Rhinocrisy

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.

You might want to check out this column in the Guardian lamenting a recent poll which found 30% of British school kids believe in Creationism or “intelligent” “design”.^* Personally, the response this evokes in me is a desire to run outside, find the nearest religious nut and sucker-punch him in the gut until he explains the workings of his mind to me.

The other day I met a born-again Christian who was willing to cop to the charge - but she refused to tell her audience why she became born-again, because she was afraid we would think it was hokey. This really blows my mind… if you, yourself find your beliefs hokey, why in the name of Christ do you hold them?

I’m also unable to appreciate the disconnect between the otherwise rational behavior of religious types, who as far as I am able to tell can operate can-openers, make their way through revolving doors and drive manual transmission automobiles, and their absurdist, counter-intuitive belief systems. I would honestly be much happier if the religious people in the world moved in constant trepidation, afraid that their dog might, without a moment’s notice, change into a sofa (or vice-versa), that the fibers of their living room throw rug would spontaneously de-interlace and crawl worm-like into the corners of the room, or that the color of the sky is constantly cycling like someone is fiddling with its “hue” tuner. This, at least, would be consistent, and consistently crazy. As it is I have to believe one of two things:

• They are all putting me on.
• There is a “religious nuttery” mental faculty that I am missing that allows this dissonant state of mind to exist.

Perhaps it’s better to gawk than to experience first-hand, but religious people seem to enjoy what seems to me to be an addled state. I can’t help feeling I’m missing out.

^† I am not actually eating soup. I am eating chocolate s’mores!^‡

^‡ No, not that either. But who wouldn’t want to eat a nice chocolate s’more? Why, I remember in my youth, when I would go on camping outings with my Boy Scout troop^§, we would roast s’mores over the campfire and enjoy their creamy, chocolatey goodness while we sang hymns in praise of Lord Baden-Powell. Ah, memory… tis enough to make a man cry into his soup.

^§ Actually the only thing I remember being roasted at a Boy Scout outing was a live chipmunk some disgusting little puke had caught and thrown in the fire. What a travesty… I bet Lord Baden-Powell is looking down from Heaven right now, crying in his soups’mores.

Plenty of people fear that the leaders of the U.S. are fired by apocalyptic fantasies.

And according to a 2002 Time/CNN poll, 59% of Americans think the events portrayed in Revelation will happen; 17% think the events will take place within their lifetimes.

I pity the fools.

They don’t realize that the Rapture took place on September 4, 2005. I was burrowing across the country with my pal in a car. We saw first one vehicle, pulled over on the side of the road, with belongings but no person inside. Then another. A few miles later, yet another.

There it was — these folks were Raptured up. I mean, all told, it’s not like there were going to be very many taken into the Kingdom. 144,000 — 12,000 from each of the tribes. Goodbye to them. I wonder if they’ve found what they’re looking for.

Now as for the rest of y’all, quit your hopeless, unrequited carping at the toenails of your almighty and get down with your bad selves. We have Sodoming and Gomorrahing to do.

I mean no disrespect to non-insane Christians, but if you want a few hearty chuckles, check out Ask the Real Jesus, a Q/A site written by the Lord Himself. Check out His Answer to the question “Is Jesus alone in heaven?” It’s funny cuz they’re serious.