Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Where does anger fit?

Again, listening to Toad the Wet Sprocket and this there's this older song of theirs called "Hold Her Down," and when it came out it was pretty controversial because of the content. Basically, I it's about a girl who's been abused (emotionally? physically? sexually?) by men and now the singer, who is her friend is pissed because of what this man has done. "I wanna die from all the hell that you've been through." What is righteous anger? I know that in my Christian life, I've been taught to be a nice guy, and yet as I've listened to this song for years, it's always struck a chord with me (no pun inteneded), because it feels so right to be angry. As a Christian shouldn't I be out-of-my-head-pissed about injustice? Shouldn't it keep me awake at night that poor people are taken advantage of, women and children abused? And yet at night, I'm just concerned with how fast I can fall asleep deep under my Eddie Bauer down comforter.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So where in the Bible does it teach men to be "nice guys"?

charlesdean2 said...

It doesn't -- but I think in my religious upbringing, we didn't teach too much about Jesus cleansing the temple, while we loved to highlight Jesus holding kids.

It's a matter of what they chose to emphasize.

Speaking of Jesus in the temple -- I was always taught that the only point of the story was about selling stuff at church, and therefore my dad wouldn't allow us to do fundraising at church -- but what if the point is also that sometimes, we should get really hosed about things!?