Category Archives: Religion

Bring Back the Smoke Filled Rooms

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This is a textbook example of why We, the People, no longer matter in American politics, from Jonathan Martin at The Politico.

It could be an episode of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story.” Mitt Romney was announced from the podium Saturday afternoon as the winner of the Family Research Council’s “Values Voter Straw Poll,” narrowly edging Mike Huckabee.

But it turns out that the 5,775-vote total included thousands of people who had voted online, and could have become eligible by paying as little as $1 to join FRC Action, the legislative action arm of Family Research Council.

Although the audience at the Washington Hilton was not told, the crowd favorite among the 952 attendees who voted in person turned out to be Huckabee by a mile. He got 51 percent of the in-person votes, compared to just 10 percent for Mitt Romney.

This led one rival to suggest the headline, “Romney Win$ Straw Poll.”

I would just love to ask some of the people who actually attended the FRC shindig how they feel about this. Used, one suspects.

I’ve been wondering why there doesn’t seem to be more movement toward Huckabee in the ranks of white conservative evangelicals. It turns out that whenever white conservative evangelicals get a close look at Huckabee, they flock to him like pigeons to bread crumbs. It’s the leadership of the “values voters” movement who aren’t flocking. I can only guess why that might be, but I suspect that power and money are factors, somehow.

The various Powers That Be like to go through the motions of asking us ordinary people what we think, but ultimately they don’t care. Eventually they’ll settle on whatever candidates promise them the most perks and influence, and then they’ll go about marketing those candidates to the rest of us, like toothpaste. Meanwhile, any candidate who fails to meet with their approval simply will not get the media exposure he or she needs to be competitive.

Note that I’m not saying I want Huckabee to be the nominee. Underneath Huckabee’s nice-guy exterior is a five-alarm whackjob. The point is that what went on at the FRC exemplifies how we’re all being jerked around.

Once upon a time there were no presidential primaries. The nominee was chosen at the party conventions, usually through a process that combined the opinions of delegates with behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing in the famous smoke-filled rooms. States began holding primaries as a way to “popularize” the nominating process. But the people at the top of the power pyramid have learned how to jerk the rest of us around and manipulate what “we” think. Most people go to polls knowing no more about the politicians they vote for than they do about what’s really in their toothpaste. All they know is that it tastes like mint and the people in the television ads have real nice teeth.

Dalai Lama Derangement Syndrome

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To his credit, President Bush defied the wrath of China to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and present him with a Congressional Gold Medal. Suzanne Goldenberg reported yesterday for The Guardian:

The White House softened the slight to Beijing by keeping today’s meeting between the Dalai Lama and Mr Bush a distinctly private affair, and by previously assuring the president’s attendance at the 2008 summer Olympics in China.

However, Chinese officials today warned that the spectacle of President Bush standing by the side of the Dalai Lama as he is awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour could damage relations with Beijing.

China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, called on Mr Bush to stay away from the ceremony.

“We solemnly demand that the US cancel the extremely wrong arrangements,” Mr Yang told reporters in Beijing.

“It seriously violates the norm of international relations and seriously wounded the feelings of the Chinese people and interfered with China’s internal affairs.”

China also withdrew from an international strategy session on Iran scheduled for today in protest at the honour accorded to the Dalai Lama. A Chinese official said the timing of the meeting was “not suitable”. …

… The Dalai Lama’s journey to Washington this week will be his 12th visit to the White House since he led his people into exile in 1959. It will be his fourth encounter with Mr Bush. But tomorrow’s award ceremony will mark the first time Mr Bush, or any other serving US president, has appeared in public with the Tibetan leader and the White House was treading very carefully today to try to minimise the embarrassment to China.

Ward Harkavy writes for the Village Voice —

Today’s scheduled embrace of the Dalai Lama by George W. Bush represents a major change in foreigner policy by the White House.

Bush’s new plan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, get a photo-op with him.

That’s a shift from the Blackwater philosophy: If you meet an Iraqi on the road, shoot him.

In any case, plagued by a war that his own regime started, the president has chosen to burnish his image by meeting with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not Al Gore, who looks as if he’s won several pizza prizes since Bush’s operatives stole the presidency from him in 2000.

This Nobel winner is Tenzin Gyatso, who was proclaimed the Dalai Lama when he was only two years old and ruled Tibet until China ousted him years ago. Gyatso won the 1989 Nobel prize “for his consistent resistance to the use of violence.”

Snark.

It’s hard to comprehend why the Chinese get so bent out of shape over the Dalai Lama, known affectionately in Buddhist online forums as HHDL. My understanding is that HHDL has offered to concede Tibet as Chinese territory, so long as Tibetans get some say over what goes on in Tibet. I believe most of the world regards HHDL as a benign and pleasant sort, even if many are befuddled about exactly what he is. But the government of China suffers from Dalai Lama Derangement Syndrome.

Last week, Slavoj Zizek wrote in the New York Times:

THE Western liberal media had a laugh in August when China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs announced Order No. 5, a law covering “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission: no one outside China can influence the reincarnation process; only monasteries in China can apply for permission.

Somewhere in the Bardo between death and rebirth, there’s a Chinese bureaucrat handing out forms.

The Chinese desire to control reincarnation has its unfunny side. Back in the day the second-highest spiritual ruler of Tibet was the Panchen Lama. The 10th Panchen Lama was held prisoner by Mao Tse Tung for ten years and repeatedly tortured to force him to recant his loyalty to the Dalai Lama. He was released in 1981 and died in 1989.

In 1995 a six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was named the 11th Panchen Lama by HHDL. Two weeks later, the young boy and his family were taken into custody by the Chinese, and they have not been heard from since. After all this time, one suspects they were killed. Later in 1995, the Chinese government arranged to have the son of a Tibetan Communist Party functionary named the Panchen Lama. Buddhists in Tibet don’t have much choice but to go along with this, but the “official” Chinese Panchen Lama is not recognized as such by Tibetans in exile.

Slavoj Zizek writes that the Chinese are not really opposed to religion. “What bothers Chinese authorities are sects like Falun Gong that insist on independence from state control.” Given what they did to the Panchen Lama, I’m not seeing a distinction.

In recent years, the Chinese have changed their strategy in Tibet: in addition to military coercion, they increasingly rely on ethnic and economic colonization. Lhasa is transforming into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, with karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks.

In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?

No shit. But here Zizek shifts gears a bit:

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it? When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged — but how many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather, we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage” of their country. Unlike us sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions.

Buddhists don’t believe in the divinity of the Buddha, either, since the concept of divinity as understood in the monotheistic religions doesn’t apply to Buddhism. The various iconic figures of Buddhist art are best understood as symbols of enlightenment, or sometimes as Jungian archetypes. On the other hand, my understanding is that Islam objects to depicting any living figure, human or animal, in art, because only God creates living creatures. This objection seems to have been ignored by Muslim artists from time to time, but there it is.

So the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas because they saw them as disrespectful to God. For the most part, Buddhist accepted the loss as a reminder of the Buddha’s teaching that everything’s gotta end sometime, and prayed for the Taliban.

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.

Except that, these days, it’s the fundies and religionists who confuse culture with religion. Take, for example, the annual War on Christmas that must be about to start, as I’m already getting Christmas catalogs. I say if the religionists were serious about keeping Christmas as a sacred observation of the birth of Jesus, they’d be opposed to the materialistic trappings and commercialism. Instead, they get bent out of shape if department store clerks say “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” In Wingnut World, the true meaning of Christmas is using it as an excuse to pick fights with people you don’t like.

In other words, it’s not the religious observance of Christmas that’s a problem. It’s the way the fundies toss Baby Jesus out of the manger so they can break it up into clubs that some of us find worrisome.

I haven’t found the text of HHDL’s remarks today, but the Washington Post has this quote: “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: That is love, compassion and forgiveness.” Susan Jacoby dismissed this as “meaningless doggerel,” and I suppose it is. But then she says,

Is the Dalai Lama suggesting that the Taliban, which reduced ancient Buddhist statues to smithereens, was interpreting Islam in a way that carried a message of love?

A Buddhist could interpret the act that way, yes, or at least as an opportunity to practice forgiveness and non-attachment, although certainly a message of love wasn’t the Taliban’s conscious intent. But what HHDL said is verifiably true — you can find, in all the major religions, teachings about love, compassion and forgiveness. That those teachings are pretty much ignored isn’t his fault.

The Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a lovely lady I met at Yearly Kos, says,

The Dalai Lama is right. All religious traditions do have messages of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Unfortunately, all religions also have messages of hate, cruelty and condemnation. The conundrum of religion, as we saw illustrated in the On Faith discussions with author and professional atheist Christopher Hitchens, is that for every claim that religion does good in the world, there are also the well-documented examples of religious messages of intolerance, moral callousness and judgmentalism, and the harm that they have caused.

The problem, however, is even more convoluted than simply that all religions proclaim contradictory messages. Love, compassion and forgiveness can be used against individuals and groups through certain kinds of religious interpretation. I have spent many years working and volunteering in the movement to end family violence. Battering husbands often accompany their violent acts with the language of love, citing the oft-quoted scripture that wives need to “submit” to their husbands. Battering parents do the same, telling their child that a violent punishment is “because I love you” and “for your own good.”

Violent people love violently, stupid people love stupidly, selfish people love selfishly and so forth. Love without justice can degenerate into sentimentalism and finally into narcissism.

Compassion is a widely respected religious virtue and rightly so. Yet compassion or empathy can keep us from confronting destructive behaviors in others. The virtue of compassion has been thrust upon women as their sole responsibility in relationships. Finally, empathy for others can erode the important and healthy sense of an integrated self that everyone, women and men, children and adults, needs to function as a separate individual.

And finally, forgiveness. Women are often urged to “forgive” their batterers. Many women have told me in counseling sessions that when they took their problem of domestic violence to their local preacher, they were urged to “forgive the beatings as Christ forgave us from the cross.” Forgiveness cannot be separated from the need of the one who is perpetrating the violence to confess the wrong and change. Then and only then does forgiveness become possible and sometimes still it takes a very long time for people to let go of the hurt that has been done to them, the deep meaning of forgiveness.

The Dalai Lama commands world-wide respect and admiration not only for his espousal of the virtues of love, compassion and forgiveness, but for his practice of them in a way that sets them in the context of peace and non-violence. Absent that context, these virtues can be corrupted beyond belief—corrupted as much as the machinations of their seeming opposites of hate, cruelty and condemnation.

I believe that the practice of peace and non-violence is the greatest religious lesson the Dalai Lama has to teach us all.

Amen, Sister Susan.

Arrogance in Action

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In Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, who call themselves “proud atheists.” But this post is not so much about their atheism as it is about language, concepts, and misunderstandings —

You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect.

PINKER: That’s right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the door open, we say, “John opened the door.” If John opens the window and a breeze pushes the door open, we don’t say, “John opened the door.” We say something like, “What John did caused the door to open.” We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on “Law and Order,” where you have to figure out if the person who pulled the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the same model of causation.

I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an assassin’s bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, “I just shot him. The doctors killed him.” The jury disagreed and he went to the gallows. It’s an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.

Rebecca, you’ve written a great deal about competing philosophical theories of language. Do you think our mind can function apart from language? Or does language define our reality?

GOLDSTEIN: Obviously, much of our thinking is being filtered through language. But it’s always seemed to me that there has to be an awful lot of thinking that’s done prior to the acquisition of language. And I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I’m thinking. So there’s something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind.

As a novelist, this must be something you think about.

GOLDSTEIN: Very much so. My novels begin with a sense of the book, a sense of the place, and then I have to find the language that does justice to it. Strangely, I find that in my philosophical work as well. And in math; I’ve done a lot of math. I have the intuition, I’ll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. So I’ve always had a keen sense that thought does not require language.

The understanding that “the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect” has been integral to Zen Buddhism for 15 centuries, and in Buddhism generally for a thousand years before that. I believe it originated in vedanta, a movement of Hindu that began ca. the 6th century BCE, possibly earlier. And of course it’s central to philosophical Taoism as well. I’m very happy to see that “America’s brainiest couple,” as Paulson calls Pinker and Goldstein, are finally catching up.

I wrote about the limitations of language in the Wisdom of Doubt series, but the Paulson article has inspired me to revisit the topic and take it a little further. And to do that I’m going to go out on a limb and discuss Chao Chou’s Dog, which is the first koan of the Mumonkon. (Please note that I’m not a Zen teacher, just a rather slow student, and will not provide anything approximating the answer.) Rinzai Zen students spend years meditating on this koan; it’s said that if you can resolve it, the other 800 or so koans aren’t so hard. Here is the case:

    A monk asked Master Chao Chou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?”

    Chao Chou answered, “Mu.”

And that’s it. Some explanation: Non-Chinese speaking Zennies are told that Mu means “No thing.” Chao Chou was a famous Chinese Zen master ca. 9th century, who sometimes shows up in literature as Joshu, his name in Japanese. “Buddha nature” is the reality that enlightened beings are enlightened to. It’s said that Buddha nature pervades the universe — that’s a line from common Zen liturgy. So, one might assume, Buddha nature pervades dogs, right? So, a dog should have Buddha nature.

But Master Chao Chou said “No thing.” Not ‘no,” but “no thing.” If a child had asked him the same question, he might have said “yes.” But a monk should be able to go beyond the words, to the meaning beyond the meaning.

The koan collection called the Mumonkon, which sometimes is called “The Gateless Barrier” or “The Gateless Gate,” was compiled by a Chinese master named Hui-k’ai (1183-1260) who also came to be called Wu Men (Chinese) or Mumon (Japanese), meaning “no gate.” Hui-k’ai/Mumon provided commentaries and capping verses to help the student along. The American Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi gives this translation of the capping verse to Chao Chou’s Dog:

    Dog, Buddha nature —
    The full presentation of the whole;
    With a bit of “has” or “has not”
    Body is lost, life is lost.

With a bit of “has” or “has not” — there’s that pesky verb. The way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect. It has a lot to do with the way we understand everything. If you think in terms of the dog having Buddha nature, then you’ve got two things — a dog, and Buddha nature — connected by the verb to have. But Mumon says no thing.

There’s a question being asked here, but as soon as you try to put the question into words, it’s wrong. You might be tempted to say, well, the dog doesn’t have Buddha nature, but what then is the relationship between the dog and Buddha nature? That’s still two things. The monk is being challenged to push beyond nouns and verbs and objects to directly perceive the nature of beingness itself, which cannot be explained with words. The koan is presenting something to be realized. It’s easy to come up with a conceptual answer — that the dog and Buddha nature are one — but just as the question cannot be conceptualized, neither can the answer, which is a matter to be resolved between teacher and student.

In the interview, Goldstein says, “I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I’m thinking. So there’s something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind. … I have the intuition, I’ll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. ” Once we can conceptualize whatever’s clanking around in our heads, we can describe it with language. But concepts are an interface; they aren’t the thing itself. Realization outside of the conceptualization/language filter is what Zen and other mystical practices are all about. The kind of head work Goldstein seems to think is cutting edge has been going on for millenia.

But, of course, when you start talking about eastern mysticism to some folks, they put up all kinds of “this is just New Age claptrap” filters, and they don’t hear anything you say.

Later in the interview, Pinker and Goldstein go on about Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza is celebrated as a great rationalist who helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment. Goldstein says of Spinoza,

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it’s through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that’s what it is about Spinoza. He’s just such a rationalist.

And that’s fine. But Spinoza was no atheist; he was a pantheist. His answer to the question of the existence of God was that nothing exists but God. “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived,” Spinoza said. “God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. All things which are, are in God. Besides God there can be no substance, that is, nothing in itself external to God.”

So, does a dog have God nature? And how close in understanding were Spinoza and Chao Chou? Not identical, I don’t think, but they were certainly pointing to the same thing.

This part of the interview pissed me off:

Steve, you recently waded into the controversy over Harvard’s proposal to require all undergraduates to take a course called “Reason and Faith.” The plan was dropped after you and other critics strongly opposed it. But the people who supported it say that every college graduate should have a basic understanding of religion because it’s such a powerful cultural and political force around the world. Don’t they have a point?

PINKER: I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. I didn’t like the idea of privileging religion above other ideologies that were also historically influential, like socialism and capitalism. I also didn’t like the euphemism “faith.” Nor did I like the juxtaposition of “faith” and “reason,” as if they were just two alternative ways of knowing. …

…But can you really equate religion with astrology, or religion with alchemy? No serious scholar still takes astrology or alchemy seriously. But there’s a lot of serious thinking about religion.

PINKER: I would put faith in that same category because faith is believing something without a good reason to believe it. I would put it in the same category as astrology and alchemy.

In his book Dynamics of Faith, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich wrote, very clearly, that “Faith is not belief and it is not knowledge with a low degree of probability.” He called Pinker’s definition of faith an “‘intellectualistic’ distortion of the meaning of faith.” This and other distortions of the meaning of faith have had a “tremendous influence over popular thinking” that “have been largely responsible for alienating many from religion since the beginning of the scientific age.” Tillich continued,

The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Somethng more or less probable or imporbable is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation. … If this is meant, one is speaking of belief rather than of faith.

So if believing that some supernatural thing is real or true even if it can’t be proved is not faith, then what is faith? Tillich said,

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. … Faith as ultimate concern is the act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. …

…Faith is not an act of any of his rational functions, as it is not an act of the unconscious, but it is an act in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of his being are transcended.

I want to do a post or two just on Tillich some day; I don’t have time right now to do his work justice. But as I understand it, faith is a means rather than an end. It’s a means of engagement with something, and that something may be tangible or intangible, true or false. The something does not necessarily have a religious nature.

The kind of arrogance and ignorance by which Pinker dismisses “faith” as something like believing in magic is disturbing. It was his own prejudice and ignorance, not rational judgment, that inspired him to oppose the Faith and Reason class. Too bad.

Update: Neil the Ethical Werewolf has a post up refuting an op ed by Lee Siegel called “Militant atheists are wrong.” There’s a lot about Siegel’s arguments that are, um, flaky, and Neil makes some decent points. But Neil’s argument is mostly based on an assumption that faith equals belief. I’m afraid both Neil and Siegel miss the boat here.

X-tians: The Last Stand

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Tim Watkin says the Republicans are hoisted by their own values. James Dobson’s announcement that the religious Right will not support a pro-choice candidate is more than a blow to Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy, he says. The statement also “shows just how the Republicans have gotten themselves tangled in knots over all things moral and signals a turning point for the religious right in America.”

But for the religious Right, the only “value” that seems to matter is sexual purity, rigidly defined. Is that to be the sole measure of a leader?

Studies over the years have repeatedly shown that integrity is core to successful leadership; the hard part is deciding what integrity means to us as voters. A lack of hypocrisy seems to be the gold standard these days. But what about a willingness to admit and apologize for mistakes? Or simple honesty? Is an entirely untainted virtue now required? I’ve spoken to university students whose wanna-be politician friends even in their early twenties abstain from anything with even a whiff of controversy. Is that really the best preparation for wise leadership? In political terms, is it worse to tap your foot under a bathroom door, cheat on your spouse or start illegal wars? These are all moral judgments.

The left tends to scoff at the right’s emphasis on morality, but it has its own set of moral no-goes – just look at their criticism of presidential lies, illegal wars and torture, and politicians denying women the right to choose an abortion.

Still, it’s true that those on the religious right have made “character” a core issue in US elections and placed a disproportionate weight on “values” over policy. Their stands on candidate morality are now so entrenched, and their obsession with sexual purity so deeply embedded, that it seems no one among them has the ability to step back and see how insignificant those demands may be in terms of leadership performance.

The great leaders in US history would all trip over one moral hurdle or another. Washington had slaves, Roosevelt had a mistress and Jefferson had both.

I disagree that we lefties “scoff” at morality. Rather, we prioritize morality differently. Starting illegal wars is a serious offense against humanity; consensual sexual acts ain’t nobody else’s business. In any event, Watkin says, the religious Right’s quest for absolute purity has reached a dead end.

They elected a president who ticked all the right boxes but turned out to be an inept leader, while the candidates who tick the boxes this time are proving to be too bland, too lightweight or too out of touch with modern life. They have chosen sexual morality as their defining issue. Politically, they’ve painted themselves into a corner.

The truth is that other values are going to win next year’s election – sound judgment, competence, team-building, compassion. After dominating American politics for a generation, the religious right finds itself out of step with mainstream American, and even with many of its conservative pals.

I’ll take compassion over morality any day. In fact, I’d say that a person without compassion cannot be genuinely moral, no matter what rules of conduct he follows. But a compassionate person generally will do the right thing by his fellow human beings, rules or no rules. Sound judgment and competence sound pretty good to me, too.

Steven Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers says the power of the religious Right within the GOP is on the wane.

Today, their nearly three-decade-long ascendance in the Republican Party is over. Their loyalties and priorities are in flux, the organizations that gave them political muscle are in disarray, the high-profile preachers who led them to influence through the 1980s and 1990s are being replaced by a new generation that’s less interested in their agenda and their hold on politics and the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is in doubt.

“Less than four years after declarations that the Religious Right had taken over the Republican Party, these social conservatives seem almost powerless to influence its nomination process,” said W. James Antle III, an editor at the American Spectator magazine who’s written extensively about religious conservatives.

“They have the numbers. They have the capability. What they don’t have is unity or any institutional leverage.”

The Religious Right never had absolute power in the Republican Party. It never got the Republican president and Republican Congress to pursue a constitutional amendment banning abortion, for example.

But it did have enormous clout in party politics and a big voice in policy, and it’s lost much of both heading into 2008.

Worse for the religious Right, there may be an anti-Christian backlash brewing. David Van Biema writes for Time:

Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman’s organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it in his new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons) UnChristian, “That was then.”

Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (and a similar number of Christians) aged 16 to 29, found that 38% had a “bad impression” of present-day Christianity. “It’s not a pretty picture” the authors write. Barna’s clientele is made up primarily of evangelical groups.

Kinnaman says non-Christians’ biggest complaints about the faith are not immediately theological: Jesus and the Bible get relatively good marks. Rather, he sees resentment as focused on perceived Christian attitudes. Nine out of ten outsiders found Christians too “anti-homosexual,” and nearly as many perceived it as “hypocritical” and “judgmental.” Seventy-five percent found it “too involved in politics.”

Not only has the decline in non-Christians’ regard for Christianity been severe, but Barna results also show a rapid increase in the number of people describing themselves as non-Christian. One reason may be that the study used a stricter definition of “Christian” that applied to only 73% of Americans. Still, Kinnaman claims that however defined, the number of non-Christians is growing with each succeeding generation: His study found that 23% of Americans over 61 were non-Christians; 27% among people ages 42-60; and 40% among 16-29 year olds. Younger Christians, he concludes, are therefore likely to live in an environment where two out of every five of their peers is not a Christian.

This is a healthy development for all of us. For example, at some point in the future the Republican Party might be forced to campaign on issues that actually matter to the running of government instead of by stirring up fear and resentment among various factions of whackjobs. This might bring the GOP back to some semblance of sanity and increase the number of politicians in Washington who give a bleep about good government.

And it might also be a good thing for Christianity. I dimly remember that there’s more to Christianity than stoning transgressors for unauthorized sexual practices. Maybe someone will look into that.

Update: See also “A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation.”

Update 2: “Militant Atheists Are Wrong.” Clever.

Dangerous Minds

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Via Hilzoy, Peter Beinart writes about his early support for the Iraq invasion.

“I was willing to gamble, too–partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn’t gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn’t think I was gambling many of my countrymen’s. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It’s a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States.

Some non-Americans did, too. “All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive,” wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, “are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?”

I couldn’t answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer, and it was the one I heard from that South African many years ago. It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can’t be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That’s why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force–because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it’s why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That’s not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It’s not even to say that we can’t, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we’re there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war–as they did in Vietnam and Iraq–because they think we’re deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they’re probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn’t have trusted ourselves.”

Hilzoy adds, wisely, “It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.” I suggest reading Hilzoy’s post all the way through; it’s very good.

But I want to go on to another thought here. Yesterday I wrote about nonviolent resistance and quoted from an article in the Spring 2007 issue of the American Buddhist magazine Tricycle — available to subscribers only — called “The Disappearance of the Spiritual Thinker” by Pankaj Mishra. It begins:

“I NEVER KNEW A MAN,” Graham Greene famously wrote in The Quiet American, “who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” After the disaster in Iraq, Greene’s 1955 description of an idealistic American intellectual blundering through Vietnam seems increasingly prescient. People shaped entirely by book learning and enthralled by intellectual abstractions such as “democracy” and “nation-building” are already threatening to make the new century as bloody as the previous one.

It is too easy to blame millenarian Christianity for the ideological fanaticism that led powerful men in the Bush administration to try to remake the reality of the Middle East. But many liberal intellectuals and human rights activists also supported the invasion of Iraq, justifying violence as a means to liberation for the Iraqi people. How did the best and the brightest–people from Ivy League universities, big corporations, Wall Street, and the media–end up inflicting, despite their best intentions, violence and suffering on millions? Three decades after David Halberstam posed this question in his best-selling book on the origins of the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, it continues to be urgently relevant: Why does the modern intellectual–a person devoted as much professionally as temperamentally to the life of the mind–so often become, as Albert Camus wrote, “the servant of hatred and oppression”? What is it about the intellectual life of the modern world that causes it to produce a kind of knowledge so conspicuously devoid of wisdom?

What is it about the intellectual life of the modern world that causes it to produce a kind of knowledge so conspicuously devoid of wisdom? Wow, that’s a question, isn’t it? Where do overeducated twits like Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice come from, and how the hell did they get put in charge of foreign policy? They may be articulate, and they have Ph.D.s and impressive resumes, but they don’t have the sense God gave onions.

THE POWER OF secular ideas–and of the men espousing them–was first highlighted by the revolutions in Europe and America and the colonization of vast tracts of Asia and Africa, and then with Communist social engineering in Russia and China. These great and often bloody efforts to remake entire societies and cultures were led by intellectuals with passionately held conceptions of the good life; they possessed clear-cut theories of what state and society should mean; and in place of traditional religion, which they had already debunked, they were inspired by a new self-motivating religion: a belief in the power of “history.”

It took two world wars, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust for many European thinkers to see how the truly extraordinary violence of the twentieth century–what Camus called the “slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy”–derived from a purely historical mode of reasoning, which made the unpredictable realm of human affairs appear as amenable to manipulation as a block of wood is to a carpenter.

Shocked like many European intellectuals by the mindless slaughter of the First World War, the French poet Paul Valéry dismissed as absurd the many books that had been written entitled “the lesson of this, the teaching of that” and that presumed to show the way to the future. The Thousand-Year Reich, which collapsed after twelve years, ought to have buried the fantasy of human control over history. But advances in technological warfare strengthened the conceit, especially among the biggest victors of the Second World War, that they were “history’s actors” and, as a senior adviser to President Bush told the journalist Ron Suskind in 2004, that “when we act we create our own reality.”

These are the same people who have pathological confidence in themselves, of course. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, “Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world.” Perhaps its a class thing; perhaps these are people who have lived lives so buffered from failure and the consequences of misjudgments that they never learned a healthy respect for failure and the consequences of misjudgments.

History as an aid to the evolution of the human race seems to be most fully worked out by the respected Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. Writing in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Ferguson declared himself a “fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang,” and asserted that the United States should own up to its imperial responsibilities and provide in places like Afghanistan and Iraq “the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” In his recent book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004), Ferguson argues that “many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule.”

Ferguson has a regular column at the Los Angeles Times. And he’s a classic overeducated twit.

But back to Pankaj Mishra:

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE now how this all began, how, in the nineteenth century, the concept of history acquired its significance and prestige. This was not history as the first great historians Herodotus and Thucydides had seen it: as a record of events worth remembering or commemorating. After a period of extraordinary dynamism in the nineteenth century, many people in Western Europe–not just Hegel and Marx–concluded that history was a way of charting humanity’s progress to a higher state of evolution.

In its developed form the ideology of history described a rational process whose specific laws could be known and mastered just as accurately as processes in the natural sciences. Backward natives in colonized societies could be persuaded or forced to duplicate this process; and the noble end of progress justified the sometimes dubious means–such as colonial wars and massacres.

Pankaj Mishra is arguing that this view of history is a kind of secular thinking, and it is, but not purely so. I’ve been reading Mark Lilla’s book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. I blogged about this book here and here. Very briefly, Lilla writes about the nexus of politics and religion in western civilization, particularly since the end of the Reformation and the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. I’m not all the way through it yet. But he seems to be building an argument that messianic religion as a habit of mind continually re-asserts itself and seeps into secular thought. So we have public intellectuals who may or may not be followers of religion or believers in God, but who still think in messianic terms. However, instead of looking forward to the Second Coming, secular messianic thought sees history building toward some politically and economically ideal future as if compelled by natural law.

Some might argue that any kind of messianic thought is religious, but defining religion that way would make Christopher Hitchens the bleeping pope.

Lilla’s book suffers a bit from a narrow understanding of religion, IMO. But perhaps that’s me. As I wrote a couple of days ago, east Asian religions as a rule think of time and events, cause and effect, as circular rather than linear. The revered Zen master Dogen Zenji (1200-1250) presents linear time as a kind of delusion; see Uji. If you don’t perceive time and history as linear it’s hard to be messianic. However, as I’ve said elsewhere, certainly Asia has seen its share of mass movements bent on shaping history — China under Mao comes to mind.

Pankaj Mishra continues,

This instrumental view of humanity, which Communist regimes took to a new extreme with their bloody purges and gulags, couldn’t be further from the Buddhist notion that only wholesome methods can lead to truly wholesome ends. It is in direct conflict with the notion of nirvana, the end of suffering, a goal many secular and modern intellectuals purport to share, but which can only be achieved through the extinction of attachment, hatred, and delusion.

Indeed, no major traditions of Asia or Africa accommodate the notion that history is a meaningful narrative shaped by human beings. Time, in fact, is rarely conceptualized as linear progression in many Asian and African cultures; rather, it is custom and religion that circumscribe human interventions in the world. Buddhism, for instance, in its emphasis on compassion and interdependence, is innately inhospitable to the Promethean spirit of self-aggrandizement and conquest that has shaped the new “historical” view of human prowess. This was partly true also for many European cultures until the modern era, when scientific and technological innovations began to foster the belief that man’s natural and social environment was to be subject to rational manipulation and that history itself, no longer seen as a neutral, objective narrative, could be shaped by the will and action of man.

It was this faith in rational manipulation that powered the political, scientific, and technological revolutions of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it was also used to explain and justify Western domination of the world–a fact that gave conviction to such words as progress and history (as much ideological buzzwords of the nineteenth century as democracy and globalization are of the present moment).

Now we circle back to Peter Beinart and other prominent “public intellectuals”:

The great material and technological success of the West, and the growth of mass literacy and higher education, produced its own model of the secular thinker: someone trained, usually in academia, in logical thinking and possessed of a great number of historical facts. No moral or spiritual distinction was considered necessary for this thinker; not more than technical expertise was asked of the scientists who helped create the nuclear weapons that could destroy the world many times over.

I should note, to be fair, that Robert Oppenheimer had studied eastern religion, particularly Hindu.

IT IS STRANGE TO THINK how quickly the figure of the spiritually-minded thinker disappeared from the mainstream of the modern West, to live on precariously in underdeveloped societies like India. It was left to marginal religious figures such as Simone Weil, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Thomas Merton to exercise a moral and spiritual intelligence untrammeled by the conviction that science or socialism or free trade or democracy were helping mankind march to a historically predetermined and glorious future. But then, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “The nineteenth century’s obsession with history and commitment to ideology still looms so large in the political thinking of our times that we are inclined to regard entirely free thinking, which employs neither history nor coercive logic as crutches, as having no authority over us.” [emphasis added]

We don’t often think of history as a crutch. Maybe we’ve become a little too obsessed with remembering history so we don’t repeat it. Since the invasion of Iraq we’ve argued whether Iraq is World War II or Vietnam or some other historical relic rattling around in our national attic. What we don’t do so much is try to understand Iraq as Iraq. Of course, we don’t remember our history as-it-was, either, but as we want to believe it was.

In America, religious and political ideology have always been interconnected, but in recent years we’ve taken this interconnection to absurd degrees. For example, the above-mentioned Niall Ferguson argues that America is more productive than Europe because our workers go to church more often than their workers. This begs the question — why is productivity a more “religious” virtue than, say, spending more time away from work to be with family? I think what we’re really seeing here is less about religion and more about voluntary submission to the authority of churches and employers.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for a public intellectual like Ferguson to make that connection. That requires thinking outside the box, and our public intellectuals are like a priestly caste charged with maintaining and protecting the box.

Peter Beinart may be trying, however. “[L]iberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time,” he said. Exactly. But we’ve got a job ahead of us explaining that to the rest of America.

Faith, Hope, Metta

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Although — for reasons I went on and on about in the Wisdom of Doubt series — I object to using the words faith and religion as synonyms, I still liked this op ed by Sam Leith in The Telegraph — “The power of faith against the bullet.”

This – these monks staring down the guns – presents a problem for a militant secularist in the Dawkins or Hitchens mould. I don’t mean that it has any bearing on the argument about whether there is or is not a God. Buddhist monks don’t worship anything resembling the God on whom the Dawkins guns are trained in any case; and the fact that they stare down the guns doesn’t make a difference to whether or not what they believe is true.

BTW, this week, while much of the world’s attention was riveted on the monks of Burma, the great blowhard Christopher Hitchens appeared at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” site, ranting about “The Subtle, Lethal Poison of Religion.”

So much for Hitchens. Here’s more Leith:

But stare down those guns they do – and their behaviour does have a strong bearing on the question of whether religious belief “poisons everything”, as Hitchens puts it. I’d submit, as an irreligious bystander, that one of the things that helps those monks hold the line is faith. The form that their resistance takes is shaped by that faith – and it is uniquely powerful.

The monks’ action is a demonstration of faith, but not belief. In religion — including Christianity, IMO — belief and faith are two different things, although this is a point lost on fundies and atheists alike.

They can’t be written off as “terrorists” or “communists”. They are not a rival faction seeking power. They can’t be co-opted into a fight. That is their strength against a regime that has only repressive force at its disposal.

If someone’s shooting at you, or throwing rocks at you, it’s not very long before the rights and wrongs of the original dispute get entirely lost amid the fighting. But if someone’s sitting patiently in the street, unarmed, daring you to shoot him dead … One of the reports from Burma has soldiers in tears. Early reports also suggested that more shots have been fired into the air than into the crowds.

In Burma, and in much of southeast Asia, it is customary for a young man to spend at least a few months as a monk before taking up his adult activities as a husband, father, and worker. It’s probable some of those soldiers have been monks themselves. I believe there was some hope soldiers would switch sides and join the monks, but I haven’t heard this has happened.

But what does this say about the nexus of political power and moral authority? They can’t be written off as “terrorists” or “communists”. They are not a rival faction seeking power. They can’t be co-opted into a fight. Religionists in America have waged an all-out campaign to get political power, and along the way they’ve proved themselves to be as morally frail and corruptible as any other human, “believer” or not. The monks of Burma renunciate power, and that renunciation is the source of their power.

That renunciation is also true religious faith. Religionists who seek political power in order to carry out some doctrinal agenda are demonstrating their own faithlessness.

I am encouraged by the fact that many of these soldiers will themselves be Buddhists; that they are facing crowds of fellow citizens who are also Buddhists; and that they know those fellow citizens are also prepared to take a bullet for their basic freedoms.

That reminds me of a Zen story, although a relatively modern one, taking place when the Japanese were overrunning Korea in the 1930s. Japanese soldiers entered a Korean Zen monastery and found most of the monks gone. But the abbot remained, sitting like an iron lotus in the zendo. The officer in charge drew his sword, walked up to the abbot, and said, “I could run you through without blinking an eye!” The abbot roared back, “I can be run through without blinking an eye!” The soldiers left the old man alone. I believe that really happened.

That suggests that a tipping point might be reached. It suggests that – as Patti Smith puts it – they might “get ’em like Gandhi; get ’em with the numbers”. Small flowers crack concrete.

Here’s the bad news — the tipping point may be postponed. The Buddhist Channel reports that monks are locked into their monasteries.

Thousands of monks had provided the backbone of the protests, but they were besieged in their monasteries, penned in by locked gates and barbed wire surrounding the compounds in the two biggest cities, Yangon and Mandalay. Troops stood guard outside and blocked nearby roads to keep the clergymen isolated.

The monks remained inside their monasteries late Saturday morning (Sept 29) with troops remaining on guard outside and blocking nearby roads. The streets of the two Yangon and Mandalay were quiet.

Many Yangon residents seemed pessimistic over the crackdown, fearing it fatally weakened a movement that began nearly six weeks ago as small protests over fuel price hikes and grew into demonstrations by tens of thousands demanding an end to 45 years of military rule.

The corralling of monks was a serious blow. They carry high moral authority in this predominantly Buddhist nation of 54 million people and the protests had mushroomed when the clergymen joined in.

“The monks are the ones who give us courage. I don’t think that we have any more hope to win,” said a young woman who had taken part in a huge demonstration Thursday that broke up when troops shot protesters. She said she had not seen her boyfriend and feared he was arrested.

The monks themselves have not given up hope.

At the Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s most important Buddhist temple, about 300 armed policemen and soldiers sat around the compound eating snacks while keeping an eye on the monks.

“I’m not afraid of the soldiers. We live and then we die,” said one monk. “We will win this time because the international community is putting a lot of pressure.”

Condemnation of the junta has been strong around the world. On Friday, people protested outside Myanmar embassies in Australia, Britain, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan.

The Tao Teh Ching says nothing is softer or weaker than water, yet water wears down what is hard and strong. Whatever happens in the next few days, the monks of Burma will, eventually, prevail.

Being Peace

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I want to respond once again to this fellow, who thinks the Burmese monks are saps for not leading an armed resistance against the military junta instead of a nonviolent protest.

The monks and their followers have caught the world’s attention, I’ll grant you that. (That and a subway token…) International pressure is probably the only hope right now, but see what good that’s done for Tibet or Darfur. Or against Iran. Or against the Taliban. I don’t need to continue. …

… These people don’t want to lose, and they’re prepared to fight a lot dirtier than the monks are.
But we already knew that.

As for Gandhi (and Martin Luther King), they knew that their opponents, bad as they were, had moral limits.

The blogger may be a graduate of the Michael Medved School of History; I don’t see many “moral limits” in the history of racial violence in America.

The American government sent the military to enforce civil rights, not suppress them. If the protestors thought they were up against similar foes, they misjudged badly. The protests are gone, and people have died.

Isn’t it only decent to ask what for?

In other words, means justify ends. But Buddhists don’t think that way. In fact, one of the differences between Eastern and Western thought is that westerners tend to think of events in terms of ends, or results, whereas easterners are more likely to think in terms of never-ending cycles of cause and effect. Ends are not, in fact, ends. Even after great victories — or defeats — the wheel of existence does not stop, and in time “ends” dissipate like smoke. Because cause and effect are locked together in a great, eternal continuum, means do not justify “ends,” ever. Even if you achieve a desired goal, sooner or later you will enjoy — or suffer — the fruits of whatever means you used to achieve it.

As my first Zen teacher said, often, “What you do to others is done to you.”

There was an article in the Spring 2007 issue of the American Buddhist magazine Tricycle — available to subscribers only, alas — about political action and nonviolence. In “The Disappearance of the Spiritual Thinker,” Pankaj Mishra wrote,

It may be hard to conceive of nonviolence as a viable force, especially as we appear to be in the midst of a worldwide upsurge of violence and cruelty. Nevertheless, the history of the contemporary world is full of examples of effective nonviolent politics. The movements for national self-determination in colonized countries, the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the velvet revolutions in Russia and Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the gradual spread of parliamentary democracy around the world–the great transformations of our time–have been essentially peaceful.

Every time a peaceful resistance is put down, somebody is bound to say they should have used guns. But when an armed insurgency is put down, or when it turns into a cycle of violence and vengeance dragging on for generations, for some reason this doesn’t count against the effectiveness of armed insurgency. And how often does the residual anger from one war blossom into the next one?

In fact, I’d say nonviolent resistance has a pretty good track record, particularly as far as long-term results are concerned.

I particularly like this next paragraph (emphasis added):

And there have been activists and thinkers in our own time, such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Václav Havel, who rejected politics as a zero-sum game (in which the other side’s loss is seen as a gain) and adopted moral persuasion and conversion as means to political ends. As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., after a spate of Buddhist self-immolations in Vietnam in 1965, “The monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of the oppressors, but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination, which lie within the heart of man.”

This touches on Pankaj Mishra’s thesis, that the western concept of “shaping history,” or pushing mankind toward some idealized future by any means, is the chief cause of much of the violence of the past couple of centuries. And I acknowledge that much of Asia got sucked into the game of shaping “history” by force — Japanese militarism of the 1930s, China under Mao. But it’s a very un-Buddhist way of interacting with the world.

“Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination, which lie within the heart of man.” If you observe long enough, you notice how easily un-self-aware people become like their own enemies. Consider the McCarthyite or Bushie, eager to flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet in the name of “freedom.”

The monks of Burma make a conscious choice not to become what they are trying to defeat. They choose not to give in to intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred, and discrimination. That’s the point of chanting the Metta Sutta as they march. To do otherwise would betray everything they have vowed to maintain as monks.

Pankaj Mishra continued,

Imprisoned by the totalitarian regime of Czechoslovakia, Havel echoed a Buddhistic preoccupation with actions in the present moment when he warned that “the less political policies are derived from a concrete and human ‘here and now,’ and the more they fix their sights on an abstract ‘someday,’ the more easily they can degenerate into new forms of human enslavement.” In his own political practice, Gandhi opposed any mode of politics that reduced human beings into passive means to a predetermined end–it was the burden of his complaint against history. He insisted that human beings were an end in themselves, and the here and now was more important than an illusory future.

This has always baffled or disappointed those who measure nonviolent political action in terms of the regimes it changed. But for Gandhi, nonviolence was not merely another tactic, as terrorism often is, in a zero-sum game played against a political adversary. It was a whole way of being in the world, of relating truthfully to other people and one’s own inner self: an individual project in which spiritual vigilance and strength created the basis for, and thus were inseparable from, political acts. Gandhi assumed that whatever regimes they lived under–democracy or dictatorship, capitalist or socialist–individuals always possessed a freedom of conscience. To live a political life was to be aware of that inner freedom to make moral choices in everyday life; it was to take upon one’s own conscience the burden of political responsibility and action rather than placing it upon a political party or a government.

As Gandhi saw it, real political power arose from the cooperative action of such strongly self-aware individuals–the “authentic, enduring power” of people that, as Hannah Arendt presciently wrote in her analysis of the Prague Spring of 1968, a repressive regime or government could neither create nor suppress through the use of terror, and before which it eventually surrendered.
Many of Gandhi’s own colleagues often complained that he was delaying India’s liberation from colonial rule. But Gandhi knew as intuitively as Havel was to know later that the task before him was not so much of achieving regime change as of resisting “the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power–the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.”

This power, the unique creation of the political and economic systems of the modern world, pressed upon individuals everywhere–in the free as well as the unfree world. It was why Havel once thought that the Western cold warriors wishing to get rid of the totalitarian Communist system he belonged to were like the “ugly woman trying to get rid of her ugliness by smashing the mirror which reminds her of it.” “Even if they won,” Havel wrote, “the victors would emerge from a conflict inevitably resembling their defeated opponents far more than anyone today is willing to admit or able to imagine.”

This takes us back to what Glenn Greenwald wrote in (A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency:

One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a crusade against Evil — is that the moral imperative driving the mission will justify any and all means used to achieve it. Those who have become convinced that they are waging an epic and all-consuming existential war against Evil cannot, by the very premises of their belief system, accept any limitations — moral, pragmatic, or otherwise — on the methods adopted to triumph in this battle.

Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as impediments to Good, if not as an attempt to aid and abet Evil. In a Manichean worldview, there is no imperative that can compete with the mission of defeating Evil. The primacy of that mandate is unchallengeable. Hence, there are no valid reasons for declaring off-limits any weapons that can be deployed in service of the war against Evil.

Equally operative in the Manichean worldview is the principle that those who are warriors for a universal Good cannot recognize that the particular means they employ in service of their mission may be immoral or even misguided. The very fact that the instruments they embrace are employed in service of their Manichean mission renders any such objections incoherent. How can an act undertaken in order to strengthen the side of Good, and to weaken the forces of Evil, ever be anything other than Good in itself? Thus, any act undertaken by a warrior of Good in service of the war against Evil is inherently moral for that reason alone.

It is from these premises that the most amoral or even most reprehensible outcomes can be — and often are — produced by political movements and political leaders grounded in universal moral certainties. Intoxicated by his own righteousness and therefore immune from doubt, the Manichean warrior becomes capable of acts of moral monstrousness that would be unthinkable in the absence of such unquestionable moral conviction. One who believes himself to be leading a supreme war against Evil on behalf of Good will be incapable of understanding any claims that he himself is acting immorally.

In Buddhism, good and evil are not thought of as attributes one may or may not possess. Rather, they are the consequences — beneficial or detrimental — of thoughts, words, and volitional acts. A practicing Buddhist doesn’t think, well, I’m a good person, and my cause is just,and my intentions are good, so whatever I do to attain this goal is OK. Believe me, after a few years of meditation practice, when a thought like that comes up you recognize such an idea as folly and let it go.

Of course, sometimes you have to fight. I don’t know where Burmese Buddhism falls on the pacifism scale, but Zen Buddhism in particular has a long association with the martial arts. However, even the most proficient martial artist should recognize there’s a time to fight, and a time to walk away from a fight.

The monks of Burma have chosen nonviolent resistance, as did the monks of Tibet and the monks of Vietnam, who still face oppression from Communist leaders. Short-term, this may not seem an effective strategy. Long-term, I suspect it is the wisest course.

Un-atoned

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I’ve been reading Chris Hedges’s excellent book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Hedges emphasizes the authoritarian nature of the Christian Right. For example:

The hypermasculinity of radical Christian conservatism, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their object obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. It is also a way to cope with fear. Those who lead these churches fear, perhaps most deeply, their own internal contradictions. They make war on the internal contradictions of others. Those who are not subdued, who do not bow before the church authorities, are seen as contaminants. Believers are driven into a primitive state, a prenatal existence, a return to the womb and a life of submission. [Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (Free Press, 2006), pp. 78-79]

What’s messed up about this beside the obvious is that these people call themselves evangelicals. And evangelicalism started out as a non-authoritarian religious movement. Believe it or not, the original evangelicalism that formed in the 18th century emphasized freedom of conscience and individual conviction over church authority, and most early evanglicals fiercely supported separation of church and state.

The latter was true because evangelicals often were victims of church-state oppression. Bill Moyers said,

On another trip to New England I drove through Lynn, Massachusetts. There, in 1751, Obadiah Holmes was given thirty stripes with a three-corded whip after he violated the colonial law against taking communion with another Baptist. Baptists were only a “pitiful negligible minority” in Massachusetts but they were denounced as “the incendiaries of the Commonwealth and the infectors of persons in matter of religion.” For refusing to pay tribute to the official state religion they were fined, flogged, and exiled. Holmes refused the offer of friends to pay his fine so that he could be released. He refused the strong drink they said would anesthetize the pain. Sober, he endured the ordeal; sober still, he would one day write: “It is the love of liberty that must free the soul.”

But we have come full circle, and now much of American evangelicalism has been taken over by authoritarians who want to fine, flog, and exile everyone who disagrees with them. Indeed, the word evangelical has come to mean “intolerant and authoritarian right-wing religious whackjob” to many people.

Hedges is a Christian himself, which informs his observances. He writes (pp. 80-81),

The petrified, binary world of fixed, immutable roles is a world where people, many of them damaged by bouts with failure, despair and their own ambiguities, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities and live with the illusion that they are now strong, whole and protected. … By submitting to the Christian leader, and to a powerful male God who will destroy those who misbehave, followers avoid dealing with life. The movement seeks, above all, to banish mystery, the very essence of faith. Not only is the binary world knowable and predictable, but finally God is knowable and predictable.

Many people look at religious whackjobs and conclude that religion has made them fearful and corrupted their ability to think rationally. I think it’s close to the truth to say that whackjobs create God in their own image — Whackjob God.

Slate has been running a conversation between evangelical David Kuo and Hanna Rosin, author of God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission To Save America. The book focuses on students of Patrick Henry College, who are mostly home-schooled Christians. Rosin wrote,

Who really is an evangelical, and is it fair to have a tiny—and some would say fringe—school stand in for an entire movement? Well, you and I both know that evangelical is a fairly meaningless term these days. Catholics use it. Democrats use it. In social science statistics on divorce, teenage sexuality, even abortion, people who call themselves “evangelical” look just like the rest of America.

When I say “evangelical,” I am thinking of that elite subgroup that goes to church at least once a week.

To which Kuo replied,

Virtually all surveys show that 30 percent to 40 percent of Americans go to church once a week. There are a lot of evangelicals out there even if, as you point out, they lead lives that are virtually indistinguishable from other Americans when it comes to divorce, abortion, and the like. I’ve argued that part of the reason for that is the political obsession of many evangelical leaders, which has in turn seduced so many evangelicals. It is that obsession and seduction that is so beautifully and horribly laid out in God’s Harvard. As you recounted over and over, there was no differentiation between Jesus and politics. There was the absolute understanding that to serve Jesus meant to grasp power and manipulate the political system for God’s gain. Sadly, this isn’t anything new. It is precisely the sort of thing that Jesus came to defeat.

About halfway through the book, something struck me. Not a single student quoted Jesus’ sayings to you in justifying their politics. Their justification came from Old Testament admonitions about power. They didn’t quote Jesus—at least as related in the book.

Why? It is because it would be impossible to quote Jesus urging young Christian men and women to tackle the political battlefield as if going unto war. It is because Jesus’ commands have everything to do with sacrificially loving others and nothing to do with influencing the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am not saying that Christians shouldn’t have a political voice. They should. But they should do it as citizens with opinions in public policy and not as “Christians” presuming they have Jesus’ answer to problems—because on virtually every position, they do not. It is perfectly possible to be a Bible-believing, Jesus-loving, born-again Christian and have different perspectives on everything from abortion to Iraq. And that perspective is what is missing from Patrick Henry.

My understanding is that the word evangelical comes from the same root Greek word as gospel, which loosely translates as “good news.” An evangelicalism that de-emphasizes the Gospels has been pulled pretty far from its roots.

Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.

I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.

I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)

Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.

A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.

Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.

I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.

About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.

This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:

Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.

The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.

The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.

Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.

Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.

As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte – and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …

…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.

Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.

So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out – it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”

In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.

Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.

I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.

Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.

Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,

The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.

This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.

If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.

All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.

This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.

Uncompromising

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An article in Newsweek about the struggle between evolution and creationism got me thinking about the recent post on religion and liberalism.

Day before yesterday I wrote about how liberalism seeks to promote domestic tranquility and individual freedom by drawing lines between the personal and the public. To quote John McGowan:

Here I just want to end by noting how “unnatural” liberalism seems. It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will. It involves, as I will detail in my next post, compromise in almost every instance, and thus can seem akin to having no strong convictions, no principles. Yet its benefits are enormous; it provides, I am convinced, the only possible way humans can live in peace together in a pluralistic world. …

…Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference. Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers. And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits….

… Except for what are generally weak claims for the benefits of diversity (weak not in the sense of being unconvincing, but weak in the sense that no very major social benefit is claimed and some costs are acknowledged), the liberal argument for non-political interference, for privacy and individual autonomy, is primarily negative. Conflict is the result of trying to tell people what to believe and what to do, so we are better off cultivating a talent for resisting our inclinations to insist that others see the world and run their lives the way I do.

Ironically, anti-liberal forces in America use the values of liberalism against liberalism. For example, creationism is argued to be an alternative view to evolution that is owed respect. Peter Slevin wrote in the Washington Post (March 14, 2005) (emphasis added):

Alabama and Georgia legislators recently introduced bills to allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio have approved new rules allowing that. And a school board member in a Tennessee county wants stickers pasted on textbooks that say evolution remains unproven. …

… Polls show that a large majority of Americans believe God alone created man or had a guiding hand. Advocates invoke the First Amendment and say the current campaigns are partly about respect for those beliefs.

“It’s an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism,” said the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life’s unfurling. “We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country.” …

…That approach appeals to Cindy Duckett, a Wichita mother who believes public school leaves many religious children feeling shut out. Teaching doubts about evolution, she said, is “more inclusive. I think the more options, the better.”

“If students only have one thing to consider, one option, that’s really more brainwashing,” said Duckett, who sent her children to Christian schools because of her frustration. Students should be exposed to the Big Bang, evolution, intelligent design “and, beyond that, any other belief that a kid in class has. It should all be okay.”

Fox — pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, drawing 6,000 worshipers a week to his Wichita church — said the compromise is an important tactic. “The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We’re trying to be a little more subtle,” he said. …

…”If you believe God created that baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby,” [Southern Baptist minister Terry] Fox said. “If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die.”

See, science is supposed to “compromise” with religion, because to deny religion equal say with science violates the liberal values of “inclusiveness” and “freedom.” And the goal is to destroy liberalism. Of course, if the creationists had the authority they’d see to it that only their version of creation is taught in public schools, because they aren’t liberals.

Here’s the latest round in the evolution wars, by Sharon Begley in the current issue of Newsweek:

There may be some battlefields where the gospel’s “blessed are the peacemakers” holds true. But despite the work of a growing number of scholars and millions of dollars in foundation funding to find harmony between science and faith, evolution still isn’t one of them. Just ask biologist Richard Colling. A professor at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois and a lifelong member of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, Colling wrote a 2004 book called “Random Designer” because—as he said in a letter to students and colleagues this year—”I want you to know the truth that God is bigger, far more profound and vastly more creative than you may have known.” Moreover, he said, God “cares enough about creation to harness even the forces of [Darwinian] randomness.”

For all the good it’s done him, Colling might as well have thrown a book party for Christopher Hitchens (“God Is Not Great”) and Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”). Anger over his work had been building for two years. When classes resumed in late August, things finally came to a head. Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from assigning his book. At least one local Nazarene church called for Colling to be fired and threatened to withhold financial support from the college. In a letter to Bowling, ministers in Caro, Mo., expressed “deep concern regarding the teaching of evolutionary theory as a scientifically proven fact,” calling it “a philosophy that is godless, contrary to scripture and scientifically unverifiable.” Irate parents, pastors and others complained to Bowling, while a meeting between church leaders and Colling “led to some tension and misunderstanding,” Bowling said in a letter to trustees. (Well, “misunderstanding” in the sense that the Noachian flood was a little puddle.) It’s a rude awakening to scientists who thought the Galilean gulf was closing.

So much for compromise.

Colling’s troubles come as more and more researchers are fighting the “godless” rap, emphasizing that evolution does not preclude a deity (though neither does it require one).

Science doesn’t have anything to apologize for. It’s the creationists and their “intelligent design” allies who dissemble and lie and misrepresent evolution and science in their war against liberalism.

I think it’s a mistake for science to attempt “compromise” with the religionists (and I doubt many scientists are thinking about doing so), because it wouldn’t be an honest compromise. Creationism/ID “theory” is not only based on lies; it has the intention of undermining science. Same thing for liberalism, which does not require giving in anti-liberal factions in the name of “inclusiveness.”

As John Holbo wrote, (h/t Dan S):

I would also like to request a moratorium on critiques of liberalism that consist entirely of a flourish for effect – with accompanying air of discovery – of the familiar consideration that liberalism is inconsistent with blanket, categorical tolerance of absolutely every possible act and attitude. That is, liberalism is incompatible, in practice, with any form of illiberalism that destroys liberalism. If something is inconsistent with liberalism, it is inconsistent with liberalism. Yes. Quite. We noticed.

Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion. Just as liberalism is incompatible with illiberal forms of secularism.

Exactly. We should all print that on our T-shirts.

It is not “inclusive” to allow propagandists to hijack science classes. It is not “academic freedom” to lie to children to confuse them. Don’t forget that this controversy is not between religion and science. It’s between a faction of religious totalitarians and modern civilization. We do not have to tolerate them, compromise with them, or humor them. They must be utterly resisted in the public sphere. And this resistance is not a betrayal of liberal values, but a defense of liberal values.

Here is the line drawn between the personal and the public: That minority among the religious who find evolution incompatible with their beliefs are perfectly free to make up their own minds who and what to believe. They can disregard science, if they wish. They can do what Professor Richard Colling did and find their own middle ground. They can even build creationist “museums” with their own money. But they have no right to demand their views be respected as science, nor may they impose their views on children through public schools.

Science doesn’t owe anything to religion, or anyone else, except to be honest, ethical and diligent about the practice of science. However, neither does religion have to justify itself to science. But that’ll have to be the topic of another post.