On Tradition, Or, Same-Sex Marriage, Seen Through A Telescope April 10, 2009

Dangerous Things are happening in America these days, we are told, and the once-innocent citizens of Iowa and Vermont have already been exposed to the hazard…and now it looks as though the contagion might spread to States across New England.

But lucky for us, our friends on the Right are here again to save to save us from…(insert horror film music here)…

…The Gay.

The Gay, it turns out, want the opportunity to marry.

Among other complaints, our friends on the Right feel this will destroy religious tradition, which will ultimately destroy first Christianity, then the Nation. Therefore, religious tradition must be protected at all costs.

Well as it turns out, there are some people from our past who know a few things about religious traditions and how they distort reality—and today, we’ll examine the lessons they have to teach us.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

–“The King James Bible”, Ecclesiastes 1:5

“…I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or Moon or my telescope.”

–“Through which the satellites of Jupiter were visible”, Galileo Galilei

“The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.”

–From the Catholic Church’s indictment of Galileo Galilei, 1633

So you get up every day and look up at the sky, and it’s obvious that the sun starts out over here…and at the end of the day it ends up over there.

Aristotle and Ptolemy figured it all out: each planet was placed on its own “sphere”, the earth in the center, and everything rotating around it; each planet (and the sun) inside the other, with the stars on the outside, in a Celestial Sphere”…all of this resembling Russian “Matryoshka” dolls.

And it’s no surprise that this interpretation of the motion of planets and the sun became not just “common sense”, but the official position of the Roman Catholic Church. After all, it was in the Bible, it was something you could see every day, and as the Greeks would have told you, it was logically “beautiful”—and who could want better proof than that?

To make a long story short, a Polish-born Church Canon named Nicolas Copernicus did. In 1543, near the end of his life, he released the book “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium” (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”), which suggested that all the planets, including the Earth, actually orbit the Sun.

It took another 40 years before someone would challenge Dogma on this point in a “threatening” way, but by 1584 Giordano Bruno’s “The Ash Wednesday Supper” was considered challenging enough to earn him the Heretic’s Fork…just before he was burned alive on the order of the Church.

By 1616 Galileo Galilei was being warned by the Catholic Church to stop talking about what he was seeing through his telescopes; a moon that was not a perfect sphere and the viewing of the phases of Venus being just two of his problematic observations.

Of course, the real reason all this was so problematic was because there were those in the Church who felt that the Word of God was to be interpreted literally…which meant that anyone who challenged either the text of the Bible or Church Dogma in any way had to be both factually wrong…and an enemy of the Faith.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

–Groucho Marx, from the movie “Duck Soup”

Despite the warning, Galileo wouldn’t let it go. He kept observing, and he kept writing, which led to his attempt, in 1632, to obtain a license to publish the “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”…which led to his being hauled before the Inquisition…which led, in June of 1633, to him forswearing any of his previous beliefs, presumably to avoid the Heretic’s Fork himself.

The Church was able to hold all this together for another half-century—but Isaac Newton essentially “won the argument” with the publication of his three editions of the “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” from 1686 to 1742.

Many of you will recall that the Catholic Church was in fact destroyed by this chink in the armor of Biblical literalism, with the Church actually ceasing operations in 1802.

Obviously, I’m kidding—but the fact that nothing terrible happened hasn’t stopped any number of religious leaders in this country (and their followers, for that matter) from claiming that allowing same-sex marriages will have the same impact on faith in America today.

Which brings us to the moral of today’s story: the next time someone tells you that same-sex marriages will destroy religious traditions…that the world as we know it will come to a horrible end…and that anyone with any “common sense” can see that for themselves…tell ‘em to go get a telescope and get over it.

On The 12 Steps, Or, The Fringe Is Smarter Than The Lampshade September 2, 2007

Hello, I’m Fake C., and I’m a member of the Lefty Fringe.

Even though I’ve been attending these meetings for awhile, I need to better understand how I came to be in this situation, so here goes…

It all started when I was reading about this George Bush guy that was running for President. This woman who used to write about Texas politics and its quirky nature put up a series of stories that gave you the impression that there was nothing good about this guy.

So I voted for Al Gore, because (I thought) he would make a better candidate. It turns out it was just a sign that I’m a member of the Lefty Fringe.

Don’t get me wrong-it’s not as if I haven’t sought help…but it just isn’t helping.

The news isn’t all bad.

I’ve been able to, with the help of my Conservative friends, admit that I’m addicted to hating America and all it stands for, which was a tough first step, but a necessary one.

I’ve also been able to recognize that the higher spiritual power of basic human morality can give me the strength to continue to seek a better future for America-and to realize that I have to work hard to own my government.

But then things start to get a bit fuzzy.

I’m supposed to be able to examine and make amends for my past errors, and I just can’t figure out what I’ve been doing wrong. They say a mentor can help you identify your past mistakes-would you like to help by telling me where I went off the track?

I remember thinking way back in 2001 that North Korea was not really as big a threat as this Administration seemed to want us to believe, and I don’t think I was wrong about that. But if you believed that point of view, you were a member of the Lefty Fringe.

I remember thinking that rolling back environmental protections was a bad thing; but lots of smart folks thought my complaining made no sense, suggesting once again that I’m stuck out there on that Lefty Fringe.

And then there was September 11th. I heard Condoleezza Rice telling me that this sort of attack was “unprecedented”, even though crashing a plane into a building as a terrorist action had already been attempted in 1994-seven years earlier. Of course only Lefty Fringers would doubt such a highly placed individual…but that’s me, I guess.

And I’ll never forget the day my friend Steve and I talked about how he was going to an anti-war protest…and I told him he was wasting his time. Being on the Lefty Fringe and all, I was pretty sure this decision had already been made (maybe even before Mr. Bush came into office), and our opinion wouldn’t mean squat. But he’s even farther over on the Fringe than I, so he gave it his best shot…

And why Iraq, anyway?

We on the Lefty Fringe knew that almost all the hijackers were Saudi.
We knew the “aluminum tube” story was bogus, and if we didn’t know it already, in this case even the Administration’s own experts were trying to tell us so.

You know what else we knew? We knew that Shi’a would get revenge on the Sunni that had been oppressing them once Saddam was out of the way, and that a civil war that we could not control would be the result. We might even find ourselves in a quagmire, some thought; killing American troops to remove a guy who “wasn’t worth much”. Of course, there were lots of people who thought having these sorts of doubts was enough to not just put us on the Lefty Fringe, but to make us enemies of the State.

Here’s something else us Lefty Fringers figured out: if you used to run a horse racing association, and have no emergency management experience, you might not be the best candidate to run FEMA.

Lefty Fringers were confused to be in the mainstream when that awful Mr. Clinton was running Federal surpluses; and we are now back in our normal place with the far more economically traditional Mr. Bush’s Federal budget deficits, which seem to be in place to go on for many years to come.

Here’s the craziest part of all: I’m forced these days to defend the Constitution and the concept of separation of powers while my Conservative friends tell me I’m just giving aid and comfort to my enemies for my Lefty Fringe ideas. Here’s where I get really confused: these days, my Conservative friends suddenly trust the Government to do the right thing, while I’ve remained the principled skeptic.

I even use Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as examples of Presidents who understood that talking to our enemies is the smart thing to do, while my Conservative friends (who you might think would be Reagan supporters) tell me I’m some sort of appeaser for my thoughts. Thoughts like this Richard Nixon quote (substitute Iran for China, if you will) “. . . we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors…” are somehow considered ill-informed and inapplicable in today’s world.

Even today, apparently because of my addiction to hating America and all it stands for, I don’t think we’re making the slightest bit of progress in this “phony war on terrorism”. (As it turns out, I’m not the only one who hates America.)

Now if I really seek recovery, I’m supposed to make amends for my errors, and adopt a new code of conduct; but how do I do that?

Am I supposed to be sorry that I knew in advance that the Administration was wrong on every one of these issues?

Should I apologize to Pat Robertson for doubting that invading Iraq would be a good idea? Should I encourage my own godson to reenlist, knowing that this war is just about over-that “enormous success” is assured because the insurgency is in its last throes?

Should I adopt the traditional Conservative worldview that just assumes the Government should be trusted when it comes to war because Government knows what it’s doing at all times? That the Government will always be the guardian of the best interests of the citizens?

Maybe it’s because I’m addicted to hating my country so much, but I just can’t seem to do it. Instead I mistrust Government, and I want to control it, rather than the other way around. I hate this country so much that I want a Government that isn’t running around “nation-building” every chance it gets. Most of all, I hate America so much that I want other countries to admire us, respect us, and maybe even join into coalitions with us-to work on other global problems that even our own EPA recognizes will have huge impacts worldwide.

So that’s my testimony for today, and if someone will just sign my slip I’ll see you all next meeting.