Rhinocrisy

I started poking around in the Book of Isaiah today, the transcription of the vision of the eponymous prophet. The book is basically an argument by Yahweh that he is the Lord of the Earth, he is undefeatable, and he needs his chosen people to spread his kingdom across the world.

This is a petulant god:

Isaiah 1:11 “I am sick of your sacrifices,” says the LORD. “Don’t bring me any more burnt offerings! I don’t want the fat from your rams or other animals. I don’t want to see the blood from your offerings of bulls and rams and goats.

12 Why do you keep parading through my courts with your worthless sacrifices?

But he’s got good things planned for us:

Isaiah 2:4 The LORD will settle international disputes. All the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. All wars will stop, and military training will come to an end.

And sometimes he’s downright gooey:

Isaiah 54:10 For the mountains may depart and the hills disappear, but even then I will remain loyal to you. My covenant of blessing will never be broken,” says the LORD, who has mercy on you.

11 “O storm-battered city, troubled and desolate! I will rebuild you on a foundation of sapphires and make the walls of your houses from precious jewels.

This really makes me think of the game Black & White, a little gem from Lionhead Studios. In this game, you were a god. You controlled a small tribe of people, whom you had to encourage to build and develop their land, and to worship you. You also had to defend them from attack by encroaching gods, and to convert the other gods’ followers into yours. All with the help of your adorable giant creature pet (e.g. a monkey).

What a terrifying possibility! Is Isaiah’s God some kind of pan-dimensional adolescent, His face pock-marked with singularities, playing out an intricately constructed game, as detailed as is appropriate for His nearly limitless intelligence? Hopefully the game has transitioned into a different mode of play, because He’s doing pretty poorly according to his initial win condition. How long before He grows bored and hits reset to start a new game?

I’ll admit, I’m not sure exactly which trench I’m lying in, here. I’m a bit of a wanderer, and I suspect I’ve been tunneling back and forth across the battlefield haphazardly, crossing over my own ditch more than once^*. Nevertheless, people are certainly throwing up a fog of war and running around brandishing their rhetoric at each other, so I feel like I should take a position in this War on Xmas^† arrangement.

In brief: I’m a big fan of Christmas. I’m not in any way a Christian, though I do have a more than usual fascination for it. I’m probably better read in certain parts of the Bible than many nominal Christians (though I’m certainly no expert), and I’m more opinionated than I have a right to be on certain hermeneutic questions. But I’m definitely a dabbler; and I have no interest whatsoever in being Saved.

As kids, despite our serious Hindu upbringing, we celebrated Christmas for many years in the secular fashion - decorating the tree, waiting for Santa, opening presents - until, eventually, even that splash of taint became too much for my increasingly orthodox parents. Nevertheless, we got our fair dose, and I still have fond feelings for the holiday as a result. Christmas is fun.

I feel I am in a privileged position here, compared to many other groaning Christians, who have fidgeted uncomfortably through dozens of Christmas masses and other generally odious lectures about the merits of Christ, barked at them by priests and vicars who make lackluster storytellers at best. I, on the other hand, get to enjoy the stuff almost unadulterated, comfortably shielded by secular society. That, of course, is what I enjoy most about Christianity: it’s an abundant store of mythology, rich (if occasionally incoherent) storytelling. The Nativity story is an excellent example: the birth of a golden child, a heroic figure destined to liberate a downtrodden people from bondage. His parents, poor folk, are hunted by a diabolic king determined to snuff out his life in the cradle, before he can grow to manhood and threaten the power of the oppressive empire. Crackerjack stuff, if you get to hear it divorced from any sanctimonious posturing.

Then there’s all the ancillary characters - Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, Black Peter, the Krampus, Rudolph, elves at the North Pole, or even later additions like Scrooge and Frosty the Snowman. In a culture that I fear suffers from an appalling lack of mythology, Christmas is chock full of it.

This is probably a depressing perspective for those who feel that what we should actually glean from Christmas is the glory of Christ and nothing else. I’m uninterested in worshiping Jesus; I like him, and I think he’s a compelling hero. But I also think Luke Skywalker is a compelling hero (and in a similar vein), and I’m not about to light candles for him.

I’ve always been a merciless syncretist; if we’re free to pick and choose the best bits from here and there (and leave behind the dross), we can assemble quite a bouquet. My interest in maintaining Christmas - in maintaining any body of stories - is to preserve the health of the field, to keep it vibrant and diverse. Stories thrive as living things - when they are shared among us, and warmed by repetition, by passage through thousands of lips. They form bright cords that knit us together, bring us close. More, please.

^* This allows for the horrifying possibility that I might sneak up on myself and shoot me in the back.
^† While I’m aware that the proper etymological origin of the X in Xmas is from the Greek Χριστός, its resemblance to the Cross always strikes me as a little weird. Jesus must get a wicked head-rush from being tilted up at a forty-five degree angle all season.

Reiterating the hypocrisy of right-wing Christians in this country is a fruitless exercise, and I’m not exactly sure why I am about to embark on it. I suspect my rational mind must compulsively disentangle their dissonance.

Observe one Paul Broun, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, who wants us to proclaim a “Year of the Bible”, so we can get back to the Biblical principles our laws and fundamental values are based on. He’s most worried about a totalitarian government:

We are headed toward a total government control of everybody’s lives — a loss of freedom, a loss of our money, a loss of our private property — and it’s extremely critical now for us to go back to those foundational principles that this country was founded upon.

I find this infuriating, because it suggests to me that Mr. Broun has never actually read the Bible. The first Christian community, made by the Apostles, whose example we’re all supposed to follow, outlines principles diametrically opposed to what Broun describes above. In Acts Chapters 4 & 5, it clearly describes how the first Christians were meant to live - that is, they were expected to sell all their property and surrender their wealth to the Apostles, who would then dispose of it in the interest of the community. In fact, there’s even an incident where someone cheats a little bit, with drastic consequences:

But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a possession, and kept back part of the price, his wife also being privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost: and great fear came on all them that heard these things. And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and buried him.

And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife, not knowing what was done, came in. And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for so much? And she said, Yea, for so much. Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out. Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.

This seems pretty clear to me: as I’ve suggested before, the early Christians lived according to something resembling Marxist democratic centralism, with a Politburo controlling the community’s wealth and decision-making. This conflicts with Broun’s claim that the Bible upholds the sanctity of private property; whence, then, does he make that argument? The Bible is not text to him, to be read and understood - it’s just a totem to be waved around. I thought that this was the problem that was supposed to have been corrected by the Protestant Reformation, when people first started reading the thing, and saying to themselves, “Wait a minute - none of this shit you’re saying is actually in here.”

I recently caught up with my friend Claudio Pasqua, a janitor who happens to work in Harvard’s Divinity School. I previously interviewed him on the bizarre subject of alien religions, here. Since we both enjoyed the experience, we decided to have another go at it, on a slightly less esoteric subject.

RHINOCRISY: So, first off, I bet people are curious about it, so I should let you clear up why it is you’ve never bothered to actually enroll in this school and get a degree and maybe a faculty post.

CLAUDIO PASQUA: You mean as opposed to enduring a lifetime of Good Will Hunting jokes?

R: Heh, yeah.

CP: Well, the list of reasons is really endless, and I’m making up new ones all the time, but to be brief: I’m happy where I am.

R: Fair enough, we’ll leave it at that. Okay, so I wanted to, um, basically get you to ramble on at length about atheism.
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I took a long trip up to Montreal to visit my best friend Thomas, who is a painter. Pride compels me to post a link to some of his stuff. There’s a lot that could be said about that; our conversations tend to be incredibly dense and traverse a great deal of territory. But I’ll leave that aside and instead speak about my trip:
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Since my sister brought it up, I suppose I might as well cover my “achaar as prasaad” theory in big, bold letters so everyone can read it.

The first obstacle in appreciating this theory will be unfamiliarity with its components. So, let me review, briefly.

“Achaar” is simply the Hindi word for “pickle”. You’ve probably consumed an Indian pickle before - they’re usually made with fruit of some sort and are heavily spiced, quite salty, usually tart and sometimes make your tongue burn with a righteous fire. I have been a fan of savory foods my whole life and enjoy eating achaar a great deal.

“Prasaad” is the Hindi word for “oblations”, and refers to a bit of food offered as a sort of sacrifice to God during prayer. There’s many problems with this arrangement, such as:

• Why does God need to eat?

• Even if God does need to eat, why can’t he/she/it take care of him/her/itself?
• Is there really any value in symbolically offering food to an omnipotent deity, especially when you’re going to eat it anyway right afterwards?

However, these are only problems for cantankerous individuals such as myself who just can’t wrap their heads around the idea of why God needs or wants to be worshipped in the first place.^* Anyway, that’s not the point: when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and when hanging around with normal, devoted Hindus, play along, even if you don’t find yourself quite believing in everything. Social utility is something I can appreciate.

Prasaad is usually something sweet. In fact, it is nearly always something sweet. Indians are quite fond of sweets and have managed to produce a dizzying number of variations on the theme of sugar, milkfat and flour. The appeal of sweets is quite clear: our biochemistry is based on the metabolism of simple sugars such as glucose or fructose. It’s sensible, therefore, that we’ve evolved a palette that appreciates and even relishes the taste of sugar. Most people love sweets and can gorge themselves endlessly on them.

Not I. I detest sweets. I suspect my palette is a little oversensitive to sugar. I usually react by having strange sugar rushes and mini-seizures when I try to eat something sweet. Un-pleasant!^†

Follow, then, my logic:
We’ve already established that anthropomorphic concepts of God are in order. I’m not prepared to accept this premise, but it seems to be the mode, and so we will take it as given. Wisdom suggests that presenting God with sweets is worthwhile because God, like us, would enjoy eating some sweets. Why? Who knows.^‡ But if hubris is the way we’re operating, why stop at an anthropomorphic God? Surely I should consider a God even more reflective of my ego - a Saurabh-o-morphic God, as it were.^§ I don’t like sweets, I like achaar. Maybe God wants achaar as prasaad, as well.

My theory has merit. There’s almost universal agreement that the world is, generally speaking, a shitty place to live. Most theories of religion blame this on an evil genius of some sort, but it’s at least as likely that the fault is that of endless millions of worshippers, who have for thousands of generations been forcing sweets onto an unhappy and possibly lactose-intolerant God. If we merely corrected our transgression, I predict that a rain of petals would be our reward.

^* I previously described my difficulties with worship here. I’m certainly a fan of awe and humility before the vast, beautiful and unpitying Universe, but I still don’t know how to jump from there to the idea of worship as useful.

^§ Such a god would presumably refuse to be worshipped, would respond to prayer only infrequently, would often leave His stereo blaring upbeat, danceable rhythms across the heavens, and would occasionally manifest in gargantuan, terrifying forms, knocking over buildings and eating random civilians, just to show you-all what’s what.

Episcopalians out amid anti-homo-fest. Witches in for armed earth-worshippers.

Special bonus from that story: did you know that the U.S. Dept. of Defense will honor a dead atheist with a special atheist logo, “an atomic whirl“? Neither did I. If I had seen that logo, I would never have become an atheist.

More proof that the Internet is awesome can be found on this site. Also I didn’t realize that Jesus looks like the lead singer for Celtic Frost.

Every Christmas, hotheaded demagogues of the American right wing howl their outrage over a purported War on Christmas. Try as we might, those of us in the reality-based community haven’t yet managed to laugh them off the public stage.

Meanwhile, many of these same theocrats have declared war on one of the two truly American holidays. While they still tolerate Thanksgiving (perhaps because they think they can turn it into a Christian allegory, Landover Baptist notwithstanding), they have lost their patience for Halloween. At the school where my partner works, teachers sent home permission slips to find out whether parents would let their students take part in Halloween activities, including demon-worshipping activities such as costume-making. Many of the parents refused to give permission. Another associate of mine plays music at a farm where kids go to pick pumpkins and take hayrides. One school that sent a group in the past week instructed him not to play any Halloween music.

Of course it’s not just the hard right that has decided that Halloween has gone too far. The city of San Francisco just posted this gloomy buzzkill of a website to discourage revelers from ravaging the charming Castro neighborhood. Or, for that matter, from coming and having a jolly good time. Ostensibly, we can expect that on Tuesday night, the only people who will show up in the Castro will be those prone to disobeying instructions or without Internet access — just the demographic they were looking for, I’m sure.

What all of this ignores is that Halloween is the closest we have in the U.S. to a glimpse of our collective repressions, our collective id. It is arguable the most important holiday of the year, up there with Thanksgiving as a secular celebration and more important than Thanksgiving in that it provides an annual outlet for whatever urges have built up and gone unexpressed. It is a leading indicator of the culture.

For years, gay and transgender culture was most visible on Halloween. Today, with homosexuality barely raising eyebrows and trans-men and trans-women showing up in broader and broader parts of the culture, we see Halloween becoming a celebration of hypersexualization, especially of women and girls but also of men and boys. I would be interested to hear from others what you think this reveals — I think it might relate to the ever-widening reach of pornography clashing with our continually prudish sexual norms.

It is also one of the few times people feel comfortable showing how they really feel about, their political leaders — there are plenty of bloody George Bushes to go around this year, and former New York City mayor Ed Koch used to march in his city’s Halloween parade asking attendees his signature line, “How am I doin?” But he was concealed in a costume that allowed people to say what they really felt. The costume: An Ed Koch mask.
This sort of periodic airing of the id goes back to Hawthorne, who traced it back to Puritan times.

The War on Halloween, of course, like the War on Christmas, is mostly in the heads of those of us worrywarts who wish our favorite holiday could pass unmolested, which might in turn imply that the holiday had lost its power — Christmas had become secularized, losing its power as a religious ceremony, or Halloween had lost its power to shock.

And like the War on Christmas, every word written complaining of the War on Halloween is a more valuable word left unwritten to express dismay at much less figurative, more awful wars over which I might have more control. (Gee, a military assault on a 5-month insurrection in a city that is as close to me as Columbus, Ohio, an assault justified by the death of an Indymedia documentarian of all people. Please tell me why this isn’t foremost in my mind. Please tell me why I care about Halloween more than about a hot war close to home, fought with weapons that I paid for with my taxes. Perhaps I am idiot.

I feel like practically everyone I meet in the educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class, white-or-hoping-to-be-white America where I live is “agnostic” about god. They don’t make strong statements one way or the other. There might be a god, they say. There might not.

Happily, such wishy-washiness seems to fade under the glare of a theocracy. In Mexico, where the Roman church continues to have power that approaches that of the semi-elected government, you don’t hear half-way statements. You’re either with god or you’re against him.

A few notes from Chiapas:
- I had a Spanish teacher who, after I said I was an atheist, broke into a big smile and said how great it was to hear that, as he was too. He said it was scary to admit in a city like San Cristobal de las Casas, a very religious town.
- A flyer, in English, arguing for the existence of god, hanging at the Spanish school.
- On the stone exterior of the city cathedral, the spraypainted words, “Ni amor ni dios,” or “Neither love nor god.”

It could be that principled stands against the superstitious version of god are gaining traction. Current Amazon bestsellers (subject to change!) include, at No. 10, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and at No. 5, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. And then at no. 2 is Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death by Gary Renard (about something he calls quantum forgiveness), which may be related in some mysterious way to No. 1, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward.

Note: I admire religious traditions for their maintenance of cultural values and arts over the centuries. I just have no interest in the superstitious notion of omniscient creators and such.