#onlysky

My latest article for OnlySky is called Islamic Dress Codes and Women’s Rights. 

Here is a sentence: “If the object of Islamic modesty is to protect women, it’s not working.” Here is another sentence: “Undeniably, there is a political context here that matters.”

My article on OnlySky about the role of the Catholic Church in Vietnam. 

Who owns morality? 

I have some exciting news! 

Well, it's exciting for me. It's probably irrelevant to you. I'm now officially an author with OnlySky which is a secular media network based in America. 

I am planning to write many articles for them. The first article is about Catholic control of Irish schools. It’s called: A constant struggle: Catholics still control Irish schools.

When I grew up in Ireland in the 1980s, it would take months for a movie to go from general release in America into my local cinema. Nowadays, everything is everywhere all at once. Apparently, anti-trans propaganda is following the 1980s protocol.

You might have heard a story. It’s always the same. It comes from someone you trust. This person insists that it was told to him by someone close to the source. A child in a local school is identifying as a cat. This child has furthermore demanded a litter tray be provided by the school to accommodate their new identity.

It may seem like this is a harmless fun story that adds some local colour to your morning news trawl. However, they are dangerous lies. Right-wing anti-trans politicians use these lies to galvanise public opinion against trans kids.

If you can’t spot the pipeline from litter box stories to damaging policies targeting trans people, you are in the right place.

Where did this stupid story come from?

The source of this myth may be an op-ed published in the Christian Post in 2016. The title of that piece is “Should We Provide Litter Boxes for People Who Identify as Cats?” Refreshingly,  there is no suggestion in the piece that it has ever happened. The writer is also kind enough to unambiguously link his hypothetical scenario to an attack on “transgender rights.”

There was a dramatic uptick in these stories in 2022. This was possibly related to the 2022 mid-term elections in November of that year.

In January 2022, a school in Michigan issued a statement on Facebook about the “false message” and “wild accusations”. The comments underneath that post demonstrate a very common reaction to the debunking of these stories. One Facebook user said that while that story had been proved false, “it wouldn’t be surprising if it did happen”. For some, it seems, the rumours do so much damage that a full retraction does nothing to repair it. Maybe that’s the point.

In March 2022, Republican Nebraska state senator Bruce Bostelman apologised for spreading the rumour. At least one newspaper was good enough to explain how this rumour is linked to “laws to ban transgender students from using bathrooms.”

In August 2022, Boston Children’s Hospital had received “a large volume” of threats which appeared to be a “very coordinated campaign.” The hospital “does not perform genital surgeries as part of gender-affirming care on patients under the age of 18.”

In September 2022, Republican law-makers in Tennessee claimed there was a “crisis” of cat students across the state. There was not one single case.

On 3 October 2022, CNN debunked the “bizarre hoax claim”, this time promulgated by Scott Jensen, a Republican candidate in Minnesota.

On 12 October 2022, the rumour got a bump from Joe Rogan. “My friend, his wife is a schoolteacher and she works at a school,” he said, citing his source. It’s always someone you know. He later very begrudgingly retracted the claim.

There were soon similar claims in Iowa, Colorado, Ohio, Illinois and even Prince Edward Island in Canada.

In late October, John Oliver demonstrated how trans people are targeted at every level of society by violence and intimidation. Part of his show discussed the “humiliating nonsense” spread about trans people, “perhaps the stupidest of which” is the litter box rumour.

In November, a school in New Hampshire had to deal with the “disruptive and demeaning hoax”. Again, it was emphasises that these stories are maliciously “used to ostracize LGBTQ students”.

So far, the only case of any school anywhere using cat litter boxes involves rather grim preparations in case of school shootings in a Colorado school.

We have this in Ireland too.

Bang on schedule, in January 2023, a school in Cork reported “a string of completely false claims” about a student identifying as a cat. The school was good enough to explain the these stories were invented “for the purpose of fear-mongering over gender non-conformity.”  

Just last month, similar rumours were spread about Thornhill College in Derry in Northern Ireland. The school described the rumours as an elaborate hoax.

Why would people believe this gibberish?

It’s a mix of yellow-press sensationalism and our old friend, conformation bias. Every single official who made this claim in public was right-wing. Right-wing politicians in the Republican party are currently engaged in a “coordinated national campaign against trans rights”. The ultimate expression of this campaign is hundreds of anti-trans laws in almost every state.

If you already suspect that young people choosing their identity is inappropriate, this story will appeal to you. If you already believe that trans people should not be accommodated in the education system, this story will appeal to you. If you have anti-trans feelings but have an atavistic understanding that this puts you on the wrong side of history, you can gloat along with a story that hits all your prejudices without mentioning trans people at all.

What can I do?

If we have been fooled by these stories, we shouldn’t feel too bad. They are specifically designed to take advantage of our weak human brains. The good news is we can be better. When we hear a story that seems fantastical, we can wait for confirmation from any reputable news sources. My aunt who knows someone who heard the story is not a reputable news source. If a story seems to fit dramatically into our opinion on a very tense cultural issue, we can be suspicious. We all love the dopamine hit we get from Being Right but we don’t have to let it control us.

And we don’t have to allow far-right lawmakers manipulate us so easily into helping cause lasting damage to vulnerable people.

In Ireland, the first day of February is the feast day of St. Brigid. We call it Lá Fhéile Bríde. This will also be the name of the new annual public holiday to honour frontline workers. The saintly name of this public holiday has been criticised by Atheist Ireland. They correctly feel there is probably enough Catholic Church in Irish public life.

When I was in school in the 1980s, we would make a little woven decoration out of reeds called a St. Brigid’s Cross as in the image above. I don’t know if children still do it but at the risk of stating the obvious, there is nothing particularly Christian about the practice. 

Originally, this festival would have been the pagan festival of Imbolc, the start of Spring. Early Irish Christians had a practice of subsuming local pagan customs and legends. With a minimal amount of tinkering, they re-packaged them as Christian. In this case, they didn’t even bother changing the name. The features and responsibilities of the Celtic goddess Brigid were grafted onto an abbess in Kildare of uncertain historicity to form the myth of St. Brigid. 

They are “both” associated with poetry, learning, healing, protection, blacksmithing and domesticated animals. They are also both associated with holy wells (which were almost uniformly repurposed from pagan healing wells) in Kildare and elsewhere. 

The reclamation of St. Brigid

In more recent times, the myth of St. Brigid has been reclaimed by modern Irish feminists, who are inspired by her legends. “Thick-skinned and defiant,” she navigated the patriarchal and misogynist society of mediaeval Ireland. It is a mark of how restrictive conditions for women were that her primary form of rebellion was a refusal to get married.

During 2018, Ireland was racked with tender and vicious abortion referendum debates. In the middle of this a Galway feminist claimed that St. Brigid was Ireland’s first abortionist. The claim comes from “Of Vanishing Foetuses and Maidens Made-Again” by Maeve Callan. An early source relates that a woman with a crisis pregnancy approached Brigid. The saint then “caused the foetus to disappear without coming to birth, and without pain.” This abortion miracle was apparently common among early Irish saints.

Brigid was a lynchpin legend of the early Catholic Church in Ireland. It is ironic that feminists can deploy her life and deeds against the restrictive and harmful laws promoted by the Catholic Church.

There will be a protest outside the Dáil (Irish parliament) today to protest the troubling rise in cases of violence against women. Organisers have named it the St. Brigid’s Day Protest.

Here’s the thing: No one knows for sure if the words of Jesus in the gospels are his actual words. We’re fairly certain that some of them definitely aren’t. There is even a not-very-good argument to be made that Jesus never existed.

Most biblical scholars accept that Jesus probably did exist. They agree that at least some of his words in the bible were probably spoken by him. But this is a particularly murky area of history. For clarity, we will follow the general consensus of bible scholars.

Did Jesus want to establish Christianity?

The standard Christian interpretation of the New Testament is that God lived among us as a man. He came back from the dead, and now we can all bask in the glow of his sacrificial act. Consequently, Jesus set up a religion more open than Judaism called Christianity.

But apart from a few scattered quotes, this view isn’t supported by the gospels. These quotes are so at odds with the general trend, they could well be verses added much later by “concerned citizens.” Bible scholars call these verses “interpolations.”

For instance, the famous line, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” is almost certainly an interpolation from an over-zealous copyist who didn’t make much of an effort to hide his work. Both gospel allusions to the Trinity are also considered interpolations (even by Christian scholars) for equally good reasons. For one, the doctrine of the Trinity was not developed until the third century. Additionally, any verses which can be reliably dated to before that time do not mention the Trinity.

So, if the verses where Jesus looks like he’s setting up a doctrinal basis for a new church were added after that church was set up, what can the remaining original verses (if they can even be regarded as such) tell us about what Jesus was actually trying to do?

The religion of Jesus

Jesus was a Jew. He was circumcised and went to temple. He observed all the Jewish traditions and holidays and rituals from his birth until his death—although in his defense, that would slow anyone down. The twelve apostles were all Jews. They were all circumcised and went to temple. After the death of Jesus, they continued to observe all the Jewish traditions, holidays and rituals. Jesus and his apostles all saw themselves as fundamentally Jewish. Perhaps they were even more Jewish that the Pharisees and the Sadducees. In the gospels, these representatives of the established Jewish faith constantly get out-Jewed by Jesus in various hot arguments.

The identity of Jesus cannot be understood apart from his Jewishness. Without exception, his teaching can be explained entirely through the Judaism of his time. In one gospel, Jesus unambiguously avers: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.”

Enter Christianity

Christianity as we know it today was invented by Paul. Jesus, for the reasons stated above, would probably be horrified at the shambling mess Paul made of Judaism in order to create the new religion.

First, the early apostles did not call themselves Christians, at least not until they gathered in Antioch years after the death of Jesus. Until then, they were referred to, and regarded themselves, as Jews. As Alister McGrath put it in his book, Christianity, “they seemed to regard Christianity as an affirmation of every aspect of contemporary Judaism, with the addition of one extra belief – that Jesus was the Messiah.”

Second, while the New Testament is presented as the gospels being expanded on by the Pauline epistles, scholars generally accept that the letters of Paul pre-date the gospels. The purpose of the gospels may be to “fill in” Paul’s writings. Paul’s letters are notoriously thin on detail when it comes to the life of Jesus. For Paul (and all Christians), things only got interesting when Jesus died. By his own admission, Paul never spoke to Jesus or met him. He developed his understanding of Jesus entirely through “divine revelation”. This is one of the least reliable paths to truth available.

Third, and perhaps the most convincing element in understanding that Jesus may not have envisioned a “Christianity” as such, the New Testament records several serious rifts in approach and understanding between Paul and Peter (the assigned best friend of Jesus) and James (one of the brothers of Jesus).

Paul versus the Jerusalem crew

James was the brother of Jesus and Peter was a close friend of Jesus. They ran the church from Jerusalem after Jesus died. Peter, James and the Jerusalem crew strongly believed that anyone who joined them would have to be Jewish. This would meant following all the laws including the dietary prohibitions and circumcision. These laws made it difficult to convert Gentiles who were more emotionally attached to the foreskins than the Jews.

After a big argument, James decided that circumcision was not necessary for Gentile converts. However they would still have to obey all the Jewish dietary restrictions. Paul agreed. Predictably, he later unilaterally trashed the dietary restrictions too.

It’s both terrifying and urgent. We can only imagine how Paul felt.

The Jerusalem crew were so hardcore that they confronted Peter when they heard he had merely shared his religious opinions with some goyim over a non-kosher meal. His defence is hilarious. You should read it. It seems clear that everyone before Paul strongly believed that they were in a strictly Jews-only club.

It seems very implausible that everyone who knew Jesus, his closest friends and family members, would somehow be mistaken about his intentions but a man who never met Jesus and knew nothing about him personally would get the correct information from the voices in his head. Yet almost all Christians are currently engaging with their religious beliefs along the lines outlined by Paul and not by Jesus.

Back to Jesus

Throughout the gospels, there is a sense of impending doom (which reaches a hallucinatory crisis in the Apocalypse). The “time is fulfilled”, the “kingdom of heaven is at hand”, this generation “shall not pass” until it’s all over, some of you will still be alive when the kingdom of god rolls in. “Be alert,” this could happen any minute now. The Apocalypse will “shortly be done” and so on.

This is why Christians from every time period believe that Jesus will come back in their lifetime. It’s difficult to take the New Testament in any way seriously without coming to that conclusion. Try it. Try reading the Apocalypse and imagine that you believe the basic thrust of Christianity. It’s both terrifying and urgent. We can only imagine how Paul felt.

What did Jesus want?

It looks like Jesus never intended to abandon the Jewish religion. He wanted to provide a more urgent, messiah-centric way of interpreting it. For many years after his death, his followers still hoped to reform Judaism. Only when that effort failed did Christianity become a new religion.

Jesus was a Jewish rabbi outside the established system who railed against it much like the prophets in Old Testament times. Fig trees aside, the only times the New Testament shows Jesus as genuinely annoyed concern the corruption, greed and hypocrisy of people who regarded themselves as “good” Jews.

When it looked like he was preaching in opposition to the Jewish law, he always made sure to explain that he was not. When asked to boil down the entire teachings of the Torah to a single sentence, he said to honour god and treat people how you would like to be treated, something which was preached in almost identical terms by the influential Rabbi Hillel fifty years before him. No one ever accused Hillel of debasing the law.

Jesus may have seen himself as the natural end-point of a long chain of prophets and rabbis. It must have seemed like a very end-pointy time to the first-century Jews of Judaea. His friends agreed that he was the Messiah and proceeded on that basis. When he died, that dream did not die with him. In fact, the dream stayed very much alive until Paul, through hard work and sheer determination, personally beat it into a whole new shape.