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Prayer isn’t stopping the violence

Jesus facepalmAn acerbic piece in Maclean’s Magazine from June had the title “America’s mass delusion.” The subtitle read, “Surprisingly, the strategy of praying to God is not stopping the mass shootings in the U.S.” That piece was recirculated when the news of the latest and largest mass shooting in the USA broke. Fifty nine (so far) people were killed and more than 500 wounded by one homegrown American terrorist with an assault rifle. A terrorist who, police found later, had more than 20 rifles in his hotel room (some reports say “more than 10”). He owned more than 40; 10 of them reportedly assault weapons – a weapon designed solely for mass killing of people.

Prayer didn’t stop him getting into a hotel with all those rifles. Prayer didn’t stop him owning and firing military-grade automatic weapons into the crowd. (And why aren’t the media telling us his religion, when they gleefully announce the religion of every non-Christian who so much as farts in a subway?)

Despite the flurry of “prayers and thoughts” for the victims that erupted when the news of the massacre broke, not a single one of those shot came back from the dead. Even the prayers of that uber-fundamentalist, VP Mike Pence, failed to move his deity to act on anyone’s behalf and you’d think he had pull with his god. So who are they praying to, if no one is listening?

Curiously, no one seems to be praying to have the NRA held accountable for its pro-gun lobbying that led directly to this and every other mass shooting in the USA. No one seems to be praying for stronger gun control legislation, for background checks or to ban assault rifles. Americans are too obsessed with their guns to pray for anything that resembles sanity about gun ownership.

Meanwhile, an NRA-backed bill to permit silencers on personal weapons is being presented. The conscienceless-GOP is pushing ahead with it despite the news of this latest shooting – feckless minions of their NRA masters. Is anyone praying that won’t pass? Why isn’t anyone praying the GOP will disappear so the country can find some peace?

Or Bill O’Reilly? The neo-fascist former Fox host apparently claimed that the shooting in Las Vegas is “…the price of freedom” for America’s sociopathic lack of gun control laws. Such an NRA shill should not go unprayed for… pray he vanishes, just like the NRA does.

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Moses Revealed

Moses with hornsHe was a murderer, a sorcerer, a slave owner. He betrayed his adopted family and led a rebellion against them. He was a charismatic firebrand, an oracle, and a misfit. He fluctuated between fits of rage and periods of meekness. He led his forces to commit what today we’d call war crimes and acts of genocide. He gave out laws and yet he ruled autocratically.

He was disfigured and wore a mask to cover his face for the latter part of his life. He brought down biological warfare on his enemies, and battled among them in a duel of magic. He had dissenters among his own people buried alive or hacked down by his armed supporters. He disappeared from history for 40 years, his whereabouts unknown, only to reappear in time to die within sight of his life’s goal.

We never even learn his father and mother’s names, nor those of his older brother and sister, until long after we’ve been told about his birth and abandonment. Yet we were earlier led to believe he was the firstborn. It’s a life filled with opposites and contradictions.

Charlton HestonPretty interesting character, Moses. Not at all like the heroic, troubled character played by Charlton Heston in the 1956 movie, itself a dramatic whitewash of the actual tale.

Full of contradictions, Moses’s story is replete with drama and passion, tragedy and pathos, murder, divine intervention and magic. And this troubled, driven man changed the world.

Or so the story goes.

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The Myth of Persecution

Myth of PersecutionI just finished reading The Myth of Persecution by theology professor Candida Moss (Harper One, New York, 2013). I picked it up because of my general interest in theology, but also my more specific interest in early church history. I didn’t realize when I started to read it that this book was at the centre of a huge kerfuffle in the Christian community over its message and its accuracy.

In short, Ms. Moss argues that while the early Christians in the first four centuries were often the victims of violence, and even some persecution, they were not the targets of systematic persecution by the Romans for the duration. In fact, the periods of legislated persecution were short and intermittent. She tries to distinguish between persecution and prosecution, and identifies situations where Christians were among the groups, but not singled out, targeted for oppression by various Roman emperors and their edicts.

Further, she argues that the majority of stories of martyrs from this time are fictional, not historic records, created to serve a political or social purpose. She deconstructs some of them, looking at historical records, literary records and internal logic.

And, she concludes, the modern cult of persecution – such as the faux ‘War on Christianity’ promoted by several right wing commentators recently – is based on both a flawed view of history and a dangerous perspective on world events that prevents dialogue and compromise between people. That perspective, Moss writes, is based on the defensive and dangerous notion of persecution and martyrdom. In a film review posted on The Daily Beast, Moss called modern Christian belief in its own persecution a “paranoid fantasy.”

With which I pretty much agree. While not by any means a scholar, what I have read over the years about the creation of the early church, the battles between sects and cults to frame orthodoxy, the arbitrary way the canon was cobbled together, the exclusion of the Gnostics, and the whole business of pseudepigrapha and fake documents supports her contention that the early stories of martyrs were part of this process.

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Judas, a Biography

Judas kissLong before Darth Vader, long before Lord Voldemort, long before Stephen Harper, Judas Iscariot reigned as the supreme icon of evil in Western mythology. Judas betrayed God. How much worse can you get?*

For 2,000 years we’ve used the term Judas to refer to anyone who betrayed anything, any cause, any belief, any friendship. Yet, like all the icons of evil that came before, and who have followed, Judas holds a fascination for us that transcends his actions.

Dante consigns him to the ninth circle of hell, one of three traitors forever chewed in the mouths of the three-headed Satan. Yet Brutus, Cassius (the other two sinners in Dante’s story), Benedict Arnold, and Vidkun Quisling never achieved such attention or notoriety. They were all were members of their respective inner circles; all betrayed their friends,their beliefs and their leaders. But they are paltry shadows beside Judas.

Perhaps that’s in part because none of the others are religious symbols, and religion far too often brings out the extreme in people.

Susan Gubar’s 2009 book, Judas, a Biography, which I’ve been reading of late, is a fascinating look at the relationship the West has had with Judas these two millennia, and how he appears in art, music, literature, religion and popular culture. Judas has become a reflection of a lot about ourselves: our fears, our religion, our mythologies, our politics, our behaviour.

Many of us have had the deeply disturbing experience of betrayal in our own lives; someone trusted, a friend or lover, someone we cared deeply about who betrayed us. And when that betrayal is over something crass like money or political favour, it cuts us deeply. We never forget, never forgive our own personal Judas.**

But who was Judas that we still use his name for such acts?

The Gospels are spare in their actual history of Judas, even in his final acts. But a whole body of legend has grown up around the man, his family, his parents, his childhood and, of course, his afterlife. All of which, as Gubar points out, is merely imagined; unsubstantiated by any historical documentation, but become part of the mythology. All of it meant to polish his evil sheen, rather than redeem him.

What’s to redeem, you might ask? Well, nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

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One Small Step, One Long Whine

What's next?The Supreme Court of the United States made a landmark decision last week that states cannot constitutionally (i.e. legally) ban same-sex marriage. The bottom line: under the Constitution, every citizen is entitled to the same rights and freedoms regardless of sexual orientation. Most of the world celebrated with the USA over this decision (the US thus became the 21st nation to legalize same-sex marriage).

Homophobia – which like racism, intolerance and Islamophobia, are all cornerstones of the uber-right platforms – is not legal. Equality is. And that’s what the decision was all about.

While the majority of states had already legalized same-sex marriage, 13 of the “fly-over” states still behaved in a medieval way by banning it. Now they can’t because it violates that most precious document of American governance, the Constitution. And to oppose the Constitution is nothing less than treason.

One would hope that in a civilized world, after all the arguments, the legal challenges and the debates, once the matter was settled, that everyone would simply accept the decision like mature adults, pull up their ‘big-boy’ pants and move on. And most have.

Everyone, that is, except for the Tea Party Republicans and their bigoted, homophobic followers. Instead they have whined and moaned like drama queens ever since the court’s decision was made public.

The Republican Party’s presidential candidates uniformly condemned a Supreme Court’s ruling that enshrined same-sex marriage as a nationwide reality on Friday.
Some struck a more alarmist tone than others.

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