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More Silence

Saturday 13 February 2021

Earlier, Fr. Mike explained that the reason Christians are to follow some of the Old Testament commands and disregard others is a question of audience. Some were meant to be only for Israel while others are clearly meant for everyone. He tried to elaborate it with an example about homosexuality in the Bible in which he pointed out that the text points out that the nations surrounding Israel “defiled” themselves in this way (I guess by showing tolerance to the gay community) and that Israel was not to do the same. Thus, Fr. Mike contended, it was clearly meant for those other nations as well. That’s how he explained away the command not to wear clothes of mixed fabrics but insisted that the prohibitions against homosexuality were still binding.

Alright, so let’s take that as a given for the sake of argument. I don’t think the point stands: I think it’s just a bunch of verbal sleight-of-hand (I know — horribly mixed metaphor). There’s nothing in the text that explicitly even suggests that some of these laws are binding for all people and some are not. Most Christians today don’t keep the OT feasts like the Feast of Tabernacles (also known as the Feast of Booths) even though Zechariah 14:16 states, “Then every one that survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of booths.” If anything seems directed toward all people, this surely is. By Fr. Mike’s logic, then, Christians should still be keeping at least observe the Feast of Tabernacles/Booths. Be all that selective-application-of-a-dubious-hermeneutic as it might be, let’s just take for the sake of argument that Fr. Mike’s interpretative principle is sound. What do we make of today’s reading, then?

Leviticus 20 is a brutal chapter. It lists the penalties for various infractions of the law. Most commonly, the penalty is death, and that death, most commonly, is by — guess! bet you’ll never guess it right! — stoning.

It starts out with a fairly disturbing command: “The Lord said to Moses,  ‘Say to the people of Israel, Any man of the people of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, who gives any of his children to Molech shall be put to death; the people of the land shall stone him with stones'” (verses 1 and 2). This giving of children to Molech was always explained as child sacrifice. So it’s disturbing that child sacrifice is such an issue (or potential issue) that right out of the gate, the first penalty deals with this. We might think, “Well, that’s good. At least this god has the children’s good in mind.” That reassuring thought disappears as soon as we read verse three, though: “‘I myself will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, defiling my sanctuary and profaning my holy name.'” So it’s not that they committed this awful cruelty to children, it’s not that they betrayed their responsibilities as parents, it’s not that they tortured children — no, it’s all about this god. Burning children is bad because it profane’s this god’s name. That’s just sick.

From that auspicious start, we have a whole litany of death:

  • In verse 9, we’re instructed to kill incorrigible children: “For every one who curses his father or his mother shall be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his blood is upon him.”
  • In verse 10, we’re instructed to stone adulterers: “If a man commits adultery with the wife of[a] his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.”
  • Verses 11 and 12 as well as 14 through 21 deal with the penalty for various forms of incest and beastiality. Death, of course.
  • Verse 27 deals with those who supposedly talk to the dead: “A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them.”

As a side note, many people have demonstrated that this “talking to the dead” nonsense is just that — it’s cold reading. Derren Brown has walked into a room and convinced people he was talking to the dead just after saying to the camera, “I’m going to go in there and make them think I’m talking to the dead, but I’ll be doing no such thing.”

It’s verse 13, though, that stands out when juxtaposed to what Fr. Mike said earlier: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.” This is a clear condemnation of homosexuality. The question is this: if the prohibition of homosexuality is to be interpreted as universal, why shouldn’t the punishment be likewise?

Verses 22 through 24, though, is even more interesting, for it seems to demolish Fr. Mike’s whole distinction between universal and non-universal application of the Old Testmant law:

“You shall therefore keep all my statutes and all my ordinances, and do them; that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out. And you shall not walk in the customs of the nation which I am casting out before you; for they did all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. But I have said to you, ‘You shall inherit their land, and I will give it to you to possess, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ I am the Lord your God, who have separated you from the peoples.”

Fr. Mike argued that the earlier condemnation of homosexuality was universal because it was set in opposition to what the surrounding nations tolerated, but these verses do the exact same thing for all God’s commands.

So what does Fr. Mike in his post-reading reflection say about all this brutality? How does Fr. Mike deal with the verse that seems not just to undermine his earlier argument but to demolish it completely? Simple: he says nothing. He instead focuses on the other reading for the day, Exodus 27 and 28, which deal with the priestly garments, and he talks about his own experiences wearing modern priestly garments.

It’s not a problem if you don’t acknowledge it…

Emissions and Lapidation

Tuesday 9 February 2021

“That can be a very challenging, challenging reading,” Fr. Mike begins today’s commentary, which I take to mean something like, “It’s really tough to explain away these passages that seem so barbaric or seem so weirdly obsessed with relatively unimportant things. They seem to challenge the very goodness and wisdom of the god we worship.” The reading was Exodus 22 and Leviticus 15, and he says that the Exodus reading seems to be more commonsensical.

The first part of the chapter has to do with the laws of restitution — things like what to do if your bull gores another animal. That type of thing. Fr. Mike discusses these laws fairly quickly, and he’s probably right: they are fairly commonsensical in a way. These passages, Fr. Mike explains are “revealing something about God’s heart.” These are “the principles according to justice.”

What he says not a word about are the instructions in the latter half of the chapter, particularly the first set of so-called social and religious laws:

“If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed, and lies with her, he shall give the marriage present for her, and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equivalent to the marriage present for virgins.

“You shall not permit a sorceress to live.

“Whoever lies with a beast shall be put to death.

“Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the Lord only, shall be utterly destroyed.” (Exodus 22 16-20)

We’re to stone incorrigible children. We’re to stone witches. We’re to stone those who change religions. Stoning is such a brutal, barbaric punishment that the fact that not only does this god justify it (“I’d rather you not do it, but I guess if you do it in these situations it’s alright”) but simply commands it — that thought alone disqualifies this god of anything other than contempt from right-thinking people, from people who have a modicum of empathy and decency.

These are, remember, the “principles according to justice” instead of vengeance; this god is all about making sure the punishment fits the crime. So apparently, taking your child out, burying him to the waist, and bludgeoning him to death with stones is a just punishment. Stoning is appropriate for the imaginary crime of sorcery. And just as we see in Islam, the punishment for leaving the faith is — you guessed it — stoning.

Remember, too, that these things, according to Fr. Mike, “reveal something about God’s heart.” What it reveals to me is simple: this is not a just god; this is not a decent god.

But it is the god presented in the Bible, so all this behavior must be justified. We have to explain away this barbarity somehow. How does Fr. Mike justify it? Simple: he just doesn’t comment about it at all. Not a word about any of the commands to stone anyone. Not one word.

He does go into detail about the passage in Leviticus, which is what all we’re to do regarding menstruating women and semen-spilling men. It reads like this:

“And if a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening. And every garment and every skin on which the semen comes shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the evening. If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the evening. (Lev. 15.16-18)

This is what the creator of the universe, the ground of all being, is concerned with: what to do after a wet dream.

Fr. Mike explains it this way: “The bodily emissions are important why? Because life is in the blood. They’re important because they refer to very intrinsic and necessary parts of our relationships.” But why would there be rules about this? Fr. Mike explains,

[It] is because the body is sacred. The emissions of the body refer to life but also because this particular kind of emissions of the body have to do with sex, have to do with reproduction, have to do with relationships. […] There’s some kind of guidance, some kind of restraint again placed upon people when a) they are engaged in sexual acts with one another, and b) they’re in community with each other. And this is just part of the genius of God’s word. God’s word is saying “we’re going to show restrait.” And that restraint is not for restraint’s sake alone and also not like “oh, gross!” — that’s not what uncleanness means. Uncleanness simple means whether this is an issue of blood, an issue of seman, whaterver this is, those are things that can bring forth life. But because they bring forth life, we have to be careful around them. This is something that’s so important for us to rediscover in the twenty-first century that because there are things so connected to life we need to be careful around them.

What does that even mean? Why would we “be careful”? In what sense would we “be careful”? Is he talking about being careful with sex? I guess that’s what he means, but the Levitical passages aren’t solely about sex; they’re about menstruation and simply ejaculation (not necessarily during coitus). It all just becomes a big confusing bundle of squishy words that don’t seem to mean anything.

I feel like he’s just providing an answer that he knows, consciously or unconsciously, is vague but will communicate enough to reassure believers who are troubled by this passage. They might not even understand it, but it gives them something to calm their worries about this passage. I can even hear someone saying something like this, then appending it with, “I’m not sure I explained it right. Fr. Mike does it better. You should just listen to the podcast.”

Header image is a still from the film The Stoning of Soraya M.

Slavery in the Bible

Monday 8 February 2021

K asked me to listen along with her has she goes through Fr. Mike Schmitz’s podcast The Bible in a Year. I’ve been eager to see how Fr. Mike deals with the more troubling parts of the Bible, and today, he hit Exodus 21, which deals with how to treat slaves:

“Now these are the ordinances which you shall set before them. When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to God, and he shall bring him to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for life.

“When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt faithlessly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money. (Ex 21.1-11)

Fr. Mike explains it this way: it’s a difficult passage, but it’s important to understand Old Testament slavery in the proper context:

He’s not revealing himself to a people who knows who he is. […] He’s not revealing himself to a people who, for lack of a better term, are civilized. He’s revealing himself to a people who are familiar with a kind of Wild West justice. He’s revealing himself to a people who have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong but don’t necessarily know how to pursue what’s right and what’s wrong in a way that’s absolutely just and fair. […] He’s teaching them, “I am a god of justice, a god who does hear the cry of the poor.”

Yet Fr. Mike contends that because slavery was so common in the ancient world, God had to take baby steps with them. First of all, slavery then wasn’t what we think of slavery. It was more like indentured servitude. So it’s slavery, but not slavery slavery. Next, he contends that God had to teach the Israelites that you can’t just do anything you want to your slaves. They’re human beings. That’s all fine and good, I guess, but it seems to me that that’s a pretty basic step, a pretty small step. Add to it the dimension of sexual slavery (“If she does not please her master”) and the thought of selling one’s daughter into this sexual slavery — it’s just astounding that someone can justify this.

More problematic is the realization that, if God was just taking these “baby steps,” we would expect to find an outright prohibition of slavery somewhere later in the Bible. After all, Christians are fond of explaining that Jesus did away with all that Old Testament stuff when he instituted the New Testament. And it seems to have caught on: Paul writes in Galatians 3.28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Surely that’s the next step implied by this baby-steps argument.

It’s hard, then, to understand why Paul himself would contradict himself and walk back this argument in Ephesians 6.5-8

Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.

Even more troubling is the whole letter to Philemon, in which Paul returns a slave to his master In verses 12-18, he writes,

I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own free will.

Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account.

Here would be a perfect chance to condemn and prohibit slavery. Here would be the perfect location to take that final step started with those baby steps in the Old Testament. Here would be the place to say something like this:

I am not sending him back to you. I would have been glad to keep him with me, but I gave him the choice to stay or to go, and he, being a free man not just in Christ but because slavery is itself vile and immoral, chose to leave. I preferred to do nothing without your consent, but because he has his own rights and liberty, I told him to go his own way.

Perhaps this is why he was parted from you, that you might realize how vile slavery is and repent of this evil. Understand me now: there is no place in the body of Christ of slavery of any kind, of any shape, of any definition. So if you consider me your partner, receive this news as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, he paid it off long ago.

There. I fixed it.

Predictions

Sunday 7 February 2021

Back on October 3, my favorite cult leader, David Pack, predicted a definitive date for the return of Jesus. It would happen before October 13. It’s now February.

Oops.

Earlier this month, though, he set a new date. During last week’s sermon, he made a few assertions:

  • It’s a perfect picture…only the whole thing crashes if Christ doesn’t come this Friday.
  • God streamed this concluding list through my mind without notes or the Bible.
  • It’s a divine act, if all these prophecies are at stake, would God let me mess up? He had to just stream it into me!
  • Sabat 24, is this Friday night. May we now see Christ, the kingdom, all the New Testament saints, and all Israel [resurrected] in just over 4 days. If it’s wrong then you now understand why I kinda thought I was on to something. (Banned by HWA)

Well, it’s now Sunday. What do we make of that? Was Pack wrong? Of course not. He sent out a memo late Friday night:

We have received numerous emails from the field expressing your amazement and excitement about what is upon us. Brethren here at Headquarters are right there with you!

As we enter the Sabbath, understand there is a case for Christ coming this side of midnight (Headquarters time). But the case grows stronger after midnight. And the most powerful case of all, with literally dozens of reasons just reviewed by 15 ministers at Headquarters, indicates Christ comes late in the day on the Sabbath tomorrow. So strong is this case, it appears virtually impossible that anything happens tonight. But do not stop watching! It is important to Mr. Pack that all of you remain on the same page we are, hence this brief update.

Rest assured, Christ coming later on the Sabbath in no way violates the intricate mathematical relationships between the key dates we have studied in God’s Plan.

We look forward to seeing you very soon!

Banned by HWA

Notice his phrasing: “As we enter the Sabbath, understand there is a case for Christ coming this side of midnight (Headquarters time). But the case grows stronger after midnight.” Using “the case grows” indicates that Pack is watching and praying, watching and reading the Bible, watching and meditating, and even now, at this last moment, things are becoming clearer: his timing might have been off by just a few hours. How do clear-headed, skeptical observers interpret this? “The day I predicted Jesus’s return is drawing to a close and, holy shit! He’s not here yet!”

He says, “Rest assured, Christ coming later on the Sabbath in no way violates the intricate mathematical relationships between the key dates we have studied in God’s Plan.” What he wants his followers to hear is simple: “This is complicated stuff, brethren. It’s taken my years to understand this! It’s math!” What we skeptis hear: “Please don’t leave my church and take your money with you when this turns out wrong! Please! I’m not qualified to do anything else. How will I make my money? How will I afford my enormous house?”

Of course, it’s written as if Pack himself isn’t saying this: “It is important to Mr. Pack…” But is there any doubt really?

Then, yesterday afternoon, they posted this:

While it is a discussion beyond the scope of a short update, bear in mind the Sabbath has not ended in the far west. The math and science do not break! In fact, many principles and verses show we must reach the far end of the Sabbath as it exists worldwide—all the way through the time zones of the western islands of the Pacific.

More than a dozen Headquarters ministers who just met discussed this again thoroughly and none can see a way out of tonight. Believe us when we say that we have tried! If there is more to see, God will certainly reveal it. Any details would be passed along in the coming days.

Again, keep watching. Our wait cannot be long!

And now it’s Sunday. And what?

Why do people continue with him? It’s simple — the sunken cost fallacy. Once you’ve invested so much in an idea, it’s all but impossible to give that idea up.

Cutting

Sunday 15 November 2020

Tonight, I spent a fair amount of time going through photos from the last year to create our yearbook. It’s a simple process: go to Lightroom; create a new collection with all flagged pictures from the year; begin deleting pictures. I started out with 1800; I’m down to 330 now.

It’s a good way to get an overview of the year. We had dozens of pictures of the family playing games (Sorry, Monopoly, hearts, etc.); we had dozens of pictures in the park going for walks; we had dozens of pictures of E and me exploring in our creek. How many nearly-identical pictures does one need?

Random Thoughts About Today’s Mass Reading

Today’s gospel reading was the famous parable of the talents:

Jesus told his disciples this parable: “A man going on a journey called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents; to another, two; to a third, one–to each according to his ability. Then he went away. Immediately the one who received five talents went and traded with them, and made another five. Likewise, the one who received two made another two. But the man who received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and buried his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants came back and settled accounts with them. The one who had received five talents came forward bringing the additional five. He said, ‘Master, you gave me five talents. See, I have made five more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received two talents also came forward and said, ‘Master, you gave me two talents. See, I have made two more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ Then the one who had received the one talent came forward and said, ‘Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter; so out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.’ His master said to him in reply, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I did not plant and gather where I did not scatter? Should you not then have put my money in the bank so that I could have got it back with interest on my return? Now then! Take the talent from him and give it to the one with ten. For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.'”

I noticed a few things about this parable that I’d never seen before: first, the master leaves all these things and then “he went away.” There’s nothing in the text that indicates the master expected the servants to do anything with the money. Perhaps that’s implied, but it’s not explicitly stated that the master expected any growth on his investment or that it even is an investment.

Second, I find it entirely reasonable that the third servant hides the money. What if he invested it and lost it? Wouldn’t the master be even angrier then?

Third, what’s all this stuff about “harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter”? Just what are the master’s expectations? What kind of a man is this? He doesn’t seem very reasonable at all.

Finally, there’s the disturbing ending: why the severe punishment?

I know, I know — it’s a parable. It’s not really about the money at all but it’s about an individual’s talents. At least that’s how everyone has always interpreted it. That leads to a realization I’ve had recently: why did Jesus speak in parables? If his goal is to transmit information, metaphor and parable are not the most effective, efficient means of doing that.

Politics, As Always

Confirmation Bias

Thursday 12 November 2020

What does it take to change a “Stop the Steal” Trump supporter’s mind about the election? What about an outside opinion, reported in the Wall Street Journal?

A team of international observers invited by the Trump administration has issued a preliminary report giving high marks to the conduct of last week’s elections–and it criticizes President Trump for making baseless allegations that the outcome resulted from systematic fraud. (Source)

But see, it’s not so easy for Trump supporters who reject the election results. They’re predominately Evangelicals. They read the Left Behind series as history written in advance. They believe in an antichrist — probably the pope — who will literally perform miracles. They think that all the world will bow down and worship this man. They won’t see this as confirmation that the election is fair; they’ll see this as proof that it’s an international conspiracy. This culminates, they believe, in the creation of a one-world government that will strip America of its sovereignty as part of the coming tribulation.

They won’t see this as confirmation that the election is fair; they’ll see this as proof that it’s an international conspiracy. They will see this as part of the grand prophetic end of the world.

You can’t reason with that. It’s a faith as strong as any other, as strong as their faith that God will somehow deal with the coronavirus (those who believe it’s real, that is) and pray for it despite evidence to the contrary. Nothing counts against that faith. If someone goes through the pandemic without falling ill, it was through God’s grace. If someone falls ill but doesn’t become overly sick, it’s due to God’s mercy. If someone falls deathly ill and has lasting complications, it’s God’s grace that he didn’t die. And if someone falls ill and dies, it’s God’s mercy because he’s gone home to the Lord. Nothing counts as evidence against that kind of faith. If nothing counts against it, if there is no way to falsify it, it’s not a rational belief but merely a warm feeling.

Transfer that to the election: these Evangelicals see conspiracy everywhere. It’s in the DNA of their religion. To forsake that is to forsake their very faith.

Misunderstanding

Sunday 11 October 2020

When creationists try to present the “lie of evolution” in an attempt to debunk it, we can often see clearly that the creationists don’t even understand evolutionary theory.

“Who’s going to make who look like an idiot?” Given the fact that you just clearly showed that you don’t have a clue how evolution works, you’ve already made an idiot of yourself.

They’re positively quixotic.

Exempt

Sunday 20 September 2020

Churches are exempt from paying taxes; political organizations are not. All too often, though, the former morph into the latter, and it’s for that reason that many of us feel that churches should not enjoy tax-exempt status. Usually, priests and pastors couch these statements in less obviously political language. It fools no one, and of course, the congregants generally support that language and their perceived right to say it in an organization that pays no taxes — it’s seen as first amendment rights.

So to be present when blatantly political speech takes place in the context of prayer makes someone who holds the above views quite irate.

Today, we went to mass at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a church that we’ve attended a few times, and probably would attend more often given the difficulty of signing up for one of the available slots at our parish’s reduced-capacity masses. But I for one will not set foot in that building again after the blood-boiling nonsense I heard today. During the general intercessions, when it came time for the priest to add his intentions, he prayed for Trump and his pick for the Supreme Court position. I really wanted to walk out at that point, but I remained. It wasn’t as if he were thanking his god — which I put in lower-case, for it seems to be the god of political power — for the death of Ginsberg; he was merely supporting the hypocrisy of the right. Given the historical hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that a priest would promote and praise political hypocrisy in the name of maintaining power.

As the mass was ending, though, during the time just before the benediction when the priest usually makes announcements, he launched into another political speech about the importance of the Supreme Court nomination. I’d had enough. I walked out.

Day 77: First Day in Conestee in Rainbows

Sunday 31 May 2020

First Day in Conestee

We’ve been waiting for our favorite park to open for weeks now. It seemed to us that going for a walk in the park should be something that lends itself rather naturally to social distancing. Certainly, you have to be aware of where everyone is and perhaps not go at the pace you would normally walk, but those are small concerns that mature people can keep in mind and in action relatively easily. But the city kept the parks closed.

Today, they were open, so we went for a walk in the morning when it was likely to be less crowded. We kept our distance from everyone and behaved as model citizens.

The kids were just glad to get out and do something. Perhaps they were also glad to see other faces — I know I was.

But I’ve had concerns about this opening up of South Carolina. I don’t get the impression that everyone else is being as careful as we are. And the numbers prove it. Earlier this week, we had a day with 300+ new cases — the highest we’d ever had. Then we had a couple of more days in the 200s or high 100s range, then yesterday we saw that the number jumped up again. Today, there were 312, but there was also an addendum about yesterday’s count:

154 cases that should have been reported in yesterday’s positive case counts were not updated from suspected to confirmed cases in our database by the time yesterday’s news release was issued. An additional quality check of yesterday’s positive case numbers revealed the omission of these cases in the daily reporting total. The corrected total of positive cases for yesterday (May 30) has been updated to 420. (Source)

So we’ve gone from having no single day with more than about 280 to having a day with over 400. Just about two weeks after restrictions were eased. Which is to say that I’m afraid people’s stupidity (“This has all blown over — back to normal”) will cause a spike that will undo all we sacrificed over the last months.

In Rainbows

When Noah and the survivors emerged from the ark after God had wiped out all of humanity except them, there would have likely been some consternation: what if God decides to do this again and this time, we don’t make the cut? It seems God wanted to assuage exactly those fears:

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds,  I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” (Genesis 9.8-16)

A skeptic like me has a lot of issues with this passage. Well, there are a lot of issues about the whole story of Noah and the ark, not the least of which is God deciding to wipe out all of humanity instead of, say, coming down and teaching them how they’re making bad choices, like a parent would do. Perhaps a spanking of some sort if we want to get Victorian. Then there’s the question of getting all the species in the boat, the inexperience of Noah as a shipwright — just problems all over the place.

But just these few verses offer a couple of big issues: first, why does God need reminding? “I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant” not “you will see it and remember the everlasting covenant,” though I guess that’s implied. But I suppose we could work out some literary way to get around that.

What we can’t get around is the simple fact that text here seems to suggest that there was never a rainbow before this event: “Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds” certainly hints at this. So you see the opening: “You mean to tell me that the lingering droplets of water in the sky that act as a prism and break the sunlight into its various colors — an act of physics — never happened before this?” Rainbows are not mysteries: we know exactly how they form, and I would imagine that meteorological sciences have gotten to the point that they can list several conditions that need to exist before a storm that will set in action a chain of events that will end in said rainbow.

Apologists who take the Bible literally have to deal with this. How to do so? I suppose they could suggest that, yes, God altered the laws of physics at that moment. But a more common explanation is a little more baffling: it had never rained before the deluge, apologist suggest. Mists and dew and the like were enough to water the flora of the Earth.

I mentioned this to K: she raised her eyebrows. “That’s the first time I ever heard of that.” I suspect it’s an Evangelical (i.e., American Christianity) attempt at explaining an obvious problem with the Biblical text in such a way that allows believers to continue interpreting it literally, word-for-word.

I first heard that argument when I was a kid. I want to say, “It struck me as strange even then,” but I don’t really recall. I remember hearing it, so it made some kind of impression on me, and it stuck in the back of my head as another example of some of the odd contortions literalists bend themselves into in order to continue interpreting the Bible literally.

I heard it again tonight. Or rather, overheard it. I wasn’t involved in the conversation, just listening from the fringes. “I mean, God created the world so perfectly that they didn’t even need rain — just a mist was enough,” the apologist explained.

It was one of those times that I really wanted to jump into a conversation but knew that there would be no point. Neither of us would budge from our view.

Day 61: Fear, Faith, and Fun

Friday 15 May 2020

Fear and Faith

Imagine fear nestled into anxiety burrowed into terror, and all of that is supposed, in the end, to be a source of great joy. “In my beginning is my end” T. S. Eliot wrote, but for some evangelical Christians, it might be reworded, “In my anxiety is my comfort,” for they view their everyday reality through an apocalyptic lens. They post things like this on social media:

The single comment “Scary” reveals the paradox at the heart of this line of thinking.

On the one hand, there is a sense of terror at what’s coming. Such believers look at the Bible as a roadmap for the future, seeing all sorts of ideas that, to those of us on the outside looking in, seem patently ridiculous. They see a coming world-engulfing violent cataclysm that will wipe out wide swaths of humanity and subject the survivors to near-slavery under the rule of some world-dominating ruler known simply The Beast, who will rule in what they call The Tribulation. During this time, there will be mass executions of believers and worldwide oppression.

At this point, the vision starts fracturing. What will happen to Christians, to good Bible-believing Christians who saw all this coming and gave themselves over to the Lord long ago? Some suggest that these poor Christians will have to go through all this; others (most) believe firmly that they’ll all be whisked away to heaven before all this — the rapture.

I grew up being taught that, like the rapture, God would supernaturally protect all his faithful Christians from this onslaught of literal hell on earth, but instead of being taken away into heaven, we would escape to a location of protection, which got the name the Place of Safety. Our religious leader conjectured it would be in Petra, Jordan. There we would spend the three-and-a-half years that the devil, through his Beast, would rule and torment the world, emerging at the end when Jesus returns to put the devil in his place and us in charge of rebuilding the world. Sounds crazy — but not any crazier than being whisked away like the Left Behind book series narrates.

Whatever the belief, though, these groups have one thing in common: the believers — the right-believing faithful — will be saved. This, then, should be a time of joy for such Christians. The end is almost here, and because they believed the right things all these times, they won’t have to endure the horrors coming.

So why the fear? Just look at the thoughts that follow the original “Scary” comment:

These poor folks are genuinely scared about Bill Gates’s supposed plans to use this pandemic and the resulting vaccine, which they fear will be mandatory (which it should be), to implant chips into them.

There is an amusing irony in all this, though:

Such a strange mix of confusion, and it’s driving thousands upon thousands to outright terror.

There is, of course, one thing that these fear-stricken Christians can do: they can pray about it.

Yet what is the effectiveness of this prayer? This verse from the Bible promises that “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray” that God “will heal their land.” If that doesn’t sound like a promise from omnipotence that is directly applicable to our current situation, I don’t know what does.

But we’ve tried this before:

These Christians will point out that there are conditions: the petitioners must “turn from their wicked ways” before this promise will be fulfilled, so that’s probably the problem: America is still aborting pregnancies, fornicating, and tolerating homosexuality (the three biggies), so God is just waiting for that to stop.

On March 30 televangelist Kenneth Copeland must have decided he would not wait for the stubborn, God-hating Americans to repent and simply “exercised judgment” on the pandemic, thus ending it:

But four days later, he realized he had to try again:

And yet it’s still not over.

Here’s where another layer of anxiety enters: these poor souls must be wracking their brains and souls trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. So it seems to me that this type of Christianity does not relieve anxiety but only heightens it. Instead of these beliefs calming you, they add another layer of anxiety when one’s prayer’s and petitions are either ignored or answered in the negative, and the natural response is to blame oneself: “God promised. I must have done something wrong.”

So by the time we get to this level, we have the following fears, some conscious and some less so.

  1. The end of the world is literally around the corner. If I’m right with God, I’ll be spared. Am I right with God?
  2. Even if I’m right with God, my interpretation of end-time prophecy might be a little wrong and Jesus might not return until after the tribulation. So if I go through this horror, how will I know I’ll be spared in the end?
  3. I know God doesn’t always answer prayers, but his Word says he will if I repent and pray, so if I or someone close to me becomes infected, I’ll pray, but it might not be his will.
  4. And even if it is his will, I might have done something wrong. Or my country might be doing something wrong.

For something that’s supposed to bring comfort, that’s an awful lot of sources of anxiety.

In a sense, these folks have a right to their anxiety. The First Amendment guarantees that right. But some of these anxiety-inducing conspiracy theories have long-reaching effects. They lead people to reject science for religious-based superstition:

Conspiracy theories have been around for ages, and fundamentalist Evangelical Christians have often been particularly willing to believe them. After all, their whole religion is a conspiracy theory: the devil is constantly trying to get humans to do his bidding unknowingly. The group I grew up in went so far as to call itself the only group of true Christians in the world: the rest of the “so-called” Christians were actually worshipping a Satan-created replacement Christianity. These “so-called Christians” were, for all intents and purposes, worshiping the devil himself. But even among the milder, less cultish groups, there is a sense of conspiracy. Indeed, this conspiracy goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when the devil tried to usurp God’s control over humanity.

I’m certainly not the only one to notice this similarity:

Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”

So we’re at the point that we’re all living in different realities. The Atlantic has an article about this now: “The Prophecies of Q,” aptly summarized, “American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

Would could imagine a scenario in which a prankster began something like Q and then it quickly gets out of hand. The prankster tries to step forward and point out that he began it all. “Look, I have evidence!” He could have even had the foresight to record everything he did on video and through screen-recording software, yet that wouldn’t be enough once the conspiracy had gained a life of its own. One can only imagine what such a prankster would feel as he watched his creation ravage reasonable — a modern Frankenstein, with the conspiracy theory being his unnamed monster.

Yet Frankenstein could reason with his creation, and in fact did attempt to talk to him. Conspiracy theories are like memes: they’re elements of the brain that are belong to no one and are somewhat self-replicating. In short, there’s no reasoning with a conspiracy theory, and there’s little ability to talk to a believer in one:

Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.

There’s no reasoning with them because they often don’t even see themselves as conspiracy theorists:

“Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to be conspiracy theorists,” [David] Hayes[,  one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet] says in the video. “I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don’t have anything against people who like to follow conspiracies. That’s their thing. It’s not my thing.”

So in the end, it’s hard not to be at least somewhat depressed about all this, and that in turn tends to make me just a little pessimistic about our future as a species — yet again. I can help our children develop the critical thinking skills (the painfully basic critical thinking skills) to avoid falling into this trap themselves, but that’s two in a nation of millions. These ideas are gaining momentum, and the alternative cultures they spawn are growing.

Fun

The Boy and I went out exploring again today. He had to try his new gumboots. I warned him about deep water: “If the water goes over the top of the boot, your foot will be permanently soaked.” He stepped in water that was too deep. One foot got soaked. We laughed quite a while about the squishing sounds coming from his boot.

Day 49: Honking Adventure

Sunday 3 May 2020

Today was a somewhat low-key day. We went for a walk or two; we did a little work around the house; K led an in-house Mass substitute for the kids. But overall, it was a very lazy day.

In the morning, I took E on a walk with the dog. Well, I was planning on going alone, but he tagged along anyway. I was glad to have him.

“I want to hear the car honking!” he proclaimed, so we went back to the neighborhood where I’d heard it last week.

“Why do they do that?” he asked.

Why indeed. What’s the point of all those “amens” and “hallelujahs”? I think it has to do with social bonding. It’s like Catholics kneeling and standing and praying together, like Miloszcz said. I wanted to say, “It makes them feel good,” but I didn’t. And it probably isn’t all that simple, either.

Clover’s new ball

After the walk, I took care of a couple of little tasks left over from yesterday. I use construction adhesive to connect the landscaping timbers on which I mounted the composter to solid concrete blocks to give it a bit more weight. I wanted to make sure that, if when another flood washes through the backyard, the composter will stay put. (I also set it behind two trees, which will help break the flow of the water.) I used the rest of the adhesives on the fire pit, gluing pairs of bricks together to make it a little more solid but not completely permanent. (To be sure, I have no idea how long the adhesive can handle the heat in the fire pit before failing, so it might have been a waste of time. Still, I didn’t have anything else to do with the remaining adhesive.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

He looks up toward the heavens, and we know what will happen: he will see something; he will hear something; he will have some revelation. What’s startling is the narrator’s take on this:

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature.

From a modern perspective, what’s most interesting is the little side comment in the opening lines: “in those days.” Were the people of Hawthorne’s day any different? Are we any different? After all, it was the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet that led 39 people to take their own lives.

Which is a volleyball, much to L’s delight

It’s really one of the many God-of-the-gaps situations: we don’t understand this, therefore God. At some point, earthquakes or comets were the antecedents, the “this” which we don’t understand. Science comes along, explains it, closes one gap, and believers searching for evidence of God’s existence move on to other gaps. The complexity of DNA and the seeming impossibility of cosmology are the biggest gaps now, and they will not likely be closed for some time. Will science ever unravel those mysteries? I don’t know. I’m not worried about it. As someone put it, I would rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.

Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness.

This problem is at the heart of all religious revelation: Joseph Smith discovered the plates that he translated into the Book of Mormon all by himself; Muhammed received his revelation alone, in a cave; Moses saw the burning bush all by himself; Mary was all by herself when the angel appeared. These revelations that started large religions later developed ways to deal with the problem that Hawthorne mentions (there were individuals who signed affidavits that they had seen Smith’s golden plates in person, for example). The smaller revelations, which lead to smaller followings, don’t: David Koresh alone heard God’s voice. At that point, short of working miracles, how do such people convince followers?

But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate!

Some people go further than this: David Pack, leader of a little sect of a few hundred to a couple of thousand followers, literally sees himself prophesied in the Bible. As such, he says things like “I have to be the most hated man on the planet,” which he claims in one of his sermons.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

So it’s remarkable to me that Nathaniel Hawthrone, writing The Scarlet Letter 170 years ago, created such commentary. And I wonder what he would have to say about contemporary Evangelical worship, with its rock-concert feels and amen-ing. And what he would have thought about nearly-sequestered worshippers replacing it with claxons.

First fire in new firepit

Day 42: The Sermon and the Wall

Sunday 26 April 2020

The Sermon

I went out for a walk this morning. It was sunny and warm, and everyone else was busy doing something, so I couldn’t resist. Listening to The Brothers Karamazov as I walked, I heard an amplified voice over the reader’s voice. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we hear the announcer at the local high school’s football games. Of course, there are no such games now, and there wouldn’t be any on a Sunday anyway. I paused the recording, stopped walking, and listened carefully. It took a moment, but I realized that it was a preacher delivering a Sunday morning message to the faithful as they sat in their cars. Drive-in church service.

As I walked a little further, I heard a little later furious honking coming from that direction, as if twenty or thirty cars were all randomly honking their horns. I took the earbuds out again and listened for some time.

Through the trees, I heard, “But we don’t have to fear death! Christ Jesus has conquered death!” Fairly typical evangelical formulation. “Isn’t that wonderful?” And then the horns began again, and I realized what was going on.

“They’re honking their amens,” I muttered to myself.

The Wall

The kids have taken the back corner of the house as their practice area: the Boy kicks his soccer ball against the wall; the Girl uses it for volleyball. They decided to use chalk to make some targets to practice accuracy.

The Girl had it all planned out. Colors, target shapes, everything. And then the Boy “messed it all up,” using colors at random for no other reason than wanting to use that particular color. And so they cleaned it and began again.

Passing

Wednesday 5 February 2020

I learned this evening that the pastor who led our local little congregation of the WCG when I was a teenager died recently. Nana and Papa had heard years ago from their connections that the man had Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, and that’s what one obit said about him:

R spent his life in the ministry, lastly in the Living Church of God. Due to his ailment, he was retired but continued to attend until his condition did not allow him that freedom.

The church I grew up in held some fairly heterodox beliefs, including the one that its members (at most 150,000 worldwide) were the only true Christians and everyone else, unbeknownst to them, was worshipping Satan and through his “counterfeit Christianity.”

When I read Peter Berger’s work on the sociology of knowledge (especially his books The Social Construction of Reality and The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Social Theory of Religion), I felt he’d looked directly into my youth and described what I’d experienced. When you hold a view that’s in the cognitive minority, Berger explained, it’s difficult to maintain that view. Everyone else says you’re wrong. You either adopt the prevailing view or you insulate yourself with what Berger called plausibility structures — rituals and such that reinforce the heterodox ideas you hold and make them seem plausible in the face of a majority who says you’re wrong. One of the most basic plausibility structures is the cognitive ghetto: you isolate yourself from others physically and mentally to avoid contact with contaminated “others,” who might introduce new ideas that lead to doubt.

Our church did this exceptionally well. We had our own little culture with its own vocabulary, customs, retreats, and other structures that kept the perverted world with their Satanic ideas at bay.

Ministers in this church enforced this isolation with varying degrees of severity and using various leadership methods. It was not uncommon to find very authoritarian and controlling people drawn to the ministry of this organization as a result.

Growing up, I had contact with a number of these ministers and heard about others. Some of them ruled as an autocrat. Many of them were controlling, manipulative, and destructive.

R was none of these.

Certainly, he enforced the rules of the main organization, but there was a gentleness about him that was unlike many of the other ministers. He didn’t seem like he was on a power trip like so many of the pastors in the church did. He seemed humble, and he could certainly laugh at himself — a rarity in ministers in that sect. One online memorial expressed it succinctly: “He brought a new way of looking at things, he encouraged the entire congregation to try new things.”

I became close friends with his sons and spent countless weekends with their family in high school. He and his wife were always kind to me and the other teens in the church.

In the early- and mid-90s, the main organization went through some doctrinal changes that led ultimately to the breakup of the church. “It turns out, we were wrong — we aren’t the only Christians” seemed to be the overriding theme. “All these heterodox beliefs — they’re pretty daft as well.” Several groups splintered off in efforts to hold fast to the truth once delivered.

My parents accepted the changes; R and his family did not. For years I never heard from any of them.

I found myself thinking, “How could our friendship mean so little to them? How could they just let that all disappear? Were we friends only because we believed the same things?” I knew the answers. Instantly we were outside their cognitive ghetto; we were the other; we were heterodox, unkosher, unclean. Dangerous.

Then in the early 2000s, I found R’s email address on the internet and had a brief exchange with him. I was curious about why he stayed with the original beliefs; he was curious about why we left. We had a few exchanges and then as often happens, it ended rather suddenly for no real reason. What really did we have to say to each other, after all?

When Nana passed, I wondered if he and his wife (rumor had it they’d separated, even divorced, but the obituary I found indicates otherwise — or at least that she kept his name) had found out about her passing. My folks were close with them, and I know the dissolution of their friendship due to no-differing theological views pained them greatly.

In my interactions with R, though, I came to see that it pained them too, though in a different way. How could we turn our back on the truth we’d once held? How could we come out of the world (“the world” was the generic term for the non-member hordes) and then go right back into it? How could we hold the key to becoming God as God is God (but not quite — hey, I said it was quite heterodox but you probably weren’t thinking that heterodox) and then give it away?

In truth, it was the church that brought us together and provided the catalyst that we used to break ourselves apart. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But is that really any different from how other friendships come and go? Except for the handful of true, deep friendships we have, don’t we all move through relationships in the same way, regardless of religious belief or other baggage?

I do this on a smaller scale with 130+ students every single year. I get to know them; I get to like them; I don’t consider them friends, but they’re more than just students. And then they’re gone. And truth be told, I can’t remember most of their names initially when the handful comes back for a visit. “What’s your name again?” I ask with some embarrassment.

Patterns

Sunday 2 February 2020

Some random thoughts that had bounced around my head during the day having nothing whatsoever to do with the photos…

We are a pattern-seeking species. We see them everywhere, and when they don’t occur naturally, we make them appear magically.

Take, for example, all the chatter online and off about the significance of today’s date: February 20, 2020. “It’s the same forwards and backward!” L explained cheerfully. “A palindrome!” I guess she learned that word from some social media post or other about the date, but there it is:

02022020

It even works if we write the year first, which I do when name files:

20200202

Of course, this only works if we’re writing the day and month with leading zeros. Otherwise, it’s just 222020 or 202022 — not nearly so exciting.

If you use the Hebrew calendar, it would be 07055780 or 05075780, depending on whether we’re to put the day or month first. In the Islamic calendar, it’s 06081441 or 08061441, again depending on whether day or month is to come first.

All of that is to say the obvious: it’s an arbitrary, meaningless day made somehow special because of an equally arbitrary way of numbering the day. There is no pattern there. We make the pattern and then feel special when it “appears.”

Sometimes, when people see patterns, they read prophetic significance into it. Take, for example, today’s reading in mass:

Thus says the Lord GOD:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.
Yes, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
But who will endure the day of his coming?
And who can stand when he appears?
For he is like the refiner’s fire,
or like the fuller’s lye.
He will sit refining and purifying silver,
and he will purify the sons of Levi,
Refining them like gold or like silver
that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.
Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem
will please the LORD,
as in the days of old, as in years gone by. (Malachi 3.1-4)

Fr. Longenecker suggested that this first portion is a prophecy that was fulfilled when Jesus was presented in the temple. In the day’s gospel reading, we find:

The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;
and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,
“Behold, this child is destined
for the fall and rise of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be contradicted
–and you yourself a sword will pierce–
so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

And so this is seen as a proof of providence, a proof that God controls everything. Except that the Old Testament source says he will “purify the sons of Levi, / refining them like gold or like silver.” Since the majority of the Jews of Jesus’s time did not convert to Christianity, it seems the sons of Levi weren’t immediately purified — if that’s what it means, and that’s not clear either. Perhaps it’s about corruption: was there less corruption among the “sons of Levi” after the appearance of Jesus? Hard to say, but doubtful. (I don’t even know if there was corruption — I’m just working under the assumption of people being people.)

So this whole thing presents a pattern of prophecy and it’s fulfillment. But it doesn’t. It only creates that pattern if we accept certain interpretations (which I don’t) and go into it with certain presuppositions (which I don’t). For that matter, we don’t even know if this Simeon bloke said these things or even if he existed — the only evidence we have is the scriptural reference, and for many of us, that’s dubious at best.

In other words, there is no naturally occurring pattern there. We create the pattern and then feel special when it “appears.”

Teaching

Sunday 26 November 2017

“I just realized we haven’t read E the Christmas story,” my wife said to me this evening. I thought of the Dickens tale, and remembering the new film version of its making that is now out, I thought, “What a great idea.”

“You mean the Dickens story?” I asked to confirm.

“No, the Christmas story,” my wife replied.

I’ve just crashed. I haven’t so much lost my faith as given it up. Tossed it. Or rather, I think I’ve realized that I never had it to begin with. This is the second time in my life that this has happened. Why I didn’t learn the first time is beyond me, but something made me want to be a Catholic like my wife. A desire for consistency? Who knows. I do know that that desire is gone now. It all seems so preposterous, the Bible, the saints, the Son of God — it just seems like a fairy tale to me again.

So the last thing in the world I want to do now is to teach this to my children. But the next-to-last thing in the world I want to do now is come clean to my wife about my new, old skepticism. I’ve decided to just play along, for now, living in a sort of spiritual closet with my children and trying to keep quiet about my doubts in front of them.

And yet I hope to plant a seed of skepticism in my children, a questioning spirit that doesn’t settle for simple answers, that doesn’t accept answers without asking further questions.

As he was eating his pre-bed yogurt, I began reading the story from the illustrated Bible someone gave him.

DSCF6675

It begins with the Annunciation, an angel appearing before a young girl and announcing that she will bear the child of God.

My mind immediately began running through the problems with this: the whole nonsensical doctrine of completely human and completely divine; the oddly perverse insistence that the girl must be a virgin out of a desire to use this to fulfill a supposed Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will be born of a virgin, which in fact was based on an inaccurate translation from Hebrew to Latin; the whole question of why in the world a god would announce his presence in such an oddly ineffective way. All this and more. Yet I just asked a simple question: “What do you think about this?”

“It’s good,” my son said.

“What do you mean?”

“Because God can do anything,” came the odd answer. He is, after all, five: critical thinking is not a skill he yet possesses.

On the next page, we read about Joseph’s concerns about marrying Mary and the account in Luke of an angel appearing to him to soothe his worries.

My mind immediately began running through the problems with this: was he just worried that Mary, being unmarried yet pregnant, risked some sort of horrible punishment at the hands of the first-century Jews, who were still stoning people? Did he find it odd that this happened before marriage, knowing the potential societal reaction? Did he wonder if perhaps Mary was just promiscuous? Why exactly did the angel need to calm his fears?

A few pages later, angels appear again, this time to the shepherds in the fields.

DSCF6674

“Has an angel ever appeared to you?” I asked.

“No,” came the direct answer.

“Me neither,” I said. “I wonder why.” And I  continued reading.

It’s in these types of conversations that I hope to spark a bit of probing skepticism. Does this mean I am seeking superstitiously to undermine my wife? I suppose it does. Is that a bad thing? I suppose it’s a bit dishonest.

If I keep this up, the real conundrum awaits in the probably-not-too-distant future: what will I say when my daughter, who is almost eleven, begins noticing the changes? I can’t bring myself to say the creed during the Mass because I don’t believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, and I don’t  believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. I won’t be going for communion anymore because when the priest says, “The body of Christ,” I am to assent to that belief by saying, “Amen.” And I don’t believe that the priest is giving out anything other than tasteless wafers and overly-sweet wine.

So she will notice, and she will ask, “Daddy, why don’t you go to communion anymore?”

And what will I say?

Incense: A New Metaphor

Sunday 19 November 2017

I’ve always heard of incense being symbolic of prayer, and most formulations follow something similar to what Doug Eaton writes at Christian Theology, where he gives four ways incense is like prayer:

  1. Incense was beaten and pounded before it was used. Likewise acceptable prayer proceeds from a broken and contrite heart.
  2. Incense rises toward heaven, and the point of prayer is that it ascends to the throne of God.
  3. Incense requires fire for it to be useful, and prayer has no virtue unless is set on fire by the power of the Holy Spirit.
  4. Incense yields a sweet aroma, and our prayers are a sweet aroma to the Lord.

Today in Mass, watching the smoke waft up from the thurible into emptiness above it, I realized that, incense being smoke, there are a couple of ways a skeptic can continue to view incense as a symbol of a believer’s prayer.

Incense, being smoke, dissipates into nothingness

The priest swings the thurible and billows of smoke flow from it, but like the spidery line of smoke rising from a cigarette, a few feet above the priest’s head, it’s turned to haze. As it rises to the top of the church, it disappears, indistinguishable from the smokeless air.

So too, words mumbled in prayer dissolve to nothingness as soon as they leave the lips. They rattle around inside hearers’ heads for just a moment, producing a warm feeling if they are believers, to be sure, but if there is no god, they are just so much noise.

Incense, being smoke, is ultimately carcenogenic

Breath enough smoke and one risks cancer: we see that warning everywhere. The Mayo Clinic’s web site describes the process thus:

Doctors believe smoking causes lung cancer by damaging the cells that line the lungs. When you inhale cigarette smoke, which is full of cancer-causing substances (carcinogens), changes in the lung tissue begin almost immediately.

At first your body may be able to repair this damage. But with each repeated exposure, normal cells that line your lungs are increasingly damaged. Over time, the damage causes cells to act abnormally and eventually cancer may develop.

In my slow arc back from belief to skepticism, I’m reading again Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and I think the idea of faith, and its outward expression through prayer, causing a brain to act abnormally — carcenogeically — is apt. The funny thing about prayer is that for the believer, even when it’s not answered, it’s answered. “God just said ‘No’” is the common response. Or “God has different plans.” Nothing counts against it. No evidence stands contrary to it.

That’s the very nature of faith, but that’s not how we work on a daily basis. We seek evidence for what we do. Teachers seek evidence for student mastery. Lawyers seek evidence for guilt or innocence. Construction workers seek evidence of a strong foundation before building higher. They all test, probe, ask questions, and ultimately, they might say, “No, there’s not sufficient evidence.” And faith is not enough. I don’t want to drive on a bridge that the engineers built on faith. I don’t want to get in an elevator that an inspector has inspected on faith.

Why should it be different with religious belief? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence asserted Carl Sagan (among others). To do otherwise is to think, in a sense, abnormally.

Crash

Sunday 12 November 2017

Within the last few weeks, it’s all crashed, all caved in on itself like a house being remodeled by amateurs who know no better than to knock out a load-bearing wall in order to let more light in. At first, everything seemed alright. The light from the kitchen in the morning passed through and lit the living room, and the evening glow in the living room passed into the kitchen just as dinner was served. But if anyone had cared to look up, they would have noticed that it was already sagging. No extra weight necessary. No snow accumulating. No high pressure system moving in. Not even a leaf landing on the room. The weight of the support system itself was pulling everything down, as if it were betraying itself. The collapse itself happened in the middle of the night, when the light of the morning and afternoon had moved to the other side of the globe and thus was completely irrelevant. There was a cracking of timber, a moaning of nails being bent and wrenched out of place, and then an incredible implosion of drywall, insulation, joists, and shingles, a noise so loud that it jolted everyone in the house into a hyper-alertness immediately, foregoing completely the drugged, heavy-brained feeling of a morning come too soon.

The problem of evil began haunting me anew a few weeks ago, though I really don’t know what was the catalyst. Perhaps the story of the child left dead in a swing for a week: “Authorities have charged an Iowa couple with murder in the death of their 4-month-old son, whose maggot-infested body was found in a baby swing in the family’s home” (source). A horrible story, but not as incredible as the story of the child left dead for two years: “The decomposed remains of a small boy still dressed in a baby-gro were found in his mother’s cot almost two years after he starved to death, a jury was told today (source). Or the story of Declan Hainey , who “was left dead for up to eight months is filled with waste including empty bottles of Irn-Bru, 3 Hammers cider, Lucozade,  vodka and crisp packets” (source).

Rubbish strewn cot: Declan Hainey's bed filled with waste including empty bottles of Irn-Bru, 3 Hammers cider, Lucozade, viodka and crisp packets. On the table are strewn cans of Tenants beer and more snack packaging, with more rubbish on the floor

Come to think of it, I know exactly what it was: I reread The Brother’s Karamazov this summer, and Ivan’s words haunted me just like they did the first time I read them, twenty years ago:

A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it. The papa was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. ‘It stings more,’ said he, and so be began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps, ‘Daddy daddy!’ By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court. A counsel is engaged. The Russian people have long called a barrister ‘a conscience for hire.’ The counsel protests in his client’s defence. ‘It’s such a simple thing,’ he says, ‘an everyday domestic event. A father corrects his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into court.’ The jury, convinced by him, give a favourable verdict. The public roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn’t there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honour! Charming pictures. But I’ve still better things about children. I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. it’s just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.”

“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to dear, kind God! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I’ll leave off if you like.” (source)

Ivan of course saves the greatest horror for the end:

“One picture, only one more, because it’s so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities. I’ve forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then—who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbours as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys—all mounted, and in uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general’s favourite hound. ‘Why is my favourite dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw. ‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He was taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy, autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry… ‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs…’At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes!…I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of administering his estates. Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”

And then the news of the child left in a swing for a week. And the discovery of all the other stories while searching for details about the swing death. Death upon death, all of children, piled one on top of another, and like Ivan, my thoughts return to the question of what kind of god would allow such barbarism.

The ceiling was sagging.

With all this on my mind, I watched a Bill Burr routine, and he began talking about leaving religion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=O6lXGkOWBzM%3Ffeature%3Doembed

“Everyone else’s religion sounds stupid,” he says. The obvious conclusion: “Why does that make sense and that shit doesn’t?” Why does Scientology sound ridiculous but Catholicism doesn’t? Why does Islam sound barbaric and Judaism doesn’t? Why are Jim Jones or Heaven’s Gate any different from Masada?

Burr explains that Scientology seemed stupid to him but Catholicism didn’t because “I heard my story when I was, like, four years old.”

There was more. Reading, thinking, watching videos debunking silly creationism.

All this sat in my head, just sat there swirling around, and because I’d lulled myself into a wishful Catholic sleep, I wasn’t ready when it all came crashing down around me. When I was standing in Mass and found myself unable to say the creed.

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.

No, I’ve been deluding myself and wanting to believe this, but I don’t. Not in this sense. Not in the dogmatic sense of the Church.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.

Nope. That doesn’t even make sense: the “Only Begotten Son” who is “consubstantial with the Father”? They’re supposed to be spirits — how in the hell can they even be Father and Son, and yet still the same being? From no perspective can that make any sense, not even when you try to throw in that quantum uncertainty nonsense: “Well, if light can act like a wave and a particle…” No. It doesn’t work.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.

Why do they all want to be adored and glorified? That doesn’t make any sense. What kind of insecure being makes an entire universe in order to create a small rock on which hairless apes live and work and kill and create vaccines and nuclear weapons and who are so stupid that many of them end up disbelieving in the effectiveness of the former and accepting the necessity of the latter — what kind of pathetic being would create such a pathetic thing just to have it praise him? Just to have it adore him? To worship him?

I’ve known that these are my true thoughts ever since I began attending RCIA five or six years ago. I heard the priests explain their self-contradictory, illogical theology and had all the counterarguments popping up in my head, and I just stuffed them down and tamped them away and said, “Nope. This is more important.”

Important to what? Why did I cling? I have no idea. It was stupid, wishful thinking, and I simply can’t keep the charade up any longer. And yet I must. I can’t bring this up to my wife: it would crush her. I certainly can’t bring this up to my parents: it might kill them to think I’ve reverted again. “Your mother thinks it’s just a phase” my father once said to me in a letter, referring to my atheism. It turns out, my silly dalliance with theism was the phase.

And I can’t bring it up to my children because they would necessarily mention it to my wife: “Daddy says…”

And that’s what haunts me. “What harm can it do?” some might ask. For fuck’s sake, I’ve said that myself: Even if it’s wrong, what harm does it do? Well, my son sometimes can’t go to sleep because he’s so scared about devils and demons. I haven’t said a word about that, never taught him anything about devils or other superstitions, but the environment I’ve put him in teaches him that shit every Sunday morning, and so now he doesn’t want to go to sleep alone. And I did that to him. I put the shackles on his mind myself. I put the chains on my daughter’s thoughts. I betrayed them.

What would happen if I just said to my wife, my lovely cradle-Catholic wife, “Look, I know it was a wonderful surprise to you when I started reconsidering my atheism, and it was an unqualified joy for you to see me enter the Catholic church, but I just don’t believe it. I just don’t buy it at all.” What would she say? I can see the disappointment in her eyes, but what damage would it do to our relationship, that kind of hurt? She would feel just as betrayed as I fear my children would feel if I hadn’t shackled them and they had a chance to look at this alternative life that I could have given them but didn’t.

So now I sit in the rubble, wondering if I can hide it from my wife, wondering if I should even try, feeling dark and empty at the center of my being. “That’s just the god-shaped hole,” some might say. No. That’s just the emptiness of realizing you’ve been lying to everyone, including yourself, for the last few years.

Fear

Sunday 5 November 2017

“A reading from the first chapter of Malachi,” she intones. It’s the first reading of the thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time during the “A” cycle, lectionary 151. She pauses and begins.

“A great King am I, says the LORD of hosts, / and my name will be feared among the nations.” And in my own mind, that which I can never say to my wife — the question. Why?

Why would God declare that his name will be feared? Why should we fear it? What kind of father would want his son to fear him? It makes God seem terribly petty, terribly immature, almost like a bully.

“And now, O priests, this commandment is for you:” And why then apply it to us? I recall the notion that we are all priests in some sense or another — isn’t that in one of the epistles? It’s terribly popular in Protestantism: the priesthood of believers.

If you do not listen,
if you do not lay it to heart,
to give glory to my name, says the LORD of hosts,
I will send a curse upon you
and of your blessing I will make a curse.

Again, why? Why does God seek glory? Why does he demand praise? Why does he require subjugation?

You have turned aside from the way,
and have caused many to falter by your instruction;
you have made void the covenant of Levi,
says the LORD of hosts.

What exactly did they do? How did they void the covenant? Was it just that they didn’t praise him? Or did they eat ham?

I, therefore, have made you contemptible
and base before all the people,
since you do not keep my ways,
but show partiality in your decisions.

Does this mean that God somehow influenced the opinions of others to make the people — his people, his chosen people — seem base to others? Isn’t that kind of cheating? And if he would do that, why not influence people to do good rather than the opposite?

Have we not all the one father?
Has not the one God created us?
Why then do we break faith with one another,
violating the covenant of our fathers?

Is this how a father treats his children?

I am falling away from the faith. I sit in Mass and think about it critically, as I’ve not done in years. I give myself licence to doubt.

It’s liberating.