elfs | Entries tagged with religion

I really want to like this article by someone named Belover entitled "Who Says the Bible is Against Porn?," but there's a huge detail missing in the middle of it.

Belover is not wrong that the Bible, unlike most of contemporary Christianity, holds up the naked human body as a beautiful work of God without requiring a context. Contemporary Christians will argue things like "that's only in the context of marriage," but the Bible doesn't say that. Judaic teachings hold that sexual desire is itself divine. There is no teaching that certain sex acts in and of themselves are abominable before God. (Go ahead, quote Deuteronomy at me, I dare you; I'll see your Deuteronomy and raise you Luke 7 and Acts 10.) Belover also points out just how often in the Bible prostitution is shown as just another career choice, one often taken as a reaction to other downfalls, but never in and of itself regarded as a fallen or degraded state.

But Belover makes a huge mistake when he fails to mention porneia. Because that's Paul's massive elephant in the room.

Porneia is really hard to pin down, no matter what the Evangelicals will tell you. ("Paul says it's bad and it starts with the letters P.O.R.N.! What more do you need to know?") I take, from the scholarship I've read, that porneia is actually about power, and about how there was a power structure prevalent in Paul's time that consigned some people to powerless vessels subject to use as relief vessels for the untamed sexuality of cruel men. This power structure abused impoverished girls and boys, and saw them not as full human beings but instead as toys to be used and thrown away. Disposable lives. Paul (and Jesus, and therefore God) object to that, not to any specific sex act or even what body parts are intermingled.

The Bible isn't against pornography, or prostitution per se. The Bible is against institutionalizing violence for the purpose of creating different classes of people and then declaring that one class exists strictly for the use and pleasure of the other, the lower class's wants and needs never being taken into account.

It's true that most of us sell our bodies one way or another; even if we're not sex workers, we schlub off to spend hours in an enclosed box owned by other people, being used by other people, for their profit, of which we get a pittance and it's called a "fair share." Given that it's hard for office workers to not be seen as victims of a weak porneia, how much harder is it for sex workers to escape the status of being disposable?

Until and unless we create an environment where we are all freely choosing to be what we want, the notion that sex work is somehow "different" from, or "distinct" from, the power differential that exists between the exploiter and the exploited, remains ridiculous, and no amount of trying to excuse one's kinks with Biblical quotes will change that.

Current Mood: calm

One of the recurring themes in progressive politics today is the question of empathy, and the constant asking, "If the GOP is allied with The Christian religion, as is often claimed, why doesn't the GOP have any empathy toward the suffering?"

In an article weirdly titled "Election results in Georgia and Florida prompt soul-searching for African Americans," the reporter quotes a white woman who didn't like Trump's "tone" and wanted to send a message, but ultimately voted for the white Republican over the black Democrat:

But she ended up voting for DeSantis, partially because she wanted to see an end to racial divisions. In Cooper’s eyes, tensions between races in Madison only worsened after Obama’s election in 2008. Black neighbors just started seeing everything differently, she said. They seemed consumed with Obama as the first black president and less concerned about how he was affecting the economy in Florida.

“That trickled down to everything,” Cooper said. “Now everyone is so worried about the other race.” She said she felt that a vote for Gillum, who had accused DeSantis of using a racist slur after he warned Florida voters on TV not to “monkey up” the state, would worsen those tensions

This in an example of empathy. This woman suddenly saw her black peers having feelings, being able to express themselves. She saw that they could, in fact, be more than just useful people-shaped devices that did things white people normally wouldn't be bothered to do.

Fred Clark has a wonderful post, "When we flinch at empathy, it curdles into fear and resentment," and the little anecdote shows exactly that. Suddenly forced to think about black people as human beings, suddenly putting them into her world as people with agency, she empathized with their plight just enough to be afraid of what they would do if they were in her place.

The difference between "nice" and "kind" is straightforward: "kindness" has a cost, in time, in energy, in emotion, and even in cash. "Niceness" doesn't. "Niceness" is what you pull out to put on a neutral face in order to navigate the world without having to endure a cost. "Kindness" is when you take an active role in making someone else's life a little better, even for a moment.

I'm sure Mrs. Cooper is a nice woman. When the time came to be kind, however, she realized that, had she been in the shoes of the black men and women of Florida, she'd have enjoyed the power and privilege of the governorship, she wouldn't have been forgiving or merciful. She had plenty of empathy, but it's not her reserve of empathy that failed her. It was her reserve of love.

Christopher Roberts, a Roman Catholic deacon, recently penned an explanation of why it's okay to take gay people at face value as unalterably gay while still condemning them to a life of celibacy, deceit, or general unhappiness. He writes:

Most any result of the Fall — having Down’s Syndrome or Aspergers, having a short temper or being greedy — can be like this. Substitute any disability, sin, proclivity or “thorn in the flesh” in the above paragraph, and you can imagine cases where somebody matured, embraced the necessary asceticism, and turned their weakness or woundedness to spiritual profit.

This is the point where I felt a deep stab of nausea, because I immediately recognized this thought process. Greg Egan, famously neuro-atypical himself, wrote of this passionately when he wrote the novel Distress.

What's the first thing you can do for people you don't agree with? Offer to heal them. Convince them they're sick and then hold out the hope of relief. The power of medical science is about to go hyperbolic, but what is the endpoint of 'health?' Whoever successfully claims the right to define the distinction between health and disease claims the right to define everything.

They get to define what a "baseline" human being is. They get to define what Adam and Eve were like, and decide which deviations from that baseline are worthy of intervention and which ones are not. They impose on those who are "too far" beyond the baseline a special burden: either conform or live with disapproval, excommunication, and banishment.

Roberts may be a priest, but the horror of demanding everyone who's gay or lesbian or in any way not gender-conforming to a life without the unique affection and physical sweetness of sexual skin-on-skin love. The brain is a part of the body and inevitably the physical manifestation, infrastructure, and organizational basis of the mind and the soul, and to assert that a simple variation in the body exiles someone from living a full and joyful life is cruel. Father Roberts is actually trying to refute God by disapproving of some people who God created and in whom the light of God is visible.

Father Roberts' is approving not of a lifestyle, but of a deathstyle. The slow, agonizing death of one's soul when one surrenders to the unending pressure of their society and "maturely embraces the necessary asceticism."

To Hell with that variety of Catholicism.

Current Mood: enraged

So, I have a question about Buddhism.

It's a given in the neurological and psychological sciences that we are fundamentally emotional beings. People whose emotional response centers have been damaged lose the ability to make decisions; they prevaricate back and forth between choices, never settling on one. The "modular" structure of our brains, the one that adjusts the knobs of our personalities (sometimes radically) in response to stimuli— hunger, exhaustion, desire, jealousy— is more or less a given. We also know that this varied, modular design is what gives rise to distraction: we aren't "in control" of our thoughts, for if we were, they wouldn't wander whenever we were bored. Buddha took this to a logical extreme: if your "self," whatever it is, can't command your thoughts to behave, then perhaps there is no "self" at all, only a phenomenal collective of thoughts and their organic origins that, having only one body, appears to be a whole human being to other human beings.

In the Buddha's view, all of civilization is a pantomime, and our evolutionary emotions dedicated to keeping us alive (fed, warmed, in a tribe where we can shine individually so long as we all keep the water running and the herd fed collectively) and getting us laid, are at the core of who and what we are. We suffer (the word is overused in Western Buddhism; Buddha meant something closer to a sense of perpetual anxiety and dissatisfaction, with 'suffering' as an extreme of the daily discomfort and alienation we experience) and we desire to alleviate that suffering through food, drink, sex, drugs, fame, power, and any number of tools.

Okay, all good. The technology (technology: "a collection of knowledge, methods, skills, and applications used in the production of goods and services toward human flourishing") Buddha gave us was the Three Meditations: Concentration, Mindfulness, and Insight— and in that order. The purpose of mindful meditation was to give us an insight into our own brains. After some mastery of concentration, we are to observe how it works, to monitor its behaviors, to tally and catalog whether our thoughs are to accomplishment, or anticipation, or rumination, or anxiety, and learn that each of those thoughts isn't the thinker. That we can observe this lack of self-mastery, this tendency for the mind to wander, and be mindful of who "we" are without having to regard every thought we're having as being part of our "selfhood."

Buddhism then asks you to go a bit deeper, and inquire about the observer. If none of those thoughts, about what you did yesterday, about what you might do tomorrow, about who might criticize you, and about who you might desire, are you, but clearly they're thoughts about things you want, or want to learn from, then what is doing the observing of these thoughts?

Dig deep enough, Buddha claimed, and you'll find that confident, concentrative, mindful "you" isn't really "you" at all, either; it's just another thought.

So let's turn this onto its neurological head: what emotion keeps you on the cushion? We are at our base emotional creatures. Buddha encouraged us to get a grip on those emotions, to marshall them. In this, Buddha and Zeno, the founder of Stocisim, found both the symptom of our problems and the solutions.

But what emotion drives a practicing Buddhist or Stoic to their daily meditations? What happens when you are finally satisfied with your Buddhist practice?

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Calibre, Even If

Brad Delong recently wrote

The original American populists were reality-based small farmers and others, who accurately saw railroad monopolies, agricultural price deflation, and high interest rates as crippling their ability to lead the good life. They sought policies—sensible, rational policies in the main—to neutralize these three historical forces. They were not Volkisch nativists distracted from a politics that would have made their lives better by the shiny gewgaws of ethnic hatred and nativism.

Rod Dreher, in a recent article challenging the "Why are Christians so hung up on sex," also recently wrote:

To the contrary, it is you who have elevated sex and sexuality to the most important issue in the Church. This is no surprise. You have been formed by a popular culture that has elevated sex and sexuality to the center of our existence. The Church is the only institution left that tries to order sex rightly, to put it in its proper place

Dreher is at least honest in that he's given up trying to change the world, and instead advocates a retreat from for Christians, or at least the Christians who believe as he does. The magazine for which he writes, however, maintains an unceasing drumbeat against the legitimization of GLBT issues, of Trans issues, and of the lives of the laity as they live it. The American Conservatives is a full-on participant in the highly schizophrenic far-right with its bizarre fusion of Christian Nationalism and the weirdly homoerotic masculinist doctrines of the "red pill" Reddit dudes.

What gets me is Delong's formulation of "The Good Life." I'm rather fond of that term, ever since reading William Irvine's "Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy," since it's a lovely, if controversial, introduction to Stoicism¹. Delong correctly identifies the true threats to most of us living the good life: collusion between large economic forces to create unproductive and even destructive entrepreneurial enterprises: those enterprises that ultimately end up taking wealth out of the system, hoarding it to the few at the expense of the many, lifting almost no boats at all.

Which has nothing to do with sex. Or race². It's about the unfeeling forces of the sociopathic entities known as "corporations" living among us, collecting vast amounts of capital to deploy against the barriers to its objectives (you know, things like you and me). Conservatives have railed against biology ever since Antoine van Leeuwenhoek described bacteria and spermatoza in the first microscope powerful enough to see them³.

The invention of the birth control pill and antibiotics released an entire sexual revolution, and the conservatives are still complaining about how it gave women the freedom to do other things with their bodies and minds, rather than enslave them to biology's strings. Nobody complains that we're free from polio or smallpox, that our lives are longer, our bodies stronger, our minds clearer, for much longer than our ancestors (well, almost nobody). We've upset the natural order of things by eliminating the 1 in 3 childhood death rate, by controlling plague outbreaks, and by instituting a public health and hygiene regimen that makes us more effective and productive than our drunk ancestors. It's only in sex that this really seems to upset the conservatives, who really wish the whole genies and bottles thing.

Trans people, gays, lesbians— everyone should be allowed to pursue The Good Life. Progressive agreed a long time ago that minorities are just as deserving of a Good Life, one freed from interference by both the state and by singular corporate forces, while also supported by effective and ethical institutions. We've come to agree that LGBT people are just as deserving. The battle over sexuality is way to keep two groups that would normally ally to fight the oligarchial monopolization of our food, our water, even our attention spans, instead fight each other into the ground.

While the fascists laugh.

¹ Irvine's book reaches a conclusion that no ancient Stoic would recognize: that the point of Stoicism is to reach a state of "tranquility." The ancient Stoics recognized that tranquility was an excellent state, but it was not the point of Stocisim. The point of Stocism is to train oneself to experience real joy rather than hedonistic pleasures, and to be completely prepared to respond effectively to the shocks and tragedies of existence.

²Although the 19th century populists were undoubtly racists. When the populists became the Populist Party, they explicity excluded Black and Chinese people from their ranks by the party's founding charter. We shouldn't sugar-coat the issue here.

³ Ever notice that it's always biology? Even creationist geology has no villains, but creationist biology is full of hatred for Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Charles Darwin, and Gregor Mendel. There's no creationist equivalent of chemistry or physics (not for lack of trying). It's always about biology, and it's always about sixth grade biology. Everything learned afterward, about the messiness of sex and gender, the way actual biology doesn't care about human categories and absolutes, is thrown away by conservatives and the anti-trans "radical feminists" alike. While the fascists laugh within their vaults of cash.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Hamilton, The Schuyler Sisters

I'm disappointed that Peter Lawler has passed away, because his last essay is a terrible mess of confused impulses that doesn't really touch on the issues he's trying to address. He starts out with a flurry of insults about young people— that they're atomized, separated from one another, incapable of deep emotional feeling or the fully human impulses of eros and thanos that philosophers love to discuss.

He's not wrong when he talks about how corporate advertising has tried to turn us against each other in a constant competition to be "better" than the other, to play us against each other in a constant war of all against all to be the best, the better to convince us of our unworthiness to compel us to buy more stuff as compensation. That part's not at all controversial.

Where it really flails though is toward the end, and the "revolt" against our technological ages; he heaps praise on the "populist movement" and the "anti-political correctness movement," calling it a "revolt against the weaponized niceness of the elite." He backhands safer sex as "detached from the bare act's natural function for an animal born to die."

Because treating people with respect, you see, leads to the dissolution. There must be war. The must be some group to look down on, to hate, to loathe.

Lawler ends with a wonderful paragraph:

Now’s the time to praise manliness, but only in the context of showing the road from anger, meaninglessness, and despair to a world once again full of ladies and gentlemen—people who know who they are and what they’re supposed to do as beings born to know, love, and die, and designed for more than merely biological existence.

I have a lot of sympathy for this quote, but when I look at the people he's praising, I just want to be ill.

Michael Sweeny's twitter rant about how progressive must understand and embraces masculinity showcases the kind of people Lawler is siding with. Men who are barely more than beasts; men who run people off the road to feel strong; men who would rather poison the air than risk being perceived as weak. Note that Sweeny identifies creativity as weak, compassion as weak, care as weak.

Lawler wanted to end "toxic masculinity." Well, so do progressives. You know who loves toxic masculinity? The sort of people who romanticize the "bare act" of sex, an act even Fox-fucking-news knows is rape. The sort of men who identify their truck with their cock. The sort of men who will die of stubborness, and they'd drag us all down with it.

Lawler was one of those people for whom there must always be someone against whom we must wage war. The adventure of space travel, the moral imperative to cure disease, the humanity of ending hunger, pale in comparison to the need to define one's self against a human "other." Lawler even sneers at the populists he admires, claiming (as Christians always have) that the Trumpist populists are "parasites on those who orient their relational lives by God, country, and family."

I have oriented my relational lives on my family, my community, my species, and my world, thank you very much. I'm not so insecure as to need to deface and poison my world to feel manly. I'm not so broken than I must deepen intimacy with the twin threats of unwanted pregnancy or potentially fatal infection; hugs, kisses, and love are highs that can be enjoyed. Loyalty to one another and the nobility of relating one to another can be glorified without narrowing our vision to one sect, one country, one skin color, one sex.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Deaf Kev, Samurai

When I was heavily active on the atheist boards, one of the most common "challenges" we got from Christians was "Why do you even bother to be good?"

They weren't even very subtle about it. "You should live the atheist lifestyle the way it is meant to be lived! Rape, pillage, and murder! If there's no god, you can satisfy your heart's every wish."

The obvious rejoinder is that obviously the speaker is projecting: it is their wish that they could rape, pillage and murder, and they would enjoy themselves doing so. Atheists would respond calmly (sometimes) that most human beings are tribal and eusocial animals, most people actually want to live in a functioning community. A rapine anarchy doesn't guarantee you food, water, and a comfortable place to sleep.

But now "reasonable people" like Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher are claiming that the atheists are wrong: most people are vicious, barely leashed animals. If you want to know why politics has become so vicious, it's because the authority of the Religious Right has declined, and now you're facing Klansmen and Nazis, The Post-Religious Right.

Now, needless to say, if we point to all the other civilizations that did well without Yahweh, we can pretty much conclude that any transcendent organizational scheme, even those that don't promise punishment in the afterlife (such as Buddhism, Confucianism or Judaism), works just as well. So why is "losing our religion" in America so damn vicious?

It's not. What we're seeing instead is the realization that the promise of white evangelism hasn't been kept: those damn brown people continue to be present, to infiltrate every corner the world, and to be loud (i.e. they say anything at all).

The Right isn't more vicious because it's losing its religion. It's losing it's religion because it wants what it has always wanted: a white America. They've just given up, in this day and age, trying to pretend it's what Jesus would have wanted.

Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1631881.html

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Daniel Patrick, is well-known among wonks for his hyper-traditionalist views of religion and its role in public life. In short: he's for it, as long as it's his flavor of Christian. He wants gays back in the closet, women to stop being sexy unless they're married and then only for their husbands, and trans people shouldn't be allowed out in public.

Texas's foster care and adoption system is in a terrible crisis. Children considered "most at risk" have gone as long as half a year between visits from a state foster care worker. The Department of Protective and Regulatory Services says its $40 million behind its state-mandated obligations.

Patrick's response has been to say that "churches should ask their parishioners to step forward" to handle the burden.

Not all of the children in crisis are Christian. Nor will all of them respond well to the kind of Christianity that Daniel Patrick is promoting through his office. But that's okay with Patrick. He doesn't mind if the kids get a little nonconsensual indoctrination along the way. Lives really don't matter all that much to Patrick; what matters is that the bureaucracy to which he has dedicated his life gains in power.

That bureaucracy is not the State of Texas. It is the church.

There's a reason I believe in republican democracy. It's the only institution that is constituted with the goal of serving everyone. Equally well or equally poorly, perhaps, but it's goal is to serve everyone who lives within its jurisdiction. To the extent that the United States is one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world, it's genuinely horrifying how we fail our poorest citizens.

Churches and their charities serve a different goal: the glory and empowerment of the church. All bureaucracies conform to a similar goal. Government is the one bureaucracy constituted to serve all of its citizens, is subject to oversight by the people it serves without reservation, and can have its administration overturned by those people if it fails to meet its goals.

I have no starry-eyed naivete about the ways bureaucracies can hide, elide, and deceive. But when someone says "The churches should do it" or "A charity can do it," what they're really advocating is for a base of power with less accountability and less interest in actually serving the poor and needful.

"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization." - Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1618914.html

Like a lot of people, I had the whiplash moment when I read about the Odgaards in the New York Times' recent Evangelicals Despair. The article focuses on the couple in New York who ran a charming general-purpose wedding chapel before gay marriage. When threatened with the loss of their business license, they ended up selling the chapel to a church which, because it is a specifically religious institution, can kick out the gays with impunity.

But I can't really hate on them. The Odgaard's are depicted with some sympathy:

Overnight, it seemed everyone they knew had a gay relative or friend. ... "It all flipped so fast. Suddenly we were in the minority. That was kind of a scary feeling. It makes you wonder where all the Christians went."

And here's the problem: the Christians never went away. They were always here. They're still here.

The Odgaards don't appreciate the way their neighbors go down among the lepers, the papuers, and the homosexuals, and deal with them with love and heart. They don't appreciate that excluding gay people from the body of Christ is not only unbiblical, it's outright immoral. It's not what Jesus would have wanted, or what he would have done. In Acts 10, Peter makes the case that followers of Christ have no argument that anyone is unclean or profane, that anyone can be turned away. Jesus heals the centurion's lover in Matthew 8; Peter welcomes another centurion in Acts 11. (Anyone who thinks Peter's vision is only about food is simply trying to excuse their own bigotry.)

While the Catholics and the Evangelicals wring their hands because their interpretation isn't the one being heard, the rest of us are moving on with our lives. Whether you believe or not, Christians ought to know what Peter said: "God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean."

The Christians are still here. It's a shame the Odgaard's aren't among them.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I've been reading David Weber's Safehold series. I can't recommend it unless you're an absolute Weber fan; it's pretty much the worst Weber fanservice I can imagine all rolled into a single, many-millions-of-words-long story. It's not really a work of modern fiction; it's more like an fable or apologue, a "moral story" in which the good guys are emphatically good, the bad guys are emphatically bad, and everyone in between is meant to highlight a point on the scale between grace and damnation.

The premise is ridiculous: the human race has been Wiped Out by an alien species that hates innovative competitors. In a classic "they hate us for our freedoms" parable, the first book has Captain Langhorne order the last human colony ships to race as far away from the battlefield as they can, find a habitable world, and create a new set of colonists brainwashed to believe in a singular, monotheistic religion with a very Catholic-like heirarchal setting, but designed with sins and punishments that theorically will prevent humans from ever innovating again, to avoid coming to the attention of the aliens. Everything is taught in terms of "preserving men's souls into heaven." Not only were the colonists brainwashed to believe in Langhorne's religion, but for the first century colonists interacted with Archangels who flew and had clearly divine powers and they all wrote down their testimonies. There is no competing religion, no alternative viewpoint, at all in this world.

Our hero, Nimue, wakes up a few centuries later to discover she's been embodies as an almost indestructible robot by rebels who want the human race to be freed of Langhorne's restrictions and take the fight back to the aliens. By now, the world is circa 16th century Earth, with sailing ships and all the rest, and it lets Weber do his Napoleonic Wars thing all over again.

It is very silly; we're expected to buy that Nimue's influence has the world going from the Battle of Cape Celidonia (1616) at the end of the first book to Appotmattox (1865) at the end of the 8th book in less than ten years.

But one thing really bothers me: to map our history to his setting, we have secular rulers who are secular rulers first. While it's unthinkable that anyone would defy The Church, and the absolute Truth of the Church is unshakable to 99% of the world, the kings and princes act as if they're just church believers like anyone else, and their duty to their kingdoms starts and stops with keeping the people alive and healthy. The church is separate from the state. There's even a republic in this world, with elections!

Which is ridiculous. Langhorne and his cronies, the "Archangels" who set up this world, knew better. In a society like this, the monarch's reign is acknowledged by the church, and would be believed "Blessed by God," and given the duty above all else of the corporate "preservation" of the nation, accountable not to The Church, but to God himself.

There would be no republic, because a republic requires republicans, leaders accountable to the people and their petty wants, rather than to God. Schism would be far harder. The excuse that our England-analogue is "on the other side of the planets, months away by sea" and therefore harder to oversee isn't credible; the Langhorne's Church not only failed in its duty in this generation, it failed in all its generations, from the first when the Archangels were around, to the present.

That's just one of many problems with the series, but it's the most subtle and yet, the most glaring.

Still, the series does swash and buckle nicely, if you're into that sort of thing.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1606193.html

World Net Daily's David Kupelian asserted that "The left is such a toxic experience it's driving people crazy."

Of course it is. But it's not toxicity. It's reality. You see, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Evolution is real, climate change is happening and will suck, vaccines work, gay people are just as valuable (and immutably gay), as straight people are valuable (and immutably straight).

The Church of No Homo is driven crazy by two conflicting desires: trying to stay within the lines of something identifiably "Christian," while not extending the decency and love God demands they do for gays and lesbians.

"We are children of God," Kupelian notes, as if to say, "... and they're not." Liberal society isn't all that confused or unhappy; it's just human, trying to figure out what it means to live in a highly technological, culturally diverse society that celebrates the individual. Poor Kupelian, he can't handle reality.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1602016.html

I'm not sure why this guy claims "No atheist can honestly answer some of these!" I'd really want to know which ones he believe I'd lie about:

How Did You Become an Atheist?

*Shrug* I was never very convinced about the stories they told me in Sunday school. None of it made much sense, and I never felt much connection to the idea of a god. I just kinda drifted into it.

What happens when we die?

Ever spend hours and hours with no awareness of what was happening? Sure you have, that's called sleep. That's what happens. The greatest disappointment about death is that you have nothing to look forward to.

What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!

If I'm wrong and the Christian God is awaiting me there, I'll go down proud to have been on the side of liberty and justice, rather than kowtowing to the rampaging beast of the Old Testament who drowned men, women and children by the millions in a fit of pique, who sent wild animals to slaughter children who do what children did, and who revels in "the dashing of your little one's heads upon the rocks."

And if it's some other god, like Bacchus, well... that will be awkward, won't it?

Without God, where do you get your morality from?

From my culture. Like everyone else, including you. You got it from your parents, who got it from theirs. The message doesn't get to everyone, which is why we create governments and police forces.

If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?

Buddhists don't believe in a god, and they clearly have the same answer; they do what is *right* because that's what living together is about.

If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?

False premise: who says it "does." What do you mean by "meaning?" This is one of those questions that *sounds* deep, but actually has no content behind it.

Where did the universe come from?

I don't know. Which is a *much* better answer than any one that you might give me, since any answer you might have will be contradicted by the evidence we actually have.

What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?

Schizophrenia. The number of people who have claimed to see angels, who suddenly "get better" when given the proper medication, is astonishing. If one can hold angels at bay with one sad little molecule, that doesn't say much about their divine power now, does it?

What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?

I'm unimpressed. None of them have said much that the Greek atheists weren't saying two thousand years ago. The biggest problem is that you all haven't brought us anything new. After two thousand years, you're still relying on the same tired stories, fables, and deceits you always have

If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?

False premise. Not every one does. Buddhists have no god. Highly primitive human societies generally don't have much in the way a god or gods.

Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1601266.html

I've often wondered if C.S. Lewis didn't read just a bit too much Buddhist literature in his time. The Great Divorce is one of those books that reads like a Buddhist tract. It starts with a premise of universalism, if not a reincarnate one: We all awaken in the Hell we deserve, and there we are given one (or more) chances to make it into Heaven. The unnamed narrator accompanies a party on an expedition to the edge of Heaven, where he witnesses several people make (and fail) the attempt to acheive a Christian notion of Grace.

But every example is one of those things that makes a Buddhist smile. In every example, the person failing to reach grace does so because of his or her attachment to something. More to the point, that attachment causes great suffering! Lewis manages to circle back to a Christian viewpoint with his emphasis that every attachment is associated with another person in each seeker's narrative: it is not that we are attached to things, but that we are attached to (and suffer by) our refusal to see other individuals as people rather than things. (Which, in the current discourse, immediately brings to mind Mad Max: Fury Road and its underlying theme that women, indeed all human beings, are not things to be used by the powerful, but other souls worthy of respect and compassion.) Most of the seekers in The Great Divorce simply cannot forgive or reconcile their feelings with their beliefs that some other agent has the responsibility to "see it his (or her) way."

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Aftermath #3, Aes Dana
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1579670.html

The atheist community has been passing around Pastor Alin's sad little The Misery of Atheism: Who Does an Atheist Thank? blogpost and answering him.

When I first read it, what struck me is this bit:

God has been very gracious to me. I have a wife, I have a house, I have food and a computer, I have a bed and clean water. And when I think on these things I am thankful.

It reminds me of the always-relevant, always-trenchant point made about folks who survive disaster ending their stories with "Thank God." Other, fellow human beings didn't survive. The message that always came across to me was "Thank you, God, for sparing me, unlike those other people." Why didn't God save them? What did they do wrong? Surely not all the sinners were killed, and all the saints preserved, after that plane crash or tornado or tsunami. Pastor Alin is thankful to God for giving him those things, but seems utterly unable to consider what North Koreans, or Somalis, or Guineas suffering with Ebola, should be thankful for.

I'm very thankful, to other human beings. I'm thankful to my wife of 25 years for her love and affection, and for putting up with me. I'm thankful to my employer for seeing my contributions and helping me make them valuable. I'm thankful to my friends for their sometimes fascinating, sometimes vexing contributions to making my life interesting. This week, I'm thankful to my older daughter for making her younger sister's transition to high school so easy and successful. I'm thankful to the younger kid for toughing out that difficult transition. I'm thankful to my parents for giving me a ton of educational opportunities they didn't really understand or appreciate at the time, but which gave me the tools to make it in the 21st century.

That last one has an asterisk beside it. Because my well-being today was contingent upon theirs. And theirs upon their grandparents. And theirs upon a whole host of events, some serendipity, some atrocity, that add up to comfort and wealth and privilege. I'm distressed that we have yet to address our inequality, and ashamed that Pastor Alin shows no interest in the essential humanity of those who aren't with him.

When it comes to privilge, contingency, and humanity, poor Pastor Alin is blind. Motes, beams, eyes and all that. Also: whales. Pastor Alin, like Jonah, would never have gone to Nineveh; he's content to stay in his comfortable home, put distance between himself and suffering, only to rant from afar about the wickedness he sees.

Let us be thankful to Pastor Alin, for being a bad example.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1564939.html

Since traffic was terrible this morning and my iPod's batteries were too dead to work effectively, I was stuck with the radio, and as is my unfortunate wont, I dialed into the morning's AM radio and stumbled upon right-wing talk show host Mike Gallagher commisserating with an interview subject about how "Government had become God, the arbiter of right and wrong, and was forcing Christian businesses to have to serve sin."

One of the cases cited was of a bakery in Oregon that, last year, had refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple and been consequently sued under Portland's anti-discrimination ordinance. A local alt-weekly called them up a few times over the course of the following year and ordered: (1) "Get Well Cupcakes" for "a friend who'd just undergone a stem cell transplant" operation, (2) a black "divorce party" cake, (3) a baby shower cake "since my girlfriend is about to have our second child," and (4) a 30th anniversary cake "for our coven's solstice celebration," complete with a pentacle design.

Arguably, divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are far more dangerous to the well-being of society than consensual love and marriage. I really don't get why Christianism wants to die on that hill.

Current Mood: lonely
Current Music: Appleseed OST, Kidou
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1559370.html

There is a fundamental ground on which Christianists, Rushdoony's Seven-Mountain Dominionists, and their co-religionists walk, and it is best described by evangelical proseletyzer Greg Stier in his ham-handed article, How to share the gospel with an atheist (gotta love the stock photo he used):

Assume that, down deep inside, they do believe in God. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who genuinely rejects the existence of God. Sure, I’ve met many who have claimed God’s existence to be a lie, but I’m convinced that, down deep inside, they really do believe there’s a God.

This is a party line. Everyone knows in their heart of hearts that God is real; those who say otherwise are simply lying about their daily experience of God for selfish and harmful reasons.

Here's another version of Stier's claim:

God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of separation is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition.

The only problem with this quote is that it was quoted by Richard Beck, who Fred Clark was praising just the other day, and has been applauded for its love and grace by Andrew Sullivan. The original quote was by Martin Laird, and while I don't know Laird, the other three are men whom I admire for their understanding that not everyone is going down the same road they are, and those that aren't going down that road aren't of necessity heading in the exact opposite direction. (Indeed, Beck's a universalist; without exception, he believes we all end up in the Christian Heaven someday.)

I know what they were trying to say, these men, in passing around this quote, but it seems to have gone wooshing by them all that Laird's take is just a kinder, gentler version of Rushdoony's hard line that all must confess their knowledge of God or be executed. They don't mean that, but it remains an ember of their faith that others can fan into flames of intolerance, hatred, and rage.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1556691.html

"Trunk or Treat" is a new "Halloween alternative" offered by churches, in which rather than go from house to house, the members of the church gather in the parking lot and trade candies from the backs of their cars, along with the usual foofraw about Jesus and saints and all that.

Fred Clark made a brilliant observation awhile back about "concierge Christians," those who will drive out of their way to find the church that best serves their needs, that has the people most like-minded to themselves. The automobile has created church communities shaped not by proximity, but by preference.

"Trunk or Treat" seems to be one of those events that successfully and conciously fulfills a triune purpose: it encourages kids to think of their own neighborhoods as dangerous places, teaches that the church parking lot is far safer, and distances them all from the fun of meeting one's neighbors and being surprised. Diversity be damned.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1554164.html

The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellious children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21:

So wrote Charlie Fuqua, GOP candidate for the Arkansas legislature, in a book he published earlier this year. He has declined to talk to the press further about his very biblical statement. In a 2009 book, Fuqua also wrote that "There is only one solution for the Muslim problem in America," and you don't have to imagine very hard to imagine correctly what he meant by that.

But Fuqua isn't the main reason I wanted to post. I could have let that news go; it's everywhere this morning, after all.

Last night, as I was driving to the grocery store, I flipped through the radio and landed on a local "Christian Talk" radio station where the host was flipping out about Fuqua. "This guy's crazy, right? Kill your children? I mean, that's just nuts. Help me out here, folks. Linda, you're on the line."

Linda delivered the crazy. "Chuck," she said, "You have to understand. It's not crazy. It makes sense in biblical terms. When that was written, people lived five hundred, six hundred years, maybe even seven hundred years. If children rebelled, it was very dangerous and could last a long time, and they had to be put down just the way you put down a rabid dog."

I had to turn it off at that point.

The sad part is, Linda doesn't even knowm her Bible. By the time of Deuteronomy, the sins of Cain and Ham had caught up with mankind and mankind had long been reduced to the allotted three-score and ten years.

God's fan club really scares me some days.

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Music: Porcupine Tree, Waiting
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1527398.html

Although it's not anywhere near Mother's day, I would like to thank my mothers: my biomother, whover she was, for giving me up, and my Mom, for having the courage to adopt and raise me, not knowing what the heck she was getting herself into.

I say this because Pat Robertson (yes, he's still alive, ornery ol' coot) today advised people that they shouldn't adopt kids because they "might be weird." He especially advised against adopting kids from other countries because it's unfair to make your relatives "take on the United Nations."

So, you can't abort, can't contracept, and can't adopt. Pat Robertson's world looks more like Sharia law every day, doesn't it?

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1517131.html

There are few things that make me more furious than the idea that one group of people "owns" virtue. So I sorta Hulked out on the radio this morning when the director of the movie "October Baby," about a woman who goes on a road trip to discover the woman who "courageously refused abortion and sadly gave her up for adoption," said of his movie:

"I think that the values that we hold dear as Christians are immensely appealing — things like sacrifice and virtue and honor and destiny and things like that. ... I think when they're presented correctly, they're appealing to everybody."

Here's a secret, Christian America: the culture wars will stop when you stop claiming you own all of the good human values for yourself, and anyone who doesn't buy into your tribal beliefs cannot possibly be a good human being.

The Greeks discovered honor and virtue and sacrifice without you. So did the Chinese. So did American Natives, and the Hindus, and the Romans, and the Nordic peoples, and the early Japanese.

This, more than anything else, is what repulses me about modern American Christianity: a claim on the last word in goodness. That to be a good person, to have virtue and honor one must buy into all the bullshit about talking snakes, burning bushes, and a god who loves you so much he'll cast you into a pit, and if you defy him:

The riders not thrown leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated. Tthe soldiers stood briefly as skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant and rave. Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too rattled to the pavement. [Tim LaHaye, Left Behind: Glorious Appearing, p 273]

Claiming to own honor and virtue is a claim to special privelege, one American Christianity has consistently failed to demonstrate it deserves.