Television just loves Christmas specials. Why, just the other evening I was channel-surfing the satellite dish and came across The Secret Lives of Jesus (Jesus was a petulant child who hurt other kids and as a grown-up had a “special” relationship with Mary Magdalene — oh, and was never really crucified), The Gospel of Judas (he was really a sensitive, sweet guy that Jesus confided in who got a bad rap because Jesus actually asked him to be his betrayer), and a show about the book of Revelation that described the Apostle John (if that’s your real name) as a bitter, half-crazed old man sleeping on rocks and lashing out at society. I also saw a few minutes of a show where an archeologist “discovered” the natural reason why the Pool of Bethesda could have looked as if an angel occasionally stirred the water.

No doubt these were all meticulously researched documentaries dedicated to digging out the truth, though I noticed that a guard leading Jesus away from Herod in one of the re-enactments was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes under his long robe. The programs all seemed to have the requisite talking heads with impressive religious and academic titles and scholarly accents for authenticity, though I suspect that a closer examination might find they and their theories about as credible as David Duke addressing a conference of holocaust deniers. As for the Gospel of Judas, the experts can prove that the fragments of the codex are old, but not that it’s anything other than a self-serving treatise from the already discredited Gnostic canon. I suppose it’s kind of like someone 2000 years in the future finding a portion of Ward Churchill’s 9-11 account and saying, “Aha – I knew it all along!”

It’s interesting that these shows all happen to be scheduled at this time of year, but at least it allows for easier side-by-side comparision. As far as credibility goes, I think the programs I glimpsed all fall short of other seasonal productions such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” (Amazing scientific fact: Bumbles bounce!)

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Not that long ago millions of Iraqi men and women boldly took to the streets, eager to vote for freedom and a chance to shape their own lives, and proud to show off their purple fingers, dipped in die as a simple way to prevent voter fraud but also perfect for delivering a collective poke in the eye to terror and tyranny.

I try to remember their faces and fingers as the media machine clanks and hums, blowing smoke and steam into its depiction of gang warfare as a civil war. The purple fingers were not enough to prevent fraud of outrageous proportions; a small but deadly minority subverts the will of the people and the efforts of a fledgling government, intimidating the majority not just with violence but with the idea that the forces standing for Reason and Order will themselves be cowed and will again abandon the innocent to the protection of paper treaties holding back a cyclone of hate. The brutal few are aided by the symbiotic complicitness of foreign media and political elements with their own desire to overthrow a government and replace it with something less of a hindrance to its own thirst for power and right-thinking, regardless of the cost to a country as a whole. Small wonder there are those who wring their hands while they still may, and reach for the soap to remove the tincture.

There are some things you get on your hands, however, that can never be washed off, as Michael Yon reminds us in his post No Darker Heart:

A Killing Field, Cambodia
After the monsoon rains abate, the draining earth offers up fragments of clothing, human teeth and bones as final testimony of the restless, wronged dead. Murdered on this now sacred ground, thirty or more years ago, they are among the millions of souls sacrificed to a fevered ideology that was completely broken only a decade ago. The remains that seep up through the mud under my feet in this Killing Field are from a different war, but they echo a mournful reminder of how jarringly common it is for societies at war with themselves to descend into madness. Death squads under holy orders, suicide bombers in mosques, machete-wielding mobs in Rwanda, industrialized gas chambers in Europe, fire-breathing Janjaweed militias in Darfur, and here the tree named for its function as “killing tree against which executioners beat children.”

Powerful, philosophical memes, forever pulsing through human populations, are never far from pushing us to some brink. The best memes land people on the moon; they create more cures than afflictions, more freedoms than restrictions, more heroes than villains, more hope than despair. These memes tend to pump knowledge into the human mind rather than vacuum it out. Perhaps memes are just memes, philosophies just philosophies, mental scripts piled atop mental scripts much as we build upon the lands where our ancestors lived and died. I once spent two days coursing down the Mekong River deep into Laos, wondering who had gone before me, and how many times humans have reinvented the boat. Today, we walk across the bridges, a concept others imagined then built, and we walk along trails and routes that have lasted for centuries or millennia, all while making new connections. Some trails lead to Hell.

Despite that many paths are clearly marked “This fork to Hell: Take right fork to nicer place,” a herd inertia prevents stopping long enough to read the signs or heed the caution. Signs appear in many forms, but they are always there. Jets crashing into buildings, yellow stars on lapels, people disappearing into the night, mass graves appearing on the edge of town, official languages, and always, the silent assent of enough people greasing the sides of the slope: visit enough genocide memorials in Germany or Poland or here and the patterns of pathology present themselves.

Here in the sweltering jungles of Cambodia, the educated, cultural elite Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge denizens perpetrated horrors ranging from ripping off nipples with pliers to vivisection, all part of a master plan to create a Utopia cleansed of all impurities of Western influence. Although Cambodia had been an ally of the West, during Cambodia’s years of darkness the eyes of world leaders were studiously averted, providing complicit cover for a charismatic zealot to excavate along ancient cultural divides and exploit rich veins of resentment.

Read the whole thing.

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The leadership of the Episcopal Church of America is finding that Biblical authority trumps church authority in the home of some of its oldest, largest and most influential churches. Over the weekend eight Northern Virginia churches, upset with the denomination’s decisions to ordain a gay bishop and sanction same-sex marriages, voted overwhelmingly to leave the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and affiliate with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), under the authority of a Nigerian bishop.

The departing congregations comprise about 10 percent of the diocese’s 90,000 members and about 17 percent of the 32,000 people in the pew on an average Sunday. Virginia Episcopalians have been in an ecclesiastical civil war since the 2003 consecration of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, an active homosexual, with the support of Virginia Bishop Peter J. Lee.

“I wasn’t at all surprised,” said Kim Cooke, a former vestry member. “This church has always made a point of being faithful to the Scriptures and God. When faced with a choice between man and God, it was an easy choice.”

“I am thrilled at the results,” longtime member Judy Thomsen said. “I think we need to move on.”

Doctrine is at the heart of the matter, but there are issues of authority and insubordination … and some very expensive real estate. The Episcopal Bishop of Virginia struck a strident note, saying there are “Nigerian congregations occupying Episcopal churches.” With respect to the bishop, next week it will be the same people sitting in the same pews as last week, inside the same buildings that have been there for decades (centuries in some cases), reading from the same Bible of the ages. The only thing that has changed are the philosophies of the denominational leadership that believes the will of God is determined by ballot rather than scripture; in turn their flocks have voted with their feet.

No doubt it will get ugly. According to Robert at The Llama Butchers, the Denomination is taking a hard-line with its rectors, insisting on obedience, with lawsuits, salaries and pensions at stake. Robert is a vestry-member at his Episcopal church in the Washington, D.C. area and his rector wants nothing to do with the dispute. Nevertheless, Rob feels he has to make a stand:

The Church has reached the point where each and every Episcopalian has to know exactly what is going on, in order to make for him- or herself a fully informed decision about where he or she is going to go. “Eyes front, mind your own business and do what you’re told,” is not, I think, the tone the Rector ought to be taking. And I also don’t think the parish should be relying on the Official Party Line as served up by the Rector as its sole source of news and opinion.

So. At tomorrow night’s meeting, I am going to propose that a committee be set up, the purpose being to gather and collate news and opinion pertinent to the Church’s ongoing controversies and to find means by which to disseminate such news to members of the congregation. I’m going to insist that such committee be independant of the Rector’s oversight or control and that its membership be politically and theologically balanced.

I am also going to get shot down in flames, of course. But I’m beginning to get angry enough that I don’t really care. If I can’t get official sanction for such a project, then I’ll do it off my own bat. And if I get threatened with personal liability as a vestryman for spreading alarum and confusion, I’ll quit and carry on as a private parishioner.

The Rector mentioned in an email to me the other day that he wanted to make sure my energies as a vestry member were being directed to areas for which I felt a passion. Well, dammit, I think I’ve found just the ticket.

God bless.

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