Joking with the Dalai Lama on Australian TV

My sense is that the Dalai Lama would appreciate a good joke, if only he could understand it.

And what is it about Aussie accents that just sounds like fun?

New Yorker on Scientology

This fascinating article in the New Yorker is built around the stories of ex-Scientologist Paul Haggis. The article seems remarkably fair-minded and careful and Haggis himself seems remarkably sensible.

I do worry about the government poking around investigating organizations that, whatever they may be for those who run them, are genuine religious organizations for most of their members. It is so very easy for the powerful to go after people who are different, whether because of their sexual behavior, their politics or their religious views. Defending people who are different is in some sense integral to defending freedom itself. I would much prefer to see bad behavior around religious organizations brought down by information, as in the New Yorker piece, than by the state itself.

The Obama as Preacher

A different and I think quite insightful take on the State of the Union address by Robert Nelson of the Independent Institute.

His closing paragraph:

Unlike some of our previous presidents, President Obama barely mentioned God by name in his State of the Union speech (only once in the closing obligatory line, “God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America”). But his speech was Christian and specifically Protestant through and through. That is the way it is with religion in America in the twenty-first century. In our secular age, our thinking is no less religious, but the most important forms of religion are now implicit and at least partially disguised.

Indeed.

Addendum: clever readers will note the pun in the title of the post.

More on the "ground zero" "mosque"

Pieces from Christopher Hitchens and from the Economist.

Hitchens raises an important issue, which is at what point one stops tolerating intolerance. When I was in graduate school at Chicago, the philosopher John Rawls came and gave a big lecture on more or less that topic that attracted hundreds. He is not the most dynamic of speakers but the substance was on target, which is to say that he went into great detail making the point that this is a very hard question indeed. At some point, one can no longer tolerate the intolerant. I think that points comes when they present a serious threat to the persistence of a tolerant, liberal regime. In my view, we are nowhere near that point in the US.

The Economist rightly mocks the illiberal and un-American opposition to the "mosque".

Like Christian pop music, only better

There is a whole subculture of Christian this and Christian that, most of it consumed not by Christians in general but by particular subgroups within the broader Christian population who seek to isolate themselves, more or less, from the broader culture, as a means either of reducing temptation or simply of avoiding engagement. This site, on the other hand, illustrates an attempt to incorporate and Christianize one particular aspect of popular culture, namely hedonistic sexuality.

I suppose that Luther might like this; probably Paul and the Pope would not.

I find it fascinating to watch the interplay between religions, both secular and spiritual, and broader trends in popular culture. In many cases, like this one, religion ends up reacting to outside forces, rather than taking the lead in change. Similar interactions can be found in religious responses to environmentalism.

Marginally safe for work: naughty words but no pics.

Hat tip: my best friend.

Movie: Agora

We say this yesterday at the Main Art theater in Royal Oak. Royal Oak is the hippest of Detroit's many suburbs, a sort of cross between Rush Street in Chicago and Ann Arbor. It is worth an occasional trip outside the Ann Arbor bubble.

This movie raises the question of whether the cause of reason (or science, or feminism, you can have your pick) justifies lying about history. The director (who co-authored the script) wants to tell a moral story about bad fundamentalists and the trouble they cause. In so doing, though, he apparently distorts the history to serve his political goals. Here is a snippet from an excellent blog post on the history:

Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia's teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric "breakthrough" and Hypatia's supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasise the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar [the director] needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.

I think the answer to the question raised by the movie is "no", so I found it irritating and preachy. A.O. Scott at the NYT, apparently part of the choir being preached to, is much kinder and seems to have appreciated the sermon.

I am no fan of fundamentalisms of any sort, and that includes the fundamentalist versions of atheism and secularism. I am very much a fan of getting the history right as history has much to teach us, most notably that things are rarely as morally obvious as this movie makes them out to be.

Addendum: if anyone can find a discussion of Agora on-line by an actual history professor, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

On Muslims near Ground Zero

This is such an easy one. Freedom means nothing unless it applies to people you don't like. Put differently, being an adult in a partly free society means leaving other people alone in their choice of leisure time activities and religious beliefs.

The right is embarrassing itself on this one and, indeed, is acting like the people they claim to hate rather than like people who understand the principles that animated the founding of this country.

More prosaically, the Muslim cultural center (or mosque or whatever, the point does not depend on which one it is) might well improve the neighborhood.

The link is via Sue Dynarski on FB

Addendum: a fine rant from Dan Drezner.

Addendum 2: Harry Reid caves in to the mob. This is called being a follower, not a leader. We could use some leaders on this issue. It is very much a teachable moment.

On performance measures for churches

It has always seemed to me that a good way to judge a church is by the relative amount of attention paid to the behavior of the parishioners versus the behavior of outsiders. On that performance measure, I don't think this church in Ohio does very well.

But bonus points to the strippers for sticking up for their side.

Via the Agitator

Religions in conflict at EMU

An interesting religion case is brewing in at Eastern Michigan University in nearby Ypsilanti. A Christian graduate student in the counseling program was kicked out because she refused to counsel gay people.

I disagree with the student's views but it seems like she should be able to hold them, and act on them when it is not majorly disruptive, as it clearly is not in this case, without getting kicked out of her program.

There are few things as moving as the intolerance of people who think of themselves as tolerant, in this case the EMU counseling faculty, who were even berated by the most recent judge to hear the case for being "unfriendly and arrogant."

Methinks maybe the EMU counseling faculty could themselves use some counseling, not least because their intolerance and posing is costing the Michigan taxpayer a lot of money.

Psychology and religion

From Slate, the story of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

There are indeed interesting issues of identity at play here, but I expect that this particular investigation, which consisted mainly of putting three people who imagined themselves to be Jesus together to see what happened, would not receive Institutional Review Board approval!

I wonder if the Three Christs researcher was friends with the Perry Preschool researchers? Ypsilanti is not a very big place.

Hat tip: the Agitator

8 Reasons Why God Hates Denmark?

Wow ... this guy is tough, going after Hans Christian Andersen, Legos, and Pippi Longstocking who, it turns out, is just part of a plot to make innocent girls "uppity".

More seriously, this sort of hate is just ignorant and sad.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Alert reader Daniel points out that the Landover Baptist Church is in fact a parody. I would add that it is a good one - it fooled me!

Addendum 2: several commenters point this out as well.

North American holiday mystery

This has puzzled me ever since I first realized it when I was on the faculty at Western Ontario: why is Easter a much bigger holiday in Canada than in the US, when most people in Canada do not go to church and most people in the US do?

Reading the Koran

The Boston Globe describes what sounds like a fascinating project on the historical development of the Koran and its links to other major religious traditions.

I have two quibbles. First, I think the article overstates the idea that Christians no longer think of the Bible as the literal word of God. I suspect that, globally at least, a majority still do, and certainly a large minority do in the United States. This, of course, does not solve the problem of differing interpretations, as the large number of different denominations that hold to this view attests. Second, I think the article underestimates the potential for rapid change within Islam away from the view that the Koranic text is literally the word of God. Several Islamic countries are quite well educated, such as Iran. When the Iranian government finally changes, as I expect it will soon, it would seem ripe for theological change as well.

Hat tip: marginal revolution

Buckfast for breakfast

A (legal) drug scare in Scotland around a mix of wine and caffeine produced by Benedictine monks and called Buckfast.

Best bit:

Nor, he said, is wine-making a sign that the monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St. Benedict, an accusation recently leveled by an Episcopal bishop.

“It’s always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine,” the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.

Amen to that!

Good to see, too, that religious competition is alive and well in Scotland between the Episcopalians and the Catholics!

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

And now for something completely different

This is a bit off the usual track of this blog but I liked this poem a lot when I heard it and thought I would put it up:

Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don'ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird,
But the God who knows only 4 words
And keeps repeating them, saying:
"Come Dance with Me."
Come Dance.

-- Hafiz (1320-1389)

Conservative Bible project

This amazing cultural artifact has been bouncing around the blogosphere the past few days.

There are many interesting things to think about here:

1. Are liberals (of either sort) really wordier than conservatives?

2. Is this the best example you have ever heard of where relying on the distributed knowledge of the internet masses is likely to produce a great big mess rather than a thing of beauty or truth? I think it may be such for me.

3. Is there perhaps a contradiction between not "dumbing down" the prose (and why pick on the NIV here and not the "Good News" bible or other similar populist abominations) and relying on internet amateurs to do a translation, rather than actual scholars?

4. Could this be a troll? That is, could this be lefties trying to make the righties look bad, rather than a sincere proposal? I assign some small probability to this state of the world.

We live in a varied and wonderful world, indeed.

Book: I'm Perfect, You're Doomed by Kyria Abrahams

This book tells the story of the author's upbringing within the Jehovah's Witness community. It is one part sociology of small religious groups, one part raucous coming of age tale and one part bittersweet tale of liberation. It was not quite what I was expecting - much funnier but also less meditative. It is remarkable for its forebearance for both the parents, trapped in their unhappy marriage and struggling on their own with lives in the church. More generally, Abrahams seems to recognize that even though being brought up as a Witness is a very different thing, and a remarkably totalizing thing, her parents probably would have been a mess even as Episopalians or Buddhists and she would still have had a bumpy teenage ride. The author also has a lot of tolerance for her own struggles along the way, which get pretty tough at times and are described without much apology or sugar-coating. I was heartened, after reading the book, to go on to the book's web page and see that things have settled down a bit in the author's life.

Bookslut review here, which captures it pretty well, though the review is a bit less positive than I am about the book.

Recommended, if the subject is of interest.

Idle hands

The economist does religion, poorly

The Economist's Democracy in America blog has a dyspeptic moment today and asks that the criticism that atheists can be fundamentalists too be dropped from acceptable discourse.

This is followed by two arguments. The first is that some fundamentalist religious people are terrorists and no atheists are terrorists, therefore atheists cannot be fundamentalists. A brief bout with a Venn diagram disposes of this one but this is left to the reader as an exercise.

The other argument starts by defining fundamentalists as those who do not change their beliefs in the face of evidence and then argues that because certain narrow types of evidence, evidence not even consist with some theistic models, have not been provided to certain atheists, that all atheists are not fundamentalists. Huh? How does the absence of certain types of evidence show that an entire group of people would change their beliefs in response to evidence, which is what is required to demonstrate that atheists could not be fundamentalists under this definition?

I have no brief for fundamentalists of the theistic, the atheistic or the political sort, but this post is just a tangled mess of poorly argued silliness. The economist can, and should, do better (or should reflect on the many benefits of the division of labor).

When the chosen does not choose

From the Guardian, a story of a reluctant lama. I like this bit:

By 18, he had never seen couples kiss. His first disco experience was a shock. "I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box full of smoke?"

From wikipedia, a partial historical analogue from the theosophical world.

Hat tip (on the lama): marginal revolution