Life in Central America

The religious foundations of American culture [1]

This is as important subject, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that Americans do not want to think about it. America is a secular country at a superficial level, but it is still full of religious beliefs at deeper levels.

America used to be full of religious controversy, but now we have moved to the opposite extreme: religion is never discussed at all, and we pride ourselves on giving equal value to all religious beliefs - as long as they claim to be Christian. I am all in favor of religious tolerance, but I also think we ought be aware of the side-effects of some of these beliefs. Let’s examine one of them.

The world is not important

Does this notion sound a bit extreme to you? Well it doesn’t to many Americans; for them it is just a fundamental tenent of Christianity. And they are right, it has been part of Christian Craziness for a long time, and the early Christians no doubt got it from some elements in the Jewish religion, and some other places besides. It is not a new idea, but it is a dangerous idea, and always has been.

In the religion of my family of origin this was expressed simply: there were spiritual matters and there were worldly matters. In other worlds, there was Godliness, and there was Worldliness. There was the good people and the bad people.

This is a powerful idea, and it has not disappeared; it still affects our lives in many ways. But it is supported by an another radical notion: the physical world is temporary, and will soon pass away. I assume most of my readers do not believe this, and reject it out-of-hand. But they should be careful to not dismiss it carelessly, because it still has a big influence on the world they live in. How so?

This is an extremely subtle set of ideas, believe it or not, and they have an equally subtle effect on our mental processing. We are easily distracted from the real world, with real people in it, to issues which seem more important, and this weakness is exploited by all kinds of politicians. They keep our attention focused on spiritual matters (the war against Islam), so their paymasters can concentrate on worldly matters (controlling the world’s oil). This allows us to keep our spiritual purity, and at the same time get our share of the world’s dirt.

More about the Rapture

From Greg in Nicaragua, who is the kind of Christian I admire, more interested in helping people instead of making themselves more powerful.
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The Rapture is, historically speaking, a fairly recent doctrine in the evangelical church. It became popular in the 19th Century and was brought to the forefront by dispensationalist Christian preachers.

The main scripture verses used to support the "taking up to Heaven" of believers are not from the book of Revelation but rather I Corinthians 15:51, Matthew 24:31 an I Thessalonians 4:16. I want to go on record as saying that not all Christians subscribe to the "Rapture." Having read only the first "Left Behind" book I can say that LaHaye's end-times theology is, as far as I'm is concerned, pretty offbase and, well, pretty wacky. If you look up the verses I cited above you will see that the doctrine of the "Rapture" is founded on pretty cryptic scriptures. I believe it's a mystery of which we are not privy. Unfortunately there are those Christians out there who make eschatology (the study of the last things, i.e., end-times theology) their main focus. We have plenty to do in the here and now (feed the hungry, clothe the poor, comfort the mourning, visit the incarcerated...ad infinitum) than to worry about what's going to happen in the last days.

The rapture letters

I thought I knew about all of the nutty religious ideas, because my family had most of them. But I see I am out of date, something new has been added: The Rapture is coming. Until now, I thought rapture refered to sexual ecstasy, but now it means: when all the believers in Jesus Christ, who have been born again, are taken up to heaven. Evidently, the existing Christian end-of-the-world beliefs are too complicated, so they have been simplified.

There is a Web site too (several, actually). This site will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven.

Christianity is polytheistic

Christianity was the product of two cultures: Hebrew and Greek. Two more dissimilar cultures could hardly be imagined, and their synthesis was a major achievement. It also integrated with Roman culture, the archenemy of the Hebrews. Rome had already borrowed its religion from the Greeks, and this made it easier for it to switch to Christianity - and for Christianity to switch to Rome. (It didn’t have much choice, actually, because the Romans took over the whole world.)

And as the Roman Empire, and its descendents, conquered other cultures it absorbed their religions too. Santa Claus, for example. Christianity is an eclectic religion. It didn’t just spring up out of nowhere, fully formed.

Much of its power is derived from ancient religions. Tribal people believed in spirits - all kinds of spirits, and all kinds of ways of living with them. This is where people first got their power. Even now, we use the word spiritual and talk about the human spirit. People who worked with powerful spirits were called Shamans.

With civilization, came gods. All kinds of gods, many of them mixtures of animals. Gods were similar to spirits, but civilization changed them. Spirits live in the wilderness; gods live in cities, in special houses. And organizations of people were developed to serve them. Religion became more organized, and operated on a larger scale, but there were still many gods.

The Hebrews added a new wrinkle: monotheism, which was adopted enthusiastically by Islam.

The Greeks gods were like people and they lived in the sky. And they also invented a new category: the demi-god, the offspring of a god and a human. These were always tragic figures, Achilles, for example.

But there were still plenty of spirits around. Gods and spirits coexisted.

Christianity incorporated many of these religious entities. The Holy Trinity includes (1) a Hebrew God, (2) a Greek demi-god, the son of God and of a woman, and (3) a spirit (the Holy Ghost). To say nothing of the Holy Saints, the Virgin Mary, and various other intermediate (but very important) beings.

Christ is now the central figure in Protestant Christianity, someone who is still living, someone who affects the emotions of true Christians. God has become more abstract, and the Holy Ghost is not very important at all. For most practical purposes, Christianity has reverted to monotheism.

John C. Bennett

I have ruined the faith of a nice young Mormon missionary. There are a lot of these down here. Latin America is a magnet for all kinds of evangelical sects. The amount of work (and money) they put into these efforts is amazing. Missionary fervor has been part of Christianity for a long time, and the White Man’s Burden has been taken gladly. These people love to be demi-gods.

I ought to know, I was brought up in this nutty atmosphere. I should write a book, or a play about it sometime. I’m just beginning to realize my childhood might be interesting, and I wouldn’t be the first person to exploit their crazy childhood.

But to get back to the subject. I met these two (they always travel in pairs) young Mormon missionaries at a bus stop near home. I explained that my family were Missouri Mormons, something they never heard of. And then we started talking about the Mormon religious books, a exotic subject of not much interest to most people.

One of these books is the Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of revelations by the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, referred to by the faithful as “The Prophet”. These are considered the word of God, much as the writings of Mohammed are to the Islamic faithful.

In one of these revelations, God heaps praise on “His servant John C. Bennett”. Shortly after this revelation was published, John C. Bennett was discovered to be a con man who had taken Joseph Smith into his confidence. News traveled slowly in back those days (the 1840s) but his shady past did eventually catch up with him, and he was expelled from the church.

The Missouri Mormons, like all Mormons, still insist that all these revelations were all divine, but they did take some of the questionable ones and the relegate them to an “Historical Section” at the back of the book. In one of these, for example, God exhorts the Saints (as they called themselves) to buy stock in the Nauvoo House, a hotel that Joseph Smith was building.

I told this story to my young missionary friend, and he said he would look up John C. Bennett in their church history. About three weeks later I saw two Mormon missionaries at the same bus stop and assumed they were the same guys. I walked up to the American part of the pair and shook his hand. He seemed puzzled, and told me he was not the guy I met the first time. He was new, and had only been in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks.

I then noticed that the Latino member of the pair (they usually have one of these down here, because their Spanish is much better) did not care for my company.

Once I sat down in the bus, I had time to figure things out. Evidently, the young missionary I talked to did look up the history of John C. Bennett, and found what I said was true. This must have created a crisis in this young man’s life, and led him to question some of his beliefs.

In a way, I felt sorry for him, because I know this is not a pleasant situation. The Mormon church requires unquestioning belief, and he no longer fits in. However, he will probably find many other Mormons in the same situation, and his horizon will broaden. He will lose friends and find others - all because of me.

Divine passivity

Once again, I am indebted to Erik Erikson, and his book Young Man Luther. There is so much good stuff here, you should read it for yourself – if God ever gives you the time to do so.
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Luther put the problem in terms of organ modes. The teeth are dentes and linguae, hard and sinister, and form words in anger and fury. The tongue is soft and suavely persuasive.

But the organ through which the word enters to replenish the heart is the ear. The greatest thing one can say about Christ, and about all Christians is that they have aures perfectas et perfossas: good and open ears. One must hear before one understands, be captivated before one captures.

Faith, for Luther is an inner appartus that has its own way of seeking and searching, and it succeeds insofar as it develops its own passivity. This is a truly Renaissance idea, and anticipated Freud, who said “I must wait until it moves in me so that I can percieve it.” This is a Buddhist idea too.

This approach may sound feminine, and, indeed, Luther bluntly spoke of an attitude of womanly conception. Yet it is clear the men call such attitudes and modes feminine only because the strain of paternalism has alienated us from them. Mannish man always wants to pretend that he made himself, or at any rate, that no simple woman bore him.

Martin Luther, the turd

“I am like ripe shit,” he said once at the dinner table during a fit of depression “and the world is a gigantic ass-hole. We will probably let go of each other soon.” Luther had many episodes where he felt he was dying, but his eloquence on this occasion will never be surpassed.

In his later years, he became very fat, and often psychotic, and did not appear much in public. But he could not resist preaching at the dinner table. By that time, thirty printers in twelve cities were publishing his sermons, and his sayings, as fast as the devoted journalists around him could get manuscripts and transcripts to them. This saying was not neglected.

Earlier, at about the age of thirty, he had the most important insight in his life, his “revelation in the tower”. Later scholarship showed that this happened instead in the monk’s toilet (cloaca). Scholars would prefer to have it happen as they achieve their own reflected revelations - sitting at a desk. Luther’s statement that he was, in fact, sitting somewhere else, implies that in the creative moment the tension of nights and days of meditation found release throughout his being – and nobody who has read Luther’s private remarks can doubt that his total being always included his bowels. Futhermore, people in those days expressed much more openly and conceptualized more concretely than we do the emotional implications (and the implications in our emotions) of the primary bodily functions.

Once again, I am indebted to the book Young Man Luther, by Erik H. Erikson