Laughing matters 6: Crossing lines, thank gawd
- September 03, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, Parenting, schools, sex
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Your [human] race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug push it a little weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.
–Satan, in The Mysterious Stranger by MARK TWAIN
This brilliant piece of satire immediately brought that Twain quote to my mind:
When Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist posted it, several commenters said they found it “inappropriate” and “in poor taste.” One sniffed, “I highly question the integrity of someone who would post it.” That the commenter’s incoming link was from a conservative blog is, I’m sure, a coincidence. An equal number of the protestors were surely my fellow Democrats. Our knees have a long history of turning to Jell-O when someone implies we’re being unfair — whether or not they’re right. It’s the one implication we can’t bear.
I don’t care what the perspective is — when a piece of satire is smart, funny, and relevant, I’ll defend it to the death. This parody-poster brilliantly condenses fact and implication by juxtaposing the abstinence-only position of a vice-presidential candidate and her pregnant teenage daughter.
As many others have noted, the McCain campaign made her pregnancy an issue. This parody simply (and quite mildly, folks) makes use of establish facts to drive home a crucial point: Abstinence-only sex education does not work. Over $176 million has been poured into the promotion of abstinence-only sex education, despite studies indicating that a majority of kids taking a virginity pledge fail to keep the pledge, are more likely to have unprotected sex than non-pledgers when they do have sex, and are equally likely to contract STDs.1
Fortunately, teen prenancy is on the decline — but not because of abstinence-only education. According the Guttmacher Institute’s 2006 report, teen pregnancy rates are down 36 percent from 1990 to the lowest level in 30 years, but just fourteen percent of this decrease is attributed to teens waiting longer to have sex. The other 86 percent is the result of improved contraceptive use.
Obama wisely put the topic “off-limits” for campaign staffers, threatening to fire anyone who went after it and rightly noting that he was himself the child of a teenage mother. That’s smart politics. Making the necessary connection to Sarah Palin’s views on sex education is appropriately left to the rest of us. And if we can do it humorously, so much the better.
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1“Abstinence Education Faces An Uncertain Future,” New York Times, July 18, 2007; Bearman, Peter and Hannah Brückner: “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Jan 2001), pp. 859-912.
is nothing sacred? epilogue
I recently offered my thoughts on the difference between pointless and pointful challenges to sacredness:
Why does the David Mills video I’ve denounced strike me instantly as a profoundly stupid gesture, while [Webster Cook’s removal of a communion wafer from a mass] strikes me just as instantly as an interesting and thought-provoking transgression?
The reason, I think, is that the act of crossing the church threshold with that wafer (whether he intended this or not) is a kind of Gandhian gesture. Doing something so seemingly innocuous and eliciting an explosive, violent, even homicidal response is precisely the way Gandhi drew attention to cruel policies and actions of the British Raj, the way black patrons in the deep South asserted their right to sit on a bar stool, while whites (enforcing a kind of sacred tradition) went ballistic….
Mills’ feces-and-obscenity-strewn video, on the other hand, had offense not as a byproduct but as its intentional essence. Of Cook, one can say, “he just walked out the door with a wafer,” and the contrast with the fireworks that followed is clear. But saying, with sing-song innocence, that Mills was “just smearing dogshit on a book while swearing, gah,” doesn’t achieve quite the same clarity. Even though it shares the act of questioning the sacred, it’s much less interesting and much less defensible.
When PZ Myers of the science blog Pharyngula made known his intention to desecrate a communion wafer, I held my breath a tad, wondering which way it would go. Would he do something stupid or something thought-provoking? Pointless or pointful?
Now Myers has made his gesture — and I couldn’t be more thrilled:
This fascinates me even more than Wafergate because it is so achingly close to the Mills’ video on the surface, yet light years away in substance.
Had Myers theatrically smashed a pile of communion wafers with a hammer while laughing hysterically, he’d have undercut his own point that it is just a “frackin’ cracker.” Instead, he made use of that old and brilliant insight that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
So he quite simply threw it out, along with the coffee grounds.
Granted, he put a nail through it, a subtle and ironic comic touch that I’m doomed to love. But the real brilliance is in the background. Myers has also thrown out pages of the Koran and The God Delusion. He isn’t allowing anything to be held sacred. ALL ideas must be exposed to disrespect, disconfirmation, and disinterest. The good ones can take the abuse, and the bad ones, to quote Twain, will be “[blown] to rags and atoms at a blast.” If instead we shield a set of beliefs or ideas from scrutiny or attack, the bad bits survive along with the good.
Myers is also making the important point that these are NOT ideas in the garbage — they are paper and wheat, which must not be confused with the things they represent any more than a flag should be revered in lieu of the principles for which it stands.
Toss in a wink at Ray Comfort’s banana argument against atheism and the whole tableau simply rocks with meaning, power, humor and intelligence. And pointfulness.
Myers’ post is long, but please take a few minutes to read it. I can’t recommend it highly enough for its provision of context and just plain smarts. The final paragraph drives it all home:
Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities’ knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
When it comes to challenging sacredness, if I can get my kids to grasp the difference between Mills and Myers, I’ll count myself proud.
thinking by druthers 2
[Second installment in a series on confirmation bias. Back to Part 1.]
An audience member at my Austin talk asked a good and common question. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris apparently made the case that those who do not hold religious beliefs must be willing to challenge the irrational beliefs of their friends and neighbors. (I say “apparently” because I started but didn’t finish EOF. I am the choir, he had me at hello, and I had other fish to fry.)
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“So,” asked Audience Guy, “do you agree that we should more actively challenge the irrational beliefs of friends and neighbors?”
I said no.
I know this will strike a lot of y’all as heresy, and it depends on the relationship in question — but I don’t think we should make a general practice of confronting people we know and challenging their beliefs uninvited. I am opposed to aggressive evangelism of ALL kinds. And not because it isn’t “nice.” The reason is that uninvited personal critiques of belief, especially of irrational ones, are almost never effective. Of the scores of people I know who have given up religious beliefs, approximately zero did so as the result of an uninvited challenge by another person.
There are all sorts of things we can and should do to make it more likely that they challenge themselves, but you can’t force another person to think. You can help another person become curious enough to invite the discussion, in part by being a visibly contented nonbeliever yourself. Once you have an invitation from the other side, a lot is possible. Otherwise, forget it.
“But but but…I have such a great argument!” You crack me up. Sit down and listen. The very idea of argumentation is based on the premise that you’re after the truth. It works brilliantly when a person is convinced of the virtues of the scientific method, convinced that there is nothing so beautiful as reality and nothing so ugly as self-deception.
But traditional religious belief isn’t arrived at by a critical determination to avoid error. It is arrived at by the focused determination to confirm one’s biases. Now, quite suddenly, you are asking a person to switch pole stars — to reorient his or her entire way of thinking from confirmation bias to a love of reality wherever it lies.
You’re funny. No no, in a good way.
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into,” said Jonathan Swift, supposedly. If you have ever tried to argue a religious point with a fervent believer, only to see the goalposts move and terms redefine themselves in midair, you know what he was talking about. But you may not have known why: the other person is working from an entirely incompatible operating system. Stop being surprised that he can’t open your attachments.
A lifetime of cherry-picking evidence on the basis of its confirmation value rather than assessing its value as evidence can lead people into unintentional hilarity. The more they surround themselves with nodding people who are busily confirming the same biases, the more hilarious it gets. The nonreligious are by no means excluded from this disease — more on that in part 3. But traditional religion, founded as it was on the principle of confirmation bias, is an especially fun source of rib-tickling.
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During some down time in my room before my May presentation at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst NY, I indulged in one of my favorite masochistic pastimes: watching EWTN, the Global Catholic Network. A panel discussion was under way, and a priest was going off on the evils of condoms, of homosexuality, of abortion — anything, really, other than unprotected-face-to-face-one-man-on-top-of-one-woman-he-is-married-to-resulting-in-baby-sex. (You know…like the kind priests have.) There was never a risk that the rest of the panel would do anything but nod, so of course his statements got ever-stranger and ever-less-supportable.
Finally he hit bottom. “And why do you think there is a priest shortage?” he asked. “That’s right: abortion! Nothing could be more obvious.”
Nod, nod, nod.
The next topic was end-of-life care. “Too many doctors are woefully ignorant of Catholic bioethics,” said an expert on, presumably, Catholic bioethics. “They will, for example, pull the plug on a patient merely because all brain activity has ceased.”
Nod, nod.
“What they fail to realize is that the suffering of the body in those final hours may be necessary to get that person into Heaven.”
Nod, nod.
“By denying the person that suffering, the doctors, in their ignorance, may be contravening God’s will by denying a chance at redemption.”
Nod, nod.
“And by moving so quickly, they may be denying God the chance to intervene miraculously to bring that person back.”
Nod, nod.
These are very close to verbatim. I was writing as fast as my little paw could push the pen.
An outsider looks at such a fatuously silly misuse of the neocortex with astonishment — and out spill the arguments. Wasn’t the plug contravening God’s will, and the removal of the plug restoring God’s intended situation? Does God, who exists outside of time and space, actually need “time” to perform a miracle? How much, exactly? Yes, yes, yes. Fine.
But those around her are having their own biases confirmed — so nod go the many heads, and she digs deeper and deeper for nonsense.
WE ALL DO THIS, myself included, as noted in the last installment. The key is to make yourself vulnerable to disconfirmation, to be in the room with people who will call you on it when you make a bias error, and to be properly embarrassed when it happens.
Need more? Enjoy this, remembering all the while that the arguments apply only to bananas — especially at 0:19, 0:41, and 0:51:
“Seriously, Kirk,” he says — which is how you know he’s serious.
Yes, fine, these are fairly extreme examples. But I think the essence of religious thought as confirmation bias is nicely captured, as is the essence of the difference between religion and science. Next time I’ll finish up by showing what it is that makes science work differently. And psst…it isn’t the superior moral or even intellectual fiber of scientists.
[On to Part 3.]
blasphemy, the game
- June 18, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, reviews
- 17
I don’t ask for much from my entertainments, but what I do ask for, I insist on. Among these are wit, intelligence, and most of all, originality. Favorite movies: Memento, Run Lola Run, Being John Malkovich. My favorite book is narrated by a fifteen-year-old autistic boy who tries to solve the pitchfork murder of a giant poodle. You get the idea.
So when I was asked to take a look at a new game called Blasphemy, I was hoping for something funny, clever, and out of the ordinary. And holy mother of pearl, did I ever find it.
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Blasphemy™ is an amazingly clever, well-made, and carefully-researched board game that manages to provide religious literacy and skewer the sacred at the same time. The game builds on the fact that there were many claimants to the title of Messiah in ancient Judea. Each player maneuvers one would-be Messiah through six phases in the life of Jesus. Whoever can attain baptism in the Jordan (you have to catch John the Baptist first), resist the devil in the wilderness (without losing all of your Faith cards), give the greatest sermons, perform the most impressive miracles, discredit his rivals, and make his way first to the cross wins the game.
Every last detail of the game has been thought out by someone with that rarest of combinations: biblical smarts and a sense of humor. Equally stunning is the craftsmanship of the game itself, from a gorgeous silk-screened cloth playing surface to the tiles, the cards, and the Messiahs. You’ll find yourself stroking the lovely little pieces as you play (a sin in 14 denominations). As for the cost ($99.99), the game’s website FAQ is absolutely correct: “It’s worth every shekel. The manufactured components for the game are both unique and top of the line. If you treat the game properly, it should easily last well over two thousand years.”
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Be advised: this is not a game for anyone who lacks patience, a sense of humor, or a high tolerance for complexity. Not difficulty — it isn’t difficult to play. But if you (or your teens) don’t like multifaceted, multilayered games with the potential to stretch into the wee hours of the night, this isn’t for you. If on the other hand that last sentence made you drool, and you think of sacred cows as excellent skewer-holders, this is the game for you.
If you do tend toward the opinion that religion should be protected from a good-natured ribbing, other games are more likely to be your cuppa. [Not sure where you land on the blasphemy tolerance spectrum? Here’s a test.]
Myself, I think a game built around the essence of a big idea is a delicious thing. Wouldn’t you love to see a game in which simple life forms compete and evolve until one of them ends up as Charles Darwin? Me too. In the meantime, have a spot of fun following the evolution of a Messiah.
the certainty myth
There is a criticism of atheism that never ceases to flummox and irritate me. Atheists are fools, goes the line, because you can’t be 100% certain God doesn’t exist.
Here are a few definitions of atheist that most people would agree with:
– Someone who denies the existence of God (WordNet)
– One who believes that there is no God (Webster’s New 20th Century)
– Somebody who does not believe in God or deities (Encarta Dictionary)
Nowhere is reference made to “Someone who claims to know there is no God.” There’s nothing about certainty. The atheist says, “You believe God exists, eh? Hm. Not me.” It’s quite simple. Elegantly so.
I’ve never met an atheist who was quite dense enough to claim certain knowledge of the nonexistence of God. Aside from the difficulty in proving a negative (i.e. I would also be unable to say for certain that there’s no teapot orbiting Jupiter), certainty itself is a bogus concept. The best we can do is increase or decrease our confidence in a proposition.
I don’t think God exists, and theists think he does. Why, in that equation, are atheists tagged as arrogant asserters of certainty, while theists get a pass? I don’t get it.
I saw this most recently, and depressingly, when a Google alert of mine popped an old blog entry by Dilbert creator Scott Adams into my inbox. It includes this passage:
This brings me to atheists. In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity –- the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.
Chuckle. I guess.
Adams is an agnostic himself, and I assume and hope he’s just riffing for laughs. Surely he knows that his beliefs are identical to almost any given atheist. Surely. Well, I’m not so sure. Many people hold this incredibly daft assumption, and few apply it to theists, as if belief is the default and atheism an assertion.
And I know where the problem started.
The problem, ironically, was started by my hero, Thomas Huxley. Prior to his coining of the word “agnostic,” it was probably understood that atheists were people who simply said, “I don’t believe in God.” Huxley wasn’t somewhere in the muddy, shrugging middle, 51-49 for-or-against belief. He had a very strong conviction that God did not exist. But it wasn’t certain, and he wanted to underline this, so he created the word “agnostic” (Latin for “not knowing”) to name what should damn well be true of the entire human race. None of us knows…but surely it’s OK to say what you think the deal is.
Thanks to our monkey tendencies, though, the upshot of Huxley’s clarifying coinage was greater confusion. Agnosticism was instantly assumed to mean “don’t know, don’t care,” and the myth of atheism as an assertion of absolute certainty was reinforced by contrast to the new term. Neither is accurate (as Russell will show shortly). They are really two different ways of saying the same thing: I think God is pretend. Agnosticism simply leans on the word “think,” and atheism leans on “pretend.”
Bertrand Russell himself was conflicted on this point, and referred to himself as an atheist or an agnostic depending on the audience:
I never know whether I should say “Agnostic” or whether I should say “Atheist”. It is a very difficult question and I daresay that some of you have been troubled by it. As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.
None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof.
Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.
from “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?” in A Plea for Tolerance in the Face of New Dogmas (1947)
Unfortunately, in the essay “What is an Agnostic?”, Russell gives this unhelpful backhand, even though it is written for an entirely popular audience:
An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not.
*Sigh.*
I, like every atheist I know, am an atheist and an agnostic and a humanist and a freethinker. Each has a different emphasis; all are compatible. Questions?
the essence of war
- May 13, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In humor, peace
- 10
The final manuscript prep for Raising Freethinkers is killing me. It literally has its hands around my throat, applying steady pressure to my windpipe, saying Who’s the tough guy now, eh, paesan? Writers…youse guys make me wanna puke. I remember this in the final days before PBB was submitted, too, that ghastly realization that it’s about to be tooooo laaaaaate to change anything.
I don’t read much during periods of intense writing, preferring audiobooks to another half-hour of line scanning. But I decided the other day, weirdly and out of the blue, that I don’t know enough about India. I pulled the first volume of Durant’s Story of Civilization off the shelf and lost myself in Indian history for a bit.
I was rewarded almost immediately with a line I will never forget, one that captures the essence of war. Durant describes the Indo-Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent about 4000 years ago:
Their word for war said nothing about national honor, but simply meant ‘a desire for more cows.’
(from Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization, vol I, p. 397.)
LEVITICUS (bookin’ through the bible 10)
[back to ECCLESIASTES and SONG OF SONGS]
Now Moses was very humble—more humble than any other person on earth.
Numbers 12:3 (The traditionally-claimed author of Numbers is, well…Moses)
The wicked man desires the booty of evil men.
Proverbs 12:12
Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, remove the foreskin of your hearts.
Jeremiah 4:4
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:20
There are many candidates for funniest verse in the Bible, but for me there’s a clear winner—and it’s found, surprisingly enough, in Leviticus, the least funny book of the Bible:
If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death.
Leviticus 24:17
During the ethics portion of my half-day nonreligious parenting seminar, and in a previous post, I talk about what I call “boiling-pot parenting”—the notion that our children are, at root, boiling pots of depravity, and that our foremost occupation as parents is sitting hard on their lids lest their naturally sinful natures o’erflow.
I quote Christian parenting author Reb Bradley who warns that “all children are born delinquent….Given free reign to their impulsive actions to satisfy each want, every child would grow up a criminal, a killer, a thief, and a rapist.” I mention The Lord of the Flies, a novel that convincingly plays out Bradley’s nightmares.
I then make what I hope is a convincing case that this is all rather silly and thoroughly unsupported by the best research in the social and developmental sciences.
Leviticus (“of the Levites”) is the book of the Bible that most directly reflects the boiling pot mindset. And though it’s tempting to lay the blame at the foot of Leviticus, that would be silly, too. The Bible didn’t create this mindset any more than it created self-delusion, self-contradiction, bigotry and fear. These are far more ancient and basic human frailties of which the Bible is merely a potent reflection, a handy place to go when we need to feel good about our lazy inability to do any better than ignorant Bronze Age goatherds.
Because I’ve come to see Leviticus as a reflection of our fears rather than the inspiration for them, it doesn’t get under my skin anymore. It’s fascinating anthropology. The fear of disorder—the absolute terror that the second law of thermodynamics governs human life as well as the physical world—is at the root of all Abrahamic religion. We’re all hurtling toward a cliff every second of our lives, says the Salvationist, with Sin leaning on the accelerator. That’s why Leviticus, the “morality” chapter in the OT, is not a steering wheel but an emergency brake. Don’t do X, never do Y, watch out for Z. Leviticus boils down to this idea: Follow God’s rules or die.
And such rules! There are rules for the wringing off of pigeon heads, precise instructions for the killing, burning, distribution, cutting, and “heaving” of animal sacrifices, for the all-important “waving” of the entrails, for the girding of men with “curious girdles.” There are rules for allowing fields to lie fallow and for washing pots, cautions against mixing this and that—different grains, different threads, same genders, the sacred and the profane. Don’t touch a menstruating woman. Don’t think an impure thought. And if you do… If you do… (Damn. What should we say?) I’ve got it! An invisible and quite powerful force will smite you.
No, that’s not exactly right, is it. One of the things I find most curious about Leviticus is that God is telling the people to do the smiting. He’s quite busy, granted, but I can’t help thinking it strange. Why bother with intermediaries? How much more efficient it would be if God would simply set things up so the scores of capital crimes in the bible are rewarded with a nice, sudden aortic rupture. Imagine Hitler crumpling on the spot before he quite got the order to invade Poland out of his mouth. Imagine how many children would have been spared if the first child-abusing priest had keeled over, pants around his ankles, as a warning to the others. Imagine all the disobedient children, astrologers, seed-spillers, marriers of their wives’ mothers, every one of them dropped where they stand. Instead, this weird system of intermediaries. I’m sure there’s a reason.
Leviticus is often maligned for its clear and happy endorsement of slavery. But dig deep enough—granted, you’ll need a big, big shovel—and there’s a hint of moral progress here. The Israelite is instructed to treat all Israelite slaves generously: “You must not rule over him ruthlessly,” and he must be released before the periodic “Jubilee year.” A miracle of progressive thinking.
You quickly note the obvious flipside—that non-Israelite slaves are designated as property “for all time” and can be treated however you like—that this is just bigotry compounded by distinguishing between those worthy of mercy (those most like one’s self) and all others. Give me a break. I’m digging for gold under a latrine here.
The book ends with an epic speech by Jehovah in which he promises bad juju if the rules are broken:
If you reject My laws and spurn My rules … I will wreak misery upon you … you shall sow your seed to no purpose, for your enemies shall eat it … I will break your proud glory. I will make your skies like iron and your earth like copper. … I will go on smiting you sevenfold for your sins. I will loose wild beasts against you, and they shall bereave you of your children … though you eat, you shall not be satisfied … your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin …
And then some stuff about taxes.
Leviticus is an early attempt to impose the order of rules on the perceived chaos of the human condition, to articulate a workable morality. In the absence of systematic evidence, we were feeling our way forward, trying to come up with rules to live by, trying to avoid screwing up—an activity in the midst of which we generally screw up far worse.
And there’s the human comedy for ya.
Far less forgivable to me is the fact that anyone in the 21st century—anyone with access to the knowledge and insight and history these guys didn’t have—still finds a single scrap of Leviticus good for anything beyond cultural anthropology. And the occasion chortle.
UP NEXT
April 3: Deuteronomy
Believers on Deuteronomy
Skeptics on Deuteronomy
Slate blog on Deuteronomy
laughing matters 5: the last crusade
[back to laughing matters 4: Saint Sorta]
Official Vatican position on the existence of St. Catherine
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It was a bit of serendipity if ever there was. My mind was still humming with gratitude the morning after the critical thinking class in which my students had been so articulately pissed off that the namesake of their college, Saint Catherine, never existed—and that the Catholic church knew damn well she never did, but never bothered too hard to share.
I was wondering what on Earth I could do with my happily tingling neurons when an announcement popped up in my inbox. It was from Professor Floyd Gardner (not his real name) who was once again heading up the committee to award the college’s highest individual honor to a graduating senior: the Helga B. Landers Memorial Award. Floyd was seeking faculty nominations of deserving seniors.
I knew immediately who I had to nominate. There was only one choice: Katie Alexander.
I sat down and wrote an impassioned nomination of Katie, whose accomplishments really did leave her fellow students in the dust. At the end of the letter, I slipped in a fact that I thought would clinch the award. Katie, you see, shared one important feature with St. Catherine of Alexandria: she doesn’t exist.
Never did hear back from old Floyd, for some reason. But when the list of nominated students was distributed the next week, sure enough, Katie’s name wasn’t on it.
The Lord had delivered them into mine hands.
I had just three installments left in my Bible Gal column in the faculty e-newsletter. And now I knew just what to do with them.
GENTLE READERS!
A Call to Action from the Bible GalPlease join me expressing outrage against an injustice currently brewing at the College of St. Catherine! A student by the name of Katie Alexander has been denied the right of consideration for the Helga B. Landers Memorial Award – excluded on the basis of a characteristic not even mentioned by the committee as grounds for exclusion!
In addition to stellar academics, Katie has exhibited extraordinary leadership skills and a heart of gold. In 2002, she founded Hey Hunger – Bite Me!, a foundation that to date has served over 150,000 hot meals to the homeless. In early 2003, Katie launched a student antiwar movement called Hey War – Fight Me!, successfully ending the Iraq war in May 2003, just in time for the President’s carrier landing.
Closer to home, Katie has twice served as governor of North Dakota. Granted, it’s just North Dakota, but it still counts as leadership in my book. She also won the Pillsbury Bake-Off and cured Restless Legs Syndrome. Apparently it just isn’t enough for the committee.
Katie shares an astonishing number of characteristics with the namesake of our beloved College: she is intelligent, ethical, courageous, virginal, and fictional. It would be strange indeed if the qualities that inspired the naming of the college after St. Catherine of Alexandria would not also merit recognition of Katie F. Alexander for this award.
Strike a blow for those among us who happen to be allegorical, a blow against blatant actualism! Let committee chair Floyd Gardner and the rest of these fictophobes know what you think: fgardner@stkate.edu. JUSTICE FOR KATIE!
The next week, a somber turn of events:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessGentle Readers –
There will be no BG column this week, my friends. As you may have guessed from the somber darkness of my font, I bring you terrible, terrible news. Our beloved Katie Alexander has been struck down in the prime of her non-existence, martyred by a seething mob of actualists who could not share the world with one so beautiful. The rabble fell upon her as she sat in prayer to her greatest imaginary friend, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. They dragged Katie off and bound her to a wheel, which, though admittedly making her quite dizzy, did not break her. So they smooshed her.
Whenever a human soul is torn prematurely from this realm of suffering and tears and condemned to an eternity in Paradise, my heart weeps. If only Katie’s cruel fate had been delayed for even an hour! Alas…it was not to be.
Will there ever be another as brave, as accomplished, as virginal and selfless and thrifty as our Katie? You know the answer. Yet still she lives – in our hearts, in our memories, and on our DWKD bracelets (Do What Katydid, available for just $16.95 plus shipping at www.dwkd.com. All proceeds go to the beatification campaign). – BG
And finally, my last hurrah:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessGentle Readers!!!
As you can tell by the cheerful whiteness behind my font, I bring you great good news!! In my previous column I cried out from the depths, mourning the martyrdom of our precious Katie Alexander. But the LORD has banished grief, as he is wont to do, sending down a torrent of signs and wonders such as our suffering world has not seen since the 1980 Miracle on Ice!
My inbox is filled with figuratively thousands of testimonials, all telling of miracles that have come to pass after praying to the departed Katie. Mrs. Frieda Groot of Bemidji, Minnesota found the rosary she lost seven months ago, tucked beneath the passenger seat of her Buick Riviera. The Lundgren twins of Kingdom City, Missouri simultaneously got over the nasty sore throats they’d been trying to shake for four days. Just ten minutes after beseeching Katie for financial help, one Gertie Holtz of Pine Bluff, Arkansas opened her mailbox to find that she may very well have already won ten million dollars! And the topper: the very day after Katie’s ascension, the air temperature in Saint Paul hit seventy-two degrees, five degrees higher than the prediction – five, the number of letters in Katie’s name! Take that, ye skeptics!
But – according to the critically rigorous Vatican procedures for sainthood, these many miracles can only be considered preludes to, not reasons for, Katie’s canonization. Though the required period between a person’s death and sainthood was reduced by Pope John Paul II from fifty years to seventy-two hours, all of the above miracles occurred, alas, within two days of Katie’s smooshing.
At last the clock ticked away those interminable three days – and bingo, a French nun was miraculously cured of restless legs syndrome after praying to Katie for something very similar! Doctors around the world are baffled, noting that diseases never go into remission on their own. Pope Benedict XVI immediately beatified our precious Katie, waiting until later that afternoon to canonize her as Saint Catherine, Jr.
I’m sure you’ll all join me as I sing her praises: Dear Saint Catherine, guard our college, bless us all where e’er we roam; saint seraphic, hear our pleading, watch our weight and guide us home!
This is the Bible Gal, signing off! – BG
I don’t really know if the Bible Gal accomplished anything for others at the college. But she did a helluva lot for me.
laughing matters 4: Saint Sorta
[back to laughing matters 3: the bible gal]
THE HYMN TO SAINT CATHERINE
O sing, my soul, Saint Cath’rine’s praises
who for Christ did live and die
The student’s saint our Church proclaims her
and exalts her name on high.
Dear Saint Catherine, guard our college,
bless us all where e’er we roam
Saint seraphic, hear our pleading
Watch our ways and guide us home.
School song of the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota.
A vocal arrangement by a Dr. Dale McGowan is still regularly performed
by the St. Catherine Women’s Choir.
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In my final year on the faculty of the College of Saint Catherine, I made a discovery both startling and embarrassing – that Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the person after whom the college is named, apparently never existed.
Why embarrassing? Because this seemingly enormous fact had eluded me for fifteen years. I’d never heard it even suggested that the college was named for a fictional character. To the contrary, the details of her biography were painstakingly woven into college lore and song and symbolism, right down to the wheel on which her martyrdom was first attempted.
“St. Catherine of Alexandria”
Though I didn’t buy the various miraculous details of her life and martyrdom, I’d assumed that she, like St. Thomas Aquinas and hundreds of other verifiables, had at least been an actual person. Apparently not. Catherine was one of 200 saints removed from the calendar of saints by the Catholic Church back in 1969 due to (are we ready?) “insufficient evidence of historicity”— a Catholese phrase meaning “she was pretend.” Catherine was one of 46 saints on the list whose existence was further declared “seriously doubtful.” Others included St. Christopher and St. Valentine.
The church at the highest level had done the right thing, ridding itself of a few false beliefs. I was impressed. But there was little felt need to see it through. Colleges and cathedrals named for beings now acknowledged (at the top, anyway) as imaginary continued to act as if nothing had changed. Millions upon millions continued to venerate and pray to the characters, like someone praying to Tiny Tim or Scarlett O’Hara.
Interior of the Church of the Sacred Heart
and St. Catherine of Alexandria in Droitwich Spa, UK —
considered by many to be among the most beautiful churches in Britain
I asked about a dozen faculty colleagues if they had any idea St. Catherine had been declared pretend. It was absolute news to all but two. Neither of the two thought it was of any big deal that a known fiction continued to be presented to the masses as true. And both of them, by the most astonishing coincidence, were Catholic.
You may now stop wondering why the place drove me to satire.
It gets much worse. Catherine’s story has the noble Christian woman steadfastly defending her beliefs, then being tortured and executed on a wheel by the pagan king for not embracing the pagan religion. But current scholarship indicates that “Catherine’s” biography was filched from the actual philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, who, according to Socrates Scholasticus, “made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.”1
Hypatia of Alexandria (actual human person)
So why didn’t the early church just make Hypatia a saint? Because of a sore spot in her resume: Hypatia was not a Christian.
Ick.
So an imaginary double was created in her stead, christened Catherine, and martyred dramatically, if ironically, for the one attribute the real person did not possess: Christian faith.
The irony goes deeper still: Scholasticus reports that Hypatia was murdered by a group of Christian monks, an assassination later applauded in the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiû for “destroy[ing] the last remains of idolatry in the city.” I mention this not to brand all Christianity with charges of intolerant homicide, but to underline the demented irony of the subsequent theft of her identity: a pagan woman murdered by Christians for her beliefs was transformed into a Christian woman murdered by pagans for her beliefs. The perpetrators thereby became the victims, accomplishing a hideous slander in the process.
Imagining an all-white college in the future searching for a namesake. They learn of this amazing man named Martin Luther King. Ah, but he won’t do, for obvious reasons. So they borrow his life story — right down to “I Have a Dream,” “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and the march in Selma — then rename him “Steve” and make him a white man who was gunned down by a black man.
The theft of Hypatia’s identity is precisely that grotesque.
A pagan woman murdered by Christians for her beliefs
was transformed into a Christian woman murdered by pagans
for her beliefs. The perpetrators thereby became the victims,
accomplishing a hideous slander in the process.
______________________________
I simply couldn’t sit on it. So when the time came to teach the final section of the critical thinking course I’d come to love, I included this question on the list of topic choices for the group research project: Did Saint Catherine of Alexandria exist?
The students were puzzled by the question. Not one had ever heard there was any possibility that their college was named for a nonexistent person. One group took the bait and dug in.
It took very little time for them to find out, Hypatia and all. In the process, they learned something I hadn’t known—that “Saint Catherine” was returned to the church calendar in 2002, not as a result of new evidence, but in recognition of her “usefulness as a symbol,” an iconic figure to emulate and to admire.
In the Q&A after the presentation, the class, to their considerable credit, erupted.
If it were openly acknowledged that the college is named for a fictional character, one student said – if we were all gathered together behind the wizard’s curtain – that would be different. Instead we are asked to invoke her concretely and call down her guardianship on our college, her blessings on us all, “where e’er we roam.”
And what does it say about humanity, another asked, that we have to create fictional characters to admire? Is it even good to require perfection, virginity and martyrdom before we can admire someone?
At the root of the discussion was a queasy feeling that either blithe incuriosity or willful patronizing was at work here, that the love of these stories had at some level mattered more than the truth. The truth certainly mattered to this roomful of minds – not whether something was “culturally true,” or “that-which-is-true-but-never-happened,” or any of the other good and valuable concepts of this type that ought to go find themselves another word, one that isn’t already busy defining something else. These students wanted to know the truth, definition 1, about the namesake of their college.
Finally, someone asked: “And what about Hypatia?”
Ah yes. What about Hypatia? What does fiction do to the reality it supplants? What about this actual flesh-and-blood woman of actual accomplishments, this three-dimensional heroine cast aside in favor of a cardboard cutout? Isn’t there something undeniably vile and anti-feminist about what the mythic Saint Catherine does to the no-kidding woman of substance Hypatia?
It was without a doubt my favorite moment as a professor, and bittersweet, since it was among my last.
But why include this story in a series on humor? Because of what I did next. My students’ enthusiasm for the truth and outrage at being patronized by the Catherine myth gave me an idea for a last satirical hurrah at the college that had made me a satirist.
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1Ecclesiastical History, Socrates Scholasticus, Christian historian (4th c.)
laughing matters 3: the bible gal
I taught at a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota for 15 years. Half of my courseload was an interdisciplinary seminar in writing and critical thinking.
Teaching critical thinking at a Catholic college is strange, but only half as strange as it seems. Every official college document, from the Mission Statement to the Catholic Identity Statement, trumpeted the vital importance of critical thinking, open intellectual inquiry, the vigorous exchange of opposing views, etc. So critical thinking was alive and well in writing. Just not in practice. Issues of religion, race, and gender, among many others, had accepted, unchallenged orthodoxies. Unorthodoxy was killed off in one way or another, usually with suffocating silence.
My head eventually began to hurt from the dissonance. To relieve the pressure, I turned to humor, writing the satirical novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff, the utterly fictional story of a secular humanist male faculty member at the utterly fictional College of St. Bernadette, a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s still selling the occasional copy after five years, which is nice, and reviews were good. Most of all, it saved me a blown cerebral artery by allowing me to get some things said. And by doing so humorously, I got the same reprieve as Erasmus from the (direct) wrath of the Powers that Were. For a while.
A few months after publication, a couple of students asked if I would like to form a student humanist group on campus, “like the one in your book.”
Like the one in the book? I thought. Surely not.
I reminded them that things in the book went seriously unwell for the group in question, and for the college itself. They shrugged. So we did it. And things went badly.
How they went badly is a good story in itself, eventually involving locked doors, bad press for the college, the first student protest in the school’s history (against the censorious college president), hate mail for me, equal measures of faculty courage and cowardice, and a tenure standoff with the college deans. But that’s another story. This series is about humor and critical thinking.
My tenure committee
In the service of my children’s addictions to food and clothing, I hung around for as long as I could, then gave notice in May ’05 that I would leave in May ’06. My resignation was gratefully accepted by the president. Many faculty colleagues expressed genuine and eloquent grief over my decision, something that warms me to this day.
I had to decide how to disengage with the place I’d worked most of my adult life. I felt tremendous bitterness at the hypocrisy and cowardice at several levels. But instead of giving in to that, I decided to say goodbye with a humor.
I approached the editors of the faculty e-newsletter with the idea of a mock advice column called “Ask the Bible Gal.” After some knee-clacking, they consented to run it. I decided to use it to gently skewer hypocrisies on campus and in religion generally.
You may recognize the influence of a famous Internet satire in the first installment:
ASK THE BIBLE GAL
A Lighthouse in the WildernessDear Bible Gal:
I have a colleague who teaches a Weekend College class on Sunday, thereby working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that she must be put to death — but am I morally obligated to do it myself?
Mystified in MinneapolisDear Mystified:
Excellent question! If the college administration doesn’t take care of it, then yes, I guess it’s up to you to lend a hand. Just don’t do it on the Sabbath, or you’d be working too! Thanks for writing, and be sure to let me know how it goes!
BG
The next week had this follow-up:
Dear Bible Gal:
Longtime reader, first-time correspondent. I’m writing on behalf of “Mystified in Minneapolis,” a colleague of mine who wrote recently for advice on dealing with a Sabbath-breaker. She took your advice, and – well, let’s just say there’s one less Sabbath-breaker this Sunday, praise God!
“Mystified” would have written to you herself, but at the post-retribution party (you’ll get a kick out of this), somebody pointed out that she had in turn violated the Sixth Commandment against killing! Oh, you should have seen her face, she turned as red as a tomato! We all had a good laugh, then killed her, of course (Leviticus 24:17, “If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death”) – and boy then did we have a problem, since we had to kill the killers…
We want to do this “by the Book,” so here’s the question: what should the last person do? – Stumped in St. Paul
Dear Stumped:
There’s a scriptural solution to every problem. In this case, WWSD: what would Saul do? (1 Sam 31:4). Problem solved! Let me know how it…oops. Never mind :-)! BG
(Saul kills himself.) A dozen faculty members whispered their approval of the satires in passing on campus. Others glared. I felt a little less pressure in my head each week:
Dear Bible Gal:
Each August, I am appalled anew by a festival of sin at the Minnesota State Fair. In case you don’t know about it, images are graven into blocks of butter, a clear violation of the Second Commandment and an encouragement to every type of unholy transgression. I’ve enclosed photos of this past year’s outrage. Can’t these people read?? It’s further proof that we need the Commandments posted in public schools for easy reference. – No Margarine for Error
Shades of MoobyDear Margarine:
May I gently suggest that you read the Commandment before casting stones about unholy oleo! The Second Commandment forbids not just graven images but the making of “any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth.” Any likeness, dear, which means your little snapshot constitutes a first-class ticket to the Ninth Circle! Why, the film The Ten Commandments was itself one gigantic violation! Cecil B. DeMille’s skull is surely the drinking-gourd of Lucifer even as we speak.
As for me, I pray to see the Second Commandment posted in art classes, for the much-needed boost it would give to Abstract Expressionism. – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
I am a Bible-believing high school senior and feminist, in search of a Bible-believing feminist college. How thrilled I was to hear about the College of St. Catherine, a place that knows the greatest source of empowerment for women is the truth of Scripture!
At least that’s what I thought St. Kate’s was. My faith in that school crumbled on a recent campus visit, when I learned that women actually teach there, despite the admonition of 1 Timothy 2:12 (“Do not permit a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”). How on earth can a college claim to empower women if it doesn’t even follow the Holy Word of God?! – Real Feminists Aren’t Timothy-Leery
Dear Real Feminist:
You truly dodged a bullet, dear! That darned place has a long history of disregarding all of the powerful feminist Scriptures. I’ve heard they don’t even require women to be silent in church – as if the Apostle Paul didn’t know what was best for women’s empowerment! You want real scriptural feminism? Go to St. Thomas, girlfriend! – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
At last, after eleven years, our church expansion is completed! Last week the Building Committee voted to inscribe the last words of Christ over the entrance to our new educational wing and coffee shop. But at the meeting, someone pointed out that the Gospels – well, I wouldn’t say they contradict each other, of course, since that’s not possible, but they seem to render the true words in three different ways – in Matthew (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), Luke (“Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit”), and John (“It is finished”). Is one of these truths more, you know, true than the others? – Stumped by a Cross Word Puzzle
Dear Cross Word:
Eleven years for one building project! I’d suggest you go with John! – BG
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Dear Bible Gal:
Last Easter weekend my husband and I stayed in the basement suites at the Days Inn in Charleston, South Carolina as part of their WWJD Easter package – “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40), just like our Lord! We checked in on Good Friday and “arose” on Easter Sunday. Get it?
My husband – apparently using secular math – blasphemously suggested at the front desk that we should have been charged for only two nights! Obviously he was wrong: Friday afternoon through Sunday morning must equal “three days and three nights” – or else Christ Himself misspoke in the Scriptures! Aack!
Easter’s approaching again, and we’re Carolina-bound. I don’t want him to embarrass me again. Please help me to help him see his error! – Counting the Days Inn
Dear Counting:
Your husband is getting caught in that literalist trap! When the Lord said “three days and three nights,” He was speaking of a metaphorical three days and three nights. I hope that clears things up, and further hope you were charged in allegorical dollars. – BG
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And on it went, for a year. By the time I left, I felt fine.
Many on the faculty apparently had the least desirable reaction of all, the same one they had to all controversy—they wished all the icky conflicting views would just go away, wished for the return to the silent, smiling denial of dissonance that had driven me first crazy, then away.
Perhaps that silent, uncommented dissonance returned after I left, I dunno. But I can’t help hoping that the genie, once out of her bottle, has continued flying around that place, knocking things over and crapping on the carpets.
