You remember Terry Jones, right? He’s the pastor who found his 15 minutes of fame by threatening to burn the Koran, backing down when the United States government called him “un-American” for expressing politically incorrect ideas, then pulling off a sneak incineration a few months later when no one was looking. If you followed the story closely, you will also remember the people who were killed when Muslims rioted about the mere thought-crime of prospective scripture burning, and the somewhat more rational response of the Pakistani Muslim who retaliated by destroying a Christian Bible.

Now another Bible has been burned, or at least parts of one. In a man-bites-dog twist, this one was torched by a Christian minister, Rev. Geraint ap Iorwerth of St Peter ad Vincula Church in Pennal, Wales. It seems Rev. ap Iorwerth is a true expert on what God really said, and thus decided to burn “all the nasty bits” that misrepresented what he knows God is really like. Presumably, he’s referring to the parts of the Old Testament where God endorses genocide and slavery. Or maybe he burnt the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus insists that every “jot and tittle” of the Jewish law shall remain in force until the end of time, specifically including animal sacrifice at the Temple, while declaring it a sin for anyone to marry a divorced woman. I can’t tell you exactly what he burnt, because the article doesn’t say. Besides, he’s the one who can read God’s mind, not me. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Last month, a national convention of the United Church of Christ voted to delete a reference to belief in the “Heavenly Father” from its constitutional definition of a local church. Instead of belief in a male God who produced offspring, local churches now need only express belief in a “triune God.”

This change in the direction of political correctness is less than it first appears. The concept of “triune God,” in every modern flavor of Christianity, involves a deity known as “God the Father,” generally pictured with a long white beard, who is said to have fathered out of wedlock “God the Son,” even though God the Son is said to have existed as long as God the Father has. It gets terribly confusing, and can only be ultimately sorted out by “It’s a mystery.” What’s clear is that if they’re keeping “triune God,” then they’re keeping a male God, or at least a God who is two parts out of three male – while at the same time, shamelessly making headlines about being more gender-neutral. This is not a mystery; it’s a shell game.

Pretending to be hip has not served the United Church of Christ well in recent decades. Its membership has declined by nearly 50% since the 1960s. One of its biggest recent defections was the Obama family, who jumped ship in 2008 when UCC pastor Jeremiah Wright went from being a political plus to a political minus.

A question more interesting than the future of this fading denomination is “How did we get a male God in the first place?” If some unseen force created and guides the universe, why does it have to be thought of as either male or female? In fact, how can it logically be characterized as male, unless there is a female deity to go along with it? There can be no “left” without a “right.”

Earlier ages solved this problem by having multiple Gods. Even the Jews gave Yahweh a Goddess wife, named Asherah. Inscriptions to “Yahweh and his Asherah” have been found at Israeli archeological sites, and the Jewish king Manasseh installed a statue of Asherah in the Jerusalem temple.

In fact, according to feminist historian Barbara Walker, in many Pagan societies the feminine Gods were more important than the masculine Gods. They were revered as the mother who infuses all creation with the vital blood of life. The Islamic name for God today bears a striking resemblance to that of the Arabian lunar Goddess, Al-Lat, who was worshipped at the Kaaba in Mecca, and whose crescent symbol appears today on Islamic flags. Pre-Christian forms of what the UCC now calls the “triune God” involved three female deities, in places as diverse as India, Ireland, Italy, and Mexico, where “three divine sisters” gave birth to the savior God Quetzalcoatl. In some earlier forms of the trinity among Arabian Christians, the Holy Ghost was Mary rather than a bird, thus neatly paralleling the Egyptian nuclear family divine trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

That trinity variant never caught on, but throughout Christian history there has been a tension between God experts who sought to elevate Mary to near-divine status and those who sought to pull her back down again. The 8^th century Patriarch of Constantinople taught that God obeys Mary “through and in all things, as his true mother.” This view was echoed by the 18^th century theologian who wrote that “At the command of Mary all obey, even God.” A 14^th century Franciscan taught that

When we have offended Christ, we should go first to the Queen of Heaven and offer her … prayers, fasting, vigils, and alms; then she, like a mother, will come between thee and Christ, the father who wishes to beat us, and she will throw the cloak of mercy between the rod of punishment and us, and soften the king’s anger against us.

Pope Pius XII himself proclaimed in 1950 that Mary was the only person other than Jesus who was born without the stain of original sin, and was “assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory.” Yet his successor Pope John XXIII, who had the power to read Mary’s mind, warned that: “The Madonna is not pleased when she is put above her Son.” The Arabian Christians who put Mary in the trinity were persecuted as heretics, and the 13^th century Pope Nicholas III ordered a friar to burn with his own hands a tract he had written that went too far in expressing devotion to Mary.

Mary’s doing pretty well today, though. There’s a major movement within the Catholic Church to elevate her to the status of “Co-redemptrix,” which would seem to put her right next to Jesus. I’m not sure what she did to deserve that other than to have a son, as billions of other non-Goddesses have done. Anyway, it’s now officially ok to refer to Mary as “Co-redemptrix,” and petitions and conferences of God experts are urging the Pope to go even further and make that status an official “dogma” of the Church, non-belief in which will result in excommunication and eternal hellfire.

The folks who are best positioned to capitalize on a feminist trend in godliness, though, are our friends the Mormons. Unlike the Catholics, who feel somewhat constrained in making sudden changes by the burden of appearing consistent with 2,000 years of precedent, the Mormons haven’t the slightest compunction about turning on a theological dime whenever it suits their political purposes. They did that on polygamy in 1890 (sort of), and again in 1978 on the in-born evil of black people (sort of). Better yet, they already have a Goddess – a “Heavenly Mother,” no less – backstage and ready to make her debut at the propitious moment.

Mormon theology teaches that there are millions of male Gods in the universe, each one associated with a particular star or planet, who have a physical body just like earthlings. A main function of each of them is to father new souls by having sex, in the normal physical manner. That requires, of course, the involvement of a female deity, at a minimum in “Lie back and think of England” mode. In fact, such a personage exists in Mormon theology – there’s even a hymn about her, written by one of Joseph Smith’s dozens of widows:

In the heavens are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare.
Truth is reason: truth eternal
tells me I’ve a mother there.

The men who ran the Church, though, took as dim a view of Goddess worship as did the Catholics who shut Mary out of the Trinity. Early apostle George Q. Cannon, sometimes called “the Mormon Richelieu,” cautioned that “To worship her would diminish from the worship of heavenly father.” Gordon Hinckley, Mormon President from 1995 to 2008, added that Jesus himself commanded prayer to “Our Father,” not to “our Mother.” A professor at Brigham Young University who suggested praying to Heavenly Mother was fired for her efforts.

The real problem here is that those who earn a living being God’s mouthpieces know that their paying customers subconsciously see them as God, to a small but significant extent. That’s certainly how the Catholics position their Pope, and how the Mormons position their President. Diluting the maleness of God distorts that picture. Secularism is going to have to expand a lot further than it already has before these guys get desperate enough to copy this particular page out of the Pagan playbook.

Luis Granados

In the debate on caste between the Untouchable Ambedkar and the Hindu God expert Mohandas Gandhi 75 years ago, Ambedkar reminded readers what caste distinction meant in practice:

The Untouchable was required to carry, strung from his waist, a broom to sweep away from behind the dust he treaded on lest a Hindu walking on the same should be polluted. In Poona, the untouchable was required to carry an earthen pot, hung in his neck wherever he went, for holding his spit lest his spit falling on earth should pollute a Hindu who might unknowingly happen to tread on it.

Gandhi’s reply did not belittle the degradation of the Untouchables, but did attempt to shift the blame away from the Hindu religion. Ambedkar had cited extensive passages in the Hindu sacred scriptures mandating the separation of Indians by caste. Since he couldn’t dispute their plain meaning, Gandhi simply asserted that these particular scriptures didn’t count: “The Smritis for instance contain much that can never be accepted as the Word of God. Thus many of the texts that Dr. Ambedkar quotes from the Smritis cannot be accepted as authentic.”

Thus, following in the footsteps of Christian God experts who pick and choose which Bible passages are divine and which are not, based on their own personal preferences, Gandhi elevated himself to God’s level by sorting out the true God commands from the fakes. He also took pains to shield against the danger that a scholar might establish that the oldest and most authentic parts of the scriptures were those that contained the most objectionable parts:

Who is the best interpreter ? Not learned men surely. Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.

Thus it is the whims of “sages and saints” we must listen to, and not the actual words of the allegedly sacred texts. Gandhi’s particular whim was that “Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” Then, having admitted that caste was harmful, he proceeded to defend it anyway.

The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful, and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahmin – spiritual teacher – and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God.

What Gandhi called “the law of Varna” was the essence of caste: that we have a duty to be locked within the same life our ancestors had. Otherwise, the whole law of karma – rebirth in a particular caste based on how good a past life you had led – wouldn’t work right.

What Gandhi called a “scavenger” was an Untouchable who was required to live on the undigested corn kernels he picked out of cow manure. But since that calling was equal in the eyes of God to that of a powerful Brahmin, that made everything ok.

Ambedkar then published a rebuttal to Gandhi’s response in which he pointed out that Gandhi himself was born into the “Bania” caste of grocers and traders. Why, he asked, didn’t the “law of Varna” apply to him? Gandhi never sold so much as a carrot, but instead waltzed about like a wannabe Brahmin, going to law school and lecturing others on what God did and did not want them to do. Gandhi’s case is a perfect example of the economic lunacy of caste. It is hard to picture Gandhi surviving as a grocer without going bankrupt; yet his brilliant organizational and communication skills made him a natural for the profession he entered. In all the millions of words Gandhi wrote and spoke over his career, I am not aware of any instance when he offered an explanation of this laughable hypocrisy.

For all his sanctimony, Gandhi’s true feelings about the Untouchables may have been revealed when he criticized Christian missionaries for trying to share the Gospel with them: “Would you preach the gospel to a cow? Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in understanding … they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.” In the midst of Gandhi’s “Be kind to Untouchables” campaign, a bill was introduced in the Indian parliament to allow Untouchables to enter Hindu temples. Gandhi had vigorously opposed this idea a few years earlier. He now gave it lip service, but not enough to move even his own Congress party, so it failed.

Ambedkar made good on this threat to abandon Hinduism in 1935. The question became, where would he land? The most politically significant move he could have made would have been to Islam, which was already a powerful and militant minority. Islam also preached, and in many countries practiced, the equality of all people before God. But Ambedkar despised the rigidity of Islam, especially its shabby treatment of women. He also knew that Muslims had ruled India for centuries before the British arrived, never lifting a finger toward the abolition of the caste system. Besides, as an Indian nationalist, he much preferred to adopt a religion that arose in India, which is also why he never gave Christianity a second thought.

Thus he was toyed at length with Sikhism, an Indian amalgam of Hinduism and Islam, that played a critical role in the Indian balance of political power. Sikhs, though, insisted that men wear beards, a practice that Ambedkar didn’t want to follow himself, and didn’t think he could sell to other Untouchable men. Besides, Gandhi kept insisting that Sikhs were actually just a subcategory of Hindus. Even though the Sikh leaders vigorously disagreed, Ambedkar wanted to get as far away from Gandhi as he could.

Some historians argue that what Ambedkar really wanted was not to leave Hinduism at all, but to use the constant threat that he might do so and take millions of Untouchables with him as a political club to bring about true reform inside Hinduism. This may explain why he took 20 years to make up his mind. Ultimately, he settled on Buddhism, which satisfied his requirement for a religion of Indian origin. At a ceremony in October, 1956, Ambedkar and 500,000 other Untouchables formally converted to Buddhism. The mass abandonment of Hinduism would have been even greater had not Ambedkar died in his sleep two months later.

What seems to have appealed to Ambedkar is that Buddhism is the most flexible and diverse of the major world religions. There is variety within Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, but not as much as within Buddhism. At one extreme is the “Imperial Way” Buddhism of the Japanese military dictatorship, and at the other a gentle philosophy that barely qualifies as a “religion” at all. Ambedkar chose that latter extreme; as one of his admirers put it:

Buddhism does not believe in revelation; does not depend on miracles; does not lay emphasis on mystic or metaphysical abstractions; does not hold out a promise of heaven; does not believe in coercion. It stands for equality and unity. It has no rituals, no ceremonies, no priests with hereditary rights, no glorification ceremonies, no Shankracharya to dogmatize. In place of fear of God, there is morality. It is based on purity of thought, deed and action, compassion and love, self-respect and self-help.

Re-read that paragraph, replacing the word “Buddhism” with the word “humanism.” Reads pretty well, doesn’t it? So why didn’t Ambedkar go one step further, and stand by his original prescription that “You must destroy the Religion”? The best explanation I can come up with is simply that everyone makes mistakes.