Anglicans like to call their faith a via media, or middle way, between Rome and Wittenberg. Much the same is the place of the agnostic, I have found.
I am not talking of those who are religionless by default but fearful of the cosmic spanking they might get in the afterlife. Those who call themselves "agnostic" to avoid the stares and frowns prompted by "atheist."
No, I am talking as someone who once believed with conviction. Not just in childhood, either. Not just as a matter of good manners or custom. Not as a cultural expression (well, perhaps a little).
I had faith and now all I have is doubt I cannot overcome. I offer this mindful of Romano Guardini's definition of faith as the capacity to overcome doubt.
The terrible thing is that I am reasonably well educated about religion. I am conversant with the salient issues in theology, biblical research and ecclesiology and the gallons of ink spilled attempting to resolve them.
Indeed, I enjoy a good discussion on these themes. I can articulate with very reasonable fidelity the prevailing consensus concerning the basic teachings of Christianity, the Catholic Church and some branches of Protestantism -- even though I do not believe in any of it.
To my mind, the question isn't even whether God exists, but whether Jesus of Nazareth ever really walked the face of the earth, which I highly doubt.
There ought to be a church in which people who do not believe can go and discuss these things. I'm not interested in socials, bake sales, services or the like. Just a good discussion in which I can speak with like minded people and broaden my understanding with the comforting knowledge that none of these questions can ever be definitively answered.
Give me the church of St. John Dominic Crossan, please.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
What Good Are the Churches?
Two issues, two days, two wrongheaded political interventions by churches: Mormons fund a proposal to ban gay marriage, Catholic bishops begin murmuring about opposing Obama on their micro-issues. Maybe it's time to take away the tax exemptions of churches, see if they have time to screw around with the rest of us then.
Note that they're never out in front for peace or for poverty reduction. Only exceptionally, and usually for the self-interest of their congregations, do they come out in favor of ethnic tolerance.
I won't even bother with whether their beliefs make sense. Let's look at their actions, which principally amount to wanting to carve into the stone of the civil, religiously neutral law of a pluralistic society minor quirks of their moral codes.
Let's start with the Mormons. The Church of Latter-Day Sainst opposes gay marriage; fine, no judge will force a church to perform a marriage that violates the churches teachings.
Certainly, no Catholic priest is legally obligated to marry a divorced Catholic who does not have an canon law annulment: Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of the bond created by the sacrament of matrimony trumps secular law under the U.S. Constitution.
On the issue of marriage, Mormons have their own unusual history.
In 1890, then-LDS President Wilford Woodruff claimed he received a revelation that polygamy, previously taught as consistent with "God's law," should be banned. The oracular event was instrumental in Utah's admission into the USA in 1896. Yet even then the first Mormon elected to the House in 1898 was denied a seat because he practiced polygamy.
Should the Mormons be allowed polygamy? Why not? The Catholics are allowed not to recognize divorce decrees that are perfectly legal in civil courts.
But it doesn't end there. The Mormons also banned blacks from the priesthood or their temples in 1849, a doctrine that was not altered until 1978. Note that government did not interfere in the application of this doctrine.
Much the same can be said of Catholicism, which as a matter of practice in the United States upheld separate seating, and in some places separate churches, for blacks and whites. The practice was still known to occur in 1949, I am aware, when Washington Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle banned it in his diocese and swiftly unseated several pastors who defied him.
But, you might say that the Catholic Church gives plenty to the poor through Catholic Charities, no? Actually, no. Between 45 and 65 percent (depending on the source) of Catholic Charities' funding comes from contracts with the government.
Catholic Charities heyday as a private beneficence was when its charges were white and Irish. Once the Irish moved to the suburbs and clients began to be primarily black or Hispanic, the organization needed government money to continue.
Now comes Archbishop Francis George of Chicago, arguing that bishops should express opposition to the rumored regulatory changes that the Obama administration will make in the areas of abortion counseling and stem-cell research.
Why haven't the bishops been as vocal on other issues as they have on this? Isn't it a fact that the bishops want a law on abortion because their preaching has failed so abysmally that Catholics are statistically as likely to divorce or get an abortion as non-Catholics?
Why should we taxpayers subsidize this nonsense? The LDS and Catholic churches have plenty of money -- witness the millions paid out in damages in response to lawsuits from pedophile priests' victims.
Traditional religion is, indeed, the only wholly untaxed business in the USA. Whatever social purpose they may have been deemed to perform in the past, that role is long gone. In a country that prides itself on the separation of church and state, religion should be taxed, like pornography, cigarettes and liquor.
Note that they're never out in front for peace or for poverty reduction. Only exceptionally, and usually for the self-interest of their congregations, do they come out in favor of ethnic tolerance.
I won't even bother with whether their beliefs make sense. Let's look at their actions, which principally amount to wanting to carve into the stone of the civil, religiously neutral law of a pluralistic society minor quirks of their moral codes.
Let's start with the Mormons. The Church of Latter-Day Sainst opposes gay marriage; fine, no judge will force a church to perform a marriage that violates the churches teachings.
Certainly, no Catholic priest is legally obligated to marry a divorced Catholic who does not have an canon law annulment: Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of the bond created by the sacrament of matrimony trumps secular law under the U.S. Constitution.
On the issue of marriage, Mormons have their own unusual history.
In 1890, then-LDS President Wilford Woodruff claimed he received a revelation that polygamy, previously taught as consistent with "God's law," should be banned. The oracular event was instrumental in Utah's admission into the USA in 1896. Yet even then the first Mormon elected to the House in 1898 was denied a seat because he practiced polygamy.
Should the Mormons be allowed polygamy? Why not? The Catholics are allowed not to recognize divorce decrees that are perfectly legal in civil courts.
But it doesn't end there. The Mormons also banned blacks from the priesthood or their temples in 1849, a doctrine that was not altered until 1978. Note that government did not interfere in the application of this doctrine.
Much the same can be said of Catholicism, which as a matter of practice in the United States upheld separate seating, and in some places separate churches, for blacks and whites. The practice was still known to occur in 1949, I am aware, when Washington Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle banned it in his diocese and swiftly unseated several pastors who defied him.
But, you might say that the Catholic Church gives plenty to the poor through Catholic Charities, no? Actually, no. Between 45 and 65 percent (depending on the source) of Catholic Charities' funding comes from contracts with the government.
Catholic Charities heyday as a private beneficence was when its charges were white and Irish. Once the Irish moved to the suburbs and clients began to be primarily black or Hispanic, the organization needed government money to continue.
Now comes Archbishop Francis George of Chicago, arguing that bishops should express opposition to the rumored regulatory changes that the Obama administration will make in the areas of abortion counseling and stem-cell research.
Why haven't the bishops been as vocal on other issues as they have on this? Isn't it a fact that the bishops want a law on abortion because their preaching has failed so abysmally that Catholics are statistically as likely to divorce or get an abortion as non-Catholics?
Why should we taxpayers subsidize this nonsense? The LDS and Catholic churches have plenty of money -- witness the millions paid out in damages in response to lawsuits from pedophile priests' victims.
Traditional religion is, indeed, the only wholly untaxed business in the USA. Whatever social purpose they may have been deemed to perform in the past, that role is long gone. In a country that prides itself on the separation of church and state, religion should be taxed, like pornography, cigarettes and liquor.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Is Atheism a Religion? What is?
In an e-mail list I briefly joined I found myself landing into a long-running debate concerning the nature of religion in which the Christian argued that a federal appeals court had declared atheism a religion.
In Kaufman v. McCaughtry, a case about the rights of atheists to form a religious club in prison, the U.S.Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in 2005 that
Moreover, legal isn't moral or philosophical. Or slimming, as I like to add.
In trying to define in a speculative discussion what "religion" means and really is, we are drawing on sociology and social psychology, along with religion and theology themselves, not to mention, ultimately, philosophy.
The Wikipedia, everyman's reference albeit fraught with problems, offers this:
In Kaufman v. McCaughtry, a case about the rights of atheists to form a religious club in prison, the U.S.Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled in 2005 that
Atheism is, among other things, a school of thought that takes a position on religion, the existence and importance of a supreme being, and a code of ethics. As such, we are satisfied that it qualifies as Kaufman’s religion for purposes of the First Amendment claims he is attempting to raise.Does this mean atheism is a religion? For legal purposes it has been for some time. In 1985 (in Wallace v. Jaffree) the Supreme Court explained the thinking this way
At one time it was thought that this right [to choose one’s own creed] merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.Mechanistic right-wing Christians have used these decisions to argue triumphalistically that atheism is a religion, much in the vein of the World War II saw that "there are no atheists in the foxholes." Hell, foxholes were hard to find in World War II, which was essentially a war of movement, with tactics designed to avoid the foxhole altogether.
Moreover, legal isn't moral or philosophical. Or slimming, as I like to add.
In trying to define in a speculative discussion what "religion" means and really is, we are drawing on sociology and social psychology, along with religion and theology themselves, not to mention, ultimately, philosophy.
The Wikipedia, everyman's reference albeit fraught with problems, offers this:
A religion is a set of beliefs and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law.To my mind, the deal breaker for an atheist, or even an agnostic, is the word "supernatural." Once you affirm something beyond what can be observed and verified, youŕe not involved in human inquiry any more.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
A Survey of My Religious Opinions
Prompted by Lifehacker's list of books people proposed as life-changing (which, yes, was disappointing), I began to compose a similar list. That four of them were religious works surprised me, yet even in my present free fall to agnosticism, they provide markers of thinking as devoid of superstition as of cultural conformity.
My top-ten influential books included 1. A Religion for Our Time by Louis Evely; 4. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman; 5. The Lord by Romano Guardini; 8. A Marginal Jew by John Meier.
Louis Evely was a Belgian Catholic priest and spiritual writer whose 1969 book I began to tackle one night in a small town of the province of La Pampa, from which my travel companions and I would journey the next day through ruts to a particular spot in the open land.
Evely's writings were in the vein of the much better-known Henri Nouwen (to whom I was never particularly drawn). Writings that are meant to inspire in a lively way, taking the teachings and scripture of Christian faith at face value, rather than analytically, to help believing people make sense of their lives in light of faith.
In an adaptation of talks delivered in 1962 at a religious retreat for people who were about to set on volunteer aid missions in the Third World, he laughs at a religion of white souls in which salvation is an individual matter, let everyone save himself. Instead he speaks of a world that does not believe, does not hope and does not love, yet one which suffers for it.
The world, he concludes, will belong to whomever gives it the greatest hope. In his view, the greatest hope was to be placed in the God who became a poor Galilean woodworker, like the majority of the people of the world, to the point of being able to affirm, without crossed-fingers, without disclaimers, "Blessed are the poor."
To Evely the task of the Christian is not so much a matter of going to church as it is of becoming poor. That became the cornerstone of my modern religion. It explains why I chose a life that was frugal and had, long before such things were talked about, a low carbon footprint.
John Henry Newman was a significant name in my life before I ever read his writings. My secondary school was named after the founder of the 19th-century Oxford Movement in Anglicanism, who eventually converted to Catholicism.
His Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Latin, literally meaning "in defense of his own life") was a collection of essays he published as pamphlets in the 1860s in response to the accusation of a detractor. Charles Kingsley had written that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy."
Newman provides "a history of my religious opinions" (a subtitle which I have twisted for my purpose in this post), directed at the academic circles in which he lived all his life, and skewers Kingsley squarely, demonstrating not merely his sincerity, but the reasonableness of his views.
This book became the sourcebook of my discussions with an older Anglican lady who was on the brink, yet in great trouble wavering on the notion of becoming accepted into the Catholic Church. My second "convert."
Romano Guardini, despite his name, was German theologian and philosopher who taught in the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign by the Nazis. His writing is primarily philosophical and extremely dense. One reads a Guardini paragraph and must stop to consider it for a day.
Nonetheless, his popular work The Lord has been a long-time bestseller since the 1940s. Modern scholars regard his methodology outdated, but he still manages to tackle for the nonspecialist the crucial meanings of the story of the gospels in a critical, thoughtful manner.
I recall being stunned by the way that, merely in his careful examination of the genealogies of Jesus, he manages to provide wonderful insights. He transforms the usually tiresome begats into a gem of a little historical treatise.
John P. Meier, the only living author in the quaternity, is a renown biblical scholar who collaborated with the late Raymond Brown, co-author of the groundbreaking Jerome Biblical Commentary, whose ongoing work A Marginal Jew runs three volumes so far, with a "final" fourth in the works since at least 2001.
Meier approaches Jesus as a historian, rather than a theologian or a believer, and attempts to distill a synthesis of what Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars locked up in a room in, say, Princeton, might come to agree could factually be asserted about the much-talked about Galilean woodworker.
I'm partial to his very funny footnotes, of which there are many. But I'm struck by the way in which he rationally limits the power of belief and nonbelief in attempting to leapfrog past the information available and the methods of historiography. For example, while he admits that the believer's grounds to affirm that Jesus performed "miracles" are circumscribed, he similarly points out that there is no scientific method to conclude they were not: there is no scientific divine-intervention meter.
These four books, by men of whom I became fond (I composed most of the Wikipedia entry on Evely to which the link above points), are markers in my journey toward, first, a post-Vatican II faith that insisted on the here and now; second, the development of a conviction of the reasonableness of faith; third, repeated retooling and reconsideration at different levels of understanding, concerning the meaning of substantially the same story; fourth, a dialogue concerning the believability of the story.
It would be erroneous to conclude from the preceding that I lost my faith thanks to Meier. Rather, his work delayed the falling of the scales for quite some time. In the end, my faith tottered not on Meier's writings, but on my own poor witness.
All four works are emblematic of many others read before and after or in tandem. I usually read several books at a time.
They were influential in different ways. Evely inspired an adolescent to dream of becoming an apostle, but the terms of faith or even doubt, remain those set in that first evening with a borrowed copy of the book.
Newman bolstered a young man in the defense of the ideal in the world once I was sent out at the end of my formation. Guardini provided critical grist for an adult professional busy with the concerns of a supporting a family.
In middle age, Meier has encouraged me to begin the work of integration, at least intellectually, of all those aspects of self that Carl Gustaf Jung says all of us embark upon before we die. Even though I have changed chairs in his imaginary team of critics, I look forward to his next volume.
In sum, a religion for our time might be to me a faith grounded in a profound relationship involving release from want and a conviction buttressed by fearless critical inquiry and the integration of experience, received wisdom and insight.
My top-ten influential books included 1. A Religion for Our Time by Louis Evely; 4. Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman; 5. The Lord by Romano Guardini; 8. A Marginal Jew by John Meier.
Louis Evely was a Belgian Catholic priest and spiritual writer whose 1969 book I began to tackle one night in a small town of the province of La Pampa, from which my travel companions and I would journey the next day through ruts to a particular spot in the open land.
Evely's writings were in the vein of the much better-known Henri Nouwen (to whom I was never particularly drawn). Writings that are meant to inspire in a lively way, taking the teachings and scripture of Christian faith at face value, rather than analytically, to help believing people make sense of their lives in light of faith.
In an adaptation of talks delivered in 1962 at a religious retreat for people who were about to set on volunteer aid missions in the Third World, he laughs at a religion of white souls in which salvation is an individual matter, let everyone save himself. Instead he speaks of a world that does not believe, does not hope and does not love, yet one which suffers for it.
The world, he concludes, will belong to whomever gives it the greatest hope. In his view, the greatest hope was to be placed in the God who became a poor Galilean woodworker, like the majority of the people of the world, to the point of being able to affirm, without crossed-fingers, without disclaimers, "Blessed are the poor."
To Evely the task of the Christian is not so much a matter of going to church as it is of becoming poor. That became the cornerstone of my modern religion. It explains why I chose a life that was frugal and had, long before such things were talked about, a low carbon footprint.
John Henry Newman was a significant name in my life before I ever read his writings. My secondary school was named after the founder of the 19th-century Oxford Movement in Anglicanism, who eventually converted to Catholicism.
His Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Latin, literally meaning "in defense of his own life") was a collection of essays he published as pamphlets in the 1860s in response to the accusation of a detractor. Charles Kingsley had written that "Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy."
Newman provides "a history of my religious opinions" (a subtitle which I have twisted for my purpose in this post), directed at the academic circles in which he lived all his life, and skewers Kingsley squarely, demonstrating not merely his sincerity, but the reasonableness of his views.
This book became the sourcebook of my discussions with an older Anglican lady who was on the brink, yet in great trouble wavering on the notion of becoming accepted into the Catholic Church. My second "convert."
Romano Guardini, despite his name, was German theologian and philosopher who taught in the University of Berlin until he was forced to resign by the Nazis. His writing is primarily philosophical and extremely dense. One reads a Guardini paragraph and must stop to consider it for a day.
Nonetheless, his popular work The Lord has been a long-time bestseller since the 1940s. Modern scholars regard his methodology outdated, but he still manages to tackle for the nonspecialist the crucial meanings of the story of the gospels in a critical, thoughtful manner.
I recall being stunned by the way that, merely in his careful examination of the genealogies of Jesus, he manages to provide wonderful insights. He transforms the usually tiresome begats into a gem of a little historical treatise.
John P. Meier, the only living author in the quaternity, is a renown biblical scholar who collaborated with the late Raymond Brown, co-author of the groundbreaking Jerome Biblical Commentary, whose ongoing work A Marginal Jew runs three volumes so far, with a "final" fourth in the works since at least 2001.
Meier approaches Jesus as a historian, rather than a theologian or a believer, and attempts to distill a synthesis of what Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and agnostic scholars locked up in a room in, say, Princeton, might come to agree could factually be asserted about the much-talked about Galilean woodworker.
I'm partial to his very funny footnotes, of which there are many. But I'm struck by the way in which he rationally limits the power of belief and nonbelief in attempting to leapfrog past the information available and the methods of historiography. For example, while he admits that the believer's grounds to affirm that Jesus performed "miracles" are circumscribed, he similarly points out that there is no scientific method to conclude they were not: there is no scientific divine-intervention meter.
These four books, by men of whom I became fond (I composed most of the Wikipedia entry on Evely to which the link above points), are markers in my journey toward, first, a post-Vatican II faith that insisted on the here and now; second, the development of a conviction of the reasonableness of faith; third, repeated retooling and reconsideration at different levels of understanding, concerning the meaning of substantially the same story; fourth, a dialogue concerning the believability of the story.
It would be erroneous to conclude from the preceding that I lost my faith thanks to Meier. Rather, his work delayed the falling of the scales for quite some time. In the end, my faith tottered not on Meier's writings, but on my own poor witness.
All four works are emblematic of many others read before and after or in tandem. I usually read several books at a time.
They were influential in different ways. Evely inspired an adolescent to dream of becoming an apostle, but the terms of faith or even doubt, remain those set in that first evening with a borrowed copy of the book.
Newman bolstered a young man in the defense of the ideal in the world once I was sent out at the end of my formation. Guardini provided critical grist for an adult professional busy with the concerns of a supporting a family.
In middle age, Meier has encouraged me to begin the work of integration, at least intellectually, of all those aspects of self that Carl Gustaf Jung says all of us embark upon before we die. Even though I have changed chairs in his imaginary team of critics, I look forward to his next volume.
In sum, a religion for our time might be to me a faith grounded in a profound relationship involving release from want and a conviction buttressed by fearless critical inquiry and the integration of experience, received wisdom and insight.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Oh, Those Gay and Lesbian Sinners!
A couple of weeks ago I visited Foundry Methodist Church (aka Hillary's church) and got into an argument over 2008 United Methodist General Conference resolutions reaffirming the incompatibility of homosexual behavior with Christianity to the point of exclusion from church membership and ordained ministry.
Although I currently view myself as a heterosexual non-Methodist agnostic, the issue strikes me as emblematic of a divide that cuts across Christian denominations and goes even beyond religion to attitudes about laws concerning sexuality, family and marriage. Yet I am of two minds in this matter.
On one hand, I find it difficult to argue that homosexual behavior is not judged morally wrong by Christian doctrine. Although the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are silent on the question, the book of Leviticus and various epistles of Paul are quite emphatic and unequivocal in their outright moral condemnation of same-gender sex.
Speaking of those who "detain the truth of God in injustice," Paul describes people such as among whom "women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy." (Romans I 1:26-27)
In his 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul adds: "Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." (I Cor 6:9-10)
Moreover, in a broader philosophical sense, I would find it difficult to defend the notion that homosexual behavior is, generally speaking, desirable and worthy of encouragement.
Given that male genitals "fit" more easily with female genitals and that the essential biological function of these organs is reproductive, it is hard to argue that the homosexual use is not, at a minimum, a tad inventive and contrived. The socially, politically and economically desirable use of genitals is for the propagation of the species through male-female contact.
This need not be the only use. Indeed, more than one male-female contact is usually needed for impregnation. Moreover, continual nonreproductive contact fosters emotional bonds that make for extended biological networks that nurture the young.
Yet, is sex an expression of love and are not lesbians and gays entitled to express their love for one another? I agree that sex can express love, quite pleasurably, but precisely because it is such an urgent bodily need, I wonder whether it is the best, most complete, most selfless and truest expression. Elsewhere I defined love "as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested loving." (See my post here.)
Sex may well oil the path to disinterested loving, but is sex, of any sort and in any circumstance, the one and only roadway and, thus, an inalienable aspect of what a human being necessarily must experience in order to live in dignity? Only an unqualified affirmative answer yields a forthright, philosophically positive endorsement the philosophical value of all sexual behavior, no matter what.
This does not mean -- insofar as I would argue -- that gays and lesbians belong back in the closet.
Christians seeking to exclude gays and lesbians from their churches and church offices had better re-read their New Testaments. What need do people in their Sunday finest have of a redeemer, if they are all sinless and pure? To this question Jesus answers succinctly: "I came not to call the just, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)
The important point that many Christians miss, in the mad dash to imitate everything they hear around them, is that from the perspective of Christian doctrine, not only is everybody sinful and fallen (yes, even babies ... especially babies!), but this is a good thing.
"O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer," Christians have sung for centuries in the Easter vigil Exultet. So, if you argue that homosexuals are sinners, then you have to welcome them and accord them a place of honor in any truly Christian church! (See an interesting discussion of the idea here.)
Similarly, whatever makes homosexual behavior problematic in a broader philosophical sense does not seem to warrant legal sanction or discrimination against people who engage in it. Just because a particular behavior is not the most natural imaginable, it does not follow that it should be illegal, or a bar against employment.
There is no secular or philosophical logic to the notion that legal marriage -- a contract between two people planning to engage in cohabitation and sexual congress on an exclusive and long-term basis -- requires a man and a woman. You can argue that "the Bahble" says this or that until the cows come home, but legally it won't wash in the United States. The U.S. legal bible is the Constitution, which expressly forbids the state to favor religion.
To be fair: the Methodists did not wander half so far as I have. Insofar as I can tell, they did two things.
First, they reaffirmed the wording in the denomination's current Book of Discipline that "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" (Paragraph 161.G).
Secondly, they approved by a 763 to 38 margin a resolution stating that "All United Methodists, clergy and laity, are bound to an honest covenant in both word and deed and that no clergy, active or retired clergy including Bishops, or lay members who consistently try to overturn the wording of the Discipline on homosexuality shall be fit for appointment and for membership in The United Methodist Church." They gave as a rationale the statement that "Homosexuality distorts the meaning of Scripture, grace, law, and regeneration. Gay activists continue to push their exclusivism by striving to abolish those opposing [views]."
Insofar as I am personally concerned, I would not have batted an eyelash if they had changed the name of their rulebook to "Book of Discipline & Bondage." But I am put off by the arguing.
On the pro-gay side, I hear much frothing about the "sinfulness"and "heterosexism" of the position that prevailed; from the anti-gay side, I am aghast to read that "homosexual practice" is among the things "that come from the devil."
I see problems with both. Now you know why.
Although I currently view myself as a heterosexual non-Methodist agnostic, the issue strikes me as emblematic of a divide that cuts across Christian denominations and goes even beyond religion to attitudes about laws concerning sexuality, family and marriage. Yet I am of two minds in this matter.
On one hand, I find it difficult to argue that homosexual behavior is not judged morally wrong by Christian doctrine. Although the sayings of Jesus in the gospels are silent on the question, the book of Leviticus and various epistles of Paul are quite emphatic and unequivocal in their outright moral condemnation of same-gender sex.
Speaking of those who "detain the truth of God in injustice," Paul describes people such as among whom "women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy." (Romans I 1:26-27)
In his 1st letter to the Corinthians, Paul adds: "Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God." (I Cor 6:9-10)
Moreover, in a broader philosophical sense, I would find it difficult to defend the notion that homosexual behavior is, generally speaking, desirable and worthy of encouragement.
Given that male genitals "fit" more easily with female genitals and that the essential biological function of these organs is reproductive, it is hard to argue that the homosexual use is not, at a minimum, a tad inventive and contrived. The socially, politically and economically desirable use of genitals is for the propagation of the species through male-female contact.
This need not be the only use. Indeed, more than one male-female contact is usually needed for impregnation. Moreover, continual nonreproductive contact fosters emotional bonds that make for extended biological networks that nurture the young.
Yet, is sex an expression of love and are not lesbians and gays entitled to express their love for one another? I agree that sex can express love, quite pleasurably, but precisely because it is such an urgent bodily need, I wonder whether it is the best, most complete, most selfless and truest expression. Elsewhere I defined love "as an emotional appreciation of others and other things for themselves that leads to disinterested loving." (See my post here.)
Sex may well oil the path to disinterested loving, but is sex, of any sort and in any circumstance, the one and only roadway and, thus, an inalienable aspect of what a human being necessarily must experience in order to live in dignity? Only an unqualified affirmative answer yields a forthright, philosophically positive endorsement the philosophical value of all sexual behavior, no matter what.
This does not mean -- insofar as I would argue -- that gays and lesbians belong back in the closet.
Christians seeking to exclude gays and lesbians from their churches and church offices had better re-read their New Testaments. What need do people in their Sunday finest have of a redeemer, if they are all sinless and pure? To this question Jesus answers succinctly: "I came not to call the just, but sinners." (Mark 2:17)
The important point that many Christians miss, in the mad dash to imitate everything they hear around them, is that from the perspective of Christian doctrine, not only is everybody sinful and fallen (yes, even babies ... especially babies!), but this is a good thing.
"O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer," Christians have sung for centuries in the Easter vigil Exultet. So, if you argue that homosexuals are sinners, then you have to welcome them and accord them a place of honor in any truly Christian church! (See an interesting discussion of the idea here.)
Similarly, whatever makes homosexual behavior problematic in a broader philosophical sense does not seem to warrant legal sanction or discrimination against people who engage in it. Just because a particular behavior is not the most natural imaginable, it does not follow that it should be illegal, or a bar against employment.
There is no secular or philosophical logic to the notion that legal marriage -- a contract between two people planning to engage in cohabitation and sexual congress on an exclusive and long-term basis -- requires a man and a woman. You can argue that "the Bahble" says this or that until the cows come home, but legally it won't wash in the United States. The U.S. legal bible is the Constitution, which expressly forbids the state to favor religion.
To be fair: the Methodists did not wander half so far as I have. Insofar as I can tell, they did two things.
First, they reaffirmed the wording in the denomination's current Book of Discipline that "The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" (Paragraph 161.G).
Secondly, they approved by a 763 to 38 margin a resolution stating that "All United Methodists, clergy and laity, are bound to an honest covenant in both word and deed and that no clergy, active or retired clergy including Bishops, or lay members who consistently try to overturn the wording of the Discipline on homosexuality shall be fit for appointment and for membership in The United Methodist Church." They gave as a rationale the statement that "Homosexuality distorts the meaning of Scripture, grace, law, and regeneration. Gay activists continue to push their exclusivism by striving to abolish those opposing [views]."
Insofar as I am personally concerned, I would not have batted an eyelash if they had changed the name of their rulebook to "Book of Discipline & Bondage." But I am put off by the arguing.
On the pro-gay side, I hear much frothing about the "sinfulness"and "heterosexism" of the position that prevailed; from the anti-gay side, I am aghast to read that "homosexual practice" is among the things "that come from the devil."
I see problems with both. Now you know why.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Amen
The American echo chamber is so focused on selling everything from cars and cereal, to political sound bites and Bible verses, that a complex discourse underlying our society, such as that hinted at by the emergence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, gets drowned out in the din, and the time needed to digest it overtaken by our rush to nowhere.
At the heart of Wright's affirmations lies one part of the American mosaic: a faith that developed in a quest to squeeze out meaning out of a lifetime of misery. Let's parse that for a moment.
Faith, quest, meaning, misery.
Faith is, of course, if not the opposite, at least the very distant cousin of knowledge. We believe there will be a tomorrow based on the experience of our yesterdays, but we do not know for a fact that tomorrow is really a day a way. Indeed, the Orphan Annie song is about the perennial American belief that if we can only hold on to the next morning, things will be better.
That's the American quest. In one version, it was to go beyond the ocean, to go beyond the Appalachians to the plains and beyond that, past the Rockies, where the pot of gold was once thought to be found. To leave Europe's prejudices, hatreds, injustices and perennially warring kings behind and instead claim the Promised Land.
Of course, the Indians -- ideological purists note: Indians call themselves "Indian" these days -- had done it before, crossing the Bering Strait about 25,000 years ago for reasons less well known, but happily settling in hunting grounds full of Buffalo.
Also, of course, the westward march of the northwest Europeans was met by Indians and the descendants of Spaniards who had reached the pot of gold at least a century before the English at Jamestown and the Puritans at Plymouth.
Then there's peculiar kidnapping and transport by American, British and Portuguese merchants of African men, women and children for generations of enslaved labor in concentration camps throughout the American South.
This gave birth to a quest directly in conflict with the ambitions of the Europeans, which raises the question of the meaning of all this questing. Why seek out a new life across a land bridge or an ocean? Why lay claim to freedom?
Perhaps because in Asia, Europe and the euphemistically named plantations there was misery and death. In America we dislike the d-word. People among us do not die, they "pass away." Yet ask any anthropologist and you will learn that we learn about the religions of the past through their burial grounds.
Less well known than Karl Marx's famous "opium of the masses" is his dictum that "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation."
The Rev. Wright is defending his people's sigh, much as immigrants did sacramentally in their Catholic ghettoes and the Calvinist unestablished denominations developed their individualistic, capitalist commonwealths -- and Indians mourned the destruction of the dwelling place of many spirits.
In the same vein, the sons and daughters of Abraham came to these shores reassured by George Washington's promise that "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens."
To the Jewish people, faith is the conviction that the world is ordered by the laws of a covenant given to their forebears. To the Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and now Latin American immigrants, faith is the assertion that hope can become fleshed in community. To the Anglo-Saxon former colonists faith has seemed to be the Calvinist claim that God helps those who help themselves.
To the black culture, faith is saying "amen" to the claim that freedom is God-given, therefore inalienable. Amen.
At the heart of Wright's affirmations lies one part of the American mosaic: a faith that developed in a quest to squeeze out meaning out of a lifetime of misery. Let's parse that for a moment.
Faith, quest, meaning, misery.
Faith is, of course, if not the opposite, at least the very distant cousin of knowledge. We believe there will be a tomorrow based on the experience of our yesterdays, but we do not know for a fact that tomorrow is really a day a way. Indeed, the Orphan Annie song is about the perennial American belief that if we can only hold on to the next morning, things will be better.
That's the American quest. In one version, it was to go beyond the ocean, to go beyond the Appalachians to the plains and beyond that, past the Rockies, where the pot of gold was once thought to be found. To leave Europe's prejudices, hatreds, injustices and perennially warring kings behind and instead claim the Promised Land.
Of course, the Indians -- ideological purists note: Indians call themselves "Indian" these days -- had done it before, crossing the Bering Strait about 25,000 years ago for reasons less well known, but happily settling in hunting grounds full of Buffalo.
Also, of course, the westward march of the northwest Europeans was met by Indians and the descendants of Spaniards who had reached the pot of gold at least a century before the English at Jamestown and the Puritans at Plymouth.
Then there's peculiar kidnapping and transport by American, British and Portuguese merchants of African men, women and children for generations of enslaved labor in concentration camps throughout the American South.
This gave birth to a quest directly in conflict with the ambitions of the Europeans, which raises the question of the meaning of all this questing. Why seek out a new life across a land bridge or an ocean? Why lay claim to freedom?
Perhaps because in Asia, Europe and the euphemistically named plantations there was misery and death. In America we dislike the d-word. People among us do not die, they "pass away." Yet ask any anthropologist and you will learn that we learn about the religions of the past through their burial grounds.
Less well known than Karl Marx's famous "opium of the masses" is his dictum that "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation."
The Rev. Wright is defending his people's sigh, much as immigrants did sacramentally in their Catholic ghettoes and the Calvinist unestablished denominations developed their individualistic, capitalist commonwealths -- and Indians mourned the destruction of the dwelling place of many spirits.
In the same vein, the sons and daughters of Abraham came to these shores reassured by George Washington's promise that "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens."
To the Jewish people, faith is the conviction that the world is ordered by the laws of a covenant given to their forebears. To the Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and now Latin American immigrants, faith is the assertion that hope can become fleshed in community. To the Anglo-Saxon former colonists faith has seemed to be the Calvinist claim that God helps those who help themselves.
To the black culture, faith is saying "amen" to the claim that freedom is God-given, therefore inalienable. Amen.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Papa Nazinger Comes to Town
Journalists who have never sat in a room full of boozed up bishops trading off-color humor about deans sodomizing seminarians have cast the pope’s arrival to Washington in terms of pseudo-ecclesiastical agendas, when in fact, it is subtly about something entirely different.
The liberal Washington Post and the conservative Washington Times played true to the script.
The Post has long fixated on ecclesiastical politics within the Catholic Church that none of its editors have ever mastered, the opening salvo in the coverage of the papal visit focused on whether the local archbishop is an “ally” of the pontiff.
In my opinion, Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, is more open to dialogue than the pope. But let’s face it: the Vatican does not make a habit of selecting Luthers as bishops.
Memo to Post editors: pretty much all bishops can be presumed to be papal allies. No story there.
The Times, whose ownership is tied to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has carefully avoided any overt reference to the denomination’s unusual theological hodgepodge of ideas, but staunchly sided with the Catholic right-wingers such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Not surprisingly, its curtain raiser, viewed the papal visit in terms of the institutional agenda of traditional-minded Catholics: please, Holy Father, save the Catholic schools!
Yet the history of Irish-American racial animosity towards African Americans and Hispanics even at the highest levels of the Catholic Church shows perfectly well that Catholic schools’ agony is the result of white flight to suburbs. When a traditional Catholic wants to save Catholic schools, the message is really: save the white schools.
Wuerl’s predecessor James Hickey, fought white suburban fellow Irish Catholics tooth and nail to keep subsidizing Catholic schools in the inner city, which in Washington, as in many other cities, essentially serve black non-Catholics. Such schools can claim successes such as Washington’s own former mayor Anthony Williams.
The real story of the papal visit is that it is nothing more than a quiet wink and nod to those who favor a certain mode of Catholicism.
When he was merely Joseph Ratzinger, theologian, the pope's view was that Christianity had lost relevancy in the Western world.
As pope he believes Christianity has all but vanished from the marketplace. He is right.
Keep in mind that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, unequivocally stated that the invasion of Iraq failed to meet the criteria of a “just war.” Recall also that for the last century vigorous Church teaching on social justice has repeatedly criticized capitalism as unjust.
The world, and in particular, predominantly Protestant but unchurched, capitalist United States, does as it pleases without more than a few pious words in church, which have no weight once outside the door.
Yet rather than change the way the message is conveyed so it might be heard -- as the Second Vatican Council recommended in the early 1960s -- Ratzinger, who served the council as a junior adviser, has long given up on what in Church parlance was once called “renewal.”
In serving as John Paul II’s theological hatchet man, Ratzinger opted to cut off all modernizing tendencies. He cut his student the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff at the knees and humiliated the Church’s foremost moral theologian, Bernard Häring, in petty proceedings entirely devoid of due process.
Now that he is pope, he is hunkering down in the catacombs in hopes of better times. He has patched up petty quarrels to his right flank, by re-opening up the use of Latin in church services, while remaining otherwise inflexible. His first encyclical letter was a rant against sex.
Significantly, he has kept the view of history that he likely learned in his Hitler Youth days. When he went to Auschwitz in 2006, he spoke of the “6 million Poles” and the “suffering” Germans and only finally, as an afterthought, oh yes, the Jews.
When the pope complains that Europe is the most secular continent on Earth, he is quietly bemoaning the demographic demise of whites in the cradle of the Caucasians.
Long ago, a prelate explained to me that Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical against birth control was designed to prevent “the suicide of the white race,” a thought I am certain was far from Papa Montini’s mind, but was and is not unthinkable in the hierarchy.
To whom will Papa Nazinger be addressing his message in the United States? To the white, conservative, most obedient Catholic “remnant.”
This is the other side of the coin. With 30 years of bishops appointed by John Paul II and the desertion of liberal or free thinking Catholics to the Episcopal Church and agnosticism, the U.S. Catholic Church offers a bride made in heaven for this pope.
American young women who yearn for the pre-Vatican II Church they never knew often go to church wearing mantilla, while young men who weigh whether to become priests speak boldly of the “ontological difference” that by right prevents the ordination of women.
Justice Scalia is a frequent attendee at events hosted by the ultrasecretive and ultraconservative group Opus Dei (Work of God) and forms with the likes of Chief Justice John Roberts, the visible peak of a phalanx of Catholics who have distinctive philosophical transformations in mind for the United States.
Scalia and Roberts belong to the growing school of “natural law” scholars, who define almost anything they dislike (think abortion and homosexuality, for starters) as against nature and therefore in principle unlawful.
Catholics make up 29 percent of Congress and are now about evenly split between Democrats who are heirs of the New Deal coalition and Republicans of the Scalia bent.
This is the pope’s base. This is the base that is willing to wage crusades against Muslims (note to militant Christian soldiers: the West lost the last crusades, consider using another term).
When Pope Benedict lands, he will be coming as the apostle to the most obedient of white Catholics. All others beware.
The liberal Washington Post and the conservative Washington Times played true to the script.
The Post has long fixated on ecclesiastical politics within the Catholic Church that none of its editors have ever mastered, the opening salvo in the coverage of the papal visit focused on whether the local archbishop is an “ally” of the pontiff.
In my opinion, Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, is more open to dialogue than the pope. But let’s face it: the Vatican does not make a habit of selecting Luthers as bishops.
Memo to Post editors: pretty much all bishops can be presumed to be papal allies. No story there.
The Times, whose ownership is tied to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has carefully avoided any overt reference to the denomination’s unusual theological hodgepodge of ideas, but staunchly sided with the Catholic right-wingers such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Not surprisingly, its curtain raiser, viewed the papal visit in terms of the institutional agenda of traditional-minded Catholics: please, Holy Father, save the Catholic schools!
Yet the history of Irish-American racial animosity towards African Americans and Hispanics even at the highest levels of the Catholic Church shows perfectly well that Catholic schools’ agony is the result of white flight to suburbs. When a traditional Catholic wants to save Catholic schools, the message is really: save the white schools.
Wuerl’s predecessor James Hickey, fought white suburban fellow Irish Catholics tooth and nail to keep subsidizing Catholic schools in the inner city, which in Washington, as in many other cities, essentially serve black non-Catholics. Such schools can claim successes such as Washington’s own former mayor Anthony Williams.
The real story of the papal visit is that it is nothing more than a quiet wink and nod to those who favor a certain mode of Catholicism.
When he was merely Joseph Ratzinger, theologian, the pope's view was that Christianity had lost relevancy in the Western world.
As pope he believes Christianity has all but vanished from the marketplace. He is right.
Keep in mind that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, unequivocally stated that the invasion of Iraq failed to meet the criteria of a “just war.” Recall also that for the last century vigorous Church teaching on social justice has repeatedly criticized capitalism as unjust.
The world, and in particular, predominantly Protestant but unchurched, capitalist United States, does as it pleases without more than a few pious words in church, which have no weight once outside the door.
Yet rather than change the way the message is conveyed so it might be heard -- as the Second Vatican Council recommended in the early 1960s -- Ratzinger, who served the council as a junior adviser, has long given up on what in Church parlance was once called “renewal.”
In serving as John Paul II’s theological hatchet man, Ratzinger opted to cut off all modernizing tendencies. He cut his student the Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff at the knees and humiliated the Church’s foremost moral theologian, Bernard Häring, in petty proceedings entirely devoid of due process.
Now that he is pope, he is hunkering down in the catacombs in hopes of better times. He has patched up petty quarrels to his right flank, by re-opening up the use of Latin in church services, while remaining otherwise inflexible. His first encyclical letter was a rant against sex.
Significantly, he has kept the view of history that he likely learned in his Hitler Youth days. When he went to Auschwitz in 2006, he spoke of the “6 million Poles” and the “suffering” Germans and only finally, as an afterthought, oh yes, the Jews.
When the pope complains that Europe is the most secular continent on Earth, he is quietly bemoaning the demographic demise of whites in the cradle of the Caucasians.
Long ago, a prelate explained to me that Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical against birth control was designed to prevent “the suicide of the white race,” a thought I am certain was far from Papa Montini’s mind, but was and is not unthinkable in the hierarchy.
To whom will Papa Nazinger be addressing his message in the United States? To the white, conservative, most obedient Catholic “remnant.”
This is the other side of the coin. With 30 years of bishops appointed by John Paul II and the desertion of liberal or free thinking Catholics to the Episcopal Church and agnosticism, the U.S. Catholic Church offers a bride made in heaven for this pope.
American young women who yearn for the pre-Vatican II Church they never knew often go to church wearing mantilla, while young men who weigh whether to become priests speak boldly of the “ontological difference” that by right prevents the ordination of women.
Justice Scalia is a frequent attendee at events hosted by the ultrasecretive and ultraconservative group Opus Dei (Work of God) and forms with the likes of Chief Justice John Roberts, the visible peak of a phalanx of Catholics who have distinctive philosophical transformations in mind for the United States.
Scalia and Roberts belong to the growing school of “natural law” scholars, who define almost anything they dislike (think abortion and homosexuality, for starters) as against nature and therefore in principle unlawful.
Catholics make up 29 percent of Congress and are now about evenly split between Democrats who are heirs of the New Deal coalition and Republicans of the Scalia bent.
This is the pope’s base. This is the base that is willing to wage crusades against Muslims (note to militant Christian soldiers: the West lost the last crusades, consider using another term).
When Pope Benedict lands, he will be coming as the apostle to the most obedient of white Catholics. All others beware.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
The Hidden Norms in Religious Flux
Being part of a survey team conducting a survey of active and lapsed Catholics in the early 1980s prepared me to deal with a today's news stories about a Pew study on religious change in the United States. Let me deal with two things I learned back then that make sense now.
Keep in mind that most of these surveys can only measure affiliation through a tangible behavior that is deemed to denote an inner disposition. While scientologists claim to have machines that can measure advancement in their religion, social scientists do not have a soulmeter of any kind.
So, for the most part, the sociology of religion describes behavior of churchgoers, often in rations that are not doctrinally correct. For example, for the study of Catholics we called someone "active" if they went to church on Sunday at least four times a year, not counting major holidays or family occasions.
This is well below the canonical obligation of Sunday Mass, but it is a behavior indication of a certain degree of engagement. Indeed, in most predominantly Catholic countries perhaps a tenth of all Catholics go to Mass on a regular Sunday; in the United States, a survey in the 1990s found attendance as high as 45 to 55%, depending on how you counted it.
OK, my insights now.
First, it is statistically normal for people between the ages of 15 to 30 to "drop out" of the organized religion in which they were raised. This I learned from sociologist Dean Hoge, who led the research teams and wrote the book, long out of print, about the study.
"Normal" to a sociologist only means that a behavior does not deviate significantly from the social average. It doesn't mean it is good or bad. There are many reasons why disaffiliation during adolescence and early adulthood might occur in societies in which this period involves a prolonged crisis.
The various Anabaptist denominations (Amish, Mennonites, Brethren, etc.) developed a detour around this by decreeing that they would not baptize or affiliate infants. Indeed, most Anabaptists don't formally join their churches before marriage.
This leads to the second interesting insight: most people's religious affiliation has very little to do with philosophy or theology.
Most plainly, I learned from interviewing people who had returned to the faith, the pattern was that once they got married, or even more importantly had children, many drifted back to churchgoing. It was almost as if they wanted to give their children something similar to rebel against.
Significantly, also, very, very few people referred to conversion or returning to faith as a process involving study and thought, or the reading of certain works. Most converts wanted to marry a Catholic.
At the time, I found this profoundly disappointing. I had been involved in the conversion of two people who had wrestled with ideas, read and discussed books with me, written lengthy letters with questions and concerns. They were modern St. Augustines, turning from one view to another with thoughtful deliberation.
Even in my questioning of religious faith, I have always felt the theological and philosophical issues were important. The idea of changing to get married or to pass on certain conventions to children seemed and still seems very hollow.
This is why I find the Pew study less than interesting. Yes, 28% of U.S. adults have changed from the church of their fathers (or mothers), more in the younger years. Given the pattern of social research, I doubt they were asked too deeply why.
Keep in mind that most of these surveys can only measure affiliation through a tangible behavior that is deemed to denote an inner disposition. While scientologists claim to have machines that can measure advancement in their religion, social scientists do not have a soulmeter of any kind.
So, for the most part, the sociology of religion describes behavior of churchgoers, often in rations that are not doctrinally correct. For example, for the study of Catholics we called someone "active" if they went to church on Sunday at least four times a year, not counting major holidays or family occasions.
This is well below the canonical obligation of Sunday Mass, but it is a behavior indication of a certain degree of engagement. Indeed, in most predominantly Catholic countries perhaps a tenth of all Catholics go to Mass on a regular Sunday; in the United States, a survey in the 1990s found attendance as high as 45 to 55%, depending on how you counted it.
OK, my insights now.
First, it is statistically normal for people between the ages of 15 to 30 to "drop out" of the organized religion in which they were raised. This I learned from sociologist Dean Hoge, who led the research teams and wrote the book, long out of print, about the study.
"Normal" to a sociologist only means that a behavior does not deviate significantly from the social average. It doesn't mean it is good or bad. There are many reasons why disaffiliation during adolescence and early adulthood might occur in societies in which this period involves a prolonged crisis.
The various Anabaptist denominations (Amish, Mennonites, Brethren, etc.) developed a detour around this by decreeing that they would not baptize or affiliate infants. Indeed, most Anabaptists don't formally join their churches before marriage.
This leads to the second interesting insight: most people's religious affiliation has very little to do with philosophy or theology.
Most plainly, I learned from interviewing people who had returned to the faith, the pattern was that once they got married, or even more importantly had children, many drifted back to churchgoing. It was almost as if they wanted to give their children something similar to rebel against.
Significantly, also, very, very few people referred to conversion or returning to faith as a process involving study and thought, or the reading of certain works. Most converts wanted to marry a Catholic.
At the time, I found this profoundly disappointing. I had been involved in the conversion of two people who had wrestled with ideas, read and discussed books with me, written lengthy letters with questions and concerns. They were modern St. Augustines, turning from one view to another with thoughtful deliberation.
Even in my questioning of religious faith, I have always felt the theological and philosophical issues were important. The idea of changing to get married or to pass on certain conventions to children seemed and still seems very hollow.
This is why I find the Pew study less than interesting. Yes, 28% of U.S. adults have changed from the church of their fathers (or mothers), more in the younger years. Given the pattern of social research, I doubt they were asked too deeply why.
Monday, November 26, 2007
The Madding Crowd
Finding myself in church on Sunday, I realized that my problem with faith has to do with the sense that I -- along with the rest of humanity, including Christians especially -- am one of the crowd spitting at Jesus. I do not believe Jesus' words to the good thief "this day thou shalt be with me in paradise," suggesting that the drama of history will have a happy ending.
In fact, I perceive war Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate fraud and the exploitation of humans by humans -- or any of the million big and small misdeeds most of us do -- as part and parcel of a picture of reality askew. Where is the evidence otherwise?
It's the conflict described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his poem "Christmas Bells," written in 1864 upon hearing that his son had been wounded in battle,
Neither the deity, nor the man-god Son rules nor exerts sovereign power that anyone can tell. I ceased believing so when I realized that I was in the first ranks among the crowd whose lives mock all professions of faith.
In fact, I perceive war Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate fraud and the exploitation of humans by humans -- or any of the million big and small misdeeds most of us do -- as part and parcel of a picture of reality askew. Where is the evidence otherwise?
It's the conflict described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his poem "Christmas Bells," written in 1864 upon hearing that his son had been wounded in battle,
And in despair I bowed my headCast an eye to the four-fifths of humanity living in benighted squalor and degradation and the conclusion is clear: God is dead and right does not prevail. The feast of Christ the King is a monarchist delusion.
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”
Neither the deity, nor the man-god Son rules nor exerts sovereign power that anyone can tell. I ceased believing so when I realized that I was in the first ranks among the crowd whose lives mock all professions of faith.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
42
This is a post about a post about a post. The circle will be completed when they post about this post, which is really about the ultimate answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything. For a very long time -- since 1978 -- we have all known the answer is 42.
But this is not about the answer. Unlike Chani or perhaps Sober Briquette, I harbor profound doubts concerning that which we have called God, Allah, Deus, Theos, YHWH (go ahead, zap me for writing it!) and so on.
Instead, this is about what the answers to the question about God are really unlikely to be.
Like Sober, whose reference to "Veggietales" flies completely past my head, I have found Joan Osborne's "If God was One of Us" an intriguing song. I even found the TV show "Joan of Arcadia" reasonably charming. Both avoid crossing the line into preaching what we all "should" believe and instead offer some possibilities.
Karl Marx thought the word "god" and theism would disappear; a century later, Karl Rahner argued that the word would survive as a question, even if theism disappeared, because without it human beings could never face the whole of reality.
We might not agree whether God exists, but we might reasonably agree on what God might not be like if She did. The scholastics called this sort of inquiry, the study of the attributes of God.
One need not hew to any particular philosophical school, however, to agree that if She existed, God would not be the sum of all things, immanent in everything. The essential problem with pantheism (Greek, pan = all; theos = god; "all is god") is that it amounts to something similar to italicizing everything.
Emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing.
Pantheism ultimately means that She does not exist except as some quality or entity so pervasive as not to be seen or heard or even be meaningful in any discernible way. I call that an atheist, which is fine insofar as I am concerned; just let's not pretend otherwise.
Similarly, I think it's very, very unlikely that She is more than one. Anyone who is the bestest and the mostest can't have peers. It's lonely at the top.
When you have a whole bunch of gods on Mount Olympus, you get to the point where everyone starts begetting demigods and sprites and heroes and who knows what and eventually Zeus has to come out, throw a thunderbolt and say "stop effing around, ch'all!" (Of course, he carefully writes an escape codicil for himself.)
She would not be a capricious bearded man on Mount Olympus. Not likely.
If God existed, She would be just your regular one-of-a-kind god next door. The Supreme! (Take that, Martha and the Vandellas!)
Oh, of course, She would not really be a she -- nor a he. I use She merely to offset some 20,000 years of masculine misattribution of a sex. (I'd say we've got about 19,965 years of saying She before we get into trouble.)
From my perspective, gynomorphizing God makes eminent sense. I have as much chance of understanding women as I do of ever understanding God. Even if I sometimes feel I "get" them.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The principle is that the really clear thing about God is that you can't really say too much about Her without falling into a serious logical rabbit hole.
God, in any case, is such a charged name. She would probably prefer being called 42.
But this is not about the answer. Unlike Chani or perhaps Sober Briquette, I harbor profound doubts concerning that which we have called God, Allah, Deus, Theos, YHWH (go ahead, zap me for writing it!) and so on.
Instead, this is about what the answers to the question about God are really unlikely to be.
Like Sober, whose reference to "Veggietales" flies completely past my head, I have found Joan Osborne's "If God was One of Us" an intriguing song. I even found the TV show "Joan of Arcadia" reasonably charming. Both avoid crossing the line into preaching what we all "should" believe and instead offer some possibilities.
Karl Marx thought the word "god" and theism would disappear; a century later, Karl Rahner argued that the word would survive as a question, even if theism disappeared, because without it human beings could never face the whole of reality.
We might not agree whether God exists, but we might reasonably agree on what God might not be like if She did. The scholastics called this sort of inquiry, the study of the attributes of God.
One need not hew to any particular philosophical school, however, to agree that if She existed, God would not be the sum of all things, immanent in everything. The essential problem with pantheism (Greek, pan = all; theos = god; "all is god") is that it amounts to something similar to italicizing everything.
Emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing.
Pantheism ultimately means that She does not exist except as some quality or entity so pervasive as not to be seen or heard or even be meaningful in any discernible way. I call that an atheist, which is fine insofar as I am concerned; just let's not pretend otherwise.
Similarly, I think it's very, very unlikely that She is more than one. Anyone who is the bestest and the mostest can't have peers. It's lonely at the top.
When you have a whole bunch of gods on Mount Olympus, you get to the point where everyone starts begetting demigods and sprites and heroes and who knows what and eventually Zeus has to come out, throw a thunderbolt and say "stop effing around, ch'all!" (Of course, he carefully writes an escape codicil for himself.)
She would not be a capricious bearded man on Mount Olympus. Not likely.
If God existed, She would be just your regular one-of-a-kind god next door. The Supreme! (Take that, Martha and the Vandellas!)
Oh, of course, She would not really be a she -- nor a he. I use She merely to offset some 20,000 years of masculine misattribution of a sex. (I'd say we've got about 19,965 years of saying She before we get into trouble.)
From my perspective, gynomorphizing God makes eminent sense. I have as much chance of understanding women as I do of ever understanding God. Even if I sometimes feel I "get" them.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The principle is that the really clear thing about God is that you can't really say too much about Her without falling into a serious logical rabbit hole.
God, in any case, is such a charged name. She would probably prefer being called 42.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Dead Faith of the Living
The argument developing in the Anglican Communion over the election, as head of the U.S. Episcopal Church, of a woman bishop who has blessed gay civil unions brings to mind a phrase of the late historian of Christianity Jaroslav Pelikan.
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," Pelikan told an interviewer with the U.S. News & World Report in 1989. "Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."
In his Jesus through the Centuries, Pelikan insistently reminds the reader just how much of what is attributed to Jesus is really in the eye of beholders throughout history. This is something that the author of the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History and Development of Doctrine should know well.
The Jesus of the gospels shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in the moral status of homosexuality, same sex orientation and so on. The absence of direct teaching from Jesus on sexual behavior was so patently obvious that it continued in the teaching of those who lived and accompanied Jesus while he walked this earth.
It's not until at least 30 years after Jesus' execution that we have the very first imprecation against homosexuality (and almost every form of sexuality outside marriage). This comes from a man who first persecuted Christians, then changed his mind and became, to be anachronistic about it, more papist than the pope; I'm referring, of course, to the apostle Paul, a man who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, the way you and I might have.
Paul felt he had to introduce a farrago of maledictions upon a wide range of sexual behavior, although he admits to a "thorn" in his own flesh, the nature of which could very well be precisely the activity he deplores. No greater temperance leader than a former drunk.
But never mind Paul. What was Jesus concerned with?
Take Jesus' "basileia theou," a Greek phrase commonly translated as 'Kingdom of God," which I think is more aptly rendered as the "reign of God." In what could easily be described as Jesus "constitution" of the new realm, the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-26), he exalts the poor, the meek, the mourning and those who hunger for justice; he reviles those who are rich, who are satisfied, who are laughing, who are blessed by men.
In brief, Jesus up-ends every known social order in history, including many that churches and clerics have blessed from their questionable perch as spokesmen for God.
In the remainder of the discourse surrounding the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not once -- not a single time -- dwell on the subject of homosexuality, and never on the subject of the appropriate sex of priests.
Indeed, Jesus has no kind words for priests at all. The one time he portrays one, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest is in too great a hurry to get on with his priestly business to care for someone who lies wounded at the side of the road. Throughout the gospel narrative priests show nothing but hostility toward Jesus.
Oddly enough, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has insisted that the message of the General Convention that elected her is that "we're more interested in feeding hungry people and relieving suffering than we are in arguing about what gender someone is or what sexual orientation someone has."
Jefferts Schori was referring to the adoption, at the Cincinnati, Ohio, convention held in June, of a new initiative, called ONE Episcopalian, which seeks to rally Episcopalians -- one by one -- to the cause of ending extreme poverty in the world. It's not a bad idea, considering the average influence and wealth of Episcopalians, who include the father of the current U.S. president.
Each Episcopalian who joins the advocacy campaign will pledge that "We believe that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty."
The campaign will advocate fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans in the poorest countries -- and a pledge to assure one additional percentage point of the U.S. budget to this purpose.
That's a lot more like what the Jesus in the gospels was talking about.
(Telling trivia quiz: What percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product (or gross national income) do you think goes to foreign aid? Click here for an answer. A good article on the myths about foreign aid is found here.)
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living," Pelikan told an interviewer with the U.S. News & World Report in 1989. "Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."
In his Jesus through the Centuries, Pelikan insistently reminds the reader just how much of what is attributed to Jesus is really in the eye of beholders throughout history. This is something that the author of the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History and Development of Doctrine should know well.
The Jesus of the gospels shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in the moral status of homosexuality, same sex orientation and so on. The absence of direct teaching from Jesus on sexual behavior was so patently obvious that it continued in the teaching of those who lived and accompanied Jesus while he walked this earth.
It's not until at least 30 years after Jesus' execution that we have the very first imprecation against homosexuality (and almost every form of sexuality outside marriage). This comes from a man who first persecuted Christians, then changed his mind and became, to be anachronistic about it, more papist than the pope; I'm referring, of course, to the apostle Paul, a man who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, the way you and I might have.
Paul felt he had to introduce a farrago of maledictions upon a wide range of sexual behavior, although he admits to a "thorn" in his own flesh, the nature of which could very well be precisely the activity he deplores. No greater temperance leader than a former drunk.
But never mind Paul. What was Jesus concerned with?
Take Jesus' "basileia theou," a Greek phrase commonly translated as 'Kingdom of God," which I think is more aptly rendered as the "reign of God." In what could easily be described as Jesus "constitution" of the new realm, the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-11; Luke 6:20-26), he exalts the poor, the meek, the mourning and those who hunger for justice; he reviles those who are rich, who are satisfied, who are laughing, who are blessed by men.
In brief, Jesus up-ends every known social order in history, including many that churches and clerics have blessed from their questionable perch as spokesmen for God.
In the remainder of the discourse surrounding the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not once -- not a single time -- dwell on the subject of homosexuality, and never on the subject of the appropriate sex of priests.
Indeed, Jesus has no kind words for priests at all. The one time he portrays one, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest is in too great a hurry to get on with his priestly business to care for someone who lies wounded at the side of the road. Throughout the gospel narrative priests show nothing but hostility toward Jesus.
Oddly enough, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has insisted that the message of the General Convention that elected her is that "we're more interested in feeding hungry people and relieving suffering than we are in arguing about what gender someone is or what sexual orientation someone has."
Jefferts Schori was referring to the adoption, at the Cincinnati, Ohio, convention held in June, of a new initiative, called ONE Episcopalian, which seeks to rally Episcopalians -- one by one -- to the cause of ending extreme poverty in the world. It's not a bad idea, considering the average influence and wealth of Episcopalians, who include the father of the current U.S. president.
Each Episcopalian who joins the advocacy campaign will pledge that "We believe that in the best American tradition of helping others help themselves, now is the time to join with other countries in a historic pact for compassion and justice to help the poorest people of the world overcome AIDS and extreme poverty."
The campaign will advocate fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans in the poorest countries -- and a pledge to assure one additional percentage point of the U.S. budget to this purpose.
That's a lot more like what the Jesus in the gospels was talking about.
(Telling trivia quiz: What percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product (or gross national income) do you think goes to foreign aid? Click here for an answer. A good article on the myths about foreign aid is found here.)
Monday, June 12, 2006
If I Founded a Religion
If I founded a new religion, it would be like one of those novels in which the protagonist struggles, yet in the end sees a new and better life ahead, one wrought by a transformation full of insight.
What do I mean? Let's see ...
In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, mile-high military absurdity ends in the quiet triumph of a secondary character who succeeds, in an uncanny, unbelievably impossible way, at finding a path out of war. The story ends with the reader's laughter at the thought that all is possible. Pity Heller had only one good novel in him -- but, hey, that's more than most of us.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams have a similar breakout feel to them. Whether it's escaping Nurse Ratched or humdrum life on this planet, both transport the reader to new possibilities. Of course, On The Road by Jack Kerouac does the Route 66 version.
Considerably less action packed, the tale of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, lends itself to a cinematic happy ending as Franco Zeffirelli discovered in making his 1996 adaptation.
Then there's the ironic touch of Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford trilogy by Canadian writer Robertson Davies. I was reading this novel the day my younger son was born. The entire trilogy is a deeply Jungian exploration suitable, of course, for religious mythmaking. Although there isn't a happy ending, the final insight turns the story inside out, leaving that "to be continued ..." feel of a good myth that never really ends.
I closed the book, called the hospital and learned that mother and son were well.
But perhaps the style of mythmaking I like best is that of John Irving. I particularly liked The Hotel New Hampshire, which was poorly received by critics, and The World According To Garp, the novel that made him rich. All of Irving's novels have a gentle ironic humor as his plots pile on a cast of oddballs in situations that are often grotesque -- as life really is.
But the pain is always meaningful, even though rarely in the way those who inflict it think it is, and, again counterintuitively to the conventional thinker, the pain often leads to conversion and redemption, as in the beloved work A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Why haven't I launched a religion, then ...? That's easy.
I find that I am more often than not mired at the beginning of my plot (and humanity's, really), or too far from that final insight. Or else I am at the end of reality, with nowhere to go, as in trummer-literatur (rubble literature) of my favorite author, Heinrich Böll.
A Nobel laureate, Böll was a German Catholic whose pacifist family was resolutely opposed to the Nazis. Unlike the present pope, Böll managed to avoid enrollment in the Hitler Youth; but even Böll could not avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht (army).
He was sent to fight in Russia, where he was wounded (inspiration for the novella "The Train Was On Time," which revolves around the thoughts of a soldier returning to his unit on the Eastern Front). He was rotated to the fortifications of France and was captured during the Normandy invasion. Eventually he was repatriated to his native city of Köln, then bombed out, much as the settings of so many of his stories and novels.
Indeed, his "last" novel was his first, "The Silent Angel," published nine years after his death. The work is set in an unnamed smoldering German city right after defeat in May 1945; an army deserter, Hans Schnitzler, searches the widow of his fallen comrade Willy to give her the man's greatcoat, which contains an important note in its pocket.
An excerpt:
The priest was startled to see a figure suddenly rise before him, his thin yet swollen face grimaced nervously, and he clutched his hands around the thick hymnal.
"I beg your pardon," said Hans. "Could you give me something to eat?"
His gaze wandered across the priest's sloping shoulders, past his large ears, to the square in front of the church: old trees in bloom, their trunks half buried in rubble.
"Of course," he heard the priest say. The voice was hoarse and weak, and now he looked at him. He had a peasant's face, thin and strong, a thick nose, and remarkably beautiful eyes.
"Of course," he said again. "Will you wait here?"
"Yes." Hans sat down again. He was amazed. He'd made the request because it occurred to him that the priest would have to try to help him, but he was amazed to find that someone actually existed who would agree without hesitation to give him something to eat.
I find we are all similarly stunned.
What do I mean? Let's see ...
In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, mile-high military absurdity ends in the quiet triumph of a secondary character who succeeds, in an uncanny, unbelievably impossible way, at finding a path out of war. The story ends with the reader's laughter at the thought that all is possible. Pity Heller had only one good novel in him -- but, hey, that's more than most of us.
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams have a similar breakout feel to them. Whether it's escaping Nurse Ratched or humdrum life on this planet, both transport the reader to new possibilities. Of course, On The Road by Jack Kerouac does the Route 66 version.
Considerably less action packed, the tale of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, lends itself to a cinematic happy ending as Franco Zeffirelli discovered in making his 1996 adaptation.
Then there's the ironic touch of Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford trilogy by Canadian writer Robertson Davies. I was reading this novel the day my younger son was born. The entire trilogy is a deeply Jungian exploration suitable, of course, for religious mythmaking. Although there isn't a happy ending, the final insight turns the story inside out, leaving that "to be continued ..." feel of a good myth that never really ends.
I closed the book, called the hospital and learned that mother and son were well.
But perhaps the style of mythmaking I like best is that of John Irving. I particularly liked The Hotel New Hampshire, which was poorly received by critics, and The World According To Garp, the novel that made him rich. All of Irving's novels have a gentle ironic humor as his plots pile on a cast of oddballs in situations that are often grotesque -- as life really is.
But the pain is always meaningful, even though rarely in the way those who inflict it think it is, and, again counterintuitively to the conventional thinker, the pain often leads to conversion and redemption, as in the beloved work A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Why haven't I launched a religion, then ...? That's easy.
I find that I am more often than not mired at the beginning of my plot (and humanity's, really), or too far from that final insight. Or else I am at the end of reality, with nowhere to go, as in trummer-literatur (rubble literature) of my favorite author, Heinrich Böll.
A Nobel laureate, Böll was a German Catholic whose pacifist family was resolutely opposed to the Nazis. Unlike the present pope, Böll managed to avoid enrollment in the Hitler Youth; but even Böll could not avoid being drafted into the Wehrmacht (army).
He was sent to fight in Russia, where he was wounded (inspiration for the novella "The Train Was On Time," which revolves around the thoughts of a soldier returning to his unit on the Eastern Front). He was rotated to the fortifications of France and was captured during the Normandy invasion. Eventually he was repatriated to his native city of Köln, then bombed out, much as the settings of so many of his stories and novels.
Indeed, his "last" novel was his first, "The Silent Angel," published nine years after his death. The work is set in an unnamed smoldering German city right after defeat in May 1945; an army deserter, Hans Schnitzler, searches the widow of his fallen comrade Willy to give her the man's greatcoat, which contains an important note in its pocket.
An excerpt:
The priest was startled to see a figure suddenly rise before him, his thin yet swollen face grimaced nervously, and he clutched his hands around the thick hymnal.
"I beg your pardon," said Hans. "Could you give me something to eat?"
His gaze wandered across the priest's sloping shoulders, past his large ears, to the square in front of the church: old trees in bloom, their trunks half buried in rubble.
"Of course," he heard the priest say. The voice was hoarse and weak, and now he looked at him. He had a peasant's face, thin and strong, a thick nose, and remarkably beautiful eyes.
"Of course," he said again. "Will you wait here?"
"Yes." Hans sat down again. He was amazed. He'd made the request because it occurred to him that the priest would have to try to help him, but he was amazed to find that someone actually existed who would agree without hesitation to give him something to eat.
I find we are all similarly stunned.
Monday, May 29, 2006
Ratzinger at Auschwitz
This Sunday's papal visit to Auschwitz was marked by a clever speech of shameless self-promotion in which Papa Ratzinger never once apologized for his own supportive role in the regime that brought about the death camp.
His speech begins by stating that words fail before the horror of Auschwitz, then he launches into about 2,000 of them. (You can read the full text here.)
Ratzinger distances himself from the events: he refers to himself as "a pope from Germany" as if he were speaking of a coincidence, as if he had not worn a Nazi uniform and uttered and performed Nazi salutes and marches and songs. What does he think we think Hitler Youth did all day?
Throughout it all, there's not one word of personal shame. To the contrary, he praises himself for going to the site of the death camp, not once but several times.
The deafening arrogance of his speech is so overpowering that observers have already strained to hear humility where it was entirely absent. In an Agence France-Presse story run by the Brussels-based European Jewish Press the curious following sentence appears: "He asked God why he remained silent during the 'unprecedented mass crimes' of the Holocaust." One oddly placed pronoun suggests that Ratzinger engaged in a public soul-searching wholly absent from his speech.
Of course, he could not have done so. Not only was Ratzinger not silent while the ovens were burning people, he was lending his voice to sieg heil. Now Ratzinger feels entitled to pose the psalmist's rhetorical questions concerning God's silence and responsibility, but conveniently the pope evades his own, or that of his country and countrymen.
Instead, Ratzinger has cleverly turned a moment that should have been of repentance into one of whitewashing. In his roster of victims the first is a Polish priest -- Maximilian Kolbe. Then the Poles, "along with the Jewish people." Indeed, in bringing up the figure now synonymous with the Shoah -- the 6 million -- Ratzinger applies it to "six million Poles"!
The next group of victims is -- hold on to your hats -- the Germans. Welcome to modern history according to Ratzinger: those poor witless people who by the millions marched all over Europe killing, raping, pillaging and, yes, exterminating a few million Poles (and, oh yes, some Jews alongside for the ride), did all that because they had been promised "future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity." Oh, the suffering!
By this logic Lt. William Calley and Spec. Lynndie England, since they surely were promised something akin to honor, prominence and prosperity by George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, shouldn't have to bear responsibility for the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib torture. Who, then, is responsible for anything?
Finally, after their brief cameo appearance beside the six million Poles, come the Jews, whom an unnamed "ring of criminals" wanted to "cancel."
Hitler Youth indoctrination was obviously quite effective. Decades after it, Ratzinger cannot bring himself to utter the word "Nazi" until the 8th of the 11th paragraph in the official English text of his speech. He cannot acknowledge that Auschwitz was constructed primarily to murder Jews -- not Poles, not Gypsies (another group upon whom Ratzinger lavishes attention as soon as he dispatches the requisite brief mention of Jews).
He wraps everything up speaking of "reconciliation," but again he botches it. Ratzinger is so uncomfortable talking about what his fellow Nazis did that he misses the one thing that could make reconciliation possible: repentance.
This is basic Catholic theology and he is the pope. Shouldn't he know this?
His speech begins by stating that words fail before the horror of Auschwitz, then he launches into about 2,000 of them. (You can read the full text here.)
Ratzinger distances himself from the events: he refers to himself as "a pope from Germany" as if he were speaking of a coincidence, as if he had not worn a Nazi uniform and uttered and performed Nazi salutes and marches and songs. What does he think we think Hitler Youth did all day?
Throughout it all, there's not one word of personal shame. To the contrary, he praises himself for going to the site of the death camp, not once but several times.
The deafening arrogance of his speech is so overpowering that observers have already strained to hear humility where it was entirely absent. In an Agence France-Presse story run by the Brussels-based European Jewish Press the curious following sentence appears: "He asked God why he remained silent during the 'unprecedented mass crimes' of the Holocaust." One oddly placed pronoun suggests that Ratzinger engaged in a public soul-searching wholly absent from his speech.
Of course, he could not have done so. Not only was Ratzinger not silent while the ovens were burning people, he was lending his voice to sieg heil. Now Ratzinger feels entitled to pose the psalmist's rhetorical questions concerning God's silence and responsibility, but conveniently the pope evades his own, or that of his country and countrymen.
Instead, Ratzinger has cleverly turned a moment that should have been of repentance into one of whitewashing. In his roster of victims the first is a Polish priest -- Maximilian Kolbe. Then the Poles, "along with the Jewish people." Indeed, in bringing up the figure now synonymous with the Shoah -- the 6 million -- Ratzinger applies it to "six million Poles"!
The next group of victims is -- hold on to your hats -- the Germans. Welcome to modern history according to Ratzinger: those poor witless people who by the millions marched all over Europe killing, raping, pillaging and, yes, exterminating a few million Poles (and, oh yes, some Jews alongside for the ride), did all that because they had been promised "future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity." Oh, the suffering!
By this logic Lt. William Calley and Spec. Lynndie England, since they surely were promised something akin to honor, prominence and prosperity by George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, shouldn't have to bear responsibility for the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib torture. Who, then, is responsible for anything?
Finally, after their brief cameo appearance beside the six million Poles, come the Jews, whom an unnamed "ring of criminals" wanted to "cancel."
Hitler Youth indoctrination was obviously quite effective. Decades after it, Ratzinger cannot bring himself to utter the word "Nazi" until the 8th of the 11th paragraph in the official English text of his speech. He cannot acknowledge that Auschwitz was constructed primarily to murder Jews -- not Poles, not Gypsies (another group upon whom Ratzinger lavishes attention as soon as he dispatches the requisite brief mention of Jews).
He wraps everything up speaking of "reconciliation," but again he botches it. Ratzinger is so uncomfortable talking about what his fellow Nazis did that he misses the one thing that could make reconciliation possible: repentance.
This is basic Catholic theology and he is the pope. Shouldn't he know this?
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Fact, Fiction, Religion
In one response to my last post, a friend wrote that my arguments against the “Da Vinci Code” work because I know more than the average person, but that surely some other equally informed person could demolish my points.
Whenever we enter the realm of religion it seems that way largely because religion, at the core, is not about facts.
Most religions begin with one or several charismatic figures, historical or mythological: Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed. These figures utter delphic words about what life is, where we come from and to where we are going after death, and provide some cryptic guidelines for living.
Then come a class of imams, lamas, rabbis, priests or whatever else they may call themselves. These people -- traditionally male only -- wear certain special ceremonial or occupational clothes, perform or lead in certain ritual actions. The scholarly among them codify, interpret, canonize certain sayings of the religion's founder(s) along with words attributed to divinity and ultimately the code or interpretation or book -- the Bible, Talmud, Quran, Vedas -- becomes the object of veneration.
Moreover, the overwheling majority of people use religion for fairly simple things: propitiation, social discipline, self-satisfaction and a sense of security in a troubling world. They want pain removed, if they have pain; they like ritual acts that make them feel good about themselves; they want doctrines, teachings or holy writings that assure them that they are right. Very few people actually believe there is someone other than themselves in charge or seek enlightenment or submit to a whole-hearted life conversion -- especially if that endeavor might disturb them from continuing along they way they are.
The reason arguing about religion seems endless is not because people really care about religion, but because the facts are never really quite clear -- inevitably, but also conveniently, so. Does God exist? Did Jesus or Abraham? The evidence for a historical person named Mohammed who wrote the Quran is overwhelming, but obviously not for his divine inspiration. Gautama Buddha's tomb can be located, although we don't know for certain whether what we know about his life is accurate.
Even if we accept God, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed as reality, what did they actually mean to tell us?
There are literally hundreds of Christian churches, each proclaiming themselves to be somehow the "bestest." There are at least a half dozen forms of Judaism. There are about as many variants of Islam and Buddhism. Can all of these be equally true and right and, indeed, bestest?
The quest is on ... endlessly.
You could not, however, easily find a lot of people who would tear down what I have said in my last post. Indeed, yesterday NBC aired an impressive documentary piece on its Dateline NBC show in which viewers were shown that the storyline of the DaVinci Code (click here to read the NBC story) is just what author Dan Brown said it was: fictional. Most historians agree that the facts are just not there.
Let's examine critically the notion of fact, just as we did with religion.
The idea of a fact is a relatively new, 18th century development from empiricism, the proposition that truth can be grasped through objective and verifiable observation. Western societies worship at the altar of facticity, yet facts aren't necessarily true.
You slap a table and decide that it is solid. But actually it isn't. There's a proportionally huge space between the electrons and the nucleus of atoms, so that the actual hard matter is really much less solid than our touch suggests. The actual pure mass of a transatlantic ship, say the Titanic, would be about the size of a baseball, if you managed to eliminate the subatomic empty space.
Even more, at the quantum level the physical laws that objective and verifiable facts confirm otherwise no longer apply, which is why modern physics has become the modern philosophy. Truth is a bit of a Russian matrioshka doll.
An image of that sort is what a charismatic religious leader would have conveyed in a pre-scientific world. In such a milieu it was accepted that demons and angels pulled us this way and that. It was also understood that we really don't know very much, that the storyteller is not as important as the story, and that some wholly invented stories teach truth.
Religion, in its theistic and atheistic forms, has never been about facts, but about what we intuitively find to be true. It takes wisdom to tell them apart.
Whenever we enter the realm of religion it seems that way largely because religion, at the core, is not about facts.
Most religions begin with one or several charismatic figures, historical or mythological: Abraham, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed. These figures utter delphic words about what life is, where we come from and to where we are going after death, and provide some cryptic guidelines for living.
Then come a class of imams, lamas, rabbis, priests or whatever else they may call themselves. These people -- traditionally male only -- wear certain special ceremonial or occupational clothes, perform or lead in certain ritual actions. The scholarly among them codify, interpret, canonize certain sayings of the religion's founder(s) along with words attributed to divinity and ultimately the code or interpretation or book -- the Bible, Talmud, Quran, Vedas -- becomes the object of veneration.
Moreover, the overwheling majority of people use religion for fairly simple things: propitiation, social discipline, self-satisfaction and a sense of security in a troubling world. They want pain removed, if they have pain; they like ritual acts that make them feel good about themselves; they want doctrines, teachings or holy writings that assure them that they are right. Very few people actually believe there is someone other than themselves in charge or seek enlightenment or submit to a whole-hearted life conversion -- especially if that endeavor might disturb them from continuing along they way they are.
The reason arguing about religion seems endless is not because people really care about religion, but because the facts are never really quite clear -- inevitably, but also conveniently, so. Does God exist? Did Jesus or Abraham? The evidence for a historical person named Mohammed who wrote the Quran is overwhelming, but obviously not for his divine inspiration. Gautama Buddha's tomb can be located, although we don't know for certain whether what we know about his life is accurate.
Even if we accept God, Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, or Mohammed as reality, what did they actually mean to tell us?
There are literally hundreds of Christian churches, each proclaiming themselves to be somehow the "bestest." There are at least a half dozen forms of Judaism. There are about as many variants of Islam and Buddhism. Can all of these be equally true and right and, indeed, bestest?
The quest is on ... endlessly.
You could not, however, easily find a lot of people who would tear down what I have said in my last post. Indeed, yesterday NBC aired an impressive documentary piece on its Dateline NBC show in which viewers were shown that the storyline of the DaVinci Code (click here to read the NBC story) is just what author Dan Brown said it was: fictional. Most historians agree that the facts are just not there.
Let's examine critically the notion of fact, just as we did with religion.
The idea of a fact is a relatively new, 18th century development from empiricism, the proposition that truth can be grasped through objective and verifiable observation. Western societies worship at the altar of facticity, yet facts aren't necessarily true.
You slap a table and decide that it is solid. But actually it isn't. There's a proportionally huge space between the electrons and the nucleus of atoms, so that the actual hard matter is really much less solid than our touch suggests. The actual pure mass of a transatlantic ship, say the Titanic, would be about the size of a baseball, if you managed to eliminate the subatomic empty space.
Even more, at the quantum level the physical laws that objective and verifiable facts confirm otherwise no longer apply, which is why modern physics has become the modern philosophy. Truth is a bit of a Russian matrioshka doll.
An image of that sort is what a charismatic religious leader would have conveyed in a pre-scientific world. In such a milieu it was accepted that demons and angels pulled us this way and that. It was also understood that we really don't know very much, that the storyteller is not as important as the story, and that some wholly invented stories teach truth.
Religion, in its theistic and atheistic forms, has never been about facts, but about what we intuitively find to be true. It takes wisdom to tell them apart.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
The Da Vinci Code Syndrome
All of a sudden, people who can't tell a cardinal from a monsignor, or a gospel from an epistle, feel perfectly comfortable pontificating about the Catholic Church's alleged conspiracy to suppress the story of Jesus' supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene.
The source of this malady? The DaVinci Code Syndrome. The symptoms are factless obsession with the Opus Dei, incongruous suppositions about the monolithic unity of the Catholic clergy, and conclusions drawn from fiction that don't hold water to the simplest critical analysis.
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of sharp rocks of my own to hurl at Rome's stained glass windows, but these cream puffs from Dan Brown's work ... amateur hour!
The Opus Dei (Latin for "Work of God"), in which my mother and one of my colleagues once held the lowly rank of "cooperators," is indeed a hide-bound organization led by Spanish, fascistoid ninnies who delight in all manner of subtle code words and secrets. Their members once held a majority in the cabinet of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They are exerting influence today on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other Catholic, right-wing officials in Washington, and they have their point men in the Vatican. The Opus has an uncanny amount of money and assets; on occasion they have been blamed for the kind of brainwashing that made the Moonies and similar cults suspect.
Yet -- Deo gratias (Latin for "thank God") -- the Opus Dei does not yet control the Catholic Church by a long shot. To get a realistic sense of this, I recomment you read one of the best articles available today on the subject, written -- oh, surprise! -- by a Jesuit. Find it here.
As to the clergy, I wholeheartedly agree with Emile Zola that "civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Yet the Catholic clergy -- as its most recent set of scandals amply shows -- are a motley group of solipsistic egotists, mediocrities who could never make it in secular life, and an occasional exceptional talent as the exception to bolster the rule. The latter are often found in religious orders, such as the Jesuits, whom several popes felt they had to suppress to keep control.
Clergy plot? Good luck with that.
Finally, there's the whole-cloth story of Mary of Magdala, wife of Jesus, which is extremely old and hoary. In the past century alone it was floated as a revival of the 1956 Priory of Zion hoax in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. More memorably for literature, a more intriguing and less conspiracy-ridden version of such a relationship appeared in the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, for which the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1955.
Still, there is no independent evidence that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived (or for that matter, Moses or Abraham), let alone a woman whose story is a wispy thread as a cameo player in the Galilean woodworker's drama. This is all fantasy and, in Kazantzakis' case, good literature.
So it annoys me no end when some wannabe Vaticanologists, who don't know spit, throw some easily dodged shots that make idiots of all Church critics. It gives apostasy a bad name.
The source of this malady? The DaVinci Code Syndrome. The symptoms are factless obsession with the Opus Dei, incongruous suppositions about the monolithic unity of the Catholic clergy, and conclusions drawn from fiction that don't hold water to the simplest critical analysis.
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of sharp rocks of my own to hurl at Rome's stained glass windows, but these cream puffs from Dan Brown's work ... amateur hour!
The Opus Dei (Latin for "Work of God"), in which my mother and one of my colleagues once held the lowly rank of "cooperators," is indeed a hide-bound organization led by Spanish, fascistoid ninnies who delight in all manner of subtle code words and secrets. Their members once held a majority in the cabinet of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. They are exerting influence today on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other Catholic, right-wing officials in Washington, and they have their point men in the Vatican. The Opus has an uncanny amount of money and assets; on occasion they have been blamed for the kind of brainwashing that made the Moonies and similar cults suspect.
Yet -- Deo gratias (Latin for "thank God") -- the Opus Dei does not yet control the Catholic Church by a long shot. To get a realistic sense of this, I recomment you read one of the best articles available today on the subject, written -- oh, surprise! -- by a Jesuit. Find it here.
As to the clergy, I wholeheartedly agree with Emile Zola that "civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest." Yet the Catholic clergy -- as its most recent set of scandals amply shows -- are a motley group of solipsistic egotists, mediocrities who could never make it in secular life, and an occasional exceptional talent as the exception to bolster the rule. The latter are often found in religious orders, such as the Jesuits, whom several popes felt they had to suppress to keep control.
Clergy plot? Good luck with that.
Finally, there's the whole-cloth story of Mary of Magdala, wife of Jesus, which is extremely old and hoary. In the past century alone it was floated as a revival of the 1956 Priory of Zion hoax in the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. More memorably for literature, a more intriguing and less conspiracy-ridden version of such a relationship appeared in the 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, for which the Greek Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1955.
Still, there is no independent evidence that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived (or for that matter, Moses or Abraham), let alone a woman whose story is a wispy thread as a cameo player in the Galilean woodworker's drama. This is all fantasy and, in Kazantzakis' case, good literature.
So it annoys me no end when some wannabe Vaticanologists, who don't know spit, throw some easily dodged shots that make idiots of all Church critics. It gives apostasy a bad name.
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Ralph Reed's Wages of Sin
Now we know, the wages of sin are $57,000. Or so it would seem from what the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed was willing to take from Jack Abramoff.
Yet where is the Christian moral outrage? Why aren't the preachers who rend their garments at the thought of gay marriage or a Democratic president not having sex with that woman concerned about bribes?
An answer may be found in an article a neighbor passed on to me. In Harper's December issue , the piece titled "Jesus Without the Miracles," starts with an appreciation of Jefferson's editing of the gospels, extracting birth narratives, miracles and resurrection accounts into what is now published as "Jefferson's Bible."
A telling three sentences from the article struck me:
To read the Gospel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. But to read Jefferson's version ... is to face a relentless demand that we be better people -- inside and out -- than most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspected, to this unfortunate conclusion: the relevance of Christianity to most Americans -- then and now -- has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.
Now I realize that propitiation is not exclusively an American phenomenon, but I find myself paying increasing attention to a divide between Jesus and Christianity, on which I mused some blog eons ago.
On one hand, you have essentially commercial self-serving churches, whose doctrines stress "pie in the sky, by and by," providing the illusion of divine favor to their customers ... ah ... members, and maybe a social club. Christianity has been responsible for wars, persecutions, mass murders, justification of slavery and racism, and in 20 centuries has served every miscreant in power.
On the other, you have an itinerant preacher of long ago, whose claims to divinity and Messiahship were ambiguous, to say the least, insisting on a conversion of life to which Christians never quite seem to get around.
In the itinerant preacher's grand vision, the order we know in everyday life is upturned:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
As to the likes of Abramoff and his unctuous Christian buddies:
But woe to you that are rich: for you have your consolation.
Woe to you that are filled: for you shall hunger.
Woe to you that now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep.
Yet where is the Christian moral outrage? Why aren't the preachers who rend their garments at the thought of gay marriage or a Democratic president not having sex with that woman concerned about bribes?
An answer may be found in an article a neighbor passed on to me. In Harper's December issue , the piece titled "Jesus Without the Miracles," starts with an appreciation of Jefferson's editing of the gospels, extracting birth narratives, miracles and resurrection accounts into what is now published as "Jefferson's Bible."
A telling three sentences from the article struck me:
To read the Gospel of Matthew or Luke is to be dazzled by one miracle after another. But to read Jefferson's version ... is to face a relentless demand that we be better people -- inside and out -- than most of us are. Which leads, as Jefferson must have suspected, to this unfortunate conclusion: the relevance of Christianity to most Americans -- then and now -- has far more to do with the promise of eternal salvation from this world than with any desire to practice the teachings of Jesus while we are here.
Now I realize that propitiation is not exclusively an American phenomenon, but I find myself paying increasing attention to a divide between Jesus and Christianity, on which I mused some blog eons ago.
On one hand, you have essentially commercial self-serving churches, whose doctrines stress "pie in the sky, by and by," providing the illusion of divine favor to their customers ... ah ... members, and maybe a social club. Christianity has been responsible for wars, persecutions, mass murders, justification of slavery and racism, and in 20 centuries has served every miscreant in power.
On the other, you have an itinerant preacher of long ago, whose claims to divinity and Messiahship were ambiguous, to say the least, insisting on a conversion of life to which Christians never quite seem to get around.
In the itinerant preacher's grand vision, the order we know in everyday life is upturned:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
As to the likes of Abramoff and his unctuous Christian buddies:
But woe to you that are rich: for you have your consolation.
Woe to you that are filled: for you shall hunger.
Woe to you that now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Merry Christmas, heathen!
Google the news for controversy about Christmas and you get thousands of hits, from the story of the Jewish town supervisor in Manhasset, N.Y., who protested a Catholic priest's invocation of Jesus Christ at the blessing of a tree, to the Christian Right's ire at George W. Bush that the White House holiday cards are too secular.
Setting aside for another blog the reality that the Christian Right is neither, perhaps we all need to take a deep breath and examine the holiday a little closer.
Let's all consider the facts.
The original quintessentially Christian feast was Easter. In Mediterranean cultures Holy Week and Easter. These remained the most important religious feasts until their cocacolanization after 1945. Now, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires you find Christmas trees with cotton "snow" and a diminished attendance for the processions of Holy Week.
Christmas, which comes from the ecclesiastical, or linguisticallty corrupt, Latin christes masse (the Mass festival of Christ), came later. Some ancient Christian Fathers believed Jesus had been born in the summer.
In the West, Christmas began to be observed as a feast around the end of the 3rd century of our era. In the East, it was observed a century later, but on January 6th, the Epiphany, rather than on December 25th. According to Christian theology, Easter celebrates redemption from the consequences of wrongdoing, while Christmas recalls the incarnation, a word that expresses the specifically Christian notion that God chose to become human to bridge in one person the distance with the divine.
The specifically Christian Christmas artifact is the crêche, or Nativity scene, which includes a representation of the stable with a few animals, Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus in a manger, angels, the three kings, and so forth. This was created in the 13th century by the very artistic St. Francis of Assisi, who also influenced church architecture to make places of worship more joyful.
Santa Claus is a modern version of St. Nicholas of Myra, a bishop in Asia Minor (now Turkey), martyred in the persecution of Diocletian in the 4th century. Nicholas, heir to wealth, had become a bishop and gained renown for his generosity. He was revered in the Eastern churches as a protector of children. In the West, what reverence of the saint existed was stamped out by the Reformation. St. Nick as a Christmas figure traces back to German colonists in Pennsylvania in the 18th century, who may have brought over the Eastern custom from the provinces Germany acquired in the partition of Poland.
From its beginnings, however, the Christmas feast had non-Christian elements.
There is ample evidence that in Rome the original December Christian feast was designed to coincide and blot out a particularly riotous pagan feast, the Saturnalia. The solstice also was then the occasion for various forms of pagan merrymaking in pre-Christian Europe.
The Anglo-Saxon and Nordic pagan focus on solstice merrymaking and fertility was presumably designed to offset the darkest, gloomiest days of the year in northwest Europe. The Tannenbaum as well as and the holly and ivy are Teutonic and Druid, respectively -- not Christian.
What has happened with Christmas in the United States and its cultural satellites is akin to the evolution of Jewish feast of Chanukah. Surrounded by supposedly Christian merrymaking and gift-giving of late December, some Jewish families decided to upgrade the commemoration of the victory of the Maccabees and the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple to a major feast. Among Ashkhenazic Jews, chanukah gelt and dreidls around the "chanukah bush" often make up for Jewish children the presents under the Christmas tree their Gentile peers receive.
How Jewish is that? The Judaism 101 site says: "It is bitterly ironic that this holiday, which has its roots in a revolution against assimilation and the suppression of Jewish religion, has become the most assimilated, secular holiday on our calendar."
A similar point might be made about the Christian culture warriors who insist on fighting for the Christianity of Christmas. Is the strife consonant with the words of the Galilean woodworker who taught about turning the other cheek and loving enemies and persecutors? Didn't the Baby Jesus grow up to submit to torture and crucifixion?
For the rest of us, I have to wonder whether Christmas makes sense as a national holiday -- as anything other than a boon to retailers and credit card companies. Indeed, as Congress and the White House vie to cut aid to the poor to finance tax cuts for the rich, I do not find a celebration of the horn of plenty for the few a cause worthy of anything but shame.
Setting aside for another blog the reality that the Christian Right is neither, perhaps we all need to take a deep breath and examine the holiday a little closer.
Let's all consider the facts.
The original quintessentially Christian feast was Easter. In Mediterranean cultures Holy Week and Easter. These remained the most important religious feasts until their cocacolanization after 1945. Now, from Barcelona to Buenos Aires you find Christmas trees with cotton "snow" and a diminished attendance for the processions of Holy Week.
Christmas, which comes from the ecclesiastical, or linguisticallty corrupt, Latin christes masse (the Mass festival of Christ), came later. Some ancient Christian Fathers believed Jesus had been born in the summer.
In the West, Christmas began to be observed as a feast around the end of the 3rd century of our era. In the East, it was observed a century later, but on January 6th, the Epiphany, rather than on December 25th. According to Christian theology, Easter celebrates redemption from the consequences of wrongdoing, while Christmas recalls the incarnation, a word that expresses the specifically Christian notion that God chose to become human to bridge in one person the distance with the divine.
The specifically Christian Christmas artifact is the crêche, or Nativity scene, which includes a representation of the stable with a few animals, Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus in a manger, angels, the three kings, and so forth. This was created in the 13th century by the very artistic St. Francis of Assisi, who also influenced church architecture to make places of worship more joyful.
Santa Claus is a modern version of St. Nicholas of Myra, a bishop in Asia Minor (now Turkey), martyred in the persecution of Diocletian in the 4th century. Nicholas, heir to wealth, had become a bishop and gained renown for his generosity. He was revered in the Eastern churches as a protector of children. In the West, what reverence of the saint existed was stamped out by the Reformation. St. Nick as a Christmas figure traces back to German colonists in Pennsylvania in the 18th century, who may have brought over the Eastern custom from the provinces Germany acquired in the partition of Poland.
From its beginnings, however, the Christmas feast had non-Christian elements.
There is ample evidence that in Rome the original December Christian feast was designed to coincide and blot out a particularly riotous pagan feast, the Saturnalia. The solstice also was then the occasion for various forms of pagan merrymaking in pre-Christian Europe.
The Anglo-Saxon and Nordic pagan focus on solstice merrymaking and fertility was presumably designed to offset the darkest, gloomiest days of the year in northwest Europe. The Tannenbaum as well as and the holly and ivy are Teutonic and Druid, respectively -- not Christian.
What has happened with Christmas in the United States and its cultural satellites is akin to the evolution of Jewish feast of Chanukah. Surrounded by supposedly Christian merrymaking and gift-giving of late December, some Jewish families decided to upgrade the commemoration of the victory of the Maccabees and the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple to a major feast. Among Ashkhenazic Jews, chanukah gelt and dreidls around the "chanukah bush" often make up for Jewish children the presents under the Christmas tree their Gentile peers receive.
How Jewish is that? The Judaism 101 site says: "It is bitterly ironic that this holiday, which has its roots in a revolution against assimilation and the suppression of Jewish religion, has become the most assimilated, secular holiday on our calendar."
A similar point might be made about the Christian culture warriors who insist on fighting for the Christianity of Christmas. Is the strife consonant with the words of the Galilean woodworker who taught about turning the other cheek and loving enemies and persecutors? Didn't the Baby Jesus grow up to submit to torture and crucifixion?
For the rest of us, I have to wonder whether Christmas makes sense as a national holiday -- as anything other than a boon to retailers and credit card companies. Indeed, as Congress and the White House vie to cut aid to the poor to finance tax cuts for the rich, I do not find a celebration of the horn of plenty for the few a cause worthy of anything but shame.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Lapwing vs. Christians
The sheer mean spirit in which some responses to my last blog were written reinforces my point: Jesus may have been a nice guy, but you can keep his followers.
And no, the same is not true of all other religions.
Ariel Sharon and Meyer Lansky aside, most people will be hard put to find Jewish authors of murder.
Muslim caliphs were more tolerant of the "People of the Book" than the Christian kings of medieval England and renaissance Spain, both of whom expelled Jews, to the point that for 500 years under Muslim rule in the Balkans and the Mediterranean both Christians and Jews flourished.
Hindus are by teaching syncretistic. They have been more apt to absorb from other religions than to persecute. Granted, the British taught them a lot about ethnic hatred.
And where is the Buddhist massacre or slum or child-raping monk?
And no, the same is not true of all other religions.
Ariel Sharon and Meyer Lansky aside, most people will be hard put to find Jewish authors of murder.
Muslim caliphs were more tolerant of the "People of the Book" than the Christian kings of medieval England and renaissance Spain, both of whom expelled Jews, to the point that for 500 years under Muslim rule in the Balkans and the Mediterranean both Christians and Jews flourished.
Hindus are by teaching syncretistic. They have been more apt to absorb from other religions than to persecute. Granted, the British taught them a lot about ethnic hatred.
And where is the Buddhist massacre or slum or child-raping monk?
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Jesus vs. Christianity
What are we to make of the differences between the Jesus of the gospels, setting aside the historical questions, and the Christian religion?
Jesus presents himself as a charismatic rabbi who gives ambiguous signals concerning his own identity; Christianity asserts Jesus is the only begotten Son of God.
Jesus preaches a divine order that upturns the human order, particularly as regards socioeconomic privilege; Christianity feebly affirms almsgiving and sets up specialists of charitable doing, but entreats the bulk of its adherents to submit to the existing, unjust human order.
According to Jesus, religious ritual is almost invariably of secondary moral significance in a follower's way of life outside worship, in particular in relation to human needs; Christianity has developed elaborate rituals, rubrics and sacramental theologies and even sets apart its ritual leaders, creating a Sunday religion of empty gestures.
Jesus asserts that peacemakers are blessed and that if someone strikes your cheek, you should offer the other cheek to be stricken as well; Christianity blesses armies and the right to wage wars called "just."
Jesus tells his followers to rejoice in persecution; Christianity has persecuted those who do not adhere to its beliefs or its ecclesiastical rules and regulations.
Jesus in the gospels comes across as an impressive charismatic figure who nonetheless leaves the observer stunned, puzzled and thinking. Christianity comes across as a religion that provides some an entertainment to distract masses from the struggles of reality.
This fellow Jesus seems at least worth considering. Christianity, on the other hand, leaves a great deal to be desired.
Jesus presents himself as a charismatic rabbi who gives ambiguous signals concerning his own identity; Christianity asserts Jesus is the only begotten Son of God.
Jesus preaches a divine order that upturns the human order, particularly as regards socioeconomic privilege; Christianity feebly affirms almsgiving and sets up specialists of charitable doing, but entreats the bulk of its adherents to submit to the existing, unjust human order.
According to Jesus, religious ritual is almost invariably of secondary moral significance in a follower's way of life outside worship, in particular in relation to human needs; Christianity has developed elaborate rituals, rubrics and sacramental theologies and even sets apart its ritual leaders, creating a Sunday religion of empty gestures.
Jesus asserts that peacemakers are blessed and that if someone strikes your cheek, you should offer the other cheek to be stricken as well; Christianity blesses armies and the right to wage wars called "just."
Jesus tells his followers to rejoice in persecution; Christianity has persecuted those who do not adhere to its beliefs or its ecclesiastical rules and regulations.
Jesus in the gospels comes across as an impressive charismatic figure who nonetheless leaves the observer stunned, puzzled and thinking. Christianity comes across as a religion that provides some an entertainment to distract masses from the struggles of reality.
This fellow Jesus seems at least worth considering. Christianity, on the other hand, leaves a great deal to be desired.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Clown and Thunder
Sunday approaches and brings its thoughts of church.
Not long ago, bells would toll and villagers would gather and mumble the ritual words of which they knew little and clerics would spout words even less understood and the village would then rest for another week of the same. Today we've said God is dead, we've entered the post-Christian era; some think that a strike of lightning, divine or clerical, is what we need to fuel a new fire in us.
Indeed, in Joseph Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity," he opens by telling the state of the Christian story in the manner of a fable.
"Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with [the] ecclesiastical," Ratzinger writes, finds himself in the position of a traveling clown who, as he approaches a new village, sees a fire breaking out in the countryside not far from it.
The clown is a stranger in this country and does not speak the language, but he is concerned that, given the lush vegetation, the fire will spread rapidly and overwhelm the village. He arrives in a state of agitation and tries to gesture to the villagers that they are in danger, but the villagers laugh at him, thinking his anxious mime is part of his act.
A priest with whom I spoke about this Ratzingerian fable added that it's worse. He said that in the contemporary age there aren't traveling clowns any more and that, if one appeared, no one would pay attention even to laugh. Then he sighed sadly and shook his head at the folly of our contemporaries.
But there's another take.
There was once a clown whose entire troupe had been laid off, as no one came to the circus any more, preferring to go to film theaters, watch television or play games on a computer or handheld device. The clown was articulate, he knew the art of costume, he understood mime, he was a fine actor. He could have made at least a decent living working in a Hollywood studio or on Broadway or in a school or college teaching his arts.
Yet he preferred to travel from village to village, complaining to himself that no one valued his ancient and venerable craft any more.
He lived poor as a church mouse and called it a sign of his virtuous dedication to his calling as a clown. Truth be told, he felt otherwise: he had no boss, if he did something wrong he could go to another village where they wouldn't know about his misdeeds, and he didn't need much since he didn't have the burden of a nagging wife and greedy children.
One day, tramping through fields in a foreign country, the sky turned dark and full of thunder. Hail pelted him. As he ran for shelter, he saw and heard the flash and crack of lightning striking a tree not six feet from him. In an instant, the tree was a smoldering cinder, hissing as rain and hail soaked it wet and cold.
But what if it had caught fire? What if he alone were to see a fire start in the fields? What if he were to run to the village and warn the hamlet's dwellers? Wouldn't he then cease to be an ignored clown and be a hero instead, crowned with laurel, dressed in purple robes, hailed as lord of the realm and savior of his people?
In a flash, he decided he would rush to convince the village that there was a fire.
But, of course, there was no fire. He was still just a clown. A few children who looked up from their handheld game consoles laughed at the oddly dressed foreigner. The village as a whole ignored him.
Not long ago, bells would toll and villagers would gather and mumble the ritual words of which they knew little and clerics would spout words even less understood and the village would then rest for another week of the same. Today we've said God is dead, we've entered the post-Christian era; some think that a strike of lightning, divine or clerical, is what we need to fuel a new fire in us.
Indeed, in Joseph Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity," he opens by telling the state of the Christian story in the manner of a fable.
"Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with [the] ecclesiastical," Ratzinger writes, finds himself in the position of a traveling clown who, as he approaches a new village, sees a fire breaking out in the countryside not far from it.
The clown is a stranger in this country and does not speak the language, but he is concerned that, given the lush vegetation, the fire will spread rapidly and overwhelm the village. He arrives in a state of agitation and tries to gesture to the villagers that they are in danger, but the villagers laugh at him, thinking his anxious mime is part of his act.
A priest with whom I spoke about this Ratzingerian fable added that it's worse. He said that in the contemporary age there aren't traveling clowns any more and that, if one appeared, no one would pay attention even to laugh. Then he sighed sadly and shook his head at the folly of our contemporaries.
But there's another take.
There was once a clown whose entire troupe had been laid off, as no one came to the circus any more, preferring to go to film theaters, watch television or play games on a computer or handheld device. The clown was articulate, he knew the art of costume, he understood mime, he was a fine actor. He could have made at least a decent living working in a Hollywood studio or on Broadway or in a school or college teaching his arts.
Yet he preferred to travel from village to village, complaining to himself that no one valued his ancient and venerable craft any more.
He lived poor as a church mouse and called it a sign of his virtuous dedication to his calling as a clown. Truth be told, he felt otherwise: he had no boss, if he did something wrong he could go to another village where they wouldn't know about his misdeeds, and he didn't need much since he didn't have the burden of a nagging wife and greedy children.
One day, tramping through fields in a foreign country, the sky turned dark and full of thunder. Hail pelted him. As he ran for shelter, he saw and heard the flash and crack of lightning striking a tree not six feet from him. In an instant, the tree was a smoldering cinder, hissing as rain and hail soaked it wet and cold.
But what if it had caught fire? What if he alone were to see a fire start in the fields? What if he were to run to the village and warn the hamlet's dwellers? Wouldn't he then cease to be an ignored clown and be a hero instead, crowned with laurel, dressed in purple robes, hailed as lord of the realm and savior of his people?
In a flash, he decided he would rush to convince the village that there was a fire.
But, of course, there was no fire. He was still just a clown. A few children who looked up from their handheld game consoles laughed at the oddly dressed foreigner. The village as a whole ignored him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)