Asp and Receive

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Among the X-Files episodes that bothered me the most was “Signs and Wonders,” where Mulder and Scully visit the snake-handlers. The human fear of snakes is so deep that it reaches back beyond our split from chimpanzees—our curious cousins who also fear serpents. The reality show Snake Salvation, which I’ve only seen once, has lost its star due to, you guessed it, snake-bite. I don’t rejoice in the death of Rev. Jamie Coots; it is tragic when a person with such faith falls victim to it. Nobody castigated Steve Irwin for swimming with rays, however. It comes with the job. Snake-handling tends to be an off-shoot of an extreme literalism. Many of the rest of the Christian mainstream are content to know that the snake-handling passage (note the singular) in Mark is a disputed section of the Gospel. It is likely not original and carries weight only for those who accept the King James without question. It doesn’t command the handling of snakes; it is merely a suggestion.

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According to the story on USA Today, Rev. Coots refused medical treatment after his bite and soon died. Snake bites are not as fatal as they once were—with proper treatment they are often survivable. The faith, however, that declares asps risk-free comes with a caveat that doesn’t allow for medical intervention. If it’s your time, it’s your time. If it weren’t for reality television, probably none of us would even know. Snake-handlers do get bitten from time to time, just as surely as Baptists dry out once they get out of the water. It is the way of nature. Religion tends to view itself as capable of overcoming nature in various ways, and that seems to draw in the reality TV crews.

Not only Jamie Coots, but the famed evangelical Duck Dynasty took a hit recently. That’s because the stars are only people. When we put them on the magic box we either worship them or wait for them to fall. Authentic faith, I firmly believe, does not come through television. Shortly after the invention of the tube, evangelists found their way onto the airwaves. But reality television is necessarily about the slightly off-kilter, those who aren’t like the cookie-cutter executives in Manhattan or Los Angeles. Chances are they’ll be from the south and people will watch with incredulity. Isn’t that what belief is all about? Faith is a wonderful thing when it works. Like most non-empirical phenomena, however, it doesn’t always work like view on demand. Snakes evolved to bite, and people evolved to believe.

Not Narnia

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The snow fountain from a fast-moving snow-plow is a thing of beauty.  Unless you’re standing in the way.  It’s been that way this winter.  The sidewalk where I usually stand to wait for the bus is an arctic wasteland of waist-high snow piles shoved higher and higher by weary plow-drivers.  So I stand in the road, near a streetlamp in winter, but this is not Narnia.  I decided to try out New Jersey Transit’s highly anticipated “real time” bus locator—that way I know when to step out into the blowing wind to wait for the bus.  After I’d been sprayed by passing cars and the occasional snow-plow for 20 minutes, I became convinced that “real time” is just academic; it is the time that the bus would arrive, were the bus actually on time, if it ever left the garage.  Not that I blame the drivers—theirs is a thankless job that must lead to early retirement, or at least support the state mental hospitals.

Where's Mr. Tumnus?

Where’s Mr. Tumnus?

Now, I’m not the only one to be standing in the street, a hooker for capitalism, under my lamppost,  and some of the stops are completely snowed in.  When three passengers ganged up on the driver for nearly missing them because they weren’t at the stop because of all the snow, I began to feel a bit uncomfortable.  Springs can be wound too tightly, you know.  All of this is an issue because businesses don’t want to close for inclement weather.  During last week’s blizzard, I ended up taking the PATH train into New York, not knowing where it was going.  A young lady was fretting—she was going to be late for work.  An older African American gentleman comforted her.  “Don’t worry.  They don’t care if you come in late on a day like today.  They just want you to show up.”  They just want you to show up.  His words have haunted me. Businesses want you to show up because that reinforces the power of capitalism.  You don’t show and you don’t eat.  You lose healthcare.  Cobra is aptly named—you pay far more than unemployment’s pittance for monthly coverage.  Obamacare is about thirty years too late.

Every time I see the Mayor of New York justifying his decision to keep schools open when literally nine inches of well-predicted snow fall on the city—dressed in his trendy action-figure jacket, just like Christie after Hurricane Sandy—I wonder who is really being cared for.  The Mayor claims that of the over 1 million kids in the school system, a substantial proportion go to school so they can get their only hot meal of the day.  Is this the purpose of schools?  Is it not the humane duty of the largest city in the country to make sure fair opportunity is offered to those who wish to contribute?  Their parents, he adds, as an aside, have to go to work.  Why aren’t they being paid enough to feed their kids?  Oh, there is a blizzard coming, and it’s one of our own making.  As for me, it’s time to step back because I think I see another snow-plow coming.

Dead Certain

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One look frightens me above all others. I have spent probably too many hours watching horror movies late at night, and I’ve seen actors—talented and otherwise—projecting the look of fear. It is a temporary thrill, soon banished by a more mundane reality. The look that frightens me above all others, however, is that of certainty. Well I remember it planted, etched, chiseled on the face of a man who believed without question that his duty was to deprive me of a career. I have seen it on faces devoid of any human emotion, but with a surfeit of self-righteousness. I was reminded of this when my wife pointed me to an article in the New York Times blog entitled “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auschwitz,” by Simon Critchley. In this piece Critchley recounts watching Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” as a child. He focuses on the episode wherein Bronowski describes the danger of certainty, which often eclipses wonder when science alone is understood to be the basis of knowledge. And we have gone forty years further down that road.

Bronowski, in the clip provided by Critchley, describes how unwavering certainty led to the holocaust. It is a moving and poignant scene; indeed, the only one I remember from the episode as I watched it along with my classmates in the required humanities module at Grove City College. Bronowski, who had relatives murdered at Auschwitz, walks into the pond where their ashes were flushed, a man in a suit and good shoes, oblivious to the rational, and reaches down to touch whatever remains of the millions who died there. The scene has stayed in my head for over thirty years.

As an undergraduate I was certain. I knew the unflinching truths taught by my rock-solid faith. After four years as a religion major I had become more circumspect. Seminary found me still pretty well convinced, although much more temperately so. The doctorate, which required more intensive work than all the previous years combined, convinced me of how little I knew. I went to Nashotah House full of questions, and my goal was to bring my students, many of them very certain, to that human point of unknowing. We need to live with a question mark before we can be truly human. Curiosity is one of the more endearing traits people possess. Certainty disallows curiosity—questioning becomes the devil’s tool and honesty is the farthest thing from God that one might attain. In this era of easy certainty I often see a look on the faces of those in power that frightens me. I need to be reminded, along with Bronowski, that when shoes become more of a concern than human beings, we’ve already gone too far.

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Snow Job

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Snow does not get mentioned very often in the Psalms. Sometimes it surprises people unfamiliar with Israel that the Bible mentions snow at all. It does, and snow does fall once in a while on the higher elevations of the hills of the Levant. This year has been a memorable one for snow in the New York City area. Generally speaking, the coastal cities of the northeast are not known for their snow. This year, however, global warming is flexing its muscles as erratic weather brings storm after storm to the region. Interestingly, an internet rumor of a thirty-inch snowstorm (supposed to have come earlier this week) demonstrates just how gullible we’ve become. If it’s on the internet it must be true.

A story in the New Jersey Star-Ledger traces how the rumor began, starting with an experimental weather model by a credentialed meteorologist, which, in the keyboards of novices, grew to biblical proportions. Fact checking is something we just don’t bother with any more. The facile understanding of “global warming” as tropics for everyone shows that. The internet makes information—true or false—available at nearly the speed of light anywhere on the globe. Except where the power is out, perhaps due to weather. Not only does knowledge spread quickly, ignorance is just as fast. People weary of snow are perhaps more open to suggestion than others. We don’t hear our Minnesota or Wisconsin friends complaining (at least not too much).

There was a time when the standard sources of authority determined what we would believe. We didn’t accept just anybody’s word for it just because they had a Facebook account. For all the debunking that we hear about, it is easier to preach than to practice. Don’t get me wrong, sledging to work through piles of snow is not fun and the old circulation isn’t as vital as it used to be, so I have to add more layers than is practical to keep warm. But I’m not expecting palm trees and rain forests in Manhattan any time soon. Nor am I expecting a three-foot dump of snow. I know better than to trust what I read on the internet. After all, they even let me post things on it every day. Talk about your theoretical blizzard…

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Jesus, My Foot

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A story going around the internet features pictures of Paula Osuna’s bruised second toe. According to the YouTube story, Osuna fell down the stairs then had her boyfriend rub some sacred dirt from the shrine of El Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico over the injury. As part of the healing process, an icon of Jesus appeared on her injured toe. Now, New Mexico has a reputation for hiding some potent sites of paranormal import (at least 51 of them), but I had never heard of Chimayó before. It is apparently one of the most visited shrines in the country. Like Holy Hill, a local shrine I used to visit once in a while back in Wisconsin, the site itself is supposed to lead to healing. Healing sites sometimes hold their own irony.

When we lived in Wisconsin, my family used to be avid geocachers. We still go out once in a while to find the little boxes hidden in the woods, but in Wisconsin there were plenty of day trips to be had with minimal traffic (unlike our current setting). One day we drove to Holy Hill National Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians, a discalced Carmelite community built atop a glacial moraine that gives spectacular views of the southeastern corner of the state. Inside there were many abandoned crutches, as I knew from previous visits, but this time we were present to find a small ammo box filled with trinkets, hidden in the wooded grounds. As our GPS narrowed us in on the coordinates, I made the typical error of watching my device rather than my feet. I slipped on a pile of rocks and my left hand slid onto a broken beer bottle, slicing open my little finger. Fortunately our geocaching bag held a small first aid kit, but no amount of gauze and holding my hand over my head could stop the bleeding. After we’d logged our find, we drove to a local emergency room where I received about ten stitches. Although the injury took place on the grounds of a healing shrine, no Jesus appeared on my shredded pinkie. Nor did miraculous healing come because of the location.

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Pareidolia is a most fascinating evolutionary development. One of the first things imprinted on a newborn person is the image of a human face. In remarkably short time the infant can register the intent of various expressions on a human face and will soon learn to mirror them. That desire to find a friendly face never leaves us. We see faces everywhere. There are entire websites dedicated to pareidolia. We like to think there is a watchful parent ensuring that we won’t stumble and fall. Life, however, is full of accidents and injuries. Some of them are even the results of visiting healing shrines. Belief is what makes the difference. Ironically, even when Osuna’s bruise lost the shape of Jesus, she still believed in the healing power of the dirt. Her story has been covered on television and is easily found on the web. It is a fame born of faith. Miracles are always there for the taking.

Horse Sense

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In an article in last month’s Federalist, Tom Nichols lamented the death of expertise. Well, not exactly. Expertise is not so much dead as lost in the wash. In the days of internet reality, it is difficult not to feel an expert after half an hour on Wikipedia and with a glance at a few headlines. What concerns Nichols, however, is that those who have done the hard work of going through educational programs and heavy research to learn materials minutely and intimately, are no longer considered any more qualified to speak the truth about their subject than anyone else. The web is full of self-proclaimed experts, and even I was always a little alarmed at student papers that took online resources at face value (I warned students about us bloggers). We have truly entered democracy—intellectual democracy—and it is scarier than anyone might have imagined.

I’m not a snob. I grew up in a blue collar home and I generally trust blue collar people more than my more educated colleagues. In the working class, at least in my experience, if someone intends to harm you there is usually some warning shot fired across your bow. In the world of business and finance the unseen and surgical strike is carried out with far more finesse. Experts can make brutally efficient killers. It was only after years and thousands of dollars I had not yet earned that I could claim to be an expert on ancient religion. From the first day in the classroom (particularly at Nashotah House) I found myself face-to-face with self-acknowledged experts who put up with my instruction only by dint of ecclesiastical command. Being an expert meant I was to be mistrusted. I was the one who might lead astray. The internet was already out there, but it was only lurking in the background. In religion, expertise had been dead long before Jesus showed up on the scene.

The problem with religion is that nobody can have the whole truth. I used to show my students a photograph of the silhouette of a horse against a sunset/sunrise. You can’t tell which way the horse is facing—toward the camera or away. When I asked them which way the beast faced, some would say away, but most said, predictably, towards them. Then I would reveal that not one of us in the room knew the answer. Religion is like that. The photographer who stood near the horse knows, but the person behind the camera may as well be in heaven for all it helps us. I was an expert because I’d spent years learning arcane languages and looking at texts in as close to the original format as we had available. All I had learned is that no one knows the direction that horse is facing. Tom Nichols is right: we face a crisis of expertise. But for me the only source of truth may be found astride a noble steed.

Photo credit: Waugsberg, WikiCommons

Photo credit: Waugsberg, WikiCommons

Past Imperfect

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WiredPastReligion is inextricably tied to the past. So when I noticed an article in Wired entitled “The End of Then: Past? Present? Online, It All Runs Together,” by Paul Ford, I determined to read it once I could figure out whence that musky aroma arose. Maybe it is just my imagination, but the order of the major advertisements in Wired seems like a pre-packaged sexual scenario. Near the beginning of the magazine is an aromatic ad for Chanel for men. A few pages on is a more than full-page ad for Viagra. A few pages on is a short piece on Trojan lubricants, followed coyly by that rare cigarette ad. (I’m probably reading too much into this, but I’m a creature of the past.) Where was I? Oh yes, the End of Then. Ford’s point in the article is that the internet has made access to the past incredibly facile. Anyone with a portal into the web can find scads of information about the past, making past and present indistinguishable in a sense. My thoughts turn to the future.

The future seems to be the true unknown country. Not long ago I saw a story on the internet about how scientists conclude time travel to be impossible because we have not found messages from the future on the web. But we have found the past. Or have we? Ford mentions our fascination with Babylonian tablets, and suggests future historians will be equally intrigued by our continuous electronic chatter. But I turn back to that clay tablet. Those tablets, many of which were already in the deep past well before the Bible was scrawled, preserved what was important for a pre-industrial society: receipts, court records, and myths—the stories of the gods. And their command to build a round ark, at least according to Irving Finkel, whose book seems not to be available in the United States. Those myths, adapted to biblical proportions, have long been in the public domain, and yet, are they really in any sense present? Try giving students a quiz and find out.

We have a past that will always remain inaccessible. The present, for better or worse, is all we’ll ever have. Religion, however, is tied to the past. True claims are based on historical events, some less believable than others, that are permanently out of reach. We can watch how religions play out in the present and decide later. In the future. But the past haunts us forever. I, for one, had thought that cigarettes were on their way to extinction. But I need to put this edition of Wired down because that cologne ad is making me dizzy. And it leaves me wondering about future prospects and what religion has to do with any of it.

‘S No Day in New York

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“You’re waiting for a train. A train that’ll take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you. But you can’t know for sure.” Yet you’ve been standing on the windy platform in Newark for twenty minutes and they’ve announced the next train to New York will be an hour late.  A man you don’t know says the PATH train will take you to New York, but New York is a big city, and you only go there to work.  It must be a snow day.  Well, almost.  I work for a company that only closes when New York City Public Schools close for weather.  Today, kids, school’s open; but all is not lost—field trips are cancelled.  And so, the constellation of companies who take their cue from NYPS truck (sometimes literally) their New Jersey-based employees across or under the river, into a city where slush half a foot deep awaits them on every street corner, and that doesn’t slow those muck-flinging cabs down at all. 

With the weather we’ve been experiencing this year, I hear a lot of people saying that Mother Nature is still in charge.  Allow me to differ.  You see, I’ve been researching the weather and the Bible for years now and I’ve come to a slightly different conclusion.  In the Psalms, anyway, it is clear that God is in charge of the weather.  Given that New York is such a sinful place, I guess none of us should be surprised.  Still, I’m not sure the Bible has got this one quite right either.  After all, I’ve walked through ice-crusted snow up to my knees for a good part of my walk to the station, and I have my coat open so the cold breeze will cool me down a little bit before I have to walk into work with crazy hair and a scowl frozen on my face.  Didn’t some great theologian once say “sin boldly?”  No, it is not Mother Nature in charge.  It is not even the deity.  It is something far more powerful than God—money.  Can’t lose a red cent when there are human resources to be utilized.

I’ve never been on a Port Authority Trans-Hudson train before, and I’m not sure where this one stops.  I heard someone say 33rd Street, and that sounds encouraging, so when the train stops I follow him across the platform.  Sheep, as any shepherd knows, will follow a random person who looks confident enough.  I emerge from the dark underground, not quite sure where I am, and I just can’t find a Psalm in my heart at the moment, unless it’s an imprecatory one.  I stepped out of my front door into freezing rain three hours ago.  My trousers are wet to the knees, and I’m a little sick from facing the wrong way on the PATH train for a lengthy ride.  The cars, I notice, are shaped like Krell.  Yes, this is a forbidden planet and I don’t know where I might end up.  Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, but I think you got it wrong.  Field trips are not cancelled after all.  And I’m not sure I’m even worshipping the right god.

Deceptively peaceful

Deceptively peaceful

Ham on Nye

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Bill Nye, the Science Guy, comprised a good part of my thirties. My daughter was young and we were living in a religious environment sometimes openly hostile to science. Nye is funny and fastidious, and completely devoted to the empirical worldview. His videos (yes, it was that long ago) were fairly inexpensive in VHS format, and even as parents we learned a thing or two. When Bill Nye came to the New Jersey Green initiative conference (I don’t recall what it was called) we were in the audience to see him live. It was rather like an epiphany. Despite his wit and charm, many of his colleagues are now advising him that he’s made a wrong turn. According to NBC, he is set to debate Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis in a no-win debate, that of creation versus evolution. Some of the top lights of science have been bloodied by lower profile conflicts because—and this is the crucial point—religion and science do not agree on basic ground rules. It’s a schoolyard scrap, and those who try to adhere to laws of reason are often ill equipped.

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The debate isn’t really over the question of how we got here. The real prize is power. Creationists cannot win on purely scientific grounds; anyone who’s tried to read Henry Morris’s books knows that you can’t get very far without a curious hand raking your head. The science is flawed but the conviction is solid. Truth, the creationists know, is not open for debate. His scientific colleagues fear for the intrepid science guy, noting that this is just another instance to give creationism faux credibility in what is really a public relations scam. Ham’s creationist museum has dinosaurs on the ark, which, in an unrelated story on NBC, is drawing righteous ire from the self-same Ham. (I’ve posted on the round ark before, and likely will again.)

If I understand the first article correctly, the debate will be taking place tonight. If I understand science at all, the world will continue to evolve tomorrow. Creationism has a curious relationship to the world, viewing it through a Bible-shaped lens. A close look at the Bible reveals that it does not support the creationist viewpoint in any literal way. Too many dragons and contradictions make implausible any but a heavily harmonized version of Genesis 1. Biblical scholars, however, are among the worst of sinners, according to the creationist camp. We might be the very ones exposing their children to Bill Nye and other questionable truths such as television and electricity that don’t even exist in the Bible. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Bill Nye, but then, superstition has nothing to do with it.

Porcine Prognostication

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Punxsutawney Phil phled his shadow this morning, leaving many despairing another six weeks of winter, which meteorology seems to dictate anyway. I used to tell my students that Phil is a most peculiar prophet, in that he is, presumably, neither Christian nor Jew, but rather of the rodent religion (whatever that may be). People pretend the little guy has powers beyond those of the average mammal when it comes to predicting vast, chaotic systems. If a groundhog flaps his eyelids in Pennsylvania, prepare for plows and shovels and more thermal underwear. Playing into this annual phenomenon is the provocative persistence of the idea that prophecy is prediction. As much as scholars attempt to expunge the idea that foretelling wasn’t what prophets were ever really about, the populace likely wouldn’t have paid them any attention, had the possibility not presented itself that these preachers knew something the rest of people didn’t.

Prophecy is a strange phenomenon. We claim that we would like to know the future, but I’m not sure that we really would. Knowing that we’ve set ourselves on many tracks that inevitably lead to tears, do we really want to know? After taking my daughter back to college, we sat in a fast-food place to grab a bite on the way home. It had been snowing again, as it will do in the winter, and the television in the corner was blaring on about another apocalyptic band of snow. A bearded and burly Pennsylvanian at the next table turned to me, attracted, I supposed by my own facial hair, and said, “What about this global warming?” I nodded politely, not being very burly myself, but I thought of the fact that global warming does mean more severe winters in some places and warmer conditions in others. It is marked, scientists predict, by erratic weather, not a constant sauna in those regions accustomed to snow.

Although a Pennsylvanian by birth, I have noticed that my ancestral New Jersey does not receive much snow. Until this year. We’ve had the white stuff on the ground for over two weeks in a row. Yes, it snows in winter, but not usually here. I shiver and think of global warming. It is a chilling thought. Punxsutawney Phil may live far enough inland not to have to worry about learning to swim, but the same can’t be said of the inhabitants of most of the major cities of this country. We know it is coming, but we turn a blind eye. Progress in the name of unbridled big business interests brighten a future otherwise a bit more gloomy than we might prefer. Phil ducks back into his burrow and the rest of us clutch our coats a little tighter around us. Prophecy is a mixed blessing indeed. We already know the outcome before the groundhog awakes.

An agnostic groundhog ponders the inevitable (photo credit: I. EIC)

An agnostic groundhog ponders the inevitable (photo credit: I. EIC)

Weather or Not

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The internet’s nothing if not self-referential. A post by Fred Clark over on Patheos, pointed out to me by my brother-in-law, has received 235 comments (at the time of this writing) for a topic I’ve addressed repeatedly, to no avail. I know my place. In any case, the topic which brought such furor was that severe weather is caused by divine displeasure, something I’ve addressed a time or two. In fact, I’ve written a book about it. Never mind, some of us revel in obscurity. Fred is writing about the remarks of former Tory David Silvester that the UK has been suffering unusually severe weather because of homosexual marriage. That’s really old news to those of us over here in the colonies; Pat Robertson told us as much after Katrina (although he didn’t limit the sins to homosexuality). Sex tends to stir up storms of its own, regardless of divine voyeurism, while we ignore the obvious culprit—global warming. (Culprit of unusually severe weather, not of sex.)

Global warming, as a recent conversation with a very smart undergraduate confirmed, is a poor name choice. Those of us on the northeastern coastal corridor have been shivering a lot this winter, and snow has remained on the sidewalks of Manhattan for more than a single day at a time. You call this global warming? Yes. The science behind climatology tells us that warming the overall temperatures of the globe will result in erratic weather, including uncharacteristically cold and freezing in some locations, dampness in others, while yet others experience, yes, warming. We know it is real, we know it is happening. We just don’t know what to call it. Some choose to call it God’s wrath. Others choose to name it more properly human shortsightedness. After we hunted the last mammoth down, we decided to start building bigger fires to warm the ice age up a bit. Those fires have been burning ever since.

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My book on the weather, by the way, suggests that divine control of the elements is an essential part of the biblical mindset. To ancient folk this was a no-brainer. God is in (his) heaven and messing with the HVAC system is one of the ways (he) passes the time. Down here we may shiver, become parched, or get washed away. It’s all a matter of the divine thermostat. As Fred Clark points out, the divine temperament sets the temperature based on human activity. Sin leads to unusual weather. Unwittingly, however, David Silvester may have gotten it right. There is a sin involved, and that sin is called global warming. No deity need be involved. We have shown that humans are quite capable of messing with the thermostat on our own. And the day I get 235 comments on anything it will be a very cold day in a place famed for its heat.

A Girl Named Cthulhu

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It was only a 25-word blurb in last week’s Time magazine. A Canadian couple decided to let the internet community name their daughter. As of the time of writing the third most popular suggestion was Cthulhu. WWLD? The internet has brought Lovecraft’s sleeping deity to life. Ironically this evil, belligerent, and fearsome god tends to have more fans than some of the more loving, cuddling varieties of deity around which western culture arose. Children are a parent’s ultimate investment (or should be) and the name we bestow will influence their view of life. I still recall the scandal of when I first showed my Mom a baseball card where the player was named Jesus (Spanish pronunciation, please!). I innocently asked if that was allowed since we’d been taught that although other biblical figures were fair game, the name of God was a retired number. There was only one Jesus, and this baseball card a monument to sinful arrogance.

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Of course, we lacked the biblical training to know that Jesus is only the Greek form of Joshua, a name of fair game to any young lad. Naming after a deity was otherwise verboten. Of course, that has all changed now. Names are up for grabs, and it is getting harder to find unique ones. H. P. Lovecraft, who died in relative obscurity, could find publication only in pulp fiction magazines—the lowbrow literature of his day. The divine fruit of his fertile imagination has now taken on the dimensions of true divinity. How many potential names are out there on the internet? Lovecraft alone gave us many gods. All the Dianas, Thors, Carmans and Dylans out there are in good company. Why not name a child after a god?

Names do effect a child’s view of life. Growing up in a biblically literate family, I often thought of the Stephen of the New Testament. The first Christian martyr, he died with a vision of heaven in his eyes, earning the meaning of his name, “crowned.” I aspired to live a selfless life, in as far as such a thing was possible in the twentieth century. It was my name—it was my destiny. There are no other “Steves” in my family, and when I was old enough to comprehend that many children bear family names, I asked my Mom whence mine had come. It turns out that I was named not after a family member or even a saint, but after a cartoon character. Touché, Cthulhu! Long may those of us with unorthodox namesakes stick together. The world is our myth.

The Devil Made

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Some things you just don’t mess with. Just in case. For a variety of reasons, not least of which is lack of biblical support, many Christians no longer believe in Satan, or “the Devil.” As I written before, the Hebrew Bible has no such diabolical character and he seems to have been devised from an old Zoroastrian dualistic belief system when he finally does appear. In other words, Satan is not among the core beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nevertheless, according to an Associated Press story the Satanic Temple is petitioning to have a statue of Satan placed on the capitol grounds in Oklahoma City. The action was prompted by the placing of a Ten Commandments monument in this public space, and, invoking the freedom of religion clause, the Satanic Temple has decided to play tit for tat. Either religion is free, or it’s not.

Backer_Judgment_(detail)Although the Satanic Temple claims to be sincere in its beliefs, the group’s website indicates that it understands religious belief in a metaphorical way, and that it wishes to parse superstition from religion. This envisions revising Satan as an “icon for the selfless revolt against tyranny,” according to the AP story. The commissioned monument includes a Baphomet-style Satan (goat head and beard, wings and pentagram—you get the picture), that features—sure to raise the ire of Oklahomo sapiens—children gathered around the dark lord. It will double as a seat where individuals may sit on Satan’s lap, although I’m not sure what they might be asking for. Various representatives of the Sooner State say they’re all for religious freedom, but Satan just has no place in the conservative breadbasket of the nation.

Provocation occurs on both sides in this trial of wills. Justice can be realized without Moses’ top ten on every courthouse lawn. The Code of Hammurabi demonstrates that. People are capable of enacting justice without God, or the Devil, telling them to do it. The triumphalism of religion is the heart of the issue. In a world daily aware of those outside the neighborhood, finding that other religions exist and thrive is an affront to the “one true faith,” whatever it may be. It may be that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have no problems with the ten commandments. Other religions might. Leading with having “no other gods before me” starts the conversation off on an awkward tone. The solution may be as simple as amending the commandments to add just one more. If we can see our way to doing that I have one that I’d like to propose: “thou shalt not let thy religion cause childish behavior.”

Shipwrecked

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Childhood dies in pieces. There is nothing a young boy desires more than a father to show him how to negotiate life. As Mick Jagger eloquently declared, however, many of us know “you can’t always get what you want.” I did not get to know my father growing up, and so I did what any American did in the 1960s—I looked to television for solutions. Children can be terribly naive, but I had a shortlist of ideal candidates in my head. The one who unwittingly set the direction for my life was shipwrecked on a not-so-grim deserted island. Everyone loved Gilligan because he made them laugh, but the Professor, he seemed the ideal father: rational, mostly kind, and generally unflappable. My earliest career ambition, before I decided that janitor was my true calling, was to be a scientist. This was largely because of the Professor. Religion eventually interfered in my plans, but even as I attended seminary, and then graduate school, the Professor never left me. He had been a kind of father figure to me. I’m sure going to miss Russell Johnson.

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I still feel a stab of delight when, watching old Twilight Zone episodes, “the Professor” appears. When I see Johnson in It Came From Outer Space and This Island Earth, it’s a particular island I’m thinking about. An island where, if religion came up, it was treated lightheartedly but even science, for all its clear thinking, never managed to help get the castaways rescued. This island represented my childhood. Innocent, sincere, and strangely funny. Little did I realize at the time that the science Roy Hinkley advocated would become such a fierce enemy to the religious milieu from whose baptismal waters I’d never fully emerge. It sure would’ve helped to have had a father to sort all this out.

Back before Borders (a kind of ersatz father) closed,Tina Louise came to our local to promote her new children’s book. I couldn’t believe I was standing twenty feet from a childhood icon—a movie star, nonetheless. How shocked I was to see her in The Stepford Wives where she talked about sex—that was always in the deep, deep background on the island. Pagan gods exerted real power on Gilligan’s island. As I grew up, religion held me in its powerful grip. With the Professor and the Bible in my head, I went off to become logical, intellectual, cynical. I taught Bible, students called me professor. Then my career was shipwrecked. Is it any wonder that I had that nightmare about being lost at Nashotah House again last night? Sometimes a boy just needs a father to show him the way. Thank you, Professor, for stepping in. You influenced one life in a way that I’m sure you never expected.

Shadowy Futures

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A thoughtful, if prescient commentary by Andy Crouch in this week’s Time magazine takes us into the uncanny valley. Despite the boastful protestations of the materialists, most people are not very brave at facing death. With the passing of Ariel Sharon and the sad story of Jahi McMath, the question of keeping the practically dead practically alive takes on a particular poignancy. It’s not that the dying are the ones protesting, but it is the living. We rage against the dying of the light, and, as Crouch notes, it is often the most religious that protest the loudest. Religion, ironically, is the framework that many use to cope with the ultimate inevitability. Death is scary. That’s why so many pray and others watch so many horror movies. We have trouble finding uncannier valleys than that of Crouch’s shadow of death.

Religion, in addition to putatively renouncing the fear of death, has often introduced the denial of life’s goods along the way. What ascetic would not have truly welcomed death? A starving belly day after day and crushing loneliness in the most barren environments earth has to offer should change one’s perspective. Not all of us have such heroics, however, hardwired into us. We may see the illogic of a religion that states death is release into a better world while creating even greater terrors of the other side of that veil. We dance between the horns of a dilemma where neither side will really sustain our weight. As Crouch notes, what we truly want is the assurance that somebody loves us at the end.

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The materialist simply falls asleep for one last time. The faithful prepare to pass through a portal through which nobody has reliably come the other way. It is the ultimate test of faith. In the nineteenth century, when the death of a loved one at home was a common occurrence, an acceptance, perhaps morbid, pervaded the era. Who can think of Victorians without pondering the grave? Technology has cheated death both in small ways and in large. We are grateful for the salvation from small issues that once meant almost certain premature death, but we are scratching at the biggest door of all—immortality—begging to be let in. Will that head in a jar really be me? I have an uncanny feeling about that. Religion, for all its problems, should help us through this valley, if we really believe.