Category Archives: random tidbits

Remember “Blessed are the cheesemakers”?

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A column on Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the blasphemy law in England.

Here, Life of Brian remains as subversive as ever. If not an overt attack on Christianity, the film is devastating in its satire of religious behaviour. Blasphemy is parodied in the famous stoning scene. Just as pointed, in its own way, is the depiction of a would-be disciple who thinks that Brian will heal his wife’s headache because “her brother-in-law is the ex-mayor of Gath”. The scene in which Brian flees from a crowd of would-be worshippers manages to encapsulate the whole history of religion in around three minutes.

The macho Jesus

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According to artist Stephen Sawyer:

“I scarcely think Jesus could have overturned the tables of the money-lenders and driven them from the temple if he was a wimp. The model I use for my paintings is a surfer guy who’s built like a brick shithouse.”

A couple of his masterpieces:

Read more here.

Apparently it’s a trend. There are books like No More Christian Nice Guy and The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity.

H/t Andrew Sullivan

 

“Spiritual, but not religious”

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Lillian Daniel rants about the passenger in the next seat in the airplane who says, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” upon learning that she is clergy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had the same experience, and the same reaction, both in my earlier life as a professor of Religious Studies (when I would usually pass myself off as a scholar of European History) and since I’ve been ordained a priest.

Of course, people who say they are “spiritual not religious” can be vacuous; but worship and life in Christian communities can be vacuous as well, as Trevor Wax reminds us.

Sometimes, such people are little more than individualist navel-gazers; sometimes, they are on quests for meaning and authenticity. Sometimes, they are burned out on organized religion, or worse. They are so damaged by life in communities of hate that they cannot conceive or ever experience the life-giving power of Jesus Christ. Sometimes, their journey has taken them away, as in the case of a woman I spoke with this week, who after years of faithful attendance, and active involvement in outreach, finds the liturgy no longer speaks to her soul. Instead, it is painting that feeds her soul. Sometimes that phrase, “I’m spiritual, not religious” is a formula they’ve learned to help them deal with the absence in their hearts that they cannot comprehend.

Sometimes, we need to listen.

 

Church attendance linked to educational level

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The news reports last week about a study that found better-educated Americans attending church more regularly than less-educated (and presumably less-affluent people) led to conclusions that instead of reducing religious commitment, higher education enhanced it. That’s the wrong way to read the data.

In the first place, religious involvement is decreasing across the board; it seems to be decreasingly less among the better-educated. There may be all sorts of reasons for this, most notably the increased prevalence of divorce and single-parent families among working and lower-middle class Americans. Family-friendly churches want their families to be traditional–husband, wife, and two children.

Second, there is the problem of how the research was done. It’s not clear from the piece to which I linked above, but I assume questions about attendance at religious services were asked to survey participants. In other words, people were self-reporting their activity. These sorts of studies are notoriously unreliable. The difference between the answers given by different socioeconomic groups might be due, not to actual differences in behavior, but in different attitudes toward what they think they “ought” to be doing. That is to say, it may be the case that better-educated, more affluent Americans still feel pressure to be involved in religious institutions, something other groups no longer sense.

Sci-Fi and Religion

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I’m not a big fan of the sci-fi/fantasy genre which might be surprising given my demographic (you know, a white guy, kinda geeky, who reads and has always read a lot). But there have been a recent uptick of interest in the blogs I read about the relationship between sci-fi and religion (or Christianity), so in case you are a sci-fi freak and haven’t seen them, I’m providing you with the links to follow.

First up, a few weeks back, The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog asked the question: What can science fiction teach us about God? Answers from British sci-fi authors.

Then came Julie Clawson’s blog post on Sojourners. Of high quality sci-fi, Clawson writes, “they are the stories that mean something. Stories that through their imaginings of alternative worlds tap into the power of the prophetic to deliver the message that our world too is not absolute, but imagined and therefore capable of change.”

On a related note, the annotated Bible of Philip K. Dick, the prolific and talented author of Blade Runner and many other works, is up for sale on ebay. In 1974, Dick had the first of a series of visions. His last novel is an imaginative retelling of Episcopal Bishop James Pike’s spiritual quest and death in the desert, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

An interesting debate about the nature of religion

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It didn’t start out that way. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry posted the following:

To have a religion is to hold a belief about metaphysics. Either you believe that Allah is God and Muhammad is his Prophet or you don’t. If you do, and you eat pork, this will not make Muhammad more, or less, the Prophet. The two things aren’t related.

He was questioning the relationship between religious belief and “action,” specifically the question “why do you, as an X (say Christian), do Y?”

Noah Millman responded with the provocatively titled post, “When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Millman points out the priority, for most of the world’s religions of “orthopraxy” over “orthodoxy;” that is to say one’s actions, especially ritual actions are what make one a Hindu, or Jew, to take two examples.

In Gobry’s response, he says:

But here’s the thing: the subtext to this entire debate is really the question: “Does (my particular) religious belief make people a better people?” “And if so, to what extent, and how, and why?”

To the first question, my answer is a resounding yes.

Religion and Violence

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Adam Serwer points to a new Gallup poll that explores the relationship between religion and the use of violence among Americans. The key take-away:

Muslims are by far the least likely among all religious groups to justify targeting civilians, whether done by the military or by “an individual person or a small group of persons.” Seventy-eight percent of Muslims say that military attacks on civilians are never justified, while the numbers for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists hover in the 50s.

Another question asked whether American Muslims repudiated Al-Qaeda: 92% of Muslim Americans claimed no sympathy with the terrorist organization; while only 56% of American Protestants answered the question in the same way.

All the more we ought to worry about Spencer Ackerman’s discovery of a pdf file that seems to have been used as recently as 2009 by the FBI to educate its agents about Islam.

Harold Bloom on the Book of Jonah

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From his forthcoming The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible.

Jonah’s book is magnificent literature because it is so funny. Irony, even in Jonathan Swift, could not be more brilliant. Jonah himself is a sulking, unwilling prophet, cowardly and petulant. There is no reason why an authentic prophet should be likable: Elijah and Elisha are savage, Jeremiah is a bipolar depressive, Ezekiel a madman. Paranoia and prophecy seem to go together, and the author of Jonah satirizes both his protagonist and Yahweh …