The hapless Nigerian kid who flamed into world attention Christmas day when he scorched his shorts and, presumably, adjacent anatomical apparatus, in a failed attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit, unknowingly played into a role in the religious character of the United States, even as he was motivated by his own warped idea of the Muslim religious mandate to “kill the infidels.” He also lit a fuse under a volatile group of American religious fundamentalists.
The clumsy but frightening attempt at airborne mass murder caused airline security administrators and many private citizens to tout the mandatory use of full-body scan machines in major world airports. In a typical American reaction we are being bombarded with a variety of opinions from “experts” of various conflicting persuasions
While scanner manufacturers gear up for a bonanza, other voices are stridently condemning the use of the devices as an unacceptable invasion of privacy.
One religious blogsite calls the scanners “invasive machines that will strip us all of every inch of human dignity under the guise of safety.” Another calls the full body scanners “a digital strip search.”
The technology places the "scanee" in a box from which their body image, with face obscured, is transmitted to scanners in another location who never see the scanee except on the screen. Exactly how this constitutes an invasion of privacy escapes me. We don’t need an X-ray machine to know what strangers look like under their clothes.
Why are Americans so edgy about nudity? No furor is raised in Europe where bakeries display anatomically detailed pastry nudes in their front windows. In the Netherlands a 1986 law allows citizens to be naked anywhere except on public roads or when they annoy others; people go naked in their gardens, the beach, the gym, public swimming pools.
In the United States, mothers nursing their infants, however discreetly, may be arrested for “indecent exposure.”
Much of this attitude is attributable to our cultural Puritan forefathers whose religiously zealous morality made them dislike nudity so much some of them refused to bathe or view their own unclad bodies in a mirror. The U.S. public has been brainwashed in the religious ideology that nudity is sexual, therefore naughty, ensuring that Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner would be billionaires.
As is their wont, righteous protesters are digging up Biblical texts to support their position. One favorite proof text regarding nudity is in the Genesis creation story.
Genesis 2:25: states: "the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." After the serpent conned Eve into eating the forbidden fruit she enlisted Adam as a co-culprit, and immediately following their violation of Divine orders “. . . the eyes of both [Adam and Eve] were opened and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." Genesis 3:7.
There are about 60 translations of the Bible in English. Each one came into existence because someone(s) thought the existing translations were flawed. Each one required educated guesses by the translators.
Now here’s an interesting thing about Bible translations: in the original written Hebrew scriptures there are no vowels, only consonants. Vowels must be supplied by the translator in a sort of interpretive guessing game. The word translated “naked” may be “eromim” which means to be without clothes, or “arumim” which means to be without shame after doing a bad thing. Genesis and the rest of the Torah was written using only consonants, with no letters or signs indicating vowels. Thus "eromim" and "arumim" appear the same in the Hebrew text, as rmm.
Suppose the folks who are in a lather over nudity are using an inaccurately translated proof text. We’ll never know for sure, so the argument will go on ad infinitum. Terrorists, who don’t give a fig about nudity as a moral issue will figure out some way to beat the machines, and the religious uninformed-but-opinionated crowd will go on choosing Bible verses to support their puritanical prejudice.
But they agree on one thing: nude is not good.
Syndicated columnist Jack Wilson is an Episcopal priest. His email address is jackscolumn@jwco.us
