The Limits of Multiculturalism

 

Statue of Hanuman under construction in Mississauga

A 55-foot high statue of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, is going up currently in Mississauga. Candice Malcolm, of True North, is disturbed by this, but apparently cannot articulate why. She says it is wrong thar this statue is being built at the same time that statues of Sir John A. Macdonald or Queen Victoria are being pulled down or covered up. But that is a non sequitur: putting up one statue does not imply pulling down others. She knows in her gut it is wrong, but not why.

It is one of several recent incidents that actually illustrate a fatal flaw in multiculturalism. Another is a current protest in France by Muslim parents, that threatens to become violent, over showing nude Renaissance paintings in art history classes.

The problem is that Hanuman is manifestly an idol. A statue of the Buddha, or Confucius, would not be a problem; that would only be, like Sir John A., a memorial to a great man. A statue of Krishna would not be; Krishna is conceptually an avatar of the one true God. But Hanuman—a humanoid form with a monkey’s head and tail, holding a mace—he is a separate, inhuman divine being. He looks like a golden calf.

Prohibition of idolatry, shirk, is the core and central tenet of the Abrahamic religions.

“You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them.”

But, you might say, liberal principles demand freedom of worship. The Christian, Muslim or Jew must allow the Hindu to follow his own beliefs, and worship what he pleases, even in this very public manner.

Yet in Jewish, Muslim, or Christian law, this is beyond the limits of tolerance. The punishment for idolatry is death. 

“If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone them to death…”

Polytheistic idol-worshippers, are most plainly the kafirs against whom good Muslims are to wage eternal jihad.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church writes “the duty to offer God authentic worship concerns man both as an individual and as a social being.”

If, in the Old Testament, Israel allows the worship of idols in its midst, a jealous God will visit destruction on the nation. This caused the fall of Israel to the Babylonians.

So there is a fundamental contradiction here: if one is to allow Jews, Christians, and Muslims freedom of religion and of conscience, one cannot allow Hindus full freedom of religion alongside them. 

It is all tolerable so long as they are in separate jurisdictions; but not in the same jurisdiction. Not both in the same city.

The French case of nudes in art is similar. Muslim parents are right, in Muslim terms, that showing naked women to their children is haram; it is not in Christianity. The Sistine Chapel, where popes are chosen, is adorned with naked images. Accordingly, if Christians and Muslims attend the same school, either the faith of the Muslim children must be contradicted, or the Christian children must be denied their cultural heritage.

The painting that caused the protests in France

Peace, freedom, and mutual respect may therefore require an end to mass immigration, and a renewed emphasis on assimilation to the existing culture whenever one does immigrate. If you choose to migrate to Canada, or France, you have chosen freely to live by established Judo-Christian as well as liberal-democratic principles.

Flying Monkeys

 

G. K. Chesterton is supposed to have said “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”

Jesus says something similar in the New Testament: 

“When an evil spirit leaves a person, it goes into the desert, seeking rest but finding none. Then it says, ‘I will return to the person I came from.’ So it returns and finds its former home empty, swept, and in order. Then the spirit finds seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they all enter the person and live there.”

It is not enough to exorcise a demon, a “mental illness.” It will come back. The only way to expel a demon permanently is religious faith.

And then there’s Bob Dylan: “It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gonna havta serve somebody.”

We are created with a God-shaped hole in our soul. Without this absolute, our thoughts and our emotions cannot cohere. If God and Good and Truth is not allowed to fill that hole, something will. Fenatyl, alcohol, Marxism, sex, power, status. Something.

For the narcissist, it is the ephemeral concept of self that fills that hole; or the self’s arbitrary desires.

Good, God, and Truth then becomes the ultimate enemy. The narcissist will deliberately deny Truth and morality. Truth is whatever they will it to be, and do what you will is the full extent of the law.

If a person is committed to God or Truth or Good, they will perceive this person as evil. This recognition is terrifying: it means to stare in the face of the Devil. Hence, PTSD. 

But if a person is not committed to God or Truth or Good, such a person will fill their God-shaped hole. They are liable to idolize them. They act, after all, as though they are God. They seem sure of themselves.

This is what produces the familiar phenomenon of “flying monkeys,” people who do the bidding of the narcissist in tormenting their victims.

These are the True Believers.

Zebedee

 

The calling of James and John

One of my favourite comedic bits from the Bible was in today’s mass reading. 

 As he was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; they were fishermen.

He said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

At once they left their nets and followed him.

He walked along from there and saw two other brothers, James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John. They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.

Nobody ever seems to notice old Zebedee.

He’s left stranded there in the boat.

No permission, no explanation, no farewells. No help with unloading the catch, stowing the craft, mending the nets. James and John leave immediately.

I can imagine the old greybeard muttering to himself about ingratitude, or shouting and cursing after them.

People do not notice it, because it defies their expectations and probably their desires.

It’s not nice, is it? It’s not respectful.

Yet it is an illustration of what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel:

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26

“Another disciple said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’

But Jesus told him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’” – Matthew 8: 21-22

The Bible is not about family values. Family is an idolatry, and the Gospel makes this point here rather emphatically.

You have one Father. Accept no substitutes.

Our Religion

 

Artemis at Ephesus as the all-nurturing "Mother Nature"

While we claim as a society to recognize religious freedom, in fact we have a state religion. We call it, incorrectly, “science,” but it is the thing we commonly know as science; and our god, or rather goddess, is Nature.

It is not tolerant of other creeds. Its rituals of worship, things like rules for recycling, or buying electric cars, are mandatory. It is heavily state subsidized; tithing is not optional.

Unlike the Christian God, but like the other pagan gods, Nature is not well disposed towards man. Her temples, the nature preserves, often ban human beings. Mankind becomes, to quote more than one writer, “a cancer on the planet.” 

She is clearly and commonly personified, and specifically as feminine. She has all the characteristics familiar from Isis, Artemis, and Gaea, previous nature goddesses. She is aka “Mother Nature” or “Mother Earth.”

Gaea or "Mother Earth" at the Montreal Botanical Gardens

The religion also makes no allowance for ethics. Ethics are unnatural; “unscientific.” Instead, we have definite obligations to the goddess, on pain of provoking her wrath and retribution. 

The priesthood dresses in distinctive white smocks. At the same time, because the goddess is feminine, mortal women in her image seem to be given unlimited power over life and death. Child sacrifice, common in earlier pagan periods, has returned. There is no more value to human life, after all, than to that of an animal.

The field of psychology/psychiatry is in effect a permanent Inquisition, seeking out heresies.

This is not going well. This has reached its strongest expressions, so far, in Nazism and in Communism; but we would be naïve to think these cannot be bettered in future.

Pachamama

But, you might protest, science is simply truth. 

So it is; but scientism and nature worship have nothing to do with science.

Or with truth.

Original Sin

 

Lots of us have trouble with the concept of original sin; including the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand." Paragraph 404.

After all, it doesn’t seem fair—that one person should suffer for the sins of another.

Indeed, it is not fair; but it is the essence of the Christian message. Jesus died for our sins.

And it is obviously, objectively true. We all benefit and suffer from the actions of others: our ancestors, our countrymen, most obviously, our parents. Some of us were lucky enough to be born in a rich family, some in a poor one. That has given us a better shot. We had nothing to do with that, and it is not fair. Some of us have had abusive parents, and some of us have had parents who coddled or spoiled us. That is not fair. Some of us were born in Canada, and some of us in Ukraine. We had nothing to do with it.

All of us trace our lineage back to Adam and Eve. Having sinned, and departed from original innocence, they passed this on to their children through imperfections in their upbringing. So we have Cain murdering Abel. Cain or Seth passed the seed of bad upbringing on to their children, who passed it on to theirs, on to Noah, who passed it on to Shem, Japheth, and Ham, who passed in on to the children of Lot, who passed it on to those responsible for founding Canada or the Ukraine, who passed it on to our parents, who passed it on to us. 

It is, necessarily, in all cases, essentially sin. It is only relative degrees of sin. All far short of original perfection, and so all fall short of proper parenting. All children suffer from bad parenting, to greater or to lesser degree. This is why Philip Larkin wrote:

“They fuck you up, your mom and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.”

 

Not to excuse parents—all parenting is not equal. Some parents are also intentionally evil. This is why Jesus says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

This is a fundamental problem. This is the original problem. Because we are naturally inclined, as children, to see our parents as the measure of all things, as our ground of being, the source of truth and morals, as gods. Accordingly, the errors and the sins they tempt us to are difficult to erase, and probably require divine intervention. It is the first and most dangerous idolatry.

This is why the Bible says, more than once, that “the sins of the father are visited upon the sons, unto the third and fourth generation.” This is why, when one prospective Christian wants first to bury his father, Jesus says “let the dead bury their own dead.” This is why we must be born again. We must fight free of the taint of our upbringing.

The Christian message has often been perverted to be one of “family values.” That is not in the Bible; that is the opposite of the Biblical message

“Honour your father and your mother,” yes. But that means support them in their old age, and ungrudgingly. Idolizing them is the greater danger. It is comparable to idolizing your motherland. We know from Nuremberg where that leads. But idolizing a parent is a greater risk than idolizing your motherland.

It is the original sin.

Men of Science

 

Scienceman

Dr. Fauci likes to say “I am a man of science.” He has also said “when they attack me, they are not attacking me, they are attacking science.”

This is unsettling. He is wrapping himself in science as though it bestows sanctity, as though it makes him a higher form of being. And he is evoking science as though it is a body of incontrovertible truths. The closest parallel I can come up with is “I am a man of the cloth,” among ministers. But it would be considered bad form to say that of yourself, and it actually does not carry as much weight. You will say, so what? What denomination? Nobody gets away with much by it.

One does not hear anyone say “I am a man of double-entry bookkeeping,” or “I am a man of actuarial tables.” Yet all are on the same intellectual plane as science. They are all no more nor less than tools. 

It is an indication of how badly we have fallen into “scientism,” the worship of science as our religion and our God.

Besides the idolatry, we need to realize the obvious truth that having training in the scientific method does not make one a moral person. Anyone evokes “science,” and we act as though this is proof of good moral character. And of a truth beyond challenge—the very opposite of the scientific method.  Charlatans and scoundrels—not here referring specifically to Dr. Fauci—can make good use of this naïveté. Freud, Hitler, and Marx are obvious examples.

Are You Going to Hell?

 

In the video clip. A college student asks Frank Turek whether she is going to hell. 

Turek of course does not want to say so. He dodges the question. But in fact, she is a good example of someone bound for hell.

She says she is a “good” person. She of course hopes this is sufficient. But her definition of “good” is “according to the standards of our society,” and in the expectation that others will treat her the same.

This is what the Bible condemns in the passage 

 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

Doing whatever society expects is an abdication of moral responsibility. It is taking society and your own well-being as God. Idolatry is a far graver sin than lying, theft, or murder.

Speaking of which, some of my students troubled me recently. The text was on lying. And the book asked the question, “Is it ever all right to lie?” 

“Sure,” they answered. “If nobody finds out.”

At the beginning of the clip, Turek has just asked the student, “If God exists and if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?” 

She answers “there is no proof that I would be able to accept.” 

When he offers her a book to read on condition that she promise to read it, she at first will not do so. I wonder if Turek meant this as a test. It demonstrates that she is not looking for the truth.

This is the essential qualification for heaven. This is what true faith means: to seek truth. The Christian God is “the way, the truth, and the light.” 

Not wanting truth means rejecting God. And Turek is right in his definition of heaven: heaven is the presence of God, hell is the absence of God. If we reject God in life, we choose for ourselves to go to hell.

I suspect in the end this woman will find her way. I sense a tremor in her voice when she asks about hell. She finally does promise to read the book. Part of her is seeking; otherwise, she would not have come to the talk. She is at least hearing the voice of her good angel.

It is those who will not read the book if offered, who are surely going to hell.

Each of us, before our deaths, perhaps gets that offer.

Iconoclasm

They have pulled down a statue of Thomas Jefferson in Portland.

I am fundamentally opposed to pulling down any statues. The world has too little art, and too little history. Pulling down any statue is a crime against our children and grandchildren; while any sentient being should be able to understand it does no harm to the historical person we are trying to insult. It is an act of despicable cowardice to assault the dead.

Statues of Churchill and Lincoln are also being defaced in London, and statues of Gandhi removed.

There are, of course, known arguments for each; arguments made by people trying to have such statues removed legally. Jefferson was a slaveowner. Churchill was callous in his dealings with both Ireland and India; he believed in the British Empire. Gandhi was racist towards Africans. Lincoln? I’m sure there must be something.

The comment often heard, at least concerning statues of Confederate generals, is “After all, we don’t have statues of Hitler.”

For what it’s worth, I have never seen a photograph of any statues of Hitler actually being pulled down. Perhaps there simply weren’t any?

I recently learned that there is a mural featuring Mussolini on horseback in a church in Montreal. Nobody has been troubled by it, apparently, even in the 1940s. Moreover, it is meant to honour him—it is a commemoration of his signing of the Concordat with the Vatican. The Ontario town of Swastika never changed its name. 

For the record, I would be utterly opposed to defacing the Mussolini mural, or renaming Swastika, or pulling down any statues of Hitler. None of this would do anything but harm.

We did see many pictures out of Eastern Europe, when the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union dissolved, of mobs pulling down statues of Stalin. This was perhaps in reaction to that dictator’s tendency to put up statues of himself everywhere; in such a case, it might be aesthetically justified. It was also a bit of payback, perhaps, for the modern tradition of pulling down statues of former rulers seems to have begun with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

A common claim made against the statues of Confederate generals is that it is wrong to erect statues of traitors. They fought against their own government.

This is historically false: from their perspective, and according to the US Constitution as written, sovereignty was retained at the state level. The Union forces were an invading army; just as if the EU landed a force at Dover today. The moral duty was to take up arms to defend their homeland—regardless of what they felt about slavery.

And as to slavery, it seems to me unfair to blame Jefferson, or Lee, for owning slaves. The problem was systemic. Had they, as southern landowners, gone without slaves, it would simply have meant surrendering their livelihood. They could not compete against their neighbours. Perhaps they should have, but it is a lot to ask.

Let’s allow that logic, that traitors should not be honoured. That does justify tearing down statues of Jefferson, and Washington, for they too, at least as much as Lee or Beauregard, took up arms against the government. But then Canada should also not feature a statue of Louis Riel in front of the Manitoba Legislature. He rebelled twice, and was actually convicted and executed for treason. None of the Southern generals honoured were ever so charged. Because they were not in fact guilty of treason in US law. The government considered charges, and realized they would be unable to convict, and would only end up justifying their enemies. 

We also have numerous statues and commemorations of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau, both of whom rose in arms against the Canadian government. 

We are obviously being inconsistent.

There is a fundamental error in supposing that, if we erect a statue of someone, or just leave it standing, it means we endorse them. Explain then, if you can, the many carvings of demons and gargoyles that adorn medieval cathedrals, or stand at the entrance of any Buddhist temple. It is remarkably simple-minded to suppose remembering someone means honouring them.

And it is a second error, as bad as the first, that you must not honour anyone unless they are without sin. No one, it should go without saying, is without sin. If you think your own heroes are, you are yourself guilty of the sin of idolatry.

This is a common misunderstanding, by the way, among non-Catholics, regarding the saints. The standard of sainthood is not, and has never been, sinlessness. We could not have statues or paintings of anyone, on that basis. The standard is a display of heroic virtue. Virtue, sadly, is a concept we seem to have lost.

Jefferson, Churchill, or Gandhi obviously pass that test. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill Establishing Religious Freedom, and was prepared then to stake his life on defending them. Churchill saved the world from Nazism, for a time standing almost alone against Hitler. Gandhi stood against the British Empire, and ended the era of European Imperialism.

If anyone is worthy of a statue in their honour, it is one of these three.

But if we are going to tear down statues and commemorations, let’s at least be even handed. Martin Luther King Jr. has to go too, right? We have credible reports that he was present at a rape, and even urged it on. His womanizing was well known even at the time.

How about Canada’s “Famous Five,” prominently displayed in downtown Calgary, on Parliament Hill, and in Winnipeg—not to mention on the currency? 

Emily Murphy was a genuine white supremacist. It was at least as prominent a theme of her writings as women’s suffrage.

She wrote: "One becomes especially disquieted -- almost terrified -- in the face of these things for it sometimes seems as if the white race lacks both the physical and moral stamina to protect itself, and that maybe the black and yellow races may yet obtain the ascendancy."

She wrote an entire book, The Black Candle, about the threat of the Chinese.

All five were aggressive advocates of eugenics and forced sterilization, in defense of the ethnic purity of an imagined Anglo-Saxon race. They got a forced sterilization act passed in Alberta, which seems to have been used predominantly to sterilize Indian (First Nations) women.

There are really only two defensible positions here: the traditional Jewish or Muslim one, to tear down all statues and paintings of anyone, or the traditional Christian one, of support for the visual arts.

No More Water, But the Fire Next Time

The notion of ancestral guilt seems central to the Bible. The story of Adam and Eve and the apple and original sin is not the only example. We also have the story of Noah and his sons.

According to a superficial reading of the tale in Genesis, Noah is the one righteous man on Earth. So God preserves him and his three sons, and their wives, in the ark, as the rest of the world dies. Kind of like the coronavirus.

When the flood abates, Noah emerges, plants vines, grows grapes, and makes wine. He gets blind drunk. While he is drunk, his son Ham comes into his tent and sees him naked. As a result, Noah curses him and all his descendants.

Noah began to be a farmer, and planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and got drunk. He was uncovered within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it on both their shoulders, went in backwards, and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were backwards, and they didn’t see their father’s nakedness. Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his youngest son had done to him. He said,

“Canaan is cursed. He will be a servant of servants to his brothers.”

But a superficial reading does not seem possible. Noah is the one righteous man on earth, and here he does not seem to be acting righteously. Is it clear Ham has done anything wrong? Doesn’t Noah bear more responsibility, for getting drunk? What is so terrible about seeing your father naked? And even if Ham looked deliberately, why should his children or grandchildren be punished for it?

The key, I suggest, is that “seeing a man’s nakedness” is a euphemism for having sex with his wife. The Bible uses this euphemism repeatedly elsewhere. Genesis itself says that man and wife are “one flesh.” See Leviticus 18: “‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife. It is your father’s nakedness.”

So what actually happened is that Noah and Mrs. Noah got blind drunk, and Ham took advantage of this to have sex with his mother.

Noah presumably indeed bears some responsibility for getting drunk. As the first to plant a vine, he might not have known wine’s effects. Nevertheless, to get so drunk, he must have overindulged. It would have been overindulgence of a natural appetite at this point even had it been non-alcoholic grape juice. He liked what was happening, and kept going. The sin is eerily similar to that of Eve in eating the apple because it “looked good to eat.”

The more serious sin of the son echoes again the subsequent sin of Cain against Abel. First you overindulge a natural appetite, which seems harmless. But over time, by the next generation, the habit of indulging appetites leads to more serious places, like rape, incest, and murder.

In our chosen translation, the World English Bible—chosen only for copyright reasons—Noah does not actually curse Ham. He only says he IS cursed. “Canaan is cursed.”

Some other translations make it an act of Noah’s will: King James says “Cursed be Canaan.” But both translations are obviously possible. Young’s literal translation has only “cursed Canaan.” No verb.

So we can legitimately read Noah as only making an observation. Ham has demonstrated moral depravity. Ham has shown no filial piety. He will presumably also show no regard for proper parenting in turn.

We have spoken before of the problem of idolizing parents and ancestors. Unreflective children naturally take their parents as the measure of all things. Noah foresees that Ham is going to pass that moral depravity on to his children, and children’s children, into the indefinite future, so long as individual descendants do not make a conscious and painful effort to exile from their families and seek truth and righteousness on their own. Noah foresees a family tradition of moral depravity.

This, in the minds of those who wrote the Bible, could explain the observed depravity of the contemporary Canaanites, Ham’s descendants, who notoriously practiced child sacrifice.

In this way, the sins of the fathers do visit the sons, unto the third or fourth generation.

Possibly a relevant thought in this time of coronavirus. Not to mention plagues of locusts, and unchecked wildfires in Australia and Thailand.

Waiting for Godot

We imagine ourselves as Vladimir or Estragon, wandering aimlessly through our modern-postmodern wasteland wondering why Godot has not yet come.

It is a damnable lie.

Godot—God—has no reason to hide from us. Remember the story of the Garden of Eden. It was Adam and Eve who hid from him.

We are only conning ourselves that we are looking for him. If he were to appear, we would crucify Him.

The wasteland is our protective shell of lies, that keeps us from having to think. Then we can go about our daily lives untroubled, worrying only about in which ditch to sleep. It is the matrix; it is the idolatry we have inherited from our parents.

We find any sincere quest for truth profoundly threatening. Leave aside Jesus; Socrates was executed for asking too many questions.

We would rather believe the obvious nonsense of Marxism, long ago disproven; or of Freudianism, long ago disproven; of postmodernism, or existentialism, or for that matter of “Hallelujah Chorus” Christianity, which obviously contradicts the gospel, but looks easier. There are many such idols of the tribe. The one thing they have in common is a denial of moral concerns.

Here’s the plain truth. God is both omnipotent and benevolent. He will hide nothing. All it takes is a sincere quest for the truth, and truth begins to be apparent. “Seek and ye shall find.”

This is why Descartes was able to conclude that anything we perceive with clarity and distinctness must be true.

Of course God would not have abandoned us in some wasteland without direction.

Here’s how simple it is: the point of life is to seek truth, and the good, and beauty. As soon as you seek truth, you have found it, because the sincere effort to find truth is the essential truth of life. As soon as you seek good, you have found it, for the sincere effort to be good is the essential good. As soon as you seek beauty, you have found it, for the quest for beauty is the most beautiful of stories.

As Vladimir might well have mumbled to Estragon, “Now where did I put my nose? I’m sure I left it around here someplace…”

Jesus Met the Woman at the Well: Take 2

“Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his children and his livestock?”

The story of the Samaritan woman at the well, last Sunday’s reading, looks like another parable of the need to overcome the natural idolatry of parents or ancestors. This is especially true if we come from a dysfunctional family; it is always true in any case.

For two wells, two waters, and two authorities, are contrasted: the physical well, and the spiritual well of the Logos; the physical water and the spiritual, or “living,” water of the Gospel; Jesus and ancestral custom, personified as Jacob, the eponymous ancestor of Israel.

And the answer is obvious: Jesus is the higher authority.

“So the woman left her water pot, went away into the city.”

She discarded the water of her ancestors. This is an either-or choice. “He who does not despise his father for my sake is not worthy of me.” “Family values” are not a part of Christianity, but radically apart from Christianity.

The point is signed and underlined by her being a Samaritan. The Samaritans and the Jews had irreconcilable differences regarding the proper place of temple worship; as the story reminds us. Both cannot be right. And Jesus unambiguously tells her her ancestors were wrong.

“You worship that which you don’t know. We worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews.”

So she faces the eternal human dilemma: accept the unconsidered assumptions inherited from your father, who at best was no more than a man, or fight through for truth.

It is here perhaps that it becomes significant that she is apparently an outcast in her own community: coming at the unseasonable hour to get her daily water, to avoid encountering others. It is naturally enough those kicked to the bottom of the social totem pole who will find it easiest to see the shared delusions. They obviously have less to lose. See the Beatitudes on this. Children are also more apt to see, having not yet been so thoroughly indoctrinated. “For such is the Kingdom of God.”

I had noted previously that the woman must have been socially rejected because she was living in adultery. I was wrong. By the rules of ancient Israel, concubinage was respectable; consider Abraham’s concubine Hagar, the mother of Ishmael.

She was more likely to have been rejected for having five husbands. A surprising fact; so surprising that it proves Jesus was not just using intuition or playing probabilities, but had true supernatural knowledge. There are two possibilities: either the husbands divorced her, socially branding as a terrible wife; or they died, suggesting she was a jinx. Or a poisoner. Either would explain her social isolation. And either would amount to a profound experience of rejection.

I think we can also infer that she must necessarily also have been extremely attractive and/or accomplished, to have had five or six suitors despite this.

When the woman asks Jesus for the living water, why does he respond, “go, call your husband?” Why need her husband be involved?

Precisely because this is a social problem, a sin of the fathers visited upon the fourth generation. It would not be enough for her to see the truth, so long as she is committed, through marriage, to that corrupted social order. Unless she is, like Peter, to abandon spouse and family, they too must be brought along.

The woman responds that she has no husband. Jesus agrees that this is true, and reveals that he knows her entire marital history.

But if he knows her entire marital history, and knows this to be true, why did he tell her to bring her husband?

The point is that she both has and does not have a husband, depending on how you look at it, surely. The reference might be to concubinage, in which case Jesus might be accused of having spoken with less than perfect accuracy on the first occasion. This is not a plausible inference, however, since he is omniscient, and immediately demonstrates this. It seems more likely that the woman actually did have a husband, and was lying.

Why would she lie?

Oh gentle reader, you are innocent in the ways of romance. This woman has just met a handsome stranger at a well. Meeting at a well is the usual first act of a Biblical romance—Jacob himself, whose well this is, met his wife at it. This appears to be a woman with a reputation for playing the field, as it were, and who is apparently naturally highly attractive. Admitting she is married might kill the fun.

If so, she actually has had six husbands, counting the present one, and Jesus would amount to the projected seventh—a magical number for the Bible.

So when Jesus says her present husband is not really her husband, he is making a more general point, about family ties.

We all both do and do not have earthly fathers; for our true father, Jesus reminds us elsewhere, is always and only our father who is in heaven. We all both do and do not have husbands; for our true husband is always Jesus, the Seventh, the Sabbath spouse. Earthly spouses are, in the end, transitory and arbitrary, like well water. Any five or six might do.

We must not elevate family ties to divine status; and this is the usual temptation.

“So when the Samaritans came to him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed there two days. Many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, ‘Now we believe, not because of your speaking; for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.’”

This fulfills Jesus’s requirement that the Samaritan woman bring her husband. She brought the entire community, and they had to be converted as a group.

The Sins of the Fathers

Orestes pursued by Erinyes.

“You shall no t make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me…”

Note this second part of the first or second commandment, depending on how you parse them. That makes it near the core of the Judeo-Christian message. It says that children and grandchildren are punished for a parent’s or grandparent’s sin.

Indeed, you get the same idea in the doctrine of original sin. Or that of redemptive suffering. One person can suffer for the sin of another.

And it is troubling: how can an all-loving God be so unjust? How can he punish Tom for Jerry’s sin?

Nevertheless, we have to accept that this is a fair description of reality. All of us either suffer or benefit from actions of our ancestors; these inform the circumstances of our birth and upbringing. Since God could intervene to prevent this, he is ultimately responsible.

But there must be more to this, too.

For this then is a case of God taking direct responsibility for human sin. Which is not theologically correct. We have free will.

And if a parent is morally depraved, it is probably not going to change their mind to hear that their children will suffer for it. That would trouble only a good person. In fact, this is what a narcissistic parent actually wants and tries to do. They inevitably choose one or more children as a scapegoat, and blame and punish them without cause. Most often, they are innocently punished for the very things of which the parent is guilty. That is what “scapegoat” means.

So it seems both false and fruitless for God to declare this commandment to the bad. And after all, if they are idolators—the specific sin which this commandment prohibits—they are not listening to God in the first place.

Nor to the already righteous parents, who care about their children. They are, after all, already righteous, and listening to God, not worshipping idols.

It has to be that he is speaking to someone else.

It has to be that he is speaking to the children. He is speaking to the grown children of the iniquities of their fathers.

Children, especially less thoughtful children, get their worldview and many of their unexamined opinions from their parents. Denominational beliefs, politics, and prejudices of all kinds run in families for generations. This is demonstrated often in demographic surveys, were it not self-evident. In our earliest years, our parents are the font of all knowledge; and this assumption never entirely fades.

Yet we all also have an innate conscience, from God, and must be conscious as well of contradictions, between this and what our parents taught us. And we all have a moral duty to actively seek the True and the Good.

It is perhaps vitally significant that this passage comes at the end of the prohibition against idolatry.

The essential and most dangerous idolatry may be this idolatry of the parent; and what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the tribe.”

The word translated here as “iniquity” is actually closest to the English “crookedness.” It is an image of a thing being bent.

That indeed makes it plausible that it refers to a distorted, dishonest world-view.

And it seems to bookend with Jesus’s condemnation in the New Testament of those who would “cause one of these little ones to stumble.” It is a condemnation of parents who fail in their children’s moral education.

One can see, then, how this commitment to sin is both passed down from the parent, and a matter of personal responsibility. We all have the moral obligation to see past such idolatries—this is what the commandment is telling us. If in an oddly oblique way, as if aware of the necessity at the same time not to upset the authority of the family—the foundation of all social order.

Happily, this conflict between God and parent is not great in most families. However, one can easily see in it the basis for original sin. Every human ancestor must, like Adam, fall somewhat short.

A similar concept of guilt running in families was known to the ancient Greeks. See, most obviously, the Oresteia trilogy: it ends in a formal trial, in which by the grace of Athena the parent is found at fault, and the child not guilty. Plato too speaks of ancestral curses for which a descendant must atone, through bouts of “divine madness” and through rituals of purification.

Plato is referring to melancholy, which is much of what we call mental illness; or at least to depression and mania (now “bipolar disorder”). In the Oresteia, the same experience is represented by pursuing Furies. This, depression, then seems to be a product of the dissonance between parental influence and eternal verities.

But those raised by a narcissistic parent who do not suffer through the ordeal remain in sin. They have broken the first commandment.

No, You Are Not a Child of Nature

Pachamama. Note that she is actually made of stones.

My friend Xerxes weighs in against the growing current tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. 

And it is a growing tendency. We see it not just in talk of the planet Earth as “Gaia”; but of “harming Mother Nature,” of Nature having specific preferences and interests, or seeking revenge, or maintaining a “balance”; of Science “knowing” this or that; of this species being “more evolved” or “more highly evolved” than that, as though Evolution per se could have a plan or a direction. Or of “harming” or “damaging” as opposed to the climate simply changing. None of these are sentient beings.

Fine to use these things as convenient or poetic metaphors, as when Carl Sandberg says the fog “comes in on little cat feet.” But no, fog is not a cat. Fine to suggest that God, or even some other supernatural being separate from the object, demon or angel, has interests here. Fine, that is, if you know what you are doing, and can produce a coherent theology. But not the inanimate object itself.

I do not think actual pagans made this mistake. This is childish thinking. I think at least some pagans had to be too smart to do this. They presumed a god who had jurisdiction over the river; they did not suppose this was the physical river itself. That would be absurd. That would simply be an error, a logical fallacy, mistaking a physical for a spiritual thing.

The Word

I think my local priest holds heretical views.

At mass today, for “Bible Sunday,” he insisted that the Mass was properly understood as “two tables”: the Eucharist and the Bible readings. And, he stresses, the Church venerates them equally. We foolish lay Catholics are generally, he concludes, shortchanging the Bible.

No. That is like saying reaching the road to Ottawa is just as important as reaching Ottawa; or that a picture of my wife is just as important as my wife.

The Bible tells us about God. The Eucharist is God.

Properly speaking, I fear my pastor is advocating idolatry.

The First Commandment

Idolatry

“I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me, and showing loving kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments."

The focus of this blog has largely become ethics. This is not intentional; circumstances in the passing parade have forced this to the fore.

Perhaps, then, it is time to look at the basic rules of Judeo-Christian morality, and understand exactly what they say.

Above is the full text of the First Commandment, as Catholicism numbers them, taken from the Book of Exodus; World English Bible translation.

Note firstly that it does not deny the existence of gods other than Yahweh. This is a common misconception. The commandment is that they must not be given priority over Yahweh, must not be “before him.” Other gods are understood as daemons, demons—real spiritual beings with real, limited power. If not necessarily positively malign, they are amoral. They are not the friends of man. This describes the Greek gods of legend.

Then there is the prohibition against “graven images.” This is taken quite literally in some forms of Islam, and Protestants regularly criticise Catholics for having statues of the saints, as supposedly violating this commandment.

But the Bible, and Yahweh, clearly do not literally mean that there is something wrong with visual arts. For in this same Book of Exodus, Yahweh commands Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and raise it above the Hebrews on a pole. This seems to preempt such an understanding.

Not idolatry

More pointedly, the Bible itself is a set of “graven images”—for that is what any written language is. So were the tablets Moses brought down from Sinai—so is this very commandment. The Book of Exodus even refers to the tablets as “graven.”

Not idolatry.

The prohibition, then, is not against making graven images, but worshipping them.

And then again, is even this quite literal? Does anyone ever really worship a literal image? The whole point of an image is that it represents something else. So anyone who worships an image instead of what it represents is simply making an obvious error. It is more or less self-evident. There are not actual little people in your TV set, for example.

So the real prohibition must be against worshipping “anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

That is, it is against worshipping material things, things immediately present to the physical senses.

In a word, it is against worshipping “nature.”

Which is obviously a temptation, because it is a temptation into which most people fall currently.

It is a prohibition against worshipping “science,” or “nature,” or “ecology,” or “Gaia,” or “the Earth,” or “the environment.” Or physical health and comfort, and not our souls.

These things are no doubt, like the pagan gods, of some significance. But we must not put them above the spiritual, or above man himself.

And what is their significance? The reference to graven images expresses it. To worship the seen world or any part of it instead of the invisible spiritual world is just like mistaking the image for the reality it represents.

Why This Modern Idolatry?

Saturn eating his children.

It strikes me that much of the temptation to idolatry is from a desire to avoid moral obligations.

If you worship “nature,” you are implicitly reserving to yourself the right to do whatever is “natural,” that is, to follow your desires without moral scruple.

If you worship “peace,” you are denying your moral obligation to combat evil. And denying the right of anyone else to resist your own chosen evil.

If you worship “democracy,” you are claiming exemption from moral choice. Going along with the crowd is easier. It protects you from having to do anything that might cost you social position. Or cost you much of anything. You needn’t be any better than the next guy; and it is now in everyone’s interest to be no more moral than is strictly necessary. Raise the bar, and you are a bad person.

If you worship “science,” you are implicitly avoiding questions of value, in the name of scientific “objectivity.” Which is to say, you are avoiding morality. Moral concerns are incompatible with science.

Worshipping “diversity,” too, may be a matter of avoiding tough moral choices—it is implicitly an assertion of cultural relativism. If your neighbor claims his culture allows him to beat his child to death, you now have no moral obligation to intervene. You are yourself exempt from moral judgement so long as you are doing things others in your culture commonly do. Implicitly, further, so long as you are doing anything conceivably permissible in any other culture, you are not really doing anything morally wrong. At best, morality is merely social convention. Like washing your hands before you eat your firstborn.

Kind of all fits in, doesn’t it? Kind of looks like a common thread.

The same motive seems to me to be behind the great god “atheism.” “Atheists” do not, so far as I have ever seen, actually deny the existence of God. That may be impossible in rational terms. They just call it “science” or “nature.” Science and nature as they describe them, as idols, have all the attributes of God except personhood and morality.

An impersonal God will not care about morality. 

The New Polytheism

The Great God Nature.

“Peace” and “diversity” are becoming dangerous idolatries. Not that they are the only ones; they join many other false gods in the modern polytheistic pantheon, like “democracy,” “nature,” and “science.”

Both are, of course, conditionally good, both peace and diversity—that is, good depending on context. Diversity is good; lack of diversity is bad. But unity is also good, surely to an at least equal extent. And diversity is close to being the opposite of unity. Accordingly, there can be too much diversity without unity, and too much unity without diversity. This is lost once “diversity” becomes the idol. The US motto is good in this regard: “e pluribus unum”; roughly, “out of diversity, unity.” The Christian doctrine of the Trinity also seems to strike this balance.

So too with peace. Peace is always preferable to conflict, if these are the only two factors in the equation, and not even for moral reasons. It’s easier and more profitable for everyone. But these are never the only two factors. If they were, the issue would never come up. Everyone wants peace.

In truth, whenever there is a conflict, it is usually, in the normal course of things, because one party is in the right, and the other in the wrong. An honest person must assume this. Cases where it is all due to a “misunderstanding” are quite naturally in the minority; this is an intrinsically less probable reason for any disagreement to occur, let alone to come to blows. To pretend otherwise is both cowardly and dishonest. Because, after all, it is not true, and it is the easier path.

In cases in which morality is on one side in a conflict, most cases, demanding peace unconditionally is always acting in support of the aggressor or the party perpetrating injustice. One is then fully guilty as well of that injustice or aggression. None so guilty, someone said, as the “innocent bystander.” Especially if they are going to condemn the victim on grounds of false morality for resisting being knifed. This is then both participating in the knifing, adding a further assault, and debasing the moral currency generally.

Or, as Edmund Burke said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Pachamama

Pachamama Museum in Pope Francis's native Argentina.

Sad to say, I think that Bishop Barron, probably the most prominent Catholic evangelist in America, is a heretic.

I pulled out on his video series “Catholicism” near the beginning, when he declared that the plan of creation was that we all would become gods.

That sounds to me like straight idolatry. That sounds a whole lot like what the serpent said to Eve: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

I have listened to him since on YouTube, without finding him compelling. He smiles too much, leaving out the tough parts.

He argues that Hell may be empty. I think he is wrong and unbiblical there.

Now I hear him assert that when after the crucifixion Jesus descended to the dead, it was to the depths of hell, to set all sinners free.

This is not the teaching of the Church. The Catechism says “Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.” (para. 633, CCC) This was affirmed by two Ecumenical Councils, at Rome and Toledo. Jesus died not for all, but for “many.”

Worst of all, in expressing his view that all are saved, Bishop Barron gave no indication that it was controversial within the Church.

Of course, it is no surprise that a bishop could be unreliable on doctrine. We know there is rot in the hierarchy. I know from personal experience that most Protestant ministers—I studied under a lot of them in grad school—are not Christian. They do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, and do not really believe in a personal God. I have known priests who were not Christian too. As we know, some are only there for the gay sex.

And then there is the current Amazonian synod, and those strange statues of a naked pregnant woman that have now been thrown into the Tiber.

What was that about? It seems to have been nothing less than a deliberate provocation by some significant body within the hierarchy, an expression of open contempt towards Catholic teaching. They were bowing publicly before a statue they would not identify. That necessarily, quite rightly, and surely quite intentionally evoked the golden calf in the Sinai Desert, or the Abomination of Desolation in the Temple at Jerusalem that provoked the Maccabee revolt. They were taunting the “deplorables.” 

One of the Pachamama statues displayed at the Amazon synod.

It seems to me a healthy sign that some unknown modern Maccabees took it upon themselves to toss them in the Tiber. War had been declared; this was a defensive move.

Now the Pope has declared sides: he has apologized for the vandalism that occurred in his diocese—that is, the assault on the statues. In doing so, he also identified the figure as “Pachamama,” an Amazonian aboriginal goddess of the earth. “Mother Earth.” 

Ceremony in Vatican gardens.

Identifying the statues as indeed idolatrous. Although, for the record, he said they were displayed "without idolatrous intent."

I hesitate to say what this means regarding the Pope. Put simply, he is apparently not Catholic.

I have direct memories of six popes now: John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. Each has been to me a rock amid the tumult of the modern age. Some were deeply troubled by Vatican II. I was not. I thought it was valuable, even vital, for its affirmation of ecumenicism. I had no problem with the vernacular mass. I thought less of Pope Paul for suppressing the Latin mass; I saw no reason for that. But I figured Paul was trying to hold things together at a difficult time; his steadfast opposition to abortion was worth more than liturgical errors. It might have been a trade he felt he had to make.

I remember, when JPII emerged on the balcony after the conclave, we were all whispering, “Who is he?” Yet there was also an immediate excitement. We could feel this was a historic choice.

I was overjoyed when Benedict emerged on the balcony. We knew him well, and had been hoping for this.

When Francis emerged, again we did not know who he was. Yet the sense was very different from the unknown JPII. My heart sank. I have heard others say the same. Charisma is a real thing. My sense was, “This is not a spiritual man. This is a bureaucrat.”

The Church, of course, will survive. The Church has gone through difficult times before, and been led by unholy men.

But who now is left to light our way?

The Golden Calf

Xerxes wants to declare water sacred, because it is so important to life. “Water needs to be treated as sacred -- a gift, and a holy responsibility.”

I heard something similar from David Suzuki in a lecture once: he wanted us to worship the four classical elements, earth, air, fire, and water.

This idea does not appeal to me. If being important to our physical life is the standard of holiness, it would be just as proper to say that we ought to worship money. Does that sound right?

If not, is it because money is invented by man, and water comes from God (or nature)? Fine. Then at least, we ought to worship sex.

Or try this one. No form of life could survive without some form of waste elimination. These wastes then become the staff of life to other beings, which feed other beings, throughout the chain; the “great circle of life.” So surely by this same standard we should worship—er, excretions.

Does that sound right?

The first Bible reading at mass last Sunday seems to address the issue. It is Exodus 32, the story of the Hebrews casting a golden calf “to go before them”; against which Moses, in rage, broke the tablets of the law.

Why were the Hebrews wrong to bow before a golden calf? Because it was a graven image? But they have not yet heard that commandment. Moreover, the passage actually takes the trouble to note that the tablets of the law were also “graven” (Exodus 32:16): also graven images. Exodus is obviously contrasting the two, the tablets of the law and the golden calf, smashing one against the other, as opposite representations of the sacred. The tablets proper, the statue improper. And this should be evident without having read the tablets.

It is not because the statue is a graven image, then, but because the statue is an image from nature. The full commandment is “you shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath.” It is a prohibition specifically against worshipping nature, or any part of nature, as sacred.

And the passage seems to illustrate why. Moses burns the statue, spreads the ashes on the waters, and forces the Hebrews to drink it. This is striking, because the statue was made of gold. Gold does not burn, does not form ash, and does on float on water. In other words, this must be symbolic, metaphoric. The point is nature’s destructibility. Nature is all that passes into non-being. It burns, dissolves, is devoured, one way or another is ultimately gone. By smashing the tablets of the law, then getting a replacement set, Moses is demonstrating the perfect indestructability, by contrast, of spiritual things. Breaking the tablets cannot break the law. Only such eternal things are to be worshipped.

The moral law, the Good, is sacred. Cows aren’t. Even gold isn’t.

Worshipping water is the essential idolatry here condemned-- which is, in a word, materialism.

Family Values and Christian Values

Among the many idolatries circulating these days, one is actually circulated by people who think themselves religious: “family values.”

According to the relevant Wikipedia entry, “family values,” the idolization of the nuclear family as the basic, essential unit of society, “is sometimes used by the media to refer to Christian values.”

Have they read the Bible? The two are not the same at all. Name one single significant religious personage in the Old Testament who came from a model nuclear family. 

Cain and Abel - Titian

Adam and Eve—one of their sons killed the other.
Noah—cursed one of his three sons and all of his descendants.
Lot—had incestuous relations with his two daughters.
Abraham—saved by an angel from sacrificing his only son.
Jacob—feared being killed by his brother, having cheated him.
Joseph—his brothers tried to kill him, sell him into slavery.
Moses—raised in a foster home.
David—killed for his wife, killed his son who rebelled against him.
Solomon—killed his brother. Took 700 wives and 300 concubines, who subverted his faith. 

Abraham and Isaac - Rembrandt

Indeed, all the patriarchs were polygamous.

Isn't there a certain consistency here? Absolutely no trace of the nuclear family as a good thing or a bastion of proper Judeo-Christian values.

In the New Testament, the rejection of the family is emphatic. Jesus took no family; and the apostles who were married apparently abandoned theirs. Jesus rejects his family when he stays behind, age twelve, in the temple. He rejects his family again when they come to call him during his early ministry, and he responds, “What have I to do with you, woman?” When he calls James and John, they actually abandon their father Zebedee in the boat. When a young man seeks to join him, but after burying his father, Jesus will not allow him: “let the dead bury their own dead.” He says, “call no one father but your father who is in heaven.” And he says, “anyone who does not despise his father and mother on my account is not worthy of me.”

Absalom

 

This is harsh; no harsher, but of a piece, with the Gospel's rejection of the kingdoms of this world. Families, like governments, are a practical necessity, but ought to be viewed with the same suspicion. They are a situation in which some individuals hold power over others; given human nature, that rarely turns out well. No doubt there are good, nurturing families somewhere; but when I survey the experiences of my close friends and relatives, I don't see many. In most families, it seems, someone is abusing someone.

This does not justify government intervening against the family; bad as most families are, government is not likely to be any better. And it is in principle easier for the abused individual to escape from a bad family situation than from a bad government. Government interventions against the family seem always to make the situation worse.

The solution, instead, is presumably “voluntary families,” groups of like-minded people, as in a church congregation or a monastery. This is what we need more of.

Young Jesus in the Temple - Hole.