Mourning the lost

 

A friend of mine and I were drinking and the conversation turned to the disaster that is the former Ottoman province of Palestine. We both agreed that it was all just hell and fucking disaster and that neither of us could see a way out.

I mourned that I as an Army-mad kid had idolized the Tzahal, the Israeli Defence Forces. I'd repainted my little plastic model Sherman and M3 halftracks in IDF colors to wargame the Six Day War with the Israelis as the heroes, and that it hurt to see my old heroes fighting women and kids and guys who just wanted the land they, too, grew up in.

My friend replied that he had been raised to see Israel as heroic as well, as a vision of strength for a kid growing up Jewish. But even more, that he - as a child and an adult - had been confident that Judaism was different from the other religions. That the long history of persecution, that the long tradition of thoughtful rabbinical exegesis surrounding the Torah, would defend his faith from the sorts of sectarian horrors that had so often visited so many other religions. That Jews would be better.

"It turns out..." he mourned, "...that we aren't. We just lacked the opportunity."

My ancestors were used by their English masters to help them run their apartheid state of Ireland. That's what "Scots-Irish" means; Scottish imported to Ireland to be reliable Protestant muscle for the English project to keep the Irish down. I'm the spawn of the "settlers" of 17th and 18th Century Ireland, no different from some ultraorthodox swinging dick gunning for Arabs in the West Bank.

My gaffers didn't lack the opportunity, either.

I was lucky; some time along the road my clan escaped that ugly cycle, came here to the US where the earlier wave of "settlers" had done the ethnic cleansing of the original natives for them, so no need to bloody their own hands.

Is that what we are? Is that all we are? Just one wave of conquerors after another? One more round of oppression and murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred?

I honestly don't think I want to know the answer.

I do know this; no matter how much killing Hamas has done this past week it will not kill the problems of the people of Palestine.

And no matter how much killing my old heroes of Tzahal will do in the coming weeks it will not change the problems of Israel with the people of Palestine.

And yet the killing will go on and on.

I can do no better than Wright did, ending his long discussion with a quote from Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz:

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

Dunnage

 

So.

Turns out that the "silence" of the night, the cease-fireworks I mentioned yesterday?

Had nothing to do either with the City rules or the fire-safety inclinations of the good people of Portland, but, just like in the movies, the "it's quiet...too quiet" silence before the French and Indians attack.

Last night the first ranging shots were fired before sundown, and by full dark the streets were exploding with all the illegal-goodness I thought the City had shut down. 

Mortars, Roman candles, fire fountains...all the bounty of mainland China was bursting in air to celebrate the 247th birthday of the Land of the Free.

Which, by the way, I remarked only through the front windows. It was a hot sultry night, and I wasn't arsed enough to go sit out in the heat and mosquitoes to watch the fire-for-effect. It was pretty ferocious, though, as the traditional scattering of dunnage at the intersection of North McKenna and Amherst Streets testifies.

Which kind of got me thinking about the whole "why-do-I-hesitate-to-wave-the-flag" thing I also wrote yesterday.

Because I opened up the phone today to read something about how some Republican nitwit had lead off his Fourth paean to Ammurica with a made-up Patrick Henry quote about how we owe our independence to Christians.

"America is a Christian nation".

How many times have you read some "conservative" saying or writing that?

By which they mean that if you're NOT "Christian" (or something their idea of "Christian" hates, like queer or poor or Samaritan or liberal or something...) you're not really "American".

Which is, well, just shitty.

The entire promise of this country is based on an idea, not a religion or a language or a kind of food or clothing. The idea of "equal justice under law"; that if you believe in and defend the rights of all your fellow citizens who are equally committed to the ideals of the nation as expressed in the founding documents then you ARE an American.

So you can be an atheist-American, or an otaku-American, or a gay-, lesbian-, liberal-, conservative-, Rule34-American. If you buy the ideals expressed in things like the Declaration and the Constitution, you're an American.

Period.

That's something pretty awesome, when you stop to think about it.

There are people who have lived in Japan for generations and still aren't considered "Japanese" by the majority of Japanese.

There are people who have lived in Great Britain, or Poland, or Argentina who aren't considered, or treated, as true citizens of those nations, because they look or speak or act "differently" from the Platonic Ideal of a Briton or a Pole or an Argentine that's fixed in the public mind.

But the promise of the United States - and I say "promise", mind, not "reality" - is that if you believe in the promise you can be American.

The Founders made sure of that by making sure they didn't write religion in to those promises.

Too many of their ancestors had beat cheeks out of Britain because of the ugly remnants of the 16th and 17th Century Wars of Religion had made their kinds of "Christianity" (or lack of Christianity) something between rebellion and treason.

And they'd seen what the unholy marriage of political power and religious sectarianism had done to both politics and religion.

It was bad. 

For both.

So yes; a hell of a lot of the people who were responsible for the design of this country were Christians.

But no; they explicitly designed the country to include all blends and shades of belief - including no belief at all - by making religion a personal, not a political, choice.

Which leads me back to yesterday.

It seems to me that we are on the cusp of having to make a hard choice, a choice foisted upon us by people like the Republican nitwit cited above (Josh Hawley? Sound like the sort of Christopathic fathead who would say something like that).

We the People can choose to become the nation our Constitution promises us we can be; a nation open to all who believe in those promises.

Or we can become the nation people like Josh Hawley promise us; a nation open only to those who believe and act like they do.

I know which nation would make me proud.

Do We the People?

Of that, I am honestly unsure.

When you're unsure that your own country truly believes, and wants to make true, the promises that you love about that country?

It's hard to be vigorous about waving its flag.

All you can do is police up the dunnage.

And hope.

Cite your sources

I get that this sort of thing has become so utterly bog-standard from the GQP/wingnut Right that the rest of us have gotten to the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ phase and just kind of elide wingnuts and wingnut pols saying it;

Okay, so.

I've made it pretty clear where I stand on the whole business of theocracy. It's a bad idea, and - believe it or not - not just for those on the theocratic-outside. 

It's bad for religion and especially bad for whichever sect gets the whip hand. The whole sorry history of the European Wars of Religion make that clear. Becoming the state religion of Rome (and its successor states) was bad for the Roman Church.

But here's the part that I think we don't talk enough about.

One of the most troublesome aspects of theocracy (or any political system that depends on an unquestioned, received creed - Nazi-style fascism and Soviet-style and Mao-style Communism were others) is that they rely on the fundamental truth of the received narrative.

In other words, for Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to "work" enough of the fundamental tenets of the creed, from Kapital through the diktats of Stalin, have to be "true". They have to reflect some fundamental political (and economic and social) reality that can be applied to the messy business of daily life.

If the fundamentals don' t work - if they're not really grounded in reality or something close to reality - then the chances of that theocracy of working IRL become significantly more difficult.

We saw that with Marxism.

The fuzzy guy had some interesting ideas. But it turned out that they were really difficult to turn into practice that didn't involve a whole lot of human misery.

Turns out that a LOT of Marxism was a sort of 19th Century political version of Scientology, and it turned out that running a civil society on them was really difficult to turn into anything that wasn't pretty punitive.

So.

What this led me back to was something I got to thinking about when I went and re-read my old battles piece on First Panipat.

When I wrote the original I hadn't gotten to the point of checking the original source materials. I did the usual "I did the research" thing on the Internet where I peeked at the first dozen Google hits and wrote based on what came up.

But the deeper I dug into the sources - especially for the events that occurred prior to widespread literacy and the printing press - the more I discovered that one of the biggest problems with the "accepted narrative" of these ancient events is that it is often 1) culled from a tiny handful of accounts that are often 2) lost in the original form and exist only as multiple-generations-removed from the original, and 3) afflicted with one or more "unreliable narrator" issues (where there are more than one contemporary source the sources contradict each other, sources state as facts things that we know from physical evidence are untrue, are written by authors that are unfamiliar with the physical realities of ancient or medieval warfare, i.e. monks writing military history...).

So, as it turns out, a lot of what we "know" about these past events - actual events we know really happened - turns out to be either untrue, or partially true, or (more often) simply impossible to accurately pin down.

And these are simple events! We're not talking about using them to set up a political system!

Which got me thinking about theocracy, and specifically Christian theocracy; what do we actually know about the actual events, people, places, and things that have been codified over centuries into the "Judeo-Christian ethic" that a lot of theocratic or theo-friendly politicians, pundits, and other authorities like to cite as the best form of human government.

Here's a little chart that displays the historians who wrote about the world of the Mediterranean littoral (including, obviously, what was then the Roman province of Judea) during the period that we interpret from the books of the New Testament that discuss it was the time of Jesus Christ:

As discussed above; this is perforce only a partial list of the people who may have written histories of this time. This is just those whose accounts remain to us!

As noted in the picture, though; none of these authors mention any of the things that are stated in the Gospels (and Acts) that you'd expect to have come to the attention of a diligent historian.

Many cultures around the 1st Century BCE/CE tended to place great import on astrological signs and symbols. Something like the "Christmas Star"? SOMEbody should have said something. Nope.

The "Massacre of the Innocents"; Herod I's supposed ratissage of newborn Messiahs? You'd think someone - particularly Josephus, who was pretty tuned into events in Judea - would have mentioned that. Nope.

The events surrounding the crucifixion - the darkening sky, the earthquake - should have caught the notice of someone writing from somewhere close enough (like Alexandria or Damascus) to have heard, felt, or seen them.

Nope.

I don't know if the whole basis of Christianity is as sketchy as Joseph Smith and his golden plates.

But if I was researching some event in ancient warfare?

I'd be utterly hesitant to place any confidence in that event - what happened, how it happened, even if it actually happened at all - if all the contemporary sources save one ignored it as if it had never existed.

If you want to govern me based on your love of Christian scripture...okay. That's your call.

But to insist that I accept that's any more of an inescapable "truth" than governance based on the events of the Twilight novels or the philosophy expressed in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?

Sorry. That's not just a bad idea. It's a bad idea based on complete and utter bullshit.

And the fact that We the People don't laugh it out of the public square is...not a good sign.

Darkness and not light

 

Worthwhile read from Fred Clark on the trace of fear, anger, and hatred that connects the current "conservative" panic that has become the animating force of the GQP with the earlier conspiracy-theory pogroms like the Salem witch trials, the "New York Conspiracy Panic of 1741" and the "satanic panics" of the 1980s and 90's like the McMartin and Kern County hysterias.

"Moral panics are not sparked by sincere, well-meaning convictions of those who wish to see wrongs righted and justice done. They are sparked by the sincere, inescapable conviction that, in the words of the prophet Amos, the day of justice would be, for them, darkness and not light. The recognition that justice would not mean well for us."

The link between the QAnuts, the "conservative" hate for the Black Lives Matter protests this past summer, and the "Stop The Steal" idiocy draws all of this together.

The people inside all of these are, more than anything else, terrified of "The Others" gaining the sort of power and control over them that they have always had over "The Others"; these wretched subhumans (who are, however, secretly powerful and dangerous) are using the Deep State or the Swamp or the black power of Antifa to swarm over the Good People who just want to Make America Great.

It doesn't make any sort of sense, of course. It's like the weird Nazi ideology that simultaneously insisted that the Jews were the worthless, degenerate scum of the cursed Earth while also running the political and financial world.

It's exactly the sort of thinking that turns a small-time New York real estate grifter, con man, frightened little germaphobe into a bare-chested hero of the People.

Here's the problem with all this.

As Clark pointed out in a pair of earlier posts, the people involved in all these "moral panics" included some deeply cynical sonsofbitches that pushed this sort of Pizzagate nonsense for the handle it gave them over their marks and dupes.

Those people are just Nazi-grade evil, Steven-Miller-type "first up against the wall" bastards.

But the rest?

There are certainly a large number of stupid and gullible people in that group. But there just aren't enough stupid, gullible people to make up a large enough group to take over the U.S. government for extended periods of time; government is simply too complex and difficult to do for large numbers of stupid and gullible people to do it.

So among this group there has to be a fairly large percentage of intelligent, competent, critical-thinking people who want to believe these implausible, ridiculous fairy tales.

As Clark points out in the last of the linked posts:

"That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.

This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty?

Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other."

It's sad to think that someone needs something like that to be able to live with themselves.

But how else can you explain the notion that otherwise-competent people believe that someone like bland corporate hack Joe Biden, the guy who represented MasterCard in Congress, is a communist puppet who wants to outlaw guns and Christianity and make every toddler attend Drag Queen Story Hour?

But...how else do you explain it?

How else do you explain things like the Texas governor's reaction to his state's catastrophic public power disaster, or his ramming his citizen's collective dicks into the COVID meatgrinder?

How else, in a pandemic on a scale unprecedented for a century, do you explain this?

I can't. Other than what Clark is talking about; that a relatively huge minority of my supposed fellow Americans want to believe that me and people like me are evil traitors who want to utterly burn down "America".

On the Left there are people who are not happy with how things are. But as Cohen notes, even these people will compromise and cooperate if that means the public good.

On the Right, there are people - in the case of the "Relief Plan" vote in the tweet above powerful, well-educated people, people who are supposedly familiar with the inner workings of the U.S. government and through it armed with all the sources of potential knowledge and understanding of the Plague Year - who have convinced themselves that their political adversaries are literally so evil and dangerous that the most anodyne of their proposals must be utterly, furiously, and sometimes even violently, fought against.

 They will not compromise or cooperate, for who can "compromise" and "cooperate" with Evil?

And that brings us to the point where we're going to discuss climate change

The Senior Master Chief has a word with the Trumpeters

My maternal grandfather was a minister.

An odd sort of minister, though. He was an officer in the Salvation Army, in his eyes a soldier for the Lord in His fight against poverty and despair.

I think he'd have some choice words for His Fraudulency and his Trumpeters now vaunting their "Christianity" to the skies in their self-appointed role as Defenders of the Faith against the eeeeevil Muslim hordes, and I think those words would be very much like those of Isaiah, who also had little patience for those who paraded about in the garments of virtue sacrificing and praying loudly while afflicting the afflicted;

"Day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments,
they delight to draw near to God.
“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

Isaiah 58

Biblical Soil Science

My work here in Everett has been postponed, so I'm sitting in the hotel waiting to hear from my temporary masters on what they need me to do for them, if anything, and idly surfing the 'net. And in so doing I came across Frank Moraes' essay on atheism and theology.

In it Frank concludes:

"One can’t be an atheist without knowing what it is to be a theist. And most atheists don’t seem to even know what God is supposed to be. What they seem to be against is ignorant people with childish beliefs. If that’s the case, we should call such people areligious. They don’t know or care enough to have an opinion about God, and thus don’t deserve to be called atheists."

Hmmm.

I guess I fit into one of these niches. I'm an atheist, or, at the very least, a "don'tgiveashit-ist". My feeling is that I have no fucking idea what is God, or gods, or what it or he or she or they do. Or whether they do anything. Or care, really.

(I should note that it seems to me that if what I see as human life, life on this planet, is really the province of a God, or gods, then those Powers are, at best, some pretty fucking capriciously feckless sonsofbitches and, at worst, some serious assholes).

If people did what those Higher Powers are accused, or credited, with doing in the physical world they'd get kicked from here to Armageddon.

Plagues? Floods? The Penn/Madonna Shanghai Surprise? WTF, deities? You got nothing better to do than eff with people bringin' that shit?

Moraes links to an earlier post of his that references S.J. Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria"; the idea that science (or, at least, non-theological explanations for physical matters) can happily exist side-by-side with theological/philosophical/spiritual explanations of moral and ethical (and ontological) matters.

Moraes' problem is that, apparently, there are a group of atheists who are not content with the Gould idea but are directly attacking religious ideas of, well, pretty much everything. And that this attack is focused on the "worst" aspects of theology, the "Answers in Genesis" sorts of theology that insist that God created dinosaurs and humans and the one rode the other (or something; I never bother much with the AIG people). Moraes wants atheists to a) ignore the AIG dumbshit and b) learn genuine theology - at least, learn enough to understand it - if they want to debate it.

But as I commented on Frank's post, I think the biggest problem is this “worst theology” and how predominant it is over the “better”, and how destructive, and I think that's why the theists are attacking religion, not because they don't understand the higher thinking or care.

There was no Great Flood. We know that. "Know" as in know; the "flood" of Genesis and the Middle Eastern texts that preceded and fomented it were legends, stories, fictions. The textural references to it are stories made up by people who saw things they didn’t have the intellectual tools to understand.

There were no humans riding dinosaurs. "God" didn't give humans "dominion" over volcanoes and oceans and squirrels. That's "Answers in Genesis", the Bible (or Torah, or Quran) as soil survey manual. Iron Age superstition and ignorance dressed up in churchy clothes.

And you'd think there'd be no point attacking or debating that.

But, dammit, this sort of “Answers in Genesis” theologian are all over the fucking place, and their nonsense contributes mightily to the very real damage that religion does in the public square.

It's that sort of Vacation Bible School "theology" that permeates the GOP and helps them in their quest to free their patrons to resume dumping shit into Love Canal and crap into the sky and credulous nonsense (or canned "facts") into kid's brains.

It's that sort of simplistic "theology" that encourages We the People to make stupid choices based on what we've been told about God and Man and the world around us (and politics as God-bothering, another real problem).

THAT’s why the atheists go after them, I think.

Not because they’re a “worthy” opponent Moraes wants to engage...but because, as rubbishy as they are, the Answers-in-Gensis sort of “theology” is much more destructive than the theology of the "better" sort, the kind of theology of people of faith willing to start from the NOMA standpoint.

To put it in videogame terms, it’s all well and good to recommend going up against the boss in an epic struggle.

But it doesn’t help when the damn trashy little minions are running all over the place wrecking the joint.

(h/t to Gods Playing Poker for the comic...)

The Art of the Deal

From somebody named Corey Robin (via, and h/t to, Frank Moraes):

"The Talmud tells a story: the reason God covenanted with the Jews was that they were the only ones who were willing to take the deal.

According to a commentary on Deuteronomy, “When God revealed Himself to give the Torah to Israel, He revealed Himself not only to Israel but to all the nations.” First God goes to the children of Esau, asking them if they will accept the Torah. They ask him what it contains, God says, “Though shalt not murder,” they say, no thanks.

God goes to the Ammonites and Moabites. Same response, only for them the prohibition against adultery is the deal-breaker. He goes to the Ishmaelites, to all the peoples of the earth. Each time, they turn him down. They can’t accept some portion of the Torah’s instructions and injunctions.

Then God comes to the Jews. They don’t ask questions. They simply “accepted the Torah, with all of its explanations and details.” So God “surrendered them [the Torah and all of its details] to Israel.”

You almost get a sense, reading the midrash, of God’s weariness. The Jews aren’t his first choice, but they’ll take the deal. God’s exhausted, history is made."

And...

...then His chosen people spend the next several-odd thousand years quibbling about, reneging on, breaking (or at the very least, trying to hedge and/or cheat on), the “deal” they made. God spends an assload of time He’d probably rather be creating galaxies, constructing mysteries, and contemplating the Universe hanging around some shitty mudball in the Sol system smiting worthless little pissant heretics, making up new rules to keep his choice from fucking with the deal, and arguing with dissatisfied dickheads and pissed-off prophets.

He just THOUGHT he was exhausted after His initial search. Compared to his subsequent dealings with the Chosen People.

Which just proves the point of which his Son reminds us in his parables: “Don’t EVER agree to anything when you’re short on food, sleep, or sex.”

Thus endeth the lesson.

Thanks be to God.

The DaVinci Hoax (or; Sorry, Janet...)

A couple of years ago I wrote a little post about the possibility that there was a person who lived in 1st Century Judea named Jesus Josephson who wandered around talking about God and who maybe, possibly, got hitched at some point before he ended up (maybe, possibly) on a Roman execution device.

This was based on the controversy surrounding a scrap of manuscript supposedly detailing some discussion this guy had with his pals talking about his ol' lady. Nobody seemed to be sure whether this scrap was genuine or not, but the idea seemed interesting enough for me to run with.

Well, sadly, the whole magilla appears to have been a complete forgery that, unfortunately enough, the original author of the paper that began the speculation refuses to accept.

The story of the journalist that chased the scam down to its creator, though, is delightful in itself, including the East German STASI, a slithering con man, and Femalebarebackgangbangextreme.com

Wowsa!

But I stand corrected; sorry, Janet. He just wasn't that into you.

Bible belting

Though I'm not personally religious I have always been fascinated by religion.

As Mark Twain said, its kind of like dandruff; a lot of people seem to have it and spend an inordinate amount of time and money fooling with it.

My Salvation Army grandfather gave me a King James Version Bible back when I was just a little proto-atheist and I've always treasured it just for the connection to him and the poetry. Whether or not you buy the religion the KGV does have some pretty terrific poetry.

I think part of being irreligious but intrigued by religion is that I was raised in a conventionally religious household but also raised United Presbyterian.

In case you're not familiar with this suburban sort of American Protestantism I should note that it's perhaps the whitest of Wonder Bread religions in this country. Even the Episcopalians (who are probably "whiter" in the pasty-faced Aryan sense) have their smells and bells and their faux-Catholic imagery. The Presbies?

Let's put it this way; when I was a kid I'd actually watch the service and take in what happened and what seemed important and what didn't. Finally one Sunday morning I asked my mother "So...what's so important about the money?"

Because to eight-year-old me the most exciting, most fun, most interesting part of the morning was when people got up and started passing these big brass dishes around. They were heavy, shiny brass with a broad brim and red velvet on the bottom of the cup-shape in the middle. Everybody put money in them while we all sang a song and then the passers took them up front and set them on a table and we all sang another song. It seemed like the highlight of the whole occasion, so I kind of figured that the object was to worship the money. This "God" stuff seemed pretty opaque but the money had its own cool dishes and songs and everything.

My mother was pretty irked at how I missed the point to churchgoing as she saw it. But that is a pretty good summation of how religion never really "took" to me.

So when speaking of the whole "buying the religion", the other morning my Bride (my rose of Sharon, my lily of the valley, my sister, my spouse...) asked me "Are you an atheist, or an agnostic?" and for the life of me I couldn't come up with a good answer. Given my background that probably shouldn't be a real shock, but, still.

"I haven't really thought about it enough to say." was my reply, and I realized that I really hadn't. In a backhanded way I suspect that I'm open to the idea of a god or gods - if no other way simply because I don't know enough about Life, the Universe, and everything to rule out a god or gods - but in my everyday life I really have no use for one or more of them. If there is a god, or are gods, it and they seem to me to be pretty careless of human lives. Both "careless" in the sense of casually throwing them away or bending and breaking them and "care less" in the don't-give-a-shit sense. If there are then they owe me huge for the death of my oldest child. But I don't see anything that makes me suspect that there is anyone there. Our lives appear to be just what we, and others, make of them.

I can see how comforting it'd be to think that there was this incredibly powerful mystical Being that cared about me and had my back. I just don't see any evidence that's true, and don't see the sense in spending a great deal of time fretting about that. I have all sorts of intellectual and moral wellsprings to learn from and to guide me. I don't feel the lack of or the need for a deity for that, so I guess the best way to describe wouldn't be "atheist" or "agnostic" but "indifferent".

So that's my religious condition taken care of.

Anyway, I got to thinking about all this when I came across Jim Wright's post over at Stonekettle Station about the recent brou-ha-ha over "religious freedom" and hatin' on Teh Gays that cited a bunch of the usual directives from Leviticus. You know what I'm talking about, right? Don't eat owl, leave seed in the field for the poor, don't bonk a guy like you would a girl, that sort of thing.

As you'd expect, down in the comments section several discussions ensued about the Levitican prohibitions and how they apply, or don't, to Christians. And that was sort of fascinating to me, historian and self-identifying scholar that I think I am. Because they all circle back to a single source; the text of one of the Gospels, Matthew, chapter 5, verses 17-19:

"Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."

That made me run down a bunch of commentary on this piece of Matt, which seems to be one of the more contentious issues in Christian exegesis.

The bottom line seems to be the question of "when the Christ said "fulfilled" what did he mean by that?" The passage in Matthew seems to suggest that the old Levitican strictures - indeed, all the laws and directives laid down prior to the 1st Century C.E. - might "pass" once "all is fulfilled". And it seems that many Christian theologians think that with the Christ the law was fulfilled; that with the events that are reported as occurring 2,015 years ago the old laws "pass". These scholars cite passages like Paul's Epistle to the Romans, chapter 10, verse 4: "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth."

What the hell does that mean?

Certainly it doesn't mean what it says: "...the end of the law..." Western Christians, American Christians, live hedged about with laws like every other American. Local laws, state laws, federal laws. Certainly being the spiritual heirs to a god's sacrifice doesn't let you beat a speeding ticket.

But does it mean that modern Christians are exempt from the stuff laid down in the Old Testament?

(As an aside, let's hope so. There's some pretty appalling shit in there. Take, for example, Exodus, chapter 21. That's the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" bit that a lot of us think of when we think of "Old Testament-y" crime and punishment. But that's actually pretty mild compared to the slavery. Selling your daughter into slavery? Jake with the Lord. You just can't sell her to smelly foreigners. Or if you and your wife are slaves after six years you get your "Get out of slavery free" card. But...if you married during those six years? Your wife and kiddies belong to your former master. Seriously.)

All this is good fun, but the question before the floor remains; are modern Christians bound by the Levitican strictures against homosexuality and homosexuals? Or does Christ "fulfill" those strictures and replace them with his own words, none of which discusses the question of who gets to go into the Fun Zone and how and whether that's bad?

Lemme cut to the crux of the biscuit: it doesn't really matter. You either don't get to hate on the queers...or hatin' on the homos is the least of your worries.

If old laws still apply, and if you want to hate the homos you also can't eat fat (Leviticus 3:17) or pet a dog (Leviticus 5:2) or wear cotton-poly fabrics. You basically can't live a modern life. I suppose if the idea of a couple of husky bears kissing reeeeeally drives you wild you could do that, but I'd put the actual number of Americans that could in the low single digits.

Go read that Leviticus stuff. I'm serious - it's completely fucking whack.

Or they don't, and you pretty much have to go with what J-dawg said:

"And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these."

Don't see "...except for the homos" after the "thyself". Seems to pretty much settle that.

So Christopath-Americans? You can all go home now. You're wrong.

Sue, kiss Sally. Joe, kiss Matt. Everybody happy now?

The hell with all this legal parsing. Let's have some poetry.

"Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.

Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.

Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards.

Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon."

(Song of Solomon 4:3-15)

Ruby the Church Lady

Sometimes I can't resist the urge. It isn't nice, it isn't pretty, and it usually strikes me at the worst of wrong moments.

But I'm like Pavlov's dog whenever I run across someone using religion as a blanket excuse for Being an Asshole Whilst Assuming the Mantle of Righteousness.

I'm not big on religion in general, as you know. But when I run across someone using it to justify assholery, whether it's being mean to a gay couple or engineering a sectarian massacre, it makes me all kinds of stabby.

Yesterday it was that idiotic Indiana "Jesus Sez It's Okay to be Hatin' on Homos" law, and a friend's Facebook feed.

Another FB pal posted this link to some sort of anti-anti-gay-law protest and it drew the ire of someone I'll call Ruby the Church Lady.

This is a summary of what Ruby the Church Lady had to say:

"This is not an anti- gay law but a freedom of religion law. Why do people insist others go against their religious beliefs just because they don't agree? What about the rights of the ones on the religious side. I suppose they don't count, they're not important, because there are those who think they're wrong. They are protected by the Bill of Rights. This law is redundant. Are they suppose to go against their beliefs because someone doesn't like what they are doing?...I'm not saying they are right or wrong. However, what good is freedom of religion if the gov't makes you go against your beliefs? You can't have it both ways. You are either free to follow your convictions or you're not. I doubt very seriously that these people, (bakers, photogs, florists) ever refused an African American. Because of all the uproar about this these people are losing their businesses. Is that right? It's not as tho they are the only ones in town who do these services. Instead of raising a stink about it, go to a different business. That's what I would do... If I had to choose who I would answer to it would be God, hands down...I am NOT openly against the rights of the LGBT community. I have a gay granddaughter and I support her completely and love her partner."

Of course you do, Ruby! Of course you do!

Anyway, let's see what else you have to say on the subject...

"...This is not a matter of discrimination against them. It is a matter of the free exercise of religious beliefs. Either you have that freedom or you don''t. If you are made to go against your beliefs you do not have free exercise of that belief. You and the Supreme Court can spin it anyway you want but that is a fact. Like I said., it is not as tho they have no where else to go, they do. The only reason you or anyone else would insist that they do not have the right to refuse service is because you want everyone to think as you do. and will cause trouble for anyone who doesn't. They do NOT have to do that. That is what FREEDOM is. They have as much right to their beliefs as you do and the free exercise thereof..."

Of course you see the problem here.

Ruby is, not to mince words, being a pig-ignorant, hypocritical, theocratic Bible-banger on this issue.

She completely misses the point where her Crusade - or jihad - stops at the end of my nose. And, of course, part of that is the part where if she opens a shoe shop and sells shoes to the public then she's gotta sell shoes to, you know, the Public. Every spotty ill-washed rube, every drooling gomer with money in his, her, or its wallet.

Every homo.

Doesn't mean she can't enforce some rules. No shirt, no service (can't really go with the "no shoes" in this case since, gudDAMN, she's sellin' shoes and if they had shoes they wouldn't be coming to ol' Honest Ruby's Shoe Emporium, right?).

No profanity. No show tunes.

But she can't hang up a sign that says "no blacks" or "no queers". Why not? Because let's say she's the ONLY shoe store in town. And she doesn't want to serve me because I'm black. Or queer. Or, hell, a left-handed atheist pan-flute-playing goatherd. So no Ruby shoes for me and how the hell do I get anything on my damn feet, then?

So. Bottom line - in this country, anyway, where Equal Justice Under Law is written on the fucking front door of the Supreme Court - is that I'm the Public, and you're serving the Public, you gotta serve me the same as anyone else providing I'm within the law.

Then you can then go pester Jesus, or Allah, or Buddha, on your own dime and on your own time...AND you don't get to be the "good guy" here. You may claim dot you vere chust vollowing Gott's orders but someone, either you or your God, is being an asshole. The hypocrisy of pretending to be the Noble and Upright Christian pisses me off far beyond the mere assholery of being cruel and unreasonable to other people for who they are and not for what they're doing.

In other words, Ruby the Church Lady pushed nearly every one of my buttons and I drooled on cue. To wit:

"Actually, no, it's not that simple.

I may worship Moloch, but the damn state law prevents me from sacrificing babies. I may worship Tir, but intrusive and unreasonable state law prevents me from strangling my king and throwing his body in a peat bog (actually, I suspect that state law has something to say about the whole "king" thing, but, whatev...). I may follow Jainism but the rigid and oppressive state law forbids me from walking into my kids' daycare sky-clad.

Sucks to be me, but, there it is. There's all kinds of things that your religion says you have to do - or can't do - that the law forces you to refrain from, or to perform. So this isn't a "controversy, got it? The people who want to run a public business have to leave their racial, sexual, religious, etc. exclusionary beliefs at home and serve the public. If you insist that your religion should let you discriminate based on things that people are and not things that people do then either you or your religion are effed up and wrong."

Now Ruby didn't like this at all. She replied:

"You are really comparing not wanting to provide your services on religious grounds to sacrificing babies or strangling a king etc? That doesn't even deserve a response!"

Yep, I said, and is the comparison so inapt?

Tir, Moloch, Satan, Ayn Rand, Communism...all have their "religions". Human and animal sacrifice were a respected part of most religions for millenia. The reasons for sacrificing kings, babies, and goats seemed perfectly good at the time. So did the reasons for stoning adulterers. So, frankly, do these contemporary "reasons" refusing to admit homosexuals to the common lot of humanity.

It's just a whole lot of lovin' or hatin' on things for no real "reasons" at all; just what your or their or his or her invisible sky-wizard or Earth spirit or inner voice tells you is good or bad. Or that YOU tink is bad and icky and wriggle around trying to find something in your religion to justify, so you won't feel like a self-righteous asshole.

And in a nation like ours, where citizenship is a matter of believing not in a God, or a flag, or a race, or a language, but in a couple of pieces of paper that boil down to "Equal Justice Under Law" that law must, must, require you to park your prejudice at the door of your public accommodation.

You don't have to love me.

You just have to work for me if I hire you, same as you do for Pastor Jenkins.

It seems to me - and pisses me off no end - that instead of admitting that they're being assholes, that they're indulging themselves and cherry-picking their beliefs that people like Ruby the Church Lady and her pals just want to have it all. They want to be "cafeteria Christian" - pick the parts of their religion they want - like not baking a cake for a couple of gay guys - but still want to wear mixed fabrics, eat shellfish, and go golfing on Sunday...and be considered sweet, wholesome, corn-fed, upstanding pillars of the community and all around Good People of the Earth.

Instead of a mob of selfish, hypocritical, bilious old bitches and bastards with a hate-on for stuff they find icky.

I'd respect them more if they just came out and said honestly that they hate what they hate and stood up honestly as the hate-filled skinsacks they are instead of hiding behind "God".

It's not the hate.

It's the hypocrisy that really gets my goat.

What IS it with the yoga pants..?

Remember the nice Christian lady here in Oregon who promised her hubby (and informed us all in Outer Blogistan) that she was hangin' up the leggings and yoga pants because of the way that watching her bottom twitching around inside them made good Christian dudes all hot, sweaty, and hard to control?

Well...turns out that she's got a brother in Christ - one Dave "Doc" Moore - up in the Montana legislature who has an even better idea.

Make it illegal to show all dat ass (and that pubic mound, and thighs, and those taut, limber calves, and bare feet, too, I'm guessing...). Nudity, revealing clothing, anything that shows off you ladies' butts? Foul! Unclean! Illegal!

But this dope got himself in real trouble when he threw in yoga pants and Speedos; that just seemed a little too much like sharia law even for the Good People of the Treasure State (the bill he introduced has been officially tabled).

Course ol' Doc now says that the whole "yoga pants SHOULD be illegal.." thing was just a jest, a jape, a mere rhetorical flourish...now that he's been shown up for some sort of moronic, bible-banging panty-sniffer all across the Intertoobz. But, really...what the fuck, guys?

Why even make the suggestion in the first place?

I mean...don't you like women? Don't you think they're nice to look at? Don't you appreciate the human body, including the female body, as "God's creation", like a sunset or a mountain or a rainbow? Why all this fuss about other people's bottoms?

And...if not, I guess my other question would be, what the fuck business is it of yours what he or she wears, or doesn't wear? Doesn't your Bible enjoin you to worry about the fucking beam in your OWN eye?

I guess I will just never understand Christians. They're like that wierd jello thing with little marshmallows that people used to serve in the Seventies; you just have to have been there to understand.

Women and leggings and...well, Carlos Bocanegra NOT wearing leggings

My friends Lisa and Labrys reminded me that looking at attractive bodies is not a gender-specific thing. So here's some eye-candy for the female readers; U.S. Soccer's Carlos Bocanegra:

If you knew that this body was under baggy sweats and a ballcap, would it matter whether it was tight shorts or baggy sweats, or a bare chest or a hoodie?

I mean, certainly less clothing is more scenic...but what is unseen can still be seen, if you're thinking about it.

As Lisa said; the brain is the real sexual organ. What can be imagined will be imagine, whether it be by man or woman. We men may be a trifle more visual, but we were all designed to respond to each other's (or our own gender's, for those of us hardwired that way...) bodies. As Labrys said; we may be married, or in love, or committed, but we're neither blind nor dead. We respond to those bodies as our own minds and bodies tell us we should. And that's just fine; if we are truly civilized people we can surely find ways to dealing with our desires in civilized ways.

The fact that religious zealots - whether fundamentalist Christians, ultraorthodox Jews, Wahhabi Muslims, or every other flavor of God-bothering asshole - can't seem to do that is their problem, not ours, frankly.

Otherwise?

Enjoy.

Men and leggings and living with them both.

So I open the digital version of the World's Worst Newspaper this morning and there's this:

"Why I Chose to No Longer Wear Leggings...(Veronica) Partridge, a 25-year-old Christian, felt conflicted about modesty, she writes in the post, and talked with her husband about whether or not leggings are appropriate as pants. He told her that it's hard for him not to look at other women wearing the tight athletic wear. She wrote: "And at that moment, I made a personal vow to myself and to my husband. I will no longer wear thin, form-fitting yoga pants or leggings in public."

And I thought, oh, Ronnie.

Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie...

You and me, girlfriend. We need to have a little talk.

Well, OK, first, let me admit; this wasn't the first time I'd heard of this leggings-deal. I ran across it the other night skimming Fred Clarke's blog Slacktivist, where he kinda slammed you not for your obsession with "modesty" but for your misprision of the central tenets of your Christianity:

"For white American evangelicals, religion is always about sex — about other people’s genitals, but when Jesus spoke about modesty of dress it was never about sex and lust. It was about money and greed and self-indulgence at the expense of those in need. If you’re striving for “biblical modesty,” that is the core and the whole of what the Bible itself has to say about leggings and yoga pants: “Whoever has two pair of leggings must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."

Which is in itself all well and good from a religious-good-doing sort of perspective. Though I should note that I tend to agree with Fred that Dale's comment was sort of a dick move. Sorry, Ron, but he was implying that it is haaaard to be faithful to you with those darn sluts prancing around in yoga pants. But that's a whole 'nother thing.

Thing is, sorry, I'm not a Christian like Fred (who is a pretty insightful guy and a fellow Jesus-pesterer; you might give him a read, just sayin'...) I'm just some random atheist. So I can't really help you on the whole "Christian morality" thing.

But.

I, like your husband Dale the "serial entrepreneur", am a guy. Dude. Vato. Hombre. Mensch. Fella. Goombah. We're both members of the He-Man Chest-Beater Club, sharers of the descended testicles, and we have a lot in common, saint and sinner the two of us.

And I thought we should reeeeeeally talk about this whole thing you said Dale said to you. Accoring to your blog "...he told me, “yeah, when I walk into a place and there are women wearing yoga pants everywhere, it’s hard to not look. I don’t, but it’s not easy.”

And, Ronnie, love ya, sweetie, bless your heart, but I'm here as a guy to tell you; Dale's lying his dear little Christian ass off.

"Looks?" Of course he looks. We ALL look.

Why?

Because we like you.

Sure, he loves you as a person, as a wife, mother of your kids, helpmeet, companion, lover. But...he's also a heterosexual guy. So he likes you as a woman.

Meaning he likes women. Women, plural. Women in general.

We're like that, us het guys. We may like some women as individual friends. We may love some - or, one, hopefully as in your case - as our inamorata, our one-and-only, our Bride, our Delight. But those are personality things, emotional things, spiritual things, individual things.

But we also like women. Physically. Generically. Generally. En masse. As a class of beings. We like how they look, how their voices sound, how they move, how they stand. We like how their faces fit together, how their hair falls, how they look hipshot, or sitting, or dancing, or sleeping. We like the high curve of the tops of their breasts, the slender taper of their fingers (or the square sturdiness of their hands - women come in a delightful assortment of sizes, shapes, and proportions, and that's another thing we like about them). We like the swell of their hips, and the roundness of their bottoms, the intricate curve where their belly meets their thigh.

We like how they laugh when they're silly, the frown that furls their brow when they're thinking. And...I hope this doesn't shock you, dear, but we like making love to them and we think about that from time to time when we look at them.

We don't really think about having sex with them when we see those women in their yoga pants and leggings.

Because, I'm sorry to say, dear, we don't need the yoga pants and leggings to think about having sex with them.

We don't need leggings...or yoga pants, or pantyhose or high heels or pushup bras or bustiers. We don't need accessories or special outfits or fetish wear. We're guys, Ronnie. Guys! We can look at a cool stylish matron in a chic suit and think of lust in the back of a limo. Or a ponytailed jogger in Nikes and imagine sweaty gym sex. Or the tattooed barista at the coffeeshop and picture wild lovemaking in a loft full of modern art.

Hell, don't even get me started on burkas or habits or granny shoes, darlin'. We're men and all of life is one ginormous Rule 34 for us. We look, and we think, and...if we love you, that's all we do.

Just looking - and thinking - doesn't mean we're going to tear off their yoga pants in a mad frenxy of lust. It doesn't mean that anytime we see a woman in a cute outfit, or a bathing suit, that we're gonna screw the poor girl to the wall. We may think about how pretty and sexy they are. We may get a little thrill of excitement looking at them.

But then we take all that home and if we're lucky get to feel and think the same way about you.

My own Bride, who is a very sensible and pragmatic woman, has a term for it: "You go ahead and work up an appetite wherever you want, big guy. Just come home to eat."

She knows we look, and she knows we know she knows, and she's okay with that. She's a smart woman and she knows that if what we have is good, and strong, and right that the looking is no more than enjoyment, and that she will reap the benefits.

And so can you so long as you remember this simple little rule: Guys Are Gonna Look - It Doesn't Matter What You Wear

So you pull on those Carharts, Ronnie dear, if it makes you feel better. But just remember - it's not about the leggings. It's about the legs, and he's gonna think about those legs - yours, hers, your Aunt Louise's - and probably will no matter if you and every other woman within sight are dressed in goddamn garbage sacks.

Losing my religion

I've got a much longer post up at the Milpub on this subject, but suffice to say that the shootings at the Paris political magazine just reminded me of what a goddamn toxic thing religion is when you throw it into the political stewpot.

And, first, I want to throw out the idea that somehow this is "Islam", that somehow Islam and Muslims are uniquely violent.

Think about it. For hundreds of years Europe was torn up by Protestants killing Catholics, Catholics killing Protestants and everybody killing Jews.

Don't even get me started on atheists and witches.

Where you went to church (or whether you did..) was a killing matter in Europe for centuries. Google "Thirty Years War" sometime and read up on what it did to Germany, among other places. Wasteland. Total fuckstory. Trust me on this.

Believing you have a pipeline to the Almighty makes a hell of a great reason to kill people who are piped into a different Heaven, and that was enough reason for Christian Europeans to do some of the world's most enthusiastic killing for centuries.

And then we stopped.

We booted the preachers the hell out of our politics - most of us - and, though we may kill each other for secular reasons, decided it was louche at best to go crusading.

Sure, some idiots still want to return to the Good Old Days when killing infidels for Baby Jesus got you into Heaven. But for most of us where our neighbors go to church - or whether they go to church or not - is a matter of massive indifference. The notion that someone is scarey because he might be Catholic and take orders from the Pope (as was said of JFK) or a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon or a Hindu or a Sikh seems ludicrous as the Blood Libel to us today. Outside of the Balkans (determined to be perverse as they have always been) religious skepticism, ignorance, indifference, and sloth is the rule in Western public life. It's considered rude (outside the Issa household) to parade your religiousity in public, let alone so much as upbraid anyone else for their infidelity.

We just can't be arsed to kill our neighbors or the random stranger anymore because they don't love our God not because we're better or kinder people but because we just don't give enough of a shit. Who cares what the Johnsons are doing Sunday morning? The fuckin' Vikes are playing, man!

As a whole, as a society, the West seems to worship - if it worships anything - sex and money and prettiness and fame. And while that in itself is a whole 'nother cluster of fuck it doesn't seem to be as lethal. Nobody seems to shoot somebody else over Hooters girls' tight shirts.

The occasional abortion doc, maybe. But, still.

So the last religion standing seems to be Islam, at this point. Which is pretty bizarre when you consider that in 1945 the idea of "political Islam" seemed like the height of lunacy.

All over the Islamic world secular governments were replacing the old colonial regimes. In fact the heartland of the current IS and AQ shenangans - Iraq and Syria - was largely run by "Baath" parties which were overtly and fiercely secular. The exemplar for the emerging Arab states was Turkey and the anticlericalism of the Young Turks.

But between the Western powers and Israel these secular states were shown up to their populations as either venal, weak, or both. Secular dictators were suborned with Western cash and weapons, or defeated by Israeli arms. The only groups that seemed to actually fight back effectively were the jihadis. The U.S. and the West also helped coddle a Saudi regime that nursed the Wahhabi madrassis that produced so many of these jihadi vipers. Charlie Wilson & Co. turned them loose on the Soviets which seemed like a damn fine idea at the time...and then cut them loose when the Soviets ran for cover.

The the world's deadest tall Saudi had the brilliant idea that if he goaded the American bull it's smash up the Middle Eastern china shop and it worked like a mechanical ass-kicker and and here we are.

It seems to me that the BEST answer to the jihadi problem would be the same thing that provided the solution to the Western Wars of Religion; indifference.

Everytime some TV preacher or some fatuous GOP fucktard starts ranting about how my country needs a healthy dose of Jesus or a return to "biblical values" my first thought is "Yeah, like witch-burning, adulterer-stoning, and crusades? The fuck we do."

We want to return to the Wars of Religion? We want to return to forced conversion and prosecutions for heresy and blue laws? My ass; the West voted with its feet - out the church door - a long time ago and it seems to me for all the flaws in Western civilization I can't but think that decision was a damn good one.

It seems to me that a big fat dose of fuck-you-preacherman would do the whole Islamic umma a hell of a lot of good, too.

But I have no idea what the hell you, or I, or anyone else on our side of the problem can do about that.

The Assassination of William the Silent

Four hundred and ninety-three years ago this month a German monk sent a letter to the Bishop of Mainz complaining about the Church practice of selling "indulgences"; that is, the forgiveness of earthly sins in return for hard, cold cash.

The result, eventually, was a series of rebellions, revolts, massacres, and wars that harrowed Europe from the gray coast of Dunnet Head to the sunny sands of the Côte d'Azur, from the dark headlands of Brittany to the dark forests of central Silesia. We will never know how many lives were taken amid what horrors of murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred.

All because many people of the day couldn't agree whose church was Church and whose god was God.

Catholics and Protestants, and those who wanted to use Catholicism and Protestantism to advance their less-elevated ambitions, butchered and harried each other for over a century, from the "Peasant's War" in 1524 to the final bloody brutalities of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and the subjugation of Ireland in 1651. The hatreds bred bone-deep still linger along today; ask anyone in Belfast or, for that matter, in the stands at Ibrox or Celtic Park.

By and large the peoples of Europe - and here I exclude the turbulent breeds in the Balkans, which have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the fucking Battle of Kosovo in fucking 1389 - no longer fight over religion.

The peoples of North America, having sprung largely from refugees of those fights or from fugitives from the very idea of such fighting, did not take their religions to the bayonet point before the modern nations of Canada and the United States were founded.

And, given that despite the lies you will often hear from those whose collection plates and political wherewithal grow from the ignorance of those lies both nations were founded largely by men with little or no use for a formal coupling of religion and the state, since the founding North America has largely been a place where religion, as Mark Twain described it, has become like dandruff; something that many people have "...and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it."

But not to the point of killing other people over.

And that, to my mind, is a very good thing.

Religion, and its quiet companion, faith, can produce great things from the mind and the hands; art, music, and literature, love, forgiveness, and kindness, comfort and mercy.

But those same can - and only can - produce the blackest of human cruelty and pitiless destruction.

A good man or woman can do good from the heart within them; an evil man or woman can do evil from their heartlessness. Only belief that doing death and giving out pain is pleasing to a God can cause a good man or woman to do great evil.

Now bloodyhanded death is being reaped in the name of another religion, and it is even alike in that it has split into sects the better to hate and struggle against itself to kill, and maim, and rape, and hate, and destroy .

I'm going to suggest that we are seeing the Peasant's Revolt of the umma, the first violent spasms of the Islamic Eighty Years War; that the Muslim world has embarked on its own Wars of Religion, and for the next decades - and only decades, if we are lucky - we will see this war fought out amongst, and between, groups and nations wherever those professing one sort of Islam or another butt up against themselves.

Unfortunately, this will also mean that some of us living in the unchurched lands outside the Muslim world, the peoples and places that outgrew our infantile religious wars will be killed by the violent spray of this religious warfare.

Collateral damage, as it were, of the Islamic Wars of Religion.

We cannot "win" this war for the Islamic lands; there are not enough bullets cast to kill every living Muslim, which is what we in the Enlightenment West would have to do to "win" such a war.

Only those living within the places where the Muslim faith is practiced can, by doing what the West did and rejecting religion itself as temporal government, rejecting religious "law" as temporal law and religious mores as social strictures, do that. And that is what must happen - there is no middle ground. There can be no theocracy lite, no half-measures of an "Islamic State" any more than there could be compromise between the Catholics and the Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire in 1558.

Simply stated, Islam cannot stand half wahhabi and half free. The wahhabis, the jihadis, the rapists of unveiled women, the killers of unbelieving men, will not let it. It must become all one, or all the other.

We, the West, can help those who stand against these unholy holy men that kill for Allah as we stood - eventually, too late, far too late, but finally - against those who killed for Christ.

But if we respond to the barbarism of the jihadis by becoming ourselves Arnaud-Amalric we will lose even if we win. If we respond with panic, with fear, by sacrificing our laws and our liberties, we will defeat ourselves.

So we will simply have to learn to live with, and accept, that we will lose our lives, some of us, even the highest among us, in this war that is neither ours to fight nor to win. To accept those losses and go on without sacrificing ourselves to our panic fear.

On the evening of July 10, 1584 the then-leader of the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries of what is today's Belgium and the Netherlands was the Prince of Orange, William, first of that name and often called de Zwijger or "The Silent". He seems to have been a man of few words.

But of deeds, many. He was a leader in the Protestant rebellion against Catholic Spain and is still today revered in the Netherlands as a good ruler and a founder of the nation. But to a Catholic named Balthasar Gérard he was just a traitor to his Spanish king and a heretic to his Catholic religion.

So Gérard picked up a couple of wheel-lock pistols, the Desert Eagles of his day, infiltrated Delft, and met William as the Prince was leaving his house where he had just enjoyed a quiet dinner with a guy named Rombertus van Uylenburgh.

William got to the bottom of the stairs and Van Uylenburgh heard Gérard shoot William twice in the chest at close range. The Prince died on the pavement.

The Dutch set up a monument to the dead man and carried on.

As should we.

Gods and mud bricks

I was helping the Boy with his homework last night and it got me thinking.

His sixth-grade class is studying ancient Mesopotamia, and the question for discussion last night was "learn about monotheism and polytheism and their effects on society" in the context of the early irrigation civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. The "book solution" was that a) the early Sumerians and Akkadians had a pantsload of gods that b) affected every aspect of their civilization, from architecture to social organization.

The kids' textbook didn't continue, but being who I am I had to follow the trail a little further. What I found based on a cursory look over the Internet was that c) the actual documentary evidence for early Mesopotamian religions is pretty skimpy - most of what we "know" is inferred from fairly fragmentary sources - and d) what consensus there is suggests that the "Sumerian" civilizations were solidly polytheistic - that is, that the peoples of the earlier inhabitants of the region centered around Sumer had a God of Bunions and another god for wheat and another for oral sex or whatever and they were all pretty much equals - but that as the "Akkadians" took over (that is, Babylon became the Big Ziggurat) a handful of the "bigger" deities tended to become, well, bigger. The various secondary sources seem uncertain as to how much this actually approached "monotheism" but agree that the result was somewhat different in both form and function from the earlier godly free-for-all.

The implication in the Boys' text was that this change in religion caused a change in society; gods first, people after.

But being the godless heathen I am I wonder; wouldn't it make just as much sense the other way around? If gods are - as I suspect they are - more a reflection of the people who imagine them why shouldn't the changes in civilizations result in a change in gods?

My brief understanding of the difference between the "Sumerian" and "Babylonian" (or "Akkadian") civilizations is that the latter was more centralized, and that the Akkadian rulers were more god-like god-kings than the earlier Sumerian versions; that Sumer was a bunch of city-states and that Babylon was Babylon and a bunch of tributary cities.

So why wouldn't it make sense for someone who looked at his or her society and saw that kind of heirarchy all around imagine the heavens as similarly organized? If your little city is just one among many it'd make sense that your city's gods were, too. If your city was the Big Pomegranate why shouldn't your god be the boss of the other cities' gods?

Makes sense to me, anyway, but I know from Mesopotamia what I know about Croatian poetry. Well, other than the Great Whore of Babylon because...well, because. It took everything I had in me not to sing the Boy the Crocodile Hotel Blues. I'm a Bad Dad that way.

Anyone with a bigger brain and more knowledge have ideas on the subject?

Let me help you with that

A friend of mine posted this little picture to her Facebook page:

To which she added "That's my guy..."

I looked at this and my immediate thought was:

"But a real, REAL woman would kick him square in the 'nards for being a pushy jerk who won't listen to her, so a real REAL guy will smile and have a couple of stiff drinks for her when she finishes up doing it herself..."

And that seemed like a frankly nasty and uncharitable reaction to what was intended to be a sweet tribute from a very good woman to her loving husband. So I sat and thought about that for a while. And after thinking about it I realized what it was about that trite little picture that pushed my feminist button.

It was the word "let".

Thing is, I don't "let" my Bride do or not do anything. There may be times that she does something and I offer to help her and there may be times she takes me up on that. But "let her" do something she wants to do herself? That presumes that it's my choice whether she does something. Which assumes that I'm the boss of her. And assuming that would earn me a solid kick in the 'nards were I foolish enough to try and insist on that.

And that kinda brings us right back to the irritation that I've been simmering in since the Hobby Lobby decision and its implications; that your gender - or your religion - lets you make decisions for someone else about what amounts to their life or their paycheck (see Lance Mannion for a nice discursion on this aspect of the issue...) so long as you're a man (or a Christian of the bible-clutching variety) and I'm a woman or married or emotionally or financially attached to one or some sort of not-your sort of Christian.

I wrote a post back in 2012 called "Looking for FitzUrse" which I ended with:

"One of the truly fundamental principles of the United States is that you're only allowed to pester people with your whacko religious ideas to the degree and extent that your powers of persuasion allow. The U.S. government, by its constitutive documents, is forbidden from allowing - much less encouraging - one religion or other to enshrine its prejudices and preferences into civil or criminal law. For the good reason that the United States is supposed to be a land where the public forum is open to people of all religions, or none, and the moment you let the pope's nose into the lawbook that freedom is doomed.

This does not, has not, and will not prevent prelates of various sorts from trying to do this. Repeatedly, patiently, relentlessly, mercilessly.

Which is why the steps of the Capitol must, must always be guarded by fitzUrse with his naked sword in his hand.For that pious, humble, saintly man Tom Becket is the black enemy of public freedom and always will be."

And I see no reason to alter or retract that statement. You are free to follow your inner religious nut to the tip of my nose, and, in the public forum, are allowed to advocate for your religious nuttery and, if elected, let it guide your personal decisions.

What you're NOT free to do is use the levers of civil or criminal law to force ME to follow your religious nuttery.

This country has seen an explosion of magical thinking in its politics in the past thirty years. Belief is allowed to trump logic, desire commonsense, ridiculous ideas like "trickle-down economics" over fiscal experience, nonsensical opinion outweigh rational inquiry.

Like the idea that because I have external genitalia or a mystical inside line to an invisible magical sky wizard I have the power to "let" my inamorata "do something herself" or decide for someone else what they can or can't do with their money?

I'm really fucking sick and tired of people who think like that and, worse, who are trying to get me and those like me to think, or act, like that.

Just fucking sick and tired.