Spike's Place

Republican Pharisees

Another thought occurred to me as I was considering the passage in the Bible from my last post. It's been so well-documented around the web that it feels pointless to post links, so I won't, but the parallels between today's Christian Right and the Bible's Pharisees are unending.

For just one more example... in the passage I quoted in my last post, the apostles ask Jesus if the man was born blind because of his sin or because the sin of his parents. Jesus responds that it is not sin at all that has caused the blindness. Biblical scholars note that one of the dominant arguments of the day among Pharisees was exactly whose fault it was that people were born into poverty or with disabilities. Was it their sin or their parents' sin that caused this suffering. They were foreign to the idea that random chance might have made some more fortunate than others. This philsophy is comforting to those in power, because it gives them license to ignore the downtrodden, disabled, and poverty-stricken. It absolves them of the responsibility to take care of those less fortunate. They can just tell themselves that the blind, sick, and poor are that way because either they or their parents sinned in some way and thus deserved their fate.

Aren't these the same arguments Republicans make today as they erode the social safety net and relentlessly pursue an "everyone for himself" social contract? The poor are poor because they're lazy and don't want to better themselves. The disabled are weak and are probably making it up and if they're not, they probably did something stupid and thus deserve it. There's no room in their calculus for bad luck (or worse, structural problems within society their policies have created) and thus they feel absolved from taking care of those in need. But like true Pharisees, nothing riles these hypocrites more than questioning their devotion to their professed philosophies. Of course they're good Christians, they just have no idea what Christ was actually talking about and don't appear to have any desire to find out.

Of course Republicans are one step worse than the actual Pharisees. The Pharisees didn't have as their model a person who died to oppose their policies.

"He was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him"

John

9:1 As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.

9:2 His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

9:3 Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."

As mass-attending Catholics know, the above text is the opening lines from the Gospel passage on March 2nd. As I sat in church listening to the reading, I was struck by a new meaning to these words I've heard so many times before in my life. The typical interpretation of the phrase "he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him" is that God made this person blind so that Jesus would heal him and we would all see how wonderful God is as a result. It's passages like these that have always turned me off from the Church and from God. God caused this man to suffer for 30 years so that Jesus would have a prop for his show.

It seems to me that Jesus and the Christian God would ascribe to themselves the Kantian view of moral philosophy which is that you are not to use others as a means to an end and that you have a categorical imperative to do the right thing in each instance, regardless of the downstream consequences. Certainly the anti-abortion crowd uses several arguments from this viewpoint and actively discourages utilitarian considerations in most contexts.

But the common interpretation of this text violates that philosophy. Putting this person on Earth so he could be part of Jesus's show is using this person as a means to an end. In that interpretation, the true end is that everyone sees how glorious and wonderful God is and the blind man is supposed to feel blessed he was allowed to be part of the show. This has always been repugnant to me. The idea that God needs anything from us, like our worship or our praise, doesn't make sense. And the idea that we're all here as pieces in God's play is even more upsetting.

For some reason, I was struck by an alternate interpretation to the text. To me, God's works are loving works because God = Love. I believe that what Jesus meant was that the reason people are created with challenges or disabilities is because those disabilities give us a chance to love that person and give that person a chance to be loved in a special way. But everybody has their own disabilities and imperfections, even if they're not the kind of thing that gets you special protection through the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I began to see the brilliance in God's plan. If we were all perfect and had no defects, there would be no opportunity to love one another. It is through these imperfections we all must suffer through that we have the opportunity to experience love. I have a much greater level of respect for human life now. Though I'm still pro-choice, I think I can finally understand why people are pro-life. They view every human life as precious, because we are all facing defects and though they may differ in degree or kind, we all need love to get through the day. And without the potential suffering there can be no love. It is only because we have failed to love each other enough that pointless suffering exists.

I'm sure this isn't coming across as being as profound as it was to me when this all occurred to me. But there are so many policy implications to my realization, to me it's the kind of thing you could build a political career on. Unfortunately, even to many of the most devout Christians, charity will continue to be seen as the means used toward the end of glorifying God rather than as the end itself. God doesn't need our glory, He needs us to live out the plan He envisioned when he decided to create each of us with our own imperfections.

Conservatives and Birth Control

There's an interesting debate over at GOP Bloggers about Hilary Clinton's and Harry Reid's proposal to have the government fund birth control. This gets to one of my biggest pet peeves about religious conservatives in America. As the discussing that follows in the comments section shows, conservatives aren't interested in eliminating abortions, per se. It is one of their goals, but it's more of a symptom of a large problem than a problem in itself. No, the problem isn't abortions, it's the sex that leads to abortions. If the problem were abortions, you would think that the religious conservatives would look to other countries that have lower abortion rates and try to model ourselves after them. Canada has a much lower abortion rate than the United States as does Great Britain and France. If those "godless" countries have lower abortion rates than we do, maybe we're missing something.

Then you can look at this quote from The Guttmacher Institute which shows a clear relationship between availability of contraception and the number of abortions.

Abortion levels are high in countries where the desire for small families is strong but contraceptive use is low or ineffective. For example, in most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, where desired family size has been small for many years, modern contraceptive methods were not generally available until recently. As a result, women relied on abortion—which was legal, safe and easily accessible—to regulate births. However, as contraceptives have become much easier to obtain in recent years, the situation has begun to change rapidly, and abortion rates in some of these countries fell by as much as 50% between 1990 and 1996.

Contraception and sex education are key pieces of the puzzle of reducing abortions and unwanted pregnancies in general. The right's persistent objection to these policies shows that they are interested in making their view of moral sex the law, not just reducing abortions.