10.13.2008
(Pagan) News of Note
My semi-regular round-up of articles, essays, and opinions of note for discerning Pagans and Heathens.
A botanica, Centro Botanico La Santisma in San Diego, burned down on Saturday after a lit candle sparked a larger fire.
"A lit candle in a voodoo supply shop sparked a fire, destroying the San Diego store and damaging an adjacent taco shop. San Diego police Sgt. Ray Battrick says the blaze's intense smoke caused officials to evacuate several homes in the Grant Hill neighborhood when the fire broke out early Sunday morning. Firefighters said the Centro Botanico La Santisma store was a total loss, with nearly $350,000 in damages. The store sold herbs, amulets and other items related to Santeria, voodoo and other religions."
Luckily, no one was injured in the blaze. A chilling reminder to all Pagan and occult stores to be careful with candles, and to have a healthy fire-insurance policy.
Jay Clarke looks at the large variety of Samhain/Halloween events happening in Salem during the month of October. Including the Salem Witches Halloween Ball (not to be confused with the Cabot Witches Ball).
"On Nov. 1, the Day of the Dead, another massive party - the Salem Witches' Halloween Ball - also takes place at the Hawthorne and on the adjacent grassy Common ($150 per person). The Common, fittingly, is where some scenes of the popular Hocus Pocus movie about long-dead witches were filmed ... Yes, Salem has real witches - more than 3,000 of them, who practice Wicca. They detest both the stereotype of wickedness as presented in the Wizard of Oz and the nose-twitching antics of Samantha in television's Bewitched."
I think "detest" is a somewhat strong term. I happen to love the "Wizard of Oz", and find "Bewitched" (and the play/film that inspired it "Bell, Book, and Candle") to be quite charming at times (especially Jack Lemmon as Nicky). Also, $150 dollars? Yikes! That's a little too rich for my blood.
According to Arnold Conrad, the former pastor of Grace Evangelical Free Church in Davenport, non-Christians around the world are praying for Obama to win the presidential election.
“There are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens,”
Conrad made these remarks at a recent McCain rally in Iowa (before McCain ever arrived). This is certainly a shock to the Pagans and non-Christians who are planning to vote for the Republican, Libertarian, Constitution, or Green party come November. One can only wonder what will happen to Conrad's faith should God let his "reputation" be harmed by an Obama win.
Are comic-book superheroes thinly-disguised gods for our modern age? Performance artist Justin Lamb seems to think so.
"I wanted to do a show exploring why superheroes and comic book culture have gotten so popular lately. I started researching it and started finding a lot of weird little similarities between superheroes and religion, which has a nice little nerd following of it's own if you haven't noticed. I wondered if subconsciously, do the things that attract people to these religions also attract people to these heroes."
Perhaps Lamb has been reading "Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes"? Or he could just be a big Grant Morrison or Alan Moore fan.
In a final note, the New Statesman publishes an interesting examination of secularism, and recent attempts to push forward a watered-down "positive secularism" by France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Pope Benedict XVI.
"To speak of positive secularism is to imply that there are two kinds of secularism, one good, the other bad. The supposedly good one, put forward by the Pope and his acolyte Nicolas Sar kozy, is a secularism that would allow politics to mingle with religions. One which would, for instance, turn a blind eye to sects and their actions, one which would accept that people be treated differently according to their faiths, one which would blur the frontiers between the public and private spheres. Sarkozy certainly knows a great deal about the blurring of the two distinct worlds whose separation has been France's trademark for at least two centuries."
Only one kind of secularism guarantees the rights of minority religions, and it isn't the "positive secularism" envisioned by the Pope. Creating a "secularism with exceptions" sets us on a dangerous road where some are more equal than others.
That is all I have for now, have a great day!
Labels: Benedict XVI, Christianity, Comics, France, Halloween, Pagan News of Note, Paganism, Presidential election, Salem, Santeria, secularism, Voodoo, Witch
8.17.2008
The Christian Presidency
Any illusion one might have had that the race for America's chief executive is a secular affair was thoroughly shattered yesterday at the Saddleback Civil Forum on The Presidency. Evangelical superstar Rick "Purpose Driven Life" Warren got the two candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, to sit down individually in his church, submit to his questions, and expound on concerns most important to evangelical Christians.
"Now you've made no doubt about your faith in Jesus Christ, what does that mean to you? What does it mean to you to trust in Christ and what does it mean on a daily basis?"
The fact that several questions in the "civil" forum sounded more like a job interview for the pastor of a Christian church didn't escape the notice of the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of Interfaith Alliance.
"Some of the questions Pastor Warren posed crossed the line and promoted the fiction that the American people are electing a pastor-in-chief, rather than a commander-in-chief. Questions like 'What does it mean to trust in Christ?' create a religious test for public office and should have no place in the political discourse for a secular office. America is the most religiously diverse country in the world, and Christianity is only one of those faith traditions. Millions of voters who tuned in tonight will feel disenfranchised by some of the questions posed in this forum."
Despite admonitions from interfaith activists, I doubt that the intense wooing of evangelicals will stop. With recent Presidential races being so evenly split, the "freestyle evangelicals" are portrayed as king-makers. Alienate them at your peril, and certainly don't be anything other than Christian if you hope to win. It is little wonder that this year's Democratic National Convention will commence with an interfaith service organized by a Pentecostal preacher, a first for the party, and a move that has troubled atheist and secular organizations.
"Democratic National Convention's Aug. 24 interfaith service in Denver is supposed to be about unity. But to a Washington, D.C., coalition that supports nontheistic views, it's about division. The Secular Coalition Group, a lobbying organization for church-and-state separation, is pushing to get an atheist on the speaker list, and contends the service is divisive because it alienates nonreligious Democrats at a time when the party needs to unite to support the presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama."
It should be interesting to see how this will be resolved. Because if the party isn't ready to navigate a compromise between secularists and the monotheist (and token Buddhist "participant") interfaith club, what will they do when Hindu, Pagan, Native, and Afro-Caribbean faiths start asking for a place at the interfaith podium? The post-Christian era is upon us, and the longer the two major political parties court 25% of America's religious adherents to the near-exclusion of nearly everyone else, the sooner they experience irrelevance as that demographic becomes just one voice in a cacophony of faiths and philosophies.
Labels: atheism, Christianity, Democratic National Convention, interfaith, Paganism, politics, Presidential election, secularism
5.24.2008
Church, State, Neutrality, Equality
Author, journalist, and The Revealer co-founder Jeff Sharlet has written a masterful essay for The Nation that looks at issues of conscience, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. Sharlet reviews "Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality" by Martha Nussbaum, and "Founding Faith Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America" by Steven Waldman, and compares their approaches to ideas of religious equality and freedom.
"Nussbaum's book, a fundamentally flawed but wise consideration of the subtle distinctions between "freedom" and "equality," may help cultivate it in years to come. Meanwhile, Founding Faith--a new book by Steven Waldman, a former religion reporter--is the sort of carefully crafted crowd pleaser that trades [Roger] Williams's liberty of conscience for the solace of centrism."
Sharlet criticizes Beliefnet founder Steven Waldman for creating a false set of "extremes" that we need to "compromise" on to achieve harmony and peace between secularists and Christian conservatives.
"Waldman wins his centrist peace by dismissing Christian conservatives' majoritarian bullying and secularists' insistence on separation of church and state as "extremes" that can be reconciled by the former acknowledging pluralism and the latter accepting that separation is neither strict nor meant to be universal. Doing so, however, would require fundamentalists to give up the most important claim of their faith--its exclusivity--and secularists to ignore history. Significantly, Waldman pays only brief lip service to an essential development in American law, the principle of incorporation--the Fourteenth Amendment's extension of the Bill of Rights to the states. Incorporation is the tidiest rebuttal to Justice Thomas's antebellum legal dreams and Waldman's contention that the protection of minority views as an essential function of separation is a 'liberal fallacy.'"
In the end, both authors are criticized for minimizing the "Christian nationalist challenge" facing us, and overlooking many of the pitfalls of their respective "compromises". But any encapsulation of this important analysis by me won't do it full justice, I strongly recommend heading over and reading the entire thing. While I'm at it, check out Sharlet's new book, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power", a chilling look into Christian fundamentalism's most elite organization.
Meanwhile, I'll keep plugging away with the "liberal fallacy" that religious minorities deserve protection under the legal and political principle of church-state separation.
Labels: books, Christianity, Jeff Sharlet, Religious Freedom, secularism, The Nation
