Ryan Overbey writes about "strong" versus "weak" religions and how it relates to religious pluralism.#

The aversion to pluralism comes mostly from my scholarly preference for strong religions. Strong religions are amazingly cool, insanely barbaric, irrational in the extreme, full of drama and emotion and violence. But I know one thing for sure- I'd hate to live in a society where strong religion is normative.

As a secular humanist, the thing that excites me most about pluralism and notions of interfaith discussion and respect for other religions is the Trojan Horse aspect- by being willing to talk to other people with an open mind, we can spread open-mindedness as a shared commitment. There's a real potential for open-minded Christians to unite with like-minded Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists to overcome the barbarous attacks on sexual and civil rights and privacy that are the staple of strong religion. My goal as a scholar of religion is to study irrationality, magic, and barbarity in religious communities. I regard them as fascinating artifacts of an animal past, something that never quite goes away, but that we always need to fight and overcome. Religious pluralism, "weak" religions, and interfaith dialogue could play a role in the battle against barbarous religion, at least in the American context. I think of it as a flu vaccine- people are still infected with religion, but it's weak and benign, and if we're lucky it generates antibodies- emotional instincts that repel strong religion.

Matthias Correction describes the second part of his story of coming to know God.#

I graduated from college with no direction, no plans. It was hard enough just getting through the day. I discovered that marijuana was especially effective in combatting the symptoms of depression for hours at a time and began ruthlessly prescribing it for myself. I had friends who had the same prescription, and we spent many long and laughter-filled evenings escaping from ourselves with the help of massive bong hits. When my parents told me that they wouldn't send me any more money, I went out and got a job, the least demanding one I could find: temping. I only knew how to do two things: perform critical analysis of literature, and type. Typing has gotten me plenty more jobs that literary criticism ever has.

Chip Gibbons writes about the lack of evolution in Georgia.#

Why is this a bad idea?

For the same reason that it's not a good idea to ban the use of the term fucking moron from the English language.

Evolution exists. Fucking morons exist. We needs words to describe things that exist.

Two comments:

1. This is the 21st century. Wow.
2. Perhaps, their miseducation is a sign that they have not evolved and are thus partially right in saying that evolution does not occur in Georgia. (Hah!)

Matthias Correction writes a parable about the nature of Divine Justice.#

When the baby died, the angels carried him up to Heaven and rested him gently on a cloud. A man was there, also new, and they decided to tour Heaven together. "Tell me about yourself," said the baby, trying to put the man at ease.

"I was old. I died in my sleep. I had a long life, so I can't complain." The man looked at the little baby before him. "You, though. How could God let you die so young? It's cruel. It's unfair."

The baby just shrugged. They walked on. As the man walked, he grew angrier and angrier at God. "How could God bless me with such a long life, and give this little one nothing? What did I do to deserve so much and him to deserve so little? How could God be so unfair? When I see God, I'm going to demand that he explain himself."

Ryan Overbey links to a story about the banning of amulet advertisments.#

Banning amulet advertisements that mention supernatural powers is like banning condom advertisements that mention sex. There's a reason people buy these things. But here's the kicker:

"The government should stop peddling lottery tickets before it tries to ban amulet ads," he said.

Bingo. That's a fantastic analogy.

Richard links to Amy who quotes from Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens.#

The excerpt is about why Hitchens is an "anti-theist, rather than atheist."

This arrogance and illogic is inseparable even from the meekends and most altruistic religious affirmations. A true believer must believe that he or she is here for a purpose and is an object of real interest to a Supreme Being; he or she must also claim to have at least an inkling of what that Supreme Being desires. I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator -- that's beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer, let alone in the great law-givers and edict-makers of whose "flock" (and what a revealing word that is) they form a part.

Kevin Lawver writes that it is not Christian to be against gay marriage.#

I don't see how allowing a gay couple to have the same legal rights as a straight couples when it comes to survivor benefits, power of attorney and the rest of the legal rights that come with a marriage (to the state, really a "civil union" anyway), threatens our families. Homosexuals are easy targets because they're "different" and "not like us". If we really wanted to strengthen the "family", we should look at the problems that already afflict families. We should look at ways to decrease the divorce rate, which is currently well over fifty percent (meaning your marriage is more likely to fail than to succeed), provide more help for single parents, and look at ways to promote marriage over co-habitation (since a couple is 33% more likely to divorce if they live together before marriage than not).

The Binary Circumstance links to a surprise announcement from the Pope: "Gays Aren't Normal."#

And he said if he media does not exercise "restraint" the state should step in. The pontifical statement called for regulations to stop the media from acting against "the good of the family," although it said the pope rejected outright censorship.

What exactly is censorship if it's not state "restraint" of communications?

Dean Esmay writes about Jews, and says some things I was not familiar with.#

My own, take, for what it's worth: The real problem with the Jews is that theirs is an hereditary religion. You can convert to Judaism, of course. They are open to that. But a Rabbi is supposed to at least try to talk you out of it. Unlike Islam or Christianity, they don't go out of their way to get people to join--although, oddly enough, non-Jews are always welcome to come worship the God of Israel in (almost) any Synagogue without being asked to convert.

Anyway, the bottom line is, you mostly become a Jew through birth. Secondarily, sometimes through marriage. Simply doing it for personal reasons is rarest of all, and isn't very common. Furthermore, as with most religions, sometimes kids fall away from the faith. Thus you usually have "ethnically Jewish" people who really have abandoned the faith--and when a lot of those have kids, they cease to raise them as Jews, and wind up blending into whatever the majority ethnicity or religion is.

Richard Tallent's church is getting the WiFi hookup and all it brings to services.#

Let's face it: we Americans are addicted to caffeine, artificial lighting, amplified music and speech, air conditioning and heating, carbohydrates, polished communication, visual stimulation, constant doses of humor, large portions of food, casual clothing, and padding under our big fat American butts. As a church, at some point you have to choose your battles and learn to recognize the difference between the state of someone's soul and our modern society's conditioning of their mind and body. Spirituality is certainly grown through discipline, but like Jesus feeding the hungry crowds and stating that he came to help the sick, not the healthy, churches should focus first on ministering to those who have firmer attachments to personal comfort than to their spiritual life, not only to those who would still attend if they had to crawl in on a bed of glass, and certainly not to those who would claim that anything less than glass-crawling is unworthy of Divine Grace.

Captain Ed writes about Mel Gibson's history of historical accuracy with regards to The Passion.#

In his later epic The Patriot, Gibson took even more dramatic licence with history, this time with the American Revolution. Among the more egregious errors Gibson allowed were a fictional account of the British burning down a church full of civilians as a reprisal for his character's commando raids on the British. Not only is this libelous to the British, who on the whole conducted themselves honorably during the Revolution, but it steals an actual Nazi atrocity from WWII. Also, slavery seemed to be miraculously scrubbed from The Patriot; the African-American characters are freed men in South Carolina, where freed Negroes were illegal right through to the Civil War. While the film was entertaining, its history was appallingly bad -- a great example of how Hollywood can't be trusted with truth.

Which brings us to Gibson's latest effort. I trust Hugh, as he is a well-read man with extensive historical knowledge, so I am greatly relieved to hear that Gibson's depiction of the Gospels improves on his track record. However, I do not blame people for being nervous about possible anti-Semitic biases or departures from the Gospels, given that track record. It demonstrates the wisdom of actually seeing a film before attacking it -- or defending it.

Correction writes about discovering God... at least Part One.#

So you would be excused for assuming that this was the day I began to believe in God. You'd be wrong, though. I didn't believe in God when I was twelve and it would be another fourteen years before I took the matter up seriously at all. Other things had to happen first: I would have to encounter a dead man in an elevator and I would have to go crazy, although not at the same time. I would have to experience something as terrible as grieving with my family over the loss of a child and I would have to do nothing more than read a book. Any of these things can lead a person to believe in God, or to lose faith in God. I don't know why they led me to God, or how they led me to a place where I could experience the reality of God's presence firsthand, and in a shower. This is just how it happened. What the pattern is, if any, remains to be seen.

Richard writes about something I said about Sin, doing wrong, and being "normal."#

Jay is wise to note, in the last sentence quoted, the he has the right to remind people of their past convictions. If, say, he were reminding me of my past convictions, I would probably be comfortable so long as he doesn't expect consistency for consistency's sake and is an information provider (or an information reminder, because people sometimes forget what they were once like) instead of someone who tells me what to do (e.g. "you used to do it differently" is okay, because that way I can provide counter information or agree with it, but "you used to be this way, so you should be this way now" is not okay) because adequate information is not always available when one is making a decision or has an opinion. When someone provides enough information to make it an adequate amount, then the other is better equiped to come to the right decision on their own.

It's not so much that I feel I have the right to remind people of their convictions. It is that it seems to me that the reason we tell other people what our values and beliefs are is so that they will remind us of them in the case of our departure from them. Why? Well, what good are your morals to me? Not much because I have my own, therefore the only goal to me seems to be in making a public statement--increasing accountability.

This is why I said "If you tell em what's wrong for you, I'll trust you." I will never invent my own interpretation of your values and tell you what you believe (or should believe.) All I can do is turn your words back at you, but if you just say, "Well Jay, that was then and this is now." The most I'll do is ask you why, an attempt to get you to justify your switch (using your own morals) so that you make it clear you actually know why you change opinions.

Reminding someone of their own words is not judging or being normative, in my opinion, it is being a volunteer watchdog for someone else. (Also note: I don't think Richard thought I was saying otherwise, but his reply is a convenient place to put an elaboration.)

The Revealer on being crazy for crosses.#

McCormack uses the poppy, perky prose of secular magazines such as Seventeen andCosmoGirl! to tell the story of 19-year-old Becky Hicks, who literally followed her dream -- she considered it a set of instructions from God -- to spend a year lugging a cross on her back around 3/4 of America's perimeter.

As journalism, there isn't much here; but as an artifact of a worldview even most evangelical Christians would consider marginal, it's fascinating. All the more so because Hicks undertook her journey with a handful of other teenagers and the staunch support of her parents and her church.

The trip took place some years ago, but The Revealer wonders what Hicks has accomplished since then. "I want to do crazy things for God," she told McCormack. At the time of writing, she planned to "take" the inner cities with a walking campaign she compared to the book of Joshua. Of course, Joshua pretty much killed everyone in the cities he "took," but we think we know what she means.

Randy Kennedy writes in the New York Times about the Jewish backlash against The Passion.#

Mr. Foxman said that in one scene in the version he watched, the Jewish high priest Caiaphas calls down a kind of curse on the Jewish people by declaring, of the Crucifixion: "His blood be on us, and on our children." In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 27, Verse 25, the only place in the Bible in which that statement appears, it is said to come from a crowd of Jews shouting for Jesus's death. The message of that passage, that the Jewish people were guilty of deicide, was repudiated by the Second Vatican Council. Mr. Gibson practices a traditionalist form of Roman Catholicism that does not recognize the changes of Vatican II.

In an article in The New Yorker last year, Mr. Gibson said he had decided, with some regrets, to cut the scene in which the high priest makes the statement. If he had left it in, he told the magazine, critics of his depiction of the Jews would "be coming after me at my house; they'd come to kill me."

Ryan Overbey comments on what this implies.

More importantly, the crux of the anti-Semitism charge is that the movie contains a scene which directly quotes from Matthew 27:25. For Christians who take the entire Bible seriously, you cannot simply ask them to pretend Matthew 27:25 doesn't exist. Literalist Christians cannot repudiate a Biblical passage. Period. If you try to fight them on this, you will lose.

This is a really big deal- these two rabbis seem to be saying that if you are a literalist Christian who accepts the Bible in its entirety as the word of God, you are anti-Semitic. If you think events happened as described in Matthew 27:25, you are anti-Semitic. That puts pretty much all of my moderate-to-conservative Protestant family squarely on the side of anti-Semitism.

Jim Gilliam "proves" that President Bush doesn't believe in the separation of Church and State.#

Here's how he addresses that little problem called separation of church and state: "We strongly believe in the separation of church and state here in Washington, D.C. and that's the way it's going to be."

Notice the language. He doesn't say "I strongly believe" he says "We strongly believe...here in Washington, D.C." He generalized it, making "we" all the people in Washington D.C. -- and not specifically himself. Then he closes with "that's the way it's going to be" since he's clearly not all that thrilled about the whole thing.

Ryan Overbey writes about the dark world of Buddhism in Japan. I love this stuff.#

Something westerners need to keep in mind: Buddhist monasteries in Japan are huge money-making institutions. These guys don't just sit around all day doing zazen. They're making loads of tax-exempt cash selling amulets, chanting for the benefit of paying clients, and performing all sorts of funerals and other ceremonies.

Monasteries have always fought tooth-and-nail for tax exemptions. Nowadays things are just so civil. They've moved from thuggery to litigation. In the 12th or 13th century, if the imperial court wanted to take monastery ricelands and redistribute them to loyal vassals, or if they wanted to levy new taxes against the Buddhist industries, you'd have armies of sohei burning and pillaging Kyoto.

Sean Bonner asks, "How bad can being possessed by Satan be?"#

My guess is not as bad as being murdered by your parents.

If your family was anything like mine, you heard a lot about the devil growing up. Things not to do because they would attract the devil's attention, things that were obviously satanic and to avoid, etc. Saying the word "Satan", listneing to "rock and roll", watching "MTV", playing D&D, staying up past my bedtime, were all things would some how give the prince of darkness some kind of evil hard on and were forbiden at one time or another. But that was all pretty harmless, the freaks were the people in the mid 80's flipping out about Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) and basically holding a witch hunt to find those nasty satanist's who were abusing and sacrificing upwards of 60,000 people people a year.

Ryan Overbey write about Falungong being hidden in France.#

The other side is that the French have a ruthlessly assimilative culture that disdains any public display of religious difference. I've mentioned this before in reference to the headscarf controversy- the issue is not about religious freedom or maintaining secularism, it's about comforting French people that yes, we're all completely French here.

I think banning the Falungong is a win-win for the French- they get to maintain their smug sense of secular Frenchness, plus they win brownie points with the "We'll be a superpower soon. No, really!" Chinese.

Ryan Overbey later refers to this as the "Fuck You, Immigrants" policy.

Aaron Swartz learns about Unintelligent Design. You should too!#

The fossil record shows dozens of animals that have died out or been improved. But evolution can't explain how such complex things were developed when their parts don't make sense alone. The "intelligent design" theory says that some clever creator made things. But then how do you explain the fossil record?

So how about a compromise: unintelligent design. Sure, there was a creator, but he obviously wasn't particularly bright.

Ryan Overbey posts a great quote from Chinese Magical Medicine:#

It would seem that a primal and obsessive fear of the Chinese male is of being devoured, or sucked dry. Apart from the snake, men feel gravely threatened by the tiger. Women born in the Year of the Tiger (1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, etc.) are deemed highly undesirable brides in Taiwan and Hong Kong today, and are often obliged to conceal or falsify their year of birth because prospective husbands dread their supposed rapacious, demonic propensities.

Michael Feldman points to a prayer against Internet pornography.#

An Israeli rabbi has invented a prayer to help Jews overcome the guilt of visiting pornographic websites.

The benediction by Shlomo Eliahu says: "Please God, help me cleanse the computer of viruses and evil photographs which disturb and ruin my work..., so that I shall be able to cleanse myself (of sin)."

Joi Ito talked to some Important People™ at a breakfast.#

An interesting point about religions in developing countries:

Religions are memories of history, rich with ritual and values. They need to create a double language, one for internal dialog and another to share ideas with others. One point I made was that many religions were designed for environments where people were still struggling to survive and the focus was on rituals and believes for such an environment. Many religions focused keeping people alive rather than providing them with a primary religious experience. For environments where the struggle to survive is not as big of an issue, it might be that religions need to help support people more with things such as their obsessions and ethics.

Joey deVilla links to Adventures of Confessions of Saint Augustine Bear.#

Correction watches a crowd of ice skaters and remembers divine love.#

One of the most wonderful things about loving God is the ability it gives you to love the God in other people. I've spent inordinate time of late thinking about other people and the magnificence that is the seed of God's love expressed through each of us. Billions of people--good, bad, and indifferent--and each with a holy seed within, each pair of lips and eyes anointed with the creative touch of a divine kiss. To look at a crowd of people with love is a wondrous thing. We're not used to looking at crowds this way, as overflowing with blessing and possibility. We're conditioned to avoid crowds, to see them as dehumanizing and impersonal. This is certainly how I've always viewed them. But a new way of seeing is slowly opening up to me, one in which each hair on each head is counted and treasured.

Davros4269 writes about Atheism at Kuro5hin.org.#

My first reason is similar to what I said above about the burden of proof. If I say that I saw a ghost while walking to work, would not the burden of proof be on me? While some might believe me outright, for those that do not, is it not up to me to demonstrate a ghost? Does my very statement carry some power of creation? If anyone asks me to provide proof, can I just fire back and say, "Show me some proof that I did not see a ghost!"? Mr. Agnostic says, "yes", in this case, perhaps to sound intellectual, as Asimov said, and perhaps to sound open minded.

If we allow this kind of reasoning, reality itself breaks down, or rather, our understanding of it. Everyone knows that one can't prove a negative. But it's just as silly to use English grammar and turn every statement around, form a negative, and expect the person hearing the claim to provide the negative-proof! The person making the claim must provide evidence and/or proof, as the situation demands, rather than using grammar to turn their claim around and throw it back at the listener.

The Binary Circumstance writes about Truth and Mysticism.#

Most of us, since we were very young children, have been taught to respect the religious belief of others. This belief is so deeply held that it is a concept that has been codified into our Constitution, which prohibits a state-sponsored religion that might infringe upon individual religious beliefs. The purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the state from dictating how individuals think.

[...]

Government endorsement of religion--and the same thing applies to all other nonreligious forms of mysticism--has created an atmosphere where we place our deepest trust in people who cannot provide evidence for their beliefs, when in fact, they are the last people we should trust.

Joe Attaboy writes about The Passion.#

The idea of anti-Semitism in the film is based on the concept that Christians through the centuries have blamed Jews for the death of Jesus. My point in my original comments was that making such a conclusion oversimplifies the issue. But, sometimes we need to do so, so let's try it again: the Jewish leadership of Christ's time feared him for what he was preaching. They believed he was a criminal and that his punishment should be severe. If one believes the accounts of the Gospels, the Roman government left the decision regarding his fate to a mob of screaming people. (This, my friends, is why our form of government is a republic and not a pure democracy). But the men who made the initial accusations against Jesus were Jewish. Did the Jews (as a people) kill him? No. The local government executed him because, based on the narrative, the people of the time wanted him killed and someone else spared. They wanted this because they believed, as the religious leadership insisted, that he was a blasphemer, and therefore, based on the cultural mores of that era, he was a criminal. The Romans carried out the actual execution.

Kasia writes about religious appropriations.#

We get a ton of nutty feedback, we get a ton of good feedback and sometimes we even get useful feedback.. but imploring us to "find god" and scaring us with fire and brimstone over the use of the term "bible" is a little out there.. but apparently we're all going straight to hell. Which begs for the question.. why would an almighty, all knowing and all understanding god give a damn (no pun intended) over the use of a term in the English language? If we called ourselves "biblia" (Polish) would we still be going to hell? Is every librarian (biblioteka, again, Polish) going to hell? Interesting.. a connection.. bliblia.. biblioteka.. anyone who knows a bit of Latin will recognize this one.. So it's pretty obvious, bible is not a religious term, it's just another Christian appropriation (see major holidays).

Ryan Overbey writes about rituals, magic, and human nature.#

Still, Brian's critique is worth considering- it's an issue I run into time and time again. There may well be something fundamentally human about ritual, and we may well impoverish ourselves by deemphasizing ritual. I encounter the same dilemma in my work on magic. No matter how stupid I think the vast majority of religions are in their pursuit of apotropaic magic, divination, invocations, demonology, and sorcery, people keep on practicing these absurdities in pretty much every religion I've encountered. There's something disarmingly universal and human about it all. And while bashing Eliade may well have been "the academic bloodsport of the 90s", we may well be at one of those fun times in scholarship when the pendulum begins to swing the other way.

Ryan Overbey writes about a great cult of prostitution in Hong Kong. (That's in China, Americans.)#

Whoever invented this religion was a genius. I love how the article thinks of the women as "snared" in the cult, and triumphantly declares that five female cult members were "rescued" from brothels. How paternalistic. If the women really do think they're getting a free ticket to goddessland from this, removing them from their brothels is hardly "rescuing." Congratulations, you've just prevented a woman from reaching her salvation. Oh wait, you mean this one of those religions we're allowed to forcibly eliminate because it's new? Sorry, I forgot myself.

Correction told his story about changing from being an atheist to a believer to his Church interviewers.#

After I left, I drove home in a strange mood. What if, I suddenly wondered, the real me was in no way the person that they were looking for. Had I offended anyone? Jesus, did I unwittingly say "fuck" at some point? I mean, I didn't think I had, but who knows? I went back and reviewed the conversation in my head. Nothing too horrible leapt out at me. At one point I'd said something like, "It's especially difficult for men sometimes to open up to each other. We don't generally do it unless we're with really old friends, or filled with the holy spirit, or. . . you know. . . unless we're really drunk." That was probably the most off-color thing I'd said. But still . . . I had told them the shower story.

Ming the Mechanic writes about being New Age and having various belief systems, or not.#

The New Age became a little too mainstream at some point. Where before it was a bit of an underground activity, pursuing experiences and wisdom out of the ordinary, where the rest of the world was really rigid, limited and analytical. But somehow it became something more watered-down, commonplace, lacking distinctions. So that New Age for many became synonymous with flakyness and lack of critical thinking. Or it became synomynous with "anything goes" and that any weird idea or practice is equally valid as any other. And it all became a good deal less useful. So, personally, I will continue to stretch the boundaries of my existence, and I will continue to choose the tools in my life that work, even if others think they're strange. But I'll probably evaluate things one at a time, and certainly avoid assuming that I'm part of a group that all shares the same views.

Life is a rather fantastic thing in the first place. Full of experiences and possibilities and insights. They might be small or large, deep or shallow. But you don't really need to invoke any fancy belief system to talk about it. The experiences and what you think and feel about them might be enough. And of course you can notice the patterns that link things together. But part of my different perspective is that I try to avoid having all the answers in advance, and rather keeping my mind open to the newness of things.

The Binary Circumstance writes, in response to Correction who wrote yesterday about a Christian/Atheist dialogue/friendship, on mysticism and reason in general.#

Many atheists, however, face the same problem. Lacking an image of a supernatural Supreme Being to guide them, they can turn to their subjective emotions or man-made authority figures like government to guide them. This is in no way an improvement over theistic religion.

As Ayn Rand pointed out, mysticism is mysticism and religion is only one of its many forms. Mysticism is a belief that cannot be suppported with evidence. Any beliefs that cannot be supported with objective evidence damage the human mind in much the same way, by destroying the ability to think rationally and objectively.

While I'm a big fan of BC's style and his theories, I must point out that he often seems to imply a great deal that religions are particularly evil and thus nothing good can come from them. I would not necessarily defend any of them but I would not write them off in the entirety just yet.

To use Christian imagery, Sin is a corruption of Love, that which is good. This is to say that evil cannot create anything on it is own and must always be accomplice to some fallen good. I see the majority of religions as a corruption of good ideas. That is, in BC's language, Faith is corrupt of Reason--and often times the original Reason corrupted can still be salvaged or studied for future benefit.

Example: Most science, seemingly to this armchair intellectually, stems from a root of religion's trying to better understand the world and their God. Isaac Newton was famously religious, as was Einstein. Georg Cantor created the study of sets and the ℵ as a way to understand the infinitude of God.

Example: Ethics and philosophy owe there existence to Religion and the constant attempt to reconcile Faith and Reason has led to many scholars trying to better understand the world and Man's relationship to it.

I'm not saying that this is the only way to achieve these goals, but I think it is dishonest and biased to denounce religion altogether. The BC did not explicitly do this, but it caused to think about people who would use such an argument to claim that religions can never do anything right.

It is a classic means vs. ends. The means were poor, but the ends were good. It is my opinion that we should appreciate good ends no matter what the means, because it is in the past and you can't go back. But we should learn from the means and not repeat them.

Ryan Overbey writes about when cultures have to lend one another a hand in the face of fascism and preservation of history.#

We can only hope they fail. If these people ever acquire real power, the collections at BORI will be in danger. How to solve the problem? Simple. Move the collections to places where real scholarship isn't threatened by religious mobs. Why not let an American or European museum assume temporary care of the collections for digital scanning and preservation? That way, even after the collection is back in India and the VHP/BJP/Shiv Sena goons burn every last cultural treasure they get their grubby fascist hands on, we'll still at least have indestructible digital copies.

The Revealer on Indian Fascists.#

Case in point: Cows. According to Bhargava, "the first movement for cow protection was initiated at the end of the nineteenth century and sought to unite all Hindus against the alleged barbaric practices of Muslims that threatened the natural order of Hindu society…. The permanent subtext of such campaigns is their anti-Muslim character: all Muslims are assumed to be beef-eaters, a permanent body of cow-slaughterers."

"I see the cow issue," a Hindu nationalist leader remarked recently, on the fight to save the bovine, "as part of the global struggle against jihadi fundamentalism."

Sappho writes about the Da Vinci Code and in the entry Peter Sean Bradley describes the book:#

I'm about 200 pages into the thing, and I may simply call it quits. I'm amazed at how poorly written it is. Brown has a tic common to hack writers of having adjectives sell the story. So, we have the "renowned curator" run into the Grand Hall in the first sentence. He creates character by physical description. Langdon is Indiana Jones and, of course, the villains are deformed or mutant. (Talk about your implicit Gnostic belief that the world is evil - evil deformed people commit acts of evil because they are physically deformed and, consequently, evil.) Likewise, Brown has this literary device of infilling his tendentious background by "remembering lectures." This device just gets annoying after a while, particularly since he never relays his recollection to the person who asked a question which kicked off his recollection. Then, there's the device of "convenient stupidity" that afflicts characters at various moments. Thus, the bull-headed, bullish inspector never stops to wonder why and how it is that a cryptographer is relaying a message to a murder suspect from the American embassy.

I'm going to make an attempt to finish the book and do a review on my site. But I was surprised how poorly written it is. I guess it is par for "airport literature," but there are better writers out there, like John Sayles, for instance, who actually bothers to research the stuff he's writing about.

Correction writes about being Christian together.#

There are my friends and family, most of whom have been terrifically supportive of me. But there are also some friends, I think, who feel that a distance is growing between us. Maybe they're afraid that I'm going to become pious and sanctimonious. I suppose that fear is understandable. If you're having a big drunken bash, do you really want to invite the pastor? Do you want him to join your rock band? Do you want him around when you're trying to meet girls? I think not. Which is sad because I like parties, and I'm a really good bass player, and . . . well, I don't have any need to meet girls at this point in my life, but you get the idea. I know that some of my non-Christian friends, who knew me when I was an atheist, feel as though I've gone off the deep end. Maybe they're afraid I'll proselytize to them or something.

AKMA writes about the unargued stance that religions in the world should be about peace.#

Let's ask the difficult question (that I wish an editor had asked): On what authority does Karen Armstrong determine that "religions" should be about peace and justice? Granted what any casual observer of world politics can see — that is, that adherents of every brand name of religion find in their faith the justification for killing others and for acts that Armstrong evidently finds unjust — on what basis does she claim that they misunderstand their own faiths? Is she claiming to be a wiser Islamic theologian than the imams of Wahhabism? A sounder rabbi than leaders of Israel's extremist leaders? A more reliable Christian theologian than a just-war apologist for the Iraq Conquest? A more enlightened Buddhist than the leaders of Sri Lanka's war against Tamil insurgents? In a word, on what basis does Armstrong make her case for peace?

Richard links to Susan Jacoby who writes about the American tradition of secularism.#

This deep sentiment was expressed in letters to newspapers during the debate over ratification of the Constitution. One Massachusetts correspondent, signing himself "Elihu," summed up the secular case by praising the authors of the Constitution as men who "come to us in the plain language of common sense, and propose to our understanding a system of government, as the invention of mere human wisdom; no deity comes down to dictate it, nor even a God in a dream to propose any part of it."

The 18th-century public's understanding of the Constitution as a secular document can perhaps best be gauged by the reaction of religious conservatives at the time. For example, the Rev. John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York City minister, denounced the absence of God in the preamble as "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate." He warned that "we will have every reason to tremble, lest the governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than individuals, overturn from its foundations the fabric we have been rearing and crush us to atoms in the wreck." But unlike many conservatives today, Mason acknowledged — even as he deplored — the Constitution's uncompromising secularism.