Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

Happy Easter

Labels: religion

The Mid West is More Religious than the Middle East
by Vikram Keskar - April 5, 2007

I was born, and spent the first 8 years of my life, in India. Next I spent a year in Kenya, a year in Saudi Arabia, 7 years in the UAE and now 3 years in Kirksville Missouri doing my undergrads. In between I have visited, on vacations, somewhere near 23 countries (including Germany and most countries in the Middle east). I don't mean to state all of this as a boast but merely to illustrate that I am not speaking from a limited or narrow experience.

Coming to the US my biggest shock was how seriously people took religion. It was a form of religious intensity that I had never encountered. In Saudi I had endured a totalitarian theocracy (is there another kind?) but I had never seen the man on the street be so wrapped up in their religion. I had never met people who defined themselves, first and foremost, on the basis of their religion. Yeah living in the Middle East I was aware of all the extremist fundamentalists. But they were the fringe. They were like UFOs. You only heard of them, you never actually met them in real life. None of my Muslim friends listed the Koran as their favorite book. They never included any suras as their favorite quotes. Sure there were Muslim mullahs on the TV but no one really actually listened to those programs. Anyhow they were TEACHING the Koran as opposed to PREACHING it.

So when I came to the US I was shocked, absolutely stunned at just how absolutely people believed the Bible. This was the first time in my entire life that I had a religious text cited to me during a scientific debate. When one of my dorm-mates tossed out the "Evolution is an unproven theory whit a lot of holes" line at me I didn't even realize that it was the opening line for a serious debate. For a second I thought it was a throwaway one-liner. He doubted evolution! Not just one odd guy, but dozens upon dozens came at me that night. I actually have met 3 different people since that night who actually doubt that the earth is more than a few thousand years old. I still can't wrap my head around this concept.

Another thing that has shocked me how strongly people feel about converting non christians to Christianity. This driven by the constant overarching belief that all non christians are wrong and are going to go to hell (something I have been told bluntly to my face). There is an inability to conceive of the fact that they might be the ones who are wrong. No one, not one single person in my 8 years in the middle east ever tried to convert me to Islam. Not once did anyone suggest that not being Muslim meant that I was going to suffer.

The problem with the mid west is the sheer homogeneity of it. Growing up in a culture where everyone is of the same religion as you, where everyone shares the same believes as you, i can see how anything different maybe considered strange or unnatural. Growing up I ate at iftar during Ramadan with my friends. They burst firecrackers with me during Diwali. We all went to Christmas parties. There was no awkwardness in celebrating religious festivals of a different religion. it never felt weird. But here in the US I cannot think of celebrating christimas. It somehow feel strange. And I am not the only one to feel so. Thats why Kwanzaa and Hanukkah are sort of celebrated/marketed as the christimas alternatives. Thats why malls are afraid of hanging up signs that say 'Happy Christmas'. Hell malls back home (in in the UAE) had gigantic banners saying merry Christmas, no one thought that was strange or somehow offensive.

Perhaps it come with being the worlds only super-power, but somewhere along the line the people of the US started taking themselves too seriously. Somehow the words 'under God' in a pledge have become so important that the Supreme Court needs to rule on this. I went to an Indian school where we recited the standard muslim prayer every day. Then we sang a prayer that appealed to a single almighty god. At no point did this offend the sensibilities of the mostly Hindu student population. We understood that emphasizing one religion does not necessarily denigrate another. 'Unity through Diversity' after all was the motto for India. Somehow this is a lesson that US has not yet managed to learn.

Labels: religion

Labels: religion

The 'Synagogue of Satan'
by Mark Potok


From a makeshift pulpit inside an Indiana Quality Inn, a baby-faced priest angrily denounces the Jews, saying they mean to "destroy all Christian nations."

In offices in State Line, Pa., an intense, bespectacled man tirelessly recounts how the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia "predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry" and warns of the Jews' role in the coming "New World Order."

At a gathering near the Philadelphia airport, men in priests' collars and brown monk's robes rage against the "Judeo-Masonic" conspiracy to destroy the Catholic Church, the "Marxist-Jewish" scheme to wreck American schools, and even an elaborate 9/11 plot, "predicted by the Blessed Virgin Mary 84 years ago."

For most Americans, the world of "radical traditionalist Catholicism" is so remote and little-known -- it entered the nation's consciousness, just barely, with revelations about the strident anti-Semitism of actor Mel Gibson and his father, Hutton -- that it may seem wholly irrelevant to the modern world. Is it really important what a group of people, many excommunicated and most gathered behind the walls of their monasteries and other institutions, think about the Jews? That many believe there was no Holocaust? That some say every pope since 1958 has been illegitimate, and a few even insist the real pope has been kidnapped?

The fact is, it does matter. As explained in a remarkable and sweeping story by the Intelligence Report's Heidi Beirich, the best estimates suggest there are 100,000 radical traditionalists in America, a number that appears to be growing. And while the size of this movement is dwarfed by the 70 million mainstream Catholics in this country, these energetic men and women are having an influence.

For one thing, the open anti-Semitism that characterizes the movement is leaking into other subcultures, some of them especially dangerous.



Navy officer under investigation for extremist activities
Navy Times
Published on March 19, 2007

Lt. Cmdr. John Sharpe Jr. looks like a naval officer sent straight from central casting in Hollywood: A fit-looking, gregarious 1993 Naval Academy graduate with short blond hair and eyeglasses, he looks just his part as public affairs officer aboard the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.

But in his off-duty hours, Sharpe operates Web sites that have landed him in a brewing controversy in this singularly Navy town. Accused of being an anti-Semite, he was temporarily relieved of his duties March 7 and is now under investigation for allegedly violating Navy regulations against supremacist activities. An editorial in The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot on March 15 slammed Sharpe, calling his ideas "crazy" and "dangerous."

Sharpe and his Web sites are on a "dirty dozen" list of anti-Semitic organizations compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a national organization based in Montgomery, Ala. [...]

Heidi Beirich, a law center investigator who has focused on Sharpe, said he is a "radical traditionalist Catholic" who believes that Jews, Masons and others have conspired to undermine the Roman Catholic Church for the past 300 years.

She called a 2005 speech she saw Sharpe give "quite the anti-Zionist screed," and said she witnessed him selling books at a gathering of a group, known as "American Renaissance," that welcomes activists to "help the cause of whites," according to its Web site.

Sharpe admits to attending the gathering but claims little knowledge of the group, describing it as perhaps "the white man's version of the NAACP." [...]

Beirich scoffed at Sharpe's apparent ignorance of American Renaissance.

"Literally next to him, in the next booth, was a guy selling ‘White Power' T-shirts," Beirich said. "You had to be an idiot not to know where you were."

Labels: religion, wingnuttery

"Losing Faith: How Scholarship Affects Scholars"


Several media stories recently reported that Bart Ehrman, a leading expert on the apocryphal gospels and one of BAS’s most popular lecturers, had lost his faith as a result of his scholarly research. This raised a question for us that is not often talked about, but seemed well worth a discussion: What effect does scholarship have on faith? We asked Bart to join three other scholars to talk about this:

James F. Strange, a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister; Lawrence H. Schiffman, a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew; and William G. Dever, one of America’s best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew and now says he’s a non-believer. The discussion took place in the offices of the Biblical Archaeology Society on November 19, 2006, and was moderated by BAR [Biblical Archaeology Review] editor Hershel Shanks.

Hershel Shanks: Bart, how did your scholarship affect your faith?

Bart Ehrman: First, I lost my fundamentalist faith because of my scholarship. Like Bill Dever, I have a fundamentalist background. I had a very high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God, no mistakes of any kind—geographical or historical. No contradictions. Inviolate.

My scholarship early on as a graduate student showed me that in fact these views about the Bible were wrong. I started finding contradictions and finding other discrepancies and started finding problems with the Bible. What that ended up doing for me was showing me that the basis of my faith, which at that time was the Bible, was problematic. So I shifted from being an evangelical Christian to becoming a fairly mainline liberal Protestant Christian.

What ended up making me lose my faith was kind of related to scholarship: When I was at Rutgers University, I taught a course on the problem of suffering in Biblical traditions, where I dealt with issues of theodicy throughout different Biblical books, both Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—

Shanks: What is theodicy?

Ehrman: Theodicy is the question of how God can be righteous, given the amount of suffering in the world. The issue as it’s usually put today is that if God is all-powerful and is able to prevent suffering, and is all-loving so that he wants to prevent suffering, why is there suffering? This problem isn’t ever expressed that way in the Bible, but Biblical authors do deal with the problem by asking: Why does the people of God suffer? In teaching this course, the thing that struck me is just how different the answers are. Depending on what part of Job you read, you get one set of answers. If you read the Prophets, you get a different set of answers. If you read apocalyptic literature, you get still a different set of answers.

...

Shanks: Well, Larry, I take it that you, as an Orthodox Jew, don’t believe those historical claims about Jesus.

Schiffman: No. One of the principles of the Jewish faith is not believing in Jesus. [Laughter] But, like Bart, I of course believe that he lived, preached and was crucified by the Romans.

From a Jewish point of view, these kinds of problems aren’t problems. First of all, the Bible was never taken literally in Judaism. It doesn’t mean that it’s not historical, but it is not taken literally in the Protestant sense. It’s not an issue in Judaism. Admittedly there is a literalist strain in a minority of medieval Jewish thinkers and a minority—maybe a growing minority—in modern Judaism, but it’s not classical Judaism. The Talmud doesn’t take the Bible literally in the Protestant sense.

Jim’s approach of taking a kind of experiential approach to the whole thing is one that is much more primary in Judaism.

...

Labels: religion

Furor Over Baptist's Gay-Baby Article

By DAVID CRARY AP National Writer

NEW YORK Mar 14, 2007 (AP)— The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary has incurred sharp attacks from both the left and right by suggesting that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.

The Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., one of the country's pre-eminent evangelical leaders, acknowledged that he irked many fellow conservatives with an article earlier this month saying scientific research "points to some level of biological causation" for homosexuality.

Proof of a biological basis would challenge the belief of many conservative Christians that homosexuality which they view as sinful is a matter of choice that can be overcome through prayer and counseling.

However, Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., was assailed even more harshly by gay-rights supporters. They were upset by his assertion that homosexuality would remain a sin even if it were biologically based, and by his support for possible medical treatment that could switch an unborn gay baby's sexual orientation to heterosexual.

"He's willing to play God," said Harry Knox, a spokesman on religious issues for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-rights group. "He's more than willing to let homophobia take over and be the determinant of how he responds to this issue, in spite of everything else he believes about not tinkering with the unborn."

Labels: gays, religion

As a progressive Christian, I always wondered why many on the secular Left felt it necessary to cut off potential political alliances with progressive religious people, to alienate most of America with nasty anti-faith diatribes, and to choose to ignore the history of most of the social reform movements in this country, where religion often served as a powerful motivator and driving force – as in the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, establishing child labor laws and social safety nets and, of course, the civil rights movement. In recent years, the Left and even the Democrats managed to appear hostile to faith and to people in faith communities

As I always want to scream when Wallis writes, WHO ARE THESE DEMOCRATS and how did they passive voice "manage to appear hostile to faith and to people in faith communities." Perhaps because Wallis keeps writing various versions of that sentence.

Labels: race, religion

Conscience and Soul

Reading through the interview with Vanderslice, who is one of the religious left political consultants, there's plenty I agree with. I do agree that Democrats should reach out to religious voters and it's something they've been bad at doing, though they've been pretty bad at direct outreach to all voters it seems (hopefully getting better). I also agree that Democrats should more clearly stand up for - and make clear they stand up for - all those things they're supposed to. Still, when I come across language like this I think I'm entitled to get my hackles up a little bit:

I've never been more on fire for the work that I'm doing. I hope that I'll find a way to continue to pioneer this path for the Democrats. I'd love to be involved in continuing to build up the voices of faith in the party and providing the training and infrastructure on the ground to state parties, to future candidates, to reach out to these constituencies, because I just believe that the religious community can be the conscience and the soul of the Democratic Party, and the more we bring that back in, I believe, the stronger our party will be, the better we'll be able to represent our positive vision for the future, and I think it'll help us start winning elections again. So I'm very excited to continue this work.

Labels: religion, wingnuttery