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archives | newquaker.comSaturday, April 10, 2004
Abraham and the crazy Texas mother (Part I). The recent Deanna Laney verdict manages to darken the boundary between God's holy requests and those that we are compelled to consider simply psychotic. The Texas woman, a practicing Pentecostal Christian, believed that God chose her to bear witness to the imminent end of the world after several delusional communications in which God commanded her to kill her three sons as proof of her faith in Him. She thought God told her to kill the boys either by stabbing or strangulation; as she delayed the decision, pondering the authenticity of the communications, she said, God commanded more violent means for the boys' deaths. She chose to kill them by crushing them with large rocks after she happened to trip over a rock during a hallucinatory episode in her front yard. Killing them with stones was preferrable to strangulation, she thought. According to prosecutors, on Mother's Day 2003, Laney, who home-schooled her children, individually led her two older boys—Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6—to the garden of their house and bashed in their skulls with a heavy rock. She then went to the crib of her 14-month-old son Aaron and also struck him with a rock; the child, now 2, survived the attack, but is blind and brain damaged. She then called 911 and calmly reported the murders. Laney was charged with two counts of murder and one count of injury to a child. Last Saturday a jury of eight men and four women rendered a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. [Sources: Reuters, April 3, 2004; CNN, April 6, 2004; Court TV, "Stoning Insanity Trial."]
When Kierkegaard wrote "Faith is the highest passion in a man," he could do this perhaps only after a deep reflection on Abraham, who was tested by God to confirm Abraham's faith, his commitment to their covenant relationship, and his commitment to the total consecration of his son Isaac (by the prior act of circumcision). The test, as we know from Genesis 22, came as God said to Abraham: "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about." For Kierkegaard, Abraham becomes more than a mere tragic hero by placing himself outside of ethics entirely, by placing himself in an absolute relationship with God through his faithful act. And that act was not in fact the killing of Isaac, but Abraham's decision to sacrifice his only son whom he loved.
In consequence, Abraham's deed is both history and a high example of the faith in which we are called to participate. It has a special significance for us as Christians, but we risk losing that significance if it is likened to a religious experience in which people who are ill hear voices and commit appalling crimes in response to those voices. On the one hand, we lose the historical significance of Abraham's deed whenever a person is bound over in a court of law to have adjudicated a case in which he/she has committed a crime in response to a mystical-religious experience, for then Abraham's act becomes not unlike the delusional criminal's act. Still, on the other hand, Abraham's faith is lost as an example to us whenever the criminal's mystical-religious experience is called delusional, for then Abraham seems suspiciously inseparable from the deranged mind. Such are the things that put psychologists of religion into a feeding frenzy. This is chum for philosophers of religion circling hungrily about the cognitive content of the religious experience. Paradoxically, we are insured against loss through a faithful understanding of Scripture. This restores the significance of Abraham's faith by removing from it any secular, psychological interpretation, and it restores the significance of Abraham's deed by placing it within a narrow envelope, in which God and human have a relationship that cannot be reduced to legal-ethical evaluations.
Kierkegaard did not write Fear and Trembling as literature for Easter, but there are many reasons why it could be consistently appropriate as such a story.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:14 PM
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Addicted to terror. The AP reported today that the US military death toll was now at 600 and I am started to feel strained and dismal every day now as I hear and read about battling insurgents, enraged jihadists, collateral damage, dead civilians, wounded civilians, dead or wounded coalition soldiers, blown-up trucks, car bombs exploding, suicide bombers, soldiers committing suicide, etc., etc. It's starting to look a lot like Vietnam all over again—but that picture, in spite of its allure, is darkly deceptive.
Iraq isn't the larger of the problems, and it's still less clear that either Iraq or Afghanistan has anything to do with the so-called "war on terror" besides their simple service now as a deadly staging ground for a good old-fashioned head-butting between East and West. We entered this arena because we wanted to pursue "terrorism." (Our president makes it sound a lot like "terra-ism" and he might well mean that, but we can't tell this just from his bad vowels alone.) I have a concern that the war on terrorism is going to be just like the other endless war, the "war on drugs."
The drug war was started when Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs" during the 1968 presidential campaign. By 1971, then-President Nixon called drug use "public enemy number one"; in the following year, he created a new drug law enforcement strategy and the war on drug was well under way. In 1969 our government spent $65 million in the fight. By 2001, our federal, state, and local governments were altogether spending close to $75 billion on the drug war, including interdiction, court costs, and ongoing incarceration. And 2001 was the same year in which William Bennett said "the facts are clear: We can win the war against illegal drugs." [Pew Report news release, March 21, 2001] Today, 35 years later, we have the largest prison population in the world, half of all incarcerations in the US are drug related, and the still-ongoing "war on drugs" has not diminished either the availability of drugs or their consumption.
And so, with the same twisted confidence, using language torn from the drug war script, we have US Attorney General John Ashcroft in Las Vegas last year praising law enforcement officials with the words, "Thanks to you, we are winning the war on terror." [Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal, Wednesday, August 27, 2003]
What our war on drugs and the new war on terror have in common is not that each will go on without end, nor that the enemies we face in these wars are legion or asymmetrical, but rather that we are engaging in these wars against the wrong enemy entirely. We cannot hope to win either "war" until we go to the human well-spring itself and divert its flow toward a world in which addiction and hatred have the faces of people in need, of people who are afraid, of people who can be friendly recipients of our compassion, not our belligerence.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:49 PM
Interfaith doesn't mean inter-truth. I have a concern about interfaith groups. My oldest daughter, A., a follower of Islam, is interested in getting involved in a local "interfaith" organization in the New Orleans area and she asked me what I thought about it. The Atlas Interfaith Foundation is a multicultural, faith-based group that is dedicated "to discovering and celebrating the common ties that bind us as brothers and sisters and to fostering understanding, tolerance, and love of our fellow human beings by sharing ideas and culture." It's a part of the Institute for Interfaith Dialog, which declares similar goals. So what's the harm in that?
I asked A. just to keep an eye and ear open. I told her that I don't think there's any intrinsic harm in getting involved with them, but I'm always personally suspicious of groups that pose as "interfaith," bringing together people of vastly different religious faiths. It's not quite like Unitarian Universalism—which is the mirror opposite of this, a kind of "interfaithless"—but still you end up with faithful people trying to find a common ground of faith for discussion and work. The potential for danger, then, is that you can end up accepting as true a kind of mélange of all faiths, a credal blend that seems so incredibly satisfying to our religious affections. The TV industry has been trying to do the interfaith thing for decades, which is precisely why you get thoughtful teleplays about angels and relationships with "God" and can end up with something that is a different religion totally. It wouldn't surprise me, I said, if this group turns out to be just another organization promoting the Baha'i Faith, which presents itself in this simple, friendly way:For more than a century, Bahá'í communities around the globe have been working to break down barriers of prejudice between peoples and have collaborated with other like-minded groups to promote the model of a global society. At the heart of our belief is the conviction that humanity is a single people with a common destiny. In the words of Bahá'u'lláh, the Founder of our Faith, "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."
Bahá'u'lláh taught that there is one God Who progressively reveals His will to humanity. Each of the great religions brought by the Messengers of God—Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, Muhammad—represents a successive stage in the spiritual development of civilization. Bahá'u'lláh, the most recent Messenger in this line, has brought teachings that address the moral and spiritual challenges of the modern world.It's interesting, perhaps, that the Baha'i faith grew from within the context of Islam. Its appeal, and the appeal of interfaith and ecumenical organizations, is the sharing of one's religiosity with others. If the organization is bringing faith-ful people together for the purposes of dialogue and community improvement, then they have a positive aim that can only bring good deeds to those in need.
So my concern with interfaith and ecumenical groups is not that there is dialogue: we certainly need this. But, as a Christian, I know that there is one road to God and it's not reached by the creed of an interfaith organization. As a Christian participant in an interfaith, pan-religious, or ecumenical organization, I should remember that my role must be as a representative of my faith, not a participant in another. But, hey, doesn't that sound just like my role as an "ambassador" of my faith on this earth? We are "Christ's ambassadors" [2 Cor 5:20] and are called to a "ministry of reconciliation" [2 Cor 5:18], seeking to heed the great commandment—to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves [Matt 2:37-40; Mark 12:29-31; Luke 10:27]. We really are aliens and strangers here [Hebr 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11]; we are new creations [2 Cor 5:17] and so this world is not our true home.
The interfaith group draws its spiritual strength from the human fact that we all have nonrational religious desires which can be satisfied by acceptance into a religion (of whatever form). In this regard, I think, we haven't advanced much beyond William James' 1902 study, The Varieties of Religious Experience. But we are more than nonrational beings, and religion always carries with it a cognitive component, something that can be exressed in terms of true or false statements. So my concern is that the naïve mixing with the interfaithful will carry with it a stealthy temptation, remembering Paul's words: "No temptation has seized you except what is common to man" [1 Cor 10:12-13]. Not for nothing, then, did Paul say "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers" [2 Cor 6:14; see also eLetter, vol. 1, no. 12].
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 3:05 PM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
