Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Opium for the masses
Mensch
Life imitates art.
In my SF novel, the heroine’s mother is notified by the principal of her private religious school that her daughter is “faith impaired” and would be much better served by a nearby secular school. Nothing so drastic with my son today, but he did put them all to task.
In Theology, he was obliged to participate in a Stations of the Cross activity. He was Station 5. (According to Wikipedia, this is the “Simon of Cyrene carries the cross” station.) In this activity, Jake was supposed to read a passage that was written in the first person. He refused on the grounds that it would be hypocritical to imply belief when he had no such belief.
His teacher objected, and insisted he go along with it. But when it came time, he refused again. Unlike Peter, Jake didn’t get the chance to deny her a third time, but was instead sent to Pontius Pilate’s the Dean of Student’s office. She passed Jake along to his counselor, who tried to use the argument that students in biology are all obliged to learn about evolution, even though some might not believe in evolution. Jake countered that the proper comparison is that students in biology must learn evolution just as students in theology must learn various things about the New Testament. But there was a huge difference between learning these things and professing belief. If the biology students were asked to get up in front of class and commit to a belief in evolution, then her comparison would be valid.
The counselor also pointed out that if the teacher allowed one student to abstain from participating in the Stations of the Cross, she would need to allow others to abstain, too. Jake’s response was, “What would be wrong with that?” She also said that most of the students at the school were not Catholic, implying I suppose that others’ lack of principles should allow for Jake, too, to have a “principle-free zone” at school.
Afterward, Jake returned to Theology to get his backpack and binder, and to ask his teacher for her point of view. She told him that she felt there was an expectation that students at a Catholic school would participate in school-related activities, and if they made an exception for Jake, etc. But this breaks down, too. While Jake must attend Mass at school, no one insists that he take communion. Perhaps even his Theology teacher sees the inanity in an atheist taking communion.
I don’t know if she is losing patience with him. Earlier this week, the kids were assigned to write a brief parable involving God in some way. Jake wrote that God was like a blanket used by people for comfort, but sometimes it’s a good idea to get out of bed.
Stay tuned.
D.
Whatever you do, don’t prop up your arm
We were talking about Noah’s Ark tonight, which reminded me of those Illustrated Bible Stories books that were an inevitable find at any doctor’s or dentist’s office when we were kids. I ate those stories up like Milk Duds. “Remember the Flood, Karen?” She didn’t remember that one. “The Flood was Jesus’ tears.”
Then I reminded her of the one about the kid in the hospital —
Didn’t take any more than that. We both put up our right hands and burst out laughing. Jake thought we were crazy.
I tried to find it online just now, and could only find a discussion of it over on James Randi’s forums. I’ll let “Lisa Simpson” explain the story in her own words:
My “favorite” story was one of a boy, in the hospital for a tonsillectomy or something similarly minor, who was placed in the same hospital room as a boy who had been in a car accident and critically injured. Car accident boy is dying and scared. Tonsillectomy boy tells car accident boy that if he raises his hand, Jesus will know he’s ready to go to heaven and Jesus will take him. But car accident boy is too injured to raise his hand by himself, so tonsillectomy boy uses a pillow to prop up car accident boy’s arm. In the morning, when tonsillectomy boy wakes up, car accident boy is dead, dead, dead.
I spent many a night sleeping with my arms clenched to my sides, afraid that Grim Reaper Jesus would kill me in the night.
My favorite response downthread:
So tonsillectomy boy killed him and got away with it?
And further downthread, commentor joobz explains that there are, in fact, some New Testament stories he likes:
Like the story of Jesus with some dude and a whore.
whore comes in, some dude says, “begone whore!”. And Jesus is all like, “No, come back here whore, it’s ok… That guy is being a D**hebag”
As a kid, religion baffled and titillated me. I fantasized wrestling matches between God and Satan, refereed by Jesus or Moses (depending on who had ref duty that day, I suppose). I was bright enough to recognize the various internal inconsistencies but not a natural cynic enough (like my son) to reject it all out of hand. Christianity in particular fascinated me; I remember reading stories of the Crucifixion that read like torture porn, and I wondered, and still wonder, how God could be kind and good and also be okay with damnation being mankind’s default state.
What amazes me is that so many people DO get their heads around these ideas, and become quite agitated if someone challenges their rationality.
D.
Over-reaching
On the road yesterday, some perverse whim took hold and I channel-surfed the radio until I heard a dynamic speaker with a British accent holding forth on the Book of Daniel.
The Book of Daniel, you may recall, is one of the Old Testament’s more hallucinatory tales, rife with symbols and prophecy. Call Daniel the Old Testament’s Nostradamus, or perhaps its John. What piqued this speaker’s interest was the Book’s warm-up, in which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon has a disturbing dream, summons his wise men, and demands an interpretation — without sharing with them the contents of the dream.
The Chaldeans (Neb’s usual band of wise men — whom this fine speaker equated with “the top men of Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley!”) rightly tell the King he’s being kind of a dick, that no man can interpret a dream without knowing the nature of the dream. Nebuchadnezzar sentences every last wise man to death. When the head of the king’s guard comes for Daniel, who is one of Babylon’s wise men, Daniel does some fast talking, buys some time, enough so that he can go to sleep and dream the King’s dream for him AND come up with the interpretation. Fast thinker, eh?
The interesting aspect to all this was the British speaker’s spin. He interpreted the Chaldeans’ failure to mean that the wisest men in the world cannot know anything for certain — that only God (who provides Daniel with the dream and the solution) can know anything. And thus we must look to God for knowledge and not to our own wise men who cannot, in the final account, be trusted to have any stock in Truth.
At this point, I hear the Church Lady’s voice in my head saying, How convenient. Because if we can’t trust our wise men, who can we trust? Duh: God’s messengers on Earth.
And at the same time I realize that I’m hearing something expressed in the most bald-faced manner possible, something that has characterized organized religion probably from its inception: the deep suspicion of, if not loathing for, men and women of learning. I’m a fly on the wall looking on as Galileo is shown the implements of torture. I’m watching helpless as women schooled in herbal medicine are dragged off and burned as witches. I’m lurking in the back of a dozen or a hundred fundamentalist congregations, listening to the preacher deride Darwinism (or global warming, or name your theory du jour) as sophistry, as no more than a belief, as requiring faith, as being a religion unto itself, and what did God say about worshiping other Gods before Him?
(Um, not exactly.)
I’ve always known that organized religion was a hell of a lot more about control, power, and money than grace, forgiveness, and salvation. But this was the first time I ever witnessed a preacher so obviously tip his hand to that reality.
D.
Worst of the worst
I’m really enjoying Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which I’m reading as part of The Classic Slave Narratives. Douglass had a remarkable intellect, which is evident even in the first few pages of his autobiography. Because the premise of my embryonic alt history involves both slavery and religion, I’ve been particularly attentive to Douglass’s thoughts in that regard. This passage piqued my interest:
Another advantage I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage. I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,–a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,–a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,–and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.
Berkeley Digital Library has Douglass’s Narrative in full text here. This should be required reading for high school US History students, or at the very least the AP students. Probably too much to ask that US History textbooks quote liberally from this work, since Texas controls textbook content in this country.
This Christian Odyssey page contains an interesting discussion touching on the Old Testament-inspired theories prevalent during the 17th to 19th centuries, regarding Africans, blacks, and slavery. Probably the most common attitude was the “Hamite view,” which held that blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham (or possibly Canaan), whom Noah cursed for undressing him whilst the old Arkist was in his cups. But a curse of slavery for all generations to come has always seemed a bit extreme to me as a punishment for such a seemingly trivial offense, so I’ve always wondered if there was more to the story. Wikipedia’s article touches on the Talmudic interpretations, which delve deeper:
The Talmud deduces two possible explanations (attributed to Rab and Rabbi Samuel) for what Ham did to Noah to warrant the curse. (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 70a.) According to Rab, Ham castrated Noah on the basis that, since Noah cursed Ham by his fourth son Canaan, Ham must have injured Noah with respect to a fourth son, by emasculating him, thus depriving Noah of the possibility of a fourth son. According to Samuel, Ham sodomized Noah, on the analogy between “and he saw†written in two places in the Bible: With regard to Ham and Noah, it says, “And Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father (Noah)â€; while in Genesis 34:2, it says, “And when Shechem the son of Hamor saw her (Dinah), he took her and lay with her and defiled her.†According to this argument, similar abuse must have happened each time that the Bible uses the same language. The Talmud concludes that, in fact, “both indignities were perpetrated.”
In more recent times, some scholars have suggested that Ham may have had intercourse with his father’s wife. Under this interpretation, Canaan is cursed as the “product of Ham’s illicit union.”
If this discussion stirs a sense of deja vu, it may be because in Greek mythology, Chronos castrated his father, Uranus, and in Egyptian mythology, Osiris’s death and resurrection involve a somewhat more than symbolic castration in the form of a missing penis.
But I digress. The point Douglass makes here and elsewhere is that religious slave owners were adept at using religion to justify their worst excesses; elsewhere, he discusses an overseer (if I remember correctly) whose knowledge of the Bible seemed limited to a passage enjoining slaveholders to punish their disobedient slaves with the lash.
Slaveholders in Douglass’s account seem more than a little ambivalent about providing their slaves with religion. I suspect a good part of that ambivalence related to their desire to keep their slaves ignorant and illiterate, a goal that runs contrary to the judaeochristian tradition, in which textual study is a core value. Indeed, one of the common tropes of the slave narrative is that literacy will set you free: the slave’s acquisition of reading and writing was instrumental to his eventual emancipation.
So here’s my thought, the kernel of an idea which I think could spawn a corker of a novel: aside from a desire for freedom, what other ideas might a group of slaves derive from a careful reading of the Old Testament?
D.
What a guy
From Judy Mandelbaum’s corker of an article at Salon, Bishop blames Jews for child molestation scandal:
Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through… I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”
Read the whole thing; Babini’s apologia for the Holocaust brought mirthful tears to my eyes. I mean, just when this guy brings down the house by grouping Teh Jews and Teh Freemasons and I’m thinking he can’t possibly one-up himself, he blames the Jews for their own Shoah. Give the guy a little more rope and he’ll surely resuscitate the blood libel. Speaking of which, excuse me a moment while I go down to the local day care center to bait me some toddler traps.
He looks angry about something
Well, to quote Angel Heart, “They say there’s enough religion in the world to make men hate each other, but not enough to make them love.” Or perhaps it would be better to paraphrase P. T. Barnum: There’s an asshole born every minute.
D.
Easter Sunday
. . . and a very happy Easter Sunday, too, to all my non-Jewish, non-heathen friends. I’d say non-Muslim, too, except my only Muslim friend follows me on Facebook but doesn’t read my blog.
On this Easter Sunday, I’d like to offer a toast to all the less successful messiahs, including Simon Bar Kokhba, whose transiently successful revolt led to he formation of a second century Jewish state, which required 12 Roman legions plus auxiliaries to put down;
Spanish Kabbalist Moses Botarel, sorcerer, philosopher, and master of the Jewish art of self-promotion; he
stated that the prophet Elijah had appeared to him and appointed him as Messiah. In this role he addressed a circular letter to all the rabbis, asserting that he was able to solve all perplexities, and asking them to send all doubtful questions to him. In this letter (printed by Dukes in Orient, Lit. 1850, p. 825) Botarel refers to himself as a well-known and prominent rabbi, a saint, and the most pious of the pious.
Simon Magus, a first century proto-Gnostic Christian heretic who might have been able to levitate — at least, that’s what his enemies said about him — and who was played by Jack Palance in The Silver Chalice;
90-year-old Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, whose followers invite impressionable undergrads to dinner parties only to meet new and interesting people and learn from them — no, really!
And my personal favorite, Moses of Crete, who in the 5th century convinced other Cretan Jews to attempt a trans-Mediterranean journey to the Promised Land by foot; many of his followers drowned, some were rescued, and Moses himself was never seen nor heard from again.
D.
Your typical seder
Passover approaches. No one invited me to a seder, and I doubt I’d go if I were invited. I haven’t been to a seder since the 1970s, back when both my grandparents were still alive.
Is your name Eliahu? Funny, you LOOK like a Peter to me.
It’s traditional to set out a plate of food for Eliahu (who might be the same as Elijah, I can never remember), and my crazy uncle would invariably eat that food as well as his own. This would always lead to a screaming fight between my grandparents and my uncle. We never had a seder without screaming. I’m not sure what it would look like.
There were certain things I liked and looked forward to with every seder. I liked the taste of matzoh dipped in saltwater, and I liked matzoh with red beet horseradish. Celery dipped in saltwater, that was good, too. Did my grandmother make tzimmes for Passover? If she did, I don’t remember it. And I suppose she made lamb, too, since that’s traditional. But I don’t recall the lamb, either.
My grandfather always hid the afikomen (a bit of matzoh — if you found it, you got a dollar) under the same cushion every year. Once I had been debriefed by my siblings, I had no trouble finding it.
And then there was my grandfather’s continual state of exasperation. He was only trying to work his way through the ritual, trying to read through the Haggadah like you’re supposed to, yet he was subjected to one interruption after another from my grandmother or my uncle. I think the whole thing made him very sad, or perhaps disgusted.
My grandmother never sat down to eat. She spent 90% of the seder in the kitchen, reserving the remaining 10% for serving food and screaming at my uncle. Considering that most of the food can be prepared well in advance, I have no idea what she was doing in the kitchen. Watering down the RC Cola, I suspect.
All in all, not a happy holiday. But then, I’ve never liked Passover, ever since I came to understand the story itself. No one (and that includes at least one rabbi and one orthodox Jew) has been able to explain to me why it’s okay for God to kill all the firstborn. They can’t all deserve to die. There are children, infants in that group, no? And after the first few plagues, God doesn’t even give Pharoah a chance to relent. God “hardened his heart.” As if God had a desired outcome in mind, and damned if Pharoah was going to screw it up by developing a conscience.
Maybe I’ll make a kugel, just for old time’s sake. And I’ll make it using butter, just so I can get some juicy hate mail.
Hey, Sis, anything to add?
D.
That’s just out there
My son’s latest assignment for Theology:
“Write about a dying-and-rising experience you had in the last year. In other words, a time when you had to go through struggles or suffering to grow as a person.”
I told him he should write, “Unlike Jesus, who only died and resurrected once, I die and resurrect on a regular basis. It’s called videogaming. Jesus saves early, saves often!” And sometimes autosaves (that, from Karen).
And if you find that at all amusing, there’s this, from Lyvvie. (Not for folks who, you know, have reverential feelings toward religion.)
Seriously, though, a dying-and-rising experience? How many kids have had a dying-and-rising experience?
“Tell her about the time you swigged a can of Drano, thinking it was Dr. Pepper, and then you had to get that stomach transplant.”
I’m no help at all.
D.
Sloppy agape?
Agape, for those of you who forget your classical education, is one of the Greek words translated as “love,” and usually connotes brotherly or parental (as opposed to erotic) love. To quote Wikipedia, “Many have thought that this word represents divine, unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, volitional, and thoughtful love.” In the past, when I’ve heard this word used by people of faith, it usually refers to the love of God or Jesus for humanity.
The wife likes to listen to Catholic radio, probably for the same reason I used to watch televangelists as a kid (and still do, when the mood hits me). Even secondhand, unquestioning faith can be an exhilarating emotion. Exhilarating? Maybe that’s not the right word. Exasperating, perhaps. Anyway, thanks to Karen, we’ve encountered the oxymoronic concept of Sloppy Agape. Here’s one example.
I’m on a crusade to end what I call “sloppy agape.” In 25 years of urban compassionate ministry experience I see churches, ministries, and good people fall into this trap over and over again. In our attempt to be politically correct and because we’re afraid of offending anyone, we give out the goods without the good news. We give out bread without also offering the bread of life. We practice social compassion without offering spiritual solutions.
. . . . If we simply give out the goods without offering the good news, we are no different than all the other social welfare efforts. People will remain hungry and lost.
The author, Church of the Nazarene elder Dean Cowles, goes on to provide scriptural support for his contention that, well, unconditional love is a bad thing. Jesus didn’t just feed the multitudes, he did it after making the multitudes listen to a “marathon preaching session.” So too with the loaves and fishes.
He describes how his “heart aches” when he hears people talk about getting taken by panhandlers who have used their money to buy alcohol, and notes ” . . . the primary problem is unwise compassion — ‘sloppy agape.’ . . . . If we allow people to manipulate us, we become enablers who contribute to their destructive lifestyle. We will miss an opportunity to empower them beyond the con.”
Perhaps the wife and I are misinterpreting this. But to us, “sloppy agape” seems to turn Jesus’ philosophy on its head (yeah, but what do we know?) The speaker who says these words seems to suggest that unconditional love is a destructive force, that we should place strings on our care and compassion. You are entitled to my charity/caring/concern only if you do as I say and believe what I believe.
And I had always thought that teaching by example was the best practice.
D.