Yes, Donald Trump is despicable, and has been that way for a long, long time. But he's just a man. What really concerns me is the environment that enabled someone as despicable (and ridiculous) as him to rise to such a level of power. Soon enough Trump will be gone, but that toxic environment will remain. Decades and decades of irresponsible right-wing propaganda set the stage. Propaganda is such a powerful thing (as any dictator knows). In the words of wise Voltaire, "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."
Saturday, June 01, 2024
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Monday, May 27, 2024
The most evil and tragic of human enterprises is war. Memorial Day should be a day of somber reflection on the terrible (and almost always avoidable) costs of war: All of the young people sent to fight and suffer and die, and the even greater number of noncombatants who also have their lives destroyed. 90% of all deaths in war are civilians. According to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the civilian to soldier death ratio in wars fought since the mid-20th century has been 10:1, meaning ten civilian deaths for every soldier death. This ought to be their Memorial Day too.
As Tim O'Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.”
The only exception I can think of to this is the tale of Desmond Doss, who joined the Army in WWII to be a combat medic, but refused to carry or use a weapon (his life was the subject of the 2004 documentary The Conscientious Objector, and the 2016 Oscar-winning film Hacksaw Ridge). Jesus said "Blessed are the peacemakers [not the war-makers]; for they shall be called the children of God." Matthew 5:9
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
Monday, June 13, 2022
Sunday, January 09, 2022
Saturday, October 02, 2021
Sunday, March 28, 2021
Today is Palm Sunday, a day that commemorates Jesus's "triumphal entry" into Jerusalem. This was an incredibly subversive act on his part, both religiously and politically. It was a bit of prophetic performance art, as Jesus and his followers reenacted the ancient Jewish ritual of the king's enthronement (for which Psalm 118 had been written and used). But, as biblical scholar James Sanders points out, in the case of Jesus, "The messiah has arrived and been acclaimed king. He has been recognized as king by acclamation not from those with power or authority but by a rather scragly crowd of disciples and followers."
The participants in Jesus entry into Jerusalem shouted "Hosanna!" which means "Please help us!" It was a cry for justice and mercy and deliverance. "Hosanna!" was what a person would cry out to the judge when they came into court as a result of having fallen behind on their crushing debt obligations from having to borrow money in order to pay civic and temple taxes (a few decades later, when violent rebel factions took control of Jerusalem and the temple, they intentionally burned all of the records of debt). "Hosanna!" was a plea from the powerless to the judge to be just and fair and merciful in hearing their case. At the triumphal entry, the people were calling out to God to hear their case against the terribly oppressive religious and civic and economic systems that they lived under.
Sanders says, "This enactment of the psalm [118] as a prophetic symbolic act would have been no less blasphemous and scandalous to those responsible for Israel's traditions (and they would have known them well) than similar symbolic acts performed by the prophets in the late Iron Age [such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel]." Those in power, who controlled the systems of oppression, would have looked derisively upon this noisy, unruly crowd and their charismatic leader. Ultimately they would decide that he and the movement he inspired needed to be crushed.
So, if you go to church today and see the children waving palm fronds, consider that what they are reenacting is a moment of radical and risky prophetic public action against rulers and authorities and systems of oppression. They were calling for a very different kind of kingdom and king; one marked by care for the "least of these"--the poor, the immigrant, the outcast, the powerless and voiceless. They were crying out for fairness and compassion and kindness and peace and radical inclusion and integrity and opportunity to thrive and grace and love. They were crying out for the kingdom of God.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
According to Sagan, “What the Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you’re accused of witchcraft, you’re a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. There are no rights of the defendant. There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes—jealousy, say, or revenge, or the greed of the inquisitors who routinely confiscated for their own private benefit the property of the accused…. The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each 'witch' was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted ‘frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive,’ as it was later put in America in the Salem witch trials.”
Sagan continues: “In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defense witnesses were inadmissible.” If, for example, a husband claimed that his wife had been with with him the whole night, not cavorting about in the forest with demons, the archbishop would explain that the husband had been deceived—such is the power of the Devil—and had in fact shared his bed with a demon masquerading as his wife.
Women and girls, in particular, but also men and boys were accused, tortured and killed in the most painful and humiliating ways imaginable. Sagan recounts, “In the immolation of the 20-year-old Joan of Arc, after her dress had caught fire the Hangman of the Rouen slaked the flames so onlookers could view ‘all the secrets which can or should be in a woman.’”
The parade of horrors goes on and on. But the aspect that really caught my attention was the attitude of the church officials who endorsed and perpetrated witch trials. They were convinced of their absolute rightness. There was no alternative explanation other than the one they already believed. To even raise the possibility that they were mistaken was to engage in heresy and commit the mortal sin of attacking the Church. Critics of witch burning were themselves put on trial and burned. “The inquisitors and torturers,” writes Sagan, “were doing God’s work. They were saving souls. They were foiling demons.” Thus any opposition was standing in God’s way and deserved to be crushed.
During my time as a fundamentalist charismatic Christian I saw the same type of mass hysteria manifest around conspiracy theories about global Satanic witch covens that kidnapped children for human sacrifice. I see it today with QAnon and claims that Joe Biden (who is cast as a godless liberal despite his devout Catholicism) somehow stole the presidential election from Donald Trump (who is cast as a righteous instrument of God despite being antithetical to everything Jesus taught). I saw in my fundy days the same practice of applying bad theology in an effort to control people’s sexuality (especially LGBTQ people) and to control women via the Pro-Life movement. I saw the same arrogant certainty in leaders (typically men) who claimed to be unquestionably right and to have authority from God which should not be criticized.
I’m grateful that the church (Protestant and Catholic) does not today have a shred of the civic power it once had. History has shown that theocracy inevitably results in oppression and atrocity. But I’ve seen with my own eyes that the mindset remains that would plunge us back into darkness if given the chance.
Friday, November 27, 2020
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
I sometimes joke that I entered seminary as an evangelical Christian and departed as an agnostic Buddhist. It's an oversimplification, but in large part true. I think of myself as a Buddhist in the sense that I recognize the genius of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and the other practical teachings of the Buddha, as well as the transformative power of meditation, but I don't believe in rebirth or other speculative spiritual components of Buddhism. I think of myself as a Christian in the sense that I try to live my life according to the values and teachings of Jesus--particularly as laid out in the Sermon on the Mount--but I don't believe (any longer) in most of the tenets of the classic Christian creeds. In seminary I learned to appreciate things about all of the world's religions, but I also came to the conclusion that the most honest religious view is agnosticism; to simply be able to say "I don't really know."
Jesus was, I think, a remarkable person who made a significant impact during his life. He lived during a time of tremendous socio-political upheaval, under a repressive religious system that was under a corrupt and tyrannical kingdom that was under an oppressive empire (which also provided benefits like capability of long-distance travel, communications, preservation and transmission of philosophy, religious plurality, and relative peace).
Jesus's teachings, and the movement he led, cut like a laser through the multi-layered systems of oppression in which he found himself. He challenged their authority, pointed out their hypocrisy, and highlighted how badly they had missed the mark in their claim of being God's (or, the case of the Romans, the gods') authority on earth. He taught that every person--no matter their gender or race or illness or socio-economic status or profession or how "other" they are--is worthy of care and kindness, deserving of respect and fair treatment, beloved by God. Clearly, what he taught, and the way he taught it, was profound and powerful to the point of being viewed as a threat to the civic and religious authorities. So they conspired to have him arrested, tortured and killed. And that was the end of Jesus the man.
But the effect of his brief life was so great that people continued to tell stories about him. And, of course, those oral tales and eventual written accounts became more and more exaggerated and weighted with symbolism. In trying to express the significance of his life and teachings, people incorporated popular Mediterranean tropes: surely he was sent from God; like others sent from [the] God[s] in Greco-Roman-Egyption-Persian theologies, he was born of a virgin; he performed authoritative miracles over sickness and nature; yes he was killed, but like Osiris and Adonis and Castor and Romulus and Heracles (etc.) he rose from the dead; he ascended to Heaven, like other Greco-Roman god-men had purportedly ascended to Mount Olympus; and his death carried a sacrificial reconciliatory significance. Jesus gradually became linked to Greek philosophical concepts such as the Logos, and Neoplatonic cosmology, and Manichaen dualism.
Jesus became a mythic figure and an object of veneration (the same fate that happened to the Buddha). The man who told people to follow him (not worship him) became an object of worship. The man who criticized the hierarchical and puritanical Jewish temple religious system became the diety at the heart of a hierarchical and puritanical gentile religious system (with temples of its own). The man who challenged the empire was appropriated and transformed into a god who endorsed the empire.
I could go on, but suffice to say that studying and pondering things like this is how I became a Buddhist who doesn't subscribe to Buddhism and a Christian who doesn't subscribe to Christianity and an Agnostic who has opinions but freely admits "I don't really know."