Home

Religion

April 2, 2008

Karen Armstrong on TED

Thanks to Saviour Onassis, who sent me a link to this wonderful talk by Karen Armstrong:

It's her speech after winning the 2008 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Prize, which is

designed to leverage the TED Community's exceptional array of talent and resources. It is awarded annually to three exceptional individuals who each receive $100,000 and, much more important, the granting of "One Wish to Change the World." After several months of preparation, they unveil their wish at an award ceremony held during the TED Conference. These wishes have led to collaborative initiatives with far-reaching impact.

Armstrong's wish is for a "charter for compassion."

She rocks.

Posted by Holly at 8:48 AM | Comments (4)

March 23, 2008

Pagan Moon Stuff

Happy Easter, I guess. Not that I much care about the resurrection of Jesus these days, and I can't say I ever much believed in it, really. Easter just seemed such a second-rate holiday. It's supposed to be the holiest day in the Christian calendar, but it never felt convincing: Thanksgiving and Christmas were obviously so much more important, even though Thanksgiving was supposed to be secular and national rather than religious.

There were two things I always liked about Easter: getting a pretty new spring dress, and the way it moved around. Ever wonder how Easter is reckoned? Well, I learned long ago in a class on medieval literature. Easter follows the lunar rather than the date calendar, because people went on pilgrimage at Easter time, and they needed light to travel by, and the sun and the full moon were really the only things that provided much light long about the sixth century. So Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox--the vernal equinox bit being important because Easter supplanted all sorts of pagan spring festivals--hence the bunnies and eggs and such.

Easter this year is about as early as it can be. The equinox was Thursday; the full moon was Friday. The earliest it could possibly be is the equinox itself, if that were also a full moon falling on a Sunday.

On my mission I went to church one Sunday morning in March and wished the elders "Happy Easter," because it was Easter. They told me it wasn't Easter, couldn't be Easter, because Easter was always the first Sunday in April. I explained about the equinox-full moon thing, adding, "Go home and ask your families when Easter is this year. They'll tell you I'm right," but the elders informed me--foolish, misinformed girl that I was--that there was no way determining the date of a holiday could be so silly or arbitrary. They were ADAMANT, and of course I had no evidence to support my claim, because there wasn't a single mention of Easter in any of the lessons or talks that day. The country as a whole didn't pay attention to Easter (and why should a non-Christian country bother with it?) and no one but me cared about observing the progress of the calendar, so no one but me knew it was Easter--even though, as I say, it was supposed to be our holiest day, the day on which the miracle that justified our entire religion occurred, some two thousand years before.

Yeah. If I ever forget why I found my mission frustrating or why I gave up on Christianity, thinking about that always helps me remember.

Anyway, if you celebrate and enjoy the holiday, I hope it rocks for you.

Posted by Holly at 10:55 AM | Comments (6)

December 7, 2007

The Best Time to Call a Do-Over

I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so very upset by JGW's story about his friend’s threatened suicide--not that I think I had the wrong response; quite the contrary. I was just a bit surprised by the intensity of my reaction. It’s true that I’m often a big cry baby and that religious despair in particular upsets me, but I’m not always so tender-hearted that I can’t stop weeping over the suffering of some unnamed stranger. (Though I admit it has happened before. And something else that made me cry today is this, on MohoHawaii.) I know part of it is that I’m deeply worried about my friend R and her husband (as I mentioned yesterday, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house), who has been sedated into oblivion since Saturday (and will be for weeks to come), and who had spinal surgery yesterday so doctors could determine the extent of and hopefully repair his injuries. But I’ve also just been feeling more theologically and apocalyptically vulnerable lately, because I recently witnessed one of the signs of the end of days: my father acknowledged the reality of global warming.

When I was home for Thanksgiving we were talking about how ridiculously hot it was in Mesa this past year, where one of my sisters lives--it was 90 F on Halloween, and 80 as the end of November neared. “Well, it’s just gonna get hotter,” Dad said. “What with global warming, plus all those air conditioners running night and day, even in winter, and all that asphalt and concrete to soak up the heat and keep it hot all night.”

I stared at him. He’s right, of course, but it’s precisely the kind of statement he dismissed when I made it seven or eight years ago.

I have always hated the story of Noah and the Ark--really, really hated it. I was very young--three or four or so--when I first heard it via flannel board in junior Sunday school, and the pictures of all these normal looking people lying around dead everywhere while Noah rode off in his ark absolutely horrified me. God had KILLED them? Killed ALL of them? Because they’d done something BAD? What on earth could they have done that was so awful that god, who supposedly loved everyone, would kill everyone? Did they bonk their baby sister on the head with a wiffle ball bat? Wet their best frilly panties just before Church? Spill a whole bowl of Count Chocula on the living room rug?

I wasn’t one of those little kids who was crazy about animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. Animals were just fine, sort of, as long as they didn’t eat you or bite you or charge you or jump on you or knock you down or lick you or give you ringworm or fleas or any sort of parasite or cooties or germs. (I was one of those kids who liked being clean.) But at some point in adulthood I started to like animals, and I started to feel really AWFUL about the ways we hurt and hunt and kill them. In particular I started to feel bad about the way we treat monkeys. I am really bothered by the fact that so few monkeys and great apes exist today, that we’ve hunted them and destroyed their habitats and done experiments on them or made them into pets until they’re on the brink of extinction. I don’t want to hang out with them, but I want them to live unmolested and happy in their own corner of the world.

In particular, I want orangutans to be just fine. As I now like animals, I support a lot of organizations that work to protect them, and these organizations are always sending me calendars featuring twelve glossy photos of animals either looking majestic and wild or else doing something cute. One of my favorites shows a baby orangutan crouching on the ground, looking really unhappy and holding a piece of wood over his head to keep the rain off his face--it’s unbelievably adorable! I showed it to a friend, who said, “He thinks he’s people.”

“No,” I said. “He just thinks it’s better not to get pelted in the face with cold rain if at all possible.”

Now, you’re probably wondering what all these things have to do with each other, so I’ll tell you, though it will take a while to explain it all.

Monday I read this article about the discovery of a previously undocumented colony of 800 orangutans in Borneo. People who lived by the orangutans knew they were there, but conservationists and scientists didn’t. It’s a big deal. But the peat swamp where these apes live is already slated for destruction so that palm kernel oil plantations can be created, so even if no one just goes out and slaughters the orangutans, they’re probably going to die. Plus turning a peat swamp into farmland releases tons of CO2 into the air, because peat swamps are carbon sinks. It’s all really, really bad.

Then I read another article about how global warming is causing expansion of the tropics, which is changing weather patterns in ways that are going to fuck things up for billions of people, plants and animals. Things are looking especially grim for Australia, where shifts in wind currents are beginning to push storms further south, which means that rain will fall on the open sea where it’s not so necessary, rather than on Australia, which is a pretty dry continent to begin with.

And as I was driving home from having my teeth cleaned that afternoon, I thought, OK, the story of Noah and the ark is A) utterly impossible and B) didn’t happen because it’s C) a myth, but if it WERE possible, would several thousand years ago really have been the best time to call a do-over? Wouldn’t NOW be a better time to pick a few carriers of really good genes for every species and send them off to safety while killing everyone else? (Actually I’d advocate saving all the animals, not just one reproducing set. They'd need a head start before the next go-round of humanity vs. everything else.) Wouldn't the time to do it be right now, before we kill off most of the animals the mythical Noah would have wanted to save? Right now, before we fuck up the climate so badly that all but a few areas of the planet are uninhabitable?

But then I remembered that I don’t really like theologies or world views that treat most of humanity as either A) expendable or B) a mistake, so I decided the whole “flood the earth and kill almost everyone” thing is never really a good idea.

To be continued.

Posted by Holly at 9:39 AM | Comments (1)

June 24, 2007

Reading Like a Sixth Grader

All in all, my current attitude towards reading reminds me, as I said in my last entry, of the summers before and after sixth grade, which I think is when I read more--voraciously, compulsively--than at any other time in my life. Actually I've reverted to sixth grade in several ways: just as I did during summers when I was nine or ten or eleven, I like to sleep late, put on comfy clothes, then settle down to munch cookies I've made and plow through one book after another.

The very first thing I read, when the end of the semester was in sight and I could read whatever I wanted, was Her Little Majesty, a really mediocre biography of Victoria by Carolly Erickson. But even that was kind of like scholarly reading, because I was teaching a class on colonial lit and after all, Victoria ruled over the largest colonial empire in the history of the world.

But the next thing I read all 480 pages of a Life of Elizabeth I by Allison Weir, and I did it in a weekend. I've read more biographies of Elizabeth Tudor than anyone else but she continues to fascinate me, and Weir's biography was excellent. I would have to stretch to make it relevant to my studies, because I don't do anything at all with the renaissance. Fact of the matter is, as a historical period, I much prefer the middle ages to the renaissance.

Then I reread several works by Karen Armstrong--all her memoirs: Through the Narrow Gate, Beginning the World and The Spiral Staircase, because they count as research for a paper I'm presenting in November and because I just plain wanted to. I even annotated them, but I find her work so compelling that it still felt like fun.

And I then I looked at my bookshelf and decided I wanted to read some things I'd be willing to sell to a used book store, because I really need to thin out my book collection. So I dragged off the shelf A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, the first two books of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, which were given to me last summer by a colleague who was leaving town.

And that's another way I've reverted to sixth grade, because they're considered juvenile fiction, though they're not really the least bit simple or simplistic. Nonetheless I read The Tombs of Atuan when I was in fifth or sixth grade, because it was a Newbery honor book and I wanted to read all the Newbery honorees. And boy oh boy did it freak my shit out. I had always remembered how profoundly that book unsettled me, which is one reason I accepted the books when my colleague offered them: I recalled aspects of that book very clearly, and I wanted to revisit them as an adult and understand better what that book was about.

So I sat down one afternoon and started A Wizard of Earthsea. I finished it after a couple of hours, at which point I refused to let myself pick up the sequel until I washed my dishes because they needed it and went for a walk (my mother and I used to have terrible fights about how I never got any exercise because I was too busy reading, and she wouldn't let me go to the library unless I went swimming at least twice a week) because I'd been so sedentary all day. And when I got home from the walk, around sunset, I curled up on my couch inside and finished The Tombs of Atuan in one sitting. I would have started The Farthest Shore, the third book in the series, that night at 11, but I didn't have a copy and had to be content with ordering it from the library.

The Tombs of Atuan is a creepy book in a lot of ways, about some dreadful cult that worships darkness, and the high priestess of that cult, who begins her initiation into her position at age five, and how she eventually leaves it. And though it freaked my shit out, I think it must have influenced me profoundly on some fundamental level, because it's also about the loss of faith and the cost of leaving a belief system. I reread this passage about fifteen times:

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy.... She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Did that ever resonate.... I had to wonder: Was I primed to leave the church in 1989 when I was 25 because of a book I read in 1974, when I was 10? I don't know. I do know I didn't feel the slightest desire to do anything but read. So before I went to bed, I read The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt, one of my favorite books from my childhood. So I read three books in one day. Which was my favorite thing to do when I was ten.

p.s. In finding the links for this entry, I discovered that the Earthsea Trilogy is actually a quartet... make that a quintet, with a couple of short stories thrown in to boot. So I get to look forward to more reading!

Posted by Holly at 2:00 PM | Comments (3)

June 2, 2007

As Opposed to a Pleasant One

The first Medici pope was Giovanni de' Medici, who, as I mentioned last time, is reported to have written to his brother, "God has given us the Papacy--let us enjoy it," when in 1513 he learned he'd be able to change his name from Giovanni to Leo X. (Leo X just doesn't sound as good as Malcolm X, does it.)

But Leo had to help God a little along the way in getting Him to give him the papacy. The pope before Leo was Julius II, a particularly bellicose and belligerent man who shocked absolutely everyone by riding out before the armies of the Vatican and who, in the words of Tuchman,

is ranked among the great popes because of his temporal accomplishments, not least his fertile partnership with Michelangelo--for art, next to war, is the great immortalizer of reputations.... He achieved important results in both these endeavors, which, being visible, have received ample notice as the visibles of history usually do, while the significant aspect of his reign, its failure of concern for the religious crisis, has been overlooked as the invisibles of history usually are.

After Julius II's very martial papacy, many were glad to have a lazy hedonist on the papal throne, particularly one who might die early and so give all the other cardinals a chance to be pope before too long. According, once again, to Tuchman, Leo's

health was a major concern because, although only 37 when elected, he suffered from an unpleasant anal ulcer which gave hm trouble in processions, although it aided his election because he allowed his doctors to spread word that he would not live long--always a persuasive factor to fellow cardinals.

Now, the fact that letting everyone think you'll die soon could aid your chances of being elected pope is interesting, but what really caught my attention in that passage is the phrase "unpleasant anal ulcer." Maybe it's just my lack of experience with anal ulcers, but I have trouble imagining a pleasant anal ulcer. The "unpleasant" there seems superfluous, about like mentioning a "tall giant" or a "short dwarf."

But in 1517 the story of Leo's ass gets every weirder, and here it is:

The Petrucci conspiracy was an obscure and vicious affair that has baffled everyone from that day to this. Leo professed to discover through betrayal by a servant a conspiracy of several cardinals to assassinate him. Led by the young Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci of Siena, who nursed a personal grievance, the plot depended on poison to be injected by a suborned doctor in the course of lancing a boil on the Pope's buttock. Arrests were made, informers tortured, suspect cardinals grilled. Lured to Rome on a safe-conduct, Petrucci and others of the accused were imprisoned, the violation being condoned by Leo on the ground that no poisoner could be considered a safe risk. Hearings produced awful revelations; confessions were induced; whispered reports of the proceedings bewildered and terrified Rome. Forced to plead guilty, Cardinal Petrucci was executed by strangling with an appropriately red silk noose at the hand of a Moor because protocol did not permit a Christian to put to death a Prince of the Church. Faced with this example, the other accused cardinals accepted pardons at a cost of enormous fines, up to 150,000 ducats from the richest, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, yet another of the nipoti of Sixtus IV, in this case a grand-nephew.

So far-fetched was the plot that the inference could not be avoided that the Pope, perhaps seizing upon some informer's tattle, had promoted the whole affair for the sake of the fines. Recent investigations in Vatican archives suggest that the plot may in fact have been real, but what counts is the impression made at the time. Coming on top of public indignation at Leo's war on Urbino, the Petrucci conspiracy further discredited the Papacy, besides alarming and antagonizing the cardinals. Whether to nullify their hostility or to fend off bankruptcy, or both, Leo in an act of astonishing boldness created 31 new cardinals in a single day, collecting from the recruits over 300,000 [which is simony, or selling a religious office for profit, a very great sin]. The wholesale creation is said to have been conceived by [Leo's cousin] Cardinal Guilio de' Medici as a paving stone on his own path to the Papacy.

Leo died in 1521; he was succeeded by Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, a Dutch-born reformer who actually wanted to be a proper pope and a true religious leader, and therefore got no cooperation from the cardinals. His death in September 1523 was unmourned, and made way for Guilio de' Medici to become Pope Clement VII. Clement's major claim to fame is that he so mismanaged what was already fucked up, failing to respond at all to what was obviously a crisis, that the sack of Rome occurred during his reign.

And all of that is really interesting and good to know, but I still find myself horrified and fascinated by the idea that people would try to assassinate a pope by injecting poison into a boil on his ass.

Posted by Holly at 11:45 AM | Comments (2)

June 1, 2007

Put a Bad Guy in a Tiara and a Dress, and See What Trouble Ensues

Last weekend I watched a thoroughly inadequate documentary on The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. A major problem was the acting, which was simultaneously too restrained and excessive, in that the actors never spoke, so they had to resort to over-emoting to convey any sort of inner state. I like cheese as a general proposition but that was just too much.

But an even bigger problem was that the whole thing was carefully sanitized to avoid offending Catholics. The discussion of Savonarola, the Dominican ascetic who persuaded people to renounce materialism and riches by casting their paintings, statues, books, jewels and fine clothes onto raging "bonfires of the vanities," makes it sound like his gripe was all about the fact that Lorenzo de' Medici paid Sandro Bottecelli to paint naked depictions of pagan goddesses instead of clothed depictions of Christian saints. In other words, there was absolutely no mention of the fact that at the time Savonarola began railing against the established church, the dude wearing the papal tiara was Alexander VI, a.k.a. Rodrigo Borgia, a licentious, scheming son of a bitch who became pope by buying the papacy outright at age 62 after fathering at least seven acknowledged illegitimate children. (I say at least seven because he acknowledged seven of them very clearly; then there was an eighth, who was legitimized first as Rodrigo's grandson and then as his son, by two successive papal bulls; one of the elders son, Cesare, whose paternity was never in doubt, was supported and protected by his father in his very successful career as a murderer and general extremely nasty bad guy.) You'd think that given that the documentary was about a family of Italian merchants who eventually became some of the most important art patrons in the history of the world before becoming very bad ecclesiastical leaders, there would be room to point out the failings of a family of Spanish scofflaws.

But no, because more important than an accurate account of much of anything is the requirement not to say anything negative about a church, which is one more reason organized religion sucks and people who follow it are so often unable and unwilling to have a clear grasp of the truth. Thus, the Borgias are not even mentioned. Nor was there any reference to mistresses kept by Medici popes (there were two popes, and god only knows how many mistresses). The famous (and perhaps apocryphal) comment by Giovanni de' Medici (a.k.a. Pope Leo X) to his brother Giuliano upon Giovanni's accession, "God has given us the Papacy--let us enjoy it," was treated as a remark that was irreverent and indecorous rather than greedy and rapacious, although Leo managed to empty the papal coffers in record time.

So I turned to The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman, a book about why governments insist on pursuing policies and actions that are contrary to their interests, even after the policies are shown to be flawed and the actions mistakes. Tuchman attributes part of the problem to "wooden-headedness," which is

the source of self-deception [and] a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived or fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian's statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns [though perhaps not of all presidents]: "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."

I read this book in the spring of 2003 as we were gearing up for the war in Iraq. The section on Vietnam was enough to persuade anyone with a brain that what we were preparing to do was the height of folly, but we went ahead and did it anyway--just as Tuchman might have predicted.

Anyway, there's a section in Tuchman's book about all the ways the Renaissance popes really, really screwed up. And the point of this post was not really to talk about the crappy documentary--that was just to introduce my real subject. But I have barely gotten around to that, and this post is already really long, so I'll finish up with my real topic tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

November 3, 2006

Buffy, Fiction and God

Here's an entry from Stephen Frug that speaks to several of my primary interests: good writing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, moral and artistic complexity, and religion. I recommend it with this disclaimer: it's LONG, as long or longer than some of the stuff I post. But it's really thoughtful and interesting, and worth your time.

Posted by Holly at 7:51 AM | Comments (3)

September 21, 2006

How to Judge Religion

I have been mulling over Matt's question about how to criticize religion and decided I was wrong to distance myself from Ms. Armstrong, especially when I remembered that she'd offered the best summary of I'd ever encountered on how to judge religion. If I'm not as close to her thinking as I might be, it's not because I think she's wrong but because I think I'm not as wise or developed as she is, and so not able to espouse her ideas with the commitment they deserve. I really think her work--especially "A History of God"--should be required reading for anyone struggling with recovery from Mormonism. As evidence, I offer this passage from a paper I delivered on her at the 2005 Sunstone symposium. The paper was entitled "Pain, Sorrow, Suffering, Failure, Despair and Occasional Moments of Transcendence: The Wisdom and Insights of Karen Armstrong." Here's something--as in a long something, as in four single-spaced pages--from the close, in case you're interested.

Note: Although Armstrong has published more than a dozen books--most of which I've read--I cited only five in this presentation. They are, in order of publication, "Through the Narrow Gate," "Beginning the World," "A History of God," "The Battle for God" and "The Spiral Staircase."

In 1981, Armstrong published Through the Narrow Gate. It didn't earn much money, but it did gain her some attention--enough that she was invited to comment on religious topics on television. Eventually she lands a job writing the text for a six-part television documentary on Saint Paul, and it is while doing research for this project that she realizes how profoundly ignorant she is about the origins of Christianity. She comes to the conclusion that it was not Jesus Christ or any of his immediate disciples who were the inventors of Christianity, but Saint Paul--hence the name of the series, The First Christian. She also realizes that she has never thought carefully about Christianity's two "sister religions," as she calls them, Judaism and Islam.

She studies the three monotheistic religions' relationships to each other when asked to write a television series on the Crusades. Calling the story of the Crusades "a hideous chronicle of human suffering, fantacism and cruelty" (258), she notes that studying them has a primary salutary, albeit painful, effect: "it broke [her] heart" (Staircase, 258). This broken heart, is, of course, a necessary spiritual development. As she notes,

All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions--Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms--teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. (Staircase, 272)

Learning how to cultivate and practice empathy is part of what makes it possible for her to write remarkably sympathetic biographies of Muhammad and the Buddha, activities in which she "had to make a constant, imaginative attempt to enter empathically into the experience of another" (Staircase, 279). Admittedly, this is a difficult thing to do. It takes self-awareness, generosity and discipline to cultivate empathy, and even more hard work to act on it rather than resorting to anger and retaliation when someone attacks us or something we love. It is also necessary if we want to make any progress as spiritual beings, and much of religion has been designed to help us do that hard work. If religion fails in that primary task, it fails supremely and definitively. One of final insights offered in The Spiral Staircase is the absolute necessity of empathy as a criterion in judging the value of religion: Armstrong states,

The religious traditions were in unanimous agreement. The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology (Staircase 293).

Armstrong notes as well that "compassion is not always a popular virtue. In my lectures I have sometimes seen members of the audience glaring at me mutinously: where is the fun of religion, if you can't disapprove of other people! There are some people, I suspect, who would be outraged if, when they finally arrived in heaven, they found everybody else there as well" (297). But she stresses that especially since 9/11, "our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that, it is worthless. And what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies" (304).

"Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong" (History, 32), Armstrong observes, and one of the things that is wrong is that the meaning of events is often not obviously manifest; rather, meaning has to be made, which is not always an easy task. There are experiences in life that logic cannot account for, and the unseen often seems more real than the tangible and concrete. We must find ways to adequately account for our lived reality, even if that means resorting to imaginative, symbolic ideas of how the world functions and what events and objects signify.

Above all, these ideas must work; when they cease to work, they are eventually discarded. Armstrong points out that "Abraham and Jacob both put their faith in [the god they called] El because he worked for them: they did not sit down and prove that he existed.... People would continue to adopt a particular concept of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound" (History, 17).

Although Armstrong sees herself as sympathetic to and, in some ways, celebratory of religion and God, many devout Christians would be outraged by her concept of the divine. Armstrong sees belief in an anthropomorphic god, a glorified human being made divine, however much that belief continues to work for people, as both idolatry and a mark of immature spirituality. Discussing "a personal God who does everything that a human being does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears, creates and destroys as we do," Armstrong acknowledges that such a deity "reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human" (History, 209) However, she continues,

A personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, 'he' can encourage us to remain complacently within them; 'he' can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as 'he' seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, 'he' can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. (History, 209-210).

In A History of God, Armstrong devotes 400 pages to detailing, contextualizing and explicating writings by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians, mystics, philosophers and scholars regarding the nature of God, the numinous unseen mystery that, however elusive, remains a genuine, felt presence throughout the world. Armstrong begins her history by considering briefly what these diverse monotheists might have told her as a teenager beginning her spiritual quest:

It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear--from eminent monotheists in all three faiths--that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was--in any sense--a reality "out there"; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist--and yet that "he" was the most important reality in the world. (History xx)

Armstrong calls attention to the fact that statements like that last one are often paradoxical by intent, a way to prevent us from considering God merely another object in the universe, like a molecule, a tree, a planet, or a black hole, albeit more distant and complex and somehow responsible for the other objects. She also considers the death of God, proclaimed by Nietzsche in 1882, devoting her final chapter to the question, "Does God Have a Future?" She contemplates the "god-shaped hole" left in the universe by the "disappearance" of God--the result, she stresses, of making him into an existent being who could be killed--and what that god-shaped hole means both to atheists who are happy to live without him and former believers who mourn his present absence.

The religious approach Armstrong learns to value over certain belief in a personalized god is an open-minded curiosity about the mystery that exceeds our human understanding and pervades our world, which can be encountered through a patient, thoughtful silence. Armstrong stresses repeatedly throughout her work that "Sacred texts cannot be perused like a holy encyclopedia, for clear information about the divine" (Staircase, 285). Rather, we should treat scripture as a kind of poetry,

which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way as you might listen to a difficult piece of music.... You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth, or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness. (Staircase, 284)

In other words, Scripture and myth are attempts to make the unseen visible, to express the ineffable and to understand the unknowable. Therefore, if we consult statements about that which exists beyond the world of facts, which must be taken on faith, and is beyond normal comprehension, and read them as if they are provable, logical statements of fact, we will be misled. Instead, when thinking about God, we should open ourselves to things that stimulate our imaginative and creative faculties. Armstrong observes,

many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not. Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion.... The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. (History, 233)

Posted by Holly at 8:55 AM | Comments (8)

September 20, 2006

More on the Religion Thing

In recent comments, Matt has raised the issue of how to criticize religion fairly and appropriately, a question that has stymied many people far wiser than I. Spike mentions that this was a question Marx sincerely and seriously grappled with. Here's an editorial by Jonathan Freedland from the Guardian about the Pope's comments and how NOT to critcize religion. A couple of excerpts:

The Pope seems unaware that, for hundreds of millions of people, religious affiliation is not a matter of intellectual adherence to a set of abstract principles, but a question of identity. Many Muslims, like many Jews or Hindus, may not fully subscribe to the religious doctrine concerned, and yet their Muslimness, or Jewishness or Hinduness, is a central part of their make-up. Theology plays a lesser part than history, culture, folklore, tradition and kinship. In this respect, religious groups begin to look more like ethnic ones. Which means that a slur on a religion is experienced much like a racist insult. Plenty of secularists and atheists struggle to understand this - wondering why they cannot slam, say, Catholicism the way they might attack, say, socialism - but the Pope, of all people, should have no such trouble. He should realise that when he declares Christianity a superior religion, as he did some years ago, that is heard by many as a statement that Christians are superior people.

and

What makes me shudder about the Pope's Regensburg lecture is that he appears to join Osama bin Laden in this effort to cast the current conflict as a clash of civilisations. Complicatedly, and dense in footnotes, he is, at bottom, trying to establish the superiority of one faith over another. His argument is that reason is intrinsic to Christianity, yet merely a contingent part of Islam.

But what sense is there in such a contest? If the most senior figure in Christendom effectively takes Bin Laden's bait and says that, yes, this is a war of religions, ours against yours, how can this end? Such a war cannot be quieted by the usual means of diplomacy or compromise. There can be no happy medium in matters of core belief: Muslims cannot meet Christians halfway on their belief that God spoke to Muhammad, just as Christians cannot compromise on Jesus's status as the son of God.

Good times, aye?

Posted by Holly at 7:12 AM | Comments (5)

August 10, 2006

Why I Go to Sunstone

Today is my first day at Sunstone. Several people have asked me recently why I go to Sunstone, especially given my relationship to the church. Since I've already written something that addresses that question, I'm posting it here. This essay was published last year in Sunstone's print journal. It's kind of long, but if you're interested, here it is.

"What are you doing at Sunstone, then?"

It's a question I am asked each year. Sometimes the question is posed with genuine curiosity; sometimes it's an accusation. Why would someone who isn't a practicing or believing Mormon attend a symposium on Mormonism? It's also a question I asked at one point. Although I had read, subscribed to, published in, cited in my own scholarship and learned from the print version of SUNSTONE for years, I never attended a symposium until 2001--and the decision finally to do so wasn't easy. Early in 2001 I submitted an essay for publication; a few months later I got a message from Dan Wotherspoon, letting me know that he'd accepted the essay, and requesting that I read a version of it at the symposium. I told him I'd think about it.

"Why would I want to go to that?" I asked myself. "It's all fine and good in print, where you can read what intrigues you and ignore what doesn't, and nobody interrupts the author in the middle of a point. But this live version...I'm sure it'll just be a bunch of disgruntled inactives arguing about stuff with a bunch of bossy hard-liners"--and I'd seen and participated in enough of that already. But Dan was graciously, persistently insistent that I'd enjoy the symposium, so I queried a few friends who had attended.

"Of course you should go," they told me. "For every panel that doesn't interest you, you'll find one that does. And you'll meet so many incredibly cool people."

So I went. And Dan and my friends were right--so right, in fact, that I've been back every year since, and plan to go again. But what is it that draws me?

The short answer is that Sunstone is a place where I can ignore pronouncements about what I should believe and value and figure out what I do believe and value--about my own history, my own faith, about how to move through this complicated world as a moral, ethical person, all the while employing a vocabulary and frame of reference shared by the people I'm talking to. I certainly can and do spend much of my time pondering questions of ethics and truth with people who have no connection to Mormonism, but sometimes it's nice not to have to explain how the particulars of my Mormon upbringing affect my views on larger questions of spirituality and ethics.

The long answer goes something like this:

I try to accept that Sunstone is everyone else's forum as much as it is mine. I know there will be plenty going on that doesn't matter to me, and that's OK. Chief among the panels or presentations that don't interest me are any that focus on Joseph Smith. He may or may not have been a living prophet once, but he's not a living prophet any more--at least not to me. I find him only marginally more interesting than, say, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; or William Miller, the farmer from Upstate New York and Baptist preacher whose apocalyptic visions help launch the Second Great Awakening of 1820s and 30s. But I accept that to many people, even to people who are no longer or never were faithful Mormons, Joseph Smith and his teachings are of vital interest--after all, he made a lasting impression on US history, and he shaped an institution that affects millions of lives. And I don't discount the possibility that the right presentation could succeed in making Joseph Smith's life compelling to me again.

Nor do I worry much about the daily workings of the Church. At the time I'm writing, Gordon B. Hinckley is still president, but I can't name his councilors. Weeks will go by in which I don't hear a single mention of the church. Unless the Church takes a political stand, I don't see the current institution as having much effect on my life. But these days I don't live in the inter-mountain West where I spent my childhood. If I did, I might feel differently.

What I do care about is how my training as a Mormon has shaped and continues to shape the choices I make and the ideals I espouse.

Primo Levi wrote, "Changing moral codes is always costly; all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this." I would add that changing moral codes rarely involves a complete renunciation of one's old ideology. Often the change comes because a beloved and honored aspect of the ideology (for instance, an emphasis on disciplined religious study and the belief that each person should ask for confirmation that something billed as scripture is indeed a source of spiritual truths) somehow comes into conflict with another aspect of the ideology (such as directives not to probe religious mysteries or question the utterances of leaders). In such a situation, the first belief often is not abandoned; in fact, it is embraced all the more fully.

There are parts of my Mormon past I shed easily enough, parts I struggle to escape, parts I still embrace gladly and parts so inescapably central to who I am that it takes careful, deliberate scrutiny to tease them out in the first place--and even more work to understand them. How I see the world, what I find meaningful in the world, is irrevocably shaped by my Mormon upbringing.

For instance: I have ancestors who joined the Church in 1832. One of my ancestors survived the Haun's Mill Massacre only by pretending to be dead. I had two ancestors in the Mormon Battalion, one on my father's side and one on my mother's. One of my ancestors arrived in Salt Lake with Brigham Young and was named the first bishop of the city--indeed he was the only man to be bishop of the entire city. There are polygamists all over my family tree. Every one of my siblings has been married in the temple. I grew up in a town so Mormon that we held our high school prom in the church's cultural hall. One of the primary, crucial events of my life was my mission in Taiwan and the crisis of faith I suffered there. I even approach my job as an English professor in a way shaped by Mormonism: I love exegesis, or critical exploration of a text, and I know one reason for that is all those exercises I learned to do with scripture: leave it in context and see what it means; take it out of context and use it to explicate something; find something else to explicate it.

So if anyone can claim to be an ethnic Mormon, I think I can. And it is partly by virtue of my religious training and partly due to my temperament that I believe quite strongly Plato's maxim that "an unexamined life is not worth living." Thus, if the church somehow lost all its members tomorrow and existed only as a historical relic, I would still be concerned with scrutinizing and puzzling out how my present life has been shaped by my past, including the 26 years I spent as a devout Mormon, obeying the commandments, participating in the culture and passionately studying the doctrines of the Church.

Chances are slim that the Church will lose all its members tomorrow, and so I am also faced with the challenge of interacting respectfully with my parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins and friends who remain in the church. I share with my family the legacy of sacrifice and creation given to us by our Mormon forebears, and I value that legacy. I chose to honor it by imitating my forebears and swapping a belief system I no longer find meaningful for something that offers me greater hope of grace and redemption, just as they did, while many in my family honor that legacy by remaining in the faith our ancestors chose. The challenge for all of us is to love and be happy for one another.

Maturity and generosity aren't always required in order to be happy for someone who behaves exactly as you believe s/he should, and is then rewarded for that behavior. But it can take maturity and generosity to be happy for someone who flourishes in a system that made you miserable, or in a system you don't approve of. How, then, do those who are gladly devout and those who are cheerfully inactive or excommunicated manage to share the cultural legacy of Mormonism and the network of relationships forged through Mormonism? For instance, should I cease to care about or pretend not to know people I loved on my mission, simply because I no longer believe what I preached then, that membership in the Mormon church is necessary to salvation? How do those of us who are no longer among the faithful reconcile a view of the world shaped by Mormonism with the sense that Mormonism is not adequate in helping us navigate the world? How do we avoid conflict with those we love who still rely on Mormonism as a moral and spiritual compass?

These are some of the questions that concern me, and I come to Sunstone because it helps me pose and answer those questions in meaningful, lively and constructive ways.

In March 2004, Karen Armstrong, one of my favorite writers and scholars, published The Spiral Staircase, a sequel to her earlier memoir, Through the Narrow Gate. In The Spiral Staircase, she discusses the difference between orthopraxy (right behavior) and orthodoxy (right thought), and convincingly cites the argument that in many religions, orthodoxy and doctrine are of little significance--what matters is behaving rightly, cultivating behaviors that change us for the better, regardless of what we believe.

This argument was so revolutionary and astonishing to me that I needed to explore it further. Remarkably, once I abandoned the idea that orthodoxy--that troublesome, unswallowable bone in my throat--mattered at all, I felt more at liberty to celebrate and embrace those practices inherited from Mormonism that truly have enriched my spiritual life. Thus I proposed a panel for the 2004 symposium: "Doing Things That Change Us: Mormonism as Praxis" (reprinted in SUNSTONE December 2004). I wanted panelists to consider the special benefits offered by cultivating religious habits and behaviors either unique to Mormonism or approached in a uniquely Mormon manner. I hoped the panel would be positive and validating for any audience: active, faithful Mormons could affirm those practices that reinforce their faith, while people who were no longer active or believing Mormons could acknowledge and remember what was valuable about their training as Mormons. The idea was to celebrate the ways in which Mormonism inculcates and encourages behaviors that truly do make us better people, regardless of belief.

That panel was one of the highlights of my five years at Sunstone--and I've been to some stellar presentations. It truly became a celebration, and no one in the audience seemed to think that anyone would need to justify a desire to identify and embrace the elements of our religious training that help us live lives of greater spiritual awareness and maturity, despite the fact that we had also shed elements of that training.

That's what Sunstone offers me: a forum where I can work to identify and embrace the elements of my religious training that help me live with greater spiritual awareness and maturity, which, admittedly, is something you can do at Church. But Sunstone also offers me a forum where I can ask if there have been elements of my training as a Mormon that get in the way of spiritual maturity, which is something you really can't do at Church. For me, it's about deciding, as consciously and deliberately as possible, what I want to keep and what I want to lose--and in order to do that, it helps to be around people who recognize some value in Mormonism to begin with, who don't think religion as a whole and Mormonism in particular are a waste of time. I am sure I will continue to encounter people who find it baffling that I want to discuss any element of Mormonism when I no longer subscribe to its doctrines; but at Sunstone, I also find people who understand where I'm coming from--and who are also willing to help me figure out where I want to go next.

I would differentiate here between community and kinship. I admit, I don't feel much of a sense of community at Sunstone: there are too many different groups devoted to too many different doctrines and too many people who don't fit in to any group for there truly to be a community. But I don't see that as a bad thing. That lack of cohesiveness means there's room to ask your own questions, spend an hour listening to someone else's questions. You may not agree with people or change their minds, but no one even pretends that that needs to happen. And at each symposium I have been lucky enough to meet someone who becomes a genuine friend, who challenges and inspires me not only for one weekend in late summer, but all year long.

A yoga teacher once explained the spiritual quest to me this way: it's as if we're all wandering through some giant maze of a corn field, the stalks too high for us to see who or what is in the next row. But if we're lucky, we find people we can wave to at those moments when we come out of a row, before we forge back down the narrow paths of the field, just so we remember that others are pursuing the same quest, even though ultimately, we must all do it alone. I buy that explanation; it resonates with my experience. Sunstone for me is the end of a row: I come out, take a deep breath, look around; I greet others seekers and hear something about their quests; then I get on a plane and head home, where I plunge once more into the maze.

Posted by Holly at 10:00 AM | Comments (4)

August 4, 2006

Old Testament Weirdness

In the comments to yesterday's post on Brokeback Mountain, CL Hanson notes that she learned at BYU that "in [Mormon] culture woman is the disposable person." That's something learned in college myself, albeit in a bible lit class, when I read this gruesome story in Judges 19, which I'm going to tell now, and then we're going to take a break from this topic, since it doesn't seem wildly popular. [OK, I lied: there's a followup here.] Plus, I'm almost done with the paper and will have time to write about something else for a while. But here it is, without further ado, one of the grossest stories from the Old Testament:

In Judges 19, we get the story of a Levite from Mount Ephriam whose concubine leaves him in order to return to her parents' house, an activity labeled "playing the whore against him," or valuing her own desires above his. The Levite eventually goes to fetch his concubine, and on their journey home they stop in Gibeah, where the men are "Benjaminites," meaning both that they are of the tribe of Benjamin and that they have sex with other men. The Levite sets up camp in the street of a city, only to be implored by an old man not to lodge there--instead, the old man offers the couple shelter for the night.

Beginning in verse 22, we read

Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. [Note: in case you don't get it, they're using "know" in the biblical sense, this being the bible and all.]

[23] And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.

[24] Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.

[25] But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.

[26] Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light.

[27] And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold.

[28] And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place.

[29] And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.

Cutting an ox into twelve parts and sending a piece to each of the twelve tribes was a traditional call to war, but why cut up a perfectly good ox when you've already got a dead--or nearly dead--concubine? Keep in mind, the Levite called the tribes to war over the fact that the Benjaminites had destroyed his property--at stake was the fact that this MAN would have to get a new concubine--rather than over the fact that a woman was raped repeatedly, since he himself threw her out the door to be raped.

The tale is revolting, in its homophobia, its misogyny, its unspeakable violence. It shows that homosexual acts are so abominable that to prevent their occurrence, one should offer one’s virgin daughter to be “humbled,” because in these matters, women’s health and happiness, if not their very lives, are acceptable sacrifices. Gay gang rape is unthinkable, but straight gang rape–hey, if it placates the horny male miscreants outside your door, no problem! The aftermath isn't much better. The other eleven tribes went to war against Benjamin, and killed over 25,000 of its men--only 600 men of Benjamin remained when the battle ended. It looked as though the tribe would die out, because all the men in the other eleven tribes had sworn not to give their daughters in marriage to Benjamin, an oath they could not renounce. But they didn't want to be the eleven Tribes of Israel, so they hatched a plan to provide the Benjaminites with wives: a group of virgins, the daughters of Shiloh, would be celebrating a feast off in a vineyard, and if the Benjaminites rode in, kidnapped the virgins and married them, well, their fathers hadn't broken their oath because they had not "given" their daughters in marriage to Benjamin, only allowed them to be taken.

Marriage and procreation, you see, were both duties and rights of these men, regardless of any sexual conduct they engaged in with other men. The important thing was to keep the tribe going. This is the spiritual and moral legacy we have inherited from the Old Testament, and it still lives on in Mormonism, which is why marriages between straight Mormon women and gay Mormon men still receive such praise.

Posted by Holly at 8:59 AM | Comments (9)

July 7, 2006

What He Said

I haven't read The End of Faith by Sam Harris, but after reading this interview with him in Salon, I want to. He hits on some of the reasons why I find many true believers intellectually, morally and spiritually repellent, and why I refuse to let my family bear their testimonies to me. Here are two excerpts from the interview conducted by Steve Paulson:

What about the Bible? Do you see this as a recipe for religious intolerance?

Oh, I do. There's no document that I know of that is more despicable in its morality than the first few books of the Hebrew Bible. Books like Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus, these are diabolical books. The killing never stops. The reasons to kill your neighbor for theological crimes are explicit and preposterous. You have to kill people for worshiping foreign gods, for working on the Sabbath, for wizardry, for adultery. You kill your children for talking back to you. It's there and it's not a matter of metaphors. It is exactly what God expects us to do to rein in the free thought of our neighbors.

Now, it just so happens, however, that most Christians think there's something in the New Testament that fully and finally repudiates all of that. And therefore, we do not have to kill homosexuals. We don't have to kill adulterers. And that's a very good thing that most Christians think it. Now, most Christians actually are not on very firm ground theologically to think that. It's not an accident that St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine thought we should kill or torture heretics. Aquinas thought we should kill them, Augustine thought we should torture them. And Augustine's argument for the use of torture actually laid the foundations for the Inquisition. So it's not an accident that we were burning heretics and witches and other people in Europe for five centuries under the aegis of Christianity. But Christianity is at a different moment in its history.

But isn't this a problem mainly when you read the Bible or the Quran literally? Doesn't the conversation change once you stop reading sacred scriptures literally? If you understand, for instance, the historical context -- when Judaism or Christianity were first emerging, they were religions competing with other religions. Doesn't that free you up to appreciate their spiritual teachings?

I'd be the first to agree that it's better not to read these books literally. The problem is, the books never tell you that you're free not to read them literally. In fact, they tell you otherwise, explicitly so. Therefore, the fundamentalist is always on firmer ground theologically and -- I would argue -- intellectually than the moderate or the progressive. When you consult the books, you do not find more reasons to be a moderate or a liberal. You find more reasons to be a fundamentalist. I agree, it is a good thing to be cherry-picking these books and ignoring the bad parts. But we should have a 21st century conversation about morality and spiritual experience and public policy that is not constrained by superstition and taboo. In order to see how preposterous our situation really is, you need only imagine what our world would be like if we had people believing in the literal existence of Zeus. I defy anyone to come forward with the evidence that puts the Biblical God or the Quranic God on fundamentally different footing than the gods of Mt. Olympus. There are historical reasons why Zeus is no longer worshiped and the God of Abraham is. But there are not sound epistemological or philosophical or empirical reasons.

There's no doubt many awful things have been done in the name of religion over the centuries. But, of course, there have also been many wonderful religious people. I would argue, for instance, that Martin Luther King has been the most important moral leader in America over the last century. And I think it would be impossible to make sense of what he did without talking about his faith. It seems to me his Christian faith compelled him to be an activist and it's what gave him strength in very difficult times. What do you make of those kinds of people who've been inspired because of their faith?

I agree, King was an incredible person who did heroic and necessary work. A couple of answers here. There's no evidence that those things can only be done in the name of faith, whereas there is considerable evidence that really terrible acts of violence are being done only because of what people believe about God. For instance, while there are Christian missionaries working in sub-Saharan Africa doing heroic work to relieve famine, there are also secular people, like Doctors Without Borders, who work alongside them, doing the same kind of work and not doing it because they think Jesus was born of a virgin. They're not preaching the sinfulness of condom use the way Catholics and Christian ministers tend to do. So while Christian missionaries are helping people, they're also helping to spread AIDS with their sexual taboos and their prudery. So that's one issue.

I'm also breaking a taboo. I'm rejecting the idea that all of our religions are equally wise and emphasize compassion to the same degree. This is just clearly not true. Martin Luther King, to some significant degree, was animated by Christianity. But when you look at why he preached nonviolence to the degree that he did, he didn't get that from Christianity. He got it from Gandhi. And Gandhi got it from the Jains. Jainism is a religion of India that preaches this doctrine of nonviolence. To argue that that's the true face of Christianity is really misleading. Christianity also gives you the Jesus of the "Left Behind" novels who's going to come back and just hurl sinners into the pit. And the God who's going to punish homosexuals for eternity.

[....]

We've been talking about how intolerant so many religious people can be. But aren't you asking us to be very intolerant of religion?

It may sound paradoxical but it's not. I'm advocating a kind of conversational intolerance. It's really the same intolerance we express everywhere in our society when someone claims that Elvis is still alive, or that aliens are abducting ranchers and molesting them. These are beliefs that many people have. But these beliefs systematically exclude them from holding positions of responsibility. The person who's sure that Elvis is still alive and expresses this belief candidly does not wind up in the Oval Office or in our nation's boardrooms. And that's a very good thing. But when the conversation changes to Jesus being born of a virgin or Mohammed flying to heaven on a winged horse, then these beliefs not only do not exclude you from holding power in society; you could not possibly hold power, in a political sense, without endorsing this kind of thinking.

It should be terrifying to us because many of these beliefs are not just quaint and curious, like beliefs in Elvis. These are beliefs about the end of history, about the utility of trying to create a sustainable civilization for ourselves -- specifically, beliefs in eschatology. These are maladaptive. For instance, if a mushroom cloud replaced the city of New York tomorrow morning, something like half the American people would see a silver lining in that cloud because it would presage to them that the end of days are upon us.

Posted by Holly at 1:39 PM | Comments (5)

February 16, 2006

My Dream Date with God

As I posted something a few days ago about having dinner with God, I thought I'd share this strange little thing I wrote a few years ago about a date with God.

Last night as I lay in my bed tossing about in that semi-lucid semi-dreaming state induced by illness, medication and not enough sound sleep, a question and an answer occurred to me. Here they are:

Question: Describe your dream date with God.

Answer: OK.

My dream date with God would begin with a phone call--none of this voice speaking from the whirlwind business; I want an actual phone call made from a real phone number that appears on my caller ID box. I figure it will consist entirely of of 8's (infinity symbol turned side-ways) and 0's (the nothingness God created everything out of) and 1's (after all, God is the big One). God will say, "Hey, would you like to spend the weekend at the Grand Canyon?"

"Sure," I'll say, and write it down in my planner.

So that's what I'd do on my dream date with God: go to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It has to be the North Rim; I haven't been there since 1976, the summer between seventh and eighth grade. We won't camp; we'll rent a cabin--separate rooms, of course. This isn't Leda and the Swan or Mary and the Holy Spirit or anything like that.

We'll look at the world in its magnificence and he'll try to explain the forces that molded it. He'll conjure a thunderstorm or two. He'll take apart a pine cone and tell me why it's constructed as it is.

God has nothing to do with ethics for me. Ethics exist outside of God. God is about power. I don't always understand power. This doesn't mean that I don't understand creation. I am perfectly willing to believe in a big bang that got everything going somehow. What I don't understand is how some things change and some things don't. What I don't understand is heresy today, gone tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 8:25 AM | Comments (3)

December 6, 2005

A Movie I Won't See

I remember disliking The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis when I read them in fifth grade, though I dutifully made my way through all but the last book in the series of seven: the elementary school librarian, whom I trusted thoroughly, assured me that they were required "great" children's literature, and I wanted to read all such great works. But at some point I just couldn't stomach any more--I found Lewis's books creepy and preachy and mean, and they got worse as the series went on. It was largely because of those books that I was reluctant to read anything else by Lewis: in high school I steered clear of The Screwtape Letters; in college I ignored what he had to say about Mere Christianity.

This review from The Guardian of Disney's new adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, describes some of the things I had the sense to be bothered by, even as a ten-year-old.

The headline reads, "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion;" the review concludes

So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

Pretty much.

Posted by Holly at 6:42 AM | Comments (2)