Today was a nice day for me. My family went with me to Mass at Our Lady of Angels Cathedral in L.A., celebrated by the Cardinal, and looked at some relics of the crucifixion before we went to visit my favorite museum from childhood, at the La Brea Tar Pits. As I turned a year older, the visit to the museum made me feel younger.
But later in the day, I thought back and found myself wondering why I had wanted to be at that particular church, which is the home of Cardinal Mahony, a church leader who I think may be wicked. I'm not alone. As the congregation celebrated Roger Mahony's 30th anniversary as a bishop, a protester outside the church quietly held a "Phony Mahony" sign and spoke calmly to several people who approached him.
My once-favorite priest, Mike Baker, liked to bugger little guys my age when I was in elementary school. I didn't know then, of course, but the church found out about it later and Baker was eventually confronted by Mahony. He admitted to the sexual abuse. "How many?" Mahony asked him. "Two or three" he answered. It was a lie, of course. That sort of question cannot be honestly answered "two or three." If you are a priest, and you've sexually abused children, when the number of victims is still just two or just three, you know damn well whether it is two, or it is three. It is only when the victims become too many to recall that you might forget one or two. The bishop must have known Baker was lying. But he did nothing. In fact, Baker's secret was kept secret, and he was given further access to children. That was wicked. Mahony may have done many good things in his life, but that was wicked.
This sort of wickedness causes me to question everything I ever believed about my church and my religion. If I cannot trust these holy men to be honest with me about whether they are child rapists, or they are harboring child rapists, what moral authority do they command when they tell me to honor the sabbath, or give up stuff for Lent, or tithe, or not say "God Damn" or whatever? The answer: a lot less authority than they had before I knew Mike Baker was a child rapist, because I've discovered that their authority is based on reputation, rather than character.
Isn't character more important than reputation? Put another way, don't you think it is more important to be good, than to be perceived as good? I used to think I knew. I no longer do.
I know a lawyer who is extremely dishonest, but has a great reputation. He seems to be doing very well in a case against a younger sole practitioner who seems to lose every credibility battle in the case. But how can he sleep at night? The answer, of course, is that he sleeps just fine. He thinks he's perfectly normal. He is either in denial or he's a sociopath. Either way, he has no regrets.
In this life, it seems, reputation is much more important, to the extent that you can have one without the other. "But what about heaven and hell?" some would ask. I don't know. I'm not at all sure it matters in the next life, either. All you have to do, my Christian friends assure me, is repent and accept the Lord, even on your deathbed.
Today, as the family of Jessica Lunsford is preparing for her funeral, the church she attends held services in which the pastor urged his flock to forgive John Evander Couey for kidnapping, raping and killing the little girl. I would never do that in a million lifetimes. To err is human, and to forgive is divine. I am not divine, and no pastor should ask me to be. I would not forgive. I would mete out retribution, and leave the forgiveness to whomever doles it out in the afterlife.
FaithGambler had an interesting discussion recently about forgiveness and salvation, in which Reid posed the possibility that Jeffrey Dahmer had accepted God and his soul had been saved before he got his earthly reward at the end of a broomstick or a mop or whatever it was that was used to beat him to death in prison. I reject that possibility.
I never have understood or believed in the concept of a just God accepting a deathbed redemption. I reject the notion that Hitler could have been saved on his deathbed. His immortal soul, if there be such a thing, was damned beyond salvation long before he picked up his last pistol. I don't even like seeing such themes in fiction. What in the world was Darth Vador's spirit doing at peace with Yoda and Obi-Wan at the end of Return of the Jedi?
Perhaps that line of thinking explains why my personal experience is that there is no surer sign that I'm going to get screwed than to find out that a prospective client or vendor has a fish on his checkbook or contract. When they end up, inevitably, screwing me, and I call them on it, they either deny being dishonest or they claim that I'm the asshole. The most obnoxious one ever responded by saying "Well, I'm not perfect. Only one man was. And his initials were J.C." As if that solved anything.
Every so often, they don't address their own conduct, but instead, throw the "you have faults, too" argument back on me. "Next time you feel perfect," one guy said, "try walking across water." What a crock of crap. True, the first stone might be best thrown by he who has no sin, but that doesn't give anyone the right to jerk me around for the rest of my life just because I stole my first pack of baseball cards as a ten-year-old. (Be that as it may, I actually have walked across water. Granted, it was very, very cold water, but frozen water is still water.)
Now, I'm not saying that all Christians are wicked, or hypocritical, or that everyone who professes faith is a liar. But I've noticed that for every quietly devout person, there seem to be an equal or greater number of prostheletizing fake Christians who will try to disarm you with their claims of piety so that they can better succeed at whatever improper goals they set out to achieve. And for every faithful prostheletizer, there are several who are all talk and no walk, and I'm sick of them.
Anyhow, I've come to the conclusion that morality and religion are barely interrelated. Suddenly, I feel much older.
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