Celibate Marriage Experts?

According to an article in the "Faith and Values" section of the Columbus Dispatch, Bishop R. Daniel Conlon is advocating a renewed effort by Priests to support faith based marriage. To that end, hundreds of priest have gathered at a hotel in Columbus, OH this weekend to increase their education and enthusiasm for supporting the institution of marriage.

The Bishop felt compelled to do this because he sees more threats to traditional marriage than ever before, probably because when Xians feel threatened, they always seem to see more threats than ever before in spite of any evidence to the contrary. Although divorce and cohabitation are mentioned, I'm pretty sure it's gay marriage initiatives that are freaking him out. It's also clear that the Bishop perceives a "traditional" marriage as one Xian man + one Xian woman (preferably of the same denomination) wed in a Xian church by a priest (or a man of the cloth of of another title).

I have a few problems with this (as if you hadn't guessed). First, why would you take marriage advice from someone who's never been married? That's kind of like taking flying lessons from someone who's never been in a plane.

Second, traditional marriage is not unique to Christianity or even the Abrahamic religions. Marriages are found all over the world, including societies that have never heard of a bible. "We have to teach what we know to be God's truth about marriage, perhaps in a more forceful way than we have," Bishop Conlon said. That would be fine if he confined himself to his Catholic flock, but that's not what he said. The jurisdiction of bishops and priests is their cathedrals and churches, beyond that constituency people shouldn't have to be subjected to the mythology called "God's truth".

Third, sometimes divorce, cohabitation, and even same-sex marriage can be the right answer. Rigid dogma and the threats of social isolation and eternal damnation have trapped people in abusive relationships and forced people apart who should be together. If the clergy wants to insist that certain rules must be followed or the offending person must leave the church and if they wish to advise that person that they believe such-and-so will happen after they die, that's their prerogative. It's not appropriate to call their unprovable beliefs "truth", or to insist that a person doesn't have the free will to change to different beliefs, and it is never appropriate to insist that a general public, with guaranteed freedom of religion, should be subjected to their dogma codified into civil law.

So if all the Catholic clergy that visited Columbus want to go home and tell their congregations that that they should only marry if their pretty sure they can stay together "till death do us part", or if you want to send same-sex couples away to get married elsewhere, or if they want to tell persons that they cannot be a church member unless they follow certain rules, that's their job, and best of luck. However, when the clergyman steps out onto the public street, his authority ends and everyone should be free to believe what they want, and participate in marriage according to their own rules, as long as it doesn't break the civil laws.

They Must Be Crackers

P. Z. Myers had a post on Pharyngula yesterday about the afternoon discussion he held in Fargo ND saying "My opening remarks were about being assertive atheists who challenge conventions and do things like desecrating crackers…", and then he commented on Catholics in the audience who expressed that they were offended. One can find examples of this kind of egocentric outrage any time a disregard for Christianity is expressed in the US (as in this later post).

They just can't shift their mental gears enough to understand that what they see as the "consecrated body of the Savior" is still just a cracker to anyone of a different belief. They think that because a priest said some words and made hand gestures over baked flour disks, everyone should perceive them as little chunks of human flesh that are part of their favorite person. A non-believer can do DNA testing, mass spectrometry, X-rays, fMRI's or satellite photos and still find nothing but flour and water. Unless one assumes that Catholics revere the Pillsbury Dough Boy, no evidence of a Savior can be found.

The point is that what is revered within a religion is perceived in a unique way by devotees of that religion, but for those outside that belief, these things are just mundane objects. Christians should understand this since it has been their attitude toward the religious objects of other religions for as long as there have been Xians. Missionaries have denigrated, defaced or destroyed religious objects of other people on every continent of the world (except, maybe Antarctica) and when the non-Xians rose up in outrage, the Xians would shrug and say, "What's the big deal? It's only a cracker."

Acts like Dr. Meyrs' "desecration" of a communion wafer need to occur to remind people that there are a lot of different views represented within the human population and one's own beliefs are no more valid than anothers. Most of the people that are outraged by the blasphemous acts of non-believers have themselves sneered at or desecrated what others believe to be holy. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Catholics should not be too surprised if a non-Catholic looks at a communion wafer and sees only a cracker, and those same Catholics should not be surprised by the outrage of Native Americans when something they revere is desecrated by ignorant or uncaring persons.

For way too long Xians in the US have had the attitude that their religious symbols are "the body of Christ" but everyone else's are just crackers. They need to learn that the trappings of their religion have no more value than anyone else's, and no less, but once that wafer is out of the hands of a believer, what ever special powers it possessed are gone and it reverts to cracker status and is not worthy of your outrage.

Christian Peace and Harmony

An article today in Yahoo news about a rift in a big Presbyterian church in FL, got me thinking about how often one sees claims that peace and harmony are among the benefits of being an Xian compared to the actual observed evidence. The above church is only unique in that it was one of the first mega-churches and that it has connections to Billy Graham and religious right leader D. James Kennedy. There's nothing at all unusual about seeing a headline that there is a rift within or between Xian denominations, and I suppose we should be glad that, at least in most places, the denominations aren't torturing and killing each other any more, but you'd think that when they make bumper stickers and song titles they might want to stick to claims that are less demonstrably false.

Most of the time when I hear of religious discord, I think of the bloody wars and suppression between Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Britain, but the first thing that came to my mind today was Africa. Have you ever wondered why there are so many followers of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, even though most of those nations were colonies of Xian countries? It seems that when the imperial Europeans decided to claim ownership of Africa, they included the traditional imposition of missionaries on the indigenous population, but the different Xian denominations spent so much time arguing with each other over who had more right to force their religion on the locals, that the Islamic missionaries were able to walk in with a monolithic message and convert everyone.

Maybe I'm the only one amused by this, but I'm always hearing about how the spread of Christianity, with all its manifest benefits, throughout the world is evidence of it being the true religion. Yet, it seems these guys are their own worst enemies and in spite of the constant discord, they'd like us to believe they are the primary force for achieving world peace and harmony.