All Posts Tagged With: "religion"
Obama’s Place in History
Buck already covered Obama’s speech and voiced a pretty much identical opinion to my own. But I just wanted to note this: at this point, we have seen Obama give probably the best speech on the confluence of race and politics, as well as the best speech on the confluence of religion and politics, that we have seen in at least a generation, not to mention one of the greatest speeches at a party convention, which itself might be described as one of the best speeches on the confluence of partisanship and politics. He’s also written one of the few political books by politicians that people seem to actually like.
Yes, those are all just words. But they’re also ideas – ideas of great substance that possess a power and a depth and a level of nuance that most politicians dare not express. Obama’s presidency would make history in a number of obvious ways, but I’m beginning to suspect that its greatest contribution might just be that it creates a successful model for other politicians to treat Americans as though they are actually intelligent human beings. Or maybe this will just be unique to him. Either way, this is a moment to savor.
Obama: On My Faith and My Church
Obama quickly responded to the political controversy of the day: several controversial statements from past sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Instead of making a public statement, he wrote this Op-ed for the Huffington Post.
Harvard, Muslims, Women, and Blogs
So Harvard University recently enacted a policy in which its gym is open exclusively to women for six hours a week in order to accommodate the religious customs of Muslim women that make it difficult for some of them to work out in the presence of men.
What follows is a spectacular encapsulation of all the danger and promise that the blogosphere offers.
First, Glenn Reynolds asks whether the Harvard policy violates the Massachusetts anti-discrimination law.
Eugene Volokh then puts together a thoughtful if somewhat technical post responding to this question. Volokh first quotes a press release from Professor John Banzhaf saying that the policy probably is a violation. But then Volokh suggests that the relevant statute wouldn’t apply to Harvard, and so it isn’t a violation.
Andrew Sullivan, in a post titled “Sharia at Harvard,” makes my ugh-o-meter go off the charts by responding to the policy thusly:
They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What’s next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.
Matthew Yglesias, in response to Sullivan, points out that Harvard and every other institute of higher education, as well as every elementary and high school in the country, shuts down and creates a holiday that just happens to coincide with Christmas, whereas no such holiday is created for Passover. He adds that when he was a student at Harvard there was a policy against starting any kind of fire in dorm rooms and that there was a movement to create an exemption for Jewish students to light Hannukah candles, arguing that such an exemption “certainly wouldn’t constitute the dawning of a new era of Jewish theocratic rule at the university.”
Noah Millman at the American Scene then takes the whole thing up a notch and asks, “Does anyone think Harvard would have made allowances to male Muslim students who didn’t want to exercise around women?”
Phew!
Honestly, I don’t know what to think about the Harvard policy. I would have to know more about how much of a burden such a policy places on the men who want to work out at the gym. In the end, I doubt that I would find it objectionable.
But what this whole thing does illustrate is what the blogosphere is good and bad at doing. On the one hand, the post by Volokh shows how much easier it is now for a casual observer to get a more detailed, expert analysis of the questions surrounding a particular issue. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan’s post shows how easy it is for bloggers to shoot off emotion-driven posts that oversimplify the issues in order to advance a sexier, culture-warrior sort of argument. On the third hand (we’re bloggers, we have lots of hands), Yglesias’s post shows how easy it is to smack somebody down who says something stupid. And on the fourth hand, Millman’s post shows how the blogosphere creates an atmosphere in which quirky, original ideas and questions can come forth and bubble up to the top if they pique people’s interest.
On the whole I feel pretty good about it.
The Church of the Great Programmer
Last September, I included in my future history a mention of The Church of the Great Programmer, which was dedicated to finding ways to level up faster in the great Multiplayer Game in which we all exist.
Yesterday, I ran across this discussion (h/t to Future Scanner) on the physical evidence for our existence being a simulation. I was particularly fascinated by the speed of light being seen as the rate at which information can go across the big computer that’s running the simulation and the Planck constant being a measure of the size of one pixel.
There are also a number of philosophical concepts that impact on this–the problem of evil with a good Creator (evil is there so that we can get XP by defeating it,) epiphanies (I can write fiction after suffering a heart attack because I got enough XP to level up and get a new skill,) and even omniscence–since a game designer can not know things about what he’s created.
Hell, it even explains the NIU massacre–the player running that guy walked away and his little brother (who’s a total noob) ran the character and got it killed off.
Last I heard, there was about a 20% proability that all this was true. You engineers, and especially Todd, should read the full paper.
Tom
Movies, Churches, and Freedoms
So I live down the street from the Uptown Theater in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. It’s a great old single-screen theater with facilities and presentation that are probably the best I’ve ever seen (though the Moolah in St. Louis is up there too). I recently saw a screening of the final cut of Blade Runner at the Uptown and was very impressed, and I recently learned that it hosted the world premier of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. The point being that while I’ve only been living in DC for a few months, I’ve already grown rather affectionate toward this theater.
You can then imagine my disappointment when I learned that the Uptown is planning to rent out the theater to a virulently anti-gay evangelical megachurch. The McLean Bible Church wants to make the theater home to one of nine satellite “campuses” designed to create a “spiritual beltway” around Washington. The church’s senior pastor, Lon Solomon, has said homosexuality is a “bridge to despair, confusion, loneliness, depression, promiscuity, guilt, self-hate, loathing and self-destruction, but Jesus Christ can set you free,” and the church has an “Out of Darkness” ministry that offers treatment for various “forms of sexual brokenness,” including “same-sex attraction.”
Many of the residents of Cleveland Park have raised objections to the idea of their neighborhood becoming home to an extension of this church. The church needs a zoning variance in order to conduct its operations at the Uptown, which requires approval from the city’s zoning board.
The neighborhood’s Yahoo! group became host to much of the debate. One poster wrote, “I do not welcome any anti-gay or anti-lesbian group to the neighborhood. I will not tolerate hate groups.” Another wrote that he opposes the church’s “Hezbollah model toward establishing a theocracy.”
One gay resident disagreed, writing that it is “positively un-American to try to use the zoning law to keep a religious institution out of the neighborhood because you personally detest its theology and social and political beliefs.”
While the idea of the Uptown renting its space to this church makes me sad, I’m also uneasy about the idea of restricting it from doing so (it’s hard to argue this isn’t a First Amendment issue, right?). This is especially true since single-screen theaters like the Uptown have been struggling financially recently, and leasing to this church could help it stay in business and keep it from being “turned into a Walgreen’s,” as another gay resident of the neighborhood argued. I really love this theater, and if renting it out to hate-mongers keeps it from closing its doors, I feel like I have to say go for it, don’t I?
It is, however, utterly moronic that churches like this get tax-exempt status. The senior pastor says things like, “Any political candidate that espouses gay rights, we have a responsibility to ensure that they never get into office. If they do, the consequences to this nation will be dire…It’s a fight we dare not lose.” Why religious organizations get tax-exempt status at all is beyond me, but this isn’t even a religious organization, it’s a political one (and likely a fairly powerful one at that).
Anyway. The whole thing makes me a little depressed. Maybe I should go see a movie.
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week
My position-taking, at times, is a bit of a high-wire act. In recent days and weeks, my opposition to religious belief has been laid out in some depth (see the comments here and here for the most recent examples). In the somewhat more distant past, on the other hand, Billy and I have exchanged blows over my “political correctness,” or my tendency at times to call for restraint where others might perceive a free speech interest (most notably here).
There’s a fairly obvious tension here, and it comes to a head with issues like Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which is coming up this Monday. It was started by conservative academic David Horowitz in an effort to “confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the War on Terror and that global warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”
Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford and the editor of the Boston Review, and Glenn Loury, a professor at Brown, discussed the week on bloggingheads.tv (a fantastic site that everybody should visit regularly) here (the whole diavlog is good, but this the part about Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week). Watch the whole discussion, but what caught my attention in particular was this exchange:
Cohen: There’s a long tradition of thinking that Nazism was Christo-fascism, [that] this was Christian antisemitism. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but there’s a long tradition of thinking that by sincere and decent people, that this is Christian antisemitism’s ultimate expression. Now, I think it would be awful if people stopped talking about Nazis and the Holocaust in Germany and started talking about the Holocaust committed by the Christo-fascists, even though you can argue the case that those were the roots of that. And I think it’s absurd to think that Christians, whether Catholics or Protestants, whatever their form of Christianity, who think that the Holocaust was…a hideous evil, would say, “Oh, you know, Christo-fascism, that doesn’t mean me.” They’d be offended by it, they’d be disgusted by it. And the idea that it’s okay to talk about Islamo-Fascism because there are people who make a defense from within Islam for the use of terror[ist] bombings, that that makes it okay to talk about Islamo-fascism, I think that’s ridiculous, as ridiculous as thinking that it’s okay to stop talking about Nazism and start talking about Christo-fascism.Loury: Yeah, well, you know, when 50 Cent, the rapper, was being questioned aggressively about the use of “bitches” and “hoes” and all that kind of rhetoric, his answer on one occasion was, “Well, you know, there really are bitches and hoes in the ghetto.” And, I mean, the fallacy of the reasoning is that because one might be able to find an instance in which someone’s behavior might be more or less accurately described with one of these pejorative terms doesn’t undo the damage that’s done to an entire class of people by the routine use of the term… And the fact that there are Islamists who behave like fascists doesn’t undo what seems to me to be the damage done by the easy, widespread, public evocation of this construction.
This is tricky territory for me, since I’m always eager to point to Islamist terrorists as an example of how religion can damage a culture, but at the same time, I have to agree with Cohen and Loury on this. Disagreeing with religion because it can lead to dangerous ideas is entirely separate from using a term that helps to equate an entire religion with an evil ideology. I believe that religion in all forms hurts people, and that even moderate Muslims should abandon their faith since even their moderate adherence to religion enables a harmful method of thought. But nuance is essential here, and sensitivity to members of all religious faiths is paramount if atheists such as myself are to have any hope of not being pegged as hateful and intolerant. That goes for Christians, Jews, and everybody else as well.
It is wrong, therefore, to argue that Islam causes radical, terrorist ideologies, which the use of the term “Islamo-fascism” implies. It’s important, I think, for people not to make that mistake, or to make the mistake of arguing that Christianity causes homophobia or sexism. More accurately, religion enables these hateful ideologies, is used to justify these ideologies, and, most importantly, constructs an impenetrable wall around these ideologies because religion does not subject itself to reasoned analysis.
I don’t want to get into yet another debate over religion (we’ve covered that ground ad nauseam). I would, however, be interested in hearing some discussion on the use of the term “Islamo-fascism,” and whether it’s a term that is appropriate to use in our discourse.
EVIL RELIGIOUS LEADERS KILL INNOCENTS!
Oops, sorry, I’ve got that exactly backwards:
EVIL SECULAR LEADERS KILL PACIFIST MONKS
Burma is just one more example of what I’ve been saying in here for over a year–Religion is the brake system on the tendency of humans to do evil, particularly when they’re in positions of power. Keep in mind that those Buddhist monks don’t believe in a God any more than most of you atheists. Their faith, however, gave them the strength to oppose a truly despicable regime.
I pray for their safety and the eventual overthrow of their government.
UPDATE: As of noon Eastern time, it looks like the death toll is in the thousands. There are new photographs at the above site. What I want to know is, “Where all the activist groups that normally bitch about everything while this is going on? “
Tom
Political Humor from Bob Dole
This evening I’m flipping through pages of former Majority Leader Bob Dole’s book “Great Political Wit: Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House.” I’m a big fan of quotation books, particularly those with a healthy share of Churchill wit. Dole’s book is a light read, and an amusing collection. Each chapter begins with a story or reflection from Leader Dole and continues with a well thought out list of political quotes. Most of these will already be known to a serious fan of political history, but all in all, this is a solid little collection.
One quote that struck me in particular, probably due in part to Brenda Kay’s great column on teaching the Bible still going through my head, was a quote by a former U.S. Senate chaplain:
When Edward Everett Hale served as chaplain of the Senate, he was asked, “Do you pray for the Senators, Dr. Hale?”
“No,” he said. “I look at the Senators and pray for the country.”
Gay Drama Queens and the Psychology of Religious Belief
Via Andrew Sullivan, I read the following quote taken from an interview with Steve Schalchlin in the San Francisco Sentinel (Schalchlin has produced several successful musicals in SF):
Gay people who are raised in a religious environment, a conservative religious environment, are basically told, “You’re not good enough / you don’t belong here / you need to change / you need to be something else.” And so, in a lot of our lives, we end up leaving the church and hating god or hating religion or hating the whole nine yards. But an inherently spiritual person doesn’t really lose the core of their being. So it’s going to come out somewhere.I think that what we discovered is that it comes out of theatre, because theatre and church are essentially the same thing. They are story-telling, they are inspirational, and they are true. Theatre brings an even higher truth sometimes. Church basically repeats the same old story over and over again. I often wonder if that’s not one of the reasons so many gay people wind up getting into theatre. We’re always told that the reasons are because we’re used to hiding and wearing masks and being somebody else. But I think there’s something more profound.
As a gay man and an atheist, the quote captured my interest and got me thinking about the nature of religious belief. Here are my rather long-winded thoughts.
A while ago, I found myself in a conversation with Billy, Augur, and Jon about the truth and value of religion. It was an interesting conversation, perhaps because of the various positions represented: Billy the committed believer, Jon the agnostic, myself the atheist, and Augur representing a somewhat amorphous “religion is useful” position. In the course of the discussion, Augur argued that without religious belief, it becomes difficult to maintain a “sense of purpose” in one’s life.
The knee-jerk atheist reaction to this argument is to ask “who cares?” since it quite obviously provides no reason to believe religion is true, only perhaps that it is useful. Nevertheless, any atheist who wishes to persuade others should not ignore the power of this kind of reasoning. Whether it is intellectually honest or not, many people are religious believers because their faith helps them to organize their lives. Faith can help to resolve certain unanswerable or difficult-to-answer questions, from “How did the universe come into being?” to “What happens after I die?” to “Is there such a thing as moral rightness?” to perhaps the most psychologically fundamental question of all: “Does my life have meaning and purpose?”
And so it is rather important to squarely confront the “religion is useful” argument. Two of the most common responses to this argument are, in my view, entirely true but also somewhat evasive. First is the argument I’ve already mentioned: whether religion is useful has nothing to do with whether it is true. Second is the argument Christopher Hitchens relies upon: far from being useful, religion actually “poisons everything.” This position has been discussed ad nauseam, including on this blog.
But here’s the central problem atheists face: neither of these arguments can truly sway the man who says, essentially, “I believe God exists because I couldn’t face a reality in which he doesn’t.”
Atheists can use such believers to mock religion as nothing more than a psychological crutch, and while I think they’d be right, I also think their point is useless and often counter-productive. While atheists are good at a great many things, they have not so far been successful in finding a way to make atheism “warm and fuzzy,” so to speak, and it is this fatal flaw that until corrected will continue to make atheism wholly unappealing to a great many people.
And so I return to gay people and the theater. Schalchlin’s point in the quote above is quite sound. While obviously not all gay people turn to the stage, it has been seldom indeed that I have encountered a gay person who has not either (1) reconciled their faith with their sexuality or (2) created some other temple for their spiritual expression, whether the theater, the runway, the courthouse, or the Capitol. Rare is the homosexual who does not at least have an avid interest in either entertainment or politics, if not both. (The exceptions, of course, are many, most notably in those gay men and women whose spiritual exile has led to lives of little meaning beyond sexual promiscuity, or worse, who have surrendered their search for meaning and ended their own lives.)
This almost certainly helps to explain why the gay community is disproportionately useful to society (being on average better educated, wealthier, and more powerful), but more importantly, it helps to shed light on how exactly atheists can squarely respond to the assertion that without religion, it is too difficult to find meaning and purpose in the world. In reality, it is surprisingly easy to do so, and provides a more solid foundation upon which to live a productive, happy, and important existence. True meaning does not take form by making God a placeholder for all our gaps in understanding, and atheism does not open the door to nihilism, but rather to a universe of spiritual expression that is far more satisfying than can be found in any church or ancient text. We need to start saying so, and making a convincing case for it, or no matter how sound our arguments are, we will always find ourselves on the losing side of history.