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2 Peter 2:18
For when they speak great swelling [words] of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, [through much] wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.
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Posted by: Gene on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 - 07:41 AM
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The Light Of Reason
Politics, aesthetics, general cultural issues and more from Arthur Silber
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« BECOMING THE ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT NATIONSHUCKS »THE FUNDAMENTALIST DEATH CULTISTS
A particularly vicious and reprehensible article concerning the Schiavo case has been published by the woefully misnamed The American Thinker. Entitled, “It’s a Brave New World after Terri Schiavo Dies,” the author compares the euthanasia practices in Huxley’s novel to the “killing” of Terri Schiavo and says:
The Terri Schiavo case has sparked a national debate over the quality of life vs. the sanctity of life. The QL people (I would argue that they are predominantly liberal, although many libertarians fit this description) argue that life should have a visible purpose and worth, and that if a person`s life is not worth living (in the judgment of others), he should die.
Oh, I know they don`t couch it in such blunt terms. They use phrases like “death with dignity” and “a peaceful end,” but the bottom line is they think people should die rather than burden everyone else – and themselves.
This is an utterly vicious lie, and a lie which in fact inverts the truth of this debate. No one that I am aware of—no one at all—is maintaining that any person “should die rather than burden everyone else.” (If anyone is making this contention, he or she is such a fringe figure as to be of no importance at all.) But by means of this falsehood, the writer thinks he avoids what is the actual issue.
Dahlia Lithwick puts her finger precisely on what the true dispute concerns:
[T]his just isn’t a case about federal civil rights. This isn’t about the federal Voting Rights Act or about Brown v. Board. At least it wasn’t until Congress attempted, at the 11th hour, to turn it into one. There was and is one principal issue to be decided in this case and that is, what would Terri Schiavo have wanted for herself had she foreseen an irreversible 15-year vegetative condition in her future? Courts have been deciding these issues for decades now, and they have done so by triangulating back not from the federal Constitution but from the implicit respect we have always had for the compact between people who marry.
The reasons given by the Rick Santorums of the world for limiting marriage to men and women always stress that marriage is different, sacred, special. And that’s true; it’s unlike any other bond under the law. Most states agree, which is why in these invariably awful substituted-judgment cases, courts generally defer to the spouse—who is presumed to best know what the incapacitated patient would have wanted.
...
There is just no evidence that Michael Schiavo is an unfit guardian. Sure, it would make for a better Harlequin Romance if he’d spent decades pining alone at his wife’s bedside; if he hadn’t found himself a girlfriend and some kids. But he and Terri were—and still are—married, and the law has always treated that bond as sacred: serious, inviolate, till-death-do-us-part serious, until the parties themselves decide otherwise. Tom DeLay may not care what Terri Schiavo’s husband says. But I’d bet Terri Schiavo would have.
I discussed these same issues at greater length here and here.
I will grant that the writer of The American Thinker [sic] article grasps the nature of the underlying conflict, as he demonstrates in these remarkable passages, after stating that those who think an individual ought to have the right to control his own body should be called “deathheads”:
They are fans and enthusiasts for Death, and they are the last visage many poor souls will see, if they get their way.
What is it that motivates the deathheads? Why are they so eager in their pursuit of death? The answer lies not in contemporary politics, but in the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism itself. Liberalism was born out of the Renaissance, which was a rediscovery of our Greek and Latin heritage. The Renaissance era saw a revival in interest in all things Greek and Roman; in art, literature, history, science, mathematics, and other branches of classical learning.
The Greeks and Romans had, for all their virtues, a far weaker respect for human life than their Christian successors. In fact, the Greeks and Romans saw a kind of nobility in death – especially a death for a higher cause. ...
Liberalism also prides itself on championing reason, and sees the life of the individual as deriving its meaning and purpose from the service that individual can render. The Deathheads are utilitarian; when the individual can no longer contribute in a meaningful way to the betterment of the larger community, that individual no longer has any real worth and should be removed in the least painful manner possible.
We already see this principle applied at the other end of the life spectrum with abortion; the fetus is unwanted and contributes nothing to the community, and therefore can be eliminated. This is what we see in Brave New World with the sick and the elderly; they no longer serve a useful social purpose and can thus be disposed of.
The matter of human reason cannot be emphasized enough. What the liberal movement did was substitute man and reason for Jesus and God, and early on they began a war to exterminate the “superstition” of Christianity. (Remember, the French had their “cult of reason” in which a nude prostitute, representing a goddess of reason, paraded about the streets of Paris.)
The liberals have fought a three hundred year war against Christ, and if man and reason are to make suitable replacement gods, they must have certain divine powers. But what powers can a substitute god have? God is the Author of life, but man can be the author of death.
This only shows that a little ignorance goes a very long way indeed. It is simply not true that reason “sees the life of the individual as deriving its meaning and purpose from the service that individual can render.” If this author knows enough to throw the term “utilitarian” around, he ought to know that Utilitarianism hardly exhausts the moral possibilities. It is possible to think that the “meaning and purpose” of man’s life is his own individual happiness, and that his only obligation is not to violate the rights of others, just as he demands that others not violate his rights. In fact, although it appears to be news to this writer, that was the implicit moral foundation of the United States, as memorialized in this famous sentence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Some people, including many fundamentalists and other assorted true believers, need to go back to basics.
Similarly, not everyone insists on maintaining a mindless allegiance to faith and superstition, as this man does. Precisely why “must” man and reason “have certain divine powers”? He never tells us, but merely asserts this apparently self-evident “truth,” which is anything but. And he is absolutely wrong: some of us who champion man and reason are entirely satisfied with life on this earth and with happiness in this world. Some of us have no need of the fables upon which others must rely.
A bit further on in the article, we also find a notable instance of projection from this writer:
By controlling the time, place, and manner of death, the deathheads have a semblance of the powers of the divine. Possibly, that is why the death of Terri Schiavo is so important to them. They want the right to control the end of life as a means to reinforce and sanctify their own inner beliefs.
If you substitute “life” for “death” in this passage, you have a perfect statement of the goal of this fundamentalist psychology:
By controlling the time, place, and manner of life , the Christians have a semblance of the powers of the divine. Possibly, that is why the life of Terri Schiavo is so important to them. They want the right to control the living of life as a means to reinforce and sanctify their own inner beliefs.
At least he understands the mechanism, even if he doesn’t grasp the most crucial point: that he’s describing himself and those who believe as he does.
Speaking of projection, it is astonishing that throughout the Schiavo debate, the religious defenders of the “right to life” have been so quick to characterize their opponents as “death worshippers.” Remember the very recent and spectacular success of Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ—and remember what a bloody feast of gore that film was. (I did not and will not see the movie, which sounds profoundly sickening. I have a very low tolerance for that kind of cruelty and violence. But I’ve read lengthy, detailed descriptions of it, from many sources, and I think I am on very safe ground in what follows.)
Consider a few excerpts from one article about Gibson’s film by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. (I strongly recommend the entire article, which is fascinating.) The article’s title is, “Jesus at Midnight: The Passion’s Portrayal of Christianity as a Cult of Death”:
I personally found the film to be a gross defamation – not just of the Jews who were portrayed as having demonically demanded the death of Christ – but especially of Christianity which is portrayed as a religion of blood, gore and death, rather than of blessing, love, and life.
...
Judaism, and its daughter religion Christianity, were a radical departure from the earlier cults of death. Both emphasized the idea of moral and righteous action on this earth. Both were based on the Hebrew scriptures’ demand for moral and righteous action and the need to perfect the earth in God’s name. Even in the New Testament, the passion of Christ occupies at most a chapter or two in each of the gospels, while the life of Jesus is spelled out over about 10 times that number.
But Judaism and Christianity must therefore be supremely careful not to emulate their pagan predecessors and become religions that put the focus on death rather than on life. ...
In the wake of Sept. 11, Judaism and Christianity now find themselves heavily at odds and under attack by forces within Islam. In a world where so many are being encouraged to die in the name of God, it behooves Judeo-Christianity to inspire the faithful to live in the name of God.
This is something that Mel Gibson, in his wearisome, monotonous and numbing depiction of endless blood and gore, fails at utterly.
There are two ways to understand Christianity. One is as a religion of life, the other is as a religion of death. The former focuses on emulating how Jesus lived, the latter homes in exclusively on how he died. The former looks at the incomparable ethical teachings of Jesus from the sermon on the mount, the latter focuses on the horrors of the crucifixion on the cross.
The Christianity of life concentrates on what Jesus taught his disciples about to how to living virtuously, the Christianity of death distills the Christian message into the single maxim that Jesus died for mankind’s sins. The Christianity of life emphasizes the idea of personal accountability in our relationship with God, the Christianity of death emphasizes that reposing faith in Jesus is all that is needed in order to gain salvation.
It is clear where Mel Gibson’s convictions lie. In this insulting film, he virtually ignores the entire life of Jesus, preferring instead to tell us that what made Jesus special was not that he lived righteously and meekly, but that he died bloodily. Many critics have already panned the film for its excessive violence. For me, the violence became so intense that I began to think that Mel Gibson’s intention was to make Jesus into a Jewish-mother stereotype whose principal message to her children is a guilt trip: “There, now do you see how much I’ve suffered on your behalf. Now, are you finally going to love me?”
Perhaps it is not surprising that Mel Gibson has focused on this aspect, given that he has told many interviewers that he came back to Christianity after being so miserable about his life that he wanted to kill himself. Death seems to be a large part of his personal pantheon. But that does not explain why so many Christian groups would play into the stereotypes of Christianity being a religion of death rather than of life by promoting “The Passion” as an evangelism tool.
In the 19th century, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the leader of German orthodoxy, responded to vicious Christian attacks on Judaism by delineating the differences between the two faiths. ...
Christianity, Hirsch argued, shows man the nocturnal spirit of passion and evil in his own breast so that he becomes frightened of himself and, in the horror of night, seeks salvation at the altar of Christ. For this reason, said Hirsch, Christianity likes to build its temples over the tombs of death, celebrates its holy mysteries preferably at night, and its fervent prayers are a cry of distress from the power of the “evil” in the world and in one’s own heart. It ties man to the Divine by passiveness, by the fear of human existence.
My reverence for Rabbi Hirsch notwithstanding, it seems that he was exposed to a Christianity that was perhaps prevalent in Germany but radically different to the life-affirming joy of the evangelical community that is so strong in the United States. ...
So where did the great Rabbi Hirsch receive so a dark vision of Christianity? No doubt, it came from tortured souls like Mel Gibson who emphasize the death of Christ to the exclusion of all else. What other conclusion than that Christianity is a religion of the deep night can be garnered from Mel’s blood-and-gore flick where Jesus is butchered and bloodied almost passively, as if he were a character in televised professional wrestling.
But whatever dark demons are haunting Mel’s soul, the question returns: Why would evangelical and Catholic groups, who love their faith and wish to see it strengthened, get behind this film as a means by which to promote the Gospel? Is that really what they want the world to know, not that Jesus lived an inspirational life by which the faithful should be roused, but that Jesus died a horrible death for which the faithful should feel responsible?
The evidence is mounting that the answer to Rabbi Boteach’s last question is an emphatic “Yes!” I wrote in much more detail about the psychological dynamics of a fundamentalist like Gibson (and his father) in this essay—and those same dynamics explain this obsession with death and suffering.
People desperately need to understand the psychology of the fundamentalist believer. This is particularly crucial at the moment, since these believers want to control what is taught in our schools, what is “allowed” to be shown and discussed in our media, and every other aspect of our lives if they had their way. But most of all, it is the fundamentalists’ obsessive, deeply disturbed and profoundly dangerous concern with death and suffering that ought to concern every one of us.
It is precisely this desperate need for “meaning” and “purpose,” coupled with the obsessive focus on endless suffering, that leads to needless war and the deaths of millions of innocent people. And it is a psychology that puts all of us in very grave danger.
(P.S. And as explained here, please remember that this is pledge week!)
This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2005 at 2:36 pm and is filed under U.S. Politics, Alice Miller, Cultural Issues, Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
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