Marco Rubio and the media’s curiously inconsistent approach to science

November 20, 2012 By

YouTube Preview ImageI wonder if any of our readers have read Thomas Nagel’s new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. I’ve been reading the reviews and they’re fascinating. The New Republic review says Nagel, a devout atheist, has “performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age.”

From Alvin Plantinga’s review “Why Darwinist Materialism Is Wrong” in The New Republic:

ACCORDING TO a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism—or don’t call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of the academy—or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.

The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an idol of the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: “I find this view antecedently unbelievable—a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. … I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Nagel is an atheist; even so, however, he does not accept the above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism; far from it. His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist naturalism.

But it was another review of the book, which was also quite favorable to it, that really surprised me. I’ll just give the beginning and closing words from the review in The New Statesman:

Thomas Nagel is widely recognised as one of the most important analytical philosophers of his generation. In both the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, he has produced pioneering and influential work. This book inherits many of the virtues of that work. It is beautifully lucid, civilised, modest in tone and courageous in its scope…

But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.

Yes, the worst sin isn’t even supposing that a prevailing view might be questioned but, rather, giving comfort to creationists. Dunh dunh dunh!

But that’s the media environment we’re in (this is straight up Kellerian philosophy that the New Statesman reviewer Simon Blackburn offered).

I thought of all this when reading the response the mainstream media had to an interview Marco Rubio gave to GQ. In only the second paragraph we get this prophetic bit from reporter Michael Hainey:

Rubio smiles a lot and likes to put people at ease. But he also speaks with the restraint of a guy who knows everything he says will be parsed and, most likely, used against him. “I’ve learned the hard way,” he says. “You have to always be thinking how your actions today will be viewed at a later date.”

You don’t say. I mean, this is obvious. You can’t have had a pulse for the last few years (much less the decades prior to that) and not have noticed that some politicians have to be particularly careful in dealing with the media. There’s a certain freedom that politicians on the left have in dealing with the media that politicians on the right don’t have. When was the last time you heard a pro-choice politician asked why he thought it should be legal to kill an unborn child just because she’s female. Never? That is correct. (Which is just astounding!) When was the last time you heard a pro-life politician asked about exceptions for rape? An hour ago? Probably.

The GQ interview is wide ranging, if by wide ranging you mean questions about Rubio’s favorite Afrika Bambaataa songs, his three favorite rap songs, whether there is a song he plays to psych himself up before a vote in the Senate and whether Pitbull is too cheesy. It’s obviously incredibly fluffy.

Here are two questions asked from the middle of the interview (in order):

GQ: You were obviously very moved by your grandfather’s dignity and your father’s dignity. What are the qualities that would qualify for a man to have dignity?

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

What the what?

Rubio gives a fairly standard political answer:

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Oh no he did-unt!

Then a bunch of media outlets all lined up to freak out. This smugtastic Slate piece, which had to run a correction about whether sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and other sciences indicate that the Earth is billions of years old, was definitely my favorite.

I guess my problem with the whole scenario is that I don’t trust the media here. It’s not like we have a media where we see routinely tough questions asked about science as it relates to human life and dignity. You remember all of the outrage over opposition to stem cell research that destroys human embryos, don’t you? The cover stories, the factually inaccurate pieces condemning ethicists as anti-science? I do. Why don’t we see the same deluge of stories about embryonic stem cell research now? Do you have any ideas? Is it because embryonic stem cell research kind of turned out to be a bust whereas stem cell research that doesn’t destroy embryos is going gangbusters?

We don’t have a media that questions all sorts of scientifically questionable thinking so long as it comports with a particular agenda.

Instead we have a group of people who have very unscientific ideas about when human life begins (or, at the very least, never even have the thought of asking that question to politicians who support abortion on demand) act outraged.

You know who was the last “journalist” to ask President Barack Obama when he believes human life begins? It was that Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Warren. Do you remember Obama’s response? At the Telegraph: Tim Stanley has thoughts on this:

More importantly, if it’s okay for Barack Obama to say that abortion is “above my paygrade” and refuse to offer a guess as to when life begins, why is it not okay for Rubio to dodge a bullet when asked a question about the origins of the Earth? Considering that the question posed to Obama back in the 2008 election had serious moral consequences and Rubio’s does not, I can’t understand why Obama’s evasion is heralded as a victory for common sense but Rubio’s is treated like a declaration of war on science. The hysteria and hypocrisy are tiring at best.

I don’t care when the world began and I don’t care if my elected officials know either. I’m far too worried about a stagnating US economy and its spiralling debt. And yet, in these strange and worrying times, how “sciency” someone is seems to have become a litmus test for office – regardless of where they stand on the things that they can actually do something about.

It’s the miserable philosophy of a materialist liberalism gone mad – a systematised worldview that prefers to wallow in inconsequential data rather than explore profound questions about life and death. Note to the mainstream media: abortion is a more important issue than the age of the Earth. It personally affects a lot more people.

The hysteria and hypocrisy are getting to me, too. I find the whole thing ridiculous.

Note: I’m sure we all have our own political, theological and scientific responses to Rubio’s comments. I know I do. But while there are many places on the internet to express those views, this site is reserved for a discussion of media coverage. Please keep comments focused on media coverage, which still gives us a lot of room to have fun.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Books, Catholicism, Ethics, Evangelicals, Politics, Science, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

CNN on the superstar Stanleys: The ties that blind

November 19, 2012 By

Suffice it to say that I started working my way onto the religion-news beat in the late 1970s, precisely the era in which the Southern Baptist Convention — the mega-denomination in which I was raised, as part of a family active on all levels of SBC life — veered into a civil war that took very few prisoners.

For better and for worse, I speak fluent Southern Baptist.

While at The Charlotte News and then The Charlotte Observer, I began to pay close attention to the Rev. Charles Stanley of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta. Yes, I even have family ties in Baptist life in greater Atlanta.

Anyway, I interviewed Stanley several times when he was leaping into national SBC leadership and, to make a long story short, I thought he was the archetypal Southern Baptist megachurch pastor of this era. He was on television, but his television ministry was really an extension of his pulpit ministry. He was a pulpit star, only with a softer edge that fit the beginning of the pastoral-counseling era in which ministers were supposed to be soothing, rather than jarring. Stanley was an old-fashioned version of smooth, blended with big doses of the new suburban Southern style.

Let me stress my main point again: Stanley was a talented megachurch preacher and, thus, it’s safe to say that he faced the challenges that the superstars in that line of work end up facing. And what might those challenges be?

First, you have to be able to maintain a high level of performance in an age in which younger audiences want younger preachers. You must retain your core audience.

Second, you have to set up loyalty structures that allow you to hang onto your pulpit to the point of retirement or beyond, depending on the size of your gifts and/or ego.

Third, you must dance a dangerous dance with workaholism and the other temptations that come with being The Man On Which Everything Depends.

Fourth, if possible, you have to find a talented successor who is willing to serve as second fiddle until the moment when you choose to step aside, to one degree or another. For some reason or another, megachurch pastors like to hand these franchises to their own children — which can get messy. Ask the Rev. Robert H. Schuller.

The bottom line: It is very hard to have an easy transfer of power when a massive institution is built almost completely on the talent and charisma of one man.

This brings us, naturally, to the massive — 5,000-plus words — new CNN feature about Stanley and his son Andy. The headline sets the tone of this dramatic piece: “Two preaching giants and the ‘betrayal’ that tore them apart.”

What, precisely, was this “betrayal”? That is the question at the heart of this story, yet it is the question that is never answered. That’s a problem.

Did the son walk away from his role as his father’s heir apparent because (a) he got tired of waiting, (b) his new neo-evangelical seeker flock was outgrowing his father’s old-fashioned Southern Baptist operation, (c) his father made decisions — precise details are hidden — that devastated his mother or (d) all of the above?

What’s at stake? This summary paragraph offers a strong metaphor:

There’s no father-son preaching duo quite like the Stanleys. Imagine if Steve Jobs had a son, who created a company that rivaled Apple in size and innovation — and they barely spoke to one another.

That was the Stanleys. Neither man has ever fully explained the events that tore them apart 19 years ago — until now.

This feature offers a riveting view of the personal conflict that tore these two superstar preachers apart, even as it becomes clear that — for whatever reason — neither man is willing to address the private details of the earthquake at the heart of the story, the elder Stanley’s divorce and the rumors that have swirled around it for years.

Thus, many will think that the following passage is the pivotal moment in this ambitious and largely successful piece:

The quiet exit of Anna Stanley from the pews went public in June 1993 when she filed for divorce. Her action caused a sensation in Southern Baptist circles, where divorce is considered a sin by some based on a literal reading of the Bible. Some pastors shunned Charles; others publicly demanded that he step down. The scandal dragged on for years as the couple attempted to reconcile.

In 1995, Anna Stanley explained why she wanted a divorce in a letter to her husband’s church that was excerpted in the local newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in an article titled “Torn Asunder.”

She said she had experienced “many years of discouraging disappointments and marital conflict. … Charles, in effect, abandoned our marriage. He chose his priorities, and I have not been one of them.”

The article makes it obvious that Andy’s primary loyalty, in this family schism, was to his mother. At the same time, how could the son build a sprawling, mega-ministry of his own — 33,000 people attend one of the son’s SEVEN churches every Sunday — without stepping into some of the same traps as his father?

Personally, I think there is another piece of this CNN feature story that comes closer to making the essential point.

You see, the CNN team seems to think that there is such a thing as a Southern Baptist tradition (there are many, quite frankly) and even a Southern Baptist theology (there is no one such approach to doctrine; ask Bill Clinton about that). The elder Stanley is held up as a prime example of the old Southern Baptist way and then Andy becomes the brave young leader who steps away from that frozen orthodoxy and finds his own way.

Truth is, Baptists and members of similar free-church flocks always evolve from generation to generation with millions of churchgoers flocking to the hot new preachers and the emerging super congregations that rise and fall in power year after year, decade after decade. One generation always creates its own new tradition and then outvotes the older generation by moving on to something new. In these evolving structures only the living saints get to vote.

Thus, here is the piece of this story that hit me:

Andy had discovered another preaching mentor, the Rev. Bill Hybels, an unassuming, genial pastor — the kind who travels alone without an entourage. He helped pioneer “seeker churches” while leading Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago.

People tend to focus on the cosmetic innovations of seeker churches: incorporating contemporary Christian music in worship, injecting clever skits and colorful stage props into services. But Andy was also drawn to Willow Creek’s primary mission: reaching “irreligious people” who had been turned off by traditional church.

After hearing Hybels, Andy says, church made sense “for the first time in my life.” Hybels became his hero.

“They were more committed to progress instead of maintaining traditions.”

How could his aging father compete with that? Especially since Charles Stanley was, in effect, his own tradition. Now his son has to come to grips with the new tradition that he, inevitably, has created by escaping from his father’s orbit.

This CNN feature is more than worth the time that it takes to read it all.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Baptists, Books, Evangelicals, Marriage & family, People, Radio & TV, Worship Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Peter Beinart and the powerful, but voiceless, Jews of Atlanta

November 14, 2012 By

The New York Times published an interesting story about the Atlanta Jewish Book Festival (“Jewish Book Event in Atlanta Cancels Author’s Talk on Zionism, and Uproar Follows“). It’s a great piece with the weirdest missing element. Here’s the top:

ATLANTA — The Jewish community in the metropolitan Atlanta area, by most definitions, is small, vibrant and close-knit.

There are perhaps 120,000 people who identify themselves as Jewish. For as long as most people can remember, relations among the various subgroups have been sometimes cantankerous but largely cordial and supportive.

But an appearance by an author who argues for a more liberal look at Zionism has been causing waves of conflict. Peter Beinart, who edits the Daily Beast blog Open Zion and writes regularly on Jewish politics, was to be one of 52 authors at the popular book festival held by the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.

But after some members complained, the center canceled his event. Even though another Jewish group rescheduled his talk, the center’s decision prompted boycott threats, criticism from rabbis and charges of censorship.

We get a feel for the diversity of the two-week festival, which draws more than 10,000 folks: Tony Danza, Michael Feinstein, Deborah Feldman. Feldman is the author of “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.”

What I find fascinating about the piece is that it’s all about how some members of the community were able to get Beinart kicked out of the festival. But we never hear from them or are told what they found objectionable about his views. We’re told about his book “The Crisis of Zionism.” We’re told about a portion of his argument:

Mr. Beinart argues, in part, that younger, liberal American Jews are turning away from the established American Jewish community in part because it is not fostering open debate about Israel and does not defend democratic values in the Jewish state. His change to a more liberal interpretation of Zionism and his call for a boycott of products from Israeli settlements and Israeli-occupied territories have made him a controversial figure.

We’re told that the talk was sponsored by “the national political advocacy group J Street.” I imagine we could describe that group with a bit more attention to its particular political views, but whatever. J Street found a new location and sold 200 tickets.

The community center’s leaders say they thought they threaded the needle the best they could, balancing the concerns of the patrons. We’re told that there was brushback. But whereas the anti-Beinart folks are kept nameless and without a voice defending themselves, the other side is given the balance of the piece to explain its side:

Rabbis criticized the decision during services last weekend. Open letters to the Jewish community were published in The Jewish Times.

“Two cardinal principles of Judaism have been violated: a support of censorship and the public embarrassment of a fellow Jew,” wrote Rabbi Philip N. Kranz of the Temple Sinai in Sandy Springs, Ga. He and others vowed to boycott the book festival because of what they perceive to be censorship.

I would have liked a bit more about this new-to-me cardinal principle about public embarrassment of a fellow Jew. Fascinating! Anyway, we here from some J Street partisans.

That’s great, but wouldn’t it have been nice to hear from the other major players in the story? The group who successfully persuaded the book festival to avoid hosting Beinart’s views?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Books, Judaism, Politics, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

What has God got to do with drones?

October 24, 2012 By

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,”a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. 

So began Peter Arnett’s 8 Feb 1968 report from the town of Ban Tre. Published in the New York Times under the headline “Major Describes Move“, time has improved the quotation to various forms of “we had to destroy the village to save it”. Questions of the proportionality of  response to a threat have been present in war reporting from the start of the craft in the Nineteenth century to the present conflict in Afghanistan. However the questions raised by Peter Arnett have been debated for more than a millennium in the theological and philosophical speculations of “just war” theory.

The moral issues surrounding the use of unmanned drones has been been raised from time to time in the U.S. press and addressed by my colleague Mollie Hemingway on the pages of GetReligion. However, the European press has been particularly exercised over their use in the battle with the Taliban. Tuesday’s Guardian in London gave the issue the front page treatment in its story on the activation of an RAF squadron operating from Britain that will control drones flying over Afghanistan. However the Guardian approaches the issue of ethics without reference to religion.

The article entitled “UK to double number of drones in Afghanistan” begins:

The UK is to double the number of armed RAF “drones” flying combat and surveillance operations in Afghanistan and, for the first time, the aircraft will be controlled from terminals and screens in Britain.

In the new squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), five Reaper drones will be sent to Afghanistan, the Guardian can reveal. It is expected they will begin operations within six weeks. Pilots based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire will fly the recently bought American-made UAVs at a hi-tech hub built on the site in the past 18 months.

Details of the new squadron’s operations are discussed and then the story moves to the moral issues involved in the use of unmanned drone attacks.

The use of drones has become one of the most controversial features of military strategy in Afghanistan. The UK has been flying them almost non-stop since 2008.

The CIA’s programme of “targeted” drone killings in Pakistan’s tribal area was last month condemned in a report by US academics. The attacks are politically counterproductive, kill large numbers of civilians and undermine respect for international law, according to the study by Stanford and New York universities’ law schools.

After raising the moral issues, the Guardian steps back somewhat and dives into eight paragraphs of operational details before resurfacing with this statement.

The MoD insists only four Afghan civilians have been killed in its strikes since 2008 and says it does everything it can to minimise civilian casualties, including aborting missions at the last moment. However, it also says it has no idea how many insurgents have died because of the “immense difficulty and risks” of verifying who has been hit. …In December 2010, David Cameron claimed that 124 insurgents had been killed in UK drone strikes. But defence officials said they had no idea where the prime minister got the figure and denied it was from the MoD.

Let me start off by commending the Guardian‘s reporter for raising the moral issues surrounding the targeted killing of America and Britain’s enemies. A story published the same day in the Washington Post on the administration’s plans to create kill lists of enemies was silent on the moral issues — though it did mention that there had been legal challenges to the government’s use of drones to kill American citizens in enemy ranks. As an aside, I am surprised by the lack of outrage over the targeted killing program from the press. America has been down this road before. The Phoenix program in Vietnam sparked congressional hearings and a steady flow of moral outrage up through the Carter Administration.

Was it sufficient for the Guardian to put forward the objections of some American law school professors when raising the moral issues of drone warfare? There are any number of philosophers and theologians who could have offered cogent critiques of the morality of drone warfare — Britain’s smartest man, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has been outspoken in his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has lectured on the issue of “just war” to military audiences. The choice of whom to quote, of course, lies with the author — but my sense of this story is that the religious element is outside the reporter’s knowledge. Ethics for the Guardian is not tied to religion.

This is, for me, is the journalism question in this story. There is an ethical ghost here — but what sort of ethical ghost, secular or religious?

The Christian tradition holds that morality without religion is impossible. There can be ethics without religion, but these ethics are necessarily incomplete or flawed. In his book Morality after Auschwitz, Peter Haas asked how Germany could have willingly participated in a state-sponsored program of genocide. His answer was that:

far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified. . . . the Holocaust as a sustained effort was possible only because a new ethic was in place that did not define the arrest and deportation of Jews as wrong and in fact defined it as ethically tolerable and ever good.

If there is no God, there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, or as Fyodor Dostoyevsky said in the Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.”

Against this view we have philosophers and ethicists such as Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton University who have argued  “that an intellectually coherent ethic has to be independent of religion and that’s an argument that goes right back to Socrates and Plato.”

Whether unconsciously or by choice, the Guardian has come down on one side of this argument. There is no God.

For those of us who are unpersuaded that there can be right or wrong without a God, should it have provided the arguments of religious ethics when addressing morality? Or should we take another newspaper?

What say you GetReligion readers? How should intelligent journalism address this question?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Atheists & Agnostics, Books, Journalism, Politics, Religion, World Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Dear Brother Powers (a parody)

October 15, 2012 By

From the desk of Ayatollah Hassan Sanei
Expediency Discernment Council, Tehran

Mr. John Powers
c/o 89.3 KPCC

Dear Brother Powers,

Please forgive me for using a business address for such a personal letter, but I cannot seem to find your home address on Google Maps.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent me a link to your review of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, I thought Punk’d might be returning to MTV. Oh, I know that too many Westerners see Mahmoud as eccentric and even a little dangerous. I hope that someday the world will meet the same man I know: a backslapping practical jokester who loves nothing more than slipping another one past the imams of greater Tehran.

As I began listening to your review, I was unsure whether you were really Fresh Air’s critic at large or a transgressive right-winger with shadowy ties to Breitbart.com doing a sly parody of an NPR nebbish. Your weightless voice, your staccato delivery, your contented verbal italics on each rhetorical flourish — all of these left me asking: Is it real or is it performance art?

But I powered through these doubts and then it hit me: this man speaks truth to power, and I am that power. After all these years I have realized that L’Affair Rushdie, as we like to call it in Iran, was not a question of blasphemy. It was not even about whether issuing a fatwa, as such, has a chilling effect on our world’s ever-fragile interfaith conversation.

It was, at heart, a question of literary integrity: Had I read the book before renewing the Rushdie fatwa? My face was crimson with shame. I had been called out as a fraud, and by a man who writes for Vogue from the West Coast of Babylon.

I took your challenge to heart, my gentle brother. I have since read every subtle page of The Satanic Verses, and I now realize that if Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had done the same in 1989 we could all have been spared 23 years of misunderstandings and unpleasantness.

I have learned deeply from this experience. I expect to turn next to God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, as I have heard that he and Rushdie were pals and that he too had a wry sense of humor. Perhaps after that I will make time for Robert Bly.

You made all of this possible, dear sir. Had you not found the insight to challenge me to read the book, I would have drifted about for the rest of my life with lingering anger and control issues. Thank you, gentle brother, thank you.

One qualifier: I speak only for myself and for no other imam.

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Books, Humor, Islam Tagged With: , ,

ABC on Jesus the sky pixie

October 11, 2012 By


Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!

These words close Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1924 poem “Vladimir Ilych Lenin“.”  Written in the months after Lenin’s death, “VI Lenin” is the greatest of Mayakovsky’s works and the apex of the socialist realist style of poetry that flowered in Russia in the decade after the Revolution. “VI Lenin” is also the template through which some in the press construct the person and works of Jesus Christ

For many members of the chattering classes Jesus is a Lenin figure, or Lenin is a Jesus figure (depending on your priorities) with the difference that Lenin was a real historical figure, while Jesus was not. A recent interview with Salman Rushdie conducted by the ABC, (note the “the” before ABC, meaning the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American Broadcasting Corporation) typifies this view of Jesus held by his cultured despisers.

But culture first, then media criticism.

Divided into three cantos, “VI Lenin” tells the story of the triumph of the proletarian revolution through the vehicle of the working class, which through toil and strife, guided by the laws of social development, revealed by its ideological genius Karl Marx, produces the “twin of Mother History” — the Bolshevik Party and its leader, VI Lenin.

The party for Mayakovsky is the symbol of the strength and wisdom of the working classes and is what has trained and mobilized the masses, and lead them out of their bondage. And over all this:

appears
the compass of Leninist thought,
appears
the guiding hand of Lenin.

Lenin’s life did not end with his death as the people and the party live on.

And even the death of Ilyich
became a great communist organizer.

Lenin will live in the hearts of the proletariat and will remain the rallying point for world revolution.

Proletarians, form ranks for the last battle!
Straighten your backs,
unbend your knees!
Proletarian army, close ranks!
Long live the joyous revolution, soon to come!
This is the greatest
of all great fights
that history has known.

What prompted that bit of showing off of the detritus of a wasted youth was the Salman Rushdie interview broadcast on the ABC Radio National program Books and Arts Daily. In a forty minute segment entitled “Salman Rushdie’s New Memoir: Joseph Anton” host Michael Cathcart spoke to the British novelist about his life in the wake of the fatwah.

The show notes state:

On Valentine’s Day in 1989, Iran’s Supreme leader the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa – any believer who assassinated the novelist Salman Rushdie was promised eternal life. The Ayatollah announced that the Indian born British novelist had committed an unpardonable blasphemy against Islam in a novel called The Satanic Verses. To supporters of the fatwa, even the title must have seemed like a confession. This was a man who by his own declaration was the author of The Satanic Verses. And so Salman Rushdie winner of the Booker prize became Rushdie the Infidel. Rushdie the man in hiding. For some he became a champion of free speech, a man who refused to cave in to bullying. To others, he was the author of his own misfortune. Now he tells the story of his years in protection in a memoir, a vast book called Joseph Anton, the alias he took while in hiding.

I encourage you to listen to the interview. Rushdie tells a fascinating story about his life and his work — and also has insights in the present unrest spreading across the Muslim world.  In recounting the protests that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses Rushdie states the “people who had demonstrated were ordered to demonstrate.”

“They didn’t know anything” about his book and were out in the streets demonstrating against a Western provocation against Islam on the instructions of political leaders who wanted to capitalize on the book’s notoriety for their local political advantage. The same pattern of events was unfolding in the Muslim world, Rushdie argued, with the obscure YouTube video “Innocence of Muslims.”

This interpretation of events is in line with the reports I shared from my contacts in Egypt on 11 Sept 2012 when a mob attacked the U.S. embassy in Cairo and consulate in Benghazi. While the government on 28 Sept backed away from its claim the attack on Benghazi was caused by spontaneous outrage from the “Innocence of Muslims” film, I have yet to see them concede what the press and Egyptian government have concluded — that the Cairo riot was a staged provocation also.

Do listen to Rushdie — he is worth your time. The interviewer, on the other hand, was not as strong.  About six minutes into the broadcast, when discussing Rushdie’s university studies about the history of Islam, the interviewer said:

There is no doubt that Muhammad was a real person. .. (while) Jesus was an ambiguous person.

Muhammad is real. Jesus is, maybe, real, or maybe a legend, the ABC argues. The interviewer has mangled his facts here, as after 150 years of scholarship on this point, the historical Jesus is conceded to have existed by most scholars. The issue as to whether Muhammad existed is an open one in Western scholarship.

For Mayakovsky Lenin is not like other men. He is a symbol of the struggle of the proletariat: past, present and future. He is a genius and a practical man, the “most human of all humans who have lived on earth”, Mayakovsky wrote.  A man “just like you and me.”

The ABC interviewer, were he to posit the existence of Jesus, would describe him in these terms also — and view the Christian religion in terms of its social utility. Let me say my concern is not to argue theology, but to point out the worldview the interviewer used in expressing what he believed to be the consensus as to who Jesus was. Jesus like Lenin was a figure whose value lay in his symbolic utility. It is how Jesus is interpreted, not who he is or his work that matters.

This, of course, is contrary to most Christian traditions, save for a few modern sects — yet the palette the ABC uses to paint who Jesus was is a default left-liberal semi-universalist one. Doubts can be raised about Jesus, but the portrait of Muhammad is the one held by traditional Islam.

Voluble skepticism of Christianity doubled with incurious statements about Islam is common among the press these days. Why?

Was this an example of political correctness? The crawling that one sees from many in the press when the topic comes to Islam? Or, was it ignorance of the topic? What say you GetReligion readers? Do you think the ABC would have argued that Jesus was real while Muhammad was sky pixie (a phrase beloved by atheists in describing divinity)?

 

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Atheists & Agnostics, Books, Interviews, Islam, Journalism, Radio & TV, World

Warning! Mixing theology, canon law and ink is difficult

October 4, 2012 By

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of journalism, the task that terrifies my students the most is attempting to paraphrase the complicated words of experts into prose that can be understood by the proverbial average American sitting at his or her breakfast table with a cup of coffee.

This is especially hard when the journalist in question knows little or nothing about the complicated matters being discussed by said expert.

Things get even trickier when the expert is highly skilled in speaking in an unknown tongue linked to a lofty profession — such as law, biology, philosophy, theology or, well, baseball.

First, the journalist has to get the words down accurately — in a recording or in dense, accurate notes.

Second, the journalist has to understand the words. Journalists must know what they don’t know and humble themselves enough to ask follow-up questions that yield understanding and, this is crucial, anecdotes and simple explanations that will build bridges to readers.

Finally, the journalist has to translate the words, slicing away layers of verbiage to reach the core information that can accurately be linked to the news issue being discussed. Journalists must attempt to say, accurately, in 50 words or so what experts would prefer to say in 500.

This is terrifying stuff, which is why journalists often seek user-friendly experts who, well, can speak ordinary English. There is a reason that, for a generation or two, religion-beat specialists have said that the formula for an A1 religion story consisted of “a poll, three local anecdotes and a quote from Martin Marty.”

On to the case at hand. The bottom line: If you put theology and law together you get Canon Law — a truly terrifying prospect.

This brings me to a blog post from Catholic scholar Edward Peters in which he describes a recent train wreck on the other side of a reporter’s notebook. Alas, this is a case in which the actual news report seems to be hidden behind a firewall at Newsday, which means I can only link to Peters’ take on the incident and a letter to the editor that followed in which the canon lawyer was accused, wrongly, of error because his words were inaccurately paraphrased.

The key is that Peters provided his answers — the topic is the possibility that women could be ordained as deacons — via email, which means he has the verbatim material. Thus, he explains at his “In the Light of the Law” website:

Over many years of trying to respond to secular reporters’ questions about religious, especially canonical, topics, I have adopted the practice of responding, in writing, time-permitting, but in a timely manner, to specific questions about canon law and Church life. (I don’t answer questions like “What does canon law say about marriage?” Not any more, I don’t.) And, I keep copies of my answers. Occasionally, as now, they are useful.

So, the reporter above contacted me in a professional manner by email, asked for a few minutes by phone to discuss female deacons, whereupon I suggested his sending a few written questions, to which I would respond within 24 hours. He sent me two good questions, and I promised written answers within 1 hour. Which I did.

It’s crucial to read the scholar’s answers, which are remarkably short and to the point:

(1) What is your opinion of the suggestion to have women deacons in the Roman Catholic Church?

The suggestion has no merit. It rests on several misunderstandings of the nature of holy Orders in the Catholic Church. It is true that in recent decades the Magisterium has spoken with greater clarity in pronouncing against the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood than in regard to deacons. Some people take from recent Roman statements on priesthood some wavering on the question of female deacons. But such language was, in my opinion, simply a showing of care not to preclude research into “deaconesses” of the ancient Church. But, whatever exactly ancient “deaconesses” were, they were not, I am convinced, clergy in the modern sense of the word, and thus appeal to them as precedents for female deacons today is bootless.

(2) What are the chances in your opinion this could actually happen?

I see no possibility that women will ever be ordained to the diaconate. The ceremonies that one sees from time to time purporting to be such ordinations are, first, of zero sacramental effect in the Catholic Church and, second, subject to severe penalties because of the confusion and disruption they introduce into the lives of the faithful.

The key point is that Peters based his answers on sacramental theology, not on canon law. He nods towards historical issues and gives his opinion on the theology in this matter. At no point does he refer to Catholic canon law.

Alas, according to Peters (if anyone can access the original, please let me know) the resulting Newsday story quoted him as saying:

“But canon law expert Edward N. Peters, of the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, sees ‘no possibility that women will ever be ordained to the diaconate’ because canon law forbids it.”

And that’s that. Peters was not amused.

Period. End of quotation.

Pffft. No nuance, none of my recognition that the other side has an argument, and, worst of all, the misrepresentation that my opposition to female clerics rests on positive canon law, instead of, as I expressly stated, in the theology of the sacrament of holy Orders.

As it turns out, the canon lawyer on the other side of the issue — Msgr. John Alesandro — was not amused with the answer that Peters was alleged to have provided and wrote the newspaper to say so. In this case, the text is not hidden behind a digital firewall. Alesandro writes, responding to the anti-Peters:

The article “Backing women deacons” [News, Sept. 27] contains a statement from a canon lawyer that “‘there is no possibility that women will ever be ordained to the diaconate’ because canon law forbids it.” It is true that current canon law forbids it, but that is irrelevant as to a future decision by the Holy Father. To conclude that there is no possibility is quite a leap.

The question of whether women can be validly ordained as deacons is a doctrinal one, not canonical. The real question is whether the prohibition of such an ordination is, when applied to diaconate, repeating an unchangeable doctrinal teaching or, alternatively, expressing a legal prohibition that can be altered — something that has happened in many areas of law in the past.

In his web post, Peters notes that Alesandro’s task was an easy one: “What I said — correction, what I was reported as having said — was as shallow as it was rigid. My kids could have refuted it.”

Peters does not believe that he was the victim of a conspiracy at Newsday or that this error was rooted in any kind of overt bias. The problem is that the Newsday team tried to make the issue simpler than it was. In the end, he was quoted as saying something that he did not say.

Now, the question is whether Peters is to blame, to some degree, because his email did not include words to this effect: “Warning! Please note that I am basing my opinion on sacramental theology, not on canon law.”

Is there a correction out there somewhere, perhaps behind a firewall? GetReligion readers, how would you word the correction?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Academia, Books, Catholicism, Godbeat, Worship

Time to pin new label on Brian McLaren?

September 26, 2012 By

If people have long had trouble defining the word “evangelical” — the Rev. Billy Graham once told me he had no idea what the word meant — it only made matters worse when the principalities and powers of Christian publishing started adding the word “emerging” or perhaps “emergent” in front of the already vague “evangelical.”

Who are, or were, the “emerging evangelicals” and what were they emerging from? Where were they going?

I always assumed that the emerging folks were people from evangelical backgrounds who had staked out new, daring, nuanced, foggy stances on the basic doctrinal questions that, several decades ago, I wrote up as the “tmatt trio.” It’s been some time since I mentioned that trio, so here is a refresher:

(1) Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?

(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)?

(3) Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

Let me stress, once again, that these are questions that — working as a mainstream religion-beat pro — I found useful when trying to get the lay of the land on disputes inside various Christian flocks, on the left and right. The whole point to was to get information about doctrinal basics and, in our era, these are some hot-button subjects in a wide variety of groups. The goal is to listen carefully as people answered or, on many cases, tried to avoid answering these questions.

Take, for example, the Rev. Brian D. McLaren — the writer, preacher, thinker and doctrinal futurist whose picture could almost certainly accompany the “emergent evangelical” entry in the mainstream-press religion dictionary of the past decade or so.

So here is my Godbeat question: Does the following wedding story in the holy of progressive holies, The New York Times, represent a final “jumping the shark” moment for those who want to use the word “evangelical” to describe McLaren? Here’s a major chunk of this short featurette:

Trevor Douglas McLaren and Owen Patrick Ryan were married Saturday in Washington. Guy Cecil, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and a Universal Life minister, officiated at the couple’s apartment.

Later in the day, the Rev. Brian D. McLaren, Mr. McLaren’s father and the former pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md., led a commitment ceremony with traditional Christian elements before family and friends at the Woodend Sanctuary of the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, Md.

Mr. McLaren (left), 28, is a senior sales associate in Washington for salesforce.com, a company that sells software used on the Internet. He graduated from Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. He is also a son of Grace A. McLaren, who lives with the Rev. McLaren in Marco Island, Fla., and who is a real estate agent for Keller Williams there. Mr. McLaren’s father, who writes and speaks on Christianity and spirituality, is the author of “A New Kind of Christian” and other books.

And so forth and so on. I am aware that readers do not really know what was included in that “traditional Christian elements” rite and, as always, it is almost impossible to know what this famous writer believes about specific doctrinal issues — such as the definition of marriage.

Still, at this point, is it time for journalists to begin referring to McLaren, the elder, as a liberal mainline Protestant? In other words, evangelical readers, is it time to stop calling him an “evangelical” in public discourse?

Print Friendly

Filed Under: Books, Evangelicals, Mainline, Marriage & family