Friday Reflection: Error's Uninvited Guest

The depth and scope of the depravity and corruption of the Bush administration—here, in Iraq, and around the world, in fact—has been abundantly documented here and in many other places on the Internet (not to mention the published literature on the same topic). It may seem difficult to understand, then, how Congress has been so ignorant of what to most of us is as plain as a drowned city in the Gulf Coast or a chaos of medieval proportions in Baghdad.

Clearly, the author of our banner quote shares the same confusion. How can these politicians, most of them Senators, even think of campaigning around the country, some 20 months ahead of the election, when the nation is under a constitutional crisis (several of them, in fact) and a losing war is being ramped up amid a tightening knot of tyranny at home?

Anyway, the author of the remarks we quoted goes by the name "The Pen," whose email dispatch I receive regularly. You can click on the "Join the Peace Team" graphic at the top of the sidebar and sign up for it yourself.



Friday Reflection: Error's Uninvited Guest

Something we always try to do here, whenever we write about the BushCo tyranny or the Iraq War, is to scratch deeper at the surface of world events and figureheads of state than others do. The point is to go beyond the spin and then keep digging from there. Often, as you've seen, we only come up with more questions rather than any conclusive answers. But that's not a problem, after all: I would suggest, in fact, that if we conducted our own lives that way, we'd experience some amazing results.

But this time, I think I have an answer to offer to a nagging question that is contained in what was discussed in the first part of this post. Our question today is: "Why can't Bush, Cheney, and their ilk admit error? Why do these guys continue to preach their own perfection to a narrowing chorus of ignorance?"

The answer, as I often say, lies within ourselves. I think the question is important because it reveals truths about our culture that the mass media entirely ignore, and that we ourselves often overlook.

In our culture, the admission of error rarely happens in isolation: you don't just say "I was wrong, I'm sorry" and move on. Something else happens instead: to confess to a mistake in our society is to accept guilt. It is this uninvited guest, this dark companion to error, that causes all the trouble and incites all our inhibitions to admitting error.

I personally sense this in Bush's famous and frequent malapropisms, word salad speech, his stiff and skittish mannerisms, and his blatant distortion of both facts and their meaning. I sense the insidious, toxic influence of hidden guilt in his persistent and flagrant acts of denial. If I had time and some grant money to do it with, I'd study this and see whether these feelings are supported by analysis of events and data.

But for now we just have our own inner laboratory to work in, and that should be enough to come to some understanding. It is difficult enough to admit one's error in a mistake at work or a misunderstanding with a spouse, because the projected stain of guilt that goes along with many such moments tends to stick our feet to the very spot that we should leaving behind. We can be thus trapped in an error that is perhaps years or even decades old, if we cannot detect the inner tar of guilt that is falsely holding us back in the swamp of a mistake that we've already confessed. As I mention in the text quoted below, this is one reason why recidivism rates for convicts in our society are so shockingly high: guilt as an inextinguishable stain, as the spot that never washes clean, is programmed into our religion, our morality, and our law.

If we in our personal lives face so much struggle with error's uninvited guest, imagine that you happened to have started a war four years ago; a war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents; a war that is being irretrievably lost amid a vortex of human and economic waste. Then imagine that more than two-thirds of your nation's citizens now realize the extent and depravity of your error. You have been personally steeped, from childhood on, in the very ideology that we've been talking about here—the indissoluble marriage of error and guilt—and you know that the weakest admission of a mistake would bring down a mountain of guilt upon you. Well, doesn't that explain something about the positively psychotic cult of denial that has defined this Bush administration?

For more on guilt and its insidious dangers, here is an excerpt from my book, The Tao of Hogwarts, where I discuss the meaning of J.K. Rowling's metaphor on government and its institutions, "The Ministry of Magic":

The ideologies of religion, law, and institutional morality—personified in Dostoyevsky's tale as the Grand Inquisitor—offer each person who will follow them the security of their protection, the comfort of a forced order, and the glossy emolument of their entitlements, but only at an incalculable price: that of the sacrifice of one's true, autonomous, and unique self. This is, in reality, a classic inner shakedown—the original bait-and-switch scheme. The need for the sacrifice has been manufactured via advertisement; the market is concocted. There is, in fact, no natural danger, disorder, or inner failing that requires the sacrifice demanded of the individual. Of even more concern is the consequence that the price of self-sacrifice conceals: a hidden tax or surcharge which will make it inevitably intolerable to the purchaser. This tax is the precondition of guilt; it is the ideological staining of one's true being. All have sinned, so all must repent (the religious embodiment of the tax); all of us are brutal, predatory, evil animals, and so must submit to the rule of a forced Code of Law in order to live peacefully with one another (the moral embodiment of the tax); all of us are lacking, incapable of living successfully out of the inner resources that Nature has provided, and so we must gain the additional support of institutionally-provided sustenance and social standing (the governmental embodiment of the tax).

Implicit in every one of these formulations is the threat of punishment: if you don't repent, you'll be punished (and according to some religious ideologies, you will even if you do repent, though not as badly or eternally as you would be if you didn't); if you disobey or question the code of conduct prescribed by the collective, you will be punished; if you attempt to live independently, according to the inborn means and social skills that Nature has given you, and without regard to the personal restrictions established by the ruling authority, you will be punished.

But mere physical punishment, while temporarily or sporadically effective, has proven itself to be an incomplete means of oppression, so the abstractions of guilt and blame were projected beneath our hearts by the collective ego—very much like the fires of the Grand Inquisitor's auto-da-fe. Through thousands of years of deep, behaviorist-style programming, these concepts have been driven deep into our psyches, forming a vast architecture of damnation. It has evolved into quite a massive structure, so perhaps a brief walk around this monument will help us as we prepare to destroy it.

Guilt is a blanket of blame thrown over all of human nature, and even over Nature itself. If you are human, you are guilty—to the collective ego, the proof is in the perpetuation of the delusion: "doesn't everyone feel guilty at one time or another?" it asks. If you are alive, you are stained; if you dare to reject, or even to question, the dogma that casts this blot on your being, then you are branded as one in denial, and you are threatened with "correction"—i.e., punishment.

Therefore, guilt is a part of your identity—you are forced to acknowledge that culpritude is a part of your nature—as an individual and as a representative of your species. Even God, in His human transmutation, was a sinner, and he admitted it! If God Himself was a sinner and therefore guilty, how much more so are you?

Guilt is an admission of the fact that one deserves to be punished by a vengeful God or an indifferent Cosmos (take your pick), and its human, self-appointed representatives. Many ideologies add to this axiom the codicil that the more painful and brutal the punishment, the better—this is the doctrine of asceticism in a nutshell. Again, God got himself nailed to a cross and only complained a little, right near the very end, so we may as well accept our punishment with open arms, whenever it falls our way.

Guilt is not only natural to humans, but also often perfectly justified. Many therapists will ask a client or patient who is feeling guilty about something, "is the guilt logical?" What they mean by this is, "did you do or say something for which you deserve to feel guilty?" They never stop to wonder whether the client should rather be undertaking an inner revolution upon the very idea of guilt itself, because they have accepted the reified notion of guilt that has been programmed into them by their culture—and even by their "science" (Freud believed that guilt was a perfectly natural consequence of the Oedipus complex, in which a child combined a sexual desire for its opposite-sex parent with a murderous wish against the same-sex parent).

Guilt is one of those spots that never washes clean. In America, the recidivism rate of ex-convicts released from prison hovers around 70 percent, closer to 90 percent in many areas. Their unemployment rates are also enormous—to have been deemed legally guilty in this society is a life sentence, whether you are within or outside of a correctional facility. This derives from our religious ideologies, which presuppose that sin can never be washed clean in this lifetime (which in turn, by the way, lies at the root of many obsessive-compulsive disorders).

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This weekend, I'll offer another excerpt, which discusses ways that we can clear ourselves from within of that muddy delusion, error's uninvited guest.

Monday with McKenna: You Lenten Bastard!

Jon Stewart explains how "Lenten" becomes a profanity in the mouth of William Donohue—click the graphic and watch the fun

Terry McKenna is back today; but it appears that he's gotten bored of following the latest of the Bushies' cut-and-run routines (the latest being on the treatment under their watch of wounded vets at Walter Reed Army Hospital). So today, he takes up the themes of Lent, Redemption, and Original Sin. Now if you've read any of my writing here about the Church, then you know that my room at the Mephistopheles Motel is already reserved. Now I know that my co-blogger will be right next door. See you in Hell, Terry...


In case you missed it, it’s Lent again. For those of you who are not familiar with the details of the Christian liturgical year, Lent is perhaps the most important season. It begins on Ash Wednesday (this year, February 21st) and ends with the triumphal celebration of Easter (this year on April 8th).

The Lenten season is one of prayer and reflection – and who couldn’t use more of that! (Wouldn’t it benefit all of us if we could get George Bush and Dick Cheney to spend some quality time on their knees praying to God for mercy?) Then there is fasting. Although now out of fashion, fasting has a prominent place in many of the world’s religions. Buddhists fast and so do Hindus; also Jews and Muslims. Among Christians, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics still fast today - though for Roman Catholics, fasting is confined to two days of light eating, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. For Protestants, fasting has all but disappeared, being considered by some a meaningless show that does nothing to promote salvation … or Redemption.

Still, these ancient behaviors are harmless, maybe even beneficial. But then we have the much more troubling concept of Redemption.

The Christian concept of Redemption goes back to the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, but Christians added original sin to the story, something that the Jews never intended – and after all, it is their Bible! From my uninformed position, Jews don’t believe in original sin, and don’t ask to be saved – they do pray, and they believe that if they live according to god’s law, that they are living righteously.

The nature of Original Sin is debated among Christians; what I present is a fairly orthodox version. But however interpreted, the stain of sin came about because of what is, after all, a pretty minor affair. Adam and Eve ate a few pieces of fruit. Yes, “God” forbade it, but so what. Thinking big picture, if killing someone is the equivalent in sin of a felony, then eating a piece of fruit is a surely just a misdemeanor, meriting at most a ticket – with a little luck, a first time offender could get off with just a warning. Yet our petty Old Testament God used this as a pretext to toss Adam and Eve out of his garden. With behaviors like this (the God of the Old Testament shows ready anger, and lots of jealousy) it's hard to imagine how the notion of an almighty, all knowing or all loving God ever developed. Certainly not from the Hebrew Bible. Of course, the Adam and Eve story is just part of an extended creation myth, and whoever wrote the story (and no… the Bible tales weren't dictated by God) had to somehow get rid of Eden by the end of the story; thus Eden was placed behind an angel with a flaming sword (to keep onlookers out?) And it had to be, for if Eden were supposed still to be accessible to man, generations of European gentlemen would have spent as much effort to find Eden as they did in trying to find the equally mythic fountain of youth.

As myth, the Garden of Eden story exists for two reason, the first is to remind us to obey God; the second is to warn us about human frailty. It’s a great story, and like any great story, can withstand all manner of retelling, from comic book and cartoon versions, to 19th century illustrations by Gustave Dore, to contemporary advertisements using Adam an Eve as stand-ins for all of us.

Still, this fetching story carries the chilling baggage of original sin. Here is the standard interpretation (from the Catechism of the Catholic Church):

By his sin Adam, as the first man, lost the original holiness and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but for all human beings.

Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called "original sin".

As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the domination of death, and inclined to sin (this inclination is called "concupiscence").

Wow. So man is pretty much lost from the start. (And it begs the question, if God were truly all knowing, why did he even devise such a test as the one with forbidden fruit?)

In any case, let’s suppose we inherit sin. Inherited sin doesn’t sound all that bad, if we can remedy it with a little water (Baptism). But then what about the Crucifixion story. Why did Jesus Christ die for our sins? The answer is because of the stain of the sin of the first man (see above). This is a dangerous concept on two levels. The first is the still troubling notion of inherited sin. Inherited sin and its opposite, inherited merit, are ancient notions that have bedeviled man since the dawn of history. It is only in the last few decades of the 20th century that western society has rid itself of the idea of inherited merit (it is a prominent theme of many a 19th century novel). The concept of inherited sin remains with us to this day. Think of the so called honor killing that plague the middle east and south Asia. What else is an honor killing but a means to expunge the shame of shared and thus inherited sin? In a typical case, a girl’s sexual indiscretion (or even her rape) looms so large that a family feels it must kill a daughter or the family will be collectively stained with her guilt. By the way, folks like George Bush hold much of their place in society though notions of inherited family merit – with any luck, his presidency will put that notion to bed forever.

Worse than inherited sin, is the idea that we needed Christ’s execution to rid us of the stain of sin. (By the way, what was Jesus Christ in the scheme of things except another rich man’s son – God’s son?). If so, then what of all the pain and suffering in Christ’s own time? Think of the slaves, beggars, widows and abandoned children who suffered while the son of God was gallivanting with his crew – was their suffering not enough to atone for their sins? At very least? And then what about the rest of us? (In our own era, were all those un-baptized Jews in the death camps stained by some sin for which they needed Christ’s death to make good?)

Of course it's nonsense. Christ suffered at most a day and a half of pain – and given the impact of “shock” he may have been numb by the time they nailed him up – yet his suffering is supposed to have meant more than any of millions of cancer victims, or the victims of war, or of the pain of childbirth?

So let’s discard the Crucifixion story along with the rest of our religious baggage. We merit our own rewards and punishments. And if there is a kind and gentle God – we can hope for his mercy. The rest is just sound and fury and you know what Shakespeare says about that, “it is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.”

Atheist, former Roman Catholic, cancer survivor, and former Saturday Night Live player, Julia Sweeney does a marvelous take on religion. If you can get to a chance to hear her perform her one woman show, she’s worth it.

—T. McKenna

God's Nose

Happy holidays to all, and a Merry Christmas to you, Bill-O: may your Who-ville moment of enlightenment be not far off.

One of the primary signs of a good blog is not necessarily its content or its writers as much as the quality of the audience it attracts. Daily Kos, Altercation, and the HuffPost (for example) are great blogs mainly because smart and perceptive people read them and post comments. So I'm always grateful when we have comments such as we received from Hugh7 to Thursday's post, where we considered the news of the supposed benefits of circumcision. Hugh7 is another of our readers who questions authority and penetrates appearances, and that's what we're about here at DR.

Now Terry McKenna is taking a well-deserved break from blogging. This week, we'll focus on the holidays and their various symbols and practices—starting with a small essay on God's Nose. First, a few news items from the weekend deserve our attention.

What does it take to make a Bush see the faintest light of reality? How about 35 minutes of torture in what is supposed to be a non-cruel and thoroughly human punishment? I suppose we should give Jeb credit for ordering the practice stopped, at least temporarily. Let's hope he has a talk with bro about the same principle: for now that the casualty count in that cruel and inhuman war for "our" side has reached 25,000 and another half million or so for "them," it would appear as if the moment has long passed to finally do what two-thirds of the American electorate is asking be done.

BBC is doing a special report on an issue that our mass media wouldn't dare touch, because it would adversely impact a cornerstone of the Washington economy, especially when Congress is in session. It's about prostitution, and is told from the perspective of the ladies themselves, and it is compelling reading. Check it out, and by all means pass the link around.

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God's Nose

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God knows all (mind, intellect); sees all (the omni-eye); and hears all (the cosmic NSA wiretapper). But He doesn't smell a thing; and this, I submit, is a problem, a failing of God.

The Greeks and other ancient cultures knew better. They understood that man was not created in God's image, but that it was really quite the other way around. Therefore, they gave God a very sharp sense of smell. This sense is a part of the many stories (usually of the big guy, Zeus), that involve attraction, deception, and even seduction. Read the tales of Homer, Ovid, or Pindar: if you wanted to get a god's attention in those days, you laid out a feast that would usually feature a juicy, burning, smoking sacrificial barbecue. The fumes from the roast would waft toward Olympus and next thing you know you'd have a god at the picnic table.

The only remnant of such stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible that I could find is Gen. 8:21, where Noah, having survived the famous flood, has smoked some sacrificial animals in the BBQ pit and the smell attracts God, who as a result swears never to destroy the Earth again. Otherwise, in both the Old and New Testaments, God's nose has been removed.

Maybe the authors of these texts wanted us to believe that God couldn't possibly be an animal like us, so they made a point of taking away or at least minimizing the most primordially animal sense—smell—from the attributes of God. Once again, in these texts God knows, sees, hears, and certainly acts a lot; but he rarely smells (though he often stinks).

The problem with a God who can't smell is that this deficiency severely weakens the teaching potential of the myth; it saps the metaphor of a crucial strain of pragmatism, since God is suddenly so fundamentally unlike us that His experience is no guide for our lived experience.

And if you think the sense of smell is overrated, check out the animal kingdom: what do two dogs do when they first meet? How do animals in the wild detect enemies or food? Then consider your own experience, and think of how often you've relied on your sense of smell to choose the right food, the best living space, even the right mate. For us, smell means so much that it has become embodied in our language as a symbolic or inner sense that's applied to situations metaphorically: we smell a rat, we sniff for meaning, we smell trouble, we will even say that we can smell a lie (and, in fact, we can).

So how can a God of the Universe teach us anything meaningful about ourselves—our lives, our bodies, our relationships—if He has been effectively deprived of the most basic and essential of our animal senses? For when we make God insensate to odor, then we in turn become the same, and we build a culture of sanitized, genetically modified foods that neither nourish nor entice us with a delightful odor. We also spew poisons into the air and can pretend they're not there, because we have denied, through our Creator stories, our own sense of smell.

This seems to be a problem we need to work on. My first suggestion would be that we simply drop God altogether—flush Him out of our consciousness, individually and culturally. This, however, may meet with a certain resistance in most parts of the world; so my second-best alternative is this: let's give God back His sense of smell. Give Him back his nose.