This Week in God

July 28, 2007

The God Machine had plenty to offer this week, so let’s get right to it. First up is a follow-up to a story from two weeks ago, when the Senate invited a Hindu leader to offer an official invocation for the first time in the chamber’s history. Three far-right Christian fundamentalists heckled the Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Nevada, and argued that only Christians be allowed to offer congressional prayers.

The three activists were arrested and charged with disrupting Congress, but the story generated quite a bit of attention — especially in India. This week, Hindu organizations started asking for more forceful denunciations from U.S. leaders.

U.S. Hindu organizations are urging presidential candidates to denounce the protesters who disrupted the Senate as the first-ever Hindu opening prayer was being delivered this month. […]

Although the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington issued a statement July 17 saying its members were “deeply saddened” by the interruption, no senators present spoke out against it publicly, according to the Hindu American Foundation and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Both organizations said they are disappointed with the legislators, and they sent letters this week to presidential candidates and senators, asking them to condemn the incident.

“We call on you to follow the example set by [Reid] and take a stance in defense of religious freedom and equality, in the face of opposition from extremists and fundamentalists,” the ISKCON letter said.

It sounds like a reasonable request. We’ll see which senators respond.

Next up is some relatively encouraging rhetoric from the pope about the intersection of religion and science.

Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the pope said. “This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

He said evolution did not answer all the questions: “Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question, ‘Where does everything come from?'”

All things being equal, having the pope making clear that devout Roman Catholics can embrace the overwhelming scientific basis for modern biology is encouraging.

Also this week, following up on a report from a month-old This Week in God, the Christian Defense Coalition is still moving forward with its plan to lead a “historic Christian prayer delegation” to Baghdad.

The Christian Defense Coalition, now joined by Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, heads off to Iraq: “The Prayer Delegation will present to the Iraqi people an engraved stone display of the Ten Commandments as a gift from the Christian community of America. The timeless and eternal truths enumerated in the Ten Commandments provide inspiration and direction to both our countries and cultures.”

I still think this has “bad idea” written all over it.

And finally this week, the God Machine closes on a rather mundane note, by way of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family.

An elementary school outside of Chicago has agreed to let a third-grade student read his Bible during “reading time,” after the Thomas More Law Center intervened.

The law center has received written assurance from Elementary School District 159 that Rhajheem Haymon will be permitted to read his Bible in school.

After being contacted by Leslie Haymon, Rhajheem’s father, Edward L. White III, trial counsel with the Thomas More Law Center, immediately sent school officials a demand letter. In the letter, White informed school officials that the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Education have assured that students are free to express their religious views while at school, a freedom that includes a student’s choice to read religious materials.

Why is this noteworthy? It’s actually not, which paradoxically, is why I’m mentioning it. Here was a school that was confused about church-state separation and denied a third-grader a chance to read the Bible during free time. The student’s family got a legal opinion, a lawyer explained the law to the school, and the matter was resolved. No muss, no fuss.

I mention this because, as far as the right is concerned, we need a constitutional amendment to protect Rhajheem Haymon’s right to read scripture at school. This example shows how foolish their constitutional argument really is — they want to preserve rights that already exist.

Well as long a little Rhajeem doesn’t read the Honeymoon scene out loud. No porn in the schools.

The Ten Commandments is such crap. The first five are about some tribal belief system and the rest are simplistic warnings about the obvious. Maybe if they carved the Beatitudes it might be better.

  • I mention this because, as far as the right is concerned, we need a constitutional amendment to protect Rhajheem Haymon’s right to read scripture at school. This example shows how foolish their constitutional argument really is — they want to preserve rights that already exist.

    This is a pet peeve of mine. For over 40 years the right wing religious types have been syaing things like “God has been kicked out of school” and “The supreme court has banned the bible.” Then, when someone who has been listening to that crap for 40 years actually acts on it, the right wingers rush in with their lawyers saying the unsuspecting teacher doesn’t know the law. Well who’s damn fault is that? These guys have figured out how to make a virtual perpetual motion machine.

  • Just to be clear, this is not the first time that the Catholic Church has acknowledged the potential scientific validity of evolution. 14 years ago, Pope John Paul II made a similiar public pronouncement.

    Even when the theory was new the Church was not blatantly opposed. Pope Pius IX wrote that it was reasonable to explore the theory and even believe in it. He did declare certain conclussions heretical, primarily because of his concept of the theology of original sin, but Catholicism was never the enemy of Evolution that some other Christian faiths were/are.

    Actually, in the small world departement, Darwin helped shape current Catholic Dogma on abortion. Remember, Darwin didn’t really understand genetics, so he promoted all kinds of theories about how traits were transferred and when they could be introduced. From the forth century to the nineteenth century, Catholicism generally held to a concept of delayed ensoulment. This tradition actually runs back to Aristotle, and basically contends that you do not have a human soul until a certain point in development.

    In practice, this basically meant that before 80-116 days abortion was not murder. Not that the church was ‘pro choice’, abortion was still considered a serious form of contraception, but it was not considered the killing of a human being. For example, in the 8th century, an early abortion carried a pennance of 120 days, murder a pennance of 15 years (oral sex, interestingly, had a pennance of 10 years).

    But, with the rise spermist theories like those being promoted by Darwin, Pope Pius IX wrote that since science was questioning the church tradition of when ensoulment occurs that the prudent thing to do was to ban all abortions – which he did in 1869. He did not declare that early abortions are nec. murder, but instead used a theological argument from a century before and contended that it is ‘anticipated murder’.

    Although the laity seems to believe that Catholic dogma is that fertilized eggs are people, this is still not so. As recently as 1987 the Church reaffirmed that it does not know when ensoulment occurs. Since a zygote can divide into multiple people, and the church holds that traducism is heretical, ensoulment occurs sometime after fertilization. But the ‘anticipated murder’ argument is still applied. This actually makes the church’s stance on delayed emergency contraception more understandable (not nec. right, but more consistant).

    -jjf

  • Evolution throws the OT into doubt, for sure, for that reason and because it is often barbaric and contradictory, when I was in Catholic HS in the 60s about the only thing they said about the OT was stay away from it. We spent most of our time talking about philosophy. The Catholic clergy are no dummies. If an agnostic were to speak off the record with a Vatican intellectual heavyweight, the agnostic would be surprised how much they agree(or so I was told by liberal nuns & priests). They rationalize the failure to be straight up with the masses because the masses cant handle the truth. Who can say, for sure, they are wrong about that. Of course, also they would be out of a job if they told the truth and they do many good things that might not get done if the church fell apart.

  • “We call on you to follow the example set by [Reid] and take a stance in defense of religious freedom and equality,[…]

    Right. Freedom — to pray to whatever god you want. In private. Equality, in that no official prayer should start the business of the state in Congress. Not Christian, not Muslim, not Hindu, not Wiccan, not… Starting the day with an official prayer is not the same as reading the Bible — to yourself — in school, in your free time.

    The Christian Defense Coalition, now joined by Operation Rescue President […]

    Nothing, but nothing, can rescue the President; it’s too late. ‘sides, he doesn’t want to be rescued; he wants to be raptured.

    “The Prayer Delegation will present to the Iraqi people an engraved stone display of the Ten Commandments […]

    Which version?

  • More diversions from the real issues of impeachment, the falling stock market and the war in Iraq. These are DIVERSIONS, we have real issues to worry about.
    This is just more noise to throw people off the real stories.

  • The Catholic clergy also told us not to take much stock in Revelations specifically. It was recognized to be the work of someone in an altered state of conciousness. The church is slumming when it hangs with the literal fundamentalists. John23 would not be cool with that.

  • Regarding 7, no, Roman Catholicism is not fundementalism. In addition to Holy Scripture there is Holy Tradition and the Magisterium – the teaching authority of the church.

    Honestly, I’ve never gotten Bible literalists at all. The discrepencies between the synoptic Gospels is anything but trivial. Acts does not even reconcile with Luke, despite having been supposedly written by the same individual.

    -jjf

  • The right already in place to read his bible in school free reading time is just a face that Dobson wants to put on a “constitutional amendment” but included in such amendment would be a load of other theological issues designed to help make our democracy a theocracy. Are students allowed to read the Koran too?…yes, so far.
    I know many “Christians”(this includes catholics) who have no problem accepting evolution without it causing any problems with their religious beliefs. They think “creationism” is a joke and see it as being implemented by narrow minded hypocrites whose ignorance of symbolism is astounding. Driving around on “fosseil” fuels claiming the earth is only a few thousand years old, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, these creationists refuse to open their minds up to allow in contradictory evidence in order to draw reasoned conclusions.
    The Pope is absolutely right, evolution does not preclude a belief in God. But creationist want to preclude science. They cannot see a structured universe of natural laws as being designed and set in motion by a higher power, and they quote mythology to substantiate their beliefs.

    I’m glad the Pope is wise enough to understand that God gave a structured order to the universe, based on immutable natural laws because it is the acceptance of reality. Creationists live in denial.

  • Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of the universe. That’s covered under an entirely different field of study. Evolution is a question of biology and the creation of the universe is a question of physics. There’s also a question regarding where life came from, but that’s also not covered by evolution, which only involves what happened to life after it was created. Perhaps that’s a question of chemistry, but it certainly doesn’t involve evolution.

    So of course evolution doesn’t answer where everything came from. It’s not supposed to. Thus said, he’s right in saying that there is nothing in evolution to suggest that a creator wasn’t involved in the beginning; though it seems odd that he went about it in such a round-about way. And in any case, evolution does put in a dent in the infalliability of the bible, so I see this as little more than the thin end of the wedge for them. That’s why the fundies are still holding firm to it.

  • btw***I still think this has “bad idea” written all over it.”

    “The Christian Defense Coalition, now joined by Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, heads off to Iraq: “The Prayer Delegation will present to the Iraqi people an engraved stone display of the Ten Commandments as a gift from the Christian community of America. The timeless and eternal truths enumerated in the Ten Commandments provide inspiration and direction to both our countries and cultures.”

    BAD, bad idea…as in the “crusades” bad. The tenacity of these people is astounding. Like coming upon a nasty auto accident, jumping out of the car and pushing emergency med techs out of the way to grab the hands of the victims and asking them to accept Jesus as their personal savior, when they don’t even speak english…the gall!

    Will the ten commandments be in Arabic or English. Will the Prayer Delegation be taking back stone tablets beautifully engraved with the words of the prophet Muhammad to be publicly displayed here. Of course not…My God is real, yours isn’t… Like people dressed as KKK members bringing ten commandment stones to a black Jewish synogugue …nothing strange here. It will just go down as another embarrassing moment for Americans. Where was this prayer group 10yrs. ago when Sadam was around? How do the Iraqis keep from laughing?

  • #2, you are absolutely right. Either the Supreme Court “took God and prayer out of the schools,” in which case the the school in the incident mentioned on the Focus on the Family website acted correctly under the law, or they didn’t. If they didn’t, then the Supremes didn’t take “God and prayer out of the school;” yet the people who actually claim that this is what the Supremes did in a few early 1960’s court decisions are the same ones who (rightly) protest when (rare) incidents like this occur. Pick an argument and stick to it.

  • CB,
    I don’t think the Senators would be doing the Hindus any favors by acknowledging a family of three morons from the successor organization of Operation Rescue. Ignoring the zealots accomplishes the goal far more effectively than encouraging copycat Bible thumpers. If they have to repudiate 3 people out of a nation of 300 million, is it unreasonable to ask them to answer every individual opinionated weed that bellows in the gallery of the Capitol? Let it die, friend Hindus. We say so little because it means nothing. Meanwhile… bring on the Wiccans!

    bjobotts@11
    Muslims revere the ten commandments as much as Jews Christians, which is to say anywhere from not at all to slavish adherence. It would really cheese off the religious right if we all referred to our worship of the one God as Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition.

  • Now, if only the pope and all the other unmarried male cross-dressers would just pay some attention to all legitimate research that shows that same sex love is natural to some people and get over their bigotry against same sex oriented individuals. Not that I look forward to it soon. Look how long it took them to get over their penchant for burning folks at the stake for daring to suggest that the earth was not the center of the universe.

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