Crucifer

This is one of my former CC students as she looked the last Ash Wednesday.What I find interesting about this is that when she posted this picture she commented how it would be a test to see how people around her reacted to a public display of faith.

Here was my first thought; I wonder how many people were just confused?

I grew up a suburban Presbyterian in the Sixties. Suburban Sixties Presbyterians didn't do none of this forehead/ash/cross stuff. If I had seen someone wearing this symbol I'd have thought that they had been cleaning their chimney and missed a spot washing up afterwards.

And my second thought was; this woman is a genuine Christian; she is a devout, hard-working, compassionate young woman whose faith makes extraordinary demands on her. She is one of the few people I know who really tries to live her faith, with all the personal difficulties and hardships that represents. So I find it almost viciously ironic that she believed that she might be scorned for publicly proclaiming her faith in a gentle way, one that silently testifies to her beliefs without getting all up in your grille, without hectoring, without accusing, without confrontation, without finger-wagging of any sort at all...in a time when it seems like you cannot turn on a piece of electronic media without being confronted by some sanctimonious jackhole wagging his finger about some damn thing.And this is supposed to be what a peaceful carpenter's son laid down his life for.

Sometimes I wonder about humans. Really, I do.

Looking for fitzUrse

Last week I posted a comment about the late give-and-take regarding the unwillingness of the U.S. Catholic Church to accept the conditions of the U.S. Code regarding health care.

After I wrote that post the Obama Administration offered a deal to the prelates; you don't have to front up birth control to the people who work for you. But your insurer has to, under the terms of the law.

And, again, if you choose not to, you will not get the sweet and juicy federal tax breaks. You don't pass go, you don't collect $200.

And that the Church would be perfectly free to indulge their passion for telling the life-support systems for wombs (those things the rest of us not stuck in the 11th Century call, y'know, women) that the wombs belong to God, or, more specifically, belong to what the Church tells them God thinks. Which is pretty amazing, when you think about it, since I haven't heard God's opinion on the subject other than the ridiculous screed Humanitae Vitae, which even his fellow heirophants advised the Pope who wrote the damn thing was the religious equivalent of the first shot on Fort Sumter in 1861.And - not surprisingly or even notably - the bishops refused even this, since every time a sperm or an egg falls fallow Baby Jesus cries or something.

I really don't have a good handle on the political ju-jiutsu of all this. At least on the surface it looks like that the seculars might have snuck one through the wheelhouse of the religious, but it's hard to tell.

But I do know one thing.

Popes, prelates, mullahs, whatever you want to call them, have never given up their quest for control over everyone they can get their hooks into.

This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It's what religious - and most other human - organizations do by their very nature.The Catholic Church canonized a man named Tom Becket, away back in the 12th Century. You can read all about the man in all the usual places, if you want, but the Clif's Notes version is that he was killed by four men who worked for the man who was then King of England, Henry Plantagenet, second of that name run the island kingdom by 1170.

And the reasons he was killed were, when you strip away all the verbiage and bullshit, pretty much the same things the present-day Catholic bishops are trying to pry out of the hands of the U.S. government; control of what people can do.

In Becket's time the issue of real contention was also a legal one. The Catholic Church insisted that it's employees (and keep in mind that the 12th Century Church was the Microsoft AND Goldman-Sachs of England - probably more people worked in some capacity than for any other organization in the place) were outside the civil and criminal law of their country. A priest who raped his altarboys (and who could imagine that would happen..?) couldn't be arrested and tried in a court of law. He could only be hauled before the bishop's court, where he would be tried and sentenced by another cleric.And who could think that would be a problem?

Henry, who, for all his faults, was a genuine legal reformer who did more for codifying English law than anyone had or would for about 500 years, found this intolerable.

I would have, too.

He appointed his chancellor, Tom Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in hopes that having a made guy as the head Jesus-pesterer in England would help bring his church around to a more reasonable position. Instead the Church captured his guy, who became as big a pain in the ass as his predecessors.

The story goes that one day in December 1170 Henry was so pissed off with his former pal that he snarled something about being damn sick and tired of people who seemed to think they had the right to give their king the finger, which motivated four of his tough guys - Reginald fitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton, to saddle up and head out to have a little talk with Archbishop Tom.

To say that things didn't go well would be putting it mildly. The boys ran into Becket in his cathedral and told him flat out that he was ordered to report to his king.

In the spirit of the U.S. bishops, Becket told Henry's boys to talk to the finger.

Concluding that conversation wasn't getting anywhere, the guys went outside, got their toad-stickers, and proceeded to open up Becket's head like a tin of canned tuna.This didn't work out well. The dead priest became a martyr and saint, Henry had to eat humble pie, the four mechanics ended up buried somewhere in the Holy Land, and the Roman Catholic Church continued its merry way as an immense political force in English politics for another three centuries until it ran into an altogether harder Henry who smashed it for good and all.

In a particularly telling move, Henry VIII had his hard men smash up the old theocrat's tomb shrine and huck the bits into the trash. All that remains is a spot on the floor of the cathedral nave.So nothing really changes, does it? Religion and hierarchical religious corporations like the Catholic Church will ALWAYS try to pull as much power as they can into themselves. This has nothing to do with holiness or "salvation" or whatever the P.R. handout reads. It's about people and how some types of people want power, whether they are priests or politicians.

The difference being, of course, that politicians are just that, and speak with no more authority than their own gravity. A politician that talks like a gibbering idiot is usually recognized as a gibbering idiot and treated with the sort of deference given to gibbering idiots.

But gibbering idiocy is often indistinguishable from religious exaltation, and the latter is utterly irrefutable. A politician that demands you cut part of your genitals off will get treated like a poop-flinging monkey by most sane people. A prophet or pope or preacher?

People might well end up doing that sort of crazy thing.

One of the truly fundamental principles of the United States is that you're only allowed to pester people with your whacko religious ideas to the degree and extent that your powers of persuasion allow. The U.S. government, by its constituative documents, is forbidden from allowing - much less encouraging - one religion or other to enshrine its prejudices and preferences into civil or criminal law. For the good reason that the United States is supposed to be a land where the public forum is open to people of all religions, or none, and the moment you let the pope's nose into the lawbook that freedom is doomed.

This does not, has not, and will not prevent prelates of various sorts from trying to do this. Repeatedly, patiently, relentlessly, mercilessly.

Which is why the steps of the Capitol must, must always be guarded by fitzUrse with his naked sword in his hand.For that pious, humble, saintly man Tom Becket is the black enemy of public freedom and always will be.

Losing My Religion

That'd be me on the upper right, next to the Scientologists.Perfectly awesome flowchart courtesy of one of my Facebook pals.

More atheistic bloggage later today.

The Post After The Last "U.S. Politics" Post I Ever Wrote

I know, I know. I said I was done.

But this is so brilliant, so succinct, so perfect an illustration of the level our political discourse had sunk to that I cannot with good intent pass on commenting on it. Here's the quote, from Charlie Pierce again, citing Rick Santorum on the evils of putting the totem pole in the donut hole without throwing the pregnancy dice (emphasis mine):

"One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

Now sit back and think about that for a moment.First of all, this man isn't running for stake president of the local Mormon outfit. He's not a cardinal hustling votes for the Papacy. He's supposed to be one of We the People, a citizen of a nation explicitly designed around not codifying religious dogma into civil law ("an establishment of religion") who is trying to convince you to vote for him as its Chief Executive.

And this is part of his platform.

Second, consider the semantics of his statement; "do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be".

Obviously, for Santorum, it's how GOD wants them to be.And this is...why?

Why should we care what Santorum's Bible says? Or even what PART of it Santorum wants us to listen to.

My grandfather was a Salvation Army officer, and I'm as familiar with the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments, as a heathen can be. And in my opinion there's a ton of stuff about sex, almost all of it archaic, almost all of it confusing, and none of it applicable to the job of the President of the United States.

There's all the old Hebrew stuff; "be fruitful and multiply", the Sin of Onan, but you'd expect that from a culture that demanded progeny due to the insane rate of death in infancy, childhood and childbirth.

But there is also some genuinely bizarre shit. Like how you're supposed to fuck your brother's widow? Or the etiquette for raping your female slaves? (Hint - make sure you have a spare ram around in case you get caught...).

In other words, there's all SORTS of ridiculous desert-wandering God-pesterer crap in the Bible, sexual or otherwise.And that Rick Santorum cherry-picks some of it says more about him than it does about the Christian Bible.

But that's kinda not the point, really, isn't it?

The point is that we're supposed to be living in a non-sectarian state, as in, you can't circumsize my daughter - or my son - because of what YOU believe. You don't get to decide whether my wife and I have kids when we have sex because YOU believe we should, or even if your GOD believes we should and tells you so. And we don't have to figure out what part of the Bible that's in; it's right in the Constitution.

That's really all there is to it.

And Rick Santorum doesn't believe this.

And Rick Santorum is not being laughed, reviled, and mocked off the public stage.

Rick Santorum is not being held up as a living example of the very dangers of theocracy by the sort of people who will swear to you that Muslims want you to live by sharia law.No.

Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by the "news media" and by a significant number of people in one of our two major political parties.Update 1/4: And the fact that this god-botherer pulled a quarter of the GOP vote - that between them this religious whackaloon who believes that it is the President's job to intone on what my wife and I do in bed and the goldbug who thinks that our country is still working under the Articles of Confederation pulled half the GOP electorate in Iowa - should tell you all you really need to know about our nation and why we are where we are today.

We Are So Fucked.

שמע ישראל

In case you don't read Hebrew, the title above translates as something like "Listen up, Israel".It is the first line from the fundamental Jewish profession of faith, the words of Moses as written in Deuteronomy Chapter 6, Verse 4: שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד which can be translated as some version or other as "Listen, Israel: The LORD is our God. The LORD is the only God."

Speaking of Deuteronomy, it's been a while since I looked at the "Israel Rules" books of the Bible (Leviticus, Numbers, and The Deut) and I had almost forgotten how truly odd some of the contents are.Here's a good example, from Chapter 25, Verses 11 and 12 (from the King James version, just because I like the Jacobean English):

11: When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:
12: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

For those of you who don't speak Jacobean, "secrets" means the guy's package; wedding tackle, junk, manbits, y'know, his genitals. So if you're a-fightin' down at the Jug and the Little Woman tries to help out by giving the other fella's...secrets...a li'l twist, it's off to the chopping block for the soon-to-be-nicknamed-Lefty.

Hunh. Love to know the history of the actual incident that cause the patriarchs of ancient Israel to throw THAT little gem into Holy Scripture. Had to be a good story there.There's lots more stuff like that, too. The Deut is where you come across the still-kinda-skeevy notion that a widow becomes the property of her dead husband's brother, who gets in all sort of theological trouble if he has reservations about shtupping his dead brother's bride.

Plus building a wall around your roof so people don't fall off it and raising animals fallen in the road. The Deut is a real page-turner.

Why bring this up now?

Because we just went to a bar mitzvah.It was one of the better - maybe the best - I've ever attended. The service was endless for five- and eight-years-old, so there was some difficulty there, and it was mostly in Hebrew, so I had a lot of time to kill skimming the juicier parts of the Torah readings.

But I like the rabbi at our friends' temple; he's the very embodiment of the rabbinical traditions of humanity and learning, the cantor there has a rich, full voice, and - since this wasn't just any service, the most important bit - the bar mitzvah himself did a terrific job.

The trickiest part of these is where the new adult has to make a brief statement to the congregation. I've been to several where the young man (or woman) tries to be very Talmudic, or mistakes the day for a middle school speech assignment, or just mumbles through some perfunctory semi-religious boilerplate.

But last weekend's bar mitzvah had a very witty little speech that managed to talk about the week's Torah reading and incorporated it into his life - he's a broth of a boy, and hasn't been the most dutiful of sons, and he talked about how disobedient sons are discussed in the scripture versus how they were, and are, typically dealt with in history - and he did terrific work with the readings. And the kiddush afterwards was good, as always (what's the point in being Jewish if you don't lay out a good spread?) as was the unusual but entertaining party at the local archery store and indoor bow-and-arrow range.It was mostly just fun, but it got me thinking about religion in general and Judaism in particular.

And reminded me again why, of all the three big monotheistic religions I tend to have more respect for the god (and the adherents) of the Torah relative to the Bible or the Koran.Most of this is because of the three Judaism is perhaps the most reflective, the most scholarly, and the most self-critical.

This isn't to say that there are no religious scholars in Islam, or Christianity. But, frankly, I tend to judge a religion more by its average schmoe than by its leaders. Leaders can posture and prate all they want, but it's the way that the average Jew, the typical Muslim, or the rank-and-file Christian lives that determines the nature of the religion and its effects on everything around it.And I find many more Jews willing to look hard at their religion, to examine its foundations, and to apply its tenets in ways that are inconvenient and even hardships in their lives than I do the other two. Perhaps because for many centuries Judaism was so divorced from political power and the expedient, self-justifying, self-deluding nonsense that because of the demands of overlordship has permeated the others.

A Christian or a Muslim has to either explain how an Islamic or a Christian state must do things that Islam or Christ forbade them, things like taking innocent lives, punishing the weak, or ignoring the helpless.

A Jew hasn't had that impossible task until recently; his or her struggle was within, with their own conscience, and while that is the toughest thing in the world it is less corrupting to the soul than trying to justify a massive defense budget with commandments to live a poor and humble life, or using might and force to beat down the defenseless civilians of an enemy nation.The second reason is that unlike Christianity, the Jews have never pretended that their God is anything but what he was from the days of Abraham; a desert patriarch. Loving dispenser of largesse to those who revere and obey him, merciless enemy of anyone or anything who looks at his family sideways...the God of Israel is a stone killer, a real bad-ass, both to the stranger as well as to those in his own tribe who have problems with his rules.

The God of the Koran is a similar guy - which may go a long way towards explaining the recent animosity between the adherents of the two faiths in the Levant

It's the Jesus-sweetened God of Christianity that has real personality problems. He wants it both ways - turn the other cheek, but beware Divine Wrath - and that's the same problem as it always is when you want two incompatible things.

The God of the Torah is a less conflicted guy, and it shows.The thing is...this brings me back to the modern State of Israel, and the problem it both faces and represents.

Several people here have observed that I seem to have a problem with Israel, when in fact I have no real problem with Israel that it doesn't have with itself. Because it seems to me - as well as to many people, including many Israelis - that you can either be a democratic state, or a religious state, but not both. And you can have peace as a egalitarian monoreligious state (where everyone is equal in the state faith) or you have to be an elitist multireligious theocracy where one religion is more equal than all the others, but you can't have both.

Because a state is defined in large part by it's institutions, laws, and rules. And in a democracy those are defined by the people as in "We, the People"; they must, or the state is not really a democracy - mere elections don't make a genuine democracy any more than good looks make a good actor.But religion is not an opinion poll. It doesn't matter if a popular vote says that women are the civic equals of men, or that blacks are the civic equals of whites; if the Holy Writ tells the uppity Negroes or ladies their place, and that place is not in the public square...well...how do you change that? Does God want you to vote on it?

Or is he more likely to cut your damn hand off?

So it seems that a nation can be a secular democracy...or a theocracy. But not both.

The original Israel, the one founded in the Forties by the largely-European Zionists, elided the issue by making its Jewishness official rather than sectarian. An Israeli was a Hebrew-speaking secularist rather than a Talmudic scholar, and Israel was a secular nation that made special place for Jews in its borders but not in its laws.Then.

But much has changed since then, and Israel has been riven, as its ancient predecessor was, with tribal divisions largely driven by the incompatibility of religion and democracy. Seculars versus orthodox Ashkenazim versus orthodox Sephardim versus Russians versus non-orthodox religious versus Arabs (both secular and devout), all fighting for control of the state, its laws and rules, and its largesse. And it has absorbed the lands of many people who are not Jewish, and must deal with the problem that these people must either be treated equally (and thus eliding the point of a "jewish state") or not and thus eliding the point of sound government.

It's a hell of a problem.

And through all of that, Israel, like Napoleon's France, has had to deal with the physical reality of being surrounded by enemies. Her response has been, as his was, to fight, and, again like the First Empire, while she has never lost a battle she has never conclusively won the war, either.

One of the most significant results has been to discredit the old secular Arab regimes and empower the Islamists - surely not a result that any Israeli (or American) would have wanted. The great Arab and, now, Islamic, Coalition that surrounds them still remains, waiting, hostile, unblinking. Neither the Israelis nor their enemies have ever found a way to solve this political dilemma. Perhaps because there is nothing TO find.

And on the way Judaism has finally been presented with the conqueror's dilemma; can a polity that is founded on a creed rule others outside that creed - or, indeed, rule at all - without bending the tenets of that creed to that breaking point. Fortunately for Israel the God of Abraham was a pretty tough guy. But even He might blench at what is being done to maintain the country's hold on the eastern edge of the Levant.Now generally speaking I like Israel. It's a nice little country, very Western, and I like the no-nonsense toughness of the secular and non-orthodox Israelis I've met. The orthodox? Enh, not so much. But then, they feel the same way about me, the damned meshugana goy.

I've always felt that the best solution Harry Truman had was to offer the European Jews a state right here in 1945. Utah is kind of deserty and not very populous. We might have avoided a pack of troubles right there. Okay, the Mormons might have had some issues. But, still...

But right now it seems to me that we've dealt ourselves an ugly hand and lots of nice kids, like the bar mitzvah who sat grinning and eating pizza with his cronies the shabbas before last, are going to be the ones who have to make the change for the money we're putting down on that particular yarborough.

And that just makes me feel old, tired, and sad.

Because a faith is supposed to bring us closer to God and ourselves, and - as, I think, was the case for the young man whose coming of age we just celebrated - a religion can bring maturity and a deeper, more farseeing understanding.Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.

Or not.

...'Cause the Bible Tells Me So...

One thing my rock-ribbed agnosticism has always helped me with is soldiering.



Knowing that I don't have to agonize over how an omniscient, omnipotent, loving Father God can sit on his holy ass in the sky whilst humans inflict all sorts of horrors on each other has made doing whatever fucked-up military thing I was told to turn my hand to so much simpler. But I did get a certain amount of unholy (as it were) amusement out of watching my Christian comrades try and work through the notion that the Christ that called them to love one another as he had loved them - and died for them - could also ask them to rip apart tiny children and helpless civilians as part of their mission.And - just my opinion, mind you - "nuclear war" has always seemed like the LEAST defensible of the "just war" notions. There's not really any sort of "defense" argument there, is there? Seeing as how you're either cold-bloodedly first-striking a helpless population, or, with missiles already inbound and your own civilization doomed, merely scourging that helpless population in a vengeful reflex, a reptile tail-whip of dying fury.



So I got a cynical chuckle our of Chaplain (Capt) Soh's little Powerpoint for missile officers that lead (naturally) to the conclusion that a good Chrstian CAN, indeed, incinerate millions of innocents and still go to church - whatever's left of it - the next day with the stainless heart of a child.



How about this?



How about just accepting that warfare in ALL its aspects is the Devil's Work and, like most things we do in our lives, there are times when the Devil sings loud and sweet, and we gleefully jump up and dance antic hay on the ruins of others' lives......and always will?

Some Thoughts on Rapture and Civic Duty in General, with Help from John Greenleaf Whittier

Well, nobody disappeared Saturday so I think that we can safely continue building equity on the mortgage.

But the non-event gave me pause for a moment to consider the essential silliness that permeates much of American public life. Not just the Rapture-sort of silliness, but the degree to which we tend to put frivolous nonsense ahead of serious business and value image over substance.And, yes, I know that for most of human history it has always been thus. The foolishness of people, especially people in groups, has been fertile soil for the cynic, the comedian, and the raconteur since the first Neanderthal got up before the night fire to entertain his or her companions with the clusterfuck that happened the last time the tribe packed up and moved or the goatrope that the most recent hunt turned into.

But as supposed citizens of a democracy we are not just any people; we are supposed to be not just people but heirarchs, not just the ruled but the ruler. We're supposed to sit in judgement on ourselves, to rise above our genital and gustatory uxoriousness to become men and women of sufficient wisdom and perception as to set a pathway for our children to follow us, one that avoids foolish excess and foolish penuriousness alike, one that provides the greatest good for the greatest number.And we have not and do not, in my opinion, and are doing worse now than we have done for several generations. Just look at the Presidential candidate field for the Republican Party if you want to see how far we have fallen from the Party of Lincoln. Hell, these greedy, pig-ignorant fuckers would make Bob Taft look like Solon and Barry Goldwater seem wiser than Solomon.

With that in mind, here's Mr. J.G. Whittier to tell us a little cautionary tale from the early days of our Republic, circa 1780:

Abraham Davenport & The Dark Day

In the old days (a custom laid aside
With breeches and cocked hats) the people sent
Their wisest men to make the public laws.
And so, from a brown homestead, where the Sound
Drinks the small tribute of the Mianus,
Waved over by the woods of Rippowams,
And hallowed by pure lives and tranquil deaths,
Stamford sent up to the councils of the State
Wisdom and grace in Abraham Davenport.

'Twas on a May-day of the far old year
Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell
Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring
Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,
A horror of great darkness, like the night
In day of which the Norland sagas tell,
The Twilight of the Gods. The low-hung sky
Was black with ominous clouds, save where its rim
Was fringed with a dull glow, like that which climbs
The crater's sides from the red hell below.
Birds ceased to sing, and all the barnyard fowls
Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars
Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings
Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died;
Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp
To hear the doom-blast of the trumpet shatter
The black sky, that the dreadful face of Christ
Might look from the rent clouds, not as He looked
A loving guest at Bethany, but stern
As Justice and inexorable Law.

Meanwhile in the old State House, dim as ghosts,
Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut,
Trembling beneath their legislative robes.
"It is the Lord's Great Day! Let us adjourn,"
Some said; and then, as if with one accord,
All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport.
He rose, slow cleaving with his steady voice
The intolerable hush. "This well may be
The Day of Judgment which the world awaits;
But be it so or not, I only know
My present duty, and my Lord's command
To occupy till He come. So at the post
Where He hast set me in His providence,
I choose, for one, to meet Him face to face,
No faithless servant frightened from my task,
But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls;
And therefore, with all reverence, I would say,
Let God do His work, we will see to ours.
Bring in the candles." And they brought them in.

Then by the flaring lights the Speaker read,
Albeit with husky voice and shaking hands,
An act to amend an act to regulate
The shad and alewive fisheries, Whereupon
Wisely and well spake Abraham Davenport,
Straight to the question, with no figures of speech
Save the ten Arab signs, yet not without
The shrewd dry humor natural to the man:
His awe-struck colleagues listening all the while,
Between the pauses of his argument,
To hear the thunder of the wrath of God
Break from the hollow trumpet of the cloud.

And there he stands in memory to this day,
Erect, self-poised, a rugged face, half seen
Against the background of unnatural dark,
A witness to the ages as they pass,
That simple duty hath no place for fear."Let God do His work, we will see to ours.
Bring in the candles."

Not a bad idea, don't you think? Why didn't we think of that?

Losing My Religion

So Friday I posted about my disgust and despair at the condition of my country's politics.

Pat, like a Terminator in a James Cameron film, came Dave Brooks to drive the last nail into the lid of that political coffin with "Creed or Chaos" in Thursday's New York Time.

Now like you, I usually ignore Bobo. He's an idiot. But...here's the thing.

As an idiot, he usually represents the mainstream Republican sort of idiot that has run the party since Reagan clubbed the last of the Rockefeller and Eisenhower faction like a blubber-chewing Inuit with adorable baby harp seals. Bobo's writings (and by "writings" I mean "nearly incomprehensible errata scrawled on the padded walls by the gibbering inmate using his big toe and a slurry of drool and his own feces") are a way to glimpse, in a sort of lifting-the-rock-to-observe-the-writhing-vermin-beneath way, what goes on inside the brainpan of a typical country club Republican.

I should be specific; this does NOT include the sort of thing that occurs inside the occipital lobes of the Palinite/Teatard Wing of the GOP. God knows what the hell those people think about; probably gypsy knives and gypsy thighs that pound and pound and pound and African appendages that almost touch the ground and little boys playing baseball in the rain. But, whatever. Bobo does nothing to enlighten you about whatever THEY think.

But for the Kiwanis-Chamber-of-Commerce-former-Quayle-supporter sort of Republican, Bobo's your man. He stands athwart the GOP like a sort of teeny tiny Colossus, mouthing the sorts of things that make the Republicans feel warm and snuggly as they enter within.

So his Thursday column was a real revelation for me, because in it the spokesmodel for the two-SUV family advocates that African - and by inference, U.S. - Christians should be more like Torquemada and less like Pastor Niemoller.

"Many Americans" he says "have always admired the style of belief that is spiritual but not doctrinal, pluralistic and not exclusive, which offers tools for serving the greater good but is not marred by intolerant theological judgments."

But this is so, so wrong, explains Bobo.

Why? Because "The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False."

Now based on human history you might be forgiven for thinking that religions that are "theologically rigorous" (meaning: intolerant of dissent and punitive to religious deviance), "arduous in practice" (meaning: insisting on complete obedience regardless of cost), and "definite...about what is True and False" (meaning: convinced that any variation from orthodoxy is False, unrighteous, and, presumably, unGodly) tend to be by nature militant, divisive, intolerant, and often dangerous to anyone and anything not beloved of their God and his tenets.

You might be forgiven for thinking that such religions are prone to outbreaks of violent persecution and religious war when they collide with people or cultures they anathematize.

You might be forgiven for thinking that such religions tend to make people smug, self-satisfied, rigid, intolerant, slothful entitled pricks.

But Bobo would not forgive you any such thing.

Because Bobo thinks - meaning that your average country club Republican, your average Republican, period, thinks - that people qua people are stupid, feckless, lazy scumbags.

"No matter how special some individuals may think they are," says Bobo, "they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own."

Think about that for a moment.

......

Bobo goes on to insist the following:

1. Rigorous theology provides believers with a map of reality.

2. Rigorous theology allows believers to examine the world intellectually as well as emotionally.

3. Rigorous theology helps people avoid mindless conformity.

4. Rigorous theology delves into mysteries in ways that are beyond most of us.

5. Rigorous codes of conduct allow people to build their character.

You got that? People whose religion demands that they accept every jot and tittle of the Holy Word (no shrimp or owl for dinner, no sex during menstruation, stuff like accepting that a consecrated celebate in a three-ringed crown is channeling the Great Spirit verbatim) are the only ones with a Michelin Guide to reality, the only ones with real intellectual acuity, the only ones with genuine originality, the only ones with the keys to the Great Mysteries.

Oh, and the only ones capable of avoiding sex with vegetables and stealing pocket change.

Okay.

I'm perfectly willing to grant you that religion, whether "theologically rigorous" or otherwise, has been the foundation of some of humanity's most incredible achievements. Faith has motivate humans to raise cathedrals to the sky, care for the sick and dying, help the poor, found cities and even nations. Religions touch something very vital in many, perhaps even most, people.

But at the same time, religion has been behind some of history's great horrors. Religions have butchered children for their "sins". Religions have sent entire populations lurching into others' lands; murdering, raping, looting in the belief that the "others" were beneath the consideration of God's love - indeed, that God demanded the others' lives as punishment for their unbelief in the invaders' God or gods.

Religions have also helped people justify those horrors, often by their very nature, in that something that helps you believe the improbable often helps you embrace the unthinkable. Bobo cites Dorothy Sayers (who was a delightful novelist and decent scholar but whose door wasn't exactly hanging on all its hinges, theologically speaking) saying that

"...Christianity’s advantage is that it gives value to evil and suffering. Christianity asserts that “perfection is attained through the active and positive effort to wrench real good out of a real evil.” This is a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition."

No. This isn't a complicated thought most of us could not come up with (let alone unpack) outside of a rigorous theological tradition. It is fucking nonsense.

Evil is evil, suffering is suffering. Fighting evil (assuming that it IS evil and not just something "abhorrent before My God" like boys having sex with other boys or women voting) is admirable, enduring suffering bravely is honorable. But neither of those "give value" to evil and suffering.

Evil and suffering are plagues on humanity, full stop, and anyone who believes that they are valuable because they allow Christians to achieve perfection through fighting them are as fucking nuts and stupid as a bag of hammers.

So, resolved; anyone who tortures, or butchers, a tiny baby is a vile criminal bag of fuck. Unless, says Dotty and Bobo, it allows a Christian "to wrench real good out of a real evil."

What.

The.

Fuck?

It is just this sort of tortured logic that allowed Crusaders (or their Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist equivalents) to believe that their evil had value, that by slaughtering infidel women and children got them closer to Paradise.

This is madness. THIS is evil.

If this were all Bobo brought with him I could simply walk away with a shrug. Theocrats are a nickel a gross; they have arisen throughout history, usually from a heap of human bodies, and have largely been tossed aside when the survivors realize what an intolerable pain in the ass being ruled by someone who insists that all his or her opinions are crafted in God's toy shop. Theocracy is probably the worst single form of human governance and has been proved as such again and again by practical example.

But remember - this isn't just Bobo.

This is the mainstream wing of the GOP that Bobo represents. It is this group that honestly believes that their fellow Americans are unable to think, plan, or control where they put their penises or vaginae (vaginas?) without Baby Jesus there to point out Tab A and Slot B and what doesn't go where. This group seems to think that what the U.S. needs is more "theologically rigorous" religion and less "...(v)ague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity..."

The real genius of the Framers was not to toss religion out of U.S. public life. They knew their country and knew their fellow citizens. They knew that the religion would get there one way or another. No, their genius was to ensure that when it did arrive a the public square it would be gutted of its "theological rigor". That it could not test Americans on their knowledge of the doctrine of transubstantiation, of the traditions of a seder, of the Five Pillars as a price of citizenship, couldn't demand fealty to any theology as a cost of entry into public business, or privilege one over another, either in public or private.

Regardless of how vile this belief is to that one, regardless of how many lives of one faith the other has taken.

This country is founded on the notion that you in the name of your religion WILL NOT be allowed to take public action against me for mine. And if you take private action that traduces my public rights you will be prosecuted for it.

This has gone a long, long way to producing the secular character of U.S. public life - despite the very public presence of religion, a presence nearly absent in Europe, a continent much more familiar with the evils of "theologically rigorous" religions and their public feuds - and the large number of U.S. believers who leave the outward trappings of their faiths in church, synagogue, and mosque.

But Bobo, and his GOP counterparts, seem to think this is a mistake. They think all this warm fuzzy ecumenism is a dodge, a cunning scheme to defile our vital bodily fluids. And what should we do to avoid this weakening, this flaccidity, this impotence of the American soul?

Well, "changes in behavior change the mind," Bobo reminds us, "...so small acts of ritual reinforce networks in the brain. A Mormon denying herself coffee may seem like a silly thing, but regular acts of discipline can lay the foundation for extraordinary acts of self-control when it counts the most."

And y'know what? If you started on young Americans with those "regular acts of (theologic) discipline" early enough you could probably lay the foundation for a cruel unflinching youth, a youth as hard as steel.

I wonder.

What could you do with people like that..?

.......

Note: On Mormonism

I observe that Bobo's observations were made posteriori to viewing something called the "Book of Mormon", a play by the guys who do "South Park".

Whilst I tend to be fairly tolerant of other people's personal beliefs if you wanted a religion to mock Mormonism is one of the fattest slow targets outside of genuinely fucking out-there religious goofologies of the Scientology breed.

I mean, read the Joesph Smith story. Guy is a "gold witcher" in Palmyra, NY, back in the 1820s, claiming that he can find gold with "magic stones". He claims that in 1823 an angel tells him where to find two golden plates written by Ether, Mormon, Lehi and Nephi, who are Native Americans circa 1AD, a brass plate with Hebrew scripture quotations and genealogies written by one Laban, oh, yeah, and "Urim and Thummim," magical translating stones.

Magical translating stones.

Okay. Now he doesn't head out, snatch this boodle and run, mind you. Nope. Instead, in 1825, he and his dad head to Pennsylvania to look for buried treasure at three bucks a day. Nothing turns up and Smith offers the suggestion that the treasure had sunk deeper due to...to...ummm...err...enchantment! That's it; enchantment! Seriously! Enchantment!

Yeah, okay Joe, sure.

He loses the job but finds a wife, Emma, the local schoolmarm. They elope in New York in 1827. Which is, you'll remember, when Joe trudges back to Palmyra to get all that golden loot and the Indian-Jesus stuff, remember?

So between 1827 and 1829 Joe Smith "dictates" the "translation" of these supposed golden plates (which no one but he has seen, remember) to his new wife and a couple of pals. The entire business is odd; sometimes he's hidden behind a screen, when he's not the tablets aren't in view. He puts the "magical stones" in his hat...and puts his hat over his face.

He finishes the "Book of Lehi", lends it to his pal Marty Harris, who takes it home and "loses" it (supposedly Lucy, who hated Smith and thought he was a fraud, tossed it).

That sucked, and Smith now says that God has taken away the "special stones" because Joe's buddies stepped on their poncho, and he starts on the "Book of Nephi" which, he says, tells the same story as Lehi only, you know, sort of, different.

Anyway. The Book of Nephi, if you've ever bothered to skim it, reads like one of those Fifties sword-and-sandal movies, with lots of thud and blunder, prophets, visions, a "ball of curious workmanship", and how Jews became the native Americans.

Really, no shit.

If you put the whole thing in a movie and got McG to direct it nobody would believe a word of it, although I would pay good money to see Adam Sandler play Smith, the old Sandler back when he was funny.

Tina Fey could play Lucy.

Either way, it seems to have become a religion because people who want to believe stuff will believe it regardless of how goofy it's backstory is. And you can say this for Mormonism as you pass up your morning coffee.

It sure as hell is "theologically rigorous."

Dictatus Papae

I hate to say this, but one thing that Facebook often lends itself to is a nattering lack of reflection.

I say this in a tone of rueful acceptance, mind you, not surprise or anguish.

It's a fucking "social network", after all.Generally I like to think that my selection of "friends" helps me avoid the "I'm picking out my toe jam! :-b" sorts of status updates; luckily I'm not bombarded with much of that sort of brain-destroying crap.Mostly the site does what it is supposed to do and provides me a sort of party line to check in with friends and chat about this and that. For all the handwringing about how the Evil Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other electronic media bete noir de jour are destroying civil society by substituting for "real human interaction", when you think about it these things are just replicating the slower means of distant communication humans have used since the beginning of literacy.

What is a "tweet" but a little postcard? What is a Facebook post but a short letter, a digital telegram, a typed-out phone call? "Having wonderful time, caught fish, weather fine. Come soon, Woosie."

I don't see how this happening in realtime, over a fiber cable, somehow makes the process dangerously antisocial. We've always enjoyed our long-distance relationships. Entire books have been published containing the epistolary friendships of pre-electronic times, when living a couple of tens of miles apart meant seeing each other once a year or so. People have always had ways of staying in touch with distant friends and lovers; these electronic means are just an adaptation of a very old gimmick, a quicker version of sending a house slave with a clay tablet to your brother and sister-in-law in Sumer.

But (and you knew there would be a but, didn't you?) to go with the advantages in celerity there is the disadvantage of brevity. If brevity is the soul of wit, it is the mother of inattention. A discussion limited to 420 characters isn't really much of a "discussion", and the one thing I find unlikeable about Facebook - I am not "on" Twitter and have no interest in doing so, since a tweet is even briefer than a Facebook post less informative, and thus more conducive to the ignorant-shouting sort of "communication" than Facebook - is that much conversation is necessarily brief and one-sided. A letter allows time and space for thought, and if two paragraphs are needed instead of one to dissect the issue they are there for the taking. The only limit is the paper and the patience of the writer, and reader.

Which may be the very heart of the matter. We as a culture are increasingly impatient; the notion of simply sitting and reading a letter - or a novel, or a long blog post - is becoming both difficult and challenging. Difficult because many of us are so busy, our days full of cascades of essential ephemera demanding our attention; challenging because our preferred style of prose is often simple and poorly suited to complex thought. While the text we read on paper or off the screen may be prolix the arguments are often crude, the exposition simplistic, and the argumentation circular or absent. So the quick declaratory statements of Facebook make us easier. We needn't marshal our overtasked intellectual reserve; the thinking is done for us.This has become a very roundabout introduction to a topic that emerged on Facebook the past week. Specifically, a friend of mine linked to this article in the New York Times discussing the falling out between the Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, and a local formerly Catholic hospital.

It seems that the hospital in question performed an abortion on a woman who was in danger of injury or death if her pregnancy had progressed. The bishop, who had apparently warned the hospital that this sort of thing would put them outside Church law, used this surgery to sever the ties between the diocese and the hospital.

My friend was incensed. "Time to move into the 17th century, boys." is the way she put it. Another of her friends replied that the bishop had the right of it; that a "Catholic" hospital had the obligation to abide by church doctrine. Several more of us piled on and we had - especially for Facebook - quite a rousing little discussion. I don't think anyone's opinions were changed, but we at least got to hear a good bit from several sides on the matter.And the more I got to thinking about it, the more I found that I tend to believe in what I first said; that the bishop's job, if he were to be any sort of bishop and not a windsock for popular opinion, was to insist that the mother, as a Catholic or at least as the patient of a Catholic hospital, give her life for the life of her child in the same sense that a bishop would expect his priests to give their lives, if they had to, to ensure the lives, or the spiritual salvation, of those who depend on them.

His understanding of God's Will as expressed by his Holy Father should admit no less, and the tenets of his Church - an authoritarian organization whose fundamental nature is spelled out by the "Dictus Papae" (which includes such statements as "That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet." and "That this (the Pope's) is the only name in the world.") - demand that those beneath him in the hierarchy submit to his interpretation of that Will.

That's cruelly hard. But religions in general ask us to put God first and ourselves afterwards; that's the nature of a religion, most religions. It's a feature, not a bug. Because of that demand religious faith can accomplish great things. Because of it faith can be the spark for horrible atrocities. The direction depends greatly on the nature of the person who "speaks" for the religion and the nature of those listening. But there is no promise that either the speaking or the reception will be beneficial and kind.

All we can only hope then is that our religions don't demand us to make choices that lead to suffering. But by their nature they can, and often do, and we can't really get one without the other, eh?

My bride, lovely woman that she is, is (if she only knew it) a classic American cafeteria Catholic. She has said that if she agrees with a doctrine, she would hew to it. If not, she would ignore it.

I can't do that or believe that.

To me the entire point of a religion - as opposed to a personal faith - is either accepting the doctrines of the religion or working to change them. But until they change, I don't thing that the adherent has an option to just ignore them.

Since I have yet to encounter a religion whose tenets I can accept without demur or disputation, I have no religion. Since I have yet to encounter a moment where my need to have an all-powerful Sky Daddy overpowers my skepticism of the entire notion, I have no personal faith, either. For good or ill, I am alone within my head when the moment for spiritual succor arrives.

And as ruthless as it is I wish that what happened to the hospital would happen more often. I wish that the Catholic Church, for example, would excommunicate people who use birth control, would stop granting annulments and force divorcees out of the laity. American Catholics haven't been forced to actually do what their church demands them to do for a long time. If they were, well, either the laity might change or the church might. Some people might find themselves alone as I do. Some may find that they can abandon themselves in order to have that Sky Daddy within them.

Either way, at least both sides would be consistent.

Because for me so long as a religion does not force itself into the public square and demand that people not its adherents adhere to its beliefs it should be true to itself. For some religions this is not a pretty or humane thing because by their nature they are not about the pretty and the humane but about the demands of a supernatural belief on a merely human soul.

This often makes them magnificent, grand, and terrible.

And it is perhaps the failure of my own soul that I would take the smallest common moment of human life; the sound of a sigh, the heat of a quarrel, the softness of a kiss, the breathless of lovemaking, the peace of a nap, the placid twilight of age, over all the magnificence and grandeur ever conceived.

Don't EVER correct me!

Good to know that piety makes you humble as well as wise.

(h/t to Pharyngula)

You Brain Too Short to Box with God II: God Hates Fags?

Courtesy of my friend Meghan, a concise visual depiction of one of the most, to me, irritating aspects of current American culture, the religious Right's obsession that somewhere, somehow, two men or two women are gettin' jiggy wit it.Honestly, WTF?

Is it some sort of prehominid monkeybone itch-scratching, poop-flinging, knuckle-walking instinct that makes some people worry about this? Or is it that organized religion can make you bone stupid? I mean, you have all the OTHER biblical stuff going on; war, famine, pestilence, death, Newt Gingrich...and some people seem to have a desperate need to fixate on this nonsense.

Remember how I was just feeling utterly drained by the ridiculousness of what seems to pass for 90% of American life? Well, this is just one of parts that make the sum of that feeling.