Here. From Professor Sarkar's generous conclusion:
[T]he lack of depth or insight in this book is more than compensated by the entertainment it provides, at least to a philosopher or historian of science. No one should begrudge us our simple pleasures. I'm happy to have read this book, and even more so not to have paid for it.
Copies of this review should be circulated whereever Professor Fuller peddles his nonsense.
Via Chris Bertram (Bristol), I learn of this pleasing excorciation of the remarkably silly and pernicious "philosopher" of science (now a sociologist) Steve Fuller, who is also a shill for Intelligent Design.
Odd. Let it be a lesson, I guess, to those who send "hate" e-mails.
Pharyngula--the wickedly funny science blog run by Minnesota biologist Paul Myers, a blog that I am happy to take some credit for promoting early on in its career (its traffic now dwarfs mine)--is under attack from the Catholic League, a quasi-fascistic group that--like its Islamic counterparts (which are more often in the news these days)--regularly tries to terrorize, threaten, and silence anyone and anything deemed offensive to its particular (and often peculiar) version of its religion, Catholicism; in this case, they apparently want Professor Myers fired for his speech. (We've been there before!)
What started it all was the Catholic League's crusade against a student at the University of Central Florida who absconded with the Eucharist during a Church service; this, in turn, led to death threats against the student! Professor Myers, correctly, came to the student's defense, but in the process really poked the bull in the eye by volunteering--in solidarity, I take it, with the student--to desecrate more Eucharists. This site has a set of links to coverage of the event. (Amusingly, it turns out that the infamous shill for Intelligent Design creationism, Francis Beckwith, has also chimed in, ostensibly opposing the witch hunt aimed at Myers, but really to confirm his reputation as "Miss Manners", a posture which is important for those who can't be taken seriously on the merits of their arguments.)
Professor Myers is obviously correct to draw the comparison between the Catholic League's response and Islamic fundamentalists. The issue here is not, however, one of "academic freedom" per se, but rather the First Amendment. What Bill Donohue of the Catholic League does not appear to understand is that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the state of Minnesota from punishing Professor Myers for his speech. (I know, it's a tricky concept.) In the United States, which is currently not a theocracy, Professor Myers does not have to be polite about Catholicism; he does not have to be respectful; he does not have to give a hoot about the sensibilities of Catholics or Mr. Donohue. The Catholic League is similarly free to criticize Professor Myers as harshly as they want, but in calling on his employer and the state legislature to punish him for his speech, Mr. Donohue and his group betray their basic affinity with all religiously motivated authoritarians, from the Texas Taliban to Osama bin Laden.
I assume that counsel will have already advised the University of Minnesota to do nothing about Professor Myers's protected speech. I'll post more if this witch hunt goes further.
Here. Very much worth reading, and sharing. What must these fraudulent conmen like Klinghoffer think when they look in the mirror in the morning?
Story here. Hopefully, the state agency will reject the bid by the crackpots to "train" teachers. (To get a flavor for how far out this particular group of creationist conmen are, take a look at their FAQ page.)
Pharyngula has the details, and the New York Times editorializes on the latest disgraceful machinations of the know-nothings.
UPDATE: Professor Forrest's apt statement on the matter is here.
A blog devoted to shilling for Intelligent Design has posted a link to the paper by myself and Michael Weisberg critiquing attempts to apply evolutionary psychology to law. It appears the author of the post, one Denyse O'Leary, a Canadian journalist who is a notorious apologist for ID creationism, thought our article was of a piece with the skepticism about natural selection that is her raison d'etre. The second commenter appears to have noticed what Ms. O'Leary missed.
So the week after next, campuses across America will be treated to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, since there is not enough awareness, it turns out, about Islam and fascism. The event is the brainchild of well-known pathological liar and enemy of academic freedom, David Horowitz. But we shouldn't pre-judge it on that basis, even if others will.
I know this may surprise readers, but I think this event is a great idea. And I have an even better idea, which is we follow it up with: Christian-Fascism Awareness Week.
Now I don't want to interfere with Horowitz's effort, which is in the spirit of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan: "fundamentalism is the enemy of all civilized humanity." So one week devoted to Islamic fundamentalism seems right; but why not devote the next week to Christian fundamentalism? The rise of Christian Fascism has gotten some attention lately, but not nearly enough in our "politically correct" culture. Sure, the Christian Fascists aren't quite as scary, since they rarely commit terrorist acts (except against abortion service providers); on the other hand, they're right here in our midst (even in the White House some say), while the Islamic Bogeyman-In-Chief is in a cave somewhere in Pakistan. Here's what one expert on Christian Fascism has to say:
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed....
The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic -- to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true -- the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens....
Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked....
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups -- the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right....
The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" -- where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens -- awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement -- the most dangerous mass movement in American history -- will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance....
So clearly there is a lot of awareness-raising to be done during Christian-Fascism Awareness week. But, of course, the idea would not be to target Christians in general, most of whom aren't fascists or fundamentalists or zealots or theocrats or anti-democratic. We'd just be targetting the extremists, the kind who advise George W. Bush and threaten to run third-party candidates in Presidential elections. So there is no reason for most Christians to take offense. We are just trying to warn everyone else. Just like David Horowitz.
Those who carry water for the Texas Taliban in the state legislature engaged in quite a lot of mischief in the last session, in their unrelenting efforts to make public education in Texas an outpost of various Christian sects dominant in this part of the country. This article from a Galveston newspaper is particularly good on one of the most venal and disruptive pieces of legislation passed and signed by the reprehensible Governor Rick Perry:
In the mythological world created for religious conservatives by people hustling those same for money and votes, Texas House Bill 3678 is an important law.
It’s meant to prevent religious students from being dragged off to gulags by federal marshals for such crimes as praying over their cafeteria hotdogs and saying “I love Jesus” in class.
The trouble is, such never happens anywhere except in the mythological world of religious conservatives, and yet the law also applies to those of us living in the real world.
The only question about HB 3678 — which lawmakers say we may refer to as the “Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act” or the “School Children’s Religious Liberties Act” and which has about as much to do with those things as the Patriot Act does with patriotism — is: Exactly how bad is it?
Is it just a gratuitous bone for conservative voters, or is it a real threat to the American concept of keeping state-sponsored religion out of public schools?
We think it’s the latter....
What the bill was drafted to do is side-step a 2000 Supreme Court ruling on a school-prayer policy at Santa Fe Independent School District, right here in Galveston County.
In that ruling, the court said Santa Fe couldn’t have a policy allowing hand-picked students to read pre-approved religious statements over campus public address systems at the beginning of every school day, every student assembly and every home football game.
The court said the district could have a policy allowing prayers before graduation ceremonies, as long as they were nonsectarian, nonproselytizing and not censored or otherwise controlled by the district.
The new law is supposed to guide school districts in allowing students to deliver short sermons before every sort of school event.
Not just any students, though. Only juniors and seniors picked from among such elites as “student council officers, captains of the football team and other students holding positions of honor as the school district may designate.” The rest of you may remain seated and keep silent.
What the Supreme Court understood in 2000, but our lawmakers still don’t get, is the other half of the expression exchange. It’s not just a matter of who gets to speak but who is compelled to sit there, captive in the classroom or auditorium or stadium, and listen.
The court rejected Santa Fe’s football-prayer policy in part because of frequency. The justices thought that having to listen to a classmate preach once in a high-school career was a reasonable burden; having to do so over and over again was not.
If this law stands, we suggest there ought to be another. Call it the School Children’s Plain-Old-American Liberties Act. The law would clarify students’ rights to hiss, catcall, boo, hoot, object or disagree via recitation of scripture or to just get up and walk out any time they’d rather not sit quietly captive through a classmate’s expression of a religious viewpoint.
Texas may be notable for how aggressive the local Taliban are, but let's not forget that these pathologies are nationwide, as a recent survey confirms: take a look at the answers to questions 25, 26, and 27 in particular.
Pharyngula is referring to the authors of a new bill designed to inject more religion into public school classrooms in Texas, which he goes on to lacerate justly. The quote from the legislation, however, does omit an important line: "Homework and classroom assignments must be judged by ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance and against other legitimate pedagogical concerns identified by the school district." That may provide a way for school districts interested in education to avoid the otherwise disastrous consequences of this piece of reprehensible legislation.
UPDATE: This commentator makes some good points. I wish I had some suggestions, but I've run out. The sense of "deja vu all over again" does tend to wear a person down.
Almost four years ago, Texas scored a great victory against the creationist conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute and their local shills when the State Board of Education voted by a decisive majority to reject attempts to force biology textbooks used in Texas schools to misrepresent the state of knowledge about evolution by natural selection.
I'm sad to report, alas, that the pathetic Texas Governor Rick Perry has appointed one of the dissenters of four years ago, Don McLeroy, a dentist, as Chair of the State Board of Education. Dr. McLeroy's record on matters of science education is not a good one. Moreover, there is now a real chance, given the changed composition of the Board since 2003, that Texas may humiliate itself as Kansas did. (It does not help that Governor Perry's spokeswoman defended the appointment--I heard this on local public radio--by saying, "The Governor has long believed that if evolution is taught in the schools, creationism should be taught as well." The conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute at least understand that that approach won't fly constitutionally any longer.)
I hope Dr. McLeroy will remember something I said to him in my office in the fall of 2003 during our very pleasant conversation after the last battle. I said, "Wouldn't you find it odd if an organized group of non-dentists got together to promulgate standards for how you should practice dentistry?" This seemed to give him real pause, and he acknowledged that essentially all scientists are on the other side of the issue about Intelligent Design.
I hope the moral of our exchange is not lost on him in his new role as head of the State Board of Education.
Long-time reader Rob Sica asked that I call attention to the upcoming "Rally for Reason" in Kentucky:
People from all over the country are invited to join outside of the gates of “Answers in Genesis” (AiG) in Northern Kentucky to let the world know that many rational Americans do not share the primitive world view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time, as presented by the 27 million dollar plus “Creation Museum” opening Memorial Day, May 28, 2007. Various groups, representing both religious and secular orientations, will join together to protest this destructive world view.
So reports the New York Times in their trademark he said/she said manner, when, of course, the article might have been more aptly titled, "A Split Emerges as Ignorant Ideologues Discuss Darwin," since ignorance of evolutionary biology is almost evenly divided between the two sides: on the one hand, the pathological liars from the Discovery [sic] Institute, the public relations arm of the "Intelligent Design" scam; on the other, Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois, and John Derbyshire, a pontificator at the National Review (who at least knows enough to know that "Intelligent Design" is bogus), who are championing a different intellectual muddle:
Darwin’s scientific theories about the evolution of species can be applied to today’s patterns of human behavior, and...natural selection can provide support for many bedrock conservative ideas, like traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.
“I do indeed believe conservatives need Charles Darwin,” said Larry Arnhart, a professor of political science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, who has spearheaded the cause. “The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the 21st century will depend on the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative thought."
This, of course, confirms an observation Michael Weisberg and I made in writing about the misuse and mispresentation of evolutionary biology by some law professors:
As Professor Jones himself has noted, “the favored perspective on the causes of human behavior often reflects ephemeral enthusiasms wafted on the politics of the moment” [footnote omitted]. That summarizes we suspect, in a nutshell, the current fascination with “law and evolutionary biology,” which permits the patina of “science” to be enlisted on behalf of various hobby horses of the right: people are “selfish,” law can’t change everything, nature puts limits on utopian aspirations, and the like. Perhaps all of these are true, but right now evolutionary biology offers no support to any of them. But “ephemerical enthusiasms wafted on the politics of the moment” have made the science irrelevant. We hope to remind people that the science is relevant, indeed, crucial, and that, so far, the needed science is not there.
Professor Arnhart, himself, maintains a blog devoted to his hobby horse, which even permits comments. Already someone has weighed in with a pertinent observation:
You will be better able to cross the divide if you stop refering to "Darwinism". The theory of gravity is not called "Newtonism". Go over to the Physics Dept. at NIU and ask someone how gravity works. Now go over to the Biology Dept. and ask someone how natural selection works. Ithink you will find the answers illuminating.
I invite some of the many philosophers of biology out there among the readership to venture over to Professor Arnhart's site to find out to what extent he has a scholarly interest in evolutionary biology and to what extent he is really an ignorant ideologue. Save a copy of your comments; if he doesn't post them, I'll post them here in due course. But perhaps we shall be pleasantly surprised?
UPDATE: A reader directs my attention to a useful short review of one of Professor Arnhart's books by philosopher of biology Roberta Millstein (UC Davis) from Ethics 110 (2000): 653. As Professor Millstein notes, Professor Arnhart makes two characteristic mistakes of the ideologically motivated in this realm: first, in assuming, without argument, that natural selection is "the primary force in evolutionary change"; and second, in ignoring that variation is both a necessary condition and consequence of natural selection, such that no one set of phenotypic traits can be deemed the "natural" ones. As she notes: these points "call into question the appropriateness of grounding his [natural right] theory in modern Darwininian biology."
Via Ruchira Paul, I learn of this interesting item from The Guardian:
The American journalist HL Mencken once wrote: "We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." In Britain today, such wry tolerance is diminishing. Today, it's the religious on one side, and the secular on the other. Britain is dividing into intolerant camps who revel in expressing contempt for each other's most dearly held beliefs....
For example, Richard Dawkins, the British scientist and chair for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, whose perhaps timely insistence on the hideousness of the other fellow's wife and fatuousness of his offspring made his book, The God Delusion, sell 180,000 in hardback - a figure that rivals sales of Jordan's memoirs, thus demonstrating what an appetite there is for unapologetically militant atheism. This is the man so voguishly intemperate that when speaking to the Times recently about Nadia Eweida, the British Airways worker whose employer refused to allow her to wear a Christian cross openly to work, said: "I saw a picture of this woman. She had one of the most stupid faces I've ever seen."
Before The God Delusion was published, Dawkins wrote about something called Gerin oil that was poisoning human society. "Gerin oil (or Geriniol, to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug that acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self-damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions that have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11 were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time." Gerin oil, of course, was an anagram of religion. His bestseller charged that God was a "psychotic delinquent", invented by mad, deluded people.
The backlash against Dawkins' abusiveness, as well as his arguments, has started. Oxford theologian Alister McGrath has just published The Dawkins Delusion?. He argues: "We need to treat those who disagree with us with intellectual respect, rather than dismissing them - as Dawkins does - as liars, knaves and charlatans. Many atheists have been disturbed by Dawkins' crude stereotypes and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion. In fact, The God Delusion might turn out to be a monumental own goal - persuading people that atheism is just as intolerant as the worst that religion can offer."
It is worth noting that The God Delusion included an appendix entitled "a partial list of addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion". In this Dawkins offers a similar service to the National Secular Society whose certificate of de-baptism is downloadable from www.secularism.org.uk. "Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had," urges the site.
Dawkins and the National Secular Society, though, are no match for Christopher Hitchens in their hostility to religion. His new book, God Is Not Great: the Case Against Religion, is to be published by Atlantic Books in May. Its first chapter, drolly entitled Putting it Mildly, concludes: "As I write these words and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything." (Hitchens' italics.)
John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, whose book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia will be published later this year, detects parallels between dogmatic believers and dogmatic unbelievers such as Hitchens and Dawkins. "It is not just in the rigidity of their unbelief that atheists mimic dogmatic believers. It is in their fixation on belief itself."
Gray argues that this fixation misses the point of religions: "The core of most religions is not doctrinal. In non-western traditions and even some strands of western monotheism, the spiritual life is not a matter of subscribing to a set of propositions. Its heart is in practice, in ritual, observance and (sometimes) mystical experience . . . When they dissect arguments for the existence of God, atheists parody the rationalistic theologies of western Christianity."
The intolerance for people of faith, though, might not seem to be the preserve of only angry atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. Instead, there is a widespread fear that religion is being treated as a problem to British society, best solved by airbrushing it from the public sphere. British Airways' insistence that employee Nadia Eweida remove her Christian cross, and Jack Straw's plea to Muslim women constituents to remove their veils at his surgery, have helped bring a sense of mutual persecution to many people of different faiths (including yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs) - and a sense of solidarity. Many people of faith share a concern that Britain may be following secularist France, where 2004 reforms meant that "conspicuous religious symbols" could not be worn in public places, such as schools.
One particularly fraught current issue creating inter-faith solidarity is gay adoptions. Many Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims and Jews last month united against the government's sexual orientation regulations that would mean all adoption agencies could not discriminate against gay couples in placing children with adoptive parents....
The gay adoption issue also outraged many non-believers, among them philosopher AC Grayling, author of Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God. "These groups are trying to be exempt from the effort to be a fair society, and we are faced with the threat of a possible return to the dark ages. We are trying to keep a pluralistic society, and elements in the Christian church and other religions are trying to destroy it."
Why this departure from tolerant, if nicely ironic, Menckenism? Why the increasing division of Britain into shrill camps shouting unedifyingly at each other?...
[T]oday everyone is feeling threatened. Not just religious groups, but also pressure groups seeking to represent those without faith (who Stinson, citing last December's Ipsos Mori poll, suggests amount to 36% of Britons).....
In any event, the British Humanist Association campaigns against the existence of religious privileges in public life. Its symbolic struggle is BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot, which the BHA argues unfairly excludes humanists and other non-faith people. But Radio 4 isn't the chief culprit: "We believe that the church having privileged access to government is not good," says Stinson. "The government has had this whole thing about giving a voice to religion, which was connected to the aim of building links with minority groups. But religions have become more and more dominating . It does connect to the whole multiculturalism debate because the government is funding faith schools in order to bind British minority ethnic groups to British society. But in so doing they are paying for people to be indoctrinated, to put it bluntly."
The role of religion in education raises a terrifying spectre for Grayling. "People who cherish tolerant argument are fighting back against the teaching of creationism in schools." Last November the Guardian revealed that 59 British schools were using teaching materials promoting a creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution, called intelligent design. At the same time Dawkins, nicknamed "Darwin's rottweiler", announced he was setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought.
Atheists such as Dawkins and Grayling fear that Britain may become more like the US, where creationism has more than a foothold....
Children's author Philip Pullman argues that atheism should be taught in schools. "What I fear and deplore in the 'faith school' camp is their desire to close argument down and put some things beyond question or debate. It's vital to get clear in young minds what is a faith position and what is not, so that, for instance, they won't be taken in by religious people claiming that science is a faith position no different in kind from Christianity. Science is not a matter of faith, and too many people are being allowed to get away with claiming that it is."
Others argue that faith schools should be abolished and religion have no role in public life. Such is the Dawkins-Hitchens position. Why such hatred for religion and the proselytisation for its removal from the public sphere? One answer comes from Rabbi Julia Neuberger: "I think they're so angry about Muslims being so strident," she says. "And then they become angry about the Church of England wading into the issue of gays and adoption."
Neuberger is to take on Hitchens, Dawkins and Grayling when she speaks at a debate against the motion We'd Be Better Off Without Religion next month. The debate has been moved to a bigger venue. "What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt," she says. "No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don't accept there's doubt in all things, you're being intellectually dishonest...."
"One form of secularism suggests that religion should be kept in the private sphere. That's Dawkins' position. Another form, expressed by philosophers suc has Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, is to do with establishing a modus vivendi. It accepts that you come to the public debate with baggage that will inform your arguments. In this, the government tries to find common ground and the best possible consensus, which can only work if we share enough to behave civilly. Of course, there will be real clashes over issues such as gay adoption, but it's not clear to me that that's a problem per se."
What should such a public square be like? It might not be Menckian, but it could be based on respectful understanding of others' most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: "We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres." It is, at least, a hope, albeit one, given our current climate, in which it would be foolish to place too much faith.
I am curious to hear what U.K. readers make of this portrayl of the "clash" between securalism and religion? Non-anonymous comments very strongly preferred; post only once--comments may take awhile to appear.
Austin is one of my favorite places in the world, but sometimes one wonders what it is doing in Texas, a state where reactionary ignoramus (and bigot) Warren Chisum is an elected representative. God help us.
...and embarrasses the (already embarrassing) Governor. A grown-up might have anticipated this problem.
The physicist Steven Weinberg here at UT Austin has a review in the TLS of the much-maligned Dawkins book The God Delusion. Weinberg makes a different, and interesting, criticism:
Where I think Dawkins goes wrong is that, like Henry V after Agincourt, he does not seem to realize the extent to which his side has won. Setting aside the rise of Islam in Europe, the decline of serious Christian belief among Europeans is so widely advertised that Dawkins turns to the United States for most of his examples of unregenerate religious belief. He attributes the greater regard for religion in the US to the fact that Americans have never had an established Church, an idea he may have picked up from Tocqueville. But although most Americans may be sure of the value of religion, as far as I can tell they are not very certain about the truth of what their own religion teaches. According to a recent article in the New York Times, American evangelists are in despair over a poll that showed that only 4 per cent of American teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. The spread of religious toleration provides evidence of the weakening of religious certitude. Most Christian groups have historically taught that there is no salvation without faith in Christ. If you are really sure that anyone without such faith is doomed to an eternity of Hell, then propagating that faith and suppressing disbelief would logically be the most important thing in the world – far more important than any merely secular virtues like religious toleration. Yet religious toleration is rampant in America. No one who publicly expressed disrespect for any particular religion could be elected to a major office.
Even though American atheists might have trouble winning elections, Americans are fairly tolerant of us unbelievers. My many good friends in Texas who are professed Christians do not even try to convert me. This might be taken as evidence that they don’t really mind if I spend eternity in Hell, but I prefer to think (and Baptists and Presbyterians have admitted it to me) that they are not all that certain about Hell and Heaven. I have often heard the remark (once from an American priest) that it is not so important what one believes; the important thing is how we treat each other. Of course, I applaud this sentiment, but imagine trying to explain “not important what one believes” to Luther or Calvin or St Paul. Remarks like this show a massive retreat of Christianity from the ground it once occupied, a retreat that can be attributed to no new revelation, but only to a loss of certitude.
Much of the weakening of religious certitude in the Christian West can be laid at the door of science; even people whose religion might incline them to hostility to the pretensions of science generally understand that they have to rely on science rather than religion to get things done.
(Thanks to Varol Akman for the pointer.)
If you failed to put this under the tree for the kids a few weeks back, perhaps you can get a post-Xmas discount? Story here:
Liberal and progressive Christian groups say a new computer game in which players must either convert or kill non-Christians is the wrong gift to give this holiday season and that Wal-Mart, a major video game retailer, should yank it off its shelves.
The Campaign to Defend the Constitution and the Christian Alliance for Progress, two online political groups, plan to demand today that Wal-Mart dump Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a PC game inspired by a series of Christian novels that are hugely popular, especially with teens.
The series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins is based on their interpretation of the Bible's Book of Revelation and takes place after the Rapture, when Jesus has taken his people to heaven and left nonbelievers behind to face the Antichrist.
Left Behind Games' president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is pacifist because players lose "spirit points" every time they gun down nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by having their character pray.
"You are fighting a defensive battle in the game," Frichner, whose previous company produced Bible software, said of combatting the Antichrist. "You are a sort of a freedom fighter."
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the retailer has no plans to pull Left Behind: Eternal Forces from any of the 200 of Wal-Mart's 3,800 stores that offer the game, including just seven in California...."We have customers who are buying it and really haven't received a lot of complaints about it from our customers at this time."
Clark Stevens, co-director of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, said the game is not peaceful or diplomatic.
"It's an incredibly violent video game," said Stevens. "Sure, there is no blood. (The dead just fade off the screen.) But you are mowing down your enemy with a gun. It pushes a message of religious intolerance. You can either play for the 'good side' by trying to convert nonbelievers to your side or join the Antichrist."
The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville, Fla., Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, added: "So, under the Christmas tree this year for little Johnny is this allegedly Christian video game teaching Johnny to hate and kill?"
Both groups formed in 2005 to protest what their 130,000 or so members feel is the growing political influence and hypocrisy of the religious right.
In Left Behind, set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive."
Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story.
When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game.
"That is so obvious," he said....
It is all "so obvious."
There is a nice profile of the important work Professor Forrest has been doing here.
Interesting story here:
The Quebec ministry of education has told unlicensed Christian evangelical schools that they must teach Darwin's theory of evolution and sex education or close their doors after an Outaouais school board complained the provincial curriculum wasn't being followed.
"Quebec children are legally required to follow the provincial curriculum ... but these evangelical schools teach their own courses on creationism and sexuality that don't follow the Quebec curriculum," said Pierre Daoust, director general of the Commission Scolaire au Coeur-des-Vallees in Thurso, whose complaint sparked the provincewide investigation.
Quebec law requires school boards assure the ministry of education that every child between the ages six of and 16, with the exception of home-schooled children, receives an adequate education, he said.
But the roughly 15 elementary and high school students who attend a school operated by l'Eglise evangelique near Saint-Andre-Avellin are being educated according to a Bible-based curriculum and their diplomas will not be recognized anywhere in Canada.
Supporters of l'Eglise evan-gelique, part of l'Association des eglises evangeliques du Quebec, counter that the school teaches a "world view" that is essential for their students.
"We offer a curriculum based on a Christian world view rather than humanistic world view," said Alan Buchanan, chairman of a committee that reorganized the school's administration this past summer, as well as a former Quebec public school teacher.
Mr. Buchanan said l'Eglise evangelique teaches evolution as well as intelligent design.
"We want the children to understand what they're going to meet in the outside world, and also what's wrong with the theory," he said. "We also teach that a better theory -- that God created the universe and so on."
While the school doesn't teach sex education, it does teach biology, he said.
"You have the Christian world view that says sex should only be in marriage and a public school system that teaches kids about sexuality," Mr. Buchanan said. "We believe students should be taught abstinence...."
Ministry spokeswoman Marie-France Boulay said yesterday the province will negotiate for several weeks with an unspecified number of evangelical schools to determine whether they can meet provincial standards that include the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution....
In case anyone had doubts about how benighted the United States is these days, the Texas Republican Party (the alleged President is a member, and a signatory to the Texas Party's platform by the way) wants to remind us:
Candidate for the Sixth Court of Appeals, Ben Franks, is reported to be a professed atheist and apparently believes the Bible is a “collection of myths.”
During debate over a plank in the State Democrat Platform, members of the Platform Committee debated dropping “God” from a sentence on the first page of the document. The plank stated: “we want a Texas where all people can fulfill their dreams and achieve their God-given potential.”
According to an article published in the El Paso Times, Ben Franks states: “I’m an atheist…”
All elected or appointed officials in Texas must take the oath prescribed by Art. XVI, Section 1(a) of the Texas Constitution:
"I, _____ , do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of _____ of the State of Texas, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State, so help me God."
Should Franks be elected in November, one would have to conclude that he will hold true to his out of touch “atheist” belief system and ignore the laws and Constitution of Texas. Mr. Franks is a personal injury trial lawyer practicing in Texarkana, Texas and is the Democrat nominee for the 6th Court of Appeals.
I have heard many rather stupid things said about atheism, but "out of touch" is a first. All of this, in any case, reminds me of a much earlier debate about the lunatic proposal by Justice Thomas to exempt the states from the Establishment Clause.
The great folks at the National Center for Science Education have the details on the latest victory against the forces of backwardness.
Last week's item on "The Manchurian Clergyman" made me seek out one of my collections of the writings of H.L. Mencken, a man who might well take credit for the modern artform of "merciless rhetorical spankings of fanatics, villains, and ignoramuses." But, I wonder, could Mencken write a column for a newspaper today in America? Doubtful. Consider this item that appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun on December 9, 1929:
The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world....
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly. If you doubt it, then ask any pious fellow of your acquaintance to put what he believes into the form of an affidavit, and see how it reads...."I, John Doe, being duly sworn, do say that I believe that, at death, I shall turn into a verterbrate without substance, having neither weight, extent nor mass, but with all the intellectual powers and bodily sensations of an ordinary mammal;...and that, for the high crime and misdemeanor of having kissed my sister-in-law behind the door, with evil intent, I shall be boiled in molten sulphur for one billion calendar years...."
N0, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense....One may forgive a Communist or a Single Taxer on the ground that there is something the matter with his ductless glands...[b]ut the average theologian is a hearty, red-faced, well-fed fellow with no discernible excuse in pathology. He disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician.
Or what of this from the Baltimore Evening Sun of June 29, 1925, regarding the Scopes trial:
Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge....
Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law....
The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex....But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth -- a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt!
What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera -- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
What is more disqualifying here from today's "polite" society, the contempt for religion or the unabashed illiberal elitism? And did the greater acceptance accorded the latter 75 years ago explain why Mencken was accorded such latitude in dispensing the former in the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines? Interesting questions, I suppose, for someone better versed than I in American cultural and intellectual history.
This is delightfully written (worthy of Mencken)...and scathing; an excerpt:
In the 1920s, explaining the growing phenomenon of religious fundamentalism and how it battened Prohibition upon a suffering nation, H.L. Mencken described Southern Baptism as "a theology degraded almost to the level of voodoo." Eighty years on, we could remark, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," but we would be wrong.
Things have not remained the same, they have deteriorated. For if there is one thing worse than Elmer Gantry, it is Elmer Gantry with a foreign policy. Not content with polluting the fields of evolutionary biology and stem-cell research with Stone Age dogmas, these zealots have now tried their hand at statecraft.
The latest specimen in Barnum's traveling museum of oddities is John Hagee, director of Christians United for Israel. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal, this dervish from the West Texas wastes seemingly lives, breathes, and excretes but one obsession: his love of Israel, above and beyond anything else, including, apparently, the country of which he is nominally a citizen.
We will not provide a comprehensive summary of the article other than to note that he and his followers are particularly active in cheering on the carnage in Lebanon. To that end, he was in the imperial capital of Washington last week to hound Congressmen about their duty of fealty to Israel as if those gunsels of AIPAC needed any instruction. Apparently, the bigger and bloodier the war, the closer the day of Armageddon looms. And the end of the world is what he seeks.
Two revealing details stand out. The first is that the President of the United States actually sent a message of congratulations to Hagee's Washington clambake. Paradoxically, the chief executive stated that Hagee and his acolytes are "spreading the hope of God's love . . ." This statement is somewhat difficult to square with the fact that Hagee, who held one of his previous séances in an Israeli Air Force hangar, seems to positively lust for bloodshed. He is not only a strong supporter of the Iraq fiasco and the leveling of apartment blocks in Beirut, but has also written a book fomenting readers to put political pressure on their government to attack Iran.
This is a new development in the annals of American politics. While the head magistrate is expected to belong to an organized religion and show ceremonial piety when the occasion demands it, it is unprecedented for a president to take such public interest in a fringe cult. It is doubtful whether the genial, (bootleg) whiskey-drinking Warren Gamaliel Harding ever sent a congratulatory telegram to the spirit-rappings of Aimee Semple McPherson. Nor can we picture Silent Cal bestowing his best wishes on a congregation of snake-handlers in the hollows of the Cumberland Ridge. But, as we have observed, these are different times....
To Hagee's motives we may apply a discount. As the Journal article describes, Hagee's IRS filings have been subject to some revision, and he is most assuredly not poor. Which leads to the question: if Armageddon lies at hand, why does he accumulate such earthly dross as mere shekels (to use his preferred unit of currency)? Can the process of Rapture, whereby the saved one is drawn up into the ether, allow him to bring his treasure chest along? Or is he merely a figure squarely in the Gantry tradition, along with his colleagues Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson? The reader will have to draw his own conclusion.
His followers are a more difficult case. They make no material profit from their peculiar obsession; rather, one would wager it is a net expenditure on their financial balance sheets. Why do they do it...?
Eight decades ago, the burghers of Sinclair Lewis's Saulk City became Elks or Rotarians, rather than Wahabbites devoted to a foreign power. We leave it to psychohistorians to divine why these times are different....
So observes John Gardner from Oxford, who sent me a link to this item:
Chris Parker, a final-year English student at Hertford College, Oxford, believes God made the world. Ask him why, and he talks cogently about the gaps in evolutionary theory and how explanations involving intelligent design are unsatisfactory. But, ultimately, it is because: "As a Christian, I have believed in it for a long time and I have no reason to doubt it."
Kim Nicholas, who is studying to be a primary school teacher at the University of Hertfordshire, agrees. "I have grown up in a family that goes to church and I have become a Christian," she says. "When I look at things in the world I think it is amazing that God has created it for us. If you have faith in God you can believe he has done it, whether there is evidence or not."
Annie Nawaz, a second-year law student at Hertfordshire, distinguishes between scientific and "natural" evidence written in stone in the holy books. "As a practising Muslim, the holy Qur'an - that's our proper evidence," she says. It does bother her when this conflicts with other kinds of evidence, but "it just comes down to the way you have been brought up and your beliefs and values and how strong they are".
Such views are less unusual among UK students than you might think. In a survey last month, more than 12% questioned preferred creationism - the idea God created us within the past 10,000 years - to any other explanation of how we got here. Another 19% favoured the theory of intelligent design - that some features of living things are due to a supernatural being such as God. This means more than 30% believe our origins have more to do with God than with Darwin - evolution theory rang true for only 56%.
Opinionpanel Research's survey of more than 1,000 students found a third of those who said they were Muslims and more than a quarter of those who said they were Christians supported creationism. Nearly a third of Christians and 10% of those with no particular religion favoured intelligent design. Women were more likely to choose spiritual explanations: less than half chose evolution, with 14% preferring creationism and 22% intelligent design.
While three years of learning how to weigh evidence appears to make students slightly more inclined towards evolution, with 57% of third-years choosing it compared with 54% of first-years, it does not appear to put them off belief in God. As many third-years as first-years believed in creationism, although slightly fewer supported intelligent design.
The findings come as little surprise to Roger Downie, professor of zoological education at Glasgow University. Two years ago he surveyed the views on evolution of biology and medical students there. "What was extremely worrying for students embarking on evidence- and science-based disciplines was that they were perfectly prepared to say they had rejected it not on the basis of evidence but on the basis of their religious beliefs," he says.
Sad to say, we've seen evidence of this unfortunate trend before.
Little to add to the facts recorded here:
Flip Benham was going to burn a Koran at Mississippi's state Capitol on July 18 but he couldn't get a fire permit. The blaze was to be the culmination of an antiabortion rally that Benham, director of Operation Save America, billed as an "ecclesiastical court." His attack on Islam might seem like a non sequitur, but to Benham, it made perfect sense. "Islam is the same thing as abortion and homosexuality," he said. "It's the black-colored glove covering the same fist, which is the fist of the devil." Benham had T-shirts made up, black with white lettering, proclaiming, "Homosexuality Is Sin! Islam Is a Lie! Abortion Is Murder! Some Issues Are Just Black and White!"
About 100 people gathered for the rally in the vicious heat, many of them, from huge-bellied men to toddlers, wearing Benham's T-shirts. It was three days into Operation Save America's weeklong siege of the Jackson Women's Health Organization, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi....
Benham's "ecclesiastical court," a ritualized indictment of the Supreme Court for breaching God's law, dramatized his contempt for the current legal regime. Before him sat a small grill like the kind football fans use at tailgate parties; he asked the two dozen or so children in attendance to gather around it.
One by one, as Elysian hymns poured from the speakers, Benham produced the texts of objectionable Supreme Court decisions. He started with 1947's Everson v. Board of Education, the case where Justice Hugo Black wrote, "In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between Church and State." He went on to decisions outlawing school-sponsored prayer and Bible reading. As each decision was introduced, a man sounded a shofar. Benham shouted denunciations and asked the kids to rip up the pages and throw them onto the grill. Someone pounded a bass drum....
Benham then produced a rainbow gay flag. As he lamented the way homosexuals "stole the colors of the rainbow," several men in attendance grabbed pieces of it and ripped it to shreds. Then he held up a paperback copy of the Koran and said, "We have one more issue that we must deal with. With this issue we have three choices. We can either kill them, be killed by them, or we can convert them to Christ." Several cheers went up in the crowd, and then, after several more minutes of preaching, Benham began to tear the Koran apart. He offered pieces of the book to the men in the crowd -- hands seemed to reach out from all directions to take them -- and they destroyed the pages further, throwing the scraps onto the grill.
Hard to know what phrase other than "fascist theocracy" describes the aspirations of these disgusting people.
They ain't just in Texas or the South anymore:
GEORGETOWN, Del. — After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.
For years, she and her daughter, Samantha, listened to Christian prayers at public school potlucks, award dinners and parent-teacher group meetings, she said. But at Samantha’s high school graduation in June 2004, a minister’s prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth nudged Mrs. Dobrich to act.
“It was as if no matter how much hard work, no matter how good a person you are, the only way you’ll ever be anything is through Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Dobrich said. “He said those words, and I saw Sam’s head snap and her start looking around, like, ‘Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?’ And all I wanted to do was run up and take her in my arms.”
After the graduation, Mrs. Dobrich asked the Indian River district school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary. As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. [Ed.--notice how complete ignorance of the law fuels the zealotry.] Anger spilled on to talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus.
“What people here are saying is, ‘Stop interfering with our traditions, stop interfering with our faith and leave our country the way we knew it to be,’ ” said Dan Gaffney, a host at WGMD, a talk radio station in Rehoboth, and a supporter of prayer in the school district.
After receiving several threats, Mrs. Dobrich took her son, Alex, to Wilmington in the fall of 2004, planning to stay until the controversy blew over. It never has.
The Dobriches eventually sued the Indian River School District, challenging what they asserted was the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages. They have been joined by “the Does,” a family still in the school district who have remained anonymous because of the response against the Dobriches.
Meanwhile, a Muslim family in another school district here in Sussex County has filed suit, alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters....
The dispute here underscores the rising tensions over religion in public schools.
“We don’t have data on the number of lawsuits, but anecdotally, people think it has never been so active — the degree to which these conflicts erupt in schools and the degree to which they are litigated,” said Tom Hutton, a staff lawyer at the National School Boards Association....
“There are communities largely of one faith, and despite all the court rulings and Supreme Court decisions, they continue to promote one faith,” Mr. Haynes said. “They don’t much care what the minority complains about....”
In interviews with a dozen people here and comments on the radio by a half-dozen others, the overwhelming majority insisted, usually politely, that prayer should stay in the schools.
“We have a way of doing things here, and it’s not going to change to accommodate a very small minority,’’ said Kenneth R. Stevens, 41, a businessman sitting in the Georgetown Diner. “If they feel singled out, they should find another school or excuse themselves from those functions. It’s our way of life.”
The Dobrich and Doe legal complaint portrays a district in which children were given special privileges for being in Bible club, Bibles were distributed in 2003 at an elementary school, Christian prayer was routine at school functions and teachers evangelized.
“Because Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, I will speak out for him,” said the Rev. Jerry Fike of Mount Olivet Brethren Church, who gave the prayer at Samantha’s graduation. “The Bible encourages that.” Mr. Fike continued: “Ultimately, he is the one I have to please. If doing that places me at odds with the law of the land, I still have to follow him.”
Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except “Alex the Jew.”
Mrs. Dobrich’s decision to leave her hometown and seek legal help came after a school board meeting in August 2004 on the issue of prayer. Dr. Hattier had called WGMD to discuss the issue, and Mr. Gaffney and others encouraged people to go the meeting. Hundreds showed up.
A homemaker active in her children’s schools, Mrs. Dobrich said she had asked the board to develop policies that would leave no one feeling excluded because of faith. People booed and rattled signs that read “Jesus Saves,” she recalled. Her son had written a short statement, but he felt so intimidated that his sister read it for him. In his statement, Alex, who was 11 then, said: “I feel bad when kids in my class call me ‘Jew boy.’ I do not want to move away from the house I have lived in forever.”
Later, another speaker turned to Mrs. Dobrich and said, according to several witnesses, “If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell him to give his heart to Jesus.”
Immediately afterward, the Dobriches got threatening phone calls....
Prudently, the Dobriches left town, before the godly could express their Christian love and charity with a stoning.
The actual Taliban have nothing on these scary folks (footnotes omitted):
"I would would execute gays only if we catch them indulging in sodomy," Gary DeMar, popular Christian evangelical minister is quoted in the December, 2005 issue of Mother Jones....
Gary DeMar stated he'd execute gays only if they were caught indulging in sodomy, but others envision sinners in line for the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their parents, and gay men. Thus, DeMar is considered somewhat of a liberal in this extreme authoritarian movement.
Gary DeMar is not a fringe Christian. He is in the same realm with Mainstream Extremist Christian leaders such as Televangelist Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. DeMar is leader of the Restore America Rally, head of American Vision and one of the most prolific publishers of the movement....
I accepted an invitation to go with Dr. Charles Stanley's In Touch Ministry on a cruise to Alaska to help a friend with her five-year old daughter and so I could have a deeper look inside the mentality of these people who seemed to me to have gotten Jesus' message all wrong, yet were claiming to be his most dedicated followers.
I discovered many of these people believe the vast majority of Americans, especially anyone disobeying God's laws, earn God's wrath by their licentious and undisciplined lives. They believe "The government is put in power by God and if you question the government you are questioning God. So don't, in a nutshell." This was their faithful response when questioned about Bush's ethics, "He is a Believer," implying immediate allegiance is expected.I received identical answers from virtually everyone. They were all plugged in and connected to the same belief structure as Dr. Charles Stanley, Rush Limbaugh and others. The media dominance of these fanatical extremist types means they can put out their messages in customized brain washing packages. They utilize all means of modern communication to spread their message. This version of "Pop Christianity" is now sweeping the country with its mind, heart and sex controlling traps....
This group of Christians is aligned with Dominionist ideology. The father of the Christian Reconstructionist/Dominionist movement is Rousas Rushdooney who believed we should "...subdue all things, and all nations to Christ and his law word." Dominionists believe, according to Gary DeMar "The reign of Christ...is meant to subdue every enemy of righteousness." Domininists believe "non-Christians cannot rule themselves and must be excluded from government under God's law."
They also believe, according to the Texas GOP, the only legitimate functions of the State are: 1. Restraining evil, 2. Punishing evil, 3. Protecting the law abiding and 4. Defending the nation. They believe a government controlled and funded welfare system is unbiblical. Scripture makes it clear; God is provider, not the State....
Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant, and Catholic theologies are the roots of the umbrella of Dominionist thinking. Yet it is the far Christian right, with the common thread of the belief of the inclusion of the military state with free market corporate influence, which is the type of Christianity in question. Dominionist theory seeks to utilize "justified" violence, including judicial dominance and state sponsored military might, to enforce the perspective of a literal biblical world order....
As the extremist Muslims recruit their youth...so do the Christians. With the packaging of Christianity into the Pop youth culture of feel good rock concerts, they are selling redemption, during and after life, to the impressionable, sexually developing and questioning, fearful youth of our times. This coalition of emotionally crippled Christians creates "Teen Mania" to redirect the natural sexual development of the youth to a militaristic style movement....
The latest trend these despots are pursuing are Mega youth rally/rock concerts in key cities throughout the United States. The parallels to Hitler's youth movement and the current day Islamic Madrasahs are disquieting....
The event "Battlecry, Acquire the Fire" is in the guise of a rock concert. San Francisco's Battlecry event held at Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC) Park drew twenty five thousand youth for two days. These concerts are being held throughout the country all year long with various different promoters and sponsors. Pop Christian magazines are there to advertise, turning Christianity into pop cultural christolatry and a commodity.
At "Battlecry," I saw the pumping up of extreme nationalism featuring, among others, the Navy Seals, and an Oakland Raider Quarterback, who all gave Christian testimony and talked of how our government is facing Evil Forces just like the youth are in their personal lives. Ron Luce, leader of the "Battlecry" youth movement, claims the phrase "they are building an army for God" is metaphorical. Military rhetoric and paraphernalia, images of automatic weapons abound in the arena, complete with a Hummer on stage displaying a red revolution style flag, Navy Seals, military fatigues and dog tags. I didn't think to ask them if the government was paying them to be there to recruit for them or if they signed out for the hummer.
After each pounding rock band is a hard sell pitch from someone giving "biblical guidance" and testimony. It's a giant glitzy "Let's get you all charged with juicy music, all open and happy, then let's plug you into some brain programming" kind of gig.
The facilitators warn the youth "Christ is the ONLY way toward salvation" from the ills of a degraded society and the certain End Times in the foreseeable future. The "Battlecry" tag line is utilizing scripture to produce the implied meaning of "there is a war for your heart and your soul". The End Times are here and only those proclaiming Christ as their savior will be saved." One musical artist, Hawk Nelson, titled a song "Smile, the end of the world is here"....Featured at "Battlecry" was former Miss Black California, Lakita Garth, to speak on bible based abstinance advocacy. Mrs. Garth instructed the youth to not even kiss before marriage and to stay married until death do ye part. Marriage, of course, only being possible between a man and a woman as that is what is deemed appropriate in "God's instruction book." Divorce is seen as a giant no no.
Mrs. Garth spent a good hour describing the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases, for example: She described advanced untreated herpes in great and gory detail, convincing the youth if they have sex, it is inevitable they will get herpes or another horrific STD. She ostensibly coaches that if they do have sex, they will get an STD, be embarrassed and wish they were dead. Therefore, the "Battlecry" crew proclaims, the youth absolutely must take a vow of abstinence in order to avoid these "plagues".
The dialogue about sexual possibilities is adamantly ignored and shut tight with double-barreled locks. It is a given in this culture to have the attitude "it's not ok to be gay and if you are, only Christ can fix you...."
The April 10, 2006 Los Angeles Times reports: "The religious right aims to overturn a broad range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality and anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open their membership to all."
In Carmichael, California, in April, just three weeks after the Battlecry event in San Francisco, The World Can't Wait organization was contacted by distressed students at the high school to ask for support in combating a rage of Christian homosexual hatred that has surfaced. The Christian students have begun bringing signs denouncing homosexuality as "sinful". At the core of Dominionist philosophy is the biblically based belief that homosexuality is unequivocally wrong....
One is reminded, again and again, of the brilliant memorial issued by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan commemorating the victims of the 9/11 atrocities and the victims of the Taliban in Afghanistan: "Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of all civilized humanity."