Sunshine Recorder

Passive acceptance or even glorification of suffering can be adaptive when people have no choice. But why does so much religion — particularly Catholicism — fetishize pain? 

With a new Pope at the helm, the Catholic hierarchy has set about to polish its tarnished image. Can an increased focus on the poor make up for the Church’s opposition to contraception and marriage equality or its sordid financial and sexual affairs? The Bishops can only hope. And pray.  And perhaps accelerate the sainthood of Agnes Gonxha, better known as Mother Teresa.

In the last century, no one icon has improved the Catholic brand as much as the small woman who founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose image aligns beautifully with that of the new pope. In March a team of Canadian researchers noted the opportunity: “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of [Mother Teresa] to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful, especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?”

The question, however, was more than a little ironic. The team of academics from the Universities of Montreal and Ottawa set out to do research on altruism. In the process, they reviewed over 500 documents about Mother Teresa’s life and compiled an array of disturbing details about the soon-to-be saint, including dubious political connections and questionable management of funds—and, in particular, an attitude toward suffering that could give pause to even her biggest fans.

Passive acceptance or even glorification of suffering can be adaptive when people have no choice. As the much loved Serenity Prayer says, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” This attitude of embracing the inevitable is built into not only Christianity but also other religions, especially Buddhism. But passive acceptance ofavoidable suffering is another thing altogether, which is why the prayer continues, “… the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” 

By even her own words, Mother Teresa’s view of suffering made no distinction between avoidable and unavoidable suffering, and instead cultivated passive acceptance of both. As she put it, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”  Or consider thisanecdote from her life:

 One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, “You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.” And she joined her hands together and said, “Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.”

Mother Teresa’s outlook on suffering played out in her order’s homes for the sick and dying, which doctors havedescribed as deficient in hygiene, care, nutrition, and painkillers. Miami resident Hemley Gonzalez was so shocked by his volunteer experience that he has founded an accountable charity to provide better care. “Needles were washed in cold water and reused and expired medicines were given to the inmates. There were people who had chance to live if given proper care,” … “I have decided to go back to Kolkata to start a charity that will be called ‘Responsible Charity.’ Each donation will be made public and professional medical help will be given,” Gonzalez said after returning to the U.S. He also launched a Facebook page called, “Stop the Missionaries of Charity.”

Even her critics mostly believe that Mother Teresa was devoted to God as she understood him and that she was devoted to serving the poor. And yet, it would appear that her institutions have offered a standard of care that would provoke international outrage if it were provided by, say the United Nations rather than an affiliate of the Vatican. How are we to understand this paradox?

Mary Johnson is a former nun who joined Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, at age 19. For the next twenty years, she lived a life of service and austerity among the sisters, which she has described in her memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. But beneath the stark simplicity of her daily routine stirred a host of emotional, interpersonal and spiritual complexities, including the order’s tangled view of love and pain. Johnson’s thoughtful observations offer a window into the woman who inspired her spiritual vows and who ran her order of women religious.

… The 1890s were a time of starvation and revolt. It was a decade of environmental catastrophe, economic depression and savage colonial wars. It was also the golden age of liberal capitalism and global imperialism, a time when the combination of industrial manufactures and Western arms had penetrated almost every corner of the world. In the 1890s, most people still lived on the knife-edge of subsistence, stalked by the threat of drought and flood, boom and bust. In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis argues that the El Niño-driven famines that characterized this era, exacerbated by political forces, helped to create the Third World. Climate oscillations put millions in jeopardy, while new technologies reduced them to the status of laboring machines and made armed resistance seem futile. In response, people pursued politics by other means. Messiahs and prophets walked the land offering fiery predictions and magical cures. Their movements confronted despair with millenarian longing. Their methods combined mysticism with violence.

In the United States, the 1890s are an almost forgotten time. The whole stretch of American history between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s is gray area in popular memory, but the 1890s are especially blank, occupying a dead zone in between “Deadwood” and “Boardwalk Empire.” The decade lacked wild frontiers to mythologize or heroes to emulate (which might be why no one remembers it). Instead, the 1890s were marked by ferocious class hatreds and savage industrial strife. In Pittsburgh, a strike at the Homestead Steel Works turned into an all-out war between union members and the Pinkerton detectives sent to break them. In Johnson County, Wyoming, big ranchers fenced off lands which had once been held in common. When small farmers refused to leave, the ranchers hired mercenaries to kill them. In 1893, a banking panic set off a four-year depression, the worst the country had known until that time. One in five industrial workers was unemployed. Groups of men in the West banded together into tramp armies, overpowering railroad guards and riding trains for free in search of food. In the East, they rallied around a man named Jacob Coxey, who led an army of them to Washington to ask for work.

Michael Lesy captures this world in his book Wisconsin Death Trip, which uses photos and newspaper snippets from Black River Falls, Wisconsin to tell the story of a rural community consumed by disaster, epidemic, and despair. As agricultural prices fell and farmers could no longer pay their mortgages, families moved out or succumbed to destitution. Lesy writes: “By the end of the nineteenth century country towns had become charnel houses and the counties that surrounded them had become places of dry bones. The land and its farms were filled with the guilty voices of women mourning for their children and the aimless mutterings of men asking about jobs.”

Some people hung themselves, some went insane, and some fled to the cities, but for the most part, the American response to these blows was political. Working people agitated for full employment and loose silver. They organized in unions and voted for the Democrats. But then, they had practice. Politics was an American habit.

In other parts of the world, places where literacy was rarer and rights newer, politics took on different forms. In Sicily, socialism was received by the landless peasants of the interior as if it was the true teaching of Jesus Christ. A peasant woman from Corleone (where Vito came from in The Godfather) told a delegation: “We want everybody to work, as we work. There should no longer be either rich or poor. All should have bread for themselves and for their children. We should all be equal…,” she said: “Jesus was a true Socialist.”

Further afield, the response of local people had less to do with parties and more with prophecy, magic and war. In Northern Sudan, Arab people rallied around their own Messiah, Muhammad Ahmad—the Mahdi—whose army drove out the Egyptians before killing General Gordon at the Siege of Khartoum. His followers believed that he could turn enemy bullets into water. A few years later, the Maji-Maji in Tanzania became convinced that their war medicine (a mixture of water, castor oil, and millet seeds) had the same power, as they did their best to slaughter the German settlers who had taken their land. In Zimbabwe, the spirit mediums of the Mwari cult promised that the rains would return as soon as the white men were driven out. In the Philippines, thousands of sugar plantation workers fled into the hills, led by charismatic miracle workers, which included an eighty-year-old woman who called herself the Virgin Mary and a transvestite who claimed to control the weather.

In China, the forces of famine, folk religion and hostility to foreigners coalesced to create the most spectacular conflagration of all. At the end of the 1890s, in the drought-stricken provinces of Shandong and Zhili, bands of landless peasants organized together in martial arts societies. They became convinced that Christians, both Chinese and foreign, were harming the geomantic currents in the earth, causing drought and floods. The churches had bottled up the sky. Fearing starvation, at odds with the government and outgunned by the Western powers, the Boxers turned to the only instrument at their disposal—their bodies. They believed in the discipline of body and of breath. With sacrifices and spells they invited spirits to possess them. Once possessed, they behaved as if they were drunk or in a dream state. They felt themselves to be invulnerable to bullets. Like the dervishes and Maji-Majis, they fought courageously and recklessly, winning many victories on the road to total defeat.

… Let’s first quickly dispense with some obvious strawmen. Of course one can legitimately criticize Islam without being bigoted or racist. That’s self-evident, and nobody is contesting it. And of course there are some Muslim individuals who do heinous things in the name of their religion - just like there are extremists in all religions who do awful and violent things in the name of that religion, yet receive far less attention than the bad acts of Muslims (here are some very recent examples). Yes, “honor killings” and the suppression of women by some Muslims are heinous, just as the collaboration of US and Ugandan Christians to enact laws to execute homosexuals is heinous, and just as the religious-driven, violent occupation of Palestine, attacks on gays, and suppression of women by some Israeli Jews in the name of Judaism is heinous. That some Muslims commit atrocities in the name of their religion (like some people of every religion do) is also too self-evident to merit debate, but it has nothing to do with the criticisms of Harris.

Nonetheless, Harris defenders such as the neoconservative David Frum want to pretend that criticisms of Harris consist of nothing more than the claim that, as Frum put it this week, “it’s OK to be an atheist, so long as you omit Islam from your list of the religions to which you object.” That’s a wildly dishonest summary of the criticisms of Harris as well as people like Dawkins and Hitchens; absolutely nobody is arguing anything like that. Any atheist is going to be critical of the world’s major religions, including Islam, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

The key point is that Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion. He has repeatedly made clear that he thinks Islam is uniquely threatening: “While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization.” He has insisted that there are unique dangers from Muslims possessing nuclear weapons, as opposed to nice western Christians (the only ones to ever use them) or those kind Israeli Jews: “It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence.” In his 2005 “End of Faith”, he claimed that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

This is not a critique of religion generally; it is a relentless effort to depict Islam as the supreme threat. Based on that view, Harris, while depicting the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor, has proclaimed that “we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam.” He has also decreed that “this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda.” “We” - the civilized peoples of the west - are at war with “millions” of Muslims, he says. Indeed, he repeatedly posits a dichotomy between “civilized” people and Muslims: “All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.”

This isn’t “quote-mining”, the term evidently favored by Harris and his defenders to dismiss the use of his own words to make this case. To the contrary, I’ve long ago read the full context of what he has written and did so again yesterday. All the links are provided here - as they were in Hussain and Lean’s columns - so everyone can see it for themselves. Yes, he criticizes Christianity, but he reserves the most intense attacks and superlative condemnations for Islam, as well as unique policy proscriptions of aggression, violence and rights abridgments aimed only at Muslims. As the atheist scholar John L Perkins wrote about Harris’ 2005 anti-religion book: “Harris is particularly scathing about Islam.”

When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted. That’s true of Dawkins’ proclamation that “[I] often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today.” It’s true of Hitchens’ various grotesque invocations of Islam to justify violence, including advocating cluster bombs because “if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too”. And it’s true of Harris’ years-long argument that Islam poses unique threats beyond what Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions of the world pose.

Most important of all - to me - is the fact that Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture (“there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like ‘water-boarding’ may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary”); to steadfast support for Israel, which he considers morally superior to its Muslim adversaries (“In their analyses of US and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so… . there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah”); to anti-Muslim profiling (“We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it”); to state violence (“On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that ‘liberals are soft on terrorism.’ It is, and they are”).

Revealingly, Harris sided with the worst Muslim-hating elements in American society by opposing the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, milking the Us v. Them militaristic framework to justify his position:

“The erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory — and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice.”

Harris made the case against that innocuous community center by claiming - yet again - that Islam is a unique threat: “At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths.”

In sum, he sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims. As this superb review of Harris’ writings on Israel, the Middle East and US militarism put it, “any review of Sam Harris and his work is a review essentially of politics”: because his atheism invariably serves - explicitly so - as the justifying ground for a wide array of policies that attack, kill and otherwise suppress Muslims. That’s why his praise for European fascists as being the only ones saying “sensible” things about Islam is significant: not because it means he’s a European fascist, but because it’s unsurprising that the bile spewed at Muslims from that faction would be appealing to Harris because he shares those sentiments both in his rhetoric and his advocated policies, albeit with a more intellectualized expression.

Beyond all that, I find extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country. That’s particularly true of Americans, whose government has brought more violence, aggression, suffering, misery, and degradation to the world over the last decade than any other. Even if that weren’t true - and it is - spending one’s time as an American fixated on the sins of others is a morally dubious act, to put that generously, for reasons Noam Chomsky explained so perfectly:

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it.

“So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

I, too, have written before about the hordes of American commentators whose favorite past-time is to lounge around pointing fingers at other nations, other governments, other populations, other religions, while spending relatively little time on their own. The reason this is particularly suspect and shoddy behavior from American commentators is that there are enormous amounts of violence and extremism and suffering which their government has unleashed and continues to unleash on the world. Indeed, much of that US violence is grounded in if not expressly justified by religion, including the aggressive attack on Iraq and steadfast support for Israeli aggression (to say nothing of the role Judaism plays in the decades-long oppression by the Israelis of Palestinians and all sorts of attacks on neighboring Arab and Muslim countries). Given the legion human rights violations from their own government, I find that Americans and westerners who spend the bulk of their energy on the crimes of others are usually cynically exploiting human rights concerns in service of a much different agenda.

Psychological Commentary on ‘The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation’.

Dr. Evans-Wentz has entrusted me with the task of commenting on a text which contains an important exposition of Eastern “psychology.” The very fact that I have to use quotation marks shows the dubious applicability of this term. It is perhaps not superfluous to mention that the East has produced nothing equivalent to what we call psychology, but rather philosophy or metaphysics. Critical philosophy, the mother o modern psychology, is as foreign to the East as to medieval Europe. Thus the word “mind,” as used in the East, has the connotation of something metaphysical. Our Western conception of mind has lost this connotation since the Middle Ages, and the word has now come to signify a “psychic function.” Despite the fact that we neither know nor pretend to know what “psyche” is, we can deal with the phenomenon of “mind.” We do not assume that the mind is a metaphysical entity or that or that there is any connection between an individual mind and a hypothetical Universal Mind. Our psychology is, therefore, a science without any metaphysical implications. The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon of the cosmos, and his “anima” is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, or spark of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul.

Psychology accordingly treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure that derive ultimately from certain unconscious dispositions. It does not consider them to be absolutely valid or even capable of establishing a metaphysical truth. We have no intellectual means of ascertaining whether this attitude is right or wrong. We only know that there is no evidence for, and no possibility of proving, the validity of metaphysical postulate such as “Universal Mind.” If the mind asserts the existence of a Universal Mind. If the mind asserts the existence of a Universal Mind, we hold that it is merely making an assertion. We do not assume that by such an assertion the existence of a Universal Mind has been established. There is no argument against this reasoning, but no evidence either, that our conclusion is ultimately right. In other words, it is just as possible that our mind is nothing but a perceptible manifestation of a Universal Mind. Yet we do not know, and we cannot even see, how it would be possible to recognize whether this is so or not. Psychology therefore holds that the mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself.

If, then, we accept the restrictions imposed upon the capacity of our mind, we demonstrate our common sense. I admit it is something of a sacrifice, inasmuch as we bid farewell to that miraculous world in which mind-created things and beings move and live. This is the world of the primitive, where even inanimate objects are endowed with a living, healing, magic power, through which they participate in us and we in them. Sooner or later we had to understand that their potency was really ours, and that their significance was our projection. The theory of knowledge is only the last step out of humanity’s childhood, out of a world where mind-created figures populated a metaphysical heaven and hell.

Despite this inevitable epistemological criticism, however, we have held fast to the religious belief that the organ of faith enables man to know God. The West thus developed a new disease: the conflict between science and religion. The critical philosophy of science became as it were negatively metaphysical—in other words, materialistic—on the basis of an error in judgment; matter was assumed to be a tangible and recognizable reality. Yet this is a thoroughly metaphysical concept hypostatized by uncritical minds. Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-critical Weltanschauung. In contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. They cling to the world of childhood. A famous modem theologian confesses in his autobiography that Jesus has been his good friend “from childhood on.” Jesus is the different perfect example of a man who preached something from the religion of his forefathers. But the imitatio Christi does not appear to include the mental and spiritual sacrifice which he had to undergo at the beginning of his career and without which he would never have become a saviour.

The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has and has given another name to the supreme principle of reality assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence “matter,” “energy,” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgre lui. Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, child-like relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents. Faith may include a sacrificium intellects (provided there is an intellect to sacrifice), but certainly not a sacrifice of feeling. In this way the faithful remainchildren instead of becoming as children, and they do not gain their life because they have not lost it. Furthermore, faith collides with science and thus gets its deserts, for it refuses to share in the spiritual its adventure of our age.

Part 1: What Does it Mean to Exist?
For Kierkegaard, the most pressing question for each person is the meaning of his or her own existence.

Part 2: Truth of Knowledge and Truth of Life
Kierkegaard understood that, when faced with a choice in real life, no amount of knowledge can resolve the dilemma.

Part 3: The Story of Abraham and Isaac
Abraham believes that the God who commands him to do what is most terrible and painful is also the God who loves him.

Part 4: The Essentially Human is Passion
The human being is above all an erotic creature: a being who, conscious that she lacks something, reaches out beyond herself.

Part 5: The Task of Becoming a Christian
Kierkegaard suggests that people who are Christians ‘as a matter of course’ are deceiving themselves.

Part 6: On Learning to Suffer
Kierkegaard suggests that by courageously confronting suffering, a person can find great joy in life.

Part 7: Spiritlessness
Not to recognise yourself as a spiritual being is the greatest danger and the greatest loss of all.

Part 8: God and Possibility
For Kierkegaard God is the fact of possibility: what makes us free – but also gives rise to anxiety.

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche.  “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”  The year was 1885 or 1886, and Nietzsche was writing in a notebook whose contents were not intended for publication.  The discussion of nihilism ─ the sense that it is no longer obvious what our most fundamental commitments are, or what matters in a life of distinction and worth, the sense that the world is an abyss of meaning rather than its God-given preserve ─ finds no sustained treatment in the works that Nietzsche prepared for publication during his lifetime.  But a few years earlier, in 1882, the German philosopher had already published a possible answer to the question of nihilism’s ultimate source.  “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in a famous passage from “The Gay Science.”  “God remains dead.  And we have killed him.”

There is much debate about the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous claim, and I will not attempt to settle that scholarly dispute here.  But at least one of the things that Nietzsche could have meant is that the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West.  For it used to be the case  in the European Middle Ages for example ─ that the mainstream of society was grounded so firmly in its Christian beliefs that someone who did not share those beliefs could therefore not be taken seriously as living an even potentially admirable life.  Indeed, a life outside the Church was not only execrable but condemnable, and in certain periods of European history it invited a close encounter with a burning pyre.

Whatever role religion plays in our society today, it is not this one.  For today’s religious believers feel strong social pressure to admit that someone who doesn’t share their religious belief might nevertheless be living a life worthy of their admiration.  That is not to say that every religious believer accepts this constraint.  But to the extent that they do not, then society now rightly condemns them as dangerous religious fanatics rather than sanctioning them as scions of the Church or mosque.  God is dead, therefore, in a very particular sense.  He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live.  Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.

The 20th century saw an onslaught of literary depictions of the nihilistic state.  The story had both positive and negative sides.  On the positive end, when it is no longer clear in a culture what its most basic commitments are, when the structure of a worthwhile and well-lived life is no longer agreed upon and taken for granted, then a new sense of freedom may open up.  Ways of living life that had earlier been marginalized or demonized may now achieve recognition or even be held up and celebrated.  Social mobility ─ for African Americans, gays, women, workers, people with disabilities or others who had been held down by the traditional culture ─ may finally become a possibility.  The exploration and articulation of these new possibilities for living a life was found in such great 20^th-century figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Studs Terkel, and many others.

But there is a downside to the freedom of nihilism as well, and the people living in the culture may experience this in a variety of ways.  Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last.  The threat of nihilism is the threat that freedom from the constraint of agreed upon norms opens up new possibilities in the culture only through its fundamentally destabilizing force.

In the mid-1980s, journalist Joel Sappell and a colleague began a five-year examination of the Church of Scientology that would ultimately produce a 24-article series. It would also change Sappell’s life in ways both mystifying  and unnerving. Decades later the onetime investigative reporter investigates what happened to him.

I’d never heard my wife so upset. “The dog’s been poisoned,” she said into the phone. Her quavering voice was scared and panicked. Soon I would be, too. It was late 1985, and I’d just checked into a San Diego hotel with Bob Welkos, a reporter—like me—at the Los Angeles Times. Bob and I had been sent out of town by our editors in the turbulent wake of a story we’d written about the Church of Scientology.  In it we revealed for the first time the secret teachings of church founder L. Ron Hubbard, who traced the origins of mankind’s ills to a galactic battle 75 million years ago, when an evil tyrant named Xenu reigned supreme. The story made international headlines, and the church was angry. The paper thought it would be best if Bob and I disappeared for a few days until things cooled down. So I’d packed a bag and headed south while my wife, Linda, stayed behind with our 13-year-old shepherd mix, Crystal.

Now the loyal dog I’d rescued from a Huntington Beach shelter a year or so after my high school graduation was dying. “She’s frothing and convulsing,” Linda told me from the vet’s office. Crystal’s illness had come on suddenly, she said, and the vet couldn’t pinpoint the cause. All we could do was keep her sedated. “Things like this don’t just happen,” Linda cried. A month or so later, after countless doses of phenobarbital failed to calm Crystal’s frightening seizures, I placed her on a gurney one final time and held her as we put her down.

Did I have proof the Church of Scientology was to blame? No. But I was haunted by the warnings I remembered getting at the start of what would become a five-year investigation of the church. More than one source had told Bob and me to keep an eye on our pets. Others who’d run afoul of church leaders had lost beloved animals under suspicious circumstances, they claim—but I hadn’t listened.

Not long after Crystal fell ill, I got another call—this one from Los Angeles Superior Court judge Ronald Swearinger. I’d never spoken to him, but I was covering a nasty civil trial over which he was presiding that pitted the Church of Scientology against a former church member who claimed he’d been relentlessly harassed. Thousands of Scientologists from across the country had converged on downtown Los Angeles to protest the trial and what they perceived as Swearinger’s religious bigotry. Now he was reaching out to me.

“I hear your dog was poisoned,” the judge said softly. I was startled. It’s highly unusual for judges to contact reporters during a trial, especially when they’ve already been accused of bias. There was a pause as Swearinger took a breath. “My dog was drowned,” he said, referring to his collie. “We found him dead in our pool. He’d never go near the water on his own.”

More than four years later, in June of 1990, the Los Angeles Times published the six-day series Bob and I had written on the Church of Scientology—one of the most comprehensive pieces on Scientology ever undertaken by an American news organization. In 24 stories based on thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews, we tackled everything from Hubbard’s bogus biographical claims to the organization’s high-pressure sales techniques to the intimidating tactics employed against perceived adversaries such as Bob and me. Personal experience had taught us how the church and its leaders—first Hubbard and then his successor, David Miscavige—had made psychological warfare a spiritual imperative.

The usual rules of journalistic engagement didn’t apply. Hubbard was both guru and general to his worshippers, lacing his writings on theological affairs with militant directives on how to blunt enemies. “If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace,” Hubbard told his flock. “Don’t ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.”

And they did. Crystal’s death, as it turns out, was just the beginning of a series of events that rattled through our lives. Which is why, a few days before Halloween, I board a Texas-bound plane from LAX to pay a visit to the man who once ran Scientology’s intelligence operations, the highest-ranking person to defect from the church since our series ran. He is also a man the church now brands “a defrocked apostate” and “pathological liar.” Nonetheless, I’m going to see what he may know about what happened to me.

The European Court of Human Rights ruling this week on four cases of conflict over religious rights, and the continuing controversy in Britain, France and elsewhere on proposals to legalize gay marriage, shows the ongoing battle  over how we should define religious freedom. I wrote a long post on this question last year, trying to establish some fundamental ground rules from first principles. Here I want to address one issue that has become prominent in recent weeks: the claim by a growing number of believers, especially Catholics, that the legalization of gay marriage amounts in itself to an attack on religious freedom, even to the persecution of Christians. More than 1000 Catholics priests, bishops and abbots – almost a quarter of Catholic clerics in England and Wales – signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph suggesting that while ‘After centuries of persecution Catholics have, in recent times, been able to be members of the professions and participate fully in the life of this country’, legalizing same sex unions would return Britain to the days of persecution, ‘severely restricting the ability of Catholics to teach the truth about marriage in their schools, charitable institutions or places of worship’. The journalist Cristina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald,  agreed that ‘David Cameron’s persecution of Catholics makes him Henry VIII, mark II’.  ‘Once gay marriage is a law’, she claimed, ‘Catholics will be barred from many professions — just as they were from the Reformation until the 19th Century’. There are, she adds, ‘many Christians willing to play Thomas More to David Cameron’s Henry VIII’.

Such claims, it seems to me, not only fundamentally misunderstand religious freedom, but, in their wild hysteria, serve also to undermine those very freedoms.

The issue here is not whether or not it is right to legalize same-sex marriage. I happen to think it is. Many believers, and some secularists, disagree. The issue, rather, is whether legalizing gay marriage would in itself amount to an attack on religious freedom, and would inevitably lead to the persecution of believers, and of Catholics in particular. Unless it is wrong for a society to enact laws that are contrary to the beliefs or practices of certain religions, then it cannot be wrong in principle for society to legalize gay marriage, nor can such legislation be in principle contrary to the demands of religious freedom. Indeed, it is only because there exists a distinction between what a religion requires or forbids and what a society permits or proscribes that the issue of religious freedom is important. If there were no such distinction, then there would be no need to defend freedom of religion.

There are many laws that liberal societies enact that are contrary to the beliefs and practices of many religions. The legalization of abortion, for instance, of homosexuality, and of divorce (and the acceptance that divorcees can remarry) – all  legally permit practices condemned by the Catholic Church (and by many other faiths). Are these also expressions of the ‘persecution’ of believers? If not, why should the legalization of gay marriage be so different?

The claim that legalizing gay marriage undermines freedom of religion has it back to front.  Legalizing gay marriage in reality extends freedom of religion. While most faiths oppose gay marriage, some support it and would like to consecrate same-sex unions. They are, however, forbidden from doing so by the law. Adherents of such faiths are, in other words, legally prohibited from following their conscience.  In permitting such congregations formally to bless same-sex unions, any law legalizing gay marriage would extend freedom of religion. The question that critics like Cristina Odone have to answer is not simply: ‘Why should your beliefs be so privileged that the fact that you hold a particular view of marriage be sufficient to prevent others from acting upon their different beliefs and legalizing same-sex marriage?’. It is also: ‘Why should your religious beliefs be so privileged as to take precedence over the religious beliefs of others who happen to hold different views to your own?’ And: ‘In insisting that certain religious groups cannot act upon their conscience, is it not you that is attacking freedom of religion?’

What would be wrong, and contrary to religious freedom, would be to force churches that do not accept the validity of same sex-unions to perform such marriages. No one is, however, suggesting that they should. Nevertheless opponents of gay marriage constantly raise this spectre. ‘Once gay marriage is legal’, Odone claims, ‘secularists can rely on a host of equality laws to prosecute a conscientious objector who fails to promote it’. There are, as we have seen, many laws that permit practices contrary to religious belief. Would an earlier version of Cristina Odone have insisted that the 1967 Abortion Act, that legalized a practice that Catholics consider far more wicked than gay marriage, would also lead to the prosecution, and persecution, of Catholics? Or the legalization of homosexuality that same year? Or the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed ordinary people for the first time to divorce, and without an Act of Parliament? If so, why should we take more seriously the claims about the consequences of legalizing gay marriage than we would have those earlier claims about the consequences of legalizing abortion and homosexuality and divorce? And if not, why is legalizing gay marriage so different in terms of consequences to Catholic belief that the legalizing of abortion or homosexuality or divorce?

In any case, what is the alternative? Odone and the Catholic priests are in effect arguing that the possibility of religious freedoms being trampled upon in the future should be reason definitely to trample upon the freedom of gays to marry today. How can this possibly be a morally or politically acceptable argument? If legislation for gay marriage does lead to unacceptable infringements upon religious freedom, then we – secular and religious – should contest any such infringements. But the fact that injustice may be done to believers in the future is no reason to prevent justice being done to gays and lesbians today. (I recognize that many believers do not see legalizing same-sex marriage as enabling justice to be done to gays and lesbians; that, however, is a different debate.) Certain injustice to X today is hardly a good remedy for possible injustice to Y tomorrow.

For hundreds of years, Hell has been the most fearful place in the human imagination. It is also the most absurd.

To many in the West, Hell is just a medieval relic. It went out with ducking stools and witchcraft. It should have disappeared with Plato, who said he wanted to delete every reference to future pain from Homer as damaging to moral character; or with Cicero, who said not even old women believed it; or with Seneca, who thought it a fable only for not-yet-shaving boys.

Hell hardly hurts any more. In everyday parlance (“What the hell are you doing?”), it is merely a bark, not a place. As a place, it is anywhere nasty: the London Underground in summer, the worst bits of Lower Manhattan, department stores at sales time, a publisher’s party. Philosophically, Jean-Paul Sartre has encouraged the idea that Hell is other people. Theologically, even the Vatican now defines Hell as a state of exile from the love of God. The devils and pitchforks, the brimstone clouds and wailing souls, have been cleared away, rather as a mad aunt might be shut up in the attic.

Hell looms just as large in the online “Catholic Encyclopedia”. The Vatican may be undecided about it, but the authors are steadfast: only “atheists and Epicureans” do not believe in it. This Hell still fits the description given in the fifth spiritual exercise of St Ignatius Loyola, in which the Jesuit novice, now as in the past, prays “for an intimate sense of the pain that the damned suffer”: to feel the fire, hear the lamentations, smell the brimstone, taste the tears. At the end of the 19th century the teenage James Joyce, shivering in his boots at Clongowes Wood College in Dublin, was treated to the terrors of the full version:But hold on. For many people in the world, Hell still exists; not just as a concept, but as a place on the map. “Hell is Real,” declare the billboards across the American South: as real as the next town. To make it an abstraction is comforting and tidy, but doesn’t work. Religion thrives on fear, as well as hope: without fear, bad behaviour has no sanction and clerical authority wins scant respect. “[People] must have hell-fire flashed before their faces,” wrote General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, “or they will not move.” And there can be no fear of a place that is not detailed and defined. Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists all still have a Hell, and those who are devout believe in it. So do fundamentalist Christians. For some decades now they have specialised in “Hell Houses” in which terrified American teenagers, herded by “demons”, are shown graphic strobe-lit scenes of brawlers, suicides and drug-takers, as plausibly infernal as any medieval imagining.

ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage…ever to curse and revile the foul demons who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of respite from such awful agony, never to receive, even for an instant, God’s pardon…

This Hell is not Hades. Most cultures have their underworlds—Egyptian Amenti, Jewish Sheol, Purgatory—in which the spirits of the dead gather, are judged, and purify themselves for other lives or life in Heaven. The Egyptian “Book of the Dead”, from around 1500BC, introduces the boat, the river, the tests of the human soul and the scales in which its deeds are weighed: all notions borrowed by the Greeks and, later, by Christianity. But sojourns in this dim, labyrinthine land, though often very long, are finite, and may be shortened by the prayers and holy actions of friends still on Earth. A stay there, though tedious and anxious, is for many not much worse than Earth-life.

Hell is not like that. It is a torture-place for the damned in which they are flayed or eaten alive, disembowelled or impaled on stakes, either for incalculable ages or actually for ever. No one can intercede for them, except in extraordinary circumstances. They will never get out, except in cultures that believe in reincarnation. At the end of a stay of aeons of time in Yama Pura, the Hindu Hell—the oldest known, with its subdivisions of heated kettles, iron spikes and “dreadful shrieking”—or at the end of the Buddhist Hell, with its particular torments of scraping the heart and stuffing the skull with hedgehogs, the purged soul returns to Earth as an insect or a reptile, entering the cycle again. From both the Muslim and the Zoroastrian Sell, souls eventually return to Earth: the Zoroastrians on an annual basis, on the last five days of every year.

The Western Hell grew out of an even sterner tradition. It was devised as a permanent punishment for the worst offenders, those who had opposed the gods. These were, for the most part, giants. In Hell, stretched over many acres, lay the Titans who defied Zeus in Greek myth—Prometheus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and the rest—or the bad angels who fought God in Judeo-Christian tradition, Beelzebub, Moloch, Ashtoreth, Belial, “hurld headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Skie”, as Milton wrote, into the lake of fire. Angels who came down to sleep with women also ended up there, together with disobedient stars.

And so Hell might have remained, a club for unruly super-humans. But man’s appetite for vengeful nastiness is pretty unlimited; and inevitably, such a first-rate broiler-house of pain swiftly became a favourite place to put ordinary enemies, routine sinners and, in Dante’s case, almost anyone from Fiesole or Pistoia.

Hell’s democratisation seems to have begun in Judaism, with both Isaiah and Ezekiel arguing that it did not seem right that good and bad alike should go to Sheol. The wicked, surely, should have deeper and sharper punishment. God should deal with them as they deserved—especially since, in life, they had usually prospered from their wickedness, whereas the virtuous, like Job, had been struck with disasters and covered with sore boils. The Essenes, a more extreme sect, injected the idea of eternity into it, as well as storms and dungeons. Just as man has always made God in his own image, so he projected his own notions of fairness on to the world to come; and ended up with a real horror story.

A string of assaults and sexual crimes committed by pastors across the country have one thing in common: The perpetrators have ties to the megachurch in Hammond, Indiana. 

The sermon was called “The Polished Shaft,” and in the many times that Jack Schaap, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, had delivered it, it was the kind of showstopper that made him a rock star to his flock. (Or would have, had Schaap not habitually railed against the evils of rock music.)

As with most of his sermons at the northwest Indiana megachurch—the 14th largest in the country and the biggest Independent Baptist house of worship in the nation—the message struck as bluntly as a pounded nail: Submit to God’s plan for your life or be snapped like a twig and flung away (as Schaap would demonstrate by cracking a stick over his head, tossing it aside, and barking, “Next!”).

When you do submit, be prepared to endure excruciating pain. God will hold a metaphorical knife to your throat (as Schaap would illustrate by holding a steel blade against a twig the way an assailant might press on a jugular). Only then, he would growl, will you become a “polished shaft”: one suitable for God’s bow.

At this point, the sermon’s climax, Schaap would heave up a high-powered crossbow and fire an arrow into a red X painted on a fake rock a few feet from his pulpit.

The effect was powerful, and it inevitably produced the desired result: swarms of male teenagers trance-walking their way to Schaap (pronounced “Skop”), ready to commit their lives to becoming pastors. And, equally important, to attend the church-owned Hyles-Anderson College a couple of miles away, one of First Baptist’s biggest coffer fillers.

But in July 2010, an hour into the “Polished Shaft” sermon—in a church packed with thousands of teenagers there for a youth conference—Schaap went further. He lifted a stick in his left hand and a silver cloth in his right. He moved the bottom of the stick near his groin and angled it away from himself. Head thrown back, eyes squeezed shut, mouth gaping, he began rubbing the shaft rapidly with the cloth, up and down, up and down. “Ohh! Oh! Ohhhh! Oh! Oh, God, that hurts!” he shrieked.

Then, his voice dropping to a guttural whisper, he said, “Oh, oh, God. Thanks for what you’re making me.”

Schaap continued to rub the stick—up and down, up and down—and converse with God, sometimes angrily, sometimes ecstatically, for more than a minute. What he was doing was unmistakable: simulating masturbation, in front of thousands of children, in the middle of a church service. A row of white-coated high-ranking churchmen seated behind Schaap watched in silence. At the end, as usual, young men streamed up to the stage.

To the hundreds of people who posted comments under a YouTube video of the event, the lack of reaction is as shocking as Schaap’s sermon itself. But to the congregation of First Baptist, it was all in a day’s preaching.

The true believers of the ultrafundamentalist Independent Baptist movement were accustomed to Schaap’s style. If he wasn’t scolding his flock for not living up to God’s demands (tithing, volunteering, “soul winning”), he was delivering R-rated sermons that, for example, likened the Lord’s Supper to having sex with Jesus Christ. “He would just repeatedly talk about sex and repeatedly talk about women, how they were dressed and body parts … in graphic detail,” recalls Tom Brennan, who attended the church for six years and is now an Independent Baptist pastor at Maplewood Bible Baptist Church in Chicago.

Unfortunately, it went well beyond talk. Last September, Schaap, 54, a married father of two, pleaded guilty to taking a 16-year-old girl he was counseling at First Baptist across state lines to have sex. Denied bond, he awaits sentencing in the Porter County Jail; the minimum term is ten years.

But Schaap is not simply one of those rogue evangelists who thunders against the evils of forbidden sex while indulging in it himself. According to dozens of current and former church members, religion experts, and historians interviewed by Chicago—plus a review of thousands of pages of court documents—he is part of what some call a deeply embedded culture of misogyny and sexual and physical abuse at one of the nation’s largest churches. Multiple websites tracking the First Baptist Church of Hammond have identified more than a dozen men with ties to the church—many of whom graduated from its college, Hyles-Anderson, or its annual Pastors’ Schools—who fanned out around the country, preaching at their own churches and racking up a string of arrests and civil lawsuits, including physical abuse of minors, sexual molestation, and rape.

It is a culture, past and present members say, enabled by cover-ups and cultlike control. For example, after Schaap’s conviction, many church members blamed his victim as a temptress. “We were taught to not question and to take the ‘man of God’s’ [Schaap’s] word over everything,” says Julie Silvestrone Busby, a former First Baptist member who now hosts a Christian radio show in Iowa. She left the church after alleging that Schaap behaved inappropriately during marriage counseling sessions in 2004 through 2009.

First Baptist Church’s longtime lawyer, David Gibbs, declined a request for comment on this story. The spokesman for the church, Eddie Wilson, did not return numerous calls requesting an interview. Schaap did not respond to an interview request made through Porter County Jail.

It’s important to stress that even the people I spoke with who felt victimized by the church did not suggest that the majority of members are anything other than sincere seekers of Christ. “There are some very good people still there whom I love dearly and who truly have hearts for the Lord but were deceived,” Busby says. “I grieve for them.”

Nevertheless, the story of First Baptist is epic enough to rival the most sordid Old Testament tale. “It really is astonishing,” says Jeri Massi, a researcher from Raleigh, North Carolina, who has been documenting the sexual abuse of children in Christian fundamentalism since 2001. “The wickedness, the heartbreak, the ruining of lives.” Examples from First Baptist “take in everything: pedophilia, violence, defamation of the innocent to protect the guilty, heresies against Christian doctrine, defiance against lawful authority… .” And all this barely half an hour’s drive from downtown Chicago.