Christian Causes

Reading a brilliant article in the New Yorker today, and came upon this phrase:

a lawyer and minister who has worked for Christian causes for decades.

And it occurred to me: what are Christian causes? There is one, ultimate Christian cause: the salvation of one's soul, and presumably others'. But in order to reconcile the kinds of causes we're meant to think of within the term Christian causes with this, we're going to have to do some extension.

Christian causes probably includes things like government affirmation of Christianity, use of prayer and religious symbols in official spaces and business, the abolition of abortion, the substitution of evolution in schools, and the rollback of civil rights legislation for homosexuals.

More on the fringe, and probably not universally understood as Christian causes are more theocratic things, like the remolding of American jurisprudence in Biblical dies, affirmation of the illegitimacy of other religions, the abolition of birth control, or the abolition of democracy. Some of these ideas have little support even among the rightest minds; though I think that all of them are abhorrent to moderates or leftists. I list them partly for inflammatory effect.

As for the others—let's talk.

• The business with evolution is all about the inerrancy of the Bible. I can't understand how this is a Christian cause, since many Christians don't believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. A billion Catholics, for instance, nominally. This is more like a fundamentalist Christian cause.
• Public symbols seems to be about winning special treatment for Christianity. This could more reasonably be called a Christian cause. Still, ask the Anglican church in England how well a faith fares once it's been big-E Established for a few centuries. Moreover, in America all faiths already technically have no barriers to practice or to proselytization; special treatment for Christianity (which will always exist to some extent as long as a vast majority of Americans identify as Christian) will not break down any hindrances to the salvation of souls, but simply make it easier to do.
• Abortion is a thing that hangs not on Christianity per se, but upon a certain philosophical view of life adhered to by many—and typically right-wing—Christians. When does Life begin? is in many ways a stupid question, because it's never ended in the first place. An embryo constitutes life. A fetus constitutes life. Shed cells from my inner cheek constitute life. Cancer constitutes life. A foreskin constitutes life. The questions are what is meaningful life, and what kinds of life do we have a moral obligation to protect. Except for perhaps third-trimester abortions, when the fetus is potentially viable, I can't see how abortion is necessarily a Christian cause, though it certainly is a conflict between philosophies.
• The gays seem to be a particular bugaboo for conservative Christians. But there are gay Christians. There are Christian groups that not only admit homosexuals, but ordain them. This isn't a Christian cause, and never was.

Some people believe that government

cannot reliably be trusted on issues of speech, gun control, or even administering social welfare or foster parent systems.

Another group of people believe that the expansion of government police powers is vital to keeping America safe from various nasty elements, including terrorists.

What isn't altogether surprising is that there's substantial overlap between the two groups. But then again, I'm an old cynical bastard.

Manipulation

I've now heard this one several times:

America now discriminates against Christians, by not allowing school prayer, not allowing Ten Commandments monuments, and not allowing religious music programs.

This is logically absurd. To the extent that religions can have rights—which they can't—no other religion has the right to push public prayers in public schools, nor do any other religions have the right to inscribe their scriptures on huge monuments and place them like spiritual sentinels along the paths to our civic buildings.

So, insofar as Christians have lost any rights at all, it has only been to destroy the privilege it has held, getting away with things no other religion should or could.

I think it's awfully specious to claim to be discriminated against, or specially oppressed, when all that's been done is to remove the special treatment given one ahead of all others. Especially since Christianity still is—and most likely for a long time will be—the dominant faith of the United States, with up to 70-80% of the population adherent. Due to the raucousness of the evangelicals, church pews will not soon be emptied. No action of the Supreme Court is going to dissuade people from Christ—though in fact, the removal of Christian privilege is likely to inflame the otherwise lukewarm faith of many. Nor should we presume that a religion that did depend on special privilege to thrive should be catered to, should be preserved artificially by the inequity of government tolerance.

Christian privilege has become nasty for the United States, because it has lured many otherwise right-thinking people into silliness. It has convinced people that de facto the United States is a Christian nation, and a Christian republic, which trailhead blazes straight into a dangerous jungle I don't want to explore. The intent of many conservative evangelicals is not now to sever any oppressive force, nor even especially to get new members, except as such gives them more power. Their goal is the subversion of American pluralist democracy, and the founding of a theocratic state.

That they share their goal with all sorts of politically deluded people around the world shows that the theocratic imperative is not a simple relic or atavism of Christianity; that in fact, Christianity—despite the protestations of evangelicals about Christian privilege—is no better than any other religion.

We should be careful how we use the word evangelical, as well, because it is not exclusive to the ignorant folks we wish to illuminate. With great apologies to those evangelicals with God truly in their hearts, and the twofold commandment of love in their minds, our use of the term in this post denotes only those shrewd manipulators who wish to subvert the Messiah and set up their own thousand-year reign of God on Earth—who are not content waiting for the divine son—who deign to pretend to know God's will through and through, mere vessels whom the fullness of God's wisdom and love would overflow a thousand times over.

The greatest crime of these hungry evangelicals is their pride. It insulates them from empathy and from compassion. It prevents them from thinking of the well-being, or even disliking the torture of anyone the least unlike them. In some unfortunate cases, it has even led to their public downfall. That doesn't surprise me at all. Hypocrisy is elastic; it may be twisted, stretched, and pulled all manner of ways. But it does have a limit, and once the proud have wrapped their hypocrisy one loop too tight around the throats of their enemies, it will rupture. The proud, manipulative evangelical is exposed, and his place is momentarily cooled for the next hothead.

I also find fault with any argument that claims secular humanism is a religion. Mind you, Buddhism has proven that a religion needs no Gods, and what's more, secular humanists have proven that you need not be an atheist to be one. But I would have thought the word secular—even though it's not of the relevant people's invention, but more of a smear invented by manipulative evangelicals for the snickering delight of their co-religionists—I say, the word secular should itself alienate any suspicion of it being a religion at all.

It's hard to describe what religion is, particularly so when some narrow minds construe true religion to merely describe the niche sect they have built and nestled like a pigeon in a cranny of an antique roof. But I think we can all agree on some salient descriptive features common to anything one would reasonably call religion. And I think one relevant feature to this discussion is sanctity or holiness. To ascribe to religiosity there must be a separation of the sacred and the profane. Churches, temples, altars, prayers, idols, dances, rituals, amulets, relics, mosques, scrolls, scriptures, collars, hats, mitres, sacrifice: these are all signs of a separate area of life from the mundane, markers of an area in one's mind and heart that has been segregated from everything else, from bills-paying and parking-space-finding, from teeth-brushing and even voting, civic service. Even Buddhists have their sacred and their profane. Those who describe themselves, or whom are described as secular, it seems that to render the description truthful should lack sanctity, should lack the holy altogether, and is not therefore a religion.

As I am more convinced the label secular humanist is more an artifact of evangelical thinking than a valid description of reality, I am not at all surprised by the conclusion. Those who seek to fortify a separation between Church and State comprise no monophyletic group. There are people within the bloc with even widely disparate reasons for supporting separation: some to preserve the holiness of their own, still-thought-privileged religion, and others to preserve the function of their civic institutions from what they regard as the polluting and ignorance-causing agency of faith.

The stereotyping of this group is part of an effort of manipulative evangelicals—perhaps not even fully conscious—to discredit the ideas they have all come to by different paths, in order to preserve the special trail they have been macheteing into a dark, swarming wood.

Though we fear that copse, we are familiar with it. Other countries have led their people through its trees and crunched their bones upon the humus. We cannot let this happen here.

Am Struck by the Utter Hilarity

of Conservative humor. Besides bashing liberal excesses, what is there? Upholding time-honored traditions is not funny. Sticking up for authority and the establishment is not funny. You never hear such a punchline:

So I said to the police officer, `Of course you can search my car—I've got nothing to hide!'

Obeying all the rules is not funny. Praying to God—unless it's some really outlandish prayer—is certainly not funny. Gay-bashing can be really funny, but you have to use words like ass and felch and many conservative audiences don't like that. Or if you're in front of one of those crass conservative audiences, one of those NASCAR audiences, why then it can be very funny but soon it feels very unseemly and ugly.

Jokes about traditional family values are really only funny if you're the dad. No one else finds it all that funny.

When the First Lady delivered her routine at the Press Club dinner a month or two ago, you'll notice it wasn't really conservative humor. It was just short of blue. She implied actions that would get her kicked out of any discerning sewing circle. What's funny is that she or her husband should do them, considering how conservative they are. In this way, comedy tends to be liberal.

The metaphorical problem in the United States

is not about a lack of meaning, it's actually a preponderance. Take for example the recent Newsweek incident. The rag published a story reporting that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had used the Quran to get to prisoners there. Not by citing it. Flushing it.

Blah blah blah—lots of people get pissed off—you know the story. Newsweek retracts, because their source isn't sure if he knows this fact from one report or the other.

Now here's where the thesis comes in: if you want to make a point about anonymous sources, then fine, okay. We can talk about that. But the meaning behind this whole fiasco hasn't been about anonymous sources. It's been about the scoop. It's been about irresponsible journalists. It's been about a much-maligned administration finally delivering some comeuppance to long comedownanced fourth estatists.

All sorts of vehicles have been fixed to this otherwise droll tenor. All but the most rational. For the fundamental story that Newsweek reported, assuming the source is not lying, has not changed. If anything, the retraction is based on what lots of commentators in the context of unfavorable court decisions have called a technicality. Which government report told of the Quranic expurgations is in doubt. Not the expurgations themselves.

Partial corroboration in the name of the Red Cross now shows the crux of the story—that American interrogators did not treat the Quran with the utmost respect at Guantanamo—is correct. The conversation we need to have about the moral worth of Guantanamo still needs to happen. The essential anger of Muslims toward America, triggered by Newsweek, is still within their sphere justified.

The story here is not about the Quran, which is just a book. Nor is it about people rioting and dying over the story—although that is a hugely unfortunate if silly overreaction. The story is about the United States government's continual overreaching of proper authority and proper standards of conduct in the perpetration of its war on terror.

In Response to a History Prof

talking about something he doesn't know much about.

I feel intensely awkward even advancing a humble corrective to a PhD, though the domain of what I believe to be his error is, by his own admission, not his expertise. The more so because, though I am much closer to the biological sciences than Professor William Rubinstein, it is not my area of expertise either, but an adjunct to my professional studies, which are in medicine.

Still, though one acquainted with modern evolutionary biology might find more reason to quibble with Prof. Rubinstein, I find the most troubling aspect of his short essay to be a certain disingenuous strain: though he confesses he has "no reason to suppose that the accepted scientific chronology of the earth's history and the emergence of life is not entirely correct," and also asseverates that he has "as much common sense as the next man and probably more in the way of an independent viewpoint than most," his points against the plausibility of evolution seem to belie a decidedly negative and persuasive opinion.

Scientists do not (nor should) have control over the popular press, so if in fact Prof. Rubinstein's myriad misconceptions about modern biological evolution stem from popular mischaracterizations, I hope this will not be laid at the feet of the thousands of evo-devo researchers who every day carry out meticulous work based on not the plausibility of evolution but the near-certainty of its occurrence.

The idea that evolution occurs in the manner Prof. Rubinstein implies, i.e., that a cat should have a litter of non-cat kittens, should be dispelled by any decent high school or college-level biology textbook. His claim that no "missing link" exists in the fossil record is archaic as well as incorrect; transitional forms pollinate the whole of the geological column.

Most egregious, however, is his claim regarding the uselessness of non-fully-formed organs. I agree that to one without a good introduction to biology, this may seem an intractible problem; and it is true that Darwin viewed the eye in particular as a difficulty--though it must be said both that a great deal of research and understanding, including the elucidation of genetics and embryology has occurred since Darwin's time, and that Darwin himself was confident that the eye could be explained. What I find especially troubling, however, is that this claim is taken nearly verbatim from the fringe academics who maintain the impossibility of common descent. Again, this is likely simply the result of a well-intentioned but non-expert man being exposed to popular mischaracterizations, as the efforts of the aforementioned fringe academics (particularly Dr. Behe, Dr. Dembski, and Mr. Johnson, Esq.) are more disproportionately spent in the popular media than in scholarly circles.

But it makes me curious--exactly what was the point of Prof. Rubinstein's essay? If he truly possesses "at least a desultory interest in many fields beyond [his] own narrow specialty, including the mysteries of science," I might expect him to have consulted a textbook or even a mainstream publication on evolution, or in place of that, airing the intellectual difficulties such as to solicit good, informed opinion to allay whatever problems may be allayed, in such deference as he should expect of those without a deep and formal understanding of history. The tone of essay, however, strikes the reader as less petitioning and more controversial. I can only, in the absence of a response from Prof. Rubinstein, defer these impressions to my lack of expertise in rhetoric, and my lack of understanding written argument, although I am very curious to learn of Prof. Rubinstein's purpose for the essay, and in any case if he should deign to converse with me, or seek more informed opinion on biological science through my intermediation, I should be happy to accept.

In conclusion, while I still possess enough nerve, I would like to enumerate a few of the findings that, to those familiar with them, confer a very high degree of plausibility to the idea of common descent. These include the cellular nature of all life; the universality of the genetic code; the commonality of biochemical pathways; the genetic similarity of different organism, proportional to the distance from their presumed common ancestor; the universal use of DNA as an information store; the exclusive use of the same twenty amino acids in all organisms; the embryological similarity of similar species; the arrangement of the geological column; the occurrence of atavisms; the occurrence of homologous structures; the differential prevalence of genes for sickle-cell and glucose-6-phosphatase traits among African and Mediterranean peoples (they confer resistance to Plasmodium falciparum malaria); and the reuse of similar proteins for similar tasks, such as bacterial and human rhodopsin, which are both involved in light sensing.

I have taken up far too much of your time already, and I shall end

Respectfully,

Even people with wacky ideas can have journals.

From the Journal of the Family research Institute, 17:4 (2002):

At a high level of abstraction, homosexuality and heterosexuality might seem similar. So similar, in fact, that psychiatry and the media would have us believe that the only difference is in one's choice of sex partners. Otherwise, homosexuals are "just like you and me." They work, dine, go to movies; they bleed, have ambitions, feelings, etc. But despite this message, in the "real world," there are enormous differences between what homosexuals and heterosexuals do.

Not just psychiatry, but psychology, too. Medical science in general. They would have us believe the innocuousness of homosexuality because it is innocuous.

There are differences—the enormity of those differences is suspect. Homosexuals need not even have sex, technically—it would suffice to be attracted to members of the same sex, just as virgin teenagers may still be called heterosexual if their yearnings stretch to the “correct” set of genitals.

There is no way to sugarcoat this reality. In fact, it is extremely distasteful. But if reality is skipped "out of decency," high flying abstractions tend to prevail. For men, what homosexuality really comes down to is getting the penises of other men—often strangers or near-strangers—into their rectums or mouths, or putting their penis into the mouths or rectums of other men. This reality is avoided at our intellectual peril.

Strangers or near-strangers? That’s a bit inflammatory, as well as a big smelly pile of irrelevant. Heterosexuals have anonymous dalliances, too. Even if we concede homosexuals (at least, homosexual men) have them more frequently, it becomes a distinction only of degree. Not enormity.

What homosexuality really comes down to is people wanting to have sex with the people they’re attracted to. They make the best of the equipment they’ve got. Some people may find this disgusting—but some people find many heterosexual acts disgusting. I regularly engage in cunnilingus. Why is it so bad if a woman does it instead of a man? (Besides the usual litany).

Furthermore, the differences between what "homosexuals" and heterosexuals do show that homosexuality is about more than just sex—it is about rebelling against and trying to corrupt society, even as heterosexuality is about, for the most part, having and raising children. Homosexuality is also about coloring the world with SEX, regardless of the consequences. Its most prominent attitude is selfishness—getting what's mine, what I deserve; getting back at all those who have hurt me, etc.

Straight people have oral and anal sex, too. Homosexuals can’t really rebel against a sexual culture (even if delitescent) that already not only condones but eagerly outdoes them in sheer numbers of acts.

Even before the pill, heterosexual sex was not about having children. Other than in individual minds, it never was. It’s about many things, no number of which is minimally legitimizing: reproduction, pleasure, social obligation, profession, appeasement of deities, etc.

I personally have never had sex because I wanted children. I know few people who do it for children any but a few times in their whole lives, and I know primarily heterosexuals. The attitude of people such as write this is more attuned to selfishness, since they wish to restrict normal sexual outlet to a specific group of people, doing a specific set of acts. Homosexuals for the most part only want equality.

Of course, those with homosexual proclivities generally do everything in their power not to admit these truths. In fact, they often become enraged if accused of being either promiscuous or fundamentally self-centered. And their rage is usually effective. Most people just "back off," not wanting a confrontation. Others decide that their anger must be justified—that homosexuals must not really be so selfish or obsessed with sex. For why else would they get so upset?

In the absence of informed psychiatric or psychological opinion, the knowledge of the article-writers of homosexuals’ true minds is remarkably suspect.

Truths pronounced as such should be either demonstrated or self-evident. Neither standard is provided by this article.