Sick of The Plague

How long has it been since I’ve written anything? I’m afraid to look. I’ve not been inspired lately.

UNTIL NOW.

No, actually I’m lying. I’m not really inspired now either. This is a guilt motivated post. I’m here. I exist. This blog hasn’t died. It’s in hibernation waiting for ideas to percolate.

The Nonbelieving Literati book choice, The Plague, couldn’t get me going. I found it dull. I had hoped for some good post-apocalypse, Lucifer’s Hammer, kind of excitement, which is what perhaps set my expectations on the wrong path. The death in the book was too removed. Body counts listed in the paper told of the rising crisis, but it made it easy for me and the characters to ignore it and wonder when things would get back to normal.

The reporter trapped in the town was supposed to, I guess, give me some sense of urgency. Being cut off from his lover in Paris he’s motivated to try and find a way to circumvent the bureaucracy and be allowed to leave. I felt more that he was driven by a sense of entitlement than any true feeling for his lover.

The doctor goes around his business, exhausted and overworked, but mechanical. He recommends the government do more to handle the situation, but seems to have a fatalistic acceptance when they don’t.

Based on the other Literati reviews, the book does pick up after the point I abandoned it. As The Greenbelt wrote,

This book, to use a cliché, has its picture in the dictionary next to "starts slowly".

And for me, that’s also where it ended. I couldn’t find anyone to care about or connect with. The impression I had of the town was hot, dusty, dull, and industrial. Not a place I’d want to spend time in neither in person nor in my mind.

Had they at least thrown in a zombie or two I could have been excited, but I guess zombies don’t qualify as high literature.

Rakhat Rising

The third book to be discussed by the Nonbelieving Literati is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

When human beings are faced with certain transcendent experiences, we seem to instinctually jump to a language that is spiritual or supernatural to explain it. We reach a point that surpasses our limits of experience and instinctively reach to define the void beyond. Some will call it God, assigning intellect and purpose where there is none. For me that point beyond ourselves, that brink of space between what we know and the potential of what lays outside has no name, no purpose, no reason. All I’m left with are feelings that I lack words to adequately describe. Small words like ‘awe’ or ‘hope’ are merely the click of a pebble bouncing down the sides of well it can’t possibly fill. I have a euphoric feeling of standing at the edge of the abyss about to take flight. I get these feelings when contemplating the potential future of space exploration, such as the documentary series Mars Rising. For the religious, these are the feelings they get when contemplating the nature of god and his purpose for creation. To-may-to -– to-mah-to. What does it matter how we classify this experience?

In the case of The Sparrow, the difference in classification could be compared almost to erotomania. The characters, faced with the transcendent, songs from another world, are swept into believing their experiences were God’s will. Driven by Father Emilio Sandoz, they rapidly go from finding an alien transmission from Alpha Centauri to being part of a Jesuit missionary team traveling and making contact with them. Father Emilio:

went sleepless, unable to decide which was harder to live with: the idea that he had started all this, or the possibility that God had. The only way he could reassure himself during these midnight debates was to believe that wiser heads than his were making the decisions. If he could not put his faith directly in God, who remained unknowable, he could place it in the structure of the Society and in his superiors.

He starts the endeavor, driving it forward, and then counts on the will of God or the Jesuits when it spirals out of his hands. Even the supposedly agnostic members of the group fall prey to his contagious belief.

In the beginning their mission seems divinely driven. Impossible obstacles are easily overcome. As one character comments,

Kinda Spooky, ain’t it. Hell of a lot of coincidences. Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin’ on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn’t get there on his own.

Members of the group look to Father Emilio and see the beginnings of a literal saint. Yet reality and misunderstandings of this alien world take their toll as all but one of the naive missionaries are killed, their leaving only Father Emilio alive, damaged and gang raped and a massacre of alien tribes corrupted by concepts brought with the missionaries. Deluded into thinking that they were part of a divine plan, they falsely operated under the assumption that each step they made was blessed and guided. Instead of smallpox, the Sparrow missionaries brought vegetable gardens. As with previous missions on Earth, indigenous beings are often destroyed by unintended and unimagined consequences.

After returning to Earth, Father Emilio explains to Jesuit Inquiry,

The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances is that I have no one to despise by myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.

The author, Russell, uses the Bible verse Mathew 10:29,

Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it

as inspiration for the book’s title. The entire story could be summed up from her perspective, as another character responds in the book,

But the sparrow still falls.

From my perspective, thinking of a future mission to Mars, I’m glad we are being guided by science and reason rather than religion. There will still most certainly be unintended and unimagined consequences, possibly even horrible catastrophic ones, but at least we will be going in with eyes wide open and in search of the truth. The sparrows that go to Mars may still fall, but at least they’ll be educated, trained, and prepared sparrows.

Julian, Jesus, and Sneetches

Being raised in the Catholic Church I attended years of CCD, where I learned about the Nicene Creed. However, the view of history I was presented with was this: Jesus passed the torch of his ministry onto Peter, the first Pope. The Pope is the direct conduit to God, therefore everything he tells us is the same as God telling us. Years after Jesus death, there were some differences of opinion on the specifics of the relationship of Jesus to God. It was like a sociable disagreement among friends. So the Council of Nicea came together where the Bishops prayed and received direct influence from God and wrote out the Nicene Creed and we know it’s true because God wouldn’t let his Church go on the wrong path.

If this were like the “good old days” where the Church had full control of what was printed and what was taught, I’d probably still believe this. Ironically, it was my desire to be a purer Catholic and my access to a more secular view of history that ultimately led to my Atheism.

So it was very interesting to me to read Julian by Gore Vidal, a work of historical fiction written primarily in the first person dealing with the life of the Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus, who reigned 360-363 CE.

Julian, before becoming Emperor, is raised under house arrest because he and his family are perceived threats, most of who are eventually “removed”, to emperor Constantius II. Unlike his father, Constantine, who favored adherents to the Nicene Creed, Constantius II was actually for the opposing doctrine – returning from exile those who’d been banished by his father and banishing, or worse, those who followed the Creed. Julian, indoctrinated to the pro-Arian viewpoint, is schooled that Jesus was alike in substance but not the same as God. Julian lives in a world where subtitle differences of belief, to my eyes, are magnified into major political battles for power that shift faster than Sneetches running through a Star-On Star-Off Machine. That the Catholic Church of today is now of the Star-On variety has nothing to do the actual validity of the Star.

While Julian rejects the Galilean religion, he fully embraces the mystery religion Mithraism. During his reign he attempts to undo the damage that the Galileans have done to the Pagan temples, returning his Empire into one of full religious tolerance (with the exception of those uppity Galileans.) At first thought, I could fantasize “if only he had succeeded” in turning the tide of Christianity’s influence on the modern world. But considering how much of the Hellenistic world the Christian world had absorbed, had Mithraism or Hellenism won the day instead, it’s hard for me to distinguish how exactly the modern world might be improved. Would we have eventually stopped the practice of animal sacrifice? Would sex be any less taboo? Would women have fared more equally? I’m not knowledgeable enough to know. We could just as easily be at war because of a President who’d been advised by an oracle as one who talks to Jesus.

Julian is an interesting perspective on the shifting nature of religious belief. The religious super-powers of today come to dominate not because of the veracity of their doctrine or the guiding hand of a supernatural being, but because of the power struggles of the past and the forced conversions that followed.