Here at God & Consequences we firmly believe in books before TV. But then happened the Internet, and Internet videos. So, just to show how up on the times we are, let’s have a little trip down MetaCafe-YouTube Lane.
* First up: Christ wasn’t the first Christ. No, seriously. Dude wasn’t. And he’d probably be offended as a Jew by the notion of pagan gods getting mixed in with his New Testament.
The thing that gets me about this one is how utterly clueless these people seem about the foundations of their faith. The early Church’s propaganda war was evidently well-fought and almost completely won.
* Who could forget the Super Best Friends–Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna, Joseph Smith, Lao Tzu, Jesus, and SeaMan.
Oh, if only all religion was like this…
* One of my favorites–the Evanescence song “Bring Me To Life” set to a montage of clips from Asoka, a movie about the man who laid the foundations for Buddhism to be a world religion. Pretty! And it rocks!
* And just for a few laughs, how about the Greatest Action Story Ever Told? (Note: if you are easily offended by parodies about Christianity, don’t play this one. And what are you doing here anyway?)
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.
My favorite Brit (next to Michael Palin, that is) takes on the evangelical fad for “prosperity”–i.e., God wants you to be rich, so give me your money as a sign of faith and if you’re not rich in X many days, you don’t believe in God enough. Pay me more money and I’ll teach you how to believe stronger.
Yeah. I have trouble believing people fall for this crap too, but apparently Barnum’s Dictum still rings true.
Poor, poor Pope Benedict. Why won’t the world just slide back into the Dark Ages, when a Pope could run his mouth off about infidels and heretics and then sit back and enjoy the bonfire? Nope, nowadays pesky newspapers get involved, and everything goes to hell.
The former Cardinal Ratzinger (I just like saying that name with a nasal whine) is in hot water over his recent remarks about Islam. He’s taken the unprecedented step of apologizing personally for running his stupid mouth off…but get this, he’s blaming the whole thing on a pesky medieval manuscript that just sort of flung itself from his throat.
Benedict ignited a firestorm of protest last week in a speech he made at Regensburg University in Germany, where he used to teach theology. The speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason, walling a belief in God out of science and philosophy.
But the pope began by recounting a conversation on the truths of Christianity and Islam that took place between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar.
“He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,’ ” the pope said.
He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of jihad, which he defined as “holy war,” and said that violence in the name of religion is contrary to God’s nature and to reason.
At the same time, though without mentioning Islam specifically, Benedict suggested reason as the basis for “that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”
In the speech, he did not say whether he agreed with the quotations he cited about violence and Islam. But on Sunday he delivered a rare papal apology putting distance between his views and those he quoted.
“These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,” Benedict said.
“The true meaning of my address,” he said, “in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.” (New York Times)
I must confess to being a little bit mystified. (Translation: It just don’t make no f&*#ing sense to me.) So Benedict’s whole point was reason and faith, how Faith has been shafted by Reason but Reason must be the grounds of discussion–and he just thought he’d throw in a little anti-Islam to liven everything up?
How does this make sense? Even the “apology” makes little to no sense–it was a medieval manuscript, so that should make it okay to dredge up and hurl at Mohammed’s followers? Did the manuscript hold a gun to Benny Ratzie’s head and make him open his big fat mouth?
Hm.
Part of a Vatican apology runs thus:
“The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim faithful. Confirming his respect and esteem for those who profess the Islamic faith, he hopes they will be helped to understand his words in their true sense.”
I kind of think the words were taken in their true sense by anyone with half a brain. When you’re digging up medieval propaganda, how can it be understood as anything other than an insult? There were hundreds of other quotes Benedict could have used, and hundred of other ways for him to express what he now says was his point all the time–the seeming modern triumph of fanaticism over reason.
There are some folks saying that Benedict’s apology should be enough for Muslims who were pissed about his remarks, that his scholarly mumblings were taken out of context and that we should all just relax. To which I say, let Benny dig out the beam in his own eye (and incidentally, face the Catholic Church’s dismal record on human rights, including the betrayal of Liberation Theology) before he starts wanting to do cataract surgery on Muslims. Maybe he should swap scriptwriters with Dubya Bush.
The overall quality of the speeches both ways might even improve…
The UN Special Envoy for AIDS has a few things to say about the United States policy, and it’s blistering.
But the US Congress has stipulated that a proportion of the funds must be spent on encouraging abstinence-until-marriage programmes.
“That kind of incipient neo-colonialism is unacceptable.
“We’re saying to Africa: ‘This is how you will respond to the pandemic’ and that’s not appropriate because African governments are eminently capable of deciding what their priorities are and what the response should be.”
“You do not provide money on the condition that they reflect your ideological priorities.”
Top US officials have rejected the criticism, denying it promotes abstinence to the detriment of other HIV prevention strategies, or that it is designed to appease conservative Republicans. (BBC)
Given the Bush Administration’s cozying up to the fundie theocon right on women’s issues, how anyone can say that current US policy isn’t doing just that–providing money on the condition that countries toe the fundamentalist Protestant evangelical line. Let’s just take a closer look at this, shall we?
One of the starkest examples of evangelical influence over U.S. foreign policy is in the arena of HIV/AIDS. Because at the start of his tenure, President Bush was ready to shelve the issue: he had shuttered the White House Office on AIDS; he’d neglected to convene a board of AIDS advisors. It was only after intense evangelical political pressure that he began to take up the issue, ultimately marshalling billions of dollars and making AIDS a cornerstone of what he likes to call his agenda of compassionate conservatism. The Christian right can take tremendous credit for Bush’s global AIDS initiative. But of course their pressure also dictated the direction his initiative took.
In an aggressive rewriting of history, evangelicals had singled out Uganda as a successful example of morality-based AIDS program. They claimed that a message emphasizing abstinence until marriage and monogamy in marriage had reversed climbing HIV infection rates there during the 1990s. The spin was patently false - Uganda’s success leaned heavily on a massive condom education and distribution program that brought condom use from negligible levels up to nearly 50 percent. But by cultivating ties with Uganda’s evangelical first family, the Musevenis, who have attracted massive U.S. aid by playing ball, evangelicals inside and outside the administration have spun out a myth, completely contradicted by scientific data, that promoting abstinence and marriage can prevent HIV. In this model, condom information and access is confined only to narrowly defined “high-risk groups” such as sex workers. In fact studies tell us that people who are taught the abstinence-only message, which bars mention of condoms, do go on to have sex, and the sex they have is more risky, less often protected, and they are far less likely to seek out care for sexually transmitted disease.
This deadly ideology has now been exported, to the tune of $1 billion or more, to countries such as South Africa where more than one in four people have HIV–in other words, where every community is a high-risk group. In a situation like that, marriage itself is an HIV risk factor and monogamy is no protection. And depriving people of condoms and information about how to use them effectively is, frankly, murderous.
I spoke with one AIDS advocate in Uganda recently, who has been active fighting HIV there since long before evangelicals discovered the disease, who says condom shortages are now so acute there, due to U.S. pressure, that some men are now using plastic bags out of desperation.
For many evangelical leaders, this kind of reality check is beside the point, because abstinence is really a back door into evangelism. As Franklin Graham, who has received a multimillion dollar grant to do abstinence education in Uganda, told the Senate a few years ago: “This crisis will be curbed only when the moral teachings of God’s Word permeate African society.” (Esther Kaplan, commongroundcommonsense.org)
Where have we heard this kind of cant before? When the Europeans invaded North and South America, extinguishing indiginous cultures, perhaps? Way back when Europeans were exporting Africans wholesale for cheap labor? Let’s face it, religion is one of the most common props of colonialism. It’s easy to feel superior and ignore the suffering of other folks when you think God’s on your side. The horrific cost in human suffering this attitude has spawned is notable in that it’s ignored by the people who perpetrate this sort of travesty.
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.
Snatched from Ekklesia, an African church leader who says faith-based AIDs programs aren’t doing any good.
“As faith-based organisations we have been involved in HIV prevention, but we have been doing more harm than good,” said J.P. Heath.
He explained: “We have offered care - made promises to look after orphans and [to] help with funeral fees. We must [now] stop helping people to die and start helping them to live. We must mobilise faith leaders to say that we can live with HIV.”
There was recognition among the religious leaders that one of their biggest challenges comes from those who use the language of faith or the doctrine of the church to preach that HIV is a punishment from God and that the use of condoms is a sin.
The head of the Lutheran World Federation, Bishop Mark Warner, said the church had to understand that the prohibition on the use of condoms was exacerbating the disease rather than preventing it. Abstinence as the only form of prevention was not viable when discussing HIV prevention, he said.
“Churches must realise that the use of condoms in fighting HIV is not contrary to our moral teaching,” said Bishop Warner. (Ekklesia)
I’ve often wondered at the anti-condom stance in some religions. The only reason I can find for it is that temporal power partly rests on number of followers–the more you have to pay tithe to the offering-plate, the better your church does. Who cares if diseases run rampant or people’s lives are destroyed by no access to health care or proper contraception? Got to get that money into our Swiss accounts, yo.
It wasn’t a surprise to me that Cardinal Ratzinger (now our very own winner in the Vatican demolition-derby to elect the next Pope, a feat probably made easier by the fact that Ratzie was Pope-By-Proxy during the last decade of JPII’s reign, but whatever) was once a member of the Nazi Party until it was “safe” to desert–in 1945.
Grass has spent years actually producing to society and tolerance by being a literary figure par excellence. Ratzinger, on the other hand, is still trying to drag women back to the Middle Ages by their hair. Which kind of beggars the question–why did nobody ask for Ratzie to give the papacy back?
I have great difficulty believing in the Rapture or the Tribulation as anything but a medieval fairytale used for political fearmongering in the pursuit of temporal power. I admit this. Revelations is one of my favorite Biblical books, just after the Song of Solomon–mostly because I think whoever wrote the Book of Revelations must have been high on something.
But what frightens me are the people who take the concepts of the Rapture and the Tribulation seriously, as if there was anything in the Book of Revelations to sustain it. As a historical document, Revelations is a hysterical denouncement of the Roman Empire. As a religious document, it’s a picture-perfect illustration that religion can hit you like a bad case of the ’shrooms, especially if you’re hanging out in the desert bigtime.
As a factor in American foreign policy, the whole damn thing is scary. I happened upon Bartholomew’s recent post about Dick Armey’s interview with Reporting Religion. Just this exchange is nightmare-inducing.
Armey: We talk about the End Times, the day of Tribulation. Yes there seems to be, if you believe in Bible prophecy, there seems to be a great deal of the circumstances that was prophesised present at this time, and a lot of people believe that this is the time for that prophecy. They also believe that a free and a, what shall I say, well, Israel will be a consequence after those days of Tribulation, but that the whole world goes through a difficult time during those days of Tribulation.
Do you believe it?
Yes, I do.
Does the President of the United States believe it?
I believe he does.
Do you understand why that would worry people who are not Christian or Jewish living in the Middle East?
Well, I can understand why that would worry people, it worries us. This is a very difficult time in the world. I know of nobody who thinks of the days of Tribulation as a good thing. We believe it will happen because the Bible says it will happen, but it is not something that we prefer to see happen. We just expect that to happen, because the Bible says so.
Are you trying to make it happen?
No, I don’t…I’d be very upset with anybody who’s advocated that we ought to make it happen. These things are supposed to happen in God’s good time, and somebody that would try to create the circumstances purposely I think would be out of step with the teaching of the Bible.
And yet a lot of people, a lot of Americans, are raising money, the Americans are sending weapons to Israel. Isn’t that trying to make it happen?
No, I don’t think so. My own guess would be that the most active Americans that are supporting Israel materially by way of sending money or materials, war materials, are not American Christians but American Jews. (Bartholomew’s Notes)
So Bush and Armey are the most recent in a long line of people whipping up fear by pretending the End Times are nigh. (I mean, after two thousand years of “this will happen in our lifetime” anything gets old, people.) But the chilling thing is that they believe it so thoroughly–and yet, have denied any responsibility for it, implicitly blaming the whole debacle on American Jews. It’s a perfectly lovely ontological shifting-of-blame. We’re not responsible because we’re not sending money to Israel, it’s those blasted American Jews. But we’ll reap the benefits of the fear of the Tribulation politically and economically–and we’ll continue to keep Israel as a foot in the door of the Middle East. But it’s not our fault, yo. It’s God’s will. And those American Jews.
The only thing that would be better is blaming it on UFOs.
Bartholomew notes that the White House is receptive to all sorts of kooky End-Timers and Jenkins-LaHaye wannabes. Still, he finished up by quoting Kathleen Parker.
…What’s missing…is a basic understanding of reality: the fact that those who preach an End Times scenario also voted for Bush does not necessarily mean that they have Bush’s ear. When someone like Hagee sends a smoke signal to the White House about Israel and Armageddon, the attitude at Pennsylvania Avenue is, ‘’Oh yeah, John, we’re aware of that, thank you.'’ (Abilene Reporter)
Which is, once one thinks about it, scary enough and not quite comforting. It indicates that down at the very bottom of his soul, Bush and Co. might not think the world matters, since if their End Times come along the whole planet will be just a disposable Handi-Wipe for the wrath of Jaysus.
