Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

I've added a new link to the Biblical links down the side. It's for the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls, which is a joint effort of Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which maintains the famous Shrine of the Book. The project is a bit of a work in progress. At the moment, you can view 5 scrolls: the Great Isaiah Scroll, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll, the Community Rule Scroll and the Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll. Others will be added progressively. When I first heard of the project I thought all the texts would be both searchable and come with translations. On the initial offering, however, it seems I was wrong. All five scrolls currently available are searchable and magnifiable so that they can be examined in exacting detail. However an English text is only provided for the Great Isaiah Scroll. The only problem is that it's not a translation. The text is instead the JPS translation of the Masoretic Hebrew version of Isaiah. However as the site itself says, the Great Isaiah Scroll contains many variants from the Masoretic text, more than 2600 of them and so a person just exploring the scroll online without checking the explanatory material can be misled into thinking that what they are reading is a translation of this, the oldest relatively complete text of Isaiah. If you play around a bit more with the some of the links you can find a parallel English translation of the first 5 chapters of Qumran Isaiah in comparison with the JPS translation. Peter Flint has translated the entire Isaiah Scroll into English and the first 5 chapters are taken from that. Presumably copywright restrictions meant that no more was possible. My own personal view is that Bibles should have Isaiah in parallel: Qumran and Masoretic and perhaps even Greek/LXX and the Targum Isaiah too. That way readers will come to appreciate the diversity within the greater textual gestalt that each biblical book represents, will realise that the biblical texts are not set in stone but have always been fluid, that there is pretty much no such thing as a definitive or standard text form handed down for all time. 

It's a shame that the other scrolls also didn't come with an English translation to give casual readers better access to the texts in question. I have a couple of  English translations, the Vermes one and the Wise/Abegg/Cook translation too. The latter is well thumbed. So I presume the people behind the project expect that we will all have copies of one or other of these translations to crosscheck to. Perhaps when more scrolls are on site then direct English translations will become available. I certainly hope so.

But still check out the site. It's quite a fascinating resource now and will likely over time become a rich and invaluable resource too.

Some Thoughts on my 59th Solar Return

First off, I want to apologise for being so infrequent in my posts here lately. I've had all manner of good intentions to write. I've thought about a range of topics I had wanted to write about, still want to write about, in fact. I hope I will resume writing about them soon. I'm hoping this post might even be a trigger for me to get back into blogging more regularly. But the first half of this year has been a very intense time. I said to my flatmate the other day that I felt like I had just finished a very heavy semester of teaching. Unfortunately I haven't been teaching and I've been unemployed now for a little over a month. The job I had been doing was a reprise of the casual research assistant work I was doing late last year and which I really enjoyed. It combined reading books, internet surfing and research cum literary detective work, all of which I found really satisfying - I was even learning things. But alas the money ran out and so the job finished end of May. The work itself wasn't intense but alongside it I've had a very busy time partly of community involvement through the LGBT History Action Group; we organised and were involved with a number of projects and big events over the last few months. On top of that there's been my work in editing the festschrift which has certainly kept me busy. And then to cap it all off I've also written an essay for an anthology on same-sex marriage. I was working on that mainly last month. And then I've experienced some demanding personal times too; I won't go into them all here now, but it's been a time of grief and joy, of uncertainties, of challenges to inner resolves, of doubts, of feeling separated from loved ones and sense of loneliness arising, of all the anxieties and disconnects that come from precarity.

With all of that happening, it's felt more like a chore to try and write anything, to summon the energy to write anything. This month, with all the intense times behind me for now, I've declared my holiday month. My holiday is courtesy of being unemployed but it feels like a holiday nonetheless. This last week I've been adjusting to this holiday mode. To taking it a bit easy. In one sense it allowed me to let my guard down and I underwent a sudden surge of topsy turvy emotional intensity. For a little while I was worried that I might be succumbing to the old depression. After all I no longer had anything to distract me, plus the stresses of the year so far had me pretty wired up. Hopefully I've settled somewhat now, at least I'm feeling some kind of equilibrium set in again (although every once and a while I feel a press of tears at the back of my eyes, bubbling up from the cellars of my heart).

A few days ago I experienced my 59th solar return. The solar return is when the sun returns to the position it occupied when a  person is born. The solar return generally occurs on or around a person's birthday. Astrologically, the position of the planets and the new disposition of ascendant and house cusps and related derived points at the time  of the sun's return to its natal position, gives an overall flavour for the year ahead. Unsurprisingly, my solar return chart is bedevilled with contradictions. I guess I'm writing this to explore and make sense of those contradictions.

Before I say more on the chart, I should first explore some more my holiday mode. In part, it's a kind of kick-back, take it easy and bugger the consequences mode. But it's also a strange lethargy, which is why I'm surprised I've started writing right now. Even a couple of days ago,the thought of trying to write something would make me feel exhausted and disinterested both, somewhat reminiscent of the depth of depression last year. But only reminiscent. I'm not in that depression now (although I know it lurks and sometimes pokes its paws through the rips anxiety causes in my emotional fabric). In one sense, I should be. I'm unemployed and at an almost unemployable age. All the career aspirations I had once, are gone now. Furthermore I have no idea of what sort of work to do. I applied for some jobs last month and explored some other employment options but all nada, not even an interview with the job applications. My confidence is down in the depths, in part because I have no enthusiasm, and yes there's self-doubt too. I look at job notices every day, generating a strange mixture of boredom, anxiety and contempt, the latter because many of them seem to be couched in the language of spin or they seem utterly unreasonable in their expectations. Maybe I feel this way because I don't feel any sort of ambition towards any of them, let alone a sense of vocational attraction. None of my main skills seem to be relevant for just about any of them and those that might have some sort of possible match for some of my experience are the ones that I feel have the unreasonable expectations. That's the work scene. My personal life has seen a number of challenges too. I won't go into them but I've been challenged in some of the resolves with which I started the year in quite surprising ways. I've stuck to them nevertheless but I've had to undergo major self-examination, reviewing quite a lot about my life. Lots of doubt, plenty of doubt, exacerbated by feeling cut off, without community. I feel quite disconnected from the society in which I live - I can't even watch TV because I don't feel any interest in the social worlds it purveys. And as for contemporary politics, well I just can't connect - it's  all so faux, so vacuous, so confected. The less said the better, actually. (But I am pleasantly relieved with the carbon tax package the federal government has negotiated - it's not the best, but it's not bad nonetheless).

So to return to my solar return for this year. As I said before it's quite bedevilled with contradictions. While the Sun will always be in Cancer everything else about it, the way it fits in the Return chart will be quite different from the birth chart. This year the sign of Leo was coming up over the horizon when the Sun returned to its natal position, thus placing the Sun in the 12th house of my Return chart. The 12th House is known as the house of solitude or sorrow, and is associated with spiritual pursuits, imaginative endeavours, behind the scenes activities, but also hospitalisation, confinement, self-undoing. In the Return chart it signifies a year of spiritual pursuits and development, service to others, but usually work done  out of view, also research and writing. It can signify work on reconciliation, of healing old wounds. The Sun is the ruler of Leo, which is the rising sign in the chart so the Sun is the ruler of the Return chart so making the 12th house themes pretty dominant for the coming year. Here, I have to admit I have been thinking a lot about spirituality lately and how to re-orient life around a more spiritual basis, and I'm thinking here in some kind of shared way, because in many respects, nowadays, I seem to be living like a kind of a monk but without a monastery, or any sort of community at all. And when I say monastery, I refer to some kind of group living, with likeminded folks. But it's all quite nebulous (another 12th house word) at this stage.

But then Leo is rising in the chart. Leo is definitely not a reclusive, behind the scenes sign. It's out there, it wants to star, it's the performer, the leader; it's dramatic, optimistic, energetic. Furthermore it's not only conjunct my natal Mercury it's also conjunct the return Mercury too. Yep, my solar return takes place a day or so before my Mercury return. Mercury is all about communication and lots of it here, a double whammy intensified by being smack on the Ascendant. According to one source I read, this Mercury position highlights "communication, adaptability, education, travel,... This year will be full of mental activity, talk, letters, phone calls, writing, travel, movement, busy work, short trips, and frequent comings and goings". I'll also seem "more youthful, agile, quick-witted, and verbally expressive'! These Mercurial themes are given even more weight by the fact that the Ascendant degree falls in my natal 3rd house, the house of communication, amongst other things, and ruled by Mercury. The natal 3rd house is highlighted in the Return chart.

But that's not all. I also have the Moon rising in Leo which not only makes me more assertive and forthright but means I'm going to be a moody and emotional person too. I probably should apologise to everyone in advance, especially when I consider the mood swings I've had over the last couple of weeks. The Moon is also in a very tense opposition to Neptune which heightens confusion, despondency, sadness and self-deception, although  can also be more sensitive, compassionate, intuitive and imaginative.

Sun Moon and Ascendant are the three main power points in any chart and in this one they are quite contradictory. Reading solar returns is not my main skill,  but it looks like I'm going to be much more low-key but dealing with emotions much more. One source I read said that Moon in the first house indicates that the year ahead will be spent recovering from emotional trauma from the past; it is a year of recovery and emotional growth.  While another source said that the 12th house Sun indicates a year of preparation with recognition coming  the following year. If the Sun is in the 10th house in the following return it will mark career recognition, in the 9th it can mark publication. In my Return next year he Sun will be in my 8th house so I'm not really certain what that means. If anyone out there has any ideas let me know. 

This year, the Sun is also in a tense aspect to Saturn which indicates another year of struggle, of lean times, highlighted too by Saturn being in the Return 2nd house of resources, finances and values. Discipline and restrictions will be the order of this year ahead. And yet the Return part of Fortune is also in the 2nd and in positive aspect to the Return Midheaven. So there might be some more fortunate moments too. And there seems to be several indications of sudden changes or unexpected directions in a positive way in the Return chart too.

But the main thing I'm getting from the chart is to try and stick to my watchword I've adopted for this year and that's trust. Anxiety stems from uncertainty, feeling powerless, isolated and abandoned. Trust is the best antidote, trust in people and in life itself, for the more religious, trust in God. I've had a couple of crises this year and yet somehow, out of the blue, things got resolved, help came my way. I was in a state of panic close to meltdown on at least one occasion. But the help came really quite out of the blue, unexpectedly. I should also add that anxiety allows the old depressive beast, that black dog, to once again start nagging away, and that old black dog just loves tossing shit, to traduce the motivations, intentions of others, to run you down, to say that all the bad stuff is a result of you. But the moment you turn around and embrace the personal vulnerability and powerlessness and decide to trust no matter what, the black dog's power is broken. The anxiety dissipates and there's a chance for insight. And lets face it powerlessness is the reality of our lives. Acceptance is the only way to deal with it and acceptance is only possible through trust.

That's about it for now, I think. Obviously there's a whole lot more in the Return chart but if I was to discuss everything I'd be writing my own Solar Return report. I hope this piece will mark a new start on blogging for me because I do have plenty to write about. And my apologies if this piece seems too self-indulgent and boring.

The Rapture - the ultimate blasphemy

I want to start with an apology for things being so quiet here. I keep meaning to write and I have notes and some semi-completed posts but nothing is ready for posting. I've also started a private blog where I record all manner of ideas and thoughts  and personal impressions in a quite rough way. It will remain private open only to one or two others. For the astrologically minded it's also interesting to note that I have had a lot of transit activity in my 12th house of late and Jupiter remains there throughout the year so this kind of hidden writing world is probably an apt reflection of these transits. In addition, I also have been busy with a number of community and writing projects. The writing projects are all due for publication down the track next year again reflecting the the transit pattern too.

But I'm taking time out from all of that and writing a public post here today because of the international brouhaha over the  end of the world predictions of a silly elderly rich man in the US, Harold Camping (!). He declared that the Rapture would take place at 6pm on Saturday 21 May and from what I can make out, progressively time zone by time zone. What's more because he is a rich man he spent millions of dollars in an international advertising campaign promoting his message. By the Rapture, he referred to the idea, abroad in Protestant evangelical and Pentecostal movements that there will be a wholesale lifting off from the planet of the true believers, the saved, the born again to be taken up to Heaven by Jesus, body and soul (but apparently without clothing), there to wait until the Second Coming when they will return, a kind of immortal elite, to rule the planet alongside Jesus for a thousand years. Camping (!) also declared that the world itself would end in October and that for the vast majority of us left behind the coming months would be a dire time of disasters, misery and oppression before the Second Coming wipes the slate clean and we are all, presumably, cast into Hell. From his timetable, Camping (!) clearly holds a kind of pre-Wrath Rapture position unlike most Rapture believers who hold a Pre-Tribulation or Mid-Tribulation view. Camping (!) is also innovative  in that he teaches that the main trigger for the Rapture is the amount of homosexuality in the world. That it didn't happen I presume means that we queer folks have to work harder to make sure that this planet is riddled with homosexuality through and through.

Many people might think Camping (!) a fool and wonder why I would waste my time writing about this. He is a fool and the millions he spent on his promotion campaign could have been much better spent. He would have made a much better testament to his Lord if he had followed the Gospel dictum to sell all he had (no small fortune) to give it to the poor and embrace a life of poverty and prayer and works of mercy. Instead he traduced the gospels utterly and brought Christianity into complete disrepute. The most depressing thing is that he has played into simple media binaries, in this case Christians vs unbelievers/secularists/atheists/humanists with Camping (!) himself as a key exemplar of what Christianity is all about. And of course Camping (!) is an exemplar of a type of Christianity or I would say a perversion of Christianity that has taken root in the US and, with the US global hegemon, is spreading throughout the world, like a noxious toxic bloom. In my opinion it's a heresy of the worst order, a vile pernicious heresy that perverts and inverts the central Christian message. Thanks to Camping (!)  unfortunately a large proportion of of the world's population believe that this pernicious theology is normative, traditional Christianity. It's not, it's a 19th century aberration that took root in the United States in the mid-19th century in a time of major transformation and upheaval.

It's all based on a single word in the Christian scriptures. It's found in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and in the Greek in which it was written, the word is harpagesometha, 'we shall be taken away' or 'we shall be caught up', derived from the Greek verb harpazo. In the Latin translation the word is rapiemur, from the verb rapio. In the passage, Paul is talking about the very end, the final things of the world, the Second Coming and he says that when it occurs, first the dead will be raised up from their graves and then the living will be caught up from the earth to meet Jesus as he returns at the end of the age, which Paul and the audience for this letter considered imminent. The issue that is being addressed here is not an elaborate end times scenario, that we see in the modern Rapture cult but rather the concerns by some in the Thessalonian community that those who have died will  not participate in the final moment of the Lord's return, or even, possibly by some, that those who are living who are alive at the Second Coming are in some way better or more fortunate than those who have died. This passage is written to disabuse  these Thessalonian Christians of such concern, or conceit. And the thing is, its context is the last things, the last day, the end of the world as we know it, the transformation and reconciliation of heaven and earth, that has always been key to the Christian proclamation. And throughout Christian history that's how it's always been understood and still is for the vast majority of the Christian world.

However, in the 19th century, that changed. In the 19th century we see the rise of industrial capitalism, a process which began in the late 18th century. The UK was the main centre of this process, a time of major dislocation, uprooting and misery for the masses. It was an 'apocalyptic' time and, of course, the great apocalyptic event heralding the new industrial age was the French Revolution, which brought to an end the ancien regime in Europe based on centralised dynastic monarchies, quasi feudalism and commercial capitalism. The ancien regime's death throes outlived the spectacle of Republican France, forming, generating all manner of strange religious movements. As I said, the eye of the cyclone that was the new industrial capitalist order was the UK and it was in the UK that we get two figures who develop elaborate eschatological systems on the belief that end of the age was imminent, Edward Irving and John Nelson Derby. Both of them in their thinking deployed a standard Protestant trope that the entire existing Christian church in all its forms was thoroughly corrupt and had departed from its true form which had to be restored. Ironically it meant that Irving, a Presbyterian/Church of Scotland minister embraced a form of apocalyptic High Church Catholicism, founding the Catholic Apostolic Church. Irving apparently taught a form of multi-staged end times theology which included a taking away of the saved at some time before the second coming. It's Derby, however, who stands behind the elaborate end time patho-theologies which underpin all the Rapture talk today. Derby, in contrast to Irving, was an Anglican/Church of Ireland priest, who seems to have had strong anti-Catholic views and held a Calvinist theology. He went the other way to Irving, leaving his Church too, but founding the highly evangelical Plymouth Brethren movement. Derby developed a highly elaborate historicalised schema called Dispensationalism as a frame for his end time millennialist Rapture theology. Key to Derby's thinking is the grossly heretical idea that the Divine plan behind Jesus' earthly mission somehow failed because he was rejected by the Jews and that the Church is a kind of Divine afterthought to the main game, which is the re-establishment of a Jewish kingdom ruled by Jesus. We live now in the Church Age, the age of Grace, but God still plans to fulfil his overall plan which is to establish the millennial Jewish kingdom. So in the Last Days, when the Jews have been restored to the land of Palestine, the Church Age will be ended and the Church itself taken away in the Rapture before the final Tribulation takes place, in which the Jewish people will be given the option again to accept Christ as the Messiah. Only a handful will, the rest being destroyed by the Anti-Christ. But at the Second Coming those Christian Jews will join the returned Church to rule with Jesus for a thousand years on earth. It's important to remember that the Derby's Church represents a minority of Christians. Roman Catholics, and presumably Orthodox Christians too, are not considered to be true Christians and so we have no stake in his Rapture and presumably neither do most mainstream Protestants either. Derby was a Calvinist and has no problem in regarding the great mass of humanity, Christian and otherwise (including the bulk of the Jews) as damned. His theology is one based on a thoroughgoing hatred of humanity.

Derby's ideas went west across the Atlantic where they found rich soil in the US. It's Protestantism had a strongly Calvinist flavour (I regard Calvin as the spiritual godfather of the US - it's whole culture both secular and spiritual is fully imbued with Calvinist thinking) and was also experiencing massive social change due to immigration, westward expansion and the blizzard of capitalism too. His ideas went viral, spreading through a variety of millennial and other Protestant sects and taking root in established ones too. Derby's thinking is canonised in the Scofield reference Bible which was published in  1909. It printed a commentary alongside the biblical text that was informed by Derby's Dispensationalist thinking and by being included in the Bible gave it an authority it might otherwise not have received (and didn't deserve). It also unmoored it from Derby's own work and so by spreading throughout much of the US it linked up with all manner of ideas that Derby himself might have regarded with alarm. It also generated a variety of schools of Rapture thought, pre-Tribulation Rapture, Mid-Trib, Pre-Wrath, plus a variety of perspectives as to how many Raptures or comings of Christ there would be. Derby taught one rapture or two Second Comings but there are folks who teach multiple raptures for different groups of people along the timeline of the end times. And there are different schools of thought as to how many people and who get raptured. The Left Behind series of novels reflect the view that all children are raptured along with the believers so that a couple of billion or so people get carried away including the Pope of the time (a notion that would, no doubt, appal Derby).

I discovered this Rapture world  when I was doing the PhD because unsurprisingly its also marked by virulent homophobia. When I first heard about the Rapture, I was seriously taken aback. It really is nothing but a 'get out of gaol free card' theology. It is predicated on a Calvinist notion of complete rupture between the cosmos and the Divine. A key notion is that the full Tribulation with Anti-Christ can't take place until the Church is taken away because it brings to an end the Age of Grace when the Holy Spirit is abroad in the world. With the removal of the Church the Holy Spirit is also removed from the world. From a Catholic perspective, such a notion is incoherent if not grossly heretical in its dichotomy of Creation and the Divine. In Catholic understandings Creation is imbued with the Divine as stained glass windows are imbued with the light on which they depend for their effect.  The Rapture doctrine contradicts sacramental theology in every way. In a Catholic perspective, God is grace and so a notion of an end to grace is bizarre, a diminution of the deity.Furthermore the Derbyite notion that Jesus' mission has to be rebooted requiring the removal of the Church and that his life and death and resurrection marked some kind of failure or derailing of the divine plan, is Christologically flawed, thoroughly heretical. It marks a complete contradiction of the entire Christian tradition in an even more radical way than any 'liberal' or 'modernist' Protestant theology of Jesus, that the exponents of rapturism usually loudly deplore.

But it is far worse than that. I found one or two sites that I started following and one, in particular, Five Doves, I've remained 'loyal' to, primarily for its entertainment value. I've written about them here before. It maintains a forum, The Latter Day Letters, to which believers share hopes, fears, and rapture/end times news and speculations. Most of it is pretty appalling, not least for its homophobia, but several things strike me as someone who thinks I understand a bit about the Christian tradition in its fullness across time and in its diversity. While the contributors not only evince an ignorance of that tradition and lack of even the most basic curiosity that would make them explore that tradition in its fullness, they seem quite willing to blend their 'theology' with a, to me, surprising blend of pop culture items such as TV shows and films. Many of them feed uncritically off New Age and UFO sites, especially, the most paranoid of them, but then give them a unique dispensationalist twist. And I should point out that the Rapture has gone so viral that it has even torn loose from Dispensationalist framework to re-embed itself in UFO and New Age contexts. The UFO cults give a lot of scope to Rapture thinking, except here instead of Jesus its the Space Brothers or Rael's Elohim who will come down in their space ships and save us - or some of us, anyway. I first encountered this phenomenon in the early 80s when I met a popular, psychic aura reader who proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Space Brothers who would take many of us away from the planet (but not all) while it was cleansed of the mess we'd made of it. He went so far as to say that they had taken away some people already and as proof cited a then recent earthquake in Italy where many hundreds or thousands had died. They weren't dead they'd been taken away.

This psychic alerted me to something that is a hallmark of all such Rapture cults, Christian and New Age alike. These really are death cults of the worst sort. If you read the Latter Day letters at Five Doves, you'll be struck by the yearning to get out of this place, to 'go home' as some of them put it. Home is heaven but usually there's only one way to get to the heavenly realm and that's by death. These people are crying out for  and yearning for death. They mask that by their belief that they will be transported body and soul but the reality is that death is what they desire, it's a deflected suicidal mentality. Because of course when you read the letters you soon detect that for many, though not all, life is hard, it's a struggle and it's often made worse because of the type of religious beliefs they hold. Many of their family members or neighbours or workmates don't share their rapture/end times beliefs (even though they might also be Christians, and it's more galling if they are than not) and so make fun of their beliefs or react against the proselytising that these people are attempting. And so for many of these rapture believers not only is life a struggle but it is also marked by conflict too over their faith. That drives their yearning even more. The Rapture becomes not just a get out of gaol free card but it's also a vindication and even reward for what they have put up with.

Vindication for them and pay back time for the scoffers and unbelievers too. The other side of the rapturist cults is a very nasty schadenfreude. The Left Behind series of books and films is not really an evangelical tool so much as a vindicatory vehicle for the confirmed believer. Both the books and the films are too awful in their execution to seriously entice anyone to join this sort of  religion. The books have been on bestseller lists for a long time but I think very few unbelievers, Christian or otherwise, would bother parting with their cash to purchase them. Their main audience has been the rapturists themselves and so they actually serve as a vehicle of vindication. Their rapturist audiences get to vicariously enjoy not so much the rapture itself as the opportunity, as pre-rapturees, to witness the sufferings of the left behind and be confirmed in their own special spiritual status. Fred Clark has repeatedly made this observation on his long running commentary on the series. I think it's not just the books but the doctrines themselves. They are built on schadenfreude and hence their appeal, especially in a rawly capitalist society like the US. By its very nature capitalism requires victims or losers and the more untrammeled it is the greater the number of those who have been screwed over. Rapturism with its arcane secret knowledges, its conspiracy theories (much of the material on Five Doves could provide inspiration for a stack of X-files series) plus its promise of ultimate escape from a cascade of horrors that will engulf everyone else not saved promotes the ideal sort of false consciousness that capitalist societies need to prevent serious critique and transformation. 

This schadenfreude is what I find most disturbing and it also represents the most heretical inversion of Christian tradition. From the very beginning Christinaity has celebrated the divine generosity that underpins the creation. The entire cosmos represents an act of divine graciousness, generosity. In Christian theology God has no need of the creation but creation would not exist without God, the overflowing lifegiving love of God, and a God that does not give up on the creation either but ultimately becomes incarnate in a human person to come down to our level in order to offer us friendship. God is love, John declares, and those who love know God. Jesus on the cross represents the ultimate kenotic self-emptying of God to demonstrate the divine solidarity with and friendship for the creation, for humans, for all of us.  Such divine friendship and solidarity has consequences not least in the lives of those who respond to it and Christian history is full of examples of people who answered the call to instantiate in their own lives the call to divine friendship. They lived that friendship directly and very  practically and often at very great cost for their lives, taking up their crosses and following their Lord. Many of these people are commemorated in the calendars of saints of the various Christian communions, many lived humble lives and their stories have been lost or they were the companions of these saints. But they stand in striking contrast to the rapturist cults whose members get excited at any news of  earthquake or war, who actually anticipate and hope for another major Middle East war because that will  be sign that they soon will be out of here. Their theology is marked by a hatred of humanity and of the creation in which we live. They have replaced the traditional Christian God of superabundant love and friendship with a narrowly vindictive deity of schadenfreude. The God of rapturism is not the God of Christianity, although it has been dressed with Christian drag, it's an idol built on human vindictiveness and selfish petty resentments. That's the sort of spirituality and religious ethos cultivated by rapturism. 

The Rapture is kind of oddly akin to much of the discourse around euthanasia, which again rapturists deplore. It could be said that much of the euthanasia discourse represents not so much a fear of death but a fear of dying and seeks an intervention to circumvent that. Rapturists likewise yearn for death, to get out of here and 'go home', but they don't want to experience dying. Instead they want divine intervention to circumvent the messy dying process and translate them instantly into the next world, body and soul. It's a divinely assisted suicide they seek and worse, it has resonances with the suicide bombers of various Islamic fundamentalist groups. By their collective suicide the rapturists know the full horrors of the tribulation will be unleashed on the rest of us. Their yearning for their own deaths is also a yearning for our suffering which they know will be unleashed by their rapture. And in some of the Latter day Letters that payback desire is expressed quite clearly.

Harold Camping (!) has done more to traduce Christianity and bring  it into disrepute than any Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins could ever hope to achieve. The anti-religious movements have started a blasphemy day, which I think originated in the US where so much of this silly thinking seems to  originate, the shadow or inverted mirror of the original. But Harold Camping (!) has performed a blasphemy that a Hitchens or Dawkins could never  hope to match. I have termed Rapturism a heresy of the worst order. I would go further and declare the Rapture doctrine and all the attendant Dispensationalist schemas in which its embedded, the ultimate blasphemy. Back in the 2nd century St Irenaeus of Lyon declared that the glory of God is humanity fully alive. Rapturism rejects that fundamental Christian principle in favour of vindictiveness and suicidal schadenfreude and hence tries to debase the Christian vision of the divine that Irenaeus and so many other Christians have celebrated over the centuries.

On Saturday I put up this status update on Facebook:

It's Rapture day! Silly idea. The world won't end today except in the usual way, sadly, for too many people. I hope for not too many, today, and for none of you who I love.

I chose this deliberately because that morning I'd also learnt of the death of a friend a couple of days before. Death comes to us all. We will all die, a fact our society tries to deny all the time. So again it's no surprise that a notion like the Rapturist fallacy should prove popular because it also tries to deny the fact of our own deaths. But Christianity celebrates a God who so loved all of us and wanted to be our friend that this God accepted death to live in full solidarity with us, to meet us on our level. My friend who died wasn't religious and didn't believe in any sort of God but I hope she has been found and eagerly welcomed by this God who so sought our friendship as to be willing to die shamefully under the boot of power and  is regularly betrayed by the Howard Campings (!) and so many other religious functionaries and charlatans and homophobes. It's a shame I can't believe in eternal damnation and like Dante, and people my own Inferno with popes and preachers and tele-evangelists. But my God is much bigger than that and I have no right to ever dare diminish God to my own need for vengeful satisfaction and vindication. To do so is an act of idolatry and diminishes my own faith and betrays the friendship this God offers to us all.

Paschal Thoughts

I'm back! Apologies to people following this blog but life has been very busy for me over the last couple of months and I've been plagued with IT problems too. But I'm back at last and hope to do more regular blogging in future. For now I just want to reflect on some aspects of the  rituals celebrating Easter or Pascha, as most of the non-Anglophone world  know the feast of Christ's Resurrection.

This year I did the full Easter/Pascha Triduum, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday night. It's the latter that I want to comment on. If you've never done the Vigil mass in either it's Roman or Anglican (rite) forms then I should explain that it includes a long series of readings from scripture, usually starting with Genesis 1, the account of the seven days of creation. I want to say some more about that but before I do I want to take a sidetrack into some history. After the Vigil Mass I wondered about the history of the rituals and the readings included in it. In particular I was interested in the antiquity of Genesis 1 as a Paschal reading. I didn't have to go far; Wikipedia has a quite comprehensive article on the Easter Vigil, especially as celebrated in the West. What was most fascinating was this:

The original twelve Old Testament readings for the Easter Vigil survive in an ancient manuscript belonging to the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Armenian Easter Vigil also preserves what is believed to be the original length of the traditional gospel reading of the Easter Vigil, i.e., from the Last Supper account to the end of the Gospel according to Matthew.

In the earliest Jerusalem usage the vigil began with Psalm 117 [118] sung with the response, "This is the day which the Lord has made." Then followed twelve Old Testament readings, all but the last being followed by a prayer with kneeling.

(1) Genesis 1:1--3:24 (the story of creation); (2) Genesis 22:1-18 (the binding of Isaac); (3) Exodus 12:1-24 (the Passover charter narrative); (4) Jonah 1:1--4:11 (the story of Jonah); (5) Exodus 14:24--15:21 (crossing of the Red Sea); (6) Isaiah 60:1-13 (the promise to Jerusalem); (7) Job 38:2-28 (the Lord's answer to Job); (8) 2 Kings 2:1-22 (the assumption of Elijah); (9) Jeremiah 31:31-34 (the new covenant); (10) Joshua 1:1-9 (entry into the Promised Land); (11) Ezekiel 37:1-14 (the valley of dry bones); (12) Daniel 3:1-29 (the story of the three youths).

The twelfth reading leads into the Song of the Three Children

The Song of the Three Children is from Greek Daniel, part of what Protestants term the Apocrypha, but which is included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments. But I'm really more interested in Genesis right now. Unfortunately the Wikipedia article doesn't say how old this manuscript and cycle of readings are but I guess ancient means pretty old, way back in the first millennium, likely dating from the days of the Christian Roman Empire, 4th, 5th or 6th centuries. Here, Genesis 1 is combined with the second creation story, that of Adam and Eve, Eden and the Fall. There's a logic there in that Christ's death and resurrection are believed to have undone the effects of the Fall. Christ is also understood as the New Adam (and Mary, his mother, the new Eve). I find it interesting that the modern day Roman rite Easter vigil does not include a place for the Eden narratives. When I say modern I should also point out that while there have been important changes to the Roman Easter Vigil rite on two occasions in the last 70 odd years the actual suite of readings has been the norm for many centuries. Interestingly, from the Wikipedia article it seems that the Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) rite has likewise dropped the Eden narratives from its Vesperal liturgy for Holy Saturday, reading only Genesis 1: 1-13, the first three days of creation.

Here are the lists of readings for the Roman and Byzantine rites:

Roman 1. Genesis 1:-2:2; 2. Genesis 22:1-18; 3. Exodus 14:15-15:1; 4. Isaiah 54:4a.5-14; 5. Isaiah 55:1-11; 6. Baruch 3:9-15, 32-4:4; 7. Ezekiel 36:16-17a, 18-28.

Byzantine 1. Genesis 1:1-13; 2. Isaiah 60:1-16; 3. Exodus 12:1-11; 4. Jonah 1:1-4:11; 5. Joshua 5:10-15; 6. Exodus 13:20-15:19; 7. Zephaniah 3:8-15; 8. 1 King 17:8-24; 9. Isaiah 61:10-62:5; 10. Genesis 22:1-18; 11. Isaiah 61:1-9; 12. 2 Kings 4:8-37; 13. Isaiah 63:11-64:5; 14. Jeremiah 31:31-34; 15. Daniel 3:1-68.

The Roman rite has reduced the number of readings, at the same time adding new ones while the Byzantine has simply increased the readings by adding to them.

But what are common to all three lists are the first creation story, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-18) and the Crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:24--15:21). The binding of Isaac makes complete sense. Early Christians understood the near sacrifice of Isaac to prefigure the sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross. The crossing of the Red Sea is a bit more obscure. Yes, it relates to Passover, from which Christian Pascha/Easter is derived but if Christ is the Lamb surely the earlier passage Exodus 12:1-24, the Charter of Passover (as the Wikipedia article puts it), would be more appropriate, given the central role of the paschal lamb there and the importance of paschal lamb imagery in the Christian context. In the Roman rite Vigil, the prayer following the reading, states that the crossing of the Red Sea  represents the waters of baptism by which the new Israel, the Christian believers, are delivered from sin and death so the text is thus reconfigured by the prayer in a symbolic and ritual way.

But what is most important here is the sea. A number of scholars have observed over the years that the Exodus account of the crossing of the Red Sea contains echoes or might even be a reworking of more ancient Middle eastern mythologies of the battle between a deity and the sea. In the Ugarit Ba'al cycle, the god Ba'al does battle with the Sea god, Yam (Yam means sea in both Hebrew and Ugaritic). Ba'al goes on to do battle with Mot, the god of death. Ba'al then dies and is restored to life. The Jewish scriptures contain many references and allusions to the battle with the sea or the sea-monster (Leviathan/Rahab), in this case the protagonist is YHWH, the LORD, the god of Israel. It's referred to frequently in the Psalms, alluded to in the answer to Job, and of course is the background to the Jonah story too (and in the ancient list of Paschal Vigil readings, Jonah precedes the Exodus account of the Red Sea crossing). We don't know the ritual context of the Ba'al cycle but we do for another major chaoskampf myth of the region, the battle of Marduk with Tiamat in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth cycle. Marduk creates the world out of the broken body of Tiamat; the Enuma Elish was recited/chanted as part of the Babylonian New Year rituals.

In the ancient world the New Year was associated with the equinox, spring or autumn. The ancient Persian New Year, Now Roz, is still celebrated at the spring equinox. Even in medieval Christendom the civil year began with the feast of the Annunciation in March i.e. the spring equinox. (And likewise Aries is the first sign of the zodiac in western astrology because it's the sign that conjoins the spring equinox). However, the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah was celebrated at the autumnal equinox. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement was an important day of the  Jewish New Year cycle. Atonement rituals were important parts of ancient Middle Eastern religions and often were key parts of the New Year rituals. What the New Year rituals signified was the renewal, re-creation of the cosmos. Atonement rituals, as in the Jewish Yom Kippur, could play a key part because they performed the healing of the cosmos as part of the start of a new cycle of the year. Scapegoat rituals, as in the one associated with the Jewish Yom Kippur, were also a frequent aspect of the atonement performances.

Listening to the cadences of Genesis 1 at the Easter Vigil the other night, I could easily imagine it recited or chanted at the New Year rituals of Rosh Hashanah in the ancient Temples at Jerusalem and Ha Gerizim. But what's it doing at Easter/Pascha, a Christian feast derived from the Jewish Pesach/Passover? Well, both Jewish Pesach and the Christian Pascha are associated with, set by the spring equinox. In the Jewish calendar Pesach falls in Nisan, the first month of the Jewish year (the autumnal Rosh Hashanah, New Year, actually falls in Tishrei, the 7th month of the Jewish calendar). In other words Pesach is itself a kind of New Year festival, and the New Year associations are given away by the Exodus account of the crossing of the Red Sea, and indeed the whole narrative of the Exodus, which portrays the LORD doing battle with Pharaoh, culminating with the defeat and destruction of Pharaoh in the sea, recalling those ancient Levantine myths in which the deity does battle with the sea or the sea-monster.

Whether or not Nisan was originally the month of the Jewish New Year is not important. What is important is that the Passover narrative and the rituals of Pesach carry strong resonances of the creation and chaoskampf mythologies of the New Year and Atonement. One could say that while Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur celebrate the re-creation, restoration and renewal of the cosmos, Pesach celebrates the re-creation, restoration and renewal of the Israelite community. Unlike Rosh Hashanah, Pesach was one of the three ancient pilgrimage feasts when the people were expected , if possible to journey to the Temple (Jerusalem or Ha Gerizim) to celebrate Pesach there, a bit like the annual Hajj to Mecca in Islam. Pesach was and is celebrated by the community as a whole unlike Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which were celebrated in the Temple by specifically priestly rituals.

But then why has Genesis 1 been maintained as a key text of the Christian Paschal rites especially given that the Eden narratives of Genesis 2-3 have actually been abandoned progressively over time in both East and West? I have been kind of developing a rather audacious line of thought here, in part in response to the work of Margaret Barker. I believe ancient Christianity began as one of many ancient Jewish movements concerned with the Temple. A recurring refrain in biblical and extra-biblical texts is the problem of the Temple and its corruption, usually by falling under the control of a rival group. We find this pattern in Ezekiel, Zechariah, 1 Enoch and a number of Qumran texts, for example. I think Christianity began with the perception that the Temple had been corrupted by the priestly circles who ruled there. Jesus himself took on a High Priestly role, might even have been understood as the heavenly High Priest. Perhaps at Jesus' own instigation, Christians began to take on aspects of Temple ritual and reconfigure them to instantiate the Temple now as the Christian community (similar ideas are found at Qumran too). The Eucharist is developed as the key bloodless sacrifice of the new but restored Temple that is the Christian community, an open community in which humans encounter the divine face to face in their communal rituals without the mediation of the corrupt Temple authorities (I more and more think the book of Revelation is a Christian prophetic reflection upon the first Jewish war and the destruction of the Temple and its replacement by the new Temple of the Christian community in which Jesus, the Logos, is made manifest, returns to the community, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist). These Christian rituals, such as Eucharist and Baptism, are derived from Temple ritual and symbolism reconfigured in a way to make God truly Emmanuel, 'with us', rather than 'hidden' in the priestly confines of the Temple. Jesus was executed at Pesach, instantiating, fulfilling the High Priestly role of shedding his blood to heal and renew the cosmos on the Day of Atonement (in the Temple rite, a goat is of course slaughtered in the High Priest's place). So Christians uncover the old New Year/Atonement meanings of Pesach but reconfigure them by joining, blending them with a reconfigured  Pesach as well. The two equinoctal feasts are merged and reconfigured to shape the development of Christian liturgy/tradition (the core component of Christian tradition is liturgy) in succeeding generations. When Pascha was developed as a specific annual feast in the second and third centuries Christians drew upon traditions and memories of old Temple practices to create  a Paschal gestalt. Christian Pascha explicitly identified itself as a new Pesach, a language used to this very day but the ritual patterns and symbolic frameworks that are deployed for this Christian Pesach are as much, even more?, derived from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur than anything to do with Pesach. It was a pattern compelled by the circumstances of Jesus' own death which was charged symbolically with the power of the old rites of Atonement and New Year in which the deity sheds blood/life to renew, recreate, heal and restore the cosmos. And these rites have an ancient provenance. Countless centuries earlier, in the Ugarit myth cycles, Ba'al does battle with Mot/Death and succumbs only to rise anew and restore the cosmos to new life. Likewise in his own ordeal Jesus does battle with Mot/Death to succumb and rise anew restoring the cosmos to new life. The language and imagery runs right through Christian proclamation although the stories of Ba'al's death and rising had been long forgotten (and ancient Ugarit too).

Genesis 1 recounts in a beautiful poetic structure the speaking of cosmos into existence by deity, it is the key text of the old New Year of Temple rite so it makes sense to me that it should lead off the readings of Christian Pascha which celebrates the renewal, restoration, recreation, resurrection of the cosmos through the broken and resurrected body of Jesus, humble Galilean and heavenly High Priest. Reading Genesis 1 in the Vigil Mass on the Paschal Eve links it to traditions and practices that go back thousands of years, into the heart of Temple Judaism and beyond into the world of Canaanite/Levantine myth and ritual from which 'Israel' was born. And not in any supersessionist way of appropriation, but rather in a lineage of creative inheritance and generation.

Caligari, Madness, Sexuality and Foucault

The other night I saw the classic 1920 German silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, at some friends’ place. I’d seen it once before many years ago, I think on SBS and probably on quite a small TV. My friends have got quite an elaborate TV/DVD/music set up in their living room with one of those quite large screens and so this time I saw the film in a lot more detail than before. It is really quite superb, not least for its sets which are quite surreal, astonishing in the way they distort angles and warp ‘reality’ (I wonder if H P Lovecraft might have been influenced by the visuals in this film for some of his stories, especially for his ‘Dreams in the Witch House’ in which the notion of distorted angles and weird perspective in room dimensions are key to his portrait of menace). Unsurprisingly, questions of what is real and what is illusion and fantasy are key to the film. That same sort of interplay of fantasy and reality was at play in a modern film, The Black Swan, I saw when down the Gold Coast. That film plays with fantasy and reality in such a way that towards the end the viewer has no idea of what is (meant to be) real and what not. Is the main character mad, has she been taken over from the depths, the Black Swan?

Curiously in both films, sexuality is interwoven with madness to signal that we are beyond the realm of the ‘normal’. There are several moments of queer slippage in Caligari, most explicitly in the final scenes when the Somnambulist character is presented as a kind of distractedly demented dandy. Likewise in Black Swan, at first, there’s more than a hint of (hetero)sexual desire in the interaction between the dancer, Nina, and the ballet director and I thought that maybe we were being given a narrative of young woman’s repressed creativity being released through eros and heterosexual eros too. But then suddenly as the boundaries between reality and fantasy really begin to blur there is a full-on lesbian eruption, much more graphic than any heterosexual scenes in the film. From that point on the story is swept away as the boundary between fantasy and reality collapses like the shattered mirror of Nina’s dressing room.

These links between madness and queer sexuality were even more striking for me as I’ve recently finished reading Lynne Huffer’s book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. I think Huffer’s book is probably the most important publication in queer theory and sexuality studies for a long time, at least in English- there has been interesting work in French not least by Didier Eribon who I was reading and writing about back in 2009. Eribon’s book made me want to go back and read Foucault’s Introduction to the History of Sexuality again. I’d read it, at least in part, back in my undergrad days in the early 90s. At that time it didn’t have much context for me and I found a range of other authors that influenced me more. At the same time, here in Brisbane those years following decriminalisation and the first anti-discrimination law were a heady time for LGBT folks, especially folks like me who were active in community stuff and politics. At UQ too, these were the first years of a queer space, the Rona Room, the existence of which was really changing the dynamics of queer life on campus. Probably, a much more important influence for me back then was Homocult and the activism around ACT UP and Queer Nation. What most appealed to me was the stance of not regarding heterosexuality as the default – as one slogan went ‘heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common’ - and that led to a reading perspective of looking for queer possibilities in anything, destabilising the heteronorm and opening a space for the queer and homosexual. That perspective still largely describes my scholarly framework on sexuality. I don’t accept heterosexuality and its norms as the default or as something to aspire to. That’s one of my concerns with the push to same sex marriage (and something I saw earlier in the last couple of days, ‘gay family values’). It seems to me that one of the dynamics of homosexual/queer sub-cultures is imitation, pushing the boundaries of likeness. After Gay Liberation came the age of the Clone, at least for gay men. I hated it and, luckily, in Australia it remained very much a Sydney thing. And way back in the 18^th century we find the molly houses of old England and their curious practices of parodic imitation of the heterosexual world of marriage and family. In our day, though, the imitation is more serious lacking any parodic element at all (the parody is more at the expense of the imitation as in the anti-marriage quip of a queer friend of mine ‘Gay marriage? Makes as much sense as a male tampon’). Are we reproducing the heteronorm as our own standard for homosexual life?

Returning to Foucault and Huffer’s book, to be honest I’ve not read a lot of his work. I own a copy of the second volume of his History of Sexuality. I’ve not finished it because like Huffer, I found it boring, not least because of its focus on elite males in ancient Greco-Roman society. Foucault didn’t inform my work on Sodom and Gomorrah much at all, although after reading Huffer I can see how I might have been able to deploy him quite productively but I don’t regret not doing so. More important for me back then was the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She helped me to refine my reading position and lens and she’s still an important intellectual influence for me. Oddly, I don’t recall Foucault as a dominant motif in her work no matter how important he was for her theoretically. But periodically I’ve been rubbed up against Foucault by the way his Introduction to the History of Sexuality was being deployed in, to my way of thinking, quite uncritical ways. The crudest rendering of this Foucault deployment is the notion that homosexuality was invented as a category by sexologists and psychologists back in 1870 (or for some even later). This marked a new beginning and the creation of the homosexual identity as opposed to a time before when we can only speak of acts, certainly not identities let alone communities. As I heard one person say, citing Foucault, at a public forum about four years ago, there is no continuity with that time before the ‘invention’ of the homosexual and our modern LGBT worlds.

To which, of course, I say rubbish, and to which I also say you clearly haven’t understood Foucault if you think that was his argument. When I was reading Eribon, I was struck by the thought that maybe people hadn’t quite gotten Foucault. While he critiqued Foucault’s History of Sexuality, from memory especially its lack of sufficient historical depth, in relation to the ‘invention’ of the homosexual, Eribon also highlighted how important Foucault’s History of Madness was in giving more depth to his arguments in the Introduction to Sexuality. Eribon seemed to suggest that Foucault might have profited much more by drawing on his earlier work. After all, he asked, how was it that sexuality, homosexuality, should be the subject or object of discussion and study/treatment by psychologists and therapists. So I went back and re-read Foucault’s Introduction. I hadn’t gotten far before I realised that Foucault’s project here was not ‘history’ and certainly not homosexuality as such but much more about the discursive structures of social power. And when I re-read it, I was struck by the realisation that the famous passage about the homosexual being invented in 1870 was not about same sex love and eros as such, the people who lived it, their identities and communities. Foucault was not interested in identities and certainly not interested in aetiologies. I was struck by the thought that this was more a wry observation on the, one could say, vainglories of powerbrokers. In the late 19^th century in the field of sexuality these were the therapists, the sexologists, who were above, outside of the realm of the deviant erotic just as a biologist of the day was above, outside the realm from which specimens were collected and returned to the halls of knowledge in the metropole for classification and study, or white male anthropologists might be above, outside the communities of ‘savages’ they were studying. (And no wonder then that the term homosexual was resisted for so long by queer folks of the past as a term that was being imposed on them and not cognisant with their own experience). I couldn’t also help but think that somehow Foucault’s wry observation had been mis-taken by so many people in the areas of queer theory and sexuality. It always seemed to be cited as grim fact rather than grim joke. Queer theorists spectacularly misread, and thus failed to get, Foucault’s wit.

I had planned to write more about Eribon and my new understandings of Foucault but last year my adventures with depression got in the way, although I think it’s quite appropriate that I re-read Foucault when I was myself off spinning in my own trajectory of soaring madness and collapse. Maybe it helps to read Foucault when you’re mad. So when the chance came to read and review Huffer’s book eventually I had to go for it and was most surprised that I could get it, that nobody else had put their hand up for it at all. The book itself is rich, very rich and rewards reading and re-reading. It is an excellent introduction to Foucault’s thought, his overall project, not just Sexuality or Madness. There is a key central thesis to the book, to wit, queer theorists who restrict their reading of Foucault to his History of Sexuality, even if supplemented by Discipline and Punish, are severely limited in their understanding of Foucault. Huffer goes as far as saying that you can’t really grasp History of Sexuality without also reading History of Madness, that the two complement each other, with Sexuality standing almost in continuity with Madness. She argues that Sexuality should even (only?) be read through the lens of Madness to be understandable. The problem was, though, that for those who don’t read French, an English translation of the whole text wasn’t published until 2006 (translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). The 1965 translation, Madness and Civilisation, was a much truncated edition which omitted important content from the original work.

In tandem with her thesis, Huffer also provides a critique of queer theory especially as practiced in the United States. In particular she critiques the ‘straight’ reading by queer theorists of that famous passage in Introduction, a passage she describes as clearly ironic especially when read in the French. She provides both the French and her own translation with the standard English translation to highlight the ironic aspects in Foucault’s words. She goes further and says US queer theorists have seriously misread it by reading it as a statement of origins or aetiology of homosexual identity. It’s nothing of the sort, she declares, indeed Foucault ‘refuses to posit an origin of anything’ (75), a fact most clear from reading Madness. She goes further saying that to ‘read the date 1870 as other than ironic is to buy into the psychological, psychiatric, and medical authority Foucault goes to great pains to dismantle’ (75). In other words, queer theorists mangled Foucault in the press of US identity politics and obsessions. I was struck by Huffer’s repeated observation that in Madness, Foucault describes (and laments?) the suppression of a homosexual lyricism in Europe during the Age of Reason , a suppression that happens alongside the Great Confinement, the rise of the asylum for imprisoning the ‘mad’ and the ‘deviant’. (And hence, says Eribon, sexuality and its manifold variations becomes the field for doctors, psychologists, therapists, and not historians, ethicists, philosophers, or theologians and biblical scholars either for that matter.)

Huffer also reminds us that first and foremost, Foucault is a philosopher, or better anti-philosopher. He wrote Madness, amongst other things, as a critique of Descartes, of the Cartesian separation of the mind/self and the body, in which madness is explicitly excluded from the Cartesian cogito; but more than just Descartes Madness was also of the Enlightenment and its heirs. However Foucault writes philosophy with the use of the archive so his work is history-like. Foucault is the heir of Nietzsche and seeks to abolish the subject so constructed by Descartes and developed by Hegel and the Enlightenment and later too by Freud and psychoanalysis. In all these projects of the internal metaphysical self both madness and sexuality have been deployed in its construction, to demarcate its boundaries and essence. As the heir to Nietzsche, Foucault rejects such essentalism of the self, as Huffer puts it there is no inside to this outside, it is a false demarcation. In this context, it’s no surprise that the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick began exploring Buddhism towards the end of her life. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta, no-self (as opposed to the Hindu/Vedanta concept of Atman/Self) bears a certain resemblance to the Foucault-Nietzschian position. My understanding of Nietzsche is that he stood for an unmediated immediacy to life which again bears a resemblance to the Buddhist aim of living free of all attachment including to the illusory ‘self’.

But this brings me to my main critique of Huffner’s book. Queer theorists might have misread Foucault’s wit and worse uncritically elevated him to canonical authority, ‘gospel’, but queer theory remains a heterogenous and fluid project. Foucault might have authority but he is jumbled with all manner of other intellectual streams. As Huffner points out queer theory even tries to couple Freud with Foucault (Huffner strongly critiques Judith Butler’s Psychic Life as one example of this coupling), which is like coupling matter and anti-matter. Foucault stands opposed to Freud; Freud’s gift, psychoanalysis, ‘endlessly performs and augments the Cartesian coup of the seventeenth century’ (160). But Huffner wants to make queer theory a more specifically, completely?, a Foucauldian project. She is herself ‘in love’ with Foucault so I can understand her zeal; she has ‘met’ this Foucault ‘in the archives’ and realised his breadth and depth in contrast to the cardboard cut-out of the standard queer theoretical perspective. I can understand her ‘love’ especially given both the splits between much of queer theory and much of feminist theory (which she explores early in her book) in part based on that old misreading of Foucault and the fact that queer theory nowadays is, in my opinion, really kind of moribund and disconnected, having no real ethical grounding or political eros to use Huffner’s term. But I would like to keep the heterogeneity and fluidity of queer theory, which might in future be further fed by a specifically Foucaultian project, overlapping but neither separate nor totalising.

For those of us who don’t want to work on a specifically Foucauldian project, Foucault might yet be a model. I like the way he works from, with the archives. The philosopher writing history against philosophy, philosophy from the archives, Foucauld blurs categories. What I appreciated about queer theory has been that blurring, the lack of rigidity, the almost bower bird approach to thinking and the commitment not to accept the heteronorm as given. But it has also remained caught in an identitarian morass (and perhaps that helps serves interests of late capitalist society anyway). I’ve not been all that interested in identities but rather the way people have lived their same-sex love and desires, how they have dealt with the rejection, also those cultures and discourses of insult and denigration that reinforce the heteronorm. I’m interested in the way those discourses work and I look for ways to change all that, to maintain a critique that opens up different possibilities. I suspect the identitarian thing may be a displaced aetiology. One thing’s for sure I’m not interested in origins or causes, or gay genes. They don’t broaden our horizons or humanise us, let alone change our world.

My critique then is not really of the book as such. In fact, looking through my copy of Mad for Foucault I see that I have underlined on just about every page, reinforced with exclamation marks and asterisks as well as occasional comments. It’s a book well worth reading by anyone doing any sort of sexuality studies, especially if they’re doing so under the umbrella of queer theory. Likewise for those doing feminist and gender studies. I recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in Foucault in any way at all. After reading Huffner there’s only one more thing to do and that’s read History of Madness, the full version, itself. I’m looking forward to it, not least to catch a glimpse of that disappearing suppressed homosexual lyric for which he mourned.

February Days, Wonderful Days in Egypt

Things have been quiet here of late because, well, life's not been so quiet for me. After I put up my last post two weeks ago I went away for a bit over a week down the Gold Coast to have a break and catch up with friends. It was a very social time, which also continued a theme that had been running in my life over the Christmas period of reconnections with people from the past - there were more such reconnections at the Gold Coast too. The Gold Coast is an interesting place in the way it can juxtapose great beauty, quaint charm and the most extraordinary ugliness all at once. I don't think anyone there ever gave a thought to building a beautiful city on the South Pacific and thus no one ever did. Apart from its natural beauty, any beauty there is completely unintentional, often dependent on accidents like time of day or unexpected vantage point. My friends live at Palm Beach which is not as built up as other parts, indeed it's very suburban often in ways recalling that old song 'Little Boxes'. But at night because it's a narrow sliver of suburbia with the ocean on one side, the sky can be quite stunning. I was down on the week of the new moon which made for a beautifully deep dark sky glistening with stars. You have to go a long way to see a sky like that in Brisbane. I went walking one night and looking up felt like I had a clear view to the end of the universe, peering into the dark depths.

All the while the drama was unfolding in Egypt, a drama which reached the denouement of its first act last night my time. The events in Egypt are stunning and amazing and inspiring. They're on a par with the end of apartheid 20 years ago and following the Tunisian revolution they're on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union's control of Eastern Europe. Tom Engelhardt writing in Asia Times Online two days ago makes this comparison of the two events:

Today, after almost two decades of exuberant imperial impunity,Washington finds itself in an uncomfortably unraveling situation. Think of it as a kind of slo-mo Gorbachev moment - without a Gorbachev in sight.

What we're dealing with here is, in a sense, the story of two "abroads". In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people's revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their "near abroad", the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire.

The US, being the wealthier and stronger of the two Cold War superpowers, had something the Soviets never possessed. Call it a "far abroad". Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan war, in the face of another people's revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its roots.

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia - along with obdurate Israel and little Jordan. In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of "stability" and "moderation", terms much favored in Washington, had been the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his fate, too).

Egypt is a crucial part of the Arab world. It's the most populous country and a major cultural and religious centre. Cairo's Al Azhar University, founded in the 10th century is the chief centre of Arabic literature and and Sunni Islamic learning in the world. What happens in Egypt has the potential to flow on to the rest of the Arab world in a major way. The Mubarak regime was a US satrapy in the heart of the Arab world, a world which, with some exceptions, is comprised almost entirely of US satrapies based on borders drawn by the British and French in the aftermath of the two World Wars and designed to serve their own colonial interests and not the interests of the locals. US policy was to break the old European Empires and replace them with US commercial and political hegemony.

The Mubarak satrapy was perhaps the most important because of the peace treaty with Israel, the only such Arab treaty with the Zionist state. Egypt also directly borders the Palestinian territory of Gaza and assists the Israelis in their blockade regime. Presumably a democratic Egyptian government will not be prepared to play auxiliary gaoler of the Palestinians, which will be good news for the people in Gaza but not for the Netanyahu government. The Mubarak satrapy unsurprisingly received copious amounts of US aid, mostly for military and police. Unsurprisingly most of that money ends up in US corporate pockets. Writing in Crikey earlier this week Bernard Keane observed:

The US government provides about $1.3 billion a year in military aid to Egypt.

Like much western aid, though, US military aid to Egypt is really about US aid to its own industries. Prior to the 1978 Sadat-Begin peace deal, Egypt had principally relied on the Soviet Union for its arms. One of the conditions Jimmy Carter agreed to as part of the peace deal was extensive military aid for Egypt -- Israel, naturally, already being a recipient of generous US assistance.

But US military companies have always been the big winners from this.The Guardian reported last week that General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky Aircraft are currently the biggest beneficiaries of the United States' military assistance to Egypt.That’s why there was never a serious chance of the Obama administration threatening to halt its military aid...

On a more real-world level, Combined Systems Inc provided the teargas that Egyptian police used by the truckload in a futile effort to suppress the demonstrations. CSI, which also provides teargas to the Israeli military, makes a wide variety of "tactical munitions", "impact munitions", "crowd control devices" and "irritant munitions". CSI is owned by Point Lookout Capital Partners, which specialises in military manufacturers, and the Carlyle Group.

The Mubarak satrapy rested on an extensive police regime of torture and murder. The police had developed a culture of impunity. I had signed on to the Facebook page We are all Khaled Said which was named for a young man murdered by police in Alexandria and his was not an isolated case. Mubarak therefore had added insult to injury by installing Omar Suleiman as his VP early in the revolution. Suleiman was the head of the torture network and had even tortured the Australian Mamdouh Habib who had been sent to Egypt by the US as part of its rendition programme. Under Mubarak Egypt had become a key torture subcontractor to a US gov't trying to avoid its legal obligations. Pepe Escobar dubs Suleiman Sheik al-Torture (follow the link to his article, it's superb; and yo can find more of his articles here).

I confess I was not all that happy when I woke this morning to see that the army had taken power. However at the Amnesty-organised Solidarity rally this morning in Brisbane, we were addressed by members of the local Egyptian community here, including a Coptic Orthodox priest, and also by phone by someone from Cairo and it was clear that they all felt that a major change had happened. After all about a quarter of the population of Egypt had taken to the streets in the last few days. The ongoing updates from We are all Khaled Said on Facebook listed details of strikes and all manner of anti-government actions happening all over Egypt. It's clear that the people of Egypt have experienced their power in a way that we on the outside can barely imagine. I don't think the people are prepared to go back to what was there before.

Here is Al Jazeera footage of the response of the people in Tahrir Square to the news Mubarak had gone

And I have to say Thank God for Al Jazeera during this time. I also want to share a song inspired by the resilience of the Egyptian people in their struggle. It contains incredible footage of that struggle

And here are more photos of the people celebrating in Tahrir Square. Roland Boer over at Stalin's Moustache shared this delightful joke yesterday: 'The Interior Minister asks Hosni Mubarak to write a farewell letter to the Egyptian people. Mubarak replies, "Why? Where are they going?"' It's Mubarak who's going instead and Suleiman with him, thanks be to God.

I hope this revolution spreads throughout the Middle East bringing down all the satrapies that the people have been saddled with for so long. Which country will be next?

UPDATE

Tariq Ali is always worth reading and he has a great piece on the Egyptian revolution in the Guardian here

The age of political reason is returning to the Arab world. The people are fed up of being colonised and bullied. Meanwhile, the political temperature is rising in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.

And Al Jazeera has an excellent piece by Lamis Andoni The Resurrection of pan-Arabism

Events in Egypt and Tunisia have revealed that Arab unity against internal repression is stronger than that against a foreign threat - neither the American occupation of Iraq nor the Israeli occupation galvanised the Arab people in the way that a single act by a young Tunisian who chose to set himself alight rather than live in humiliation and poverty has.

This does not mean that Arabs do not care about the occupied people of Iraq or Palestine - tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands have taken to the streets across Arab countries at various times to show solidarity with Iraqis and Palestinians - but it does reflect the realisation that the absence of democratic freedoms has contributed to the continued occupation of those countries.

The Arab failure to defend Iraq or liberate Palestine has come to symbolise an Arab impotence that has been perpetuated by the state of fear and paralysis in which the ordinary Arab citizen, marginalised by social injustice and crushed by security apparatus oppression, has existed.

When they were allowed to rally in support of Iraqis or Palestinians it was mainly so that their anger might be deflected from their own governments and towards a foreign threat. For so long, they put their own socio-economic grievances aside to voice their support for the occupied, only to wake up the next day shackled by the same chains of repression.

All the while, both pro-Western and anti-Western governments continued with business as usual - the first camp relying on US support to consolidate their authoritarian rule and the second on anti-Israel slogans to give legitimacy to their repression of their people.

But now people across the region - not only in Egypt and Tunisia - have lost faith in their governments. For make no mistake, when protesters have gathered in Amman or Damascus to express their solidarity with the Egyptian revolutionaries in Tahrir Square, they are actually objecting to their own rulers.

Ironically, the Arabic word for resurrection is 'ba'ath' - Washington might have destroyed the Ba'ath party of Iraq but here is, I hope, a new ba'athist trajetory that Washington and other foreign powers and their client rulers cannot withstand, God willing.

For Epiphany 2011: Thoughts on Religious Pluralism

(I began this post on the day after Epiphany Gregorian reckoning, while I was still housesitting. After I got back home a couple of days later, life got rather intense for me including some disastrous floods in Brisbane. Where I live in New Farm stayed high and dry but we lost power for a few days and so decamped to friends with power. Other friends of mine were not so lucky. Once I finally got back home again I had other stuff to attend to which put this on the backburner. I'll leave what I've written as is and then continue)

7 Jan 2011

For Christians using the Gregorian calendar, it is now the the season of Epiphany. Western Christendom has traditionally associated the Epiphany with the coming of the Magi to the Christ-child in Bethlehem, as recounted in Matthew's gospel (Eastern Christendom associates Epiphany with the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by John the Baptist, also known in the East as the Forerunner). This time last year I put up a post about the Magi and the history and symbolism, including astrological symbolism, this story invokes. You can read it here, and if you haven't read it, I'd recommend you do, because for this post, I want to start by quoting one of the final paragraphs from that older Epiphany post:

As well as astrologers and sages, the Magi were also priests, pagan priests. But in Matthew's story they travel to Palestine, they meet with Jewish sages, they bow before the infant Jesus, they converse with angels and then they return to their homeland, presumably to resume their religious duties. There's no trace of anxiety about pagan priests attending the birth of the Messiah, the child "from the Holy Spirit", Emmanuel 'God is with Us'. I said before that early Christians read Virgil's 4th Eclogue as a pagan prophecy of Christ. It seems that some early Christians accepted that there had been some sort of 'preparation for the Gospel' not only in Judaism but also in the pagan religious world as well. In other words, that as with Judaism, some sort of divine activity had been at work in the pagan religious worlds to make them ready for the Christ event too.

And it might be worth it to have a look at this post, also from last January, where I reflected on some of the complex inter-relationships between Jewish religion and Persian religion. The two religious traditions have strong connections with each other, and it's worth remembering that Cyrus the Great, the founder of the ancient Persian Empire is hailed as Messiah, Anointed, in Isaiah (45.1). In last year's Epiphany post, I also reflected on the change of identity for the Magi in Christian tradition, making them into kings out of the East, instead of sages. I speculated that such a move might have served to 'cover up' (or at least deflect attention from) the fact that the Christ-child was attended by pagan astrologer-priests, a most uncomfortable fact for a more triumphant Christianity in Rome, Armenia and elsewhere.

So, at least for Western Christendom, Epiphany raises the most uncomfortable question of Christianity's relationship and connection with other faiths in rather unsettling ways for those more triumphalist, exclusivist or fundamentalist in their religious outlook. And not just Epiphany, but Christmas itself, a major Christian feast, is also a site where differing faith traditions rub up against each other, both in terms of the varieties of Christian traditions themselves and Christianity vis a vis other religious traditions. This inter-faith overlay is further complicated by the demands of capitalism and its makeover of the feast into a 'secular' spending extravaganza. Here in the southern hemisphere, it's further complicated by the fact that a traditionally mid-winter feast is being celebrated at mid-summer.

Christmas is one of those feasts that highlight the differences within Christianity itself. There are Protestant denominations that do not observe Christmas at all, regarding it as a pagan or, even worse, a popish festival. Back in mid-17th century England, Cromwell's time, this position was held by a much broader Protestant constituency resulting in the suppression of Christmas, both as a religious observance and as a public holiday and festival, during the time of the Commonwealth. This was an unpopular move and with the restoration of the monarchy the bans on the observance of Christmas as both a religious feast/holy day and civil festival/holiday were lifted. But Protestant purists, to this day either regard Christmas (and Easter/Pascha too) with suspicion or reject it completely.

At the other end of the spectrum, Christmas serves to highlight the divisions within Catholic Christianities too. The greater number of Eastern Christians celebrated Christmas early this month on January 7. These include Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Serbian, Macedonian Orthodox Churches and the Jerusalem Orthodox Patriarchate. However, the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul plus the Patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria, and the Greek, Albanian and American Orthodox churches observed Christmas at the same time a Western Christians. The former Churches still use the old Julian calendar which is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar of the West. The latter Churches use the Revised Julian Calendar of 1923, bringing the greater part of the liturgical year into harmony with Western timing (the exception being Easter/Pascha which is calculated in such a way as to ensure all Orthodox observe it at the same time). But not only was the New Calendar obviously not adopted by all Orthodox but in the Greek Church especially it prompted a schism leading to small Old Calendarist denominations, who stick to the Julian calendar along with their Russian and other Slavic co-religionists. The Coptic and most other Oriental Orthodox Churches also use the Julian calendar so that their Christmas falls on January 7 Gregorian too. The Armenian Church, however, still observes the original date of Christmas, January 6, combining Christmas and Epiphany in the one feast. So even as a Christian festival Christmas highlights differences amongst Christians. to the extent that it is celebrated on different days by different communities or ignored, even, by some.

22 January 2011

As well as becoming a point of contention through its being given a 'makeover' by capitalism into a secular festival of shopping and consumption in the lead up to the New Year, Christmas also highlights the differences and interconnections between Christianity and other faiths. Christmas comes after the solstice, the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, and much of the customs and foods and symbols traditionally associated with Christmas have their origins in old pagan winter solstice practices, especially in the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic lands outside the old Roman Empire. In other words these practices were adopted or absorbed as the Irish and Scots, Saxons, Swedes, Germans, Danes, Czechs, Poles and Russians adopted Christianity through the second half of the first Christian millennium. It's a popular myth that Christians or even Constantine himself picked the date of 25 December to take over the old pagan religious festival. But that appears to be no more than a furphy as Christmas had already been set at 25 December in the West and 6 January in the East before Constantine ever appeared on the scene. These dates seem to be based more on the date of Jesus' death, as Christians then understood it, and the believed harmony of the death date with the date of Jesus' conception than on any pagan festival. And while, as has been seen, for many centuries the old pagan associations with Christmas only gave concern to purist Protestants, the situation has changed with the emergence of neo-pagan religions in the West, many of which claim a direct connection with the old religions of pre-Christian Europe. So there are growing numbers of people who are celebrating Solstice and not Christmas, per se. In the northern hemisphere, that can lead to arguments over who 'owns' what in relation to Christmas; less so in the southern hemisphere, as it's summer solstice down here with different seasonal symbolism to Christmas. But at the same time in Australia there has developed the tradition of Christmas in July, as an attempt to keep some kid of traditional seasonal connections with Christmas, too. And I've heard people advocate moving Christmas to winter as a way to respect the traditional liturgical calendar.

Christmas also falls around the time of the Jewish feast of Hannukah. Hannukah is the Jewish Feast of Lights and commemorates the cleansing and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after it had been desecrated (the 'abomination of desolation') by the Seleucid King, Antiochus Epiphanes, back in 167 BCE. Hannukah is an 8 day feast that starts on 25 Kislev: the Jewish calendar is a luni-solar one and so 25 Kislev falls any time between late November and late December on the Gregorian calendar. So more often than not, Jews are celebrating Hannukah around the time most Christians celebrate Christmas. And to further compound things in 2006 and 2007, the Muslim feast of Eid al Adha fell around Christmas too, which meant that in 2006 three of the Abrahamic religions were celebrating a major feast in the second half of December. However the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar so there are no seasonal associations with their feasts, which move all over the Gregorian calendar (and Julian and Jewish ones too) through the years.

The mention of Islam serves to remind that over the last few decades, the countries, like Australia, of the old 'settler' Commonwealth, along with the UK, USA and many European countries have seen the growth through immigration of substantial and growing communities following Islam and other religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism etc. Questions have been raised about how appropriate it is in a multi-faith culture for the state to give preference to one religion by observing a holiday for it's key holy days (Christmas, and Easter too). Sometimes the debates can be quite contentious, especially in the USA, which strikes me more and more as a very fundamentalist society (perhaps as a result of it being the capitalist heartland - I'm thinking more and more that capitalism spawns fundamentalism, that most superficial form of identity politics, and lets face it the capitalist system doesn't want us to go any further in our politics than the superficial). Ironically, the voices of Muslims, Hindus et al are rarely heard in these discussions, which seem to be mostly bouncing around among Christians and post-Christians. And with the rise of the apparently new (and militant) atheism, both in response to the ridiculous excesses of US Christian fundamentalism and fostered by George Bush's crusades against the US's fundamentalist simulacrum in the Middle East, it's almost as if some people actually resent having to take a holiday. In my younger working days, all holidays, any holidays were always welcome no matter what, so I find this newfound secular puritanism quite disturbing, especially in Australia, the proverbial land of the long weekend.

The irony is that Christmas has been changing, too, as capitalism has morphed it into a secular celebration of the great market sacrament of shopping. This process began over a century ago and is most dramatically evidenced by Coca Cola's makeover of Santa Claus (Santa Claus or Father Christmas was a much more complex, even threatening figure before this makeover). It's perhaps ironic, given the contentious nature of the debates on this question, that it is the USA which is the home of secular Christmas. Not only the commercialised Santa, but a whole suite of secular Christmas music, White Christmas, Frosty, Rudolph etc. To be honest I find these songs completely banal, if not vapid and utterly incongruous, too, in an Australian context of high summer. But to be fair, there are some pretty tawdry religious carols too, mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries. I can't began to say how much I despise Away in a Manger for it's cheap sentimentality and it's obnoxiously patronising approach to children. I despise it as much as I do Frosty, Rudolph, and these neverending sleighbells jingling through our pretend winter wonderlands.

Secular Christmas was invented in the USA and then exported very successfully to Japan, definitely not a Christian country, where it is both a children's festival and oddly enough a kind of holiday for lovers too. Christmas has also been taken up in Singapore, again in a big way. Like Japan, Singapore is not a Christian country either. Perhaps because Christmas draws on a rich range of associations, both pagan and Christian, and given its seasonal winter associations in the northern hemisphere, it's a package that can be picked up and adapted in non-Christian cultures like Japan (and as China becomes more capitalist will Christmas be added to the Chinese festive calendar too?).

28 January

(since I resumed this post the other day, I had further problems with internet access which prevented me from getting back it)

I said before that most of the debates about the appropriateness of keeping a religious festival in the Anglosphere, anyway, seem to be mostly conducted by Christians and post-Christians with very rare participation by people from other faiths. Several years ago I had the privilege to work with two colleagues at UQ from Slovenia (one of whom now dead and the other returned to Slovenia). Their specialty was South Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism especially. They used to laugh at the Christmas debates. Being socialists they couldn't understand why people would resent a holiday (although they would critique the gross commercialisation of it and the associated hype). But they also told me that in much of India it's quite normal for people to join in each other's religious celebrations and holidays. It's a way that religious difference can enrich people's lives and their society. And India is a very rich and religiously diverse society containing ancient Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian communities, as well as Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain. I've also been told that in much of Syria too it was common for Christians and Muslims to join in each others holidays and share celebrations at each other's shrines and sanctuaries. And while we think of Syria as Muslim, the fact is that it contains many varieties of Islam, not one, and many, mostly ancient, varieties of Christianity too. Syria is a multi-faith society then despite appearances.

I think that these practices might provide a worthy model for our modern secular societies. Secularity does not mean the banishing of religion from the public sphere as in religious and spiritual = strictly private, while public = secular/atheist only. That's just a form of tyranny and only serves to promote arid fundamentalism and cheap sentimentality as evinced in the regular and tedious US Christmas wars and the incredibly vapid nature of commercial capitalist Christmas. Just compare the emptiness of Frosty the Snowman with the depth of something like Coventry Carol. The commercial and secular infantilises and diverts our attention from the depths of joy and of horror.

Here in Brisbane the Buddhist community has taken to holding public celebrations of Vesak, the birth death and enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, on the Labour Day public holiday. I've yet to get along as I'm usually marching with my union in the Labour Day celebrations. But in our multi-faith society I can't why there shouldn't be a public holiday for Vesak so that Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike can share in the day. And the same applies for other faiths too, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, indigenous religions etc. A secular and multi-faith society provides the opportunity for mutual enrichment, whether one's a believer or not. The secular state itself offers nothing for us to address the substantial questions of life and nor should it try to. All it can do is provide us the spaces, temporal, spatial etc, whereby we can share with each other and learn from each other and our respective traditions, in mutual respect, gratitude, and fun too. After all these are holidays.

AFTERWORD: Given all the disruptions in the writing of this post, which stretched out the timeframe for composing it, I suspect that I got clear away from where I thought was heading when I began early this month. However I intend to return to some of these themes through the course of this year.