Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

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.

4-21e.pdf (application/pdf Object)

REFRACTED VISION: n Analysis of Religious-Secular Tensions in Israel
Ahava (Laura) Zarembski

A rise in tensions between the religious and secular Jewish communities in
Israel over the past thirty years is having a negative affect on Jewish social
cohesion and social morale. The problem is critical for its own sake and in the
context of the nation relating to its security-related crises. Yet the rise in
tensions between Haredi, Religious-Zionist, and Secular communities is
occurring against what the Louis Guttman reports revealed to be a backdrop of
relatively steady, nonpolarizing religious practice in Israel.¹ What then is
causing the rise in tensions if not changing religious practice? How does it relate
to Israel’s diverse conglomerate of religious-traditional-secular-alternative
religious behavior? How is Israel to address the declining religious-secular
relationship? To do so, there needs to be an intricate understanding of the causes
of and influences on the growing divide as well as a projection of where the
nation ought to be going.

To help facilitate this complex endeavor of addressing religious-secular
relations, the Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies has undertaken a two part
series dealing with the various elements contributing to Israel’s religious-secular
divide.

EnglishGuttman_0.pdf application/pdf Object

A PORTRAIT OF ISRAELI JEWRY: Beliefs, Observances, and Values among
Israeli Jews 2 0 0 0
Shlomit Levy Hanna Levinsohn Elihu Katz
Highlights from an In-Depth Study conducted by the Guttman Center of the Israel Democracy Institute
for The AVI CHAI Foundation

The Israel Democracy Institute and The AVI CHAI Foundation
June 2002

Heba Saleh, Pleas for condemned Saudi ‘witch’, BBC, February 14, 2008

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.

In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened.

‘Undefined’ crime

The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih’s conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.

Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.

Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system.

The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says.

(Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty)

Muslims in Karachi torch a Danish flag in protest at the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed

Newspapers defy Muslim fanatics to support Kurt Westergaard, TOL, Feb. 13, 2008

Denmark’s three main newspapers will take the provocative step today of reprinting a cartoon showing the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb instead of a turban after the arrest yesterday of three suspected Islamic terrorists for plotting to murder the artist.

The cartoon by Kurt Westergaard was one of 12 depicting the prophet which triggered riots around the world leading to dozens of deaths when they first appeared in 2005. The violent backlash demonstrated starkly the incendiary interface between Islam and the boundaries of freedom of expression in Europe.

Mr Westergaard, who has spent three months moving between secret addresses while security services tracked the alleged plotters, was back at work yesterday to draw a self-portrait for today’s editions. It shows him still clutching his pen and a Danish flag, but he is obscured by a dark and bloody cloud featuring Arabic script which declares: “Glorious Koran.”

Muslim leaders in Denmark appealed for calm last night as police interviewed a Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians about plans for the “terror-related killing” of Mr Westergaard, 73, who said that he expected to live the rest of his life under threat of death.

Franco Origlia / Getty Images

Sarkozy Ignites Church and State Debate, Newsweek International Edition, Feb. 18, 2008

Being an Honorary Canon of The Basilica of Saint John of Lateran is an honor enjoyed by French leaders since Henri IV. Most dont care much Presidents François Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou skipped the trip to Rome altogether. Not so current President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been gaining a reputation as France’s chief sermonizer. Last December, as he received his title, he made a long speech to the gathered clerics, expounding on “Frances essentially Christian roots.”

“A man who believes is a man who hopes,” said the president. “And the interest of the republic is that there be a lot of men and women who hope.” He advocated a new “positive secularism” that “doesn’t consider religions a danger, but an asset.” And he declared, “In the transmission of values and in the teaching of the difference between good and evil, the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor.”

Those are fighting words in strictly secular France.

Jeremy Bransten, Religion and Tolerance, RFE/RL, October 26, 2004

Many of the countries in which the Orthodox Church has a significant following were devastated by communism and by the interethnic conflicts that followed its collapse. Some say the church is uniquely poised to help these societies rebuild, but others question whether Orthodoxy itself — and its historical ties to nationalism — may be part of the problem. In this first of a two-part series on the Orthodox Church, RFE/RL examines this unique link between church and state.
Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Aleksii II accuses the Vatican of “stealing souls” on its territory.

A leading bishop in Russia denounces the import of Western human rights values as an “alien concept.”

In Serbia, the Orthodox clergy rallies behind ultranationalist politicians. A senior churchman rails against the West’s “devilish lust for power.” Another calls for the creation of a “Greater Serbia.”

Are these isolated examples of the abuse of faith, or is there a natural — and sometimes toxic — link between Orthodoxy and nationalism?

Putin’s Reunited Russian Church - TIME, May 17, 2007

Nationalism, based on the Orthodox faith, has been emerging as the Putin regime’s major ideological resource. Thursday’s rite sealed the four-year long effort by Putin, beginning in September 2003, to have the Moscow Patriarchate take over its rival American-based cousin and launch a new globalized Church as his state’s main ideological arm and a vital foreign policy instrument. In February press conference, Putin equated Russia’s “traditional confessions” to its nuclear shield, both, he said, being “components that strengthen Russian statehood and create necessary preconditions for internal and external security of the country.” Professor Sergei Filatov, a top authority on Russian religious affairs notes that “traditional confessions” is the state’s shorthand for the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Church’s assertiveness and presence is growing — with little separation from the State. The Moscow City Court and the Prosecutor General’s Office maintain Orthodox chapels on their premises. Only the Orthodox clergy are entitled to give ecclesiastic guidance to the military. Some provinces have included Russian Orthodox Culture classes in school curricula with students doing church chores. When Orthodox fundamentalists vandalized an art exhibition at the Moscow Andrei Sakharov Center as “an insult to the main religion of our country,” the Moscow Court found the Center managers guilty of insulting the faith, and fined them $3,500 each. The ROC had an opera, based on a famous fairy tale by the poet Alexander Pushkin, censored to the point of cutting out the priest, who is the tale’s main protagonist. “Of course, we have a separation of State and Church,” Putin said during a visit to a Russian Orthodox monastery in January 2004. “But in the people’s soul they’re together.”

European Pressphoto Agency

Tens of thousands of secular Turks demonstrated in Ankara against the lifting of a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at Turkey’s universities.

Turkey’s Parliament Votes to Lift Head Scarf Ban - New York Times, Feb. 9, 2008

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s parliament took a major step toward lifting a ban against women’s head scarves in universities on Saturday, setting the stage for a final showdown with the country’s secular elite over where Islam fits in the building of an open society.

Turkish lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a measure supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change two articles in Turkey’s Constitution that they say would guarantee every citizen the right to go to college regardless of how they dress. Turkish authorities imposed the ban in the late 1990’s, arguing that the growing numbers of covered women in colleges threatened secularism, one of the founding principles of modern Turkey.

Secular opposition lawmakers voted against the change, with about a fifth of all ballots cast. Large crowds of secular Turks backed them on the streets of Turkey’s capital, Ankara, chanting that secularism, and women’s right to resist being forced to wear head scarves by family members or religious authorities, was under threat and demanding that the government step down.

Biography of Jesse Helms Reviewed, New York Times, February 10, 2008

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

‘The Prehistory of the Mind’: An Exchange - The New York Review of Books, May 28, 1998
By Merlin Donald, Steven Mithen, Reply by Howard Gardner

In response to Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange (October 9, 1997)

To the Editors:

The exchange between Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker [NYR, October 9, 1997] regarding the nature of evolutionary psychology and more specifically the notion of cognitive spandrels was entertaining and informative. Which aspects, if any, of our mental functioning are spandrels, as opposed to adaptive mechanisms “designed” by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems faced by our ancestors in their struggle to survive and reproduce (quoting Pinker), is an extremely important question that requires serious discussion and debate. But it also involves a study of precisely what those “kinds of problems” may have been, and quite how our ancestors solved them.

In this regard a serious weakness in the current literature of evolutionary psychology is the almost blasé disregard for the archaeological, fossil, and palaeoenvironmental records that provide evidence to address these questions. Reading much of the evolutionary psychology literature as an archaeologist, I find it astonishing that gross generalizations are made about our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer past, with such little reference to the research of archaeologists who endeavor to reconstruct past lifestyles. Pinker did at least acknowledge the existence and value of the archaeological record, when commenting about whether reading may be a spandrel. But whatever its theoretical strengths or shortcomings as debated by Pinker and Gould, evolutionary psychology will not prosper until it takes the hunter-gatherer past as seriously as it claims to do so. The archaeological, fossil, and palaeoenvironmental records provide evidence about past behavior and cognition.

Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange - The New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997

By Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker, Reply by Stephen Jay Gould

In response to Darwinian Fundamentalism (June 12, 1997)

To the Editors:

Evolutionary psychology is the attempt to understand our mental faculties in light of the evolutionary processes that shaped them. Stephen Jay Gould [NYR, June 12 and June 26] calls its ideas and their proponents “foolish,” “fatuous,” “pathetic,” “egregiously simplistic,” and some twenty-five synonyms for “fanatical.” Such language is not just discourteous; it is misguided, for the ideas of evolutionary psychology are not as stupid as Gould makes them out to be. Indeed, they are nothing like what Gould makes them out to be.

Evolutionary psychology often investigates the adaptive functions of cognitive and emotional systems—how natural selection “engineered” them to solve the kinds of problems faced by our ancestors in their struggle to survive and reproduce. The rationale follows from two premises Gould himself states nicely:

(1) “I…do not deny either the existence and central importance of adaptation, or the production of adaptation by natural selection. Yes, eyes are for seeing and feet are for moving. And, yes again, I know of no scientific mechanism other than natural selection with the proven power to build structures for such eminently workable design.”

(2) “The human brain is the most complicated device for reasoning and calculating…ever evolved on earth.”

Quite so. First, adaptive design must be a product of natural selection. Complex organs like eyes have many precise parts in exacting arrangements, and the odds are astronomically stacked against their having arisen fortuitously from random genetic drift or as a byproduct of something else. Second, the brain, like the eyes and the feet, shows signs of good design. The adaptive problems it solves, such as perceiving depth and color, grasping, walking, reasoning, communicating, avoiding hazards, recognizing people and their mental states, and juggling competing demands in real time are among the most challenging engineering tasks ever stated, far beyond the capacity of foreseeable computers and robots. Put the premises together—complex design comes from natural selection, and the brain shows signs of complex design—and we conclude that much of the brain should be explained by natural selection.