Rand Paul, Libertarian candidate for Kentucky’s seat in the US Senate and son of former presidential candidate Ron Paul, is set to take office January 2011 to replace Jim Bunning. During the election campaign, an article in GQ magazine “revealed” that while an undergraduate at Baylor (the world’s largest Baptist university) he was a member of a “secret society” called the “NoZe Brotherhood.”

A fellow member of this “society,” John Green, said the group “aspired to blasphemy” in response to the schools dogmatic Baptist religiosity.  The president of the school at the time described them as “lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious.”  According to one informant, a female student who was Paul’s teammate on the swim team Paul and a fellow NoZe Brotherhood member kidnapped her:

“He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.”

Paul and his friend then drove her into the country and stopped near a stream and forced her to engage in taboo religious acts.

“They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him . . . they blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

Jack Conway‘s campaign took a literalist interpretation of parts of this story (at least for the purposes of the election), using the following image in advertising against Paul:

And during a debate, Conway attacked Paul saying:

“When is it ever a good idea to tie up a woman and ask her to kneel before a false idol, your god, which you call Aqua Buddha?”

Aside from the fascinating political questions (among them: does conway believe that? Is he calling him on his hypocrisy or calling him a ‘bad Christian’?), my first question was: what exactly is an Aqua Buddha? Paul, now senator-elect, hasn’t said much more than a statement from his campaign:

“During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas.”

So, we’re left to try and piece together this “ritual,” and ask: was it a practical joke? a stunt? an act of violence or intimidation? or religious activity?  While it’s easy to dismiss it as a stunt, a discordian game in the face of the pervasive Baptist dogma of their school, the choice of words, actions and the way they’ve constructed this “idol” speaks to their religious experiences and beliefs in a way worth noting.

So what is an Aqua Buddha?  According to Conway’s ad above, it appears to be very literally, an aqua colored Buddha.  But the informant’s interpretation of their motivation suggests it was a stand-in for the “golden calf,” an idol constructed in the minds of these two young men to represent precisely what they were forbidden to worship: Nature, in the form of water, and a figure from a non-christian religion, the Buddha.  Read as such, and depending on the victims beliefs and the field of cultural and social factors involved, an act like this could be religious torture.  Imagine the story from a different angle: a young Buddhist woman kidnapped and dragged to a creek by two young men and then forced to proclaim her faith in Christ.

In this instance however, the victim (now a clinical psychologist) doesn’t make that claim saying instead: ”They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke . .  I never saw Randy after that—for understandable reasons, I think.”

I looked forward to hearing Andy Letcher speak at Horizons.  I hadn’t heard of his work or his book “Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom,” but the synopsis for his presentation sounded interesting:

For those who have encountered the sacred mushroom, the psilocybin experience is like an ancient codex whose glyphs are at once baffling and clear. To make sense of it, each must perform an act of translation or interpretation by which the strange is rendered familiar. But how should this be done? In the post-war period alone an original psychological framework has given way to mysticism, itself replaced in turn by the language of shamanism.

Here, I want to draw attention away from the mushroom experience itself – the usual province of trip-lit – to a consideration of the ways it has been interpreted throughout history. For, contrary to received wisdom, very few cultures have decoded the mushroom as we do. I shall ask a fundamental question: does the mushroom bring genuine transcendence, or are the experiences it occasions forever bound by culture?

(Horizons Conference Program, 2009)

Letcher began by situating himself in academia and describing how he arrived at religious studies.  He had started with an interest in ecology and direct action and was then invited to pursue a PhD in religion.  He explained that he was looking critically at the beliefs of the psychedelic community and we might not like his findings.  He discussed hermeneutics and told the audience that they to, even if they didn’t know what it meant, were hermeneuticists.

He made it clear that his is a scholarly approach, and he won’t give a pass to any of the myth making that is going on in the psychedelic community.  In fact, he wants to debunk those myths.  He expressed his intent to “debunk” the UFO cults, the 2012 movement, the valorization of R. Gordon Wasson, and other mythologies constructed within the psychedelic community.  He discussed the problem of ‘seeing’ mushrooms in ancient art when they aren’t there – and suggested that this can be debunked because they are not in fact mushrooms.  Why?  Because they don’t look like mushrooms.

I agreed with his main point that our interpretations of experience are based (to some degree) in culture, and that we are always engaging in a process of meaning making when we interpret, describe, recount and mythologize experience.  But what wasn’t clear to me is why he seemed to be so hostile toward the mythologies that were being constructed within the psychedelic community. So I asked:

“I understand why you would like to see a more rigorous academic discourse on psychedelics, but aren’t the myths being constructed around Terence McKenna and the 2012 communities not something to be debunked, but something we should look at using that same academic rigor?”

He took this question (which I realize now I should have phrased more precisely) as an opportunity to discuss why he didn’t like the 2012 movement – an answer that boiled down to two things: because it’s millenarian, and that it doesn’t leave room for free will (this answer seemed to exclude the Daniel Pinchbeck brand of 2012ism/mayanism).  If I’d had a chance for a follow up, I would have been more specific and a little more forceful in my critique, asking:

“Why would a scholar of religion be interested in debunking ANY myths?  Isn’t myth the object of our study?  Are you also, for example, interested in debunking the myth systems of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam or is your interest in debunking restricted to these specific new religious movements and myths developing around the psychedelic community?”

(Posted about Bike Blessing on Drunk and In Charge of a Bicycle.)

The pope’s vehicle is much stranger than I remember. He really looks like an artifact in a display case at a museum. An interesting blend of security and visibility.

ZDnet posts an article called “Mac OS X Leopard installation as a spiritual practice“. I’m engaging in that practice right now – preparing my various Macs for the upgrade, the archive and install and the clean install. But it’s more than the installation that is spiritual.

To retrieve the software, I walked through the rain to wait in line at the Apple Store on 59th and 5th. A huge illuminated glass cube rising out of the midtown/central park architecture, the flagship Apple store can only be described as a temple.

After waiting in line, I was greeted by a collection of Apple store ‘evangelists’ standing by the entrance cheering and clapping for us. Upon entering the store, I was handed a “Leopard” t-shirt and encouraged to use the “Leopard only” purchasing line. Holographic DVD box in hand, I proceeded down a long path with ropes on either side to a special cashier who took my electronic form of payment for this virtual environment in a box I have been religiously anticipating for months…

The operating system on the hill… has arrived.

In The Soul of Cyberspace Zaleski quotes Rabbi Yosef Y. Kazen, founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch Web site, description of his “Global Interactive Database of Good Deeds” in which users type in an act of goodness or kindness and a ‘vitrual menorah’ lights up:

“[this database adheres to] our perspective that the Internet is a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of swords into ploughshares”

The text referenced is: “And He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaih 2:4, Neviim, The Tanakh)

O’Leary (1996) as quoted by Højsgaard & Warburg in “Religion and Cyberspace”

As we move from text-based transmissions into an era where the graphic user interface becomes the standard, and new generations of programs such as Netscape are developed which allow the transmission of images and music along with words, we can predict that [the available resources of] online religion will [expand beyond text to include] iconography, image, music, and sound — if not taste and smell…Surely computer rituals will be devised which exploit the new technologies to maximum symbolic effect.