Okay, now I know what you are thinking; “Dan is posting porn again! Will someone please keep him away from that damned erotic heritage place!?!” But no. I tell you I didn’t find this in a red light district, smut shop, or even a kinky museum. This naughty little lady was found at a church. Her name is Sheela, or at least that’s what folks call her and a vast array of figures like her. She and her sisters go by the full name of ‘Sheela-na-Gigs’, and you can find them on churches throughout the United Kingdom. Yes, that’s right, it appears that one can find images of grotesque women spreading their labia can be found at old churches throughout the United Kingdom.
Why, you may ask. Well it’s a fair question, but the answer appears to be difficult to nail down. There are a couple theories as to the origins of the term, Sheela-Na-gig, just as there are a few theories as to the reason such images could be found in old churches. Is she a relic of past paganism, an omen about the temptations of sin, or possibly just an erotic gargoyle of sorts. It really depends on who you ask. As I recall, an archaeologist once suggested that she was a symbol of Jesus himself, but I can’t find a written source on that. Presumably, that theory didn’t get very far. Anyway, the whole thing is a little too far outside my own areas for me to weigh in on the controversies with confidence, but I think we can safely draw one conclusion from it; the history of Christianity is far more complex and interesting than you would gather from your local neighborhood church (unless perhaps you are in England).
Of course most history is more complex than folks would gather from the world as it is now, but it doesn’t hurt to remind people of the full range of human possibility from time to time.
That’s what Sheela is here for.
***
The image above is on Kilpeck Church. I have included a few others below, most of which I drew from a website called The SheelaNaGig Project. Also included are images from Chloran, Moulton, Fiddington, Binstead, Oxford, and Llandrindod. You may click to embiggen (if you dare), but a visit to the almighty wiki or the SheelanaGig Project is well worth the time it takes to read about these figures.
Chloran (Got this one from the British Museum website)
Y’all might have noticed a little clip making the rounds on the net lately. It’s a debate between Jamie Kilstein and John Fugelsang over the existence of God. It occurs on Totally Biased with Kamau Bell, and frankly, the whole thing is a lot of fun.
Yes, I am going to take a stand against fun here. I mean, someone has to do it!
Seriously though, it’s hard to dislike this piece, because all three come across as funny and likable, and all three make interesting points, though I have to say the best point Kilstein makes is the one he attributes to his girlfriend. I’d have to give the edge to Fugelsang on this one though. His humor was the edgier of the bunch, and definitely the most thoughtful. If I had to pick a winner, …or even if I didn’t, I’d give it to the believers in this one.
Lest you think I have already give up the gripe and joined the fan-club though, let me get to the problem. Okay, I don’t really have a problem with anything in this video. I don’t literally agree with a lot of the points made by any of these guys, but I’m happy to have a laugh and take it as food for thought. What bothers me is the way some folks are touting this as a model of religious discussions and debate between different viewpoints. By some people, frankly I mean the folks at Upworthy.
…and I like Upworthy, but that’s not going to stop me from cappin’ on them.
…the bastards!
By ‘bastards’ in this case I mean Joseph Lamour, who has this to say about the segment:
If you’re religious, think about the last time you had a talk with an atheist about religion. If you’re an atheist, think about the last time you talked religion with someone who was devout.
Now think how you would have liked that to go.
Okay, Lamour isn’t really a bastard, but dammit, I’m trying to pick a fight here, so I’m calling him one anyway. Someone has to be the bad guy amidst all this goodwill and nice-ossity.
…dammit!
I should add that Upworthy puts this page under the following title: “A Debate Between An Atheist And A Christian Has Quite A Surprising Result.”
So what’s the problem?
Well first, I’m still looking for my surprise. Believe it or not, a polite and friendly conversation doesn’t count as a surprise ending for some of us. These happen all the time; ugly conversations too, but friendly and polite conversations about religious topics are not that rare. If that was supposed to be the surprise, then I’m a little disappointed. I feel like a kid who just got a Happy Meal without a toy. And no, I don’t want the damned cashier to give me one now; it’s too damn late dammit!
I do damn-say.
I do!
Okay, but what’s the real problem with this piece? It’s this. There are reasons this debate went so well, and those reasons should make it perfectly clear why this bit of comedy fun isn’t really a model for how these discussions are supposed to work. If this is a fun chapter in the story of interfaith discussion and debate, it is ultimately a unique chapter, and it isn’t going to set the tone for the rest of that story. Sorry, it just isn’t.
For one thing the Christian wasn’t very ‘Christian’, so to speak. That might actually be because he was too Christian for Christians, though I suspect many would respond that he wasn’t Christian enough, and of course he may well be right to say that Jesus wouldn’t be either, cause Christianity is a tough club and the Prince of Peace may well be barred entrance at this point, and well, …fun with identity-belief games. The point is that he wasn’t representative of Christianity as it is conventionally defined in the public eye. That may be a good thing in itself, but let’s be honest, it’s one of the reasons this debate went so well.
Fugelsang’s values, at least as he represented them in this discussion, don’t necessarily clash with those of Kilstein or any number of secularists such as, …well, myself. He may well have values to which we object, but he did not put those values front and center in the discussion above. Fogelsang may believe in something we don’t, but in this discussion he did not threaten many (or perhaps any) secular ideas about how to live and behave. Put a conservative Christian up there, standing up for conservative Christian values, and we would have a much deeper clash between all the parties involved. I suspect that both Kilstein and Bell would have had a much more difficult time relating with God’s man in this debate had he taken a different approach to the issues in question.
Is Fugelsang’s faith better, more accurate, or more true than that of the folks we normally associate with the label? Well that’s a battle between him and them (though I kinda hope he win’s it). For the present, the point is that he is for many of us in the just-say-no-to-God club the kinda Christian we can readily get along with.
So, perhaps it isn’t so surprising that the folks in this debate got along after all.
More to the point, look at the contours of the debate. These are comedians; they are playing for laughs. Each makes his points, but not one of them really scrutinizes the claims made by the others. In fact, each gets by with a lot of shaky reasoning and imprecise language because we don’t normally expect rigorous arguments from comedians. We expect to laugh. …and if a comedian also gives us something to think about, well hey, then that’s a plus. But we don’t sit in the front row and shout “red herring” at folks like this. And apparently they don’t do it to each other either.
…which is another reason why this turns out to be a friendly debate. The poison pens and trashy talk comes out on this issue when people actually begin to take apart each other’s reasoning on the subject. That’s when it starts to get personal, not necessarily because the other guy is calling you names, but because your own thinking is actually on the line in such a debate. …and okay, because people also call each other names. Discussions about religion get a lot more heated when people actually respond directly to the arguments of the other person, …when they say things like; “that’s not true!” or “that’s totally irrelevant.” It’s at such moments that people start to pepper the discussion with additional phrases like “…you stupid git” or “you miserable cur!” It is much easier to keep it calm when folks just outline their basic point of view and move-on. It’s counter-arguments that turn up the heat on iterfaith conversations, and those really didn’t happen here.
Which means none of these guys got called-out on their cheap shots, their wonky reasoning, or their not-literally-true claims. None of these guys even had to make up his mind as to just how serious he was about the claims he made on the topic, much less answer a direct challenge to the truth of those claims. The tougher arguments don’t necessarily happen because people are trying to be mean, but because there are genuine questions about whether or not some points of view are just wrong, and once you put those questions on the table, the pulse rates start to go up. Counter-arguments are where the shit gets real, and counter-arguments didn’t really happen here.
Counter-arguments didn’t happen, because of course this wasn’t really a debate; it was a venue providing each party with a chance to highlight aspects of their comedy routine, and each did so with remarkable skill. In short, this was comedians doing what comedians do.
The debate wasn’t ugly, because they never really got to the ugly questions.
Sometimes your 15 minutes of fame is a moment in the sunshine (or so I hear), and sometimes it’s fifteen minutes under the spotlight of public interrogation (or so I fear). Sometimes, I expect it’s a confusing mixture of both. Take for example the case of Diane Medley, a special needs teacher who claims those of homosexual orientation have no purpose in life. She will be grist for the left wing mill for a little while, and I suppose a hero to Christian conservatives and right wing culture warriors.
Just to be clear, we will be doing the grist-grinding thing here in this post.
…just a little.
So, what’s the story? Well apparently the standard prom for the local high school will be allowing those of homosexual orientation to attend, which is the reason Medley and others have taken to advocating a second prom in which homosexuals will not be admitted. Wabashvalley.com come attributes the following quote to Medley.
Homosexual students come to me with their problems, and I don’t agree with them, but I care about them. It’s the same thing with my special needs kids, I think God puts everyone in our lives for a reason.
Asked if this also holds for those of homosexual orientation, she responded:
No I honestly don’t. Sorry, but I don’t. I don’t understand it. A gay person isn’t going to come up and make some change unless it’s to realize that it was a choice and they’re choosing God.
Now to be fair, there is a trace of compassion somewhere in these comments, but it’s struggling for shoulder room with a whole mess of condemnation. One suspects that Diane Medley’s caring may well be cold comfort for those whose lives she has declared to be utterly without purpose.
The same could be said of assurances made by some of the others in favor of the alternative prom, and by Christians everywhere who wish to assure us that they hate the sin but not the sinner.
A distinction that often comes up short of any real difference.
And here it is easy to get dismissive, easy to write Medley and so many others off as people without redeeming value. I can’t pretend I don’t feel that way at times, but herein lies the really terrible thing. I actually don’t think she sounds like a person completely devoid of humanity. I strongly suspect that she does indeed help students on a regular basis, that she cares for them deeply, and that her caring does extend in some perverted sense to the homosexuals that may come to her for help.
I said perverted, didn’t I?
And I mean it too.
And yes, it is Medley’s approach to homosexuality that strikes me as perverted, deeply so in fact. To imagine that one could help someone whose very life one accords so little value requires an exercise in mental gymnastics that would surely break the back of a healthy conscience.
This is good will gone wrong folks, and that’s the charitable interpretation of her statements.
You can ask people to change and rethink an awful lot in life, and yes that includes religious beliefs, political commitments, work ethics, and even favorite sports teams. Hell, you can ask people to get over an aversion to cats. But you cannot reasonably expect people to change their sexual orientation, nor to live their whole lives as though it didn’t matter. I expect there is a certain range of people with bisexual orientation who could make conscious choices about what gender they do and don’t want to be with, but for the vast majority of us that decision has simply been made for us. We don’t choose which gender we find attractive; we learn it. …and that learning process can be difficult enough for those of us fortunate enough to end up on the socially acceptable side of the spectrum. So much the more difficult for those whose desires take them in a different direction! People going through that deserve all the help that they can get; they do not deserve the conditional embrace of those whose love is full of caveats and footnotes. And they certainly do not need to hear that the only choice that they can make which would possibly make any difference in their lives, the only choice that could give their existence meaning, is the one that will have them going against their their own natural inclinations.
That approach just isn’t good enough.
And God is no excuse.
Medley has attached conditions to her compassion, conditions that dehumanize those who may need her help. That she accounts for these conditions by recourse to her faith in Christ is both beside the point and ironic at the same time. Frankly, I don’t think you get to set aside the vast array of evidence on the subject of human sexuality and proceed as though important factual questions can be safely relegated to the sphere is personal faith, not when other people’s lives and mental health lies in the balance. But beyond that, there is something deeply inauthentic about that approach.
It isn’t that Medley and her allies have renounced the love and compassion, so central to the vision of Christianity. Indeed that message is all over their approach to the subject. But they have reduced it to a sort of footnote. Gone is the motivating force of this powerful message, and what is left of that message is a mere rationalization. Love does not guide their actions; it guides their narrative. Because it is unthinkable that a Christian should act without love, an explanation must be offered which includes it. And so we get one, a vision of love and compassion so filled with caveats that it is guides actions indistinguishable from those motivated by clear malice. And we are left with an absolutism of laws and rules while the very value of a human life is reduced to an artistic expression of sorts, a trick of story telling.
Again, I don’t think Medley is a beast. But in this matter, her faith is hardly a virtue. Indeed, Christianity as she articulates it in this story is an outright moral failing. It is the reason she cannot treat some students with the dignity they deserve. I’ve known Christians who took the message of love to heart, Christians for whom it was a genuine force in their lives. And perhaps on other days, in other moments it is for Medley.
One hears it all the time; the notion that religion ought to be kept out of politics. I’m torn by the suggestion, because it is commonly used in response to the politics of conservative Christians, …and I have little sympathy for their politics. But the fact is, that just isn’t where I would draw the battle lines. If most people frown at the likes of Pat Robertson or Rick Warren, I suspect they are frowning for reasons that differ significantly from my own.
Religion IS politics as far as I am concerned; it’s bad politics, but politics just the same. I don’t quite mean to suggest that religion is simply a crass tool by which some folks seek to enhance their own power and influence.
….seriously, I don’t QUITE mean to say that.
…at least not as a general rule.
No. What I am suggesting is that religion consistently presents folks with a vision of order in the cosmos. That vision answers questions about how one ought to behave, yes, but it also contains answers to questions about the nature of authority and the social expectations that go with it. These traditions may tell us about Heaven and Hell, Karma, etc. all visions of a cosmic order, but they also tell us a little about how one ought to treat others, assess other people’s character, and what we may fairly do in response to the virtues or vices of those around us. The notion that all of this is supposed to stop short of addressing real political questions strikes me as a rather improbable.
…it’s also unreasonable.
To put it in more concrete terms, it makes sense to me that someone who believes in the Ten Commandments would (when stepping into the voting booth) bear in mind the likelihood that a political candidate was going to follow them as well. It makes sense to me that folks would bear such things in mind when making in countless other decisions of a political nature.
Which is part of what makes the role of religion in American government (and perhaps other settings as well) so completely absurd. On the one hand, religious teachings are all about precisely the sort of questions that one must address in politics; on the other, it is separate from and distinct from those institutions, limited in some respect by the establishment clause and re-enforced by the free exercise clause. Religion has a potentially absolute absolute claim on every aspect of life, and yet while protecting the rights of believers, we expect them to stop short of weighing in on the most important questions of the day. The whole situation is at least a little odd, to say the least.
Far from the natural order of things, this feature of American politics rests in our Constitution and popular culture like a fault line running through a population trying its best to ignore it and get on with life.
…which I think is the real reason people want to keep religion out of politics. If they can keep folks from putting the two topics together in the same conversation, then they can avoid dealing with a mountain of contradictions even Mohammed would be hard pressed to move about.
The history of religion certainly doesn’t teach us to expect its proponents to stop short of political commentary. The God of Abraham in particular has played an overtly political role in each of his major religions. It is only with the decline of ancient empires that Christianity and Islam have come to be defined as something distinct from politics. Each of these traditions became mere ‘religions’ when the moral order they espoused lost its connections to the political order in which they once flourished. Institutions that we think of today as religion were once unashamedly political. Few if any thought twice about it.
What distinguishes religious traditions from those of modern politics is less of an ontological divide than a range of social conventions, not the least of them being a clear discordance between the visions of authority contained in each. Indeed, the notions are so far apart that people often fail to recognize them as different answers to the same question. The end result is a rather marked failure to notice something very interesting about the relationship between religion and politics in modern life. You see, there is something highly ironic (and more than a little tragic) about the sensibilities of those who speak of a Lord in world wherein we elect a President (or, for that matter, a Congressman or a Parliamentian).
And this is what I mean by a fault line that the public does its damnedest to ignore. Most people don’t even pause to think about this, but the notion of a ‘Lord’ has not always been so divorced from the social order. The language about which one spoke of God was not always so completely severed from the language about which one thought about their own government. There was a time when that term, ‘Lord’, would have pointed not merely to a benign old man in the sky, but also to the nobility of Europe. The implication was neither accidental, nor trivial. Indeed, the point of such language was to draw a clear parallel between the loyalties that men owed to each other (or more to the point, that commoners owed to the aristocracy) and those that they owed to the keeper of cosmic justice. A reference to the ‘Lord’ would have meant for many in past times a role reflected in both their religious discourse and in the social realities of their daily lives.
How weird it must be to live in a world in which one answers to a Lord in Heaven but votes for politicians down here! At least it would be weird if we paid more attention to the way either of these institutions actually handle questions about how people ought to behave.
But of course the problem is not merely a function of this one word. When Conservative Christians speak of power, they almost invariably invoke a range of metaphors ill-fitted to the realities of a republican style government. They speak of God as a sovereign, all the while operating in a public life wherein the people are assumed to be sovereign. They speak of the Ten Commandments in a world wherein laws are deemed in some sense to be created by the people (albeit indirectly). And how strange that we (and by ‘we’ I mean mainly Christians) want Children to pledge allegiance to one nation (under God or not), as if such an oath had much bearing on modern notions of citizenship! It cannot mean nothing that people who live in a participatory democracy envision so much of their lives through the language of aristocracy.
Does this mean that Conservative Christians do not understand democracy?
No it doesn’t.
…at least not in principle, but I can think of a few folks!
It does suggest a certain tension between the nature of authority some folks encounter on Sunday and those they are called upon to use in the voting booth. This sort of tension might even have some positive benefits, though I suspect that would require people to be more aware of the difference than they generally seem to be. It probably should not surprise us too much when the language of one sphere creeps into that of another. I think we can see this in the way that many conservative Christians speak of the founding fathers in reference to a broad range of constitutional questions. So much the more so on litmus test politics such as gay rights which so many use to discern the loyalties of those around us.
I could field a number of polemics at this point, but perhaps that is not really where I want to go with this. The divergence between modern visions of political authority and the archaic language with which conservative Christians approach that same subject is an interesting point in itself. What to make of it is another question. And of course this returns us to the original question of whether or not one can reasonably expect religious leaders to keep their noses out of politics.
If I am reading the popular culture correctly, I think most people expect a natural division between these spheres of social (and political) life, as if some great natural boundary separates them. For my own part, I think it’s little other than history. Indeed, I don’t think the term ‘religion’ denotes a clear and well defined body of institutions, beliefs, or practices, certainly not any that fall neatly outside the boundaries of political life. As it happens, the modern world has developed a range of political expectations which simply differ from those of the institutions we now call religion. That difference does not lie in the nature of the institutions in questions, it lies in the particular approach that each takes to the deeper moral questions of social life.
What keeps conservative Christianity from enjoying a more direct role in American political life is its political anachronism. It’s vision of authority is not (thankfully) that of our own government.
The first sin was not the eating of an apple (or even a pomegranate). No, it began when mankind (or at least Eve) gave an ear to the Serpent, or so the story goes, at least according to my old Bible-as-Literature prof. I try to keep that in mind whenever I find myself cast in the role of that Serpent, or at least one of his servants.
I am speaking of course of those moments when someone tells me that I worship Satan, or that I serve him. It is common enough to see this charge leveled at atheists, at least on the net. I doubt its occurrence is limited to that context.
I must say that it took me some time to wrap my mind around the concept. You might think it would be a little difficult to worship an entity in which you don’t believe. I certainly did. But it turns out to be remarkably easy to serve him, he does all the work for you, even without letting you know about it. I have been reassured many times that my actions serve the dark lord, regardless of my own conscious intent. I have also been told that deep down I know this to be the case, whether I will admit it or not. It’s always fascinating to find out what I know and what I believe, especially when it has the makings of a good horror story.
Just think of it; you have two competing stories!
– On the one hand, I would like to think of my story as one of a sincere guy tapping away at the keyboard in the hopes that he can present a reasonable case for a position that he thinks is correct. In the end maybe I can teach something to someone, or perhaps learn something from a well-reasoned response. We could call this the intellectual exchange model of the disc… hey you! Wake up, dammit!
– Okay, on the other hand, you have a minion of Lucifer operating under the auspices of the Dark Lord himself to invest ordinary binary code with the force of evil and send it out to work its insidious wonders on unsuspecting believers. The argument itself is hardly important; it serves as a vehicle for some sort of insidious power.
Honestly, it doesn’t take much effort to figure out which is the more interesting story. (Sigh!) And if you too count yourself as a vocal non-believer, this whole thing probably rings a bell or three in your own experience.
In truth, there is little one could do to answer such a claim, that one serves Satan, because of course every answer you give would be subject to the same suspicion. This is why I am inclined to think of the story of Adam and Eve here. …and of the Serpent. The trouble really does begin for that narrative in the decision to listen to that serpent as it is an act of disloyalty to God. To speak with His enemy at all is itself unthinkable! Subsequent troubles could hardly be surprising; they are the narrative consequence of willfully opening oneself to an evil message. If that’s the way some believers see the input of atheists, then that doesn’t bode well for anything along the lines of, um, constructive dialogue.
I do think this is the model behind the charge that atheists serve Satan. It not merely some bit of empirical confusion about what we do and don’t believe, so much as it is a warning about the nature of any message we happen to carry. That is precisely the point of casting atheists in the role of Satan’s servants; it is in effect to construe our every word and deed as an evil which one ought not to give reasonable consideration. It isn’t really even the metaphysics of this proposition that matters; it’s the pragmatics. Simply put, the moral of the story is don’t listen to anyone who casts any sort of doubt on God.
I have tried myself and seen others attempt a range of different responses to this kind of charge, but lately I am inclined to accept it.
I’ll be your huckleberry.
I don’t mean to say that I actually intend harm to others, but I am simply done trying to convince certain parties that I (or other atheists) can be good without God. If these are the terms, then I sometimes want to say ‘so be it’. I will not give those who make such accusations the satisfaction of trying to plead innocence from the bottom of a poisoned well.
The whole accusation smacks of manipulation of course, but it is not merely manipulation, because some people actually do seem to believe it, or at least they say that they do. In its own right, this sort of charge is actually a fascinating example of the limitations of reasoning.
Another of my old professors, Maurice Finnochiaro, used to talk about the study of argumentation as an historical phenomenon. He was interested in meta-argumentation, arguments about arguments. And in its own way this little gift of frustration for an unbeliever is in fact an argument about an argument. It is a clear and concise statement about the prospects for constructive discussion, albeit a rather pessimistic one.
The viewpoint in question is very much informed by the outlook of Spiritual Warfare. It reflects a range of suppositions about the spiritual powers at play in the world. It is the same sort of thinking that finds Satanic messages in so many rock&roll lyrics, Devil Worshipers in Day-care centers everywhere, and demons in Hentai images. It is the same thinking that leads to talk of protecting baby-Christians (those new in the faith) from exposure to other views, and it is the same sort of thinking that plays havoc with the lives of homosexuals in Uganda and other places where some Charismatic Christians go to press for policies they could never manage in the west. But seriously, my list of horribles aside, the point is that there is a body of religious tenets behind the sort of charge that atheists serve Satan. If we are inconvenienced by the whole thing, chances are we should count our blessings.
…though we won’t actually want to call them ‘blessings’ of course.
But the charge of Satanic worship, absurd though it may be to the mind of an unbeliever is a good reminder of the reflexive nature of reasoning. It would be a swell world for rationalists if we could divide all the ideas of humanity up into those about which we reason and then a separate list of ideas about how to reason about the items on the first list. It would be swell if that second set rested safely outside the scope of disagreement, a sort of neutral arbiter in our disputes. But it just doesn’t work like that. And in this as in any other debate, one must remember that among our disagreements we often also differ on the significance of the disagreements themselves. In other words, part of the argument is also always about the nature of argumentation itself.
Sometimes we are fortunate enough to discuss (or even debate) people with whom we share enough assumptions about the nature of reasoning to proceed with a constructive discussion, even in the face of vast disagreements over issues like belief in God. Folks may not flip their whole belief orientation on the basis of a single conversation (or even thirty of them), but sometimes we shift a little, modify an assumption, or even simply come to appreciate the aesthetics of a well argued point from the other side. Such discussions can be rewarding and pleasant exchanges, …if that is, one starts with a range of assumptions that makes it possible.
Some people just don’t make those same assumptions. When someone says that atheists serve Satan, they are sending a very clear signal that they are not down for the discussion, at least on any terms which would give an unbeliever a chance. To do so would already be a betrayal of their faith, and a mistake exposing them to tremendous evil (evil carried by you and I, my unbelieving friends). It is also a signal that the clear significance of your words (to that person) lies not in the quality of your reasoning so much as an impersonal force over which you may not have conscious control. That force will be the focus of the accuser, not the cogency of any argument you make.
Of all the Old Testament stories in my old Cartoon Bible, the one that made the greatest impression on me as a child was the story the Abraham and Isaac. It’s a pretty terrible thing for a 6 year old to contemplate, the specter of a loving father prepared to kill his own child. I was supposed to be impressed with the faith of Abraham and the mercy of the Lord. Instead I shuddered to think of a father willing to do such a thing and a God for whom that would count as a virtue. I had never been taught to fear the Lord, as they say, but I certainly began to wonder if I should fear Him upon reading that scripture. More to the point, I wondered if I should fear my own father?
Significantly, it was my own father that I turned to for questions about the meaning of that Bible. I don’t recall exactly what Dad had to say about that passage, though I want to think that he might have called into question its particular vision of God. There are of course plenty of wonderful messages to be found in (or read into) the story of Abraham, but there is at least one message that I could never reconcile with my own sense of right and wrong, with my own sense of what family should be to one another. It was never Abraham’s faith that impressed me. Rather, it was his faithlessness; his betrayal of his son.
Of course Abraham didn’t actually kill his son, an Angel of the Lord stayed his hand. Still, I couldn’t help but imagine looking into my own father’s eyes and knowing that he was prepared to do such a thing. How could anything be right in the world after a moment such as that?
And how could anything be right in a world where its creator could want such a moment? At 46, the moral universe of that lesson still terrifies me, all the more so, because there are people who reside within it, even if their God does not.
It doesn’t appear that I am alone in this. The late Christopher Hitchens raised this objection several times, most notably in his book, God is not Great. But of course Hitchens is hardly the first public figure to underscore the trace of terror in this narrative. The story of Abraham and Isaac has darkened more than a few moments of artistic expression.
The sinister vision of Abraham appears in Leonard Cohen’s Story of Isaac, and of course in the opening lines of Dylan’s Highway 61. The sculptor George Segal deemed it a fitting symbol for a memorial to the Kent State Shootings (though Kent state University rejected his work, which is why it now rests at Princeton University). I’m also reminded of a rather bad movie with an interesting twist. In The Rapture, Mimi Rogers plays Sharon, a mother commanded by God to kill her own daughter in order to achieve Heaven. Having complied with His commands, she cannot bring herself to enter Heaven. Perhaps she too thought that nothing could ever be right again after crossing such a threshold.
My favorite use of the Abrahamic trope comes from Wilfred Owen who used it to comment on the horrors of World War I. His poem is called The Parable of the Old Man and the Young:
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
It would be a mistake to see in all these narratives the sort of polemics Hitchens had in mind, but they do speak to an element of meaning that cannot quite be reduced to the faith of Abraham or the mercy of God. There is something truly disconcerting about the command given to Abraham. Still more so his willingness to follow it. In the story of Abraham, if only for a moment, faith becomes a source of terror. I expect that for most believers the moment passes.
For some of us it never does.
Kurt Vonnegut may have struggled with that moment more than any of us. It haunts the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, though Vonnegut took his point of departure from a different passage. It was the story of Sodom and Gomorrah that seemed to ask too much of Vonnegut.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.
It shouldn’t take much imagination to understand why Vonnegut of all people would identify with Lot’s wife. …to see how he could find in her a fitting symbol of something human, something often lost by demands of faith and loyalty. It was typical of Vonnegut that he didn’t quite field a direct objection to the Biblical narrative. He doesn’t deny the moral order of God’s commands (or even those of the Allied Air Command in his own day). He doesn’t even say that she was right and God was wrong. He simply embraces the moment when Lot’s wife does look back, and in doing so Vonnegut reaffirms the value of all the lives buried in that Biblical tale, …and of course those consumed in the fires of Dresden.
Gods do what they will, so it seems. There is little that mortals can do about it, but the God Abraham has always demanded just a little more. He has always demanded that we love him for it, that we condemn his victims along with him, and that we think of his acts of terror as positive moral actions.
And sometimes that is just too much.
For me that line is crossed in at least one more sort of story, one which brings us full circle to the relationship between father and child.
The concern is illustrated wonderfully in is a scene from the movie Black Robe wherein a missionary (Father LaForge, played by Lothaire Bluteau) tries to convert an Algonquian-speaking native (Chomina, played by August Schellenberg) to the Christian faith just before the man dies. Desperate to save his companion’s soul, Laforge offers Chomina the promise of eternal life in Heaven. But of course LaForge must admit that none of the Chomina’s heathen relations will be with him in this eternal life. Neither Chomina’s wife, nor his parents, nor even his youngest child will be there to meet him in Heaven, because they died without accepting the faith.
It would be easy to under-estimate the power Chomina’s response to LaForge in that movie, but it has always seemed to me a very compelling argument. It works for me, not because of fictional characters with fictional relations, but because of real people in my own life. I am well aware that some (perhaps many) of those I have known and loved passed away without reconciling themselves to terms of sundry Christian teachings. What must be done of course varies from church to church, but in each case where the price of heaven is conversion, I know of specific people who failed to make that choice in terms described by one or all of these churches. Faced with the prospect of conversion and its benefits myself, I can honestly say that the choice strikes me as a betrayal.
Do I belong in this heaven, while my father does not? And will I enjoy paradise while others that I loved rot in graves, burn in eternal fires, or simply waste away in outer darkness?
If there is a God in heaven that would have this, then I will say ‘no’ to Him.
Sometimes idealization strengthens a value; sometimes it destroys it. The trick is to know the difference.
It gets more difficult to tell the difference when a value becomes central to one’s own life, or if it has become a commonplace theme in the community around her. Failure to follow a given value can become so unthinkable that dissonance reduction strategies simply overtake the effort to apply it to the miscellaneous judgement calls of daily life.
At the extreme end of caring about something, defense mechanisms become so strong that the rhetoric of rationalization simply eclipses the discourse needed to plan effective action. Thus, love becomes a foreign notion to much of Christianity, Reason and Logic brand-names jealously guarded by unbelievers, and self-reliance the hallmark of Americans themselves as dependent on others as any people ever were. In like manner, racism becomes unthinkable to liberals, notwithstanding the prominence of racial categories in our policies, and patriotism goes without saying to conservatives, even when they attack their own nation (literally or metaphorically). It is easy enough to see that talking-up a value doesn’t always mean living up to it; but things are worse than that. Talking up a value can sometimes chase any meaningful effort to put it into practice right out of the building.
***
I used to think about this a lot when I worked in Navajo country. Out there the value term with the most weight to it was hózhǫ́. This is usually translated as something like ‘balance’ or ‘harmony,’ and for many this is enough to tie the notion to themes better suited to American pop-Buddhism and New Age thought. In contrast to bilagáanas, diné (Navajos) were non-confrontational, at least according to common folk-wisdom on the subject.But it wasn’t merely outsiders that approached the concept in these terms; Navajos themselves sometimes use this approach to explain themselves to others.
This theme always troubled me, because it sure as Hell didn’t describe the people I knew and worked with. Sure I had seen plenty of situations in which I had seen diné show notable restraint or reluctance to engage in confrontation. But I had seen some spectacular confrontations in my days out there. More to the point, it had always seemed to me that conflict rested just under the surface of pretty much every item of business occurring in that area. The question it seems to me is not whether Navajos engage in conflict more or less than the average Bilagáana (white person); but rather under what circumstances will each do so and for what purposes. I think the answer to this question is different for Navajo than it is for Anglos, but I also think this requires a lot more subtlety than the oppositional stereotypes generally allow.
I had a boss out there who used to tell me that the sort of balance implied in the concept of hózhǫ́actually entailed a trace of conflict. Conflict too had its value in this ideal, he seemed to be telling me, and so it too had its place in the balance people strove to attain. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a layer of conflict in the workings of folks who embraced this value. But sometimes I am a damned slow student. Years after I had moved on from that job, I think I finally got this lesson. I got the point while reading up on Henry Kissenger. Thinking of hózhǫ́ as a kind of Realpolitik is of course little more than replacing one metaphor for another, but I continue to think it is a helpful correction to the cosmic muffin concepts that saturated so much of the public discussion of hózhǫ́, at least when the rest of the conversation occurred in English. Even still, the distance between this value and the practices of those who hold it dear is vast, so vast that it seems often to escape the ability of folks to conceptualize the matter.
Which I suppose puts diné on par with the rest of us.
***
It used to drive me to tears, back during my brief stint as a moderator on the Internet Infidels message boards, when I would see some fellow heathen lecturing a Christian on the virtues of reason and rationality. Okay, this didn’t always bother me, but it drove me nuts those specific moments when the Christian was doing a damned good job of reasoning about the particular issue and the unbeliever not so much
Yes, that does happen.
I wouldn’t count myself an Atheist if I didn’t think that ultimately the most reasonable thing to do about gods is to just say ‘no’ to them. But the backing of reason needs to be earned in the details of a discussion, and which side will earn it is back on the table every time you decide to take up the subject. Like it or not, in some conversations about religious matters, it is in fact the believer that is doing a better job of reasoning. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone whose sense of human nature hasn’t been completely overdetermined by their sense of the battle lines in question. Yet in such moments, when the compelling argument just isn’t coming, leave it to the rotten-hearted to simply claim the cultural capital of a free thinking rational person and remind the believer that she isn’t in the club, so to speak.
That is the sort of hypocrisy I suppose I should expect in any camp, including my own, but it doesn’t make seeing it any easier. Take any given value, and you will always see a sort of tension between its motivating characteristics, the oughtness it urges on us, and its currency for those with some claim to that value. Ideally, one could expect those claiming the virtue of reason to be those who actually live up to it, but ideological movements and philosophical orientations also generate a degree of association with a given virtue. And for some, that is enough. They are more rationale by virtue of their allegiances; and little else need be said about the matter.
***
Likewise I will never accept the excuses that conservative Christians make for opposition to homosexuality. It is common enough to hear from folks that their stance on the topic is taken out of love, that they have gay friends, and that they are merely following the word of the Lord on this. (I’ll skip the example of the lady who re-assured me that she had nothing personal against gay people, because she loved Will & Grace. …okay, I didn’t quite skip it, but, well, …I can’t help myself sometimes.) Conservative Christians often cry foul when their position is described as hateful, insisting that we take their own motivations into account.
In my book, you measure goodwill by the way people treat others; and efforts to deprive gay lesbian folks of the right to marry, to adopt, or to security in the workplace make for a straight forward case of malice. Even without these concrete harms, the high suicide rates for those of homosexual orientation speak to the high costs that some folks pay for unwarranted stigma placed on certain sexual preferences. Against all this and more, the oft-repeated claims that one can oppose homosexuality while keeping to the admonition to love others starts to ring a bit hollow. The approach taken by conservative Christians against homosexuality makes of ‘love’ a mere footnote, an intellectual exercise in resolving an apparent inconsistency. It falls well short of living up to a virtue which could well be the shining light of Christian faith.
***
What has me thinking about this is a recent encounter with one of the ways this sort of problem is commonly expressed in ordinary language. I can’t think of any other way to put it, so I will just call it ‘vacuous Idealization’. What I mean to get at by coining this monstrous bit if vocabulary is a variety of rhetoric that cancels a value in practice by elevating it to a level of abstraction which is utterly meaningless.
Take for example ‘true love,’ which we are often assured isn’t selfish at all. But that’s not all that true love isn’t. It also isn’t carnal, and it isn’t fleeting. It really isn’t harmful to the one who is loved, and it most certainly isn’t conditional. True love doesn’t keep track of the time, and it doesn’t care how much money you have or how tall you are. True love is timeless, and true love is, …blech! I can’t go on.
By the time we get done with all the things true love isn’t, I can’t help wondering if anything is left in the category at all. And that I suspect is the point of ‘true love’; it is actually an empty set, with no concrete members no associated concepts to define it. Instead we get the illusion that true love has been defined by taking ordinary instances of perfectly human (and rather flawed) love and negating each of the flaws. We are left to believe that we still know what we are talking about when all of the frailties of human relationships have been tossed in the trash of love that is merely real, as opposed to that which is true, …pardon me True.
I call Shenanigans!
Real love looks nothing like this True love that people talk about. You notice when she gets in bed without brushing her teeth. And yes Real Love hopes that her relatives will take care of her when she needs them. Real love may not care how tall you are, but she’s damned glad you don’t have any really ugly birthmarks. And if real love hasn’t made a point of principle out of your race, your nationality, your political party or your religion, then she certainly does have a way of finding people most when they travel in the same circles she does. Real love comes and goes (dammit anyhow) sometimes without warning and without leaving behind any explanation for her visit, or her departure. And sad to say, real love does have her contingencies, much as we might wish otherwise. Real love always comes with the blemishes, and the do matter, and they don’t go away.
True love is little other than the hope of some ineffable residue left when we’ve taken out all the things that come with Real love in our actual lives. But that is a hope hung on an imaginary hook. If you take away enough of the things that come with real love, you end up with nothing at all. Sadly, I am inclined to think that may be the point of this kind of rhetoric. By stripping out the foibles of real human relationships and the attitudes that go with them, one ends up with a value that is whatever you will make of it. It is something that will never happen, a virtue no-one will ever realize, nor will they ever have to.
And being thus emptied of its meaning, True Love is the perfect predicate for an imaginary subject, to wit, “God is love!”
***
On a side note, and I will just throw it out there, I do think this is one the reasons those who emphasize the divinity of Jesus most seem least likely to emulate his actions and teachings. If he is a human, with real human foibles, then the stories told about him offer a real example of how one ought to live. If he is a God, though, well then who could hope to live up to that example?
Yes, I get that this is generally thought to be a paradox in that Jesus is commonly supposed to be both. And yet it is the nature of such enigma that one can only meaningfully speak of, or think about, one of its axes at any given moment. You can say of a paradox that it is both x and y, but you cannot grasp both at the same time. And of course believers do typically come with a marked preference.
***
In like manner, I think people often approach issues of objectivity in the most self-defeating manner. It is common enough to speak of a knowing subject and known object when framing different questions about how knowledge works. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, providing one understands the two as part of a relationship of sorts. Once folks start talking about the possibility that a claim could belong entirely to one or the other, the whole model gets rather misleading.
To put it another way, I think we can speak meaningfully about objective features in knowledge, or even of greater or lesser degrees of objectivity, but if objectivity is defined as the total absence of subjective input, well then that is epistemological failure on the horizon. Bringing this a little closer to actual contexts of reasoning, I often hear (or read) commentary in which people compare reasoning with emotion or logic with rhetoric, etc., the implication being that one must choose one over the other. In the popular imagination good reasoning does not appeal to emotion, and rhetoric is always a bad.
But of course the point of much good reasoning is rhetorical; it is an attempt to convince someone of something. Far from requiring an absence of emotion, this kind of project is often enhanced by a display of emotion. If you want people to care about something, then you ought to show them that you do too. Fail to do that and watch them doodle as you talk.
The bottom line here is that the quest for objectivity becomes mysticism when it is conceived in terms of purity. If the practice of careful judgement requires an absence of subjectivity, emotion, or conscious efforts at persuasion, then careful judgement resides in a world we have never been and never will be. In fact, we don’t have the faintest idea how to get there, because the very notion is simply nonsense.
***
On a related note, let us consider the notion of Truth with a capital T. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I have been told that truth is unattainable, or heard questions such as ‘what is truth’ framed as though it were something ‘out there’, so to speak. Not surprisingly, this approach has the effect of rendering meaningless the mundane truths of daily life. Against the promise of this cosmic Truth, no mere fact could possibly hope to hold our attention. And so the quest for Truth so often becomes an escape from truths.
Countless sophomoric essays have been written about the unattainability of this grand truth …Truth. It sits like the Kantian thing-in-itself well beyond our mere mortal efforts to find it. Many are the ways people have found to explain our failure to find this elusive entity, hiding somewhere in the mountains of philosophical goodness. But the details are un-necessary, because the failure of this quest begins with the framing of the question.
We use the concept of truth (or falsehood) on a daily basis to help us distinguish between claims we agree with and those we don’t. There is a lot of room for disagreement over the nature of that process, and it’s a damned interesting question, but if any theory of truth doesn’t address that sort of process then it is already headed down the wrong path from the outset.
Ultimately, questions about truth are less a matter of discovering a fact in the myriad lands of facts about the world around us, than it is a question of figuring out what means to say that something is true (and how that possibility relates its alternatives). Questions of truth value often involve great concepts and momentous philosophical questions, but they also occur in the context of topics of little importance, some of them being outright dull. I know that I consider it true that the Dr. Pepper I am drinking is too warm and false that the weather is nice outside. (I live in the arctic; what did you expect?) Any theory about the nature of truth that separates it entirely from such mundane matters is less a theory about truth than a hijacking of the notion for some other purpose.
What is Truth?
If you really must go on a quest to discover the answer to this question, then don’t let that quest
***
On a related note, and because it fits the pattern, could someone please tell the boys from Chicago what time it is. It is a good song, but seriously, does anyone really know what time it is?
YES!
We know what time it is, because time is not a thing to be known independent of human reckoning. If the conventions of human discourse say it is 5:30pm, Alaskan Standard Time, then it is 5:30pm, Alaskan Standard Time.
To make the question more complicated than that is not a quest for something profound; it is a dramatic self-indulgence.
Yes, I’m a lot of fun at parties too.
***
And with that the rant is nearing its end. If you are still reading this, then you have more patience than I do, and I apologize for tramping through matters both sacred and profane as well as a good many points in between. But of course that is my point, so to speak, that in effect the two extremes may at times prove to be one in the same. When a value becomes too important, even to conceive the possibility of transgressing against it, then people remove it from conscious thought in ways that parallel the treatment of things they abhor. Such sacred values can cease to be an effective means of motivating people, precisely because they mean too much to allow for the full range of human possibilities. Worse yet, people sometimes seem to take a value down this road for the very purpose of cancelling its bearing on daily life. Either way my point is that you should be careful about just how much you care about such things, because somewhere past “a lot” lies “Fuhgetaboutit!
It’s a funny thing, even unbelievers typically assume there is a difference between God and Satan. It seems so obvious. After all we don’t confuse our friend Mike with our friend Chuck, but such friends are there to remind us of the difference between them on a daily basis. Entities such as God and Satan operate under no such constraints. Their traits change from one faith to another, even from one believer to another, or (truth be told) sometimes from morning to noon out of the same mouth.
Satan has certainly made a few significant changes in the years, graduating from a mere servant of the Lord to a principle nemesis for the Lord. For his own part, God has taken on a range of different faces over the course of human history. He still keeps an awful lot of them handy, even within the same tradition. Indeed the Christian world keeps its pretension to monotheism only by ignoring a likely case of multiple personality disorder. He is at the least bipolar.
And of course a trace of projection runs through all of this, right down to the most specific details and sources. You can tell a lot about people from what they say about their gods. And that is precisely why the quote above gives me such pause. To hear some folks talk about God, they might as well be speaking of the Devil.
When I was younger, I used to hear this phrase a lot; “The devil made me do it!” This usually came after someone had just done something they shouldn’t have, something they knew was wrong. Seems like these days people are more likely to lay their sins off on Jesus. Whenever their actions cannot be defended in reasonable terms, it is because Jesus wants it that way.
I’m not just being facetious here, not JUST anyway.
All to often, Jesus is the reason someone must suffer some indignity at the hands of a believer. Every enemy of Christendom, every native forced to endure abuse at the hands of his more forceful missionaries has certainly borne the brunt of this gambit. Yet they are not alone in learning that the Prince of Peace has ugly designs on their health and happiness. Jesus, we are told, is the reason that gay couples cannot marry; he is also the reason those of homosexual orientation must endure any number of indignities from ‘Christian’ circles. Jesus is the reason for compromising women’s health care. He is often the reason you cannot find certain books at the librar. He is the inspiration for a good deal of pseudo-science (some of which is genuinely harmful), for a good deal of pseudo-history, and even for the occasional cold cereal mishap. Jesus may or may not be responsible for some novel forms of corporal punishment and parenting practices, but if sundry Christian organizations are to be believed, he certainly approves of some highly creative approaches to that practice. Time and again, Jesus is the reason someone supplies for actions that are manifestly dishonest or demonstrably harmful to other people.
It really is difficult to tell just how far the Lamb of God is willing to take his lust for violence and cruelty, but it seems that he likes to do the really nasty work himself. To hear some folks talk, he is the reason for one or two great disasters; 9-11, earthquakes and Tsunamis ravaging Thailand or Japan. I remember when Jesus demanded a ransom to spare the life of Oral Roberts, one of His most trusted servants. But of course, such divine temper tantrums are nothing new; just ask Lot’s wife.
Has it escaped anyone’s notice that the witnesses to Jesus’ greater crimes are the ones who so consistently inflict suffering in his name? Can it be a coincidence that the same people who speak approvingly of god’s greater acts of cruelty would be so quick to commit the mortal equivalent in his name?
Jesus is not just a source of terrible headlines; he is also the source of myriad petty cruelties which will never make it far into the public discussion. I expect most of us have learned in one form or another that Jesus has taken sides in some personal dispute with friends, family, or coworkers. Lord knows, he is certainly the reason given for most of the dick moves made by the moderators on sundry Christian message boards. Indeed, Jesus seems to be implicated in all manner of grievances great and small.
One wants to say to some of these people; “dude, your Jesus is a dick!”
But of course, the real point is that Jesus could never have been anything else but a dick to some of these people; he begins and ends in their least admirable qualities. And if there is anything more to the story of Jesus than a sort of malice to be inflicted upon others, you would never know this from the words and deeds of so many who claim to be doing his will.
There comes a time in all of this, when Jesus can no longer be distinguished from Satan. For some people, He is in effect little other than a name they give to their own vices.
I have been reading some of the why-I-am-an-atheist stories over on Pharyngula, and it has led to thoughts about the various moments in my younger days which might have led me down that path. I wouldn’t say that any of these stories could really constitute an adequate answer to the question of why I am an atheist. Taken together, I’m not sure they do add up to such an answer either; instead they form a record of the impressions made by various skeptical thoughts in my youth. Some of these were my thoughts; some came from others, but each of them has made a lasting impression on me.
As to others, well we shall see…
***
A CARTOON BIBLE AND AN EAGER YOUNG MIND: No sooner had I learned to read than I decided to tackle the cartoon Bible sitting beside the bed. In fact, I think the ability to read that bible had been one of the major selling points for learning to read to begin with. Cartoons or not, this was a thick volume and it took a lot of time to work through it, just a little reading every night for God knows how long!
…well, no he doesn’t, but you get my point.
Now my choice of early reading material ought to tell you something about my youthful priorities, but please let me assure you that I was every bit as boring and straight-laced as you might have gathered from this fact. Anyway, I loved that book, and I loved it for the right reasons, as some might say; I wanted to learn about God.
So, you can imagine my surprise when my father told me he didn’t believe in the story of Noah and the flood. I was shocked. The mere possibility that any detail of that sacred cartoon filled bundle of Godly goodness could be wrong was beyond me. So, I did what any properly annoying first grader would do. I asked why? Dad told me that the very notion God would need a flood to clear away so many bad people would mean that God made a mistake in the first place, and that seemed unlikely. This is where I must admit I failed in my childhood duties and let Dad off with a single ‘why’. Seriously, I should have pestered him for hours after that. Instead, I just sat there dumb-damned and trying to soak up this new possibility. The Bible could be wrong about something.
Wow!
***
A CHICK IN THE BOY’S BATHROOM: I remember the first time I ever saw a Chick tract. For those of you blessed with ignorance about these things, let me sully your mind with a brief explanation. A chick tract is a cartoon sermon produced by Jack Chick publications. Back in the mid-seventies, it would have been Chick himself who did the one I saw that day. Chick Tracts typically follow the life of some character engaged in a sinful activity such as believing in Evolution, Practicing Paganism, Celebrating Halloween, Playing D&D, or Going to a Catholic Church, for example. The tract will normally include graphic threats of hellfire and damnation before introducing the good news that all of this can be averted by embracing Jesus Christ. It’s a pretty standard script from which neither Chick himself nor those who have filled his shoes deviate by much.
I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I found one of these in the school bathroom. I don’t remember a lot of details, but it definitely followed the familiar script. I don’t think the positive Jesus-loves-you theme made much of an impression on me at the time; I was still tingling in horror at the thought of Hellfire and damnation, and at the thought that someone could be perverse enough to believe in such things. For a kid raised in a Spiritualist household (just think New Age, but not quite as marketable, at least not on the cusp on the 80s) this was quite a shocker. I had heard of people that believed in Hell, but I hadn’t to my knowledge met any of them. And I didn’t know which scared me more; the fantastic thought of actual hellfire, or the very real prospect that someone who embraced the concept had been at my school.
It was shortly after this that I began talking about my ‘beliefs’ (and those of my family) with some classmates. I quickly discovered that my parents were not comfortable with this. I also discovered that I actually knew quite a few people who believed in Hell; I might even have known the person responsible for putting the tract in the school bathroom. And thus I grew to understand my parents’ reluctance to engage in open discussion of the topic.
…and before moving on, let me just say that I think it very fitting that my first encounter with a chick tract would be finding one of them in a bathroom. I could only wish it had been properly disposed of.
***
SASQUATCH, WHERE FOR ART THOU: The highlight of my 6th grade year was the big field trip to somewhere with cabins (I want to say Big Bear). Yes, that’s right; it was that sort of field trip. In the days and weeks leading up to the trip, I heard talk of bunk-beds, long hikes, campfires, and roasted marsh-mellows. …and something else.
Bigfoot! …of course.
Now, you have to remember this was Southern California, and it was the 1970s. Bigfoot was big (pun intended), as was the Devil’s Triangle, and UFOs were everywhere. I even remember a popular movie about reincarnation, and another one about the discovery of Noah’s Ark somewhere in the Himalayas. All of this seemed much more plausible to me as a 6th grader, but more than that, I think it seemed much more plausible to people in the 70s.
I blame it on disco!
The trip would include all the things we talked about, including at least one encounter with Bigfoot, or at least one of our teachers dressed up like him in the dark. It didn’t really fool anyone, …well not after word got out about the zipper.
But the next day…
I don’t remember exactly what we were all supposed to be doing on that day, but apparently it amounted to a stretch of free time. I was near the edge of the campground when some of my classmates began to point out into the trees, just up the mountainside a little. I can still hear them talking; “What is that?” “It’s moving!” “Holy crap!” and “That thing is big!” There weren’t any teachers around this particular spot in the campground, but more and more children (myself included) made our way to the edge of the trees to see what the others were looking at.
I couldn’t see a damned thing!
Like a lot of my classmates I was scared, and I was curious, and those two emotions fought for control of my soul (or at least my feet) in that little spot near the edge of the forest just below the side of a hill. I really wanted to see Bigfoot, and I wanted to live through the experience. In an effort to satisfy my fear while edging closer to the unknown danger I picked up a rock, as did a few of my classmates (because of course Bigfoot would have been no match for 6th graders with rocks). I then stepped as close as I could bring myself to the forest.
When someone said it was moving towards us (whatever it was) we all took a step or three back, but we didn’t quite run. And then of course nothing happened. I grew more and more frustrated, because I still couldn’t see a damned thing. …dammit!
Several of my classmates had surpassed the what-is-that stage and begun to claim with absolute certainty that they were looking right at a Bigfoot. They pointed, and I looked, and I just didn’t see it. A couple kids pointed more and proclaimed still more loudly, and I still didn’t see a damned thing. I edged closer to the forest. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t see him, but I may well have been the kid there who most wanted to.
And I just didn’t.
I’m not entirely sure why, but a few kids began to throw rocks into the forest. When one of the rocks came bouncing back down the side of the mountain, we all took a few hurried steps back. …only most everyone else took a few more than I did, and suddenly there I was out ahead of anyone else. To fully appreciate this you have to understand that I was a pretty flighty kid. (Seriously, my sister and a few of my old classmates could tell you stories, but thankfully this isn’t their blog). For the moment, I was well out ahead of my classmates, rock in hand, ready to confront Bigfoot all by myself if need be.
And damned mad, that he wasn’t making an appearance.
He never did.
When the teachers finally broke up the whole thing and called us inside, I became completely disgusted with the matter, and especially at my classmates. I had recently become acquainted with the phrase; “mass hysteria,” and in the wake of the absentee Bigfoot incident, I made damned sure that everyone within ear-shot was became as familiar with it.
…I could be a really annoying kid.
***
BAD AIM: When I was 14, my Dad and I attended the Daisy International BB-Gun Championship held that year in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Seriously, I think it was mostly the states that supplied teams, but Mexico and Canada sent teams, so I guess that made it an international event. Now I was a budding young gun-nut (seriously, I was), so I hope you will understand that this event was Disneyland, Christmas, and my birthday all rolled into one as far as I was concerned. And I did reasonably well, not well enough to win anything mind you, but, …what the Hell! I was 1 point 1x off a tie for third in prone (he says beaming with pride). But, what the Hell is this story doing here, you may ask?
Well, the contest included a Sunday.
As I recall, there were three options for activities on Sunday morning. One of them was a movie, I do remember that. The third option, I don’t recall, but you’ll never guess the one I chose. I chose to go to a church (or at least a sermon held in the great ballroom that we called church that day). This was my chance to witness mainstream religion in all its glory, and to do it without much effort. For half an hour I could peer into the lives of my Christian classmates and learn what God meant to them, at least on Sundays.
The sermon?
It was about how sin is like missing the mark and failing to hit the bullseye. For half an hour this minister told us all about the nature of sin; it was, in his view, essentially bad aim. I couldn’t believe my ears. I don’t think I had quite mastered the word ‘patronizing’ yet, but as I sat there struggling with the icky feeling in my gut, I knew there had to be some word for the utter stupidity of this man’s sermon. And I came away wondering; is this what mainstream preachers do? …make up lame analogies based on the presumed interests of their target audience?
Suffice to say, I wasn’t dying to repeat the experience.
***
ABSOLUTELY! …OH, WAIT A MINUTE! The words were quite familiar, Hell I had probably said them myself a time or two; “You can’t just expect God to walk up and greet you in person.” It was High school and one of my classmates had just said this in response to another person. I remember nodding in earnest, because everyone knew you couldn’t just expect that, …and then a thought struck me like a bug in the mouth while riding a skateboard.
Why not?
Was that really so unreasonable? Why couldn’t you just say; I’ll believe in God if I actually meet him. And if God failed to pass this test, would He really hold it against someone for having adopted such a standard? Or would he say; oh that’s just So&So; he wants more evidence than I feel like giving. He’ll learn when I get around to it.
I can’t say that I made this my standard just then, or really that I ever have taken such a stance (it is a bit of a caricature), but in that particular moment, I simply ceased to think of it as an unreasonable position.
Course the fact that my mind was on this while talking to a really cute girl is the rally sad part of this story.
Really, it is.
***
SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOE! I was a freshman in College when my friend Joe told me there were factual errors in the Bible, and I did a double-take. Joe may be surprised to know this, but that was a pretty powerful moment for me, not because I was enamored of the Bible, but because I had grown accustomed to the notion that religious beliefs were vague and fuzzy and didn’t really leave anyone with enough leverage to say; “no that’s just incorrect.” Even my Dad had been talking about moral themes back in that discussion over the cartoon Bible; that left room for disagreement. Joe on the other hand, he was suggesting the Bible could just get its facts wrong, and that blew my mind. This may well have been the first time that I heard any religious matter described as a simple factual error.
Surely, the whole thing was much more complicated than that, I thought, …unless it wasn’t.
This conversation renewed my interest in scripture; but this time it had me wondering just what would happen if you approached the text with more straight-forward expectations than I had grown accustomed to. I think that conversation might have been what led me to read The Age of Reason and to take that “Bible as Literature” class. Having been raised in a world of spirits that may or may not manifest themselves at any given time and Auras that you can see if you’re in the right mind and hold your eyes just like so, the notion that religious matters could raise clear questions of truth value was a little novel to me. …A few years and one article by Anthony Flew later, I even had a word for the problem Joe had just set me to thinking about.
Okay, now I know what you are thinking; “Dan is posting porn again! Will someone please keep him away from that damned erotic heritage place!?!” But no. I tell you I didn’t find this in a red light district, smut shop, or even a kinky museum. This naughty little lady was found at a church. Her name is Sheela, or at least that’s what folks call her and a vast array of figures like her. She and her sisters go by the full name of ‘Sheela-na-Gigs’, and you can find them on churches throughout the United Kingdom. Yes, that’s right, it appears that one can find images of grotesque women spreading their labia can be found at old churches throughout the United Kingdom.
