To those who believe that those of us who do not fully agree with you are all going to hell:
There are a number of problems with this approach of casting stones against those you judge, (not least of which is the presumption that your interpretation is any less erroneous or unforgivable, or why, if you have indeed embraced one god, you are so confident that you have chosen correctly, and that you have not offended all of the other possibilities - Zeus may be at least as vindictive as Yahweh, and who is to say any god would not respect us more for saying honestly out loud what we think and feel rather than groveling and saying something we don't believe out of fear? (I am not accusing you of doing these things, but were I to echo the platitudes of Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, I would be lying to myself and everyone else).
The first major problem with your hell threat is that in John, which you cited, Jesus never mentioned hell. He made some references to it elsewhere, of course, particularly in Matthew, but there he makes only 18 references (1.7% of all passages) including 9 direct (0.8%) and 9 indirect (0.8%) references. Again, hell appears a lot more important to his followers than it did to Jesus. That leaves us a choice: either place our faith in the original teachings of Jesus or in the medieval corporate church concerned about losing market share to competitors and who therefore started pushing the "outside the church no salvation" slogan as if it had been there all the time). It could be Jesus cared as much about hell as Catholics during the time of the Inquisition or Puritans during the great witch hunts, but that would imply he had been misquoted, which seems a far more serious charge than questioning if someone could really live 8 centuries.
Second, you are assuming, without evidence, that we will be punished in some way not for what we do or who we help or the types of lives we lead but for what we say out loud about using our God-given reason and senses. Whether the Bible was divinely inspired or not, those putting pen to paper were definitely men. If Jesus wrote anything down, it has not survived, and what we are left with is an oral tradition, imperfectly remembered, recreated decades after the fact and translated and transcribed countless times. Which is the more radical notion - that all of the men who were involved in this endeavor were perfect in a way that we know no editor or author today is, or that mistakes, very human mistakes, perhaps well-intended, were introduced along the way?
Third, if we are indeed to be punished or not for what we believe, then it seems the game is up for most of us, since that is not something we can really control. We can try to make ourselves receptive to an idea, but try as I might, I cannot force myself to believe that I can fly or that dead men can come to life. It may have happened on some corner of the planet at some time - I don't know, I wasn't there - but I do not believe that the overwhelming weight of empirical evidence should be ignored in favor of an ancient collection of texts which although in places are lyrical and poetic, in others are simply meaningless to a modern audience who cannot pretend to understand an agrarian Mediterranean culture.
Fourth, although I will yield the point that the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament are, like the compassionate teachings of Isaiah and Amos, an antidote to some of the formulaic mumsimus that bred the hypocrisy and false piety against which Jesus railed, the New Testament does suffer from some glaring inconsistencies and errors that undermine the credibility of its authors (who were not, of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but scribes and anonymous clerics writing decades later "in the spirit of" those personalities, some of whom hardly appear in the texts after which they are named).
Consider the famous generational problem, highlighted centuries ago by Voltaire in Traité sur la Tolérance, whcih I just read and highly recommend, by the way. Although the lineage from David to Joseph is moot, the author of Matthew spent the first 16 verses (1.6% of the total text by my count) establishing it in painful detail. Matthew described 26 generations between Jesus; Luke describes 40. Assuming 25 years per generation, this implies an error of 350 years! More disturbingly, not a single name on the David-Joseph lineage of Matthew overlaps with the David-Joseph lineage of Luke. Clearly, they cannot both be right in the way we use the word right today.
If you are claiming that anyone who rejects or criticizes sections of the Bible risks the wrath of Yahweh, which lineage are you betting your soul on, Matthew's or Luke's? You can't choose both, since they can't both be true. Is it Curtain #1 or Curtain #2? I hope you see the problem with taking this concrete approach.
All of this is to say that the rather flippant reference to eternal torture you made in your "pearly gates" remark, if you really believe it, should give you at least as much pause as those you feel disagree with you.
I do not think that any deity will punish anyone for pointing out the ludicrousness of a man having a child at over a century old, then living another 700 years - which you would laugh at if you read in the Inquirer but for some reason take seriously because it is found in a book that happens to be held in some reverence by a significant minority of the world population today, most of whom have not read it.
If such a deity exists - and you can no more prove it than I can disprove it although we can assign probabilities - then I think we are all lost, for surely an omniscient god could see through our attempts to appease him through saying something we do not believe. If we avoid the issue of Noah's age or Lot's incest with his daughters, both of whom he impregnated while drunk (physiological impossibilities aside, this is not my idea of family values) simply by ignoring them, then who is to say this also won't incite the wrath of a vengeful deity?
I have been living my life fairly consistently in truth to my convictions. I have lived to a ripe old age, not by Noah's standards, but by reality-based ones, produced 3 beautiful children, and have never felt I was about to be turned into a pillar of salt or struck by lightning. In other words, if my words and thoughts have offended Yahweh or Thor or Zeus, they had plenty of opportunity to silence me or even the score, but when I look into the sky at night, I like Pascal am sometimes "terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces."
In contrast to the paucity of evidence of a vengeful deity who micromanages the universe and punishes those who think, there is sadly plenty of evidence of the damage and cruelty caused by those who continue to insist despite all evidence to the contrary that their sacred documents are the One True Path (and that those who disagree with them are going to hell).
I imagine, but cannot prove, if there is some sort of judgement, those who dropped fire and high explosives on children, those who murdered physicians or bombed night clubs or cafés in the name of religion, those who shamed and humiliated those who did not act like them or look like them (using religion to justify their prejudice and cruelty), or those who stood by silently while others acted out their religious prejudices will have far more to answer for than someone who simply reads a book, does the math, and reports honestly what he finds. Thinking and encouraging others to think harms no one except those who find such a process threatening for some reason. Were I to try to overlook what a lifetime of study, reflection, and observation leads me to believe, I would be fooling neither myself nor anyone else.
I know others have made the same studies and come to different conclusions, and if this gives them a sense of peace or purpose, then I am happy for them. My world view is neither threatened nor undermined by its not being universally shared, something I think would be rather boring anyway. We need diversity of belief. I just don't know how we can foster that diversity if we go around telling those we disagree with that we think they are going to hell.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Did Jerry Falwell Ever Read the Bible? Really?
When he wasn't blaming feminists and those advocating separation of church and state for the 9-11 attacks, Jerry Falwell spent a lot of time explaining why the Bible had to be read literally and authoritatively. "The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc." Yet a cursory reading of Genesis makes me wonder if Falwell ever actually read the book he so ardently defended.
I have. You can find the entire text online at several places, but perhaps the best is the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. Unlike Falwell and other fundamentalists, I do actually read the book in question, if only to remind myself that I am not making this stuff up! (I wish I were.)
Most of the rambling texts that make up the Bible are either distractingly inaccurate, shamelessly anthropocentric, immoral, or just plain weird. How is knowing the names and years lived of all the supposed descendants of Adam and Eve supposed to help me be a better person? Am I supposed to be wowed by the fact that Adam was a 130-year-old father (when he father Seth, who himself lived for 912 years)? Really? What should I do with this information exactly?
Why should I be awed at the fact that Yahweh moved upon the waters to create life if only a few chapters later, he was so offended at the "imagination" of man that he decided to kill everything he had so painstakingly created? Reading Genesis is like reading a moving account of a father lovingly overseeing the birth of his children, knowing that later in the same account, he will murder almost all of them (and their pets, who did him no harm).
Then what does it mean when that same deity, after going through all the trouble to create then destroy the world, changes his mind once again and sort of forgives men their imagination - AFTER the flood has destroyed most life? And since we now know that 90% of life lives in water, how would a flood destroy them exactly? Why was Noah not hypoxic or frozen if the level of the water rose to above the level of Mount Everest? How did two of every creature on the planet survive on a craft 450' long and not eat each other or Noah? How did all reproduce successfully? How was there room for rhinos and elephants? How could he feed them all?
If zoos have trouble keeping animals alive in captivity, how could an untrained nomad?
It just makes no senses. It is beyond insulting to a modern reader. It is like telling a Marine recruit he must clean a latrine with a tooth brush - the ridiculousness of the task speaks to the level of unquestioning obedience demanded by those who pass these stories off as either accurate or useful.
And what, pray tell, is the moral of this story?
That we should be prepared? Any Boyscout could tell me that without fabricating stories of impossibly overcrowded boats built by a man with no expertise in ship-building or animal husbandry or hunting (he would have had to capture a number of these animals after all).
That god is prone to temper tantrums so he should be feared? Fair enough, but why not just make it a really bad flood? Or an earthquake? Why this ridiculous yarn?
Those who wrote the Bible doubtless had no idea about the height of Mount Everest or the size of the Earth. If so, they apparently were mathematically challenged, unable to calculate that the amount of water required for such a deluge was impossibly high.
They also didn't understand that the moon is simply reflecting the light of the sun, and that our sun is one of many stars (Genesis claims erroneously the stars were created last, after the Earth, sun, and moon, more or less in that order (Genesis 1:16).) They had no idea how old the Earth or the universe were, nor did they understand that the Earth was much younger than the universe. They apparently never bothered to dissect a body and count the number of ribs in men and women to know that they were equal, so the idea of the rib of Adam being removed to create Eve (Genesis 2:23) was nonsensical. They didn't apparently understand photosynthesis, which is surprising since they were agrarian, so the creation of grains and plants (Genesis 1:16) before the creation of the sun would have been an impossibility, as of course would the production of light (Genesis 1:3) without a light-generating sun or star (Genesis 1:16).
For those who want to wow us with their supposed knowledge of the mind of god, this is pretty amateurish, weak stuff. The first chapter of a well-written physics textbook is far more awe-inspiring than this rambling narrative of one man begetting another (women are generally nameless and faceless and ageless in this account).
I have. You can find the entire text online at several places, but perhaps the best is the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. Unlike Falwell and other fundamentalists, I do actually read the book in question, if only to remind myself that I am not making this stuff up! (I wish I were.)
Most of the rambling texts that make up the Bible are either distractingly inaccurate, shamelessly anthropocentric, immoral, or just plain weird. How is knowing the names and years lived of all the supposed descendants of Adam and Eve supposed to help me be a better person? Am I supposed to be wowed by the fact that Adam was a 130-year-old father (when he father Seth, who himself lived for 912 years)? Really? What should I do with this information exactly?
Why should I be awed at the fact that Yahweh moved upon the waters to create life if only a few chapters later, he was so offended at the "imagination" of man that he decided to kill everything he had so painstakingly created? Reading Genesis is like reading a moving account of a father lovingly overseeing the birth of his children, knowing that later in the same account, he will murder almost all of them (and their pets, who did him no harm).
Then what does it mean when that same deity, after going through all the trouble to create then destroy the world, changes his mind once again and sort of forgives men their imagination - AFTER the flood has destroyed most life? And since we now know that 90% of life lives in water, how would a flood destroy them exactly? Why was Noah not hypoxic or frozen if the level of the water rose to above the level of Mount Everest? How did two of every creature on the planet survive on a craft 450' long and not eat each other or Noah? How did all reproduce successfully? How was there room for rhinos and elephants? How could he feed them all?
If zoos have trouble keeping animals alive in captivity, how could an untrained nomad?
It just makes no senses. It is beyond insulting to a modern reader. It is like telling a Marine recruit he must clean a latrine with a tooth brush - the ridiculousness of the task speaks to the level of unquestioning obedience demanded by those who pass these stories off as either accurate or useful.
And what, pray tell, is the moral of this story?
That we should be prepared? Any Boyscout could tell me that without fabricating stories of impossibly overcrowded boats built by a man with no expertise in ship-building or animal husbandry or hunting (he would have had to capture a number of these animals after all).
That god is prone to temper tantrums so he should be feared? Fair enough, but why not just make it a really bad flood? Or an earthquake? Why this ridiculous yarn?
Those who wrote the Bible doubtless had no idea about the height of Mount Everest or the size of the Earth. If so, they apparently were mathematically challenged, unable to calculate that the amount of water required for such a deluge was impossibly high.
They also didn't understand that the moon is simply reflecting the light of the sun, and that our sun is one of many stars (Genesis claims erroneously the stars were created last, after the Earth, sun, and moon, more or less in that order (Genesis 1:16).) They had no idea how old the Earth or the universe were, nor did they understand that the Earth was much younger than the universe. They apparently never bothered to dissect a body and count the number of ribs in men and women to know that they were equal, so the idea of the rib of Adam being removed to create Eve (Genesis 2:23) was nonsensical. They didn't apparently understand photosynthesis, which is surprising since they were agrarian, so the creation of grains and plants (Genesis 1:16) before the creation of the sun would have been an impossibility, as of course would the production of light (Genesis 1:3) without a light-generating sun or star (Genesis 1:16).
For those who want to wow us with their supposed knowledge of the mind of god, this is pretty amateurish, weak stuff. The first chapter of a well-written physics textbook is far more awe-inspiring than this rambling narrative of one man begetting another (women are generally nameless and faceless and ageless in this account).
Note to anyone out there interested in starting a new religion: if you are going to make a prediction, make sure it is about something that we can never prove or disprove in the future or you will just look silly. Or worse.
Why Can We Admit Reindeer Don't Really Fly, but Can't Say God Probably Doesn't Appear on Grilled Cheese Sandwiches?
Most religious people don't think all that much about religion or the tenets of their faith one way or another (if they did, many would re-evaluate); most are drawn to their religious affiliation because of habit or tradition or because of some warm, fuzzy association that goes deeper than religion, just as the idea of Santa Claus and flying reindeer, patently absurd to adults, are viscerally entwined with pleasant associations from childhood that of course have nothing to do with the literal truth of those childhood stories.
The difference between Santa Claus and adult religious stories is that no one was ever burned alive or broken on the wheel for saying he thought Dad dressed up as Santa or that there were 11 reindeer (or 10 or none). It is considered neither impolite nor radical to admit (adult to adult) that the idea of Santa Claus is a deception created by parents to outsource their authority a bit ("he knows when you've been sleeping") and to create a warm and fuzzy and personalized pseudo-deity (he brings you presents in the end). We grow out of this idea but many do not grow beyond a man-in-the-sky belief in a personal deity who will respond to them if they address him (and it's usually a him) in the right way. We really don't know if dead people flew out of their graves and appeared in a flash of light to certain people who died thousands of years ago, then never appeared again (with the exception of an occasional grilled cheese sandwich) to anyone else, but the overwhelming weight of evidence is that they probably didn't.
The simple observation that people were burned alive for saying what I just did provides strong additional evidence that it is probably not true: testimony literally obtained through torture or the threat of torture is inherently unreliable.
If one tenet of a belief system is that questioning that belief system is itself offensive, then this faith must be fragile. The more a dogma deviates from reality, the greater the fragility. If we believe that we must tell our children things we ourselves do not believe in order for those beliefs to be propagated, it does not say much about the endurance or validity of those beliefs, does it? I don't have to worry that my children will doubt what I teach them about the laws of gravity: their own visceral experiences, enhanced by a thousand scrapes and bumps over the years, will allow the truth of the world around them to develop and be reinforced.
There are no natural phenomena important to our survival that do not have strong biological analogues - we don't need to tell adolescents about sexuality for them to be interested in it, nor do we need to convince a newborn, hungry baby to suck and swallow milk, nor do we need to convince someone who is cold to move toward the warmth. Our central nervous systems are wired to guide us through a sometimes hazardous world to not only survive, but to thrive and reproduce.
Religious fundamentalists want us to believe that for what they see as the most important task of all - recognizing and worshiping a particular deity - our senses are next to useless, that only through the reading, studying, and meditating upon ancient sacred texts (and only their valid sacred texts, not the fraudulent or even evil sacred texts of all other faiths) can we connect to this deity who remains so conspicuously and cruelly invisible (I say cruelly, because what father would let his children murder themselves in his name without stepping in and breaking it up? God could have ended the Thirty Years War or the Holocaust or prevented 9-11 but he either chose not to or does not exist, at least in the form fundamentalists insist we must believe).
Most things that are true are cross-culturally robust. Gravity is called different things by different cultures, but there isn't a place in the world that you can step off a 1,000' cliff and survive. We don't need a sacred text to tell us to fear heights or be careful walking along a high path. So the burden of proof remains why an all-powerful, all-knowing deity would outsource the job of advertising his presence to some guy handing out flyers in a Walmart parking lot.
The difference between Santa Claus and adult religious stories is that no one was ever burned alive or broken on the wheel for saying he thought Dad dressed up as Santa or that there were 11 reindeer (or 10 or none). It is considered neither impolite nor radical to admit (adult to adult) that the idea of Santa Claus is a deception created by parents to outsource their authority a bit ("he knows when you've been sleeping") and to create a warm and fuzzy and personalized pseudo-deity (he brings you presents in the end). We grow out of this idea but many do not grow beyond a man-in-the-sky belief in a personal deity who will respond to them if they address him (and it's usually a him) in the right way. We really don't know if dead people flew out of their graves and appeared in a flash of light to certain people who died thousands of years ago, then never appeared again (with the exception of an occasional grilled cheese sandwich) to anyone else, but the overwhelming weight of evidence is that they probably didn't.
The simple observation that people were burned alive for saying what I just did provides strong additional evidence that it is probably not true: testimony literally obtained through torture or the threat of torture is inherently unreliable.
If one tenet of a belief system is that questioning that belief system is itself offensive, then this faith must be fragile. The more a dogma deviates from reality, the greater the fragility. If we believe that we must tell our children things we ourselves do not believe in order for those beliefs to be propagated, it does not say much about the endurance or validity of those beliefs, does it? I don't have to worry that my children will doubt what I teach them about the laws of gravity: their own visceral experiences, enhanced by a thousand scrapes and bumps over the years, will allow the truth of the world around them to develop and be reinforced.
There are no natural phenomena important to our survival that do not have strong biological analogues - we don't need to tell adolescents about sexuality for them to be interested in it, nor do we need to convince a newborn, hungry baby to suck and swallow milk, nor do we need to convince someone who is cold to move toward the warmth. Our central nervous systems are wired to guide us through a sometimes hazardous world to not only survive, but to thrive and reproduce.
Religious fundamentalists want us to believe that for what they see as the most important task of all - recognizing and worshiping a particular deity - our senses are next to useless, that only through the reading, studying, and meditating upon ancient sacred texts (and only their valid sacred texts, not the fraudulent or even evil sacred texts of all other faiths) can we connect to this deity who remains so conspicuously and cruelly invisible (I say cruelly, because what father would let his children murder themselves in his name without stepping in and breaking it up? God could have ended the Thirty Years War or the Holocaust or prevented 9-11 but he either chose not to or does not exist, at least in the form fundamentalists insist we must believe).
Most things that are true are cross-culturally robust. Gravity is called different things by different cultures, but there isn't a place in the world that you can step off a 1,000' cliff and survive. We don't need a sacred text to tell us to fear heights or be careful walking along a high path. So the burden of proof remains why an all-powerful, all-knowing deity would outsource the job of advertising his presence to some guy handing out flyers in a Walmart parking lot.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Why We Need Religious Diversity as Much as Financial Diversity
Voltaire had it right when he argued that not only did religious tolerance and diversity not weaken a society, but the flourishing of many different faiths simultaneously kept them from slitting each other's throats.
The most horrible conflicts between any traditions seem to occur when one group feels it is so dominant it can make one final push to purge the other.
Queen Isabella of Spain felt this in 1492 when she issued the Act of Expulsion, forcing Jews and Muslims and free-thinkers to convert, flee, or die.
In France, the king was advised there were only a handful of Protestants, so revoking the Edict of Nantes would be a good idea. It wasn't; the bloodshed climaxed in the the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. Geneva, where we live, was a huge beneficiary of this religious intolerance, tripling in population as it was flooded with Protestant refugee's from the French Catholic theocracy.
After centuries of pogroms and ghettos and massacres, the Jewish population in Europe had been marginalized enough that Hitler felt a Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe, as he called it, was possible, and the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded. (We always tend to forget that the Holocaust arose in Christian Europe, executed largely by men who considered themselves Christians, acting in accordance with a faith that included as part of its liturgy "the perfidy of the Jews"; nothing equivalent to this arose in the Muslim world.)
I think the only thing that can save us from slitting each other's throats is to recognize that however quaint our practices or absence of practices may seem, no one wants to kill a potentially paying customer, or start a pogrom against one group could conceivably target one's own group next. Christians in America no doubt feel they are in a secure enough position to threaten or intimidate the Muslim minority to build their mosques somewhere else or not at all; I doubt they would be so uncivil if they realized how many of their neighbors or co-workers are Muslim.
I agree that all three of the Mediterranean Monotheistic faiths (since 1 is literally an outgrowth of the first and the 3rd shares many revered prophets and teachings) have some pretty nasty things to say about those who do not believe in Yahweh or Allah, and give license to kill or ethnically cleanse not just those who have different practices, but even their animals and their children. If any Christian thinks this is not the case, then dig up a description of the war crimes God supposedly commanded Joshua to commit at the Jericho, and the rage with which the compassion of some of the men toward the unarmed and innocent was met. And to those who say that Jesus represented a departure from all that gore, why then is the Old Testament included as part of the Christian Bible, and why did Jesus never explicitly denounce it (he saw himself as collecting stray sheep to bring them back to the proper worship of Yahweh, and said he had come to fulfill the law, not to break it)?
The point is that as much as I would like to live in a world in which we all sit down and have some kind of modern Nicean Conference, where we decide what parts of these sacred texts were clearly a product of the men who wrote them and the times in which they lived, and create a new consensus document that reflects what we have learned over the past few hundred years, I doubt we can. I would love to excise the parts of the Bible that condone slavery and stoning adultresses, replacing them with promises that we will not do that again. I would love to create a thinner document, keeping all the poetry and messages of compassion and basic decency, but deleting pre-scientific overreaching about the supposed evils of eating shellfish, rotating crops, or wearing shirts of mixed fiber (such as cotton-polyester blends), all condemned by Leviticus. I would love to introduce what we now know about the distribution of same sex preferences in the human population, and the evils of hating each other for who we are rather than for the demonstrably bad things we do (like killing or bearing false witness). I would hope the new text would spend as much time exhorting us to be good people today as arguing over what might or might not have happened in Palestine 2,000 years ago. If this new text did risk getting bogged down in historicism, I wish it would be at least consistent, deciding, for example, whether there were 26 (Matthew) or 40 (Luke) generations between Jesus and David, and having at least one name overlap! (It would be nice to explain to those of us who know a thing or two about DNA to understand why the lineage of Joseph should matter since he is not the father of Jesus anyway.)
Scientific inaccuracies could be apologized for or at least corrected - the idea of the Sun revolving around an Earth only a few thousand years old inhabited for all of its existence (instead of only a tiny fraction) by people come to mind. Now that we know that 80% of biomass lives in water and that far greater mass extinctions predated the evolution of man, the myth of Noah's ark could be either eliminated or updated (although we are left with wondering why God would bother destroying most species hundreds of millions of years before the emergence of man - is it meaningful to say that microbes or early vertebrates worship or don't worship in the correct way? And what does this do to our idea of an anthropocentric world?)
Anyone who has read anything about quantum physics, anti-matter, dark forces, the big bang, walks away with a far greater sense of awe than one gets by reading what some Mediterranean authors 2,000 or more years ago felt would wow an audience. Why not work some of that in, with disclaimers that all of what we think we know about the world is subject to change pending further investigation and that no one will go to hell or be turned into bacon or a pillar of salt for changing their mind or asking questions about the world around them.
But since we cannot even agree on the far less controversial idea that a poor woman in Africa should be able to protect herself from her HIV-infected husband with a condom, or that the rise in temperatures and CO2 levels probably has a great deal to do with the explosive increase in fossil fuels worldwide (and it might be a good idea to explore alternatives), I doubt a frontal assault on Mediterranean Monotheism will work.
Instead, I think we are left with the more realistic strategy of not just tolerating diversity of religion, but encouraging it. Like a portfolio of risky assets, our society is paradoxically more stable and less likely to implode if many different faiths are both forced to get along with each other and in some respect cancel out each other's more extreme ideas. Again, it is very hard to hate all members of a religion or ethnic group if your son goes to Boy Scouts with them or you see them every day at work.
Religions, even ones that begin as extremist or cult-like (and that includes all religions probably if we could go back far enough in time), mellow out. Methodists and Quakers were once considered the real radicals; now they are considered either mainstream or at least harmless. Mormons (mostly) renounced polygamy because they lived in a part of the world that had changed over time to become exclusively monogamous (something not true of course of Abraham, Moses, or Mohammed). Most American Catholics use contraception and are a bit more likely statistically to get an abortion than their non-Catholic citizens because no doubt of the influence of competing traditions (including none at all) that are less restrictive in this area.
In the same way, Muslim immigrants, even hardcore ones, who might have some Biblical-era ideas about women (although most certainly don't) will mellow out over time, if that is the concern of the Sharia-is-coming! Sharia-is-coming! crowds trying to shout down the planners of a cultural center in Manhattan.
So yes, I would be in favor of creating or working toward a world where truthiness is encouraged and we all agree not to tell our children things that we don't know to be true (or to admit when things are articles of faith over which intelligent adults clearly do not all agree), but until then, we are stuck with the admittedly less desirable formula of letting all people decide for themselves how, if at all, they want to worship, and to whom, as long as exercising that right does not deprive other citizens of their rights - to a science-based education or the full spectrum of family planning services, for example.
I do have a problem with some of the more hateful and exclusivist teachings of Mediterranean Monotheism and think we should call them out on them. Teaching children they will go to hell forever and ever if they do not listen to the nuns or the priests or the imam is a form of child abuse worse than hitting them, and perhaps right up there with fondling them, since it shuts down curiosity and reason, fills them with terror of something no adult can know to be true (there may be some hell, but there may also be teapots among the rings of Saturn; the fact something cannot be disproven does not make it true), and teaches them to hate those who don't share their faith tradition (how can you respect someone if you secretly or not so secretly believe they are so hated by God he will torture them forever and ever, amen?). I do not know if fundamentalist Christians in the United States would have supported the invasion of Iraq so ardently if they did not believe that the 98% of Iraq that was not Christian was all going to hell anyway, but it's hard to imagine how one can feel true compassion for someone if you think their ideas are not only wrong, but offensive to the One True God.
For so long the Muslim world was the repository of learning and civilization. They gave a relatively primitive and much more religious Europe the number zero, the Hindu-Arabic numbering system, algebra, paper (via China), Greek philosophy (most of whose works had been burned as pre-Christian (and therefore bad) by the Christian mullahs overseeing intellectual life in Europe), and the first maps and compasses. They were tolerant toward Jews and non-Christians when they fled a Europe that was burning them alive, drowning them, or throwing them down wells. I think it's fantastic we have lately carved a clear line between church and state but let's not forget that many among us would love to return to the bad old days, and we had to make our own history.
The most horrible conflicts between any traditions seem to occur when one group feels it is so dominant it can make one final push to purge the other.
Queen Isabella of Spain felt this in 1492 when she issued the Act of Expulsion, forcing Jews and Muslims and free-thinkers to convert, flee, or die.
In France, the king was advised there were only a handful of Protestants, so revoking the Edict of Nantes would be a good idea. It wasn't; the bloodshed climaxed in the the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. Geneva, where we live, was a huge beneficiary of this religious intolerance, tripling in population as it was flooded with Protestant refugee's from the French Catholic theocracy.
After centuries of pogroms and ghettos and massacres, the Jewish population in Europe had been marginalized enough that Hitler felt a Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe, as he called it, was possible, and the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded. (We always tend to forget that the Holocaust arose in Christian Europe, executed largely by men who considered themselves Christians, acting in accordance with a faith that included as part of its liturgy "the perfidy of the Jews"; nothing equivalent to this arose in the Muslim world.)
I think the only thing that can save us from slitting each other's throats is to recognize that however quaint our practices or absence of practices may seem, no one wants to kill a potentially paying customer, or start a pogrom against one group could conceivably target one's own group next. Christians in America no doubt feel they are in a secure enough position to threaten or intimidate the Muslim minority to build their mosques somewhere else or not at all; I doubt they would be so uncivil if they realized how many of their neighbors or co-workers are Muslim.
I agree that all three of the Mediterranean Monotheistic faiths (since 1 is literally an outgrowth of the first and the 3rd shares many revered prophets and teachings) have some pretty nasty things to say about those who do not believe in Yahweh or Allah, and give license to kill or ethnically cleanse not just those who have different practices, but even their animals and their children. If any Christian thinks this is not the case, then dig up a description of the war crimes God supposedly commanded Joshua to commit at the Jericho, and the rage with which the compassion of some of the men toward the unarmed and innocent was met. And to those who say that Jesus represented a departure from all that gore, why then is the Old Testament included as part of the Christian Bible, and why did Jesus never explicitly denounce it (he saw himself as collecting stray sheep to bring them back to the proper worship of Yahweh, and said he had come to fulfill the law, not to break it)?
The point is that as much as I would like to live in a world in which we all sit down and have some kind of modern Nicean Conference, where we decide what parts of these sacred texts were clearly a product of the men who wrote them and the times in which they lived, and create a new consensus document that reflects what we have learned over the past few hundred years, I doubt we can. I would love to excise the parts of the Bible that condone slavery and stoning adultresses, replacing them with promises that we will not do that again. I would love to create a thinner document, keeping all the poetry and messages of compassion and basic decency, but deleting pre-scientific overreaching about the supposed evils of eating shellfish, rotating crops, or wearing shirts of mixed fiber (such as cotton-polyester blends), all condemned by Leviticus. I would love to introduce what we now know about the distribution of same sex preferences in the human population, and the evils of hating each other for who we are rather than for the demonstrably bad things we do (like killing or bearing false witness). I would hope the new text would spend as much time exhorting us to be good people today as arguing over what might or might not have happened in Palestine 2,000 years ago. If this new text did risk getting bogged down in historicism, I wish it would be at least consistent, deciding, for example, whether there were 26 (Matthew) or 40 (Luke) generations between Jesus and David, and having at least one name overlap! (It would be nice to explain to those of us who know a thing or two about DNA to understand why the lineage of Joseph should matter since he is not the father of Jesus anyway.)
Scientific inaccuracies could be apologized for or at least corrected - the idea of the Sun revolving around an Earth only a few thousand years old inhabited for all of its existence (instead of only a tiny fraction) by people come to mind. Now that we know that 80% of biomass lives in water and that far greater mass extinctions predated the evolution of man, the myth of Noah's ark could be either eliminated or updated (although we are left with wondering why God would bother destroying most species hundreds of millions of years before the emergence of man - is it meaningful to say that microbes or early vertebrates worship or don't worship in the correct way? And what does this do to our idea of an anthropocentric world?)
Anyone who has read anything about quantum physics, anti-matter, dark forces, the big bang, walks away with a far greater sense of awe than one gets by reading what some Mediterranean authors 2,000 or more years ago felt would wow an audience. Why not work some of that in, with disclaimers that all of what we think we know about the world is subject to change pending further investigation and that no one will go to hell or be turned into bacon or a pillar of salt for changing their mind or asking questions about the world around them.
But since we cannot even agree on the far less controversial idea that a poor woman in Africa should be able to protect herself from her HIV-infected husband with a condom, or that the rise in temperatures and CO2 levels probably has a great deal to do with the explosive increase in fossil fuels worldwide (and it might be a good idea to explore alternatives), I doubt a frontal assault on Mediterranean Monotheism will work.
Instead, I think we are left with the more realistic strategy of not just tolerating diversity of religion, but encouraging it. Like a portfolio of risky assets, our society is paradoxically more stable and less likely to implode if many different faiths are both forced to get along with each other and in some respect cancel out each other's more extreme ideas. Again, it is very hard to hate all members of a religion or ethnic group if your son goes to Boy Scouts with them or you see them every day at work.
Religions, even ones that begin as extremist or cult-like (and that includes all religions probably if we could go back far enough in time), mellow out. Methodists and Quakers were once considered the real radicals; now they are considered either mainstream or at least harmless. Mormons (mostly) renounced polygamy because they lived in a part of the world that had changed over time to become exclusively monogamous (something not true of course of Abraham, Moses, or Mohammed). Most American Catholics use contraception and are a bit more likely statistically to get an abortion than their non-Catholic citizens because no doubt of the influence of competing traditions (including none at all) that are less restrictive in this area.
In the same way, Muslim immigrants, even hardcore ones, who might have some Biblical-era ideas about women (although most certainly don't) will mellow out over time, if that is the concern of the Sharia-is-coming! Sharia-is-coming! crowds trying to shout down the planners of a cultural center in Manhattan.
So yes, I would be in favor of creating or working toward a world where truthiness is encouraged and we all agree not to tell our children things that we don't know to be true (or to admit when things are articles of faith over which intelligent adults clearly do not all agree), but until then, we are stuck with the admittedly less desirable formula of letting all people decide for themselves how, if at all, they want to worship, and to whom, as long as exercising that right does not deprive other citizens of their rights - to a science-based education or the full spectrum of family planning services, for example.
I do have a problem with some of the more hateful and exclusivist teachings of Mediterranean Monotheism and think we should call them out on them. Teaching children they will go to hell forever and ever if they do not listen to the nuns or the priests or the imam is a form of child abuse worse than hitting them, and perhaps right up there with fondling them, since it shuts down curiosity and reason, fills them with terror of something no adult can know to be true (there may be some hell, but there may also be teapots among the rings of Saturn; the fact something cannot be disproven does not make it true), and teaches them to hate those who don't share their faith tradition (how can you respect someone if you secretly or not so secretly believe they are so hated by God he will torture them forever and ever, amen?). I do not know if fundamentalist Christians in the United States would have supported the invasion of Iraq so ardently if they did not believe that the 98% of Iraq that was not Christian was all going to hell anyway, but it's hard to imagine how one can feel true compassion for someone if you think their ideas are not only wrong, but offensive to the One True God.
For so long the Muslim world was the repository of learning and civilization. They gave a relatively primitive and much more religious Europe the number zero, the Hindu-Arabic numbering system, algebra, paper (via China), Greek philosophy (most of whose works had been burned as pre-Christian (and therefore bad) by the Christian mullahs overseeing intellectual life in Europe), and the first maps and compasses. They were tolerant toward Jews and non-Christians when they fled a Europe that was burning them alive, drowning them, or throwing them down wells. I think it's fantastic we have lately carved a clear line between church and state but let's not forget that many among us would love to return to the bad old days, and we had to make our own history.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Mayors Against Illegal Guns: A Stray Bullet
Date: August 24, 2010 8:31:52 PM GMT+02:00Subject: A stray bullet
Dear Friend,
In the last 3 years, 22,000 people have been murdered in the Mexican cartel wars -- and violence is spilling into the U.S. Just last weekend, a violent gun battle broke out just south of the border in Ciudad Juarez -- so close to the U.S. that a stray bullet actually struck a building at the University of Texas in El Paso.
The police don't yet know the source of the guns. But, what we do know is that 90% of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crimes come from gun dealers in America.
There is some good news however. Recently, Congress authorized $37.5 million in additional funding to help curb gun trafficking across the Mexican border.
It's a big step that was recommended by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but it couldn't have happened without the trailblazing work of four Members of Congress.
Call to thank these brave leaders in Congress who fought to get more resources to combat illegal gun trafficking:
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) - (202) 224-5521
Rep. David Price (D-NC) - (202) 225-1784
Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-TX) - (202) 225-4511
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) - (202) 224-6542
Tell them "thank you" for supporting increased funding to help stop gun trafficking across the Mexican border and encourage them to consider other recommendations from Mayors Against Illegal Guns to curb illegal gun trafficking.
This important step is commendable, but we cannot stop fighting illegal gun trafficking. As long as illegal guns get into the hands of criminals, our work is not done.
That's why we need to recognize our leaders when they stand up to do the right thing.
Call these Congressional leaders today.
Sincerely,
Mayors Against Illegal Guns
P.S. Mayors Against Illegal Guns recommended additional funding as one of its 40 recommendations in the Blueprint for Federal Action on Illegal Guns. Read the full list of recommendations here (PDF).
You are receiving this email because you have expressed interest in the work of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org | Unsubscribe
Bhutan's Index of Happiness
After my wife returned from a trip to Bhutan, a country that actually has a Gross National Happiness Index that it publishes, she showed me a book full of glossy survey results including a tally of Very Happy Households by region. A country that takes happiness this seriously can teach us all a thing or two about right government priorities!
Our Shame Made the French Press: Le Monde covered Congress's Failure to cover 9-11 Volunteers' Medical Expenses
September 11, 2010:
"Mais un mois après cette relative bonne nouvelle, la Chambre des représentants américaine rejetait, le 29 juillet, un projet de loi censé fournir une couverture maladie à ces victimes. Le texte prévoyait un programme destiné à mieux les traiter, pour un coût de 7,4 milliards de dollars."
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Would Newt return our lost colony?
The BBC's Mark Mardell asks this question in an intriguing post related to Gingrich's remarks that President Obama can only be understand through the prism of Kenyan anti-colonialism. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? If it's bad, does it mean that the former history professor who once wrote somewhat wistfully of the Belgian colonial experience in the Congo (an experience so brutal that another observer Joseph Conrad turned into the novel Heart of Darkness).
Is Newt Gingrich a Closet Jihadist?
Is Newt Gingrich a Closet Jihadist?
Mark Vakkur, M.D.9/22/10
Before dismissing that question, consider the following:
While playing Grand Inquisitor against President Bill Clinton for having an affair, Gingrich now admits he was cheating on wife #2, Marianne Ginther (who he married after cheating on wife #1). Unlike Clinton's fling with Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich's affair with Congressional aide Callista Bisek, 23 years his junior, destroyed his marriage (Callista and Newt are now married, at least for now; give it time though - they have been married only since 2000 and Gingrich's pattern seems to be a marriage-ending affair every 10-15 years).
So, if history is any guide, then the man who was so publicly outraged about adultery but was privately engaging in it who is now so publicly outraged by the threat of radical Islam may be secretly embracing it. Gingrich's rants against radical Islam may be a signal that he has privately converted.
It would not be the first time Gingrich has made a religious conversion after all. Raised a Southern Baptist, the party that once condemned the Pope as an anti-Christ (the disproportionately Southern Baptist KKK was as anti-Catholic as it was anti-black and anti-Jewish), he converted to Catholicism in 2009. To outsiders this may seem like a small change among interchangeable denominations of a shared Christian faith, but not to anyone privy to the ugly politics of the Jim Crow south where Gingrich spent his formative years. He graduated high school in segregated Columbus, Georgia, 2 years before Martin Luther King was to give his "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington, and the better part of a decade from implementation of the historic civil rights legislation passed by a process of judicial activism Gingrich later condemned as overreaching.
So a man who condemns adultery but commits it and who has a history of being flexible when necessary (his conversion to Catholicism was apparently to please his wife) might now be praying in the direction of Mecca five times a day.
Not that I have anything against that, but then again, I am not Newt Gingrich, who seems to be doing his best to make Islam the new Red Menace. He describes a vast left wing Islamic conspiracy (left wing because of course Democrats, the same ones who he once claimed would inspire mothers to drown their children if elected, appease closet jihadists). I did not realize it, but by embracing secularism and separation of church and state, I am actually helping Islamic fundamentalists impose Sharia Law on unsuspecting Americans.
Frankly, when Newt first told me what I was really doing without knowing it, I thought it sounded like his latest attention-grabbing gimmick to differentiate himself from the right wing pack (if you really fear Islam, vote for me, that sort of thing). But as I considered the possibility of Gingrich's conversion to Islam, I realized he might be far more intelligent than I imagined.
This is a twist so deep and drenched in irony it just might be true. Imagine a plot to implant radical Islam in America spearheaded by a cranky white man who alleges to hate Muslims! Brilliant.
Of course, many will say that this is nonsensical, that baseless accusations that a public figure is Muslim (as though being a Muslim is a crime) require proof, or that making these charges against all contradictory evidence is irresponsible. To which I have to agree except that the right wing of the American right - Gingrich's base - continues to make identical speculations about the winning candidate in the last presidential election cycle. Am I then not free to make a similar charge against one of the losers (of the campaign that is)?
There is at least as much evidence that Newt is a closet Muslim as there is that President Obama is. Newt is, as his political allies once said of Valerie Plame Wilson, fair game.
So now Newt Gingrich, whose serial adultery became Exhibit A as to why those who proclaim their personal honor the loudest are most likely to steal your family silver (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson), tells us he sees religious extremists under every school desk. Eugene Robinson points out in a recent editorial in the Washington Post "there is no left-of-center movement dedicated to fighting the steady, stealthy insinuation of sharia into America's legal system because no such thing is happening. Gingrich invents an enemy and then demands to know why others haven't sallied forth to slay it."
Or does he? If Gingrich cries shrilly enough that the sharias are coming! the sharias are coming! then when they really do.... ah, you see where this is going now.
Very deep, Mr. Gingrich. Very deep. We should all watch carefully to insure he does not order a matching set of prayer rugs from IKEA or avoid pork at the next fund-raising Tea Party Barbecue.
While playing Grand Inquisitor against President Bill Clinton for having an affair, Gingrich now admits he was cheating on wife #2, Marianne Ginther (who he married after cheating on wife #1). Unlike Clinton's fling with Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich's affair with Congressional aide Callista Bisek, 23 years his junior, destroyed his marriage (Callista and Newt are now married, at least for now; give it time though - they have been married only since 2000 and Gingrich's pattern seems to be a marriage-ending affair every 10-15 years).
So, if history is any guide, then the man who was so publicly outraged about adultery but was privately engaging in it who is now so publicly outraged by the threat of radical Islam may be secretly embracing it. Gingrich's rants against radical Islam may be a signal that he has privately converted.
It would not be the first time Gingrich has made a religious conversion after all. Raised a Southern Baptist, the party that once condemned the Pope as an anti-Christ (the disproportionately Southern Baptist KKK was as anti-Catholic as it was anti-black and anti-Jewish), he converted to Catholicism in 2009. To outsiders this may seem like a small change among interchangeable denominations of a shared Christian faith, but not to anyone privy to the ugly politics of the Jim Crow south where Gingrich spent his formative years. He graduated high school in segregated Columbus, Georgia, 2 years before Martin Luther King was to give his "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington, and the better part of a decade from implementation of the historic civil rights legislation passed by a process of judicial activism Gingrich later condemned as overreaching.
So a man who condemns adultery but commits it and who has a history of being flexible when necessary (his conversion to Catholicism was apparently to please his wife) might now be praying in the direction of Mecca five times a day.
Not that I have anything against that, but then again, I am not Newt Gingrich, who seems to be doing his best to make Islam the new Red Menace. He describes a vast left wing Islamic conspiracy (left wing because of course Democrats, the same ones who he once claimed would inspire mothers to drown their children if elected, appease closet jihadists). I did not realize it, but by embracing secularism and separation of church and state, I am actually helping Islamic fundamentalists impose Sharia Law on unsuspecting Americans.
Frankly, when Newt first told me what I was really doing without knowing it, I thought it sounded like his latest attention-grabbing gimmick to differentiate himself from the right wing pack (if you really fear Islam, vote for me, that sort of thing). But as I considered the possibility of Gingrich's conversion to Islam, I realized he might be far more intelligent than I imagined.
This is a twist so deep and drenched in irony it just might be true. Imagine a plot to implant radical Islam in America spearheaded by a cranky white man who alleges to hate Muslims! Brilliant.
Of course, many will say that this is nonsensical, that baseless accusations that a public figure is Muslim (as though being a Muslim is a crime) require proof, or that making these charges against all contradictory evidence is irresponsible. To which I have to agree except that the right wing of the American right - Gingrich's base - continues to make identical speculations about the winning candidate in the last presidential election cycle. Am I then not free to make a similar charge against one of the losers (of the campaign that is)?
There is at least as much evidence that Newt is a closet Muslim as there is that President Obama is. Newt is, as his political allies once said of Valerie Plame Wilson, fair game.
So now Newt Gingrich, whose serial adultery became Exhibit A as to why those who proclaim their personal honor the loudest are most likely to steal your family silver (to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson), tells us he sees religious extremists under every school desk. Eugene Robinson points out in a recent editorial in the Washington Post "there is no left-of-center movement dedicated to fighting the steady, stealthy insinuation of sharia into America's legal system because no such thing is happening. Gingrich invents an enemy and then demands to know why others haven't sallied forth to slay it."
Or does he? If Gingrich cries shrilly enough that the sharias are coming! the sharias are coming! then when they really do.... ah, you see where this is going now.
Very deep, Mr. Gingrich. Very deep. We should all watch carefully to insure he does not order a matching set of prayer rugs from IKEA or avoid pork at the next fund-raising Tea Party Barbecue.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Christianity and Sex: It's a Problem That Won't Just Go Away
The modern obsession with sexuality would have struck a contemporary of Jesus as odd, perhaps startling. He had some things to say about adultery, but never once mentioned homosexuality, for example, and good luck finding any clear and convincing reference to masturbation as a mortal sin, which the Catholic church still teaches. It might be surprising to some that Catholicism had no fixed teaching on contraception until recently and until the 13th century it was possible for priests to marry. In 1968, the commission appointed by Pope Paul VI initially found no reason a Catholic in good standing could not take the pill or use other forms of contraception, but that was not the answer Paul wanted to hear, so he fired those who favored the pill and voilá, Humanae Vitae was issued which split the church, with the hierarchy upholding the ban and the laity virtually ignoring it. (Karen Armstrong gives an excellent history of this period.)
But I think regardless of the facts of the specific issues at hand, the method by which religions in general, especially those who are more concerned about orthodoxy (right thinking) not just orthopraxy (correct behavior), seek truth is deeply problematic. Galileo exemplifies this: a few passages of the Bible seemed to imply that we live in a geocentric universe. Until the discovery of the telescope, what the Greeks had actually known (and the Roman church forgot) could not be proven - that our system is actually heliocentric. So if you have a sacred text that stakes its claim on something that its authors could never imagine to be able to be proven or disproven, then what do you do when technology allows you to discover things with your own eyes that clearly are not accurately portrayed in that text, or collection of texts? The modern solution has been generally to shrug and say of course those texts were a product of their time and contain great wisdom in general even if some of the particulars are glaringly inaccurate (as Galileo asked, why would anyone turn to a text as an authority on a topic on which it is generally silent - why indeed?). But that approach is of course not good enough for fundamentalists of all stripes, and also for traditionalists, such as the Pope, who are confronted with overwhelming evidence that the way they have conceptualized the world is deeply flawed. The idea of renouncing your sexuality in some spiritual union with God does not seem a particularly reliable construct, and those who are compelled to take vows of celibacy seem empirically to include some who are deeply troubled, perhaps looking for refuge from forbidden impulses that torment them. Put those men together with a vulnerable population and disaster results.
This is not to say that all who pursue celibacy or other forms of self-denial are all pedophiles or predators, only that one can't help wondering if allowing priests to marry and have a healthy, pro-life outlet for their natural, God-given sexuality might decrease or even eliminate the types of horrors that have occurred with numbing frequency in so many settings that have the same elements: demands for celibacy, exclusion of women, and an unyielding centralized chain of command where loyalty to superiors trumps loyalty to scientific or forensic reality.
So I doubt cosmetic changes or another commission or tearful apology will do the trick. What is needed is a fundamental overhaul of how authority flows, which in a sense was what the Reformation was about, although Martin Luther and King Henry VIII had their own demons also, and Protestants showed our our side of the Atlantic that they could be as good at imagining witches and killing innocents as any Inquisitor.
We know the earth is much older than Usher's 1650 estimate (he dated genesis to Oct 23, 4004 BC), in fact so much older that all of the history of our species would represent less than a fraction of a second of the earth's hour of time. We know leprosy is not particularly infectious and we believe that slavery is wrong and that adultery or cursing your parents should not be capital offenses. So the logical and moral gymnastics required for belief, certainly the type of authoritative belief and obedience demanded by Rome, are much greater today than ever which is why all churches, despite the recent evangelical flourish in the United States, are facing a very deep credibility crisis. How they negotiate that crisis will determine how and in what form they survive, but if educated people of good will are ever to take the pronouncements of an unelected group of celibate males seriously, they must first renounce the idea of infallibility (itself a modern doctrine promulgated by Pius IX in 1870) and admit they put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Maybe even more so.
But I think regardless of the facts of the specific issues at hand, the method by which religions in general, especially those who are more concerned about orthodoxy (right thinking) not just orthopraxy (correct behavior), seek truth is deeply problematic. Galileo exemplifies this: a few passages of the Bible seemed to imply that we live in a geocentric universe. Until the discovery of the telescope, what the Greeks had actually known (and the Roman church forgot) could not be proven - that our system is actually heliocentric. So if you have a sacred text that stakes its claim on something that its authors could never imagine to be able to be proven or disproven, then what do you do when technology allows you to discover things with your own eyes that clearly are not accurately portrayed in that text, or collection of texts? The modern solution has been generally to shrug and say of course those texts were a product of their time and contain great wisdom in general even if some of the particulars are glaringly inaccurate (as Galileo asked, why would anyone turn to a text as an authority on a topic on which it is generally silent - why indeed?). But that approach is of course not good enough for fundamentalists of all stripes, and also for traditionalists, such as the Pope, who are confronted with overwhelming evidence that the way they have conceptualized the world is deeply flawed. The idea of renouncing your sexuality in some spiritual union with God does not seem a particularly reliable construct, and those who are compelled to take vows of celibacy seem empirically to include some who are deeply troubled, perhaps looking for refuge from forbidden impulses that torment them. Put those men together with a vulnerable population and disaster results.
This is not to say that all who pursue celibacy or other forms of self-denial are all pedophiles or predators, only that one can't help wondering if allowing priests to marry and have a healthy, pro-life outlet for their natural, God-given sexuality might decrease or even eliminate the types of horrors that have occurred with numbing frequency in so many settings that have the same elements: demands for celibacy, exclusion of women, and an unyielding centralized chain of command where loyalty to superiors trumps loyalty to scientific or forensic reality.
So I doubt cosmetic changes or another commission or tearful apology will do the trick. What is needed is a fundamental overhaul of how authority flows, which in a sense was what the Reformation was about, although Martin Luther and King Henry VIII had their own demons also, and Protestants showed our our side of the Atlantic that they could be as good at imagining witches and killing innocents as any Inquisitor.
We know the earth is much older than Usher's 1650 estimate (he dated genesis to Oct 23, 4004 BC), in fact so much older that all of the history of our species would represent less than a fraction of a second of the earth's hour of time. We know leprosy is not particularly infectious and we believe that slavery is wrong and that adultery or cursing your parents should not be capital offenses. So the logical and moral gymnastics required for belief, certainly the type of authoritative belief and obedience demanded by Rome, are much greater today than ever which is why all churches, despite the recent evangelical flourish in the United States, are facing a very deep credibility crisis. How they negotiate that crisis will determine how and in what form they survive, but if educated people of good will are ever to take the pronouncements of an unelected group of celibate males seriously, they must first renounce the idea of infallibility (itself a modern doctrine promulgated by Pius IX in 1870) and admit they put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Maybe even more so.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Ron Paul to Sunshine Patriots: Stop Your Demagogy About The NYC Mosque! | Ron Paul .com
Excellent article by Ron Paul, someone I rarely agree with:
The claim is that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And, we're supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems.
The nineteen suicide bombers didn't come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. Fifteen came from our ally Saudi Arabia, a country that harbors strong American resentment, yet we invade and occupy Iraq where no al Qaeda existed prior to 9/11.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)