Sometimes I'm surprised (though I know I shouldn't be) by the lengths to which religious "fundamentalists" who espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible will go to interpret some passage of the Bible in a way completely contradictory, not only to the proper meaning of the passage in context (the spirit of the passage), but even to the literal meaning of the passage (the letter of the passage), which of course aren't always the same thing.
Recently, I was speaking with a youth in my church youth group about the sermon she was going to deliver at the upcoming Youth Sunday; the text was the Beatitudes. She was explaining to me how she had been reading up on the passage and discovered how, when Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," he wasn't ruling out the use of violent means to do so. Huh -- who knew? It kind of gives a Strangelovian twist to a Homer Simpson quote: Violence, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. Of course, some of us simple-minded folk believe that violent means never, over the long term, bring about the peace they're intended to, and that that's what Jesus was trying to get across, unsuccessfully it seems, when he said, "Blessed are the peacemakers."
Essentially, fundamentalists start with the belief that pacifism is idiotic and naive and work backwards to the belief that Jesus couldn't have been a pacifist. They then torture all his commands that would seem to endorse pacifism and say, "See, Jesus wasn't a pacifist." But what is religion really demanding of you when you reconfigure it to justify your holding the same beliefs you would have without the religion?
Let's switch to the subject of the individual for a second. The doctrine of justified use of violence in self-defense is so engrained in our Western consciousness that we assume there is a basis for it in Christianity. There isn't. To the contrary, Jesus said, "When someone strikes you, turn the other cheek." As far as I'm concerned, you either believe this or you don't, and all the people who get their panties in a wad literally interpreting a certain passage in Leviticus and another one in a Pauline letter over a certain "abomination" are all too happy to interpret and marginalize the "Turn the other cheek" passage into insignificance.
Quite simply, when Jesus commanded us to turn the other cheek, he was ruling out the use of violence in self-defense. The most common reply to this is, Jesus couldn't have meant that, because anyone who believed that wouldn't be able to defend himself in a fight -- he might even get himself killed. Exactly.
See, once again, most people start out with the proposition that Jesus couldn't have been espousing some radical practice that could result in the death of the person and then work backwards to interpret the passage not to contradict their belief. (Our survival instinct sure runs deep.) But couldn't that be exactly what he meant? Isn't that exactly what he did himself and modeled for us in his submission to death on the cross?
Now, switching back from the individual to society, the fundies would say, Jesus couldn't have been teaching pacifism, because any nation that is pacifist is doomed to be conquered by its neighbors. So what? From my reading of the Gospels, Jesus just didn't care about who ran the government. The Messiah that most Jews were looking for in Jesus' day was a Messiah that was going to come to lead a military revolt against Rome and restore homeland rule, and Jesus, claiming himself to be the Messiah, could easily have stepped into that role; he would probably have attracted more followers that way. But he didn't.
Jesus said, in essence, "I don't care about the government. I care about you. I care about the choices you make on a daily basis and the evil in your heart." And if our peaceful actions result in our being conquered by a neighboring country or even in our death, well, Jesus has got that one covered as well.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Monday, April 11, 2005
They say they're literalists, but I think they interpret "peacemakers" metaphorically
Upon the death of Pope John Paul II, President Bush predictably praised the pope's life. When a reporter pointed out to the President that the Pope had adamantly opposed the American war in Iraq, the President replied, "Well, the Pope was a man of peace," in roughly the same condescending way Vice President Cheney referred demeaningly to energy conservation as a "personal virtue."
Sadly, before his body was even placed in the ground, the Pope's bones were being picked by the politicians who would refashion the Pope's message to serve their own political causes.
A "man of peace"? Well, yes, Mr. President, because the man who the Pope followed, and who you so publicly claim changed your heart, was the "Prince of Peace."
You can almost imagine the President's press conference right after the Second Coming. Reporter: "Mr. President, Jesus himself has denounced the Iraq war." Bush: "Well, the Messiah is the Prince of Peace." All that's missing is the President rolling his eyes or making that circling motion with one finger pointing toward his head while he's saying the word "peace." The message is clear: in the President's world, "peaceful" people are naive people.
Conservatives loved the Pope's opposition to abortion and communism. Early in the Pope's papacy, he stamped out the Marxist-leaning liberation theology movement popular in Latin America which stood in vocal opposition to the fascist military dictatorships in power in many countries in the region, an action which conveniently dovetailed with the American government's own support of many of those dictatorships.
So they conveniently glossed over the Pope's views which they found didn't support their own cause, such as his opposition to the death penalty under any circumstances, to the war in Iraq, and perhaps most damning, to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the rank materialism it engenders.
Republicans were so eager to join in the encomiums to the Pope that they were even willing to give the Pope some of the credit for the downfall of the Soviet Union (which they know in their hearts was due 95% to Ronald Reagan and 5% to Margaret Thatcher).
But of course, at this point, conservatives are so skilled at twisting and distorting the main precepts of Christ's ministry on earth, it's shooting fish in a barrel to do the same to his vicar. I once heard a Bush speechwriter explain that the military action in Iraq was not at odds with Christianity by pointing out that Jesus himself was not above showing anger, as he did when he overturned all the money-changers' tables at the Temple. That's right. He compared the invasion of a country which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of both civilians and combatants with . . . a symbolic, subversive, peaceful outburst that, as far as we know, didn't even cause a scratch.
Bush was right. The Pope was a "man of peace," or at least he aspired to be. What I find distressing is not so much that men and women of peace, such as the Pope, seem rare in today's world, and even sometimes within the Christian church. Most distressing are "Christians" like the President who pay their religion so much lip service, simultaneously disparaging those to seek to model the peacefulness of Christ as unrealistic in today's complicated geopolitics. Meanwhile, the President refuses to allow government funding of programs, either domestically or overseas, that in tandem with the promotion of sexual abstainance or monogomy, encourage the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Who's being (fatally) naive and unrealistic now?
Sadly, before his body was even placed in the ground, the Pope's bones were being picked by the politicians who would refashion the Pope's message to serve their own political causes.
A "man of peace"? Well, yes, Mr. President, because the man who the Pope followed, and who you so publicly claim changed your heart, was the "Prince of Peace."
You can almost imagine the President's press conference right after the Second Coming. Reporter: "Mr. President, Jesus himself has denounced the Iraq war." Bush: "Well, the Messiah is the Prince of Peace." All that's missing is the President rolling his eyes or making that circling motion with one finger pointing toward his head while he's saying the word "peace." The message is clear: in the President's world, "peaceful" people are naive people.
Conservatives loved the Pope's opposition to abortion and communism. Early in the Pope's papacy, he stamped out the Marxist-leaning liberation theology movement popular in Latin America which stood in vocal opposition to the fascist military dictatorships in power in many countries in the region, an action which conveniently dovetailed with the American government's own support of many of those dictatorships.
So they conveniently glossed over the Pope's views which they found didn't support their own cause, such as his opposition to the death penalty under any circumstances, to the war in Iraq, and perhaps most damning, to the excesses of unbridled capitalism and the rank materialism it engenders.
Republicans were so eager to join in the encomiums to the Pope that they were even willing to give the Pope some of the credit for the downfall of the Soviet Union (which they know in their hearts was due 95% to Ronald Reagan and 5% to Margaret Thatcher).
But of course, at this point, conservatives are so skilled at twisting and distorting the main precepts of Christ's ministry on earth, it's shooting fish in a barrel to do the same to his vicar. I once heard a Bush speechwriter explain that the military action in Iraq was not at odds with Christianity by pointing out that Jesus himself was not above showing anger, as he did when he overturned all the money-changers' tables at the Temple. That's right. He compared the invasion of a country which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of both civilians and combatants with . . . a symbolic, subversive, peaceful outburst that, as far as we know, didn't even cause a scratch.
Bush was right. The Pope was a "man of peace," or at least he aspired to be. What I find distressing is not so much that men and women of peace, such as the Pope, seem rare in today's world, and even sometimes within the Christian church. Most distressing are "Christians" like the President who pay their religion so much lip service, simultaneously disparaging those to seek to model the peacefulness of Christ as unrealistic in today's complicated geopolitics. Meanwhile, the President refuses to allow government funding of programs, either domestically or overseas, that in tandem with the promotion of sexual abstainance or monogomy, encourage the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Who's being (fatally) naive and unrealistic now?
Monday, April 04, 2005
Calvin's March Madness
Several weeks ago, I engaged in my perennial March pasttime: completing a losing bracket for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. This year, instead of merely filling out by hand a bracket downloaded off the internet, I actually filled out the bracket online, at ESPN's "Tournament Challenge." Then, immediately after the completion of each game, I would get online and check my rank (which rapidly declined; as of this writing, I'm 2,354,778th, which is the 16th percentile).
What was more fun than keeping tabs on my plunging ranking (what could be more fun than that, you ask?) was checking the updated leaderboard. After the first round, there was one guy who had correctly predicted the outcome of all 32 games (the odds of doing this are 1/4,294,967,296, though if you assume no 1 or 2 seeds lose, it's only 1/16,777,216). And, due to the nature of the upsets, after the second round, there were a number of entries in the top 40 whose pick to win the whole tournament had been eliminated; obviously these entries were merely dead men walking.
In fact, after each round, the majority of the new top 40 had not been in the old top 40, which made me realize: such a contest isn't like a horse race. You won't see an entry building momentum. Instead, the path that leads to the winning entry will only be clear in retrospect.
Like life. (The best segue ever.)
It seems to me that our lives progress in a sort of, to borrow a phrase, punctuated equilibrium. They seem very static for years on end. We have the same job, eat at one of a couple different restaurants every day for lunch, engage in a rotating list of activities on weekends, all very predictable.
And them something changes. Perhaps a parent becomes sick and requires you to move back home. Or maybe you take a job in another state, or maybe decide on a career change and go back to school. And then there's always the predictable get-married-and-have-a-kid.
So you get married, move to Philadelphia and in a couple years, have a couple kids. And then life settles down again for what seems like a long time.
And at any given time, you might get a windfall or a catastrophe unexpectedly fall into your life. Maybe your wife dies, leaving you with two small kids. Maybe your husband is called into active duty and sent to Iraq, or your three year old is diagnosed with autism. And then suddenly all those 5 year and 10 year plans have to be scrapped.
On the other side of the coin, sometimes the alcoholic, after years of not being able hold down a job or a relationship, has something click in his head, gets himself clean, and gets his life together, or maybe somebody is finally accurately diagnosed with a mental disorder that is treatable, leading to a vast improvement in quality of life, both for the patient and for his or her entire family.
At a poker table, you can always decide you've racked up enough gains, stand up, and cash out. In the stock market, it's called "profit taking," when you decide the stock has gone up as much as you can reasonably expect it to and sell the stock.
But in life, there's just no way to lock in those gains. There's always churning, both at the top, and at the bottom. The easy examples in the headlines are Martha Stewart and all the executives at Enron, HealthSouth, and WorldCom, but on a more personal level, each of the hypotheticals I described above has happened to a friend of mine. (Except one. I don't know anybody who has moved to Philadelphia.)
In law school, after telling my friend some story that left me shaking my head, I would always conclude by saying, "It's a crazy world." After hearing me say that enough times, my friend developed a pat response, "It's not that crazy. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense." To which I eventually developed the pat reply, "Only in retrospect."
One of the tenets of Calvinism has been alliteratively summed up as, "The faith that fails at the finish was faulty from the first." In a similar vein, C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce,
What both these passages get at is that only in retrospect will it be evident what direction our lives were taking. The present will always be the lens through which we judge the past. Life progresses. Trends emerge.
In retrospect, the choices leading to the winning bracket in the ESPN contest will be obvious; in fact, they'll almost seem self-evident. Prospectively, it's impossible to predict with certainty.
Similarly, only in retrospect will it be clear whether that stupid fight you picked with your wife was an exception in a stable relationship or indicative of deeper frustration and incompatibility. Only in retrospect will we know if those years that your life seemed stagnant you were actually laying the groundwork for a period of creativity or were, alternatively, hitting your peak.
The good news is, as we age, greater perspective and a greater frame of reference allow us to increase our self-knowledge. The bad news is, the best view is from the grave.
What was more fun than keeping tabs on my plunging ranking (what could be more fun than that, you ask?) was checking the updated leaderboard. After the first round, there was one guy who had correctly predicted the outcome of all 32 games (the odds of doing this are 1/4,294,967,296, though if you assume no 1 or 2 seeds lose, it's only 1/16,777,216). And, due to the nature of the upsets, after the second round, there were a number of entries in the top 40 whose pick to win the whole tournament had been eliminated; obviously these entries were merely dead men walking.
In fact, after each round, the majority of the new top 40 had not been in the old top 40, which made me realize: such a contest isn't like a horse race. You won't see an entry building momentum. Instead, the path that leads to the winning entry will only be clear in retrospect.
Like life. (The best segue ever.)
It seems to me that our lives progress in a sort of, to borrow a phrase, punctuated equilibrium. They seem very static for years on end. We have the same job, eat at one of a couple different restaurants every day for lunch, engage in a rotating list of activities on weekends, all very predictable.
And them something changes. Perhaps a parent becomes sick and requires you to move back home. Or maybe you take a job in another state, or maybe decide on a career change and go back to school. And then there's always the predictable get-married-and-have-a-kid.
So you get married, move to Philadelphia and in a couple years, have a couple kids. And then life settles down again for what seems like a long time.
And at any given time, you might get a windfall or a catastrophe unexpectedly fall into your life. Maybe your wife dies, leaving you with two small kids. Maybe your husband is called into active duty and sent to Iraq, or your three year old is diagnosed with autism. And then suddenly all those 5 year and 10 year plans have to be scrapped.
On the other side of the coin, sometimes the alcoholic, after years of not being able hold down a job or a relationship, has something click in his head, gets himself clean, and gets his life together, or maybe somebody is finally accurately diagnosed with a mental disorder that is treatable, leading to a vast improvement in quality of life, both for the patient and for his or her entire family.
At a poker table, you can always decide you've racked up enough gains, stand up, and cash out. In the stock market, it's called "profit taking," when you decide the stock has gone up as much as you can reasonably expect it to and sell the stock.
But in life, there's just no way to lock in those gains. There's always churning, both at the top, and at the bottom. The easy examples in the headlines are Martha Stewart and all the executives at Enron, HealthSouth, and WorldCom, but on a more personal level, each of the hypotheticals I described above has happened to a friend of mine. (Except one. I don't know anybody who has moved to Philadelphia.)
In law school, after telling my friend some story that left me shaking my head, I would always conclude by saying, "It's a crazy world." After hearing me say that enough times, my friend developed a pat response, "It's not that crazy. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense." To which I eventually developed the pat reply, "Only in retrospect."
One of the tenets of Calvinism has been alliteratively summed up as, "The faith that fails at the finish was faulty from the first." In a similar vein, C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce,
But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.
What both these passages get at is that only in retrospect will it be evident what direction our lives were taking. The present will always be the lens through which we judge the past. Life progresses. Trends emerge.
In retrospect, the choices leading to the winning bracket in the ESPN contest will be obvious; in fact, they'll almost seem self-evident. Prospectively, it's impossible to predict with certainty.
Similarly, only in retrospect will it be clear whether that stupid fight you picked with your wife was an exception in a stable relationship or indicative of deeper frustration and incompatibility. Only in retrospect will we know if those years that your life seemed stagnant you were actually laying the groundwork for a period of creativity or were, alternatively, hitting your peak.
The good news is, as we age, greater perspective and a greater frame of reference allow us to increase our self-knowledge. The bad news is, the best view is from the grave.
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