Today…in God: Weekend redux.

Charles M. Blow in the New York Times on Religious Outliers

With all of the consternation about religion in this country, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how anomalous our religiosity is in the world.

A Gallup report issued on Tuesday underscored just how out of line we are. Gallup surveyed people in more than 100 countries in 2009 and found that religiosity was highly correlated to poverty. Richer countries in general are less religious.

But that doesn’t hold true for the United States.

Sixty-five percent of Americans say that religion is an important part of their daily lives. That is compared with just 30 percent of the French, 27 percent of the British and 24 percent of the Japanese.

I used Gallup’s data to chart religiosity against gross domestic product per capita, and to group countries by their size and dominant religions.

The cliché goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Assuming that this holds true for charts, here is mine.

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Clay Farris Naff on “Stephen Hawking to God: Your services are no longer needed. God to Hawking: You so don’t get who I am.” Via Huffington Post

Stephen Hawking has touched off a Big Bang, and his publishers couldn’t be happier. But just like the original Big Bang, Hawking has created an explosion out of nothing.

In his latest book, the famed physicist says, “Because there are laws such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself out of nothing. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”

Hawking’s statement is no big deal. It’s not original, it’s not certain, and even if true it’s no threat to authentic faith.

Hawking may have abandoned the dappled language of his previous utterances for the harsh light of atheism, but there’s nothing new in what he says — not even for himself….

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From USA Today via AP: Vatican decries stoning in Iran adultery case

The Vatican raised the possibility Sunday of using behind-the-scenes diplomacy to try to save the life of an Iranian widow sentenced to be stoned for adultery.

In its first public statement on the case, which has attracted worldwide attention, the Vatican decried stoning as a particularly brutal form of capital punishment.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the Catholic church opposes the death penalty in general.

It is unclear what chances any Vatican bid would have to persuade the Muslim nation to spare the woman’s life. Brazil, which has friendly relations with Iran, was rebuffed when it offered her asylum.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was convicted in 2006 of adultery. In July, Iranian authorities said they would not carry out the stoning sentence for the time being, but the mother of two could still face execution by hanging for adultery and other offenses.

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Deepak Chopra on “Right thinking and wrong thinking about Muslims” in the Washington Post

Earlier this year Gallup provided two intriguing statistics about Americans and their view of Islam: 53 percent of Americans view Islam unfavorably compared with 42 percent who view the religion favorably. Majorities view other major religions favorably: 91 percent for Christianity, 71 percent for Judaism and 58 percent for Buddhism. The negativity comes even as 63 percent of Americans said they know little about Islam.

It’s no surprise that ignorance leads the way for prejudice. When I set out to write a fictional account of the life of Muhammad, I considered myself free from prejudice. I was raised in India playing with Muslim kids and maintain close ties with Muslim friends. Yet when I began to research the origins of Islam, I found that compared to what I had absorbed about the life of Jesus or Buddha, my knowledge of the Prophet’s life was almost a blank slate.

In the present climate of antagonism toward Muslims, a blank slate is good, since so many people started out their knowledge of Islam with two facts: Arabs control the world’s oil supply, and Muslim extremists attacked the U.S. on 9/11. This accounts for another finding by Gallup, that Americans see extremists as woven into the basic fabric of Islam, a view they don’t hold about Jewish or Christian fundamentalists. Would you say that Christians who kill anti-abortion doctors and burn down abortion clinics are basic to Christianity? Yet the protest of moderate Muslims that jihadis are an extremist minority tends to fall upon deaf ears.

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“Vatican accuses BBC of “anti-Christian” bias” in advance of papal visit, by Heidi Blake in London’s Telegraph:

Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the BBC’s news coverage is contaminated by “a radically secular and socially liberal mindset”.

He said: “This week the BBC’s director general [Mark Thompson] admitted that the corporation had displayed ‘massive bias’ in its political coverage throughout the 1980s, acknowledging the existence of an institutional political bias.”

He is also angered by a 15 per cent slump in religious programming over the past 20 years and believes the broadcaster should appoint a religion editor to address the decline.

He also accused the corporation of plotting a “hatchet job” on the Vatican in a documentary about clerical sex abuse on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.

Cardinal O’Brien believes that atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins are given a disproportionate amount of airtime while mainstream Christian views are marginalised.

The Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh said the corporation’s intolerance of religion is equivalent to its “massive” political bias against the Conservatives in the 1980s.

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Jim Wallis’ “Open letter to Glenn Beck” via Sojourner magazine’s God’s Politics blog:

Dear Glenn,

I think we got off on the wrong foot. I listened to your speech last Saturday and heard a lot of things that we agree on. In fact, I have used some of the same language of our need to turn to God, and the values of “faith, hope, and charity” (love). What I would like to find out, and others would too, is what you mean by that language. Until last weekend, you have consistently described yourself primarily as an entertainer, and the public has known you as a talk show host. But last Saturday, you sounded more like an evangelist or revivalist on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I know we disagree significantly on many issues of public policy, but you said that people can disagree on politics and still agree on basic values and try to come together. Maybe we should test that. Instead of my being up on your blackboard and a regular target of your show’s rhetoric, why don’t we finally have that civil dialogue I invited you to months ago? Your speech on the Mall suggested and even promised a change of heart on your part, so why don’t we talk? Here are a few things I think we could talk about.

First, I’ve been asked by people in the media if it matters that you are a Mormon. I unequivocally answer, no, it does not. We don’t want more anti-Mormon bigotry any more than we want the anti-Muslim bigotry now rising up across the country. By the way, you should speak to that (against it)….

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