Recently in Matters of faith Category

As reported by CNN, UCLA has refused to offer academic credit to some Christian schools' courses on science and history, jeopardizing the admissions prospects of graduates from those schools. Good for UCLA and the UC system.

One religious school administrator offered this other-worldly defense of his school's academics:

Our teachings reflect that God exists ...whereas UC wants courses to be taught from a perspective that there is no God.

And one student offered this defense of her religious school's curriculum:

When you look at our science curriculums -- we're given every theory from intelligent design to evolution... whereas it's more narrow in public schools so I think we're given a broader spectrum.

Sure, that's great. But it's fair to say that, at any school where creationism is taught as a legitimate theory, evolution will be taught as a weaker cousin. In other words, such a school intentionally places its ideology above the ideology of empiricism, which drives American higher education.

So they've made their choice. And choices have consequences. They'll need to go to Azusa Pacific instead of UCLA.

Barack Obama has been accused of a great crime - of feeling sympathy for ordinary Palestinians. To counter this charge, he has demonstrated on his current world tour that he will tilt more toward Israel than most Israelis would. Let's consider a better way:

1. Consider the practical benefits of neutrality. When U.S. politicians conclude that God gave Israelites enduring control over Canaanites and Palestinian Arabs, the world criticizes our unfairness and we violate our own separation of religion and state.
2. Exhort Muslims from Morocco to Pakistan to get on the therapist's couch and stop playing "vicarious victim." They can do more to get Palestinians on their feet, but they often prefer to complain.
3. Even if we remain "Israel's good friend," we can critique it constructively. Many Israeli citizens are such critics, and they are not "mere self-loathing Jews."

A new Fields poll shows that Californians tilt toward allowing gay marriage. This will be seen as bad news by religious conservatives who believe they are doing the Lord's work in upholding traditional views of marriage.

As someone who has gay friends and friends on the religious right, I find all this to be a puzzlingly high-schoolish issue.

Those who are exemplars of monogamous commitment and who detest promiscuity are trying to keep one community from practicing fully sanctioned monogamy. Those who should be celebrating their freedom from traditional rules are demanding, "I want a ball and chain too." As a single person who is ambivalent about marriage, I imagine that one solution to all the political fighting would be to allow gay marriage but to outlaw divorce. That would make many gays say, sensibly, "who needs marriage?"

As for religious conservatives who believe that they must ensure that marriage is a sacred, lifelong union of one man and one woman in order to raise a stable family, I am not sure why they put more importance in protesting gay weddings than in protesting Brangelina, who has done much to popularize infidelity, divorce and shacking up within the straight community. I believe the answer is that the former is, at this point, still an easier target. But this will inevitably change.

Traditional morality and the "clear" teachings of Scripture meant that conservative churches frowned on divorce and remarriage just a generation ago. Now, pastors themselves can divorce and remarry while pontificating about how gay marriage undermines Biblical authority. A conservative friend, commenting on the ongoing battle among Presbyterians on gay ordination, complained to me last night about how his church allows practicing gays into membership. I told him that his church doesn't bar from membership or even leadership those who engage in various forbidden activities such as gossip, slander, gluttonous materialism, hatred toward others, and so on.

The difference is that, in such religiously conservative communities, there is great empathy for such persons -- they are "sinners like myself." But to them, gays are "sinners totally unlike myself." The reaction is a more visceral, "Ew, how can anyone do that?" That's why they have come to accept divorce but not homosexuality, even though divorce was more expressly forbidden by Jesus and even though divorce has far greater ramifications for the majority of society.

I suppose that religious conservatives' visceral reaction to "others" is something like my reaction to "saggers," who are now being banned in Flint, Michigan. Ban the butts! But I also understand that some "sins" are a matter of taste, and that we are better off dealing with more substantive issues such as how to pay for a half-trillion dollar war.

Ultimately, until religious conservatives convince the rest of society that the yoke that they seek to place on others is no heavier than the one they place on themselves -- and that it is not based on a matter of visceral personal taste -- will lose political battles inside and outside their churches.

A "clash of civilizations" could become self-fulfilling prophecy, especially as politicians and partisan pundits use anger at Muslims to redirect attention from domestic failings. Americans and the Muslim world are polarizing increasingly. Consider the manner in which Investor's Business Daily (subscription only) subtly conflates "Muslims" and "enemies" in a July 3, 2008 editorial on Pakistan and Pervez Musharraf:

Rewind to 9/11 and imagine the strongman of a Muslim country sheltering bin Laden and dictating to the White House the terms of how we can bring him to justice... If we were reliving those raw days -- back when we were still pulling bodies from Ground Zero -- we would justifiably tell this Muslim leader to stand aside while we invade the territory where our enemy's holed up. And we would withdraw not a moment before we flushed him out of hiding and put his head on a pike... Ultimately, the commander-in-chief must decide who's running this war against Muslim terrorists -- him or a Muslim general.

Imagine if the word "Muslim" were replaced above by "black" or "Jewish" -- you would find it hard to believe that the writer would escape a sharp rebuke.

This piece also shows that the newspaper's editorial board is obviously unaware that Musharraf resigned from the army more than six months ago; and the piece revealed great ignorance on many other issues too. I wish that they would all sit down to carefully read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars before they attempt to make sense of who caused what in that part of the world.

Here are some fascinating findings from the Pew people.

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of their professed faiths.

For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that "many religions can lead to eternal life," including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

As an ex-evangelical who was worn down by years of internal criticism that I wasn't Christocentric enough, I wonder if most evangelical pastors and theologians would see this statistic as a good thing or a bad one. I'm tempted to believe that most would be inclined to see it as a case of weak theology, as an example of how society's prevailing pluralistic assumptions have eroded the laity's ability to acknowledge "Solus Christus, Christ alone" -- but when confronted with the charge that evangelicalism is narrow-minded and chauvinistic, they will quickly roll out these same statistics to counter that charge.

Meanwhile, the Catholic wing of Christianity continues to take a fascinatingly open-minded approach (I say this to butter up my boss at this site!).

As Israel nears her 60th birthday, this is major food for thought: Hamas airs a "documentary" showing that Jews supposedly plotted the Holocaust to weed out the weak and gain international sympathy. They release it just a couple of weeks before the day when the world remembered the victims of the Holocaust. The media largely ignores this outrage, because Hamas represents the "persecuted" Palestinians. I write about the lessons we need to learn from this -- with the insight of my pal Valerie Harper, who took her amazing Golda Meir character to the big screen recently -- in my column this week:

"Sadly, as we marked this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, 'never again' seems further from reach than ever. Jews continue to be targeted, be it in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or the repeated desecration of Jewish graves in Berlin. Holocaust denial has became accepted as legitimate thought in some circles and has become a foreign-policy talking point in the regimes of others.And when I, a gentile columnist, have written about the outrage of Holocaust denial, I've received far too many letters defending the deniers.

'Jews don't care about anybody but the Jews,' wrote one Canadian reader. '...Only a fool would trust a Jew to play fair with gentiles. ... They're laughing at you for falling for their lies. Don't be such a sap.'

Hamas is doing its best to stoke that disbelief in the true nature of the Holocaust, while fanning the flames of hatred for the Jewish people.

On April 18, Al-Aqsa TV - which brought Palestinian kiddies Farfour the martyr mouse and Assoud, the Bugs Bunny rip-off who vowed to 'eat' the Jews - aired an 'educational' program that accused Jews of perpetuating the Holocaust to weed out the weak among their ranks and simultaneously gain international sympathy.

This, of course, walks a fine line with Hamas' contention that the Holocaust never happened..."

Read the whole thing!

And if you want to be even more depressed, read the reader comments, which include this gem from a woman in Redondo Beach:

"Holocaust 'denial' is a misnomer. Nobody denies the Holocaust. Some people have noticed irregularities with some aspects of the official holocaust story and have raised questions. For example, why haven't the mass graves at the death camps been opened up to estimate the number of victims and see what we can find out about who they are or how they died? Why hasn't anybody demanded information about a relative they believe was murdered in one of the death camps? How exactly did the gas chambers work and how did they dispose of all the bodies?

All reasonable questions but instead of answers, you get called a bigot and anti-semite for asking them. For that reason, people will continue questioning the holocaust. It's not bigotry that leads people to holocaust revision, it's simply curiosity."

To which one reader from New York responded:

"Christina, I could not agree with you more. It's not bigotry to find the truth. The real bigots here are the stiff-neck mutated counterfeit jews that reasons with their own vile vehement that spews forth without intelligences, along with their brain dead following.."

Feeling truly ill yet? There was a positive comment over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to lift one's spirits (the last line cracked me up, anyway):

"I'm surprised the PI let Bridget Johnson's opinion on here.

The popular opinion on the far left is that the Jewish people and Israel are the root cause of all violence, poverty and hate in the Arab world. Without Jews, none of it would exist.

I'm sure they would have felt sorry for them as they were being cooked early in the late 30s, had they been around to see it, but now that they have recovered, prospered and are white and wealthy, they are a target.

Hamas could fry babies, and they do in a sense, and they would be the noble ones to the far left, because they aren't wealthy.

Keep the faith Bridget and if your letters smell of lattes and incense, save yourself some grief and throw them away."

My column from a few weeks' back about Ben Stein's "Expelled" -- which posited that the movie should be taken as satire -- has been affirmed by none other than its screenwriter, Kevin Miller, who calls my review "brilliant."

This is, I think, a remarkable endorsement, considering that I called the movie's tactics "nasty" and "unfair," and described some of its main arguments "a stretch" and "a cheap shot."

That Miller doesn't take offense to these descriptions suggest that I was right in my understanding of the movie:

Stein's film is part parody of, part rebuttal to, the crusading atheists who have risen to prominence in recent years - such as Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. And it employs the same nasty tactics they have perfected.

By the way, some have asked where they can find the video I wrote about in my column's lead. Here ya go:

And momentarily, the smell of sulphur left by Hugo was washed away...

On Easter Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI baptized Magdi Allam, an Italian newspaper editor and a former Muslim, into the Christian faith. And ever since, various Muslim, secular, and even Christians have denounced this high-profile conversion as reckless and needlessly provocative. Allam, they argue, should have received the sacraments quietly, without all the attention and papal fanfare that could harm interfaith dialog and offend Muslim sensibilities.

But in terms of shock value and provocation, Allam’s conversion has nothing on Bl. Anthony Neyrot’s.

Neyrot, who celebrates his feast day today, was a Dominican brother living in Sicily in the Fifteenth Century. While sailing to Naples, Moorish pirates captured his ship, then sold him into slavery in Tunis. There, Neyrot would win back his earthly freedom by rejecting Christianity in favor of Islam. He was adopted into the Tunisian king’s family and took a wife, leaving his vocation, his order, and his faith behind.

It's quite possible Anthony would have died an apostate were it not for the intervention of his former Dominican prior, who had only recently passed away — St. Antoninus. Antoninus appeared to Anthony in a dream, the message of which was so profound that it spurred Anthony’s repentance. Neyrot sought out a priest, confessed his sins, sent his wife back to her family, and was readmitted to his order.

But his reversion didn’t end there. Anthony wanted his return to Christ to be as public as possible. On Palm Sunday of 1460, Anthony appeared at a procession before the Tunisian king, wearing his white Dominican habit for all to see. He publicly denounced his conversion to Islam and proclaimed his restored devotion to Christ.

Now that's a provocation.

Writing for public consumption is always interesting. What I intend and what the readers get are often at odds. Usually I take full responsibility for this, since it is my job to communicate. Yet, when readers “get” such wildly different understandings of my message, I put some of it on the readers. Writing is, something of a Rorschach test and what someone sees or understands may say more about them than what is on the paper.

)">">That some people read my piece on Obama (Can Obama win with a third impression? Daily News April 6: as strongly anti-Obama, while others thought I was being overly kind to him, is pretty normal. People can see my observations, criticisms and suggestions as hypercritical or defensive. I think that his actions and inactions raise legitimate questions for all voters—and we will answer them differently.

My piece was very specifically a report on how I saw a portion of the electorate, the Jewish portion, reacting to Obama and the questions raised by Pastor Wright’s repeated clips. It was not about what it was not about; which is to say I was not reporting on all Jews, all Californians or all Democrats. I was not making a judgment on the fitness of the candidate. It was a limited topic, but I believe a valid one, and apparently it was both interesting and controversial. It is somewhat pleasing to have responses from London, England, Johannesburg, South Africa, Washington DC, Dallas and San Antonio, Texas—as well as the more expected Van Nuys, California.

That said, some of the comments both to my personal email and on the discussion page raise troubling questions about how we see each other as citizens of the world, Americans, Christians, Muslims and Jews and how we communicate with each other. Is communication meant to build a bridge, change a mind or to insult and punish? Writers and speakers should know their objective before writing or speaking.

I was disheartened by Chris in Dallas who wrote: “We Americans are getting tired of hearing from Jews about this politician or that politician loosing (sic.) support from Jews. Who cares if a politician is loosing support from Jews.”

Here’s the thing about this kind of unkind locution: Jewish citizens of America are, well, Americans. Those of us who are citizens are fully American and have viewpoints that give us a right to have and share our views and perspectives. Jewish Americans have legitimate interests. Remember that citizens of our nation who live in California are Americans, and Texans can be proud Texans, loyal Americans and Jews—all at the same time. I know this since I have family from Corpus Christi, now in The Woodlands who are patriotic Americans, life-long Texans and Jews.

My neighbors in the San Fernando Valley have particular concerns about services in the Valley and how we are treated or ignored by greater Los Angeles. These are narrow concerns but none-the-less they are real and important.
I believe that Texas, California and the District of Columbia can have special interests and make requests of our national candidates to see how they will serve our interests. We then get to decide for whom—or more often, against whom—to vote.
Gabi wrote from Johannesburg: “As usual, the Jewish community is only concerned about what is best for Israel. Not what is best for America.” This comment, like Chris’, assumes that the Jewish community (or the Muslim community or the San Fernando Valley community) is both monolithic and monomaniacal. Neither is true. Gabi’s comment asserts that American Jews are only concerned with Israel and not patriotically attached to America. This is an unwarranted assertion. We can care about more than one thing at a time. We can care about family, tribe, community, state nation and even foreign nations. I must assume that Gabi in South Africa cares about both South Africa and the larger world—particularly the Middle East. If he can multi-task, so can we.

One single geographic, political, social, international or religious issue might or might not be decisive. There being no perfect candidates, we all have to come to our own best sense of what serves our complex constellations of interests and concerns.

In the American Jewish community, most of us are interested in Israel, in its survival and in peace. This does not imply a rejection of Arab, Muslim or Palestinian needs and desires. Peace will involve their interests, and they too have every right and responsibility to ask questions of the candidates and express their own concerns. It would be un-American for them not to.

I believe we communicate—or try—in order to build bridges. It is simply self-indulgent to burn them. Bridges are difficult because while under construction they are supported by a flimsy scaffolding. As we build bridges with words made of air, ink or vibrating electrons, they are precarious structures. We can only bridge the real and important gaps with an attitude of good will, generosity and respect.