Imagine the Quaker
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archives | newquaker.comSaturday, September 06, 2003
"Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many." So declared Jesus in Matthew 24:4-5. Well, they sure keep on coming. There are at least 3 false Messiahs running around now: all three claim to be the Christ, all three deny being the Antichrist, and all three want to unify the world's religions in a new age. Perhaps we could just put them in the ring in an Ultimate Fighting Championship, or let them show their stuff in a World Wrestling Federation (WWF) Smackdown, or, hey, maybe let them punch themselves silly in an episode of Celebrity Boxing: Battle of the False Messiahs.
Here are the contenders.
In this corner is ... Vissarion. According to his bio: "Vissarion is the Word. The Word of Him Who has sent Him. He and the Father are one." He was born Sergei Torop in 1961 in the suburb of Krasnodar, in southwest Russia, but his family later settled in central Siberia. At the age of 29 he realized that he was the son of God and at the age of 30 there was a "Christening" by the "Heavenly Father Himself." His religious aspiration is the unification of all religions under his leadership. One would think that the new Christ would have a more polished website, but at The Last Testament Church you get direct access to his message—"The Last Hope: Appeal to the Modern Humankind. About The Father and His Son"—as a Word document (it's a really rough, often unintelligible translation from the Russian). There is also his "The Time of Turn," a discourse on the process toward humanity as one great big family. This also includes diagrams illustrating the nature of energy, egoism, consciousness, re-incarnation, salvation, etc., and is translated (by "Your Olga, the interpreter") into something resembling English. Vessarion apparently travels frequently to proselytize, but nevertheless heads a hardy band of followers in a commune on a mountain in Petropavlovka, Siberia, where they study Vessarionism and eat a strict vegan diet. The Daily Telegraph (UK) has published a couple of pieces on Vissarion, archived at Religion News Blog, and there is additional information about the Vissarion cult at Critical Information Studies - Alternative Religion.
And in this corner is ... Maitreya. "Many now expect the return of their awaited Teacher, whether they call him the Christ, Messiah, the fifth Buddha, Krishna, or the Imam Mahdi. Few know that the Teacher who fulfills all these expectations already lives among us now." So declares the Share International site under the auspices of British artist and lecturer Benjamin Creme, the main spokesman for the "reappearance of the Christ." Maitreya first appeared in Nairobi, Kenya, on 11 June 1988, and has since been popping up all over the world—accompanied, of course, by miracles. Well, it turns out that this Maitreya really is the Christ and that Jesus is only the highest person in a spiritual hierarchy, known as Master Jesus. There are photos of the Maitreya on the site, but he can assume many guises and can appear anywhere and any time (accompanied, of course, by miracles). In one modern story, he shows up as an alcoholic bum with Master Jesus at his side, as his pet dog. Maitreya resides temporarily in London, but travels frequently, laboring as a World Teacher and unifier of all religions in the new Age of Aquarius.
And in this corner is ... Maitreya—again! This Maitreya denies being the Maitreya touted by promoter Benjamin Creme, and declares that HE really is the real deal. This Maitreya was born in 1944 in Tehran, Iran. The location is important, for Tehran is east of Jerusalem and west of Tibet, thus fulfilling "the expectation of the Jews and Christians who are waiting for Maitreya to come from the East" and it fulfills "the expectation of Hindus and Buddhists who are waiting for him to come from the West." He has a graduate degree in business from a US university and learned that he was the Messiah while studying yoga. Now he works to unify and synthesize the world's religions as he teaches "One World, One Humanity, Under One God" in order to begin the "New Order of the Ages (Golden Age)." His "The Holiest of The Holies (THOTH ), The Last Testament" is their scripture book. Other publications are available on the Mission of Maitreya website.
If we can't get them into a ring for fisticuffs, championship wrestling, or some other prize bout, then what about a test of intellectual skill—say, The Weakest Link?
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 3:12 AM
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Death at Le Bal Masque. On the Army of God website is a copy of executed anti-abortionist Paul Hill's statement defending his 1994 killing of Dr. John Britton at an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. "Why Shoot an Abortionist" is a curious but lamentable example of human ratiocination masquerading as Christian desiderata.
In Mark 12:28-34 Jesus is challenged by a scribe to name the greatest commandment. '"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."' [See 12:30-31] In Luke 10:25-37 the declaration is used for illustrating who our neighbor is.
Hill and his followers take seriously the extension of "neighbor" to include the unborn child, but in doing so they also err seriously by casting Jesus' unique expression of love as a mere moral calculus. This is what enables them to make the easy transition from this is how I wish my life to be defended to this is how I ought to defend the unborn life. It certainly works as a behavioral calculus—and for that matter is pretty easy to use—but its use ends up excluding the abortionist as our neighbor and fully overrides all other strategies, including our need to change the heart of the abortionist through the Gospel of Christ.
Because we can't consistently treat the command to love our neighbor as a mere decision tree, Hall is forced to fall back on the ethics of utilitarianism in defending his opposition to abortionism. So the shooting of the abortion doctor instead becomes valuable because of its utility for:– Putting pro-life rhetoric into practice
– Underscoring the full humanity of the unborn
– Publicizing the consequences of abortion
– Urging obedience
– Convincing interested parties to take sidesFinally, says Hill, it "would uphold the truth of the Gospel at the precise point of Satan's current attack (the abortionist's knife)." Sadly, this is not the truth of Christ's Gospel, but only the gospel of angry men.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:26 AM
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
There was a period of my life when I couldn't keep a house plant alive, even if my own life depended on it. No matter what I did or tried—they always died. I think what changed things for me was my reading of The Secret Life of Plants. It actually changed my relationship with plants. Now I have no problem keeping a house plant alive.
And I think it was that book that gave me a rich appreciation for soil. Now I see not only the importance of crop rotation and natural fertilizers, and the benefits of organic farming, but I also see a creepy resemblance between our use of chemical fertilizers and supply-side economics: both have similar motives, and both don't work.
Chemical fertilizers actually upset the complex nutrient balance of the soil, requiring a constant maintenance of more chemicals in order to mimic God's natural nutritional mix. By upsetting this balance, the plants become diseased and prone to attack by insects, and the chemical farmer feels compelled to lay down chemical insecticides. All of this ends up in the plants and thus becomes part of our food. God required of the Hebrews a Sabbath rest for the soil, and the fallow year served as a kind of crop rotation (see Lev 25:1-4). Failure to let the soil recover, as happens in the fallow year and in crop rotation, results in the growing of plants with many missing nutrients—and so our diet becomes a meal of bogus substances.
Supply-side economics, which comprises most of what our federal government engages in today, is like chemical fertilization: it pretends to fix a process that, if left alone, can function perfectly well. Once started, though, it's difficult to have it look like a healthy "organic" state; like the chemical farmer, the economy farmer is left to fertilize the soil of capitalism with a strange chemical brew of taxes, tax cuts, subsidies, regulatory policies, and regulatory reforms. Not even the worker on this economic farm can get a Sabbath rest in such an environment.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:29 AM
Monday, September 01, 2003
Building fences for the ages. In declaring the timeliness of everything earthly, the author of Ecclesiastes brings up enduring truths about our own mortality and stages in life. In Asian cultures there is reverence for the aged and some clear social distinction between young and old. Normally, everywhere, we all distinguish between the child, the adolescent, the adult, and the elderly human. The distinctions are transitional, but easily marked: just as we recognize the differences between the newborn, the toddler, the pre-schooler, the kindergartener, the junior high student, etc. There are stages of biological development, stages of psychical development, and cultural tags for each of the stages.
Whether we extol this or not, the stages are a fact of our existence, no less real than birth, old age, infirmity, and death. I don't think anyone would dispute this. If we look at the place of these factual transitions—these stages of human life—we should come to see that within the context of Western civilization, especially contemporary life, we inadvertently try to meld the ages, until culturally there are few distinctions.
All of us tend to move toward that which is similar to ourselves. This is how we build up identities of reference and a complex sense of self. We see this commonly in racial and ethnic behaviors: Caucasians hang out with other Caucasians; people of color tend to hang out with other people of color; if two albinos went to a party, they would be talking together long before it ended. We see this cohesiveness on worship and doctrinal grounds: Muslims cluster with other Muslims; Jews cluster with Jews; Christians cluster with Christians; and even Unitarian Universalists are drawn to the wandering lost (and will of courses gather to see whose compass is spinning around the fastest).
At the macro level, this clustering behavior is especially common among nationalities. It preserves corporate identity and at the same time makes possible the sanguine nationalism of patriots. At micro levels, we see Shi'a Muslims gathering apart from Sunni Muslims; Orthodox Jews gathering apart from Reformed and Conservative Jews; Protestants gathering apart from Catholics; Republicans meeting apart from Democrats, and so forth. At parties, women can be found gathered with women and men can be found grouped with other men.
Whenever I take my children anywhere, they always seek out others their own age. Often they would ask, before we left, if there would be children where we were going. They have been this way since they were very young and will continue this until they are too old to discern the difference. Recently my teenage daughter Lara refused to attend a martial arts class because the students were all college-age—she was uncomfortable studying with those who were not her own age. When I am at a mixed party, I too find myself seeking out people of my own age, etc.
In contemporary North America, and probably in other Western nations, we are blurring these age-bound distinctions through a media culture that tends to put all ages on a level with each other. When they are distinguished, they are presented as caricatures—the young child as sparkling prodigy, the old person as constipated and quarrelsome. Through some kind of complex Venn diagrams, the normal human being is actually a strange statistical construct, all others being cast out to the fringes of uncertainty. The stages in life are not extolled and not at all appreciated. Consequently, our culture is able to present mature themes to younger and younger children, as if it is perfectly appropriate for them. So the youngster wants to dress like the adult and the oldster wants to be hip and younger, for they want to leave the fringe and be normal humans; children are seen as sexual creatures, the older human is seen as out of touch and his opinions without value, and we are moved from one age group to another without a sense for the richness of the appropriate experience.
Now admittedly much of this weird classificatory grading is the result of consumer behavior within modern capitalism (and the centrality of that behavior for the marketplace), but we need to value the natural divisions of human development, restoring the right fences in this artificial cultural landscape. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." We, too, ought to put aside the immature vision of the human being as a cultural construct and know once again the value of life's stages, if only so that we may better treasure what is our daily bread.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:07 PM
Sunday, August 31, 2003
On Friday, in a professional development session, I spoke to the whole faculty on the subject of plagiarism and the use of Turnitin.com as a tool for instructors to use in helping them decide what I called "the fork of plagiarism"—plagiarism either as a professional mistake or as a moral failure. I approached the subject of my PowerPoint lecture "in the shade of Marcel Proust," using as my theme (i.e., my angle) the subject of inauthenticity found in The Sweet Cheat Gone, the sixth book of his Remembrance of Things Past.
Preparing for it left me with the concern that Proust's undeveloped view of inauthenticity (as found in his treatment of "human plagiarism") seems suspiciously like Sartre's developed doctrine of "bad faith," suggesting perhaps that a good part of 20th-century Continental philosophy is actually built on an intellectual embezzlement. This would be more hideous than Martin Luther King Jr.'s literary shady business. It is pretty much agreed now that King regularly misappropriated ideas in his graduate papers, his Ph.D. dissertation in theology, and his "I Have a Dream" speech, among other disconsolate acts of plagiarism that his teachers and his peers let him get away with. Not surprisingly, the trail goes all the way back to his high school. Boston University refused to take back his doctorate, despite the investigating committee's finding that he had plagiarized 66% of his dissertation. The whole of this business made me sweat and tremble, but those feelings eventually subsided as I realized that we can do nothing about the past except: to remember it, to be clear about it, and to look forward to changing the future by helping our youth to appreciate truth and good scholarship.
Our Lord said: "Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one" [Matt 5:37]. We need to remember this more often.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:37 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
