A Declaration of Co-Dependence

Whatever it is, I can make it better. You can count on me. I will always be there for you anywhere, anytime, and sacrifice my time, effort, money, and dignity to maintain you in your delusions. I will even come to believe some of them as if they were my own. I will do and be whatever you need me to do and be, because you have that way of making me feel needed, wanted, and sometimes even loved. I will be your rock and your strength, because you need the stability that I bring to your life. I know how to be and do all these things because I have been practicing them since I was a child. I have been trained by my family of origin and by my culture to give my all for someone. And that someone is you. You have only to be yourself, and to do what comes naturally to you. I will mold my identity to yours because you are now the source of my identity. You give me a way to justify my existence, a reason to be, and a way of being. The meaning in my life comes from serving you.

Editor's Note: Addicts often need a co-dependent to aid them in maintaining themselves in their habit. I first encountered the phenomenon as a Stephen Minister. This is my attempt to "get inside" the co-dependent mindset. Co-dependence is self-sacrificing in a way that damages both the co-dependent and the primary addict. It is also subtly idolatrous.

Of Pedophiles and Suicide Bombers

Catholicism and Islam in Crisis

As I write this an ad hoc council of American Catholic Bishops has just met in Dallas, TX, and passed a so-called zero-tolerance resolution concerning priests that have sexually abused their parishoners. By zero-tolerance the Bishops mean that sexual abusers may under some circumstances remain priests, but may no longer have contact with parishoners.

Excuse me, but that kind of bullshit is a lot more American than it is Catholic, or even Christian. It smacks of the recent Clintonian "continental drift" in American morality that seems almost automatically to excuse a man for not keeping his word. The vow of celibacy is a vow made to God as part of assuming a holy office, which is to be discharged in God's Name. The breaking of the vow is the breaking of the office. In particular, he who breaks his vow of celibacy in order to have sex with a minor rapes the child physically (a crime against the child's body which the State must prosecute), emotionally (a crime against the child's relationship with him/her self and with others), and spiritually (a crime against the child's relationship with God - which is ultimately a crime against God).

If I were hearing a priest's confession, and he were to admit that he had sexually abused a child during his priesthood, I would assign him this penance: He must go to the civil authorities and confess his crimes. Under appropriate supervision he must confess each crime before each victim together with the victim's parents. At his trial, he must confess his crimes before the court and demand the maximum penalty the law permits. In prison, he must continue as a priest to serve the spiritual needs of his fellow inmates. But when he leaves prison, he must leave the priesthood.

Now this is not to say that I agree with the Catholic position on priestly celibacy, or the non-ordination of women. But the rules are the rules. You either play by them or change them, but you don't subvert them and cover it up. It is the "community of subversion" that has formed within the American Catholic church that has brought on the current crisis. And it is deserved. You can save souls in a lot of ways, but as far as I know, you can't do it with your penis.

The crisis in Islam is no less shameful. There are Palestinian publications (on-line and off) that announce the death of a young man in a suicidal attack against random civilians (who almost always include children) as if it were a marriage — he has been "wedded to the dark-eyed" they say, referring to dark-eyed houris (ever young, ever virginal beings who will attend to the every need of one who arrives in heaven). More than one commentator has described the sales pitch used to recruit suicide bombers with the words " Heaven as whorehouse," which miss the mark, but not so widely that they should be ignored. The real whoredom here is that some people who call themselves Islamic clerics countenance the slaying of children, which from my reading of the Qur'an, is expressly forbidden.

And yet these clerical abusers of children are open about it, and have followings, and recruit more people to do more of the same. I make the comparison with sexually abusing priests, because if having sex with a child is abusing that child, so is killing the child, even if it is done through an intermediary. The glorification of suicide bombers is a kind of bullshit that is more tribal than Islamic. In particular, it is a self-justification by focusing on one's enemies' atrocities (both real and imagined) without adhering to the Moral Law as a whole. As far as I know, you can't save souls with your bomb, either.

I invite comments from anyone, especially Catholics and Muslims.

God's Reasons Reconsidered

A Response to Professor George

June 2002

Introduction

In "God's Reasons" my friend and former classmate, Robert George, argues that abortion is intrinsically evil and a violation of human rights, and that therefore any morally legitimate government must severely restrict the practice. Since only one VCBC reader has stepped forward to challenge Professor George, and chose to raise new points (about which more later) rather than to challenge his points directly, I feel compelled to try. I will first try to strengthen those of his arguments with which I agree. Then I will attempt reasonably to refute those points with which I disagree.

I must state that I am not trained in jurisprudence or political theory, as is Prof. George, nor am I as knowledgeable in theology. I therefore cannot argue as an attorney on this topic, but can only volunteer my thoughts as if I were a juror evaluating to Prof. George's statements.

I must also thank Prof. George for a sustained and remarkable work of civility and citizenship, as embodied in his papers and books, in which he states with care, skill, and above all reasonableness, his conservative positions on many social issues. I had thought that moral philosophers had gone AWOL in the twentieth century until I began reading Robert George. The United States would be a better country if liberals were as civil toward conservatives as he is toward liberals. I thank him for making "God's Reasons" available on this web site, and encourage everyone to read his new book, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, in which yet another revision of "God's Reasons" appears.

Nolo Contendere

To begin, I would like to emphasize a point on which I think Robert and I agree, even if I stray beyond what Rawls would call "public reasons" — the value of a single human life. We are each made in the image of God, according to Genesis. This statement is at first enigmatic, given that we are forbidden by the Second Commandment to make and worship any images of God at all. Its meaning however, is given in the Church's teaching about the incarnation of God as Christ. The Nicene Creed states that Jesus is simultaneously truly human and truly God — that Jesus the man is nevertheless "of one substance" with God. Therefore, it seems to me, being made in the image of God means human nature is such that God can become human and still be God.

Now I know of only one mundane relationship that is anything like this. In mathematics, an infinite set can be mapped in a one-to-one relationship onto a smaller subset of itself, but only if that subset is also infinite. You can map the whole numbers (going from 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on to infinity) onto the even numbers (going from 2, 4, 6 to infinity) by multiplying each whole number by 2. Now between any two numbers you choose, there are half as many even numbers as there are whole numbers, so the set of even numbers is half as big as the set of whole numbers. Notice also that every even number is also a whole number, but not the other way around — the even numbers are a subset (are contained in) the whole numbers. And yet for each and every whole number there is a unique even number. This doesn't work for finite sets. The set consisting of 1,2,3 (and no other numbers) can be multiplied by 2 to get the set 2,4,6 (and no other numbers) but the set {1,2,3} does not contain the set {2,4,6}, even though they have the same number of elements. [The notation for an infinite set is {1,2,3,...} where the ellipsis means ad infinitum, "and so on to infinity."]

In other words, the Incarnation of God in Jesus implies to me that being made in the image of God means being made as an infinitely lesser infinity than God, but an infinity nonetheless. Which means to me that the value of each single human life is infinite. The Commandment "Thou shalt not kill," bears more weight than any of us can imagine.

On another point, I must agree that a fertilized human ovum is obviously a new unique individual member of the species homo sapiens sapiens. That is, a fertilized human egg is a biological human being by definition. [More specifically, since a fertilized human egg can give rise to multuplets, it is at least one biological human being.] Historically, there has arisen a distinction between human beings and persons — a distinction that continues to be abused — but while one may reasonably debate whether a fertilized human ovum is a person, one may not reasonably deny that it is a human being.

But whether a fertilized human ovum is a person or not, it is certainly trying with all its might to become a person, and once implanted in a womb, it will do so absent accident, disease, or human intervention. The likelihood that it might already be a person seems low when one contemplates a clump of a few cells, but that likelihood grows as rapidly as the clump. Now, if you think there is some possibility that an innocent person might be standing behind a curtain, it would be morally wrong - evil - for you to shoot a bullet into that curtain. [Our classmate Tim Romano told me of this example in 1977.] By the same token, I agree with Robert George, and with His Holiness John Paul II, that abortion is evil. Moreover, I agree that it is intrinsically evil in that the goal of getting an abortion (other than abortions done to prevent permanent and substantial injury to a pregnant woman) is to kill a human being before it can become undeniably a person, with a moral claim on its parents and its society.

I must also point out that the US Declaration of Independence states that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being life...." The right to live was acknowledged by the founders of our government to be part of human nature itself, and therefore to exist independently of and prior to any government whatsoever. In particular, it exists prior to and independently of any vote on the question. [A majority vote to deny unjustly a person's right to live is wrong, no matter how many people believe otherwise. Though the majority rules in a democracy, the majority is not infallible. Consider that a democratic majority condemned Socrates, and that a democratic majority passed the Jim Crow laws that later showed the Nazis how to separate a minority from the general population.] In other words, the right to life is acknowledged (not granted) in the foundational documents of the Government of the United States. The government of the United States was instituted to secure that right, among others. There is nothing comparable in the founding documents that might be used to establish a right to abortion.

Thus far I can go with Robert George: Abortion is evil, and unlike the right to life, abortion is not a right, but a wrong. But, before we make public policy, we must try to understand the necessity and possible consequences of that policy.

On Becoming a Person

The objections to banning abortion are all driven by anxiety over the status of women. Abortion is seen as underpinning a woman's right to determine the course of her own life, and more intimately, what happens to her own body. Mary Anne Mills in "One Woman's Reasons," argues that while she would not get an abortion, it is of crucial importance to her that abstaining from it is her choice, rather than someone else's. In particular, she objects to the idea of someone who cannot become pregnant, such as a man (or presumably a postmenopausal woman), using the coercive power of the State to dictate what her choice must be.

Elsewhere in The Clash of Orthodoxies, Robert George argues that our bodies are not objects that are owned by our disembodied minds (or souls) but are in this life inextricably bound up with our minds as indissoluble single units — our selves. Robert makes this argument as part of his demonstration that euthanasia is intrinsically evil (with which I also agree) and I accept it here. Thus, dictating to a woman what access she shall or shall not have to abortion diminishes her power of determining what will happen not just to her body, but to her self. It impinges upon her power of self-determination.

Self-determination is recognized in the United States as a right (although the founding documents recognize it more as a right of communities than of individuals), at least in so far as one's actions do not conflict with the rights of any other person. The argument to ban abortion hinges on the idea that an unborn human being is a person at every stage of development, and that its right to live always trumps a pregnant woman's right to self-determination. Thus, when we even begin to consider the status of women, we are immediately turned to the question of whether an unborn human being is a person, and when it becomes one.

Robert argues that a fertilized human ovum develops continuously into an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a toddler, a teenager, an adult, and so on to a senior citizen without any change in nature. That the development is continuous (smoothly proceeding, uninterrupted) is beyond question. However, the phrase "without a change in nature" bears some scrutiny. Just as I used an example from mathematics to support one of Robert's points, I would like to use one from physics to challenge this one.

An isolated water molecule cannot freeze, melt, or evaporate. It has no surface tension. It cannot dissolve anything. Nor can a few water molecules. And yet, when we assemble enough water molecules together, they can do all these things and have all these properties. There is no change in nature in terms of the composition of the water molecules — but the mere aggregation of a sufficient number of water molecules suffices for for bulk properties and behaviors to emerge that are discontinuously different from the properties and behaviors of the constituents, even though the aggregation itself may be a continuous process. It is quite legitimate to say that the nature of a water droplet is different from the nature of a single water molecule, even though the water droplet is composed exclusively of water molecules. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is true for a trivially simple system like a water droplet, and much more profoundly true for living things. In particular, a fertilized human ovum has few of the properties and behaviors of a human infant other than the human genome. Moreover, a human infant lacks certain properties of a single fertilized human ovum — it will not become twins if you separate it into two halves, for example. In other words, the nature of an unborn human being changes discontinuously as it develops. This is what makes it reasonable to speak of "stages" of development.

Therefore, Robert's intuition that personhood is an inherent property of a human being from the moment of fertilization is precisely that — an intuition. In the field of public reason, it is open to challenge, and I challenge it here. I am not asserting that the person comes from without to dwell in the developing embryo. Rather I assert that the embryo, executing its self-directing genetic instructions, develops the capacity for personhood as an integral part of itself, and indeed becomes a person, a dynamic unity of body, mind and spirit, as Robert so eloquently states.

Thus, I believe there is some span of time in which the right of the developing embryo to live does not automatically trump a woman's right of self-determination. I don't know how long that time is. Hence, we are back at the analogy between getting an abortion and shooting into a curtain when one cannot insure that there is no person behind it. The act is manifestly evil, and the State can point to a dead body. But, just as we cannot check behind the curtain before the shot to insure that no person is behind it, neither can the State determine beyond reasonable doubt that the body indeed was a person prior to its death by violence. The evidence does not support an equivalence between early abortion and murder.

And yet, in our safety conscious culture, we shut down a production line, or recall a product if we find that there is a chance that some person might be harmed. Permitting abortion is an exception to this ethic. In abortion, we take the chance that we are killing an unborn person, while insuring to the extent possible the safety of the pregnant woman undergoing the procedure. The hypocrisy of this situation is obvious.

Less obvious is the hypocrisy of some claims that an unborn human is a person from the moment of conception. Consider that most anti-abortion positions allow for abortion in cases of rape or incest. The idea is that a pregnant woman should not be forced to deal with the consequences to herself of actions performed against her will. Such an "escape clause" is needed to get the electorate to even consider an abortion ban. But if a human is a person from the moment of conception, then that person has the same right to live as humans conceived by consensual sex. Permitting abortion in the case of rape or incest makes that unborn human less of a person than another unborn human. If one is going to permit early abortion in the cases of rape or incest, I think it more consistent to assert that a human being becomes a person during pregancy, rather than to assert that a human being becomes a person at the moment of fertilization.

The question then becomes, "Does a developing human that is not yet a person have a right to be allowed to become a person, and does that right trump the right of a pregnant woman to self-determination?" The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, implied that the developing human becomes a person with inalienable rights sometime between the first and third trimesters of pregancy, and that during the first trimester, a pregnant woman's right to self-determination must be given priority. This does not imply that a pre-personal developing human has no right to live — only that its right is subordinate to its mother's right to self-determination.

Until our society has a collective change of heart, I must agree with that implication for the following reason: Suppose we were to ban all abortions outright. The historical experience is that a substantial minority of women (some of them married mothers who already have children) will be desperate enough to seek illegal abortions. Some of these will be done under less than the best possible circumstances (including simple lack of follow-up) which will cause some of these women to sustain permanent and substantial injury or death. That is, a public policy, a law will have resulted in injury and death to humans who are undeniably persons. Those who enact such a policy must bear responsibility for those injuries and deaths, not perhaps on an individual case-by-case basis, but in aggregate. Consequentialism is not the only criterion of morality to be sure, but in the field of public policy, the policy makers must answer for how the numbers come out. In short, even though abortion is intrinsically evil, banning it is not automatically intrinsically good. Perhaps it is better to give people a "grace period," in which we let them choose for good or evil as best they can, and forgive them when they realize they need forgiveness.

Second Thoughts

Now, continuing to grant abortion on demand during the first trimester (which is when the overwhelming majority of abortions take place, indicating a kind of consensus among those seeking abortion that the earlier it is done the less evil it is) may be necessary for our "hardness of heart," as manifested in our failure to love our unborn children, our failure to love and support women in need, and our unwillingness to accept in loving submission to our Creator the burden they and their children may place upon us. Such an abortion license may be necessary to "create a fence" around the dignity, worth, and independence of women as persons. But there are consequences to society of so doing, and a multiplying danger that these consequences will get worse.

Elsewhere ("The Redoubt of the Soul") I have described the gathering assault on human nature that is beginning to happen as a result of the convergence of computers, communications, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. As Francis Fukuyama notes, the future may be "post-human" even though I think he lacks imagination in considering biotechnology to the near exclusion of the parallel developments I just mentioned. In particular, the technological augmentation of humans may result in the fragmentation of humans and human nature into various enhanced types, none of whom could grant equal status to unenhanced humans such as ourselves, any more than we could bring ourselves to let a gorilla become a commercial airline pilot. The fragmentation of human nature may create vast inequities, lay siege to fundamental human values, and at the same time undermine the foundation of Natural Law theory as a basis to criticize the process. And it may happen fast enough that those who read this in the year 2002 may see themselves become unwelcome and unpitied "living fossils" in a world they no longer recognize as their own.

I thus see the debate over abortion as an early stage of a much larger and more problematic series of moral problems in which the "humanity" of future humans is at stake. In that light, I take seriously Robert George's warning that automatically dismissing a fertilized human ovum as a non-person creates a class of disposable humans, potentially available for experimentation, and with it the potential for great evil. In other words, even if I am right that innocent personhood and its unconditional right to life emerge during gestation, this may be a debate that is better to lose.

If we as a society are to decide that personhood emerges sometime during fetal development rather than at fertilization, then we had better create a special status for the pre-personal unborn in which we recognize that although their right to live does not automatically trump a woman's right to self-determination, they nevertheless have other rights by virtue of their being both alive and human which must not be violated. Robert George is right in implying that what we do to society's most vulnerable members we might allow ourselves to do some day to anyone. I fear that "anyone" might someday come to include all "persons" as we know them today. I remind the reader that the Zimbardo and Schachter-Singer experiments of the 1960s support this warning. There is a little bit of Eichmann in us all.

The New World War

June 28, 1914 — Austrian Archduke Fanz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are murdered by a member of a Serb nationalist group, who attempted to commit suicide to cover the connections behind his crime. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was one of four young men, who were equipped with pistols, bombs, and cyanide capsules by a terrorist group with connections to the Serbian government and army. Thus began the cascade of crises that became World War I, the War of European Monarchies against emerging Liberal Democracies.

December 7, 1941 — Japanese bombers strike the US Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in an attempt to deliver a blow so crippling that the US would not be able to interfere with Japan's territorial ambitions in Asia. In response, the United States enters the ongoing World War II, the War of Facism against the Liberal Democracies.

September 11, 2001 — Nineteen young men, sponsored by an Islamic terrorist group with connections to an Islamic Fundamentalist theocracy in Afganistan and an Islamic Fundamentalist sect in Saudi Arabia, hijack four aircraft over the United States. They fly two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, ultimately causing the buildings to collapse. A third plane is flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the nation's capital. They crash the fourth plane into an open field in Pennsylvania when the passengers, who by then had found out the fate of the other aircraft via in-flight telephone calls to relatives, tried to retake control of the plane.

I mention these events one after the other to point up some obvious parallels. September 11, 2001 shares state sponsored terrorism with June 28, 1914, and a devastating sneak attack with December 7, 1941. But there is one more. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians threatens to become one of the cascade of crises that, like the events of 1914, leads the world into war.

We might be able to avoid a hot World War if we can achieve a peaceful "two-state" solution to the "Israel/Palestinian Problem." But we can no longer avoid a prolonged conflict similar to the Cold War of Communism against the Liberal Democracies, which I consider to have been World War III. The War of the Islamofacists (I thank Francis Fukuyama for the term) against the Liberal Democracies was begun by Ayatollah Khomeini, who won its first battle by overthrowing the Shah of Iran and establishing an Islamic Fundamentalist theocracy in that country. That victory, however well deserved, marked the return of militant Islam to the stage of world history, and it isn't going to leave until it plays itself out or is removed by someone else. World War IV is simmering upon us, trying to go from cold to hot.

However, making peace in the Middle East is likely to become possible only after both the Israelis and the Palestinians are exhausted by sufficiently intense and prolonged hostilities. After over 18 months of intifida, both sides want only to beat the other into some kind of submission. As horrible as it is to say this, it appears that not enough people have been maimed and killed for either side to want peace badly enough to forgive the other.

In other words, the prospects for keeping World War IV cold depend less on Israel and Palestine, and more on the good will of the wider Islamic World, the umma, in their terminology. I use this mystical term in the same way I would refer to the Christian World, fragmented as it is, as the Body of Christ. Both terms have a meaning that transcends the vagaries of culture, geography, and current events. If I may borrow a metaphor from Tolkien's Silmarillion, both terms point to themes in the music of world history. And Judaism has a similar term, Eternal Israel.

So the question for the umma, is whether the Islamofacists (totalitarian Facists like the Taliban and al-Quaeda who wrap themselves in culturally Islamic dress) are leading the Way to Truth, or are seducing their children into the Pit of Hell. I think of the lovely, soft-spoken teenaged girl, Ayat al-Akras, who blew herself up in front of an Israeli market in order to shame the young men of the umma into doing likewise. My first thought on hearing the news of this event went immediately to the words of Jesus Christ (known to Muslims as the Prophet Issa):

It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. — Luke 17:2 (NRSV)

Can terrorism really be the Will of "God, the Compassionate, the Merciful" (as God is so named in beginning of all but one of the 114 chapters of the Qur'an)? Or is there some better, higher way? My friend Bob Mantei maintains that if a few hundred Palestinians were to have sat on the Temple Mount and sung "We Shall Overcome," in Arabic, instead of making intifada, there would have been a Palestinian state a long time ago.

But the issue for the umma is larger and more serious than either the Palestinian situation, or even the prospect of a hot World War against the Liberal Democracies. Bernard Lewis pointed out recently that oil has been a curse, rather than a blessing, for world Islam. In order to consolidate their power, the House of Saud made a bargain with the Wahabbis, a facist Fundamentalist sect that is to Islam what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. The result is that the Wahabbis have access to an effectively infinite supply of oil money, and have used it to set up or take over madrassahs (schools) all over the Islamic world, including many in the United States of America. For a comparison, Lewis invited his listeners to imagine the Klu Klux Klan having the funds to set up schools all over Christendom. A sect that, without access to money and power, would be marginalized and ignored even in its own country, Saudi Arabia, is hijacking Islam.

And they're doing it with our money. There is a commercial on American TV these days to the effect that if you buy drugs, you are supporting terrorists. The same is much more true if you buy oil or gasoline. Thus, part of winning World War IV for the Liberal Democracies may be using nuclear power to dissociate water into its elements and creating a hydrogen fuel cell economy. It is certainly less violent than unrestrained Global Warfare, it is certainly better for the environment than the status quo, and it has the advantage that, by drying up the money supply of the Islamofacists, it may help Islam win back its soul.

Now back to our parallels. World War II started because Europeans were short-sighted and provincial when it came to foreign affairs, and rather loathe to stand up to tyranny until it was too late. The same can be said of the present situation, in which it has become fashionable for the European Left to make common cause with the European Right in condemning Israel, but not the Palestinians in the current conflict. Beyond mere siding the the apparent underdog, they are trying to slough off their existential guilt for the Holocaust by comparing the Israeli devastation of a couple of city blocks in towns (not camps) like Jineen to the Nazi's systematic extermination of European Jewry and Yiddish culture. The comparison is false, as are those who embrace it. I do not to excuse the wantonly hateful acts of many Israeli soldiers and their superiors, but I do want to call the Europeans on their game. Since they live in Liberal Democracies, they are also targets in the War that the Islamofacists insist on having. And once again, the leadership to win the war must come from outside Europe, from the original Liberal Democracy, the US. This is due to European, rather than US exceptionalism — during most of the 20th Century, Europeans have proven themselves exceptionally bad at world affairs.

Hot or cold, World War IV has some themes in common with previous global conflicts, including the ancient conflict between Islam and Christendom. But one theme is coming to the forefront — so-called "asymetric warfare." If you feel that you must strike at an enemy whose strength is vastly superior to yours, what do you do? Historically, inferior forces have used various tactics and devices to "even the odds," ranging from George Washington's crossing of the Delaware to win the first significant victory of the American Revolution in a surprise attack, to the first use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war by the forces of Saddam Hussein. In this war, technology has become so powerful that individuals and small groups of people can wreak mass destruction on lightly defended targets — what the rest of us call civilians. Anthrax is not bulky, and can be smuggled at least as easily as illicit drugs. Radiological dispersal weapons can be made from nuclear reactor waste and ordinary explosives.

But, as in the attack of September 11, no material need be smuggled in at all. Like those aircraft, our own technologies can be used as weapons against us. Those involved in the manufacture, handling, transportation and use of any potentially dangerous materials, including gases and chemicals, need to be on their guard.

We had been counting on moral restraint to prevent such occurrences. Prior to September 11, passengers understood that if they did not interfere with the hijackers, they would eventually be released. That the passengers were of no interest to the hijackers other than as a distraction to flying fully fueled aircraft into large buildings full of unsuspecting people, was hitherto unthinkable. But the line has been crossed by our enemies, whose publicly stated goal is to kill as many Americans, Jews, Westerners and other designated enemies as possible, wherever they may be found. If this were the intention of a militarily superior force, no one would hesitate to call it genocide.

The mix of genocidal intent with religious fervor is not new — the Nazis did precisely that, even though they had to invent a pre-Christian pagan legend to achieve it. But the mix of genocidal intent, a hijacked established religion (Islam), and weapons and techniques of mass destruction is new, and leads naturally and insidiously to an ugliness that is sickening to contemplate. If a single person can cause the kill and maim hundreds or thousands, then what is the face of our enemy? Is it the delicate-looking woman wearing a long dress, her head covered by a white shawl, whom I saw walking into the supermarket? She looked neither right nor left, and wore her face like a mask — of determination to strike, or fear of the discrimination that will grow in Western societies as we struggle to respond to attacks from within our midst? If the Islamofacists choose to make this war widespread and intense, it will have a corrupting influence on all its participants, to the detriment of the very people whom the Islamofacists purport to respresent.

Of course, the other pathway for intensifying and widening the war is for the various predominately Islamic nations to try to engage the Liberal Democracies in open conflict, making this less a war of Islamofacists against the Liberal Democracies, and more a war of Islam against the West. That the Islamic nations would be militarily defeated seems almost certain, but their leadership would then pursue further legitimization of "asymetric response" which might then lead the West to try a new round of colonialism. This would only prepare the bitter ground for the seeds of World War V.

There is no way out now, only a way through the present war. We must all recognize it for what it is, and set our faces against totalitarianism and facism whether they take on Islamic or any other cultural trappings. The predominately Islamic countries need to develop legitimate democratic governments that are true to the predominately Islamic character of their peoples, but nevertheless grant full citizenship to non-Islamic peoples in their midsts. The Palestinians are now a nation that needs a state to protect it, but they must learn the discipline to co-exist with their neighbors. And those of us in the Liberal Democracies (including Israel) must stand firm in support of our core values, clinging to the Just War tradition (see Just War: an Exchange by George Weigel and Paul Griffiths in First Things) to guide us in our conduct of this conflict, and to the generosity of the Marshall Plan in cleaning up after its conclusion.

You Can't Know Jack

But you have to try

Essential Blind Chihuahuaism

Theoretical physics, the piece of modern science in which I have participated, is successful because it uses a description of reality that is reduced to only a handful of numbers relevant to a given set of problems. For example, if you want to know how hard you will hit the ground if you jump off a one-story building, I need only your weight to tell you the answer. That is to say, I reduce the description of you, a potentially infinitely complex being made in the image of God, to a single number. I can safely ignore your name, race, state of health, relationships with your fellow humans, your religion, your thoughts — everything else about you — and be confident of getting the right answer.

Or can I? Have I reduced the description of you too far? Have I left something out? The only way to know for sure is to have you do the experiment — jump off the building — over and over again to see if the force with which you hit the ground is statistically significantly different from my calculation. If it is, then my reduced description needs to be enlarged to include some additional information. If not, then my reduced description is good enough until some reliable evidence shows otherwise.

This reduced description of reality is what gives theoretical physics its power. By picking out the essential stuff, and ignoring the rest, a physicist's limited mind only needs to deal with a few things at a time. And these things have been chosen to be so simple that relationships among them can be described by mere mathematics! That enforced simplification is what enabled a pacifist patent-office clerk to realize that if the speed of light was really a universal constant, then mass could be converted into energy, which opened the way for the invention of the atomic bomb. If Einstein's mental model of reality had been complete, he could never have sorted that out of all the confusion.

I used to think that building such an absurdly reduced description of reality was exclusively the province of the hard sciences, but I was wrong. We all do it, all the time. Reality is simply too big and too complicated to fit in our heads. So we each construct a stripped-down, simplified model of reality that we carry around in our imaginations — and that is our world view, or weltanschauung, as the German philosophers called it.

We construct our worldview from real data — that tiny portion of reality we can perceive with our senses. What little of that percieved data we can retain in memory we organize into a model using a framework that is built into our brains, and we revise the model we make based on our experiences. If you have managed to become a reasonably self-sufficient and contented person who is able to live more or less comfortably in community with the rest of us, then your model of reality is probably good enough. But it can't possibly be complete, because there is just too much reality. To survive, you simply have to ignore the non-essential stuff, and you do.

Let's say you want to buy some vegetables from a grocer. You must have a mental model of how people generally behave in these situations, so that you have a context for the interaction. You know in advance what to say and how to say it, and you know in advance pretty much what the seller is going to say, at least in direct relation to the sale. But you don't need to know the genealogy, medical history, and intimate thoughts of the seller. Your mental model of the seller is so incomplete as to be a mere caricature, but it is accurate enough for the purpose at hand. And if it isn't — if the seller is sufficiently different from what you expect — there will probably be no sale.

Now, if your mental model of another human being is incomplete (but complete enough to get by), it should not surprise you that the same can be said of your mental model of God. In fact, your mental model of God is your creation as surely as if you had carved a statue of God with your hands — it is a graven image, an idol, which, if you are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, you are forbidden to worship. Do not fall in love with your theology. And have a little respect for religions like Buddhism, which avoid that idolatry by refusing to have a mental image of God, at all.

But it gets more intimate than that. You have a mental model of yourself, which is also incomplete. If it were complete, you would know why you do everything you do, think everything you think, and you would never need to go to a doctor to find out what's wrong with you. Your mental model of yourself is the hardest of all models to revise. Generally speaking, people are so attached to their mental models of themselves that they experience embarassment, shame, or guilt at the attempted introduction of new data, and often transmute those feelings into anger.

It also gets more public. Your politics, whether you are liberal or conservative, are based on your mental model of reality, which, as I have labored to convince you, is approximate and incomplete, as all models must be, to have any power (to enable you to think) at all. The two most popular models of political reality, liberal and conservative, are so severely reduced that they have almost no overlap. The result is that liberals and conservatives can't really engage each other, even when they talk to each other about the same topic. Each thinks the other is deliberately and maliciously wrong. And indeed, they are.

You see, if the other person is a reasonably capable and functional human being, his or her mental model of reality must contain some elements of truth. In other words, it is not possible for the other person to be completely and entirely wrong about everything. In fact, it is highly likely that the other person is very nearly completely right about some things.

So you liberals and conservatives out there, get a clue. If you can't constructively engage each other on public policy matters, if all you can do is shout and accuse and evade each other's arguments, then you are bound to be missing something in your mental models. You need to build an addition to your model, or maybe to revise the whole thing. An unbending liberalism or conservatism is a sign of mental laziness and cowardice. It is a sign that you are willing to let your politics be determined more by your genetics than by your reason.

Top Fallacies about Christianity

Christians wouldn't welcome someone like me into their Church.

That depends on which Christians. Have you ever walked into a church whose members were a different color than you? Blending in is not always an option during what Martin Luther King called "the most segregated hour in America." But in general, the more authentically Christian the congregation, the more welcome you will find yourself. And remember, most Christian churches wouldn't welcome the historical Jesus either, but we're trying to get better about that.

Christianity is just a cult like any other.

Christianity began as the quintessential anti-cult. Consider that cults usually wind up killing their followers and their opponents. Christianity began with outsiders killing the leader. The followers were neither homicidal nor suicidal, nor were they asked to be. They were emboldened with a miraculous courage to proclaim the Truth as they understood it. Christianity really is about getting in touch with God, not rallying around a psychopath (which is what cults are about).

I can be a Christian without attending Church.

From its beginning, Church has always been understood as community. Even ascetic hermits who meditated alone for years had their influence on the unfolding Church. In other words, if you are called to Christianity, you are called to make yourself known to the Church and the Church to you.

Modern day Christians are mostly Televangelists and their viewers.

Hardly. When my pastor was asked about Televangelism, he replied, "When was the last time a TV screen handed you the wine and the wafer (the elements of the Eucharist or Holy Communion)?"

I can be "spiritual" without being "religious."

Without a normative tradition to stand for or against, you can engage in what Bellah, et al. in Habits of the Heart, called Sheilaism. Sheilaism a hyper-individualistic "my-way" of dealing with one's religious impulses, named for a woman whom the authors interviewed. As such, it does not build institutions that shape societies, which is one of the functions of religion, but it may tear them down, which would be a demonic perversion of religion. In other words, your individualistic faith will do nothing for your world. Even Jesus stood in relation to the normative tradition of his day.

Christianity is not relevant to a technological world.

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indespensable supports....Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintaned without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of the religious principle." — George Washington's farewell address.

There is not one mention of technology in that statement, which remains as true today as when Washington spoke it over two centuries ago. In other words, technology is not relevant to the human need for religion.

All Christians are hypocrites.

So? Do you know of any religion or ethical system whose adherents are not hypocrites to some extent? At least Christianity recognizes this and makes room for it with the doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sin.

Christians can't let themselves have any fun.

Yeah, right. Like we never have any fun here. A humorless faith is an idolatrous faith. If it ain't ever any fun, its probably a foul fantasy.

All Christians are conservative.

Actually, the dominant movements in world Christianity are liberal, like the World Council of Churches. Christians come in all political persuasions. Just pick a congregation in tune with where you are now, and enjoy.

Religion is a sham for the weak-minded.

It's not a sham. It is a constructive way of living with our religious impulses. Basically, religion is for those of us who can't get along without God. Of course our minds are weak, compared to say, God's Mind. So are our bodies and our souls. We participate in religion to connect with our source of strength.

There is no hard evidence for Christianity or any religion.

So... You are convinced without proof that empirical evidence is necessary for you to believe in, or trust in, anything. How long have you had this delusion? How long have you denied all the things you do accept without proof just to get through each day? In our world, the world God gave to us, we live by proof. In God's World, the world to come, we live by faith. It is our job to live in both worlds at once. Trust me, it takes a some common sense.

An Open Letter to Survivors of Clergy Abuse

contributed by Kay Goodnow

We are the ones we have been waiting for. — Oraibi, Arizona, Hopi Nation

 

Along with the rest of "us survivors," I have been following the story of the Pope's apology (even if it was just one paragraph) for the sexual and psychological abuse perpetrated against the innocent by the ordained (what I often refer to as ‘authority in organized denomination’). I have also been following the comments and correspondence between us that resulted from that apology.

Before I proceed with this epistle, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to those who put the recent Link-Up conference in Toronto together! For me, and this was my first conference, it was a rewarding experience and possibly the best investment in myself that I have ever made! I am what is known as a "sensitive" and I was a little afraid that what I might find at the conference would open old wounds, but just the opposite occurred. I found myself gaining strength and I rejoiced at the power, the energy that I felt in sharing friendship with those of you who were there. I both felt and saw the light that surrounded all of us and I believe that there just may have been the human equivalent of lightning bolts in some of those sessions. More than happy that I attended, I returned home with new insights, new courage and new hope.

I was in New York City when CNN presented a one-liner relative to this historical apology and I smiled at the television set and breathed the words "This is just the beginning, just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and it is good!"

Later that day I sat in Carnegie Hall, in a packed house, and I listened to a choir perform John Rutter’s Requiem. My oldest daughter was a part of this choir, which consisted of singers who had all attended Shawnee Mission South High School right here in Overland Park, Kansas. A strong part of my personal heritage is the ancient Latin of the church combined with the music, the spirit of God in song, if you will. I dearly love and secretly treasure her music. I know that the "church" can never take that away from me. Although both the composer and director are younger than I, the words were the same as they have been for centuries. Only the interpretation of those words has changed!
That day, that Sunday, two wonderful things happened to me; the apology by the Pope and the joy of that concert. As the words "Lux aeterna dona eis Domine" echoed through that magnificent recital hall my heart kept trying to stop beating as I experienced the Light that truly is God. Here was further verification that God is always present, always near at hand, always available. He was there. He heard that magnificent music and He smiled.

I felt myself accept the Pope’s apology. I felt peace, humility, courage and the empowering strength that comes from accepting the inevitable and making the brave decision to proceed along whatever path it is that I am to follow. I do not have to forgive those atrocities, but I do have to accept the apology. The Requiem had become a channel.

For what it’s worth, from me to you and just between us, what has happened has happened and there is absolutely nothing in this world that we can do to change that. Once we have been abused, life changes. I can no more go back to being an innocent 15-year-old than can any of you go back to before your damage was done. Yes, I agree, it should not have happened; not to me and not to you and not to anyone else and especially not in God’s name! But it did.

I have just read the editorial from the December 7, 2001 issue of the National Catholic Reporter dealing with the need for an "open and just procedure needed in Maciel case." My head and my heart, acting as one, said, "Well, d-u-h-h-h!"

I have just read the new set of norms from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. My head and my heart, acting as one, said, "This may be new to them, but to me it sounds just like all of their 'Hear, Speak and See No Evil' methods for avoiding with their serious internal problems!"
Some clergy are openly committing crimes against humanity. Abuse is one part of those crimes. And the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith continues to both propagate and perpetuate the problem.

The 'committee' defined by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is no doubt another attempt to keep the perpetrators and the facts hidden. Like the ostrich that buries it’s head in the sand to avoid confrontation, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith sounds good, but it isn’t. That is unfortunate, but true. And granted, a token apology cannot take away the years and years of pain that each of us has experienced…

A very wise woman once told me "We are each responsible for our own spirituality." I have accepted that responsibility, with great pleasure. And I would like to submit to each of you, for your consideration, the following:

Maybe it’s time to start telling the truth to ourselves and our children and grandchildren: God is alive and well! He is always there for us! He is too big to be contained, defined, categorized or limited in any way. He existed before Christianity, before the birth of our planet and before the birth of time as we know it. It really doesn’t matter what we call Him… He loves us all, every single one of us!
Maybe it’s time to stop exposing our children and grandchildren to 'authority within organized denomination' while we hope that they never encounter a 'perp' or, if they do, that we can do something about it!

Maybe it’s time to stop enabling this 'authority' by denying access to what it is they want, REGARDLESS of their motivation!

For me, the message brought by Christ is valid. It is the vehicle that is wrong! It was the vehicle that invented the Trinity, pronounced babies sinful, proclaimed those who chose to think for themselves to be heretics. It was the vehicle that 'created' hoaxology ad nauseum. I believed it all, right out of the Baltimore Catechisms of the 1950's! I am now in a phase of berating myself for believing any of it, because it simply doesn't make any sense. Alas, it isn't even logical. They did a very, very good job of brainwashing me. It has taken a lot of years, oceans of water under the bridge, for me to get to where I am today and I certainly did not get here by myself! The Ancient Light that is the author of the universe had quite a lot to do with breaking those deceitful, self-deprecating tapes!

Certainly I believe that there are good people and good leaders in all of the forms of Deism that exist. Certainly I respect every other person and his or her own personal beliefs. Certainly I know that each of us is in a different stage of growth. Certainly I can identify with the rage, the fury or being slapped in the face and called "insignificant." The opposite of love is, after all, indifference. I know for a fact how very scary it is to stand before God and say "I give all of this nonsense back to You, do with me whatever it is You want."

I have what I call the "gift of perception." No doubt this is due in large part to the abuse and the ridicule I experienced from "God’s representative here on earth." I now believe that "authority within organized denomination" is diametrically the opposite to the real message of the Christ…
Some of you may be in crisis with your God identity. Some of you may not honestly know what you do believe. Some of you are caught in the throes of not being able to believe or accept that your church could do these things…

All of these are normal feelings, under the circumstances that have severed you from your churches. Please know that God is alive and well, very present and very real, very aware of the pain and the rage. He simply is not the God that we were taught! He walks around with us in our daily lives. He understands that we are who we are… Once used to this concept and living life in this way, it becomes increasingly difficult to find peace at a church service. At least it has for me!

I have decided to quit believing in somebody else's God. I have decided to invite organized religion to takes its Thou Shalt Not's and go elsewhere with them. Enough hypocrisy! Enough lies! Enough discrimination! Enough duplicity! Enough control! Enough final authority!

As someone at the convention stated with a smile, "I have excommunicated them from me!" I agree, but I have welcomed all people of all faiths into my life. My gift of discernment is like a beacon in a storm or a virus detector on a computer: It shouts "Warning! Warning!" and I walk away… Chances are that you have this gift too; you "feel, sense" that something isn't quite true about someone else. It is okay to protect yourself and it is okay to question! Once the information is obtained, it is okay to sift, sort, pitch, retain and validate. That's how growth and recovery happen. How marvelously freeing it is for me, but how painful was the process, and how slow!

I believe that we must continue to make abuse cases public. We must educate the world and we must be confident in knowing that we will make a difference in the future, each of us. We are, after all, stopping the cycle of abuse by being ourselves. We should be proud, stand tall, hold our heads high and celebrate!

Perhaps it's time to reread the message of Christ and interpret it on our own. If, after all, that message is valid then it is 'authority within organized denomination' that is the so-called anti-Christ!
I wish for all of you, during this season of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Solstice, all that is good! If anyone wants to talk, ever, at any time, please do not hesitate to contact me. There will be similarities between us, but no two of us are identical. Therein lies the strength, and light, that is God!

Rejoice in the birth of the Light!

Although this e-mail was started with the intent of communicating with those who attended the Link-Up Conference in Toronto last month, it is also intended for SNAP (Survivor's Network for those Abused by Priests) and all persons who have been abused or seduced by a trusted mentor; those who have experienced the very real (and awful) violation of fiduciary responsibility no matter what their religious expression (or lack of same) may be.

I have emailed a copy of this effort to the National Catholic Reporter with the sincere hope that publication will result in reaching those who have never come forward to tell their stories. — KG

Lessons from Dogs

In 1990 I wrote in Obscenity and Peace that

We are now living in the "post-Communist" era, whose shape is only beginning to be delineated. Regional or "tribal" conflict rather than peace seems to be at hand, as proliferant nations attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

A decade later, things are worse than I had anticipated. Our technologies are becoming so powerful that a clever band of psychopaths can inflict mass destruction without warning on any society they please, in order to gain some advantage or notoriety for their tribal conflict. And our media are so pervasive that they can find an audience sufficient to hijack an entire religion as they murder in the name of their idolatrous misrepresentation of God.

On September 11, 2001, a band of terrorists who fancied themselves to be Muslims hijacked four passenger airliners and deliberately crashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and one into the Pentagon. The terrorists crashed the fourth plane into the ground rather than let the passengers (who by this time had discovered their intent) overpower them. In all, some 7000 non-combatant people of all nations and creeds were brutally murdered. It was a brave act, in that the perpetrators lost their lives doing it. It was a cowardly act, in that they struck soft, unresisting targets by surprise. But mostly it was obscene, evil, and blasphemous.

The responses available to us as the injured nation-state are limited. We are attempting to make our society more difficult to attack, and, we are attempting to eliminate this particular threat — organized global terrorism. But we are also attempting to make peace with the population from whom this particular band of terrorists, the al-Quaeda network, extracted support and safe haven. In other words, we are empowering the powerless, enfranchising the disenfranchised, and destroying (because they cannot be deterred) the wilfully destructive. Our ultimate effectiveness will depend upon whether we can help establish a genuinely Islamic, genuinely democratic, and genuinely pluralistic government to replace the Taliban in Afganistan.

We are implacably against those who are implacably against us, yet we are generous toward those who are willing to reason with us. It is simple, but not simple enough for a distressingly large number of Americans, some of whom are in positions of political power. For instance, the Chancellor of New York City public schools, Harold Levy, has decreed (in violation of the US Constitution) that each NYC school must set aside a room for Muslim children to pray in during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ("Schools OK Ramadan Prayers," New York Post; Nov 15, 2001).

Let's replay the action: (1) Terrorists kill 7000 people in New York in the name of their brand of Islam. (2) New York Schools set aside places for Islamic students to pray. Might I add: (3) Hardline Islamic terrorist sympathizers declare a major victory has been won against America, the bastion of secularizers and Crusaders.

Anyone who is capable of training a dog knows what Mr. Levy has done wrong. Never give your dog a treat when it bites you. The dog will take that as a reward, and bite you again. You must assert dominance over your dog by doing whatever is necessary to force it to the ground and onto its back. The dog will understand that biting you results only in reinforcement of its inferior status to you, and will give up trying to challenge you by biting. If asserting higher status than your dog goes against your ideal of your relationship to your pet, then you shouldn't own a dog. Your lack of common sense, fortitude and responsibility will teach almost any dog you own to become viscious.

Since I believe we humans are all like little blind Chihuahuas, making noise in God's general direction, the parallel is obvious. When terrorists attack, don't abrogate your own laws in favor of the religion they play as a team sport. You make war on the terrorists, and you make sure all people of all religions have the same rights, protections, and priveleges in this pluralistic society. Period.

But there is another thing we can learn from dog ownership in terms of making peace with those who are willing to be reasonable. I remember walking my dog, Samwise, along a street near my home, when he suddenly stopped and left his third poop. I had taken a bag for his usual one poop, and a spare for a possible second, but was unprepared for this third, which was, to be frank, a real steamer. There was nothing for it but to head for home to get resupplied. At that moment, a car swerved up to the sidewalk, and the driver began to berate me for not cleaning up after my dog. The driver was getting angrier and angrier, and so was I. Then I thought to myself, "How would I react to this if I were actually a Christian?"

I smiled at the driver, and asked, "Would you like me to go home, get a plastic bag, and pick this up?"

The driver was flabbergasted. He could only smile back and say, "Well, yes, I would." Grace had struck. The conflict was over.

"That's what I'll do." When I got back with the bag, the driver was gone.

The driver, even though he was venting his anger with irresponsible dog owners at me, was nevertheless a reasonable human being, trying to deal with me concerning values we both shared. He was not a terrorist fed up with dog poop who would kill anyone who walks a dog.

The driver you talk to. The terrorist you confine or kill. If you can't tell the difference, don't vote or run for public office. You'll just teach terrorists to become more viscious.

Thinwa against Paranoid Conspiracy Theory Fundamentalism

In the Name of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, greetings to all people of good will.

There are among us Fundamentalists who believe, as a matter of Religion, in various Paranoid Conspiracy Theories, by which they permit and impel themselves to commit acts of gross violence against those who would do them no harm. They do this because they perceive that their way of experiencing the world is under attack by an aggressive and inexorable modernization of human material circumstances, and with it human sensibilities and desires. But rather than non-violently reject or confront modernization, they attribute it to some group of people they can identify, isolate, demonize, and brutalize. They usually start by fighting their co-religionists (as those who endanger their pure faith by sympathizing with modern notions) in order to establish for themselves a unique group-identity. Then they reach out to attack those whom they consider to be the source or driving force of the bad (modernizing) influences. At various times and in various cultures they have attacked Jews, Women's Rights Activists, Abortionists, Americans and others.

I, a nobody, on no authority whatsoever, declare this Paranoid Conspiracy Theory brand of Fundamentalism to be anathema, a poison infecting the lifeblood of true religion, and its adherents to be enemies of that which is holy. I call upon all people of good will and good faith to say unto them, "Piss off!" and "Get a Life!" and all such manner of expression as may seem appropriate. Let all Paranoid Conspiracy Theory Fundmentalists (henceforth PCTFs — pronounced "pucktuffs", which is f__ed up pronounced backwards) be laughed to scorn in all venues in which they dare to air or act on their delusions. May their gatherings become objects of intense study by social psychologists. Let them be parodied, joked about, and cartooned without mercy. Let them be embarassed into dealing more constructively with the world.

Let them eat Prozac.

I have spoken this thinwa, which cannot be undone.

(See Bin Laden's fatwa.)

Religious Non-Entity Calls for Yeehah!

Paradise, Ky (AP - Oct 25, 2001) In a rare appearance, the Blind Chihuahua, the world's most unrecognised religious non-entity, came out of occultation to call for yeehah (comic conflict) against the worlds' dictatorships. "Large parts of the world are still under the control of clowns who think being an S.O.B. gives them the right to rule. These wannabes can take it from the real thing — being an S.O.B., which I proudly am, gives you nothing more than the right to pee on a tree," he said, standing atop glowing clouds, while the sun shone out his anus.

Sources close to the Blind Chihuahua revealed that yeehah derives from the pleasure-whoop originally uttered by Lutherans of New Braunfels, Texas, whenever they were having a really good time. Now is the time for all good people to chide dictators, apologists for dictators, supporters of dictators, and even the families and pets of dictators, in a humorous manner, they claim.

"Dictators instigate most of the world's warfare," elaborated the Blind Chihuahua. "They either start wars themselves, or simply sit on people so hard that their only chance to participate in any kind of political process is by throwing stones and doing suicide bombings in displaced rage against someone else." The Blind Chihuahua then urged his cult of followers, none of whom were to be found, to take up ridicule and sarcasm against the true foes of world peace.

"Take Saddam Hussein," continued the Blind Chihuahua. "He and his stooges claim that sanctions against Iraq for continuing to develop biological and other nasty weapons are starving the Iraqi people. But the amount of trade Iraq is now conducting under the UN's Oil for Food program is equal to the amount it was conducting before the Gulf War. To them I say, 'Liar, liar, pants on fire!'"

In a related development, the Pooper Scooper, the Blind Chihuahua's webmaster and self-appointed spokesperson for the Blind Chihuahua during his periods of occultation, issued a thinwa (opposite of a fatwa) against Fundamentalists who indulge themselves in Paranoid Conspiracy Theories. "By concocting false conspiracy theories about how their one true way of believing is about to be annihilated by somebody else, these people emotionally masturbate themselves out of anxiety/depression into violent rage," claimed the Pooper Scooper. "They go from being the 'God's fearful faithful' to the 'devil's deadly dick-heads,' as it were."

When asked to respond to the Pooper Scooper's thinwa, the Blind Chihuahua responded, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..."

Violent Fundamentalists of various religions declined to comment for this story, preferring instead to assault reporters with knives, guns, burning torches, box cutters and other ritual weapons. The world's Dictators all claimed to be too busy to respond to charges leveled by imaginary creatures and fictitious web personae.

To US Military Members and Families

I pursued my enemies and overtook them; and did not turn back until they were consumed.
I struck them down, so that they were not able to rise; they fell under my feet.
For you girded me with strength for the battle; you made my assailants sink under me.
You made my enemies turn their backs to me, and those who hated me I destroyed. — Psalm 18:37-40

If you are called to this service, your duty is to fight, kill, and, if need be, to die for the rest of us, or to support with your untiring effort those who do. Your work is hallowed in so far as the cause for which you fight is just, and in so far as you use no more force than necessary to subdue our enemies. You serve well if you fight not to destroy what you hate, but to defend what you love.

Let us here acknowledge that those who espouse pacifism do so with the expectation of living full lives only because you protect them with your willingness to make war. May a great and grateful nation welcome you home, or if your fate is beyond this world, may it always remember you. And may it take good care of those of you return with injuries.

May the rest of us take care not to squander the peace that you now buy with your courage and hard work. And may these words be a comfort and inspiration to you and your family.

Hinduism

As far as we know, the first sacred literature were the Vedas (Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda), which consist of hymns to the various gods of the Hindu pantheon (which has uncountably many). The philosophy implied in the Vedas (ca. 4000 — 1500 B.C.) was made explicit in the Upanishads (600 - 300 B.C.). Overlapping and following the period of the Upahishads came the great narrative epic poems. These are the Ramayan, which tells of the adventures of the great hero Ram and his wife Sita (and ascribed to the poet Valmiki), and the Mahabharata (ascribed to the poet and sage Vyasa), which tells of the great hero Arjuna, and the great civil war in which he fought. The sixth book of the Mahabharata is the famous Bhagavad Gita, or Song of the Lord, which tells of the philosophic conversation between Arjuna and the god Krishna, who during his incarnation was Arjuna's chariot driver.

The gods, and indeed everyone and everything, are manifestations of a single divine principle called Brahman. The principal manifestations are three: Brahma - the Creator, Krishna (aka Vishnu) - the Sustainer, and Shiva - the Destroyer (who is also associated with eroticism). The manifesting and unmanifesting of Brahman creates and destroys the entire Universe in an endless series of long cycles. Thus what appears to be progress is illusory — it is but the change associated with this particular cycle.

In addition to this, Hinduism posits that every sentient being in the Universe is reincarnated countless times, until it attains Enlightenment and returns to the eternal Brahman, thus exiting the cycle of Birth and Death. Bad deeds negatively affect one's karma, leading to a less auspicious rebirth, and decreasing one's chance of becoming Enlightened in this lifetime and the next one (or even several).

This Hindu conception of Time is distinct from that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which implicitly hold that time is linear - that the Universe had a beginning and will have an end, and that one's actions take place in the context of an overall Divine Plan for the Universe. This leads to morality as a heightened concern on the part of monotheistic religions for conformity to what is perceived as God's Will, as distinct from Hinduism and Buddhism, which are concerned with morality as providing a shorter path to escape the suffering associated with the cycle of being reborn, living, dying, and being reborn again. An interesting parallel with Christianity is that Hindus believe Krishna became incarnated as a man for a single human lifetime (although Krishna's mortal life lasted 125 years, ending when he was shot accidentally by a hunter).

Hinduism is the progenitor of Buddhism, which is a simplification of Hinduism from uncountably many manifestations of Brahman to no god at all. That is to say, since you yourself are a manifestation of Brahman, and since Enlightenment is realizing your one-ness with Brahman, it facilitates Enlightenment to eschew conceptualizing Brahman as distinct from oneself, and vice versa.
Jainism is a sect of Hinduism that emphasizes non-violence, which leads many of its followers to take up professions that do no violence to any living or non-living thing, such as being a lawyer like that most famous Jain, Mahatma Mohandas K. Ghandi.

One of the bits of negative cultural baggage to which popular Hinduism in some parts of India still clings is the caste system, which classifies people as

• Brahmins (the priests and academics)
• Kshatriyas (rulers, military)
• Vaishyas (farmers, landlords, and merchants)
• Sudras (peasants, servants, and workers in non-polluting jobs), and
• and Dalits (Untouchables) who do labor that is considered polluting to one's body or soul.

India has officially disbanded the caste system and has enacted a number of anti-discrimination measures to ameliorate the situation of the Dalits, but more work needs to be done.

Hinduism has produced a system of medicine called Ayurveda, which arose from observation and anecdotal information, without benefit of statistically controlled trials, a germ-theory of disease, internal anatomy or surgery. What is remarkable about Ayurveda is the extent to which some of it works, despite these limitations. Finally, Hinduism in India has led to a rich musical tradition, in which a musical performance is a guided meditation of the audience by the performers. The Hindu varieties of meditation are called Yoga, and some of them involve various bodily movements and postures, because we are an integrated body-mind — the movement of one affects the movement of the other.

Hinduism has enjoyed a reputation of being tolerant of other religions, but has proved itself capable of being as violently intolerant and xenophobic as any other religion when it is politicized.


Hinduism Links

Hinduism, including links to online scriptures
Wikipedia article on Krishna
Jainism
Resources for the Study of East Asian Language and Thought

Buddhism

The sacred literature of Buddhism is both immense and non-essential. It consists of written accounts of Sutras (sermons) spoken by the most recent Buddha, who was born in ancient India as prince Siddhartha, and by others of his disciples and enlightened followers. But none of these is essential for Enlightenment, the unmediated experience of Reality as It Is. Since you are part of Reality, this includes the experience of your real self, as distinct from your personality, which is your own creation. Thus, Enlightenment can occur in a sudden flash, without any prior conscious preparation, or after years of meditative discipline, or after meditating on the Sutras, or any combination of the foregoing. Because the Enlightenment experience of Reality transcends dualistic distinctions between self and other, or between anything and anything else, there is no personification of God in Buddhism. (In other words, there is no God in Buddhism, because you're It. So is everyone else.) Buddhists do revere the Buddha, because such reverence evokes emotional states that are conducive to Enlightenment, and because those who are Enlightened are grateful to Buddha for having pointed the Way.

That said, Buddhism has divided into many traditions. Zen Buddhism, which began in China, but later became popular with Japan's samurai warriors, emphasizes sudden Enlightenment, and uses riddles called koans to awaken and develop Enlightenment in Zen students. Tibetan Buddhism produced the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a set of instructions to be spoken to a person immediately before, during, and after death, which tell how to achieve Enlightenment in the bardo state between lives, or, failing that, to achieve an optimal rebirth. According to these instructions, a person's spirit commonly swoons into unconsciousness for three days following death, after which it awakens and imagines a body for itself — a curious parallel with the Christian account of the Resurrection of Christ after three days, and with the Christian notion of bodily resurrection in general.

Buddhism's atheistic conception of Divinity is distinct from, but not in opposition to, the Hinduism from which Buddhism arose. Hinduism's infinity of gods are all emanations from a single Divine Principle, as is everything else, including you. Thus, ultimately, you are that Principle, as is everything else. However, there are many traditions within Hinduism, honoring various deities as ends-in-themselves, which leads to religious conflict with peoples of other traditions.


Buddhism Links

VCBC's Favorite Zen Sayings
Buddhism in Ottawa
Tricycle Buddhist Review
Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors. See also Popular Zen Stories.
The famous "Ten Oxherding Pictures" and commentary describing the stages of enlightenment.
Resources for the Study of East Asian Language and Thought

Baha'i

The Earth is but one country, and Humankind is its citizenry...
 
These words of Mirza Husayn-'Ali-i-Nuri (1817-1892), known to Baha'is as the Baha'u'llah (Glory of God) summarize the thrust of the Baha'i faith toward the unity of all humankind. He was preceded by his mentor, Siyyid 'Ali-Muhammad (1819-1850), who declared himself to be the Bab (Gate) after a Shi'ite Muslim concept, on May 23, 1844 in Shiraz, Persia (now Iran). The Baha'is consider this event to be the founding of their religion, which is as different from its origins in Islam as Islam is from its orgins in Judaism and Christiantity.

In 1866, after years of persecution (both the Bab and the Baha'u'llah were imprisoned, and the Bab was executed in 1850), the Baha'u'llah declared himself to be the new Messenger of God for this age, whose coming had been predicted by the Bab. He left the world a large number of writings, including The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (The Most Holy Book), and the Kitáb-i-Íqán (The Book of Certitude) as major theological works, and the Hidden Words and the Seven Valleys as mystical treatises. He died under imprisonment in Akka in what was then the Ottoman Empire, but is now Israel. The Baha'u'llah left a will which made his eldest son, Abbas Effendi, also known as Abdu'l Baha (Servant of Baha) the next leader of the Baha'i faith. He eventually passed leadership to his eldest grandson, Shoghi Effendi.

After him, leadership has passed to the Universal House of Justice, currently located in Israel.
Baha'i worship takes place in the homes of individual Baha'is or rented quarters. There are seven Baha'i temples in the world (one for each continent). Baha'is believe that the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religions are sacred, and that the Prophets sent by God for each Age include Adam, Krishna, Buddha, Y'shua of Nazareth (Jesus), Muhammad, the Bab and the Baha'u'llah. Baha'is do not have clergy.

The Baha'is
Baha'i Faith on Wikipedia
Baha'i Faith in the US
About.com: Baha'i

Islam

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful...
 
These words begin 113 of the 114 surahs of the Qur'an, the Book of the words revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). The Qur'an's beauty and severity shine through even English renderings.

While the Qur'an is the heart of Islam, much can be learned from Muhammad's extra-Qur'anic utterances and deeds, preserved for us in the Sunnah, of which his sayings are called the Hadith.
Still more is revealed in the Salah, the Islamic way of prayer, which involves the whole person, body and soul, in reverence to the Creator, five times per day, with special observances for Islamic Holidays.

In the Qur'an it is twice written (2:62, 5:69):

Surely, those who believe, the Jews, the Christians, the converts; all those who believe in God and in the Hereafter, and do righteousness, will receive their recompense from their Lord; they have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve.

Surely, we can all get along.

But, reading between the lines of the Qur'an we see that while Jews and Christians initially supported the Prophet because he was teaching monotheism, they felt betrayed when they realized that his teachings diverged from theirs. When two Arab-Jewish tribes who had previously pledged their support to the prophet fought against him at a critical battle in Medina, the Prophet considered them to have committed treason, and he had the men of those tribes executed. This incident has since been considered by Muslims to be an example of the treachery of Jews, and by Jews to be an example of the brutality of Muslims. Thus the seeds of misunderstanding were sown.

This misunderstanding is amplified by those Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have become what the Qur'an calls People of the Book, those who use the narrowest interpretations of their respective Scriptures to justify making enemies of one another.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim to worship the one true God of Abraham. Let us take those claims at face value, and respect each other as brothers and sisters proceeding along parallel paths to our Lord. We could in principle even briefly pray together.

This is not to ignore our differences. Muslims do not observe Jewish Law and ritual, nor do Muslims and Jews accept the Divinity of Christ (nor his death on the Cross and subsequent Resurrection). And neither Jews nor Christians accept the authority of the Prophet and the Qur'an. But Muslims observe Islamic Law and ritual, and honor the Hebrew Prophets, among whom Muslims count Jesus. Our differences are not so great that God cannot overcome them. Let us remember that Islam's Prophet was the first to say so.

The central narrative of Islam is the story of the first Muslim community, from the first revelation received by the Prophet until his death. The community underwent periods of violent struggle for its very existence, until it finally triumphed over its enemies. The Qur'anic revelations during the periods of struggle naturally dealt with war, and have led many to develop a warlike understanding of Islam, an understanding that is becoming increasingly dysfunctional in a world in which weapons of mass destruction are becoming increasingly available.

Islam has divided into two major movements, Sunni, and Shi'i originating in a dispute as to who should succeed the Prophet as leader of the Islamic world. Minor movements include the Amahadis, the Nation of Islam in America, and the Druse. A new universalist religion, Baha'i, emerged from the Shi'ite Islam practiced in Iran during the 1800's. A blasphemous perversion of Islam is believed by certain terrorists and the regimes and sects (like the Wahhabis) that support them — they transgress the rules of engagement prescribed for jihad, the sacred struggle.

Sufism is the mystical or esoteric tradition in Islam. Islam's esoteric tradition began with with the teachings of the Prophet and his Companions (Abu Bakr, Ali, Salman al-Farsi and Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqas, may Allah be pleased with them). In this tradition there are three levels: Islam (submission to God's Will), Iman (faith), and Ihsan (perfection). Muslims strive to journey through these stages until they experience the Beatific Vision of God. Tassawuf is the discipline of achieving Ihsan, and one who achieves it is called a Sufi (Saint).

Islam is not so much a religion of orthodoxy (right belief) as of orthopraxy (right action). To become a good Muslim, one need only recite the profession of faith (shahada — "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his last Prophet."), keep up prayer (salat — five times a day, facing toward Mecca), give alms to the poor (zakat), fast (sawm) during daylight for the month of Ramadan, and make the pilgrimmage (hajj) to Mecca at least once during one's lifetime if one is able. This last, the hajj, has been a transformative experience for Muslims, including Malcom X, who shed his racism in Mecca. Muslims believe in God, the Qur'an (and therefore in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and Prophets mentioned in it), fate and destiny, the unseen realm and the day of Judgement, and the angels. Many Muslims also believe in the jinn (singular jinni, also written genie), because they are mentioned in the Qur'an.


Islamic Links:

Al-Qur'an al Kareem: English Translation and Arabic Text
Blogging the Qur'an: a serious reader's companion.
Searchable Hadith
IslamiCity in Cyberspace
Al-Islam
Masud Ahmed Khan bills itself as a resource on traditional Islam.
About.com: Islam
Faith, Practice, and Law in Sunni and Shi'i Islam
Finding the Law: Islamic Law (Sharia)
A Shi'ite Encyclopedia
Lila Forest suggests the International Sufi Order and a Cherag's library.
Q-News, the Muslim Magazine of Britain
Islamicfinder helps you find all things Islamic, including mosques near you
Ijtihad: a Return to Enlightenment
al-Tafsir: the most comprehensive resource for Qur'anic study on the internet

Christianity

The Kingdom of God is at Hand.

This was the Good News (Gospel) proclaimed by an itinerant Jewish teacher (rabbi) and faith-healer called Yesu (a Galilean short form of Yehoshua) bar Yosef (Jesus son of Joseph) from the hick town of Nazareth in the Roman province of Judea (formerly the southern Kingdom of Judah), in what is now Israel. Jesus was regarded by his Jewish followers as the Meshiach (Messiah). They expected him to liberate Judea from the brutal Roman Occupation. During the Passover of approximately the year 30 of the Common Era, the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, had Jesus scourged and crucified (executed by being hung from a cross) for the crime of sedition against the authority of the Roman Empire. Three days later, Jesus began appearing to many of his followers alive, in the flesh as the Risen Christ. This event, the Resurrection, galvanized his followers to proclaim what they had witnessed by teaching and preaching throughout first Judea, and then the world.

The most effective of these preachers was a Pharisee named Saul (Greek name Paul). Paul undertook as his special mission to bring Christianity to the Goyim (Gentiles) throughout the Roman Empire. The letters (epistles) he wrote to the churches he founded form the earliest documents of the Christian faith. Others wrote epistles as well, and these were read at clandestine gatherings of Christians until some of the original eyewitnesses of the Resurrection (Apostles) among Yesu's closest students (disciples) began to die. At this point, disciples of the Apostles wrote what we now call Gospels, which were various versions of the life and sayings of Jesus.

Some 300 years later, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the official religion of the Empire. This completed the transformation of Christianity from a variant of Judaism to distinct and exclusively Gentile religion. During this process, much of Jewish liturgy (especially the use of Hebrew) and ritual (especially rituals for worship at home) were discarded or simplified in order to make the religion palatable to a Roman pagan sensibility. Constantine's Council of Nicaea fixed (for the most part) the present form of the Christian Bible, which includes a rearrangement of the Hebrew Bible called the Old Testament, followed by the New Testament, which consists of the four canonical Gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the Epistles of Paul and other writers, and the Revelation to John.

Christianity has split into Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) traditions, and Protestantism has further fragmented into Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, Presbyterian, Baptist and other flavors, all with slightly different theological emphases, liturgical (worship) practices, organizational structures (or lack thereof) and social traditions. Christians understand that these schisms (and church politics generally) are manifestations of the present flawed Human Condition, which they attribute to Original Sin (an innate tendency to use our God-given Free Will to disobey God's Will). All of these branches adhere to some version of the Christian Calendar. A new, North American variant of Christianity is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon Church.

The central message of Christianity is the Incarnation of God as Jesus, his death by Crucifixion, and his Resurrection to new life. Christians believe that this event sequence establishes a new covenant between God and all of Humanity, by which we humans receive Forgiveness of our Sins so that we, too, will be Resurrected to a glorious new life with God, after we die to this Universe. In response to this Good News, Christians are expected to spread the message of Christianity through thought (prayer, study), word (teaching, preaching) and deed (right living, obedience to God's Commandments, ministry, charity).

While there are strains of exclusivity in Christianity, including a poisonous anti-Semitism which set the stage for the Holocaust (Shoah) of the Jews during World War II, as well as a poisonous antipathy toward Islam which set the stage for the Crusades in the Late Middle Ages, there are also strong movements within Christianity to reach out to adherents of these religions, as well as to Buddhists and indeed, to all Humanity. Christianity contains several opposing traditions, such as Just War theory (a temporal ruler may be under a positive moral obligation to make war to defend his or her people) and pacifism (there is never any justification for violence).

Christianity has shaped most of the history, philosophy (political and moral), and legal tradition of Western Civilization (including idea of the sanctity of individual Human Rights). The current fashion on the part of Western intellectual elites to abandon Christianity therefore risks cutting off Western Civiization from the powerful mythic basis (in the Joseph Campbell sense) of its identity and reason to exist. That is to say, if these elites cut off the past, they may lose the way forward as well.

For more on Christianity, check out the links below.


The Christian Church as a Whole

• Christian Classics Ethereal Library Christian writings online, from early to modern
• Guide to Early Church Documents
• Ecole Initiative online documents from early church history
• Fides Quaerens Internetum, the Christian Theology Page
• Creeds of Christendom
• Creeds and Confessions
• About.com: Christianity
• Christianity FAQ for new Christians and old skeptics
• BELIEVE Religious Information Collection — Scholarly articles
• VCBC's Top Ten Fallacies About Christianity

The Roman Catholic Church

• Christus Rex et Redemptor Mundi Catholicism par excellence.
• New Advent Catholic SuperSite.
• The Holy See (The Vatican's official website).
• Documents of the Roman Catholic Church.
  • Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth) John Paul II on the moral teaching authority of the Church.
  • Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) John Paul II on the sanctity of innocent human life.
  • Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) John Paul II on the life of mind and soul.
  • Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) Paul VI's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.
  • Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) John XXIII on society, war and nuclear weapons.
  • Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) Paul VI's Declaration on Relations with Non-Christians.
  • We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah
• Writings of St. Augustine the original source of Christian Fundamentalist hermeneutics and apologetics.
• The "Confessio" of Saint Patrick the autobiography of the Irish savior of Western Civilization.
• The Mary Page
• Jesuit Resources on the World Wide Web

The Eastern Orthodox Church

• Images and Words of the Desert Fathers
• The Orthodox Christian Information Center
• Catechism of The Eastern Orthodox Church
• Orthodox Church in America
• Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
• Protection of the Mother of God Russian Orthodox Church
• Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the United States of America
• Coptic Orthodox Church

Protestant and Other Churches

• Project Wittenberg, online texts by and about Luther and other Lutherans.
  • The Book of Concord contains the founding confessions of Protestantism, 1528-1580.
  • See also Writings of Martin Luther
• Jesus, Mary, and Martin, a page of Lutheran mariology.
• Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics Calvinism explained.
• The Religious Society of Friends. They tolerate all expressions of faith, even ours.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
  • The Bookman's Mormoniana page
  • The Book of Mormon online