Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Feuerbach is best known for his book The Essence of Christianity which burst like a bombshell on the German intellectual scene in the early Forties and was soon translated into English by the English novelist, George Eliot. It quickly became like a Bible to an entire generation of intellectuals who thought of themselves as reformers and revolutionaries, including Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and David F. Strauss, who wrote that the book was the “truth for our times.”

Superficially, the central thesis is deceptively simple: the self comes to consciousness over against another self and in the process of self-differentiation realizes that it is a member of a species. The imagination under the pressure of wish and feeling seizes on the idea of the species and converts it into an individual being.

Man — this is the mystery of religion — objectifies his being and then again makes himself an object to the objectivized image of himself thus converted into a subject … . (GW 5:71; EC 29f).

But this simplicity vanishes as soon as the reader turns to the first chapter. There one is confronted with argumentation and terminology that are obscure and speculative by contemporary standards. It is argued that (a) religion is identical with self-consciousness, (b) that consciousness is in the strict sense identical with the “infinite nature of consciousness,” and (c) that a limited consciousness is no consciousness. These sweeping assertions are then interwoven with such claims as “man is nothing without an object” or that “the object to which a subject necessarily relates is nothing else than the subjects own objective nature” (GW V:28–32; EC. 1–4). The reader, hoping to understand the ramifications of the simpler thesis, is suddenly wrestling with obscure arguments that seem to be the tip of a greater conceptual iceberg.

Media Matters – Will MSNBC devote as much coverage to McCain’s embrace of Hagees support as it did to Obamas rejection of Farrakhan?, Feb. 28, 2008

Also on February 27, John Hagee, founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas –who has made numerous controversial statements about, among other things, homosexuality, Islam, Catholicism, and women — endorsed Sen. John McCain for president.

On the September 18, 2006, edition of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, host Terry Gross said to Hagee, “You said after Hurricane Katrina that it was an act of God, and you said when you violate God’s will long enough, the judgment of God comes to you. Katrina is an act of God for a society that is becoming Sodom and Gomorrah reborn. ” She then asked, “Do you still think that Katrina is punishment from God for a society thats becoming like Sodom and Gomorrah?” Hagee responded:

HAGEE: All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing. I know that there are people who demur from that, but I believe that the Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment. And I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

More than one-quarter of American adults 28% have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today 16.1% is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds – New York Times, Feb. 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — More than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion, according to a new survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The report, titled “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” depicts a highly fluid and diverse national religious life. If shifts among Protestant denominations are included, then it appears that 44 percent of Americans have switched religious affiliations.

Nir Rosen, The Myth of the Surge : Rolling Stone, March 6, 2008

It’s a cold, gray day in December, and I’m walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city’s no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

Israeli MP blames quakes on gays, BBC, Feb. 20, 2008

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament’s tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave “legitimacy to sodomy”.

Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and has since passed several laws recognising gay rights.

Two earthquakes shook the region last week and a further four struck in November and December.

‘The God Delusion’ – The New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007

By Daniel C. Dennett, Reply by H. Allen Orr

In response to A Mission to Convert (January 11, 2007)

To the Editors:

H. Allen Orr, in “A Mission to Convert” [NYR, January 11], his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and other recent books on science and religion, says that Dawkins is an amateur, not professional, atheist, and has failed to come to grips with “religious thought” with its “meticulous reasoning” in any serious way. He notes that the book is “defiantly middlebrow,” and I wonder just which highbrow thinkers about religion Orr believes Dawkins should have grappled with. I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy. (I devote a scant six pages of Breaking the Spell to the arguments for and against the existence of God, while Dawkins devotes roughly a hundred, laying out the standard arguments with admirable clarity and fairness, and skewering them efficiently.) There are indeed recherché versions of these traditional arguments that perhaps have not yet been exhaustively eviscerated by scholars, but Dawkins ignores them (as do I) and says why: his book is a consciousness-raiser aimed at the general religious public, not an attempt to contribute to the academic microdiscipline of philosophical theology. The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

H. Allen Orr, A Mission to Convert – The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007

Scientists’ interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

A law contrived in secret – Haaretz, Feb. 21, 2008

Following 60 years since the historic error of not separating religion from the state, the government is now expanding the authority of religion in the judiciary. Instead of heading the opposite way and taking away from the rabbinical courts their monopoly in matters of marriage and divorce, the state is now granting them further decision making powers in civil matters.

According to the bill prepared by the ministerial committee on legislation, the citizens of Israel will not be able to choose what kind of court will deliberate their disputes on capital, property and contracts. Will they choose to be judged according to the law of the Torah, or according to the law of the Knesset? All this was contrived nearly in total secret in the prime ministers bureau, in order to please Shas, with the assistance of ministers Yitzhak Herzog and Ruhama Avraham.

This superfluous piece of proposed legislation is even being presented as an achievement to womens organizations, because it blocked a much worse bill. This distortion of the facts is nothing more than a rude spin.

Over the years, the rabbinical courts have taken upon themselves authority that had not been granted to them by law, and transformed themselves into arbitrators and judges in a variety of matters. Two years ago, Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia ruled that the rabbinical courts are delving in areas that are beyond their authority. Since then, Shas tried to overturn that ruling and to anchor the practice already rejected by law, which would allow the rabbis to rule also on civil matters and not only on marriage and divorce.

Two Ultra-Orthodox Men In Jerusalem

Tamar Rotem, Beit Hakerem – The last secular holdout in Jerusalem – Haaretz, Feb. 20, 2008

It took about a decade for the small north-Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamivtar to change its skin. Now, after most of its well-to-do secular households have been replaced with ultra-Orthodox families, the metamorphosis seems almost complete.

For Yael Bar-On, the decision to leave was made four years ago, when it came time to enroll her 6-year-old son for elementary school. That presented a problem, because by then, the Bar-Ons were among the few remaining secular families in the neighborhood.

“The population of young couples with children had slowly disappeared,” she recalled recently. “Only the older residents remained. The neighborhood’s kindergarten and its secular schools just kept losing students.”

Increasingly, the families replaced those who departed came from Ramot Eshkol, the Haredi neighborhood to Givat Hamivtar’s west. Since the latter half of the 1990s, many relatively well-off people from Ramot Eshkol began buying homes in the secular neighborhood.

AP, Iran Says God Protects Nuclear Program – washingtonpost.com, Feb. 17, 2008

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Sunday that God would punish Iranians if they do not support the country’s disputed nuclear program, state radio reported.

“The Iranian people openly announce that they will defend their rights… God will reprimand them if they do not do so,” state radio quoted Khamenei as saying.

The 68-year-old ayatollah, who has final say on all state matters, said Washington’s claim that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon is false. The Iranian government has long insisted its nuclear activities are only for peaceful generation of fuel.

AP, Vatican Toughens Sainthood Procedure – washingtonpost.com, Feb. 18, 2008

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is making it tougher to become a saint.New procedures were announced Monday calling for more “rigor” and “sobriety” by bishops when deciding to begin the process of beatification and in determining the required miracles.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican’s sainthood office, recently suggested that the Vatican was overwhelmed by causes following the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, who elevated more people to sainthood than all his predecessors combined.

Saraiva Martins said there are more than 2,200 beatification and sainthood causes pending.

Carolyn Drake for the New York Times

In Turkey, Is Tension About Religion? Class Rivalry? Or Both? – New York Times, Feb. 19, 2008

ISTANBUL — When two women in Islamic head scarves were spotted in an Italian restaurant in this citys posh new shopping mall this month, Gulbin Simitcioglu did a double take.Covered women, long seen as backward peasants from the countryside, “have started to be everywhere,” said Ms. Simitcioglu, a sales clerk in an Italian clothing store, and it is making women like her more than a little uncomfortable. “We are Turkeys image. They are ruining it.”

As Turkey lurches toward a repeal of a ban on head scarves at universities, the countrys secular upper middle class is feeling increasingly threatened.

Religious Turks, once the underclass of society here, have become educated and middle class, and are moving into urban spaces that were once the exclusive domain of the elite. Now the repeal of the scarf ban — pressed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, passed by Parliament and now just awaiting an official signature — is again setting the two groups against each other, unleashing fears that have as much to do with class rivalry as with the growing influence of Islam.

FTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008

Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics – and occasionally their religious organisations – gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].

In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.

Peter Steinfels, Religious Right May Be Fading, but Not the ‘Culture Wars’ – New York Times, February 16, 2008

On every side, one can read obituaries for the religious right.

Jim Wallis’s new book, “The Great Awakening,” carries the subtitle, “Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.” E. J. Dionne Jr.’s book, “Souled Out,” is subtitled “Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right.” The subtitle of David P. Gushee’s new book, “The Future of Faith in American Politics,” poses “The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center” against that of the religious right.

Sometimes stated outright and sometimes between the lines is the hope that the decline of the religious right will ease what Americans have come to know as the culture wars.

There is no question that many evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics have grown disenchanted with both the political agenda and what they see as the strident style of the organized religious right. Some have been convinced, by their own Scriptures and by new leaders, that poverty, human rights, genocide, sex trafficking and global warming must be no less matters of Christian concern than abortion, homosexuality and embryonic stem-cell research. Even more have reacted against their faith being enlisted in partisan politics.