Mr. Witch of Endor here. Yes, yes, I know you’ve seen neither hide nor hair from me, but trust me, religion hasn’t been much on my mind these days.
This post on Daily Kos, however, deserved attention. Here are the basic facts of the case:
The Smalkowski family lives in a small Oklahoma town called Hardesty. They are atheists. The oldest daughter in the family played basketball at the public school in town. She refused to participate in pre-game prayers. Because of this, her teammates tormented her, with the encouragement of the coach, sometimes hiding her sneakers so she couldn’t play, sometimes just being verbally abusive. Mr. Smalkowski went to complain to the principal and wound up being charged with a felony after an altercation took place. Mr. Smalkowski did nothing wrong, but he was tried as a dangerous criminal, largely because he is Godless. The following is Mr. Smalkowski’s account of the day the verdict was read.
Mr. Smalkowski’s description of the courtroom scene leading up to the verdict is a must-read. In this age of increasing fanaticism, sometimes folks do the right thing.
D.
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo is not a shy retiring flower by any stretch of the imagination. And his refusal to stop calling himself a witch doctor is…well, a little disturbing, to say the least.
But the man is a bishop taking on the Vatican. You’ve got to give him props for that.
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who was excommunicated Tuesday, said he does not accept his excommunication and will continue his campaign to persuade the Vatican to allow married priests. The 76-year-old archbishop married a Korean acupuncturist in 2001.
“We do not accept this excommunication and lovingly return it to His Holiness, our beloved Pope Benedict XVI, to . . . withdraw it and join us in recalling married priests to service once again,” said excommunicated Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo in a written statement read for him at a news conference at Imani Temple in Northeast Washington. (Indian Catholic)
Milingo has committed the grave sin of asking the Church to allow priests to marry (so they’re not tempted to pork young boys) and calling the Pope out on several other issues. Pope Benedict, as a former leader of the Inquisition (oh, I’m sorry, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), is not disposed to take this lyin’ down. So he’s pulled out the worst weapon of the Church–
No, not child abuse. Excommunication.
And Milingo is still sticking to his guns, throwing the excommunication back at the Pope politely but firmly.
Priests had been permitted to marry during the First Millennium, but marriage was condemned by the Church at the Second Lateran Council in 1139.
Milingo said the Vatican’s stand had led to crisis in the church, with the average age of priests at about 74 years.
“In 20 years there will be few priests left,” he said in a statement. “Who is going to provide the sacraments and the Eucharist to the people?”
He said many priests forced to leave the priesthood because
they married would be willing to return to the ministry.
“There is a desperate need for priests now and in the future, but we have almost 25,000 married priests in the United States and almost 150,000 worldwide who are not being called to service because of a Medieval, church-imposed regulation that priests be celibate,” Milingo said. (Washington Post)
My God, look at that. It was actual common sense, and it probably whooshed in one Vatican ear and out the other. Poor Benedict. First he has to deal with uppity Muslims taking offense when he denigrates their religion, and now this. I wonder if he prays for a time machine to take him back to the 1400s.
Come to think of that, maybe we’d all be better off if one showed up. But that’s just humble opinion.
I must admit, I love The Gods Are Bored.
Today, the Fabulous Goat Judge took on the issue of Jesus’s pursestrings.
Sometimes when I’ve contemplated the world’s great and fabulous cathedrals, I’ve wondered who paid Jesus’s bills. We all know he preached outdoors (we heartily endorse this practice). At best he might have spoken in some modest synagogues. But even the biggest Bible moron knows that when he went to the fancy Temple in Jerusalem he more or less freaked.
Here was a guy and twelve of his closest friends. Thirteen men needing three hots and a cot every day for three years. I’m a goat judge, not a mathematician, but that adds up to 1095 days. I don’t know if they had leap years then.
Who picked up the tab? Was Jesus like Salieri, with a rich patron, or was he like Mozart, scraping together the rent month to month?
The Bible is strangely silent on this issue. (Gods Are Bored)
I’ve often wondered about this too. Whatever Christ did in the Temple that day was seen by the Romans as an act of political sedition, and we don’t know WHAT it was. The Gospels, frankly, don’t tell us. However, one can suspect from Jesus’s insistence on poverty that building huge edifices for his glory wasn’t quite the result he had in mind when he went a little nutso and laid his life on the line for a principle.
Anne goes on to take the gold in the high dive:
To be brutally frank, I’d rather hold out for worship in the forest on a shoestring with a leader who wants to be there but can’t because he’s now freelance and needs to make ends meet. It has been thus with the Druids, I feel, since the Christian occupation of their lands. And it was probably thus with Jesus, or at least his early followers, back in the day. (Gods Are Bored)
There’s nothing wrong with feeding and housing the people who take talking to the gods and spreading love and joy seriously. But most established religions are mostly engines for the fiscal rape of the poor, not to mention engines for the collection of temporal power (po-TAT-to, po-TAH-to…) Is there a particular point where ecstasy stops and the power-brokering begins? Could a religion find that point and stop just short, or implement means of breaking that vicious cycle?
I suppose there might be, but good luck getting any established religion to take it seriously.
Or, as Anne puts it:
Religion plus harsh reality equals authentic correspondence with the gods. Remember that this fall when you settle into your pew for the annual round of stewardship sermons.
Amen.
From The Revealer:
As do a new generation of Christian conservative leaders who look at Pat Robertson in his dotage and Jim Dobson in his proud fury and D. James Kennedy in his absurd, shellacked hair dye, and decide to plot a more subtle course. That means theological and political adjustments, But liberals and newspaper reporters shouldn’t mistake those adjustments for a fundamentally different relationship of Christian conservatism to power; indeed, it remains constant. National preachers do what they need to do to stay close to the muscle in American life. There are no “good” preachers and “bad” preachers at that level, there are only power preachers, some smarter than others. (Revealer)
Word. Beware the fundamentalist bearing a message of tolerance, for his goodwill is as thin as nonexistent underwear.
