julesjones: I believe in safe, sane, and consensual Christianity. by Zeborah@DW - gankable (Christianity)
Posted for Pentecost at the Bearing Witness community on Livejournal and Dreamwidth. Comments welcome at the copies on the Livejournal comm and Dreamwidth comm. You can comment anonymously on both.

***

Creationists will tell you that Genesis says that the world and all within it was created in seven days. Some of them will tell you that it was created specifically in 4004 BC, following the Ussher chronology. They hate the very concept of evolution, seeing it as a denial of God.

Some atheists will tell you that the evidence for evolution is all around us, and thus anyone who believes in God is a fool, because the Bible is clearly a lie.

They have both fallen into the same trap -- literalism.

The Bible is not a single book. It is a collection of works by multiple authors, written in different places over many, many years, edited, re-edited, and translated through multiple languages. Those works include history written by the winners, history written by the losers, genealogical data, poetry, philosophical musings, just-so stories, and mythology. Yes, mythology.

"Myth" is not an insult or denial. It is a description of a thing which is not literally true, but which nevertheless shows us truth through symbolism. The Bible is filled with myths and fables. Some of them are explicitly labelled as such, for Jesus was a great one for the parable as teaching tool. If you insist on taking every word in the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of God, Ur Doin It Rong. Not least because there are multiple contradictions in the Bible.

One set of those contradictions is in Genesis. There are two creation stories, following the same pattern but with different and contradictory details. No problem at all, if you see Genesis as another parable, a (divinely inspired) teaching tool rather than an accurate or even inaccurate historical record.

As it happens, the Christian creation myth is quite a good match for the current scientific understanding of the evolution of the universe, if you read it as allegory rather than history. (Sufficiently so that one Big Name Astronomer campaigned passionately against the Big Bang Theory to his dying day, in part because he was an atheist who felt that it gave too much credence to the notion of a Creator.) That's not really relevant. The job of Genesis is to give us a tool we can use to think about a deep philosophical problem. It's not supposed to be a locked door barring our way.

We have, over the last few thousand years, used the minds God gave us to deepen our understanding and appreciation of God's creation. It is not one tiny, flat world at the centre of a complex piece of clockwork providing a show for our sole benefit a few thousand feet, or perhaps a few thousand miles, up in the sky. It is a vast and ancient universe, with many wonderful things in it besides us. It is giant galaxies and tiny microbes. It is deep time going back at current estimates some 12 to 14 thousand million years for Creation as a whole, and perhaps 4.5 thousand million years just for our own small pebble in the sky. It is certainly not all about us as the pinnacle of Creation. And it is, for now, beyond our complete comprehension. That last can be frightening, but it's also inspiring.

For me, there is a God, and evolution is Its tool. Having a Creation that is 12 aeons old and wide to contemplate in awe and joy as part of appreciating its Creator, yet in fear trying to force it down into the narrow confines of that tiny clockwork toy -- that to me is a sorrow and a burden that should be laid down.

God said, "Let there be light". And there was. And it was, and is, beautiful to behold.

(Comments welcome at the copies on the Livejournal and Dreamwidth versions of the Bearing Witness comm. You can comment anonymously on both.)


Ultraviolet image of the large face on spiral galaxy NGC 3344 - image from Nasa JPL.

(Image from JPL Nasa.)
julesjones: (Default)
So, the Pope's published the pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland. It's an amazing piece of blame-shifting, and I recommend to you Natural20's analysis of the letter, with further commentary by Sciamanna. A hearty dose of "what they said".

Now, I'm an Anglican. Anglican, not Church of England, because I was baptised in the Church of Ireland, which is a separate and autonomous province within the Anglican Communion. It's clear that I am not likely to look upon the doings of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland with an entirely unjaundiced eye. However, I remember reading about this pattern of cover-up gradually coming to light in Canada -- in the 1980s. It was the same story that's become so familiar since, from one country to the next; the victims and their families sworn to secrecy on pain of excommunication, the rapists quietly moved on to another parish when it became too difficult to keep the lid on rumour.

And Ratzinger has the damnable cheek to blame this on a mix of secularisation and Vatican II?

I mean that damnable quite literally. This is not the product of the liberals within and without the church having some sway. It is entirely the opposite. It is the product of a hierarchy obsessed with its own status and power doing anything, anything, to preserve their grip on authority. These cases run back to at least the 1950s in Ireland, and that's the ones we know about. Don't try blaming Vatican II for that. Vatican II tried to tackle the mindset that leads to cover-up. The organisational crime here is simple and obvious -- it is that of putting image before substance, of clinging to earthly pomp and power rather than easing suffering that was well within their power to mend at least a little. There are one or two Biblical verses on that subject, though they seem to have slipped the memory of those involved.

No organisation can entirely eradicate those within its structure who will abuse the power given them by their position. It would not be fair to blame a church simply for having abusers within its ranks. What a church can be blamed for is the way it handles cases that come to light. And the handling here was utterly amoral.

I can understand a church trying to hush things up out of embarrassment. I might not approve of a church simply removing an abuser from contact with those he is likely to abuse, but I can understand and forgive an attempt to restrain him within the confines of the organisation rather than without. But what the Roman Catholic Church did was not restrain such men, but actively enable them. Their victims were silenced by threats, they were provided with easy access to fresh prey. And this was not the work of one rogue diocese, but institutional policy, corrupt and criminally complicit from top to bottom.

And even now, the institutional reaction is to avoid accepting moral responsibility. As individuals, as an organisation. "I was only obeying orders." Benedict's letter is the closest I've seen any senior figure come to saying honestly, "We fucked up, big time, and we're sorry," and even he is using it to say that the answer to the problem is greater lay obedience to that very hierarchy that failed to protect the innocent.

They have no moral authority. They have shamed not just themselves, but those priests who have faithfully tried to keep God's word. There can be no trust where trust was so shamefully used, and honest priests will have to bear that burden now. And that too is a sin, if not so grievous a sin as the enabling of abuse, for there are many who have found comfort in religion who will now no longer have it.
julesjones: (Default)
This week we have had not one but two romance blogs start talking about why there is so little f/f romance about. And in both cases, the usual thing has come up with some people claiming that the only conceivable reason why straight women won't read f/f is because they are terrified that they will like it and this will make them lesbians. Even after other women have posted to the thread that it's because guys turn them on and women don't, and thus f/f is *boring* if they're only reading it for the porn. Not repellent. Boring.

This... is annoying me. Because I'm one of the women who finds f/f boring if I'm only reading it for the porn. I'm Kinsey 0. I don't find women's bodies disgusting. I just don't find them a turn-on. So many books, so little time, and why would I want to waste time reading about women slapping their bits together when I could be spending it reading about men doing likewise?

And the theory that bi and lesbian women liking m/m is proof that we've all internalised hatred of women's bodies doesn't wash either. There are *other* reasons for women to find m/m more interesting to read than f/f, regardless of their personal sexual orientation, and for some it's all about the hurt/comfort and emo!porn. Women are allowed to express love and fear and other squidgy emotions, and men aren't. So it's fun to watch them being forced to open up and deal with those emotions. For many readers that's part of the point of the romance genre in the first place. M/m gives you double the man-angst for your money, while f/f gives you none. I'll point here at my Girls who like boys who do boys essay and its comment thread for a more detailed discussion of this and other reasons for the appeal of m/m.

Which isn't to say that I don't read f/f stories. I do. I've read some superb f/f fanfic, and published some of it in my zine series.[*] But what I'm reading there is generally not PlotWhatPlot. A lot of commercial f/f is PWP, or at least doesn't have any other story elements that are sufficiently interesting to me personally to make up for my lack of interest in the sex scenes. This isn't just because it's f/f -- I react the same way to m/f contemporary romance. I generally don't read either unless I have specific recommendations from people I trust, because prior experience suggests that it is far more likely to be a boring waste of my time or an active wallbanger than something I'll really enjoy.

Yes, some women do indeed read m/m but steer clear of f/f because they're homophobic, or because of internalised misogynism. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a liking for real phalluses is just a liking for cock.


[*] I'm not linking to examples because the very thing that makes them good reads for me means that they may not work for people not familiar with the fandom.

ETA: I'm using "porn" here in the fanfic/sf fannish sense, which doesn't have the derogatory connotations that it does in romance fandom. Given last week's explosions in the romance blogsphere about the word, I thought I'd better clarify.
julesjones: (Default)
Guess what. The hoop's just been raised again. RWA has just put out new definitions for vanity publishing and professional publishing in which epublishers are labelled vanity presses by definition. Here's part of the paragraph listing the criteria which will immediately class a publisher as vanity:

"publishers whose primary means of offering books for sale is through a publisher-generated Web site;"

In other words, any epublisher is a vanity press in RWA's eyes, even if it isn't a vanity press by any sane definition involving "money flows towards the author". Because this is how epublishing works -- the primary means of offering ebooks for sale is through a publisher-generated website, even where the publisher also uses distributors such as Fictionwise.

Obviously there were far too many of us "vanity"-published authors who were managing to make $2000 in royalties from a single title.

I do not have an issue with RWA deciding to demand that a publisher offer a significant advance to every author as one of the qualifications for being considered a pro publisher. It's what SFWA does, after all, and there's a sound rationale behind that (though I really, really doubt that said rationale is the reason for RWA doing it). I wouldn't have a problem with RWA saying that my publisher is a small press -- there are many highly respected small presses in science fiction.

However, I have a serious problem with RWA declaring my publisher to be a vanity press purely on the grounds that it uses the distribution method that is most appropriate to the format the books are published in.

This is a very clear message to epublished authors, no matter how successful they may be -- the RWA not only doesn't want us, it's prepared to tar us as vanity-published to make sure we get the message that we're riff-raff and not welcome.

And in order to deliver that deliberate insult, RWA has quite thoroughly muddied the definition of vanity press. How on earth is that supposed to protect writers who are trying to understand the warning signs to watch out for? When RWA has such a blatantly stupid criterion that labels legitimate small presses as vanity presses, then authors may start wondering if the other "vanity press" criteria they list are really so bad. And some of us already have enough work trying to explain the difference between legitimate small press and vanity press to new people on the writer forums.

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