the end of the journey: chez nous

I've continued reading Journey of the Magi, and sure enough it has only irritated me the more. In this passage he gets more blatant, and ridiculous.

Freedom without divine laws results in, to paraphrase Shakespeare, humanity preying on itself like monsters of the deep; and progress has brought us to the brink of doing to the world what God promised he would never do to it again himself.

First, to exonerate Shakespeare. The beauty, and to some the frustration, of the reflections expressed in Shakespeare's plays is that none of them can be pinned on the bard himself. The words belong to Albany, in King Lear, who mordantly asserts that, without the 'visible spirits' sent down from the heavens to tame us 'humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters of the deep' - and yes, he uses the plural, just as Gloucester does when he famously says, 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport' - which gives an idea of what he thinks of divine law, a view not dissimilar to that of Mark Twain. King Lear is a pagan play, so what is asserted here about 'divine law' is hard to ascertain, suffice to say that humanity needs taming - something we can perhaps all agree on.
As to progress, that long-suffering whipping-boy, if we define it, uncapitalized, as positive change, or improvement, it reflects a thoroughly human and indispensable striving. The notion that we're on the eve of destruction, going to hell in a handcart etc, is as old as civilization itself, and hardly needs any effort expended on it here.
It might be pointed out, though, that divine laws, whatever they are, are inimical to the notion of progress, because of course they're eternal, as divine stuff tends to be. How can anything which is eternal change? This is, of course, a big problem, bigger than is recognised, for all proponents of 'divine law'. If you think biblical injunctions, or sharia laws, really are divine, then you're stuck with them for ever and ever. Hardly any wonder then that so many experts on divine law, imams and rabbis and so forth, have sprung up over the centuries to 're-interpret' the laws for changing times. Not that they've done a particularly impressive job - sharia law, in particular, continues to be a gross insult to anyone who has any respect for human rights [that construction of miserable, despised human beings].
Of course, there are no divine laws. Roberts should have written 'freedom without laws leads to humanity preying on itself', as, basically, Hobbes asserted. But that would've been way too prosaic, I suppose.

I feel almost guilty about getting stuck into Roberts like this, searching for 'gotcha' moments, or passages. I remember Glenn Gould, the pianist, saying that he gave up concert performances because he felt that the audience was only there to hear him fail, to wait for that 'gotcha' moment when the whole performance might collapse on a bum note. Roberts' book, which he sees as an entertainment, is contradictory, muddled, funny, angry and occasionally inspired. He has apparently written acclaimed reportage on both gulf wars, and he has some of the footloose, rambling quality of a Hunter S Thompson. Also, I read on his website that he has gone blind in both eyes, a fate I don't even want to begin to imagine. Yet I also feel something like a duty to challenge sentences such as the one quoted above. To not let people get away with hazy-lazy religious talk, to show up the emptiness at its heart. Human laws are imperfect, but they're all we have, and if we accept they're always going to be only human, we'll accept the challenge of constantly modifying them. Unlike the mysteriously misplaced ones given to Moses, they're not written in stone.

I return - to a religious mishmash

Jesus the cutely meditating Essene Nazarean

Thought I'd lost my blog there.

I've been awol for a while, trying to write essays for The Faith Hope, The Book.

This leads me to read all sorts of stuff I wouldn't usually read. Journey of the Magi by Paul William Roberts, has some good humorous bits in it, but it's an odd and unconvincing mixture, part travel novel, part speculative thingy [about inter alia the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judeaism and so Christianity], part satori, part mockery of Marco Polo, part spruik for Zoroastrianism and eastern-style Christianity as opposed to the nasty materialist Roman Catholics, and I'm becoming less and less interested in the evidence-free dogmatism - for example, on Zoroaster, he writes:

It is... worth repeating the traditional account of the prophet's life - since there is no doubt that he lived one, and lived it under very human conditions, too.

He then goes on to point out that nobody knows when and where the guy lived, and that claims about the dates of his life vary by a millenium or so! In fact nothing is known about his life, and he seems to be as shadowy a figure as Homer. The 'no doubt' claim is simply absurd. What's more, Roberts also has no doubt that Jesus was a 'pure Essene rabbi' - having read three quarters of the book now, I'm still waiting for a skerrick of evidence to support this. Many of Roberts' conjectures are interesting and even ingenious, and certainly he knows far more about Judaic and early Christian history than I do, but I detect a clear bias. Organised religion generally repels him, but he's drawn to the unorthodox, idiosyncratic religions, or dimensions of religion, such as Sufism, Zoroastrianism, Eastern Christianity and Essene Judaism. He depicts Christianity as being hijacked in the west by an orthodox, power-hungry clique who divested of its real essence. He writes of Eastern Christianity as the Truth and Western Christianity as the Lie. Naturally this doesn't convince me, as I don't find anything 'true' about religion, though it might be sometimes appropriate to talk about authenticity versus cynicism or disingenuousness. Clearly though it's the authoritarianism of established religion that gets my goat, while I find individual mystics merely quaint, or sad - and sometimes, admittedly, impressive, For example, I'm not sure if Leonard Cohen would want to call himself a mystic but he has that aura of calm and strength about him which is just what you need from a guru, and it clearly engenders great respect and love. And does no harm that I can think of, which is far more than you can say about organised religion.

So I've been reading the passages in Roberts' book which deal with the histories of these religious movements with increasing skepticism, and boredom. And when I got to this infuriating passage I really wondered whether it was worth continuing. He is writing about his differences with Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Barbara Thiering:

As brilliant as many of her interpretations are, Thiering's major shortcoming is her inability to realize that the "Eastern" gnostic, or Magian, or Nazarean Essenes were not superstitious fools: they opposed Pauline Judaeo-Christianity for the very reason that, by removing doctrines and practices regarding the subjective experience of "Truth", it would end up as little more than the secular humanism Thiering herself seems to have arrived at - besides creating a society governed increasingly by political or personal expediency rather than eternal spiritual values and truths.

Now this really is a load of tosh. What are these 'eternal spiritual values and truths'? Apparently they're arrived at through doctrines and practices dealing with the subjective experience of truth. Basically he's lost himself in a mire of theological claptrap - amazing how you can do that in one short paragraph - and the onus is on him, as it is upon any theological spruiker, to let us know what these eternal spiritual values are. As for the political and personal expediency that, he intimates, flows from secular humanism, we've all heard that one before. It conveniently ignores the fact that all our laws are secular, and those that haven't been, historically, have generally been bad laws. Even if you look at the decalogue, the commandments that are most convincing and 'eternal'-seeming are the least 'spiritual' - thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal. That's because they're based on a common-sense understanding of how we are to best survive and thrive as social beings.
I've been reading Geoffrey Robertson's important book Crimes Against Humanity, and in it he traces the history of human rights since the Universal Declaration, that monument to secular humanism, came out in 1948. As he points out, many nations with poor human rights records signed up to the document cynically believing it to be a paper tiger, but the tiger is beginning to grow some baby teeth. I think it has largely defeated claims about western bias and 'Asian values' and it still stands, in fact more so than ever, as a model to aim for, and to measure performance against. Enforcement is of course the primary problem, but the human rights model, it seems to me, has a solid basis in our practical understanding of what it is to lead a life of value. Whether they embody 'spiritual values', I don't know, as I've never understood what that word means, but they do embody 'eternal' values, at least for as long as human beings go on being human.

a familiar refrain

It's pretty well impossible to get round the fact that the god who stars in the Old Testament is not a nice guy. There are numerous instances of gobsmacking cruelty and barbarity throughout, but I'll just focus on one event: the Flood.

Kids tend to like this story, with the animals tramping into the ark two by two, joined, we can imagine, by love and loyalty, eager to face a new beginning. But outside the ark? Apparently we needn't worry about the people outside the ark, not to mention the other living things. We're assured that they all deserved to die:

5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” [Genesis 6: 5-7 – ESV Bible]

Of course the god's judgement is infallible, so if he says [or somebody says that he says] every person's thoughts were continually evil we aren't really in a position to demur. As for all the other creeping and flying things, the fact that the god is sorry that he made them should be enough for us.

But of course it isn't, not for any thinking feeling person. It was this part of the story - of drowning, desperate people, of toddlers and six year olds swimming and struggling desperately for disappearing higher ground, seeing their siblings and parents washed away, seeing dead babies and animals floating by – that haunted me. It didn't get much of a mention in the sermons.

Yet the sermonisers and interpreters can't quite wash their hands of this crime. On About.com's page about the Flood, under 'Points of interest from the story', the interpreter kindly informs us that God's purpose in the flood was not to destroy people, but to destroy wickedness and sin. So the god really wanted to get rid of unspecified 'wickedness and sin', and the only way he could think to do that, in spite of being all-powerful, was to destroy every living person, not to mention, again, all the other living things. I should've paid attention to this explanation when I was younger, but somehow it slipped by me. All I kept in my head were hundreds of drowned babies, and screaming, gurgling children. And later, in association, the bowed, cowed children following their wicked parents into gas chambers. After all, the Reich's purpose wasn't to destroy people, but to make everything cleaner and brighter for the chosen ones of the earth.

processing to irrelevance

In normal circumstances, in decent, civilized society throughout the West, a person who expressed the view that the Harry Potter novels, with their incantations and magical games and mythical beasties, posed serious dangers to our kids, and that hurricane Katrina could well have been a god's retribution upon the residents of New Orleans for such iniquitous activities as homosexuality and prostitution - such a person would be politely shunned or perhaps referred to authorities as a suitable case for treatment. Certainly such claims would, and should, cast serious doubts on that person's fitness to hold any responsible political or community position.
However, the values of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church are not those of society at large. It doesn't bend to mere public opinion, because it believes its values are eternal, given to it by its god - who is our god too, even if we know nothing about the fellow. Besides, the claim about Katrina is quite plausible, as this god has committed such mass murders before when he has been displeased by members of his specially created species. Indeed he once murdered the whole species apart from one small family, apparently for disloyalty - something dictators rather relish doing, or would relish if only they had the supernatural powers of a deity.
So it's not surprising that a person who would be rightly reviled by most reflective secularists should be promoted within the Catholic Church. Yet there are some good signs to note here. The promoted ultra-conservative pastor is Austrian, and his appointment to a bishopric in Linz will undoubtedly turn ever more people away from a rigid, backward, bigoted church hierarchy. The Catholic Church is completely on the nose in Austria, apparently, and the numbers of its followers have dwindled dramatically. It can only be hoped that Herr Ratzinger continues on this track.
The Catholic Church hierarchy's response to Ms Rowling's massively popular magical adventure series is in fact highly diverting, offering light relief from consideration of its campaign of intimidation, repression, misinformation and outright murder in many African countries in recent years. There seems more than a touch of jealousy in their critique of the books' effects on the young innocent minds who flock to them. Take these remarks by none other than the Vatican's chief exorcist:

"You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a likeable wizard, but you end up with the Devil. There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books."

We may well laugh, both at the primitive manichaeism of these remarks, and at the title of chief exorcist, but we would do well to remember that this gentleman, Gabriele Amorth by name, is the inheritor of a long line of murderers, rapists and torturers doing their all for the glory of their god and church. It should never be forgotten that this church has never never willingly given up an inch of its power to destroy any rival superstition. It has been dragged kicking and screaming to its current state of relative impotence. It lives and breathes solely for a return to its old medieval powers.
Herr Ratzinger is very much at the centre of these dangerous puerilities. In a letter written before he was 'elevated' to the popehood, he wrote to a conservative critic:

It is good that you shed light and inform us on the Harry Potter matter, for these are subtle seductions that are barely noticeable and precisely because of that deeply affect (children) and corrupt the Christian faith in souls even before it (the Faith) could properly grow

I can only commend the Harry Potter author for corrupting the Christian faith by means of a fun rival, and I'd urge other authors of imagination and verve to continue the process. The human imagination, and especially the deliciously bottomless imagination of childhood, surely deserves much better than the murderous bigotry of Catholicism.