Church hates sex, screws self
I heard this week that the Vatican issued policies on gays that it “intended to be welcoming”. Naturally, the policies were about as welcoming as a mat made of cactus burrs. Basically they managed to muster enough compassion to switch from “You sick little monkey!” to “Aww, poor monkey’s got a problem”. The document advises gays to keep their “condition” a secret except from close family members and counselors, and basically treats homosexuality like an STD–something to do penance for and keep secret. Needless to say, gays reported that they were feeling less than “welcomed”. In fact, one might even say they felt more, “Judged”. But Jesus said to welcome everybody and Judge Not, didn’t he? Oh, I’m so confused.
Actually, no, I’m quite darkly amused, because of this item that surfaced at the same time: The Church did a study and, GASP! Only four percent of their followers are still following the anti-science, private-life-restricting rules about not using birth control! Who are these people, to think that they can have sex without the Pope’s stamp of approval?? So the Church re-iterated for the poor lambs the hard, fast rule that if they’re not “living as Christians” then they can’t take communion.
Oh, so no communion for people who judge others, who lie or steal, who put their parents in retirement homes with one hand while buying a new SUV with the other, who–what? What’s that you say? It’s “No communion for people having sex”, including in their own home with a safe partner they’ve freely chosen and love dearly, if that couple isn’t married, is using a condom, or likes it doggy-style, eh? Yes, I can totally see that…devout politicians are God’s chosen, but Ms. Happily-Married-Using-A-Condom is going straight screaming to the pits.
This is why I’m darkly amused: I love to see antiquated, anti-science, openly nonsensical organizations like this sink themselves. Yes, it’ll take a long time for the the HMC Battalion to actually sink, but look at how fast they’re hemmorhaging members already. And now, they’re going to stick to their guns on no birth control allowed except the kind that doesn’t work.
You know what that says to me? It says, we must outlaw familiy planning! Otherwise you might have people, *women* even, making decisions about the best time to have children. Like, when they can afford it, or are emotionally ready! The horror! Those women might even make themselves enough time to influence society, or compete with good God-fearing men for jobs! And, and, we might decrease the amount of environmental damage coming from overpopulation, and that would delay the Rapture! –Okay, unfair; Catholics aren’t Rapturists; but still, what’s the reasoning here? “We must let God decide how many children are born, and if that means there’s too many and it makes us miserable and uneducated and poor and causes disease outbreaks and famine and global warming and kills us off as a species, then, well, that’s okay because God must have wanted it”? Yeah, well what happened to “God helps those who help themselves”, then?
…And the beat goes on, I’m afraid. Just this week, there’s the “Jesus Camp” closing due to extremely bad (deserved) publicity, the Polish exchange student that fundies only took in to try and brainwash him into helping with their ministry (”they haven’t had sex in 17 years”, but they’re trying to teach HIM how to do it?), and the history “teacher” who got busted on tape preaching to his class and denying scientific theories.
That tears it. I’m going to hang up a sign:
The kids will love it. ;) Or how about:
…Yeah. Oo! One more:
-PD
17 devoted students of Roshi accepted this page in 0.320 seconds without moving, or saying a word.
Basically, you see the Church as a social or political organization. You separate jurisdiction of the organization from private life, for example, like with privacy vs. the American government. You appraise the value of Church doctrine with the same criteria as is applied to any social or political issue. But the Church is neither a social or political organization. You see morality as a social value and not as the fact of one’s spiritual state. What you generally do is create a straw man to attack and name it “organized religion”.
On its own terms, the Church is the body of Christ. Christ is both God and man, and the Church is an organic part of him like a body. A person becomes a member of this body by participating in the life of the body. Christ (God) is the source of life and every member joined to his body shares in his life as well. Sin is a sickness that separates people from that sharing in life. The Church is a hospital that heals sin and restores fullness of life.
There is a common misconception concerning how the Church comes up with its rules. The Church is either viewed as an social institution that makes and breaks it’s own rules until Christ comes in glory, or as a boundary-less community of like minded people, kind of like a club. Neither of those perceptions reflect how the Church sees itself in history on its own terms and what the Church is in essence.
Sin is a matter of fact, as well as union with God. Sin also has the characteristic that it blinds the person it sickens. We received from God through revelation guidelines to follow in order to find healing. As time passed the Holy Spirit through people defined more exactly these guidelines, although the basic reality of sin does not change.
When you analyze the Church’s position on a subject, if you are not approaching it’s position on it’s own terms, nothing is going to make any sense unless you see it’s doctrines and dogmas as an expression of what it is in essence. What Christians believe in fact determines what they do. Doctrine is not independent of life for the Church, but they are the same thing. The Church is not a social organization, but a living body. It’s mission is not to maintain a nice fat membership or subscription, but to heal people of sin. If society finds that the Church is an obstacle in one way or another, it will regulate or persecute it, or at least influence it, but the Church can not change what it is in essence.
The Church can not deliberate on issues outside of itself. The Church, for instance, can not answer scientific or social questions because those fields of study are external to her. But, the Church consists of people who may be scientists and other professionals. The Catholic Church mixed with the society it found itself in and became a state power, that is when it began to support scientific or political movements which advance and change and left the Catholic Church supporting outdated or incorrect ideas. It simply should not have involved itself with disputes external to itself. The same goes for scientific or social conflicts today, except where these issues do in fact touch the Church.
I am not sponsoring every modern aspect of Christianity, but in fact by orientating myself from this point I can immediately identify the origins of what we have today, whether it be from the Church proper, or from an outside influence on the Church.
Basil the Great in the 4th century wrote a treatise on the six days of creation, and his question was just how long were those six days. This is a good example of where a scientific question becomes internal to the life of the Church, and the proper limits of such questions. Basil could not determine scientifically how long those days were, just as we can not today. But Basil concluded that regardless of how long each day was, 24 hours, an entire age, or whether or not they had different lengths, God was capable of performing his creation in that time.
Around 1920’s the Big Bang theory was introduced by Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest. But the prevailing theory of the 1940’s was Steady Stability, that the universe simply existed in its current state forever. The Big Bang theory was considered by opponents as a push by a religious figure to introduce “creation” into science. With the discovery of the Red Shift and expansion of the universe, the Big Bang theory is now in fact the prevailing theory. This was purely a scientific dispute, which happened to have a scientist with a religious vocation participating. But the Church has no right in taking sides in purely scientific disputes like this. Intelligent Design vs. Evolution is another example.
Oliver Thomas in his article “When Religion Loses Its Credibility” (USA Today) uses the exact same approach as you do. He sees the church as a social institution that should be like any other social institution. He accuses it of being un-scientific. Interestingly, he uses the example of Rome’s dispute with Galileo to point out the Church’s scientific mistakes. The Church should not have involved itself in scientific disputes because that is a dispute external to itself. Rome was a state power and so abused its moral authority to maintain secular influence. But that does not change the nature of the Church, and criticizing the Church’s scientific mistakes does not affect the Church in its essence.
Mr. Thomas is right in line with Dawkins in that religious belief should be based on scientific fact. He expects medical science to beat religion over homosexuality. If the Church places its position on common ground with science and not on its own true reality of being beyond science then it will in fact lose its credibility—as a scientific body. What we know about God, the soul, free-will did not come from our own scientific investigations but from revelation. That is the source religion should look to for answers because that is the source for its existence.
Anti-religious groups have entrenched themselves in a position where the can attack the Church on their own terms. The Church simply does not belong in a social, scientific or political position. It is Rome’s fault that they took that position in the past. I foresee any attempts by traditional religious groups to base their authority on an ever-changing science as their own death warrant. As long as traditional religions preserve their true identity as a mystic reality beyond science then both science and religion can live their true lives without conflict.
This is a viewpoint I’ve heard before, though I freely admit that you do a better job of defending it than anyone I’ve yet encountered.
However, it still sounds thoroughly suspect to me. The Church, which acts like a social organization, and which (historically and up into the present) takes and demands powers of social and political influence, shouldn’t be held to the same standards as other social organizations? Piffle! Obviously the Church, in any of its incarnations, had no problem being seen as a social force as long as it could make the case that it was the best one. Only as other things have arisen that do a better job for society (secular government, scientific knowledge) does the Church retreat from the realm of social institutions.
I see this as a very clever move: Rather than being replaced and going extinct, as most defunct institutions do, this one re-defines itself constantly into something that still has some use, and works to co-exist (though not peacefully) with that which would replace it. Placing more focus on the spiritual nature of the rhetoric it uses to attract and direct followers, however, does not change the fact that the Church exerts great social influence, and that that influence is increasingly in directions that various sciences have shown to be unsound.
The “you must evaluate the Church from within” argument I’ve heard many times before as well. It sounds like brainwashing to me. Nazism makes *internal* sense too, you know; it’s only by looking at it objectively and applying trusted principles — logical, moral or emotional — that we can spot its falsity. This comes back to my problem with religion’s requiring that its premises be granted before its argument is evaluated…anybody can make a valid argument using untrue premises, but the soundness of the argument depends on whether the premises are objectively true. “All men are poopheads / Socrates is a man / Therefore Socrates is a poophead” is a valid argument, but its premises are false, and that matters! I can’t “prove” to you that it’s worthy of your consideration by asking you to first grant that all men are poopheads, and *then* look at how valid my argument is. By asking me to grant theologic “truths” prior to evaluating the role and value of religion, I feel the argument is being tipped unreasonably in favor of the religious, whatever their faith.
Now, to clarify a bit, I don’t grant absolute supremacy to science in evaluating and discovering all the truths of the Universe either. Science is a product of the human intellect, and the human intellect can’t even conceive or understand all of what a *human* is, much less the rest of the Universe. In fact, many very important scientific discoveries were initially discovered by intuition, creative impulse, aesthetic attraction, biological intelligence, and who knows what else. But those truths, when tested with scientific methods, showed themselves to be either true or untestable with our current level of knowledge and skill; if they were falsified by science, we have benefited from getting rid of them.
Now, is the existence of God verifiable at our current level of knowledge? Heh, not likely! But the social effects of many of the Church’s prescriptions for humanity ARE scientifically testable, and many of them have been shown to be counterproductive or outright harmful. Birth control is good, abstinence training doesn’t work, women should be treated equally with men, and it’s not okay to kill people whose faiths differ from yours. Should we ignore this knowledge just because it conflicts with the Church??
What I see happening is that, whenever scientific methods show something to be irrefutably true — for instance, the fact that interracial marriages are not bad for the human species or for society — and the Church can no longer win the majority opinion by sticking to its guns, it usually folds on that item, and switches to agreeing with science, often fabricating (or, okay, “discovering”) a dogmatically-tenable reason to do so. Otherwise the Church would have been done and over with a hundred times by now.
It’s a pet theory of mine, however, that when it comes to sex, especially the aspects of “family values” that keep women financially and socially subservient to men, the Church cannot afford to fold, and so it won’t. The major hegemony of religion–the Judeo-Christian/Islamic chunk that dominates the religion-scape for most of the world today–is patriarchal, and I can’t see how it could survive the major influence of women in decision-making positions within it. Whatever happens, it will be a tight race for the future, especially since women who eschew traditional barefoot-and-pregnant values in favor of education, career and intentional family planning will quickly surpass religious women in power and influence, while of course the religious women will have far more progeny, potentially increasing the chances of passing on their views to more people. It’ll be interesting, to say the least.
To conclude, I’m not quite with Dawkins…I don’t think that religion can be based on science, because religion (in its aspect as a spiritual path) is addressing some core truths that science cannot (yet) speculate upon (though it can be used to test and disprove hypotheses, as that’s what science is all about). What is the nature of consciousness? Is the human entity in some way immortal? Is there an objective source of our moral sense? All things that science knows not wot of, and is unlikely to know anything about for a long time; yet not things that human beings should be ignoring. However, organized religion goes further than spirituality, by courting and maneuvering for social and political influence, and THOSE things should not be handled outside the realm of what science knows to be true. Encouraging prayer as an untested but worth-attempting method of communing with a spiritual source is one thing. Encouraging that evolution, or sex education, not be taught in public schools is something WAY else. If the Church really wants to be a non-scientific, mystical entity, then it needs to keep its fingers out of things that ARE the domain of science, like biology, astronomy, anthropology, medicine, sociology, and so forth. I wouldn’t even object to “religion-based” recommendations for social policy being heard and considered — you never known when mysticism might hit on an answer that science would have missed (for instance, would science have concluded on its own that altruism makes social and genetic sense? Probably not, but following the lead of religion–or at least ethics–it has in fact been scientifically shown that this is so). But the mere thought of the Church trying to *argue* with science, the sheer ridiculousness of claiming that people should live according to a dogma rather than according to reality, gives me worse screaming heebies than Satan did when I was a kid!
One of my absolute favorite books is a compilation of essays called “Quantum Questions”, which I think you might really enjoy. It’s a collection of writings about religion by the grandfathers of modern science — Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger, Eddington, etc. None of them, surprisingly, was really an atheist; but unsurprisingly, they weren’t big fans of any particular organized faith either. They had very clear and cool ideas of where both science and religion couldn’t go, and if I’m reading them right, they sort of agreed with both of us (difficult as that seems from here!). If you do pick it up, make sure to let me know what you think!
Thanks for yet another fantastic reply to what I’m sure was probably a wincingly aggravating post for you to read. ;)
-PD
I will definitely have to read the book you recommended. Thank you.
I think we agree that the Church should stay out of scientific or political disputes which are external to itself. I think that is the best for everyone.
You said, “the sheer ridiculousness of claiming that people should live according to a dogma rather than according to reality”. I do think that revelation, which traditional dogma expresses, is a historical fact. God did reveal himself to the Jews on Mount Sinai, and that Jesus was in fact God and healed people and left behind a Church. My archeological argument would cover early written sources, discovered artifacts and remains which would support what we know of the early Church. I would continue with recorded miracles, and I would especially like to direct you to the rite of the Holy Fire celebrated in Jerusalem every year, as well as the video footage from Garbandle of the children taken in ecstasy. Dawkins sees that anything we consider now as a miracle is actually a natural event that we just do not understand at this time. But they could also be in fact workings of a God that has his own plan. If you want repeatability, the rite of the Holy Fire is repeatable. Get a ticket to Jerusalem for April 22 and go investigate it yourself. My faith is based on reason, and not just because I want it. These are the premises on which I base my arguments.
You said, “the Church, which acts like a social organization…shouldn’t be held to the same standards as other social organizations?” But the church is a different entity, a living body connected with God, it goes beyond the sphere of social issues. You are reducing the Church to an institution or community of people. The Church, for example, is in heaven as well. You can not appraise the life of the Church like you would a typical social organization. You can not rate the Church’s effectiveness as you would a social organization because its mission and existence is completely different. A little further you repeat the same thing, “Rather than being replaced and going extinct, as most defunct institutions do, this one re-defines itself..” You still only see it as an institution. Its life is not changed by external social events. The Church is not of the world. But, and this is important, it is still influenced by the world, and participates in a degree with the world. It has a form from its context, language, culture, all of that of course may change.
Actually, I am not asking you to evaluate the Church from within. What I want to say is that the Church is not a social organization but a mystical body. This is the reason why the Church does not think or act as a social organization. The reality of the Church is that is consists of a whole set of different elements which comprise its existence. The nature of the Church is different, and goes beyond science and politics. To label this body as unscientific or antiquated reduces the Church to something it is not in fact. It is beyond science.
You continue a favorite theme as I see it which I think Dawkins started, that the real value of religion is defined by how it benefits society. The starting point of this train of thought is that the well-being of human society is of primary concern, and everything else follows from there. But the Church, being the body of Christ (God), has God as its starting point. Our relationship with God is of primary concern. The question then is how does one or another issue affect that relationship.
With the exception of the priesthood, the Church is not patriarchal. Men and women are equal members of the Church. You are making a mistake if you see the priesthood as somehow owning the Church, that is not the case. You can not have a priesthood without a Church. In the Catholic Church the priest is considered as being the source of the priesthood, but a more traditional view, one of the Orthodox Church, is that the Holy Spirit acts through the priest as an instrument. The priest acts by the power of the Church, not by his own power. The priesthood does not sanctify the Church, but the Church sanctifies itself through the priesthood. So, you can not have a priest without a Church, which consists of both men and women as equal members. They are all members of one body. The head of the Church is God.
I think your solution is to completely “spiritualize” the Church and not allow it to influence the lives of its members beyond what you would define as purely “spiritual”. Or, another way to put it, its members would have two lives, a religious life, and a secular life, and the two lives would not mix. If Christianity was a philosophy, then this could be possible. But traditional (and authentic) Christianity is participation in the life of Christ in a Church. The whole life of its members participates in Christ and receives sanctification through that participation. Family planning is a part of the Church since marriage and what relates to it is part of the mystery of the Church as a body.