Disgust

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 24 of 90 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The timeless realities that the Shiis learned to see at the core of existence must be activated in the present. The example of Imam Husain at Kerbala should, Shariati believed, be an inspiration to all the oppressed and alienated people in the world. Shariati was disgusted by the quietist ulema , who had locked themselves away in their madrasahs and had, in his view, distorted Islam by making it a purely private creed. The period of the Occultation should not be a period of passivity. If the Shiah followed Husain’s example and led all the people of the Third World in a campaign against tyranny, they would compel the Hidden Imam to appear. 60 But the ulema had ruined the religious experience for young Iranians, bored them to distraction, and driven them into the arms of the West. They saw Islam in purely literal terms, as a set of clear directives to be followed to the letter, whereas the genius of Shiism was its symbolism. This taught Muslims to see all earthly reality as “signs” of the Unseen. 61 The Shiah needed a Reformation. The original Shiism of Ali and Husain had been obliterated in Iran by what Shariati called “Safavid Shiism.” An active, dynamic faith had been converted into a privatized, passive affair, whereas the disappearance of the Hidden Imam meant that the mission of the Prophet and the Imams had in fact passed to the people. The period of the Occultation was thus the age of democracy. The ordinary people should no longer be in thrall to the mujtahids and forced to imitate (taqlid) their religious behavior, as Safavid Shiism required. Each Muslim must submit to God alone and take responsibility for his own life. Anything else was idolatrous and a perversion of Islam, turning it into a lifeless observance of set rules. The people must elect their own leaders; they must be consulted, as the principle of shurah demanded. By their consensus (ijmah) , they would give legitimacy to the decisions of their leaders. There should be an end of clerical control. Instead of the ulema , the “enlightened intellectuals” (raushanfekran) should be the new leaders of the ummah . 62 Shariati was not entirely fair to the Usuli doctrines of “Safavid Shiism.” They had arisen in response to a particular need, and, though they had always been controversial, they had expressed the spirituality of the premodern age, which could not permit the individual too much freedom. 63 But the world had changed. Iranians who had been affected by the Western ideals of autonomy and intellectual liberty could no longer submit to the rulings of a mujtahid as their grandparents had done. Conservative spirituality had been designed to help people accept the limitations of their society and submit to the status quo.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  flesh an illusion; his Passion and death should be blamed on the Creator Demiurge. In characteristically Greek fashion, Marcion found the Tanakh in its Greek form crude and offensive – ‘Jewish myths’, in a phrase of the Epistle to Titus, which he would have attributed to the Apostle Paul.42 He saw the Creator God of the Jews as a God of judgement, rather than the God of love whom he saw perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ had died to satisfy the Creator God. It is not easy to reconstruct Marcion’s biblical writings and commentary, since they were largely destroyed by his enemies, but it is clear that he was a literalist who despised any figurative or allegorical interpretation of scripture and rather took the first apparent sense. If that sense clashed with his own sense of true religion, he simply rejected the text. The result was that all the Tanakh had to go, even though Marcion still drew on its prophecies to complete his picture of the saving work of Christ. What remained of the New Testament was a collection of Paul’s letters (probably the collection which he inherited), together with a version of Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps he simply chose this because Luke was the Gospel with which he had grown up, but it may have been because Luke’s constant references to the Spirit in the story of Christ and the life of the Church appealed to him, or because of Luke’s evident association with Paul through Luke’s authorship of the Acts of the Apostles.43 To hammer home his anti- Jewish and ultra-Pauline message, he added a book of Antitheses, pointing out the difference in approach between his selection of scripture and the Hebrew sacred books. He was no isolated eccentric: references to Christians opposing Marcion come from places as far apart as France and Syria, so it is clear that his teachings had a widespread effect, and there is evidence that congregations with Marcionite beliefs survived until as late as the tenth century in what are now the borderlands of Iran and Afghanistan.44 Marcion fascinated the great German Lutheran Church historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adolf von Harnack, and it must be said that there are curious resemblances in Marcion’s thought to the spiritual progress of Martin Luther: the revulsion against the idea of a God of judgement, the contrast between Law and Gospel, the fascination with Paul and the single-minded search for a core message within the inheritance of sacred writings.45 CANON, CREED, MINISTRY, CATHOLICITY Gnosticism and Marcionism offered two possible futures for the Jesus cult. A gnostic Christianity would have bred immense diversity of belief; indeed,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Many clergy had been disgusted by the growing corruption of the court and by the economic insecurity of the government which had led the Qajars to grant unacceptable financial concessions to foreigners and to take out expensive loans. They had seen that this shortsighted behavior had led in Egypt to military occupation. It seemed clearly preferable to limit the oppressive policies of the Qajar state by means of the constitution. 92 This point of view was expressed forcibly by Shaykh Muhammad Husain Naini (1850–1936), in his Admonition to the Nation and Exposition to the People , which was published in Najaf in 1909. Naini argued that representative government was the next best thing to the Hidden Imam; to set up an assembly capable of restraining a despotic ruler was clearly an act worthy of the Shiah. A tyrannical ruler was guilty of idolatry (shirk) , the cardinal sin of Islam, because he arrogated to himself divine power and behaved as though he were God himself, lording it over his subjects. The prophet Moses had been sent to destroy the power of Pharaoh, who had oppressed and enslaved his people, and force him to obey the commands of Allah. In the same way, the new Majlis with its panel of religious experts must ensure that the shahs obey God’s laws. 93 The most lethal opposition to the new constitution, however, came not from the ulema but from the new shah, who, with the help of a Russian Cossack brigade, led a successful coup in June 1908 and closed the Majlis; the most radical Iranian reformers and ulema were executed. But the popular guard in Tabriz held out against the shah’s forces and, with the help of the Bakhtiari tribe, staged a countercoup the following month, unseated the shah, and put his minor son, Ahmad, on the throne with a liberal regent. A Second Majlis was elected, but, as in Egypt, this fledgling parliamentary democracy was cut down to size by the European powers. When the Majlis tried to break the stranglehold that Britain and Russia had long had on Iranian affairs by appointing a young American financier, Morgan Shuster, to help them reform Iran’s ailing economy, Russian troops advanced on Tehran and closed the Majlis in December 1911. It was three years before the Majlis was permitted to reconvene, and by that time, many had become embittered and disillusioned. The constitution had not been the panacea they had hoped for, but had simply thrown the fundamental impotence of Iran into cruel and clear relief. The First World War was very disruptive for Iran and left many Iranians longing for strong government. In 1917, British and Russian troops overran the country.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars, and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative postures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts and the mass media! And add to all this, the system of usury which fuels man’s voracity for money and engenders vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.17 He wanted Muslims to revolt against this secular city, and to restore a sense of the spiritual to modern society. Qutb saw history mythically. He did not approach the Prophet’s life like a modern, scientific historian, seeing these events as unique and located in a distant period. He had been a novelist and a literary critic, and knew that there were other ways of arriving at the truth of what had really happened. For Qutb, Muhammad’s career was still an archetype, a moment when the sacred and the human had come together and acted in concert. It was in the deepest sense a “symbol,” which linked the mundane with the divine. Muhammad’s life thus represented an ideal beyond history, time, and place and, like a Christian sacrament, it provided humanity with a “constant encounter” with the ultimate Reality.18 It was, therefore, an epiphany, and the different stages of the Prophet’s career represented “milestones” that guided men and women to their God. In the same way, the term jahiliyyah could not simply refer to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia, as in conventional Muslim historiography. “Jahiliyyah is not a period in time,” he explained in Milestones, his most controversial book. “It is a condition that is repeated every time society veers from the Islamic way, whether in the past, the present, or the future.”19 Any attempt to deny the reality and sovereignty of God is jahili. Nationalism (which makes the state a supreme value), communism (which is atheistic), and democracy (in which the people usurp God’s rule) are all manifestations of jahiliyyah, which worships humanity instead of the divine. It is a state of Godlessness and apostasy. For Qutb, the modern jahiliyyah in both Egypt and the West was even worse than the jahiliyyah of the Prophet’s time, because it was not based on “ignorance” but was a principled rebellion against God.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The more successful the Zionists became, the more the Neturei Karta were baffled. Why had the wicked prospered? When the State of Israel was established in 1948, so soon after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum and Blau could only conclude that Satan had intervened directly in history to lead Jews into a realm of meaningless evil and sacrilege.16 Most of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox were able to accommodate the new state. They declared that it had no religious value and that Jews who lived in Israel were still in exile, just as they had been in the Diaspora. Nothing had changed. Agudat Israel was prepared to engage in shtadlanut—dialogue and negotiations—with the Israeli government to safeguard the religious interests of Jews, just as they had with the gentile governments in Europe. But Neturei Karta would have none of this. Immediately after the proclamation of statehood on May 14, 1948, they imposed a ban on any participation in the elections, refused to accept government funding for their yeshivot, and vowed never to set foot in government institutions. They also redoubled their attacks on Agudat, whose pragmatic acceptance of the state they regarded as the thin end of the wedge. “If [we] let up even to the slightest degree, God forbid, from our hatred of evil, of seducers and corrupters,” Blau insisted, “[if we breach] the separateness to which our holy Torah obliges us … then the way is open to every forbidden thing, for we will have left the straight and narrow path for a crooked one.”17 The Zionist venture, which had enticed almost the entire Jewish people away from God, was plunging into a nihilistic denial of all decent and sacred values. The more rooted Zionism became in the Jewish world and the more successful the new state, the deeper and more principled was Neturei Karta’s repudiation of both. There could be no possibility of reconciliation, because the State of Israel was the creation of Satan. As Teitelbaum explained, it was not possible for a Jew “to adhere to both faith in the state and faith in our holy Torah, for they are complete opposites.” Even if the politicians and cabinet ministers were Talmudic sages and devout observers of the commandments, the state would still be a demonic profanity because it had rebelled against God and tried to snatch salvation and to advance the End of Days.18 Neturei Karta had no time for Agudat’s efforts to get religious legislation passed in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It was not a pious act to try to limit public transport on the Sabbath by law or to ensure that yeshiva students were exempt from the draft. This was simply converting a divine law into human law; it amounted to an annulment of the Torah and to a desecration of the Halakhah. As Rabbi Shimon Israel Posen, a leading scholar of the community of Satmar Hasidim in New York, said of the Agudat members of the Knesset:

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  After the 1967 defeat, Nasser had retreated somewhat from socialism and had initiated a rapprochement with the United States. He had also acknowledged the new religious mood in the Middle East, and, though the Muslim Brothers remained in prison, Nasser began to lard his speeches with Islamic references once again. These two tendencies became more marked under Sadat. In 1972, he dismissed the 1500 Soviet advisers installed by Nasser, and, after the Yom Kippur War, announced a new policy designed to bring Egypt into the capitalist world market. He called this new economic initiative infitah (“Open Door”).24 Sadat, however, was no economist and Egypt’s financial problems, always an Achilles’ heel, were exacerbated by infitah. It certainly opened Egypt up: foreign currency and foreign imports poured into the country. Western investors were wooed by advantageous tax deals, and Egypt did become closer to the United States. Open Door also benefited a small percentage of the rising bourgeoisie, and a few Egyptians made a great deal of money. But the vast majority suffered. Inevitably, Egyptian businesses could not cope with this foreign competition; there was corruption, and the ostentatious consumerism of the elite aroused intense disgust and discontent. The young especially felt alienated. Only about 4 percent of them could expect a decent job; the rest had to survive on very meager public-sector salaries, which they were forced to supplement by moonlighting in their spare time, working—often ineptly—as taxi drivers, plumbers, and electricians. Decent accommodation was prohibitively expensive, and this meant that a young couple often had to wait for years before they could marry and set up house together. Their only hope was emigration. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were forced to leave home for long periods to find work in the wealthy oil states, where they could earn a good salary, send money to their families, and save for the future. Peasants also joined this exodus to the Gulf, returning only when they had enough money to build a house or buy a tractor.25 Infitah endeared Sadat to the West, but it meant that most Egyptians simply could not afford to live in their own country, and were forced into exile.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Society was not perfect. Because of its appeal to the masses, it tended to be anti-intellectual. Its pronouncements were often defensive and self-righteous. The Brothers’ image of the West, which stressed its greed, tyranny, and spiritual bankruptcy, had been distorted by the colonial experience. The object of Western imperialism had not simply been, as one of the Society’s spokesmen maintained, “to humiliate us, to occupy our lands and begin destroying Islam.”80 The Society’s leaders were intolerant of dissension in the ranks. Banna insisted on absolute obedience and did not delegate responsibility sufficiently. As a result, after his death, nobody could take his place, and the Society was virtually destroyed from within by fruitless infighting. But by far its most serious and damaging failing was the emergence in 1943 of a terrorist unit known as “The Secret Apparatus” (al jihaz al-sirri).81 It remained marginal to the Society as a whole. Because it was so clandestine, we have very little information about it, but in his definitive study of the Society, Richard P. Mitchell states his belief that by 1948, the unit only had about a thousand members, and that most of the Brothers had never heard of its existence until this date.82 For the vast majority of members, social and spiritual reform was the raison d’être of the Society, and they abhorred the terrorism of the Apparatus. Nevertheless, once a movement has started killing in the name of God, it has embarked on a nihilistic course that denies the most fundamental religious values.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  A tiny minority have proposed extermination, using the biblical precedent of the Amalekites, a people so cruel that God commanded the Israelites to slay them without mercy. 85 In 1980, Rabbi Israel Hess published an article entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” in the official magazine of Bar-Ilan University. He argued that the Palestinians were to Jews what darkness was to light, and that they deserved the same fate as the Amalekites. 86 In the same year, the Gush settler Haim Tzuria wrote that hatred was “natural and healthy”: In each generation we have those who rise up to wipe us out, therefore each generation has its own Amalek. The Amalekism of our generation expresses itself in the extremely deep hatred of the Arabs to our national renaissance in the land of our forefathers. 87 On May 3, 1980, six yeshiva students were murdered in Hebron. This inspired some of the most extreme Kookists to take revenge. Menachem Livni, a settler at Kiryat Arba, and Yehuda Etzion, a veteran Gush settler, planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them, so that they should be living reminders of the consequences of anti-Jewish terror. When he heard the news, Rabbi Haim Drukman exclaimed in rapture: “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!” 88 Most Israelis, however, were horrified by this attack, which, in the event, only maimed two of the targeted mayors. They were even more disgusted when they learned that for Livni and Etzion this act of terror was just a sideline. In April 1984, the government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground in Israel which had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Islamic world. During the Six Day War in 1967, the IDF had conquered and taken East Jerusalem and the Old City from Jordan, and, a few days after the war, Israel had annexed these districts and, in defiance of the international community, had declared Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. It was a controversial decision, since in 1947 the United Nations had declared that Jerusalem should be an international zone, and after the Six Day War had demanded that Israel withdraw from all the territories occupied during the hostilities, including Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been a Muslim city since 638, apart from a brief period of Crusader rule (1099–1187); Jerusalem, which Muslims call al-Quds (“the Holy”) is the third-holiest city in the Islamic world, after Mecca and Medina. The Dome of the Rock, which was completed in 691, was the first major Muslim monument ever built and was believed to mark the spot where Abraham offered his son to God in sacrifice; later tradition had it that the Prophet Muhammad had made a mystical ascent to heaven from this rock.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the Christian faith. He had been brought up a Christian under the tutelage of Eusebius of Nicomedia, but had come to be sickened by what he regarded as Christianity’s absurd claims, and he discreetly developed a deep fascination for Neoplatonism and the worship of the sun; he may have been initiated into the worship of Mithras.67 He was a subtle and reflective man, perhaps too much of a philosopher for his own good, and he employed the devastatingly effective strategy against Christianity of standing back from its disputes to let it fight its internal battles without a referee, a mark of how quickly the emperor had become a crucial player in the Church’s disputes. There was widespread support for his reversing the humiliation of traditional cults, and some violence against Christians, which seems to have included the lynching of George, the recently arrived Bishop of Alexandria, although it is not clear whether partisans of the previous bishop, Athanasius, were in fact the main perpetrators of this outrage.68 Only Julian’s early death on campaign on the empire’s eastern borders in 363 restored the alliance of imperial throne and imperial Church. Not everyone said that the spear that killed him had been wielded by enemy forces, and there was indiscreet rejoicing in the city of Antioch, whose Christian majority had been a particular source of distress to him.69 This was Athanasius’s moment of opportunity, particularly since his rival George was now dead. The Homoeans were in disarray; the theological radicalism of the Anomoeans concentrated the minds of their opponents, while Julian’s exposure of Christian insecurity made the more statesmanlike leaders of the Eastern Churches realize that they must find a new middle way. Among them was a group whom the Cypriot Bishop Epiphanius, an even more assiduous labeller of undesirables than Athanasius, christened the ‘semi-Arians’. They shifted the language at issue, trying to avoid further argument by rallying the Church to a word which differed from homoousios by one iota: so they declared that the Son and the Father are not ‘the same in essence’ but similar in essence (homoiousios).70 Fortunately for Athanasius and his scheming, the semi-Arians included some of the most reflective and constructive theologians of their day. Chief among them was a trio who have come to be known as the Cappadocian Fathers. The monk-bishop Basil of Caesarea (‘the Great’) we have already met (see p. 209): he said sadly about the state of the controversy that it was like a naval battle fought at night in a storm, with crews and soldiers fighting among themselves, often in purely selfish power struggles, heedless of orders from above and fighting for mastery even while their ship foundered.71 Associated with him were his brother, Gregory of Nyssa, and their lifelong friend, Gregory of Nazianzus. Athanasius and the remaining champions of the homoousios view now found them unexpected allies, and the Cappadocian Fathers provided a way

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  45 A highly emotional account of the Kerbala story, the Rawdat ash-Shuhada by the Iraqi Shii Waiz Kashift (d. 1504), was recited at special meetings known as rawda-khani (“recitals of the Rawdat”), while the people wailed and cried aloud. The rituals had always had a revolutionary potential, demonstrating as they did the willingness of the people to fight tyranny to the death. Now, however, instead of encouraging the masses to see Husain as an example, Majlisi and his clergy taught them to see the Imam as a patron who could secure their admission to paradise if they showed their devotion to him by lamenting his death. The rituals now endorsed the status quo, urging the people to curry favor with the powerful, and look only to their own interests. 46 It was an emasculation and a degradation of the old Shii ideal; it also bowdlerized the conservative ethos. Instead of helping people to attune themselves to the basic laws and rhythms of existence, the cult was simply used to keep the masses in line. It was a development that showed in quite a different way how destructive political power could be to religion. One of Majlisi’s chief targets was the school of mystical philosophy developed in Isfahan by Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his pupil, Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), a thinker who would have a profound influence on future generations of Iranians. 47 Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra were both utterly opposed to the new intransigence of some of the ulema . They saw it as a total perversion of the Shiah, and, indeed, of all religion. In the old days, when the Shiis had searched for hidden meanings in scripture, they had implicitly acknowledged that divine truth was illimitable, fresh insights were always possible, and no single interpretation of the Koran could suffice. For Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra, true knowledge could never be a matter of intellectual conformity. No sage or religious authority, however eminent, could claim a monopoly of truth. They also expressed clearly the conservative conviction that mythology and reason were both essential for a full human life: each was diminished unless complemented by the other. Mir Dimad was a natural scientist as well as a theologian. Mulla Sadra criticized both the ulema , for belittling the insights of mystical intuition, and the Sufis, for decrying the importance of rational thought. The true philosopher had to become as rational as Aristotle, but must then go beyond him in an ecstatic, imaginative apprehension of truth.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  True to the disciplines of the conservative age, Kook did not intend his myth to become an ideology, to be a blueprint for action. In any case, he had very few followers, and in his own lifetime was regarded as something of a crank. Kook put forward no political solution to the pressing problems of Zionist activity in Palestine. God had everything in hand. Kook’s mythos simply enabled his followers to see what was really going on. Kook seemed utterly indifferent to the political form the future Jewish state should take. “As for me, my main concern is the spiritual content, grounded in holiness,” he wrote to his son, Zvi Yehuda (1891–1981). “It is clear to me that, no matter how matters develop on the governmental level, if the spirit is strong it can lead to the desired goals, for with the sublime manifestation of free, shining holiness, we shall be able to illuminate all the paths of government.” 71 In the present, unredeemed age, politics were corrupt and cruel. Kook was “disgusted with the terrible iniquities of ruling during the evil age.” Fortunately, Jews had not been able to take an active political role since they had lost the Holy Land in 70 CE and gone into exile; until the world had been morally and spiritually transformed, Jews should stay out of politics. “It is not for Jacob to engage in government, as long as it entails bloodshed, as long as it requires a knack for wickedness.” But very soon, “the world will be refined,” 72 and when that happened, Jews could put their minds to the type of polity and practical policies they wished to implement. “Once the Lord’s people are established on their land in some definite way, they will turn their attention to the [geo]political realm, to purifying it of its dross, to cleansing the blood from its mouth and the abominations from between its teeth.” 73 In the premodern world, myth was not supposed to be translated into practical action; that was the job of logos and—in Kook’s scheme—of the pioneers. Kook still felt that, in the present dispensation, religion and politics were incompatible, a conviction that had acquired the force of a taboo in the Orthodox world. The Zionists, who had cast off religion, were doing all the practical work. Kook died in 1935, thirteen years before the establishment of the State of Israel. He did not live to see the terrible expedients to which Jews would feel driven in order to create a state for themselves in Arab Palestine. He never witnessed the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, nor the Arab and Jewish blood spilled in the course of the Arab-Israeli wars.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Church (see pp. 170–71), the essence of Cathars’ beliefs was dualist; they believed in the evil of material things and the necessity to transcend the physical in order to achieve spiritual purity. Their Greek name is one of many indications that this movement took its origin in the strain of dualist belief recurrent over many centuries in the Greek East, most recently in the Paulicians, who had been a presence in the Byzantine Empire since the eighth century, followed by the Bogomils (see p. 456). It may be that Catharism sprang from Latin contacts set up with Bogomils in Constantinople during the First Crusade. Certainly contemporaries made the connection with the East: the English word ‘bugger’ is derived from ‘Bulgarian’, and reflects the common canard of mainstream Christians against their opponents that heresy by its unnatural character leads to deviant sexuality. Cathars soon set up their own hierarchies of leaders in France, Italy and Germany: a direct criticism of the monolithic and powerful clerical structure created by the Gregorian Reform, for Cathar dualistic rejection of the flesh was a rejection of what could be seen as a fleshly hierarchy.45 The campaign to wipe out the Cathars soon turned into a war of conquest on behalf of the king and nobility of northern France. In its genocidal atrocity, this ‘Albigensian Crusade’ (the city of Albi was a Cathar centre, with its own Cathar bishop), ranks as one of the most discreditable episodes in Christian history; mass burnings at the stake were a regular feature of the crusaders’ retribution against their enemies, who were by no means all Cathars.46 During the thirteenth century, the idea of crusade reached its most strained interpretation when successive popes proclaimed crusades against their political opponents in Italy – chiefly the Holy Roman Emperor and his dynasty – and in the end, when the papacy itself splintered, even between rival claimants to the papal throne. Such campaigns dragged on intermittently until the 1370s. For the papacy, these were just as much a logical defence of the Church as crusades in the East, but it was not surprising that crowds did not rush to support the Holy Father, and that plenty of faithful Christians were perfectly ready to fight papal armies.47 What still did galvanize people to support crusades was the continued reality of threats from Islam, and as late as the sixteenth century there was real popular enthusiasm for crusading ventures to the East along the shifting frontier of the two faiths, now creeping westwards in the Balkans. One of the great Christian achievements of the fifteenth century was the successful defence of Belgrade against Ottoman Turkish armies in 1456, achieved by a combination of aristocratic-led armies and crowds of ordinary people aroused to fight for Christendom by charismatic preaching, just as had happened in the classic crusades of earlier centuries. Yet at the same time theologians began expressing increasing qualifications or doubts about the rightness of waging war on non-

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  confessions and so enter the individual fears and miseries of those who heard their message from the pulpit. They developed a special mission to the universities too, and gained a brilliant reputation as defenders of orthodoxy yet often as restlessly original thinkers. These talents earned them another specialization which has not done any favours to their later reputation. In the mopping-up operations which ended the Albigensian Crusade, Dominicans found employment as investigators in the tribunals known as inquisitions, and soon dominated inquisitions as they became the chief weapon against religious dissidence wherever it appeared in Europe. In a rueful division of their Latin name, some came to call them Domini canes, ‘hounds of the Lord’. It could not have been predicted that the fascinating and maddening eccentric Francis would end up creating a very similar organization to that of Dominic. He was brought up in Assisi, a hill town of central Italy which typified the new wealth of late-twelfth-century Europe, and his father was a well-to-do cloth merchant. It was the same sort of background as that of Valdes in Lyons, and Francis had the same reaction to it. In his twenties, he reached an emotional and spiritual crisis: he took it as his divine mission to turn upside down the central obsession of his father’s world, the creation of wealth. The trigger was his attitude to lepers. His revulsion against them had been as intense as that which later caused their scapegoating in the 1321 persecution. Then he realized that the blessed biblical figures of Job and Lazarus had been lepers – it was he and not they who needed healing. He rushed up to a leper and folded the outcast in his arms. Now he would gather together people who would strip themselves of all possessions and would be outcasts for Christ. So this playboy son of an Italian millionaire threw away his money, shouted the Christian message at birds in a graveyard, and threw the Church into a turmoil by saying that Christ was a down-and-out with no possessions. He might have been burned as a heretic. Luckily for his future, alongside his almost pathological nonconformity, Francis was deeply loyal to the Western Catholic tradition. Against the Cathars, who said that the world was evil, he passionately affirmed that all created things – Brother Sun, Sister Moon – were good, sharing the goodness of God’s human incarnation in Christ. In his own body, Francis is the first person known to have suffered stigmata, fleshly wounds which followed the patterns of the wounds of the crucified Christ (see Plate 25). This echo of Paul’s mysterious remark in Galatians 6.17, ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus’, has since been a recurrent phenomenon among ascetics of the Western Church. At the time, it may have been a response to the Cathars, who claimed purity and said that flesh was part of the world of evil. What greater symbol could there be than Francis’s stigmata that the divine suffering condescended to

• From Action (2014)

  My distaste is not only about the intense “key party” atmosphere around sex-positive—I also don’t like the term because differentiating a healthy and normal attitude toward sex by bestowing it with a special title reinforces that mindset as marginal while holding up that the “normal” thing is to revile sex, which I earnestly do not think most people do. Despite its faults, “sex-positive” will help you find sex stores, literature, and pornography that make more sense to you than a lot of mainstream kinds, in many cases. You won’t catch it in this book, though—at least not without audible groaning. sex versus gender: Your sex is what a doctor decided based on what they saw between your legs on your zeroth birthday and then wrote a letter on a certificate. Your gender is “male,” “female,” and/or any designation between or outside those roles that you feel most closely matches the person you are in a way that extends to the rest of your body and mind. PART I [image file=image_110.jpg] Age of Consent [image file=image_121.jpg] The number one most essential part of any and all sexual encounters: establishing the often-hazy-seeming-but-actually-pretty-clear parameters of “consensual sex,” which is otherwise known as “sex.” Sexual consent is a direct verbal go-ahead that conveys, “What we’re doing with our bodies is okay with me,” as confirmed before not only sex involving penetration, but so many other kinds of sensual scenarios, too. Consent is an important part of getting down with anybody, of any gender or sexual persuasion, every single time you’re getting down. In fact, it’s probably the most important part: If you’re in a physical situation where the other person disregards that you’ve told them not to touch you in the way they’re touching you, what you’re experiencing isn’t sex (a catchall term I’m using here for “hookups of all stripes”), but sexual assault, and possibly rape. There is a plethora of ways to give and receive consent—and to refuse it. We’ll explore as many of them as we can here today. Is that okay with you? (Look! We’ve already begun. I wish it were always this easy.)

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  flesh an illusion; his Passion and death should be blamed on the Creator Demiurge. In characteristically Greek fashion, Marcion found the Tanakh in its Greek form crude and offensive – ‘Jewish myths’, in a phrase of the Epistle to Titus, which he would have attributed to the Apostle Paul.42 He saw the Creator God of the Jews as a God of judgement, rather than the God of love whom he saw perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ. Christ had died to satisfy the Creator God. It is not easy to reconstruct Marcion’s biblical writings and commentary, since they were largely destroyed by his enemies, but it is clear that he was a literalist who despised any figurative or allegorical interpretation of scripture and rather took the first apparent sense. If that sense clashed with his own sense of true religion, he simply rejected the text. The result was that all the Tanakh had to go, even though Marcion still drew on its prophecies to complete his picture of the saving work of Christ. What remained of the New Testament was a collection of Paul’s letters (probably the collection which he inherited), together with a version of Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps he simply chose this because Luke was the Gospel with which he had grown up, but it may have been because Luke’s constant references to the Spirit in the story of Christ and the life of the Church appealed to him, or because of Luke’s evident association with Paul through Luke’s authorship of the Acts of the Apostles.43 To hammer home his anti- Jewish and ultra-Pauline message, he added a book of Antitheses, pointing out the difference in approach between his selection of scripture and the Hebrew sacred books. He was no isolated eccentric: references to Christians opposing Marcion come from places as far apart as France and Syria, so it is clear that his teachings had a widespread effect, and there is evidence that congregations with Marcionite beliefs survived until as late as the tenth century in what are now the borderlands of Iran and Afghanistan.44 Marcion fascinated the great German Lutheran Church historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adolf von Harnack, and it must be said that there are curious resemblances in Marcion’s thought to the spiritual progress of Martin Luther: the revulsion against the idea of a God of judgement, the contrast between Law and Gospel, the fascination with Paul and the single-minded search for a core message within the inheritance of sacred writings.45 CANON, CREED, MINISTRY, CATHOLICITY Gnosticism and Marcionism offered two possible futures for the Jesus cult. A gnostic Christianity would have bred immense diversity of belief; indeed,

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  202 Biographical Notes ruled over an extensive empire, including modern-day Iraq and parts of Iran and Turkey. Babylonian civilization reached new levels in astronomy and literature. The government was marked by a well-trained bureaucracy. Hammurabi issued a major code of laws that in fl uenced the subsequent legal systems of the ancient Middle East, including the Old Testament. He is important both for our understanding of the historical background of the Ten Commandments and for the transmission of the Gilgamesh epic. Hitler, Adolf: German dictator (1889–1945). Born an ethnic German in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Adolf Hitler was a failed artist who discovered the meaning of his life in World War I. Determined to lead Germany back to greatness after the defeat of 1918, Hitler became leader of the National Socialist Party. He transformed a fringe political group into the dominant force in the chaotic democratic politics of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, the Weimar Republic. In jail, he wrote Mein Kampf , which stated clearly his determination to destroy the Jewish people of Europe and to begin another world war. He became chancellor of Germany in 1933 by legal means. He moved swiftly to establish a totalitarian system as complete and as evil as that of Stalin. True to his promise, he led the world into World War II. That war, as Winston Churchill said, would never have happened except for Hitler. In the name of his crackpot ideas of racism and nationalism, Hitler ordered the murder of more than 6 million people in concentration camps. The total number of people who died as a result of Hitler’s war and policies is estimated at 50 million. He committed suicide in the last days of World War II, leaving his nation and Europe in ruins. Julius Caesar: Roman statesman (100–44 B.C.). Julius Caesar is one of the most infl uential fi gures in world history and one of the most gifted individuals in history. Beginning his career as a rather shady politician, he grew into a fi gure who transformed history. A military genius, Caesar conquered Gaul (France), successfully invaded Britain, and defeated his rival Pompey, reputed to be the best general of the age. Caesar used this military success and the loyalty of the army to establish himself as dictator of the Roman Empire. He understood that a republic could no longer rule this empire and that the Roman people wanted authoritarian rule. He described his victories in Gaul and in the civil war against Pompey in Commentaries, which became the model for history and Latin prose. Such generals as Napoleon, Robert E.

• From Action (2014)

  • Hanging out with small children for extended periods of time (love: You are so canny, all discovering the world and comparing it to the scant other parts of the world you know about so far and making me laugh a lot; hate: You are so loud, plus definitely a barometer for whether I’m a good person or not based on whether you like me, and I don’t want to know the answer to that) • The word “cleave” (love: it starts with a voiceless velar stop, which is the term for a hard “k” sound, my favorite; hate: anytime “cleave” is used biblically or sexually, ew) • Reading about feminism on the internet (love: attention is being paid to inequality, and that like-minded people are globally able to rally around and converse about that; hate: when women dog or exclude one another for not allowing for female viewpoints that disagree with or come from a different experience than theirs) • Country music (love: heart pangs and alcohol; hate: racism disguised as “down-home culture”) • Pornography, which I have quite obviously been waffling on addressing for this whole chapter thus far. Pornography is unusual because it’s a silent partner in so many aspects of our lives: It’s all around us, influencing so much of our intake and output of how we behave in ways both overt and covert. I’d rather do just about anything, including getting catcalled by randos, than talk unflinchingly and straightforwardly about the kinds of porn I watch. The prospect alone falls exclusively on the “hate” list. Parsing why this is not the case for the pornographic medium itself is tougher. I am going to do my best to peer at the tension between liking and getting off to pornography and abhorring it with my whole self, because I think plenty of people share a similar discomfort with it. The main consideration as to when the last item hews “love” rather than “great pulsating hatred” in me: Am I watching a kind of porn I like and not confusing its plot devices with real-deal in-person cleaving (ugh), or am I in the wilds of the internet that can make me feel inadequate, grossed out, or that I am not tan, thin, young, ’n’ pube-shorn enough to ever be a candidate for sex again???

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  From below, he could see a greenish-brown blob, about the size of a golf ball, moving toward him. For a moment, the physicist in him took over, and Anders followed the object with wonder as it oscillated in three dimensions, a movement impossible on Earth, and quivered toward the ceiling. Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum . Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls. Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they had been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea. Lovell and Anders grabbed as many wipes as they could find and began hunting down the fluttering pieces, netting them like butterflies. For several minutes, the three men worked to clean the cabin. After restoring some order, Lovell and Anders could see that Borman was very sick. The situation, Anders thought, needed to be reported to Houston right away. “Absolutely not,” Borman said. Anders understood his reaction. Borman was a test pilot in his bones; no one with his instincts or credentials would want the world to know he’d become sick in space. And Anders didn’t blame him—he would have felt the same way himself. But it was more than that to Borman. He didn’t trust NASA’s doctors, especially the agency’s medical director, Charles Berry, whose judgment he questioned and who he believed to be ever itching to make himself part of the story. And it wasn’t just Dr. Berry who worried Borman. Give any NASA doctor a chance to play the hero, he believed, and you were asking for trouble. Borman could imagine it happening now, some medical guy stepping in and canceling the mission “for the good of the crew.” Borman would rather have died than foul up Apollo 8. News of his illness would remain between him and his crew. Lovell agreed. He saw NASA’s doctors in much the way Borman did—eager to become major cogs in the wheel of space exploration. He remembered how he’d been rejected on his first application to the astronaut corps on account of a slightly elevated level of bilirubin, a phony excuse if ever there was one.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  people had emerged. The awful tidy-mindedness of Enlightenment thought bred an insistence on everyone being liberated in ways defined by Revolutionaries – forcing them to be free, in a ghastly echo of Rousseau. What was new about this regime – contrasting, for instance, with the austere enthusiasm of Savonarola’s Republic of Florence or the nightmare popular kingdom of the Anabaptists besieged in Münster (see pp. 591–3 and 623–4) – was that the Jacobins, most extreme Revolutionaries of the French Republic, radicalized the snickering scepticism of French philosophes about the whole Christian message. They came to regard any form of Christian faith as a relic of the ancien régime which they were destroying, though they had to acknowledge that the people on whom they were imposing liberty, equality and fraternity craved for some sort of religion. The Revolution which had begun with a sincere effort to improve the Church now sought to replace it with a synthetic religion, constructed out of classical symbolism mixed up with the eighteenth century’s celebration of human reason: the Christian calendar of years and months was abolished, religious houses closed, churches desecrated. Much of the violence against the Church exploded out of popular feeling, striking out at anything which spoke of past authority, but much de- Christianization was imposed by government decree, and it was particularly hard to create new public ceremonies for a manufactured religion that did not seem ludicrous. An opera singer posed as the Goddess of Liberty (or Reason – her sponsors changed their minds) on a stage in Notre-Dame de Paris. She had novelty value but no staying power. When the coldly anti-Christian revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre tried to redesign and calm down the revolutionary liturgy, his efforts turned into a trigger for his own sudden march to the guillotine.78 Although the campaign of active de-Christianization petered out by the end of the 1790s, the Revolution had served long-term notice that the institutional Church and perhaps Christianity itself would be seen as an enemy of the new world. The Constitutional Church was wrecked; this ally of the Revolution was caught miserably between the de-Christianizers and those fighting the Revolution. As wars with all France’s neighbours dragged on, the French people became increasingly disillusioned with their masters: the Church had been shattered apparently to no purpose, and, since before the Revolution it had a virtual monopoly on caring for the poor and helpless, the weakest suffered most by the destruction of Church institutions. The most successful of the Revolution’s generals, the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte, gained more and more popular support, in contrast to the revolutionary government’s waning popularity. It would have taken a man with no ambition to resist this temptation, and Napoleon

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  which he considered no more evidence-based than conventional Christianity, and he left in disgust the one seance he was persuaded to attend (perceptively, since the medium was later revealed as a fraud). His fellow explorer in evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, by contrast enthusiastically went into print to celebrate the movement, undaunted by such disappointments.105 Roman Catholicism had a predictably more combative relationship than mainstream Protestantism with developments in scientific and historical study. The pattern was set in the career of Joseph Ernest Renan, a Breton destined for the priesthood, who found that the combination of his reading in German biblical scholarship and his contempt for the superficial religion he met with in Paris drove him beyond Christian faith. In 1863 Renan produced a Life of Jesus which utterly denied that this Jewish teacher had any divine character. It was with that in mind, against a background of bruising conflicts with liberal Protestantism in Germany and aggressive secularity in France, that the mood in Rome turned decisively against adventurous scholarly enquiry. Leo XIII initiated a drive against ‘Modernism’ in the Church, which intensified under his successor, Pius X, and destroyed any chance of Roman Catholicism taking a positive attitude to new ideas in biblical and theological scholarship until well into the twentieth century. The same defensive mood affected Protestant Christians most antagonistic to papal Catholicism. Not all Evangelicals were as sanguine about Darwin as President McCosh of Princeton. From the 1870s a series of Evangelical conferences, among the most prominent of which were those held at Niagara-on- the-Lake in Ontario, reinforced a mood of resistance to Darwinist biology and the Tübingen approach to the Bible. The movement was given an international dimension by Ira Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, who adapted the old American revivalist style to nineteenth-century theatre entertainment: Sankey sang sacred songs, many freshly composed, and Moody was a preacher of extrovert charisma. Their extensive travels had an impact throughout the anglophone world; those involved were much influenced by the growing Evangelical enthusiasm for a ‘dispensationalist’ view of God’s purposes in history (see pp. 911–12). From dispensationalism grew another ‘ism’: ‘Fundamentalism’ was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled The Fundamentals. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning (‘verbal inerrancy’), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was