The Serpent's Wisdom

The Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal is beautiful. I mean, breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

It is dark as night inside. The neo-gothic ceiling is decorated in dark blue with gold stars and large rose windows. The balconies and columns are made of dark, rich wood intricately carved and decorated with gold leaf. If one turns around and peeks up, one can see a 7000-pipe organ over the back balcony. Despite all of this complex ornamentation the eye is drawn forward to the chancel and altar, which stands out of the darkness, shining and bright.

cowgrrl and i first arrived at the Basilica at 11:30 on Sunday -- so a morning Mass was underway. We were able to peek in for a few moments, and could hear the organ and accompanying choir. In those few moments i felt an immense sense of peace, of centeredness; i remembered a few things about religion and worship that, in my cynicism, i had forgotten.

cowgrrl described her reaction as "religion envy," since she was brought up without exposure to devout religious practices. And i began to feel like a refugee again, because this is a place to which i can never return.

I just can't set aside awareness of the many people i've known, including myself, who have been deeply damaged by people acting in the name of god and church. I cannot overlook the role of religious institutions in the stealth genocide.

For me the damage runs deeply enough that i doubt i will be able to sit peacefully in any sort of church ever again, feeling welcome and valued and loved. The closest i came was during my years of involvement with the UU church. And while during those years i encountered a number of people i feel very fondly towards even now, i am just too disillusioned by organized religion these days.

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

A line-by-line response to Gay Marriage Foes Face Issue in Schools

Ever since her 5-year-old brought home a book from kindergarten that depicted a gay family, Tonia Parker has felt that her parenting has been under attack in the only state that allows same-sex marriage.

Translation: they want to feel safe in imparting bigotry to their children.

She and her husband, David, didn't want to discuss sexual orientation yet with their son, and were shocked that the book was included in a "diversity book bag" last year. David Parker subsequently got arrested for refusing to leave a Lexington school after officials refused to meet his demand that he be notified when homosexuality was discussed in his son's class.

Yes, i remember this. The arrest was for trespassing or creating a nuisance, that sort of thing, but they've tried to characterize it as an arrest for "standing up for what is right." I'm sorry, this is not the same as protesting outside the School of the Americas, okay?

Now the Parkers and another couple have sued school officials in federal court, claiming Lexington officials violated their parental rights to teach morals to their own children.

The way they and other opponents of gay marriage see it, the 2003 ruling that cleared the way for same-sex weddings has emboldened Massachusetts gay rights advocates to push their views in schools and ignore those who feel homosexuality is immoral.

"In many parts of the United States, we could have presented our concerns and our objections, and it wouldn't have been a problem," Tonia Parker said.

Translation: anywhere else in the country, their bigotry would be perfectly acceptable.

Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said there is no pro-gay campaign in the schools, just isolated cases exaggerated by anti-gay marriage activists who suffer from "narcissistic activist personality disorder."

Yes. Reduction of your privilege is not oppression.

Carisa Cunningham, spokeswoman for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, said school curriculums haven't changed, just the reaction to them by gay marriage opponents. "Maybe the impact of the law is that it has made people much more defensive and much more afraid," she said.

She has more sympathy than i do (though, to be honest, any sympathy would be more than i have). It is not rational for homophobes to be defensive and afraid. They are not losing anything here except the privilege to be a bigot.

...Brian Camenker of the Article 8 Alliance, which opposes gay marriage, said there's been a striking change in tone by gay marriage proponents since marriages started.

"It's like you're dealing with people from Mars, people who feel they're so superior they can use your child's mind as a sandbox for their own personal ideologies," he said.

That's quite a statement from someone who wants to treat OUR child's mind as a sandbox for THEIR personal ideologies.

But Eliza Byard of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network said gay families exist everywhere — the only thing different about Massachusetts is that same-sex marriage makes it much harder to push them aside. Public schools must acknowledge gay families, she said, even if it upsets parents who believe same-sex relationships are immoral.

"One of the basic realities of American life," she said, "is that all of us have to deal with beliefs we disagree with."

Queer people have been forced to live with, and continue to have to live with, offensive and hateful ideologies shoved down our throats every day. We get to see the privileges others around us have and take for granted, that have been denied us. These bigot crybabies wouldn't last five minutes in our shoes, to judge from the way they get so freaked out by what are actually very small nods to the fact that queers are people too.

Thanks to griffen for linking to this piece from the Los Angeles Times. I want to examine it.

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality.

No, it's only her bigotry that compels her to speak out against homosexuality, because there is no commandment or requirement of the Christian faith to do so.

The only passages in the Bible on homosexuality relevant to Christians are Romans 1 and I Corinthians 6, and these indicate Paul's opinion that homosexuals do not have a place in the Kingdom of Heaven. They do not require Christians to speak out against them, just to avoid associating with them.

But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

What exactly is "religious expression"? Is that the right to wear a cross, or a burqa, or a pentagram? The right to spend a moment out of every day in class saying a prayer?

Does it include the right to make proclamations that, directly or otherwise, promote hatred?

There is no "right" to avoid being offended. All of us are exposed, all the time, to statements that offend us. We cannot ban speech on the basis that it offends someone.

And believe it or not, that is not the rationale behind bans on hate speech.

What makes hate speech problematic is not that it offends someone. What makes it problematic is that it promotes a social power imbalance rooted in violence, exploitation, and discrimination. A target of hate speech is not simply "offended" or "put-off;" hate speech can trigger a post-traumatic stress response, which causes anxiety and other major mental health issues.

Not only that, but it cultivates an environment where people feel safe and entitled to commit acts of aggression and even violence against members of an oppressed class. The homophobic sentiment in our society is so strong (and hardly needs bolstering) that fully 84% of queer people report being verbally harassed and insulted, and over a quarter are physically assaulted.

There is, whether some want to admit it or not, a social power imbalance favoring heterosexuality. Queer people are at a distinct economic disadvantage (in spite of the stereotype of queer people as affluent), are much more likely to be the targets of violence, and as a direct result of societal homophobia have a higher incidence of mental health problems.

So, what Ruth Malhotra wants, in effect, is the right to contribute to my mental illness, and to encourage people to beat, fire, insult, and marginalize me. And, taking that a step further, i think that she and people like her are quite aware of the effects her hate speech will have. They are in fact counting on it, because they want us to feel ashamed of who we are, they want us to go into hiding because that is most beneficial to them.

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Our ability to understand and make judgments about our environment evolved out of the need to know what is going on around us in order to find food or keep from becoming food. It is linked to some of the 'oldest' parts of the brain such as the amygdala, a portion of the brain that sifts through sensory data for threats and governs emotional responses like fear and fight-or-flight.

The human capacity for thought is still connected to the amygdala. The need to understand is fundamentally an emotional need. Failure to come up with an answer to an important question is deemed a threat.

The brain is capable of holding myriad complex and even contradictory thoughts at once, because it is not a CPU but is more like a house with several rooms. One room can hold one thought and another room can hold another thought which is in direct contradiction to the first.

This kind of inconsistency does not always cause dissonance. When it does, though, the dissonance creates an emotional dilemma, activating the amygdala which adds an exclamation point to demands for a resolution to the crisis.

When this happens, the brain looks for a quick answer it can apply to make the distress stop. There is even a biosociological theory of religion rooted in this observation. A while ago i built on this and suggested that it creates an opportunity for memetic parasites to thrive in human culture.

There is another way in which emotion can get in the way of logic, and that is the emotional investment which most (if not all) people put into thoughts, concepts, ideas, or cultural labels. These things become a part of our identity, and so information that contradicts what we have invested in is perceived as a threat to our well-being.

It was because of all this that i was not surprised by results which i cited a couple of weeks ago about the way in which emotion prevents some information from being processed logically or rationally.

Now, let me be clear that this does not mean that we are totally helpless in the face of our emotional response. One of the beauties of the human mind is that we have the capability to override our emotions with force of will. But this emotional response makes it difficult, and also makes it possible for memes to override logic or rationality.

[By the way, awareness of this does not make one automatically immune to it, which leads to some interesting sensations when you realizing you're reacting in ways you 'know' are "irrational" but which still make sense, because they reflect your experiences rather than the concepts you are able to parrot back on demand.]

I bring this up now because there is also a dimension of restriction that comes with the experience of trauma related to oppression. It is very difficult to communicate beyond this trauma, especially if someone associates a certain kind of language with the mistreatment they received.

For example, it is very hard for me (and many of the people i know and/or love) to remain rational when we hear certain kinds of religious language which we came, during the course of our lives, to associate with mistreatment. When this happens, the words are not "communication of ideas" but "signal of impending threat."

I make the effort to see things rationally, but do not always succeed.

These are all powerful impediments to peaceful co-existence and rational dialogue between people, which it should be a cultural priority to address.

People with cultural privilege protest that they never asked for that privilege, therefore they should not be held accountable for it, nor should they have to participate in efforts to level the cultural playing field. For example, i've been told, "I am a man who does not rape, therefore i have done enough," i am told, or, "I am a Christian who does not bash gay people, therefore i have done enough," or the like.

But this very attitude is part of the pattern of privilege you enjoy. You have the privilege of not thinking about inequity in society, not thinking about how minorities to which you do not belong are asked to sacrifice in ways you've never known about.

Minorities -- women, non-Christians, people of color, queer people, people with disabilities, and so on -- have no choice but to think about it. We can't help but notice that you have advantages we do not. It is blatantly obvious to us, but you have the option of completely ignoring our protestations, and, quite frequently, that is exactly what you do.

You have the privilege of not even noticing the power you wield and possess as if it were a natural part of the way the world works; and that includes deferential self-sacrifices by people in your lives. Chances are, there is someone in your life who is making a sacrifice for you that you never requested, that they never explicitly offered, but which you unthinkingly accept as a part of the way the world works.

And as i wrote yesterday, you are ethically responsible for it. It is your responsibility to take note of what other people give up so that your life can be improved. When that sacrifice comes at great cost to someone, it is your ethical duty to deny acceptance of it.

It is not too much to ask. It is the right thing to do.

This kind of introspection beyond the basic golden rule is what is required of all of us. If we are serious about combatting oppression, it is our duty to take note of how we benefit from it, each of us, and decline to accept that benefit any longer. It is our duty to look for it. It is our duty to acknowledge it when it is pointed out to us.

This is hard. It's damn hard. But this is what it takes. I won't settle for less, not in myself, not in any of you.

One form of privilege is immunity from the community-wide effect of a hate crime. When three straight people are shot and/or hacked up in a bar, it is not perceived as a crime against all straight people. When it happens to three gay people, as happened last night not far from where i type this, It sends the message that it could happen to any one of us at any time, and it triggers post-traumatic responses in the large portion of our community that has been victimized for being queer.

People who are straight generally have no comprehension of what it feels like to have this fear, because they don't have to; they are privileged in that respect. Straight people are perhaps only marginally less likely to actually have their face hacked up randomly in a bar; i don't know what the stats are. But they are excused from having to fear it.

It is said that it is hard to detect the presence of absense, or to prove a negative. How is someone heterosexual supposed to notice the absence of such fear in their lives? How are they supposed to recognize that 1,049 rights which they have and take for granted are not shared by another segment of the population?

By listening, by caring about your fellow human being. These things take a toll on your fellow human being that is not being taken on you; and as a result, we are more likely to suffer depression, substance abuse, and so on. We are therefore at a disadvantage when we compete with you for scarce jobs and resources. Even in the absense of blatant discrimination, you are benefitting from stealth genocide.

And these patterns hold for other forms of discrimination too. Women fear being raped; and even men who do not rape benefit from this, even if they don't want to. For example, many women avoid going out at night, creating an economic and social advantage for men who do not have this fear.

It is the duty of each of us to actively look for these privileges in our lives and decline to benefit from them. Waking up to the ways you benefit from sexism, racism, homophobia, is a lifelong commitment, and one in which we often stumble. It is also one that makes us unpopular with people around us, because they know, even if they cannot consciously articulate it, that you are thereby becoming part of the rebellion against Cannibal, a step that they are themselves not ready to take.

For the pastor of a conservative church to be the first one to speak about an end to violence against queer people is a move that requires a good deal of bravery. So does being the man who speaks up when his friends make sexist comments. In either case, the person who speaks up will catch flak for it. But people respect bravery and compassion. Displays of it can change the world. For each brave soul who takes that step, it becomes a little easier for the next person to do so. Bravery seeds bravery.

Is it unfair for me to demand that step be taken? Maybe it is. But i need, my community needs, more people to take that step. We are literally dying in the meantime, waiting for it to happen. I will pray i have the courage to take that step when i am called upon to do it myself.

Five teachers at San Leandro High School have refused to comply with a school district order to display a rainbow-flag poster in their classrooms that reads, "This is a safe place to be who you are," because they say homosexuality violates their religious beliefs, Principal Amy Furtado said.

The high school's Gay-Straight Alliance designed the poster, which includes pink triangles and other symbols of gay pride. In December the school board approved a policy requiring all district teachers to hang the posters in their classrooms.

from 5 teachers balk at posters for gay students (thanks to novapsyche for the link)

So, let's consider this from a few angles.

1. Children are not going to be having sex in class. So the issue here is not sex or sexual orientation, it is being safe from harassment at school.

2. Fully five-sixths of queer teens face harassment of some kind from their peers.

3. This harassment is part of a pattern of traumatic stress that causes queer people to have an unusual amount of emotional strain throughout the rest of their lives.

4. Therefore, what these signs represent is not an effort to give 'special' rights or recognition to queer students, but simply to indicate to non-queer students that their queer peers should be treated like human beings.

So, what is it that the teachers are opposed to? Are they opposed to homosexuality? Or are they opposed to a token effort to indicate opposition to the oppressive abuse virtually all queer people experience?

Apparently, it is too much to ask teachers of a certain religious persuasion to get behind this goal. That is, they think it is perfectly fine for a certain segment of their students to experience abuse and harassment.

This is what hatred looks like.

A link on the friend's list this morning had some interesting information on the Fed's decision to stop reporting on M3 and suggesting that this is to cover up a Federal Reserve plan to hyperinflate the dollar. So far, so good; that's the kind of evil i can see happening as a result of the Fed's relative impotence in the face of Congress's utter fiscal irresponsibility. Printing lots of money is every junta's favorite way of paying off its debts.

I should have stopped reading the comments though when i saw the word "Bilderburgers." Ordinarily, i would have; LaRouchean-style conspiracy theory doesn't sit well with me.

If there were truly a conspiracy to shape the course of world events, it would not look like a secret cabal. A secret cabal could be too easily exposed for what it is. Just the fact that there is widespread speculation about secret cabals precludes the existence of one, because no secret cabal worthy of the name would tolerate open speculation about the existence of secret cabals.

No, it would look like something else entirely, something much less obvious.

I think that a lot of people are drawn to the idea of a conspiracy because, after all, there are a few people in the world who have a lot of power, money, and influence, and there are many of us who have little or none. And this is a situation with which the majority of us accept quietly, due in no small part to the presence among us of people with uniforms and guns who take orders from the influential folks. It's also a situation that exists because there are people in the world who feel completely entitled to take whatever they want, without any thought for who is put out in the process.

It's been recently established that primates have an innate sense of fair play; and so even on an unconscious level we look at the world around us and know that there is something vastly unfair going on around us. But we can't see it. That's because we've been very effectively blinkered to its existence.

THAT is what a real conspiracy looks like. It would be something we all buy into, a presumption built in to all of our language, culture, and ideology fnord. Something considered "common sense" so that the defenders of it seem rational and straightforward, can defend the unfairness of it all with a calm rational voice. Something considered "natural" so that proposals to replace it with something more fair and egalitarian sound wacky and far-out. Something we are all recruited to play a part in, unable to see it because we have been cultured from birth to see it as a normal part of the way the world works. Something we have no words to describe because we have been numbed and desensitized and because, even more subtly, we employ a censor on our consciousness to keep it from active awareness. Our own scrambling from day to day for survival keeps us from seeing it, because we are too busy worrying about our own lives and sanity. And lastly, those who do happen to look up from the grindstone to see that the emperor has no clothes are led to dualistic "us vs. them" thinking that makes it difficult to understand (and therefore criticize) the full ubiquity of the conspiracy and our own individual participation in it.

Hannah Arendt's appraisal of evil as banal holds in this case, because the conspiracy shaping world politics and events, preserving privilege for a few, looks exactly like the kyriarchy.

In Hebrew, ha-satan means "the adversary."

Elaine Pagels argued in The Origin of Satan that the term evolved as the Tanakh was written so that by the time of Jesus it referred to the spirit of social discord. That is, Satan was not necessarily God's adversary, so much as Satan was the embodiment of adversity between people.

Jesus placed above all of the laws and commandments two which he called the greatest: to love God with all of one's heart, mind, and soul, and to love one's neighbor as oneself. If these principles indeed took center stage for Jesus, then that casts his workings against Satan in a new light. Satan is then his opponent not for opposing God but more for causing people to oppress and abuse one another.

Combine this with an argument i made in the past, that Jesus was far less concerned with the transgressions of ordinary people than he was with oppression and exploitation. In fact, to recast God's judgment so that it seems to be about everyday transgressions is to subvert and misappropriate the message of the prophets, who were concerned with social justice. It then becomes a tool of the oppressors, as many ex-Christians can tell you it was used against them to hound them into submission.

During the course of events in the early church 'heretics' were accused agents of discord and therefore were called antichrists or agents of Satan. This is further misappropriation: dissidence is not discord.

By this interpretation, then, to promote peace, understanding and togetherness, to promote justice and equality, no matter what your beliefs or background, is to be in accord with the wishes of God and Jesus, and to promote intolerance, discrimination, and abuse, to promote war and exploitation, is to be an agent of Satan.

It is more truly Satanic to misuse religious teachings to promote discrimination against or abuse of others than to commit individual transgressions.

In fact, Jesus gave special attention to those who take on the appearance of being righteous while acting as agents of Satan. This is why he gave so much of his scorn to hypocrites: he knew that this particular guise of Satan would be the hardest for people to see and understand.