Is the Pope Catholic ... or one of the Vaishnavas?

In his NYT oped, which I referred to in this post yesterday, the Pope writes:

If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. ...

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future. 

"we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain."

Yes.

Empathy, as I have often written about here and even in my newspaper columns, is fundamental to understanding what it means to be human. I wrote in this oped in October 2016 that one of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.”

The Pope writing that we have to let ourselves be touched by others' pain echoes the message that I received through the faith in which I was raised.  The fact that I do not practice religion, and challenge the very notion of a supreme being, does not mean that I do not value empathy that non-politicized religious leaders talk about with the faithful.  Why the faithful choose not to let themselves be touched by others' pain is beyond me.  The utter selfishness and disregard for human suffering that the faithful display and practice is one of the most hypocritical behaviors of the religious folk.

Empathy is framed in non-secular philosophy too.  Adam Smith, often hailed as the brains behind capitalism, was a philosopher who wrote in A Theory of Moral Sentiments " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

Many among the faithful and the irreligious alike seem to conveniently shut themselves off from the sufferer.  As the Pope writes, "some of us that we can act as if they don’t exist."

Think, for example, of the wars scattered across different parts of the world; of the production and trade in weapons; of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of opportunity; of climate change. These tragedies may seem distant from us, as part of the daily news that, sadly, fails to move us to change our agendas and priorities. But like the Covid-19 crisis, they affect the whole of humanity.

Shutting ourselves off from the sufferer is nothing but a statement of our priorities.  We would rather spend money to buy the latest gadget than donate that money to help alleviate human suffering.

I am glad that the Pope continues to hammer the message that the church needs to go to the margins to see life as it really is. 

“I’ve always thought that the world looks clearer from the periphery,” he said in the book. “When God wanted to regenerate creation, He chose to go to the margins — to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude.”

If only the faithful would think about that!

Father, what does lying mean?

The title of the post that ended the series on Jill Lepore's book was this: Lying is as American as apple pie.

Of course, there is nothing exceptional about lying in America.  Everybody lies.  It is universal.  In the modern world, businesses are experts at lying.  How many years has it been since the Bhopal tragedy, for instance, and how truthful has the criminal business been?  Or, how truthful has the Indian government been?

Businesses routinely lie. Which is why we often joke, because there is nothing else that we can really do, that "business ethics" is an oxymoron!  A short piece at Harvard Business Review begins like this:

Many of the corporate scandals in the past several years — think Volkswagen or Wells Fargo — have been cases of wide-scale dishonesty. It’s hard to fathom how lying and deceit permeated these organizations.

Wait a second, aren't lying and deceit important and fundamental values in money-making?!

At least these businesses do not pretend to be moral compasses that point to people the direction to heaven and hell.  Lying, as we have always known, is very much a part of the culture of institutionalized religions too.  As if the Roman Catholic church has not messed up with people's lives enough and then lying about every crime that they have been involved with, the latest--as shocking as it is--continues along the path of lying and deceit that the institution has always done:

[The] Vatican has confirmed, apparently for the first time, that its department overseeing the world’s priests has general guidelines for what to do when clerics break celibacy vows and father children.
“I can confirm that these guidelines exist,” the Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti wrote in response to a query from The New York Times. “It is an internal document.”

Think about this: The Vatican has developed procedures on what to do, what to say, whenever one of its priests end up fathering children.  And these procedures are to ensure that the word does not get out.  Systematic lying and deceit are fundamental values in religion too!

The Vatican even has a specific phrase to refer to the children of priests: "children of the ordained."  And, of course, there is no "official" estimate of the numbers of "children of the ordained."

The children are sometimes the result of affairs involving priests and laywomen or nuns — others of abuse or rape. There are some, exceedingly rare, high-profile cases, but the overwhelming majority remain out of the public eye.

Just awful! 

Keep this, too, in mind when the Pope or any of his underlings chastize the business world for not working for the greater good.  Nor should you ever be fooled by any business that pretends that it never does anything evil.  And, don't get me started about politicians and governments.

Bloody liars they mostly are!

Build that wall

The Europeans kept coming in by the shiploads.  And the original inhabitants of the land were systematically ousted from their homes and lands.

Jill Lepore writes:

Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers.  Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends.  "This is a free country," a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. ... A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, "The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted."

Maybe the Swede and the Norwegian did not know about the conditions of blacks and the original inhabitants.  Or, maybe they didn't care, and what mattered to them was how the whites were "free" and could enjoy the "principle of equality."

How huge was this white immigration?

European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent [of the U.S. population] in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. ... By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic.

The Catholicism of the new white folk bothered the older white folk who were Protestants.  "By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish.  Signs at shops began to read, "No Irish Need Apply."

To think that America needs to keep immigrants out is a remarkable denial of the country's history.  The current President, who was elected by 63 million racists, openly declares that he would welcome immigrants from Norway but not from "shitholes."

We are yet to reach the critical time of the Civil War.   But, even at this stage of Jill Lepore's history of the US, think again about Frederick Douglass' speech from 1852, in which he thunders:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

When we sing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave," I am not sure who we refer to. 

The unbearable burdens of the years past

There are at least two important reasons why I continue to read and think about the caste issues in the old country, and about slavery in the adopted home.  As one who was born into the privileged Brahmin caste, I want to apologize and compensate by at least understanding the sociopolitical aspects of the atrocious caste system that has left India messed up.  In the adopted home, being in the privileged stratum, the least I can do is understand slavery and racism that have seriously screwed up the country.

There is also one other reason.  I am always, always, amazed that the oppressed lower castes and the "untouchables" of India, and the blacks and Native Americans here, are not intensely angry and unforgiving.  The fact that there is no violence and blood over these issues intrigues me.  After all, for instance, I continue to be pissed off at the bastards who looted India or the white supremacist whose actions resulted in a million deaths.  I am angry man!  If I--with all the privilege--can be so angry, then ...

Hence, the post on "Strange Fruit."  While such cruelty is simply beyond my absolutely wildest imagination, I force myself to make my own sense of that horrific past.   As one who does not care for forget or forgive, the tragic transgressions are more than mere history to me.

A new day dawns and then I read this in the New York Times:

More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognized their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say.
At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The college relied on Jesuit plantations in Maryland to help finance its operations, university officials say. (Slaves were often donated by prosperous parishioners.) And the 1838 sale — worth about $3.3 million in today’s dollars — was organized by two of Georgetown’s early presidents, both Jesuit priests.
Some of that money helped to pay off the debts of the struggling college

Think about this.  A highly respected university. And a Jesuit university. But, even its very presence today--leave alone its reputation--was made possible by the 272 men, women and children it sold in order to pay off its debts.  How can we not continue to have conversations on slavery and racism?

researchers have used archival records to follow their footsteps, from the Jesuit plantations in Maryland, to the docks of New Orleans, to three plantations west and south of Baton Rouge, La.

I will be mad as hell if I were one of those descendants.

Life is hard enough, and on top of that there are assholes who love to mess around with the lives of others.  We shall over come. Some day, we shall overcome!

The pope is coming. The pope is coming.

There is always some media event or the other here in America.  I can easily imagine t-shirts and baseball caps sold to memorialize the trip.  Money will be made--of course, not by me!  BTW, let me tell you a little bit about me, ok?  Me is a pronoun used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself as the object of a verb or preposition!  A horrible groaner, eh?  Hahaha!

Everybody loves Pope Francis, Public Radio reported when I was driving back from campus.  Yep, the commute to campus has begun.  Anyway, enough about me; back to the pope:

Roman Catholics — who make up about 20 percent of the US population — are jazzed about Francis coming, which is hardly surprising. After all, the pope is their representative of Jesus Christ on earth.
But plenty of people from other faith traditions are singing the praises of Francis. And that goes for non-believers too.
“Some of Pope Francis’s actions are really praiseworthy,” says Greg Epstein, who works as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Epstein is an atheist.

As I listened to it, I forgot about the pope.  It was like, "hold it right there; the university has a humanist chaplain and he is an atheist?"  Damn, no wonder Harvard is Harvard, and then there is Western Oregon University ;)

So, the atheist chaplain loves the pope?

 But Epstein says he refuses to lionize a world leader with beliefs that are so out of step with a large chunk of the American public.
“Pope Francis is still out there advocating for a view of human sexuality that is really damaging to a lot of people. He’s giving temporary, partial absolution to some women who’ve had abortions this year. It’s a good step, but it’s not a solution,” Espstein says.
Esptein hopes people will be open to what Pope Francis has to say on his trip to the US, but also that they listen with a critical ear.

I am not sure that we have enough people who listen to anybody with a critical ear.  Most people seemed to have stopped listening.  And among those that do listen not many do that "critical thinking."

But, apparently there is a good chance that Francis might make political leaders here a tad uncomfortable:

America’s political leaders should expect some discomforting talk when the pope addresses Congress. He will likely praise the founding ideals of the United States — but point out the ways in which its leaders fall short. He’ll be equally blunt when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly in New York on issues ranging from climate change to poverty to war and refugees.

If that will be his agenda, then it seems like the Democrats will applaud him all the time, while the Republicans might begin to wonder if the pope really is a Latin American Marxist communist!  The NY Times has even setup  an opinion debate on "How Radical is Pope Francis?"

The Republican leaders of the House and Senate may squirm a bit, though, when he addresses a joint session of Congress. After decades of a conservative papal vision, the pope’s call to fight inequality and climate change has inspired many progressives, but infuriated conservatives. Is he focusing on issues at the center of Catholic teaching, or has he abandoned core Catholic beliefs to promote a liberal agenda? 

The Economist has a different kind of observation:

In the course of his travels the pontiff, who has shown real eloquence in condemning the excesses of the capitalist north, can still expect some hard questions about his attitude to excesses of another kind. Will he denounce left-wing authoritarianism as much as he has denounced the right-wing variety?

Francis won't let himself be dragged into that kind of a mess.  He seems to be charmingly diplomatic, especially after his predecessor's rottweiler image.  A diplomat is tactful.

Francis is a grandmaster of messaging. Religion writer Michael O’Loughlin has named him, “The Tweetable Pope.” 

Of course, a Tweetable Pope:

Bishops are getting crash courses on tweeting and live streaming, and organizers are pushing the official papal hashtags: #PopeInUS and, for Spanish speakers, #PapaEnUSA.

It seems to me that our political theatre will get that much more exciting to watch.  I tell ya, never a dull media moment in these United States of America! ;)

Mel Gibson alert :)

Slate Video has a mashup video bringing in the latest of Mel Gibson audio.  Hilarious.

Also at Slate, Christopher Hitchens has a brilliant piece thanks to which I had to figure out what the word gauleiter means!  Hitchens writes:

what he is issuing is the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry—and sexual hypocrisy—that stretches from the Crusades through the Inquisition to the "concordats" between the church and Hitler and Mussolini. Yet he's still reporting for work. When will Hollywood, and the wider society, finally decide to shun and spurn him utterly, both for what he is and for what he represents?

Frank Rich is all about schadenfreude, and writes:

It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.
Take, for instance, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. During the “Passion” wars, he had tried to blackmail Gibson’s critics by publicly noting that Christians are “a major source of support for Israel” and that Jewish leaders would be “shortsighted” to “risk alienating two billion Christians over a movie.” That evangelical leader was Ted Haggard, the Colorado megachurch pastor since brought down by a male prostitute. Gibson’s only outspoken rabbinical defender in 2004, the far-right Daniel Lapin, would be sullied in the scandals surrounding the subsequently jailed Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. William Donohue of the Catholic League — who defended Gibson in 2004 by saying, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular” — has been reduced these days to the marginal role of attacking The Times for reporting on priestly child abuse.
The cultural wave that crested with “The Passion” was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal antihomosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.

I suppose Gibson is one of those celebrity wells that keep on giving.  Here is a classic from the Daily Show :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Highway to Mel?
www.thedailyshow.com
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The tyrannical group called "faculty" :)

The world outside academia is often confused, at best, whenever there are reports of faculty being reprimanded or fired for saying something "wrong" because of the pervasive belief that we faculty have academic freedom.  Yep, we do have freedom, but only if we say what is ruled as the correct thing to say.  If otherwise, it is the tyrannical equivalent to "off with their heads."

Hey, I ought to know this--the faculty body and its leaders ruled that I do not have a right to expression, and also advised their peeps not to ever listen to me.  Yes, academic excommunication :) 

So, it does not surprise me at all that a religion professor--an adjunct--who had been "recognized by the religion department in 2008 and 2009 for being rated an excellent teacher by students" was fired not because he groped students or that he yelled and screamed, but "for saying he agreed with Catholic doctrine on homosexuality."

He was a religion professor in Illinois, and taught Roman Catholicism.  Is it difficult for anybody to imagine that he had his religious beliefs as well?  And he was fired for stating his belief in the context?  Despite the recognition the last two years for the excellent teaching?

Oh well, yet another evidence of the tyrannical ideologues who masquerade as faculty in colleges and universities. I tell you, the real news from academe will be if and when a Marxist professor ever tells students that maybe a liberal democratic economy is not that bad after all :)

(Source: 1, 2, and 3)
ps: No, this post is not because I agree with the Vatican's stand on homosexuality.  I don't care what the Catholic church thought or what the Ayatollah thinks.  Those are for the respective believers to sort out.  I am more worried about the physical and emotional abuse to kids ...
Nor am I one of those in-your-face atheists who wants to convert the believers away from religion.
What worries me is when democratic governments rule on how people ought to live. Like when France decides that a religious garb is illegal. Or when the US Congresses decides that a marriage is only between a man and a woman.  Or when the Anglo-American alliance decides it can freely torture the lives out of anybody it thinks is worth torturing while conducting the War on Terror.

Faith-based thoughts and actions, well, people can always exit those religions if they do not agree with those views ...