Christianity

Long time readers know I have a soft atheist spot for Liberation Theology. I'll come back to discuss this post later, just wanted to give you this awesome discussion of Black Liberation Theology by the man who wrote the book about it, James Cone.

Check it out.

Creationism vs. Evolution. Heliocentric vs. geocentric solar system. We are all familiar with the conflicts between scientific and faith-based thinking. Many historians, including Edward Gibbon, largely blame the rise of Christianity for the decline of reason as the Classical world became the Medieval world in Europe. So this is not a new concept. But it is an idea explored in great depth in the book The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. Subtitled “The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason,” Freeman traces first the origins of reason-based thought in Greek philosophy, and then the rise of Christianity in all its sordid details. Freeman’s analysis of the rise of Greek philosophy is fairly cursory and simplified, but in it he traces not only the rise of scientific thought as we might know it through the Aristotelian tradition, and sets up for the rise of faith-based thinking ironically through the Platonic tradition. The former centered on empirical observation as the basis of knowledge in a manner that is very similar to the modern scientific method. By contrast Platonism places “pure reason” at its center and rejects empirical observation as a basis for knowledge. Although Platonism sought to be a purer form of reason, Freeman argues that by putting the human mind over empiricism, and by establishing the belief that only a very few elite thinkers are qualified to tell everyone else what is true and what isn’t, Plato essentially provided early Christianity with the tools it would need to supplant reason with faith and learned argument where no one is an unquestioned authority with the idea that a hierarchy of elite thinkers can dictate truth.

My college-loving book and culture nut daughter blogs, too. Writes rings around me already, to be honest, and certainly around the unhoned writer and thinker I was at her age!

She gave me permission to crosspost her latest work here. It's true I thought Liza, Lorraine, moiv and CaLiberal (who I keep wanting to call Callie!) would especially like it, but also I want her POV accessible here at Culture Kitchen, because I hope it will speak to a larger progressive audience in the too-often-unheard voice of young feminism, from the direct line of fire in the culture wars.

RUMINATIONS ON OLIVE OIL
Standing in line at a fancy grocery store, I spotted a display among many :
EXTRA EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL! It proclaimed.

Excuse me? I thought. Extra extra? Isn’t that a little unnecessary?

That is to say, I never really understood the concept of Extra Virgin Olive Oil to begin with. Is it made from olives that aren’t allowed to touch other olives? Are they modestly shielded from life’s elements by tarps?

And Extra Extra Virgin Olives - what on earth does that entail?

Or does the “virgin” refer to the oil itself? Has it never been mixed with another oil, commingling and developing new, brassy flavors? I certainly hope not, one takes for granted when one buys olive oil that it is, in fact, olive oil, and not some other hybrid. But then it seems that they shouldn’t have to bellow about its virginity so explicitly.

My skin is crawling because I just had a creepy epiphany about the power of religious story in politics.

I've been listening on CNN to Barack Obama preaching, I mean campaigning, in Selma, Alabama. Demagoguery is alive and well in southern churches; in the hands of a master, it does send shivers down your spine one way or another (either because you buy it utterly or conversely because it's frightening to see the congregation buy it so utterly.)

Looks like this will be an even more uneasy election cycle for me than the last two -- and this time not because of far-right Christian activists manipulating lesser-educated minds (always assumed to be headquartered in the South, sigh) with simplistic, storybook preaching to motivate and direct that base straight to the polls like lordly lemmings.

This time I may have to fight the so-called liberals too, those willing to dominate civic and global matters from the pulpit if need be, with an army of God behind their politics . . .

Obama kept evoking "Generation Joshua" this afternoon, to hallelujahs from the crowd (congregation?) If you're a secular homeschooler, that'll send shivers down your spine and if you're not, let me 'splain --

There's a well-financed, evangelical-dominated national organization of lawyers, lobbyists and speakers/advisors in the homeschool movement, known as the HomeSchool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA.) Its heft and heat tend to blot out the sun -- with the Son? -- in homeschool politics and the public mind. AS if that weren't plenty of power for me to fret over, in 2003 HSLDA leaders launched a kiddie "education" project aimed at getting conservative Christians to steer children into Republican politics and government at the highest levels.

There is a subtext underlying the various discussions circulating in Cyberspace at the moment--running the gamut from the controversy surrounding the Edwards campaign, to the Megametameltdown focusing partly on what constitutes "free speech," to what will likely be the next charge brought against Barack Obama from the Left (i.e., it's not his Muslim past that's the problem, it's his Christian present) and, of course, it all comes back--at least in a roundabout way--to that elephant still lurking in the liberal-left living room: understanding, in terms of real world political strategy, just what it is that Lesbian Feminist author Bernice Johnson Reagon was saying in her now quarter-century old speech/essay on Coalition Politics:

You don't go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive.

And ...

I want to talk a little about turning the century and the principles. Some of us will be dead. We won't be here. And many of us take ourselves too seriously. We think that what we think is really the cutting line. Most people who are up on the stage take themselves too seriously-it's true. You think that what you've got to say is special and that somebody needs to hear it. That is arrogance. That is egotism, and the only checking line is when you have somebody to pull your coattails. Most of us think that the space we live in is the most important space there is, and that the condition that we find ourselves in is the condition that must be changed or else. That is only partially the case. If you analyze the situation properly, you will know that there might be a few things you can do in your personal, individual interest so that you can experience and enjoy the change. But most of the things that you do, if you do them right, are for people who live long after you are long forgotten. That will only happen if you give it away. Whatever it is that you know, give it away, and don't give it away only on the horizontal. Don't give it away like that, because they're gonna die when you die, give or take a few days. Give it away that way (up and down). And what I'm talking about is being very concerned with the world you live in, the condition you find yourself in, and be able to do the kind of analysis that says that what you believe in is worthwhile for human beings in general, and in the future, and do everything you can to throw yourself into the next century. And make people contend with your baggage, whatever it is. The only way you can take yourself seriously is if you can throw yourself into the next period beyond your little meager human-body-mouth-talking all the time.

Ted Haggard had a bad day yesterday. His self-loathing, his hatred of his body and its desires, desires he has stifled and twisted, caught up with him--publicly, and shamed, he resigned his position as President of the National Association of Evangelicals.

But, yesterday, I also had a bad day. I spent much of yesterday crying, sick to my stomach, unable to catch my breath, and contemplating the various implements within my own house that could be used to effect my own demise.

Jesus commanded that we should love all people as we love ourselves. But perhaps Ted Haggard and many, many of his compatriots do not love themselves; therefore, they cannot love others.

I get that kind of pain.

In the Sudan, members of a fundamentalist Islamic movement took control. As that new fundamentalist government tried to consolidate its control, in the south anti-fundamentalist forces, led by a non-Muslim, held out against the wave of Jihadists.

Europe, swept by anti-Muslim sentiments and a sense of their own righteousness and self-importance, sends a multi-national force to relieve the beleaguered holdouts in Southern Sudan. The Jihadists fuel the flames of mutual hatred by demanding that a leading European leader come to the Sudan to submit and convert to Islam.

As the multi-national force was dispatched, it was beset from the beginning by poor management and greed. The very route they took to reach the Sudan was determined not by military strategy, but by the desire for certain vested interests to profit from the military action. Even as private individuals profited, the military expedition proved a disaster. The multi-national force was poorly supplied and took their anger out on the natives, slaughtering innocent lives, turning the natives against them almost immediately. Atrocities were committed by BOTH sides, making both side's claims to moral superiority a farce.

This is not today. This was in the mid-1880's when Mahdist rebels took over in the Sudan, then jointly mismanaged by Egypt and Britain. The southern holdouts were led by the Emin Pasha, who was actually a German Jew, originally named Eduard Schitzer. The European nations sent a relief force, but the greed of people like Belgian and Congolese King Leopold II (who later presided over one of the worst holocausts in history), British merchants hoping to get their greedy hands on ivory, and various newspapers who wanted some good stories, led to the relief effort going through the Belgian Congo (then called the "Congo Free State" but was actually a private domain of King Leopold). Look on a map. This route makes no sense militarily and by the time the relief effort reached the Sudan, half its members had died of disease and starvation and needed to be helped by the Emin Pasha. In the meantime, the Mahdist threat had retreated...until the abuses by the European relief expedition stirred up native anger again, giving the Emin Pasha a new situation to deal with.

Last week I reported an incident where it sounded a lot like the Pope was calling Islam "inhuman and diabolical" and comparing it unfavorably with the more reasoned and peaceful Christianity. My original source was an Israeli news source which interpreted the remarks of the Pope similar to the way many Muslims around the world were interpreting them.

Many wrote to defend the Pope's comments as quoting a Byzantine Emperor's remarks not as his own, as advocating reason, not violence, and not being hostile to Islam. The people who defended the Pope's comments are people I respect and in all honesty I tried seeing it their way. I couldn't. No matter how I read the Pope's comments I couldn't see them as being in any way disagreeing with the Byzantine Emperor's comments. That Emperor's comments were critical of Islam for spreading its faith by the sword and the Pope was arguing that religion should not be spread by the sword but rather by reason. This Jesuit-like argument is fine in itself, but my reading of the Pope's comments still sounded like he was saying Islam is a backwards, evil religion because it inherently spreads its faith by violence while the more enlightened Christianity doesn't. I still feel that the Pope's speech was insulting to Islam.

Is it just me or does the West just not get it when it comes to Islam. I remember thinking Bush was incredibly stupid when he called the fight against al-Qaeda a "crusade," a word BOUND to inflame tensions with Muslims. Now the Pope says something even worse.

I mean, I am Jewish and pro-Israel, but even I am well aware that if you go around saying bad things about Mohammed you are going to piss off a lot of people. I fell pretty solidly on the side of freedom of the press when it came to the Danish cartoons and thought the Muslim reaction was unfounded. But the Pope has just been inexcusably rude to Islam and thinks a half assed apology will suffice.

From Guysen Israël News:

Pope Benedict XVI "sincerely regrets" his comments deemed offensive by Muslims. The Pope is sorry that his speech was misinterpreted and hopes that the "true spirit" of his comments will be understood. The Holy Father had said in his speech, "Show me something new that Mohammed brought and you will find only inhuman and diabolical things, such as his order to spread his faith by the sword." The Vatican press release did not however go as far as to make an apology in the name of the Pope.

Um, so just what WAS the "true spirit" of calling Mohammed's teaching "inhuman and diabolical?"

fresh (just a day later!) from the Associated Press:

Workers discover chocolate Virgin Mary
Drippings beneath vat at chocolatier bear resemblance to mother of Jesus
IMAGE: Chocolate Virgin Mary
Nick Ut / AP

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. - As a chocolatier to the rich and famous, Martucci Angiano has posed with many celebrities — but on Thursday she held in her hand a figure that dazzles her more than any Hollywood star.

Workers at Angiano's gourmet chocolate company, Bodega Chocolates, discovered under a vat a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary.

Since the discovery Monday, Angiano's employees have spent much of their time hovering over the tiny figure, praying and placing rose petals and candles around it.

"I was raised to believe in the Virgin Mary, but this still gives me the chills," Angiano said as she balanced the dark brown figure in her hand. "Everyone should see this."

Kitchen worker Cruz Jacinto was the first to spot the lump of melted chocolate when she began her shift Monday cleaning up drippings that had accumulated under a large vat of dark chocolate.