Homer Simpson, the benign patriarch of the best-known animated family in the world, has become the centre of a censorship dispute between Rupert Murdoch's television company, Fox, and counter-culture comedian and writer Paul Krassner.
Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer on The Simpsons, performed an introduction for Krassner on a live comedy album, Irony Lives. In Homer's voice, Castellaneta said his only problem with Krassner was that he was an atheist. He asked: "If there is no God, then who has placed a pox on me and mocks me every day?"
But Fox's lawyers stepped in and insisted that Homer's voice is part of their intellectual property. After requesting copies of the CD they denied permission for its use.
I'm starting to think that writing the Bible down was one of the worst things that ever happened to Christianity.
The problem is the concept of scripture. To say that the Bible is scripture means that it is a complete and perfect record of truth. The text becomes authoritative in and of itself. This tends to create a sort of absoultism, the idea that there is one correct Christianity. The text has a meaning, that can be discovered by careful attention to every detail of wording (since everything, down to the smallest preposition, is there for a reason). The authenticity of the version being used becomes paramount, and conflicts over disputed verses revolve around whether the verses are "supposed" to be there. Obviously, this phenomenon of absolutism and authenticity is not solely a product of making the Bible a fixed text (and it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that). But it is an illustration of a problematic trend.
Contrast this with "living" traditions, whether they be "traditional" oral traditions like the body of Navajo myths, or scriptureless religions like neo-paganism. These religions provide their practicioners with a common vocabulary, shared reference points that can be used to frame ideas and expressions of truth or religious experience. Norse bards, for example, did not aim to recite myths word-for-word from memory, but rather to creatively shape the familiar outlines of a story into a new and interesting form, embodying morals appropriate to the situation and the audience.
Christianity is very malleable, too. While it has influenced centuries of Western thought, it has also been used by various movements. Much of what has been done through history in the name of religion was done simply "in the name of" -- not "because of," or "due to," but "justified by reference to." But despite this history, Christianity operates with the assumption that the practicioner's version is the "real" one that all others ought to be like -- hence the ironic situation of evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses expressing very diverse theologies but all claiming to be living as the first apostles did.
This attitude of authenticity has spilled over into non-Christian religions in the West as well. For example, there is a current in neo-paganism that stakes the religion's claim to validity on its roots being older than Christianity, that today's neo-pagans worship just the way people thousands of years ago in pre-Christian Europe worshipped. And those inspired by Eastern religions will sometimes assert that these traditions have retained a purer version of the original religion that was corrupted in Christianity.
Seeing Christianity as having one, unchangeable message has led to it being written off. Ever since Lynn White's charge that Christianity is the culprit in the modern ecological crisis, various ecological and feminist theories have written Christianity off as patriarchial, dominating, and otherwise unsuitable for today's reality. These types of charges partake of the idea of an "essential" Christianity, the idea that any other form of Christianity is ignoring parts of or distorting the "real" message. For example, a lecturer last semester was discussing a passage in one of St. Paul's epistles (I don't recall specifically where) that, while on the surface homophobic, had been re-interpreted by some in the queer community as empowering. She explained that her textual analysis showed that the real message of the passage was unfortunately homophobic, and therefore "revisionist" reinterpretations were just denials of the underlying homophobia of Christianity. While she may have been correct in ascertaining what St. Paul meant when he wrote the words that are in today's Bibles, it is the idea of scripture that led her to believe that the "real" interpretation is the only one that can be used.
This is not to say that all religions are infinitely malleable, or that any religious tradition works as good as any other in any personal and social context. And it is not to say that non-Christian religion is unnecessary or that non-Christians should "come back" and work within the Christian tradition instead of leaving it. I'm just raising these thoughts because in many contexts I've encountered criticisms of Christianity that suggest that the religion is one thing, and that thing is outdated or dangerous. Any attempt to find an ecological Christianity, for example, is seen as forcing the tradition to be something it's not -- using a screwdriver to pound in nails, so to speak. There is an assumption there that an outsider can define the tradition and state its limits, which is only possible if the tradition has one authoritative and universal identity. posted by Stentor Danielson at 20:56 -- link --
Did You Know? Angelfire and Webmonkey are teaming up against us ... posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:55 -- link --
A Malaysian man has claimed that a treatment for hiccups left him partially deaf in one ear, damaged his throat and shortened his penis, a news report said today.
Chong Wee Ken, 38, told The Star daily he had sought treatment at a hospital on April 24 for hiccups, and was put on an intravenous drip and oral medication.
"After two days, my left ear started to turn red and my throat started to hurt. When I asked the doctor, he said I had shingles and told me to continue with the medication.
"I also discovered that my penis had become shorter because of all this," he said.
We can only hope he has a Hotmail account. posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:57 -- link --
In light of the fact that I will (theoretically) soon be kicked off of people.colgate.edu, I have registered myself a more permanent account at brunchma.com. Sometime in the very near future (hopefully Monday) I will be moving debitage over to its new location, http://www.brunchma.com/~acsumama/blog. And in honor of the move, I've done a redesign. Take a look and let me know what you think. I've taken a couple screenshots of how it's supposed to look. I'd appreciate any comments, no matter how nitpicky, about anything that is a) different from how it ought to be, or b) correct but ugly. The index page that is currently on brunchma just has one post of placeholder text at the moment, and I haven't done anything to the archive, about, or best of pages as of this post. But the links to other blogs should be working. The light patch behind the second placeholder paragraph is the equivalent of the lighter gray I've been using behind quotes from news stories and other sources. posted by Stentor Danielson at 08:52 -- link --
24.7.02
Danielson's Third Law:
The amount of time a website spends declaring that it is for "free thinkers" is directly proportional to the rigidity of the ideology it is advancing. posted by Stentor Danielson at 17:34 -- link --
The casual visitor to this small rural community about 15 miles west of Lake Okeechobee might barely notice the broad indentations that run for seven miles from a cluster of oak-shaded mounds through scrub pine and palmetto to the Caloosahatchee River.
But to archaeologists they are monuments to prodigious engineering skill and hard work — canals that enabled Indians to travel between Lake Okeechobee and the Gulf of Mexico.
Around A.D. 250, Indians inhabiting this area began digging the canals by hand, using wooden and shell tools to create waterways 20 feet wide and 3 to 4 feet deep, said Robert Carr, the Florida archaeologist who directs excavations at the site.
Their goal was not to drain or irrigate land, Mr. Carr said, but to create a waterway to bring dugout canoes to their village, a mile north of the Caloosahatchee. The canals also allowed paddlers to bypass rapids roiling the river.
Archaeohydrology is cool. Every time I think about what I might do for my dissertation, I assume it's something ethnographic -- talking to actual people. I forget that there's so much great archaeology out there. posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:27 -- link --
21.7.02
I'm wondering if I ought to create a second blog to hold some of this theology that I've been posting recently. I feel like it's taking debitage away from its old identity as a place for personal reflection and experiences mixed with commentary on the news. And I wonder how much most people really care about long-winded Christian ramblings. But on the other hand, I feel like making the theology too separate and official puts too much pressure on me to make it polished and systematic, rather than spontaneous. And I wonder if I'd be able to get back into it after hitting a plateau (as I'm sure I will eventually). So, I'm still thinking about it. posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:29 -- link --
In St. Augustine's Confessions, he spends some time trying to imagine what the earth was like in Genesis 1:1, when it was "formless." His attempts center on the idea that formlessness is somehow between non-existence and form. Ultimately, he gives up on trying to picture formlessness, but I think he was on the right track for understanding it. Formlessness in the sense that it's used in Genesis (not the colloquial "formless" that means its form simply doesn't fit any pattern or shape we're familiar with) is, for all intents and purposes, nothingness. Form is a pattern of connectedness, a scheme that establishes relations between parts. Without relationship to anything, they might as well not exist. I'm reminded here of the "invisible, intangible unicorns in your garage" analogy that people sometimes use to disprove God. Essentially, the argument is that if you can't sense it or determine its existence in any way (and we would assume that in addition to being unable to be directly sensed, these unicorns don't scare cats or paint graffiti or do anything else to connect themselves to our world and thereby make their presence known), its existence is profoundly irrelevant. It might as well not exist. This is what is suggested by Genesis's statement that the world was dark -- inaccessible to our senses.
What God did in creating was not so much to bring something out of nothing, but to connect the formless "stuff" into form. Its existence became relevant because it could interact, it had relationships between parts. (I'm tempted here to make an analogy with electrons that can be understood only as fields of potentiality, until interaction with something else forces them to take on a definite position and motion -- but we've already established that my grasp of particle physics leaves a lot to be desired.)
I think the shift from "something from nothing" to "relevance out of irrelevance" makes God's act of creation more closely parallel what we know of creation since the Beginning. In art (for example), nobody ever creates something new, an idea out of nowhere. What true creativity consists in is making new connections. "Love is like a rose" is not creative, because it's a connection that's been made so many times it's become a cliche. But "Love is like an aardvark" is potentially much more creative, if it can be substantiated (otherwise the connection is uselessly weak). posted by Stentor Danielson at 19:25 -- link --
27.7.02
