Category Archives: Religion

I Swear

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The Westchester County (New York) Courthouse was built in 1973. When the Dumbest Trial of the Century ended I googled for this information. I had guessed the courtrooms, at least, dated from the 1960s or 1970s. The courtrooms are all in blond wood — cold, blocky, and graceless — and back then when people talked about “modern” decor there was nearly always blond wood involved.

In the front of the “dumbest trial” courtroom, high on the wall above the judges’ chair, the words IN GOD WE TRUST were carved in capital letters in the blond wood. And a Bible was kept on the witness stand for the swearing-in of witnesses. All the witnesses were asked by the clerk to put their left hands on the Bible and raise their right hands. (These directions confounded some of the witnesses, who needed reminding which hand was which. That was often the best part of their testimony.)

I realize that to many citizens religion is a primitive and irrational cult. And, of course, lots of religion is a primitive and irrational cult. The inscription didn’t bother me, but if I’d had anything to say about it I would have chosen something else out of consideration for non-believing citizens. Maybe “Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due” (Cicero) or “Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens” (unknown) or, my favorite, “The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be” (Raymond Chandler). Hey, it’s a big wall. But then, I would have stipulated oak paneling and furniture in a Mission or Shaker style, with bright red and blue cushions and carpeting. That courtroom was just too … beige.

But the swearing on a Bible thing concerns me a little. I don’t know if all judges still expect people to swear on Bibles, but the “dumbest trial” judge, apparently, did. I wonder what happens if a witness doesn’t want to swear on a Bible? This might be OK with the judge, but wouldn’t it be prejudicial to some jurors?

As far as church-state issues go, this one hardly belongs at the top of the list. I’d like to hear other opinions, though.

Inalienable Rights

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Two hundred and seven six years ago, three members of the Danbury Baptists Association composed a letter to President Thomas Jefferson regarding religious discrimination in the state of Connecticut. Connecticut had established Congregationalism as the official state religion, and the Congregational Church was supported by state taxes. Connecticut law provided that people of other faiths could file exemptions to have their religious taxes routed to their own churches, but the exemptions often were not approved.

Some background: In 1801 Connecticut had not yet adopted a written state constitution, but instead was operating under a government derived from its old colonial charter, received from King Charles II in 1662. Charles’s policies were more tolerant of religious diversity than was often the case in those days, but religious establishment, politics, and government were tightly knotted together in Britain, as illustrated by the history of the Puritans. Charles’s charter assumed the colonists would work diligently to convert the “Natives of the Country to the Knowledge and Obedience of the only true GOD, and He Saviour of Mankind, and the Christian Faith, which in Our Royal Intentions, and the adventurers free Possession, is the only and principal End of this Plantation.”

The Bill of Rights had been adopted in 1791, but the First Amendment prohibited only the Congress of the United States from establishing religion. It would be many years before the Fourteenth Amendment extended this prohibition to the states.

Anyway, the Danbury Baptists were pretty fed up with religious discrimination in Connecticut, so they wrote to President Jefferson:

Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty–that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals–that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions–that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors;

“The legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors.” That’s a point we might want to discuss sometime.

But, sir, our constitution of government is not specific. Our ancient charter together with the law made coincident therewith, were adopted as the basis of our government, at the time of our revolution; and such had been our laws and usages, and such still are; that religion is considered as the first object of legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights; and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.

I included the historical background about the charter because some right-wing religious historical revisionists have claimed that the “ancient charter” the Danbury Baptists referred to was the U.S. Constitution, even though the Constitution was hardly ancient at the time and had not even been written, much less “adopted as the basis of our government, at the time of our revolution.” The revisionists try to claim that the Baptists were OK with government getting entangled with religion as long as it did so in a non-preferential way.

But that’s bogus. The Baptists continued,

It is not to be wondered at therefore; if those who seek after power and gain under the pretense of government and religion should reproach their fellow men–should reproach their order magistrate, as a enemy of religion, law, and good order, because he will not, dare not, assume the prerogatives of Jehovah and make laws to govern the kingdom of Christ.

Jefferson famously wrote back in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

What this exchange amounted to was that the Danbury Baptists wrote Jefferson complaining about legislators in Connecticut who “assume the prerogatives of Jehovah and make laws to govern the kingdom of Christ,” and asking for his assurance that the feds wouldn’t do the same thing. And Jefferson wrote back saying, damn straight we won’t, because the First Amendment doesn’t allow it.

So now it’s more than two centuries later, and some Americans are still struggling to wrap their heads around the idea that government may not be used to enforce or coerce religious beliefs and practices, and that a person’s religion ain’t none of the Gubmint’s damn business. Such a person is U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) who sent a letter to constituents

… warning that unless there is an immigration crackdown “many more Muslims” will be elected to public office. And these Muslims, Goode noted, would take the oath of office with a hand resting on the Koran. In a December 7 letter, a copy of which you’ll find below, the Republican congressman warned that if “American citizens don’t wake up” and adopt the “Virgil Goode position on immigration,” there will “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

The Congressman actually wrote,

I fear that in the next century there will be many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

Alan Dershowitz writes about a Jew, Jacob Henry, who was elected to the North Carolina state legislature in 1808 but was blocked from taking his seat because of a state law that required legislators to accept the divinity of Christ. And now almost two centuries later another Jew, Dennis Prager, is leading a campaign to keep a Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from being sworn in on a Koran.

As they say — the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I already wrote about Dennis Prager and how he hates America, here. Since then I’ve heard from a number of people that U.S. Representatives don’t put their hands on anything when they are being officially sworn in, but sometimes pose with Bibles at photo-op swearings-in at another time. So this whole swearing-in controversy is bogus on several levels.

(However, during my recent detention at the Westchester County Supreme Court as a jurist for the Dumbest Trial of the Century, I observed a whole lot of swearing-in of witnesses on the Bible, and I have some thoughts about that I want to put into another post soon. And since two of our new congress critters are Buddhists, I want to explain why the practice of swearing on sacred books of any sort is problematic for Buddhists.)

I’m pleased to report that not everyone on the Right agrees with Rep. Goode’s letter. For example, blogger Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House wrote,

But beyond the shameless, shallow pandering by Goode is a revealed truth; that too often Republican politicians are using this “traditional values” theme to capitalize on some unimagined fear as in the case of Goode and his phantom Muslims. We also see other individual groups like gays targeted as somehow being in conflict with traditional American values – as if these values are practiced by people solely as a result of their religion, sexual orientation, ethnic heritage, or any other qualifier that a politician seeks to use to drive a wedge between us….

…I’m all for controlling our borders. I’m all for enforcing the law. But I am also in favor of increasing legal immigration. If someone wishes to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole that it takes to get here legally and then work toward citizenship, that alone should denote a person’s interest in the “traditional values” of America. There are plenty of Muslims here today – second and third generation Muslims – who embrace the same values you and I do and are no more a threat to those values than my pet cat Snowball.

For Goode to posit the notion that Muslims are incapable of adopting and embracing traditional values not only flies in the face of history and everything we know about immigrants but also bespeaks a shallow and corrupt mind, incapable of grasping the shining truth about America as a melting pot that embraces all cultures and ethnic groups.

And that may be the most traditional of all American values.

Probably the last thing Mr. Moran wants is praise from me, but I’ll say it, anyway … Amen.

On the other hand, there are plenty of righties who live down to our expectations. The blogger of Riehl World View writes,

Founded, to a degree by Deists, or not – American tradition and the root of her social values is Judeo-Christian belief. That is a fact and no amount of protestation is going to change it. Though certainly a large influx of, say a Muslim or Hindu population most certainly would.

Which takes us back to Mr. Jefferson, who wrote in his autobiography of the adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

Heh. But blogger Riehl is less worried about religious liberty and inalienable rights than he is about preserving our “social values.” The fact is that our “social values” have already changed enormously since Jefferson’s time — slaves were freed, women got the vote, the Irish became respectable, etc. If we could go fetch Mr. Jefferson in a time machine and bring him here, he’d be shocked out of his stockings. So many of the social values of Jefferson’s time have disappeared that the nation would be as alien to Mr. Jefferson as Mars. And social values will continue to change whether large numbers of Muslims move to America or not, because that’s the nature of human society.

That said, I would insist that Muslims or anyone else who move here be advised of the Wall of Separation and warned not to try to tear it down. It protects us all from the likes of Rep. Goode.

Dichotomies

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    The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
    When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised.
    Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
    If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything.
    To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.
    When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail. — Sengtsan, 3rd Zen Patriarch

Humans have a proclivity for framing issues as dichotomies — this and that, right and wrong, black and white, us and them. Old Sengtsan would have called this “dualism.”

Dualism is actively at work distorting our ongoing political discussions. For example, few days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote about the Iraq Study Group:

But more notable than the supposed exclusion of neocons (something that should be believed only once it is seen) is this claim about Washington-style balance and “centrism”:

    The panel was deliberately skewed toward a centrist course for Iraq, participants said. Organizers avoided experts with extreme views on either side of the Iraq war debate.

I’d really like to know what the excluded anti-war “extreme view” is that is the equivalent of the neonconservative desire for endless warfare in Iraq and beyond. The only plausible possibility would be the view that the U.S. ought to withdraw from Iraq, and do so sooner rather than later. What else could it be? Nobody, to my knowledge, is proposing that we cede American territory to the Iraqi insurgents, so withdrawal essentially defines the far end of the anti-war spectrum.

Is withdrawal — whether incremental or total — considered to be an “extreme view” that the Washington “centrists” have not only rejected but have excluded in advance even from consideration?

Good question, and I fear the Baker panel does consider withdrawal to be an extreme view not under consideration. We’ll see.

But I’ve long believed news media screws up discussion of abortion the same way. We’re told there are two “extremist” views, pro- and anti. But what is the “pro” extreme view? I know of no reproductive rights organization that advocates elective third-trimester abortion, for example. Reproductive rights organizations have been fighting to maintain Roe v. Wade, which allows states to ban abortions after the 23rd week gestation (earliest possible viability; late second trimester) as long as exceptions are made for life and health of the mother. That’s extreme? Extremists on the other side not only want to eliminate the “health” exception. They’re not crazy about the “life,” “rape,” and “incest” exceptions, either. And don’t get them started on birth control.

I could be wrong, but I suspect the enormous majority of pro-choice people would accept some kind of legal gestational limit on elective abortion as long as it wasn’t set absurdly early and as long as physicians are allowed a decent amount of discretion for deciding what constitutes a legitimate medical reason for a non-elective abortion. In fact, I think a big whopping majority of the American electorate would accept that compromise. The Fetus People, on the other hand, will not rest until they achieve a total ban on abortions, no matter what voters want.

So who’s “extreme”? Seems to me the preponderance of the extremism is on one side.

I thought of dualities today when I read this column by Cathy Young:

Behind the political divide in America, there is also a religious divide.

The split is not just between people who believe and people who do not; it is between those who see religious faith as society’s foundation and those who see it as society’s bane.

I guess those of us who see it as neither society’s foundation nor society’s bane don’t count.

A look at recent best-selling books illustrates the divide. Ann Coulter’s “Godless: The Church of Liberalism” excoriates liberals for being, well, godless. Bill O’Reilly’s new tome, “Culture Warrior,” urges traditionalists to combat the evil influence of the “secular-progressives.” For the other side, there’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” by philosopher Sam Harris, who calls all religion “obscene” and “utterly repellent,” and “The God Delusion” by biologist Richard Dawkins, a tome whose title speaks for itself.

Both sides in the debate traffic in simplistic stereotypes.

Sort of like Cathy Young?

It doesn’t help that religion has become intertwined with politics. A recent column by film critic and pundit Michael Medved conflates attacks on religion with criticism of the political power of religious conservatives.

Such books as “”The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right” by Rabbi Michael Lerner, written from a religious point of view, are lumped together with Harris’ anti-religion screed. Meanwhile, conservative author Heather MacDonald, writing in USA Today, complains that “skeptical conservatives” feel marginalized in today’s discourse.

Over the past several weeks I’ve seen the “religious right” juxtaposed against the “unreligious left” dozens of times, and hardly anyone questions this. I don’t think it reflects reality, however. There are plenty of deeply religious lefties, and plenty of atheist and agnostic righties.

What’s more, if the “extremes” are pro-religion (as defined by Michael Medved) and anti-religion (ditto), then what the hell is the center? The “I don’t give a shit about religion (and/or Michael Medved)” faction?

What if we change the dichotomy? Let’s put everyone who thinks religion should be everyone’s bleeping personal business at one extreme, and people who want to coerce everyone else to think his way (a.k.a. God Nazis) at the other? This would put Richard Dawkins and Michael Medved together at the “God Nazi” end of the continuum, opposite from me.

I’m sure Dawkins and Medved would disagree with this model, but I care what they think about as much as they care what I think.

But I suppose I should try to take Sengtsan’s advice. Looking at religion dispassionately reveals a lot of people frantically grabbing for something to either soothe their existential fears or stoke their egos, or both. There are people looking for easy answers to difficult questions and finding difficult answers to easy questions. There are dogmatists and there are mystics; there are those who approach religion with fear, and those who approach it with love. There are those who find comfort in familiar liturgy and iconography and those who leave the familiar behind and wander off in search of something else. And there are those who don’t see any point to religion at all.

The problem is that people mistake whatever little bit of doctrinal or institutional jetsam they’re clinging to as the Complete and Total Absolute Truth and Wisdom of the Cosmos Forever and Ever Amen. This reminds me of an essay written by John McGowan and posted at Le Blogue Bérubé in June 2005. This is about politics, but it speaks to any issue (emphasis added) —

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place—democracy in the people, liberalism in the law—and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity.

Not only the Republicans, but the American nation as a whole, seem to have lost any sense whatsoever of what liberalism means and what it strives to insure. Even at the best of times, the liberal check upon power is a tenuous bulwark that fights against the odds. There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful—or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic—and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?) …

… 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. Given how distasteful liberal expedients are in experience, it is a miracle that they ever get established and maintained. But the benefits of that miracle are multiple—and we, as a nation, will sorely regret it if we trash our liberal edifice out of impatience, frustration, or, even worse, sheer forgetfulness of why that edifice was put in place, how it works, and what it accomplishes.

It frustrates Michael Medved’s will that filmmakers are allowed to express their own points of view in their films. Religion itself seems to frustrate Richard Dawkins’s will. But the contest shouldn’t be between opposing points of view on religion, but between those who support the First Amendment of the Constitution and those who would circumvent it.

Whatever your religious beliefs, as long as you’re with me on the Constitution’s side, we’re good.

Why Does Dennis Prager Hate America? And Other Religious Questions

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Dennis Prager: One more rightie who wants to shred the Constitution. Just read this sewage he spewed out at Townhall.

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, the Koran.

He should not be allowed to do so — not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.

First, it is an act of hubris that perfectly exemplifies multiculturalist activism — my culture trumps America’s culture. What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

If “America” forces an elected official to venerate a religion other than his own in order to take office, then “America” has just shredded the First Amendment and violated Article VI, paragraph 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

According to Robin Marty of the Minnesota Monitor,

In our country’s history, four presidents have been inaugurated without swearing an oath on the Bible. Franklin Pierce was affirmed, and swore no oath, Rutherford Hayes initially had a private ceremony with no Bible before his public ceremony, Theodore Roosevelt had no Bible at his ceremony, and Lyndon Johnson used a missal during his first term.

Despite Prager’s insistence that “for all of American history, Jews elected to public office have taken their oath on the Bible, even though they do not believe in the New Testament,” it is clear that he is wrong. Linda Lingle, Governor of Hawaii, took the oath of office on a Torah in 2001. Madeleine Kunin, a Jewish Immigrant and Governor of Vermont “rested her left hand on a stack of old prayer books that had belonged to her mother, grandparents, and great grandfather” as “a physical expression of the weight of Jewish history.”

And in North Carolina, the Notary Public has a written code for swearing in:

    “A person taking an oath should place one hand on the Holy Scriptures. This book will vary depending on the person’s religious beliefs: Christians should use the New Testament or the Bible; Jews, the Torah or the Old Testament; Moslems, the Koran; Hindus, the Bhagavad-Gita; etc.”

Prager’s column is nothing but bigotry and jingoism. Prager and other whackjobs (see previous post) demand that their points of view be respected, but there’s no virtue in tolerating intolerance (or, as in the previous post, plain ol’ idiocy).

God Nazis

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Two stories being linked to on the Right Blogosphere:

Tricia Bishop writes for the Chicago Sun that retailers have already surrendered in the Christmas Wars.

Christmas is back at Wal-Mart – not that it really ever left.

After testing out a generic, yet all-inclusive, “happy holidays” theme last year, the nation’s largest retailer announced this month that Christmas will dominate its seasonal marketing in the U.S.

“We’ve learned our lesson,” said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Marisa Bluestone. “This year, we’re not afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas.'”

Neither are Walgreens, Target, Macy’s, Kmart and Kohl’s, among others. In interviews this week, spokesmen from those major retailers said that their stores acknowledge the Christmas holiday, hoping to avoid a repeat of last year’s backlash led by conservative Christian groups. …

… “Clearly, retailers have learned that they can still be inclusive of all religions while wishing their customers a ‘merry Christmas,'” she said.

Sure, they have.

Some said Wal-Mart might actually be asking for trouble with its new policy. Employees were encouraged to mix it up this year and toss out a “Happy Hanukkah” and “Kwanzaa” among their “Season’s Greetings,” or maybe even a “Feliz Navidad” if the mood strikes.

Wal-Mart workers are supposed to “use their best judgment” to figure out what’s appropriate for whom, spokeswoman Bluestone said.

“How can they tell? They’re going to look at people and [guess]?” asked Amna Kirmani, a professor of marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

At the Wal-Mart on Port Covington Drive this week, aisles were stocked with Christmas items and their generic, wintry counterparts – such as decorative snowmen and sleds – but nary a menorah to be found. A manager said the store doesn’t stock many Hanukkah items, and what it had this year was already purchased.

This rightie blogger is glad Wal-Mart has “seen the light,” but I’m not persuaded that all the God Nazis will be appeased. When people want to take offense, they nearly always find something that offends them.

The other story is from Australia, where Scholastic Australia has killed publication of a book because it might offend Muslims.

A LEADING children’s publisher has dumped a novel because of political sensitivity over Islamic issues.

Scholastic Australia pulled the plug on the Army of the Pure after booksellers and librarians said they would not stock the adventure thriller for younger readers because the “baddie” was a Muslim terrorist

You need to read the whole story for the context in which this decision was made, but it is a shame, when people allow themselves to be intimidated into self-censorship.

The arbiters of righteousness at Little Green Footballs are outraged. (Linking to LGF violates Mahablog policy; I trust you can find the post if you really want to.)

The Australian branch of a multinational publisher of children’s books has canceled their publication of an adventure thriller by an award-winning novelist—because the bad guys are Islamic terrorists: Islamic fears kill off children’s thriller. (Hat tip: Andrew Bolt.)

But get a load of what they are willing to publish.

The article describes a couple of other books, recently published in Australia, that allegedly make excuses for Islamic terrorism. However, the article doesn’t say that Scholastic Australia published those books. I checked Scholastic Australia’s web site and couldn’t find them; I suspect another publisher brought them out.

Once again: Righties can’t read.

But the moral is, intimidation by Muslims is bad; intimidation by Christians is good.

One more example of God Nazis — I don’t have time this morning to do this subject justice, but I call your attention to this article by Deepak Chopra at Huffington Post. I agree with Chopra’s basic premise — that religion and science are not mutually exclusive — but then he goes off on some mushy New Age tangent about consciousness that destroys his own premise. (I added a comment to the article, but my comment hasn’t been published yet. It may show up later today.) Chopra has established himself as some kind of spirituality guide, but after reading this I question if he has ever gone beneath the surface himself. For another take on spirituality and consciousness, try this.

However, I am not calling Chopra a God Nazi. I may disagree with him, but he’s not marching around trying to intimidate people into thinking the way he does. Some of the commenters, on the other hand, want to stamp out Chopra. Some put him in the same box as James Dobson; hardly. In this case, the militant atheists are the God Nazis.

Update: Glenn Greenwald points to righties who are upset by the word Christianist but who themselves use the word Islamist.

Respecting Life

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Emptypockets has a long rumination about embryonic stem cell research at The Next Hurrah.

That subject of desecration and its relationship to organ donation is, I think, a more apt context for discussing embryonic stem cells than the abortion rubric under which stem cells are usually put. Unlike a fetus, which likely would become a person, an unimplanted blastocyst is terminal and the moral issues about how we treat it are closer to end-of-life issues than conception ones. At least, that analogy is more apt biologically — whether it is helpful politically, I don’t know.

What does emerge from this analysis is, for me, a better understanding of what may be on the minds of stem cell research opponents. The sanctity of life may mean, for them, not only the call to preserve life itself — something which is, for an unimplanted blastocyst, impossible — but the demand to treat the elements of human life with respect and dignity. Some opponents may be appalled not by the demise of a ball of cells, but by what they see as an undignified death, in the polished steel of a tissue culture hood with a lab-coated graduate student bearing a pipetteman in place of a funeral Mass.

Call it a desecration or just plain creepy, that cold alien-autopsy vision of life’s end may be what drives some segments of the opposition. It is partly relieved by shifting the view to patients the research might help, just as rabbis struggling with organ donation may yield most often when they confront the potential for saving another life. But it may also be partly relieved by writing into future stem cell legislation explicit language requiring the blastocysts be treated with respect, and by acknowledging in debate that scientists recognize this concern and are sensitive to it.

I doubt opponents of embryonic stem cell research will be appeased by promises to treat blastocysts “respectfully.” However —

I’ve gone on and on about life and the moral argument for embryonic stem cell research already, and I don’t want to repeat all that now. Let’s explode everyone’s head today and look at some undiluted Zen.

Living beings are the result of many factors and conditions. Some of these are the presence of sperm, an egg, the condition of fertility, and the presence of a being desiring a form. Once living beings are created, there are other conditions necessary for their survival, such as sunshine, warmth, air (or the absence of these) as well as water and food. Many of the things that make up our world were once alive and depended on these same conditions, like wood, paper, cotton, wool, and oil products. Even stones and diamonds, and the planet itself, are the result of many related factors. All causes and conditions are interrelated. Yet, because of our conditioning and our delusions, we are easily confused and distracted from seeing our true relationship to all things. I think the nature of delusion is that it makes us feel separate, giving the illusion of duality.

In Taking the Path of Zen, Aitken Roshi writes, “There is fundamentally no birth and no death as we die and are born. When we kill the spirit that may realize this fact, we are violating this precept. We kill that spirit in ourselves and in others when we brutalize human potential, animal potential, earth potential.”

Another facet:

In the first precept, the crucial section is, “In the sphere of the everlasting Dharma, Not nursing a view of extinction…” The Dharmakaya is complete, ultimate reality. It is selfless and empty and is the origin from which everything arises and to which everything returns. The Dharmakaya is never “born” into the world of appearances, so it cannot die. We arise, together with our world, as human beings. Each moment we arise from and return to unity with everything; we are all children of our common parent – the Dharmakaya. When we consider the questions of “killing” or “not killing” we have already divided our world into self and other. If we see our world only through human self-interest we will miss the underlying unity that is our common origin. When we are unaware of this underlying unity, the best that we can hope for is a respect for all life.

From this perspective, to deny the potential of a blastocyst to heal the sick — a blastocyst that would otherwise remain frozen until it had lost all potential — is not respecting life at all, but denying life. Belittling Michael J. Fox for the sake of keeping some cells frozen is not respecting life. Belittling, even lying about, the potential of embryonic stem cell research is not respecting life.

More:

The First Grave Precept is “Affirm life—do not kill.” What does it mean to kill the environment? It’s the worst kind of killing. We are decimating many species. There is no way that these life forms can ever return to the earth. The vacuum their absence creates cannot be filled in any other way, and such a vacuum affects everything else in the ecosystem, no matter how infinitesimally small it is. We are losing species by the thousands every year, the last of their kind on the face of this great Earth. And because someone in South America is doing it, that doesn’t mean we’re not responsible. We’re as responsible as if we are the one who clubs an infant seal or burns a hectare of tropical forest. It is as if we were squeezing the life out of ourselves. Killing the lakes with acid rain. Dumping chemicals into the rivers so that they cannot support any life. Polluting our skies so our children choke on the air they breath. Life is nonkilling. The seed of the Buddha grows continuously. Maintain the wisdom life of Buddha and do not kill life.

Treat the air respectfully, and the seas respectfully, and birds and bugs and everything else on the planet respectfully. And we should treat living beings respectfully. Picketing an abortion clinic while wearing shoes made with slave labor in a third world country is not respecting life. Opposing abortion by belittling the lives of women — screaming at women entering abortion clinics, for example, or calling them selfish — is not respecting life.

Making excuses for civilian deaths in Iraq is not respecting life.

More:

We can play around with the word “state.” “State” is a condition or manner of being. In Buddhism, mind-states determine our thoughts, words, and actions which in turn create karma and its fruits. In a worldly sense “state” means position or rank or class. It also means a polity or nation. America’s leaders point their fingers at an “axis of evil” states. As far as they are concerned, it is just fine to despise Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. They add other enemies like Cuba, Syria, and even France (without whom there would never have been a United States). Despising these states and the people who live in them goes against the spiritual reality that all beings are Buddha, all beings are God. They may as well be pointing at themselves. [p. 3]

Yes, of course we should treat the blastocysts with respect. This means freeing them from freezing and allowing them to be life — if not as an embryo, then as a treatment for a sick child or a crippled adult.

It’s all One.

Busted

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The Associated Press reports —

The Rev. Ted Haggard was dismissed Saturday as leader of the megachurch he founded after a board determined the influential evangelist had committed “sexually immoral conduct,” the church said Saturday.

Haggard had resigned two days earlier as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, where he held sway in Washington and condemned homosexuality, after a Denver man named Mike Jones claimed to have had drug-fueled trysts with him. He also had placed himself on administrative leave from the New Life Church, but its Overseer Board took the stronger action Saturday.

“Our investigation and Pastor Haggard’s public statements have proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct,” the independent board said in a statement.

    “Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.”

    — Dogen, Genjokoan

    “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”

    — Jesus, Gospel of Thomas

Update: Blaming Mrs. Haggard.

Update update: You want to read James Wolcott.

Karma Wins Again

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If I believed in a personal God, I’d think she was trying to send America’s Christians a message.

You can cheat in love, and you can cheat in politics, but you can’t cheat the Tao.

Update: Church leader admits to some indiscretions.

Update update: See also Mr. Wolcott.

… it confirms my suspicion that all Republican men are privately, passionately, exceedingly gay. According to this exciting morsel, Haggard took part in weekly conference calls with President Bush–“he and the president like to joke that the only thing they disagree on is what truck to drive.”

‘What truck to drive’–I wonder if that is some kind of cryptic butch gay Western lingo. It’s a shame Will & Grace is no longer on the air to provide enlightenment on such matters, leaving us to forage on our own.

Being Good

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There’s tons to blog about and now I’m a day behind. Let’s start off with a Sunday morning religion post.

There’s an outstanding column in today’s Boston Globe by Sam Harris, titled “Bad reasons to be good.” Harris argues against the common idea that religion is the best arbiter of morality. Harris is an atheist who seems to have made a project out of exposing the shams and inconsistencies of religion. This should keep him busy.

Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. … The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality. The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don’t have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature’s brain and its experience of the world.

I’ve long believed that good socialization, not religious belief, is the real key to moral and ethical behavior. Emotionally healthy and well-socialized people, religious or not, nearly always treat other sentient beings decently. Sociopaths can quote the Bible all day long and still get their kicks out of bashing bunnies.

The bare-assed fact is that human history and everyday life are overflowing with empirical evidence that “religion” and “morality” don’t always hang out in the same ball park. Yet unthinking people (which is most of ’em, alas) continue to believe that religion is somehow a necessary prerequisite for morality.

Unfortunately, religion tends to separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people often devote immense energy to so-called “moral” questions — such as gay marriage — where no real suffering is at issue, and they will inflict terrible suffering in the service of their religious beliefs.

Under some circumstances our marriage laws may inflict real suffering on gay couples, but let’s put that aside for the moment. There is no better example of what Harris talks about that the embryonic stem cell controversy. To my mind, anyone who puts a higher moral value on saving frozen blastocysts than on alleviating suffering and disease is self-evidently screwy. Yet in our current sick culture the Screwjobs are respected for their “values,” and the rest of us are told we’d better straighten out or no one will like us.

I suspect a great many people have a gut-level queasiness with this view of morality, but they haven’t found a way to drag this queasiness into their heads to think about it and explain it. Language and logic seem to fail us. If killing is “bad,” then killing a blastocyst is “bad,” we are told. Is that not logical?

The “logic” of morality fails the “values” side, too, sometimes. The famous “rape and incest” exemption to abortion bans comes to mind. Logically, if abortion is murder, then it’s murder no matter how the conception took place. Yet many who oppose abortion can’t bring themselves to take that last, logical step and extend the ban to rape and incest victims. Some twinge of sympathy for the victimized women holds them back. To anti-abortion rights purists, on the other hand, that sympathy is moral weakness; the righteous must harden their hearts and stick to logic.

Perhaps you see the problem.

The purists painted themselves into a “logical” corner with Terri Schiavo, IMO, because too many of us these days have personal experience with making end-of-life decisions for loved ones. And most of us know in our hearts and guts that, sometimes, it’s selfish to cling, and loving to let go. The Schiavo episode revealed the “values” tribe to be a small, hysterical minority.

Harris continues,

But the worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to do fewer good deeds than they might otherwise.

Last year a “creationist” testifying in the Dover evolution trial perjured himself by lying about using church money to buy “creationist” books for the public schools. A “Christian” organization called the Alliance Defense Fund routinely fabricates lies — such as the claim a California school banned the Declaration of Independence because it mentions a “Creator” — as part of its crusade to break down the separation of church and state. ADF and the perjured creationist have, apparently, decided that lies are OK if they help spread the Gospel (and they call us “moral relativists”).

Last July I wrote a three-part series explaining why the purists are wrong on the embryonic stem cell question; here is Part I, Part II, and Part III. Parts II and III in particular focus on the disinformation about stem cell research being spread by the purists to defend their “logical” opinion. I wrote,

The fact is, opponents of stem cell research routinely lie — to themselves, to each other, to anyone who will listen — in order to defend their belief that embryonic stem cell research is immoral. This suggests to me that the real reasons people object to stem cell research have less to do with moral principle than with some deeply submerged but potent fear. And this takes us back to elective ignorance. Something about flushing all those blastocysts makes the Fetus People uncomfortable in a way that condemning Henry Strongin to death does not. The arguments they make against stem cell research, which are mostly a pile of lies and distortions, are not the reasons they are opposed to stem cell research. They are the rationalizations created to justify their opposition.

I’m hypothesizing here, but everything about the “logical” morality of the purists seems ass-backward to me. Very often their “logical” arguments seem post hoc, and assembled to provide a pretty cover for opinions that actually were dredged out of the murky depths of their ids. The fact that most of their “moral” causes involve sex and death seems to be a clue.

And the problem with their “logic” is that it is based on assumptions about matters like life, death, beingness, selfness, etc. that are rigid and narrow and make no sense to me. As I argued here, if you change the assumptions the “logic” falls apart.

Sam Harris is arguing for a secular morality — fine with me — but throughout the ages many religious people also have expressed the view that true morality — “goodness,” if you will — is based on compassion. This is central to Buddhism, which teaches that the two eyes of enlightenment are wisdom and compassion. And, ultimately, wisdom and compassion depend on each other, because true compassion (metta) arises from the wisdom that all beings are One, and true wisdom arises from the desire to realize enlightenment (bodhi) to benefit others (bodhicitta). The actions of a genuinely wise and compassionate person will always be moral.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 comes to mind also —

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

The word for love used in the original Greek text is agape, which I’ve been told meant something like “affection” or “concern for others” before Christian scholars got hold of it.

And, of course, several of the Heavy Hitters of Religion — Rabbi Hillel the Elder and Confucius, for example — independently came up with the Golden Rule. Although seems to me a truly compassionate person follows the Golden Rule without having to think about it as a rule.

As it says in the Tao Teh Ching —

      1. Thus, when the Way is lost there is virtue
      2. When virtue is lost there is humaneness
      3. When humaneness is lost there is rightness
      And when rightness is lost there is propriety.

    (Verse 38, Charles Miller translation)

    I guess if you’ve lost propriety, the final fallback position is “logic.”

    Update: Dinesh D’Souza is “logical.”

Give ’em an inch …

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Diana Henriques writes in today’s New York Times:

At any moment, state inspectors can step uninvited into one of the three child care centers that Ethel White runs in Auburn, Ala., to make sure they meet state requirements intended to ensure that the children are safe. There must be continuing training for the staff. Her nurseries must have two sinks, one exclusively for food preparation. All cabinets must have safety locks. Medications for the children must be kept under lock and key, and refrigerated.

The Rev. Ray Fuson of the Harvest Temple Church of God in Montgomery, Ala., does not have to worry about unannounced state inspections at the day care center his church runs. Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.

The differences do not end there. As an employer, Ms. White must comply with the civil rights laws; if employees feel mistreated, they can take the center to court. Religious organizations, including Pastor Fuson’s, are protected by the courts from almost all lawsuits filed by their ministers or other religious staff members, no matter how unfairly those employees think they have been treated.

And if you are curious about how Ms. White’s nonprofit center uses its public grants and donations, read the financial statements she is required to file each year with the Internal Revenue Service. There are no I.R.S. reports from Harvest Temple. Federal law does not require churches to file them.

And they whine about a “war on Christianity.”

Henriques writes that some of the exemptions from taxes and regulations have existed since the beginning of the republic, but many more have been added over the past 15 years — more than 200 “special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents” since 1989.

As a result of these special breaks, religious organizations of all faiths stand in a position that American businesses — and the thousands of nonprofit groups without that “religious” label — can only envy. And the new breaks come at a time when many religious organizations are expanding into activities — from day care centers to funeral homes, from ice cream parlors to fitness clubs, from bookstores to broadcasters — that compete with these same businesses and nonprofit organizations.

But it gets better. According to today’s Boston Globe, under the Bush Administration our government has begun to sponsor Christian missionary work on foreign soil.

For decades, US policy has sought to avoid intermingling government programs and religious proselytizing. The aim is both to abide by the Constitution’s prohibition against a state religion and to ensure that aid recipients don’t forgo assistance because they don’t share the religion of the provider.

Since medical programs are aimed at the most serious illnesses — AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis — the decision whether to seek treatment can determine life or death.

But many of those restrictions were removed by Bush in a little-noticed series of executive orders — a policy change that cleared the way for religious groups to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in additional government funding. It also helped change the message American aid workers bring to many corners of the world, from emphasizing religious neutrality to touting the healing powers of the Christian God.

Bush’s orders altered the longstanding practice that groups preach religion in one space and run government programs in another. The administration said religious organizations can conduct services in the same space as they hand out government aid, so long as the services don’t take place while the aid is being delivered. But the rule allows groups to schedule prayers immediately before or after dispensing taxpayer-funded aid.

Bush’s orders also reversed longstanding rules forbidding the use of government funds to pay for employees who are required to take an oath to one religion. In addition, the president’s orders allowed faith-based groups to keep religious symbols in places where they distribute taxpayer-funded aid.

And in implementing the president’s orders, the administration rejected efforts to require groups to inform beneficiaries that they don’t have to attend religious services to get the help they need. Instead of a requirement, groups are merely encouraged to make clear to recipients that they don’t have to participate in religious activities.

Bush made some of the changes by executive order only after failing to get Congress to approve them; the bill faltered in the Senate, where moderate Republicans joined Democrats in raising concerns about breaking down the barrier between government and religion.

Are we having fun yet?

… the faith-based initiative overseas is almost exclusively a Christian initiative: Only two Jewish development groups and two Muslim groups of any type got any grants or contracts between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2005, and Christians received 98.3 percent of all such funds to religious groups from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005.

The prime beneficiaries have been large groups including Catholic Relief Services and evangelical organizations such as World Vision — the former employer of Bush’s longtime USAID director Andrew Natsios — and Samaritan’s Purse, which is led by evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, who guided Bush to his own religious rebirth.

Groups counted on to be GOP “values voters,” I believe. The Bushies are using bleeping foreign aid to funnel money to their constituents.

However, Howard Fineman reports in Newsweek that the faithful are restless.

A Pew Foundation survey found an 8-percentage-point drop in Republican preference among “frequent churchgoers.”

Long before the Foley e-mails surfaced, the gears were grinding in the faith-based machine that Ronald Reagan inspired and Karl Rove perfected. It has been 30 years since evangelical, “Bible-believing” Christians flocked into politics. Figures such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Charles Colson of the Prison Fellowship have enormous clout within the GOP; Rove is a phone pal of both. But a younger crop of grass-roots activists views the elders of the cultural right as accommodationists who have failed to press a social agenda aggressively, and who now balk at calling for the ouster of Speaker Denny Hastert. “They need to wake up!” said Jamie Johnson, a religious broadcaster in Iowa. “Heads have to roll! The older generation is satisfied with a seat at the table. We want to build a whole new table.”

Interesting times.

If you missed it in the comments to an earlier post — here’s a good page on fundamentalism to bookmark for future reference.