Vandals for god

When I wrote last year about ISIS's systematic destruction of the archeological treasure-trove in Palmyra, Syria, one of my readers stated, "And there you have one more difference between the Muslims and the Christians; you don't see Christians participating in this kind of wanton destruction."

After a brief exchange in which I at least got her to add the words "... any more" in the interest of historical accuracy, I let the matter drop.  Whether the aggressive proselytizing by Christian missionaries in the 20th century, especially in Africa, could be looked upon as accomplishing the same thing was a direction I didn't have the inclination to take the conversation.  In any case, arguments about religion rarely ever accomplish anything but hard feelings on both sides.

And to be fair, the scale on which ISIS and the Taliban have destroyed the cultural heritage of Syria and Afghanistan is far beyond anything similar we've seen recently.  But that doesn't mean the same sort of impulses don't drive some of the Christian fringe.  They just have less opportunity to exercise their crazy ideas.

Enter the Christians who are working in Mexico to destroy the iconic Mexican pyramids because they're "used for devil worship."

Authorities in the village of San Bartolo Tutotepec are investigating damage to the 7,000 year old pyramid of the same name, after Jehovah's Witnesses took credit last month for similar damage to the Makonikha sanctuary in Hidalgo.

"We are following the word of God," a spokesperson for the church told Mexican news source Telesur after the first incident.  "We believe that the sites are still used for traditional rituals that are not Christian and may involve devil worship."

The pyramid of San Bartolo Tutotepec [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In fact, San Bartolo is used for religious observances by the Otomi people to worship and give sacrifices to their deities of earth and water.  But apparently there are those who follow the general scheme of "if it's different than what I believe, it's devilry," and think this equates to "worshiping Satan."

Mexican authorities have stated that it may not be the same people who participated in the earlier incident, and are also investigating some local villagers who have voiced the same opinions.  But whoever turns out to be responsible, it comes from the same motives; the idea that it's somehow virtuous to be vandals for god.

I think what galls me most about this is that these people, and others like them, think that the beliefs of others don't matter.  They are not content to follow the tenets of their religion insofar as it guides their own ethics and morals; they take the further step of claiming that god is directing them to control how everyone else lives.

Plus, of course, there's the tragedy of irreparable damage to a beautiful structure that has withstood 7,000 years of human use and natural wear and tear.  The idea that these people would think they had the right to walk and and vandalize it makes me feel a little sick.

I'm also amazed at how far some people will go to give the vandals a bye simply because they're Christians.  I was discussing this with a friend a couple of days ago, and he said, "You can see why they think it's devil worship.  You do know that those temples were once used for human sacrifice, don't you?"

Yes, well, they aren't now, are they?  If we were to tear down every structure that had ever been devoted to torture, execution, and man's general inhumanity to man, we wouldn't have much left.  Starting with the Tower of London and working our way outwards from there.

So I can't find any mitigating circumstances here.  I hope that the vandals get caught before they can do any further damage, and that "wait, it's my religion" isn't pulled out as some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card.

News from the fringe

It's getting to the point that I'm not entirely sure whether the hyperreligious types here in the United States might be engaging in an elaborate act of self-parody.

I mean, is it just me, or have their claims been getting more and more ridiculous?  As I was casting about yesterday for a topic for today's post, I ran across not one, nor two, but three stories that made me say, "Okay, be honest.  You people aren't serious, right?"

First, we had the Jehovah's Witnesses releasing a creepy cartoon aimed at children, trying to convince them that if they have friends with LGBT parents, it's their duty to make sure that the friends find out that their parents are sinners who are doomed to hell.

The cartoon features a little girl who comes to her mom, dismayed because she has a friend whose parents are lesbians.  The mom explains that this is problematic:

People have their own ideas about what is right and wrong – but what matters is how Jehovah feels.  He wants us to be happy and he knows how we can be happiest.  That’s why he invented marriage the way he did -- between one man and one woman. 

Jehovah created Adam and Eve, male and female. Then he said a man will stick to his wife… Jesus said the same thing. 

Jehovah’s standards haven’t changed.  It’s kind of like bringing something on a plane – what happens if someone tries to bring something on that isn’t allowed?

What a brilliant analogy!  Who you are attracted to is exactly like someone trying to bring a hand grenade onto an airplane.  Do go on, Creepy Cartoon Mom:

It’s the same with Jehovah! He wants us to be his friend, and live in paradise forever, but we have to follow his standards to get there.  To get there we have to leave some things behind – that means anything Jehovah doesn’t approve of...  People can change, that’s why we share his message.

Creepy Cartoon Girl then says she'll make sure to tell her friend's parents that Jehovah doesn't approve of their lifestyle, a development that Creepy Cartoon Mom pronounces "awesome."

Then we had a fundamentalist pastor in Tennessee who said that scientists are "abandoning Darwin" in favor of ghosts and UFOs, which (given that they live in the sky, sort of) are basically god.  As long as you squint your eyes and look at them really carefully.

In fact, Pastor Charles Lawson of the Temple Baptist Church of Knoxville has a great deal to say on the topic, following the general scheme of "if you're making up random shit, make up a lot of it":

Think about what I’m saying about aliens communicating with you. Aliens from above.  Something coming down from the skies and communicating with us here on this earth. A lot of scientists, a lot of them, and there’s really no way to know specifically because of political correctness and the pressure that’s put upon them.  A lot of scientists have abandoned Darwin, but because of fear of losing their jobs, fear of losing the ability to produce papers, uh, fear, peer pressure, they have to keep it in, and they don’t come out with it, but here and there some do.  They have abandoned Darwin.  They have abandoned evolution.

Yes, there's "no way to know specifically" because it's bullshit.  But that doesn't stop him for a moment:

Scientists have jettisoned Darwin and now they’re looking up, and past, and they’re getting into the spirit world, into the paranormal world.  And the two of them, they compliment each other, and they begin to get into something that their scientific books know nothing about...  You can get a Ph.D. from Harvard and not know one thing about a spirit.

And once again, there's a reason for that, but probably not the one Pastor Lawson is thinking of.

Finally, we have Mayor Tony Yarber of Jackson, Mississippi, who is recommending taking care of the abysmal conditions of roads in the city by... praying that the potholes will get filled.  Yarber tweeted:

Yes….I believe we can pray potholes away.  Moses prayed and a sea opened up. #iseeya #itrustHim #prayerworks

Some of the residents of Jackson were less than sanguine about the idea.  Glenn Garber responded:

Are you fucking kidding me?!  I have a better idea… Pay to have them filled!

Yarber responded, apparently in all seriousness:

We tried that.  So praying is the obvious alternative.

When days went by and lo, the potholes were not magically filled, one Jackson resident posted some doubts:

I thought he was going to pray for them to be fixed.  Did God deny his prayer?

Undaunted, Yarber responded:

Absolutely not.  I’m never denied.  Go to http://data.jacksonms.gov to see infrastructure plans.

Because evidently one of the mysterious ways in which god works is through filing road maintenance plans with the city council.  

Is it just me, or is god relying more on bureaucracy now than he did back in the good old create-loaves-and-fishes days?  When the multitudes came to Jesus to be fed, he didn't say, "And I hath filed a requisition with the Greater Judea Food Distribution Network, and thy loaves and fishes will be delivered three weeks from next Thursday, as hath been prophesied in the scriptures."

The Miracles of Christ (Aert van den Bossche, ca. 1500) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyhow.  I'd like to think that these people aren't serious, but I'm very much afraid that they are.  Worse still, there is a good percentage of folks in the United States who read this kind of thing and say, "Hallelujah!" instead of doing what I did, which is guffawing.  I live in hope, however, that the more outrageous the claims from the fringe get, the more people will stop and say, "Okay, wait a moment.  That can't be true."

Or maybe not.  After all, this is the country where a majority of the citizens say that climate change is a "myth" while simultaneously believing that people do bad stuff because a woman created from a rib was given an apple by a talking snake.

Ethics, religion, and the right to die

One of my failings is that I never seem to be able to see ethical questions in black-and-white.

Life would undoubtedly be easier if I did.  Humans, myself included, appear to me to be impossibly complex, full of competing motives, attitudes, thoughts, and prejudices, with an incomplete access to the facts (and a fallible machine with which to process those facts).  Given all that, a lot of the time I really don't know how to make decisions on ethical matters -- I can too easily see the arguments from both sides.  All of which makes it all the more baffling to me how people can seem so sure of themselves in (for example) politics.

Maybe it's why I'm comfortable in the realm of science.  There, there's a clear decision-making protocol, and rules of logic that govern it.  Things may not always be simple in science, but they sure are a hell of a lot clearer.

I ran into an especially good example of this yesterday, with the story of the seventeen-year-old Sydney, Australia boy who is fighting in court for the right not to be treated for his probably-curable Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The boy is a Jehovah's Witness, and they believe that you are showing a lack of faith in god if you seek medical care when you're ill.  You should, they say, pray for healing.  If you die, then (1) you didn't pray hard enough, or in the right way, or (2) it was god's will that you died.  Either way, they're insulated against criticism of the claim, which strikes me as pretty convenient.

The case was in the courts in April, and was characterized as a situation of neglectful, ultra-religious parents victimizing an ill child by denying him treatment.  Supreme Court Justice Ian Gzell agreed, stating in his ruling that, ''The sanctity of life in the end is a more powerful reason for me to make the orders than is respect for the dignity of the individual.  X is still a child, although a mature child of high intelligence.''  The boy was ordered into Sydney Children's Hospital, where he began chemotherapy.

But the case jumped back into the news when it was reported that the boy himself is threatening to rip the IV needle out of his arm -- after his father wrote a line from the bible on a whiteboard in the boy's hospital room that allegedly supports the contention that it is against god's will to have a blood transfusion.

A spokesperson for Sydney Children's Hospital said the boy had a ''cocooned upbringing'' and his family had ''little exposure to challenges of their beliefs from outsiders''-- implying that he and his family were simply wrong, and therefore incapable of making a responsible decision.  The boy himself expressed horror at the thought that he might be sedated and treated against his will -- likening it to being raped.

So, what's the answer?  I teach seventeen-year-olds, and a good many of them are highly mature, sensitive, and intelligent.  Some are less so.  Even the less mature ones feel strongly that they should be able to make their own decisions.  In the eyes of the law, however, they are still legally their parents' responsibility.

Then we have the religious aspects.  It's easy enough to ridicule the beliefs of these folks from the outside -- but put yourself in their places.  What if you really, truly believed that death was not final, that your soul lived on -- but that you might end up in eternal torment if you sought out medical care?  You are in pain now, but that's temporary.  Hell, on the other hand, lasts forever.  Wouldn't you choose a few months' discomfort over an eternity in agony?

Then there's the aspect of "brainwashing" -- as it's been widely characterized.  I agree to the extent that the Jehovah's Witnesses' view of the world is unsupported by everything I know about science, logic, and nature.  There is, in my opinion, not a shred of evidence for their claims.  Still -- shouldn't we all be allowed to make those decisions for ourselves?  Why should my reliance on science and logic dictate what someone else does?  I sure as hell would resent that if the situation were reversed -- which it sometimes is.

It's not an easy thing to decide, is it?  It would be different if the boy were younger; but even that is an ethical conundrum, because there's no on/off switch for maturity.  Are you capable of making this sort of decision at sixteen?  Fourteen?  Ten?  In most places, you become the master of your own fate at eighteen, but even that is an arbitrary number.  I know some people who are more mature at fifteen than others are at twenty-five.

So I'm left with a question.  We have a boy who is almost certain to die because of his, and his parents', religious beliefs, and a hospital that is desperately trying to stop that from happening.  And all I can say is that I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make the decision about what is best to do.