Tag Archives: christianity

Flip Benham: one of many wastes of talent.

With gay marriage now legal in North Carolina, it was only a matter of time before Flip Benham of Operation Save America started crashing wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.

The North Carolina-based pastor, who is the father of Religious Right activists David and Jason Benham, reportedly disrupted several weddings at the Mecklenburg County and Courts Office in Charlotte last week.

Benham’s group, which in July disrupted a memorial service at a Unitarian Universalist congregation in New Orleans, “interrupted several couples’ weddings as supporters held up a large rainbow flag to block his view,” according to the North Carolina LGBT publication Q Notes. “Another protester waved a bible in the air as he screamed several profanities and vulgarities.”

via Flip Benham Crashes Gay Weddings In North Carolina | Right Wing Watch.

In re: John Becker on “Indifference”

John Becker from The Bilerico Project demands, with reason, that the rest of us don’t say to survivors of the RCC’s anti-gay abuses two statements which we’re apt to use: what did they expect?” and “why do they belong to an organization that hates them?” 

Well, how else do we who are not or were never raised Catholic respond to a profoundly-undemocratic, intelligence-insulting, hierarchical culture that encourages the firings of church employees over LGBT identity? How do we respond in regards to Mormon excommunications of LGBT people (and feminists)? Or less-episcopalian polities like some rinky-dinky SBC Baptist church?

We’re outside of the culture, and there is no means for us to respond to their behavior except through the civil sphere or the liberal-religious niche outlets like Religion Dispatches, fully knowing that we will not be listened to or considered. So what can we say when our options are limited in communicating to members of a religious sect that their rhetoric is uncivil and bigoted?

Some of us tune them out. We tune out the bald-faced lies and scaremongering apocalypticism. We don’t dissect any of it, or at least we stop trying to dissect it. We just treat it like a bad dream on the periphery of our eyesight.

After so long of angrily tuning it out, we then hear of the firings, the excommunications, the “loyalty oath”-like contracts, and we hear of those turned out of their small lower niche of the religious hierarchy for their LGBT identity or their feminist critique. We wonder “how was I ever in such a position when I’ve lived my life in reality for so long?”

We remember our own subjection to abuse and bigoted rhetoric. Then, freshly recalling the trauma, we ask “what did they expect?” and “why do they belong to an organization that hates them?

We were traumatized. Our intelligence was insulted. But we tuned all of it out. We don’t maintain contact with most members. We ultimately “other” the organization, leading to our wondering about how anyone, including ourselves, could stay in such an organization.

We project our trauma, even with such trauma being distinct in some way from someone else’s experience. Maybe it is not appropriate. Maybe it is an unthinking reflex.

But because we tuned out the experience for our own mental stability, we may not have the proper words, let alone actions, to expressing our solidarity.

What are those words of solidarity? What are those actions of solidarity? What are those expressions which can transcend between my “non-denominational” experience and the experience of those raised in the “Catholic” religion?

And how can we even begin to move forward in that solidarity?

We’re being told that it probably isn’t beneficial to encourage survivors of anti-LGBT abuse to leave their religion altogether, or that it is rather smug to encourage survivors to choose another religion or congregation that is more welcoming. What is the necessary solidarity?

Until these questions are answered, until *real* progress is possible at such levels, our questions of “what did they expect?” and “why do they belong to an organization that hates them?” will be the default.

via LGBT Catholics Deserve Respect, Not Indifference | The Bilerico Project.

Ah, imprecatory prayer

 "You too Mr.Tucker were sent here by Jesus but I doubt if he has much more use for you here judging from some of your idiot comments . He may call you home just any moment. When I pray tonight,I will tell Him that you and Stewart don’t have any thing left to do here. Don’t bother to pack.They don’t let you take anything with you where you wil be going."

— "klyeb" in a comment posted to Ken Tucker’s Entertainment Weekly blog post on Jon Stewart’s send-off of Glenn Beck.

Nationalist negation of the diaspora and theodicy: where they intersect

When the audio transcript of John Hagee’s theodical justification of the Holocaust (and, by extension, Christian anti-Semitism) as a means of accomplishing Christian eschatological ends through mass Jewish aliyah surfaced online in 2008, various political sectors observing the then-ongoing presidential election leveled intense scrutiny against Hagee and the Republican presidential aspirant who had courted Hagee’s support in the election; not least among those reacting sectors were the demographically-dwindling Jewish members of the Holocaust survivor community, who took particular exception to Hagee’s open and explicit co-opting of both an ideologically-driven tragedy that wreaked so much havoc upon them and the repatriative ideology of Israeli Jewish nationalism – both of which emphatically exclaim that the adherents to the Jewish religion, including the dead victims and living survivors of the Holocaust, do not belong anywhere else in the world but Israel – as a positive step toward the eventual end and destruction of the world (according to the Christian worldview).

Within Judaism, theodical explanations for the Holocaust have been offered – and just as fiercely rejected and demeaned among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust – by Haredi (Orthodox) rabbis and rabbinical authorities, including former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef (repeatedly) and the late Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch sect, Menachem Schneerson. 

But an interesting aspect of John Hagee’s intersection of Jewish aliyah with the Holocaust (as a forceful push), Israel (as a destination to be pushed toward), anti-Semitism (as an ideological justification), Negation of the diaspora (as a process) and Christian eschatological timing (as the end and answer to all of the above) is that he only added a further layer to the belief that the Jews are only a collective object to be pushed around at the whim of their neighbors, most of whom want to push them entirely away from themselves and reject the view that these people are citizens of their own countries (or, in the case of Iran and the USSR, keep them within their own states in order to eventually drive the Jewish religion or sense of ancestral/cultural homeland out of their adherent citizens and turn them into compliant, assimilated citizens). Another, more crazed dimension to this meme is the long list of ethnic enclaves to which various powers sought to pull or push the Jews as a people, the majority of which placed the Jews in the most-isolated (or least-populable) outposts of various continents.

This meme of constricting an entire people into one place in the world was also visited at one point by both U.S. philanthropists and (repeatedly) Afro-American ethnonationalists upon the Afro-American minority of the U.S. in the view that Afro-Americans cannot ever belong in this society, and that the colorism, racism, ethnic segregation and slavery foisted upon them was the end result of existing in a majority-European-populated country, and that the only country in which they could feel safe and defend themselves and their interests would be in a country that was ruled and majority-populated by their "kind", reasonably removed from the land of their should-be-former oppressors, and build alliances with foreign powers which work to their own best interests. Of course, Liberia didn’t attract the majority of the African-American population, and neither did Sierra Leone attract the majority of former British Empire slaves and maroons, but both countries became templates for the sometimes-mutual ideological movement for repatriation, which presented the two agents – the repatriater and the receiver – view the same people within endemic views which complimented each other: the repatriating country saw the ethnicity as trash, and the receiving country saw the ethnicity as treasure. 

This trash-treasure view is embraced in some countries in Europe by far-right nationalists, who often participated in discussions which demonized the Jews as "parasitic" "trash" which could only gain respect if they were as far away from their own white, European Christian selves as possible (hence the oft-used expression by far-rightists in Europe "go back to Israel", which is probably less used than "to the ovens" or "Hitler should’ve finished the job"). The BNP in the UK (and, perhaps, the NASOFI group in Germany) is one of the more notable "converts" to this ideology, particularly as it pragmatically-partners with the pro-Israel right (seeing that Israel plays a useful role in decimating the presence of Jews in Europe and earns its macho stripes in "kicking barbarian ass") against Muslim fundamentalists in an about face from their previous stance against the presence of Jews in the UK. 

To the theodical and eschatological views typical of Hagee, however, perhaps the Jews are seen less within the "trash-to-treasure" spectrum and more along a "wandering, rebellious ram to docile, sacrificial lamb" spectrum. For Hagee, it matters less that the Jews get out of his country and stop being "parasitic" "pests" and more that they stop being so gosh-darn rebellious and proceed to fully populate Israel and the West Bank in order to set the stage for Christian eschatology already (even if it means that there are few rebellious Jews left in North America in his view, or the less, the merrier!).

What do Israelis get out of repatriation (whether it is justified by anti-Semitic or "philo-"Semitic reasons)? They regain their homeland in full, get back the Temple Mount, smooth out the wrinkles caused by the initial Roman kickout of their ancestors nearly 2000 years prior (or get those other tribes’s lost descendants back as genetic citizens, if possible), let the Arab-Israeli dispute settle down somewhat, hope that the European Union can nip the pervasive anti-Judaism meme that caused incidents like the Holocaust in the root, hope that both Christianity and Islam both deservedly grind themselves and each other into dusty minority stubs over their very structures of propagation and expansion, and so on. (Sorry, no Holocaust Part 2: Christian Apocalypse – ed.).

But perhaps there will be an end to the usage of the Jewish people as an object to be carried around. Maybe the Jewish nationalism in Israel will be less propelled (or resisted) in its persistence and will morph into something else (like most nationalisms do after the threat of eminent danger has passed), even as the religion continues among its practitioners and leaders without as much molestation, or becomes subject to another cataclysmic schism within the group. 

EDIT 1/1/2011: Let me also emphasize that one component of this belief – that the Jews are a monolithic people who are destined to be placed in some part of the world at the end of time – also intersects with the study of any nation-state’s own intersection with its own diaspora. Diasporas can be used as couriers and beneficiaries of the homeland state’s own relationship with another state, or they can be rejected by their homeland state’s government due to an antagonistic foreign policy against political exiles. 

 
Thus, if diasporas are seen as "useable" or "disposable" by the home country’s ruling government when they are not resident inside the home country, then such a perception should be judged by observers of human rights as a barometer in terms of that home country’s civil and human rights record, holing just as much validity in terms of observation as the treatment of that same country’s current residents and citizens, immigrants, expatriates, etc. 

More on editing the Jefferson Bible: de-geographization

I edited a copy of Jefferson’s Bible to remove the words "Jews" (replaced with "the people"), "Israel" and "Judaea" (replaced both with "the land"), and "Jerusalem" (replaced with "Great City"). I’m still thinking about replacing other notable cities in Israel with non-descript synonyms.

The reason for that is my recent idea that Christianity’s doctrinal obsessions over Judaism, Israel and Jerusalem are manifested both in anti-Judaic/anti-Semitic and Christian Zionist/apocalyptic extremes, both of which de-humanize the Jews into tools for Christian eschatological machinations; the same treatment is afforded regularly to Israel and its cities, especially Jerusalem. 

In fact, what helped me come to this conclusion is a documentary on Jerusalem syndrome which I watched a long while back. The syndrome, which has been documented by psychologists as happening primarily among both adherents to, and former subscribers to, Christianity in its more established forms and denominations, is an affliction which manifests itself in a number of ways ranging from tripping out (as in coming to the idea that you are a reincarnation of King David) to falling out (as in running around in the street, claiming that you are a prophet for "God’s imminent coming", or trying to blow up the al-Aqsa Mosque in order to hasten the aforementioned eschatological event). 

Perhaps, by removing all explicit references to landforms and extant human settlements in Israel and nearby areas, Jefferson’s Bible can be further removed from the precipice of absent-minded bigotry and inanity which has been occupied by various translations and versions of the New Testament for over a thousand and a half years or more. 

My edit of Jefferson’s Bible is designed, in my opinion, to resemble the Book of Job – sans the supernatural content – in its non-localization; basically, the less that people know of the whereabouts of the land of Uz, the better chance that Christians won’t desire a Crusade to gain it back for Christendom. The same approach should be used for explaining Jesus’ concepts on ethics – that he was simply a guy who lived in such-and-such place who demanded a reform of the ethical system of his culture and pissed off the cultural leaders enough that he was accused of apostasy and was executed. No depiction as a prophet, no virgin birth, no miracles, no blaming a specific extant people and religion for the problems in society, no mentioning of a specific target people. Just the facts and no more.

Furthermore, if neither the Jews nor any part of Israel are mentioned in the New Testament, then perhaps it will finally exempt Judaism’s subscribers and associates from those special "tender mercies" and "caring love" which Christians and ex-Christians, for millenia, have desired to shower upon the Jews in particular (and, with just as much fervor, LGBT people). The Jews won’t be that group of people upon which so much is blamed (issues in Southwest Asia, blood libel, world domination, being too smart – for which I had fallen a few years ago and have yet to shake off – and so on).

It doesn’t mean that I will convert to a customized Christianity or identity as a Christian; too many hangups from years past, so I can never fathom returning to it. I COULD convert to Reform Judaism or anything left of that (the more conservative Judaic denominations tend to wax more authoritarian and chaotic against their members and competing sects), but I fancy the more ancient (semi-)polytheistic – or even (semi-)polyDEistic – folk belief systems, at least more for their ability to not rule out other fellow deities with as much fervor as Abrahamic monotheism.

Of course, if I were to identify with a religion now, I’d say Buddhism mixed with a fondness for Pagan and Neopagan traditions.

But if I’ve only made one contribution to the world for which I can have no regrets, it is to help de-supernaturalize and somewhat de-bigotize the scriptural basis of a religion which holds sway over a sixth of the world’s population. 

Religion, descent and the one-drop rule

This morning, I thought about how religion uses patrilineal or matrilineal descent as a means of indicating whether one has been born into the religion of his or her most immediate ancestor(s), and how, in the case of Judaism and Islam, such stipulations have been contorted by both adherents, non-adherents and detractors from a simple Abrahamic membership inheritance issue into an ethnoracial issue in those societies which observe an Abrahamic religion on a majority basis.

Continue reading Religion, descent and the one-drop rule

Multiculturalism, cultural integrity/sovereignty, and social progression

In light of both

  • the Swiss referendum-based ban on further building of minarets on mosque edifices in Switzerland
  • the European Human Rights Court’s ban on displays of the crucifix in Italian public schools

I think that it is time to highlight the growth of an strong pan-European movement of anti-triumphalism and laicite, one that doesn’t ignore any religious or spiritual belief system in its wake. Furthermore, I would also recommend to the Europeans (and even the Turkish people, if Kemal’s legacy is to be continued in that country) a further logical expansion of a further pervasive regulation of religious triumphalist displays in public:

  • church bells and bell towers
  • stripping explicit references to unique churches or religions from constitutions and other public documentations

But ultimately, the argument in the Global North over the clash between the religions of Christianity and Islam (and Islam vs. Judaism) and secular Humanism is cultural, as the ideas of law and custom which are embedded within the cultures whose members also subscribe to the religions tend to widely differ on their views (or their capability to modernize their views) regarding concepts of rights and liberties.

I’ve come to the conclusion that multiculturalism – a well-intentioned idea – is very much pinned, in its current implementations, between the rock of social progression and the hard place of cultural integrity/sovereignty. Multiculturalism, as it stands, has not been engaged in a significant attempt at demonolithization that let’s at least one school of multiculturalist ideology try to remove itself from attempting to actively embrace claims to cultural integrity or sovereignty.

I think it would be better to say that multiculturalism respects the rights of multiple cultures to exist, but does not respect the right of a culture to make claims or moves for "integrity" or "sovereignty" against those – within or outside the culture’s main grouping – who syncretize with other cultures or interpretations. Instead, those who do syncretize should also receive the same support and standards of judgement as any other culture if they so apply for such treatment.

Hence, I agree more with Anne Phillips’ book Multiculturalism without Culture, particularly in its feminist angle (since feminist and LGBT organizations have had the hardest time with current multiculturalist models).