RIP Harold Camping

Harold Camping at work

If I were a Catholic, I’d have to go to confession over this.  I suffer from a superiority complex when it comes to TV evangelists.  I know such arrogance will keep me out of heaven, but I can’t seem to stop the urge to giggle uncontrollably whenever I see one of these clowns at work.   I’m easily persuaded they’ve been put on this earth to make the rest of us look good.

Watching them prance back and forth across the stage, all puffed up and filled with the spirit, so all-fired certain they’re doing the work of the Lord.  What’s not to giggle at?

And there are so damned many of them!  For a list of American evangelists, click here.     What a wacko country we live in.  My Australian friends love to tell me, “We got the prisoners; you got the Puritans.  Lucky us!”   Sociologists have told us it’s this separation of church and state idea we came up with that is responsible for all these many religious sects.  Places with an established religion get tired of it fast.  Here, when you get tired of your church, you start a new one.  Say the name of Jesus with a quiver in your voice, whip up a tale about a struggle with alcohol and a penchant for loose women and a conversion story and you’re in business.  No taxes.  No proof of sincerity required.  Call it religion and off you go.  All the shekels you can collect are your own.

Jim and Tammy Faye

I’ve had so many favorites over the years.  Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, for starters.  And Jimmy Swaggert.  Loved their hypocrisy.   Watching them crash and burn a la Ted Haggard was more fun than the pile-ups at the stock car races my father used to take me to as a kid.   You suspected there was decency in there somewhere and you can see why people have invented demons and other living creatures to personify temptation.   Like so many people who stumble over fame and fortune, they’re not ready for it.  Clueless about how the adulation can fool you into thinking it will go on forever.

Jim Bakker and his secretary
at Praise the Lord Ministry
whom he had an affair with
(the secretary, not the Ministry)

I used to watch Oral Roberts as a kid, wondering about the science of putting your hands on your TV set and getting cured of cancer.  Jack Van Impe and the way he would dwell on the final consonant of a word and his lovely wife with the science fiction name, Rexella.  Dumb as her shoes, but earnest as a case of the shingles.   

Then there are the politicos who rose to the top, starting with Billy Graham.  He was of the Amy Semple McPherson variety, not seedy, even lofty, although now that he’s gone, his son Franklin is doing his best to bring the Graham name down to the level of most of their fellow shysters.   John Hagee is actually dangerous, suckering all those evangelicals into supporting the rightwing in Israel by making them believe their money will convert the Jews, a necessary last step before the Rapture.  And shame on the Israelis who milk this source – the same way they threw their lot in with apartheid South Africa when it served their interest.  Hagee, the Lucky Pierre of evangelism – screwing people and being screwed simultaneously.

And, speaking of danger, let’s not forget James Jones, who, before he got his flock to drink the Kool-Aid in Guyana, was a TV evangelist from Detroit.

Then there’s the king of the sleazy smarmies, Jerry Falwell, and the Big Daddy TV Evangelist of them all, Master Joker Pat Robertson.  Together, they declared that 9/11 was brought on by “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…the ACLU, People for the American Way…I point the finger in their face and I say “you helped this happen.”  That was Falwell.  Robertson’s response?  “I totally concur.”  

If you poke around in their backgrounds, you find a large number of them come from evangelical families.  Hagee, for example, is a 5^th generation pastor.  Many are Pentecostalists and have little formal education, even creating their own institutions to grant themselves degrees in theology.

Dr. Gene Scott

Melissa Scott

And then there’s the exception to this group, Gene Scott, possibly the most inflated ego of all time.  He used to come onto his program wearing a series of hats, cowboy to turban, and shout at the top of his lungs that he wasn’t going to preach another word until his followers coughed up more money.  And he’d sit there – they’d all sit there – in silence, waiting for the phone to ring.  Scott got his degree from Stanford in the School of Education,   I get to say that Scott and I got the same education, only a few years apart.  His shtick was to fill a whiteboard with passages written in the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, and impress his audience with his ostensibly erudite ways.  Look closely at what he was saying, though, and you see the linguistic bravado as pure theater.  When he died, his wife Melissa took over, using the same pseudo scholarship as a substitute for authenticity.  Look behind the meanings of the words they trot out and you see a very simple declaration of their faith.  Nothing wrong with that, except that the suggestion of scholarship was little more than smoke and mirrors.

The shysterism is harmless if it you believe it’s your God-given right to spend your money any way you choose.  It’s part of our libertarian tradition that we consider the freedom to be stupid to be the foundation of all other freedoms.  I suppose, if you want to put a positive spin on TV evangelism you might take this to heart.  You might also consider how many lessons there are to be learned from their failings.  Jim and Tammy Bakker's son, Jay, for example, hit the skids after their demise.  Now he's back with the goal of ministering to gays and lesbians. 

All this is just a circuitous way of getting to the news that Harold Camping has died.  Of all the TV evangelists I ever came across, he was the most sympathetic.  I went through a wide range of emotions with this guy over the years.  The first time I saw him I howled with derision.  Such a loser!  Such a sadsack!   Then I realized he was like all the others.  He had raised millions from donors with his end of times predictions. Not such a dumb-dumb after all, I thought.

But what to make of his apparent sincerity?

And what an example of dull boring Middle American beige consciousness.  A friend of mine wrote of him, “He could be Mr. Rogers’ brother! If Heaven exists, it’s a grand reunion and a beautiful day in the neighborhood.”   His clothes were off the rack at Goodwill.  The furniture was all Toledo discount house.  And the plants were fake!  Who in the world lives with artificial plants?

I was raised in a culture that taught me never to expose myself in public unless I knew what I was doing - never say anything unless I was sure I was right.  A lot of what New Englanders of my childhood called common sense rubbed off when I came to California, where people tend to believe your right to speak is a higher priority than your responsibility to have your facts right, but it still amazed me how so many people – certainly some of them have to be sincere – can stand before millions and make declarations about their faith without the slightest humility.  Not listening for the voice of God but shouting it from the rooftops, to use an old metaphor for satellites that bring their messages to millions in 150 countries around the world.

Harold Camping’s abundant confidence lacked smugness somehow.   He knew his Bible so well he could flip to a passage in nothing flat, when a caller asked about it.  He sat with the bible on his lap.  He lived not far away from me, here in the East Bay, in Alameda.  He predicted the end of the world would be first on September 6, 1994, and when it didn't happen, he changed the date to May 21, 2011.  And when the end didn't come, he revised it to October 21, 2011.

It still didn't come and he retired.  He had spent five million dollars on billboards advertising the Rapture, and began losing money when donations dropped off precipitously.  Down from $135 million in 2007 to $29.2 million in 2011.  But still he remained Mr. Unflappable.  Looks like I got it wrong, he said.   “That’s because God has his ways and they are greater than mine.”  Can’t argue with that.  There’s a great YouTube of a guy shouting at him, here.  (The quote comes at the end, at minute 2:31.)

Caller: “You always say a lot of shit.  I lost all my money because of you, you asshole! 

Camping:  I’m sorry.  I didn’t hear your question. (pause)  We’ve lost the caller, and shall we take our next call?

I almost miss watching him sit in that chair of his and interpret the Bible in that room with the fake woodpaneling and artificial plants.  The dull image made you feel sorry for the old man, plodding on with his advice and his end of the world predictions.

Harold Camping lived to a ripe old age.  When Jerry Falwell died, because he had spent his life preaching the message that he would go to heaven and gay people like me wouldn’t, I announced that if somebody would bring me a contract to go to hell, I’d sign it – anything to make sure I didn’t have to spend eternity with the likes of Jerry Falwell.

Camping and Falwell shared a belief in the Rapture and in end times.  Falwell died before his charlatan ways were exposed.  He was far too political to say anything he couldn’t weasel out of later.  Camping died after being humiliated because he went out on a limb, exposed himself as a silly old man with old man limitations.  He was wrong, he said, once he had gotten over the shock of still being alive.  His defeat was, in a sense, a reminder to me of my own limitations, and for that I see him apart from all the others.  He’s gone on, now, as they say, to his reward.  Not a bad man, I think.  If there is a heaven, I hope he’s got a better seat than Falwell.

RIP, Harold.  Flipping channels has suddenly lost much of its appeal.

photo credits

1. Harold Camping at work: http://www.christianpost.com/news/family-radios-harold-camping-quiet-as-oct-21-judgment-day-approaches-55637/

2. Countdown till the end of the world: http://larrydixon.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/may-21-2011-countdown-ala-harold-camping/

3. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/gallery/tammy_faye_obit/ 

4. Dr. Gene Scott: http://www.shortlessonsfromthebigbook.com/

5. Melissa Scott, Greek scholar: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13738003@N08/2253528537/ 

Still Slogging

Weimar's Courtyard of the Muses

Let’s hear it for the Enlightenment.

God bless those often godless folk of the Age of Reason, as the Age of Enlightenment is sometimes also called.  All those 17^th and 18^th Century thinkers, the philosophes, Descartes, Newton, Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau.   Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the United States.   And others who gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of 1791.  (I threw that last one in to show I’m not Americo-centric.)

Kant called the Enlightenment “mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance.”    Hit the nail on the head, it seems to me.

Enlightenment ideas are so much a part of our lives that we take them for granted.  We don’t stop to recognize how wretched our lives would be without this great leap forward in human progress.  The force that ripped the teeth out of superstitious authoritarian religion and made the good life we know today possible.  The French summed it up with liberté, égalité, fraternité; the Americans with “liberty and justice for all.”

The humanist moral code of the Enlightenment didn’t entirely replace the religious codes that went before, and the old ways can surface at any time and claw us back into the darkness of fear and superstition, as they did with the announcement today that India’s Supreme Court has just overturned a 2009 ruling that had decriminalized gay sex.  Sad news for LGBT people in India.  And because we’re all linked together in this battle for human rights, sad for the rest of us, as well.

nbcnews.com ran with the shock headline, “India goes 'back to the Dark Ages' by banning gay sex — again.”

Well yes, and no.  Yes, if you look at this at ground level, at how this affects individual gays and lesbians and other sexual minorities.  If you look at the evolution of India as a modern democracy, not so much.  The Court decided the case on procedural grounds.   The Delhi High Court had overstepped its powers back in 2009 when it granted people with a same-sex orientation equal rights.  That power belongs, according to the Supreme Court, only to Parliament.   India’s penal code has a clause – Section 377 – which specifies that “sex against the order of nature” should be punished by up to ten years in jail.

You’ve got to love the choice of words.  So deliciously 19^th Century British somehow.  The Roman poet Terence had expressed humanist values centuries before the Enlightenment  when he declared, “Humani nil a me alienum puto – Nothing human is alien to me.” The sex-averse Saint Paul had a different view.  He and others responsible for establishing the practices of the ancient Hebrews as if they were dictates from heaven, believed in the curse of the Garden of Eden and the unending sinfulness of mankind.  Cherry-pickers of that tradition are still very much with us.  From the Baptists who don’t want to have sex because somebody might see them and think they were dancing, to the folks living in fear that somebody somewhere might be having a good time, religious proscriptions are never totally out of sight.

Another way to speak of these laws which offend nobody except possibly a fictive deity is to call them laws against victimless crimes.  Nobody gets hurt, say the humanists.  God gets hurt, say the authoritarian religionists.  Well, not so much anymore.  They know they can’t be that obvious about it, so they express it in terms of “nature” or “the social order.”  But you know they mean God.  They will admit it, if you push them on it.

Steven Weinberg is known in academic circles for his Nobel Prize in Physics.  I think he deserves equal recognition for his insight into the power of religion.  “With or without religion,” he said, “You would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

We in America talk about our “Culture Wars.”  What we’re talking about is the clash between two different sources of a moral code, one which we admit is man-made, the other which various self-imposed authorities tell us is the will of God.  From the Enlightenment rose the radical notion that “all men are created equal.”  Today we have updated our language use, having recognized that too many people mistook “men” to mean “men only and not women” instead of “all human beings” regardless of sex.  It has been a long and painfully slow process freeing ourselves from the dead hand of traditional religion, from sex discrimination, from racism, from the belief that Northern Europeans were more clever than Southern Europeans, who, in their turn, were better than Africans.  The thrust of this Enlightenment value system was that there is no justification to granting rights to one human being that you do not also grant to all others.

In general, the modern world moves in the direction of Enlightenment values.  The Mormon Church has just come out and admitted they were wrong – actually used that word – about black people.  We just followed the custom of the day, they say.  Everybody around us was racist, so we were too.  They were wrong, and we were wrong.  Notice, though, that they cannot explain how it is that their anti-black principles are to be found in their religious texts.  They’ve still got a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do.  My point, though, is that our progress out of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism and homophobia has been pretty consistent, even if we do fall back from time to time.

The Indian Supreme Court decision may not be a falling back.  It may be what they say it is, merely a cold rational legal decision based on the British inspired notion of the importance of legal procedure.  Not intended to further homophobia, but necessary (if they're being sincere), because the homophobic law that needs correction was put there by the legislature and should be taken out by the legislature. 

I am in no position to judge.  I’m too far away and I lack the legal background to take sides in this issue.

That said, there is no doubt homophobia is alive and well in India, and progress out of the darkness has not been without its hitches.  And it’s no surprise to discover that homophobia in the legal code can be traced back to the Brits and their religious prejudices at the time the Indian Penal Code was written.

Chapter XVI of the Penal Code (Sections 299 to 377) deals with “Offences Affecting the Human Body.”   These include murder, kidnapping, slavery and forced labor, and rape.  All but the last one, 377, involve a victim.  377 is the notorious section related to so-called “unnatural offences.”  The Indians have been trying for some time to get rid of 377, not only because it legalizes persecution of LGBT people, but because it had made it difficult to get at the AIDS problem.   The 2007 case against four men in Lucknow illustrate the danger of giving homophobes free rein to go after gay people.  The police in Lucknow concocted a case against them because they had found their names on a gay website and assumed, because of Section 377 they could get away with criminalizing them.  It wasn’t the first time that “being” gay was taken as synonymous with “doing” gay.  Section 377 is intended, obviously to have a deterrent effect, to instill fear so that gays and lesbians will remain in the closet.  To quote another Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, speaking of Section 377, “It is surprising that independent India has not yet been able to rescind the colonial era monstrosity.”

The Indian Penal Code, including Section 377, was established during the time of Lord Macaulay, a “classical liberal”, opponent of slavery and advocate for equality of all men and women before the law.  Macaulay might be called an Enlightenment figure, actually, although motivating his good works was a belief in the superiority of his British civilization and the need to get the Indians to give up their traditions, including the use of Persian and Sanskrit, in favor of the English language, so that they might be more amenable to his instruction.  And his values.  He was a pious man and what went into the penal code no doubt expressed his moral views.   Once established with British sensibilities, Section 377 was “updated” in the 1930s, when crimes against nature were expanded to include not only oral sex but intercrural sex (friction against the thighs) as well.

Sexual intercourse got defined for the first time as “the temporary visitation of one organism by a member of the other organism, for certain clearly defined and limited objects. The primary objective of the visiting organisation (sic - the source writer obviously meant 'organism') is to obtain euphoria by means of a detent of the nerves consequent on the sexual crisis. But there is no intercourse unless the visiting member is enveloped at least partially by the visited organism, for intercourse connotes reciprocity. Looking at the question in this way it would seem that [the] sin of Gomorrah is no less carnal intercourse than the sin of Sodom.”

Just in case you had any doubts about the Christian origins of the suspicions held by the British and the Anglo-Indians running India in the 1930s.   If you're schooled in the sin of Adam, you know very well that people, if left to their own devices, might do really naughty things in the privacy of their own bedrooms. 

Laymen – non legalists – will not be persuaded that this Supreme Court decision was based on a technicality.   The Human Rights Campaign – and they're hardly alone – sees this decision as “recriminalizing love.” 

It’s one thing for one branch of government to throw a decision into the hands of another branch of government, but with the Indian parliament in the hands of conservatives, this setback for LGBT rights may take years now to correct.   And as an article in today's New York Times reports, Indian judges have a long history of judicial activism.  The argument that the decision was out of their hands, in other words, appears to be a cop-out. 

Some days you win.  Some days you lose.

photo source: http://www.advocate.com/politics/2013/12/11/photos-indias-supreme-court-reinstates-sodomy-ban?page=0,6

Weimar's Courtyard of the Muses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

So that we can protect you in an emergency

I listened today to spokespeople for the TV networks fall all over themselves trying to explain how difficult it was to make the call whether or not to play the 911 calls that went in after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  They were released to the media today over the protests of parents and others involved.

What's so damned difficult, I'd like to know.  There is only one reason to play the tapes – so people could look at their television sets and gasp and cluck and get a little charge out of life.  I was reminded of the time I saw somebody actually stick a microphone in the face of a parent who had just lost a child in a car accident.  This isn't quite as obscene as that, but definitely moving in that direction.  Where's the friggin NEWS in this news story?

Instead of getting rid of guns, we put our energy into titillating ourselves with the misery of others.  You’ve got to give credit to CBS.  They said no to this folly right off.  CNN is another story.  Fox went on about how important it was to select the passages you played carefully.  For what?  So the part you played didn’t cross the line?  So that you captured the fear in the voices but didn’t actually play the sounds of the shots?  It makes you want to throw something.

Then came the news of Nelson Mandela’s death, and for a moment I was lifted up again.  The human race was not just one clown after another.  There are people who give their lives to make the world a better place.  Mandela was one of those people.  You mourn his passing, but you know he will always be there, along with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to remind you there are people who turn despair into inspiration, and that there is no cause to wallow in cynicism and rage at the injustice all around.

But then, as if to remind me not to get carried away with all this loftiness, an e-mail pops into my inbox from my friend Bill in Indiana telling me he is in his office on the campus of Indiana University Southeast, behind locked doors, listening to the sound of helicopters flying over trying to locate a man with a gun.

Indiana University Southeast

They found him.  A stupid kid had forgotten the world we live in today.  They needed a gun as a prop in his theater class, so he brought in his BB gun.  Simply walked onto campus with it as if it were no big deal. Somebody saw him and pushed the panic button.

This is 2013, and this was a university campus, and of course it’s a big deal.  What in the name of all that’s holy was this shlemiel thinking?

As usual, the word went out on Twitter:

IU Southeast Emergency! An armed person has been seen on campus. Go into nearest room and lock door. Follow instructions from authorities

And for 45 minutes people, including my friend Bill, cowered, hoping the next sounds they heard would not be shots or shouting, hoping this would pass.

It did pass.  As soon as the student with the gun realized he was the cause of the ruckus, he phoned in and explained himself.

The interim chancellor sent a message around at the end of the day explaining the events and thanking everybody for keeping calm and helping themselves and others get to a safe place.

What caught my attention in her message was this paragraph:

I want to remind you of how very important it is for you to be registered in IU Notify, our emergency notification system which sends messages via email, text message, voice message, and social media. If you did not receive a notification message, please go to https://onestart.iu.edu and click on the notification link at that top of the page to update your contact information as soon as possible. It is critically important that we have your current contact information in order to protect you as best we can in an emergency situation.

There it is in a nutshell.  The event itself, which no doubt terrified pretty much everybody on campus.  Some students piled desks in front of the door, barricading themselves in.  And the sign of the times that is the campus “emergency notification system,”   So authorities can “protect” the student body.

There is something terribly terribly wrong in this country.  And I'm not talking about clueless young people who have yet to figure out the rules of common sense in this brave new world we now live in.

photo credit: