Part 2 of 2. (Read part 1…)

It’s Time to Separate Church and State, Once and for All

If you recall, anti-Catholic prejudice was once a problem for Catholic politicians in the US. John F. Kennedy went so far as to address the issue head-on in his 1960 campaign – probably because he didn’t feel he had much choice. Here’s what he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12 of that year:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.

He went on to assert his respect for the separation of church and state and vowed that Catholic officials would not dictate policy to him. As noted in part 1, the times, they have a-changed.

In 1960 it was “anti-Catholic prejudice.” In 2010 it’s “empirical evidence of improper behavior by the Roman Catholic Church.” And it’s time it stopped. Cold.

If I were a Congressman, I’d introduce a bill yesterday stripping all US operations of the Roman Catholic Church of their tax-exempt status. At the press conference announcing the move I’d also say something along these lines: “I won’t be running for re-election – what could possibly be the point? However, between now and the day I leave office, I’m going to raise hell 24/7/4ever over this issue. I know that I’ll probably never get my bill into a committee hearing, let alone get it out of committee, but if Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens can draw as much attention as they have, I feel certain that I, as a sitting member of the United States Congress, can get booked on every talk show in America. Rest assured, my fellow citizens, this is going to make for some epic television.”

Of course, I’m not Congressional material. If you want to know what Congressional material is, recognize that representatives of a foreign theocracy are inside Congress shaping policy … and not a damned one of the spineless sacred whores on Capitol Hill has uttered a fucking syllable in protest.

Did I miss something?

“America is a Christian nation.” It certainly is. Sort of. It’s a Christian nation in the same way that it’s a white nation, a heterosexual nation, a right-handed nation and a nation with brown hair. That is, “Christian” is the majority position. Boy howdy, is it the majority position, with a majority of the population saying it believes angels and demons are active in the world and 80% saying they believe in miracles. Hell, even our atheists and agnostics sound a little religious. A snapshot of American religious affiliation that I offered up back in 2007 is instructive:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

There’s no denying that we’re a Christian culture – in many ways, that’s a simple math question and it’s about as controversial as noting that whites of European descent are the racial majority. But Christian culture and Christian government aren’t the same thing, and the United States is most emphatically not a Christian state. Not yet, anyway.

Reflecting back on my “if I were a Congressman” fantasy from above, I suppose I’d spend the remainder of my time in office asking the audiences of those TV shows to think about a proposition: to wit, while most Americans are Christian, “Christian” describes a lot of different things and not one unitary thing. Dr. Sid’s “modest proposal” from a couple of months back was more about provoking than persuading, but at its core there’s an important question. If you’re a Christian, you may want to see a more Christian government. But if you’re a Baptist, do you want to see a more Catholic government? If you’re Catholic, how are you going to react when the Texas School Board is co-opted by Mormons and all of a sudden the nation’s textbooks are filled with lessons that transform the hallucinations visions of The Prophets into stone cold fact? If you’re a member of the Foursquare Bible Congregation in Smallpond, Alabama, you probably agree with the Stupakers on abortion, but how do you feel about the idea that your duly elected representatives are keeping counsel with that German eunuch in the pointy hat?

Think about it, Christian supermajority. Think hard.

Crawling Toward a More Rational Future

Evidence suggests that there may be hope in the long run.

From USA Today:

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

From FutureMajority:

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) also found that a movement towards claiming no religious affiliation is “a general trend among younger white American.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported “people not affiliated with any particular religion stand out for their relative youth compared with other religious traditions.”
…
The National Journal profiles a growing faction of non-religious youth – the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). Their motto is “Mobilizing Students for a New Enlightenment.” The SSA’s chapters have grown from 42 in 2003 to 129 this year and they currently have a network of over 14,000 students. Their mission is “to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics.”

From AlterNet:

We are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

So perhaps in the 2020s and beyond the Bible-thumping Jesus Jihadi yahoo will be a thing of the past – or at least, his inexplicable influence on the course of government will be. But that’s of little comfort today. Just because the good guys win the war eventually doesn’t mean they don’t lose battles along the way, and lost battles mean casualties, measured in lasting damage to real human lives. Even if it’s just ten years until we’re free of these crusaders, understand that a lot of mischief can be done in a decade. If I might put it in more meaningful terms, remember how long George Bush was in office? Add two years to that.

Not that it will do any good, but your Senators and representatives need to hear from you that it is not acceptable for the Catholic Bishops to be meddling in the people’s business. Separation of church and state. Today.

When Jesus attacks, the proper course of action is to smack him in the nose with a crowbar. It says so, right there in the Constitution.

Part 1 of 2.

I tripped across a provocative headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: “They Need to be Liberated from Their God.” Turns out the story was about Mosab Hassan Yousef and his spying on Hamas. Which was a little disappointing. There’s no doubt that Palestinian Muslims need to be liberated from their god, but given the recent explosion in documented attacks by US Christians on their fellow Americans (as well as on reason and basic common sense), I thought perhaps the WSJ was going to be the first mainstream “news” outlet to do a story on Jesus Gone Wild!

I keep a running tab of stories that strike my interest. Taken individually, each might suggest a particular narrow social pathology, which is to be expected in a nation of 300 million. But over time they accumulate into a gestalt, with all the small pictures adding up to a disturbing big picture. For instance:

Item: Pope warns against witchcraft in Angola

(AFP) – Mar 21, 2009

LUANDA (AFP) — Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning against witchcraft Saturday during his visit to Angola, after calling on African leaders to battle corruption and drawing a tough line against abortion.

Item: Pope in Africa reaffirms “no condoms” against AIDS

YAOUNDE, March 17 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict on Tuesday reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS as he started a visit to Africa, where more than 25 million people have died from the disease in recent decades.
…
“It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem,” he said in response to a question about the Church’s widely contested position against the use of condoms.

The disease has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and some 22.5 million Africans are living with HIV.

Item: Rape row sparks excommunications

By Gary Duffy
BBC News, Sao Paulo

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The girl, aged nine, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins.

It is alleged that she had been sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather.

The excommunication applies to the child’s mother and the doctors involved in the procedure.

The pregnancy was terminated on Wednesday.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother’s life is at risk and doctors say the girl’s case met both these conditions.

Police believe that the girl at the centre of the case had been sexually abused by her step-father since she was six years old.

Item: Did the Mormons baptize Obama’s mother, after her death, without his knowledge or consent? A: Yes, they did.

A reader contacted me last week, saying that last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, the Mormons had posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Baptizing the dead of other faiths, secretly and without the consent of their families, is a common Mormon practice. For the past fifteen years the Mormons have caused quite a stir by forcibly baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims – in other words, converting them to Mormonism – despite strong objections from the Jewish community.

Thus, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine the Mormons’ doing this to Obama’s mother. Still, I had no proof. Then yesterday, I received a document. It’s allegedly a screen capture of the registration-only section of the Mormon-run Web site, FamilySearch.org. In that screen capture, excerpted above, is clearly the name and correct date of birth and death of Barack Obama’s mother (Stanley Ann Dunham, born 29 Nov 1942 in Kansas, died 07 Nov 1995) and the date of her alleged post-death baptism by the Mormons.

Item: Catholic schools bans child whose parents are gay

Last week, a standing policy of the Archdiocese of Denver denied a child from enrolling in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School for kindergarten next year because the student’s parents are lesbians.

Currently the student is in the school’s preschool program and will be allowed to finish the year, according to Jeanette DeMelo, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

“It’s clear if they only accept students with perfect parents, they would have almost nobody,” said Beth Osnes, an organizer for the protest. “I know they have the right to, but why would they want to?”

Inside the church, the Rev. Bill Breslin addressed the issue in his sermon. He also posted his comments on his blog.

“If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad,” Breslin said on his blog. “We don’t want to put any child in that tough position.”

Please note: this is happening in the People’s Republic of Freakin’ Boulder!

That’s some big picture, huh? It’s gotten so bad that even former president Jimmy Carter, a man as responsible as any for introducing the poison of evangelical influence into the mainstream of modern politics, has had enough.

Of course, you live here. You read the news. That a lot of Christians are out of control isn’t a real revelation, is it? But lately, the goddamned Catholic Church has been making an unusually immoral and anti-Constitutional nuisance of itself. For instance:

• The Catholic Church is ending its long-standing relationship with St. Charles Medical Center in Bend over a surgical birth-control technique. Note, that’s Saint Charles the place is named after.
• The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a directive for Catholic health care that insists on inflicting artificial “life” sustaining techniques on dying (or functionally dead) patients despite the wishes of the patients or their families.
• And it doesn’t matter whether you’re even Catholic or not – all you have to do is be in the building.
• 300,000 Terri Schiavos, anyone? Let’s face it, the opinion of one reactionary geezer in Rome has now trumped centuries of ethical progress.

Still, we’re talking about their facilities and they’re paying the bills, and they have the right to control their operations the way they see fit, no? Well, maybe, maybe not. Ignoring the wishes of the patient, especially when those wishes are legally expressed in something like a living will, that’s pretty appalling, but I guess you could make the argument.

Even if you won that argument, though, get a load of the latest shenanigans from our friendly Catholic Bishops, who have now offered their “help” in wrangling an outcome in the Senate. You know, because that would make democracy better and stuff.

The Roman Catholic bishops signaled Thursday that if agreement is reached with House leaders on anti-abortion language, the church would work to get the votes needed to protect the provisions in the Senate — and thereby advance the shared goal with Democrats of health care reform.

“We would strongly urge everyone, Democratic and Republican, to vote to waive the point of order,” Richard Doerflinger, an associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told POLITICO. “Whether it would be enough to get to 60 votes, I can’t predict. We would certainly try.”

“I think it’s something we should explore,” said Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a longtime opponent of abortion. “It could be something that could carry out the bishops’ objective.”

And why not? The Bishops have “helped” before, after all.

In November, the bishops drove a tough bargain, winning an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that would severely restrict the ability of even private companies to provide abortion coverage under new state insurance exchanges. That House deal — since weakened by the Senate — is what the bishops want to revive now as part of Obama’s final push on health care. But to survive the Senate, any revisions would need 60 votes to overcome points of order under the expedited reconciliation procedures being contemplated.

David Dayen observes, astutely enough, that “the Catholic bishops want to show a measure of dominance over the US government.” His nuanced look at the tactical knife fight of this particular backroom liturgical drama is helpful to those trying to understand how sausage law gets made.

Meanwhile, those of us out here beyond the Beltway can perhaps be forgiven for saying “wait a sec – back the truck up.” An organized cabal of Roman Catholic aparatchiks are so far up Congress’s ass that they’re openly discussing how they’re going to inject Vatican dogma into a US health care bill?

Excuse me?

The Constitution is clear that what you believe is your business, and I have no problem with that. But when your beliefs inspire actions that hurt the innocent, that systematically victimize those who believe other things, then I start to care. When those beliefs fuel actions that harm me and impinge on my freedoms, well, that’s the point where it becomes self-defense, isn’t it?

Tomorrow: Divide & Conquer

So here’s what we have to do. Let’s forget separation of Church and State and accept that we are One Nation Under God, In God We damned sure Do Trust, and that we are a Christian nation (this part is crucial). Let’s get past all that soulless secular humanism and By God establish a state religion. Better yet, let’s charge Congress with the job, since so many of the members of that august body have thought long and hard on the subject already.

Here’s how it works. The U.S. will adopt as our national religion that which Congress can agree on sufficiently to pass by a two-thirds majority, and by this I mean they must pass each plank of the resolution by that margin. Understand, “God” is way too vague, and you can’t very well build a moral society around vagaries. We have to insist that Congress agree on what God is and how He (She) should be worshiped.

For instance, we’ll need Congress to decide whether the Bible is intended as a metaphorical guide or as literal, journalistic fact. Was Mary literally a virgin? Did Abraham literally live 900 years? Did Moses literally tie his ass to a tree and walk 40 miles? These are not small issues, and if they are settled by legislative fiat we risk another millennium of sectarian strife.

Other issues we’ll need Congress to rule on:

• Should baptism be by sprinkling as an infant or by immersion once one is born again? And, how quickly can we set in place an emergency re-baptism program for all those people who had it done wrong the first time?
• Is God a man, a woman, both, or neither?
• What race is God? This will be important when we do physical and artistic representations of Him/Her/It.
• What about those places where the Bible appears to contradict itself, as in Genesis 1 & 2? Are we to take these as tests by God, or error by monks, or what?
• How old is that darned Earth, anyway? I mean, it’s important to know what to tell kids about dinosaurs if the world is only 6000 years old.
• We’ll need a plan to transfer power from the President to Jesus when He makes his triumphant return to Earth after the Rapture.
• We’ll also need a policy of engagement for Armageddon. When do we launch the nukes, and at who? Once we know who’s on God’s side and who’s on the side of Satan, shouldn’t we just go ahead and launch a pre-emptive strike?
• What the hell do we do about those damned Jews, who have made clear that they aren’t on board with Jesus as the Son of God? Do we wait and let Jesus deal with them himself or should we set about making them either believe what we believe or leave?
• And don’t even get me started on Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and other varieties of Satanists. If we’re truly a Christian land, is it right that their blasphemy should be tolerated, and worse, that they should be able to benefit from social programs paid for by Right-thinking Christians?
• Should the Office of Homeland Godliness be a Cabinet-level appointment reporting to the President? Should the President be the de jure head of the Church? Should it be a separate branch of government insulated from the meddling influence of future secular legislators, and especially from Satanic minions on the Supreme Court? Or, for that matter, should we rework the government and Constitution so that we replace the democracy with a Christian theocracy?
• What should our foreign policy toward non-Christian nations be like? Some of them are Godless, but strategically important (Britain, Canada, anybody with oil, etc.) Should a nation’s relationship with God be a consideration in conferring most-favored-nation status?
• There’s also the woman problem. Are they to be submissive to their husbands, as dictated by some, or are they to be accepted as full partners in God’s Church of America? Can they be ministers, for example? And while we’re on the subject of troublesome sorts, is the Church going to take the “accepting” stance toward gays or are they all going to hell? If the latter, should we get them on their way or let God deal with them in His own good time?

Give me another hour or two and I’ll come up with more of these issues, but you get the idea. The success of a faith-based government hinges on getting these issues settled and chiseled into stone sooner rather than later. If Congress leaves wiggle room and unanswered questions we’ll be at each other’s throats until the Second Coming, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Framers intended.

I’ve been thinking with increasing irritation about that perennial conundrum-within-an-enigma-which-actually-isn’t-that-difficult-at-all: the separation of church and state, this time in the context of gay marriage. The issue becomes more annoying the more headspace I give it, and it’s not the prejudice or the public protests or the proclamations of any group on either side. The question that makes my brain twitch is this: why is this even an issue?

I firmly believe that the followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and/or vilify anyone they choose. I further believe that their right to express their group disapproval stops absolutely short of causing their chosen bugaboo any actual harm… as in, breaking the laws enacted by the larger secular state in order to protect all its citizens.  Those laws, we hope, evolve in specificity and efficacy as our understanding of what constitutes demonstrable societal or individual harm evolves as well. The American legal system has always possessed the power to control, modify or ban religious practices on these grounds: for example, in direct contradiction of Biblical precedent and many current religious beliefs, women are no longer owned by their husbands, twelve-year-old girls are off limits and public stoning for adultery has been replaced by Facebook flaming.

Another example: the general population, excluding certain Louisiana JOP’s, has eventually come to understand that a union between two people of differing overall skin pigmentation does not lead to apocalyptic plagues or children with multiple heads (also, that allowing humans to own other humans is a damaging economic construct, not to mention leading to some rather hard feelings in general). Had the original Southern Baptist Conference (and by “original,” I mean the SBC from 1845 until 1995) been able to retain a state-sanctioned grasp on the laws of the Southern states, slavery would still be legal, “miscegenation” would still be a crime and hundreds of thousands of lawn jockeys would still be on proud display across the land of Dixie. The Southern Baptist Conference was created to support these ideas: in defiance of the views of other Baptist congregations, but with the full support of Messieurs Leviticus and Nehemiah, to name only two. The Old Testament is all for concubines, slaves and massacres, but not intermarriage among tribes. Is this our best authority on human relations?

And what about the endless variations on marriage sanctioned by religions just as legitimate as Decent Christians Everywhere Inc? Why aren’t we respecting their traditions? Why are we letting widows remarry, those whores (Hinduism)? Why aren’t we letting Islamic American men who can afford it collect the four wives to whom they’re entitled? Who’s in charge here? The Founding Fathers, those whacked-out Deists, should have left us some instructions about which religion is right so we would know whose tenets to make law… oh. Wait. They did mention it. NONE OF THEM.

In a democratically-based society, the general idea is that we don’t let small groups dictate to everyone, in the belief that time, evolving understanding and the collective better judgment of a larger group of citizens usually works out better for everyone.  When small groups, or large groups, or individual states or Bible-beating rednecks do attempt to tar and feather someone, we can take their asses to courts which represent successively larger segments of the population and hope that somewhere along the line, better judgment and better education will prevail.

I don’t give a damn what happens in anyone’s church if the law isn’t being broken, if children aren’t being abused, if the Kool-Aid is untainted. And if a particular religious sect decided that I was by nature a lesser human being, I think I’d leave. Wait, make that I know I’d leave – that’s essentially why I don’t consider organized religion a tool that’s safe for most people to play with.  Any system of thought which approves and allows the dehumanization of certain other humans is risky stuff.

No religion owns marriage: the concept, the reality or the word itself. Religions have their own variations on the theme and every right to them. Marry (or don’t) anyone that you like (or hate (or sadly but firmly condemn)). Your religious definition, Ms. Christian or Mr. Sikh (and you do NOT want to go to the dictionary on this), is yours to live by. But please try to understand: pair-bonding predates religion; stable, wealth-creating, ably-parenting households are the true and demonstrable societal benefit of such bonds; and there’s not one iota of real evidence that a pair of the same gender doesn’t work just as well… and your talking shrubbery or flaming cow, while inspirational and possibly entirely real, is no excuse for ignoring science, history and simple justice.

On Considering Compassion

Well, as one who can dish out vitriol with the best of them, i can feel a finger pointed at me. I also know better…which obviously doesn’t mean that i act better.

I’m familiar with the Bodhisattva’s vow: self-sacrifice for the sake of compassion towards all living things, to practice until every blade of grass attains enlightenment. (i differ with it there, the grass is already enlightened)

The fear-anger-hatred continuum is the strongest metaphysical force in the universe because it is easy; it does not take self control. It’s dangerous because it is easy and because it is self replicating and communicable.

On the other hand, there are times when it’s needed…or at least when the action it is likely to produce is needed. Maybe it is more that there are times when its abundance needs to be turned from its current ends to more productive ends.

As i look around, i can’t help but see it everywhere in my country. It’s used to control us (War on Terror) and to divide us (politics). I can no longer rationalize the answer that the top of the social scale is simply callous in its disregard for the lower rungs. It displays hatred towards them. What else can explain our current state of affairs and the treatment of the majority of Americans?

But i can think of two examples where anger and compassion were married to produce positive action. The early labor movement in America was militant against its oppressors, yet displayed compassion towards the oppressed. Compassion being necessary for solidarity. The Civil Rights movement, motivated equally by compassion for one’s fellow man regardless of skin color and anger at injustices suffered by people because of that skin color.

Both examples produced profound change for the better, and in light of Dawn’s post i have to wonder if they were successful because they managed to harness anger that grew out of compassion.

That’s the important part: compassion needs to come first, because only it can control anger. Only it has any hope of channeling vitriol into anything except destruction. More precisely, it is compassion that can turn destruction into the creation of something better, rather than destroying to create from hatred. Creation from hatred can only be malformed and ignoble.

Our nation is terribly lacking in compassion. The myth of rugged independence has run amok. There is no such thing as independence, either in origination or action. Existence is in relation. We cannot live without death, nor can we grow rich without creating poverty. The fallacy of independence only allows us to believe that we exist outside of relation. But we can be prosperous without creating poverty. When prosperity is based on compassion it becomes a matter of the common wealth.

That’s not Communism, because the state is unnecessary for – and probably counterproductive to – true compassion. It has nothing to do with taking from one and giving to another. It is not “charity” as commonly defined, where some portion of individual wealth is handed out to the less fortunate. It is the simple recognition that existence is in relation and that harm to one is harm to all. Conversely, compassion for one is compassion for all.

And if all this sounds too Eastern and esoteric, try Luke 6:27-31 (and onto 36 if you’re so inclined):

“But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

Anger is understandable when others do terrible things unto you, it can, and should, motivate action against injustice. It leads men to turn over the tables of money changers in the temple, strike for a living wage and face loaded guns for peace and equality. But it cannot be forgotten that the opposite of injustice is justice, and justice is not possible without compassion.

Having never heard of Harold Camping before seeing this article, i had to do a little research. My suspicions were confirmed.

Mr. Camping isn’t a “Biblical scholar”. I’ve seen no indication that Mr. Camping reads and works with texts in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic** or even Latin. What i have seen is that Mr. Camping uses a concordance to check questions of language.

Mr. Camping is entitled to believe that the world will end whenever he believes it will end. Fools are welcome to believe that he’s right. But Mr. Camping is not a “Biblical scholar” in any sense of the word. He spends at least two hours every day reading a translation of a translation (and in many cases) of a translation. In all these years he’s never even bothered to learn Greek. On the other hand, i guess i can now call myself a “Biblical scholar” since i actually have more formal training than Mr. Camping.

“Crazy old man thinks the world will end: May 21, 2011″. There, i fixed it. Not only am i a Biblical scholar, i’m a headline writer too.

*The link does not go to the HuffPo. Click it, it goes to an article about that “Internet Newspaper”.

**I realize that Aramaic is not necessary to read the Bible as a scholar because none of the Bible was written in Aramaic. But if we’re discussing what Jesus said, then it’s an important language since Jesus was saying whatever he said in Aramaic. But i will cut Mr. Camping (the engineer) a break on this one because he’s more concerned with reading the Jewish parts of the Bible than the Jesus parts to get his end times scenario, so no harm no foul on the lack of Aramaic, Mr. Camping.

Lawmakers in staunchly Catholic Ireland passed the law in July, but it came into force January 1.

A person breaks the law by saying or publishing anything “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.”

Errrm, wait a second. “…saying or publishing anything “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion…”

Sonofabitch. I think I can get the Bible outlawed in 15 minutes, tops….

Thanks to Ubertramp for passing this item along.

Still, if that whole scene set your plausibility alarms to ringing, you might want to brace yourself for this one.

Think Progress makes a great catch on C-SPAN this morning: Someone calls in while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) is answering the lines, practically in tears because Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) missed this morning’s procedural vote on health care.

He was apparently concerned that — after following Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) instructions to pray that someone couldn’t make a manager’s amendment vote Sunday night — his prayers for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to die struck the wrong senator.

“Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night,” the caller said.

Let’s review. A teabagger, following the lead of his duly elected Congressfolk, gets together with his fellow Christians and prays that God will kill a political opponent.

WWJW? Sen. Byrd, that’s who.

There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start. But suffice it to say that these mouth-breathers worship one more hateful god. Further, this god is apparently a bad shot – if you’re aiming for Byrd and only manage to wing Inhofe, well, omnipotence is right out the window, huh?

Maybe in the next Spidey sequel they can cast Sen. Coburn and his drooling band of lobotomized Christian teabaggers as the villains. But while we’re waiting on the fantasy to arrive at a theater near us, isn’t it nice to know that these people are free to roam the streets in reality?

UPDATE: TPM wonders if the caller was a prankster. Could be, could be. Hard to say for sure, but it’s certainly plausible. It’s just a shame that we live in an age where we have things like “citizens” carrying assault rifles to political rallies to consider – makes it hard to sort reality from fantasy.

Image Credits: Panchosoft.com and Raymond Pronk

Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?

Those who backed the gay marriage law ponied up 12 to 1 over donors to the anti-gay donors and had more money — $5 million. But they lost. The institute’s report, written by Tyler Evilsizer, says:

The measure pitted conservative groups and churches against gay-rights groups, a few wealthy donors, and more than 10,000 smaller donors from Maine and around the country. Question 1 attracted over $9 million, or 72 cents of every dollar raised around Maine’s seven ballot measures. [emphasis added]

But press attention, money, and political capital focused on a wedge issue to divide people of good conscience and faith and divert their attention from far more pressing matters. Maine needs more attention to the condition of its roads, bridges and airports than it does in the bedrooms of loving, consenting adults who wish to make a lifelong commitment.

The blunt end of the money hammer used in Maine against gays was primarily wielded by a group called Stand For Marriage Maine. Like all political communicators and niche interest groups these days, it has a website. But its site is notably deficient. It does not have links such as “About Us” or “Who We Are.” Such links usually provide a list of financial supporters, coalition partners, and the names and contact data for organization officers and staff. Stand For Marriage Maine does not provide such information on its website.

Wading through the organization’s press releases and media stories is needed to learn that Marc Mutty is chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, that Scott K. Fish is communications director (releases provide a phone number) and that Bob Emrich is a member of the group’s executive committee.

That lack of clear, easy-to-find disclosure makes it difficult for those interested in the issue to find out more about the bona fides of donors and supporters who worked to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.

Why not explain “Who We Are”? Only conjecture is possible. It is, perhaps, easier to operate in ideological shadows. According to Mr. Evilsizer’s report, here are the principal sources of money that drove the effort to repeal gays’ right to marry in Maine. A few groups are well known outside Maine.

StandForMarriageMaine.com | $2,650,052
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland | $553,608
Focus On The Family Maine Marriage Committee | $114,500
Family Research Council Action | $25,000
Maine Marriage PAC | $11,539
Maine Grassroots Coalition | $9,410
Marriage Matters in Maine | $2,678
Maine4Marriage | $230
Proponents’ total $3,367,018

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, asked Maine ethics officials to investigate the organization. He said it was laundering money. His August letter

contained allegations religious organizations are hiding contributions to the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign. The letter reports how the National Organization for Marriage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the national office of the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family had contributors give the money to their organizations, and in turn gave the money to the Stand for Marriage Maine to hide the donors’ identity.

But a federal judge ruled on Oct. 29 that the “state can compel the National Organization for Marriage to disclose the identities of donors who contributed to its effort to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.” In that story, the Portland Press Herald said NOM — based in Washington, D.C. — had funneled $1.6 million to Stand For Marriage Maine. A resolution of the lawsuit was “months away,” the story said — well after the Nov. 3 referendum. Mr. Evilsizer’s report contains a breakdown of donors to Stand For Marriage Maine showing NOM’s $1,622,152 donation.

But his report notes that financial supporters of gay marriage in Maine “from Away” were also plentiful. Those who supported the gay-marriage law raised $5,678,579.

The Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization,” donated $267,589 to the principal umbrella organization, No On 1 Protect Maine Equality. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave $139,056. Esmond Harmsworth, a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in Boston and New York, gave $100,000. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders of Boston gave $91,258.

The website of No On 1 Protect Maine Equality also has a “Who We Are” page that lists its coalition partners. Its “Contact Us” page list its physical address, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address. Its campaign manager is clearly identified as Jesse Connolly.

The gay marriage caravan now moves on, it seems, to New York state. Gov. David Patterson wants a same-sex marriage bill, passed twice in the state Assembly, on the floor of the Senate for debate on Tuesday.

And the money, both for and against, will likely move on as well.

It’s also clear from an article in The Colorado Independent that this is only half of what the amendment’s authors intended.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” [Gualberto Garcia] Jones explained. (Jones heads the organization that initiated this year’s amendment)

That this law could be interpreted to include sperm is an ironic example of the law of unintended consequences.

The amendment’s final language, on which Colorado will vote in November 2010, is as follows:

SECTION 1. Article II of the constitution of the state of Colorado is amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION to read:
SECTION 2. Person defined. As used in sections 3, 6, and 25 of Article II of the state constitution, the term “person” shall apply to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.

So what does “biological development” mean? Last year’s amendment defined a person as starting with a fertilized egg (and it lost by a 3:1 margin), and the new amendment could be interpreted to mean the same – a zygote is a person.

But this time, the amendment’s language is even broader. The Independent article makes it clear that this was intentional on the part of the amendment’s authors. The language was written specifically to “to be more comprehensive in our definition of a person,” and the result is that, if passed, the amendment will outlaw abortion, many types of birth control, stem cell research, and could potentially outlaw fertility clinics.

“Beginning of the biological development.” That phrase may be perfectly clear to a conservative Christian abortion activist like Jones, lawyers and judges will have a more difficult time interpreting what it does to Colorado’s laws.

Last year, our own Dr. Slammy and commenters pointed out a number of the absurdities that went along with last year’s failed amendment, such as allowing a pregnant woman to drive in the HOV lane, the legal drinking age becomes 20 years, 3 months, sex with a pregnant woman becomes menage-a-trois, a woman who is not aware that she is pregnant while engaging in a harmful activity of any kind could be charged with neglect, and so on.

The new proposed amendment is even broader in its possible interpretation because a single cell – an egg – would be defined as a “person” this time. And as a result, the possible ramifications are even more farcical.

The problem is that it’s really hard to define when a “person’s” biological development starts. You could say that it starts when an egg is fertilized and be relatively safe (if it passes in 2010 and survives the inevitable legal challenges, that’s probably how this amendment would ultimately be interpreted). But it’s possible that the amendment would be interpreted more broadly. After all, that egg started its development years or decades before it was fertilized. If the egg is damaged, then the “person’s” development will be adversely affected. And damaged eggs happen all the time – they’re one of reasons for miscarriages and failures to conceive. Does that mean that we need to protect a woman’s children when they’re eggs in a girl toddler’s immature ovaries? And how, exactly, are we going to do that?

Are we willing to charge prepubescent girls with child neglect for daring to play soccer and risking ovary damage? What’s next, forcing women to wear petticoats and ride horses sidesaddle? Actually, I suspect that many of Jones’ supporters would find cultural regression to Victorian or Puritan values to be pleasantly refreshing.

And since a human can’t develop without the aid of sperm (cloning aside), does development start when intercourse and ejaculation provide the sperm? Or does it start in the man’s testicles? Or even before then? Damaged sperm are a lot more common than damage eggs – that’s the biological reason that men produce billions of them. Is each damaged sperm an example of child neglect? Should we charge a little league coach with manslaughter if he accidentally throws a baseball into a boy’s crotch with an errant pitch? And should urologists be prosecuted for accessory to murder for performing a vasectomy?

The zygote personhood amendment last year crashed and burned because Coloradans understood that it was a legal minefield of epic scale. This proposed personhood amendment is even worse. Any legislation that makes a minimum of 20,000 separate changes to Colorado law is going to have a huge number of unpredictable unintended consequences.

One of those unintended consequences will be that Colorado will become more of a laughingstock than it was during the Amendment 2 debacle decades ago, or than Kansas was after its school board voted to permit the teaching of “intelligent design.”

It will be in the voters’ hands in 2010. Hopefully they’ll make the right decision next year just as they did last year.

The serpent, “who was more crafty than any of the wild animals the lord God had made,” practiced his deceit with the cunning of Socrates. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” he asked, leading poor Eve towards our collective doom. Only two trees—one mostly ignored—were forbidden with the pain of death. The serpent persuaded Eve that she would not die; instead, he told her, “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

We all know that Eve did eat the apple, and she convinced poor Adam to eat the apple too. The rest is an unfortunate history of pain and exile. But in light of last week’s thoughts, i’m most interested in the idea that the tree was of the knowledge of good and evil. There are the binary opposites, which Genesis tells us not only make us God-like but also constitute our fall from innocence and grace. An Indian sage might phrase the whole situation thusly: “There’s the moment we decided to play the game; that’s when we became trapped in maya.”

Trapped we are, and it’s all Eve’s fault. Well, except that Adam blamed the whole mess on God because he made Eve in the first place, and Eve blamed it all on the serpent. The serpent has had a bad rap ever since, being conceptualized as either Satan himself or a manifestation of the evil one. God punished him too. What i find interesting, however, is the role of the serpent in other traditions.* For example, the serpent Mucalinda protected the Buddha during meditation, just as he was about to achieve the wisdom for which he became famous.

Now, while it may look very cut and dried within the Christian tradition that we’ve all come to know, it isn’t. There’s a whole other Christian, creation myth that turns what we’ve heard on its head, and if you’re of the thought that Eve was framed (or you just like snakes), then it may interest you.

We need to back before the creation of man, at least with a rough sketch, to put the events of the Garden in perspective. In this story, Sophia (wisdom) made a grave mistake in her attempt to get closer to the ultimate and found herself trapped in a region close to Earth. In the sorrow of separation from good and her heavenly consort (Christ), she created a being to ease her loneliness. But she quickly realized that her creation was imperfect, having been created in sorrow and mourning. She named him Yaldabaoth (Child-lord) and after he went around proclaiming that there was no other God but himself, she called him Samael (the blind lord of death) or Saklas (the foolish one). We’ll continue to call him God, because it’s easier.

What God made was not the first man, but a replica of a heavenly man. It was a weak and pitiful creature until, by way of a cunning ploy, Sophia breathed life into earthly man. Unfortunately, God recognized that he’d been tricked and banished Adam to the darkness. Sophia intervened again, sending Adam a helper who hid inside Adam so as not to be discovered by God. Her name was Zoe (life), but we call her Eve.

The garden was a creation designed to trap man, because God knew that he would be unable to rule man directly. Eve wasn’t deceived by the serpent; he was her helper in a great deed. It was her job, as a manifestation of Sophia (again, wisdom), to give Adam the fruit of knowledge. As you might guess, this made God very angry. So angry, in fact, that he pursued Eve around the garden, and when he caught her, he raped her. The rape produced Cain and Abel, though there were other children of Adam and Eve who were not imperfect because they were conceived in a union of choice.

Exile from the garden was not punishment, but freedom from the deception of a God who was inherently flawed, angry and jealous. He was, however, ruler of the material world and he punished the daughters of Eve, making their lot in life particularly difficult. This story continues on marvelously through many of the Old Testament tales, but we’ll have to leave those for another day.

What i find interesting in this alternate, Christian creation story is it’s elevation of man, as opposed to the standard version which makes man out to be a weak, fallen creature. It has always struck me as strange that our religion would find its most basic structure in promoting ignorance over knowledge. Christianity is special in that regard. As we saw last week, many other great traditions make the path of man to know and even transcend. Christian tradition, however, has us still serving a punishment meted out by that angry God. From the looks of things, the New Covenant ushered in by Jesus really doesn’t matter in the standard tradition. He serves only to absolve us of Adam and Eve’s sin by his death, without addressing the situation of ignorance as bliss.

In the other story, Jesus Christ comes to Earth to finish Eve’s work. His role is to show us that we have the intellectual and spiritual power to break the shackles of God’s deception. And so it should come as no surprise that Christ is the heavenly principle in union with Sophia, or the reconciliation of binary opposites…the two into one.

I’ll leave you to ponder the implications of this in reference to Mary Magdalene’s role in the life of Jesus, or why certain strains of Christianity made a habit of calling the Catholic Church “The Church of Satan” until the 13^th century.

*These other traditions actually include ancient Israel, where the serpent plays a dual role.

The question is fundamentally one of the relationship between binary opposites: good and evil, black and white, day and night, alive and dead, yes and no, ad infinitum. Or as Claude Levi-Strauss posed the situation in his seminal work, The Raw and the Cooked. These pairs are obvious to the human psyche, and it appears that they always have been obvious. The importance, then, is in what relationship develops between the pairs and their human examiners.

It is not precisely true that the Abrahamic faiths are founded on the idea of good defeating evil with finality. The selections of works that form their canons suggest it, but those selections were guided by very earthly principles of politics and power. The interpretations of those canons for consumption by lay believers certainly leads us to believe that the role of good is to vanquish evil, but even that rests on selectively reading the texts.

Job, for example, is put through his trails because of a wager between God and Satan. The two are clearly operating together on the supernatural plane in less than fierce battle. We’ll be off the theological reservation in contemplating the idea that God and Satan need each other, but that is what’s suggested. And such a suggestion is far from being an anomaly.

In the Orient the relationship between binary opposites takes a much different form and produces very different models for worldly action. The role of the binary pairs is elevated to the highest of spiritual heights. For the Hindus the gods are locked in a cyclical dance of creation and destruction played out over time spans that are purposefully incalculable. It is simply the way of the universe, and the mathematical summation is zero. Good is in exact proportion–over the long term–to evil. One cannot vanquish the other because they require each other.

Could you identify good outside of its relationship with evil? Would the day hold any meaning if not for the night? Can life be a celebration without the mourning of its passing?

In Yoga and Buddhism there is a fundamental acceptance of this state. The interplay of binary opposites makes the world go round, but that interplay is at its root an illusion (maya). A human’s greatest possible achievement is to transcend the illusion, to go past the binary opposites. That’s what enlightenment is, or as close as we can come to a positive definition of it. The traditions themselves do not accept positive definitions; they say what enlightenment is not, and what it is not is everything associated with life, i.e. the cyclical round of binary opposites. This is why vegetarianism plays such an important, spiritual role in these traditions–exemplified by the Jains refusal to even pick fruit. Sustenance through taking life traps the eater in the binary world of life and death.

Further East, the Chinese conceptualize the binary opposites with the graphic Taijitu (“diagram of the supreme ultimate” or just “yin-yang” if it’s a tattoo). Taoism regards the situation very differently than the Indian traditions. It is not something to be escaped, but rather to be cultivated in such a way that balance between the two is achieved. Harmony with the way of the universe is the goal, and while it can be cultivated, the highest affirmation is “to be as a ball bouncing in a mountain stream”. Perfection is in letting go, because perfection just is and exists everywhere, all the time.  The interplay between the equal opposites produces perpetual motion, but the sum of the universe is still zero.

There are Western examples that contradict the supposed Abrahamic position. Nietzsche’s uber-mensch is not so much an Aryan overlord as a philosophical man who transcends the world of binary opposites. He recognizes them clearly, and affirms them vigorously. He is the man who says “Yes!” to life. “Yes” to even pain, hunger and death. “Yes” to the proposition of doing it all, even the worst, over and over and over again.

I am not arguing that we should base our worldly actions on the belief that they will come to nothing. That sort of resignation is self-defeating insomuch as it logically leads to inaction. But as we strive to make the world a better place or improve ourselves or fight the good fight, we must consider that the path is one without end. To see victory as possible, no matter how long the time line, is to invite frustration and disillusionment. The sum of the universe has always been and will always be zero; consequently, the final victory of good over evil (or it’s opposite) is as impossible as day triumphing over night.

The problem facing conservatives is that updates to the New International Version are decided on by a committee “dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal* and feminist in outlook”. That would explain why the project proposes to replace all occurrences of the word “Pharisee” with “intellectual”. Mark 3:2 (KJV), “And they [the Pharisees] watched him, whether he would heal him [the man in the synagogue with a withered hand] on the Sabbath day; that they might accuse him.” Mark 3:2(CBP), “The intellectuals watched Jesus to see if he might catch and accuse him of healing on the Sabbath.” No, i didn’t mistype anything. That’s what it says. Maybe God’s revealing himself to be semiliterate. And the “translators” reveal themselves to be rather inconsistent, as the word “Pharisees” in Mark 7:5 is not translated into Modern Conservative but left in plain old English.

Before we leave Mark—the only gospel even partially translated—behind, let’s pause at 7:15. This is the famous verse wherein Jesus says, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile a man.” Aside from changing the meaning by replacing “the things which come out of him” with “that which comes from within” and moving from a definite state of defilement to one of possible corruption, there’s an analysis of the verse. Translator(s) wonder if maybe Plato was inspired by God because he said the same thing; they even entertain the possibility that Jesus knew “earlier doctrines”. Now that’s just blasphemy because all the earlier doctrines were false and Jesus was the truth…get it together, conservatives.

Should i dare point out the fact that there’s no proof that Jesus said anything recorded in the Gospels? (He might have, i wasn’t there.) Would it be unkind to suggest that since they were written in Greek, the writers might have heard of Plato? I’ll leave aside that wisdom is wisdom is wisdom, no matter who says it or when.

The projects only completed work is the short, “Epistle to Philemon”. “Fellow labourer” is changed to “fellow volunteer” in verse one, because the former “falsely connotes socialism”. And in verse three—“Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”—we learn that “peace” really means “peace of mind”. Peace, you see, is not as Merriam-Webster defines it but means “anti-war”, and we all know that good Christians are not anti-war.

There is more of course, but you’re probably an illogical liberal who hates Jesus and the Bible, so i won’t bore you by going through the translated text with a fine toothed comb.

The project is starting with the New Testament, both a curse and a blessing. The Old Testament would be a lot more interesting, e.g. we’d get to find out the Modern Conservative for “begat”. But at least they’re only adulterating a second rate collections of stories that define modern Christianity. All the best books were thrown out and burned very early on, and the rest have been a tool of conservative politics since the Council of Nicea. I will not digress too far into exegesis, but it should be noted that the project questions whether Luke 23:34 is a “liberal corruption of the original”. There’s actually a fair amount of debate on this verse, but to suggest that its inclusion is a liberal corruption makes for a vast, left-wing conspiracy that stretches back to c. 400AD. Surely they’re just begetting around in jest.

Not even the Bible is immune to socialism, its terminology “permeates” the damned thing without justification. Worse, this corruption encourages the social justice movement within Christianity. Jesus was clearly not interested in social justice, he was just a dork who couldn’t make the football team and had to hang around with lepers and whores and acne-ridden outcasts. Would anyone like to place a bet on the conservative bible project discarding Catholicism’s just war argument like it discards the social justice argument?

But this isn’t about people degrading the New International Version’s seventh grade reading level to somewhere in early elementary school. It isn’t about “translating” English into English. It isn’t even about the simple-minded trying to avoid the complex social, political and religious situation in Judea during Jesus’ lifetime. This is much more serious. The debate surrounding this project “would flesh out – and stop – the infiltration of churches by liberals pretending to be Christian”. If all goes well, the project might prompt the Bible to become part of the curriculum in university Politics Departments, and perhaps the conservative Bible could even be a public school textbook. See where this is going?

Liberals will argue this till the second coming, but the project coordinators aren’t worried about arguing their translations, because the argument will force liberals to read the Bible. That will open up the liberal mind. I’ve read the Bible a few times and look at me. It obviously doesn’t work. I still figure that Jesus looked like Yasser Arafat, was all over Mary Magdalene and that he was probably a revolutionary who associated with terrorists. … Hmm, well now that i think about it, maybe the CBP is right: Jesus might have been a modern, American conservative.

*A “liberal” is someone who “rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons”. Liberals are also socialists, so liberals are self-centered socialists. The Inuit may have a hundred words for snow, but Modern Conservative has none for contradiction.

We all know what happens after that. The wickedness of the world is washed away in a deluge of planetary proportions, and only Noah, his family and the two of each unclean animal along with seven of every clean animal (but oddly, no plants) are saved to repopulate the world. Of all the mythological motifs that circle the Earth and run like a string through human history, none is told with more regularity and consistency than the story of the flood.

Myth is analyzed by different methods, and often not consistently with just one method. Until the 20^th century, the Judeo-Christian flood myth was often regarded as historical truth; some Christian archeologists are still searching Mt. Ararat for the remains of Noah’s Ark. Literal interpretations of myth tend to be put forth by believers in a particular religion, and, consequently, are inconsistent insomuch as they dismiss all myths except their own as pure fantasy. The 20^th century saw the rise of symbolic interpretation of myth, drawing from the works of Freud and Jung. A few mythologists have suggested that myth was a form of proto-science: a way of categorizing and explaining the natural world.

To what extent myth served as proto-science is not our present concern; however, with the prevalence of astronomical information—particularly the math of the precession of the equinoxes—included in myths as far separated as Scandinavia and the Indian subcontinent, and ranging as far back in time as the written record exists, we must consider that myth has served as at least a mnemonic device for ancient man’s scientific information.

While symbolic interpretation does a wonderful job of bringing the motifs of disparate mythologies together into an explainable whole, it falls short in a few instances. The inclusion of astronomical data would seem to have little to do with Jungian archetypes. And i have read no symbolic interpretation of the flood myths that strikes me as robust enough to account for the story being so widespread and consistent through time and across cultures. To say that the deluge represents cleansing is no more than a repetition of the myths themselves, which all claim that the flood was unleashed to punish humans.

Combining interpretations to suit a scholar’s needs is a popular method of mythological explanation. For example, the antediluvian king list of Sumer is regularly regarded as fantasy, while the list of kings post-deluge is considered historical fact. Flood stories are often interpreted in semi-literal fashion. That is, the story of the flood is accepted as historical truth, but it must have been a local flood inflated by the literary imagination of the population. This explanation strikes me as particularly weak. We have ancient people capable of making precise records of the heavens, building fantastic architecture and establishing complex social orders, who are also so intellectually primitive as to mistake a flooding river for a world-encompassing deluge.

We can be sure that no mythological record of the flood depicts literal, historical fact, if for no other reason than that so many of them, e.g. the story of Noah, build on and borrow from earlier traditions. The Vedas depict a deluge, but it would strain the bounds of credibility to believe that Manu and the Seven Sages were carried to such a height that they tethered their ship to the highest peaks of the Himalayas. Similarly, we might question how Noah’s Ark was capable of holding (and feeding) all the animals of the planet, and that Noah was able to repopulate the Earth with animals but without plants. A strict, literal interpretation of the flood myths fails by way of the devil in the details.

But can we wholly discount the basis of the stories because of literary embellishments that have accrued over the course of thousands of years?

Common to most, if not all, of the flood myths is the idea that the antediluvian world was populated by great beings. Genesis uses the terms “giants” and “mighty men”. From Sumerian texts and the Vedas we hear of a group called “the Seven Sages”. These antediluvians are often referred to as “gods”, but we would be unwise to assume that the ancients were operating under the same conception of god(s) that we use. The line between godliness and mortal man as solid and impenetrable is a fairly recent construct. Consider also the common theme that the great man/men who survived the deluge bequeathed the arts of civilization to humanity. Manu explicitly saved the cultivated plants and introduced agriculture. Or more precisely, re-introduced agriculture if we take the Vedas at their word, because the agricultural cornucopia must have predated the deluge for Manu to be able to have saved it for the benefit of his fellow men.

To continue we must cross the intersection of archeology and mythology, a hazardous journey in the best of times. In what appears to be a fantastic moment in human history, the arts of civilization spring forth, fully formed in Mesopotamia. Classically, this is considered to have occurred c. 4,500 BCE. That date, however, does not stand the evidence of modern archeology. The great sites of Sumer have revealed themselves to be several thousands of years older than the dates most of us learned in school. Jericho shows signs of settlement going back 10,000 years. And anything written about ancient, Indian history before 1995 is hopelessly out of date. The sites of the Indus Valley (Harappan) civilization were not even discovered until the 1970’s, and research there is ongoing, though it seems to have put to rest the well-worn story of an Aryan invasion. (or even the idea of the Aryans)

Consider that fully modern humans have populated the planet for 40,000 years. Yet we assume that very little happened for the majority of that time in terms of social, cultural and technological evolution. And then one day, towards the end of that history, everything happened almost at once. Perhaps we give our ancestors too little credit. Granted, we prefer to not hazard speculative guesses without evidence, and the hard evidence we possess says very little about time periods before c. 5,000 BCE.

What if we are missing, or misinterpreting, information? We have found the five great antediluvian cities recorded in the Sumerian flood myth (of which we have only a partial record). What we’ve unearthed is at odds with their supposed splendor; ergo their greatness must be a figment of mythological imagination. Imagine 7,000 plus years into the future. Climate change has reduced the polar ice caps to nothing, raising sea levels. The reduced weight at the poles has changed the lithosphere, causing subsidence of some land masses, violent earth quakes, volcanic activity, etc. The records of our civilization are mostly lost and the remainder is hopelessly confused. Future archeologists have scant, but tantalizing, records of a great city called London that was supposed to exist on an island off the coast of Europe. No such island exists. Digs in what we call Ontario reveal a small city called London. With the evidence at hand, these archeologists conclude that our great London was, in fact, a myth.*

Would these future archeologists be correct in their assumption? Can we firmly conclude that our ancestors would not have named a new city after an older, greater city? If we accept our present conclusion because we base it on what we know rather than what we don’t know, aren’t we forced to admit that what we don’t know far exceeds what we do know? Can we simply discount a long tradition spoken of by the ancients that they were heirs to civilization rather than its creators because we don’t have any evidence beyond their words?

We know, based on geological fact, that the world we inhabit is not static and that it has gone through great changes during the time period of modern humans. Yet we assume that humans have lived only in the places we know today, or at least that civilization occurred only in the few places where we’ve found it. Can we discount the possibility that our “pre-civilized” ancestors might have lived in places lost to the sea since the end of the last ice age? Can we be sure that those possible locations did not see the developments we consider to be the hallmarks of civilization?

And if the above questions have any merit, we cannot discount the flood myths as mere imagination. Perhaps the most common of shared, mythological motifs rests on a kernel of truth passed down to us from before our conception of human history. Where antediluvian civilization might have arisen and what it might have looked like can only be speculation based on mythological clues. How it might have been destroyed is a question for geology and climatology. But the question is there to be answered if we’re willing to ask it.

*This is in no way intended to be a prediction of climate change or its effects, but merely a thought experiment.

We will pick up the story at the moment when Gautama’s father knew the danger to be greatest. His son had mastered the arts of his society, married and given birth to a son. In short, his duties had been fulfilled. The danger was that he would turn away from the plenty and pleasure of the princely life. Gautama’s father had kept his son from the practice of religion, afraid that it would propel him to the forest.

The Four Signs

And so, on a certain day when the lotus ponds were adorned and the forests carpeted with tender grass, having heard of the beauty of the city groves beloved of women, the Bodhisattva resolved to go forth, like an elephant long shut up in its barn. And the king, having learned of the wish of his son, ordered a pleasure party prepared, with extreme precautions taken that no afflicted person should appear along the way to unsettle his son’s protected mind.

In a golden chariot, with a worthy retinue, and on a road heaped with strewn flowers, the prince set forth, drawn by four gentle horses; and when the word went out ahead of him, “The prince is coming forth,” the women, having obtained the permission of their husbands, hastened to the roofs, frightening the flocks of birds among the rooftops with the jingling of their girdles and anklets resounding up the stairs. . . .

The gods, however, in their pure abodes, having recognized the moment sent forth an old man to walk along the road.

The prince beheld him.

The prince addressed his charioteer.

“Who is that man there with the white hair, feeble hand gripping a staff, eyes lost beneath his brows, limbs bent and hanging loose? Has something happened to alter him, or is that his natural state?”

“That is old age,” said the charioteer, “the ravisher of beauty, the ruin of vigor, the cause of sorrow, destroyer of delights, the bane of memories and the enemy of the senses. In his childhood, that one too drank milk and learned to creep along the floor, came step by step to vigorous youth, and he has now, step by step, in the same way, gone on to old age.”

The charioteer thus revealed in his simplicity what was to have been hidden from the king’s son, who exclaimed, “What! And will this evil come to me too?”

“Without doubt, by the force of time,” said the charioteer.

And the great-souled one whose mind, through many lives, had become possessed of a store of merits, was agitated when he heard of old age–like a bull who has heard close by the crash of a thunderbolt. He asked to be driven home.

A second day, another outing; and the gods sent a man afflicted by disease.

The prince said, “Yonder man, pale and thin, with swollen belly, heavily breathing, arms and shoulders hanging loose and his whole frame shaking, uttering plaintively the word ‘mother’ when he embraces there a stranger: who is that?”

“My gentle lord,” said the chrioteer, “that is disease.”

“And is this evil peculiar to him, or are all beings alike threatened by disease?”

“It is an evil common to all,” said the charioteer.

And a second time the prince, trembling, desired to be driven home.

There came a third time, another outing, and the deities sent forth a dead man.

Said the prince, “But what is that, borne along there by four men, adorned but no longer breathing, and with a following of mourners?”

The charioteer, having his pure mind overpowered by the gods, told the truth. “This, my gentle lord,” he said, “is the final end of all living beings.”

Said the youth, “How can a rational being, knowing these things, remaing heedless here in the hour of calamity? Turn back our chariot, charioteer. This is no time or place for pleasure.”

The driver, this time, however, in obedience to the youth’s father, continued to the festival of women in the groves. And the young prince, arriving, was met as a bridegroom. Some thought of him as the god of love himself incarnate; others thought of him as the moon. Many were so smitten they simply gaped as if to swallow him. And the son of the family priest urging all to make use of their charms, their souls were carried away by love. . . . But that best of youths, there wandering like an elephant of the forest accompanied by his female herd, only pondered in his agitated mind: “Do these women not know that old age one day will take away their beauty? Not observing disease, they are joyous here in a world of pain. And, to judge from the way they are laughing at their play, they know nothing at all of death.”

The party returned to the palace with broken hopes.

He was riding his white steed, Kanthaka, across a field that was being plowed, when he saw its young grass not only torn and scattered, but also covered with the eggs and young of insects, killed. Then filled with a deep sorrow, as for his own kindred slaughtered, he alighted from his horse, going over the ground slowly, pondering birth and destruction, musing, “Pitiable, indeed!” And, desiring to be alone, he went apart, to sit at the foot of a rose apple tree in a solitary spot, on the leaf-covered ground. Pondering the origin of the world and destruction of the world, he laid hold there of the path to firmness of mind. And released therewith from all such sorrows as attach to desire for the objects of the world, he attained the first stage of contemplation. He was calm, and full of thought.

Whereupon he saw standing before him an ascetic mendicant. “What art thou?” he asked. To which the other answered, “Terrified by birth and death, desiring liberation, I became an ascetic. As a beggar, wandering without family and without hope, accepting any fare, I live now for nothing but the highest good.” Whereupon he rose into the sky and disappeared; for he had been a god.

The Graveyard Vision

The prince, returning home, went to his father in the full assembly of the court, and, prostrating himself, hands joined above his head, said to him, “O Lord of Men, I want to become an ascetic mendicant.” But the king, shaken like a tree struck by an elephant, gripped the joined hands of his son and said to him, choked with tears, “O my son, keep back this thought. It is not time for you to be turning to religion. During the first period of life the mind is fickle and the practice of religion full of danger.” The prince looked up and answered sharply, “Father, it is not right to lay hold of a person about to escape from a house that is on fire.” And he rose and returned to his palace, where he was greeted by his wives. But the king said, “He shall not go!”

The prince, in his palace, sat on a seat of gold, surrounded by those charming women, who desired nothing but to please him with their music. And the gods threw on them a spell, so that as they played they dropped off to sleep with their instruments falling from their hands. One lay with her drum as with a lover. Another, hair disheveled, skirts and ornaments in disarray, was like a woman crushed by an elephant and then dropped. Many were noisily breathing; others, bright eyes wide and motionless, lay as dead. One with her person exposed, with fully developed limbs, drooled saliva as though intoxicated. And all, with their garments variously astray, were lost to shame and helpless, who had before been possessed of all grace. They were like a lake of lotuses broken by a wind.

The prince considered. “Such is the nature of women: impure and monstrous in the world of living beings! Deceived by dress, a man becomes infatuated by their charms. But let him regard their natural state, this change produced in them by sleep!”

And he rose, with a will only to escape into the night.*

The first noble truth of Buddhism is, “Life is suffering.” Suffering here does not mean “unfair treatment”. It is the simple fact that disease, old age, death and birth (and in this story, the women represent birth) are the inescapable facts of life. For a common man such as Gautama’s charioteer, they are self-evident. That they struck Gautama with such ferocity has as much to do with his father’s attempt to shield the young prince from what life really is as it does with Gautama’s innate buddhahood.

And so the young prince began the attempt to remove himself from the suffering of the world.

*The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology; Joseph Campbell; 1962; pps 259-264

Image Credit: sarvajan.ambedkar.org

Star Wars doesn’t exactly fit in any film genre. It has action and romance, but it isn’t an action or  a romance film. It isn’t sci-fi either, though for lack of a better classification it often gets put in the genre. Star Wars is a myth. It reveals itself in the opening scroll, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” From the beginning we’re separated from the mundane by a thin line of imagination, but the line is so thin that seeing the fantastic in our own existence is nearly impossible to miss. Campbell was fond of saying that, “Myth is a public dream and dreams are private myths.” Lucas managed to draw the line between them with precision and grace. And in doing so gave Campbell his life-long dream: a modern myth. That is, the psychological motifs present in all mythology dressed in metaphors accessible to modern man.

With the predictive powers of hindsight it’s easy to see Campbell becoming the scholar he was. His middle class childhood in New York state was dominated by an intense fascination with all things Native American. The auto-didactic streak that would characterize his life was evident in a young man reading through whole library collections for pleasure. His early biography is punctuated by profound moments that clearly shape the man he would become. On the return from a European vacation with his family, Campbell befriended Jiddu Krishnamutri. The trans-Atlantic length conversation they shared prompted Campbell to forsake his native Catholicism and ignited his curiosity for the beliefs beyond his personal context.

In 1927, he left for Europe again, this time as a post-graduate student at Columbia University. He was to study Old French, German and Provencal as part of his Medieval Literature studies. He found far more than he expected. He began a life-long love affair with the Cathedral at Chartres; discovered Joyce and Mann; wondered at post-impressionists like Picasso and Klee; and began making sense of the world under the influence of Freud and, especially, Jung. Upon his return to America, he proposed adding Sanskrit and modern art to his course of studies at Columbia. His advisers felt that neither was appropriate to the study of Medieval Literature, and so Campbell left formal, higher education for good.

But he did not leave education. With little hope for gainful employment – it was 1929 – Campbell commenced five years of self-education and travel. He broke each day into four, four-hour blocks, three of which were spent reading. To his impressive foreign language abilities he added Russian, because he wanted to read War and Peace and assumed that much would be necessarily lost in translation. He traveled the U.S. extensively during those years, befriending John Steinbeck and living next door to Ed Ricketts. He spent a year as the headmaster at The Canterbury School and published a short story. And he spent another year living in a rustic, tourist cabin in Woodstock, NY; he simply asked publishers for books, and since no one was purchasing them, they obliged.

A 1932 journal entry shows a man deep in thought and points the way to his ultimate destination:

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere–but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is–but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books. — It isn’t in travel. — It isn’t in California. — It isn’t in New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all?

Creepy as it may have been, Campbell eventually took a position in the literature department of Sarah Lawrence College. He retired from the same position 38 years later, still without his doctorate. He spent the rest of his life examining, pondering, discussing and sharing the questions he asked himself in 1932.

Some claim that Campbell was not a great scholar of myth and religion, and to some extent this is true. He never claimed to be one. He was, however, a brilliant synthesizer, able to take in the big picture and tease out the similarities in prima facia dissimilar traditions. He saw context where others saw only details. He shared with Jung a vision concerning the common psycho-spiritual context of humankind. Like Jung, he he saw myth as a means for man to describe the context that was simultaneously internal and external, the present and the eternal. But foremost, Campbell was an educator. He had the gift of the story-teller, and it allowed him to share scholarly thoughts in a way that engaged the not-so-scholarly.

The long conversation with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth) recorded shortly before his death is a staple of public library AV sections. He’s best known for efforts of that sort because they are so accessible. But his writing is hardly confined to popularizations of myth. The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a deep and complex work exploring the hero monomyth as it has been retold countless times around the world and throughout history. The four volumes of The Masks of God are a heavily footnoted history of man’s spiritual journey from the deepest mists of prehistory to expressions of mythology in modern art and culture. They could easily constitute a fine lay education in comparative myth and religion.

Campbell may be one of the handful of people who understood Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, co-authoring an explanatory tome. And he edited the collected works of Heinrich Zimmer and Carl Jung. And all of this was done in the context of a long marriage, a distinguished teaching career, and a host of deeply intellectual friendships that spanned the globe.

Myth, in Campbell’s view, is metaphor. It is a means of accessing truth and wisdom, and it forms a context in which to integrate the boon into life. He liked to point out that “happily ever after” in fairly tales did not mean “without care or worry”, but rather “knowing and integrating wisdom into daily life.” It troubled him that modern man has little connection to myth, and he rightfully wondered if our sorry state of affairs is the result of too little mythic understanding. For Campbell, this situation did not exclude the throngs of devoutly religious people the world over. He often pointed out that these people are regularly guilty of mistaking the metaphor for the truth that it describes.

His work is a testament to the thought and belief of all humanity, and to the idea that knowledge is understanding, rather than power. He was an erudite scholar, but the rogue’s glint in his eye was impossible to hide. And he spent a life time imparting knowledge that came with the roguish and mildly subversive instructions that we should follow our bliss.

Image credit: The Joseph Campbell Foundation (click for further bio, complete works, etc.)

The reading list given for Campbell’s “Introduction to Mythology” course at Sarah Lawrence.

I have not checked every assertion made in this video, so i cannot vouch for every piece of information. Some i know to be stretching the truth; though the field is dominated by interpretations, multiple translations and incomplete pictures, there are things we know. Fortunately, the problems with the video are not central to the thesis. They occur in an attempt to connect every savior myth directly and exactly. Myth never works that way, and while the creator of the video may have suggested otherwise in an attempt to clean up and compress the information, it does detract from the total experience.

What is correct outweighs what is incorrect. The heavens were both literal and figurative to ancient man. Until a period in Egyptian history (and more recently elsewhere), everything was dictated by the activity of the heavens…up to and including regicide. We know very well that the ancients were excellent astronomers. Witness tiny holes hewed in solid rock that allow light to pass into a sacred chamber only at a certain time on a certain day. We also know that astronomical numbers and observations have a strong presence in myth: as both personification of the heavens and tools to pass information across generations. And we can be sure that there’s no such thing as an original myth. The original myth is buried far deeper than Egypt or Mesopotamia. Where it comes from is a mystery, but this video almost certainly points in the right direction.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Returning myth to its psychological function within the context of established religion is difficult, if not presently impossible. The seeker will find few allies, certainly none among the religion’s adherents constrained in their infantilized psychology of literal interpretation and few among the secular who set themselves up against the religious adherents in a battle for supremacy of the nursery floor.

The transition from “…mythic identification, ego absorbed and lost in God, [to] its opposite, mythic inflation, the god absorbed and lost in ego,” (Joseph Campbell; Oriental Mythology; 80)  is a fascinating moment in human history that can be seen quite clearly. It is not, however, our present concern. What we see in modern religion is clearly mythic inflation. What we seek is mythic identification, because it is in the identification that myth’s psychological power flowers. To find it we must dust of the stories and ways of old, generally relegated to literature departments as fanciful tales told by people far less advanced than we like to imagine ourselves.

Thomas Mann: “The Ego of antiquity and its consciousness of itself was different from our own, less exclusive, less sharply defined. It was, as it were, open behind; it received much from the past and by repeating it gave it presentness again . . . ’imitation’ meant far more than we mean by the word today. It was a mythical identification . . . . Life, or at any rate significant life, was the reconstitution of myth in flesh and blood; it referred to and appealed to the myth; only through it, through reference to the past, could it approve itself as genuine and significant.” (Supra, 54)

It was this ego that myth was presented to, and the openness that Mann describes allowed cross-pollination between myth and everyday reality. This mythic situation can be found in most places, from S. America to taiga shamanism to the Melanesian vegetal myths. And it did not end cleanly with the identification to inflation transition as it occurred in Egypt. Unfortunately, the content that would show broad context to Western minds is mostly unknown to even the educated. But it is clearly visible in the Greek myths, with which many of us have some familiarity.

F.M. Cornford: “Greek theology was not formulated by priests nor even by prophets, but by artists, poets and philosophers. . . . There was no priestly class guarding from innovating influence a sacred tradition enshrined in a sacred book. There were no divines who could successfully claim to dictate terms of belief from an inexpugnable fortress of authority.” The gods, then, are not literal concretizations, like Yahweh, but personifications of ideas that rise from human imagination. Or as Campbell expands on Cornford’s idea, “They are realities, in as much as they represent forces both of the macrocosm and of the microcosm, the world without and the world within. However, in as much as they are known only by reflection in the mind, they  partake of the faults of that medium—and this fact is perfectly well known to the Greek poets, as it is known to all poets (though not, it would appear, to priests and prophets). The Greek tales of the gods are playful, humorous, at once presenting and dismissing the images; lest the mind, fixed upon them in awe, should fail to go past them to the ultimately unknown, only partially intuited, realities and reality that they reflect.” (Supra, 31-2)

Mythic inflation puts us in the pious and submissive position of Job rather than that of a similar mythological figure, Prometheus. Unlike the innocent Job, Prometheus committed an act of his own free will that led to his torture. Yet it is Prometheus, not the meek Job, who is willing to say, “I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do what he likes.” We have one set of mythic instruction leading us toward our human power and another leading away. The question, then, is which set of instructions is better able to contextualize the human condition and give individuals the ability to develop psychologically.

Like the nursery environment, mythic inflation is protective. The ferocity and power of the world-at-large (or what occurs internally) can be held back, but not without the myth sacrificing its own power in the bargain. The symbols all remain but they are impotent, unable to point beyond the metaphor to the underlying – and eternal – truth. In their impotence, they must be taken literally or lose all power. And when they are taken literally, they actively block access to the depths because the symbols must be final terms in themselves.

Dr. Jung took up this idea and pointed out that mythic inflation taken to the point of dogmatic credo, “protects a person from a direct experience of God as long as he does not mischievously expose himself. But if he leaves home and family, lives too long alone and gazes too deeply into the dark mirror, then the awful event of the meeting may befall him. Yet even then the traditional symbol, come to full flower through the centuries, may operate like a healing draught and divert the final incursion of the living godhead into the hallowed spaces of the church.” (Supra, 46) In other words, the inflection is replaced by identification gained the hard way.

But that is the path of heroes, poets and prophets. It is easier to remain in the nursery, ensconced in the protection of family (Church), never alone and avoiding even a glance into the dark mirror. That way, unfortunately, is the path of neurotic modernity where the poets, artists, philosophers, great gods and their stories are left to molder in the dusty corners of academe. Our brave new world is, essentially, the same world that we have always inhabited; it is only lacking the tools of human imagination made mythically real and brought into the collective consciousness. The poets and artists who might be tasked with this essential process are smothered by symbols rotten from disuse, not to mention a population in thrall to mythic inflation.

It is now left to the individual to find his own way, if he can, to the numinous. Should he make it, he is unlikely to have the means to share and validate the experience with his fellow man. Should he only make it half way, he is likely to go insane or be shadowed by depression. Should he-like most-refuse the call entirely, he is likely to go to church where mythic identification can be replaced with mythic inflation. And so the individual saves himself, sacrificing the world on the altar of his ego. It used to work the other way around.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has conditionally reinstated

Last Thursday the Philadelphia Eagles answered the question as to which team would sign a convicted dog-killer (there were 32 possible answers to the question, and “none of the above” wasn’t one of them), and in doing so touched off a long-awaited PR war for the souls of their stunned fans. That the move is this controversial in Philly is instructive, because this is a city that has some of the meanest, most hardcore fans in the sporting world. Imagine if the team had instead been somebody like Seattle or the 49ers.

In any case, this is America, and as such there was never any doubt that Vick would be reinstated and that some team would pay millions to sign him. If Saddam Hussein had been able to break down a defense and get to the rim he wouldn’t be in Hell right now, he’d be in the NBA. So the controversy, such as it is, has nothing to do with anybody being surprised that Vick would find his way back onto the field.

Nonetheless, the argument is raging, and not just in Philadelphia. As I’ve read what people on “both” sides of the question have to say, as I’ve listened to the takes from local and national various sports commentators, as I’ve heard callers to sports talk stations offering their humble (and utterly meaningless) opinions, I have to admit that I’ve gotten a little tired of some of the memes being trotted out to defend Vick, the Eagles and the league. No matter how self-evidently inaccurate or utterly silly a particular idea may be, once it reaches the point of cliché the chances of somebody not repeating it are about the same as a crack addict not honking on the pipe every chance he gets. It’s true that much of what I’m complaining about comes from a noble place and it’s also true that many of those who are getting on my nerves are in fact good people espousing worthy ideals. Still, we have to understand that good intentions don’t guarantee positive results, and sometimes the pursuit of even the best ideals can effect unanticipated and undesired outcomes.

Here are some examples.

Everybody deserves a second chance…

Really? Everybody? Let’s test this. How about Charles Manson? Does he deserve a second chance? If so, can he stay at your hosue when we release him? Did Ted Bundy deserve a second chance, and if so, would you have let him escort your daughter to the prom? How about TIm McVeigh, or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold or Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer?

Okay, okay. What Vick did wasn’t as bad as those guys. I get that. But two things to remember. First, the meme says everybody, not almost everybody, and this ain’t no straw man – I’m quoting lots and lots and lots of people that I’ve heard with my own in ears in just the past month. If we agree, as I suspect we do, that it’s not really everybody, then what we’re literally saying is that not everybody deserves a second chance.

Second, let’s try a scenario involving nobody famous. Say you’re a parent and you have a brother named Fred. And one day you catch Fred molesting your five year-old daughter. Assuming you’re even vaguely human, Fred’s ass is off to jail (assuming you can keep yourself from killing him on the spot).

So one day Fred gets out of jail. Do you let him babysit your daughter? If not, why not? After all, everybody deserves a second chance.

Give me a few minutes and I think I can convince just about anybody out there, even the most charitably minded person alive, that some people don’t deserve a second chance. Once we get to that point, the only thing left is to decide where to draw the line. At a minimum, though, we’ve demonstrated the ridiculousness of ever saying those words again.

He’s paid his debt to society…

We’re a nation of laws and we must, at some level, invest a measure of faith in the collective justice of our system if we’re to live civilly. Otherwise there’s a lynch mob on every corner, a vigilante lurking in every dark alley, and that’s a prescription for chaos. Who will watch the watchers, right?

That said, it’s hard for an intelligent and moral citizen to take the system at its word, to assume that justice is done in each individual case. If a man breaks into a home, rapes and murders a woman, and winds up pleading to a misdemeanor because the prosecutors can’t cobble together enough evidence to get a felony conviction, has the perpetrator paid his debt to society? Has OJ Simpson paid his debt to society? (Remember, he was found liable for the deaths of his ex-wife and Ron Goldman in a civil case.) Or has he merely paid a fraction of the debt he should have incurred?

The “paid his debt” meme forces us to assume and to assert that the system is always right, and I’ve never yet met anyone who believes that, I don’t think. Yes, the system has run its course, but it’s not hard to find cases where offenses are punished too heavily or too lightly and every day the guilty walk free (and the innocent are sometimes convicted, as well). We do have an obligation to accept the results of the justice system, writ large, though, so while I’m mad as hell that Michael Vick only served a fraction of what I think his crimes merited, I’m not campaigning to throw him back into prison. Given a chance I’ll certainly support much stiffer penalties for dogfighting, but that’s about the future, not the past.

That said, what should I think of people who spout these kinds of clichés when they clearly have no idea of the implications of them? Further, what do we do with those who seem to think that the framers of the Constitution meant that multi-million dollar sports contracts were an inalienable right?

The system has rendered a verdict and exacted a punishment. In one context this means Vick has a right to pursue a life for himself. But in no sense does this entitle him to resume the life of royalty he lived before he was caught.

Forgiveness

Don’t get me wrong – forgiveness is a wonderful thing, taken in moderation. People make mistakes and it wouldn’t be much of a world if we couldn’t forgive the simple fact of human failing. For my part, I’ve made massive mistakes in my life and am the (hopefully worthwhile) person I am today because I’ve been afforded the chance to learn from those errors. By the same token, I have been the victim of the mistakes of others, and have tried to be as generous with my own spirit of forgiveness as possible.

That said, we Americans have some problems where forgiveness is concerned. For starters, not all mistakes are created equal. I do not believe that all things deserve forgiveness (refer to my comments above on Tim McVeigh and your Uncle Fred) and even if I did, I think it would need to be earned by a regimen of penance that was proportional to the offense. Despite what 90% of Americans are required by their religions to say they believe, I don’t think that if we all felt free to voice what we really believe that I’d be in the minority at all.

For example, if you’ve been around long enough you’ve probably had the misfortune to be involved with some form of marital or relationship infidelity. Maybe he/she cheated on you, or maybe you were the cheater. Or both. Or maybe you’ve been lucky enough not to be involved, but you know people who have. In any case, tell me if you have heard some variation of this: “I forgave him/her, but I can’t ever forget.” My guess is that most of us know of a case where person A forgave person B, but nonetheless exiled person B from his/her life forever. Well, is that really forgiveness? If so, then what is the functional difference between forgiveness and can’t-forgiveness? The practical results are the same in both cases – the only distinction is that in one case you repeat the words that you’ve been taught you have to repeat when issuing mandatory forgiveness.

An ever bigger issue has to do with the hypocrisy of forgiveness – in short, the ways we use the certainty of forgiveness to enable all manner of bad behavior. We get a lot of this from those in the ministry, it seems. Jim Bakker. Jimmy Swaggart. Ted Haggard. Henry Lyons. If it isn’t a preacher it’s somebody famous in the news all the time. Right now the happy guys in the spotlight are Louisville hoops coach Rick Pitino and former Senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards. (One wonders if “Catholics in Louisville” would be less forgiving of a coach who knocked up a stranger in public restroom and then paid for her abortion if said coach’s record was in the .500 range.)

The problem here has to do with the concept of intent. It’s one thing to forgive someone who acted improperly in a time of crisis, or who made the wrong choice when the choices were ambiguous, or someone who hurt us accidentally through some form of negligence.

But what about those people who intentionally did that which they knew or believed to be wrong with clear planning and/or forethought? Jim Bakker didn’t realize that he shouldn’t cheat on his wife? Really? All those Catholic priests didn’t know that molesting little boys was bad? Really? Ted Haggard can’t say hello without railing against the abomination of sodomy but he thought it was okay to buy a male hooker for himself? Really? In these kinds of cases there’s a good degree of arrogance associated with even asking for forgiveness, because the regret very clearly isn’t about the action, it’s about getting caught.

To this point, can you actually argue that Michael Vick didn’t realize dogfighting was wrong? If so, then why did he take such effort to conceal it?

We’re not just talking about famous people and preachers here, of course. The certainty of forgiveness plays a big part in the way some of us plan our lives. For instance:

• Monday-Friday: go to work
• Friday night: get loaded, get into a fight
• Saturday night: pick up a hooker
• Sunday: go to confession

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. How many times do you suppose that the aforementioned legion of priests confessed for buggering altar boys? What do you think is the world record for number of consecutive weeks confessing to buggering altar boys?

At some point, we’re not talking about genuine forgiveness, we’re talking about enabling.

Rehabilitation

The purpose of prison – or at least one of the purposes – is rehabilitation. We send people who do bad things to prison so they won’t do them anymore. Studies indicating national recidivism rates of better than two-thirds tell us what we need to know about the rehabilitating effects of incarceration. Still, it’s a nice idea.

But even in the absence of this data, we’re assuming that all things can be fixed. In truth, an extremely detailed study would probably conclude that some kinds of anti-social behaviors are more easily addressed than others. For instance, a small-time mugger who encounters a strong vocational training program in jail is a very different case from a pedophile. A few experts seem to think that pedophilia can be treated, but I don’t believe this is anywhere near a majority opinion.

So if we’re going to talk about rehabilitating Mike Vick, it’s fair to ask about the nature of the crime and its amenability to treatment.

And here’s my biggest problem: what Michael Vick did was simply sub-human. I don’t mean that word in a pejorative, insulting way. Instead, I’m referring to a clear deficit in human empathy. One of our greatest writers, Philip K Dick, in one of his greatest books, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, confronted a world of increasingly human-seeming androids and posed the question: what quality makes us essentially human?

The answer: empathy. In the narrative (upon which the film Blade Runner was based), humans worked hard to cultivate their empathy (which was central to the society’s dominant religious ideology) through the stewardship of animals. A citizen who didn’t have an animal to care for lived a deficient, hollow life, and few sins were more damning than the failure to properly care for one’s animal. In one of the central moments of the novel, one of the replicants kills an animal – something no human could have even contemplated. The lesson is undeniable: only something inhuman could harm an animal.

Dick’s depiction of a strange science fiction near-future was brilliant in its grasp of the fundamental character of our actual humanity, here in the real and now. Empathy makes us human, and there are few measures of empathy that are more revealing than our treatment of animals. Why animals? Because they are helpless. They rely on us.

There’s no absolution here for Michael Vick

We all have our own means of evaluating other people and the moral codes that govern our lives, but for me no bell has ever rung more clearly than the one PK Dick sounds in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? From where I stand, there is no more meaningful and reliable measure of human character than how one treats the innocent and those who cannot take care of themselves. Animals are one case, and a good one. So are children. And if you’re a man, especially a strong one, I know all I need to know about you if you abuse women. You are sub-human.

I have no forgiveness for that, and I’ve never really understand people who do.

So here’s how I see it from the context that I’ve described here. The NFL has said that sub-human behavior doesn’t disqualify you from membership in their highly paid club, and the Philadelphia Eagles have gone a step further and said they’re willing to subsidize those who exhibit sub-human behavior.

You do what your conscience tells you is right. For my part, though, I won’t be spending a penny on the NFL this year. Further, I’ll be paying attention to who advertises with them and making sure I don’t patronize their businesses, either. It’s not much, I know. I don’t have a lot of money and the NFL doesn’t care what people like me think. But my principles must matter to me and I won’t apologize for having a code that isn’t subject to compromise on something as essential as the default qualities of humanity.

Meanwhile, it’s a shame that Rae Carruth isn’t up for parole anytime soon. I’d like to see if the league would at least put its foot down when the victims are human.

What’s missing though is an honest acknowledgment that fear of death can be a rational response. If you break the fear down to its components parts, it suddenly starts to make sense. Prominent among our fears are eternal punishment and non-existence, not to mention the pain of the dying process. A fourth fear — that of the unknown — essentially incorporates the other three.

Even those of us who believe we’re destined for a better place can’t deny that we’re heading out essentially sight unseen. Not only aren’t we shown a travelogue of our destination, we’re provided with no travel brochures to leaf through. Guide books, such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, are the exception, especially in the West. Nor is there a map or even an itinerary — inexcusable omissions in the Information Age.

Of course, there’s always word of mouth. On Christianity’s heaven: “God’s crystal-clear light will fill heaven [which is] a city made of pure gold. … Each of the twelve gates of the city will be made of pearl.” On Islam’s jannah: “[A state of bliss where you wear] costly robes, bracelets, [and] perfumes as [you] partake in exquisite banquets [and] recline on couches inlaid with gold or precious stones.” (Note how I refrained from the cheap joke about houri, those translucent virgins used to entice suicide bombers.)

But for those of us who fear death with its concomitant uncertainty about the afterlife, a life rope has been thrown to us. It comes in the form of the comforting notion that when we pass over we’ll be greeted by loved ones.

You didn’t hear this from Christianity or Islam, though. True, you’re assured that you’ll see your family again upon your assimilation into the afterlife. However, you’re gently but firmly reminded that heaven is all about God or Allah. You can be forgiven if that reminds you of a cult.

What then is the source of the “greeted by loved ones” motif? In fact, it’s a product of mediums — one actually titled his book Never Say Goodbye — and those who’ve had near-death experiences (NDEs), as well as those who believe in past lives. According to this belief, not only will you be reunited with your family, but, according to the NDEs of many, its members will appear, not at their cachexic death-bed worst, but as in your most cherished memories of them. Your mother will be at her most maternal and your grandmother will be at her grandmotherly best.

For many who fear death, this may be just what the doctor ordered. But what about those for whom the prospect of meeting their family is a source of little or no consolation?

Many — perhaps more than care to admit it — subscribe to the notion that family is just a group of people, most of whom we’d never spend time with if our lots hadn’t been thrown in together by the luck of the draw. To us, family is, at worst, abusive, at best, dysfunctional. Then there are those of us to whom the idea of family is decent enough, but representative of a commonplace, provincial mentality that we’ve dedicated our youths to escaping.

In other words, the prospect of an afterlife in which we’re enmeshed in the web of family life all over again is even worse than being kept in the dark about the afterlife. Wait, how about if we just give family members we meet up with there an air kiss? I mean, what’s more befitting the incorporeal? Then we’ll engage them in some small talk — “Uncle Harry didn’t make it? Sorry to hear that.” — and move on.

Unfeeling as it sounds, that may be all that’s required according to psychologist and hypnotist James Newton. The author of popular and provocative books about reincarnation like Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, he’s at the forefront of the minority who, instead of past lives, explores lives between lives, aka, the afterlife. According to Dr. Newton’s hypnosis subjects, once family greets you, its members fade into the woodwork (or cloudwork, as it were), at least for the time being.

You then move on to your “soul group” — not the Earth Wind and Fire kind, but the type said to account for that “Haven’t I met you before?” feeling. Composed of individuals with whom we’ve reincarnated on a regular basis, we catch up on old times with them in the afterlife. This is where the worst fears of those to whom family has been an albatross around their necks come to fruition.

Soul groups, see, are said to often include family members. Furthermore, when it comes to reincarnation, family roles are interchangeable. For example, your mother in a previous life may be your wife in this life. Good thing we’re not privy to that information on earth — the “ew-w-w” factor would be off the charts.

Furthermore, in the afterlife we can expect to hash out our differences with family members who are part of our soul group. However civil the tone — as you can imagine, strife on high is frowned upon — an afterlife encounter group with our family doesn’t sound so heavenly, does it? Not to mention the boundary issues that mind-reading raises.

Still, if you’re among those to whom one of reincarnation’s selling points is that you get to change families, you can take comfort in the knowledge that your stay in the afterlife should be brief. After you’ve enjoyed some r & r, digested your previous life, and drawn up an action plan for your next, your soul will be recycled to earth again. Gut it out in heaven until you get out — just like when you were growing up in a bad or dreary family.