I miss youth group

Procrastinator's Link of the Day™: Since I've finally run out of procrastinating time myself, I can't write lengthy commentaries these days, but my last deadline is now a day away and after that I'm sure I'll be able to write something.

In the meantime, this news article is so twisted and bizarre, from the unbelievably asinine youth group to the overly anxious mother inexplicably calling the police, that it needs no further commentary on my part. I'll simply quote one of the juicier bits:

Ms. Metz said at the Nov. 29 Young Life meeting, after her son and two other boys were selected to take part in the skit, they were taken to a rest room by an older teen and given adult diapers, bibs and bonnets and directed to take their clothes off and put the diapers, bibs and bonnets on. Her son took off his pants, but kept on boxer undershorts, his shirt, shoes and socks.

The boys returned to the group, where they were asked to sit in the laps of three girls. The girls spoon-fed baby food to the boys and then gave them baby bottles filled with soda pop. The first boy to finish was the winner.
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The New Christian Economics

Procrastinator's Link of the Day™: Meet Supply-Side Jesus, Al Franken's unholy re-interpretation of Jesus's teachings based on classical economics. (Hopefully the humour is still present without readers having to take a first-year economics course or immerse themselves in Christian conservative notions about politics and the economy.)

Unlike the almost anarchistic Jesus of the original four gospels, Franken's Jesus helps the poor by refusing to give them free handouts, relying on wealth trickling down through rampant consumerism, and eventually sailing to Rome to bceome a politician.

Speaking of trickle-down economics and first-year courses, here's some corrective medicine for students who've been misled to believe Adam Smith was the father of modern capitalism:

"To widen the market and to narrow the competition is always the interest of the dealers ... The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted, till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

"What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."
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Indulgences are Making a Comeback

Procrastinator's Link of the Day™: Reserve your spot in heaven today.

There's limited space, the owners of this website warn, and you don't want to be stuck at the wrong end of a weeks-long lineup at the gates. For $13, you can purchase a unique heaven ID number, an early reservation, and a tourist's guide. I wonder how you're expected to take these items with you.

This is not a sponsored link.
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Miscellaneous Updates

One of my friends has complained that I'm too negative and cynical, and don't put forward solutions to the many problems identified on this blog. Fair enough. I'm actually preparing a more proactive series but in the meantime here are some updates on reactions to recent posts.

More Oral, Anyone?

Readers may remember Richard Roberts, the head of Oral Roberts University, whom God first called to remain at his post despite dubious scandals and abuses. After the Church of the Orange Sky made known its position on the matter, God relented and told Roberts to consider stepping aside. (Alternatively, Roberts, like most evangelical leaders, is habitually taking the Lord's name in vain by making the decision he wants to make and then invoking the G-word as extra justification.) That resignation has now been made permanent, in the wake of a faculty revolt. So long, Richard. Your family's antics were almost enough to earn you an official nickname, up there with Big Gay Ted and Gunrunner Pat, but with a father named Oral, I figured there are enough potential slurs out there already.

The reaction to the allegations among people at ORU is intriguing. One student confesses that the "corruption everywhere" makes the religious school "feel empty, like an elaborate masquerade party." Former regent Carleton Pearson admits that "people are asking questions and questioning answers, and we're not used to it." Well. Hopefully more people keep asking questions. It's a pretty sad university where student radicals don't cause trouble at least once in a while.

In the very latest news, it seems that ORU has fallen into considerable financial difficulties. (Whether this is a result of the huge sums of money squandered by the Roberts dynasty is not clear yet, although I doubt it could have helped.) But that's okay, because a knight in shining armor is already riding to the rescue: Mart Green, owner of the Mardel chain. That's a hilarious store that specializes in "Christian office and educational supplies," perhaps so that you don't have to buy pencils and paperclips from homosexuals who will use the proceeds to fund demonic rituals. I'm not sure what makes one binder Christian and another secular, but for ORU it really doesn't matter: Green is going to pay $70 million to bail out the flailing university, on the condition that it lets two of his family members join the board of regents and separates itself from the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. Sounds like good conditions, actually. Score one for Christian big business.


Why not rather let yourselves be cheated?

So says the apostle Paul in his rambling First Letter to the Corinthians. Ironically, the evangelical Bible-believing Anglicans who've recently proclaimed schism in Canada don't agree with Paul, even though the stated rationale for leaving the Anglican church is that the liberal mainstream in Canada no longer takes the Bible seriously. I guess by Bible they meant "the parts we want to interpret literally," which, interestingly, is very much the same as the definition used by many of the liberals they claim to despise.

Anglican Essentials, the coalition at the centre of the new splinter faction, has released documents to the press pronouncing itself ready to rumble. Ready in the legal sense, that is: the group has retained a Bay Street law firm and is preparing itself for a protracted legal battle to gain control of the church properties owned in breakaway parishes. In true evangelical form, one of the documents notes the "possib[ility]" that church properties could be lost "at the end of the day" -- but this hardly matters, because "that day could be very long coming." In other words, it doesn't matter whether we're in the right or not because we can tangle this up in the judicial system for at least ten or fifteen years. Their boisterous lawyer-director, Cheryl Chang, claims that the Anglican faction is ready to go all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. Chang threatens that her clients will have to pay money, but so will the Anglican Church of Canada. In other words: if the Anglican Church doesn't back down, the Anglican rebels are going to take another big bite out of its already dwindling revenue.

Unfortunately, some anonymous idiot has given the new group $1 million to play with. (Under the circumstance, I can understand wanting to remain anonymous.) Like irresponsible children squabbling over their dead parents' estate, Anglican Essentials has decided it's prepared to squander the money playing games in court instead of taking care of some of the church's real missions in this world, like ministering to congregations or feeding the hungry. It's even decided to ask for a 10% tithe from all members in order to pay for its courtroom crusade.

We remember 1 Corinthians for a variety of different reasons - Paul's chapter on love and works (contrast that with James' faith and works) in chapter 13, his condemnation of denominations and factionalism in chapter 1, his cautions about marriage in chapter 7 (in which marriage is described not as the sacred cow most evangelicals make it out to be, but as a compromise for people who want to get laid but stay Christian). Today's reading, however, is from chapter 6, where Paul claims that it is better to be knowingly cheated by a fellow Christian than to bring shame upon oneself and upon the offending brother (or sister, I suppose) by kicking love and charity to the curb and hauling the case before a secular court. It didn't take long for the new Anglicans to decide paying attention to the Bible wasn't worthwhile after all.
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An Anglican Counter-Reformation?

Some of my friends have accused me of writing extra blog entries lately as a way of avoiding writing my thesis. Well, that's true. The bright side is that followers of the Church of the Orange Sky are treated to my regular ramblings on religion and police brutality. Having already violated my own rules on not discussing politics on this blog, I'm going to preserve what tatters of principle remain by not mixing the two in a single post.

Intrigued by the schism in the Canadian Anglican church, I decided to go to church this morning, at an Anglican church a few kilometres from my apartment. I'm lucky to have a liberal Anglican church within walking distance (or maybe unlucky; I'll bet going to one of the new "South American Canada" churches would have been much more fun). Unfortunately, like most of the Anglican churches I've been to, the average age looked to be about 65. I'll say one thing about the evangelicals, they're damned good at bringing in attractive, impressionable young people. (They also found cult-like missionary groups which, among other activities, conjure exciting acronyms for their projects and post impressive dance videos on YouTube.)

To their credit (at least in the eyes of me, Dave the Heretic), these Anglicans didn't make that big a deal of the so-called spiritual crisis. The priest did spend a couple of minutes on the subject, claiming somewhat dubiously that he "hadn't intended" to talk about the schism but it "just came up" while he was speaking. Right. Well, I suppose it could happen.

The default position of the liberal Anglicans seems to be basically the polar opposite of the Anglican Network I wrote about a couple days ago: the mainstream Anglicans are the real Anglicans, it's too bad that some conservatives feel they no longer want to be part of the church, and it's sad that they've decided it's more important to impose particular interpretations of the Bible and particular positions on social issues like homosexuality than to remain united in Christ by taking communion together. To the liberal churches, acceptance of gays and lesbians is the latest in a series of social issues the church has had to overcome in racial and sexual discrimination over the last three hundred years. As I recall, the Anglicans weren't exactly leading the charge on such issues in the past, nor are they now, given the church's schizophrenic (and some might say hypocritical) stance on blessing gay and lesbian marriages. It's a compelling notion - Anglicanism as ecumenical and inclusive - which doesn't seem to be wholly borne out by the national and global schisms over homosexuality.

(On that note, it seems the conservative churches also intend to "protect" the priesthood from female ordination. Incidentally, this year is the 340th anniversary of Margaret Fell's Women's Speaking Justified, one of the foundational Quaker tracts on women's rights in religious teaching.)

Rebel bishop Don Harvey apparently gave an interview to 100 Huntley Street a day or two ago. That's Canada's evangelical talk show, for those of you who try to avoid religious television; its corporate web page is horribly crowded but contains the requisite invitations to "receive Jesus," request prayer, and "make a donation." Implausibly, Harvey claimed that one of the reasons the Anglican Network approached the South American Anglican church because its headquarters was in the same time zone as Newfoundland. Perhaps Harvey has forgotten that Newfoundland has its own time zone. It's a "short term arrangement... [that] could last for years."

Harvey is almost as good as Gunrunner Pat or Big Gay Ted in his next pronouncements. He explains that the Anglican Church of Canada "is not faithful and is under judgment." Under Harvey's judgment, presumably, since to my knowledge individual preachers still lack the authority to proclaim God's own judgement against the church. (That didn't stop Pat Robertson, for example, from mocking citizens of Pennsylvania for their rejection of creationist textbooks and hinting at divine disasters in store for the state, perhaps aided by cheap assault rifles purchased with Gunrunner Pat's conflict diamonds.) In the close of the summary I've linked to, Harvey tosses ecumenicism to the curb with the typically evangelical claim that there can be no negotiation because "we are standing for... essentials." This is ridiculous. If Harvey really wants to live under South American Anglican jurisdiction, he could always move there and save us the trouble. That way he wouldn't have to step off the reservation and try to provoke a schism.

In the meantime, the Anglican Church's response has not been particularly praiseworthy. Archbishop Fred Hiltz is said to have written a letter, to be read in all churches, denouncing the South American church's interference in Canadian Anglican affairs, and threatening that Anglicans who leave the church will not be permitted to take their church property with them.

It's interesting that the church of tolerance's first organized response to a doctrinal challenge is an attempt to re-impose order by coercing churches back into line through property threats and an attempt to expand what is effectively a border skirmish with South American Anglicanism. If anyone's looking for proof of an international Anglican schism, this is it: the South American church is apparently willing to sponsor Canadian dissentors and no one else in the global communion, either the primate in England or some other regional church, is (at least publicly) willing to mediate or even to speak out on the subject. What the church should do is permit any parish to leave the national church if they feel they are no longer capable of worshipping in fellowship with Canadian Anglicans and want to be South American Anglicans instead. It seems fundamentally wrong that the mainstream church, given its established positions on tolerance and inclusion, would attempt to maintain the status quo through discipline and coercion.

Ideally, an invitation to leave would provoke churches to choose sides, immediately, and if there are enough liberals left in the church (which I believe there are), the inability of the Anglican Network to seduce more than a small handful of breakaway parishes would establish pretty conclusively that the schism is not critical. There have been independent Anglican churches in various places before and hopefully, over the next twenty or thirty years (assuming there are still Anglicans in Canada in thirty years), the present debates will die down and the churches will find some way to make a peaceful reconciliation.

On the other hand, the church hierarchy probably feels it would be taking quite a risk by letting slip the reins of control. It's a battle they really can't afford to lose, since the Anglicans probably have neither the people nor the dollars to found rival churches in breakaway parishes. Even if they win on this issue, establishing the precedent that parishes can make their own decisions about doctrinal issues might do major harm to the ability of the established hierarchy to maintain control over the churches. Ironically, that hierarchy is a large part of the reason the church is in trouble to begin with. When lay people and clergy voted to approve same-sex unions this summer, it was the senior level - the bishops - who vetoed the proposal and fell back on the inane compromise that gay marriages were not anti-Christian but still would not be blessed. That's kind of like saying ordaining women isn't wrong but still probably shouldn't be done, which is still the default position of the Canadian Evangelical Baptists.

So, the Anglican Church of Canada talks of tolerance while threatening top-down punishment, and the Anglican Network of Canada talks of bottom-up revolution while practicising exclusion and soliciting institutional support from South America. Ultimately, though, to both sides this is rapidly turning into a jurisdictional dispute: which group of elites gets to decide, for which churches, what doctrines should be followed and which should be disposed of. Neither is doing much credit to the Erasmus-style ecumenicism which supposedly helped guide the formation of the Church of England in the first place.
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Fun With Tasers, Part 5

Another day, another body. Robert Knipstrom now lies dead in a morgue in Chilliwack, killed by police. Oops.

Saying Knipstrom was killed by taser fire is probably a bit of a stretch, seeing as how he was also subjected to an extensive beating which, according to the police, involved "soft hand tactics," "hard hand tactics," pepper spray, batons, and tasers.

According to the police, an autopsy will determine the cause of death. Perhaps this will be another contrived case of non-existent "excited delirium."
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Fun With Tasers, Part 4

So, the RCMP "revised" their taser policy in August to allow multiple shootings of victims and now this new policy is being blamed by the media for the shooting of Robert Dziekanski. That's an interesting development, one worthy of Noam Chomsky's propaganda model of liberal media.

First off, the media's spent days noting that multiple taser shots is standard practice, even if it's not policy, and has been for quite a while now - whether the subject is resisting, lying handcuffed on the ground, or is refusing to enter a jail cell. (Shooting someone for refusing to enter a jail cell sounds border-line illegal to me, but heck, I'm not a lawyer.) That's also been the conclusion of Amnesty International reports on Canadian policing over the last couple of years, plus a more recent review from a Canadian oversight agency which was partially leaked to the press over the last couple of weeks. Now the truth recedes under a veil of "good intentions."

The police now acknowledge that maybe shooting someone multiple times with a taser might be associated with health risks. Cpl Greg Gilles, one of the RCMP's trainers in BC, admits that "clearly you don't want to do multiple exposures if you don't need to," beacuse it may be "hazardous." But, he adds, "we don't know," and they're going to teach officers to continue shooting people as many times as they want to until more research is done. That's a brilliant strategy. Never let it be said the RCMP would hesitate to fulfill their jobs simply because citizens' lives are put at risk.

Second, the police continue to rely on the old "excited delirium" defence, which, as the media have now picked up on, is actually not a medical condition. That's no problem, say the RCMP: they have determined that it exists. As well as being a policing organization, it seems, the RCMP is also our national medical and pscyhological research agency. Soon we'll be asking them for legal advice and free healthcare too, perhaps.

Accdording to Ontario coroner David Evans, it doesn't matter that "excited delirium" isn't a medical condition because it's actually just a "forensic term." This is even more disturbing. First, it means that we can legally attribute death to a non-existent condition which always occurs after the subject is beaten by police.

Second, it means the police are effectively being taught to decide whether or not to shoot someone based on a cause of death which hasn't actually happened yet. Who the hell has given front line police the authority to diagnose the presence of a psychological condition and to respond with a public and high-tech version of electroshock therapy? Sounds like the formations for an interesting lawsuit.

Edit: Earlier this week, Day said there would be a Border Services Agency review of Dziekanski's killing released by yesterday - the first of what promises to be many official inquiries. Looks like he couldn't be bothered to keep that promise. Well done, minister.
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How to Be the Next L. Ron Hubbard

Catherine has posted an instructional video for aspiring religious leaders.

I wonder how I'm going to afford all those neat blue shirts for my servants.
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New denominations make the baby Jesus smile

I urge you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and in the same purpose... Is Christ divided? - 1 Corinthians

If you don't like the way your current Christian church is being led, you can always just leave and start a new one. This fundamental Protestant principle has resulted in an absurdly number of denominations, many of whom can't really remember why they're different anymore (what, for example, is the current real difference between the Baptist Genral Conference of Canada, the Baptist Union of Western Canada, and the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada?). Usually it's the newer and more agitated Protestants - the spiritual descendants of the Anabaptists, for example - who are accused of religious factionalism. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened the Ottawa Citizen this morning to discover that Anglicans are capable of joining in the factional fun.

Of course, during the inane gay marriage and gay ordination debates of the last few years, there was already a de facto independent Anglican church operating in Vancouver, after some of the churches in one diocese began blessing same-sex unions and some of the other Anglican churches in the province retaliated with the rather petty decision not to share communion with the evil pro-gay people. (Given the decidedly non-central importance of the issue in Jesus's teachings, it's interesting and almost evangelical for Anglicans to decide to effectively declare they don't consider the offending churches to be Christian anymore simply because of an inappropriate stance on homosexuality.)

Now, however, the Anglican Network of Canada, a conservative splinter group within the Anglican church, has decided it's time to give up on the official church and create a rival faction. According to J.I. Packer, one of the theological leaders of the group, the Anglican Church of Canada has been "poisoned" by liberalism, which "knows nothing of a God who uses (the Bible) to tell us things and knows nothing of sin in the heart and in the head." At a meeting in Burlington attended by 260 clergy and lay people, former Manitoba bishop Malcolm Harding proclaimed his allegiance to the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, which is South American. Harding explains that he has "lost hope for reformation." His move followed former Newfoundland bishop Donald Harvey's, last week. Apparently 16 parishes are presently aligned with the Network and more are expected to follow.

The New Westminster bishop who sparked the same-sex problems, Michael Ingham, is not pleased. He accuses the Network of "Orwellian double-speak," which might be a bit of an exaggeration, although there's certainly a great deal of rhetorical bullshit being issued by the Network. For example, their leaders insist that they are not, in fact, "leaving... the Anglican Church of Canada." Instead, everyone else in the Anglican Church has already left, so "we will not see that as a leaving, but as a staying." The logic is so twisted that I find it unlikely anyone with the modest intelligence necessary to become a bishop would actually believe what they're saying, but I suppose anything is possible.

The churches claim that they're doing what's best for God, truth and the Bible (which has become the New Trinity in evangelical circles), but what they're really doing is shifting Anglicanism towards a Protestant denominational pattern. It used to be that the Anglican church had a fairly organized hierarchy: one "church" for one country (or at least one region). Parishes who are now proclaiming the right to join other regions' churches are effectively saying that the church should be reorganized on doctrinal lines rather than geographical ones. They may not like the fact that the Anglican Church of Canada has an inappropriate stance on gay marriage (on the other hand, most tolerant Christians also haven't been too impressed by the rather schizophrenic approach taken by the Anglican Church this year, in which churches refuse to bless same-sex unions but also refuse to declare the unions in opposition to doctrine). But they should drop the fiction of maintaining one mother church, because what they really want is a theological splintering.

On the one hand, I don't like religious institutionalism. I dislike it because it promotes precisely these sorts of problems: the institution links itself to a particular doctrine, usually one which is in no way central to Christianity, and this leads to resistance from others with often equally nonsensical re-interpretations of their faith. Some such people make some effort to reform the current church, but eventually they decide the institution is not worth saving. But resistance is a difficult act in any circumstances, and it's genuinely hard to conceive of what you'd do beyond what you've always known and done. So the solution to the Anglican church of Canada being "decayed" is to start a new Anglican church of Canada, which will probably end up worse than the one it has left: declining membership, an unhealthy fixation with the homosexuality debate, but much less tolerance towards alternative interpretations of Christianity. Those who begin revolutions by storming Bastilles, usually end up building new ones.

On the other hand, the Anglican Church of Canada had a lot going for it, at least from my perspective. In my limited experience, churches claimed to welcome people who considered themselves Christian regardless of their stance on what were seen to be peripheral areas of debate. If Christians are ever going to move beyond petty factionalism, they're going to have to acknowledge that there are many such areas of debate, that these will not be easily resolved, and that ultimately the decision of whether someone is a Christian or not lies between them and God, and is not something to be declared one way or the other by any church. And, despite the formal hierarchy, most of the local Anglican churches I've had friends in have typically had more genuine democratic activity than the Baptist churches I've belonged to, whose community votes frequently felt something like Soviet-style elections, and usually had similarly one-sided outcomes.

The Anglican Network has a website here. Interestingly, one of the three core components of its "identity" is that it is in "serious theological dispute... with the Anglican Church of Canada." That's interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it means that we've expanded the "culture war" to include other Christians as well as the "evil secular liberals," although since many of those evil liberals are also Christians, I suppose this is less of an expansion than it seems. Second, what precisely is going to happen when either the Network becomes an effective independent denomination in its own right, or its "theological" issues with the Anglican Church are eventually resolved? Assuming the Network doesn't fail completely, one of the former two outcomes is going to happen. It's really not very healthy (though it's also not uncommon) when one's religious "identity" is determined in opposition to the identity of others. That basically justifies inter-church conflict as a necessary part of Christianity.

"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
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Fun With Tasers, Part 3

A police propaganda outlet cites a number of recent studies which it claims prove that Tasers are quite safe. Aside from the fact that a study on "safe" weapons from the Canadian Police Research Centre is approximately as credible as the latest "science" papers from the Discovery Institute, these studies are probably quite accurate: there's probably almost no risk at all in being zapped once or twice by a taser under calm, controlled conditions. Unfortunately, for the most part the deaths occur in situations where victims are not calm, are often high, and are typically shot at least several times. Unfortunately most university ethics boards aren't going to approve tests where sleep-deprived undergrads are given large doses of cocaine, shot multiple times with a taser, and then held prone on the ground while a thug in a suit leans on their neck with his knee. Oh, for the days of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.

Regardless of what contrived lab tests can be summoned by the police lobby, the fact remains that in field conditions people are dying after being shot with a taser. Most of these circumstances are ones where police would never consider drawing their guns and deliberately attempting to kill the person - the Dziekanski case is a perfect example of this. Instead, according to the RCMP's civilian complaints commissioner, there is mounting evidence that tasers are routinely used in situations which would previously have been resolved non-violently, as a way of rapidly getting people to comply with police orders. Like taking down an unarmed and non-violent subject in the middle of Vancouver airport, for example. Tasers are publicly claimed to be safe, non-lethal weapons used in situations where much greater physical force would have to be used; yet this is demonstrably not true. Furthermore, given the number of deaths, individual officers cannot really be certain that the victim is going to survive being shot in any given situation. These would seem to be perfectly good reasons to at least sharply restrict the situations in which taser use is permitted.

In the meantime, another oops, this time in Nova Scotia, although the circumstances in this one are pretty vague. That makes at least three dead here in the last two months. As usual, the police are going to investigate the police on the Halifax case. Good thing we know the RCMP never lie to the public about such things.
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Fun with Tasers, Part 2

TASER International is behaving a bit like a combination of doomed religious leaders when they're first accused of wrongdoing (like the exciting case of Big Gay Ted, for example), and entertainment industry cryptographers when their "advanced" schemes to punish their own paying customers go awry. TASER is disturbed by the fact that its weapons, along with a few troglodytes in the RCMP, are being blamed for the execution of Dziekanski at Vancouver airport. Perhaps it's even more concerned that the killing of Dziekanski has given people who've been suggesting tasers are routinely abused by police a public forum for their concerns. I suspect if the man recently shot in Chilliwack also ends up dying (he's now in critical condition in hospital), that may be it for the taser in Canadian law enforcement. Imagine the lost profits!

According to TASER, there's no evidence that their weapons kill people. They blame the mainstream media for "irresponsible" reporting. They're upset by the media attention and so they're now sending legal threats to the "sensationalistic media" for tarnishing the glorious name of TASER. According to chairman Tom Smith, the media is "mislead[ing] the public and could adversely influence public policy." I'll take that risk, if the benefit is not running the risk of being shot and killed by police in Vancouver airport. (One of the official explanation in this case was that tasers had to be used because beating him the old-fashioned way would upset watching witnesses, which, given the circumstances in the video, says a lot about how aggressive the police have become.)

TASER goes on to say that people die after being shot not because of electrical current but because of "excited delirium." They add that "excited delirium" is a "potentially fatal condition" and that Dziekanski showed "the earmark symptoms." That's interesting, because "excited delirium" doesn't appear in my copy of the DSM-IV, and it's not recognized by the American Psychological Association or the American Medical Association, either. In fact, it's a medical-sounding condition that police in Canada and the U.S. have invented to "explain" why extremely agitated prisoners sometimes die of heart problems after being subjected to repeated shocks from a taser.

It's also interesting that the first instinct of every "responsible" political leader in Canada thus far has been to run for cover. If the incident had never been filmed, the RCMP probably would have succeeded in sweeping the incident under the carpet. In fact, they might even have succeeded regardless - the owner of the video, Paul Pritchard, had his video camera confiscated by the police under apparently false pretenses after the execution, and he had to resort to court action in order to get his belongings back. That's why the video appeared in public a week or so ago, even though Dziekanski was killed over a month ago.

This is the latest in a series of incidents where Canadian police forces have proven willing to break the law, harm, or kill Canadians with virtual impunity, then routinely cover up the incident with bald lies. For example, there was the Quebec police's hamfisted attempt to incite riots in Montebello in August, the execution of Ian Bush in a Houston, BC interrogation room in 2005, and police attempts to cover up their assistance to American intelligence services in "deporting" Canadian citizens to Middle Eastern dictatorships in the two years following September 11. Good thing they're here to enforce the law, or I'd be worried.
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Why arrest people when you can kill them?

This is a religious blog and at one point I said there would be no political commentary here. So there won't be.

But I will note that I think the Royal Canadian Mounted Police should stop killing people.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hrjpSO7tQoC5yLurQ42zheGYVKfAD8T136EO1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqdUhotL6Fw

http://www.24hrspodcast.com/index.php?id=345

Apparently shooting unarmed people is fun

According to the latest news, the RCMP have "reassigned" this particular victim's killers. Heh. That's kind of like churches moving accused priests to new parishes, I suppose. Shuffle them along and hope the inquiry doesn't turn up too many embarrassing facts. I'll bet if I walked into the airport and killed someone I'd be more than "reassigned."

Rest in peace, Robert Dziekanski. I'm sorry our supposedly free country couldn't give you a better welcome. May God forgive us for what is done in our name.

According to the news there's now going to be a review of taser policies. I suspect it will be a whitewash, mind you. Perhaps the RCMP could demonstrate good faith by shelving the tasers until the conclusion of the inquiry. The list of people routinely shot while handcuffed and lying on the ground is getting rather long, as is the list of people who die from being shot. So much for our magic non-lethal weapons.

Postscript: My news today (Nov. 21) tells me that Canada's official minister of love, Stockwell Day, is going to have a report released by the end of the week. Here's my recommendations: (a) after a foreign arrival has been detained for ten hours, don't shoot him before at least trying to communicate with him; (b) for that matter, don't shoot anyone who isn't posing an actual physical threat; (c) for God's sake, don't tell the guy's mother, after you've just killed him, that you don't know where he is and that she should just go home and wait for a phone call; and (d) don't lie to the public about what happened until after video evidence from a bystander surfaces a month after the murder, and then claim that the public is "misperceiving" police brutality. A bit of honesty from police spokespeople over the past month might have gone a long way.

Plus, I also have a prediction (which, with the authority of the orange sky, becomes a prophecy): the report will acknowledge that there were "serious errors" in following regulations, propose some banal new procedures for police in responding to problems at airports, and conclude that the people involved acted with the best interests of the public in mind. You know, just like they did when they conspired to help the Americans deport Canadian citizens to the Middle East to be imprisoned and tortured. Or like when they killed Ian Bush in Houston, BC.
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Big Gay Ted: Another One-Year Retrospective (Plus Money Laundering for Dummies!)

This message was commissioned by the official Canadian representative of the Church of the Orange Sky. The Church urges all followers and readers to consider donating to its Big Gay Ted support campaign, since at the moment the Church is dirt-poor on account of a current deficit of rich donors.

A year ago this month, Ted Haggard -- aka "Big Gay Ted" -- was unexpectedly outed by his prostitute and dealer, Mike Jones. To many, the fact that one of the national leaders of the anti-gay marriage movement was himself gay was proof positive of the repressed sexuality and blatant hypocrisy inherent to the modern Christian political movement (or maybe to the Christian religion more generally). Like many people caught in a lie, Haggard first denied everything, then issued a few qualified confessions, then let someone else admit publicly on his behalf that actually pretty much everything Jones alleged was actually true.

What makes Big Gay Ted's unfortunate situation even more ironic is that he played significant roles in a pair of Christian documentaries over the past two years, Jesus Camp and Friends of God. Both were filmed before the Jones incident, though the latter actually came out afterwards, and cheekily reminds viewers of this fact both at the beginning and the ending of the film (just in case you missed it the first time around). Haggard comes across as a little eery in Friends of God, waxing poetic about how Christians have lots of sex and how Christian women have more orgasms. He's genuinely disturbing in Jesus Camp, mugging for the camera in the middle of a sermon, expounding on his "ten year rule about dating" (i.e. if you marry older people, do it for the money), jokingly suggesting that he'll help cover up extramarital relationships for cash, and giggling like the jackass he is. Later he even explains to the documentary crew that he lives a "fabulous life," which I guess was more true than he was willing to admit at the time.

After being outed, Big Gay Ted resigned in semi-disgrace and promised to get his life back on track. He acknowledged that he had been struggling with homosexuality for his entire life. I think this was intended to win the sympathy of his evangelical listeners, who usually have a soft spot for stories about people who fight valiantly against sin and occasionally falter. On the other hand, it does raise the question of why Ted was so cavalier about condemning homosexuality in others if he knew just how difficult the struggle was within his own life. Oh, well. Nobody ever said Christianity had to be compassionate.

The solution to homosexuality, it turns out, is a three-week intensive course in reaffirming heterosexuality. I'm not going to go into detail on this, since it's been covered ad nauseam and I want to move on to current events before I go back to writing my thesis. However, I will note that a gay-to-straight counseling course is an interesting idea. I wonder whether there's a course that can accomplish the reverse, as well. And I also wonder whether there's some sort of final exam you have to pass.

A couple of months ago, it turns out, Haggard re-emerged on the religious scene with a new fundraising request. In late August, he sent an emailed request for money, saying that he was planning to work for the Phoenix Dream Center (a halfway house for homeless people and recovering addicts), while working towards a master's degree at the eminent University of Phoenix.

According to a recent article at Christianity Today, Haggard sent the request to "friends." This may be a very loose interpretation of the word, since when the request first went out in August, CT's blog declared shenanigans on this, saying it was probably "sent to a lot of people." Lots indeed; at least one included an ABC reporter, which might have been a bit of a tactical blunder on Haggard's part.

At this blog, readers are always encouraged to make their own judgement, so here's a copy of the letter, posted by ABC's subsidiary KRDO. The letter does start off as though it's on a first-name basis, but it does have most of the hallmarks of a standard form letter: a generic appeal for "people" to send money, a request to forward this on to anyone else who "might have an interest," and so on. Somewhat disturbingly, Haggard actually proposes that his would-be supporters send the money via the Families with a Mission charity in order to claim a tax deduction. Families with a Mission will deduct a 10% fee for playing the intermediary. In secular society, we call this "money laundering" - or, at the very least, tax evasion. Suddenly that "tax war on evangelicals" thing I mentioned a couple of posts ago is starting to sound like a good idea after all. Perhaps Big Gay Ted is looking forward to a new career in organized crime (or should I say, resuming his career in organized crime?).

Why Big Gay Ted needs money is not immediately apparent. His last job, according to Christianity Today, paid him $200 000 the year he left, plus a $140 000 severance package. Then there's the royalties from his book sales, though these have no doubt declined since Ted's fabulous double life was revealed to the world. He also owns a $700 000 home in Colorado. Even if Ted's been spending money like a drunken lord, he should still be in a lot better shape financially than I've been since I started grad school myself, even considering the fact that he has a family to look after. (Though it does raise the question of why, in a world full of poverty and misery and supposed gay conspiracies, any church has enough extra money to pay its pastors with six-figure salaries.)

In addition, according to CT, it turns out that Big Gay Ted has gone off the reservation with this latest request. His committee of "overseers," who are responsible for making sure he stays straight this time around, has condemned the money request as an "unacceptable" act, and the Phoenix charity, the Dream Center, apparently has no intention to employ Haggard. Instead, "he will be seeking secular employment to support himself and his family." Oops. So much for the laundering scheme.

On behalf of the Church of the Orange Sky, I have decided that I will financially support Big Gay Ted myself, by kicking off the Big Gay Ted Support Campaign. After Ted dismisses his overseers, apologizes for the harm he has caused during his years of anti-gay campaigning, acknowledges that he is in fact homosexual and admits that sexual orientation is not in fact a matter for national debate, I will personally write a cheque for $500 for Ted and his family. Sorry I couldn't sweeten the pot further, Ted, but I'm a student myself, see. After paying for the prostitutes and the crystal meth, there's not much left for charity cases. However, I am happy to forward donations from other interested parties through the Support Campaign. I can't promise the same tax benefits that Haggard did in his original letter, but on the bright side, I can guarantee none of us will get hauled away for tax fraud.
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Why Christians Should Embrace the "War on Christmas"

The Church of the Orange Sky defies Satan's imposition of secular humanism upon North American culture. People wishing to contribute to the Christmas wars may do so through donations to the Prophets for Profit Institute, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky.

I've finally obtained my copy of Friends of God, last year's documentary on the evangelical movement from Alexandra Pelosi, and may write about it shortly. The movie is a bizarre montage of Christian cultural experiences from across the U.S. - "Christian" wrestling, children's songs about dinosaurs co-existing with man (but nothing from the Flintstones, unfortunately), the "Holy Land Experience" Christian amusement park, Pat Robertson (aka "Gunrunner Pat") calling on his university students to pimp Republican Party candidates, and one of my favorites, Ted Haggard (aka "Big Gay Ted"), just before his unexpected coming-out incident, expounding on the importance of the female orgasm. Amidst the unintentional hilarity, one of the common underlying themes was the sense of an ongoing war against secular liberal elements who were trying to destroy Christianity in America. It's a common theme in contemporary Christianity and it's come up a lot on this blog. Today's topic is a little more specific: the so-called "war on Christmas."

The war on Christmas, to many conservatives, is a microcosm of what's wrong with liberals. Every November and December the Christian forums light up with angry complaints that liberals are stealing Christmas, renaming it the "holiday season," and destroying our Christian heritage. Even non-Christians I know sometimes complain about the reduction of Christmas as a form of asinine political correction gone mad. A few years ago, I used to earn a few extra dollars playing the piano for schools and other groups who needed a pianist for background music, singing, or whatever else. I remember playing for one Christmas singalong at a school where the principal approached me and apologetically said we'd have to select the music in advance and make sure there was nothing offensive in it. At the time I was still going to a properly conservative Baptist church and thought this was great confirmation of the need for our war on secular culture. (Not great enough, though, to walk out on principle and proclaim myself a victim of persecution; after all, $50 is still $50.)

In the past I've always deplored the fact that the Christmas season - or the holiday season - now starts in November or even October, so it's kind of ironic that I'm bringing this topic up so early. However, I'm not the first. Bill O'Reilly started the game off early, and here's a summary (this version comes with convenient progressive commentary as a bonus). According to Oo'Reilly and his friend, Colorado radio host Dan Caplis, Colorado town Fort Collins is buying some first-class tickets to hell for their decision to use "white lights" rather than "colored lights" on their "holiday trees." Caplis, with O'Reilly nodding in approval, explains that the end of "colored lights" at Christmas is "something out of the old Soviet Union." Last year, O'Reilly apparently launched his war in late October, which moves the Christmas date even earlier than most of his secular "holiday season" foes. At the time, the target was the right's favourite whipping-boy, the American Civil Liberties Union, which rates highly on the growing list of targets whom the religious right believes exists in a state of exception. (That's a technical philosophical term from Giorgio Agamben; basically it refers to situations in which you claim to defend laws by breaking them, like fucking for virginity, fighting for peace, or showing the love of Christ by calling your enemies evil lesbian Satanists who eat babies.)

But that's enough about jumped-up talk show hosts cloaking their bigoted patriotism in a false cloak of religious grandeur. Today's topic is a microcosm of a microcosm: the war on the Christmas tree. I actually discovered this before discovering O'Reilly's latest ramblings. Lowe's home improvement chain was busted by the conservative propaganda outlet Cybercast News Service for publishing a Christmas catalog which referred to "family trees" instead of "Christmas trees." Actually, this is an interesting new development; usually they're called "holiday trees" by the politically correct, and I would have thought a renewed emphasis on the family would be welcomed by the religious right.

Obviously I was wrong. The American Family Association sent out an "Action Alert" by email denouncing Lowe's decision to "avoid the use of the term 'Christmas tree.'" As usual, the AFA claims this is an insult to Christians: "Lowe's evidently did not want to offend any non-Christians; therefore, they replaced 'Christmas tree' with 'family tree. Of course, if Christians are offended, that is evidently OK." Give me a break, you polemical jackasses. How in God's name are you actually "offended" by the fact that some large store is failing to make the logical link between small pine trees and Jesus Christ?

Maureen Rich, Lowe's spokeswoman, backtracked by calling the publication a "complete error" and a "breakdown in our creative process." Rich is lying, of course. Calling Christmas trees Christmas trees is not a function of "creativity" - if anything, the creativity involved was in coming up with a new name, not in misapplying an existing one. She added a preemptive defence for the catalog itself, which is called a "holiday catalog" rather than a Christmas catalog because it is intended to serve for all holidays between October and January.

Now, the fact that the Christmas tree has become a fixed point of the battle for Christmas is particularly interesting given that it's probably the only real aspect of our present holiday rituals that actually gets mentioned in the Bible. That's right, all you doubters: Jeremiah 10 speaks of the pagans cutting trees in the forest, bringing them home, and "adorn[ing them] with silver and gold. With nails and hammers they are fastened, that they may not totter." It's eery. In fairness, this is actually talking about the creation of idols by pagan societies, and this point is eagerly brought up by the Bible's eager defenders, like BibleInfo.com.

It's a legitimate point, and my argument here isn't that Christmas is a pagan holiday and Christians shouldn't celebrate it, although you can presumably find thousands of pages to that effect on the Web, some written by a minority of far-right Christian fundamentalists who think the King James Bible is the defining achievement of human civilization, and others written by an equally idiotic minority of neo-pagans who think the Catholic Church stole its religion wholesale from early European "old religions."

My real point is that Christians should think carefully about what part of Christmas they're willing to go to "war" to defend as "Christian." (I use war very loosely here, as do they; while "Gunrunner Pat" Robertson merrily uses Christian aid jets to help Liberian and Congolese warlords mine diamonds and buy AK-47s, the culture "war" in America involves a lot of ranting, a lot of condemnation, but no direct action to speak of. Hell, even Gandhi would be disappointed by what usually passes for evangelical "war"-fighting.)

In this case, we have religious groups claiming that Christianity is somehow threatened by the fact that Lowe's thinks trees aren't Christian. More broadly, though, we have Christians claiming that what's wrong with this country is the fact that people aren't willing to describe two and a half months of frantic consumerism -- most of which is conducted in the name of bourgeois icon "Santa Claus," about whom parents routinely lie to their young children -- as being "Christmas." Well, I say good for them. That's not "Christmas," at least not in any meaningful sense of what most evangelicals claim Christmas should be (i.e. reverence for the birth of Christ).

If Christians want Christmas to be about the celebration of the incarnation of the Lord in human form, then that's what they should make it about. It's really quite striking that so many Christians are so insecure and uncertain about their faith that they don't feel they would be able to celebrate Christmas without making sure everyone else in society is celebrating it along with them. I suggest that we let the vague new "Holiday Season" appropriate every aspect of modern consumerism that its proponents want it to. This doesn't make Christmas weaker: by contrast, it makes it stronger. The "Holiday Season" becomes defined by the selfish materialist obsessions of modern capitalism, in which the best way we can think of to show our love for other people is to shower them with unnecessary gifts. This makes our spiritual celebration of the Lord even more striking in its contrast. So I say let the evil secular humanists have their family trees. We never needed them anyways.
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Jesus Drives an SUV: A One-Year Retrospective, plus Dollar and his Dollars

The Church of the Orange Sky is happy to endorse this entry by one of the true authors of the third-best religious blog in Canada.

About a year ago the righteous authors of this blog, inspired by their ordination into one of the world's largest churches (at least if you count based on the number of ordained ministers), posed the question: What would Jesus drive? Our innovative answers came from an important interdisciplinary perspective backed by years of experience at the cutting edge of revolutionary politics and academic research.

A year later, this blog has earned massive international attention. We routinely get visitors from as far away as Europe, South America, and Japan. I used to be able to keep track of this when I had a stat counter on this blog, but then I modified the template and the stat counter vanished. Fortunately for you, the reader, that means we're no longer collecting personal information about you and your computer without covering our butts with a vague privacy policy.

Even better, last year we rocketed to the top of the famous Canadian Blog Awards, which sadly do not appear to have come round for another go this fall. In the end the fair and entirely incorruptible awards process voted us the third-best religious blog in Canada.

More importantly, though, we have answered the question posed by the marketing campaign which inspired the creation of this site, and according to Google, we've done it better than anybody else. The only person who outranks us on the subject of "Jesus drives", it turns out, is Leonard Sweet, who's flogging a book on how Jesus drives him crazy, which I suspect isn't actually true. (Dr. Sweet is cordially invited to consider contributing a free PDF of his book to the great electronic library proposed in a recent column from the Church of the Orange Sky). In the spirit of fairness, I should note another site, actually called What Would Jesus Drive?, which adopts a more literal approach to answering the question.

This blog has also contributed to the downfall of important individuals. For example, shortly after the Church of the Orange Sky denounced the ruling dynasty of Oral Roberts University for their flippant abuse of supporters' holy money, God took the almost-unprecedented step of reversing his own decree on the subject and calling away president Richard Roberts for an indefinite leave.

So, reader, you've probably observed by now that the authors of this blog are neither as prolific nor as consistent in their postings as you might like. But this is an important blog with global influence, and your loyal support has made it that way, so thank you for your support over the past year and please come back in the future for more long-winded monologues on important subjects relevant to everyone's lives.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, it seems that this blog's celestial calling - to smite the evil amongst us - remains just as relevant as ever. Some recent publicity-seeking hearings by secular humanist politicians in the U.S. has netted much new exciting information about prosperity theology salesman Creflo Dollar, who, along with his wife Taffi, heads up Creflo Dollar Ministries and World Changers Church International. My suspicions that the Dollars were in it for, well, the dollars were provoked by the many gifts Dollar has been given for his faith: two Rolls-Royces, three private jets, and expensive digs in Georgia and New York. Someone once said, "if you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to." Well. Congratulations, Creflo. I'd say God-damn your prosperity theology, but I am somewhat impressed by your ability to take cynical sarcasm and turn it into real life.

The Senate investigation of Dollar is apparently part of a campaign by senator Chuck Grassley to investigate evangelical profiteering, which apparently might be tax fraud given that it's done through religious "non-profit" organizations. Also on the list of suspects are Kenneth Copeland, Bennie Hinn, Eddie Long, and others. I was very interested to learn that Dollar, Hinn and Copeland are all members of the Board of Regents at the decadent and disreputable Oral Roberts University. Other than all being members of the evangelical backbone cabal, I wonder what qualifies these fraudulent chuckleheads to rule an academic institution.

On the one hand, Grassley's neo-McCarthian witch-hunt will probably win him some votes, and he's very carefully insisting that he's not proposing any new laws, just enforcing existing ones (the ones that say you can't use a non-profit society to make a profit, or to fund a political movement, or a few other things that churches routinely do and routinely denounce). He's making that distinction, I suspect, in order to give him a defence against the religious right, which will soon be protesting persecution at the hands of the "secular humanists." However, as you may have guessed from the first sentence of this paragraph, I still think it's a terrible idea.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dollar and his ilk are a combination of hypcocritical, fraudulent, and pitiful. If Dollar really loved God, maybe he'd sell one of his Rolls Royces. (Perhaps he could sell the car, use the money to buy HIV medication for one of MSF's projects in sub-Saharan Africa, and then use one of his private jets to fly the medicine across the pond for them.) And Grassley, as a senator, certainly does have a right to insist that people follow the laws. But I really don't see this being very useful, for a couple of reasons.

First off, he's targeting religious organizations and it's going to be pretty tough to conclusively establish that religious leaders are making an illegal profit without stepping over a lot of sensitive boundaries in terms of government interference in religious practice. The implication is that Grassley is the people's hero, fighting for the little guy against the evil Dollar. But everyone donating to Dollar, or Copeland, or Hinn, already knows that those guys are taking out a fair amount of money for their religious "services." Those people who don't know, could easily find out, if it concerned them. And many of them, perhaps most of them, really don't care.

Last year the Toronto Star, up here in Canada, ran a similar exposé on a megachurch in Toronto, the idiotically named Prayer Palace, though without the added benefit of a Senate hearing with powers to subpoena witnesses. The Star described the largesse of the pastors, most of whom are part of a single father-and-sons team and all of whom have expensive cars, expensive houses, and vacation homes in Florida, which the paper suggested might have been partially paid for directy from church coffers. It also described the gripping poverty of some of the church members, many of whom have salaries far below the national average yet still put hundreds of hours of work and thousands of dollars of money into various church-related projects.

I honestly think the writers at the Star thought plenty of those people would be indignant at being manipulated. Whether or not that was what they expected, though, it definitely didn't happen. The pastors denounced the Toronto Star during the next church service and, while undercover reporters watched in stunned silence, encouraged willing parishioners to race up to the front and toss their savings onto huge piles of cash in order to "prove" their faith in the church's leadership.

Second, and related to the first, I suspect Grassley's actions are just as likely to incite retaliation from the religious right as it is to expose to the underlings of that movement the hypocrisy of its leadership. There's an intriguing siege mentality in the churches right now and people are quick to jump on each new instance of "growing persecution" of Western Christians, a notion which might seem unbelievably asinine but is readily accepted by millions of evangelicals. Grassley has picked some targets which might well fall easily - after all, plenty of conservative evangelicals hold people like Dollar and Hinn in great contempt, denouncing prosperity theology as liberal heresy. But getting the government involved in religion strikes me as a good way to bring the various conservative splinter denominations together against "secular persecution."

The notion of persecution through the tax laws isn't an original one, either. Last month, James Dobson spent almost all of his monthly Focus on the Family newsletter ranting about a "liberal attack" on his group. The IRS, you see, investigated Focus on the Family for violating the tax laws by claiming to be a nonprofit while engaging in partisan political activity. Showing that grace and compassion which Christians everywhere are well known for, Dobson seized the opportunity of being acquitted of wrongdoing to launch into an extended, vitriolic attack on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Way to turn the other cheek, Dobson. We must repay the liberals eye for an eye or God might lose the culture wars!

I have a fantastic solution, which actually might suit Dobson too, since Focus on the Family is a nominally secular organization: let's revoke all tax-exempt status for religious organizations. This is something a few of my non-religious friends have been suggesting for a while, but I have a different reason for it.

Every organization which at some level sets itself against mainstream culture (realistically or just rhetorically) has to make decisions about how many compromises it's going to make in order to maintain a permanent institution. The church has made a lot of such compromises, in part because in the distant past it saw the surrounding society as being basically Christian, as opposed to the "culture war" mentality which has re-emerged over the last few decades. As a youth leader my actions were constrained by contracts signed in order to maintain insurance policies; as a church member we voted in accordance with sham bylaws in order to protect the church's legal status under the provincial Societies Act; as a collective body Christians demand various rights like tax-free church status, which there is really no reason for us to have.

I can conceive of a few rationalizations to protect the church's tax-free status, most of which relate to the argument that the church is providing a valuable social service (like other charities and non-profits) and therefore the money shouldn't be taxed by the government because we want to encourage donations to such socially valuable organizations. But that doesn't hold a lot of water. For one thing, the church might provide social services, but if we want to maintain any pretense of the separation of church and state, it has to go both ways: we shouldn't be taking benefits from the state any more than we should be accepting constraints from the state. There is no cooperative relationship between church and society in some grand project to heal our society. Or at least there shouldn't be according to me, Blaisteach the Anarchist. Religious projects with government backing will eventually want to make use of the core service of government - legal force - which is something Christianity as a basically dissenting, non-coercive religion, should never touch.

The obvious response to this is that if church money is taxed it will mean two things: people may be less willing to give money to the church for fear of loxing tax deductions, and churches (at least some of which will then decide to reorganize as for-profit corporations or some other type of taxable entity) may have to pay out taxes too, further shrinking the dwindling funding pool available to our churches. That's not really a very good argument, though. There is no inherent reason why almost any of our religious activities as Christians needs to be funneled through a legally separate organization with its own bank accounts, executive managers, and other apparatus. We could find other, more personal, more direct ways of serving Christ, I'm sure, and perhaps we'd be better it, as well. Tax-free status doesn't protect Christianity or Christians: it protects institutions.

Ultimately, though, what worries me as a Christian is what any real anxiety over the tax laws says about how we run our churches. The New Testament wasn't written in a society we would today think of as a democracy, and even within that society, none of its writers were in a position to exercise any political power. So none of them thought to give us advice on what to say about tax laws. However, we ought to recognize that money doesn't belong to us, it doesn't belong to the church, and it only "belongs" to God in the sense that we assign god ultimate authority over everything on earth. Money belongs to the government and to the social order that the religious right insists is evil and secular. If they really wanted to separate themselves from the evil secular materialist worldly order of things, they wouldn't care what money was taxed or at what rate.

So, my radical solution to this contrived battle over religious non-profits' right to tax exemptions is that we extend the notion of the separation of church and state. In innumerable discussions with (particularly) American Christians over the last several years, I've lost count of the number of times I've been told "well, that's not really in the Constitution, you know." I don't think it's in the Canadian one, either, come to think of it. And I don't really care. Something does not become justifiable or unjustifiable on the basis of being written down as a government law. In this case, in any event, freedom from paying taxes doesn't protect Christians, it protects one particular form of organized "Christian" institutions, and I don't think government ought to have any role in protecting a religious organization. The church could use a little revolution now and then.

Finally, I close with an inspirational Scriptural passage for the day: flip over to Numbers 22 to see God literally talk out of his ass.
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Selling Salvation

This article is a policy statement from the Church of the Orange Sky. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent Capitalist Jesus™ in his new SUV.

Several days ago I invented a fantastic solution to the problem of gay marriage in Canada, at least for people who favour small government solutions whenever feasible. As a lapsed socialist and current anarchist, I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I'm pleased to announce it has passed peer review in British Columbia and Ontario. However, the grand unveiling will have to wait a little while, for the anniversary of the last gay marriage vote in Canada. (For those counting, that was the third vote in the third Parliament, tabled by the third Prime Minister. It's oddly trinitarian.)

After the 2005 vote under Martin, back when I was still writing at Notes from the Abattoir, I predicted that we would not see a sustained campaign from the religious or secular right now that gay marriage had been effectively legalized. This was for several reasons: it's a lot more difficult to motivate support to overturn a law than to prevent one from being passed; a lot of people probably came to realize that the sky has not fallen; and, let's face it, the contemporary Western church is really not very good at real political opposition. Maybe that's for the best, since the church should never really be a political movement anyways. The church isn't the only one to fall prey to this problem; a lot of protests don't last long once the issue is cemented into law and fails to provoke mass civil disobedience.

I did a little reading on the Web and confirmed that many of the marriage-defence sites seem to have started to abandon the issue; DefendMarriage.ca has not moved on from its 2006 petition campaign yet (and in fact has lost its separate domain name), Restore Marriage Canada hasn't updated its site since 2006 either, etc, etc. Many of the organizations should be transitioning back to a general Focus on the Family type of approach, like the Institution of Marriage and Family Canada, which held a conference on "good economic policy in support of good family policy," which sounds a bit like "social conservatives" adopting social democrat approaches to social problems if you ask me.

Anyways, along the way I came across ChristianGovernment.ca, which revived my interest in another topic I've considered before. The site doesn't obviously sound like it's going to be an advertisement, and the main page even makes a token effort at raising some rhetorical points: "Christian civil government" is federalist, decentralist, and an "act of service" (to this end, it points out that senior politicians are called "ministers" in deference to "the Christian worldview," which teaches that politicians should be servants, not tyrants."

First off, this romantic myth of Christianity as the source of democracy and accountable government is getting very tiring. Historically, both the Jewish and Greek variants of early Christianity were explicitly dissenting movements with no great interest in political power. Political mechanisms were grafted on later, mostly borrowed from Greco-Roman political philosophy, which is where the actual concepts of political servant-leadership comes from. For every historic Christian source defending federalism, there are at least two more defending the divine right of kings and various other notions which don't fit our Christian democracy myth.

For the moment, however, I'm concerned with something else going on at the site, which is that it's really a gimmick intended to sell Timothy Bloedow's book on the subject, State vs. Church: What Christianity Can Do to Save Canada From Liberal Tyranny. You click on the "Buy!" link and Bloedow thanks you for visiing the web page, insists that "this book will be an encouragement and benefit" to readers fighting "Canada's culture war" (whatever the fuck that is), and offers the book for a fairly standard price of $20 (paperback).

We've all read this sort of article. Either on the Internet (as in this case) or in one of the countless Christian magazines out there, someone writes a column with some vaguely intriguing ideas about an important issue and closes with a couple paragraphs about how their book addresses the issue in more detail and everyone who's interested should buy said book. The "culture warriors" of the religious right make their pitch in militarist language, conveniently not-quite-mentioning the fact that, like arms manufacturers in every age, they stand to make big profits if you decide to join their culture war (in this case via the bookshop rather than the battlefield).

The intersection of business and religion is one that is inherently difficult to navigate. Churches have this problem, too; but the benefit of churches is that they are almost entirely donation-based. In most cases, people won't even look funny at you if you routinely receive the services of the church without actually contributing money in return. For the most part I don't really like the economic model of the Protestant church, but I have to admit one benefit: if you want to (or have to) free-ride, you can do so without too much difficulty. There's a fairly important theological rationale for this: most churches implicitly, and many churches explicitly, market their version of the truth as quite literally a matter of life and death. It would be deeply immoral, not to mention devastatingly unbiblical, to grant and withhold such truth on the basis of material wealth.

In the context of the church, the Biblical writings we have from the early church more or less bear out this argument, and to our credit this is something we've actually maintained, at least in part. James, from the Jewish side of the early church, wrote in his epistle that believers ought not to show favoritism to the wealthy by giving choice seats to "a man... wearing a gold ring and fine clothes," while directing a poor man "in shabby clothes" to sit on the floor. This was because, James reasoned, God has "chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith." Taken literally, this would seem to be going almost as far as liberation theology in specifically linking God with the poor, against the rich (who he later accuses of "exploiting" the church and "slandering the noble name" of Christ). A lot of evangelicals today would be uncomfortable with such an anti-materialist and anti-capitalist argument, but at least most of us have preserved the principle of free teaching in church.

Christian writing is a bit of a different story. Not that there's really an extreme shortage of reading material from pretty much any branch of the religion, available online. And if you time it right, you can often get a fair chunk of evangelical literature free of charge. I've known groups willing to hand out Lee Strobel's somewhat contrived Cases books, and I've also seen free attacks on The Da Vinci Code handed out by evangelical groups on campus. However, for the most part the Christian publishing industry operates the same way as its secular counterpart, with the twin exceptions of a more focused market and frequent claims that its books hold major significance for your life, in this world and maybe in the next as well. So my question is: why does written spiritual truth always come with a price tag?

There's a very good historical reason for books to cost money: they're expensive to produce. In past centuries, this cost was not merely inconvenient but truly extreme. Until the invention of the printing press, a single copy of any decent-sized book would require many months, and often years, of labour. Gutenberg's original printing press was derived from existing and predominantly East Asian woodblock printing, which did make printing easier - once you'd engraved the text, page by page, into a wood template. And that was only the writing bit - parchment required large amounts of hide, ideally (for the best quality vellum) from stillborn or unborn animals. Gutenberg's first Bible required 300 sheepskins - meaning that, even with movable type, Europe lacked the resources for mass book printing until paper was made from linen and hemp rags.

Even with the comparatively cheap ink and paper of today, books do still have to be printed, and as I understand it the publishing industry still takes the lion's share of the book price in compensation for providing this service. There are only a handful of books which one can easily get without paying someone for it, and for the most part they're religious texts like the Bible and Koran, purchased on your behalf by someone else willing to cover your costs.

Beyond covering production costs, however, books are copyrighted to preserve profitability, and here the Christian publishing industry could - but does not - provide any challenge to the prevailing capitalist model. At the moment, even most of our in-print Bible translations are under copyright protection - for example, the International Bible Society holds the text of the New International Version, and it is published exclusively by Zondervan, which is one-quarter of the Grand Rapids publishing cabal which holds a stranglehold on North American evangelical book publishing. The others are Eerdmans, Baker, and Kregel, and taken together they're the major partners of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, the Christian publishing lobby, which together does $2.3 billion in business each year. Since the 1980s, Zondervan has been mostly owned by Harper Collins, which serves the same general-purpose role in the secular world as Zondervan does in the religious one. HarperCollins is in turn owned by News Corporation, which means that every time you buy an NIV Bible, you're lining the pockets of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News.

The NIV is a common translation and this network of intellectual property is also common. The New King James Version is "owned" and published by Thomas Nelson, a Scottish firm which, with its network of subsidiaries, has grown to include educational presses, Thomson Corporation, Nelson Thornes, etc. It also owned the American Standard Version once upon a time, but sold the rights to an NGO in 1928 and lost its exclusive publishing contract in 1962 after failing to meet the demand for new printings. The American Thomas Nelson later bought the Christian music label Word from ABC, spun it off to Gaylord Entertainment, then bought the Cool Springs, World Bible, and Rutledge Hill presses; and also founded the dubious conservative propaganda and "news" site, WorldNetDaily. Today it's owned by InterMedia Partners (which bought the company for $500 million last year) and manages a number of profitable conferences, like Women of Faith and Revolve.

Given these tie-ins, perhaps it's no surprise that Christian book publishers are indistinguishable from secular ones: in many cases, they're the same people. Kind of ironic, considering the things some of those books have to say about the evils of secular modernity. Some other Bible versions are owned by non-profits, like the New American Standard Bible (NASB), which is owned by the Lockman Foundation and published by that foundation's own Foundation press; or the English Standard Version, owned and distributed by Crossway Bibles (a subsidiary of Good News Publishers). However, even being a nonprofit evidently isn't enough to convince the Lockman Foundation or Good News Publishing that they ought to relinquish their ownership "rights" to the supposed words of God. Oxford and Cambridge university presses run a translation scheme too, which has produced the English Revised, New English, and Revised English translations.

Using the Bible as my example may be a bit extreme, and it's not generally too hard to find parts of any translation online in searchable databases, or even to find translations that are old enough to be in the public domain (like the King James Version). However, the absurd idea that one can "own" the text of 2000-year-old religious scriptures is one that need not be endorsed by the Christian community. There's no immediate need to rise up and seize these translations back from the publishing cabals, since for the most part anyone who wants an English-language Bible can get one, at least here in North America; but it should give us pause to consider where to draw the line between commercial interest and the dissemination of ideas about religious truth. At the very least, this could be easily carried over into the release of free online versions by some of the authors who currently spend so much time flogging their new books on Christianity in the 21st century, Christianity in the culture wars, or even Christianity with respect to some other more interesting topic I'd be seriously interested in reading about. If we're serious about promoting discussion amongst religious people, and also potentially religious people (i.e. converts with thick wallets), surely we are as wrong to tie up the discussion in potentially expensive legal protection as we would be to charge entrance fees to listen to pastors' sermons.

The standard capitalist response to what I'm suggesting is that there isn't going to be any more written innovation - i.e. more books - if there's no way to make a profit from them. This isn't a very good rationale among Christians, and it does suggest that we as the Christian consumers bear part of the blame. In theory there's no particular reason why we shouldn't think it natural and normal to give at least something back to the author with or without being legally required to do so. On the other hand, the dubious value of self-interest (our weak version of what would otherwise be called "greed") is hammered into us since childhood, inside and outside the church, and so except among friends we generally don't think about value except in terms of exchanging money. The only movie I've ever downloaded then considered sending some compensation for, for example, is The Corporation, and that one only because the producers took the innovative step of releasing a "shareware" version to the file-sharing networks, which is exactly the same as the standard version except for a brief spiel at the beginning encouraging viewers to send in donations if they enjoy the film.

There are conceivable compromises between the status quo on the one hand, and throwing everything into the public domain and trusting one's fickle readers on the other. The open source computing community, for example, has achieved growing success with free and copyleft licenses, which retain legal "ownership" while permitting people to copy and redistribute the book however they wish, including giving away copies for free. Many companies in the field offer free source versions downloadable over the Internet, but make their money selling hardcopies and customer support to consumers who need something more solid than an unsupported downloaded file.

In theory, many of the major writers in the evangelical field should be okay with these ideas. James Dobson, for example, says that, at least for his followers and listeners, he waives all royalties on his publications "to obtain the lowest possible price from the publisher." There's an even cheaper price - $0 - which could be obtained if Dobson were to post a PDF of his presumably very important books online. On the other hand, if this were done on a large scale, publishers might be less willing to publish the print versions, and that in turn would rob Dobson of his royalties from non-listeners, who (at least according to the link above) may not be eligible for the royalty-free book sales.

To see the future of Christian publishing, perhaps we can return once again to examining Bible translations. A handful of new versions, like the Updated King James Version (UKJV), literally are new works deliberately declared to be in the public domain. The World English Bible, which is still being prepared, is supervised by Rainbow Missions, which has waived its copyrights and will place the entire translation in the public domain. A Wiki-based translation, the Free Bible, is even underway here, which, if it ever goes anywhere, should prove very interesting. If worst comes to worst, Christian authors may even have to feed themselves by making tents during the day, like Paul did.

Once book publishing has been reformed a little perhaps people can start paying attention to the even worse state of the Christian music industry, which has managed to convince churches to pay annual "licensing fees," albeit minimal ones, for the privilege of having worship music available every Sunday (see, for example, Christian Copyright Licensing International). The big Christian record labels are also owned by the big record labels. ForeFront, Gotee, Sparrow, Tooth and Nail, Chordant and a few others are owned by EMI Christian Music Group, which, as the name suggests, is a subsidiary of EMI. Word Records and its various holdings (Myrrh, Canaan, DaySpring, Rejoice, etc.) followed a long and twisted path from ABC to Thomas Nelson, Gaylord, Time Warner, and finally Warner Music Group. Provident, which holds Brentwood, Essential, Flicker, Gray Matters, Reunion, and Praise Hymn Music Group, is actually Sony BMG's Christian music division. This corporate mega-structure isn't necessarily a problem if we want to see religious music as a major commercial venture - let's just not delude ourselves about what we're doing by coating it in charitable religious language.
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The Reverend Reads the Bible

The Praxis Institute, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky, is pleased to present a revolutionary new perspective on the Christian Bible. The Church regrets that its authorized spokesman may have erred in representing one of the links in a previous post. Please be assured the individual in question will be stoned as soon as possible to preserve our honour.

An update to my previous post - The Sword of Gryffindor, which I linked to in the previous post, has prepared some lengthier reflections on the "culture war" with respect to Harry Potter. I think the suggestion of stepping away from the usual liberal-conservative categories has some merit. Kudos to the people who didn't see this as a big deal, and to the ones who used it to suggest a future beyond "culture wars." The religious right has begun to grumble a little, too - Laura Mallory thinks this is further "indoctrination" into "anti-Christian values," and people at the "Values Voters" summit think the injection of homosexuality into the series makes it too "political." I'm fascinated by how making a character gay makes him (or her) intrinsically "political," when him being implicitly heterosexual was politically irrelevant. In any event, this is hopefully the end of my present interest in Harry Potter and I will say no more about it, except perhaps to note that my frustration in this case applies in similar form to people hunting for homoeroticism in The Lord of the Rings or Fight Club.

A message from one of the Mad Reverends - I've found what could have been our blog's anthum, though sadly we had nothing to do with the production or distribution of it: WWJD? (A Music Video). Asinine, hilarious, and heretical, all at the same time - ideals to which I also aspire.

This blog has sort of a disturbing pattern: both of its mysterious authors both vanish for months on end, popping up only when their frustration with world events reaches a boiling point and they need to bitch about corruption, sexuality, school killings, and various other marginally depressing topics. This proposes a problem for the exaggerated hopes of the Church of the Orange Sky, which now finances this project in the belief that Jesus Drives an SUV is going to spearhead a revolution in North American Christian culture. A new Cultural Revolution, if you will, except without Red Guards or Maoist personality cults. At the very least, the Mad Reverends' Cultural Revolution will require more frequent blog posts.

Fortunately, as a semi-Christian writer, I can always resort to writing about the Bible. There's thousands of chapters in it and it's a constant subject of conversation on Sunday mornings (not so constant at other times of the week, mind you). Back when I first became a Christian, a well-meaning youth pastor gave me a free copy which I studiously read from cover to cover, trying along the way to convince myself of the absolute truth of the contents. Occasionally I suspect I should read it again, with the benefit of a little more maturity and ability to think critically, though I usually get rather bored after stumbling about in the Old Testament for a while. Nevertheless, while on one of my many periods of procrastination lately, I sat down and re-read the first few chapters of Genesis. I'll start there and see how far I get this time. In the meantime, you're welcome to my thoughts on the contents, some of which is even more difficult to accept than I remember it being.

The fact that the Judeo-Christian creation myth is the first story in the first book of the first Testament of the Bible creates considerable difficulties for me, since it means that I have to develop my view on the inerrancy of the Bible – as well as what the Bible really is, if it’s not the inerrant word of God – right off the bat. Of course, as a reminder of the fact that the Scriptures have been ineptly manipulated by human hands in the centuries following the original writing of them, here we’re also treated to a curious chapter placement: notice that the second chapter of Genesis begins in the middle of the first creation story, rather than a few sentences later, when we move to the second creation story.

For someone simply looking for Scriptural inconsistencies, it doesn't take long to hit paydirt. Genesis 2 is a very different story of the creation than Genesis 1, because this story has man created first, followed by plants, which are followed by animals. From a literal perspective, these accounts are probably irreconcileable. One of the more widely referenced contemporary evangelical propaganda websites, Answers in Genesis, argues that “Jewish scholars” understood verb tenses based on context, so the problem vanishes, apparently assuming that our own translaters are therefore incompetent at reading ancient Hebrew, which is very disappointing. In any event, this is irrelevant because Genesis 2 actually notes that “the Lord God formed the man” at a time when “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth,” a statement which has nothing to do with verb-tense context. In Genesis 1, the “trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds,” and other plants, were created on the third day, before even the sun was created; in Genesis 2, the garden (with its trees) appears after the man. Answers in Genesis further explains that Genesis 2 is a “recap” which might not present events in “chronological sequence,” since it is “a more detailed account of the creation of Adam and Eve and day six of creation.”

My real problem with the six-day creation, however, is not that the Biblical account of it has some textual enigmas, but that the whole process really does not make a great deal of sense. The worldview which lays behind the creation myth, and almost certainly would have belonged to Moses himself even if modern young-earth (and even old-earth, to some extent) scientists are desperately trying to find an adequate reinterpretation, is clearly the work of a cosmology alien to our own. The Scriptures say that the Earth was initially “formless and empty.” God created “light” ex nihilo and then “separated” it from the darkness, so that there was light for part of the day but darkness for the rest of the day. He does not actually create the Sun until the fourth day. This would mean that God not only created the Earth before the Sun, but that in the absence of the Sun he created some other source of light, with the Sun existing only to provide order to the procession of day, season, and year.

Next, God creates an “expanse between the waters” above and the waters below, which is called the “sky.” Where the waters above eventually go I’m not sure, since the universe is not filled with water at present. After he creates the plants, he creates “lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night,” and to “mark seasons and days and years.” These are “governed” by two “great lights,” the sun and the moon. Of course, the moon is not really a light at all: it is a giant rock which serves us as a giant mirror. God created only one “great light.” Finally, once all this work is finished, he creates a large number of animals and plants which coexist with one another, despite the fact that they never do so again throughout our entire fossil record -- including primitive organisms, dinosaurs, and human beings.

What emerges from Genesis 1 is the creation account of a people who saw a flat Earth, surrounded by water hovering above the sky; an Earth-centered universe with an uncertain span beyond this solar system (beyond which there are billions of other stars and millions of other galaxies), in which the sun and moon were lights which “hung” in the sky above the Earth. It would be simplistic and somewhat immature to now rush forward with new scientific evidence that the Earth is not flat, and in fact revolves around the Sun, which is one of an uncounted number of stars in the universe with dubious claims to uniqueness. The most obvious method of discounting these differences is that Moses simply related the creation of the world as he saw it, which was from an imperfect human perspective we today do not share. To this, more traditional Christians have in the past responded to me: if that's true, how can we trust any other part of the Bible? Fair enough, if "trust" is earned through some sort of Enlightenment-inspired textual examination of the Bible as a single flawless unit.

It has to be said that, unsatisfying as this may seem, this is the point where old earth creationists and many of the current crop of young-earth creation "scientists" have to abandon pretensions about Biblical inerrancy. If they don't use the above argument, they have to instead argue that Moses didn't actually understand the real truth of the stories he was writing in Genesis. That's a disturbing argument given the questions it raises about the relationship between God and humanity (including the humans who wrote the Bible), and it's one which most people want to drop later on, when it becomes more convenient to say the author can be ignored because he was tied down by a particular cultural context (i.e. the argument we use to dismiss many of Paul's various statements about the subjection of women within the church).

Can we decide now, long after the fact, that Moses is dead and we can read into his words whatever "godly" meaning we wish? The Statement of Faith of the denomination in which I am currently nominally a member, the Canadian Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches, believes that “the Bible [is] the complete Word of God… as originally written… [and] verbally inspired by the Spirit of God and entirely free from error.” I’m not entirely certain what it means to “verbally inspire” a text, but it seems to imply that God determined the selection of the words used, as well as their meaning. The Biblical authors (so far referred to here as "Moses," though it could have been damned near anyone) thus become the unthinking channels through which God’s language is communicated. If this is true, then God has told humanity statements which appeared at times to be untrue. I should stress that I can’t disprove the fact that the earth was created in six days in the manner described in either Genesis 1 or Genesis 2: I simply have no reason to believe it. This, perhaps, is the root of the disagreement, and really there is no way past it. I simply do not believe that the creation event in Genesis 1 is what really happened, over the period of 144 hours at an unspecified point in history. I cannot “choose” to believe such a thing simply because it is in accordance with accepted doctrine, and frankly, I would look with suspicion on anyone who was able to accept something as truth simply because they were told to by an institution of the church.

It is possible that people such as myself are the targets of the “science” being practiced by members both of the old earth and the young earth creation camps. However, in many ways I find these even less useful. In my experience, neither a conversion nor a faith that is based on human interpretation of the geological past is likely to be deep or enduring. This is because ultimately my relationship with God is and always has been based on an experiential awareness of the presence of the Lord; what I consider “knowledge” has been subject to that awareness, rather than the other way around. I do not believe that Christianity is likely to win many converts by arguing that it has a scientific account of the history of the planet.

Speaking of science, that branch of human activity is normally the observation, identification, description, investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena. A scientific hypothesis is an inference which can never be proved; it may be supported by observation and evidence, and it may be disproved when this evidence contradicts the thesis. Today's creationists take the opposite approach, beginning with the creation of the world by God and then casting about for evidence to support a chain of events in keeping with their predetermined conclusion. Yet this ignores the fact that our religion is by definition a non-scientific thing: God is not a physical, natural phenomenon and thus should not fall within the jurisdiction of scientific investigation anyways, just as we would not attempt to share the gospel through the instructional manual for a toaster oven.

Particularly in the case of the Old Earth investigators, then, creationists tend to slide towards the seemingly more appealing alternative of simply arguing that the other options available to us – namely, the theory of evolution – are irreparably flawed and must be discarded, even if there is not a better theory currently available. Most such arguments derive from some variant of the notion of “irreducible complexity” – that is, that aspects of life and nature are so complex that they could not possibly have arisen without divine intervention in the form of some sort of creator, or at least intelligent designer. The fact that presentations of this theory usually require misrepresentations of what the actual theory of evolution is does us no credit with many of the audiences we are attempting to persuade, and even when it does, I do not believe that the Christian faith should ever be – or should ever need to be – spread through intellectual dishonesty. Neither did St. Augustine, incidentally, who, in similar circumstances, complained that

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

A little like Augustine's idiots, some of the young earth crowd go further by developing seemingly sophisticated theories to explain a scientific method of divine six-day creation. This is hardly new – some geological catastrophists used to argue that most of the Earth’s features were established in the Great Flood, and most young earth types still do – but it has expanded to include more smoke and mirrors. Barry Setterfield, for example, has amassed some frankly confusing arguments that the speed of light (and therefore time) declines over time, allowing more human history to happen in a year in 2000 B.C. than a year in 2000 A.D. Extremely conservative groups, such as Rapture Ready, frequently attribute their failures to the hardened anti-Christian attitude among scientists, and sometimes go so far as to claim that many scientists want to come forward with the evidence which disproves evolution but are being repressed by the atheist academic establishment. It is true that this establishment is and always has been reluctant to accept new ideas that fundamentally change existing theoretical frameworks, but there is more at work here: the “scientific” case for creation is largely limited to the claim that evolution does not work, and that the remaining “gaps” must be the result of divine intervention. This is not a scientific "theory" and we should not bother to pretend that it is: as I remarked before, the tools of science are inappropriate for the religious and spiritual task which we have set for ourselves.

Some of my brethren would doubtless respond that my conclusion about Genesis 1 and 2 is unacceptable from a Christian perspective because it casts doubt on the reliability of God’s Word. This is often coupled with the claim that dismissing parts of the Bible is the first step on a slippery slope leading to the rejection of the entire Bible. My answer to this is very simple: I first trusted the gospels through the influence of the Spirit of God, and I never felt compelled to believe in the accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 in the same way. I struggled to do so when instructed to by the church, and ultimately concluded that belief does not follow from obedience. Furthermore, I simply do not believe that the Bible is some sort of unitary machine made up of innumerable cogs and pulleys and belts; I do not believe, therefore, that pulling out one or two of these cogs is somehow going to “break” the Bible.

If I have dismissed their historical validity, is there still religious meaning in the accounts of creation in Genesis? Perhaps there is. A Jewish philosopher from the first century, Philo, argued that “it is quite foolish to think that the world was created in the space of six days or in a space of time at all”; to Philo, Moses’s creation account was an allegory of God’s perfection. Mind you, Philo also thought that the number of days were chosen to represent mathematical perfection. Three centuries later, the somewhat unconventional Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, also rejecting a literal reading of creation, wrote that “I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally.” Many of the early Christians, too, saw the story of creation as an allegory for God's love for and salvation of humanity.

At the end of the day, though, I don't find much meaning in those statements either. The creation question has ceased to have any real meaning for me one way or the other. I hadn't really realized I would conclude with that somewhat nihilistic observation when I started writing this post. I suppose it means I will have to submit a resignation to my old church on the grounds that I no longer accept their statement of faith, though in fairness I should have done that quite some time ago, since this is hardly the first serious disagreement I've had with that silly little document. On the bright side, this liberation will bind me closer to the Church of the Orange Sky, which is the profitable postmodern future of all good religion.
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