Moral Extortion —

I've got God on the brain.

I've had it since I received this comment from Cyn:

"So god likes you more than he likes your friends? You're an asshole if you believe that. Not to mention a superstitious idiot."

She was responding to my theory that the reason I've had such a fortunate life was "either... a function of my optimism that keeps things from spiralling out of control or just the random hand of Life that I was dealt or (my personal opinion) God just really likes me."

It was a joke, attributing chance to God's favor.

I do think God likes me, but no more than the rest of you goons.

Anyhow, I love people who preach tolerance and acceptance for one group (say, the fatties), while dismissing an unrelated group (say, the Goddies).

Superstitious idiot? All right, I'll take the bait.

Yes, I believe in a Divine Source, or Ground, as Huxley called it:

"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

The essence of this Perennial Philosophy (a great book, by the way) should be the source and substance of religion. If it were, this world would be at peace with itself. Believers from all corners could accept the coexistence of non-believers (atheistic, agnostic and ecumenical) as the result of cultural differences, rather than willful heresy.

Sadly, religion is humanity's way of bottling up God for our needs, our desires. Religion, at its core, is a selfish sport, focused more on bettering me and mine, rather than you and yours.

Let me stipulate this by saying that when I refer to Religion, I'm referring to the hierarchical structure, rather than individual believers.

There is a problem amongst people who dislike organized religion to conflate the Religion with the religious. The misdeeds of a Religion should not reflect upon the religious. Religion isn't like a political party, that if your team is incompetent you don't necessarily jump ship for a better team.

For many religious, Religion is a way of life, no more extractable from their essence than their educational residue. Around 56% of Americans keep the religion of their childhood. I would love to find a statistic about how many Americans end up living in the same city they grew up in. I would imagine it would be a bit higher.

We cling to what comforts us and to begrudge Bob Christian for clinging to his faith makes about as much sense as begrudge Mary Humanist for clinging to her science. Both people are struggling to find meaning — one finds it through spiritual beliefs, the other through empirical beliefs.

Is one "wrong"?

I don't know. Is there something inherently "wrong" about a set of values or beliefs? Bringing it round to FA, is it "wrong" for me to be attracted to fat women? Is it "wrong" for society to place so much value on thinness?

Or is the "wrong" in the execution of your beliefs: in how you belief, rather than what you believe?

An example: the Catholic Church's official teaching on homosexuality says that gay people are okay, but gay sex is bad. So, in theory, you could be a gay Catholic in good standing, so long as you remained celibate.

Is that belief wrong?

No, it's a belief. There's no scientific study that can verify whether gay sex is "good" or "bad." You read a question like, "Is gay sex bad?" and your answer depends on your beliefs. And your beliefs should not be subject to moral judgment because the question, "Is believe that gay sex is bad good?" is just another rabbit hole for us to fall down.

I can say, "Yes, gay sex is bad," but that doesn't make me a bad person.

What does make you a bad person is if you act on that belief in such a way as to cause harm to others, as the DC Catholic Church proposed.

Now you've got the zealous enforcement of that belief affecting not believers, but anyone who relies on Catholic Charities for support. That is wrong.

But, again, it's all subjective. Those within the Catholic Church who believe the "gay marriage bad" opinion see it as simply exercising their right not to support or encourage behavior they find morally reprehensible. They argue that they should not be forced to provide benefits for gay couples due to their beliefs.

Whatever side you belong on, you no doubt find the other side's comments offensive and horribly misguided. Both sides see the other as forcing others to accept their beliefs.

Personally, I believe it's wrong for the DC Archdiocese to wield their charity as a cudgel. How far from Christ can a Church possibly get?

The actions of the Archdiocese are wholly separate from the actions of individual believers. To me, Religion operates under rules similar to quantum mechanics. Church leaders exists on separate moral ground than the their believers.

"But," I hear you say, "believers are a part of the Church and by remaining in a Church that has poor moral standing must be the believer's responsibility as well."

True enough.

Let's take the most grotesque and disturbing example currently in existence: pedophile priests. It's something that I have a bit of experience with.

Those who aren't familiar with the structure of the Catholic, its run a bit like a Fortune 500 corporation. For illustrative purposes, let's say McDonald's.

The way it's supposed to work is that God is the CEO and the Pope is the President. Then you've got the Cardinals, who are Vice Presidents, and Archbishops and Bishops, who are Regional Managers. The individual churches are like franchisees, run by a Pastor, who is the manager of that particular franchise.

The theological decisions are made by the CEO (in theory). Those theological decisions make up the framework of the faith: dogma. Catholic dogma has been established over the 2,000 years since eternal Ray Kroc established the first establishment in Israel. Much dogma came from the oral history of Jesus, which eventually formed the Gospels, followed by the rest of the New Testament.

Sifting through scripture, the great theologians, such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas More, distilled the Word of God into a set of beliefs that would eventually form modern dogma through the periodic councils convened by the Church.

Despite the glacial pace, the Catholic Church has seen its share of dogmatic upheavals (there are many Catholics who still consider Vatican II a heresy). But for the most part, no single figure has shaped the dogma of the Church as it exists today. Individual dogmatic beliefs? Maybe. But the entirety of Catholicism's core beliefs? Not likely.

Examples of dogma include the Trinity and Immaculate Conception.

Dogma is not negotiable. If you're Catholic and you don't believe in Immaculate Conception, then you're not really Catholic. Issues such as these are when a Pope's infallibility comes into play.

Contrary to popular belief, not everything the Pope says is infallible.

Likewise, not every teaching of the Catholic Church is considered infallible. Dogma also comes from the teaching office of the Church, known as the Magisterium. There are two types of belief that come from the Magisterium: the infallible Sacred Magisterium and the fallible Ordinary Magisterium.

Immaculate Conception is Sacred Magisterium. Proscriptions on birth control is Ordinary Magisterium. Which means that the Catholic Church could be wrong about birth control (and I strongly believe that it is), yet because it is a teaching of the Church, we, as Catholics, are expected to respect obsequium religiosum, or religious submission, to Church leaders.

And this is the key to understanding the difference between the Religion and the religious.

There is a rich tradition of arguing with God within Judaism.

Not so much the Catholic Church.

But I feel more akin to the Jews than I do to Catholics. Personally, I think God can handle our skepticism and our doubt. He can handle our anger and our frustration. He can handle our struggle to believe. He can even handle our disbelief.

God does not abandon you because you believe gay marriage is okay. He does not turn His back on you because you had an abortion. That's just not how God works.

So, when the hierarchy of the Church gets caught committing one of the gravest sins anyone could commit (the polar opposite of "laying down your life for a friend"), it rocks the foundation of believers more than it rocks God.

Saddens Him? Immensely.

Angers Him? No doubt.

Affects the essence of who God is and how much He loves us? Not one iota.

The monsters who executed this crime against humanity did not operate with God's approval. Yet God did not stop them. Why not?

Because, personally, I don't believe that's how God works. I don't believe in an interventionist God, reaching down and smacking the bad people into submission. I believe all the intervention that He desired was programmed into this world at it's creation (and by creation, I mean God as the source of the Big Bang, or whatever science finally settles on).

Why does God allow horrible things to happen? Because from an eternal viewpoint, our brief mortal suffering is oh-so-temporary. Once the veil is lifted and we are reunited with Him, we shall look back on our earthly experience with eternal eyes.

And so, why did God allow pedophile priests to be shifted from victim to victim? He didn't. The completely fallible, completely corrupt human leaders of the Church did so out of self-preservation, to prevent the Church from looking like a den of deviants (which it has been almost since the beginning).

But the fact that the Church is home to both sinners and saints should be no surprise. Nor should it be a surprise that sinners often rise through the ranks to become leaders. The characteristics that enable a person to climb the ladder of success (ambition, narcissism, greed), whether in the corporate or clerical world, are inherently opposed to the core values set down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (meek, merciful, pure of heart).

But these humans, these corruptible seeds, are not one and the same with God or Jesus or even the Church. They are not representatives of the Faith. They are (false) agents of Faith. They are no more a part of what Religion aspires to than you or I. They are merely leeches of Religion, extracting the value they desire from the Church without regard for anyone but themselves.

These people and their actions have no bearing on the soldiers on the ground, the priests and laypersons who are executing the day-to-day operations of the Church. The Church leaders operate completely out of sight of the people, and though their decisions ultimately affect those beneath them, those decisions are not the purpose of their relationship with the Church.

People join a Church because they seek meaning. Religion is the science of meaning. If you have spent the past five years of your life improving yourself through the teachings of the Church, and the revelation of pedophile priests comes out, you're not going to abandon those beliefs outright.

I did.

That was the last straw for me.

But I don't begrudge the Catholics who remained for remaining under the shelter of a morally-compromised Religion. The horrible choices of the Church leaders (and I count Pope John Paul II in this since he was President at the time) does not change the dogma, the structure, the frame on which the Catholic Faith was built.

It does, however, call into question its moral authority on Ordinary Magisterium (the fallible beliefs).

I still believe the central tenets of Catholicism (the Apostle's Creed). But on social issues, I make a clean break with the Church.

And, in actuality, Catholicism has a rich tradition of dissenting from the hierarchy. Rome despise liberal Catholics. In the United States, 58% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal. In that same study, 78% oppose allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions; 64% oppose abstinence only education; 41% support gay marriage; 50% support doctor-assisted suicide; and 69% support stem cell research.

Just as Jews embrace arguing with God, Catholics embrace arguing with the Pope.

Arguing with the Pope nearly cost Veronica and I our wedding.

Our families live about an hour and a half apart.


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So, we decided to have our wedding Downtown. We contacted our priest and gave him the date. He checked his calendar and said, "Sure, I can do it, but I'm going out of town for two weeks, so we'll have to talk about it when I get back."

Two weeks later we call and he says, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about this other thing I have to do on that day." I called back pissed, and after arguing with him for 20 minutes he finally admitted that he was backing out because he didn't want to drive all the way Downtown.

In fairness, we had never attended that Church. We were bad Catholics. So, if we were good church-going Catholics, he may have been more understanding.

Still, I was pissed that a PRIEST LIED to me.

I was especially pissed because in the two week interim, we had put down the (nonrefundable) deposit on the reception hall and the church.

So, we had to search for a new priest for that specific date. Finally found one I remembered from my youth group days. He was the priest in charge of recruiting.

We started our weekly meetings with him and right away he seemed sort of off-put by us. We weren't sure why. But the third week we got into a discussion about birth control and natural family planning. NFP is basically a birth control method whereby you monitor physiological signs for ovulation and avoid sex when you're fertile.

But you know what they call Catholics who practice NFP, don't you?

Parents.

Anyway, I love a good debate, as you may have noticed, and I asked the priest what the difference in mentality was between a couple that was using birth control to avoid getting pregnant (and thus having sex for recreative purposes only) and a couple practicing NFP to avoid getting pregnant (and thus having sex for recreative purposes only).

He lost it. Told us he had been having regrets about agreeing to marry us. He didn't think our marriage would last. He lectured us for a few minutes before ushering us out the door.

Eventually, the priest at my parents' church agreed to marry us, despite our birth control skepticism.

(Incidentally, since I do have three birth control babies, I, for one, know that even if you use birth control, it's still possible for God to enforce His familial plan (if He does indeed have one)... it is then that you must still be open to that plan (if there is one) and bring that life into the world... if that's what you believe. I believe in making abortion obsolete through effective birth control, but that's another post for another day).

The fact that a priest used his beliefs (beliefs fully endorsed by the Church) to inhibit my life does not negate the truth about God, whatever that may be.

The Church cannot be all things to all people.

God can.

*sigh*

This is totally not where I wanted this post to go.

I was planning on talking more about my personal beliefs, which are not as zealous as this post makes them sound.

Ten years ago, I considered myself a Roman Catholic.

Today, I call myself Reformed Catholic in the tradition of Reform Judaism.

I cling to the core dogmatic beliefs, but have jetissoned the moral authority the Church has claimed. Who knows, I might just condone beastiality, if I can find an effective rationalization for it.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. Sorry for the Teal Deer, but as I stated previously, religion, politics and size acceptance are three topics that I get very passionate about.

The other reason I have God on the brain is that Larry is doing very, very badly. Julie called Hospice. He hasn't had his TPN for days and his liver is shutting down.

Last night was hard. I just kept thinking about how I'm going to regret for the rest of my life banishing Larry from the deck for two weeks. The last two weeks he was healthy.

We have a babysitter this weekend, so V and I are going over there to hang out. Not sure what to expect, but I expect there will be tears.

And, ultimately, isn't that why we cling to God (those of us who chose to)? For comfort. For strength. For support.

That's why I do.