I'll bet this was a surprise

I tend to check my stats on blogger. So yesterday, I was looking at the search keywords used to get to my blog and I found the following search words:

"kids girls xxx 11 years old".

So I had creepy pedophile looking at the blog. I wonder which post he (maybe I'm being sexist but ...) got to - "This is not a kids book. Rating XXX"?

I can only assume that it was a 5 second look and a move on.

This was a propos of nothing really.

Bedazzled Crone speaks!!

The following is a post that I made on another website (rayharvey.org) in response to a commenter on a post that would have had something to do with education or health care and economics. The site belongs to a friend who is a libertarian [I have all kinds of friends :-)].  I can no longer quickly find the original web page, so I am reposting this because it is about a different part of my childhood/formative years & does explain some of the other figures, who were influential on developing my life philosophy [besides Babylon 5 :-)]

Note: BC stands for Bedazzled Crone - a name that I sometimes use on the net (& linked to this website address); POG is who knows??

BC: I will address some of the issues that you have brought up in your post over a number of comments. Don’t want to make them too long. This is the first response to something that was a little ad hominem, n’est-ce pas? So to clarify:

POG: The problem is that you continue to view “capitalism” and “competition” through your lens of Marxist critique, I am guessing it was ingrained in you in the 60’s by some professors who were apologists for Stalinism and you haven’t been able to shake it since.

BC: My intro PoliSci prof. in 1968/69 was Polish and hardly a Marxist.  He taught at Conrad Grebel College (attached to the U of Waterloo where I was a computer science/math major). If I were anything, I was first and foremost an existentialist in my late teens (when I read Sartre, Nietzsche & others) and my 20s. I was an ardent supporter of human rights, and already, seriously critical of “systems”. The main influences on my philosophical thinking were Erich Fromm (Escape From Freedom, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness), A. S. Neill (Summerhill), John Holt (Escape From Childhood) but probably, one of the most important was Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis, and Deschooling Society). These writers do not a “Marxist” make!  If I have "socialist roots", they are derived from two basic areas.

The first is the reality of being the daughter of a steel mill ladleliner. The owner of the "means of production" always needs to be forced to do right by the very people that allow the owner to make his/its profits & he/it sure as hell didn't/doesn’t want to share it around. My father led sit-down strikes, my Dad was laid off. I doubt very much that he gave a damn about socialism, Marxism or anything else along that line. What he did care about were his and his fellow steel workers human rights; - the right to work in a safe environment and the right to a fair wage for a day's work. The labour movement wasn’t about "socialism/Marxism" as far as I can see - it was about individual human rights. And, sometimes, you needed/need to come together collectively to assert those rights. It is those "capitalists" and their government cronies that labelled the labour movement as "socialist" as it became a corrupted "big business" itself, particularly in the United States. This eventually led to the McCarthy hearings in the US – talk about moral panic creators). What is wrong with people wanting to collectively better themselves? Why is it there a need to "break the unions" within government agenda? Shouldn't the goal be to bring everyone up to the economic levels achieved by some of the unions so that people get "fair wage for a fair day's work"? Instead what we see is the attempts to break the unions through government legislation; the branding of unions as "socialist" or "marxist". Break the unions so that everyone can slowly find their economic status devolving to that of the level of the people who work at Walmart or McDonald's. Breaking the unions abrogates my individual right to act collectively should I want to.

The second comes clearly from my social gospel United Church of Canada Christian roots. Jesus as the Dude! The worldview that I inherited there and still maintain to a large extent would argue that human beings are interdependent. We are indeed our brothers’ and our sisters’ keepers. We always need to care about those who have less than we do. We need to care about those who are injured, who are treated unjustly. Empathy is the thing that differentiates us from most other animals. The ability to care about other human beings should matter as much as “systems”. Sometimes, I think that that is the core of the problem with most “systems” – no matter what they are: the tendency to forget that we are talking about individual human beings who get hurt by these systems. Altruism may have its roots in TheSelfish Gene, but it is a fact that humans seem to be as willing to support one another as they are to kill one another - in the evolutionary context. No matter what is in our genetic inheritance, we are thinking beings; we can envision a future different from the one we live in. Historically speaking, human beings are constantly finding ways to overcome their genetic inheritance through creating alternative scenarios, different religions, different societies, different childrearing methods, and different hierarchical or non-hierarchical forms of governance – all for the sole purpose of finding out how we can live interdependently. I doubt very much that that is “socialism” or “Marxism”. 

FYI: If you got this far, here is a link to a few more of my thoughts (more philosophical and political) at one of Ray's blog posts Political Theory of Government.

Canon Within the Canon / Inclusive Bible?

These are two of the ideas that have floated around among feminist biblical scholars & in feminist hermeneutics by those who wish to stay within the Christian belief system. I have problems with both of these attempted solutions to the patriarchal construction of the biblical texts. As I see it, some of the major problems with both solutions are that:

1. The texts were all written from within patriarchal societies by people who were socialized within those cultures. No matter how hard you try, you cannot avoid this fact. We cannot escape our past, we can only be aware of how it shaped us.
2. Both solutions contain within them the assumption that there is something authoritative and "divinely inspired" about (some of) the biblical texts. They are thus privileged and contain ethical and instructive material that cannot be found elsewhere.
3. There will be no consensus on what should be the "good" canon as opposed to what is the "bad" canon. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but believers often have the idea that everyone should somehow see things the same way. Some decisions might be easy, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", for example [but that is contained in just about every ethical system in existence]. 
4. Incipient Christianity was an apocalyptic Jewish sectarian movement. A text such as Paul's comment that there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, etc., one of those "good" texts, derives from the apocalyptic assumptions of the early beliefs of the proto-Christian belief system. You can only accept it if you remove the verse itself from everything around it. This is a major problem for the entire Christian "New Testament" corpus, its apocrypha and cognate writings.
5. The big one. How do you deal with the atonement? Jesus' death on the cross and then his resurrection are central to the structure of Christianity. Even if one focuses on the resurrection, you can't have a resurrection without a death. So do you leave it in? If yes, then how to deal with all of the theologies that were built around this from the earliest days? If no, then what are you really left with? I happened to believe that there was a real person, Jesus who was an itinerant preacher and who was sent to his death. However, why, what happened afterwards, are all open to interpretation - right from the beginning. What we have is the hero myth, writ large and it appealed to the world in which it was created. Short of Dr. Who's Tardis, we will never know what happened.
6. Inclusive language is almost a mythical attempt to reshape the bible. What difference does it really make if Jesus died for humanity, rather than for mankind? The problem is not language but the entire construct that implies that humanity (or mankind) is in need a scapegoat - that we are guilty of something more than just living life.

Why I do this

During the question period after my presentation at the SBL International conference in Amsterdam (entitled "The Personal is Still Political: What else did you expect, or have we forgotten just how radical feminist exegesis can be?"), I was asked a question by a very upset and angry participant. In essence, the questions were: "Why did I waste my time on something that I didn't believe in; didn't I have better things to do than rip apart the bible; why didn't I go and spend my time doing something else?" 

So, how to answer? There is the obvious, academic answer: The bible and Christianity are the foundations of western culture in all its good and its bad. Therefore, we have to understand where the structures of our societies' ethical systems, presuppositions about the nature of human interaction, etc. come from. And to do this, we have to look at the bible as the foundational document of Western society. 

That is how I would have answered the question 10 years ago. Two weeks ago, today, I answered quite differently. I just laid it all on the line. A short version: I was sexually abused when I was 8 years old by a Roman Catholic priest, became hyper-religious, spent years in therapy dealing with the biblical god. AND I DON'T WANT ANYONE TO EVER HAVE TO GO THROUGH WHAT I HAVE GONE THROUGH. 

Now I know that that is not going to happen. I don't control the world. The bible is still out there, and that biblical god is still holding sway over people's lives (for one example, just watch Jesus Camp!!) However, by writing what I do, by saying what I say, I make a difference in the lives of a few people. And they have expressed this to me. A whispered "thank you" from a conference participant years ago; a "I never believed anybody else felt like that" from a very distressed woman who came to talk to me (after I gave her the Psalm of Anger to read);  a secondhand thank you from the friend of an incest victim who said that reading "Christian Virtues and Recovery from Child Sexual Abuse" had helped her more than 2 year of therapy. And what I write sometimes forces other academic theologians to think differently about the Christian religious system - see Atonement, Cycles of Abuse, and Virtue, a classroom blog from Duke University. It is discussions like this one that give me hope for a better future.

I won't change the world. However, I have nothing to lose in taking the "extreme" position. The personal is political - my life experience is my life experience - but I am not alone and I am not the only one who has ever felt like this. I am not the only one who has ever suffered from a Christian worldview that blamed me, and not the perpetrator(s) of the crimes committed against me.

If what I say and write makes even one other person's life easier, it is enough.

I will end this blog with yet another quote from Babylon 5: year 1, episode 16:

Mollari: Of course, we do. There's a natural law. Physics tells us that for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. They hate us, we hate them, they hate us back. And so here we are - victims of mathematics.
Sinclair: He never listens.
Delenn: He will, sooner or later.
Sinclair: How can you be sure?
Delenn: Because the alternative is too terrible to consider. Without the hope that things will get better; that our inheritors will know a world that is fuller and richer than our own, life is pointless and evolution is vastly overrated.

This is not a kids book! Rating: XXX

At the conference that I just attended, I made a comment (well more like an STATEMENT) during a discussion of the rape of Dinah and its consequences (Genesis 34). I asked what happens if an 11 year old girl read the story in whatever translation. She would certainly not tell on her abused, particularly if it were someone she knew - because what happened to the abuser in the Dinah story? He and his whole family & extended kin were murdered.

The respondent said, "The Bible is not a children's book!!!!!!!!!!" (emphasis hers)

I agree with her. However, I and many, many children receive their bibles when we were & are very young. I was given my first leather bound, red letter Bible when I was about 7 & 1/2. And we were & are encouraged to read it from beginning to end - certainly by say grade 7 (12) or grade 8 (13). Why? Because it is the "Word of God".

Which is why I am so concerned about what children actually understand when they read the "bible" not just Children's Stories from the Bible - which are often not much better.

The Bible should not only be X-rated (caution - read only with adult present), but it should come with a warning - supports patriarchy, hierarchy, slavery, blind obedience. The only problem that I see is that once you say something is X-rated, everyone will want to read it!! Although that may be a good thing; you can't miss the problems then!!

My younger son was the classic case of this. He decided that he should probably read the bible when he was about 16 - foundation of western culture, and all that. He began at the beginning and read every word in the Revised Standard Edition. He came to me at one point and asked, in a totally stunned voice: do you mean to tell me that people actually believe this stuff?

To Read:

A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

For a first look at the book, which is a really great read, go to his website:

http://www.ajjacobs.com/books/yolb.asp

If you believe that the bible is the divinely inspired "word of god"

then, what do you do about "prophetic pornography"?

The prophets, Hosea, Ezekiel, & Jeremiah, contain images of rape, sexual mutilation, gang rape, etc. imposed as punishments by the god of Israel (as the male) on the people of Israel/Zion/Jerusalem (as the female(s)). The god punishes his wives (!) - just go read it all.

So how are these passages supposed to be read in the modern world? This is a question that has been asked by feminist biblical scholars and needs to continue to be asked, again and again. As a feminist not embedded in the belief that the bible is the "inspired word of god", this is fairly easy. The texts are an indication of a patriarchal societal structure that devalues women and feels that they are fair game. They smack of misogyny.

These are the sort of texts that should perhaps be best left in their original languages. This would be similar to the authorized edition of the Church Fathers (pre-Nicene, Nicene & post-Nicene), that left all the "spicy" bits in Latin while the rest was translated. Look for any pre-1950 edition or so.

At the conference where I presented last week, I was told that you need to put all of these passages in their cultural context. That is all well and good, but I asked the man who was insisting that sociocultural context is the answer, what about preaching? Then I was told that you tell your congregation that this is how women were treated in the past, and we don't do this anymore. I say "Bravo". But is that good enough?

For example, it doesn't answer the question about divine inspiration and the privileging of the Bible as normative for the belief system. Were these prophets only divinely inspired when they say acceptable things? It is the conceit of prophecy that the divine is speaking through them & what kind of a divinity would use these images? What about the men and women who read these texts as "divinely inspired"? How does it affect them? Just something to think about.

A couple of places from which to start reading

Book & article to read:

Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Reading Hosea in the Late Twentieth Century  (T&:T Clark/Continuum, 2004; 2nd edition ).

Cheryl Exum, "The Ethics of Biblical Violence against Women" in The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium (Sheffield Academic Press, 1995).

Just a Question; maybe an Answer?

I have started reading a book called Holy Misogyny: Why the Sex and Gender Conflicts in the Early Church Still Matter by April D. DeConick. It got me to thinking over breakfast that this book contains some of the reasons that I had problems for years with feminist biblical studies and the rush towards the "alternate" gospels (gnostic or otherwise). However, I never really spent the time to fully articulate my disagreement.

This book is hardly feminist. However, it does bring up one issue. Why do women and men go to the books that were rejected by the canonists in early Christianity and somehow assume that these texts have answers other than showing how varied early Christian thought actually was? It is as if just because they were rejected, they must contain some elemental truth that would have made the world a better place if only these works had been included in the canon.

Hardly! I guess that I always worked from the assumption that the patriarchal, hierarchical structure of greco-roman civilization would have infused all of those texts as much as it does the canonical texts. In all my reading over the years, I have yet to be disabused of that assumption. I look at some of the "rejected" texts and try to think about what kind of world they would create. Not ones that I would want to live in.

I will review the book when I have finished it, and comment further on early non-canonical texts some other time.

My Mother was a Difficult Child

Yesterday we visited my aunt. She is 89 and has Alzheimer's, just like my mother. She is 5 years younger than my mother. She had no idea who I am, she remembers a 15 year old who visited years ago. That was what I expected.

However, when we started looking at pictures from the distant past, she started talking about her parents and her sister. We would ask questions and she would talk about things.

I have been learning some of the answers to questions in previous posts. My mother told my cousin why she never spoke to her mother. She had been sexually abused by her stepfather and her mother didn't believe her. So this answers why she left home so early & why she never talked with her mother. When I talked to my youngest son (over SKYPE, of course), his response was Bravo for her! and I agree with him.

But my aunt was saying how "my mother was a difficult child" and that was why she left home and went and found a "new mother". Clearly, this is what my aunt was told to explain why my mother was no longer around.

There is so much that I have learned in the week that I have been here and it is going to take some time to digest. All I can say, is that I wish my mother had been able to talk about all of these things years ago. Oh well, such was not the way of the world. I will be writing as I digest the information - it explains so much and so many missing pieces of the puzzle have fallen in my lap. I think that it has been good for my cousins as well - our mothers were far more alike than we ever knew. We have been comparing stories about the past - their similarities and their contradictions.

I even have a picture of my grandmother, grandfather & half-aunt. I also have pictures of my mother & aunt from an earlier period and when mother was a nurse in a pediatrics ward.

The universe unfolds as it will. It has been a very difficult and energizing week. The conference has gone well - I am actually a little bit hopeful.

That's all that faith requires - that we surrender ourselves to the possibility of hope. With that, I am content. (my B5 quote from June 22, 2012)

Further to Yesterday's Post on Schism

Feeling Under Siege, Catholic Leadership Shifts Right

by BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/04/156190948/feeling-under-siege-catholic-leadership-shifts-right

This is, of course, a normal fall back position for institutions. This was the position that the Council of Trent took in response to the Protestant Reformation. Centuries of history should make us understand that this was inevitable. Our understanding of moral conflict, cognitive dissonance, sociological analysis of institutions suggest that this is inevitable.

I shall watch with interest.

Jason Berry Told Us So Back in 1992

Catholic Schism: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Influential Church Historian, Predicts Major Division In 'Silence In Christian History'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/10/catholic-schism-diarmaid-macculloh-silence-in-christian-history_n_1663231.html?ref=topbar&utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=612565,b=facebook

I don't think that there is much to add to the story. It is clear that there is a serious disconnect between the Vatican and many of the laity - just from talking with Roman Catholic friends who clearly either don't know that they are not following the rules, try to find ways around the rules ( particular RC teachers on birth control issues) or they don't care. Generally speaking, they tell me that the"Church is the people", and what does the Pope have to do with it anyway. That catch phrase from Vatican 2 is seriously embedded in a good portion of the present-day Roman Catholic Church, and isn't going to go away any time soon.

The potential schism can be seen in 2 of the books that I have read lately. The first is Myra Hidalgo's, which falls on the potential schismatic side (See My review: Sexual Abuse and the Culture of Catholicism). Leon Podles' book, Sacrilege, comes up with solutions that would bring back an idealized medieval church (I will do a review of this after I get back from vacation in August).

Both authors are absolutely horrified by the Vatican's response to the "priestly pedophilia" scandal. Both love their church. One was a victim/survivor of sexual abuse by a nun. The other was a lawyer for victim/survivors. However, I am not sure that both could survive in the same church.

Go, S.N.A.P., Go

This is just a comment that I added to a column by Michael S Winters on Sept 14, 2011 entitled "Shame on S.N.A.P.'s Lawyers" (somehow, he seems to think that if he blames the lawyers, he is avoiding upsetting all us little ole survivors - sorry Mike, we're not that stupid!). Here is the link to the Winters post:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/shame-snaps-lawyers#comment-353003

No one at S.N.A.P., I suspect, would disagree with you about abusive governments. However, that is someone else's problem [p.s. ask why the U.S.A. is not a signatory to the world court].

However, there is a big difference between secular governments and the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church believes that it is the moral authority of the world. Its theology is that the only way to salvation is through the Church (& this was recently restated by PB16 on June, 29, 2007). It considers itself to be the only true MORAL/ETHICAL belief system for all humanity. Thus, in my opinion, the Roman Catholic Church is even more responsible for the abuses within its structure (and the massive destruction that it has perpetrated on the survivors) than are governments, which are only made up of mere frail, sinful human beings unimbued with the sanctified grace (!) of the Pope, the Cardinals, the Bishops, the priests through whom humanity must find its salvation.

Would you want a world based on the moral and ethical belief system of the Roman Catholic Church based on what we know now?

Go S.N.A.P., go. As Jeff Anderson said the Church will never take this seriously until the first bishop, archbishop or cardinal, finally ends up in jail for failure to report the massive abuses and failure to protect the children under their car.

If you are not familiar with the details of just what was done to some of the children, please read Leon Podles, Sacrilege or David France's Honor Your Fathers. I may not agree with everything in their analyses or proferred solutions, but for graphic descriptions, it should be enough to turn most people's stomachs.