Occam’s Razor

The pope pays a visit

Count me as one of those not lining the streets of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. trying to get a glimpse of the pope. This may have something to do with me not being a Catholic.

Of course, I understand Pope Benedict heads the Roman Catholic Church. To those vested in the faith I am sure his visit is a big deal. Even if I were inclined, it would be devilishly hard to even get a glimpse of the man. Getting a ticket to the mass he held today at the new Washington Nationals Stadium was challenging even for devout local Catholics. Most area Catholics will have to be contented watching him on TV. The good news for Pope Benedict XVI is that he picked a wonderful time to pay a visit to Washington. You could arguable that the weather was heavenly inspired: clear blue skies, abundant sunshine, mild winds with flowering trees everywhere.

Yet I find nothing particularly holy about Pope Benedict or the institution he heads. Like most large institutional religions, Catholicism has had big ups and downs. Unless you measure success in souls saved, it is hard to make the case that Catholicism’s pluses have outweighed its minuses. As much as the Catholic Church would like to pretend otherwise, I see it as an institution of men, not of God. It suffers from being guided by men whose lives are so warped from reality they have lost perspective. As a result, they needlessly lead billions down treacherous spiritual paths. It may be true that God’s agenda is very different from that of mans’. However, it appears to this observer that there is a causal relationship between priestly celibacy and priest abuse scandals here in America. It is easy to applaud Pope Benedict’s 25 minutes spent today with victims of priestly pedophilia. Nonetheless, I would feel the contrition were more genuine if the pope required that all priests were bonded by insurance companies. That way if there are any future victims they at least will not have to wait decades and file lawsuits to be reimbursed for the mental health expenses.

I suspect that for every indigent person helped by Catholic Charities there is another soul who was one of its victims. I count myself among its victims. Thankfully, I was never abused by a priest. However, I was abused and witnessed regular physical and emotional abuse from its sisters during nine years of parochial school. I have spent thousands of dollars on therapy over the years in part trying to come to terms with the abuse I witnessed. Somehow, I doubt the Vatican will be cutting me any checks.

Catholicism is hardly unique for instilling its values in the young, but few religions are so aggressive cementing a faith. You are baptized as a baby before you can babble a word and without your consent. You are typically confirmed when you are just entering adolescence, and sometimes a little before. This typically occurs at your parents’ prodding and long before you have an adult perspective of whether Catholicism is really a lifelong calling. You learn that even you, a sweet and innocent baby, was born with the stain of original sin. You learn that Jesus is forgiving, but except for a few asterisks, you must depend on your parish priest to act as your intercessor. God may be full of grace, but grace is largely earned by jumping through the hoops of its various sacraments. Your head is filled with beliefs that amount to nonsense, such as the consecrated host is the real body of Jesus and that Mary was immaculately conceived.

It is no wonder then that a church full of such cognitive dissonance is capable of soaring to great heights and falling to such great depths, sometimes at the same time. In many ways, the Vatican embodies humanity in all its highs and lows. For relatively benign and holy popes like John Paul II, there are execrable popes, like Pope Gregory XIII. When French Catholics in 1572 killed somewhere between ten and a hundred thousand French Protestants (Huguenots) on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Pope Gregory was giddy in joy. He took it as proof that God was wreaking vengeance on what he saw as the apostasy of Protestantism. In his glee, he ordered a special Thanksgiving where a Te Deum was sung. To this day, the Catholic Church has not fully apologized for inciting this massacre, although some claim that Pope John Paul II’s 1997 statement amounted to an apology.

I realize my own religion, Unitarian Universalism, is figuratively an ant next to the institution called the Catholic Church. It too has suffered its share of sins. One of our interim ministers some years ago scandalized the denomination by faking some references so he could get a permanent ministry. I heard that some UU youth groups decades ago amounted to free love communities. However, our denomination never caused any wars, or tried to exterminate people who did not share their beliefs. On the contrary, the Unitarians experienced oppression by the early Christian church, which would not tolerate the Unitarian belief that there was no trinity. It is unlikely any of our heroes would qualify as Catholic saints, but had she bothered to twiddle a rosary Clara Barton could give Mother Teresa a run for the money. At least our denomination, rather than indoctrinate someone into a faith, is creedless. Our salvation may feel more ephemeral than eternal, but at least we make no claim to understand the mind of God. We realize that beliefs evolve just as people evolve because beliefs are a human manifestation. Consequently, what suits us today may not suit the changing world of tomorrow.

Pope Benedict of course sees truth like Prudential Insurance sees the Rock of Gibraltar. The same ideas that Jesus preached 2000 years ago remain wholly applicable today. The splintering of religion, and indeed the splintering of Christianity into innumerable denominations, is proof that Pope Benedict should take to heart: that no religion, not even Catholicism, can fit all souls.

The Catholic Church will always appeal to those who value constancy. Increasingly though constancy no longer works in a world that seems to reinvent itself with every generation. The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is proof that the square peg of Catholicism no longer fits into the round hole that is modern man. I find it hard to believe there would have been a sex abuse scandal at all had Catholic priests had the privilege of marriage, as they in fact had until about five hundred years ago.

It is a good thing I am not the President of the United States. I would not pander to Pope Benedict the way our president is doing. I would treat him as an honored guest of our country. I would never assert that he is any holier than any of us, only that he is holy to most of the Catholics in our country.

Instead, I might be tempted to preach to the pope. I would preach that the diversity and tolerance, which is built into the fabric of our country is a blessing. I would point out that the diversity of faiths in our country makes us a stronger country and a stronger people. I would celebrate our separation of church and state, one of the most enlightened and brilliant ideas ever practiced by a country, and the secret of our two hundred plus year union. I would show him our version of holy writ, the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. These too are solid moorings on how people can be happy and live in harmony. Our political faith is a pragmatic one that works with our natural weaknesses, rather than against them.

I have no doubt that the Pope would be unmoved. He spent too many years learning that the reason the Catholic Church survives today is because of its constancy. Constancy though is actually the faith’s Achilles heel. Because of the constant pruning by its clerics, the faith has become surreal and moribund. It is like a bonsai, always alive, but constantly pruned and propped up so that it can never grow naturally. In the end, it makes it weird and surreal, giving the illusion of wonder but leaving it nonetheless ultimately spiritually bereft.

April 17th, 2008 at 09:22pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

The Human Blastocyst: My Friend, My Dependent

I am reading Scott Adams’ book Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! Scott of course is the very successful artist behind the Dilbert comic strip. He has also written a number of legitimate non-comic books including some bestsellers like The Dilbert Principle. I bought his latest Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! for my wife as a Christmas present. Thus far, she has merely scanned it. I have been the one actively reading it. One must read something (while also scratching my cat’s belly) during the half an hour between slipping under the bed covers and actually turning off the light.

Thus far the book is a lot like my blog just (and I say this with complete sincerity) not as good. Scott’s book is essentially a collection of musing sent to members of his online fan club. If a book could be like the TV show Seinfeld, this would be it. It has no central theme or subject. It amounts to somewhat structured ramblings that escaped Scott’s brain. I am about a quarter through his book. Occasionally though Scott does have a topic that I find interesting or humorous. That it has no general categorization is actually something of a virtue. If you get bored with the current essay then since for the most part they fit on a page or a page and a half, you know you will soon be onto the next topic.

One ramble of his that I was reading last night titled “Adopting” stimulated today’s post. Scott is thinking of adopting some embryonic stem cells. He does not seem to have the patience to adopt a real child, but he does care about children so why not adopt some fertilized human eggs? He wants to keep them in his refrigerator. If they need to be fed, he figures it should work the same way it works with goldfish: shake something from a little can into their Petri dishes and forget about them for a day.

I had a similar idea years ago. I just forgot to blog about it. Scott’s little tongue in cheek essay though does neatly render absurd the whole argument of when human life begins. I try to have respect for the people who believe that life begins at conception. While I have respect for them as individuals, some part of me wants to call them a word that Scott Adams coined: induhviduals. I keep thinking, were they even awake during those human biology lectures in high school?

I am sorry but if you believe that a fertilized human egg is life (as in alive) you might as well also believe in the tooth fairy. Are those dozen eggs in your refrigerator alive? Granted in most cases they are not fertilized but occasionally a fertilized egg does make it into the food supply and ends up in your refrigerator. (Not to squick you out or anything but when this happens you basically cannot tell so you fry it up anyhow.) In any event, I think we would all agree that a fertilized chicken egg is not alive. If we revered chickens way the Hindus revered cows then perhaps we could keep excess eggs in cold storage until a spare hen was available.

What is clear is that a fertilized chicken egg is inert. Like every other form of life, to move from being a potential chicken into an actual chicken it needs something. Basically, it needs the right kind of energy and some time. When the egg absorbs sufficient warmth, it begins to grow. It is when something is growing that we know it is alive. The eggs in my refrigerator are not alive. Similarly, a human embryo is not alive either. It is inert.

As proof, go to the dictionary. My online dictionary defines life thus: “the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body”. There is nothing vital nor functional about a human embryo. Therefore, quite clearly a human embryo is not alive. Arguably, the sperm is alive until the moment it fertilizes the ovum. Then, like the male praying mantis after mating, it ingloriously dies. It carries with it some tiny amount of energy that is apparently sufficient to create the human zygote. The energy must be enough to cause the zygote to divide a few times until it becomes a blastocyst (human embryo). Once formed though the blastocyst is completely inert. It takes a lot of good luck for the blastocyst to become implanted in the uterine wall. At that point, if it is enriched by the energy in the uterine wall it can continue to multiply and divide. Perhaps at that point you can say technically that the blastocyst is alive. Anyhow, with luck nine months later a baby emerges.

It just so happens that my daughter is now of legal age. I will not be able to claim her as a tax dependent much longer. I have grown used to claiming our costs of supporting her on our income taxes. As our dependent, we get a tax break. Our taxes will go up when she is no longer our dependent.

However, perhaps I should go with Scott’s suggestion and get us a human embryo. I hope that it will remain inert just fine buried in the bottom of our freezer. It seems to me, as many moralists claim, that if this inert blastocyst is truly a human life and I am responsible for its expenses (our freezer probably costs a hundred dollars or more a year to operate) then I am entitled to claim him/her as a dependent. (It is hard to determine gender at this point.) Heck, I want a whole freezer full of human embryos. Perhaps instead of paying taxes, with all those dependents, Uncle Sam would pay me.

To claim them as dependents though, the IRS requires that I get each blastocyst a social security number. On the application, I must give the blastocyst a name. That should be easy enough to do with a baby names book, though to be safe the names should be gender neutral. One problem is that I will not have any actual birth certificate to show the Social Security Administration. This can be solved if the laboratory provides me with dated adoption certificates. The Social Security Administration will accept adoption certificates. I promise I will be a good parent to my blastocysts. Heck, I raised my daughter and she has not gone to jail or gotten pregnant out of wedlock. If necessary, to be a good blastocyst parent I will even ensure my freezer has a redundant power back up.

Since our president believes that as soon as we have a zygote we have a human life, and all human life must be protected, I am sure the IRS (as well as all fundamentalists) will stand with me when I claim my blastocysts as dependents. According to these people, there is nothing more important than protecting human life, unless you mean the time after they are born when we reserve the right to kill people if they do things the state does not like.

Anyhow, this is my plan to show I support the traditional family values this country stands for. And, oh yeah, it will also reduce my taxes. I am so overcome with patriotism at the moment that it is hard to keep from crying.

God Bless America.

January 18th, 2008 at 08:08pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

So what’s the problem with Mitt Romney being a Mormon?

From time to time, I rail about the various forms of discrimination and prejudice that are sadly still rife in our country. For example, I have complained about marriage discrimination, which in most states does not allow committed gay and lesbian couples to enjoy the same privileges as us heterosexuals. I have huffed at the State of Virginia for making adultery a crime. I have groused about nanny-ing legally adult college students, which at least here in the Old Dominion means that at certain public universities women can get antidepressants but not birth control pills from campus health clinics. I have railed about DC Voting Rights, or more specifically the lack of full voting rights in the District of Columbia.

As best I can tell Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and well-moneyed presidential candidate, is not a victim of religious discrimination. However, he is a victim of plain old fashioned and really quite mean spirited religious prejudice. Oh Lordy, Mitt happens to be a Mormon.

The horrors! Because he is a Mormon, Mitt must be one step away from having a second wife. Lord knows with all his millions that he is spending on his own presidential campaign that he could afford another one. In much of the South, despite his love of family and his generally conservative credentials the fundamentalist Christians are busy stuffing their ears when he comes to town. It is not just in the South where Mitt is getting something of a cold shoulder, but he probably receives more of it there than in other parts of the country. Many of us still respond to Mormons the same way we do to telephone solicitors.

Mitt is not trying to convert anyone to Mormonism, at least not as part of his run for the presidency. In fact, he is doing his best not to call attention to his Mormonism. He wants to be President of the United States, not head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Since reputedly Mitt is something of a born salesman, perhaps if he loses his White House bid he will start working his way up the Mormon church hierarchy instead. Right now he just wants to be treated (and here is a radical idea) just like anyone else running for this high office.

For many of us this will not do. Perhaps if Mitt were to stop believing in those special words allegedly transcribed by Joseph Smith these voters could embrace him. He could embrace the Southern Baptist Church instead. Or the Methodists. He could even convert to Roman Catholicism, since being a Catholic is no longer a bar to the presidency. Given that Mitt has a history of changing his political stripes to suit the times, why not require him to change his religious stripes in order to get our vote?

It does not look like that will happen. Mitt is a Mormon and is likely to always remain a Mormon. For him to give up Mormonism he also has to estrange himself from much of his family and his social circle. Mormonism is a faith, but like most of us born into a religion, it is also a way of life and a way of seeing the world. Maybe John McCain can be a bit disingenuous, calling himself a Methodist for years until he runs for the presidency. (Now he says he is a Baptist.) With few exceptions, it appears that once you have swallowed the Mormon Kool-Aid, you are a Mormon for life. I empathize. I swallowed the Roman Catholic Kool-Aid because I was born into a family of Catholics. I left the church shortly after turning adult. Nevertheless, Catholicism is still inside of me. Its perspective still colors much of my world. I will no more wholly excise Catholicism than Mitt would successfully excise his Mormonism.

So why are all these Christians upset with Mitt being a Mormon? Most of them are devout Christians, and Mitt would count himself as one of them. Just like his Southern Baptist friends, he wants to bring as many people to Jesus Christ as possible. He clearly loves his wife. He has raised a very healthy and happy family. He is very successful both politically and financially. However, many Christians just cannot see any Mormon as Christian. Why? Apparently, they think the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, was either delusional or a fraud. They do not believe he found those divinely placed silver tablets in upstate New York. They do not believe he was a messenger from God. They especially do not believe that the Book of Mormon is some sort of newest testament. Of course, the whole polygamy thing really upsets them, even though Mormons abandoned it long ago. Had society been more accommodating toward their lifestyle they would not have moved en masse to Utah. They were the 19th century’s version of Pilgrims, spurned by their own neighbors and forced to move far, far away to practice their faith.

So is it the silver tablet thing that gets traditional Christianity up in arms? Or is it the polygamy? Or is it both? My question is, “Why should it matter anyhow?” Have these Christians excised that portion of the Bible where Jesus speaks so lovingly about universal brotherhood? Jesus did not scorn the lepers, or the prostitutes or the Samaritans. He broke bread with them and spoke to them as equals. As for those silver tablets, is there any less evidence for them than the many miracles attributed to Jesus? Did Jesus really ascend into heaven? Did he really bring back the dead? Did he really feed thousands with a few loaves of bread and some fish? According to the Bible, he did all these things along with the impressive feat of raising himself from the dead. It is in the Bible, but the Romans and others in that time and place apparently never bothered to write these remarkable feats down. My guess is that most Christians believe in Jesus’ miracles because they were taught to believe them. The same is true with Mitt. The evidence that Joseph Smith encountered those silver tablets with the Book of Mormon on them is no more ludicrous than Jesus feeding thousands with a few loaves and fishes.

The tenets of most faiths by definition are unprovable. That’s why they call it faith. Christians or anyone who are leery of Mitt Romney based on his religion need to look in the mirror. The only thing that may make your faith more “reasonable” than someone else’s is that more people agree with your faith. That proves nothing. Except for a few dissenters like me, back in March 2003 most Americans were convinced Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and our national security was in peril. They were wrong. Being part of a consensus does not mean you are right. It just means you have many people who agree with you.

Now it just so happens that I have my issues with Mormons too, particularly in the way they treat their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. However, I refuse to say their faith is anymore unreasonable or unworthy than anyone else’s faith, including my own Unitarian Universalism. The reality is that while many of us believe in our souls in the rightness and correctness of our faith, our faiths are not provable.

Our founding fathers refused to establish any religious test in order for someone to hold office. A new president is not required to take the presidential oath on a Bible, or even to add, “So help me God” to the oath (which in fact is not even in the oath of office). He or she does not even have to swear to uphold the oath, just to affirm it. Our founding fathers were smart. They knew that a person’s religious faith or lack thereof had no relationship to their ability to serve in a public office. Instead, we were invited to judge someone based on their history, their character and their views.

For my part, I will try to vote in the spirit of our founding fathers. While I may not like Mormonism in particular, I also know that it is no more unreasonable than any other religion out there. Like most faiths, it has many admirable qualities. If I discriminate against someone solely based on his or her religion, I am doing myself and my country a disservice. We have huge problems to deal with in this country. We need to most competent people possible in public office. Ruling out someone based solely on their religion (or lack thereof) simply adds to the considerable odds that we will not get the person we need for our next president.

Cut Mitt some slack.

October 10th, 2007 at 08:05pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | 4 comments

The End of the Angry God

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God“, 1741

Homosexuality is Satan’s diabolical attack upon the family that will not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America.

Jerry Falwell (1933-2007)

On Monday, the Reverend Jerry Falwell passed away and entered the great hereafter or nothingness, depending on your beliefs. It appears that he died at age 73 of congestive heart failure. What I really suspect he died of (based on recent pictures) was obesity. Presumably, he did not view gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins. However, it might have had the effect of helping him commune with his Lord a bit earlier than he expected.

Falwell, of course was the famous televangelist and creator of the so-called Moral Majority. He went on to help found the Christian Coalition, which yielded surprising political clout over the last quarter century. The Christian Coalition was instrumental in turning the GOP from the Goldwater Republican set into the God-fearing all pomposity all the time set. Perhaps the last great triumph of this group was the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Arguably, Bush would not have won Ohio (and the election) without their help.

As a progressive, I find that it is hard for me to shed tears over Falwell’s passing. When I envision the words sanctimonious and chutzpah, Falwell’s image will indelibly come to mind. Falwell was the epitome of both: utterly certain about everything, and not afraid to use his mighty pulpit and TV ministry to tell us about it. He wielded disproportionate influence from Liberty University (which he founded) there among the rolling hills of Lynchburg, Virginia. His choice of residency is perhaps a bit ironic given that in one of his more flamboyant quotes he actually said:

I had a student ask me, “Could the savior you believe in save Osama bin Laden?” Of course, we know the blood of Jesus Christ can save him, and then he must be executed.

I have little doubt that given the opportunity Falwell would have been glad to lead the lynching of Osama bin Laden. I am sure he would have a Bible in one hand as he kicked the chair out from under him.

Falwell’s God is choosy and apparently has an inner circle, of which he confidently claimed membership. He told us that God must love homosexuals in spite of their perversions, but apparently, not very much, because they ignored 3000-year-old advice in the Book of Leviticus that Jesus repudiated. So in the unlikely event we feminists, secular humanists and homosexuals do make it into heaven, we will be firmly escorted to the cheap seats way in the back. This is just as well because even in heaven, they have their standards. Any flagrant sinners who through God’s grace somehow manage to escape Hell do not get to mingle with the premier elect, you know, people like Jerry.

In general, Falwell had nothing but thinly disguised contempt for gays, feminists, secular humanists and pretty much anyone who did not think exactly like him. That was because his God was actually a jealous and angry God. Hey, it takes a mean God wielding a big stick to get us sinners into line. Nonetheless, you would think that after repeatedly putting his foot in his mouth with his outrageous comments that he might have modified his behavior. But no, not his type, not when you are consumed by righteousness. He went through life with religious blinders on. His path to God was straight and he walked it with complete ease and confidence. All we had to do to get there too was to act just like him: a weird, loud but generally kindhearted and sanctimonious bigot. God and the Bible gave him certainty that eluded the rest of us fallible mortals.

Now Jerry is gone. I would like to think that maybe no one will rush to fill his shoes, but as we all know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Ted Haggard of course got his comeuppance last year, so he is not available to until he is sufficiently forgiven by his fellow elect. In time, doubtless sooner rather than later someone will take that first audacious step forward. However, it is unlikely he or she will be able to command as much attention from the media. Falwell innately understood that evangelists who do not want to be footnoted by history must put on a wild show, and he rarely failed to deliver. Most of us are more circumspect.

In the 21st century, Falwell’s oratory, for all its pomposity, huffiness and vitriol, now looks both pathetic and comic. Those damned secular humanist forces, which I guess includes me, seem to have gained the upper hand. Apparently, I am a servant of Satan or something. Damned people like Jon Stewart can now dismiss people like him with a single smirk. Yet in fact, Falwell was just the latest and most prominent pompous leader whose time has passed.

There will doubtless again come a time when we will be vulnerable to those who propose simple solutions to complex problems. For now, the public is still reeling from the effects of having its hand pressed on the hot stove by people like Falwell. In truth, modern demons like Osama bin Laden are manifestations of the sanctimonious black and white thinkers like Jerry Falwell, rather than the result of societal debauchery, homosexuality and rampant secular humanism. In fact, many of those “sins” are the wreckage from people like Falwell trying to make us square peg Americans fit into the round holes of their conformity.

Now we know that if we are to slay these demons of stupidity (as Dogbert would put it), we need to use more intelligent tactics. The straightforward path apparently goes right into a brick wall. A more circuitous but rational path seems to be in order. That means application of reason, science and rational tolerance, you know Jerry, that secular humanist forebrain stuff instead of that primordial limbic brain stuff. Rational leadership eschews launching impossible crusades and worrying later about whether it was a good thing to do. The Crusades, by the way, never succeeded in removing the alleged apostasy of Islam or in permanently liberating the Holy Land. As a tactic, crusades suck.

So perhaps Falwell has left something of a positive legacy after all. By being such a pompous and egregious example of what not to do and by exercising such disproportionate political influence he may have moved America more quickly toward its progressive, more tolerant, more diverse and secular humanist future. I will note that since Western Europe has gone secular, it has not experienced a single war. Maybe some of that secular stuff will rub off on us when we come back bloody and defeated from our latest crusade in Iraq.

If that turns out to be the case, then thanks Jerry.

May 17th, 2007 at 02:38pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Speaking of faith

Well, it has taken a few centuries but it looks like there is a small, tiny hairline fracture in the religious space-time continuum. When atheists and devout Christians can sit down together and learn from each other without dismissing or proselytizing to one another, this is news. Yet somehow, this momentous event was largely overlooked. Yet it is actually happening, albeit in a relatively small way.

Mehta, now an honors graduate in mathematics and biology, has not converted, but the two have become friends. Mehta has started his own blog (friendlyatheist.com) and travels to speak to churches and humanist organizations. He has written a book - “I Sold My Soul on eBay” - that explains why he is an atheist and gives churches advice on what it would take to reach nonbelievers.

This is not to suggest that interfaith dialogs never occur. They do. Even the Pope occasionally catches the ecumenical wave and is seen openly praying with Muslims, Jews and assorted Protestants. The problem with most of these dialogs is that no real understanding occurs. These dialogs serve some other purposes but mutual learning is not one of them.

Nevertheless, when atheists and devout Christians can actually hear what the other is saying and take some actions based on their learning, I begin to feel that there is hope for humanity. It makes me wonder if seemingly intractable problems like global warming can be solved too. In the case of Jim Henderson, a former evangelical pastor, he is learning from atheists what I suggested back in 2004: Christian marketing practices suck. They suck because they are based on the model of the ignorant savage. There are not many of us still running around the bushes. Evangelicals hoping to draw in new adherents had better understand where the modern unchurched are coming from.

As for the “friendly atheist” Hemant Mehta, he is getting an eye opening in contemporary Christianity. If he was inclined to believe that Christians are starry-eyed myopic zealots, his understanding is now clarified through actual experiences. It seems that Christians are not necessarily always studying their Bible on break, or spending their weekends knocking on doors bringing the good news to the unenlightened. It seems that Christianity does not necessarily wholly define the lives of all Christians. Who would have thunk?

If you ask me, both the religious and the non-religious should spend much more time listening to each other. Talking at each other is easy. Listening is hard. When you listen, you have to acknowledge the point of view that you are hearing. When you listen, some part of your mind must see the world through the eyes of the person you are hearing. When you listen, it is hard not to develop empathy with the person talking. The person you are tuned into is no longer objectified as the heathen or the unenlightened. Instead, they become a human being. They become personable and real.

Many issues needlessly divide us from one another, and one of our most polarizing differences is religion. I count here atheism as a religion too. I am sure many atheists will want to harass me on the point, but there are many similarities between the religious and the atheists. Christians and atheists have this in common: certainty. Christians are certain that Jesus is our Savior. Atheists are certain he is not and God is a fiction. Both are dogmatic. Only now, maybe they are a little less so than they used to be.

Here is one of life’s lessons that I fortunately learned quite early after I pulled away from Catholicism: what religion you do or do not practice doesn’t really matter. Religion is the window dressing. Values are the window itself. I am guessing that you think that Christians and atheists do not have many values in common. Guess again. Both likely have a reverence for life. Both likely believe in love, fidelity and family. Both share a passion for the truth and only differ in how the truth should be interpreted. Of course, they also have other values that are not in common. That is okay because we are all unique. We all arrived where we are at via different paths. Consequently, we are not all going to believe the same things. So of course, we are not always going to share the same exact perspectives. We are each like a unique mold of gelatin, but we are all made of same gelatin. Our mold just happens to be our path through life. We are different but simultaneously we are also the same. This is natural for us. This is the way it was meant to be!

We need to never forget this. Truly, far more commonalities tie us together than pulls us apart. Your religion, your lack of it or your complete indifference to it should not matter any more than your eye color. The world would be a less interesting place if we all had brown eyes. The same is true with our many faiths and spiritual practices. Why not embrace our differences, instead of feeling affront if your beliefs are different from mine? If we were all the same then this world would be deathly dull. You can see how exciting the world was when much of it lived under communism. Was it better when everyone lived in the same kind of drab block apartments? How much more interesting life becomes when we celebrate, respect and realize we draw collective strength because of our differences.

My inner theist almost thinks this meeting of minds between religious and irreligious must be divinely inspired. How wholesome it is. How intuitively right it is. Now what is needed is much more of the same. Let us bring many more of the churched and unchurched together. Let us get them talking in measured and respectful ways. We have nothing to fear from open and respectful dialog and everything to gain. We are simply who we are. Yet almost all of us want to be listened to with respect. When we are not heard in a respectful way that is meaningful to us, the extreme cases can end up wreaking their vengeance in horrifying ways.

Look, I know it is not easy to listen. It is as hard for me as it is for you. Nonetheless, we need to make active listening a conscious and regular habit, particularly with people we are most prone to disagree with. Let us listen to each other with a kind and open heart. Let us find common connections with each other. There may or may not be a heaven in the hereafter. However, we can all agree that there is plenty to do in the here and now to make our world much better, kinder and gentler place.

Genuine dialog is the means to achieve this end. So step one is simply this: to listen.

May 14th, 2007 at 10:07pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | no comments

Anthropomorphosizing Jesus

If clocking more page views were my sole goal in blogging, I would spend this evening writing another entry about pornography. However, I simply cannot find anything else to say on the subject. Perhaps I should try harder. Despite being published more than two years ago, my entry Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint often brings in a dozen or more Googlers every day.

Writing about sleazy sex is another way to push up my page views. While I will not give away too much about my personal life, I can say that I do not have a whole lot of experience in the sleazy sex department. This is probably a good thing. It markedly improves the odds that I will survive to be an old man. That is not to say that I would not necessarily want to imbibe in some good sleazy (but harmless) sex now and then. In real life though, imagination typically has to suffice. Therefore, I have pontificated as if I really know something about it the world of sleazy sex. Such was the case last January when after spending a few hours browsing through the Craigslist Washington D.C. Casual Encounters site, this entry popped out of my brain. This one entry alone now often overtakes Sharon Mitchell as the biggest reason strangers will connect with my blog.

Another way to bring in readers is to write controversial entries about religion. For many, religion is such a focus of our lives that writing anything that contradicts or even gently lampoons our personal beliefs is likely to draw notice and maybe even some ire. So perhaps tonight, while I poke a little fun at Jesus, my page views will go up. The devil made me do it.

This entry was inspired by my annual visit to the Jesus of the Week web site. For many devoted Christians, Jesus is sacrosanct. To them, he is certainly not a subject of parody. In a way, I agree. Jesus, or at least as he is portrayed in his buffed up form in the Bible, does deserve respect, if not downright admiration. While I have a few problems with Jesus’ portrayal in the Bible (for example, it is inconsistent of Jesus to say, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged” and elsewhere call the Pharisees hypocrites), mainly he comes across as a wise and learned teacher. However, I am often fascinated by how we anthropomorphosize Jesus.

If you are feeling a bit irreverent toward Jesus, or just assume that Jesus is big enough to have a sense of humor, then the Jesus of the Week web site is for you. The site owner pokes gentle fun at the many otherwise excellent (and not so excellent) artistic Christians out there who get perhaps a wee bit carried away imagining Jesus. This is hardly a new phenomenon. As I mentioned when my family and I toured the Louvre last summer, the paintings of Jesus typically portrayed him as a flaxen haired Anglophile. You would be hard pressed to find any visual depiction of Jesus in most mainstream churches in this country as anything other than a longhaired Caucasian. This is probably a good thing. Since Jews were Semites and Semites are hardly a flaxen haired, fair-skinned race, it would be hard to get Junior to identify with a man with dark skin and long, kinky hair. Who knows? Maybe Jesus wore dreadlocks. African Christians of course typically portray Jesus as a black man, which was likely much closer to the truth. Christians in the Far East see him as Oriental. Since no one knows what he looked like, your guess is as good as mine is. However, the odds are he looked more like Yassir Arafat than Sting.

At Jesus of the Week we web surfers get to psychoanalyze the devoutly Christian artist. The results are frequently hilarious. Admittedly, the site owner may skew results to match his audience, which likely consists of mostly disgruntled former Christians, i.e. the damned like me. These artists keep creating depictions of Jesus that, like an excellent bad movie, are hilarious to the dispassionate observer, but which appear devoutly inspired to the believer. Along with each depiction of Jesus comes a short tongue in cheek essay on the picture of the week, yet written in such a way as it is almost never denigrating.

Other web sites out there are less subtle at poking fun of modern Christianity. Perhaps the best known of them is the Landover Baptist Church site and their related sister sites like Betty Bowers and their White House parody site. Arguably, Landover Baptist is such an over the top and rude parody of the bizarre right wing of Christianity, that regular readers may develop something like sympathy toward the Jerry Falwells of the world. That these folks have kept it up for so many years attests to something: probably that they got way more weird religion shoved down their throats during their formative years than they could possibly process and are determined to spend their adult lives getting even.

I have made my own attempt to understand the historic Jesus. It may be that I am as guilty of anthropomorphosizing Jesus as everyone else is. For most of us, whether we choose to or not, we simply must frame Jesus in a modern context. We do this because we live in the present, not two millennium in the past. Only academics like those involved in The Jesus Seminar can come close to fully grasping the historic Jesus and the times in which he lived. Lacking their scholarship and patience, the rest of us are left with the New Testament, which we know has been translated and retranslated and likely does not portray very well its original intent. Most of the original texts have long ago returned to dust. We also know that early Christians ruthlessly suppressed the Gnostic gospels. It is not surprising then our minds fill in the gap between the gospels and the present.

Consequently, the Jesus that emerges depends very much on our personal imagination of him. In many ways, although these depictions of Jesus on Jesus of the Week are often hilarious, they are also comforting. For myself, I find that I want Jesus to be the friendly father type so lovingly depicted by his contemporary followers. I like my image of Jesus as a man surrounded by children whom he gathers in his big arms, or Jesus walking through a meadow full of flowers carrying a lamb under the crock of one arm. I like Jesus as a hunk rather than Jesus as a balding, nearsighted man with dirty feet, a tattered robe and with dirty, unwashed hair. If Jesus were alive today, he would smell so bad you would not want to get within a dozen feet of him. So by all means, give us an idealized image of Jesus. I will smile, I may laugh, and I may even smirk. Occasionally, I may feel touched. At least these Jesuses are typically idealized as loving and harmless.

These depictions of Jesus likely say more about us than of Jesus. It suggests we are still naïve and sappy creatures. These are not necessarily bad traits for us human ancestors some two thousand years later. It means we have a blind side to us, but at least it is a softer and less cynical side.

October 2nd, 2006 at 09:48pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

Some words on faith

I receive a comment today from John O’Brien. It is attached to an old entry Unsaved that I made back in 2003. His questions deserve a fuller answer. I will not answer all his questions here, because I have put my thoughts in other blog entries where I touched on religion and faith. Readers are welcome to check out these entries:

• Contemplating Purgatory (1/5/2003)
• Sincerely Unitarian (3/24/2003)
• The Lure of Mommy Church (10/30/2003)
• The Mystery of the Gospels Revealed at Last! (3/1/2004)
• Why do proselytizers think I am a moron? (9/1/2004)
• The root of human conflict: Emotion vs. Reason (10/24/2004)
• What spirituality means to me (11/16/2004)
• Religion a la carte (2/27/2005)
• Just another Secular Sunday (4/2/2006)

I would like to preface my remarks by saying that I do not claim to have all “the answers to life’s persistent questions”, as the radio detective Guy Noir puts it. I simply have my thoughts, informed by my unique experience and through learning. I respect everyone’s religious beliefs or lack thereof. In some cases, I may profoundly disagree with your beliefs themselves, but I do respect your right to believe in anything you wish.

Conversations on matters of faith are always iffy. Often there is a subtext to such discussions. It is, “I want to keep discussing things with you until you come around to my point of view”. This more often translates into “I want you to become a Christian/Muslim/Jew/Atheist/Moonie/Mormon just like me.” There are many people out there who want to save my soul. While I respect your wish to save my soul, I do not want you to save my soul. I do not open my door to proselytizers. I avoid public discussions of faith altogether. One thing I have learned painfully about the devoutly religious (and it probably applies to me as well): if you have your mind made up about the correctness of your faith, argument cannot change it. Only those without a faith can have an honest discussion on the merits of faith. Otherwise, you come into the discussion with a profound bias.

John wonders if there are parts of the Bible that I consider trustworthy. Yes, there are parts of the Bible: matters of historical record that have been proven as a result of archeology. I am very skeptical about certain alleged events like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but others like the Sermon on the Mount seem quite plausible, although I suspect Jesus was paraphrased. I doubt someone was standing in the crowd taking notes.

His question on what authority can be accepted in one’s life implies an absolute and external standard of reference. Clearly if you believe in God, it is easy to posit an absolute standard of reference. Clearly, the Bible is one of many out there. For myself, I do not place faith in any absolute authority, which is why I am logically agnostic. Bertrand Russell has an answer that works fairly well for me:

I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cozy homelike comfort of a fenced dogmatic creed? To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind.

John asks if I believe there an acceptable authority, either internal or external. I think we must each answer that question ourselves. As creatures of free will, we can choose to submit to someone else’s will, or we can choose to think for ourselves. I choose the latter, but I have no problem with those who prefer the former. They seem to make up the overwhelming majority.

Is there any absolute standard of life to which I can relate? I am not very sure what John means here. For myself, I notice that our universe is ordered relatively, not absolutely. Einstein’s Theories of Relativity, for example suggest that everything made of mass or energy influences everything else. As you watch a train go by and you hear the pitch of the train’s whistle change as it passes, does the pitch actually change? It depends on the perspective of who is doing the listening. To the train’s engineer the pitch does not change. To someone watching it pass, it does change. Both are true at the same time. Einstein’s general and specific theories expand this idea to all the energy and matter in the universe. If I have a small article of faith, it is that I do not think I am really separate from anything else. I think our separateness is an illusion and we are both united and separate at the same time. For me, this renders the idea of absolutism absurd. I think the universe is an organism and we are part of it. For some this suggests that each of us is part of the mind of God. For more thoughts on this, check out my entry Our Wild, Wild Universe.

I hope this answers John’s questions though. I suspect though that it will more likely leave him confused.

June 24th, 2006 at 09:48pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | 2 comments

Review: The Da Vinci Code

Full disclosure: I have not read Dan Brown’s now ultra-famous book The Da Vinci Code. My daughter has read it and greatly enjoyed it. My wife got a few chapters into it before putting it down. She felt the quality of the writing was too poor for her to endure any further. Between the endless publicity, the hype about the movie, and the recent plagiarism case in Great Britain against Dan Brown, reading the book seemed superfluous. Anyone in a first world country who does not know the book’s central thesis is likely living a cloistered life. In that sense, seeing the movie is probably anticlimactic.

However, my 16-year-old daughter saw the movie when it first came out. She said it was a good movie, and volunteered to see it again with me. So partly to have an opportunity to get away with my daughter, we saw the movie together yesterday.

I assume you know the basic key points in the book, so consequently there is little to spoil. However, if you were recently released from cloisters then read no further because I will spill some of its main plot points and dubious assertions.

The Washington Post says the movie may be the first movie that takes longer to watch than to read the book on which it is based. At times, it certainly felt this way. Since my daughter read the book and liked the movie, I strongly suspect your appreciation for the movie will depend on how vested you felt reading the book. As for the rest of us, you may find that the movie to be an over-hyped disappointment.

I do not think that the movie of The Da Vinci Code is bad. Another movie I have seen lately truly qualifies as a bad movie. Instead, it is a mediocre movie. It is a movie that with a different director and cast maybe could have pulled off a satisfying movie. Tom Hanks is an excellent actor. However, that does not mean he is right for every role, even when a movie is formulated to be a blockbuster. He struck me as out of his element as Robert Langdon, an apparently real expert in symbology at Harvard University. In The Da Vinci Code, Hanks seems unable to find a way to express the character, so he wings it and in the process badly misses the mark. Perhaps this is because his character is never well defined by either Brown or Ron Howard, the director. In the movie, Langdon is simply a catalyst to move the movie forward. Hanks though really looks like he wishes he were doing some other movie. Maybe he knew this movie was a waste of his talents, but he could not turn down the millions of dollars he was offered.

However, Hanks is positively brilliant compared with Audrey Tautou. She plays Sophie Nevue, a.k.a the latest direct (and for a while, believed to be the last) living descendent of Jesus Christ. I have to assume she too was stunningly miscast, since this is the same woman who delighted millions with her performance as Amelie in the French made subtitled movie of the same name. Granted in Amelie her role was more of a comedic one. Perhaps she is more suited to comedic roles. Here she comes across as mostly one-dimensional and she is about as interesting as a flat soda. For someone who should be very excited by all the discoveries being unearthed, she seems largely dispassionate.

The movie is supposed to be suspenseful but largely failed to engage me. A few scenes may frighten you a bit. Most of the twists and turns are not hard to anticipate, even if you have only a passing familiarity with the key revelations (as I had). Ian McKellan, as Sir Leigh Teabing, helps to enliven the tedium. Like Robin Williams in the otherwise dreadful movie Cadillac Man, McKellan can help make an otherwise mediocre movie endurable. Paul Bettany is also suitably creepy as the brainwashed masochistic Opus Dei cult henchman Silas. (It was hard to believe this is the same man who played Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He certainly is a versatile actor!)

The book is apparently filled with short chapters. Each chapter end with a cliffhanger. This makes it difficult not to turn the page. The movie tries to emulate this aspect of the book. It certainly does move along at a brisk pace. Unfortunately, in spite of this the movie largely failed to engage me. It is not that I do not find conspiracy theories interesting. I think it is certainly plausible that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. She could well have been pregnant at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Most Protestants take it as given that when the Bible speaks of James as Jesus’ brother, he was his biological brother, not a fraternal one. Naturally, the Catholics would find the notion of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife the most offensive. Since for all but the last 500 years or so they controlled the Christian church, it is plausible that they would want to hide or minimize Jesus’ affection for Mary, since it would go against doctrine.

No, the whole notion of Opus Dei and a plot to keep “the truth” about Jesus obscured for 2000 years is where The Da Vinci Code breaks down for me. It fails my Occam’s Razor test because it is just too far out in left field. Heck, even Jesus’ divinity is more plausible than this preposterous tale of the search for the Holy Grail. At least Monty Python’s movie was funny. This one tries to make you believe the ludicrous. Perhaps as a result the longer the movie went on (and it never seemed to end) and the stranger the plot twists became, the more I started yawning and the less I cared about the conclusion.

If director Ron Howard had at least taken the time to throw in a little romantic tension, perhaps the movie would have been more enjoyable. Yet Hanks and Tautou are not given any opportunities to develop chemistry. Their mutual interests are wholly academic. The closest they come to any sign of affection is a chaste kiss Hanks gives Tautou on her forehead at the very end of the movie. When it finally ends after 149 minutes, I felt mostly relief.

The result is a B movie masquerading as an A movie. It gets 2.7 on my 4.0 scale.

(If anyone wants my take, not necessarily on the movie’s central thesis, but on the meaning of Jesus’ life, read this entry.)

May 28th, 2006 at 09:09pm Posted by Mark | The Arts | no comments

Just another secular Sunday

I have lost that Easter feeling.

When you grow up Christian, Easter is one of the two high holy days of the year, the other one being Christmas, of course. Our culture makes it impossible to escape Christmas. Ironically, I have forgotten all about Easter again this year. Had I not read about it in the paper today, I would have forgotten about it today too. Of the two Christian holidays, arguably Easter is the more important. After all, had Jesus been born and had not risen from the dead, as most Christians believe, well, he would have been just another anonymous brat born in a manger. (Of course, I have a different take on the meaning of Jesus’ life.)

If you grow up Catholic and attend Mass regularly, as I did, it is impossible not to anticipate Easter. As with Christmas, the many events that preceded it acted as a crescendo to the actual event itself. Just as Christmas is preceded by the season of Advent, Easter is preceded by Lent. When I was a wee lad, Lent meant forty-four days of denial. Now Lent usually means devout Catholics have to abstain from meat on Fridays. The Catholics who studied their Baltimore Catechisms might also spend more time during Lent devoted prayer and almsgiving. I suspect most American Catholics could not even tell you what almsgiving actually is.

Holy Week (the week before Easter) was of course a big deal when I was growing up. Mass on Palm Sunday included a procession into the church with palm fronds, reputedly reenacting Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Good Friday meant heading to the church to devoutly perform the Stations of the Cross. At each station, we had to ponder the horror and the sorrow that poor Jesus underwent because our nasty and pervasive sinning. Easter itself meant large crowds of lapsed Catholics at church (who would reappear on Christmas), kielbasa and eggs for breakfast (for we were a Polish Catholic family), and of course Easter eggs. In our family though, we were not talking the Cadbury kind, but actual hardboiled eggs that we painted in watercolors and placed in Easter baskets. All those eggs were very pretty to look at, except few of us liked hardboiled eggs, so they were largely left uneaten. The eggs were either gone or thrown away long before Ascension Day.

Since then of course I have spent thirty years away from Catholicism and have gone largely secular. When our daughter was a child and her grandmother was still obsessed about sending us Easter baskets, we would hold an Easter egg hunt or two. Then we simply forgot about Easter. This year was typical. As usual last week I had no idea that Easter was arriving.

Supposedly we live in a more religious and Christian country than we used to. I doubt this for we are too busy breaking Sabbath laws in the name of our real God, capitalism, to care too much anymore about holidays like Easter. I remember a time when Easter was as pervasive as Christmas. You can still find the Easter candy and Easter baskets at stores this time of year. Like Christmas presents, they tend to arrive months before the actual event.

Perhaps Easter would mean more if the date did not change every year. According to Wikipedia, Easter is calculated as follow. “The canonical rule is that Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox).” Establishing Easter as, say, the first Sunday in April might help cement the date in our minds. Since it can arrive as early as March 22nd or as late as April 25th, chances are whatever Sunday you think it is during a given year is likely to be wrong.

Given its confusing arrival date, my spiritual but not religious state, and my rather harried life, Easter tends to slip by me most years. Often it is not until I see the Easter candy discounted at the local CVS do I have a clue that I missed it again.

Perhaps I have lost something precious as a result of my secular adulthood. Some part of me does miss the hoopla surrounding Easter. The smell of burning incense in the sanctuary, the solemnity with which I did the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday and the High Masses celebrated on Easter Sunday are certainly childhood memories to treasure.

Also gone is of course my naiveté. It is strange that although Jesus reputedly was raised from the dead, only his disciples saw him. It is also curious how the legend of his resurrection grew in the telling. The Gospel according to Mark, the first gospel written, has little of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, yet we get much longer and florid accounts in later gospels like Luke’s. It seems Jesus wanted to test our faith a bit. He was not the type after resurrection to go back to the temple in Jerusalem and allow himself to be inspected by the rabbis so there would be no doubt whatsoever about his resurrection. I guess he did not want to frighten little children or anything. Jesus was so thoughtful that way.

For me today is just another Sunday. Since the weather is nice though, I intend to celebrate Easter in my own way. While I shall not celebrate a resurrection that I do not believe actually happened, I shall get on my bike and peddle twenty miles or so on the W&OD trail. I shall enjoy the fresh air, the sunshine, the glorious flowering trees in Washington this time of year, and the intoxicating feeling of rebirth during spring here in the northern hemisphere. For me this is the real resurrection.

April 16th, 2006 at 11:07am Posted by Mark | Sociology | 3 comments

Are free societies incompatible with Islam?

Publish a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad and you may find your country’s embassy or consulate attacked and burned by angry mobs of Muslims. At least that is what happened to the Danish consulate today in Lebanon. At least one person has died, hundreds have been detained and Christian neighborhoods in Beirut have been ransacked. We can hope that this will be the last of this, but likely passionate Muslims will commit more acts of violence like this in the days and weeks ahead.

Granted, the Danish newspaper and many of the other European newspapers that reprinted these cartoons should have known better. Moreover, even if you are not a Muslim, the cartoons were in poor taste. We know there are some obvious hot buttons that will incite some groups of Muslims to riot. After all, in 1977 merely showing the movie Muhammad, Messenger of God caused Hanafi Muslims to hold 123 hostages for 39 hours at the B’nai B’rith building in Washington, D.C. Oddly enough, in that movie, Muhammad was neither seen nor heard, and was a reasonably accurate depiction of the Prophet’s life, yet it still gave offense to millions of Muslims. As Salman Rushdie the author of The Satanic Verses discovered, it is very dangerous to write a book that could offend Muslims. It has been nearly 17 years since the late Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa on the man’s life. Any devout Shiite Muslim has permission to murder him in Allah’s name.

Therefore, these newspapers should have been mindful of the consequences of their actions. I hope that they have paid up on their property insurance. Even so, this violent reaction from what is likely a small minority of Muslims is disheartening. What is the likelihood of instilling a pluralistic and democratic society in Iraq if any group feels it can flout the law when an action offends their religious sensibilities? In the United States, should we be giving a pass to abortion clinic bombers because their concern for unborn life supersedes their requirement to be law-abiding members of society?

Newspapers throughout the Islamic world are full of political cartoons that take raw barbs at Americans and Jews. It is a good thing that both Americans and Israelis are reasonably tolerant people. The sad truth is that you would be hard pressed to find adherents of any other religion so, well, sensitive to having their religious figures or beliefs parodied.

Free societies are, well, free. Freedom of thought and expression come with the territory. The nature of a free society means that your feelings are going to be hurt from time to time. The good news is that in free societies people or institutions that engage in boorish behaviors like this Danish newspaper are generally shunned by the rest of society. The majority may not agree with those who express these opinions, but we learn to live with it so that order prevails and so we can express our opinions without fear of sanction when we feel called.

Perhaps this social contract needs to be made more explicit. Every naturalized citizen of the United States must take the following oath of citizenship. I think it should be amended to include the phrase in italics, and I would recommend that other free societies insert similar language in their citizenship oaths.

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I understand that this country is a free society that requires me to be tolerant of lawful behavior that I may disagree with as a result of my faith or convictions; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; that failure to uphold my oath may result in sanctions including my loss of citizenship and deportation as spelled out by law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God. In acknowledgement whereof I have hereunto affixed my signature.

Mixing democratic institutions with Islam may be like trying to get oil and water to mix. A good Muslim after all subjugates him or herself wholly to the will of Allah. Pluralism and Islam as it is currently interpreted in much of the Islamic world may simply not be compatible.

If faithfully practicing Islam means that when provoked Islam wins over civil law, then I do not see how such Muslims can be integrated into a free society. They should choose to live in societies that practice Islamic law only. In addition, western countries should rethink having any diplomatic or trade relationships with countries that adhere to such principles.

I do hope that in time Muslims will find lawful and nonviolent ways to accommodate such expressions. If they do not, rather than spreading Islam they will probably find that their societies will be increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

February 5th, 2006 at 08:12pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2006 | no comments