The news from Egypt this week is about what could be a new case of clerical kidnapping to save a soul. Camillia Shehata, age 24, is (or was) the wife of a priest in the Coptic Christian church named Thaddeus Samaan Rizk, and the mother of one child. In July, she disappeared from the family home in Minya, a town about 150 miles south of Cairo, and was missing for five days. Egyptian police found her, and returned her to her home.

What was she doing during the five days? Trysting with a lover? Hiding from an abusive husband? Egyptian Muslim organizations are claiming that she was undergoing a spiritual experience, in which she decided to convert from Christianity to Islam. After she was returned home, the story goes, the Coptic Pope Shenouda III was terribly upset about this, and decided to lock her away in a monastery until she returns to her senses. A dramatically different version of the story is that Camillia was kidnapped by Muslims and subjected to five days of abusive brainwashing to force her to convert to Islam, and that the Coptic authorities are now giving her some privacy to help her recover from the trauma.

One response to this would be to storm the monastery and liberate Camillia by force. The Muslims are not doing that. Instead, they are bringing lawsuits, against both Pope Shenouda III and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak (who has the power to appoint and remove Shenouda) to obtain her release. Those of us in the legal profession believe that the more lawsuits there are, the better.

If you’re looking for an answer here as to what really happened to Camillia, you can stop reading now, because you won’t find one. What you will find instead is some background on the concept of kidnapping someone in order to prevent him or her from making the terrible mistake of believing what the wrong God experts say, instead of believing what the right God experts say, as both sides here are claiming happened to Camillia.
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Last week we looked at the Indian half of the Dalai Lama’s claim that China had a lot to learn about religious harmony from its neighbor to the southwest. Try to find stories about recent events in China similar to India’s Gujarat massacre, India’s burnings of Christian churches, India’s Muslim bombings, India’s continuing religious warfare in Kashmir, India’s heavy-handed Puritanism of Hindu Taliban thugs. You won’t find much. In a country of 1.3 billion people there is a little bit of almost everything, but “infinitesimal” would be a good word to describe the level of religious violence in today’s China.

The 20^th century revolutionary movement in China started at about the same time it did in India, but against a historical backdrop of theocratic violence that young intellectuals were determined not to repeat. In the 1850s, a lunatic Christian named Hong Xiuquan persuaded followers that he too was the son of God, sent to save the East as his brother Jesus had saved the West. The tale of what became known as the “Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping” is far stranger than fiction; Hong conquered most of southern China, ruled as its emperor in the old imperial palace at Nanjing for many years, and was ultimately overthrown only at the cost of some 20 million lives. That’s a lot of bodies, even for China.

On top of that, the communists saw that their rival, Chiang Kai-shek, had converted to Christianity, and that the corruption of his government and his perceived sellout to Western interests were inextricably entangled with foreign efforts to Christianize and colonize China. If there was one thing the often-bickering Chinese communists agreed on, it was that religion was not going to undermine their campaign to modernize the nation.

That never meant banning religion per se. It did mean bringing religion under firm control of the state, so that it could not pose a political threat. The approach is quite different from that of India and America, where religion is respected as a power in its own sphere equal to that of the civil government. China has five government-approved religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, and Taoism. Anyone can worship in any of these faiths to his heart’s content. Catholics, for example, are free to believe in Purgatory, indulgences, and the magic power of relics; free to attend Mass whenever they want, sing their hymns, and receive all seven sacraments. So why do the Vatican and its American Christian allies complain about China all the time?
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The Dalai Lama was sounding off again a few days ago, this time recommending that China should learn about religious harmony from India. “When I see conflicts in various parts of world I try to tell them that people belonging to different races and following different religion can live in harmony.” He boasted that India was known all over the world for non-violence and religious harmony, adding that “People in China very much need to know this.”

What on earth is he talking about?

Is he talking about the Gujarat riots of 2002, where Hindus enraged over what turned out to be an accidental train fire killed an estimated 2,000 Muslims and drove another 100,000+ from their homes, with the connivance of the local government? Only 11 people have been punished for this so far – they must have been awfully industrious. That’s fewer than the 14 people handed life sentences for the slaughter of another thousand Muslims at Bhagalpur in 1989, but that process took 17 years to complete.

Is he talking about the mass violence directed against Christians in Orissa at Christmas in 2007? Read the rest of this entry &raquo

A humanist analysis of bullying.  See link:

http://open.salon.com/blog/dave_niose/2010/04/10/understanding_bullying

Caner was Liberty University’s seminary dean, a position he rose to after only two years as a member of the faculty.  He was Liberty’s star player, booking speech tours and selling over a quarter of a million books.  He injected charisma and vitality into what he once referred to as a needlessly dry field of study.  So what made him different from all the other hyperactive Evangelical enthusiasts?  Caner was raised Muslim.

Born in Turkey, he claimed, he spent years in an Islamic extremist environment, even going so far as to confess himself a member of the Islamic youth jihad.  A child trained in the manner of the 9/11 assailants, he said.  Upon moving to Ohio as a teenager with his family, a friend brought him to a Christian church and thus he was “saved.”  How droll. 

In a post 9/11 country, Caner’s story of “redemption” was scooped up by the Christian right and worshipped on high.  He provided so-called insight into the seedy Muslim world and an assurance to terrified Christians everywhere that Muslims could see the “error of their ways” and convert.  He lectured, he pontificated, he told the Christian right what they wanted to hear about the religion they equally feared and despised.  How convenient, to be a Muslim guru and a Christian hero!  At the same time!

One problem: Caner wasn’t born in Turkey, but in Sweden, a fact he forgot to consider while penning a later book with his brother, inadvertently exposing the original fib.  Furthermore, it was revealed that his family had moved to Ohio years before Caner previously claimed. A little difficult to be a member of the youth jihad when you’re shoveling snow in the Midwest and listening to Peter Frampton like every other Ohio teen, wouldn’t you say? 

Suspicious observers were already on to him.  A web of controversy cropped up across the internet as curious Muslims and scholars detected error after error in Caner’s library of Islamic knowledge (if you want a laugh, search Ergun Caner on YouTube and watch an array of clips of Caner botching basic terminology and confusing customs).  Whispers culminated into action this spring as Liberty University launched a formal inquiry into Caner’s past.  Following a curt statement from Liberty University regarding the disappointing findings, Caner’s position as seminary dean was up for grabs. 

Caner was a used car salesman of Christian conversion hawking busted parts.  Mangled, dishonest and cheap, reeking of fraud and agenda.   Is he the first of his kind?  Most certainly not.  But his attempt was so shoddy, so arrogantly full of holes and awash in anti-Muslim hostility, his blunder seems like a well-timed, shrewdly planned investment in the culture of fear.  If this were the ’50s he’d be selling you hula-hoops (probably decorated with Red Scare propaganda and anti-communist slogans).  

Entertainers and artists have been known to stretch truths in the name of creation.  Though James Frey’s partially fictionalized (and fantastically written) memoir was shredded by the media, his defense in Vanity Fair was a relatively fair one:   “The thing on the side of the book means nothing. Who knows what it is. It’s just a book. It’s just a story.”

But James Caner—excuse me, Ergun Caner—was not selling literature.  He was selling a religion, Christianity, wrapped tightly with an anti-Muslim bow, inspiring more fear and hatred in a climate already awash in prejudice.  He was peddling his life of redemption at the price of Liberty University’s tuition.  (And the man knows how to sell—under his guidance, seminary enrollment tripled.)  He was loved.  He was talented.  He was lying. 

Ergun Caner’s relationship with Islam is one I cannot comment on with any authority, but I believe that while attempting to make an example of Islam, he has made a mockery of the very religion he claimed to be promoting.  Just another zealous charlatan, he turned out to be a disappointment to the students who valued his teachings and a disgrace to non-violent Muslims attempting to live their lives free of harassment.    

Though Liberty University has not completely washed their hands of him—Caner will continue to serve as a member of the faculty this fall—his reputation has been considerably damaged and his credibility destroyed.  So what’s left for Ergun Caner?  I think he should focus on his strengths, seek out further education in an institution where he belongs: NYU’s Tisch School of Performing Arts.

Over the weekend, the number of people killed or hospitalized by a falling tree branch in Central Park increased to three so far this year. This is in addition to several individuals who were lucky enough to escape serious injury from falling branches. And it’s only June. At this rate, the park’s trees could easily claim a dozen victims by the end of the year. The public—understandably filled with anger, fear, and questions—is unlikely to be satisfied by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s response, who, quoted in the New York Times, called this weekend’s incident that killed a six-month-old girl “an act of God.”

This statement can be interpreted in two ways. The first is that the mayor was being imprecise. While its’ not entirely uncommon for someone to refer to a natural disaster euphemistically as an act of God, doing so assigns blame to an unseen entity rather than stressing the accidental nature of an event. If every mandated precaution is taken and still an unavoidable accident occurs, then one should say so rather than offhandedly blaming a God who will not speak out to explain. If, however, the accidents in Central Park were due to negligence then the situation needs to be investigated and the guilty parties should be held responsible.

The phrase “act of God” is often used in reference to life or death situations. At best it describes a wonderfully unlikely occurrence like winning the lottery or even the welcomed death of a suffering loved one. At worst the phrase is used hatefully to indicate God’s punishment for certain behaviors like blasphemy or homosexuality. In both cases the person who says it seems to believe in its literal meaning. Did Mayor Bloomberg believe that God himself used a tree to kill an innocent baby and destroy a young family? If that’s the case, I have to ask, where are the Christians on this one? They say that God is perfect and that we are made in his image; our national motto tells us to trust in Him. So when the newspaper headlines quote Bloomberg calling an infant’s death an act of God, why aren’t more people defending God? Especially given the park’s recent history, it seems that the accusation uses God as a scapegoat, portrays him as violently irrational, and suggests that no matter how innocent you are you could be struck down at any moment.  

Say that God doesn’t exist and you’ll be met with an angry mob but say he’s serially killing zoo goers and you’ll be met with a shrug.

I think the mayor’s statement should offend everyone. If you believe in God, he’s perverting your religion. If you don’t believe in God, he’s insulting you with false answers and may as well be blaming the boogeyman. Even if you don’t take his words literally, he’s still brushing off the issue and taking it less seriously than he should. Rather than looking to console the families, comfort the public, and prevent future incidents, the mayor is clearly more focused on the political aspect of absolving various organizations of guilt and directing blame away from officials. To convince the public that this incident was beyond human control makes it easier not to examine current protocols or make changes to prevent similar accidents in the future.

Bottom line: when an atheist cries, “don’t blame God!” perhaps it’s time to listen.

Just over a week ago, Muhammad Parvez, and his 29-year old son, Waqas Parvez, were sentenced to life in prison by an Ontario court for the murder of Muhammad’s daughter and Waqas’ sister, Aqsa Parvez. Aqsa was a rebellious 16-year old, the youngest of 8 children. She objected to her father’s demand that she wear a traditional Muslim hijab, and wanted to get a job so she could have the money to lead a normal teenage life. After she ran away from home and then returned, she told her friends she feared for her life, because her father had sworn on the Koran that he would kill her if she ran away again. She was right. Three months later, after another battle royale over her disobedience in attending her first movie, Aqsa ran away again. Her brother picked her up from a school bus stop and took her home; half an hour later, she was dead.

In an interview with police, Aqsa’s mother, Anwar Jan Parvez, said her husband told her he killed his youngest child because “My community will say, ‘You have not been able to control your daughter.’ This is my insult. She is making me naked.” This evidence of what he called “a twisted and repugnant mindset” led Judge Bruce Durno to find it “profoundly disturbing that a 16-year-old could be murdered by a father and brother for the purpose of saving family pride, for saving them from what they perceived as family embarrassment.”

Nevertheless, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations refused to admit that this was a Muslim “honor killing,” saying it was just a case of domestic violence that can happen in any family.

Domestic violence happens everywhere, including the most secular of families. What Canadian CAIR and other defenders of Islam deliberately choose to ignore, though, is that a substantial body of Muslim scripture and tradition teaches people like Muhammad and Waqas Parvez that it is God’s will for them to impose this kind of punishment on disobedient daughters.

It is true that there is nothing in the Koran or the traditions of Muhammad that flatly states “Thou shalt kill thy unruly daughters.” There are even some passages in the traditions that can fairly be interpreted as encouraging lenience and mercy in cases of violations of the sexual code. The trouble is, the Koran and the traditions are a jumbled mess of conflicting commandments, and there is plenty of ammunition there to turn a case of wounded pride into homicide.

First, there is the extensive Muslim authority that females in general are subhuman; their testimony counts as half the testimony of a male [Koran 2:282], their inheritance rights are half those of males [Koran 4:176], and they need to be covered up and kept inside as much as possible to avoid tempting males into sin. Men can have multiple wives, but women cannot have multiple husbands. [Koran 4:3] God said in the Koran that “Men are in charge of women, because God hath made one to excel the other,” while ordering back-talking women to be scourged. Muhammad is reported to have added that: “Women are naturally, morally, and religiously defective.” You don’t see many alleged honor killings of males; daughters and sisters are the principal targets.

Then there are the laws commanding death for illicit sex. Sharia is a mass of contradictions on this point, but there is plenty of support for Muhammad’s saying that “For a fornicator, there is stoning.” Sometimes the punishments for men and women are equal, but sometimes they are not. In one notable case, Muhammad ordered an adulterous man to receive 100 lashes and exile for a year, while the woman was stoned to death.

Then there is the teaching on apostasy. Here Muhammad did not mince words: “If a Muslim discards his religion, kill him.” Even closer to the honor killing point is the Koran’s approving discussion of the murder of a boy by a God expert, in order to prevent the boy’s apostasy from corrupting his parents. [Koran 18:74-80] According to tradition, Muhammad himself opposed the killing of children, except where the killer knew that the child would grow up to be a non-believer. The evidence is pretty strong that the sum of Aqsa Parvez’s actions were tantamount to abandoning her religion; what’s a devout father to do?

A 12^th century Muslim legal manual of Umdat al-Salik, certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, today’s most respected authority in Sunni Islam, carries the logic one step further. It notes that normally “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” The province of Ontario is thus being highly un-Islamic in imprisoning Muhammad and Waqas Parvez.

All these ingredients make it easy for Muslim God experts to justify honor killing as divinely ordained, as many of them do. Savitri Gooneskere has carefully documented the honor killing teachings of imams in Pakistan. A Gaza journalist was refreshingly candid:

Deep down, we know that when a woman has disgraced her family, nothing will restore honor except by killing her. This is understood in Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, the Gaza strip and the West Bank. So why are we Arabs telling the Western press that honor killing is cultural, that it is not really part of Islam? Our way of life is based on maintaining our honor. And make no mistake about it: a woman does tarnish her family’s honor by engaging in pre-marital sex, or by getting herself raped, when she seeks divorce and when she marries against her family’s wishes. And keeping our women pure is a big part of our honor. So there’s no point saying honor killing isn’t really part of our religion. Honor and Islam are inextricably bound; they are what give our life meaning. A strong religion demands we choose to maintain our honor.

So was the Islamist President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Commenting on the discovery of the bodies of seven women found by a roadside last year, he explained that they had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings. “If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them are killed,” he said, adding for good measure that “No one can tell us not to be Muslims. If anyone says I cannot be a Muslim, he is my enemy.”

Honor killing is not an isolated phenomenon. A United Nations study estimated the number of honor killings at 5,000 per year. Many arise from a daughter’s resistance to an arranged marriage, as occurred in Atlanta last year. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali went on a one-woman crusade to get the Dutch police simply to keep track of the number of honor killings in Holland, she was scorned for exaggerating the problem – until a pilot program in just 2 of the country’s 25 regions found 11 such killings from October 2004 to May 2005. After we “liberated” Iraq from the secular Baath Party regime and handed it to the Shiites, there were 47 documented honor killings in 2006 in Basra alone. Ayman Udas was killed by her brothers in Pakistan for bringing disgrace on the family by singing on television. A 4-year old Palestinian girl who had been raped by an adult was allowed to bleed to death, to preserve the family’s honor.

In Jordan, the Penal Code states flatly that “he who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty.” A proposal to repeal this law failed when Jordan’s Islamic Action Front issued a fatwa saying that doing so would “destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity.” Syrian and Egyptian law also permit judges to reduce penalties in honor killings cases.

People like Muhammad and Waqas Parvez may or may not be able to cite any of these passages, much less traditions that lean the other way. That’s not the point. The point is that the God experts who do study these things and who have a stern paternalist view of the world spread the message, explicitly and implicitly, that a God-fearing father does not allow his daughter to run wild, and does whatever it takes to keep her in line. Putting the stamp of God’s approval on a dark impulse drives the Parvezes of the world over the edge. The ultimate answer is to wear down the credibility of the God experts themselves, so fewer and fewer people like the Parvezes care about what they say, leaving common sense and the common values of human society as their only guides.

The American Humanist Association (AHA) voiced disappointment yesterday in a US District Court verdict allowing a council of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to occupy a building owned by the city of Philadelphia rent-free, despite the city’s attempt to end the lease because of the BSA’s discriminatory policies. The verdict was handed down after the scouting council sued the city for attempting to end the lease due to BSA’s discriminatory practices.
 
“The AHA is suggesting that everyone step back for a moment to consider how aggressive the BSA is willing to get in imposing its discriminatory policies on the public,” said David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association. “This shows that the BSA not only wants the right to discriminate, but that it still expects special treatment despite its unfair prejudices.  As the scouts sue the public to obtain special privileges that other groups don’t enjoy, we see in many ways that the BSA is no longer an example of model citizenship.”
 
The BSA has historically remained unapologetic and deliberate in its exclusion of gay youths and troop leaders, and has also banned the participation of atheists and agnostics. Many groups, including the AHA, have urged the BSA to adopt inclusive policies, such as those of the Girl Scouts of America, that would allow participation by gays and nonbelievers. 
 
The BSA argued that the city’s eviction attempt, which was based on a disagreement over the BSA discriminatory policies, was a violation of the BSA’s own constitutional rights. The BSA further protested the city’s offer to allow the group access to the building on the condition that rent be paid. 
 
“The BSA should be ashamed to demand free rent while at the same time continuing policies that discriminate against nonbelievers and gays,” said Niose. “If they want to discriminate, they should have enough decency to pay their way like everyone else.  As a defiantly discriminatory organization, the BSA has lost its exalted status.”
 
Though the city of Philadelphia cannot force the local BSA chapter to renounce the organization’s policy banning homosexuals, reports state that the possibility of negotiation still remains as the city decides what step should be taken next. 
 
“We believe that the City of Philadelphia’s non-discrimination policy fully comports with the American principle of equality and expect that the jury’s decision will be reversed on appeal,” said Bob Ritter, staff attorney and legal coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. “It is totally indefensible for the Boy Scouts to discriminate against atheists and gays and receive substantial governmental benefits for doing so.”

As noted a month ago, the Texas Board of Education voted 8-7 against adding James Madison to a short list of thinkers who influenced the American Revolution, while adding Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin instead. Had they included Madison, Texans would have had a special opportunity to celebrate yesterday’s 225^th anniversary of one of his (and America’s) most important documents: the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which first appeared on June 20, 1785. But don’t let its age deceive you; many of its arguments appear to have been freshly written about issues facing America today.

James Madison was America’s most powerful exponent of the separation of church and state. He even tried, without success, to add a condemnation of officially established religion to the Declaration of Independence. As a member of the Virginia legislature at the height of the war in 1779, Madison supported Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which, among other things, would have eliminated taxpayer support for the Anglican Church in Virginia. Virginia’s legislature felt it already had its hands full opposing the British crown, and was unwilling to antagonize anyone else while the battle raged.

After Jefferson left for diplomatic duties in Europe, Madison became the bill’s prime sponsor. But even after the victory at Yorktown in 1781, legislators were still reluctant to step on the clergy’s toes – until, that is, Madison took his case, in the form of the Memorial and Remonstrance, directly to the people.

What moved Madison to action was a counter-proposal by his fellow revolutionary Patrick Henry, who disliked the Anglican establishment as much as Madison did. But instead of simply cutting off its funds, Henry proposed to have the taxpayers finance its competition. Under Henry’s proposal, a small tax for the support of the Christian religion in general would be imposed, and each taxpayer would be able to designate which Christian denomination his funds would support. Non-Christians, of course, would get nothing.

To Madison, this moved government in exactly the wrong direction. As he expressed so eloquently in the Memorial and Remonstrance, the proper function of government was not to promote fairness of division of spoils among the sects, but to keep out of the God business altogether.

The Henry-Madison fight generated intense interest throughout Virginia. More than 13,000 people signed petitions about it, in a state with fewer than 100,000 eligible voters. That would be the equivalent of nearly a million petition signatures in the state today – at a time when communication and transportation were exceedingly difficult. Among the petitioners, opponents of government support for religion outnumbered supporters by 12:1, and Henry’s proposal was defeated. The momentum generated by the defeat of the Henry bill carried over into final passage of Jefferson’s Statue of Religious Freedom:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

What makes Madison’s argument even more compelling is that it applies to so many issues of church and state that we confront today:

• “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” Did the Texas Board of Education have this in mind when it ordered school children to begin studying Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin?
• “The Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” We now have a president who insists on opening all of his appearances with a prayer, pre-vetted by a White House bureaucrat, who occupies the position of “competent judge of religious truth,” precisely so that the p Read the rest of this entry &raquo

It’s not that often you can find Anglicans, Catholics, and Muslims presenting a united front. It takes a truly threatening common enemy to achieve that. This week in Australia, such an enemy arose: ethics.

Students in New South Wales, the nation’s most populous state, have been offered classes in the scriptures of a variety of religions for many years. The classes are not compulsory, out of respect for the wishes of families who do not want to have their children brainwashed with supernaturalism. There has been a stiff price to pay, though, for those willing to buck societal pressure and pull their kids out of religion class. For the only alternative offered to religion class has been no class at all. Children of humanists who opt out of religion class have been given only empty time, which they undoubtedly fill with exploring innovative ways of getting into trouble.

Someone in the New South Wales school bureaucracy decided that this was unfair, and that the same amount of taxpayer resources ought to be devoted to the children of humanists as to the children of supernaturalists. So they devised a class in ethics, in which students are encouraged to engage in discussions about fairness, honesty, care, rights and responsibilities. The class is now being tested in ten schools before being rolled out statewide.

From the reaction of the churches, you would think Satan himself was running the education department. The Anglicans are now even trying to stack the local Parents and Citizens Associations (equivalent to our PTAs) with people who otherwise wouldn’t participate, in order to get the trial cancelled. Why? Anglican Bishop Davies put it best:

It’s not about ethical instruction at all. It’s not about distinguishing between right and wrong. It’s more about ethical inquiry or metaethics. It’s a philosophy of ethics, and if you’ve seen clips of children in classes, they’re trying to express their point of view and they’re welcome to their point of view, but there is no education of right and wrong. It’s just what I think in my situation.

In other words, there is no catechism! There is no top-down instruction, for example that huge families are RIGHT and oral sex is WRONG. How are children supposed to figure out for themselves what is right and wrong unless they read God’s instructions in 2,000-year-old books?

God experts are especially outraged because students previously enrolled in scripture classes were allowed to switch to the new ethics class, contrary to what they claim was a promise when the program started. Free choice? Where in scripture does it say that’s a good idea? As the representative of the Australian Catholic Church put it, “They’re offering something in competition with SRE [Special Religious Education], and we don’t think that’s fair.”

Worse yet, the class actually encourages “thinking” about what is right and what is wrong in a given situation, rather than obediently following the dictates of the God experts. What could be better calculated to undermine the public’s willingness to pay God experts for answers than the realization that they can provide these answers for themselves? If children cannot be forced to sit through scripture memorization classes, far better to let them smoke in the lavatories than to encourage habits of probing and questioning on matters that God has already decided.

Australia is not the only country where this issue comes up. Four years ago in Bolivia, President Evo Morales introduced a proposal to replace Catholic religious instruction in state-run schools with ethics courses. Though Morales succeeded in implementing other radical ideas, he could not defeat the power of the Church, which threatened to take to the streets – supernatural brainwashing remains firmly planted in Bolivian schools. Two years ago in Quebec, compulsory religious instruction classes offered separately by each denomination were replaced by a generic “Ethics and Religious Culture” class, dealing even-handedly with all of the province’s major religions. The specter of young people being given the information with which to make their own choices about what, if any, set of supernatural beliefs they ought to adopt was so horrifying to Catholic authorities that they encouraged a boycott of the classes, even though it meant suspension from school. Even Rome got involved: Cardinal Grocholewski of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education fumed that “Talking in the same way about all religions is almost like an anti-Catholic education, because this creates a certain relativism.”

Here in the United States, the tradition of ethics education in the public schools goes back a long way, even if we didn’t call it that. Public schools in the 19^th century had more of a Protestant flavor than 21^st century humanists would prefer, but compared to the rest of the world they were quite tolerant and secular. Though they didn’t have a specially constructed course in ethics, they did have the McGuffey reader, which was explicitly intended to communicate moral values at the same time it taught children to read. (This used to be called “efficiency.”) We can argue about the relative merits of the moral values taught and omitted by the McGuffey readers, and I certainly wouldn’t agree that they ought to be resurrected in their original form. But that’s just the point: we can ARGUE about them, we can improve them, we can use our gray matter to see what works and what doesn’t and steer things in better directions over time. That’s exactly what happened with the McGuffey readers; scholars write books about how their moral messages evolved in a more humanist direction over the decades. We don’t have to let experts inform us what God’s will is on every ethical issue that comes up.

Of course, the leading opposition to the McGuffey reader concept was – you guessed it – the Catholic Church. Canon law made it a grave sin for a Catholic family to send its children to a public school in a place where a Catholic school was available. Archbishop John T. McNicholas, general president of the National Catholic Educational Association, explained that: “There must be no wall of separation between God and the child. The secularistic educators who raise this wall are, in reality, fascist educators, who, perhaps without realizing it, are planning to give our country millions of uncontrolled juvenile criminals.” For decades on end, Catholic congressmen blocked the idea of federal aid to education on the grounds that under our Constitution, Catholic schools would be excluded from it. In 1953, the Church even encouraged Catholics to violate the law by refusing to pay taxes to support public schools that did not include Catholic religious instruction:

An example in our land of what might be called an unjust law opposed to a human good insofar as it burdens a special group excessively is the legal tax arrangement whereby Catholics contribute a large amount in taxes for educational purposes but do not receive anything from these collected funds for the support of their own parochial schools. … Since these laws are unjust, Catholics could not be held bound in conscience, in light of the demands of legal justice, to pay the excessive taxation, except in order to avoid scandal or disturbance. … If because of the injustice a particular Catholic should refuse to pay a portion of his taxes, his portion of that set aside for schools, and as a result be brought before the court in contesting the law, the Catholic judge should do what he can to show the law’s injustice and to avoid its application.

One novel idea the Australians might want to consider would be to let the voters have a voice. In 2006, the city of Berlin approved a program in which ethics became a compulsory subject for all high school students. God experts hated this, for all the usual reasons, and last year won the right to a referendum on their alternative plan of offering separate classes for Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims, who would each get their own particular supernatural flavor. The referendum was supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, and generated intense coverage by the press with lots of paid advertising on both sides.

Under Berlin’s referendum rules, it is necessary for a proposal to win both a majority of the votes cast and at least 25% of the total registered voters in order to pass. Thus, staying home was almost the same thing as voting “No.” Even though this referendum was held on a Sunday, when churches could most easily maximize their turnout efforts, staying home is exactly what 70% of the Berliners did. Even among those who voted, a majority opposed introducing religion classes into the schools. American politicians who think that kowtowing to God experts is always smart politics should take note.

Luis Granados

Last week, heavily armed forces attacked a defenseless convoy of ships in international waters, temporarily seized its cargo, and stole the cash and personal effects of some 500 passengers. In the process, dozens of passengers were wounded, and at least nine were shot at close range and killed. A number of other passengers remain unaccounted for; some report that several persons were thrown overboard.

The convoy was carrying medicine, medical equipment, food, and toys for the people of Gaza, now suffering through their third year of an Israeli blockade. After a thorough search of the ships, the “weapons” the Israeli attackers found were kitchen knives (in the kitchen) and a safety razor.

Among the passengers who were tasered, shot in the face with paintballs at pointblank range and generally roughed up were two women journalists from Australia, whose cameras recording the mayhem were then confiscated.

One of the passengers who was shot through the forehead and killed was an American citizen, 19 years of age. Other Americans who were injured before being arrested included a retired engineer who planned to help rebuild private homes destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers. Another humanitarian aid ship that was seized by Israel on Saturday was named the Rachel Corrie, after a fearless young American woman crushed to death by Israeli bulldozers in Gaza in 2003. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

On Friday the meeting of the Texas Board of Education began with a prayer offered by member Cynthia Dunbar, a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Dunbar prayed “in the name of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” on behalf of “a Christian land governed by Christian principles…I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses,” she said, adding that “I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it.”

With the tone properly set, the Board proceeded to give final approval to a new set of standards to be taught in the state’s public schools. Voting strictly along party lines, the Republican majority decided, among other things, to remove a reference to Thomas Jefferson from history books, replacing him with the study of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.

The old standard:

Explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.

The new Republican standard:

Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.

I am all in favor of adding John Calvin to the list. The more students learn about his bigotry, his burning of heretics, and his dumbfounding notions of predestination, the better. His ideas certainly had an impact on New England’s Puritans; students should learn about the Massachusetts statute of 1641 providing the death penalty for blasphemy, or, for a lesser offense, mutilation of the tongue. They should also learn about the Massachusetts Calvinists who executed four people in 1659 for the crime of being Quakers.

Aquinas is a different matter. I’m drawing a blank on what relationship he has to the founding of America; his opus was more concerned with theological niceties like the different categories of grace and the nature of limbo. I suspect the board is just being politically correct here, tossing a bone to the Catholics if they were going to add the rabidly anti-Catholic Calvin. Being generous, I suppose Aquinas’ teachings in favor of slavery could have some relevance.

Part of the argument for leaving out Jefferson was that he didn’t have many original ideas, but merely implemented the ideas of others. Stretching my generosity to the limit, I could agree with that. Besides, he was a slaveholder, which ought to subtract a couple of points. But instead of omitting him altogether, how about replacing him with the guy who inspired many of his ideas, who has the added advantage of being one of America’s first abolitionists?

Jefferson planned the inscription for his own tombstone, and it mentioned only three of his accomplishments. Two of them were authoring the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Independence for the colonies wasn’t really his idea, though. At the dawn of 1776, almost no one was in favor of that. Greater local autonomy for the colonies, yes, but not outright independence. When full-scale warfare broke out, though, Americans didn’t appreciate being shot at by their benevolent British masters, and at this “teachable moment” a little pamphlet by Tom Paine, written at Ben Franklin’s suggestion, took America by storm.

Common Sense was written in the unflowery language of a non-professional educated in the school of hard knocks. Among simple colonists it struck a nerve, arguing not only for independence, but for the even more radical idea of not having a divine-right king at all, but a republic governed by elected representatives of the people—an idea not advocated by any of the other thinkers included in the new Texas standard. More than 500,000 copies of Common Sense were printed—not bad in a total population of 2.5 million, and by far the number one seller in America for the entire 18^th century. It changed minds. Washington himself wrote that the “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning” of Common Sense was working a “powerful change … in the Minds of men.” Even John Adams, never a Paine ally, admitted that “without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Six months later, the Continental Congress jumped on the bandwagon Tom Paine had set in motion, and assigned Jefferson the scrivener’s task.

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, while highly important, also carries out ideas expressed more fully by Tom Paine in what by my reckoning is the most profound religious work ever written: The Age of Reason. From the outset, Paine rejects the atheist certainty that no supernatural force exists. “I believe in one God, and no more.” Yet he spends most of the book debunking the Christian Bible, in a manner rather contrary to Ms. Dunbar’s belief that the “Good Book” is our guiding genius. The Gospel story “has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. … [I]t is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty, more inconsistent with His wisdom, more contradictory to His power, than this story is.”

Paine finds God not in the glibness of the God experts, but in the world around us: “It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. … It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. … It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.”

Calvin and Aquinas based their entire systems on “revelation,” the idea that God communicated his will to certain experts. Calvin insisted that revelation was contained solely within the books selected for inclusion in the Bible; Aquinas taught that God also sends revelation telegrams into the brain of the Pope. Paine’s treatment of revelation is essentially unanswerable:

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication.

Paine then dwells on the evil that God expert power has done the world across the centuries: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” He instead stresses reason and morality, eliminating the theological speculation of people like Calvin and Aquinas. But he shrewdly identifies the political problem with this simple approach:

Pure and simple Deism does not answer the purpose of despotic governments. They cannot lay hold of religion as an engine but by mixing it with human inventions, and making their own authority a part; neither does it answer the avarice of priests, but by incorporating themselves and their functions with it, and becoming, like the government, a party in the system. It is this that forms the otherwise mysterious connection of church and state.

Which, of course, is precisely the kind of two-step Texas Republicans are trying to bring to the public education dance.

So instead of just shaking our heads about how backwards these new standards are, maybe there’s an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons here. A campaign, perhaps, to develop a lesson plan asking students to compare and contrast the ideas of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas with those of Tom Paine. That could surely get some minds moving.

UPDATE: Lacking in the divine guidance that enables God experts to be infallible, I made a rather egregious error in yesterday’s “Texas Two-Step” entry, which I regret. The Texas Board of Education, back in March, had approved preliminary standards removing Thomas Jefferson from a list of political philosophers to be studied in Texas schools, replacing him with Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. On Friday, May 21, the board made a number of changes to the proposed standards, and then voted final approval. When researching my post on Saturday I reviewed a number of news articles about the events of Friday, none of which mentioned any change to the Jefferson decision, so I assumed that portion of the March draft had remained unchanged. It is now evident that I didn’t look hard enough, because in fact Jefferson has been reinstated to the list. Aquinas and Calvin are still in, but an attempt to add James Madison failed.

On the one hand, had Saturday’s search revealed that Jefferson had survived the cut, I would have arranged the post differently, noting that if the God experts get two additions to the list, our side merits at least one, and nominating Paine as a substitute if they don’t like Madison. On the other hand, now that the deed is done, I still think the single best choice for young Texans to study is Paine, that contrasting Paine with Calvin and Aquinas is a wonderful exercise, and that almost any opportunity to spread the ideas of Tom Paine is well worth taking. Admittedly, that sounds a little like Bush defending the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that even though we didn’t find any WMDs, the world is better off anyway. But at least I didn’t kill anybody.

Luis Granados

A woman is alive today in Phoenix, Arizona, and the “pro-life” Catholic Church is busily doling out its maximum punishments as a result.

The woman, whose name is not public, was 11 weeks pregnant. She was also seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension, a condition that does not go well with pregnancy – in fact, the combination is probably fatal. An Ethics Committee at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix convened to consider her case. The Committee, which included a Catholic nun named Sister Margaret McBride, determined that it was necessary to abort the fetus in order to save the life of the mother, and the procedure was quickly performed.

As a result, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, publicly announced that Sister McBride is automatically excommunicated from the Church, its gravest punishment. What does excommunication mean? She has already been demoted within the hospital, and I imagine she will be expelled from her order of nuns. If she has earned any pension rights within the order, they will probably be lost as well, since churches are exempt from the laws that govern the pensions of everyone else. No good Catholic may eat, play, or do business with a moral leper who has been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. If she is inadvertently buried in a Catholic cemetery, she must be dug up as promptly as possible and moved away. Until she is moved away, the whole cemetery where she is buried is considered defiled.

Bishop Olmsted is not deviating from Catholic policy here. He is following it to the letter: Canon law 1398 says that “A person who procures a successful abortion incurs an automatic excommunication.” According to canon lawyer Colin Donovan, quoted in a Spero News article of July 2, 2008,

Conspirators who incur the excommunication can be defined as those who make access to the abortion possible. This certainly includes doctors and nurses who actually do it, husbands, family and others whose counsel and encouragement made it morally possible for the woman, and those whose direct practical support made it possible (financially, driving to the clinic etc.).

In a similar case in Brazil last year, a girl who had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather since the age of 6 became pregnant at the age of 9 – with twins. Neither the girl’s mother nor her doctors thought that either the girl or the fetuses had the slightest chance of surviving a pregnancy, so a legal abortion was performed. Both the mother and the doctors were then excommunicated. Interestingly, the father was not – church authorities specifically pointed out that his sin was not nearly as heinous as that of saving the child’s life.

Such a procedure could not have been legally performed in Chile, Nicaragua, or El Salvador, where the Church has succeeded in criminalizing abortion even where necessary to save the mother’s life.

For the Church, the survival of the fetus is irrelevant. Ivory tower scholastics pick out one of the 613 commandments from the Old Testament, “Thou shalt not kill,” and apply it with ruthless disregard for particular circumstances. For example, consider the ectopic pregnancy, in which a fetus begins to grow outside the womb. It cannot possibly survive, and allowing it to remain will surely kill the mother. A mid-20th century book by Father Patrick Finney called Moral Problems in Hospital Practice, that was officially approved with the imprimatur of the Church, was crystal clear:

Question 35. In a case of ectopic pregnancy, which has been diagnosed as a case of unruptured tubal pregnancy, is it lawful, before the term of viability, to remove the unruptured tube with the living fetus, as a means of forestalling the danger to the mother’s life, upon the rupture of the tube?

Answer. No, it is not lawful. Such a removal is a direct killing of the fetus, and is therefore forbidden.

This was directly in line with a 1902 pronouncement of the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome.

In his 1948 classic American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard attempted to estimate from the available data how many American women died each year as a result of the Church’s insistence that abortion is not allowed even where necessary to save the life of the mother. Though his methods were far from precise, they were not unreasonable. He concluded that the number was approximately 1,000 dead mothers per year. If he’s right about that, as an average across the century, that would mean that more Americans died from this Church teaching than died in World War I and Vietnam combined. That figure, of course, is just for America, which has only a small fraction of the world’s Catholics.

Remind me: Why is the moral authority of the Catholic Church thought to be even slightly higher than zero?

Luis Granados

Defenders of the Constitution lost another round in court last week. You may recall that when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year, Michael Newdow and others filed suit to require the Chief Justice to administer his oath of office in the manner that is prescribed, word for word, in our Constitution. The Chief Justice had proposed, at Obama’s request, to modify the words by violating yet another rule of the Constitution, the one against government promotion of religion, by adding the prayer “So help me God” to the oath. The district court ruled against Newdow, and now the D.C. Circuit Court has affirmed that ruling.

In doing so, the court stated that every President since George Washington had added this prayer to the oath – a myth that I debunked last year. The court also said that it was too late for it to rule on a 2009 oath that had already happened, and too early to rule on future oaths that have not yet happened, a neat Catch-22 that appears to allow free reign for future violations without any judicial oversight whatsoever.

This matter brings to mind another situation involving religion in an oath of office, from 1775 France. For the preceding 250 years, officially Catholic France had been cracking down on its small Protestant minority. Six different civil wars were fought in the late 16^th century, which were finally put to rest when the leading Protestant prince agreed to unite the country by converting to Catholicism. A few years later, after being recognized as king, he issued the Edict of Nantes, guaranteeing perpetual religious freedom for Protestants and bringing France unprecedented peace and prosperity. But the Pope called the Edict “the worst thing in the world,” and a zealous Catholic ultimately assassinated the king. Thereafter, the screws on France’s Protestants were turned progressively tighter. One favored technique, called the dragonnade, involved the forced quartering of French soldiers (who were often not nice young men) in the homes of Protestants, until their hosts would agree to convert to Catholicism.

Ultimately, in 1685, Louis XIV announced that there were no Protestants left in France, and thus repealed the “perpetual” Edict of Nantes altogether. Hundreds of thousands of Protestants then fled the country, crippling its economy just at the time when Louis was nearing hegemony over all of Europe, thus ruining his plans.

French Protestantism was ultimately saved by Voltaire, even though he despised it as being even more unreasonable than what was then an agreeably decadent Catholicism. In 1762 a Toulouse Protestant named Jean Calas was brutally tortured and executed for having murdered his son for allegedly having decided to convert to Catholicism, despite overwhelming evidence that the son had simply committed suicide. Voltaire made the case a cause célèbre, hammering away for years at the total lack of evidence of the son’s proposed conversion, and the physical impossibility that his death could have occurred the way the judges said it did. Ultimately Voltaire succeeded in getting the central government at Paris to review the case, despite its arguable lack of authority to do so; by a vote of 40-0, the review panel concluded that a terrible injustice had been done, while blaming the intolerance against France’s Protestant community for the outrage.

At a late stage of the Calas campaign, Voltaire published his brilliant Treatise on Tolerance, demolishing the folly of religious bigotry throughout recorded history. The Calas verdict and the Treatise both made a deep impression on French public opinion, and by the time the future Louis XVI was ready to be crowned in 1775 he had determined in his own mind to restore the freedoms of the Edict of Nantes. But there was one enormous problem: in the oath of office to be sworn before God and the nation at the time of his coronation, he had to swear to exterminate all heretics from his dominions. He wasn’t king yet, so he couldn’t change the oath. What to do, what to do …

History does not regard Louis XVI as being particularly intelligent or brave, as he blundered his way into what became the French Revolution. But his strategy at coronation, though ignominious, is hard to criticize. Before the assembled nobility and hierarchy of France in the majestic cathedral of Reims, as he solemnly intoned his coronation oath, when he got to the part about exterminating the heretics, he mumbled. (For those of us who have difficulty with a language that only pronounces half its letters, spoken French often sounds mumbled anyway.) To this day no one knows exactly what he said. The presiding cardinal was either too surprised, too inattentive, or too timid (or some combination thereof) to ask him to the repeat the words. Louis would never reveal what he said; but when shortly thereafter he began removing the legal disabilities on French Protestants, he was safe from the charge of having violated his oath.

How different the Obama approach! The words “So help me God” do not appear in the oath as it is delineated in the Constitution, a document notable for never using the word “God” at all. This was no accident; there was extended debate at the Constitutional Convention about whether the fundamental law of the land should refer to God, and the humanist side won. When George Washington first took the oath, he apparently said it the way it was written; there is no evidence that any other President until Chester Arthur in 1881 chose to re-write the oath. Obama was simply pandering to the God experts by ignoring the Constitution, as other politicians do.

If there is a conclusion to be drawn from contrasting these two oath modifications, it is that legal formality does not matter as much as culture. Voltaire and his adherents changed the culture of 18^th century France by making people ashamed of the prevailing intolerance. Once that happened, it made no difference what the law prescribed – even a creampuff like Louis XVI found the backbone to do the right thing. In 21^st century America, the God experts are allowed to have such unquestioned command over the culture that a smart fellow raised in a humanist household like Obama knuckles under, injecting a supernatural element into a civil oath where it does not belong.

So we need another Voltaire, right? Not going to happen. What can happen, though, was foreshadowed by Prince Talleyrand in 1815: “There is someone who is cleverer than Voltaire, cleverer than Bonaparte, cleverer than any of the Directors, than any Minister in the past or in the future; and that person is everybody (tout le monde).” In the 21^st century, tout le monde is empowered by this marvelous invention called the Internet, which has the same potential for weakening the stranglehold of supernaturalism as the printing press had 500 years ago. Écrasez l’Infâme!

In an age of PSAs and the Vagina Monologues, many of us consider ourselves informed and educated about institutionalized female violence.  “It happens over there,” we tell ourselves, pointing to remote locations on a map, barely envisioning what “it” might entail.  But some forms of violence against women are disguised as customs, some of those customs have crossed oceans to arrive here, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has created a loophole that will keep those customs alive.  Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Dorota Rabczewska, the flamboyant Polish pop singer better known as “Doda,” may face two years in a Polish prison for saying something unkind about the Bible: “It is hard to believe in something written by people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes.”

In the current issue of The Humanist, I talk about the new blasphemy law in Ireland, and outline a strategy for undermining it by claiming that Christians blaspheme against humanists every time they say we deserve to be eternally tortured in hell simply because we don’t believe what they believe. The same ploy could be used in Poland, which also has blasphemy laws on the books. Perhaps even more easily.

According to a report published by the Council of Europe in 2008, Article 196 of the Polish Criminal Code provides that “Anyone found guilty of offending religious feelings through public calumny of an object or place of worship is liable to a fine, restriction of liberty or a maximum two-year prison sentence.” Doda pretty clearly committed public calumny against the Bible, which is an “object,” and lots of witnesses are lining up to say that their religious feelings have been offended thereby. Don Quixote had an easier time with the windmills than a lawyer arguing that Doda didn’t break that law would have.

So let’s look instead at Article 257 of the same Criminal Code. According to the COE report, this “offence is committed by anyone who publicly insults a group within the population or a particular person because of his national, ethnic, race or religious affiliation or because of his lack of any religious denomination or for these reasons breaches the personal inviolability of another individual.”

Does a day go by in which some Polish priest does not condemn the Godless? I doubt it. How about starting at the top? Just last fall, Pope Benedict XVI visited the neighboring Czech Republic, which statistics show is the least religious country in Europe. There he launched into a tirade against the Czech people themselves, railing about “the poisonous effects of a certain secularism and Western consumerism,” and accusing the large majority of Czechs who don’t buy what he is selling of being “sad and unfulfilled people.” None of this got nearly the attention that a spider did who was caught on camera crawling across the pope’s robes as he spoke. Now, if the pope went to Jerusalem and talked about the “poisonous effects” of Judaism, wouldn’t that make news? Or if he went to Mecca and talked about how Islam leaves people “sad and unfulfilled,” wouldn’t that make news? But when he goes to the most secular country in Europe and talks about the poisonous effects of secularism, we are supposed to sit back and nod our heads about what a wise and holy man he is.

Seize him! Or at least prosecute him. Doda’s many fans can mount an excellent argument that the pope and every Catholic publisher in Poland who carried his words (or amplified them) violated Article 257 of the Criminal Code, and it’s time for all the insults to their sensitive feelings to stop. This pope’s worldwide popularity is at an all-time low; it may be even lower in Poland, given what seems to be the current Vatican spin that the sex abuse coverup was really John Paul II’s doing, with Benedict taking the fall for cleaning up the Polish pope’s mess. If enough demand for an Article 257 case can be ginned up, then at some point wiser heads can step in and say “Let the pope speak his mind. Let Doda speak her mind. Then let the people make up their own minds.”

What this country needs is a detailed federal regulation on permissible prayer.

One thing just about everyone agrees on is that this should be a government of laws, not of men. It is fundamentally unfair to penalize people for saying things unless they have been warned in advance what they may and may not say.

Take Rev. Franklin Graham. Here’s a fellow who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charitable relief, whose son is serving his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan. Graham volunteered to serve without pay as chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, arranging events around the country to cooperate with the Congressionally-mandated National Day of Prayer. What thanks does he get? At the last minute, he gets unceremoniously booted off the program at the National Day of Prayer event at the Pentagon, because some bureaucrat decided that his prayers weren’t good enough to satisfy the standard. What standard? The secret standard inside the bureaucrat’s head. Our only clue is a hint that Graham is not “inclusive” enough, because he reaches the logical conclusion that if his own beliefs are true, other beliefs that contradict them must be false. With a published rule, Graham would know where he stands, and wouldn’t be subjected to such a terrific public humiliation.

Graham is not the only person these secret standards apply to. Last year, according to US News & World Report, President Obama launched a practice of beginning most of his public events around the country with a prayer, delivered by a local God expert. This is new; no president in recent memory – not even George W. Bush – followed this routine. Not just any prayer, though. It has to be a prayer that is pre-approved by a government bureaucrat from the White House Office of Public Liaison. Approved based on what standard? The secret standard, inside the bureaucrat’s head. This is not the way civilized government is supposed to work.

What kind of prayers would be rejected under a federal prayer regulation? The short but heartfelt “God damn America!” prayer of Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright would probably be excluded. I’m also guessing the Good Friday prayer from the pre-2008 official Catholic Missal might not make the cut:

Let us pray also for the perfidious Jews: that Almighty God remove the veil from their hearts, so that they too might acknowledge Jesus Christ Our Lord. … Almighty and eternal God, who does not exclude from Thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of Thy truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.

Is it possible that the reason the Church wants to convert the perfidious Jews is because of the Talmud’s command for Jewish men to pray every morning, thanking God for not having made them women? I don’t think that’s the reason, but I do think that is another prayer verboten under the regulation. Maybe it would have been ok when Obama was running against Hilary, but not now.
Read the rest of this entry &raquo

According to published rumors, Comedy Central is thinking about developing a new cartoon series satirizing the childhood of Jesus, who wants to escape his “powerful but apathetic father” and live a regular life in New York City.

As someone admittedly clueless about what is and what isn’t a good way to make money on television, I’m reluctant to use words like “harebrained” to characterize this. And I’m an old twentieth-century fuddy-duddy, so I hope I’m proven spectacularly wrong.

Going way out on a limb here, I’ll predict that a lot of professional Christians will have unkind things to say about a show like this. If so, it won’t be the first time that Christians cracked down on stories about Jesus’s childhood.

There are four books today accepted by Christians as divinely-inspired Gospels, each of them written at least many decades after Jesus’s death. But those were not the only biographies of Jesus written at the time. There were dozens of others, and the process the early Church went through to decide which of these were divine truth and which were forgettable garbage is not one that inspires great confidence among objective scholars today. For example, why are there four Gospels, and not three, or five? According to the second-century bishop who was most responsible for picking the ones that made the cut: “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the World in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel . . . it is fitting that she should have four pillars.”

One of the early lives of Jesus that didn’t make the cut is now known as the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” now reproduced in Bart Ehrman’s book Lost Gospels. It has several stories that the Comedy Central writers may want to explore:

The Little Rascal:

Somewhat later he [Jesus] was going through the village, and a child ran and banged into his shoulder. Jesus was aggravated and said to him, “You will go no further on your way.” And right away the child fell down and died. One of those who saw what happened said, “Where was this child born? For everything he says is a deed accomplished?”

Fun on the Roof:

Some days later Jesus was playing on a flat rooftop of a house, and one of the children playing with him fell from the roof and died. When the other children saw what had happened, they ran away, so that Jesus stood there alone. When the parents of the one who died arrived they accused him of throwing him down. But Jesus said, “I certainly did not throw him down.” But they began to abuse him verbally. Jesus leapt down from the roof and stood beside the child’s corpse, and with a loud voice he cried out, “Zenon!” (for that was his name) “rise up and tell me: did I throw you down?” And right away he rose up and said, “Not at all Lord! You did not throw me down, but you have raised me up!” When they saw this they were astounded. Parents of the child glorified God for sign that had occurred, and they worshiped Jesus.

Respect Your Teacher?

Then Jesus said to him, “If you are really a teacher and know the letters well, tell me the power of the Alpha, and I will tell you the power of the Beta.” The teacher was aggravated and struck him on the head. The child was hurt and cursed him; and immediately he fainted and fell to the ground on his face. The child returned to Joseph’s house. Joseph was smitten with grief and ordered his mother, “Do not let him out the door; for those who anger him die.

The author of this book was working with the same kind of oral tradition evidence as were the authors of the books now attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Will the real Jesus please stand up?

Could there be a better argument against government endorsement of prayer than the antics of Rev. Franklin Graham?

Having an official National Day of Prayer apparently means having a lineup of God experts praying at the Pentagon, so the politicians can pop up and show their constituents how pious they are. This means having our government pick and choose which experts get to speak, and which get frozen out. Billy Graham’s son originally made the cut, until Muslim God experts started to whine that he once called Islam evil. According to the officially prevailing theology of the United States Government, calling something evil is evil, whether or not the something is evil. (If Christianity is true, then Islam actually is evil – and vice versa.)

So Graham suddenly found himself switched over to the frozen-out column. He is not being a good sport about this. First, he goes and ruins Obama’s photo-op with his 91-year old father by showing up and demanding that Obama “do something” about his dis-invitation. Obama promised he would look into it; a promise which wound up on the same pile as his campaign promise to end discriminatory hiring by those feeding at the faith-based trough. Now Graham says he is going to turn up at the Pentagon anyway, leading some sort of anti-official-US-government-theology prayer on his own. He perhaps gave some hint about the tone of this prayer when he ridiculed Hinduism as a religion of hundred-armed elephants.

I like Graham. He says what he thinks, rather than being so PC all the time. I agree with him about Islam and Hinduism; I would just lump Christianity in with them, as he would not. What I don’t like is hand-wringing politicians trying to have their cake and eat it too, pandering for votes from the religious while trying to sweep under the rug the thousands of years of problems that have been caused whenever civil government gets in bed with God experts of whatever stripe. Neither did the Founding Fathers, which is why they adopted the establishment clause of the First Amendment, now largely a dead letter. If people want to pray, do Tarot cards, or whatever, by all means let them go ahead. Just leave the government out of it.

I’ll have much more on this, including a brief history of government promotion of prayer since Roman times, in my God Experts piece this Sunday.

[Rant & Reason welcomes new blogger Luis Granados, who also writes the blog God Experts. His bio is here.]

Talk about a made-for-blogosphere non-event. A cartoonist posts a clever take on the censorship of the South Park Muhammad-in-disguise episode (more on which you can see in my April 24 God Experts piece), showing entries in an imaginary “Everyone Draw Mohammed” contest. Next thing you know, someone picks up on it, and there’s a Facebook page with 8,500 members, all pledged to draw a picture of Muhammad on May 20, defying a Muslim ban on depictions of the prophet. Since every blogosphere action has an opposite (if unequal) reaction, there is soon angst and hand-wringing over such insensitivity to Muslims worldwide.

At least this has the benefit of smoking out muddleheadedness so it can be shot at. Leading the charge was the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, who compared the plan to “Everybody Burn the Flag Day,” suggesting that just because we have the freedom to express ourselves doesn’t mean that doing so is a wise idea. The obvious difference for me personally is, I don’t want to burn the flag—I’m rather proud of what it stands for. But the taboo against depicting Muhammad is intolerable. Granted, some religious rules happen to coincide with common-sense values—“Thou shalt not steal” is pretty non-controversial. But threatening to kill someone for drawing a picture of Muhammad, disrespectful or otherwise, is idiotic.  The bigger the outcry, the sooner this thuggery will end.

According to Taranto,

The problem with the “in-your-face message” of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” is not just that it is inconsiderate of the sensibilities of others, but that it defines those others—Muslims—as being outside of our culture, unworthy of the courtesy we readily accord to insiders. It is an unwise message to send, assuming that one does not wish to make an enemy of the entire Muslim world. 

The problem with this thinking is that it is essentially racist. The implicit assumption is that those brainwashed from birth into being Muslims, most of whom are black or brown, are incapable of responding to constructive criticism by changing their ways, so suggesting they do so lacks “courtesy.”

For almost all of Muslim history, a teaching far more central than the ban on depicting Muhammad was that of slavery. God commanded it repeatedly in the Koran, and Muhammad practiced it extensively throughout the body of traditions ascribed to him. Most black Americans are here today because their ancestors were captured and sold by Muslim slavers. In the Taranto view, criticizing slavery would be “an unwise message to send, assuming that one does not wish to make an enemy of the entire Muslim world.” In fact, the anti-slavery agitation of the 19^th century did make an enemy of large portions of the Muslim world: the Mahdi’s 1881 uprising in Sudan was largely sparked by Britain’s godless crackdown on the slave trade. If Taranto were king, our deep respect for the cultural sensibilities of others would have allowed slavery to roll merrily along.

By far the most effective way to undermine the moronic idea that visual depictions of Muhammad warrant violent reaction is to ridicule it. If that earns us as many enemies as abolitionists like Voltaire and Paine had in their day, we’re in good company.

Ann Althouse reserves her crocodile tears for innocent Muslims. “Depictions of Muhammad offend millions of Muslims who are no part of the violent threats. In pushing back some people, you also hurt a lot of people who aren’t doing anything.”

Now she’s done it. She’s gone and hurt my feelings. Here I am, all abuzz about participating in “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day.” I have my entry all planned out: not a caricature, but a tasteful, respectful, historically accurate tableau of the episode from the Sunna in which Muhammad personally beheaded 600 Jewish prisoners in the market square of Medina, while enslaving their wives and children.  (If I could actually learn to draw something like this between now and May 20, that would be a miracle.) I’m joining hands in fellowship with like-minded humanists in a common mission to preach the values we hold sacred: tolerance, freedom of expression, reason over revelation, and creativity. (And let me add, I don’t even like South Park.) Now Ms. Althouse bursts my bubble, telling me that I’m a bad person for putting into a picture what the sacred Sunna puts into words. I am hurt; I am offended; I may cry myself to sleep tonight. Ms. Althouse cares deeply about Muslim feelings—what am I, chopped liver?

What baffles me most about the whole South Park affair is why the person who threatened the show’s creators is walking free. This is America—the litigious society. Why is there no lawsuit? An American named Abu Talhah al-Amrikee (aka Zachary Chesser, a resident of Virginia) threatened violent death to Trey Parker and Matt Stone. In many states, the common law tort of assault is defined as “an attempt to menace (or actual menacing) by placing another person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury,” and victims are allowed to sue for damages. If al-Amrikee/Chesser wants to try his snarky defense that he didn’t mean to threaten or incite, just to warn of what some other mean-spirited Muslim group might do, let him. At the very least, having to defend a lawsuit would surely bankrupt al-Amrikee/Chesser and his little hate club. Of all people, you would think Mr. Wall Street Journal Taranto would know that, this being America, little guys can’t tweak giant corporations with impunity. South Park is indirectly owned by Viacom—where’s Goliath when we need him?

I recently filed a friend of the court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the AHA and six other nonprofits. The case – Christian Legal Society v. Martinez – seemingly pits the free speech and association rights of CLS against the right of all students at a public college to participate in officially recognized student groups.

How will the Court balance these interests? I wouldn’t be surprised if the Court split 5-4, but my guess isn’t much better than a flip of the coin.

Here’s an outline of the facts. Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco conditions its recognition of student groups on their agreeing to abide by the law school’s nondiscrimination policy. Up until 2004, CLS had agreed to abide by the policy. Then, to affiliate with the national CLS group, the CLS chapter changed its constitution to require voting members and leaders to subscribe to a Statement of Faith. That statement is interpreted by the student group as requiring it to exclude non-orthodox Christians (including heterodox Christians, atheists and Jews) and gays. As a consequence, Hastings denied CLS “recognized student organization” (“RSO”) status. This is important because RSOs have priority access to meeting spaces and communication channels, and they are eligible to apply for funds from student activity fees and to use the Hastings logo.

CLS argues that Hastings violated its expressive association rights by denying it RSO status on account of its religious viewpoints.

Here’s what I argued in AHA’s brief. First, CLS has the right to determine its own membership under the Supreme Court’s decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) (which held that private groups can exclude anyone they want to). However, CLS doesn’t have the right to be privileged by the state including those privileges I mentioned above that Hastings grants to RSOs.

Second, I argued that under the Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), Hastings’ nondiscrimination policy is permissible because it is viewpoint neutral and applicable to all student groups. The District Court based its decision in Hastings favor on this basis and the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed for the same reason.

It’s important to note here that the District Court found that because CLS was permitted some access to Hastings facilities, its right of expressive association was not substantially burdened. It is also important to note that Hastings’ nondiscrimination policy targets “conduct” which the school may establish reasonable regulations, and not “speech” (i.e., viewpoints which it may not be censored).

And third, I argued that Hastings has a compelling interest in preventing the discrimination and stigmatization of “outsiders” and that its policy works to achieve this purpose. Simply put, it would be unreasonable to ask students to fund their own discrimination.

Oral arguments are scheduled for April 19 and a decision in the case is expected before the end of June.

I would be interested in hearing your views on the case and my arguments for upholding Hastings’ nondiscrimination policy by commenting on this blog post.

The American Humanist Association is at the forefront of atheist/agnostic/humanist/whatever-you-want-to-call-it advertising. Our billboard, transit, and publication advertising has been seen in cities across the country—and this is to say nothing of the work of our sister organization, UnitedCoR.

One argument against advertising that has been brought up again and again is that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Fair enough. But advertising also brings interest to our philosophy, and this is one of the stated objectives of the AHA.

The mission of the American Humanist Association is to be a clear, democratic voice for Humanism in the United States, to increase public awareness and acceptance of humanism, to establish, protect and promote the position of humanists in our society, and to develop and advance humanist thought and action.

One may disagree with the importance of this objective, but so long as the AHA’s mission contains public awareness we will continue; and we will succeed. Our advertising not only causes a press heyday, it also provokes a counteroffensive of some kind (also here and here).

But our good friends over at Answers in Genesis (AiG) have now gone a step further in Boston. Their ad is strikingly similar to our winter campaign ad. Now we could start screaming copyright, but we won’t. In my opinion they can go to town with our ad; who cares? The simple fact is that we know and admit an ad will never convert someone, so we target our ads to those already sympathetic to our message.

Looks like AiG is tying up their resources as they attempt to market to our sympathizers. That’s a foolish errand, and one we are happy to send them on.

ABC News reported yesterday that 800,000 rifle sights that will be provided to the U.S. Marine Corps will have coded references to New Testament Bible passages. The inscriptions include references to Second Corinthians of the New Testament and to the books of Revelation. Citations Trijicon, a Michigan-based company, is providing the sights under a $660 million multi-year contract.

Spokespeople for the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps said their services weren’t aware of the markings, and that officials are figuring out what steps to take now that the issue has been brought to light. Given Trijicon’s values statement, however, the revelation shouldn’t be too much of a shock. According to their website, “We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.” In addition, the group dismissed concerns about the coded sights by saying the issue was being raised by a group that is “not Christian.”

But not only should those who embrace non-Biblical values be worried about these coded sights. If our military has any appearance of waging a religious war in the Middle East, it’s dangerous to all of us and a threat to our mission to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan—particularly considering Iraqi soldiers are being trained by our military with rifles that are outfitted with these sights. As Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation says, “It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” and will play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

Iowa State Representative Dawn Pettengill (R) is proposing a resolution that would change the Iowa constitution to require lawmakers to say “so help me God” when being sworn into office. According to the Associated Press, Pettengill cares little about whether the proposal would offend lawmakers who don’t believe in God, saying that it’s offensive to her own faith not to require the phrase in the oath.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy says he’s checking with other lawmakers to see if there’s interest in moving forward with the resolution (it hasn’t been filed yet), but if any of them are at all familiar with Constitutional law they’d be wise to advise him to drop the matter. The ACLU and other groups are closely watching this issue, and no doubt someone will sue if such a measure were to move forward. And such a legal suit is very likely to win. There are all sorts of Constitutional protections this proposed resolution would violate, such as both religion clauses of the First Amendment, as well as the Free Speech Clause (most everyone is familiar with the Constitutional prohibition on restricting free speech—well, compelled speech also counts as violating free speech rights). Moreover, Article VI clearly states that the U.S. Constitution trumps state law on these issues.

But even if under the exceedingly unlikely scenario Iowa lawmakers aren’t aware of such Constitutional law, they should eschew Pettengill’s proposal based on simple principles of fairness and common sense. Besides being Constitutionally prohibited, anyone who understands the Golden Rule also understands that it’s wrong to require a nontheist to profess faith in God—just as much as it would be to require someone of faith to profess their disbelief in God. And such a requirement would do nothing to ensure the veracity of a person’s statement or promote reverence for the propaganda promoted therein, but rather would serve to undermine respect for the very ideas such a law would ostensibly advance.

By now you’ve heard of the devastating 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday. As international aid starts to arrive, tens of thousands are feared dead, and countless more are homeless, injured, and still on their own.

As the international community responds, Humanist Charities, a project of the American Humanist Association, has established a Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund that will direct your donations to relief projects in Haiti.

For up-to-the-minute news updates on the situation in Haiti, I highly recommend that you visit Talking Points Memo’s Haiti Quake Wire. And for more information on other organizations that are providing immediate aid and relief in Haiti, I recommend visiting the Huffington Post‘s continuously updated How You Can Help page, which lists several dozen organizations that are responding to the Haiti quake.