Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

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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.

Munson: The fact that a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is often asked what he believes about Jesus is scandalous, as is the fact that he feels compelled to say that he believes that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of Mankind.” Let us hope the day will come when presidential candidates of both parties will feel free to say “I don’t believe Jesus is the son of God, moreover I don’t believe candidates for public office should be asked about such matters.”

Romney’s ‘Faith in America’ Address - New York Times, December 6, 2007

“There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

Wheatcroft, The Church in England: Downright Un-American, New York Times, November 25, 2007

The authoritative Catholic paper The Tablet of London now writes that, some time before Christmas, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair will at last be received into the Roman Catholic Church by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

The historical resonances and political overtones of this are as significant as the event itself — which also illustrates again the great trans-Atlantic gulf. Not only are the English now a notably irreligious people; in striking contrast to America, religion plays no part in British political life.

For years it has been rumored that Blair would one day convert, the culmination of a journey that began when he discovered religion at Oxford. An Australian clergymen named Peter Thomson introduced him to the work of another writer. “If you really want to understand what I’m all about, you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray,” Mr. Blair has said. “It’s all there.”

Little read now, Macmurray was an academic theologian and proponent of “communitarianism” who died at 85 in 1976. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as Mr. Blair. George Orwell, for one, was suspicious of Macmurray as a “decayed liberal” who was even susceptible to totalitarian rhetoric.

However that may be, Mr. Blair joined the High or “Anglo-Catholic” wing of the Church of England, whose adherents, from John Henry Newman on, have been inclined “to pope” (as they used to say) and go the whole way. His wife, Cherie Booth, is a Catholic, and for years he went to Mass with her and their children, even taking holy communion, irregularly and sacrilegiously in Catholic eyes.

All of which sets him far apart from his compatriots. When an interviewer once tried to raise the question of faith, Mr. Blair’s press officer, Alastair Campbell, snapped, “We don’t do God,” and on that occasion at least he was quite right.

AFP

John Micklethwait, In God’s name | Economist.com, Nov. 3, 2007

Formerly communist countries are also getting hooked again on the opium of the people. Russia’s secret police, the KGB, hounded religion: its successor, the FSB, has its own Orthodox church opposite its headquarters. In the Polish parliament the speaker crosses himself before taking his seat. Some of China’s technocrats think that Confucianism, which Mao condemned as “feudal”, is useful social glue in their fast-changing country. But they brutally repressed a Buddhist sect, the Falun Gong, and they are worried that Christian churchgoers may already outnumber Communist Party members.

In Western politics, too, religion has forced itself back into the public square. The American president begins each day on his knees and each cabinet meeting with a prayer. The easiest way to tell a Republican from a Democrat is to ask how often he or she goes to church. And although European liberals sneer about American theocracy, American conservatives claim that secular, childless Europe is turning into Eurabia.

Many secular intellectuals think that the real “clash of civilisations” is not between different religions but between superstition and modernity. A succession of bestselling books have torn into religion—Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith”, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God is not Great—How Religion Poisons Everything”. This counterattack already shows a religious intensity. Mr Dawkins has set up an organisation to help atheists around the world.

Part of that secular fury, especially in Europe, comes from exasperation. After all, it has been a canon of progressive thought since the Enlightenment that modernity—that heady combination of science, learning and democracy—would kill religion. Plainly, this has not happened. Numbers about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, but most of them seem to indicate that any drift towards secularism has been halted, and some show religion to be on the increase.

Report on Hindu god Ram withdrawn, BBC, September 14, 2007

The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report submitted in court earlier this week which questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram.

The report was withdrawn after huge protests by opposition parties.

The report was presented to the Supreme Court on Wednesday in connection with a case against a proposed shipping canal project between India and Sri Lanka.

Hindu hardliners say the project will destroy what they say is a bridge built by Ram and his army of monkeys.

Scientists and archaeologists say the Ram Setu (Lord Ram’s bridge) - or Adam’s Bridge as it is sometimes called - is a natural formation of sand and stones….

In their report submitted to the court, the government and the Archaeological Survey of India questioned the belief, saying it was solely based on the Hindu mythological epic Ramayana.

How the World Works: Globalization, Globalization Blogs - Salon.com, September 14, 2007

To this day, as indicated by NASA satellites, there is a detectable ridge running across the Palk strait that separates Sri Lanka from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Known colloquially as Adam’s Bridge, the ridge is held by some faithful Hindus to be Ram Sethu, the actual structure built by Lord Rama’s mighty monkey army. Lord Rama, the epitome of a just and righteous king, an avatar of Vishnu, the Hindu Supreme Being, is one of the most cherished figures in Hindu culture. And his legacy is not to be trifled with. In 1992, Hindu nationalist activists destroyed a 500-year-old Muslim temple originally erected by the Muslim conquerer Babur, on the grounds that it had been sacrilegiously built on the site of an earlier temple to Rama that commemorated his birthplace in the north Indian city of Ayodhya.

But to more secularly-minded fellows, Adam’s Bridge is a barrier composed of sand and coral that must be cleared away in order to create a shipping lane through the Palk Strait that would shorten shipping times between the east and west coasts of India. The Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project, which may have been conceived of as early as 1860 by the British, finally received a go-ahead in June 2005 from the United Progressive Alliance government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. But criticism of the project on a number of fronts has continued, and several petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court of India asking that the barrier be kept intact.

There are significant non-religious reasons to oppose the project. Environmentalists believe the massive dredging involved will cause significant damage to marine life, while others are skeptical that saving just the few hours required to circumnavigate Sri Lanka is worth all the trouble. The strait is also considered to be something of a cyclone magnet.

On Wednesday, the long simmering controversy turned into a full-fledged uproar. In a joint filing with the central government, the Archaeological Survey of India filed an affidavit with India’s Supreme Court declaring that there was no historical evidence proving the existence of Lord Rama, and no archeological basis to consider Adam’s Bridge to be the mythological Ram Sethu.

An incomplete sketch of secularism - Haaretz, September 14, 2007

In 2000 Eliezer Schweid, a professor of the history of Jewish thought, defined Israeli society as “post-secular,” arguing that, according to self-definition, the secular make up some 10-15 percent of the Jewish population in Israel, Orthodox-religious Jews of various stripes account for 20 percent, and the rest label themselves as “masorti” (observant of Jewish tradition) - a group that includes most Mizrahi Jews and members of the Conservative and Reform movements.

It is true that one can turn the tables and argue that only 20 percent define themselves as Orthodox-religious Jews; but the power of the post-secular argument lies precisely in the fact that it makes it possible to recognize both possibilities at once, along with movement in the space between secularism and religiosity, a space that defies clear distinctions. Also, political scientists Charles Liebman and Yaacov Yadgar have shown in their joint research that “secularism” as a self-definition is a default position, not an independent category of identity. They also showed that the “ideologically secular” account for only about 8 percent of the population.

On Faith: Georgetown Blog, July 16, 2007

Query: Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than thirty seconds without referring to religious people as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the common good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists, pedophiles, bearers of false consciousness, authoritarian despots, and so forth? Is that possible?

First, some basic definitions. Politically speaking, American secularism is made up of two overlapping, albeit distinct, constituencies. The first is comprised of the aforementioned nonbelievers whose best-selling spokespersons are fast becoming the soccer hooligans of reasoned public discourse. The second is much larger and much quieter. It encompasses religious Americans who favor strict Church/State Separation this they share with the nonbelievers.

Nonbelievers of late have been churning out loud, unsubtle, anti-religious manifestos. The world would be a better place, they all seem to suggest, if religion and all of its associated personnel were simply to disappear. In this regards the new nonbelievers seem stuck in the ‘90s—and by this I mean the 1890s. This calls attention to one glaring problem with atheism and agnosticism today: it lacks new ideas. The movement abounds in polemicists, but has not produced a thinker of real substance since perhaps the days of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Mazower reviews Sacred Causes, washingtonpost.com
Burleigh is nothing if not opinionated. He despises “sneering secularists” but is a considerable sneerer himself. Targets include “humanist radical eggheads,” “tenured radicals” who take a “vampiric interest in female students,” the “horde of bodgers and shysters” in the English construction trades and “dingy Irish theme pubs” with their “relentless, mindless gabbling.”

As the book moves on, jibes and bile clog the writing, and one has the sinking feeling of being cornered by the pub bore, ranting on about 60s swingers, the threat to European civilization, terrorists and trade unions — pretty much everything and everyone except the pope, Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher.