You Listening, E.J.?

E. J. Dionne, whose father had the same name, had a column in today’s (5.14.12) paper about why he’s not quitting the Catholic Church. E. J. doesn’t give us an email address to respond to his comments, so I’ve had to resort to the bully pulpit here at Ape Shit. I’m sorry you made me do this, E. J., I wish we could have kept it quite, but no, you’re in lock-down mode and I’ve had to resort to this messy public forum.

You listening, E. J.?

You were complaining about being badgered by folks from an outfit called the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). They—if I have this right—accused you of being an enabler of the evils the Church is and has been involved with over the years. You, on the other hand, held up the Mother Terresa defense: “But look at all the wonderful things people have done within the Church.”

I think, E. J., that is precisely what they are saying. It does take a leap of cognition to understand how buying into the “good” argument enables the bad, but it does. Mostly it demonstrates a fuzzy understanding of the traditional role of religion in society. A role, I might add, that has been on the wane since the Enlightenment; and thank God for that.

Since time immemorial, society has been under the control of two elements of state apparatus: the government and the church. Any church, any government. Those two machines work together to control the populace. The government, essentially, controls the direction of society (at this point in time) while the religion supplies the motivation. Furthermore, traditionally, government has controlled the engines of coercion and restraint, whereas religion has been left with education, charity, and social causes. Together they define the parameters; religion has the sales job and government the enforcing job.

What that means is that the church (or Church) does good because that’s it’s job. Hospitals save lives because it’s their job. Likewise, people who want to do good will gravitate towards those jobs which will allow them to do good. The Church did not create Mother Terresa; Mother Terresa used the Church to attain her goals. If the Church had not existed, she would have found another way to accomplish her goals. The credit goes, not to the Church, but to Mother Terry.

The Church, the Catholic Church, exists not to do good—people will do good regardless—but rather as an instrument of control: they would like the good to be done in their name.

The great glory of the Enlightenment was the realization that we didn’t need that instrument of control. If fact, it realized that, in the long run, having that kind of control over people was not a good idea; and ever since then, religion has slowly been losing ground to the rationalists. There’s nothing religion can do about it, it’s strictly evolutionary. There’s no turning back the tide. Slowly religion turns into folklore.

Yes, by buying into the Mother Terresa defense you’re slowing down the process of evolution. Yes, you’re an enabler. But not to worry, it makes no difference. You can prop up a dying belief all you want, but once it’s dead, it’s dead. Tell it to Zeus. I’m in the FFRF camp in that I wish you guys would brighten up a bit more quickly, but I’ve always had that problem with society. I’ve learned to accept that progress is inevitable but slow.

The Pope's shoes

The real question is, what are we going to do with all those old churches? How many performance halls do we need? Posh restaurants? Museums? Not to mention all those great priests’ robes. Don’t you think they’ll look good in the gay and lesbian parades? I do. Think they’ll look good.

Stick to your guns, E. J.

Deliver Us from Evil

A Documentary about Oliver O’Grady
Catholic Priest and Pedophile
Currently at Large in Ireland

But is it? Evil? Is the problem the Catholic Church? Is the problem ever the church? Any church?

Is our problem with the Muslims, the Mormons, the Fundamentalists, or the Jews? The Jains, the Buddhists, the Hindus, or Voudoun?

Should we be concerned about the Unitarians?

What should be done with Oliver O’Grady? Hundreds of children? Their mothers? What should be done with Bishop Mahoney (who protects pedophiles) or the Pope?

What should be done about people who blow themselves up, just to kill you? Is there a source for evil? Is there a source for good? What is evil and what is good? How does a person do one or the other? Who is judging? What are the rules?

It’s not so easy, is it?

It begins with babies, no? Either they start out evil or something along the way makes them do evil things. Either they have crossed wiring or bad chemistry, or experience taught them evil was the best solution.

But then, is it evil if they think it’s the best response available? When we confront evil, our instinct is to punish it. Besides correct it, of course.

We rarely look beyond our instinct. Punishment gives us satisfaction, it gives us revenge, which is what we want. We have been injured and we want someone to pay for it. We want, at the very least, the satisfaction of revenge.

That’s usually where we stop thinking. We rarely ask, do we want to change the evil behavior? Do we want to protect our society from evil?

As to the first question, we don’t have much interest in that other than how it relates to the second question. We mainly care about evil when it affects us. We’re only interested in redemption so far as it offers us protection. Unfortunately, instead of redemption we offer more incarceration. We’re more willing to try deterrent than reform, which may be an economic response rather than a rational response.

But punishment, aside from the satisfaction, implies that those babies had a choice about their wiring or their life experience. I don’t know about that; I just don’t know. My gut feeling says that, when evil shows up, something went wrong. Some connections were loose or somebody got a bad education.

How willing a choice did Father O’Grady make? It’s true, he molested hundreds of people, both sexes; and it’s true, he disassociates himself from his crimes (at one point he wanted to have all his victims—in California—come to Ireland together so he could say he was sorry); but what kind of punishment makes sense? Whipping? Stocks? Emasculation? Throw him in a hole at our expense?

Or the Church? What should we do about the Church? Were they not complicit? Didn’t they hide him and shelter him? Didn’t they sexually abuse him when he was a child?

What about his brother or his sister with whom he had sex? Are they complicit, too? What should we do about them?

It gets sticky, doesn’t it?

A suggestion, if you will:

Regardless of the origins of O’Grady’s evil, it was able to spread and go on for so long and still be protected, because of the authority and power of the Catholic Church. Yet the Catholic Church is only one of many churches and mosques and synagogs that operate in essentially the same way: they all require a suspension of rational observation in favor of faith-based belief. The crucial element is not in what you believe, but rather that you are willing to believe in the irrational. The goal is to get you to give up your powers of observation in favor of the party line (herd instinct). Once you believe in the unbelievable, you’ll believe in anything. And once you believe in the unbelievable, you are united with all other people who share the same belief; and those who don’t are your enemies. That’s a vital power for any oligarchy to have over its tribe. It’s so powerful it’s universal and ancient.

What it leads to—and one sees this time and again in the documentary—is people, unthinkingly giving their powers of observation over to other people, to designated authorities. These people really believe in the cloak of piety. These people invited Father O’Grady into their homes to rape their children. They couldn’t believe God could be the source of evil.

That’s the same God who sends children strapped with bombs into crowded marketplaces or sends teenage girls into polygamous marriages or butchers homosexuals. Once they believe…

Can anything be done about it?

Well, not very quickly. We could start by talking about religion. We could put two and two together and see how religion runs as a common theme through so many of our national and international problems that we might want to start taking a closer look at the role religion plays in our communities.

We could start in the schools. We could start in the grade schools. We could have comparative religion taught from kindergarten on. We could teach little kids about the many varieties of faith as an element of culture, and we should treat it as a folk art, along with songs, dances, art, etc. We could teach little kids about the differences between belief and non-belief. As they got older, we could teach students about the role of religion in society; how different societies incorporate religion into their structure. How, for example, does religion affect international alliances? How do religious charities affect the government’s need to supply social programs? Why are some religious issues settled at the ballot box?

Is there any chance of this?

No.

But it would be a good start. And, I believe, it would work. But, then again, I believe in the Enlightenment and I believe in the Emancipation Proclamation. What a fool I am.

On the other hand, I’ve got two things going for me: time and truth. Time will tell.