Religion and Politics

OK, you can just say, "I hate Steve," now and get it over with. I have friends who have the good sense to say, "Never discuss religion or politics," and this is good advice, too. So, I'm not going to follow that good advice.

It all started when the Pope resigned and they named a replacement Pope. I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a dog in this fight. But I am a Christian, so am not completely disinterested. Whenever anything like that happens I hear stupid things said about Catholicism.

To hear some people talk about Catholics the only things Catholics do is cover-up pedophile priests, discriminate against women, and oppose birth control. Funny how a major world religion should be built upon such narrow interests.

The stupid things I hear said about Catholicism are usually in the form of questions, "Will the new Pope allow female priests (priestesses)? Will the new Pope come out in favor of gay marriage? Will the new Pope declare Zeus the king of the gods? Will the new Pope tell everyone to worship Caesar?"

I knew these were stupid things, but a caller on a radio show said something that crystallized my thinking on the subject: Politics and Religion are opposites.

The laws of a country should follow from the desires and values of that country's citizens. The will of the people can change and that changing will engages politics to change a nation's laws. Is it illegal to marry your same-sex lover? That law is a reflection of the political consensus of a nation at the point of that law being enacted. Should the political consensus change, then the law can be changed to reflect the changing consensus.

For instance, amphetamines were dispensed over-the-counter at the time that Have Spacesuit Will Travel was written. But the consensus of their legality changed by the time Breaking Bad was written. Apparently, the consensus is moving the other way with marijuana legalization.

People should be free to choose their legislators who'll enact laws that reflect the people's will. This is politics.

Religion is the opposite. Religion is what humans do about God. Jews, Christians, and Moslems teach that God dispenses moral laws. These laws reflect each religion's God-concept.

I can speak best for Christianity. Christianity teaches that God does not change. Human understanding of God may change, but the essential deity disclosed by General and Special Revelation does not change. And the essential moral character of deity does not change. What must change is me. I must accommodate my internal moral compass to what has been disclosed to me by Christianity.

There's an old joke about Moses coming down from the Mount saying, "The good news is that I got him down to Ten Commandments, but the bad news is Seven is still in there." The joke works because we all have times when we wish some part or another of the moral law weren't there. But we must accommodate ourselves to it. It does not go the other way. I cannot accommodate the moral law to my preferences.

And you cannot impose your preferences upon any religion's moral law.

I happen to think it abhorrent that people expect to be rewarded for murder with virgins in Paradise. Therefore, I don't belong to any religion that thinks so.

You may have similar notions about one thing or another that the Pope or Catholics believe. If so, you shouldn't belong to a Catholic church.

It's OK to find another church whose beliefs are not abhorrent to you, but it is not OK to try to change that church to make it after your own image. That's how people make Golden Calves.

On Happiness And Writing

I watched a documentary called Happy last night and I agreed in part with it and I disagreed in part with it.

I don't think I become happier if I support some 3rd party's crusade to save the world. Granted, giving money to someone who is Doing Something Good is a great way to assuage your guilt for Doing Nothing, but I don't see this as necessary to happiness.

Ayn Rand would say that Altruism is a Bad Thing, because men and women are not sacrificial animals. This is in part true, but Ms. Rand failed to account for the fact that altruism makes the altruist feel good.

Karl Marx said, "religion is the opiate of the masses." If so then altruism-borne happiness is part of the high. (I always like it when I can juxtapose Marx and Rand.)

I've personally experienced the fact that I'm happier when I can "get outside myself." And altruism is one way to do that. Same goes for community. One may deny that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but one cannot deny the existence of the communities one associates oneself with.

My extended family, and my church aren't perfect but when we're getting along I get a warm fuzzy from the association. Same for the circle of friends I meet with because we share interests in writing, programming, technology, etc.

One the thing that really gives me a huge kick is getting something done. Sometimes that accomplishment comes at the end of a long, hard slog. Those times it is more like a feeling of relief. Like the first day after you've been sick and you feel good about feeling good. Or when you get a chance to put your feet up after you've been on them all day.

A bigger kick is accomplishment after I've had fun doing the work. Some times the joy is in the journey. Some times work is play. When you are writing there are times when the scene and the characters take charge: your fingers fly across the keyboard and prose pours onto the page. The ancients would pray to the muse and the Hebrews would say that they spirit of the LORD came upon skilled craftsmen. Today we term that state of mind "flow" and I am happiest when I am in a flow state of mind.

The employer is wise who can arrange for his workers to spend the majority of their working hours in a flow state. This explains why my writing suffers when my day job is most enjoyable, and why my writing gets so much better when I have to "pay my dues" in the rest of my life.

I spoke earlier of having a sustainable rhythm of writing. I've found that nothing disrupts my rhythm of writing more than having so much fun at work that I forget my work-in-progress. And nothing gets me back into that sustainable rhythm of writing than getting into a flow state while writing. Hemingway said that he always quit writing when he still had something more he could write. This kept him in the flow state right up to the moment he quit work, and it gave him an avenue to get back into the flow state when he resumed work the next day.

How To Risk Amish Wrath

There's one sure thing about religion and that is that whatever you believe someone else believes to the contrary. Even if you say reason is reasonable use to reason about deity in an interfaith dialog, someone else may respond by setting fires and killing people.

This presents the writer with a problem of avoiding the giving of offense when s/he writes about religion. I'm happy to state that no Amish Fatwa has been issued pursuant to blogging about the Strategic Amish Reserve. My head rests easily on my pillow knowing that no Amish fanatic with a name like Yoder or Miller will try to behead me.

One strategy for avoiding offense is to refer to deity in the only vaguest, non-sectarian terms. This is what US media did in the early 1960s and this offended my mother whose religion was neither vague nor non-sectarian.

Another strategy is to avoid any religious motif whatsoever. This is the easiest approach and it's  worked well to a large extent. However, it has limitations.

I must confess that crime stories are a guilty pleasure. Or stories that revolve around prior bad acts and their consequences. The detective story is in one sense a puzzle story where the reader is to ascertain whodunnit or how to prove whodunnit, but in another sense the detective story is a depiction of a cosmic imbalance of justice that requires the detective's sleuthing to restore to balance.

Humans do bad things to each other and life goes on (except for murder victims). The badness of a bad act depends upon the malice of the perpetrator, the act itself, and the pain of the victim. And bad acts range from mere annoyance to soul-destroying injuries. There is a lot of this going on in the world and there are a lot of interesting stories that can be built around bad acts. Not all of these stories need to be about mass murderers.

I recently saw a movie that hinged upon an inciting incident of rude words spoken to and then coffee being thrown on a girl. A boy (one of the regulars at the coffee shop where she works) comes to her aid and he treats her kindly. As the story progresses a mystery begins to emerge as to why he's doing all the kind things.

The girl had been bullied as a schoolchild. He had joined in and now he is doing these things to atone for his prior bad acts. The climax of the story occurs when the boy discloses this. The girl is furious and despite his sincere apology and the penance he has paid her. The story then turns on her reluctance to forgive him. Her resistance to forgive is justified. Few injuries hurt as much as those inflicted in childhood by classmates.

None of the this rises above the level of misdemeanor, but the girl's pain is real and her grievances are real in the story. The story works better because the hurts are small enough to be personalized. The reader can more easily identify.

Forgiving the boy is the key to the girl's future happiness. At this point, a Christian propaganda movie would start hitting the audience over the head with the Savior's parable of the two debtors. Happily, that is not necessary, because the way the story works out is just one person offering his apologies and one person accepting them.

That's what any society needs and that's what each person needs to know.

In another movie--a black comedy--the girl marries an abusive, violent man and she causes a hunting accident. And then she marries another man who turns out to be a heroin addict and she overdoses him. And then she marries another who is a wife-beater and she buries him alive. And this goes on and on through six different husbands... the last of which is a poisoner who's trying to kill her. In each case, the viewer can appreciate her motivation and may even think her actions justified.

Anyone who's survived the honeymoon can understand the temptation to do in one's spouse. This made the movie work. I kept watching mainly to find out the next spouse's flaw and the next spouse's cause of death. It was interesting to watch the girl change as the weight of her crimes grew heavier and heavier. After she's faked her own suicide on the eve of her seventh marriage she appears to be literally bloodthirsty.

And then in the last scene they pulled the rug out from under me.

Murder is not one of those things where you can apologize and people say OK. The person who might accept your apology is DEAD. Society takes a dim view on murder. The weight of guilt--not subjective guilt, but objective guilt--associated with murder is more than a human can bear. How can you end a movie about a serial murderess that the viewer sympathizes with and give it a satisfactory ending?

I was shocked when I learned that her 7th husband is the second person of the Christian Trinity. If you're not familiar with Catholic nuns, you won't know they "marry" Christ. And when Priyanka Chopra says she'll drink his blood, she refers to the Catholic notion of transubstantiation wherein wine becomes Christ's blood, and bread becomes Christ's flesh. (It only seemed that I used "literally" incorrectly.) As a nun she'll do more good for society than rotting in prison. And nobody gets off "scott-free" because her sins are paid for by Christ on the cross.

Nobody in their right mind would ever confuse this movie with a Christian tract. Yet it shows in a very sly, perhaps unintentional, manner the essence of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness.

That's the best way to put religion into a story.

Don't preach. Just show how parts of the religion work.