Kudos to the Pope, but Not to Catholicism! Pope Francis’s Climate Change Encyclical

 

[A slightly modified version of a one-page leaflet I passed out at a discussion and question-and-answer session on Pope Francis’s new encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’,  held in the Interchurch Center on the campus of the Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana, June 22, 2015.  The event was organized around panel presentations by Jesse Kharbanda, Executive Director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, and Andy Pike, head of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and School’s Creation Care Ministry.  The discussion with question-and-answer session, open to the public as part of a series of forums held under the sponsorship of the Seminary’s Monday evening SPEA class and organized by the students themselves, while positive on the need for environmental protection and the need for action, focused primarily on the “spiritual” side of the Pope’s encyclical, and what individuals themselves “could do” to advance environmental awareness.  Aside from the students, the great bulk of the audience was decidedly senior, with most of the public attendees easily in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s, which is reflective of Indianapolis’s aging “progressive” population itself.  The youngish (under 40) Kharbanda, by his own admission, has tried to “broaden the appeal” of environmentalism by pitching the environmental message not only to the usual left and liberal activists and groups, but also to corporations and conservative Christians and other religious; Pike, who is retired, spoke as a Catholic activist on environmental and other issues.  The modified text of the leaflet is directly below.  It is essentially as it was originally composed (admittedly in a hurry) and passed out at the meeting, where it was received with interest—GF]

 

POPE FRANCIS’S CLIMATE CHANGE ENCYCLICAL—

KUDOS TO THE POPE, BUT NOT TO CATHOLICISM!

written on June 22, 2015

 by George Fish, georgefish666@yahoo.com, Indianapolis, Indiana:

ex-Catholic, atheist, democrat, socialist, humanist, secularist

While we can indeed take heart at the Pope’s recent, very positive and needed, affirmative encyclical message and call for action on climate change, Laudato Si’—a message issued so strongly, so urgently, and with such scientific validity it upset climate-change denialists and conservative Catholics to a degree that drove them into frothing rage—let it not stand as a vindication or a prettifying of a still-ugly and ominously regressive Catholic Church.  Of course, we who are secular and democratic in our instincts should be delighted at the viciousness and obtuseness it has excited among the likes of the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue and Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum, notoriously right-wing Catholics and ardent opponents of both science and secularism.  Yet that not serve as pretext for overlooking the still-seamy underside, indeed, even the public face, of official Catholicism:  as illustrated by remarks, and their lack, from Pope Francis himself.

In all honesty, even as we celebrate the Pope’s directness and scientific correctness evinced in Laudato Si’, let us also pointedly note that scientists and secularists have been saying the very same things as the Pope is now saying, and for a good decade previously.  And in honesty, let us also pointedly note that Pope Francis, ever true to official Catholicism even in its open obscurantism, felt obliged to gratuitously insert into his climate change encyclical yet more inappropriate, dogmatic and obscurantist screeds against not only abortion, but even birth control, “officially Catholic” positions even much of the forced-to-remain-silent Catholic lay body objects to; not to mention all of us outside of the Catholic Church who are sick and tired of hearing these monotonous, one-sided mantras that indicate so firmly that Catholicism has yet to actually enter the 21^st Century.

Let us not also forget the Pope’s, and the Vatican’s, denunciation of the recent historic vote in traditionally-Catholic Ireland firmly upholding same-sex marriage, a fundamentally decent political and human rights position the still-viciously homophobic Catholic Church insists on repeatedly negating and denouncing; thus denying in its ecclesiastical fulminations the fundamental dignity and humanity or non-heterosexual humanity.  Let us not forget either the Pope’s own backhanded approval given to the Muslim fanatics who committed the Charlie Hedbo massacre, as the Pope himself gave backhanded justification to the murders of the magazine’s staff for “offending” another religion—as if the magazine’s open secularism and anti-clericalism even justified horrific mass murder!  Let us also note the Pope’s own glaring silence on the ethnic cleansing being carried out today in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka that is being fomented by chauvinistic Buddhist monks.  As well his silence on the ever-prevailing atrocities continually carried out in the name of Islam not only by supposedly “rogue” groups such as ISIS, but even by Islamic states themselves, as in Saudi Arabia and under the military dictatorship in Egypt—not to mention the Islamic suppression of the Arab Spring!

Nor let us forget the still-festering scandal within Catholicism due to rampant priest-pedophilia, and the Vatican’s still-prevailing do-nothing-effective approach to it (Pope Francis did nothing more except appoint yet another commission to “study” the problem).  Nor let us forget the centuries of abuse and suffering meted out to Catholics and non-Catholics alike through the official actions of the Church, in the rampant abuse and abuse of power in the Catholic school system, and the systematic oppression meted out to whole populations, even those that were comprised of stalwart Catholics, in such Catholic countries as Ireland, Spain, and throughout Latin America.  Despite the Pope’s new encouraging words on climate change, Catholicism still has a lot to answer for before the body of secular, democratic humanity.

 

AHISTOICAL “IDENTITY POLITICS” AND THE LEFT NEWSMAGAZINE IN THESE TIMES

 

Normally I like, and am impressed by, articles in the left news magazine/website In These Times (ITT).  However, four articles which appeared in the February and March 2014 issues have raised hackles with me, hackles insistent enough to move me to write this riposte.  For all four show a tendentiousness and “identity politics” lack of clarity that I consider destructive to the further development of the left in our present time—and in their essentially non-class, ahistorical approach both illuminate a severe fault in present left analysis, and through their critique, present ways to overcome it.

The four are:  Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor’s “Where Obama’s Class Speech Failed,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16121/where_obamas_class_speech_failed, and Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16113/the_pope_vs._capitalism, in the February issue; and Susan J. Douglas’ “Grand Old Race-Baiting,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16260/grand_old_race_baiting,

and Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” http://inthesetimes.com/article/16275/a_canon_without_balls, in the March issue.  While each of the articles does have some merit (in a publication of such caliber as I consistently find ITT to be, it would really be surprising to find an article within that completely lacked merit), this merit is very much attenuated and truncated by the essentially non-class, ahistorical “identity politics” approach that runs through each and all.  An approach that is fundamentally problematic in itself, and only creates more problems when the authors above try to use it.

 

Yamahtta-Taylor’s and Douglas’ articles are about race, and while Yamahtta-Taylor’s does give a gloss of social class and its importance to her argument, she seems to argue more for the irrelevance of class in relation to race and presents an argument that is more a variant of a “new revolutionary working class vanguard based on race” that was once in vogue in left circles, but hasn’t materialized in fact.  This is evident in her noting that blacks and Latinos make up 40% of the low-paid workforce, which, by simple arithmetic, means that a clear majority—60%—of the low-wage workforce is white and “persons of color” generally excluded by the left as such from the “persons of color” distinction—persons of East, Southeast, South and Central Asian descent.  She also omits noticing that often blacks and Latinos fight ethnically and racially with each other over the fruits of labor and entitlements, that they aren’t this homogeneous category of “blacks and Latinos,” even in both constituting major sectors of the low-wage working class.  Also excluded from consideration is that the CEO of the epitome of low-wage labor, McDonald’s Don Thompson, is himself African American—a problem for a race-based analysis, but not so for a class-based analysis, especially one that incorporates Lenin’s understanding of the comprador bourgeoisie.

Susan Douglas notes perceptively how the Republican Party has successfully used race-baiting to divide white workers from feeling affinity with workers of color, especially blacks and, more recently, from Latinos as well, but the illustration accompanying her article contains a photo of Bill Cosby, himself African American and a vigorous critic of what he sees as major dysfunction among his fellow African Americans—an indication in itself that more is involved that simply a black-white dichotomy.  Of course, the real kernel of truth in Douglas’ analysis is that the Republican Party and the Tea Party within have been very successful in the so-called “culture wars” in dividing white workers, especially white male workers, from their counterparts along racial lines, disingenuously channeling white economic populist concerns into racial resentments, into support for policies that go against the needs of white male workers themselves.  Further, this policy has been very successful, and has created a fertile base of support for Republicans and Tea Partiers that has enabled the absolute stymying of progressive efforts to change the political and economic status quo.  But this successful polarization that is so much part of US politics today should give progressives and leftists real concern, because changing demographics that are empowering more and more racial minorities, women and youth to support progressive politics are not in themselves going to end the political impasse that we’ve experienced so frustratingly these past few years, and could well continue for many more years to come. 

Yes, that small but fanatical minority that encompasses the Republican and Tea Parties, and that can also mobilize resentful white male workers as part of its base (a significant part of the Tea Party/Republican base, to be sure, but far from being its entirety, or even its majority), has demonstrated a real political staying power so far unmatched by anything the left and progressives can muster; something clearly demonstrated by the politics of inaction that has plagued the Obama Administration almost from its beginning.  This politics of paralysis has certainly proven its force—another good reason not to abandon the white male working class in favor of a supposedly triumphant future demographics.  Because racial resentment is against the real wishes and needs of the white male working class itself, a nuanced left politics of both race and class could have a positive effect even in the short run, which is as soon as the upcoming 2014 elections—elections which should make all of us progressives and leftists nervous.  But  the progressive and left forces will have to stress commonalities of interest, not triumphalist notions of non-white race-based “vanguard workers,” to bring white male workers back where they belong—in a unified populist movement that stresses social and economic justice for all, while also addressing residuals of past societal racism in a constructive, not divisive, way.

Dennis Coday’s “The Pope vs. Capitalism” strikes this ex-Catholic left writer as too much a gushing, teenage-crush love letter on the new Pope instead of a sober analysis.  Truth is, the new Pope is far more ambiguous and even doctrinally reactionary than Coday portrays.  And the Pope’s first encyclical, Evangelii Gaudium, not only critiques capitalism sharply, as Coday correctly notes, it also upholds the Catholic Church’s traditional opposition to birth control and abortion, insists on the male-only Catholic priesthood, and when discussing women and their concerns, has a distinctive air of patronizing about it.  A patronizing further demonstrated in a later interview with the Jesuit magazine America, September 30, 2013,  http://www.americamagazine.org/pope-interview, in which the Pope dismissed women’s concerns over equality in the Church as “female machismo.”  Further, even Pope Benedict XVI spoke in opposition to “unbridled capitalism” (during his Papal visit to Brazil in 2007; see “In Brazil, pope assails capitalism, Marxism. Sees decline in church influence,” Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press, May 14, 2007), so Pope Francis’ economic message isn’t completely novel, though certainly his tone and his broader sweep are—and are enough to cause the political right to mistake him for an actual Marxist! (Give credit where credit is due.)   However, on the issue of Catholic priest-pedophilia, as Archbishop of Buenos Aires Pope Francis sent very conflicting messages on this, as he hardly moved decisively against priest-pedophiles in his own diocese.  (For further reading on these matters see Adele Stan’s dissection of Evangelii Gaudium in AlterNet, December 6, 2013, “Killing Them Softly: Pope Francis Condemns Income Inequality, Sanctions Gender Inequality,” http://www.alternet.org/killing-them-softly-pope-francis-condemns-income-inequality-sanctions-gender-inequality; the British National Secular Society’s provocative October 31, 2013 blog by Terry Sanderson, “Are we being bamboozled by this charming Pope?” http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2013/10/are-we-being-bamboozled-by-this-charming-pope;  and Catholic investigative reporter Jason Berry’s December 31, 2013 article on GlobalPost which examines the new Pope’s ambiguous record on priest-pedophilia as bishop in Argentina, “How Pope Francis took 2013 by storm,” http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/italy/131231/how-pope-francis-took-2013-storm.)  As for the Pope’s establishing a Commission to “study” the priest-pedophilia issue, noted by Coday and now operational, wouldn’t it be far better to just turn over suspected priest-pedophiles and their personnel records over to the civil authorities for investigation and, if warranted, prosecution?  And same with covering-up clergy and bishops—turn them and their personnel records, correspondence and e-mails over as well to the civil authorities for investigation and possible prosecution of child endangerment or obstruction of justice?  Shouldn’t that be at the top of the new Commission’s agenda for “study”?  I believe a lot of people, Catholic, non-Catholic and ex-Catholic alike, would agree!

When I read Sady Doyle’s “A Canon Without Balls,” the first thought that entered my mind was how it reminded me of feminist lawyer Catharine MacKinnon’s Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame during her speech before the Harvard Law School in the early 1990s advocating censorship on feminist grounds, dismissing works of “literary or scientific merit” with a cavalier “If a woman is involved, why should it matter?”  For what Doyle seemed clearly to be proposing was a feminist litmus test for deciding if any work of literature was “politically correct” or not.  Indeed, her screed harkened me back to my reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s powerful dystopian novel We, and how it had run afoul of militant “political correctness.”  Zamyatin, a Soviet writer in the 1920s, had written We as a science-fiction extrapolation of disturbing trends he’d already found apparent in the fledgling Soviet Union; and in 1923 the reading of his manuscript elicited vigorous and indignant attack from the new commissars of Socialist Realism, i.e., literature that conformed to the “needs” of Socialist Revolution, at the meeting of the All-Russian Writers Union.  My impression of Doyle’s essay is that she is reading literature in the spirit of these Socialist Realism commissars—more concerned with “correct political line” than with quality literature as such.  But all quality literature, whatever its ideological bent, is a contribution by the best of humanity to the best of humanity as its audience, and of course that includes within it that half of humanity which is female. 

As for “bad,” “harmful” and “reactionary” ideas, the purging of them “to protect the innocent” from the “offensive” has always been the rationale of censors, whether overt, or more “benign,” as through “ideological criticism.” Yet it has been censorship or tendentious “criticism” that has more often than not given such “bad” ideas their attractive force—and yes, there are indeed “bad,” reactionary and chauvinist ideas in many great works, and yet—while they may give “offense” to some readers, has anyone been harmed by them who read them as literature should be read, with a critical yet open mind, a mind capable of separating the wheat from the chaff?  In just my own particular case, did I become a neoliberal because I read Wealth of Nations and the popular works of Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose?  Was I made susceptible to sadism because I read the account of God-sanctioned genocide in the Book of Joshua?  And haven’t feminists themselves been more harmed by censorship than by exposure to “male chauvinist” writers such as Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac?  To ask the question is to answer it.

Just as an updated footnote to the above, we can also pointedly note what the Atlantic, in May 2014,  termed “empathetic correctness,” http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/empathetically-correct-is-the-new-politically-correct/371442/, the new push for “trigger warnings” to preface readings and films shown in academic settings that might—just might, not necessarily would, even among the most  squeamish and vulnerable—set off emotional reactions of unease, discomfort and panic.  Which we should invidiously dismiss as just another unfortunate example of our contemporary left’s penchant for protecting people—from fundamental reality itself!  Of course, this is just another “benign” form of censorship, and is patronizing itself to the 3% of the population (according to the Center for Disease Control) which suffers from PTSD, “concern” for whom motivates the “trigger warning” advocates to embrace yet another variant of censorship.  But just as censorship is no substitute for therapy, it is also no preventative of panic, or any other “disturbance”—although it does encourage, even directly cause, disturbance, disruption, and even elimination of the capacity for critical thought!  Truly a “cure” far worse than any disease it supposedly prevents.

 

 

  

Religion is not the solution to the problem. Religion is the problem.

This paraphrase of Ronald Reagan’s famous words as President (“Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”) becomes so apt, so tellingly truthful, upon even the most cursory, but honest, examination of religion and its influence on public life. We need look little beyond the headlines of the day, the leading news stories involving religion, for confirmation. First, and obviously, is the continuing scandal of priest-pedophilia and its even worse, even more reprehensible, cover-up by the Catholic Church, especially in Ireland, where the Vatican’s deliberate intervention in preventing action against pedophilic priests drew the ire of the Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who angrily denounced “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism and narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.” There were further determined protests on the issue of the Catholic Church’s denial of women’s ordination to the priesthood, a conflict that’s been raging now for years, but has only been met with demands for silence by the Vatican. These issues were extensively reported in the New York Times of July 10, July 13, July 22, July 23 and July 25, 2011. (See “References” below)

The death of Osama bin Laden brought back to memory yet another set of crimes committed in the name of a certain type of Islam, those of Al-Qaeda, not only in terms of 9/11, but also in regard to al-Qaeda’s bloody attacks against Muslims who did not share its repressive theocratic authoritarianism. (See Karima Bennoune, “References”) The unholy alliance between the socially hidebound fanatics of the Religious Right with the “secular” economically hidebound fanatics of the Tea Party is still another example. (See Ted Kilgore, “References”)

Does the nefariousness of religion in the public realm ever end?

The religious liberals and mainstream pastors and laity will cry out, “But that’s not us!” But they will do so in vain, for they have not only been silent too long, but have even lent the cover of “religious tolerance” to such theological ugliness. So while their disingenuous acquitting of themselves is technically true—for they are not the ones committing the nefarious deeds—they fail the moral test of at least one mainstream religious current, i.e., Quakerism, in failing to “speak truth to power.” They fail the test of mandatorily speaking out against injustice and deliberate cruelty that’s expressed in both atheist and Christian perspectives: in the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre with his “Silence is complicity,” and in the Catholic Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, about to be laicized for speaking out against the Vatican’s “sin of sexism” in ruling that the Catholic priesthood was a strictly male prerogative. Echoing Sartre, Bourgeois said, “Silence is the voice of consent.” (See George Fish stories on Bourgeois, In These Times, “References”) We need look no further than the silence of mainstream Protestantism in the face of Catholic priest-pedophilia and cover-up. For where were the voices of Christian compassion for the victims here, victims who were obviously receiving no such Christian compassion from the Catholic Church, only the barrage of the Church’s lawyers?

As for Islam, while we can properly note that not all Muslims embraced the methods, or even the aims, of Al-Qaeda, Muslims of note did not speak out against the placing of a bounty on the head of novelist Salman Rushdie, nor the riots by Muslims engendered by the irreverent Danish cartons, acts which are commonly regarded in the “Great Satan” West (to use a popular fundamentalist Muslim characterization) as permissible expressions of free speech. (See Ibn Warraq, “References”) We can talk as well of an assault on a Muslim people themselves in the name of a non-Muslim religious “mandate”, the continued denial of human rights to the Palestinians by the Israelis. Of course, all this above is denounced within the Christian religious tradition itself, in the words of the one Christianity calls the Messiah: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” But where are the voices of Christianity heeding this, acknowledging its telling admonition? Certainly not on the public record, nor, as I’ve found, even in private conversations!

As an accountant might say of the above moral bookkeeping by religion, “There are definitely two sets of books being kept here.” This is something I’ve experienced personally also, in my daily life lived among the believers as well as in being someone who reads the newspapers. This gives a new dimension to my atheism: moving it beyond a strictly intellectual objection to the teachings of the world’s various theologies, to a moral objection that pointedly notes that deliberate cruelty, abuse of power, hypocrisy and the promulgation of double standards are an integral part of religious practice—something I learned early in life growing up Catholic (but didn’t become aware of its causes until later), surrounded on all sides by the emotional and verbal abuse of Catholic parents and family, on the one hand, and, on the other, the abuse of power, censorious repression, and looking the other way when evil was done to me by the Catholic school system and the clerical and lay teachers and fellow classmates within it. So I can truly say I’ve directly experienced the malevolence of religious practice as an integral part of my life experience. A malevolence that by no means ended when I left Catholicism through entering the university, but a malevolence that’s also directly manifested itself in my life here in Indianapolis. A malevolence that’s been, and still continues to be, part and parcel of my treatment by the Indianapolis “peaceable religious progressives;” a malevolence that started with the lies and deliberate character assassination promulgated and broadcast extensively since 1980 by one late “good Quaker woman” who was believed uncritically, and who did permanent damage to both my reputation and to my standing among others. (See George Fish blog, “References”) Fortunately I’ve been able to free myself somewhat by discovering good people who are not motivated by the sanctimonious self-righteousness, that sense of being part of a sanctified elect, that’s so integral to the de facto self-definition of Indianapolis “religious progressives”—even though they will (unsuccessfully) try to deny it.

But this is not merely my own sui generis view. This dissection of Christian morality finds solid intellectual foundation in that seminal work by the 19th Century German atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity. In it, Feuerbach not only tellingly depicts the self-estrangement of Man from his better nature through adoption of theology (which he distinguishes from the “natural” but vague religious impulse toward love of self and one’s neighbor, but which is corrupted, and has this corruption codified, by theological systems), but shows amply that through such theological embrace, the most cruel and perverted, the most unloving, the most destructive, forms of human behavior are not only tolerated, they are actually celebrated as the will of God and walking in the ways of God himself! Needless to say, history abounds in real-life examples, of which we need only mention the over 900 wars in the West during the Christian era, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo, right up to our own day with the priest-pedophilia scandal, the televangelism and political activism of the Religious Right, the televangelizing message of “God wants you to do well in the stock market” as preached by Robert Schuller and his devotees, right into my own personal life of active child abuse by my own “loving” devout Catholic parents, the character-assassination grousing behind my back by the late “good Quaker” mentioned above, and the gleefully active assault on my character and personality by the Indianapolis “religious progressives.”

Even leading Indianapolis “religious progressive” Jim Wolfe concedes that eminent British philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead was right when he stated that religion has probably done more harm than good in human affairs. He’s even willing to concede that “there have been more than enough of crusades, holy wars, pogroms, massacres, despotisms, spats, bigotry, abuse” committed in the name of religion. (Jim Wolfe, “Making Peace Among Religions Within Myself”) Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens states appropriately that, while religion is not the cause of what’s bad in human behavior, he also goes on to state incisively, “But the bad things that are innate in our species are strengthened by religion and are sanctified by it…so religion is a very powerful re-enforcer of our backward, clannish, tribal element.” (Quoted in Be Scofield, “5 Things Atheists Have Wrong About Religion," Tikkun, reprinted by AlterNet, www.alternet.org/story/151396/) Put all the above together, and a powerful case is made for regarding religion not as a good in our individual and collective lives, but one of the great evils within these lives.
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My good friend Greg King had a long, but most appropriate comment on this blog entry:

Even Karl Marx said something like, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed; the heart of a heartless world." I'm sure I don't have the quote exactly right, but it's close to that. Many hundreds of millions of oppressed people around the world, for thousands of years, would have killed themselves, were it not for that "pie in the sky when you die" as Joe Hill sang -- that promise of a heavenly reward, if only they can keep trudging through this vale of tears. It has given them a reason to carry on.

Of course, terrible things have been, and continue to be, done in the name of religion, but if it gives people a little comfort, a little solace, it's played a useful role. Of course, for many people throughout history, it has placed them on the wrong end of a pounded nail, a crossbow or a scimitar,faggots and torches, a noose, some stones. There have been many innocent victims of religious blindness and bigotry. But there have been hundreds of millions, or, over the last thirty thousand or so years, even billions of people, for whom it has played a useful role. No, I don't mean the role it has played for the pharisees, the popes, the bishops, the caliphs or the mullahs. I mean, as I've stated, the role it has played for the downtrodden peasants and workers. Buddha, Lao Tse, Jesus, St. Theresa, St. Francis, Dorothy Day, Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Buber, Maimonides, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Romero, Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, Fr. Roy Bourgeois, have all played very good roles and each, in their own way, has provided some comfort for the oppressed.

Of course it's better that the oppressed rise up and throw off their chains. But you know as well as I do many people have not had a real opportunity for that. People with the ability to lead, like Spartacus, John Ball and Wat the Tyler, Jean D'Arc, Danton, St. Just, Robespierre, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Sam Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, St.Simon, Robert Owens, Karl Marx, Proudhon, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Ho Chi Minh, Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Mother Bloor, Mother Jones, Anne Burlak Timpson, Amilcar Cabral, Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Kenji Miayamoto, Tom Hayden, Rudi Deutschke, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, Angela Davis,Carl Davidson, Carl Boice, Wayne Hayashi, Carol Amioka, Stan Masui, Kalani Ohelo, you, me and countless others, mostly unmentioned, who played major roles or very minor roles (like some of those listed), have to come along and provide inspiration and leadership. Not all of that leadership was good, but it had its good aspects.

Now, you know just as well as I do that the alternative to political leadership -- religious comfort -- may be based on a lie or, in any case, an illusion, a delusion. But we don't know that. We won't know until after we die. Most likely, we'll just insensately feed the grass, or our ashes will be scattered to the wind, and that will be it for us. But we may wake up in some way station between birth and rebirth. We may find ourselves in paradise or purgatory, or a hell somehow worse than the one we came from. We don't know. We may think we know, but it's much easier to prove the existence of something than the non-existence of something. So we might as well try to lead good lives, be considerate of our fellow beings. All our fellow beings.

Me? I don't know what to believe. Maybe Camus was right, and life is a cruel joke. We humans have this wonderful ability not only to experience, but to contemplate the world. But it's all going to be obliterated in an instant. As Simon and Garfunkel sing, "All lies in jest, yet a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." But I have found that appealing to something outside myself helps me through rough times. "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comforts me," as the Beatles sing. I know it may just be an emotional crutch; that what I'm appealing to is just air, and nothing more. But it provides some comfort. I suspect that's pretty universal.

REFERENCES, ALL SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Bennoune, Karima, “Remembering all al-Qaida's victims,” Guardian (UK), May 3, 2011

Dalby, Douglas, and Rachel Donadio, “Irish Report Finds Abuse Persisting in Catholic Church,” New York Times, July 13, 2011

Donadio, Rachel, “Vatican Recalls Ambassador to Ireland Over Abuse Report,” New York Times, July 25, 2011

Dowd, Maureen, “The End of Awe,” New York Times, July 23, 2011

Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989 [Originally published in 1841]

Fish, George, “Roy Bourgeois Faces Excommunication,” In These Times, March 2009, www.inthesetimes.com

Fish, George, “No Indulgence for Father Bourgeois,” In These Times, October 2010, www.inthesetimes.com

Fish, George, “Politically Incorrect Leftist” blog, www.politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com, esp. entries “Guest Blog from my friend John Williams: The Woman You Thought You Knew” and “On Mother’s Day: for those mothers who were really ‘mothers’”

Frosch, Dan, “Accusations of Abuse by Priest Dating to Early 1940s,” New York Times, July 10, 2011

Goodstein, Laurie, “In 3 Countries, Challenging the Vatican on Female Priests,” New York Times, July 22, 2011

Kilgore, Ted, “’Teavangelicals’: How the Christian Right Came to Bless the Economic Agenda of the Tea party,” The New Republic, www.tnr.com/article/the-permanent-campaign/91661/tea-party-christian-right-michele-bachmann

Mackey, Robert, “Video of Irish Leader’s Speech Attacking the Vatican,” New York Times, July 25, 2011

Scofield, Be, “5 things Atheists Have Wrong About Religion,” Tikkun, reprinted by AlterNet, www.alternet.org/story/151396/

Warraq, Ibn, Why I Am Not a Muslim, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003

Wolfe, Jim, “Making Peace Among Religions Within Myself” speech text manuscript, n.d.

On Mother's Day: for those mothers who were really "mothers"

...as in that compound word that begins with “mother” and is followed by a second word that begins with “f.” Unofrtunately, that was the kind of mother I had, as will be seen below, and I see no reason to be disingenuously silent about it.

This piece was originally posted on my former Bloomington Alternative blog on Mother’s Day, 2008. The only thing changed is to give it the date for Mother's Day, 2011--GF

Well, it’s May 8, 2011, Mother’s Day. A day to get sentimental about Mother, celebrate fulsomely how our mother contributed so positively to our upbringing as children that she guaranteed our satisfaction and success as adults. But what my mother so fulsomely gave me through the way she raised me—and I’ll be brutally honest here—is simply a deep sense of regret at being born.

Had I a choice in the matter I wouldn’t have chosen either her or my father to be my parents. And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to be raised in their Catholic religion. Nor would I have chosen to be part of that dysfunctional, authoritarian, repressive Catholic family I was raised in, and which was so very typical of Catholic families, both in its authoritarian lovelessness and in its exercise of arbitrary, repressive power.

My mother had one particular bête noire, and that was men and boys urinating standing up, and thus allegedly dripping and splashing. She was so obsessed with this that any little faux pas on my part would set her off in a screaming apoplectic rage so deep that her face would not only turn beet red, but the veins and tendons in her neck stand would out like mountain ranges as well. She’d screech at the top of her lungs, “All women just hate that!” then go into a ten-minute tirade on how all women were deeply offended and put upon by males urinating standing up, with their inevitable dripping and splashing on the rim of the toilet bowl. (But I never did know another woman who was so deeply offended by this natural male urination the way she was.) These unpredictable apoplectic rages, which could be set off at any time over any issue, were an integral part of not only my childhood, but my adolescence and even adulthood as well. Needless to say, as a good Catholic wife and mother, she never did go off on my father for his urinating the same way I did. She saved the expression of her seething rage at my father (and probably her own father as well) for when he was completely out of earshot. She needed a convenient scapegoat for her rage at my father, and lucky me, I became it.

Of course, that’s fundamentally child abuse, verbal and emotional child abuse that cuts as deeply as any physical abuse does (but which I was not generally subject to, only continuous verbal and emotional abuse). Needless to say, such abusive tirades not only undermined my most basic sense of self-esteem, any sense whatsoever of ever living up to any positive expectation on my part that I would ever please my mother; and their very capriciousness and unpredictability made me grow up with a constant fearful awareness of walking on eggs. With no recourse or avenue of escape whatsoever, for neither church nor society provided for that; they only upheld and reinforced such abuse as within the proper realm of parental authority.

I inherited a less-than-sterling set of genes from both my parents. Those behavioral patterns and mind-sets that have been so troublesome for myself and others in my life—my irritability, moodiness, sudden mood changes, depression and seething rage that suddenly, unpredictably explodes in volcanic eruption—I now see clearly as being integrally part of both my parents’ personalities also. But their power and authority enabled them to completely get away with it. As for me, when I was 18 and a college student, I sought psychiatric help for depression, only to have my life essentially put 40+ years on hold as the perpetual psychiatric outpatient. (Such is the result for most people entering into psychiatric treatment—the “professionals” now take it upon themselves to micro-manage their patients for the rest of their lives, because they’re obviously incapable of ever being more than demented cripples. This is called “curing mental illness.”) The Problem George I was to my parents and to the Catholic Church now became Problem George to psychiatry as well.

My mother’s great fear was somehow not being found quite respectable enough no matter what she did or didn’t do. This according to that tawdry, constricted sense of what was respectable and what was not so assiduously promulgated by the Reader’s Digest especially in those days of my youth, the 1950s and early 1960s. Both my parents read the Reader’s Digest religiously, the only magazine either of them ever did read regularly, or at all (my mother also read religiously the eminently respectable woman’s magazine of the day, McCall’s). Being “respectable” under such conditions meant not only not challenging authority, but also never being suspect or doubted by authority; and for parents, that “respectability” also meant never having children who weren’t also “respectable” by those standards. Alas, I failed miserably at that test. I was simply too bright, too stupidly unable to resist asking the question “Why?” in the Catholic school system to ever expect to pass that test, the test by which “good Catholics” were measured. And, needless to say, a system dominated in the most brutally authoritarian way by priests and nuns, and one never, never, crossed a priest or nun and expected to be considered worthwhile. My father once did so in my defense, and after being firmly rebuffed by the priest who was also the school’s principal, never made that mistake again. As for my mother, she hated those “liberal, questioning” priests that came out of the authoritarian closet in the early, heady days of Vatican II, much preferring those rigid, fundamentalist priests who could comfort her in her sorrowful lot as the Sinful Daughter of Eve, but who was still redeemable as a woman if she kept her nose clean.

Feminism changed (only partially, conditionally, unevenly) part of this. Needless to say, my mother hated feminism as “un-womanly,” and still does. She’s not overly fond of anti-racist (she’d say regularly in the 1960s, “They don’t want equal rights, they want special rights.”) or antiwar attitudes either (she’d say also in the 1960s against my opposition to the war in Vietnam, “No one wants war, but…” and then uphold the Vietnam War in knee-jerk, “respectable” fashion). In the early 1970s she went into a burning rage over the daughter of a family friend who took, along with her husband, a hyphenated surname instead of her husband’s name. As noted above, “male chauvinism” to her was men urinating standing up, to which she took righteous umbrage on behalf of oppressed womanhood easily as great as that that might be expressed (on different matters, of course) by Gloria Steinem. Needless to say, I’m horribly politically incorrect by the standards of contemporary leftism for expressing such thoughts and noting such things; but as I wrote many years ago on structural oppression and the human personality, “While oppression may ennoble in some cases, in the majority it curdles, it sours and makes opportunistic the personality.” I stand by this politically incorrect, yet palpably real, insight 100% today still, even as I wish mine and yours a “Happy Mom’s Day” this May 8, 2011.

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It should be added here that I did successfully confront my mother on her past abuse and moral blindness, following the course advocated by psychotherapist Dr. Susan Forward in her excellent book, Toxic Parents, in which she says the only way to move beyond abuse is to confront the abuser. I did so, and all my mother could say in "response" was to indignantly utter the egregious falsehood, "You never had to clean toilets!" However, I will say positively that when I needed a new car my mother volunteered to take out a bank loan to pay for it. Of course, that was in her direct self-interest also: having a car to go to work and get around here in Indianapolis kept me from moving back with the family, and thus preserved peace on both sides through geographical distance!