Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Stephen Jay Gould, Darwinian Fundamentalism, The New York Review of Books, June 12, 1997

With copious evidence ranging from Plato’s haughtiness to Beethoven’s tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot. But Charles Darwin must have been the most genial of geniuses. He was kind to a fault, even to the undeserving, and he never uttered a harsh word—or hardly ever, as his countryman Captain Corcoran once said. Darwin’s disciple, George Romanes, expressed surprise at the only sharply critical Darwinian statement he had ever encountered: “In the whole range of Darwin’s writings there cannot be found a passage so strongly worded as this: it presents the only note of bitterness in all the thousands of pages which he has published.” Darwin directed this passage that Romanes found so striking against people who would simplify and caricature his theory as claiming that natural selection, and only natural selection, caused all evolutionary changes. He wrote in the last (1872) edition of The Origin of Species:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position—namely at the close of the Introduction—the following words: “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.” This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

Darwin clearly loved his distinctive theory of natural selection—the powerful idea that he often identified in letters as his dear “child.” But, like any good parent, he understood limits and imposed discipline. He knew that the complex and comprehensive phenomena of evolution could not be fully rendered by any single cause, even one so ubiquitous and powerful as his own brainchild.

In this light, especially given history’s tendency to recycle great issues, I am amused by an irony that has recently ensnared evolutionary theory. A movement of strict constructionism, a self-styled form of Darwinian fundamentalism, has risen to some prominence in a variety of fields, from the English biological heartland of John Maynard Smith to the uncompromising ideology (albeit in graceful prose) of his compatriot Richard Dawkins, to the equally narrow and more ponderous writing of the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (who entitled his latest book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea).[1] Moreover, a larger group of strict constructionists are now engaged in an almost mordantly self-conscious effort to “revolutionize” the study of human behavior along a Darwinian straight and narrow under the name of “evolutionary psychology.”

Hitchens and Boteach’s Great Debate - Forward.com, February 6, 2008

Acclaimed polemicist and atheist Christopher Hitchens traded wit on science and scripture last week at a debate titled “Does God Exist?” with his opponent, Orthodox rabbi and television host Shmuley Boteach.

Ticket holders filled the auditorium at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y to capacity; many hoped that Hitchens would demonstrate his irreverent, razor-edged reasoning. The fans weren’t disappointed.

“We’re all atheists,” Hitchens argued in his dry British timbre. “We no longer believe we need to tear the beating heart out of a virgin to make the sun rise. We no longer believe in the sun god Ra or in Zeus, and we now must go one step further.”

In attack-conscious Israel, even a crematorium needs protection - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

In terrorism-conscious Israel, security has been beefed up even for the crematorium of a company providing Israelis a choice of burial services, but the potential assailants are apparently Jews.

The firm, called Aley Shalechet (”Autumn Leaves”), was the first company in Israel to offer “alternative burial services,” notably cremation.

In August 2007, a day after the location of the company’s crematorium was revealed in an ultra-Orthodox newspaper, unknown assailants broke into the grounds of the firm on Moshav Hibat Zion and torched its facilities, causing serious damage to the crematorium, and igniting a public debate on burial services outside the Orthodox Jewish norm.

No one has been charged in the relation to the arson, though Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, founder and public face of the ultra-Orthodox ZAKA rescue service an the self-styled operations officer of the Eda Haredit religious organization, was temporarily detained by police after reports surfaced that he was seen at the site the morning of the crime.

The company had kept a low profile until the attack, its offices situated at the end of a hallway in a nondescript mall in central Israel. Since its operations were publicized, however, Aley Shalechet has been the subject of concerted efforts by religious authorities to have its activities banned, saying that it violates Jewish law and desecrates the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whose bodies were incinerated in Nazi ovens.

Pope Benedict XVI (AP)

ADL slams Vatican over revised prayer for conversion of Jews - Haaretz, February 7, 2008

The Vatican has come under fire from Jewish groups in recent days for changing its Good Friday service to include a prayer urging God to let Jews “recognize Jesus Christ as savior of all men.”

Earlier this week, Pope Benedict ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at traditionalist Good Friday services, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ.

But the Anti-Defamation League has called the changes “cosmetic revisions,” saying that the prayer is still “deeply troubling” because of its call to convert Jews.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer - which has retained the name Prayer for Conversion of the Jews - also excludes a former a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

Haredi sect brands Chief Rabbi Metzger ‘Zionist stooge,’ wicked - Haaretz, February 5, 2008

The strongly anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect of ultra-Orthodox Jewshas attacked Ashkennazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger as a “very well paid Zionist stooge” and a “a wicked emissary of evil” who should be expelled from Israel, following Metzger’s reported comments proposing that poor Gazans be moved to a Palestinian state established in the Sinai.

The statements, reported in Haaretz last week, spurred an angrily worded response from Neturei Karta, which has often taken vocally pro-Palestinian stances against Israel.

Denouncing Metzger’s Sinai proposal, the group refered to him as the “so-called Chief Rabbi of the so-called State of Israel” and as a “very well paid Zionist stooge”.

Referring to Zionism as an “idolatrous cult,” Neturei Karta called for Metzger to “removed from the Holy Land,” describing him as “a wicked emissary of evil”.

Metzger had said that his plan would be to “take all the poor people from Gaza to move them to a wonderful new modern country with trains buses cars, like in Arizona - we are now in a generation where you can take a desert and build a city. This will be a solution for the poor people - they will have a nice county, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace.”

Ian Fisher, Pope’s Rewrite of Latin Prayer Draws Criticism From 2 Sides - New York Times, February 6, 2008

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued a replacement for a contentious Good Friday prayer in Latin, removing language that many Jewish groups found offensive but still calling for the Jews’ conversion.

However, representatives of Jewish groups as well as traditionalist Catholics quickly condemned the new prayer, though for different reasons. Jewish groups said it was still offensive, and traditionalists said they preferred the version that was replaced.

“It’s disappointing,” said Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, who for 20 years has worked on Jewish-Catholic relations with Benedict as pope and, earlier, when he was a cardinal.

The prayer was a focus of dispute last year when Benedict allowed for greater use of a traditional version of the Latin Mass, called the Tridentine rite. That decree improved ties with Catholic traditionalists, who oppose the sweeping changes to church liturgy made from 1962 through 1965 during the Second Vatican Council.

The prayer is not part of the standard service used by most of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, who celebrate Mass in their local languages.

The new prayer, published only in Latin on Tuesday in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, deletes a reference to Jews’ “blindness” and a call that God “may lift the veil from their hearts.”

Pope nixes reference to Jews’ `blindness` over Jesus in prayer - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

Pope Benedict has ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at Good Friday services by traditionalist Catholics, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ, the Vatican said on Tuesday.The Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano published the new version of the prayer in Latin and said it should be used by the traditionalist minority starting this Good Friday, March 21.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer also removes a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

But the new prayer hopes that Jews will recognize Christ.

Le pape atténue les termes de la prière de “conversion des juifs”, Le Monde.fr, February 6, 2008

À la veille du Carême (période de quarante jours de prières et de pénitence avant Pâques), ouvert mercredi 6 février, dit “mercredi des Cendres”, le Vatican a tenté de clore une polémique qui a assombri, ces derniers mois, le climat des relations entre catholiques et juifs, devenu plus fraternel quarante ans après le concile réformateur Vatican II (1962-1965).

Cette polémique était née le 7 juillet 2007, avec la publication du motu proprio (décret) de Benoît XVI libéralisant sous conditions - à titre “extraordinaire” - le rite antérieur à Vatican II, appelé rite “tridentin” (concile de Trente au XVIe siècle). Destiné à satisfaire les fidèles traditionalistes, ce décret du pape avait choqué la communauté juive parce que l’ancien rite de l’Eglise comprend - outre la messe en latin - une prière pour la “conversion des juifs”, traditionnellement récitée dans les églises le Vendredi saint (jour de la crucifixion du Christ).

En 1959, cette prière avait été réformée par le pape Jean XXIII (1958-1963), qui avait supprimé l’emploi de l’adjectif “perfides” pour désigner les juifs. Mais le reste n’avait pas été retouché.

En date du 4 février, une note de la secrétairerie d’Etat du Vatican rectifie à nouveau - partiellement - cette prière. Les passages demandant à Dieu de “soustraire le peuple juif de ses ténèbres” et de “l’aveuglement” ont disparu. Mais la suite, qui invite à prier “afin que Dieu illumine le coeur des juifs et qu’ils connaissent Jésus-Christ, sauveur de tous les hommes”, est maintenue. Elle demande à Dieu de permettre “que tout Israël soit sauvé en faisant entrer la foule des gens dans (son) Eglise”. Cette nouvelle version devra être en usage à compter de l’année 2008 dans toutes les célébrations de la liturgie du Vendredi saint.

Avirama Golan, Splintering into tribes in the name of unity - Haaretz, February 6, 2008

An emotional advertisement in the newspaper Hamodia this week urged ultra-Orthodox Jews to come to Jerusalem en masse yesterday. The Haredi community knew that this would be a political-diplomatic demonstration, but the official pretext was an injury to Haredi educational institutions. Only for that is it permissible to abandon Torah study and take to the streets.Representatives of the national religious community also took part in the “mourning.” Seemingly, this is a new alliance. In reality, it is a process that has gained strength in recent years and has made the Zionist rabbis superfluous, split the national religious movement and created new political splinter groups.

Professor Yisrael Aumann, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, recently joined one of these splinters. Ahi (literally, “my brother,” but also a Hebrew acronym for “land, society and Judaism”), is a movement established by MKs Yitzhak Levy and Effie Eitam. It plans to hold a membership drive and then allow its members to directly elect its Knesset slate, because the negotiations it held on a joint list with two other factions, Moledet and Tekuma, failed. Levy and Eitam argue that the registration drive will redefine the leadership of the religious right, and in the end, everyone will reunite. But Tekuma, Moledet and the National Religious Party all protested the move in an angry letter to leading rabbis.

It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the resentment percolating through the religious right. The only common denominator among the various splinters is the claim that all are working to unify the nation. In the name of this unification - and after the NRP was swallowed up in the National Union faction, along with Moledet (a party of religious and secular rightists) and Tekuma (a religious faction headed by rabbis) - Ahi is now threatening to shed the old NRP, headed by MK Zevulun Orlev, like a discarded skin.

Uganda/Lord’s Resistance Army Peace Negotiations by David Smock, U.S. Institute of Peace

Juba, Southern Sudan – Northern Uganda is one of the world’s humanitarian disaster areas. Twenty thousand have been killed and up to two million have been displaced in Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps over the last 20 years. This havoc has been created by the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), whose agenda and purposes have remained murky. Joseph Kony, the rebel commander, asserts that the LRA political program is based on the Ten Commandments, despite the fact that the LRA routinely violates most of them.

Archbishop Christodoulos

Archbishop ChristodoulosArchbishop Christodoulos obituary - Times Online, January 29, 2008

Popular Greek Orthodox priest who used the media to energise his Church and relished attacking its secular enemies

Christodoulos presided over one of the more tumultuous decades of the Orthodox Church of Greece. Elected at 59, he was the youngest archbishop to lead the church. Often outspoken and always at ease with television and the internet, he did much to reinvigorate that unwieldy and somewhat conservative institution.

One of his much publicised achievements was to ease relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, in the process eliciting from Pope John Paul II an apology for presumed sins committed by Rome against the Greeks in the crusades.

A formidable priest, Christodoulos spared no efforts to combat what he perceived to be Greek Orthodoxy’s foes. Secularism, Roman Catholicism, the Turks, the Americans, the Jews, the leftwing intelligentsia, even non-Greek Orthodox - all at times came under the lash of his emotional oratory. Once elected to lead the Greek church, in 1998, he tried to use his power to revive the old tradition of ethnarch, or spiritual-cum-political leader, a model which had administered the Christian populations of the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire, and whose most effective recent exemplar had been Archbishop Makarios III of Cyprus.

Le patriarche de l’Église orthodoxe roumaine, Daniel. Crédits photo : ASSOCIATED PRESS

Les projets pharaoniques de l’Église orthodoxe à Bucarest, Le Figaro, February 1, 2008

Le projet de construction d’une gigantesque cathédrale, financée pour moitié par l’État, suscite la polémique.

C’est un projet pharaonique, digne de la mégalomanie de Nicolae Ceausescu. Une cathédrale susceptible d’accueillir 6 000 fidèles, complétée par une bibliothèque, un hôtel pour les pèlerins et la résidence du chef de l’Église orthodoxe roumaine. Budget présumé : environ un milliard d’euros.

Lancé à la fin des années 1990, ce «nouveau Vatican» a soulevé une polémique qui n’a cessé de s’amplifier. Non parce qu’il transgresse les règles intimistes de l’architecture orthodoxe, mais parce qu’il devrait être financé en grande partie par l’État roumain qui a déjà offert le terrain : onze hectares au cœur de Bucarest, juste derrière le palais cyclopéen de Ceausescu, devenu aujourd’hui le siège du Parlement.

Soutenu par une partie de l’intelligentsia, Remus Cernea, le jeune président de l’Association pour la liberté de conscience, multiplie les démarches juridiques pour bloquer la réalisation de ce vaste complexe en dénonçant une «collusion inacceptable entre la classe politique et l’Église». Traité tantôt de «satanique» tantôt de «communiste», Cernea commente laconiquement qu’il doute «vivre dans un pays membre de l’Union européenne».

La future cathédrale «du salut de la nation» est le dernier avatar du retour en force d’une Église orthodoxe qui n’hésite pas à s’ingérer dans la vie publique en affichant des convictions nationalistes exacerbées. Dix-neuf ans après la chute du communisme, les icônes ont pris massivement la place des portraits de l’ex-Conducator dans les écoles. Diverses pressions administratives y ont rendu l’éducation religieuse implicitement obligatoire.