Category Archives: Religion

In which I contemplate my eternal damnation

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During my early morning run the other day I was thinking about this post, where I suggested that, according to standard Catholic doctrine, a pretty large percentage of Americans over the past forty years were prime candidates for eternal damnation.  And it occurred to me that, according to the standard doctrine I learned growing up, I’m going to hell too, along with a large chunk of the people I know.  Not because of anything to do with abortion, but because I was given the gift of faith and rejected it, turning my back on God’s love.

Hell doesn’t come up much nowadays–I’m sure parts of the Church find the fire-and-brimstone stuff embarrassing.  This Times article (“Hell Is Getting a Makeover”) points out that the latest Catholic catechism contains only five paragraphs about hell in a 700-page book.  And the pain of hell, we now believe, is not physical but mental:

Hell is best understood as the condition of total alienation from all that is good, hopeful and loving in the world. What’s more, this condition is chosen by the damned themselves, the ultimate exercise of free will, not a punishment engineered by God.

Of course, to get to this spot, the theologians have to go the “Jesus’ words shouldn’t be taken literally” route, since Jesus had lots to say about unquenchable fire and the weeping and gnashing of teeth and so on.  But that’s theology for you.

In any case, hell is still real, and apparently I’m going there.  Maybe I’ll contemplate Pascal’s wager on my deathbed–but I doubt it.

And I can’t help thinking that the sermon in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a far more interesting vision of hell than the etiolated modern view.  Here is just a taste.

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

That should’ve kept those Irish lads on the straight and narrow!

Americans like their candidates religious, but not really religious

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So the Republican senate candidate from Indiana has gotten himself in hot water for saying that pregnancy resulting from rape is the will of God:

“I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,” Mourdock said. “And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

On the one hand, God intended the baby to happen.  On the other hand, God didn’t intend the rape that resulted in that gift from God, which is sort of confusing.  This is somewhat different from the “legitimate rape” comment that got another Republican senate candidate into trouble.  The latter was just bad science; the former is theology.  As I say, I find the theology somewhat confusing, but not absurd, from a Christian perspective.  Bad things (like rape) happen as a result of free will; God permits them even if He doesn’t approve of them.  But God is in favor of life, and He is certainly opposed to the unjustified ending of life.  And presumably that is the case Mourdock was trying to make.

Kevin Drum makes the point that this is a pretty conventional religious belief. It’s just not the sort of thing a politician (in particular) is supposed to say out loud:

What I find occasionally odd is that so many conventional bits of theology like this are so controversial if someone actually mentions them in public. God permits evil. My faith is the only true one. People of other faiths are doomed to spend eternity in Hell. Etc. There’s a lot of stuff like this which is either explicit or implied in sects of all kinds, and at an abstract level we all know it. Somehow, though, when someone actually says it, it’s like they farted in church. Weird.

I don’t find it particularly odd, though.  Americans like religion, but most of us are not especially religious when it comes to actual dogma.  So people like Mourdock or Rick Santorum who are really religious make us uncomfortable.  And they make the mainstream media, who are even less religious, even more uncomfortable.  So good politicians always skate around the implications of their (supposed) religious beliefs, because they don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.

I see all of this from the perspective of a lapsed Catholic.  For example, Catholic theology is about as clear about abortion as it is about anything.  Abortion is murder.  Murder is a mortal sin.  People who commit mortal sins will go to hell. So, to a true believer, the fifty million or so American women who have had abortions since 1973 are going to hell (except for those who subsequently repented).  So are the doctors and nurses involved in the abortions.  Maybe all the politicians who vote in favor of abortion rights are going to hell too.  It would have been great if someone at one of those primary debates had asked Santorum about all those people going to hell.  (Santorum, by the way, thinks the Mourdock controversy is “gotcha politics.”)  I wonder if Santorum would have been a good enough politician to skate around it?

Miracles and sainthood: Kateri Tekakwitha

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Kenneth Miller’s book Finding Darwin’s God got me thinking about miracles, because Miller believes in them and believes he understands how they can occur. And now we have the Catholic Church canonizing a bunch of new saints, including Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks.” She becomes the first Native American saint.

Kateri was noted for her chastity and her “mortification of the flesh”:

Tekakwitha’s dedication to ritual mortification became more intense and consuming over the remainder of her life; she included prolonged fasting, flogging, cutting, sleeping on a bed of thorns, and burning herself with hot coals

Good job, seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries!

I can recall her name from my parochial-school history book long ago–she probably showed up in a sidebar as an example of how even American Indians could become good Catholics.  (I recall the name, I think, because it has a nice rhythm to it, like an Indian chant.) There’s a Church of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha down the road from me in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the parishioners are of course excited.

The Church, like Miller, also believes in miracles, and it requires them before making someone a saint.  Nowadays you need one to be beatified, and another to be canonized.  The miracle that brought Kateri over the finish line happened to a kid from Washington state, who recovered from an infection of flesh-eating bacteria after his family prayed to her.

I read a good book once called Making Saints about the careful process the Vatican undertakes to investigate the miracles needed for canonization.  It is one example, among many, of very smart, very dedicated, very religious people spending their lives doing something entirely worthless. The miracles, as I recall, were pretty much all inexplicable medical cures, like the one attributed to Kateri.  The problem, of course, is that inexplicable medical cures happen all the time.  Why?  Because we have only an imperfect understanding of medicine.  For the stuff we do understand–like, you don’t grow a new leg when one gets cut off–well, there aren’t any miracles in that neck of the woods.

I read a few news accounts of the canonization and the related miracle, and none of them questioned the miraculousness of the miracle.  The family was convinced, the Vatican was convinced, so what more do you want?  People, in fact, want miracles.  They make life more interesting; they give us hope.  I will note that my novel Pontiff is suffused with miracles — they make novels more interesting, too!  So I guess I’m not one to complain.  But it does seem like some reporter should quote a medical authority expressing some skepticism about the whole thing.  I suppose an editor would just lose the quote, though.

(A person I work with has been to one Mass in her life — the canonization of one of her relatives at the Vatican. That’s pretty cool, although her relative’s death was anything but cool.  Saints don’t generally lead happy lives, or have happy deaths.)

The usual suspects weigh in on heaven and miracles and Newsweek

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Here are my initial thoughts on the “Proof of Heaven” cover story.  Of course, all sorts of people are now commenting on the article. The deepest dive I’ve encountered is by Sam Harris.  But, one might argue, Sam Harris has a dog in this race — he wrote a book called The End of Faith!  True, but he’s also a neuroscientist.  And he’s also very sympathetic to “spiritual” experiences — he’s had them himself.  Further he’s agnostic on the relationship of consciousness to the physical world:

There are, of course, very good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind obviously is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were, in fact, irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned. I know that we do not understand consciousness, and nothing that I think I know about the cosmos, or about the patent falsity of most religious beliefs, requires that I deny this. So, although I am an atheist who can be expected to be unforgiving of religious dogma, I am not reflexively hostile to claims of the sort Alexander has made. In principle, my mind is open. (It really is.)

He then proceeds to rip Dr. Alexander’s article to shreds as science.

Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.

Harris wants to make sure he has the science right, so he corresponds with his PhD advisor, who (from all I can tell) doesn’t have a dog in the race.  The guy says:

As is obvious to you, this is truth by authority. Neurosurgeons, however, are rarely well-trained in brain function. Dr. Alexander cuts brains; he does not appear to study them. “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness …” True, science cannot explain brain-free consciousness. Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Either his brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.

There are many reports of people remembering dream-like states while in medical coma. They lack consistency, of course, but there is nothing particularly unique in Dr. Alexander’s unfortunate episode.

Harris then goes on to make the case that Alexander’s vision was not something uniquely “hyper-real” and “crisp”:

His assertion that psychedelics like DMT and ketamine “do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since he returned from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about.

Harris concludes by saying this:

Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.

Alexander’s claim to being a scientist is probably what is most irksome to me.  He is a smart guy who has obviously had to study science to learn how to cut brains.  But he doesn’t know (or choose to know) how science works.

Here is a post from an academic clinical neurologist at Yale Medical School:

Of course his brain did not go instantly from completely inactive to normal or near normal waking consciousness. That transition must have taken at least hours, if not a day or more. During that time his neurological exam would not have changed significantly, if at all. The coma exam looks mainly at basic brainstem function and reflexes, and can only dimly examine cortical function (through response to pain) and cannot examine higher cortical functions at all. His recovery would have become apparent, then, when his brain recovered sufficiently for him to show signs of consciousness….

Alexander, in my opinion, has failed to be true to the scientist he claims that he is. He did not step back from his powerful experience and ask dispassionate questions. Instead he concluded that his experience was  unique, that it is proof of heaven, and that it defies any possible scientific explanation. He then goes on to give a hand-waving quantum mechanics, the universe is all unity, explanation for the supernatural. This is a failure of scientific and critical thinking.

Addressing his one major unstated premise, that the experienced occurred while his cortex was inactive, demolishes his claims and his interpretation of his experience.

Jerry Coyne points out the mercenary aspect to all this:

 I’m sure he thinks he saw heaven, and the public is so hungry to hear that their deaths aren’t the end that they’ll enrich Alexander far beyond his (heaven-envisioning) dreams.

This is the way to get rich in America: have a medical emergency in which you see visions that correspond to the Christian mythology.

(Not even available yet, Alexander’s book is already #1 in the science, medicine, and religion categories on Amazon.) This reminds me of Drew Gilpin Faust’s great book This Republic of Suffering, where she talks about the hunger for just this sort of book after the unimaginable losses America suffered during the Civil War.  But the popular books that fed that hunger were novels and theology (like My Dream of Heaven); they didn’t pretend to be science.  The yearning is always the same; the way we satisfy the yearning has changed.

Heaven and Miracles and Newsweek

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So Newsweek has a cover story called “”Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife.”  It’s a pretty standard near-death experience story, with a couple of twists: it’s told by a neurosurgeon, and it took place during a coma during which his brain supposedly wasn’t functioning:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

And here’s the kind of experience the doctor had:

Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.

All pretty standard-issue stuff for near-death experience (NDE) stories.  What’s annoying is that a major magazine is calling this “proof” without quotation marks, without a question mark, without any sort of rebuttal.  (The story is an excerpt from a book by a mainstream publisher, Simon & Schuster.) Where are the alternative hypotheses?  Where is the objective analysis?

For a rebuttal, you have to go elsewhere, like the Huffington Post, of all places, where the physicist Victor Stenger says:

[The neurosurgeon] writes, “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”

This is nothing more than the classic argument from ignorance, which forms the basis of almost all ostensibly scientific arguments for the existence of the supernatural. The argument from ignorance is a less polite but more descriptive name for the God-of-the-gaps argument. This argument often appears in dialogues on the existence of God or anything supernatural. Basically, it says: “I can’t see how this [observed phenomenon] can be explained naturally; therefore it must be supernatural.”

The flaw in the argument should be obvious. Just because someone–or even all of science–currently cannot provide a natural explanation for something, it does not follow that a natural explanation does not exist or will never be found. Indeed, the history of science is nothing more than the story of humanity filling in the gaps in its knowledge about the world of our senses. In the case of NDEs, plausible natural explanations do exist.

Another description I’ve heard for this approach is the argument from personal incredulity.  It is, of course, strongest when it’s your experience; your brain knows what it knows, no matter what the scientists say.  But (of course) your brain doesn’t necessarily know what it knows.  I’ve just finished a book called Subliminal by the theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow, which surveys the research currently taking place that shows just how mistaken our conscious brain can be when it comes to understanding behavior and experience.  The more science progresses in this field, the shakier some of our most basic ideas about how we act and perceive and know appear to be.  As Mlodinow puts it, “the brain is a decent scientist but an outstanding lawyer.”  That is, the objective truth seeker in us generally loses out to the impassioned advocate for what we want to believe.  If you’ve had a life-changing experience, you want to believe in the truth of that experience; you don’t want to be told that it’s the random firings of neurons as you came out of a coma, or fragmentary memories that your brain has somehow turned into a coherent narrative, or any of the other dreary, trivial explanations that the scientist is going to offer.

One of the things I like most about Christianity is that it turns human history into a story, because I love stories.  How much more interesting the Christian world of sin, sacrifice, and redemption is than the Darwinian world of purposeless, mindless change and adaptation and extinction.  But not all stories are true; in fact, nearly all of them aren’t.  We shouldn’t believe them just because we want to.  And we need to understand that our brains aren’t always the best judges of what is true; for that, we can’t do without science. This neurosurgeon, and Newsweek, have left the science behind.

Forbidden Sanctuary: The pope gives a sermon about aliens, among other things

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Readers of this annoying blog may have noticed that I have lots of problems with religion.  Readers of my fiction (especially Pontiff) may have noticed that I treat religion (and, in particular, people with strong religious faith) pretty sympathetically. What’s up with that?

Beats me.  It really is a mystery why some characters and plots and issues seem worth writing about, and others don’t (why, for example, I have no interest in writing the organically plotted novel I talked about here).

Anyway, here is a little snippet from Forbidden Sanctuary that addresses issues I still find interesting: the relationship between science and religion, the nature of morality, blah blah blah.  Pope Clement is giving a brief sermon to a small congregation in a drafty rural church before he goes off to meet with the alien leader–a meeting on which the future of the world depends (naturally).  He has been doing a lot of thinking….

***************

“We have heard it stated,” Clement said softly to the congregation, “that mankind’s knowledge has outstripped its religions. The Church fights losing battles against Galileo and Darwin, and people’s faith is shaken. Is the Church nothing more than a relic of ancient ignorance, vainly reinterpreting its doctrines in an attempt to reconcile them with modern facts?

“We would suggest that the opposite is true, that science is struggling fitfully toward truths our spiritual nature has always apprehended. And chief among these is the interdependence of all life, all matter. As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Ask the ecologist, the physicist if that is not a scientific truth as well.

“Always our perspectives are widening, but the moral basis for our response to these perspectives has always been there. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Science makes the starving African our neighbor, and the homeless Indian, and the oppressed Cambodian, and we realize our actions affect them, they cannot be ignored. Now we have a new neighbor, and science struggles to understand why, and how. But the moral, the spiritual response to this knowledge already exists, and it is right. If we falter in our application of these spiritual truths, then truly religion’s claim to superiority is lost. This is a crucial time for mankind, not the least because these truths are being put to the test.

“That is why we ask for God’s blessing on our work, and your prayers. The truths will always be there, but men and women must always seek the strength to put them into practice. That strength can only exist with God’s help. Let us stand and profess our faith. I believe in one God…“

Bishops and nuns, then and now

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I recently watched Come to the Stable, a 1949 Loretta Young movie about a couple of French nuns who get it in their heads to come to New England and build a hospital for sick kids in a town called Bethlehem.

I didn’t go to the movies much as a kid, and that’s probably why I still remember seeing this movie on the big screen.  I have no idea why it was playing in a movie theater–I wasn’t around in 1949, so it had to have been a special showing of some kind.  I couldn’t have been very old, because I can remember being confused by the location–could there really be two places called Bethlehem?  That didn’t seem right.  Anyway, the movie is in the tradition of 1940s Catholic movies like Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s.  The nuns (Young and Celeste Holm) are holy innocents who get their way by being holier and more innocent than everyone they encounter, including the soft-hearted mobster who owns the land they need for the hospital and the practical bishop who has to approve their harebrained scheme.

Come to the Stable was nominated for a bunch of Oscars–most of them baffling.  Back then, you were apparently guaranteed of a nomination if you appeared in a habit. (Elsa Lanchester, playing a local artist, also got a nomination for looking ditzy in a few scenes.  Claire Boothe Luce, the conservative Catholic playwright/politician, got a nomination for the dopey story.)  Seems to me that this sort of movie must have done a lot to pave the way for the country to elect a Catholic to the presidency.  The Church wasn’t this secret foreign power intent on subverting American values–it built hospitals for sick kids!

The movie seems hopelessly quaint nowadays.  I don’t think the story would work on the Hallmark channeI.  I was particularly struck by the way the nuns genuflected and kissed the bishop’s ring every chance they got.  Does anyone still do that?  It was a given that the nuns owed the bishop absolute and unquestioned obedience.  It was a given that nuns would be so unworldly they wouldn’t know what a parking ticket was, even though one of them had grown up in Chicago and the other had been a tennis champion.

So here is an American bishop nowadays:

The first American bishop criminally charged in the clergy sex abuse scandal was found guilty Thursday of a misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse, a conviction that extends the struggle of Roman Catholic leaders to restore trust in the church.

Bishop Robert Finn was acquitted on a second count. He received two years of probation, but that sentence was suspended and will be wiped from his record if he adheres to a set of conditions that include mandatory abuse reporting training, setting aside $10,000 in diocese money for abuse victim counseling, and instructing all diocesan agents to report suspected criminal activity involving minors.

And here is an American nun, Sister Simone Campbell, who recently spoke at the Democratic National Convention:

And at a convention that is revolving largely around an alleged GOP-led “war on women,” Campbell is a poignant feminist symbol. She has stood up to the Vatican’s criticisms of American nuns for what the church says is their fixation on progressive advocacy at the expense of promoting socially conservative positions.

“We’re certainly oriented toward the needs of women and responding to their needs,” she told Colbert in June, defending the nuns against the Vatican. “If that’s radical, I guess we are.”

It’s lot different from the post-war fantasy world of Come to the Stable.  And I think that’s all to the good.  We shouldn’t be afraid to arrest bishops who don’t protect the children in their diocese.  And we should listen to nuns who have something important to say.

Our Jordanian correspondent on Ramadan — plus, when we come back more of our exclusive Olympics coverage

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In less than two weeks our intrepid Jordanian correspondent will be rotating stateside to take up the prestigious Somerville/Medford assignment.  Meanwhile, here are some of his observations on Ramadan.

During the parade of the athletes in the opening ceremony, the NBC announcers mentioned the problem of Ramadan occurring during the games.  Of course, they couldn’t say “Some of the Muslim athletes are totally blowing it off because winning a medal is the most important thing in their lives”; they simply allowed as how some of them are postponing their fast till after the games.  Here‘s an article about the various complexities the Olympics have to deal with when it comes to religion.

As part of our training for the Olympics we re-watched Chariots of Fire.  Some utterly random comments:

  • The movie hasn’t aged especially well, or maybe I have just become bored with feel-good sports movies.
  • One of the many funky (and endearing) things about Friday’s opening ceremony was the decision to give Rowan Atkinson five minutes of prime time to do a spoof of the movie’s iconic music and opening.  Does the entire world think Rowan Atkinson is as funny as I do?  Or did people in India or China watch the skit in utter bafflement? Anyway, here it is:
  • I once saw Simon Rattle (the guy conducting the Chariots of Fire theme) conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The LA audience was getting restless during a bleak Shostakovich symphony (is there any other kind?) and he turned around and glared at them during the performance.  I guess everyone doesn’t like Shostakovich as much as I do.
  • Does everyone watch old movies the way I do, with IMDB ready at hand?  The stars of the movie mostly have had solid careers since then, but none really broke out.  I was sad to see that Ian Charleson, who played Eric Liddell and was probably the best actor in the movie, died of AIDS a few years later–the first celebrity death in the UK openly attributed to AIDS, according to Wikipedia.  IMDB tells me that Kenneth Branagh and Stephen Fry were both extras in the movie, but I couldn’t pick them out.
  • Eric Liddell, the Scottish athlete who wouldn’t run on Sunday, became a missionary to China and is now on the calendar of saints for the Episcopal Church of the USA–the day after John Henry Newman, who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and two days after Frederick Douglass.  I had no idea the Episcopalians had such an interesting calendar of saints.  Yesterday they honored Bach, Handel, and Purcell.
  • The religion/Olympics conflict goes back to the first time the Olympics were held in London, in 2008.  Here is the famous photo of the American hurdler Forrest Smithson holding a Bible while running to protest the scheduling of races on Sunday.  Apparently this was a posed photograph, and he didn’t actually run his race with Bible in hand.  He won the gold medal in a race held on Saturday.

There, that about does it for today’s Olympic coverage.

 

“You knew full well what was right, but you chose wrong.”

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That was the judge’s comment when sentencing Monsignor Lynn to 3-6 years in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia sex abuse trial. As I mentioned before, this case is in its own way much more significant than the Penn State scandal, because the Catholic church is (some would say) more important than college football.  Andrew Sullivan notes that Pope Benedict was apparently responsible for much the same crime 30 years ago:

[T]his precise chain of events – in which a child-rapist priest was reported as a criminal to the church authorities, then sent to therapy, then reassigned only to rape again – is exactly what Joseph Ratzinger did in Munich in the 1980s. How does an institution allow a lower priest to go to jail for such an act, while allowing the chief pontiff to carry on as if nothing had happened, as if children had not been raped because of his direct complicity in protecting the rapist?

Here’s an interesting quote from one of Lynn’s supporters:

After the sentencing, Ann Casey, a friend of Monsignor Lynn for 36 years, said she believed he was a scapegoat and a victim of his intense faith in the archdiocese’s leaders. “It was his vow of obedience to the church that landed him this morning in jail,” she said.

That is to say, he was only following orders.  This is, of course, the problem that comes from being part of an institution with an absolute belief in the rightness–and goodness–of its beliefs and practices.  Nothing can be allowed to happen that might lessen people’s faith in that institution.  And if you have taken a vow of obedience, nothing can stand in the way of fulfilling that vow.

The judge’s remark is an interesting refutation of the NOMA position that morality is the province of religion. Clearly we have a common understanding of when religious authorities are being immoral.  We need to hold them to our standards, not theirs.  So why should religion be privileged in its pronouncements as to what is right and wrong?

Let’s hope Monsignor Lynn has a chance to ponder this in prison.

More on Weinberg on religion

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Here is Jeff’s very fine comment on the Steven Weinberg quote in yesterday’s post:

Well, Weinberg did get his Nobel in physics, not psychology or sociology, so I mean no disrespect to his science when I say I think he’s wrong. What it takes for good people to do evil is any number of things, including temptation, the seduction of power, corrupt surroundings that cloud one’s moral thinking, guilt and fear that keep people from coming clean… in short, the whole panoply of human weaknesses. Religion might play into it, and sometimes does, but it\’s just scapegoating to blame religion for it in general.

Institutions, now–I think you’re on to something there. What led to the abuse coverups in the Catholic Church wasn’t the religion–and by religion, I mean not the church but the underlying faith that is the church’s reason for being–but, as you say, the belief that the institution was more important than the individuals being hurt. Even the slightest examination of the Christian faith makes clear that the faith is not about covering up wrongs, but rather shining a light into dark places. So the fear of hurting the institution (and the powerful, guilty individuals) led to wholesale abandonment of the actual tenets of the faith. It wasn’t the religion at fault, but a corrupt institution, and human weakness at its ugliest.

Jeff’s first point is obviously true.  But his second paragraph misses something that I believe is fundamental about religion and religious institutions.  Let me try a different way of stating what I think Weinberg is getting at: Religion uniquely empowers good people to ignore common conceptions of individual good in the pursuit of “higher” goals.  For a salvation-based religion like Catholicism, nothing in this world is–or could be–more important than its mission of saving souls.  It is really too facile to say that the sex abuse coverup in the Catholic Church is just about protecting an institution. The whole point of “not giving scandal” is to keep people from losing their faith and thereby risking eternal damnation.  And that’s what the bishops said they were worried about when they didn’t publicize the misdeeds of the priests in their dioceses.  Not giving scandal has to compete with other values within their faith, and sometimes the other values lose.

We can believe, I suppose, that this wasn’t the real reason for their actions, that they were really just trying to protect their own reputations and do everyday damage control.  And I suppose some of that was going on.  But I’m just taking their explanations at face value, because the concept of “giving scandal” is an essential part of their faith.  And, of course, the Catholic Church has done this sort of thing before.  The Inquisition had an iron-clad logic to it if you accepted the Church’s theological premises.  Heresy was an unmitigated evil for the individual who believed the heresy–but also for society at large, which must be protected from heresy at all costs.  If you could get the individual to recant his heresy, you were helping to save his immortal soul, and you were protecting the rest of the faithful from falling into the same error.  How could mere physical pain stack up against that?

Similarly, I’m trying to give Paterno the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t just an everyday creep who was protecting Sandusky in order to protect himself.  Probably there was some of that, but I also think that Paterno had the much the same motivation as Bernard Law. The Penn State football program was his equivalent of the Catholic Church.  Which is to say that I don’t think Weinberg has it entirely right.  Some institutions (communism also comes to mind) become like secular religions, with equally disastrous results.

By the way, all of a sudden there is a weird Red Sox angle to the discussion about Paterno.  Everything in life is ultimately about the Red Sox.