Nerd moment

One of my major geeky interests is religious history, particularly in the form of a) fairy stories/fairy lore and taxonomy (i.e. Irish folk history, Jungian and other analysis of the content of fairy stories, et. al.), b) ancient Mesopotamian history (anything and everything I can get, but the Sumerian and Babylonian polytheistic traditions are fascinating), and c) early Christianity (which is to say Judaism and early Christian or Christian-like sects in Palestine and the surrounding area in the first century CE). (Islamic religious history I place in another category, which is to say that it's a branching of my actual area of focus and therefore not simply an area of geekdom).

All of this is by way of saying that while some people may spend their Saturday nights out drinking and partying, I spent mine drinking and watching Blade Runner with my roommate (a deep meditation on existence and mortality if ever I saw one) and then watched a lengthy lecture on the location of the historical Jesus within Jewish sectarian and mainstream tradition. I share it because, as I said, I'm having a nerd moment.


Enjoy, if this is your thing!

Al-takfir (التكفير)

Ta-Nehisi Coates was away in Chicago for a while, so he had some friends guest blog in his absence. Adam Serwer was one, and his post, "American Takfiris," is as good a piece as any blogger could hope for from a guest.

The theological justification for al Qaeda's wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, "The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge," that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.

The legal memos justifying torture aren't very different in terms of reasoning--it's clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.

It's worth reading the rest. I don't subscribe to the more or less optimistic conclusion Serwer comes to, but I'm very inherently cynical about this sort of thing. It would certainly be nice if he were proved right.

It's Idiot Day and this time someone told me

Reproducing John Cole's post in its entirety:

And 100% of Popes are Catholic

by John Cole

Here is the MSM’s go-to guy on terrorism, Rep. Peter King (R, NY), on Fox News:

The fact is while the overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding people, on the other hand 100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims, and that is our main enemy today.

We are to the point that merely exposing yourself to right-wingers makes you dumber.

This on the same day that I read this discussion of environmental economics from Ezra Klein featuring a lovely quotation from Larry Summers:

THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.

Some quick hits

The situation for Afghani women isn't getting any better. There's not much new in the report, which could be fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, I guess; just a tragic sameness. I've posted about this topic before, and I wrote a paper that was about half on this subject. I don't really want to go over it again right now--it's too sad.

I'm getting to this way late, but Switzerland banned minarets a couple of weeks ago. In protest, a Swiss businessman built a minaret on top of his business in protest. Awesome.

Morand said he viewed the ban was all the more "scandalous" given that Switzerland actively encourages Arabs to "visit the country and to spend their money here."

The minaret, which has been in place since Tuesday, has "generated a lot of interest," he said, adding that he will wait and see before deciding if further action was needed to push his point.

I vote further action.

Andrew Sullivan flagged a video a while ago where a suicide bomber was interviewed on "All Things Pakistan." He titled the post "Interviewing Evil," which I object to--I think largely because I don't believe in evil. I'm not interested in this interview for purposes of staring into the underbelly of moral absolutes; I want to know what the suicide bomber thinks, that's all. Here's the video:



As always, there's more, but I'm too tired right now.

Fair's fair

In light of my last, rather vehement post on Uganda's kill-the-gays bill and American Evangelical Christians, it's only fair to acknowledge Rick Warren's speaking out against the Ugandan initiative:



Andrew Sullivan comments:

This is an extremely positive if overdue development. I remain deeply concerned that Uganda's public policy is based on the "curing" homosexuals rubric, but that sure is better than executing them. The Ugandan bill should be abandoned. And Warren's call on pastors to disown the bill is a real step forward.

[...]

What I think is most significant is that Warren called this bill "extreme, unjust and unchristian towards homosexuals". It is absolutely and unequivocally unchristian to demonize a whole group of people and to threaten them with execution simply because of their sexual orientation and their need for love and sex and intimacy and companionship like every other human being. And for Warren to deploy Christian arguments in defense of the dignity of homosexual persons is a big step forward in this debate. I am grateful to him for staying true to the Gospels.

A hellfire sandwich

Recall the new Ugandan bill that will render homosexuality, or harboring, supporting, or not reporting homosexual Ugandans, punishable by death. It might even lead to the execution of HIV-positive people.

Well:

Some observers have wondered if Purpose Driven Life author and mega-evangelist Rick Warren has had a role in the globally controversial bill, especially because of Warren's close association with Ugandan anti-gay activist Martin Ssempa and, more broadly, because Warren has refused to denounce the anti-gay bill. To little notice, a charismatic network overseen by Warren's doctoral dissertation advisor, C. Peter Wagner, has played a major role in politically organizing and inspiring the Ugandan legislators who have spearheaded the anti-gay bill.

Someone please explain to me why Warren, Wagner, etc. cannot or should not be prosecuted for murder should this bill be implemented.

Sigh. The answer is that there is no institution or judicial body capable of doing so. The US, conveniently, is not a signatory to the ICC, and even if we were I doubt much would happen. If we can't even prosecute our war criminals--war being the form of international interaction most robustly understood and governed on a global and juridical level (commerce is an issue for another time)--we sure as hell aren't going to get anything done about rampantly homophobic pastors indirectly killing hundreds, thousands--I don't even know--of poor Africans.

The Talk to Action piece I linked above is further interesting for the following pieces of information:

Both Wagner and Warren have designed elaborate infrastructures for blurring the lines between church and state. Wagner describes his movement as the “New Apostolic Reformation” and openly espouses his goals of reorganizing and mobilizing the church to take Christian “dominion” over government and society. Warren’s movement is described as a “second reformation”...

Wagner is the Convening Apostle in a movement of charismatic "relational networks" which has extended its reach from the United States to Uganda, and worldwide. Under its umbrella of authority are virulently anti-gay apostles in the United States and Uganda including Lou Engle of TheCall, who led thousands of young people in a twelve hour November 1, 2008 stadium rally in support of California's anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight. The San Diego event closed with Engle, a member of Wagner's inner circle of "prophets," calling for Christian martyrs. [...]

In C. Peter Wagner's 2008 book "Dominion", he describes the process through which this brand of Christianity can take dominion over government and society, and claims that this can be accomplished within a democratic framework. Wagner clearly states that Rick Warren's global P.E.A.C.E. Plan is an example of "stage one":

"I think the P.E.A.C.E. plan fits most comfortably into Phase One, the "social action" phase of strategies for obeying God's cultural mandate. The Phase Two emphases on strategic-level spiritual warfare and associated activities have not been placed front and center. And crucial to Phase Three, as I am defining it, are such things as apostolic/prophetic government of the Church, the Church (including apostles) in the workplace, the great transfer of wealth, dominion theology and the 7-M mandate."

If Rick Warren is "phase one," what do Wagner's stages two and three entail ?

The "7-M" or Reclaiming the Seven Mountains mandate encourages believers to take over key societal sectors such as government, and a leading Ugandan spokesperson for the theocratic 7-M paradigm has played a major role organizing and inspiring politicians behind Uganda's Anti Homosexuality legislation.

There's much, much more in the piece (including all the in-text links that I got too lazy to reproduce). It's very much worth reading.

What I now want to know is how these people are any different from Wahhabi or Salafi Islamic fundamentalists seeking to take over various Muslim countries and impose an atavistic reading of sharia law, other than in their remarkable success at seeing their goals enacted in countries to which they have no real connection. Who in Uganda elected Peter Wagner?

I'm truly disgusted. I'm having a hard time viewing the success differentiating Warren/Wagner from the Taliban as due to much of anything other than that the Ws are rich white men working from the global center to impose their views on the periphery, and Islamic extremists are poor brown men working from the periphery toward the center.

So we're sandwiched. With a little luck, eventually we can all look forward to living in a hell modeled on someone's holy book.

Schwoa

The Vatican released a 12-song playlist for its MySpace page (The Vatican has a MySpace page?! How was this not breaking news on its own?), and, well:

Among selections from Mozart, Muse and Dame Shirley Bassey is the slain rapper's [Tupac Shakur] song "Changes," which was released two years after his shooting death on a greatest hits album in 1998.

That's right. The Vatican has embraced Pac.

I don't have anything insightful to say about this, other than I LOVE IT.

The Vatican commented:

"The genres are very different from each other, but all these artists share the aim to reach the heart of good minded people," the Vatican wrote on its official MySpace Music page.

I also want to point out that the list includes Muse and Fleet Foxes as well. Amazing. Apparently Father Giulio Neroni's got the 411.

About that

Regarding the most recent post:

I suspect that what we will see in the future is a church basing itself in the developing world, and adopting more African views on the subjugation of women, criminalization of homosexuality, and the evils of Western liberal capitalism. Europe will remain the enemy, Islam a useful ally and America's Republican Party Christianists a source of money and power as the Western flock shrinks to the rump that Benedict devoutly wishes for.

This is about the Catholic, not any Protestant, Church, but it could be interpreted as an interesting sort of reversal of the dynamic I was trying to describe in that post. I would say I need to think about this more, but I don't have anything like the time. Alas.

Family knows best?

Sitting in Logan airport using Google's free holiday wi-fi (thanks, Google!), I came across the following:

With their reported $13 billion tax-exempt financial empire, the Mormons may be the wealthiest cult in America — and Scientology may be the big thing among the rich and powerful in Hollywood — but when it comes to political power neither of those sects holds a candle to the Family, the Christian extremist political group that operates the now infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill in Washington.

[...]

But what many people may find surprising is that the Family has branches around the world. In fact, yesterday, Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” reported on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that it was a Family member in the Ugandan parliament who introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for homosexuality from life imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence today, to death:

SHARLET: [The] new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.

And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study and the export of a lot of American largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end.

[...]

[The] legislator that introduces the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of the Family. He appears to be a core member of the Family. He works, he organizes their Uganda National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which the Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda…

So who are the members of Congress who belong to the Family and tolerate, if not encourage, this sort of extremism overseas? According to Jeff Sharlet, while most cult members are Republicans, members of both parties are welcomed. “Jesus didn’t come to take sides,” the members are fond of saying. “He came to take over.”

Now check this:

The mainstream media avoids referring to the Family as a cult, but check out this description of the group’s belief system from Jeff Sharlet and decide for yourself:

They have a very unusual theology in the sense that they think that Christ had one message for an inner circle and then a kind of different message for a sort of slightly more outer circle. And then the rest of us, Christ told us little stories because, frankly, we couldn’t handle the truth. And the core members are those they think are getting the real deal.

He didn't come to take sides, he came to take over. It makes me shiver.

But what makes me shiver more than the Family/cult/power network stuff is the overarching dynamic. A lot of gay people in Uganda are going to die, or live in misery. A lot of their friends and family will, too. And they will go through this directly because of globalized Evangelical Christianity.

I was just reading about a much different, milder, nicer version of this in a book about the Full Gospel community in Trinidad. Protestantism plus colonialism in Trinidad, at least, has rendered the local and the native identical to the carnal and the primitive, while the nonlocal (North America in particular) is identified with the spiritual and pure. This gets played out in choices of music appropriate for worship services, but that's not the point here. In Trinidad, at least, sects are concerned with the "global church" (largely Pentecostalist and Evangelical) as a way of defining for themselves what is proper religious practice and what is appropriate for someone living a religious life.

I admit that I don't know much about Uganda, and I am very ready to be wrong. But as we know, a little information is a dangerous thing, and so armed with my one book about Trinidad I see a bit of a parallel here of a global (read: American) church having a strong influence on congregations far from the global center--peripheral nations like Trinidad and Uganda. And especially in the case of particular issues, like abortion and birth control, this flow of influence has been strengthened and backed by explicit U.S. policies.

That makes me shiver, too. In a much less titillating fashion.

Here there be magical thinking

Through a bunch of web-hopping (I think from The American Scene to Postmodern Conservative to Front Porch Republic to De Rogno Christi), I've spent the last hour reading a bunch of very abstracted conservative thought with a lot of roots in critical theory as well as theology and probably a bunch of stuff I wouldn't recognize, coming as I do from a completely different direction. I wouldn't say I agree with all or probably even half of what I've read, but I definitely have found it an interesting hour. Anyway, I wanted to reproduce this from Caleb Stegall at De Rogno Christi:

Anglo-catholics like Lewis, Tolkein, Chesterton, Eliot, etc., all understood the Church as a crypt in which the essential and primary blood and soil paganism of Europe was embalmed and allowed to stare up at us out of the waters. Think Tolkien’s ghostly undead kings of the past coming back to help the heroes/true church at its time of need. I don’t know exactly what Tolkien meant by that, but they are a cursed and unfriendly lot. This isn’t really redemption but a lingering paganism that speaks to this not entirely appropriate collaboration and amalgamation between Christianity and paganism in the west, which Protestantism/enlightenment/modernity has tried to efface and now has completely forgotten. This forgetting has caused all kinds of problems which was the most basic point of Tolkein’s books. The foremost problem is that Christianity as a depaganized political religion is Liberalism, radicalized and out of whack with reality in which one must at times do evil and even commit mortal sins for temporal goods that are the charge of those with political power. And then seek absolution in the magical appeasement of the gods. The medieval church allows, or found a way to admit and cope with this. It is a deal with paganism. Take it away and you get a devolution from Protestantism into liberalism. You get the new American personal faith Christianity (evangelicalism) with the magical thinking of overbought homes on ARMS and credit cards and daycare and building democracy in Iraq and all the other delusional magical thinking of late-modernity in the capitalist-state. And you get a whole new class of materialist therapeutic witchdoctors rising up to give the newest incantations: ‘your best life now!’ ‘your purpose driven life!’ or whatever.

So now we see American Christianity “emerging” more and more into universalism. It is in the water. All roads lead to ruin as Eliot knew. And for those who see this, the desire for “tradition” or whatever you call that which is largely lost and haunting us is a partly sick desire to unearth the dead.

We are at a dangerous crossroads. Messing with the dead is dangerous stuff. But it must be done. But like Tolkein understood, it can only be done by the “true King,” by the church, and even this is not without debilitating and compromises. This is connected to what I have been arguing about being able, at least occasionally, to admit that the narratives of tradition and church history are to an extent myths that legitimize what I would call the “mojo” … or the magic … the authority of the church. The simple yet profound truth that at the very bottom, we have very little to go on other than “because the church says so.” So this is in part what I mean by repaganizing … that our churchmen need a hint of witchdoctor in them, or if you prefer, a touch of Gandalf or Merlin. They have “powers” as my kids would say. This is completely flattened out in a rationalistic modernizing deracinated disenchanted liberalizing protestant culture. And the inchoate need for magic and appeasement of the gods gets shifted in very unhealthy materialist directions which can be exploited by those who understand the psychology.

(I know that was long. But come on, it was interesting.) This is fascinating stuff for me for a few reasons. First let me say that I don't really agree with the idea that a depaganized or sanitized church is the same thing as liberalism, largely because I don't agree with what he seems to think about liberalism. Possibly this is because he is using the word in a different sense than any I can think of, and if I were to ask him what he meant maybe that section would become clearer to me in the form of something I with which could agree to disagree.

That said, I find it interesting because I think the general point that a sort of paganism or a magical thinking is endemic to being human is completely true. We all like fairy tales, we are all superstitious to some degree, we all have our rituals and our sense, however vestigial, of some kind of cosmic justice ("What did I do to deserve this?"). For me, as an atheist, this has always been completely decoupled from any sort of intermingling with religion; and as a rationalist with a lot of economic privilege I've had what is probably the luxury of avoiding magical thinking in the sense of lottery tickets, a purpose-driven life, et. al. But it's obvious to me that we have witch doctors in our society, whether they are televangelists, Alan Greenspan, therapists or dieticians. Last year I wrote this:

Current discussions of economics and the economy contain a bizarre contradiction: On the one hand, the Free Market Rulz OK because the economy is too complex, diverse, and fast-moving to be comprehended sufficiently by any planner or regulator. It is, to a certain degree, unknowable and all-powerful, if benevolent. This idea is roughly analogous to ABVC's description of a puppeteer with no will--"the laws of cause and effect. You have a will, but it is not free, it is the effect of lots of causes." [...]

On the other hand, we flatter ourselves that with enough math, studies, models, and theorizations we can understand how these things work.... This effort is roughly analogous to the notion of "seeing the strings", or trying to.

We understand the economy as both a reflection and the driver of our entire world.... This is a bizarre combination of The Economy's being by and of us while simultaneously being completely alien to us. We do things to it, we figure it out and profit off it, we game it, we live in it, but occasionally it completely swamps us. It's a force of nature--it is to us as the sea is to fishermen, or the Euphrates was to Mesopotamian farmers (floods are a central mythic trope in ancient Mesopotamian religion).

Furthermore, even when I come out of my academic funk enough to take the crisis at face value, the degree to which nobody has any idea what is going on or what is to be done about it, and the degree to which any one opinion can be convincingly argued against, certainly suggests that while the phenomena at hand are real, our understanding of them is merely a comforting fiction.

[...] But we persist in believing, very firmly, that policymaking and many other arguably more quantitative fields are rational processes of improvement, whose wildly unpredictable results are owed more to the complexity and difficulty of the problems or questions these disciplines engage than they are to the complete disconnect between what we think we are doing and what is actually going on.

This, of course, is the joke. We think we see the strings, but they are far too long for us to comprehend them as such.... The punchline is that we don't actually understand the economic forces around us, nor do we understand our interactions with them. It's all fooled by randomness with a healthy dose of storytelling and myth. A form of paganism, if you like--believing that human actions affect natural phenomena. (Thank god we burned a Yule log this year, or the sun might not have come up in January either.)

I stand by that. And in my own rationalist, atheistic life, I have still harbored a fascination with the pagan or the mythic. For as long as I can remember I was fascinated by mythological traditions--Norse, Irish, and Anglo particularly--and I've read a few theoretical unpackings of fairy stories (notably Diane Purkiss's At The Bottom of the Garden) that have left me convinced that fairies are the things we fill in in liminal spaces: life changes (from childhood to adulthood, maidenhood to motherhood, prince to king, maturity to old age) and events (birth, death, loss of virginity, quest fulfillment); literally liminal spaces and moments like threshholds, twilights, and borders; unknown areas like forests, the bottoms of ponds, mountain fastnesses.

We still have fascinations with these liminalities, and we still have ceremonies surrounding them. Boomer fascinations with pre-birth rituals like reading baby books and carrying eggs around and such are basically magical rituals intended to make birth and becoming parents easier, to ensure it goes well. We still have sweet sixteens and graduation parties and the insane coming of age ritual known as applying to college (which is a process chock-full of magical thinking). The old magical rituals are basically the same as our current endeavors because they both represent attempts to colonize and control these spaces. Leaving offerings for fairies before, during, or after birth is not that different from, say, insisting that your boyfriend light candles and strew the bed with rose petals when you plan to lose your virginity. Neither will have much effect on how this completely scary and unknowable (till it happens) event goes off, but hey, at least we tried, right? There may not be fairies in the forest these days, but we still make movies about giant octopi preserved in glaciers since the Cretaceous (or whenever) at the bottom of the ocean. Even the notion of extraterrestrial beings who sweep you up in their ships and do weird things to you maps almost perfectly onto the fairy kingdom under the hill.

And of course this kind of pagan ritualism has its analogues in religion. What else is a Confirmation or a Bat Mitzvah? Christmas is famously full of old English pagan rituals.

My point is that even without a personal connection to what one might call a paganized church, and even without what I would call a spiritual identity, I get what he's saying (for the most part) and I find the discussion interesting from the point of view of my own interest in paganism, mythology, and their persistence in a supposedly rationalist contemporary world.

And it's become clear to me that I really need to read more T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis.

Travel notes

Two days ago, I came back to the hostel at a reasonable hour for once and then got caught up in a conversation with two people staying there and Nora, my sometime roommate, for a really long time. Everyone had eventually gone to bed except for me and my friend Muhammad (or Mohammed, or any number of spellings--I don't know) when we heard the call to prayer (at about 3:45 am). We ended up going to the mosque, because he wanted to pray and I wanted to go.

We spent a long time being lost, and then we figured out where we were and got lost again, and then we found it. It was really...peaceful. I sat in the women's section, with mostly Iranian women swathed in black, and just watched and listened. There were birds flying in the rafters and they kept dropping small down feathers around me. I understood small parts of the sermon, but not most of it.

Eventually we walked back, got lost again, and finally made it home around 4:30 or 5.

The next day I moved into an apartment; the only housemates I've really met are two very studious but nice guys who are great about telling me words in Arabic and speaking slowly when I ask them to. They actually both speak good English but I've only really heard one of them speak: he says he has to speak English at work all day (he works at UNHCR) and doesn't like speaking it at home.

Yesterday was the first day I really got to use Arabic and by the end of it I felt like my brain had been stretched two sizes. I went to visit Nora at her apartment and made friends with several of her housemates--three Syrians, two with great English and one with almost none (though he does have a hookah, or arghileh as it's called here, named Shakira)--a Brit, who may be organizing some sort of local wine tasting for an article he wants to write, and a Belgian guy who's been here for two and a half years and is doing his Ph.D. in Arabic poetry. They all spoke lots of Arabic to me and got me to speak it. Then I spoke it at the cafe. Then I spoke it at Nora's house again. Then I spoke it when I got home.

I was doing pretty well by the end. I got told four times that my Arabic was good (granted, three of those by the same person) and once that my accent was good. It was a good feeling. I hardly remember any of the new words I was told, though. Oh, well. Progress by slow inches. I think I may have agreed to do a language exchange with Ahmed, one of Nora's housemates who's an Arabic teacher and is learning English.

Finally: I have gotten sick at last. Nora went first, with the typical traveler's sickness; then Merritt got some sort of horrible bug that made her throw up every 20 minutes for like two days; Ben got travel belly too; and finally, today, it's me. Woooo. I feel awful. At least I've been through this before.

I have pictures of my house and will post them as soon as I get around to putting them on my computer. EVERYONE STAY CALM.

Some beautiful posts

Go. Read them in their entirety. To excerpt them would be to mangle their integrity.

Hilzoy on Dr. George Tiller

One of Sullivan's readers on torture.

The more things change...

So I'm in the midst of writing a paper on the political efficacy of violence between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs between 1929 and 1948. I took a quick Internet break and came across this meditation on the Bibleand wow, some of the irony is rich:

Throughout “Good Book,” you talk about violence—between tribes, between family members, between men and women. Leaders flying into rages; people being sacrificed to mobs. Were you surprised by the prevalence of violence in the Bible?

I don’t think it’s surprising. Every great epic and myth and religious text is shot through with violence. The surprising part is the way we try to whistle past the violence in order to make the book more morally palatable. The Book of Joshua, for example, is an account of a divinely ordered genocide: God commanding His people to exterminate every person in the land of Canaan, even down to the boys and girls. Yet in our happier retelling, this book is the story of the Jewish arrival in a land of milk and honey, and their rightful assumption of the land God promised to them. To focus on the milk and honey rather than the blood and guts is a willful refusal to grapple with the morally problematic nature of the Bible.

The overarching theme of the Bible, particularly of Genesis, is real estate. God is Trump-like, constantly making land deals (and then remaking them, on different terms). When Sarah dies, for example, there are two verses about her death, and a whole chapter about Abraham negotiating to buy a burial site for her in Hebron. It’s not just land that the Bible is obsessed with, but also portable property: gold, silver, livestock.

...perhaps...the Israelites were just as maniacal about land ownership as we are. None of them wanted to rent in the Promised Land. They all wanted to own (and there wasn’t even a mortgage interest deduction).

It kind of set my head spinning, especially because Hebron is still there and still named Hebron; it's the biggest city in the West Bank.

Combine that with the incredibly tragic and frustrating way that by 1939 the dynamic that we see today among Israelis, Palestinians, neighboring Arab states, and the heavy-handed superpower of the day (Britain then, the U.S. now) was already in place, and it's all very frustrating. Rueful might be the best word to describe the way it makes me feel.

Civil unions

Are a different issue in Lebanon than they are here:

Renewed calls for Lebanon to allow civil marriages were made in a Valentine ceremony at a Beirut bar over the weekend.

Several inter-religious couples staged mock weddings at a bar in Beirut's trendy Gemmayze district to protest the country's stiff marriage laws.

As it stands, civil weddings between inter-religious couples are only recognised if the marriage did not occur on Lebanese territory. For a country with a handful of religious sects, this makes for a sticky situation for many cross-sectarian couples.

It's a war on family values! A war on religious traditions! Next thing you know they'll be allowing beastiality! BOOGA BOOGA!

Obama has read his Reinhold Niebuhr

Marc Ambinder has some nice rhetorical and literary annotations of Obama's speech. Part I, Part II.

I am very privileged--I'm young, straight, white, upper middle class to upper class, not disabled in any way, etc. So I can't speak the way many can of having been left out or ignored of public discourse, inaugural addresses, etc. But when I got to this:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

Has a president ever acknowledged non-believers before?

I teared up just a little bit. It's not that I wasn't all right before; I sort of just accepted that nobody was too concerned with atheists, and I thought that was fine--it wasn't as though (in my experience) atheists were suffering discrimination or oppression. But reading that made me feel, "Hey--he took the time to go back and mention me, in the part of the speech that is usually by definition not about me." And that was far more moving than I would ever have expected it to be.

I can only imagine what this day must be like for some others.


ETA: The listing of America's essential values is mostly full of things I've heard before that have little resonance because they're so overused: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism."

But "tolerance and curiosity," now. These have been missing from this list for a long time, it seems to me.

This op-ed about China vs. India is about a week old, but I finally got around to reading it and I'm not sure what I think.

It's an interesting topic for sure. I'm just not sure the cultural analysis holds much water. It's this paragraph I have an issue with:

The idea of becoming a military power in the 21st century embarrasses many Indians. This ambivalence goes beyond Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle for India’s freedom, or even the Buddha’s message of peace. The skeptical Indian temper goes back to the 3,500-year-old “Nasadiya” verse of the Rig Veda, which meditates on the creation of the universe: “Who knows and who can say, whence it was born and whence came this creation? The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?” When you have millions of gods, you cannot afford to be theologically narcissistic. It also makes you suspect power.

I don't know, it just seems too easy. I'm not sure why this should be all about theology. Is China theologically narcissistic? Uh, not so much. I think a stronger argument could be made about India's massive diversity vs. China's more homogeneous society. Don't get me wrong--China is not nearly so homogeneous as we Westerners tend to imagine. But the cultural, regional, and ethnic differences present in China have been handled by government very differently from the ones in India for centuries, and it seems quite reasonable to imagine that China's imperial history could lead to a different set of political values and ideas than India's hugely varied history of colonialism, foreign rule, and diversity as enshrined within the government (Emperor Akbar). The notion of one unified China has been around in the public consciousness much longer than a corresponding notion of one unified India, and that notion has been concieved very differently in China than in India.

This seems more like an issue of different historical experiences and paths taken in government policy and political consciousness than it does of Hinduism vs. Confucianism or whatever the Chinese equivalent would be. If there's an underlying, endemic cultural component, it is very difficult to separate from those historical factors since it would have to have been at least partially shaped by them. For example, it seems backward to posit Ghandhi's pacifist approach as a cause for the attitude discussed here; a more productive question might be to ask how this cultural orientation might have not only produced Ghandhi and his ideas but allowed them to be popular enough to be effective.

Vandals at the walls of Rome

I didn't realize people actually thought these things and then got paid to have them printed in newspapers.

The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones. The deranged hatred of the Jews lies at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of America, the ‘infidel’ west and modernity, and is the reason why they wish to destroy Israel. Unless people in the west understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the west but civilisation in general.

Melanie Phillips in the Spectator, quoted by Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online. Good. Fucking. Lord.


Maybe they're pissed off at the West because the West has colonized, exploited, manipulated, and generally fucked the Middle East for the past 100 years or so? No? Okay. Clearly, it's the West's explicitly Jewish basis. I just typed that sentence and I'm fighting the urge to smack myself across the face because it makes. No. Sense.

On a more general note, this whole "clash of civilizations"/"the battle for civilization" formulation makes me absolutely beside myself with annoyance and intellectual disgust. I mean, Jesus, if you're going to be shallow, at least let me wade farther than my goddamn ankles. It's lazy, it's stupid, it's demonstrably false, and any time you try to break it down into anything more specific than that phrase it falls apart in your hands. How do you define a civilization? What separates one from the next?

What the "clash of civilizations" thing is really about is a strategy to take whoever your enemies are as a monolith and define them as not just Other but nearly subhuman--extra-civilization, or that time-honored term, barbarian. We see this word used to describe terrorists, Hamas in particular, the Taliban, and any number of foes all the time. Currently, because the people who use this concept see their world order (or privileged position, depending on how you want to look at it) as under threat from Muslims, civilizations are supposedly based on religion (Islamic civilization, Christian civilization, etc.). At other times cultural practices, or technology, or skin color, or any number of other characteristics have been used to define "civilization" depending on who is seen as "civilized" and who is seen as a danger to them.

Defender of what?

Whoa!

Prince Charles wants to change British law so that when he accedes the throne he'll be entitled "Defender of Faith," rather than "Defender of the Faith," to reflect Britain's multidenominational society. (Apparently he originally wanted "Defender of the Faiths," but that caused too much controversy.

It would be really interesting to look over the documents and statements surrounding this discussion and see exactly why and how "Defender of the Faiths" was more controversial than "Defender of Faith". My first thought is that simple, indefinite "Faith" can mean whatever the hearer or reader thinks it means, and so Anglicans can go on thinking it means Anglicanism, while "the Faiths" irrevocably and unavoidably acknowledges and validates other faiths. You can keep ignoring religious minorities with the former version, and indeed depending on how you define "faith" you can even argue that the title still doesn't describe them. It's harder (though still not impossible) to do that with the latter version.

I confess

So I'm reading Augustine's Confessions for class and it's a profoundly weird experience--being up against someone's overflowing faith like that, when you have never experienced anything remotely analogous and feel no need to.

It's making it hard to focus on the book, because, well, I don't care whether God is in him or he is in God or both or neither. I'm impressed with his ability to maintain cognitive dissonance--I suppose that's a big part of what faith does--but in terms of the actual investigation? Yawn.

It's not a general allergy to religious texts. I enjoyed reading parts of the Hebrew Bible that have profound influence on his thinking--I recognize a lot of language. I suppose that's the difference between studying actual myth and studying a person's experience with that myth? Then again, maybe it's just that I'm tired and hungry. Plus, I was reading the Hebrew Bible in the context of a cultural history of myth and making a lot of connections to Mesopotamia and West Semitic gods, and we got to read all kinds of unorthodox variants that I'd never seen before. It's much harder for me to read Confessions as literature.

Every day a little death

This is a really interesting piece on existentialism and conservatism. It opened up a whole intellectual community that I didn't know existed, and it was the first piece on or of existentialism that gave me some sense of what that philosophy (or, as he would have it, critique of philosophy) might really be about.

The author would probably say that I just haven't thought far down enough, but I still think it's a bit of a crock. To me, this is really what the God Gene (which, of course, does not exist as a matter of science--I'm using it as a shorthand for a kind of personal predisposition or need) is all about. Either the sheer experienced fact, objectively real or not, meaningful or not, of one's existence is enough, or it is not. For existentialists (at least of this stripe), it is not; the screaming abyss of unmeaning is pain and chaos, and the starting point for either a way out or a way to live with it. From the essay:

Am I living in personal despair? No. No, I'm not. Things are pretty great, actually. That's the other reason. For all my clever criticisms of Karras, and Dreher, and the pomocons, I don't live my despair the way pure intellect perhaps insists I should. That's the laurel that my pragmatic approach to human life has rewarded to Karras and her inconsistent, but humane, refusal to live in the mind. She will, I suppose, have this last laugh. This is also, by the way, why the intellectual love of my life will always be Simone de Beauvoir, who crafted a livable existentialism, far thorougher and more compassionate than anything approached by Sartre and Heidegger. She recognized the existential death at the heart of living life too seriously.

What The God Gene means to me is this: some people ask a kind of existential question. They may answer it with religion, with conservative tradition, with community, even with genetics (The Selfish Gene, anyone), or with existentialism, but it is fundamentally the same yearning for a meaning, an explanation. Some people may not have an explicit answer so much as a certainty.

I'm an atheist who can't stand conventional atheism. And it's for this reason: only God can rescue human life from meaninglessness, if not me, if not the ego and the I. Atheists love to say that most religious people actually think like atheists. I think most atheists think like the religious, because they have not yet begun to imagine the wasteland of meaning that the death of God has left us in. (I think of Bill Maher and his stupid sneering face, and I see a man who wields the truth the way a chimpanzee holds a gun.)

But some people don't ask. I am one of these. If there is an explanation, I'll admit to being fundamentally skeptical of it, but I will allow as to how it may well be--because if there is one, I am immovably convinced that it is far too big to see. But I am 100% fine and dandy with either not knowing what it is, or, far more likely in my opinion, simply not having one. We are born. We live. We die and then we rot. These things are simple objective truths, in my view, and they are...neutral.

I was going to say "They are enough," but that would be false. "Enough" implies a need to be filled or a standard to be met. I have no such measure. These happenings of existence can never be too little, enough, or too much--too much for what? They are. What can be too little or too much, and what we bear responsibility for, is what we do in between. No, I don't know what "enough" is, or what the standard is; I mean only that these things can be evaluated, while the above neutralities cannot.

The beauty of this divide, to me, is that it ultimately doesn't matter. Whether we're living an existence pasted over a painful abyss of nothing, an existence granted us by a God, or just existing (does this make me a nihilist? I wish I had time to just sit around and read everything), we all tend to come out in the same place--buying groceries. Getting on with things. It's the nutjobs at both ends who get us in trouble.