22 posts tagged “christianity”

As most of you know, I never really got the whole religion thing.  When my grandmother tried to teach me to pray, I thought she was talking to her invisible friend Jesus.  I was never convinced by the idea that there was some invisible all-seeing, all-knowing entity watching what I did.  I spent a lot of time when I was younger trying to figure it out.  As though it were just some complex word puzzle I needed to think about.  Eventually, I accepted that I don't have whatever gene is required to believe in God.

Still, I'm fascinated by religion and by news stories about religion.  This one really caught my eye: Episcopal Minister Defrocked after Converting to Islam.

Wha?

So, quick run-down.  She's been an Episcopalian minister for more than 20 years.  Not just an Episcopalian, but a Minister.  A couple years ago, she went to an interfaith hooziwhatsit, heard an imam doing the call to prayer and BLAMMO!  Next thing you know, old Jed's a Muslim. Only, she's also still a pastor in a Christian church.  She continues to be both for a couple years, until at last, the Episcopalian Nabobs (or whatever the guys in charge are called) decided she can't be both.  They yanked off her stole and kicked her to the ecclesiastical curb.

Now she says she can simultaneously be both a Christian and a Muslim, but I wonder what everybody else thinks about it.  I mean, is it like me being both a Democrat (in my voting habits and my feelings about "social values") and a Republican (in my voter registration and my feelings about guns and actual fiscal conservatism)?

Or is it completely different?  She claims that the Christian god and the Muslim god are the same god, which I don't know if that's true.  Who gets to decide that?  The Episcopalians, however, say that Jesus is the son of god.  I know Muslims revere him as a prophet, although not as important a prophet as Mohammad, but they don't think he's their god's son, right?  So, is she basically playing Garanimals with religion, like the Jews I know who eat shrimp?  Or the Christians I know who are all about the smiting and not so much into the turning the other cheek?  Just playing mix and match?  Or is this something more sinister, like being a member of the KKK and then joining the Black Panthers?

And what will this do for recent efforts to promote, yanno, interfaith understanding?  I mean, if your minister's in danger of jumping ship to a different religion, do you really want him/her to attend an interfaith hooziwhatsit?  If you're the leader of a religion, do you really want your minions to hang out with minions of other religions? 

Also, how long can a joke be a joke before it becomes a religion?  I mean, how long until the Pastafarians start attending interfaith hooziwhatsits?  What about atheists?  Can I be an atheist and a Hindu?  'Cause I dig Ganesh, but I don't really believe in god.  Is that a problem?  Or is that why Unitarian churches exist?

So many questions... 

If this is "work," I don't like it.  Not one bit.

With the election over.  With the latest draft of my current book done and resting.  With our department preparing for an impeding relocation in Brain Tumor Hall...it all adds up to a need for me to do actual work. 

It sucks.

I got a paper cut.  Also, I had to type up a bunch of meeting minutes.  There are forms to fill out.  Bills to pay.  Plans to be drawn up for the move.  Stuff to be ordered.  More forms.

Crap.  I'm a wage slave.  Ugh.

Plus, I have menstrual fury.  I hope people keep their distance, because I don't want to end up with anyone else's blood on my hands.  Also, I haven't killed anyone this year, so I'd like to keep that trend going.

Last night, Hubbicula and I saw Religulous.  OMG.  Funny, scary, bizarre.  Part of it is like a montage of my childhood religious "education."  Crazy women spouting about the Savior.  Creepy guys talking in tongues.  Thankfully, no children parroting propaganda like we saw in Jesus Camp.

Throughout the film, Bill Maher is almost unflappable*.  Much of his comedy schtick is simply asking the very questions that I spent my childhood asking.  He's polite about it, until he reaches the stage of complete amazement that allegedly rational adults could believe some of the crazy things they believe.  Like in the store that sells various devices to help Orthodox Jews exploit "loopholes" in the laws that govern the Sabbath.  (Wheelchairs that run on compressed air instead of electricity!  An elevator that relies on a sensor instead of a button to call the car.  Because YHWH wouldn't want you to push a button on Shabat, but it's okay to ride in an elevator!)  The other big comedic moments come from Maher sitting back and waiting for his interviewees to realize how ridiculous what they've just said is.  There are several of these moments and they're beautiful. 

If you're an unbeliever (which apparently 16% of Americans are) or you're comfortable with your faith and not easily offended, I highly recommend the movie.

*Maher does get flapped by an Anti-Zionist rabbi, who once visited Iran to participate in a Holocaust denial conference and is shown in video footage hugging Ahmadinejad.  The rabbi simply talks so fast and furiously about everything at once that Maher gives up, shakes his head, and walks off the interview set.  Sounds like my last church experience. 

The Gideons are on campus today, handing out Bibles.  Naturally, today is the day that I have to run a dozen paperwork errands to deal with the departing GTA.  So already, I've been offered a dozen Bibles and said, "No, thanks," a dozen times.

By chance--dare I call it serendipity?--I took a suitable picture for this post last night.  I was sitting at my writing desk, when I glanced up and saw the box to my childhood Bible from a new angle.  I don't know where the Bible is, but I still use the box for other things.  Last night I noticed something about the box that I'd never seen before.

Really?  If I should ever feel that this Bible is unsatisfactory, I should return it to the place of purchase?  I definitely find it unsatisfactory, but I notice there's no suggestion of a refund being offered.

A Baptist minister in Indianapolis is protesting the suggestion that a foot-washing sink be installed at the Indianapolis airport to serve the growing number of Muslim taxi drivers who use the airport bathrooms at various times of the day in preparation for their prayers.  Rev. Hillenburg claims the sink is unconstitutional--breaking the separation of church and state. 

Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that if someone else were arguing for the separation of church and state in regards to an accommodation for Christians, Rev. Hillenburg would claim there is no constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state?  Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that if some misguided atheist were trying to get Christmas decorations removed from their local public park or the Ten Commandments from their local courthouse, Rev. Hillenburg would oppose the effort?

Rev. Hillenburg also claims that the sink is a special accommodation for one group of people.  Like handicapped toilet stalls?  As with other public bathroom facilities, including handicapped stalls, anyone would be able to use the foot-washing sink.  More importantly, the impetus for the suggestion has little to do with religion and a lot to do with hygiene and safety.  The taxi drivers are going to wash their feet no matter what, but currently, they're doing it in the regular sinks in the public restrooms, leaving behind a wet mess that breeds germs and makes the floors slippery.  The simple fact is that if Christianity required its believers to wash their feet before prayer, every public facility in America would already have foot-basins.

"Some have tried to make this about the death of my son, Eric, that I am only a grieving father embittered because my son was killed in combat in this current war," Hillenburg says, dismissing the idea.  I'll take his word for it, and assume that this is more about these two old standards: hatred of the Other, and contempt for everyone's religious freedom but one's own.

You thought Kathy Griffin was in trouble?  A report by the government of India suggests that the Hindu god Ram doesn't exist.  More specifically, it claims that a bridge allegedly built by Ram and his army of monkeys (how cool would that be?) is actually a natural formation of rocks, caused by erosion.  Those blasphemers are likely to get what's coming to them, either by the hand of Ram, or more likely by the hands of Ram's angry followers.

Elsewhere, a Nepali airline sacrificed goats in an effort to get one of their planes back in the air.  This got played up in the media as a "humor" or "oddball" story, which strikes me as a bit of a double-standard.  You won't see stories about the Pope performing the communion rite in the "news of the weird" sections of your paper, because the Western world only demands respect for its own religions.  As an atheist I love stories like this, because they just highlight what are to me the basic absurdities found in all religions.  Some people pray, some people speak in tongues, some people hold brunches and rummage sales, some people handle snakes, some people sacrifice goats, and everybody thinks he's got the in, the secret, the true path.  Here's the kicker: the plane made it safely to Hong Kong.  Conclude what you will.  The aircraft mechanics do good work without the goat-fueled intervention of a Cosmic Muffin.  Or the Mighty Akash Bhairab received the sacrifice with pleasure and helped out.

I feel a similar annoyance when I contemplate Emperor Qin's terracotta army or the public display of Egyptian mummies.  Westerners treat these things like cultural artifacts, suitable for display in museums, but the actual dead people involved, this was part of their religious life.  Why do we find the Egyptian approach to the afterlife any more bizarre than Christian expectations of an afterlife?

Let me close by mentioning that today is Lord Ganesh's birthday.  If I were going to believe in a god, I think I'd go with Ganesh, who symbolizes wisdom, prosperity, and happiness, and is also considered the "Patron of Letters."  The perfect god for a writer.  (Plus, he has this adorable little mouse companion who serves as his trusty steed.  Shhhh...don't try to make it make sense.)

So, have a joyful Ganesh Chaturthi and a pleasant weekend!

Not that I'm limited to just one inappropriate remark a day, but I do try to restrain myself.  In this case, I couldn't help it. 

Somebody came by my office and remarked on a news story on BBC about the recently freed South Korean missionaries who had been held hostage by the Taleban.  Talking about the experience, the hostages said that they were beaten and threatened a gunpoint, made to work like slaves and forced to chant along with a prayer for conversion. 

"Sounds like church camp," I said.

Many thanks to Kzinti for tracking down this video, by Lee Goodman, of the At Center Network.  At an anti-abortion protest, he posed two simple questions:

1. Should abortion be illegal?
2. If abortion were illegal, how should women who have illegal abortions be punished?

It's more than just a clever gimmick to get anti-abortion protesters to admit they don't really believe that abortion is the same as murder when it comes to punishing perpetrators.  It reveals a deep-seated disconnect between ideology and reality in the anti-abortion movement.  What the video shows is protesters who claim to have "never thought about" what punishment should be meted out to women who have abortions illegally.  Protesters who don't believe any punishment should be given for a medical procedure they would like to see criminalized.  Protesters who believe punishment should depend on "mitigating" circumstances.  Protesters who actually believe that criminalizing abortion would stop it.  You know, how murder statutes prevent people from killing?  In short, the sort of astounding ignorance and delusion that has made fundamental Christianity a scourge in this country.

Peel back the layers, and this attitude reveals three interesting facts:

1. Anti-abortion protesters really do sympathize with women who have abortions, but they don't think those same women can be trusted to make decisions for themselves. 
2. The anti-abortion contingent doesn't think that women are responsible for their own abortions, but prefer to punish abortion providers, who would be out of business if women stopped requesting abortions.  (Maybe because the majority of abortion providers are men and therefore assumed in Christianity to be more morally capable?)
   
3. No matter how much lip service the conservative Christians pay to "free market values," they don't in fact place any faith in the free market.  In short, they don't seem to understand that women who want abortions are the ones driving the market for abortions.  They either don't understand or don't care that abortion has always been about supply and demand, especially in countries where abortion is illegal.  (For a quick comparison: Canada, where abortion is legal and readily available through the national healthcare system, has a rate of 15.5 abortions per 1,000 women ages 18-40.  Brazil, where abortion is illegal in all but the rarest circumstances, has a rate of 40.8 abortions per 1,000 women aged 18-40.  [Numbers from Alan Guttmacher Institute.])
   

FAIR WARNING: As are many anti-abortion protesters, the ones in this video are armed with large posters of aborted fetuses.  If that freaks you out, you may just want to listen to the video.

And no...I'm not posting about abortion because today is my sister's birthday.  I've finally gotten over wishing that Mom had "taken care" of her.  Happy B-Day!  Love you, and hey, 40 is just around the corner.

Hubby and I watched Jesus Camp last night.  It was like an 84-minute flashback to my childhood church experiences.  Left me feeling nauseated.  Back in the 70's, the marketing of Evangelical Christianity was nowhere near as slick and packaged as it is now, with Creationist videos and Power Point presentations (which get prayed over during the film.)  It wasn't as slick, but the screaming, crying, weeping, hysteria-of-Jesus carnival aspect was all the same.  Little drama queens sobbing.  Little boy-men speaking in tongues.  Children being hammered with propaganda.  Adults high on their own righteous ignorance.  It left me feeling a little amazed at my own passage through the experience.  I survived twelve years of bombardment and managed to walk away without ever joining the club. 

The only thing I really couldn't watch was the deleted scene where the little embryo-Christian-warriors descend upon the Planned Parenthood office in Kansas City.  Having lived through that pretty recently, when I worked for PP, I didn't want to watch it being reenacted.

Perhaps the most chilling portion of the movie for me was when the children's pastor discusses her envy of the successes of radical Islam--raising children so passionate for their faith that they're willing to die (and kill) for it.  If that's the goal the Evangelical movement is setting for itself, we all need to be a bit more vigilant.  (Oh, and the creepy part where they prayed over the cardboard cut out of our "God-anointed President.")

It's a film worth watching, not merely for its political import.  It's well made and entertaining, albeit in a hand-over-mouth-with-horrified-giggling way.  On the political aspect of it, I recommend it alongside Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?  They're both important pieces of documentation that all people who consider themselves Americans and/or Christians ought to experience.

If you'd just like a little quick amusement on the topic of religion, check out The Onion's latest: Various Deities Still Sorting through Victims of Tragic Bus Accident.

My husband has a theory that anytime a church has the word Unity or Unitarian in its name it will be a magnet for lesbians.  I don't completely buy into this theory, but I accept its underlying premise that churches of the Unity/Unitarian bent are more likely to welcome people who would otherwise be shunned by more mainstream churches.  For instance, at the Church of the Valet, where I worked, there was much heated debate over whether we would allow the gay couples in the church to be photographed as couples in the church's photo directory.  No one seemed to object to the people who chose to be photographed with their dogs, but for some folks I guess two happy gay men in beautifully tailored Easter suits was just too much.  I don't imagine you get that debate at your average Uni church.

For me, though, the thing that sets Uni churches apart from mainstream churches is their unabashed embrace of all things fruity, marginal, and New Age.  Oh, sure, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, they all accept that an Invisible Cloud Being Who Shall Not Be Named spoke to a tribe of Hebrew nomads and rescued them from Egypt through miraculous means, and told them not to eat shellfish or meat and milk or look on their fathers' nakedness or have congress with a woman during her monthlies, and demanded that they sacrifice animals, and in some cases their children, and wanted every man to have his foreskin cut off, and generally sent the Hebrews rampaging, raping and pillaging across the countryside to establish themselve as the Chosen People.  And sure, Pentecostals, Nazarenes, Quakers, and Christian Scientists believe that the Invisible Cloud Being Who Shall Not Be Named sent his son--who was also him--to earth to preach peace and heal people. In this case, it sounds like the acorn fell pretty far from the tree.  (Could we abbreviate Invisible Cloud Being Who Shall Not Be Named to ICBWSNBN?  Or would that sound too much like a frozen yogurt shop?)

But in none of those churches will you find Chakra Bear:

Chakra Bear, one presumes, is intended to help children learn about the body's chakras.  In the same way that the little model of Jericho that was in my Sunday School class when I was child was useful for teaching children about how the ICBWSNBN smites people he doesn't like.  You know, like how snake handling helps kids understand  ICBWSNBN's heavenly protection.  Or how communion helps remind us of how ICBWSNBN, Jr. was murdered, but not until after his followers drank his blood and ate his flesh, and then said, "Oh, I never saw that dude before.  I don't know him."

In short, no matter what the lesbian head count is, you can usually count on a Uni church to offer children a lesson in something from the fringe that is more wholesome than mainstream Christianity.

I wanna be fair to the guy who's credited with coining the phrase compassionate conservative.  Marvin Olasky isn't as much of a hypocritical torture-loving hate monger as the people who have since started using his catch phrase.  (Jesus would find himself in the same boat, to be faced with the misbehaviors of people who choose to call themselves Christians.)  Unlike George Bush, I don't think Olasky would relish being the person responsible for executing deathrow inmates.  In fact, he went so far as to spend the night in prison with Senator Sam Brownback, Kansas' "presidential hopeful."  Now, like most people in this blue corner of Kansas, I don't hope for Brownback to become our next president.  He is opposed to equal rights for gay people, and opposed to abortion rights for women.  He's extremely conservative and extremely religious.  He says that he believes "in a separation of church and state," but does not believe that faith should be removed "from the public square."  (By faith, however, he means Christianity.)  In his talk with prisoners in Angola, he claimed that "Our motto of our land is, 'In God We Trust."'  Um, Sam, you might want to check your facts on this one.  That's the motto on our money.  The phrase doesn't even appear in our Constitution.  I thought the motto of America was "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."