Monthly Archives: August 2010

Here come the Assyrians

When we last left them, Batman, Robin, and Batgirl were about to be burned to death by the evil King Manasseh [cue dramatic music]….

Batman somehow gets one hand free,
Reaches his utility belt, presses
The Assyrian army activation device.
Soldiers appear on the streets of Jerusalem,
Commandoes cut Batman and the others free.
It’s another fighting free-for-all!
Crash! Ka-blam! Manasseh goes down!

Batman swoops over and jumps on Manasseh;
Batgirl and Robin put Bat-manacles on him.
“Time for Plan B,” Manasseh says to himself.
The Assyrians and Batman take Manasseh to Babylon.
Manasseh looks up, and calls on Elohim.
“Elohim,” he says, “I repent! I’ll be good!”
So Elohim lets him go back to Jerusalem.

The Assyrians groan, “Not again! Every time
We think we’ve won, the Judeans repent.
Then the guys writing the Bible badmouth us again!”
Batman just grinned : he’s got Batgirl and Robin.
Manasseh grinned too : the idols are gone;
Elohim gets bribed with burnt sacrifices;
And Manasseh still sits on the throne of David.

2 Chron 33.10-20

Manasseh meets Batman

Manasseh became the king of Judah
When he was at the awkward age
Of twelve: neither child nor man.
He reared up altars to Asheroth,
And to Baal, and other idols.
What was worse was when he burned
His son. Old Elohim was pissed.

Gotham City, capital of Judah,
Is now corrupt. The Caped Crusader
Suddenly appears, out from his cave,
prowling the streets in his Bat-chariot,
Robin at his side, Batgirl offstage.
Manasseh doesn’t know what to make
Of Batman’s tights and weird mask.

So he hauls off and hits him. Pow!
Robin fights Manasseh’s wizards.
Wham! Batgirl swoops in next.
Bash! Ka-zam! Fists are flying!
But wait! Batman is tied to a stake!
So are Robin and Batgirl! They struggle.
Manasseh lights a fire around them….

2 Chron 33.1-9, with thanks to Erp and Jean.

Part II

The punishment of Prometheus

Another in a series of stories I’m writing for liberal religious kids. As always, your comments and criticisms are welcome.

Once upon a time, the immortal god Prometheus stole fire from the other immortal gods and goddesses, and gave it to mortal human beings.

Zeus, who had just become the new ruler over all the other gods and goddesses, was very angry. To punish Prometheus, Zeus commanded him to be nailed to a cliff in Scythia, a distant place at the end of the world. Zeus told two of his henchmen, a demon named Might and another demon named Violence, to take Prometheus to Scythia. Prometheus had taken the fire from Hephaestus, who was the god who made things out of metal for the other gods and goddesses at his forge, so Hephaestus had to go along to make shackles of bronze to hold Prometheus tightly against the rocks.

After traveling many miles, at last they came at last to a high and lonely cliff. Hephaestus began working while Might and Violence watched to make sure Prometheus didn’t get away.

“I don’t have the heart to bind another god in this desolate place,” said Hephaestus to Prometheus, as he hammered bronze nails into the cliff face. “Yet I have to do it because it’s dangerous to ignore the commands of Zeus. Prometheus, I don’t want to do this to you. The sun will scorch you during the day, and the cold will freeze you at night. This is what has happened because you opposed the will of Zeus. This is what you get for giving fire to the human beings.” Hephaestus paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Zeus is a new ruler, and new rulers are harsh.”

“Why are you delaying?” said the demon named Might. “Why do you pity this god who has betrayed all other gods and goddesses by giving such power to mortal beings?” Continue reading →

Happy 90th birthday, 19th Amendment!

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. Ninety years is a relatively short period of time: within memory of people I know, women did not have the right to vote in federal elections.

Unfortunately, by the time that women were gaining the right to vote, women ministers were finding it nearly impossible to find settlements in Unitarian or Universalist churches. There had been a period of a few decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when a few dozen women would get settlements in our churches. But by 1920, that period was over. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Unitarian Universalists began ordaining — and settling — women in significant numbers once again.

Maybe we’ve done better in politics than we’ve done in religion. In politics, the fact that we have powerful female politicians on both the left — Nancy Pelosi is a liberal powerhouse — and on the far right — Sarah Palin is a central figure of the Tea Party — is remarkable. In religion, however, most religious groups do not have gender equality among their clergy or equivalent leaders; many religious groups do not allow women to even serve as clergy at all. Sure, Unitarian Universalists have more women ministers than male ministers, but we constitute a tiny fraction of the U.S. population.

In her preface to a 1992 reprinting of Sexism and God-Talk, Rosemary Radford Reuther wrote: “The starting point for feminist theology, perhaps all theology, is ‘cognitive dissidence.’ What is is not what ought to be. Not only that, but what we have been told ought to be is not always what ought to be” [SCM Press: London, p. xix].

The feminist revolution is not even complete within Unitarian Universalism: men still dominate the highest-paying ministry jobs. In many other religious traditions, the feminist revolution has barely begun. Sure, I’m ready to celebrate the 19th Amendment: break out the cake and cookies! And while we’re celebrating that political achievement, let’s figure out how we can do a little cognitive dissidence in religion. Maybe we can figure out how to reach out to feminists in other religious traditions, to offer support if they need it, to learn from them so we can keep moving forward in our own feminist revolution, and perhaps to make progress towards a world where all religions recognize the equality of women and men.

Summer reading: Escape from Hell

Back in 1976, I read Inferno, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which tells the story of an atheistic science fiction author named Allen Carpenter who, much to his surprise, finds himself in a place that very much resembles Dante’s vision of hell in the first book of The Divine Comedy. Carpentier tries to find a rational explanation for what he experiences in his tour through hell, and spends much of the book convinced that he’s in a sort of bizarre amusement park (call it “Infernoland”) created by sadistic aliens with a very high technology. But by the end of the book, Carpenter is finally convinced that he is indeed in hell.

I read Inferno when I was a senior in high school, and I loved the book; I didn’t pay any attention to the theology, I was captured by thinking about what a twentieth century person would do upon finding himself in Dante’s version of hell. Allen Carpenter builds a glider to try to fly over some of the circles of hell, and this is not unlike the heroes of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island using their nineteenth century technology to address the problem of being stranded on a desert island. In my freshman year of college, I went out and bought a bilingual edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (trans. by John D. Sinclair), and started to read the Inferno; I got about three quarters of the way through, but got tired of Dante getting revenge on people he didn’t like by placing them into his vision of hell.

Last year, Niven and Pournelle came out with a sequel to their Inferno, another science fiction novel titled Escape from Hell. At the end of the earlier book, Allen Carpenter learned that you can get out of hell, so he goes back to try to help lots more people escape from eternal damnation. Niven and Pournelle come up with enough new ideas to make this second book worth reading — their depiction of Hell’s bureaucracy is funny and entertaining — but there are major problems with the book. One big problem is that Sylvia Plath is a major character in this book, but Niven and Pournelle’s characterization doesn’t convince me: their character named Sylvia Plath is just another interchangeable female character, and you simply don’t believe that character is capable of writing great poetry. A second big problem is that rather than actually resolving their plot, they end the book with the ridiculous plot device of having a hydrogen bomb explode in hell.

But the biggest problem I had with Escape from Hell is the theology behind the book. Allen Carpenter discovers that anyone can escape from hell, as long as they’re willing to go through a process of confronting the bad things they did in life — there’s a sort of pseudo-psychotherapeutic element in this process. Even though Niven and Pournelle don’t use the psychobabble jargon of “denial” and “acceptance” and so on, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect from mediocre self-help books.

Niven and Pournelle’s understanding of God is about as interesting as their theological psychology. Their God is probably pleasant rather than definitely good, distant and unimaginable rather than immanent and present, and vague rather than awe-inspiring. Their God-concept feels like it’s straight out of the mid-twentieth century when people presented God as either nice or dead, but when God was rarely presented as something compelling enough to believe in. From a literary point of view, if a writer is going to talk about hell as a reality, I’d take the stern yet interesting God of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” — or, for that matter, the God of Dante who invents such creative tortures for damned souls — over the the namby-pamby, wishy-washy, exceedingly boring God imagined by Niven and Pournelle. They make hell seem much more interesting and even attractive than God.

Then there’s the purpose of hell, as the authors understand it. When I think of Dante’s conception of hell, I think of a place of eternal torment; if you’re talking about punishment for sins over a limited time, then you’re talking about the subject of Dante’s second book, Purgatorio, purgatory. Niven and Pournelle borrow Dante’s hell, and turn it into purgatory. So then what’s the purpose of purgatory? I admit my bias: I’m a Universalist, and I know hell is a mistaken concept to begin with; nevertheless, within the limits of their theological logic, their conception of hell simply doesn’t make sense.

So I find Niven and Pournelle’s theology problematic. But that was actually part of the fun of the book: I not only enjoyed the adventure, I argued with their problematic theology the whole way through, and enjoyed every minute of the argument. Unlike the liberal Christian apologists who dodge the whole issue, Niven and Pournelle confront hell head on. In the end Allen Carpenter admits that he can’t really make complete sense out of hell; it’s beyond human understanding; but this didn’t feel like a cop-out to me so much as a literary excuse for a pretty good adventure story.

Summer

The heat broke today: it only got up to 90 degrees in Palo Alto before the cool air started to move in from the Pacific, and now it’s already down to 69 degrees. It’s supposed to go down into the fifties tonight in San Mateo. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that school has started again, and family vacations have ended. All summer long, the traffic on the freeways was merely miserable; now it’s back to being completely insane.

Happy 200th to Theodore Parker

Today is the two hundredth anniversary of Theodore Parker’s birth. I’ll leave it to others to talk about his contributions to Transcendentalism; his scholarship, and the way he brought the insights of German philosophy and theology to New England; how he drew some two thousand people to his sermons at his church in Boston. Others can tell you about his intellectual and professional accomplishments; I’d rather think about his home life. Here, then, is a sketch of Theodore Parker’s Boston house, from Theodore Parker: a biography, Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1880, pp. 241-242, 244):

“In January, 1847, Mr. Parker removed from West Roxbury, where he had been living till now, to Boston. A house in Exeter Place — a little court, so near to Essex Street that his yard was adjacent to that of his friend Wendell Phillips — was provided for him. The upper floor was thrown into one room for a library. In this house he lived till his last sickness took him away: there his widow resides still, though the quiet of the spot is invaded by business. The household consisted of himself and his wife, whose domestic name is Bear, or Bearsie, and who, as usual, is nearly the opposite of her husband, except in the matter of philanthropy; a young man by the name of Cabot, one and twenty years old, an orphan, brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Parker from childhood, and treated by them as a sort of nephew; and Miss Stevenson, “a woman of fine talents and culture, interested in all the literatures and humanities.” The entire house was given to hospitality. The table always looked as if it expected guests. The parlors had the air of talking-places, well arranged and habitually used for the purpose. The spare bed was always ready for an occupant, and often had a friendless wanderer from a foreign shore. The library was a confessional as well as a study: this room, airy, light, and pleasant, was lined with books in plain cases, unprotected by obtrusive glass. Books occupied capacious stands in the centre of the apartment; books were piled on the desk and floor. There was but one table, — a writing-table, with drawers and extension-leaves, of the common office pattern. A Parian head of the Christ, and a bronze statue of Spartacus, ornamented the ledge: sundry emblematical bears, in fanciful shapes of wood or metal, assisted in its decoration. The writer sat in a cane chair: a sofa close by was for visitors. A vase of flowers usually stood near the bust of Jesus. Flowers were in the southern windows, placed there by gentle hands, and faithfully tended by himself. Two ivy-plants, representative of two sisters, intwined their arms and mingled their leaves at the window-frames. Every morning he watered them, and trained their growing tendrils. … In the winters of heavy snow he kept a little corn-crib in his library, and regularly fed at the window-sill the city pigeons deprived of their street-food. They soon found where breakfast was to be had, and flocked daily to the window; while he, with delight, watched them as they cooed and quarrelled, and hustled each other, and sidewise nodded through the pane at him.”

Summertime, and the livin’ is smoggy

It feels like summer has finally hit the Bay area. There’s apparently a high-pressure system sitting over the desert southwest pumping hot air up into our area. Temperatures got up into the mid-nineties today, with little or no wind.

Summer heat in the Bay area means smog and ground-level ozone. Driving down Route 101 to work today, the mountains on the other side of San Francisco Bay, usually clearly visible, were hard to see through the light blue haze. Smog and ground-level ozone mean that I feel lousy.

The short-term bad news is that tomorrow it’s supposed to hit one hundred degrees in Palo Alto. The short-term good news is that the forecast says cool air from Alaska will move into our area by the weekend. The long-term bad news is that University of California scientists are now predicting that climate change in our area is going to cause more hot days, which means more days of high ground-level ozone levels. The long-term good news is… um, what is the long-term good news?