Declaring War on Bikinis and Pyramids

Why is this not surprising news? With the “Arab Spring” fading into the long hot summer, the Islamic militants in Egypt are focusing on their favorite targets (besides Coptic Christians): women, eroticism, and Paganism.

Some slight changes will be made in public beaches, to make the situation better than it was before,” Ali Khafagy, youth director of Freedom and Justice [part of the Muslim Brotherhood] in Giza, told The Media Line. “Bathing suits and mixing on the beach are things that go against our tradition. It’s not just a matter of religion. When I go to the beach I don’t want to see nudity.”

Right. “Slight changes.” There speaks the voice of incipient dictatorship.

And then there is Egypt’s big money-maker: tourism. A lot more people come to see the ruins of Pagan Egypt than to see any mosque in Cairo, but do the radical beardies care about that?

But bathing suits are not the only worry of Egypt’s Islamists. Abd Al-Munim A-Shahhat, a spokesman for the Salafi group Dawa, has said that Egypt’s world-renowned pharaonic archeology – its pyramids, Sphinx and other monuments covered with un-Islamic imagery – should also be hidden from the public eye.

“The pharaonic culture is a rotten culture,” A-Shahhat told the London-based Arabic daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat on Wednesday, saying the faces of ancient statues “should be covered with wax, since they are religiously forbidden.” . . . .

The Islamist challenges to the tourism industry in post-revolutionary Egypt have led to the establishment of the Coalition to Support Tourism, whose members also met with [Muslim Brotherhood official] Al-Katatny on Monday. The coalition, which includes a broad array of travel industry organizations and figures, argued that the real problem isn’t modesty but the absence of any strategy on the part of Egypt’s new parties to protect the country’s faltering tourism industry.

Would you book a cruise up the Nile right now? I doubt that many people are.

Another Blowhard Religious Leader, But Pagan

To Bo, the current Arthur Pendragon, “the nom d’épée of deluded old sponge John Rothwell,” holds up a Pagan mirror to religious leaders everywhere.

And in the long run, the attempt by some British Pagans to play the NAGPRA-derived “reburial of the sacred dead” card is going to be a public-relations disaster.

Aiiee, the Dominionist Burning Times Are Upon Us!

Kenaz Filan brings a little perspective: “In my experience to date (well over 20 years of same), every Pagan fraudster and exploitation-artist I have encountered has used ‘Christian persecution’ as a shield.”

And there is this:

“The prose is execrable: if the English language were Ed Hubbard’s dog, he’d be sharing a prison cell with Michael Vick.”

The snark is strong with this one. Read it all.

Mother Goddess Temple or Brothel?

From the fascinating”mortuary archaeology” blog Bones Don’t Lie, diverse explanations for the collection of babies’ skeletons in a ruin from Roman Britain.

Dr. [Jill] Eyers continues to argues for the brothel hypothesis, finding that further research and the combination of the human remains with archaeological evidence only further supports her conclusions. However this has been called into question by archaeologists, like Brett Thorn, who argue that the site also has evidence of a Mother Goddess cult, and may represent an area where women went to give birth.

Read more.

Sociologists Flummoxed by Las Vegas

Recently the American Sociological Association had to relocate its annual meeting to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

You would think that Las Vegas was a hotel buffet of raw material awaiting the sociological investigations, “the best spot in the world to do sociology,” as a member of the department at the University of Nevada, Las  Vegas, said. (There is apparently a university attached to the basketball team.)

But you would be wrong. You don’t know academics:

Lisa Dawn Wade, assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College, said the conference was her first trip to Vegas, and she described the experience in terms that corresponded with Jones’s assessment.

“There’s so much here,” Wade said, “and I feel like I don’t have the tools to process it… . There are stories here about consumption and about leisure and about social class that are really interesting, and I just feel kind of at a loss to say anything really smart about it.”

To borrow her blog’s subtitle, she must have experienced a failure of sociological imagination.

But some UNLV faculty members found themselves disappointed by what looked to them like knee-jerk reactions from their visiting colleagues. Las Vegas, they said, is a complex and multifaceted city too quickly written off by those who don’t really understand it at all — and many of the conference attendees, they said, hadn’t even tried.

I would never have called Las Vegas “too much the real world,”  but as Wade added in a carefully nuanced way,

Wade said it might not be a bad thing if the city made its visitors uncomfortable. Academics, she noted, tend to lead “pretty cushy” lives, and spending a few days in a difficult and even disturbing environment could prompt them to think about the “real people” who call the city home — and about the fact that, in many ways, Las Vegas is just a distilled and amplified representation of the world we all live in. “There’s a little bit of Vegas in all of us.”

I think I will suggest it as a venue for the American Academy of Religion. These meetings are planned seven or eight years ahead, but  you never know, a hotel workers’ strike might cause AAR to change its plans too.

Between Life and Death, No Balance

That was the title of a post that I wrote yesterday evening on my other blog.

I wish that I could think of some cool animistic perspective to take, but  cannot. When you are trying to save one critter, you kill others. I think that is called “being in the world.”

The Wild Hunt Gets Some Respect

It is nice to see that Jason Pitzl-Waters’ The Wild Hunt blog has gotten a major shout-out at Get Religion, the site for people who wonder why the mainstream media handles religion so ignorantly.

I predict that as Pagan traditions become more visible, our activities will be covered by the usual motley crew who went to journalism school instead of, y’know, actually learning anything about anything—history, science, economics, politics, religion, you name it.

Well, good for Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway, one religion writer who knows the difference between a Mormon and  an evangelical Christian.

See, blogging is easy. All you have to do is put out good content on an almost-daily basis while writing polite and informed comments at the sites that you hope will notice yours. Nothing to it.

Despite CUUPs, Unitarians Still Aesthetically Deprived

Victoria Weinstein, a blogging Unitarian minister (also known for her clerical-fashion advice blog) critiques her fellow UUs for neglecting the aesthetic side of worship:

I wonder how much of our beauty-avoidance is a hangover from our iconoclastic, Puritan origins in America. If so, it’s time we got over it and started realizing that the Arts are one of the most profound ways to communicate the humanist gospel. All our clergy should have some understanding of the fine arts, the humanities, not just theology and social justice.

Nor does she think that the increased Pagan element within Unitarian Universalist congregations has improved the aesthetic poverty. From the comments:

In fact, I believe that the neo-pagan [sic] community has done more harm than good by inflicting too many embarrassingly bad rituals, dances and music on our worshiping communities.

Discuss.

Religion and Foodways

Read this post about an Egyptian television cooking show and the importance of foodways in religion, if only for the all-too-typical “Polish cookies” anecdote.

I cannot see any Pagans today using the “Polish cookies” line, although we do have all too many people invested in boundary maintenance.

What is [any subdivision of’] Pagan cooking, anyway? And what would be considered objectionable food?

How not to Argue for Matriarchy

Thealogian Carol Christ shows you how not to do it at the Feminism and Religion blog.

First, create a “straw man” argument that lets you be the  heroic rebel:

[T]he “party line” in the fields of Religious Studies and Archaeology—even among feminists—is that there never were any matriarchies and that claims about peaceful, matrifocal, sedentary, agricultural, Goddess-worshipping societies in Old Europe or elsewhere have been manufactured out of utopian longing.

I can’t speak for archaeology, but in those corners of religious studies that might discuss Goddess religion, there are no “party lines” about anything. I have attended Pagan studies-related session at the American Academy of Religion for years, but I do not recall seeing her at one since 1997. So where does she get this idea? Never mind, it’s useful to her.

Second, change the key definition to give yourself more wiggle room:

A recent book, Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present, and Future (2009) defines the term “matriarchy” differently.

No more “archy,” from the Greek for “rulership,” but just being matrilocal is enough. That makes traditional Navajo Indians “matriarchal.” Someone go tell them. And how many societies are even matrilocal these days?

Third, find a culture far, far away:

In the cultures of the Masuo people on Lugu Lake in the Himalayas matriarchy in this sense has been preserved up to the present day.

But the next paragraph qualifies that claim slightly:

If the only the Masuo still followed these customs, and there is ample evidence in Societies of Peace that they do, then theories of the universality of patriarchy are shown to be false, and those of us who speculate that woman-honoring societies of peace have existed can no longer be accused of indulging only in fantasy.

Finally, accuse your previously created straw man opponent of bad faith:

Why is there such resistance to the idea that matriarchies could and still do exist? Could it be that accepting this idea would force us to reconsider absolutely everything?

Where is this “resistance”? Is it because the evidence for “woman-honoring societies of peace” is still weak—maybe one tiny group in the Himalaya?—or is it because her “conspiracy” of opponents are bad people?

Belief first, evidence later. It works for fundamentalists of all sorts.

Now it is true that I have seen some good feminist scholars sit and roll their eyes at each other while someone presented a poorly sourced and shaky paper on “matriarchal religion.” That is not because of any “party line” but because these women can be both Pagan and intellectually rigorous. It’s possible.

Carol Christ does not need to apologize for being utopian. It’s just that like many people who help to create new religions, she feels that she needs the prove that it is really really old.