The Church of Social Justice

This new church at a mountain resort near Qingdao, China, is unconnected with anything or anyone mentioned in this post.  However, its stark, absolute purity of form and color seems emblematic of something.  You be the judge.

Helen Lewis, a staff writer at the Atlantic, has put into words some thoughts your Head Trucker has had for quite a while now.  Excerpt from her article in the current issue:

In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggest that we look at campus protests as outbreaks of “collective effervescence,” a term coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe emotions that can be accessed only in a crowd. Singing, swaying, and chanting build up a kind of electricity, which ripples through the group. And that’s how a person can end up screaming “repent” at a stranger for the crime of holding a funny sign.

Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we've got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.”

Oldfield was one of the many commentators, activists, and religious leaders—and, sometimes, people who are all three—whom I recently interviewed for a new BBC documentary, The Church of Social Justice. Some of what I discovered surprised me. I asked Alex Clare-Young, a nonbinary minister in the United Reformed Church, whether their faith or their gender was more surprising to Generation Z acquaintances. “I think probably being religious,” Clare-Young responded. “I know a lot of LGBTQ+ young people who say it’s harder to come out as Christian in an LGBT space than LGBT in a Christian space.” . . .

This phenomenon is not confined to the left, though. At Donald Trump’s rallies, booing members of the press, who were kept in an exposed pen, became part of the ritual. The storming of the Capitol involved hardened militia members and amateur gun nuts, but also dozens of otherwise law-abiding citizens swept up in collective effervescence. There are other religious parallels: QAnon’s lurid myths about blood-drinking elites echo medieval anti-Semitic tropes, and the QAnon rally where adherents awaited the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. had a distinctly millenarian feel. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has reported, followers of this conspiracy-theory movement treat the anonymous Q’s online postings as something akin to divine revelations. “I feel God led me to Q,” one QAnon follower told LaFrance. . . .

In real life, churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples force together, in their congregations, a random assortment of people who just happen to live close to them. But today’s social activism is often mediated through the internet, where dissenting voices can easily be excluded. We have taken religion, with its innate possibility for sectarian conflict, and fed it through a polarization machine. No wonder that today’s politics can feel like a wasteland of anguished ranting—and like we are in hell already.

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Show Me the Way: Gay in Tennessee

A moving, enlightening documentary by Emmy Award winner Kate Kunath, released in 2019.  From the YouTube description:

The battle for LGBTQ rights hasn't only been fought on the streets of coastal cities; it has also taken place on the dirt roads, campuses, and in the homes of rural America. In this new short documentary‚ released 50 years after the Stonewall riots, which brought LGBTQ rights into the national consciousness‚ gay men living in central Tennessee, and their families, share stories of struggle and self-acceptance. We meet the retiree who spent his entire professional life in the closet, his devoted partner of 20 years, a pastor determined to overcome his own prejudices, and the pastor's gay son, newly in love and just starting to come into his own.

The location is Centerville, Tennessee, about 60 miles southwest of Nashville; Nashville is the home of Vanderbilt University, a large, prestigious private college.

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More Churches Okay with the Gay

Results from the 2014 Pew Research Center survey of religious life in America continue to be assessed.  This week, the Pew folks released these charts showing the change in acceptance of homosexuality among various Christian denominations between 2007 and 2014 (click to enlarge):

And here's a chart Pew created last July showing where American religious groups stand on same-sex marriage:

Also of interest from last summer is this chart showing religious affiliations in major U. S. cities:

In case you are wondering, Wikipedia lists the major American metro areas and their populations here.


And of course individuals vary widely in how much time they devote to church activities, as shown in this chart released last month:

Alone in the Taiga

Smithsonian magazine published a couple of years ago this fascinating article about a Russian family who fled Stalinist persecution to live in a remote area of Siberia in the 1930's and remained there with no other human contact for four decades, grubbing a living out of the wilderness and practicing their fundamentalist Old Believer faith - they didn't even know that World War II had happened until they were found by a team of Russian geologists exploring the area by helicopter in 1978. But they still refused to return to "sinful" civilization - now only one is left, 70-year-old Agafia, who is shown in this 2013 video.



This story brings up many profound reflections on human nature, society, religion, and materialism - but I will leave you readers to explore your own thoughts on those things. Your Head Trucker will say only that on some days he can well sympathize with the desire to find a remote, happy little spot far from the madding crowd - but he would damn sure pick a warmer spot than Siberia to exile himself to! Aruba, maybe.

Where the Churches Stand on Same-Sex Marriage

Click to enlarge.

The chart above summarizes a new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on official attitudes towards same-sex marriage held by major U.S. denominations. Another recent report by Pew discusses the hard-line anti-gay attitudes of most Evangelical church members, as shown below:

At its General Assembly in Detroit this week, The Presbyterian Church U.S.A., which already allows gays and lesbians to be ordained ministers, will consider resolutions to allow same-sex weddings in states where they are legal.

Update, 6/19: The Presbyterian General Assembly voted today 76%-24% to allow same-sex weddings.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (PDF, 1.42 MB) in 2008, which offers a sweeping analysis of religious beliefs and denominational identification among American adults. A short summary of their findings is presented in this table:

And per the U.S. Census Bureau, it appears that adults make up 76.5% of the 2013 total population of 316,128,839. So you do the math.

Francis, Are You Listening?

I couldn't have said it better myself:  Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times:

It was too much to hope that after the white smoke rose and the TV anchors began nervously filling time and the cameras lingered for what seemed an eternity on that balcony over St. Peter’s Square, the man who stepped onto it would be someone open to revisiting the most archaic, obsolete matters of Roman Catholic doctrine. The group electing him was assembled by the last two popes, both conservatives. Its choice was bound to be more carbon copy than new page.

But it’s not too much to hope that the man who did appear there — and who has lived a willfully humble material existence until now, and took the name of the poor’s patron saint — will change the church’s emphasis. That’s the great opportunity before Pope Francis, whose biography and style make him an ideal candidate to point the church toward a new conversation and a better focus for its spiritual energies. To have it dwell less in the bedroom, more in the soup kitchen.

It’s time for the church to stop talking so much about sex. It’s the perfect time, in fact.

It’s on matters of sexual morality that the church has lost much of its authority. And it’s on matters of sexual morality that it largely wastes its breath. By insisting on mandatory celibacy for a priesthood winnowed and sometimes warped by that, by opposing the use of contraceptives for birth control, by casting judgment on homosexuals and by decrying divorce while running something of an annulment mill, the church’s leaders have enraged and alienated Catholics whose common sense and whose experience of the real world tell them that none of that is wise, kind or necessary.

It Gets Better: Bishop Mark Hanson, ELCA

Ya know, guys, I'm very distressed with some of the well-known bloggers and other supposed representatives of the "gay community" whom I've noticed over the last several years have fallen into a pattern of bad-mouthing all Christians and all religion, often in highly profane and digusting ways. They do not speak for me, and I hope not for you.

By broadly lumping all believers into one class, without discriminating between the fantatics and the reasonable people of faith, these purported representatives of our cause are making themselves morally no better than the wild-eyed demagogues and bigots of the opposing side. They show themselves to be just as bigoted and just as tyrannical as their opponents, which disgusts me. The long, tragic history of humankind has shown times without number that it is but one small step from being oppressed to being an oppressor.

Religion is a human institution of many forms and varieties; and like all things human, is a mixture of good and evil. So are you and I, my friends. That is the human condition. It is up to us, individually and collectively, to discern the difference and to keep choosing the good whenever we can. Religion is and has been a great help to many, many millions of people in that way. Religion can also be misused as a weapon of oppression and ignorance, and should rightly be rebuked and condemned when it is; but the fanatical commenters amongst us do a great wrong when they ignore the power of faith to make people better human beings.

I could go on at some length here, but I think this video made by Bishop Mark Hanson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America makes the point - for those who have ears to hear.

How the Gospel Sounds to Gays

In all too many cases:

Review: American Gospel

In lieu of a hymn today, your Head Trucker would like to post this excerpt from a brilliantly written book by Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer-prize-winning historian and former editor of Newsweek, entitled American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, published in 2006.  In this thoughtful, well-balanced survey of the relationship between religion and reason, faith and freedom, from the birth of the Republic down till today, Meacham (who is, by the way, both a Tennessee boy and an Episcopalian) conducts the reader through a fascinating summary of the twin poles of American thought, beginning with the Founding Fathers, who were indeed, most of them, of a religious cast of mind, but widely varied about the details and application of religious principles.

Even Jefferson, the most secular-minded of them all, wrote, it must be remembered, the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom, a ringing declaration of Americans' liberty to believe everything or nothing at all, without coercion or penalty by government - a principle later incorporated into the Bill of Rights.  And yet, as Meacham demonstrates in his masterly synthesis of American history and thought, the separation of church and state has never meant the complete eradication of one or the other, for liberty as we understand it in this country depends upon the complementarity of both to sustain what Meacham calls the "sensible center."

I hope this short excerpt, which displays to your Head Trucker the thoroughly Anglican ethos of the via media, the middle way, will whet the appetite of some of my truckbuddies to read the book, which is partly viewable on Google Books, or can be had for about five bucks in print form from Amazon, or for twelve bucks on Kindle.

Remarkably, upon publication Meacham's book was praised by critics and commentators on both the right and the left, deservedly so.  It's quite pertitent to today's headlines, and I recommend it very highly it to all of you.  Click to enlarge these screen captures, where Meacham is speaking about today's poisonous divide between the ultra-religious and the ultra-secular:

The Shared Truth of All Religions

Bob Schieffer on this morning's Face the Nation:

Grandparents for Marriage Equality

You know, guys, I'm getting really tired of hearing the mindless catchphrase "Religion ruins everything" bandied about, and another day I will rant more on that subject. For right now, I just want to say that religion can also help a lot of things get much better, as witness this short clip of the Rev. John and Dorothy Ruitan, married 70 years, grandparents of nine, including two gay grandsons - as they speak out for equal marriage.




Which, by the way, shows there is no reason to give your relations a pass on this subject just because you think "oh they are so old, they just can't get it." Nonsense. Of course they can. It's whether they want to get it, that's the question.

What a Billion Muslims Really Think

Today I stumbled across this very enlightening film, the result of a six-year project by the Gallup Poll:

Gallup researchers began by asking the questions on every American’s mind. Why is there so much anti-Americanism in the Muslim world? Who are the extremists and how do Muslims feel about them? What do Muslims like and dislike about the West? What do Muslim women really want?

Crucial policy decisions hang on these questions. They continue to generate passionate disagreements in the public square. Yet for all the heat and controversy, the actual views of the world’s Muslims have been conspicuously missing from this debate.

Now, we have the missing answers and statistics, gathered, parsed, and analyzed not by pundits but by professional researchers.

As part of this groundbreaking six-year project, Gallup conducted tens of thousands of interviews with residents in 35 predominantly Muslim nations, as well as smaller populations in Europe and the USA. The broad extent of the polling has delivered findings for the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims with a plus or minus accuracy of 3%

Focused on the issues of Gender Justice, Terrorism, and Democracy –the film presents this remarkable data deftly, showing how it challenges the popular notion that Muslims and the West are on a collision course. Like the research, the film highlights a shared relationship that is based on facts – not fear.

I've been wanting to find something like this ever since 9/11.  It was produced in 2010, before the "Arab Spring" uprisings this year.  You can watch the whole 58-minute film at Snag Films.

Watch more free documentaries

A personal note:  I had a date one time years ago with a Muslim IT professional from North Africa; he was a sweet guy, very likeable.  I knew some Muslim foreign students in college, and have occasionally met or worked with some other Muslims through the years since.  Of course, none of them were monsters or terrorists.

But try telling that to all the proud ChristiansandAmericans here in small-town Texas.  The analogy of the Ku Klux Klan versus ordinary peaceable Christians they don't even get; washes right over their heads.

Which of course is the same reaction as with any other group that is Not Our Kind.  The old, old human story.

What We Believe

Map showing the largest denomination (a plurality) 
in each U. S. county; black dots indicate a majority.

Since it's Sunday, here's some stats on religious belief you can meditate on. Keep in mind that no survey of human behavior can ever be totally accurate to the last decimal point; and people do sometimes change their, um, lifestyles beliefs as they proceed through life.

From the U. S. Religious Landscape Survey, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007, based on about 36,000 responses nationwide:

For a breakdown by denomination, check the PDF summary here.

And you can cross-check the numbers with those provided by the Association of Religion Data Archives here.

Population of the U. S. at the 2010 census was 310,232,683. 

Homos included: latest estimate is 3.5 percent of the adult population, equal to the state of New Jersey, plus 700,000 transgendered folk. 

But that estimate came up with 1.8% bi, and only 1.7% gay or lesbian; your Head Trucker is just not sure that's entirely right.  Also, it ignores the fact that people are gay from birth on up, just like with race or sex, so the numbers are skewed.

The Great Agnostic: Robert G. Ingersoll

Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
The way to be happy is to help make others so.

Reason is the highest attribute of man.

The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. . . .  It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do.

Argument cannot be answered with insults. Kindness is strength; anger blows out the lamp of the mind.

Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest.

The other day, while doing a little research on the history of divorce laws in this country - which just goes to show that the straight boys have been changing the rules of marriage all the time, just as they pleased - your Head Trucker happened to stumble upon this very interesting work:  Is Divorce Wrong? 

Written in 1889, it is a response to the question by three well-known public figures of the time:  Archibishop Cardinal Gibbons of Maryland, who naturally condemns the very idea out of hand, holding squarely to Roman Catholic teaching on the sanctity of marriage; Episcopal Bishop Henry C. Potter of New York, who as a good Anglican naturally waffles a good deal about it, pro and con; and finally Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, known as "The Great Agnostic," who ringingly denounces the tyranny and injustice of religious precepts against divorce, which cause so much needless harm to innocent people, though at the same time very warmly and rather poetically defending the sanctity of marital love and the family home.

Somewhere along the line I had heard of Ingersoll's name before, but couldn't remember anything about him.  So a little further googling turned up the very interesting facts of his life, and his numerous speeches and writings, which you can browse through at your leisure if you have nothing better to do after brunch.  Many of which are quite good, and even amusing at times.  "The Most Remarkable American You Never Heard Of" - yes, and I can see why he was never, ever mentioned in the history books down here in the Bible Belt when I was a schoolboy.  Or if you don't have time for reading today, at least check out this video, I think you'll be amazed for one reason or another:

[For some strange reason, none of Ingersoll's videos will display here - how odd. But try this link for an overview of his life and work:]

What I Say:  Ingersoll was a man of great intelligence, and of great compassion for the human race.  It seems to me that he is a more outspoken proponent of Thomas Jefferson's famous vow of "eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the human mind."  And I agree wholeheartedly with Ingersoll's great aim of removing the shackles of ignorance and superstition from the human race.  Quite an admirable man, who deserves to be better remembered than he is.

Yet from reading a few of his works, I think Ingersoll, in his zeal to bring light and freedom to his audiences, sometimes overstates his case - as all zealots do.  Just as Ingersoll inveighs against ever placing "unquestioning faith" in any scripture or supernatural authority, so your Head Trucker would offer a gentle warning against placing the same kind of blind faith in any one remark of Ingersoll's.  To take just one example, in one of his writings he heaps great scorn upon the book of Job and condemns it as essentially worthless.  Perhaps so, if you think it was written to be taken literally.  On the other hand, if you approach it as a work of fiction - moral fiction - to begin with, then you may take an entirely different view of its worth.

Continued after the jump . . .

There Is No Ground Zero Mosque

Keith Olbermann, in his inimitable way, gives a tour-de-force refutation of the hysterical right-wing claims about the proposed Islamic center; highly recommended if you want to see the reality of the situation there in lower Manhattan.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Honk to The Gospel of Hate.

Sex, Lies, and Catholicism

Excerpt from a Sunday essay on the Pope's sexuality by the devoutly Catholic Andrew Sullivan, under the ironic title "The Pope Is Not Gay":

The choice between this kind of affirmation of spirituality and love and a politics of control and fear was what the church faced under John Paul II, as modernity pressed. . . . The pursuit of control is really a fear of scrutiny and transparency which, when added to the unspeakable crimes of the past, ineluctably led to the current meltdown in the West. The homosexual question is not in any way marginal to this; in fact, you could see it as a central challenge for a church caught between truth and power. . . .

It seems pretty obvious to me - as it does to Angelo Quattrochi, whose book is reviewed by Toibin - that the current Pope is a gay man (just as it was blindingly clear that John Paul II was straight). I am not claiming that Benedict is someone who has explored his sexuality, or has violated his own strictures on the matter. There is absolutely no evidence of that, or of hypocrisy of any sort. But that does not mean that he isn't gay. In fact, Ratzinger's command that gay priests should actively lie about their orientation makes any public statement about this on its face lacking in credibility. But when you look at the Pope's mental architecture (I've read a great deal of his writing over the last two decades) you do see that strong internal repression does make sense of his life and beliefs. At times, it seems to me, his gayness is almost wince-inducing. The prissy fastidiousness, the effeminate voice, the fixation on liturgy and ritual, and the over-the-top clothing accessories are one thing. But what resonates with me the most is a theology that seems crafted from solitary introspection into a perfect, abstract unity of belief. It is so perfect it reflects a life of withdrawal from the world of human relationship, rather than an interaction with it. Of course, this kind of work is not inherently homosexual; but I have known so many repressed gay men who can only live without severe pain in the world if they create a perfect abstraction of what it is, and what their role is in it. Toibin brilliantly explains this syndrome, why the church of old was so often such a siren call for gay men who could not handle their own nature. In Benedict, one sees a near-apotheosis of this type, what Quattrocchi describes as "simply the most repressed, imploded gay in the world." . . .

I would like to return to the world where this kind of speculation was disgraceful, unnecessary and blasphemous. But when this Pope has already enabled the rape of children, has covered up the crimes of many priests, when he has responded by blaming gay men for the moral failings of his own church, when he has publicly demanded that gay Catholics remain in the closet, i.e. lie about themselves as a sacred duty ... then such deference becomes much more difficult.

What I Say:  As a gay man, and an Episcopalian-on-hold, I understand the point Sullivan is making about being attracted to a spirituality supported by liturgy, ritual, and finery; in fact, as I've blogged in the past, I do think that the love of beauty - creating, revealing, sharing it in any of a myriad possible ways - is a defining element of the gay personality, which of course also comes in many shapes and sizes from silly twink to gruff leatherman.  But when you get past whatever the exterior may be, I think you find the same motive animating all of us at heart.

In contrast to our straight brothers, some of whom are very creative indeed and might take great delight in crafting pastries or growing roses - as did one very butch and very straight retired Marine captain I once knew.  Yet my hunch is that for them the beauty motive is a sideline, not the animating principle; seems to me that the heart of an unambiguously straight man is driven to build a metaphorical fort, not a house or a garden, as well as finding the means to knock down the other guy's fort.  In other words, aggression and domination, or to put it differently, the defender and the warrior, two sides of the same coin:  that's what makes them tick and sets their life agenda.

Continued after the jump . . .

Faith and Reality

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) by Salvador Dali, 1954

Today I just had to swipe the painting - one of my great favorites - and this excerpt from Andrew Sullivan - also one of my great favorites, I guess you boys know - because both are so fitting, so apt, for where I am now:

Christianity is in crisis - and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe. I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists - of total papal or Biblical authority - because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves. . . .

No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have - copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories - are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later. Anyone who believes that the Holy Spirit automatically guides every church leader to the perfect truth at all times need only look at the current hierarchy to be disabused of such childish wish-fulfillment; or cast an eye on church history for more than a few minutes.

So the solid architecture of the faith we inherited has been exposed more thoroughly in the last few decades than ever before. There is no single authoritative text, written by one God, word for word true. There is a much more complicated series of writings designed by many men, doubtless under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that help us see some form of the figure Jesus through languages and texts and memories. I think the character and message of Jesus are searingly clear and distinctive even taking into account that daunting veil through which we are asked to see. But we can only begin to see this once we have understood the veil that both obstructs and made possible our view.

The same, I think, is true of the papacy as an alternative to Biblical literalism. This is in some ways a more durable defense against logos than Biblical literalism, but it is just another form of fundamentalism, deploying total obedience to total authority as an alternative to a living faith that can both doubt and yet also practice the love of God and one's enemies, Jesus's core instructions. I do not see how the limits and flaws of such total authoritarianism could have been more thoroughly illuminated than in the recent sex abuse scandal. When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called "absolute corruption".

So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely. We will catch Him at times; He will elude us at others. We will have to listen to many words he may have spoken before we can each discern the words he may have meant; we will have to keep our eyes and ears open for science's revelations about the world, while understanding that science is just one way of understanding the world and that poetry, history, and practical perspectives have things to tell us as well. The cathedral at Chartres; the long story of Christian debate and theology; the rituals and daily practices that help us stay trained to intuit the divine we cannot understand and the divine we do not always see in every face around us: these too tell us things that go beyond fact, archeology and hermeneutics.

Yes, this intellectual sifting is hard and troubling to faith; yes, it may end with more mystery than clarity. But if our faith is to be true, it must rest on something more than denial of reality. It must rest on being the greatest experience of reality.

I would add only this, and I think Sullivan would agree: the fact that in every age and every clime, in every culture and society, a certain percentage of people are born gay instead of straight; that it is not an illness, a mental disorder, a perversion, or a choice; that it is not the result of demonic influence or bad parenting; that it is as much a wholesome variety of nature, of the universe, as a red rose or a yellow one; that gay people are fully as capable of love and devotion, of self-sacrifice and service to the greater good as any straight person is; all this is part of reality also, which faith to be worthy of belief must acknowledge and value as it values all that is truly human.

Jesus - truly God and truly man - knows the reality of all things, and is reality, the ultimate fusion of spirit and flesh, divine and terrestrial, mortal and immortal, all that is or was or can be. Take it as theology or philosophy or poetry:  this I believe.

"A Very Isolating Experience"

Via Box Turtle Bulletin, a couple of clips from Exodus co-founder Michael Bussee (- woof -) on what happened when he left that ex-gay outfit, and what he regrets teaching; part of a series you can view in its entirety on YouTube.

First, I can totally relate to his description of being cursed and shunned:



And I understand exactly what he means about "the biggest heresy":



Interestingly, that Stonegate Fellowship Church video I referenced yesterday that Rob Tisinai posted on his blog has now been taken private by the owner; guess the secret of how to turn gay cocksuckers into born-again cuntlickers will have to remain a mystery known only to the saved.

Excuse my language, guys, but this subject really pushes my buttons:  that bullshit theology crucified me all of my teenage years, and came very close to killing me.  I still have the scars.  And they still fucking hurt.

That was the Devil's work, not God's.

Wave and Water

Your Head Trucker isn't very well read in Buddhist theology; but here's something I found over on Sullivan's blog - and I like it a lot.

When we look at the ocean, we see that each wave has a beginning and an end. A wave can be compared with other waves, and we can call it more or less beautiful, higher or lower, longer lasting or less long lasting. But if we look more deeply, we see that a wave is made of water. While living the life of a wave, the wave also lives the life of water. It would be sad if the wave did not know that it is water. It would think, "Some day I will have to die. This period of time is my life span, and when I arrive at the shore, I will return to nonbeing."

These notions will cause the wave fear and anguish. A wave can be recognized by signs -- beginning or ending, high or low, beautiful or ugly. In the world of the wave, the world of relative truth, the wave feels happy as she swells, and she feels sad as she falls. She may think, "I am high!" or "I am low!' and develop superiority or inferiority complexes, but in the world of the water there are no signs, and when the wave touches her true nature -- which is water -- all of her complexes will cease, and she will transcend birth and death.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Of course instead of saying "return to nonbeing," one could say "return to God" and for my money, arrive at the same place:  the end of all strife and all striving; the perfect fulfillment of every desire in that Love that moves the stars - as Dante put it:  the glorious, eternal Beatific Vision.  Eternal rest.  The peace you long for in the depth of your heart, even though you might call it by another name.

Sullivan says the same thing I'm trying to express, in his own way:

I have two intuitions about what happens when I die. The first is that I cannot know in any way for sure; and I surely know that whatever heaven is, it is so beyond our human understanding that it is perhaps better not to try an answer. The second is that I will continue to exist in my essence but more firmly and completely enveloped in the love and expanse of God, as revealed primarily in the life of Jesus.

I guess you can believe there is nothing there (atheism/agnosticism); or that there is something there into which everything dissolves - human and divine - which is a kind of non-material unity of love and compassion (Buddhism). Faith gives me the hope of the Christian alternative to both, that we will remain who we are, the unique objects of God's love, and yet part of such a miraculous sea of divine love, we will be both ourselves and yet far less limited by ourselves, freed from the sin that keeps us from knowing one another, forgiving one another and loving one another and loving God as parent, child and spirit. . . .

So I do not believe our consciousness is utterly different after death than now. I believe, with Saint Paul, that this is the same divine experience, but through a glass darkly. I believe it is Love, because Jesus showed me so. And I await with great fear because I am human and I await with great hope because of the incarnation and resurrection of God in human history.

To philosophize is to learn how to die.

To believe is to hope for light in the face of "some blackness coming toward us."

The thing is, it's a mystery we can sense but never prove. Guess we'll all find out the straight of it when we get there, huh boys.

House Passes Healthcare Reform

By 219 votes to 212, and not a single Republican vote among them.  NYT:

Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. That may be the true measure of how much has changed in Washington in the ensuing 45 years, and how Mr. Obama’s own strategy is changing with the discovery that the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work. . . .  In 1966, celebrating the creation of the first Medicare rolls that covered 20 million Americans, President Johnson recalled the complaints three decades earlier that Social Security “would destroy this country,” and noted “there is not one out of 100 who would think of repealing it.” . . .

Mr. Obama’s gamble is that what worked for Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt will ultimately work for him. Once Americans discover that they can no longer be rejected for insurance for pre-existing conditions, he is betting, or that they can keep their children on their own insurance plans longer, the more they will come to appreciate the effect of the changes on their day-to-day lives.

L.A. Times:

The House vote Sunday to send a comprehensive healthcare reform bill to President Obama's desk put the United States on a path toward universal health insurance, a goal that had eluded reformers since then-presidential candidate Teddy Roosevelt called for all workers to have coverage in 1912. It may prove to be the signal accomplishment of Obama's administration, even though the controversy surrounding it threatens to end his party's majority in Congress. Rarely has such a good thing for Americans been perceived by so many as a threat to their livelihood and liberty.

There's wide agreement in the healthcare industry and across the political spectrum that the system is in dire need of repair. But while liberals called for government to eliminate the insurance middleman and act as the single source of coverage, conservatives sought to reduce the government's presence in the market and give consumers more responsibility.

The measure that emerged from the Senate, HR 3590, pursues a course between those two extremes. It augments the existing system with a new marketplace for individuals and small groups to shop for insurance, a mandate that everyone buy coverage, insurance subsidies for the working class and rules limiting insurers' freedom to design, price and market their policies. It won't bring coverage to everyone -- the Congressional Budget Office estimated that HR 3590 would leave about 6% of Americans uninsured in 10 years. But that's a significant improvement over the situation today, when an estimated 17% have no insurance and thousands lose their coverage daily.

Well, finally a victory after a hundred years of struggle on this issue:  Obama has done what FDR, Truman, Nixon, and Clinton could not.  For an enlightening history of the long, drawn-out fight for healthcare reform, see this excellent summary (PDF) by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

What this bill ended up being is a mishmash and doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion; I would like to see a single-payer nationwide system, which this is not.  But at least, thank God, it's a start on something that could eventually be a decent program.

If the fascist fundamentalist know-nothing crowd doesn't overthrow the government, that is.  Note this very interesting map I swiped from Sullivan's blog, and the overwhelming Baptist population of my tragic, benighted Southern homeland:  notice that the green area is practically identical with the boundaries of the Confederacy, even 150 years later.  Nothing wrong with being a Baptist per se, but so very often that kind of believing is allied with ignorance, arrogance, and a hatred of everything and everyone who isn't a straight white Bible-believing Anglo-Saxon Republican.  And then there are plenty of people in this region who never show up in church and don't much miss it, but still retain the prejudices of the culture they grew up in.

Compare that with the NYT's interactive map of the geography of tonight's House vote here.