Stealing a Saint

According to church tradition, Saint Mark founded the church in Alexandria and ultimately was buried in the church.  I should note that my source for this part of the story is satirist, Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad.   According to Twain, a fifth century Venetian priest had a dream of an angel who told him to steal the body of Saint Mark.  According to the angel, if Mark's body resided in Venice, then the city would rise in prominence among the nations.  If Mark's body ever left Venice, the city would perish from the earth.[1]  Leaving Twain, everyone seems to agree that centuries later AD 828, Venetian thieves managed to finally pull it off.  In the seventh century, the Egyptian Arabs had converted to the pork avoiding religion of Islam. Some enterprising Venetians stole the body from the church and buried it in pork products.  The Muslims came to search the ship, but shunned the halal sections which were forbidden.  The stolen body was entombed in St. Mark's Basilica.[2]

Here the Basilica has a slightly less nefarious version of events.  According to the Basilica, the Muslims were actually going to destroy the Alexandrian church for the marble.  The Venetian thieves took the body to comfort the Alexandrian Christians and save it from the Muslims.  Even in this overly amicable retelling of the story, they still have to deceive the local Christians.[3]

After the Basilica burned down, in 1094, supposedly Mark miraculously revealed his body out of solid stone.

It may seem incomprehensible today to believe that a human being can emerge from a column, from a block of stone. We are accustomed to considering stone and walls as inorganic, dead substances. But it wasn't that way in the pre-"rationalistic" ages. In the writings of Andrea Palladio (I quattro libri dell'architettura, 1570) we again find the concept of stone as being literally living, with characteristics we would now call organic. We may imagine a sort of identification between St. Mark and the structure of his burial place. The central point in the "legend" of the miracle of the column consists not only in linking the saint with the basilica which, since it contained his tomb, became a sepulchral basilica, but also in creating a direct bond between the material structure of the building and an event concerning the saint in person. An important effect of the miracle must have been intensified concrete contact with the patron saint and his relics, which is to say his body. The miracle occurred during a period of reinforced popular sensitivity about holy matters and it is legitimate to suppose that precisely this collective desire lay at the heart of the "legend".[4]

According to the Orthodox Church the thieves left the head of Mark, which the church ultimately lost over 250 years ago.  In 1968, the Catholic Church ultimately returned some of Mark's relics to Alexandria, but apparently some still remain in Venice.[5]

This feud between Venice and Alexandria should put Calvinism and Arminianism into perspective.  I follow the Coptic Pope on facebook and he recently commemorated the discovery of Mark's head.[6]  

 

Indonesian man persecuted for atheist statement on facebook

An Indonesian man who said that God did not exist in a posting on a Facebook page for atheists could face jail.

Civil servant Alexander Aan, 31, is now in protective police custody after he was attacked by an angry mob earlier this week.

He may also lose his job over his posting on the social networking site.

Atheism is a violation of Indonesian law under the founding principles of the country.

Indonesia - the world's most populous Muslim nation - recognises the right to practice five other religions aside from Islam, says the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta.

Local media said a mob attacked Mr Aan when he arrived for work at a government office on Wednesday.

Police said that according to Indonesian criminal law, anyone who tried to stop others believing in a faith could face up to five years in prison

The Facebook page where he made his comments is now unavailable. Supporters of Mr An have urged police to release him. [1]

The above article is from the BBC English version.  In the Turkish version, the above picture was posted containing this old picture from The Thinking Atheist facebook page.  Though he did not actually post his comments to this page, the picture has led to increased Muslim postings on The Thinking Atheist facebook page.

The six legal religions in Indonesia are "Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism. Others are officially banned. It also prohibits alternative interpretations of recognized religions, including Islam."[2]

Talk about your ridiculous laws!

Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio is coming to Houston

The genesis of these blogs about Nigerian Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio has to do with her conference that she is holding in Houston, Texas from March 14th - 25th.[1][2]  She is a noted exorcist of child witches. Earlier she attempted to use Nigerian law to ban all criticism of her.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Ukpabio alleges that the state law infringes on her freedom of religion. She seeks 2 billion naira (about $13 million) in damages, as well as “an order of perpetual injunction restraining the respondents” from interfering with or otherwise denouncing her church’s “right to practice their religion and the Christian religious belief in the existence of God, Jesus Christ, Satan, sin, witchcraft, heaven and hellfire.”

In other words, in the name of religious freedom, Ms. Ukpabio seeks a gag order on anyone who disagrees with her. [3]

She has made a number of claims and I will survey them over the next few days.  

The Religion We Need

Ok, why am I, a baptist, putting on a quote by a catholic apologist? Because nobody cares when I put on a quote by an Anglican converted by Catholics: i.e. C.S. Lewis. Seriously, in The Catholic Church and Conversion Chesterton was right on a lot, but he was wrong on the Catholic stuff. For example I am not a “bad Catholic” even though the “good Catholic”, Chesterton thinks so. Anyways the last two paragraphs quoted Chesterton gets it right, even though the conclusion that draws him to the Faith is wrong. I had to add the context otherwise it would make sense and thank goodness for google that allowed me to search for the excerpt without having to type it myself

The Catholic Church [ok, here he starts out wrong, but read on] is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. I have compared it with the New Religions; but this is exactly where it differs from the New Religions. The New Religions are in many ways suited to the new conditions; but they are only suited to the new conditions.[sure there are timeless stuff about the Catholic Church, but a lot of that was in vogue at the time]When those conditions shall have changed in only a century or so, the points upon which alone they insist at present will have become almost pointless. If the Faith has all the freshness of a new religion, it has all the richness of an old religion; it has especially all the reserves of an old religion. So far as that is concerned, its antiquity is alone a great advantage, and especially a great advantage for purposes of renovation and youth. It is only by the analogy of animal bodies that we suppose that old things must be stiff. It is a mere metaphor from bones and arteries. In an intellectual sense old things are flexible. Above all, they are various and have many alternatives to offer. There is a sort of rotation of crops in religious history; and old fields can lie fallow for a while and then be worked again. But when the new religion or any such notion has sown its one crop of wild oats, which the wind generally blows away, it is barren. A thing as old as the Catholic Church has an accumulated armoury and treasury to choose from; it can pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of another. It can call in the old world to redress the balance of the new.

Anyhow, the New Religions are suited to the new world; and this is their most damning defect. Each religion is produced by contemporary causes that can be clearly pointed out. Socialism is a reaction against Capitalism. Spiritualism is a reaction against Materialism; it is also in its intensified form merely the trail of the tragedy of the Great War. But there is a somewhat more subtle sense in which the very fitness of the new creeds makes them unfit; their very acceptability makes them inacceptable. Thus they all profess to be progressive because the peculiar boast of their peculiar period was progress; they claim to be democratic because our political system still rather pathetically claims to be democratic. They rushed to a reconciliation with science, which was often only a premature surrender to science. They hastily divested themselves of anything considered dowdy or old-fashioned in the way of vesture or symbol. They claimed to have bright services and cheery sermons; the churches competed with the cinemas; the churches even became cinemas. In its more moderate form the mood was merely one of praising natural pleasures, such as the enjoyment of nature and even the enjoyment of human nature. These are excellent things and this is an excellent liberty; and yet it has its limitations.

We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. In these current fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty allowing us a religion. These people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious, and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But the mood would exist even without the creed. They say they want a religion to be social, when they would be social without any religion. They say they want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without any religion. They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion. They say they want a religion like this because they are like this already. They say they want it, when they mean that they could do without it.

It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood. It is very different when some of the saints preached social reconciliation to fierce and raging factions who could hardly bear the sight of each others’ faces. It was a very different thing when charity was preached to pagans who really did not believe in it; just as it is a very different thing now, when chastity is preached to new pagans who do not believe in it. It is in those cases that we get the real grapple of religion; and it is in those cases that we get the peculiar and solitary triumph of the Catholic faith. It is not in merely being right when we are right, as in being cheerful or hopeful or humane. It is in having been right when we were wrong, and in the fact coming back upon us afterwards like a boomerang. One word that tells us what we do not know outweighs a thousand words that tell us what we do know. And the thing is all the more striking if we not only did not know it but could not believe it. It may seem a paradox to say that the truth teaches us more by the words we reject than by the words we receive.  [1]
G.K. Chesterton