25 posts tagged “religion”

Tess

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not simply a novel. It is a way of looking at life.

In Robert Frost's poem, The Woodpile, the author decides to wander out into a swamp where he gets lost. He no longer knows just where he is. He just knows he is far from home. Later in the poem, Frost wonders about how a cord of wood came to be abandoned in the swamp to experience the “slow smokeless burning of decay”. His question is more about life than it is about a woodpile. Why is it that we see glimpses of meaning and order in life when ultimately we also see it being allowed to go to hell in a handbasket? One gets this same observational complaint in Thomas Hardy's work. Often, his characters seem so worthy of happy lives and so unable to attain them. His novel explores the question, “Why?” The novel begins with a group of young women out in the field's dancing, full of hope and promise:

“And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They were all cheerful, and many of them merry.”

In a world governed by a benevolent providence, one would expect them all to achieve these dreams, or, if not, to achieve the happiness by means of things they cannot dream of yet. But in Hardy's world, that divine ordering Providence is replaced by a combination of Darwinian materialistic indifference and ancient Greek fate. The young Tess is innocent, hopeful, and naive. “Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life” he says, “was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.”

Hardy frequently intrudes on his story to speculate as to whether there are any powers behind the curtains of our lives working things out on our behalf or working against us. He presents Tess Derbeyfield as the flower of innocence and decency, handicapped with poverty and an alcoholic father and lets the machinations of her pedigree, evil, and chance crush her before our eyes.

In the crucial scene where Tess is violated by Alec D'Urberville, an event that will ruin her life in the end, Hardy laments the injustice of life and the way that the coincidences often work against us and not for us.

“In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress [read: “evolution”] these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.”

“Where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps... he was sleeping and not to be awaked.... 'It was to be.' There lay the pity of it.”

“Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”

Hardy poses the question of Job again: Why do rotten things happen to good people? Where is the justice in this world? "I shouldn't mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike," Tess asks at one point in the novel, "But that's what books will not tell me."

Why horrible things happen to Tess D'Urberville is a mystery that Hardy can only offer conjectures at.

“One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.”

At the conclusion, he simply makes reference to the fickleness of the gods.

“"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.”

Clearly, Thomas Hardy does not believe that traditional religions can be called on to answer these questions any more. From his perspective, even if they could be regarded as satisfying answers, the logic of them cannot hold up to experience and their side-effects are not worth it. He prefers to see life best lived in harmony with the rhythms of nature rather than in the confines of theology. “Women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature,” he says approvingly, “retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at later date.” For Hardy, life is something that sends us so many opportunities and so many challenges that one cannot afford to burden oneself in responding to them with social, religious, and moral obligations that detrimentally affect one's abilities to benefit from the opportunities and overcome the challenges.

Tess D'Uberville, though well schooled in grammar and theology, laments the absence of a practical education in the ways of nature.

"O mother, my mother!" cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. "How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o' learning in that way, and you did not help me!"

In time she comes to regard the wisdom conveyed in weekly sermons as irrelevant at best and harmful at worst. Indeed, it is her religion and the rules of her society that constantly inflict pain upon her after her unfortunate victimaization and pregnancy – a pain that Hardy does not feel she would feel if she looked at herself as a being of nature rather than a creature of social convention. “Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges,” he writes,

“watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.”

It is social conditioning and not nature that imposes on her the crippling guilt that wrecks havoc on her life:

“Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done, burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls, she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn therefrom. . . . Alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.”

The process of shaking off conventional religious ideas and exchanging them for either classical or pantheistic ideas is further advanced in Angel Clare than in Tess but it is a similar process.

“Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches and chapels on fine summer days.”

Angel tells his father that he can no longer ascribe to the fundamental core beliefs in Biblical inspiration and thus cannot see himself becoming a minister. His arc involves returning to nature as a source of guidance in his life and it is no accident that it is Tess' essential connection to nature that attracts him to her just as it is Mercy Chant's commitment to organized religion that repels him from the course his parents have chosen.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he says to himself of Tess, simply glad that Tess is enough of a church goer to give his decision some “cover” with his parents. He knows the trajectory that she is on though and it is no accident that Angel Clare and Tess D'Urberville conclude their lives together at Stonehenge rather than in a church.

Hardy draws his most striking contrast when he describes Angel's relationship to his father and two brothers:

“Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his intelligence —less an argument than an intoxication. His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and deemed himself consistent through the whole category—which in a way he might have been. One thing he certainly was—sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition. He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after.

. . . After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition.

They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection.”

. . . As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived in him—that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.”

“Niether saw or set forth life as it was really lived.” This is perhaps the touchstone of Thomas Hardy's criticism of life lived by religious scruples and social conventions rather than by common sense, natural philosophy, and reason. No doubt many who look at life through the eyes of Parson Clare would see the tragedy that befalls Tess D'Urberville as a consequence of straying too far from the path of righteousness laid out in the Holy writ. Hardy would see it as the consequence of being too influenced by the same. It is as if he is suggesting that Tess and Angel would have lived happy lives together if they had simply refused to let anything interrupt nature. If they had simply responded to the feelings that they had for one another the first instant they met at the dance in the very first scene, everything would have worked out.

Hardy's religion is a religion of Adam and Eve and not of Moses and Paul. When Tess and Angel find themselves in places of nature, as in the opening festivities in the field, at Stonehenge, or under the stars, they are at peace. When they think too much of their social and religious conditionings, they suffer.

“At first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.”

Note the contrast to the passages about their Edenic happiness and how they compare to passages about their relationship to organized religion. "You quite misapprehend my parents, Angel tells Tess,

“They are the most simple-mannered people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I do," she remarked as a safe generality. "It is often a great sorrow to me."

Ultimately, it is Angels concern for what his society, his family, and his religious community will think that destroys the love between he and Tess. Under the baleful influence of conventional morality “the pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires.”

“God's not in his heaven:
All's wrong with the world!”

The irony is that to Thomas Hardy, the more the perception of God held by the likes of Parson Clare, Mercy Chant, and the evangelical version of Alec D'Urberville rules the world, the less likely one is experience heaven on this earth. Again and again, his characters must be called back to nature and away from established religious mores if they are to find relief for their troubles and wisdom for their challenges.

“So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. . . . She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature.”

Over the course of her experiences, Tess begins to lose her belief that Nature is something one can use God to change and begins to believe that nature is something that must be adapted to. This is most evident in her conversation with the evangelical Alec D'Urberville:

"How can I pray for you," Tess said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?"

"You really think that?"

"Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise."

"Cured? By whom?"

"By my husband, if I must tell."

"Ah—your husband—your husband! How strange it seems! I remember you hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really believe in these matters, Tess?" he asked. "You seem to have no religion—perhaps owing to me."

“"I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my dear husband… But I don't believe—"

Here she gave her negations.”

Perhaps Hardy's most interesting criticism of religion in the novel (to me) is how religion so often evaluates a person's moral worth by their past deeds rather than by their present intentions. Angel comes to see this habit as his principle logical failure in regard to Tess.

“Why had he not judged Tess constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?” he says.

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

How, then, about Tess?”

And Tess encourages him in this “natural” instinct. “Don't think of what's past! I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?" she asks.

"And—and," she said, pressing her cheek against his, "I fear that what you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me that you despised me."

This is perhaps the saddest aspect of the story to me. Had these two young people not been taught to feel how they should feel, they would have simply allowed themselves to feel what they did feel … and I suspect Hardy would have had things turned out wonderfully for them.What if someone were to rewrite Tess of the D'Urbervilles so that at the dance int he first scene, Tess had seen Angel, acted on her attraction, and simply said to him, "You know, there is something special about you. Would you mind if I walked with you to where you are going?"

Question for Comment: Rarely does one see religion in a positive light as it is expressed in Thomas Hardy's variously religious characters and thus Hardy's novels are often considered “dangerous” to those with religious perspectives on life. Would you agree?

Obama Cairo Speech [Full Speech PT1] June 04 2009

I just got the opportunity to listen to Barak Obama's speech in Cairo June 4. I would highly recommend it as it sets a tone for a future based on possibilities rather than practicabilities, a future based on a chosen way of seeing the world rather than an inherited one. Naturally, the question will have to be settled: Can we really chose new ways of seeing the world, or must we endure the ones that we have earned by our past behaviors and mistakes? Obama's speech also asserts, without an argument, that the world can move forward without arguing about the validity of its episimological sources of cultural values because, and this is the lynchpin of the assumptions he makes, those sources (Bible, Talmud, Qur'an) are fundamentally, not in conflict about anything that "really" matters.

Though asserting that he was himself a Christian, in a number of places he made reference to "our Holy Quran". Rhetorically, it was extremely effective. But on a pure logical level, I can see it being fraught with difficulties. The question is, will people respond on a level of logic or a level of sentiment? I suspect the later. And maybe therein lies our salvation as we make our way forward. Can one argue for some things (peace, human values, non-violence) on the basis of an authority that - if read in entirety - ALSO rejects some of the same propositions that you are arguing for? i.e. the status of Jerusalem or the West Bank/Judea-Samaria?

“The Holy Koran tells us …”

“The Talmud tells us …”

“The Holy Bible tells us …”

President Obama makes a powerful argument that these sacred books all agree on certain things. But what of the differences? He advocates - by his silence - ignoring them. Regard them as authoritiative where the ends are consistent with a peaceful world. Neglect the aspects of their messages where those messages might lead to contrary ends. I think that is essentially the argument that he is making.

“Faith should bring us together” he says, " As the Holy Quran tells us, be conscious of God and speak always the truth. . . . Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad joined in prayer”

In several places, he made the argument that America and Islam are not based on competing assumptions and he said so with such authority that his tone of voice and assurance carried the argument. But I myself feel a need to think more on the matter.

"America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition," he said, "The freedom to live as you chose. These are not just American ideas. They are human rights and that is why we will support them everywhere.”

And it is at this point where the most interesting debate should occur. Are the Qur'an or the Bible or the Talmud really arguing that human beings should be given the freedom to live as they chose? Is a religion whose name MEANS submission, a religion of choice? Is the Talmud a record of a debate about what humans want to do? Or is it a record of people trying to discern in the minutest of detail what God wants them to do? When Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount "Anyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them is like a man who builds his house upon sand and when the floods come ..." is He advocating autonomy from divine command? When the Apostle Paul says "Have this mind in you that was in Christ ..." is his goal the autonomous individual, free to live as they chose?

Barak Obama has taken the approach that all sources of certainty can be regarded as equally valid and authoritative as long as none are. No one thus wins. No one looses. No one must admit to having been misled for a few hundred or thousand years.

It remains to be seen if this argument, made forcefully and diplomatically, and frequently enough, can carry the day.

Question for Comment: If we assume for a moment that major Western Religions are a Ven Diagram of concentric circles - each advocating certain assertions that are common and certain assertions that are exclusive, is there any reason to retain the exclusive elements if the result is irreconcilable conflict?

To Die In Jerusalem

To Die in Jerusalem is a story of two mothers. Two mothers that illustrate and exemplify two whole peoples. In the last half hour of the movie, a mother who’s daughter has been killed in a suicide attack speaks with the mother of the girl who committed it. I confess, it was almost like watching Sarah and Hagar reincarnated.

It was as if electricity was moving up out of the ground in one and meeting electricity coming down through a lightening bolt out of the other’s sky. And just as the very place where their hearts connected, the force of the energy exploded. As if to say, "Now that I know you are listening, I need to be able to tell my story of suffering so that it can neutralize and even negate yours.” I have a confession to make. I am no fan of suicide bombers in general and certainly not when they are children killing children. But I honestly felt like the Palestinian woman gave the better arguments and came across as less “stuck” even though it was her daughter who had committed the act that took the other’s life. She was simply saying, “understand the context in which young people like my daughter must make moral decisions” and the Israeli woman would respond “Why do you hate us?”   

I think it is fair to say that throughout history, circumstances have created in people anger and leaders have directed it. Someone holding a hose will not be able to do anything with it if there is no water pressure. But water pressure undirected cannot be blamed for what someone holding a hose can do. A suicide bombing is an act of desperate inexpressible anger. It seems obvious that Israelis need to understand that they play a part in the creation of that reservoir of anger. By the same token, takig a young seventeen year old girl’s anger and using it to blow up another girl her age indiscriminately is a concern that Palestinian leaders need to examine themselves about.

People need to understand that whole societies are creating the anger that portions of societies are using to create more. Hatred is something some people profit by and they will invest the principle as long as they are allowed to do so.

This was a hard movie for me to watch. This was not like many of the documentaries I have seen where individual citizens are simply seen offstage as world leaders argue. This was a movie about the ground floor and grass roots of animosity. It seems like the positions are or have been almost set in concrete now. Israelis seem to have decided that the responsibility for the happiness of refugees lies in the hands of surrounding Arab countries. If those refugees are unhappy, they believe the animosity should now be directed at the surrounding countries that will not take them in. Either because of their historical education or their religion, they believe that the Palestinian right to return to their homes in 1948 is subsumed and nullified.

Palestinians have concluded that justice demands their return to their lost homes and lost status as a people worthy of a dignified place among the nations. Like Serbians who wanted to be members of a Serbian State in 1914 or Kurds who want to be members of a Kurdish State in the modern world, they see no reason to inflict an apartheid status on themselves and agree to relocation. Armed with these positions, there is nowhere to go besides conflict it seems. If only land could be stacked up like a bunk bed.

Justice and understanding of another person’s history: I have always regarded these things as the pre-requisites to peace. But in cases where there are two notions of justice and two notions of history, the conflict is made worse by them and I wonder if a region wide self-induced amnesia is what is required.

I hope to bring some measure of mutual understanding to my Middle East courses this summer. A task to which I now turn.

Question for comment: Have you ever been in a situation where justice for you would have entailed an injustice for someone else? Is one morally obligated in any way to fight for one’s own justice? For another’s or for a split of the difference?

A Jihad for Love

Two movies to report on: Jihad for Love and Call to Witness. In both Christianity and Islam some people are saying that God is fine with people being gay and some people say God forbids it. So a bunch of humans get together for councils and they declare their positions on the questions and God forgets to come to the meeting and the world is left wondering. The status quo appeals to the Bible and the Koran and their laws and the insurgents appeal to their experience and logic and their love and the band plays on.  

Who can say where it will all wind up?

Secret Files of the Inquisition

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to view several episodes of the PBS documentary on The Secret Files of the Inquisition. I confess, PBS has a certain format that it follows for all of its documentaries now that involves certain stock approaches to the teaching of historical subjects. They hire “actors” who generally play roles as “living manikins” as the historical commentary voiceovers carry most of the teaching load. I suppose the advantage is that you don’t have to get actors who can speak in 12^th century Spanish but, it gets hard to concentrate sometimes. I almost think I might prefer listening to a lecture about the subject.

But I am not here to critique form. It is the subject of the Inquisition that interests me. I often get students who like to assert that it is religion that is to blame for much of the intolerance and violence in human history, and I like to remind them that it is really what I call “epistemological arrogance” that is the culprit. It just so happens that religious systems often create such states of mind but they do not have to. And that there are non-religious systems of thought that can and have led to equally destructives states of “epistemological arrogance.” Alexander the Great for instance took a philosophical approach to knowledge that left him epistemologically certain enough to lead armies all the way to India to impose his way of thinking on people. Stalin or Mao Tse Dong could be far more epistemologically arrogant than an inquisitor like Bernard Gui.

All it takes is to have a source of truth that can be regarded as inerrant (in the case of the Inquisition, the Catholic Church hierarchy), and a predisposition to believe that there can be no other sources of any significant worth.

What is fascinating about studying the ideas of those groups that the inquisition tortured, persecuted, and tried to eradicate is that invariably one finds a number of teachings among their various doctrines that one is prone to agree with today. For example, the Cathars in Spain argued that the host (bread/wafer) could not possibly be the body of Jesus because if it was, Jesus would be bigger than the Alps, given how much communion bread had been consumed. The Catholic church argued that it miraculously turned the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and that it was only by ingesting this incarnated bread/God that people could receive the power of the life of Christ for the living out of their daily lives in conformity to God’s will. I suspect that there are no Protestants and probably fewer and fewer Catholics today that still hold to this doctrine of transubstantiation. Most would regard it as somewhere between superstition and excessive literalism.

But it was just one of many doctrines of the Cathars (or Albegensians) that the Catholic church took exception to. Naturally, I could not agree with all that any of these so called heretical groups ascribed to but what is interesting about reading about their ideas is the discovery that many times, they are bringing up questions that I myself find myself asking. I don’t always agree with their answers to them but I admire the fact that they were thinking and making astute observations. For example, according to one Medieval text on the Cathar heresy, Albegensian theologians struggled to reconcile the God they saw in the Old Testament with the God they saw portrayed in the New Testament. They

“held that there are two Creators; viz. one of invisible things, whom they called the benevolent God, and another of visible things, whom they named the malevolent God. The New Testament they attributed to the benevolent God; but the Old Testament to the malevolent God, and rejected it altogether, except certain authorities which are inserted in the New Testament from the Old; which, out of reverence to the New Testament, they esteemed worthy of reception.”

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/heresy1.html

In short, they took a radical approach to a difficult question that the Catholic church of their day was not answering for them. It is also interesting to note that a number of their teachings went back into the history of the early church as the letters of the New Testament. There was a clear Gnostic element in their teaching about the fundamental evil of all material things that was no doubt very similar in nature and content to teachings that the Apostle Paul was confronting in Colossians and Peter was confronting in his Second Epistle. What makes the heresies so interesting is that in some cases, they seem to be drawing on some of the latent ideas that the apostles may have held about the flesh and the body themselves in some respects.Paul, it should be argued was NOT arguing for asceticism. He did not condemn marriage or material things. But he did places them in a subservient role, arguing that the soul was of MORE importance. ("Better to marry than to burn.")

It does seem that one has a legitimate question to ask when they wonder if God would place physical being below spiritual in a hierarchy. Can we imagine Him saying to the first human "I have made you a body but it is not as important to your happiness as your spirit and soul"? Or would He have taken a holistic approach, suggesting that there might not be clear lines between soul and body?

The inquisitor, Bernard Gui ties the Albegensian doctrines to the Manicheans, a religious sect that had deeply influenced Augustine of Hippo before his conversion to Christianity. (See here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/gui-cathars.html )

It is actually quite fascinating (though albeit in a retroactively appalling sort of way) to see Bernard Gui explain how he went about ferreting out heresy in the early 14^th century. Imagine if you will someone with a single solitary dissenting idea, trying to hide that idea from Bernard Gui’s Inquisition. Like a tax evader trying to hide from the IRS a single solitary undeclared asset in some Swiss bank account. Gui drags the “accused” into the full glare of the klieg lights, hooks them up by the thumbs to the lie detector, and practices the probing arts for which he is widely known. Every "t" must be crossed. Every "i" dotted, until the terrified sinner fesses up to holding a belief not specifically endorsed by his Holiness the pope.It is all in the manual.

I think one of the greatest discoveries of the modern world has been the discovery that different ways of knowing things are best used in different circumstances. It is the acceptance of the idea that as good as one particular way of knowing is for getting at the truth in one area, it cannot be expected to compete with another way of knowing in some significantly different area. On some questions, you will be better served using a microscope than you will a Bible. On other questions, you may be better served consulting subtle emotions than a rational argument. Sometimes logic will serve you better than dialog and sometimes a dream will tell you more than a therapist. The key to a living a better epistemological life is having numerous “clubs” in the golf bag and knowing when to use which.

Naturally, the danger is that the more you have the more confused you can get when they seem to disagree but … the less likely you are to turn into a Bernard Gui. And the world could use a few less of him I think.

Question for Comment: What are your most dependable ways of knowing? How do you derive these conclusions?

As and interesting aside, there is a Shiite doctrine that allows, and in some cases mandates that a person of Shiite faith hide their faith and intentionally mislead an "Inquisitor". The doctrine, known as Taqqiya, is explained thus by the Grand Ayatola as Sayyid Ali al-Husseini as-Sistani in the following way:

"Question : What are the kinds of Taqiyah (dissimulation) and when is it obligatory?

Answer : There are different types of Taqiyah:
1) Taqiyah is done for safety reasons. For example, a person fears that he might be killed or harmed, if he does not observe Taqiyah. In this case, it is obligatory to observe Taqiyah.
2) Reconciliatory Taqiyah. This type of Taqiyah is done when a person intends to reconcile with the other side or when he intends to soften their hearts. This kind of Taqiyah is permissible but not obligatory.
3) Sometimes, Taqiyah may cause a more important obligation to be lost or missed, if so it is forbidden. For example, when I know that silence would cause oppression and infidelity to spread and will make people go astray, in such a situation it is not permissible to be silent and to dissimulate.
4) Sometimes, Taqiyah may lead to the death of an innocent person. If so, it is not permissible. It is therefore haram (forbidden) to kill another person to save your own life.

http://muslihoon.wordpress.com/2006/03/18/taqiyyah-or-dissimulation-or-deception/

The Cathars could have used a good Shiite theologian in the 14th century I should think.

Centurion

Well, say goodbye to the Battlestar Galactica. Four years of searching and they finally found earth. All that technology. You would have thought they would have thought of Google Universe. But the last episode ties everything up. One, we discover that the original human of our species - the "mitocondrial Eve" as it were was half Cylon and half human. This explains the leap from "pre-human" to ourselves. The implication? We are part machine too.

Secondly, we discover that there is a God - or a force - or some intelligence that has thought ahead (or behind) and basically orchestrates the universe towards its meaningful end. Or ... er .. beginning. "History is cyclical" my friend, R. tells me. And the series Battlestar Galactica, as it turns out, agrees. (Though it is also Cylonical). My basic understanding of the nuanced ending to this story is that it is a beginning and thus prophecy is really memory and history is really deja vu trailer.

Thirdly, we come to think of the Battlestar Galactica as some sort of a cosmic ark, saving humanity from holocaust and depositing them on dry ground to be fruitful and multiply, sent out with a  clear message, "no more cities folks. No more cities". Its all very Genesis 11

"They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

The series leaves the viewer with the clear understanding that placing too many people in urban concentrations was and remains the great glitch in the cycle of history. Very interesting.

Fourth, there may be angels among us.

Fifth, it is NEVER a good idea to stick your hands in goop with a group of people if you KNOw that by doing so, they will see all the ways you have sinned against them or people they love.

In the course of the last half hour, different caracters get to wrap up the threads in their own stories. Lovers get to say goodbye to one another or to make commitments. Those who have been dying for four years get to die. Those who have wanted to be reunited with families, get to be so reunited. those who had their karmic cumuppance coming, get it. Those who have their freedom coming (The Cylon Centurians) are set free. Those who have been waiting for the self-serving cynic Gaius Baltar to find his core and finally earn the respect of his red dressed arm candy, get ... well ... something. And those who just wanted to be remembered, are assured that they will be.

And the last scene contains a prophetic warning for us all "Lets not let our toasters get too smart".

Wheel of Time

 It would be well beyond my pay-grade as a World Religion teacher to explain everything in this movie. Maybe even to explain anything. It is about a completely different, it would seem, way of seeing the world, oneself in it, and purpose of life. There are people interviewed in this movie who are more devoted to the way they see the universe than any of us reading or watching are I suspect. A man who spends years of his life, traveling by foot, bowing every few steps, inch worm like to his destination in India where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment.

To me, it has always been a rather thought provoking experience to be in the presence of people who I know believe what they believe more strongly and without distraction than I believe what I believe. Through the making of the sand mandala, the universe is created, and then it is destroyed, poured into the river, and a few years later, made again. Grains of colored sand have their purpose in an intricate map of symbolic universe where every grain has its meaning in relationship to others. And then. With a few easy leisurely brushes, it is gone. In a similar way do millions of people see their lives.

It is so ... intriguing to see what efforts millions of people will expend to advance themselves in some imaginary or potential way. To reduce their karmic debts, they will circle sacred mountains on foot, even crawl around them. The effort it must have once taken to build pyramids, expended simply in hiking, or meditating, or prostrating. One simply has to wonder what changes could be made to this suffering world if this energy was converted to service. And then, in a moment of Buddhist thought, one wonders what changes might this world be blessed with if we converted the energy we use in pursuing our lives to what these Buddhists deem as "useful" activity?

Use lies in the eye of the beholder, as it always has I suppose. A fascinating video if you are interested in Buddhism, but well worth the time if you simply have an interest in seeing how different the world can seem to a different culture of thought.