The Medieval Papacy - Now, THERE was a Quality Religious Institution

Libraries are evil. This is my conclusion after a traumatizing trip which began with me needing to sign out a book my students had written reviews of, and ended with me signing out two dozen books on religious history, alphabetically everything from Ellul's Subversion of Christianity to Weber's Protestant Work Ethic. It's going to take me weeks to get through this material - weeks I should be spending writing my damned thesis. Normally I'd say goddamned thesis but on this particular project, I think I could actually use his help, which would conflict with the whole damnation thing.

Anyways, I've been reading about the medieval Catholic church, and between the odd reference in high school history and the more frequent doses of anti-Catholicism from my evangelical days, I've realized I basically know almost nothing about the medieval papacy, at least relative to most other aspects of European history. (So much for my degree in history.) I thought reading about popes would be more boring than reading about other European dynasties, but actually it's way more exciting, what with popes selling the papacy for gold, dying from STDs, getting murdered, and even murdering other, rival popes. Among other things, this has led me to discover the most awesome trial in the history of everything ever: the Cadaver Synod.

If you thought the Catholic Church was corrupt and fractured by the late Middle Ages and then the Protestant Reformation, wait till you start reading up on the 9th century. In 882, when John VIII died, the church lost a fairly decent pope - a reformist who'd defended holding services in Slavonic languages, re-recognized the Eastern churches, and (a little more questionably, I admit) fought with Muslim forces in Italy. For these deeds, John was rewarded by being the first pope ever assassinated, and one of very few human beings ever to be assassinated by two enemies simultaneously: one with poison, and then another with a hammer to the skull while he lay dying. John was replaced by Marinus I (for two years), Adrian III (one year), Stephen V (six years), and finally Formosus (five years, 1891-1896).

This is where things get interesting. Formosus had been exiled by John but invited back by John's successors. When Formosus died, Boniface VI won power in the midst of massive riots in Rome, but lasted only two weeks before dying under suspicious circumstances (Wikipedia charitably suggests that Boniface was "forcibly ejected" from life). Even under the circumstances, this was a bizarre choice, and Boniface is now known as the only man to become pope after having been stripped of holy orders on two previous occasions for immoral behaviour. For his many sins, Boniface VI was retroactively deleted from the papacy afterwards when a successor determined the election was inappropriate. Next up was Stephen VI, who was backed by powerful Roman noble families.

In January 897, Stephen determined that Formosus had been guilty of some indiscretions while in office. Today, when we find out former prime minister Brian Mulroney accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribe money from German crooks, we hold a "public inquiry." Well, that's what they did in the 9th century too.

The similarities don't end there, mind you. Today, Mulroney argues that the discovery of his fraud occurred post-statute of limitations for tax fraud, so he's home free. Back then, Formosus opted (we may presume) for a very similar argument: his charges were laid post-being alive. Normally this would probably have worked, but Formosus had been a particularly bad boy (among other things, he'd backed the wrong side in a royal succession dispute), and besides, never let it be said that mere death could stand in the way of the justice of the eternal church.

Stephen organized a trial court consisting of himself, a panel of judges drawn from the clergy, and the defendant Formosus, whose corpse was removed from its tomb, dressed in formal clothing, and carried to a chair in the courtroom. Next, Stephen formally read out the charges: perjury, envy, and violation of church laws. Stephen conducts most of the prosecution's case himself, giving numerous extensive speeches directed towards Formosus. Dead bodies can't answer charges, of course, so a junior deacon is ordered to stand behind the dead man's chair and give "answers" on the dead pope's behalf.

Unsurprisingly, Formosus is found guilty of all charges. He can't be executed, obviously, so instead Stephen orders the body stripped of its religious clothing and cuts off three fingers from the right hand (the ones used for performing blessings), after which Formosus is re-buried in a less honourable plot in a foreigners' graveyard. Even this is too good for Formosus, of course, so Stephen later has him exhumed again and dumped into the Tiber river. The remains were subsequently pulled out by a solitary monastic who presumably gave him another, more private burial.

And things didn't even end there. Formosus had been a popular leader in Rome, and rumours spread of him returning from the dead to perform miracles. Stephen VI was deposed by a popular revolution, and strangled to death in 897. Stephen was replaced by Romanus, a monk who by all accounts was quite a fair leader. Fair leaders tend not to do well in politics, though, and Romanus lasted only a few months before the Roman nobility managed to oust him.

At this point, the Eastern Christians decided they'd had enough of this nonsense, and Theodore II, the son of the Patriarch of Constantinople, was sent over to restore order in Rome. Theodore cancelled some purges of the clergy performed by Stephen VI, officially pardoned Formosus, and ordered a new funeral held for the dead Pope so that his remains - or a reasonable facsimile, anyways - could be returned to the papal tomb. Unfortunately, Theodore lasted for less than a month in office, but his own successor, John IX, agreed to keep Formosus buried with honour.

I'm still not finished, though. Medieval Rome was kind of like today's Canadian politics - a continuing succession of minority governments. A few years later, in 904, the anti-Formosus group was back in office, led by Sergius III. Sergius had been angling for power ever since Formosus died the previous decade. He'd even won a contested election for the Papacy in 897, but been exiled from Rome before he could take office. Afterwards, he'd been excommunicated by the new winner, John IX.

This double hit from the banhammer didn't work, though. John died in 900, and was replaced by Benedict IV. He also only survived a couple of years, and was replaced by Leo V in 903. Leo V lived thirty days before ousted by an otherwise unknown priest, Christopher. Christopher threw Leo into prison and tried to rule as pope for about thirty days. At this point, the anti-Formosan nobles invited Sergius back to Rome to straighten things out. Sergius did just that, winning the papacy and ordering both Christopher and Leo strangled in prison (probably, anyways; there's some dispute). Sergius had actually been one of the judges at the original Cadaver Synod so, for good measure, he cancelled the pardon on Formosus and re-established the guilty verdict. He even had poor Formosus exhumed again and, by some accounts, beheaded.

So ends the story of the Cadaver Synod, though not the troubles of the medieval papacy. Sergius set several records as pope, some of which have stood the test of time: for example, he's the only pope to order the murder of another pope, and the only pope to father an illegitimate son who also became a pope. You may have begun to suspect that the Chair of St. Peter seems to be moving around a lot more quickly than it does nowadays, and you'd be right: between 896 and 904, there was a new pope, on average, about once per year. Between 872 and 965, there were 24 popes, and somewhere between five and seven of them were murdered. The fifty years after Sergius became known to papal historians as the "pornocracy", which I guess is what you get when you combine rigidly patriarchal church historians with a period of Roman politics controlled by leading noblewomen.

After Sergius came Anastasius III, one of Sergius's rumoured bastard sons. Next came Lando, a six-month wonder who was the last pope to use his birthname in more than a thousand years. Then John X, who came to power through his connections to a wealthy noblewoman named Theodora, and lost power through the connections of Theodora's daughter Marozia, who had John deposed, imprisoned, and eventually smothered with a pillow. Marozia also seized power in Rome through a coup d'etat, which allowed her to handpick the next two popes, Leo VI (seven months) and Stephen VII (three years). By this time (931 AD, for those keeping count), her own son John XI had turned 21, so next she had him "elected" as Pope. (Incidentally, Marozia had been sleeping with Sergius III as a teenager, and John was the illegitimate son of that relationship.) Marozia herself was ousted from power in the 930s and her successor, Alberic II, oversaw a similar succession of popes.

By this time, the popes were getting a little bit too independent, and a few of them, like Agapetus II and John XII, actually asked other countries to intervene in Rome and get rid of some of the troublesome noble families. Eventually the Germans did this, and in return their king (Otto I) was awarded the title "Holy Roman Emperor," something the German noble family would keep for most of the next thousand years. John didn't much like the Germans either, though, and fled the city. Otto, who wanted to get back to Germany, simply "elected" a new Pope, Leo VIII. Furious, John re-invaded Rome, prompting Leo to head for the hills. A furious Otto resolved to return to Rome and set things aright, but by this time John XII had already been murdered, allegedly by the jealous husband of one of his mistresses. John was replaced by Benedict V, but Leo and Otto would have none of this, so Benedict was stripped in council, demoted to deacon of Hamburg, and carted off to live out his days in Germany.

Leo also lasted less than a year, by which time the Theophactyl noble family was truly out of favour and the Crescenzi family was able to put one of their own favourites, John XIII, onto the chair. The Crescenzis had made peace with Otto, but not with the other Romans, who banished the pope from Rome just two months into his reign. John XIII, too, is rumoured to have been murdered. Otto came back to install a new pope, Benedict VI, who turned out to be another six-month wonder. This time, though, it was through no fault of his own: just after he'd seized power, Rome learned that king Otto had died. Without Otto's support, Benedict was imprisoned and eventually strangled by one of the sons of Theodora (mentioned earlier). One of the conspirators, Boniface VII, tried to seize the papacy but was forced to flee to the relative safety of Constantinople, though not before pilfering the treasury.

The new Holy Roman Emperor, Otto II, appointed a reformist, Benedict VII, who lasted a surprising nine years. Then Otto II died, too, leaving the German throne in the hands of his three-year-old son. Boniface hurried back from Constantinople and led a popular uprising against John XIV, who he had killed (either by starvation or poison). Boniface became pope himself, but was assassinated the following year.

Next came John XV, who lasted ten years and might have re-established some stability if he hadn't been so ludicrously corrupt. He died of a fever in 996, and the Germans tried to install Gregory V as the new pope. (Speaking of corruption, Gregory V was the cousin of the German then-king, Otto III.) Unfortunately, Gregory V was unpopular with the Roman nobles, so he was violently ousted and replaced by John XVI. In response, Otto III ordered the church to excommunicate the pope. He actually got his way at a council of bishops, but when John showed no signs of budging, Otto re-invaded Rome, captured John, and had him tortured - in the process of which John lost his nose, ears, tongue, and apparently some of his fingers. He was then imprisoned until his death a few years later.

Mercifully, Gregory V died a peaceful death in 999. He was replaced by Sylvester II, who introduced the study of Arabic mathematics and astronomy, which at the time made its European counterparts look childish by comparison. He'd been Otto III's tutor, once upon a time. Not surprisingly, the Romans didn't like him either, and revolted in 1001 A.D. Sylvester was chased from the city and made four separate attempts to return before his death. The Romans chose one of their own, John XVII, as the next pope, but he died after just five months in office. Next up was another Roman, John XVIII, who not only survived for years but retired from office to return to the less exciting life of his monastic order.

Then the papacy falls off the wagon again. The Crescentis, who control Rome at this point, appoint one of very few working-class popes in history, Sergius IV, the son of a shoe-maker. Sergius seems to do well but dies, probably of foul play, just days after the death of his leading Crescenti patron. The Theophylae family promptly "elect" their own pope, Gregory VI, but he's banished from the city and ends up as a refugee in Germany. Benedict VIII takes the chair, assisted by German king Henry II, and eventually passes the papacy to his brother, John XIX.

Normally, passing your titles to your kin was acceptable practice in Europe, but normally that's not the way the papacy works. At the time, John XIX wasn't even a priest. So he was hastily ordained as a bishop, after which he could legally become pope. Amongst other things, John went on to accept an enormous bribe in exchange for new titles for the Patriarch of Constantinople. (Which was fitting, because, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, John had also handed around a few bribes on his way to becoming pope.) The deal turned out to be quite unpopular, so John backtracked, though it's unclear whether or not he refunded the money.

Speaking of bribes, up next is Benedict IX, the only man to ever sell the papacy. Benedict was John IX's nephew, and became pope while still a teenager. He was later accused of a grand litany of sins, ranging from rape and murder to bestiality. For his lechery and his general incompetence, Benedict was ejected from the city in 1036, but German emperor Conrad II forced him back into office. He was beaten out again in 1044, at which point Sylvester III won a heavily contested election but was then charged with bribing opponents. Benedict IX retaliated by excommunicating Sylvester III and retaking the papacy. In 1045, Benedict IX left office again, this time after accepting approximately one metric tonne of gold in payments for his title. The purchaser was Gregory VI, allegedly Benedict's godfather, and despite the rather dubious method of ascension, reformists and critics of corruption like Peter Damian praised him for at least getting Benedict out of the way. Together with his advisor, fellow reformist Hildebrand (the future pope Gregory VII), Gregory VI tried to re-establish some semblance of religious order.

The litany continues, however. By this time, the Vatican was almost bankrupt, and both of the previous popes, Sylvester III and Benedict IX, were trying to regain the city. Gregory VI managed to convince German king Henry III to come to Italy, summon a religious council, and arbitrate the case. The price was high: Gregory agreed to resign from the papacy if, in exchange, Benedict's claims were dismissed and Sylvester was demoted and banished to a monastery. In the ensuing hearing, Gregory freely confessed to buying the Papacy but argued that this was justified under the circumstances. The council of bishops disagred and Gregory agreed to resign. Henry also chose the new Pope, Clement II, in a move which pissed off reformists. It turned out to be a mixed blessing, however; Clement II compromised with the reform movements through new restrictions on buying church offices (known in the Middle Ages as "simony"). Clement died the next year of lead poisoning, which means either he was assassinated or died of treatment for a sexually transmitted disease (lead sugar being the medicine of choice for such illnesses during the Middle Ages). I'm not sure which of the two options reflects better upon the church, but after the disasters of the last two centuries, I suppose it hardly matters.

Then, unbelievably, Benedict IX comes back into the picture. Benedict had never formally accepted the verdict from Henry's council of bishops, and seized the pope's palace in 1047. He held the palace - and thus claimed the title of Pope - for an additional eight months, before an incensed Henry III sent Poppo of Brixen to evict him. Benedict refused to appear on charges, so he was formally excommunicated by the church. Poppo became the new pope, changing his name to Damasus II. But he lived only 23 days after kicking out Benedict, before dying - either of poison or of malaria, depending on what source you trust.

Finally, after a period of almost two hundred years, we come to a fucking hero of a pope. (It normally takes a lot for me to say that, being an anarchist, but I've gotten so depressed over the last few paragraphs that even my trusty bottle of Smirnoff's isn't taking the edge off my emotions anymore.) Leo IX is another German nobleman-become-bishop, and he's appointed to the Papacy on those conditions, but then makes a stunning declaration: he won't accept the papacy unless and until he is escorted to Rome and receives the consent of the bishops and populace of the city of Rome. Democracy, in the church, you ask? Perhaps. Leo meets Hildebrand, the reformist advisor of Gregory VI, and together they travel to Rome, dressed as pilgrims. At the Easter Council in 1049, Leo orders all clerical orders of the church to actually obey the conditions of celibacy and officially (if not effectively) bans all purchasing of church titles (i.e. simony). Leo also travels about Europe holding councils with regional clergy. More dubiously, he also excommunicates the Patriarch of Constantinople, thus provoking the Great Schism between the Roman Catholic Church of Western Europe and the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe. He also helps start a war with the Normans in 1053, which Rome loses badly. On the bright side, Leo surrenders in person to prevent further death or destruction. He dies the following year.

This has gone on a lot longer than I thought it would. I think the Great Schism is an appropriate place to leave off, though it does have the downside of skipping over Celestine V, my personal favorite, who willingly renounced his office on the grounds that it was interfering with his desire for tranquillity and humility.

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A brief history of the Cadaver Synod can be found on Wikipedia here. And you thought history was all about boring dates and stuff. Medieval papal elections are even cooler than the 2000 Bush-Gore debacle, I've discovered.
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"Comfort" Food for Bigots

Procrastinator's Link of the Day: Ray Comfort, half of the brains behind the asinine Way of the Master, actaully has his own blog, which he calls Comfort Food. The subtitle claims that this food "gives a sense of well-being," which unfortunately is not what Comfort's blog does. What the blog actually is, is an opportunity for Comfort to take potshots at every other religious group. The main page right now features a largely unnecessary observation that scientologists don't preach the love of Christ, repeated mockery of atheists, and criticism of what Comfort calls "Christianity Light." Coming from someone who apparently believes we can reduce Christianity to the Jewish Ten Commandments, this is a stunningly ironic post.

What's even better, though, is the part where Comfort claims that atheists are picking on Christians because if they picked on Muslims, the Muslims would come over and chop their heads off. Well done, Mr. Comfort. You've made atheists, Christians, and Muslims look like assholes all at once. It takes rare skill to pull that off. Here's a thought: most North American atheists are more concerned with Christianity than Islam because Christianity is a lot closer to home. Most of them also aren't, for example, very much concerned with countering the claims of Judaism, mostly because it's not predominantly Jewish or Muslim evangelists who are prancing around North America mocking atheists.

Comfort rationalizes being an ass on the grounds that he's doing it "in love." That doesn't make it better, sir, it makes it worse. The idea that your "love" for the atheists is so fluid that it justifies whatever you were going to do anyways basically makes it clear that you don't love them, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. You're writing this so that like-minded Christians can read it and chuckle, I suspect.

If Comfort really wants to be a fantastic evangelist, he needs to consider humility. You're unlikely to sway people through childish mockery. Instead of parading into "dark" urban areas with your film crew, ditch the crew, ditch the fancy clothes, and actually try living with the people you're trying to "save." After all, if you really believe what you're preaching, you're going to be living with some of them for eternity, so you might as well get to know them better now.

In other news: The U.S. wants everyone to mourn the passing of former Indonesian president Suharto, who died this weekend, for his contributions to "economic and social development" in that country. Well, we ought to do that. Then we can also raise a glass to the half million "communists" murdered by his regime, and to other hundreds of thousands killed by massacres or subjected to mass rapes committed on East Timor by invading Indonesian troops while the Americans looked on approvingly.
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Dude, I was NOT serious

Just for the record, I'm still not convinced that giving hash-laced pizza to youth groups is a good idea for churches. Even though I did say that the Church of the Orange Sky wanted to see alternative witnessing techniques.

The last entry on Torchwood apparently earned this blog some attention on sci fi sites, ranging from total agreement to total disagreement to complaints that I'm a bit prudish for complaining about there being too much sex on late-night British TV. This post also was not entirely serious, but they're right that I don't watch much late-night British TV drama. Presumably most of it is better written than Torchwood. Despite my last post, sex doesn't bother me nearly as much as stupid sex combined with bad writing. James Kirk was not significantly less promiscuous than Jack Harkness (though he did happen to meet mainstream North American expectations for sexuality a little more precisely), yet I still watch Star Trek, and cringe at the writing there occasionally as well, especially on the original series and on Enterprise, a lot of which probably rates below Torchwood on my list of bad sci fi. It's just hard to take a show seriously when alien gas clouds come to earth because they want to have as many orgasms as possible.
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Why Russell T. Davies Sucks

The Church of the Orange Sky has expressed severe concern about the increasing non-religious content of this site, particularly in the recent series of "why * sucks" posts, and has threatened disciplinary action if this disturbing trend continues.

Why the hell is Torchwood still on the air?

After expressing sympathy for porn addicts in my last post I thought it was important to balance this with some good old-fashioned grouching about hypersexualized pop culture. I've been considering this for a couple of weeks, since a friend - a religious one, incidentally - complained that he didn't like to go to video rental stores anymore because of the increasingly revealing covers on the front of DVD boxes. I thought this seemed somewhat silly at the time, a hypocritical stance given that the day before that, with other friends, I was sarcastically decrying the increasingly soft porn-ish tendencies of modern television shows for the hoi polloi.

Which brings us to Torchwood. The BBC just started airing the second season, and what with the writers' strike and the Christmas break combining to give me very few original shows to watch in the middle of January, like a sucker I decided to give Russell Davies another chance. Despite the fact that he doesn't hold a candle to some of the better writers on Doctor Who, Davies's resurrection of the oldest surviving science fiction serial in television history apparently bought him enough street cred that he was able to embark on asinine side projects.

Torchwood is the "mature, gritty" version of the revived version of Doctor Who, which unfortunately is Newspeak for "the soft porn version." Most of the basic plot seems to have been developed by undergrads in a college pub. The underlying theme of the show is that everyone is three drinks (or less) away from being bisexual. Sometimes they try to integrate this into the plot: in the second episode, for example, an attractive, college-aged alien-possessed girl becomes a serial nymphomaniac-murderer - well, rapist-murderer, really - who seduces half of the returning cast along with an impressive list of nameless extras, though only the latter end up being killed in the process, thus bringing new meaning to Joss Whedon's quip that killing extras is always fun. Most of the time, though, there's no real significance to the story, thus proving that the standard formula for making a "gritty" version of a show is that you add sexual innuendo and stir. Not that Doctor Who was really in need of more innuendo, between Martha Jones telling the doctor he "should be used to [fitting into] tight spots by now" and an apparent threesome between two chicks and a human-sized cat in Gridlock. (See? I can meet the qualifications of being a wannabe censor for the Parents' Television Council!)

The chief manifestation of Davies's grand vision is lead character Capt. Jack Harkness, a bisexual cross between Angel from, well, Angel, and Shane McCutcheon from The L Word. Harkness was imported from Doctor Who, where he flirted incessantly with the Doctor, the Doctor's chick of the year, and a few robots for good measure. In this year's pilot episode, Harkness flirts with most of his employees, arranges a date with his male secretary, and re-enacts Bond's and Xenia's makeout/fight scene from Goldeneye with yet another male ex-partner, after which they spend most of the episode comparing the size of their "stopwatches." Harkness's self-proclaimed willingess to fuck anything that moves is apparently shared by everyone from his distant home time, since the latter ex-partner similarly expresses sexual interest in men, women, and at one point a poodle. If the show wasn't so earnest about being serious and original, I would think this was supposed to be ironic.

Like Harkness, Torchwood borrows most of its best ideas and actors from Doctor Who, where skilled writers other than Davies have spent much time developing them. That will continue to be true, given the content of the list of upcoming guest stars. This is probably necessary because recycling characters lets Davies save money, after blowing most of the show's budget on useless CGI gimmicks, like a CGI Pterodactyl the team inexplicably keeps as a pet, a magic gauntlet which has grown slightly less impressive since its previous appearances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Witchblade, ridiculously implausible Godzilla-sized demonic foes, and repeated aerial shots of Harkness perched atop half the skyscrapers in Cardiff.

It's also necesary because of Torchwood's single redeeming feature, which is that it's efficient television for the sexually frustrated sci fi addict. It's basically the investigating team from Angel, in the universe of Doctor Who, operating off of stolen alien technology like some renegade Welsh Stargate team, solving cases lifted from shows like The X-Files if not from Doctor Who itself, with the juvenile hyperssexuality of Lexx (though without the benefit of cruising around in a planet-destroying phallus, I'm sorry to say), all mixed together with the gender-bending intricacies of The L Word (admittedly, not sci fi, but at least there are lots of exposed breasts, which must count for something). Most of the episode plots are also recycled from other shows, and most of the characters are flat, predictable clichés, which means that instead of catching up on a dozen different shows, you can just watch Torchwood and giggle at the writing team's crude efforts at innuendo. It's ten shows for the cost of one!

Unfortunately, even the concept of plagiarism isn't very original in sci fi. Torchwood is proudly continuing the tradition of shows like Threshold, a sadly short-lived American series which crossed The X-Files with Stargate SG-1 and, for its final episode, courageously lifted a script from Stargate, dropped the complexity of government conspiracy, switched alien names where appropriate, and then re-enacted it with different characters. About the only benefit is that when the show reaches the States, Davies can make his first entry in the competition for the prestigious red-light trifecta - three consecutive TV shows to earn a triple-red rating from the Parents Television Council.

I'm grateful that the amount of time I've wasted while supposedly writing my thesis has enabled me to draw comparisons between some of the most hideously badly written TV shows of all time.
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The Pitfalls of Professional Christians: Of Pastors and Pornography

Prophet: This is the word of the Orange Sky.
Congregation: Thanks be to God.

Another month, another news story about a pastor losing his position because of lust. This one because of online pornography, specifically, and I admit I missed this story by a month, because I'm not usually at the cutting edge of gossip about pulpits in Florida. In my defence, my source on the story is a more recent article at Church Central which defends the pastor in question on the grounds that there are "deeper emotional issues" which motivate "addiction" to pornography.

The original story is fairly familiar if the circumstances are somewhat specific. A pastor confesses to a leading committee at a church that he is dealing with a personal moral failure. The committee, in this case, consults others within its denomination before sending the pastor on an indefinite "leave of absence." Dubiously, it brings in "a computer firm under contract" to "investigate the computers" at the church, because even though the pastor hasn't committed a crime, his word can't be trusted anymore and it's time to investigate him like a criminal. Other than that, the Methodists have been fairly gracious here. Instead of running him out of town, Mr. Brian James is permitted to stay in his church-owned home "for up to three months," and gets a vague promise of "some support." What happens at the end of the three months, I'm not sure.

Church Central tries to be compassionate by noting that this is probably a common problem and that the church should consider the presence of "deeper emotional issues" underlying pornography "addicts." I suppose that's true, though I'm a bit skeptical of whether we can basically equate looking at porn with being a victim of sexual abuse or even being on par with other "sexual addicts," something the article does unquestioningly.

The main problem which concerns me is something Church Central only hints at, in noting that pastors likely feel unable to confess their sins to others at the church because doing so "can cost them their job."

Basically, the church creates in its leaders a new category of religious person - the professional Christian - who simultaneously becomes the model of Godly behaviour, a sort of stand-in for Christ, while also a scapegoat in the event anything goes too seriously wrong. Such professional Christians are expected to be able to relate to sinners but nevertheless float somewhere above sin, at least "serious" sins, an artificial category of sin we establish to separate the sins we think are "imortant" and socially disruptive from those which are "less important" and not socially disruptive. Pornography presumably fits into the first of the two categories.

This despite the fact that fully half of evangelical church-attending men in the U.S. struggle repeatedly with pornography, according to one claim. The group which conducted the survey doesn't seem to be fully active online anymore, so I can't verify the results of that survey, but based on similar numbers at sites like this and this, I think we can basically conclude that pastors are human, and generally fall on the low side of the porn-addiction spectrum at that, probably statistically lower than most of their congregations.

Projecting an image of moral superiority onto religious leaders may be convenient in churches but it can also create expectations that these people shouldn't reasonably be expected to meet. My point here isn't to legitimize porn - and in any event, that's a debate for another day. What's important here is that, even from an evangelical perspective, our current system encourages churchgoers to project an image as more than human, and pastors to do this even more so than others. It's unrealistic and harmful. If churches really want to tackle the clearly serious issue of porn use, it would probably be helpful not to pretend that some of the people involved are morally superhuman.
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Why Banks Suck

The Church of the Orange Sky wholly denounces and decries the following post and urges all adherents to take advantage of any easy financing options available to purchase SUVs and other godly luxuries fast, fast, fast, to help prop up the flailing North American economy.

I know I'm getting into this whole subprime/recession/banks-going-bust shit a few months late, in part because once upon a time I said Jesus Drives an SUV would not be political. It's unbecoming of myself as a reverend and I know my coauthor tries to deal with political commentary as a separate side project. But reading the business pages of the newspapers for the last few days - something I normally try to avoid, for precisely this reason - has caused my latent Marxism to bubble to the surface. I apologize to those who came here for religious inspiration. Today you get political ranting instead.

There's a saying I ran into as an undergrad: "When you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. When you owe the bank ten million dollars, the bank has a problem." It's time we rephrased this from the bank's perspective: "When they owe us a billion dollars, we have a problem. When they owe us ten billion dollars, the government has a problem." Everyone knows the Canadian government would never really let CIBC get into serious trouble, even after it's apparently blown several billion dollars and symbolizes the creeping spread of America's present economic troubles north into Canada. The Big Five are too big, at least in the Canadian context, for the government to let any of them turn into another NetBank. Actually, there just aren't a lot of dead banks in Canada, period: none since 1996, and virtually all the insured bankruptcies before that are mortgage and trust companies.

Here's a concept that works: you have a pile of money, you decide to invest it in the markets, and so you take risks. When you take high risks, either it pays off pretty well and you get another pile of money, or it doesn't pay off and you lose your money. When you loan out most of your money to people you know don't really have the means to repay you, you're quite likely to be completely fucked at some point in the future when the adjustable interest rates go up and these people can't pay you. I'm not much of a capitalist, but even I get that that's how the "free market" is supposed to function.

That's how the free market works - that vague and nonexistent abstract creation we learned about as undergrads. Ironically, the people at the centre of the monetary system have less real contact with the alleged "free market" than almost any other sector except the defence complex. The reality, of course, is that when you're a big bank in trouble, you still have the option of asking the government to help you engage in all kinds of fun alternative activities, including grand theft on a scale far beyond anything the "law" is calculated to prevent. Last week President Bush announces $145 billion fucking dollars in tax cuts, basically 1% of the GDP in free cash given his country's existing staggering deficit, and investors who spent the last five years clamoring for more "deregulation" and less government intervention in the economy are all of a sudden whining about how this is "not enough" and they need more government welfare to dig them out of the hole they've dug for themselves. Government has apparently become the Jesus Christ of the financial industry.

When you're big and do something stupid, you force the government to introduce interest rate cuts and tax breaks to "correct" your misdeeds. This is the latest in a series of "unsuccessful" measures, such as central banks "increasing liquidity" via low-interest loans to the private banks as well as various other so-called "injections" of cash into the banks. If necessary, presumably, the governments are prepared to bail out the banks with even more severe measures, like they did during the savings and loan crises, the Asian market crisis, the Third World debt crises, etc. In Canada, at some point someone's going to raise the question of bank mergers again, which is a scheme the big five banks have been sitting on for some time now, waiting for another window of opportunity to con the public into supporting a national oligopoly in the name of "international competitiveness." (You may recall this being raised several years ago, at which time the "big six" became the "big five" with the merger of TD and Canada Trust.) Then heads will nod sagely and say this is indeed a good time to act, deliberately ignoring the fact that being bigger didn't protect any of the big American banks from being stupid about subprime mortgages, either.

Let's be clear, very few banks and even fewer other investors are actually making bundles of money in this process, so much as cutting their losses; and the higher-ups at Royal Bank, CIBC, etc. have probably lost a fair amount of sleep in the process. Nevertheless, the "free market" is clearly an antidemocratic farce when the people are expected to pay for the missteps of the wealthy, who in turn demand lower taxes for themselves and less government intervention on behalf of others with less material means. Next time banks need financial help from the feds, they should do what they do with the other potential creditors they approach: offer stock at a discount rate. No one seems to want to talk about nationalization of the banking system anymore, and I'm not suggesting it be taken that far either, but it's better than bailouts, and it might cause the banks to think twice in the future about whether leaning on the public for charity is an appropriate way to deal with risk.

Most of this situation, of course, could also have been avoided by proper financial planning by the people who took out these ridiculous mortgages in the first place. Attacking the banks is kind of like shooting drug or arms dealers - it's a somewhat easier option for law enforcement, with the convenient bonus of not having to solve the flaws on the demand side of the economic equation. These people on the ground may well be suffering a lot more than the executives of the banks, and in fairness some of the American public's money is also being splashed around for the borrowers' sakes through various refinancing programs. Surprising how helpful the welfare state suddenly becomes when the free market fails to live up to the promises of affluence we were hearing about a couple years ago.

On the other hand, "accepting responsibility" is a word not normally associated with political economy. Instead we have a system designed to dilute and pipe away responsibility through an intricate network of public relations experts, mid-level scapegoats, and docile corporate media. Occasionally even the elites supposedly get fooled in the process: thus the present crisis began when a number of middlemen and mortgage lenders were facing bankruptcy, before the losses from that sector started getting the big banks "concerned" about where they'd been lending money. At the political level, the federal and provincial governments that proudly sold us down the river on raw log exports, protection rackets which overruled NAFTA on softwood lumber exports, etc. presumably aren't going to offer any mea culpas for the fact that increasing our dependence on American markets also increases our vulnerability to the fallout when those markets inevitably contract. The situation is somewhat different in Canada, where subprime mortgages are only a direct, serious problem for creditors who thought jumping into the American market was a fast way to make some extra cash.

One thing's for sure: whatever new measures are trotted out will be advertised as the best deal possible for some variation of the "average working family." Everything's done for the average working family these days, which ought to be a great comfort to social democrats and Christian conservatives alike. Chief flimflam man Stephen Harper even justified this month's GST cut as a benefit for the poor and the working classes to the tune of "hundreds of dollars per year," a blatant lie given that the poor already get refunds for average GST payments and that you're not going to save "hundreds of dollars per year" on a 1% GST cut unless you're spending at least a few tens of thousands of dollars on non-exempt goods and services. Some particularly stingy people are actually going to lose money as a result of the GST cut for this reason.

If we had a political and economic system where people were generally open and supportive of government as an active player in people's personal and economic lives, where these roles were genuinely determined by an informed, thinking public, then expecting the central banks to be the saviours of the frequently troubled banks would be less of a problem. But what we actually have is a system where we get a few years of pious rhetorical flapdoodle about "small government," "freedom and choice," etc., followed by an orgy of multibillion-dollar "emergency measures" and "helpful" regulations, followed by another five years of deregulation, privatization, and the resurrection of "small government." It seems, to borrow some cynicism from Wendell Barry in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, that the appropriate size for government is that size at which it can destroy other nations (all of them, if necessary); spy on its citizens and those of other governments; and maintain the health of its largest corporations. Such a government will be "too small to notice and will require almost no taxes and spend almost no money."
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Other notions related to the Genesis matter..

In my last post, I talked about the concept that if sin was to originate from a source, the reasons behind it must because of two possibilities: the nature of God, or the will of God. I was left concluding this must be the will of God.

But in this conclusion, it leads me to another philosophical dilemma: it everything is God's will, then there seems to be a question of one of the fundamental pillars of Christianity and Judaic thought - free will.

Does it it exist? It must. As Rene Descartes proved with simple, basic logic - 'I think, therefore, I am', free thought must exist on some level and validates our existence. But if it exists, how much of exists? After all, was not the destiny of Christ preordained hundred of years before his birth? Is free will a necessity to Christian life, and what about the end times? Are they not also preordained, and it's outcome predetermined?

Answering the origins of sin has implications to the very nature and structure to Christian-Judea thought. And it will probably be something I will ponder upon further throughout this week.

Shawn
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Some thoughts on the Genesis matter..

It appears my partner on this site, Blaisteach, is having all the fun with posting. To be honest, some of the material he is writing about has crossed my mind. I wrote earlier this year, in a class about women and religion, about the differences of the genesis story within Judaic, christian, and Islamic cultures. There is other slight differences which played a role in the recruitment of women to those particular faiths. But, I'll save that for another post. I've been currently writing about Theocracies, and their governing structures. I would eventually like to be published, so my writing here has been scarce. However, this discussion of sin and it's origins is too interesting not make some comments on it:

If sin did not have an origin point - as we see in the bible - was it always with us? And if so, was it was with creation?

Are some sins in the bible directly from God, and others from the writers themselves? And if so, what does this mean for our interpretation of good and evil?

Why is there no story about Lucifer or the angels in the creation story? Are we to assume they were there when creation occurred? Is this the reason for the reference to 'we' when speaking? And how does this relate to the later passages with the singular 'I' when speaking?

Possibly the most troubling question for me is: if something is good because God wills it to be so and vice versa, or because God is good? I find this troubling because then I have to look at the other aspect of the question: Is something bad because God willed it or because God is bad? I'm left to conclude that God willed it, and his nature can be independent of his will. That sin and evil might have created because God willed it, although God is good in nature. However, this still leaves me with some unease: Satan, mankind's fall, and the Crucifixion could have all been avoided - but weren't. So, I'm left trying to understand God's will and God's nature.

Exploring the nature, and definitions, of sin has never been easy. It has plagued theologians for centuries. I doubt the question will be resolved anytime soon.

Shawn
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Church of the Orange Sky Awtaf No. 2

The Church of the Orange Sky proclaims that the authors of Child Labour Made My Jesus have been granted a unique gift of revelation by the Orange Sky and hails them for using this gift in constructing an imaginative and relevant witness of the glory of God to this lost world.
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How to Be a Relevant Witness to Today's Generation

"Hey man, can I score some pot?"

The question is directed specifically to me, not to my drinking buddy, whose short hair, button-up shirt, and large, nerdish glasses apparently exclude him from consideration. Should have known better than to go drinking on my first night back home without bringing adequate provisions.

It's the sort of question I'm getting more and more often these days. That's probably a result of my increasingly unkempt appearance. I've taken to hiking around campus with uncombed hair nearly down to the small of my back, some barely-controlled facial growth, a well-worn 65-litre hiking pack, and clothes which - not incorrectly - lead passersby to conclude I buy most of my wardrobe in bulk from the nearby Value Village. Unless I wear my nicer clothes, it's getting hard to pass as a grad student; eyes narrow when I add that I'm actually in the international affairs school here, known mostly for training the polite, well-spoken future generation of Canada's diplomats and international trade bureaucrats rather than cynical long-haired anarchists who apparently resemble drug dealers.

This youngish-looking brat, though, has just set a record. I've been back on campus less than an hour and already I'm being reminded of how easily I could have supplemented my meagre grad student income with some illegal agricultural experimentation. He's clearly not very bright, either: he's asked the question in the middle of a well-lit hallway not thirty yards from the nearest security office (which, on campus, could presumably at any time mean a few armed police, of which we have our own detachment). Granted, it's 1 a.m. here, but still.

I decide I can give him a few tips on the on-campus drug trade - I don't regularly smoke pot myself, but my hair has earned me enough friends who do that I know exactly where to go and who to talk to, plus a couple of their preferred secluded locations nearby also makes excellent places for quiet studying outdoors. Thus passes another opportunity to proclaim the glory of the Orange Sky, or even the love of Christ, to the heathen and hedonistic undergraduate students who infest this school at all hours of the day.

Since I'm not cashing in on the drug trade, though, I've instead decided this is a message from the Orange Sky that I need to dissociate from the riffraff by adopting a cleaner, more professional, drug-free hairstyle, like maybe dreadlocks.

In the meantime, it seems to me that proselytizing groups really need to update their techniques. Christians are apparently still using the tired old Matthew Party concept (read more here, which hilariously calls it "socializ[ing] strategically"; and here, a more critical commentary on evangelism by impressively radical if disturbingly emergent Mennonite pastor Mike Perschon), which basically involves inviting a few select non-Christians to a Christian "party," assuming they're stupid enough not to realize they've become marks, then impressing them with a combination of fun times with friends and a positive spiritual message.

The problem is that the "party" isn't really the sort of "party" most of the marks are probably used to, which is why it seems so obvious to them. "Where is the beer?" another of my friends recalled remarking to her brother, upon arriving at one such party last week. I think even Matthew probably would have served some good alcoholic drinks at his party. We should emulate the apostle's example by creating an appropriate atmosphere. The on-campus groups already habitually serve pizza and nachos at their events; unfortunately they've missed the crucial preceding step to such cheap junk food, the pot, which might be enough to attract such impressionable first-year students as the one who approached me this evening.

Maybe the combination of religion and psychoactive plant products is going too far, though the Native American Church and the Rastafari would probably disagree vehemently on that point. However, at least some alcohol would help people relax. It might even make them more susceptible; most people, by the time they finish university (if not high school), have a few stories of things they were talked into while drunk that they probably would never have agreed to while sobre. Granted most of those stories aren't about religion as such, but perhaps that's because it's never been tried.

Of course, this would require a paradigm shift from "Jesus really drank grape juice" towards "Jesus helps people get drunk". Defenders of the former position, including the reverend at the cited link, are invited by the Church of the Orange Sky to explain why the book of Proverbs makes the rather disturbing suggestion that alcohol be given to poor people to comfort them in their poverty. I was one of those pious abstainers once, and I remember being surprised and righteously uncomfortable when bottles of Molson Canadian actually were passed around at an outing of the UNBC InterVarsity chapter.

Here endeth the lesson. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord or the Orange Sky, as is your custom.
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Inspirational Messages from Inspirational Places

Procrastinator's Link of the Day™: First Baptist Church of Prince George, B.C., I noticed while out driving today, wants people to know that "kindness is the oil that reduces the friction of life." There are so many ways to snark about that, I'm not even sure where to begin. This came to passersby via the church's bright new sidewalk sign, which recently replaced an older, duller sign taken out by someone who was already too lubricated to be driving.

For many more dubious attempts at inspiration, check out Joel B.'s Crummy Church Signs website.
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Church of the Orange Sky Awtaf No. 1

As an expression of gratitude for repeated funding awards in the past, this author has graciously extended space upon this blog for electronic propagation of the Church of the Orange Sky's official public proclamations, officially known as the "Awtaf" series.

The Church of the Orange Sky is pleased to proclaim Tatsuya Ishida a gifted messenger of the divine who has been blessed with the will and capacity to make the will of the Orange Sky known to humanity.

His webcomic, SinFest, has been providing unique religious commentary for several years now. Some fairly recent work which attracted the attention of the Church of the Orange Sky may be found here, here, here, here, here, and here (that's Buddha on the cloud, I think).
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Enjoying the End Times

This post incorporates research funded by a generous grant by the Eschatological Sciences Research Foundation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's occurred to me recently that my undue focus on certain branches of Christianity has led me to ignore the wide variety of apocalyptic notions floating around elsewhere. I'm sad to say this didn't occur before now - indeed, I ought to have realized it a couple of years ago, before I was kicked off of the Rapture Ready bulletin boards by zealous administrators, at which time I'd been repeatedly lectured by the pompous pious on the supposedly apocalyptic views of Iran's president, Ahmedinejad. (At the time, this little corner of the evangelical right seemed convinced that Ahmadinejad believed it was his divinely appointed role to blow up Israel and thus provoke a world-destroying nuclear armageddon.)

A couple of months ago, I had an even more interesting conversation on the train in Ottawa with a fellow (unfortunately, I've forgotten his name) who'd done some very interesting research into the end of the world from a quite different perspective. He began with the rather often-repeated (even, hilariously, among futurist evangelicals, who ought to know better if only because of their delusions about Satanic inspiration) claim that the world is going to end in 2012, something the Mayans knew but none of the rest of us have been able to figure out in the intervening five hundred years. Wikipedia has a page on the Long Count calendar and, unsurprisingly, the 2012 story is largely a myth: this date marks the end of an era in world history, not the world as such. That doesn't stop people, though; 2012 figures significantly in everything from the New Age theories of José Arguelles to the alien conspiracies of The X-Files.

What was more interesting about this conversation, though, was not the date but the details. Among other things, the Earth's magnetic poles are going to begin fluctuating - after learning I was a university student, he nicely asked whether I knew much about whether such fluctuations had occurred before in world history - and there are going to be enormous floods, covering the vast majority of the world's surface with seawater. Fortunately, he and apparently some others had been able to figure out which mountain ranges would escape the flood relatively unharmed, and he was making a map of suitable escape locations. Unfortunately I can't remember which ones were favoured (after all, you don't want just high dry land but high dry land you can survive on), except that one of the optimum mountain ranges was located in sub-Saharan Africa. It was an interesting conversation and unfortunately the train ride only lasted ten minutes or so.

All of this pales, however, next to the latest eschatological pronouncement from the always-entertaining Church of the Subgenius, which has recently proclaimed via its High Weirdness Project, that the end of the world is coming a little early, in July of this year. Consequently, the Church is going to suspend new memberships beginning late on July 4 (the day before the end of the world - Armageddon's Eve, perhaps?) and is inviting all of its members to a nudist retreat at the Brushwood Folklore Center to celebrate their last days on Earth. (The end of the world, conveniently, coincides with the church's annual X-Day celebrations, which customarily invite "disbelievers, blasphemers, pranksters, rebels, hackers, pornographers, geeks, and outcasts" to explore the Church's concepts of enlightened "sexual freedom."

For those who are worried that this is starting to sound like a suicide cult, don't worry - the Church of the Subgenius, like all Discordians, tends to hover somewhere between peacefully psychotic and ironically humorous, sort of a long-winded cousin to Pastafarianism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Actually, I kind of like the Discordian movement. Unimginatively named Christian deities like "God," and authority figures like "the Pope," seem downright dull when placed next to Bob Dobbs the divine equipment salesman, who escaped death Rasputin-style before finally being gunned down in San Francisco in 1984, after which he has subsequently returned from the dead on multiple occasions; or especially Malaclypse the Younger, Omnibenevolent Polyfather of Virginity in Gold, who once exchanged telegrams with God while vacationing in the Celestial Hotel.
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Mad Reverends, 2008 Edition

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

Procrastinator's Link of the Day™: The latest dubious hate songs, apparently from Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church are available here, in Flash, QuickTime, and WMV formats for your convenience. It goes without saying, hopefully, that the Church of the Orange Sky does not condone spreading any message of hate and provides this link only as a matter of convenience to loyal readers looking for something slightly more off-color than YWAM dance videos.

The centrepiece of the collection, unfortunately, is available from an alternate source - Google Video, here - and takes a marginally asinine 1980s social protest song to an entirely new level. "God hates the world," indeed.

This blog has been silent lately as the authors celebrate Christmas and other equally non-religious holidays. Rest assured, however, that new and exciting things are coming, including collaboration on a new website which will be a provocative and relevant witness of Christ to a new generation.
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