Bigger Picture

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One of the quirks of my thought process is that I tend to look for the bigger picture.  I’ve always done this and I suspect it drives some people batty when they ask me a question and I begin to answer from what seems to be a tangent.  (I also think this is why I performed well in the classroom.)  So, when I saw the article by Eric Holloway on Mind Matters, titled “Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science,” I had to take a look.  Mostly a series of bullet-points that point out some of the religiously-motivated ideas that led to scientific discoveries, the article is useful.  My penchant for the big picture goes a bit broader, however.  The entire worldview in which the scientific process was born, and thus its underlying presuppositions, are religious.  Science and religion are the dogs and cats of the thought world but I’ve seen dogs and cats live happily together.

Science has always been with us.  Early peoples weren’t benighted troglodytes.  They observed, hypothesized, drew conclusions.  Science as we understand it, however, began in the Middle Ages in Europe, drawing on observations from earlier thought in the Arab world.  The context in that Arab world was solidly Muslim.  The Middle Ages in Europe were solidly Christian.  None of this discounts the contributions of Jews to the whole, it’s merely an observation regarding the larger cultural outlook.  Many of the principles of science even today (for example, that people are categorically different from other animals) are based on those religious worldviews.  We seldom go back to question whether we might’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong.  Meanwhile, the dogs began to chase the cats.

College as a religion major involved a lot of discussions about basic presuppositions.  Then questioning them.  Not much of this went on in the classroom (Grove City was, and is, a conservative Christian school).  The wonderful thing about higher education is the bringing together of people with different outlooks.  It was those after-hours conversations that helped form my questing nature.  I’d already started asking bigger questions when I was a child, annoying my parents and, I suspect, sometimes vexing clergy.  A single human mind is too limited to grasp it all, but it seems to me to deny religion a place at the table is to leave out massive amounts of human experience.  Of course, economics, the dismal science, seems well on the way to eliminating the study of religion in higher education.  And we will have lost, if this happens, a large piece of the bigger picture.

Photo credit: NASA

A Different Legion

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Religion and horror can play well together.  They can also be unevenly matched.  Although Legion has been on my list since shortly after it came out, my impression after having watched it is that the angels are strangely corporeal.  Their fights are physical with very little supernatural involved.  I suppose that’s why it’s generally classified as “action,” but the premise is one that suggests a bit more supernatural would’ve been welcome.  The writing suffers from any number of ailments, and the ending leaves you wondering just how good God is supposed to be in this telling.  I suppose a plot synopsis might help.

A pregnant waitress in a remote diner is nearly at term.  The Archangel Michael has come to earth in Los Angeles (get it?) and has armed himself to protect this unborn baby.  He comes to the diner where the owner and his son, his cook, and four customers are holed up against what they think is a demon attack.  Michael eventually reveals that the arriving hordes are not demons, but humans possessed by angels.  God has decided to wipe out the human race again, this time with angelic mercenaries.  If the waitress’s baby survives, however, the world will be saved.  So there’s lots of shooting, and although a white guy dies first, the only two Black characters are the next victims, of course.  To kill angels, it turns out, you have to shoot them.  Who knew?  In the end, which pits Gabriel against Michael, it’s revealed that God was testing the loyalty of his angels by giving them this task.  Mindless obedience, God thinks, is wrong.  If people have to be killed to prove it, so be it.

The theme of the messianic baby stays intact but goes nowhere.  At the end it’s unclear if the angel attacks are still going on, but the waitress and her boyfriend, along with the baby, drive around heavily armed, ready to fight.  Did the angels get the message that they are being tested by God or are they, like many Republicans, simply following the “leader”?  Seeing the title and knowing nothing of the story, I had assumed this was a movie about demons.  The “Legion,” of course, is angelic but there’s not a lot transcendent about them.  Even the use of wings (which are bulletproof), makes this feel like Dogma without the humor.  I knew religion would be involved in this horror, but I didn’t know how poorly it was played out.  Still, it would fit into Holy Sequel, if it ever happens.

Upon Further Occlusion

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Admittedly the source is GBN, but the headline is irresistible: “Nasa ‘quietly funding’ theological conferences amid ‘demonic’ UFO fears.”  Essentially an interview with Nick Pope (no relation to “the Pope”), the story posits that NASA has been spending on theology because of fears that UFOs might be demons.  Nick Pope is a recognized ufologist, but the story doesn’t state where he acquired the information on NASA’s spending habits.  Pope did work for Britain’s Ministry of Defence, and has had a long-standing interest in UFOs.  And some US congressional members have stated that they believe said UFOs are demons.  I’d still like to see some documentation, however, before accepting that NASA’s paying for conferences in a discipline that’s on decline in academia.  Seems a little difficult to believe.

It also seems like this would be a more exciting theological conference than the one I attend.  Perhaps even stranger than UFOs is the use of the word “theology.”  In British English the word tends to mean what “religious studies” means in these (still) United States.  American English understands theology to be a distinct part of religious studies—the discipline that is occupied with philosophical questions within a specific tradition.  The one probably most familiar is Christianity, where historical theology and systematic theology are often on seminary curricula.  I’ve noticed more and more Jewish and Islamic theology cropping up in recent years.  I always take pains to say I’m not a theologian (in the American sense).  Maybe it would just be easier to consider UFOs.

Image credit: George Stock, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

There’s no doubt that theology gave us demons.  One of the points I was trying to make in Nightmares with the Bible is that that’s not entirely true.  Demons came first, and theology later.  People have, historically, always believed there were other entities that behaved with intelligence.  Generally they were more powerful than mere humans.  It was really only around the time that Christianity began that such entities were coded as purely evil.  Those who posit that UFOs are demons really aren’t up on their theology, which makes me wonder what kinds of conferences NASA is spending its money on.  If it is.  This seems plausible because the government often spends on things that are unexpected.  I personally would like to see a bit more of it funneled towards education, but I’m just one voter.  In any case, if there are such conferences, and if they’re British style theology, please put me on the mailing list.

Sinful Thoughts

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The driving force behind Holy Horror is the fact that the Bible appears in lots of horror movies.  More than might be expected.  Although I’ve moved on to other projects, I still keep an eye out.  There may not be time or opportunity in my life to write a sequel, but you can’t unnotice the Bible in The Sinners.  The title drew me in, as did its free status on Amazon Prime.  It’s a Bible-based flick, for sure, but even the basic description gets religion wrong.  I generally like movies by female directors, and this one was a project of Courtney Paige whose name, for some reason, sounds strangely familiar.  In any case, one of the biggest blunders movies like this make is that the religion doesn’t hang together.  Of course, it doesn’t say what variety of Christianity it is, but it’s of the literalist stripe.

Seven alpha females at a Christian school in a Christian community form a clique in which they’re each characterized by one of the seven deadly sins.  They’re lead by the pastor’s daughter, of course.  One of the girls keeps a journal in which she confides that she confessed their activities to the pastor.  The betrayed girls decide to scare the offender but she escapes when they’re intimidating her.  She’s found dead but then the other sinners start being murdered.  The police aren’t really effective and the girls try to figure out who’s behind this.  I won’t say who but I will say that it doesn’t really make much sense.  Scenes jump around and characters appear with little or no introduction—it’s disorienting.  But that religion…

I know enough PKs (preacher’s kids) to know they often aren’t as innocent as dad thinks (and it’s generally dad).  I also know that forced conformity of religion builds resentment and resistance.  But there’s something wrong here.  The pastor drinks wine.  Even the truly religious girls drop f-bombs.  One even attends a Satanist meeting with no explanation.  The pastor’s wife is having an affair.  The school librarian has sex with her husband at the school between classes.  They can all quote scripture, and often do.  What religion is this?  I couldn’t really engage with the movie because there were too many distracting religious gaffs.  Hey, I don’t mind when movies show the problems with religions—they’re fair game for commentary, after all.  But if you’re going to do it, try to understand the mindset of the religion you’re criticizing.  There’s a lot to think about in this movie, and it really isn’t that bad.  But for those who know religion there’ll be some question of which it is that’s under fire.  If I ever get back to Holy Horror I’ll say more.

Modern Gnostics

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It’s not exactly a standard church.  At least I don’t think it is, but I’m just learning.  (That’s my life’s motto—I’m just learning.)  A convoluted path brought me to the Gnostic Catholic Union’s website.  I’m quite curious about this group.  I’m kind of busy, however, and I’ll hope to come back to it later.  You see, Gnosticism and Catholicism don’t sit easily together in my mind.  There’s a standard myth, accepted by many, that Christianity grew in linear fashion from Jesus through today’s weaponized Evangelical.  Or today’s Roman Catholic.  Or today’s—you fill in the blank—denomination.  Those of us who study the history or religions know the story is much more complicated than that.  It’s more like cladistics than theology.

It wasn’t so simple as a baby born in a manger.  Christianities were a variety of thought pools (not quite think tanks) in the first century.  There was a mix of Jewish ideas and messianic fervor.  One of those pools developed into a type of Christianity known as Gnosticism.  Gnosticism also had branches but one of the main ideas was that only initiates know a hidden knowledge necessary to make it work.  We still see this at play in both religious and secular organizations.  You need to know the secret handshake to be on the winning team.  Meanwhile different Christianities grew different ideas.  We rather simplistically think that Constantine unified them at the Council of Nicaea but you can bet that the guys leaving the council room did so with different ideas on the way home.

Roman Catholicism today is a very diverse religion.  You see, religious identity is something you tend to be born into.  Many people never question it because they’ve got other things to do with their lives.  Still, if you look you can see just how different “Catholics” can be.  It’s perhaps ironic because “catholic” means “universal.”  What’s really universal, however, is that people think differently about religion.  It’s the human condition.  There’s no reason a person can’t be both Gnostic and Catholic, just like there’s no reason you can’t be, say, a Unitarian-Universalist and a Hindu.  Religion is perhaps the most misunderstood of human enterprises.  Since most of us are too busy with other things we hire experts to tell us what to believe.  When enough of these experts are close enough in thought a denomination is born.  And it has many, many siblings.  I ran across the Gnostic Catholic Union quite by accident, but even those of us who are religionists by profession have limited time for everything.  I’m just learning.

Calculating Christians

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I know some calculating Christians.  I use “Christian” as religion scholars do—it is the way people identify themselves, not necessarily what they are.  For example, I grew up learning that Christianity was God’s excuse for throwing a bunch of unknowing people into Hell.  Laughter all around!  Then I did something radical.  I started reading the Bible.  Spoiler alert: as you start to get near the end, you learn that Jesus and his early followers (except maybe Paul) promoted the idea that God is love and the only correct response to that is to love other people.  Of course, a religious founder, deity or not, can’t control what his/her followers will do.  Christianity quickly became judgmental.  “I’m going to Heaven and you’re not!”  Laughter all around!  In my life I’ve been the recipient of calculating Christians more than once.

Calculating Christians are those who, like ein U-boat Kapitän, try to figure out the best way to do the most damage to those they don’t like.  They will destroy your career—torpedoes away!—and then get on their knees to thank their vengeful god for sinking a satanic vessel.  And all the lives of Christians onboard are counted as collateral damage.  God’s good at sorting things out.  Laughter all around!  I’ve also known “Christians” who will target a family member when he’s down, and stressed out to the max, only to tell him he’s going to Hell and they’re just fine with it.  Laughter all around!  They do this without ever asking about the two seriously ill people in a family of three, or how you’re doing with that therapy you’ve had to start.  Jesus would do no less than kick a confessing sinner when he’s down.

There’s a reason Christianity is developing a bad name.  With the first compassionate Pope in centuries we find doctrinaire Catholics condemning his compassion.  Among the Fundamentalist camp we find those who would gladly die for the most hate-filled politician ever elected on these shores.  Calculating the end of the world is, after all, a tiring activity.  No matter that you’re wrong (you never consider the possibility and you never, ever try to weigh the facts), you calculate how to blow it up for everybody.  Laughter all around!  The only thing that keeps me sane, I believe, is knowing that many actual Christians out there know that such actions are taking God’s name in vain.  And that, they know, is against the commandments so prominently placed on courthouse lawns.

Pietro Perugino, The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John, Saint Jerome, and Saint Mary Magdalene [middle panel], public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rocks and Philosophs

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Porphyry is, apart from being a cool word, a kind of purplish stone that was prized for statue-making in antiquity.  It is also the name a Syrian philosopher gave himself in the third century of the Common Era.  Now, if you read widely about antiquity, as some of us have done, you’ll encounter the name Porphyry from time to time, but those of us who focused on older materials don’t pay him much mind.  I was reading about Porphyry recently, however, and did a little poking around to discover that he’d written a book called, in translation, Against the Christians.  Some historians speculate that Porphyry may have once been a Christian himself, but whether or not that’s true, he developed an antipathy to the sect.  I was curious about what his beef may have been only to discover that this book is lost.

Now lost works in antiquity are the rule rather than the exception.  Literacy may not have been widespread, but those who could write did write, and often prolifically.  Human history was very well documented.  But tonnes of it went missing.  Wars have been part of that history and wars are notorious for destroying written records.  Also, much writing was on perishable materials that, well, perished.  That wasn’t the case with Against the Christians, however.  Porphyry’s work was purposefully destroyed.  By this point Christianity had taken over the Roman Empire.  Rather than accepting the challenge of a philosopher, officials censored and destroyed his work.  Ironically, all that survives are quotes from books of theologians who were trying to refute him.

This made me reflect on the book bans that are currently all the rage among some “Christian” politicians.  Such rearguard actions belie the confidence that imperial religions showcase.  A religion that’s afraid others might see the holes raises many questions, does it not?  It seems to come down to the idea that nothing has changed in two millennia, even though Jesus didn’t have a cellphone—not even one of those old flip-open kind—and much of what we know of nature was still many centuries in the future.  The fact is that we only try to silence those who disagree when we fear them.  Book bans pretend that they can hold the hands of the clock still and that all will remain as it was decades ago.  Learning, however, is a genie let out of the bottle.  Back in Porphyry’s day powerful bishops and emperors ordered his book banned and destroyed.  And we are all the poorer for it.

Seminary Daze

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It’s surprisingly easy to throw away an expensive career that once held much promise.  It really involves just a two steps: spend thousands of dollars earning a Ph.D. in religious studies, and take a job in a seminary.  It’s disheartening to watch colleagues going through this as seminaries contract, then close.  I know how it feels personally.  You’re suddenly aware that your years and years of training have made you practically unemployable.  If you do find a job it won’t pay as well.  Chances are you won’t enjoy it either.  Having taught in a seminary will mark you in academia as one of those “uncritical believers,” and, well, nobody wants to touch one of those.  While I would’ve taken a regular seminary job after my doctorate, my wife remembers me lying awake at night asking “Am I cutting off my career if I take a job at Nashotah House?”  The answer: yes.

I’ve been watching colleagues have their worlds torn apart as seminaries try to figure out how to stay open when institutional churches are dying.  Megachurches don’t require a seminary degree to run—natural grifters do it quite well with no advanced education, thank you.  But mainstream churches have been losing members, and therefore financial support, for years now.  And seminaries supply a commodity no longer in demand.  This may have been a trend when I started out back in the eighties.  If so, nobody told me about it.  I walked into this career naive and came out jaded and cynical.  My motives were to help other people.  It’s getting harder and harder to find jobs where you do that any more.  At least while being able to keep body and soul together.

Thing is, it takes years to earn the degrees you need to teach in a seminary. You have to think ahead.  When I started out, trends suggested a huge glut of jobs in the teaching market.  That never panned out, of course, as human predictions seldom do, and the decline in jobs has been pretty steady over the past thirty years.  Back in the eighties seminaries were doing okay.  Growing, even.  I do hope it didn’t have anything to do with me, but I hit this surprisingly fragile market at just the wrong time.  After having been overboard without a life preserver myself, it pains me to watch colleagues facing the same fate themselves.  Religion hasn’t disappeared—it’s simply taken on new forms.  Those forms don’t require seminary. Those of us who followed the rules on how to teach religious studies, however, somehow find ourselves in disposable careers.

Lilith Be Gone?

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One of those questions it isn’t politic to ask is “Are you Jewish?”  I get asked that once in a while but mainly by Jews.  I’m not Jewish but some people tell me I look like I am.  In any case, as a Bible editor at an academic press, the question of someone’s ethnic affiliation sometimes comes up.  The dilemma is that we can’t ask that.  And it is very difficult to know the answer if someone doesn’t tell you.  The reason that this is on my mind is that I recently watched John R. Leonetti’s horror film Lullaby.  The film was one of at least two that came out with that title in 2022.  And since it deals with Jewish themes, that question naturally comes to mind: is the director, or are the writers, Jewish?  I suspect, from the way all of this plays out that the answer is “No.” Or, if they are, they didn’t do their homework.

Lullaby is a Lilith story.  A young couple—she’s Jewish, he’s a convert for her—have a newborn.  The woman’s sister has sent to them, among other things, a book in Hebrew that contains a Lilith-summoning lullaby.  Lilith shows up and steals the baby but a tattooed rabbi gives the husband some Jewish rituals to combat Lilith.  Apart from the spurious etymology of “lullaby” as “Lilith be gone,” this rabbi doesn’t seem convincing.  His Hebrew handwriting looks as if he might be a first-year student.  And keeping a menorah lit all night is supposed to keep a demon at bay?  Not only that, his assistant can be bribed to regain the cursed book.  All of this begins to look like a gentile trying to direct a horror film in a religion he doesn’t understand.

Religion and horror go naturally together.  I’ve written several posts about Jewish horror that really works.  In those instances, it’s clear that the writers and directors understand what Judaism is.  The solution here is that the convert husband must “really believe” in order to conquer Lilith.  The rabbi tells him to have faith.  The thing is, Judaism isn’t a religion based on having faith—Christianity is.  And taking that aspect of Christianity and using it to try to make other religions faith-based is one of the most common mistakes of those who don’t study religions professionally.  Horror works well with religion when those doing it actually understand the religion they’re trying to portray.  When they don’t, it can end up looking like appropriation of the worst kind.  I watched the movie because it was about Lilith.  What I found was a basic misunderstanding of how religions work.

The Point of It

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It’s not difficult to feel overwhelmed by the scope of the problem.  Race was a construct developed to oppress.  The intention was to keep those of non-European, especially non-northern European, ancestry in servitude.  The rationale for doing so was part capitalistic, but also largely religious.  Convinced that Jesus was white, and that the “New Israel” had passed to Christianized Europe, it didn’t take much theological maneuvering to get to the point that others can be—in that mindset, should be—brought into line.  And since this religion comes with a built-in body-soul dualism, it’s not difficult to claim you’re trying to save a soul by destroying a body.  That way you can still sleep at night while doing something everyone knows is wrong.

Martin Luther King, Jr. stood up to such ideas.  His understanding of Christianity was more in alignment with what Jesus said and that threatened those in the establishment who found any challenge to profit heresy.  There can be no denying that racism is one more attempt to keep wealth centralized.  It’s something not to share, which, strangely enough, is presented as gospel.  There are many people still trying to correct this wrong.  It is wrong when a religion distorts its central message in order to exploit marginalized people.  The key word here is “people.”  Black people are people.  Their lives matter and every time this is said others try to counter with “all lives matter, ” a platitude that misses the point.  We need Martin Luther King Day.  We need to be reminded that we’re still not where we should be.  We’re still held in thrall to a capitalism that rewards those who use oppression to enrich themselves.

I was born in the civil rights era.  I suppose I mistakenly reasoned that others had learned the message as well.  All people deserve fair treatment.  Today we remember a Black leader, but we still have the blood of many oppressed peoples on our hands.  Those who first came to live in this country, whose land was stolen in the name of religion.  Those whose gender and sex put them at threat by those who believe control of resources is more important that care of fellow human beings.  It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but in King’s words, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”   If we believe that, and if we can act on it, there remains the possibility that we might actually achieve the reason we set this day aside to reflect.

Photo by Katt Yukawa on Unsplash

Souls, All

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What is a soul?  Can you lose your job for believing in one?  Well, maybe not lose your job, but be placed on paid leave.  Yesterday’s New York Times ran a story about Google engineer Blake Lemoine being put on leave after claiming a soul for the company’s artificial intelligence language model.  Isn’t that what artificial intelligence is all about?  We’ve become so materialistic that we no longer believe in souls, and when we create life we don’t expect it to have one, right Dr. Frankenstein?  One of the sure signs that we are alive is our sensing of the many qualia of biological existence.  We understand that we’re born, we’re biological, and that we will die.  We also sense that there’s something beyond all this, our self, or mind, or psyche, call it what you will.

In our minds the soul has become entrenched with the Christianity that provides the backdrop to our somewhat embarrassing history of repression of those who are different.  How do we redeem one without having to be shackled to the other?  And once we do, can we declare why AI doesn’t have a soul while biological beings do?  Or will we insist that it is solely human?  In this odd world that’s evolved, we view animals as innocent because they can’t know what they’re doing.  Historically there have been animals put to trial.  That’s an aberration, however, from our usual ways of thinking.  We don’t know what a soul is.  We’re not even sure there is such a thing.  To suggest a machine might have one, however, is taboo.  Would we trust a soul made by humans?

Skepticism is good and healthy.  So is having an open mind.  We’ve been a polarized people for a long time.  If it’s not politics it’s elites versus uneducated, materialists versus those who think there might be something more, self-assured versus those who question everything.  The path of learning should keep us humble.  We should be open to the possibilities.  There’s no way to measure the immaterial since all our tools are material.  Even psychology, which utilizes categories to help us understand neurodiversity, often finds chemical solutions to the most cerebral of problems.  Perhaps overthinking is an issue—it can certainly get you into trouble.  Believing in souls can put you in a place of ridicule or suspicion.  Does AI have a soul?  Does a soul emerge from biological existence, whenever a sufficient number of neurons gathers in one place?  Is it the fabric of the universe from which we borrow a little?  We have some soul-searching to do.

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

Behind Science

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Science and religion have been sparring partners for a few centuries now, and I believe this is a generational conflict.  The child, science, arguing with the parent, religion.  You see, religion is all about worldview.  As secular as secular scientists declare themselves to be, their worldview was likely formed by their religious heritage.  Religion can’t be teased out of culture.  Here in the western world modern science was born in a fully Christianized cultural landscape.  That’s not to say that Judaism and Islam didn’t contribute, but European culture was based on some basic Christian ideals.  Creatio ex nihilo, for one—creation out of nothing.  Another aspect is that Occam’s razor accounts for the world we see.  This was a philosophical concept born of the Christian worldview.  And the list could go on and on.

Scientists, focusing on their specializations, generally don’t sit back to think about the origins of their basic cultural presuppositions.  Many of them came directly from their religion.  Ever since college I’ve tended to think back to presuppositions, and question them.  How do we know we know?  Epistemology is as useful as it is disturbing.  And if we discover that the basis for what we know was locked into a worldview we can no longer accept, what does that say about the underpinning method?  Our science is based on the idea that the world is rational because a benevolent deity wouldn’t make it absurd.  Would he?  And why are we still referring to the deity as a male?  Indeed, we still think of him as a human.

It’s difficult to get beyond our basic cultural propositions.  Religions such a Buddhism promote the idea that change is the only constant, yet the science in countries of the east is borrowed from the concepts of the west and its monotheistic sub-structure.  We tend to think that if humans can’t sense it, and quantify it, it doesn’t exist.  So it is that many scientists become atheists, but without perhaps questioning the cultural presuppositions that have led to the scientific outlook in the first place.  Some will go as far as saying philosophy is a waste of time when philosophy is the framework of all rational thinking.  And that’s not to forget that there’s emotional thinking as well.  The big picture is complicated by philosophers writing in lingo that the rest of us can’t understand.  And even they have presuppositions.  Maybe it’s time for me to go back to school and examine them again.

Rel Stud 101

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There’s no such thing.  Religious studies, that is.  I first heard this a decade ago while working as religious studies editor for Routledge.  My supervisor stared at me with such knowing eyes that all I could do was nod.  I figured that since I’d spent my entire career in religious studies I’d probably know if it existed or not.  I’ve heard the statement a number of times since then and have come to realize that what it means is this: unlike other academic disciplines, religious studies has no single, central topic of study and no agreed upon methodology.  It consists of scholars trained in a variety of fields looking at different aspects of religion from different perspectives.  There’s even little agreement as to what religion is.

Religious studies is an outgrowth of biblical studies.  Studying the Bible was a long preoccupation with Jews and Christians.  Long before there were universities there were places you could study the Good Book in depth.  When enough time had passed history of Christianity and theology were added to the mix.  It was only fairly recently, about the late nineteenth century, that scholars of Christianity began to wonder about other religions.  The earliest religious studies were Christians studying other faiths.  Now, of course, religious studies exists in a number of universities and colleges (but by no means all of them) and nobody really stops to think how this came to be.  Students are very interested in religions, but as a major it offers few career options (yours truly is a case in point).  It’s a discipline under duress.  Pretty stressful for something that just doesn’t exist, isn’t it?

My suspicion is that many who entered this limbo started out as I did—a curious Christian wanting to know as much as possible about what I’d been taught.  You learn to think along the way, with somewhat predictable results.  Sometimes it takes years to dawn on you.  In other words, I doubt that many entered this field consciously thinking “I want to learn religious studies as a discipline.”  Like a pitcher plant, however, once you fly in there’s no way out.  Instead we have to find tools to study this strange and slippery environment into which we’ve fallen.  Otherwise we’ll simply be digested.  I made it through three degree programs in this field without ever encountering this idea that apparently has been long known.  Numbers are declining, which makes those of us in here how long our odyssey might continue.  If it even exists.

Shifting the Narrative

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Wide ranging.  That’s a phrase that comes to mind to describe Vine Deloria Jr.’s book God Is Red: A Native View of Religion.  Another phrase is very important.  I know this book has been available for several years and it’s been on my reading list for many of those.  What is it about?  Some books are just difficult to summarize, but the basic answer is that it’s an American Indian view of how Christianity has distorted the world.  An accomplished academic, student of law, and activist, Deloria knew of what he wrote.  His book explains articulately the view of Christianity from the outside and what a religion that reverences the earth really looks like.  What makes the book so fascinating is that Deloria had theological training and could engage with the Christian worldview over a considerable range of topics.

Controlling the narrative is of primary importance and the fact is white men have controlled the narrative and normalized one view of history, science, and our place in the universe.  First nations peoples had, and some still have, a radically different outlook.  Deloria makes the crucial point that even our science developed out of our religion.  That science, in turn, supports the worldview that created it.  It is possible to look at things differently.  In fact, for much of human history those alternate views were predominant.  The triumphalist view of Christianity claims it’s successful because it’s right.  A native view takes a longer view, saying “we’ll see.”

Very concerned about the state of the planet brought on by the Christian/capitalist partnership, Deloria advocated for not only Indian rights, but environmental protection s well.  Not only is the environment central to Indian spirituality, the concept of sacred spaces is very real.  Many of us not raised with indigenous points of view have experienced this as well.  Some places are special to us.  We hesitate, because of that very science created by the Christian worldview and its view of God, to call such spaces objectively sacred.  Even the “objectively” part is determined by a Christian perspective.  Deloria ends up by asking whether this form of religion has improved the state of the world.  There’s no doubt that some of Christianity’s achievements have lessened human suffering.  It is also true that science has achieved great things.  If I understand correctly, Deloria isn’t disputing this.  His point of view is much more essential.  Is this the only way to live on this planet?  From the indigenous point of view, which is far more important that we want to admit, the question is—is this the only way to see it?

Altared States

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Religion Dispatches is a great website.  I used to write for them from time to time, and according to Google they were probably the most read of my internet publications.  I’m not sure what happened, but a few years back time simply evaporated.  These days literally the only time I have to get things done is on the weekend.  A simple thing like taking the car in for inspection takes advance planning and can throw off my entire schedule for the week.  I have difficulty finding time to write for Horror Homeroom these days.  That’s a long preamble to saying I saw an interesting article by Hollis Phelps on Religion Dispatches titled “Hulu’s ‘Hamilton’s  Pharmacopeia’ Shows that We Can No Longer Ignore Connections between Religion and Drugs.”  There have been a number of suggestions that drugs and religion are related over the years, but our “Christian” culture has declared the former taboo.  (Except wine, of course, and even that’s suspect.)

Photo by Alex Kondratiev on Unsplash

This article has me thinking about chemistry.  Not that I ever did very well in it.  Still, I recall hearing one high school teacher or another saying life is organic chemistry.  I’ve come do doubt the standard definition of life as I’ve aged, but there’s no doubt chemical reactions are a large part of the somatic existence we all experience.  Eating leads to chemical reactions to break down the chemicals in food.  Some of them are good for us, others are not.  Some (but not all) of the really dangerous ones we outlaw.  Drugs are a good example.  I don’t use drugs, but I’m aware that many religions do.  I don’t doubt the altered states of consciousness that reportedly arise from the responsible use of such drugs.

I haven’t watched “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia” (I have no time).  Still, I have to wonder why Christianity, in particular, came to declare its own war on drugs.  A large part of it, I expect, was the belief in the imminent return of Jesus.  You didn’t want to be caught unawares.  Then there was also the sad fact of abuse of controlled substances.  Alcoholism and the opioid crisis are reminders that these unfortunate aspects can still cause serious problems.  At the same time, research is demonstrating that religious experience and the use of some drugs are related.  American Indians, at least some of the tribes, found religious significance in peyote.  There are present-day religions devoted to cannabis.  Does it all just come down to chemistry?  I don’t know, but if there’s a drug to increase the number of hours in a day that might be a real revelation.