Ameneh Bahrami was a 24 year-old electronics student in Iran when 19 year-old Majid Movahedi through acid in her face and burned out left eye. It seems that Majid was pissed that Ameneh just wasn’t that into him.
Majid was arrested and convicted, and, in accordance with Iranian law, it is up to Ameneh to determine his sentence. She was given two choices: she could ask for financial compensation or she could demand an eye for an eye. To her credit, Ameneh chose the latter. Not only will Majid be blinded in his left eye, but his right eye too will be burned out, as ten drops of sulfuric acid will be applied to both his eyes.
Now that is what I call justice. The Hebrew Bible also calls for an eye for an eye, and while the rabbis insisted that Jews interpret this financially, it is clear to me that God was an Iranian. It makes perfect sense.
Imagine someone commits armed robbery by breaking into a convenience store, shooting and killing the store clerk, and making off with $75 and a package of Slim Jims. If the punishment is 15 years in a cell with three meals a day, exercise privileges, and color TV, the guy is probably better off in jail than on the street. So for him it is win-win. But if the punishment is having to fork over $75, work in a Slim Jim plant until he has actually made a Slim Jim, and then get shot in the face, that’s justice.
Sure it may be cruel, and I am not in favor of cruelty. So, I’d let him slide on having to make the Slim Jim. But isn’t it more satisfying to know this asshole is dead than imagine him watching Law & Order in HD and laughing his head off?
There is something very satisfying about this. Think of the AIG people. Taking away their bonuses is nothing. Let’s strip them of everything they own just the way they did millions of Americans. And Bernie Madoff in jail? What a waste. Make him work off the billions he scammed by being a greeter at Wal-Mart.
The true genius here isn’t the punishment, however, but who gets to determine it. In Iran the victim rather than the judge determines the fate of the wicked. I think we should establish this rule in the United States as well. Let the victim set the sentence. Or, if the victim is dead, the victim’s next of kin. Or, to be even fairer, people could write into their will just who they designate as their avenger. I’d choose the meanest SOB on the planet. In fact I can see a whole new industry emerging for psychopaths. Ala the television show Dexter where a serial killer limits his kills to other serial killers, people with killer tendencies would be employed to kill criminals at the behest of their victims. This would keep these psychopaths employed, out of jail, and sated on evildoers rather than stalking the rest of us. Another win-win.
I know some of you think I am kidding, but I’m not. And to prove it I’m going to pretend to incorporate an imaginary company called True Avengers. Our mission is to determine and carry out the punishment of those convicted of harming you or those you love. For an annual retainer of $10,000 True Avengers will go after your enemies and exact vengeance on your behalf. All you have to do is tell us who they are, where they live or work, what they did, and provide proof of their conviction, and we will take care of the rest. True Avengers even hires incarcerated individuals so that if your guy goes to jail before we get him on the street, we will still get him behind bars.
When it comes to justice those Iranians may have something to teach us. I say we ought to learn it quick and apply it soon.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Intend This
Anyone who has watched What the Bleep Do We Know knows that water can be transformed by having people pray over it. Anyone who has read more deeply in this phenomenon knows that it is bogus. Nevertheless an entire industry has emerged to vibrationally transform your food and empty your wallet. It is called the intentional foods industry. Their intention is, of course, to make money. [In the interest of full disclosure, it is an intention I share.]
One California company, H2Om, sells bottled water infused with good blessings. According to their website the water is transformed by altering its vibrational frequencies. Here are some of the ways this is done:
1. Each bottle is imprinted with the Sanskrit word OM, plus words like “perfect health,” “gratitude,” and “love” written in various languages.
2. The color of each bottle corresponds to a specific charka, and
3. The water is exposed to frequencies generated by music and sounds of “crystal bowls, Acoustic Piano, Spoken Word, Ancient Healing Scales and more.” [I suspect the more refers to the mocking laughter of the workers who are making these sounds.]
You the consumer become part of the transformation process by being urged to “Think it while you drink it.”® That is to think good thoughts as you drink this good water.
To be honest, I want to believe. Not only do I want to believe that I can transform food and drink by thinking good thoughts and playing Bach, but I want to believe that millions of people are willing to pay premium prices in a recession to buy the food I have transformed,
Because I believe I have created an after-market intentional food transformation company called Eat, Love, Buy (www.eatlovebuy.bul). What I do is purchase products from the grocery store and subject them to good vibrations. I then resell said items at $10 over retail (plus 8.95 S&H) to you, the believing consumer. Here are just a few the products I have to offer:
1. Ex-Lax tablets with the word “Flow” printed on the box with a Sharpie.
2. Apples of various kinds with the word “Wisdom” printed on them with a Sharpie.
3. Corn chips with the word “Amaizeing” printed on the bag with a Sharpie.
4. Various brands of cigarettes with the word “Life” printed on each pack with a Sharpie.
Notice the extensive use of the Sharpie. This is essential to the process, for the letters S-H-A-R-P-I-E also spell Share Pi, Pie Rash, and Harpies which in turn can be reconfigured to spell Sharpie. This is clearly indicative of something and for most of my customers being indicative of anything is usually convincing enough.
Of course you may have no use for laxatives, apples, corn chips, or cigarettes, so I also offer a personal transformation service. If you purchase the products you already use and send them to me, I will write on them with a Sharpie and return them to you for the value-added price of $10 plus $8.95 shipping and handling.
I know what you are thinking.
You are thinking that all you really need to do is buy your own Sharpie and write your own words on your own already purchased products. And you can do this. Just send me $10 plus $8.95 shipping and handling for having given you the idea.
One California company, H2Om, sells bottled water infused with good blessings. According to their website the water is transformed by altering its vibrational frequencies. Here are some of the ways this is done:
1. Each bottle is imprinted with the Sanskrit word OM, plus words like “perfect health,” “gratitude,” and “love” written in various languages.
2. The color of each bottle corresponds to a specific charka, and
3. The water is exposed to frequencies generated by music and sounds of “crystal bowls, Acoustic Piano, Spoken Word, Ancient Healing Scales and more.” [I suspect the more refers to the mocking laughter of the workers who are making these sounds.]
You the consumer become part of the transformation process by being urged to “Think it while you drink it.”® That is to think good thoughts as you drink this good water.
To be honest, I want to believe. Not only do I want to believe that I can transform food and drink by thinking good thoughts and playing Bach, but I want to believe that millions of people are willing to pay premium prices in a recession to buy the food I have transformed,
Because I believe I have created an after-market intentional food transformation company called Eat, Love, Buy (www.eatlovebuy.bul). What I do is purchase products from the grocery store and subject them to good vibrations. I then resell said items at $10 over retail (plus 8.95 S&H) to you, the believing consumer. Here are just a few the products I have to offer:
1. Ex-Lax tablets with the word “Flow” printed on the box with a Sharpie.
2. Apples of various kinds with the word “Wisdom” printed on them with a Sharpie.
3. Corn chips with the word “Amaizeing” printed on the bag with a Sharpie.
4. Various brands of cigarettes with the word “Life” printed on each pack with a Sharpie.
Notice the extensive use of the Sharpie. This is essential to the process, for the letters S-H-A-R-P-I-E also spell Share Pi, Pie Rash, and Harpies which in turn can be reconfigured to spell Sharpie. This is clearly indicative of something and for most of my customers being indicative of anything is usually convincing enough.
Of course you may have no use for laxatives, apples, corn chips, or cigarettes, so I also offer a personal transformation service. If you purchase the products you already use and send them to me, I will write on them with a Sharpie and return them to you for the value-added price of $10 plus $8.95 shipping and handling.
I know what you are thinking.
You are thinking that all you really need to do is buy your own Sharpie and write your own words on your own already purchased products. And you can do this. Just send me $10 plus $8.95 shipping and handling for having given you the idea.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Who Are You Really?
Who are you really? Not the self you imagine yourself to be when you look in a mirror. Not the self your parents, bosses, co-workers, teachers, spouses, partners, children, and friends say you are; but your true self. The self we are when no one is looking, even yourself. Who is that?
You have never ever seen yourself. You can’t see yourself because the self you are looking at isn’t the self that’s looking, and it is the self that’s looking that is the real self. You can no more see yourself then you can smell your own nose or hear your own ears.
So, who are you really? You have no idea. Which is a good thing, since all ideas about who you are turn out to be just whom you aren’t.
A lot of people try to find the true self by looking inward. OK, but all you will find there is what you found when you looked outward—more ideas. You can’t look inward to find yourself because the self that is looking inward is the self that you are, and it cannot see itself looking inward or outward because it is itself.
Dizzy yet?
Think of the classic figure/ground puzzle; that simple black and white drawing that sometimes looks like a vase and other times looks like the profiles of two people facing one another. When you see the vase, you don’t see the people. When you see the people, you don’t see the vase. But what is the figure when you aren’t looking at it at all? Is it a vase? Or is it two people facing one another?
Some people will insist it is both, but this makes no sense to me. It is never both. It is always one thing or the other; the vase cancels out the people and the people cancel out the vase. And neither is real unless you are looking at it.
I think the figure itself is nothing you and I can grasp. And it will remain nothing until you look at it and make it something rather than something else.
What is true of the figure is true of you as well. When you look you see one self or another. But the one who is looking is no self at all. Your true self is no self. Your true self is formless, nameless, birthless, and deathless. It just is and has always been and will always be. It’s you, but you aren’t really it. Why? Because as soon as you talk about it or look at it, the you who is talking and looking is not the object talked about or looked at.
If you want to know who you really are, ask yourself this: Who is asking “Who am I?” If you have an answer you have missed the point. Ask again and again and again until you simply realize the vast nothing that is the field in which all things happen. That’s you. Or at least it was until I said it was.
You have never ever seen yourself. You can’t see yourself because the self you are looking at isn’t the self that’s looking, and it is the self that’s looking that is the real self. You can no more see yourself then you can smell your own nose or hear your own ears.
So, who are you really? You have no idea. Which is a good thing, since all ideas about who you are turn out to be just whom you aren’t.
A lot of people try to find the true self by looking inward. OK, but all you will find there is what you found when you looked outward—more ideas. You can’t look inward to find yourself because the self that is looking inward is the self that you are, and it cannot see itself looking inward or outward because it is itself.
Dizzy yet?
Think of the classic figure/ground puzzle; that simple black and white drawing that sometimes looks like a vase and other times looks like the profiles of two people facing one another. When you see the vase, you don’t see the people. When you see the people, you don’t see the vase. But what is the figure when you aren’t looking at it at all? Is it a vase? Or is it two people facing one another?
Some people will insist it is both, but this makes no sense to me. It is never both. It is always one thing or the other; the vase cancels out the people and the people cancel out the vase. And neither is real unless you are looking at it.
I think the figure itself is nothing you and I can grasp. And it will remain nothing until you look at it and make it something rather than something else.
What is true of the figure is true of you as well. When you look you see one self or another. But the one who is looking is no self at all. Your true self is no self. Your true self is formless, nameless, birthless, and deathless. It just is and has always been and will always be. It’s you, but you aren’t really it. Why? Because as soon as you talk about it or look at it, the you who is talking and looking is not the object talked about or looked at.
If you want to know who you really are, ask yourself this: Who is asking “Who am I?” If you have an answer you have missed the point. Ask again and again and again until you simply realize the vast nothing that is the field in which all things happen. That’s you. Or at least it was until I said it was.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Ladies in Waiting
I can’t imagine joining a religious organization that treated me as a second-class citizen, and yet tens of millions of women do just that. A new report by the Pew Research Forum on Religion & Public Life shows that women are far more religious and religiously active then men, and yet three of the four largest Christian churches in the United States, the Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Mormons, prohibit women from becoming clergy. So paranoid is the Southern Baptist Convention that last September they removed all copies of Gospel Today magazine from the racks of their LifeWay bookstores because the magazine featured a cover story on women clergy.
Why do women stick with these religions? I can only think of two reasons. Either they really don’t care about gender equality in the clergy, or they accept on faith that this is the way God intends things to be. And maybe it is.
According to the Catholic and Southern Baptist hierarchies, had Jesus wanted women to be clergy he would have had at least one woman among his twelve apostles. I know this will startle some of you, but I think they are right.
Jesus broke so many cultural taboos that one is hard pressed to argue that the traditions he adhered to were chosen lightly. If Jesus had wanted to have women apostles he would have had them. Yes, I know about Mary Magdalena, and I am more than willing to accept her as a close confidant of Jesus, but he doesn’t count her among the Twelve. So I think these churches are correct to outlaw women clergy and thereby remain faithful to the traditions of Jesus. I only wish they would be more scrupulous about it.
For example, all of the Apostles were Jews. Jesus had no Christian Apostles, so neither should the church have Christian clergy. This could open a whole new career path for Jewish men, and I am all for it.
Similarly, Jesus preferred fishermen for apostles, and so the church should require that clergy learn to fish. All of Jesus’ apostles ate raw corn, so this too ought to be a requirement for clerical positions. To the man, the Twelve were incapable of staying awake with Jesus or standing by his side when he was arrested, beaten, and crucified, so cowardliness ought to be another criteria for clergy. All apostles wore sandals, so shoe wearers have no place at the altars of the church. And they wore robes, so pant-wearing men are also out. None of the Twelve brushed their teeth, took baths on a daily basis, used toilet paper (or toilets for that matter), or vaccinated themselves against any communicable diseases. Not one apostle read the New Testament or observed Christmas or Easter, so these practices should be off limits to clergy as well.
I could go on, but I suspect the point is made. If we are going to appoint clergy based on the choices Jesus made in choosing his apostles we must restrict ourselves to Jewish fishermen with bad breath and itchy anuses. Maybe if the churches were more traditional in this way more men would get involved. I’m sure fewer women would.
Why do women stick with these religions? I can only think of two reasons. Either they really don’t care about gender equality in the clergy, or they accept on faith that this is the way God intends things to be. And maybe it is.
According to the Catholic and Southern Baptist hierarchies, had Jesus wanted women to be clergy he would have had at least one woman among his twelve apostles. I know this will startle some of you, but I think they are right.
Jesus broke so many cultural taboos that one is hard pressed to argue that the traditions he adhered to were chosen lightly. If Jesus had wanted to have women apostles he would have had them. Yes, I know about Mary Magdalena, and I am more than willing to accept her as a close confidant of Jesus, but he doesn’t count her among the Twelve. So I think these churches are correct to outlaw women clergy and thereby remain faithful to the traditions of Jesus. I only wish they would be more scrupulous about it.
For example, all of the Apostles were Jews. Jesus had no Christian Apostles, so neither should the church have Christian clergy. This could open a whole new career path for Jewish men, and I am all for it.
Similarly, Jesus preferred fishermen for apostles, and so the church should require that clergy learn to fish. All of Jesus’ apostles ate raw corn, so this too ought to be a requirement for clerical positions. To the man, the Twelve were incapable of staying awake with Jesus or standing by his side when he was arrested, beaten, and crucified, so cowardliness ought to be another criteria for clergy. All apostles wore sandals, so shoe wearers have no place at the altars of the church. And they wore robes, so pant-wearing men are also out. None of the Twelve brushed their teeth, took baths on a daily basis, used toilet paper (or toilets for that matter), or vaccinated themselves against any communicable diseases. Not one apostle read the New Testament or observed Christmas or Easter, so these practices should be off limits to clergy as well.
I could go on, but I suspect the point is made. If we are going to appoint clergy based on the choices Jesus made in choosing his apostles we must restrict ourselves to Jewish fishermen with bad breath and itchy anuses. Maybe if the churches were more traditional in this way more men would get involved. I’m sure fewer women would.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Poposterous!
Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa recently and reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms. He has been getting a lot of flack for this, but I have no problem with his position. True, according to the UN, there are approximately 22 million people in sub-Saharan African infected with HIV, and 75% of all AIDS related deaths in 2007 happened in sub-Saharan Africa, and condom use is one of the few proven ways to avoid HIV, but this isn’t the Pope’s fault. He didn’t make up the idea that God hates condoms. It’s in the Bible, “Thou shalt not cover thy member in latex, nor sheathe thy member in plastic, nor shalt thou do anything to prohibit thy member from sending sperm into egg and thus depriving the Lord thy God with more members.”
The Pope is very clear, “You can’t resolve it [AIDS] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.” I know lots of people take issue with this, but I think the Pope is correct.
Think about this for a moment, just distributing condoms does nothing. People have to put them on human penises prior to said penises entering orifices in other human bodies. So the Pope’s assertion that distribution without use is meaningless is true. But what about the Pope’s claim that distribution actually increases AIDS? Here, too, I think he is correct.
For example, if you hand out condoms to people who don’t know how to use them they will find other uses for them. For example, they will fill them with water and throw them at people. The water will soak those people’s clothes making their bodies all the more alluring which will result in more unprotected sex. Or they will pump them full of air and use them as bats. Fighting with these latex bats will lead to close physical contact that will lead to more sex. Or they will cut holes in the top and sides and wear them as clothes revealing even more of their bodies, which will lead to more sex.
When the Pope urges abstinence he is sharing a method that works for him and all of his co-workers. Or at least most of them. And if the people of sub-Saharan Africa, the Church’s fastest growing market, reject condom use, I wish them luck.
If it were up to me I’d mandate a new form of circumcision that replaced all foreskins with permanent condoms. These would function like those toilet cover machines in public restrooms that automatically drape the toilet seat in a fresh cover after each flush. The permanent condom machine would slip a fresh condom over the penis after each use of said penis for sex or urination. Couples wishing to have children could apply for the temporary removal of said condom machine after successfully completely courses in sex-ed, hygiene, and marriage and parenting skills. Oh, to be king. Or even pope.
The Pope is very clear, “You can’t resolve it [AIDS] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.” I know lots of people take issue with this, but I think the Pope is correct.
Think about this for a moment, just distributing condoms does nothing. People have to put them on human penises prior to said penises entering orifices in other human bodies. So the Pope’s assertion that distribution without use is meaningless is true. But what about the Pope’s claim that distribution actually increases AIDS? Here, too, I think he is correct.
For example, if you hand out condoms to people who don’t know how to use them they will find other uses for them. For example, they will fill them with water and throw them at people. The water will soak those people’s clothes making their bodies all the more alluring which will result in more unprotected sex. Or they will pump them full of air and use them as bats. Fighting with these latex bats will lead to close physical contact that will lead to more sex. Or they will cut holes in the top and sides and wear them as clothes revealing even more of their bodies, which will lead to more sex.
When the Pope urges abstinence he is sharing a method that works for him and all of his co-workers. Or at least most of them. And if the people of sub-Saharan Africa, the Church’s fastest growing market, reject condom use, I wish them luck.
If it were up to me I’d mandate a new form of circumcision that replaced all foreskins with permanent condoms. These would function like those toilet cover machines in public restrooms that automatically drape the toilet seat in a fresh cover after each flush. The permanent condom machine would slip a fresh condom over the penis after each use of said penis for sex or urination. Couples wishing to have children could apply for the temporary removal of said condom machine after successfully completely courses in sex-ed, hygiene, and marriage and parenting skills. Oh, to be king. Or even pope.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Shhhhh
Shhhh. It’s quiet. Too quiet. If this were an action adventure script now would be the time the bad guys would attack. But this isn’t a movie, it’s a moment of legalized silence in Texas public schools.
This week a federal appeals court upheld a 2003 Texas law mandating a moment of silence in its public schools. Students can pray, meditate, think (OK, who am I kidding?), or use the time any way they wish that doesn’t violate the silence.
To the surprise of many, I love this law. Mandating prayer is unconstitutional and I am opposed to it, but a moment of silence is different. Silence is a crucial aspect of life that is becoming more and more rare. To begin a school day with silence can begin a life-long appreciation of the art of being still, inside and out. Unfortunately just mandating a moment of silence won’t bring this about. But it might just entice some kids to explore this more deeply later in life.
Here is what I would like to see happen. 1. Texas upholds its moment of silence. 2. Student clubs are founded to learn how to most effectively use this moment of silence. 3. The students invite secular meditation teachers to speak to their club about the art of meditation. I stress secular to avoid church/state issues, but it may be possible to invite more spiritually based meditation teachers to the club. If it is, I would like to see that happen as well. 4. Students would learn the art of being still, explore what Dr. Herbert Benson calls the Relaxation Response and how to use it throughout the day to enhance their well-being and effectiveness. 5. These students would grow their appreciation of silence into a contemplative practice that would stay with them throughout their lives.
Will this happen? I doubt it. I imagine that the people who voted for silence weren’t particularly interested in silence. They were trying to create a place for prayer, most likely Christian prayer of the Southern Baptist variety, and figured that most kids would use the silence to pray. I think they are correct, and here are some of the prayers likely to be said at the beginning of the school day:
“Dear God, Please don’t let me fail my math test today. If You help me to pass I promise next time I will study.”
“Dear Jesus, Please don’t let anyone notice I’m wearing two different socks.”
“Dear Lord, please don’t let that bully beat me up again today.”
“Dear God, please don’t let my girlfriend be pregnant.”
“Dear God, it would be really great if You could send Jesus back to us before fourth period. There is no way I’m going to pass that math test. If You already planned to help me pass because of my earlier prayer, however, please disregard this current prayer. You can still send Jesus back to us today if You wish, though it would be great if You could give me a heads-up so I can have a few days to get ready. Amen.”
Shhhh.
This week a federal appeals court upheld a 2003 Texas law mandating a moment of silence in its public schools. Students can pray, meditate, think (OK, who am I kidding?), or use the time any way they wish that doesn’t violate the silence.
To the surprise of many, I love this law. Mandating prayer is unconstitutional and I am opposed to it, but a moment of silence is different. Silence is a crucial aspect of life that is becoming more and more rare. To begin a school day with silence can begin a life-long appreciation of the art of being still, inside and out. Unfortunately just mandating a moment of silence won’t bring this about. But it might just entice some kids to explore this more deeply later in life.
Here is what I would like to see happen. 1. Texas upholds its moment of silence. 2. Student clubs are founded to learn how to most effectively use this moment of silence. 3. The students invite secular meditation teachers to speak to their club about the art of meditation. I stress secular to avoid church/state issues, but it may be possible to invite more spiritually based meditation teachers to the club. If it is, I would like to see that happen as well. 4. Students would learn the art of being still, explore what Dr. Herbert Benson calls the Relaxation Response and how to use it throughout the day to enhance their well-being and effectiveness. 5. These students would grow their appreciation of silence into a contemplative practice that would stay with them throughout their lives.
Will this happen? I doubt it. I imagine that the people who voted for silence weren’t particularly interested in silence. They were trying to create a place for prayer, most likely Christian prayer of the Southern Baptist variety, and figured that most kids would use the silence to pray. I think they are correct, and here are some of the prayers likely to be said at the beginning of the school day:
“Dear God, Please don’t let me fail my math test today. If You help me to pass I promise next time I will study.”
“Dear Jesus, Please don’t let anyone notice I’m wearing two different socks.”
“Dear Lord, please don’t let that bully beat me up again today.”
“Dear God, please don’t let my girlfriend be pregnant.”
“Dear God, it would be really great if You could send Jesus back to us before fourth period. There is no way I’m going to pass that math test. If You already planned to help me pass because of my earlier prayer, however, please disregard this current prayer. You can still send Jesus back to us today if You wish, though it would be great if You could give me a heads-up so I can have a few days to get ready. Amen.”
Shhhh.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
When Religion is Obscene
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is famous for his 1964 “definition” of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” What is true of obscenity in the movies (Potter’s challenge) is also true in religion. Case in point: the ruling of the Catholic Church in Brazil, backed by the Vatican, to excommunicate the mother and doctors of a 9-year-old girl who received an abortion after being raped by her stepfather and found to be pregnant with twins.
I know it when I see it: obscenity is forcing a 9-year-old to give birth; obscenity is ex-communicating (and hence in their minds condemning to Hell for all eternity) her mother and her doctors; obscenity is a religion of love made heartless by its own law.
Brazil is a strongly Catholic country, but the law allows for abortion in the case of rape, and the ruling of the Church raised the ire of many Brazilians including President Luiz Inaccio Lula da Siva. It raises mine as well, and I think it should raise the ire and outrage of any thoughtful, compassionate human being regardless of his or her theology. I know of course that it won’t, for so many of us have become legalists when it comes to abortion.
I find it painfully, sorrowfully, ironic that so many Christians whose God is a God of love, compassion, and forgiveness, and whose faith supposedly frees them from the letter of the law are so chained to the Church “law” prohibiting abortion that they cannot see the need for flexibility. Indeed, a Church that did not deny Communion to Adolf Hitler but will deny it to a mother whose concern for the welfare of her daughter (assuming of course she is not complicit in her daughter’s rape) trumps her loyalty to her church is a Church without a heart or a soul.
And make no mistake, it is loyalty to the church rather than fealty to God that is the issue here. The very same God that gave us the Vatican gave us rabbinic Judaism as well, and in the latter case abortion is allowed in certain circumstances. So to say we are violating God’s law when allowing for abortion in certain cases is pure arrogance, imposing a single theological stance on the world that does not want it or need it.
Those who worry about the souls of those unborn twins are denying the compassion of God. Can anyone imagine a loving God damning these unborn souls while forgiving their rapist father who most likely remains a “good Catholic”? Can anyone imagine a loving God condemning a loving mother for an act of love toward her daughter? Yes, they can! The so-called God of love that millions claim to worship is, in their hands, a screen behind which to proselytize heartlessness, injustice, and cruelty.
I am not speaking about abortion in general. I am talking about the obscenity of this case. There is room for honest and heartfelt debate on the larger issue of abortion, but there is no excuse for the heartless attack on the mother and doctor of this nine-year-old girl.
I applaud the people of Brazil who stand up to the madness of a Church blinded to love. I wish there were more people with that kind of moxie willing to take on the obscenity of religious excess.
I know it when I see it: obscenity is forcing a 9-year-old to give birth; obscenity is ex-communicating (and hence in their minds condemning to Hell for all eternity) her mother and her doctors; obscenity is a religion of love made heartless by its own law.
Brazil is a strongly Catholic country, but the law allows for abortion in the case of rape, and the ruling of the Church raised the ire of many Brazilians including President Luiz Inaccio Lula da Siva. It raises mine as well, and I think it should raise the ire and outrage of any thoughtful, compassionate human being regardless of his or her theology. I know of course that it won’t, for so many of us have become legalists when it comes to abortion.
I find it painfully, sorrowfully, ironic that so many Christians whose God is a God of love, compassion, and forgiveness, and whose faith supposedly frees them from the letter of the law are so chained to the Church “law” prohibiting abortion that they cannot see the need for flexibility. Indeed, a Church that did not deny Communion to Adolf Hitler but will deny it to a mother whose concern for the welfare of her daughter (assuming of course she is not complicit in her daughter’s rape) trumps her loyalty to her church is a Church without a heart or a soul.
And make no mistake, it is loyalty to the church rather than fealty to God that is the issue here. The very same God that gave us the Vatican gave us rabbinic Judaism as well, and in the latter case abortion is allowed in certain circumstances. So to say we are violating God’s law when allowing for abortion in certain cases is pure arrogance, imposing a single theological stance on the world that does not want it or need it.
Those who worry about the souls of those unborn twins are denying the compassion of God. Can anyone imagine a loving God damning these unborn souls while forgiving their rapist father who most likely remains a “good Catholic”? Can anyone imagine a loving God condemning a loving mother for an act of love toward her daughter? Yes, they can! The so-called God of love that millions claim to worship is, in their hands, a screen behind which to proselytize heartlessness, injustice, and cruelty.
I am not speaking about abortion in general. I am talking about the obscenity of this case. There is room for honest and heartfelt debate on the larger issue of abortion, but there is no excuse for the heartless attack on the mother and doctor of this nine-year-old girl.
I applaud the people of Brazil who stand up to the madness of a Church blinded to love. I wish there were more people with that kind of moxie willing to take on the obscenity of religious excess.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Lama Lo
I believe, for no reason whatsoever, that I am the 24th incarnation of the Tibetan monk, Lama Lo. Since I have no proof of this, and therefor cannot make any money writing books or giving teachings as Lama Lo, I have written His Holiness the Dalai Lama asking that he recognize me as Lama Lo.
Lama Lo, also known as the Doatyng Lama was the founder of Hodayaknothat, a school within the Dalai Lama’s school of Nyingma Buddhism. I have heard nothing from His Holiness regarding my request for recognition. I am sure he is busy, but I am getting older and have seen many people my age pass away in the past few years, so I am afraid I am running out of time to cash in on my incarnation. So I have decided to improve my chances for recognition by appealing to the Communist Chinese for authorization.
The Chinese have sought to take control of the reincarnation of lamas to insure that future Living Buddhas are pro-Communist and will teach a modified version of the Four Noble Truths: Suffering, The Cause of Suffering, The Ending of Suffering, and the Eightfold Path to the Ending of Suffering by Pirating DVDs and Selling Substandard Products to Americans.
Traditionally toddlers competing for reincarnated lama status are shown a bunch of items that belonged to the lama in a previous life. Many of these items were lost on airline flights and were only returned to the lama by the airline after the lama has died. So the toddler is asked to identify lots of luggage.
If the toddler recognizes the deceased lama’s luggage or other items it is assumed that he is the reincarnation of that lama. The Chinese add an item to the mix to insure they get the lama they want. In addition to picking out the deceased lama’s suitcase, the toddler must also pick a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book hidden inside a plush stuffed Chinese dragon. If the toddler takes the dragon as well as the suitcase he is the lama the Chinese are looking for. The chosen lama is allowed to keep the luggage but not the dragon for fear that the toddler will choke on the dragon’s eyes or be poisoned by the lead in the paint used to decorate the dragon’s body.
I have assured the Chinese that I will choose the dragon, though I did admit that I have trouble recognizing the luggage I have bought in this life let alone a previous one. In addition I have explained to them that I am Jewish in this incarnation and that Jewish people have a fetish for Chinese food and Mahjong so they can rest assured that I will lead my followers to appreciate Chinese culture despite the brutality perpetrated on the Tibetans by the Chinese.
The Chinese government, too, has seen fit to ignore my plea for recognition as Lama Lo. A waitress at a local Tibetan restaurant said she would recognize me, but only in exchange for endorsing her restaurant as “Best in the Bardo.”
This, of course, gave me a great idea: a restaurant guide for the afterlife. I plan to sell it on itunes. Yes, there’s an app for that! Lama lo?*
*Lama lo is Hebrew for “why not,” but the coincidence is purely karmic.
Lama Lo, also known as the Doatyng Lama was the founder of Hodayaknothat, a school within the Dalai Lama’s school of Nyingma Buddhism. I have heard nothing from His Holiness regarding my request for recognition. I am sure he is busy, but I am getting older and have seen many people my age pass away in the past few years, so I am afraid I am running out of time to cash in on my incarnation. So I have decided to improve my chances for recognition by appealing to the Communist Chinese for authorization.
The Chinese have sought to take control of the reincarnation of lamas to insure that future Living Buddhas are pro-Communist and will teach a modified version of the Four Noble Truths: Suffering, The Cause of Suffering, The Ending of Suffering, and the Eightfold Path to the Ending of Suffering by Pirating DVDs and Selling Substandard Products to Americans.
Traditionally toddlers competing for reincarnated lama status are shown a bunch of items that belonged to the lama in a previous life. Many of these items were lost on airline flights and were only returned to the lama by the airline after the lama has died. So the toddler is asked to identify lots of luggage.
If the toddler recognizes the deceased lama’s luggage or other items it is assumed that he is the reincarnation of that lama. The Chinese add an item to the mix to insure they get the lama they want. In addition to picking out the deceased lama’s suitcase, the toddler must also pick a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book hidden inside a plush stuffed Chinese dragon. If the toddler takes the dragon as well as the suitcase he is the lama the Chinese are looking for. The chosen lama is allowed to keep the luggage but not the dragon for fear that the toddler will choke on the dragon’s eyes or be poisoned by the lead in the paint used to decorate the dragon’s body.
I have assured the Chinese that I will choose the dragon, though I did admit that I have trouble recognizing the luggage I have bought in this life let alone a previous one. In addition I have explained to them that I am Jewish in this incarnation and that Jewish people have a fetish for Chinese food and Mahjong so they can rest assured that I will lead my followers to appreciate Chinese culture despite the brutality perpetrated on the Tibetans by the Chinese.
The Chinese government, too, has seen fit to ignore my plea for recognition as Lama Lo. A waitress at a local Tibetan restaurant said she would recognize me, but only in exchange for endorsing her restaurant as “Best in the Bardo.”
This, of course, gave me a great idea: a restaurant guide for the afterlife. I plan to sell it on itunes. Yes, there’s an app for that! Lama lo?*
*Lama lo is Hebrew for “why not,” but the coincidence is purely karmic.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Jewish Nones
The new American Religious Identity Survey (see my post “Becoming a None,” March 8, 2009) reports that the number of Americans identifying as Jews has fallen from a mere 1.8% to a miniscule 1.2%. We are joining the ranks of the Nones, the Spiritual But Not Religious who find little value in organized Jewish religious life.
Those Jewish leaders concerned that the drop in numbers will translate into a drop in political influence will be quick to challenge the survey, arguing (correctly in my view) that many Jews continue to identify as Jews while not identifying with the religion of Judaism (so don’t count the Israel lobby out just yet). But this is beside the point of the survey.
As a rabbi myself these numbers are hardly comforting. Playing with the numbers, rounding up the high and rounding down the low, we could say that almost half of American Jews no longer see themselves as religiously Jewish. That is huge. And there is only one group to blame—us rabbis.
Of course you could blame God, arguing that if God had made the religion more attractive more people would identify with it, but this is a dodge. Most Jews don’t believe in the God of the their religion—the God that chose the Jews, dictated the Torah, restricted our diet, and threatened us with death for picking up sticks on a Saturday— which is why they feel comfortable abandoning that religion even as they stay members of the tribe for familial and cultural reasons.
Nope, it is rabbis who are to blame. Since the invention of rabbis by rabbis over two thousand years ago, rabbis have quietly reshaped Judaism in their own image, claiming that this is really what God intended all along. Change, not continuity, is at the heart of the rabbinic experiment, but over the past few decades religious change has been anything but progressive.
Sure we have opened our ranks to women and homosexuals, but this is a social change not a theological one. We still rise to praise the God Most Of Us Don’t Believe In. We still read responsively words that, when read in English, make no sense to most of us. We still read Torah and try to excuse the brutality it sanctions in the name of an Iron Age God of War. We still ask our congregants to engage in a moment of silence that lasts no longer than the time it takes for us to take a breath and say, “Now please turn to page…” We still promote a vicarious religiosity that seeks to find meaning in history rather than in the eternal present.
What we need is a 21st century Mordecai Kaplan. Someone who has the courage to reinvent Judaism for our time. We need a new theology, a new liturgy, a new understanding of Torah, a new reason for kashrut, Shabbat, and Shemini Atzeret. Calling on Jews to return to tradition is like asking us to abandon our cars for horse drawn carriages. It works for the Amish but not for the Jewish. We love our zippers and need a religion that speaks to people who are post-tribal, post-national, post-personal-God, and who have a hard time celebrating the murder of thousands of first-born Egyptians at Passover. Even my beloved Jewish Renewal movement has failed to stem the rising numbers of Jewish Nones.
The ARIS should be a call to rabbis to radically challenge the status quo we are paid to uphold. Few will. Even those of us who entered the rabbinate promising progressive change have been co=opted by a system that insists rearview mirrors are in fact windows open on the future. Rather we will see in the survey a call to return to tradition, a call to read more Hebrew so people won’t know they are spouting things they don’t believe, and a further emphasis on tikkun olam (world repair) rather than the far more painful work of tikkun hanefesh (soul repair) for which the growing number of Jewish nones so desperately hunger.
Those Jewish leaders concerned that the drop in numbers will translate into a drop in political influence will be quick to challenge the survey, arguing (correctly in my view) that many Jews continue to identify as Jews while not identifying with the religion of Judaism (so don’t count the Israel lobby out just yet). But this is beside the point of the survey.
As a rabbi myself these numbers are hardly comforting. Playing with the numbers, rounding up the high and rounding down the low, we could say that almost half of American Jews no longer see themselves as religiously Jewish. That is huge. And there is only one group to blame—us rabbis.
Of course you could blame God, arguing that if God had made the religion more attractive more people would identify with it, but this is a dodge. Most Jews don’t believe in the God of the their religion—the God that chose the Jews, dictated the Torah, restricted our diet, and threatened us with death for picking up sticks on a Saturday— which is why they feel comfortable abandoning that religion even as they stay members of the tribe for familial and cultural reasons.
Nope, it is rabbis who are to blame. Since the invention of rabbis by rabbis over two thousand years ago, rabbis have quietly reshaped Judaism in their own image, claiming that this is really what God intended all along. Change, not continuity, is at the heart of the rabbinic experiment, but over the past few decades religious change has been anything but progressive.
Sure we have opened our ranks to women and homosexuals, but this is a social change not a theological one. We still rise to praise the God Most Of Us Don’t Believe In. We still read responsively words that, when read in English, make no sense to most of us. We still read Torah and try to excuse the brutality it sanctions in the name of an Iron Age God of War. We still ask our congregants to engage in a moment of silence that lasts no longer than the time it takes for us to take a breath and say, “Now please turn to page…” We still promote a vicarious religiosity that seeks to find meaning in history rather than in the eternal present.
What we need is a 21st century Mordecai Kaplan. Someone who has the courage to reinvent Judaism for our time. We need a new theology, a new liturgy, a new understanding of Torah, a new reason for kashrut, Shabbat, and Shemini Atzeret. Calling on Jews to return to tradition is like asking us to abandon our cars for horse drawn carriages. It works for the Amish but not for the Jewish. We love our zippers and need a religion that speaks to people who are post-tribal, post-national, post-personal-God, and who have a hard time celebrating the murder of thousands of first-born Egyptians at Passover. Even my beloved Jewish Renewal movement has failed to stem the rising numbers of Jewish Nones.
The ARIS should be a call to rabbis to radically challenge the status quo we are paid to uphold. Few will. Even those of us who entered the rabbinate promising progressive change have been co=opted by a system that insists rearview mirrors are in fact windows open on the future. Rather we will see in the survey a call to return to tradition, a call to read more Hebrew so people won’t know they are spouting things they don’t believe, and a further emphasis on tikkun olam (world repair) rather than the far more painful work of tikkun hanefesh (soul repair) for which the growing number of Jewish nones so desperately hunger.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Becoming a None
Freedom of religion is fast becoming synonymous with religiously free. Findings from the 2008 American Religious Identity Survey reveal that the numbers of Americans who have opted out of any formal religious affiliation has almost doubled since 1990. Then the number of people marking “None” when asked about religious affiliation was 8%, today it is 15%.
This is a huge shift in the American religious landscape. Where are these newly minted Nones coming from? The data is suggestive: those Americans identifying as one kind of Christian or another has dropped 11%. Even Baptists have lost 4% of their membership. And Americans who no longer believe in a personal God now totals almost 1/3 of the population.
Is this something worth cheering about? It depends. If those self-proclaimed Nones are making their choice based on a serious study of religion and an equally serious quest for spiritual maturity and wisdom, then, yes, I am applauding. If, on the other hand, the Nones are simply bored with and untouched by all things religious and spiritual, then I am saddened. The survey interpreters suggest the latter is true. Religion is simply becoming more and more irrelevant to more and more Americans.
Almost 1/3 of Americans are simply numb to the soul. This is not only saddening, it is frightening. For me the soul is that aspect of human consciousness that realizes the interdependence of all life. It is that aspect of human consciousness that lifts the “I” into the “We” and gives rise to deep compassion for all life. In Judaism this is called Chayya or Life consciousness, what we might now call Cosmic Consciousness: the awareness that we are all one with and in the One. It is from the perspective of Chayya consciousness that we have the opportunity to slip into Yechida consciousness, that level of pure awareness where the realization that “we are one” shifts to reveal that the One is us.
I don’t mean to imply that 2/3 of Americans are soul-conscious, however. Far from it. Most of what passes for religion in America is simply a sacred tribalism worshipping a god of its own making who rewards those who sacrifice blood and treasure to him and his chosen leaders. And as long as this is so, the numbers of Nones will grow, as will the numbing of the soul that causes this.
Religion isn’t the enemy, but it isn’t the solution either. Reducing God to an “ism,” and insisting that those who reject that “ism” are damned isn’t going to resuscitate the soul. Religion in this form has no interest in or use for spirituality, the cultivation of universal justice, compassion, peace, courage, wisdom, and humility. The goal of religion as currently defined is simply to grow the ranks of its members, and the only tools they have are guilt, fear of damnation, and triumphalism over the damnation of those who choose a faith other than the that of the self-righteous and self-proclaimed triumphalists. Of course this is a generalization, and the varieties of religions make any such generalizations suspect. But numbers matter or we wouldn’t both with surveys that count people’s membership in this or that religion.
I will leave the religions to fend for themselves. It is the Nones that appeal to me. These people have freed themselves from religion but not necessarily for spirituality. They need to be offered a way to uncover the soul that honors their individuality, their freedom, and that doesn’t devolve into a mere feeding of the ego.
This may require a new kind of “affiliation” that offers deep community and disciplined spiritual training when needed, and individual autonomy and aloneness when that is needed.
I am not sure how this would work, but I am interested in hearing from you if you have any ideas. Here are some questions you might considered addressing the Comments section of Toto: If you are a None why are you a None? What are you looking for as a None? What would your life look like if you found it? How much community do you want and need?
PS: Since writing this post I have been introduced to www.sbnr.org. This is a website and “movement” for those 50 million Americans who are “spiritual but not religious.” It is just getting of the ground and I am assisting a bit. Check it out, and let us know how such an effort can be of help to you.
This is a huge shift in the American religious landscape. Where are these newly minted Nones coming from? The data is suggestive: those Americans identifying as one kind of Christian or another has dropped 11%. Even Baptists have lost 4% of their membership. And Americans who no longer believe in a personal God now totals almost 1/3 of the population.
Is this something worth cheering about? It depends. If those self-proclaimed Nones are making their choice based on a serious study of religion and an equally serious quest for spiritual maturity and wisdom, then, yes, I am applauding. If, on the other hand, the Nones are simply bored with and untouched by all things religious and spiritual, then I am saddened. The survey interpreters suggest the latter is true. Religion is simply becoming more and more irrelevant to more and more Americans.
Almost 1/3 of Americans are simply numb to the soul. This is not only saddening, it is frightening. For me the soul is that aspect of human consciousness that realizes the interdependence of all life. It is that aspect of human consciousness that lifts the “I” into the “We” and gives rise to deep compassion for all life. In Judaism this is called Chayya or Life consciousness, what we might now call Cosmic Consciousness: the awareness that we are all one with and in the One. It is from the perspective of Chayya consciousness that we have the opportunity to slip into Yechida consciousness, that level of pure awareness where the realization that “we are one” shifts to reveal that the One is us.
I don’t mean to imply that 2/3 of Americans are soul-conscious, however. Far from it. Most of what passes for religion in America is simply a sacred tribalism worshipping a god of its own making who rewards those who sacrifice blood and treasure to him and his chosen leaders. And as long as this is so, the numbers of Nones will grow, as will the numbing of the soul that causes this.
Religion isn’t the enemy, but it isn’t the solution either. Reducing God to an “ism,” and insisting that those who reject that “ism” are damned isn’t going to resuscitate the soul. Religion in this form has no interest in or use for spirituality, the cultivation of universal justice, compassion, peace, courage, wisdom, and humility. The goal of religion as currently defined is simply to grow the ranks of its members, and the only tools they have are guilt, fear of damnation, and triumphalism over the damnation of those who choose a faith other than the that of the self-righteous and self-proclaimed triumphalists. Of course this is a generalization, and the varieties of religions make any such generalizations suspect. But numbers matter or we wouldn’t both with surveys that count people’s membership in this or that religion.
I will leave the religions to fend for themselves. It is the Nones that appeal to me. These people have freed themselves from religion but not necessarily for spirituality. They need to be offered a way to uncover the soul that honors their individuality, their freedom, and that doesn’t devolve into a mere feeding of the ego.
This may require a new kind of “affiliation” that offers deep community and disciplined spiritual training when needed, and individual autonomy and aloneness when that is needed.
I am not sure how this would work, but I am interested in hearing from you if you have any ideas. Here are some questions you might considered addressing the Comments section of Toto: If you are a None why are you a None? What are you looking for as a None? What would your life look like if you found it? How much community do you want and need?
PS: Since writing this post I have been introduced to www.sbnr.org. This is a website and “movement” for those 50 million Americans who are “spiritual but not religious.” It is just getting of the ground and I am assisting a bit. Check it out, and let us know how such an effort can be of help to you.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Follower of Moses
Newsweek Magazine (Belief Watch March 16, 2009) reports on a growing trend among some Christians to drop the label Christian in favor of “A follower of Jesus.” “Christian” it seems is too loaded with right-wing rhetoric, homophobia, and Republican party politics to speak to millions of people who take comfort in the teachings of Jesus and, perhaps, find salvation through his death and resurrection.
I have no god in this hunt (get it, “god” is “dog” spelled backwards; no god in this hunt, no dog in… oh, forget it) so I have no problem with this change of labels. I was thinking, however, that it might apply to my situation as well. Maybe I should stop calling myself a Jew and start referring to myself as a follower of Moses.
Well. Maybe not Moses, but Hillel. Moses is too violent for my taste. Look at his response to the call for democratic reform by Korach and 250 of the leaders of the Israelites. Moses has God sanction first a plague that kills thousands of his opponents, and then sanction the murder of thousands more. Talk about collective punishment. And then, of course, there is the little matter of the genocide against the Hittites, Amorites, Jebusites, Termites, Websites, and any "ites" Moses convinces the Lord are bad for business. Moses is too violent, so I don’t want to be a follower of Moses.
Hillel is more to my liking. Maybe I should call myself a follower of Hillel. What I like about Hillel is that, thousands of years before it was de rigor, he managed to reduce the entire Torah to a tweet: “Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” I mean you could learn that Torah in seconds, and thus free up all those hours that your Jewish friends spend in Hebrew school.
I suspect, however, that Hillel may have a been a bit disingenuous with his Twitter Torah. After all given his definition how many of us would circumcise our sons?
Anyway, given the penchant of the the Jewish people for argument and diverse opinions, not all Jews would choose to be followers of Hillel. Some Jews might be followers of Shammai, Hillel’s personal Lex Luthor. Others would prefer to follow Moses or Aaron or even Korach.Now that I think of it I might might even disagree with myself and drop my FOH status for the more challenging FOEBA, follower of Elisha ben Abuyah, the great doubter of the Talmud whom the rabbis dubbed Acher, the Other.
But why choose only one person to follower? Religion could be like Twitter where you can follow as many people as you like. In fact I think we should create Twitter accounts for all the great sages of humanity. People could “follow” Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Krishna, Patanjali, the list is endless. Throughout the day these people would tweet from their published works. Since they wrote the books copyright wouldn’t be a problem. (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, so don’t trust me on this.) All we would need is a group of dedicated volunteers to collect and post the teachings daily.
Anyway, I like the idea of naming the hero you follow. Let me know whom you would follow by posting them in the comments section of Toto. I think we could all learn something from that.
I have no god in this hunt (get it, “god” is “dog” spelled backwards; no god in this hunt, no dog in… oh, forget it) so I have no problem with this change of labels. I was thinking, however, that it might apply to my situation as well. Maybe I should stop calling myself a Jew and start referring to myself as a follower of Moses.
Well. Maybe not Moses, but Hillel. Moses is too violent for my taste. Look at his response to the call for democratic reform by Korach and 250 of the leaders of the Israelites. Moses has God sanction first a plague that kills thousands of his opponents, and then sanction the murder of thousands more. Talk about collective punishment. And then, of course, there is the little matter of the genocide against the Hittites, Amorites, Jebusites, Termites, Websites, and any "ites" Moses convinces the Lord are bad for business. Moses is too violent, so I don’t want to be a follower of Moses.
Hillel is more to my liking. Maybe I should call myself a follower of Hillel. What I like about Hillel is that, thousands of years before it was de rigor, he managed to reduce the entire Torah to a tweet: “Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” I mean you could learn that Torah in seconds, and thus free up all those hours that your Jewish friends spend in Hebrew school.
I suspect, however, that Hillel may have a been a bit disingenuous with his Twitter Torah. After all given his definition how many of us would circumcise our sons?
Anyway, given the penchant of the the Jewish people for argument and diverse opinions, not all Jews would choose to be followers of Hillel. Some Jews might be followers of Shammai, Hillel’s personal Lex Luthor. Others would prefer to follow Moses or Aaron or even Korach.Now that I think of it I might might even disagree with myself and drop my FOH status for the more challenging FOEBA, follower of Elisha ben Abuyah, the great doubter of the Talmud whom the rabbis dubbed Acher, the Other.
But why choose only one person to follower? Religion could be like Twitter where you can follow as many people as you like. In fact I think we should create Twitter accounts for all the great sages of humanity. People could “follow” Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Buddha, Muhammad, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Krishna, Patanjali, the list is endless. Throughout the day these people would tweet from their published works. Since they wrote the books copyright wouldn’t be a problem. (Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, so don’t trust me on this.) All we would need is a group of dedicated volunteers to collect and post the teachings daily.
Anyway, I like the idea of naming the hero you follow. Let me know whom you would follow by posting them in the comments section of Toto. I think we could all learn something from that.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
The Real War on Christianity
There is always lots of talk in my neighborhood about the so-called War on Christianity that the liberal left wages in the United States. I understand why some people feel this way, but there is little evidence that Christianity or Christians are in any real danger in the US. The fate of Christians in Iraq, however, is another matter.
According to the U.S. State Department, Iraqi Christians and other religious minorities have experienced intense persecution by Iraqi Moslems since 2003. Religious leaders have been murdered, the faithful have been forced to abandon their homes and businesses, and churches have been bombed or otherwise destroyed. One half of Iraq’s Christian population (estimated to have been around 740,000 prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq) has fled the country in the past five years. According to USA TODAY (“An Exodus from Iraq,” June 30, 2008), Iraqi Christians are being told to “convert, leave, or die.”
Of course the Iraqi government isn’t sponsoring this evil, but they are doing little to stop it. And we are propping up the government.
Article 2 of the Iraqi Constitution supposedly protects religious freedom in the country, but the text also says “No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.” Just what it is that contradicts the established provisions of Islam is not spelled out, so nonMoslems and Moslems belonging to sects the government doesn’t like are all at risk. So much risk, that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom put Iraq on its watch list.
This is outrageous! Thousands of Americans have died and many more continue to die to establish a free Iraq, and yet America itself admits that the country it expects to be a beacon of democracy is a danger to its own citizens over freedom of religion. According to our government’s own statistics, religious minorities in Iraq were safer under Saddam than under today’s U.S. backed regime.
Why are Christians in America not screaming about this? Why aren’t they demanding their government protect Christians (at least Christians) in a country under our occupation? Interfaith organizations in the United States should be marching on Washington demanding the safety of religious minorities in Iraq. But we aren’t. And we won’t. Why? Because deep down we know there is no point.
We didn’t and don’t give a damn about Iraq or Iraqis or freedom or anything other than our ability to suck the country dry of its oil. We are a Christian nation only when saying so gets those who say it enough votes to get us to act as a nation of barbarians. Being a Christian in America has everything to do with culture wars and nothing to do with actual wars, even wars against Christians.
Obama can’t change this. Only we can change this, and we won’t. At least not as long as the price of gas matters more than the integrity of our souls.
God bless America.
According to the U.S. State Department, Iraqi Christians and other religious minorities have experienced intense persecution by Iraqi Moslems since 2003. Religious leaders have been murdered, the faithful have been forced to abandon their homes and businesses, and churches have been bombed or otherwise destroyed. One half of Iraq’s Christian population (estimated to have been around 740,000 prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq) has fled the country in the past five years. According to USA TODAY (“An Exodus from Iraq,” June 30, 2008), Iraqi Christians are being told to “convert, leave, or die.”
Of course the Iraqi government isn’t sponsoring this evil, but they are doing little to stop it. And we are propping up the government.
Article 2 of the Iraqi Constitution supposedly protects religious freedom in the country, but the text also says “No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.” Just what it is that contradicts the established provisions of Islam is not spelled out, so nonMoslems and Moslems belonging to sects the government doesn’t like are all at risk. So much risk, that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom put Iraq on its watch list.
This is outrageous! Thousands of Americans have died and many more continue to die to establish a free Iraq, and yet America itself admits that the country it expects to be a beacon of democracy is a danger to its own citizens over freedom of religion. According to our government’s own statistics, religious minorities in Iraq were safer under Saddam than under today’s U.S. backed regime.
Why are Christians in America not screaming about this? Why aren’t they demanding their government protect Christians (at least Christians) in a country under our occupation? Interfaith organizations in the United States should be marching on Washington demanding the safety of religious minorities in Iraq. But we aren’t. And we won’t. Why? Because deep down we know there is no point.
We didn’t and don’t give a damn about Iraq or Iraqis or freedom or anything other than our ability to suck the country dry of its oil. We are a Christian nation only when saying so gets those who say it enough votes to get us to act as a nation of barbarians. Being a Christian in America has everything to do with culture wars and nothing to do with actual wars, even wars against Christians.
Obama can’t change this. Only we can change this, and we won’t. At least not as long as the price of gas matters more than the integrity of our souls.
God bless America.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Dick Heads
I called my dad the other day trying to track down a relic of my past that I thought might have some value to me in the near future—my foreskin. This bit of penis, removed under penalty of law on my eighth day of life, meant nothing to me for the past 57 years, but after reading an article in the current issue of Search magazine I changed my mind.
The article, written by Peter Manseau, opened with an overview of some of the more famous Christians who have claimed to be in possession of Jesus’ foreskin. I admit that despite my teaching a class on the Historical Jesus at Middle Tennessee State University, it never occurred to me to concern myself with the Historical Foreskin. But, once you think about it, the desire to possess the foreskin of God is obvious.
The first to claim possession of what is officially called the Divine Prepuce was the Emperor Charlemagne sometime around the year 800. When I read this I didn’t know what a prepuce was. It turns out that Charlemagne was French and that prepuce is French for foreskin. I looked it up. It’s too bad that God didn’t speak French in Bible times. If he had told Abraham to cut off his prepuce and the prepuces of his son and servants, the Hebrew speaking Abraham would have had no idea what a prepuce was, and, after nodding politely to God, would have gone about his business, leaving foreskins where they belong.
Anyway, not to be outdone by the French, Saint Birgitta of Sweden claimed that she was given the Divine Prepuce by the Virgin Mary. One can only assume that the Holy Foreskin didn’t rise to heaven with the rest of Jesus. Of course this leaves me wondering why Mary kept the foreskin of her Son while my mother didn’t keep mine. But then my mother didn’t bronze my baby shoes either, so I guess she didn’t love me all that much.
As for how it is that both Charlemagne and Birgitta both managed to secure the prepuce of God, I am at a loss. Some might argue that Jesus had two penises, one for meat and one for milk, in keeping with the Jewish law against mixing the two. Others might claim that God’s penis would probably be miraculous (true, almost every man says this, but this is God after all), and could be in two places at once. I find this explanation more plausible since many men, being made in the image and likeness of God, fantasize about their penises being in two places at once as well. So maybe Charlemagne and Birgitta were both right to claim possession of the Divine Prepuce.
Over the centuries the number of claims to possessing the Divine Prepuce increased to the point where John Calvin, no fan of circumcised penises and those who had them, marveled at how very large God’s penis must be to have had a foreskin that so many throughout Christendom could possess at the same time.
All this got me to thinking: What would you do with the Divine Prepuce if you had it? eBay comes to mind certainly. In Italy Saint Catherine fantasized about wearing the Divine Prepuce as an engagement ring. I suppose after remembering her vow of celibacy she decided not to risk it.
Why does all this matter? Mr. Manseau uses the history of God’s foreskin as a lengthy introduction to his real topic the current British craze of having the foreskins of American babies processed to produce a Botox-like liquid that is injected into the face to remove wrinkles. Given the topic, Mr. Manseau’s title for his essay, What is Skin For? is incredibly bland. I would have called it British Dick Heads or some such thing.
Anyway, the stuff sells for $1000 per bottle, and one bottle is only enough for one cheek’s worth of wrinkles. Now you see why I called my dad. A thousand dollars for my foreskin! Why I couldn’t get that for the whole penis here in the States.
Bottom line, however, my dad had no idea where my not-so-divine prepuce is. What a pity.
Well, it may be too late for me, but if you know anyone who is soon to sever the foreskin of a penis make sure to gain possession of it so that you can sell it to the Brits. Or, if that doesn't work, pretend it is the Divine Prepuce and find a rich French guy to sell it to. (Swedish saints are harder to come by.)
The article, written by Peter Manseau, opened with an overview of some of the more famous Christians who have claimed to be in possession of Jesus’ foreskin. I admit that despite my teaching a class on the Historical Jesus at Middle Tennessee State University, it never occurred to me to concern myself with the Historical Foreskin. But, once you think about it, the desire to possess the foreskin of God is obvious.
The first to claim possession of what is officially called the Divine Prepuce was the Emperor Charlemagne sometime around the year 800. When I read this I didn’t know what a prepuce was. It turns out that Charlemagne was French and that prepuce is French for foreskin. I looked it up. It’s too bad that God didn’t speak French in Bible times. If he had told Abraham to cut off his prepuce and the prepuces of his son and servants, the Hebrew speaking Abraham would have had no idea what a prepuce was, and, after nodding politely to God, would have gone about his business, leaving foreskins where they belong.
Anyway, not to be outdone by the French, Saint Birgitta of Sweden claimed that she was given the Divine Prepuce by the Virgin Mary. One can only assume that the Holy Foreskin didn’t rise to heaven with the rest of Jesus. Of course this leaves me wondering why Mary kept the foreskin of her Son while my mother didn’t keep mine. But then my mother didn’t bronze my baby shoes either, so I guess she didn’t love me all that much.
As for how it is that both Charlemagne and Birgitta both managed to secure the prepuce of God, I am at a loss. Some might argue that Jesus had two penises, one for meat and one for milk, in keeping with the Jewish law against mixing the two. Others might claim that God’s penis would probably be miraculous (true, almost every man says this, but this is God after all), and could be in two places at once. I find this explanation more plausible since many men, being made in the image and likeness of God, fantasize about their penises being in two places at once as well. So maybe Charlemagne and Birgitta were both right to claim possession of the Divine Prepuce.
Over the centuries the number of claims to possessing the Divine Prepuce increased to the point where John Calvin, no fan of circumcised penises and those who had them, marveled at how very large God’s penis must be to have had a foreskin that so many throughout Christendom could possess at the same time.
All this got me to thinking: What would you do with the Divine Prepuce if you had it? eBay comes to mind certainly. In Italy Saint Catherine fantasized about wearing the Divine Prepuce as an engagement ring. I suppose after remembering her vow of celibacy she decided not to risk it.
Why does all this matter? Mr. Manseau uses the history of God’s foreskin as a lengthy introduction to his real topic the current British craze of having the foreskins of American babies processed to produce a Botox-like liquid that is injected into the face to remove wrinkles. Given the topic, Mr. Manseau’s title for his essay, What is Skin For? is incredibly bland. I would have called it British Dick Heads or some such thing.
Anyway, the stuff sells for $1000 per bottle, and one bottle is only enough for one cheek’s worth of wrinkles. Now you see why I called my dad. A thousand dollars for my foreskin! Why I couldn’t get that for the whole penis here in the States.
Bottom line, however, my dad had no idea where my not-so-divine prepuce is. What a pity.
Well, it may be too late for me, but if you know anyone who is soon to sever the foreskin of a penis make sure to gain possession of it so that you can sell it to the Brits. Or, if that doesn't work, pretend it is the Divine Prepuce and find a rich French guy to sell it to. (Swedish saints are harder to come by.)
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Resist Evil, Part Two
Is there any hope that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will free themselves from the insanity and hatred written into the heart and mouth of God in time to save civilization from centuries of religiously fueled conflict? I doubt it. I am persuaded by Samuel P. Huntington’s notion of the “clash of civilizations.” Huntington argues that with the end of communism and the triumph of capitalism (though not democracy) the world is shifting from a clash of ideologies to a clash of cultures and religions. The liberal hope of a future where peace loving and freethinking individuals are the majority is vain. The history of humankind, ancient and recent, suggests that given the choice between free thought and group think, we most often choose the latter. Humanity isn’t evolving toward global peace, but devolving into tribal war.
This is not a new phenomenon. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), the great fifteenth century Muslim jurist and philosopher wrote: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.” (Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: an Introduction to History (abridged), trans. Franz Rosenthal, Princeton: Princeton University, 1967, p. 183).
I think Ibn Khaldun is right about Islam and wrong about the other religions, at least the Abrahamic ones. All three Abrahamic faiths worship a god of war, and all three bear responsibility for the evil that threatens to engulf our planet. If this kind of hatred is to end the god who foments it must die. One way to do this is to admit the human origins of sacred texts.
I am not the first to say this (Spinoza predates me by centuries, and even some of the ancient rabbis hinted at it when they said Torah speaks in human language), nor am I alone in the rabbinate for saying it. But even those of us who do admit the human origin of the Torah (New Testament, Qur'an, etc.) tend to gloss over the madness in the books. Teaching these texts as political documents masquerading as sacred text provides us with the opportunity to identify the humanness of these texts and free ourselves and those we teach from the propaganda and hate contained in them. Teaching Torah et al as human creations allows us to examine these texts for wisdom without obligating ourselves to swallow and follow their teachings whole.
It was to further this effort to teach sacred text in humanistic terms that I wrote An Open Letter to Peoples of Faith. I wrote this several years ago hoping to start a campaign and get people to take it into their churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. I am fairly inept at campaigns, but the text of the Letter still speaks to the point I am making and to one way to end the madness that is God-sanctioned evil. So I am including it here in hopes that one of you might make wise use of it in service to truth, freedom, and peace:
WE BELIEVE God transcends theology; that no idea about God can adequately encompass the reality of God. WE BELIEVE that revelation is not given to a people, but through a people to the world. WE BELIEVE that the truth in each scripture is common to all scriptures, calling us toward justice, compassion, humility, dignity, respect, love for both person and planet, and the transcending of self through service to others.
WE RECOGNIZE that filtering divine revelation through human hands allows fear, greed, anger, ignorance, and violence to masquerade as truth. WE RECOGNIZE that most of the evil plaguing our world is rooted in this masquerade, and the violent image of god that comes from it.
WE COMMIT ourselves to ending this evil by rejecting religious violence and the false god who sanctions it. WE COMMIT ourselves to separating timeless truth from time bound bias in our respective scriptures; affirming the former and moving beyond the later. WE COMMIT ourselves to teaching the God of justice, compassion, love, and respect Who speaks to us through all scriptures, and Who calls us to free ourselves from fear, greed, anger, ignorance, and violence.
WE CALL upon peoples of every faith to liberate the wisdom of God from the xenophobia of tribe and ego, and to free religion from fear and violence by distinguishing the holy from the merely sacred. WE CALL upon peoples of every faith to share their wisdom with the world, to fearlessly speak out when their faith is kidnapped by evil, and to remind us all that there is no god but God, and that justice and compassion are the way of God for all time and for all people.
If we are to turn back from the brink of global apocalypse we must resist the call to endless war; we must resist the lure of ideologies and revelations that perpetrate evil in the name of God and country; we must resist those gods, religions, cultures, and individuals who claim hate is better than hope, and fear is better than love, and cruelty is better than justice, and terror is better than talk; we must resist the claims that evil done in the name of God is any less evil; and we must resist those who wish to engulf the entire world in a thermonuclear bonfire of theological vanities. Do you have the will to resist? The fate of humanity rests on your answer.
This is not a new phenomenon. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), the great fifteenth century Muslim jurist and philosopher wrote: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.” (Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: an Introduction to History (abridged), trans. Franz Rosenthal, Princeton: Princeton University, 1967, p. 183).
I think Ibn Khaldun is right about Islam and wrong about the other religions, at least the Abrahamic ones. All three Abrahamic faiths worship a god of war, and all three bear responsibility for the evil that threatens to engulf our planet. If this kind of hatred is to end the god who foments it must die. One way to do this is to admit the human origins of sacred texts.
I am not the first to say this (Spinoza predates me by centuries, and even some of the ancient rabbis hinted at it when they said Torah speaks in human language), nor am I alone in the rabbinate for saying it. But even those of us who do admit the human origin of the Torah (New Testament, Qur'an, etc.) tend to gloss over the madness in the books. Teaching these texts as political documents masquerading as sacred text provides us with the opportunity to identify the humanness of these texts and free ourselves and those we teach from the propaganda and hate contained in them. Teaching Torah et al as human creations allows us to examine these texts for wisdom without obligating ourselves to swallow and follow their teachings whole.
It was to further this effort to teach sacred text in humanistic terms that I wrote An Open Letter to Peoples of Faith. I wrote this several years ago hoping to start a campaign and get people to take it into their churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. I am fairly inept at campaigns, but the text of the Letter still speaks to the point I am making and to one way to end the madness that is God-sanctioned evil. So I am including it here in hopes that one of you might make wise use of it in service to truth, freedom, and peace:
WE BELIEVE God transcends theology; that no idea about God can adequately encompass the reality of God. WE BELIEVE that revelation is not given to a people, but through a people to the world. WE BELIEVE that the truth in each scripture is common to all scriptures, calling us toward justice, compassion, humility, dignity, respect, love for both person and planet, and the transcending of self through service to others.
WE RECOGNIZE that filtering divine revelation through human hands allows fear, greed, anger, ignorance, and violence to masquerade as truth. WE RECOGNIZE that most of the evil plaguing our world is rooted in this masquerade, and the violent image of god that comes from it.
WE COMMIT ourselves to ending this evil by rejecting religious violence and the false god who sanctions it. WE COMMIT ourselves to separating timeless truth from time bound bias in our respective scriptures; affirming the former and moving beyond the later. WE COMMIT ourselves to teaching the God of justice, compassion, love, and respect Who speaks to us through all scriptures, and Who calls us to free ourselves from fear, greed, anger, ignorance, and violence.
WE CALL upon peoples of every faith to liberate the wisdom of God from the xenophobia of tribe and ego, and to free religion from fear and violence by distinguishing the holy from the merely sacred. WE CALL upon peoples of every faith to share their wisdom with the world, to fearlessly speak out when their faith is kidnapped by evil, and to remind us all that there is no god but God, and that justice and compassion are the way of God for all time and for all people.
If we are to turn back from the brink of global apocalypse we must resist the call to endless war; we must resist the lure of ideologies and revelations that perpetrate evil in the name of God and country; we must resist those gods, religions, cultures, and individuals who claim hate is better than hope, and fear is better than love, and cruelty is better than justice, and terror is better than talk; we must resist the claims that evil done in the name of God is any less evil; and we must resist those who wish to engulf the entire world in a thermonuclear bonfire of theological vanities. Do you have the will to resist? The fate of humanity rests on your answer.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Resist Evil, Part One
Over the past few weeks I facilitated a conversation on Islam hosted by Congregation Micah of Nashville, Tennessee. With the help of two leading members of the Nashville Muslim community, we sought to grasp the central tenants of the faith, its commitment to justice and peace, its love of God and submission to God’s Will, and to wrestle with the harsh teachings of Qur’an regarding nonbelievers in general and Jews in particular. The question that haunted me was this: Why does God/Allah teach hate?
My answer is simple enough: God doesn’t teach hate because God didn’t dictate the Qur’an or any other book. I believe people write books, and people preach hate, and hate-filled people know that putting their own hate into the mouth of God is a powerful way of promoting their own agenda. This is what the authors of Torah did when trying to convince the Israelites to wage genocide against the peoples of Canaan. This is what Matthew, Luke, John, and Paul did when they taught the vileness of the Jew in an attempt to rally Gentiles to their new religion of the risen Christ. This is what Muhammad did when seeking to ally his forces against his enemies, including the Jews of Medina. It is my opinion that unless and until we root out human evil masquerading as divine will we cannot free ourselves from committing atrocities in the name of God.
Here are some of the teachings of the Qur’an regarding Jews:
The Jews wronged themselves (16:118) by losing faith (7:168) and breaking their covenant with God (5:13). The Jews kill their prophets (4:155; 2:91) and murdered Jesus (3:55; 4:157). The Jews ridiculed Muhammad (2:104; 4:46), and distort the truth (3:71; 4:46). Jews are envious (2:109), and heartless (2:74). They confound the truth (2:42), and deliberately pervert scripture (2:75). They are liars (2:78), and idol worshippers (2:53). Jews are deceived by their own lies (3:24), and try to lure Muslims away from Islam (3:99). Jews are blind and deaf to the truth (5:71), and what they have not forgotten they have perverted. Jews mislead the people (3:69), and cheat Gentiles without remorse (3:75). Muslims are warned against befriending Jews (5:51), and are warned never to forget that the Jews hate them (5:82). The Jews are the devil's minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, and they will be destroyed (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam they will be turned into apes (2:65; 7:166) or pigs (5:60), and they will burn in hellfire (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).
As painful to Jews as these teachings may be, they are not new. If the Qur’an is God’s word, he is repeating himself. Listen to what the New Testament has to say about Jews:
Jews are “a brood of vipers” and “evil” (Matthew 12:34); they willingly take upon themselves and their children the blood of the murdered Christ (Matthew 27:25); Jews are Satan’s children, murderers and liars by nature (John 8:44-47), and they are “not of God” at all (John 8:47). Jews are stubborn, heartless and deaf to the truth, resisting the Holy Spirit from their very beginnings; and Jews persecute all prophets who foretold the coming of Christ who they have betrayed and murdered (Acts 7:51-53). Jews who reject Christ are members of Satan’s synagogue (Revelation 3:9). And Saint Paul in 1 Thessalonians (2:15-16) writes that Jews killed Jesus and previous prophets, persecute Christians in order to prevent them from bringing salvation to the Gentiles, and in this way have earned the wrath of God that is about to be heaped upon them.
Are these vile teachings of God found in the New Testament and the Qur’an simply artifacts of history meriting no concern? Or do they poison the very religions they birth? Listen to the teachings of Martin Luther, no less a man of God than Muhammad. Like Muhammad before him, Martin Luther imagined that his religious reformation would earn him the allegiance of the Jews, and, again like Muhammad, when that allegiance was not forthcoming, he turned on the Jews with a vengeance.
In his book On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) Luther writes that Jews who remain loyal to Judaism are “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth,” (On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229, cited in Michael, Robert, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 111). The Jews are “full of the devil’s feces… in which they wallow like swine,” (ibid. p. 113). The synagogue he tells us is an “incorrigible whore and an evil slut,” and he urges the burning of synagogues and Jewish schools, the destruction of Jewish prayer books, the silencing of rabbis, the razing of Jewish homes, and the confiscation of Jewish property and wealth. Jews should be shown no mercy, granted no legal protection, and should be forced into slave camps or permanently expelled. He even implies that murdering Jews should be tolerated and says that Christians “are at fault for not slaying them” (On the Jews and Their Lies, cited in Robert Michael ("Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews," Encounter 46 (Autumn 1985) No. 4:343-344).
Luther’s book was central to the Jew-hatred that defined Protestant Europe, and was proudly displayed by the Nazis during their Nuremberg rallies. It took over four centuries for the Lutheran Church to begin to formally question Luther’s anti-Semitism and distance itself from it. For example, in November 1998, on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht and 455 years after the publication of On the Jews and Their Lies, the Lutheran Church of Bavaria issued this statement: “It is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from every [expression of] anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology” ("Christians and Jews: A Declaration of the Lutheran Church of Bavaria", November 24, 1998). Other Lutheran groups have made similar statements.
Do not imagine that God-sanctioned hate and genocide belongs to Christians and Muslims alone. Here are the words of Torah:
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their Gods, and so to sin against the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 20:10-18; RSV)
Regarding those who lived in the Promised Land prior to the coming of the Israelites the Bible says:
They should be utterly destroyed, and should receive no mercy but be exterminated as the LORD commanded Moses (Joshua 11:20). Utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling (I Samuel 15:3). You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear. The LORD will swallow them up in his wrath and fire will consume them. You will destroy their offspring from the earth and their children from among the sons of men (Psalms 21:9-10 RSV).
And lest you think that this Jewish lust for blood ended with the Hebrew Bible listen to the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides: “Moses bequeathed the 613 commandments only to Israel,” and “in a similar fashion Moses was commanded to enforce the seven commandments of Noah upon every human being— and whoever does not accept them, must be killed (Laws of Kings 8,10).
The madness so many attribute to Islam alone infects all three Abrahamic traditions. The only reason we Jews seem to have the moral high ground demanding justice from Christians and Muslims is that there are no Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites to bring charges against us. And if there were, and if they did, would we Jews be willing to deny the genocidal god we call Aveinu Malkeinu, our Father our King?
[I will post Part Two of this essay tomorrow.]
My answer is simple enough: God doesn’t teach hate because God didn’t dictate the Qur’an or any other book. I believe people write books, and people preach hate, and hate-filled people know that putting their own hate into the mouth of God is a powerful way of promoting their own agenda. This is what the authors of Torah did when trying to convince the Israelites to wage genocide against the peoples of Canaan. This is what Matthew, Luke, John, and Paul did when they taught the vileness of the Jew in an attempt to rally Gentiles to their new religion of the risen Christ. This is what Muhammad did when seeking to ally his forces against his enemies, including the Jews of Medina. It is my opinion that unless and until we root out human evil masquerading as divine will we cannot free ourselves from committing atrocities in the name of God.
Here are some of the teachings of the Qur’an regarding Jews:
The Jews wronged themselves (16:118) by losing faith (7:168) and breaking their covenant with God (5:13). The Jews kill their prophets (4:155; 2:91) and murdered Jesus (3:55; 4:157). The Jews ridiculed Muhammad (2:104; 4:46), and distort the truth (3:71; 4:46). Jews are envious (2:109), and heartless (2:74). They confound the truth (2:42), and deliberately pervert scripture (2:75). They are liars (2:78), and idol worshippers (2:53). Jews are deceived by their own lies (3:24), and try to lure Muslims away from Islam (3:99). Jews are blind and deaf to the truth (5:71), and what they have not forgotten they have perverted. Jews mislead the people (3:69), and cheat Gentiles without remorse (3:75). Muslims are warned against befriending Jews (5:51), and are warned never to forget that the Jews hate them (5:82). The Jews are the devil's minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, and they will be destroyed (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam they will be turned into apes (2:65; 7:166) or pigs (5:60), and they will burn in hellfire (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).
As painful to Jews as these teachings may be, they are not new. If the Qur’an is God’s word, he is repeating himself. Listen to what the New Testament has to say about Jews:
Jews are “a brood of vipers” and “evil” (Matthew 12:34); they willingly take upon themselves and their children the blood of the murdered Christ (Matthew 27:25); Jews are Satan’s children, murderers and liars by nature (John 8:44-47), and they are “not of God” at all (John 8:47). Jews are stubborn, heartless and deaf to the truth, resisting the Holy Spirit from their very beginnings; and Jews persecute all prophets who foretold the coming of Christ who they have betrayed and murdered (Acts 7:51-53). Jews who reject Christ are members of Satan’s synagogue (Revelation 3:9). And Saint Paul in 1 Thessalonians (2:15-16) writes that Jews killed Jesus and previous prophets, persecute Christians in order to prevent them from bringing salvation to the Gentiles, and in this way have earned the wrath of God that is about to be heaped upon them.
Are these vile teachings of God found in the New Testament and the Qur’an simply artifacts of history meriting no concern? Or do they poison the very religions they birth? Listen to the teachings of Martin Luther, no less a man of God than Muhammad. Like Muhammad before him, Martin Luther imagined that his religious reformation would earn him the allegiance of the Jews, and, again like Muhammad, when that allegiance was not forthcoming, he turned on the Jews with a vengeance.
In his book On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) Luther writes that Jews who remain loyal to Judaism are “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth,” (On the Jews and Their Lies, 154, 167, 229, cited in Michael, Robert, Holy Hatred: Christianity, Anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 111). The Jews are “full of the devil’s feces… in which they wallow like swine,” (ibid. p. 113). The synagogue he tells us is an “incorrigible whore and an evil slut,” and he urges the burning of synagogues and Jewish schools, the destruction of Jewish prayer books, the silencing of rabbis, the razing of Jewish homes, and the confiscation of Jewish property and wealth. Jews should be shown no mercy, granted no legal protection, and should be forced into slave camps or permanently expelled. He even implies that murdering Jews should be tolerated and says that Christians “are at fault for not slaying them” (On the Jews and Their Lies, cited in Robert Michael ("Luther, Luther Scholars, and the Jews," Encounter 46 (Autumn 1985) No. 4:343-344).
Luther’s book was central to the Jew-hatred that defined Protestant Europe, and was proudly displayed by the Nazis during their Nuremberg rallies. It took over four centuries for the Lutheran Church to begin to formally question Luther’s anti-Semitism and distance itself from it. For example, in November 1998, on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht and 455 years after the publication of On the Jews and Their Lies, the Lutheran Church of Bavaria issued this statement: “It is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from every [expression of] anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology” ("Christians and Jews: A Declaration of the Lutheran Church of Bavaria", November 24, 1998). Other Lutheran groups have made similar statements.
Do not imagine that God-sanctioned hate and genocide belongs to Christians and Muslims alone. Here are the words of Torah:
When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their Gods, and so to sin against the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 20:10-18; RSV)
Regarding those who lived in the Promised Land prior to the coming of the Israelites the Bible says:
They should be utterly destroyed, and should receive no mercy but be exterminated as the LORD commanded Moses (Joshua 11:20). Utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling (I Samuel 15:3). You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear. The LORD will swallow them up in his wrath and fire will consume them. You will destroy their offspring from the earth and their children from among the sons of men (Psalms 21:9-10 RSV).
And lest you think that this Jewish lust for blood ended with the Hebrew Bible listen to the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides: “Moses bequeathed the 613 commandments only to Israel,” and “in a similar fashion Moses was commanded to enforce the seven commandments of Noah upon every human being— and whoever does not accept them, must be killed (Laws of Kings 8,10).
The madness so many attribute to Islam alone infects all three Abrahamic traditions. The only reason we Jews seem to have the moral high ground demanding justice from Christians and Muslims is that there are no Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites to bring charges against us. And if there were, and if they did, would we Jews be willing to deny the genocidal god we call Aveinu Malkeinu, our Father our King?
[I will post Part Two of this essay tomorrow.]
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Wheel of Misfortune
Do you ever wonder what will happen to sinners when they die? I admit that I don’t spend much time on this question, but there are people who do, and I am always interested in the opinions of these folks especially when they have the backing of religious professionals. So you can imagine my interest when the Vatican recently released the following finding: Men sentenced to hell for sins of lust will have their souls pummeled with fire and brimstone, and women convicted of the sin of pride will have their souls “broken on a wheel.”
Honestly my own musings on the topic never came close to these findings, and I am grateful to the Church for making them public. But I do have a few questions. For example, as a man I would like to know if I will be tied to a target when the fire and brimstone is thrown or if I am free to duck and dodge? I am also curious if the soul if flammable or not.
As for the fate of prideful women I am curious as to how a soul, which I assume has no bones, can be broken on the wheel. And it would be helpful to know if the wheel is solid like the ones used by the Vatican during the Inquisition (presumably modeled after God’s heaven wheel of misfortune), or if this is a spirit wheel? And how is the soul tied to either wheel or target?
All of this begs two more central questions: Who invented such a sadistic god in the first place, and why are we so eager to praise him?
I for one find it hard to take seriously any religion so clearly addicted to a god who makes the Marquis de Sade look like Mr. Rogers. What is it about us that we want to worship a sadistic King who takes delight in the eternal torture of his creation? When parents act the way God the Father does we arrest them. How come when it comes to God we send him money?
I don’t believe religion tells us much of anything about the reality God, heaven, hell, and the like, any more than I believe Star Trek tells us much about the reality of alien species. But I do think religion tells us a lot about those who invent it, control it, benefit from it, and allow themselves to be abused by it. What this new revelation from the Vatican tells me is that we humans are one sick species.
Why invent a God who plays with fire and has a fixation on torturing women with medieval instruments of terror? Who is moved to praise this Guy? And why? How much idiocy can people take in the name of God before we finally say, “Enough!”? How outlandish do the claims of religious leaders have to be before their followers simply walk away in disgust?
Given the history of religion and its current track record I cannot help but conclude that we humans have a limitless capacity for religious terror, brutality, and sadism both in this life and the next.
Of course being disgusted with sadistic religion doesn’t make it wrong. I may be destined to play brimstone dodge ball with God for all eternity which is why I’m adding a clause to my will insisting that I be buried in a shroud made of asbestos. Ladies, I suggest you start taking yoga classes to better work that wheel.
Honestly my own musings on the topic never came close to these findings, and I am grateful to the Church for making them public. But I do have a few questions. For example, as a man I would like to know if I will be tied to a target when the fire and brimstone is thrown or if I am free to duck and dodge? I am also curious if the soul if flammable or not.
As for the fate of prideful women I am curious as to how a soul, which I assume has no bones, can be broken on the wheel. And it would be helpful to know if the wheel is solid like the ones used by the Vatican during the Inquisition (presumably modeled after God’s heaven wheel of misfortune), or if this is a spirit wheel? And how is the soul tied to either wheel or target?
All of this begs two more central questions: Who invented such a sadistic god in the first place, and why are we so eager to praise him?
I for one find it hard to take seriously any religion so clearly addicted to a god who makes the Marquis de Sade look like Mr. Rogers. What is it about us that we want to worship a sadistic King who takes delight in the eternal torture of his creation? When parents act the way God the Father does we arrest them. How come when it comes to God we send him money?
I don’t believe religion tells us much of anything about the reality God, heaven, hell, and the like, any more than I believe Star Trek tells us much about the reality of alien species. But I do think religion tells us a lot about those who invent it, control it, benefit from it, and allow themselves to be abused by it. What this new revelation from the Vatican tells me is that we humans are one sick species.
Why invent a God who plays with fire and has a fixation on torturing women with medieval instruments of terror? Who is moved to praise this Guy? And why? How much idiocy can people take in the name of God before we finally say, “Enough!”? How outlandish do the claims of religious leaders have to be before their followers simply walk away in disgust?
Given the history of religion and its current track record I cannot help but conclude that we humans have a limitless capacity for religious terror, brutality, and sadism both in this life and the next.
Of course being disgusted with sadistic religion doesn’t make it wrong. I may be destined to play brimstone dodge ball with God for all eternity which is why I’m adding a clause to my will insisting that I be buried in a shroud made of asbestos. Ladies, I suggest you start taking yoga classes to better work that wheel.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Urine or You're Out
Ever wonder how far you’d go to be healed? I started thinking about this after reading about a Hindu group promoting the drinking of cow urine as a way to cure what ails you. The cow is sacred to many Hindus, symbolizing as it does the forces of life and fertility, so it is not such a stretch to imagine that the urine of a cow might be life-giving.
I have two problems with drinking cow urine. First, I’m a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten a cow in decades, and I am concerned that drinking the urine of a cow might be a violation of my vow of vegetarian abstinence similar to my hypocritical choice to eat eggs while refraining from eating chickens. This problem is, however, of lesser import than my second problem, which in fact renders my first problem mute. My second problem is this: Drink cow urine? Are you out of your frackin’ mind?
You can see how my second problem trumps my first. Yet perhaps my response is simply an expression of ignorance and cultural bias. After all I am not a specialist in cows or urine (though my sister collects ceramic cows and I do pee), and my limited training in Hinduism never covered urine drinking. (I know Gandhi drank urine, but who knows what you might drink after fasting for weeks on end?) So maybe there is something more to it than meets the eye.
To find out I placed a call to India to ask some Hindu scholars about drinking cow urine. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone in India, let alone scholars of Hinduism, so I didn’t deliberately call a specific person. No, I dialed the call centers of several credit card companies whose cards I own, and kept calling until I found a very lovely Indian woman named Tiffany. When I asked Tiffany if she drank cow urine she reminded me that “this call may be monitored for training purposes.” She then hung up on me.
I took up a second credit card and within minutes was taking to another Hindu, a fellow named was Devin, who told me he lived with his parents, was finishing college, and planned to come to the States for graduate school.
“Do you drink cow urine?” I asked.
“No!” he said with genuine shock. “Is that required for study in America?”
“No, no, “ I assured him. “But I thought Hindus drank the urine of cows and I wanted to know if you found it soothing and healing because I don’t want to try it unless it really works.”
Devin was silent for a moment and the call was taken over by a man who identified himself as Mr. Prahadamananda, whose name sounded so unlike authentic Hindu names like Tiffany and Devin that I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a Hindu and maybe wasn’t even speaking to me from India. In any case Mr. P. insisted that I was wasting the time of his employees, insulting his faith, and in need of an identity theft protection service that my credit card company was offering at a special introductory rate.
I explained to him that as a Hindu he should know that my identity was entirely fictional and illusory in the first place, and that there is no protection from maya. Mr. Prahadamananda said nothing, and continued to say nothing for such a long time that I finally realized he was no longer on the line.
I gave up calling after that, so if you’re interested in drinking cow urine you will have to call your own credit card company.
I have two problems with drinking cow urine. First, I’m a vegetarian. I haven’t eaten a cow in decades, and I am concerned that drinking the urine of a cow might be a violation of my vow of vegetarian abstinence similar to my hypocritical choice to eat eggs while refraining from eating chickens. This problem is, however, of lesser import than my second problem, which in fact renders my first problem mute. My second problem is this: Drink cow urine? Are you out of your frackin’ mind?
You can see how my second problem trumps my first. Yet perhaps my response is simply an expression of ignorance and cultural bias. After all I am not a specialist in cows or urine (though my sister collects ceramic cows and I do pee), and my limited training in Hinduism never covered urine drinking. (I know Gandhi drank urine, but who knows what you might drink after fasting for weeks on end?) So maybe there is something more to it than meets the eye.
To find out I placed a call to India to ask some Hindu scholars about drinking cow urine. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone in India, let alone scholars of Hinduism, so I didn’t deliberately call a specific person. No, I dialed the call centers of several credit card companies whose cards I own, and kept calling until I found a very lovely Indian woman named Tiffany. When I asked Tiffany if she drank cow urine she reminded me that “this call may be monitored for training purposes.” She then hung up on me.
I took up a second credit card and within minutes was taking to another Hindu, a fellow named was Devin, who told me he lived with his parents, was finishing college, and planned to come to the States for graduate school.
“Do you drink cow urine?” I asked.
“No!” he said with genuine shock. “Is that required for study in America?”
“No, no, “ I assured him. “But I thought Hindus drank the urine of cows and I wanted to know if you found it soothing and healing because I don’t want to try it unless it really works.”
Devin was silent for a moment and the call was taken over by a man who identified himself as Mr. Prahadamananda, whose name sounded so unlike authentic Hindu names like Tiffany and Devin that I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a Hindu and maybe wasn’t even speaking to me from India. In any case Mr. P. insisted that I was wasting the time of his employees, insulting his faith, and in need of an identity theft protection service that my credit card company was offering at a special introductory rate.
I explained to him that as a Hindu he should know that my identity was entirely fictional and illusory in the first place, and that there is no protection from maya. Mr. Prahadamananda said nothing, and continued to say nothing for such a long time that I finally realized he was no longer on the line.
I gave up calling after that, so if you’re interested in drinking cow urine you will have to call your own credit card company.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Outer Critics, Inner Adversary
I am teaching a course in Mussar, the Jewish ethical training system. One of the Mussar teachings is that each of us contains an Inner Adversary (Yetzer haRah) perfectly tailored to our own psychology, and designed to challenge us to grow ethically at every state of our moral development. It is as if we were each born with an inner moral coach who comes up with tests designed to both test the quality of our present level of attainment and push us toward an even higher one.
While I find the idea intriguing, I must admit that I tended to take it in a somewhat abstract and even off-handed manner. Perhaps because I did so my Inner Adversary decided to work overtime.
Over the past seven days I have received more hate mail that at any other time in my writing career with the single exception of the essay I published in Spirituality & Health magazine critical of The Secret. Most of the mail was from people angry over the way I am teaching a three-week introduction to Islam for Jews.
The basic criticism is that I am whitewashing Islam, making it respectable, when, in fact, it is the greatest threat to Jews, Americans, and democracy in the 21st century. I was called a self-hating Jew, and anti-Semite, a Muslim sympathizer, and a terrorist collaborator.
I admit to being naïve when it comes to people’s responses to my work, and I admit to being shocked, hurt, and not a little frightened by the venom I sensed in these emails. The synagogue hosting this seminar has hired an off-duty police officer to help insure that things do not turn physically violent.
At first I was just stunned and upset by what was happening. Then I remembered the Inner Adversary and, without putting too fine a point on this, began to see this as the work of Yetzer haRah. In other words I set up the conditions that would invite the responses that would force me to look at what I was doing.
Regarding Islam and the teaching of religion in general, I always present the religions I teach in their best light. I want people to learn something positive from these traditions. I also believe that each religion contains gems of wisdom from which all can benefit. So I teach each religion as the best and brightest followers of that faith see that faith. Once we have a sense of that, however, I can and do turn to the darker aspects of the faith.
I also got two letters from a very thoughtful and passionate man responding to my earlier post “I am not Open-Minded.” This gentleman found my basic philosophy empty of any intellectual value whatsoever. I posted both letters in the comments section of that blog entry so you can read them for yourself.
I read his two emails carefully, hoping that I might see where my logic is faulty, and where I need to rethink what I think. The truth is I am still convinced that what I say is not only true, but also compelling.
This of course doesn’t prove either point. All it proves is that I am failing to grow from the efforts of my Yetzer haRah. I’m sorry about that for two reasons. First because it might mean I have reached my intellectual plateau, and, second, because it might mean my Yetzer haRah will try harder.
Disagree with me all you want, but be nice. I bruise easily.
While I find the idea intriguing, I must admit that I tended to take it in a somewhat abstract and even off-handed manner. Perhaps because I did so my Inner Adversary decided to work overtime.
Over the past seven days I have received more hate mail that at any other time in my writing career with the single exception of the essay I published in Spirituality & Health magazine critical of The Secret. Most of the mail was from people angry over the way I am teaching a three-week introduction to Islam for Jews.
The basic criticism is that I am whitewashing Islam, making it respectable, when, in fact, it is the greatest threat to Jews, Americans, and democracy in the 21st century. I was called a self-hating Jew, and anti-Semite, a Muslim sympathizer, and a terrorist collaborator.
I admit to being naïve when it comes to people’s responses to my work, and I admit to being shocked, hurt, and not a little frightened by the venom I sensed in these emails. The synagogue hosting this seminar has hired an off-duty police officer to help insure that things do not turn physically violent.
At first I was just stunned and upset by what was happening. Then I remembered the Inner Adversary and, without putting too fine a point on this, began to see this as the work of Yetzer haRah. In other words I set up the conditions that would invite the responses that would force me to look at what I was doing.
Regarding Islam and the teaching of religion in general, I always present the religions I teach in their best light. I want people to learn something positive from these traditions. I also believe that each religion contains gems of wisdom from which all can benefit. So I teach each religion as the best and brightest followers of that faith see that faith. Once we have a sense of that, however, I can and do turn to the darker aspects of the faith.
I also got two letters from a very thoughtful and passionate man responding to my earlier post “I am not Open-Minded.” This gentleman found my basic philosophy empty of any intellectual value whatsoever. I posted both letters in the comments section of that blog entry so you can read them for yourself.
I read his two emails carefully, hoping that I might see where my logic is faulty, and where I need to rethink what I think. The truth is I am still convinced that what I say is not only true, but also compelling.
This of course doesn’t prove either point. All it proves is that I am failing to grow from the efforts of my Yetzer haRah. I’m sorry about that for two reasons. First because it might mean I have reached my intellectual plateau, and, second, because it might mean my Yetzer haRah will try harder.
Disagree with me all you want, but be nice. I bruise easily.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Religion-Science Smackdown
Monday is Religion Day at USA TODAY and this week’s paper featured an essay by Henry Brinton on honoring religion and science. The gist of Pastor Brinton’s piece is that religion and science answer different questions and therefore should not be in conflict. Religion, he says, speaks to why things are the way they are, and science speaks to how things are the way they are. If this were true there would be no conflict. But it isn’t true, at least not when speaking of the three Abrahamic religions. (The Buddha demanded from the beginning that people test his truth claims for themselves.)
To speak of science this way is to ignore the implications of science and the scientific method. Science isn’t simply a collection of facts about the mechanics of the universe; it is a philosophical stance toward that universe. Science insists that anything that cannot ever be tested and potentially disproved is irrelevant. (This leaves room for many hypotheses that may not be testable today but are open for future testing when such testing becomes possible).
The three Abrahamic religions are not about proof-tests but proof-texts. A matter is true if it appears in or can be made to appear in the holy book of your choice. Jesus is God because the New Testament says he is. Jesus is not God because the Hebrew Bible doesn’t say he is. The Bible Code was a very popular method among some Orthodox Jews for proving that the Torah was true because it showed that the Torah predicted Hitler and the Kennedy assassination (among many other historical events). It quickly fell out of favor when Christian decoders proved that it also predicted Jesus. Adherence to fixed belief rather than a willingness to undergo rigorous testing is the hallmark of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Religion and science offer two very different worldviews. Science is rooted in naturalism, religion in supernaturalism. Science can’t disprove God (God is not testable), but doesn’t need God to explain reality. Religion can’t prove God (God must not be tested), but doesn’t need proof in order to insist that people believe; indeed belief is irrelevant if a matter can be proven.
Nor can religion be confined to abstractions about “why” or lovely pronouncements about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. If religion were only about universal meaning, justice, and love we would have no conflict between religion and science or between one religion and another. But religion demands more than this. It demands loyalty to a set of untestable propositions that elevate some people over others and sanction horrendous acts of violence against those others either in this world or the next. In this sense religion is more like politics than science, more about power than truth.
Science doesn’t need religion to make sense of the world. Nor does science need religion in order to find life-affirming values that transcend human whim and ego. The more science reveals the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life the more it finds scientific justification for an ethic based in mutual caring and support. True, science can be used for evil ends, but so can religion. Neither of which suggests that science and religion are without ethics, only that people ignore ethics when they no longer serve our purposes.
Similarly, religion doesn’t need science to explain the world or to live in it meaningfully. Hence the Taliban, Creationism, and any other fundamentalist faith that ignores or denies the facts of science. So what if they would never get to the moon or split the atom? Getting the heaven is the point of life, and compared to that going to the moon is a distraction.
I understand that many people want to keep religion and science separate. It makes life easier if we compartmentalize things this way: I can live as if the earth orbits the sun six days a week, and pretend that it doesn’t one day a week. What’s the harm? I can live off the oil produced by dinosaurs millions of years ago, and yet insist that in fact there were male and female brontosauruses on Noah’s ark some few thousands of years ago.
But I don’t want reductionist science or ridiculous religion. I don’t want to compartmentalize reason and faith. I want science and religion to work together and the challenge the reductionist tendencies of each. I want priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, swamis well trained in the fundamentals of science, and scientists engaged in the exploration of spiritual potential.
For me religion and science are different languages, different ways of speaking about reality. And as with all languages the each have their brilliance and their blind spots. Science speaks in facts and numbers, religion in myth and metaphor (though some scientists are discovering that metaphor is necessary for them as well). Science is prose, religion is poetry. Science would never posit, “My love is a red red rose” but that doesn’t make the statement false, just metaphoric. Science can help me understand the grandeur of a tree; religion can help me experience its magic. Science can reveal the majesty of the heavens; religion can help me feel its love. Should we separate poetry and prose, or simply recognize them as being unique unto themselves?
Science is like the score of a great symphony; religion is the act of playing that score or listening to it being played by a fine orchestra. They compliment one another. Can we separate the score from the music? Of course not.
The battle between religion and science is silly. It only happens between reductionist fundamentalists in both camps—people who wish to see their way as the only way. At the Science and Spirituality Forum I help direct at Middle Tennessee State University we invite people from all fields to offer their various understandings of life from their various disciplines not to decide which is right, but to discover that all are incomplete and in need of the others.
To speak of science this way is to ignore the implications of science and the scientific method. Science isn’t simply a collection of facts about the mechanics of the universe; it is a philosophical stance toward that universe. Science insists that anything that cannot ever be tested and potentially disproved is irrelevant. (This leaves room for many hypotheses that may not be testable today but are open for future testing when such testing becomes possible).
The three Abrahamic religions are not about proof-tests but proof-texts. A matter is true if it appears in or can be made to appear in the holy book of your choice. Jesus is God because the New Testament says he is. Jesus is not God because the Hebrew Bible doesn’t say he is. The Bible Code was a very popular method among some Orthodox Jews for proving that the Torah was true because it showed that the Torah predicted Hitler and the Kennedy assassination (among many other historical events). It quickly fell out of favor when Christian decoders proved that it also predicted Jesus. Adherence to fixed belief rather than a willingness to undergo rigorous testing is the hallmark of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Religion and science offer two very different worldviews. Science is rooted in naturalism, religion in supernaturalism. Science can’t disprove God (God is not testable), but doesn’t need God to explain reality. Religion can’t prove God (God must not be tested), but doesn’t need proof in order to insist that people believe; indeed belief is irrelevant if a matter can be proven.
Nor can religion be confined to abstractions about “why” or lovely pronouncements about loving one’s neighbor as oneself. If religion were only about universal meaning, justice, and love we would have no conflict between religion and science or between one religion and another. But religion demands more than this. It demands loyalty to a set of untestable propositions that elevate some people over others and sanction horrendous acts of violence against those others either in this world or the next. In this sense religion is more like politics than science, more about power than truth.
Science doesn’t need religion to make sense of the world. Nor does science need religion in order to find life-affirming values that transcend human whim and ego. The more science reveals the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life the more it finds scientific justification for an ethic based in mutual caring and support. True, science can be used for evil ends, but so can religion. Neither of which suggests that science and religion are without ethics, only that people ignore ethics when they no longer serve our purposes.
Similarly, religion doesn’t need science to explain the world or to live in it meaningfully. Hence the Taliban, Creationism, and any other fundamentalist faith that ignores or denies the facts of science. So what if they would never get to the moon or split the atom? Getting the heaven is the point of life, and compared to that going to the moon is a distraction.
I understand that many people want to keep religion and science separate. It makes life easier if we compartmentalize things this way: I can live as if the earth orbits the sun six days a week, and pretend that it doesn’t one day a week. What’s the harm? I can live off the oil produced by dinosaurs millions of years ago, and yet insist that in fact there were male and female brontosauruses on Noah’s ark some few thousands of years ago.
But I don’t want reductionist science or ridiculous religion. I don’t want to compartmentalize reason and faith. I want science and religion to work together and the challenge the reductionist tendencies of each. I want priests, pastors, rabbis, imams, swamis well trained in the fundamentals of science, and scientists engaged in the exploration of spiritual potential.
For me religion and science are different languages, different ways of speaking about reality. And as with all languages the each have their brilliance and their blind spots. Science speaks in facts and numbers, religion in myth and metaphor (though some scientists are discovering that metaphor is necessary for them as well). Science is prose, religion is poetry. Science would never posit, “My love is a red red rose” but that doesn’t make the statement false, just metaphoric. Science can help me understand the grandeur of a tree; religion can help me experience its magic. Science can reveal the majesty of the heavens; religion can help me feel its love. Should we separate poetry and prose, or simply recognize them as being unique unto themselves?
Science is like the score of a great symphony; religion is the act of playing that score or listening to it being played by a fine orchestra. They compliment one another. Can we separate the score from the music? Of course not.
The battle between religion and science is silly. It only happens between reductionist fundamentalists in both camps—people who wish to see their way as the only way. At the Science and Spirituality Forum I help direct at Middle Tennessee State University we invite people from all fields to offer their various understandings of life from their various disciplines not to decide which is right, but to discover that all are incomplete and in need of the others.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Open-minded? Not Me.
During a talk on Judaism delivered at a synagogue last week, I nonchalantly mentioned that I thought of myself as a humanist. I went on to define this as someone who assumed that all systems of belief were of human origin reflecting human biases, concerns, and limitations, and that religion told us more about the worshipper than about the object of their worship. I said that this is why I am so comfortable in interfaith settings—not because I believe all religion is true, but that I believe no religion is true.
The congregation froze at this remark, and the host rabbi leaped up to say how wonderful it was that I felt free enough to share my thoughts, and by doing so proving just how welcoming Judaism is to a wide range of opinions. As the rabbi put as much distance between my ideas and his as possible, I was once again surprised at the seeming rarity of what is to me common sense.
During the question and answer period people sought to reject (as opposed to rebut) my humanism and reaffirm their theism, and I did my best to honor their beliefs. I am always happy to clarify what I believe and inquire with real curiosity into what you believe, but I never argue. And because I don’t argue many people complimented me on my open-mindedness.
I didn’t say anything at the time, but the truth is I am not open-minded. While I rarely get upset when someone disagrees with me, the reason I don’t has nothing to do with being open-minded. Put it this way: I am convinced that the moon is a rock. If you insist it is made of green cheese, I won’t argue with you, but the reason for not arguing has nothing to do with my willingness to entertain the possibility that you are correct in your assessment of the moon. I won’t argue because arguing with someone who believes something so outlandish is simply a waste of time.
Applying this to religion, I do not for a moment imagine that any book is divinely revealed; that any religion is anything other than a human creation serving the socio-economic and political desires of those who created it and gain power and authority from it; or that any idea about god is God.
Do I believe in God? God for me is Reality, the IS-ing of things: that intrinsically creative process that manifests as everything and nothing. God is neither to be feared nor worshipped, but wondered at and marveled over and lived with deep humility, courage, and chutzpah. God is an ever-surprising, irreducible, uncontrollable, celebration of creativity worthy of the deepest respect, awe, reverence, humility, and even love.
God isn’t anywhere or anything; God is everywhere and everything. God doesn’t choose, reward, or punish. God isn’t conscious of me. On the contrary: I am a way God becomes conscious of God. Is any of this Jewish? Not exclusively so, but the language of Judaism works as a way of articulating my beliefs.
For example, I am convinced that Reality is an intrinsically creative process (In the beginning God created, Genesis 1:1); that Reality is a multi-pronged evolutionary experiment in life creation (I will be what I will be, Exodus 3:14), with a penchant for sentience (Let us make humanity, Genesis 1:26); that consciousness pervades all reality (the whole world is filled with God’s glory, Psalm 72:19); that some sentient beings are capable of discovering and consciously participating in the moral nature of Reality as humans perceive it (Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly, Micah 6:8); that the religious geniuses of all time have discovered and articulated the same ethic: Love your neighbor as your self (Leviticus 19:18), and that over time such people continue to expand our understanding of neighbor to ultimately include all reality (Love the Lord your God, Deuteronomy 6:5).
I also believe that just as birds build nests, and beavers build dams, humans make music, art, literature, science, ethics, philosophy, religion, and contemplative tools that sharpen our awareness of the grand play of life. This is why I love what I do, and am blessed to be able to do it. Just don’t imagine my joy at learning the myriad ways we humans make sense of reality has anything to do with being open-minded.
The congregation froze at this remark, and the host rabbi leaped up to say how wonderful it was that I felt free enough to share my thoughts, and by doing so proving just how welcoming Judaism is to a wide range of opinions. As the rabbi put as much distance between my ideas and his as possible, I was once again surprised at the seeming rarity of what is to me common sense.
During the question and answer period people sought to reject (as opposed to rebut) my humanism and reaffirm their theism, and I did my best to honor their beliefs. I am always happy to clarify what I believe and inquire with real curiosity into what you believe, but I never argue. And because I don’t argue many people complimented me on my open-mindedness.
I didn’t say anything at the time, but the truth is I am not open-minded. While I rarely get upset when someone disagrees with me, the reason I don’t has nothing to do with being open-minded. Put it this way: I am convinced that the moon is a rock. If you insist it is made of green cheese, I won’t argue with you, but the reason for not arguing has nothing to do with my willingness to entertain the possibility that you are correct in your assessment of the moon. I won’t argue because arguing with someone who believes something so outlandish is simply a waste of time.
Applying this to religion, I do not for a moment imagine that any book is divinely revealed; that any religion is anything other than a human creation serving the socio-economic and political desires of those who created it and gain power and authority from it; or that any idea about god is God.
Do I believe in God? God for me is Reality, the IS-ing of things: that intrinsically creative process that manifests as everything and nothing. God is neither to be feared nor worshipped, but wondered at and marveled over and lived with deep humility, courage, and chutzpah. God is an ever-surprising, irreducible, uncontrollable, celebration of creativity worthy of the deepest respect, awe, reverence, humility, and even love.
God isn’t anywhere or anything; God is everywhere and everything. God doesn’t choose, reward, or punish. God isn’t conscious of me. On the contrary: I am a way God becomes conscious of God. Is any of this Jewish? Not exclusively so, but the language of Judaism works as a way of articulating my beliefs.
For example, I am convinced that Reality is an intrinsically creative process (In the beginning God created, Genesis 1:1); that Reality is a multi-pronged evolutionary experiment in life creation (I will be what I will be, Exodus 3:14), with a penchant for sentience (Let us make humanity, Genesis 1:26); that consciousness pervades all reality (the whole world is filled with God’s glory, Psalm 72:19); that some sentient beings are capable of discovering and consciously participating in the moral nature of Reality as humans perceive it (Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly, Micah 6:8); that the religious geniuses of all time have discovered and articulated the same ethic: Love your neighbor as your self (Leviticus 19:18), and that over time such people continue to expand our understanding of neighbor to ultimately include all reality (Love the Lord your God, Deuteronomy 6:5).
I also believe that just as birds build nests, and beavers build dams, humans make music, art, literature, science, ethics, philosophy, religion, and contemplative tools that sharpen our awareness of the grand play of life. This is why I love what I do, and am blessed to be able to do it. Just don’t imagine my joy at learning the myriad ways we humans make sense of reality has anything to do with being open-minded.
Friday, February 13, 2009
What's Love Got to Do with It?
Valentine’s Day is February 14th and one billion Valentine cards will be shipped worldwide. One billion affirmations of love and affection! Add to that tons of candy and perhaps a few diamonds and we have a celebration of love that might actually shift the consciousness of the planet. Unfortunately all it does is feed the profit margin of greeting card companies.
The only thing I know about Valentine’s Day is the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago when Al Capone’s Italians gunned down seven of Bugs Moran’s Irish. I always assumed this was contrary to the spirit of the day, but it turns out I was wrong. There are three saints called Valentine who vie for the honor of being THE Saint Valentine and all three of them were murdered: Valentine of Rome was martyred around 269 CE, Valentine of Terni was killed during the persecution of Christians in 197 CE, and a Valentine about whom nothing is known except that he was martyred in Africa. So blood and murder rather than candy and diamonds are the real traditions of the holiday.
How did we get from martyrs to lovesick chocoholics? I’m coming to that. But first I think it is important to note that the original love celebrated on Valentine’s Day was love of Christ. These three Valentines were killed because of their love of their Lord and their faith. Jews, Christians, and Muslims love their martyrs. There is something about dying for one’s religion that speaks powerfully of… what?
What idea would I be willing to die for? This is a very different question than its corollary, what idea would I be willing to kill for. I’d being willing to kill you for disagreeing with me about the merits of mint chocolate chip ice cream, the musical quality of the Beatles White Album, and even which Dr. Who is the real Dr. Who. But die? No thanks. I’d rather live to think another thought another day.
But it might be wise to have one day each year set aside to explore where love turns bloody. And this is where the romance comes in.
There is a legend about another Valentine who was rejected by his mistress. This Valentine was so distraught that he took a knife and cut out his own heart and shipped it (still beating!) to his lover as a token of his undying love.
Lots of questions here. How did he manage to cut out his heart, take a coach to the local UPS (or the equivalent of his day), stand in line for who knows how long, wait to have the heart (still beating!) boxed, gift wrapped, and addressed, and still have the strength to pull out his purse and pay for the shipping? And why did he think his girlfriend would prefer a bloody heart (still beating!) to flowers? If this is the kind of taste he had, she was probably right to dump him. And why would this kind of behavior catch on? How many men cut their own hearts out before someone invented the Valentine’s Day card instead?
But the big question is why did this guy become a Saint? He wasn’t a martyr. All he did was commit suicide. You don’t need Jesus for that. At least the other Valentines died because someone else hated what they loved, rather than kill themselves because of what they loved. If the latter had caught on Christianity would die out in a generation.
So, lots of problems with this holiday. But I am not ready to give up on it yet. I just want to get back to tradition.
Here are some suggestions. First, a great seasonal home business would be to make a plastic wind-up beating heart (like plastic chattering teeth) that people could send to their loved ones. Second, more religiously minded people might sell chocolate relics of the Valentines (bones, teeth, hair, still beating hearts) to be given as gifts for the holiday. Third, those with a more secular humanist bent could donate their heart to an organ bank in the name of their loved one. The recipient of the heart would be required to visit the designated loved one every Valentine’s Day. Nothing says “I love you” like a visit from the heart of a dead lover.
My own preference, however, is to spend the day thinking about for what and for whom I would die. I know most of us would be willing to die for our kids, but those of us who actually have children can probably remember moments when we wanted to kill them, so let’s not be too smug.
Anyway, Happy Valentines Day.
The only thing I know about Valentine’s Day is the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago when Al Capone’s Italians gunned down seven of Bugs Moran’s Irish. I always assumed this was contrary to the spirit of the day, but it turns out I was wrong. There are three saints called Valentine who vie for the honor of being THE Saint Valentine and all three of them were murdered: Valentine of Rome was martyred around 269 CE, Valentine of Terni was killed during the persecution of Christians in 197 CE, and a Valentine about whom nothing is known except that he was martyred in Africa. So blood and murder rather than candy and diamonds are the real traditions of the holiday.
How did we get from martyrs to lovesick chocoholics? I’m coming to that. But first I think it is important to note that the original love celebrated on Valentine’s Day was love of Christ. These three Valentines were killed because of their love of their Lord and their faith. Jews, Christians, and Muslims love their martyrs. There is something about dying for one’s religion that speaks powerfully of… what?
What idea would I be willing to die for? This is a very different question than its corollary, what idea would I be willing to kill for. I’d being willing to kill you for disagreeing with me about the merits of mint chocolate chip ice cream, the musical quality of the Beatles White Album, and even which Dr. Who is the real Dr. Who. But die? No thanks. I’d rather live to think another thought another day.
But it might be wise to have one day each year set aside to explore where love turns bloody. And this is where the romance comes in.
There is a legend about another Valentine who was rejected by his mistress. This Valentine was so distraught that he took a knife and cut out his own heart and shipped it (still beating!) to his lover as a token of his undying love.
Lots of questions here. How did he manage to cut out his heart, take a coach to the local UPS (or the equivalent of his day), stand in line for who knows how long, wait to have the heart (still beating!) boxed, gift wrapped, and addressed, and still have the strength to pull out his purse and pay for the shipping? And why did he think his girlfriend would prefer a bloody heart (still beating!) to flowers? If this is the kind of taste he had, she was probably right to dump him. And why would this kind of behavior catch on? How many men cut their own hearts out before someone invented the Valentine’s Day card instead?
But the big question is why did this guy become a Saint? He wasn’t a martyr. All he did was commit suicide. You don’t need Jesus for that. At least the other Valentines died because someone else hated what they loved, rather than kill themselves because of what they loved. If the latter had caught on Christianity would die out in a generation.
So, lots of problems with this holiday. But I am not ready to give up on it yet. I just want to get back to tradition.
Here are some suggestions. First, a great seasonal home business would be to make a plastic wind-up beating heart (like plastic chattering teeth) that people could send to their loved ones. Second, more religiously minded people might sell chocolate relics of the Valentines (bones, teeth, hair, still beating hearts) to be given as gifts for the holiday. Third, those with a more secular humanist bent could donate their heart to an organ bank in the name of their loved one. The recipient of the heart would be required to visit the designated loved one every Valentine’s Day. Nothing says “I love you” like a visit from the heart of a dead lover.
My own preference, however, is to spend the day thinking about for what and for whom I would die. I know most of us would be willing to die for our kids, but those of us who actually have children can probably remember moments when we wanted to kill them, so let’s not be too smug.
Anyway, Happy Valentines Day.
Sayings of the Juddah
I never pass on stuff like this, but I just got this from a Buddhist friend of mine and thought it was hilarious. So I am passing it on. Good Shabbos to all of you.
Sayings of the Jewish Buddhist
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a Danish.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.
The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. (You might want to see a specialist.)
The Torah says, Love your neighbor as yourself. The Buddha says, "There is no self." So, maybe we're off the hook.
Sayings of the Jewish Buddhist
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a Danish.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.
There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.
The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. (You might want to see a specialist.)
The Torah says, Love your neighbor as yourself. The Buddha says, "There is no self." So, maybe we're off the hook.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Religion and Truth
Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, wrote a very moving and, to me, troubling essay in today's USA TODAY. The basic idea is that too much truth when it comes to religion is a bad thing.
At issue is Rod’s journalistic examination of the sex abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church. It drove him out of Catholicism and into Eastern Orthodoxy. “After I left Rome,” Rod writes, “I made a deliberate decision not to investigate scandal in the Orthodox Church of American (OCA), my new communion.” To his credit Rod says the decision bothered him, but he needed a safe haven and would have one even at the cost of truth.
This is what I found so troubling. If the only way I can remain loyal to a community is by turning a blind eye to evil and falsehood, then I cannot help but question my need for that community.
I assume that power corrupts, and absolute religious power corrupts not only absolutely but existentially. So I steer clear of any religious institution that demands such power for itself. I want a religion that frees me from slavery not one that enslaves me. If the institution is corrupt it is also corrupting, so why would I want to belong to it? Why would I endanger my family by belonging to it?
Rod argues that while it might seem a good thing that the Catholic sex scandal was brought to light, “it’s not such a clear-cut issue.” He fears that by shining light on religion we lose the magic. Just so! Magic isn’t real. When a magician tries to con you into believing what he is doing isn’t simply entertainment but revelation demanding absolute loyalty, it is vital that light be shined on the scam.
But not all religions are like this. True, as Rod says, no institution is perfect nor should we expect it to be, but the more transparent an institution is the less damage it can do. And I am not limiting my concern to religious institutions as Rod does in his fine essay. I think all religious teachings can benefit from daylight: historical and scholarly exploration. If religion is sleight-of-hand and only viable in the half-light of half-truths then I want nothing to do with it.
Rod asks a very important question, “How much reality must we choose to ignore for the greater good of our own souls, and society?” My answer is simple: none. If my religion cannot stand up to reality, who needs it? If my faith doesn’t help me engage reality but rather demands that I ignore reality, who needs it? A religion that ignores reality is just escapist fantasy, no different than watching TV or reading a good novel. And, as many atheists will insist, that is what religion is. But I think there are exceptions.
While I do not believe it is possible to package the truth, I do believe it is possible to point us toward it. That is what religion should do, both theologically and institutionally. If a religion has to lie in order to survive, it is time for that religion to die.
At issue is Rod’s journalistic examination of the sex abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church. It drove him out of Catholicism and into Eastern Orthodoxy. “After I left Rome,” Rod writes, “I made a deliberate decision not to investigate scandal in the Orthodox Church of American (OCA), my new communion.” To his credit Rod says the decision bothered him, but he needed a safe haven and would have one even at the cost of truth.
This is what I found so troubling. If the only way I can remain loyal to a community is by turning a blind eye to evil and falsehood, then I cannot help but question my need for that community.
I assume that power corrupts, and absolute religious power corrupts not only absolutely but existentially. So I steer clear of any religious institution that demands such power for itself. I want a religion that frees me from slavery not one that enslaves me. If the institution is corrupt it is also corrupting, so why would I want to belong to it? Why would I endanger my family by belonging to it?
Rod argues that while it might seem a good thing that the Catholic sex scandal was brought to light, “it’s not such a clear-cut issue.” He fears that by shining light on religion we lose the magic. Just so! Magic isn’t real. When a magician tries to con you into believing what he is doing isn’t simply entertainment but revelation demanding absolute loyalty, it is vital that light be shined on the scam.
But not all religions are like this. True, as Rod says, no institution is perfect nor should we expect it to be, but the more transparent an institution is the less damage it can do. And I am not limiting my concern to religious institutions as Rod does in his fine essay. I think all religious teachings can benefit from daylight: historical and scholarly exploration. If religion is sleight-of-hand and only viable in the half-light of half-truths then I want nothing to do with it.
Rod asks a very important question, “How much reality must we choose to ignore for the greater good of our own souls, and society?” My answer is simple: none. If my religion cannot stand up to reality, who needs it? If my faith doesn’t help me engage reality but rather demands that I ignore reality, who needs it? A religion that ignores reality is just escapist fantasy, no different than watching TV or reading a good novel. And, as many atheists will insist, that is what religion is. But I think there are exceptions.
While I do not believe it is possible to package the truth, I do believe it is possible to point us toward it. That is what religion should do, both theologically and institutionally. If a religion has to lie in order to survive, it is time for that religion to die.
Friday, February 06, 2009
Resurrection Diet
I’m fat. I could be fatter, of course, but given my body mass index and all that, it is safe to say I’m fat. I’m not happy about this and I work hard between snacks to do something about it, but still…
I used to worry about being fat, but no longer. What changed my mind? New revelations about the coming resurrection.
Newsweek magazine reported on a movement among some Christian and Jewish scholars to get Americans to believe in the literal fact of a physical resurrection at the end of time. (My clocks are off, so I’m not exactly sure how much time is left before the end of time, but I assume there is still time for a quick run to pay homage to my earthly lords Burger King and his Dairy Queen before I meet the King of Kings).
What does all this have to do with being fat? Everything. According to religion scholar Paula Fredriksen, author of “Augustine and the Jews”, “Our bodies will be the very same as the ones we had in life, but buff and beautiful.”
Buff and beautiful! I have never been buff and beautiful, but if this is what God has in store for me, well Halleluyah!
Lest you think that resurrection isn’t part of the Jewish playbook, let me remind you that the Talmudic rabbis made resurrection one of their few faith requirements. They said that anyone who doesn’t believe in resurrection in the World to Come has no share in the World to Come (Sanhedrin 50a). True, this is not a very persuasive argument; after all if you don’t believe in the World to Come in the first place being threatened with not having a place in it isn’t very compelling. But it does show that they took the idea seriously.
And then there is Maimonides who made resurrection the thirteenth of his list of Thirteen Principles of Faith: "I believe with complete (perfect) faith, that there will be techiat hameitim - revival of the dead, whenever it will be God's, blessed be He, will (desire) to arise and do so. May (God's) Name be blessed, and may His remembrance arise, forever and ever." That last part just shows what a suck-up Maimonides was, but facts are facts and Jews are supposed to believe in bodily resurrection. And I for one am going for it.
Here’s my plan. Given the hard economic times more and more people are going to become poor. It is a fact that poor people eat more fast food than rich people. It is also a fact that fast food makes you fatter than slow food. So there will be more and more poor people who are getting fatter and fatter. I think I can capitalize on this.
I’m going to start selling a new program called the Resurrection Diet. There’s no calorie counting or exercise involved. It doesn’t matter how thin or fat you are in this life, after all this life is temporary. “Eternity in the buff bod you always wanted” is my slogan. All you have to do is get resurrected. And all you have to do to get resurrected is to believe in the resurrection.
The Resurrection Diet is simple: People will send me ten dollars American and I will send them a copy of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. You can eat what you want, lie around watching television, just swear allegiance to the Thirteen Principles. That will get you into the resurrection and the buff and beautiful bod that comes with it. It’s easier than The Secret!
But wait! That’s not all! Even if you don’t believe in the Thirteen Principles you still get resurrected. Yes you will spend eternity in your buff and beautiful body doing Bikram Yoga® in hell, but we will throw in Sham-Wow® towels to help keep the sweat out of your eyes so you can ogle all those other dead beauties.
But wait! There’s more! If you send me the money now, I will send you two copies of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles. That’s two copies of the Thirteen Principles plus the Sham-Wow® towels all for ten dollars plus shipping and handling.
But wait! There’s even more. The first million callers may also receive my perhaps never to be published book, “Left Behind, Right Behind, Tight Behind: Having the Butt You Want in Heaven.”
Call now. Operators are standing by.
I used to worry about being fat, but no longer. What changed my mind? New revelations about the coming resurrection.
Newsweek magazine reported on a movement among some Christian and Jewish scholars to get Americans to believe in the literal fact of a physical resurrection at the end of time. (My clocks are off, so I’m not exactly sure how much time is left before the end of time, but I assume there is still time for a quick run to pay homage to my earthly lords Burger King and his Dairy Queen before I meet the King of Kings).
What does all this have to do with being fat? Everything. According to religion scholar Paula Fredriksen, author of “Augustine and the Jews”, “Our bodies will be the very same as the ones we had in life, but buff and beautiful.”
Buff and beautiful! I have never been buff and beautiful, but if this is what God has in store for me, well Halleluyah!
Lest you think that resurrection isn’t part of the Jewish playbook, let me remind you that the Talmudic rabbis made resurrection one of their few faith requirements. They said that anyone who doesn’t believe in resurrection in the World to Come has no share in the World to Come (Sanhedrin 50a). True, this is not a very persuasive argument; after all if you don’t believe in the World to Come in the first place being threatened with not having a place in it isn’t very compelling. But it does show that they took the idea seriously.
And then there is Maimonides who made resurrection the thirteenth of his list of Thirteen Principles of Faith: "I believe with complete (perfect) faith, that there will be techiat hameitim - revival of the dead, whenever it will be God's, blessed be He, will (desire) to arise and do so. May (God's) Name be blessed, and may His remembrance arise, forever and ever." That last part just shows what a suck-up Maimonides was, but facts are facts and Jews are supposed to believe in bodily resurrection. And I for one am going for it.
Here’s my plan. Given the hard economic times more and more people are going to become poor. It is a fact that poor people eat more fast food than rich people. It is also a fact that fast food makes you fatter than slow food. So there will be more and more poor people who are getting fatter and fatter. I think I can capitalize on this.
I’m going to start selling a new program called the Resurrection Diet. There’s no calorie counting or exercise involved. It doesn’t matter how thin or fat you are in this life, after all this life is temporary. “Eternity in the buff bod you always wanted” is my slogan. All you have to do is get resurrected. And all you have to do to get resurrected is to believe in the resurrection.
The Resurrection Diet is simple: People will send me ten dollars American and I will send them a copy of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. You can eat what you want, lie around watching television, just swear allegiance to the Thirteen Principles. That will get you into the resurrection and the buff and beautiful bod that comes with it. It’s easier than The Secret!
But wait! That’s not all! Even if you don’t believe in the Thirteen Principles you still get resurrected. Yes you will spend eternity in your buff and beautiful body doing Bikram Yoga® in hell, but we will throw in Sham-Wow® towels to help keep the sweat out of your eyes so you can ogle all those other dead beauties.
But wait! There’s more! If you send me the money now, I will send you two copies of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles. That’s two copies of the Thirteen Principles plus the Sham-Wow® towels all for ten dollars plus shipping and handling.
But wait! There’s even more. The first million callers may also receive my perhaps never to be published book, “Left Behind, Right Behind, Tight Behind: Having the Butt You Want in Heaven.”
Call now. Operators are standing by.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Putting the Nut in Donut
Sometimes the left just goes too far. In this case its hatred of the unborn has sunk to new lows as that noted left-wing god-hating company Krispy Kreme uses its irresistible donuts to lure unsuspecting Americans into supporting abortion rights. Here’s the story:
Seeking to capitalize on the excitement surrounding Inauguration Day, Krispy Kreme announced that it was giving away a free donut on January 20th. While giving away anything for free is clearly anti-capitalist, this isn’t what was so offensive about the Krispy Kreme move. In advertising their free donut scheme the company said they were giving the donuts away as a way of “honoring Americans’ sense of pride and freedom of choice.”
Americans and “freedom of choice”? How dare they! Everyone knows that freedom of choice is code for abortion rights. Krispy Kreme was supporting the murder of the unborn. Or at least that is what the American Life League believes. Its president Judie Brown said, “Choice is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of freedom of choice is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights.” Take that you donut sucking God haters!
Krispy Kreme was quick to deny any intent to link donuts with abortion, but the facts are the facts. First donuts are sort of shaped like diaphragms. Second… well, there is no second but the shape of a donut is bad enough. And when you realize that donuts have holes and crullers are shaped like uh, you know, the male member or p#n#s, it is clear that Krispy Kreme is pro-sex, anti-abstinence, as well as being pro-abortion.
So kudos to the American Life League! But why stop with creaming Krispy? I say let’s go after every organization that supports choice starting with the United States government. From this day forward I am urging all Americans who love zygotes to demand an end to beef labeled "USDA Choice". I am also demanding that Americans boycott the Choice Hotel chain, Healthy Choice food products, voucher systems promoting school choice, and Citizens for Healthy Options in Children’s Education (CHOICE) and their efforts to improve school lunches which, for all I know, probably includes substituting Krispy Kreme donuts for Sloppy Joes. And this is just for starters.
By November of 2012 I hope to see all references to choice removed from every book, dictionary, company, agency, and institution in these God fearing United States. There is only one way to end abortion and that is to make sure that no one is free to choose anything. I hope you agree.
[By the way, if you know anyone at Dunkin’ Donuts please see if you can get them to financially support me in this anti-Krispy Kreme effort. It will be good for their business.]
Seeking to capitalize on the excitement surrounding Inauguration Day, Krispy Kreme announced that it was giving away a free donut on January 20th. While giving away anything for free is clearly anti-capitalist, this isn’t what was so offensive about the Krispy Kreme move. In advertising their free donut scheme the company said they were giving the donuts away as a way of “honoring Americans’ sense of pride and freedom of choice.”
Americans and “freedom of choice”? How dare they! Everyone knows that freedom of choice is code for abortion rights. Krispy Kreme was supporting the murder of the unborn. Or at least that is what the American Life League believes. Its president Judie Brown said, “Choice is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of freedom of choice is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights.” Take that you donut sucking God haters!
Krispy Kreme was quick to deny any intent to link donuts with abortion, but the facts are the facts. First donuts are sort of shaped like diaphragms. Second… well, there is no second but the shape of a donut is bad enough. And when you realize that donuts have holes and crullers are shaped like uh, you know, the male member or p#n#s, it is clear that Krispy Kreme is pro-sex, anti-abstinence, as well as being pro-abortion.
So kudos to the American Life League! But why stop with creaming Krispy? I say let’s go after every organization that supports choice starting with the United States government. From this day forward I am urging all Americans who love zygotes to demand an end to beef labeled "USDA Choice". I am also demanding that Americans boycott the Choice Hotel chain, Healthy Choice food products, voucher systems promoting school choice, and Citizens for Healthy Options in Children’s Education (CHOICE) and their efforts to improve school lunches which, for all I know, probably includes substituting Krispy Kreme donuts for Sloppy Joes. And this is just for starters.
By November of 2012 I hope to see all references to choice removed from every book, dictionary, company, agency, and institution in these God fearing United States. There is only one way to end abortion and that is to make sure that no one is free to choose anything. I hope you agree.
[By the way, if you know anyone at Dunkin’ Donuts please see if you can get them to financially support me in this anti-Krispy Kreme effort. It will be good for their business.]
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Gay Gene
Today I learned that Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, gave the invocation at the pre-inaugural “We are One” concert hosted by the Obama’s at the Lincoln Memorial. The fact that I didn’t know there was such a concert, and was not invited to attend the concert let alone offer a prayer at the concert probably doesn’t concern you. It should, but it probably doesn’t. The fact that Robinson’s prayer was cut from the broadcast of the concert does concern you. And it should.
With all the controversy surrounding the inaugural invocation given by Rev. Rick Warren, noted enemy of all things gay, one would think that Bishop Robinson would be big news. But it seems to have been, shall we say, kept in the closet. The HBO broadcast of the event chose not to include it (true), and Fox News refused to even mention it saying, “There is no such thing as a gay Gene” (not really true but you know it could be true if I hadn’t made it up).
This is troubling, but understandable. Rick Warren usually wears Hawaiian shirts and Obama’s grandmother lived in Hawaii, so featuring him makes sense. And Rev. Joseph Lowry, contrary to many who believe he was asked to pray because he was black, was invited because he could speak in rhyme (as opposed to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, also black, whose “God damn America” prayer is free verse). Obama prefers rhyme, that choice makes sense as well. But other than the fact that almost every gay person in America supported Obama with cash and votes, the President has no real ties to the gay community.
I get that our President (and every president) is a politician, so I understand why President Obama would want to snuggle up to the Evangelical Christian community who didn’t support him while taking the Gay community for granted. After all I watched every episode of West Wing. But, had he followed my advice, the President could have pleased both communities.
My suggestion to the Inaugural Planning Committee was to kill two birds with one stone and invite evangelical pastor Ted Haggard to speak. That way the President could kiss the butts of both pro-lifers and homosexuals at the same time. The fact that they once again failed to listen to me aside, Bishop Robinson’s prayer blew the other two out of the water.
Because most of us were prevented from seeing Bishop Robinson give his prayer, I am reprinting his text here. The prayer was taped by Sarah Pulliam, who is, ironically, a reporter for the notably not gay-friendly magazine Christianity Today. Here is Bishop Robinson’s prayer:
“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…
Bless us with tears — tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless this nation with anger — anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort — at the easy, simplistic answers we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience — and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility — open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.
Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance - replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.
And bless us with compassion and generosity - remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.
And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.
Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for all people.
Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain.
Give him stirring words — we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.
Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.
Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.
And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand - that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.
Amen.
Now that’s a prayer! It almost makes me want to become an Episcopalian. Or at least gay.
With all the controversy surrounding the inaugural invocation given by Rev. Rick Warren, noted enemy of all things gay, one would think that Bishop Robinson would be big news. But it seems to have been, shall we say, kept in the closet. The HBO broadcast of the event chose not to include it (true), and Fox News refused to even mention it saying, “There is no such thing as a gay Gene” (not really true but you know it could be true if I hadn’t made it up).
This is troubling, but understandable. Rick Warren usually wears Hawaiian shirts and Obama’s grandmother lived in Hawaii, so featuring him makes sense. And Rev. Joseph Lowry, contrary to many who believe he was asked to pray because he was black, was invited because he could speak in rhyme (as opposed to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, also black, whose “God damn America” prayer is free verse). Obama prefers rhyme, that choice makes sense as well. But other than the fact that almost every gay person in America supported Obama with cash and votes, the President has no real ties to the gay community.
I get that our President (and every president) is a politician, so I understand why President Obama would want to snuggle up to the Evangelical Christian community who didn’t support him while taking the Gay community for granted. After all I watched every episode of West Wing. But, had he followed my advice, the President could have pleased both communities.
My suggestion to the Inaugural Planning Committee was to kill two birds with one stone and invite evangelical pastor Ted Haggard to speak. That way the President could kiss the butts of both pro-lifers and homosexuals at the same time. The fact that they once again failed to listen to me aside, Bishop Robinson’s prayer blew the other two out of the water.
Because most of us were prevented from seeing Bishop Robinson give his prayer, I am reprinting his text here. The prayer was taped by Sarah Pulliam, who is, ironically, a reporter for the notably not gay-friendly magazine Christianity Today. Here is Bishop Robinson’s prayer:
“O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…
Bless us with tears — tears for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless this nation with anger — anger at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort — at the easy, simplistic answers we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience — and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility — open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.
Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance - replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.
And bless us with compassion and generosity - remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.
And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.
Give him wisdom beyond his years, inspire him with President Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for all people.
Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain.
Give him stirring words — we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.
Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.
Give him strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.
And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking far too much of this one. We implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand - that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.
Amen.
Now that’s a prayer! It almost makes me want to become an Episcopalian. Or at least gay.
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