Last Yuletide News Bits

Re-purposed Santa figure, Pueblo, Colorado

• This is your brain. This is your brain on Christmas.

• “How the Lawyers Stole Winter”  — are we raising kids who can’t cope? No, it’s not Yule-related, directly. Indirectly, yes, I would argue. You have to embrace all of the wheel.

• No matter how “imagistic” it may be, Iraqi Christians are afraid to celebrate Midnight Mass. The current bunch of Islamists may succeed after 1,400 years of effort in chasing the last Arab Christians out of the Middle East. Expect them all in North America soon. (I have already met Egyptian Christians in a tiny town near me.)

• I was watching a re-run show hosted by travel writer Burt Wolf in which he reported that Christmas trees were promoted by 16th-century German Protestants who considered images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the saints to be idolatrous and who wanted to replace them with something else. That is counter-intuitive enough that it might be right, and it matches what was going on elsewhere, such as England in the time of the boy king Edward VI. In that case, the Christmas tree does not qualify as a “Pagan survival,” at least not directly.

• And don’t forget Krampus coming to town.

Those Wacky Muslims

We keel you! (Part 241).

French magazine fights back after firebombing. Cartooni-jihadis also swarmed its Facebook page, leading the group Reporters Without Borders to call on Facebook to “renounce censorship” and let the editors access their own page.

I give them credit for guts: They plan to republish the “guest-edited by Muhammend” edition.

• Arab spring? Let the killing begin! Coptic Christian high school student murdered  by his own teacher (with help). Does teacher-education in Egypt include a course on strangling and bludgeoning, or is that learned in continuing-education classes? This sheikh perhaps inspired him.

I expect that we are going to see a whole lot of Coptic Christians in North America very soon, the ones who survive.

• Toy guns made in China are part of an anti-Islamic plot.

Refresher: Aisha  was the prophet’s 9-year-old wife. And he consummated the marriage right away. But, hey, it’s a different culture, and who are we to judge?

An Islamist group whose name means “Western education is forbidden” kills 63 people in Nigeria.

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.

Christians’ Persecution Perplex

So there was some kind of big evangelical Xian pep rally in Houston, headlined by Gov., Perry of Texas, a possible presidential candidate, which is why that it is getting media attention.

Jason Pitzl-Waters watches it nervously from the minority-religious-rights perspective. Kallisti works it into a post on polytheism: “Powerful images and vengeful gods.”

The thundering irony is that the evangelicals see themselves as a persecuted minority in America, although they are willing to admit that Muslims are even more disliked.

The blogger linked, Bradley R.E. Wright, notes,

Similarly, somewhere along the line we evangelical Christians have gotten it into our heads that our neighbors, peers, and most Americans don’t like us, and that they like us less every year. I’ve heard this idea stated in sermons and everyday conversation; I’ve read it in books and articles.

There’s a problem, though. It doesn’t appear to be true. Social scientists have repeatedly surveyed views of various religions and movements, and Americans consistently hold evangelical Christians in reasonably high regard. Furthermore, social science research indicates that it’s almost certain that our erroneous belief that others dislike us is actually harming our faith. (emphasis added)

Why this need to feel like victims? Is it a hankering for the good old days of the 2nd century C.E. when they were persecuted (although not as much as they think)?

The Christians’ big mistake was when they stopped being at all “countercultural” and snuggled up to the emperor Constantine, who then used his power to intervene in their squabbles (see Council of Arles, Council of Nicaea.)

Jesus had little to do with kings, but things sure did change after that.

Soon there was no turning back. The Catholics adopted the imperial table of organization: Pope = emperor. College of Cardinals = Senate. Big church = city hall (basilica, lit. “royal tribunal chamber.”) In the Eastern Roman Empire, the Orthodox prelates generally were equally cozy with kings, right up through the  end of Czarist Russia in 1917.

(Muslims, of course, did not even go through much of a countercultural period, since Mohammed led armies, negotiated treaties, etc. Yet they have a martyr complex too.)

On the principle that cornered animals are dangerous, this self-image of being a persecuted minority not only “harms their faith” but is indeed a potential seedbed of trouble for non-Christians.

Beards and Religiosity

Religion journalist Mark Oppenheimer begins a New York Times article on the religious significance of beards this way:

Go ahead, picture a religious Jew.

Now picture a Muslim cleric.

Now an Amish farmer.

What do they have in common? Beards. And not neatly trimmed beards, but, in the popular stereotype, long, unruly beards, which connote piety, spiritual intensity and a life so hard at study that there is no time for a shave. The scholar, the mystic, the terrorist, the holy man — they all have beards.

Now who is missing from that list?

Of course, we would not want male Druids to be viewed as in an anecdote passed along by Adnan Zulfiqar, the Muslim spiritual adviser at the University of Pennsylvania:

“I recall one gentleman who came back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, ‘I learned one thing: the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.’ His anticipation was people with big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him.”

Starting Over as a Virgin (Or Else)

When I was a teenager, I remember hearing some slightly older female friends cracking up over the line, “Let’s go to California and start over again as virgins.”

Only it should be “Toronto,” not “California,” the reason being that you do not want your Muslim husband to beat you.

Lina, 20, is originally from Afghanistan and isn’t surprised the surgery is now available in Canada.

“My friend heard that it was going on in Saudi Arabia because people fear their husbands,” she said.

“If she doesn’t get it done, then they are going to find out that she wasn’t pure on the wedding night, but if she does get the surgery done, they could find out that she wasn’t pure and got this surgery in secret, which would be very bad.”

File under “Desert Monotheisms.”

“You know how it is in the Middle East …”

I read this CNN story about Osama bin Laden’s relatives wanting proof of death and was smacked with the 2×4 of irony.

It’s in this sentence, quoting writer Jean Sasson, apparently a ghostwriter to the family:

You know how it is in the Middle East so many times: They really need proof or people start believing — this has been discussed by a lot more people than me — that many people will not believe that he’s dead…

So if the Romans had dropped that troublesome prophet guy in the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago instead of leaving him up on the cross, there would have been no Christianity? No witnesses to the allegedly empty tomb? It certainly would have affected the character of the religion.

Bollywood versus Desert Monotheism

A discussion (with lots of music and dancing) about why Bollywood movies are a devastating weapon against the more radical desert-father monotheisms.

There is some deeper resonance that [these movies] have, which is why people want them. . . . Young people in the Middle East are just lapping up Bollywood.

As I said earlier, Aphrodite will not be denied.  Fight fire with hotness.

Aphrodite Smiles

Back when this blog was young, I wrote a post called “Aphrodite will not be Denied”  about the botheration caused to some Muslim clerics by the sultry Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe.

If there is anything that drives the mullahs and imams mad, it is female sexuality.

The bloom is off the rose of the recent Egyptian revolution, you may be sure, for now the Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organized political grouping, wants to establish Saudi-style morality police.

Veena Malik

In a video at this link, the Pakistani actress Veena Malik rips into a grim-faced mullah who claims that she has “filled his heart with sadness.”

“No one in Pakistan can look at her pictures in the presence of their daughters,” he rants. (These mullahs can accelerate from reasonable to rant in 2.4 seconds.)

“I don’t think that her [hypothetical?] son will like to look at his mother’s pictures in the future.” (It’s always all about the boys.)

Whereupon she rips him a new one, suggesting, for example, that he concern himself with Islamic clergy who rape the little boys that they are supposed to be teaching. (Sound familiar?)

In American political discourse, however, feminist values too lead to some odd turnings when they conflict with the mainstream media narrative about “the religion of peace.”

For example, when Time magazine ran a picture of  a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban for an alleged sexual offense, the New York Times dismissed the photo as “war porn.”

And although Veena Malik might be shocked to hear it, I see the power of Aphrodite in her “smackdown” of the ranting mullah.  As as goddess, she can manifest how and when she pleases.

The ‘Sickness’ of Monotheism

Prompted to write on “Muslim-Christian relations” for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section, Jason Pitzl-Waters changed the terms of the usual interfaith conversation and “spoke truth to power,” thus:

These events are the sad fruits of mixing raw social and political power with religions that operate on a exclusionary, one-true-path, basis. What you see in Iraq or Egypt is just the extreme and violent form of a sickness that has haunted history since the now-dominant monotheisms rose to prominence and power [emphasis added].

He then linked to his piece on Facebook and at his Wild Hunt blog.

Right away some concern troll pops up asking, “Of course, you don’t address why a fair number of Pagans, who belong to a supposedly tolerant and diverse community of non-monotheists, are also in the anti-Muslim camp.”

It’s all about [nasty Western] imperialism, you see.

Sure. Take Persia (Iran) for example, the center of a major empire for centuries. Then conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the eighth century, who killed off most of the native Zoroastrian priests and imposed Islam at the point of the sword. Reconquered by the Muslim Tamerlane, who piled up thousands of skulls whenever someone “questioned his authoritah.”

Seriously, I think we are in the “anti-Muslim camp” because we know well that thousands of Muslims want us either (a) converted to their One True Way or (b) dead. Those are your choices.

Look what happens when a “moderate” politician in Pakistan questions that country’s draconian anti-blasphemy laws, which make it criminal to say anything remotely bad about Islam—although you can insult Hindus, Christians, and, I suppose, even Wiccans to your heart’s content.

When he is murdered, his killer is a hero to lawyers (!) and to religious leaders. (Read the dead governor’s last Twitter here.)

I have to wonder, when you drive through Islamabad or Lahore, are there billboards?

Know a Blasphemer?

Call our confidential tip line: 1-8oo-OFF-HEAD

Allah will reward you (and so will the government)!

Is a thorough knowledge of blasphemy law a way to riches in the Pakistani legal profession, like being an expert in water law is here in Colorado?

• • •

One of my favorite scholars of new religious movements, Bob Ellwood, wrote a book late in his career called Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World’s Religions.

He set forth a sort of “lifespan development” theory of religion, in which all the biggies go through the same stages, even as humans go through infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc.

It seems too pat, but it’s appealing, at least when looking at Christianity and Islam.

Ellwood argues that Islam now is where Christianity stood in the 16th century, in the “reformation” stage. And that was the era of the witch trials and of religious wars up and down Europe with aftershocks that carried into the Americas and even followed European explorers and settlers into Africa and South Asia.

Islam, he argues “is in fact displaying many of the initial characteristics of the Reformation period in the history of a world religion. There is a response to secularizing trends, an inward fervor, the early desire to create an ideal society, the emergence of a new kind of elite.”  In this case, Islamic thinkers see decay in the Muslim world and blame it all on “the West” (and on the Jews, naturally).

So the concern troll above is just parroting that line: everything the matter in the Islamic world is the fault of “the West.”

Ultimately, Ellwood suggests, the blood-letting recedes, and we move into the era of Folk Religion, when a dominant religion becomes disconnected from the concerns of the political elites—except when convenient. That is where he places Western Christianity now.

I find the book interesting although I distrust Grand Intellectual Schemes. And I doubt that I will live long enough to see the end of the bloody Islamic “reformation,” which because I am a Western Pagan, represents a very real threat to my health and well-being if it comes too close.

Lucky for Jason Pitzl-Waters, there are no blasphemy laws in America, and the very fact that the Washington Post solicits his views shows that religion is not something we kill people over in America, usually.