Dog Gone!

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Religion is a strange attractor. Maybe not in the exact same sense as in chaos theory, but in reality it brings together mental states so bizarre that science fiction and fantasy writers have a buyer’s choice. Yesterday the New York Daily News reported on a South Carolina woman who hanged and burned a one-year old pit-bull puppy. Why? The bitch had bitten the woman’s Bible. Citing the animal as a “Devil dog,” the southern woman became a vigilante for the Lord. Now she’s being tried on charges of animal cruelty. This story touched me in a number of ways.

With family roots in South Carolina, I can conjure up images of this happening. Having known many, many Fundamentalists, it seems even more plausible. Given the constant barrage of contrary messages descrying the presence of evil in the world, all the sudden any mutt can become Mephistopheles. Begging off the Baskervilles, the demonic hound has a long pedigree in mythical imagination. It is well known that the Bible cites dogs as unclean animals, but it is their charnel character that leads to the development of the full-blooded hellhound. Prior to the Hebrew Bible, in ancient Ugarit dogs had an infernal connection. It isn’t seen clearly, but the association is there. Snatches of the underworldly dog appear long before Cerberus, and last well nigh into the twenty-first century.

Hel and his hound

Unfortunately for the deceased canine, it is a myth. Hellhounds still abound in popular media, everywhere from The Omen to O Brother, Where Art Thou? Dogs, however, were among humanity’s earliest partners in the survival game. From about as early as I can remember, we always had dogs in the house, and nary a demonic encounter. We never put them on trial, even when house-training was in progress and an accident occurred.

The news story reminded me of an episode of Dragnet I saw as a child. A woman was arrested for murder, and Sergeant Friday, in his unflappable voice, told his partner it was because the victim had shot one of her books. In the final fade out, after Bill Gannon asked what book it had been, Friday holds up a Bible with a bullet-hole through it. I was a little confused. Was the woman guilty or was someone shooting a Bible just cause? The episode did not answer the moral dilemma. I can’t even remember the outcome. But in 2011 things haven’t much changed. If he goes to South Carolina McGruff better watch what he takes a bite out of, or it could be lynching time again.

Beside Metallic Waters

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My brother recently pointed out the story of Rev. John Van Sloten, a Canadian pastor who has written a book about how he’s come to see the gospel in the songs of Metallica. Yes, Metallica. Even the members of the 1980’s hard rock band found the association a little surprising. It all came about, it seems, through an open mind. The story is narrated in basic form on the Gibson guitar website. Young parishioners at Van Sloten’s church suggested he should listen to Metallica. Perhaps aware of the principally negative conservative Christian reaction to rock in general and hard rock in particular, the pastor says he ignored the advice. Then the minister was presented with Metallica tickets. A divine mix was in the works.

At the concert the pastor had a revelation: the issues wailed against by the band resonate well with the concerns of Christianity. In fact, some of the band’s concerns sound downright prophetic. The concept of prophecy today often revolves around a prediction of future events (à la Harry Potter). Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible far more often concerns social justice, speaking out against the oppressor. Metal bands, from their inception, were vehicles for protest. Disillusionment against a system that perpetuates unfairness either at a governmental or a cosmic level. When I sat down to listen to the lyrics of Black Sabbath for the first time, I was surprised how biblical many of them were (don’t tell Ozzy).

Many religious folks prejudge heavy metal as “satanic” and evil without even listening to it. I have always been struck by how much these groups frequently draw on bleak biblical images. Today we treat biblical characters as paragons of emulation. The Bible does many of its characters no such disservice. Prophets are to be heard, not emulated. We think of Isaiahs or Jeremiahs as pleasant supper guests who happen to have a divine word inside. In the Bible their actions often lead to recriminations, but their uncomfortable message is sound. I grew up in a tradition that discouraged heavy metal, as if something in the music were inherently evil. I applaud Rev. Van Sloten for approaching one of the formative bands of the genre with an open mind. Truth may be found in some very unlikely places.

New Age Present

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Okay, so I admit I’m curious. As my “six month” subscription to TAPS Paramagazine continues into its second year, itself somewhat paranormal, I get the feeling that I’m witnessing the birth of a new religion. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that new religions are hardly rare, but this one seems an accidental entry into the field. Now ghosts and religion are natural enough as corollaries. Both involve afterlife concerns and the unknown. Having watched TAPS Paramagazine feature fairies, tarot cards, and zombies, however, I wonder if the distinctions are becoming blurred. In this latest issue (January/February) many of the articles make explicit mention of God. God and ghost in the same breath, with the exception of a particularly holy spirit, is an odd combination, given the biblical injunction against mediums.

Spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was descried by famous debunkers such as Harry Houdini and accepted by famous intellectuals like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is that liminal area that stays out of the reach of traditional Christianity and Judaism, but strays into the afterlife-prepared psyche. If the dead are out there, they should be able to communicate. Right? And with God’s full approval, so it seems. This latest issue alone suggests that UFOs may be demonic, that clergy may be legitimately interested in ghosts, God may speak through dead children, and that one may become addicted to paranormal investigation. Sounds like a recipe for a New Age mythology. Throwing in light-hearted contributions about the Walking Dead, and suddenly zombies become real as well. Oh, and skunks have a special wisdom.

Traditional Christianity cautions against all of these things (except skunks). When it comes to the supernatural, it claims, there is only one super, supernatural being. The rest are charlatans and wannabes. The Bible certainly does not encourage consorting with ghosts, and yet, in this New Age milieu it is possible to find any remotely spiritual entity touted as proof of reality beyond reality. As Bader, Mencken, and Bader observe in Paranormal America, citizens of this country are inclined to believe. Where does belief lead when there is no pole-star to guide the ship? I sense that we may be steering into uncharted waters. Anyone want to volunteer to be captain? Religions always get to make up their own rules, so feel free to devise your own compass.

Black and White Zombies

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One of the sweetest privileges of a school-year weekend is the Saturday afternoon movie. The advent of relatively cheap, boxed sets of old films has opened the realm of many forgotten classics for me. My wife recently purchased one of those 50-movie boxes of classic horror films for me, and I’ve been making my way through it weekend-by-weekend, and occasionally there is a gem among the tailings. Yesterday I saw White Zombie for the first time. Back in the days when Bela Lugosi claimed a faithful following after his trend-setting interpretation of Dracula, he played a voodoo doctor with the power over zombies in this widely panned movie. In these days of the Walking Dead, it may be hard to appreciate that White Zombie was the first full-length film about our undead friends.

With the exception of the always professional Lugosi, the acting in the film received a well-deserved trouncing. Interestingly, the “van Helsing” of the drama, the doctor who overcame the monster, was a missionary. White Zombie is authentically set in Haiti, and it is never made clear whether the undead are really deceased or simply mindless. But the goofy, pipe-smoking missionary is the one who defeats evil at the end of the day. As noted elsewhere on this blog, monsters frequently emerge from the dark realms of religion, and the zombie especially so. Today, however, the zombie is all the scarier for being secular, unaffected by God or human deterrent. Originally it was a case of voodoo versus Christianity.

In what is perhaps an unintentional irony, the character who comes across the most sympathetically in the film, apart from the fetchingly pouting Madge Bellamy, is Murder Legendre (Lugosi). The missionary wins out by dim-witted happenstance, while the character responsible for the actual death of the zombie master is a partially aware zombie fighting against his fate. It may be assigning far too much credit to assert that the film had intentional social commentary, but White Zombie has had an often unrecognized impact on what has today become the symbol of corporate America: the once humble zombie.

A typical zombie

Ghost in the Ark

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Jonathan Carroll’s The Ghost in Love demonstrates what might happen if all the rules were broken. Slipstream writing is new to me, being a conventional nineteenth-century American writer fan. Nevertheless, I regularly try to stretch my imagination wider than it has previously gone to see how others view the world. The Ghost in Love was quite an adventure into multiple realities. As with all fiction I mention on this blog, however, there is a profound religious dimension to the work. Besides the eponymous ghost of the title, the Angel of Death also makes an appearance in the narrative. Among his early lines is the statement that black-and-white movies are like prayer because it is necessary to work harder to overcome disbelief. This is just before the Angel of Death is stabbed to death.

In an ongoing theme of my own, however, the truly striking element was the use of Noah’s flood yet again. In the fiction I’ve been somewhat randomly reading, the flood story continues to appear at unexpected junctures, underscoring its depth in the human psyche. In this case, a talking dog has to solicit support from other animals to assist the protagonist in fighting off death. Invoking what Carroll terms UPTOC, “universal peace to overcome chaos,” Pilot the dog engages the hidden communication skills of animals that had been first instituted at the flood to get everyone aboard the same ark. In this sly rhetorical use of the theme, Carroll throws light on an aspect of the flood story that might otherwise remain unilluminated: it is a metaphor for universal peace.

Reading the news headlines can be a trying exercise. I fully realize that bad news sells better than good and that what we read in the papers is, like most human activity, a business enterprise. Nevertheless, the truth remains that humanity’s greatest enemy is itself. Peace has never been universal, not at least since Sargon of Akkad began toying with the idea of empire. Great catastrophes cost countless lives, but in those dark moments are glimpses of light: humanity at its most human, caring for others regardless of outlook or creed. Maybe that’s why the flood story recurs so frequently in literature. We’re not all in the same boat, but we are all trapped outside the one vessel that might save us. As we fight against the overwhelming waves, gasping our last breaths, we realize that we all have a lot more in common than we might have ever supposed.

Winter’s Music

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An editorial in this morning’s paper once again raised the question of whether we need a politically correct version of Huckleberry Finn or not. The story led me to recall the origins of rock-and-roll – not that Mark Twain was a rocker, but because I’d recently viewed the first installment of Time-Life’s History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Both Huckleberry Finn and rock-and-roll owe a vast debt of gratitude to African-American culture, and both bear the scars of prejudice. An unfortunate aspect of life is that few people willingly subject themselves to hard labor when they realize an easier lifestyle is available (thus, Brave New World). This has been true since civilization began. With the advent of the Sumerians we begin to read about the slavery of war-captives. Even today, dressed up in fancy clothes, slavery of various degrees continues to persist. The reprehensible treatment especially of Africans for slavery is a heritage that will not easily be overcome. And yet American culture owes much to its African components.

While already in the back of my head, this was once again brought to the front by the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Explodes” episode of the Time-Life series. Now, being a musically deficient individual, I claim nothing particularly insightful here – my wife and daughter are the musically accomplished ones in this household – rock clearly has its roots in the blues and gospel. In the documentary Little Richard explains how rock was often simply music of the black churches transposed to secular clubs. Xenophobic “white” culture of the 1950s felt threatened by this catchy music and sought to disarm it. Calling it “race music” producers had the more popular songs covered by white singers such as Pat Boone. (His cover of “Tutti-Frutti” always makes me smirk.) The real element at work here was the prejudice against the other.

As a youth I recall literally throwing my rock albums in the trash because of a Fundamentalist tract that declared in no uncertain terms that it was the “Devil’s music.” I’d bought those albums with my own hard-earned money, but sacrificed them to save my soul. Little did I know that “Devil” was a code word for “African” in this fundie literature. Otherwise, why was it alright when Pat Boone (of The Cross and the Switchblade fame) sang the same song? Mistrust runs very deeply in monotheistic religions. Even today many branches of Christianity inveigh against the horrors of rock without acknowledging that the music has its roots in the cry for liberation on the part of slaves, as expressed in Christian worship. Civilization will always insist on retaining its slaves. At the very least modern western culture should say “thank you” for the unrequited gift of the musical voice of the twentieth century.

Epiphany Perception

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Our local parks and recreation department has a Christmas tree recycling program. While trees are biodegradable, it always seems crass to me to take such a symbol of joy, hope, and anticipation and have it just thrown in the landfill. The local trees are recycled into mulch, and those who own their homes are free to help themselves to the giant pile of finely chipped pine that smells like the north woods just minutes from Manhattan. The strange part is transporting a dried, outdated tree through town to the drop-off point. Pedestrians and other drivers stare at a car with a tree strapped to the top a few weeks too late for anyone’s holiday. They may find it just a little disorienting: why would someone be taking a dead tree out for a drive? It is not how we’re accustomed to seeing it done.

Perceptions, even if entirely artificial, see us through each day. Some continue to argue that perceptions are indeed reality. When we see something mildly disconcerting, we might ask what is happening. A familiar character in an unfamiliar costume is a trivial sort of dissonance, but it is enough to raise perception to a conscious level. We all know the accepted color scheme, so what (other than bad photoshopping) is going on when the Enterprise crew swaps shirts?

The issue is, however, a serious one. Many of the troubles we experience in society are based on fictitious certitudes. It is a strange human trait that me may not know why we believe something, but of that belief we are dead certain. From an absolute perspective, we have no way to determine which way space is oriented. If we see a globe facing “the wrong way” the dissonance drives us to correct that misperception. North, south, east, and west are relative terms. They are models that we overlay on our universe. Which way that universe actually tilts is anybody’s guess. Freshly hewn pine trees atop cars are common in December. When such things transpire in January, many people, to guess from the stares, believe their world has somehow gone askew.

Which way is really up?

You, Robot

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Although robots occupy many of my waking hours, I have been slow to consider the consequences. As the president of a high school FIRST Robotics team, I seek corporate donors who have the kind of money those of us in the humanities find difficulty believing even exists. Somewhere deep inside, however, lurks the fear of the entity with no sympathy. This has only been exacerbated by my experience of churchmen with the same condition. In any case, I’d been wanting to see the movie version of I, Robot for some time. Now that I stand at that three-day break between semesters, I thought I’d take a chance on it.

I knew the movie had received mixed reviews from critics, but several had stated the story had brains as well as action. It took me quite some time, however, to see the connection between the laws and Moses. The three laws of robotics, the only part of the movie besides the title to reference Isaac Asimov, dominate the plot. The law-giver, the posthumously present Moses (Dr. Alfred Lanning) has implanted a literal dream of freedom into the computerized soul of Sonny. Sonny’s dream of robot liberation is framed like Moses on the mountain. The laws in fragments at his feet. At what point does consciousness emerge? Since we haven’t adequately defined consciousness yet, we simply can’t say.

Near the climax of the movie, Sonny experiences an epiphany. Sometimes “the created must protect the creator, even against his will,” he realizes. Here the metaphor takes over the literal reading. Many religious people today feel that they must somehow protect their maker. This leads to great distentions of logic and even empathy for fellow humans as violence erupts in order to protect an idea that has become divine. Even the laws given by the creator may be violated to protect the idea of that creator. It is a world we find frighteningly familiar. Technology will continue to advance at a rate beyond the comprehension of a scholar still studying those ancient laws. This scholar, for one, hopes that our future creations lack the capacity for religious thought.

Mummery and Divinity

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The human psyche is a fascinating study. As an undergrad I stopped just shy of a psychology minor (partially this was due to the place, but also to a haunting feeling that psychologists are often attempting to resolve their own problems). Even as an armchair psychologist there are plenty of human tendencies to note. One that I occasionally mention in this blog is pareidolia, the attribution of significance to random information. Pareidolia often comes in the form of seeing faces, entire people, or even animals, where they don’t actually exist. This has been proffered as the source of belief in everything from ghosts and aliens to God himself. No doubt pareidolia is a strong tendency in the human mind. When my family recently saw Mummenschanz this was again confirmed.

This Swiss mime troupe – pioneers in experimental theater – makes simple objects come to life. The illusion works because of pareidolia. When we saw the show, even the youngest audience members could be heard exclaiming what obviously non-human tubes, slinky-like characters, and shapeless blobs were trying to do. “It wants the balloon!” “It likes that other one!” “It feels sad.” As the various abstract pieces moved about the stage, a laugh was guaranteed if they flashed a simple round orifice at the audience that clearly perceived it as an eye. We attribute intentionality and purpose to objects unvivified without the soul of Mummenschanz inside them.

Prior to the current tour, the last time my wife and I saw Mummenschanz was about two decades ago in Edinburgh. This was long before I’d been introduced to the concept of pareidolia, and, although I enjoyed the show, the more recent experience was more profound for it. Some of the adults present without children left at intermission, perhaps not finding the abstract personalities engaging. Children, however, seemed to comprehend what was going on. This does lend credence to the power of pareidolia to make sense of a bewildering world. When faced with the unfamiliar, we put a human face on it, ascribe it intention, and call it either a deity or Mummenschanz.

From Palin to Phelps

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People get shot every day, but that does not take the sting from the January 8 shootings in Tucson, Arizona. We live in a nation filled with angry, violent people. Most of them hold their rage in check, but others act out their frustrations aided by the obscene ease of firearm ownership. Into this volatile brew, mix in the warped rhetoric of a politics of fear and who knows what might happen. Sarah Palin and other outspoken conservative ideologues hold up their pristine hands to demonstrate they have nothing to do with the hate-mongering that haunts our streets. She calls the jabs at conservatives “blood libel.” I say if you propagate the politics of fear you’re liable to get blood on those hands. Often in the bookstore I see titles like How to Talk to Liberals: If You Have to. The liberals I hear talking are only asking for dialogue and coexistence. One side wants a chance for everyone to be heard, the other wants to throw stones at those who are different.

Students do presentations in my classes. The assignment is to choose a social issue where the Bible is brought to bear on the topic and present to the class what you learn about the subject. Two groups last night presented on the Westboro Baptist Church and its outspoken pastor and founder, Fred Phelps. Both presentation groups showed videos of members of the Westboro Baptist Church speaking out about various and sundry liberal groups/causes/nations they hate. Plucking verses from the Bible like a chicken pecking at the ground, they cite only those passages that justify hating those who are different. They seem to have overlooked the part that says, “by their fruits you shall know them.”

On today’s schedule? According to the Westboro website: “WBC to picket the funeral of Christina Greene, the 9-year-old girl cut off in her youth for the rebellion of the parents, preachers, and leaders of this nation.” They’ll have a hard time finding any place in the Bible that condemns children, shy of sly old Elisha calling out she-bears to kill 42 of them. Having read the Bible for practically my whole life, I have a very difficult time reconciling those who use the Bible for conservative causes with their own sourcebook. What will it take for them to realize that “what I want” is only part of the picture? Whether presidential hopefuls or crazed curmudgeons, we would all sleep better if we took to heart that inequality is very easily transformed into iniquity.

Hanny’s Voorwerp Factor 5

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Staring at the mysterious green blob of Hanny’s Voorwerp, it’s hard not to imagine being Captain Kirk sitting cantilevered forward in that famous chair on the bridge of the Enterprise. Even for those of us who are not Trekkies, the giant space nebula looms between galaxies where no one expected stars to be born. Their own private intergalactic nursery. With my mind already on Star Trek, I think of the web-page sent to me by one of my winter term students at Rutgers: the Memory-Alpha Bible page. Since my loyalty to Star Trek only reaches as far as the occasional viewing of an episode for light relief – and only from the original series at that – I had no idea that the Memory-Alpha wiki had bloomed into existence like Hanny’s Voorwerp itself. This wiki dedicated to everything Star Trek has 32-and-a-half-thousand pages on every angle of creator Gene Roddenberry’s unintentional universe.

The Bible page’s first paragraph (accessed 1/12/11, sometime around 7 a.m. EDT) reads: “The Bible is a collection of ancient Earth writings usually bound together as a book. The Christian Bible is divided into the Old and New Testaments; however, other translations and versions exist and vary by faith groups. It is among these faith groups that the Bible is considered a sacred text, which is generally viewed as having been inspired by one of the Human gods.” Someone takes his/her future, wiki-writing persona very seriously. Nevertheless, it is a perspective that could be helpful in handling a Bible that has grown politically powerful without being understood here in the paltry twenty-first century.

The page also lists all of the episodes where the Bible is referenced or alluded to in Star Trek. As my student pointed out, almost all of these references (in the original series) are to the Hebrew Bible, with very few being from the Christian Scriptures. This makes sense, given the context of the 1960s when McCarthy’s aroma still hung heavily in the air and the war in Vietnam was daily in the newspapers. To offer up television fare that might have been considered “unchristian” in any way was a faux pas in such tortured times. The Hebrew Bible is great for providing allusions to paradise and apocalypse, but the words of Jesus were taken with a solemnity far too great to allow for fictional space explorers’ banter. So maybe it’s just an accident of astronomy that the amorphous, green cloud of Hanny’s Voorwerp appears to be wearing a galactic halo.

Hanny's Voorwerp on NASA-view

FIRST Things First

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Being a religion specialist in a crowd of engineers is a surreal experience. Indeed, the clash of worldviews could hardly be more apparent, shy of crossing the border into Iran. I support the efforts of FIRST Robotics because they encourage children to excel in science, math, and engineering. My own childhood, however, was dominated by an overbearing religion that forever scarred me with a fear of Hell that I still can’t quite shake. Somewhere out there behind the stars there must be a horrid place engineered for the eternal torment for sinners like me, for the Bible tells me so. Speaking of stars, the live feed to kick off the FIRST Robotics Competition is sponsored by NASA. Yesterday was the international kickoff for this year’s competition, and as president of my daughter’s robotics team, I naturally sat among the well-paid engineers and professionals as we watched Dean Kamen unveil this year’s assignment.

The kind of guy who stands alone at parties

The FIRST kickoff video is available online for those who missed the event. The organization grants millions of dollars in scholarships to deserving students, funding college careers for the future of humanity. As I watched the live feed yesterday, a profound angst settled on me. Successful guys my age working for companies flush with money described how the latest medical and humanitarian breakthroughs were being made in the sciences. I have a part-time job with no medical coverage, and know, somewhere deep inside, that if something goes seriously wrong I will be permitted to go the way of all flesh, without benefit of these great technologies. And without the benefit of spiritual reward. A lost child of the cosmos. A life spent in the pursuit of truth, yet ending up with empty hands at the end of the day.

The eye in the sky is watching you

As a child I was a charter subscriber to Discover magazine. One of my earliest career ambitions was to be a scientist. One of my favorite classes in high school was physics. I was, however, haunted by the knowledge that the clergy had divined Hell behind all of this; only those who sought the keys to the kingdom would be spared. In college I majored in religion and took classes in astronomy, still flirting with my first crush. Now, an unemployed religion professor, I watch as day by day my specialization become more and more obsolete. No matter how far our telescopes peer into the universe, they just don’t spy God in an unguarded moment, captured by candid camera. Those with the money say truth lies in the progress of science, others in the unethical life of corporate America. The future lies anywhere but here in the world of religion. As I tell my students: be very careful in choosing a career. The best of intentions will lead to the worst of anxieties unless the way of the universe is truly comprehended.

Which Witch?

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Witches have been flying all over the Internet the last few days. A story from AP Online, picked up by several websites, reports that witches in Romania are planning to cast spells on the government. Now, I have to admit to having been tempted to cast a few spells myself during the Bush years, but since I don’t believe in magic the desire simply fizzled. These witches, however, are serious. Cat excrement in hand, the carcass of a dog nearby, these witches are outraged. Perhaps even more surprising is that some government officials are taking it seriously too, according to the article. The reason for the hexes? Romania has just started charging witches income tax.

Romania is a nation that evokes the darkness of primal forests haunted by werewolves and terrorized by vampires. The one-time domicile of Vlad the Impaler, the region has retained this mystique into the twenty-first century while elsewhere rovers roll around the surface of Mars and instantaneous world-wide communications are available at the press of a button. I am nevertheless encouraged by this display of activism. These supernatural citizens are challenging what they perceive to be unfair government practices. Statesmen wear purple on auspicious days to mitigate the effects of enchanters who are in touch with the financial struggles of the vast majority of religious specialists. Most of us just sit back and take it.

Meanwhile, as thousands of blackbirds fall from the sky, members of our own government are posturing to take back the modest health care improvements President Obama has helped to institute. Emotional Republicans are getting ready to strike back at programs designed to help those less fortunate than they are (apparently so they’ll have someone to pray for at grace over meals). “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Mt 10.29). Never mind casting spells, the government will always find ways of making life less comfortable for those they see as threats. Which witch would you choose? I’d select the one with a moral compass, even if she has cat excrement in her hand.

Back to Paranormalcy

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Belief is a paranormal phenomenon. Or so it would seem. Having just finished the fascinating sociological study of Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph Baker, Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture, the implications are thought-provoking. I’ve known the work of Christopher Bader, the lead researcher, for some time. Instead of trying to prove or disprove the phenomena under study, he performs a rare feat in actually addressing something most scholars avoid: what people really believe. As becomes clear throughout the book, a substantial majority of Americans believe in some paranormal phenomena at some level. The official story is that nobody believes this stuff, but the numbers beg to differ.

It is appropriate that such a topic should be undertaken by sociologists of religion. One of the difficulties the authors have is differentiating between religion and paranormal. Both religion and paranormal subjects involve going beyond empirical evidence. There is no “proof” that their objects of interest/devotion exist. The authors ultimately decide that what separates belief from God from belief in aliens is a matter of numbers: is it a generally accepted belief or one that is outside the norm (i.e., paranormal)? Since a vast majority of Americans believe in God, that is religion. Since far fewer believe in ghosts, they are paranormal. As I have suggested before, the main problem is one of definition. Religion stands on a continuum with “paranormal” beliefs. One society validates, the other it castigates.

I sensed a hesitation as I read this study. Grouping psychics alongside ghost hunters may seem reasonable, but how do Bigfoot and UFOs fit in? Those who research these latter topics often claim they are physical phenomena, as real as the keyboard I’m using, only undiscovered. Does an unsubstantiated phenomenon qualify as paranormal? Who decides what is really real? Academic institutions often distance themselves from subjects that might be suspect. (They also distance themselves from fair hiring practices as well, but that is perfectly normal.) It seems to me that the problem with “paranormal” comes in the grouping. Some of the individual subjects may indeed have merit: ghosts are perceived, reported, and some would say even photographed and recorded. They make up one of the earliest facets of religious belief. The psychic down the street has a less sure pedigree.

These fringe subjects, regardless of veracity, have a wide following. Even highly educated people generally believe in some form of “paranormal” phenomenon. Religion, widely accepted and practiced, ventures beyond the empirical as well. The difference is only, it seems, a matter of degree. Where is Fox Mulder when we really need him?

Determinism to Succeed

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I’ve been watching some episodes of Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole, the recent Science Channel sop to the masses to explain what scientists are thinking. I always appreciate when scientists (and other specialists) are willing to abandon argot and talk to the rest of us in plainspeak. Even if the implications are a little scary. The episodes I watched this weekend shared a near determinism. The physicists interviewed stopped shy of saying that all is ordained by the rules of science, but the implications still rang loudly in my ears. This concept is at home in the church.

Back as a college student attending a Presbyterian school (I have never ascribed to this particular flavor of Christian thought), I first chanced upon predestination. In fact, the subject was well nigh unavoidable. Students of all majors and backgrounds ended up discussing it around dinner tables as well as in the classroom. The instigator, instead of physics, was John Calvin. His theology suggested that mere mortals had no say in their destinies; God created some to be saved, the rest to be damned, fairness be confounded. I sat through many classes where the professors would argue with erudite words that all this had been foreordained. Some, “double predestinarians,” went as far as to argue that every firing of every synapse, every motion of every muscle, had been predetermined by God before the creation of the world. When I asked “why?” I was told that God has his (always “his”) reasons, and that I, a non-Presbyterian, should simply accept my fate.

Four years of wrangling and no one managed to convince the opposite party. One of my more intelligent professors once told me after class, “you free-willers always win on philosophical grounds, but we predestinarians always win on scriptural grounds.” He seemed to think that solved it. Perhaps he was predestined to conclude that. I disagreed. No greater monster could exist than a deity who predestined the horror we’ve created in our world. To see all this human suffering, much of it pointless, and simply shrug and say “God has his reasons,” is to implicate the creator in a cosmic Nuremberg. For me, I’d feel safer with the physicists saying it is all a matter of unfeeling cosmic laws. Perhaps I’m predestined to write this, but I still think they’re all wrong.

Was Calvin predestined to wear that hat?