Bump Stocks: Aiding and Abetting the Enemy

This is why we banned bump stocks: Sixty dead. Four hundred and thirteen injured. One gunman.

Again, that's why bump stocks were banned. A massacre at a country music concert. Bump stocks permit terrorists, both domestic and foreign, to modify any semi-automatic rifle to full-auto. Thus modified, they are crude and easily accessible instruments of mass slaughter.

We banned them, and the Supreme Court overturned that ban. The odd arguments offered up by members of the Court about the mechanism involved were obviously, self-evidently immaterial, and the worst form of legalism.

With no training, anyone...I mean anyone...can put an entire magazine downrange in seconds. Reload, then do so again. And then again. Before the Las Vegas massacre, I'd watch gun enthusiast videos about bump stocks, and as they dished about how badass they felt using one, I marveled that they'd not yet been used in a mass shooting. They reduce accuracy, waste ammunition, and are useless for shooting sports. A bump stock would be equally pointless for home defense. But if you're firing into a fleeing crowd, that doesn't matter.

Watching the videos produced by avid gun Youtubers, there was no question about the purpose of a bumpstock. It was a cheap way to circumvent restrictions on full auto machine guns, for funsies. Because what's more fun than blasting away at a target with a couple of hundred rounds? I mean, it would be kind of fun, honestly, in a world where terrorists and psychopaths didn't exist.

But that's not the world we live in. The video above makes that abundantly clear, without commentary or question.

Nor is the world we live in one where making meaningless, obviously specious arguments about trigger mechanisms is anything other than evil. Sure, it's "true," but in the way that willful spin is often "true." We do not limit access to full-auto receivers because we have an issue with receivers. We limit access to full-auto receivers because of what they *do*.

C4 and dynamite aren't the same chemically, but they still blow things up, eh?

A workaround that allows you to do the same thing...to pour hundreds or thousands of rounds into a crowd of warm bodies...violates the obvious intent of restrictions on automatic weapon access.

The sophistry involved in overturning that ban is crude, self-serving, and willfully ignorant. It's argumentation straight out of scholasticism, in which the letter of the law is debated and the intent of the law is ignored. It shows a complete failure to understand the purpose not just of bump stocks, but of the entire system of justice. Overturning that ban poses a threat to law enforcement professionals, to citizens, to all of us.

This is Trump's court, after all, so that should come as no surprise.

The Wrong Tree

Having watched and listened to the dear departed Carl Sagan talking about our tiny, fragile world recently, I found myself watching the next video that spooled up on that particular YouTube playlist.  I love listening to Carl, who in his gentle warmth and wonder is...to my soul, at least...so much more inviting than Mr. Degrasse-Tyson, the celebrity scientist du jour.  Or maybe I'm just cheesed at Degrasse-Tyson for his one great scientific achievement, which was leading the charge for the demoting of Pluto from its status as a planet.  Grrr.

The second video I watched from Sagan was a critique of the human tendency to self-absorption, and specifically, some gently spoken but pointed debunking of what the good Mr. Sagan considered the deepest tensions between the Judeo-Christian tradition and science.

Sagan was not a theist, not at all.  A "strong agnostic," perhaps, with the weight heavily on the doubt. Most specifically, he had beef with two things:  

First, that human beings should have the arrogance to imagine that God--should such a being exist--is like us.  For that, he relies on that passage of Genesis where the Creator of the Universe makes us "in his image."

God, a bipedal hominid?  How preposterous!  Against this idea, he recounted the writings of the ancient philosopher Xenophanes, who mocked the human propensity to create deities that resembled themselves.  If cows made gods, they'd look like cows.  When cultures make gods, they look like themselves.  How silly!  How arrogant.

Which would be fine, if that had been meant as a critique of theism itself.  Given that Xenophanes was one of the first Greek monotheists?   It's not.  

The core of Xenophanes' argument was not a critique of the idea of God, but of the absurdity of anthropomorphizing such a being.    It's the difference between Zeus and the I AM THAT I AM, between Storm from the X-Men and the One who Speaks from the Whirlwind.

So, sure, yeah, God's ways are not our ways.  We do get that, my friend.  Point taken. 

Second?  The second and more substantial thing that struck me was Carl Sagan's recounting of the story of the garden in Genesis.  In Sagan's telling, what happens in Eden is simple.  We are forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.  We are kept from truth, kept from exploration, kept from the joys of discovery.  Humankind in Eden exists in ignorance, willfully suppressed by an oppressive, controlling Deity.

In this line of thinking, the Eden of Torah may be perfect, but it is a dark perfection, in which we are denied the right to know and wonder and explore, trapped forever in a stunted, childish state.  This is recounted as an indictment against all of the faith traditions that arise from that story.  Even in our most primal story, we are oppressive, and the enemy of science. 

It's a familiar spin, casting out the second of the two Genesis stories as a functional variant of the Prometheus myth, with the serpent in the role of Prometheus, the giver of fire and knowledge.  In that telling, God is the dark demiurge, the one who would keep humanity eternally subjugated.  That's the take of the ancient Gnostics, who saw only malignance and oppression in the story of the Garden, and for whom the serpent is Christ.  Interesting folks, the Gnostics.

It'd be a fair critique, if the Tree that shows up in that story from Torah was the Tree of Knowledge.

But it isn't.   

In that story, the tree is מֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָ.  
  

It is me-esh haddat towb warah, the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  

What the adam, which means "creature of dirt" is warned against is not knowledge itself.  Everything already exists in the garden, in a state of primal, archetypal goodness.  All that--every creature, every plant, everything--can be known, explored, named, and wondered at.  That is, in fact, stated as humanity's purpose.  It is a place of learning and delight, in which every choice is good.

The warning is against being able to know and choose evil. God knows what is evil, what is broken, what will bring woe and hatred and oppression, and chose not to place it in the garden.

Which is why the story of Eden does not involve God being really cheesed off at the ish and the isshah for drawing up the specs for an unauthorized large Hadron Collider.  

The knowledge they get from that tree is social shame.  What they have learned is not the capacity to help and support one another--their created purpose--but the ability to pass blame and recrimination.

And there, from context and purpose, I must demur from the gnostic/atheist spin on that story.   It's just not what it says, or the reason for its telling.

Understanding Evil

In a recent article distributed by CNN, human rights author James Dawes suggested that calling the actions of ISIS "evil" was counterproductive.

"We only call people 'evil' as a pretext for killing them," Dawes said.  And there is, without question, truth in that.  Once you have affixed that label, it's far easier to radicalize your perspective, to see only a caricature of a person.  You shroud them in your own image of them, obliterating their humanity, seeing only everything that justifies your choice to hate them.

It's how we approach our falsely binary political "system," certainly.  The Clintons were not a left of center political couple.  They were murderous jackbooted liberals who were taking away our freedoms!  George Bush was not a genial, straightforward guy with a gladhanding way.  He was a genocidal monstrous tyrant who secretly engineered 9/11!  Obama is not a centrist intellectual.  He's a socialist crypto-Muslim traitor!

It's the easiest way to engage in conflict.

Once we decide someone is evil incarnate, that becomes all that we see.  And because it is all that we see, we can fail to go deeper.  We become so focused on destroying that personification that we do not see what shaped them as a person.  So we slice away at the surface, shaving at it, poking it.  We don't go to the heart of it.

That's not to say, of course, that ISIS is not evil.  They are.  Their actions, their ideology, and the fevered mockery of faith that rules them?  All of those things must be called evil, because they are the inverse of good.  Of course, you can always putter around with academic deconstructions of the idea of the Good, but...dude.  It's compassion, love, grace, patience, kindness, and mercy.  Those things are good.

The danger of naming things "evil," according to the article, is that it causes us to view things in a binary, absolutist way.  And I'm fine with that, up to the point where Dawes uses that observation to make a binary, absolutist statement.

"There is only one good reason to denounce a group as evil--because you intend to injure them."

This is not so.  Calling out a group as evil can also mean you intend to stop them from engaging in evil.  It does not mean you are going to seek their harm, but rather, that you're still willing to ascribe moral agency to them.  Only sentient beings can engage in evil, after all.  And it is not an "injury" to prevent a person or group from engaging in monstrous actions.

Naming actions as evil, though, demands that we go deeper.  Why is this happening?  Why are individuals acting in this way?  Why is an ideology so monstrous finding fertile ground?  Dig deeper, and we find that hunger, poverty, ignorance, and oppression are the poison that brings up that bitter crop.  The more desperate or purposeless a life feels, the more likely evil is to flourish.

And when we try to understand evil, we aren't saying "tolerating" evil.  Seeing through the eyes of hate only deepens love's horror at that state of being.

That is not love's end, as it pushes to the heart of the broken other.  Compassion seeks to truly understand the heart of evil, so that we can turn it, and heal it, and end it.

The Diagnosis

Another mass killing echoes in our collective consciousness this week, for a while, at least.

It's spun differently this time, as we chatter and screech in our social media trees like startled monkeys.  It is misogyny, this time, that has become the focus of our #hashtag uproar.  We also note that the killer had a small collection of guns, one of which was used in the killing.  And he was privileged--wealthy and lacking nothing materially. These are all certainly part of that horror, but his darkness seems deeper and more indiscriminate than all of those things taken individually.

Yes, he was a virulent misogynist. And yet four of the six dead were men.  Yes, he loved the easy power of the gun.  But half of those who died--his roommate and his friends, all Asian, all men--were stabbed to death.

There is more at play here.

The crass, hateful, and starkly self-absorbed rantings of the latest "killer-of-many" were remarkable only for their strange shallowness.  This is not the Unabomber, caught up in some falsely "noble" fantasy of bringing down the machine.  This was just a soul that had fallen in on itself like a black hole, lost in a remarkably banal hatred.

"Girls don't like me, and I desire them. That makes me feel powerless, so I'll kill all of them."  Like rape, these murders were just about power.

That was as far as his ethos went.  He had become blind to everything else.  At no point in his rantings, in his feedback loop of solipcistic self immolation, did he ever think that perhaps people did not like him because he did not like them.  He had lost awareness of women--or other men, really--as persons, as sentient and self-aware beings.

If you view people as soulless objects and/or projections of your own frustrations and hungers, they don't like that.  So. Very. Simple.  And yet that most basic knowledge was not in him.

"Girls don't like me."  It's so stupid, such an impossibly stupid thing to use as a justification for shattering the hopes and lives of others.  But as that dark old Boomtown Rats song goes, what reason do you need?

Ultimately, there are no valid reasons behind such horrors.

It was striking how little got through to him.  Those who view such hateful behavior as best dealt with with a good solid beating had their swing at him.  Police reports show that'd been tried.  He'd acted out, drunk at a party, striking and pushing women.  The other partygoers had beaten him to the ground, and kicked him into submission, as others called the cops.  That only deepened his hatred.

Those who'd talk it through, exploring feelings?  That failed, too.  He'd been in and out of therapy, as his concerned parents had tried to break through his increasingly toxic isolation.  He's mentally ill, in need of help and healing.  That was the thought, and at least it was hopeful, trying to set a life on a restorative path.  But those interventions, unless they cast a clear alternate future before a blighted soul, can do little.

I hear talk of mental illness being the cause, and yet I'm not sure it's so easy.  His rantings are not the word-salad of the schizophrenic.  He was able to mask it, easily, when confronted.

They were not incoherent. They represent an internally cohesive way of viewing the world. I have known many people living with mental illness, struggling with clinical depression or mania or any one of the many ways our complex brains can malfunction.  They do not yearn to harm others.

What was at play in Isla Vista represented an ethos, meaning a set of enacted beliefs that gives a person their integrity.

There is a name for that state of being, one that we seem to have grown strangely coy about using.

Evil, that word is.

We worry that this seems harsh, and that it seems judgmental.  Yet if there is good, there must be evil.  If we affirm that compassion, mercy, justice, lovingkindness, and graciousness are states of being that constitute a way in which we should live, then there are also ways in which we should not live.

Misogyny, for instance, is evil.  I would name it as such.  It is evil to simultaneously despise and objectify half of humankind.  Fetishizing violence over others is evil.  It is evil to desire the harm of other beings as an affirmation of your own power.  If we take those memes into ourselves, we become them.  We actualize them.  We are them.

Is it a sickness?  Yes, of sorts, but not necessarily one that's part of our individual meatware wiring.  Evil has to do with software.  It's learned.  It's socioculturally installed and updated.

It is chosen, then chosen again, carved into us until the furrow in us is so deep that we lose ourselves in it.

That is true for human beings, and for cultures as a whole.

It has always been our curse.

The Faith of Sandy Hook "Truthers"

Human beings are great at coming up with reasons why things are.  We see patterns in things, connections and linkages and interweavings, and in some ways, that's our strength as beings.  Creation is a fabulously knit thing, and the insights of both faith and science show that those threads bind us up with each other and all of being in marvelous and inscrutable ways.

But sometimes, that ability is our curse.  Out of that same mystic inclination, we create false connections that do not deepen, but that tear apart.  We imagine connections that rise out of our pride or our desire for power, casting a web of dark and hateful fantasy over our perception.  

Those things allow us to see others not as they are, but as projections of our own shadow selves.  We see political opponents through these lenses, imputing intentionality that isn't there.  We see estranged lovers and friends through those eyes, assuming their actions to be governed by malices that are simply the hissing of our own unresolved anger and bitterness.

The latest burst of conspiracist whispering about Sandy Hook is a perfect illustration of this form of human hubris.  A certain wing of paleolibertarian thought works under the assumption that any and every event that speaks against libertarian assumptions about firearms and weaponry must have been planned and plotted.  This was true in Aurora, and after the shooting of Gabby Giffords, and it's been doubly and deeply true after Sandy Hook.    Bombings?  Mass shootings?  They can't be what they are.  What they must be instead is part of some vast dark plot to take away the killing implements that are the foundation of human coercive power over others.   Odd, that those who fetishize freedom understand so poorly the real foundation of our liberty.

And so the complex reality of this horrible tragedy is swept aside.   All data that disconfirms an existing understanding is ignored.  Every possible interpretation and carefully spun datapoint that can be found to reinforce what is believed is found, and then woven into an impenetrable veil.

It's important to name this phenomenon.  

This is not faith.  Faith is that which allows us to see connections that bind us closer to our neighbor.  Faith breaks down the existential barriers we'd build around our souls, and calls us deeper into an ever growing and loving relationship with both creation and Creator.  It is the transformative aspect of the Deep Real.  We know it by its fruit, or so a dear friend once told me.

This is idolatry, which is the the shadow of faith.   Idolatry comes when we worship the creation of our own hands and minds.  Idols can be little hunks of wood or stone, but they are now more often culture or tribe or nation or political ideology.  These idolatrous patterns of thought are the totems worshipped by our demons, those dark and gibbering semi-beings that live and grow in the shadows of our selfishness and isolation.

And that is the source and heart of all human brokenness.   It is the root of Evil, assuming that we're allowed to use that word these days.

Anders Breivik, Violence, and Violent Software

Last night, as we ate a late dinner following drum practice, I ran something by my eleven year old.  He and I both share an enjoyment of first person shooter games, and so I ran a bit of challenging FPS news by him.

That news came out of Norway, where the trial of mass-shooter Anders Breivik is underway.  Breivik, in the event you don't recall, is the man who walked into a youth camp with automatic weapons and proceeded to methodically kill seventy-seven unarmed individuals.

He's utterly unrepentant, viewing his actions as a necessary act of resistance against the forces of Marxist/Islamism, which he sees as all part and parcel of the liberal agenda.  In trial this week, Breivik claimed that he'd used FPS games to train for his attack, particularly Modern Warfare 2.  Video games facilitate violence, went the headlines.

So I asked my son what he thought of this.  He was skeptical on two fronts.  First, he noted that Modern Warfare 2 bears only a passing resemblance to actual combat.  It's frenetic, hyperkinetic, and not particularly representative of the dynamics of battle.   My eleven year old has a love of history, and knows that warfare itself looks and feels very little like the gaming experience.

Second, how much "training" do you really need to kill unarmed kids?   My son noted that the mass killing of helpless, terrified, fleeing civilians is not generally part of FPS games.  There, the game is about competition with equals, and testing your skills and reaction times against those of others who are equally empowered.   And it is simply a game.  It is not violent, because those playing it know and mutually assent to the rules of the game.  No physical or actual harm is inflicted to opponents.

The issue is not gaming software.

Nor, quite frankly, is the issue that Breivik is insane.  As the court has found, he is not.  We might like to think that the problem lies in some deep seated neurological problem, but the pathology of his monstrous acts has nothing whatsoever to do with that.   I've spent much time with schizophrenics in my life, and gotten to know those living with real clinical mental illness.  Some have been my friends.   From that context, it is clear to me that there is nothing wrong with the hardware of his mind.

I spent some time reading through portions of Brevik's 1,500 page manifesto yesterday.  Lord have mercy, what is it with these people and their manifestos?  It is "rambling," as they tend to be.  But it is not the work of a broken mind.

It is not the most original work.  In fact, it reads remarkably like the writings of other ultraconservative mass murderers, like also-not-insane Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh.  It also reminded me a bit of Ayn Rand.   It is utterly self-absorbed and convinced that it contains the One Great Truth Only The True Believers Know, wrapping a fundamental selfishness and disdain for other human beings in concepts like liberty and freedom.  It is the work of a mind in isolation, tuned only to those who echo its hatred.

The issue is the software.  Not the gaming software.  The wetware software.

What it is not is insane.  It is not mental illness that drove Breivik to kill, but a pattern of thinking that lead him down that path.  That pattern of thinking is not insanity.  It is better described as evil.  And it's OK to say that word.

Much has been made of Breivik being "Christian."  But his Christianity bears no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus.  Searching his manifesto for the keyword "Jesus" gets you some angry invective about how liberals have stolen Jesus, or are misusing Jesus to excuse being kind to and tolerant of Muslims.   The name of Jesus is dropped when he talks about being a Crusader or a warrior.  Where Jesus himself is mentioned at all, it is not in his core teachings of love, self-giving, or the Kingdom.  Instead, we get two painfully familiar proof-texts about how Jesus gives us the right to armed self-defense.

I say painfully familiar because a skim of Breivik's fulminations reads remarkably like the fury in the American ultraconservative blogosphere.  The same enemies are cited.  The same arguments are made.  The same anger is expressed.   Ultimately, it's an anger rooted in a transition-resistant culture, and its fear of loss.   Clearly, he was an isolated soul, who became so lost in anger and the silo of ultra-right-wing aggrievement that he stopped viewing other human beings as human.   That is true of any extremism.

And it is that programming, diametrically opposed to the love ethic, that has always been the heart of violence.

Gaming, Evil, and the Virtual World

Having recently read a blogosphere exchange about whether or not gaming can be art, several recent moments of online unpleasantness cause me to wonder if gaming can be actively evil.

As a pastor and a gamer, I try to steer away from games that are overtly negative. Meaning, I don't like games that require me to steal, or games that require me to harm innocents, or games that so deeply revel in horror that you can't play 'em without indulging in a fantasy of darkness. True, I do indulge in plenty of..err...aggressive games, and now and again wonder if my diet of simulated violence is entirely healthy.

Lately, though, I've been struggling with how to deal with my encounters with rather more concrete forms of gaming evil, namely, human beings. When you play online, you encounter all manner of blighted souls, and filtered through the medium of a game, it's a bit difficult to know how to respond to them.

I've played a little bit of a free online game called UMAG (follow the link, and you'll lose a few hours. You've been warned). It's a turn-based artillery game, in which folks fire shells at one another whilst texting comments that appear in little thought bubbles above your tank. It's simple. It's goofy. It's fun. Or it usually is.

Two nights ago, as I dropped into a game, the guy in position to strike at me texted the following to those around him:

[sumbuddy help me kill this Jew]

Suddenly, the game wasn't fun at all. With two Jewish boys and a Jewish wife and an extended Jewish family that I love more than I love myself, that kind of hatred tends to evoke a blind rage response. I took the guy out, of course, digging him into a hole and then dropping a MIRV on him. But that wasn't satisfactory. That sort of thing goes far beyond smacktalk, and into a dark place where play is no longer possible.

That was not the end of this week's online encounters with antisemitism. Last night, as I played through the delightfully frenetic FPS Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I found myself face to face with an opposing player whose avatar was named JEWSLAYER14.

Again, I took him out, with a fusillade of well placed rounds from the main gun of my BMD3 light tank. But again, that wasn't enough. Things were no longer fun. Someone who would choose that for their online identity is a person with whom I can't play, or have conversation. They are the Enemy, in a very spiritual way.

Electronic Arts, which publishes the Bad Company series, makes a point of booting such folks from their servers. Their Terms Of Service explicitly state that hate speech will get you thrown out...but folks like that still pop up. My hope is that my second encounter doesn't have 13 friends, but is number 14 because they've been kicked 13 times.

It does raise several conundrums about confronting virtual evil. First, it's very easy for evil to hide and reform and resurface on the interwebs. Removing a user for TOS violations is no more effective than deleting a spam email. They'll be back, with a different and equally offensive name, spitting out the same hatred they were before. There, I think folks in the gaming community are responsible for enforcing a community ethic. If someone goes beyond mocking you for your pathetic noobness and is expressing racial hatred, they're ruining the game for those around them. Gamers need not to tolerate that in their online friends, and if you're hosting a server and encounter someone who is eager to engage in pointless hatred, ban or block or kick them.

The difficulty comes with point number two. The "gaming community" is a pretty wildly diverse place. I've been on servers in the online game Warhawk, for instance, where everyone is screaming in Arabic, and the gamertags are things like jihad4ever1972. My suspicion is that a gamer with a tag like JEWSLAYER14 might not be booted from such a server.

Here, the question becomes how deeply a for-profit entity is willing to stand by the values of the culture from which it springs. The deep hatreds that have lead to such horrors in the meatspace world should be resisted wherever we encounter them.

If Electronic Arts and Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo put serious effort into keeping their games...you know...games...then gaming will remain a playground on which we can have all kinds of fun.

Bad Data

This weekend, two new movies will arrive in our nation's Cine-MegaPlexes. One is part of a familiar franchise, one that's moved countless buckets of popcorn and cheez-drowned Nachitos over the past decade. The other is one-a dem furrin' films. You know. Moody. Existential. Independent, with a director who views it as deeply conceptual and who has a particular vision as an auteur.

The cinematic extravaganzas in question are Saw VI and Antichrist, and while they may seem to appeal to different audiences, they are cut from the same cloth and of the same genre. In an excellent essay in the WaPo yesterday, movie critic Anne Hornaday pegged the connection. Both are what cinephiles have come to describe as "torture porn," films that focus on the relentless and graphic depiction of the bloody torment of other human beings.

Both movies attempt to make the case that they are, in fact, furthering human understanding. The underlying premise behind the Saw franchise is, apparently, that the threat of a slow and horrible death inflicted on our helpless body by a sadistic psychopath enables us to better appreciate life. A few years back, I remember one of our Sunday School teachers suggested integrating that into our third grade curriculum. It didn't go over well.

Antichrist is a bit less like something written by Dr. Phil's sociopathic younger brother. It's more intentionally obscure, more aware that it is not a movie. It is not meant to entertain. It is Film! It is Art! It's array of misogynistic and increasingly harrowing images have something to do with the power dialectic between reason and emotion, male and female, sexuality, self-affirmation and self-mutilation. Though it's made by a Dane, he's evidently one of those Danes who hasn't discovered the pleasures of a good beer. It feels more High German, with a vision probably expressed best with some long technical made up word, like, say, dafoeingeweideblutforterungschafft.

Sigh. We Americans are just so..provincial.

Here, I feel a strange desire to go all Father Ted standing self-righteous with a sign outside of the theater. It's painfilth! It's degrading hurtsmut! Stay away! Down with that sort of thing!

I won't do that, tempting though it may be. But prog though I am, I can honestly see no reason to watch films that serve up meticulously presented brutality for our prurient delectation and amusement. I mean, jeez. I had to watch the Passion of the Christ once for church, and I never ever want to go through that again. Torture porn is a spiritually blighted genre, one into which Jesus-folk should wander only with deep caution. Better yet, stay away.

Some of my fellow progs might disagree. I am being judgmental. Prejudiced, even, given that I won't go see those films. Art that expresses human suffering is still art, they might say. Speech that revels in and celebrates inflicting mortal pain is still speech, they would suggest. What right do I have to make value judgments about things that other people enjoy or find expresses the human condition?

Discernment is just so...unpomo.

I am convinced, though, that storytelling and the images and ideas we take in transform us as persons. They are not passive expressions of what is, but help form us and shape us. It's part of the reason Jesus told stories to get his point across, eh? When we take in images of brutality and cruelty as a form of entertainment, it coarsens us. Stunts us.

It is, in programming terms, bad code.

The Appearance of Evil

While my little guy was banging his way through his drum lesson earlier this week, I took a few moments to wander down to a specialty store that had opened nearby. It was a Halloween Store. Not a generic costume store, or a party store. The sole purpose of this store was Halloween costumes and decorations, which makes it something like Christmas Mouse for the Trick-or-Treating set.

Unlike the Christians who hide away from this event, I tend to enjoy Halloween a great deal. It's utterly innocuous. In my community and in most communities around the country, it's a wholly secularized time to get to know neighbors and their kids. The candy we hand out to little Yodas and Elves and miscellaneous Cartoon Characters is a source of pleasure for both us and the recipients. The little impromptu block parties and groups of mellow, chatting, friendly parents are a self-evidently good thing, no matter what Jack Chick tells us.

But the store felt...well...off. Not..."good." Maybe it was my mood that day. But I got a mild but unmistakably negative feeling the moment I walked in, a soft gnawing discomfort that didn't yield until I left. It was, I think, because of the way the store presented itself. It was too intentionally dark. It was too commercial, too adult, and too fascinated with the macabre, with blood and blade and horror.

One entire wall was full of "grownup" costumes, by which I mean the costume options currently open to women. They can be anything, so long as it's Sexy. To reinforce this, there were plenty of images of scantily clad hotties on display, to the point that it almost seemed like it was another sort of store altogether. Not that I've ever been in one of those stores. Ahem.

The rest of the store was decorated with elaborate models of the mutilated undead, monsters, and howling, illuminated-eye demons. Full-sized rentable mannequins of serial killers and succubi stood motionless in the back, each framed in a black velvet sarcophagus. The effect was not festive, not silly, not outrageous, or goofy. It didn't even feel particularly creative. In it's zealous effort to market All Hallows product, the store managed to come up with an overall feel that was claustrophobic and mildly menacing.

What struck me was the reaction of the kids. Those few who were in there didn't seem excited, or like they were having fun. They weren't scurrying from section to section. They seemed slightly wary. They were sticking close to their parents.

Evil...even just the surface appearance of evil...just isn't something people like to be around.

Honestly, it was the kind of store that would even bug a self-respecting Wiccan.

Applied Memetic Demonology 102

If demons are memetic in character, then how do we fight them? This is Applied Memetic Demonology, after all. So...where's the application? (If you want the more abstract theoretical stuff, you'll have to wait for my Arcana Daemonica 301, which isn't offered again until Fall 2010.)

There are a variety of tools that are efficacious in the battle against those self-perpetuating threads of thought and cultural darkness that shatter us individually and cause our societies to devour creation and neighbor. Those tools include the following:

1) To Kill A Demon, Starve A Demon. Memes reinforce themselves through repetitive control over our actions. The more often we engage in a particular behavior or allow our actions to be controlled by that thread of thought, the stronger that thread becomes. At a personal level, cycles of addictive behavior, anger, jealousy, and bitterness can become so deeply entrenched in us as to completely control our actions. Resisting the urge and undercutting that pattern is one essential step in breaking the cyclical character of a controlling meme. This can be immensely difficult for us to do alone.

So pray over it. Meditate over it. Supplant and subvert that pattern of behavior at every level. Replace it with actions that are healthy and in the service of others.

Don't just briefly stop yielding to it. Leave no room in your life for it to feed.

Also...don't give it power. Don't say, "I'm in the grasp of a mighty spiritual power." Say, "I'm in the grasp of something that is nothing." We want our own struggles to be part of a great war that is raging across heaven. We want this sense that we're part of a great life or death struggle for the cosmos itself. But we only want that because we are selfish. God already rules everything but us. Our own struggles...our own demons...are tiny. Call 'em on it. They are practically nothing.

Those controlling patterns of behavior are even more ferocious at a collective level. Resisting social compulsions towards hyperconsumptiveness or xenophobia is a huge challenge. There, the church and communities of faith can respond. We can provide prophetic witness. We can provide a community that nurtures countercultural alternatives to the demonic ethos that consumes us with consumerism and stokes the fires of nationalistic fervor.

Or not, depending on the church. But the battle is worth waging.

2) Apply Light. Demons rely on darkness for their survival. Enveloping them with shame and silence is just what they need. So don't give it to 'em. Open yourself up to the love of God and neighbor.

Praying, meditating, and allowing yourself to stand before your Maker helps give a foundation for taking the little buggers out. That doesn't mean crying out "The Power of Christ Commands You" over and over again while wearing big billowy vestments. That's a movie, folks.

The awareness of God's presence that comes from prayer provides a sacred space in your life, an awareness of the presence of the holy that can act as a beachhead in your efforts to drive out the darkness. That radical kenosis or "self-emptying," if done regularly, connects you to the truth of God's absolute power and transforming love. The more transparent you are before God, the less shadow you cast. And those memes only live quivering in the shadows of your soul. Fill yourself with light.

You need to open yourself to neighbor, too. That means sharing. Confessing. Find a friend or loved one you can speak to who will support you. Find a mature person in the faith who will hear without judging and hold you accountable. That connection, that opening to another, makes for a connection in the Spirit that transcends the reach of the pernicious little memelings within you.

There are plenty of groups that can help with this. 12 Step programs, though often maligned, are of tremendous help. Church accountability groups are also very effective. People of faith often reject the assistance of professionals...but a good, faith-sensitive psychologist or psychiatrist is yet another weapon in your own struggle and an aid to overcoming those things within yourself that oppress and subvert you.

Applied Memetic Demonology 101

One of the things about being a pastor is that you get all sorts of interesting questions. Having been brought up in a slew of moderate to progressive churches, in which social justice talk, service missions, and the life of the mind predominated, not a lick of that experience tells me how to respond when another soul comes up to me and asks about demons.

Demons? The very word is pretty much anathema to progressive Christians. We generally think of demon-talk as the theological kissin' cousin of snake-handling, the sort of thing that only gets taken seriously by large sweaty men in ill-fitting suits who bellow at you in intermittent all caps while they point at a large and OCDetailed hand-drawn chart of demonic names and functions.

"..and THIS is p'a'AArgasheh, the Demon of Excessive CHOCOLATE COATED Macadamia Nut Consumption, who RESIDES in the LOWEST QUARTILE of your PINEAL GLAND..."

As I think back carefully over the seven years I spent in seminary, I can think of perhaps one or two discussions on the topic, always from a clinical remove. We want to approach evil only on psychological terms, as just a manifestation of a clinically treatable disorder right out of the DSM IV. But the concept persists, and tends to weave deep into the theology of many churches. So folks come up to me and ask me about demons. Or about the demons they are sure are assailing them. What to say?

When folks ask, I say that demons are real. And that they are not real. Typically cryptic of me, but that serves a further purpose.

When I say that demons are real, I'm saying that they only exist in memetic form, as memes, those transferable and self-replicating patterns of thought that can be passed from one sentient being to another. They only exist in the shadows cast by human separation from God. The "power" that they have...their reality...does not extend beyond us into the created order. That belongs wholly to God. That doesn't mean that these fragmentary entities don't have power, or a form of reality. Addictions and compulsions and hatreds and bigotries are intense and destructive things. They shatter individual lives and poison whole societies.

Still, theologies that assume that evil goes beyond that, that it's somehow woven into the fabric of heaven or creation, that it has a reality that extends outside of humankind, those theologies are...well...dangerous. If you assert that something has more power than it actually does, then it becomes harder to kill it. And as the battle to establish the Kingdom of God rages across our souls, slaying demons is kinda a priority.