Supernatural Experiences & Adventures in Philosophy

 

A short entry this week...

This is an embarrassing bit. For a while, I thought that I was experiencing ‘supernatural’ events; sounds, coincidences, apparitions, and the like. What can I say? I’m a child of my time.

My first ‘experience’ was an auditory phenomenon. It happened when I was about 12 years old. At home alone, I heard (or thought I heard) footsteps descending the stairs in a hurry. The stairway was to the attic of our small home and the huge ‘trap-door’ was firmly shut. It startled me and I leapt to a conclusion; a false one.

 

Other times that I would include in ‘supernatural events’ was when I was about 20 years old living in Nashville with the ‘adepts’ in the nascent cult which I mentioned above. The ongoing talk in our house for days was on spirits and ghosts. We talked about methods of ‘seeing’ them as ghosts and spirits were purported by some to be ‘everywhere’. Sitting in the living room, I thought I saw the silvery outline of a spirit descending the stairs. (Again with the stairs!) The ‘vision’ was confirmed rather half-heartedly by one or more of the ‘adepts’.  Again, a leap to a conclusion. Again, a false one. 

 

My sisters (Bless their little hearts!) have reported ‘seeing at a distance’, ESP, the foretelling of future events and ‘dreams’ which prophesized events, usually delivered by deceased family members. I usually just sit quietly and listen to the guff without comment. I’ve concluded that they perceive themselves as ‘special’ by claiming such extra-sensory rot.

 

These incidences, on re-telling, are totally bland and innocuous but when they occurred to me, they each were accompanied by an emotional component which amplified the experience. That emotional component (fear!) is what people hold on to so as to rationalize their experiences. Falsely, IMHO.

 

I have intentionally avoided any of the experiences which would be attributed to the ingestion of mind altering chemicals; alcohol, psilocybin, mescaline, THC, LSD, etc. Those experiences, which many others attest to being supernatural in nature, will be dealt with later in a section entitled ‘Psychedelics’. As intimated, a seeker seeks and I was a ‘seeker’. There were answers to the mysteries of the world and I hoped to find them. I know better now.

 

 

Adventures in Philosophy

Philosophy is like a game so complicated that few want to take the time to learn the byzantine rules and opaque terminology and which, moreover, never produces a winner.

 

Philosophy is a stately dance; I’ve never learned the steps and detest the music. 

 

When I attended Springfield College in Illinois (SCI) at the age of 23, I signed up for a philosophy course. I attended two class sessions but never purchased the text books; I determined that the class would not provide what I sought which was more than the semester hours the class offered. The professor was a priest; the Order of St Viator. Since SCI was a Catholic college, most of the instructors were clergy. I felt on common ground as I knew of this order from attending Bishop McNamara High School in 1964. 

 

(Father Mayer (remember him?)was a Viatorian, BTW.)

 

The first class was a basic introduction to constructing syllogisms. During the second meeting of the class, however, the professor, a Viatorian priest, laid out a simple syllogism – I don’t recall the exact syllogism but it was on god. I could sense that the priest’s intention was to prove the existence of the god of the Roman Catholic church and more exactly, the god of the Jesuits and Ignatius Loyola. I balked at the proposition of spending an entire term preparing and testing for that eventuality. I dropped the course. I was not going to subject myself to studying and entangling myself in learning an invalid argument for the existence of Loyola’s god. 

 

I did not define myself as an atheist at the time; I was more of a ‘free-thinker’. As I said before; being a Catholic was not de rigeur at the time. Being a ‘seeker’ and an iconoclast was the meme of the era. Pyramid power and crystal amulets were still on the fringes and in our future; on-coming lights in a dark tunnel.

 

Not to brag, I usually did quite well in classes where the subjects interested me and which were taught by interesting, thinking teachers. In the USA, however, tertiary education is expensive. Being an aging student with few prospects and growing debt, remaining in college was a trial. Rather ironically (or fortuitously) I happened to read ‘Deschooling Society’ a book by Ivan Illich (ironically a Roman Catholic priest) which played a huge role in dismissing the need for adhering to the strictures of academic study. That might well be a time when the book was ‘told’ by its cover. I chose it for the very reason I needed to forestall 

any regrets or resentment for ending my time in college. In short, I left the ivy-ed halls.

 

Since then, I’ve held philosophy at arm’s length. Watching the Atheist Experience with Matt Dillahunty lead me back to the baroque and byzantine dance of philosophy; the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the philosophical fallacies, metaphysics and the numerous –ologies (e.g. epistemology, tautology, teleology, ontology, etc.) that keep my head spinning while looking for an exit from the unfalsifiable mind-game of making sense of the senseless. 

 

Conclusion: It makes no sense to try to make sense of the senseless.

Likewise, it is senseless to expect sense from those who have abandoned good sense.

What Puzzled Me (not a comprehensive list)

My counter-point teacher in music school once explained that by learning to move freely in the tight strictures of the contrapuntal form, one gained a dexterity.  He likened it to a straight-jacket; it was not a complimentary comparison nor did it engender confidence in a promising outcome.  My straight-jacket in the ‘god’ sense – the ‘atheist drift’ sense - was my parochial school education; the elementary, high school and tertiary phases. It was like a very prolonged boot-camp for faith through which I learned to navigate.

 

Onward Christian soldiers!

 

Priests and nuns were like camp guards (to complete the heavy-handed analogy) and very little in the way of discrepancy or divergence was tolerated. There was no lingering in the grey zone. One committed or was consigned to the rubbish bin; ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’.  That sort of mentality, anyway; beatings were largely unnecessary. There were many other ways of milking the rat, as it were. (Recall the stern upbraiding that awaited the wag who’d chirped up linking Holy Communion to ‘cannibalism’.)

 

Stories about young girls with roses growing from the chests as they floated down the river were not to be scoffed at. They were not to be questioned. Questioning the sense of any story relating miracles or martyrdom was NOT to be tolerated. In fact, the questioner or quipster was subject to being anathemized. In previous times, taking tales of miracles or prophesy lightly was frowned upon. A persistent insistence to broaching such questions would have resulted in torture and possibly death by burning at the stake, in former times.

 

Learning to deal with the straight-jacket of fear was a lesson learned from parochial school. Face the fear; look it right in the face and sneer. If it doesn’t sneer back and double-down, you’ve won the stand-off. Facing down the nuns was not to be taken as a metaphysical challenge, however; another lesson learned, but by proxy. 

 

Which reminds me of another bit of ‘ancient wisdom’ which ‘Believers’ aren’t allowed to ask about seriously; an age-old saw for directing one to find the straight-and-narrow. It is said; ‘Fear of the ‘Lord’ is the beginning of wisdom.’ (There’s that feudal word, again…) In California, I once asked a guy who was a nascent preacher, a deacon or ‘presbyter’ or some such; someone who was revered in a small circle of ‘Believers’ as a Christian religious leader. 

 

As I was in the company of ‘Believers’ –  a couple of the ‘adepts’ from Nashville were among that company - I sincerely posed this question to him for explanation; ‘What does ‘Fear of the etc’ mean?’ I don’t recall what he said in response because what he said, quite honestly, made no sense whatsoever. It was something along the lines of ‘Fear is a motivator and god is fearsome but loving… yadda-yadda. It was gibberish. I had expected little more, to be honest; word salad with the garlic croutons of ‘our lord’ as condiment. It was the kind of gibberish that is called ‘deepities’ by Dan Dennett. What the ‘deacon/presbyter’ told me was meant to sound profound but wasn’t. Not in the least. 

 

‘A deepity involves saying something with two meanings—one trivially true, the other profound sounding but false or nonsensical. Dennett illustrates this with the expression “Love is just a word.”

 

The ‘deacon/presbyter’s’ answer had droned on about submission to the ‘Lord’ (that word, again) and obedience – blind obedience to a ‘power’ that was beyond my knowledge and beyond my comprehension. Halleluiah? Isn’t it odd that an all-knowing, all-wise god would make us humans in ‘his’ image but make us so dumb that we fail to comprehend the mystery of ‘him/it’? Right? The ‘Lord’ gave me an intellect but denied me an intellect robust enough to understand what ‘he/it’ was up to at all. 

Huh?

 

But ‘Believers’ insist that ‘belief (aka Faith)’ is all that’s necessary to get that golden ticket to eternal life. ‘You can’t use your intellect to ‘know’ god’, they’ll say. ‘You have to meet ‘him/it half way’, they’ll insist. Why the fuck on earth would that be? Is god so insecure that he/it needs to be coaxed into revealing him/itself to satisfy his/its ego? He/it purportedly explicitly told folks in the Old Testament that he/it is a jealous god. That sounds like a mighty weighty deific insecurity to me. 

 

Are we all meant to be psychological support animals for an insecure god/thing? No, thanks. I gave up my ‘security blank-y’ years ago. ‘god’ should as well.

 

Was Zeus ever wracked with angst? Was Odin All-Father clenched in the grip of insecurity? And they both had sons who vied for their godly thrones. They, furthermore, certainly had other gods before them; pantheons of celestial characters with powers and tales of their own.  Didn’t seem to cause them to act all murderous and blood-thirsty like the borrowed Hebrew god. The Egyptian god, Osiris, was killed – hacked to pieces - and resurrected and he didn’t appear to be skittish about anyone making golden idols of other gods. He never said much on the subject. Heck, Osiris was even married to a god and had one for a son.  Gods everywhere and few of them were as jealous and fearful as that Yahweh dude. 

 

Must have been a Judean thing.

 

Another early puzzlement that niggled at me was the ‘three days in the tomb and then rose from the dead’. How does anyone get three days out that story? 

 

(I know; the idea of a man coming back from the dead should have been the tip-off to this bit of bunkum but questioning the foundation of the Christian religion was strictly verboten. I mean, this is the resurrection; the Christ’s victory over death. He’s the Pascal Lamb sacrificed to ease the sins of the world and guarantee salvation for mankind. Halleluiah!) 

 

Back to my math-geek insight, however. Perhaps, I’d best recap the story of the Passion first; Good Friday was a no good, very bad day for Jesus; trials, scourging, crown of thorns, lugging the cross to Calvary, being crucified. 

 

(Not what you’d call a day at the beach…)

 

Then, the Man from Galilee died on the cross (at about 3pm according to my Catholic teachers). The curtain in the Temple was ‘rent’; the sky turned black and the dead rose from their graves (!).  Mary Magdalene was the one who had him taken him down and who arranged for him to be laid him in the tomb; a tomb borrowed from Joseph of Arimathea - who serendipitously appeared, then disappeared from the story. 

 

(Question (one of many); this was all prophesied and foreseen, foreordained by god, the Father, supposedly but where to put the corpse of the crucified man/god wasn’t considered or arranged beforehand? And during Passover? Mysterious ways, again?)

 

Anyway, all that funereal rigmarole amounts to 7 or 8 hours following his ‘Eli! Eli! moment’, depending on lots of factors; lowering the cross, removing the corpse, preparing it for burial, transportation, avoiding all the zombies which rose from their graves when Jesus died, etc. 

 

(See Matthew 27:46-54 for grins.

Why is there no accounting of this event of a Jewish zombie jamboree apart from this single passage? Why didn't historians like Josephus or Tacitus or Philo ever mention anyone else telling crazy stories about dead Jews breezing through town in their burial shrouds)?

 

Anyway, into the borrowed tomb Jesus goes, to chill for all of Saturday. Then – Pop! Weigh! Hey! And up he rises early Sunday morning, 5, 6am? 

 

So, 8 hours on Friday after dying, 24 hours chilling in the tomb on Saturday, then 6 hours from midnight Sat to Sun morning. That’s not even 2 fricking days in the tomb. Apologists fidget and tap-dance to make the story fit some prophesy or other, but time is time, an hour is an hour and a day is a day. It wasn’t three days in the tomb; it wasn’t even 2 days by my reckoning. Like I said, ‘picking at nits’ but…come on! Get the stupid story straight at least. 

 

Oh, and another thing – besides the clear and obvious fact that NO ONE comes back from the dead – why were there were guys ‘guarding the tomb’? WTF? From what? Grave-robbers looking for riches from an itinerant carpenter-cum-rabbi crucified as a criminal and interred in a borrowed tomb? Was this normal SOP back then? During Passover? To think that this makes sense to millions of people should give one pause for thought.

 

Ugh…

 

Granted this math conundrum was a minor one but, like the crack in the dike, it eventually brought down the wall.

 

More Adventures in Religiosity 

 

I recall playing a gig with a show-band at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The university was founded on the principles of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and with money from the Beatles, no doubt. The university offered advanced courses in levitation. Open only to graduate students. Really… 

 

Classes were held in a padded room where advanced candidates sat lotus position and bounced themselves higher and higher. Supposedly, graduates of the course could actually hold themselves above the padded mat for a brief moment. No one could offer proof or even anecdotal evidence of any success. I have to assume that photography was disallowed. 

 

A-hem

 

Did I mention I lived in California? I have had countless encounters with ‘seekers’; people who vouched for the efficacy of Eckankar, soul travel, astral projection, telekinesis, crystals, pyramid power, Scientology, and on and on.  All the seekers sought ‘enlightenment’ and ‘transcendent whatever’. All the various paths to a ‘higher state of being’ were couched in spiritual twaddle and esoterica. 

 

IMHO.

 

For much of my early adulthood, it seemed that all the ‘seekers’ were looking everywhere for something to plug the absence of Christianity and formal religion from their lives. ‘Ancient wisdom’ was a popular by-word and marketing ploy. Mysteries revealed! ESP, Lost Atlantis, Mu or Lemuria; Edgar Cayce, L. Ron Hubbard, pyramid power, soul travel, interdimensional beings, crystals, etc. Many got lost in the intricate maze of deception, manipulation, falsehoods and confusing spiritual non-sequitur. 

 

 

After transferring to a secular high school from the diocesan, parochial high school, Bishop Mac , I attended ‘catechism classes’. (Roman Catholics don’t refer to these as ‘Sunday school’ or ‘Bible study’. Recall that Catholics are sternly dissuaded from reading the Bible unaccompanied by a priest.)

 

Bored to tears hearing the nonsensical story of Noah or the Garden of Eden or other Biblical drivel for the umpteenth time, I suggested that perhaps we might study comparative Christianity in our catechism class. 

‘What do other Christian religions believe?’

I recall that the teacher (a local auto dealer) got a terror stricken look on his face; aghast at the thought. He said that he’d ask the priest about the request before continuing with the biblical fairy tale of the week. Needless to say, discussion of Lutheranism or the Methodist or Episcopalians never happened or was ever mentioned. I took my leave of the class and preferred driving the country roads listening to rock and pop music on the car radio. 

 

Far more enjoyable and edifying.

 

I also had an encounter or two with a pastor of the local Church of Christ, Scientist; the family of my high school girlfriend were member of that Faith. The pastor, a spritely, oddly mustachioed fellow, felt it his duty to proselytize. He voiced fear that what he said did not fall ‘on fallow ground’.  I assured him that I was sincerely interested. Seeing me as a possible convert and tithe-giver, I learned a bit about Mary Baker Eddy, the sect’s founder. I was introduced to the precepts which I found to be less than compelling; ‘Biblical Christ’ and all but devoid of science.

 

It was about this time that I determined that if I couldn’t make sense of the palaver; it was bogus. There were caveats, of course – higher math, advanced science, etc.  – but otherwise, if I was confounded and had no recourse to learning, then that topic was set aside, labeled ‘twaddle’.

 

Much later in life, I took to practicing a mind experiment in which I imagined myself peering into the ‘abyss’; a black, endless, void. It was a form of meditation, now that I think of it. I did it in order to get accustomed to confronting the inevitable ‘abyss’ of nothingness death.

How Did I Find My Way Out of the God Maze?

The $64,000 question. I wish that I could be glib with the answer. Pithy and concise. It’s far too complicated to tuck it all in a nutshell. However, one thing I’ve noticed is the preposterous lengths to which some ‘Believers’ go to rationalize their ‘Faith’; pseudo-quantum mechanics, wave theory, universal consciousness, uncaused first cause, reductio ad absurdum, gob-smacking analogies between atoms and star systems leading to sentience, etc. The amount of ‘what-ifs’ and gibbered rationalizations of Biblical twaddle is astounding. It all boils down to: God is god because god is god. 

 

Q.E.D.

 

Being an atheist seems so simple compared to the torturous mental gymnastics which the more cognizant ‘Believers’ must perform to justify their theism. It is astounding, as well, that the apologists’ fall-back position seems to be ignorance and the comfort they find in ignorance. ‘Believers’ find comfort in confirming that we are all ignorant; from which point they joyously assert that since we’re all lowly cretins when it comes to knowing the universe then we must then reconcile ourselves to being ignorant of the mind of god. God is god because god is god.

 

That thought aside, perhaps the one circumstance that allowed me to find an exit from ‘god-land’ was an economic one. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to the parochial high school for my sophomore year. Due to financial considerations (i.e. the high cost of tuition) I had to rub shoulders with protestants and other similarly cash-strapped Catholics. Consequently, there were no daily or weekly ‘convocations’, masses, novenas and prayers; no nuns or priests to reinforce the teachings of the Church.

 

There was no one single epiphany or event where the light came on and Eureka! I’m an atheist. I do recall at some point in the early ‘80s when I defined myself as agnostic. I didn’t know. What I did know for sure was that the Roman Catholic church was bonkers and wrong. I recall that our family had a volume of Greek and Roman myths which a favorite of mine and which I read with delight. The stories of Zeus/Jupiter, Persephone, et al. revealed that each culture had its stories and that these stories were somewhat interchangeable; the stories of Zeus were the same as the stories of Jupiter. A bit later, the myths of the Norse pantheon and the ancient Celtic myths of Cúchulainn and Finn McCool showed that stories about gods were varied and yet dealt with similar issues. Much was handled with brute force and an almost flippant disregard for humanity. 

 

Importantly, those heathen tales were just as loony-toons as the Christian stories the nuns and priests presented me. Point of fact, nowhere in the world’s myths is there more gore and bloodshed, rape and murder, burning and death than in the myths of the Bible. The Norsemen, whom the Christians in Europe considered ravenous barbarians – and righty so – had myths of delicate beauty. At least the beheadings and disgorgements were separated by misty woods, far-off horizons and an after-world that was stirring and adventurous rather than chaste, prim, meditational and riddled with guilt and angst. 

 

My father was the one who taught me critical thinking skills. He and I would engage in loud, late night discussion about politics, social issues, art and familial matters. Those sessions were informal seminars on rhetoric, philosophy and critical thinking. He was an autodidact who had left school at fifteen to join the Merchant Marines. He’d seen the world and served in the US Navy as radarman during the Second World War. He’d read a bit and challenged my thinking regularly. While discussions were vociferous and impassioned, they weren’t propelled by animosity. He respected my view - as I did his - if the position could be supported rationally.

 

Perhaps another exit from ‘god-land’ was my aversion to reading the Bible. Roman Catholics are instructed to NOT read the Bible at all; ‘leave it to the professionals, dear’. I was content with that; there were plenty of better written books to read. I found the narrative dreadful. The allegories obtuse. The prophesies vague. There was no history. Biblical tales were no more substantial than the tales of Valhalla or Olympus and less well-told. 

 

The stories in the bible are so shopworn, of course, that they have a distinct patina of wear and over-use. Centuries of making Noah, Moses, Jesus, Paul icons rather than historic characters detract from the claim that the Bible is source for historic act. 

 

Why didn’t ‘god’ make Stephen King or Asimov, or Tolkien to write the Bible? They’re all better story-tellers than the anonymous hacks that came up with the gibberish of Noah, the Garden, Joshua and the walls of Jericho.

 

The story of the fricking Ark – Come on. No one buys this nursery school nonsense, right? (‘It’s a metaphor …’is what we were told; a metaphor for what? The power of ‘god’ to do stupid genocidal acts for his personal amusement? For his own benighted glory?  Or for revenge for something that he, himself in his omniscience set in motion – huh?) 

 

Dead people walking around alive? Not zombies, mind you, but perfectly functioning human beings who thought they’d been asleep or something. The dead in Jerusalem walking at the hour of Jesus death; Lazarus rising from the grave. Over and over, so as to soften the blow for when the star of the show, man/god/son, G-suz has a particularly bad weekend before coming back to life as a full-blown god in his old human form – very ‘Amazing Tales’ – and then floated off into ‘heaven’ to sit with the ‘father’? Please… 

 

The Epic of Gilgamesh makes fewer demands of the suspension of disbelief than the Bible mark 1 and mark 2. 

 

And the narrative style is awful. Sure, that’s understandable given centuries of editors and revisionists, transcriptions, transcriptions of transcriptions of translations of transcriptions; cherry-picked and compiled in dozens of different editions. All repackaged, revamped and realigned to fit the post facto narrative that Christians had been developing for centuries before being nailed down in codices by this bishop or that ‘doctor of the church. 

 

But the stories themselves are less than marvelous, generally speaking Familiarity breeds contempt, granted, but the Mabinogion and Tolkien’s legendarium made much better reading. Talking snakes did have a short-lived appeal but Disney defanged the image and, once more, the story sucked. 

 

More metaphor? Perhaps; but nonsense nonetheless and without a scintilla of ‘reality’. In order to ‘Believe’, we’re must ignore the paradox, the dichotomies, the contradictions, the non sequiturs, the logical fallacies, the total absurdity of the Bible account ‘cuz it’s the word of ‘god’? 

 

And the Iliad was the word of Homer. Hear how nonsensical that sounds?

 

But simply seeing a comparison between the guff of the Bible and the outrageousness of world mythologies was not a pressure point that split the boulder of belief. Seeing the similarities in the Gilgamesh/Noah stories was one thing. The repetitiveness of the death and resurrection myths of Osiris and Jesus informed me, but I was already a non-Believer.  I didn’t experience a singular, epiphanal ‘a-Ha!’ moment. 

 

The gory fear-scape presented by the Bible was both spell-binding and repulsive. To think ‘How could god be so cruel?’ is considered a ‘thought crime’ in and of itself.  Far worse than touching yourself or having impure thoughts. Doubt was most strictly a no-no – taboo! The very worst affront against ‘god’ from which there is no forgiveness or redemption. Non-believers had a one-way express train trip to Hell and the Lake of Fire!

Taboo! As bad as cannibalism. That bad!  All those …but Communion, taking and eating the body of Christ was the supreme sacrament. Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Savior man/son/god was the very height of the god experience. 

It don’t get no better than this – feel the god juice run through our soul! When the very human essence of Christ Jesus is placed on your tongue for you to choke down. Never let it be said that a good bit of irony and hypocrisy aren’t interwoven in tapestry of the Roman Catholic church.

 

But to actually ‘BELIEVE’ this twaddle? 

 

Then, we have the Resurrection …

 

This is all more fully dealt with in the section of the Bible, itself.

 

Phrases like ‘god’s word’ to swear to the truth ‘so, help me god’. Oh-my-god as an exclamation and ‘god bless’ to a sneeze. Hell, yes! To hell with you. Hell's bells. It’s gospel – give me chapter and verse.

Bloody Nonsense

Most people have little experience with the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Most are rather fearful or disdainful of the Papists. That’s understandable; why deal with lunacy if unnecessary? Few know just how bloody and gore-filled is the Catholic liturgy and its imagery. 

 

Here’s a taste.

 

Seth Andrews, a former Christian pastor and proselytizer, gave a lecture on the blood rituals and symbology of Christianity. Mr. Andrews talked about the ‘Passion of Christ’ and Holy Week.  

(nota bene: crucifixion has the same Latin root as excruciating; crux, cruc- ‘cross’ + figere ‘fix’.) The whole gory magilla begins with the Last Supper. 

 

(One wonders how they split the check).

 

Seth calls the Roman Catholic communion the ‘pinnacle of communions’ as Catholics believe in transubstantiation; the host (a thin wafer) and the wine (real wine!), by dint of the miraculous power of god and his servant on earth, the ordained priest, become, in fact, the actual flesh and blood of Christ. 

 

Ugh… It’s ritual, symbolic cannibalism. 

 

When the priest raises the host (bread wafer) to be observed and adored by the congregation, it is believed to be the actual flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. 

(A slice from the thigh, perhaps.) 

 

All the priest needs do is to say ‘This is my body.’ Followed by a prop shift, and ‘This is my blood’. Done deal; he’s holding and eating the flesh of Our Lord and sipping the blood ‘that is shed to save the world’. And of course, it is.

 

What was never, ever, mentioned was that ritual communal meals were a standard feature of most of the many mystery cults of the Mediterranean. Christian communion can be traced to the rituals of those mystery cults.

 

That’s it as far as the transubstantiation part of the ritual went, but the blood ritual went on. It was now on to the stage of the Mass when the miraculous carnage was doled out to those ‘believers’ in attendance who were in a ‘state of grace’. 

 

Let’s take a moment to consider the dogma of transubstantiation. The wine was actually the blood and the bread was actually the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, Prince of Peace, Savior, lamb of god, who was tortured and slaughtered in order to ‘take away the sins of the world’ and redeem us from our sins; flesh and blood which we all had to consume physically, psychically and theologically if we were ‘good’ and if we wanted to remain in a ‘state of grace’. 

 

Ghastly!

 

To set the stage for all this blood magic, the costumery (i.e. the cassocks, the surplices, the albs, the chasubles, etc) and the grand, solemn demeanor of a church or a cathedral, the burning candles, the stark lighting, the sun-light filtered by the stain-glass images of saints and the horrific scenes from the Passion of Christ, the exotic fragrance of incense and the tinkling bells all help to sell this to the Believers. It’s all about the setting and the staging. Right?

 

Seth Andrews remarked in his lecture ‘…and Catholics don’t think twice about this.” I answered back to the video, ‘I thought about it several times’. In my experience, it’s the go-to, snarky, comic query that the class arse might ask; “Sister, that’s cannibalism, ain’t it?” 

 

(Obviously, a Catholic school.)

 

If the teacher was a mean nun or a no-nonsense priest, the kid would get it but good. The nun - as teacher - would make him sweat and suffer for days. The priest might simply smack the kid on the back of the head as Father Mayer had done to Rick in Spanish class.

 

It was a personal risk to ask a question like that. In the Dark Ages, a comment like that would have you burning as a heretic at the stake after you’d been made anathema, imprisoned and tortured. 

 

You know, the good ol’ days. Before the Enlightenment.

 

So, the question was never asked out loud, by me. But I asked it to myself a few times; not about the bloody, sacrificial sense of it but from the physics of it; bread can’t become human flesh and the rest was too icky to dwell on. It was impossible, so it was silly to consider what came after the impossible. 

 

However, after the snarky grade-school heretic had been dealt with by stern look and corporal punishment, the cross-brained, incoherent, schizophrenic explanation for transubstantiation - something that is so far outside the natural world that the mind would experience a kind of brain-freeze - would begin. 

 

Cognitive dissonance all over the place. It’s like being in three places at once and being nowhere at all. 

 

After the deluded nonsense that was meant to explain a preposterous theological concept, the cleric would begin a series of horror stories which were meant to terrorize and traumatize the listeners into accepting the preposterous as fact. 

 

One such story went: a man who doubted transubstantiation took communion in bad faith and slipped the communion wafer, into his hanky. He then took it home and sliced it with a knife and it bled and bled and continued bleeding! The Horror! 

Another similar story had the non-believer drive nails through the wafer with the same profuse sanguinity.    

 

Another famous story of the Catholic Church and the bloody ritual of the Eucharist is the Miracle of Lanciano, a Eucharistic miracle which is alleged to have occurred in the eighth century in the city of Lanciano, Italy. The host and wine actually became flesh and blood which coagulated. (yuck!) In 1971, a scientific examination of the material from the 8^thcentury was conducted and found that the ‘blood’ was blood and the flesh was flesh - of the heart! Heart tissue! And, the blood was type AB! A bloody miracle, right!? But wait, there’s more! (Here’s the kicker) That blood type matched with the Shroud of Turin… (ahem) one of the most infamous frauds ever; denounced as a fake in 1389 and determined by radiocarbon dating in 1988 which established that the shroud was from the Middle Ages, between the years 1260 and 1390. Yet, still, the bogus Shroud and the bloody Miracle of Lanciano persist in bemusing the gullible.

 

I know whereof I speak. I was an altar boy and served at the Mass many times in Latin. I was an accomplice to this farce; the farcical ‘miracle of the Eucharist’. I prepped and set the props, set the stage, (lit the candles, flipped on lights, etc.), wore a costume, said my lines and made my marks. It was a ritualized staged play celebrating bloody sacrificial murder and facilitating ritual cannibalism.

 

One thing that must be kept in mind about the Eucharist ritual is that it is blood magic. However, in this case, it is blood magic performed without burning the actual source of the blood; but it’s blood magic for certain. (i.e. A bird or goat or bull or a human killed as a sacrificial offering to god is then burned to complete the ritual). As has been observed, the god of the Bible really enjoyed the smell of burning blood and flesh.

 

Nasty, gore-filled sermons were all we, as Catholics, heard during Lent, when the bloody and woeful statues and paintings are covered with shrouds and the priests wore purple. Not a somber purple, but rather a regal purple. (Perhaps another subliminal nod to royalty.)

 

 Catholics are raised with all that savage imagery of bloody scenes and the tortured look of penitence on the faces of saints. We were made to meditate on the gore and blood and pain of the ‘Christ’s Passion’, as Catholic children. Think of Mel Gibson's movie being played in an endless loop once a year for the six weeks of Lent when we were all meant to sacrifice by depriving ourselves of candy or meat or some other minor pleasure. The gore-fest of the ‘Passion’ was what we had to concentrate on, extemporize on, write about and even illustrate. 

 

I would like to say that all the gore was a turn-off but as the bloody mess was so commonplace, I can’t honestly say that. Depictions of bloody suffering abounded in paintings, drawings, graphic illustrations, statuary, etc. There was nowhere one could escape the gore; in fact, even the thought of escaping the bloody horror was discouraged as an avoidance of truth and a shirking of duty. That’s how commonplace – how normal - it was presented and constantly reinforced. 

 

It would be analogous to watching one gore-filled horror story after another (Hallowe’en, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) in which each nightmarish iteration of horror stressed your personal stake in the drama itself. This cavalcade of bloody angst would then be off-set by the fairies and light of the Nativity and the warm-and-fuzzy retelling of the feeding of the multitudes, the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead.

 

Glory Be!

 

By the by, my favorite subject in drawing class during my time in parochial school was the ‘Sacred Heart’. (If you’re unfamiliar with this image, Google it.) It’s the motif of many paintings and sculptures of the Middle Ages. Gruesome stuff; a human heart, encircled with the crown of thorns, which pierces the heart, causing it to bleed. The right ventricle slashed and bleeding (as was Jesus’s side on the cross at Calvary, purportedly). This delightful, winsome image was topped with a cross of granite or marble with bright, glorious rays of golden light radiating from it. This image, itself, was often then capped with a very regal crown which a king or an emperor would wear.

 

More regal, medieval clap trap.

 

Dr. Seth Andrews, in his video, goes on to highlight the bizarre, psychopathic euphoria in Christians Churches of being ‘bathed in the blood’. 

 

Ew… 

 

For Catholics, we had a more prosaic take on the savage, bloody imagery and spoke of the ’Blood of the Lamb’; the ‘lamb’ being Jesus who was sacrificed to his father for our transgressions. It makes the gruesome image gentler, what with the cuddly lamb and all. The lamb was usually pictured as meek, mild and cozy in its resignation to being slaughtered.  

 

‘Virgin Mary had a lamb. Its fleece was soaked in blood…’

 

The blood ritual was playing out a scenario that he/it, him/itself, concocted to teach humans a lesson for …being human, I suppose. More blood magic; Abraham was ordered by god to kill his only begotten son, Isaac, then accepts the slaughter of a nearby ram in lieu of the boy’s blood. 

In the ‘pagan’ ceremonies of Rome, the penitent/petitioner would kill an ox to gain favor with a god.

In Christianity, the ‘father-god’ kills the son of self-same god in order to ‘take away the sins of the world’, as the saying goes.

Or something…

That’s a big task. It takes godly blood to do that kind of magic. 

 

And get this; this insane blood ritual is the culmination of an act of ‘mercy’ from a loving god. Who loved us so much that ‘he’ sent his only begotten son to redeem the world…from the mess, he/it had made. 

 

On a distinctly lighter note, I once worked at a Catholic hospital, St Mary’s. Grunt work; making noise with the pots and pans. A co-worker was named ‘Debbie; she introduced herself as BVD: Blessed Virgin Debbie. She was a partying girl and obviously did not fit the profile of a virgin and the elicitation of a famous under-wear manufacturer, BVD, made her blasphemous sobriquet both hilarious and insightful. In the bowels of a building dedicated to the BVM (i.e. Blessed Virgin Mary), Debbie had flipped the script.         

 

The script, known to all Catholics due to incessant indoctrination, was the Mother of god was set apart from all other women. Holier. Purer. Blessed. Unstained. Immaculate. Without the bane of Original Sin; the ‘Curse of Eve’ which precipitated all of the bloody sacrifice of god’s son in some crazy scheme. None of that vile, sordid business of grunt and thrust normally necessary for human procreation was involved with the incarnation of the ‘son of god’. No, sirree! No messy menstruation or ovulation or semen or vaginal secretions required. Child birth without all the typical fuss and muss; human procreation without the untidiness of being human. 

 

Thus, to be the BVM, all that was necessary was to strip the young Galilean girl of her humanity and separate her in the minds of Faithful from the act of sex, menstruation and childbirth altogether. Recall that when the shepherds and the Magi visited the manger, there were no signs of childbirth or placenta or wet-nurse or, indeed, of a prostrate, exhausted woman to attest to the birth of a human baby. There was only a tranquil scene of peace and glory – without the gory bits every other woman in history has ever experienced in giving birth.

 

Also, to be noted ironically is that Joseph, the Carpenter, is the most lauded cuckold in all of Christendom.