New York City [photos]

So last time I was in the US, I stopped by New York City and saw ALL THE THINGS. And here they are:

The giant Macy's store

Times Square

Times Square at night

Times Square at night

Times Square at night

M&M's store

Inside the M&M's store, you can buy an M&M Statue of Liberty

Street sign for Broadway

Tour bus. I went to all the touristy places so there were a lot of these around.

Giant Toys R Us store, with Lego Statue of Liberty and Lego King Kong on the Empire State Building.

Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Morgan Freeman was there.

Brooklyn Bridge

AMERICAN FOOD, YOU GUYS. Cheesesteak sandwiched between waffles, with waffle fries and onion rings. Yeah.

So I went to the Chinese consulate (because bureaucracy), and there were dueling groups of protesters there. The ones in this picture were protesting China's treatment of members of the Fa Lun Gong religion. The opposing protesters held a banner that said Fa Lun Gong is a cult. Honesty I don't know the whole story.

Chrysler building

Grand Central Station

When you forgot to wear pants to school. (Big painting at the New York Public Library)

"Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art

Chinese boat with a ton of arrows in it- this art is based on some old Chinese legend apparently. (Museum of Modern Art)

I love really weird art like this. So you have a bike wheel sticking out the top of a stool, and a shovel hanging from the ceiling. I seem to remember that actually these are 2 unrelated works of art, but I like to imagine they're together.

Soup cans at the Museum of Modern Art

NBC studios is in here apparently

The New York Times

Radio City Music Hall

Rockefeller Center

This "no smoking" sign was interesting to me because it has Chinese on it too. (Traditional Chinese, like they have in Taiwan, and like mainland China used before the 1950s. Now we use simplified Chinese characters, but they're similar enough that there's no problem reading this sign.)

New York City is full of pigeons

Tom's Restaurant- do you recognize it?

How about from this angle?

(This is the restaurant from Seinfeld.)

  
Content note: the next 2 photos are from the 9/11 Memorial

So this is the big fountain at the 9/11 Memorial where they carved the names of the people who died.

On September 11, hundreds of people ran down these stairs to get out of the towers. (9/11 Museum)

Here's the Statue of Liberty. It's on an island- I didn't go to the island, just took a picture from way over here.

Here's Trump Tower, if anybody cares

Central Park. You guys, Central Park is HUGE.

Balto statue in Central Park

Here's where you can rent remote-control boats in Central Park.

Sea lion show at the Central Park Zoo

The Central Park Zoo has a ton of birds. I'll just show you this one picture of ducks and I think that mostly sums it up.

Red pandas at the Central Park Zoo

Penguins at the Central Park Zoo

There was also a petting zoo with like, sheep and stuff.

Wall Street bull

Wall Street bull

Maybe my favorite part of being in New York City was the subway system. Elsewhere in the US, without a car I have no choice but to wait for other people with cars to drive me places. But in a city with good public transportation, I can be a lot more independent.

Shanghai's subway is way better though.

Also I love how NYC is so diverse, and there's so many different kinds of good food, and you can hear people speaking Chinese (and tons of other languages) just walking down the street.

Blogaround

Image source.

1. The Myth of Welfare’s Corrupting Influence on the Poor (posted October 20) "Already in 1995, an analysis of rates of birth to unwed mothers by Hilary Hoynes of the University of California, Berkeley, found that welfare payments did not increase single motherhood."

2. Diversity is for white people: The big lie behind a well-intended word (posted October 26) "It lets white people off the hook from doing something about our own culpability in the problem"

3. Sundays With The Christianists: Let’s Read Some Terrible Pro-Abstinence Comics! (posted October 18) "This Stats kid — we think he’s supposed to be Asian, like all smart kids — apparently keeps some pretty pervy databases. Great future for him in the NSA, we’re sure."

4. On God-ordained, Abortion-inducing Magic Potions and Jealous Husbands Shaming Their Wives in the Bible (posted August 19) "Apparently, it wasn’t enough to pronounce the curse over the bitter potion. God instructs the priest to write down the miscarriage curse, and then WASH IT INTO THE WATER. We are dealing here with the vestiges of sympathetic magic."

5. Biblical Inerrancy is an Attack on the Bible (posted October 27)

6. Christian Blogger Says To Avoid Looking At Your Wife During Sex If She Isn't Enjoying It (posted October 29) Trigger warning, oh god all of the trigger warnings.

7. Mental illness, morality, and holiness (posted October 26) "Because of my memory of so many days when I accomplished absolutely nothing, I cannot think “lazy” when I see people being unproductive; I just think maybe they’re paralyzed by depression or something similar. When I see people in a poor part of town sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, I’m not able to muster up any scorn for them. Even when people I know are doing something like smoking a lot of pot that undermines their sense of willpower and initiative, I tend to view their predicament through a pathological lens rather than a moralistic one, all because of my experience with mental illness."

8. When The Police Turn Someone You Know Into A Hashtag. #CoreyJones (posted October 19)

9. Does the Bible prohibit marriage to a non-believer? How does this correlate with verses like 2 Corinthians 6:14? (posted October 22) Wow. I have never heard this interpretation before. I will have to check into this.

10. On not trusting the Bible (or taking seriously what the Bible's messiness has to teach us about faith) (posted October 19) "These questions presume something of the Bible that my pointing out of historical problems, etc., supposedly “takes away.” That presumption is that a book worthy of being called “sacred scripture” or “God’s word” would not behave these ways but instead be consistent, historically accurate, etc."

11. How I Went From Being a Pro-Life Activist to Being a A Pro-Choice Christian (posted October 27) "I know that there are as many reasons to have an abortion as there are pregnancies, and I do not get to sit in judgment and decide which of those reasons are “legitimate” and which not. I don’t get to define the exceptions. I don’t get to say exactly how or when a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, or when a relationship is abusive enough to justify it. That is for each of us to decide privately." THIS. This is what I believe.

12. China two-child policy not valid until March, government says (posted November 2) China is changing the one-child policy. Hooray!

13. AP: Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct (posted November 1) Trigger warning: descriptions of sexual assault

Blogaround

Image source.

1. Embracing the Gentiles (posted October 17) "Is it time for us, not to “accept [LGBTQ people] into the body,” as though we were making some momentous decision ourselves, but to recognize that God has already accepted them–and we simply need to acknowledge what God has done?" Amen.

2. Sin Problems and Skin Problems (posted October 18) "By even suggesting that racism isn't a "skin problem" immediately makes racism abstract. It erases the violent effects racism has on a specific population- people of color. If there is no racial skin problem, then there also aren't people with skin whose lives are deeply effected by racism."

3. Don't let time shield sex predators (posted October 19) "How many predators are roaming our neighborhoods, unknown to us because their victims have been denied the right to hold their abusers accountable?"

4. Hateful anti-abortion activists force creator of #ShoutYourAbortion into hiding (posted October 2) "Many women want to live in a world where you can say, ‘I’ve had an abortion, and I’m perfectly fine with that,’ and not have people saying they want to kill you."

5. What Do "Certificates of Purity" Communicate to Sexual Assault Survivors? (posted October 20) Oh my god this is disgusting.

6. David Was a Rapist, Abraham Was a Sex Trafficker (posted October 22) [trigger warning: rape] I really love how this article points out explicitly what nobody at church wants to say about, for example, David and Bathsheba. And at Christianity Today, too! But I feel kind of uneasy about some parts of it, like hinting at some form of 'oh isn't it great that God forgave David, God's forgiveness is all that matters, not the victim's'... but at the same time it also has stuff about how victim-blaming is a huge problem and that's not okay, and how there needs to be justice for victims, and if there's sex abuse in your church you go report it to the police RIGHT NOW. A lot of really good stuff that I'm glad Christianity Today is publishing, but... ehhh just using some of the language about "God's forgiveness" that Christians who victim-blame and cover up abuse use too.

7. 3 Ways to Keep Yourself Safe When You’re Not Ready to Leave Your Abusive Partner (posted April 28) "When I was being abused, the only advice I found was about how to leave an abusive partner, or how to heal after you’ve left."

8. 'Zeno effect' verified—atoms won't move while you watch (posted October 23) "One of the oddest predictions of quantum theory – that a system can't change while you're watching it – has been confirmed in an experiment by Cornell physicists." Cool!

9. Ads for Period Underwear Might Be Too Lewd for the NYC Subway (posted October 21) "Most of the many ads that have plastered women in various states of undress on subway walls have been designed from the perspective of how others (read: heterosexual men) see women. The THINX ads address how women see and take care of themselves. “You don’t want to talk about how women’s bodies actually work, but you want to doctor the way a woman feels about her body?” asked Agrawal, comparing THINX’s designs to the breast-augmentation ads."

Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, Shanghai

Hi everyone! Today I'm happy to share the photos I took at the Shanghai branch of Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Here we go!

Here's the entrance.

Thor

Spiderman

So the problem with going to a wax museum in China is there are a lot of Chinese stars I don't know. Like in this picture, which are the famous wax people and which are the customers? Okay I'll tell you the answer: The woman in the pink is Dee Hsu, and the man in the colorful suit is Kevin Tsai, they are Taiwanese talk show hosts. (The others are flesh-and-blood humans.)

Yang Liping, a Chinese dancer, plus an admirer

Vicki Zhao, a Chinese actress

Tiger Woods

Kobe Bryant. The NBA is really popular in China.

Michael Jordan

Yao Ming is super-tall

Everyone wants to get their picture with Yao Ming

Liu Xiang, Chinese Olympic gold medalist hurdle runner

Guo Jingjing, Chinese Olympic diver

Li Xiaoshuang, Chinese Olympic gymnast

Nie Weiping, Chinese go champion

David Beckham wax figure and two actual humans

Sun Li, Chinese actress

Arnold Schwarzenegger wax figure (right) and actual human (left)

Zhang Yimou, Chinese film director

Bruce Lee wax figure (right) and actual human (left)

Sylvester Stallone

Pierce Brosnan and a random passerby

Marilyn Monroe

Li Yundi, Chinese pianist

Kelly Chan, Hong Kong singer

Anita Mui, Hong Kong singer

Nicholas Tse, Hong Kong singer, and who's that in the back- the Chinese version of Bruno Mars? It's Aaron Kwok, another Hong Kong singer.

Lady Gaga

Elvis

Princess Diana and an admirer

This girl really likes Winston Churchill

Vladimir Putin

You can get your picture taken with a really young Obama

Chen-Ning Yang, a Chinese physicist

Einstein wax figure (right) and actual human (left)

Yang Liwei, the first astronaut sent to space by the Chinese space program

Kate Winslet

Fan Bingbing, a Chinese actress

David and Victoria Beckham. Please somebody tell me she looks like Julia Roberts, because I was totally convinced this was Julia Roberts.

Robert Pattinson

Cecilia Cheung, Hong Kong actress and singer

Julia Roberts

Tom Cruise

There was a good mix of Chinese and international figures, from all different areas: sports, music, movies, world leaders, etc. To be honest, I was scared to go to the wax museum- I thought it was going to be super creepy. And it was a little bit creepy, but it was also full of actual living non-creepy humans who were excited and having fun and taking pictures, so I was able to ignore the creepiness.

The creepiest thing, though, was that the wax figures' feet are all bolted to the floor, so if you push them, they kind of wobble in a really unnatural way.

Overall, though, I thought it was so cool! The wax figures are amazing artwork. It was totally worth going.

When I said "I don't know if you're going to hell" what I meant was "probably yes"

Grumpy Cat: "Don't know, don't care." Image source.

Here's an interesting post from Peter Mosley: Why It Wasn’t Good Enough for This Ex-Christian to Say the Eternal Fate of Others Was up to God. It's about this:

Almost every time I ask a Christian if non-believers go to heaven or hell, they answer that it’s not up to them. It’s up to God.

Yeah, I used to say that sometimes. You know, if you go out and "do evangelism" and somebody's like "but ... is my grandma in hell?" you can say "well I don't know, only God can judge."

Of course, for me, "well I don't know, only God can judge" actually meant "Was she a Christian? No? Well... unfortunately, yeah, she's probably in hell. But I don't want to actually say that out loud."

Here's what Mosley has to say about this kind of answer:

My experience of talking to Christians indicates that, for many of them, passing the buck on to God is good enough. But should it be? Honestly — if you really, deeply care for your friend, wouldn’t you want to make sure that they weren’t going to spend eternity in torment, instead of just being resigned to a third party? Wouldn’t you want to make sure God let them into heaven with you?

That’s how I felt, eventually, as a Christian. “It’s up to God” wasn’t good enough. I wanted to know for sure. Did hell exist? Who was going there? Who wasn’t?

And I also asked myself an arguably more difficult question: “What does it say about me that I believe in and worship a God whose law indicates that this person I care about might go to hell forever? What kind of person would I have to be to even think to worship a God like that?”

I'm kind of startled, to be honest. He says "if you really, deeply care for your friend" but when I used that answer, of course I didn't care. It was just a way to sidestep a particularly nasty part of "the gospel." Grandma was just a data point in an apologetics argument. Just an objection that had to be overcome so this person could "get saved."

I already knew the answer: yeah, she was most likely in hell. But I could get away with saying "I don't know, only God can judge" because it's possible she had a secret deathbed conversion, or maybe she had prayed the sinner's prayer at some point in her life and God counted it, or maybe the narrow gate is wider than it seemed. I hoped the narrow gate was wider than it seemed, I hoped for some kind of Christian universalism, but based on what I knew of "God", it was very unlikely.

So anyway, now I'm wondering, are there Christians who use this answer to mean something different than "yeah probably but I don't want to actually say that out loud"?

I actually have encountered that- there was one time I was talking with some Chinese Christians about hell, and they seemed to be unaware that Christians were "supposed to" believe that people get into heaven based solely on whether they believed the right things about Jesus. (To be clear, I'm using the term "supposed to" here to make fun of the American evangelicals who think they know the correct definition of "Christianity" for all people for all time. In reality, Christianity manifests itself differently in different cultures.) So when we talked about hell, it was sort of hard to communicate because we had completely different assumptions about it.

When I asked them directly, what do you think the criteria is for going to heaven or hell, they said we don't know, only God can judge. So I asked them, do you think it's based on whether or not a person is a Christian? And they said no. It seemed that the idea was ridiculous to them. Of course hell would be based on if we treated people right or wrong in this life.

When I asked them, "so, do you think Christians should warn other people about hell?" they said yes, and I was surprised. But, upon further questioning, I realized they didn't mean warn people "you need to believe in Jesus, otherwise you'll go to hell" but to say to someone who's mistreating others "hey, there's going to be a judgment someday, better stop doing that."

I guess for them, "I don't know, only God can judge" meant "I'm not exactly sure how bad you have to be in order to get sent to hell. But it's definitely something along those lines." So was your grandma a pretty great person? Then God knows that. She's probably okay.

(I have no idea whether or not this is typical among Christians in China. But I would guess, since Christians are a minority and it's very common that a Chinese Christian's parents/ close family members/ friends are not Christians, it's much harder to sell the "all non-Christians go to hell" line here.)

Anyway, the other important point that Mosley makes is "What does it say about me that I believe in and worship a God whose law indicates that this person I care about might go to hell forever? What kind of person would I have to be to even think to worship a God like that?"

Yeah, I never questioned that.

Because I was taught that I was so sinful that I couldn't trust my own sense of what morality and justice are. Yeah, it may seem like it's awful to send the vast majority of the human population to hell, but a person would only think that because they're a sinner who's unable to understand what justice actually is.

The worst thing about this theory is that it's completely logically consistent. People deserve to go to hell. If they say, "no, we don't deserve to go to hell", well OF COURSE that's what they're going to say, they're sinners who deserve to go to hell.

We are so sinful we can't even understand how sinful we are, apparently. The only counterargument is "but... but... that's AWFUL!" and actually having a heart, and I was taught I can't trust my heart; it was in opposition to God's truth and God's justice.

So no, I didn't question. I didn't say, "Actually, it's not right for God to send my friends to hell." No. I really really really really didn't want my friends to go to hell, but I never once questioned that that's what God would have to do if they didn't believe the right things about Jesus. So I worked so hard at evangelism, and I prayed so hard for God to change their hearts so that they would realize they needed to become Christians.

In church, they said "God doesn't violate people's free will. He's not going to force them to become Christians." But if it was up to me, I would have totally violated EVERYONE'S free will. If I was able to, I would have, back then. If there was anything I could have said or done that would force my friends to become Christians, I would have done it. I tried everything.

My Christian friends told me, "God loves our friends even more than we do. God wants them to become saved even more than we do." (Which, on that topic, I also recommend this post by the Slacktivist. "One of the many problems with all of that was that it required us to believe that Bruce Springsteen is greater than God.") Apparently, God, who was sending our friends to hell, really really wanted not to. We said this to encourage each other when we tried so hard at evangelism and our friends remained stubbornly unsaved.

Apparently, God wanted my friends not to go to hell even more than I did. But God was sending them to hell anyway, and I believed that was right. I believed there could be no way out except for the loophole that Jesus made possible on the cross.

And I really think the worst part of this theology is when I have conversations with Christians who just CANNOT FATHOM why anyone would think it's offensive, unjust, unloving, or unreasonable to believe that everyone deserves to be tortured eternally. Evangelicalism has created a whole culture where "we're sinners" is the most important thing about people, and basic human compassion is "watering down the gospel" and being "soft on sin" and forgetting "God is holy."

I've said it before and I'll say it many more times in the future. Hell ruins everything about Christianity.