sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with answering modern christianity

This morning i finished reading The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. Now it's time for my review of the His Dark Materials trilogy to which this is the conclusion.

I've been writing this review in my head through half the trilogy, but i wanted to actually finish the trilogy before setting any of it down.

The quality of Pullman's writing craft i'll give a B. It was particularly uneven with regard to vividness. In many parts, there was no attention given to the senses at all - no description of sights, sounds, smells. Now, typically, i don't like prose which is bogged down in elaborate descriptions of things. But a few hints here and there, just to tickle the senses, would have been effective - especially given the (literal) otherwordliness of many of the book's settings. In other places the setting descriptions were so elaborate the scene felt bogged down.

Dialogue was good though, and the characterization was (with one exception) superb. I love that the protagonist is an untidy, poorly-behaved, stomping-in-the-mud, neighborhood-warfare-waging, prank-pulling, truth-challenged 12 year old girl.

The exception is Marisa Coulter, a femme fatale who wields charm, seduction, and manipulation to achieve supernatural results. Coulter is the hardest character to read, because one never knows when she is being upfront and when she is lying until she actually acts. I know this is by design, and that element of not knowing would be laudable if it were done via any different means; but it's still unfortunate to see a character play an essential role mainly because everyone who meets her is stunned by how she looks.

Still, i have to give Pullman some points for writing a work of fantasy in which female characters are just as strong and prominent -- if not, on balance, a little more so -- as male characters.

The plotting and storytelling i'll give an A. As a whole the work is superbly conceived and structured. It's set in an elaborate multiverse and the reader finds herself wishing she could take tangents, just to learn more about this or that. Lyra's world, where the story starts, is fascinatingly different from our own. Even the experience of day to day life as a human being is vastly different there, because every person has a companion, a dæmon, who is an extension of their individual being and nature.

In many ways, this is the ultimate "underdog" story. The heroes are figures usually cast as villains: witches, fallen angels (esp. gay ones), dæmons, harpies, users of divination, gypsies ("gyptians" in Lyra's world), African kings, rebels, dissidents... while the villains of the book are figures of authority: various members of the European upper class, bishops and other church functionaries, and upper ranks of angels, including God himself.

Wait, so God is a villain in His Dark Materials? Well, it's more complicated than that. ( spoilerish stuff starts here )

Hmm, not sure how to characterize the last few paragraphs, but since they gel with my own views, i'm going to give it an A. Which means that my overall grade for the trilogy is about an A-.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

A few days ago i described the amazing energy i feel whenever i’m around young queer people. There’s a vibrancy there that brightens the day and gives me hope.

But i’m also very worried because queer youth are in deep trouble. If you’re young, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, you’re in crisis. I’m especially concerned about young people of color in our community.

Statistics. They never tell the whole story, but pretend i’m writing about real people here:

83% of queer youth experience damage to their property, personal attacks, or verbal insults. (83%? Just pretend this refers to every young queer person you meet and you would basically be right.)
40% of queer youth experience physical harassment.
26% are forced out of their homes due to conflicts with parents and family over sexual identity. That’s one in four. I’m sure that’s what Jesus really wanted, right — your kid on the streets?
Between 25-40% of homeless youth are queer. Since queer people make up somewhere around 5% of the population, this means that a queer young person is five to eight times as likely to wind up homeless than a straight young person.
Homeless queer youth are often prostituted, and face discrimination in the shelter system. Only a few small shelters have been designed to meet the needs of homeless queer youth.
The hate-murder rate of transpeople may very well outpace the per-capita rate of all other hate killings. Most of this is happening to young adult transpeople of color.

A few sources:
Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
Southern Poverty Law Center: ‘Disposable People’
Gender PAC: 50 Under 30
Transgendered Youth at Risk for Exploitation, HIV, Hate Crimes
After Working the Streets, Bunk Beds and a Mass (NYTimes, reg. req.)

Here in Massachusetts, there was some “controversy” last year over Youth Pride. I put “controversy” in quotes because, unless you are ex-Governor Mitt Romney, Brian Camenker of MassResistance, or some other reactionary Republican or Catholic, you can either see the need for Youth Pride (see the above if you have any doubts) or it doesn’t put you out very much.

Mitt “i’ll be a more effective champion of gay rights than Sen. Kennedy” Romney thought it would look good for his 2008 presidential campaign to take this class of exploited, abused kids and add his own kick for good measure. He moved first to kill (that didn’t work), then to gut, the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth.

This after using his line-item veto to kill (the very meager) state funding for AIDS programs and GLBT domestic violence programs in Massachusetts.

Kicking someone when they’re down. Mmm, very compassionate.

(Connected to this was the decision of 39 commissioners, advisors and past members of the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence to express “no confidence” in Lt. Governor Healey as the head of that Commission.)

As you might guess, i have a problem with people who can look at a class of vulnerable people who are being routinely harassed, beaten, kicked out of their homes, prostituted and otherwise exploited, and killed, and think that the compassionate thing to do is to treat them like a political football, to point a finger at them and talk about what is wrong with them.

Of late i’ve been finding my perspective shifting much more towards the situation young people are in. For those of us who are over 35, our job really is to pave the way for them and to not screw up their lives. They’re not just “the future,” they’re the world. And those who lead our society should be deeply ashamed at how low they have prioritized the needs not just of young queer people, but of young people in general.

I honestly can't tell if this is a fraud:
Blogs4Brownback: Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine

Basically the argument goes like this: The Bible says the earth was created by God and is "fixed and unmoveable" (1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 104:5) while the sun goes around the earth (Isaiah 45:18, Ecclesiastes 1:5, Joshua 10, 12-13). The Copernican assertion of heliocentrism, based on "abstract, abstruse, and esoteric mathematics," was devised as part of a political agenda to undermine the political and intellectual domination of the Bible.

I fear this isn't a hoax, because this is the next logical step down the slope after insisting on 6-literal-day-creationism. Actually, i take that back; it does not come after creationism because it is frankly less far-fetched. It is (**sobs**) more reasonable.

Elsewhere i read today that reactionary Christians and social conservatives are lamenting that they are behind liberals (and, one might add, libertarians) in developing a presence on the internet. Seeing links in this essay to sites like "Conservapedia" shows what it looks like when they try to catch up to the rest of us.

They cannot compete. They cannot compete in the fair marketplace of ideas, and this was demonstrated the first time scientists concluded heliocentrism was the better theory. But they are not really interested in honest competition; this is entirely about politics and money. They have been rounding up money by the hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue and promote these ideas, and have been quite bullisome about it. So because of their heavy-handedness, we unfortunately don't really get to have, in this generation at least, an open scientific examination of whether there could be intelligent design at the center of the universe. Academic reputations are already being ruined for scientists who research this, and shortly, no scientist at an accredited research facility will touch ID with a ten-foot pole.

I have two incomplete drafts of an entry i've tried to write all day about reparations for centuries of unpaid labor and ethnic cleansing upon which American wealth was built. It's a messy subject that defies encapsulation, but ultimately the ethics of it demands i address this, especially since so many even today perform crucial tasks every day without compensation equal to their contribution to the economy.

But my brain is too scattered for this today, and it's even more scattered now after learning that Jerry Falwell has passed. I'm not sad about this, but i agree with

griffen that there is some cause for sorrow, since now there is no chance that he will repent of the harm he has caused and work to reconcile it with the faith he professed, or even to acknowledge us queer, pagan, or feminst folk as children of the same deity. This would have been greatly helpful for the communities he caused deliberate harm for his own profit and prestige. He became a tangible symbol of the trauma many of us felt as we were expelled from families, homes, and jobs, or shouted at in the hallways of our schools or beaten up in the allyways of our neighborhoods, his hateful words providing the soundtrack by which this abuse was carried out. Now he is gone, and his legacy in many quarters will be rejoicing at his death.

I posted Friday about a new study out of Harvard indicating that "Verbal beatings hurt as much as sexual abuse".

We are a hair's breadth away from established evidence of the trauma and emotional damage of living in our culture of homophobia and transphobia. The case has already been made with regards to racism and sexism. Evidence has already been assembled on the harmful effects of social homophobia and transphobia. Now all we need is to have a causal link established clinically. I expect we will see that in the next decade, maybe five years tops.

Will it make a difference? Maybe not much of one. But it will be another step in the unraveling of the cloak of hatred cast over our society in order to make money and consolidate the state's monopoly on violence.

But this isn't a political game or a religious dispute, this is a visceral life or death matter for millions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people who live with fear and anxiety and self-loathing brought about because of this. We will carry these scars forever, they limit our lives and our health and our economic solvency, and the best outcome we can hope for is that future generations won't have these same scars. It is a worthy tribute, but it shouldn't have to be a tribute at all.

Even so, having this evidence in hand could actually lead to one of the conservative Christians' worst nightmares becoming true -- courts and legislators agreeing that Christian instruction regarding the "sinfulness" of homosexuality is harmful or even a hate crime. This seems an extreme outcome and one that is certainly doubtful in the US, but it's believable in some parts of Europe and perhaps even Canada, where this possibility has already raised its head.

But, here's the thing. Those who have been sowing the seeds of homophobia have our blood on their hands. Even when directly confronted with the reality of the harm to which they are indirectly, if not directly, contributing, they will not stop or at least even stand beside us. They won't stop even though the harm they cause is ethically wrong. They won't stop even though Jesus taught compassion and unity over division and shunning. They won't stop even though moral absolutism is ethically wrong. And they won't even stop when they can see that their hatefulness is literally destroying the fabric of their own churches and communities.

If they won't stop, we ex-Christians and atheists will do it for them, and i guarantee the results of that will be much less kind to Christianity (and maybe even religion in general) than it would if conservative Christianity got its own house in order and stopped hurting people.

ETA. I meant for this entry to have a more personal element, some reflection on how these things affect me every day, the cumulative trauma of transphobia from my parents, from the church, from society at large. But it didn't come out. I've already written about it, anyway.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, feminist blogger, has chosen to resign from the presidential campaign of John Edwards after being embattled (by certain right-wing zealots) for several weeks. The final straw, in the eyes of the Catholic League's head, Bill Donohue, was this comment in her review of the movie Children of Men:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

This apparently qualifies as a "vulgar" and "intolerant" anti-Christian comment. To say that critique is intolerant shows an utter misunderstanding of the concept of intolerance, which seems, from the perspective of people like Bill Donohue, to mean, "any act or utterance which offends our oh-so-delicate sensibilities."

The right has tirelessly labored to misappropriate the idea of intolerance, so that people think it refers not to efforts to counter structural power imbalance in our society, but to improve the niceness of language. By focusing on language they hope to take the focus off of actual oppression.

There is absolutely no measure whatsoever by which Christians are oppressed in this country. Keep that in mind. Christians run this country; they utterly dominate the public discourse, the cultural institutions, the laws, the mores, the standards of decency. Isolated instances of anti-Christian discrimination (which do occur) do not constitute institutional or state-sponsored oppression, exploitation, or disenfranchisement of Christians.

So, in order to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of misappropriating the idea of intolerance, they have to make people think that saying mean things (or things you claim are mean) in your blog is the equivalent of a pogrom, or a gay-bashing, or a clinic-bombing. It is insulting to anyone who is working to end real intolerance in the face of violence and numerous other obstacles.

All that said, i also happen to think Amanda is absolutely right about the Christian idea of the virgin birth.

The gospels' authors must have felt some pressure to distance themselves from Pagans, who depicted divine impregnation of mortal women in a sexual way. In fact, Mary herself had to have been immaculately conceived, so that she would not bear the stain of Adam's sin -- because, apparently, sex itself befouls and stains your soul.

Amanda's comment about women only being a vessel applies too, because this was a widely-held belief about pregnancy in the ancient world: women were only a vessel through which men brought children into existence. This desire to cut women out of the picture is the very essence of misogyny. This view is most obvious in the account of the Gospel of John, whose author claimed that Jesus existed long before Mary did, making Mary's womb nothing more than a tunnel through which he passed into this world.

I'm going to resolve not to make references anymore to "radical Islam" or "fundamentalist Christianity." Radical Islam is not 'radical' in that it doesn't represent the root of Islamic belief; Fundamentalist Christianity is not 'fundamental' in that it doesn't represent the core of Christian belief.

Both movements want people to believe that fundamentalism is what it looks like when you are more fervently religious. That is, they want the rest of us to buy into their position that theirs is the only way to be fervently, devoutly, deeply religious. The mass media, of course, eats this up and serves it back to us as a tasty second harvest.

These movements are at war with me and i refuse to dignify them any longer by utilizing their terminology, along with the implications they carry. Instead i am going to, from now on, refer to both as "reactionary Islam" or "reactionary Christianity."

For a couple of weeks now, i've been thinking about the Parable of the Vineyard Workers. This is one of the more bizarre parables, and that's saying quite a lot as many of them are quite odd.

( the parable )

Those who say the primary or sole focus of Jesus' message was "saving souls" say this teaches us about getting into heaven. If you are born again while young and do good your whole life, you'll get the same reward as someone who converts on their deathbed after a life of wickedness and iniquity. This is because God is "merciful." Don't forget that the twisted assumption behind this is that God doesn't care about how good we might or might not be, just whether or not we have "accepted Jesus" (whatever that actually means).

Let us say that the above interpretation is correct. Even if so, this parable is hardly a ringing endorsement of the doctrine, because in that case at least a third of the parable is given to considering that maybe it's not fair for someone to "toil" all their lives (as if living an ethical life is necessarily drudgery) and get the same heavenly reward as someone who comes along at the last minute and converts right before they die.

Essentially, we are supposed to accept that god tells do-gooders, "Suckers! Gotcha!"

But all of this strikes me as an excuse to overlook the parable for what it is on its face: an examination of the way wage labor works. What we see here is that the person who pays the wage has the opportunity to set the terms, to give favor or not as they see fit; and that those who are forced to work for wages have very little input into the way they are paid -- creating opportunities for exploitation. The landowner is hiding behind "the tyranny of the contract" to exploit the day laborers who worked for him all day, under the guise of generosity towards the later laborers.

Labor for wage is a good thing to question, because in an empire, jobs which relate directly to the business of empire tend to earn the highest wages. Look at our present-day American empire and see how many positions of prestige and wealth are ethically bankrupt and involve directly increasing American power or profiting from disparity with developing nations. Note, too, that many of the most important jobs in human society -- bearing and caring for children, teaching, maintaining house, day-to-day caretaking of sick relatives -- pay almost no wages at all. Wage labor is a system designed to push people into working for the perpetuation of empire.

If the hypothesis i've offered in the past is correct, and Jesus wanted his followers to turn on, tune in, and drop out of the monstrous imperial machine, then the second view of the parable makes a lot of sense. Jesus would have wanted his followers to examine the true nature of wage labor.

John Dominic Crossan demonstrated in his complex anthropological investigation of Galilee at the time of Jesus (detailed in The Birth of Christianity) that a considerable upheaval was going on in which many peasants were driven from their land so that rich Roman developers could build large villas and other pet projects. Displaced peasants have a much lowered standard of living and are forced to take up crafting or day labor -- which Crossan pointed out added a dimension of significance to the fact of Jesus' career as a carpenter: he was a displaced peasant.

Property ownership is the key to power in a human society. Any class of unpropertied renters are kept in a state of perpetual debt to them. This is particularly hard to swallow when many of the unpropertied renters once owned their own land.

This is why throughout human history, mass displacement of peasants -- usually from families which had owned their land for generations -- is one of the primary causes of armed rebellion.

Christianity, which may have had its roots as a pacifist and egalitarian response to lower-class unrest, was over the generations misappropriated by the Roman upper-class and became a primarily "spiritual" movement, with all vestiges of its former radicalism painted over and spliced out. It became dominated by the heirarchical edifice of the church and became eventually a gear in the imperial machine. The "spiritual" interpretation of this parable, as an instruction on god's endorsement of the moral unfairness of deathbed conversions leading to eternal reward in heaven, is revealed as not simply being nonsense, but a deliberate burial of radicalism beneath a memetic morass.

Bridget Mary Meehan said she and seven other women are Roman Catholic priests after being ordained Monday during a riverboat ceremony in Pittsburgh.

But church officials say the ordination was invalid and could lead to excommunication. Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic Diocese warned the women beforehand that those participating will have "removed themselves from the church."

The Church of Kenya writing to the Anglican Consultative Council interprets this as, "the provinces of Canada and ECUSA... by their actions have chosen a different path from the rest of the Communion and should be considered by the rest of the Communion as having broken fellowship. They need to re-consider their official standing in the spirit of repentance, reconciliation and willingness to re-affirm their commitment to the Communion and restoration should only take place after repentance and healing".

What do these statements and issues have in common? Look at the emphasis i added to these quotes above to see what i am getting at. In each case, we have a worldwide religious organization with clear rules about who is allowed to contribute in what way and who is not, and a group of dissidents who believe the rules are against the spirit of the church and who actively break the rules in accord with their conscience. We have in each case the organization stating in response that the dissidents have removed themselves from fellowship by their actions.

Actions of conscience in defiance of prejudicial institutional rules can have a profound effect on public opinion. For example, look at what has happened in the United States since San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples in 2004. Opposition to same-sex marriage has dropped from 63% to 51% and support has risen from 30% to 39%. Since then one state, Massachusetts, has instituted same-sex marriage; in Massachusetts, same-sex marriage is supported by 62% of the population.

Public opinion took a similar course when courts began to strike down laws banning interracial marriage, too. When this redefinition of marriage took place, conservatives warned that public morality, indeed the fabric of society itself, was threatened with collapse. This has not happened, in fact in the last 20 years there has been a notable and enduring drop in the crime rate. Massachusetts has not seen any sign in the last two years that its social institutions are collapsing.

Similarly, there have been no signs of collapse of British civilization since the Church of England began ordaining women.

I've written in the past about "trajectories" in the development of Christian doctrine and practice. The idea of trajectories (or as Jon Stewart called it in his interview with Bill Bennett, the "human condition"), extended to the evolution of justice over the course of human history, provides a way to gauge the change over time in a culture's social institutions.

If the trajectory of the human condition is towards greater equality and equity of human rights, seen through the history of debates over slavery, freedom, suffrage, property rights, employment access, freedom from violence, then we must conclude that those who seek female priests, gay bishops, or same-sex marriage are on the right side of history.

At the outset, the church was an egalitarian emancipatory movement seeking justice for the oppressed and downtrodden. Christian doctrine, however, is not equipped to handle the situation where the church itself is an instrument of oppression, or, even more subtly, where the language itself of Christianity has been co-opted and misappropriated. The authors of the christian testament could not have conceived of such an outcome. They did see the dangers of literalism, but could not have protected against the subverting of their message.

As the ancient theologian Valentinus observed, when we awaken from a bad dream, we find that the scary phantoms which gave us chase are nothing. Similarly, "one's ignorance disappears when [one] gains knowledge, and... darkness disappears when light appears." Acts of conscientious dissent, like the ordaining of women as Roman Catholic priests or the consecration of homosexual bishops in the Anglican church, have the effect of waking us from our bad dream because they are in accord with the trajectory of justice in human history. The phantoms we feared prove to be nothing, just figments, and public opinion shifts drastically in the course of a single generation.

This demonstrates the importance of being brave.

Have the dissenters truly separated themselves from the community of justice and faith? Notably, talk of divisiveness and schism comes not from the dissenters but from the voices of the institutions -- who then is the actual source of that divisiveness? Is what defines a strong union conformity and strict obedience to written rules, or is it mercy and respect for diversity?

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 friend who was raised by extremely abusive Christian parents told me once of the theory she developed while coming to awareness of the depth of the mistreatment she had received, of Christianity as a religion based on child abuse. It starts with Abraham and Isaac, she said, before she pointed out that there many rules given in the Bible allowing or even commanding physical punishment of children. Finally, she said, you have God the Father punishing his own son for misdeeds he did not commit. In fact, the more Jesus suffered, the better for us.

I wasn't really sure what to think of this. But it was one of many thoughts that prodded me to think about power dynamics in the Bible. The Bible was, after all, written by and for men of prominence and power; it is reasonable to inquire into whether it promotes a social scheme which preserves their power and prestige. Who, after all, does not consciously or unconsciously give preference to ideologies that leave one better off?

Even having been exposed to the idea before, i was still astonished to see an idea very much like this promoted by a Bishop of the Episcopal Church. This is more or less the reasoning John Shelby Spong gives in his chapters in The Sins of Scripture on Christianity and corporal punishment: God is a parent who demands obedience under threat of violence and who acted this violence out on his own son. The only remaining major proponents of corporal punishment in America cite Christian doctrine, and many conservative preachers (including virtually all of the televangelists) speak approvingly of physical punishment they received regularly as children.

Spong finds within Christianity a strand of thought promoting violence, and its subtler forms guilt and shame, as acceptable for maintaining structures of dominance. He touches on dystheism (the idea that God is wrathful and will punish us if we do not appease him) as a theology that Christians adopted not just in response to their persecution in the early centuries or disasters like the Bubonic Plague, but also in response to the widespread approval of the physical punishment of children, and adults considered to be childlike such as slaves or women.

He pulls on this thread and finds that the central themes and myths of Christianity itself unravel when we reject violence. He even refers to Christianity as fundamentally sadomasochistic. His solution is a radical re-invisioning of Christology and Christian belief, which he says must change or die.

The deconstruction begins with the dismissal of [the story of Adam and Eve]. It has already moved from being thought of as literal history to being viewed as interpretive myth. The next step is to dismiss it as not even an accurate interpreter of life. There never was a time, either literally or metaphorically, when there was a perfect and finished creation. That biblical idea is simply wrong. It is not even symbolically valid.

... Since there was no perfect beginning... there can also be no fall into sin and thus no act of disobedience that destroyed the perfection of God's world. These details cannot be true even as symbols.

... There is a vast contrast between the definition of being fallen creatures and that of being incomplete creatures. Our humanity is not flawed by some real or mythical act of disobedience... it is rather distorted by the unfinished nature of our humanity.

... [Our critical examination of this issue] is like an unstoppable waterfall. Baptism, understood as the sacramental act designed to wash from the newborn baby the stain of that original fall into sin, becomes inoperative. The Eucharist, developed as a liturgical attempt to reenact the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross that paid the price for our sinfulness, becomes empty of meaning. Various disciplinary tactics, from not sparing the rod with our children to the use of shame, guilt and fear to control the behavior of 'childlike' adults, become violations of life based on an inadequate knowledge of the nature of our humanity. They are the application of the wrong therapy designed to overcome a faulty diagnosis. Even the afterlife symbols of heaven and hell, designed to motivate behavior by promising either eternal reward or eternal punishment, now lose their credibility. A system of rewards and punishments, either in this life or beyond it, does not produce wholeness, nor does it issue in loving acts of a self-giving person. It produces rather a self-centered attempt at survival. It leads to behavior designed not to do good for good's sake, but to do good in order to win favor or to avoid punishment.

The Sins of Scripture pp. 176-178

It is hard to overstate the gravity of what he is saying here. His meaning is this: humans cannot possibly be born into a state of original sin. He states the implication of that explicitly: Jesus did not die for your sins.

Of course, any of us non-Christians could'a told ya that... but to see someone so deeply embedded in the edifice of the church admit that this is evident gives me hope that change is possible.

In his treatment of homophobia in Christianity, i am glad to see that John Shelby Spong did not shrink back from admitting that certain texts in the Bible are homophobic. I haven't read his previous book on the topic, but i feared that he would try to rework or revise our understanding of these passages instead of just admitting that they are bad and wrong, the way i have seen some liberal Christians do.

At one time i believed in, and even formulated myself, arguments that passages like Romans 1 or I Corinthians 6 have been misunderstood and misapplied, and should actually be read in ways that are much more narrow than the conservative interpretation of applying them to all forms of homosexual love and sex. I am wary of such arguments because i fear they are selectively revisionist, and i fear that they defend a kind of text-centric approach that will ultimately fuel literalism.

He suggests that in Paul's writing, and i have noticed this myself, there is a distinct contradiction between his understanding of Christ as the bringer of universal redemption, and his passages of moralizing condemnation.

Spong then mentions a mentor of his who went through a time of being idologically rigid and fanatically pious, before breaking down and admitting that he was gay. He argues that many of the most ardently anti-gay preachers are projecting outwards their own inner struggle with homosexuality -- an argument that has some precedent in psychological research.

Paul, he says, was doing this: projecting outwards his own inner struggle against homosexuality. I've seen this argument before, and i think it is a good one. There is another possibility that occurred to me a while back: that Paul's disapproval of men who have sex with men stems from having been sexually preyed upon at gumnasium.

The problem with either of these theories is that they cannot really account for Paul's disapproval of lesbian sex. Paul would have known that Jewish law specifically bans gay male sex, but does not mention lesbian sex. Paul's disapproval of homosexuality did not stem from his understanding of the law -- Paul NEVER moralized against something from the basis of its being against the Mosaic Law. That would contradict his understanding of the Law as something that Christians have transcended. (Never mind how dangerous this notion is to the fundamentalist program -- ::gasp!:: you mean God's law can change?) But even so, his thinking would have been influenced by it.

It's possible that his own inner conflicts or his own rage at being molested might extend to lesbians as well as gay men -- but it does not strike me as intuitive. Especially given that the Mosaic Law says nothing about lesbian sex.

No, his disapproval stemmed from something new: he believed that gay sex is not expedient.

Now, i've argued in the past that the reason gay male sex seems inexpedient from an economic point of view is that it reduces the reproductive potential of the family. (In the ancient way of thinking about pregnancy, at least.) An act of male masturbation has the same effect -- and both are prohibited in the Old Testament, while lesbian sex and female masturbation (neither of which directly reduce reproductive potential) is entirely overlooked.

So, what kind of expediency does he think is reduced by lesbian sex?

Paul believed that sex itself, on the whole, is not expedient. Like any good authoritarian, he believed that sex must have consequences to prove that it's better to avoid it. And like any good dualist, he thought of flesh and its needs as something that impedes the proper functioning of the mind.

He stopped short of telling Christians that having any sex at all would lose them a spot in the Kingdom of God. For one thing, children have to come from somewhere. He treated marriage, and marital sex, as a concession, but stated his strong preference for universal celibacy.

But gay and lesbian sex are slippery, in that they do not have consequences the same way that heterosexual sex does. It can't result in pregnancy. It can result in venereal disease, but that's not special to gay or lesbian sex. So in his authoritarian mind there's nothing to stop people from having gay/lesbian sex.

Furthermore, he saw homosexuality as a consequence of having the wrong thoughts about God. This must have explained, in his mind, why the Jews rejected it while the Pagans accepted it.

SO, Paul may have been emotionally conflicted or angry, but i don't think this is the ultimate cause of the conflict in his writing. I think it stems, ultimately, from his instincts as an authoritarian, clashing with the inherent radicalism of the early Christian message.

So, about a third of the way into Spong's Sins of Scripture, i am starting to have... i don't know if misgivings is exactly the right word. I don't have disagreements with him and i can't really fault what he has to say. I'm just not sure how relevant his message is.

Spong's heart and mind are in the right place. He has a zeal for honestly and forthrightly addressing the misdeeds of Christianity in the past and present, and demonstrating that they are the result of error. He has a particular talent for illuminating new ways to see familiar passages of scripture, as well as calling our attention to lesser known gems.

But i wonder how relevant this kind of theology is. He sees the Bible with a sense of wonder, even while criticizing the fundamentalists for worshipping it. His hope is that people who have come to doubt or hate it will come to think of it as a misunderstood treasure from a previous age, and not a horrible instrument of evil.

It is hard, having stepped back from my own fascination with that style of theology, to think of it as something that will save the world. Doesn't any scripture-centered approach carry within it the seeds of fundamentalism? Not everyone possesses the skill to read texts in a nuanced way; and so long as there are power imbalances in human society, authoritarian structures will always tend to favor literalistic text-centered theology. Also, haven't we had enough of looking in books for answers to flesh-and-blood questions?

Current Music: The Cure "The Drowning Man"

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.

( Read more... )

...but i'd rather see Christianity eradicated entirely than watch it continue to be hijacked in the name of bigotry, greed, and sexism:

The Northern Marianas Islands are a U.S. protectorate (so it can label goods "Made in the USA") in the Pacific being used as a sort of labor gulag, with workers imported from China and elsewhere and paid pitiful wages. Jack Abramoff had a contract with the government of the Marianas to lobby against stopping the flow of immigrant labor to the islands and to prevent a minimum wage bill (mandating a level higher than the island's standard $3.05 per hour) from getting to the floor of the House.

The islands are home to classic sweatshops. In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay's office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas' largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan.

Tan had to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book "The Hammer" by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is forbidding women to work when they are pregnant, thus leading to a high abortion rate.

Evidently, DeLay didn't have time to look into such allegations, since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor, sponsored by Tan's holding company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff "one of my closest and dearest friends." He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.

"Stand firm," he added. "Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator." He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.

This is why DeLay's professions of Christianity make me sick. He was there. He could have talked to the workers. Instead, he chose to walk with the powerful and do real harm to the very people Jesus mandated we especially care for.

from Molly Ivins: DeLay's sins

Speaking of Tom DeLay's profession of being a Christian, let's see some notes from a conference he attended recently in DC, alongside Senator John Cornyn, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, Phyllis Schafly, and others:

Beginning with the premise that there is a war on Christianity, conference organizers and participants were eager to issue calls to arms in response. “We are under spiritual invasion!” intoned Rod Parsley, an evangelist from Ohio. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! LOCK AND LOAD!” (The audience responded to these imperatives with a raucous and exuberant standing ovation.) Parsley also claimed that those Christian churches not sharing the perspective of the Christians represented at the conference constitute “the devil’s demilitarized zone,” naïvely and fatally embracing “peace at any price.” Meanwhile, Laurence Wright, a Lutheran pastor and co-president of Vision America, announced that the time of a peaceful and contemplative Christianity is over; that Christians have been AWOL (“absent without Lord”) in the battle; and that “We must attack the evil now where it is strongest” in order to restore America, the city high on a hill.

... Perhaps the most explicit call to arms came from Ron Luce, the president and founder of Teen Mania, a Christian revivalist youth ministry, and the author of Battle Cry for a Generation, a multimedia campaign that deploys military images and language to recruit soldiers in Christ’s army. Toward the end of his speech, Luce invoked the biblical story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. (In the story, the Levite’s concubine is gang-raped by men who wanted to do sexual violence to the Levite. When the Levite’s host refuses to deliver the Levite to the assailants, he offers them his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead. When the assailants reject such an exchange, the Levite simply expels the concubine from his host's house, leaving her to be raped repeatedly throughout the night. The following morning, upon finding the concubine’s dead body on his host’s doorstep, the Levite dismembers her and sends her body parts out to the twelve tribes of Israel as a provocation to revenge.) “I kind of feel like the Levite,” Ron Luce confessed. And then he uttered a battle cry of his own: “CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE! CUT UP THE CONCUBINE!”

from Notes from the War Room (thanks to _raven_ for the link)

Current Music: Thievery Corporation "Sol Tapado"

...[A]mong those celebrating the prominence of these two Darwinians [Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett] on both sides of the Atlantic is an unexpected constituency - the American creationist/intelligent-design lobby. Huh? Dawkins, in particular, has become their top pin-up.

How so? William Dembski (one of the leading lights of the US intelligent-design lobby) put it like this in an email to Dawkins: "I know that you personally don't believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God's greatest gifts to the intelligent-design movement. So please, keep at it!"

... Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: "Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level." The nub of Ruse's argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: "If Darwinism equals atheism then it can't be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool."

Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins (Thanks to supergee for the link)

Say it with me, now: atheism is not a religion. There is no doctrine, no scripture, no church, no congregation, no priesthood, no tradition, no temple, no ritual, no prayerbook, no dietary restriction, no almsgiving, or any other religious trapping, associated with atheism.

Disbelief in God is not a religious belief. This assertion presumes that "belief in God" is normal and standard, such that disbelief thereof requires maintenance of faith and positive reinforcement. No, "God" is an assertion made by most religions, the burden of proof for which rests on those who promote religion. Not subscribing to someone else's assertion is not an act of faith.

Current Music: Peter Murphy "Huuvola"

On a certain occasion the Blessed One [the Buddha] was dwelling at Savatthi in Jetavana monastery in Anathapindika's Park. Now it happened to the venerable Malunkyaputta, being in seclusion and plunged in meditation, that a consideration presented itself to his mind as follows:

"These theories which the Blessed One has left unexplained, has set aside and rejected -- that the world is eternal, that the world is not eternal, that the world is finite, that the world is infinite, that the soul and the body are identical, that the soul is one thing and the body another, that the saint exists after death, that the saint does not exist after death, that the saint both exists and does not exist after death, that the saint neither exists nor does not exist after death -- these the Blessed One does not explain to me. And the fact that the Blessed One does not explain these to me does not please me nor suit me. Therefore i will draw near to the Blessed One and inquire of him concerning this matter. ... If the Blessed One will not explain to me [the answer to these questions], in that case i will abandon religious training and return to the lower life of a layman."

Then the venerable Malukyaputta arose at eventide from his seclusion, and drew near to where the Blessed One was; and having drawn near and greeted the Blessed One, he sat down respectfully at one side. [And then Malukyaputta asked the Blessed One his questions and demanded an answer.]

( Read more... )

I quoted this at great length because it is illustrative of a Problem on which i've had my eyes set for quite some time. It is a subset of a greater pattern which i have previously described: the misappropriation of radical speech by the statists and the upper class, and the subsequent redirection of radical movements so that they come to favor and promote the social stratification to which they originally objected.

In this case, it is an example of misappropriation of mystical speech by the adherents of religious edifice. Mysticism is raw observation about human experience, followed by exploration of practical, i emphasize, practical solutions to problems which make people miserable. Solutions proposed two or three thousand years ago may, in light of modern understanding, seem not to directly address the ills of human society -- they may, for example, consist of meditation and/or ritual -- but they are done with the intent of directly minimizing suffering in some way.

Contrast this with religious solutions, which involve appealing to deities to intervene on our behalf.

The difference between the two paradigms is that under the mystical paradigm humans have the power and duty to fix their own problems. Under the religious paradigm, any action we take is merely a band-aid on the true source of our ills, because it is up to God to save us.

Whether the view i am here calling religious is true or not, it tends to find favor among authoritarians because the underlying message is that we are fundamentally powerless in the face of human suffering. If the authorities intend to enhance their own well-being in ways they know will increase the suffering of everybody else, the state of existential helplessness caused by relying on divinity to save us works in their favor.

From that perspective, the teachings of mysticism are a mixed blessing; they could on the one hand encourage people to question and revolt against the status quo -- or they could pacify people just enough to help them tolerate the pain of being slowly cannibalized. In any case, it helps to redirect mystical teachings so that they pose no radical threat; the populace-pacification provided by a "tamed" mysticism is a useful bonus.

At the outset, the teachings of Buddha began with the observation that people suffer, followed by a way of life designed to alleviate that suffering. This included meditation, now proven scientifically to make people happier. (It doesn't work for everyone, but for many it does provide tangible, quantifiable benefit.) The general gist of the proposed way of life is avoiding extremes. According to the passage above, none of this relies on what one believes about things that have no impact on one's immediate suffering or happiness. Emphasis is on action, not belief. Thus i characterize the above as exemplary of mystical teaching -- probably the clearest mystical passage i have read in all of ancient scripture.

And yet... and yet we can see that this passage comes to us couched in religious terminology. Most Buddhists are adherents of a religion; they prey to a pantheon of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas to save them. They meditate, yes, and this reduces their suffering, but is employed as a balm to soothe suffering caused in part by social stratification.

"Spirituality" is what i call mysticism that has been tamed and misappropriated. Spirituality is notably concerned with 'lofty' matters, which are vaguely considered to be less important or pressing. In spiritual contexts one is considered vaguely out of line if one asks questions about material problems, because these arenas are considered to be strictly divorced. Activism as a solution to suffering is portrayed as entanglement in the "web of illusion" and is therefore to be avoided.

The benefits to those at the top of any social heirarchy are easy to see.

The questions posed by spirituality may or may not be valid, but they have the effect of discouraging and even denigrating attempts to view action as a viable solution to social ills. If action is ultimately pointless or fruitless in the face of metaphysical adversity, then what is the point of taking any action at all? Taking action is sometimes even explicitly forbidden; for example, some communities forbid accepting medical care or blood transfusions because healing is left up to God.

The promotion of spirituality by religious teachers has worked so well that i have had to construct more or less from scratch an 'embedded theology' that considers material concerns a valid dimension of mystical inquiry. Guide books on material-practical mysticism are hard to find, because as soon as they're written they are spiritualized -- or, in the case of many ancient texts, they were spiritualized before being written down, such the highly stylized passage i quoted above (or, as i have contended at length, the teachings of Jesus).

The questions with which Malunkyaputta concerned himself in the passage above are typical questions of spirituality. They are rejected by the Buddha out of hand as being of "no profit," which, from the standpoint of practical mysticism, is true. It does not alleviate suffering to know whether or not the world is eternal.

In order to keep the focus away from immediate pressing problems and put it onto lofty matters, proponents of religion and spirituality must convince people that something even greater than life or death is at stake. Again, even without directly commenting on the truth or falsehood of ideas like eternal life or eternal damnation, it's interesting how, seen this way, religion and spirituality begin to look as though they have almost been deliberately constructed to draw people away from concerning themselves with practical matters -- especially when we look at the long history of mistreatment and subsequent misappropriation of mystics and prophets by members of religious establishments...

Yesterday's observations about the Catholic Charities of Boston ending all of its adoptions in Massachusetts to avoid doing a few (probably less than 5%) to gay households is an example of why i am opposed in principle to moral absolutism.

Here's another: conservative groups like the Family Research Council are fighting the development and distribution of a vaccine for two strains of Human Papilloma Virus (which is known to cause cervical cancer) beacuse the virus is often (but not always) transmitted sexually. Their allegation is that an HPV vaccine will encourage premarital sex. The message this sends is that it is more important to preserve the moral absolute of "sex in marriage only," even at the cost of 3,700 women's lives per year in the US alone.

And here's another: the Bush Administration has aligned itself with moral absolutists who are spreading untruths about condoms being ineffective at preventing the spread of HIV. In fact, clinical evidence (which means, surveys of results from people actually using condoms) shows that condoms are more effective at preventing HIV transmission than any other STD. The Vatican's claim that condoms have "microscopic holes bigger than the HIV virus" (which in the US was latched onto by promoters of abstinence education) overlooks the fact that the virus is transmitted only within cells, which are bigger than microscopic holes.

The above are examples of "cutting off your nose to spite your face" to which religious organizations have been driven by their adherence to moral absolutism. In this view, it is acceptable to perpetrate a huge wrong to avoid committing an arguably much smaller wrong. At the crux of this is the view that it is okay to "punish" people for having sex in ways not allowed by (a particular interpretation of) certain ancient moral codes. It's one debate whether or not God will punish people for having premarital or homosexual sex; it's another debate whether any person or agency can legitimately become an agent of God's judgment. I'm willing to take my chances on whether or not there will be any sort of Judgment Day, but i am not willing to sit back while people proclaim themselves the agents of "God's judgment" on the basis of scriptural claims which i believe are false.

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.

When i first came out in 1989, my experience of the queer community is that it was a family of refugees, an entire community of people somewhat adrift because we had nowhere else to turn. Many people i spoke to had been expelled by families, friends, churches, employers, landlords.

I was too young to go to bars legally, but my new girlfriend Dee and i would get in, not to drink but to perform in "AIDS benefits," talent shows the community held. Performers would get a dollar here, a dollar there, which would go towards assistance for people with AIDS who had nowhere else to turn, because the charitable, medical, and church communities treated them like pariahs (many of you are too young to remember what the atmosphere around AIDS was like during the Reagan years), and many of them could not turn to families for help, because they had been utterly rejected. AIDS made people unemployable and homeless back then (and it still does, but perhaps not quite as often). This trickle of money we raised in these performances was sadly significant and direly needed -- and it sent a signal to people with AIDS, that we would stand by them, even if their families and churches and community no longer wanted them.

Like bubbles on water, society's currents pushed us together. We made a liferaft of our huddling, clinging souls in a hostile sea. And this is what it was like in Asheville, a relatively liberal oasis in North Carolina.

Things have changed somewhat, but as the saying goes, the more they change, the more they stay the same. I find it impossible to shake the feeling of being a "refugee," even when i live in an era where people with AIDS are legally protected against discrimination and some places have laws protecting against employment and housing discrimination for queer people. My birth family is not any more accepting of me than it was then, and neither is the Christian religion which i left behind, or the communities in which i've lived.

I see Christians calling us sinful and immoral, but i don't know how to match up their claims with the compassion and solidarity i've witnessed from other queers, given when i had it to give, and drawn upon when i needed it. I don't know how to match up Christian claims of being morally upright with the ugliness i've seen directed at me and people i've known and loved. If Christians are truly interested in 'reclaiming us lost souls,' then they are going to have to treat us with MORE compassion than we use with each other. They've got a long ways to go.

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with answering modern christianity

his dark materials - a gnostic/humanist fairy tale

have you hugged a young queer person today?

first creationism, now geocentrism

jerry falwell and you

hate is undermining the fabric of the church

misogyny, then and now

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spirituality as misappropriation: the parable of the vineyard workers

by their actions

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on theology which rejects violence and domination

more on the sins of scripture: Paul and homosexuality (again)

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I still feel abiding affection for Jesus

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moral absolutism: cutting off your nose to spite your face

bravery seeds bravery

compassion and families of choice

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December 2021

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