February 7th, 2010
Napoleon did give Europe an efficient civil code. Mussolini did make the trains run on time. Hitler did revive the German economy, and genuinely liked dogs. In the spirit of giving even the worst devils their due, let’s hunt for something nice to say about the Ku Klux Klan.
Last week in Oregon, Democrats pressed for repeal of a perfectly sensible law enacted in 1923, at the behest of the Ku Klux Klan at a time when the Klan dominated state politics. The law is simple and understandable: public school teachers are not allowed to wear religious clothing in their classrooms. Introducing the legislation last fall, House Speaker Dave Hunt said it would “allow teachers to have the same religious free exercise rights as every other Oregonian.” At a hearing on the bill last week Hunt held up a picture of a Klansman who had legally changed his name to “Kasper K. Kubili” before becoming his predecessor as Speaker of the House, and urged the committee “To send a strong message that Speaker Kasper K. Kubili and the KKK members of the era were wrong.”
I’m not so sure they had this one wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Free exercise | No Comments »
January 31st, 2010
As a rule, the tone of these articles for the past 2½ years has been a bit negative. That’s the nature of the beast: pointing out the inanity, past and present, of listening to con men and their flunkies tell us what God wants us to do. This piece is the other 1%: a paean to someone standing up for truth, even when it is inconvenient to do so. I speak of our Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, and her speech last week on internet freedom.
Secretary Clinton spoke at the “Newseum,” a Washington landmark dedicated to the freedoms Americans enjoy under the First Amendment to the Constitution – carved in 50 tons of marble on the building’s exterior. She started with the usual banality about how marvelous the internet is, then got a little saltier when talking about governments around the world who are engaged in censoring it. China is the most well-known offender, but Clinton slammed Muslim-dominated governments as well. She picked on not just our enemy Iran, but even our so-called ally, Saudi Arabia, which routinely blocks people’s access to internet sites not in strict conformance with Wahhabi Islam. Just within the past year, she pointed out, Uzbekistan and even a relatively moderate Muslim country like Tunisia have tightened the screws on what their people are allowed to look at online.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Popular culture | 2 Comments »
January 24th, 2010
This week’s insight on the world of religion comes from Trijicon, a company in Michigan that manufactures gun-sights for the wea-pons used by the United States mili-tary and others in Iraq and Afghani-stan. For the past few decades, unbe-knownst to almost everyone, Trijicon has added codes to the end of the serial number that was stamped in an inconspicuous location on the device. One such code, for example, was “JN8:12.” It turns out this code has nothing to do with identifying the gunsight model, or the batch in which it was manufactured; instead, it is a reference to chapter 8, verse 12 of the Gospel of John: “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Another code was 2COR4:6, which stands for II Corinthians 4:6: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Other codes cited the books of Revelation and Matthew; a common theme seems to be Jesus as “the light of the world.”
Some, but not all, of the company’s products shine a laser beam on the person about to be shot. It’s not clear whether this feature is somehow connected to the “Jesus is the light of the world” theme, or whether shining the light of Jesus on a Muslim is supposed to be a euphemism for shooting him.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Magic | 1 Comment »
January 17th, 2010
Within hours after the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince last Tuesday afternoon, NPR was reporting that “Church groups are singing throughout the city all through the night in prayer. It is a beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tra-gedy.” Another re-porter on the scene noted that “Several hundred people had gathered to sing, clap, and pray in an intersection here by 9 o’clock last night, a little more than four hours after an earthquake had devastated much of the Haitian capital … I couldn’t make out many of the words. ‘Alleluia’ was the refrain for some of the hymns the group at the crossroads sang. A minister was preaching to the other group about Bondye (‘God’) and kretyen (‘Christians’). The congregants replied with bursts of song.”
Hundreds of people still trapped in the rubble were probably of the view that singing and praying should not have been the number one priorities for Haitians right at that moment. The mentality that begging some outside force – God, America, the UN, whatever – is the best way for Haitians to improve their lot underlies most of what is wrong with that pitiable country.
Of course, it is possible that the preachers on the scene were echoing what Pat Robertson told Americans the following day: that the earthquake was a “blessing in disguise.” Robertson explained Haiti’s problem as follows:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Money, Science | 1 Comment »
January 10th, 2010
The response of Ireland’s atheists to the new blasphemy law was immediate. The day the law took effect, a group called “Atheist Ireland” published on its website 25 potentially blasphemous quotations from figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, George Carlin, and Mark Twain, daring the government to prosecute.
Care was taken in selecting the 25 candidates. The arrangement is politically correct, covering most of the world’s major religions (with the notable exception of Hinduism). Many of the passages, though, do not fit the statutory definition of blasphemy – thus playing into the hands of the law’s backers, who can now say “You are just proving that we carefully wrote a good law, that does not prevent you from saying exactly what you are claiming is blasphemous.” For example, leading the list is Jesus at Matthew 26:64: “Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” While it is true that the Jewish priests of the day alleged this statement to be blasphemous, it would not fit the definition of the new Irish law, because it is not “grossly abusive or insulting.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Church & State, Intolerance, Popular culture | 2 Comments »
January 3rd, 2010
Ireland has a new law, effective New Year’s Day. The offense of blasphemy, which Ireland’s Constitution has long prohibited, has now been carefully defined, and made punishable by a hefty fine of €25,000.
Of course, atheists are outraged. They are good at being outraged. Richard Dawkins fumes that it is “a wretched, backward, uncivilised regression to the middle ages. Who was the bright spark who thought to besmirch the revered name of Ireland by proposing anything so stupid?”
Simply calling your opponents stupid is, well, stupid. Had Dawkins spent a little time looking at history rather than spouting off, he might have realized what a fabulous opportunity this law presents.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Church & State, Intolerance, Popular culture | 4 Comments »
December 27th, 2009
Last August, Sweden’s leading newspaper pub- lished an article alleging that the Israeli govern- ment was in the habit of harvesting body parts from dead Palestinians for use in research and transplan- tation applications, dispensing with the formality of asking their families’ permission. The author, Donald Boström, wrote of the shortage of transplantable organs in Israel, where demand exceeds supply several times over, and of young Palestinian men who would disappear from their villages, with their bodies returned after having been ripped open. Boström claimed that UN staff told him they were aware of the thefts but helpless to prevent them. He personally witnessed the shooting of a teenaged stone thrower in 1992, and photographed the corpse that was returned five days later, stitched up from abdomen to chin.
The response from the Israeli government and Jewish God experts was instant and overwhelming: Boström was not only lying, but was deliberately perpetrating in modernized form the “blood libel”: the Middle Ages myth that Jews drank the blood of Christian children as a sacrament. A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned the newspaper for publishing the story, as well as the Swedish government for allowing freedom of the press. “In a democratic country, there should be no place for dark blood libels out of the Middle Ages of this type … This is an article that shames Swedish democracy and the entire Swedish press.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Judaism | 3 Comments »
December 20th, 2009
Pope Benedict likes to use his general audiences to show off how smart he is (or how smart his staff is) by citing some obscure figure from Church history and lecturing about how relevant he or she is today. The Catholic Church, after all, is the repository of eternal truth, and what it knew to be true in the 1st century is still just as true in the 21st.
Last week, his exemplar was John of Salisbury, an Englishman who was politically active in the latter half of the 12th century. John’s special insight, according to the Pope, is that “there also exists an objective and immutable truth, whose origin is God, accessible to human reason. This truth regards practical and social actions. This is a natural law, from which human laws and political and religious authority should take inspiration, so that they can promote the common good.”
From this natural law, the Pope said, “descend precepts that are legitimate for all peoples and which in no case can be abrogated.” What precepts are those? The Pope left no question about that: “Perhaps John of Salisbury would remind us today that only those laws are equitable that protect the sanctity of human life and reject the legalization of abortion, euthanasia and limitless genetic experimentation, those laws that respect the dignity of matrimony between a man and a woman … ”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Politics | 8 Comments »
December 13th, 2009
Late last week, someone broke into the Deftera village cemetery on the island of Cyprus, then dug up and stole the corpse of former President Tassos Papadopoulos. He had died a year ago yesterday, and a ceremony marking the first anniversary of his death had been planned. The cancellation of the ceremony will receive a lot more attention than the ceremony itself would have.
Public suspicion immediately turned to the island’s minority Muslim community, who detested Papadopoulos as a Christian oppressor. The police though, are now questioning several Christian Greek soldiers, who may have been trying to make it look like the Muslims were committing an atrocity. Or maybe it was Muslims after all, trying to make it look like Christians were trying to make it look like Muslims had done something awful. It goes on and on. What is safe to speculate is that the 550 pound slab was not removed by teenagers as a prank, but by devotees of one religion intent on inflicting distress on the devotees of another.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Intolerance, Politics | 1 Comment »
December 6th, 2009
Liberal pundits were stunned last week when the voters of Switzerland, by an overwhelming 57%-43% majority, approved adding a terse amendment to the Swiss federal constitution: “The building of minarets is prohibited.” Only four of Switzerland’s 26 cantons voted against it. A week earlier, opinion polls had shown only 37% of the electorate in favor of the measure, which was strongly opposed by the government and the business establishment. Evidently, there is some difference between what the Swiss are willing to say to strangers on the telephone and what they actually think.
The law does not ban belief in Islam, or the building or utilization of mosques. It does not prevent Muslims from entering Switzerland, or from pressuring women to wear burqas. It does not prevent the dissemination of portions of the Koran and traditions of Muhammad calling for the extermination of non-Muslims. It does not affect the status of the country’s four existing minarets. No doubt some clever lawyer will point out that if a minaret is “built” outside the country, then flown in by airlift chopper and simply planted, the law has arguably not been violated. Of all the features of Islam, minarets are perhaps the least repulsive – they are in fact majestically beautiful. So what exactly is the point?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Intolerance, Islam | 2 Comments »
