Almost Heaven?

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HeavenCanWaitLike most kids raised Protestant, I had little idea about the Catholic worldview.  Despite family wishes, I had Catholic friends, and topics such a Purgatory inevitably came up.  (Well, they did if you were me, with my insatiable interest in religion and its trappings.)  Purgatory was a concept both just and unjust at the same time. It seemed only fair to give people who’d made mistakes a chance at Heaven, yet, at the same time, to make them suffer when they already realized that they’d made mistakes seemed like, to put it bluntly, bad parenting.  The key was in the name: Purgatory.  A place to purge the evil.  Melvillian try pots. Given this background, I couldn’t wait to read Diana Walsh Pasulka’s Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture. The afterlife is the ultimate 64-dollar question. It pays to be informed.

This fascinating study demonstrates that the idea of purgatory has long roots into Christian history. The Bible does mention Heaven and Hell, concepts borrowed from Zoroastrianism, but it doesn’t directly mention Purgatory. For this reason most Protestants reject it out of hand as Popish and superstitious.  Heaven Can Wait, however, explores how the idea grew into an almost inevitable aspect of Catholic theology. Most intriguing to me was the concept that, like Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven, Purgatory is a place on earth. Specifically, in many Medieval minds, in Ireland. There a cave of torments, guarded by monks, on an island in Lough Derg provided those brave enough to enter the chance to purge their sins before death.  In short, those who braved this cave could bypass Hell by suffering in advance.  Heaven on an installment plan, crudely put.  As Walsh Pasulka describes the accounts of Lough Derg, archetypes begin to fly thick and fast, like proverbial bats out of Hell. This single location, sometimes venerated by, sometimes destroyed by the church, was a vortex of torment.

Over time, as the rationalism of the Enlightenment settled in, the idea of a state of being having a physical locality led to changes in the concept of Purgatory.  The kids I knew took it for granted that it existed, and, with tween angst, accepted that that’s probably where they’d end up.  At least for a while.  Protestant that I was, my choices were a bit more stark. If I messed up, as I well knew I did, my torment would be neverending. Heaven Can Wait is a rewarding exploration of how an idea, logical in its original context, survived long after the worldview of the church had begun to change. Indeed, it survives to this very day.  And like most doctrines of the church, it has a way of scaring even the most inoffensive souls straight.

Geneva Conventions

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As an alumnus of Grove City College, I generally don’t have the chance to consider other colleges as unreasonably conservative. College taught me, after all, that education involves thinking things through, and that, of all things, doctrine is one of the many human constructs that wilts under close examination. Both religious and political doctrine fall under this rubric. So when an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education fingered Grove City’s near neighbor, Geneva College, I was both relieved and not really surprised. Grove City was strict, but Geneva, located down the road in Beaver Falls, was even more Reformed. Tales at the Grove said that even off-campus dancing was an infringement of the student code there, and that even a legal sip of beer with dinner, off campus, could get you expelled. You know how students talk. In any case, both cut from Presbyterian fabric, Grove City and Geneva Colleges hold out against the world and its multiple evils. So why did humble Geneva merit notice in the exalted Chronicle?

Geneva College recently sued for exemption of the contraception-coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act. You see, in many conservative religious traditions pre-marital sex is not only from the Devil, it practically never happens among true Christians. If it doesn’t happen, why should you be forced to pay for its treatment? Denial runs profoundly through these conservative colleges. While at Grove City, in a first-floor dorm room, my roomie and I were awakened one night by a group of pretty obviously drunken frat boys from the third floor. Cursing loudly, one of them rammed his fist through our window, showering the floor with glass before stomping loudly up the stairs. When I went to the housing office the next morning, they wondered about my story. Students at Grove City, drunk? It simply did not happen. In all likelihood, I’d broken the window and made up the story so I wouldn’t have to pay. I pointed out that campus security had noted the glass was inside the room and my roommate and I were both there at the time. Reluctantly, while still withholding judgment about the drunken part, I was believed.

Conservative Christian colleges often face the specter of reality. College kids were killed driving drunk. Girls, gasp!, did get pregnant and did not always decide to keep the baby. Real world issues declared anathema by a magisterium with its hands firmly over its eyes. No matter one’s view of morality, singling women out for punishment of sexual sins is just plain unfair. The issue here is health care, not the consequences of a decision made in the heat of passion. How often the anonymous male gets to scamper off, his health fully covered. The co-ed, however, is treated like Eve holding a newly bitten apple. Students attend Christian colleges for a wide variety of reasons, and the education, apart from the theology, can actually be excellent. It is the ethical obligation of the schools to cover all the human needs of emerging adults, not just those based on a morality still mired in the Middle Ages.

Time for a Reformation? Photo credit: Roland Zumbühl, Wikimedia Commons

Time for a Reformation? Photo credit: Roland Zumbühl, Wikimedia Commons

Hot Pants

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Over a decade ago now, the populace was buzzing about Stella Liebeck’s suit against McDonald’s. You may remember the case. Liebeck was handed very hot coffee through a drive-up window in one of those flimsy cups, and suffered second-degree burns when it spilled in her lap. The incident spawned a documentary movie and even a New York Times retro report a couple of years ago. No doubt the injury was serious enough to cause medical treatment including skin grafts, and McDonald’s does, as we all know, process its customers just like it processes everything; you can’t serve over 100 billion burgers and be the world’s second largest private employer without process. Food injuries in a world of business feeding can be serious. “Eating out” is a way of life for many and when people eat out they take their religion with them. That’s why Hiram Jimenez’s case is so interesting.

According to the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Jimenez decided to bow in prayer over a plate of sizzling steak fajitas at Appleby’s. For those who’ve never witnessed fajitas being served, they are an attention-demanding dish, served loudly steaming and popping with smoke rising up forever and heads being turned. I suspect that’s part of the appeal. According to the paper, Jimenez bowed over his food and the grease popped, burning his face, causing him to knock the plate of food onto his lap. None of the burns left scars, and a Superior Court here in New Jersey found the restaurant not negligent as the danger was “open and obvious.” What makes this story so interesting is not the injury but the cause behind it. Food being hot is somewhat universal. Praying in restaurants, however, is an evangelical cultural practice.

Growing up with evangelical friends, I learned to pray in restaurants. (My family was of rather humble circumstances and we didn’t eat at restaurants.) Partly it was in actual thankfulness, but clearly it was partly also in show. We were witnessing by invoking our gustatory gratitude. For being literalists, we didn’t take Jesus’ injunction to go into the closet and shut the door before praying too seriously. The culture around public prayer involves bowing. The bow is a mammalian display of submission. Thy will be done. In the biblical world being thrown into a blazing furnace for public displays of faith didn’t lead to lawsuits. Everyone knows infernos are hot. I can’t help but wonder whether a martyr complex is at play here. A praying customer is doing what his religion demands and gets burned for it. Yeah, I know what that feels like. And, I suspect, so do countless others who find no hearing in courts at all.

Photo credit: Bryan Hong (Brybry26), Wikipedia Commons

Photo credit: Bryan Hong (Brybry26), Wikipedia Commons

Wag the Tail

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Among the most respected of intellectual endeavors is political science. Analysts who read and reason beyond national borders, finding implications in countries many of us have never heard of, they can be an intimidating lot. Experts in economy and psychology, they tell us what the big picture looks like—why we do what we do. And almost universally they disdain religion. We’re talking politics here, why don’t you go sit at the kid’s table? Religion is the stuff and nonsense of make-believe. What politics is about is who has the biggest bombs and bank accounts. Those who impact the world in real ways. And yet.

I would never claim to be up-to-date on current events. I don’t have time to read newspapers and if my friends didn’t send me pertinent articles now and again I might still believe that social justice is more important than the color of an anonymous dress. When no less than an authority than the New York Times speaks, however, I do have to pause a minute or two to consider the implications. Frank Bruni has recently been writing on the Opinion Pages about those ultimate strange bedfellows, religion and politics. I may have got the order wrong, but that’s for political scientists to determine.

Many people don’t consider that religion can be, in some respects, scientifically analyzed. As a deeply divided nation, one factor that even political scientists should note is that yes, religion does count. No matter how naively conceived, people vote with their faith behind that polling curtain. The Republican Party realized this in the 1980s. If you take just one or two religious issues and make them the platform on which you stand, you can garner a disproportionate amount of the conservative evangelical vote. A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute, according to Bruni, demonstrates just how disproportionate the outcome can be. Surveys may not be precise, but less than 20 percent of Americans are white evangelical Protestants. Yet their issues are the ones that make or break elections.

Life has a way of making one cynical. I grew up a white evangelical Protestant. Although my viewpoint has evolved with my education, I can’t shake two of those qualifiers even if I want to. I read political scientists dismissing religion as a bogus topic, mere twaddle to fill the daub of inert minds walled in by primitive thinking. And I read the occasional news story that demonstrates that the facts don’t fit the premise. Do we need to understand religion? Absolutely not, I’m told. But in the end, even the analysts of the political beast will have to realize that tails wag dogs just as surely as raising hackles will make any mammal appear larger than it really is.

Not a tail to be seen...

Not a tail to be seen…

Holi Daze

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It’s pretty white out there. For many parts of the eastern United States it has been a season of snow on snow on snow (why does that sound familiar?). The wisdom back in old white Wisconsin was there’d be three snows on the crocuses. This year the crocuses have remained buried, even in New Jersey. Judging from the number of people not driving, it looks like most people had a snow day yesterday. The color white has often been treated as a symbol of purity in various religions, but today is also the celebration of Holi, a Hindu festival of color. I’m no expert on Hinduism, but I do find the concept of a day of color to be immensely appealing. Anthropologists trace its roots to some fertility festival, but the fact is, we could all use some color right about now.

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Winter technically lasts, in this hemisphere, until the vernal equinox. Religions around the world have festivals to celebrate this slow turning of the seasons, and the lengthening of days. A long while back I wrote a little book on the holidays. In it I tried to find the basis for various holiday colors. We all know red and green clash, but when we see them together we think of Christmas. Black and orange make a standard Halloween combination, and red by it self suggests St. Valentine, while green alone gives St. Patrick his identity. A more recent addition is black and silver for New Year. Easter, coming in the spring, however, is a celebration of color. We don’t dye the eggs just one hue—it has been a long winter and we celebrate its close with a burst of color. Even the staid old Episcopal Church reverences the liturgical seasons with distinct colors. In other words, colors mean something.

Years ago a friend recommended Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey (this was before Fifty Shades of Grey took over the world). It quickly became one of my favorite novels. It’s all about color. Apart from a few years under the influence of a friend with a strong personality, I’ve always been a subdued haberdasher. I tend to wear understated colors because I don’t like people commenting on the way I look, or, even for that matter, looking at me. I enjoy public speaking, but having someone single me out on the street or the bus has always felt distinctly uncomfortable. Still, I think we may have lost something that Holi has retained. Color exists to be celebrated. And shared. It is so important that commerce and trade apparently stopped last week to figure out the color of a certain dress. I may not be a Hindu, but I think I might wear my brightest shirt today to welcome color back to the world.

Once Bitten

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TheologyOfDraculaOnce vampires sink their fangs into you, it’s hard to shake them. I’m referring to an intellectual connection here, instead of a physical one. M. Jess Peacock’s book on theological vampires spurred me to read Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac’s The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as Sacred Text. It has been on my “to read” list for some time, and since I finished re-reading Dracula recently, I felt the canonical text was still fresh enough in my mind to take on an analysis. I have to confess that even though I grew up as a religious kid, and I loved monsters, I had no idea that the two were connected. Strangely, religion tended to elicit a fearful response while monsters gave me a kind of comfort. Of course, I always supposed that was normal. Then I learned that mature adults didn’t talk about, or even think about, monsters. I had to try to find solace in religion instead. Rarignac clearly figured out, however, that Dracula was a sacred text long before I came along.

What exactly does it mean to treat a book as a sacred text? Before anyone gets any funny notions, I need to say that Rarignac is not suggesting vampirism is, or should be a religion. That hasn’t prevented other people from seeing it that way, but that’s not what this book is about. It is about Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Devoting the kind of attention to detail that is often reserved for biblical texts, The Theology of Dracula examines the many religious traditions (not all of them Christian) that lie behind the novel. Stoker drew on many “pagan” traditions, including those of ancient Egypt and of Nordic mythology. Clearly Dracula responds to Christian symbols pretty violently, but he isn’t a classic Catholic. In fact, he seems to shy from Catholicism while admitting that its symbols work.

Rarignac, however, suggests more than this. He suggests that Dracula was written intended to be a sacred text. Not a Bible—we already have one of those, thank you—but a text that has its own mythology and symbols. Dracula‘s characters are not always what they seem. Careful scrutiny reveals that they often have celestial connections that tie them to ancient mythologies long forgotten by most modern people. We read the book expecting it to be about a vampire. Well, clearly it is. But not only a vampire. There is a much larger story at work in Dracula, and Rarignac has done an admirable job tracing its Vorlage (if I may step into jargon for a moment) and its wider context in the world of literary creations that specialize in our nightmares. There is much at which to marvel in this little book. I’m not convinced that Stoker intended his book to be read this way, but it is nonetheless a richer experience for it. Rarignac gives a simple monster tale real teeth.

Our Gods, Ourselves

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The near-death experience, made popular by Raymond Moody in the 1970s, has hit the cultural mainstream with movies like Heaven Is Real. The now-familiar scenario of going through the tunnel toward the light and meeting something like God is so widespread that mention of “staying away from the light” can be a metaphor for remaining alive. Although experts (one of which I’m decidedly not) disagree on interpretations, nobody doubts that the dying often report such things. Some say it is the impression left on an oxygen-starved brain about to implode, while others postulate a soul has made an actual bid for freedom only to be returned to sender. No matter what you believe, it’s hard not to be intrigued. Not all the experiences are identical, however. A friend recently sent me a story from World News Daily Report that headlines “Catholic Priest Who Died for 48 Minutes Claims that God Is a Woman.” The story by Barbara Johnson, which ran earlier this month, is an interesting variation on the standard. Often the “being of light” met at the end of the tunnel is kind of asexual. After all, there are no physical bodies there.

This story has me thinking. Traditional Christian, indeed, Judeo-Christian thought posits that God is neither male nor female. Of course, given human experience, many people find that difficult to conceive. It does occur in intersex persons, and it is actually pretty widespread in nature where some animals change gender over their lifespans. Still, when it comes to the Almighty, people want to know with whom they’re dealing. Think about it. When you walk into a doctor’s office and meet a physician for the first time, your response will differ depending on their gender. The same is true of going into a car dealership, or a daycare facility. We use gender to give us the first hint on how to respond. A genderless God, let’s admit, is somewhat disquieting. What is the message you want to send to a person without knowing their gender? Or maybe like me you’ve read a book and discovered halfway through that you had the gender of the author wrong. Doesn’t it impact how you read the rest? So, what if God is a woman?

Interestingly, the case of Father John O’neal comes from a Catholic context. Along with Evangelical Christians, Catholics are among the most likely to hold a residual maleness to God’s identity. Theology of the Trinity, always beginning with “the Father” makes it hard to escape. Perhaps what Fr. O’neal unexpectedly encountered was a God-concept without judgment. That would certainly be disorienting to a faith that has a multi-layered afterlife including limbo and purgatory as well as heaven and hell. A deity who decides the fate of souls must be a judge, and although Judge Judy rules daytime television, the church still has a traditional mensch on the bench. What if Fr. O’neal really did get to heaven? What if he found God really was female? Could human religions ever recover? I, for one, am intrigued. Still, I’m content to wait another few decades before finding out. And maybe for the time we have down here we should all start practicing by realizing that gender is always far less important than the personhood that we all share.

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Four Gods’ Sake

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AmericasFourGodsStatistically speaking, most people don’t like statistics. I’m one of those. Numbers can do funny things to a person’s perception of things, nevertheless, I appreciate those who can work with them and make sense of them. When I saw the title America’s Four Gods, my disappointment engine kicked in. Is this book going to be about numbers? It was written by a couple of sociologists after all (and even a couple is a number). I’ve read enough of Christopher Bader’s work, however, to trust him. Paul Froese should be the same. Subtitled What We Say about God & What That Says about Us is an appropriate introduction to the book. Based on the Baylor Religion Survey, this study looks at what one of the most religions nations on earth believes about God. Since God is a key political player these days, that’s not a bad idea. Their conclusions are well worth noting.

Froese and Bader find that belief in God is highly idiosyncratic. It is likely the case that, similar to sacerdotal snowflakes, no two ideas about God are precisely the same. Categories, however, help to analyze things, and America’s Four Gods does just that, suggesting four main images of God that have very different characteristics. The Authoritative God we all know well. This is Jonathan Edwards’s deity that dangles spiders above the fire—active and angry in the world. The Benevolent God is also active, but more avuncular and kind. The Critical God is not very active, but is still annoyed with us. The Distant God tends to be kindly, but is rather remote. Using these four kinds of God, Froese and Bader examine what people believe about all kinds of issues, from war to social reform to adultery. When Americans say “God bless America” they mean very different things.

When it comes time to troop to the poles, we listen to what our candidates say about the Almighty. It is a virtual certainty that an atheist is unelectable in these religious states, so we want to hear what the candidates have to say about God. What they say and what their listeners hear, however, are clearly different things. Still, religious conviction is one of the most important variables when it comes to selection a President, Governor (at least in some states), or congress-person. Some candidates, with God off the plate, have nothing left to commend them at all. So it is in one of the wealthiest, most powerful nations in the world. A basic truth that we choose to ignore decides our fate for us. Mired in a Gulf War? Who you gonna call? Chances are we all know the answer to that. Chances are equally as high that we all mean something different by it.

Biblical Weather

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On President’s Day, my wife pointed out an article in the New Jersey Star-Ledger headlined, “‘Biblical’ snowstorms battering New England.” She asked, reasonably enough, “What makes a snowstorm biblical?” Since I have written a book on the weather in the book of Psalms, I might be able to speak to that. First off, yes, there is snow in the Bible. It’s not mentioned often and it is a rarity, but the Israelites knew what snow was. In fact, one of the most difficult Psalm weather references is to snow, in Psalm 68. The man interviewed in the newspaper, however, was not being literal. “Biblical” has come to mean disastrous. I can exegete that a bit more: disastrous because of quantity. Too much of a good thing. Or bad thing. In Boston this year the weather just won’t quit. The topic that really has people talking, however, is the temperature. It has been very chilly. My daughter complained when her university didn’t cancel classes with the air temperature at about 9 below. Her note prompted my thoughts of a day to remember.

When I taught at Nashotah House, the weather did not stop us. Ever. It was a residential facility with both faculty and students living on campus. Everything was within walking distance. My close exposure to the weather was one of the reasons I wrote the book. One Lent, and this must have been in February, we had a quiet day. Quiet days were taken very seriously. On this particular occasion the day was to be used for a meditation in the Milwaukee Cathedral, some 35 miles away. The problem was the air temperature was -42 Fahrenheit. That isn’t wind chill, that’s how cold the air actually was. (For those of you reading in Europe, Fahrenheit and Celsius are the same at -40, then they begin to diverge again.) It did not stop us. We piled into the van and prayed earnestly that we’d get there safely. On the way home we manically recited Evensong from memory. When the wind blew the chill dropped to -70 (my Minnesota friends will believe me here). If ever weather was biblical, that day was.

I do wonder if overusing “biblical,” however, will wear it out. Where do we go after biblical? What is conceptually bigger than God? Anselm would panic. What if next year it’s even worse—how will we describe it? We’ve already used up the apocalypse. We’ve entered into a crisis of superlatives. Nothing is big enough any more. As I look at the early fading light of this President’s Day, the snow is beginning to fall again. When I was a child we had, I seem to recall, a simple word to describe it. We didn’t invoke the Almighty. We didn’t hear the galloping of distant hooves. We didn’t act as if a day out of the office were the end of the world. Our simple word for it was this: winter.

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Under Who?

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Who is God anyway? The question occurred to me as I read about the current Superior Court decision in New Jersey that “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance remains constitutional. The American Humanist Association had sued to have the offending prepositional phrase removed, based on first amendment rights to religious freedom. I’ve always found the whole indoctrination of swearing to a flag somewhat provincial and perhaps even damaging to the unity of humankind. Nations, after all, are about keeping things for ourselves, something that the God of the Bible seems to find naughty. During the Cold War, waged against the “godless Communists,” the questionable phrase was added in 1954, only after we’d secured nuclear weapons. Does any nation that has the bomb have the right to declare divine sanction? I guess so, on second thought.

IMG_0962In his decision Judge David Bauman said that God, in this context, is not about religion, but about the state’s history. Granted, one of the New Jersey delegates to sign the constitution was a clergyman, and president of Princeton College. The same Princeton that became the home of the man who would open physics enough to let us begin a nuclear reaction. But I’m getting ahead of my story. This concept of God being an arcane aspect of history as opposed to a present and active force motivating people’s lives is a curious one. In order to keep the deity, he (and the historical God is male) must be demoted to an historical relic. If that is true of divinity, what does it say about the concept of nationhood itself? Have we come to admit that it is all a fiction to keep status quo ante?

Humanist and atheist groups have argued for years that public school (which no government takes that seriously) should not be a forum for religious indoctrination. Some religious groups (such as Creationists) clearly see such schools as a mission field ripe for proselytizing young minds. Such was clearly the case in 1954. Today we see the Russian Orthodox Church becoming a supporter of the government in Russia, where godlessness might be more a factor on the ground than on paper. In the United States we have a culture that provides lip-service to the almighty while the true god is secreted away in the shrines of bank vaults and expense accounts. It is really about a way of life, after all. Should we keep or remove “under God” from a pledge to personal gain? It is all a matter of how you define “God.”

Thor’s Return

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Once as I sat in the office of an Ivy League professor of Greek religion, I asked about the myths of the Classical gods. The professor (who knew that I had taught religion as well, but at more like a Noxious Weed League school) appeared genuinely insulted and told me in no uncertain terms that scholars of religion didn’t take that nonsense seriously. The study of “myths” was left to Classicists, not actual scholars of religion. Is it any wonder, then, that we don’t really have a grasp on what the average person believes? Being a blue-collar scholar, I always took seriously what students told me about their beliefs. It wasn’t really a great surprise, then, when my wife pointed me to a story in The Guardian about a temple to the Nordic gods being built in Iceland. According to the story, the modern adherents of Ásatrúarfélagið (thank you unicode) don’t really believe in a literal Odin or Thor or Frigg, but see them as metaphors to help them face the way life is. A millennium after becoming Christian, some Icelanders are apparently getting back to their roots.

There has always been, to me, a fascination with the Nordic gods. These rough-and-tumble deities inhabited the harsh and snowy regions where daily life was often a struggle to survive against the elements. Frost giants were enemies and nobody really emerges as the winner after Ragnarok. In the Bible Yahweh does sometimes come out swinging, but for the most part he seems a deity content to sit on his throne and issue commands. The Scandinavian gods were characters of action. In some sense they seemed to struggle just like the rest of us do. They are, of course, more powerful and as the movie makes clear, Thor has a charisma that more self-righteous deities appear to lack. Lest anyone be ready to run to their priest at this point, please be aware that this too is a metaphor.

On the other side of the equation there are sure to be critics who argue that building a temple to fake gods in this day and age is obviously a waste of human talent and resources. Such are people with no imagination. Religious belief, metaphor or not, has been part of the human psyche from the very beginning. Elsewhere I have suggested that animals show the same behaviors as what we Homo sapiens would declare rudimentary religion. Rationalism has not provided a reasonable alternative to religious expression. Even a Stoic knows to appreciate art, although beauty provides no essential element to simple survival. Simply put, humans enjoy the finer things of life. Perhaps unappreciated since long sublimated, among those finer things are the old Nordic gods. And their return is a kind of resurrection.

The Battle of the Doomed Gods

The Battle of the Doomed Gods

White Carrots

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Acronyms are useful in a complex world, although they are frequently opaque to outsiders. Taking a new job you’re found constantly swimming in an alphabet soup of abbreviations that can drown you as easily as ABC. Each the church has them. As an undergrad religion major at a Presbyterian school I had to memorize TULIP (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints), all of which but the last I had to reject on the grounds of sanity. As aids to memory they can serve as mnemonic devices, or they may simply be frustrating caricatures of reason. In any case, we all know them. In universities departments or divisions are known by acronyms, local businesses and landmarks may be as well. The internet has only speeded the process up, with countless abbreviations, some of which are definitely NSFW.

IMG_1889So it was that I learned an acronym that is current in the publishing industry. I always thought of the parsnip as a rather curious root vegetable, somewhat like a white carrot. As a child I severely disliked them, but I’ve come to appreciate them, roasted and glazed, as an adult. The word itself is somewhat fun to say: PARSNIP. It is also an acronym of things publishers, particularly those who publish textbooks in English as a second language, have to avoid. PARSNIP stands for, according to the popular explanation, Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, Isms, and Pork. Interestingly to me, at least four of these things have their traditional taboo status because of religions. Clearly Religion is one of those, but restrictions on Alcohol, Sex, and Pork are also based on religious rules. One could argue that Narcotics also fits into that category as well. As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, religion, substances, and sex are all deeply intertwined.

One of the curious things about this is that our post-Christian society has declared that religion is not worth discussing, or even learning about. We slash religion departments from universities and then wonder why we can’t discuss things like sex and alcohol, without which our society would apparently collapse, freely in other cultures. When I was a child, reading MAD magazine, I quickly learned two things that adults didn’t discuss were religion and politics. The list has grown since that time, but apart from the fact I have no idea which Isms are to be avoided, I see PARSNIP as the white carrot of religious taboos. And politics. In this secular world, we’ve become very politically correct, although we really shouldn’t mention politics in that phrase. Now I’m wondering if maybe I should reevaluate TULIP after all. At least the first part.

Star Struck

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One of the coveted symbols of approval in my childhood was the star at the top of a paper. I watched in amazement (perhaps because they were so rare) when a teacher would inscribe a star without lifting her pencil from the paper. I thought I had never seen anything so perfectly formed. Of course, in my teenage years under the influence of Jack T. Chick and his ilk, I learned that the five-pointed star, especially in a circle, and more especially upside-down in a circle, was a satanic symbol. My childhood achievements had been, apparently, a demonic blunder. This fear of geometry still persists in America, as a story of a woman in Tennessee fighting to have “pentagrams” removed from school buses shows. The woman, who has received death threats and therefor remains anonymous, took a picture of the offending LEDs and has asked, out of religious fairness, to have the satanic symbols removed from the bus. The news reports are almost as tragi-comic as the complaint.

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The pentagram, or pentacle, has a long history, some suggest going back to the Mesopotamians. (Uh-oh! We know how they loved their magic!) In fact, the symbol was benign in religious terms until it was adopted by Christians as symbolic of the “five wounds” (zounds!) of Christ. The symbol could also be used for virtue or other wholesome meanings. The development of Wicca began in earnest only last century, although it has earlier roots. Some late Medieval occultists saw the star as a magic symbol, and the inverted pentagram was first called a symbol of “evil” in the late 1800s. As a newish religion seeking symbols to represent its virtues, Wicca adopted the pentagram and some conservative Christian groups began to argue it was satanic, representing a goat head. (The capital A represents an ox head, so there may be something to this goat. I’m not sure why goats are evil, however.) Wicca, however, is not Satanism, and is certainly not wicked.

Symbols, it is sometimes difficult to remember, have no inherent meaning. Crosses may be seen in some telephone poles and in any architectural feature that requires right angles. The swastika was a sacred symbol among various Indian religions, long before being usurped by the Nazis. And the pentagram was claimed by various religions, including Christianity, long before it was declared dangerous by some Christian groups. There may be a coven in Tennessee seeking to covert children by designing and installing taillights of school buses, but I rather doubt it. School children feel about their buses as I feel about mine on a long commute to work each day. A kind of necessary evil. The truly satanic part, I suspect just about every day, is the commute itself. There must be easier ways to win converts.

Creating Diversity

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Informed opinion is a chimera. I write that as someone who has time to read only the news stories my wife or my friends pass on to me. Once in a while one of those stories makes me feel less bad about being uninformed. A recent piece by Slate author William Saletan looks at polls regarding Creationism. The piece, picked up in the New Jersey Star-Ledger on a recent Sunday, demonstrates that although the United States is a nation of Creationists, we don’t agree about what that means. What becomes clear to me when I read such stories is that people who believe in the Bible seldom read it. Or at least understand it. Creationism “is not a thing” in the Bible. Many accounts about how the world began are represented, and the main point seems to be that it’s important that it was the God of Israel who did it rather than the competition. The first couple of creation accounts are compelling with their insistence that people are special, and that we are in charge while the owner is away. In fact, however, creation is a minor point in the story. It just has to start somewhere.

Those who set out to read the Bible, I suspect, begin to stumble in parts of Exodus and generally give up once they reach Leviticus. Although the main point of the books of Moses is the rules, the modern Christian finds the story more engaging. And the creation accounts of early Genesis are among the stories people actually read. They do make for a great, if contradictory, tale. They have, however, little impact on what people are supposed to do. Ironically, those accounts have become failsafe political devices. We vote according to how old we think the earth might be. We are special, after all.

Saletan’s point in the article is that the finer we parse the questions, the more divergent opinion becomes. The Bible doesn’t say how old the earth is—it’s really not a point of any significance to the story—but if you’re going to take it literally, you can do the math. Few literalists truly take the Bible literally. Logic very quickly breaks down as Genesis 2 follows Genesis 1. Americans are told that the Bible is literally true, but such a view literally makes no sense. We are committed to it, however, as we somehow equate believing in stories to be more important than understanding what those tales are trying to say. The polls, according to the article, make the point abundantly clear. When it comes to understanding the Bible Americans are very committed, if very confused.

Just one Creationist museum. Photo credit: Creashin, Wikimedia Commons

Just one Creationist museum. Photo credit: Creashin, Wikimedia Commons

Divergency

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DivergentSelf-denial, no matter what its motivation, is a religious ideal. In its more extreme forms it becomes martyrdom, but most religions agree on the value of taking less for yourself so that others might have more. This has been running through my head since seeing the movie Divergent. I read and posted on the book some time ago, but having recently seen the movie—a fairly faithful adaptation to the novel—I was forcefully reminded that this is a dystopian parable. In the future, society is divided into different factions, based on a person’s predisposition. This is done to keep the peace, and the factions seem to get along until suspicion grows about the group called Abnegation. The Abnegation faction is moved by pity and compassion for others. They are the consummate self-deniers, not thinking of themselves to the point of limiting time they can spend looking in a mirror. Others are the focus. Naturally, those who see the utter selflessness of others wonder what they’re really up to. Suspicion grows that this group is after wealth, in the form of food, secretly stockpiling it for themselves. Nobody would give up for themselves so that others can have more.

As I watched the movie I thought about religious groups that preach self-denial. Granted, I’m only one person, but growing up that was the message I continually heard loud and clear in the teachings of Jesus, according to the Gospels. Deny yourself so that others might have more. The deeper I became involved with the church, however, the rarer I found such behavior. By the time I reached college, I still hadn’t figured out that religion had become an industry, like any other. A service industry, to be sure, but it still had CEOs and treasurers and, increasingly, political power. The political seduction of religion already had a history by the time I became aware of it, but I still believed that self-denial was at the core of true religion. Perhaps the factions I heard whispering around me were right. Perhaps there was something more driving all this.

In Divergent, the belief in selflessness leads to self-sacrifice. In many feel-good movies, this leads to an expected resurrection. Here the future is bleak, and the dead remain dead. There is a kind of resurrection as the Dauntless faction comes out of its stupor, but the movie leaves the viewer wondering if there is a future after all. Is there a place in the world for those who legitimately want everyone to share? I think that every time I find myself driving. Behind the wheel, selfish maneuvers that lead to little, if any, ultimate gain seem to be deeply embedded in those who want to get there first. Abnegation, it seems, is a danger on the road. Driving, it seems to me, is a real test of someone’s religious convictions. Perhaps it is that one has to realize that the vehicle in front of you contains another human soul. Or perhaps it is that the fragmentation of society has already gone too far and those who don’t take for themselves are not emulated, but consumed.