In Karen Armstrong's A History of God, Armstrong talks about the fact that monotheism was an unusual creation, but - further - that the refutation of other gods was a practice unique to Christianity. This is a point reiterated by Jeffrey B. Russell in A History of Witchcraft, in which he discusses paganism and the vilification of non-Christian deities.
Armstrong's point was that early Christians denied the very existence of other entities besides their god. Russell observes that what began as a denial - a policy that obviously needed revision - became a tendency to coopt:
And now Christian theologians made another important identification: the demons that the sorcerers were calling up were the pagan gods. Jupiter, Diana, and the other deities of the Roman pantheon were really demons, servants of Satan. As Christianity pressed northward, it made the same assertion about Wotan, Freya, and the other gods of the Celts and Teutons. Those who worshipped the gods worshipped demons whether they knew it or not. With this stroke, all pagans, as well as sorcerers, could be viewed as part of the monstrous plan of Satan to frustrate the salvation of the world. This was the posture of most theologians and church councils. Yet at the same time popular religion often treated the pagan deities quite differently, transferring the characteristics of the gods to the personalities of the saints. (39-40)
Since they couldn't eliminate other gods by denying their existence, Christian authorities instead labeled them either demons or, it seems, saints. Those whose myths could be refigured to include God and Christ were deemed acceptable, those who defied the kind of authoritarian strictures promoted by Christianity became its enemies.
What is perhaps most interesting is that we can clinically identify this move in historical circumstances (December 25th is the birthday of Mithras, for instance, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the birth of a nice Jewish boy in Bethlehem except for the fact that the Church needed a good day for its celebration), but that we as a society continue to cling to the religious elements that have so clearly been coopted as though they are empirical truth. Yet more evidence of our ability to believe in whatever we want despite the facts that contradict it waving small flags directly underneath our noses.
Human society is a fascinating melange of a variety of long- and short-term traditions that have given us enormous intellectual wealth, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to wholesale believe in them simply because your mother told you to. Look first, people, then leap. Or, better yet, keep your fool feet planted firmly on the ground unless you've put on the safety harness first.
"Words fly up, my thoughts remain below."
black and white, Angels and demons.
We aren't two sides of the same coin.
We're the gold into which those sides are imprinted."
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Airborne
As a person who travels frequently, both for work and pleasure, I find myself often in a position to consider both the nature of the airline industry and the types of people who make use of it.
Travelers come in all shapes and sizes, all ages, both genders, and a variety of self-limiting economic strata.
The most impatient are the business folk - the people who have a pressing, important, or otherwise needful reason to travel. They have a mission to accomplish that is more specific than "visit my mother" or "go home." They travel with laptops and cell phones and bluetooth headsets plugged in from the moment the airplane lands to the three minutes between when the plane door closes and when the flight attendant tells them to shut it off. They are efficient in security lines and intolerant of small children or inexperienced travelers.
These are followed by people like me - frequent travelers, though ones who travel fewer than ten times a year, on average. We know the drill in security, we know where to find restrooms, coffee, and what passes in an airport for lunch. We know about flying standby to get home a few hours earlier. We also tend to hate it - we are not yet dulled to the atmosphere of the airport, which rankles us, gets under our skin and itches until we can get out of it and into the confines of an airplane, which is preferable simply because it means we are moving. But we are accustomed to the rhythm - the start and stop and stand and stretch and so on - of travel. To the requirements of the security checkpoints that make us put off our morning coffee for an extra aggravating twenty minutes, the method of packing both the carry-on and the personal item for maximum capacity and entertainment value, the appearance of nauseating versus passable food. We dislike people who slow us down, are irritated by the people who fumble their way through the process, who impede the airplane aisles, who don't know what to expect. It isn't fair of us, but the irritation is there, nevertheless.
The next species of traveler is the pleasure-traveler. The vacationer. The elderly couple or successful family. The people who have done this often enough that they are prepared but not so often that it has become a chore. These are the pleasant people to sit by, to be behind in line, to follow through security. They are efficient enough not to irritate those of use in the frequent- and business-style of travelers. Sometimes, the college student who has gone to school and gone home enough to be happy to go in whichever direction they're headed, especially if it's spring break.
Finally, the group that stalls the rest of us. The first-time travelers, the families with small children who don't know how to keep them under control or entertained (I've traveled with many a pleasant family and/or small child), the people who have never been on a plane (or act like it). In terms of annoyance, I have to admit that the experienced-but-overly-entitled travelers are often worse than the rookies, but the rookies are more frazzled, more nervous, more excitable, and more prone to being in the way no matter how much they try not to be. They are well-intentioned, but nevertheless manage to be in the wrong place, to stuff their luggage in the wrong way, or to block the aisle because their stuff doesn't fit in the overhead bin.
In a system as simultaneously efficient and inefficient as the airline industry, this mix makes traveling... interesting. Because one or two are enough to clog the gears, to slow the system, and to create a fascinating domino effect that causes the whole thing to come screeching to a staggering halt.
So what is the point of this little diatribe? Simply that any system that deals with humanity is bound to have cogs, whether out of good or malicious intents, that slip and stick and get in the way.
So some of us need to be more tolerant, more patient. And others need to pay more attention and attempt to make things smoother for everyone else - either by learning how the system works through a little research or themselves being more willing to let well enough alone.
Travelers come in all shapes and sizes, all ages, both genders, and a variety of self-limiting economic strata.
The most impatient are the business folk - the people who have a pressing, important, or otherwise needful reason to travel. They have a mission to accomplish that is more specific than "visit my mother" or "go home." They travel with laptops and cell phones and bluetooth headsets plugged in from the moment the airplane lands to the three minutes between when the plane door closes and when the flight attendant tells them to shut it off. They are efficient in security lines and intolerant of small children or inexperienced travelers.
These are followed by people like me - frequent travelers, though ones who travel fewer than ten times a year, on average. We know the drill in security, we know where to find restrooms, coffee, and what passes in an airport for lunch. We know about flying standby to get home a few hours earlier. We also tend to hate it - we are not yet dulled to the atmosphere of the airport, which rankles us, gets under our skin and itches until we can get out of it and into the confines of an airplane, which is preferable simply because it means we are moving. But we are accustomed to the rhythm - the start and stop and stand and stretch and so on - of travel. To the requirements of the security checkpoints that make us put off our morning coffee for an extra aggravating twenty minutes, the method of packing both the carry-on and the personal item for maximum capacity and entertainment value, the appearance of nauseating versus passable food. We dislike people who slow us down, are irritated by the people who fumble their way through the process, who impede the airplane aisles, who don't know what to expect. It isn't fair of us, but the irritation is there, nevertheless.
The next species of traveler is the pleasure-traveler. The vacationer. The elderly couple or successful family. The people who have done this often enough that they are prepared but not so often that it has become a chore. These are the pleasant people to sit by, to be behind in line, to follow through security. They are efficient enough not to irritate those of use in the frequent- and business-style of travelers. Sometimes, the college student who has gone to school and gone home enough to be happy to go in whichever direction they're headed, especially if it's spring break.
Finally, the group that stalls the rest of us. The first-time travelers, the families with small children who don't know how to keep them under control or entertained (I've traveled with many a pleasant family and/or small child), the people who have never been on a plane (or act like it). In terms of annoyance, I have to admit that the experienced-but-overly-entitled travelers are often worse than the rookies, but the rookies are more frazzled, more nervous, more excitable, and more prone to being in the way no matter how much they try not to be. They are well-intentioned, but nevertheless manage to be in the wrong place, to stuff their luggage in the wrong way, or to block the aisle because their stuff doesn't fit in the overhead bin.
In a system as simultaneously efficient and inefficient as the airline industry, this mix makes traveling... interesting. Because one or two are enough to clog the gears, to slow the system, and to create a fascinating domino effect that causes the whole thing to come screeching to a staggering halt.
So what is the point of this little diatribe? Simply that any system that deals with humanity is bound to have cogs, whether out of good or malicious intents, that slip and stick and get in the way.
So some of us need to be more tolerant, more patient. And others need to pay more attention and attempt to make things smoother for everyone else - either by learning how the system works through a little research or themselves being more willing to let well enough alone.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Divine History
This week I finished Karen Armstrong's A History of God, which catalogs the last 4,000 years of religious monotheism. She makes some interesting points which I felt were worth a comment or two. The first is the idea of our tendency as humans to anthropomorphize our deities. We want our gods - for some reason entirely unclear to me - to be like us. Personally, I think we're horrible enough a species on our own that we don't need to be endowed with divine powers, and Armstrong seems to agree:
Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism. (55)
"More attractive and popular" because he "endorse[s] our egotistic hatred and make[s] it absolute"? That sounds disturbingly like my memories of high school (which was, for what it's worth, Catholic). But the idea that our deity of choice behaves like a 13-17-year-old girl ought to rightly give us nightmares, especially if we remember what it was like to be the other 13-17-year-old girl who wasn't "attractive and popular." And yes, I know that isn't quite the point Armstrong is making... in fact, her point is worse. We are attracted to deities who are cruel and exclusionary because exclusivity and ostracism makes us feel better about ourselves. What a shining endorsement.
More disturbing still is the idea that it isn't simply others that religion of this sort teaches us to condemn. In fact, later monotheism (as it appears in Armstrong's study, this includes Christianity and Islam, but has moved past Judaism) encourages us to regard ourselves not as beings in need of improvement, but fundamentally and critically flawed:
A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. (124)
So to sum up the argument thus far (and to give Armstrong her due, this book is not a rant akin to those offered by Richard Dawkins; rather, she includes these comments amid well-researched history and plenty of comments about the good religion has offered throughout history, as well), we see monotheism alienating subscribers of other religions, and then alienating its own adherents from one another. Armstrong continues to comment that "This is doubly ironic, since the idea that God had become flesh and shared our humanity should have encouraged Christians to value the body" (125). But it did not. Instead, Christianity (specifically, early to medieval) encouraged the physical and psychological debasement of human physical needs, causing repercussions that have lasted in the human psyche well into the twenty-first century as we know it.
Armstrong does not offer a solution - she isn't trying to "fix" religion, simply to explain its history. But she does remark upon something very interesting in one of her later chapters on the Enlightenment: "Once 'God' has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, 'he' does not exist" (342). Which makes me think very carefully about the recent rise (noted in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason) of subjective opinions as "fact." It is an issue I see with my students (college freshmen), and one that appears with increasing frequency in today's media. So what do I take from this? The idea that the more subjective we are with our "facts," the more prevalent intolerant religious fundamentalism will be because if facts are subjective, then no one can be wrong, no matter how irrational or counter-factual their assertions are.
Not all spirituality causes these reactions or oppressive ideological tendencies. I recognize this. As an avowed atheist (or "Bright"), I am biased against religious views, but I know that not every spiritual person is intolerant, exclusive, or irrational. I know many spiritual people who are quite the opposite. But in today's increasingly fundamentalist world (be it Christianity, Islam, or Scientologist), reason is taking a back seat to subjective self-promotion and exclusionary racial, ethnic, and creedal oppression. And if we can permit this because it exists under the blanket of "religious freedom," then God - or Reason - help us all.
Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism. (55)
"More attractive and popular" because he "endorse[s] our egotistic hatred and make[s] it absolute"? That sounds disturbingly like my memories of high school (which was, for what it's worth, Catholic). But the idea that our deity of choice behaves like a 13-17-year-old girl ought to rightly give us nightmares, especially if we remember what it was like to be the other 13-17-year-old girl who wasn't "attractive and popular." And yes, I know that isn't quite the point Armstrong is making... in fact, her point is worse. We are attracted to deities who are cruel and exclusionary because exclusivity and ostracism makes us feel better about ourselves. What a shining endorsement.
More disturbing still is the idea that it isn't simply others that religion of this sort teaches us to condemn. In fact, later monotheism (as it appears in Armstrong's study, this includes Christianity and Islam, but has moved past Judaism) encourages us to regard ourselves not as beings in need of improvement, but fundamentally and critically flawed:
A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. (124)
So to sum up the argument thus far (and to give Armstrong her due, this book is not a rant akin to those offered by Richard Dawkins; rather, she includes these comments amid well-researched history and plenty of comments about the good religion has offered throughout history, as well), we see monotheism alienating subscribers of other religions, and then alienating its own adherents from one another. Armstrong continues to comment that "This is doubly ironic, since the idea that God had become flesh and shared our humanity should have encouraged Christians to value the body" (125). But it did not. Instead, Christianity (specifically, early to medieval) encouraged the physical and psychological debasement of human physical needs, causing repercussions that have lasted in the human psyche well into the twenty-first century as we know it.
Armstrong does not offer a solution - she isn't trying to "fix" religion, simply to explain its history. But she does remark upon something very interesting in one of her later chapters on the Enlightenment: "Once 'God' has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, 'he' does not exist" (342). Which makes me think very carefully about the recent rise (noted in Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason) of subjective opinions as "fact." It is an issue I see with my students (college freshmen), and one that appears with increasing frequency in today's media. So what do I take from this? The idea that the more subjective we are with our "facts," the more prevalent intolerant religious fundamentalism will be because if facts are subjective, then no one can be wrong, no matter how irrational or counter-factual their assertions are.
Not all spirituality causes these reactions or oppressive ideological tendencies. I recognize this. As an avowed atheist (or "Bright"), I am biased against religious views, but I know that not every spiritual person is intolerant, exclusive, or irrational. I know many spiritual people who are quite the opposite. But in today's increasingly fundamentalist world (be it Christianity, Islam, or Scientologist), reason is taking a back seat to subjective self-promotion and exclusionary racial, ethnic, and creedal oppression. And if we can permit this because it exists under the blanket of "religious freedom," then God - or Reason - help us all.
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