Acts of God
I'm unfamiliar with both the etiquette and the mechanics of using links to other people's blogs (do I write and ask permission? And if so, why? Isn't getting to the widest audience possible the whole point? I think I've provided you (at the end of this instead of at the beginning - sorry about that, I expect I'll sort it out next time) with a link to a story I personally found so disturbing yet so worthy of consideration that I'd like to pass it on. Briefly, for those who don't want to or can't be bothered to scrolldown and use the link (or in case it doesn't work), it's a story of Young White Christian Boys and Gay Bashing. There were several ironies in this particular case, such as both assailants and victim, previously unknown to each other, being from the same ethnic and religious minorities; the linked article is excellent in its grasp of the moral stance of both agressors and victim, and how their similarities were more marked than their differences, the main (perhaps only) one being the sexuality of the victim.
Whatever one's personal religious or philosophical persuasions, the recent death of Jean-Paul II has provided us with an occasion, perhaps even an obligation, to consider the place of religion in politics and society, and as an influence on human behaviour. I knew there were a lot of Catholics; I didn't know that there were a billion of them, though. I didn't know that 1/6 of the world's population at least nominally subscribed to the idea that the Pope is Infallible. I think that history will certainly accord a special place for this man, whom I believe to have been honest and sincere in his devotion to his faith; he's certainly been more politically active on the world stage than most of his immediate predecessors, yet his legacy is mixed. I think it's probably true that because Jean-Paul II was Polish and had lived and preached under the Soviet-controlled regime in Cold War Poland, he had a deeper understanding of, sympathy for and (crucially) influence over the collapsing Soviet Bloc. At that point in history, his Papacy became part of the evolution of post-Communist politics, when a lesser Pontiff, or a less influential and committed Pontiff, might have allowed the Church to be come sidelined and irrelevant.
However, it's hard to deny that Jean-Paul II's adherence to the "condom" question has caused enormous loss of life and suffering in Africa, where many of the Church's most fervent and (crucially) conservative (both priests and lay persons) members can be found. More progressive thinkers are mostly to be found in the developed Western world, whose "flocks" are vastly more sophisticated and liable to pick which parts of their religion suit them and dispense with what's inconvenient. Sure, if the Pope is right, when it comes to the Pearly Gates the Africans will probably get free passes while the rich Easter-Christians who sometimes ate Dover Sole on Fridays will be sweating it out in Purgatory (and I'll be roasting, but that's another matter). It doesn't change the fact that millions of people, in some places whole generations, are dying miserably in poverty, squalor and pain because they sincerely believe that if they put a bit of rubber over their dick they'll go to Hell.
So back to the link and the story I mentioned above. These young men were all (apart from the victim, who's father was one and who had rejected his son because of his sexuality) Evangelical Christians, and their main defence, if you can dignify it with the name, was that homosexuality is an "abomination" according to the Bible and it was "against their religion". I believe the reference comes in one of Paul's Epistles in the New Testament, but it doesn't mention anything about slashing them so badly with smashed bottles they look like "sides of beef". Even in the Old Testament, where Sodom and Gomorrah were thoroughly chastised, it was God who actually did the work; in fact, "Vengeance is Mine", Sayeth the Lord. He seemed to make quite a point of that.
"God made me do it" has been the standard fallback of loonies, psychos and would-be Presidential assassins for as long as there's been a God/Gods. I don't mean to devalue the millions of people who do actually do conscious good because of their faith, whatever it may be, but when it comes to atrocities, real atrocities, then almost as many seem to be of religious as of good old common-and-garden greed (oil, water, raw materials, slaves - don't kid yourselves, they just call it "people trafficking" nowadays). It seems, if God really does deliver the odd personal message, the message is always something pretty nasty or - and maybe this should be looked at as a possibility - a message from the Almighty makes you insane. It's true, you do occasionally read about someone who donates all his/her wordly goods to a Church, but the actual money tends, sadly, to end up in the pockets of people like Jimmy Swaggart. Such misguided faith is more likely to produce feelings of pity rather than a desire to emulate.
But given the massive public grief at the death of Jean-Paul II, much of which I know to be real and deeply sincere, and the Bush administration's tactics in the US (and to a lesser extent the Conservative Party in the upcoming British General Election), which shamelessly evokes the "dark side" of Christianity (intolerance and religious hatred), maybe Western liberal thinkers should give a bit more cerebral time to religion. Because you live in an apartment in a city with water coming out of a tap and several direct connections to the rest of the world at your disposal, because you're politically well-informed and read the right books and watch the right films, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of organised religions as faintly medeival and not worth taking seriously. Anything that 1 billion people believe in, whether it's the Catholic Church or a Flat Earth, has to be taken seriously. And I'm not comparing the two in terms of relevance, I'm just making a point. Anything that leads three young men to launch an unprovoked (unless you have a real dislike of white trousers) attack on a complete stranger deserves examination.
I'm not going to get into rivalry or even downright hatred between different faiths; not because I don't have anything to say, because it's a constant interest (and horror) of mine, but because I'd rather take it as a seperate subject. The kind of hatred that motivates atrocities like Darfur, the India/Pakistan arms race, or the Twin Towers deserves to be treated as a thing apart. And I bet you never read such a list in that order before, either. For now, it's enough to look at the metaphorical beam in our own eye; what are "we", in the sense of our societies, teaching our young people by way of morals, that they end up slicing up people who don't share their beliefs? Or shooting their classmates? Or getting pregnant at 13?
Lots of different issues here, but ultimately they come down, I think, to the fact that a lot of us are living in a post-Christian era. Certainly, there are plenty of Christians, especially in America, but exactly what brand of Christianity are they pushing? The New Testament brand, with it's insistence on love and tolerance, or the Old Testament fire and brimstone variety? And if we aren't Christians and have children, what kind of moral framework are we laying down for our children instead? Because the fact that I, as an adult, have opted out of organised religion means, to me, that I have to replace this in my daughter's life with something, a code of ethics which I believe to be right and which involves her as a human being with all her faults and her gifts. It's a big job, being a parent, and I think we're beginning to get a sense now, as a society, of what happens when we abandon the "old" moral values and don't replace them with something approaching a sense of right and wrong (or acceptable/unacceptable) in our children.
I live on a large, poor housing estate, and the scariest thing I ever encounter round here is a bunch of early teens with a few cans of lager inside them. If you follow the link, you'll find something scarier, but it boils down to the same; something is very wrong with what we're teaching our kids, or not teaching our kids, and if we expect to have a society where you really can walk down the street carrying a whie stick and not get mugged, we ought to be addressing this problem. Whether Gods tells us to or not.
Link
Whatever one's personal religious or philosophical persuasions, the recent death of Jean-Paul II has provided us with an occasion, perhaps even an obligation, to consider the place of religion in politics and society, and as an influence on human behaviour. I knew there were a lot of Catholics; I didn't know that there were a billion of them, though. I didn't know that 1/6 of the world's population at least nominally subscribed to the idea that the Pope is Infallible. I think that history will certainly accord a special place for this man, whom I believe to have been honest and sincere in his devotion to his faith; he's certainly been more politically active on the world stage than most of his immediate predecessors, yet his legacy is mixed. I think it's probably true that because Jean-Paul II was Polish and had lived and preached under the Soviet-controlled regime in Cold War Poland, he had a deeper understanding of, sympathy for and (crucially) influence over the collapsing Soviet Bloc. At that point in history, his Papacy became part of the evolution of post-Communist politics, when a lesser Pontiff, or a less influential and committed Pontiff, might have allowed the Church to be come sidelined and irrelevant.
However, it's hard to deny that Jean-Paul II's adherence to the "condom" question has caused enormous loss of life and suffering in Africa, where many of the Church's most fervent and (crucially) conservative (both priests and lay persons) members can be found. More progressive thinkers are mostly to be found in the developed Western world, whose "flocks" are vastly more sophisticated and liable to pick which parts of their religion suit them and dispense with what's inconvenient. Sure, if the Pope is right, when it comes to the Pearly Gates the Africans will probably get free passes while the rich Easter-Christians who sometimes ate Dover Sole on Fridays will be sweating it out in Purgatory (and I'll be roasting, but that's another matter). It doesn't change the fact that millions of people, in some places whole generations, are dying miserably in poverty, squalor and pain because they sincerely believe that if they put a bit of rubber over their dick they'll go to Hell.
So back to the link and the story I mentioned above. These young men were all (apart from the victim, who's father was one and who had rejected his son because of his sexuality) Evangelical Christians, and their main defence, if you can dignify it with the name, was that homosexuality is an "abomination" according to the Bible and it was "against their religion". I believe the reference comes in one of Paul's Epistles in the New Testament, but it doesn't mention anything about slashing them so badly with smashed bottles they look like "sides of beef". Even in the Old Testament, where Sodom and Gomorrah were thoroughly chastised, it was God who actually did the work; in fact, "Vengeance is Mine", Sayeth the Lord. He seemed to make quite a point of that.
"God made me do it" has been the standard fallback of loonies, psychos and would-be Presidential assassins for as long as there's been a God/Gods. I don't mean to devalue the millions of people who do actually do conscious good because of their faith, whatever it may be, but when it comes to atrocities, real atrocities, then almost as many seem to be of religious as of good old common-and-garden greed (oil, water, raw materials, slaves - don't kid yourselves, they just call it "people trafficking" nowadays). It seems, if God really does deliver the odd personal message, the message is always something pretty nasty or - and maybe this should be looked at as a possibility - a message from the Almighty makes you insane. It's true, you do occasionally read about someone who donates all his/her wordly goods to a Church, but the actual money tends, sadly, to end up in the pockets of people like Jimmy Swaggart. Such misguided faith is more likely to produce feelings of pity rather than a desire to emulate.
But given the massive public grief at the death of Jean-Paul II, much of which I know to be real and deeply sincere, and the Bush administration's tactics in the US (and to a lesser extent the Conservative Party in the upcoming British General Election), which shamelessly evokes the "dark side" of Christianity (intolerance and religious hatred), maybe Western liberal thinkers should give a bit more cerebral time to religion. Because you live in an apartment in a city with water coming out of a tap and several direct connections to the rest of the world at your disposal, because you're politically well-informed and read the right books and watch the right films, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of organised religions as faintly medeival and not worth taking seriously. Anything that 1 billion people believe in, whether it's the Catholic Church or a Flat Earth, has to be taken seriously. And I'm not comparing the two in terms of relevance, I'm just making a point. Anything that leads three young men to launch an unprovoked (unless you have a real dislike of white trousers) attack on a complete stranger deserves examination.
I'm not going to get into rivalry or even downright hatred between different faiths; not because I don't have anything to say, because it's a constant interest (and horror) of mine, but because I'd rather take it as a seperate subject. The kind of hatred that motivates atrocities like Darfur, the India/Pakistan arms race, or the Twin Towers deserves to be treated as a thing apart. And I bet you never read such a list in that order before, either. For now, it's enough to look at the metaphorical beam in our own eye; what are "we", in the sense of our societies, teaching our young people by way of morals, that they end up slicing up people who don't share their beliefs? Or shooting their classmates? Or getting pregnant at 13?
Lots of different issues here, but ultimately they come down, I think, to the fact that a lot of us are living in a post-Christian era. Certainly, there are plenty of Christians, especially in America, but exactly what brand of Christianity are they pushing? The New Testament brand, with it's insistence on love and tolerance, or the Old Testament fire and brimstone variety? And if we aren't Christians and have children, what kind of moral framework are we laying down for our children instead? Because the fact that I, as an adult, have opted out of organised religion means, to me, that I have to replace this in my daughter's life with something, a code of ethics which I believe to be right and which involves her as a human being with all her faults and her gifts. It's a big job, being a parent, and I think we're beginning to get a sense now, as a society, of what happens when we abandon the "old" moral values and don't replace them with something approaching a sense of right and wrong (or acceptable/unacceptable) in our children.
I live on a large, poor housing estate, and the scariest thing I ever encounter round here is a bunch of early teens with a few cans of lager inside them. If you follow the link, you'll find something scarier, but it boils down to the same; something is very wrong with what we're teaching our kids, or not teaching our kids, and if we expect to have a society where you really can walk down the street carrying a whie stick and not get mugged, we ought to be addressing this problem. Whether Gods tells us to or not.
posted by holojojo at 8:32 AM
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