The Ark and The Dove

Someone's Got Some SPs

There is a hilarious news clip on Youtube where a Scientologist gets all dweeby-freaky on a FoxNews reporter at a local Detroit station.

Also, if you've seen the Anonymous post, you might find this post from XenuTV interesting.

The most fascinating parts of the XenuTV clip (which is a bit long) are 1) a call to fight fair, and 2) a statement that some Scientologists work on commissions (which are a cut from donations given to them). The argument goes that any Church whose workers receive payment on commission from donations does not deserve to have a tax-exempt status.

Pro-Life March

Despite the best efforts of the Catholic Terps to lose me pretty much the whole course of the Pro-Life March, I managed to make it through another rousing protest.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the March's founder, Nellie Gray, who had a rather nasty fall on stage during the speeches. We were repeatedly asked to pray for her, and she was taken away in an ambulance.

Darned if I can find much in the news about it though. It takes more clicks than I have patience for.

On the other hand, I suppose there isn't really much to report on the March. There aren't really any dramatic incidents that happens. Everyone pretty much gets along. Nobody riots, and nobody set up an offensive counter-protest.

I always feel better for having done the March; it gives me the feeling that I can say I took a public stand against abortion at some point in my life. It will be something to tell the grandkids about when they gasp at the page in their history books describing the early 21st century practice of abortion. Still, the March itself has a tendency to be a bit uneventful. You spend more time standing around outside in the cold listening to speakers that don't really appeal to you, and then shuffling a couple blocks down the streets of D.C. to say a quick prayer in front of the Supreme Court (the Catholic Terps didn't even make it all the way this year).

Perhaps the most impressive phenomena about the March was just seeing the sheer volume of Catholicism. There were four Masses scheduled for this morning. I arrived too late to meet up with the Terps in the Verizon Center...I was told it was filled to capacity. That was okay, because it turns out the Terps couldn't get in either. So off to St. Patrick's I went (following a lead)...only to find out it was equally full. St. Patrick's appears to have initiated an impromptu Mass at an earlier time just to clear out people for the scheduled Mass (I did manage to squeeze my way in the door for the earlier time). Nevertheless, I rather felt like one of the virgins who hadn't enough lamp oil, and then was turned away at the door by the bridegroom.

The point is there were a lot of Catholics and there was a lot of Catholicism, making this event not just a political rally against national atrocities, but a kind of Catholic culture greet and meet. I do think this sometimes lends to a certain degree of conflict as the March becomes one part protest, one part Columbus Day parade. You'll probably never meet a more jovial or gregarious band of people gathered together to defend the relentless and merciless slaughter of innocent lives. If you've been on the March, you'll hopefully know what I'm talking about.

The Simple Things

In an extemporaneous speech reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams argues that creationism is flawed because it imagines a top down approach to creation. It suggests a very complex being created beings of lesser complexity. He says that evolution, and most notably the way computers and their programs work, have given us a different model. Human complexity, according to Adams and his sources, arises not from some ineffable and greater than human intellect or spirituality. Rather, our complexity is generated by millions upon millions of iterations of small, basic subroutines working together to create a whole that appears to be greater than the sum of the parts, the same way little bits of code can be strung together to create a very complicated video game.
For Adams, the most basic, fundamental principles of the universe guide this, and that is enough.
But what if Adams is wrong in his depiction of God? What if God is not only a hyper-complex super-being? What if God, in His completeness, is also the most simple and basic of all being. What if God's mere being, what if love in its purest form, is the most simple, basic thing that lies at the very root of even the most fundamental particle that science can imagine?

I'm not sure that you can empirically prove that, but I'm also not sure you can empirically prove love at all...yet, I'm pretty sure most people think it exists.

Anyone have any thoughts on how we might prove love is not merely an evolved psychological condition that merely happened favorable to the survival of the species?

Abortion Statistics

via FoxNews article...

Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to least one child prior to getting an abortion...

In fact, the women come from virtually every demographic sector. But year after year the statistics reveal that black women and economically struggling women — who have above-average rates of unintended pregnancies — are far more likely than others to have abortions. About 13 percent of American women are black, yet new figures from the Centers for Disease Control show they account for 35 percent of the abortions.

Speaking of Wacky Scientologists

Don't miss the crazy video of Tom Cruise that has the "Church" of Scientology filing a copyright lawsuit...

It's a pretty bizarre video. Not only does Cruise claim that Scientology is the only way to build a better world, he also claims that he hates "spectators" and that Scientology has to find a way to get the spectators to do something "or get them out of the arena." Uhm...I'm not quite sure what that analogy is supposed to represent. So much for universal inclusiveness, eh?

Actually, much of what Cruise says could be a good thing, if it wasn't allied with such a goofy cult. In fact, it sounded a lot like the beginning of The Way. If only some Opus Dei missionary could infiltrate Scientology and bring all the former Catholics back over...

Choose Your Poison

I was listening to two radio personalities prattling on about organized religion and scientology earlier today (note that those are separate categories). They inevitably started talking about the "Free Katie Holmes" movement, and even though the talking heads had nothing positive to say about Catholicism they definitely saw Scientology as the nightmarish cult that it is.
This got me to thinking...
Which of the following things is better or worse than the others:
1) To be someone who thinks they are a good Catholic, but who publicly misrepresents articles of faith.
2) To be someone who is a bad Catholic, but represents the faith accurately.
3) To be someone who thinks they are a bad Catholic and misrepresents the faith.
4) To be someone who renounces Catholicism.

WoW!

BBspot.com linked to this article about a World of Warcraft player who has been building pascifist characters. So why I do I care enough to post about this? Well, if the geek factor wasn't enough, the player was interviewed...

Tell us about the concept behind Reinisch, your first pacifist character. I started him from a roleplaying point of view, based very loosely on a real German priest, Franz Reinisch, who refused to serve in Hitler's army and was executed. My undead priest's back story is basically the same, and he still refuses to kill.

This, of course, sent me on a long tangent of reading about Fr. Reinisch...which, according to the histories that Google Books provides, is a pretty depressing story of a priest who essentially went rogue by resisting the Nazis even when the German Catholic Church seemed largely complicit. As Guenter Lewy writes,

the Pallotine priest Franz Reinisch was denied Holy Communion by the Catholic prison chaplain on the grounds that he had violated his Christian duty by refusing to take the military oath of alegiance to Hitler. Josef Fleischer, a layman, recalls that he was visited in prison by a high Church dignitary who tried to persuade him to abandon his refusal to serve, and who finally left in a fit of anger declaring that  people like Fleischer deserved to be "shortened by a head." Even the relatively innocuous statement of a parish priest made in 1939 that he waited for the end of "this awfully stupid war" and that those fed up should be allowed to go home, drew a reprimand from his diocesan chancery; the priest in question was made to send his apology to the officer to whose soldiers he had made the comment.
But by and large the Catholics willingly followed the exhortations of their bishops to do their Christian duty and fight for the fatherland....

I'm not expert in WWII era Catholic history, so I have no idea how accurate the above passage is. I'm sure that maintaining an institutionalized religion during a fascist regime is no cakewalk, and I'm also certain that there have always been bad bishops and priests in the Church (even when Jesus was running the show in person, one in twelve priests were horribly corrupt). However, I'm also fairly certain that it was the Catholicism of those who resisted above that empowered them to resist (as evidenced by the Nazis attempts to appeal to their very Catholic identities). One of the greatest powers of Christianity is its self-correcting nature. You can attempt to exploit the authority of the Church, but her core truths will eventually purge that corruption.

Princess of Persia 2

I started reading the second volume of Persepolis today.
Volume One was a bit more engaging, by my standards. One thing that comes out loud and clear, however, is the importance of religious making the right impression. Satrapi was apparently sent to a boarding school run by a group of nuns. She writes (er...draws?) that she was scolded by the mother superior for eating a dinner she cooked right out of the pot while watching television. According to the dialogue bubble, the sister says that the lack of manner proves that Iranians are uneducated. This prompts an insult from Satrapi, which results in her expulsion. The conclusion Satrapi reaches is that fanaticism is present in all religions.
One ignorant statement of racism by a sister avalanches into a scandal.
Now, we have a world famous graphic novel that depicts nuns as blind, angry religious fanatics who kick fourteen year old refugees out of their schools.
Imagine if it had been otherwise. Imagine if the mother superior had approached the issue differently...then we'd have a world famous graphic novel that showed the patience and virtue of Christianity juxtaposed to the hatred and intolerance of radical Islam.

The View...P-U!

The View is possessed by a demonic presence, and the diabolic spirit that once spoke through the mouth of Rosie has moved on to the other hosts.

I am, of course, referring to Joy Behar's deranged ramble that the saints were all crazy people (via FoxNews).

Obviously, I'm using the terminology of possession in a purely metaphorical sense...or maybe not..

Is everyone who claims to have had a supernatural vision really a divine prophet? No.
Is everyone who claims to have had a supernatural vision really just mentally unstable? Maybe.
Is it possible that some people who claim to have had supernatural visions really did? Why not?

There is one major flaw in Behar's perhaps jocular logic. She assumes that people who had visions were all mentally handicapped. Now, she argues, we put such people on medication so they stop having visions (and we no longer believe their visions were true revelation because we can control them with chemicals).

That being said, why is it that people seek psychiatric help when they are susceptible to hallucinations or "voices?" It seems to me that they are really only a problem when they are misleading you into harmful acts, to yourself or another. If your dog is telling you to kill your next door neighbors, you really should confer with a mental health professional.

If your dog is telling you that you should feed the homeless, I'm not sure that it's quite as much of a threat to society.

The visionary saints were not lead to murder their families.
Their voices and visions led them to love more greatly.
If the saints were all the victims of mental disorders, I would wish there were more such victims...and I hardly think we'd feel the need to medicate people who ran around being charitable just because a voice in their head told them to be charitable.

That being said, I see no reason to dismiss every supernatural event as a merely benevolent mental disorder. Plus, I think it is far more plausible that the average medieval visionary would strike the average American as far more even-keeled and sane than any of the people on The View.

If a person wants to take a scientific approach to the supernatural, they will never be satisfied. Science depends on the ability to reproduce phenomena. Miracles have a nasty habit of not being reproducible, even when they are observable.

Princess of Persia

In my break from prepping for job interviews and preparing for next semester, I read through volume one of Persepolis, the Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic book on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran.

Needless to say, my break devolved into an extended break.

It seems impossible to avoid making comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus.
Both are autobiographical. Both have simple art styles. Both reveal how perplexing simple and swift it is for an entire, real world society to devolve into an Orwellian police state.
From my first reading, I would say that Maus certainly seems the more complex of the two works, perhaps because I read Maus as a graphic novel about writing a graphic novel about the Holocaust, rather than being a comic about the Holocaust. Persepolis has occasional moments of anachronistic metafiction, but these are usually designed to present quirky observations, humor, or the occasional footnote about Iranian culture.

What I found most stunning about Persepolis is how recently Iranian society was hijacked by fundamentalist extremists and how very minor cultural trends (say, wearing a tie or buying an Iron Maiden poster) could suddenly become an act of rebellion and treason. Satrapi's graphic novel relates these issues in a way that only a comic can make emotionally accessible, and provides a celerity to the social upheaval that would be bogged down in a prose narrative.

My only concern about the tale is that volume one does not provide much counterbalance to its depictions of Marxism. Marxists and Communists largely come off as attractive heroes and/or martyrs. The only seeming questioning of Marxism comes when the young protagonist declares herself a revolutionary, and finds that God (whom she had been on a personal basis with during her previous desire to be a prophet) suddenly disappears from a panel. The fact that the Iranians largely seem to rebel by adopting (or rather, I should say, continue to consume) Western culture might also provide a commentary on Marx, but it would be a rather indirect inference.

Essentially, what seems most attractive about Marxism in the graphic novel is the offer of a classless society to replace what was once a hard-line class system (there is a brief story of a maid who falls in love with the son of a neighbor and is rejected when he discovers her career). Extreme Islam seems to offer certain characters a loophole around the class system: by becoming die-hard fundamentalists, lower class people seem to magically ascend ranks in the society. Indeed, the anti-Imperial revolution which the author's parents joined as Marxists became a bait-and-switch, replacing the socialist ideal with religious fanaticism. This, of course, is the problem with a revolutionary ideology like Marxism...what you get from the new order is often not what you were promised.