Terror Able

Leave a comment

Saturday afternoons were made for B movies. After a hectic week, nothing soothes like grainy picture quality and poor dialogue. This weekend offered a chance to view The Terror. This 1963 Roger Corman film won its bad marks the honest way – by earning them. Nevertheless with Jack Nicholson playing against Boris Karloff and a plot so convoluted that I had to draw a chart to figure out what I’d just watched, the movie lived up to its grade. Throw in Francis Ford Coppola as an associate producer and it’s party time. Corman’s legendary cheapness and fondness for disproportionate claims of scares that never materialize only add to the charm. After watching the opening sequence one gets the distinct impression that Franklin J. Schaffner had watched this film before setting up the climatic scene of Planet of the Apes.

In keeping with a recent trend on this blog, the plot involved a witch. An old woman from Poland resettles in France to avenge her murdered son. The crone casts a spell transforming a bird into a beautiful young woman. The first words of the spells sent me fumbling for the “rewind” button. “Tetragrammaton, tetragrammaton,” the old woman intones to begin her spell. In a movie fraught with dialogue problems, this might be considered simply a choice of foreign-sounding, mysterious syllables to be uttered for an audience not expected to know that tetragrammaton is the title of the sacred four-letter name of Yahweh. By this point the plot was so convoluted that making God the agent behind a pagan curse seemed almost natural.

The analog with the Bible soon became clear. The Bible holds its sway over many because of its often beautiful rhetoric. Sparing the time to study what the rhetoric might have meant in its original context is an exercise few believers can afford to undertake. Our world has become so full of things that taking time to explore the implications of one’s religion must compete with ever increasing Internet options, thousands of channels of television, and plain, old-fashioned figuring out how to get along. Religion is a luxury item and, as experience tells us, it is best not to look too closely at luxuries – their flaws too readily appear upon detailed inspection. Allowing religion its exotic sounding mumbo-jumbo preserves its mystery and power. And if a witch says a theologically freighted word we can just chalk it up to entertainment. We are too busy to examine what our religions really say. Roger Corman may have unintentionally discovered a real terror in a movie that will keep no one awake at night.

Neverwhere Angel

6 Comments

Neil Gaiman is popular among my students. At least among those that still read for fun. A couple of years back one of them lent me a copy of American Gods, and the story stayed with me. Having lived for many years in Wisconsin, and having visited the House on the Rock, the novel was like a kaleidoscope of some of my more pleasant memories of the state. Neverwhere is quite different and yet equally compelling. Gaiman peoples his worlds with characters just on the edge of believability thrown in with protagonists who tend to be completely confused by what they’re experiencing. Instead of gods, in Neverwhere there is an angel with the unlikely name of Islington and we have the myth of Lucifer’s fall retold in fantasy format, rolled together with Alice in Wonderland and the myth of Theseus. For starters.

A person is a composite of what s/he reads and learns and accepts. The books we digest, each in a unique recipe fitting our individual tastes, create new compounds and concepts that explore our personal realities. Neverwhere takes the reader down a rat-hole instead of a rabbit-hole, but nevertheless follows a young girl on a journey of maturity. The hero’s quest is undertaken to actualize both protagonist and idol, and along the way the beast in the labyrinth must be encountered and slain. Theseus, the flawed hero, dominates a world where even saviors have peccadilloes.

The protagonist of Neverwhere does not believe in angels, despite his encounter with one. As Gaiman puts it: “it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name.” Belief generally involves not seeing. Once the object of belief is empirically confirmed, belief becomes knowledge. Today the belief in angels remains unabated. No empirical proof, nothing tangible confirms this belief beyond the anecdotal accounts of those who claim to have experienced them. Even the fanciful image of their androgynous good looks and unlikely wings remain untainted for all the centuries. Neverwhere raises an intelligent question about angels, but to discover what it is you’ll need to go down the rat-hole as well.

Evolving in America

2 Comments

Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. is one of the most sensible men in America right now. Witty, humble, and bright, he sees clearly and shoots straight. In an allegory entitled “A tale of a giant grown stupid” he illustrates the frustration many intelligent people feel in a country where thinking is viewed askance, and accepting empirical data is rife with suspicion. He begins his article by citing a statistic in Science that indicates some 60 percent of high school biology teachers in the United States inform their students that they don’t have to believe in evolution, they just have to know enough to get through the test. And evolution is not alone in the field of falsified information. Americans are regularly fed a high-fat, low-fiber diet of poor quality religion and told it is the only correct one.

While the remainder of the developed world has moved on to more important issues, we in America are still stuck in Fundamentalist kindergarten. The constant barrage of insipid theology from self-proclaimed doyens of the Scriptures assures the masses that the price of heaven is a healthy dose of creationism. Making matters worse, most biblical scholars choose not to engage these misguided spokespersons, choosing instead to believe they’ll eventually just go away. But why go away when you’re winning the fight?

Evolution is such an odd issue over which to argue. Neither serious biologists nor serious biblical scholars have any problem with it. Only a society increasingly under the power of a jacked-up, over-eager, offensive Christianity buys the feeble creationist rhetoric. And buys it in bulk. That is the American way. For many, society’s ills may be blamed on too much thinking. The Bible requires no thought, just the ability to see in black and white. And the Bible has proven a more powerful weapon than an H-bomb in the educational curriculum of our bright young minds. America itself is evolving. Unfortunately it is evolving into a nation satisfied with simplistic solutions to complex problems. And Bible scholars do nothing and wonder why everyone ignores them. Once upon a time there was a giant. Only it was not sleeping, it was already dead.

Witch World

1 Comment

Little did I realize when I posted an entry on witches two days ago that the news this week would itself become bewitched. Tuesday’s New Jersey Star Ledger contained a piece entitled “Catholics publish guide to witches and wizards.” Then the next day a former student posted a link to CBC News article headlined “Witches to face prison for false predictions.” Last week the Jehovah’s Witnesses left an issue of Awake! at my door that reveals “The Truth About the Occult.” Coincidence or black magic? Are we really in the twenty-first century? If only employment had the same staying power as superstition there would be no jobless rate to complain about!

The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned about all the interest Harry Potter is generating. Afraid that tweens and teens might tiptoe into the dark side, the Catholic Truth Society has produced a booklet called “Wicca and Witchcraft: Understanding the Dangers.” The booklet, written by a former Wiccan, is a strange answer to J. K. Rowling given that Potter and friends are not members of the Wiccan faith. They are simply fictional witches that haven’t been grounded by the constraints of the Enlightenment. Fantasy grants them their magical powers, not the Devil. In Romania, meanwhile, witches beset by income tax laws are now facing hard time if their predictions don’t pan out. New laws in the economically depressed nation would require witching permits to be obtained and receipts to be given to customers. This is not to sweep out paganism, but to gain some lucre from it. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are just concerned that occult practices, often seen as mere entertainment, might lead the younger generation down the road to sex and violence.

I was disabused of belief in witches before I failed out of kindergarten the first time. Teaching religion and mythology classes at two major universities, I see students from many different backgrounds trying to improve their minds. But once the sun goes down a backlash against the empirical method is nightly unleashed. I’m not sure whether to pick up my Kant and Descartes or my mugwort and rosemary. Religion breeds these darker manipulators of magic, a force against which many fear God has no recourse. So in our world of high tech gadgets and space stations and cyclotrons, we still have to worry about witches. Theirs is a metaphor yet to be fully appreciated.

Weird sisters or strange attractors?

iConfess; Indulge Me

5 Comments

I confess to being a Luddite at times. I was a late-onset cell-phone user and my last laptop (Macintosh, of course) survived ten years of hard, academic use before an accidental drop forced me into a newer model. Now I walk through student centers and see banners advertising “new apps” and wonder what an app is and whether it is something I should have already had old versions of. I’ve figured out that “app” is an apocopated form of application, and that it generally has something to do with handheld electronic devices. Now it seems that I’ve been out-teched by the Catholic Church. That great bastion of faith that agonized over Galileo for four centuries has now whizzed by guys like myself who cut our high-tech teeth on telephones that had rotary dials.

What is this new app? According to the New York Daily News, the app is called Confession. The program apparently lets you choose a commandment that you’ve violated and offers a list of sins to tick off. (I envy the priest who got that job!) A press of the button and your sins are forgiven. Sure is a lot easier than getting down on your knees and telling it all to a guy you barely know. This handy app even automatically tracks the time since your last confession, so you can give it to the holy father in nanoseconds. It only costs $1.99.

Technology has wreaked havoc on ecclesiastical tradition. Only the most severely shortsighted of churches denies the draw and retention of the electronic revolution. Problem is, the worldview that generated these religions simply doesn’t fit into a palm-sized box. The world of century one was full of demons and dragons, and all on a very flat earth. Confession, when it became a requirement, was a visceral outpouring of deep secrets and fears before a black-garbed authority figure who had the power to dole out Hail Marys like a theophanic thunderstorm. Now it can be done at the stoplight on the way to Starbucks. The last time the church had asked for payment for forgiveness Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Door. Today, I’m sure, it would be an electronic error report posted to a Wiki-board Domain, whatever that might be.

Forgive me, Father -- oh! I've got email!

Witches or Prophets?

8 Comments

Some things never change. My daughter’s English class has finished its Shakespeare unit and this year’s selection was MacBeth. I recall the play from my own high school days, perhaps one of the hidden attractors that eventually drew me to Scotland. Shakespeare’s use of Holinshed’s Chronicles, however, was news to me. Raphael Holinshed was a 16th century chronicler of world history and his work gave Shakespeare the outline of MacBeth. The passage from Holinshed that stood out, concerning the witches, reads: “But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken” (page 269 of volume 5, Scotland).

Being in the midst of courses on both prophecy and mythology, this passage ties a number of popular concepts together. Clearly the clairvoyance of magical females is simply accepted, and the easy association with classical characters such as the Fates or nymphs is evident. This is a world of mythical literalism. The weird sisters are able to predict the future with their necromancy. In a more nuanced view of prophecy, the concept actually incorporates effective speaking rather than future predicting. If a prophet speaks the words of Yahweh, in the Bible, then those words must of necessity transpire. When the stated events take place, it looks like prediction. Here Holinshed suggests the source of such knowledge for the women was more suspect.

Few of the biblical prophets are female. It is almost as if clandestine knowledge possessed by a woman marked her as a necromancer while a man might legitimately wield esoteric knowledge. This double standard no doubt applied in biblical times, and has lasted in various forms to the present day. The male establishment fears the knowledgeable female. Privilege takes many forms, all of them greedy. In my case I must gladly acknowledge that I would not have learned of Holinshed’s Chronicles if it weren’t for my daughter, and I am pleased for the opportunity to expand my esoteric knowledge.

Sacred Bowl

2 Comments

No winners in this game

I am not a sports fan. Nevertheless, in years when we can afford cable I’ve watched the Super Bowl with a perverse curiosity. Especially when I’ve lived near the locus of one of the competing teams. Having grown up just north of Pittsburgh and having spent fourteen years just south of Green Bay, this year would have been a toss-up for me anyway. I have friends from both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and it was interesting to watch the pre-game posturing, knowing that someone’s self esteem would be low this morning after. The Super Bowl, unlike Sunday religious meetings, is an event that never fails to fill the pews. Football reaches across denominational borders into personal pride. It is an odd thing to find regional self-worth in the antics of highly paid professional players from all over the country secured in a single location by money alone.

Sports are religious for many. There are acolytes, saints, bishops and high priests of the gaming community. And the congregation feels special when their team wins. An odd way to measure civic pride. When was the last time that a city bragged about the social care offered to its unfortunate? Would sponsors pay millions to see a city cleansed of unemployment, uneven health care, and corruption? Shining cities just aren’t set on the hills any more. What shines are lycra leggings and polycarbonate helmets. And funny commercials. For one day many Americans are gathered around the common altar of the television screen and many, many prayers are uttered.

In a world full of serious problems, playtime may be essential release. Nevertheless, when the game is over the problems remain. If only people could get as excited about solving a genuine crisis, and feel a sense of accomplishment by helping those on the opposite team. Instead religions divide up into teams and compete for stakes higher than even a Vince Lombardi, stakes that are sometimes taken too literally. No matter what the teams may be, the losers are always the same. They are the ones who suffer no matter which team walks away with the prize. Who won the Super Bowl? Did anybody really win?

Anvil Chorus

Leave a comment

Last night I watched Les Choristes, the 2004 film that received two Academy Award nominations. The story, set in a school for troubled boys in France, felt eerily familiar. Not only did it resurrect the ghosts of Dead Poets Society, it felt like a page – or a substantial chapter – from my own life. The movie was recommended to my wife by one of my colleagues at Nashotah House, an institution that the film strangely resembles. The more I pondered the implications of a small school run by an authoritarian headmaster full of students with malevolent tendencies, the more I realized how much my Nashotah House experience has set the tone for much of my life. While I was at Nashotah, P. D. James’ murder-mystery novel, Death in Holy Orders came out. Immediately students and faculty began to speculate that James must have known of or have visited the seminary. Similarly, the Harry Potter novels led many to compare Nashotah to a decidedly less magical Hogwarts. Some of the students even honored me as the putative master of Ravenclaw.

My personal experience with religious institutions has led me to conclude that they indulge themselves in doling out the abuse that only religious sanction permits. I had attended the Presbyterian-affiliated Grove City College where chapel attendance was mandatory. My experience at Boston University School of Theology convinced me that seminaries were not a good fit for most people, particularly those like myself. I left declaring I would teach anywhere but a seminary. There is no balm in Gilead.

Forever after, any small, religious school with dark secrets would be my Nashotah House. But the problem is much wider than that. Religions seek to control. Some manage to do so benevolently, but too often the human element eclipses the divine. It is a temptation, when in positions of religious leadership, to insist that one’s personal outlook is correct. We all believe that our views are right. Those who receive the holy unction of an institution have the means to make it so. It is not Nashotah House, but human nature. When religious leaders confuse divinity and authority, that is when trouble inevitably begins.

Son of Stone Flies

Leave a comment

One of my favorite comic books growing up was Turok, Son of Stone. We couldn’t afford as many comics as our friends, but among brothers we’d share our resources and get a fair variety of reading material. Turok belonged to my older brother. It felt so ancient and sophisticated, tinged with primal urgency as Turok and Andar attempted to make their way from the Lost Valley where dinosaurs daily threatened their existence. The comics had a gravitas that even The Valley of Gwangi lacked. In one installment, a scroll-keeper joined Turok and Andar and claimed his sacred scrolls would show them the way free of this accursed valley. Turok doubted this and was rebuffed with “Fools scoff at what they don’t understand!” as their erstwhile companion decisively re-rolled his scrolls for storage in a handy leather pouch.

One pilgrim's progress

That image comes back to me when I think of how ancient writers sometimes used ridicule to castigate competing religions. It even happens in the Bible. A friend recently inquired into the figure of Baalzebub, the famous “Lord of the flies.” The Bible attributes worship of such a deity to the Philistines, the popular pagan foil of the children of Israel. The Philistines, as we know today, were a sophisticated group of Indo-European settlers on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean who showed up about the same time as the early Israelites were emerging from their “Canaanite” milieu. Since they didn’t practice circumcision and didn’t worship Yahweh, the Philistines were shackled with the worship of ineffectual fish-and-insect deities. (Dagon would never regain his proper significance until he was rediscovered by H. P. Lovecraft many centuries later.)

A different pilgrim's progress

With the discovery of the Ugaritic tablets, the common usage of the term zbl (let’s say zebul, so it can be pronounced) was clarified. Zebul commonly designed “prince.” One of the recipients of this honored title was the deity formerly known as Baal. Baal-Zebul, “Prince-Lord,” the great thunderer Hadad. From the sketchy evidence of Philistine religious practice, it seems the new-comers did adopt some of the gods of their new land, and perhaps among them the lordly Baal. In order to disparage the cafeteria choice of their neighbors’ gods, a biblical writer renamed Baal-Zebul, Baal-Zebub, Lord of the Flies. There have been other explanations for the title, but the lessons learned from our youngest days often furnish our adult interpretative lenses. This explanation makes sense to me, and it reminds me of a bit of wisdom from Turok, Son of Stone.

Cyclotrons and Stardust

1 Comment

While recently watching an episode of Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole, a connection emerged between religion and science. In an episode entitled “What Are We Really Made of?” the viewer is taken deep into CERN, and shown the tunnel where the Large Hadron Collider slithers like a 17-mile metallic snake coiling back on itself. In a quest for what ultimately constitutes sub-atomic particles, the script informs us, when the Collider is up to full speed it will recreate conditions as they were nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Scientists will be witnesses to creation itself. Their book of Genesis, however, will not be as easy to read as the one we currently have.

From CERN's website; the apocalyptic LHC

CERN represents perhaps the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever built. And the Kepler Space Telescope, one of the far-sighted members of our arsenal of understanding, has discovered rocky planets like our own 2,000 light years away. When the light of their sun left, Christianity was just beginning. Since then, millions of earthlings have died because of religious fanaticism. The deeper we peer, the less unique we become. Life is surely out there, and maybe building cyclotrons larger than CERN. The more we populate the universe, the lonelier we feel.

Kepler's guide to planets, from NASA

Scientists are also closing in on the creation of life itself. Working with self-replicating collectively autocatalytic peptide sets, they are nearing the point where we might say life has emerged independently in a laboratory. Where might religion be then? Human initiative in discovering the secrets of nature has balanced a divine creator on a precarious precipice. If life may emerge from a large soup of non-living peptides, and if we push the moments from the Big Bang back to merest fractions of a second while waving to our neighbors light-years away, have we consigned God to the unemployment line? I feel in better company now, although the light may have taken eons to arrive this far.

Faith Stealing

Leave a comment

The sad story of the Schaible family of Philadelphia has reached a compromise that demonstrates just how awkwardly religion and politics sit together. Believers in faith healing, the Schaibles watched their two-year old son die for lack of medical attention. No limits exist on what people are capable of believing. Belief is at the root of most religions, so any nation that advocates freedom of religion has to open itself to the bizarre and wonderful possibilities that follow. Belief can’t be legislated. Too many revolutions throughout the world have amply demonstrated that. If a religion decides that the use of turn-signals is sinful (apparently a popular doctrinal stance here in New Jersey), it may bring conflicts with civil authorities and other citizens. When a religion declares professional medical treatment to be wrong, it is simply exercising its right to believe. When civil laws declare that parents must watch over the physical welfare of their children, clashes with such faith systems are inevitable. Believe what you will, physical death will not be cheated.

The shift of religion from praxis to belief gave believers a shove down a very slippery slope. Ancient religions tended to be matters of practice: gods demand sacrifice, so we grudgingly give them that. In actual fact, sacrifices supported the temple staff, often an arm of the government. It was, although probably not disingenuous, taxation in disguise. To be the member of a community, you have to pay the price. The system started to break down when religious individuals began to internalize this external structure. Instead of just offering the sacrifice, you have to do it with the right intentions. Those intentions evolve into beliefs. And beliefs are the ultimate free agents.

When a society defines religion as a belief system to which you may (or may not) subscribe, then myriad religious concepts emerge. Offering religious institutions tax-exempt status only encourages such behavior. If you tax them, on the other hand, the wealthier religions will have more political influence. No matter what pious lips may say, money will always trump pure belief. Meanwhile very real human suffering takes place, hostage to belief systems made up by somebody else. Religion has given us many lofty ideals; maybe one of those ideals is that we should limit its own infinite power.

Borrowed from some place on the Internet

Return of the Frost Giants

Leave a comment

We have ceased believing in the gods, but we still feel their wrath. The recent winter storms encompassing much of the nation demonstrate our arrogance in the face of the uncontrollable. It has long been my contention that the chief god is a personification of the weather. No matter how many HAARPs we put into place or how many satellites we hurl over our heads, the atmosphere remains a chaotic system. Global warming triggers unpredictable weather and extreme conditions. Yet people claim the moderate level of snow in the northeast is proof against the facts. I say the gods are laughing. How quickly we forget the ice ages.

As a child Norse mythology was among my favorite pagan religious systems. Obviously those responsible for naming our weekdays felt the same. The struggles and weaknesses of Odin, Thor, and Loki are far more honest than claims of pristine intention on the part of the majority of gods. The most captivating aspect was the eventual victory of the frost giants at a kind of Ragnarök. In Scotland, so close to the landfall of many a Viking, I took advantage of indulging in Viking sagas and myths. My understanding remains that of a curious layman, but I sense a deep wisdom at work here.

A recent email from a university dean on a particularly treacherous weather morning admonished all instructors that classroom presence was a commodity that paying students have a right to expect. Deans, with their six-figure salaries, are not accustomed to not getting their own way. How hard it is to admit that the gods have bested us! There are those who’ve not bothered to study global warming but nevertheless like to make pronouncements about it. They claim such weather disproves that the world is heating up, despite the global warming models that predict erratic and localized colder weather. We have released the frost giants. The more we mess with them the more dangerous they become. So, what is my solution to the dilemma of too much weather? Well, I’m morally obligated not to say until I receive my six-figure salary.

The little wolf laughed to see such sport

The Heart of Babylon

Leave a comment

One of life’s great ironies I’ve been pondering is how I earned a Ph.D. in a world-class university only to find myself unemployed, and apparently unemployable. Never one to rest on laurels – my own or anybody else’s – I nevertheless feel a sting whenever an alumni magazine arrives in my mailbox. All those successful, smiling faces depress me. Some of them have even studied religion and found a place in the field. When my advisors encouraged my aspirations in the academic world I wish they’d told me that it is really an old boys’ network of drinking partners and back-room favors. The university days I dream of ended long ago. I still look through the magazines to try to understand what went wrong.

FREDDY II is happy to meet you

So it was that the article on FREDDY in the Edinburgh alumni circular caught my attention. As the flummoxed president of Team 102, the local high school FIRST Robotics team, I was glad to be reminded of my alma mater’s hand in the field. FREDDY was developed in Edinburgh as the “first automated industrial robot to integrate perception and action” (according to my alumni rag). This meant that robots would be able to perform complex tasks in industry and earn lots of money the university would never see. So it is that we build our own nemeses. We look for progress and find the creature no longer requires the service of the creator. Those who gaze too deeply into the light lose their vision.

I am awaiting the automated university professor. I sing the soul electric (with apologies to Walt Whitman and Ray Bradbury). Should we not be honest about what we want? Universities seek entrepreneurs and sports stars: real learning takes place in the market and on the gridiron. Never mind the current economic meltdown; it’s all part of the classroom experience. Meanwhile the number of adjunct instructors nationally now outnumbers the full-time faculty of the university world. We have built a machine designed to deconstruct itself. As more and more colleagues join me on the sidelines we will always have something to read, as long as we share. I have enough alumni magazines to last any victim of academia a lifetime, and everyone in them seems destined to live happily ever after.