Suing God

A Nebraska state senator is working hard for his constituents:

A US judge has thrown out a case against God, ruling that because the defendant has no address, legal papers cannot be served. The suit was launched by Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers, who said he might appeal against the ruling.
He sought a permanent injunction to prevent the "death, destruction and terrorisation" caused by God.
Judge Marlon Polk said in his ruling that a plaintiff must have access to the defendant for a case to proceed.
"Given that this court finds that there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant this action will be dismissed with prejudice," Judge Polk wrote in his ruling.
Mr Chambers cannot refile the suit but may appeal.

Being an atheist, of course, I agree with the court's ruling. You can't sue a defendant that doesn't exist.

WWJD

Is this where the whole country is heading?

A good friend of mine used to be an admissions officer at Princeton. She once said that she started getting applications with the acronym WWJD in the essay sections, one after another. Whole chunks of the application were supposed to be devoted to unpacking complex issues and she was getting a lot of white space - a sea of white space - broken by this single acronym. Thinking it was some kind of objection to the nature of the question, she gathered the applications up and took the stack to the dean to ask him what this acronym meant.

“What would Jesus do,” he said. “That’s their answer to the question.”

“But the whole point of the question is to display your ability to think critically,” she said.

The dean shrugged.

The theocrats lose a round

An Israeli judge dismissed indictments against store owners for selling bread during Passover. The law bans displaying of "leavened bread" in public places during the holiday, per Jewish [religious] tradition, but the judge ruled that the private property of a store does not constitute a public place, and the law does not ban sale. It seems a reasonable compromise to me, respecting the traditional culture in public, but not forcing it into people's private affairs. With the Knesset facing increasing haredi power and the private sector buckling under its boycotts, it's heartening to see some institution in Israel that stands up for freedom from religion.

The American religious marketplace

From a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life:

Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification. ...

"Constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents," the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey said.

The survey also concluded that 16 percent of American adults are not affiliated with any faith today. About 4 percent describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. Young adults ages 18 to 29 are much more likely than people 70 and older to say they are unaffiliated with any particular religion, Pew found.

Israel still rejects civil marriage

Most people probably don't realize that there is no institution of civil marriage in Israel. A Jewish couple must go through the rabbinical institutions, tightly held by the ultra-orthodox, to get a marriage license. A Jew and a non-Jew have no way to legally marry. (Never mind a gay couple, obviously.) The saving grace is international law: the state has to recognize the marriage of couples married outside of the country. Many, including a friend of mine who recently got fed up with having to pay money and produce endless documents and witnesses to prove he was Jewish enough, get married in Cyprus to exploit this loophole.

Anyway, two Knesset members proposed a bill to legalize civil marriage in Israel, and it was overwhelmingly defeated. Small parties (there are many) can have disproportionate power in Israel's parliamentary-coalition system, so the big parties vying to select the next prime minister didn't want to upset the ultra-orthodox parties. The far-left opposed the bill, supposedly, because it didn't include gays. (If that excuse is serious, it is surely absurd: if they'll only support a bill that no one else would support, how can there be any progress?)

Israel is officially a secular country. But the religious aspects of its national narrative, and the growing, anti-modernist power of the ultra-religious (whose constituents do not serve in the military and take far more from state welfare than they contribute to the economy), threaten to make that secularism meaningless. The defeat of this bill confirms the direction the country is still moving in. The government of Cyprus can rest assured that a lucrative source of tourism and state licensing revenue won't be threatened.

Mormon Mythology

Watch this video if you feel like wasting a few minutes. It's a cartoon depicting the Mormon creation mythology. There's a character named Jesus, otherwise it doesn't sound anything like the traditional "Judeo-Christian" mythology. Trillions of stars ruled by many gods having lots of sex, a Jesus-Lucifer conflict that plays out on Earth and followers of Joseph Smith trying to get to Heaven so they can become polygamous gods themselves.

I'm not going to waste my time pondering the philosophical merits of monotheism vs polytheism, because frankly, it's all ridiculous and I don't really care. But let's be honest: if someone proclaimed ancient Greek mythology as the absolute truth guiding his life today, he would be laughed out of town. I question the whole concept of "Judeo-Christian traditional values," because it's an arbitrary hodgepodge of contradictory ideas united more by politics than philosophy or theology. But even if such a tradition did exist, I can't see how Mormons can claim to be part of it.

WP on Romney

The WP editorial on Romney's speech:

Where Mr. Romney most fell short, though, was in his failure to recognize that America is composed of citizens not only of different faiths but of no faith at all and that the genius of America is to treat them all with equal dignity. "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom," Mr. Romney said. But societies can be both secular and free. The magnificent cathedrals of Europe may be empty, as Mr. Romney said, but the democracies of Europe are thriving.

"Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government," Mr. Romney said. But not all Americans acknowledge that, and those who do not may be no less committed to the liberty that is the American ideal.

Romney's Tightrope

Mitt Romney's speech on his Mormon faith reflects the tightrope he is trying to walk between the evangelical Christian base of the party on the one hand and his non-mainstream faith on the other. He draws parallels with JFK's 1960 speech to promise that the LDS church will not influence his decisions as President, justifying the separation with the Constitution's Establishment clause, but simultaneously seeks to reassure his audience that he does believe Jesus is the Savior and Son of God. What he's really saying is not that religion and policy are separate realms - as Kennedy did - but rather, that the religion he will apply to public life is mainstream evangelical Christianity. He has adopted the evangelical positions on abortion and gay rights (contrary to his positions as Governor). He wants nativity scenes and menorahs to be present in public spaces around the holiday, but when asked if he would have Muslims in his cabinet a few weeks ago, he balked. (His reasoning - that there aren't enough Muslims in America to justify cabinet representation - contradicts the Constitution, meritocracy and his plea to disregard his particular faith - but that's because the latter is really a red herring.)

My problem with Mitt Romney's religion isn't his Mormonism. Sure, Mormons believe in all kinds of nutty stuff, but so do fundamentalists of every faith. There should be no religious test of a candidate's personal beliefs and I will not apply one. What bothers me is three-fold: first, that he has a religious agenda on key domestic policy issues (just not of his particular sect), which gives theology an inappropriate, unjustified credence in policy debates. Second, that he tries to play both sides of the game, disqualifying atheists for office but demanding no religious test be applied to himself (quotes here). No religious test means a person of any religion or no religion should be judged equally for office. Romney's and the GOP's position is that a person of certain accepted sects may run for office (with Mormonism trying to be on the list) but no others. They don't believe in the separation of church and state - they just want their own churches in the state. Whether the list of accepted religions has one entry or a few, it is still a violation of the Establishment clause.

Third, I have a philosophical problem with the assertion that is constantly made, and which Romney reiterated, that without God, there is no freedom or morality. God did not bring liberty to the world; Deist philosophers of the Enlightenment did that. That religion has succeeded in appropriating the best of the Enlightenment as its own is partly a failure of contemporary secular philosophers, but it doesn't make the claim true. Centuries of religious tyranny prove that the God-liberty marriage is a recent one. (The long-held tradition of St. Thomas, for instance, involved secular courts executing people for heresy.) Morality without divinity can be established on numerous grounds: Aristotle disregarded divinity, Kant questioned whether God is moral, Nietzsche declared God as dead, and so forth. Religion is no better at morality than secular alternatives, and often much worse (e.g. read Hitchens or Harris). The subtle application of Christian theology to the War on Terror, for instance, could lead the country on a very immoral, even disastrous, path. It's time for this lie to finally be exposed.

(Update: Andrew Sullivan - a Catholic secularist - has a fantastic piece on the speech here.)

Intelligent Design on Trial

PBS' Nova had a fantastic documentary last week, "Intelligent Design on Trial," on the recent Dover, PA trial over teaching evolution in high school, and the science behind it. The whole program, divided into 12 chapters, is online. I particularly liked the chapters discussing (and refuting) the idea of "irreducible complexity" and the canard that evolution is "just a theory," not a "fact." Quoting from a re-enacted trial scene:

To say it's just a theory is really a bit insulting to science, because in science, a theory holds more weight than just a fact does. ...

A theory is not just something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep. That's an idea. A theory, in science, means a large body of information that's withstood a lot of testing. It probably consists of a number of different hypotheses, many different lines of evidence. Gravitation is a theory that's unlikely to be falsified even if we saw something fall up. It might make us wonder, but we'd try to figure out what was happening rather than immediately just dismiss gravitation. ...

Facts are just the minutiae of science. By themselves, they can be right or wrong. But, a theory is something that has been tested and tested over and over again, built on, revised. It continues to be reworked and revised. ...

No theory in science, no theory is ever regarded as absolute truth. We don't regard atomic theory as truth. We don't regard the germ theory of disease as truth. We don't regard the theory of friction as truth. We regard all of these theories as well-supported testable explanations that provide natural explanations for natural phenomena.

If a doctor prescribes medication for a religious patient's infectious disease, and the patient objected on the grounds that germs are "just a theory" and really God made him sick, the patient would be considered a nut. But it's still fashionable to express that kind of gut indignation towards the theory of evolution. The Bible says God is the creator - end of story - and anything that suggests man is not a spontaneous, divine creation must therefore insult human dignity and be wrong. That's really what the Dover creationists' argument boiled down to. "Evolution must be wrong" is not their conclusion, it's their premise - so all the experimental data in the world isn't going to convince them. Scientists could synthesize life from scratch in a petri dish tomorrow and the creationism/design camp would not be discouraged one bit. (That such an experiment has not yet succeeded, though, is something they're happy to use to support their case.)

The sad part of all this is that really, evolution does not have to nullify their beliefs. Natural selection does not disprove God, it only removes the absolute need for one. It seems to me that a religion premised on "God exists because he can't possibly not exist," while holding your fingers over your ears and shouting blah blah blah to drown out possible objections, has very weak foundations.
I respect the Catholic scientist in the documentary who explained Aquinas' principle that "truth is one": Faith and reason, for a believer, must co-exist. Reason without faith, for a non-believer, is also a valid position, but faith without reason is not. A religious person could, with intellectual honesty, hold that God started or oversees the process of evolution. Maybe God controls gravitation and germs, too. That's not my view, but I respect it as a valid one. There is really no need at all for religion to eliminate science to preserve God's existence.

The Atlantic shines

This month's issue (Dec 07) of The Atlantic is fantastic. The cover article is Andrew Sullivan's "Goodbye to all that," on the potential of Barack Obama to transform American politics and bridge the still-raging battles of the 60s that desperately need to be laid to rest for the country to heal and move on after the Bush years. A friend commented to me that the piece is light on argument, and it probably is - because what Sullivan is trying to convey is intuitive and emotional, not purely rational - but not to its detriment. Not lacking examples of Obama's proven ability, Sullivan is calling for Americans to take a risk on a relatively unknown but potentially revitalizing candidate, because the near-certain alternatives - a continuation and affirmation of the creeping fascism of Bush-Cheney, or a polarizing, Bush-lite candidacy of Hillary Clinton - are guaranteed to continue the inter-generational feud that continues to pointlessly paralyze and stultify American government.
Whether the piece will convince anyone not already in the Obama camp, I don't know, but it's definitely worth reading.

The article immediately following that is a wonderful piece of behind-the-scenes journalism by Mark Ambinder, "Teacher and Apprentice," on the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and the workings of their campaigns. It's journalism exploring the depths, not only of political figures, but of political journalism itself, with some very interesting analysis of the role the media plays in the system.

Finally, Hanna Rosin has a story, titled "How Hollywood Saved God," on the making of Philip Pullman's novels into movies. I read The Golden Compass many years ago; I don't remember much except the term "daemons" and that I liked it. The movie, judging from the article, sounds like it'll be entertaining but terribly dumbed-down. I love this paragraph,

You can almost see Pullman cringing at the standard Tinseltown crypto-Buddhist babble. Be Spiritual. Praise the Divine. Offend No One. Then say, Ommmmm.

It is sad how the studios have to bend over backwards to avoid saying anything subversive. Hollywood has taken on the financially secure role of

defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world.

In other words, blah blah blah. One innocent soul can the world, but don't offend anyone doing it! The removal of all anti-Church motifs from the movies does not mean religious groups are embracing the film - they're still worried that the movie will encourage kids to buy the books, God Forbid - but it will ensure that the whole trilogy goes on screen, and that's in both the author's and the studio's interests.

There's more in this month's issue, of course. Worth picking up at a newsstand or reading online.

Give me a break

Michael Vick has "renounced dogfighting":

He said that he was "disappointed in myself" and that "dogfighting is a terrible thing and I ... reject it." ... "Through this situation I've found Jesus," he added.

Avoid prison and find Jesus all in one. Aint that convenient...er, I mean, sweet.

Orthodox Paradox

Noah Feldman has a fantastic article in the NYT Magazine about the contradictions of Modern Orthodox Judaism and the boundaries the Jewish community sets up to isolate itself and exclude dissent. Having grown up in an environment similar to the one he describes, I can relate. Fortunately for me, my high school doesn't have an alumni publication to remove me from.

Religious Fanaticism in Israel

I lived in the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh for nine years. YNet reports on its takeover by fanatical ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects:

Haredi residents had hung up a sign at a shopping mall attesting to the character of the place, instructing shoppers to dress modestly. The shopping center has little traffic as it is, having to adhere to strict modesty regulations and holding limited supplies.

The local health clinic and supermarket operate separate hours for men and women. A pizza parlor owner was warned that if boys and girls sat there together in the evenings, they would suffer the consequences.

After the plaque was removed by police and local inspectors, on the grounds that it was placed there illegally, all hell broke lose. Haredi residents started throwing stones at the police, who responded by fighting back. Eight protestors were arrested and one was evacuated, unconscious, to hospital. ...

Out of a total 5,000 haredi families in Beit Shemesh, 1,500 families are from these sects.
Soon after these families moved in, a modesty revolution started: Public buses, faced by competition from haredi pirate services, get stoned; falafel and pizza shops are forced to close early in the evening. Major sidewalks are split, with one side for men, the other for women. Police were physically attacked when they tried to take a body of a person who collapsed and died on the street for an autopsy, as autopsies are forbidden by Jewish law.

Religious fanaticism comes in many forms. Maybe it's a good thing that the ultra-orthodox in Israel are exempt from military service: they're dangerous enough with sticks and stones. Their position in Israeli society is a particularly bizarre one because they shun the secular state, refuse to serve in the military, are generally not gainfully employed (preferring to study talmud full-time), and do not teach any non-religious subjects (like math and science) in their independent schools. Their effect, therefore, is to suck the state's welfare coffers dry through political whoring to the most advantageous coalition at any given time, but providing nothing constructive in return. They would literally not survive without the secular state and citizenry they so despise. And their demographics are growing at a tremendous rate. How a society can function like that in the long term, I have no idea.

The Contradictions of a Secular Jewish Identity

Daniel Gordis' latest "dispatch" from Israel is a response to the recently published Defeating Hitler by Avraham Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset, and the interview of Burg done by Ari Shavit, one of the most extraordinary interviews I've ever read regardless of this particular subject. Some quotes from the interview (Shavit in italics):

"The occupation is a very small part of it. Israel is a frightened society. To look for the source of the obsession with force and to uproot it, you have to deal with the fears. And the meta-fear, the primal fear is the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust."

That is the book's thesis. You are not the first to propose it, but you formulate it very acutely. We are psychic cripples, you claim. We are gripped by dread and fear and make use of force because Hitler caused us deep psychic damage.

"Yes." ...

The truth is that you are a salient Europist. You live in Nataf but you are all Brussels. The prophet of Brussels.

"Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish." ...

"The true Israeli rift today is between those who believe and those who are afraid. The great victory of the Israeli right in the struggle for the Israeli political soul lies in the way it has imbued it almost totally with absolute paranoia. I accept that there are difficulties. But are they absolute? Is every enemy Auschwitz? Is Hamas a scourge?" ...

Are you concerned about a fascist debacle in Israel?

"I think it is already here."

There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally, you are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you, and by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually meager. It broadens neither the heart nor the soul.

"Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they are certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At most 50 percent. In other words, the Israeli elite has already parted with this place. And without an elite there is no nation." ...

That is not completely accurate. I am aware of the Jewish richness you are talking about. But I am also aware that the basic Zionist analysis was correct. Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization.

I don't know who is right. Having lived in Israel for ten years and left for reasons similar to Burg's, I certainly relate to his thesis. Intellectual-leftist notions of the EU as a "biblical utopia" aside, it is his deep personal sentiment that I am interested in. In particular the last line that I quoted: Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization. It is the argument made, in various forms, by Zionists, secular and religious, for some 150 years. It is the argument that hits at the core of the Jewish contradiction.

That contradiction stems from the dual identity of the Jews: the Jews are an ethnic group with a religion, yet the majority of Jews (myself included) don't subscribe to that religion. Those who do subscribe to the religion insist on the religious identity superseding the ethnic one – for example, with solely matrilineal blood lines and entry into the nation via religious conversion. For the religious Jew, in fact, secular Jews are merely straying souls who will either “return” to the faith or be lost. The secular Jew can either agree with that exclusivist identity and have no part in it, or reject that identity and find a different one.

But forging a Jewish identity distinct from religion was and remains no simple task. Without religion, the historical alternatives were tribalism, assimilation or a mishmash of religiously-based secular “culture.” The first fit well in the early 20th century when eugenics theories and racism were almost universally accepted and the question was merely which race was superior. But as secular Jews found themselves losing the issue of superiority in the face of bullets and eventually gas chambers, they turned to the dream of Zionism, which was supposed to solve this “Jewish problem.” A Jewish state would create a political, geographic and cultural entity distinct from (but somehow also tied to) the religion, thus creating a home and identity for secular Jews. One did not have to insist on a secular Jewish identity in Germany or the Soviet Union; Palestine would make that identity automatic and worthy of pride, by building and defending a homeland. Soviet Socialist and German National-Socialist ideals were adopted into Zionist ideology. Skeptics of the need for such a haven were proven wrong by the Holocaust, and the Jewish State was founded. Assimilation in the new state was a moot concept, or so the theory went.

But the contradictions in Zionism – the most important being the role of religion – were never reconciled, and so that third option, the incoherent morphing of religion into “culture,” became the ill-defined standard. The secular Zionists could not eliminate religion from the modern Jewish culture they wanted to develop, because the historical narrative of the nation was so closely tied to religion. (I do not believe it was impossible to discern a non-religious historical narrative of the Jews; rather, religion was simply the most convenient thread to tie together the varying linguistic, political, and cultural experiences of the nation that was not really a nation for most of its existence. Never mind that at no point in Jewish history did the majority of Jews subscribe to anything resembling what is today considered Orthodox Judaism.) Needing religion to unify their historical narrative, but unable themselves to explain its meaning or value, there remained in the new Jewish-Zionist identity a vacuum for the self-proclaimed Orthodox to fill. Politically, the ultra-Orthodox hijacked the political entity while rejecting its secularism, while the "National Religious" movement turned Zionism into a messianic narrative, pitting Israel in a religious war against the Muslim world and fueling the similar narrative of fundamentalist Christians. (In many ways, in fact, National Religious Zionism is National Socialism on a smaller scale, limited only by political constraints. It is no coincidence that the rhetoric of its leaders is sounds so eerily fascist.) Philosophically, by defining their own Jewish identity in terms of the State, the secularists acceded to the Orthodox the claim that the only alternative identity was religion. (Who cares what their alternative is, the twisted logic went – it’s no longer necessary.) As Shavit explains: Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization.

These fundamental contradictions of Israeli society brought about a constant state of domestic conflict – between religion and secularism, between Messianism and realism – usually resolved with political compromises that exacerbated the contradictions but let society go on another day. Add in socialism, corruption and more than a healthy share of militarism (the result of necessity or ideology or both), and you get a place that, for many people lacking the die-hard Zionist ideology to begin with, is not a particularly pleasant place to live.

Myself, after living there for ten years (brought by my parents’ religious ideology), I left. My problem with Israel related both to religion and tribalism. I do not believe in God, and so the premises of all religions are absurd superstitions. I have an a priori problem with racially defined identities: they are genetic accidents, meaningless, needlessly exclusive. Any coherent, secular Jewish identity is necessarily tribal. So my inability (or unwillingness) to find a non-Zionist, non-Secular Jewish identity is of course hindered by those sensibilities.

The inability is also because of the hypocrisy that seems to be necessary to forge such a convoluted identity. Secular Jews often observe Jewish holidays in “secular” ways, knowing that their basis lies in a religion they do not adhere to. I can pretend, as many do, that Passover is a holiday of freedom – but who am I kidding, when the whole concept of “pass-over” stems from the “death of the firstborn,” the celebration of God’s smiting of a gentile nation. Reading books like “God-Optional Judaism,” which try to develop cultural symbols and rituals derived from religion but not actually religious, I can’t help thinking there is something absurd about the whole endeavor. The Jewish New Year, separated from its religious overtones of sin and Divine redemption (concepts I find absurd), is just another arbitrary anniversary. Sure, there is something nice about a day to look back and reflect on the year past – but the baggage involved with assigning this to religious holidays is not worth the gain. If reflection is the purpose, then do it on any other day, why that day? Because, of course, reflection is not really the purpose – the purpose is really the religious tradition as a value in itself – and that is irreconcilable with a secular worldview.

Ultimately, it comes down to that question of value. What is the value of possessing an ethnic identity? Specifically, what is the value of possessing a Jewish identity when that identity is so historically tied to ancient superstitions that have no place in a rational worldview? That is something no one has yet been able to explain, perhaps because values are by nature a function of a person’s sensibilities rather than reason. If Jewish identity across all its myriad communities has any universal principle at all, it is that Jews should not marry non-Jews. What is the value of such a restriction, apart from pure tribalism? The restriction is usually qualified with an emphasis on women – men should not marry non-Jewish women – in a deeply hypocritical nod to religious superstitions which the secularists who espouse this restriction don’t even believe in.

As a secular Jew, not interested in living in Israel, deeply opposed to religion, and wary of us-versus-them tribalism, the options available, were I to value a Jewish identity, are slim. So it is probably better that I have yet to be persuaded of the value of such an identity.

Circumcision

It's only a matter of time until it's finally recognized as a barbaric practice.

Andrew adds:

If parents tore the skin off their infants in any other part of the body, they'd be arrested for abuse. The great unmentionable, of course, is that religion, not medicine, is behind this practice - Judaism and Islam, to be precise. Many secular men, in other words, bear the scars of someone else's religion on their own bodies for life. (I should add, as I have written before, that female genital mutilation is exponentially worse. It removes a girl's sexual pleasure, rather than simply scarring and numbing it.) One commenter on Jeff Goldstein's blog put one rationale for it this way:

Further proof that God exists: he mandates a ritual that tones down the male sex drive, if only by a little, to help men become more godly instead of more carnal.

Moyers on Falwell

Bill Moyers has a fascinating segment on Jerry Falwell and religious fundamentalism in America and Europe.

(ht: Andrew)

Hitchens on Falwell

I think I agree with Christoper Hitchens on everything but the war in Iraq. Here he is talking about the late Jerry Falwall. I saw the link on the Dish; as Andrew writes, "Hitch says what a Christian cannot."

Update: SM sent me this even better clip of Hitchens on Hannity & Colmes. The man has balls of reinforced concrete, and that show has got to be the most ridiculous hour on television each day.

Accu-Wrath Forecast

By Bill Maher.

Christoper Hitchens

After listening to the debate between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens, I went on youtube and watched a bunch of Hitchens clips. He has the moral authority Rand craved but never deserved. In his moral certitude he reminds me of Ayn Rand, but he's a hell of a lot smarter, better read, more articulate, and more credible.
This clip on free speech is vintage. A quote from there:

That's a scandal. And I can't find a seconder usually when I propose this, but I don't care. I don't need a seconder. My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any concensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get on line, and kiss my ass.

I also love this one between Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan, another of my favorite scholars/polemicists, on politics and religion. I'm with Hitch on this one, like all the others I've seen. It probably doesn't help him that he flips off audiences and treats TV anchors like shit but damn, he's right every time.

Battle of Great Minds

Al Sharpton debates Christopher Hitchens on religion. Audio, Report.

Islamists through a Christianist lens

Matthew Yglesias catches an error in Romney's simplistic worldview. I'll admit I didn't realize the mistake when I saw it. I'm also not sure that Yglesias's distinction between political Islam and militant Islam is entirely valid; at the very least the former easily leads to the latter. However, it does make me think of another problem with Romney's (and Brownback's, Tancredo's and a bunch of others') views of Islamic terrorism. They're all Christian fundamentalists, and so they all view this conflict as inherently a religious one. The distinction between Islamic civil groups and terrorists is an interesting but non-essential nuance to them - what matters is that their political ideologies are based on faith in the wrong God. Even if their conscious policy thoughts say otherwise, this is at the core of their fundamentalist beliefs and is therefore unavoidable in their thought processes. It's another reason why I'd much rather have a non-fundamentalist Christian like Barack Obama, who also understands the nuances of Islam firsthand from Indonesia, leading our foreign policy.

Could this be more ironic?

An interfaith soccer match of priests and imams was cancelled because the imams didn't want women on the priests' team.

Church and State

Trip quotes the Treaty of Tripoli of 1796:

As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Why only one?

From here:

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) is first Congress member in history to acknowledge his nontheism ...

Although the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, the Coalition's research reveals that Rep. Stark is the first open nontheist in the history of the Congress. Recent polls show that Americans without a god-belief are, as a group, more distrusted than any other minority in America. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president even if he or she were the most qualified for the office.

Well that makes sense: the God-fearing, deeply religious people we have in power now are always honest and trustworthy...

Salvation via Gene Therapy

Sullivan links to this article, in which Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary expresses support for a hypothetical "cure" for the genetic disease (should such a gene be identified) of homosexuality.

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

Part of the reasoning:

Given the consequences of the Fall and the effects of human sin, we should not be surprised that such a causation or link is found. After all, the human genetic structure, along with every other aspect of creation, shows the pernicious effects of the Fall and of God's judgment.

The danger of such notions is so self-evident it probably doesn't even deserve to be commented on, but this kind of thing gets me riled up so I want to get it off my chest. God, the Bible claims, created people. So if homosexuality is genetic, then He created certain people that way. (Even if it's not genetic, it's still not a "choice," so the same holds.) Isn't it violating His will, then, to genetically engineer (i.e. "treat") one of these traits? Doesn't "Created in God's image" make the whole notion of homosexuality-as-sin a disgusting, anachronistic contradiction?

What these people will never admit is that all "sin" is in some way genetic. Evolution is the ultimate cause of promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, and all the other sins religion conjures up. Should we develop "treatments" for all these? If such treatments were developed, should they be used? If so, how is that any different from Nazis today "treating" inferior races with genetic engineering? Sullivan is write to call this a "final solution" for gays. It's disgusting, and the whole dogma behind it needs to be turned on its head.

Atheists Unwanted

Andrew quotes a USA Today/Gallup poll showing that only 45% of Americans would vote for an Atheist president. So much for that career path...

Harris-Sullivan & Red Herrings

Sam Harris replied to Andrew Sullivan in their ongoing online debate on faith and reason. Read it here. Harris dismisses most of Sullivan's latest piece as a red herring and then further drives in the point he's been making all along, to little avail: whatever value religion may have, at the end of the day, it's unsubstantiated and irrational, and does not deserve to be treated as truth.

Sullivan-Harris, cont.

The latest exchange between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris in their debate on religion and faith is here, by Andrew. I think it's his best yet in this debate. (The whole debate is here.)

Latest Harris v Sullivan

The latest segment in the online debate about religion between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris is up, this one by Harris. The latest is here, the whole thing is here. Two key paragraphs:

Perhaps I’m missing something, but your claim about God really does not appear limited to your own experience. You are not saying—“Sam, I just don’t know how I can convince you of this, but when I close my eyes and think of Jesus, I experience a feeling of utter peace. I’m calling this feeling ‘God,’ and I suspect that if more people felt this way, our world would be radically transformed.” An assertion of this sort would give me no trouble at all. But you are saying quite a bit more than that. You are claiming to know that God exists out there. As such, you are making tacit claims about physics and cosmology and about the history of the world. What is more, these are claims that you have just pronounced unjustified, unjustifiable, and yet impervious to your own powers of doubt.
[...]
I’m asking you to imagine a world in which children are taught to investigate reality for themselves, not in conformity to the religious dogmatism of their parents, but by the lights of truly honest, fearless inquiry. Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is. Science really does transcend the vagaries of culture: there is no such thing as “Japanese” as opposed to “French” science; we don’t speak of “Hindu biology” and “Jewish chemistry.” Imagine a world that has transcended its tribalism—racism and nationalism, yes, but religious tribalism especially—in which we could have a truly open-ended conversation about our place in the universe and about the possibilities of deepening our experience of love and compassion for one another. Ethics and spirituality do not require faith. One can even achieve utter mystical absorption in the primordial mystery of the present moment without believing anything on insufficient evidence.

This is of course the same Sam Harris as in the C-SPAN debate I mentioned a few days ago. That's scheduled to be on TV again on Sunday and I intend to watch it in full and record it.

Religion as Astrology

I happened to turn on C-SPAN the other day, to a BookTV "Debate on Religion and Reason" with Sam Harris (the Atheist who is debating Andrew Sullivan in the blogalogue I linked earlier) and Reza Aslan, an expert on Islam. I tried to record it but it got messed up, so I'll try to record it when it's on next, apparently at 9:45pm on 2/11 (schedule here). (I can't find the video online; if anyone can, please let me know.)

Both Harris and Aslan are brilliant scholars and debaters. Aslan subtly accused Harris of a lack of sophistocation on Islam, probably a legitimate charge. He argued that, contrary to Harris' (and Andrew Sullivan's) contention that Islam is radical today because it never had a Reformation (as Judaism and Christianity have), in fact the opposite is true: bin Ladin and the various Jihadist movements are actually part of a broad Islamic reformation that is going on. It is a very compelling argument, and the parallels with the violence in Europe following the Reformation - centuries of brutal religious warfare - sheds a useful light on tensions in the Islamic world today. Of course, Aslan believes the Jihadists are only some of many strands of reform, many being more "enlightened" and peaceful, but he was anything but a tribal advocate in the debate.

Quibbles about developments in Islam aside, however, Harris ended with a brilliant set of points that deserve to be repeated. Astrologers, he said (and I am liberally paraphrasing here), are given no credence in our society today. A candidate for a job who declares that the arrangement of the stars will determine his performance is not hired; a politician who appeals to the constellations for policy decisions wouldn't get any votes. And yet, somehow, it is OK to say that a man from 2000 years ago will return to redeem us, it is OK to say that prayer will determine the outcome of wars, it is OK to appeal to ancient scripture for moral policy making. But rationally, there is no difference. People preaching such doctrines are both equally deranged.

No one questions the right of an individual to hold such beliefs, and for some they may even be greatly beneficial. But in the public realm, especially in politics, they are useless and even dangerous. As he writes in his book, Letter to a Christian Nation, even if scripture tells us to do something good, that good is done for the wrong reasons, and often it's not really good at all.

Every society sets boundaries to legitimate discourse. In our culture, "Judeo-Christian" doctrines are legitimate, but paganism and astrology are not. We rationalize this like 17th century philosophers - imagining our beliefs "enlightened" and others barbaric (but with more politically correct terminology) - but really, this is an arbitrary distinction set almost entirely by historical circumstances.

I imagine this as spheres of legitimacy. Everyone agrees on the concepts in the innermost sphere. As the spheres move outwards, the discourse becomes less mainstream but still acceptable, until it crosses some threshold, where it becomes unacceptable. At the farthest extremes of the unacceptable spheres we define people as insane or socially outcast.

Someone preaching that he is the Messiah on the streets of New York today is called insane, but someone doing the same 2000 years ago was called a prophet. What's the difference? And why is it OK for someone to laugh at the first, then go to church and worship the second? Is there not something inherently selective, and therefore hypocritical, in having irrational faith systems in the public discourse?

Response to Mory

Mory commented on my Fanaticism post:

The article makes it sound like these people's religious leaders do not approve of the tradition, which does make this a tragic occurrence. But if it actually did have a religious value to them, I don't think you'd have the right to criticize them for it. It's not like they're doing this to other cultures, they're doing it to their own kids. Which makes it an internal issue which non-Muslims don't have any right to condemn. [...] You have a problem with your own religion's practices, that's fine. But don't think you have the right to tell other religions what to think.

a) Something has religious value when people say it has religious value. Those people value slashing their foreheads; others (maybe including their leaders) do not. Neither I nor Mory can say who is "right" in this dispute, and it is irrelevant. Religion is as religion does.

b) I am not imposing my condemnation on them, I am simply stating an opinion, as is certainly within my right. But more generally I reject the notion that I can only speak of my own culture or surroundings; if that were the case, the sphere of what we could speak of and judge would be very small indeed, and a full understanding of the world would be impossible (understanding not being the same as accepting). I don't need to be an expert on Islam or a Muslim to have a "right" to condemn such a practice, any more than I would need to be a member of a cult that practices human sacrifice to condemn that.

c) Muslim violence affects us all, and violence by Muslims against other Muslims (their own children included) should not be ignored on cultural grounds, but rather noticed and taken into consideration because of the larger picture of violent fanaticism.