Friday, February 22, 2008

Ethnic War, Ancient Edition: Exodus 1-2

This post is part of a revolutionary Bible commentary sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

My memories of Exodus from reading it the last time are minimal, perhaps because I was paying too little attention at the time (it was one of those mad dashes through the Old Testament, the ones that usually peter out somewhere in Deuteronomy or Numbers.) The NKJV version I’ve just pulled off the shelf helpfully opens with the title “The Second Book of Moses Called Exodus,” which is intriguing since Moses himself does not in fact appear in “The First Book of Moses Called Genesis.” If I were still to take the Bible as the literal word of God, accepting the authorship of Moses makes a kind of sense – he is the first important figure in Hebrew history after the patriarchs of the previous book, and responsible for the creation of the bulk of the Jewish law – though really it serves no purpose, since presumably God could have dictated the history of the world to some other marginally literate individual as easily as he could have to Moses.

The picture of ethnic relations in ancient Egypt described in the beginning of Exodus – what is now “chapter 1” – describes an intriguing tension between the Egyptians and a people now known as the “children of Israel,” at least within the text – so named because they are the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel who arrived in Egypt at the end of Genesis and, via Joseph, went on to occupy privileged positions in a vastly reformed, thoroughly nationalized economy. These “children of Israel” prospered and multiplied until “the land was filled with them.” This is a considerable accomplishment, and a new pharaoh even makes the implausible claim that the Israelites have grown more numerous than the Egyptians.

A new ruler, “who did not know Joseph,” incites his people against the Israelites and effectively enslaves them, although my NKJV translation does not actually use the word – instead, it speaks of specially appointed “taskmasters” who make the Israelites “serve with rigour.” Heavy burdens were set upon the Israelites, like building new “supply cities.” This move is an intriguing one. Clearly there is more going on than that the new pharaoh “did not know Joseph.” By this time, Joseph himself must be long dead, for one thing – not only this pharaoh and his predecessors could not have known Joseph personally. Another way to take this statement would be that the new pharaoh was simply unaware of Joseph’s actions on behalf of the Egyptian royalty, which cemented the monarchy’s position in society. This, too, seems somewhat unlikely, given the importance of Joseph in Egyptian history (or at least Egyptian history as described in the Bible, something which does not necessarily correspond to the archaeological evidence as we now have it). Presumably part of the education of ancient royalty involved at least some understanding of the recent history of the bases of their power.

A more cynical political analysis suggests a possible alternative. Recall that at the end of Genesis Joseph was responsible for reforms which doubtless caused massive resentment among the Egyptian public – a permanent income tax, nationalization of property, and effective enserfment. A new government – or at least a new pharaoh – takes charge and perhaps has difficulty maintaining its stranglehold over the economy and society. The government, not the Israelites, is the one collecting the taxes, and searches for a way to distract the people from its own shortcomings by identifying an enemy. The Jews have played this role in the recent past as well, as have other ethnic and religious groups, although it is very unusual (not to mention implausible and almost certainly an exaggeration) that they would be an economically dominant majority at the time of the new repression. In this case, the Egyptians might have been particularly receptive to such a diversionary tactic given their recollection of the role Joseph had played in their subjugation. This does not provide a moral justification for the Egyptians’ actions, but it does provide an alternative understanding to the bald and repetitive story of an evil king attacking God’s people. Either way, the subjugation of the Israelites echoes their assistance in the subjugation of the Egyptians so many years before.

Having grasped the difficulty of oppressing a majority, and possessed by the sort of genocidal tendencies so common to people in the Old Testament, the pharaoh hits upon a new and novel method of reducing the Israelite population: he instructs the Hebrew midwives to kill all sons born to Israelite women. The midwives disobeyed, apparently because they “feared God.” They justified the lack of infant corpses to the pharaoh on ethnic grounds, too: “the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.” Since there are apparently only two midwives to cover the entire Israelite population (v. 15 helpfully names them for us, as Shiphrah and Puah), it is entirely understandable that they would frequently be late, whether the new mothers are “lively” or not. God rewards the midwives and the Israelites generally and they continue to “multiply and grow very mighty,” despite the fact they are apparently now in slavery. At this point one must begin to wonder how a population which is large, rich, and “mighty” could be so easily subdued and enslaved by the less numerous, weaker Egyptians. In any event, a frustrated pharaoh orders a new tactic: “every son who is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save alive.”

Presumably, the pharaoh expects the Israelite girls to grow up to be either exploited by or married off to Egyptian men (or perhaps he intends both). If this is true, then at least some of the gendered aspects of genocide have changed relatively little over the last three thousand years. As becomes typical of Israelite practice later on, the women are largely irrelevant to the question of bloodlines: they are a sort of reproductive investment, property which can produce new children on a fairly regular basis. It is the power of the Israelites, not their identity as Israelites, which is resented.

The marginal status of the female offspring, however, is in this unusual case an intriguing contrast to the role of the women themselves. As I noted in various cases in my commentary in Genesis on this same track, major roles are not typically played by women; and when they are, these roles are usually negative. In this case, however, the actions of the Hebrew women stand as the resistance of their community to Egyptian oppression. The marginalized Israelites do not (yet) struggle against their chains through the actions of warriors, priests, or other men of God; here, it is women who fight Egyptian repression. Their roles are still limited to reproduction, but reproduction is a decisively political activity here: the (male) Pharaoh orders the (female) midwives to kill male newborns, but either the midwives, the mothers, or both refuse to obey. God blessed the Israelites for the women's courage: “the people increased and became even more numerous,” because “the midwives feared God.” The way v. 20-21 are constructed suggests that the midwives may have chosen this profession because they themselves were barren, or at least had no children; God then rewarded them for their courage by “giving them families of their own.” Exodus 1 represents a rare case of the courage and determination of the Israelite community being represented not by a small handful of male religious and political elites but by Israelite women.

The story of Moses in Exodus 2 begins with an elaboration on the Hebrew women's acts of resistance described in the previous chapter: a Levite woman gives birth to a male child and, after hiding him for three months, puts him in a floating basket and sends him off down the Nile, in the hands of fate and (presumably) of God. It is unclear what the Levite woman expected was going to happen – the chances of a baby surviving on its own after being sent down a river being rather slim – but is understandable. In this case, Moses is curiously fortunate, being found by the unlikely saviour of the Pharaoh's daughter. Her slave girl recognizes the crying baby as “one of the Hebrew babies,” suggesting perhaps that such abandonment was commonplace. It is not impossible that the slave girl herself was Hebrew (by this time, the Hebrews having been enslaved). Moses's older sister, who apparently had followed her infant brother's progress along the Nile, then approaches and suggests she will get “one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby.” The woman she has in mind is, of course, Moses's mother. Later, Moses is given up again, this time directly to the Pharaoh's daughter, who raised him as a son. How, precisely, the Pharaoh's daughter was able to justify the sudden arrival of a new son to her father (or to her husband, if she had one) is an interesting question which the Biblical account does not bother to answer.

The role of women in this account is again significant – indeed, there are no men involved at all. Moses's mother abandons him in order to avoid discovery by the Egyptian government, with the faint hope that by putting him in a basket she might allow him to survive as the child of another family farther down the Nile. Her daughter stands on the riverbanks to watch, and later plays an instrumental role in having Moses returned to his mother. The Pharaoh's daughter rescues the infant – or more precisely, her slavegirl does so on the woman's orders. These women are not mentioned again in the Bible, except for the sister, who might be Miriam.

Once Moses has grown up, indeed, the story returns to the traditional heroic figure – the strong and protective Hebrew warrior. Moses watches an Egyptian beating a slave, and then kills the Egyptian. It's not clear what was special about this particular experience; Moses had been raised at the Egyptian court and presumably would have been aware of such goings-on for quite some time. In any case, apparently he has had enough. He is surprised the next day when he breaks up a fight between two Hebrews and is not met with gratitude or respect. Moses's reasoning in this case is a very curious matter. He is afraid because they are aware he has killed an Egyptian; he seems blind to the fact that they might be resentful of his intervention because, in their eyes, he is just one more Egyptian noble. The great revelation that Moses is both an Egyptian noble and a Hebrew Levite never seems to happen; the Pharaoh expresses no surprise at Moses's new role as the priest of the Israelites several chapters later. This is one of the most confusing and contradictory points in the narrative.

At any rate, Moses seizes the opportunity to flee Egypt and goes into self-imposed exile in Midian, where in exchange for helping a priest's seven daughters get water for a flock of sheep, he gets a hot pastor's kid as a wife (Zipporah). He seems to accept his new, diminished status, but longs for his homeland via the name of his firstborn son, Gershom – the name apparently refers to “alien,” and at the birth the father somberly notes, “I have become an alien in a foreign land.” Fortunately, his time as a political dissident-in-exile soon comes to an end.

The status of Zipporah, or more accurately of her father Reuel, is curiously vague. Zipporah is not an Israelite by birth – which would become a problem for future Israelite men, but apparently is not a serious concern yet – and it is not clear in what religious tradition Reuel serves as “priest.” Were non-Israelite religious groups serving God at this time in Biblical history? Did Moses accept the charity and hospitality of a pagan family? Significantly, the writer of Exodus does not seem to care.
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Thursday, February 21, 2008

Beware! Evil!

This post is sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Years ago, Focus on the Family head James Dobson published Bringing Up Boys. Then he published a truly bizarre guide to preventing your male children from growing up gay. Among other elements, possible solutions included fathers taking the time to shower with their sons, and fathers teaching their sons to pound pegs into holes. Fun!

Ever since then, I've been eagerly awaiting Dobson's follow-up masterpiece, Bringing Up Girls. And at long last, he's finally delivering! This month, in his classic monthly newsletter, Dobson provided an excerpt from the manuscript of the new book. I eagerly linked to the letter in hopes of finding out how to prevent girls from becoming lesbians, but unfortunately the provided excerpt seems to have nothing to do with girls specifically, and more to do with the necessity of protecting all your children from the pedophiles lurking just outside your front door.

To summarize Dobson's argument in fifty words or less:

Be afraid! Fear! Fear! There are predators everywhere! The world is worse than it used to be! If you're not careful, your daughters might go out and have sex!

Dobson, of course, uses more colourful metapors. He explains that our kids are "little bunny rabbits running through the meadow." Parents are "their only defenders" in a world of evil "predators" and "ultimate killers." If you're not careful to "fill the void" in your children's lives, they might seek "the warm company of other bunnies." That is one kick-ass euphemism.
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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Christians Need More Sex!

Kind of like the teenagers-wearing-diapers story a couple of months back, there's so much idiocy here I hardly know where to begin.

Paul Wirth is a senior pastor in Ybor City, Florida. The church that decided Wirth was worth the money is... the Relevant Church! Come on, people. I know all the evangelicals want to be "relevant" to today's "postmodern" unchurched, but when you put it in the name, you kind of start to look desperate.

The Relevant Church claims that it is designed "specifically for urban professionals and young families." That's awesome. Ybor City is a Tampa neighbourhood which had a proud (and, in the American South, isolated) history in labour organization. Then it was gentrified and now, apparently, its churches aim to be "relevant" to professionals. That's brilliant. There are only about six thousand homeless people in Tampa's county, and some other ministry will probably take care of them, right? When James wrote that the wealthy were oppressive and that catering to them dishonoured the poor, surely he didn't mean "relevant" urban professionals. It's this nonsense that has convinced me that "emergent" churches, which apparently is what the Relevant Church bills itself as, are a fad for Christian yuppies who listen to indie music and drink fair trade coffee and want a suitably "alternative" religious identity to go along with their "rejection" of the corporate mainstream. Galatians and James, not just the gospels, should be required reading.

(Speaking of the above, Tampa is one of a large number of cities in both the U.S. and Canada which have been gradually pressuring church and charity groups to stop charity programs for the homeless, usually through a combination of outlawing feeding the poor and harassing groups with unnecessary police surveillance. I don't usually have anything nice to say about Pentecostals, but in Tampa's case, one New Life Pentecostal church defied police orders to disperse and dared the city to a public confrontation. Well done, Pentecostals. The Catholic church also offered sanctuary to a food program after police ejected it from its usual location within a public park.)

But that's enough about depressing subjects like poverty. Mr. Wirth has correctly noted that Tampa's urban professionals have more pressing problems than the poor and the destitute within their city. For example, they have to worry about making sure their sex lives are as exciting as you'd expect from righteous Christians.

Wirth thinks that divorce rates are unreasonably high and that the solution is for Christians to have more sex. Specifically, he wants married Christians to have sex at least once a day for the next month. With each other, presumably, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of the exercise. I'm not married, but if I was, I have to think my response to Mr. Wirth would be to (a) stay the hell out of our bedroom and (b) stop defining relationships - any relationships - as sexual intimacy. But I'm not married, so the fact that to me thirty straight days of sex is starting to sound a lot like work isn't really germane.

Single Christians are said to have a "slightly different" challenge: they should have no sex for the next thirty days. Oddly enough, I don't think I needed Wirth's "challenge" to accomplish this grand feat, but then, I'm not an urban professional. At any rate, this is equally important, Wirth says, because "when you're single it's like you're always thinking about it and you're like, man I'd like to have it as much as possible." The solution to single people always thinking about sex, it would seem, is to go to a church where people are always talking about it.

Even among the "alternative" "emergent" crowd, apparently, sexuality and marriage just have to be at the center of everything. I'm not sure I'd go so far in criticizing this idolization of marriage as Paul does in his letters to the Corinthians, in part because Paul's as bad as Wirth in basically reducing marriage to a way of getting laid without doing anything immoral. Unfortunately, the church seems to have only three responses to sex and sexuality: nervous silence, condemnation of non-marital sex at high volume, or praise of intra-marital sex at equally high volume.
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Persecution!

This post is sponsored by the Secular Humanist Conspiracy Project of the Church of the Orange Sky.

Last year a Congressional committee in the U.S. began investigating various mega-churches for financial misdoings, hinting that ministers like the aptly-named Creflo Dollar were engaged in too much profiteerng and political activism to qualify for the tax-exempt status traditionally given to churches. At the time, I believe I suggested we drop the tax exemption altogether, since churches shouldn't need it and it would force us to think about alternative ways to build religious community and engage in charity projects than simply moving money through church bank accounts. It seems, however, that the publicity of the megachurches' corruption may be having an effect anyways, though, even without withdrawing their tax exemptions.

A couple of years ago, I went, with one of my friends back in Prince George, to a "non-denominational" charismatic church called the Overcoming Faith Christian Centre. This struck me, and always has, as a really dumb name for a church. Actually it sounds more like a recovery group for former Christians turned atheist. But that's not the point today. The "Christian centers" are spread out through cities in Canada and the U.S., ostensibly without denomination but in practice all sharing the name "Christian centre" and a focus on charismatic evangelicalism.

One of their counterparts in Minnesota is the Living Word Christian Center, which has a very nicely professional Website here. I tried to find out how big the church is and could only find out that ten years ago it had 7000 members. Presumably it has more now. This certainly qualifies it as a megachurch. The senior pastor is Mac Hammond, who last year claimed he'd "welcome" an IRS audit in order to clear the church's good name. This article on Hammond, from last year, explains the basic issues, including millions of dollars in "personal loans" given him by the church. It also contains some fabulous quotes from Hammond himself, like this one: "It takes wealth, folks, to establish God's covenant on Earth... It takes money to be influential. If you have no money, you can't even love, because love is about giving and not being a burden."

Bravo, Mr. Hammond. I don't think you could have subverted the message of Jesus any more effectively than you did with that statement there. Incidentally, he also explains later that God has given him a "Holy Ghost siphon" which funnels money from his congregation to his own pockets.

Unfortunately, Hammond has fallen on hard times. Church spokesman Rev. Brian Sullivan says this is because of all the bad publicity about the Prosperity Gospel over the past year, sparked by the government investigations. The church is so short of money that - God forbid! - they're going to have to sell their private jet.

Which leads to my next question: why do pastors need private jets in the first place?
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Monday, February 18, 2008

Bakker's Back!

The Church of the Orange Sky praises all religious leaders who have discovered ways to make absurd profits through modern telecommunications technology.

Older readers may remember Jim Bakker and Praise the Lord ministries from the 1980s. Back then, Bakker was quite a successful prophet for profit and raised an enormous amount of money to build a "luxury hotel" at his complex, Heritage USA. This was done through $1000 "memberships" entitling members to stay three nights every year at the hotel; far too many memberships were sold to actually leave rooms available if everyone took advantage of the "deal" on an annual basis. Bakker raised more than enough to build the necessary extensions, but most of it was siphoned off into the "operating expenses" of Heritage, and to himself through $3.4 million in righteous "bonus" payments. Another $300 000 was quietly funneled to church secretary Jessica Hahn, whom Bakker had sex with once in Clearwater, Florida. Interestingly, Clearwater is also the site of another religious point of significance: the Church of Scientology's primary "base," where construction on the "Superpower Building" is now underway.

Hahn claimed that she was raped; Bakker insisted it was consensual. Either way this was a little too much for a preacher, and he had to leave Praise the Lord ministries; his replacement was another member of America's pompous pious, Jerry "the Jackass" Falwell, better known for illegally spending millions in religious ministry dollars on political activism, funding the slanderous Clinton Chronicles, claiming that the Teletubbies were part of a gay conspiracy, and claiming that people who are pro-choice, gays and lesbians, and the ACLU were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Bakker himself was sent to prison on various counts of fraud, initially for a total of 45 years. (That was reduced to 18 years on appeal, and he was released on parole after only five years.)

Anywho, Bakker's back after a long hiatus. He's actually been back for a few years, in the form of a new show on a Christian broadcasting network, but now his network of supporters have given him enough money to re-develop his theme park/resort, once Heritage USA, now relocated in Morningside. The "lifetime memberships" are out, but among other things, the project has its own brand of handcream that it's selling to raise money, and it's picked up some venture capital from an investor who was swindled by Bakker back in the 1980s but, like most of those attending the new opening, claims to have "forgiven" Bakker for his past transgressions.

Normally I'm critical of churches' willingness to crucify pastors who have broken the rules, especially when those are rules that others also break on a frequent basis. But why in the hell you'd want to trust a proven con artist is beyond me. The amount of faith these people have in Bakker is astonishing and disturbing, all at once; some proudly proclaim that when they received their small compensation cheques from the original swindling litigation against Bakker, they immediately sent the money back to him as a show of faith.
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This is the word of the Orange Sky

So, Britain's government had the courage to fully nationalize Northern Rock after all. The Conservative and business opposition is, unsurprisingly, upset at the "interference" in the economy, which is odd, since back when the government was just stealing money from the public for the sake of the bank, that was perfectly okay, but now that the people are actually getting something for the money (even if it is a basically insolvent bank), that's unacceptable "interference."

Mere hours after the Church of the Orange Sky made known the divine will on this matter through its representatives at Jesus Drives an SUV, Britain's government moved accordingly. They are to be commended for their deep faith.
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Sunday, February 17, 2008

Banking, Part 2

I wrote before about the apparent ability of big banks to persuade governments to engage in grand larceny on their behalf. It seems this isn't simply a North American phenomenon - in Britain, for example, much the same thing is going on with the burning hulk of Northern Rock. This particular bank stupidly borrowed enormous amounts of money from American banks, even more stupidly dumped it all into the British subprime mortgage market, and famously lost it all a while back, creating a run on the bank.

In the name of the free market, Britain's government responded by bailing out the banking system, absorbing a fucking ludicrous $200 billion in bad debts and liabilities from Northern Rock while it lets the Virgin group buy up all the remaining assets for a song. The bizarre role of government as legalized banditry is best summarized in this asinine paragraph in the CBC analyst's report:

"But though a Labour prime minister, Brown was nonetheless terrified of being tagged as a statist and a nationalizer and so decided to leave the bank private and feed it money, with the government announcing it would guarantee all the deposits."

Assuming CBC is right about that $200 billion figure, basically the government and the banking sector have just stolen about $3000 from every woman, man and child in Britain. Apparently "thief" is a title preferable to "statist."
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Monday, February 11, 2008

First Letter to a Young Plagiarist

Two years of marking undergraduate papers has finally driven me to this:



Specifically, two years of marking bad attempts at plagiarism. Come on, people, this isn't high school anymore. The competition between the plagiarist and the marker is a game like any other, and when you're not playing to win, the game just isn't much fun. The fact that you think plagiarizing from dictionaries, Amazon.com, or Wikipedia is actually good enough to fool me is an insult to my intelligence and a discredit to yours. Play the game properly.

Ironically, Wikipedia might be the perfect place to plagiarize from if you're a decent writer but pressed for time. You can borrow a few phrases here and there, and then go back later and change the wording ever so slightly in the original - not enough to change the meaning (and thus provoke a reversion by another editor), but enough so that the bit you plagiarized can't be so easily found through a simple Google search anymore by the time the marker gets around to actually reading your paper.

Beyond that, you should always aim to plagiarize from offline and uncommon sources. Old journal articles used to be useful resources - a bit dated, but at least offline. Unfortunately, services like JSTOR are scanning these journals and Google Scholar is scanning JSTOR.

Fortunately, there are still all kinds of semi-published sources like other people's master's theses and dissertations that can usually be acquired easily (or free) and which can't be found in fulltext through Google. Plagiarizing from dissertations is a time-honoured tactic in the academy - even professors are getting in on the action with disturbing frequency. It's tough for a junior scholar to challenge a tenured colleague, and some major professional groups - the American Historical Association, for example - have quietly killed off their investigative arms to save their members the embarrassment of losing a challenge. Senior colleagues, at least within the same university, often don't really want to poison the atmosphere by accusing one of their own, nor face the harm to the faculty's collective image of integrity.

Unfortunately, we're only students, which means it's a lot easier to punish us. About the only major plus in our favour is the level of paperwork it takes to process a full investigation of a student's plagiarism. This means that unless you do something ludicrously stupid, like photocopy a chapter from your instructor's own doctoral thesis, you're unlikely to be facing full expulsion. There are still consequences, though, which is why it's always better not to get caught. The one possible argument you can use in the face of real evidence is that it was an accident, and while that may sometimes work, it's a hell of a risk, especially on the fourth and fifth offence.

The remaining online source which can be useful is mediocre-quality generic work. This is the sort of thing you'd only copy when you're short on time and worried about failing, because this sort of shit may take you within a few grade points of failing anyways. The benefit is that it's not very good, because it was written by some idiot on the Internet with even fewer research skills than you. Your marker is less likely to bother looking it up online because the mediocre writing doesn't attract suspicion. It's what they're expecting to see from an average or slightly below-average student. I myself have been bested by such a strategy on at least one occasion. Even here, capable with word choice. If you're going to plagiarize from an online source, always alter the wording enough that you won't be made by a simple Google search.

Speaking of which, the most serious indicator of plagiarism is a sudden disruption in style. Professors who are trying to scare students away from plagiarism often tell students they can tell when you're plagiarizing because of the sudden change in style. They're right! Too many students just copy a sentence here, a phrase there, typically from some scholar in the same field who is trying to justify their doctorate by employing impressive four- and five-syllable words.

The solution, then, is to plagiarize more, not less. Find something with a writing style not dissimilar to your own, and copy as much as you think you can get away with in order to minimize the number of awkward transitions between your words and someone else's. There's a perfect balance somewhere and a good plagiarist can find it: copying enough to minimize awkwardness, but not so much that if you do get caught, you can still feign naivete.

Finally, the golden rule: never write about something your professor knows much about if you can possibly avoid it. Independent research is a vital skill as well as an awesome opportunity for cheating, which is probably why despite maintaining the pretence of being "academic," professors in many large arts and social science programs, etc., are moving away from giving this degree of freedom to their undergrad students. I think this is a horrific trend because it punishes everyone of value: the gifted students have fewer opportunities to test their skills, and the cheating students have fewer opportunities to avoid needing skills. The only ones who don't lose are the average B/C students who are doing most of their own work anyways, and they don't benefit much, either.

I'm saving some of my better advice for future posts.
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Sunday, February 10, 2008

Day 20

A few posts ago, in one of my posts, I claimed I was going to grow dreadlocks to emphasize my new professionalism in style and appearance and therefore present the image I'm supposed to as the student of a professional school of international affairs.

No less than three friends subsequently concluded that I was actually planning on cutting my hair and was simply foreshadowing this with great sarcasm, sort of like a plea for help before a suicide I guess. Two of them added - one at great length - that this was a good thing, since my hair was already too long. One of those two suggested my long hair was interfering with my obvious desire to find and marry a fellow student. The third said my long hair was interfering with my obvious desire to find and sleep with a fellow student. I think he was not serious. These comments represent the findings of my social scientific study of reactions to hairstyling commentary on Jesus Drives an SUV. Other comments arising solely from real-life interaction are part of a separate study funded, as always, by the Church of the Orange Sky. Among other things, people who have no dreadlocks have begun to give me a wide variety of frequently contradictory advice on how to grow dreadlocks.

The sarcasm was actually the part where I said dreadlocks would stop making me look like a drug dealer. Twenty days after I decided to let my hair air-dry and begin to tangle more or less randomly, I have made a good beginning towards my goal of becoming truly unemployable. Either I comb these out soon or I let them lock properly, which will probably look better but will force me to eventually cut my hair.





Failing to understand the words of he who has been anointed and called to the ministry of the Orange Sky is a high crime which would be punished with much torment if my religion had yet grasped the concept of divine retribution.
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Monday, February 04, 2008

Dave's Whirlwind Tour of the Papacy, Part 2

After discovering the fabulously preposterous Cadaver Synod last week, I resolved to find even more interesting events in the history of the papacy, but sadly, there don't seem to be any. After seeing one pope who fathered an unknown number of illegitimate children, ran the church like any other state but with more moral pretensions, and died under suspicious circumstances after getting caught with someone else's wife, you've pretty much seen them all.

Every once in a while, someone truly worthwhile comes along, like Celestine V, a Cincinnatus-like ascetic monk who was picked as a surprise "compromise" candidate during the 13th century. By all accounts Celestine was comletely out of his league running an enormous institution in a large city, accustomed as he was to leading a tiny Benedictine community in the Abruzzi mountains. (This later became the Celestine monastic order.) Celestine is supposed to have made a series of bad decisions as pope, which is not impossible, though so far the standard for being a competent pope seems to be pretty low. Celestine evidently realized this and, with a humility totally uncharacteristic of the papacy, made some new rules regulating the conclave to force future papal elections to run more quickly and with less outside interference. He then summoned some cardinals and proclaimed his intention to resign. It was an unusual, if not completely unprecedented decision, under the circumstances, and people didn't seem quite sure how to react. Celestine returned to his little community, but his successor, Benedict VIII, was suspicious of his predecessor's unusual popularity in Rome. To cut off any chance at a palace revolt, he had Celestine arrested and imprisoned, where he later died. On his way to his jail, Celestine quipped, "I wanted nothing but a cell, and a cell you have given me."

There are still a few more interesting stories left, even if I can't beat the Cadaver Synod. Alexander VI, for example, was pope from 1492 to 1503, and is widely regarded as one of the most corrupt popes in the history of the papacy. He owed his initial promotions in the church - from bishop to cardinal and vice-chancellor - to his uncle, Pope Calixtus III. He then served Calixtus's successors until 1492, the same year, coincidentally, that Christopher Columbus got lost on his way to India and accidentally on purpose found the Americas.

Alexander, then named Rodrigo Borja, was one of several noble Romans who might be in line for the Papacy. Earlier, it had become tradition for the belongings of the pope-elect's palace to be given to the poor. By this time, it was therefore also common practice for papabiles like Alexander to pre-empt the poor by moving all their possessions to the country. From these riches, Alexander took four mule-loads of silver and delivered them to one of his competitors, who promptly withdrew from the election. This competitor also got a bishopric, a vice-chancellorship, and a castle. (These bishoprics, incidentally, were basically revenue sources at the time; by this time in the Middle Ages, virtually no one was even bothering to pretend anymore that there was some sort of religious qualification or significance to the position.) Alexander paid several more by promising them towns, bishoprics, and abbeys once he became pope; discovering even with these promises that he couldn't win a 2/3 vote, he simply offered cash payments to the remaining cardinals until enough of them gave in. Alexander's bank could barely keep up with the withdrawals being demanded and nearly went bust shortly after the conclave. The open corruption became so ludicrous that Alexander's successor, Pope Julius II, immediately outlawed the buying or selling of religious property as papal bribes again, with the penalty that both buyer and seller be immediately excommunicated and the results of any corrupt election be cancelled.

Alexander saw no need to stop his sell-off of church resources once pope. In theory, the church had enforced celibacy for centuries now, but he already had at least four children with one of his mistresses. Alexander arranged for appropriate senior positions to be rewarded to his children and arranged marriages with various Italian royals. His daughter he actually married off to several men, one after another, each of increasing political influence.

Even better, though Alexander held a series of orges at the Vatican, culminating in the ludicrous Banquet of Chestnuts on Halloween, 1501. Several dozen prostitutes and courtesans were in attendance as chestnuts were strewn about the ground and a massive feast was held. After eating, Alexander auctioned off the clothing worn by the women, then had them crawl around the floor gathering up the chestnuts. The clergy and other noble guests were then encouraged to have sex with the prostitutes. Alexander's master of ceremonies, priest Johann Burchard, wrote in his memoirs that "prizes were offered - silken doublets, pairs of shoes, hats and other garments - for those men who were most successful with the prostitutes."

Alexander's death was as unseemly as his reign. He and a dining companion fell ill in 1503 - the circumstances would seem to suggest either food poisoning or deliberate poisoning, although the official explanation is malaria. He died after a week of extreme pain, in which his skin peeled and his stomach swelled. The body was eventually displayed to the public, prompting the ambassador of Venice to report home that Alexander's body was "the ugliest, most monstrous and horrible dead body that was ever seen." The priests at St. Peter's Basilica initially refused to accept the body for burial, only a sparse handful of clergy attended the funeral, and his immediate successor, Pius III (who croaked after only a few months), promptly forbade further official mourning and prayers for Alexander VI, saying it was "blasphemous to pray for the damned."

I think that concludes my tour of the papacy. I'm off to read something more spiritually uplifting, like the book of Judges.
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