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Beatlenews

As one who came of age during the height of Beatlemania (I'm still a huge fan), I feel obliged to pass along these two news  items --with musical accompaniment.

First, from yesterday's Oregonian Living section, an article about "Eleanor Rigby".   Was she a real person?  Or did she spring from the imagination of Paul McCartney?  Either way, it turns out there's a statue of Eleanor Rigby in Liverpool, where people leave flowers to mourn her death.

That's nice to know.  Here's the song:



The second is the announcement that the Vatican has finally decided to "forgive" John Lennon for boasting the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus".

The greater sacrilege was actually John comparing himself to Jesus in his really great song "The Ballad of John and Yoko", the one that goes "Christ you know it ain't easy ...the way things are going, they're going to crucify me."

Here's the song. Listen for Paul's brilliant harmonies in the second half of the song:

Rick Warren and the "New Atheists"

Pastor Rick Warren, author of the best selling The Purpose-Driven Life and praised by some as the "anti-Jerry Falwell", was asked by a Jewish woman at the Aspen Ideas Festival if she was condemned to burn in hell. 

Warren's answer --"Yes."

Such absolute certainty should be troubling to all Americans, religious or otherwise.  The fact that presidential candidates Obama and McCain submitted to Warren's  faith inquisition last Saturday should be more troubling yet.  But the Warren interrogation raises a deeper question:

Can an professed atheist ever be elected President of the United States?  Probably not.  Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.

I say that because atheists are every bit the "true believers" that Bible thumping Christians are, as sure of their belief in rationalism as fundamentalists are in the divinity of Jesus.  Both are convinced of the correctness of their beliefs.  They allow no doubts or uncertainties to seep into their worldviews.  No "true believer" of that sort should ever seriously  be considered for high political office.  Absolute certainty leads to almost certain political and humanitarian disaster.

Marx's dismissal of religion as the "opium of the people" led to Leninism and then Stalinism.  The Roman Catholic insistence on "papal infallibility" led to the Inquisition.  Different sides of the same "true believer's" coin. 

Chris Hedges, who calls Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins the "new atheists" (he debated both Harris and Hitchens), said of Harris in an interview with Salon:

"The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness.  And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous."

Like Stalin.  Or Torquemada. *

In the  symposium with Obama and McCain, Warren posed a question about evil, and what should be done about it.  Evil is a religious construct.   And when the term is used to characterize Arabs and Muslims,  it becomes a  racist epithet and religious  slur.   What Warren should have asked first is, do you accept the notion of evil? 

There's no certainty in my mind that evil does exist in this world, either in the religious sense --as in possession by the devil-- or in  psychological terms -- as in cases of  socio- or psycho- pathology.   Individuals so diagnosed supposedly lack a conscience.  But how does anyone know for certain?  The problem posed by the existence of truly "evil" persons admits only one solution --their elimination.  That's how many justify the death penalty.

Pastor Rick Warren's questions were designed to elicit overtly religious responses.  Well, I say that  religion  has no place in a political campaign.  As I was reminded recently,  Presidents take an oath to uphold the Constitution.  They do not pledge their adherence to a  particular religious belief.

Insofar as the Constitution separates religion from state, what Warren enticed candidates Obama and McCain to discuss Saturday evening was clearly un-Constitutional.   Or, as Kathleen Parker wrote,  it was  "supremely wrong."  And certainly un-American.  

*(Much like Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, Sam Harris supports "water boarding", and other forms of torture, for America's "evil" enemies.)

Global warming 'religion'

That phrase was used Sunday in a letter to the editor criticizing "big government" for going after "big oil" in Congressional hearings and suggesting that, in "the near term" we start looking for more oil resources here at home --in the oceans and in Alaska, meaning I assume, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Now I'm no scientist but I do know how to read the 'scientific' conclusions of experts who say that oil from ANWAR wouldn't be available for at least ten years and even then might knock only seventy five cents off the cost of a barrel of oil.  That doesn't sound like much of a solution to the high price of gas, let alone our "addiction" to foreign oil.

But the part of the letter that got my attention was the reference to environmentalists preaching "...the tenets and doctrine of the Global Warming religion... ." 

Again, I'm no scientist.  And I don't have anything against religion.  But I do consider myself an environmentalist concerned about climate change and the ongoing degradation of the earth's ecosystems.  That concern is based not on religious "tenets and doctrine" (unless my regard for the survival of life on earth, including human life, can be considered "religious") but rather on the hard scientific data that overwhelmingly points to catastrophe in the very near future if we don't stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The burning of fossil fuels, including oil, accounts for almost all of those earth warming greenhouse gases.

If one were to base the formulation of public policy on science, then, it seems clear that oil advocates, not environmentalists and their alternative energy ideas, would lose out.  To conclude otherwise is wishful thinking, probably influenced by adherence to some form of free market ideology, which is probably more akin to religious belief than anything  espoused by those who work to save the earth. 

Dueling pastors

For the last word on the non-issue of Jeremiah Wright, I defer yet again to the wisdom of Bill Moyers:

"Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. ...

"But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger ... . I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, 'We the people.' Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic."

As the title of Moyers' piece cautions, beware the simplifiers!  And the simple-minded.

************************

Outspoken clergymen will remain an issue, however, in the general election.  And for John McCain, rightfully so.   Unlike Obama, McCain eagerly sought the endorsements of two fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists who espouse views that few Americans can easily accept.  Thus far, McCain has refused to denounce them.  The endorsements stand.

Pastor John Hagee is by now fairly well known for his staunch pro-Israel and anti-gay, anti-Catholic positions.  The other, the Reverend Rod Parsley, has not been as frequently mentioned, but he may well be the more controversial of the two.  His characterization of Islam is not only inaccurate and intemperate, it's also dangerous, especially in service of the militant and war-loving John McCain, who at a campaign rally called Parsley "one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide".

Here's what Parsley said about Islam:

"I can't begin to tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam. That we see it for what it really is. In fact...I do not believe that our nation can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam… . The fact is that...America was founded in part with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed. And I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we no longer can afford to ignore."

The media has temporarily forgiven McCain his sin of embracing the two pastors who together make Jeremiah Wright seem a sage and biblical scholar of the first rank.  Why?  Because McCain hasn't had a "close" relationship with either man.  Obama, on the other hand, was a member of Wright's largely mainstream Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty years.

Forgive my naivete, but doesn't that cast the strange political alliance between McCain and his two preachers in an even more tawdry and cynical light?  I daresay it does.

Perhaps the general election campaign between Obama and McCain will reveal a more even-handed media coverage.  Time will tell.

Render unto Caesar

" 'God Damn America,' the people of Sadr City must rage, as the bombs shake their homes and tear the flesh from their friends and family. 'God Damn, America,'I mutter, echoing the good Reverend Wright, as I witness the indifference of the American people to the war crimes committed by our nation's leaders."  --Phillip Rockstroh

"The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, ... and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came... . Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, ... so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."   

--Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

And I say:  woe to those who claim that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is obligated, through self-imposed silence, to further the political career of Barack Obama.   Those making that demand confuse the call of the religious life with the call of politics.   They conflate the transcendent with the temporal, God with Caesar. 

Even the estimable Thom Hartmann, a self-proclaimed Christian, argues that  Jeremiah Wright should have postponed his media blitz until after the November elections.  That's his firm belief, despite his acknowledgment of the truth of much of what Wright has said in the past three days.

And further woe to all the talking heads, millionaires and celebrities all, far removed from the slums and ghettos,  who are quick to characterize Wright's comments about Obama speaking "politically" as a slander and an ill-timed blow to his electoral chances.   I say Wright merely revealed the obvious.  Politicians temper their speech and their positions for political purposes.  Their goal is to get elected.   Obama is no exception.  He has been politic in his pronouncements on guns, gays, and most revealingly, God.  He has pandered to the Israel lobby.  He has hinted at the use of military force in Iran.  He has voted for continued funding of the Iraq War to "support the troops." 

If I were a churchgoing man --like most Oregonians, I'm not-- I'd like a man like Jeremiah Wright as the pastor of my church, a man who speaks truth to power and seeks justice for the oppressed while preaching compassion and forgiveness for the oppressors. 

Religion without compassion can hardly be called religion at all.  In the words of the scholar Karen Armstrong:

"The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion."

 

More Jeremiah Wright

I note that John McCain has now raised the issue of Barack Obama's affiliation with the controversial Jeremiah Wright after vowing that his campaign would take the high road.

Given McCain's embrace of the blathering evangelical literalist John Hagee, that's hypocrisy in its purest sense.  It also reveals the media's simpering devotion to McCain and its knee-jerk pro-Israel sympathies.  The mainstream media is obsessed with Wright, but says little about McCain-Hagee. 

Apparently you can spew vitriol about gays and the disastrous consequences of their parades as long as you don't "damn" America for it's genocidal history and it's murderous foreign policy.  And you can blurt out anti-Semitism without repercussions as long as you voice support for America's staunch nuclear ally --Israel-- in the Middle East, even if that support is compromised by Israel's expected demise in the soon-to-come battle of Armageddon.

Which of the two --Wright or Hagee-- is truly delusional?

(The American Israel Public Affairs Committee --the most influential American pro-Israel lobby-- and the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman have embraced Hagee as well.  McCain's hypocrisy pales in comparison.)

If Jeremiah Wright's damning of America is a campaign issue --only ignorance and intolerance makes it one in a country that separates church and state-- then McCain's embrace of the delusional, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic John Hagee, for "political" purposes, should surely be an even more legitimate, and publicized, campaign issue.

Jeremiah Wright revisited

Bill Maher called him a "dick".  Chris Matthews announced that he wasn't interested in hearing anything more from Reverend Wright.

My brother wrote that Wright was a "borderline nutcase", and that, unlike Martin Luther King, would hardly "merit a footnote" in history.

Hillary Clinton has cynically used (and misused) the issue of Pastor Wright to her political advantage.   And even Barack Obama himself, although refusing to "disown" his longtime pastor, has condemned his remarks as unpatriotic.

After Jeremiah Wright's appearance on Bill Moyers' Journal Friday evening, they (and all his  critics) should beg his forgiveness.  I include myself for not acknowledging my ignorance of the man and his work when I denied comparing Wright to Martin Luther King.  I was wrong.  I now believe that a comparison between the two, in many respects, is warranted. 

Pastor Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, I've concluded, is smart, articulate, well-educated and profoundly insightful about the black experience in America, and the influence of that experience on American Christian theology:

"The shame of being a descendant of Africa, was a shame that had been pumped into the minds and hearts of Africans from the 1600s on, even aided and abetted by the benefit of those schools started by the missionaries, who simply carried their culture with them into the South and taught their cultures being synonymous with Christianity. So that to become a Christian, you had to let go of all vestiges of Africa and become European, become New Englanders and worship like New England, worship God properly and right. Well, that shame was a part of the shame that many Africans in the '60s and the '70s were feeling."

The University of Chicago Divinity School taught Wright about the hermeneutics of black theology:

"Hermeneutic is an interpretation, it's the window from which you're looking is your hermeneutic. ... Dr. James Cone put it this way. The God of the people who riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you're praying to, 'Bless our slavery' is not the God to whom these people are praying, saying, 'God, get us out of slavery.' And it's not like Notre Dame playing Michigan. You're saying flip a coin; hope God blesses the winning team, no. That the perception of God who allows slavery, who allows rape, who allows misogyny, who allows sodomy, who allows murder of a people, lynching, that's not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, and carried away into a foreign country."

That's the context, "the frame", of Wright's controversial sound bite snippets from past sermons.  The "No no no ... God Damn America!" is spoken in the context of the biblical prophetic tradition of "condemning" --Wright reminds us of the etymology of "damn"-- a government for it's sins.  The post 9/11 sermon saying "America's chickens have come home to roost" --quoting Malcolm X-- is uttered in the context of this government's terrorism against oppressed minorities at home --Native Americans, African-Americans, Japanese Americans-- and abroad --in Grenada, in Panama, in Iraq.

And  Bill Maher's "he's a dick" comment?  That was in response to Obama's defense of Wright --his refusal to "disown" him-- repaid with what Maher interpreted as ingratitude. Here's the offending remark:

"He's [Obama] a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds."

Two different worlds indeed.  I wouldn't expect Maher to understand the distinction.  He has little use for pastors or any adherent of what he calls an irrational belief in "the talking snake." 

Jeremiah Wright speaks Monday at the National Press Club.  I'm sure you can catch it on C-Span.  But read the entire Bill Moyers transcript for come context.

We're in dire need of context.

We versus me

That's what it all comes down to in politics, religion, sports, isn't it?  Are you playing for yourself?  Or for the team? 

In sports I've found a new hero, John Goncalves of North Portland who coached his Junior Baseball team to the 9- 10 year-old state championship.  Quite a feat for this real life version of the Bad News Bears, some of whom could barely throw or catch a baseball before the season began.  Perhaps this is a harbinger of the revival of Roosevelt High baseball. 

It ranks right up there with Roosevelt's runner-up finish in the Class 5A basketball championship last March.  That team was coached  by my son's former JV coach at Cleveland, Robert Key.  Key is a good coach and a good person.  He's a team man all the way, in the best sense of the word.

As I said, that's what life as we live it comes down to, in an ethical and moral sense.  You're either a team person or you're in it for yourself.  Take for example the simmering and divisive issue of school choice.  Two of my recent posts have elicited a record (for this site) number of comments on the effect of choice and school transfers on lower class, racially diverse neighborhood schools.

Steve Rawley on his blog provides evidence that the district transfer policy tends to exacerbate school racial segregation.  Earlier studies have also shown that transfers leave already poor schools with an even greater percentage of poor students, regardless of race.  So in effect, parents who choose "better" schools for their children are arguably doing harm to the children of other parents who, for whatever reason, "choose" to stay behind in their neighborhood schools.

In a comment to my post on charter high schools, Rawley points out that, in the scramble to do well by their own children, people tend to "forget about the common good."  I agree.  In fact, the political divide in this country falls squarely between those who believe we should provide for the common welfare and those who believe in individual responsibility.  The "individualists" are currently in the ascendance, and perhaps always have been, which is why we have no European style universal health care and why the schools are under increasing pressure to privatize.

Religious ascetics, Catholic monastics, for example, take vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity for good reason --to serve the greater good.  The last vow, celibacy, enables the devotee to avoid the trap of particular, or exclusive, love*, say for a wife or a child or brother.  That frees him to embrace a greater, more universal love for all people regardless of family, tribe, clan, or ethnic connection. 

Am I recommending that we all become monks and forsake our families?  Hardly. But the ethics --the morality-- of providing for the common welfare should not be ignored.  Even the most irreligious and agnostic among  us should be forced to answer the question asked of Jesus, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

My answer to that, in the Jesus sense of brotherhood, is --yes, I am.

* (love, not lust)

More Karen Armstrong: Our "Oedipus complex"

In this earlier piece for the Guardian, Armstrong applies the Sophoclean version of the Oedipus story to current problems in foreign policy and religion:

"Despite his reputation for vision (oidos), Oedipus had been blind to basic realities of his identity. All his life, he had tried to act rightly and find the truth, but it eluded him and, through no fault of his, he had brought pestilence upon his city."

Oedipus was too sure of himself, in other words, like many of our political and religious leaders today. 

Like Sophocles, Armstrong urges us to seek "alternative" narratives:

"But Sophocles's Oedipus story reminds us that there was never a single version of a myth. As we listen to the antithetical mythologies that tear our world apart, we need to be receptive to the counter-narrative that opposes our point of view and expresses the 'other' perspective."

It's doubtful that George W. Bush --or Osama bin Laden-- will rise to Oedipal awareness. It's unlikely that either will "gouge out" his eyes when they discover how wrong they have been, how "blind" they have been to  other perspectives.   

And therein lies the problem.  In politics, we revere resolve, no matter how simple-minded.  To his admirers --35 to 40 percent of voters-- Bush is a strong leader for the very qualities which inevitably lead to tragic ends.  Like Oedipus, Bush's blind pursuit of his vision of justice will bring --indeed has brung--"pestilence" upon the world.

The real tragedy is that Bush, unlike Oedipus, will never become a tragic hero.

Who you gonna believe? The Pope? Or Karen Armstrong?

Karen Armstrong, of course. 

The Oxford-educated ex-nun is not only a renowned scholar of religions, she writes from outside any traditional religious affiliation.  Unlike the Pope, in other words, she does not  advocate a particular religious world-view.   

Of Pope Benedict's recent remarks about Islam, she says:

"Hatred of Islam is so ubiquitous and so deeply rooted in western culture that it brings together people who are usually at daggers drawn. Neither the Danish cartoonists, who published the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad last February, nor the Christian fundamentalists who have called him a paedophile and a terrorist, would ordinarily make common cause with the Pope; yet on the subject of Islam they are in full agreement."

Armstrong concludes her short Guardian piece with this:

"As we see the violence - in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon - for which we bear a measure of responsibility, there is a temptation, perhaps, to blame it all on 'Islam'. But if we are feeding our prejudice in this way, we do so at our peril."

By "we", Armstrong means the West, primarily the United Kingdom and the United States. Today's New York Times article on the increased threat of Islamic "terrorism" because of our -- British and American-- presence in Iraq  lends credence to Armstrong's warning.

I've read three of Armstrong's books --her autobiographical The Spiral Staircase, and two of her scholarly works --The History of God, about the three great Western religions, and The Battle for God, which examines the rise of fundamentalism in those three religions.  In fact, reading the latter inspired my first OlsonOnline post. 

I've yet to read her book on Islam, but it's on my list.  And it should probably be on yours, too.