



Thursday, September 20, 2012

Of sin and atonement and what we can learn from Yom Kippur

 the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."
--Graham Greene

I said something below about imposing religious ideas on the non-religious, and the advent of Yom Kippur is my starting point for that observation.  Talk of the Nation devoted some time to the Jewish observance and the ideas of sin and atonement; the guests were a rabbi, an imam, and a Jesuit priest, and the discussion was uniformly excellent between them.  But first I think of the "Christian" holidays of Christmas and Easter, and even of Mardi Gras, which marks the end of Epiphany and beginning of Lent.  Those are widely observed holidays, or at least very widely known, but they commonly have as little to do with Christianity as a fish has to do with a bicycle.  Yom Kippur is distinctly Jewish, and distinctly related to the concepts of sin and atonement, as well as the nature of God.  Lent is similar, but far less widely observed among Christians.  But what was interesting to me was the very idea of "sin" in the first place.

Sin is a concept passed down in America through Puritanical hands and closely associated with an "angry God," thanks to the eloquence of Jonathan Edwards.  I'm hard pressed to condemn the Puritans, in part because they are part of my religious heritage through my ordination into the United Church of Christ.  I have a direct connection to them through the Congregationalist church which is a major historical root of the UCC.  But sin is so often, among Christians and those who know the term only from Christianity, a burden, a malaise, a source of shame and despair.  It doesn't have to be, although Christians since at least Augustine have treated it so.  As Krister Stendahl points out, if sin seems deeply connected to our Western sense of self, it's because the source of our self-consciousness (literally as well as the source of our shame/self-concern) is Augustine and his confessions.  Paul, if you can strip away your anachronistic lens placed over his letters by the saint of Hippo, has a clearly "robust conscience," and defies the sense of shame and despair that haunts more pious Christians nearly 2000 years later.  So if we are going to make sin a universal condition of all humankind, we have to discuss just what we mean by the term.

It isn't that we can't make sin a universal issue; it is more how we do it that concerns me.  To hear the rabbi discuss the tradition of atonement for Yom Kippur, I heard the echoes of a covenant behind it.  If Alberich is good enough to read this, perhaps he can add more information in the comments, because my knowledge here is admittedly fragmentary, and even my memory of what the rabbi outlined is fading away.  The practice, though, involved far more than prayer and confession in corporate worship (as almost every Protestant and Catholic does in weekly worship).  It involved activity, the basic thrust of which was to seek forgiveness and make amends before turning to God to ask for absolution.  This was, basically, the Muslim practice as well, but in the rabbi's description I heard the clear substrate of a covenantal idea, of being bound by the covenant with Abraham to others (perhaps even Gentiles.  Why not?), and owing them as much duty as you owed to God.

It started me thinking that religion today is declared to be a private practice, and that is the problem with it:  we want our religion to be private and personal, when of all things it should be the must public and corporate.  Not corporate in the meaning of a fiction of law, but corporate in the sense of corporeal, of lived in the world, and incorporated into daily life.  How many Christians prefer to leave their religion at the door of the church, to pick it up again like a hymnbook or a church bulletin on Sunday morning?  There is a problem, but I still maintain a slight one, in Christians behaving like Rick Perry:


I think his words are the sheerest nonsense, but if he wants the people in the public arena to be only people of his version of faith, my best response is to show up in the arena with my version of faith; not to set mine aside so I can be a better citizen when I reach the agora.  And if I'm going to live my faith, my confession and repentance and atonement have be something more than what I offer to and ask from God in the privacy of my thoughts or in the repetition of a printed prayer.

Does that mean I should expect this of everyone else?  No, of course not.  But it was the rabbi who spoke of giving forgiveness as well as receiving the confession of sin, and that was the linchpin of the covenant, to me.  Of course, just because it is expected doesn't mean it is given, and just because two Christians, or two atheists for that matter, try to reconcile but one won't and reconciliation takes two, doesn't mean a covenant would fix it, or a covenant is broken.

A caller to the program said that people can forgive each other and learn to get along with each other without religion; that humankind knew apologies and forgiveness were necessary long before religion came along.  I'm not so sure about his history or his anthropology, but even taking him at face value and accepting the basis of his argument, the fact remains:  how many people will do that without some sense of the metaphysical, or the transcendent, of a covenant or a binding love of God or something beyond the need of two people to cooperate, to make forgiveness finally happen?  It is like the argument that religion is not needed to build hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly and the mentally challenged, places of refuge for workers forced to work far from home.  No, it isn't needed, but the German E&R church built all those things in the 19th century for fellow immigrants from what wasn't yet then Germany, for those who were strangers from foreign countries who spoke an almost common language and little more.  How many atheists did that, without first requiring a profit motive or a favorable tax law?

I have a book by a Jesuit priest that describes sin in terms of the American frontier of the 19th century.  Sin, as I recall him putting it, is either violating one of the rules of the town (for which the sheriff will harshly punish you); or sin is being in the wagon train, and wanting to turn back.  I like that second metaphor:  it places us in a journey, among others with a similar purpose, going to a destination that, like Abram in Genesis 12, we can't quite imagine.  And sin is not a rule we break, but a lack of faith in where we are going, and who is leading us there.  In terms of the Hebrew scriptures, it was the land flowing with milk and honey, which would be theirs so long as they were faithful to God; and the Torah gave them guidance (much more than that, but again, I'm no rabbi).  In the Christian scriptures, that destination is the kingdom of God, and the journey is not to a physical locality, but out among people.  People who believe as we do, and people who do not.  According to the letters of Paul, it's the people in the former category who actually give us the most trouble about where we are going, and how to get there, and how to behave along the way.

I'll have to leave it there.  Perhaps I can return when I am more coherent, or more sure of what I want to say.  But I won't get any further just now.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Why doth anyone rage?

I heard on the radio today (probably BBC News) that it is recorded (in the Koran?) that the prophet Mohammad himself was attacked and vilified in his life time; his response sounded almost Christian.  He blessed those who persecuted him, and forgave them their treatment of him.

I realized this afternoon this matter of insulting the Prophet touches on an issue central to Niebuhr's thesis in Moral Man and Immoral Society. I can, as a moral matter, accept calumny and even assault, in the name of my religious or ethical beliefs.  But can I, as a moral matter, accept the same on your behalf? 

That is entirely the thesis of Neibuhr's analysis:  an individual can be moral on their own behalf.  But can they be moral on behalf of others?  It may be right for me to accept insult of my Lord by others; indeed, there is nothing you could say to me that would enrage me enough to attack you, if your insults were directed toward Jesus of Nazareth.

But if they were directed toward my wife?  My daughter?  My brother?  My parents?  My friends?  At what point am I immoral, or at least unfeeling, to accept insults on behalf of others?

Let us posit that I should.  Who would blame me if I didn't?  If you felt any sympathy for any of the groups I've named, would you feel sympathy for my plight?  Or would you wonder, instead, about my self-esteem, my courage, my willingness to oppose evil even if it is merely insults to those I love and care about?  Might you even wonder how much I love and care about them?

It is not an unanswerable situation.  It is not a paradox without a resolution.  But the resolution is hard; it is almost superhuman one, it requires almost a saint-like composure and an almost inhuman withdrawal from the affairs of everyday life.  If I did it, who would understand me?  If I fought back, who would blame me?

It is right for Muslims to do as the Prophet taught and did.  It is right for Christians to do as Jesus and Paul taught and did.  But how far can we go in expecting others do to what we would not do?  We might not be as prompt to explode in public anger at insults to Jesus, we Christians.  But is that because we are morally superior to the angry Muslims on our TeeVee screens?  Or is it because we really don't care as much about our religious figures as they do?

Are we more spiritually pure?  Or just less spiritually concerned?

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Let me take a moment to upend some of this before it becomes ridiculous (Hah!  As if I had that power!  Nonetheless....).

As the article points out in the middle (rather than at the breathless beginning):

And this isn't the first time in human history that anyone has suggested Jesus was married.  There was the old legend of the last temptation of Christ, where Satan returned to Christ on the cross and offered him a vision of a normal life, with a wife and kids.  Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a wonderful novel on that legend.  (Does anybody read Kazantzakis anymore?  They should....).  There was an argument I heard about in seminary, that because Jesus was called "Rabbi," it implied he was married, since rabbis were supposed to be married men. (I have no idea if that is even true, about rabbis and marriage, nor when the term "rabbi" actually became a term associated both with leadership in Jewish communities, and so with marriage as a concomitant of being a community leader.  I'd also note the only consistent reference to Jesus as "Rabbi" is in the gospel of John, which dates to the late 1st century or early 2nd century).  The article mentions a 2nd century controversy about Jesus having a wife, to settle the question of whether Christians should marry (Some of Paul's letters, almost two centuries earlier, reflect similar concerns.  The more things change....)

This fragment, then, has about as much historical veracity as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, where Jesus the young child kills the children who irritate him.  The NYT, of course, plays this as if it were something found in the world of The DaVinci Code:


Yeah, I don't see much happening on that front because of this fragment of papyrus. It is interesting, though.

Give the king your justice, O Lord!







Ironic, no?  Frum puts it this way:






Would that we could have that conversation now.

Friday, September 14, 2012

Watch the doughnut....

The Onion essentially gets this right (click on over there to read it, I won't excerpt from it), and in light of the fact protests have broken out in Southeast Asia this morning (where there are more Muslims than in all of the Middle East, something easily and constantly overlooked in America, if not all of "the West"), it shows that the violent protests are not about offended religious sensibilities.

Indeed, from news reports I gather it's a fair statement that most Muslims, "upon seeing it, ... simply shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and continued on with their day."  What about all those rioters and protesters?   A vocal minority, for the first part, no more representative of the whole of their countries than the US college anti-war protestors represented even the majority sentiment of students on their college campus (all the people killed at Kent State were going to class or doing something other than protesting.  Vietnam ended not because students led marches, but because the nation got tired of the war.  Anyway....).  Why are they angry?  Probably for many reasons.  Richard Engle told Rachel Maddow last night much of it has to do with authoritarian regimes which maintained power for decades by telling the people the world was in a conspiracy against them, a conspiracy of Jews and Americans and Freemasons (yes, his word; I think he was using it for comic exaggeration).  He argued some of the anger is over the idea America would allow a film like "The Innocence of Muslims" to exist, betraying a complete misunderstanding of the concept of "free speech."  But that cultural clash was upheld not by ignorance, but by a conspiracy theory that America decried the film publicly, but privately promoted it.  Hillary Clinton's denunciations of the film, in other words, just prove the US government was behind it.

Which is the way most conspiracy theories work.  But why isn't this sentiment felt as strongly throughout the Muslim world, which would mean throughout Southeast Asia?  Could it had more to do with culture and history than religious sensitivities?  Could it possibly be connected with the unflinching support of Mubarak in Egypt, or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or the Shah of Iran?  Could it be because America supported Israel despite the fact the country was founded by kicking people out of their houses at gunpoint (I've spoken to people who lived through the establishment of Israel; sooner or later geopolitics lands on the ground and becomes one person telling another person you no longer own that, I do.).  The Palestinians got about as much in reparations as the Native Americans did, but our sympathies and our military power have never been with the Native Americans.  Either.  (Since I started this post, protests and violence have spread across the "Muslim world."  I would still note that these are all countries where the populace is likely to feel as if they have been, and have been, on the short end of the power relationship with Europe and the United States.  It's no accident the embassies being approached now are former colonial powers.  Some of the outrage, too, surely has to do with the content of the "trailer.")

So probably there are reasons people in the Middle East who are Muslims find reasons to be inflamed about depictions of their faith in the West, especially when those depictions are meant to be offensive.  Maybe it has more to do with power and powerlessness than with delicate feelings.  The fact that protests have spread to the German and British embassies today underlines that point:  those countries have no more to do with this "movie" than America does.  Maybe the insult is more grave than we want to realize, because the wounds are deeper than we want to see.  Comments on BBC's "World Have Your Say" today from Muslim countries wondered if the same outrage would be shown by Americans to an anti-Semitic "film," and others wondered by these insults are always aimed at Muslims.  It doesn't really matter that they aren't; it's the sense of insult, of being on the short end of a big stick for too long, that is being aroused.

Too much of what I already hear exists in an ahistorical vacuum where the "Muslim world" is the Middle East and not Asia or Africa, and the reactions of this "Muslim world" have no connection whatsoever to US involvement in the Middle East since at least the discovery of oil there.  This anger has roots that are not religious, but may use religion; and are not irrational, though it may lead to irrational acts.

Is it too much to ask that we watch the doughnut, not the hole?

No more pencils, no more books....


And I don't know enough about it to do that.
















Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Departed





What do we do about that?

Houston, we have a problem

Deep in the heart of Texas, Austin wants Houston (and the rest of the state)  to comply with a new state law.  Problem is, Austin is demanding Houston (and the rest of the state, not that anyone else is complaining)  violate Federal law.

The Texas Secretary of State's office, in a strongly worded letter Wednesday, said Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners likely is violating the law and jeopardizing the integrity of the Nov. 6 election in deciding not to purge presumed-dead voters from the rolls before the vote.
The number of voters affected is 9000 in Harris County, almost 73,000 statewide (or 77,000, depending on who you ask.  See the link further below).  The practice of sending out notices about voter eligibility is known as "caging," and it's not necessarily illegal or improper; except when it is:

 a) In general
In the administration of voter registration for elections for Federal office, each State shall -
(1) ensure that any eligible applicant is registered to vote in an election -
(3) provide that the name of a registrant may not be removed from the official list of eligible voters except -
(A) at the request of the registrant;
(B) as provided by State law, by reason of criminal conviction or mental incapacity; or
(C) as provided under paragraph (4);
(4) conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters by reason of -
(A) the death of the registrant....
(b) Confirmation of voter registration Any State program or activity to protect the integrity of the electoral process by ensuring the maintenance of an accurate and current voter registration roll for elections for Federal office- (1) shall be uniform, nondiscriminatory, and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. 1973 et seq.); and
(2) shall not result in the removal of the name of any person from the official list of voters registered to vote in an election for Federal office by reason of the person's failure to vote, except that nothing in this paragraph may be construed to prohibit a State from using the procedures described in subsections (c) and (d) of this section to remove an individual from the official list of eligible voters if the individual - (A) has not either notified the applicable registrar (in person or in writing) or responded during the period described in subparagraph (B) to the notice sent by the applicable registrar; and then (B) has not voted or appeared to vote in 2 or more consecutive general elections for Federal office.
(c) Voter removal programs
....(2)(A) A State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.
(B) Subparagraph (A) shall not be construed to preclude -
(i) the removal of names from official lists of voters on a basis described in paragraph (3)(A) or (B) or (4)(A) of subsection (a) of this section....

Emphasis added.

That can be a bit much to deciper (Federal law is not written to be easily deciphered!), but the upshot is this:  Texas cannot remove voters from the rolls on the grounds the voter is dead without sending out a notice to said voter, getting no response, and then waiting to see if the voter has failed to vote in 2 or more consecutive general Federal Elections.

In other words, Texas can't purge the rolls on these notices until after November, 2014, at the earliest. But it is clear the State of Texas isn't going to wait that long:

A match is strong if the last name, date of birth and all nine Social Security numbers are identical. A weak match occurs when two records have either the same nine digit Social Security number and same date of birth, or the last four Social Security numbers, the same birth date and one matching name component. A voter's registration will be canceled automatically if the match is strong, but not if the match is weak, according to the Travis County voter registrar.
 An automatic purge of voters that prevented them from voting in the November Federal Election would be a violation of Federal law.  All I'm wondering now is whether anybody is going to muster a suit over this before November.  Granted, the story only hit the press yesterday.  But this has been going on long enough that Harris County has already tried it, declined to continue it, and received a warning from the Texas Secretary of State about it.

Time's a wastin'.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Perils of the Unreliable Narrator

Yesterday, as I heard about the US Embassy in Egypt (long before the assault on the consulate in Libya), the media reported protestors were upset by a film nobody could identify.

This morning, I learn not only about the film, but that it was produced by "Sam Bacile," who talked to the AP and otherwise was in hiding.

Now, there are legitimate questions as to whether "Sam Bacile" exists.  Huffington Post says the film exists, if not Bacile, but the only evidence they cite is the clips on YouTube.  What if the YouTube video is all there is?

Every year I teach my students about point of view in literature, and the problems and pitfalls of narrators and why we believe them, and when we shouldn't.  This entire problem may be based on a pastiche which has been taken seriously by "Egypt's sometimes-raucous, often rumor-heavy media" (Atlantic) and by Egyptians, Libyans, and (most recently, as I write) Tunisians.

It may, in other words, be outraged focused on US embassies by a lens that doesn't exist and for which we cannot find the lenscrafters.

Welcome to the interconnected world.  O, what a paradise it seems!

Update: the timeline at TPM makes the whole thing even more suspicious.  I don't know who's behind it, but you can't blame it on "zealots" and "crazies."  Not just yet.

And, in the spirit of the post (that too much too soon is too unknown), there is this:
Initial accounts of the assault in Benghazi were attributed to popular anger over what was described as an American-made video that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad, which had been publicized by Egyptian media and led to a mob protest at the United States Embassy protest in Cairo on Tuesday. But administration officials in Washington said the attack in Libya may have been plotted in advance.

 Buzzfeed, btw, is thinking the way I am.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

In Memoriam

The fortunes of war favored Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army.  So his mind turned
to hall-building; he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old---
but not the common land or people's lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples.  And soon it stood there
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls.  Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table.  The hall towered
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning.  That doom abided,
but in time it would come:  the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.

from Beowulf, tr. Seamus Heaney

Thursday, September 06, 2012

Hello darkness my old friend....

For my money the better speech last night was delivered by Elizabeth Warren.  Bill Clinton did what Bill Clinton does:  he eloquently defended the status quo.  Elizabeth Warren delivered the truly radical concept that whatever you do for the least, you do for all.  She noted that things weren't always like "this," that the game is, in fact, rigged.  She never mentioned Jeremiah, but she did mention Matthew.  And her thesis was rooted in the words of the prophet(s), which are still written on the subway walls and tenement halls.  And still whispered in the sounds of silence, because none dare speak of what is right, without speaking of what is possible through power.

It could be that Ms. Warren's argument is too religious, even with that one bare mention of a Sunday school lesson explicitly stated.  We are still  surprised that the religious can be interested in others. Maybe that's because politics is only about power, not about morality.  Concern for others is the foundation of morality.  How to wield power, is the foundation of politics.  Politics can be shaped toward moral ends, but most of us aren't really interested in that; we are interested in what's in it for us, as Tom Junod illustrates in that linked post.  Mr. Junod makes two fatal mistakes there:  1)  he assumes religion, especially orthodox varieties, are always about exclusion; and 2) he assumes that politics is about what is right, rather than about power.  Elizabeth Warren came closer than anyone at the DNC to talking about what is right; Bill Clinton talked about power.

And Bill Clinton is who everybody is talking about this morning.

Charlie Pierce said Elizabeth Warren finally became a politician last night. Ms. Warren is not a completely religious figure, but I hope Mr. Pierce is not completely right.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Still running on empty....

Right after this, the Dems do this:




Yeah, whatta loada crap.  But what you don't hear President Obama reaffirming his "unshakeable commitment" to, or the party attesting and affirming is, any concern for the poor in America.

 The number of U.S. families struggling to put enough food on the table remains at record-high levels, according to new figures out today from the government. Last year, 1 in almost 7 households were what the government calls "food insecure." That's about the same level as in 2010, but still far higher than before the recession. The problem finding enough food is especially severe among households headed by single mothers with children.
That's how the article starts; this is how it ends:

The program is facing steep budget cuts in Congress, mostly from Republicans who think the economy would be better off with smaller government. Nelson says he also went to the Republican National Convention to make the case that childhood hunger has to be addressed.

"We're finding that both parties are really, to a large extent, particularly at the federal level, way too quiet on this issue," [Tom] Nelson [president of Share Our Strength]  says.

In fact, neither President Obama nor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, had any comment today about the new numbers.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré (Ret.) was right:  we are scared of the poor.  Which bothers me a helluva lot more than what words are, or are not, in a party platform.

Why I am a Democrat

