Eighth Circle of Hell

My church, my ex-church, which I've grown steadily disillusioned and disgusted with, has decided to enter the political arena. I know that the Church, and individual churches, have been involved in politics since the time of Charlemagne, but St. Helen's has been steering clean of controversy. Lately, they've grown more conservative — like a few sermons away from preaching tax cuts for the wealthy, energy deregulation, and expanding Gitmo conservative — and I'm really disappointed that they've gone from peacekeepers to enemy combatants in the culture wars. Not coincidentally, the church's message has also strayed from Jesus's commandments and into a realm of contempt for any challenge to their dogma.

I don't recall St. Helen's ever giving pro-life activists an open forum in its younger days. I'm sure they were pro-life, but they had the decorum not to rub it in your face, and no one got up at the altar talking euphemisms like a "culture of life." No longer. We had a pro-life speaker, and I could tell she was pro-life because her shirt said "PRO-LIFE" on it. Well, thanks for that. Your shirt totally changed my deeply-held beliefs on a complicated, sensitive, and personal subject! They're some group who's walking across America, from the godless activist-judges and hippie-filled West coast to the apostate, gay-marrying East coast, somehow raising pro-life money and awareness.

As and aside, I never understood these fundraisers where people get donations based on how far they walk or how many cheeseburgers they eat or whatever. Can't the donors just give the charity a set amount of money? It just seems like a cruel game for imperious philanthropists: "I want to see a cure for breast cancer, but I also want to see the lower classes perform useless labor. Perfect!"

Thankfully, this pro-lifer's speech was short, but she described the group's agenda and said something that caught my mind, "We believe in the sanctity and dignity of all human life, from conception to natural death." Now, here's the problem with the abortion debate. One side argues that life is sacred and the other side argues that a woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy, and they're not mutually exclusive because both sides aren't even talking about the same goddamn thing. If you want to watch a pro-lifer equivocate, you need to attack their premise. I guess I was pretty angry after the priest's Dobson-worthy pandering sermon and I have never in my life done this before (although I've always wanted to), but I took this girl's pamphlet and challenged her premise.

"Since you believe in the sanctity of all human life, I suppose you're also against the death penalty." There might have been a little stereotyping on my part, assuming anyone who wore a PRO-LIFE in all caps t-shirt would also be a Bush idolater, but there isn't a ton of subtlety to the pro-life (or pro-choice) movement. "And where does your organization stand on the issue of gun control, or providing health care to children," and yes, I know how to pull the "oh, our children are so precious" card when it comes in handy.

"What's your guys' view on the war in Iraq? Tens of thousands of people have died over there. You all have to be opposed to that." This is a pet peeve of mine, that the whole church will say a prayer for the safety of every American soldier, which is all good, but apparently God doesn't care about the Iraqis being blown up? I call bullshit, right there. (I also call bullshit on our prayer for the victims of the Minneapolis bridge collapse. That's what they call and "act of God," and while I guess you could beg God for mercy, you can't praise him for mitigating a disaster that he himself caused.)

I guess she never expected anyone to examine her views. "Well, we believe in the sanctity of individual life. All individual life." I don't really know what that means — so suicide is bad, but mass suicide is okay?

I have no problem with her believing that every (human) life is sacred. I sincerely hope she believes that. My problem is that she doesn't believe that all life is sacred. There are a lot of shitty people in the world — murderers, rapists, child molesters, terrorists — and when she's at the podium proclaiming that all human life is sacred, she has to be willing to stand in front of the entire church and say that, for example, Osama bin Laden's life has dignity and sanctity. I doubt she's willing to do that (but I seriously applaud her bravery if she is), and I think she's oblivious to how untenable her position really is.

My own opinion is that no life, human or otherwise, is sacred, but that we should (or a moral authority commands us to) strive to minimize suffering. I also believe that death itself involves no suffering, although of course the cause of one's death might. So abortion's cool until the fetus is sentient — I realize it's taboo to be so blasé about a topic like abortion, but if I truly believe that abortion is okay, speaking in gentle euphemisms is cowardly. Euthanasia, what's clearly misnamed "death with dignity," depends on whether the mental anguish of someone taking their own life outweighs the pain the person is suffering. This utilitarianism leads to some weird places that I'm not totally comfortable with (i.e., it's okay to kill somebody as long as they don't suffer and no one else cares about their death) but my point is that until I figure out how to modify my axiomatic premise, I'm stuck conceding these bizarro notions.

Like I said, I really hope she means it when she says all life is sacred, and with only circumstantial evidence to the contrary, I sincerely wished her good luck getting her message heard. The problem with hypocrisy is that you can't satisfy it: I either agree with your words and unwittingly fall into conflict with your beliefs, or I agree with your beliefs and explicitly undercut your words. I can deal with honesty. I may not agree with you, but at least I know where you stand, and we can figure out a way to share a community without repressed (or unrepressed) anger, persecution complexes and paranoia. I believe this is how America is supposed to work, but I'm apparently an unpatriotic blue state liberal, so what do I know?

Jesus For Sale!

Here's a video from the Associated Press about Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, revealing Himself to a hick family in Virginia (a fifteen minute drive from Jerry Falwell University) via an oil stain on their garage floor. An all-powerful manifestation of ultimate greatness and does He send a message of world peace, or the meaning of life? No. A fuzzy self-portrait on a garage floor. Thank you, Jesus. You really saved mankind with that one.

The family claims that their Jesus pic is "hallowed ground," and they won't step on it. But apparently there's nothing in the Bible saying they can't tear it up and sell it to the highest bidder on eBay. So they did. After all, what's the point of having a miracle in your home if you can't make a buck or two off of it?

But did you catch the starting bid for "Image of Jesus Christ on Concrete APPEARED SUDDENLY?" A hundred dollars. Excuse me?? This is Jesus, the hand of God touching all mankind, and you're gonna sell it for barely enough money to buy a DVD player! It's not only sacrilegious, it's just bad bargaining.

But bad bargaining for some hick family out in the boonies is good bargaining for you, tech-savvy urbanite! The current bid is $430. Think of that. How much would you pay to have a divine image bless your home and family? A thousand dollars? Two thousand dollars? Well, right now, Image of Jesus Christ on Concrete APPEARED SUDDENLY can be yours for the low, low price of $430! That's less than the price of an iPhone, and for all the things the iPhone can do, it's not gonna be able to save your soul.

Also, make no payments until 2008! We have great financing, just the way Jesus would want.

The Vatican is all set to publish a papal doctrine, allowing priests to celebrate the Tridentine Mass without prior approval from the local bishop. Benedict is trying to win the prodigal, excommunicated Lefebvrist movement back into the flock (along with devout Christian Mel Gibson), and simultaneously alienating everyone who'd actually want to understand the Word of the Lord. I don't go to church, so none of this really matters to me except that centuries-old ass-backwardness in a world that desperately needs forward momentum in its unjustifiable faith-based dogmata.

See, the Tridentine Mass is the traditional, old-timey mass, where the priest faces the altar, not the congregation, and the priest speaks the mass in Latin, the language of Jesus.... if Jesus lived six hundred years longer than he actually did. Which, even though he was Jesus, he didn't. It's not the mass itself that bothers me, it's the ignorance of the contexts it gets put into. Some octogenerian, remembering the good old days, when church wasn't air-conditioned, gives the media a "man on the street" quote, rambling on about tradition and how the church has strayed. I get the same vibe from Benedict (maybe it's just that he looks like he's 150 years old): the old church was great, and the new church is a moral wasteland of gays, abortionists, and gay abortionists.

I love ecclesiastical history precisely because it's so incredibly debauched. There was a period in the Church's history called the "Pornocracy," for Heaven's sake! Bet you didn't know that, old lady who's mindlessly reciting the Rosary! In fact, two-thousand years of Catholic tradition make our modern vacuous Hollywood culture look almost saintly: orgies, murder, incest, and putting corpses on trial, like the world's longest-running soap opera. The modern church has apologized for much of its sketchy medieval history — of course, it still has its recent history to apologize for — and I think the increased transparency in religious ritual has something to do with that. It's harder to follow something blindly when you can actually see what you're following.

While I'm at it, I'd also like to take on the other argument of mouthpieces for the Church's antediluvian dogma — that the Tridentine Mass somehow restores God's law. On a personal level, I'm agnostic, but I absolutely refuse to believe in the idea of a god who wants his message obfuscated. But to the people who hold this viewpoint: How are you so sure what God's favorite language is? The guy who initiated the vernacular mass, he was a freaking pope! Were you ever pope? I didn't think so.

You might have heard about the German man who tried to hitch a ride on the popemobile yesterday. The New York Times reports, "The 80-year-old pope did not seem to notice as his security guards quickly subdued the man, a 27-year-old German who appeared to hold briefly onto the rear of the white vehicle. The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pope’s spokesman, said the man, wearing shorts, sunglasses and a baseball cap, was not armed." I'm not a theologist, and I'm not even a good Christian — but I try to be a moral person and, even though I'm skeptical of His divinity, I think Jesus Christ is a pretty damn good role model. So when something like this happens, it seems like a good idea to reflect and ask, "What would Jesus do?" And also, "Would Jesus have armed guards, and a spokesman?"

I know that the New Testament was written in a pre-9/11 mindset, but I don't recall the chapter and verse where one of the faithful tries to touch Jesus's robes and he goes all Akon on their leper ass. My recollection of the Bible is a little fuzzy here: The blind and crippled and just general assholes who wanted to trick up Jesus needed to go through Ticketmaster to get an audience with him, right? And Jesus lived in a giant house covered in gold stolen off Roman ruins, and he totally kept women out of his ministry. You know what else Jesus was really big on? Adhering to ridiculous centuries-old traditions that distanced people from their faith.

When you use the brain that God gave you, rather than ideological dogma, Jesus and Benedict seem more and more mutually exclusive — the latter's single-minded focus on the dissolution of his spiritual authority in the information age, and the former encouraging spiritual growth between individuals, society, and God. It doesn't surprise me when a certain Texan born-again demagogue doesn't get Jesus's message, but isn't Ratzinger a professor of theology? (According to Wikipedia, he was also a leftist in his younger, wilder, more Christ-like days.) Again, my Revelations is rusty, but I'm pretty sure one sign of the apocalypse is when I'm a closer adherent to Jesus than the pope is.

The Veritas Forum is, let's be honest, a mildly-successful Christian proselytization tactic. They organize lectures on college campuses, ostensibly around secular topics but with a hint of that haughty know-it-all-ism that characterizes both the devout and liberal arts students. Veritas' mission is to "inspire the shapers of tomorrow’s culture to connect their hardest questions with the person and story of Jesus Christ," which is a sneaky way to undermine the whole concept of a "forum": individuals arrive with their own experience and ideas, but the forum itself grows organically out of the diversity. If you already know the answers, then you should really just get a soapbox.

Harrigan's been going to all the lectures this week, and she invited me to come along to one called "Minds, Machines, And Metaphysics: What Makes Us Human?" If you guessed Jesus, then you're right. But the talk was by a professor from MIT who worked in an artificial intelligence lab, developing "emotionally aware" software (not as creepy as it sounds), and as a scientist, she'd only make vague allusions to our divine developer, programmer, and debugger. If humans were able to build robots with consciousness, she would say, it would logically follow that those robots could deny their Creator. So, atheists, deal with that logic while you're burning in hell!

I don't see a ton of ways into or out of the whole mind-body dualism conundrum, so I sort of avoid the whole topic, and turn grumpy when I watch something like Ghost in the Shell, wondering, "Now what does that robot have to gain by falling in love?" The whole idea of automaton wants and desires — we can have a facile debate forever about how deterministic human minds are, but we're talking about glorified toasters here and desires that stand outside of whatever mathematical function the programmer uses to represent them.

And besides, couldn't you just unplug them?

The lecturer was emphatic about the point that these artificial intelligences certainly don't feel emotions yet. They built a robot with a mechanical face, for example, that smiles when you're nice to it and looks ashamed when you scold it, but obviously it's not experiencing shame in the way that we do. (Or some of us do, anyway.) It's analyzing the pitch and timbre of its operator's voice, comparing them to "pleased," "sad," "frustrated" templates and then moving its little countenance pieces. The fear that these things will someday supplant us as the dominant minds on the planet is laughable — although maybe a little less so if you believe God graced you with a soul and granted you dominion over all creatures, and along comes these godless liberal ivory tower scientists emulating that. The religious types tend to not like being humbled; I guess that's an advantage to believing that emotions are nothing more than physical brain states and free will is an illusion cloaked behind the laws of nature. We're already humbled. It won't be such a dramatic transition when we're enslaved by our future robot overlords.

Not to belittle anyone's faith, but...

..."Jedi" is not a real religion. On a list of retarded belief systems, Jedi falls somewhere between Scientology and those tracksuit-wearing weirdos who killed themselves so the aliens living behind the Hale-Bopp comet would be their friends. In the 2001 British census, about four-hundred thousand people put down "Jedi Knight" as their religion because they're either deluded enough to believe in the Force, or they enjoy fucking around with statistical data. Apparently being a Jedi Knight has its benefits over other, more established religions — like, whereas Muslims have to take time out of their day to pray, Jedi-ism has no such requirements and its practicioners have tons of free time, which some of them waste by fucking with the United Nations. Last week, "Umada" and "Yunyun," two self-proclaimed Jedi Knights whose parents probably pretend they don't know them petitioned the U.N. to rename its wildly successful International Day for Tolerance as the Interstellar Day for Tolerance because.... I don't know why. I guess this is what happens when your only friends are Wookiees.