An agnostic on religion

This blog post from Aaron was sitting unfinished for a while... it starts back at Easter...

We spent Easter in Ayacucho, Peru. The city's Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebration is the grandest in a very Catholic nation. The festivities last for over a week, beginning the friday before Palm Sunday, and continuing through Easter. We arrived in the city on Wednesday and started visiting the city's many cathedrals. On Good Friday, we watched, in elbow-to-elbow packed streets, a procession of hundreds of candle bearers made up of soldiers, city officials and religious leaders. A toddler on her dad's shoulders watched with us as the procession's centerpiece, a life size, bloody, Jesus statue lying in a glass coffin, was carried past while somber brass and drums played. The next day, Saturday, was a surprise - there was a small running of the bulls accompanied by drinking that lasted through the day and night. I heard one explanation that this is because God can not see you between crucifixion and resurrection... hmmm... That night, about twenty very homemade looking towers of fireworks, three stories tall and complete with hacked together pin-wheels, rockets and flying saucers, took turns showing their stuff and lighting up the main plaza. Sunday at 5am, in celebration of the resurrection, a sunrise procession carried a massive pyramidal structure, covered by thousands of candles and topped with a statue of a risen Jesus, around the central plaza while more fireworks exploded. (Ayacucho photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronboydyo/2008320323Ayacucho)

To put it simply, Holy Week in Ayacucho makes you think about religion, whether you're a worshiping believer, or, like me, an agnostic looking in, wondering what it all means.

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that there is a huge deal of misconception between people of different faiths, and certainly between believers and non-believers. Obama's speech on race a couple months ago opened an important conversation about some divisive misconceptions. Kristof of the New York Times wrote a great follow up article with the stark observation that "Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives."

I think Kristof is spot on. Can similar statements be made regarding faith? Do non-believers know what believers think, and vice versa? I don't think so, though in this case the ignorance may run equally in both directions.

Here's a pretty scary statistic from a 2003 Kristof article (yeah, I like Kristof): "Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view. "

About 10 years ago I was sitting at dinner with a good friend and his family, all of whom were practicing Catholics. Somehow my own agnosticism came up, and I was asked by the mother if "I felt a hole in my life because I did not believe in God?" The question caused discomfort for most of the table. It was a terrific question for its honesty, sincerity and concern, and it demonstrated, particularly in the table-side squirming, a huge communication gap.

Being an agnostic and an engineer and having studied science, I have had many discussions about religion with non-believers. Also, I have heard the impossibility of God's existence preached with all the furor of a Jeremiah Wright church sermon. If you turn off the sound, riled up non-believers rationalizing atheism might appear just like righteous believers denouncing heathens, though I think the former smirk a bit more and the latter get redder in the face. More common than atheist rant, though, is the misconception that people who do not believe in God are more rational than those who do. It's an error that mirrors the ignorance that believers own morality.

Before spending time in South America, before meeting so many Catholic faithful, before seeing the charity, before reading the history, my strongest images of the Catholic church were its scandalous priests and the apparent hypocrisy of its centuries of wealth. I suspect (trying to find an excuse for my ignorance) this is because news loves a scandal and because the church's wealth is an easy target for non Catholics. Letting those images define the Catholic church is like letting the worst of U.S. leaders and businessmen, e.g. multinational oil barons, define us and the American Dream. I suppose every institution, religious or secular, has its extremists who pervert an otherwise good thing.

Recently, Melissa and I visited the huge Convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa. Taking up a very large city block, it is best described as a Citadel, with huge stone walls that keep nuns from seeing the outside world. There's a little gift shop with crafts made by the nuns presently living in the remaining private section. Outside this gift shop is a sort of mission statement from the nuns. The last paragraph really struck me. It started something like (you'll have to trust that my memory has this right enough), "The purpose of our life is LOVE." Jesus Christ was not actually mentioned in the first statement. What struck me is how easily I related to this statement when the name of Jesus was removed. I wondered if the nuns had done this on purpose. The paragraph went on to explain that this love is indeed for Jesus Christ, but also for the people of the outside world, whom they are devoted to in habitual prayer. They drew more attention to love, in all caps, than to Jesus. (photos of the monasterio can be found in this album: http://picasaweb.google.com/aaronboydyo/200804100415ArequipaAndMonasterioSantaCatalina)

I'm a capitalist and an agnostic, but perhaps I have a lot in common with these nuns. At least, I'd like to think I have more in common with them than with certain secular capitalist extremists.

Kuélap, and life without a shower

We have reached our record for most consecutive days without a proper shower or bath: 5. Several factors made this record possible. At first, we were just traveling a lot and were a little lazy. Then we were both nearly bed-ridden with equal bouts of "Bienvenidos a comida Peruana." Finally, when we were good and ready to shower, our hostel didn't have power. Not wanting to take a cold, dark shower in an unfamiliar bathroom at 3:30 am, we decided to press on to our next destination: a relative splurge where not only a shower but also a hot tub(!) awaited us.

That was last Saturday morning when we found ourselves without power. We were staying in Chachapoyas (or "Chacha"=, Peru, a northern highland town named after a pre-Incan civilization . (Losing power for a few hours or even a couple days is not uncommon in these small towns. Btw, mini tungsten flashlights blow compared to LED lamps.) We made it down to the street by 4 am to await our bus to the ruins of a Chachapoyan citadel known as Kuélap. It's not that we particularly like 4 am buses, this was just the best we could find. In Peru and Ecuador, unless you're willing to pay for a guided tour, transportation to many popular tourist destinations is surprisingly limited.

4:15 am rolls around, and we´re wondering if something has gone wrong. At 4:25 am, an already full taxi pulls up... This couldn´t be our "bus," could it?

"Van A Kuélap, si?"

Yep, that was our bus. A child moved to the rear of the hatchback, and we squeezed into the backseat with two other adults and a baby. Melissa had to hover as she pulled the door close, then fell into place while all of our hips were forced into a working configuration. Fortunately, our driver was quite skillful. He drove like a rally racer over the bumpy dirt roads, knowingly and artfully avoiding the worst of the road´s irregularities. Thank God the road itself was all we could make out by the headlights - on the return trip we learned much of our route was flanked by a sheer drop off some odd hundred meters. As for not being bathed while crammed into tight company with strangers, not a problem. The campesinos have a different bathing standard, so we were right at home, so to speak.

We arrived at the site´s parking lot at something to 7 am. We had our breakfast of whatever we found at a small market and took in the view, from about 3100 m, of green Andean valley. Aaron mentioned that we´re starting to take these breathtaking views for granted. It really is gorgeous country in Peru and Ecuador, and it has been a bit of a revelation for us that beauty alone is not enough to attract tourists. Outside of Machu Picchu and the Galapagos, there just are not enough creature comforts and luxuries to attract big money tourism.

It was a short and easy 2.5 km climb up to Kuélap. The fortified city crowns a mountain ridge affording great views and a serious defensive advantage in battles fought over 1000 years ago. You enter just as the Chachapoyans did, and just as their enemies attempted, walking through a long and narrow passage which forced armies into nearly single file while the Chachapoyans attacked from atop imposing 11 m stone walls.

I´m sure, by modern standards, they had a hard life, but what pride they must have lived with perched on top of the world in this fortified kingdom. In all, millions of cubic feet of stone were used to build this place. There is something appealing about the hundreds of round stone dwellings that housed the Chachapoyans. Perhaps it´s just the fact that they didn't go with the square, maybe it's that the roundness just fits well with the the roundness of nature, or perhaps it´s just that it's easy to imagine a bunch of cute little gnomes scampering in and out of these homes. (The gnome fantasy is gone when Melissa reminds Aaron that the walls of this place were adorned with enemies' heads.) Melissa discovered that the acoustics in these cylindrical stone homes is terrific -- hmmm... maybe Aaron will find an excuse to build one of these some day.

The vast majority of the site has not yet been excavated, and is overgrown with trees, bromeliads (did you know that a pineapple is a bromeliad?) and flowers including some orchids. The currently financed excavation project is to last another ten years, and tourism to this site is still relatively undeveloped.

The ruins were inspiring, but after three hours of wandering and imagining fending off an Orc invasion (we actually saw The Return of the King in our hotel the previous night) we were ready to make progress towards our shower and hot tub. We hiked the return 2.5 km, and then about 9km to the hamlet of Maria. According to our Lonely Planet, it would only be another hour to our lodge. Damn thing was wrong again. After a long day and 23km of trails (mostly flat, but still tiring) Aaron had started referring to the Lonely planet as the "damn thing" or worse, and rambling about the better online solution that apparently is a forgone conclusion.

But in the end, it only took us an extra hour to get to the lodge, and with our knees aching a bit more now, the hot shower and hot tub that we splurged for sounded that much better.

Only, it wasn´t to be. It was as if we already had known our fate, like we were being told bad news that that we had been waiting to hear all day. There was no running water - the rains had disrupted their systems. Aaron asked if that meant no hot tub, too - indeed. Instead of on-demand and jet-bubbled hot water, we had a plastic garbage pale full of cold water. Nothing we aren't used to at this point, but it isn't every day that us two unemployed bums splurge for extra conveniences.

Once we were alone, Aaron had to vent some more. "Great splurge, eh? Total waste. And, btw, no, the water is not out because of the rain, the water is out because your plumbing system is insufficiently resistant to a not that uncommon level of rainfall." An ounce of truth in a pound of hot air. No real use in worrying about these things when as far as you know, and more than likely, the situation is much worse at other establishments (no electricity, no water at all, etc.). Anyway, we did get a tea kettle of hot watter, which proved sufficient for the most important bits. And our hosts at Choctámal Lodge proved extremely hospitable.

That made four days without a shower, and we would have to wait another day and night as we traveled by bus to Trujillo. When Melissa didn't take a shower right away, Aaron had to confirm that "you are going to shower before you get into bed, right?" The urgency with which Aaron asked made us erupt with laughter.

We hope the pictures of Kuélap do it justice. If you are planning on doing a trip to Peru for Machu Picchu, we definitely recommend adding a few days to visit the pinnacle architectural achievement of the Chachapoyans.

For more of our Kuélap pics, you can see our Album.

Cheers,
xoM+A