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!

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.

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!

You may have seen the banners (especially if you’re in New South Wales). “Jesus: All About Life,” they read. It is an initiative of the Bible Society, in conjunction with marketing company Taurus. Although I didn’t know that at the time. I asked my mother (a dedicated Anglican) if the signs were something to do with her particular church. She told me that it was actually an initiative across ‘all the churches.’

I looked at her thoughtfully for a moment and said, “Well, at least the ones that believe in Jesus.”

But the general idea and hope is to produce dialogue among those faiths that incorporate Jesus as a central figure – Catholicism, Christianity (various denominations) and Judaism, I suppose.

Daniel Willis, CEO of The Bible Society, talking to Rachel Kohn on The Spirit of Things:

Well I’m saying people don’t know what Jesus said and here is the opportunity, in this campaign, to put out there the actual words that Jesus said. Because when you look at what Jesus said you find he’s actually a very radical person. He was counter-cultural. [...] So what we’ve ended up with I think over the centuries is the message of Jesus being clouded by movies, by what other people have said, by what the church has added to it. And when you get back to what Jesus said it actually makes sense and it under girts the values we all want.

[ad#adsense250]This was a major stumbling block for me. I am not a biblical scholar but I am reasonably convinced Jesus never said anything to the effect of ‘the shetland pony was an absolute cinch’ (as he does in a Jesus: All About Life radio ad). Whether you treat the Bible as literal truth, as allegory or as fiction, it is important to appreciate the distinction between ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ (an invitation to speculate) and ‘What Did Jesus Do?’ (as recorded within these texts). That Willis freely acknowledges that without a understanding of the Bible many artistic, literary and pop culture references are lost on individuals while feeling he has license to further cloud ‘the message of Jesus’ within the context of this campaign is perplexing. But it seems to be a broader trend within Christian traditions, one that sees this kind of embellishment as permissable if it exists within a generally accepted narrative and understanding of Jesus.

And even the tagline ‘All About Life’ is open to interpretation. In what ways is Jesus ‘All About Life’? Does Jesus’ supposed relevance to life relate to him as a historical figure, as the key to ‘salvation’ in the Christian tradition, as a ‘personal’ figure? If you accept the idea of a ‘personal Jesus’ over a historical one, suddenly the popular tendency towards speculation and embellishment makes perfect sense.

Writer and former religious reporter, Tom Harpur:

I can’t prove to anyone Jesus Christ or Muhhammad or whomever never existed. And in one sense, it doesn’t really matter because the average Christian has a mythical Christ that they’re talking about anyway. You take ten people coming out of a service anywhere on a Sunday and ask them what their picture of Jesus is. And you’ll find it is not exactly something that can be replicated because everybody has their own personal Jesus. This is a creation of the religious imagination. Not that they have been brainwashed, but taught, or however you want to put it by a religious tradition into thinking a certain way about it. But I mean, Christ in you, Paul says. How can a historical person be in you? I fail to understand.

I don’t have a personal Jesus. Like Harpur, I struggle with the historical Jesus. And I wonder what the ‘word of Jesus’ might do for me, as a non-believer, that modern morality cannot? Perhaps the emphasis on Jesus (as opposed to God) is about highlighting the New Testament in favour of the Old Testament (with its burnt offerings and slavery). I once suggested that the Harry Potter books had as much to say about life as the Bible did. I was being flippant at the time, but there is a great truth here. Any compelling work of literature encapsulates themes and ideas that relate to life and morality and personal and societal values. Modern texts have a modern frame of reference and perhaps a greater understanding of the complexity of modern life, as well as a broader sense of community values. Certainly the bible’s relationship with women, homosexuals, slavery and human sacrifice is a far cry from modern day morality. And at the point where you selectively embrace teachings of Jesus have you not in effect elected a ‘personal Jesus’ over a historical one?

And why Jesus, why not God? I mean it’s all well and good to say this is not about ‘the church’ and rather about Jesus but there is clearly a proselytising element to this campaign.

Happy Sunday!

It certainly confused many of my friends… The day that I decided that there probably wasn’t a God (and that He probably wasn’t going to shoot down me with lightning) I became completely fascinated with religion. [ad#adsense250]Suddenly with the fear evaporated and some clarity on what I did believe I was just left with all these artifacts. Some of them oddball, some of them profound, but all of them quite interesting. I wondered too why people believed the things they did, why individual denominations seemed to distinguish themselves so much from each other when they (seemingly) had so much in common. I think I was trying to take a sociological approach to religion.

Recently I found someone who had considered this – and many other things – and expressed them much more eloquently than I could muster. Former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever encountered. Speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year, here recorded and transcribed by Encounter on Radio National:

There isn’t a real divine broadcaster, there isn’t a real God, 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 narratives to try and explain the mystery of our own existence, and if you’re a wise person you’re not going to dismiss that. You’re not going to simply erase and rub out as if it lacks significance, these thousands of years of gathered tradition. You’re going to look at it, you’re going to interrogate it, because it’s telling you about you, it’s telling humanity about itself. It’s a kind of gestalt of the human condition.

It talks about Hell, it talks about the Devil, it talks about sin and temptation. And these are not supernatural realities, these are human experiences. There is a dark continent in each of us that can easily give itself to the dark side, we know that. And so interrogating these texts makes sense. Do not let them die, do not let them fade into the past like lots of other things, because we need them today. These narratives, these metaphors, these troches speak to us about the sorrow and glory of the human condition.

And then there was the idea of Ethical Religiosity that I clumisly proposed. The idea that somehow people should complement their religious beliefs with a modern compassion and decency towards other people. For Holloway the greatest danger seems to be supposing too much about God, having too much certainty and too little doubt, too little modesty. He explains:

[...] I’m a bit loose on God, I’m not an atheist, I can’t confidently say there is no God. But I’m equally allergic to people who claim to know everything about God. And one reason I call myself an agnostic is because I think it’s quite a biblical position, because certainly in the Hebrew scriptures, the greater danger was always idolatry, knowing what God was, than not knowing, which is why they didn’t even like me to use the name of God, to take the name of God in vain.

And finally:

And so given the shifting, kaleidoscopic nature of this human debate that has been going on for centuries and is likely to go on, it seems to me to be immodest to claim too much certainty for the particular notch in the continuum in which you find yourself. And one of the things I find myself doing is pleading for a bit more modesty in the way we debate these issues, a bit more magnanimity towards the people with whom we disagree.

I haven’t even touched on Holloway’s Kaleidoscope (the distinctions he makes between Strong Religion, Weak Religion, After Religion, and Absence of Religion), though it was also a great personal revelation and helped my own understanding of individuals’ relationships to, and consumption of, religion.

Download Richard Holloway’s Shaking The Kaleidoscope

Happy Sunday!

Questions from YeaJordan:

1. What is Religion
Religion is an attempt to make sense of the mysteries of life.

2. What meaning does it have for you?
To me religion is an attempt to answer the unanswerable. Some years ago I decided I didn’t really subscribe to the worldview that religion (specifically, Christianity) had provided me with. It is funny though because I still have moments where I revert to old patterns of thinking. I commented whimisically on twitter recently that despite not really believing in ‘God’ I still get angry with ‘him’ periodically.

3. What contribution does religion play in your life.
My interest in religion these days is mostly academic. I find it interesting. I listen to religiously themed podcasts, read religiously themed blogs, and write entries on the subject myself. This confuses a lot of people. At the risk of offending people, I tend to think of my interest in religion as extensions of my interest in the paranormal and the psychological. My concern is that religion is used to justify all manner of atrocities. It is remarkably easy to decide God’s will, beliefs and intentions since ‘he’ hardly makes television appearances or press conferences himself. (And as Delos McKown noted, “The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”) Interpretation of religious texts has become a theological art, and used to reinforce the beliefs and prejudices of practitioners and clergy. Atheists can be equally militant.

It is my hope that people can find some middle ground, be afforded the opportunity to practice their religious beliefs in their own way while being respectable of others.

Happy Sunday!

Sex. And religion. Ah, strange bedfellows certainly. I mean Mary didn’t have it so why should anyone else, right?

In an Associated Press video, Reverend Ed Young of the Fellowship Church in Dallas, Texas, has been encouraging people to have sex. He explains:

God is pro-sex. He thought it up. It was his idea and he wants those of us who have said ‘I do’ to do it.

The caveat – unimaginatively – hinges around marriage. I promised myself I wouldn’t write about Obama or Proposition 8 this week, so I will refrain from editorialising too much and instead think about sex and religion in a historical context. (Though it is difficult not to acknowledge the relationship between the church’s insistence that sex should only be the preoccupation of married couples and the church’s involvement in determining who can actually be married.)

I’m going to be honest with you. It’s 11am on Sunday morning and the idea of tackling such subject matter is slightly beyond me. So in place of something more thoughtful, here’s Young & The Restless star Eric Braden (he plays Victor Newman) talking about sex, nudity and religion.

If you can’t rely on soap opera actors for gems of wisdom, who can you rely on?

Next week join us as we consider sacrifices (of all kinds) and that one item on your christmas list that not even Bunnings/Home Depot stock – the immaculate contraption.

Happy Sunday!