Time Immortal

I suppose it was inevitable, with the popularity of Stuff White People Like, that someone would start up a website devoted to Stuff Catholics Like.

Oh, this is good cheese, O Reader.

To wit:

I. Rome

…

1) Go to a Papal audience and get stuff blessed. If you let your friends know about your trip in advance you will find yourself needing an extra suitcase to carry all the rosaries and medals that they want you to get blessed by the Pope. Extra points if you can get past the ninja nuns and actually shake the Pope’s hand.

2) Visit St. Peter’s and stay for Mass. How could you possibly go to Rome and not see St. Peter’s?

3) Stick your hand in the Mouth of Truth and scream. This isn’t really a Catholic thing but Gregory Peck might have been Catholic so it counts.

4) Go to the bone church. This isn’t something everyone does but you get a lot of mileage out of the stories you can tell.

5) Visit the Vatican Museums. Every. Last. Room.

6) Visit one of the catacombs. Ask if it’s where they filmed the Indiana Jones movie.

7) Stop by the Opus Dei headquarters and ask to see the albino monk.

8 ) Throw coins in the Trevi Fountain. See number 3.

9) Visit the church of San Clemente and ask to see the basement.

10) Get your picture taken with a Swiss Guard. Extra points if he cuts off your head with his hauberk. Maybe they’ll stick it in a box like the Church did with St. Catherine’s.

Or how about:

VI. Babies

…

However, if a Catholic family has 5, 6, 7 or more babies, it is seen as a crime against nature and a sin against humanity. In fact, countless Catholic mothers, who have 5 or more babies, have often received flabbergasted looks after having responded “yes” to the question “Are all these yours?” This encounter normally occurs in public places such as supermarkets, department stores, malls, or any other place that makes it difficult for the mother to keep track of every behavioral happening of her babies. The question “Are all these yours?” commonly follows when another person sees a Catholic mother who, with two shopping carts spilling over with groceries, without makeup on, and hair is tied in a pony tail, has one baby in her arms, another in the shopping cart, a third gripped tightly in one hand, the fourth baby clinging dearly to his mother’s dress, while the fifth baby has just knocked an entire shelf of canned peas onto the floor, which by chance startled the baby in the mother’s arms causing him or her to wail like a banshee. She will unjustly be labeled a ‘bad mother’ by outsiders for not having the grace of being born with 5 arms.

Some good stuff at the site — who says there is no humour in Catholicism? Go thou and read it all!

Update: I might have suspected that the Curt Jester had something to do with this.

That’s what it looks like, at least — Cardinal John Henry Newman, the English convert to Catholicism who established himself as a prominent theologian and inspired a wave of Catholic youth groups across North America, has been approved for beatification by the Vatican.

Very cool.

joel writes in with a comment about this article (or, at least, that is the article I presume he is responding to).

As an atheist, I’ve noticed that, yes, Christianity does come under more attack than other Religions (at least in the U.S.)

There’s a couple reasons for that, though:

1. In the U.S., Christianity is the biggest kid on the block. The biggest kid is always the biggest target.
2. Christianity also likes to throw its weight around in Politics. Intentional or not, its the christian worldview that has the strongest influence on our policies. Its actions in that realm make it a target, because its actions affect us all. Hinduism simply doesn’t have that kind of power.
3. Christianity is, as best I can tell, the only proselytizing religion in the US (that we don’t consider a cult). So, even walking down the street, or at our homes, it can intrude. Again making it a target.

You might argue that #1 and #3 are not fair (I think a case can be made on either side), but #2 is a real issue.

-j

In truth, O Reader, I would not argue as joel indicates. None of his points are particularly unfair, but all of them miss the point…so spectacularly, in some cases, that they seem almost specious.

The Biggest Kid?

To be sure, argument #1 is spurious, and meaningless in light of the other two points that joel makes above. Were we discussing, say, why most computer viruses seem to be targeted at Microsoft Windows, it would be a valid argument — Windows has most of the market share, and so is a natural target for people looking to cause a little chaos; were most viruses targeted at Ubuntu, the amount of chaos caused would be minimal indeed. And virus-makers are looking to cause chaos. Were we discussing the dynamics of the schoolyard (a slightly more apt example, although still not accurate enough to suit our needs in this analysis), however, we would observe that very often it is not the biggest kid who is the “biggest” target (biggest, in this latter sense, taken to mean “most often targeted,” essentially).

One tries, honestly, to limit one’s quantity of jokes about American myopia, but in this case a remark along those lines cannot be avoided. It is true that in the U.S., Christianity is the biggest kid on the block — that is safely beyond dispute. But of course, the world is much bigger than just America, and globally the “biggest kid” is probably Islam (in fact, I seem to recall some trumpeting in the media, recently, about an admission by a Vatican official along these very lines).

So really, if the preferential targeting of Christianity by atheist apologetics has anything to do with the biggest kid on the block, then atheist apologists need to give their heads a shake and realize that Islam is the biggest kid (in terms of raw numbers). Yes, this may not be true in any individual Western country, most of which are derived from a Christian heritage. And perhaps that should be telling — in countries which are predominantly Muslim, one is substantially more at risk of losing one’s life for one’s atheism, after all. Perhaps joel can be forgiven for his myopia

Which is all to say nothing at all about the fact the West, by and large, ticks along on reserves of Catholic/Christian moral capital, and that it is this moral capital in Western culture that enabled an atmosphere of open inquiry — which in turn allowed atheism to flourish — to emerge at all.

And finally, as mentioned before, joel’s first argument is invalidated by his other two arguments. That is not to say that the other two arguments do not capture aspects of what Christians in America (and elsewhere in the world) do; it is to say, however, that Christians are hardly the only ones, and it is to say that Christians do not present a sufficient danger in their attempts to justify the level of opposition that atheists bring against them. Islam is every bit as active, and in many cases more insidious, in attempting to work its way into the political fabric of Western nations — even the US — and the implications of its successes in this regard are much more dire than the imagined evils of an imaginary Christian theocracy.

Religiosity exists outside American borders, and yet pretty much everywhere one goes in the world, one can find atheists who are primarily opposed to Christianity. This is even the case in England, in spite of the fact that English Christianity is rather subdued and not particularly involved in the day-to-day politics of the land (despite the fact that Anglicanism is the state religion of Britain; America has no official state religion). By contrast, Islam is surging in Britain, with no-go areas for non-Muslims, cousin marriage, and arranged/forced marriage of schoolgirls becoming more and more commonplace each year.

Throwing its weight around

Argument #2, joel asserts, is a “real issue.” On the face of it, I don’t see what he’s getting at in regard to Christianity. Having just pointed out that Christianity is the “biggest kid” in the American philosophical playground (and, indeed, the “biggest kid” in terms of population — most Americans are Christians of one variety or another) am I right to assume that he is then complaining that Christianity is too involved in the American political scene?

What a strange concept, O Reader: that a nation where a majority of people are Christian would have a political scene in which Christianity is a concept that appears from time to time. How very unheard of! Then again, perhaps I am being sardonic.

One wonders exactly what joel is suggesting here. Is he implying that only persons of a secular bent should be allowed into the American government? Is he implying, perhaps, that persons elected to government office in America should leave their religious convictions at the door (even though, for many religious people, their religion is the first and foremost consideration in their lives)? Is he say that he personally finds it odd/unacceptable that a religious philosophy held by approximately 80% (maybe a little less) of the American population occasionally appears, in mild ways, in the political discource of an elected, supposedly representative government?

Curious.

Additionally, joel gets a bit intellectually dishonest when he attempts to note that other religions don’t have the kind of power that Christians do. He cites, by way of example, Hinduism. And he’s right in a sense: Hindus don’t really have that much power in the American government. But joel is being myopic again — were we to travel to, say, India, we would observe that Hindus have quite a lot of power in government.

Moreover, Islam is making numerous inroads into the political scene in America, including openly violating the concept of separation of church and state that many Americans, secular and religious alike, uphold and value*.

And while the involvement of Islam in American politics has not yet reached an equivalent level to that of Christianity’s involvement, numerical quantity is not the sole consideration (although I realize that for many atheists, quantity — i.e. empirical measure — is all there is to go on). The quality of the interference has to be examined.

Setting aside obvious straw men (i.e. Pat Buchanan, the legacy of Jerry Falwell, and the Westboro nutters), the average Christian in America is, typically, fairly devoted to his/her family and country; most American Christians love America and what it stands for. They might have their reservations about some things (evolution, the military, capitalism) but they will tend, by and large, to abide by American ideals. If they run for election, almost all of them do so not because they desire to impose their Christian values on the rest of the nation (although in most cases, such an imposition wouldn’t hurt America at all), but because they want to serve their country, the same as most secular politicians would.

And yes, the fact that Christians get elected to political office in America does mean that American politics take on a Christian character of sorts. But that is something not only to be expected — that is something to be praised, in a certain sense, because it confirms that the government is at least somewhat “representative” of the people it governs. There shouldn’t be a dichotomy between the ideals of government representatives and the people they represent. And at any rate, the occasional debate about evolution/intelligent design in schools nonwithstanding, the “quality” of Chrisitian involvement in government is benign; they’re not there to see about imposing a theocracy or rounding up and shooting all the homosexuals.

joel’s intellectual dishonesty, then, is his refusal to consider Islam, or even mention it by way of example, and his attempt to sidestep the issue by instead mentioning Hinduism.

The fact of the matter is, Islam is becoming more and more involved in the political scene in many Western nations, including America, and the tone of the political discourse is beyone merely worrisome. When the Archbishop of Canterbury states, bald-facedly, that sharia is unavoidable in England, when a Canadian government agency apparently has ties to Islamist elements in Canadian society, when sharia banking begins to emerge at even mainstream banks, when incidences of violent rape attacks in communities rise in lockstep with an increase in Islamic immigrants living in the same community, and when honour killings happen in places like Lewisville, and atheists are still wasting their breath decrying the subversive Christian element in American politics, I call shennanigans.

(Indeed, the only active theocracies I can think of in the world today are Islamic, and Muslim nations are about the only places in the world I can think of where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.)

Were atheists even remotely serious about standing up in opposition to the threat that religion poses in their view, they would be all over Islam like a dirt on a mud wrestler. That they are not, with the occasional exception of Christopher Hitchens (not exactly the best or most authorative voice out there) suggests that they are afflicted with either monumental ignorance or willful blindness (or else that they are cowards hiding in fear of a fatwa).

Who proselytizes?

In argument #3, the full magnitude of joel’s intellectual dishonesty is made its most apparent. That is not to deny that Christians do not engage in evangelism. But then, so do atheists. So do Mormons. So do Jehovah’s Witnesseses. joel makes exemption for religions that could be considered “cults,” which is an interesting bit of sleight-of-hand, given that I think the most active proselytizers are said “cults” (i.e. Mormons, Jehovahs, and the like) as opposed to mainstream Christian denominations. joel hasn’t quite said “Excluding Republicans, Democrats are the most hawkish of Americans,” but he has come close to doing so, and his statement is similarly misleading because of it.

And in fact, his statement is false (tautology is a wonderful thing). joel observes that, as far as he can tell, Christianity is “the only proselytizing religion in the US” that isn’t considered a cult. That would probably come as more than a bit of a surprise to the Muslims of America, many of whom engage in far more aggressive proselytism than their Christian counterparts. One cannot fail to note, for example, that Islam is the fastest growing religion among American prisoners; it would be the height of reckless ignorance to assume that similar conversion trends did not exist in the non-incarcerated portion of the American population. Islam is also the fastest-growing religion in Europe.

Within my own lifetime, assuming trends do not shift dramatically, France will become a nation in which Islam is the religion of a majority of the population. joel objects to Christianity being a philosophy present in American politics, because within that governmental realm “its actions affect us all.” Myopic as ever, joel seems to spare no thought at all for how we all may be affected by the prospect of nuclear power France slowly and inexorably becoming the Islamic Republic of France.

Now, perhaps the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have it exactly right — maybe Christianity is the threat after all. If so, I don’t see it. Maybe I’m just blinded by my own stake in the Christian faith. Somehow, though, I very much doubt it. Taking even one example, were I an avant-garde artist presenting my “Piss Kaaba Key” in a public forum, I’d be scared witless for fear of getting the Theo van Gogh treatment. Were I instead the artist presenting “Piss Christ,” I would have no analogous fear, except perhaps the fear that people would exercise in droves their right to not attend my art show.

Any reasonable, rational person should be able to discern where the real problem is to be found. That so many supposed rationalists choose instead to focus on a non-problem is curious, and also telling.