Asthmatic Kitty and the Thing about Christianity

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36653798.post-1161961867235097722006-10-27T10:13:00.000-04:002006-10-28T17:00:44.806-04:00Asthmatic Kitty and the Thing about ChristianityBecause it's much cheaper than iTunes, more manageable, less annoying, and has heaps of oddities that are hard to find anywhere else (a lot of Harry Partch's own recordings, for example, plus the BIS catalogue, Michael Tilson-Thomas's Mahler, Shahram Nazeri, El Perro del Mar, The Books, etc., etc....) I subscribe to <a href="http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2188148-10364534">eMusic</a> <img src="http://www.tqlkg.com/image-2188148-10364534" border="0" height="1" width="1" /> Confession: that link pays me if you check them out and get the 25 free trial downloads. <a href="http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2188148-10412420">What's eMusic?</a> <img src="http://www.awltovhc.com/image-2188148-10412420" border="0" height="1" width="1" /> I recently downloaded a free sampler CD from <a href="http://www.asthmatickitty.com/main.php">Asthmatic Kitty Records</a>. I could hardly resist the name, it was a chance to hear a few cuts by Sufjan Stevens, and it was, after all, free. I found it an excellent bargain. The level of craft is high and the songs ingratiating. The various musicians are all worth my attention. But they are also overtly or obliquely Christian. Not the scary, stereotyped born-again, Bush-loving, panting-for-the-apocalypse type, but the kind of intelligent, open-minded, heart-in-the-right-place Christians you run into at anti-war demonstrations and welfare rights rallies. So why am I still uneasy? Is it simple prejudice that makes me single out an album suffused with Christianity and not, say, one that's Buddhist to the same degree--like <a href="http://www.thebooksmusic.com/living_room/index2.html">The Books' wonderful Lost and Safe</a>? Aren't "religions" essentially the same? Doesn't "this is the day the Lord hath made" say the same thing that Zen masters convey by saying, "every day is a beautiful day"? Well, they're not all the same. It's true that both of these sayings remind us that the world isn't set up to meet our standards--they can be boiled down respectively to "Thy will, not mine, be done" and "not my will", which are indeed remarkably close. They point to a profound and difficult truth that secular humanists rarely appreciate. But the differences are even more important. Buddhism doesn't privilege humanity. The Bodhisattva takes a vow to release all sentient beings, including cockroaches and poisonous snakes--not just people. There's a kind of chill to its rejection of all of humanity's special pleading. It's summed up in John Cage's answer to a woman who asked him if he didn't think there was too much evil in the world. Cage replied that he thought there was exactly the right amount of evil in it. We surely have the right to recoil from such cold-bloodedness. (No less a Zen character than <a href="http://home.att.net/%7Epaul.dowling/archive/zen/blyth/blyth-all.htm">R.H. Blyth</a> did so.) But the Christian alternative exacts too high a price--not just in its exclusivity and factual absurdity, but in the way it tosses out the baby with the bathwater. The joke in Christianity is that because God is especially concerned with his human children, he wills for us what we would have willed if only we had our heads on straight. Whatever happens only seems to be contrary to our will. We should accept it and embrace it because it's all been set up for our ultimate benefit. In other words, Christianity is the ultimate exercise in bad faith. It only appears to put us in our place. As the Gospels say, he who would save his life must lose it, which means that you get to save your life by pretending to want the opposite. That's where the smart money goes. How does it accomplish this paradox? In part by telling us, correctly, that the appearance of the world doesn't reproduce the real structure of the world--but then, rather than directing us to look attentively and egoloessly at reality, going on to ask us to see it through a particular and very anthropocentric set of glosses. Most of the practices we lump together as "religions" tell us to stop mistaking our ideas of things for the things themselves. The oddity and frightfulness of Christianity is that, more than any other tradition, it places its own set of ideas in front of us and passes them off as the things themselves. In that sleight-of-hand is its real danger.Michael Steinberghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17118718835605717691noreply@blogger.com