British biologist Richard Dawkins recently published The God Delusion, a scathing denunciation of religion in all its forms that attributes most of the evils of the world to religious belief. A number of rebuttals have been published in the mass media, but the Mahablog has one of the best:

I agree with Dawkins on many points. For example, I agree with him (and Sam Harris) that good socialization is a better prerequisite for moral and ethical behavior than religious belief. I agree that much religion is a stew of shams and inconsistencies and superstition that people use as an emotional crutch. What Dawkins writes about religion is, IMO, generally true of that part of religion he is writing about.

Unfortunately, like every other fundamentalist atheist I’ve ever encountered, he is profoundly ignorant about religion as a whole. The small part of religion he knows and writes about is not representative of the whole. He’s like a really backward space alien who lands on the North Pole and assumes the whole planet is covered by ice. And, because he doesn’t respect religion enough to study it, he remains willfully ignorant of it. This is, pure and simple, elective ignorance, which is the hallmark of a fanatic.

Mahablog: Richard Dawkins and Fundamentalist Atheism

Jerusalem, December XXV, IV. There was mixed reaction in the markets to the birth of the Son of God. The futures market in human chattels took the biggest hit, with 1-year future contracts declining by I.V dinarii. The sacrificial animal industry declined XII%. Imperial revenue bonds declined II% on news that a significant new monarch had appeared on the scene that could create long-lasting instability within the empire.

His majesty, King Herod, stated to reporters that he was aware of the new developments, having already received intelligence to that effect from eastern sources, and that he had placed the armed forces on alert to deal with the developing threat. "Investors can be confident that no problem of monarchial succession will disrupt the regular operation of markets as long as We are king."

The king further stated that Roman imperial military intervention was not called for and that local troops were more than adequately prepared to carry out his plans which he refused to disclose, citing security reasons. He expected his precautionary actions to be unpopular among the subjects of his realm, but stated that he had the unqualified support of the financial sector, including the directors of the Temple Currency Exchange, which felt particularly threatened by by prospect of a new regulatory regime hostile to their currency arbitrage business.

"The small sacrifices that must be made by the general population will ultimately lead to greater happiness and prosperity in the future." said His Majesty. "Everyone must sacrifice in these troublesome times. I myself will forego my usual daily plate of hummingbirds' tongues sauteed in Falerian wine for the duration of the crisis."

According to an anonymous source within the kings's circle of economic advisors, "These developments present too much risk to settle for half-measures. Inaction would allow the threat to grow and finally to become unmanageable."

The king promised reporters that the additional military expenditures would not lead to a tax increase, but could easily be accommodated within the current budget by reducing governmental waste and inefficiency.

It was later reported that the royal treasury had taken a long position on casketmakers, favoring manufacturers specializing in small caskets.

I first published this on October 20, 1999 in the Jackson Progressive and again offer it in the spirit of the season. - Tom Lowe

In a few nights, children will walk from door to door wearing ghoulish masks and costumes and calling "trick or treat"--we must give candy or catch mischief. Children love Halloween. Most adults love it. But some well-meaning Christians regard it as demonic and evil. I think they are mistaken.

Halloween clearly has pagan origins. In Medieval Europe, it was commonly believed that the dark, mischievous spirits of the night celebrated the change of season that would lengthen the nights and shorten the days. During those supposed nocturnal demonic celebrations, young men ventured about pulling pranks in imitation of the spirits, a throwback to the animism that permeated primitive societies prior to the coming of Christianity.

Halloween, of course, is short for the Eve of All Hallows, the latter known as All Saints Day, a celebration of the communion of saints. The early church originally established the Feast of All Saints to honor saints without a specific day. Although it was first set in the spring, the feast was later moved post-harvest to October 1, when adequate provisions could be made for the many pilgrims that flocked to Rome. It was only over a long period of time that the celebration of the nocturnal spirits became the eve of All Saints.

I suspect that most Americans living today acquired their understanding of Halloween from Walt Disney's Fantasia, which included an animation of the Russian composer Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. In Fantasia, the spirits of the dead emerge from their graves and flock to the top of a great mountain, where the devil himself holds court. He sports with the dancing evil spirits, torturing them by throwing them into fire and molten lava, but when the church bell strikes, signalling the advent of morning and All Saints Day, he retreats into his mountain and the dead return to their graves. The scene ends quietly.

The movie is, of course, preposterous. It has no basis in Christian theology and only slightly in the pagan myths that underlie Halloween. It is no more than imaginative storytelling—entertaining, even terrifying—but hardly the stuff of belief. It is unfortunate that some persons have taken this version of Halloween seriously, not literally, but as a celebration of evil. Halloween is in fact a much deeper phenomenon than Disney's two-dimensional portrayal.

Festivals and celebrations do not survive for centuries out of mere nostalgia or sentimentality. On the contrary, they survive because they express in dramaturgic form the soul's condition and movement. To understand them we are compelled to enter the realm of myth. It has been said that a myth is a collective dream and that a dream is a personal myth. To understand the message of Halloween, we must study it with a mythical eye, rather than literally. Halloween and All Saints come together. Is this merely a chronological accident? Perhaps, but probably not.

Masks and costumes are archetypal. They change a person from an individual into a symbol. In Greek tragedy, staged during the festival of the god Dionysos, each actor wore a mask, a "persona," and it is clear that in wearing the masks, the actors represented something other than themselves, something bigger, something quite universal. Darth Vader, for instance, is clearly archetypal, with an imposing black mask through which his voice is painfully distorted. At the end of the movie and the end of his life, Vader's face, unmasked, is seen to be fatherly and kind—the hidden face behind the monster's mask.

Likewise, the children knocking at our door wear the symbols of death: ghosts, goblins, skeletons, witches and monsters (astronaut, ballerina and hobo costumes don't count). But we know that these grotesque wrappings hide beautiful, innocent, faces. Is it possible that the strange attraction of Halloween lies in its evocation of the profound, submerged knowledge that underneath the gruesome and frightening masks of death lurks a reality both innocent and beautiful? Could it be that the deepest fears of our lives, our psychic "skeletons,"once we summon the courage to face them, become harmless, and even beneficent?

Alan Watts once wrote that God plays peek-a-boo with us, much in the manner that adults play peek-a-boo with children. The psalms are abounding with prayers begging God not to hide his face from the psalmist and lamenting the fact that the Lord had hid his face. "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (Ps. 13:1) "My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning." (Ps. 130:6) "Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress—make haste to answer me." (Ps. 69:17) In counterpoint to the mood of the lamentations is the delight of the psalmist in the revealing of God's face. "For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him." (Ps. 22:24) "So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory." (Ps. 63:2)

The Bible could even be defined as the record of the progressive revelation of God, first, as a stern, avenging, oriental-style monarch who reacts at humanity's sinfulness by flooding the earth, then, as a rule-making celestial executive who adopts a Semitic tribe and gives them a code of laws, and, finally, as a loving father who reveals himself in a fully human incarnation. It is as though God had been slowly withdrawing a stern, frightening mask from His face, but only as quickly as humankind was able to accept the revelation.

The proposition that good lurks underneath the appearance of evil is not exclusive to Christianity. In Plato's Symposium the drunken Alcibiades compared the homely Socrates to a Silenus, a small statue of the father of the god Dionysus, ugly on the outside but when opened, being found to hold images of the gods. And one must not omit The Eumenides of Aeschylus, in which the furies, ruthless creatures tormenting Orestes for the crime of matricide, were propitiated by the goddess Athena, who made them protectors of the City of Athens.

The Tibetan pantheon contains frightening and grotesque deities that are not really gods, as Westerners understand the term, but aspects of our own existence, who, when acknowledged and honored, become friendly and loving. In one story, two monks sat in a mountain cave, meditating in an attempt to evoke a particularly fearsome deity. After much time and effort, the deity appeared, terrifying beyond all imagining. One of the monks took leave of his senses and ran down the mountain, totally mad. The other monk, although frightened, remained, and began to study the visage standing before him. Immediately, he perceived that the monstrous deity was actually Amitabha, the "Buddha of Boundless Light," and that the fearsome appearance was merely an illusion caused by his initial failure to perceive the true nature of reality.

The complementarity of Halloween and All Saints Day reminds us that the saints, before they march in the heavenly procession, must face squarely, acknowledge and even "treat" the goblins and monsters in their own souls, who, when courageously confronted, reveal themselves to be helpers, not hindrances, but which, when denied and concealed from consciousness in the underworld of the soul, do not disappear, but return in vicious and harmful forms to cause dysfunction and suffering.

The child in monster costume proclaims "trick or treat." The child is an actor in a cosmic drama. Either we open our door and honor these masked children, or else they will return to do mischief, just as we must open ourselves to our own "monsters"—our deepest fears, angers, attachments and aversions—so that they do not do us mischief.

Halloween, therefore, is a ritual enactment of the dark night of the soul, a reminder of our need to enter and explore some of the darkest corners of our being, and that the reward for such a journey is not despair or hopelessness, but joy, love and peace.
 

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Copyright Thomas Lowe, 1999. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.

Tags: Halloween, Plato, Euripides, mask, Mussorgsky, Silenus

By way of the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal via the Carpetbagger Report via the Daily Kos, the Fellowship Baptist Church in Saltillo, Mississippi, voted not to approve blacks as members during a scheduled Sunday night business meeting Aug. 6. A 12-year old boy of mixed race who was converted in the church at a revival sought to become a member, but the church was afraid that he might come with his people, and they couldn't have that. The pastor, Rev. John Stevens resigned that night in protest.

When I was in high school in Jackson, my church, Central Presbyterian on West Capitol Street, was the target of a civil rights effort to integrate white churches in the city. I remember that my father, one of the leaders in the church, argued in favor of seating them when they came, but he was overruled, so when they arrived, accompanied by a crowd of reporters and photographers, there was a solid wall of elders and deacons across the front of the church that refused to let them in. It was not our proudest moment. They were refused by nearly all the churches in Jackson. St. Andrews Episcopal Church seated them, but they left almost immediately.

The Bible makes it extremely clear that the kingdom makes no distinction of persons. At Central we frequently sang from the Presbyterian Hymnal the hymn "In Christ there is no East or West," but I guess people didn't bother to think about what they were singing. That very hymn is undoubtedly contained in the hymnbook that sits in the pews of Fellowship Baptist Church. The story of Philip and the Ethiopian is contained in their Bibles, just as it is in ours. Acts 8: 27-39. Given sufficient emotional (and financial) investment, however, the human mind can easily convince itself that fair is foul and foul is fair.

So the stench of bigotry hovers through the filthy air.

The great Bengal poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) via The Episcopal Peace Fellowship wrote the following lines which seem to me particularly relevant to our nation:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

The U. S. Government (Republican and Democrat) preaches democracy, claims to believe in elections, but pouts like a spoiled child when the voters refuse to obey its suggestions as to whom they should elect.

The latest pout is the Bush administration's ban on U.S. citizens and corporations doing business with the Palestinian Authority because the Palestinians, in their exercise of the right to vote, rejected the utterly corrupt Fatah and put Hamas into power. Hamas has a rather peculiar (and unacceptable) view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict: if you are bombed and strafed, your homes bulldozed, your people deprived of water, land and the right to travel and treated like sub-humans, you are justified in taking up arms against your oppressors. What an outrageous notion!

I suspect the Palestinians have been reading our Declaration of Independence and taking it seriously -- not a smart idea, as too many nations have unhappily discovered. Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, East Timor, Guatemala, Vietnam--the list is endless--have discovered that self-determination is a luxury that can be enjoyed only by nations with overwhelming wealth and power.

Or nations with nuclear weapons.

In any case, the cutoff of U.S. aid and commerce will undoubtedly result in an even worse humanitarian catastrophe than the one which has been going on since 1967 in the occupied territories. As with the sanctions on Iraq during the '90s, one wonders what political objective is so important that to further it innocent adults and children should needlessly die from hunger and disease? More to the point, what vital interest does the United States have in Israel's oppression of the Palestinians and its illegal appropriation of their water and land?

But on this Holy Saturday let us put others' sufferings out of our mind (even though they result directly and deliberately from our own government's policies in support of Israel's desire for lebensraum) and think only of Christ's sufferings and death. Let us anesthetize our consciences with ancient rituals that grant us permission to ignore everything that does not relate to our own personal salvation. Let us lay out our Easter clothes in preparation for our celebration of the resurrection (and our affluence). Let us drive to church tomorrow in our SUV, a family idol the worship of which has led directly to the disaster in the middle east and is inexorably leading us to our own social and economic disaster here at home.

It is not too much to say that our nation, and perhaps our entire world, is spiritually dead. There are a few flickers of the spirit but they are faint. The death of our civilization will inevitably follow our spiritual death. The wave of fundamentalism enveloping the globe--Islamic, Christian, Jewish, even Hindu and Buddhist--are like the last gasp of a star that has burnt up nearly all its fuel and become a red giant on the verge of collapse.

I once heard Episcopal priest and prophet Michael Dwinell say that before there can be a resurrection there must be a betrayal. Our nation is being betrayed by its leaders. Worse, we are betraying ourselves by our indifference, our greed, and our willful refusal to acknowledge our role in bringing about suffering in the world. Dwinell could have added that for there to be a resurrection there must also be a death. Since we are on a downward and possibly fatal spiral, it is not out of place to speculate on the meaning of death in the context of contemporary civilization. In one of the finest poems ever written Dante represented the road to Heaven literally spiraling down into the depths of Hell, wherein we must face Satan, the archetype of betrayal-- the ultimate sin--appropriately set in a vast lake of ice. It is only by grasping the fiend himself and climbing up his hideous body that we are able to ascend.

Even though from a theological standpoint the souls suffering in Hell may fly straight to Paradise by simply desiring to go there, Dante's vision implies that for living humans there are no shortcuts. One cannot climb up from, for instance, the burning lake of the grafters in the Eighth Circle toward Purgatory, because Purgatory sits on the other side of the ice lake. There is no shortcut because there is no perfect contrition. The path from the Dark Wood of Error to Paradise inevitably leads through the deepest places in Hell. As Jung might say, to find light, one must accept darkness. Like Prospero, one must acknowledge the creature of darkness as one's own.

It is no accident that one of the medications most in demand today is the antidepressant, a sign that the universal psyche senses the approach of darkness but shrinks back from it with all its might. But as long as we individually and collectively refuse to acknowledge and even embrace the darkness within us and within our nation and society, we will remain unconscious on a course to catastrophe.

The June 18, 2002 issue of Scientific American contains an excellent article debunking the arguments made for intelligent design:

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

On the same note:

Perusing Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology yesterday, I came across the following passage that criticizes the creationist and intelligent design standpoints:

The term "apologetic," which had such a high standing in the early church, has fallen into disrepute because of the methods employed in the abortive attempts to defend Christianity against attacks from modern humanism, naturalism, and historism. An especially weak and disgusting form of apologetics used the argumentum ex ignorantia; that is, it tried to discover gaps in our scientific and historical knowledge in order to find a place for God and his actions within an otherwise completely calculable and "immanent" world. Whenever our knowledge advanced, another defense position had to be given up; but eager apologetes were not dissuaded by this continuous retreat from finding in the most recent developments of physics and historiography new occasions to establish God's activity in new gaps of scientific knowledge. This undignified procedure has discredited everything which is called "apologetics."

Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol 1, p. 6 (Chicago, 1951)

by Arnold Kenseth

In this snowfall season the birth
Of god's furious and tender Son
Gives us our holy days by fire. Earth
Cradles once more the hope that Eve
And her winter children will receive
The sunlit garden; because fear
Has no room in our Saviour's castle.

All love shepherds us. The pageant kings
Weep for us. In argent rings
Heaven's wild gabriels wrestle
For our very souls. What stables here
Is time for us to give our sin
The shape of kneeling, to perch seven
Times seventy singing robins

Of forgiveness on our tongues,
Blessing our enemies, that the bones
Which we have broken may rejoice.
No one is lost, not one, who yields
Himself to Christmas. The red ribbons
Of his grief adorn us. The voice
Of his mercy is heard in our fields.

Today, November 27, is the earliest possible Advent. For reasons I cannot completely fathom, Advent was always for me the most meaningful season. It's observance is not a matter of mere expectation, nor of filling one's mind with thoughts of the coming Christmas or even the first Christmas. We are called to live in the present, not the past or future.

We are called to live in the now during Advent as at any other time.

It is said to be a season of contemplation, of expectation, of awaiting. It is living in a world that is always pregnant with a new world and the infinite possibilities inherent in new worlds.

For me, Advent is a good time for sweeping the cobwebs from one's soul, of deconstructing one's mental edifices of how both the world and the spirit work; of being as realistic as I can about everything; of seeing things as they are and not as I would like them to be; and of accepting all things, not as the best of all possible worlds, but as the world we have to work in and to work with.

May Advent be a blessed time for you.

Article on Advent from the Catholic Encyclopedia

From the Wikepedia

Two very interesting blogs for Christian readers that want something beyond the culture wars:

The Anti-Manicheist
Example:

One of the best things we can do is to rally now to force the cultural wars issues from playing a big role in the upcoming elections. That means we need to reframe them in ways that neither side will like and both sides might be willing to live with.

Street Prophets: Faith and Politics
Example:

Then Peter came and said to him, `Lord, if a brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?'  Jesus said to him, `Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven times.

I borrow my title from an amazing reflection on forgiveness by the remarkable Rev. Debbie Blue.  I've been searching for much on this idea, and I've come back to her words among others.  Because it keeps sticking in my craw.  Hasn't Dubya done 490 dumb and hurtful things yet?  Hasn't he run out of chances?  When do I get to feel good about disliking this man?

Enjoy.

I am rapidly tiring of the phrase "be afraid," used frequently throughout the liberal blogosphere. Fear is the worst possible response to any threat other than immediate physical danger.

Although the love of money is productive of much evil, fear, not money, is the root of it all. A person overcome by fear will commit the vilest acts of treachery without the slightest remorse. Tyrants rule by fear and in turn are ruled by fear, which turns them into monsters that ultimately destroy themselves.

Science has only recently begun to discover the deleterious effect of fear and anxiety upon the human body and psyche. The hormones our bodies produce in response to danger, if produced continuously, cause all manner of damage to the body and the brain.

One of the principal objects of all the world's great religions and paths is the conquest of fear. Jesus was continually exhorting his disciples to "be not afraid." (Matt. 8:26; 17:7; 28:10; Mark 6:50; Luke 12:7; John 14:27); Jehovah and his messengers frequently admonished people not to be afraid of anything on the Earth and to only fear Him. (Gen. 26:24; Josh. 10:25; 2 Kings 1:15; Ps. 27:1). Sri Krishna told Arjuna "Do not be troubled; do not fear my terrible form." (Bhagavad Gita, 11:49). The Buddha: "From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear; he who is free from pleasure neither sorrows nor fears." (Dhammapada, XVI:212) Chögyam Trungpa: " The key to warriorship and the first principle of Shambhala is not being afraid of who you are. Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself." Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, p.28 (Boston, 1984)

Jack Kornfield wrote that after all is said "there is only love and fear," the two mighty opposites, the two worldviews that through their interplay create history.

It seems to me that the chief psychological manifestation of fear is what psychologists call projection: attributing to others unacceptable aspects of one's self. We fear the darkness within and therefore project it onto other persons, nations, religions or gods. The less familiar the "other," the more effective the projection. All of the problems of the world, nation, person, etc. are said to be caused by liberals, communists, fascists, conservatives, vegetarians, catholics, protestants, blacks, whites, latinos, or some other person, group, tribe, family, or nation that is the object of our projection, and that object must be suppressed or destroyed to solve the problem. For 50 years we projected our dark side onto Communism. When the Soviet Union collapsed, thus depriving us of our projection, our rejoicing was short-lived, because our elites quickly initiated a frantic search for a new enemy, a new target for our projections. After demonizing Serbia and bombing it into ruin, it was not long before they settled upon Islam as the preferred enemy.

Islam, in many respects, makes a perfect target of projection. Few Americans know Arabic or Persian or have even visited the middle east. We know little of the religious or social customs of Muslims. Few Americans have muslim friends. There is an abysmal ignorance of middle eastern history, especially the last two hundred years. Our Christian and Jewish religions have fought with Islam at one time or another for over a thousand years. A lack of familiarity with the target of projection is almost a prerequisite. It is difficult to project attributes onto someone you know well.

For elites, there is much to be said for demonizing an enemy. The nation can be mobilized for war. Civil liberties can be curtailed in the name of national security. Profits that would be considered obscene in peacetime can be made by corporations with the right political connections without interference by the organs of state charged with controlling corruption. Fear impairs judgment, and a fearful population is more pliable and more likely to believe what they are told than a less fearful one. Therefore, there is a constant struggle between those who would instill fear in the people and those who would endeavor to dispel that fear.

To the point: The the right-wing movement that controls the levers of the United States government has gained that power and is attempting to retain and extend that power by fear. It has been extraordinarily successful because liberals and progressives have attempted to mobilize opposition against the right wing by telling people that they should fear what Bush and his administration is doing and trying to do. This is a losing fight. You cannot fight fear with fear any more than you can fight evil with evil or fire with fire. Fear only makes the right wing stronger because the basis of its power is fear and fear alone. Roosevelt was right: we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Ultimately, the origin of all fear is the repressed fear of our own selves. The only remedy for that kind of fear is the willingness to see ourselves and our nation honestly for what we are--basically good but, like all humankind, deeply flawed and too often prone to foolishness and evil.

We are progressives and liberals; we are not afraid of Osama Ben Laden, or Saddam Hussein or communism or anything else that we are told to be afraid of. We will not kowtow to injustice, whether it is domestic or foreign. We are not willing to give up our freedom for security, because the deal is rigged and we end up with neither. We realize that the price of freedom and justice can be high, but that any other bargain is no bargain at all. That we might become victims of terrorism is no reason to be cowards, about whom it is rightly said die many times, whereas the brave die only once.

Our nation was founded on ideas of freedom, justice and democracy--not race, religion, history or soil. Abandon those ideals and there will be no nation to preserve. Many people gave their lives for those ideals and considered it a good trade. We feel the same way.

So don't tell me to be afraid. Concerned, yes. Angry, perhaps. But not afraid.