Milk, eggs, and a hug from the god
Laurence Tribe and Michael Dorf write about the Supreme Court ruling that puts “religious freedom” ahead of public health:
The Roman Catholic Diocese ruling is also far-reaching in its substance. The unsigned majority opinion decries what it deems discrimination against religion because worship services were subject to capacity limits while some essential business were not. Likewise, Justice Neil Gorsuch complains in a concurrence that under some circumstances, New Yorkers in a hot zone were permitted to crowd into a liquor store or a bike shop but not a church, synagogue or mosque. Justice Brett Kavanaugh registers the same complaint about grocery stores and pet shops.
Those comparisons are inapt. Government discriminates illicitly when it fails to treat like cases alike. One needn’t discount people’s spiritual needs to recognize that liquor stores, bike shops, groceries and pet shops differ from churches, synagogues and mosques with respect to public health. The risk of coronaviral spread is not merely a function of the number of people at a venue; it increases dramatically as they linger in a stationary position, especially when they speak or sing.
Going to a store to get needed supplies is less risky than spending an hour in a crowd inside with praying and singing – even if the supply-getting takes longer than you would like because other people need supplies too.
But another point occurs to me. These religious gatherings in buildings – they’re to get together to talk about and petition and sing about an absent entity. The god isn’t sitting there, wearing robes or scrubs, in the flesh, touchable and smellable and solid. The god is in their heads. Even if you believe in the god you don’t think it’s sitting there among you in the same sense that you and the imam or rabbi or priest are. Religion is all about the unseen – it will say as much itself, while treating it as a virtue. You don’t go to mosque or chapel to pick up supplies you can’t get anywhere else, you go there to pay your respects to the god. In short you’d think it would be the kind of thing believers could easily transfer to another setting when there’s a contagion loose.
Religion is also about getting together, it’s about praising the god with other people, and the fellow believers are a major reason people lean on the institutions…but still, you would think they could go all-spiritual temporarily, to protect the other believers if not themselves.
On the other hand if you think of it as just another front in the great theocratic war, it makes perfect sense.
Matthew 6:5-6
It also makes sense if you realize that believing in the unseen requires regular outside reinforcement. The singing, praising, and talking reassures people that yes, God is real. A social group quells doubts and strengthens commitments. And when an unseen, invisible person isn’t just counterintuitive, but counterindicated, that group is necessary.
Ahhh good one. I’d forgotten about it.
“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
There is also a problem with the fact that by giving churches special treatment that you don’t give to, say, movie theatres, football games, etc, you are not treating them the same, and you are in fact preferencing religion. Of course, for most of those judges, that’s a feature, not a bug. They put a scanty loincloth over it by crying out about grocery stores, but still…
And there is also Matthew 18:20. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.” In other words, you don’t need to be in a big church; home in front of Zoom with your family is enough…or even without Zoom. Pray with your spouse, your children, or your dog, and you are meeting the standard (especially since it just says two or three, not two or three people. So Rover could fill the need).
It’s funny how emotive the words are even when you don’t believe they come from a god. This is less true in the original demotic Greek, I gather, and I know it’s less true in contemporary translations, but in the KJV – it’s there.
God is held to be omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient: everywhere, all-powerful and all-knowing. If you ask me, that trilogy is actually a bit of a swamp that God has created for himself and suddenly found himself in, and with consequences. If those consequences were unexpected, then we can forgive him: he is only human (or a human creation) after all. But if those consequences were expected, then unfortunately, God only has himself to blame.
God’s omniscience means not only that he knows your thoughts, but being omniscient, he knows them before you know them yourself. That means also, that God knows exactly what any given prayer will contain, before it even forms in the mind of the faithful believer who is about to pray it. So, on the face of it, there is no need for it to be prayed out loud for it to reach the awareness of God. The preacher and the separate members of the congregation only have to think their separate prayers inside their separate heads, and God will not only know in advance what each and every one will contain, he will know before those thinking them know.
The only reason praying needs to be done out loud is because the god it is addressed to is the congregation itself. The group is worshipping itself. (h/t Emile Durkheim.) Believing is the means to belonging. It does not matter what we believe, as long as we all believe it together. 100%; no dissent, exceptions or heresies please.
When God himself set up that Garden of Eden with its talking snake, before Eve had been sweet-talked by the said snake into taking a chomp out of that fateful apple and then passed it across to Adam, God must have known that he was setting them both up for The Fall. No need for God to play dumb, and wander about calling “Adam, where the hell are you? Did you eat the fruit of that tree I told you not to touch?” or some such; while knowing all along what the answer to that question had to be.
All the disputes, murder, mayhem, wars, tyrannies and revolutions of history are down to that one decision by God. Himself; to create that tree and forbid its fruit. But does he take any blame for it all?
Is the Pope a Presbyterian?
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Without getting into the substance of the arguments on either side, this seems to me to be yet another example of the increasing selfishness of our society. So what if you think it’s your right to gather–be an adult, and stay apart so that you cannot possibly infect or even kill your neighbors. Or do what they are doing in my city–hold services virtually, over Zoom.
Wonder if the vote would have gone the same way if the occupant of the Oval Office hadn’t been such a dick about taking the pandemic seriously? If he’d set a better tone from the start, he might have convinced his cult that masks and lockdowns were patriotic, and good for the country. We’ll never know, and a quarter of a million lives later, it’s a bit academic. Never in the field of medical conflict has so little been asked of so many, and yet many refused to do even that.
If he could have done just one thing right, it should have been this. There was never a chance of that: what are millions of livesnext to the gratification of Trump’s ego? Less than nothing.
YNNB @ 10, I think it highly likely that if Trump had taken the pandemic seriously from day 1 (and had retained the pandemic plan that Obama left for him), that he might well have had a comfortable win. Enough people would forgive him for being a lying, thieving, horrible shit of a man as long as their lives are largely unaffected. A whole bunch more just don’t vote because they think nothing will change.
This election demonstrated that by allowing 260,000+ Americans to die and 12 million plus to face devastating and life ruining financial catastrophe motivated people to vote. Weirdly, a whole lot more people voted for him than last time, but not only did a lot change their mind, millions more actually voted, possibly for the first time, to get rid of him.
Few deaths and a stable economy and it probably would have been different. Just goes to show that you reap what you sow.
The good news, as such, is that local lawmakers who want to enforce some more sanity can simply include grocery stores, et al, in the capacity rules. Honestly, we should be forcing caps on occupancy in any public space. Yes, it’s a bad ruling, and bodes ill to come, but this specific instance can be worked around.
Ophelia @6:
Funny little side-story: I was at a reading of American Gods, during the author, Neil Gaiman’s, book-signing tour. He told the crowd about staying in Vegas while finishing the final touches on the book, in a hotel that was slowly emptying out because it’d been slated to be torn down. He was doing the chapter-quotes, and when he got to a chapter about the Queen of Sheba, he naturally opted for something from the Song of Songs/Song of Solomon.
Now, being a hotel makes this easy–you go to your side-table and get out the Gideon’s. Only the exact page that he wanted happened to be misprinted, with the text askew and unreadable. So he called down to the front desk, asking for a replacement Bible, as his was defective. Long pause, request for confirmation, then assurance that it would be done.
A few minutes later, he gets a knock at the door, and there were three staffers–bellboy, desk clerk and night manager, IIRC–carrying the new Bible like a relic. Clearly, they all wanted a look at the man who was so pious that he wanted not merely a Bible, but one that was correctly printed on all the pages. He thanked them and took it, bidding them good-night. Unfortunately, he then discovered that this Bible, unlike the first one, was not KJV, but one of the modern translations that lacks the poetic punch you noted above. He said he didn’t have the heart to call the desk back and ask for another.
Freemage:
I misread that and thought that one of the people who brought up the bible was Hellboy.
He could have said when the gaggle arrived: “My mistake. What I wanted was a Koran.”