Maiden, Madonna, Crone- (or, How Madonna Taught Me to be a Fearless Writer)

Maiden, Madonna, Crone- (or, How Madonna Taught Me to be a Fearless Writer)

It’s hard to be a writer for many different reasons, but the fact that your parents might read what you write is no small censorship. The truth is, you often feel naked and exposed or embarrassed by a harsh opinion, a contentious phrasing, or good old- fashioned sex. But if you stopped writing those things just because someone might read it, well, that would defeat the whole purpose, now, wouldn’t it?

Well, I’ve always learned from the best. What if Madonna had run back to Michigan and given up the first time she met with opposition? What if she threw in the towel the moment she made a misstep? What if she had thought, gee, I can’t do that, my dad wouldn’t approve? Thankfully Madonna paved the way for us to be all we can be, and those who find her somewhat hard or brazen might do well to recall the tremendous drain of being the most famous woman in the world. It’s bad enough when they love, love, love you…but what about when they hate you?

Scandal is one thing, but that’s just a bit of blushing. It’s more difficult to stand naked in public with certain opinions, and find yourself unpopular. Contending with venom, or plain old hurt feelings, is hard for me to do- it is a fault of the sensitive bipolar to take everything very personally. It’s not easy to be super-sensitive and have a big mouth at the same time.

Of course, I had never anticipated any of this stuff, because up until I began to have a readership, however humble it still is, my idea of ‘fearlessness’ was getting my ears pierced fifteen times or wearing a Marshall Mathers t-shirt.  The writing part is easy- being read is far more difficult. And so I practice remaining open to

mixed-media by Lorette C. Luzajic

change: only a fool never changes her mind. I practice knowing you can’t please everyone all of the time. I practice standing firm for the convictions that aren’t negotiable. I practice drawing on a renewable resource of strength instead of buckling, because I’m going to be doing this for a very long time. It doesn’t matter if my bravado is just an act, and behind it lurks a very shy woman. I’m going to need it, so I best practice using it.

No fear, no fear, no fear. Recall that Madonna started insisting on women’s right, no, her obligation, to pursue full spirituality, sexual liberty, and creative recognition at a time when we were still supposed to submit to a man’s headship and vote for whatever he did. (Oh… we’re still there….) Today it’s commonplace to see naked women in the entertainment business, and so we forget. If Madonna had gone sobbing to her ladies knitting circle the first time they called her a slut, where would we be? Possibly nowhere. If she had faded into obscurity security the second they called her a faggot lover, where would civil rights be today? We can’t know.

Way back when, Madonna was a mouthy teenager in a billion rubber bracelets and not much else. Today she is blowing up that last frontier of stereotype. AGE. We razz her for trying to disprove she’s a washed up starlet, an aging rock star, for fighting her wrinkles with expensive creams promising the fountain of youth. We accuse her of trying too hard, being so over, of being past her prime, of being totally sexless, of being old enough to be a grandmother, bla bla bla.

Excuse me?

For those of you too dense to see the reign of Madonna as the mythic incarnation of the goddess, let me spell it out for you. Having been named Madonna by her mother, not by herself, she was born to the role. The role begins with maiden- you know, like a virgin. It continues to motherhood- you know, suddenly she started penning all those lullaby songs. Now it’s on to crone.

Maiden Mother Crone, the original trinity. It’s a tremendous duty to be the goddess in the public eye. Some still yammer such petty and ruthless idiocies like, “I don’t know why she’s so famous, when she has no talent.” Her talents clearly range from pop ditties to staying power to extreme yoga, to marketing, to choreography, to video making, to dancing…so what if she wasn’t the best actress? She tried. And so we, her minions, can be empowered to try new things, even if we fail. To explore the outer reaches of our powers, to discover our strengths and our weaknesses.

Now as Her Madgesty sails through fertility into menopause and older age, she shows us that we can continue to be productive, funny, creative, sensational, experimental, and fully sexual beings. She shows us that we may endure humiliations like divorce and disappointment, but not to just lay down and wait for death. Live, live, live.

It’s too bad that Guy was such a fuddy duddy. Their relationship is not my business, but I always wondered what she saw in him in the first place. He seems nice enough, but far too average. Of course, in the mother stage you long for stability, and you fancy that it might be somewhere outside yourself. A nice guy seemed like a safe bet after so many torrential bad boys and whirlwinds. Madonna’s husband, whoever it would be, should surely have been intelligent enough to know he would always be Mrs. Madonna, and that he’d better take that like a man. Instead, we get a pub scruff mumbling about how her body is like a piece of gristle, and she’s not all cuddly and not a stay at home mom.

Er, no. To be a woman of this kind of power, you unfortunately do need to work out five hours a day. I’m grateful that to do my job, I merely have to tend to my carpal tunnel issues. To work the stage like Madonna does, you need the training of a professional athlete with the practice of an acrobat. I’d love to see her a bit softer, too, and we might in her last years. But remember what she said: “This is who I am, like it or not, you can love me or leave me, but I’m never gonna stop.” Not even old age is going to keep her from raising the roof every time, from being the centre of the biggest show on earth. She will never just stand there and sing- remember? she can’t sing anyway. She takes her limits to the limit every time, using her body in every conceivable way.

So what do you do when you are a fifty year old Madonna and your bland, smarmy husband dumps you? Well, you head to Brazil in the biggest hussy wig you can find, and take up a torrid affair with a boy named Jesus, of course. Perfect.  Brazilian porn actor and model Jesus Luz has the kind of muscle definition any cougar worth her salt dreams about. Rippling, tan, with intense eyes, he was the perfect accessory for her Old is Sexy campaign. Hear that girls? We get better with age, and won’t have to worry about making babies, amen! I bet Madonna is not as pretentious as some conclude- there is a great deal of camp in the things she does, a deep vein of humour. Indeed, she said so herself: “You only have to have half a brain in your head to see that I’m quite often making fun of myself.”

What’s not funny is that to live out loud for a female still means cruel whispering, and worse, death threats from men who are completely threatened by the power of the goddess. The crone is the most frightening of goddesses, because she cannot be bound by virginal naivety or biology/pregnancy. She outlives her consorts. You can’t lock her up or knock her up. She is too old to worry what people think, so social sanctions mean diddlysquat.

“I will have the honour of to be the first one to cut the head off Madonna,” said the Palestinian leader. While certainly Madonna’s nouvelle-ancienne Jewish mysticism must miff a country scorned by Israel, all evidence guarantees that if Madonna embraced Islam, the tables would be turned. Come on, now, are the ancient wars in the Middle East, raging since Bible days, entirely the fault of this one woman? That said, he is inadvertently acknowledging that she has many heads, like the timeless Hecate, if he should be the “first” to cut it off. Hecate: maiden, mother, and crone.

Now the only death threats I’ve received have been from that fount of compassion, the life-loving vegans, for some food writing where I had the audacity to suggest that the human heritage diet is omnivorous. That was unnerving enough, but it wasn’t an influential leader of a furious country threatening me, nor was it the public at large. It would be terrifying to face the public fury after such grand scale trespasses. Recall that there is no greater sin than blasphemy, a convenient way for the church or government to assert that their interpretation of mystic events is the only way.

The very idea that there’s only one faith, or only one way of interpreting The Book, sprung up because the patriarchs of Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions wanted to stop the goddess worship of the time. Think about it: Iraq, today’s battleground, hides beneath its blood soaked soil all the secrets of Sumer, the first civilization, where the goddess reigned supreme in temples miles long. Purging pantheism was never entirely successful, but in the old days, it meant the only god left was a thundering war God who avenged and smote every city and left no one alive except the virgins, whom his people could make use of as they willed. Whenever new (old) philosophies began to surface, the monotheists burned/looted/stole/destroyed the literature, but some survived because they were so busy warring over the finer points of their own faith, killing one another over an interpretation of the same damn god.

No, I’m not implying that the days of primitive cults and goddess worship were not bloody. That’s a utopian dream. We’ve always used mythic names and ritual stories to explain things we don’t understand, and so her many names were also associated with storms as well as with fertility and harvest. War would rage regardless, with or without religions, but the danger of a ‘god said so’ kind of religion is that people are willing to kill and die for some apparent reward in the afterlife, without instead sorting out the issues here and now, whatever they might be. No era has ever been perfect, but with what we have evolved to become, with the information and affirmation we have, it is feasible to have an egalitarian society at long last without one gender or one ethnic group or one religion being threatened.

It was Madonna’s fate to carry out the terrifying and monumental task of encouraging society to evolve until the point where women would feel their power. While stuffy governments were still deciding whether it had been wise to let black people sit at the front of the bus, and church elders were squabbling over whether unbaptized babies go to heaven, Madonna was blasting the airwaves with empowerment and unity for all. She was unafraid to touch a black man, an AIDS patient, or herself. She put racist, sexist, homophobic garbage in your face, and then threw it in the dumpster where it belongs.

Dismantling the cumbersome terror of sex was no small task. Women have been the gateway of the devil for so long, disposable garbage, good for nothing but ensnaring godly men, that it’s high time the world had a mama who taught us how to use it or lose it, all the while engaging the rest of our brains and imaginations, too.

Listen:

Woman is man’s destruction, Tertullian said. “Woman is a temple built over a sewer, the gateway to the devil. Woman, you are the devil’s doorway. You led astray one whom the devil would not dare attack directly. It was your fault that the Son of God had to die; you should always go in mourning and rags.” Thanks a lot, Tertullian. Or the ‘great’ Augustine: “Only man is in the image of God.” So much for protestant “reform”- John Knox wrote, “Woman was made for only one reason, to serve and obey man.” His follower, John Wesley: “Wife: Be content to be insignificant. What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born.”

It’s 2009. Now that we know that famines and plagues and the crucifixion of Christ did not happen because women were screwing Satan, we can carry on with our evolution.

And so, Madonna, the angel of apostasy rose forth, carrying the name of the only surviving goddess in the monotheist tradition, disguised as a bratty dance student. Who knew she would be known the world over as the whore of Babylon, even as the hatred toward the fountain of life was dissipating, slowly but surely. Oh, it’s still out there- we are, after all, only in the first century of equal rights for a paltry few countries of the whole world, for the first time in about five millennia. And though Christian Dominionists want to restore Old Testament law and enforce the death penalty for apostates, unchaste women, adulteresses, and homosexuals, perhaps Madonna has taught us well and we won’t let them have us back. Freedom of religion, freedom of sex, freedom of race- these are basic human rights, and Madonna’s been mixing and matching ‘em for quite some time, now. And we’ve been front row centre for her private spiritual journey, too, from spoiled megalomaniac to mistress of Malawi. Madonna insists you can be old, sexy, fit, rich, and still follow the true words of Christ: feed the poor.

Some have said Madonna has a hardened heart, but if she were as vulnerable as I am, she would have offed herself a long time ago, against that constant barrage of fury and controversy, and the exhausting drainage of giving everything you’ve got and us all wanting more. To carry out her fate, she’s had to have ruthless moments, and she’s also human, a particularly ruthless species if I recall correctly. In fact, she’s strong enough to carry out the role, and has asked generations of fans and foes alike to question everything, to vote, to ‘don’t go for second best,’ to

Pretty AND smart!

take control of our bodies and sexuality, to flaunt what we’ve got, to explore spirituality, to fix our mistakes, to accept our bodies, to push them, to refuse limitations, to speak against racism, to refuse sexism, to refuse homophobia, to use our wits and our brains, to grow and learn, to read, to love without fear.

Maybe her ex-husband has personal and realistic reasons to see her as hardened ‘gristle,’ as a tin woman with a tin heart. But I see that as only one guise in the thousands of facets of Madonna/Ishtar/Hecate/Luna/Aphrodite/Venus/Medusa/Artemis/Ashera/Shakti/Freyja/
Sophia/Inanna/Kali/Isis (her names unto infinity).

She may not be the cuddliest grandmother ever, but not a piece of “gristle.” She’s a lean, mean dancing machine. I see bravado, courage, audacity, power, discipline, fury, determination, creativity, and persistence. Madonna’s mission isn’t over- and it’s hardly just her own career at stake, in my mind. She has come to fulfill something much larger, a terrifying and exulting fate. Perhaps I give one woman too much credit? Doubtlessly, there are many forces of freedom at work, in the law, in the home, in big and small ways. Yes, yes, yes. But Madonna reaches the masses in ways of considerable power, and her inspiration is huge. Who would I be if I had not hidden the True Blue cassette under my pillow, sneaking it along when I went babysitting? We were fundamentalist Baptists, and all I had to look forward to in life was listening to a man bark orders while I changed diapers. The Mother Goddess wouldn’t be allowed into my home or heart, even if I were to become a mother- which is, after all, the most sacred art, one that somehow got twisted into property and service to the man.

Instead, Madonna told me a secret- I could be anything I wanted to be. If I had courage, I could live the wild heart that was inside me, and become an artist and a writer with a progressive spirituality of reason. I could answer my calling instead of suffering through the cookie cutter life that society had planned for me. And I’d have to be brave enough one day to make mistakes in public, to tell the truth as I knew it, to speak against injustice, and not to be afraid to be naked, in more ways than one. My fate is to write, and I’m committed to that, to writing as if my parents aren’t reading it, even if they are.

It’s the height of tongue-in-cheek that Granny Madonna is now cavorting with a 21-year-old man named Jesus, in all his Adonis beauty and power. Is Madonna making too much of sex again? I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s trying too hard to be young again. That’s bullshit. She’s breaking down that last frontier, that old women are used up, washed up, frail, powerless, sexless beings just because their baby bearing days are over. It was one thing for her beauty and power to change the world while she was still like a virgin, and then like a harlot. Yes, she is showing the world that she’s not desperate, and nor is any other old lady. Sex and beauty are powerful at every stage of life, and a wrinkle or two can’t change that.

My critics will say it’s easy for Madonna to be sexy when she can afford surgery, makeovers, and clothing that we can only dream about. But I think she has worn so many various disguises (‘reinventions’) of mythology, from waif to whore to cougar to soccer mom for the very simple reason of revelation, revealing that artifice and masks may simply be ways to show us the soul. In theory, I could blame every Playmate model for appearing without a stretch mark or surgically fixing their sagging breasts. But I don’t. Instead I see the simple power of taking off my clothes, and see the possibility that stretch marks and lard and all, it might leave a man speechless instead of sending him running.

Indeed, it has.

We, too, are free to experiment with all of the guises and masks- and I for one love to play dress up, and dress down, and yes, I do have to put cover-up on my varicose veins. But I’m not going to hide in a potato sack because I’m overweight. Nor am I going to marry a Baptist boy because I should. I’ve been over both those things for a long, long time, thanks to Her Madgesty. Maiden, mother, crone- I embrace all three. It’s not over ‘til it’s over. Life begins at fifty.

Do not regret growing older.  It is a privilege denied to many.
-author unknown

Not bad for an old bag!

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Fahrenheit 451 Revisited: Blinded by the Light

I had a heated argument recently with a person I respect profoundly, a person to whom I have turned for wisdom and comfort time and time again. The altercation occurred following some gruesome discoveries I’d made that a large faction of the Christian church is still in the superstitious throes of the Middle Ages, and that it is still looking to kill heretics and heathens just like the good old days.

I’d heard about the Dominionists before, in passing, in Rolling Stone Magazine or something, but I was part of a progressive church family that welcomed women and diverse faith families, so I didn’t perceive the gravity of the threat.

So what if a few fanatics thought unchaste women and apostates should be stoned to death? I lived in a society that was stumbling toward civilization, with its own faults, but certainly moving towards a truer morality than we’ve known in the Dark Ages, where we debated over whether brown-skinned humans had a soul, and used sex torture to provoke witchcraft confessions from perceived adulteresses.

But you never know what will happen to you in a day, and the day following the inauguration of President Obama was by chance a domino that has knocked over a house of cards- a house in which I lived, but of which I was not the architect. That was the day the sleeping kooks and crackpots came out of the woodwork, and the dormant extremism of racist, sexist, homophobic Christianity rose from the dead.

Ironically, while their own henchman Bush was at the helm, their voices were not as loud. Their purpose was placated to some degree. But once a mixed-race black man of mixed faith backgrounds who cared for women and the poor rose up, the ghouls crawled out of the ground and into the daylight, much like Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

I won’t recount the multitude of disgusting racial, anti-gay, anti-women slurs I found in the body of Christ and in my inbox- I already did so in a lengthy diatribe about my crisis of faith. Suffice it to say, when anyone uses words like “plate lip nigger” in their threat to assassinate the babykilling president, you know we have stepped into a time machine and landed five centuries ago. But in my mind, there was no excuse then, either- we can always use ‘the times’ as an excuse to torture and terminate, and in that regard the times they aren’t a’changin’.

Horrified and regrettably naïve, I waded through a good deal of online and library literature, seeking what could possibly drive these people to such hate. I found it in the contemporary church. Indeed, I found it in the church yesterday today and forever. Twenty years ago when I first gave up God, I gave up the women-hating, women-erasing God. I discarded the ‘inerrancy’ fairy tale like a hot potato, as any thinking person must. Obviously the Old Testament must be filtered through the lens of patriarchy, for here some primitive scholars, at the cusp of pagan rejection, threw out all the goddess stuff and just kept God. Women’s divinity had to be swept out of the record in order to rape, pillage, and subvert us, just as we later had to question whether black people had souls to justify slavery and missionaries’ slaughter of those who had never heard of Christ.

The Spanish Conquistadors Maim and Kill Natives for Personal Entertainment

Rather than squelch my faith in Christ, the mystery grew huge and profound. No longer terrified of ‘other’ religions, I studied the fascinating sacred worlds of other cultures. I acknowledged how much fundamentalist Christianity had injured me and distorted truth and reason. But I was also thankful for the many gifts that knowing Jesus inside out gave me, in comfort, in peace, and in poetry. The Bible has shaped culture through much of history in much of the world, and I felt the intellectual and literary impoverishment of those who weren’t familiar with its stories, truths, and metaphors. I didn’t yet know that once upon a time, those who read the Bible were slayed by the church, for its contents blew apart the whole premise of Christianity as a religion. Not just the timeless truths of Jesus, but the moral depravity of the Old Testament- these were rightfully seen as dangerous to a strict faith.

Those who believe that all faiths are the multifaceted expressions of one truth are the only ones who are on to something. The idea that the right God revealed Himself to your church alone is arrogant and immoral, and the cause of most racism, sexism, hatreds, wars, tyrannies, genocidal atrocities, and even serial killings. In our culture, we are quick to say, “Yes, we agree, look at the Taliban!” But we don’t see our mirror reflection inside.

That’s because our own faith is always right, and the other is always wrong. Other religions feel like fairy tales, or matters that are anthropologically or culturally fascinating, but certainly not ‘real.’  Ours only feels right because we are born and raised into it. Even more arrogant and confusing is the assertion of my childhood faith’s superiority of doctrine- thousands and thousands of other Christian interpretations are misguided, misled, not ‘real’ Christians, fakes, posers, or downright heresy. Catholics are especially hell-bound, for they do not profess the doctrine of being born again, and their Eucharist is WAAAAAAAY too frequent, not to mention all those pagan trappings and Mary worship.

It’s the same old story, Christians killing Christians for being the wrong kind of Christian. If not killing, then barely restraining ourselves from doing so. Gleefully resting on the laurels of knowing they’ll end up in hell.

That may be, but what then of the fact that for centuries, there was no other church to bring the scriptures forward, to carry the traditions and beliefs in Christ into the age of the Reform? And after the reform, which didn’t limit the superstitious tortures of women or homosexuals, heinous acts born of ludicrous repressions, but did revive a most appalling Lutheran brand of Jew-hating, and add dance, drink, gambling and Catholic art to the already long list of deadly sins.

Those who decry syncretism are not educated or open minded enough to see the obvious facts: the Bible is a fascinating historical document, indeed, a very special book that allows us to see the majesty and light of love and the darkness of both humans and our gods. But it is in and of itself a masterwork of syncretism.

Fundamentalists used every weapon of Christian apologetics to attack poor Tom Harpur’s brave suggestions that Christianity has pagan roots harpooned in The Pagan Christ. After all, what date was Mithras thriving in? And what context did other gods raise from the dead? Forget the “pagan Christ” for a moment and think about the pagan ‘other’ religions. No one in the Christian spectrum would find it a stretch to call Hinduism, Buddhist, Voodoo, the various Native American animisms, Mormonism etcetera ‘pagan.’  We can see clearly when we look at ‘other’ faiths. The seeds all come from our earliest ancestors. Christians call those ancestors Adam and Eve. And so does most of Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Judea,  Egypt, and on and on…why? Because Adam means ‘of the earth’ ‘of the clay’ ‘of the dust’ and ‘first man.’ Eve means ‘first woman’ or ‘mother of all.’ The very first words of the O.T. were penned some five millennia or more after recorded history began, or 2604 years if you are so fundamentalist that you believe the earth was created on 4004 B.C.  And 1400 is the generous Christian scholar’s guess for the writings of Moses. They would love it to be 4000 B.C. but know the latest possible writing time is 1440 B.C. The scholars who aren’t ‘real Christians,’ many of them Jews, are certain the dates are more like 700 B.C. Either way, there is no possible way Moses could have known the entire history of the world up until that time. Oh, I know, but God told him.

You know what would happen if I rewrote history, even with my best guesses, and said “God told me to write this down?’ Same thing that happens to everyone else with this story. They end up in the nuthouse. I won’t say here that Moses didn’t even write the Pentateuch because that’s another story.

Either way, the syncretism of the Bible begins with the Creation Story. Noah’s Ark, Jonah and the Whale, Moses the Lost Prince of Egypt, the Parting of the Red Sea, the Sacrifice of Isaac…. of course all religions come from the earliest seeds of faith in our civilizations. The stories came from somewhere, from other books and from word of mouth.

Three millennia later, the Christian Dominionists are seeking to return to Old Testament Law. The newspapers are filled with scare stories that Muslims want Shariah law in countries where they have immigrated. But these Christians want a return to a mythical world in which they will have free reign to execute heretics all over again. Not just heretics, either- but those who work on Sundays, rebellious children, adulteresses, women who aren’t virgins, prostitutes, apostates, and blasphemers. Oh and heathens- that’s every other religion but theirs, including progressive Christianity. Oh, and homosexuals. Notice the mirror-like parallel to everything these people find loathsome about Islam. They want the same power for themselves, but with their own God.

So what if a few nutcrackers want to prove their almighty might?

It’s not just a few. That’s what I found out when my domino tipped everything I had standing over. Forever. Under many, many names, they rise. They have trillions of dollars and media all over the world. They seldom make their agenda known, though if you look, it’s proudly stood for. So proud that one of their many modern journals of faith suggests with a straight face and no irony intended, that the execution of rebellious children should take place by stoning, so the whole village can get involved.

And where do they lurk, you ask? The entire American home schooling movement, for starters- the aim is not just for children to avoid learning science the way I missed learning it- it’s also so that they never meet children of other backgrounds. It’s brainwashing. It comes from Rushdoony, the ‘father of Dominionism’ whose racism and sexism knew no bounds. The subtle objective beyond keeping kids from book knowledge is to keep mom at home. These groups also ultimately want women’s and nonbeliever’s votes rescinded, the removal of all progressive,

raise up a child in the way she should go, and when she is old, she will not depart from it

unbelieving, or heathen judges from the courtrooms, and the execution of homosexuals. Homos are, after all, the biggest threat to America. They’re just so dang abominable.

In my furious unearthing of these sick inquisitors, I saw names that were familiar to me from my childhood, and from my friend’s library. James Dobson, James Kennedy, to name two.

The friend was unconvinced that there was anything wrong with Christians hoping to evangelize nonbelievers, even as I told him that Dobson had no understanding of homosexuality, and his unwarranted fear was ludicrous. I suggested he hang out with a bunch of queens and get to know them. Far from being a threat to society, gays are I daresay a more evolved kind of human being, and they are funny, intelligent, and creative. They are also my community. Even when I told this person that these groups want homosexuals out of the workplace, out of the schools, and executed- despite the fact that most child molesters are straight men- the person still didn’t concede that Dobson may be wrong. Dobson after all knows that the man is the headship of the family, created first, and he must subordinate women and not be some flim flam egalitarian who talks with a lisp.

Okay, I’m putting words into this person’s mouth. But not really. His words were even clearer: “The Bible says it is an abomination to the Lord.” The fact that the Bible was written three thousand years ago before an understanding of hormones or diversity came up meant nothing to this man. A man whose intelligence I admire, except in this one regard. And even though I presented masses of evidence loudly proclaiming a desire for Old Testament law and public stonings, this friend said he just couldn’t believe this was accurate. If I had shown the same documents about Islam or Buddhism it would have been easy to believe. But when it’s your own faith, no matter how much evidence piles up  against it, you can’t see. Blinded by the light.

I handed this man a list of over 1000 names of religious groups, corporations, and media outlets that support Dominionism and still he refused to acknowledge that something is not quite right in the Christian church today. “I don’t think it’s true,” he said. “These must be old records.” When you can look at documented evidence dated from this millennia but hold on to the words of every Dobsonite despite that all of his learning comes from only one book at the exclusion of the rest of his brain is mind boggling. “I don’t think Coral Ridge Ministries is wrong,” he said, dismissing the possibility of even investigating for himself whether my concerns were valid, if hatred really lies at the core of someone’s beliefs.. “Their doctrine is sound,” he said. Sound to whom?

The bomb dropped when he said I was “obsessed with defending homosexuals.” I guess African Americans were obsessed with defending black people.

by his stripes we are not healed: whipping scourges of a slave

Obama argued with Dobson over the homosexual issue. If we should execute gays, should we not then execute rebellious children and Sabbath workers, he asked. Then he shouted out, READ YOUR BIBLE, people! The problem? Obama didn’t know that that’s EXACTLY what these people want. Complete power to shed blood, in the Lord’s name.

I told my beloved that, inspired as The Word might be, it’s still subject to the bias of its writers, who knew nothing of the next 3000 years in evolution, biology, medicine, technology and other developments. These were people steeped in paganism, moving toward monotheism.  They needed stories to explain the weather and the plagues, things we now understand more. Today we know that germs cause many diseases. We know that brimstone in the desert easily catches fire. It’s easy to see why early people believed “God rained fire and brimstone” on evildoers or wiped them out with sickness. They didn’t understand epilepsy or schizophrenia, and so they believed these twitching, muttering mysteries were demon possession.

And that’s when my friend said, “Some mental illness STILL comes from demonic possession.”

Once upon a time a man named Copernicus was tried as a heretic for suggesting the earth was not the centre of the universe. Many others who suggested variations on this theme, or who suggested that bathing might reduce disease, were executed for blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, whatever.

I personally think it’s a sin to not use the intellect we are given to expand and explore and seek to know. If there is a God, he is disgusted with us all for being so prudish, self-important and genocidal in his name.

I told my friend that I believe that instead of brainwashing children into being terrified of hell and hating heathens, it should be mandatory learning from every pulpit about the ancient and modern atrocities of religion. Not the demonic world of tribal cannibals or Indian elephant worshippers, either- but the Christian slaughter of Muslims in Sarajevo, the Christian slaughter of Jews in Germany (no Hitler was not an atheist), the Irish Catholic/Protestant burnings and tortures, the sex torture of women ‘witches,’ the hunting of native Indians for sport, the religious justifications for slavery. Perhaps these crimes were a little more abominable than being born gay or female.

To me it’s no surprise that some ‘demonic’ killers invent perverse torture methods

Ed Gein himself could not have dreamed this shit up.

to get off. They learned it in the church. Do you have any idea of the creativity holy men used to torture women? The rack, the anal pear, the hook, the breast ripper…This history should be required reading.

But it always comes down to this: “Those weren’t REAL Christians,” my friend said. When will we take our heads out of the ancient desert sand?

“With all due respect,” I said, because I truly do love and respect this person above most, though we have seldom agreed on faith matters, but I was furious. “Have you EVER read a book in your life that was not written by Calvin or Dobson or other theologians, a single book on mythology or history or archeology or Christianity or science that was written by a progressive Christian or a person from another faith, or no faith? One? ANY other book in the past 2000 years that was not ABOUT the Bible?”

“That in itself would be idolatry,” he said.

I almost tore my hair out by the roots.

Would you like to know why our world is left with this particular bundle of scriptures and a few odd desert finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls? What happened to the other scripture-like contributions, or simply the other books 2, 3, 4 thousand years old? There are some- The Epic of Gilgamesh (the flood story), a few ancient philosophy texts. But not many. The church destroyed them. They didn’t want anyone to think in other possibilities. So much for free will. I said that Christians destroyed most mythic and historical literature, as well as divergent Christian thinking, and secular histories, as well as other Scriptures.  My friend didn’t believe me. “You can’t know that,” he said.

That’s the danger of burning books, and of not reading them. I CAN know this, though few people know it, or to what extent it took place. Priceless records that could tell us more about our world, our past, gone forever. It’s not a fairy tale. Early theologians gloated and glowed in their letters about the destruction of literature. Today we still burn books, and rock’n’roll records in churches- rock, often a portrait of dissent and protest- and we still censor science and history from our schools and churches. Christians in 2009 still find the two interracial sex scenes and the water-rod divining fantasy in Margaret Laurence’s brilliant The Diviners worthy of censorship. Christians still make a big to do about how Harry Potter and The Golden Compass books are homo-promo witchcraft and wizardry, though witchcraft and wizardry are now and have always been fantasy stories just like these.

Of course, defenders of the faith contest Christian vandalism- James Hannam presents a convincing argument that none of it ever happened. Like all other writers of Christian apologetics, including Lee Strobel, one might be convinced if their knowledge is limited. But if they have studied and learned from a wide variety of sources, they know apologists are masters of selective citations and of whitewashing history. There are plenty of Christian thinkers and philosophers who acknowledge the past and the present. They do not have to burn or banish contrary books to retain their faith. It is not threatened by learning or experience. It comes from and transcends through the ancient documents which illuminate it. Their predecessors may have been monsters, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. It is not these willing thinkers in Christian faith whom I denounce, those Christians like myself who are not afraid of reality, but the unreasonable literalists who insult the intelligence of their God along with ours.

You can blame the world’s problems on sin, homosexuality, abortion, women, or westernization all you want, but this kind of bullheaded attitude is actually the root of all evil. It pains me to say so about someone I love, but if this person is free to blame the world’s problems on my homosexual lifestyle, I must be free to speak the truth. “The Bible said so,” whatever that culture’s Bible is has given rise to unspeakable crimes of war, rape, slavery, racism, murder, torture, ignorance and stunted intellectual development we have.

Primitive mythology, which was largely figurative as a way to explore and explain the world, would not have stunted our evolution this much. Indeed, even those peoples like the Aztec or Maya who were still practicing human sacrifices had

not the last vestige of human sacrifice rituals by a long shot....God told susan smith to sacrifice her babies, too, so why did she end up in psychiatric treatment in jail instead of on our lists of obedient Christians?

breathtaking knowledge in science and technology. And what did Christians do? The same as they did throughout history, to make it look like theirs is the only book ever written. They destroyed the libraries. Destroyed the books, the priceless mathematics and astronomies and histories.

Reading is, after all, idolatry.

“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.