Manifest Religiousity

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about about missionaries. What spurred this thread was something little Isis sent me. It is a link to Tamerlane’s blog who I usually read at Liberal Rapture. Frankly, I’d been thinking of the entire topic a lot recently. Probably the primary reason is that over break I started playing a Civilization game called Colonization which is historically interesting but not the most politically correct strategy game that I play. You basically choose the French, Spanish, English or Dutch and go colonize an area where there are natives. I normally try to play the French and co-exist with the natives, but the algorithm includes some more historically accurate happenstances. Even if you try to co-exist with the natives peacefully trading and living with them, your cities eventually crowd them out of their resources and they either attack you or disappear. That’s if you take the peaceful coexistence route. If you take the more direct route, you just send in a Jesuit priest to convert them which basically drains them of people and resources very quickly.

It’s probably also why I heard this news today on the radio during my commute with a certain degree of skepticism. Although, this Saint got her self excommunicated on a few occasions by irritating the powers that be, she was still mostly recognized for her work in orphanages across Australia and bringing people into the fold. You just never know how much of it is just marketing vs. the work of a really dedicated humanitarian when religion is involved.

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI approved sainthood for Mother Mary MacKillop on Friday, making the woman known for her work among the needy Australia’s first saint.

The pope made the announcement during a ceremony at the Vatican and set the formal canonization for Oct. 17 in Rome. Five others — from Italy, Spain, Poland and Canada — will be canonized at the same time.

MacKillop founded the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, an order that built dozens of schools for impoverished children across the Australian Outback in the 1800s, as well as orphanages and clinics for the needy.

With vows of abstinence from owning personal belongings and dedication to helping the poor, MacKillop is credited with spreading Roman Catholicism in Australia and New Zealand.

In 2008, the Pope made a Saint of an Indian (that would be India Indian) women who basically was some one who came from that sort’ve history. Saint Alphonsa got converted in an orphanage and then continued the practice of converting others, draining her native land of its culture, religion and their most precious treasure; their children. Of course, it’s never quite portrayed that way. Saint Alphonsa rescued children from abject poverty and sent them on the ‘Lord’s path’ is the religiousity-correct term. She of course suffered mightily while doing so which makes her even more the saint.

Tamerlane’s story is based on that headline grabbing story of those baptists from Utah that headed down to ‘rescue’ Haitii orphans from their lives of abject poverty too. You know the story. It’s bumped a lot of really newsworthy items right off the front page and it’s been made to look like just another example of the prosecution of god-faring christian people out there rescuing the helpless from helpless situations. Tamerlane’s story adds the twist that I find most interesting. What exactly, when you bring a child back to an extreme religionist to raise like a pet project, do you do to them? This is the the story to which he links.

OROVILLE — A fundamentalist religious philosophy that espouses corporal punishment to “train” children to be more obedient to their parents and God is now being investigated in connection with the death of a young Paradise girl and serious injuries to her sister.

Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey confirmed Thursday that other children in the home who have been interviewed told investigators “this philosophy was espoused by their parents.”

Ramsey said he is also exploring a possible connection to a Web site that endorses “biblical discipline” using the same rubber or plastic tube alleged to have been used to whip the two young ridge girls by their adoptive parents.

In court Thursday, a judge granted a two-week postponement before the children’s parents, Kevin Schatz, 46, and Elizabeth Schatz, 42, enter a plea to murder and torture charges that could carry two life terms in prison.

What exactly do you rescue these children from and what do you bring them to? That’s the bigger question to me.

We have several Native American posters here that probably can do a better job explaining what their lives have been like since their ancestors were uprooted from their native traditions. I was born in Oklahoma around the Cherokee Nation and raised in Nebraska around both the Pottawatomie and Ogalala Sioux of the Lakota Nation. I was at university at Lincoln, Nebraska when there was a huge encampment of Sioux there from Pine Ridge doing protests along with Russell Means and got to spend some time hearing lots of stories that would raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Now, I work with the Sherpa peoples in Nepal and I think I’ve shared some of the horrid stories of religiousism and the treatment of native peoples there by missionaries of several stripes.

I think we need to remain vigilant about these people who move in and abduct children in the name of bringing them to a better life through ‘religion’. The Buddhist people of the Himalayan region never had words for things like self esteem problems and the little Buddhist country of Bhutan didn’t even have suicides until they got cable tv and now they feel they have an epidemic of it. That being said, I’m not glorifying native cultures and saying we should keep every one back in the stone age tribes and free of medicine. I’d just like to warn against the arrogance of Manifest Destiny when it comes to culture, politics and religion.

Jose' de Anchieta

Maybe I’m just playing into the meme here as smug atheist, but I can’t believe that taking children away from their families, countries, cultures, and lives for some hyperactive version of the Religionist American dream is in the real interest of children. I say this as I watch the Tupi fall to my strategies in Civ IV: Colonialization much like they fell to José de Anchieta and the Portuguese around 300 years ago. Why do we glorify something which historically has been responsible for death, disease, and the wholesale destruction of entire civilizations? Why beautify and make into a saint the products of radical and sadistic religious chauvinism like poor Saint Alphonsa?

It worries me to watch the heroes’ welcomes for those 8 missionaries released from the jail in Haiti who were suspected of possible child trafficking. Maybe it wasn’t their intent to sell the children into the sex trades or the domestic trade but just simply place them into a home with some hyperactive Dobson/Focus on the Family family with a vision of beating God into children. Is that really a better life?

Many of the rescued children still had one live parent. Haiti is full of poverty, but who among us would want to live with an evangelical in Idaho? Perhaps RD or myiq2xu can speak to that sort’ve upbringing better than me since I come from a long line of avowed church avoiders and seem to have raised two more of them. I’d rather take my chances with poverty in Haiti, frankly.

So, let me ask this question: What’s to say we’re not repeating the sins of our colonial past? Who are the real saints and who are the sinners?