Hours later, after mild resistance and insults from the ex-nuns and the intervention of psychologists, about 65 defeated ex-nuns, escorted by policewomen, walked out calmly in their black habits — some carrying guitars, others tambourines or small drums...They were disobedient:
About 150 police in riot gear went into the compound to find the ex-nuns defiantly singing religious songs and playing instruments, Puzewicz said.
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"Today's police intervention was a sort of act of desperate aid for people who for the past two years have lived in very unusual conditions, in a closed environment, in seclusion, in uncertainty, where various forms of thought take shape," the PAP news agency quoted Zycinski as saying.
the ex-nuns appeared to have been "manipulated" psychologically.During questioning, the ex-friar "didn't respond to questions in any topical, concrete or logical way or to the charges," Bednarczyk said. "He also didn't give any logical answer to his place of residence, but instead made some religious references."AP/Yahoo 10.Oct.07
Mother Jadwiga reportedly is a charismatic figure who claimed to have religious visions, and was attempting to transform the convent into a contemplative order.
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At 9am this morning, a debt collector with an eviction order for the 70 people remaining inside the building knocked in vain at the convent’s door, which was finally opened by a locksmith, escorted by the police.thenews.pl
The police detained the former Mother Superior of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Bethany Family Jadwiga Ligocka, who was the main reason for the sisters’ disobedience, and the former Franciscan Roman Komaryczko, who was behaving aggressively towards the officers.
[...]
One of the priests asked of his opinion about the conduct of the disobedient sisters said that, “Such behaviour is a classic example of a sect”.
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"It is a sad case for the (Catholic) church and for those who disobeyed the church and ended in such a situation," Warsaw Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz told PAP news agency.Reuters/Yahoo
He said the nuns could come back to the Catholic community if they repented and obeyed the rules.
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So. Dawkins finally throws his weight at a real opponent, which leaves me at least clambering for purchase, and then this, which has a tremendous light coming from it somehow. I'm discombobulated but gratified, amused - nervous, but still ragingly pissed off.
The nuns and their worldly shepherd are excommunicated for short-circuiting the proprietary middleman relationship. Can't go directly to the Almighty because we have all the legal documentation, you'll have to go through us, or over us, and we're way too big for you to do that. So they're crazy and amusing because of course there's nothing to what they think they believe and the Catholic Church is only significant because it's so huge and old and politically and economically powerful. Not to mention various intrigues and conspiracies that function like outriders in front of its vast bulk, sweeping up the pathogenic and threateningly adamant truth-seekers, and the "truer" believers.
What we'd like is for there to be a firm and confident decision as to its validity, the validity of its tenets and dogma anyway, as a religion and as an institution of human affairs - instead of all this homemade argumentation. What we get is all this nebulosity - is, isn't, might be, could be. The English monarchy has a similar presence now, with way less on-the-ground power, and way way less behind-the-scenes.
The simpleton aspect is hey, these people are acting, and being treated, just like the early Christians ducking for cover from the Legionnaires or whoever it was the Roman pigs threw at them back when. Which is something most sects end up claiming eventually. Which doesn't make it either bogus or valid.
But there's that light, Where's it coming from?
And Dawkins. Interesting to see what Sam Harris has to say if anything about Dawkins pointing out how much more powerful Jews are in current events as a minority compared to the significantly larger segment of the demographic the atheist minority occupies.
What has me flummoxed is the biology. Which is the bottom line generally for the non-believers. But it's schoolhouse biology, after-the-fact science. Where the "truth" is always triumphant, once it's made plain. Having the right answer means you win. Which is true if you're trying to land on the moon, but meaningless if you're in a combat zone.
Most of the time these days it reminds me of someone getting mugged and trying to lecture the aggressor on his moral failings. A somewhat courageous move, but easily refuted by the "I don't got to show you no badge" gambit, or one of the myriad other versions that essentially are the predator's teeth and digestive system in action, to which the only viable response is superior force, which has nothing to do with truth, except inasmuch as it can be inspirational to know you're in the "right".
But then you get these rogue actors who get so far out into being wrong being right would be suicidal or exceedingly detrimental. So they create delusions of rightness to carry them forward. And that's survival stuff, biology. There has to be some forum for debate for that to be a liability, some place where the smug superiority of the non-delusional can reveal its irrefutable glory.
Yet there's that light. The innocence there, those tambourines and guitars. Something in this world hates innocence.
The way "kumbaya" is used to confirm scorn for the weak and sentimental. The laughter of the already-sodomized as the new prisoner gets his ass broken in - the need for the cynical to see themselves as pragmatists - "that's just the way things are" - not defeated losers but realistic, more central to what is than the more optimistic delusional.
Mother rats quiet in the old old walls, feeding their young. What? The shift in perspective that undoes the valence, because the foundation has to be fictional, it's the guiding story of our own importance, that's what those guys mean when they say science offers no moral foundations, because really there's no difference between that rat family and anyone else's, without the assertion of affinity, the assertion from affinity. So it's a struggle to defend and provide for that affinity group, family tribe race whatever, biology with its warm tones prominent. Unless there's a connect outside the system. Which makes biology then only useful, a tool, a path toward other, higher elevations. Something then becomes necessary to guide and contain biology, to direct the user through and past the meat snares of the day-to-day.
Which is religion. Religion's mandate is to communicate with what's already out there, beyond the observer's rickety platform, or in there, or whatever spatial analogy works; science's mandate is to move toward that thing under its own steam on its own terms. It's specious to assume there's nothing out there, crazy really, yet it's crazily arrogant to assume you've got the only direct line to the whatever that is.
Arrogance...where do I keep seeing that? Everywhere, baby. Except in the "ex-nuns" being led to the police vans.
Maybe the light's in the computer? Maybe it's the new coffee beans I tried this morning? My blood sugar cycling out of control.
Or maybe just maybe the things that kept us intact as a species ever since we first learned to sing were more than just technologies of advancing scale, as well as more than just raw obedience to inherited rules. Something less susceptible to the conscienceless and heartless scalpel of autistic hyper-rationality, but more solid than the priests' memorized cant and flatulent hot air.
When I was a kid they told us cavemen suffered all day long unless they were too stupid to feel anything much at all, but I've had visions of people from those times with flowers and laughter and singing and strength and health - with everything we really value there in place at least sometimes already, and the people held together, kept intact by both strands of what we were and are, thinking and feeling, knowing and wondering, humble and deft, quick with pride, selfless and patient - all of it there, all of it terribly pressed on from all sides, beleageured, shaped and damaged, crippled and refined and made strong, and kept back from what's really true by that pressure.
The falsity of this time gives many of us despair. Hopelessness is easily maintained by a daily reading of the news. The absurdity of so much of that news confirms the worst of the arrogant and weakens the resolve of many. But there's that light.
I had a dream last night, or a hypnogogic thought, I was sitting at a keyboard made of little glistening beetles, alive and sensitive to my fingers' pressing, and as I pressed them, just like this, as I'm doing now writing this, a cloud of tiny flying insects shaped and reformed in response, changing colors as they responded, and blurred away into the air, indefinably connected to I don't know what, but brightly, in a day and a world filled with light.
