City of Humanity vs. City of God

I remember growing up in the evangelical community that it was pretty common for people to assert that they are "a Christian first and an American second." Sure, people sometimes just said it in public as a way to show off the size of their faith, but judging from some polls a lot of Christians genuinely feel that way, and are likely to minimize the faith of a person who doesn't agree. I wonder if Mike Huckabee believes that? I'm pretty sure that, if he did, people would want to know that.

Think that might make a good debate/interview question? Why do you think no one's ever thought to ask him or any other candidate for any office whatsoever?

the connection between violence and stupidity

In the middle of this CNN article about a Muslim who helped the 3 Jews assaulted by a phalanx of Christmas warriors on the subway:

One member of the group allegedly yelled, "Oh, Hanukkah. That's the day that the Jews killed Jesus," she said.

"There are internet rumors that Perry Bacon had an affair with a spider monkey, despite Bacon's denials"

This article by Perry Bacon at The Washington Post is disgusting. The Lede?:

Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him

Hey, anybody want to know what Obama's "Muslim ties" are? Well, he had a stepdad who infrequently practiced Islam and he lived in a majority Muslim country from kindergarten to 4th grade.

That's it.

But despite that, the Washington Post devotes a front page story to telling you that there are... internet rumors that he's actually a radical Muslim waiting to destroy America from the inside. Don't believe me? Here's the third paragraph:

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a "Muslim plant" in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.

That's on the front page of the the Washington Post today.

The evidence that Obama might be Muslim: 2 partisan conservative rags ran hit pieces saying he might be, and some "internet rumors" mentioned on Snopes.com.

The evidence against? Obama's own books in which he discusses his transition from skeptic to Christian in Chicago; his long-time membership in a United Church of Christ church on Chicago's south side and the confirmation of his beliefs by no fewer than 5 of its ministers; the fact that he regularly confesses his Christian faith in public; the fact that said conservative rags are unable to point to any evidence whatsoever that he's Muslim; the fact that the Snopes article mentioned in the Post actually says that the rumors are false (the Post article, by the way, fails to mention that Snopes found the rumors to be false. Ace reporting there, Bacon!); and the fact that we're talking about f*#king chain emails. For God's sake, people, this is the same medium from which we learn that the Qu'ran predicts the American conquest of Iraq in glowing, peaceful terms, where we are shown doctored photos of John Kerry protesting beside Jane Fonda, and tells us that Microsoft is dying to give us a nickel for every person we forward an email to!

Anyone with eyes to see can tell immediately there's no case here, and that all this unsubstantiated rumor has no grounding in reality, in all likelihood having been cooked up by political enemies to sink Obama's campaign. But here's how the Post weighs in on the merits:

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim... Obama aides sharply disputed the initial stories suggesting that he was a Muslim,... After Obama denied the rumor, Jeffrey Kuhner, Insight's editor, said Obama's "concealment and deception was to be the issue, not so much his Muslim heritage,"... Conservative talk-show hosts have occasionally repeated the rumor... The rumors about Obama have been echoed on Internet message boards and chain e-mails... Bryan Keelin of Charleston, S.C., who works with an organization of churches there, posted on an Internet board his suspicion that Obama is a Muslim... A CBS News poll in August showed that a huge number of voters said they did not know Obama's faith..."

This is what gutlessness and laziness look like when enshrined in newspaper ink. Isn't the point of the press to find and disseminate the truth? The unwillingness to make at least some judgment call as to what is trustworthy information and what is not (or even just to sift out the basest rumor and innuendo) leads to the reporter wasting his own (and our) time publishing things that are simply not true. Thus the reporter is actually working against his own office.

Digby put it better than I did:

According to the Washington Post "Republicans say Barack Obama is a Muslim and Obama says he isn't" is a legitimate story. Modern campaign journalism in all it glory.

James Dobson is to Christianity as George W. Bush is to the GOP

This study on generational shifts in perceptions of Christians is fascinating. It confirms suspicions many of us non-brownshirt Christians have had for a while-- namely, that the Christian Right is soiling Christ's good name and turning the masses away from the faith.

Simply put, the bigots are f*%king everything up for the rest of us.

The "duck your head and wait for liberalism to blow over" tactic (I actually had a conservative Catholic theology MA use those words to explain the best strategy for the Church to handle these trying new times), while easier than actually adapting to our constantly deepening understanding of humans and creation, may well go down in history as the most boneheaded idea ever conceived. Even more than trickle-down economics, Napoleon's march on Russia, and no longer stopping the clock on first down, and that's saying something.

"Massachusetts values"

Hysterical. The Log Cabin Republicans figure out how to take Romney down for going whole hog against the gay community. They're running this ad...

...in Iowa.

See, this is why the idea of a Romney campaign seems so absurd to me. I mean, this is all the Dems would do on TV, because let me tell you people, if you think John Kerry was a flip-flopper, this guy will blow you away!

Of course, on the other hand, unlike Rudy, at least the Christian Right hasn't said they'll mount a 3rd party challenge if he wins the nomination.

Baptist minister wins!

Are they trying to 1-up each other or something? This is absurd. From AP (c/o Pam's House Blend):

Tommy Tester, 58, of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly urinating in front of children at a car wash, police said.

Police also said Tester offered to perform oral sex on officers who were sent to the scene.

Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM in Bristol.

And believe it or not, that's not all he was arrested for. From WGAL in Harrisburg, PA:

A report also accuses Tester of offering police officers oral sex and says an open bottle of vodka and empty oxycodone prescription bottle was found in his car when Tester was arrested Friday. [emphasis mine]

Who'da thunk the '80's rash of ministers getting caught with prostitutes would become "the good ol' days," eh?

on witchhunts

I was reading this post on Orcinus (and you don't have Orcinus in your daily reading rounds, you *really* should), and it got me thinking.

There are certain moments in history that we use as "lessons" for the modern day (whether one can actually use history in this way is not something I'm dealing with here). There's WWII and the need to stand up against evil, for instance. The siege of Troy, and the lesson of trusting enemies bearing gifts. There's the Holocaust and the "banality of evil."

One important historical lesson is that of witch-burning, in the Inquisition and in Salem, Massachusetts. There's a lesson there about hurting others in the name of superstition, about letting fear take hold of a society and allowing fear to cloud our reason, and about recognizing the good in others.

I wonder, though: if you actually believe in witches and sorcery and the need to combat them, with deadly force if necessary, what's the lesson of the Salem witchtrials?

the fallacy of the "God gap"

Here, from Mahablog, is a really good discussion of the God gap and its history. I highly recommend it.

There you go again, Cardinal...

From Rawstory:

The Vatican set itself on a collision course with other Christian faiths Tuesday, reaffirming the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church in a corrective document which it said was designed to clear up recent "erroneous" doctrine.

The document's central claim, that only the Catholic Church is "the one true Church of Christ", is likely to revive a debate which has dogged the Vatican's relationship with rival Christian denominations for decades.

Such faiths, namely the Protestant and Orthodox churches, "lack elements considered essential to the Catholic Church," it said.

The document is the second strong reaffirmation of Benedict's traditional conservative line in the space of a few days. On Saturday, he issued a decree bringing back the old Latin mass alongside the modern liturgy.

Yes, Benny, this is exactly the way to save the Church: hold service in a language nobody understands and imply that other Christian denominations are going to Hell. Don't think that's what he's saying?

It restates key sections of a 2000 document the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, “Dominus Iesus,” which set off a firestorm of criticism among Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the “means of salvation.”

Say what you will about John Paul II, he at least thought Protestants and Orthodox were going to Heaven, too.

And what "elements," by the way, are essential to the Catholic Church that other denominations lack?

Central to that identity [of the Catholic faith] is the idea that eastern or Orthodox churches were suffering a "wound" because they do not recognize the primacy of the pope.

It said "the wound is still more profound" in "communities emerging from the Reformation" -- the Protestant and Anglican churches.

Is the pope offering salvation to other Christians only if they bow to himself? Ya see, the Pope has Peter's keys to Heaven, and when he ordains priests, they also have access to the keys, and that's why they can hear confession, absolve sins, perform baptisms and, most importantly, hold Communion. If your preacher wasn't ordained by the man with the Keys, well...

Heckuva job, Benny, this is exactly why the Church is hemorrhaging followers: because the Church's relationship with other churches meant that Catholics were unsure where to go. Perhaps their unseemly proximity to heathens like Anglicans and Methodists was clouding their faith. Or maybe because they just weren't getting enough Latin in their lives. Certainly it couldn't be because the Church looks like a bunch of tools because it preaches against science and birth control and it hoards wealth while its followers starve and its clergy rapes boys and it tells people that God only wants people with penises running God's Church.

Righto, Benny. The problem was your followers were fraternizing with the Lutherans.

somebody thought Falwell wasn't anti-gay enough

Did you know that the protesters at Falwell's funeral whom Mark David Uhl was planning to bomb weren't anti-war protesters or anti-fundamentalists or people who thought Falwell was too hardline, but rather the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Fred Phelps and "God Hates Fags" fame? Falwell's funeral was being crashed by people who thought Jerry Falwell was too friendly to gays!

This, of course, brings up an interesting question-- does this knowledge in any way change or mitigate your opinion of Mark David Uhl? Obviously, it shouldn't, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't at least send flitting across my consciousness the thought that, "Well, it would be nice to be rid of them..." Then I felt a sudden empathy toward the totalitarians in our midst who base their opinion on governmental force on whether they like the victims, and I felt a little sick.

RIP Jerry Falwell

Hopefully someday, when we're not quite at each other's throats as much anymore, someone will be able to make an honest and edifying assessment of Jerry Falwell's impact on this country, which, positive or negative, was certainly significant. Now, however, is a time of high emotion, and despite our opinions on the man (and said impact), should be the time when his family, friends, and followers mourn as they should, and the rest of us show a little class and leave them be. I don't care who the person was, it's cruel to innocent loved ones, as well as utterly tasteless, to say ugly things about a man who just passed on. If you don't have anything nice to say...

Oh, and don't go around dKos, that joint is a real cesspool right now. If there's anything I don't like about communication over the web, it's that it's made our hearts harder. We say things that are much harsher than what we'd actually say to someone in real life and react much more aggressively and pitilessly and vainly, probably because we just see a screen with letters on it instead of an actual person. Combine that with the extreme polarization that causes us to cast political differences as incorrigible moral failures, and you have a very toxic and inhuman atmosphere. Communication can't take place because of the barriers that don't allow us to connect in recognition of each other's goodness and validity as human beings. Whether Falwell himself had any part in the creation and maintenance of such an atmosphere is beside the point right now; the point is that, one day, we are going to have to get past this.

That, mon freres, is the message of Christ, and I suppose talking about Christ's message is the best place to start for that assessment.

disproving evolution with Peter Pan

Brothers and Sisters,
I know we don't all agree on some aspects of the scientific ethos, like evolution and abiogenesis (nota bene: those are not the same thing), but please, for the love of God, stop inflicting this shit on the rest of us. It makes it more difficult for us sane Christians to argue that Christians can, in fact, be sane.

Best,
el ranchero

[P.S.: for the rest of us, a question: was that guy really waiting for ants for spontaneously erupt from the jar?]

God, god, G-d

And one more thing about this religion stuff: often in the netroots you see the the name "god" spelled in all lower cases. When I see this, I get the exact feeling as when I hear W say "the Democrat party." Looks to me that, in both cases, the speaker wants to insult people so badly that they're willing to break with linguistic tradition to do so. The word "Democrat" is a noun; "Democratic" is an adjective. Thus "Democrat party" is grammatically wrong.

Similarly with the former example, however. One of the very few actual ironclad rules in the English language is that proper names are capitalized. Fucking always. If you name your dog "Dog," from that moment forward every time you refer to its name in writing, you capitalize it. Same with deities when the word "god" is used as the being's proper name: "God, my dog Dog worships me as if I were a god."

I don't get it: is not believing in a deity the excuse for this? It would be a pretty shoddy defense, unless you also don't capitalize santa claus or huck finn.

separating the sheep from the goats

Damn you people! I haven't been posting lately, obviously, but I can't stand this religious conversation in the blogosphere anymore, so I'm going to have to add my $.02 (since this is sort of a pet issue of mine).

In case you've missed it so far, Bill Donahue, wack-ass nutjob from the Catholic Alliance, threw a fit over Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon's posts about the Immaculate Conception and got her fired (sorry, "she resigned"). Then Atrios exploded the whole issue with a series of long (for Atrios) posts about the role of religious people in the Democratic party vis-a-vis the netroots, as in "Why do the netroots hate Christians so much?" etc. (see here on "people of faith", then on Romney's Mormonism, then on religious people as "the heart and soul" of the party, then fighting about it with Kleiman, then on Atrios' own perspective on religion generally, then on Mormonism vs. atheism). Then everyone linked to Atrios' points, as is the general practice, then Digby jumped in, then all the Kossack diarists started throwing pies at each other, then Kos jumped in, then Jim freakin' Wallis jumped in, then DLC guys like Ed Kilgore jumped in. Ed, by the way, links only to Atrios' front page, while most others don't link to him at all; really helpful, guys, thanks.

I hate this fight because it pits a lot of people I otherwise deeply respect against each other on a subject heavily fraught with political, emotional, and philosophical baggage. But I do have opinions on this matter and I feel like I have a fair amount of "expertise" on it, being someone who encounters both sides of the debate on a virtually daily basis. Hopefully when this is all said and done, I will have at least helped some of you to untangle not only the conversation itself, but your own beliefs on the matter by tracing my own reactions.

First of all, the Pandagon thing. So here's what Amanda Marcotte, the proprietor of that establishment, said that got Donahue all riled up:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

So, looking at that quote honestly, I want to side with Marcotte, and on the issue of the post (birth control), I think she's right about the Church's ridiculous stance. The Catholic Church's opposition to birth control has certainly, in my opinion, done more harm than good. But I can't; there's just no context in which the quote above isn't offensive. Much as I hate to say it, Donahue was right to be offended (not right to gloss over the substance of her post or right to try to get her fired, mind you).

And I noticed afterwards, reading posts by Atrios and Kos and Digby and Glenn Greenwald and John Aravosis, I realized that, as a practicing Christian, I've never been offended by any of them, even when they talk about religion from the standpoint of being agnostics or atheists or just pissed off at some religious group. And I think, on some level, maybe that's what has differentiated the "big blogs" from everyone else. Yes, Marcotte is a good writer, as are many bloggers, but perhaps too often they offhandedly offend some group and end up alienating lots of potential readers, whereas Atrios' "don't be an asshole needlessly" approach has helped him retain many of the people who visit his site, thus becoming regular readers. It's at least had an effect on the blogs I read; I've been turned off of more than one blogger because they make insulting generalizations about Christians, or religious people, or southerners, or Texans, or meat-eaters (yes, it can get that petty), or even conservatives (I'm not, but I have family and friends who are, so it still offends me). Eyerolling generalizations about people irritates the hell out of me and often demonstrates a huge flaw in one's thinking.

Interestingly, on this issue there was one notable exception: Tristero, who writes on Digby's blog and has offended my religious sensibilities on a number of occasions, totally nailed the issue with people attacking the people or politics they don't like by attacking religion:

To attack the religious beliefs of someone like Donohue is to completely miss your target. That's right, to mock Donohue's religion is tactically useless. Because his christianism, not his Catholicism, is the danger. And it is a very, very grave danger.

Stated another way, the argument is that Donohue's religious beliefs and practices are none of my, or anyone else's business other than those in his church. His political actions most certainly are, and they deserve our full, uninhibited, and completely withering contempt. As for his craven hiding behind the skirts of priests to deflect criticism, Donohue and his fellow christianists, whatever their denomination, deserve widespread denunciation from the larger Christian community.

There's something about religion informing politics that often historians are the only ones to really "get": it's usually the reverse of reality. Donahue uses his Catholicism to shield his anti-semitism and misogyny, and he views Catholicism through the prism of hate, but he doesn't need Catholicism for them. If he lost his faith tomorrow, he'd still be a bigot. Similarly, even as Christianity recedes from the European landscape, racism and anti-semitism persist; hyper-nationalist political parties in France and elsewhere are polling better than ever before. And there are plenty of secular misogynists in American society.

Moving on. I want to talk a little bit about Atrios. First of all, I would strongly suggest that you go back and read his posts that I linked to above. You'll find that Atrios is thoughtful, respectful but not "pc," and fair in his estimation of the role of religion in politics (for what it's worth, I'm of the opinon that he is quite possibly the single most insightful political observer in our entire national discourse; the fact that Atrios and Digby write on free, low-publicity little blogs while Joe Klein and David Brooks have columns in some of the nation's most prestigious news publications and Bill Kristol appears on marquee news shows on a weekly basis signifies more than perhaps anything else how decrepit and dysfunctional our current journalistic system is. Talk about "failing upward!").

Atrios is right on a point with which I've only slowly been reconciling myself, and he's largely the only one saying it:

I tend to try to have a "don't be an asshole needlessly" attitude when it comes to dealing with religious beliefs that no one is trying to impose on me, but there's no requirement for people to share that attitude. Beliefs cloaked in religion shouldn't be granted automatic immunity from scrutiny, and nor should the sometimes powerful institutions run by people, not angels or saints, around which the various religions are organized. While genuine bigotry exists against people of various faiths which is the equivalent to the kind of bigotry which exists against gays or African-Americans (involving unfair symbols or stereotyping rooted in historic oppression, assigning unshared beliefs to an entire group, etc...), mocking or having contempt for actual religious beliefs isn't by any reasonable definition "bigotry." It's simply heated disagreement, and as with disagreements about politics, or sports, or whatever, sometimes people who disagree with each other use mockery and insults in their discourse. Religious people may think that their beliefs about religion are on a different level than these things, but, you know, I don't really agree with that.

And that's the basic issue. We disagree about things. We don't all share a belief in God, or the supernatural, or the spiritual plane, or whatever. Those who believe in these things don't agree on the details. There are a tremendous variety of belief systems in this country and across the world. The tendency to divide people into "faith" and "non-faith" has, as I wrote, obscured these differences, but the fact is that disagreement within "communities of faith" is no different than disagreement between religious and non-religious people. While I think there are those who genuinely believe in a "many paths to God" kind of worldview (and I have no opinion on whether that's theologically sound within the Christian or any other tradition), plenty of people don't actually share that worldview. They believe "other" beliefs are wacky, or stupid, or nuts, or contemptible, or immoral, or likely to lead to eternal damnation, etc.

Having religion is fine and having your religion inform your politics (a la rightwingers, and even progressives like Wallis) is fine. But when you do that you essentially make your religion a political philosophy, which is also fine, but that means it's open to criticism and even ridicule just like any other political philosophy. For religious people to take fringe and dangerous views, as they do on birth control, abortion (remember, many American religious fundamentalists also support terrorism-- in the form of abortion clinic bombers), Israel, or global warming, associate those views with their religion and then take offense that anyone would dare criticize their "religious views" is a pretty dirty political trick that, to everyone else, reeks of moral cowardice and hypocrisy.

For religious people to claim "persecution" based on this tactic is similarly hypocritical. There are entire radio and television stations dedicated to damning agnostics and atheists to Hell, street preachers screaming at them as they go to work and unwind at any of the nation's party districts, and mainstream politicians like Mitt Romney talking openly about how only "people of faith" should be leading this country. Secularists are tacitly banned from the elected office: aside from one Muslim and a handful of Jews, pretty much the entire elected government of every state is composed of Christians. And remind me again how many avowed non-Christians have been president?

This is why I'm bothered with the neologism "people of faith." Besides the Atriotic argument that different religious belief systems are, in fact, quite different, both in means and in the goals themselves, this term is similar in tactic to "pro-life" and "pro-choice": it's designed to bring a particular group together by alienating another group. It's triangulation. In the latter examples, it's understood that the others are "anti-life" or "anti-choice," which in most cases is simply bullshit, while in the former case, it's meant to bring together Catholics and Evangelicals and Jews by isolating agnostics and atheists.

Alienating non-believers is something of which Jim Wallis, whom I otherwise love, is one of the biggest offenders (no pun intended). His constant sneering at "the secular Left" besmirches what are often otherwise valid points (read his post linked above and you'll see what I mean). Yes, it's true that the left and the Democratic party often have trouble dealing with religious people and, in particular, pointing out the religious motivators for liberal or Democratic viewpoints, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's because they hate religion or don't think it's a valid philosophy. In the case of his skirmish with Kos above, it seems like he wants so much to maintain balance by shitting on the "secular Left" and the Christian Right equally that he attributes to Kos an opinion he quite simply doesn't have and didn't exhibit at any point: namely, that religion can't be the prime motivator for a good Democrat's political views. All Kos said was that religion's only one of many possible motivators, and Kos is exactly right.

So now, unfortunately, I have a problem, and you may have picked it out en route to this paragraph. How can I say Donahue was right to be offended by Marcotte, and then agree with people saying that, when you have dangerous/fringe political views, you can't hide behind your religion and call foul when someone turns their guns on it? This is the part where my opinion is still in motion, but to me it turns on Atrios' "don't be an asshole needlessly."

Keep firing, assholes!

Marcotte failed in her jab at the anti-birth control crowd because, in bombing Donahue's car, she sprayed a lot of undeserving people with shrapnel. Cue Tristero and his point that attacking one's religion is sloppy rhetorical targetting. Atrios is still right that it's not morally wrong to attack someone's philosophical/theological underpinning for political views, but you have to be precise about it and aim for the part that really is objectionable and that doesn't alienate vast tracts of the American people that you really don't want alienated. If we're talking about a basic religious tenet shared by the vast majority of the populace, in all likelihood the tactic will prove ineffective and quite possibly counterproductive, as your attacks may well hit lots of bystanders and even allies.