This is, apparently, the third time this particular radio station has announced the End of the World in the past twenty years or so. They obviously haven’t learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf: never repeat the same lie twice.
I threw a party on a different End of the World day back in 1989. Maybe we should host another one on May 21. Who’s in?
One of St. Petersburg’s most famous monuments is a sprawling, ornate Russian Orthodox cathedral. Unlike most of the various Orthodox cathedrals throughout Russia, this one isn’t built in the Baroque style, but is built in a style that recalls Medieval Russian architecture.
Medieval Russian architecture is modeled, it seems to me, on the basic design of a turnip. Or perhaps an onion. One of those little white kinds of onions they chop up and put on hot dogs that you get when you’re visiting Boston and you kinda feel hungry but you don’t want to waste the time it takes to go to a restaurant or something, so you stop at a street vendor who’s selling hot dogs out of a little push-cart thingy. There’s an art to finding just the right hot dog street vendor…but I digress.
The cathedral has many names. In Russian, it’s called “Собор Воскресения Христова”. In English, it’s most often referred to as the Church on Spilt Blood, but it also goes by the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, the Church of our Savior on the Blood, the Church of the Resurrection, or the Church of the Assumption.
Personally, I call it the Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot.
It was built, explained our tour guide of the Name Whose Utterance Invokes The Walking Nightmares, as a monument to Alexander II, who was assassinated on that spot in the late 1800s.
Apparently, he’d been riding along the road, just minding his own business and doing whatever it is a despotic monarch does, when some Anarchist threw a hand grenade at him. The grenade totally missed, and did little more than make some noise and frighten the horses. So Alexander, being a despotic monarch who thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted to, stopped the carriage, got out, and started yelling at the Anarchist who had just thrown a grenade at him. Whereupon another Anarchist just happened to wander by, and just happened to have a grenade in his pocket, and it was curtains for the luckless Tsar. Lacy, gently wafting curtains, on windows gilded in gold with a strange half-Greek-god, half-angel, half-tentacle-monster thing embossed over the top, but curtains nonetheless.
Alexander, like many a monarch before him, forgot the lesson so clearly articulated by Ambrose Bierce, which is that an absolute monarch can do as he pleases so long as he pleases the assassins.
His successor to the throne, the unimaginatively named Alexander III, commissioned the church to be built in the exact spot where Alexander II was sent to meet his maker in little teeny bits. Hence, Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot. There’s an important lesson in here for you, kids. When someone has just tried to kill you with an explosive device, don’t stand around arguing with him. His friends might have explosive devices, too.
And better aim.
Alexander III wanted a way to memorialize his dear departed dad. Since the first thing he did upon reaching the throne was to try his damndest to erase his father’s legacy, and since one of the ways in which he set about doing that was to fuel a revival of nationalist sentiment by strengthening the Russian Orthodox Church at the expense of other religious traditions, memorializing his rather unwise predecessor by building a church seemed like a gimme.
The place is mind-blowing, in a way that only religious edifices can be. This is what it looks like on the inside:
A few months ago, I visited a Mormon temple for the first time. Mormon temples are awe-inspiring structures, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. Every aspect of the temple’s architecture, from the choice of materials to the shape of the front door, is carefully calculated to create feelings of awe in anyone who sees them. It’s a devastatingly effective technique for emotional manipulation; if you can stir up the right feelings, you can make people forget that the religion was founded by a huckster and convicted fraud artist as a way to con people out of their money.
It works. I could probably write an entire book about creating spaces that manipulate people on an emotional level, just from one afternoon at the temple. The Disney Imagineers have nothing on the Mormons when it comes to manufacturing spaces that inspire an emotional response.
And the Mormons got nothin’ on the Eastern Orthodox architects when it comes to doing the exact same thing. It’s difficult to express in shitty low-resolution JPEGs just how incredibly affecting the architecture of this place is designed to be.
I probably need not say this by now, but yes, that’s real gold up on the walls.
The impact such a building must have had on an illiterate, poorly-educated serf must have been fiercely overwhelming. Take a guy who’s never learned to read, has never seen anything more grandiose than a wood shack or the back end of a horse, a guy whose life is metered out in units of cow manure and bales of hay, and bring him into a place like this, and he’s yours. One look around inside this cathedral and you’d be able to convince him that up is down, black is white, left is right, and there’s an invisible man who lives up in the sky and who wants him to give you money. Or his wife. Or both.
Speaking of invisible men who live up in the sky, the entire building is filled, from one end to the other, of pictures of them. The Roman Catholics don’t got nothing on the Eastern Orthodox when it comes to saints. They gots hundreds of them. They like putting pictures of all of them everywhere they can, floor to ceiling, culminating in this picture up on the central dome just in front of the altar in almost every Orthodox church:
That’s Jesus up there, in his role as Jesus, King of the Universe–a depiction which the actual person, if indeed he existed, would no doubt have found…surprising. It is a truism of Christianity that Jesus became what he set out to destroy.
But I digress.
The Russian Orthodox Church is so fond of its saints that it even puts ’em all over the screen that separates the main part of the church from the sanctuary, where the altar itself and the various widgets and objects used in the magical process of turning cheap wine and bland crackers into the stuff of ritual cannibalism is kept.
These icons dedicated to the hundreds and hundreds of sacred figures in the vast pantheon that is monotheistic Orthodox Christianity are adulated by the faithful, but it should be pointed out that this is not idolatry. The Orthodox understand that when they pray before or genuflect to an image, they are actually paying respect to the thing the image represents, not like those idolaters who build a representation of a sacred force and then pay homage to them as a way to respect the thing that the image represents. Clear?
Add the grandeur of this place to the secret magical rituals carried out by the priest class behind that screen, and our poor illiterate serf never had a chance.
The Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot is no longer an actual cathedral. When the Bolsheviks took power, they looted the place. Lenin reportedly wanted to demolish it, according to our tour guide, but was persuaded not to by some of his underlings. For a long time, it was used as a warehouse for potatoes, and it wasn’t until after the fall of the Soviet Union that anyone bothered to restore it.
Back when I was a a very young child, I used to love playing hide and go seek. Somewhat later, in my middle school days in Nebraska, I played a more elaborate version called “ditch ’em,” which pits two teams of players against one another, preferably late at night on a minimum of fifteen acres of ground or so.
A central part of the structure of both games is the concept of a “home base.” People who are on their home base can’t be tagged by the people chasing them; home base is the ultimate sanctuary.
After it was restored, the Church of Tsar Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot was never reconsecrated. Consecration is, as near as I can gather, a process by which a church or other religious structure is specially designated as a sort of religious home base in the grand theological game of tag; a consecrated structure is safe against demons or the army of the walking dead or something. If it ain’t consecrated, the rules say you can’t use it as a church, or something like that.
Since this place isn’t consecrated any more, on account of the potatoes, it’s now just a museum rather than a church. I’m not sure the distinction really matters much to Alexander II, who I’m sure if he had it to do over again would perhaps prefer to forego the honor of having the church built in his memory in favor of not being blown to bits with a grenade in the first place.
…for a bit of very funny, very clever pro-rationality ranting disguised as beat poetry. joreth and the rest of the Squiggle, this one’s for you!
From The Pharyngula blog comes this little gem, a page from a Fundamentalist Christian textbook about electricity.
Now, anyone who’s read my blog for any length of time will know I’m no fan of right-wing religious zealots. But occasionally they manage to surprise me. Sadly, they tend to surprise me by not even rising to the bar of my already abysmally low expectations; no matter how bad, how ignorant, how credulous, or how dishonest I think these guys are, they somehow manage to be worse.
Here’s the page, scanned from a fourth-grade home-schooling textbook on science (click for a larger version):
This kind of thing is the reason I cringe whenever I hear the phrase “home schooling.” I know there are home schoolers who aren’t ignorant Fundamentalist boobs, but damn, they sure do seem to be a small percentage.
The notion that someone can spout nonsense like “We can not even say where electricity comes from. Some scientists think the sun may be the source of most electricity. Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it” interspersed with Biblical passages and call the result a science textbook is, to me, beyond belief.
A part of me wants to think that whoever wrote this nonsensical tripe was deliberately lying, because the notion that the author genuinely doesn’t know what electricity is, and furthermore can’t be arsed to look it up on Wikipedia or something, blows my mind. But, no, I do think it’s at least possible that whoever wrote this passage sincerely believes what he wrote.
Taken in a larger context, though, it doesn’t matter whether or not he believes it, or understands enough basic science to understand what electricity is. (“We cannot say what electricity itself is like”? Seriously?) The goal of this book is not to educate the reader about science; indeed, I think the goal of any home-schooler using this material is not to educate their child about science.
No, the goal is something very different. It’s twofold, really. The most obvious intention here is to present the world in a way that makes it as opaque as possible, while simultaneously denigrating the ability of science to make any sense of it; science, in the minds of the Fundamentalists who write and teach drivel like this, is a haphazard conglomeration of a bunch of competing wild-ass guesses about the way things might work, each of which has no real basis in fact. Some scientists think our electricity was produced in the sun; others think that some of it might have come from the movement of the earth. (As a person in the dismal movie Jesus Camp says, “science doesn’t prove anything.”1)
The second aim of this textbook is something more subtle. There is an axiom among many religious Fundamentalists that we can never know something which we do not observe directly. This argument pops up in Creationist arguments with depressing frequency; since we can not go back and directly observe, as a firsthand eyewitness, the creation of the earth or the advent of life, we can never know how it went down; ergo, all ideas about what might have happened are equally likely. And since only one of those ideas has the imprinteur of God, that’s the most likely one. All the other ideas are merely idle speculation; since we can’t go back and see it happen, we can’t actually say we have any evidence for it. Only eyewitness evidence2 matters.
And on those counts, I think this passage does precisely what it intends to do.
1 Which might be true from a particular perspective, in the sense that the scientific method seeks hypotheses which are falsifiable, and model is only as good as the next data point which contradicts it. But the Fundies who spout “science doesnt prove anything” mean something quite different; they’re basically saying that science is not useful as a tool to understand the physical world. And that blatantly isn’t so.
2 Or the scribblings of a bunch of barely literate Bronze Age tribesmen which have been shuffled around, rearranged to suit various political factions several times throughout history, and then badly tanslated into a succession of languages, presumably.
For as long as I can remember…even, truth be told, back when I was a kid and still religious–I’ve always had a problem with the Ten Commandments.
People hold them up like they are some sort of amazing moral code that would make the world a better place, if only folks would follow them. And some of them are not bad, really. But honestly? If you set out to make ten rules of conduct that’d make the world a better place, the Ten Commandments really aren’t very good. They read like a hasty and poorly-thought-out first draft, scribbled on the back of a napkin at a greasy all-night diner rather than handed down from the divine lips of a burning bush and carved by an act of supernatural will onto tablets made of stone.
So let’s look at ’em, shall we?
#1: I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.
Okay, fine, we get it. The god of Abraham is a jealous god. In fact, the formal name of that god is not “Jehovah” or “Elohim” or “YHVH” but “Jealous,” according to Exodus 34 (“Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for The Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”).
Now, one might argue that this commandment, if it were followed, would make the world a better place, or at least one less fraught with religious warfare; if everyone is following the same god, there’s no religious strife, right?
Well, no. Protestants and Catholics, Catholics and Jews, Protestants and Jews, Protestants and Muslims, Muslims and Jews–they all find plenty of reason to beat one another up even though they nominally have the same god.
And what’s so great about a god who’s insecure, anyway? I’d give this one a miss completely.
#2: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth.
This is the one that everyone gets wrong. The Catholics, who have a rich and proud tradition of idolatry, ruled that this rule applies only to idols, but the language is pretty clear…no likeness of any thing. The original intent was to prohibit ALL representational art–an intent that portions of the Muslim community still follow today.
No representations. Virtually the entire Western world totally ignores this. Lose it. Next:
#3: Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
Another one that nobody gets right.
The ancient Israelites had a very deep set of beliefs about the power of a name (why do you think the Genesis story features Adam naming all the animals so prominently? It was a symbolic way of giving Adam power over them.) To “take the name” of someone is to call yourself that thing; if I take the name of my neighbor, it’s identity fraud. Vanity is pride. If I take the name of the Lord in vain, it means to call myself god (or, presumably, an agent thereof) out of pride.
It does not mean to say “goddamnit,” goddamnit.
But even if it did, seriously, there’s a lot more evil done in the world than folks saying “goddamnit.” Wasting ten percent of the entire moral code on this seems quite a waste to me. Lose it. Next:
#4: Remember to honor the Sabbath, and keep it holy.
Except that the Sabbath is…err, Saturday.
But what exactly does this mean? In Atlanta, it means you can’t sell beer on Sunday until the afternoon, because Jesus don’t drink beer ’til twelve o’clock, but that’s about it. Now, I can get behind the notion of having a day that’s reserved for not working, especially in a Bronze Age slave society–hell, everyone needs a day or two off. But again, reserving 10% of a universal moral code for this?
#5: Honor thy father and mother that thy days be long in the land which the Lord gives thee.
No.
Seriously, no. Even as a 5-year-old, I thought this was a terrible rule. Now, as an adult, I think it’s even worse.
Honor and respect are always earned. They are never automatic. I’ve met waaaaaay the fuck too many parents who do not deserve honor–parents who abuse their kids, parents who neglect their kids, parents who rape and sexually violate their kids.
This becomes ESPECIALLY odious when you consider that it’s a one-way street; parents are nowhere commanded to treat their children with respect, and not, y’know, rape and abuse them. Any just system of morals has to apply both ways. It cannot place bounds on the behavior of one group toward another while also tacitly permitting the second group carte blanche with the way they treat the first. This rule is fucked-up and poorly conceived from the get-go. More on it in a bit.
#6: Thou shalt not kill.
I have no problem with this one.
Nobody I know actually takes it as a given; everyone I’ve ever personally met, without exception, carves out exceptions and limitations. Like in self-defense, for instance, or defense of another. Or in war. Or if the other person is gay, or has brown skin. Or if the other person has been convicted of a capital crime, or has brown skin and lives in Texas, which is pretty much the same thing. Or when the spirit of the Lord fills him to plant pipe bombs in women’s clinics, that the Lord may blow people into bloody scraps, in His Divine Mercy.
I think the world might be a better place if people applied fewer exceptions to this rule, actually.
#7: Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Back in the days of the ancient Israelites, only women could commit adultery; if a married man slept with a woman not his wife, that was considered fornication, not adultery. The Ten Commandments were written by–err, handed down by men. They condemn only adultery specifically. Coincidence? I think not.
In any event, I can get behind the notion that it is wrong to betray the trust of a person to whom you have pledged your love. Betraying the trust of another person sucks, and it’s wrong.
But adultery, whether narrowly or widely defined, isn’t always a betrayal of trust. There can be and are people who genuinely don’t mind if their lovers have other lovers. I’m one of them. Any reasonable universal code of morality has to recognize that not everyone is the same, seems to me. More on this one in a bit, too.
#8: Thou shalt not steal.
A good start. I’d like to see language that makes it plain this applies not only to direct theft, like at the point of a gun, but also to any deliberate attempt to defraud, either a person or a group of people, through direct or indirect means (I’m looking at you here, Enron). This can and should explicitly be extended to contract fraud, price-fixing, securities fraud, pension-skimming, Ponzi schemes, bribery, counterfeiting, forgery, license fraud, kickbacks, insurance fraud, investment fraud, and so on, which are all theft in my book, and deserve to be explicitly identified as such.
#9: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not bear false witness period. Police officer who lied under oath at zaiah‘s traffic court hearing, I’m especially looking at you.
It’s interesting to me that Biblical morality does not prohibit lying; only bearing false witness, a very narrow and specific type of lying. While I am reluctant to go so far as to outlaw every form of falsehood, I think this rule could be expanded a bit.
And finally:
#10: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house or fields, nor his male or female slaves, nor his ox or ass, or anything that belongs to him.
You know, the notion of thought crime has always smelled a little rancid to me. I can see not stealing one’s neighbor’s goods, but not wanting them? That’s reaching. First, because we don’t really have a good grasp on controlling what we want; I desire an iPhone 4, but I hardly think that makes me a menace to society. Second, because detachment from desire as a general principle leads, I think, to stagnation; sometimes it’s desire that gives us the impetus to accomplish something.
Ixnay.
So out of ten commandments, we have five that I’d lose completely, a couple more that have serious problems, and some fine-tuning on the rest.
Just as important as what the Commandments say is what they DON’T say. For a list of supposedly divinely inspired moral absolutes, they sure do leave a lot of room of some pretty reprehensible stuff.
Like using violence, torture, or threat against another person, say. Or unlawfully depriving other people of what is theirs without actually stealing it…say, by burning down someone’s house. Or depriving other people of their life, property, or dignity on the basis of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on. Or engaging in corruption as part of a civic, religious, social, police, or government institution.
Or running forced labor camps like those in North Korea, where people convicted of a crime are punshed “to the third generation.”
Or, y’know, engaging in slavery, that appalling and horrific institution of evil which the Bible nevertheless accepts and condones.
So here’s a Ten Commandments as I might find it more palatable:
#1: Thou shalt not have, keep, or deal in any slaves; nor indentured servants, nor any other kind of unpaid serf; nor shalt thou traffic in human beings as chattel for any purpose.
#2: Thou shalt not deprive any person of the liberties thou claims for thyself, on the basis of that person’s religion, nor race, nor creed, nor ethnicity, nor language, nor sex, nor sexual identity, nor gender identity, nor parentage, nor occupation, nor caste.
#3: Thou shalt not hold the transgresses nor infractions of the law against any individual save for those who committed those transgresses, or caused by act of will the transgresses to be committed; thou shalt not hold the sins of the father against the son, nor of the aunt against the niece.
#4: Thou shalt not use torture, nor threat of torture, in any way for any means, whether to interrogate or to coerce any statement from any person.
#5. Honor thy family, and treat them with respect and compassion, if thou expects respect and compassion in return. Thou shalt not commit any abuses upon those in thy care, nor abuse others, but shall instead seek to treat all persons with the respect and compassion thou feels is thy due; and to acknowledge that we are all family.
#6: Thou shalt not kill, nor justify killing in the name of any god who thou dost worship; for surely any such god does not deserve thy worship. Thou shalt not commit violence upon another. Thou shalt return violence for violence only as a last resort, and only to the extent necessary and no more.
#7: Thou shalt not betray the covenants of thy relationships with thy spouse or spouses, or thy lovers or romantic partners.
#8: Thou shalt not steal, nor deprive of others their possessions or property by any unlawful means, direct or indirect. Thou shalt not extort, nor seek through violence, trickery, coercion, graft, extortion, falsehood, scam, or misrepresentation to obtain that which belongs to another.
#9: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, nor seek through falsehoods or misrepresentation, direct or indirect, to manipulate, control, or coerce other people.
#10: Thou shalt not deprive unlawfully thy neighbor or any other person of his property, his money, or anything else which belongs to him, by taking it for yourself, by destroying it, or by otherwise maliciously preventing him from using it. Thou shalt not poison nor pollute thy neighbor’s land or his fields, or the air he breathes.
Honestly, I think my version is a lot better than the first draft in the Bible.
In 1977, a guy named Stewart Parnell founded a company called Peanut Corporation of America. Parnell built the company into an enormous supplier of peanut butter, primarily for candy makers, that eventually was responsible for about two and a half percent of the nation’s total production of peanut butter. He had a very simple strategy for business success: underbid everyone.
Peanut Corporation of America made tens of millions of dollars a year but ran on a shoestring budget. In fact, Parnell Was so cheap that some of his processing plants were unlicensed and unregistered; he ran a plant in Plainview, Texas, that the state government didn’t even know existed.
Which is an awesome money-saver, if you think about it. You can’t be forced to comply with inspection results if the facility is never inspected; you don’t have to worry about FDA regulations or compliance with OSHA mandates if the FDA and OSHA don’t know you exist.
This is actually a post about religion, and not, say, Libertarianism. Hang on, I’m getting there.
Anyway, as you might expect, this approach to business had a predictable result. In 2008, nearly 700 people had food poisoning from peanut butter produced by Peanut Corporation of America, and nine of them died. A massive recall was launched, the government started inspecting Peanut Corporation of America facilities and discovered a horror show (peanut butter that was shipped even though the company knew it was contaminated with salmonella, leaky plant roofs, air conditioning systems that sucked bird shit from the roofs and sprayed it over vats of peanuts, that sort of thing. The plants were closed by the government, the company went bankrupt, and there are still Federal investigations pending against our hero, Mr. Parnell.
All this did lead to one humorous moment, when he was called to testify before Congress and took the fifth when he was asked to eat some of his own peanut butter. Mad lulz aside, though, it seems Mr. Parnell is a very bad man.
He’s also a very bad man with an unimpeachable religious pedigree. He belongs to that particular school of Evangelical Christianity prominent in his home town of Lynchburg, VA. His sister was married to a relative of Jerry Falwell’s family, and he himself was a conservative Southern Baptist.
Now, one of the things we hear about religion is that religion serves a valuable social function by providing a framework of morality. Morals, the religious say, are codes of conduct created and sanctioned by God to direct human behavior toward one another, and indeed some religions claim some morals which are, in fact, good ways to behave.
The problem is that the moral values promoted by religions, especially conservative religions, tend not to focus very heavily on things like “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”–a value claimed by many religious tradition but not really advocated very strongly by most of them. Instead, the moral values are more often, it seems to me, promoted as arbitrary lists of things you’re supposed to do and things you’re not supposed to do, with no coherent underlying logic to them.
And it seems a lot of them are about sex.
When you look at the major organized religions in the United States, and examine their moral teachings closely, you can’t help but come away with the notion that God is nothing short of obsessed with what goes on with our crotches.
This obsession with sex extends to social ideas about morality. If someone tells you “I have strong morals” or “I believe in good moral values,” you can be pretty sure that what they’re talking about is sex.
And they’re probably not going to follow those statements up with “I believe that people should do unto others as they would have done unto them,” either. For all the fact that religion likes to give lip service to notions like that, I doubt many “moral values” folks actually say “That’s why I believe in people making their own choices about who they have sex with, because I want them to let me make my own choices about these things.”
There are all sorts of reasons why institutional power structures are obsessed with sex. It’s a great hook; control people’s basic drives and you control the people. It’s an inevitable outcome of the way our brains work; fMRI studies have suggested that people who hold socially conservative ideas are strongly motivated by feelings of disgust, and tend, by and large, to believe that if something makes them feel an emotion of disgust, their emotional response is proof that the thing itself must be inherently wrong. It’s a characteristic of the way we form social bonds; we are strongly driven, as part of our evolutionary heritage, to divide social groups into “in” groups and “out” groups, and to seek differences to delineate those groups.
And so on, and so on. None of those things is really all that interesting, I think; it’s all just part of the tedious and yucky parts of how social power structures flow, as disagreeable but inevitable in its operation as the flow of sewage through a city’s pipes, and often just as pungent.
That’s not the bit I think is important. The drab banality of institutionalized power isn’t, for me, the most disappointing thing thing about organized religion. The most disappointing thing, to me, is the way that such organizations have seized the mantle of moral authority and then utterly fumbled it, to the detriment of society as a whole.
So many religions have made such vigorous claim to the throne of moral arbitration that there are actually people who believe that without religion, a person can not be moral. People ask ridiculous questions like “Can atheists be sexually moral?” Commentators claim that without a god, a person can not have “morality in his heart;” and some people even point to the fact that the non-religious are less obsessed with sex than the religious as proof that those without religion are less moral.
But having successfully made the argument to a great many people that they and they alone can protect and promote morality, what do they do with it? That’s the part that disappoints me.
You can argue, of course, that men like Stewart Parnell are driven by greed, and would not behave in moral ways regardless of the teachings of their adopted religions. And that might be true. But the fact is, the major religious organizations tend to focus so heavily on sex as the beginning and end of morality that other lessons are let slip by the wayside.
When a person adopts the idea that morality is primarily about the goings-on in his crotch, a dangerous thing happens. That person can very easily say to himself “I m a good person; I don’t cheat on my wife, have premarital sex,lie with other men as I lie with women, or do her up the poop chute. I am a moral person; immorality is about my sexual behavior, and I keep my sexual behavior confined within the proper parameters.” And once a person says “I am a moral person,” he may stop watchdogging his decisions. He doesn’t question the moral nature of his own actions, because, after all, morality is about sex, right?
I’m not saying that religions don’t talk about the moral dimension of things besides sex. But I am saying that, by and large, so much emphasis is placed on sex that they don’t make the case for an overarching, coherent foundation or morality; they don’t argue that morality is ultimately founded on the notion that you should treat others with compassion and respect, and not make decisions which adversely affect the lives of others.
By, for example, selling them contaminated peanut butter.
And they can’t. They can’t make this case, because if they do, many of the constraints they place on sex begin to look like anomalies, arbitrary rules not founded in any sort of notion of treating others with compassion and respect.
Looked at through the lens of treating others the way they want to be treated, there is nothing immoral about, say, oral sex. Or sex with two partners, if all the people involved are on board with that. Or masturbation. These things don’t fit the notion of morality as a framework that prevents people from doing harmful things to one another; they aren’t harmful.
In fact, if you assume that framework for moral choices, prohibitions on masturbation begin to look downright stupid, and a god who would send someone to an eternity of suffering simpy for touching herself begins to look vicious and petty.
Especially if you accept that it was that very same god who put our wibbly bits within arm’s reach in the first place.
Morality is not about memorizing a set of rules. It is, when it is most properly applied, an entire system of ethical decision-making, one that places a watchdog within us which examines our choices in light of the way those choices affect others. It is an internally consistent set of checks and balances, which reminds us to place ourselves and our actions within a larger context and take responsibility for the effects of those actions on other people.
Masturbating isn’t immoral. Poisoning seven hundred people with products that you know to be contaminated because you can make money by doing it, is. By creating the perception that morality is first and foremost about sex, the large religious institutions have consolidated social power and, in the act, destroyed their own moral credibility. They have failed to teach morality as more than a list of rules about who to fuck, when to fuck, and in what position to fuck, and in so doing they have exerted a harmful influence on society as a whole. The Catholic church, for instances, focuses so heavily on ideas of sex that they condemn the use of condoms in AIDS-ravaged Africa, a moral teaching which helps promote the very human misery and suffering they then spend millions to try to relieve. Conservative Islamic teachings on sex are so repressive that to a Fundamentalist Muslim, paradise is a seedy gang bang out of a 70s porn flick, where the pious can look forward to the awkward ministrations of 72 sexually inexperienced women.
This weird, obsessive-compulsive fixation on sex will have to end before any religious institution can really become the moral authority they all claim to be.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some peanut butter eggs to eat. I hope the company that made them isn’t owned by a conservative Christian.
My browser has 32 open windows, so you all know what that means: time for another list of Linky-Links, where we see who fed it and who ate it all across the Whacky Wide Web!
This episode seems to have a special theme: those whacky Christian fundamentalists, up to their silly hijinks in their classic laugh-a-minute way that we all know and love.
So without further ado, on to the links!
First up, we have this breaking news from Muckflash: Christian Group to Produce Clean Pornography.
The group, recently incorporated as the Southern Coalition for Progressive and Pure Change (an obscure sub-branch of the International Congress of Church and Ministries), will pay for the production of 5 films which they say will act as a “stepping stone away from iniquity” as viewers use the films as an intermediate step as they “switch paths from the sexually impure world of the devil to the white shining path of the Lord.”
“We’re envisioning a kind of ‘nicotine patch’ for the tortured souls that struggle in this world to find a Christian voice in the midst of a popular culture that has lost the Word of God in a heathen cacophony of selfish desire,” said Reverend Dr. Stanley Lovett, Founder and Executive Director of SCPPC.
Let’s not forget the subtext of racism and good old-fashioned slave-era stereotypes about blacks, which tend to follow conservative Christianity like flies following a charnel wagon:
Dr. Lovett was willing to give a general description of the the first film, however. According to Lovett, Jodie and the Great Black Whale will feature an 18 year old missionary in Jamaica who is swayed by native temptors into working as an exotic dancer.
And just in time, too, because over at the God and Science site, we learn that pornography leads to sex with robots, and sex with robots leads to the extinction of the human race.
The data underlying the “radical” predictions laid out in this page come from scientific studies that have examined the pervasiveness and effects of pornography upon men and women. In particular, recent data show widespread acceptance of pornography among today’s young adults as “an acceptable way to express one’s sexuality.”1 For males the acceptance rate is 67% compared to 37% for their fathers. Among young adult women the acceptance rate is 49% compared to 20% among their mothers. So, the rate of acceptance of pornography has doubled in just one generation. When those young adults raise their own children, the acceptance rate will probably be greater than 80% for both males and females. The step between watching pornography through technology and engaging in sex acts through an attractive technological object is not that far, especially when the object acts as if it were a real human being.
I don’t know what’s more silly about this article–the notion that human beings don’t actually sex out to have babies and certainly won’t go out of their way to have one if there’s a convenient, non-baby-making alternative, or the even more insulting notion that human relationships are a dismal, unhappy affair, filled with complication and weighed down by erratic, moody women, and that anyone who could skip the whole sordid mess by having sex with robots would never want human companionship.
The Religious Right truly is the village idiot of American culture. These guys never cease to blow my mind with their bizarre misunderstanding of basic human emotion. They really, truly do not get it, on a level that borders on autistic.
Oh, and anti-intellectualism. Mustn’t forget anti-intellectualism. Over on the NY Times Stanley Fish blog comes this astonishing condemnation of intellectual enquiry, Does Curiosity Kill More than the Cat?
Most conservative Christians seem content to keep anti-intellectualism as the subtext of their basic world view. Not so for Stanley, who puts it right out there:
In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship.
And finally, PZ Myers posted this little gem, which neatly sums it all up:
