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I think the Bible's pretty clear on this one: Jesus would drive a donkey. So then the question becomes, to which part of the donkey would you attach your "Abortion is Murder" bumper sticker? I also have a serious observation here. The polarized view of politics tends to see the Christian Right as simply the most extreme version of conservatism, an image boosted by the Christian Right's disproportionate power in setting the Republican agenda. But that ignores the real complexity of the Republican coalition. Granted, the polarized view shapes people's political opinions, especially on issues they don't care as much about -- you become more sympathetic to certain positions depending on if their label of "conservative" or "liberal" matches your own. But different types of conservatives approach things differently, so they come to different conclusions. For a while we've been seeing how Christian conservatives have been coming to different conclusions than hawks on the question of war. And here we have an example of them coming to a different conclusion than the business interests.
VVV A month or so ago, Anthony "Tony" Lopez-Cisneros contacted me, asking if I would join his House of Representatives campaign in Illinois' 4th district. He found me because of a commentary I wrote a while back criticizing Bill Clinton for pardoning several Puerto Rican terrorists. Tony didn't seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer, since if he read a couple more of my commentaries he'd have noticed my political views tend to be pretty much the inverse of his own. And if he dug a little deeper he'd find that I didn't live in Illinois. I didn't reply, but he put me on his campaign mailing list, so I received periodic updates as well as inexplicable blank emails. Alas, with 88% of precincts reporting, it looks like Democrat Luis Gutierrez has squashed poor Tony, 79%-16%. At least he can say he beat out the Libertarian.
I knew they tested people who were joining the military, but I didn't know they had a maximum IQ limit for the folks in charge.
So in other words, nobody won. Lambert was kicked out of an organization that meant a lot to him and stripped of an honor he had earned. The council avoided having to mature and learn to respect others' beliefs. And Scouting as a whole lost a good Scout. VVV More thoughts on the Goddess myth: it's interesting what Goddess writers tend to do with the idea of parenthood. They generally start from the assumption -- borrowed from early cultural evolutionary theory -- that the earliest societies (as well as the primitive people of today) were matrilineal because they didn't understand the father's role in reproduction. Women were the center of social organization -- and thus held both political and religious power -- because of this. Any power that men exercised was at the whim of their priestess-consort (interestingly similar to the position of mideval queens). The emergence of patrilieneal systems was then a plot by men to seize power for themselves. The concept of marital fidelity, enforced by strict laws governing women's promiscuity, was designed to ensure knowledge of paternity and thus make a patrilineal system possible. I can understand these writers' critique of patriarchy, in particular regarding the double standard for fidelity. But the implicit praise of matrilineal systems seems odd. Though these writers always claim that matriarchy is a benevolent, gender-equitable system, the treatment of parenthood has the marks of patriarchy-in-reverse. The underlying theme seems to be a distrust of men, as if given any knowledge of their heirs men would seize power. The women of these Goddess cultures seem to guard their special privileges jealously, engaging in ritual promiscuity in order to make sure that paternity would never become an issue, thus enforcing a parthenogenic myth, a myth reflected in the praise of female Creator deities and the ridicule of male deities who presume to try to create. It also trivializes the possibility that a father could have some bond with his children. Women's greater biological bond with their children is polarized and extended to the social sphere, so that women have relationships with their children while men have none. These writers' purpose is to criticize inequitable gender relations justified by religion, so why is there not a word spoken against these Goddess cultures? Why is Goddess-worshipping women's rule presumed to be benevolent, in the same way that conservative Christians will defend traditional gender roles?
VVV Comet Cursor has been in the Kiosk for quite a while now. Granted, there are no redeeming values to Comet Cursor, so in theory it could be in the Kisok eternally and never be denigrated adequately. However, since I no longer have to use Comet Cursor-equipped public computers, it is no longer actively grating on me. What is actively grating on me is Idrisi, Clark's very own raster-based GIS. Now, in some ways I like Idrisi. It's certainly better than ArcView -- fewer bizarre quirks, more straightforward operation. And overall I can understand raster systems better than vector systems as analytical tools (though I like vector-based drawing tools). But the students in the class I TA have managed to uncover every possible way to break Idrisi. And when it does weird stuff, it doesn't give you any clues as to how it can be fixed. So I think Idrisi can spend a little time in the Kiosk. VVV Lately I've been reading a lot of stuff about Goddess spirituality, since I'm writing a paper about the myth of the Neolithic Mother Goddess among modern feminists. One of the persistent themes that the authors bring up is that women can't relate to the Judeo-Christian God, because he's male. Therefore, women need to find or construct a female divinity. This line of reasoning never quite sat right with me, because I never really conceived of the Christian God as being particularly male. I'm not denying the church's continuing history of sexism, or ignoring that plenty of women have felt alienated from the Christian God due to their gender (though I also know many who haven't had a problem with it). But my personal experience, in a church that was neither particularly liberal nor particularly conservative, was of a being who had aquired a veneer of maleness only due to our language's lack of a gender-neutral/indeterminate pronoun that can apply to a person (which tempts me to adopt the Finnish hän, which does just that). There was nothing intrinsically male about God's attributes. Any resemblance of male social roles to God was due to ascribing God's characteristics to men, not giving men's characteristics to God. The Goddess worshippers I've been reading clearly didn't see it that way. But instead of searching for a gender-neutral God, they chose to adopt one that was specifically female. In some ways the Goddess is simply a mirror image of how they saw God working -- it's just that the qualities they saw as being crucial to divinity were also ones they considered essentially feminine. But they went farther than that and suggested that the Goddess, rather than being appropriate for only women the way God was a strictly male affair, could encompass all of humanity. They proposed that holism -- which integrates everything -- is fundamentally female. And that femininity by its nature incorporates masculinity because a woman can give birth to a son, but a man can't give birth to anyone. But this still leaves me wondering why God needs a gender. On the one hand, it seems like hän needs one inasmuch as religion is a human enterprise. Whether or not the divine exists, religion is a human construct. Religious beliefs, stories, and rituals represent ideas about how humans conceive of themselves and their place in the world. And gender is one of the major features that impact people's lives -- even the most egalitarian societies still have to confront the biological demands of reproductive systems. So it makes a certain kind of sense that, in order to speak to a human characteristic, the divine would need to participate in it. This means, of course, that God would also need a race, class, etc. -- and a rejection of the Judeo-Christian God similar to the Goddess worshippers' has occurred among people such as some Native Americans (who see him as too white) and practitioners of Asatru (who see him, with his Semitic roots, as not as white as the Norse pantheon). At the same time, though, it seems like an important function of God is to link the worshipper to the larger world. And that world is, for the most part, not gendered. Sex (I'm blurring the sex/gender distinction here because both Goddess and God traditions tend to naturalize gender roles as deriving from biology) is an adaptation of a small portion of the animal and plant kingdoms to enable mixing of genes. So a gendered deity would be necessarily parochial, patterning the ultimate reality after a reproductive strategy that's irrelevant to rocks and walls and atoms. And it's that kind of an ecological God that I'm interested in.
VVV i used to believe | |||||||||
