Category: Religion

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Bernita: What’s Wrong with Hicksville?

When I went to college, I met a beautiful, very bright girl named Bernita*. She was from a small town, Hicksville, in Southwestern Ontario and came from a very conservative, bible-believing family. She and her room-mate wandered around campus together, laughing, teasing, and having a good time.

I never got to know Bernita real well, but we did have a late night chat or two, and I found out that she didn’t believe in God. She didn’t think the idea of God made any sense. But she didn’t tell this to anyone else and she went on with her theology, sociology, history, and introductory psychology courses at this Christian College as if she was a believer.

Bernita had a boyfriend back home. You know what usually happens with those relationships, of course. The girl goes off to college, broadens her horizons, meets a lot of new, bright men, and, before you know, it’s “Dear Ralph…”.

Well, that didn’t happen this time. Not exactly. Bernita was interested in this one guy with long hair but it didn’t work out. She went home at the end of the second semester unattached. By the end of the summer, Bernita was pregnant. She ran off to British Columbia. Then she returned to Hicksville to face the music. Standard procedure in conservative Christian communities? She married the guy. She never went back to college.

You don’t often meet these people again in life.  I did.

It’s twenty years later: she still lives in the same small town, with her five children. She is a stay-at-home mother. She is involved in the PTA and stuff like that. Her oldest child is already in college himself. I don’t know if she believes in God now or not, but she goes to church and she sends her children to the Christian school.

So you’re eighteen and you’re beautiful and you’re smart and you’re 500 miles away from home, living in one of the great cities of North America, with it’s blues bars and great restaurants, and the fabulous Art Institute, and Wrigley Field, and the Sears tower. The whole wild and crazy world and a future of untold experiences and insights opens up before you. You’re frightened and thrilled. But you go home one weekend for some stupid reason you give in this one time (that part’s a mystery to me: why?) And you end up spending your entire life in some wretched little hick town in the middle of Ontario’s own Green Acres. My wife says I’m too harsh, and that there’s nothing wrong with living your entire life in a small rural community. I thought she was right for a while. What’s wrong with Hicksville?

We lived in Hicksville ourselves for about 15 years. The trouble with Hicksville is that after a while you really do forget that there is a broader horizon out there beyond the dusty cornfields and windmills. You forget that people have different experiences of different lives. You think you have made a reasonable judgment about things when you reject certain possible alternatives, and forget that there are possibilities that you haven’t even imagined.

Hicksville allowed malls to be built on the edge of town, and then, when stores in the downtown area started to lose money and go out of business, demolished the only building with architectural distinction and built another mall right downtown. That finished it off. Now the mall itself is half-empty. That’s Hicksville: yesterday’s solutions for the problems we will create tomorrow. The whole debate about this building, the former city hall, featured a lot of ridicule about “preservationists” and their granola-crunching ilk. Meanwhile, towns like Stratford and Oakville were thriving by preserving their old buildings and renewing their city cores. How much do you want to bet that in ten years, when that trend has run it’s course, Hicksville will just be embarking on it?

Maybe it’s not fair, but I shed a little tear inside when I think of Bernita. I wish she’d finished college and taken a job in Toronto or Vancouver and traveled a little before she got married and settled down and had kids. But I bet that if I asked her now if that would have been a good idea, she’d answer, “why?”

Upon Further Reflection…

I had believed that Bernita eventually changed her mind about God and became a believer. Probably she did. But it’s not unlikely she simply submerged her real beliefs for the sake of expediency. When you are a beautiful daughter of a controlling, conservative family, one form of liberation is to run off to college, but another is to get married to a jellyfish whom you can dominate and control because, after all, you’re a lot smarter than he is, and he’ll do anything to have your gorgeous body.

He’s the one who will continue to vote to keep women out of church offices. You’re the one that rules the roost. You are not going to rock the boat too much because your life is pretty good. People have been bought and sold before for far less…

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Exploiting a Tragedy

It might have been a wonderful story. Well, not a “wonderful” story. It’s a horrible story, actually. But part of the story would have been very appealing to a certain constituency: when one of the teenage killers at Columbine High School held a gun to the head of Cassie Bernall and asked her if she believed in God, she courageously said “yes”. Then he blew her away.

Oh wait. What do you mean “might have been a wonderful story”? Didn’t it happen?

The Christian community in the U.S. has seized upon this incident. It has a lot of appealing elements for them. First of all, Cassie was a young, attractive teenage girl. She had gone through a rebellious stage, including, allegedly, some dabbling in witchcraft, but her parents had straightened her out by sending her to a strict “program” at West Bowles Community Church. She wore a “What would Jesus do” bracelet. She carried a bible to school every day and was reading it at the moment the carnage began. She confessed her faith in words loud enough to be heard by her cowering classmates, though she knew it might mean her life.

So the story seems to provide a little of everything. Cassie was courageous because she confessed her sin. When she had rebelled, her parents no-nonsense, “tough love” measures worked. She carried a bible to school, where, of course, thanks to the godless liberals and feminists, prayer and bible study is no longer permitted. She was murdered by two young boys who were heavily immersed in video games, violent Hollywood movies, and rock’n’roll. Most importantly, she was murdered because she was a Christian. Because America turned it’s back on God when it banned prayer in school.

The latest fad among the ultra-right in the U.S. is to assert that they are now a persecuted minority. In a perverse way, this is the rationale they now use to assert their traditional privileged status in society. They claim that they are the only religion not allowed to have prayers in school (ignoring, with twisted logic, the fact that no other religion ever had a large enough constituency to even attempt to assert such a right in the first place, and ignoring the fact no other religion is or ever was allowed to lead classes or assemblies in prayer at any time).

It’s a story that plays into the social and political attitudes and platitudes of the Christian right.

The trouble is, the story is not exactly true. Well, it’s not true at all, essentially.
The report originated with one of the boys who was in the library, and who survived the assault. He was the brother of Rachel Scott who was killed outside of the school. He told the police that he heard the conversation and recognized Cassie’s voice.

The police later tried to verify the story. They took Mr. Scott through the library, as part of the process of meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events at Columbine. When Mr. Scott showed them where Cassie had been during the exchange, the police knew that the voice did not come from Cassie Bernall. Cassie’s body had been found in a different location. In fact, Cassie had been hiding under a table with Emily Wyant, quite some distance away from all of the other students. This is information that is not difficult to confirm.

This much is true. The gunman—most likely Dylan Klebold—asked a girl if she believed in God. The girl was not Cassie Bernall but Valeen Schnurr. Valeen did indeed answer yes, courageously, yes. But the gunman did not shoot her. In fact, he allowed Valeen, who was seriously wounded, to crawl away, without further harm.

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

The Christian community has adopted Cassie Bernall as a symbol of all that is forthright and courageous and virtuous in America, just as they have come to see Klebold and Harris as icons of deviance, immorality, and godlessness. Every hero needs a villain. Even Valeen Schnurr says she doesn’t mind that this spurious story circulates because it might bring someone to Jesus. Meanwhile, she has come under some abuse herself by “Christians” who are upset at her for disabusing them of their congenial myth.

So, she goes along with the silent consensus here among people who should know better: a little lie can be excused if it furthers the greater good.

I have trouble with this. So some minister is going to tell the story of Cassie Bernall at an evangelical service somewhere and fifteen young people, as a result of the story, will come to the front to pledge their lives to Jesus. No harm done? Not if they find out some day that Christian leaders knowingly perpetuated a lie? No harm done when reputable scholars and writers and journalists are aware of the deceit and draw negative conclusions about the integrity and honesty of the Christian community as a result? No harm done when a Christian congressman like Asa Hutchinson stands up in Congress and argues for a bill and some wavering delegate sits and listens and thinks, “Well, this is the guy who still goes around flogging the story of Cassie Bernall even though he should know better….”

If Christianity is true, would it’s adherents willfully lie about a thing like this?  If Christianity means something to its adherents– if it means anything– why does this happen, often?

 

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Abraham Lincoln and the Evangelicals

According to biographer Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln might have believed in a divine maker, but he certainly did not believe in Jesus Christ–in a personal savior. He did not belong to a church. He believed that people were generally in charge of their own destiny and had the capacity to build a better society together.

In short, Abraham Lincoln was one of those evil, secular humanists that people in the Christian right in the U.S. constantly badger us about.

Lincoln?

Thomas Jefferson? Benjamin Franklin? Thomas Paine? How convenient that they are dead and unable to speak for themselves. These “heroes” of the American Revolution have their names invoked time and time again by Republicans, homophobes, militant evangelicals, and tv preachers, as paragons of Christian virtue and “traditional” values.

Do you believe me? Or do you want to believe Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?

You know, it’s not very difficult to find the truth in this matter. There really isn’t a controversy, like there is, say, over the efficacy of gun control or feminism or the Equal Rights Amendment. You can read the original works by these guys in any library. They were NOT—I repeat, NOT—Christians. They did not base the constitution on scripture. They did not base the Bill of Rights on scripture. They based their work on the ideas of people like John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

So when someone tells you that America needs to return to the moral virtues of the past, and to the examples of stalwart men like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine – I say, “Amen, brother!”

Well, no, I don’t, exactly. You see Jefferson owned slaves and he sired children by one of them. Benjamin Franklin had quite a reputation in Paris, when he was American ambassador. And George Washington certainly didn’t think Martha should be entitled to equal pay for work of equal value.

So there you go. You see the danger of trying to read the past into the present or, even worse, the future.

The truth is, we are here and now and we have to try to find the best answer to our various social and economic and moral problems all by ourselves. We can learn from the past, but you can’t go back, and America can’t go back.

The Founding Fathers, fearful of invasion by Britain, believed that every man should keep a gun handy. Today, 40,000 people a year a murdered at least partly because it is easier to get a gun in the U.S. than it is to get a firecracker.

Time to move on, I say.

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The Last Refuge of These Scoundrels

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has just approved a proposal to pass a constitutional amendment which would make it a crime to “desecrate” an American flag. The vote was 11-7. Who are the patriots? Who are the scoundrels?

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What is a flag? It’s a piece of cloth. That’s all. There is nothing sacred about a piece of cloth. Who is harmed by the “desecration” of a flag? No one. What utility does it serve to attribute such magical power to a symbol that the law must protect it from those who do not subscribe to it’s mystical power? None whatsoever. Unless you believe that it is a good thing when men are stirred by symbols to incomprehensible feelings of loyalty and devotion and are, then therefore susceptible to manipulation by evil men and scoundrels.

So the purpose of this law would be to protect the dainty affectations of scoundrels, who, as we all know, take refuge in patriotism. In other words, the purpose of this law is essentially religious. The flag is the bible, the cross, the alter of nationalism.

Nationalism is a religion. It’s values cannot coexist harmoniously with the values of any other mainstream religion. Nationalism demands of us greed, selfishness, and brutality. It demands that we place our interests first. It demands that we worship our ancestors who fought in wars. It demands uniforms and parades and brass bands and cemeteries and monuments and medals and solemn oaths and hymns and eyes teared over with myopic miasmic melodrama– crocodile tears– and myth and lies and “saints”. We always say that these “saints” sacrificed their lives for our noble cause. We act as if our armies are not equipped to kill and destroy, but to preserve life, even at the expense of their own lives.

We ask, are you willing to die for your country– as if this is a good idea– instead of the honest question: are you willing to kill for your country?

I know why militarists and nationalists love the flag. Because they are idiots. Anyone who has examined the history of western civilizations over the past 500 years cannot have missed the fact that nationalism is responsible for more carnage and evil than any other single factor. From Napoleon to Hitler to Stalin, humans have done more evil to each other in the name of nation and state than they ever did in the name of any other religion.

“Without a strong value system, our children cannot distinguish good from bad or right from wrong,” says Orrin Hatch, one of the Lewinsky conspirators, who may have a point here, but one that has nothing to do with flags.

The simple question is, what values is Orrin talking about?

Most of us agree that selflessness and the love of justice are good values. So is compassion, mercy, and toleration. Hatch’s logic is hypocritical: the exact purpose of a flag is to arouse patriotic fervor in the service of selfish nationalist impulses. A flag is used to stir patriotic feelings, and patriotic feelings are used to persuade men to join armies, where they are taught to act with aggression and strength, to obey orders without question, to kill for no reason known to themselves. In other words, to over-ride good values and replace them with bad values.

A constitutional amendment banning “desecration” of any national symbol is nothing less than an intrusion of the state into religion. If Orrin and the other Senators want to bow down and worship the flag, they are welcome to do so, in their own cathedrals, on their own time. Keep the government out of it.

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The Sacred and the Weighty

A recent study reported that the more religious a person is, the more likely he or she is to be overweight. In fact, fundamentalists are kings of the hill– Southern Baptists weigh more than any other brand of Christian.

This is a shocking revelation, indeed. But it doesn’t surprise me. It could mean one of several things:

1. Christians have more food than other people. That’s not possible, because Christians give so much food away to the needy. So let’s rule that out.

2. Christians eat fattier food than non-Christians. Again, not likely. The body is “the temple of the Lord”. Christians don’t fill that body with smoke, alcohol, or other people’s bodily fluids.

3. The Holy Spirit has an actual weight. Never thought of that before, did you? How much does the Holy Spirit weigh? Judging by looks, I’d say a good 40-50 pounds.

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Pope in a Box

Some people, like the late Frank Sinatra, like to travel “heavy”. They take lots of suitcases and equipment and ride around in expensive armoured limousines or private jets. That makes sense for these people, in a way. Frank Sinatra was a vain, pompous, crass, self-important Las Vegas entertainer. He used to make large sums of money singing to old, over-weight women in ugly pant suits, God bless ’em. If you had asked Frank what it was he relied on to see himself safely through another day, he would have pointed to Turk and Otto, his steroid-enhanced Austrian body guards.

The Pope never performs in Las Vegas, and hardly ever sings in public at all. If you asked him who he trusts to see himself safely through another day, he would answer “God”. Furthermore, he likes to tell the 700 million Catholics around the world not to use birth control. “But we are poor,” the people reply. “How can we afford to support large families?” Trust in God, says the pope.

Does the Pope follow his own advice? Not really. He has body guards too. And when he wants to be seen by the public, he travels around in a bullet-proof “Pope-mobile”, just like Frankie used to. Doesn’t the Pope think God will protect him from assassins? I guess not. That is too bad. One in six people on this planet are Roman Catholic. If there is anything our age needs, it is someone like Frank Sinatra or the Pope to come right out and say, “I don’t need any body guards or bullet-proof limos… I trust in God to keep me safe.”

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I was watching Larry King on CNN the other night. He had a theologian from some Southern Baptist Academy on, and Robert Schuller, and the President of the National Organization of Women. They were arguing about women, of course.

I learned two thing. Number 1, I will avoid CNN at all costs. The number of commercial interruptions was excruciating. CNN has no shame, no dignity, no self-respect, no honor, and no class. But if they hire any more of these luscious lips to read the news, I’m investing in the company that makes collagen.

Secondly, I am sick to death of these smug, conservative Christians trying to tell me that anyone who disagrees with their archaic social and political views is, therefore, disagreeing with the very word of God. Because, don’t you know, it says right here in Ephesians 22 that women are to submit to their husbands. Simple. Straight-forward. No interpretation required.

This discussion was a little better than most. From a Christian point of view, most feminists probably don’t spend a lot of time reading the Bible, so they don’t argue very well against people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. But Larry King knew his bible a little, and Robert Schuller knew it pretty well, and they pointed out that shortly after Paul tells women to submit to their husbands, he tells slaves to submit to their masters. Larry King asked the Baptist theologian whether he believed that slaves, nowadays, should also submit to their masters. Well, the theologian almost came right out and said that he did. He certainly didn’t clearly, unambiguously declare that slavery was wrong.

What ticked me off–pardon the expression– was his insistence that he wasn’t responsible for his own opinions. He was merely obeying God’s infallible word in the Bible and anybody who disagreed with him was going right up against the word of God Himself. That is a load of horse manure. But people like Dobson, Falwell, & Company say it all the time, as if they just happened to read the Bible that morning, and low and behold, it just happened to confirm my very own opinions.

The truth is that these guys are gut level conservatives. They were conservative long before they ever read the bible, and they only seem to read only the parts of the bible that coincide with their prejudices. They pick and choose whatever it is in the Bible they like and ignore the passages that don’t jive with their middle American patriotic right wing free enterprise presumptions.

There were lots of other verses that Larry King or the feminist could have asked Mr. Knowitall Baptist Theologian to explain. How about these. The point is that literal inerrancy– the doctrine that every word of the Bible (usually the King James Version, no less) is infallible– is pure nonsense, and the truth is that even the most conservative fundamentalists don’t act as if they really believe it. There is always a measure of interpretation, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It makes more sense to say that the Bible is an infallible guide to the will of the Lord, while allowing for the fact that none of the writers of the gospels foresaw the massive economic, social, and political changes that were going to occur in the next 2,000 years.

Given the social and economic conditions of first century Palestine, Paul would have been no more likely to suggest that women should take leadership positions in the church than he would have been likely to suggest that they go out and get jobs, or put grandma into a nursing home, or start a beauty salon, or go swimming on Sunday, or wear a pant-suit. These ideas would have been meaningless to his audience at the time. It doesn’t mean that women are forever forbidden from doing any of those things.

How do we know how the word of God applies today, then? It’s not all that hard. We know what Jesus means when he castigates the Pharisees, though, Lord knows, we still seem to put up with a lot of Pharisees today. And we certainly know what he means when he says, “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone”. No, he didn’t say it was okay to sin. But he did tell us a lot about those who are quick to reach for stones. I have a feeling that if Jesus met James Dobson today, he’d ask him a question: “How many hungry children did your $180 million a year ‘ministry’ feed today? How many poor inner-city teenagers have jobs, thanks to you? How many of the sick and destitute have seen the inside of your glorious office building in Colorado?”

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CNN

I saw something really cool today. In the World Cup soccer match between the Netherlands and Korea: a Korean player was given a yellow card for taking too long to take a penalty kick.

Just think: someone made a rule for this incredibly popular sport that requires players to hurry up and put the ball back into play. And this is a game which never stops for a commercial. If you watch only North American team sports and never watched soccer, I need to repeat that to you: they never stop for a commercial.

TSN, of course, does stop. So what do they do? They split the screen into two ugly boxes, one large one on top, and one tiny one on the bottom. They show a commercial, of course, in the large one, and boost the sound way up over the game.

May you never get used to such outrages. The owners and managers of TSN stink. They are pigs. They are greedy and despicable. There is a special place in Hell for them, where they will be strapped in chairs, their eyelids held open with steel clamps, and they are forced to watch 6,778,569 Tidy Bowl commercials over and over again.

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I tried watching Larry King on CNN the other day. They had four guests on to discuss the Southern Baptist’s Convention’s decision that women should submit to their husbands. Larry King, by the way, has been married about five times. His latest wife is 14 years old. No, I’m kidding. I think she is 28. Larry King looks like he is about 60.

The theologian who tried to defend the statement was a liar. He said it doesn’t mean what we think it means: husbands have the greater responsibility because they are servants and must be responsible for Christ for the family. Really. Women should be happy that men have gladly undertaken this terribly painful, heavy responsibility.  In other words, it means exactly what it appears to mean: men are the boss.  Saying that being the boss is a burden doesn’t change that fact one iota.

As I said, the man is a liar. He has poor ethics. He knows very well that “submit” is exactly what the men of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. It is also, probably, what the women of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. They really believe that the immorality of our day and age is largely the result of women living independent little lives without any men around to make them submit to their leadership. Why don’t these people shows some guts and admit that it means exactly what we think it means?

CNN was more appalling than the Baptist. It cut for commercials about every 30 seconds. You might think there is a legal limit to commercials on U.S. television, but that’s not true. U.S. networks can broadcast as many commercials as they want. And if Larry King or any other broadcaster wants to keep his job, he better resist the temptation to look over to his director, drop his jaw, and say something like, “What? Another commercial already? We just had a whole pile of them?”

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God and Frank

I often wonder what ultra-conservative “leaders” like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson think of Frank Sinatra. My guess is that they liked Frank. He was the very embodiment of reactionary, repressive, hierarchical thinking. God bestowed that wondrous voice upon Frankie and made him a star. Therefore he was entitled to special treatment, body guards, limos, mansions, numerous wives (including, astoundingly, Mia Farrow), the best suite at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Anyone who thought otherwise was a radical, and dangerous to God’s good appointed order.

Then Frank sings “My Way”. The irony is, of course, is that “My Way” is probably one of the most anti-Christian pop songs ever recorded. It is one of the most explicit statements of utter self-sufficiency and moral relativism.

Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humour? There is something wildly comical about the fact that, in his later years, even with the assistance of a teleprompter, poor addled old Frankie couldn’t even get the words right. All those fans paid big bucks to hear the old crooner mumble incoherently while he tried to remember what city he was in. The old man, trying to assert once again his own personal macho myth of self-sufficiency, needed all the help he could get.

Well, who knows? Maybe Pat Robertson is a Dylan fan instead. Maybe James Dobson comes home from a long day of ranting about the evils of toleration and compassion and flips “Sticky Fingers” on the turntable for an hour of relaxation. Maybe Jerry Falwell hops into his limo and says to the driver, “hey, you got any Ani DiFranco tapes in there?” And maybe Jimmy Swaggart, when nobody’s looking, pops in a CD of cousin Jerry Lee’s “Great Balls of Fire”.

Well, when I get a chance, I’ll look up some of these guys’ web sites and see if I can get any of them to respond to a couple of simple questions: do you like Frank Sinatra? Does he represent to you, as a Christian, a morally acceptable style of entertainment? If you really believe that God appointed you to be a spokesman for the Christian community how come you have rigged your organization so that you are accountable to no one but yourself? Where do you guys get those awful haircuts? When did you run out of Brylcreem? Explain to me why you drive around in a limo surrounded by bodyguards while claiming to be a follower of a man who surrounded himself with the poor and the outcasts and rejected material wealth at every opportunity?

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The Missionary Position

The statistics keep changing– depending on who is doing the counting– but there can be little doubt that there are now more Christians in Africa, Asia, and China, than there are in Europe or the United States. So why does the United States and Canada keep sending missionaries to the “Third World”?

The answer is, probably, because we can.

I remember reading a fairly detailed story about a large charity organization that raised funds for research into a certain childhood illness. It might have been polio or something. Anyway, the disease was finally virtually eradicated.

So what happened to the charitable organization? They had a big party, right? They laid off all their staff, sold off their buildings, shredded their internal memos, and disappeared, right?

Wrong. The organization simply adopted a new cause and began raising money for it. The tools were all in place. Jobs were at stake. The decision of what to do was made by the people whose jobs depended on the continued existence of the organization.

Well, obviously, we haven’t found a cure for apostasy yet, so, in that sense, missionary organizations should continue their work. The trouble is, they are doing all this work over-seas, not here.

The real reason we don’t send missionaries to New York and Chicago and Paris and Toronto is that we haven’t yet found a way to present the gospel message in a compelling way to a literate, educated, and somewhat cynical population. Why not? Because the church chose certain battlefields many years ago, and they were the wrong battlefields. We chose to fight the doctrine of evolution, and we lost. We chose to fight the discovery of dinosaur fossils, and we lost. We chose to fight the scientific conclusions about the age of the earth, and we lost. Now we are fighting a battle for the morals and cultural values of our society, and we pretend that we never lost any of those earlier battles. We tell people, “take our word for it: we’re right”. But we haven’t earned the right to invite anyone to take our word for anything. We haven’t explained yet why we fought the idea of dinosaurs so energetically, and now we try to explain that Noah actually took dinosaurs with him on the ark. We haven’t explained how Noah could have saved two of every creature in his ark when it wasn’t even big enough to carry two of every single species of fly.

I am told that no other world religion, Buddhism, Islam, or Confucianism, for example, entertains a conflict between the evidence of our senses and the evidence of sacred scripture or tradition. And that is why, the educated, professional classes of Buddhist and Islamic societies are full participants in the religious life of their nations.

But here in North America, and in Europe, religion–Christianity–has virtually proclaimed: forget everything you learned about truth and science and knowledge, and accept these doctrines without question…