I was getting off of the Amtrak train this morning at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia and saw this printed on the inside of the conductor's box:
I don't know if it was the early hour or the fact that I'm near the end of "American Gods" but the message seemed to impart some additional doom that it normally wouldn't have.
In British Columbia, Canada, a few noisy parents are overreacting about the introduction of yoga into their school as a means to combat childhood obesity. The claim is that yoga is a religion, and if we're going to strip Jesus from the classrooms, we shouldn't allow yoga either.
My first reaction was "It's nice to see that this kind of reactionary pharasitical thinking isn't confined to just America." Then I got sad to thinking about how this kind of fundamentalism is spreading. It seems that as the Islamic world is itself embroiled in a kind of reformation movement, so too is a larger tug-of-war between atheists, moderates, and arch-conservatives consuming the Christian world.
It makes sense to me that some people would run into the shelter of fundamentalist religions in a time of great uncertainity. The last 15 years have been overwhelming and distressing to many people, especially since 9/11. Cultures are spreading faster than ever, and forces like the internet make it nearly impossible for the would-be censors and morality police to tamp down the fires of change.
Economies are shifting, bulging, and blossoming around the world, and then vanishing again. We are bombarded by contradictory figures and shouted at on all sides by bloviating populists, all who have different agendas.
So for a few parents in a more remote section of British Columbia to protest the introduction of yoga is not, surprising to me. But it disheartens me. It disheartens me because there is so much information available now, there is so much transfer of culture, there is so much opportunity for learning, and the spreading of tolerance, and understanding.
The very same earth-shaking forces that scare people so now are the same forces that can change the world for the better.
The new economy that made Bill Gates so stunningly rich has made it possible for him to potentially solve an issue like malaria. The internet has made it possible for people around the world to speak to dissidents in places like China and Iran and help them seek freedom for themselves. It can give children in British Columbia a way to exercise that will them be healthy and live longer. Yoga will probably even help children in school, as it can calm and center a person.
Sure, the origins of Yoga came from a religious discipline, but that no more makes it a religion itself than Tai Chi is a religion, or makes the running the Tendai monks do a religion.
H.P. Lovecraft said once (in a slightly different context):
"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
So again I'm sad, because it seems that instead of pushing forward into the new world and seeking those new vistas of reality, people are averting their eyes, and quickly assembling walls around their hearts and minds, so as to shut out the light and truth. They're not just fleeing into a new dark age, but flinging themselves into the shadowy abyss of ignorance.
In Florida, some people took time to camp in the woods next to a mosque and shoot at the Muslims who were arriving to celebrate Ramadan. (Link)
Bill O'Reilly, best known for his bloviating and blustery style and mocked for his continual accusations about a war on Christmas denounced the attacks on the mosque as a "further example of the godless attacking the godfearing in a turbulent difficult time".
...
Well, actually, he didn't. In my mind he should have though. I know he doesn't necessarily think that Muslims are godfearing, and he's clearly a devout Christian, but Christ wouldn't have advocated attacking others for their faith, and certainly not by sitting in the woods taking pot shots at the people entering a mosque. It's disgusting that this happened, though I imagine it's simply a case of just some good ole boys getting drunk and sitting in the woods giggling as they shot at the building and the people.
The last thing we need as a culture is more division and separation. We don't gain anything by splitting the Muslims apart from the rest of the world, or all the South Asians from the rest of us. Separation doesn't lead to peace or security, no matter how much Michelle Malkin really wants it to work.
I hate sounding like a broken record, because I risk sounding like an apologist for Islam, which I'm not (the religion has its issues, as do some of the practioners of the religion, but that's true for all religions just about). It just seems to me that if some shitheads had parked outside a Christian church and drunkenly started firing at the people filing in for Wednesday evening Bible Study, O'Reilly would be marching down the street in front of the church, arm in arm with Jerry Fallwell and Ralph Reed, decrying the war on Christianity and demanding the capture of these yahoos.
Which is what should happen.
I excerpted this from a book I've started working on. I like it and I wanted to share it.
I'm going to push back my first Koran article to this weekend. It's been a wild and wooly week at work and I got a little behind. Not that many of your care, but maybe one of you does and was waiting, and I didn't want you to think I forgot.
This week, the Lutheran Church held a vote at their convention regarding the place of married gay people in the clergy. The measure failed 503 against to 490 in favor.
Earlier in the day of voting the Church voted 851-127 to keep the church unified in spite of a serious split concerning the role of gay people in the church.
I am constantly distressed by what I see to be the pharasitical movement in the church constantly taking precedence over what I believe the church is really supposed to be about. Jesus walked with the unclean, he healed the sick and unworthy, he tried to refocus the direction of people's spirituality from one of law and rules (as exemplified by the Pharisees in the Bible (yes, I know that current scholarship does not bear out them being such heartless hard-headed pricks, but I'm going off of the accepted archetype right now)) to one of love and caring and compassion and faith.
To put it another way, it is common to see protesters gather at Mormon events decrying them as unchristian and doomed to spend eternity in hell. When Brennan Hawkins went missing in the mountains of Utah while on a Boy Scout trip, the Mormons in the area cancelled church, and gathered en masse to find him. They put aside the legal way of thinking (I better get to church or I'm not worthy to go to heaven) to find someone who was in great peril. Now, I am the last to applaud the culture or actions of the LDS most of the time, but I think that if Jesus were here now, he'd tell the pharasitical dickheads protesting out front of the Mormon churches to put down their placards, put on their hiking boots, and follow him up the hill with the Mormons to find that boy.
