Killing the Buddha

Yesterday the folks over at The Guardian‘s Belief section asked me to weigh in on their question of the week, and for better or worse I sacrificed most of the day’s opportunity for book-writing on the altar of Welcome Distraction.

The question is: “Can religion be apolitical?” What they have in mind, being British and all, is the recent revelation of Catholic priest Fr. James Chesney’s involvement in IRA car bombings in the 1970s. Being the chauvinistic American that I am (and a pretty sporadic news-reader lately), I didn’t mention Chesney. But the question presented simply too good an opportunity to summon the rarely-summoned memory of my favorite theologian. Here goes my answer:

Religion is politics. It just is. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim was right almost a century ago when he wrote of religion as “an eminently social thing”. We learn it (or don’t) at our mothers’ breasts and cling to it (or not) as we set out into the world. We speak the word of God with human lips and hear it with human ears. The ways we do so are our first inkling of what a good society should look like. And that inkling forms habits of how we bother to treat one another. How we treat one another is politics.

Few have known this quite as well as the Episcopalian lawyer-theologian William Stringfellow, a man who followed Karl Barth’s advice to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. “There is no option in this world of abstention from politics”, he wrote. “Everyone everywhere is involved, whether intentionally and intelligently or by default or some moral equivalent of it.” So, no: religion cannot be apolitical. But people can think it is, and that’s when it becomes truly dangerous, or at best vapid and naive.

Keep reading to watch me rather recklessly equate spirituality with terrorism.

Those of you who thought Buddhism was still the proverbial last righteous man in Sodom might be disappointed to read August 20th’s New York Times. In his article “Sex Scandal Has U.S. Buddhists Looking Within,” Mark Oppenheimer likens a recent sex scandal in a New York-based Japanese Buddhist society to the slew of sexual improprieties among religious leaders made public over the past year. Apparently, Abbot Eido Shimano of the Zen Studies Society has been a little more than a spiritual guide for several female members of his community—yeah, you get my drift—and has been doing so for at least the past thirty years. Allegations have been building both on the board of the society and in the media for the past two years. Last month Shimano ended up resigning from his position after a woman publicly pronounced that she had had a consensual affair with him.

It is undeniable that the news is hot on stories of what Oppenheimer calls “clerical impropriety.” As distressed as I am over the sentence I am about to write: it seems as though it is only a matter of time until every religion has its fifteen minutes of sexual scandal. But while stories like this one are trendy, it could be dangerous to analogize one religion’s scandals with those of others.

While this particular instance obviously and unforgivably includes abuse, it is an abuse unique to this particular religious society, and to this particular religious leader. The article makes it seem as though this abbot’s misconduct occurred only among adult women, and we know at least one affair was consensual. The story here is less about adding Buddhism to the list of religions that have had public scandals, and more about how this one community is handling the situation.

Oppenheimer suggests that while characteristically Western faiths have a built-in protocol for abuse (with, if I may editorialize, the nauseatingly true sentence: “Priests and rabbis know the boundaries, even if some do not always respect them”), this does not exist in Buddhism. He says, “The teacher/student relationship in Buddhism has no obvious Western analogy,” and in this context of blurred lines, there is a gray area in terms of sexual relationships. The article also explains that questions regarding the appropriateness of such relationships are becoming an issue now as many Asian Buddhist leaders are encountering Buddhist communities that include female members for the first time, and that they don’t always know how to react to the situation.

While Oppenheimer might be onto something here, I tend to err on the side of skepticism in this particular instance of abuse. Let’s be honest here: you would think that a married abbot, one who has been the head of this society since 1956, at a monastery on 67th between 2nd and 3rd should, in some way, be in touch with Western societal constructs.

Even if I am wrong, and Shimano did not feel that his behavior was inappropriate, it was pressure from Western voices that led to his resignation. Once the record of Shimano’s affairs got into the hands of bloggers and other U.S. media outlets, there was a frenzy of criticism that the Zen Studies Society leadership, and ultimately Shimano himself, could not ignore. Stepping down might not be an admission of guilt, but it is definitely a nod to the attitudes of troubled critics. And by the way, the article doesn’t mention that Shimano’s wife was also a board member, and she has also resigned.

The fascinating part is, even though this issue is somewhat resolved, it seems as though the society still doesn’t quite know how to handle the aftermath. If you go to its website, you will notice a point of information right on the home page about ethical guidelines. The write-up on Shimano’s leadership it links to is both critical and reverential. It understands and is troubled by his misconduct but also retains respect for him as its spiritual leader. In addition, after some thought, it has decided to outsource the management of the remaining fallout to the FaithTrust Institute, “a multifaith organization that addresses ethical violations by spiritual leaders.” In the meantime, Shimano will “remain committed to ordained and long-time students for as long as his health allows.”

If Oppenheimer is right, and Buddhist societies are encountering these kinds of problems more and more, will we begin to see standardized protocols like the one the Zen Studies Society is working to build? And what affect might these protocols have on Eastern Buddhism? I guess we will just have to wait to find out.

(H/t Josh Baran.)

Glenn Beck recently threw a party for an “overwhelmingly white” crowd on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. I’m not going to make a lot of classist, snarky comments about the fashions on display but: apparently the uniform of true patriots is jorts. Check out the guy with Abe Lincoln. I think the gathered ladies are snapping photos of his hot ass in smokin’ denim shorts.

Beck announced that “America today begins to turn back to God.” He’s the sponsor of the “9.12″ movement, which refers to his liking for the the “sense of unity and purpose” the country had after 9/11. I don’t know about y’all, but I mostly just remember Bush telling everyone to go shopping, and being secretly pleased that property values were going to fall because I was in the market for a house. I was also really squicked out by people grief-glomming when they had suffered no personal loss; the most egregious example of this was a book put out by The New York Times containing little biographies of the murder victims. I had to tell my husband that if I ever died in a massacre, I specifically did not want a capsule bio for strangers to fawn over. “My love of Duran Duran and propensity to write and sing little jingles about daily events dies with me,” I said.

Herewith, 9.12′s 9 Principles, some of which I agree with, and my comments. If you look at the original page, there’s a rather scary-looking graphic of a snake choking the Capitol dome. Maybe some nice, quiet prayer would be good for your soul, Glenn? I have just the saint for you! His name is Patrick. Also, Mary, the Mother of God has been known to trample a few snakes in her time. Just something to consider.

Here they are:

1. America is Good.

Mary: It’s pretty good. Yeah, it could be better.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

Mary: Which God? Whose God? Mr. Beck: BE MORE SPECIFIC! My God says a lot of stuff that I don’t think your God would really like. “People don’t like birth control?” He chortled one day. “That’s like not liking rainbows and kittens!”

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

Mary: This just makes me think you’re a habitual liar, and, in that case, being more honest than yesterday is negligible.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

Mary: Agreed. Especially on my property! I would hasten to add that my husband is the ultimate authority on my property. Since he has a penis.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

Mary: (garbled) What? No, I’m good. Yeah. Totally.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

Mary: Yeah! Shove it, poor people! Your results will vary!

7. I work hard for what I have and will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

Mary: Oh man! I thought I had to make a $50 annual donation to Hampshire College or I was going to get audited or something! (Airpunch!)

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

Mary: Glenn Beck, we’re agreeing on this one too! It is, in fact, totally 100 percent American!

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

Mary: Fabulous! Could I get twice-weekly recycling pickups and a city-wide composting program?

In light of Glenn Beck’s invocation of phony American history on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial today, I think it’s worth reviving my 2006 Harper’s magazine story on the Christian Right’s make over of the past, “Through a Glass Darkly: How the Christian Right is Re-imagining American History.”

Howard of W. Bloomfield, MI, writes, with regard to Mary Valle’s “The Cock Crows“:

Mary dismisses Rice saying: “she’s out of Catholicism and I’m in and out every day. And aren’t all Catholics in and out?”

No. Some of us got out and stayed out. I was a Catholic until I decided I didn’t think Jesus could be born of a virgin, die and rise again, as part of a suicide mission, as a scapegoat, to have my sins forgiven. Then there’s the Transubstantiation. It’s all a Mystery. The greater mystery to me is why any Catholic “stays in.” Maybe the reason is, as Mill suggested: “not because they think it’s true but because they wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

My conversation with Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” is now online. It’s a discussion of chapter four in my new book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, the story of American fundamentalism’s long shadow overseas and the genocide on the mind of Uganda’s antigay crusaders. From the interview:

“When you speak to [Bahati's] allies, they’re pretty clear: This is a project to eradicate homosexuality in Uganda, and they hope it will become a model for all of Africa. They’re not saying, ‘This is a reform.’ They’re saying, ‘We can do this. We are at the crux.’ When I was there, an American pastor [named] Lou Engle, who leads a big Christian right group called The Call, said, ‘This is ground zero of the great war with homosexuality.’”

Newcomers to KtB don’t know me, but I’ve been here since Peter Manseau proposed a webmagazine named Killing the Buddha in 2000. I didn’t know what that meant, or what it would be about, but I immediately agreed. When you find a good title, leap.

That’s what I did last summer, after a series of political sex scandals propelled my 2008 book The Family onto the bestseller lists. The scandals took place in a posh Capitol Hill townhouse maintained by the Family — the oldest and arguably most influential Christian conservative organization in Washington — for congressmen looking for a break on rent or spiritual counsel, or both. Since the townhouse is on C Street, it’s cleverly called C Street. And since there was really only a page or two in The Family dedicated to C Street, I cleverly grabbed the name — now synonymous with corruption — for my next book, written in deep seclusion during the past year. C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy arrives in bookstores on September 27.

And I’ll be on NPR’s “Fresh Air” to discuss it with Terry Gross today, August 25th. You can find local air times here. Also scheduled for the program is Eliza Griswold, whose fascinating new book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam, I’ve just started reading. It’s a nice pairing, since that fault line runs through Africa, and for my part I’ll be talking about a chapter in C Street on Uganda and its so-called “kill-the-gays bill,” which is excerpted as “Straight Man’s Burden” in the September issue of Harper’s magazine, on newsstands now. It’s sub only at the Harper’s site, but NPR will have all or part of the story up tomorrow. If you’re really interested, you can read an additional piece on the subject I wrote for the September issue of The Advocate, “Dangerous Liaisons.” Come September, I’ll have some original material for my first love, KtB.

My publisher, Little, Brown, has set up a Facebook page for the book on which I and the Little, Brown folks will be publishing news, including updates on the stories dealt with in the book. Please befriend this lonely page here.

Better yet, befriend me. I’m easy. Just have a beer with me. But to do that, you’ll have to come to a C Street event — or, better yet, book one. Contact Carolyn O’Keefe at carolyn dot okeefe at hbgusa dot com, and cc me at jeff dot sharlet at gmail dot com.

Here’s the itinerary up to late October:

September 21 — Austin, TX. Blandy Lecture at the Seminary of the Southwest.

September 23 — Gettysburg, PA. Gettysburg College.

September 27 — Washington, DC. National Press Club

September 28 — Washington, DC. Georgetown University Bookstore.

September 28 — Washington, DC. Politics & Prose Bookstore.

September 29 — New York City. The Strand.

September 29 — Brooklyn. The Powerhouse Arena.

September 30 — Madison, CT. RJ Julia Booksellers.

October 7 — Hanover, NH. Dartmouth College, with poet Cleopatra Mathis.

October 12 — San Francisco, CA. The Green Arcade Bookstore.

October 13 — Lafayette, CA. The Commonwealth Club.

October 15 — Salt Lake City, Utah. The Ex-Mormon Foundation.

October 22 — Charlottesville, VA. University of Virginia Miller Center for Public Affairs.

1972: Secret IRA priest
is protected from prosecution
in car bomb attack—
Martin Scorsese!
cue up “Gimme Shelter”

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67N23820100824

In regard to Mary Valle’s essay “The Cock Crows,” Darrell from California writes:

I am not Catholic and I am a Jew who has been in and now out of organized religion. Organized religion with its financial needs for buildings and paid professionals, its rationalizations for history and present conduct, and the people in it choosing in very degrees to numb themselves to these realities, is for many of us a difficult to impossible place to take the God/spiritual aspect seriously and enjoyably. I think Ann Rice left the organized religion aspects of Christianity so that unencumbered and unfettered, she could embrace the God/spiritual aspects of her religion. This is my case. And projection or not, I think it is the case of many people. I understand the line is thin. There are many people on the other side who have the same frustration and angst. I think they tend to be more community/group oriented people who get more out of the social interaction and social structure that any church, synagogue, or other provides. And that is enough to keep them in. For myself! anyway, as a loner generally, the social structure of religion neither defuses nor negates the alienating power of the religious structures doings. It in fact, makes me feel more different and left out.

To which Mary Valle responds thusly:

1. ”Darrell, I feel ya?”
2. “Darrell, I, too, feel the chafe of institutions. But sometimes it’s nice to participate in arcane rituals with other people.”

Especially given the span of the article (covering decades), it’s striking that the Times fails even to mention Ivar Lovaas’ critical involvement in the Feminine Boy Project, the so-called “spank-away-the-gay” study that is still cited by ministries and therapists who strive to work clients through their unwanted (or unwanted by their parents) same sex attraction or cross-gender identity.

Elsewhere on the behaviorist research scene, a cat learns to fire a cannon.

Though Lovaas reportedly downplayed his role in the infamous project, claiming that he was “simply on a committee” and that “gender deviation was of absolutely no interest to him,” Gender Shock author Phyllis Burke makes a case that Lovaas, as Priniciple Investigator, was the “kingpin” of the oft-cited study. An “extraordinary amount” of NIMH money supported the study, a fact which legitimized efforts to alter gender identity and, in turn, sexual orientation. But should we believe Lovaas was a key player in this study simply because a trans activist tells us so?

Well, George “Rentboy-renter” Rekers is no gay activist (Actually, maybe he is. But not in that sense), and he arguably goes even further than Burke. Just last year, Rekers described Lovaas as not only critical for the funding and oversight of the study, but also for its planning. In fact, the way Rekers tells it, Ivar Lovaas came up with the idea in the first place.

Listen here to Rekers’ dramatic description his mentor’s role in the study (stay-tuned as Rekers contextualizes in the first minute or two):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(Could someone fact check Rekers here? Who really came up with this scheme? Did Lovaas tell him about Rentboy.com, too?)

In 2004, Ivar Lovaas said to Los Angeles Times Magazine, “If I had gotten Hitler here at UCLA at the age of 4 or 5, I could’ve raised him to be a nice person.”

Yeah, and maybe he could’ve raised him as a girl, too. Just to be safe.

Our very own Stephen Prothero has been sticking it to Franklin Graham on CNN, where the son of “America’s Pastor” has been on an offensive against Islam and, in the process, stirring up libel against the president.

Far short of getting into the finer points of Qur’anic interpretation, all the Proth really has to do is what he does best, as in his recent books Religious Literacy and God Is Not One—remind us of the barest basics that we so easily forget (or never bothered to learn in the first place). Here he is, in an addendum to his TV appearance:

[T]o truly become a Muslim (which literally means “submitter”), you need to follow through on that intuition by submitting to God. You do this not by testing your DNA but by doing Islamic things, first and foremost by observing the Five Pillars of Islam. I wish I had been able to say that Obama’s father was an atheist who did not raise his son to be a Muslim, so it is incorrect to say–as Graham did, that he “has renounced the prophet Muhammad and he has renounced Islam,”–because you cannot renounce something you never affirmed.

I wish I had been able to say that none of the Muslims I know see Obama as a Muslim. They all know full well that Obama is at least as Christian as Franklin Graham.

I wish I had been able to say that, just as it is baptism that makes you Catholic and conversion that makes you an evangelical Protestant, what makes you a Muslim is saying the Shahadah (or profession of faith), sincerely and (ideally) in the presence of witnesses.

I wish I had been able to say that Islam is a choice rather than an inheritance. It is not a medical condition, passed down through sperm, like original sin in the Christian tradition. It is a spiritual community of individuals choosing, one by one, to submit to what Muslims believe are the revelations delivered by the one God, through an angel, to the world’s final prophet.

Wanted: a Monica Lewinsky-type insider catching Obama’s Shahadah on tape. Applicants with sperm samples need not apply.

We all wish we could block out some things we see on the internet. No matter how carefully you try to tailor a search query, you’ll often find yourself with stinging eyes at the various dreadful things that populate the electronic collective consciousness. And often those examples of violence, sexual degradation, bigotry, and racism come from the religious among us. Who doesn’t sometimes wish they could filter it out?

Enter GodBlock, a supposedly soon-to-be-available web filter that will, according to the website, “block religious content”: scripture, names of religious figures, and something it calls “religious propaganda,” an ill-defined but somewhat useful catchphrase when making light of religious ideas and trying to show how religion has been used to propagate all manner of human ugliness. GodBlock’s tagline is “Protect your children.”

Though not advertised as such, this would be a useful tool for the religious as well. Christians could customize the software to filter out references to Mohammad, Buddha, paganism, and those dirty hippie wiccans. Whatever your flavor of faith, you could be certain to protect your children from any opposing or alternate idea, belief, or mythology.

Whether such a piece of software will ever actually be made (there is currently a download button but nothing to download), GodBlock is a piece of satire, offering a corrective to the overly literal and overly zealous aspects of religious expression. It’s also a glimpse of what a practical extension of the New Atheism would look like.  Those loud and intellectually vigorous polemicists such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins have made an important critique of what often appears to be a science-ignorant, gay-hating, war-mongering religious culture in America. But what if GodBlock does become a real downloadable filter you can install on your computer?

One of the problems people first encountered when using web filters to block sexual content was that the programs were too sensitive. Folks at public libraries, for example, would find Web resources on breast cancer, birth control, and even educational information about the human reproductive system unavailable. Teenagers at home hoping to learn about safe sex were simply blocked from any sexual discussions. For something like GodBlock, the ramifications of blocked content, when you get down to it, are unexpected. It asks us to pretend that an idea of God or gods has not formed and breathed life into almost every aspect of art, music, literature, and philosophy.

What would an algorithm designed to filter out “religious propaganda”  use as criteria? It would have to include Audubon’s declaration that watching an eagle led him to an “admiration of the sublime Creator of all.” Even Martin Luther’s King “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written on the margins of old newspapers and slipped through the bars, includes such sentiments as, “We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights.” What else? The stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer? The life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach? The paintings of Michelangelo? The fiction of Flannery O’Conner? The writings of Isaac Newton, Louis Agassiz? A report for school on the Civil Rights Movement based on internet research would be a fluff piece at best. What about an essay on the art, architecture, and mythology of Egypt and Greece using material from museum internet sites? The origins of the civilization in the Fertile Crescent, the history of the Jewish people, the entire story of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism? The notion that religious expression is something we could, or would even want to filter, is possibly more naive and closed-minded than the ideas than those expressions can often be.

The web is fast becoming the repository of human knowledge, of human history—our own virtual Library of Alexandria, but not nearly as vulnerable to ravages of war and time. But it is vulnerable to those who would oppose safeguards like net neutrality, and even more so, from those that believe particular aspects of human civilization should be purged from the record. The New Atheists fail again and again in responding to one of the essential truths about culture and history, a failure that GodBlock—even if it is merely satire—makes readily apparent: human civilization is indebted to, and woven through with, religious “propaganda.”

If you didn’t get enough Jay Bakker from Joseph Huff-Hannon’s “Happy Hour Gospel” last week, be sure to check out our friend Nicole Greenfield’s new essay at Religion Dispatches: “Cooler than Thou: Will Hipsters Wreck Christianity?”

Bakker constantly reminds people in his sermons that his life and experience, his relationship with Jesus is no better than theirs. It is unclear whether Revolution will ever be the tight-knit, everyone-is-equal church community he envisions. Because even though people may be attracted to the message of grace, church in a bar, or to social justice, many ultimately go to see the rebellious son of Jim and Tammy Faye. It is his Christian star-power and his family history that will keep Jay Bakker in the spotlight, preventing him from being a normal hip and young preacher, a job he says any one of Revolution’s members can perform. “Your stories are just as special as mine,” he told an attentive audience soon after the release of Sundance Channel’s six-part documentary series in which he was prominently featured. “Any one of you could be up here doing this.”

But everyone in the place, including, it seemed, Bakker himself, knew that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Brett McCracken, Bakker is one of the few pastors who strike the right balance between cool and Christianity. In a sea of wannabes, he’s the real thing.

In other hipster-y news, there’s a pretty lively discussion happening on our Facebook page right now about the following: “True or false: Until rather recently, calling yourself an atheist was something like calling yourself, today, a ‘hipster’; you may have been, but you wouldn’t admit it, either to yourself or to anyone else.” Inevitably, it has turned into a bit of a food-fight in the atheism wars.

Read “moving” and can’t get enough of Eileen Myles? Wanna know how to honor a dead poet and how to get hate mail that persists for a quarter century? (HINT: You can do both at once!)

Yup, that’s the rockstar book trailer for Inferno (a poet’s novel), which is available only from OR Books, the infamously Amazon-bypassing publisher that featured another Buddha-killer or two in their also infamous Palin anthology, Going Rouge.

If you just can’t come around to the idea of a book trailer, however atypically sexy and interesting, check out the jacket blurbs instead:

I was completely stupefied by Inferno in the best of ways. In fact, I think I must feel kind of like Dante felt after seeing the face of God. My descriptive capacity just fails, gives way completely. But I can tell you that Eileen Myles made me understand something I didn’t before. And really, what more can you ask of a novel, or a poet’s novel, or a poem, or a memoir, or whatever the hell this shimmering document is? Just read it.

— Alison Bechdel

Zingingly funny and melancholy, Inferno follows a young girl from Boston in her descent into the maelstrom of New York Bohemia, circa 1968. Myles beautifully chronicles a lost Eden: “The place I found was carved out from sadness and sex and to write a poem there you merely needed to gather.

—John Ashbery

Eileen Myles debates her own self identity in a gruffly beautiful, sure voice of reason. Is she a “hunk”? A “dyke”? A “female”? I’ll tell you what she is—damn smart! Inferno burns with humor, lust and a healthy dose of neurotic happiness.

—John Waters

And if you don’t put stock in blurbs or trailers, just go read Inferno for yourself. Here’s the first line:

My English professor’s ass was so beautiful.

Order now for a 15% discount. You can even choose your book cover.

Nathan’s not the only KtB editor having trouble in the dating department. And if you think the OKCupid pickins are slim in NYC, imagine trying to find a suitable mate in a Northwoods town with a population of 200. There’s not a single OKCupid member, male or female, gay, straight, or otherwise, within a 25 mile radius. Well, OK, there’s me. But lest I date myself, I’ve opted for a late summer fashion makeover sure to attract suitable mates. I can’t divulge all my wardrobe secrets, but I will share with you a certain must-have accessory that’s guaranteed to improve your spiritual outlook, if not your romantic one.

Clothesline Revivalist and KtB friend Alyce Santoro really amped up my swagger last fall with a sonic fabric tie that’s so totally dope I figured it had to be a one-off. But this year’s offering was channelled directly to the artist by Jesus himself during an Amazonian vision quest.

That’s right. Behold, Alyce’s high performance Third Eye Sunglasses:

Softening the glow of mystical illumination.

In 2002 I traveled to the Peruvian rainforest to meet with an “ayahuascero”—a shaman who works in particular with ayahuasca, a very powerful vision-enhancing elixir. For me, the plant medicine provided a range of extremely intense experiences. During one “journey” in particular, I travelled to another planet where Jesus was debarking from a spacecraft wearing a white sparkly Elvis costume. He was also wearing sunglasses with an extra lens for the third eye. I said, “Nice glasses!” and Jesus replied, “Alyce, these are for you.” Since this experience I have been collecting old pairs of glasses from thrift shops with the intent to recreate the glasses in my vision. I’ve finally gotten around to assembling a few pairs—this is one of my favorites.

– Alyce B. Obvious

So get yourself a pair (or a triad) of third eyeglasses, as well as some free tequila, September 10th at this very cool “fashion night out fundraising event for non fashion people.”

Wait. What does that say about me?

If I’ve gotten my zero dollars’ worth from my OkCupid membership, it’s for the data more than the dates. (My scientist uncle suggests that five dates would be an adequate sample. I’ve been on two and am having trouble bringing myself to try a third.) The site seems aware of this bit of consolation; their official blog, OkTrends, is entirely devoted to statistical analysis of the poor, single suckers who posture and divulge whatever we think it will take to make someone want to care for us. Trolling over hundreds of profiles, I’ve learned quite a lot about—if not what women want, which would be useful—what women imagine that men want. I hate to say it, Second-Wave Feminism, but there are a lot of ‘em just dying to bake cookies for Mr. Right. I don’t even like cookies that much. And, disconcertingly, there is far less stated interest in cleaning up afterward.

What brings me to OkCupid now, though, is a theological question: is God simple? It’s an oldie but goodie, an issue taken up in detail by Muslims (through the concept of tawhid, or “unity”), Christians (most famously in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica), and Jews (especially with Maimonides, also a major source for Aquinas). Now the matter has returned with special urgency, since simplicity is the crux of Richard Dawkins’ argument against God’s existence in his bestselling The God Delusion. He calls it “the ultimate Boeing 747.” Basically, the idea is that if somebody could do all the crazy things God does (creating the world and its inhabitants, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, etc.), God must be really, really complicated. To use God to explain complexity in the world, then, is nuts—God is the truly complex one, so God would require an explanation even more than the world does.

The philosophers and theologians who let themselves be bothered by Dawkins are up in arms. We’ve been saying all along that God is simple! If you’d bothered to actually read all the books we’ve been writing about this for hundreds of years, you’d know that the answer is, well, in a sophisticated and intricately-argued sort of way, simple. Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting recently reiterated this complaint over at The New York Times‘ excellent philosophy soapbox, The Stone.

So here’s where that otherwise useless dating site comes in. (Almost.) The idea that such a busy God could in fact, all along, be simple often rests on an analogy with people. Remember, God is traditionally thought of and portrayed as personal, and human persons are made in God’s image. The “I,” the “me,” am/is capable of lots of things, the argument goes, but at bottom it is unitary and singular. Neuroscience may suggest that personhood emerges out from complex biological systems, but some argue that the direction of emergence can be reversed: just as simple God orchestrates complex nature, a simple person orchestrates a complex nervous system. If we people can be simple, then it is all the more plausible that God could be too. Ask yourself: are you simple? Are we?

OkCupid has a pretty useful feature for taking a straw poll on this matter. The first question on the standard profile is “My Self-Summary,” and it provokes often-contorted responses as people try to squeeze all the wonders that they are into something quick and arresting. Crafting these is an art, really, as much an art as any theology. I’m interesting, you’ve got to say, but not so interesting as to be high-maintenance or as that I’ll talk too much or too little—but don’t get the wrong idea even about that because really, deep down, beneath all the accomplishments and boundless vivacity, I’m really just little old me.

Here—you’ve been very patient—are a few unscientific excerpts from the collective wisdom of women that the site’s marvelous algorithms think I should be interested in:

First can I say that summing up my life in a paragraph is much more difficult than I thought it would be

Lets see… Well, I’m a bit of a hybrid

I like people who know who they are and what makes them tick. I certainly do.
I am looking for someone who knows what they want and isn’t afraid to ask for it.

I think that it is incredibly difficult to describe yourself – but I will try my hardest.

These self-summarys tend to be redundant and often times rather inaccurate, but I’m very open to getting to know people! I am quixotic, bubbly, and complex

Hair dye and makeup bring me more joy than just about anything. Oh, the possibilities.

hey! Armenian Jersey Girl here!!

My only two obsessions are The West Wing & the BBC Miniseries of Pride & Predjuice. Those might sum me up: I’m a realist & a romantic; an intellectual & a dreamer.

The pictures speak for themselves, no?

God help me.

Buddha killer Becky Garrison has published a new book. Jesus Died for This? A Satirist’s Search for the Risen Christ. You should buy it. But if you’re broke, we have an extra copy we can give you. We would like you to have it, to read it, to tell all your friends about it. But only one of you can do this. Which one? We don’t know. So we’re having contest. We’re providing all of our readers with broken pool cues. The last one standing gets this free book. Plus, we’ll know you’re the Second Coming.

For cowards, anti-Christs, heathen, and we’re also sponsoring an alternative contest. The first reader to write us at contact at killingthebuddha dot com and make us snort with laughter will receive this free book.

There are some additional rules: Your email must contain the word “Jesus.” If it’s really hateful, we probably won’t laugh. And who are “we”? “We” is the Killing the Buddha editor who happens to have multiple copies of Jesus Died for This? So really, you only have to make him or her laugh.

Also, if you win this free book, and you like it, you should probably twitter about it, or facebook, or blog, or tuck fliers about it under the windshield wipers of all the cars at Home Depot. If you win this book, and you don’t like it, you should keep your trap shut.

Today is Feast of the Assumption, to commemorate the Virgin Mary’s leave-taking: the day she went to holy sleep, with no earthly pain, according to Catholic tradition, and her body was assumed into heaven. And she is standing at the right hand of the altar, in a painting on the sanctuary wall of Our Lady of Sorrows church in Homewood, Alabama. Her strap-sandaled feet are firm on an unstable surface: her left foot on a round blue orb she dwarfs, her right foot on the back of a snake-bodied dragon with a pointy crocodile mouth whose teeth are piercing an apple. The shadow of the dragon’s neck on the orb makes a dark diagonal to what looks like the end of a crescent moon behind Mary’s heels.

The clouds in the painting are J.M.W.-Turneresque, but there’s no landscape except a crag with no mountain in sight. Two mischievous-faced cherubim peek out from the drapery folds of Mary’s blue, white and gold robes. She holds her hands as if she’s playing a harp. Above the stars circling her head is a hovering dove: its feet drawn in, close to its body—the better to fly with; its beak pointed towards Mary, whose eyes are are downturned towards the fern plant and the rose resting on the crag of the unseen world below.

The painting is an image of John’s vision of a lady in Revelation: “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head” (Rev. 12:1).  And of a dragon, whose “tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth,” who “stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.” And the child, a ruler-to-be, was born and rescued, “snatched up to God and to his throne” (Rev. 12: 4-6).

We don’t know if the woman in the Revelation reading for today is Mary, the priest at Our Lady of Sorrows said in his sermon. But we do know that there are two glorified bodies in heaven—Jesus and his mother, I assume him to mean. The rest of us are waiting for our souls to be joined to our bodies, waiting to become glorified, in the resurrection of the dead. And our spiritual bodies won’t suffer pain like our natural bodies, the good news some read into Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “Listen, I tell you a mystery…we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet…the dead will be raised imperishable” (1 Cor. 51-52).

We celebrate the Feast of the Assumption as we celebrate the Eucharist—death and resurrection in one fell swoop. “Heaven is the common denominator,” the priest told us. When Mary died, Jesus joined her soul to her body, and brought them into heaven, because he didn’t want his mother to suffer physical decay.

*

I’ve seen two bodies beginning to decay: My Aunt Judy, in Alabama, and my Aunt Elene, in Egypt. Judy’s veins showing through the powder a mortician caked on her face. The make-up didn’t quite match Judy’s dead skin tone. And it couldn’t conceal the blackening blue of the veins in her nose, the agitation of the oxygen tubes that kept her barely alive with ovarian cancer—until my mother heard her breaths getting further and further apart, then stop.

On the way to the hospital, perhaps at the moments Judy was dying that day, I saw a sky I’d never seen before. I was driving down the highway, noticing how iron-dark smoke pumps out from sloss furnaces, when the sun jolted me: long spokes out of thick clouds, lines out of ether, yellow-white out of blue-white, light blaring through. Like the image on the cover of The Book in contemporary Christian stores, like the white light people describe from near-death experiences. It was almost too trite to be true.  But the sky that day was too striking to dismiss. I couldn’t see the circle-shape of the sun, just the light, breaking through the clouds in lines—not a diffuse brightness, but stark, blinding rays, breaking me open to something. I couldn’t look right at it, and I couldn’t look away.

Is that what the priest means when he says heaven is open to us? Is that what we mean when we say, in the Nicene Creed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead”?

I saw Aunt Elene’s body in a back room of the intensive care unit in a hospital in Alexandria, a few hours after she died in a coma. Elene, who used to pray through the Virgin Mary for healing for my father and, to his exasperation, for repair for the dishwasher. Elene, who died, I like to think, much like Mary: She fell asleep and went to heaven.

And we got to say goodbye. “Maesalaama” my uncle said, go in peace, in Arabic. “Hanshoofik fiy’l sama’,” we’ll see you in heaven.

“Au revoir,” I said to Elene—French was our common denominator of language. “Chez le Bon Dieu,” at God’s home, the way she would say heaven. I said goodbye to her mouth, agape like a fish, goodbye to the last sign of life on her body: the blood crusting over the cracks in her lips, her mouth healing from the agitation of the respirator.

I saw Elene’s body again in her casket. Her hands were drawn like the feet of a dead sparrow I’d seen, her mouth sealed shut as its beak. Traces of the crusted blood that hadn’t come off the corners of her mouth in the washing of the body. And the red-blackening edges of the petals of the roses, already darkening, in her casket. I dropped in a faded picture of the Virgin Mary I’d found on her bedside table, for the life of the world to come.

And we said goodbye again. “Maesalaama…Hanshoofik fiy’l sama’…Au revoir, chez le Bon Dieu,” Goodbye, until we see you in heaven.

*

If heaven is the highest common denominator among Christians, then I’ll tolerate all I cannot stomach about the church. I’ll keep looking up to the sky or the ceiling, keep saying the parts of the creed I believe, to make them come true: We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.