Religion Dispatches
In 2005, Rolling Stone contributing editor Janet Reitman first stepped into the New York Church of Scientology to begin research on what culminated in her 2006 article, seeking “to understand Scientology: not to judge, but simply to absorb.”
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From the novel: “God hates us more than we can hate Him, and we do not deserve that hate, and therefore against God we are always in the wrong… Well, that’s our relationship with God in brief, isn’t it?… We are ‘lucky’ that God is angry with us, ‘lucky’ that He made us, and even when we have not behaved badly in the vineyard and have done nothing bad at all, we should still bow and scrape, and murmur, like my father’s poor parishioners going down on their knees, ‘My mistake, my mistake, I am lucky that You are angry with me’—all because Adam, who was anyway created by this hateful tyrant and might not have wanted to be created, this poor Adam, ate the luckless apple. Oh when will humans murder this devilish concept of God?”
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A history of what began as a clique of kids on the street, developed into a disciplined organization that reordered the nature of gang relations in Chicago (inaugurating the alliances of various gangs under the umbrella “People” and “Folk” labels), and was reinvented by its “Chief” as first a Moorish Science and then an Islamic religious organization; all the while running a variety of criminal enterprises, culminating in negotiations with the Libyan government with the hopes of being paid in exchange for unleashing certain amount of targeted violence in Chicago. There’s a series of huge stories here, and this book—while certainly the best resource on the subject—is hurt by the sheer range of material it has to address.
“If I were to think of a use that I would want my book to be put to, it’s to try to provide for anti-capitalist Christians a more theologically robust response to that kind of thing, something that goes beyond proof-texting and presents a more convincing theological argument.”
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It’s been over a decade since the final installment of Philip Pullman’s subversive fantasy trilogy was published, with no new work in sight. So what are devotees of Oxford’s Rebel Angel to do? Well, they could do worse than to remember an old hand at religious satire: Anatole France. While my local big-box bookstore doesn’t carry a single one of his titles, this Nobel Prize winner (for literature, 1921) is among the world’s greatest satirists. He is also the writer of a clever piece of speculative fiction, Revolt of the Angels (1914), that comes across a bit like Pullman—drunk on sacramental wine.
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“If anyone can look at the way religion has treated and treats women and not be pissed off, they have something wrong with them. So, yes, I intend on pissing off every misogynist homophobic religious conservative and/or empire-building neo-conservative imperialist supporter of our permanent war economy stuck in the ideological straightjacket that I used to so proudly wear.”
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Usually, a book about ideas is pretty straightforward. The author is saying this stuff because he believes it. With Terry Eagleton, the British Marxist literary theorist, it’s less so. Marxism, in Eagleton’s hands, is neither exactly a science, nor a practical political agenda. It emerges as essentially a vision, a gaze, a discourse—of political life transformed, of human dignity at last universalized.
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I think some outsiders still think American Judaism is divided into Reform, Conservative Orthodox. In recent decades, it has become much more pluralistic, with several additional groups that could be seen as fledgling denominations and many others that are floating somewhere between institutional categories. On the other hand, some insiders believe that the American Jewish religious denominational structure has collapsed.
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This is a world in which all the dials are turned up to 11—there’s more risk, more conflict, more drama. It’s a world where a few men have over 100 children apiece. One guy has over 250. Drab or dismal it’s not.
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When he’s not writing bestselling books, Vincent Bugliosi is a legendary prosecuting attorney. As such, he is certainly well acquainted with the legal policy of presumption of innocence. His newest book, Divinity of Doubt, a treatise on agnosticism, would have been much better if Bugliosi had taken this principle into account in the context of his arguments for, and against, God.
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