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September 30, 2004

Terms whose definitions I know not

Filed under: Humor — Camassia @ 9:05 pm

I was amused by this quote from Eli Lilly on trying to read philosophy:

Occasionally in the past, and even now, ambition leads me to set sail upon those entrancing waters, but unfortunately I never had any training in navigating the deeps of philosophy and have always promptly run hard aground on the reefs or mud flats of terms whose definitions I know not. Blowing a whistle blast for help from that staunch tugboat the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, instead of one powerful unit coming to my help, three or four smaller variations of meanings show up, usually pulling in opposite directions, leaving me helpless and making it necessary to take to the life boats of history and biography.

And this was before the postmodernists took over.

September 29, 2004

Harry Potter and the warrior code

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 10:39 am

Not long ago Marvin did a post explaining how Harry Potter is an allegory for Christian nonviolence. This is not exactly the deepest theological question out there, but it actually seems to me like a good demonstration of the confusion of common grace with special grace that I mentioned here. And it also reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a few weeks ago about why we like Harry Potter books but we can’t love them. So here’s my rebuttal.

First of all, I don’t buy Lilly Potter as a Christ figure. She’s a mother, and the phenomenon of mothers laying down their lives for their children is found even in the animal kingdom. It is not, by itself, an inherently Christlike love. For that matter the Malfoys seem pretty tight — who’s to say they wouldn’t sacrifice for each other also? Jesus spoke to a society in which such family loyalties were common, indeed assumed; his call was to act that way toward people who aren’t family.

Such clannishness is, in fact, the feature of the novels that my friend and I were talking about. The Potter novels have been criticized for their endorsement of disobedience and rule-breaking, usually from the point of view of parents and teachers who don’t want this to give their kids ideas. Since I’m not a parent I don’t object to it on those grounds, but it bothers me for another reason. It reminds me of when I was a kid going to school and trying to figure out the “schoolyard code.” The adults made rules, which were at least explicit and comprehensible; but there was this other set of rules, the rules of your peers, that you had to divine through social contact. The second set of rules often conflicted with the first, because peer groups are jealous gods. Loyalty to them was supposed to come before loyalty to anything else.

Since Harry Potter is an abused orphan, his peer group is all he has. So I don’t particularly blame him that his life at school revolves around his homies and their relations with other groups, notably their conflict with the Malfoy clique. What bothers me more is how the school structure, the “good” authority figures, and apparently Rowling herself seem to basically endorse this. The school is divided into four houses which are set in permanent competition with each other; each house racks up “points” that determine a victor at the end of each year. My mother, who has read a great many British novels in her life, says that this is pretty much the way British boarding schools operate. She quoted somebody, I forget whom, to the effect that their business since the nineteenth century was to create a ruling class — which meant training not only in the ways of civilization but, less explicitly, in the ways of warriors.

You can see this in other features of the books. Students are selected to the four houses based on their virtues: Gryffindors have courage, Ravenclaws intelligence, Hufflepuffs dependability and Slytherins cunning. All the heroes are in Gryffindor, so courage is presented as the chief virtue above others, whether it takes the form of bravely confronting evil or of stupid risk-taking. Hence the constant breaking of rules. It’s also, I think, why sport (in the form of Quidditch) is so exalted in the books; Rowling completely supports the culture of jock worship.

To a great extent I think the conflict between brave Gryffindors and cunning Slytherins represents the distinction between honorable and dishonorable warriors. Being an honorable warrior means exercising restraint, and sometimes having mercy on your enemy when he’s in a weakened position (a la Pettigrew, though I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be dead than under the dementors the rest of my life). But I don’t think we should confuse this with actual nonviolence and Christian compassion. Despite the distate for capital punishment there’s a definite glee at giving the bad guys their comeuppance in less drastic ways that runs throughout the book. (I would also note that the reluctance to kill an enemy because you don’t want to become like him is actually a fairly common theme in children’s entertainment; it even appeared in the generally dreadful Batman Forever.)

The idea of honorable combat is nothing to sneeze at, and indeed it could use a revival on today’s fields of battle. Some Christians, notably the Salvation Army, employ military language and ethics in the service of nonviolent Christian action. But they use it in order to advance a definite agenda of helping others, preaching Christ, etc. In the Potter novels, it’s not at all clear what the good guys stand for. It’s clear what they stand against, but being against genocide is not exactly a major moral position. In general, what they seem to stand for most if loyalty to your homies, and this is where it gets most morally troubling. In the first book we learn that Harry Potter’s father saved Snape’s life, and Snape resents this debt. In Prisoner of Azkaban (spoiler alert, for those who care) we learn that it was the dad’s buddy Sirius who actually attempted the murder, by sending him into the lair of a werewolf. The way the good guys in the book treat this is weird. They acknowledge that this was wrong, but treat it as a kind of schoolyard prank, and act like Snape really ought to get over his resentment of Sirius for it. Sirius seems to feel no remorse, and as an adult tells Snape that he ought to have done it because Snape was such a meddling creep.

If Sirius had been a villain one could imagine how this would be treated. But Sirius is a good guy, because he loves Harry and Harry’s father, and how people feel about Harry is always the first indicator of whether they’re good or evil. I should say that I might feel differently about this at the series’ end, because Rowling does seem to be going somewhere with the character of Snape and the fact that the senior Potter and Sirius bullied him when they were teenagers. Still, so far I don’t see any reason to give this series the exalted title of “Christian allegory.”

September 27, 2004

Bowing to nothing

Filed under: Theology (other) — Camassia @ 10:12 pm

Andi is in Paris, and wrote a remarkable post about empty altars. This part rang extremely true to me:

One thing I never lost hunger for, however, was for someone to save me. In Sacre Cour, Christ spreads His arms hugely across the central dome of the cathedral. He is huge. He dwarfs Mary, He dwarfs the Apostle, He commands the heavens and from our vantage point He even dwarfs God and the Holy Spirit, who also have Their places on the Dome. But it is Jesus Christ we see first, and it is to Him we turn our eyes, Christian, heretic, heathen, and infidel alike, and our bodies all lie under the sweep of His arms and gaze.

What a religion! It is what I have secretly wanted my entire life, that there is Someone Out or Above There who, encompassing all, will get me out of my messes and patch up my tarnished, tattered, well-worn life. I’ve done my best to give this hope, this need, the slip in Buddhism. “It’s not the Buddha we bow to, it is our own True Nature.” But I’m bowing to Buddha. Buddha-Christ. I was never Christian in the sense I never felt faith in Christ as my Savior. Not once. My confirmation was a sham my entire family participated in because it’s What Good Families Do, and I still struggle to forgive myself for that spiritual lie. It does not bode well, the ultimate of False Witness. But though I was never Christian, I am also not un-Christian. The talk of God, of Saviors, of relationships and most especially spiritual duality between the Ultimate and the Earthly is embedded in me.

Converts between religions are a tricky bunch. We carry both the imprint of the old practice and an aversion to it. Things that have been tickling the back of my mind for years are coming to the surface, like a batik: a pattern revealed only as more color washes over, more exposure and more work. Because side-by-side with my hunger for someone else to get me out of this mess is the lack of faith that kept me from Christianity: no one but me can get me out of this mess, whatever the mess is. It occured to me, sometime slowly in the past two days, that I seek the Other because I fear myself. I cannot believe in my own effort any more than I can believe in the acts of salvation by Jesus Christ. I want to believe in my own effort: this hope is what brought me, with a healthy dose of old-fashioned suffering, to Buddhism. That I have replaced Christ with Buddha is indicative of fear and attachment, as well as habit.

That feeling — the hunger for a savior along with the belief that no one but myself can save me, and yet I can’t do it — is basically where I’ve been stuck for at least a year. Some Christian friends have lately urged me to get baptized, but I’ve balked at the fear of false witness. I’d have to go up there and say the Apostle’s Creed, and really really mean it! And yet I can’t not be Christian, in a way. I write on this blog as if I were one; I have strong opinions about what Jesus was about and what a Christian life entails, and I’ve been trying to live it. Except for that one thing, the essential thing: that giving of oneself in faith.

Since I don’t have the baggage of a Christian upbringing the way Andi does, I obviously feel freer to pursue Christ as my Christ instead of Buddha as my Christ. Yet I have that voice in the back of my head expressing what Andi is saying: that the desire for a savior is nothing more than another unhealthy attachment, even a delusion, a sign of immaturity. When I pray, I do not get much of a feeling that anyone is listening. In fact, the fear of talking to nothing kept me from praying alone for the first year or so of churchgoing. But I’ve lived with myself long enough to have developed a rather Augustinian pessimism about my own will, and everyone else’s for that matter. I no longer believe I can save myself.

It’s a mighty conundrum.

By the way, on a slightly related note, Jeremy Puma explains how the Buddha was semi-accidentally turned into a Christian saint. I’d heard of this before, but he fills in some more details.

Weekend happenings

Filed under: Arts and entertainment — Camassia @ 9:40 am

I had some work and some play over the weekend, and not enough sleep thanks to a slight religious clash. I had invited a friend of mine out to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on Saturday night, but since he was Jewish he was observing Yom Kippur until after sundown. And then he wanted to go out to dinner first since he hadn’t eaten all day, so we saw a 9:40 showing of the movie. Which would not have been a problem except that I had to get up at 7 the next morning to sing in the church choir. So I kept yawning in church, although actually I imagine that was good for my voice, since it opened and relaxed my throat. (Some even recommend yawning as a warm-up exercise.)

My friend is not normally an observant Jew at all, although he does keep semi-kosher (no pork or shellfish). When I asked him about this contradiction, he shrugged and said, “It’s how I was brought up.” I expect that accounts for a great deal of religious practice and non-practice in the world. But for Yom Kippur he had gone to a service that was specifically aimed at non-practicing Jews, sort of like Fr. Jim’s program for lapsed Catholics I imagine. It was held at a Marriott hotel of all places, and he said he liked it, although I didn’t glean much info from him about what happened there (just a lot of prayer and Torah readings, which I would have expected).

The movie was fun, though it had serious flaws, mainly the fact that the heroine was a bleeding idiot. Stupid heroines generally annoy me but I guess I took this especially personally because a lot of the idiocy arose from a trope that appears fairly often in movies like this: that newspaper reporting is really all about photography. The lady is a reporter and her running gag of sorts is that she’ll do anything for a great picture, and will risk life and limb in order to preserve her camera and film. Far be it from me to deny the power of news photographs, but honestly, when you’re scooping major political events pictures are not essential. Nobody got pictures of the Watergate break-in or of Bill Clinton’s sex acts, yet careful reconstruction of these events seared them into the public consciousness anyway (for better or worse). So I wanted to grab ahold of this woman and yell, “Look, you’re the only reporter getting the inside story on a mad scientist building a robot army in a plot to destroy the world. You don’t even need a @#$&ing picture!”

But of course films are made by filmmakers, and so it’s not surprising that they would think pictures are everything. In fact, the reporter whose idea of “getting the story” is taking lots of pictures of it is an apt metaphor for the whole movie, and what’s entrancing and annoying about it. Actually, since the movie presents such a beautifully realized world with such underdeveloped characters it’s one of those cases where the fan fiction could turn out to be more interesting than the original movie. I’d love a story just about Angelina Jolie’s character, who personally I think should have been the female lead.

Anyhow, the rest of Sunday was spent mostly reading up for an article I’m working on (speaking of the boring non-visual elements of reporting). I slept like a log last night, and had a dream where I was a young female character in some story whose plot I forget now, but it was a Madeleine L’Engle-ish metaphysical sci-fi. Toward the end somebody showed me — but wouldn’t give me, since possessing such a thing would be more than humanity could handle — a collection of actual sayings of Jesus that didn’t make it into the Gospels, and addressed matters that have been controversial since. (I’m sure the dream was inspired by this post.) The only line I remember was something to the effect that if you have a dispute over a reading of Scripture or a conflict between two passages of Scripture, pick the one that sounds most lyrical and poetic. As you might imagine, in the dream that was rather disappointing but now it’s mainly amusing. I guess some dreams, like some movies, exist mainly to entertain.

September 23, 2004

The resident aliens vote

Filed under: Politics and society — Camassia @ 10:12 pm

Klingons endorse Kerry. Maybe he’ll have them over for a bowl of serpent worms to show his appreciation.

Your own impersonal Jesus

Filed under: Christology — Camassia @ 3:59 pm

Interesting post at The Grace Pages about whitewashing Jesus:

Even liberals seem to me, for all the fuss about being rigorously historical in their assessment of Jesus, still to want to protect Jesus’ reputation at all costs. I suppose otherwise it would be difficult to claim him as so exclusively their own. Is it just me or can you see what I’m getting at here?

For example, I think it’s anachronistic to portray the historical Jesus as a great champion of equality in the modern sense. While Jesus’ actions certainly turned many of the cultural values of his day on their head, I think it’s either disingenuous or naive to claim Jesus as some sort of proto-feminist, and to jump glibly from, say, Jesus breaking with social convention to talk to the woman at the well to so modern and assumption-laden a statement as “Jesus supported equal rights” or “Jesus was an advocate of female leadership”.

Or let me deal with a more controversial example. I’ve often heard people say, “Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality,” and then proceed from there to argue that Jesus didn’t have an opinion on it or, more strongly, that he was “not against” homosexuality. What disturbs me is that, with no evidence other than the absence of an explicit statement about homosexuality, it strikes me as historically and culturally unrealistic simply to assume that Jesus was pro-gay. And I say this as one who firmly believes that gays and lesbians are created in God’s image and can have committed, loving sexual relationships that are blessed by God.

This brought me back to high-school semantics class. (Yes, my high school had a semantics class; it was the pet subject of one of the English teachers.) Some semanticists group words by different levels of abstraction. A low-level abstraction would be a word like “table.” It’s an abstraction because it describes a category of thing rather than a specific thing, but I think most speakers of English can agree on what’s a table and what isn’t a table. When you get to high-level abstractions however, such as “justice”, “peace”, “righteousness” and so on, it’s much more subject to interpretation.

What Dave is talking about, I think, is how much we are willing to abstract Jesus. In order to connect his sayings and doings to our lives at all we have to discern the abstract principles behind them, but that’s where disagreements begin. For instance, you can say that Jesus defended the outcast and the marginalized. Who are the marginalized now? Some will say gays and lesbians are, so incorporating them into church life is faithful to his teachings. Others see acceptance of homosexuality as part of the general sexual depravity that is taking over our culture, and therefore not marginal at all. Meanwhile, we can also say that Jesus defended the sanctity of marriage, because of his sayings on adultery and divorce. But does that exclude gay marriage? Well … refer to the first problem.

And let’s not even get started on “Love God and love your neighbor.” I think the only word in that sentence with an unambiguous meaning is “and.”

So I think Dave is correct that over-abstraction allows people to see in Jesus whatever they want to see. And that may or may not be true to how Jesus actually was. But over-particularizing also has obvious problems. As the Church of Christ discovered, trying to re-create the church of the New Testament in every particular can drive you to madness. And I also have to wonder about that story about that gluten-intolerant Catholic girl who was forbidden to take communion with a rice cake. The Pontificator defended the action at the time by quoting Robert Jensen:

If the church had begun in a northern climate, doubtless its sacramental drink, if it had one, would be beer. But just this contingency binds us. The gospel is a message about alleged historical events. The contingency of the historical is therefore affirmed by faith, which in this differs greatly from most other religion. God might not have chosen Israel from the nations, or Jesus from among the Israelites, or washing instead of incensing, or bread instead of potato chips. But for Christian faith, “might not have been” does not at all decrease the authority of what in fact is.

This is following Jesus at its lowest level of abstraction. He ate wheat bread so we eat wheat bread, even if there is no abstract principle behind favoring wheat bread. I guess I can see that for believers in the Real Presence you’d want to stick to the literal, sort of the way Muslims believe you should read the Quran in Arabic because that is the language with which God spoke to Muhammad. But on Pontifications it doesn’t seem to stop there, which is exactly why the blog depresses me. It sounds like Jesus’ mission on earth was to replace the detailed, inflexible, culturally specific rules for Jews with detailed, inflexible, culturally specific rules for everybody. Thanks a lot, J.C.!

But in fact, one interesting thing that Jesus does is bring Jewish law to a higher level of abstraction. Love God, love your neighbor — the spirit of the law takes precedence over the letter. In some sense that liberates Christians from the rules, but it also makes determining the right way a lot harder.

In the New Testament, this seems to be a sign of spiritual adulthood. Paul plays the disciplinarian with the Corinthians, whom he calls “children,” but advises the Galatians to get over their rigidity. And this makes sense: when we were children we had to follow rules without understanding why, but as we grew up we came to understand and absorb the principles behind the rules, so we can make more of our own decisions. I gather that one reason (among many) that the Reformation happened is that only certain people were allowed to be “adults” in medieval Catholicism, and they weren’t even acting much like it. Concepts like the priesthood of all believers and consulting your own conscience about the Bible assert the essential adulthood of all Christians.

Of course, Protestants haven’t always done such a great job of acting like grownups, which is perhaps why Catholics still outnumber them. Is it inevitable that most people will be as children instructed by a select few adults? And if so, how do we really know who they are?

September 22, 2004

The real you

Filed under: Religion and sex — Camassia @ 5:40 pm

The comments to yesterday’s post turned into a discussion of individualism, and how it relates to Christian life. The subject came up again over at Hugo’s blog, where he pondered whether even his own church is too interfering:

If a gay man showed up at All Saints Pasadena and said he was uncomfortable being a gay man and wanted to change his sexual identity, we would not be prepared to support him in that. Indeed, our Vestry issued a statement several years ago condemning reparative therapy in fairly strong terms, and urging the diocese not to have anything to do with organizations like Exodus and Love Won Out. The judgment we have made at All Saints is, I think, ultimately the right one: gays and lesbians who want to change their sexual orientation are, to one degree or another, in need of reassurance that they are good and loved just as they are. Our focus is on enabling GLBTQ folk to find self-acceptance, not transformation into heterosexuality or celibacy.

Is that wrong? In an earlier comment on Jenell’s blog, I compared reparative therapy to plastic surgery. If one of my teenagers at All Saints says she wants liposuction or breast implants in order to feel better about herself, what is my job? Do I encourage her to pursue that goal, or do I work — with others, of course — towards helping her to love herself as she is now? If she saves her money and works overtime to pay for a boob job, should we be cheerleaders, blithely saying “you go, girl!?” I don’t think so!

In the comments, Jonathan Dresner wondered:

I was struck by the converse of your discussion. Another question to consider is: what happens when a person says “I’m heterosexual, but I’m not terribly happy. I think I’d like to explore alternatives”?

In that case, a GLBT-friendly congregation might well support their ‘coming out’ quite consistently.

It seems to me that the major criterion here has to do with the idea of discovering one’s true self. And the major criterion for trueness seems to be social approval. Wanting to become heterosexual and physically attractive seems like something you’d do for other people’s approval. Wanting to become homosexual does not.

The search for the authentic self is a common quest in people lives, including that of yours truly. But the recent discussions made me think about how we assume the true self is found. It’s pretty common in modern America for the search to look backwards — to how you were born, how you would be if you were uncorrupted by others’ influences. So the way to help someone find their true self is largely to get out of the way, to let them introspect, and approve of whatever turns up.

The problem, as I mentioned to Joe in my earlier post, is that people often seem to feel that their true self wants to fit in. In fact, in an earlier post on plastic surgery that I’m not going to try to dig up now, Hugo mentioned that some women who get it insist that they only look like their “true selves” after the surgery. Also, over at Joe’s blog the Quaker Ranter wrote:

When I’m in business meeting, I’m in prayer, trying to discern divine guidance–yes, Christ right there on the facing bench. Glory, Hallelujah! But if no one else is doing this, then what does that mean? I want to be part of a people, a people gathered into one, not just another quirky character in a Meeting.

Inevitably, homo sapiens is a social animal. The occasional feral children who grow up with little or no human contact turn out mentally stunted. So as much as social influence can be toxic, to ask who you would be without it is in a large sense a meaningless question.

In the Bible, the theme of the true self also occurs, but in a different way. “For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like,” says James 1:23-4. The apostles repeatedly admonish their brethren to act like who they now know they are: sons and heirs of the kingdom, temples of God, etc. The true self is found not by stripping off the negative social influences and seeing what’s left, but by looking to Jesus.

The difficulty of this is precisely that it seems so unnatural. It’s natural to be selfish, to want revenge, to be attracted to people other than your spouse, to fear death. It’s not natural to love your enemies, turn the other cheek, give away your possessions, and submit to martyrdom. Or to the extent that it is natural, there are strong countervailing forces that are equally natural. But it’s an image of self that looks forward rather than back. It’s not you as the “uncarved block,” as Lao-tzu put it, but you fully carved into God’s image.

I still don’t know what this means for homosexuality, but this seems like bad news for conservatives arguing from natural law as much as for liberals arguing from genetics. Heterosexuality makes nature run, but it is a nature groaning for redemption like the rest of us.

September 21, 2004

Speaking of church discipline…

Filed under: Church life — Camassia @ 7:09 pm

Bwahahahaha!

(Via The Gutless Pacifist.)

Persona non grata, part 2

Filed under: Ecclesiology — Camassia @ 6:26 pm

Back at that post at the Ivy Bush I linked to the other day, one of the people behind that Methodist petition against Bush clarified that she wasn’t actually pushing for excommunication:

I would never keep anyone from communion. Jesus never reserved his table for the righteous.

I’m talking about membership in a Methodist church, which used to mean some level of commitment toward living a Christian life. I’d like to bring the Methodist church back to that understanding of membership.

Hm. What does denial of membership entail, then, if he can show up, worship, and take communion along with everybody else? They won’t accept your offering money? Won’t send you their newsletters? This keeps getting murkier.

Later in the thread, Heather makes this observation:

Both Hauerwas and Yoder note that excommunication is never intended to be permanent. Originally, in the first century, people were excommunicated with the desired end result to be reconciliation. It was to bring people to repentance and change.

This jibes with how I was reading Matthew 18. Thanks to events in the intervening centuries, words like “excommunication” and “heresy” tend to conjure images of burning people at the stake. But that seems not to have been the case in the apostolic era. Paul advises excommunications at various points in his letters, but he advocates no further punishments.

She also writes:

Taking this question further, can excommunication even be effective anymore? This is when there was one church–there were no denominations. So, to be cut off from the church was to be cut off from the Eucharist and the fellowship of believers. In today’s society, they can just pick another denomination that is more accepting of their actions (SBC, anyone?). So, while I would like to see the church take a stand against their actions (and any and all who have supported the war in any way), I don’t know how effective excommunication is, today, and if it even really sends a message.

It’s a good question. In fact, it may be because of ecumenicism that people like Methodists are so reluctant to deny communion. It’s one thing to say you aren’t a Methodist, but another to say you aren’t in the Body of Christ. To take that authority upon yourself is to effectively deny that any other denomination is part of the Body.

Nonetheless, there must be some reason why Bush is a Methodist, and not something else. So if the Methodists were to chuck him out (whatever that entails exactly), it would force him and probably a lot of other Methodists out there to think about that reason, and how important it is to them. The only modern excommunication story I’ve encountered was in a biography of Conrad Hilton, the hotel mogul. He was a devout Catholic all his life, but in a fit of temporary insanity he became one of the many husbands of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Since they’d both been married before, they couldn’t take communion. They continued to go to church and participate in all the rituals, except that one. Hilton never exactly repented of marrying her, at least not in the book, but he did say that the excommunication along with Zsa Zsa’s profligate self-indulgence made the marriage unbearable. They divorced, and he did not remarry until after his first wife’s death.

It is, of course, different with Protestants than with Catholics. But especially in mainline denominations like Methodism the experience seems to be similar, in that people grow up in them and regard them as reliable institutions in life, like libraries and public schools. And I suspect that many people disobey their teachings not because of real theological differences but because they ignore them. What if one of those institutions started expressing opinions about your moral behavior? Would that make a difference to you? And what would it mean to the institution if it started defining itself publicly like that?

Finally, in a comment to my earlier post Lee remarked:

… we (meaning we Protestants) can’t agree on what beliefs and/or practices are essential to the faith, and so have a hard time defining what puts someone outside of that consensus. And the temptation will always be to define our pet political views as “essential.” My own personal inclination, I think, would be to regard historical essentials of the faith to be non-negotiable (divinity of Christ, the Trinity, etc.), but allow for greater latitude on moral questions, especially where that involves applying moral principles to concrete issues like a particular war.

I tend to agree. As I’ve written here before, the identity of God seems like the most basic starting point for a religion, because you can’t really be part of the same family if you can’t agree who your father is, if you know what I mean. Protestant churches tend to go in one of two rather frustrating directions: fundamentalist churches try to dogmatize everything, so no disagreement is allowed, while liberal churches seem to reverse Lee’s priorities, and make moral questions non-negotiable while leaving issues of God more open-ended.

I must say that the latter always kind of baffled me. When I see things like Spong’s twelve theses, or the eight points of progressive Christianity, or the Unitarian Universalists in general, I wonder how such a vague and pluralistic notion of God yields such implacable moral and political opinions. (Apparently the same thing happens with Quakers, according to Joe.) How is it that the Christian Unitarian and a Buddhist Unitarian and a pagan Unitarian all come together to agree that, say, abortion should be legal and discrimination against homosexuals is wrong?

I know what Telford would say: they actually do worship the same god, and that god is liberalism. I don’t know, since apart from my brief sojourn to All Saints I haven’t been to churches that were that far left, but I have to wonder. It does sound as though, on an unspoken and perhaps unconscious level, there is dogma under all that pluralism. And, perhaps, as much inclination to whup you if you misbehave.

Jake pointed out in a comment to the same post that no two people have exactly the same view of God, which is certainly true. But some people are definitely farther away from each other than others. And perhaps some people who use different names are speaking of much the same thing, whereas others who use the same name are speaking of different gods. There are no clear boundaries to this, and yet there is something that keeps so many people miles apart.

September 20, 2004

Put away that toothpaste!

Filed under: Humor,Religion and sex — Camassia @ 9:10 pm

OK, even in my less-than-stellar condition, this made me laugh. Especially the comments. (“Better switch to Arm and Hammer toothpaste, that’s an unquestionably rugged he-man brand of paste that resolutely hetero guys like myself all use.”) Via such small hands.

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