Recently in Matters of faith Category

Just as necessity is the mother of invention, the fear of death is the mother of religion, of the quest for transcendence and the hope of immortality. Death makes us wildly irrational. Death, especially an untimely passing, is what turns ordinary and flawed people into martyrs and what turns ordinary and flawed politicians into enduring legends. Death makes hard people soft, death makes people ashamed to remember past sins and slights by the deceased, death makes every one of its victims stand larger in our memories as being bigger and better than they were. Death makes us lose all perspective -- and in so doing, death reveals much about us as poor, fearful, mortal creatures. In a week in which we are thinking much about the deaths of famous persons, that is all I will say about death.

Social conservatives will soon tire of liberals' snickering about the latest true confessions of philandering GOP would-be presidential candidates. I think the larger problem for the conservative faithful is that they've gleefully led a divisive culture war in recent decades, condemning media and universities for warping the values of the mainstream. So I don't think they convince others when they then blame innate human weakness for their own foibles; they'd been arguing that their way is better and healthier. If they're going to maintain that position, it would be more credible if they focused less on cultural street fights and moralizing on Fox News, which then leads to a loss of credibility when "life happens."

I was having dinner with a morally conservative couple a few years back, when the wife joked about how her husband was eyeing a fetching waitress -- prompting him to bellow, "How dare you?!?!" She withered, as did our evening. I realized he was outraged by the insinuation of "wrongdoing," but he seemed too defensive.

Now Todd and Sarah Palin, the parents of at least one sexually active teen who snubbed their moral teachings, are outraged that a talk-show host would poke fun of the Palins for having family problems. That's Letterman -- always irreverent and rude, regularly poking fun of Bill Clinton for being a slut long before even Monica-gate. Like it or don't, but the indignance is tiresome. The Palin teens are not "off limits," given how the McCain campaign exploited them. At last, Levi Johnston's assessment of the Palin parents indicates they're a bigger threat to the maintenance of conservative values than Letterman is.

Shephard Smith worries that anti-Obama violence is in the air, here in a clip from Fox. This won't be popular with those who feel that Obama's administration is planning on rounding them up for daring to oppose mandatory abortions. But Frank Rich argues that, just as it took McCain's best efforts to calm down the people calling the eventual US president a treacherous terrorist, the GOP's leaders must calm down the people who are signaling their intention to "put an end to the false prophet Obama." Camille Paglia, herself a critic of Obama, shares some concerns about the threats against him here.

This is my piece today for Foreign Policy mag's online version, part of a larger debate about "the Obama effect."

I'll go back to TS's request for "evidence" of Mark Steyn's bigotry.

Before giving specifics, I'll note that Steyn's comments consistently, over time, show a strongly anti-Muslim view that stingily refuses to give Muslim civilization any credit for its past successes. While Obama is trying to tell Muslims that they should re-embrace their own best principles, Steyn says Muslims have no principles to fall back on. Um, that's not a good way to engage them. Even if you believe they should all come to Jesus, I'm sure Diane would agree that getting them all defensive and angry about their tribal identity is not a good way to "share the good news." The mission committee doesn't teach that approach -- I know, I used to chair those kinds of committees in a former life.

As Philip Jenkins has written, people like Steyn demonize Muslims in much the manner that Protestants once demonized Catholics as representing a peril to America a century ago.

Here are the passages I question:

In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran...

That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it...

Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders....

The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

I've complained about Steyn before, notably here with my brother:

This "red-egghead" approach is exemplified by Mark Steyn, a hero of the religious right. "With every passing month," Steyn wrote in a recent column, there are more Muslims and fewer Episcopalians, and the Muslims export their manpower to Europe and other depopulating outposts of the West. It's the intersection of demography and Islamism that makes time a luxury we can't afford."

In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, he escalates his argument that Muslims are breeding fast enough to destroy all civilization within little Mariam's lifetime. Steyn is careful not to prescribe bombings, beatings or final solutions. He leaves that to the fertile imaginations of his rabid following. He has perfected the mixed message sent by America's leaders to Muslims: We will deliver democracy to your doorstep, and we believe that democratic institutions will speedily bring peace and enlightenment to your nations; but we so fear your irredeemable madness that we think your grandchildren will corrupt our own centuries-old democratic institutions and will bring the West to a new Taliban-like state.

If you want to read more unfiltered Steyn, try this, which strikes me as bigoted.

Again, while I write about this urgent effort on the part of Muslims to reclaim the best in their heritage, Steyn argues loudly -- against either evidence or good taste -- that they have nothing good in their heritage. That helps nothing except his own desire to be a rabble-rouser.

Finally, my brother and I concluded our piece with this: "Scratch a conservative, flag-waving intellectual, and under the surface you will see an America-basher -- one who complains that America lacks character and resolve, one who has no confidence in America 's transforming power, one who cannot trust America to defend its principles when they are truly threatened."

And Steyn proves that anew in his latest piece, with these silly words: "A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower."

I'm attempting to back away from this topic in the future. I never believed President Bush was a bigot, but I did believe he received fevered counsel from bigots. But I have no interest in giving attention to fading figures like Steyn, because I suspect they are like parasites that feed on attention and will straddle whatever line necessary to get it (which he proves by snidely citing criticisms like mine in his "Reader of the Day" section).

This New York Times piece is a fascinating look at an underreported aspect of the Mideast conflict.

We've talked a little lately about nuances as they relate to how our arguments are perceived by others.

I'd like to share two blog posts that I think are nicely nuanced, on the things that some of our readers love to spar about. Let's hear their thoughts on this one about Jesus' approach to gay marriage and this one on atheism vs. faith.

Diane speaks of compelling proofs of the existence of God. There are indeed some fascinating philosophical points to be made, notably Aquinas' famous contention that the cosmos must have a first cause and first mover, and that God would be the reasonable choice.

Sure, a Western theologian is very comfortable saying, "Okay, God must have come first, that's settled, now let's fight holy wars over theories of salvation." They laugh at questions like, "But who or what created/moved/caused God" because "He was always there, forever, sitting there by himself, until he decided to create stuff and people a few thousand years ago." But they think it's insufficient to say that the Big Bang came first, and/or that it may have been preceded by endless cycles of universes.

Why exactly is one more unreasonable than the other? I wonder if these "proofs" have been rigged in a certain way, to position what I want to believe as the only reasonable thing to believe.

But here's a bigger issue: The Aquinas-type proof involves a narrow set of assumptions that have been challenged in an age of pluralism. An Eastern view, say Buddhist or Taoist, presumes that the universe is an ongoing, endless process. The concept of a first cause is meaningless, because something would have preceded any first cause anyway. (The Taoists even attempt to capture that by sometimes talking about the Tao as the endless Creator of God.)

Diane defends religion from the attacks of David, which is puzzling considering that I'd imagine she considers people from most religions to be hell-bound anyway. But a classic religious view from the East sees the universe, again, as an endless cycle of processes: and in a true Buddhist view, life isn't a good gift from a Primal God, it's a process from which we are to extract ourselves.

For many throughout history and in our pluralistic day, that is more intellectually satisfying, and no more empirically implausible, than the idea that an eternal God only created one cosmos, somewhere between 6,000 and 13.7 billion years ago, and that he intends to wrap up all space and time sometime in the next few generations.

That does bring up another question. Does anybody know what percentage of the human population believes in the monotheistic God whose existence Diane says has been proved convincingly?

I've written recently about concerned Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans who are attempting to reclaim that country's future. One such group of progressives intend to rally at City Hall's South Lawn (200 N. Spring Street) on Saturday, May 30, at noon.

Their stated goals: to stop the Taliban movement in Pakistan; to embrace tolerance and acceptance for all there; to promote education and stability; and to denounce extremism in the name of Islam. You can write to the organizers at PeaceForPakistanRally@gmail.com.

I know there are cynics out there about who doubt that there is much compatibility between Muslims and the West. The quick case I'd make is this:
1. Human beings tend to play identity politics. When things go bad in our lives or our community, we do so with even more enthusiasm (as Eric Hoffer noted, the less we can claim excellence for ourselves, the more we claim ALL excellence for our tribe or religion or sports team. Because of problems in the Middle East and South Asia, we've seen identity politics there shift from love of country, within failing countries, to love of religion (where extremists can at least claim some hope of recreating a golden age that once existed).
2. If the West and the Muslim world were so inherently at odds, why was talk of a civilizational war so muted in the childhood of anyone over the age 30? Presidents from FDR to Reagan to the Bushes eagerly lined up to do business with Muslims in the Middle East, never worrying about incompatibility. The notion of a "civilizational war" is a recent development, a rallying cry for Mideast extremists and American talk-radio hawks who find it to be a wonderful ploy for maximizing their influence.
3. Identity politics depends on region and social conditions. Muslims act differently in Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation, than in Saudi Arabia, or in Orange County.
4. Being cynical about or combative against Islam only feeds into a dangerous polarization of societies. If people in the West condemn Islam as a whole, then progressive Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere, who are plentiful if a bit quiet, will by the reality of identity politics feel polarized into the very camp that we in the West want them to stay out of. Finger-pointing against poorly understood neighboring religions may make some Westerners feel superior, but it's not good form or good strategy.