The Language of Servitude: A Test of Faith

One of the hardest, but most important, lessons that we learn as children is that life is not fair. It is a hard pill to swallow when we are forced to accept that winning and losing has almost no correlation to whether you are the good guy or the bad guy. We learn that tragedy befalls the best of people, and fortune can often favor the worst. Parents do what they can to shield us from this reality until we have the strength to face it, but face it we must. We eventually are forced to abandoned the story book fantasy that somehow the great chain of events will tend to intrinsically favor those the just and noble.

However there are many who do not abandon this fantasy, rather they re-work the model to suit a more complex world. I am speaking, of course, of the religious, and more specifically Christians. I am certain that much of what I am about to say is applicable to a majority of faiths, but Christianity is the one with which I am most familiar and qualified to speak on.

The Christian fantasy promises that those who believe in God, and pray faithfully in his name, shall receive his blessings and know his love. Of course some theologians and apologists define God’s intervention is such an incredibly intangible way that God seems to do nothing at all, other than simply be. This kind of quasi-deistic approach to God’s intervention is not the belief I am talking about here. I am talking about the millions of American Christians who actively believe that God will intervene on behalf of the faithful in a real (although often vague) way. Most Christians believe in the power of prayer to some extent, but are often uncertain about the details of the process. The general principle is that being a devout follower of God will cause things to turn out the best for you. In some fashion God will intervene, imposing his will on the natural order of things, so that events will go better for you than they would have without your faith and his involvement. Even if the fates which rule this mortal plain conspire against you relentlessly, there is always the promise that your faith will be ultimately rewarded in death. This is the ultimate version of the childhood fantasy that Good Guys win and Bad Guys lose. This is a cosmic version of the idea that everything will work out in the end for our hero. It is the ultimate manifestation of the fact that we, as a people and a culture, crave justice.

I cannot possibly attack justice can I? Would I dare? Of course we crave justice. We long to, as much as it is within our power, support and enforce a just society. The definition of justice may be amorphous and relative, but the general tenets remain the same. Justice is a state which exists when all things are fair, when those who do good are assured that good will come to them, and those who do bad will reap what they sow. Justice exists when people are rewarded for the ways in which they are exceptional, but not penalized for shortcomings beyond their own control. We all long to live in a just world. There is certainly nothing wrong with that.

Justice becomes a problem when we decide that it is a quality which emerges from an entity rather than a state to which entities must adhere. There is a stupendous potential for harm when we decide that any agent, be it King, Emperor, or Deity, is intrinsically just, and their actions define the just state.

So when trouble befalls a Christian, as it does all of us, what is that person to make of their situation? Omnipotence is within the definition of God, he controls everything. Justice is within the definition of God, for any act of God’s is intrinsically just. It is also within the definition of God that he will bless the faithful. So when hardship befalls the faithful, of course it would cause cognitive dissonance. As we know, when there is cognitive dissonance, the imbalance must be corrected. Unfortunately that corrective mechanism, as taught and believed by most Christians, comes in the form of servility.

What does the devout Christian say when the worst things happen to them, despite their prayers and observations? We’ve all heard it. “This is a test of faith.”

Church leaders have known since antiquity that trouble can befall the faithful, and that this fact clashes directly with other features of God, and so since the very beginning the religion has included, as one of its most popular parables, a story that attempts to make a virtue out of patient unquestioning submission in the face of repeated abuse. Of course I am speaking of Job.

This man, elevated as a paragon, is subject to repeated abuse, of the most extreme nature, so that God may boast about how faithful his followers are. The story teaches the lesson that a proper servant is to endure the beatings of his master, no matter how inexplicable they may be, and be proud of the opportunity to do so.

This is the mechanism many Christians use to justify the worst in their life. They are merely to trust in God’s supreme motives, endure with humility the burden placed upon them, and always be thankful to their Lord. They believe, with all of their wretched hearts, that what is happening to them is, in fact, part of the ultimate justice, even if they do not understand it. At least in the end, these poor souls believe, they will go on to their eternal reward.

This is the ultimate form of servility: To suffer abuse and then thank your abuser, to accept the whipping and trust that it is for your own good. There is no more absolute expression of what it means to be a slave than this. It is always amazing, or rather disturbing, how much we are willing to pay for some measure of security against doubt. Death is the last frontier. At best what is beyond the door of death is a great unknown. At worst lies beyond the door of death is true oblivion, nothingness, the ceasing of existence as we know it. What could be more terrifying than that? We would rather face a Hell than face unbeing.

And so religion will quell that ultimate fear. Religion will sooth the nervous uncertainty. Christianity will assure us that beyond death lies Heaven or Hell, but still some eternal form of being. Religion will take us by the hand, as if we were children, and assure us that in the end the good guys really do win, the bad guys really do lose, and the universe really is fair. We are only asked to pay a toll of pride, dignity, and integrity to receive this perverse blessing.

The Language of Servitude: A Test of Faith

One of the hardest, but most important, lessons that we learn as children is that life is not fair. It is a hard pill to swallow when we are forced to accept that winning and losing has almost no correlation to whether you are the good guy or the bad guy. We learn that tragedy befalls the best of people, and fortune can often favor the worst. Parents do what they can to shield us from this reality until we have the strength to face it, but face it we must. We eventually are forced to abandoned the story book fantasy that somehow the great chain of events will tend to intrinsically favor those the just and noble.

However there are many who do not abandon this fantasy, rather they re-work the model to suit a more complex world. I am speaking, of course, of the religious, and more specifically Christians. I am certain that much of what I am about to say is applicable to a majority of faiths, but Christianity is the one with which I am most familiar and qualified to speak on.

The Christian fantasy promises that those who believe in God, and pray faithfully in his name, shall receive his blessings and know his love. Of course some theologians and apologists define God’s intervention is such an incredibly intangible way that God seems to do nothing at all, other than simply be. This kind of quasi-deistic approach to God’s intervention is not the belief I am talking about here. I am talking about the millions of American Christians who actively believe that God will intervene on behalf of the faithful in a real (although often vague) way. Most Christians believe in the power of prayer to some extent, but are often uncertain about the details of the process. The general principle is that being a devout follower of God will cause things to turn out the best for you. In some fashion God will intervene, imposing his will on the natural order of things, so that events will go better for you than they would have without your faith and his involvement. Even if the fates which rule this mortal plain conspire against you relentlessly, there is always the promise that your faith will be ultimately rewarded in death. This is the ultimate version of the childhood fantasy that Good Guys win and Bad Guys lose. This is a cosmic version of the idea that everything will work out in the end for our hero. It is the ultimate manifestation of the fact that we, as a people and a culture, crave justice.

I cannot possibly attack justice can I? Would I dare? Of course we crave justice. We long to, as much as it is within our power, support and enforce a just society. The definition of justice may be amorphous and relative, but the general tenets remain the same. Justice is a state which exists when all things are fair, when those who do good are assured that good will come to them, and those who do bad will reap what they sow. Justice exists when people are rewarded for the ways in which they are exceptional, but not penalized for shortcomings beyond their own control. We all long to live in a just world. There is certainly nothing wrong with that.

Justice becomes a problem when we decide that it is a quality which emerges from an entity rather than a state to which entities must adhere. There is a stupendous potential for harm when we decide that any agent, be it King, Emperor, or Deity, is intrinsically just, and their actions define the just state.

So when trouble befalls a Christian, as it does all of us, what is that person to make of their situation? Omnipotence is within the definition of God, he controls everything. Justice is within the definition of God, for any act of God’s is intrinsically just. It is also within the definition of God that he will bless the faithful. So when hardship befalls the faithful, of course it would cause cognitive dissonance. As we know, when there is cognitive dissonance, the imbalance must be corrected. Unfortunately that corrective mechanism, as taught and believed by most Christians, comes in the form of servility.

What does the devout Christian say when the worst things happen to them, despite their prayers and observations? We’ve all heard it. “This is a test of faith.”

Church leaders have known since antiquity that trouble can befall the faithful, and that this fact clashes directly with other features of God, and so since the very beginning the religion has included, as one of its most popular parables, a story that attempts to make a virtue out of patient unquestioning submission in the face of repeated abuse. Of course I am speaking of Job.

This man, elevated as a paragon, is subject to repeated abuse, of the most extreme nature, so that God may boast about how faithful his followers are. The story teaches the lesson that a proper servant is to endure the beatings of his master, no matter how inexplicable they may be, and be proud of the opportunity to do so.

This is the mechanism many Christians use to justify the worst in their life. They are merely to trust in God’s supreme motives, endure with humility the burden placed upon them, and always be thankful to their Lord. They believe, with all of their wretched hearts, that what is happening to them is, in fact, part of the ultimate justice, even if they do not understand it. At least in the end, these poor souls believe, they will go on to their eternal reward.

This is the ultimate form of servility: To suffer abuse and then thank your abuser, to accept the whipping and trust that it is for your own good. There is no more absolute expression of what it means to be a slave than this. It is always amazing, or rather disturbing, how much we are willing to pay for some measure of security against doubt. Death is the last frontier. At best what is beyond the door of death is a great unknown. At worst lies beyond the door of death is true oblivion, nothingness, the ceasing of existence as we know it. What could be more terrifying than that? We would rather face a Hell than face unbeing.

And so religion will quell that ultimate fear. Religion will sooth the nervous uncertainty. Christianity will assure us that beyond death lies Heaven or Hell, but still some eternal form of being. Religion will take us by the hand, as if we were children, and assure us that in the end the good guys really do win, the bad guys really do lose, and the universe really is fair. We are only asked to pay a toll of pride, dignity, and integrity to receive this perverse blessing.

Prophecy Doesn’t Prove Anything

Something is Wrong with this Picture

Take a look at this picture, which amounts to a very informal demographic study. As you look keep political influence, social influence, and tax free income in mind.

Video- The Poverty of Objective Morality

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Video- Religion and Authority

Abortion Rights and the War on Women

I hope that one day the account I am about to deliver will seem woefully outdated. I hope that within my lifetime, this subject will have been so long ago laid to rest that younger generations will only be able to interface with it as an oddity of the past, not as a day to day reality. What I also hope is that the deplorable state of current public opinion will never be forgotten, and serve as a shameful warning for the future. So I will provide a snap shot, a moment, preserved in the time capsule of literature, to describe our time.

In the medium sized Midwestern city of Springfield Missouri, a young college woman of 23 drives past the local Planned Parenthood center. In front of the building is are a dozen or so people hoisting signs. “Abortion is murder!”, some of them read, “Planned Parenthood = Planned Genocide” stated some others.

Just a week prior the popular Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh referred to Sandra Fluke, the young law student who appeared before congress to plea for women’s access to birth, as a slut and a prostitute. Far from being one lone right-wing nut, the words of this man were lauded by many on the Christian right, with most high ranking church and political leaders either directly endorsing the statement, or only weakly disassociating with it.

The legislature of the State of Kansas, that same week, introduced legislature that would grant doctors legal immunity if they wished to hide the existence of birth defects from parents if they felt knowledge of the condition might cause the parents to consider abortion. Even in cases as extreme as incest and rape the conservative religious right had been unwavering in its siege on the sexual independence of women. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvanian Senator and Presidential hopeful, said that abortion was unacceptable even in that case of rape, and that the victim should learn to accept the gift of human life God has granted her.

Within the past year numerous other states had introduced, with varying levels of success, a plethora of laws to hinder access to abortion, or attempted to eliminate it all together. In Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Dakota it was proposed that abortion be made criminal and prosecutable as a form of murder. Some legislation had proposed that hospitals be allowed to deny Abortions to women, even when their lives are threatened. Others had suggested that women be forced into attending pregnancy crisis counseling before being permitted access to an abortion, or be subjected to a series of expense, invasive, and unnecessary tests prior to abortion. One bill required that a women view an ultra sound of the fetus prior to signing off on the procedure. All of these measures were clearly intended to threaten, shame, guilt, and bully women out of the option granted to them by Federal Law under Roe v Wade.

All of this was swirling in the head of the young women as she drove past the protest in front of Planned Parenthood. She had been bombarded with attack after attack on the integrity of her gender and the rights that previous generations of women had afforded her. She’d been raised with a liberal arts education, was well aware of exactly where her gender had been, and how hard women had struggled to rise up. She knew that the Planned Parenthood protests, the political posturing, and the barrage of state legislation were far from being a stalwart defenses of the life of the unborn, but rather saw it for what it was, an nationwide attack on women, hiding under the sheep’s clothing of the poor helpless unborn. So she responded to them, in a far more honest way. She blared her car horn, leaned out of the window, and shouted, “Fuck you!”

What better response could there be? As it so happens this author is dating that young women, and so I have the privilege of some context that I should share with you, the reader. She was raised in a Liberal house hold, and taught from an early age to respect the rights of others. Her family is a religious one, but holds their religion as a personal choice, never using it as a cudgel with which to beat others. In college she had volunteered as an organizer of campus Planned Parenthood events, and had dealt with plenty of harassment as she hosted the free-condom table on during campus events. She’d encountered these kinds of people before, and knew there was little used talking to them.

It is a funny thing, the over-bearing hatred that the religious in this nation have for abortion. It is an unpleasant medical option that no decent person relishes the thought of, but the Evangelicals go beyond distaste. Based on their actions you’d supposed that their God must have condemned abortion in come chapter of his best-selling holy book. The strange truth is that he did not. There are general admonishments against murder (although there are even more endorsements of it), but nowhere in the Bible is abortion addressed, or even some ancient medical equivalent from which we may draw parallels.

The Bible is silent on the subject. Of course it would be foolish to think that there was no such thing as abortion in the ancient middle east. As long as there have been pregnancies there has been unwanted ones, and women in ancient times risked their lives to terminate pregnancies that would bring them unbearable financial burden, or the cost of dishonor. Given that the Bible doesn’t weigh in on abortion, and it is a certainty that the biblical authors knew of the practice, it would be reasonable assume that they were indifferent on the issue.

So then why is the anti-abortion party almost exclusively religious? Why do churches donate incredible amounts of time, money, and manpower to anti-abortion campaigns? Why is it, that if you stop at an abortion protest and approach any given participant, the appropriate question is not, “Are you religious?”, but rather “Which Christian Church do you attend?”?

As I have discussed before, Religion and Conservatism are dangerous when they collude. While the books of the Old and New Testament don’t specifically condemn abortion, what they do clearly support is Patriarchy. Women in the Old Testament are spoils of war at worst, property as a rule, and faithful servants to their husbands and duty at best. The New Testament doesn’t do much more to hurt women, but certainly does nothing to overturn the status quo in their favor. The Biblical structuring of society is one in which all power lies with the great fathers, or Patriarchs, who spread their influence by having many sons to expand and inherit their property, and daughters to marry off strategically to secure alliances and earn dowries.

Conservatism wants to maintain tradition, and seeks in all places and all times to return society to some shinning golden ideal that it once held. In our world that ideal is a fictionalized version of the 1950’s; a world that was still, for all intents a purposes, a Patriarchy, in which any cleverness or wit from a women amounted to nothing more than a humorous lovable quirk. This is where Religion allies with Conservatism against Abortion, as indirect as the path may be.

Every step that women take towards independence is a step away from Patriarchy, a step away from tradition, and a step towards liberal values and progressivism. It is absolutely true that the liberation of a people must begin, first and foremost, with the liberation of their sexuality. Sex is one of those rare human universals where each and every one of us, along with every person who has ever been, meets. Power over the sex lives of others is an immense source of social control, one that religion has fought tooth and nail to maintain for the past half century. It is no coincidence that each and every time sexual liberty has arisen as a social issue, the opposition has been almost universally conservative and religious.

Women have fought for each new liberty against staunch opposition. One of the few areas that remain sharply divided by an obvious double standard between genders is in regards to sexual promiscuity. Men have always had the privilege of enjoying a sex life with far fewer dangers and consequences that that faced by women. Up until recently, just a second ago in historic time, it has been impossible to prove the paternity of a bastard child, but there has never been a doubt as to the identity of the mother. Imagine how different our history may have been, and how equal our genders would be in every regard, if both parents were saddled with the physical burden of pregnancy, the undeniablilty of parenthood, and the 9 month interruption of career, social life, military duty, and travel.

If women are liberated utterly from sexual consequence, and given total mastery over their reproductive cycles, rather than being mastered by them, Patriarchy is dealt a death blow. In a world where a person’s value rises from the strength of their mind, rather than their sword arm, reproductive equality for women means total gender equality. Ubiquitous birth control, including abortion, is the final step in that direction. If no women ever has to fear an unwanted pregnancy, if the consequences for following the same sexual habits as men are completely eliminated then it is only a matter of waiting for the last biased generation to grow old and die off, for the old way to be gone completely.

The Conservatives fear this as a step away from tradition. The Religious fear this as a step away from the ideal society set out in their Bible. With such a large overlap between the Conservative and Religious demographics, it is no surprise that preachers, politicians, and church goers manage to tie their anti-abortion message into their religious sensibilities, despite the fact that the Bible makes no mention of the act.

There is no secular justification for denying a woman access to comprehensive birth control. There is no religious justification either. The moral argument against abortion is a weak and scattershot appeal to guilt. With a population of 7 Billion and growing, the social argument against abortion is dead in the water. The true impetus to oppose abortion is a gnawing fear of complete gender equality, and seeing that ideal golden past slip away forever. The banners being flow in front of Planned Parenthood may speak of murder and display images of aborted fetuses, but what is implied is servility, and a woman’s social obligation to serve a factory for the production of male heirs.

That young woman’s two word rebuttal to the protestors was as appropriate as it could possibly be. Every single day, with exhaustless resources, these people attack her rights. But it’s not just her they are attacking. Billowing up behind her is a great cloud of history and context, a cloud swimming with the faces of untold multitudes that have been abused and misused for centuries, a cloud that swells with the cries of those women still subjugated and mistreated today, a cloud that sparks and rumbles with the marches, rallies, petitions, and campaigns of the past hundred years. We would do well to realize that this struggle is not just a struggle for women, that cloud is one mighty thunder head in a much larger storm, the storm generated by the constant struggle of humanity, for as long as words have been recorded, against this kind of fear, loathing, hate, and control. A civil liberty victory for even one small group of us is a victory, and a step forward, for all of us. So, with the deepest sincerity, I join her, and say to those who would seek to use guilt, shame, and fear to control the minds and bodies of others, “Fuck you!”