Indomitable spirit: A note on Prince

A conversation just before the Super Bow XLI halftime show:

Bruce Rodgers, Super Bowl production designer: We’re in this truck sitting behind Don Mischer. I remember Don said, “Put me on the phone with Prince.” Don says, “Alright. Now I want you to know it’s raining.”

Bruce: And Prince is like, “Yes, it’s raining.”

Don: “And are you OK?”

Bruce: And Prince is like, “Can you make it rain harder?” And I was like, “Right on.”

***

I was never the biggest fan of Prince’s music, but came to appreciate how unbelievably talented he was, especially on vocals and guitar, his untouchable presence on stage and his connection with fans.

Prince was better at playing multiple instruments than many of us will ever be at anything. He played almost all of the instruments on his first few albums and has produced his own work since the age of 21.

I’m not going to do the overdramatic stuff about how it was a real loss because every death is a real loss. But I just appreciate his virtuosic talent and what he meant to the music industry for more than 30 years.

Here’s the video from his performance during the 2007 Super Bowl in the pouring rain:

[Cover photo credit: Getty]

Haslam says no to Bible bill

Time to give credit where it is due. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has vetoed the bill that would have made the Bible the official state book.

bill haslam bible bill

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in Nashville on April 12, 2016. (Samuel M. Simpkins /The Tennessean via AP)

This comes after both the state Senate and House approved the measure. The House voted in favor of the bill last year, while the Senate approved the legislation by a 19-8 vote, despite the fact that Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued an opinion in 2015 saying that it violated the separation of church and state. Haslam voiced similar concerns before agreeing to veto the bill.

The point that seemed to carry the most weight with the governor was the idea that the Bible would be devalued if it was placed alongside many other random and relatively inconsequential state symbols like limestone and the raccoon.

Here is what he wrote to House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville:

In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text. If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.

Although I disagree that the Bible is a sacred work, I can’t disagree with his logic.

I will take issue with the last part of his statement to Harwell:

I strongly disagree with those who are trying to drive religion out of the public square. All of us should and must bring our deepest beliefs to the places we are called, including governmental service. Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate. However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our Constitution prohibits.

No one is attempting to drive religion out of the public square, and local, state and federal officials are free to worship as they see fit and draw on their faith however they choose so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others or impede their work. What they can’t do is use public resources to show favoritism for one religion over another or for religion at all, organize prayer or Bible studies on government property during school hours, open with prayer during meetings of publicly-funded bodies or place religious symbols on property that was purchased with taxpayer dollars, all of which, like the Bible bill, violate the separation of church and state.

I have no doubt that at least one or two of these, perhaps all of them, are going on in many small, rural counties across this state and, indeed, across the South but because of a lack of resources and frankly, time, these practices quietly go unchecked.

Fortunately for believers, who, for some reason, think the god of all heaven and earth would care about what happens in a city council or commission meeting taking place in some podunkville county in the hinterlands of Tennessee or Georgia or Mississippi, the ACLU and other organizations that seek to expose church and state violations can’t be everywhere at once. And so, the exploitation of public resources at the altar of religion lingers on.

I must say, though, the fact that believers so vigorously defend their right to exercise religion in public even at the expense of violating the law shows a troubling amount of insecurity. If religion has that much going for it, if more people, not fewer, were signing up to follow Christ, if scripture was so self-evidently true, why do believers have to fight so hard to protect it?

Simply put, if the case for Christianity or Islam or Judaism were stronger, people would not be running from religion in droves. It would not need all this breathless support, and the all-powerful, omniscient god of all three messianic traditions would not need millions of cheerleaders shilling his message to the masses.

It’s not that people are rejecting religion because they are resistant to change or want to defile themselves in a heap of hedonistic pleasure and debauchery, as many pastors claim; people want to live genuine, fulfilling, lives of grace, dignity and honesty, and all religion has to offer is compulsory love and admiration for an absentee god; some highly unsophisticated, self-contradictory, cobbled together texts written by people who were so ignorant about the world that they didn’t know what they didn’t know; a barbaric sense of morality that carries vicarious redemption, human sacrifice and scapegoating as its main principles; and plentiful amounts of wishful thinking and false hope, all packaged in this sinister little word, “faith,” or, the pretense of knowledge in the absence of actual knowledge.

Unholy ground: The Bible as the official state book

Below is the letter I wrote to Gov. Bill Haslam on Tennessee’s bill to christen the Bible as the official book of the state. The legislation passed both the Senate and House and is now awaiting a decision from Haslam.

As I outlined in the letter, this is a bad idea for many reasons — and for Christians and nonbelievers alike. This appears to me to be just another in a string of proposed bills across the nation designed as a pushback against what Christian lawmakers and their constituents no doubt feel is the great demoralization of America, as members of the LBGT community finally get some of the rights they have been due all along.

Screenshot 2016-04-13 at 1.21.57 AM

Lawmakers, preachers and those with a modicum of power, of course, don’t want this and seemingly feel threatened that, perhaps, they are losing their grip on America, as Christianity has already lost its grip on much of the developed world.

The truth is that however much believers like to claim the moral high ground, while at the same time castigating gay and lesbian people, even those who are in loving and committed relationships, as hedonists who are one second away from devolving into sex-crazed maniacs — a completely distorted and bigoted picture of reality — the Bible, and believers’ willingness to trust it on its own merit or on the authority of church leaders, is responsible for holding mankind back morally and socially for hundreds of years such that we humans, only now, are beginning to pull ourselves out of the mire.

As I said below, the Bible, whether the stories are true or not, depicts some of the most depraved acts and belief systems in all of literature. Only the most sadistic of fathers would create his children, set them up to fail in the garden, tell them about the wonders of heaven and then demand that they love him and worship him or else, face annihilation and unrelenting, eternal torment. Further, the Bible’s “teachings” about the supposed value of human sacrifice and scapegoating are borrowed from savage ages, and were it not for the centuries-old tradition of the church and humans’ fear of the unknown and their incessant need to be told how to think and feel, these ancient elements would have already been discarded in the dustbin of history where they belong.

But for Tennessee lawmakers, although they had scores of more deserving books from which to choose, the Bible was apparently the best they could do. This is truly sad.

If you would like tell Haslam what you think about this noxious bill, go here to send him a letter.

Here is mine.

***

Dear Gov. Haslam,

Tennessee includes people of many different backgrounds, including Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers. According to data from Pew Research Center, 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents are either agnostic, atheist or unaffiliated with any religion.

State, local or federal governments serve at the behest of the people — all of the people — and as such, should not show favoritism toward one religion over another or indeed, to religion at all.

Passage of SB 1108/HB 0615 would serve as an affront to thousands of your constituents who don’t regard the Holy Bible as a suitable moral or spiritual guide. The Old Testament contains some of the most vile passages in all of literature with its tacit promotion of slavery and bigotry and graphic depictions of rape, looting and pillaging and outright slaughter in the name of religion. We don’t believe the New Testament is any better, holding as its central tenets eternal damnation for nonbelievers and people of other faiths and the immoral doctrines of vicarious redemption and scapegoating. The Bible is not fit to be the official book of Tennessee or any other state.

The Bible has some historical and literary significance, but it doesn’t just claim to be a work of literature or a history book. It makes serious claims about the origin of the universe, the nature of humanity, morality and God. The Bible claims for itself ultimate authority from God the Father and Jesus Christ, a message that, if foisted upon the state as the official book, would surely ostracize people of other religions along with nonbelievers in Tennessee. For us, the Bible has exactly the same spiritual significance as the Iliad and Odyssey, which is to say, none.

Notwithstanding the personal misgivings of myself, my fellow nonbelievers and advocates for the separation of church and state, it should go without saying that government officials should not use their public positions to promote their personal feelings about the validity of the Bible, much less attempt to translate those beliefs into law.

This legislation is a clear and blatant violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Tennessee Constitution.

Moreover, making the Bible just another officially recognized state symbol alongside things like the raccoon, the mockingbird, the square dance and limestone, the state’s official rock, would greatly undervalue a book that many lawmakers, hundreds of pastors and millions of churchgoers across the state consider to be a sacred text.

For the rest of us — at least 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents and possibly even more — the Bible is a non-entity in our lives. That such a bill could even be considered in the Tennessee House and Senate, much less pass, defies logic.

I hope that you will consider just how bad of an idea this legislation is and veto it at the first opportunity.

Thank you for your time.

Jeremy Styron

Book review: ‘Blood Meridian’

Note: This review contains a small spoiler, in that I hint at the ending, but don’t spell out precisely what happens to the protagonist. Neither does McCarthy.

***

The New York Times Book Review once said, “(Cormac) McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame.”

I would say that’s pretty much true with exceptions made for William Faulkner, Thomas Woolfe, John Steinbeck, Phillip Roth and a handful of others, but it’s most certainly true for contemporary American authors.

Credit: “Blood Meridian” book cover artwork by Fish-man at DeviantArt.com.

Credit: “Blood Meridian” book cover artwork by ECTmonster at DeviantArt.com.

Cormac McCarthy’s command of the English language, his flow, word choice and ability to craft excellent sentences that pull you along, almost in waves, until you feel their full force by the end, is impressive. Readers can turn to nearly any page in “Blood Meridian” and can find these nuggets in all their stark clarity and emotive power — passages like:

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.

The difference between literature and rote fiction, in my view, is that literature doesn’t just tell a story; it has an elusive quality that demands second and third and fourth reads. It’s contemplative, philosophical and timeless. Although this is my first foray into McCarthy, I’d be willing to bet that “Blood Meridian” will stand the test of time.

This novel, which has been described as a kind of anti-Western, follows the trail of a character named “the kid” as he leaves his Tennessee home, heads out west and gets involved with a crew known historically as the Glanton gang, a sundry band of outlaws who initially collect Native American scalps for money and later, apparently just for the hell of it.

Also afoot is an erudite, brutal, perverse, prophesying and borderline supernatural character named Judge Holden, who concludes ultimately that human existence, much like the blood-soaked plains in the novel, is awash with violence from start to finish, and if untold numbers of massacres and scalpings didn’t drive this point home, the fate of the kid certainly does.

Here is the judge laying out the main points of his thesis:

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

And here:

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

I’m not so sure that war is god anymore than god is god, but is the second part of this really that far off base? I don’t think so. We humans typically come to the height of our influence on the world somewhere between our 20s and 50s, if we are lucky, and then begin the slow wriggling crawl down the other side of the mountain where we at last meet inevitability, such that the primary symbol in “Blood Meridian” is the dying of the sun, smoldering out on the horizon in orange and red and cooling off the wasted earth.

This is “Blood Meridian’s” contribution to the literary canon. Fatalistic and hedonistic though it may be in parts, particularly embodied in the person of the judge, it offers an honest look at humanity’s capacity for violence and our ultimate frailness and mortality, as if being forced to stare into the sun, even if we want nothing more than to turn away.

[Rating: 4.0]

[Cover artwork from this piece by Fish-man at DeviantArt.com. The full artwork is embedded above.]

Legislating discrimination under banner of ‘liberty’

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. — Bertrand Russell

***

As most people who follow politics know by now, conservative Christian lawmakers have begun proposing measures that would give businesses, churches or other faith-based organizations legal license to turn people away based on their religion or gender identity, yet have framed the discussion in terms of increasing “religious liberty.” This, in a nation that already has unfettered religious freedom and a church on nearly every corner.

What lawmakers in states like North Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi really want is a legal workaround that would allow for the discrimination against members of the LBGT community such that, after the nation was lifted up on a wave of equality after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, Republicans now seem hellbent on organizing a pushback against what they no doubt feel is affront to their “traditional” values. Of course, given the many disgraceful policies against black folks throughout the late 19th century and continuing through much of the 20th century — not even counting all the inhumanities that took place in the land where “all men are created equal” before and during the Civil War — one could make a strong case that racism and bigotry are as “traditional” in America as apple pie and baseball on Sundays.

Credit: Associated Press/Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announces he will veto religious liberty bill.

Credit: Associated Press/Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announces he will veto religious liberty bill.

So when conservatives start talking about traditional family values in one breath and in another float proposals that would separate families and send parents thousands of miles away from their kids, prevent loving couples from enjoying the same protections and privileges under the law as everyone else, defund an organization that provides invaluable, affordable services to millions of women and men each year and gleefully acknowledge their belief in a book that gives us story after story of families being ripped apart or slaughtered outright at the behest of an angry god, I really have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.

Indeed, one can easily infer Republicans’ real intentions from what they have actually said on their not-so-thinly-veiled planned discrimination against the LGBT community. As a former Georgia resident, I’m not Gov. Nathan Deal’s biggest fan, but he deserves a lot credit, as I said on Twitter today, for sticking to his guns and vetoing his state’s so-called “religious liberty” bill that would allow faith-based organizations like churches, religious schools, conventions and others to deny services to those who do not share their “sincerely held religious belief” and then provide legal protection against lawsuits if and when denials take place.

State Sen. Josh McKoon called the current bill “significantly watered down” from a previous version that did more of what McKoon and his ilk were actually intending; that is, prevent businesses and other organizations from serving people who do not hold their beliefs. Here is McKoon:

I’m extremely disappointed. … (The bill) did not apply to businesses. I’m just very, very disappointed the governor would veto this modest protection for people of faith.

I sense a hint of victimhood in that last sentence. “People of faith” have a robust set of protections to ensure that they can, not only worship as they choose and congregate unhindered in every town and city in America, but churches enjoy a range of tax exemptions that actually place more financial responsibility and pressure on everyone else to make up the difference in lost revenues to support things like fire and police departments, schools and other public services.

But back to the bill. In addition to potentially allowing churches to deny services to people, perhaps most importantly, the legislation stipulates that no faith-based organizations will be required to hire people who do not agree with their worldview:

… no faith based organization shall be required to hire or retain as an employee any person whose religious beliefs or practices or lack of either are not in accord with the faith based organization’s sincerely held religious belief as demonstrated by practice, expression, or clearly articulated tenet of faith.

Nonetheless, as it stands now and if Deal’s decision is upended by a veto session, the legislation could pave the way for members of the LGBT community to face discrimination, overt or otherwise. Although the bill doesn’t come out and say that churches can screen potential employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity, which would be a clear violation of federal law, the implication is most certainly there, which is the context for this whole discussion in Georgia and states with similar legislation.

For his part, Deal said the bill sent the wrong message and did not reflect that Georgians were actually “warm, friendly and loving people:”

Our people work side by side without regard to the color of our skin, or the religion we adhere to. We are working to make life better for our families and our communities. That is the character of Georgia. I intend to do my part to keep it that way For that reason, I will veto HB 757.

Georgia’s bill was not solely about protecting religious liberty and everyone knows it, which is why a large number of large corporations, including Time Warner, Disney and Apple, admonished Deal to ax the bill, and the NFL and the NCAA have also “hinted,” as this AJC story worded it, that they could pass over the state as a location for championship games as a result of the bill.

While I realize we have little assurances of this, if Georgia lawmakers are smart, they will abandon the bill, and with it, the brazen affront to actual liberty, so that their state can avoid what is currently happening in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Religious freedom law have been around a long time going back to 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and proponents of the bill at the time were more focused on protecting believers from being forced into taking actions that went against their convictions or protecting elements of religious practice. As this article from Time outlines, the law said the federal government must have a “compelling interest” before it could infringe on religious liberty, and “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.” Perhaps the most conspicuous application of it has been in the case of Native Americans, some of whom have sought exemptions on religious grounds for the use peyote in traditional spiritual ceremonies.

The spirit of the federal law, then, is to actually protect the free exercise of religion, whereas the recent string of state laws are meant to restrict liberty among certain groups that conservatives would, if they could, more or less ignore completely except to keep passing more restrictions to effectively eviscerate them from civil society altogether.

Unfortunately for these traditionalists, the tide has already turned, and public sentiment is now largely against the kind of America that they want to create such that sooner or later, like the enfranchisement of women, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage and other victories that have charted our path on the moral compass, the United States is moving toward a more diverse and pluralistic society, and we are headed there with or without conservatives and the Republican Party.

That’s not a prediction or wishful thinking. The march of progress may be long, arduous and slow, but it is certain.

[Cover photo credit: David Goldman/AP]