America's True Religion is Violence.

August 28, 2007

True American religion is violence

By David Truskoff

"America is, by far, the most violent country in the world when measured against comparable, industrialized nations. Violence is deeply rooted in our society and has become woven into the fabric of the American lifestyle. A culture of violence has emerged that invades our lives at every level, from our most intimate relationships at home to our schools and work environments. For many of us, violence has become an acceptable strategy for solving conflict, exerting power and control, obtaining possessions, and satisfying emotional desires. Moreover, violence has itself become entertainment, glamorized in the behavior of both real and fantasy heroes."

California Attorney General Daniel E. Lungren

Attorney General Lungren made that statement back in 1995. The situation has not improved. It has, in fact, become much worse. There have been 202 homicides in the city of Baltimore alone this year, (2007) The city is headed for at least 300 murders this year. Those are murders alone. It does not include the hundreds of non-fatal shootings.

On any given day in America one can turn on the television set and watch, Kick Boxing, women boxing, extreme fights (Where anything goes, biting, kicking, punching and knees to the groin) There is also a daily fair of so called wrestling (where grown men break metal chairs over the backs of their opponents and perform other insane violent acts.) Add to that the films such as the one that was on while I was writing this piece. I left it on because I was too busy to shut the set after the news and it was so apropros of what I was talking about. The film was titled "Wyatt Erp". In the movie men are shooting men in scene after scene. If you do not want to watch a movie there are many violent detective stories that include all kinds of murder and mayhem for you to enjoy.

After they watch the movie Americans can turn on the local evening news and see how many fellow Americans were shot, knifed or just plain killed by other means in their community. That of course is followed by the death count from Iraq.

It is true that violence is inbred in Americans. It is part of our tradition and culture. We revel in the stories of the Wild West and the horrendous Civil War. We play World War Two movies over and over. Actors who were never in the service glamorize over emphasized violence in "the Longest Day" a movie about the Normandy invasion. It is played along with many other War movies very often on movie channels.

Do not miss-understand me. I am not saying that violence belongs to Americans alone.

I remember one day when I was speaking to a convention of Church youth groups about the Civil Rights struggle in America. During the question period one young women said," I am afraid to go downtown because they (meaning Blacks) are so violent." I lost my composer, for which I later apologized. "You mean like that (N) (I used the forbidden N word) Hitler who was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people Or that (again the N word) Truman who dropped the atom bomb and killed 70 thousand people in one day and then a few days later did the same thing again?"

No we Americans do not have a corner on Violence. No race or ethnic group does, but we have made a religion of it. We have poisoned each generation with it and allowed the mass media to ridicule those who oppose it. We have made it into the most profitable product that we produce. Like sex, violence sells. One can not watch an American football game without seeing the joy a "Great Hit" brings to the announcers. The "Great hits" are played over and over interspersed, of course, with commercials. Violence sells.

Two subjects that American politicians dare not touch without risking burned fingers, are Gun Control and of course the plight of the Palestinians. Both of these subjects are guarded by the most powerful lobbies in Washington and a political career can be dashed on the rocks by supporting the Palestinians who are suffering from the American intercourse with the Israelis’ violence (who came by their brand of violence suckling at the breast of the American military complex) and calling for gun control to protect Americans who are also suffering from their own violence.

US Children are ten times more likely to die from gunfire than in 25 industrialized nations combined. For young black males in the US guns are the leading source of death…In 1995 one in 12 students reported carrying a firearm or some other weapon. In 2004, 81 people were shot dead every day in the US according the US center for decease control. 29,569 were killed by firearms that year.. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reveals that every day; nearly eight children or teens are killed by gun violence in America which adds up to about 235 each month.

Where did they get the guns? That is the question gun control advocates continue to ask, but it is like trying to find an acceptable answer to the so called mid east crises. Everyone knows the answer, but no one can apply it. Let’s just dream for a minute. The answer to the gun lunacy can be simple. Guns, in particular hand guns, are used to kill people so the US government should take over all gun manufacturing businesses that make huge profits from the gun murder rate and see to it that only the law enforcement people and the military have guns. Why do any others need them?

There was a time, not too long ago, in England when even the Bobbies didn’t carry guns, but since the huge influx of illegal weapons they are now forced to carry them in order to protect themselves and the general public.

The gun nuts still parrot "Guns don’t kill people, People kill people." No, people with guns kill people more often. They will also quote from the second amendment to the constitution "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." June 21, 1788.

The small country of 1788 when much of the population had to hunt for food and many still worried about Indian wars was a much different place than the three hundred million divided population of present day America.

The second amendment should have been amended before the Wild West became so wild. For decades cowardly politicians have never been able to rewrite it so that it will really protect the people. After demands by law enforcement agencies who have found some of their men outgunned by outlaws (Protected by the second amendment) the best they could do is try and control military assault weapon being used by criminals. They even failed in that.

Oh my, how the neo-cons will scream. Take over an American business, that is socialism they will say. No, it is common sense to save the children and in turn save the nation. It might even inspire the United Nations members to demand weapons limitations. Of course, the merchants of death will also join the chorus and scream that is Marxism being promoted by the dangerous Peace people.

David Truskoff

www.erols.com/sutton

Face of God, via Pope Benedict.

The Face of God

WHAT BENEDICT’S ‘JESUS’ OFFERS

Peter Steinfels

---

You can read Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, $24.95, 374 pp.) to learn about Jesus of Nazareth. Or you can read it to learn about Benedict XVI. Of course, it is not impossible to do both. In some respects, it is impossible not to do both.

My own interest, I confess, was more in Jesus than in Benedict. Jesus of Nazareth speaks to a real problem. In recent decades, historical scholarship has been churning out multiple images of Jesus and leaving the impression, the pope believes, that any understanding of Jesus as divine stems not from him but from his followers. “Intimate friendship with Jesus,” Benedict warns, “on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.”

I think the pope is mistaken in thinking that all these images are incompatible with one another, opposed to the idea that the church’s faith in Jesus’ divinity was rooted in his own words and deeds, or merely the reflection (as Albert Schweitzer had written a century ago) of their scholarly authors’ temperaments or ideological convictions. In fact, much of this scholarship has been morally, spiritually, and intellectually invigorating.

But like the constant parade of new and better cell phones, it has also been befuddling. The sheer kaleidoscope of images-rabbinical sage, Jewish mystic, apocalyptic prophet, faith healer, revolutionary leader, philosophical provocateur, zen master, and New Age shaman-induces a tentative attitude that is hardly the basis for “intimate friendship” or, as an older language would put it, a “personal relationship” with Jesus.

One might expect that the Jesus of history would be a flesh-and-blood person, and the Christ of faith the more theoretical product of belief and doctrine. Instead, the Jesus of history turns out to be one (or several) of an array of scholarly constructs, whose shelf life may be quite limited-hardly an individual to be personally and intimately known, loved, worshiped, and followed. By contrast, it is the Christ of faith who is concrete and enfleshed, embodied in centuries of saints and experienced in family, sacraments, and a lifetime of gestures, stories, and prayers. For many Catholics like myself, moments of intimate friendship or personal relationship with Jesus are more likely to occur in returning from Communion than in encountering Scripture.

Perhaps this is the way it should be, or must be. One unhappy consequence, however, is an ecclesio-centrism eclipsing any Jesus-centrism. Jesus may symbolize a set of moral principles, even model them the way Socrates models the inquiring intellect or Gandhi models nonviolence. But the church is the locus of attachment and authority and energy. Our emotional bond is not with a person but with a tradition, an institutionally structured set of practices, beliefs, and loyalties, sometimes instanced in a local community, most often existing in our heads and psyches. The impulse to read this book to learn about Benedict more than about Jesus is a symptom of that reality.

The crux of the wider problem, of course, is not as new as Benedict supposes. It is the ancient difficulty of grasping the interior life of a person affirmed to be both human and divine, something that an intimate or personal relationship, certainly in our age, seems to demand. Until only a few decades ago, Catholicism resolved this difficulty by adopting a semi-docetism. Jesus was simply God in his internal life-his knowledge, self-understanding, and sense of mission-with a slice of humanity added on, primarily his being subject to physical pain, the anguish of rejection by those he loved, and death. This view threatened to endow Jesus with a puzzling kind of split personality, to strain the Gospel accounts, especially the synoptics, and to contradict the conviction that he was like us in everything but sin. The humanness of Jesus was doctrinally necessary; its full implications were left in the shadows.

The pendulum has swung, and now it is Jesus’ divinity that is often left in the shadows. Jesus of Nazareth attempts to challenge this disjunction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith without returning to the earlier semi-docetism or to the biographical and devotional portraits that historical criticism has inoculated us against. The pope’s approach is one of “canonical” or “theological” exegesis (see Jack Miles, “Between Theology and Exegesis,” July 13). Major elements of the Gospel accounts are read not only with the eyes of faith but in relation to the entire story of the Bible and the drama of Israel and the pilgrim People of God.

Benedict portrays Jesus therefore as the promised new and greater Moses. Like Moses, Jesus speaks to God face to face. Unlike Moses, he also looks directly on the glory of God. And he will be the mediator of a greater, now universal covenant. His unity with God, filial communion with the Father, is the key to understanding Jesus’ words, deeds, sufferings, and triumph. For Benedict, Jesus’ frequent withdrawal for prayer, so easy to read as pauses between the acts, becomes central to the action: “He lives before the face of God [except in Gethsemane and perhaps Chapter 17 of John], not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father.”

So the message of Jesus, first of all, above all, and before it takes on any of the varying content biblical scholarship ascribes to it, is Jesus himself, Jesus as the face of God. When Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God, he is “quite simply proclaiming God”; the Kingdom is “at hand” because Jesus himself is. Jesus does not claim to reform the Law, whether in a permissive direction regarding the Sabbath or a more stringent one regarding marriage. Rather he claims to be the Law, to be, in his person, the new Torah. The volume ends, fittingly, on Jesus’ “I am” sayings, primarily found in John.

Jesus of Nazareth is a patchwork, not a scholarly treatise, and readers will be richly rewarded if they accept it as such. Some sections clearly derive from homilies on topics like the Lord’s Prayer or the temptations in the desert or the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. These Benedict has probably polished over years, carefully folding his scholarship into an eloquent language of reflection, exegesis, and exhortation. Other sections feature a more outright engagement with the arguments of (mostly German) biblical scholarship, making points that seem plausible, though here the cautious lay reader (like me) may want to reserve judgment until more returns come in from the scholarly precincts. But in both cases, Benedict constantly weaves the events, prayers, and symbols of the Old Testament with those of the New, producing, to me at least, powerful and fresh insights.

Because this text is generally thoughtful, measured, and serene, I found Benedict’s occasional jabs at “the so-called modern worldview,” at utopian politics, “liberal exegesis,” or “modern liturgists” jarring. The battle scars of the sixties still throb. Obviously Benedict’s intellectual stance as well as obiter dicta regarding biblical scholarship is of major interest.

In January 1988, reporting for the New York Times on then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s role at a conference on biblical studies, I was struck by both his animus against historical-critical scholarship and his tendency to characterize it almost entirely in terms of the German trajectory from Reimarus to von Harnack and on through Bultmann. Yet, to the great distress of conservative Catholics, at a closing press conference he abundantly praised the work and faith of Raymond Brown-who was sitting next to him and had politely offered a more positive assessment of recent Bible studies.

In Jesus of Nazareth, the German perspective and the somewhat dated quality of the pope’s references remain, and yet the animus seems much diminished. This is not only a matter of Benedict’s explicit expression of “profound gratitude for all that [modern exegesis] has given and continues to give to us”-specifically, that “it has opened up to us a wealth of material and an abundance of findings that enable the figure of Jesus to become present to us with a vitality and depth that we could not have imagined even just a few decades ago.” The fact is that this scholarship, whether in agreement or disagreement, is the baseline of the entire book.

In this regard, whatever its shortcomings or contestable claims, Jesus of Nazareth is leagues in advance of both the theological and biblical underpinnings of 90 percent of the preaching or catechesis encountered in Catholic America. The book has been a bestseller for more than a month. How many of those buyers will actually read it, and read it in keeping with the pope’s intention “not to counter modern exegesis”? If a thorough, open-minded assimilation of the learning and reflection in these pages were to be the mark of a new generation of Benedict XVI priests, I would certainly welcome them.

Benedict’s book does not address, let alone resolve, many a question about God and Jesus. Its central case ultimately rests on the coherence and power of its portrait of Jesus as a person for whom “communion with the Father” was “the true center of his personality.” It is a case built not on psychological speculation or devotional fervor but on an imposing web of Old and New Testament texts. It is a case I find persuasive and deeply helpful.

---

ABOUT THE WRITER

Peter Steinfels

Peter Steinfels is the author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (Simon & Schuster), and writes the “Beliefs” column for the New York Times.