PZ has a brief item up with a one-sentence review of books about how pets go to heaven, and Orac has a sad anniversary today, and both got me thinking about something I wrote that until now lived on only in the Wayback Machine Archive, which is kind of the Rainbow Bridge for dead blog posts. So I thought I’d play God and reanimate it through the judicious use of the sinister, Tesla-coil powered mad laboratory here in my computer. Of course I have no idea what I’m tampering with in doing so.
Context: this post went up at Pandagon the week Zeke died. In that week, Pandagon co-blogger Amanda Marcotte had come under fire from reactionary Catholic jerks for saying something hilariously obscene that was ironically utterly consistent with conservative Catholic dogma. She lost her job as a result. I posted this in the middle of the imbroglio.
Short version: those of you who try to comfort grieving people you don’t know with images of Heaven, Doggie- or otherwise, are insensitive jerks who kick people when they’re down in order to make yourselves feel like you’ve scored Jesus points.
Yes, I am still angry about this.
Tolerance for me and not for thee
Tolerance works in more than one direction.
This week has been an interesting object lesson in why that's important, at least to me. Because while my esteemed co-blogger has been raked over the virtual coals for past snark with regard to large religious organizations and their sometimes reprehensible politics, with attendant calls for greater tolerance of religious belief from progressives, I've had a markedly unpleasant experience in my personal life that has illustrated just how little that demanded respect is returned toward people with my religious beliefs.
The context: my dog died on Saturday. A supremely trivial matter in the global scheme of things, to be sure, but he was my dog and thus by definition the best in the world, a constant companion for 15 years, and I've spent the last few days alternately stunned and heartbroken.
And as I've written about Zeke at Creek Running North pretty much since 2003, he had a fan base, so I've gotten lots of very thoughtful notes from his internet admirers, for which I'm surpassingly grateful.
And I've also gotten some not so thoughtful ones.
I was raised Catholic. Like most real Catholics, I have a thick skin when it comes to insults or slights to my religious beliefs. (You think the stuff Amanda's being quoted over is offensive? Eavesdrop on the parking lot chatter of a Catholic high school sometime and Amanda will seem positively Immaculate by comparison. I mean, don't even get me started on the “Lamb of God” jokes.) I also like to think I'm respectful of people's personal spiritual beliefs. I've worked with the Berrigan brothers, sat respectfully through neighbors' funerals and weddings in fundie churches, sung along with homilies whose words I found abhorrent so that I wouldn't make a scene, nodded politely at Jehovah's Witnesses while hung over, broken bread gladly with people as they maintained that their indigenous North American ancestors came out of holes in the ground. I prize finding common ground where possible.
Is that enough qualification for the trolls? No? Oh well, sometimes there is no common ground. At least I tried. And I mean every word.
Here's the thing: I don't believe in an afterlife. What's more, in contexts like the one in which I live now, I find the whole concept of an afterlife to be profoundly unhelpful. No, that's not strong enough. It's like sticking a fucking corkscrew in my heart and yanking it out. After all, I'm not so completely rational that I don't succumb to the temptation to stand on his grave and talk to him. After years of indoctrination in Roman Catholic dogma, the reflex of imagining the Pearly Gates dies hard. But it's false hope, and both the glimmer of reunion and the fleeting thought that he misses us make me feel worse.
So I asked early on on my blog that people refrain from trying to comfort me with the Rainbow Bridge or Dog Heaven or what have you. The good news is, a lot of people respected that request, either by not invoking it at all or keeping their heaven talk well within the context of their own beliefs, which I don't have a problem with. It can be done! You can be devoutly religious without pushing your beliefs on someone when he's vulnerable, as witness this kind comment left by an evangelical blogger who, I think it would be fair to say, wears his religious beliefs on his sleeve:
Much love to you and Becky from a man, a woman, and six chinchillas in Pasadena.
One of my oldest blog pals, a devout Episcopalian who wrote a biography of Bishop Gene Robinson last year, has likewise offered much-appreciated solace without mentioning doggie heaven once. Some friends have offered religious beliefs cast as cultural stories or metaphor, and I'm all about cultural stories and metaphor, especially when written beautifully, so no harm there. Far from it!
But when people persist, in what they know is one of the worst weeks of a person's life, in telling that person his belief system is wrong and misguided as a way of ostensibly showing sympathy and compassion, that, my friends, is an example of religious intolerance. When people respond to a politely worded request to can the heaven stuff by ramping up the heaven stuff, that is an example of religious intolerance. When a person has to take time out from grieving to forgive people who've made him feel a lot worse, telling himself that he has to give them slack because they're upset over the death of his family member, that he has to remember they're just trying to make him feel better with promises of meeting again despite his express request, that is a symptom of religious intolerance.
When a person has to take the time out from his equivalent of sitting shiva to close comments on his blog because he is sick to fucking death of moderating all comments with the word “Rainbow” in them and then he starts getting email like “I saw you'd closed comments on your blog so I just thought I'd email you to tell you that Zeke will fetch sticks for you again in heaven,” when if the person had read word one that I'd written he'd know that Zeke never fetched a fucking stick in his life, that is religious intolerance in the smarmy sheep's clothing of intrusive missionary zeal.
And when it is assumed that the deeply held beliefs you've arrived at after a lifetime of soul-searching are something akin to a public costume, to be shed in favor of the “normal” dogma of a vaguely Christian veterinary afterlife at the first sign of loss or adversity, that is not just religious intolerance but a profound personal insult, and I do not give fuck one about your intentions in making that insult.
Here are a few basic ground rules for religious tolerance. Not everybody believes what you believe. This includes the existence of an afterlife, the existence of a soul, the existence of any gods at all much less one all-encompassing one. A person's failure to believe what you believe does not constitute disrespect for your beliefs. Failure to be obsequious in the face of your religion's central story does not constitute disrespect for believers in your religion. One can respect Christians as human beings and still opine aloud that the New Testament is a bunch of nonsense, just as one can respect traditional Hopi culture without writing in your Pleistocene paleontology paper that the ancestors of the Hopi emerged into this world from a sipapu in the Grand Canyon.
It's clear to most thinking people that Opus Donohue and his like aren't interested in tolerance at all, but in theocratic subjugation. What's apparently less clear to some? That subjugation rests on the assumption that everyone secretly believes in a Christianist god and heaven despite their pagan or atheist or pantheist poses. A tolerant ecumenicism, these people seem to think, consists of granting the possibility that the All-Powerful One God in an afterlife heaven might go by more than one first name. A little-considered fact about even the most strident atheists: they spend most of their public lives not challenging people's false assumptions about what they believe. Small wonder! A solecism about Christ's birth far tamer than some I heard emerge from the mouths of Jesuit priests can apparently derail a career, while grinding a grieving unbeliever's heart beneath your heel in the name of compassion is considered a consummate act of Christian charity.
Some tolerance.
Bravo, again. I’m forwarding this to a couple of my friends. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, if Christ ever did return to earth, do you really think he’d want to be in a room with Christianists? But then irony and self reflection are qualities in short supply today.
Jayzuss, that was brilliant.
When I read the title in my email I thought you were going to be dissing Rainbow Bridge. It is a *very nice* hunk of rock in Utah, after all. Never heard of a rainbow bridge to heaven. Would that lead to the pearly gates? And wouldn’t that make a clashing color scheme? Who’s doing the art direction on this show, anyway?
Doggy heaven? Doesn’t sound very Christian to me. But what I don’t know about Christianity could fill a very large book, like the one the Gideons leave in hotel rooms.