Internal Organ Kidney Heart Lungs Liver c. 1850 Heck antique detailed engraving

By Ann Neumann

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine. You can read the October column here.

For the body is not one member, but many. –1 Corinthians 12:14, KJV

If I pay you $10,000, will you give me a kidney? Just one. You have two and you really only need one; you’re healthy, and while I don’t know you, I think you might have an idea of what to do with an extra ten G. I’ll cover your hospital stay, your operation, your recovery*, all you have to do is… let my surgeon cut into your abdomen and take your kidney. You’ll be saving a life. You’ll be richer. You’ll be giving the ultimate gift.

This is about the same deal that Raymond Crockett, a London doctor, struck with four Turks in 1989: cash for kidneys (he paid each about $6,000). The medical world was rocked when it discovered what Crockett was doing. And from, of all places, his office on London’s Harley Street, an address that since the 1800s has been synonymous with well-respected medical practice. The organ trade had slapped the medical community on its most ethical flank. They and the global media were aghast.

Immediately the UK passed the Human Organ Transplants Act, imposing fines and censure on doctors who participated in fee-for-organ transplants. The World Health Assembly convened in 2004 to stop such trade; the meeting resulted in the passage of The Declaration of Istanbul in 2008, the preamble of which in part reads:

Organ transplantation, one of the medical miracles of the twentieth century, has prolonged and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide. The many great scientific and clinical advances of dedicated health professionals, as well as countless acts of generosity by organ donors and their families, have made transplantation not only a life-saving therapy but a shining symbol of human solidarity. Yet these accomplishments have been tarnished by numerous reports of trafficking in human beings who are used as sources of organs and of patient-tourists from rich countries who travel abroad to purchase organs from poor people.

On its surface, a “black market” trade of organs is repulsive, its censure obvious. And yet, as doctors, philosophers and bioethicists have asked since the Harley Street incident, what motivates our visceral reaction to payment for organ donation? Our assumption that the most poor will be coerced by money? Our belief that (parts of) the human body should not be commodified? Our hope that “human solidarity” is preserved in the altruistic gift of organs–by the living and dead–because donation saves the lives of others?

As far as organ donation goes, “human solidarity” isn’t working. As I write, there are more than 105,000 patients in the US waiting for a kidney. Each year, the waiting list increases by three to four thousand.** A host of social and medical factors contribute to this exponential increase in the need for kidneys, including the aging US population, poor health and prevention (the two leading causes of end stage kidney disease, ESKD, are diabetes and high blood pressure), and a too-limited supply of viable kidney donations. Unlike other organs, kidneys can be “harvested” from living donors; other organs, like hearts and livers, cannot be removed until a patient is dead (And must be removed quickly! Organs degrade rapidly once they cease to receive oxygen via the blood).

This growing need for viable kidneys has increased pressure on the medical community to find new sources. Over the past twenty-five years, since transplantation became widely accessible, various studies have examined our resistance to a fee-for-kidney structure. One such study, conducted in 2010 by University of Pennsylvania’s Scott Halpern, found that those with an annual income of $20,000 a year were no more likely to donate a kidney than those making $100,000.

The study is provocative because it pinpoints one aspect of our revulsion to fee-for-kidney donations: it asks if financial incentive essentially results in coercion of the poor. In other words, are poor people more likely to donate a kidney if they are paid for it?

Because the conversation surrounding organ donation is a global one, the premise for concern is that kidneys will come from the poor who would most benefit from (or be susceptible to) payment, and that recipients will be the financially well-off. “The poor” in this case are primarily the global poor, people in “developing” countries for whom $10,000 might be worth more than an in-tact body. The Harley Street incident, one could say, supports this assumption. Yet, this scenario does not consider forms of regulation, at the state or international level, that could address transplant tourism, predatory middle men, or killing for organs. Too, it posits that those with empty pockets–regardless of what country they live in–place less value on their health or bodies, that they are vulnerable to wads of cash, that their vulnerability will override any sense of self-preservation or sound judgement they may have. Despite the Western world’s concern, naysayers counter, even the global poor have a right to decide what they do with their bodies, thank you very much.

What, then, is the cost of our prohibition on the sale of kidneys? A conference at Princeton University in October, “The Ethics of Transplants: Is Careless Thought Costing Lives?,” titled after a new book by Janet Radcliffe Richards, Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford University, probed this question. The conference was coordinated by Frances Kissling, president of The Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy and the former president of Catholics for Choice, and Peter Singer, a philosopher and Professor of Bioethics at Princeton.

In her keynote address, Richards wondered if perhaps our initial reaction to organ trade was caused by something other than our ethics, say, by our moral confusion. After all, how can it be legal to donate an organ if you know where it’s going (for instance, to a family member), but illegal to do so if you don’t? And what’s the matter with appropriate compensation when we have already compromised the no-fee policy for other body parts or products? One of the Harley Street Turks wanted the money to care for his ill child. The real question, Richards surmised, is about the legal status of donors.

Conference attendees cited examples of when we allow humans to sacrifice their bodies: women who act as child surrogates or carry pregnancies to term for the sake of adoption; soldiers sent off to war; routine payment for eggs for invitro fertilization. Others pragmatically noted the literal price paid by US society for all those missing kidneys, significantly, $34 billion spent a year on dialysis, a taxing process whereby a person can have excess toxins and water removed from their blood each week. It’s a privilege to think that discussing the cost of a kidney is crass, as any ill person will tell you. How many other ways, then, could $34 billion be used by our health care system to save lives? Still others noted that bodily autonomy, a principle of medical ethics, grants all patients control of their medical decisions–even when those decisions mean certain death.

http://www.arizonatransplant.com/healthtopics/

In October, a team of Canadian researchers published a new study in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology that sought the optimal price for a kidney. $10,000, they found, was about right in the US market. In an article at NBCNews Health, Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, writes that even though 40% of Americans polled said they might be willing to donate a kidney for the right price, there is “no guarantee that more kidneys will become available or that harm will not be done to the rest of the organ transplant system.” Telling a researcher you’d give up a kidney is one thing, crawling onto the operating table and under the knife is another. If kidneys in America bring $10,000, what would the price be for a heart? A lung? And how do you prevent killing for organs?

Caplan notes another deterrent to donation: religion. “Several religions–including Catholicism, many conservative Protestant sects and others–strongly oppose any form of organ sales. Their theology says that you do not own your body, it is a gift from God, so it is not something you can choose to sell.” Pope Benedict, Caplan notes, forbid the buying and selling of organs. We all know that believers don’t always do what their leaders, priests and pope tell them to (think of the 98% of Catholic women using contraception). Caplan’s point is that paying for kidneys may still not achieve a 5% increase in donations… and religious belief is just one more deterrent. Five percent doesn’t put a dent in the 105,000 US citizens who are already waiting.

But there’s another point to be made from Caplan’s mention of religion. With the Catholic Church managing about 650 hospitals in the US and playing such a strong role in the formation of health care policy, what would the Vatican say about paid-for kidneys? Most certainly, the one-fifth of all US hospital beds they manage wouldn’t be used for paid donation.

How then, across cultures, classes, religions, borders and currencies, do we find an ethical solution to the kidney shortage? What would a fair, compassionate and just kidney trade look like? And how do you regulate it, both nationally and internationally? Here, in the nuts-and-bolts formation of health care policy–and not in a back office on Harley Street–is where “moral confusion” meets a “gift from God.”

*The long-term risks of kidney donation may vary.

**About 30% of patients on the kidney waiting list are considered “inactive” because they are not healthy enough for a transplant, either because of their medical status or because they are still being prepared for transplant. See here for more details. About 4,400 people die waiting for kidneys each year, although this number is perhaps misleading. Not all kidney recipients return to perfect health; not all those hoping for a transplant are otherwise healthy.

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer where she writes the column “The Patient Body.” She’s written for Guernica magazine, New York Law Review (forthcoming, January 2014), Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Nation, among others. Her chapter on class and hospice use will appear in Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2013), edited by Brian Seitz and Ron Scapp. Neumann is currently writing a book about a good death. 

The post What’s a Kidney Worth? appeared first on The Revealer.

(www.buzzfeed.com/christinebyrne/thanksgivukkah)

• Many of us here at TheRevealer are suffering from PBBD– Post Breaking Bad Disorder. To pay tribute to the show that invited us to dabble in the realms of nihilism, moralism, and redemption, here is a tiny excerpt from a 2011 interview show creator Vince Gilligan granted to the NYTimes:

“If there’s a larger lesson to ‘Breaking Bad,’ it’s that actions have consequences,” Gilligan said during lunch one day in his trailer. “If religion is a reaction of man, and nothing more, it seems to me that it represents a human desire for wrongdoers to be punished. I hate the idea of Idi Amin living in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years of his life. That galls me to no end.” He paused for a moment and speared a few tater tots in a white plastic-foam tray perched on his lap. “I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something,” he said between chews. “I like to believe there is some comeuppance, that karma kicks in at some point, even if it takes years or decades to happen,” he went on. “My girlfriend says this great thing that’s become my philosophy as well. ‘I want to believe there’s a heaven. But I can’t not believe there’s a hell.’”

• T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist of religion at Stanford University, has a thought-provoking analysis on the intersections between mental illness, violence, and American culture in the NYTimes this month.  She also has an interesting piece out titled, “Counjuring Up Our own Gods.”The article is a compelling read, especially for those trying cultivate their own tulpas.

• According to the NYTimes, the Vatican Bank has “published the first annual report of its financial records in its 125-year history.” The publication of the report was in sync with the issuance of yet another interview with Pope Francis, this time conducted by Eugenio Scalfari, founder of Rome’s newspaper La Repubblica, in which Francis is quoted as critiquing the bureaucracy of the Vatican, referring to the Church court as “the leprosy of the papacy.”

• In other Vatican news, NPR’s Senior European Correspondent, Sylvia Poggioli, has launched a Reddit thread engaging with readers about the recent going-ons of Pope Francis.

• Buzzfeed reminds us to start making proper preparations for “Thanksgivukkah,” as we will not have the opportunity to celebrate this hybrid-holiday for another 70,000 years.

• Do you have any other plans this November besides Thanksgivukkah? Consider RSVPing to Billy Graham’s evangelistic 95th birthday extravaganza. The event, dubbed “My Hope America,” will feature a series of “videos designed to clearly present the Gospel with life-changing testimonies & powerful messages from Billy Graham.”

Billy Graham
(http://breathecast.christianpost.com/)

• In American Right-wing news, Pat Robertson claimed on the 700 Club that eating halal food is equivalent to funding terrorists, Michelle Bachmann evoked apocalyptic-end of-days sentiment when accusing President Obama of funding Al-Qaeda, and Fox News contributor Todd Starnes prophesied the US military waging war on American Christians.

• In news that seemed to be plucked straight out of a bad R.E.M. song and not a Pew Research report,  American Jews have apparently been losing their religion.

• Evidently, racial profiling is not limited to the NYPD. In sensing out who to approach with the question “Are you Jewish,” members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement claim it’s all about the forehead.

• The NYTimes this week also reports on the rise of American Jewish students deciding to “take up study of the Arab world.”

• NPR’s sectional, All Things Considered, launched a series this past week entitled “What Comes Next? Conversations on the afterlife,” in which an imam, a nun, and a rabbi provide their thoughts on what happens when we die.

• According to Salon this month, members of the hacktivist organization “Anonymous” have once again started waging cyber-warfare on the Church of Scientology, claiming the religious organization has begun using Craigslist in an attempt to attract new members.

• Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tweeted at Twitter chairperson Jack Dorsey this week, relaying that Internet censorship in the Islamic Republic is not a matter of concern.

• In other internationalist news, Guernica has a nice piece this week on the powers of spiritual healing in Sierra Leone. The NYTimes also issued an article entitled, “The Politics of Religious Conversions in Jharkhand. “

• The funeral for Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke was suspended this week, after clashes erupted between protesters and right Wing sympathizers. The service was being conducted in Rome by members of a Catholic fringe movement known as the Society for Saint Piux X. Here is a clip from a 1994 interview with Priebke conducted by ABC’s Sam Donaldson.

• Eighty-nine people were killed after a stampede broke out during the Hindu Dussehra festival in Datia, India this week, Reuters reports.

• Australian artists explored the spaces of religion and spirituality in the country’s longest-run art competition, the Blake Prize.

Trevor Nickolls: Metamorphosis.
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-17/trevor-nickolls-metamorphosis-blake-prize-winner/5029572)

• In Swedish news, the Church of Sweden elected its first female archbishop this week.

• The NYTimes reports that a Malaysian court issued a ruling barring all non-Muslims from using the word “Allah.” Because the Malay language incorporates numerous linguistic derivatives from Arabic, many Malaysian non-Muslims (40% of Malaysia’s population is non-Muslim) use the term “Allah” when speaking of God.

• The Christian anti-human trafficking organization, Price of Life NYC, held an event on the ethics of the pornography industry this week at NYU. Participants included porn-star Ron Jeremy and Craig Gross, pastor of the XXX Church.

• Slate has a piece this week on a recently discovered manuscript that reveals the late George Bernard Shaw’s thoughts on the divine.

• In Friends-of-Ours-News, our very own contributing editor Ann Neumann has agreat new piece out   on stem cells and the Vatican. Ann Pellegrini, Professor of Religious and Performance Studies here at NYU, along with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, released their collaborative book entitled “You Can Tell Just by Looking: And 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People.” You can read an excerpt from the book at The Nation, here.

• On funnier notes, God eats humans, OJ Simpson wants his own religious television show titled “Holy Safari,” claiming he converted his White-supremacist cellmate to Christianity, DailyMail reports.

• Finally, here’s some awkward Jesus art.

– Christopher Smith, Student Assistant, The Revealer

The post In The News: Breaking Bad, Thanksgivukkah, The Vatican, George Bernard Shaw & much more appeared first on The Revealer.

Protestors at Shahbag Square wave the Bangladesh flag, February 6, 2013. Image via Wikicommons. Photo credit: Kabir Hossain

In the first of a series of posts on religion and politics in Bangladesh, Nayma Qayum looks at the emergence of a new religious politics following the sentencing of leading politicians in the country’s International War Crimes Tribunal.

By Nayma Qayum

On 17^th September 2013, Bangladesh’s Supreme Court sentenced to death Abdul Quader Mollah, leader of the Jama’at-e-Islami (JI), Bangladesh’s leading Islamic party.  The Supreme Court found Mollah guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation war, when the region sought secession from West Pakistan. Earlier this year, a special International War Crimes Tribunal (ICT) had found Mollah guilty of five out of six alleged war crimes and handed him a life sentence. However, a national backlash to this verdict prompted the Bangladeshi government to amend ICT laws and permit a retrial. The Supreme Court found Mollah guilty of the additional charge and sentenced him to death.

The trials have left Bangladeshis with a new problem. They have permitted a new grassroots religious force to emerge and challenge the country’s prospects as a secular democracy. Bangladesh is a predominantly Muslim country and Jama’at-e-Islami has a massive following, especially in the rural areas. The ruling Awami League has created new divisions with the trials targeting leaders who belong to the Jama’at and its ally, the leading opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

In early February, the ICT’s verdict prompted a mass people’s movement in the capital of Dhaka. The protest is now referred to as Shahbag, after its central location at Dhaka’s Shahbag Chottor (Shahbag Square). On 6^th February, the Bangladesh Online Activists and Bloggers Network instigated this massive protest that initially drew ordinary citizens, activists across political parties, and nonpartisan groups, including activist non-government organizations (NGOs). As the movement grew, protestors demanded the death penalty for all war criminals. Their posters, slogans, and banners said, “rajakarder fashi chai” (we demand the hanging of war criminals). Their calls for the death penalty echoed citizens’ frustrations with a 42-year old struggle for justice and an ineffective legal system, where criminals often go free following changes in government.

Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Mollah following his conviction for war crimes. February 5, 2013. Image via Reuters/Stringer/Files.

But earlier this year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement claiming that the trials had violated international standards as outlined in the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (ICPPR). Although HRW has long sought trials for the 1971 war crimes, they also advocated for due process. On 17^th February, when Shahbag was at its peak, the government amended the ICT law which allowed the prosecution to appeal the tribunal’s verdict, even in instances when the sentence did not involve acquittal. The legislation permitted the Supreme Court to overturn the ICT’s verdict and retry Mollah’s case. HRW argued that retrial based on a retroactive legislative amendment violated international fair trial standards.

The trials have also added a religious dimension to the existing division in Bangladeshi politics; they have intensified existing tensions between the ruling Awami League (AL) and the opposition JI -BNP alliance. Since 1991, Bangladesh has implemented a two-party political system in what is theoretically an electoral democracy. However, both ruling parties have practiced oppressive politics; they have repressed the opposition, allowed extrajudicial killings, amended laws at will, and engaged in electoral violence. Parliamentary walkouts are common, as are opposition-held protests in the form of hartals – strikes or nationwide shutdown of all commercial activity.

Since early 2013, the trials have led to numerous episodes of violence. Even before the ICT had delivered its verdict for Mollah, JI activists had gone on a nationwide rampage along with its student wing Shibir. One news outlet reported JI’s acting secretary as saying “Don’t push the country into a civil war by delivering one-sided verdicts against our leaders. If anything happens against Kader Mollah, every house will be on fire.” As the Shahbag movement spread across the country, the ruling AL expressed its support as the opposition stood by their ally Jama’at. Initially standing alongside Shahbag, the AL has since condemned the movement. The opposition BNP has also claimed to support the war crimes cause as long as trials were fair and the government did not use them as a tool to target the opposition.

Both groups called a series of strikes and counter strikes; in many instances, JI-instigated violence targeted Shahbag supporters. On 15^th February, blogger and Shahbag activist Rajib Haider was found dead, strengthening the movement’s momentum of the Shahbag movement. In early March, police recovered the body of the 17 year-old son of a man who led the Shahbag movement in Narayanganj, a small town on Dhaka’s outskirts.

Shahbag square, Dhaka, during mass protests earlier this year. Image via Washington University Political Review. Photo credit: Kazi Tahsin Agaz Apurbo.

On 21^st February, a group within the Shahbag movement came up with a six-point list of demands which included arrest of Rajib’s killers, and the banning of extremist organizations and affiliated organizations. In the meantime, the broader movement was developing its own cracks and fissures. Many Bangladeshis remained conflicted over the issue of the death penalty; some voices in the social media amended their call to reflect maximum penalty for war crimes instead of the death penalty.

But it not enough to appease the opposition. An Islamic group calling themselves Hefazat-e-Islam marched through Dhaka city in what one news outlet called the biggest-ever showdown by any Islamist group in recent times. The Dhaka Tribune reported that hundreds of Hefazat supporters entered and vandalized the city. In the middle of the night on 5^th May, police forces stormed the streets of Dhaka city’s Motijheel area to contain the Hefazat. Sources remain conflicted over the events of that night. Hefazat supporters and their allies claim that government forces killed thousands of their people and disposed of the bodies.  In the following days, a number of videos circulated within the social media showed bodies strewn across floors; however, the authenticity of these videos cannot be verified. The true number of Hefazat supporters killed that evening may never be known. Over the coming months, clashes continued between Jama’at-Shibir-Hefazat supporters on the one hand, and government and ruling party forces on the other.

Eyewitness reports suggest that the Hefazat activists were mostly children and young adults. The march had one single call – “Nastik blogger der fashi chai” – death penalty for atheist bloggers, reminiscent of the death penalty demands of Shahbag activists. The Hefazat launched a 13-point set of demands, which included punishment for allegedly ‘atheist’ Shahbagers and the banning of secular traditions. A new dichotomy emerged in Bangladesh’s urban politics as the JI started to address Shahbag’s leaders as “anti-Islam”, and supporters of the Shahbag movement increasingly calling the JI-BNP alliance and its supporters “anti-liberation”. Dialogues in the media and blogosphere suggested that the average Bangladeshi citizen, too, felt compelled to take a side.

This dichotomy is deeply rooted in the history of Bangladesh’s liberation war. Bangladesh became independent in 1971, following a brutal and bloody war of secession from East Pakistan. When the Indian subcontinent won independence from British rule in 1947, the founding fathers split the region into two countries – India and Pakistan. Contemporary Bangladesh, then the province of East Bengal, was bordered by India on three sides and the Bay of Bengal in the South. However, despite lying adjacent to India, the province was partitioned with Pakistan as based on the common Islamic identity of the two regions. From 1947 to 1971, East Bengal became East Pakistan. During the-24-year existence of unified Pakistan, the central government in West Pakistan drained the east of resources. The state directed all development efforts – investments, foreign aid, and profits from the east’s flourishing industries – to West Pakistan.

In 1971, East Pakistan’s struggle against the west culminated in a violent, 9-month war of secession. JI leaders historically opposed this war citing the common religious identity that bound the two Pakistans. During the war, the Pakistani Army committed war crimes and crimes against humanity on a massive scale, along with the paramilitary units Al-Badr and Al-Shams and collaborators from the Bengali side. Although there is some contention regarding numbers, estimates of loss of life range from 200,000 to 1.5 million; an estimated 200,000 women were subject to rape and sexual abuse.

Following independence, domestic politics took precedence over the war crimes issue. In 1972, the constitution of Bangladesh established a country based upon the foundations of secularism, socialism, and democracy.  In 1973, Bangladesh elected an AL government with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as Prime Minister. The very same year, Sheikh Mujib banned all religious politics. Earlier in 1972, the government had passed a law to try all collaborators in a tribunal and took 30,000 people into custody. In 1973, the domestic International War Crimes Tribunal Act 1973 demanded the trial of both Bangladeshis, and members of the Pakistani Army who “participated in, helped commit, or incited to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1971.” The same year, the government revoked the citizenship of known war criminal and JI leader Gholam Azam, along with 38 others. The exiled leaders sought refuge in Pakistan.

However, in November 1973, the AL government declared amnesty for the arrested, with the exception of collaborators who had already been charged with a crime. The amnesty came in the aftermath of the Simla Pact between India and Pakistan, released arrested Pakistanis in an exchange for Indian and Bangladesh Prisoners of War in Pakistan. In 1975, a violent military coup resulted in the assassination of Sheikh Mujib and many members of his family. General Ziaur Rahman became President of Bangladesh in 1977 and established his own political party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the leading opposition party.

In 1977, President Ziaur Rahman amended Bangladesh’s constitution to remove secularism as a state principle. The move reflected a larger effort to seek a leadership position for Bangladesh in the Islamic world. By 1979, the JI had re-emerged as a political party. Bangladesh’s military regime gradually civilianized throughout the 1980s under President H.M. Ershad; the JI participated in all subsequent elections as a political party. In 1990, the JI joined a massive coalition of over 25 parties, including the BNP and AL, to overthrow the military regime of General Hussain Muhammad Ershad and install parliamentary democracy.  Since then, the JI has allied with both leading parties and enjoyed a steady following among the population.

Almost two decades later, AL leader Sheikh Hasina promised to bring back the trials as part of her election manifesto. At the same time, the JI amended its constitution to remove anti-liberation sentiments. In an effort to win elections, the party revamped its manifesto to simultaneously uphold the values of liberation, Islam, and democracy.  The JI’s alliances with both parties at different times and adoption of a seemingly progressive and pro-liberation agenda signal the party’s emergence as a key political force.

The trials have left Bangladeshis with mixed feelings. They now face a major dilemma regarding the kind of justice that they seek. The trials have been inundated with irregularities even before Mollah’s retrial fiasco. Witnesses have disappeared before they were due to appear in court. The opposition has claimed that the trials targeted leaders of their coalition partner JI, but not other alleged war criminals who were allied with the ruling party. And yet, the wounds from the war – having occurred less than a generation ago – are still fresh and deep enough that for many, the outcome matters more than the process. The Economist blog reports findings from an opinion poll by AC Nielsen in April 2013, where nearly two thirds of respondents found the trials to be unfair or very unfair, but 86% wanted them to proceed regardless. Bangladeshis have watched as these alleged war criminals have escaped justice and held leadership positions in the government. The trials offer some closure for their wounds.

These events have also provided an opportunity for new political forces that seek a role for religion in politics. They may very well have provided an opening for the kind of religious politics that Bangladesh’s secular political system is unprepared for. In a country where major parties win elections based not on programmatic differences but on past histories and legacies, the JI-Shibir-BNP camp could win over rural, impoverished Bangladeshis with their new programmatic platform.

Nayma Qayum is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and served as Adjunct Faculty at City College, CUNY, and Rutgers University.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Shahbag: Religion and Politics in Dhaka’s Public Square appeared first on The Revealer.

In a replica of Noah’s Ark, a small dinosaur and Noah are depicted by small figurines. The Creation Evidence Museum contends that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, created by God 6,000 years ago. Photo by Maurice Chammah.

By Maurice Chammah

Carl Baugh, a former television personality with slicked-back grey hair and a warm, deep baritone, is a well-known figure in Glen Rose, Texas, a rural town near Fort Worth with a population of 2,400. On a warm Saturday in early September, he greeted several dozen men, women, and children at the Creation Evidence Museum, a small exhibition space open Thursday through Saturday, which he founded and directs. “It’s so good to see you,” he said, smiling as the families took their seats in the wide, tiled room, with high ceilings and a balcony around the perimeter. The museum features a replica of Noah’s Ark and a set of human and dinosaur footprints in a chunk of rock under a glass case. The tracks, found in 2000 by an amateur archaeologist who was exploring a riverbed near Glen Rose, are said by Baugh to be authentic proof that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, created by God roughly 6,000 years ago.

Baugh’s “Director’s Lecture” is held each month. Today the topic was not just creationism, but the importance of Israel, a country Baugh has visited sixteen times. “It’s my favorite place on Earth,” he told me. “I think it’s God’s favorite place on Earth.”

Israel is popular among American evangelicals, but no more so than in Texas, a state where the governor created the Texas-Israel Chamber of Commerce to foster economic ties. Politicians often wear lapel pins with the Israeli and Texan flags side by side. Founded in San Antonio, Christians United for Israel, the “largest pro-Israel organization in the United States,” hosts events around the state to tell church crowds why the U.S. relationship with Israel must be unshakeable. “It’s a matter of learning to talk the language and relate to people,” said Pastor David Simmons, the group’s Cowboy Church coordinator; he specializes in giving lectures at churches housed in barns or arenas, where congregants meet after services for rodeo events. “Our focus is, as long as we don’t stand for Israel, our nation becomes weak, simply because the Bible says Israel is the apple of God’s eye.”

Baugh is a passionate advocate for the Jewish people and their state but, in contrast to political activists like Simmons, he does not argue that they need help. “God is behind the activities in Israel,” he says, “and God is not dead, and Israel is not dead.” The goal of this lecture was not to urge support for Israel, but rather to show how Israel is connected to the argument for creationism. God’s hand is evident in the human and dinosaur tracks, Baugh explained, just as His hand is evident in Israel’s continuing military and political strength.

Baugh founded the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose in 1984 because the town is near Dinosaur Valley State Park, home to dinosaur tracks in the limestone along the Paluxy River. The museum’s centerpiece is a human footprint inside of a dinosaur footprint. After an amateur archaeologist named Alvis Delk found the print in a 140 pound slab of rock, Baugh took it to a medical center in Glen Rose and had 800 X-Rays performed, which showed that the compression of the rock under the prints could not have been faked and that the human print indicates a rolling step, rather than an even indentation. Baugh estimated the tracks were made around the time of Noah’s Flood, 4,500 years ago and not — as many scientists claim — 100 million years ago during the mid-Cretaceous Period.

Before the recession, Baugh says, the museum hosted as many as 15,000 visitors a year, teaching them how the study of science does not automatically lead to a belief in evolution; it can support the idea that the Earth was created roughly 6,000 years ago in the exact way described in the Book of Genesis.

For eleven years, Baugh hosted a show called “Creationism & the 21^st Century” on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, the channel founded by the once famed and later disgraced televangelists Jimmy and Tammy Faye Baker. He still speaks as though he is in front of a television audience and, due to the electronic speakers and the reverberant tile floor, his voice permeated the room. His East Texan intonation is slow but without tedium and his rhetorical questions (“Are you ready?” “Are you still awake?” “I assume you know about…?”) are spoken with a slight lilt.

For many in the wider U.S., Baugh is a marginal curiosity, a subject of ridicule for bloggers and Yelp commenters. But he has been criticized more pointedly by other creationists, who say he has fabricated his degrees and promulgated “proof” that they think is misleading. They are embarrassed by his notoriety. On The Daily Show in 2001, Baugh was shown a scene in which Fred Flintstone cradled a small dinosaur in his arms. He responded, “I find that rather plausible and realistic.”

Exhibit at the Creation Evidence Museum, Glen Rose, Texas. Photo by Maurice Chammah.

Other creationists don’t buy into the overlapping footprints. Carl Kerby, a creationist author and speaker who is on the board of the more famous organization Answers in Genesis (they have their own, much bigger museum in Kentucky), has written that “some Christians will try to use Baugh’s ‘evidences’ in witnessing and get ‘shot down’ by someone who is scientifically literate. The ones witnessed to will thereafter be wary of all creation evidences and even more inclined to dismiss Christians as nut cases not worth listening to.”

Baugh is sanguine about this disparagement, though he took down several degrees from his online resume that had been disputed. “Creation work is controversial,” he told me. “I have three earned doctorates, but I do not refer to them. The evidence speaks for itself.”

After a local singer performed two Christian popular songs over synthesizer-laden backing tracks (“The storms will come, but fear not, oh children, I am nigh”), Baugh took the stage and announced, “We have guests from throughout the country, which is rather usual here.” He discussed the museum and its many artifacts. The crowd nodded and voiced encouraging ‘amens’ and ‘that’s right’s.” “You can say ‘amen’ if you like,” Baugh said. “You can respond. Just don’t throw anything!” In an adjoining room, some children giggled as they watched Baugh on a live television feed. There were not nearly enough people present to merit an overflow room, but some months the crowds are much larger. The kids seemed to see the televisions as a novelty.

At the museum, a section called “Israel is Special” features photos of modern and ancient Jerusalem, a replica of the Moabite Stone, a menorah, a shofar, a letter written by Israel’s modern founder David Ben Gurion, a bronze bust of Ben Gurion, tablets with the Ten Commandments, scrolls and other antiquities, a half shekel excavated from the City of David, and twelve Jewish pots Baugh says were found at the site where the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. Where the footprints down the stairs are specific proof that God made the world in seven days, 6,000 years ago, these artifacts illustrate a more general proof of God’s existence: he gave the holy land back to his chosen people after an absence of two millennia.

Baugh, like the leaders of Christians United for Israel, pays little attention to Palestinians. He has brought volunteers from rural Texas to help excavate the City of David in Jerusalem, where Palestinians live in houses on top of many of the dig sites. This has been a source of tension, as Israeli archaeologists and Jewish tourists who see King David’s claim to the territory as evidence of their own collaborate with the Israeli settlers who are trying to reclaim much of the property in the area and live in it.  “Beyond re-inscribing the village with this new symbolic meaning as ‘Jewish space,’” archaeologist Jeffrey Yas wrote in Jerusalem Quarterly in 2000, “the practice of archaeology is physically reshaping the village, having in several cases paved the legal path for Jewish settlement expansion.”

Though Baugh did not mention Palestinians, he made a point of comparing the number of Nobel Prizes won by Jews (129) with those won by Muslims (7). It was a slide of his power point presentation meant to show the special, God-ordained qualities of the Jewish people. “By the way, God loves the Muslims,” he said. “He doesn’t like the way they’re behaving, but sometimes he doesn’t like the way we behave either.” Everyone nodded, as if this was a good point they hadn’t heard before. Baugh was not putting down Muslims so much as arguing that Jews are favored by God, and hence have more of a right to the territory.

But for a presentation so dependent on physical artifacts, there seemed to be no Jews in the room for him to gesture towards as he spoke. And then he remembered that I had told him about my Jewish upbringing.

At the Creation Evidence Museum, the absence of certain steps in the evolutionary chain from ape to man is meant to cast doubt on evolutionary theory. Photo by Maurice Chammah.

“Maurice is my Jewish friend,” he announced. “I have a lot of Jewish friends.” He asked if I had heard the story about how the Israeli army captured the city of Eilat in 1948. I had not.

According to Baugh, during the 1948 war between Jewish nationalists and several Arab armies, three Israeli soldiers drove to an outpost at Eilat, hoping to claim a spot on the Red Sea before the United Nations declared the new state’s official boundaries. At a little mud hut, they found four Egyptian soldiers. One of them walked up to the soldiers and asked, “Would you like some chocolate?”

The crowd laughed as Baugh made eye contact with me and said, “Maurice, this happened.”

The Egyptians excitedly took the chocolate. And then the punch line:  “It was exlax.” Big laughs simmered down to quiet admiration as Baugh continued. The Egyptians ran off to the rocks to relieve themselves, and the Israelis made a hasty flag out of a T-shirt, thereby claiming the territory. “That’s how God deals with Israel.” The political success of Israel, for Baugh, is continuing evidence of God’s ability to shape real-world events, a narrative that began with the creation of the world.

There were more murmurs of agreement and quiet exclamations of “wow.” Many in the room, I learned, already agreed with Baugh about the Earth’s young age and follow Israel avidly in the news for proof of God’s continuing hand in human affairs. But they had not necessarily tied the two together, viewing the political history of contemporary Zionism as the focal point for God’s continuation of the work he began when he created the world.

“Have you learned anything?” Baugh asked at the end, the anticipatory lilt of his voice interrupted by a wave of applause. “God bless you.” The audience lingered and then slowly trickled back to the parking lot. The sun, low in the sky, lit up the barren landscape in a dramatic fashion; you might even describe it as “biblical.”

Maurice Chammah is a writer and musician in Austin, Texas who studied journalism in Egypt as a Fulbright student, 2011-2012. More about him at http://www.mauricechammah.com. He writes regularly for The Revealer.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post God’s Favorite Place on Earth appeared first on The Revealer.

Drawing by Don Jolly

The Bridge Beyond the Bridge: Mark Rathbun’s Search for the Future of Scientology

By Don Jolly

The Phoenix Saloon is about what I expected from New Braunfels, Texas: part hustle, part heritage, an Old West paean in what used to be the frontier’s most civilized town. The Phoenix is a tall place, wood-on-wood decor and unlit except for the dusty shafts of sunlight spilling through the front windows. I arrived there on a hot June day just before noon and took a table beneath taxidermy.

Mark “Marty” Rathbun arrived a few minutes late, moving quickly, never breaking eye contact. “I know you’re a spy,” he said, sitting down. Rathbun is around fifty, bottom heavy, with sun-baked skin and hair as white as tooth enamel. “I know everything I say here is going to go right back to David Miscavige,” he said, referring to the current leader of The Church of Scientology. “So who cares? What can he do to me? What can you do to me?” His chair scraped the wooden floor as he saddled up to the table. I’d come to get a lesson on the state of Scientology from it’s most vocal outlaw.

Astounding Science Fiction
(scientologytruthrevealed.blogspot.com)

Scientology got its start in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. In those coarse pages–just behind Poul Anderson’s novelette on the vagaries of interplanetary aid, “The Helping Hand”–fiction writer and ex-naval officer L. Ron Hubbard debuted his system of Dianetics, a “modern science of mental health” that promised to open its readers to the “vast and hitherto unknown realm half an inch back of [their] foreheads.” Primarily, this opening was to be accomplished through a practice of one-on-one therapeutic interview known as “auditing.” For some, at least, it delivered. An expanded version of Dianetics released that year hovered on the New York Times’ bestseller list a straight twenty-eight weeks and early adherents experienced more than just emotional breakthroughs: there were reports of past lives returning, spirits separating from bodies. “We’re treating present time beingness, psychotherapy treats past and the brain,” Hubbard realized, writing to one of his executives, Helen O’Brien, in 1953. “And brother, that’s religion, not mental science.” By 1954, branches of the Church of Scientology had been opened in California and Washington, D.C. It was the beginning of sixty years of suspicion, counterintelligence and crime.

Scientology has never rested comfortably within the available categories of twentieth century social movements. It makes spiritual claims, of course, such as its foundational doctrine that human beings are, in reality, immortal spirits, known as thetans. It makes medical claims, too: boasting the ability to cleanse its participants of neuroses and ailments. Structurally, the Church follows the model of a diversified corporation, with organizations, or orgs, devoted to media production and the maintenance of copyright, in addition to more traditional ecclesiastic functions. The writings of Hubbard, classified as “source” within the Church, are considered both holistically consistent and completely infallible. Secrecy governs their dissemination, and members are expected to take everything in the proper order, as dictated by Hubbard’s “Bridge to Total Freedom,” a syllabus of coursework and ritual designed to move its adherents towards complete mastery of themselves and the universe. Advancing along the Bridge costs money — and that, according to most critics, costs Scientology any chance of religious legitimacy. A 1991 Time magazine cover story declared the group “the cult of greed,” dismissing its administrators as frauds and its members as victims of mind control.

In 2011, an investigation by the Village Voice estimated that, despite the organization’s grander claims, only 40,000 Scientologists were active worldwide and that the number was falling sharply. Today, once-secret Scientology doctrines, the higher levels of the Bridge, are being disseminated online and picked apart by anti-Scientology activists. Books exposing malfeasance within the Church, both by outsiders and ex-members, are more popular than ever: Going Clear, 2013‘s seminal investigation by journalist Lawrence Wright, debuted on the bestseller list where, sixty three years before, Dianetics reigned supreme. Wright’s first printing, totaling 150,000 copies, could have supplied every practicing Scientologist four times over. “Exposing” Hubbard and his followers is, in other words, big business — bigger business, perhaps, than the movement being exposed.

Today, the Church of Scientology is beset on all sides, and its enemies are substantial: news outlets, publishing houses, national governments. The loudest and brashest of Scientology’s naysayers is Mark “Marty” Rathbun. “There’s no bigger threat to the existence of the Church of Scientology than Marty Rathbun’s blog,” wrote Tony Ortega, the Village Voice’s former editor and current Scientology blogger. The Church has its own perspective, most recently articulated in the documentary Marty Rathbun: Violent Psychopath, Cult Militia Leader.

+++

Rathbun impressed me in New Braunfels. His body language embodied a particularly Texan confidence: I’m only this relaxed, it said, because I’m absolutely certain I can take you. I grew up in Texas. The dynamic at that table was a familiar one. Rathbun played benevolent predator and I, his moonstruck prey. The effect was compounded by his eyes: never blinking, clear as quartz crystal. He’d learned the technique in Portland, Oregon, 1976. It was the year he became a Scientologist.

Rathbun joined the Church while he was assisting his brother Bruce through a period of catatonia and institutionalization. “Insanity runs deep in my family,” Rathbun writes in his self-published autobiography, Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior. When he was five, his mother jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, putting a taint on his family that most of them never got clear of. “Scott, two years my elder, has been institutionalized for ‘schizophrenia’ most of his adult life,” Rathbun writes. “Bruce, four years older than I, was locked up in mental institutions several times, and finally was stabbed to death after a barroom brawl.”

It was in hopes of helping his brother that Rathbun enlisted in Scientology’s elite administrative corps, the Sea Org, in 1978. Originally, this group operated from Hubbard’s fleet of globe-trotting yachts. By the time Rathbun joined, however, it was primarily terrestrial. The crisp naval uniforms remained.

Mark Rathbun
(NY Daily News)

Sea Org members are the most dedicated of Scientology’s practitioners: they live in constantly shifting “berths,” often little more than bunks, and move around the world according to the needs of the Church. Their media consumption, free time and family life are subject to strict control. In return, members are given free access to costly training. The center of a Sea Org member’s life is their advancement up Hubbard’s Bridge — not just within this lifetime, but within a succession of lifetimes. Enrollment comes with an unbreakable contract, promising service for a billion years.

The concept of an immortal thetan moving from body to body across geologic time appealed to Rathbun, according to Warrior. He saw Hubbard’s system as a powerful counter to the “genetic theory of mental health,” which held that human beings are “simply organisms, unthinkingly carrying on the […] cellular commands [they] are born with.” Scientology offered him a chance to retain his agency, even in the face of his family history. Through the teachings of Hubbard, Rathbun writes, “each of us is capable of sanity and becoming the captain of his own destiny, irrespective of genetic or biological make-up.”

This doctrine, Rathbun believes, has been denied by what he calls “corporate Scientology.” This is his term for the Church as it has existed since L. Ron Hubbard’s death in 1986. Since that time, Church leadership has passed to David Miscavige, a Sea Org member who once served as one of Hubbard’s personal assistants. Miscavige has been accused of physical and emotional abuse by numerous subordinates. The 2009 Tampa Bay Times expose “The Truth Rundown,” for which Rathbun was a critical source, provides a surreal list of examples.

It was tensions with Miscavige, Rathbun says, that led to his departure from the Church of Scientology in 2004. After escaping from a secure Church facility in California known as “The Hole,” Rathbun went off the radar, relocating to Texas to avoid the pursuit and antagonism regularly visited on ex-Scientologists, especially those departing the Sea Org. Rathbun re-emerged in 2009 as a proponent of “Independent” Scientology: a Scientological heresy, practiced without official sanction. In Independent Scientology, Miscavige’s authority is not recognized — nor is the exclusive provenance of his Church to teach the Bridge or sanction auditors. Most Independents are Scientologists who, like Rathbun, left the Church for personal reasons but still find value in the teachings of Hubbard. They deal mainly with one another: congregating online, offering courses and living the best they can, absent a settled ecclesiastical structure. Rathbun has the highest public profile of any Independent. His blog, “Moving on Up a Little Higher,” is popular with both Scientologists and anti-Scientologists alike and has netted him media coverage from The Independent, the BBC and the New York Times. In addition, he has penned three self-published books over the last two years: What is Wrong with Scientology? and The Scientology Reformation in 2012, Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior in June of 2013.

When I sat down with Mark Rathbun at the Phoenix, it was to discuss The Scientology Reformation, a volume written with those Scientologists still inside the Church in mind. In it, Rathbun carefully makes the case that the state of the Church of Scientology today is eerily similar to the state of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, right down to the alignment of certain personalities. For instance, according to Rathbun, David Miscavige, is analogous to Leo X, the Pope whose material and architectural excesses inspired believers to rise up against the Church. Rathbun acknowledges that, in some ways, the equivalence is strained. “As sick and degraded and as much of a disgrace to all the world’s Christians as Leo X was,” Rathbun writes, “David Miscavige does far greater disservice to Scientologists today.” Leo X was, after all, “a typical example of medieval tyranny. David Miscavige has no such excuse.”

The Church of Scientology, Reformation contends, has become so corrupt and so focused on material gain that the spiritual advances present in Hubbard’s writings have been obscured. Independent Scientology, however, is an avenue for Scientologists to return to Hubbard’s philosophy and reclaim agency in its application and interpretation. “The [Protestant] reformation began with the recognition that no man or institution held a monopoly on the Bible and its teachings,” Rathbun writes. Hubbard’s work is similarly free.

The food arrived on brown plates, clattering as they landed. I was the only one drinking. “That chili burning your head off?” Rathbun asked. “I’m a spice guy — and this is mild. But it’s hot to me!” It was bizarre to hear Rathbun’s thoughts on chili. Reformation, I thought, had the potential to be a truly transformative work, a path by which Scientology might emerge from scandal and gain a degree of public legitimacy for its practitioners. It was focused, serious — important. If Miscavige is Leo X, it follows that Rathbun, by exposing him, is some kind of Martin Luther. I had come expecting historical austerity. What I found, instead, was human. Rathbun was less interested in discussing Reformation than I was. He encouraged me to read Memoirs, which had been published the previous week. You kinda gotta get up to speed,” he said. “When I wrote [Reformation] I was very hopeful, now I’m becoming more cynical. Maybe I’m having an influence and there’s sort of a lag on it.” He shrugged. For the most part, Scientologists within the Church seemed unwilling to hear him out. “I’m not getting immediate results so I’m getting frustrated,” he said. In addition, his picture of the Independents was more complicated than Reformation made them seem:

I’ve sort of gone full circle, to the point were the things that I find difficult about Scientology, I see them repeating [with the independents]. So I spent time looking into ‘what are those elements’ and those elements are not David Miscavige. Those elements are Scientology.

Even within Hubbard, Rathbun had begun to detect serious, fundamental flaws. Our conversation dwelled on this topic, teasing out Rathbun’s complicated engagement with his former faith. Scientology, he thought, was a valuable phase of his spiritual development. It was, however, limited. As the immortal thetan moves from body to body, Rathbun saw himself as “graduating,” carrying Hubbard’s valuable technology into a new and necessary phase. He encouraged constant evolution: a bridge beyond the Bridge.

+++

One of Mark Rathbun’s first assignments, after joining the Sea Org, was playing bodyguard for a high-ranking Scientologist who was afraid of her unhinged ex-husband. When the ex arrived with a gun, Rathbun dove for it. He ended up with the barrel pressed to his temple. In Warrior, he recalls what happened next:

CLICK! My entire body went limp and instantly I was watching the scene from ten feet above our bodies. I was sure I was dead.

He was not dead. The gun had misfired. Still, Rathbun was deeply affected by the moment, and not in the way one might imagine. “My final thought gave me a measure of peace,” he writes.

It was the recognition that, at a moment when I faced death very directly indeed, I had most definitely departed from my body. It was a clear break between the material and the spiritual.

Such moments of transcendence are central to Rathbun’s conception of religion. His autobiography is structured around them, and the various environments which have, over the years, prompted him to “go exterior.” First it was basketball and other team sports. He worked, he excelled, he departed. Then, for 28 years, the Church of Scientology. After demonstrating his willingness to take a bullet for the cause in 1978, Rathbun was taken to the secure California facility where L. Ron Hubbard was sequestered, trying to avoid prosecution. The move signaled Rathbun’s entrance into Scientology’s inner circle.

Until his departure, in 2004, Rathbun was deeply involved in some of the most sensitive operations undertaken by the Church. In the early eighties, he ran the “All Clear” unit, coordinating lawyers across the country to handle the dozens of lawsuits targeting Hubbard. In 1993, alongside David Miscavige, he was instrumental in securing the Church’s religious tax-exemption from the IRS. His one-time prominence in the Church is, in fact, central to the potency of his critiques. “Church members are trained very well to ignore anything critical that shows up in the press,” journalist Tony Ortega told the BBC in their recent documentary on Rathbun, Scientologists At War. “When Marty writes something critical of Miscavige or the Church on his blog, it reaches deep into the membership of Scientology.” For Scientologists within the Church, Rathbun’s predictions are dire.

As the sunlight shifted around the Phoenix and glasses clattered at the bar, he told me how dire. “Scientology, as a body, it’s not going to survive the age of information,” he said, speaking with certainty. “All that’s gonna survive are the ideas of Hubbard.”

L. Ron Hubbard
(www.sitnews.us)

Rathbun believes the Church has reached the limit of its “expansion formula,” leaving nothing but a future of decline. During Hubbard’s tenure the Church survived by releasing periodic discoveries and technology, new steps along the Bridge. “Hubbard was a master marketing guy,” Rathbun said. “He had a knack for coming up with things that people find useful in the mind and the spirit [too, but] he was a master marketer and he kept people on the edge of their seat waiting for the next development.” When Hubbard died in 1986 the engine of production ceased and David Miscavige was left with no method by which to restart it.

Since Hubbard’s death, various officials within the Church have implied–or outright stated-that as-yet unreleased levels for the Bridge exist in Hubbard’s notes and documents. “All this talk about new levels is bullshit,” Rathbun said. “There [are] none. And [Miscavige is] powerless to create them.” The final level Rathbun attributes to Hubbard was released in 1988. “The statistics have been going down ever since,” he said, referring to the number of Scientology members, “twenty-three straight years.” Through sheer attrition, he believes, the Church is finished. The situation has even given him a certain sympathy for Miscavige. “He was put into an unenviable position,” Rathbun said, reflectively. “You could’ve been mother Teresa and you still would have been up shit creek without a paddle.”

The loss of this “expansion formula” might not pose so deep a threat if Hubbard was not read within the Church as internally consistent and unquestionably correct. “With Hubbard it’s almost like stream of consciousness,” Rathbun said. “There’s all these gems within [his work] but to say nobody can change a single thing….” He shrugged, screwing up his face.

Rathbun still offers auditing to interested parties. It’s how he makes his living, partially. He still uses technologies of focus and meditation which he learned while in the Church. But these practices are isolated elements of a system that, as a whole, he finds crippled by twin strands of aggression and paranoia. The uncritical reverence demanded by Scientology towards Hubbard, Rathbun believes, serves to highlight these problematic aspects.

Talk of these aspects left Rathbun visibly agitated. He shook his head, moving quickly from one emotion to another. “One thing that I’ve wanted to do — I’m not going to do it, or maybe I will one day,” he began. “I wanna say look man, I know what the whole bridge is, okay, I’ve delivered it. The end phenomena, if you wanna take Scientology literally, the state you’re going to attain? Here it is: The videotape of Tom Cruise in that interview.”

No, not the video where Cruise is jumping on Oprah’s couch. Rathbun means the other one: a leaked video depicting cat-eyed, raving Cruise regurgitating Scientology jargon over a Mission Impossible bass line. “That is the end product,” Rathbun declared:

And these Independent Scientologists say ‘no, that’s not Scientology.’ I’ve got news for you: it is. If you follow it to the T as prescribed by Hubbard that’s the end product. I’d also like to put an asterisk in there — you’re gonna wind up like this but you’re probably not going to be famous and you’re definitely not gonna have a lot of money.

He slammed his fist on the table, almost toppling the ketchup. “There are a lot of great ideas in Hubbard,” he said. “But this package, the Scientology package… It’s hardwired to create conflict.” The proper response, he believes, is to “graduate.” Take what’s valuable, leave the rest and strike out for transcendence.

“I’m not telling people to eschew it,” he clarified. “I’m saying move on. There are other, higher levels of spiritual awareness and states you can go to.” Scientology, however, “plateaus” within the work of L. Ron Hubbard.

Rathbun has been expanding his horizons, reading voluminously and sussing out Hubbard’s potential influences and interlocutors, a controversial practice even among Independents, many of whom still believe the founder is peerless. Our discussion contained long digressions on Ken Wilbur, the American philosopher who founded Integral Theory (also known as the “theory of everything”), and the psychologist Carl Rogers. Rogerian psychotherapy is especially appealing to Rathbun because of its similarity to the practice of auditing. In some ways, he thinks, it is even superior — where Hubbard requires membership of his subjects, Rogers requires nothing. With Rogers, “it’s unconditional acceptance, it’s unconditional forgiveness, it’s unconditional safety. [Membership] taints that process, which is the most powerful process in Scientology.”

Scientology has moved from being the essential frame of Rathbun’s religious inquiries to one of many elements he feels free to explore, accept, modify and combine.

The next day on his blog Rathbun struck out again toward transcendence by publicly denying the label of “Scientologist,” Independent or not. “I do not go by any labels and I am not a member of, nor am I affiliated with, any groups,” he wrote. It was a brave move for man who has become the public face of Independent Scientology. By the time we sat down together at the Phoenix in Texas, Rathbun had already resolved to do it — he just hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. “I don’t know where it’s gonna go,” he said, shaking his head. “I told my wife, I might be out hustling real estate by the end of the year.” If the doing so shook him, he gave no sign.

Rathbun’s violent split with the Church, and now Independents, have allowed him to exercise what Marion Goldman identifies as “religious privilege” in her 2012 study of California’s Esalen community, The American Soul Rush. This kind of radical agency also echoes Catherine Albanese’s analysis of American metaphyisicals, a wide category of practitioners for whom openness to obscurity and democratic acceptance of various traditions are foundational. In this context, Rathbun exists in a storied lineage of American seekers, including Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, in my opinion, L. Ron Hubbard.

+++

I drained the last of my beer. “The people I’ve audited to clear,” Rathbun said, referring to people outside the Church, “None of them really consider Scientology a religion. I don’t think any of them really considers themselves a Scientologist.” He paused, letting the lack of definition land.
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“To me it doesn’t!” Rathbun said. “But I’m just telling you. We could do an experiment. Let me put it on my blog tomorrow. Watch the response: You’re not an American?! It’ll be like that. You’ve renounced your citizenship? You commie, fundamentalist Muslim pig! It’s an identity, you adopt an identity. And the whole thing [in life] is to discover your true identity.”

There was some push back on his blog after he renounced the Scientology label, but the preponderance of comments were supportive. Since I met with Rathbun in June, his work on the blog has shifted from criticizing Scientology to assisting its readers in their graduation. “The vast majority of people who devoted time to Scientology ultimately go through the graduation process,” Rathbun wrote on August 9. It involves “reconciling what they learned and gained, differentiating it from the entrapment mechanisms involved, and finding ways to evolve and transcend as a person.”

He spoke with defiance, but one tempered by sincerity and commitment to continuing the search. “I can do all these great things with you using what I know of Scientology,” he said. “But y’know when I do it per the book, literally, like you said I gotta do it, I don’t want to do it to you.”

Scientology “is a striking example of the complex, shifting and contested nature of religion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,” observed scholar Hugh Urban in his 2011 book, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion. Rathbun exists in the center of this shifting debate; perhaps he even drives it. While academics and people outside the Church may conceive of the changes within The Church of Scientology in abstract terms, Rathbun has no such luxury. Whether we recognize its legitimacy or not, Scientology is a vital and difficult cornerstone of Rathbun and his follower’s cosmography.

Rathbun left first. I followed, a few minutes later. Over the course of the meal, I had been debating something: an arrangement of shadows on his shirt. It might have been a bulge beneath the right arm — but, then again, the room was dark. I thought he might have had a gun. Maybe I was just paranoid.

It was Texas, either way.

Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City.  

The post The Bridge Beyond the Bridge appeared first on The Revealer.

Barbara Mancini with her father, Joe Yourshaw.
(http://www.compassionandchoices.org)

By Ann Neumann

*This is the first of an ongoing monthly column, The Patient Body, about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine.*

In 1971, Geertruida Postma, a medical doctor in the Netherlands, gave her mother a lethal injection of morphine. She could no longer watch her mother suffer the agony of a brain hemorrhage when she knew how to end it. For the next thirty years Dutch law had a gaping hole in it. Assisted suicide, defined as helping to take the life of a person–even at the person’s explicit request–was not legal; nor was it prosecuted.

“He who takes the life of another person on this person’s explicit and serious request will be punished with imprisonment of up to twelve years or a fine of the fifth category,” read Article 293 of the Dutch Penal Code that rendered assisted suicide (or euthanasia or aid in dying) a criminal offense. And yet, the penal code also includes, in Section 40, a clause that ameliorates the assisted suicide prohibition. It states, in part, that “an individual was not punishable if he or she was driven ‘by an irresistible force’ (legally known as force majeure) to put another person’s welfare above the law.” Assisted suicide was legalized in The Netherlands in 2002. In 2010, 4,050 patients, roughly three percent of those who died, utilized the law.

As Bruce Jennings, Director of Bioethics at the Center for Humans and Nature, stated at a symposium on ethics and hospice at New York University last month, medicine is now able to “do bad things to the people who are dying.” His statement is passive, a construction that implicates not just medicine (the treatments, the operations, the drugs, the machines), but the medical community (its patients and practitioners), the justice system (used to formulate society’s laws) and ultimately, all of us. Doctor Postma, even in 1971, knew what Jennings was getting at. The advancement of medical technology over the past fifty years has created a nightmare, even as it has saved lives. With respirators, pacemakers, defibrillators, and new treatments employed each day, how do we make ethical choices that both honor our patients and maintain what we call “our humanity?”

Also in 1971, Catholic pacifist Eileen Eagan first defined the “seamless garment,” a metaphor for our absolute duty to preserve the human body. It was incorporated by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin twelve years later into his “consistent life ethic”: that all human life is sacred and should be protected by the law. Absolutes have an enticing romance, particularly when discussed in the abstract. We hark them when we don’t have clear answers; they become fast laws that protect our consciences, our social mores, what makes us care for one another. But what is our duty when a life can’t be saved? Or when preservation of life comes at a terrible cost, either unbearable suffering for the patient, or an unsustainable use of medical resources? The principle that “all human life is sacred and should be protected” is then changed by individual circumstances, by the patient and their body, by varying conceptions of what is sacred and what must be protected.

Erring on the side of life is an unquestionable principle. Until, perhaps, you’re standing where Postma was standing, watching your mother’s death drag her over the last coarse days of life. Or perhaps when you’re standing where many doctors stand today, watching terminal patients’ lives prolonged by treatments and machines that can no longer cure.

What gets lost in the chasm between Bernardin’s “all human life is sacred” and Postma’s “irresistible force” is a world of definitions. What is life when death is the decision to remove a feeding tube? What does sacred mean to us today? What is suicide to an actively dying person? To their family? What is dignity in the face of pain? Even too, what is pain?

Erring on the side of life is an unquestionable principle, perhaps, until you’re standing where Barbara Mancini was on February 7, 2013, in her father’s home outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Joseph Yourshaw asked his daughter, Barbara, a nurse, to hand him a bottle of morphine. Yourshaw was 93, a war veteran with diabetes, end-stage renal disease, heart disease and the effects of a stroke. She gave him the bottle. He took the morphine.

Moments later, a hospice nurse arrived and–against Yourshaw’s written wishes, Mancini’s verbal request, and the general guidelines of hospice–called 911. Michael Vitez writes at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Durkin [the police captain] also said he spoke with Barbara Mancini: “She told me that her father had asked for all his morphine so he could commit suicide and she provided it.”

When the ambulance arrived, Durkin continued, Barbara Mancini “told them not to take or treat her father.” But the officer said he told Mancini “that she no longer had any say in the matter and her father was going to the hospital.”

Her father was revived at the hospital with the drug Narcan. He was given a urinary catheter and breathing mask, among other treatments.

Barbara Mancini was arrested and released on $100,000 bail. Yourshaw died four days later in the hospital – after receiving morphine to ease his pain.

Mancini could spend ten years in prison if she is convicted. I suspect that, as a nurse, she knew the potential ramifications of doing what her father asked her to. His request was an irresistible force, one that filled the chasm between two duties: “The duty of not taking a life and the humane duty to end a patient’s intolerable suffering.”

Asking what our duty is when faced with situations like Mancini’s is not a thought exercise. Today in the U.S., assisted suicide, or what activists call Death with Dignity, is legal in four states. There are multiple initiatives to legalize assisted suicide at any given time. New drugs and treatments that can prolong death are developed constantly. As the US populations grows increasingly older and we watch our loved ones struggle with the “bad things” that medicine can now do, new understandings about how we die will continue to challenge each of us.  The question is not whether we have the courage to imagine ourselves in Mancini’s place, but–as a society charged with formulating ethics, opinions, laws and policies–when each of us will be forced to.

Ann Neumann, a hospice volunteer, has written for Guernica, the Nation, New York Law Review, and Religion & Politics, among others. She is contributing editor at The Revealer, a publication of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, where she is a Visiting Scholar.

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“After the Apocalypse, she missed her dog”
Reading Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses

By Elizabeth A. Castelli

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses
Lucy Corin (McSweeneys August 27, 2013)

A friend of mine was driving along a northbound highway from Austin to Waco a couple of weeks ago and snapped a photograph of a roadside billboard announcing a website—www.august2nd2027.com. If you visit this site, you’ll feel (as one often does when visiting websites that broadcast end-time prophecies) as though you have been transported back in time to, say, the mid-1990s when most webpages were hosted by Geocities and displayed an earnest and makeshift aesthetic favoring black backgrounds and flashing rainbow-colored fonts. There’s something so familiar about these sure-to-fail predictions—their combination of urgency and credulity and intrigue as they promote biblical interpretation via secret decoder ring.

But, of course, apocalyptic and dystopian visions are not limited to roadside pronouncements along rural highways in red states. They are rather the coin of the realm in contemporary US culture, the shadowy underside of our gilded age, part cautionary tale, part revenge fantasy. My favorite bookstore in downtown New York City, for example, currently devotes its special display table in back and one of its front windows to a celebration of “dystopian fiction,” displaying over two dozen titles from Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick and Samuel Delany to Cormac McCarthy and Tatyana Tolstaya and Franz Kafka, among myriad others. Meanwhile, last summer’s offerings from Hollywood included a motley collection of post-apocalyptic dystopias, zombie apocalypses, sit-com style confections about groups of friends awaiting The End, a wide array of fantasies of finality. I leave it to the culture’s psychoanalysts to diagnose the root causes of these fixations and fascinations.

This is the cultural moment into which an amazing new collection of stories intervenes: Lucy Corin’s lovely new book, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, published  in August by McSweeney’s. Corin is already an established writer with a novel (Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls) and a short-story collection (The Entire Predicament) to her credit. If these earlier works fit more conventionally into recognizable genres, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses defies easy classification. It is a compilation of three short stories (the “Other Apocalypses”) and 100 short-short stories, some of them no more than two sentences long, arranged into four sections. The stories can stand on their own as elegant and evocative snapshots, but they connect up with one another thematically through echoes and repetitions of images and formulations. Biblical apocalypses tend to offer up tours of heaven and hell; Corin’s apocalypses offer us tours of the everyday world, suburbia, urban environments, and wilderness—ordinary and familiar, but just slightly off-beat.

First off, just to get it out of the way, let me say this: Lucy Corin is a genius.

Okay then. Let’s start this discussion of the end at the beginning, with an etymology: the English word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek verb apocalyptō, a root that means “to uncover, to display, to reveal”—hence, “apocalypse” is sometimes rendered “revelation” in English. As the word has transmogrified into its contemporary usages, it has come to be synonymous with cataclysm, violence and destruction on a global scale, fire and brimstone, the End of Everything. Suppressed by such emphases is the other side of apocalypse: utopian dreams, “a new heaven and new earth” as the biblical apocalypse puts it, the fantasy of the slate wiped clean. In Corin’s apocalypses, this fantasy of freshness bubbles up repeatedly—apocalypse may promise some sort of ending that is a source of both lamentation and longing, yet pulsating under its surface are the prospect and the possibility of something new.

Corin uses the language of “apocalypse” most frequently as a temporally specific event, a happening that divides time into “before” and “after.” “After the apocalypse” signals a narratively significant temporality: “After the apocalypse, she missed her dog” – “After the apocalypse I was wandering around thinking about real magic” – “After the apocalypse, a brother of mine said: ‘Do you remember if you were nervous with all those poison spiders radiating from the jar?’” – “After the apocalypse we didn’t even talk about all the crap we’d read about it before or seen in movies. Like we were embarrassed of our whole species’ imagination” – “After the apocalypse, I see concrete” – “Postapocalypse, we were all still racist and clamoring for scraps of gold” – “One thing about after the apocalypse is you can’t get dirt on you” – “After the apocalypse she was dead anyway, but her work remained.” In each example, the cosmic cataclysm ushers in something small, particular, personal, quotidian; you are set reeling by the shift in perspective, the disorienting turn from the macro to the micro, the narrative turn itself an experience of the disruptions and disorientations of apocalypse, but also the surprising revelation that there is something “after” apocalypse – a remnant of ordinariness, a resituating of the self and the social, in spite.

Sometimes, Corin’s apocalypses focus on the utopian promise of apocalypse’s aftermath, as in the first of the one hundred apocalypses contained in the collection, a story called “Fresh.” The narrator, whose particular characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, social circumstance, etc.) remain undisclosed, confesses a longing for apocalypse: “To tell you the truth, I kept asking for it. I was looking for the apocalypse. I was tired of the way things were going. I was looking forward to fresh everything.” This story, coming first in the long series of gemlike short narratives, sets up a certain expectation—an expectation dashed three-quarters of the way through in a startling story entitled, “Bathing,” which concludes with this stark observation: “The whole point of the apocalypse was to feel clean. What a load.” In between, the intimate, embodied experience of orgasm performs metonymically as “the most productive moment of the day, because, apocalyptically, it has wiped the slate clean, and no one will ever know about it” (“Nice Day”). Taken together, these three moments capture Corin’s perspective: quotidian, embodied, a little claustrophobic, life (apocalyptically speaking, of course) as a balancing act, perching on the edge of hope and bracing for disappointment, both at the same time.

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Elsewhere amidst these stories, apocalypse is not an event but the name for animated creatures or for miniature objects arrayed in a careful order and glistening with a shiny newness: “We were coming out of the movies into some real-life darkness when we heard his coat open. Rows and rows of apocalypses shone along the satin lining….the edges of the apocalypses winking in and out of view.” (Three Sisters: Blond, Brunette, Red-Head”) Or this: “He led her to a long white table, so clean, so cold, so bare, but for the apocalypses laid out in grid formation, uncountable, bouncing like icons waiting for updating, little puff of smoke in the grid, little lightning bolt, little funnel cloud, tiny tsunami, dancing flame, miscroscopic viruses magnified to match the rest, matchstick aliens, monsters like the figures on coins, anything you ever wanted. He said choose. She let several of the apocalypses run up her sleeve, down her pants, and enter her body while he wasn’t looking. She let them look out of her eyes.” (“Rate this Apocalypse”) Or this: “Stars fell in unison, and in a mossy grove on the hill, the Apocalyptasaurus was having the last sex on earth….and soon the cries of leftover apocalypses were all that remained.” (“What It Was Like”)

Ironically, this collection of stories about apocalypses doesn’t follow an eschatological structure: we are not in the framework of biblical apocalypse, which organizes history linearly and suspends events on a scaffolding of cause-and-effect, judgment-and-execution. Instead, the structure is elliptical, themes threaded through the short narratives—love, ruins, grief/lamentation/regret, memory/forgetfulness, ghosts/haunting, freshness and pollution, raggedy remnants, vision/dreams/perspective, embodiment—images looping forward and back. Yet, like a conventional apocalypse, the text inspires an almost obsessive interpretive desire: though the 100 apocalypses are independent of one another, they give the impression of a coherent pattern just out-of-reach with the promise of clarity and illumination if one can just find the key to unravel the images, the hidden patterns, the veiled secret meaning of revelation itself. They make you want to make sense of them, imprinting your experience as a reader with the coercive quality of apocalyptic.

Corin’s apocalypses insist upon the persistence of narrative, even in the wake of cataclysm. In this, they might be fruitfully juxtaposed to Anne Washburn’s play, “Mr. Burns: A post-electric play,” currently playing to sold-out houses at Playwrights Horizons in New York. On one level, a post-apocalyptic comedy, but at another level, something far more profound, “Mr. Burns” tells the story of a small group of survivors who reconstitute their frayed sociality through storytelling—in this case, trying to reconstruct from memory the “Cape Fear” episode of “The Simpsons.” As the play unfolds, time passes, and eventually the audience realizes that future generations have managed to canonize “The Simpsons” and to create out of the absurd remnants of our contemporary culture a solemn tradition. Corin’s stories strike me as having this same sort of scriptural potentiality—evocative, funny, warm, episodic, ironic, even glib at points. But stories that contain these little gems of sparkling wit and insight, apocalyptic in the sense of revelatory rather than explosive and meaning-ending.

Corin’s vision is unsentimental, sharp-edged, but yet not unkind. She knows that the world can come to an end in a fiery cosmic cataclysm—as we have all been trained by scripture and Hollywood and life in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction to understand—but also in the failure of relationship, in the last piece of cake at a dinner party, in the routine collapse of meaning that occurs when our precarious hold on the sense of things unexpectedly goes slack. Corin’s stories are set at human scale, unafraid to lay a probing hand directly upon a tender wound, comic and tragic at once, as any good apocalypse must be.

What would a secular apocalypse look like, or a religious apocalypse without God or divine judgment, without heaven or hell, but with the persistent if impossible utopian promise embedded within the apocalyptic sensibility? Lucy Corin’s stories offer a vision of just that sort of apocalypse—one that preserves the quotidian, the detailed, the narrative, and the humor that serves as a remnant and a bulwark against annihilation.

Elizabeth A. Castelli is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Religion at Barnard College. A specialist in biblical studies and early Christianity, she is also interested in the “afterlives” of biblical texts in contemporary culture. Her translation of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s never-produced script, Saint Paul, is forthcoming from Verso Books. She is currently at work on a collection of essays on the theme of confession.

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