Wrestling with Religion

  In the Hebrew Bible, God is the author of of human suffering. He promises to bless his people if they obey him, but, if they disobey, he will send "fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses" (Deuteronomy 28:59). Evil in the sense of human suffering, even if disproportionate and personally undeserved, is not the Devil's work, but the Lord's. God takes full credit. Suffering is punishment for disobedience either by the sufferers or by their ancestors--tribal suffering for tribal guilt, even down to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 34:7).   In a modern law court, this would be shamefully unjust. It may describe the way economic advantages transmit through families, but it is no excuse for deliberately hurting the innocent. Human justice is violated when God kills the first son of David and Bathsheba to punish their adultery and then blesses their second son, Solomon, and allows the three to ...

    Writing about Isis, the Great Goddess of Egypt, punted memories back to the 1960s, when my libido was strong enough to generate religious feelings in the fashion of D. H. Lawrence, especially in the presence of a woman who still delights me fifty years later. The goddess named in my first poem is Isis' mother Nut, who represents the arc of the sky, perhaps the Milky Way. The poem was published later in the Winter 1986 issue of Yellow Silk: Journal of the Erotic Arts , a copy of which is open before me and is really yellow now because it was printed on newsprint. LETTER IN EARLY MARCH The sleet fell yesterday. The thin- leaved bushes sang like skin as I moved in you. Brown buds darkened with the sudden bloods that drum our spiral dance, efface our being in the ancient race. Like Geb and Nut, Earth and Sky, we merge, enfold a world, and die. Let me be Sky--apologies to old Egyptian--let my knees be wind, and let a pubic cloud halo m...

The cult of Isis Out of more than 31,000 verses in the Christian Bible, five have been read to condemn consensual homosexual practice. As discussed in a previous post, the parallel stories of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19) and of the Levite's concubine (Judges 19) condemn savage violations of the obligation to give hospitality to strangers. Same-sex rape is threatened in the first story, but heterosexual rape in the second one demonstrates that this isn't the point. Violence against guests is evil regardless of gender, and condemning such violence says nothing about mutual, loving sexuality. Two verses in Leviticus prohibit lying with a man as with women (18:22; 20:13), but this is framed as a purity rule required of Hebrews in the Promised Land (18:24) and appears as a transgression nowhere else in the Old Testament. Homosexual practice itself is apparently not egregious enough to mention elsewhere. Prophets such as Amos condemn Israel for its transgressions, but focus ...

Water Children from Kira Dane's film "Mizuko" Years ago, when I was a Roman Catholic, I listened to sermon in which a priest attacked pro-choice Catholic politicians. He said of one, "I want to ask him when he thinks life begins." My response was that, well, I'm no biologist, but scientists have found traces of life that are 4.2 billion years old, so life apparently began over four billion years ago. All life since then has been that same ancient life mutating through an uninterrupted chain of transmission. That is to say that between one individual "life" and another there was no gap of dead matter. All life is a single river of living tissues. Every separate "life" begins with the form and matter of life before it.          Of course, this isn't what the priest meant. He didn't mean living matter as defined by biologists--anything with the capacity to metabolize, self-repair, and replicate. He assumed, presumably, the theologica...