Going Back

We cannot go back to a more innocent time, before we started torturing prisoners or before we invaded Iraq. Here are the reasons I believe this:

One thing that the Christian religion instills in the malleable brains of its children is that life is unidirectional. This is interesting since one of the other great religions that predates Christianity, Buddhism, does consider life cyclical. And, up until the 20th century, most humans were exposed to this cyclicity in the yearly seasons much more so than at present. One needs to figure out why Christianity deviated from this obvious view of life. I suspect it is because Christianity developed a sense of the afterlife versus the Buddhist concept of reincarnation (which actually predates Buddhism by centuries) versus the pagan, Jewish and now atheist concept of a very diminished or non-existent life after death.

In any case, one could make the argument that, because Christianity has this "time is an arrow" concept, it puts much more weight and responsibility on an individual for their actions. For political reasons, good actions don't account for much, it is really only sin that is of interest. Again, it is very likely that this stress is mainly for political reasons. And people in power cherry pick the sins of Christianity for obvious reasons.

Take the issues of sex and abortion. A very strong argument can be made that extramarital sex is prohibited because such activity leads to bastards. In the two millennium of Christianity, based mainly in Europe and its colonies, property was of the utmost importance. (It still is. Consider the materialism of America versus the rest of the World.) One of the things about property, and possession of land was what to do with it once you died. The obvious solution was to pass it on to your children. Needless to say, one had to have a real good idea of who your children were to accomplish this. A corollary to this was that your wife couldn't be playing around. Thus the advent of chastity belts during the Crusades (one wonders whether medieval European women didn't suffer more than the Saracens at times. Have you ever seen a chastity belt?)

A similar argument can be made for abortion in that abortion decreases the number of soldiers and workers for those that hold property. Actually, abortion was tolerated far more than we realize even by the Catholic Church up until about 150 years ago. (see the excellent article by Gary Wills that I have linked to before. Unfortunately, it is now buried in the pay for view NYT.)

Both of these activities, extramarital sex and abortion, are considered sins mainly because they have political consequences. That is, they impact on the power structure of society which lives in an unholy alliance with the prevailing religion, Christianity in this case. (If you doubt the close association of Christianity with politics from the word go, please read Elaine Pagels.)

But therein lies a tale. While those in power preach all of the ideas that are needed to support this end-directed (and not cyclical) religion, they do not practice what they preach. In fact, they have never practiced what they have preached. The history of Christianity in Europe has been one long bloodbath. And when you get to the rapacious colonization of the world during the 17th-19th centuries, it sowed the seeds of what we are reaping today. Is it any wonder that Muslims doubt our intentions in the midEast when they have so much history stretching back to 1092 to inform them? (Incidentally, Muslims have adopted the Christian view of life being unidirectional. Unfortunately, their afterlife seems very rewarding and we have a surfeit of suicide bombers.)

So this returns us to our original observation, that we cannot go back to a time when America didn't torture prisioners, didn't engage in "extraordinary rendition", didn't lie to its people about the most important aspects of its operation. But we can change. And we can make amends.

The one thing we can't do is, as Mr. Bush wishes, is ignore it.