Entries associated with the tag "Religion":

The late congressperson Henry Hyde, speaking at Notre Dame 24 Sep 1984:

"Many of the same voices who hailed the American bishops as 'prophetic' when they tacitly endorsed the nuclear freeze now find the bishops 'scary' when the issue turns to abortion. This is hypocrisy."

An excellent point. Of course, it applies equally the other way around -- these days, to those who talk about the pope's opposition to abortion but ignore what he said about the US war in Iraq.

Henry Hyde was well qualified to speak of hypocrisy, having managed the impeachment of a Democratic president for perjury and then kept quiet about the far more consequential perjuries of his Republican successor. His legacy is that of a partisan first, with patriotism and morality trailing well behind.

H/t Jameson Campaigne for the link.

Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow evidently has the data and he's not afraid to use it. From his new book After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion:

"...unless religious leaders take younger adults more seriously, the future of American religion is in doubt.... Younger adults are already less actively involved in their congregations than older adults are. Not only this, younger adults are currently less involved than younger adults were a generation ago. The demographics behind this declining involvement also do not bode well for the future. Religious involvement is influenced more by whether people are married, when they get married, whether they have children, and how many children they have than almost anything else. Religious involvement is also shaped by how committed people are to their careers and to their communities. All of these social factors have been changing."

Most of the reviews and blog commentary that I've seen is a direct reaction to this, usually from people who find it worrisome. But as a recovering sociology major, I also enjoyed Wuthnow's takedowns of popular and journalistic thinking about generations:

"...there is simply no evidence that younger adults currently have been decisively shaped by a particular historical event in the same way that the baby boomers were by the Vietnam war or by their parents waiting until after World War II to marry and have children... The other reason for being skeptical of generational language is that popular usages of it strain to draw contrasts with baby boomers, but in doing so are misleading. For instance, one reads in the popular literature that the millennial generation is supposedly defined by an interest in small fellowship groups that meet for prayer and Bible study during the week at churches or in homes. But precisely the same argument was made about baby boomers and, in fact, research has shown that baby boomers did gravitate to these groups." 

Read the whole first chapter here. Wuthnow's own data groupings pay even less respect to the "boomer" vs. Gen X rhetoric. Usually he compares people born between 1953 and 1981 ("younger adults who were between the ages of 21 and 45 in the years from about 1998 to 2002") with those born 1927-1955.

More than one blog commenting on this links to a recent David Brooks column. Not having read the book yet, I'm not sure Wuthnow would care for the association. It's also been reviewed in Christian Century .

Football fandom is kind of a substitute for community, writes historian Eric Miller in this month's cover story  in Christianity Today. I read through it hoping to find something a bit more original. There wasn't, unless you count this paragraph:

"So we must ask of the NFL what we must ask of any entity with the ability to touch our souls and shape our lives: Does it have our best -- and our children's best -- interests at heart? Is there good evidence that it even knows our best interests? More particularly, to what lengths will it go to create a wholly faithful, devoted congregation, er … 'fan base'?"

Good questions. Subversive ones, too. What if Miller's readers took them seriously enough to ask them of their own church and religion? Christopher Hitchens did effectively that in God Is Not Great (page 212) and the result wasn't anything CT would ever publish:

Pascal's famous wager, Hitchens writes, "reminds me of the hypocrites and frauds who abound in Talmudic Jewish rationalization. Don't do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who's counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer 'temporary marriage,' selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable. . .

"This pathetic moral spectacle would not be necessary if the original rules were ones that it would be possible to obey. But to the totalitarian edicts that begin with revelation from absolute authority, and that are enforced by fear, and based on a sin that had been committed long ago, are added regulations that are often immoral and impossible at the same time" -- such as the commandment forbidding people from thinking about coveting, or Jesus's saying that for a man looking at a woman the wrong way is the same thing as his committing adultery with her. "The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey."

It's enough to make the NFL look harmless.

Mark Lilla, formerly of the University of Chicago and now of Columbia University, previewed his forthcoming book The Stillborn God in this weekend's New York Times magazine. (No wonder he moved away; can you imagine trying to publish something this intelligent anywhere in the Tribune?) Some of the questions he tackles: Why hasn't religion melted away like it was supposed to, and why is fanatical religion so much more attractive than the milquetoast liberal kind, and what is to be done?

"Quixote" at Shakespeare's Sister thinks he missed the point -- religion's just the hot air spewed by power-hungry politicians, Ahmadinejad, Bush, whoever.

I think Quixote missed the point, which is, why is a certain kind of religion still useful to the power-hungry? But the debate's off to a good start.

Freakonomics coauthor Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago doesn't know what he doesn't know, and publicly admits to being bewildered by how The God Delusion could be a best-seller:

"I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that bird watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend $20 in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird watcher books would be."

Does he think that it's unbelievers who deny evolution and try to stop stem-cell research? Does he think those maniacs with box cutters on 9/11 were secularists?

Andrea Althoff of DePaul University and the University of Chicago Divinity School has a short but nuanced take on the question, how will Latinos vote next year? Read the whole thing at History News Network.

The shorter, less-nuanced version, generalizing across many different nationalities and experiences, is that "Latino Catholics still outnumber Latino Protestants to a large extent, and these Latino Catholics prefer by and large the Democratic Party over the GOP....In the long run, however, the Republican Party may benefit from the conversion of Catholic Hispanics to Protestantism."

Barbara O'Brien at The Mahablog is impatient with Americans' belief in belief (hat tip to Slacktivist):

"The statistics suggest that more people 'believe in' the Ten Commandments than actually know what the Ten Commandments say. And I don't care what religious tradition you call your own; just 'believing in' something that you don't practice or understand or follow is crap. It's not even religion... 

"[Susan] Sontag said that when George Bush said Jesus was his favorite philosopher [in 2000] 'Bush didn't mean, and was not understood to mean, that, if elected, his administration would actually feel bound by any of the precepts or social programs expounded by Jesus.' She's right. We all understood that, even before we knew Bush very well, and isn't that remarkable? These days Jesus is little more than the Right's team mascot." 

Sure, hypocrisy is bad, and it's easy to shoot down. But make sure your argument does what you want it to. There are plenty of right-wing theocrats who know their Bibles as well as Christopher Hitchens does.

Would The Mahablog really feel better if Bush could reel off the Ten Commandments, and if he did believe his administration was bound by them? I doubt it. The real point is this: you and I are free to think that Jesus, or Krishna, or Loki, calls us to make, say, immigration policy more generous, or less generous. But when we go into politics we have to make the case based on values and reasons that everybody can buy into, not just one brand of belief.

Mark Oppenheimer adds to my reading list with his New York Times review of Stephen Prothero's new book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't; the review includes this bipartisan historical smackdown: 

"Both conservatives and liberals are to blame for American religious illiteracy. Beginning with 19th-century Unitarians, liberal Christians dropped Bible learning for good deeds and progressive politics. But conservatives have also turned away from religious study. From Charles Finney in the Second Great Awakening to contemporary megachurch preachers, evangelicals have won converts by advocating enthusiastic faith at the expense of religious study. ...Conservative evangelicals, uniting in pursuit of political influence, played down old denominational differences. 'Family values' became for the right what 'justice' or 'peace' was for the left — a catchphrase that obviates the need for religious literacy." (Also available here.)

Maybe the no-nonsense giant of a farmer who taught my fifth-grade Sunday School class had a point. His curriculum eschewed both commercial texts and popsicle-stick crafts -- it was all memory work: books of the Bible, ten commandments, the works.

Is it good news that Jim Wallis of Sojourners is trying to recapture the flag of "religious faith and values" for non-Republicans? (Video of Sojourners' Obama-Clinton-Edwards forum here, comments from "faith bloggers" here.) Sam Smith doesn't think so:

"Whether religion is a good place to look for faith and values seems to vary over time. For example, in the 1960s, ministers were among the most valuable voices of change because they found the best parts of the Bible and acted on it. Now, even in the milder sects, clergy is so busy keeping their budget up and vestry happy that you hardly see a white collar at a demonstration any more. When America finally decides to ditch the disastrous faith and values of the neo-colonial, neo-corporate, neo-corrupt Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years, I suspect that the preachers will return to help lead America's revival, but at present religion collectively is a predominantly evil force in the world and until a lot more religionists become embarrassed about this, it will stay that way."

Two thoughts:

Smith, as a Green Party member, has no trouble seeing the many similarities between W and his predecessors that I for one tend to forget.

Isn't Wallis pushing in the same general direction as Smith would like to see -- in this case, highlighting biblical injunctions to help the poor? So why the venom? 

In the midwest, we have bumper stickers instead of scenery. ("If at first you don't succeed...then skydiving is not for you.") My sister's car is still wearing a Kerry/Edwards sticker from three years ago, but I've been trying to find stickers that don't just blare ("Re-Elect Gore 2008"), but that might act as prybars on the contradictions in people's thinking. My favorite so far is "God Bless Everyone -- No Exceptions."

It is surprisingly hard to find bumper stickers of this type. Right now my bumper has an open slot, and I'm holding auditions. "Who Would Jesus Torture?" is looking good, although some consultants, known as my wife, think that "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" might be less offensive while posing the same puzzle for Christian warmongers.

Suggestions welcome -- or you could answer the question.

The indefatigable Martin Marty reports that of the 14,720 lines written in his column "Sightings" since 1999, only 7 were devoted to the late fundamentalist politico Rev. Jerry Falwell. "Accuse us not of overdoing comment on [the religious] Right," Marty wrote last week. "We resolved early on not to over-comment on over-done subjects that need no one to do any 'sighting.'"

I won't. I accuse him of not commenting enough on Falwell and his ilk. Who better than a popular mainstream Christian writer and professor to explain how Falwell's beliefs and actions contradicted many Christian tenets? Who better than one of the pre-eminent church historians of our time to explain how thoroughly Falwell's attempt to join church and state runs contrary to the insights of his own Baptist denomination (which for centuries understood that the wall between church and state was there to protect the church)? And who better to do these two jobs over and over again, as needed?

I don't make this accusation lightly. I like Marty, profiled him 21 years ago, worked with him briefly on a book-reading committee. Plus the Reader has long prided itself on a similar editorial philosophy of not overdoing already overexposed subjects.

But we've been known to repeat ourselves when the cause was serious enough. Given the damage that political fundamentalism has done to American life, culture, morality, and, yes, religion, Falwell needed to be tracked and exposed at every turn. The fact that he and Marty pray to the same god makes the task more imperative, if anything. (The bloggers at Talk to Action have seen this and are acting on it.)

Marty and his colleagues and successors are better placed than any humanist or atheist to expose the fallacies and evils perpetrated by Falwell and his colleagues and successors. But do the moderates care enough to truth-squad these renegades?

Somewhere along the way, I lost the bad habit of Newsweek without picking up the good habit of the Economist. So a hat tip to Jim Krohe, who calls attention to the Economist's alarming reportage on anti-Darwinian extremism on the march not just in the U.S., especially Kentucky, but in Russia, Turkey, the Vatican -- even Kenya, where

"there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claims to speak for 35 denominations and 10m believers, has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: 'I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.'

"Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who unearthed both the skeleton and the fossils in northern Kenya, is adamant that the show must go on. 'Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his,' Mr Leakey has insisted. Local Catholics have backed him."

As this excerpt hints and the whole article makes clear, this isn't religion vs. atheism. This is knowledge vs. militant ignorance, not to mention freedom vs. theocracy, with religious believers on both sides.

Not to get all ironic about it, but the world the militant ignorant would usher in has already been described by Matthew Arnold, although he meant to be talking about something else: a world with "neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain..."

First Asma Khalid explained why she rejects the label "moderate Muslim" (at Christian Science Monitor, then at Alternet). Applied to Muslims who reject terrorism, the phrase seems to imply that "Osama bin Laden and Co. must represent the pinnacle of orthodoxy," that "suicide bombing is a religious obligation for the orthodox faithful," something that "moderates" have fallen away from.

Then Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise chimes in with the more general point that claims of "moderation" and "orthodoxy" can't be taken at face value in any situation. Why should UCC members be called "moderate Christians," as if they were watered-down alumni of Moody Bible Institute? "Claims of fundamentalism or orthodoxy are positioning statements for brands. We often treat claims of religious orthodoxy as if they were statements of fact rather than rhetorical devices. Positioning your doctrine as the orthodoxy is a way to marginalize your competition. If we uncritically allow the most reactionary sects to claim the mantle of orthodoxy, we do the work of fundamentalists for them."

Khalid says, too simply, that "True orthodoxy is simply the attempt to adhere piously to a religion's tenets." But it is rarely obvious what those tenets are, or, more precisely, which ones are considered operative at any given time. I can't say whether Khalid or Osama is the more accurate interpreter of Islam, but I do know that both warmongers and pacifists believe they're following Jesus.

In normal usage, "orthodox" pretty much signals "conservative" or "fundamentalist." Anyone willing to apply that word to themselves probably doesn't believe what many more liberal Christians do, that their religion's tenets evolve over time and will continue to do so. For those folks there is neither orthodox nor unorthodox, but simply more or less evolved. (Correct me at will.)

It would be nice to think that Osama and Pat Robertson were unorthodox representatives of their faiths, but I don't think it can be assumed. It has to be checked out. The mantle of orthodoxy is not necessarily the property of those whose opinions we agree with.

Martin Marty, from the University of Chicago Divinity School, may be retired but he's not retiring. In the always interesting column Sightings he reflects on how evangelicals (who overlap with fundamentalists but aren't the same) have been criticized for selective literalism.

These Protestants "once spoke with horror and judgment against divorce and the divorced," but are now "blithely settling for possible presidential candidates who have divorced repeatedly." Of course, they also used to speak strongly in favor of Sunday closing laws and Prohibition. On much thinner scriptural warrant, many of them now speak strongly against gay sex.

Marty lists three evangelical scholars -- David Instone-Brewer, Craig Keener, and William Heth -- who reportedly have found ways around Jesus's and Paul's firm-sounding strictures against divorce. They now think Jesus and Paul were really only against no-fault divorce.

I haven't read any of these scholars, life being short, but I'd be happy to hear from those who have. From outside, it seems like a remarkable coincidence that the scholarship comes along just as we learn that evangelicals and fundamentalists divorce at the same rate as the general population. Isn't their scholarship the tail being wagged by the dog? Hasn't Christian morality been made more just and humane by continued exposure to a secular culture that respects freedom and women more than anyone could 2000+ years ago? (If you want to turn these rhetorical questions into real ones, i.e. blow my argument to bits, find an evangelical/fundamentalist Christian proposing this lenient interpretation prior to, say, 1907.)

Once enough evangelicals started shopping on Sundays, drinking in moderation, and divorcing for reasons they found sufficient, the church and the scholars followed. Perhaps the moral is that Christians need fewer scholars and more self-sacrificing witnesses: more gays to come out of the closet in their churches of birth, more women in those churches to stand up and say, yes, I had an abortion, it was my choice and it was right.

Having grown up in a small town, I don't make this suggestion lightly, but how else is change for the better going to happen?

Hemant Mehta, the "friendly atheist" in his blog and this week's Reader, is congenial by temperament, heritage, and strategy. (He's speaking tonight at the Barbara's near UIC.) But that attitude also reflects his confidence that extreme fundamentalism will die out soon, and that supernatural belief will too, eventually.

Is this confidence justified? He says kids these days are too well-educated to fall for religious hoo-ha. The Pew Center has some evidence in that direction: of those born before 1946, 5 percent call themselves agnostic, atheist, or nonreligious. That percentage increases to 11 among those born 1946-64, 14 among those born 1965-76, and 19 among Mehta's generation, born since 1977.

But at this rate it will be a couple of centuries before believers are the same-size minority atheists are today. And trends of this sort have been reversed in the past. 

An hour and a half on the late train at the end of a long day is a recipe for walking insomnia -- can't get comfortable, can't sleep, can't concentrate on the day's mail, you know the drill. But the other night I got lucky, because my shoulder bag contained a fresh copy of Nothing: Something to Believe In, by Nica Lalli.

For Chicago history buffs it includes a child's-eye view of William Singer's mayoral campaign against Richard I. For religion buffs a dismayingly honest account of her various encounters with organized religion as the child of Italian and Jewish parents with no religious affiliations. For me, it did what a good book does. When I looked up, it was an hour later and my surroundings were unfamiliar. For a moment, I thought I'd read right past my stop.

I don't want to sound like an idiot, but sometimes there's no help. Where has Susan Neiman been all my life? Alonzo Fyfe of Atheist Ethicist describes and links to this video (Session 6) of the Princeton-based author of Evil in Modern Thought speaking at last year's "Beyond Belief" conference.

She retells two Bible stories about Abraham, arguably the Ur-figure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all three. First (Genesis 18), Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abraham tells God it would be wrong to destroy the entire city of Sodom, and bargains the deity down until He agrees to spare it if He can find just ten righteous men. Second (Genesis 22), the story in which God orders Abraham to take his only son and sacrifice him on the mountain and Abraham obeys right up to the critical point where God intervenes and it turns out he was just testing.

The important division in the world today, Neiman argues, is not between believers and nonbelievers. The division is between those who follow the heroic Abraham of the Sodom and Gomorrah episode, who knows when God is about to do wrong and tells him so in fear and trembling, and those who follow the obedient Abraham of the second story, who does whatever he's told whether it makes sense or not. To put it another way, one kind of belief in God requires you to make sense of the world; the other kind requires you to give up on sense itself.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula performs a public service by collecting (in the comments) books for parents looking for "a primer on skeptical thinking, the scientific method, and religious criticism that was appropriate for early readers or junior high school kids."

It turns out there are several. But commenter Tristero didn't need to make another purchase. He just read some of the Bible to his six-year-old, who asked some good questions. He encouraged her to keep asking, adding, "By the way, what goes for the Bible, goes for all books. Always ask, 'why'? And if they can't explain it in a way you can understand, don't feel you have to believe it. You don't. And never accept 'Because the Bible says so' as an explanation. And that goes for other books, and for people, too."

"'Including you and Mom?' my precocious daughter said.

"'Especially Mom and I,' I replied."

Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog pays attention to the ongoing blogalogue between Andrew Sullivan (cafeteria Catholic) and Sam Harris (evangelical atheist) so you don't have to, declaring a TKO for Harris when Sullivan admits he has no rationale for his belief. Rosenhouse explains why he thinks even moderates like Sullivan need to be debated and outed as intellectually vacuous:

"To the extent that religious people are genuinely willing to make their faith a private affair I have no quarrel with them at all. The problem is that religious belief so rarely remains private. Our society is littered with the fruits of religious lunacy, from squabbles over science education, prohibitions against potentially life-saving medical research, laws against private consensual sexual practices, pervasive bigotry towards atheists, and on and on. Somehow the ostensibly private religious beliefs of others leach out into the public policy reservoir from which all of must drink.

"I am often lectured about how the theological moderates like Sullivan, the ones who do not want to inflict their religious beliefs on others, actually represent the mainstream of American religious life. The results of elections for the last two decades do not bear that out."

Physicist Steven Weinberg is unwilling to respect all sincere faiths equally (Times Literary Supplement, via 3 Quarks Daily):

"My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

"Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries."

Think it couldn't happen here? John Quiggin of Crooked Timber pulls it together with valuable links:

"Jonathan Chait connects the dots between dishonest conservative claims about income inequality (coming in this case from Alan Reynolds) to similar arguments made about evolution and global warming. As he says, to construct an alternate reality in which income inequality is not increasing, global warming is not happening and the world is near the end of its 6000 years anyway, there’s no need to prove a case – just cast enough doubt on the facts and ideology or faith will do the rest. This is happening across the board. The Republican War on Science is so broad-based that there is now no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans."

This list was compiled by Dan Burrell, senior pastor at Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'll quote his first and tenth items and leave it at that. I'd heard of only the second and third. Burrell did take some heat from commenters for picking too many negative stories. (Hat tip to Pseudo-Polymath.)
 

#10: "The much bally-hoo’ed debate between the four docs who thought they could settle the centuries-old conflict over Calvinism turned out to be an embarrassing bust for all involved. Unable to contain themselves before the actual event scheduled for November in the new auditorium of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia (the Mother Ship/Church of Liberty University), the four 'intellectuals' started unleashing on each other via email in the ugliest of terms over everything from the rules of the debate to the tone of each other’s emails regarding the rules of the debate. In the end, it spilled out onto the Internet and created a messy scene that drew rubber-neckers and sycophants alike. Finally, the plug was pulled (creating yet another exchange of 'who quit firsts' postings), and the whole sullied affair finally disappeared from cyberspace."

#1: "Multiple studies show a crisis of pornography viewing and addiction that is infecting born-again males as much as it is those who do not profess to be believers. The Internet has opened the gateway to a private struggle that many Christian men fail to admit they have—controlling one’s thought life and sexual appetites and using the gift of sex outside of the context of Scripture. Because of the three 'A's—it’s Anonymous, Affordable, and Accessible—more and more men are casually visiting pornographic websites and then finding themselves ensnared. Most men report that they did not have to go looking for pornography. Through thousands of spam email messages, deceitful links on Google and Yahoo searches, and other covert methods, the pornography came to them. Before long, they developed a habit. As a result, Christian counselors report a dramatic rise in crisis counseling among porn addicts."

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility reminds us that the National Park Service still offers a creationist pamphlet for sale at the Grand Canyon. A promised official review of the approval of the pamphlet for sale was never carried out. PEER's release includes links to official policy and many related documents. It's asking the new Park Service director to do her job, which is to explain science, not theology.

But PEER may be exaggerating its claims. Christopher Heard at Higgaion points out that the park's Web site FAQs are science-based, stating, for instance, that "the oldest rocks at the canyon bottom are close to 2000 million years old."

Alon Levy at Abstract Nonsense discusses a related question posed by a believer, "Why do atheists believe books that say the Earth spins but not a book that says God exists?" (Short answer -- it's not about the books.) "Scientific hypotheses, like 'the Earth spins,' make an enormous number of falsifiable predictions that can be independently verified. In case of the statement about the Earth’s spinning, its converse also makes an equally large number of predictions that are falsified: that the Sun will be found to revolve around the Earth, that there will be no centrifugal force, that there will be no Coriolis effect, and so on."

That said, it's no longer possible even for a complete nerd to be able to give good answers to every possible question. Levy gones on:

"The Enlightenment didn’t make the common people more rational; it made the scientific and philosophical establishment more rational. A century of developments in public education hasn’t been able to extend knowledge of scientific evidence to more than a few percent of any country’s population. It so happens that most people in the modern world believe in true things, but it’s sheer luck. Three hundred years ago, they’d believe in witches.

"The increasing complexity of scientific theories makes things even worse. In 1750, an educated person could have a grasp of the entirety of human knowledge available in his locale. In 1900, a scientist could know everything in his field. Right now a scientist is restricted to one subfield; when he knows two, it’s usually as part of a fusion of fields, like biostatistics.

"I know the precise evidence for the Earth’s spinning, but I know the evidence for relativity only in general and without the math that distinguishes it from woo. The only way I can know PZ Myers isn’t lying in his science posts is that there are other evo devo-minded commenters who’d check him, who I in turn trust because I have no reason to believe that scientists are only honest when I know enough to check their work."

Books about religion and science get an intelligent reviewer in Thomas Dixon in the (London) Times Literary Supplement. He's impressed by the restraint shown by would-be combatants Todd Tremlin of Central Michigan University (Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion) and J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen of Princeton (Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology).

Tremlin makes the cognitive-science case that human beings have "an almost irresistible natural tendency, embodied in every single human brain in much the same way, to explain natural phenomena as the results of deliberate actions by thinking, feeling, supernatural agents." In other words we're programmed to see gods where there aren't any.

Van Huyssteen, a professor of theology and science, uses some of the same scientific theories to say that "the 'image of God' should be thought of as something that emerges in flesh-and-blood human beings during the course of their evolution." In other words, perhaps our programming is there to help us to see an actual god.

Dixon is pleased that both authors are less dogmatic than I just made them sound: "Both authors resist the temptation to make hasty inferences from their observations about the naturalness of religious beliefs to a conclusion about either the truth or the falsity of those beliefs. The implication, but not the explicit conclusion, of Tremlin’s reductionist account is that religious beliefs can be not only explained, but effectively explained away by cognitive science. Van Huyssteen tends towards the opposite view – that the naturalness of religious beliefs argues, if anything, in favour of their plausibility and rationality. Of course most of us assume that all our beliefs – the true ones as well as the false ones – are, among other things, products of an evolved brain. The fact that many writers about science and religion no longer assume that such an observation is a knock-down argument either for or against religious faith is surely a sign of progress in the field of science and religion."

My summary: We've evolved lots of natural tendencies — to reason and to rape, to do astronomy and to do astrology. Nothing follows about the value or truth of those tendencies. That has to be judged on logic and evidence, not origins.

Is it really progress to have grasped that the genetic fallacy STILL is a fallacy? Good grief.

Senator Barack Obama:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. . . . Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality."

Jerome Copulsky of Virginia Tech responds at "Sightings," a publication of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago:

"This sort of translation, however, is no easy feat. If one maintains that his religion is universal, he may not see how his values are to be regarded as merely 'religion-specific.' How do you translate into secular terms religious truths that are not accessible to unassisted or unreformed human reason?  If faith has the transformative effect that Obama and others claim that it does, wouldn't some reasons be opaque to those whose hearts have not yet been turned? Who determines the 'common reality' that we all share? Indeed, the very notion of a 'religiously neutral' common reality is subject to serious contention."

WTF? Only to fanatics. Or to those who've forgotten the lessons of the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War.

Some Virginia fundamentalist Christians discovered "common reality" when they persuaded Hollymead Elementary School in Albemarle County to distribute their Bible School flyers—and then went ballistic when the school, acting in common fairness, allowed some pagans to distribute theirs as well. Details at Americans United and additional perspectives at Stylos—follow the comments too. (Hat tip to Ed Brayton.)

Amanda Marcotte has read one too many news stories that sound like The Handmaid's Tale:

"Between the Quiverfulls and the polygamous Mormons, it’s hard not to develop just a whiff of a hint that these oh-so-holy religious sects are about one thing and one thing only: phallic worship. I find it a little bit telling that God never, ever comes into people’s dreams to tell them that women are men’s equals or anything like that."

Never? Hardly ever? Counterexamples, anyone?  (I'm not sure Genesis 21:11-13 counts.)

Is this bumper sticker (which apparently still has to be imported from the U.K.) sarcastic or not? Does it depend on the gross weight of the vehicle to which it's attached? (Thanks, Treehugger.)

And here's a glimpse of the world where sarcasm can go entirely undetected: "The November 15 edition of 'The Colbert Report' on Comedy Central offered more proof of comedian Stephen Colbert's ineffective charade at pretending to be a conservative." (Hat tip to Pharyngula, where commenters indulge in a discussion of whether there has been an intentionally funny conservative since Evelyn Waugh. Your thoughts?)

And finally, just for fairness and balance, here's an unbelievably ignorant comment from the liberal side by David Shenk, author of The Immortal Game, published in the Toronto Star and republished at 3 Quarks Daily:

"Q. Do you ever fantasize about teaching chess to some religious fundamentalists?

"A. What a great question. I should actually try to do this some time—just spend time studying how someone who thinks in this fundamentalist way most of the time is also a chess player, because I really see it as a contradiction."

Here I wish he was being saracastic! Having played tournament chess for decades, I can assure Mr. Shenk that strong chess players can hold every imaginable kind of preposterous opinion without damaging their game at all.  George Orwell still rules—he had to make this same point about Ezra Pound, who spoke for fascism and wrote great poetry. Deal with it, folks.

"I don't believe in life after death," Natalie Angier wrote in the American Scholar two years ago, "but I'd like to believe in life before death. I'd like to think that one of these days we'll leave superstition and delusional thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now, they like their grants even more."

Angier's eloquent plaint is getting a second life on the Web thanks to Edge magazine.  Her prize examples revealing how scientists malign some superstitions more than others were drawn from two installments of Cornell University's "Ask an Astronomer" online feature.

On religion: "Modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God and that there are plenty of places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions."

On astrology: "Astronomers do not believe in astrology. It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. There is also no mechanism by which distant planets could possibly influence personalities."

Logically, of course, it's equally possible to find hidey-holes in the currently known universe for astrology, suitably interpreted. But the stars haven't been aligned to get those believers' hands on NSF funding.

Slog takes a look at the afterlife, version 2.0: "Relatives of the fantastically named Hyman Victor connected his tombstone via satellite to his real immortal resting place -- several Internet sites with information about his life and family."

Sure you want to write a blank check for the Olympics? Ask London about 2012. Lynne Kiesling of Northwestern University, writing at Knowledge Problem, has Friedmanesque thoughts about why Chicago should fear 2016.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist reads the Left Behind books so we don't have to, complete with their "weird disconnect . . .   absence of consequences, [and]  . . .  apathy and incuriosity toward the victims of the story."

The last and best 2006 election maps: from Hodas & Associates via Rich Miller, maps of Illinois, Cook County, and suburban races. From Mark Newman via the Swamp, cartograms of congressional races nationwide, with districts sized by population rather than land area.

Strange Maps knows that, in DVD world, Guyana, South Africa, and Japan are in the same place.

Jimmy Carter makes what would be called a gaffe if he were running for office (IOW, he states the obvious but unsayable truth): "There's no open debate in this country if it involves any criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, even though many people in Israel debate and condemn some of the policies of the right wing governments under Sharon and Netanyahu and others." The question is, why?

Religion is more interesting than Elton John, Richard Dawkins, or PZ Meyers seem to think. From TruthDig:

(1)  "Vatican condemns border policy," in which a senior Vatican prelate "condemned the building of walls between countries to keep out immigrants and said Washington’s plan to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border was part of an 'inhuman program.'”

(2)  "Catholic Church still out of touch," in which the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops reconfirmed the church's condemnation of gay sex and "artificial" contraception.

As TruthDig's chosen headlines hint, few people (and few Catholics, I dare say) will have exactly the same response to both church positions. Not conservative, not liberal—something else. Much like Wal-Mart but older and more powerful, the Catholic Church confounds of our usual ways of thinking. 

In the same vein, sort of, Fred Clark at Slacktivist reflects on what a wonderful guide Paul's writing in I Corinthians 13 (the "love chapter") can be—and how sharply it contrasts to other passages where he's busy prescribing male and female roles. One of the post's commenters describes a wedding where one participant accidentally wound up reading I Chronicles 13 instead—the one where God strikes Uzzah dead because he touched the sacred ark to steady it in transit. A pastor in the back row "had to lie down he was laughing so hard."

"Cafeteria Catholic" is a term that's used dismissively, but is the general idea so bad? So the cafeteria offers junk food mixed randomly with the fruits and vegetables? That's what a cafeteria does; choose wisely. There's no need to puzzle over the weird story of Uzzah in order to benefit from I Corinthians 13, any more than we're required to wonder why Shakespeare writes "Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war" in one place and "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments" in another.

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance makes a good point, buried in a discussion of recent books, about why religious discussions can get so confused: in the West we have two "only gods" disguised as one.

"The problematic nature of this transition -- from God as ineffable, essentially static, and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth -- is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of 'sophisticated theology.' It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: 'Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?' The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions."

Read the whole thing if you dare, including Carroll's view of how these rather different monotheisms evolved out of polytheism, and have since been uncomfortably coexisting in successive traditions. It's interesting even if you aren't buying everything that Dawkins and Carroll are selling.

The comments, which are even longer than the post, include this at #119: "The reason for god isn’t to explain what is observed, but to explain what is observing."

America may or may not be a Christian nation, but two atheist manifestoes are on the best-seller lists: Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Michael Conlon reports on this phenomenon from Chicago, quoting Wheaton College theologian Timothy Larsen: "Some of these are people we wounded that we should be handling pastorally rather than with aggressive knockdown debate." His condescension is no more palatable than Dawkins's predictable sneers.

Conlon quotes both sides, but they're just pushing their beliefs or unbeliefs. No one's looking for evidence wherever it leads -- the only person I know of who does that is NYU's Thomas Nagel. He cemented his status as my favorite philosopher with a sophisticated takedown of Dawkins in the New Republic (subscription only; text also available here).

The key question is whence came design in nature. Dawkins says God's no explanation, because then you have to explain God. But on this field Nagel is a pro and Dawkins is an amateur: "All explanations come to an end somewhere," explains Nagel, since Dawkins evidently didn't do the reading. "On either view [Dawkins's secularism or the God hypothesis], the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics."

Having laid out the rules of the match, Nagel finds that the God hypothesis loses round one, since "the theory of evolution through heritable variation and natural selection" explains how intricate designs such as the eye can come about naturally, and hence these designs no longer provide evidence for the God hypothesis.

But round two is still being fought out, because the evolutionary process is undergirded by DNA. And since DNA itself can't have evolved, where did it come from? "At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."

Of course that could change, and likely will if we can keep the theocrats at bay and dispassionate biological research going. (BTW, Nagel isn't buying Dawkins's idea that everything can be reduced to physics in any case.  No matter what anyone says, your own experience of being aware isn't the same thing as neurons firing in the brain. Some things are just . . .  different.)

Even if the God hypothesis were confirmed, it offers little comfort to believers. Nagel delivers the throwaway line early: "The purposes of such a [hypothetical] creator remain obscure, given what we know about the world." On the New Republic site, commenter jhildner did a nice job of unpacking this:

"Does it follow from this alleged act of creation that the creator continues to exert influence over events? That it is one force and not many? That is is a benevolent force? That it still exists today? That it has desires as well as agency? There's a fun Simpsons Halloween special in which Lisa unintentionally creates a minature civilization by placing a tooth in a container of soda for a school science project, and the minature people think she's God. Can our dispassionate observer rule out the possibility that the universe is an alien's science project? Can he reasonably infer that any tenet of any major religion is factually true? I don't think so."

Unfortunately, the fate of honest inquirers like Nagel is to be selectively quoted and used by religionists like Stephen Barr at First Things -- or, worse, evolution deniers -- to prop up their dogma. George Orwell, call your office.

(Two much-discussed Dawkins reviews are Jim Holt's in the New York Times and Terry Eagleton's in the London Review of Books.)

Some days it just feels like feudalism is coming back -- hereditary nobility, locals banding together for protection, and religion über alles. Either that or the nurse hid my medication again . . .

• The Sunlight Foundation, which broke the Hastert Highway scandal, is putting the grassroots to work:  "Citizen Muckrakers have investigated 438 members of Congress, and tentatively found 19 spouses who were paid by a member's campaign committee -- totaling some $637,424 since January 1, 2005."  Bobby Rush and Danny Davis are the Illinoisans on that list. This looks like good news for organized transparency in government, and bad news in what was found. So, is "family" getting more important in politics, or are we just touchier about it? Bear in mind that 1972 was the last presidential election in which neither a Bush nor a Dole was on the Republican Presidential ticket. A Stroger for your thoughts!

• Sam Smith at Undernews picked this up from Jesse Halladay's USA Today story: "Louisville, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis city officials have agreed to offer one another emergency resources in case of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or other catastrophic events. In one of the first agreements of its kind in the nation, the cities have pledged to help each other when a disaster overwhelms one of them."

• According to law.com, "The Austin-based Republican Party of Texas played the religion card in a Sept. 21 online newsletter. As alleged in the newsletter, Texarkana solo E. Ben Franks, Democratic nominee for a seat on the 6th Court of Appeals, 'is reported to be a professed atheist' and apparently believes the Bible is a 'collection of myths.' But Franks says he has never professed to be an atheist and is not a member of any atheist organization."

• In related news, the lobbying group Secular Coalition for America has opened a contest to find the highest elected official in the U.S. who is an atheist, humanist, or freethinker. Nominations are open through the end of the year; the person who nominates the winner will get $1,000. The person who next runs against the winner will get a free pass to public office.

I missed gay ex-fundie Mel White, author of Religion Gone Bad, when he was in town, but I did visit his Web site. There I found Walter Wink's fascinating article, "Homosexuality and the Bible."  Wink teaches at Auburn Theological Seminary, and he argues that while the Bible has nothing good to say about homosexuality, it puts forth so many long-gone sexual customs (polygamy, stoning of adulterers, categorical prohibition of divorce, and 13 more) that we don't need to sweat the specifics.

"There is no Biblical sex ethic," he writes. "Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand-year span of biblical history. . . . The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, culture, or period."

That sounds like a book I could live with. More than one version of Wink's article is on the internet, though, and while trying (and failing) to figure out which was the most recent, I ran across Wink's exchange with Robert A.J. Gagnon (PDF) of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in the Christian Century, and Gagnon's 53-page takedown (PDF) of Wink's argument in Horizons in Biblical Theology.

Gagnon is deeply conservative, but he's no ignorant literalist who regards the Bible as some kind of lawnmower instruction manual; he knows that its teachings change over time. The question is, do the fundamental teachings change? He reckons that the most fundamental of the sexual teachings cited by Wink is divorce. Wink writes that Jesus categorically forbade divorce, "yet we ordain divorcees. Why not homosexuals?"

But even today, as Gagnon observes, the cases aren't analogous. Mainline churches may not stigmatize divorcees as in the past, but they "do not regard divorce as an act to be celebrated and repeated. They regard divorce as a sin to be repented of and not repeated. If it is repeated, repentance rather than self-affirmation is again expected. Serial unrepentant divorce is viewed as a grave problem that has serious consequences at least for holding ordained office." In other words, "the appropriate parallel [to ordained divorcees] is the ordination of a homosexual person who may have engaged in same-sex intercourse in the past but who in a spirit of repentance does not intend to repeat such behavior in the future."

Ouch! There's much more on both sides -- read the whole thing. It's not technical but you do have to pay attention. (Paul Whiting has blogged on this as well.)

Of course, if the Bible is anti-gay (taken as a whole and interpreted reasonably), then one of two conclusions follows: either it's bad to be gay, or the Bible is a great literary work lacking in moral authority.

Would you collect jokes that aren't very funny? Of course not. So instead I collect arguments that don't exactly prove what they're supposed to. Let me know if you find a bad argument that's also funny . . .

• Ralph Luker of History News Network's Cliopatria group blog quotes this and links to the original translation: "Since 1948, the number of Muslims killed by the Americans and Israelis combined is still less than the number killed by the French. And the number of Muslims killed by the French, Israelis, and Americans combined is still less than the number killed by the Soviets/Russians. And the number of Muslims killed by the Soviets, Russians, French, Israelis, and Americans, combined, is still about 1/3 of the number of Muslims who have been killed by Muslim states."

• Scott Carson of Ohio University and the "An Examined Life" blog has more arrows in his quiver than this one, fortunately: "All the scientific evidence in the universe could suggest that there is no God, and there might still be one."

• John J. Emerson of the Idiocentrism blog tries to run Saint Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God backwards: "God, if He existed, would be a Thing of such perfection that His existence could not be doubted. But His existence is doubted. Therefore, He does not exist." Or, in a more amusing version: "A real God hiding in a sock drawer would be so transcendently evident that his attempt at hiding would fail. His transcendent butt would be sticking out, and you'd just want to kick it so bad."

Two examples of why the golden rule rules: 

(1) Hard-core evangelical Christian Gary Christenot attends a football game in Wahiawa, Hawaii, and relearns what previous generations of Baptists already knew -- the wall between church and state is there to protect minorities, and you could be a minority at any time:

"Coming from a fairly traditional Southern upbringing, I was not at all initially surprised when a voice came over the PA and asked everyone to rise for the invocation. I had been through this same ritual at many other high-school events and thought nothing of it, so to our feet my wife and I stood, bowed our heads, and prepared to partake of the prayer. But to our extreme dismay, the clergyman who took the microphone and began to pray was not a Protestant minister or a Catholic priest, but a Buddhist priest who proceeded to offer up prayers and intonations to god-head figures that our tradition held to be pagan. We were frozen in shock and incredulity! What to do? To continue to stand and observe this prayer would represent a betrayal of our own faith and imply the honoring of a pagan deity that was anathema to our beliefs. To sit would be an act of extreme rudeness and disrespect in the eyes of our Japanese hosts and neighbors, who value above all other things deference and respect in their social interactions." (Hat tip to Pharyngula, who comments astutely.)

(2) The scenario Republicans should have contemplated before abrogating habeas corpus last month -- from Avant News, for Feb. 2, 2009: 

"President [Hilary Rodham] Clinton Jails 938,000 Enemy Combatants . . . 

"'The legal basis of these sweeps is firmly grounded in the Military Commissions Act of 2006,' Paul Grisley, White House Press Secretary, said . . . .

"While the names and crimes of the detainees are classified to protect the interests of national security, a clue as to some of their identities could be gleaned by means of a stroll though major government offices around the country. Four of the nine Supreme Court Justices, for example, failed to show up for work, as did approximately 220 congressmen, 52 senators and a number of governors and presiding justices of district and appellate courts. The vast majority of absentees, coincidentally, were Republicans." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

The Predatorgate coverup divides those conservatives who actually believe in their values from those who value only power. The long-term question remains: has the unnatural marriage between big business and fundamentalist Christians finally begun to unravel?

• Conservative Chicago blogger Tom Roeser has met Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and he describes them as "so medieval, laced with mindless staccato biblical quotes, that they richly deserve the opprobrium. When he was running for president, Robertson told me about a terrific storm that was headed for his mammoth television studio in Virginia Beach. He said he knelt down to pray and the storm detoured and took out a third of Front Royal. Anyone who believes God acts that way . . . that he is on such a wavelength with almighty God . . . and that by force of his prayer can redirect a storm to hit innocent people (God being convinced Robertson is worth more than they) is a nut-bar . . . which unfortunately threatens to hold all Protestant evangelicalism to be held in disrepute." There's more.

• The Progressive States Network sees this long-standing geologic fault within conservatism start to move and shake: "An example was former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey, saying last week that 'James Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies,' labeling the Focus on the Family leader as engaging in 'high demagoguery.' Since Armey is now President of FreedomWorks, one of the key corporate-backed lobbying groups in D.C. and in statehouses around the country, this is a serious declaration of war between previous political allies." More.
  

Didja ever try to measure the circumference of a circle with a yardstick?  That seems to be the problem with anthropologists studying Christianity.

"Christian ideas of time and belief emphasize radical discontinuities both in people's experience (at conversion) and in world history (at Jesus' birth and at his second coming), while anthropologists have always stressed the continuity of cultural traditions over time," says University of California, San Diego, anthropologist Joel Robbins in this press release.  (The article on which it's based is in