Invoking God

Mark and I always manage to have a Seder at Passover with whoever happens to be around and interested in attending: non-Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends from Santa Fe, family from New York, etc. One year, our friend Lisa, a Jew from Washington D.C., who was at the time living in a small Hispano village across the Rio Grande from us, decided to have a Seder and invite all her Catholic neighbors. We downloaded a liberation Haggadah from the Internet and went over to Servilleta Plaza to celebrate Passover in Lisa’s run down adobe house. Besides being the only Jews there except for Lisa and her mother, who was visiting from D.C., we were the only gringos as well. Everyone crowded into the large kitchen while we went through the ceremony and took turns reading the passages from the Haggadah before digging into a scrumptious meal of lamb, matzo ball soup, and frijoles. When it got dark we lit a bonfire outside, told stories and danced.

Mark and I also attend Catholic mass in El Valle, on Christmas and special occasions, and at funerals (or rosaries, where the penitentes sing on their knees in front of the alter). I’m not sure anyone in the village even knows we’re Jews, but they don’t care what we are as long as we come to show our neighborliness and respect for their religion and culture.

That being said, I truly hate organized religion. I hate the fact that certain friends find it necessary to “rediscover” their “spiritual” life (particularly after they become parents) that gets all tangled up in some form of religion, usually the one they grew up in, or sometimes, one they find more “liberating.” Religion is not liberating: it is suffocating. It is about taking on faith certain precepts that have nothing to do with liberation or freedom or goodness. It is about believing stories that were devised to control people by keeping them ignorant and disenfranchised. And it is about fomenting hate and intolerance. According to Voltaire: “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are moulded from the same sh . . . , and soaked in corrupted blood.”

This is the promo for a new video game:

Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to
remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of
the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech
military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of
New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a
military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state –
especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct
physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with
extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose:
you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose
creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.

Actually, they’ve got it wrong when they target “moderate, mainstream Christians” because they’re just as insidious. This is author Sam Harris in his book The End of Religion, who is unafraid to state the obvious (although a certain political naiveté shortchanges the impact of the book):
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. . . . Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The test themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. . . . Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. . . . Moderates do not want to kill anybody in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about.”

My son Jakob, who worked in Evansville, Indiana as a photojournalism intern, told us about the church on every corner and even attended some of them to get a feel for what Midwest culture is really like. At the last one he went to, a middle-class mainstream Christian denomination that houses thousands of worshipers every Sunday, the minister’s sermon was singing a dirge for the church’s younger generation, who were not attending services with their parents and apparently showed little inclination in becoming members. So there is still hope, that the next generation, which already embraces a much more culturally inclusive lifestyle that bends gender and class rules, will eschew the trappings of organized religion and celebrate their spiritual lives through their acceptance and celebration of all human diversity.

Solution: Give all churches to their respective communities to be run as halfway houses, homeless shelters and training centers, domestic violence retreats, and dancehalls.