choice and even people who are unaware of God can be good. In theory, someone could even manage to live their entire life without sinning, which would make the sacrifice of Jesus unnecessary. I find that argument to be pretty weak and mostly irrelevant anyway. I'm not picking my theology based on what might hurt God's feelings.

The important distinction is that in Pelagian Christianity, God is viewed as a teacher who provides guidance that people can follow to be better people, while in Augustinian Christianity, God is viewed as an all powerful miracle worker who decides who will be good and who won't be. So in Pelagian Christianity, it is all about trying to be a good person. Not because of some promised reward (like getting into heaven), but just simply because it is the right thing to do. I have been asked if I think that people can earn their way into heaven by being good enough, and that is most certainly not what I mean; I consider the question of how people get into heaven to be basically irrelevant and unimportant.

When Mira took a class about religious thought in America, she stated very clearly a major difference between Judaism and most forms of Christianity: Christianity is about orthodoxy, while Judaism is about orthopraxy. In other words, most forms of Christianity are distinguished by beliefs, and a good Christian is someone who believes the right things, while a good Jew is someone who does the right things. Pelagian Chrsitianity is also more about orthopraxy than orthodoxy. Ultimately, in Pelagian Christianity, the best thing that a person can do is try to sin as little as possible and to raise their children to do even better.

So now I have gotten to the point where it begins to make sense that I could suddenly switch from actively going to church all the time to actively going to synagogue all the time. The moral teachings are essentially identical, and that is the part that matters most to me. Combine that with substantially more freedom to argue ideas (Jews are actually encouraged to debate theology, rather than just accepting what they are told), and it is only natural that I would prefer Jewish practices. Mira did not drag me to synagogue, she brought me once and then I dragged her to synagogue until she liked it enough to go on her own. Our religious compromise was that we would practice her religion, but we would do so to the degree that I had been raised with. At the time, this was probably more of a compromise for Mira than it was for me.

My favorite religious holiday is Holy Thursday (which is the only day that I insist on going to church still). To me, the essence of Christianity is displayed more clearly on that day than any other. Holy Thursday is the celebration of the last supper. It is the day on which the reading focuses on Jesus getting together with his disciples and washing their feet. So you have the leader of this new religion, who is in some sense God or a high-ranking servant of God, doing the lowest task any servant would be asked to do. I don't think you can have a much clearer statement of the idea that people are supposed to be kind to each other and help each other. No matter what the task is, you are not too good for it and it is not beneath you. Service to God and other people is the point.

And today is what is possibly my second favorite religious holiday: Yom Kippur. It is a kind of odd holiday to like, since it is kind of unpleasant with the fasting and everything. But it emphasizes the idea that we have sinned, the world is a worse place because of that, and we have a responsibility to try to fix the problems we have caused. We can't always fix what we have broken, but we should at least try. And we should be aware of what we have done and what we have failed to do, so that we can try to do better in the future.