The "Christian church," ca. 20th century

In the words of Mrs. Benny Hinn, I guess I need a "Holy Ghost enema right up [my] rear end."

When a good message meets a bad idea

I've posted it before, but it bears repeated posting:

the renewed mind

Michael | MySpace Video

Which church for your children?

I just viewed, finally, Deliver Us from Evil, Amy Berg's sober, sobering account of the uncovering of widespread sexual abuse of children throughout the Catholic Church in California, particularly focusing on one now ex-priest, Oliver O'Grady, whose deeds were continually and consistently covered up by the Catholic hierarchy (most notably Roger Mahoney, now the Archbishop of Los Angeles).

This is not merely a "Catholic problem," although it does seem to be particularly endemic to the priesthood. That said, all other faiths have produced figures showing they have sex abuse problems in their leadership, as well. Jay Nelson, a former Catholic priest himself, has done yeoman's work in documenting the breadth and depth of this horrific scandal. As he reports at his website, various news sources report the following prevalence (mostly from anonymous self-reporting surveys):

• Four in 10 US Catholic nuns report having experienced sexual abuse, (a rate equivalent to that reported by American women in general), a study by Catholic researchers supported by major religious orders, has found. The study found that sisters have known sexual abuse less in childhood, dispelling what the authors call an "anti-Catholic" canard that girls fled to convents to escape sexual advances. During religious life, close to 30% of the nation's 85,000 nuns experienced "sexual trauma," ranging from rape to exploitation to harassment. A total of 40% reported a least one experience of that kind. NCR, 1/15/99 See The Nuns' Stories for details.
• The Wisconsin Psychological Association's survey found offenders distributed among the following professions: Psychiatrists 34%, Psychologists 19%, Social Workers 13%, Clergy 11%, Physicians 6%, Marriage Counselors 4%, and Others 14%.
• The Center for Domestic Violence found that 12.6% of clergy said they had sex with church members. 47% of clergy women were harassed by clergy colleagues.
• The Presbyterian Church stated that 10-23% of clergy have "inappropriate sexual behavior or contact" with clergy and employees.
• The United Methodist research (1990) showed 38.6% of Ministers had sexual contact with church members and that 77% of church workers experienced some type of sexual harassment.
• The United Church of Christ found that 48% of the women in the work place have been sexually harassed by male clergy.
• The Southern Baptists claim 14.1% of their clergy have sexually abused members.

Author Jay Nelson wrote Sons of Perdition to document the long history of sex abuse in the Church. At his website, Nelson shares a few telling figures (originally published in the Hartford Courant, and taken from the official preliminary report from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People:

US clerics (priests, deacons, bishops, etc.) accused of abuse from 1950-2002: 4,392.
About 4% of the 109,694 serving during those 52 years.

Individuals making accusations: 10,667.

Victims' ages: 5.8% under 7; 16% ages 8-10; 50.9% ages 11-14; 27.3% ages 15-17.

Victims' gender: 81% male, 19% female

Duration of abuse: Among victims, 38.4% said all incidents occurred within one year; 21.8% said one to two years; 28%, two to four years; 11.8% longer.

Victims per priest: 55.7% with one alleged victim; 26.9% with two or three; 13.9% with four to nine; 3.5% with 10 or more (these 149 priests caused 27% of allegations).

Abuse locations: 40.9% at priest's residence; 16.3% in church; 42.8% elsewhere.

Known cost to dioceses and religious orders: $572,507,094 (does not include the $85 million Boston settlement and other expenses after research was concluded). (Hartford Courant, 2/27/04)

It should be noted that Mahoney is a major advocate of open borders immigration, which no doubt would bring many prime Latino and Latina children into the waiting arms of the Golden State's priesthood. But that couldn't possibly be the motivation, could it? Well?

We're all Marxists now ...

It was amusing and dispiriting to me to witness so many Tea Party protesters, over the past few months, stand shoulder to shoulder with signs that cried for liberty on the one hand, and yet decried any effort to "touch" Medicare (and other, ahem, very socialist programs).

Is Barack Obama a socialist? Yes, but no more or no less than was George W. Bush, his father, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan (in spite of his words to the contrary), or any other American politician, with very few exceptions (Ron Paul, and the relative few that see the clear dangers of collectivism). Fact is, Social Security IS socialism; so is Medicare, Medicaid, ADFC, and any other government program that uses taxation to fund social engineering at any level. To the extent any of us embraces this, we are socialists. The moment I cash my first Social Security check, I am de facto a socialist.

Like it or not, that's the bottom line. The documentary Original Intent deals with them at some length:

As the quote misattributed to Alexis de Tocqueville famously reads: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

Music for the savaged soul

God blessed me last night with beautiful French music, courtesy of our Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and three wonderful guest performers. The program opened with Ravel's Mother Goose Suite (here performed by the University of Illinois Philharmonia Orchestra:

I loved Debussy's Danses Sacrée et Profane, in particular the performance by a gifted high school student-harpist named Hanna Blalock (performed here by Amy Turk and the Woking Symphony Orchestra). Enjoy:

Also loved Ravel's Pavane Pour Une Infante Defunte, here performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa:

And Saint-Saëns' Cello Concerto, which featured another young star named Julian Schwarz (performed here by the great Mstislav Rostropovich in 1977):

... as well as Saint-Saëns' Havanaise and Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, which featured Greensboro's own violinist extraordinaire Stefani Collins (here performed by the legendary Jascha Heifetz):

Here's Heifetz again, performing the evening's finale, Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso:

Great music is a wonderful thing.

We are all in competition

We are all in competition

It's the one thing that is central

We are all in competition
It's not so bad in the promised land

That old Gang of Four song ("Call Me Up"—I'm dating myself there rather severely) has been in my head lately. It's true. Every living thing feeds on the death of other living things, one way or the other, directly or indirectly. Resources are limited, always, and the race is to the swift, the best-adaped, the determined. Losing equals extermination.

It does not matter what system of organization we come up with to blunt the effects of constant competition, politically or otherwise. No matter what, a few get much, the rest fight over what's left. It's not just the human world; it's the nature of nature, too. Tooth, claw, blood. It's life.

It rattles in the back of my head constantly: "Hurry up. If you want to survive, you'll hurry up."

My depression puts this question to all that, though: Do I want to survive? Why? What's the purpose?

I think of this now in reading about a French documentary that staged a game show, called "Game of Death," which replicated the setup of Stanley Milgram's famous 1963 Yale study of authority and obedience. Sure enough, same results: Ordinary people have no problem obeying orders to torture to the point of death.

Which reminds me, again, of a favorite moment from Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Max von Sydow, a tormented artist in a May/December romance with Babara Hershey, is sharing what he watched on TV while she was gone: a panel discussion of the Holocaust. "The question is not, 'Why did it happen?'" says von Sydow. "The question is, given human nature, why doesn't it happen more often?"

That's how you get child soldiers willing to gang rape girls in the Congo, hack off the limbs of other children in Sierra Leone and Liberia, burn people alive in Angola; how you get government policies that result in the deaths of millions of people, a la Mao's China; how ordinary Russians become slavedrivers at Kolyma and other gulags (with millions more dead to their credit). On and on and on and on.

We just left a century in which—not counting war casualties, which easily topped 100 million on their own—governments murdered more than 100 million people. In "peacetime." And what are governments made up of but ordinary people following the dictates of their leaders, no matter how insane?

Which leaves me with another song lyric, this from 16 Horsepower's "Black Soul Choir":

Every man is evil
Every man a liar
Unashamed with a wicked tongue
Sing in the black soul choir

I keep waking up every morning ...

Went to bed last night hoping it would somehow end, that I would not wake up. I am so tired of breathing, of putting one foot in front of the other, of thinking, metabolizing, all of it. I know I'm depressed, insane, worthless in every imaginable way. I know. I know. No need to remind me, unless it helps you sate your appetite for kicking dogs when they're down. Please, have at. I really don't care.

Went to bed hoping I wouldn't wake up, again, and yet I woke up, again. No. No no no. I just want this to stop. I am so tired.

Worthy of destruction only

From Romans 9:

 ¹⁹One of you will say to me: "Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?" ²⁰But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' "^{[h] 21}Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?
 ²²What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? ²³What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— ²⁴even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?

There you have it. In order that God might make His mercies clear to His children, He has made people fit only for destruction. The contrast is necessary, and these others must be destroyed, and will be. By God. And as v. 20 makes clear, I, one such vessel, cannot question why I am made for destruction any more than Job had a right to question God about all that befell him.

There is nothing in this earth, in this life I fear as I fear God's wrath. I believe in God's white-hot wrath against all sin, and I know He is against me, and I am doomed. I live under the shadow of His fist, waiting for it to fall on me. I am without hope. All I can do is mark time until He throws me into hell and tortures me for eternity, to His eternal delight. Those who do not fear God and tremble before the thought of Him are fools, as was I for so long. He made me aware of His presence, however, and I once believed He had awakened me to salvation. I have learned, in time, that I was wrong (as usual). He has awakened me to my destruction. It should have been obvious to me, but that's how poor my vision is.

I wish that death would come now, in this minute. I must face God's judgment alone, and then His wrath, and then His torture. There is no other way. I wish I had never been born.

The big hole is always one step ahead

I am, in every conceivable way, an utter failure. I do not question that. I am as sure of that as I am that I am sitting, typing away on my computer, writing a blog post right now. I loathe the skin I'm in, the person I am. I am ashamed of everything about me.

This, all this, even though my medication has been adjusted and is working better than it was. All this in spite of the fact that I'm back in talk therapy, trying to make sense of everything. All this in spite of the fact that I've actually felt a bit better in the past few weeks, more or less. Only to fall in again and again.

I have been telling myself that depression is the cause of my utter self-hatred, my desire to die, my fantasy of having never been born. It's not that I am so important a source of evil that my nonexistence would make a big difference. Just the opposite, in fact; I am already a nonentity. I have no intrinsic value, no reason for existing. My death would be as meaningless and uneventful as my life has been.

There is some image of me, some other "me," out there somewhere that people claim to care about. I don't know who that is, even though that person shares my name and address, social security number, all of that. They don't see me; if they did, they'd recoil in horror. How have I managed to foist this lie upon everyone? I have no idea. I am not that guy who people seem to care about. I am the guy in the hole, the guy who sees too much of the reality of who he really is, and yet ... doesn't even see it all. The evil. The blackness and malevolence. The churn of hatred and hostility, all eventually pointed back at me, where it belongs.

I do not understand how God could have the least mercy on me. But I believe He does, because He is God, not me. God is very capable where I am utterly at a loss. God can love whom I cannot: me. Even me.

Should we return to hunting/gathering?

I am asking myself this honestly. There is much about Western civilization circa 2010 that is ugly and exploitative, make no mistake. I just watched Crude, Joe Berlinger's 2009 documentary about the hideous pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon by oil companies. Without question, Chevron-Texaco bears some responsibility, as does Ecuador's own nationally controlled petroleum industry. All for ... oil.

It's fair to ask: Why are we so dependent upon oil? A better question: What is oil used for? There is a long list here, and it's by no means exhaustive. A small sampling:

• CDs and DVDs
• Ammonia
• Antihistamines
• Antiseptics
• Asphalt and other paving materials
• Computers
• Clothes
• Crayons
• Deodorant
• Detergent
• Eyeglasses
• Fertilizer
• Floor wax
• Guitar strings
• Insecticides and insect repellent
• Ink
• Insulation
• Jet fuel
• Life jackets
• Plastics
• Refrigerators
• Saccharine
• Shoes
• Telephones
• Upholstery and curtains
• Wax

Again, that's a sampling. The real list is much longer. Suffice it to say that our civilization itself depends on oil.

How did we get here? The anarchist thinker John Zerzan pins the blame on the development of agriculture itself. I first read his essay, "Agriculture: Demon Engine of Civilization" in the original Feral House book, Apocalypse Culture. To say that Zerzan blew my mind would be an understatement. I've since read several of his books and, frankly, I find it difficult to challenge his arguments. I'm beginning to think he's right. If I could quote the second paragraph from the above-mentioned essay:

Agriculture is the birth of production, complete with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as “something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond found only “conscripts, not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture. And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine.

As an American and a Westerner, I know I'm the zenith of consumption evil. I live in great comfort, thanks in no small part to the oil industry. I am both thankful and suspicious of the shoddy practices in the Third World that get that oil to us. Oil's products are everywhere in my home. How much death and destruction do these things represent?

But I wonder, too: Am I the Stalin of the environment? Am I the smiling annihilator who culls what he needs from the innocent? As scarcity dictates our future increasingly (peak oil, peak water, peak everything may well come into play, and we all know what happens when resources become scarce), maybe it's time for ordinary joes like me, for workaday American Christians and others, to put down our politics and begin to disengage. It will mean hard decisions. It will mean no more movies, no more technology at all, goodbye to everything in the long list linked above (at a minimum), to say nothing of everything that farms produce, and living off the land and dying much, much younger, as do all hunter-gatherers.

Or there is the other course, always the other course: Stop living. And along the way to embracing death, encourage others to take the same path. If there are too many people here now, and the population is only growing worldwide, then people like me must lead by example. Since I am easily a net abuser of the environment and of people I will never meet through the mere acts of living in American civilization, my death will be a virtuous act, whether by my hand or not. A small step, but a necessary one. I am the equivalent of garbage, of waste; I am human waste, and all that implies.

Am I insane? I just read a very good essay by someone who certainly doesn't seem to be that would suggest, at a minimum, I am indeed insane and so is everyone else at a most fundamental level. To quote the essayist, Ray Grigg:

Are we poised on the edge of chaos, that uncertain place where ordered balance tips and neither our remedial efforts nor nature's resilience can stop a descending slide into chaos? No one knows. But the evidence suggests we are moving inexorably toward such a critical point.

And some thinkers are beginning to get the uncomfortable impression that our collective human behaviour is delusional, founded on inherently dysfunctional assumptions that are incompatible with the way nature operates.

The task, however, of convincing the insane that they are insane is formidable, requiring more of the penetrating powers of the therapist than the persuasive arguments of the philosopher.

Environmental thinkers, such as Bill McKibben, see a way out of this, a big-picture plan to move toward a happier and healthier world for all concerned, including humans. He's surely right in diagnosing the problem, as a review of his new book, Deep Economy, points out:

• Our ideas of growth and development can’t involve the rest of the world (or even Americans) living like Americans.
• If the Chinese ate meat like Americans, they’d use 2/3 of the world grain harvest.
• If the Chinese owned cars like Americans, they’d use more than all the oil currently produced globally.
• If the Chinese ate fish like the Japanese, they’d consume more than the current global harvest which is already not sustainable.
• Now think what if India, SE Asia, and Africa followed suit.

I do not share his optimism; I don't believe in utopia. It is human nature to foul one's own nest, to chuck cigarette butts out the car window, trash into the streets, to dump wherever we can, so long as it's out of sight. We are the problem itself; not the cause, not "part of the problem," but THE problem. Human extermination is, thus, the only way out. But how to achieve this in greater numbers?

Let me suggest that maybe suicides, and those who struggle with the idea's consideration, should be hailed as people who see reality more clearly, who are not deluded into thinking all is well when it isn't. Let me suggest that maybe those who die have done a service for the entire planet (including its human occupants), no matter how old they are, no matter how they die, no matter the pain of . The only thing that holds me back is the apparent grave harm I would do others by killing myself (I don't understand why, but I am assured that this is so by numerous people; perhaps you, rare reader, would stand in the other column and encourage me to think beyond them?). And then there are the animals who depend on me, although I've made arrangements for their care post my mortem.

I do hope that one day, humans in environmentally balanced numbers will live in harmony with the earth. What a gift that would be to our children (at least, those who survive). But it will take a lot of human slaughter to get there. Is it time to see massive human death as the ultimate benefit?

The physical sensation of emotional pain

It burrows into my chest, like an animal, choking off my esophagus. It crawls up my into my throat and even into my septum, and that's when it signals its hunger. It seizes me and holds me like this, gradually losing its grip, tiring as I do of its dependence on me.

When? Any time. Out of nowhere. Perhaps it's hibernating in me, then something arouses it, it knows its hungry, and demands to be fed with, I don't know, what? How do I feed it, or starve it once and for all? What do I do? Why do I feel this way? I do not know. But I do feel it, much as I hate it (and me for feeling it). I look out at the world and see all sorts of reasons for it to be inside me. I can think back over my life and see reasons for its life in me there, too, but I feel no sympathy for that boy, for that young man. Made his own bed. No one is innocent, and I surely am a piece of the proof.

I do not know where this pain comes from. It is partly loneliness, no doubt. It is maybe grief, but over what? It has the taste of loss, but of what?

I don't know.

What I do know: It makes me aware of a huge, gaping pit inside me. Something is missing, utterly missing. Something is gone, something I need to be healthy mentally. And I get the distinct feeling that I will never have it. So I go on like this.

And I hate myself for it. Oh, I do. Passionately. I hate myself for needing at all. I hate myself for what I am, and for what I am not. I hate myself for taking from the earth, for giving nothing but pain in return. How much more poison will I generate for this earth that supports me? How much more oxygen will I absorb? How much more garbage will I create? How many more people will I hurt?

Oh my father in heaven, I pray it will not be too many more. I pray I will not be any more of a burden than I already have been. On this beautiful Saturday afternoon, I pray for just one mercy: a quick end, and soon. I am so tired of the pain, I grow weak in bearing it, and it cannot be healed. It just cries to be fed, and I can't feed it, and I can't kill it. I can't bear it, even. I can't carry it. God have mercy on my worthless soul.

The shaky value of good intentions

I've been thinking a lot lately about misguided help—how it can do as much harm as help. The old saw runs thusly, of course: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

My interest was piqued again by an interesting article by Jeffrey Zaslow in The Wall Street Journal today. Zaslow discusses the problems afflicting the relief efforts in Haiti with reminders of the same sorts of missteps in relief efforts aimed at previous disasters:

Every day, we see reminders of the limitations, and even the dangers, of good intentions. In Haiti, U.S. missionaries who said they only wanted to save orphaned children ended up arrested on child-trafficking charges. In Asian countries hit by the 2004 tsunami, residents still shake their heads over the warehouses filled with unusable donations, including winter coats and stiletto shoes. And earthquake-ravaged Chile is sure to receive its share of "useless aid" in the days ahead.

A further problem, of course, is that filling warehouses with useless items is worse than wasteful; it's taking up space that could go to much-needed items. And then there is the issue of visibility and promotion where relief efforts are concerned. An immediate, lethal disaster always draws massive attention and outreach; a low-grade conflict with a gradual churn of horror in an isolated part of the world? Not so much. I have yet to hear of a celebrity demanding attention be directed toward the ongoing human rights catastrophe in the Congo, where the on-and-off civil war-cum-small-scale-uprisings has put nearly 6 million people into graves. Congo has also redefined rape as a war crime; the many individual accounts of vicious, sadistic brutality—no mere gang rape of children here, although that is common enough—are beyond disgusting. But no one's singing "We Are the World" or even "We Are Vaguely Aware of You" for them.

Congo is hardly alone. Conflicts rage all over the world to this day, and disasters plague many nations. The weak and poor are killed with impunity. And aid, whether it comes from government foreign direct investment or through NGOs ... often prolongs the very conflicts and repressions whose depredations the aid seeks to address. It's an awful conundrum. And it never ends.

Zaslow shares the pointd comments of one aid organizer who has her head screwed on straight:

"Throw away your assumptions about what people need," advises Tori Hogan, a 27-year-old activist who has traveled the world studying the effectiveness of aid programs. Beyond Good Intentions, the Cambridge, Mass.-based charity-watchdog organization she founded, posts videos on its Web site that evaluate aid projects.
Ms. Hogan tells of going to a village in Peru where an aid group brought in tourists to help build public toilets. The group ran out of money and time, the tourists ended their volunteering vacations, and the toilets were never completed. The aid group had thought access to restroom facilities was needed to boost living standards, Ms. Hogan says. "But when I asked people in the community what they wanted, they said, 'What we really needed was irrigation, and to have our bridge fixed, so we could take our goods to market.'"
The never-completed toilets were gaping holes that had to be covered. Villagers feared their children would fall in.

I think we all need to remember that the mad rush to help can be even more counterproductive than offering no help at all. Intentions mean nothing if they don't produce lasting good.