Hedges: Murder is our National Sport

Murder is our national sport
By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, May 12, 2013
Murder is our national sport. We murder tens of thousands with our industrial killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq. We murder thousands more from the skies over Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen with our pilotless drones. We murder each other with reckless abandon. And, as if we were not drenched in enough human blood, we murder prisoners—most of them poor people of color who have been locked up for more than a decade. The United States believes in regeneration through violence. We have carried out blood baths on foreign soil and on our own land for generations in the vain quest of a better world. And the worse it gets, the deeper our empire sinks under the weight of its own decay and depravity, the more we kill.

There are parts of the nation where the electorate, or at least the white electorate, routinely and knowingly puts murderers into political office. Murder is a sign of strength. Murder is a symbol of resolve. Murder means law and order. Murder keeps us safe. Strap the criminal into the gurney. Plunge the needles into veins. Haul away the corpse. It is our Christian duty. God Bless America! And one of the next on the list to be murdered in Florida—a state that has decided, under its new and cynically named “Timely Justice Act,” that it needs to accelerate its execution rate—is William Van Poyck. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. June 12 at Florida State Prison. He is a writer who has spent years exposing the cruelty of our system of mass incarceration. On June 12, if Gov. Rick Scott has his way, Van Poyck will write no more. And that is exactly how our political class of murderers wants it.
“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the Timely Justice Act in the Florida House of Representatives, said during the debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.”
Van Poyck, 58, knows what is coming. He has seen it many times before. He chronicles existence on death row in his blog, posted by his sister, Lisa Van Poyck, at deathrowdiary.blogspot.com, where there is a petition to Gov. Scott asking for a reprieve.
“I wasn’t really surprised when they showed up at my cell door with the chains and shackles,” he wrote his sister May 3. “For the last month or so I’ve had a strong premonition that my warrant was about to be signed, but that wasn’t something I wanted to share with you.”
“Sis, you know I’m a straight shooter, I’m not into sugar coating things, so I don’t want you to have any illusions about this,” he wrote. “I do not expect any delays or stays. This is it. In 40 days these folks will take me into the room next door and kill me.”
“After 40+ years of living in cages I am ready to leave this dead end existence and move on,” he concluded. “I leave with many regrets over the people I have hurt, and those I’ve disappointed, and over a life squandered away. My spirit will fly away hugging all the life lessons learned over 58 years on Schoolhouse Earth and with an implacable determination not to repeat these mistakes the next time around.”
Van Poyck, before the signing of his death warrant and his abrupt transfer to a cell next to the execution chamber, was one of the few inside the system to doggedly bear witness to the abuse and murder of prisoners on death row.
“Robert Waterhouse was scheduled for execution at 6:00pm this evening,” Van Poyck wrote to his sister in 2012. “In accordance with the established execution protocol he was strapped to the gurney and the needles were inserted into each arm about 45 minutes prior to his appointed time. Just before 6:00, however, he received a 45-minute stay which morphed into an almost 3-hour endurance test as he remained on the gurney as the seconds, minutes and then hours slid by at an excruciatingly slow pace, waiting for someone to tell him if hope was at hand, if he would live or die. Just before 9:00 he received his answer, the plungers were depressed, the syringes emptied and he was summarily killed.”
“Here on the row we can discern the approximate time of death when we see the old white Cadillac hearse trundle in through the back sally port gate to pick up the body, the same familiar 1960s era hearse I’ve watched for almost 40 years, coming in to retrieve the bodies of murdered prisoners, which used to happen on a regular basis back when I was in open population,” he went on. “I’ve seen a lot of guys, both friends and foes, carted off in that old hearse. Anyway, pause for a moment to imagine being on that gurney for over three hours, the needles in your arms. You’ve already come to terms with your imminent death, you are reconciled with the reality that this is it, this is how you will die, that there will be no reprieve. Then, at the last moment, a cruel trick, you’re given that slim hope, which you instinctively grasp. Some court, somewhere, has given you a temporary stay. You stare at the ceiling while the clock on the wall ticks away. You are totally alone, not a friendly soul in sight, surrounded by grim-faced men who are determined to kill you. Your heart pounds, your body feels electrified and every second seems like an eternity as a Kaleidoscope of wild thoughts crash around franticly in your compressed mind. After 3 hours you are drained, exhausted, terrorized, and then the phone on the wall rings and you’re told it’s time to die. To me this is cruel and unusual punishment by any definition.”
Van Poyck was convicted in the death of a corrections officer in 1987, although he insists he did not pull the trigger. But even if he did, it does not justify murder in the name of justice. Do we rape rapists? Do we sexually abuse pedophiles? Do we beat violent offenders? Do we strike hit-and-run drivers with a moving vehicle? And what if Van Poyck is telling the truth? What if he did not kill the corrections guard? He would not be the first inmate on death row to die for a murder he or she did not commit, especially in Florida. The state has sentenced more people to death than any other in recent decades. It has executed 75 since the death penalty was reinstated in Florida in the 1970s. There have been 24 death row inmates in Florida exonerated—one exoneration for every three executions. Not only might we kill the innocent, we have killed the innocent, as sadly illustrated by contemporary DNA tests that have cleared some of those who were put to death.

“When I heard from Bill’s lawyer about the warrant I lost it,” Van Poyck’s sister told me as she was driving Sunday from Richmond, Va., where she lives, to Bradford County, Fla., to see her brother. “I was on my lunch break. I broke down sobbing and crying. Gov. Scott signed warrants for prisoners who had committed heinous crimes, people who murdered children or serial killers. I thought Bill was safe for a long time. I still have visions of him walking out of there. And now he is in the death watch cell.”
“While he did commit a crime in trying to break a friend out of a prison transport van where his accomplice, Frank Valdes, shot and killed one of the guards, Bill never intended for anyone to get hurt, much less killed,” Lisa said. “I feel that 26 years on death row with the sword of Damocles hanging over his head has been punishment enough for the crime he did commit. I have received so many letters from people saying that his writings, especially his autobiography ‘A Checkered Past,’ have changed their lives. He is not the man he once was. He underwent a profound spiritual conversion. He is a beautiful soul. He deserves [to live].”
In “A Checkered Past” Van Poyck describes his troubled boyhood, including the death of his mother from carbon monoxide poisoning when he was a year old. His father, who worked for Eastern Airlines and had lost a leg in World War II, turned the children over to a series of housekeepers, most of whom were neglectful or abusive. By 11 Van Poyck was in a juvenile home, along with Lisa, who was 12, and a brother, Jeffrey, who was 18. By 17 Van Poyck was in prison for an armed robbery. And then in 1987 he and Valdes attempted to free a friend from a prison transport van in downtown West Palm Beach. A corrections guard was fatally shot, apparently by Valdes, who a dozen years later died after eight prison guards beat him in his cell. Van Poyck’s brother, who is ill with lung cancer, has been in prison since 1992 for a series of bank robberies in Southern California.
Van Poyck has written two novels, “The Third Pillar of Wisdom” and “Quietus.” One of his short stories, “The Investigation,” will be included in an anthology of prison writing edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
“I started working with Bill [Van Poyck] in 2007 in the PEN prison writing program,” said Elea Carey, a short-story author based in San Francisco who was his writing instructor for two years. “There is a sense of isolation in his writing, as if he grew up alone in nature. He defined his experience without anyone around to help him understand it. He often appears as if he was dropped into a foreign land. His sensitivity to others, his compassion, his awareness and his empathy grew with his writing. He moved from his aloneness to grappling with the basics of human relationships.”
“People die every day,” Carey said when we spoke by phone. “I lost my dad in January. I am not afraid of death. I don’t think Bill is afraid of death. I am not shocked that Gov. Scott did this. But I want to do everything possible to stop this from happening. We are asleep as a society. We too do not know what it means to be fully human. This asleepness was once part of Bill’s life. He was asleep, in this way, when he carried out his crimes and committed the wrongs he knows he did. But this unconsciousness is not limited to people like Bill—it is part of all who think it is OK to do this kind of harm to other human beings. I want my government to be above murder.”
Van Poyck has an eye for detail, a terse, laconic writing style and a deep compassion for those trapped in the system. He explores the daily degradation of prison life, a Stygian world where some 50,000 people are held in solitary confinement in supermax prisons or special detention units and where hopelessness and despair threaten to overwhelm those inside.
“Yesterday the prison was locked down all day for the standard ‘mock execution’, the practice run which occurs a week prior to the actual premeditated killing,” he wrote to his sister in February 2012. “For the mock execution they lock down the joint, bring in an array of big wigs, and go through a dry run to make sure the death machine is in working order, everyone on their toes. The big wigs are just voyeurs, here to vicariously kill someone while allowing themselves the bare moral cover of not actually pushing the knife between the ribs. Their minions do the actual dirty deed while they can go home with technically clean hands. These mock executions are as depressing as the real thing, in the sense that it’s dispiriting to watch an entire organization (a prison, with all its constituent parts) so seriously dedicate their time and energies to practice killing a fellow human being, as if this is a good and natural thing to do. It takes some peculiar mental (not to mention moral) gymnastics to justify this to oneself, but we humans have proven ourselves immensely adept at self-delusion and hypocrisy, especially when we bring religion into the equation. We are really, really good at killing others in the name of God. We are a strange species, aren’t we? To those who argue that the death penalty isn’t killing (or murder, which is merely a legal definition) because it is all done ‘according to the law’, I’d remind them that the Nazis did everything they did ‘according to the law’. The Nazis, for all their terrible deeds, were sticklers for following the law; they found their refuge in the law, meticulously following the letter of the law before they enslaved and/or executed their victims. ‘We were just following the law’ is a lame excuse when you are the one writing the laws in the first instance. ...”

In prisons, he writes, time merges into a long, seamless monotony broken up by periodic and often explosive acts of tragedy and violence—an execution or death, a stabbing with a “shank,” beatings by the guards, mental breakdowns, rape and suicide.
“The search team came and tore up my cell last week,” he wrote in January 2012. “It was a surgical strike (they came for me alone) and I was later told that ‘someone’ wrote a snitch kite on me claiming (falsely) I had a weapon in my cell. I’m fairly certain it was someone trying to get a DR (disciplinary report) dismissed by dropping a dime on me on the hope they’d shake me down and find something, any kind of contraband, and the rat would then get credit for it. But I had no contraband so the snitch struck out. If the administration had any integrity they’d write the rat a DR for ‘lying to staff.’ I spent several hours putting my cell back in order; it looked like a hurricane came through, all my property scattered everywhere. This is the kind of bullshit you have to put up with in prison; it’s the nature of the beast. Hell, it happens on the streets, too, though. Informants are master manipulators and the police routinely play their game even though they know the rats often fabricate stories and evidence to their own ends. ...”
He wrote earlier this year about the rapid decline of another prisoner, Tom, who “just 4 months ago had a hale and hardy soul and “now [is] a mere envelope of cancer-gnawed flesh and bones.” He “was removed from his cell by wheelchair, too weak to offer anything but meager protest, and transferred to the one place he dreaded going to, our notoriously filthy, blood spattered clinic holding cell, consigned to die in pain-soaked isolation. The image of him, barely able to croak a few words, weakly waving goodbye to me, his sunken, lingering eyes reflecting his recognition that he was going to his death, will forever be imprinted on my memory.”
“I confess that it is tiring to be surrounded by so much death—the dead and yet-to-be-dead—these past two decades, a struggle not [to] be drenched in negativity, with precious little to mitigate my disappointments,” he wrote. “Each day requires an act of will to wake up and set myself with a purpose, to believe this mortal life is more than just a play of shadows in a shadow box. ...”
“My old pal Tom died on Friday, Feb 8th at 4:10 pm, alone in the clinic isolation cell at UCI,” he wrote to his sister a little later. “I hate that he died alone, locked in a tiny cell with no property (no radio, TV or anything to occupy his mind) and nobody to converse with, just laying on his bunk, staring at the ceiling, waiting for his final escape. His loved ones, who were able to travel from Texas and North Carolina to visit him for three hours just two days before he passed away wrote and told me that he was very weak and gaunt, could not keep down any food or liquids, but was lucid enough for a meaningful visit, though just barely so. Although I know his death was inevitable and imminent, I’m surprised at how much it has affected me. I’ve seen an awful lot of death during my many years in prison (way too much death, in all its myriad variations), including some friends, but Tom’s has knocked the wind out of me. I still catch myself starting to call over to him when I read something interesting or see something on TV that would pique his interest, and I sometimes swear I hear his voice calling me. A part of me is happy for him because I know he’s finally free, but I can’t lie; I really miss him.”

(#4)...A Heretic's guide to the universe

Let's look more closely at God's love for human beings, not in the typically empirical manner in which we perceive everything, but rather more like looking at a painting and finding the "dark spaces," those spaces through which the artist defines his subject.
We humans are taught from early days to regard the empirical world as valid, as dangerous, as potentially exciting and certainly as the one through which we have to navigate. It is the world of "doing the right things" and "doing them rightly" first in the eyes of our parents, later in the eyes of our teachers, soon in the eyes of our peers, and later in the eyes of our mentors, bosses and spouses.
We are living in a tangible world of our physical senses, and those sense impressions paint our world in the sounds and sights, the touches and the rebuffs, the blacks and the blues of our universe.
And while that world of the senses becomes highly sophisticated in terms of how refined is its measurement of our "successes" or failures, and those of others are defined, we are nevertheless, left with a physical universe, from which we are going to depart, some day, all of us.
And in the meantime, we are also going to live in another world, that of the imagination, of the capacity to envision things differently from what they are and what they appear to the empirical eye.
It can be argued that we have created an idol of the empirical world, and then, following our forefathers and mothers, we have set out to conquer that world, in the eyes of the others who inhabit that world.
All of the sciences, medicine, law, and our interactions between and among our society, are regulated on an empirical basis. Evidence for decisions about one's medical condition, evidence for the court, evidence for the estimation of the age of the universe...these are all gathered and presented as the basis for our best minds to theorize about, to experiment upon, and to teach our children about those empirical facts in whose veracity and reliability we have some confidence. Much of that empirical evidence is  also documented, as our narrative, first oral and later in written form, from the earliest civilizations forward.
Embedded in our story, also, are some basic errors of empirical fact, many of which have taken on a hard-copy of the belief system of many people, including many people who call themselves christians. The earth is flat; the sun moves around the earth, not the other way round; people of different ethnicity, colour, language, beliefs are inherently evil; women are inferior to men; humans will always be an argricultural species, foraging for food; man cannot fly; being unmarried is a higher calling than being married; homosexual behaviour (sodomy) is evil; "an eye-for-an-eye" interpreted as justification for revenge, not a limit on vindictiveness; and there are literally dozens of others.
There is a sacralizing of many of these shibboleths, contained in what has come to be known as 'the holy book'....and our reading of that holy book, for the most part, is fraught with our partial viewing capacity...reading poetry as literal prediction, literal history, literal punishment, literal foreshadowing would be one such example.
In fact, our capcity, and our willingness to "fully appreciate" both the theological and the literary content of the holy book renders us, in most cases, still infantilized, with God out of reach and seemingly unwilling to reach out to us. In fact, it can also be argued that we have put the 'holy book' between God and our persons, and our lives, and our faith and spiritual journey. God cannot be and is not reducible to the human words in any set of books no matter how holy we consider those books. Nevertheless, and this is a tribute to the Jewish community, our diligent, constant and stumbling pursuit of whatever God means throughout that book, and any other book to which humans have access, as part of our formal and informal formation, as both social and spiritual beings, is worthy of both the time and the effort we spend, with others who share our diligence and our capacity to continue our search without expecting to reach a final, and unshakeable and incontrovertible "TRUTH" as the full revelation of God's mind, heart and spirit.
So just as we have placed an inordinate degree of importance on the "lighted" spaces in our universe's painting, rendering those darker spaces much less important, if significant at all, we have also placed an inordinate degree of importance on those signs that we believe are from God, without paying close attention to those "other" parts of our life's landscape, where God is equally, if not more prominently, present. Too many times, we have all heard, when one has fallen ill, "What did I do to deserve this? Why is God angry with me? What kind of punishment is God meting out to me, and for what?"
As if our physical, psychic and/or emotional pain would be the way God would speak to us, based on our guilt for whatever it is we have done/not done/ witnessed/ listened to, that we estimate that God would consider unacceptable!
It was John Milton, I believe, who wrote that we are punished not for our sins, but by them...as if the punishment is contained within the commission of the act, or the failure to act, should that be considered a sin. And clearly, when reflecting on the human relationship with God, from a christian perspective, sin has to be considered part of the relationship.
However, it does not have to be the part for which we pay with our escapism into any of the plethora of medications, alcohol, drugs both prescription and non-prescription, sex, work, isolation, pursuit of power and wealth as obsessions, violence and any of the other ways by which we sabotage ourselves, once we consider ourselves wortheless.
"You will never amount to anything," as a recitation from a parent for all the years when one lives at home as a child, or any of the many other forms of rejection, will never engender the kind of self through which one might be able to appreciate an unconditional love from a stranger named God. Punishment for innocent incidents, as an outlet for a control freak's obsession with power, will also impede the development of a self which might be able and willing to let in the truth of an unconditional love from a God whose capacity to extend such love is limitless.
The projections of neurosis, and more importantly psychosis, onto our children, in the name of God, is nothing short of the imposition of our human will-to-power, as compensation for our neurosis/psychosis and makes the appreciation of God's love almost unreachable, unattainable, out of reach of such depravity as we have been characterized to be. And this is the kind of education that is occurring in too many of our classrooms in so-called, self-appointed christian cultures, where modesty, inferiority and self-debasement is mistakenly considered humility, a profoundly christian value. It is also occurring in too many of our christian churches, where the will-to-power is at the core of too many practicing theologians, clergy, and ecclesiastical administrators, also deeply embedded in their own "worthlessness"...from the perspective of the sinfulness of their lives, as compared with Jesus the Christ.
And who is it that requires such a comparison? God? Jesus? the Holy Spirit?
I do not believe so!
We do not have to be compared to God, with respect to moral purity, in order to be able to integrate God's unconditional love into our perception of both ourselves and of God's place for us in the universe. And, if and when such a comparison is undertaken, whether consciosuly or unconsciously, once again, we are drowning in a pool of false modesty and "playing God" in our own lives.
Whether such comparisons are an integral component of our obsession with empirical extrinsic comparisons, the gift of Aristotle's comparative nomenclature, is uncertain. What is not uncertain is that such a concept of a relationship with God, is both unfathomable and unsustainable.
We carry this obsession for competition even futher, in our daily interactions too.
We consider those who lack an education, or a job, or a respectable house, or a late-model car, or a fashionable wardrobe, or a respectable family, career, retirement account, a different religion, or worse none at all, ....all of these plus many others, as inferior....as if God cared about those "empirical" benchmarks, and especially as if He cared most about the "right" brands we purchase, as signatures for our personhood.
If we were truly focussing on God's love for us, individually and collectively, we would most likely be more than a little in "awe" of the overwhelming gift of that love, and humbled in a manner that can only be characterized as authentic, as compared with the faux-humility with which we too often clad our bodies, our minds, and our social and political status.
And if we were to stop and reflect on the possibility that God's love, while unconditional, is also universal, for the Confucians, and the Zoroastrians, for the Hindus, the Jews, the Muslims both Sunni and Shia, for the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, for the agnostics and the apostates and the infidels, as a gift for which our receptivity has yet to mature into reality,  it might amaze many, from all faiths, to recognize that possibility.
And even as a possibility, (and who can legitimately argue that it cannot be the case?) we would, each of us whose lives depend on the planet's continuing beneficience, and also on our continued protection of its capacity to be beneficient, be somewhat transformed, even if only in those places on the canvas of our lives, where the light is not shining, where the dark spaces are found, where no one is paying any attention, all of us having rushed headlong into the conventional "take" that God is only in the lighted spaces, and whatever is in the dark spaces is dangerous.
It was Carl Jung whose word Shadow, and its unpacking both consciosly and unconsciously, gave some direction for those courageous enough and with sufficient stamina and self, to mine and to mind the gifts of that Shadow, not unlike the mining of the relationship between God and human, where the dark spaces live replete with their unfound and untapped gifts.

(#3) A heretic's guide to the universe

What if, just what if....we have got it all wrong, upside down, in our perception of both evil and human beings, as God sees it?
What if evil is both a gift of God and man is more than capable of loving his fellow creatures, if and when he is loved from the beginning?
What if it is the human limiting of man's capacity to create, to love, to forgive, to form community, in order to somehow please an almighty God who must find us beastly given the mess we are making?
What if Augustine was wrong in berating himself for having loved his mistress and in urging his mother to  help him resist such temptation in the future?
What if the apple (pomegranate?) was not a misleading and tempting crossing of the line of disobedience and "Eve" in conjunction with the serpent, was not the seductress who led "Adam" astray?
What if God, in both his/her wisdom and his/her mercy, is still waiting for humans to see 'the light' differently, having spent the last two millenia in a darkness of their own making?
Surely, killing others, "in God's name" is hardly what He would have wanted!
Surely, telling aboriginal people, living in harmony with the land, that they were evil savages, and stripping them of their dignity, and their authentic spirituality, in God's name, is not what he would have wanted!
Surely, telling members of different faiths, or of no faith at all, that Christians have the "true and only faith" is not what He would have wanted!
Surely, even converting a political empire to "christianity" in order to enhance and sustain the power of the Emperor, is not what He would have wanted!
Surely, turning the institutions in which He is supposed to be worshipped into corporations, looking for growing numbers of both adherents and dollars, and then using those measuring sticks as legitimate benchmarks for the "successful" and politically correct establishment churches would never have been what He intended!
Surely developing the largest, most lethal and most ubiquitous military machine, by a country that calls itself Christian, and then deploying it when and wherever it deems a threat is developing is not what He would have dreamt as his fate for humankind, especially if they really are 'created in his own image'!
Could it be that we have failed to love ourselves, not in a narcissistic and self-indulgent manner, but in a self-respecting, and a self-authenticating and in a supportive manner, and are thereby "normally" acting out of fear, neurosis, even psychosis and some kind of perverted attempt to please a deity who has already loved, sacrificed for and forgiven us for our self-loathing?
Could it be that "converting" others to a list of dogmatic rules and regulations, thereby reducing the manifestation of our practice of faith, as salesmen and women ramp up their quotas, is the last thing that God would have wanted?
Could it be that marrying both capitalism and evangelism into a profit-driven faith journey is, in fact, as well as in symbol, a complete perversion of anything that Jesus, as Son of God, would have wanted?
Could it be that all attempts to claim the authority of the "right" interpretation of the books in the Bible, both in their uniqueness individually and in their collective wisdom and insight, are suspect, simply because they claim to be "right"...given our human capacity to misread, and to see from eyes that have been clouded by our anxieties and our over-compensating of those anxieties, in our hubristic pursuit of "getting it right"?
Could it be that, as faux disciples of Jesus Christ, we have so perverted the faith, that it has become, in our hands a metaphoric 'thalidomide' child, warped and twisted into a form that no one, not even God, could recognize and respect?
Could it be that, as self-absorbed, self-indulgent and spiritually misled characters, we have deigned to write prescriptions for human illness that is at its root, our mis-reading of our relationship, both collectively and individually, to a deity?
What kind of deity worthy of worship would want us to interpret everything around us as our "enemy" and then to create a "defence" system both politically and psychologically, that armours us against the kind of agape love and spiritual intimacy from which community can only grow and develop?
What kind of deity would have us pitched into a universe bounded on the one side by a firey pit, for those who have done wrong, and a city of golden streets and perfect bliss as the afterlife for those who have "done it right" as those who have taken it upon themselves to decide "what is right" have written?
What kind of world has been generated by those of us honoured and privileged to be alive, that can only be characterized as blind to reality, drunk on self-indulgence, and running from the provoked vengeance of others who are equally blind, drunk and running from the wrath of their enemies? Certainly it is not a world where any legitimate deity would want to be responsible for the acts and beliefs and attitudes of the people who worship that deity!
Let's take as given that there is a God, who truly loves and cherishes and supports every individual on the planet, in whatever circumstance that individual finds himself.
Let's also take as given that, for us to comprehend, not merely in a cognitive way, but in a literal and a metaphoric and a spiritual way, the truth and the magnitude of that reality.
That gap itself, if nothing else were added to the given's, would generate a kind of cognitive dissonance that would render the Grand Canyon a mere pothole in the land.
Why then are we so unwilling, incapable, resistant, and rejecting of a God who truly loves and cherishes and supports every single person? Is it because we consider ourselves unworthy of such love? Is it because God could only love those that the world deems unloveable, like the lepers and the criminals, and the starving and the destitute and the helpless cripples and the mentally challenged and only for those people is God's love available, directed and accepted fully, because for those people there is no other hope?
Is it because we know the secrets of our own lives, having lived under the judgements of other humans who are equally blind and resistant to God's love, that we could not possibly open our hearts to receive that love of God, because we are "too evil" as we have been raised, both in the family and in the church?
Is it because there have been churches founded on the notion that without those buildings and their hierarchies and their seminaries and their faith canons, and without a full submission to the authority of those "legal and brick and mortar structures" and the monitoring and disciplining 'courts' to provide the sanctions against those who have gone "rogue" on the discipline, as the church hierarchies see it?
And is it also because we can and will listen only to those historic and monstrous institutions' "truths" because of their size, their power, their wealth and their capacity to evict those who display behaviours and attitudes and beliefs that do not "fit" within the boundaries set by those institutions?
There is something wrong with putting those large institutions, their scholars and their presumptions and assumptions, their dogmatic declarations and their capacity to exclude those who fail to conform and comply to those assumptions, presumptions dogmatic declarations between the human spirit and its capacity to relate to a God of love, forgiveness and compassion, since they have, as institutions, morphed into spiritual, as well as legal, financial and political fossils, at least in the eyes of this writer.
And that fossilizing process has not resulted from the utterings of one person, or one generation of persons charged with the leadership of those institutions. It is the culmination of literally centuries of misplaced trust, misread theology and misapplied psychological diagnostics.
One small example of how our 'christian' society has lost its way: the most recent DSM-5, defines as mental illness, and thereby warranting treatment, the depression that follows the loss of a loved one, should it continue "too long"....While no one is or can be certain whether the writers of that document have a 'christian' theology behind their accomplishments as psychiatrists, we can be certain that the motivation of such a definition is "to provide care and healing" through treatment. That goal would and likely does have a 'christian' motivation, given the role model of Jesus healing those he encountered.
However, such a definition of depression goes beyond the normal limits of grief, possibly for the legitimate extension of the profession's purview, and the some 7000 additional patients for whom that profession could legitimately offer care, in a country whose health care system is driven by patient visits that generate fees for those same professionals.
We need human circles, possibly church communities, taking the responsibility for such compassion.
And in order to accomplish that role for those church communities, we need a theology that accepts human loss and pain and tragedy and grief as an integral component of our lives.
We not only deny death's inevitability and its unpredictable and untimely nature; we also seek to medicate the pain that comes when death knocks. And we call the United States a 'christian country'.
Go knows, and we can accept, however much difficulty that acceptance requires, that we are capable of being loved, worthy of being loved, and potentially open to the love of our families, our parents and siblings, our grandparents and uncles and aunts....and later our teachers and our neighbours, not only in times of crisis, but in normal times. And God's love is neither of a different metal (platinum and not iron, for example) nor of a different kind and degree that that coming from our parents. Nor is our worthiness of God's love to be determined by our assessment of our loveability.
That is to play God, in our own lives, and we can and do commit such hubris, simply by how we talk to ourselves and we can do that without any other human being knowing how we are perverting and precluding God's love for our person, our life and our dreams and ambitions.
And we do not need some magnificent cathedral or some theatrical liturgy, or some highly inspiring and intellectual homily to start talking "truth" to our somewhat wizened spirit whose capacity for new life continues until we stop breathing.

Lots of new ideas in Canada, just waiting for a government to lead with courage and vision

She said nothing about changing the tax code to reward investors who commit money to social projects. That is what proponents of social financing want. They believe investors who provide upfront cash for social projects should qualify for the same tax credits as philanthropists who give money to hospitals, art galleries and universities. (from "Diane Finley seeks market solution to deeply-rooted social problems: Goar" by CarolGoar, Toronto Star, May 10 2013 below)
Mobilizing private capital to do the government's work is, among other things, another shot across the bow of the social safety net that has been and must continue to be underwritten, designed and executed by the government. It is also a shot across the bow of public service workers whose job it is to design new approaches to the many social ills that undermine both productivity and income and investment levels, not to mention lifestyle options.
When the government literally despises the public service, and sees all of its members as a 'drain' on the public purse, without a bank vault of innovative ideas to meet the problems for which it doles out millions, that is not a failure of the public service. It is a failure of the government to marshall the best ideas, to bring together the professional stakeholders and bring about social policy that generates the kinds of positive results that everyone wants. Not only would this be a legitimate sign of leadership and accepting responsibility on the part of the government, it would also provide considerable authentic fodder for a successful political campaign in the next election because it would restore the trust between the electorate and the government for its handling of extremely difficult and complex and long-standing social gordion knots.
We have known for decades that a paucity of ideas has never been a problem in this country. New ideas abound in every coffee shop, research lab, social think tank and political brain-storming sessions across the land, including most editorial rooms of most dailies. What we as Canadians lack, and we have also know this for decades, if not centuries, is the guts and the foresight to risk both the necessary trials for the implementation of ideas, and that includes managing the funds to support clinical trials in the social laboratories of  our universities, our schools, our hospitals, our social service agencies and, especially, our governments where the fear of public ridicule for attempting ideas the public scorns will result in such public embarrassment that the measure is left to gather dust in the archives of all our public organizations.
We love to talk and to dream about new ideas but we hate the thought of having to sell them to a public that is so resistant to change that we have a national equivalent of a bowel obstruction blocking the delivery of innovation. We simply refuse to permit even the professionals, well trained and schooled in the design and delivery of new ideas, to execute, and our governments are notorious for funding little, unknown and confidential projects that never see the light of day, unless and until some courageous politician or university president, or some visionary thinker puts his/her heft behind them and brings them to the public's attention.
We have a deficit of believing in our great ideas, except those that were introduced a hundreds years ago, like the national rail systems, or a half-century ago like the national health care system....but it is the government's job to unlock the bubbling ideas from the think-tanks, and the doctoral theses, and the research labs and bring them to the public for execution, even if there are tweeks that are necessary to make them more sophisticated, more fiscally sound, and more sustainable for the clients for whom they were designed in the first place.
Let's just look at one such idea, so long studied and included in public address of social scientists, politicians, religious thinkers and prophets....the guaranteed annual income. The most recent public voice for this idea is Senator Hugh Segal whose is making the progress of a snail among his own party, Conservative, because that is what we do to a new idea whose time has long ago come....and not gone!
Quit looking for profit from everything, Ms Finley, and start putting the prophet back into our national life!
We need government capacity to govern and we need it now....not the capacity to generate public relations campaigns, advertising campaigns and faux policy ideas....
Generate the kind of tax policy that rewards those with the gift of philanthropy of both ideas and funds and uncap the blocked capacity to bring our innovation to the real world, and let Canadians start to believe that living here means more than harvesting nature's ore, and crude and timber and wheat and then selling it abroad....we are more than heuwers of wood, drawers of water, miners of ore and fishers of seafood.
And lets demand that our government lead on substance and on policy and not on another one of their interminable self-congratulatory, pompous and presumptuous media blitzes.
And public funds for start-ups and for a legitimate and sustainable system for bringing the plethora of useful, and perhaps even profitable ideas to the table for execution, will be necessary...and all Canadians, not just the small hard-core constituency that supports this government, stand to be winners.


Diane Finley seeks market solution to deeply-rooted social problems: Goar

Diane Finley unveils scheme to pay investors to tackle nation’s biggest social challenges

By Carol Goar, Toronto Star, May 10, 2013
The private sector will supply the cash. The non-profit sector will provide the ideas and deliver the programs. The government will “harness the power of social finance.”

That, in a nutshell, is Human Resources Minister Diane Finley’s formula for tackling Canada’s most deeply entrenched social challenges: chronic poverty youth unemployment, homelessness, aboriginal despair.
“We must look at new ways to unlock innovation in local communities,” she told 200 female business executives and non-profit leaders at the inaugural Women in Social Business Forum this week. “We need continued partnership from public, private and not-for-profit sectors to improve results and maximize our investments.”
She is confident Canadians are ready for a new approach. Last November she put out a call to non-profit organizations, businesses, charities and citizens for concepts “that could help our government address some of our social challenges in new and different ways.” Within three months, she received 154 submissions. “The response exceeded our expectations,” she told her audience.
What wasn’t clear in Finley’s speech or her department’s background documents was the role she and her government would play.
She was explicit that Ottawa would not be a financial contributor — quite the opposite. The aim of the initiative is to “mobilize private capital” to do what the government has always done or paid social agencies to do.
She said nothing about changing the tax code to reward investors who commit money to social projects. That is what proponents of social financing want. They believe investors who provide upfront cash for social projects should qualify for the same tax credits as philanthropists who give money to hospitals, art galleries and universities.
Finley was manifestly right about one thing: there is no shortage of creative ideas bubbling up at the local level. Visit almost any Toronto neighbourhood and you’ll find pioneering business-charity hybrids. Visit the Centre for Social Innovation and you’ll see people turning their passion for a fairer, greener, more inclusive city into socially motivated businesses. Visit the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing and you’ll find policy-makers, community leaders and corporate types putting their heads together.
What’s holding things back is an acute shortage of funding. Without an angel investor, many social ventures can’t get off the ground. Canada has a handful of these investors: community-spirited individuals, enlightened businesses and large pension funds. But most financiers regard social enterprise as a high-risk, low-return proposition.
Although Finley did not address this dilemma directly, her report, Harnessing the Power of Social Finance, provided a couple of clues about her government’s intentions:
•It highlighted pay-for-performance agreements. These are pacts between the government and a social agency in which the government identifies the result it wants and undertakes to pay the social agency only if that result is achieved.
•It also shone a favourable light on social impact bonds. These are three-way arrangements in which a social agency pairs up with a private investor willing to underwrite its project and the government specifies the desired outcome. If it is achieved, Ottawa returns the investor’s principal and pays a predetermined profit. “This allows the government to use funds otherwise spent on services like counselling, health care or detention to reward investors,” according to the report.
It is easy to see why the government likes these schemes. They produce quantifiable gains. They give Ottawa control without requiring a financial commitment. And they allow federal politicians to cut payroll costs while maintaining — perhaps improving — public services.
It is harder to see the appeal for private investors. They would be taking a big risk for a modest payback.
It is also hard to fathom why a non-profit social agency would want to make profits for a private investor.
Taking a positive view, the minister’s approach could stimulate fresh thinking, strengthen cross-sectoral bonds and tap into the good will and resources of retiring baby boomers.
Taking a less sanguine view, her quest to impose market discipline on the social sector could undercut churches and charities, stifle true altruism and blur the lines of responsibility.
It is a question of balance. Finley hasn’t got it quite right.

(#2) A heretic's guide to the universe

The obvious convergence of two ill-informed at best, uninformed at worst, concepts has created a conundrum from which only God can extricate the christian church. Certainly, human brains and ingenuity, even with the prayerfully sought assistance of God, have been unable to unpack the conundrum for well over two thousand years.
The first concept is the presumption of "knowing" the will of God, including His will for individual human beings, his will for the church community that espouses to follow his teachings for disciples of the faith. The second concept is to presume that whatever the church expresses as the "rules of faith" can and will be followed by human beings living their lives in dedication, even devotion to the practice of their faith.
Let's look at the first concept, the will of God....The Lord's Prayer might be a place to start...
Our Father, which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth,
As it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
The power, and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.*                             (*from the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer)

We start here with the concept of a holy "father" residing in heaven, awaiting His coming to earth....the pilgrim then asserts that His will is being carried out in heaven and prays that is may be as well on earth....Asking for forgiveness of sins, concomitant with our capacity to forgive others, asking for guidance away from temptation and deliverance from evil both seem like eminently reasonable requests, even petitions, for a people fraught with both guilt and the failing strength to take a wide berth around temptation when it has been encountered and to extricate himself from evil once it has overtaken his life. The belief that all power resides with the recipient of this prayer also seems consistent and congruent with the Old Testament concept of an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent God to whom these prayers are directed.
None of us would have difficulty in accepting the notion of a powerful, ubiquitous and all-knowing Holy Being of some kind. It does not strain our capacity to believe or to imagine.
We understand from the history of the Old Testament that a belief in and a widely held hope about some form of apocalypse, or Second Coming, as part of the appeal to any God, who "could not have" wound up this orb and left it running as would a clockmaker. Looking to the future when the full experience of an encounter with this Holy Being would occur had to be both overwhelming and somewhat intimidating at the same time.
So, belief in an exceptionally powerful Being has its price: it makes those who have been impregnated with this belief both self-conscious and self-critical, considering the potential punishments that could be meted out on the occasion of a misdemeanour. So a notion of God as the ultimate holder of POWER comes very early in our religious language and history.
There are also many 'signs' in the Old Testament that God is guiding the people, both into and out of wars, oppression, pestilence, good and bad rulers and even signs like the Tablets containing the decalogue, as rules for a civilized society, under law, designed by God and delivered to humans in a somewhat mystical piece of theatre....all of it emergent from the imagination and spirit of a highly inventive, and even courageous and prophetic genius....and declared to be sacred...
Just for emphasis, the decalogue is repeated more than once, in somewhat altered form, and provides a reasonable foundation for a society attempting to find its way through the murky fog of potential anarchy and lawlessness. Two laws stand out: no killing and no adultery or messing with another man's wife, nor his property....oh, and honour your parents!
Highly hierarchical, non-debatable, and without any mention of context, or responsibility or a process of unpacking the complexities of each of these edicts. That came later, in Jewish communities in the midrash, and the debates that continue to this day, as part of the development of young boys and girls in the faith and in the community.
A black-and-white universe, while fitting and appropriate to a tribal society, wandering among the hills of the Middle East, searching for a place to "put down roots" seems about as much "documentation" and litigation their often warring factions could endure. And a God in charge, makes it much more possible to keep people "in line".
So with God at the helm, and those at the centre of the boat pulling on the oars, (as it were) the little ship of faith starts out onto a sea (actually many!) of winds, storms, burning sun and patchy catches of fish. Even in those stories, later transformed into New Testament narratives, matters of weak faith, doubt, deviance, deception, defiance and betrayal, including of course, blindness, prostitution, the pursuit of money, leprosy and most other forms of human "sickness" of both the body and the spirit, (today we might include the mind and psyche), none were turned away. Rather, even the murderers on the crosses next to the crucified Jesus were forgiven, if I recall rightly, as were the executioners who triggered the expression, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do!" from the dying Jesus.
However dangerous it is to conflate the Old and New Testaments, there is long-standing tradition that links them, as Frye explained it, from "garden to city" (of the New Jerusalem)
The literary mind, not incidentally, looks for form, and for poetic images and for pastoral narrative and does not feel as comfortable with "law" as do some others who search for the cornerstones of their faith in morality. And sometimes, for people of varying appreciations, a clear articulation of the "laws of God" are very helpful in their pragmatic search for guidance and direction in their daily lives....however, that pursuit might push the poetic and the pastoral aside. Their God is one of authority, power, law, punishment and then possible reconciliation.
For the poets and the artists, the pursuit of a faith and a full spiritual life is conditioned by the imagination and by experience of both actions and thoughts and aspirations that would not, could not have occurred without a relationship to God, configured more as counsellor, friend, mentor and perhaps even lover.
God as Judge, versus God as spouse (for nuns, for example) or God as counsellor, mentor....these are complementing yet also conflicting in their application. A counsellor/mentor nudges, guides, hints, paints pictures, whereas a judge "judges" and while God is capable of both, and more, we humans tend to become more attached to one or another without fully and simultaneously embracing the complexities of God. Another voice of God, captured in the Old Testament is God as prophet, able to predict the future, and able to see into the life of things in mysterious ways that both Judge/King and Counsellor do not.
We are constantly involved in some form of a reductionism of God, depending on our perceptions of ourselves, and our universe and our relationship to both God and the universe.
As a practicing Roman Catholic nun pointed out, in a family violence workshop, "The greatest violence we do to each other comes from the reductionisms we impose on each other!"
And, my head bolted to the right, from where her voice was coming, as my heart sped up dramatically, and my hard-drive memory indellibly embedded her words as a gift from God, through her.
Aren't we all looking, searching, hoping and even dreaming for words, musical sounds, mountainous sights, deep rivers and cascading waterfalls to overtake our senses and thereby to infuse our spirits with the most beautiful and the most profound and the most uplifting experiences, as signs that there really is a God, and that there really is a heaven....as the scientists are only recently starting to believe...??
Have we not, perhaps, fallen into a too literal and too limiting by more than half, view and expectation of both the evil of others and the evil of institutions governed by others, as an inheritance from the world view of the christian church (and possibly other faith communities as well) that since God is the one and only perfect One, man must be little more than an ethical, moral and spiritual insect by comparison?   And then, when the evidence of human depravity leaps out at us in tsunamis, confirming our jaundiced belief system, we cry once again, "God help us!" for we are helpless sinners and profoundly need to be reformed, transformed, converted to something "better" than we were when we were born.
Is it not, perhaps, a false premise on which to base such an important cornerstone of human existence, that all human beings are evil and in need of transformation, except those who have seen the light and found their Saviour in Jesus?
Have we not, collectively, and historically, fallen into the trap laid by our earliest writers, that our moral compass is so twisted and unsound, that we are incapable of finding our way through the many temptations, without God's unerring and loving guidance?
Or is this equation of the church holding onto the 'word of God' as its touchstone, along with the promise of a hell of an afterlife for those who fail to comply,  little more than a group of serious thinking and praying men attempting to marry their "hold" on the word of God, (their interpretation and their applications and their authentic belief that they know something the rest of the world does not) to their perceived need for the church to have control over the lives of its parishoners, in order to justify the existence of the church, now and in the future?
Could the civil society not just as easily and as successfully originate and certainly sustain itself, without making God's law, as perceived by any faith community, the lens through which the world is perceived, the ink with which the laws are written, and the prison bars in which the deviants are held, often without just cause?
Does it not seem that  in attempting to please the God of both Old and New Testaments, we have bound ourselves, and our institutional church, in ways that no deity would ever have wanted, in a perverted and misguided attempt to "please" this deity?
Living lives of self-loathing, judgement of others (the only possible outcome of self-loathing) and fear of retribution from a loving and forgiving God is the most unsustainable proposition imagineable.
If we believe that love is truly at the heart of our faith, the love of God for each person on earth, and the love of God for the planet on which we live, and the capacity for love of each other, "as God has and does love each of us" then it is long past time for christians to incarnate such a belief in our practice...without fear of the scurrilous attacks on the frivolity and immaturity of such a belief.
Loving is never easy or without risk. Love is never self-serving and gratuitous. Love is never merely physical and sensational. Love is hard because it requires truth telling, and truth-telling when it is least wanted, or even perceived to be needed by 'the other'...Love is the most courageous act of a human being, risking complete commitment to a relationship, including sacrifice, without ever doing the 'work' of the other...Loving engages both parties to a degree that no other kind of relationship requires or expects and it cannot be contained, managed or regulated by the laws of either the church or the state...
And there is the rub...that our faith journey is not one in which either the church or the state can play a role.
Nevertheless, our religion demands that we accept the premise that we begin as evil, defined so by a "fall" story that has crippled the growth and development of our faith for centuries. And while writers like Matthew Fox have attempted to overturn the impact of that "fall" in books like his "Original Blessing" through which he articulates the gift of wisdom and insight in the fall, as opposed to the punishment that previous interpretations have awarded the story, nevertheless we are still living, as Christians, in deficit, scarcity, and starving for the love of God, which is all around us, in every breath we take, in every bird that sings, in every leaf that bursts from its bud, in every baby that smiles and cries, in every loving touch from our partner, and in every theme in every symphony.
We cling to our imperfections as our definitions of our essences as human beings, and the argument goes that to do otherwise, would be presumptuous, arrogant, and unseemly. We even link, consciously or unconsciously, our sickness and our pain to our sinfulness, as if we expect God to punish us for being alive. Death, then becomes the last great punishment, to be avoided at all costs, because the risk of going go Hell is far too monstrous even to contemplate. Sickness, pain, both of our anatomy and our external circumstances take a toll far greater than necessary, given our fixation on our extrinsic realities.
If we are to become truly loving, we must bring our Shadow realities into the picture, which, given its capacity to insert itself without our conscious engagement, will happen anyway. We must commit to the unpacking of our personal and our institutional Shadow, as an integral part of our developmental journey, as spiritual beings, in our relationship with a deity whose capacity to love the totality of our being is limitless.
And that requirement, very different from the legalistic restrictions on our public persons, and on our public attitudes to others, is essentially missing from all christian faith pilgrimages. In its place, we have made idols out of what we consider to be enforceable extrinsic sins that can be observed, documented, prosecuted and punished, (with or without due process) to the denial of whatever might be happening within the person's inner life.
The church falls into the classic trap of being seduced into using the empirical evidence of our lives to judge our "conformity" with the faith canon while, simultaneously, failing completely to pay attention to the Shadow sides of our lives, including its own, as the more important ingredient in all our development.
The church has, through a glaring default of centuries of over-focus on the observable, the canons, the buildings, the liturgies, the bank accounts, the fuel bills, the correct theology in the homilies, the correct relationships among and between the clergy and the laity...all of those matters that can be litigated in a public or private forum...left the spiritual lives of both its members and adherents, and the institutional lives of its organizations to drift aimlesslessly, without the courage even to acknowledge the "sins of omission"...that this process involves.
The overt and covert competitions, patronizings, vindictive revenges, suicides, ex-communications, cold shoulders, insults, cooked books, inappropriate relationships, the corporate reductionisms....all of these have come to characterize the institutional church's relationships within and without, among members and between churches of common and differing denominations....and there is no hue and cry to protest this sacrifice of things that matter to the things that can be included in the accountant's ledger.
We have, in effect, somewhat willingly and consciously and somewhat unwillingly and unconsciously, created anther public corporation in the name of God, that has little or nothing to do with fertilizing, incubating, delivering and developing disciples of Jesus Christ Resurrected. It has everything to do with generating numbers on pages of membership, and on accounting ledgers, and on front pages of newspapers, and in transcripts of 'court hearings' and in 'lists of baptisms, marriages, burials, attendees, special liturgies'.
We have failed utterly, in developing a community of persons committed to their own and their colleagues spiritual lives, of disclosure, of unpacking their individual and collective Shadows, of rendering the extrinsic secondary to the intrinsic, of rendering the things of the spirit to God and the things of accounting to the accountants.
In short the lawyers, accountants and marketers have taken over the church, along with the gender warriors (female) and the prices that are and will be paid are enormous.
I recall working with a female clergy, a student of the Myers-Briggs testing instrument, who invited the congregation to complete the test, and afterwards, having analysed the results, thereafter wrote her homilies in a manner directly shaped to the demographic curve of her audience. Now that's a level of marketing that Wall Street would envy. I am convinced that her motive for pursuing ministry as a career was to advance the feminist cause from the bully, political pulpit. She demonstrated contempt for men, without having to face that truth, because obviously no one in her circle of influence was willing to pay the price of confronting her with that truth. And that circle included her supervising bishop who had to know the full truth of her situation. And if he didn't, he needed to!

(#1) A Heretic's guide to the universe

Just read a short piece in the Globe and Mail, by Reginald Bibby, he of the sociology of religion fame in Canada, attempting to mine the limited findings in the Canadian Household Survey (the replacement of the Long-form Census) about the declining numbers expressing a formal relationship with any specific religion. No surprise there, as the planet moves inexorably toward a more secular world view.
However, before we bury the churches, and the theology that has both birthed them and to a degree  sustained and sabotaged them, let's look more closely at the picture that emerges from what one might imagine to be the lens of the eye of  christian churches over the last half century.
There is a faint scent hovering over those eyes, hinting of some family bible with its pages inscribed with births, deaths, marriages from as far back as the various custodians of the museum piece can dig.
Probably those inscriptions have had more eyes poring over their contents than the words in the actual document. There is also a great respect for memory, given that the "book" (New Testament) emerged from the centuries shortly after the life of Jesus, and the Old Testament rose from the documents of the earliest oral histories of the tribe of Israel. And while no one doubts there is deep, useful and sometimes even startling wisdom, insight, poetry and narration in both sections of the 'book' there is a declining interest in reading anything that might take longer than a few seconds to penetrate, given the time warp in technological communication.
Most people in North America, and probably many in Europe, and more recently in Africa and South America have been 'fed' some form of religious curriculum, catechism, baptism as part of their early years, often pointing to the 'highlights' of a similar offering to previous generations in their families.
First Communions, too, have dotted the calendars of many young people, whose new wardrobes for the special day were put together as much to trumpet the pride of their parents as to express thanks, or even awe to a Holy God.
In some communities, attending church became a mark of business respect, giving the pew-resident a slight glow among the local potential client market. In some, church attendance was also an indication of the 'good parenting' of the guardians of the family, whose offspring were more likely to attain a respectable adulthood than those who were out "joy-riding" on a Sunday morning, after their loud and unseemly Saturday night parties.
In some communities, sobriety and abstinence, in both realms of alcohol and extra-marital sexuality, were communicated by merely appearing as one of the members of a local congregation.
In some church communities, and this gets a little more troubling, there was even a "given" that the people under that roof were practicing a form of the faith that demonstrated the errors of those practicing a different form of the faith. And so there was a kind of both snobbery and bigotry implicit in the faith communities, even if such exclusive and alienating attitudes and perceptions were only faintly audible inside and outside the church building. Those inside the 'circle' knew that their grandparents and great-grandparents would turn over in their graves if they knew that some current members were actually forming friendships, perhaps even dating, members of that 'other' church full of 'holy-rollers' or dogans, or 'political activists' or.....
And as those walls of separation began to crumble, and the various faith communities began to work toward some forms of harmony, or ecumenism, or possibly even union with others, of course, the purists in one church vowed never to 'break bread, and drink wine' with those of another church where similar vows were being whispered, or perhaps even uttered.
And there began to appear differences in approach to adolescent development, including sexuality, around such new technologies as birth control, and the churches scrambled to learn about the new developments, while their adolescents predictably outstripped their parents in both knowledge and use.
And there were also differences in approach among the churches around such issues as criminality, and poverty and formal education. Some, for example, would have nothing to do with the 'criminal element' believing them to have already 'sealed their fate' with God, and set their path on the road literally (and probably metaphorically) to Hell. Others preferred to train the laity to work in prisons, teaching, and counselling and befriending their brothers and sisters whose lives, for whatever reasons, had fallen into chaos; while others also attended AA meetings with their brothers and sisters whose lives had become subject to what the twenties dubbed the 'demon rum.'
There is an obvious pattern to the language attributed to those activities to which any church was opposed: those activities were 'evil' or 'the work of the devil' or 'Satanic' or 'unnatural'.
And then there was a collision of what it means to be a human being with what is evil....because humans are naturally sexual, and naturally gregarious (and consume alcohol as one way to celebrate their human associations) and naturally skeptical. On the other hand, there was little, if any, room amid the "hard and fast rules" for debate, discussion, difference and growth and development both of the individuals participating and the community that can and does grow only from such interactions.
And the churches that clung to their dogma (those matters they considered "sacred" as if they were imported directly from the mind/heart/spirit of God!), in the face of attitudes and behaviours that seemed both natural and even life-giving to some of their folk, struggled now with what to do with those who "fell by the wayside". In some cases, some clergy with the support of their bishops, refused to serve the eucharist to those who had wandered too far from the straight and narrow. In some cases, the miscreant was expelled, excommunicated, or simply turfed from the community, as an indication that the hierarchy simply "will not tolerate" such attitudes and/or behaviours, as, just like the legal system, made a glaring example of those miscreants, often even without anything resembling what the world now knows as due process...
The churches have been negligent in failing to develop processes of training, reformation and reconciliation, preferring, it would seem, to not have to deal with the messiness of such processes, and the impact on the fund-raising programs, the development of foundations, that have become a requirement of the future financial security of those same, once well-funded, ecclesial organizations.
The churches have also been in denial of too many of the human traits, to which each of us must claim possession, whether they have all been demonstrated in our actions or not, and whether they have been "found out" but those same church police whose job it is to keep the church "pure" and "chaste" from evil, just as they once attempted to keep their adolescents "pure" and "chaste" from exploring their sexuality.
There is such a flaw in the "perfectionism" that lives, vibrantly or more strugglingly, in all christian churches, that separates the human being from the love, forgiveness and embrace of God, that such perfectionism verges on, if not actually incarnates, infantilism. No form of religion practice, no path of the pilgrim, can be called such a path while at the same time excluding human attitudes and behaviours of all kinds. And no church worthy of the name can follow a "theology" or a belief system which functions primarily as a code of judgement, on the other people in the village, or even in the same pew.
And so, we will continue to witness falling numbers of people willing to sit in pews and to write cheques to support hierarchies and values that are necessarily rife with incompatible, irreconcilable and irreducible paradoxes, hypocrisies, and the expression of values and beliefs that are formulated to "target" others whose behaviour cannot and will not fit the perfectionist strait-jacket of a faux faith in an awesome God.

The question is not "can we trust Harper to govern?" but whom does Harper trust?

While the opposition, both NDP and Liberals are attacking the Harper government for lost money, and for wasted money on self-promoting ads advertising Action Canada job grants (nothing of which is actually in the government's budget) there is a much bigger question, that looks more at the "empty spaces on the canvas" that at those obviously glaring at the observer.
It is not so much a question of  whether the Harper government can be trusted to govern, although that is certainly a reasonable and legitimate question, given the evidence of mismanagment that abounds.
It is more a question of "Whom does Stephen Harper trust?"
Clearly, he does not trust scientists, academics, members of the public service, his backbenchers and the members of his Cabinet; he does not trust Palestinians, nor the RCMP, nor public servants like the Auditor General whose reports, (both current and previous) are glossed over, refuted or outright shredded as incomplete. He does not trust the Eurpoeans to get their economy back on a solid footing; he does not trust the United Nations, as witnessed in his standing and failure to gain a seat on the Security Council for Canada, for the first time since the organization was founded.
He muzzles the members of the backbench and  there is now a government edict forbidding RCMP officers from even meeting with members of parliament or Senators, simply to provide information that would be part of the parliamentarians' conduct of their nonmal responsibilities.
It is not merely the failure to account for large sums of public monies, but the insouciant manner in which the matter is dismissed as if it is of no account by the government that matters.
One has to wonder too, if the prime minister trusts workers in this country, especially those in public corporations, where his government intends to play a larger role in their bargaining process and in the assignment of executive remuneration.
From the Ottawa Citizen, May 9, 2013 by Kathryn May:                     
The government estimated it would eliminate about 19,200 positions as it phased in the $5.2 billion spending cuts from the 2012 budget. It has so far eliminated about 17,000 positions.Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Hundreds+more+affected+notices+seven+government+departments/8361260/story.html#ixzz2SpOCGEaDHas Has the prime minister grown cynical, or were these the true colours of the man from the beginning, faintly camouflaged with unctious smiles and telegrammatic answers to as few reporters' questions as he could manage even in the height of an election campaign?