True believers tend to only see things that they think support their arguments and for conspiracy theorists everything (no matter how apparently irrelevant or mundane) is imbued with great significance.

And it’s difficult not to see some religionists in these dimensions. For certain factions whenever something bad or ominous happens it’s because you’re not following God’s divine plan (whatever that is).

The Catch The Fire Ministries website concluded that the dire floods experienced in Queensland, Australia, were… erm…. Well read for yourself, Daniel Nalliah writes:

Then at once I was reminded of Kevin Rudd speaking against Israel in Israel on 14th December 2010. It is very interesting that Kevin Rudd is from QLD. Is God trying to get our attention? Yes, I believe so.

[...]

Australia’s Rudd urged Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and open all its nuclear facilities to UN inspectors.

Apparently God doesn’t want the United Nations to know what Israel’s doing with Nuclear power (and arms?)… who knew, right?! And pity any one known to anybody who makes suggestions to contrary.

Curiously – if these evangelical groups are to believed – words irritate God much more than actions. Kevin Rudd’s supposed mistake was talking about Israel. Similarly what really bothers God is not that homosexuals exist, or that they serve in the US military, but rather that people are talking about them! Times were so much easier and less doomsday-esque back when people weren’t allowed to ask or tell.

And how does God show his displeasure at this? By knocking birds out of the sky, apparently.

A comment on the SFGate.com coverage of Cindy Jacobs’ comments by MattySF is both amusing and telling of the kind of ‘leaps’ (of faith and logic) sometimes taken.

This woman is totally on to something. I looked it up and gay marriage was legalized in Canada on July 20th, 2005. Just a month later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. I mean, you can’t dispute that because, ya know, there are um…the French Canadians….and uhhh, Louisiana has a lot of French culture in it. Oh, and the French LOVE THE GAYS! So uhhh, yeah. In summation – gay marriage leads to hurricanes which is all because the French love the gays. It’s the lord speaking to us, people!!

Happy Sunday!

I made the mistake of waking up to television news earlier in the week. Ordinarily I dip in and out of the news stories as the television plays in the background. But there seemed to be one story dominating that morning, a push to legalise gay marriage in Australia… or at least broach the subject in a parliamentary setting.

Only… as the day progressed the outcome looked very bleak indeed. It seemed the subject of ‘gay marriage’ was just a window dressing to more widely held misgivings about gay people. Newspapers carried opinion pieces on how gay parents would never be a suitable parallel to heterosexual parents. Politicians ducked and weaved, doing the slippery slide for which I suppose they’re celebrated, avoiding questions, avoiding declarations. Gay people aren’t as important as ‘community consensus’ and none of them seemed too sure what that was exactly. I was particularly disillusioned with a transcript of a doorstep interview with Malcolm Turnbull which seemed to suggest there was no benefit in doing anything until everyone within the community was on board with the idea.

More closely to home a tiny little opinion poll at the bottom of the website for Federal Member for Gilmore Joanna Gash actually suggested this region was surprisingly liberally minded. This frankly took me a little by surprise. But home town pride was short lived as a local church leaped into action. They were apparently horrified that the media would have a field day with the results. They sent out an instruction to their entire congregation to remedy the survey results. Apparently it was part of their ‘righteous mission.’

Despondent, I sent a message to a friend. He expressed something I was reluctant to think – let alone say. “Religion is stupid,” he explained. “I’m sorry but it is.” I smiled a little reading it. The truth was despite not being a religious person myself, despite not having a religious affiliation, I had always been a big proponent of religion. I saw some of my friends taking part in religious practice and could see it as a largely positive influence in their lives. I wanted them to have that. In truth I was secretly fascinated by religion. I clung to the edges of the subject and explored different traditions and theological ideas, if at a distance.

But I was feeling increasingly uneasy by it all. Religion seemed too abstract, too malleable. Like reading a painting it was all too subjective. God can be – and is – anything you want him (her? it?) to be. The word of God is whatever text you want it to be, whatever translation you want it to be. It is as literal or as allegorical as you choose. It is a product of the time in which it was produced or a volume of timeless unwavering universal wisdom. And, of course, and perhaps most sobering, your unique point of view is (if you’ll forgive the pun) ‘gospel’ and all those other wretches are just terribly mistaken…

Of course there are others who have put it more succinctly and eloquently than I ever could. I think particularly of former Archbishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway, who was himself largely disenchanted with the way homosexuality was treated within his own tradition. In a talk titled ‘Shaking the Kaleidoscope’ he explains:

There isn’t a real divine broadcaster, there isn’t a real God; religion is a work of the human imagination. It is a work of art, like a great opera, like a great fiction system. So all this revelation that we’ve been receiving, all this talk that we’ve been doing, is us talking to ourselves. But that does not reduce its meaning or value, it’s good talk, it’s powerful talk, it’s meaningful talk, it’s us telling ourselves stories, offering ourselves narrative to try and explain the mystery of our own existence.

I think too of authors of fiction who tell me emphatically that the way to get to ‘truth’ is through fiction. At face value this statement seems silly and flawed. I imagine they mean that one can explore themes and issues through the course of their stories. So in this way Harry Potter might be get you to truths about friendship and loyalty and courage even though Mr. Potter himself never existed. But I worry this kind of ‘truth telling’ could work equally well in promoting propaganda. So how do we evaluate the ‘meaningful talk’ of religion, and how and when do we use it?

And yes, frankly, who is using it…?

At the present time (certainly in this country) we seem to have one section of the population telling another section of the population what they can and cannot do. The fact that these orders are coming not from law enforcement agencies but rather religious institutions is of particular concern. Remember: religion is opt-in. The term ‘coercive religion’ is used to describe religions that exert pressure on their congregation, but you might equally use the more informal term ‘cult.’ It is also bothersome that certain religions want to dictate how non-followers live their lives. Can you imagine the outrage if the Catholic Church started ordering Islamic people around? Perhaps it is time to defend the rights of secular non-religionists with the same rigor that religionists protect their own rights.

Happy Sunday!

Last week’s The Spirit of Things saw Rachael Kohn talking to Marion Maddox about ‘Mega Churches.’ In Australia we probably most closely identify this idea with the Hillsong Church. I found this quote about the ‘vision’ of mega churches quite fascinating.

Marion Maddox:

Well growth is certainly a big part of it. Growth in numbers, growth in excitement, growth in the feeling that something’s happening, there’s always something very exciting about to happen. God is going to deliver something wonderful for us any minute now. One of the features of mega churches is that they have what sociologists of religion call a high level of churn, so other churches often look within the mega churches and notice that they have a real demographic bubble around 18-30 age group, but it’s an interesting thing that a mega church that has been going for 20 years, 20 years ago had that same demographic bubble of the 18-30s and still has that same demographic bubble, so they’re not the same people who were there 20 years ago. People often say, ‘A wide front door, but a lot of small back doors’. People come in but they also move out.

One reason for that is that the vision is all about growth and positiveness and being who you want to be and just as the leader visions what the church should be, individuals are encouraged to vision who they want to be, and this works very well, as long as you’re getting promotions and your career’s on the up, and your family’s growing. It doesn’t sustain you so well when your spouse gets a terminal illness or one of your children runs into serious difficulties, or you yourself face life crises of one sort of another to be turning up to church where every week there are praise notices about everyone else in the congregation, who’s finally got the house or the car or the job they wanted and these things are prayed for and given thanks for when they happen, can be a dispiriting message if you’re not getting there.

Happy Sunday!

I’m standing around at an 80th birthday celebration for a distant relative. I have my jacket zipped up (it’s cold). My mother turns to me and asks, “What t-shirt are you wearing?”

I look at her curiously for a moment.

“Because some people have been telling me how impressed they were to see a young person wearing a t-shirt with a religious message.”

My mother knows me well enough to realise I don’t possess such a t-shirt, and I laugh to myself at the source of the confusion.

One of my favourite computer games is DOOM. I couldn’t tell you much about the game’s storyline but essentially you go around killing monsters and people. I played it when I was in high school, infact after a particularly gruelling day it seemed therapeutic to put the cheats on and take my frustrations out on these pixellated characters.

Some months ago I decided to honour a few of my different interests by buying tshirts about them from RedBubble. I bought one tshirt with a Space Invader character on it, another that featured a scifi pulp magazine cover artwork, Mario (of Super Mario Brothers) with his arm up in the air and in the style and colour of those Obama posters. And I also bought a tshirt design inspired by the Doom computer game.

The Doom shirt reads:

IDDQD: The Secret To Eternal Life

This isn’t a religious message – at least not of any religion I am familiar with – it is the cheat code for so-called ‘God Mode’. The secret to eternal life is super powers and invicibility… not saviour via Jesus Christ.

It made me laugh anyway.

Happy Sunday!

It might surprise many of you to know that a lot of thought goes into these ocassional blog entries pertaining to the subject of religion. Though despite knowing that Easter was coming up for a very long time and reflecting upon many different things from many different angles, I confess I haven’t anything particularly fascinating to say.

I would however like to leave you with some words from Canada’s best known religion writer, Tom Harpur. The Spirit Of Things‘ Rachael Kohn asked if those reading the Bible literally were ‘getting the message wrong.’

Tom Harpur:

I think yes, I think they are getting parts of it very wrong. I mean for example, if you’re on a Billy Graham Crusade and you hear him preaching, this whole picture of yourself as a massa damnata or whatever it was St Augustine called it – a mass of sin – and you have be dangled over the flames of hell in order to be sufficiently needy that you reach out for the answer that they ust so conveniently have ready to hand you. I think doing that to people can be very cruel. I know people who went to the Billy Graham Crusade with deep, deep, deep problems and got ‘saved’ and went out later on and took their own life.

This happened with an Oxford student friend of mine, and Billy came to Oxford. You know, I’m not blaming Billy for that. But the last thing this person needed was to be told there was some instant answer to his need, or to be told that he was the terrible sinful person in the eyes of God needing the shed blood of someone long ago. Does that make any sense anyway really? It doesn’t make any sense to me. And I don’t think it makes very much sense to an awful lot of people who stop to really think about it. Does it make sense that one person could take on himself the sins of Buchenwald and Auschwitz and all the camps? I mean just to mention one sick phase in our history. Could all the sin of all the people of all the world be taken away by any amount of blood of any amount of perfect paragons? I don’t think so.

Happy Easter…

A. J. Jacobs is the author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. He gave a great talk at TED.

Jacobs had some great things to say on a range of subjects but there’s one I really wanted to zero in on and look at today, because – as long time readers will know – it is something I’ve been preoccupied with for a really long time. Specifically, when evaluating the Bible as a religious text, how do you negiotate which things are most imperative and which are dispensable?

I always think of that line Ned Flanders delivers in The Simpsons:

I’ve followed everything it says in the bible – even those bits that contradict the other bits.

A. J. Jacobs:

And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose. And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible. And I failed miserably. Because you can’t. You have to pick and choose, and anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing. The key is to pick and choose the right parts. There’s the phrase called cafeteria religion, and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way, and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s just cafeteria religion. You’re just picking and choosing.” But my argument is, “What’s wrong with cafeterias?” I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some meals that make me want to dry heave. So, it’s about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion, about tolerance, about loving your neighbor, as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin, or intolerance, or violence, which are very much in the Bible as well. So if we are to find any meaning in this book, then we have to really engage it, and wrestle with it.

In the talk Jacobs compares the Bible to Wikipedia, in the sense that it has “all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years. And it’s sort of evolved. It’s not a book that was written and came down from on high.” He notes too the approach of the Red Letter Christians, those who emphasise the words apparently spoken by Jesus Christ over the contribution of those other authors and editors.

So how do you wrestle with a religious text if you can’t take it literally? And what’s so great about literal interpretations anyway? Can you practice a religion without adhering to the traditional norms and practice of that religion?

Mona Eltahawy, speaking to Rachael Kohn on The Spirit Of Things, explored the perceived relationship between conservatism and authencity.

Mona Eltahawy:

I think also at the heart of this argument is this idea that conservative equals authentic, and that the more conservative you are, the better of whatever religion you are. And I oppose this idea vigorously because I’m a liberal Muslim and I’m also an authentic Muslim. But the kind of Muslim you see in the media is always the conservative Muslim who wants to speak for me. So it’s always the man who has a long beard and very, very severe and very strict, and the more covered up the woman is, the more authentic she must be. Well I am not covered up and I am a Muslim, and I demand to be taken seriously as a Muslim.

Something to think about. So how do you pick and choose?

Happy Sunday.

Meaning is a funny thing.

A boy, when asked to draw something that reminded him of Christmas, draws a stick figure character (apparently) of Jesus Christ. The boy is promptly sent home and sent off for psychological evaluation. It was a reaction that had even some of my atheist friends crying “overkill.” Was this political correctness gone mad? An extreme action to enforce some sort of separation between church and state? An appropriate response from a concerned teacher (in a nation with a particular history of school shootings)?

Who knows… Infact the more you dig into the story, the more confusing it becomes. But what interests me here is religion and it’s symbols. It is one thing to associate Jesus with Christmas, but why the crucifix? I mean, don’t misunderstand me; the cross is an important part of the Jesus story. It is symbolic of the sacrifice God made obtensibly on behalf of all of humanity. But it is the domain of the Easter story. Christmas is more concerned with baby Jesus, the immaculate virgin birth.

Or is it?

Clay Nelson on Christmas, Theologies and Billboards:

To make the news at Christmas it seems a priest just has to question the ‘literal-ness’ of a virgin giving birth. Many in society mistakenly think that to challenge literalism is to challenge the norms of Christianity. What progressive interpretations try to do, however, is to remove the supernatural fluff and delve into the deeper spiritual truth of this festival. Christian fundamentalism believes a supernatural male God who lived above sent his sperm into the womb of the virgin Mary. Although there were a series of miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth – like wandering stars and angelic choirs – the real miracle was his death and ressurrection 33 years later.

In the Fortean Times 1993 Diary, compiled by Paul Sieveking and Val Stevenson, there is an interesting note on the 21st January (incidentally my own birthday). It reads:

The day of St. Agnes, patron saint of sheep. She is probably the Roman-Jewish version of Agna, an incarnation of the Ewe goddess Rachel. Like the Virgin Mary, she came from ‘immaculate’ parents. In spite of being pre-Christian, not to mention closely connected with sacred prostitutes, her relics are preserved in Rome and constantly adored by the faithful. Unfortunately for her credibility, Agnes is said to have been martyred in the reign of Constantine – when Christians were not persecuted.

Two thoughts occur to me. Just how rare were ‘immaculate’ births; and how problematic such tales must be if we cannot confirm the circumstances of a person’s death (what with dying – unlike immaculate conception – being an observed and documented phenomena)?

Of course these things are just the tip of a much more problematic iceberg. It is the kind of iceberg that Clay Nelson alludes to. It is this underlying conflict between literalism and non-literal readings of texts within the same traditions. Even listening to Nelson’s sermon for the first time I wondered why some sections were (as he puts it) “supernatural fluff” and others were “miraculous.”

Increasingly I encounter religious proponents who stress the importance of not taking religious texts so literally. Take for example Brian McLaren’s take on the Book of Relevation:

My background, before becoming a pastor, I was a college English teacher, so my background was literature, and that’s been something of an advantage to me in approaching the Biblical text because when you study literature, one of the first questions you ask is ‘What’s the genre of this piece of literature’ and the Book of Revelation is in the genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature. We had dozens of examples of this genre from about the 2nd century BC to the 1st and 2nd century AD, and when you put the Book of Revelation back into that genre, just like putting Jesus back in a setting, you put that document back in a setting, you read it completely differently. It stops being a prediction about the end of the world and it becomes a way to talk about what was going on at that moment.

Now there are two theories about the Book of Revelation. One is that it was written in the 60s and the other in the 90s, but either way it was written under a period of intense persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor, and they were being killed and brutally persecuted and blamed for all kinds of things. And under that regime, the Book of Revelation says ‘Don’t give up hope, don’t give up your faith, in the end it will triumph.’ But it uses subversive language to do that, and what’s happened is, without being aware of the rules of the genre, people have interpreted it to say all kinds of outrageous things.

Genre and historical context should help with understanding religious texts, but I suspect where these things aren’t known to the reader, the meaning becomes a very open ended thing. This is what it says, and this is what it means.

I am reminded of a musician and composer I once worked for. She had released an album of mostly improvised piano pieces. She was set to play one on live television. “Is that how long it goes for?” a segment producer asked. She answered the question with yet another question. “How long do you want it to be?”

Merry Christmas!

Something has really been pissing me off lately. And actually it’s something that I haven’t ever really had much emotional investment in until very recently. Because I always thought it was a legal construct, a formality, but actually within the last week I think it’s affecting people’s psyches in ways I certainly hadn’t considered. I might write about this some more in the future – but I tell you all this just to explain that the video I’m about to quote wasn’t the one I went looking for, though I thought it embodied something worth sharing…

YouTuber 1938Superman made a video titled Milgram Religion. The video is about 25 minutes long. He makes a lot of points within that time, but there was one I wanted to really focus on here.

1938Superman:

I put it out as plainly as I could. Your religious views are yours. Other people who don’t believe what you believe shouldn’t be subject to them. That’s most of the reason your religious views shouldn’t be involved in making laws, because your religious views govern the people that believe that religion, while the laws are supposed to govern everybody. And you wouldn’t find it very favorable if someone who had different religious views than you was having their religion infused into the laws and you had to follow the philosophies and rules and laws of their religion or you’d be arrested. By our own legal process you would be forced to follow them. You wouldn’t like that.

I wonder if this mentality doesn’t hark back to times when we didn’t have the kind of racial and religious diversity we see today. Times when a ruling monarch actually did set the religious standards and they were enforceable in this way, that there was this meshing of religion, law and power. I imagine in some special instances – say, Vatican City, for example – that this is probably still the case.

I am always slightly bemused when people tell me “Australia is a Christian country.” Even if you resist the urge to take this literally, to think that this piece of dirt has a religion (and that it has nothing to do with Aboriginal mysticism), it is usually cited as an excuse to enforce a kind of social norm. And, actually, we see this all the time in Australia, even in more secular pursuits. The Melbourne Cup, for example. If you don’t place a bet on this celebrated horse racing event or have a drink on this day, you’re clearly “UnAustralian.” (Never mind the terrible social consequences such an attitude might have on those suffering from gambling addictions and alcoholism.) You’ll be harassed if you don’t participate in this ritual, but you won’t be arrested – and that’s kind of the point, I think.

This is what is at the heart of the separation of church and state, this understanding that certain things apply to certain people in certain contexts. And religion is tribal, religion is ‘opt-in’. You are initiated into a tradition in one fashion or another. You choose to do certain specific things and identify as part of a specific group. Other people identify with other traditions and participate in other rituals.

I think Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence, talking to Rachel Kohn on The Spirit of Things, makes this point well.

Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence:

As Rebecca was saying before, you say a certain food isn’t allowed and it creates some kind of desire. Within the Torah we’re given a whole slew of animals, many of which are not readily accessible, but others which are, like a pig or a camel, that we’re not allowed to eat, and meat with milk that we’re not allowed to eat.

On the verse that I referred to before, it says you should be holy, and that meant you should separate, so Nachmanides says if you’re walking past a butcher’s shop and you see this huge pig hanging up there, you’re not supposed to say ‘How revolting, how terrible, how could people eat such things?’ You’re supposed to say, that you know, ‘This is food and God has provided in the world, but it’s not for me to eat’ and I’ve got a measure of self-censorship in that.

Here eating pork is not in and of itself a bad thing necessarily, those keeping Kosher are motivated by the commitment they made within their tradition. You’ll note the expression “self-censorship” here. You could perhaps argue that the act of consuming certain foods and not others here is of less importance than the commitment to the tradition that the act represents.

I understand that proponents of specific religious traditions may wish that everyone should embrace their particular tradition. (Many of the world’s religions are deeply rooted in proselytizing traditions.) Though such a push would result in less authenicity among religious practitioners because to participate authentically within religion requires faith and commitment.

I’m reminded of the remark of Twitter user @NZAfro:

I hate it when people say they pray for me. I ask them not to! I’m atheist, that’s like eating a chicken to help a vegetarian!

Happy Sunday!

I recently mused over the word play of a local church sign. The puns were so cringeworthingly awful that I couldn’t help but laugh. “The Best Vitamin For A Christian is B1,” it exclaimed. And during another week, “Give the devil an inch and he’ll become a ruler.”

Today’s message me wonder. It read:

Silence is often misinterpreted but it is never misquoted.

[ad#adsense250]The links between the other messages and Christianity seemed obvious. This one had me slightly baffled. You can never misquote Jesus’ silence? Something about the church’s response to systematic sexual abuse within the clergy? Perhaps the local Presbyterian church reached a conclusion similar to that of my friend Daniel. He ultimately decided that God answered prayers in the same way a piece of cheese did. Of course I’m being silly. God answers all prayers it is just that sometimes the answer is no… or [the sound of crickets chirping]

One group of people who will not go quietly however are New South Wales HSC students. Religion students are crying foul at one of questions that appeared on their final exam, which apparently baffled many students and reduced some to tears.

The thing that interested me though was the subject matter of the offending question. According to ABC News online:

She [McAuley Catholic College student Lauren Priest] says the question began with a quote and then asked students to assess, in relation to the quote, how Christianity is a living religious tradition in the life of its adherents.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you must, but has the Department of Education done a deal with the Bible Society? It seems interesting that such a question should coincide with the Bible Society’s “Jesus: All About Life” campaign.

I don’t know what this quote was, or who was quoted. I’m not even familiar with the curriculum for this subject. But, wow, if students at a Catholic College can’t make a case for Christianity as a living religious tradition… that’s kind of “interesting” – don’t you think?

Happy Sunday!

I fear I may have been a tad too generous in thinking there might’ve been a more thoughtful purpose to the Bible Society’s Jesus: All About Life advertising campaign than prosletysing… A Bible Society brochure has cleared up all the question marks.

From the brochure:

The ‘Jesus. All About Life’ campaign is all about helping you understand what Jesus said about what he called ‘the abundant life’ or ‘life to the max.’ Many people find this hard to accept because they think that being a Christian means you have to stop doing anything you enjoy and instead walk around being boring and dull.

You think so? Really? The primary reason that people opt for a non-Christian religious practice (or no religious practice) is because they’re worried about walking “around being bored and dull”? You don’t think belief or life experience might factor into this equation?

[ad#adsense250]That there was human life before Jesus, that there were other religious traditions before and after Christianity, that there were (as Tom Harpur noted) “Christ figures [plural] and Christ communities and many Christianities” are of no consequence here. That is unsurprising; uncertainities do not create converts, especially not within people who base their religious orientation on its proximity to excitement and ‘life to the max.’

The trick is to reframe the whole experience. You’re not being ‘converted’ rather you’re discovering how to experience ‘an abundant life.’ The three steps towards this process involve accepting Jesus (as “not just another spiritual option…” but as God), asking (specifically about the death and ressurrection of Jesus and atonement), and finally changing (converting?)…

Increasingly when I approach the subject of religion I am noticing two distinct camps of people. Those that have a very visceral experience of their religious practice, they tend to talk in expressions that embody and celebrate their belief. They might exclaim, “God is love!” or “Jesus loves me” and feel loved. Often these people don’t have a particularly sophisticated theology, and you could probably argue that they don’t need one. (I think from the earlier remark about walking ‘around being boring and dull’ it is safe to assume that these are the kind of people being targeted by this campaign.) Then there are other people who consider religious ideas as ideas, and consider them in a context much larger than their own religious tradition. I don’t particularly understand how one could commit to a religion without a thoughtful discourse about revelation, particularly, and atonement. Because really religion isn’t about morality necessarily, it is about the divine and the mysterious – the mysterium tremendum, it is about the nature and existence of God and whether that force reveals itself and interacts with humanity or not. And what, if any, implications that might have for us as a species. So how do you know God? Through the religious texts, through the relevations he made through individuals? How do you evaluate religious texts? Which prophets are the ‘true’ prophets; and which are mouthpieces for the devil, or suffering from mental illness? Which God(s) are the true one(s) and which the ‘false’ idols? But most importantly consider your own process; how did you come to know these things? How did you decide? What’s your method?