Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

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*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Kamala Harris addressed the Leading Women Defined Summit (what?) the other day.

 

She decried people who weren't doing anything, which was interesting because the people who aren't doing anything are the leadership of the Democratic Party, notably Senator Chuck Schumer.  She doesn't seem to have named any names here.  And then she said, "I'm not here to say 'I told you so,' but ..." (which of course she was) before bursting into her familiar drunken wine-mom laughter and adding "I swore I wasn't going to say that."  Okay, fine, but why say it to a crowd of her fans, who presumably voted for her?

A lot of people tried to tell her so during the campaign.  They told her it was a bad idea to defend and support Israeli atrocities.  They told her it was a bad idea to insult and mock important segments of her base.  They told her it was a bad idea to court the Cheney crime family.  They told her she needed to distance herself from Biden.  And so on. She ignored such good advice, preferring to listen to the worst people in her party.  If she had won despite all this, she could gloat and wag a finger at her critics.  It's entirely possible that she'd have lost anyway; but she lost, badly.

I hadn't watched this clip until I saw another one, in which her former running mate Tim Walz criticized her remarks.  Walz is often erratic, but he did a good job here.  He even admitted his own mistakes. True to Democratic establishment form, Harris blamed everyone except herself.

In Our Hands

Someone posted the above clip on Facebook the other day; luckily for me and this post, it was also available on YouTube.  (Probably it came from there.)  I haven't seen The Good Lie, a 2014 movie about Sudanese refugees in the US, and I don't know whether I will.  But this bit stirred up my urge to write.

It appears that the three young men have been brought to the US, and their caseworker (Witherspoon) has brought them to see the bald guy, who is evidently a farmer, presumably to stay with him.  (I said I haven't watched it yet.)  They ask permission to see his cows, and ask if there are any dangerous animals they should watch out for.  Permission received, they walk off, hand in hand.  The bald guy mutters, "I wish they wouldn't do that."  Given that this is America and he's the people of the land, the common clay of the New West, I sympathize with him slightly.  A good many gay American men would read the gesture the same way, except that they would jerk off to it.

Some commenters on the Facebook clip said that holding hands didn't mean the young Africans were gay, which is true, but added that it was no longer seen that way in Africa because of American gays, which probably is not true: it is because of viciously antigay bigots in Africa, abetted by viciously antigay American Christians.  (As some scholars have noticed before, non-Western bigots love to claim that homosexuality is a Western import, even as they happily import Western antigay religious and medical bigotry for their own agenda.)  As recently as 2019, though, I saw male African students in my college town holding hands with one another; it was orientation time for international students, and they'd probably been warned about US attitudes so they looked somewhat nervous, but they held on.

What I'm asking here is why men holding hands came to be seen as a sign of homosexuality in the United States.  During the US invasion of Vietnam, I read that American soldiers saw South Vietnamese soldiers holding hands and decided they were homosexuals. This fed their contempt for the ARVN, though it's likely that NLF and North Vietnamese men also held hands: they were just unlikely to be observed by Americans, and South Vietnamese troops were capable of as much manly violence as Americans could wish.  This was during the 1960s and early 1970s, and I doubt that American grunts had ever actually seen homosexuals holding hands in the US in those days.

Some might argue that men holding hands just is gay, it's common sense.  But it isn't, as shown by the number and expanse of cultures where it's routine.  Nor do those cultures accept male homosexuality.  In the US, norms of male-to-male affection have changed over time, and there's never been unanimity about them.  Walt Whitman's moist nineteenth-century poems about "adhesive" love between men seem to have appealed to many heterosexuals, as did the twentieth-century J. R. R. Tolkien's depiction of fondness between hobbits.  Academics, gay and straight like, refined the word "homosocial" to explain away these relationships, but couldn't explain why what previously had been endearing suddenly set off alarms.  In fact there had always been those who objected that there were "too many kisses in this work to avoid slander, suspicion and mockery."  Personally I favor slander, suspicion, and mockery of those trying to suppress displays of affection, but that's another post.

I associate holding hands with childhood: being required to hold someone's hand in public, while crossing the street, while standing in line with other children, and so on.  Children are ambivalent about it, if I may generalize from my own experience: it means you're a baby who can't be trusted to cross the street by yourself (which you can't), or you are ordered to hold the hand of someone you dislike, whose hands are sticky (unwashed isn't the problem, stickiness is).  But when they feel unsure or unsafe and can't crawl into someone's lap, they'll reach for someone else's hand.  It also signifies mutual belonging, for adults no less than children. Some Americans have explained foreign men holding hands to me as a sign of exceptional closeness and trust, but at best I think they're projecting.  At least it isn't always the case; men in other countries don't seem to need that much intimacy to reach for each other's hands.

Nor should they.  Numerous writers, such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, have stressed the importance of physical contact for all people, from infants to adults.  I remember someone telling me in the early 70s, about when Montagu's book was published, that American men could only allow themselves to seek touch through sex.  That's probably still true for many of us, but I have the impression that things have improved since then, and American men are more affectionate than they used to be.  But there's still room, and need, for improvement.  We must respect each others' boundaries, and no one including children should be compelled or pressured to give touch.  One reason I think it's important to push back hard on antigay bigotry is that it is used not only against sex between men, but against affection as well.  That's harmful not only to gay men but to straight ones, and it must not be tolerated.

Speaking of Coincidences ...

I recently read Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), pieced together by Jesse Green, with entertaining and informative footnotes, from the reminiscences of Mary Rodgers.  She was the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers, and she knew a vast array of musical-theater people, from her parents to Stephen Sondheim and beyond.  The book offers up a spicy buffet of dish on all of them, including herself.  It's not for everyone; many readers were offended by her bluntness and openness.  "Make it meaner," she told Green when he showed her his early drafts; "Make it funnier."  He did.

Rodgers was also a composer, a writer, a producer.  Among her credits is the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, which gave Carol Burnett her big break.  I believe I saw the first TV version, broadcast in 1964, but there have been two more since then.  She also worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, broadcast on TV from 1958 to 1972, which I watched regularly in its first years.

In 1966 Rodgers composed a ditty known as "The Boy from..." for an off-Broadway revue, The Mad Show.  Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, which parody the bossa nova hit "The Girl from Ipanema" but also draw on Rodgers' admitted tendency to fall in love with gay men, such as her first husband and Sondheim himself:

Why are his trousers vermilion?
Why does he claim he's Castilian?
Why do his friends call him Lillian?
And I hear at the end of the week
he's leaving to start a boutique.

The original recording was sung by the actress Linda Lavin, with a breathy -- indeed breathless -- delivery exaggerating Astrud Gilberto's in "Ipanema."  It took me several listenings to fully appreciate Lavin's performance, partly because the recording level was low, but it grew on me. 

Not being a musicals queen, I hadn't heard of Lavin until Rodgers mentioned her in connection with this song.  Then, a few days after I read Shy, I began seeing YouTube clips from a new sitcom, Mid-centuiry Modern, in which Linda Lavin plays the mother of one of the characters.  Interviews with the other cast members contain praise of her greatness and sadness for her loss; she died of cancer in the middle of production of the first season.  At some point I realized that her name rang a bell, but it took me a few days to make the connection.  If I were the kind of believer who sees the world that way, I'd say that God must have been in there somewhere; luckily, I'm not.