March 6, 2005
JUST A MINOR DOCTRINAL DISPUTE (Via Barry Meislin)
Death worshippers demand tolerance Associated Press, March 4th, 2005)
Hundreds of Mexican devotees of Saint Death — a cult worshipping the skeletal figure of death — marched through downtown Mexico City Friday to demand respect for their religion and its followers.Holding banners reading “Respect Religious Freedom” and “We are not criminals or drug addicts,” marchers drawn from some of the city's roughest barrios carried statues of the elegantly-clad Grim Reaper down the city's main boulevard.
The march was called in response to an investigation launched last month by Mexico's Interior Department into complaints that the church falsely registered itself as an offshoot of Roman Catholicism, which neither recognizes nor approve of the death cult.
Some of the anger was directed at the government — which has not yet decided whether to sanction the group — but there was also resentment at the official Catholic church and society at large for looking down at the Death worshippers.
“In many parishes, they say our people are all drug addicts or criminals,” said Juan Manuel Cortes, 27, who officiates masses at the main Mexico City death shrine in a crime-ridden section of the old downtown. “That's not true, but we also don't close our doors to anybody.”
“They say we have some bad characters, but don't they also in the Catholic church, where they worship San Judas Tadeo?” he noted, referring to an official Catholic saint, St. Jude Thaddeus, who has been informally adopted in Mexico as the patron of lost causes, thieves and police.
Lucia Sanchez, a street vendor who, like many on the march, carried white gladiolas in the procession behind the grinning skeleton shrines, said, “The Catholic church should remember it was once the new religion on the block here, too.” [...]
The group registered as a religious group in 2003 under the name The Mexico-US Tridentine Church, also known as the Traditional Mex-USA Church, allowing it to legally raise money and own property.
But the Mexican government said it was considering withdrawing official recognition of the church after an excommunicated member accused the cult of forcing its members to worship death and failing to stick to its bylaws.
As Barry Meislin asks: “Do they believe that life is the wages of sin?”
This kind of thing is a lot of fun for liberal Western secularists. Delighting in the discomfort of the Church and insisting all faiths are equally wrong, they will claim Senor Sanchez’s logic is irrefutable, rally to the cause of absolute religious freedom and proclaim the kind of faux-tolerance they do for misunderstood witches and peace-loving Albigensians. Then, when the inevitable happens, they will blame religion and claim it was all the fault of the Church.
Gee, Peter, your writing our stuff for us now!
Posted by: Robert Duquette at March 6, 2005 5:01 PMPeter, what are they doing that bothers you? How are their rather silly practices harming you?
In the last national census, something like 30,000 Australians registered their religion as Jedi. So what?
Tend your own garden.
Posted by: Bart at March 6, 2005 5:50 PMReading the headline, I figured it was about a Howard Dean speech.
Posted by: David Cohen at March 6, 2005 6:39 PMI would happily concede that pronouncing on what is and is not a valid religion is a very dicey business and that the benefit of doubt must be extended to toleration, but when I see otherwise intelligent people shrugging off or defending the right of death cults to troll the slums, I sense that we are in the grip of quite another kind of fundamentalism.
Posted by: Peter B at March 6, 2005 7:06 PMIf they are some kind of Thugee cult, I'd agree. But this seems to be merely another form of silliness that will run its course, not unlike Anton LeVey.
Posted by: Bart at March 7, 2005 6:52 AMOr Jim Jones. Bart, where do you think death cults usually end up? When the libertarian impulse becomes so absolute that it blithely ignores human nature and condemns the naive and innocent to forseeable death and pathology, it is simply a "beggar thy neighbour" creed for intellectuals.
Note we haven't even begun discussing what is the appropriate response. You are just sitting back saying: "show me a few dead children and then I'll think about it".
If they merely kill themselves like the comet-worshippers with the matching robes and Reeboks that is one thing. I don't really care what they do and their absence is a net improvement, not unlike culling the herd. When they feel empowered to murder people like Leo Ryan and his entourage, that is a different matter altogether. Groups that engage in kidnapping and other wrongful behavior like the Children of God or the Moonies are a different kettle of fish than the merely strange like the polygamous Mormons of Colorado City, Arizona or the phony Kabbalists with the red string.
The bottom line is that we can't protect people from being stupid or loopy, but we can try to protect them from being assaulted, kidnapped, murdered or swindled. And one man's deep and sincere faith can be another person's sleazy con.
The freedom of religion cannot be absolute. We obviously could not countenance an Aztec death cult in modern America. Grabbing people off the street and ripping their hearts out shocks the conscience. But drawing those lines is a difficult matter. Had we done in 1787 what the Russians currently do and that is delineate certain religions as 'approved' while barring others, there would be no Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists or Nazarenes. I need not ezplain why this would be an unacceptable state of affairs.
It requires an acceptance of the fact that others will do things which will be distasteful or weird to 99.99% of us but should probably still be permitted anyway.
Posted by: Bart at March 7, 2005 12:08 PM