50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion

by Daniele Bolelli

  Heyoka are individuals who received a vision from the spirits of thunder. In exchange for the vision and for the powers that come with it—which can range from the ability to bring rain to healing—the thunder spirits demand that those they bless turn themselves into “sacred clowns.” This is something so at odds with how most religions view the world that it deserves an explanation. In the minds of most people, clowns are strange looking guys who are supposed to make kids laugh—not exactly what we typically connect with the word “sacred.” What the hell is a sacred clown, then?

  Heyokas are clowns in the sense that, by violating all the most basic social rules and routinely doing the opposite of what is normally expected, their behavior comes across as hilariously funny. They may say “yes” when they mean “no,” go around half-naked complaining about the heat in the midst of a blizzard, shiver and cover up with blankets on the hottest summer day, laugh at funerals, cry when everyone around them is happy, pretend having sex with anything that has a pulse during sacred ceremonies, and the list goes on …

  At the same time, they are also sacred. Not only are they believed to possess supernatural powers beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, but also through their outrageous actions they teach religious lessons of the utmost importance. Although it may not be obvious, there's a method to their madness. Addicted to a sharp dualism, much of humanity likes to divide the universe in neatly divided categories: black or white, masculine or feminine, sacred or funny, etc. The heyoka's message is that this is a dangerous illusion. With all their weird antics, they shake people out of their habits and invite them to look at reality in a different way. By acting contrary to normal expectations and flirting with seeming contradictions, the heyoka are the ambassadors of paradox, the living embodiment of a yin-yang way of perceiving the world, constantly bringing together what regular humans keep separate. In doing this, they remind us that life is always more complex and more beautiful than any doctrine and any simplistic category. It's a never-ending dance of opposites that are not easily divided. Their enemies are the dualism blinding us to the true nature of reality and self-importance from which all dogmas are born. Laughter is their way of giving battle, and cracking people up even in the most atrocious situations is their mission. The more something is sacred and important, the more most people in the world become overly serious and rigid. But the heyoka agrees with Nietzsche when he says that if we don't want to be crushed by the heaviness of it all, the most deadly serious of issues need to be approached with levity and playfulness.

  21 A LAWFUL, ISLAMIC MARRIAGE … THAT LASTS AN HOUR

  It's a fairly safe bet to assume that if you are looking for a paradise of free love and sexual indulgence, Iran may not be the first country that comes to mind. Ever since the 1979 Revolution ushered rabid fundamentalists to power, the Islamic Republic of Iran has not exactly been known for an enlightened attitude about sex. I mean … hell … any country that has a morality police whose tasks include arresting women whose coats are too short or whose head scarves are not tight enough doesn't sound like the right place if you are looking for a good time. Even if we move past the first impressions, the reality on the ground doesn't get much better. The Iranian legal code, after all, states that unmarried couples having sex or simply dating and hanging out together can be arrested and flogged. And to make things more cheerful, adulterers are to be stoned to death.

  But horrendously strict rules go hand in hand with the very Iranian habit of finding creative ways to bypass them. Enters the legal institution of sigheh. A man and a woman can marry with the blessing of a cleric. Nothing strange so far, except that these are marriages that come with an expiration date. The couple, in fact, can and will write down the expected length of their marriage—which can range anywhere from a few minutes to 99 years—and how much money should go to the woman as “dowry.” In honor to the usual double standards popular in the Middle East (and in much of the rest of the world, for that matter), men are free to enter as many temporary marriages as they want, whereas women can only enter one at a time. Sunni Muslims have banned this custom, but the Shi'ites (the majority in Iran) firmly believe that Muhammad was down with temporary marriages. Even though the Koran doesn't seem to even discuss this, its supporters regularly quote a koranic passage that they believe legitimizes this practice. Perhaps knowing that the Koran's backing of temporary marriages rests on very thin ice, they are also quick to add that in any case there exist several traditions about Muhammad's wholehearted approval of this idea. Allah is merciful—they argue—and in His mercy he wouldn't want a man who is on a pilgrimage or otherwise separated from his wife to go without any sex for too long.

  Marriages lasting barely an hour? Women being paid for them? In the same ultra-conservative nation where heavy sexual repression is touted as a virtue by Islamic fundamentalists, the very same religious authorities call “temporary marriage” what everyone else would call prostitution. But reality is yet again more complicated than appearances may suggest. Or rather, in many, many cases temporary marriages are indeed just a front for prostitution. Odd? Yes. Hypocritical? Obviously. Why even bother being such hard asses about sex and maintaining that prostitution is a terrible sin if then you turn around and allow it under a different name? I understand it's in the nature of religious fundamentalism to set up rules that no one can live by, and to regularly behave in direct contradiction to one's own moralistic preaching, but still … There is, however, another side to temporary marriages. Many couples that simply want to date freely, without being harassed by the religious fascists of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, use temporary marriages as a license to spend time together and explore with sex outside of regular marriage in a cultural environment in which these options are not allowed. In either case—whether we are talking about prostitution or dating—temporary marriages are proof that Iranian creativity will always be stronger than the most repressive fundamentalist zeal.

  22 ENLIGHTENED RELIGIOUS POLICIES AND MASS MURDER

  The two elements that make up the title above don't exactly look like they belong hand in hand together. Generally speaking, enlightened religious policies and mass murder are the pastimes of very different kinds of people. So, the logical assumption would be to imagine that our story will contrast an atrocious tale of mass murder committed by some horrible human being against one of enlightened religious policies promoted by a saint. But as it turns out, our story is much weirder than that. The lead character who is about to join us on the page had a peculiar talent for both these hobbies at the same time. The man we are speaking of is Genghis Khan (a.k.a. Temujin).

  Few individuals have left a mark on human history as deep as Genghis Khan. Here is a guy who single-handedly created the biggest empire the world had ever seen. He began his career as a hunted down renegade who didn't even control his own, tiny Mongolian tribe and ended up as the ruler of dozens of nations and millions of people. But clearly, no one gets to conquer a huge chunk of the earth without busting a few heads. And in Genghis Khan's case, the heads were not so few after all. It has been estimated that his armies may have massacred somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million people. From Russia to Iran, from the edges of Western Europe to China, his name used to evoke a very justified, overwhelming fear. His Mongolian hordes made it their profession to level one civilization after another. Anyone who dared to stand against them regularly met the same, predictable, sorry end. In some places, such as the area of modern day Iran, the population wouldn't return to its pre-Genghis Khan-showed-up-in-the-neighborhood size for several hundred years.

  But alongside with drowning Eurasia in blood, he also promoted some of the most advanced religious policies anyone could expect in the 1200s—or at any other time for that matter—and, incidentally planted trees wherever he went, thereby removing several million tons of carbon from the atmosphere. Unlike many other world conquerors, he didn't even bother claiming some divine right for taking other peoples’ lands. “I kick your ass”—Genghis reas
oned—“because I am a big fish and you are a small fish. The day you get bigger, knock at my door and we'll go at it again. Neither Gods nor morality have anything to do with this.”

  But more importantly, unlike what his contemporaries were doing throughout Western Europe and much of the Middle East, Genghis Khan gave full freedom of religion to all people within the lands over which he ruled. Despite being an adept of his tribe's brand of shamanism—which was the staple of the Mongols’ ceremonial life at that time—he was very interested in learning anything useful from other religions. So in this spirit, he encouraged religious syncretism and sponsored many debates between the representatives of different spiritual traditions. Taoists, Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, Christian missionaries and Muslim traders were regularly invited to exchange ideas in his presence. The same man who had killed a greedy governor by pouring molten gold down his throat was also responsible for a truly enlightened policy of religious toleration. As history would have it, one of the first paladins of freedom and individual rights also happened to be a mass murderer.

  23 BILL CLINTON HATES MASTURBATION AND OTHER TALES

  Bill Clinton's loyalty to the woman he had appointed as U.S. surgeon general was unwavering. Joyce Elders was the first African-American woman ever to take on this post, and was also a die-hard Clinton supporter. When many called for her head, after she had told abortion opponents to get over their “love affair” with the fetus, Clinton defended her. When controversy erupted after she had openly advocated drug legalization, Clinton again stuck to her. But then came the fateful day when she committed such a grievous sin that even Clinton could not forgive.

  Did she secretly torture babies in her basement? Was she plotting against the safety of the nation? Much worse … At an international conference, when she was asked whether she believed that masturbation should be taught as part of sex education courses, she replied, “I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.” Without thinking about it twice, Clinton promptly fired her.

  Sorry for the interruption, Bolelli, but wasn't this book about religion? What does Bill Clinton have to do with it?

  The fact that, at the dawn of the 21st century, a supposedly liberal president would consider the topic of masturbation a deal breaker speaks volumes about popular attitudes toward sex in the Western world. This is not just the result of Clinton's weird idiosyncrasies. And it is not about Clinton drinking from the Kool-Aid of hypocrisy, as most politicians are required to do. It would be easy to think so considering that his puritan stance doesn't exactly fit neatly with him having oral sex with a White House intern. But, even though Clinton and hypocrisy are on a first name basis, the roots of this story reach deeper. Clinton's allergy to masturbation is a direct result of centuries of sexually repressive theologies, and of the effects that this religious heritage has left in the psyche of most people.

  The Clinton story, in fact, finds many carbon copies in the lives of countless religious leaders preaching a very strict brand of sexual morality. Take the case of Ted Haggard, for example. A seemingly true bastion of Christian ethics, Haggard regularly decried the evils of homosexuality and the virtues of absolute abstinence before marriage, and complete monogamy in marriage. Haggard's popularity among conservative Christians propelled him up the rank to the presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals. But he didn't exactly practiced what he preached. Perhaps figuring that if you stray a little you might as well stray a lot, Haggard went all out. When he didn't don the robes of moral censor of the sex lives of others, Haggard was busy buying crystal meth from a gay hooker with whom he was regularly having sex. Damn … Clinton, with his measly Monica Lewinsky scandal, was an amateur by comparison.

  But scores of Catholic priests take the cake when it comes to writing the master text on the clash between theory and practice. To this day, the Catholic Church still considers contraception a sin (incidentally most other forms of Christianity felt the same way until the early 1900s). And much like Bill Clinton, it considers masturbation as a ticket to hell. The willingness to be ultra-strict on these issues, however, didn't extend to raping little kids. Not only so many of these robe wearing men preaching against sexual “immorality” were enthusiastic pedophiles but, even more disturbing, the establishment of the Catholic Church did its best to protect them rather than their victims.

  I could go on with examples until I run out of ink, but the point is that it seems as if the more one endorses impossibly severe sexual ideologies, the more likely he or she is to practice the exact opposite. Rather than questioning the unhealthy sexual ethics peddled as normal by their religion of choice, they verbally uphold the party line only to miserably fail in action. After all, Bill Clinton and Ted Haggard find out they are twins separated at birth.

  24 WHY WOULD A YOUNG IRISH CATHOLIC WOMAN TEAR UP A PICTURE OF THE POPE ON NATIONAL TV?

  On an evening of October of 1992, in the eyes of most Catholics, Sinéad O’Connor turned overnight from the girl who sang beautiful love ballads such as “Nothing Compares 2 U” into the antichrist's employee of the month. Sinéad had gone on Saturday Night Live, and performed a modified version of Bob Marley's “War” which, in her rendition, discussed child abuse. To wrap the night, she pulled out a picture of the pope, and tore it up in front of the camera. “Fight the real enemy,” she told a stunned audience.

  Sinéad clearly was not trying to win a popularity contest. Millions of Catholics probably regretted the good, old days when they could have dealt with her by barbecuing her at the stake. And even much of the non-Catholic world responded with equal moral indignation. The following day, cheering protesters crushed hundreds of her CDs with steamrollers outside of Rockefeller Center. Joe Pesci and Frank Sinatra vied with each other for who could proclaim louder their intention of beating her to a pulp. Just a couple of weeks later, she was booed off stage by the audience attending a Bob Dylan tribute! Her very promising career never fully recovered. Just about everyone looked at her as a nut case who didn't know what she was talking about. Her allegation that the upper echelons of the Catholic Church had covered up for decades thousands of cases of child abuse—which was the reason for her gesture—was dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory created by a virulent anti-Catholic.

  But as it turns out, she was neither crazy nor anti-Catholic. As later revelations made abundantly clear, Sinéad was right. Simply, she had dared to speak out about a horrific issue long before doing so would be popular.

  In the following years, evidence began to emerge from every corner of the world. The dirty little secret Sinéad was talking about became impossible to ignore. In just about every continent, thousands of kids had been raped by Catholic priests. If the story stopped here, one could push the argument that maybe, just maybe, the Church was not responsible for the action of some awful individuals who just happened to don Catholic robes. But the actual rapes were only the first layer in this sickening tale. In case after case, when reports of the abuses climbed the ladder of the Catholic hierarchy, reaching the ears of those in leadership positions, the reaction was always the same: rather than reporting the rapists to the police, let's just reassign them to a new location where they could continue their child-molesting activities without attracting too much attention. If some victims are too determined to give up, let's just throw some money their way in exchange for their silence. But in all cases, let's make sure that they don't sue us thereby spoiling the good name of Catholicism. Time and time again, the Church's response indicated a greater concern with protecting its image and reputation than with protecting kids. As Sinéad would argue, the fact that so many local churches took the exact same steps to cover up the tracks of the rapists among them was evidence that they were following the same directives from the very top of the Church.

  The Church's public relations department certainly botched their damage control operation. Instead of taking responsibility and trying to figure out concrete ways to prevent further abuses, the Church res
ponded by blaming the media coverage that—according to them—had focused excessively on the issue. “Protestants rape kids too”—they screamed loudly—“but the big, bad media only focuses on the kids raped by us poor Catholics …” Not exactly a sympathy-inducing argument. And just to add farce to tragedy, Catholic politicians like the former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum also blamed cultural relativism and sexual permissiveness for these events. The Church itself concluded that the 1960s’ liberal standards, feminism and a growing acceptance of homosexuality went hand in hand with a spike in priestly child abuse cases. The rapist priests—in other words—were just victims of the liberal culture that had caused people to question the Church and its sexual rules. Damned hippies… it was really all their fault.

  Sinéad's critics, despite all their smug self-righteousness, were eventually silenced by the mountains of evidence indicating she had been right all along. But clearly they forgot to apologize with the same loudness with which they had attacked her. Not only had they been wrong about her being crazy, but they were also wrong about their portrayal of her as an anti-Catholic zealot. What everybody forgot in the midst of all the confusion was that Sinéad was herself Catholic. To be sure, she disagreed with much of what the Catholic Church had done, but she also believed Catholicism should be rescued by the hands of those who had hijacked it, and should be restored to its rightful glory. This is why she decided to be ordained by a dissident Catholic group that had broken away from the Church. Her mission—she said—was nothing less than rescuing God from religion.