Ambassador to the Vatican

I think it’s a weird idea that appointing an Obama-supporting Catholic (ergo, not strictly pro-life voting) to be ambassador to the Vatican would be an insult.  Henry Farrell argues that so far as Catholic orthodoxy has been defined on the issue, voting for a pro-life Catholic can leave you a Catholic in good standing.

More importantly, our ambassadors often have major disagreements with the countries they are assigned to.  It would be quite a poor American ambassador to Syria whose opinions were consistently congenial to the Syrian government.  The Vatican is made up of much nicer people, but that just means that there are many more issues where an ambassador’s opinions should naturally align with the Vatican.  On issues where they aren’t aligned, the situation should be the same.  Under any administration, Roe v. Wade, puts the US position out of line with the Vatican, and an Obama administration makes the disagreement sharper.

The policy of being delicate with the Vatican only makes sense so far as the issue is merely symbolic, and I doubt that’s the case–the Vatican is too political for that to happen.  If, for some strange reason, the Vatican would prefer a non-Catholic ambassador to present American pro-choice principles, there’s no reason not to appoint one–surely we should do what will get us the best results.  But this means positing a very weird sort of irrationality on the Vatican’s part–any ambassador worth having will be defending policies that the Vatican disagrees with.  If they’d prefer to avoid having a pro-life Catholic do that job, it’s hard to see what motivates that preference.

Sacrilege

Even the opening prayer was politically charged. “O God, we are in a battle that is raging for the soul of this nation,” the preacher said. “You, O God, have raised up Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin for such a time as this.” The preacher went on: “Help them, O God, to strengthen our economy, to keep our taxes and spending low . . . and grant them the privilege of being elected the next president and vice president.” (Source: Dana Milbank)

No other word for it.  This should be deeply distressing to anyone who thinks the Church is neither an arm of the state nor of the ruling party.

First Christian Mayor?

A few days ago, I frothed at the mouth over reports that Palin’s campaign had promoted her as Wasila’s “first christian mayor.”  Thankfully, I now have to reduce the outrage level to hypothetical frothing at the mouth.  While it’s still an incredibly nasty smear, it’s also unclear whether she ever made it.  While the Times article that I originally linked to made it sound as if the claim was part of Palin’s campaign against incumbent mayor Stein, both the Seattle Times and the Anchorage Daily News make it sound as if the quotation came from a television program broadcast after Palin’s election.  They also report that Stein responded in the Wasila paper after the election was over–circumstantial evidence that the claim wasn’t made until after her election.

None of this strictly contradicts the Times’ account being true, but both the sources that I mentioned seem more detailed, while neither repeats the Times’ version of events, so it would be unfair to assume that Palin or her surrogates made the “first christian mayor” claim as part of their campaign.  That’s all for the best, because it’s a nasty campaign tactic.

Interestingly, I’m not sure if anyone has really picked up this story–all I can find are syndications of the original article, then these two followups.  Not a lot of commentary, so I don’t know if we’ll find out whether and how the incident happened.

Extremism

I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”

“I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’ ” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”  (NYTimes)

I was raised a Lutheran, so this one is from the heart: get the fuck out of my country.

Communion Wafers and Rainbows

Daniel Davies has the best response to PZ Myers and his whole communion wafer saga.  Backstory: a student steals a consecrated communion wafer, and people start threatening him and calling it a hate crime.  PZ Myers requests that his readers get him a communion wafer to desecrate.  Davies thinks that’s dumb, and proposes that he tweak Myers’ nose by choosing to tell a small and impressionable child that the rainbow is God’s symbol that he would never again flood the Earth.

The brilliance of the response is its neutral character.  Aside from a misplaced reference to secular humanists, I don’t think Davies has a dog in the game: he doesn’t care one way or another whether children get told about God’s use of the rainbow, and he likes having some fun at the expense of the religious.  Davies isn’t Myers’ enemy, he just sees a blindspot in Myers’ bizarre obsession with issues that don’t matter.  I’m pretty sure that Myers isn’t motivated by religious extremists, and that it really does bother him that people tell their children stories about Jesus.  Which, even from the perspective of an atheist, doesn’t seem that important, since one of the fun things about children is that you can tell them silly things.

Predictably, people have hijacked the comments to explain that while a crackers are one thing, but the precious mind of a child is not to be tampered with (thereby showing the effectiveness of Davies’ idea).  No one would ever find these sentiments plausible if they didn’t already have an obsession with people’s religious practices.  My parents told me about Santa, and I am not only the smartest and most rational person I know, but probably the smartest and most rational living person.</hyperbole>  Some folks have a distate for the Santa story, but no one thinks it’s wrong.  You expect that kids will do what I did: sneak upstairs and overhear their parents talk about buying gifts that they then receive from Santa.  It doesn’t screw up the children–it’s more like training wheels for really questioning your parents’ beliefs.  Maybe it’s different because children aren’t quite praised for questioning God, but Davies doesn’t plan to spend a lifetime pressuring that child into religion.

On the Subject of Shooting Fish in a Barrel

It would be a lot easier to ignore self-evidently stupid ideas, as Megan McArdle nobly proposes that we do, if there weren’t so damn much of it. And it’s easier to ignore an idea if there’s a group of you ignoring it. But such coalitions are difficult to maintain, and so you end up pointing out that a given idea is stupid.

My complaint du jour is with Rod Dreher, who at the end of a post, casually tosses off the following line:

Here’s my question, though: If God doesn’t exist (that is, if there is no such thing as absolute moral truth), why shouldn’t the woman have sex with her brother? They’re careful not to risk reproduction, its always been consensual, they enjoy it, and they don’t feel guilty. So what’s the problem?

Interesting question how morality works without the existence of God, of course. Does Dreher ask it in good faith? Well, of course not, since if he did, he’d confront the same question that bedeviled the church fathers, namely how God’s existence or will mattered to morality. I assume that Dreher knows that “if God wanted you to do evil, would it be wrong?” is actually a very awkward question. He’s just saying this for rhetorical effect.

And the thing is, people care what Dreher says, not just people out on the “mainstream fringe” who apparently believe in divine command theory, but also people I expect to be more sophisticated.

Quote of the Day

The Wicked Bible of 1632 left the word not out of the seventh commandment: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” An edition printed in the reign of Charles I replaced the word no in Psalm 14:1 with a: “The fool hath said in his heart there is a God.” The first Bible printed in Ireland, in 1716, transposed two letters in John 5:14: “Behold, thou art made whole: sin on more.”

That’s from a description of Murphry’s Law, which is a good law, and one of interest to editors.

A Brief Summary of P.Z. Myers’ Blog Oeuvre

“Someone is wrong on the internet.  Well, two can play that game.”

Damn Yanks

There’s an irony to Rod Dreher’s post on Christians being told that they couldn’t minister to Muslims in Birmingham, UK–the two ministers who were stopped were Americans. Though they live in Birmingham, they apparently emigrated there for the purpose of proselytizing. They are also evangelicals, a group that is rapidly growing in the UK partly due to *drumroll* immigration.

Thus does the multicultural state collaborate in its own destruction. –Rod Dreher.

Indeed. Invite the Americans over and everything will go to hell.

Disclaimers: It goes without saying that proselytizing is not a hate crime, and it would be good if the officer involved were locked in a padded room where he can’t hurt himself trying to handle difficult concepts.

Islam in England

Mark Steyn notes a Church of England editorial according to which Islam is gaining ground rapidly enough in England that it will soon be able to claim that England is religiously a Muslim nation (it’s not at all clear what the threshold Islam will pass in 30 years is).  He calls this national suicide.

Leaving aside the Islamophobia, it’s quite clear that England will not identify as a Muslim nation anytime in the future.  Three possibilities suggest themselves, none of which follow Steyn’s scenario.  First, people might actually become more Christian in England, as a sort of identity politics, reacting to the growing number of Muslims.  Christian church going might become a way of asserting one’s difference from them.  I doubt this is likely, but this kind of reaction is a real phenomenon.  Second, people might get more aggressively secular.  Many secular folk regard the church as fundamentally harmless, having grown up within it or nearby it, but never having felt much impact from it.  However, confronted by an assertive and foreign religious group, they might begin to press the claim that religion has little place in society.  This is what has happened in France.  As their example shows, it may not be a benign development, but it also is not establishing Islam.  Third, Islam might be domesticated, with the conservative aspects of its religion practice diminishing in visibility and importance.  In light of that development people might happily live and let live.  That this domestication is not happening is the worry that possesses Steyn et. al.

They’re All Imams to Me

“Tariq Ramadan has emerged over the past decade as one of the most influential Muslim preachers in Europe.” (David Frum)

And yet, so far as I can tell, Ramadan is not a “preacher.”  He is an academic and a theologian, but he is not  a preacher or Imam (I’m not 100% clear on the terms applied to Islamic spiritual leaders).  I have no opinion on Tariq Ramadan, but folks like David Frum would sound smarter if they got rid of a few stereotypes.  He refers to the author of the book reading Ramadan’s sermons, but perhaps a pair of searches will reveal more.

Progress!

It’s almost as if Saudi Arabia is going to treat women as human beings–they’ll now be allowed to check into hotels by themselves.  Of course, just to be safe, they then have to show a photo ID and register with the police.  The king even might allow women to drive, if the public will tolerate that.

Quote of the Day

It’s all too early to label it the best, but here it is anyway from the BBC:

Pope Benedict was in charge of Roman Catholic doctrine in 1990 when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he commented on the 17th-Century Galileo trial. He has been quoted as saying the trial was “reasonable and just”.

Today’s Quotation

…the extent to which the “new atheism” — which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks — is specifically bound up with some problematic anti-Muslim sentiments. (Matthew Yglesias)

The bit about Muslims is what Yglesias thinks matters in his post, but I rather like the characterization of Hitchens and Dawkins (the new atheists Yglesias mentions by name).

More Biblical Weirdness

Or “The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses.” The Ezekiel verse that I found so striking a few weeks ago makes the list.

Do What, God?

So I don’t think the bible is a bad book, and I don’t think it was wrong for my parents to unworriedly watch as I read it in the church pew while I was in third grade. But let’s just go ahead and admit that this is a really weird book to give an 8 year old (ambiguously work-safe content after the cut):

Atheists Discover Quietism

Sam Harris moves up the list of “new atheists to read” with this quote

Then again, there may not be a sequel if Harris has his way: “We [atheists] should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.” (Source)

As it stands, the list is:

1. Daniel Dennett
2. Sam Harris
3. Richard Dawkins
4. Clever undergraduate papers
5. Pol Pot
6. Christopher Hitchens–While Pol Pot is probably a worse human being, Hitchens has more of a chance of causing harm to me.

Anthony Flew

Oh my. Anthony Flew is a well-known atheist philosopher who recently declared himself a believer in a deist God and a sort of intelligent design. Only as the Times article reveals, it looks much more as if he was manipulated by the people around him into writing the book.  I’ll just repeat what I wrote at Ross Douthat’s site:

as a graduate student in philosophy, it’s quite shocking to me that Flew would sign off as author of a book he did not write (this [norm] is probably common to academics of all stripes). Right now, I cannot think of a single major figure in the field who has done such a thing-it seems almost dishonest.* (*Followed this up by noting that I was not accusing Flew of dishonesty).

That by itself, with or without the more serious charges of manipulation, would suffice to make me doubt that this book was worth anyone’s attention.

Is This the New Intolerable Meme?

There’s a roundtable discussion being held at the America’s Future Foundation on the topic “Are Atheists the New Religious Right?” Of course I do not mention this to promote it. Other provocative titles I would recommend:

• Are Jews the new Hitler?
• Are moderates the new extremists?
• Are Democrats the new Republicans?

The problem is that while writing the title, some undergraduate was too concerned with providing a new snowclone to wonder if he actually had a coherent idea. What exactly are the grounds for comparing atheists to the religious right? All I’ve got is that each group can each be quite obnoxious about the subject of religion. Let’s hope our panelists have something better to say. I will note that at least one of them is not a sucker (and perhaps another follows suit).

Been Nice Knowing Ya, Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is at most one nicety away from advocating genocide against Muslims. If it were most anyone other than PZ. Myers saying it, I’d be skeptical, but Myers isn’t gonna bad mouth Hitchens just because Hitchens is a mean old atheist.