Gay rights for Straights!

O.k., the last post tried to address a question; “Why do Christians receive very little flack for their negative views of sex before marriage, and a much greater and more virulent amount for their disapproval of homosexuality?” 

I never really could get stuck into answering it. The problem was that the question contained too many assumptions and prejudices. I spent the whole post deconstructing the question. It turned out to be the wrong approach to the topic that I want to address, namely that the conversation over whether gay people should have sex (Are you paying close attention gay people? Or are you over it?) is actually a question in which people who aren't gay are attempting to resolve arguments that don’t particularly have anything to do with gay peoples lives. Gay sex is the site over which non-gay specific battles are being fought (hence the title of this post).

Firstly we should recognize that the question as to whether or not gay people should have sex is in fact a transformation of another question; whether or not people should have gay sex. (You may have to read them closely to notice the difference). What has caused this transformation is that we have a concept of gay people not just gay sex now. We have such a concept largely because we have a concept of heterosexual people. Men and women do not generally view their relationships as an obligation to come together and commit the gross indecency of sex for the purposes of procreation according to their parents’ wishes, except perhaps if they’re royals. Instead heterosexual relationships are viewed as consequences of deep attraction by people seeking life partners. That attraction is not just physical. It is a type of love that while different to the love of parent to child is no less love. One aspect that distinguishes that love from others is the appropriateness of its physical expression in sex. The experience of that love for people of the opposite gender is what we understand by heterosexuality.

The Christian bible was written long before any common concept of heterosexuality permeated society. In fact a darn good case can be made for blaming the Bible for our concept of sexuality (particularly Paul) and the whole modern relationship between sex and love – but it’s a complicated one and it took several centuries for it to bear fruit. I won’t go into it here. It’s sufficient to say that in Christendom until relatively recently sexual expression of any kind was not generally treated as the consequence of sexuality. Homosexuality has been historically understood as just the pursuit of a base pleasure that anyone might enjoy, or as an act of deliberate rebellion.

Sexuality and its benefits is the first subtext of the conversation about gay sex. People in sex-less heterosexual marriages (and there are many of them) for example find an expression of their pain in the language of sexuality. These people do not feel that they are just missing out on some pleasure like a good wank, they feel like they are living out a diminished life. They feel like an important part of their self-hood is denied them. This is a new articulation; that sexual expression belongs to a part of our self-hood called sexuality. When people argue over whether gay people can be expected to be celibate, these people in sex-less heterosexual marriages find themselves answering no because it is the answer which respects the concept of sexuality and therefore their own story and suffering.

Now of course it is not just people in sex-less (love-less to use a more common term) marriages who are using gay rights arguments to represent their own sexual situation. Obviously gay people are doing it too. But gay people form a minority of the population and gay rights is increasingly a majority concern. It is for all of us that sexuality has become about much more than just having sex because we ought to. Sexuality is a part of an expectation of quality of life and significance for our feelings that is becoming more and more universal.

Are arranged marriages wrong for example? If your answer to that is generally yes then you are possibly relying on a human right to a sexuality that is going to decide your opinion on gay marriage as well. It is the concept of sexuality as being the good expression of our own attractions that both condemns arranged marriages and supports gay ones. Note that this expression is not limitless. No-one gets to marry whoever they want to – you have to woo them first. There are also matters of consent and cruelty and probably even the carbon footprint of it all will become relevant. It’s not a free for all. However there is still within those limits a right to sexual expression according to this idea called sexuality.

This is why the limits to sexuality can’t just be arbitrarily set. Any limits to sexuality have to take the value of sexuality into account. That’s part and parcel of treating our sexuality with respect. We need to balance respect for our sexuality with other respects (such as for other peoples sexuality)  but there’s a default healthiness and goodness to our desires that ought to see the light of day in some manner. This is the positive personal script that is expressed by supporting gay relationships.

Another subtext to straight peoples support for gay and lesbian relationships is around a redefinition of their own relationships. What does it mean to be distinctly heterosexual – to see your relationship as remarkably different to a gay relationship? One the one hand it is merely noticing the sex category of the partners. It may even be noticing the socially privileged status of your relationship. On the other hand though, to be distinctly heterosexual is to elevate the heterosexual aspect of your relationship to one of primary moral or health importance. It is to say that each person’s gender in the relationship should have significance. Putting that personally it would mean that I as a guy think my own guyness and my partners womanhood ought to be important in how we interact with each other and with others.

It doesn't necessarily follow that if a person feels distinctly heterosexual in this way that they have to be opposed to gay relationships. They can simply imagine that different boats float differently. However it is impossible to hold a strong opposition to gay relationships without believing in such a distinct heterosexuality. This is why even the more benign organizations which have problems with same sex attraction believe in the notion of people fundamentally and spiritually divided into men and women. Meanwhile the less subtle an organizations disapproval of homosexuality, the more patriarchal their politics. There is a relationship between calling gay relationships sinful and a belief in such ideas as male-headship and women’s special roles of submission.

The relationship between the two is partly governed by the biblical fundamentalism which supports both. However the rejection of the two isn't anything to do with biblicism. It’s to do with feminism. I would be genuinely offended if someone at the bank or the ballot box for example treated my partner differently to me on the basis of her gender. Although gender might well matter to us erotically our practice of it is a matter for our own selves. It’s a role-play to which nobody else is invited. We don’t want our genders to be political or social categories.

This belief broadly held in Australia by all ages but especially the young, means that politically and socially we are all in gay relationships. That is to say that where gender is understood as a political and social category we want to belong to the same one as our partners. The conservative detractors were right that feminism could ultimately lead to universal lesbianism – they just didn't see that some of those lesbians would be men.

The above is a bit of hyperbole; this is still a pretty straight world. Most people are still presuming opposite-sex attraction of most other people most of the time, certainly in Bendigo where I live. However we are increasingly presuming that gender roles in families have no common definition. This makes it a private matter for a relationship to be gay even in the midst of straight cultures. Consider the following much-tweeted quote from Ellen DeGeneres;

“Asking who's "the man" and who's "the woman" in a same sex relationship is like asking which chopstick is the fork.”Couldn't a similar claim be made for every modern relationship? Who is the fork or knife in your relationship?

These are two ways in which the opposition some have towards homosexuality runs foul of matters important to straight peoples own agendas. We oppose the politicization of our genders in our straight relationships in the way that is necessary to disapprove of gay relationships. We don’t want to be distinctly heterosexual. We also want to live out our own sexuality fully – treating our romantic and sexual feelings with respect. We see our best chance to do that tied to the rights of gay people to do the same.

There is another big battle that is being fought out over gay people’s lives I've yet to mention. It has to do with how we allow morality and God to be defined. It particularly has to do with whether we tolerate inexplicable morals and victim-less crimes as the will of God. I won’t touch it in this post but I may get to this point next. Because it is a battle that just plain interests myself and others of a theological bent we possibly overstate it's influence anyway.

Truth is we're not grappling with theology so much as we're just looking for someone to love.

Deconstructing a question about Christian attitudes to sexuality.

Recently a question came up as to why Christians receive very little flack for their negative views of sex before marriage, and a much greater and more virulent amount for their disapproval of  homosexuality. Before answering this question I want to unpack the assumptions in the question.

The first point to make is that a question addressing both sex before marriage and homosexuality can lead us to reduce homosexuality to just sex in order to compare the two as similar moral acts. In fact, I think the question unfairly implies that this can/should be done. No-one is suggesting that heterosexuality before marriage is disapproved of in its entirety by any Christians. Indeed, as the father of a young girl, heterosexuality is something which has been creepily put upon her from infancy by all sorts. People suggested within twenty-four hours of her birth that she will break boys’ hearts. Certainly dating, courtship, enjoying romantic stories, admiring others and enjoying admiration in ways that are consistent with heterosexuality are tolerated, if not celebrated, before marriage by people who still disapprove of (heterosexual) sex before marriage. People who disapprove of homosexuality seldom wait until the pants come off before the disapproval applies.

An exception to the above might be found in the celibate orders of the Catholic church. There and only there have I ever encountered a general acceptance of heterosexual or homosexual attraction equally and a separate and distinct objection to the practical rubbing of genitals together or heavy petting. (I am deliberately avoiding making any reference to sexual abuse by Catholic clergy here. It’s too serious to overlook or to glibly joke about.) In fact the Catholic Church officially considers homosexual sex to be wrong in common with oral sex, anal sex or mutual masturbation in a heterosexual married relationship. All are non-procreative. That rather rarified view of sexual sin is not a generally held one even among Catholic laity.

 

The second point to make is that Christian views on sex before marriage and homosexuality are diverse (as the above distinction drawn between Catholic clergy and laity shows). Definitely in regard to homosexuality there is vocal support for loving and committed homosexual relationships among a growing number of Christians. I would suggest that Christian opinion on homosexuality is about as pluralistic as Christian positions on birth-control or euthanasia. (I would appreciate any links to research on Christian attitudes to homosexuality if readers can suggest some).

Similarly there are many non-Christians who share a disapproval of both sex before marriage and homosexual expression, married or not. Christians don’t own the conflation of these disapprovals which the original question might suggest. However this blog’s bias is that I know Christianity far better than any other faith or even ethical system. Therefore when I answer this question I’m going to be thinking foremost of the Christians who hold both views, rather than the Muslims or Buddhists. I’d be happy to receive comments from others with different experiences.

Before attempting to answer it I’d like to tidy up this question to account for the above problematic points. At first it seems easy to just clarify who we are discussing by referring to “those Christians who disapprove of homosexuality and sex-before marriage” rather than just to Christians. However when we consider people who hold both views in question we are really just drawing a convenient category. Some people who disapprove of homosexuality and sex-before marriage are going to disapprove of them in the context of also disapproving of divorce and contraception, others are not. It’s somewhat arbitrary to treat homosexuality and sex-before marriage in isolation. For some people we will have missed the point of their views by doing so.

There are also some people who would disagree with sex-outside of marriage who might only disapprove of homosexuality on that basis too. I think my mother might well fit that space. My mother is not inclined to view homosexuality as immoral itself despite that being the attitude of her upbringing. She holds now, I think, that God makes some people that way. She has a problem with promiscuity however and she would encourage people to make a marriage commitment to be together for ever before shacking up. (Mum, please comment if I have your views wrong by the way). Now she is in a position of feeling like homosexual sex is somewhat wrong for occurring outside of marriage but she would say that this is hardly gay people’s fault seeing as we (wider society) are not allowing them to get married. I’m also arbitrarily excluding such views as these when answering this question.

It’s even harder to adjust definitions in the question for the difference between the moral acts being discussed. One is about the act of having sex and the other about a whole range of romantic and sexual expressions.  One way to resolve that difference is to consider a point at which people who disapprove of sex-before marriage and homosexuality would encounter a more similar test of their approval. That’s the point when people in some form of solid unmarried straight or gay relationship might want recognition. Now we are comparing a bit more apples and apples.

Even there can we really say that any community, other than the exclusive aforementioned catholic ordained, has a common disapproval of de facto heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationships? Hypothetically it’s possible but practically does it exist? I live in a de facto opposite sex relationship and in circles where that is frowned upon I still feel I have to additionally and dramatically come out as someone who doesn’t disapprove of homosexuality. By comparison my de facto status is barely ever an issue.

I think that despite my lack of directly experiencing it, there are people who do have a kind of sameness to their attitude towards sex-outside of marriage and homosexuality. You can see something of it in such writing as by Vaughan Roberts. Practically they may not express it in the same way however. That’s about power and privilege as much as anything. Gay people are a minority and, living in a regional town as I do, it is often just presumed by people that they are nowhere around. Statistically speaking more often they aren’t - just ask any gay rural people trying to find partners. That makes it less confrontational to condemn them than the obviously in-the-room pre-maritally fornicating heterosexuals. It’s a case of politeness… sort of.

Note: I am reflecting here on my own repeated personal experience. Evangelical Christians are regularly inviting me to events were homosexuality is presumed to be absent. Evangelical Christians are regularly holding discussions about gay relationships and “the homosexual question” with me but are much more muted about the unmarried nature of my own heterosexual relationship. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt that this is borne of some kind of politeness.

It should also be noted that an unmarried heterosexual relationship just isn’t the same kind of upset to heterosexually organized churches as a gay relationship is. My partner has been invited to attend conservative Christian mothers’ groups. Realistically the lack of a ring on her finger just doesn’t have to come up that much, unlike if any invite had to go to her and her partner as well. So there is a pragmatic basis for the different expression of moral disdain for my relationship and for a gay relationship. It’s less of a challenge to people’s own relationships.

Honestly based on my experience the only time someone who disapproves of homosexuality and sex before marriage reaches some point of convergence in expressing those views is in the appointment of a church leader or role model. Until that point the two views are expressed so differently it’s not fair to compare them. Maybe they just are receiving different flack because of the difference in their expression; maybe people receive more hostility for saying homosexuality is wrong because they actually say it more often and more insensitively than they make statements about defacto heterosexuality.

Hence I think if we want to properly investigate the question of “why Christians in particular receive very little flack for their views on sex-before marriage and a much greater and more virulent amount for their views on homosexuality” then we have to reserve that for asking about appointing people to Christian leadership positions. I think it’s a fairer question to ask.

Unfortunately it’s also a much narrower question and less interesting question. My first response is that I don’t really care what a church does with its own ministers. So no flack will be received from me regarding views on homosexuality and sex-before marriage that impacts on those appointments. That’s not entirely true as I feel sad and angry when churches exclude women from leadership but so long as belonging to those churches is voluntary I accept a level of it being none of my business.

However I have a problem with schools and hospitals that get public funding discriminating against people based on their relationship status. In fact I think I would be just as appalled at a publicly subsidized school firing an unmarried mother as I would them firing a gay man or lesbian. So in those situations it is equal flack from me in response to views on homosexuality and sex-before marriage that impacts on those appointments.

I’d really appreciate other people’s thoughts on this. I got really excited by the question at the start of this piece because I thought it might finally be the right way to approach something I've wanted to say for a while; that the morality of homosexuality is an issue in which a great many other battles over the nature of sin and god are being fought by all sides. I do think gay people and their lives are being used symbolically for other causes, like biblical literalism for example. I had hoped to come at those points from this question. However I think once I've unpacked the assumptions in this question it ceases to be a very good approach at all.

What do you reckon?

An interested love of Wisdom.

It’s a reasonably well known piece of trivia that the word philosopher means “lover of wisdom”. Less well known is that the word was coined in ancient Greece to recognise one group of public intellectuals who did not make money directly from their arguing skills, as distinct from others who did. Philosophy’s original meaning can, therefore, be read as someone who particularly loves wisdom, above its commercial applications.

The exact nature of those historical other “non-philosophers” who plied their arguing skills for money is hard to determine. They were called “Sophists” and we mostly know about them from their detractors. They have been characterized as people for whom “reasoning” was essentially the art of “rationalizing” and from them we have the modern word “sophistry” - the practice of deceptive argument. In one interesting charge the Sophists were dismissed as rhetoricians – masters of speech but not logic, as if the two were ever so different. The philosopher by contrast was supposedly a man or woman for whom reasoning alone was the way to reach decisions – a sort of proto-scientist in pursuit of the truth – a submissive devotee of wisdom herself.

This definition of philosophy is one I’m suspicious of. It promotes such an obedient “love of wisdom” that the lover is also able to disavow the conclusions of their love. Any results of such a philosophers’ reasoning belong to reason itself, with the philosopher who advocates them merely the messenger. All this springs from a distinction from “non-philosophers” that is merely that no cash pays for their view. I find that a disingenuous claim.

A good illustration of what I mean by this can be found with one of the earliest “philosophers”, Aristotle, pupil of Plato and one of the most influential philosophers to bother Western civilization with their ideas. Aristotle claimed that women could not be philosophers. As a “lover of wisdom” he could claim a protection for his views as the product of that love. Supposedly his misogyny was not personal but simply how Aristotle saw the facts.

However Aristotle was a contemporary of Hipparchia, and even more closely connected to Lasthenea of Mantinea, and Axiothea ofPhlius who were also students of Pluto and members of the academy alongside Aristotle. Their scholarship would have had to have been obvious, to have attained such astonishingly rare recognition. Aristotle’s belief that “women should not leave the female quarters of the house” served his interests by damning these female rivals for Plato’s legacy. He became Plato’s only legitimate successor, part of a very limited pantheon of well known Ancient Greek philosophers to this day. 

I rather suspect the definition of philosophy that Aristotle himself promoted doesn’t accidentally conceal the politics of Aristotle’s male interests. Instead I think the notion that philosophy is a “love of wisdom” untainted by grubby commercialism is itself a rotten act of “sophistry”. It worked in Aristotle’s case because the money exchange became the sole definition of corruption (and the definition of a non-philosopher). People failed to notice the other ways in which power can be stored and shared and advanced, in particular, Aristotle’s patriarchal power.

What is the point in describing all this – other than putting the boot to an iconic philosopher like Aristotle? The point is that it describes a continuing situation. We readily recognize that commercial interests indicate a bias. No-one ought to expect the concept of “Zero Harm” in corporate workplace safety to be much more than corporate hype. When a company like BHP uses Zero Harm (in capitals no less) to promote their corporate mission then hopefully we are not paying too much attention to this as a meaningful direction for environmental philosophy. We tend to be reasonably savvy at following the money trail to discredit paid-for spokespeople and positions.

However, just as when the word philosophy was coined, we still struggle to assert how non-commercial interests also distort the “love of wisdom”. So long as no money changes hands for a specific outcome (ie. no fee for service), we can sometimes believe that statements about obvious matters of power are not self-interested, or that we must assume them to be as such.  For example consider Doug Phillips’ (of the arch-conservative patriarchal Vision Forum) claims that “Daughters aren’t to be independent. They’re not to act outside the scope of their father.” Doug makes this claim regarding even adult unmarried daughters as part of a “commitment to affirming the historic faith of Biblical Christianity.” We might feel obliged to accept that Doug is simply reading and responding to his Bible. We might feel that without the clear evidence of a cash receipt Doug may be reasoning his way to his conclusion rather than rationalizing his interests and must be assumed to be doing so.

To that I think it’s appropriate to call bullshit. I don’t just say that because it seems culturally obvious in this case that Vision Forums’ Doug Phillips is being self-interested; his are not mainstream views even amongst most religious conservatives. Instead I want to make the far more contentious claim that no philosophy can ever disavow its interests and claim to come from an objective position. I believe that all philosophy originates from us taking an interested position rather than an objective one.

The idea that all philosophy proceeds from interests first rather than some objective place of pure reason is best illustrated by what we think about the environment and environmental politics. There is simply no objective way to say that one environment is better than another. There are microbes that live in lava vents that would vote (if they could) for a seismically unstable world. Our disagreement with them indicates we have different interests.

We can only think about our environment and how best to interact with it from a prior assumption of interests. The most obvious of these is to take an individual interest or a special interest (for all humanity). However it is not irrational to take the interests of very different living creatures into account or the ideal of a diverse and colourful planet.

I don’t believe that rationalism can be expected to shift us from a position of complete neutrality in which the concept of any environment’s value is nonsense, to the right interested position in which we can properly conceive environmental concerns. Nor do I think that rationalism can provide us with reasons to shift from one interested position to another alternative. This is why I say that all positions of interest on the environment, even one in which destruction is the goal, are equally rational or irrational.

I think if we want to call some position on the environment right or better than another we have to return to the sort of sophist arguments that philosophy in the greek tradition tried to distance itself from. I don’t mean sophist in the modern sense of dishonest. I think we simply need to use the full range of language and not just logic. In doing this we practice what the classic Greek philosophers and some "moderns" would not call proper philosophy.

Only via story, evocative rhetoric and even intuition can we be obliged to value interests other than our own.  I would also credit compassion to developmental factors such as the experience of reliable and honest relationships. I don’t believe it can be based in argument alone. For some people this is potentially paralyzing. If one position of interest cannot be verified as the true or right one with any finality in scientific fashion, and if we must take a position of interest before we engage in any philosophy, then for some people this is the end of the philosophical enterprise all together, as a valid search for truth.

It isn’t, in my opinion; it is merely the end of absolute certainty. The love of Wisdom has been mistakenly believed to be the same thing as the disinterested pursuit of certainty for so long but it's not. It's something that involves much more of ourselves than that - all of our interests. Unlike Aristotle we should be prepared to admit them.

Doing what Jesus says.

There was a video (above) which I saw shared on facebook recently. It talks about the importance of “following Jesus” by obeying his commands. It does this by trivializing the alternative of just emptily repeating such commands. The video is somewhat persuasive because in the example used “Clean your room”, we can see how doing what has been asked of us is the only way to respect the asker. We can feel the annoyance that would be generated by anyone merely memorizing “Clean your room” and not cleaning it when asked.

The problem is that Christianity struggles to maintain a list of “clean your room” type instructions from its God. That kind of clear definition of spiritual practice can be found in Buddhism for example with its five precepts for lay practitioners:

1. Do not kill 
2. Do not steal 
3. Do not indulge in sexual misconduct 
4. Do not make false speech 
5. Do not take intoxicants

It can sometimes seem that Christianity has a set of equally clear precepts. The certainty with which some Christians will tell you that sex before marriage is forbidden is matched by the certainty others will tell you that Christians mustn't own a gun. If you search for “Jesus’ actual teaching” you will receive numerous confident declarations. The confidence of these declarations of the ethical “rules” of Christianity can seem to only rise in spite of their disagreements.  

Unlike the Buddha, Jesus not only doesn’t tell us to clean our room, he never actually wrote anything down. His words have instead been remembered and recorded in four Gospels. Other than discrepancies between them there are three main reasons why the Gospels just don’t lend themselves to an easy precept building exercise.

1.

Firstly the Gospels present much of Jesus’ teaching in parable form. Consider Mathew 22:

  

 1Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying,2“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son.3“And he sent out his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling to come.4“Again he sent out other slaves saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited, “Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding feast.”’5“But they paid no attention and went their way, one to his own farm, another to his business,6and the rest seized his slaves and mistreated them and killed them.7“But the king was enraged, and he sent his armies and destroyed those murderers and set their city on fire.8“Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those who were invited were not worthy.9‘Go therefore to the main highways, and as many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast.’10“Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.

Now in this parable Jesus’ Jewish audience are told to equate the wedding feast with the kingdom of heaven. This is the kingdom of theirs and their ancestors’ longing. This parable is warning them not to ignore the call to kingdom. For one thing they must not seize the king of heaven’s slaves and mistreat them. Perhaps what that means is not to abuse the lowest members of Jewish society. If they do, Jesus is saying, then these “invited members” can expect to be unwelcome in the kingdom and even destroyed. Instead the slaves will be welcomed.

Then the parable continues:

 11“But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes,12and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?’ And the man was speechless.13“Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’14“For many are called, but few are chosen.”

Ummm… I’m a little with the speechless guy here too. These were slaves who got invited so one presumes most of them wouldn’t have wedding clothes. Why expel one of them for it? Perhaps the wedding clothes signify something other than nice clothes, some sort of readiness perhaps but the metaphor is making less and less sense. No matter how we interpret this it’s pretty clear this bit is not “Clean Your Room” clear at all.  We may be arguing fruitlessly about how to interpret this for ever.

2.

Secondly Jesus’ teachings may be difficult to clarify because they are recorded by people who already had a lot of writing and philosophy backgrounding their discussions. Jesus seems to rely on his audiences’ understanding of that background in some conversations:

"You must not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to complete them. Indeed, I assure you that, while Heaven and earth last, the Law will not lose a single dot or comma until its purpose is complete. This means that whoever now relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men to do the same will himself be called least in Heaven. But whoever teaches and practises them will be called great in the kingdom of Heaven. For I tell you that your goodness must be a far better thing then the goodness of the scribes and Pharisees before you can set foot in the kingdom of Heaven at all! (Mathew 5:17-20)

However Jesus himself seemed to overturn the dietary laws of the Prophets. (Mathew 15:10-11)  Certainly Christians in Jesus’ name don’t heed those laws. Jesus also gathered grain on the Sabbath and opposed stoning in one instance at least. There is no way that you can read the laws of the Prophets, the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus for example, and suggest that “not one dot or comma” is different in Jesus practice. Therefore although it reads as clear at first, it’s not “clean your room” clear exactly what Jesus means for his audience to assume in Math 5: 17-20.

Some Christians have tried to resolve this problem by saying that there are cultic and universal laws in their Old Testament. The argument goes that cultic rules are extinguished by Jesus bodily replacing the temple. Those laws were time and situation limited. However the non-cultic universal ones remain in place.  This allows those Christians to flesh out Jesus’ teaching with the specifics of the Old Testament while dismissing those laws that Jesus practically overturned or would be ludicrous to try and impose today. The problem is that this is not reflected in the text. It is a distinction added by modern readers and thus easily accused of merely being convenient.

“For example "love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:18) is followed in the very next verse by the law "do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material" (19:19. Should verse 18 be applied as binding, while verse 19 is dismissed as non-applicable altogether? The text gives no indication that any kind of hermeneutical shift has taken place between the two verses.” http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_law_hays.html

We can’t even say that the Ten Commandments are enduring although they are arguably the core of the law inherited by Jesus. I have heard some people describe them as pillars of our civilization. However right in the middle of these “core” instructions is one that most contemporary mainstream Christians ignore:

"Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it."(Exodus 20:8-11)

In fact this is something that according to one story Jesus himself disregarded firstly because he was hungry and secondly because he was responded to another person’s need. . (Mathew 12:1-14)  Jesus is recorded as saying that “it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” and that “God requires mercy not sacrifice”. I think this means Jesus was arguing that the point of the Sabbath was to give people a rest day and oblige their employers basically to restrain from working them seven days. The Sabbath was not to oblige people to suffer or to justify cruelty.

It’s worth noting that if we were to stand in Jesus’ time with the attitude of a modern Christian fundamentalist then we would come to a strange conclusion. Jesus’ response to the Pharisees about the Sabbath is far less supported by the original text of Exodus than the Pharisees’ own position. Jesus is the heretic while the Pharisees are simply submitting to the authority of the text.

Jesus is telling his hearers to look to the point of the text – not just its plain reading. Specifically we are supposed to find the justice angle – something I feel more and more is the lens via which to read Jesus best. As the following text suggests;

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices--mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law--justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” (Mathew 23:23)

This is contrary however to a Christian fundamentalist approach.

Christian fundamentalists can hide from this paradox because Jesus is now also in the text. This enables them to try to make a dog’s breakfast fusion of Jesus and a literal Exodus and claim to follow the whole (literal) bible. In Jesus’ time they would not have had that privilege and would have had to struggle with a living contradiction to the text in their hands - like the Pharisees.

3.

The third reason why it is impossible to make a simple list of precepts from Jesus teaching is… actually there isn’t a definite third reason. I was going to say that Jesus’ commands are the kind that don’t make for a list of explicit rules. However the more I read the more I realize that that position is potentially a cop-out. It’s possible to read clear instructions in some parts of Jesus recorded words. It’s just that you end up with something unusual. Unusual is certainly not impossible.

Arguments like the video at the start of this post draw their inspiration from passages like that at the end of the Sermon of the Mount from Mathews gospel;
21“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.22“Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’23“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.’

In Luke’s Gospel the text is virtually repeated but with greater emphasis on doing what Jesus himself says (making it a better justification of the video):

    46“Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?47“Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them, I will show you whom he is like:48he is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.49“But the one who has heard and has not acted accordingly, is like a man who built a house on the ground without any foundation; and the torrent burst against it and immediately it collapsed, and the ruin of that house was great.”

To understand what these passages mean we merely need to read them at the end of the Sermon on the Mount which contains the “What I say” of Jesus’ “do what I say”.

Firstly this Sermon actually has Jesus summarising the Law and the Prophets allowing us to clear up what is meant by Matthew 5:17-20;

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matth 7:12)

Then the sermon does contain some clear instructions. I’ll use Luke’s version ( in particular Luke 6:27-45) because it’s much (much) briefer. However Mathew’s version (Chapter 5-7) is also worth reading.

 1. ..love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.. .

2 “Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt from him either.

3.“Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back…. lend, expecting nothing in return…   

4.“Treat others the same way you want them to treat you…

6. do not judge… and do not condemn…  first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

The problem I have with the video at the start of this post is that in the truncated form it was shared in it fails to mention what should be in place of “clean your room”. In such a vacuum I suspect people are not going to fill in the contextually appropriate commandments above. Instead I suspect they are going to add in those things which in their community form the obvious teachings of Jesus – the no sex before marriage or the lack of a gun rules. Or they are going to play arbitrary games with the Law and the Prophets to decide on some “non-cultic” ones to retain.

Those are poor way to respond to the text but I see it as almost inevitable. The rules above don’t feel like they are enough to base a religious life on. In fact they almost seem to be suggesting something in opposition to our religious instincts. No judgment? That’s not very moral.

A life lived according to these six precepts would also look a little bit mad. Lending without expecting in return? Giving up your shirt to whoever takes your coat? All of that seems deeply unsustainable. It’s certainly not pragmatic. It's not even fair.

Behind it however lies a foolhardy optimism that is also repeatedly scriptural. The passage in Luke I have drawn the above precepts from also includes this promise:

“Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return.”

(Luke 6:27-36)

And in the middle of Mathew’s much longer rendition of the Sermon of the Mount:

 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? “And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? “And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.30“But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!31“Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ “For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

    “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

That would be doing what Jesus says.

Fred Lives!

This Easter you may be encouraged to think of someone who gave their life to redeem us.

This is what a messiah is; their life redeems us. And this redemption doesn’t work from the outside but from the inside. The messiah must be one of us so that their life counts as one of ours. That’s why it has this redemptive nature.

How does it save us? It shows us what we can be. Also that means there’s no salvation except through emulation.

From our exploitation of the poor and vulnerable, to our adoration of whatever is powerful, humanity can often seem shitful. Look at the abuse of our children. Look at the idiotic cunning of nuclear deterrence. Look at climate change skepticism, still. We are cruel, and murderous and thick as bricks.

But the messiah figure is different to that. They oppose that. As a human they refuse to be just defined by their humanity. They are kind and wise. They bring joy.

Other than the messiah, we can feel that humanity is worth stopping like a failed experiment, or like an oil spill. These aren’t sensible thoughts. But we feel them some days anyway; Then, because of the messiah… maybe not.

This Easter like every Easter we will be told by some that our one and only messiah is Jesus. I imagine that reflects the experience of the first Christians. I imagine that is why Jesus was celebrated in that way.

You may struggle to see the messianic quality. There are too many Jesus followers who think of kindness and wisdom and joy as secondary issues. They propose Jesus following as attending church, railing against other people’s sins, prayer and praise and obedience to certain biblical laws (though not others). Some can even follow Jesus and cover up the abuse of children; some can follow Jesus and still support nuclear deterrence. There can seem to be little of a redeeming nature there, just more shitful humanity.

Last Easter I wrote about what I think what Jesus’ message was. It’s primarily about God. I think there is something awesome there. However if you don’t, I don’t care. There is nothing in my mind especially gained by “recognizing” Jesus as a messiah or as a redeemer of humanity. The proof of that is history. It’s a crying shame but it’s evident.

Fortunately there is not only one messiah 2000 years old speaking in a language we have to struggle to understand. Instead there are many. Humanity throws up countless lives who respond to whether we deserve destruction with “maybe not”. Malala_Yousafzai, Charles Perkins, Jonas Salk are amongst many others. Your messiah might be someone very close to you (like my partner is for me). Or it might be Jesus from 2000 years ago.
 

I often think of Fred Hollows, an Australian eye doctor. That’s a life to emulate. It’s a life that shows us a path to restoration of a humanity of redeemed value, in the midst of human caused pain.

The important thing to remember is that merely admiring a messiah gets us nowhere. Messiahs that we put the work of our salvation on to are false messiahs. They have become separate from our humanity and can no longer redeem us. Ultimately it is not the messiah that truly saves us but the path they show.

Happy Easter.

Nature and the Unnatural.

Through all the challenges our planet and the human race is enduring in these transformative times, we have such a powerful ally in Nature and more than ever, we need to be collaborating with her in all of her aspects.

(http://www.muriellindsay.com/nature-as-teacher.html)

The concept of nature as a teacher or ally has a salience to our lives expressed in the above quote by “these transformative times”. I feel, with mounting evidence, that we as a human race must resolve our relationship to nature differently, perhaps even more traditionally.

The calving of continent sized ice sheets are signs from the world of these “transformative times”. The increases in obesity in developed countries are symptoms from our own bodies of the same. “Something is dangerously wrong with our shit” sounds louder and louder all the time and it seems only a fool can’t hear it. Alienation from and antipathy towards nature is a diagnosis that makes some sense of our condition.

There’s a spiritual malaise too that focuses our attention on these material signs and symptoms. We don’t feel well. Sure, it begs the question to say this spiritual malaise is due to our not listening to nature. It’s uncertain if feeling the malaise precedes the interpretation or is induced by it. However that sickening sense of artificiality I feel in the middle of a mall is privately convincing our society has some kind of a problem with nature, as is the healthier feeling I get when bush walking.

But then we encounter our problem of definition. Is a mall really something unnatural in contrast to a preserved stretch of bushland? A clearly built environment, whose light hides the stars at night and whose concrete covers the earth, is still the consequence of choices which could be called natural for humans to make. And if so, aren’t we nature too, as much as trees and kangaroos? Nature, in its broadest sense, can lay claim to be whatever is.

Talking to my five year old by the way, her definition of nature excluded angry stray dogs. Nature was in her words, “everything that was around us and nice”. She initially included as nature cars but then doubted that, houses were more natural, rubbish on the ground was definitely not and trees were nature’s best representation. God was a part of nature too.

In the “adult” conversations I’ve had on this topic, the tendency has been to accept that everything is natural. To justify calling anything unnatural (or supernatural for that matter) we have to do two things. We have to have a source for it, or a logic for it that is outside of nature. Secondly we have to retain that outside status. We can’t allow our concept of nature to grow to include the unnatural.

My adult friends weren’t generally willing to do these tasks with anything my child considered “unnatural.” No-one seemed willing to say that a car or a mall has a source or logic outside of nature and that we shouldn’t ever increase our concept of nature to include that source or logic. Human psychology and society in all their forms were accepted as natural.

To put this another way, most people I spoke to accepted a monism of nature. A monism is something which is indivisible. The effect of this is to render impossible appeals to nature:

“An appeal to nature is an argument or rhetorical tactic in which it is proposed that "a thing is good because it is 'natural', or bad because it is 'unnatural'". – Wikipedia

Appeals to nature are impossible when nature is a monism because moral language is about alternatives which are at least dualistic. Something can be good or bad in moral language. If nature is the whole of reality, then nature can’t be good or bad.

Instead if nature is a monism what makes sense for us to do is to view morality as something imposed onto nature from outside it. As an example the polio virus is natural. It naturally infects children who naturally suffer for it. However the eradication of polio is good (and also natural by the way). What makes the eradication of polio good are values which we give to events which don’t belong to them in any essential way. Specifically we call the suffering of children bad even though it is as natural as anything else.

By the same logic the extinction of tigers is natural. If we are to say it is a bad thing then we have to justify this in a way that doesn’t belong essentially to tigers or the world. We have to create the value from elsewhere such as our enjoyment of tigers or a tiger’s usefulness in their ecosystem, which then must relate to something else of value to us. This is the point where I begin to question whether we have gone astray.

A refusal to deify nature and to identify anything as unnatural helped us with the polio situation but it seems to miss something with the tigers. We seem to be forced down long paths of utlity measuring to say why tiger extinctions are wrong when more useful language lies in my child’s vocabulary. We seem to have gotten to this point because we are unwilling to complete two tasks – to have a source for something or a logic for it that is outside of nature and to not forbid our concept of nature to grow to include this.

I think this is not a decision we have properly investigated. I also think this is a cultural phenomenon which it is very interesting to imagine undoing. Imagine if we did have a conception of an unnatural logic that was seen as different to a natural logic and we refused to incorporate it into a natural logic. As an example we could identify capitalism as an unnatural culture and deny it the same status as natural. We could declare it foreign to the “real world”. Those are the kind of steps we might need to take for the quote at the start of this post to make robust sense.

Are they impossible steps? Would we be better off or worse off for attempting them? I think our reasonable fear is that we will only be fooling ourselves; that all appeals to nature are based on romantic misrepresentations of nature. After all is it evident that capitalism is unnatural or natural? Are we just making an entirely random declaration and if so could someone else equally declare that reading or women in the workforce is unnatural? Is it better given its potential to oppress and hamper common sense to declare the language of natural and unnatural an off-limits moral rhetoric?

Certainly if we are going to come up with a pejorative idea of unnatural we need to do more than derive “natural” from simple observations of nature. If we do that we may end up modeling human behaviour on that of other species which is never going to fully work and in some cases will be just ridiculous. Should we pick off the weak like a predatory cat? Or be as patient as a tortoise?

Natural and unnatural will need to be fairly complicated concepts if we do employ them. They have to speak to everything we feel about the sickness of our lives, the upheaval of our planet’s climate and ecosystems and still retain a sense of who we are as particularly human animals with our human concerns of justice. I share the belief with all the people I spoke to that this is not an easy definition to come up with. Maybe we should just deconstruct “natural” as a propaganda tool without any real hard meaning and leave it at that.

However if we do merely deconstruct the concept of natural with no reconstruction will there be any way of saying that the things which are “around us and nice” matter in and of themselves?  Will a tiger in a computer game be as good as the real thing? Or better even for being safer? In this matter I feel like consulting my five year old is probably the best idea I’ve had on this topic. For her, language is something she is unsure of and prepared to renegotiate, partly at least to feel well with the world. That’s why I want to give the idea of nature as a teacher or ally proper consideration even if it upsets my "adult" thinking. Language ought to be subject to our needs for wellness, not the other way round.

A preferential option for the poor.

I was recently asked why I often write within or at least around a particularly Christian mythos. It’s a legitimate question. It also has three distinct answers. I’m going to give the most important one, a qualified defense of Christianity, and leave the other two shrouded in mystery. Perhaps I’ll get to them another time.

Christianity is a highly literalized religion. Something in the majority Christian psyche from as early as we have records has been unable to hear phrases like the Son of God without having to imagine a male God literally impregnating a woman. I find that ridiculous. Similarly there are stories of Jesus calming storms, walking on water and even raising the dead with the strong suggestion this could be done by his followers. Given that Christianity did not usher in an era of miracles in which the boat and medicine became redundant I likewise consider these stories symbolic.

There are many ways in which my attitude to the miraculous events of the Christian bible put me outside of normal Christianity. I don’t consider Jesus especially and uniquely the Son of God. I don’t think I can talk to him today in any normal sense of talking. I don’t think Jesus’ triumph over death means they are alive now. That also means that I don’t believe that you and I will be able to chat in a billion years in heaven (or in the other place). You and I will be as dead in a billion years as Jesus. Meanwhile Jesus’ biological father, possibly Joseph or possibly some random raping roman soldier will be even deader.

Given the literalism of Christianity and my statements of belief in the above paragraph it’s pretty simple to say I am not a Christian. The cracks in that certainty appear when we start to ask “what is God?” If God is some very special personage akin to Zeus then a literal Christianity with a literal impregnation of Mary makes sense and can be easily disagreed with. But if God is in fact a symbol (Paul Tillich calls God “the symbol of God”) or, as I have referred to God, a “moral field” then Jesus being the Son of them means something much more interesting quite frankly. It means that Jesus is the image of that morality. His life supposedly points towards it most accurately. Jesus is the human incarnation of the mindset of God.

In a literal Christianity an understanding of how Jesus is the son of God is supposed to inspire worship of Jesus. Jesus is set apart from us by his divine and strangely both supernatural yet biological parentage. He is not to be treated as just some teacher like the Buddha for example. He is above our humanity rather than beside us. In a non-literal christianity however the emphasis is on how we are supposed to share in what Jesus claimed as his authority. We are also supposed to be children of the “moral field”; children of love, righteousness, justice and mercy. That’s the place in which I am in conversation with Christianity.

What that conversation reveals is the stand-out quality of Christianity amongst comparable philosophies. Christians reject the neutrality of god in matters of justice. There can be no doubt that this is a continuation of a jewish heritage but it is also further reinforced in Christianity. In Liberation theology this bias of God is named as God holding a “preferential option for the poor”.

I consider this “preferential option for the poor” to be a very important quality to attribute to our “moral field”.  I don’t think the moral field is so much of a “thing” as it is a conceptualization of the assumptions that give positive meaning or sense to life. For example, the moral field in which science makes sense is one which values honesty. I’m saying that all life, including science, makes sense when we adopt the moral assumption to stand with “the poor” or more generally the oppressed and view the situation from that direction. Without that stance bullying (on any scale) for example would simply look like a “personality clash”.

Taking this stance of applying a pro-poor filter to our moral view is not something that is arguable. It is essentially a radical “free” choice. By free I mean we are not obliged to adopt it by any logical necessity. The historical word for an assumption that is radically chosen and invested in as a starting point for any moral questioning is God. Therefore I find myself saying, using historical language, what I believe about morality is that I believe God stands with the poor and oppressed. Of all religions, in my study, Christianity is the best expression of this view.

This idea of God’s bias in favour of the oppressed is pretty mainstream Christianity. Any enquiry of popular depictions of Christianity would acknowledge that, as in the third Indiana Jones movie, the Holy Grail is actually a pauper’s cup. And of course there is the classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. This is why I frequently praise the sort of unpolished Christianity that forms popular fiction. It preaches a sympathy with the underdog and a criticism of inequality as the definition of Christianity. While the idea of Christian humanist values can be overstated, here is the connection between our rejection of might-equals-right and a Christian cultural background. When Christian apologists argue that women’s rights, opposition to slavery, hospitals and public education have come out of a particularly Christian sense of universal dignity they really aren’t wrong.

Some Christians have, however, also opposed all these ideas. When they do so they usually occupy a stream of Christianity which claims that nature is morally teleological – that is to say that what is natural also describes what should be. This stream entrenches inequality through “natural” hierarchies; white above coloured, and men above women. It then denies the inequality even exists by claiming nature as its defense.

My view is that this kind of nature based moral teleology doesn’t properly belong to Christianity. It is not historically Jewish and it contradicts other aspects of Judeo-Christian thought. I think it belongs to Greco-Roman paganism far more naturally.

To be perfectly clear on this: The idea that men and women have different morally obliged functional roles based on their created natures (which evangelical Christians call complementarianism) makes sense as Greco-Roman philosophy but is contrary to the direction of Christian philosophy. The similar idea that natural law codifies our biological instructions for sexuality (ie. that the penis and the vagina are “meant for each other”) is also Greco-Roman. By this I don’t mean that heterosexism in Christianity comes from Greco-Roman roots, just that this particular process of grounding right and wrong in nature and creation does. These ideas are as Platonic in style as looking for moral meaning in the shape of our skulls. However these are the ideas that still justify inequality today.

By contrast the Mosaic era condemnation of homosexuality was about its social implications for patriarchy, not its biological unnaturalness. The created order in Judaism is much more ambivalently able to serve as a template for how we should act. Even in Eden before the consequences of our first disobedience there isn’t any stasis. At first Adam is lonely, then the serpent enters the picture, contradicting God. The apple eating also reeks of inevitability. Creation is never a perfect picture. That idea is to come much later from, I believe, Hellenic influences. In Judaism the status of the relationship between nature and the good is “complicated” and thus can’t be used to entrench inequality.

Christianity may have made a big mistake getting into bed with Greco-Roman thought. It’s a naïve project however to separate the two. Jerusalem was heavily Hellenised before Jesus even entered the theological arena. Paul, the apostle, whose writings compose much of the New Testament is a Romanised Jew. The notion of an original Christianity prior to the “infection” of Greco-Roman thought can never be uncovered. Instead if we want to imagine Christianity completely free of a natural moral teleology that justifies inequality then we have to go beyond it to something new.

That is exactly what is underway and has been for some time, in feminism and queer theory. It may seem strange but I see these movements as offshoots of Christianity. In fact I see them as taking the direction of Christianity, with its bias towards the oppressed, further than Christianity itself. In this way feminism and queer theory are at least potentially more Christian than Christianity.

I think it’s regrettable (and understandable) that many feminists and queer activist have jettisoned the language of God; definitely the Judeo-Christian god. In doing so, they concede their own social history. If anyone can claim rightfully to be standing in God’s current place, the claim made by Jesus, it is not church oppressors of women and queers (and queer women) but people working on behalf of those oppressed. When Christianity is viewed in its context, as a movement away from its surrounds, its progressions and arguments are continued by feminists far, far more than they are continued by Christian complementarians.

To express this on a more personal level, when I left the Catholic Church as a young man and became involved in queer politics I was only superficially rebelling against my parent’s beliefs. On a more fundamental level I was living out my parent’s beliefs in a good God who loved everybody and cared especially for the oppressed. Nowadays I think we all see that more clearly. There is something deeply healing about acknowledging my parent’s values in my life even in the places we disagree.

I also believe that myth can only be defeated by myth. Myth is ultimate reality, the realest of the stories we tell, in the sense that Micheal Polyani or Paul Tillich would use the term. (For what I mean here see the end of this post, No-one believes in Reality).

We can’t defeat the myths that support women’s divine inequality to men or the spiritual inferiority of gay love, or the holy purpose of violence with appeals to pragmatics. That kind of a counter can only distract momentarily, like offering candy to a potential suicide. Ultimately when oppression is heaven sent, the oppressed need to locate God on their side. That’s something that Christianity provides.