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Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Nerd

“TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The death toll from severe storms that punished five Southern U.S. states has jumped to 269.” 

This is the opening statement from Weather.com‘s article, “Tornadoes Cut Path of Destruction,” which documented the devastating tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27^th, 2011. 

The article itself did not surprise me… but the comments from the website’s respondents most certainly did. What I found most intriguing was the theological language being used on this modern media site, one explaining scientifically natural weather phenomena and includes no reference to any theological agenda.  Here are just a few examples:

God loves us so much and He is trying to get our attention one more time before He judges the earth. He wants us to live and not die. Wake up, people.

I pray God’s protection during this difficult time. May He give us His peace, comfort, and strength.  Romans 12  

Many such comments were directed towards those affected by the storms, letting them know that people were praying for them and the affected region. However, there were a few indicating that those people spared from the wrath of the storms felt that God had spared them for a reason. Other remarks used thick theological language indicating that these disasters are signs from God, of the ‘End times,’ and have been sent by God to call Americans to repentance. 

Representing another audience entirely, some challenged these theodicies. Theodicies offer religious justification and explanation for why evil (deadly tornadoes) exists in the world: if God is all knowing (knows that innocents are being killed), all powerful (has the power to intervene to protect said innocents), and is all good (loves his human creations), then why doesn’t he intervene and stop such disasters, which often happen to good, God-fearing folk? Of course, some commentators anticipated this tough theological problem, and either worked to resolve it, or berate those who might raise it in the first place, insisting that:  

God is the only reason more weren’t killed.  Be thankful it wasn’t your family. 

Don’t get upset people. Just pray for this very lost person! 

I wonder if that was what the people thought when Noah built the ark?  I believe!:  D and I am so glad he is preparing a place for me.. Sure don’t want that smoking place, do you? 

Yes, hopefully [people] like you, low life ass crack scum, will go first……I’ll pray for that. 

Wake up in hell and I think u will change your mind. 

Dear Lord, Please bless the people who walk with the breath you gave them and down you with it in the same. These people need a guiding light as they have become lost in their path. Please protect their families as they are lead into Hell by the sinners of the lands. In your name we pray, Amen.

God does exist. He wants America to repent of their sins and turn to Him. John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” 

Satan has turned many against God, including many of the posters on here. Questioning the existence of God is EXACTLY what Satan wants you to do…Satan …causes all the bad in the world, not God. Stop blaming the one who gave you life and put the blame where it really belongs!

These responses seem to be drawing on various starting assumptions about the nature of God: 

• God does exist and He is using natural disasters to chastise certain people so they will repent and return to God;
• God is the source and catalyst of natural disasters, but is also the reason more people were saved;
• God is sending these disasters as signs of the ‘End times’;
• Satan (the originator of evil) challenged God’s authority and now stalks weak humans attempting to destroy their faith in God; those who pose non-religious explanations for such events are themselves lost sinners in the grip of Satan and are headed for Hell unless they repent and believe.

The source of my wonder here is the eagerness to assign these natural disasters to an all-loving supreme being, the loathing directed at nonbelievers, and the medium through which these ideas are being conveyed. While these views are as old as monotheistic belief itself, what I find surprising is the social platform through which commentators offer such a stark and uncompromising theology… The Weather Channel.

Weather Religion?  

The connection between religion and weather is actually not as unusual as it may appear at first glance.  Many of the earliest theorists have argued that the origin of religion lies in its relationship with the natural world. Max Muller, a 19^th century German linguist and one of the “founding fathers” of the comparative religion, argued that, “all religions, primitive or otherwise… have their origins in the personification of natural forces and objects and the ‘myths’ that arise from these personifications.” 

This view, Naturism, holds that, 

humans gain a sense of the divine from natural phenomena: sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, thunder and lightning, storms, the seasons, animals, and plants. Faced with such an inspiring, mysterious, frightening, and awesome natural world, humans endowed nature with supernatural qualities. (Rodney Stark, 24-5) 

Some scholars have supported sociological, anthropological, and psychological analysis of what they claim is the human creation of the supernatural and religious, via the personification of natural phenomena. Other scholars, however, have advocated for a view of ‘religion’ as a separate category all together. For these scholars, religion is separate, and human experience of the sacred is a ‘real’ experience, and not merely a byproduct of language, social construction, human anxieties, or psychological dysfunction. 

Mircea Eliade, an adamant supporter of the categorical separation of religion from other disciplines and oft labeled ‘high priest’ of the ‘history of religion’ model mentioned above, opens his hallmark work, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, by praising the work of a German scholar by the name of Rudolf Otto: 

Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience… Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers- of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in divine wrath. (8-9) 

Otto rejected the idea that the ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ is necessarily moral or rational.  For Otto, the ‘numen’, the ‘holy’ minus moral and rational aspects, is awe-inspiring, mysterious, terrifying and ‘wholly other.’ Due to the ‘wholly otherness” of Otto’s ‘numen,’ all language falls short to accurately express it in its totality.  

Despite the limitations of language, humankind has borrowed the imagery it has used to describe the most mysterious, terrifying, and ‘wholly other’ phenomenon humans have encountered—nature.  Otto’s description of the divine as terrifying and ‘wholly other’ and Muller’s view of religions as originating in the personification of natural forces, although hardly comforting, do seem to find some resonance in the Hebrew Bible’s description of the holy and powerful god of the Hebrews, Yahweh. 

The Jewish Weather-deity? 

Walter Gerhardt Jr. in his article, “The Hebrew/Israelite Weather-Deity,” presents a persuasive argument that the Hebrew God “is expressed in Biblical literature as an “allegorized idiom” of the weather phenomena” (130).  According to Gerhardt, the Hebrew God, known as YHWH, “is the personification of environmental forces and energies of weather indigenous to the Sinai/Edom and Syro-Palestinian geographic locales” and is often described using “the precipitive elements of the rainstorm” (130). Gerhardt presents Moses’ encounter with the deity on the holy mountain as an excellent example of this, emphasizing the dense cloud shrouding the mountain (133). Gerhardt highlights how YHWH thunders from heaven and “scatters lightning” (138). 

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible, known the TaNaKh to Jews and the Old Testament to Christians, is chock-full of disastrous natural events as well as sometimes contradictory explanations for them. One need look no further than Genesis to find stories where natural disasters are being attributed to the God: Noah and the flood, the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, are two of the most commonly referenced events. In Exodus, Moses encounters God via a startling viewing of a burning bush, represents Him before the Egyptian pharaoh, witnesses ten horrific plagues used to motivate the pharaoh to relent, experiences the parting of the ‘Red Sea’ which in turn “saves” the Hebrew slaves but wipes out pharaoh’s army, and negotiates the terms of the covenant with the Hebrew deity while on a holy mountain surrounded by a lightning storm. 

Luther’s God of Lightning 

The Hebrew Bible, noted above, is not just a sacred text for Jews but for Christians.  Christianity, historically, grew out of an apocalyptic and messianic sect of Judaism in the 1^st century, Common Era. The earliest followers of Jesus believed him to be the ‘messiah,’ a long anticipated political and religious savior meant to overthrow the Romans and restore the ancient kingdom of Israel. These earliest followers came to this conclusion about Jesus’ identity by finding what they interpreted to be prophetic statements in the Hebrew Scriptures. Early Christianity inherited the Hebrew Scriptures and added their own writings about Jesus and the early church to them to make their own Bible. So, it is worth asking whether the weather-deity of the Hebrew Bible persisted as Christianity developed out of Judaism. 

Christians inherited not only the scriptures of early Judaism but also many of the theodicies buried in the scriptures themselves which give various justifications for why ‘evil’ exists.  The book of Job itself provides numerous explanations, though none are conclusive, as to why disaster had befallen Job and his family, although the text states that Job was blameless in the sight of God.  The book of Job ends with the Hebrew God appearing to Job in a whirlwind, another destructive weather-related phenomenon. 

Such stories have not been lost on prominent Christian theologians, such as the architect of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. Luther suggested that his own entrance into monastic life was driven by a terrifying experience he had during a violent thunderstorm. Protestant Christianity has been deeply marked by Luther’s description of how the Christian God used nature to His own ends. As Craig Martin writes on Luther’s perspective in an article titled “The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology” found in The Journal of the History of Philosophy: 

… He also interpreted “fruitful weather” as proof of God’s love for humanity.63 Thus, in the Sermons on Luke 21, while rare events were ominous or apocalyptic, fair weather might signal God’s protection.”(275) 

Many Protestant Christians today, especially those of an Evangelical nature, like many Christians found in the South Eastern United States, still hold to this correlation between nature disasters and God’s will.

Evangelical Christians in the South

According to a survey given by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, regarding the “most religious states” in the U.S. (based on four criteria: “the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God”), Southern States consistently lead the states in self-claimed religiosity.  According to their data: 

“More than eight-in-ten people in Mississippi (82%) say religion is very important in their lives… In some other Southern states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina, at least seven-in-ten people say religion is very important in their lives.”  

The U.S. Religious Landscape survey, also from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, estimates that 50% of the U.S.’s Evangelical Protestant Christian population lives in the Southeastern region of the country.  

Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestant Christians make up 49% of Alabama’s state population (the national average is 26%).  Mainline Protestants represent 15%, historically black Protestants make up 18% and Catholics only make up 6% of the states’ population (while nationally they represent 24% of the population).  Jews, Orthodox and other Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, separately, at most, represent 1% of the state’s population.  A group labeled “unaffiliated” make up 8% of the state’s population. 

An article in the Christian Century titled “Most don’t blame God for disasters,” presents the following statics based on a poll by Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service after the devastating earthquakes and tsunami in Japan: 

“Nearly six in ten evangelicals (59 percent) believe that God can use natural disasters to send messages—nearly twice the number of Catholics (31 percent) or mainline Protestants (34 percent) who so believe. Evangelicals (53 percent) are also more than twice as likely as the one in five Catholics or mainline Protestants to believe that God punishes nations for the sins of some citizens.”(14)

Why the Weather Channel?

Now, the most compelling question of all… why the Weather Channel.com?  Why are these comments showing up in an unlikely platform?  Why did these respondents feel the need to post such overtly religious comments on such a seemingly “secular” website?

 The reasons may be multifold. The Weather Channel’s website specifically does NOT offer theological reflections on natural events. While science is often credited with telling us how the world works, religion has often presented us with reasons, adequate or inadequate, for why the world works as it does. The desire of respondents to find meaning, and not just logistical analysis of how weather works, may be why they felt the need to provide meaning to these disasters. 

However, while the Weather Channel does not specifically offer theological explanations for natural disasters, this doesn’t mean that the site doesn’t attempt to capitalize off of the deep-seated desires of the population to feel “in control” over weather events. 

Monitoring the conditions which might lead to dangerous weather does not equate to controlling the weather but scientific analysis and advanced technological weather-monitoring equipment which result in weather ‘forecasting,’ may be feeding the same desires for control that religions have often offered to the population. 

Nicole Fleetwood, in her article “Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event”, explains how some viewers may be turning to various technologies to feel in control, which I would argue is one of the desirable characteristics institutionalized religion offers:

“On some level, meteorological technologies give the power to predict the future. We are able to witness the storm as weather media event from its inception as tropical storm to its naming to its levels of categorization to its arrival. The detailed sophistication afforded the viewer promises to lower our risk by increasing preparedness. Marita Sturken argues that computer visualization technologies, such as Doppler radar, ‘are used to convey the sense that weather-tracking technologies can actually help to control the weather itself.’” (772) 

Perhaps the reason the Weather Channel’s website has become a platform for commentators to process grief, send condolences and prayers, and work through theological concerns is due to the fact that the meteorological technologies, like religious and spiritual theodicies, provide some sense of control and order in times of chaos.

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

The Parable of the Good Samaritan (the Gospel of Luke 10:25-37) is probably one of the best- known parables from the Christian New Testament.  In the U.S. the phrase ‘good Samaritan’ is commonly understood to describe someone who has gone out of their way to help another.  This phrase has been thoroughly secularized and one need not be a Christian to know its meaning.  You voluntarily carry your elderly neighbor’s groceries… you are a ‘good Samaritan.’ You clean up someone else’s litter on the side walk… you are a ‘good Samaritan.’

In the second grade, I was recognized as the most conscientious student in the class… and you guessed it… I was awarded a certificate for being a ‘good Samaritan.’ But wait… who exactly are the Samaritans and why did my second grade teacher think I was a particularly ‘good’ one?

Who are the Samaritans?

Stephen L. Harris in his text, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, describes the Samaritans of first century Roman occupied Judea as a sect of Jewish people who “recognized only the Mosaic Torah, but not the prophets or other biblical writings, as binding Scripture (67).”  

According to Harris, there was a great deal of animosity between the Samaritans and other Jewish groups due to the Samaritan’s acceptance of only the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as scripture.  Not only did the Samaritan scripture differ from that of the standard Jewish version but the Samaritans also embraced Mount Gerizim, rather than Mount Zion, as God’s holy place.  

During Jesus’ time, the Samaritan Jewish identity was hotly contested… so much so that “Jews in Judea regarded the Samaritans as an alien people who practiced a false version of the Jewish religion (67).”  Harris also notes that according to some biblical verses (such as 2 Kings 17) the Samaritans were viewed as the descendants of “Mesopotamians whom Assyrian conquerors settled in the area during the eight century B.C.E.- and therefore not ‘authentic’ Jews (67).”  Harris states that this description of the Samaritans’ origin, although historically inaccurate, was a widely held belief among the various Jewish sects in Judea during the first century CE. 

Jesus and His Historical Context:

Historically speaking, Jesus was a Jew.  He had Jewish parents, went to the Jerusalem Temple, knew Jewish scripture and often quoted from them, and celebrated Jewish holidays such as Passover.  The name Jesus is actually the Greek version of his Hebrew name—a variation on the name Joshua.  The majority of Jesus’ followers, according to the four gospels of the New Testament, are patently Jewish.  I am illustrating this point because there is a tendency among some Christians to see Jesus as outside of his Jewish context and thereby miss the impact that many of his actions and sayings would have had on his primarily Jewish audience.

The Parable:

According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is approached by a Torah scholar (a man very learned in Jewish law) and asked what he must do to inherent eternal life.  Jesus returns his question with another question: “What is written in the law?  What do you read there?”  The scholar quotes from the written Torah: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus affirms the man’s answer but before he leaves he wants Jesus to clarify who his neighbor is… who does this category include?  Instead of directly answering the man, Jesus tells him a parable, a common didactic literary tool used by Jewish teachers to have listeners work through their own questions.  The parable illustrated is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which reads as follows:

30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  33 But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.  34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.  Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  35 The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’

After telling the parable, Jesus turns back to the man and asks “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”  (New Revised Standard Version, 1989)

Unpacking the Parable:

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho, in Jesus’ time, was a notoriously dangerous stretch of road.  Particularly hazardous because bandits would often lie in wait for travelers.  The unfortunate man in Jesus’ parable fell victim to a band of robbers and they striped him, beat him and went away leaving him half-dead.  The injured man is anonymous. The parable presents three new characters: a priest, a Levite, and finally a Samaritan.  According to Brad Young’s book The Parables: Jewish Tradition and Christian Interpretation, the priest and Levite both “serve religious functions in the temple” and did not “follow the oral interpretation of the Torah” which means they were probably associated with a particular group of Jews in the first century known as the Sadducees (106).  These Sadducees were very concerned with ritual purity and followed the written Torah injunction (Lev. 21:1) that they not touch a dead body which was understood as ritually contaminating.  The priest and Levite’s actions were dictated by their strict interpretation of ritual purity laws.  If the man is dead, then they risk ritual contamination by touching a corpse.

Relationship to the Law

According to the Law, what is one required to do?  Some Jewish groups like the Sadducees accepted only the written Law and read these texts literally.  The Samaritans, who as we previously discussed, were often viewed as enemies of the Jews, ironically shared one characteristic with the Sadducees… they too only accepted the written Law.  Both groups rejected the oral Law.  According to Harris, the Pharisees “accepted not only the written Law contained in the Mosaic Torah but also a parallel oral law (65).  Harris explains this oral law as “intended to extend the laws of Temple purity to virtually every aspect of life” (65).  So this parable not only suggests that Jesus viewed even one’s enemies as one’s neighbors but also shows his affinity with the Pharisee’s reverence for both the written and oral Law.  The oral law, accepted by the Pharisees, prioritized the preservation of life over ritual purity.  Therefore, if there had been a Pharisee in this parable, we can guess what, given his view of Jewish law, he would have done in this circumstance… he would have done as the Samaritan did.

What is so shocking about this parable?

The audience listening to Jesus were Jews, as he himself was, and the man to whom Jesus was speaking directly was not only a Jew but he was very well versed in Jewish law.  It is likely that Jesus’ audience had heard a teaching like this before and were merely waiting for Jesus to fill in the details.  This might have been akin to hearing the opening lines of a joke you have told a number of times… only to find out that the person telling the joke had modified it.  The audience probably nodded their heads in agreement and gave each other knowing smiles as Jesus began the parable… of yes… the infamous road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the callousness of the priest and the Levite, and then the… what?  Jesus’ followers probably expected the champion of the story to be a Pharisee… after all… this group of Jews were required to follow the oral as well as the written law.  But Jesus changes the pattern and chooses a very unlikely candidate as his hero… a Samaritan.

Why did Jesus tell a Parable about a ‘Good’ Samaritan?

We have briefly touched on Jesus’ historical context and noted the significant historical tensions between Samaritans and other Jews living in Judea during Jesus’ time.  We might not be shocked to find Jesus, as a first century Jew in Judea, telling a story about a Samaritan to his predominately Jewish audience.  What is shocking is that Jesus makes the Samaritan the champion of his parable!  Not only were Samaritans seen as enemies of the Jews, they also followed the written Law (albeit a distinct version of it) and were not beholden to the oral Law. The Samaritan was not fulfilling a requirement placed on him by oral or written Law and given his status as outsider was probably risking his own life helping the anonymous man laying half-dead on the side of the road.

The Torah scholar to whom Jesus directs his parable is now asked which of the three characters in the parable “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers” and the scholar responds knowingly to Jesus’ question… “the one who showed him mercy.”  Keep in mind that this Torah scholar knows both the written and oral Law and appears to be in line with the Pharisaic view of the law.  He too may have expected the hero in Jesus’ parable to be a Pharisee if not Pharisee like.  He might have expected the man to act due to his lawful obligation.  Here, in this instance, the Torah scholar is the champion because he understands the underlying meaning of the cryptic parable.  The Torah scholar did not answer Jesus’ question by saying ‘the Samaritan.’ He defines the man by his actions and not is social, cultural, or religious status.

After telling the parable, Jesus turns back to the man and asks “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

“Marley was dead: to be begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” (Dickens 45)

Thus begins perhaps one of Charles Dickens’ most popular works. One need not be an avid reader of Victorian literature or an English major to be struck by this short story (total, its length is less than 100 pages). Even if you never sat down and read A Christmas Carol, if you live in the U.S. or Britain, you probably know the major components of the story: an elderly miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, undergoes visitation from a series of ghosts, each attempting to woo or terrify Ebenezer to reform. Who could forget Scrooge’s kind hearted clerk Bob Crachit, or his crippled and beloved son, Tiny Tim, who, despite his hardship, proclaims “God bless us, everyone!”? Among the plethora of versions of the Carol are Disney’s latest version starring Jim Carey, a modern remake starring Bill Murray called Scrooged, and, one of my personal favorites, A Muppets’ Christmas Carol. This is not even to mention the numerous black and white versions gracing TV screens every December. Upon my reading of the classic this Christmas, I was intrigued by something I had never noticed on previous readings: a woodcut image gracing the pages across from the description of Marley’s ghost. The title of the woodcut, done by John Leech, is Ghosts of DepartedUsurers. This image title haunted me because, despite the popularity of the term during Dickens’ time, one hardly ever hears the term “usurer” today. Albeit the infrequency of the use of the term today, the concepts behind “usury” are at the heart of what plagues our modern economies and religious lives. Here is the description which provided the inspiration for the woodcut mentioned above:

“The air filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.” (65)

The description of Marley’s Ghost is even more harrowing:

“The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” (57)

The spiritual burdens these spirits are bound by are symbols of their greed… and they appear to represent a particular type of sin greatly condemned throughout Christian history (that is until today), usury.

As mentioned earlier, “usury” as a term, is hardly a household name anymore and yet postmodern culture is greatly plagued by its effects. The term itself has developed a long history, especially among the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Interestingly, Islam still vehemently opposes “usury” and has developed special banking principals to guide devout Muslims. Like other ancient concepts, the word “usury” has been defined differently by various scholars and theologians. Usury, in its most common use today stands for “interest.” Could it truly be the case that earning interest could make someone culpable of a grievous sin in the eyes of the Christian Church? Yes and no.

For thousands of years, the Christian Church has identified “usury” as a sin… however various theologians and scholars living within these thousands of years disagreed over exactly what “usury” was and was not. A brief exploration of the term “usury” (and its multiple manifestations) may lead us to a better understanding of what was actually being prohibited by various religious communities, especially Christian ones.

In his book, Usury, Interest, and The Reformation, Eric Kerridge, gives us some insight into the intricate and sometime tedious art of trying to pin down a definition of “usury”:

“Usury or fenory is the taking of payment over and above the amount lent merely and solely in return for a secured loan.”(5)

Kerridge presents the definition explicated by the famed church father, Thomas Aquinas, to further clarify the concept of “usury”:

“To take money as the price of money lent, that is to take usury…the price for use, that is called usury.” (5)

Given this definition of “usury”, it seems that any interest on a loan is usury and therefore a sin in the Christian church. Aquinas bases his condemnation of “usury” in Biblical and Classical texts. For example, Aquinas’ view was in part dictated by Aristotle’s remarks on money:  “Aristotle… comments that money was not intended for this, but for buying and selling; usury merely produced money out of money, and so of all the ways to wealth was the most unnatural.” (15)

If one was not convinced by Aristotle’s argument against “usury”, one could always look to the multiple Biblical injunctions against “usury”:

“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest.” (New International Bible, Exodus 22:25)

“Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit.” (Leviticus 25:36-37)

“Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.” (Deuteronomy 23:19-20)

“Who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent. Whoever does these things will never be shaken.” (Psalm 15:5)

“He lends at interest and takes a profit. Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he is to be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.”(Ezekiel 18:13)

One might have noted that these injunctions are all found in the Hebrew Bible (which Christians refer to as the Old Testament). Another point to note is that these Biblical injunctions against interest apply only to taking interest from fellow Israelites (Jews), not other communities. Christianity, originally being a sect within Judaism, inherited these laws against taking interest but encountered a new dilemma due to the nature of the Christian community. Judaism fostered an exclusive religious and ethnic communal identity: there were Jews, those bound by the Covenant with the Hebrew god, and there were Gentiles, everyone else. Christianity, whose growth and strength depended on proselytizing to outsiders, viewed all outsiders as potential converts and thereby, potentially part of a worldwide community. The various Biblical laws mentioned above were ironically the very laws that allowed Jews to play the role of lender to European Christian communities (seen as Gentiles) and also the very same laws that prohibited Christians from playing any role but that of the borrower. The Christian New Testament is less lucid regarding the stipulations on lending and borrowing. Most theologians point to Jesus’ words as documented in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 6:35, “Lend, hoping for nothing again” as spiritual justification for legalized lending, although each may interpret these words differently. Some readers may interpret these words to mean that lending is allowed as long as no interest is charged. Others view these words as encouraging investment and others may read this passage as authorizing lending without any expectation of the principal being returned.

Unfortunately for Jewish communities in Europe and England, the livelihood that lending to non-Jews brought, also evoked a deep-seated hatred for the Jews among borrowing Christians:

“Not being Christians, they were debarred from the public exercise of lawful trades and occupations, but where allowed to practice them within their own community, which needed rabbis, physicians, surgeons, lawyers, butchers, bakers, and so on. Thus, while by no means all Jews were usurers, all lived by usury directly or indirectly, so the stigma attaching to usurers was extended to the Jews as a whole, and heightened by the general dislike of foreigners and foreign ways and beliefs.” (Kerridge 20)

In England, the words “Jew” and “usurer” became synonymous and one need only look to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, to see how Jews were often portrayed by Christian communities. From this vantage point it is easy, although disheartening, to see how easily the Christian condemnation of “usury”, meant originally to dissuade Christians from taking advantage of the poor, became a tool of propaganda used against Jewish communities. Dickens’ himself, although never naming Scrooge or Marley as “Jews” did include the Jewish villain stereotype, embodied in the infamous character Fagin, within his novel, Oliver Twist, referring to him many times simply as “the Jew”. However, there has been some mention of Dickens attempting to de-emphasize Fagin’s Jewish identity in later editions of the novel.

Kerridge notes that over time there are more distinctions made between “usury” and “interest”. For one thing, some writers commented that “interest” was not “usury” if it was charged as a penalty for not paying back the principal on an agreed date. Another distinction, albeit a rather murky one, is that “interest” requires that the lender or investor must share the risks of the business with the borrower or partner. The various terms linked with the concept of “usury”, such as “ochre”, “fenory”, etc., each had slightly different meanings and were often used interchangeably, making any definitive statement on the issue difficult. John Calvin, another significant Christian theologian, made a distinction between various kinds of loans and distinguished between who one could lend to based on the borrower’s economic status:

“Humanist that he was, Calvin knew there were two Hebrew words translated as “usury.” One, neshek, meant “to bite”; the other, tarbit, meant “to take legitimate increase.” Based on these distinctions, Calvin argued that only “biting” loans were forbidden. Thus, one could lend at interest to business people who would make a profit using the money. To the working poor one could lend without interest, but expect the loan to be repaid. To the impoverished one should give without expecting repayment.” Jones, Norman. “Usury”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. February 10, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/jones.usury

Calvin also notes that the Latins (Romans) viewed “usura” as honorable but detested “fenory”, which he describes along with others (such as P. Melanchthon) as the “biting” kind of loan mentioned above. Cato, according to Calvin, put “fenory” on the same level as murder and described those who practiced it as those who “suck the blood out of others”(from J. Calvin, Commentarii in Librum Psalmorum, Amersterdam, 1567, p. 47, translated by Eric Kerridge). These biting and blood sucking allusions link to the negative caricatures used to demonize Jews such as the bizarre charge brought against Jews in England and Europe referred to as “blood libel”, which according to the Internet Medieval Sourcebook was the belief that some Christians held that Jews used the blood of a Christian child to make Passover matzohs.

According to Joseph Shatzmiller in his book Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society, not only was “usury” considered a sin and a crime throughout Christian history, according to the Council of Vienne (1311-1312), it made one a heretic and made Christians and Jews vulnerable to church inquisitors (46). Despite the declaration of such councils against “usury”, many European governments had, by the 14^th century, gained from the well-entrenched credit system and profited from the Jewish moneylenders’ activities. The more criminalized lending became, the more reticent lenders and borrowers were of admitting their involvement. Lenders and borrowers had to depend on unwritten agreements, interest percentages were not documented, and payment, nonpayment and indebtedness sometimes led to violence. In his book, Shatzmiller also notes that during the Black Death of 1348-1349:

“many believed that the Jews created the pestilence, and as a result Jewish quarters were attacked by fear-stricken crowds. But even in these circumstances the populace was intent on destroying notarial records and other evidence of indebtedness, as Pope Clement IV noted in a bull of 2 October 1348” (49).

The major thinkers of the Protestant Reformation (Luther, Zwigli, Calvin, etc.) were particularly critical of what they saw as the Catholic Church’s abuses of the poor. They, like their predecessors, did not approve of “usury”, although their definitions of what “usury” entailed differed. Martin Luther, often depicted as the “father of the Protestant Reformation”, critiqued any enrichment which came at one’s neighbor’s loss:

“That is the deepest depth of greed, that just looks upon a neighbour’s want and need as an opportunity not to help him but to enrich oneself and become wealthy through one’s neighbour’s loss. Those who do that are all daylight robbers, thieves, and ockerers.” (36-37)

Although there is much argument over the terminology used and what limits should be placed on lending, perhaps Luther’s condemnation can shed some light on exactly what was at the heart of the issue—how one dealt with others, especially those less fortunate than oneself. Perhaps the condemnation of “usury” was not all about how much money was gained but rather how much money was gained on the backs of others. The sin of “usury” might be that it sees other people as a means to end, instead of an end in and of themselves. “Usury”, in this sense, is predatory and pitiless… it not only makes the borrower destitute financially but it also makes the lender destitute in spirit. Think back to the description of Scrooge, Marley and the other “usurer ghosts” depicted in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Take the passage where Marley explains why he is fettered:

“I made the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard, I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it… My spirit never walked beyond our counting house- mark me!- in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me.” (61)

When Scrooge exclaims that Marley was always a good man of business, Marley remarks:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business…” (62-63)

While many Christians may be reticent to abandon “usury” in the strictest sense, perhaps words such as those from the Church fathers and, in this case, Dickens, may make us think twice about what is, as Christians, truly “our business” in this world.

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By Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Bulletin

On June 1^st, 1933, New Testament Professor and Christian theologian, Dr. Gerhard Kittel (picture to the left) delivered a speech entitled Die Judenfrage, “The Jewish Question,” which was later published in a 78 page booklet. In Die Judenfrage, Kittel advocated that German Jews be demoted to “guest status” in Germany, a position which was attacked by more right-leaning Nazi groups insisting upon forced exile or worse. In reaching his conclusion, Kittel considered three other potential answers to the Jewish question commonly debated at the time: extermination (which he dismissed as impractical and, in later editions, “un-Christian”), a separate Jewish state in the Middle East (which he declined for various logistical reasons, such as hostilities from displaced Arabs), and assimilation (which he argued was actually part of the problem, since mixed marriages between Jews and Christians in Germany resulted in the spread of secular liberalism in Germany).

In May of 1945, Kittel was arrested by French authorities, imprisoned for 17 months, dismissed from his academic position and refused his pension. In his own defense, Kittel claimed to be a “good” Nazi, having joined the party only one month before delivering Die Judenfrage. He insisted that he was attempting to work within Nazi institutions to steer the discourse on racial issues away from “vulgar racism” and provide a moral Christian stance for dealing with the Jews in Germany. Kittel also enumerated fourteen acts of kindness towards individual Jews in his own defense, such as dedicating one of his books to Issar Israel Kahan, his deceased Hebrew teacher, and intervening with the Gestapo in Vienna so that Jewish Christians in the ghetto could receive devotions. The only moral (and possibly legal) mistake Kittel admitted was being duped by the Nazi Party and Hitler himself, which he referred to as the “most bitter deception” of his life.

Although Kittel’s relationship with historical Judaism and German Jews was complex, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he willingly aided and abetted the Nazi movement. His father was a specialist in the Old Testament, and Kittel himself knew biblical, rabbinic, and modern Hebrew, worked with Jewish scholars, and even supported the publication of critical editions of rabbinic texts. However, after his 1933 speech, Kittel lost many admirers and some of his scholarly peers viewed his ideological turn with skepticism and disappointment. In light of Die Judenfrage, some of his earlier writings, while (incredibly) not seen as especially anti-Semitic at the time, come into sharp relief, such as Jesus und Die Juden, published in 1926 and describing modern assimilated Jews as “people who have lost their souls- and all that remains of them is the outward hulls of a human being foreign to us.”  In 1943, Kittel worked with Eugene Fischer (a Nazi scholar involved in race science) on “hooked nosed” terra cotta figurines unearthed in Trier which he saw as evidence of Jewish racial traits.

He taught college courses on the Jewish question and recommended barring Jews from professional work and education (e.g., in the picture to the left, SA soldiers link hands preventing  Jews from entering the University in Vienna in 1938, where Kittel would soon serve as chair). He continued to write publicly on Talmudic justifications for violence towards non-Jews even after 1943 when he admits to knowing about Jews being murdered in Russia (published, for instance, in Goebbel’s Anti-judische Aktion). Kittel wrote more articles for Walter Frank’s National Institute for History of the New Germany (which was meant to highlight German scholarship and was constructed by order of Hitler himself) than any other contributor including Frank himself, and was one of the Institute’s fifteen original members. Kittel praised the Institute for its “service” as a “weapon in the fight against Jewry.” The 1936 opening of a special section of the Institute (dedicated especially to the Jewish question) was attended by Rudolf Hess and heralded by the Volkische Beobachter (the Nazi party’s newspaper).

With such complexities in mind, scholars of religion face important questions as to how Kittel’s scholarship should be regarded and (perhaps most crucially) whether it ought to be used at all. Although Kittel never supported extermination of the Jews, and never, as did other Nazi Christian groups like the Deutsche Christen, suggested that Jesus was anything but Jewish in blood and culture, or sought the removal of the Old Testament from the Christian Bible, his ideological work is imbricated with Nazi politics. Kittel, for instance, commonly referred to assimilated German Jews as “refuse,” a poison and corruption which “eats at the marrow of a Volk.” It is therefore worth inquiring as to the relationship between his politics and his scholarly work.

Take, for example, Kittel’s Greek New Testament Dictionary/Lexicon (Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, or NWNT) which includes contributions from a wide range of scholars in Greek, Hebrew, and Biblical Studies, and the academic importance of which transcends the war years. The editor’s preface to the 1963/4 English translation (written by G. W. Bromiley) described it as “not only a reference work or a starting-point for further research, but also as a formative contribution to theology.” Kittel’s role as editor and contributor of the first three volumes of the NWNT may not, at first glance, appear to be problematic, but it is worth noting that the first volume was published in 1933, the same year that Kittel proposed his solution to the “Jewish Question” in Die Judenfrage. Kittel edited the first three volumes of the NWNT from 1933-1938, though volumes four through ten were published under different editorial direction. An English translation of the first volume was published in 1963/4 and reprinted in 1993. The English translator, Bromiley, in his 1963/4 preface states that the “ultimate worth” of Kittel’s NWNT ‘lies in its fundamental orientation and its objective findings.” The 10 volume English translation was finished in 1976.

In Kittel’s preface to the first volume, he credits the contributors for their expertise and hard work, such as Walter Grundmann and Georg Bertram. Grundmann joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and from 1939-1943 headed the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Bertram presided over this same Institute in 1943 and in 1944 described the war as the “world conflict with Jewry for which all the powers of the German soul have to be mobilized.” Kittel’s volumes are still used in seminaries today without any mention of the contributors’ involvement in the Nazi order.

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

Alfred Rosenberg, sometimes referred to as ‘the philosopher of the Nazi party,’ was instrumental in the ideological construction of what might be called a Germanic Aryan ethic.  Rosenberg, an ardent anti-Semite, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Catholic, presented the Nazi establishment with a disparate and staccato ‘history of the Aryan’ in his book, The Myth of the 20th Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual, which was used to philosophically support Nazi doctrines on race and religion.  While Nazi German elite often held a great disdain for Christianity, condemning it as a flawed ideology not compatible with the regime’s political and social aims, they were not, initially, opposed to using Christian theories about Jesus to promote their own cause.  Rosenberg is no exception. In his most prominent book, second only to Mein Kampf in Nazi circles, Rosenberg presents a rather unusual, and ahistorical, view of Jesus of Nazareth.

Rosenberg claims that Jesus was not a Jew (but that he might have been Aryan) and that it was in fact the Jew Saul/Paul that twisted Jesus’ words in order to use Jesus’ message as part of the conspiracy for Jewry to take over the world.

There is no proof for the often made claim that Jesus was a Jew.  Indeed, there is much to show the contrary.  Jesus possibly was Aryan, or partially so, showing the Nordic type strongly. (page 411)

Blaming Saul/Paul and the institutional church (especially the Catholic Church) for the gross distortion of Jesus’ message, Rosenberg’s Jesus was a master, a conqueror, and the antithesis of what he sees as the broken, humble, Jesus of the Christian Church:

The smiling blond child who often gazed at the world with unhesitant heroism was transformed into a broken down figure tortured by pain. (page 292)

Rosenberg hopes to return to the ‘real’ image of Jesus:     

From the dark Jesus on the cross comes a luminous, slim, blond, risen Christ. (page 293)

Heralding the Jesus of the Gospel of John as the best canonical example of what he will call ‘positive Christianity,’ Rosenberg condemns the current state of European Christianity:

The Gospel of Saint John, which still retains an aristocratic spirit, strove to defend Christianity against this collective bastradisation, orientalism, and Judaisation. (page 88)

So, how might a Nordic-blooded Jesus have ended up in 1^st century Palestine? 

Rosenberg built upon the theology of his mentor, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (a British author who married Richard Wagner’s daughter and became a German citizen and a Nazi) and used Chamberlain’s book, The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century, as a model for his book, The Myth of the 20th Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual. 

Rosenberg claims that thousands of years ago, Nordic races left their prehistoric homeland and carried the worship of their sun god from Europe to Mesopotamia.  Pulling from Chamberlain, Rosenberg envisions a Nordic people associated with the Assyrians of Ancient Mesopotamia. The Assyrians are thought to have invaded northern Israel (722 B.C.E) and to have displaced the original population.  For Rosenberg as well as Chamberlain, immigrants from Assyria (distant descendants of Aryan conquerors) were placed in the region that would later be referred to as the Galilee. 

How does Rosenberg explain the ‘Jewishness’ of Jesus in the New Testament?

Many of the subsequent  ‘Aryan Jesus’ arguments spawn out of this desire to place pure blooded Aryan-Assyrian (at least non-Jewish) communities in the Galilee.  Chamberlain emphasizes that these Jews in Galilee- were not Jews by blood but by faith (after years of cultural assimilation).  Chamberlain, like many of his colleagues, attributes the rebellious nature of the population of the Galilee to the natural consequence of link between blood and cultural character: 

the national character of the Galileans was essentially different from that of the Jews.  Open any history of the Jews that you will, that of Ewald or Graetz or Renan, everywhere you will find that in character the Galileans present a direct contrast to the rest of the inhabitants of Palestine they are described as hot-heads, energetic idealists, men of action. (Chamberlain page 207)

Needless to say, Rosenberg’s hypothesis troubles me as a reader but what is perhaps even more disturbing is how his ‘theory’ on Jesus is not an isolated incident among writers and intellectuals in Europe (going back even to the 1800s).

Further Reading:

• Article: “The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus” by Peter M. Head, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Jan2004, Vol. 2 Issue 1, p55-89, 35p
• Book: The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany by Susannah Heschel
• Book: The Myth of the 20th Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual by Alfred Rosenberg
• http://www.archive.org/details/TheMythOfThe20thCentury
• Book: The Foundations of the 19^th Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain
• http://www.archive.org/details/TheFoundationsOfThe19thCentury_362

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By Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Bulletin

Goring, Goebbels, Hitler, Himmler, Hess, and… Rosenberg?  The first five men listed here might easily be recognized as the architects of the infamous Third Reich, whose atrocities still haunt European history. Rosenberg, however, is less well known. Alfred Rosenberg was an early supporter of the National Socialist German Workers Party, became the editor of Volkischer Beobachter, the official party newspaper, and was appointed by Hitler as the temporary head of the Nazi Party while Hitler was in prison.

Once the party came to power, Rosenberg, despite his lack of charisma, was appointed to the foreign policy office and later became the minister for conquered eastern territories. Perhaps the most notable aspect of Rosenberg’s work on behalf of the regime was his extensive ideological production. Often referred to as Hitler’s theoretician or Hitler’s philosopher, Rosenberg codified much of the anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Communist rhetoric which Hitler used to legitimize his political agenda. Rosenberg’s most significant text, The Myth of the 20th Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual, was revered, at least superficially, by the Reich as second only toMein Kampf as embodying the mythical and ideological frame for Hitler’s Germany.

Rosenberg’s mythological frame was just part, and often considered a pseudo-scholarly construct by other Nazi officials, of what Hitler referred to as the ‘anti-Semitism of reason,’ his attempt to bolster German scholarship on what he saw as the inherent weaknesses of the Jewish race. Emotional anti-Semitism, according to Hitler, had to be unified with a scientific and scholarly authenticated anti-Semitism.

While there remains a dearth of work on the scholarship of Nazi intellectuals, some researchers have elucidated the unnerving relationship between the German academic community and the Nazis. As the party grew in power and influence, Germany became riddled with institutes, like historian Dr. Walter  Frank’s Institute for History of the New Germany, Rosenberg’s The Institute for Research on the Jewish Question (pictured above), The Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life founded in 1939 by the Protestant theologian Walter Grundmann, racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin and Wilhelm Grau’s Research Department for the Jewish Question.

These institutes viewed the work of their scholars as scientific, objective (free of Jewish influence), and the product of rigorous scholarship, often using Jewish texts and scholarship as ‘source’ material for their critiques of the Jewish race. The academic pedigree of these prominent German scholars was used by the Nazi government to authorize the social and political programs against the Jews. Even Rosenberg, regarded as an intellectual lightweight among Nazi scholars, had a Ph.D., albeit it was in architecture and engineering. Eugen Fischer was the first Nazi rector of the Berlin University. Gerhand Kittel, the official theologian of the Nazi party, a respected New Testament scholar and translator, was awarded the chair of Adolf Schlatter in Tübingen. The Jews of Eastern Europe by Peter-Heinz Seraphim, a Nazi ‘expert’ on Eastern European Jewish culture, ran 732 pages, had 197 charts and graphs, and included over 1,000 footnotes.

Even this brief glance into the world of Nazi intellectuals, philosophy, and academics, raises disturbing questions about what counts as scholarship. Many of us, I think, would look to Bruce Lincoln’s impressive work, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, in hopes of clearly distinguishing between political mythmaking and the higher order of scholarship. As is well-known, Lincoln holds that myth is ideology in narrative form, story-telling that works to “recalibrate the social hierarchy.” While scholarship also trades in narrative and ideological production, and is thus to some extent mythical, it is distinguished from mere mythmaking by the presence of footnotes, that ubiquitous scholarly device that (ideally) holds the researcher accountable and displays her engagement in broader discussions and debates. The terrible irony here, of course, is that the more closely one interrogates the world of Third Reich intellectuals, the more difficult it is to exclude them from a Lincolnian definition of “scholarship.”

*************

This article was originally written for Religion Bulletin, October 17, 2011

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By Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Huff Post Religion

Two religious responses from the days immediately following the attacks of 9/11 demonstrate how religion has been both a divisive and unifying force in America over the last ten years.

The first was from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who assigned blame for the attacks to God who, they explained, was angry at America because of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-CAcdta_8I

target=”_hplink”>Gays, Feminists and the ACLU, among others. While fires still smoldered at Ground Zero, Falwell and company were ironically fanning the flames of discord and division by blaming God and liberals instead of religious extremism.

The second response was different. As soon as reports made clear that the terrorists claimed allegiance to the fundamentalist Islam of Osama bin Laden, many feared violence might be directed toward the American Muslim population. Yet in the days after 9/11, reports came from all across the country that Christians, Jews, and other people of faith had called local mosques to offer support and solidarity. Instead of turning against Muslims, the religious community rallied for their fellow Americans of a different faith tradition.

These two examples show the simultaneous yet divergent directions that religious practice and thought has taken in America in the last ten years. 9/11 made it clear that religion, which had been ignored in global political calculations and overlooked by the media for decades, was still a force, and perhaps the force in people’s personal and communal lives.

While many still hold that religion is essentially divisive, since 9/11 it has been clear that religion has been an overwhelmingly positive force to bring people from different backgrounds together within American society.

I use myself as a case in point. Ten years ago I knew basically nothing about Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. I knew a bit about Judaism being from an interfaith background, but even that was minimal. I was an ordained pastor, yet my training had ignored other religious traditions. Ten years later, most seminaries require a working knowledge of other religious traditions to graduate. 9/11 impressed upon religious communities that to be an effective religious leader requires knowing the essential beliefs held by our neighbors of other faiths.

In fact, 9/11 gave me a new sense of my vocation as a pastor. From 2003 to 20011, my ministry consisted of promoting interfaith engagement at Princeton University. I worked with hundreds of students from different religious traditions who demonstrated a deep commitment to being with and learning from people of different religious and ideological backgrounds. Since 9/11, interfaith groups have been formed at colleges and high schools around the country. A new movement of interfaith cooperation is growing that values the uniqueness of individual traditions (increasingly including secular-humanist), while believing that people can and must respect one another across differences of belief. Groups such as Religions for Peace, the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Fellowship in Prayer and countless of others continue to bring people of different faiths together both in America and around the world.

Yet there is a sense of urgency that surrounds the mission of these groups. Eboo Patel, a Muslim leader who heads the Interfaith Youth Core acknowledged: “In the twenty-first century, faith can be a bomb of destruction, a barrier of division or a bridge of cooperation.” Even while there have been great strides among all faiths towards a more unified pluralistic America, there have been episodic physical attacks against Muslims and Sikhs, and there are many for whom religion provides a platform for proclaiming suspicion and division of people of different faith traditions, most notably Muslims.

Last year’s observance of 9/11 was marred by an intentional furor over a proposed Muslim community center at Park 51 even though the Imam was widely known for his interfaith cooperation and his rejection of Islamic extremism. A recent study showed that there is an organized and concerted effort to create a fear of Muslims which had led to anti-sharia (Muslim law) bills being proposed and passed in states where nobody was even proposing that sharia might be instated. While anti-Muslim sentiment appears to be increasing, even after Osama bin Laden was killed; Muslims in America have a general sense of well-being, and are actually more satisfied with the way things are going in this country than the average citizen.

In recent years we have also heard an increasingly loud insistence on the essential Christian (and more recently Judeo-Christian) nature of this country. When the interfaith director of a Hindu Temple was invited to open the Senate in 2007, there were protests against an invocation to a “non-theistic god.” And who can forget the mustachioed Florida pastor who decided to make a name for himself by burning a Quran.

Yet even the much publicized proposed Quran burning demonstrated how much America had come together across religious divides. As I wrote in an earlier piece, the Pastor was surprised to find himself completely isolated in his desire to desecrate another tradition’s Holy book. Both liberal and conservative religious and political leaders recognized that this was not the kind of America we envisioned, and instead as one people we showed our support for a genuinely pluralistic America.

Perhaps nothing has given me more hope in the productive possibilities of religious people coming together than my experience as the Senior Religion Editor of The Huffington Post. We have over 600 religious leaders and academics from across the religious and ideological spectrum who write for the site. Each of our writers is on the front line against extremist and destructive elements within all of our traditions; and are living examples of the possibility of honestly sharing the wisdom and truth of their own tradition without succumbing to the temptation to violate or denigrate the tradition of their neighbor.

We are all still healing from the wounds of 9/11. Religious communities and leaders must continue along a path that rejects division, violence and hate, and must instead harness all of the wisdom and compassion inspired by the world’s great traditions to create a more perfect America and world.

*****************************

Visit Huff Post Religion for more articles by this author and others.

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By Kenny Smith

While they presently remain at the level of fandom and  “just for fun,” elements from the Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica series have been re-crafted and re-presented in religious terms. See, for instance, the Church of the Cylon God Facebook page,  or the Church St. Gaius Baltar.   

“Pray at the Pump” founder warns President Obama, create jobs or face more earthquakes, a claim which God then quickly refuted.  Others have suggested that the divine reprimand said to be implied in recent earthquakes and historic hurricanes was in fact aimed at Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor, in whose district a major quake’s epicenter was located, perhaps in response to the steep cuts Cantor proposed to the U.S. Geological Service.  So, is God an angry geologist?

Moderate and liberal Christians are in fact Vampire Satanists sent to infiltrate churches, one Christian conspiracy theorist thinks so. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMAjdW-xinE

A recent mathematical model predicts traditional institutional forms of religion will soon be extinct in nine Western countries.  

Lesbian Pagans, a fundamentalist’s worst nightmare.   An African American Pagan priestess reflects on her experience in Christian and Pagan traditions and the lack of cultural resources she found in both.

A severe case of gender confusion seems to have baffled Islamic police in Indonesia.

Flash meditation mobs, sending peaceful vibes through the world’s cities, are increasingly common.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTybVK76sg

The complexities of Scientology and celebrity continue, this time for Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.  

Former Fox News personality Glenn Beck wrapped up his “Restoring Courage” campaign in Israel, an event which seems to have been of interest mostly to American Evangelicals, Jews and Israelis not so much.   Evangelical Michelle Bachman may already be “obsolete” as a 2012 Presidential candidate.  

For would-be Dudeists fallen on hard economic times, some free copies of the forthcoming Dudeist Bible, The Abide Guide, are available!  

After a very well-attended Go Topless day in Venice Beach, Ca. last week, the city of Toronto has denied GoTopless.org and members of the International Raelian Religion a permit for a public demonstration in a downtown park, though some plan to do so regardless.

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By Kenny Smith 

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has appealed to indigenous spirits and deities for aid in healing his cancer.   San Francisco’s Yoda statue draws pilgrims from around the globe.  Are we all Jediists at heart?  (May the Force be with you.)

According to the Prison Literature Project, inmates most frequently request books on Buddhism, Wicca, and Islam.  Practitioners of minority religions continue to face many different forms of discrimination throughout American culture.

One writer recalls the Church of the Subgenius’ Prophet Bob and the balmy days of the 1980s.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw

Rather controversially, volunteers from the Church of Scientology have been seen on the streets of London after recent outbreaks of violence.   Religious disagreements and the religious education of their children (at a Scientology school) may be to blame for the breakup of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony.  

Fifty Pro-Islamic billboards go up across the U.S.  

Who would Jesus nuke? Apparently anybody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Vkj0mLI2M

The popularity of religion comes and goes with the times, a new study says.

Self-identified American Buddhist Geeks gather in Los Angeles for a conference.

Former Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, infamous for her negative comments regarding Wiccans, (apparently) finds herself the victim of an online prank, hence her many vibrators and witchcraft books listed for sale on Amazon.

Is V for Vendetta functioning religiously for Anonymous members?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1K3XzzEICw

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By Joe Pompeo, The Cutline

Hillary Clinton’s expression, right hand clasped over her mouth in astonishment, is largely responsible for making the above photo iconic–and, to at least one newspaper, sexually suggestive.

In the photo, President Obama and his national security team are huddled around a conference table in the White House Situation Room, watching CIA director Leon Panetta narrate last Sunday’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. The mood is clearly tense.

When Women’s Wear Daily consulted a coterie of photo editors and designers about why the image is “destined to be one for the history books,” Clinton was foremost in their responses.

“The Hillary Clinton expression is the one that holds the photograph fully,” Time’s photo director told the magazine. “You can see 10 years of tension and heartache and anger in Hillary’s face,” Conde Nast’s Scott Dadich agreed.

Turns out she was probably just coughing during that crucial moment captured by White House photographer Pete Souza. But nevertheless, the image still proved a bit too racy for at least one of the many newspapers that printed it.

That would be the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic broadsheet Der Tzitung. The paper photoshopped Clinton, as well as the only other woman who could be seen in the room–Audrey Tomason, the national director of counterterrorism–out of the frame.

“Apparently the presence of a woman, any woman, being all womanly and sexy all over the United States’ counterterrorism efforts was too much for the editors of Der Tzitung to handle,” noted the prominent women’s blog Jezebel.

Indeed, “The Hasidic newspaper will not intentionally include any images of women in the paper because it could be considered sexually suggestive,” Rabbi Jason Miller explains in The Jewish Week. Though he notes that the publication’s “fauxtograpphing” may in fact be a graver act against their religious tenets: “To my mind, this act of censorship is actually a violation of the Jewish legal principle of g’neivat da’at (deceit).”

Beyond that, Der Tzitung’s editors apparently missed or blatantly ignored the guidelines stipulated on the official White House Flickr page, where the photo was released for use by news organizations: “The photograph may not be manipulated in any way.”

The White House has not issued a response on the altered image.

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By Michel-Camille Bordeau

CJ Werleman

If you ever wonder what’s the future of freethinking and who’s leading the charge; if you are curious to know what Freethinkers of today are doing to ensure that tomorrow’s secular world is on the right path; if you want to know what’s good to (free) think about these days; or, if you simply want to read a mind-bending interview, tune in to Religion Nerd for my series, Freethinking Tomorrow: In the Words of Today’s Freethinkers.

The format is simple: I read a book, contact the author with a lengthy email, invite him/her to answer half a dozen questions, and then I wait eagerly to see if blind confidence gets rewarded.  And it does.

The first Freethinker I decided to interview for this series was the Australian born author of God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible and  Jesus Lied-He was Only Human: Debunking The New Testament, C.J. Werleman. When I initiated contact, after a brief introduction, I made sure to explain to some length how much I understood, enjoyed, and had a willingness to share with fellow Religion Nerd readers his rationalist take on the Bible.

My hopes were very soon answered. CJ sent responses to my questions in less than twenty-four hours—I like to think we are on a first name basis. I am a fan, if you haven’t notice.  And after this, I hope you will be one too.

MC:  Do you think rationalists, freethinkers, and secular scholars have to resort to in-your-throat titles in order to be heard?  How did this marketing strategy work for you? What other titles did you consider? Anything Twitter worthy? [CJ Werleman--@rationalists-- is very active on Twitter]

CJ: Interesting question.  I guess a captivating title is essential for any book these days, no matter the genre. Especially when you consider the vast number of new titles released every year, which is a result of improved self-publishing ease and accessibility.  Now days, anyone can write a novel, for example, and then self-publish on Kindle within two minutes of completing their manuscript.  Thus, with a litany of available titles on the market, an attention grabber is a must.  Unless you’re a Dan Brown, of course. Coming up with the title for God Hates You. Hate Him Back was as difficult as writing the book itself.  I wanted something that conveyed the objective of the book, that being to demonstrate the God of the Bible is arguably the most wicked character of all fiction, using the sixty-six chapters of the Holy Book to validate that claim.  For a long time, every title that either I came up with or my publisher suggested, didn’t meet the litmus test I had set.  Then, with less than four weeks to release I was watching Lethal Weapon 2, of all movies.  And there is a scene where Danny Glover’s character says, “I think God hates me!” In reply Mel Gibson says, “Do what I do, hate him back.” That was the light bulb moment, while eating nachos and enjoying a beer watching a crappy movie.

MC:  God Hates You. Hate Him Backis refreshingly humorous considering the seriousness of your project—plowing through the Bible for a non-apologetic, textual analysis. Was there a particular point in your research where you wanted to toss humor out the window and empty your lungs? Can you recall particularly frustrating passages?

CJ:  Ha. Well, yes, the Bible can be a tediously boring endeavor.  For example, reading Leviticus is like watching golf on valium.  It reads as an ancient cookbook, providing every minuscule detail for preparing bread offerings.  I’m sleepy just thinking about it. But overall I love the Bible. It remains the most significant book in all of Western civilization, but no one reads it. Christians don’t even read it. In my book I cite one study that shows 93% of American households own at least one copy of the Bible but 75% of Americans can’t name the four gospels. So I wanted to write a summary of the Bible in a manner that makes it enjoyable and entertaining, and not just for theologians, but for the man in the street. Like me.

MC:  By the end of the Old Testament, your precise count reveals that Satan is not in God’s league when it comes to genocidal mania—40 innocent victims versus 31 million is a shocking discrepancy. What social, cultural, if not economical mechanisms must be set forth for people to realize that (1) the Bible is a toxic, if not dangerous read, and that (2) their interests are better served outside the influence of Religion?

CJ:  Absolutely the Bible is a dangerous book if you do what God commands you to do.  For example, if my daughter says, “God damn it!” I’m to take her to the edge of the town and bash her brains out with large rocks.  If I wish to sell my daughter into sexual slavery, not only does the Bible not say there’s anything wrong with that, it gives commercial terms and conditions for doing such a thing.  When we look at places like tribal Pakistan, for example, there they routinely execute people for blasphemy, a victimless crime.  Now, are they barbaric, evil people?  No they’re not.  In fact, according to biblical law, of which the Koran is based, they’re more pious and pleasing to God than those who ignore that command. When people become cognizant of these kinds of issues, people realize this ancient book has no relevancy in today’s times.

MC:  You make a point of demonstrating that authors of the Bible were ‘family-challenged.’ What’s your reaction to contemporary theists who are still convinced that the Bible is a moral barometer in matters of marriage, family, parenting?  What would you like (to tell us) to tell them?

CJ:  Well, similar to my answer in the previous question, the Bible only provides moral guidance if you wish to live in a world of tribal barbarism.  If you don’t think slavery, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia are good values, then the Bible is not a great reference for morality.

MC: Which argument in God Hates You. Hate Him Back shows your greatest strength as a thinker?  Is this the strength most recognized by your readers or critics?

CJ:  I’d hate to second guess or presume my reader’s thoughts, but based on the feedback I do receive, and at the risk of being a presumptuous turd, it would seem people admire the way I do go question the taboo and sacred in a no-holds barred manner.

MC:  Tell us about your new book, Jesus Lied-He was Only Human: Debunking The New Testament. You don’t beat around the (burning) bush with that one either; do you consider it a continuation of God Hates You, or an entirely new project? What should your readers be excited about?

CJ:  Jesus Lied He Was Only Human is somewhat of a sequel to my first book.  With God Hates You. Hate Him Back I examine all sixty-six chapters of the Bible, but as the Old Testament comprises more of the Bible than the New, it’s the former that gets most of the attention, and therefore a closer examination of the Jesus myth had to be its own, stand-alone book, as there was just too much to cover. Using the New Testament, and some Gnostic gospels, I break down Jesus’ life into the respective milestones of birth, baptism, childhood, ministry, arrest, trial, execution, and resurrection.  I then show readers how wildly the gospels contradict one another with their respective accounts. Bearing in mind we have no biographies of Jesus outside of the Bible. When one sees the gospels examined side-by-side, or horizontally, one sees how absurd the Jesus biography is hacked together.

MC: What’s next for CJ Werleman? 

CJ:  My next book tackles Islam, which is due for release in the Fall 2011.  I provide a biography of Muhammad, from childhood to his prophethood, while explaining the entire Koran alongside the things Muhammad did and experienced.  The ultimate objective is to provide readers with a contextual understanding of the Koran. For example, when Muhammad said, “Jews behave like apes”, people will accuse the Koran of being anti-Semitic, and it seems that way when you take that passage in isolation. But this verse is contained within an entire chapter that refers to one specific Jewish clan in the city of Medina, a clan that went behind his back to offer assistance to the people who were trying to kill him, the Quraysh.  Hence, this verse is Muhammad expressing his disappointment with that particular tribe he thought was friendly to his mission and is not directed to the entire Jewish people.

In this first installment of ‘Freethinking Tomorrow: In the Words of Today’s Freethinkers,’ I thought it fitting to start with CJ Werleman, a man who dared to plow thru the 770000 words of the Bible never lost his sense of humor, au contraire! Good (free) thinking always begins with a thorough analysis of primary texts, which is rarely something to smile about. So, it only makes sense to conclude that with God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible and Jesus Lied-He was Only Human: Debunking The New Testament, C.J. Werleman has been responsible for an incredible tour de force.  And we (free) thank for that!

Please, follow CJ Werleman on Twitter (@rationalists) and keep an eye on this busy man on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CJ-Werleman/207324500344

***************************************************

About Michel-Camille Bordeau

Michel-Camille Bordeau is the founder and author of The School of Seshata (www.scriptotheism.net), a blog about secular spirituality and the home of the Scriptopedia Project. Michel earned an M.A. in French Studies from The Ohio State University (1998).  Mid-life crisis oblige, he is returning to college in August 2011, to pursue an M.S.W. with a specialization in Mental Health & Drugs of Abuse.

Before relocating to Atlanta, Michel was an Academic Advisor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor campus, for nearly ten years. He has advised many students (and parents) on academic and life matters. He taught English, Public Speaking, Humanities, and French at various colleges and universities. In 2002, Michel published Poire Sucrée, Salée, Epicée, a short novel about a dance teacher forced to face the demons of her past. He is currently seeking representation for Seeing Purple, a dystopian novel set in Anaïs Abelard’s hometown, the New Orleans of tomorrow, also home to the power-hungry mega church known as the Calvinistry. Michel considers himself an amateur ‘atheologist’ and he often writes under the nom de plume Anais Abelard.

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By Joshua Stanton, State of Formation

Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, Executive Director of Rabbis for Human Rights, may have said it best:

Ever since the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, hatred and discrimination against Muslim Americans has been growing. Over the past year, the rhetoric has only gotten louder and more violent. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly. These are also essential American values. Yet across the United States today, we see attempts to prevent the construction of mosques, laws outlawing Sharia law, and the vilification of our Muslim neighbors and friends as un-American. Jewish historical experience remembers that not too long ago, we too were the victims of suspicion and hatred based on our religion and ethnicity. The actions of the few should not condemn the many, and every religion has its teachings both of violence and of peace. Jewish tradition demands that we remember the heart of the stranger, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. If one minority can be singled out for congressional hearings or restrictions on places of worship, anyone can be. These are not American values. These are not Jewish values. It is time to Stand Together and speak out against Islamophobia.

Rabbis for Human Rights then organized 25 of the leading rabbinic voices in the country to explain why it is so dangerous, immoral, and runs contrary to our beliefs as Jews. I was fortunate to be one of two students who — with luck and a history of inter-religious work — were able to join in the rabbinic course against Islamophobia. I pray that it becomes a groundbreaking moment for Jewish-Muslim relations in America and proves to be a lasting “good” forged in what might otherwise be seen as a spate of ignorance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmbjOpRwCec

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmbjOpRwCec

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmbjOpRwCec

Here are my thoughts, particularly regarding Representative Peter King’s wrong and misguided hearings on supposed Muslim “radicalization.” What are yours?

Joshua Stanton serves as Program Director and co-Editor of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue at Auburn Theological Seminary. He is also a Schusterman Rabbinical Fellow and Weiner Education Fellow at Hebrew Union College.

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By Lady Arsinoe

I was raised Lutheran.  It didn’t take.

I remember sitting on the edge of my bed at the tender age of five, crying my eyes out because I was going to hell.  My teachers in Sunday School said that everyone was a sinner, and that all sinners go to hell.  I decided right then I was no longer a Christian.  At that point, I started looking elsewhere for my spiritual sustenance.  How could a loving God condemn the innocent to an eternity of torment?  To a child’s mind, that teaching was evil.  As I grew up, I studied many different religions and history a great deal, and have read the Bible from cover to cover, though it took me a long time to do so.  As a result, I have a basic understanding of many spiritual paths. This ultimately lead me to Wicca, in which I have found a great deal of comfort, love, and connection to the Divine.

Recently, I have been examining the nature of evil as viewed by the majority religions, Christianity in particular.  I often wonder where the idea of the Evil One comes from.  “From the Torah/Bible/Koran!” I hear you say.  After all, these three Holy Books are based on the same Hebrew sacred texts.  From a Wiccan perspective, Christian ideas, in particular, of “Satan”, “evil”, “the Devil”, and “Lucifer,” seem rather muddled.

But what is evil, after all? Where do our ideas about evil originate?  “Evil” is generally defined as “morally wrong or bad, immoral, or wicked”.  Many who follow spiritual paths other than The Big Three (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are characterized as “evil” by many who don’t, or won’t, take the time to understand different spiritual practices and paths. From many of these perspectives, evil is often connected to the figure of Satan. There are forty nine references to Satan in the King James Version Bible.  A typical Old Testament account is found in 1 Chronicles 21:1:  “And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel” for which God punished David and the people of Israel with a plague which killed 70,000 men.  Punishing a people for being counted seems excessive to me.  Which is more evil, tempting a king to count, or killing 70,000 simply for being counted?

Then we get into the unfortunate Book of Job, where God and Satan make a bet on the faithfulness of one good and pious man, “one that feareth God, and escheweth evil.”  Poor Job gets the short end of the stick.  “The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them.”  All his property, livestock, servants, children, and wives, are wiped out by the hand of God, just to see if Job would crack.  Being the pious man, “Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, and said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.  In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”  In the end, God wins the bet with Satan, for Job never condemns God, despite all the things that God allows to be done to Job.  In winning the bet with Satan, God loses.  If “evil” means morally wrong or bad, immoral, or wicked, who was evil in this story? If God is the Good Guy, and Satan the Bad Guy, based on this story, the Good Guy is the bad guy.  Therefore if one wants to live a Godly life, evil is good!

The name “Lucifer” pops up in modern times as a reference to the Evil One.  There is only one direct reference to Lucifer in the Bible, as found in Isaiah 14:12, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”  (This passage is actually a reference to King Nebuchadnezzar, not to any evil Divinity.)  The only other reference to Lucifer is Revelation 22:16 which says, “I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”  The word “Lucifer” translates from the Greek as “day star”, “morning star”, or “the light bringer.”  If Christians equate Lucifer with the Devil, then they are equating Jesus with the Devil!  Confused yet? No wonder the Abrahamic ideas of evil are so muddled.

The followers of the Abrahamic faiths often characterize Wiccans as evil and “satanic” by saying we worship the Devil.  Based on the Book of Job alone, if I were of these religions, I would have to say that yes, Satan is the lesser of the Evil Deities.  Since Satan and God are specifically of the Abrahamic faiths, who is the Satan worshiper?  Certainly not Wiccans; we don’t believe in the Devil.  “There is no Devil in the Craft,” as Sandra Bullock succinctly stated in Practical Magic.  As Celsus, writing around 180CE, so succinctly stated, “it is blasphemy…to say that the greatest God…has an adversary who constrains his capacity to do good.” And, Christians “divide the kingdom of God, creating a rebellion in it, as if there were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is hostile to God.”  If God is ‘all that’, how can there be a Devil?

The Wiccan idea of evil is vastly different from that of the Abrahamic religions.  Wicca is a nature-oriented spiritual path that tends to focus inside ourselves and then outward to our relationship with the Universe.  We do not see evil as being something outside or “other”.  As a result, Wiccans have no convenient excuse for ill behavior; there is no “the Devil made me do it!” in Wicca.  Evil exists only because mankind has evil tendencies.  Wiccans understand that we, as human beings, are responsible for our own actions.  No outside Deity of Good or Evil makes us do anything.  We see humans acting out of Good or Evil because humans want to, and we reap the benefits or consequences of our actions accordingly.  We see everything we do as coming back to us according to the Threefold Law: whatever energies we put out into the world comes back to us threefold, be it for good or ill.

Wiccans follow a very difficult path because of this.  We have no Evil One to blame, only ourselves.  The ultimate responsibility rests within us all.  Our code of ethics is derived from the Wiccan Rede, the short version of which states “’An it harm none, do as ye will” which is an awfully difficult rule to live by, if you think about it!  There is no way to go through life without causing any harm.  We have to eat, for example.  Even vegans cause harm, from the plant’s perspective.  The Wiccan Rede demands that we closely examine all our thoughts, words, and deeds, and then to act in a manner that causes the least harm, and doing the most good.

Because of these laws, Wiccans do not practice animal sacrifice, as we have been accused of by some.  The idea of taking a life is abhorrent to a Wiccan.  How dare we, as Children of the Divine, take the life of another as a sacrifice to Divinity?  All life is Divine in our eyes.  And, since all life is Divine, we ourselves are part of that Divinity.  By causing harm to another, we are ultimately causing harm to ourselves.  This view is one of the reasons many Wiccans are environmentalists.  By caring for our planet, and all that inhabit it, we are caring for all of us.

Wiccans have also been accused of being sex-crazed, we participate in orgies, and dance around naked.  Do we dance “skyclad” (clothed in nothing but the sky) under the moonlight stars?  Some Wiccans do, but really, how many people in their right mind want to run around naked in February?  The answer is, “Not many!”  And let’s face it; people don’t really want to see large groups of other people naked.  Not all of us are as fit as we should be…

The main reason Wiccans are said to be evil, Satanic, or any of the other outlandish “crimes” we are accused of, is Fear.  Fear of “the Other.”  People are afraid of what they don’t understand, and for the most part, they refuse to even try.  The Jews and Romans didn’t know exactly how to take the early Christians.  Try looking at Holy Communion from the outside:  Eating the flesh and blood of your God?  Of course that sounds evil.  How is one supposed to understand that?  Why should one even try?!  That’s just Evil!  The same tired accusation lobbied against early Christians, of killing babies for blood rites, has been recycled and used against Wiccans.  Simply because of fear.

Fear clouds otherwise rational judgment.  People identify with those like themselves, and shun or “demonize” those who aren’t. It’s hardwired in us, biologically. This fact of humanity has been proved over and over again, in different ages and different cultures.  Fear can be blamed for racism, sexism, war, and every other evil.  Fear is the Great Evil.  Understanding is the one sure way to combat Evil.  The question is:  do the fearful have the courage to understand?  Or will they hide behind their fear, and continue their evil ways.

If there is a Devil, then his name is Fear.

*******************************************************************************

In addition to our regular academic and news articles, Religion Nerd also offers a forum for the religious “insider.”  Lady Arsinoe’s thought provoking look at Evil from the perspective of a practicing Wiccan grants RN readers an intimate opportunity to “hear” the voice of a Wiccan High Priestess and presents us with a snapshot of her personal religious journey and chosen tradition.

Lady Arsinoe’s Bio:

I was initiated into the Wiccan spiritual tradition as a First Degree in 1993.  Over the years, I continued my studies and increased my involvement.  In 2000, the members of OakSpring (www.HouseOfOakSpring.org) separated from Ravenwood to go our own way.  In 2006, I became the High Priestess of OakSpring, with my husband serving as High Priest.  OakSpring is large by Wiccan standards, and has been blessed to own and maintain our covenstead on 38 acres of woodland in the Metro-Atlanta area.

Like most Wiccans, my mundane life is similar to anyone else’s:  I go to work each day (for a large engineering firm), bear with traffic, and go home to relax with my family and pets.  Living a magical life isn’t always about the spells; it’s about living in a way that is harmonious with Nature, the Universe, and ourselves.  I do my best to live in accordance with Wiccan principles every day of my life.  I think that is the best way to show the world what Wicca is all about.

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By Anthea Butler, Religion Dispatches

Sarah Palin just made her horrendous week worse with her ” target=”_blank”>new video in which she accuses her political critics of “blood libel.”

This gaffe — demonstrating both an ignorance of religious history and language — tops a disastrous week: her crosshairs map has been Exhibit A in the discussion of the use of gun-related imagery in political rhetoric. But her PR has been woefully inadequate in explaining the map away as “surveyors symbols.” Her TLC show will not be renewed by TLC, her chances for a successful run at the presidency have been downgraded, and even Barbara Walters expressed “feeling a bit sorry for her.” Palin, however, has remained aloof and cocooned in Wasilla, while hired minions wipe her Facebook page constantly so that negative comments do not show up. So how is Barracuda Barbie a.k.a. Queen Esther shaping her response? The persecution meme.

Palin’s typical pattern is that she takes a phrase from somebody (in this case, possibly Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Wall Street Journal), picks it up, and uses it for her own. In today’s debacle, referring to criticism of her “crosshairs” map as a “blood libel,” Palin shows that even if six people are killed, it’s still all about her. The strategic release of this video, before President Obama travels to Arizona today for a memorial service, shows her self-serving political ends. In addition to misuing the term blood libel — which historically refers to the accusation that Jews murder Christian babies — her additional reference to dueling shows that she will not retreat from any violence-laden speech.

Blood libel, a term rooted in medieval Christianity, started as a rumor that Jews were killingChristian babies, and using their blood to mix into matzoh. The blood libel, refuted first by Pope Innocent IV through a series of papal bulls, has nonetheless persisted throughout history as a way for Christians at times to scapegoat Jews. Palin, by calling the media’s alleged persecution of her a “blood libel” plays into this evil history by inference. But does she understand how this comment of blood libel appears anti-Semitic? Not only is Rep. Giffords Jewish, but accusing the media of “blood libel” could be seen as playing into anti-Semitic memes that Jews control the media.

Earlier in the week, Glenn Beck, her BFF, sent Palin an email of “concern,” stating that she should get “protection” because an attempt on her life could “bring the republic down.” In response, Palin wrote Beck back, and he read a portion of her email over his radio show. Palin’s email? “I hate violence. I hate war. Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence. Thanks for all you do to send the message of truth and love and God as the answer.”
Beck and Palin’s “paling” around, to use her phraseology, is the fueling the “Christian persecution” meme that has given Palin strength since her vice-presidential run in 2008. Many Americans believe they are persecuted for believing in Jesus Christ, but Beck took that belief to a new low. By equating the potential for an attack on Sarah Palin as an event that would “bring the republic down,” Beck plays into the martyrdom fantasy he promotes daily. It is this type of bombastic hyperbole that has the nation in mourning. By turning the tragedy inside out, making it about themselves, and not about Palin’s “don’t retreat, reload” refrain, and the crosshairs map smack dab over Congresswoman Gifford’s district, Beck and Palin are taking advantage of the situation by attempting to cast themselves as the persecuted. Their “persecution” is worth more than any other story in their inflated egos, including the Arizona massacre. Even in tragedy, they both look for the camera and the press to focus on themselves, rather than their conscience or the victims.

While it is clear that both Beck and Palin suffer from martyr complexes, Palin’s disease is far worse. The “mean girl of Wassila” can dish it out, but she can’t take it. She is a cheerleader inciting strife, not a leader. Rather than take criticism like a leader would, her minions are working overtime to scrub clean her Facebook page. She can’t stand reading disparaging things about herself, while relatives mourn their dead loved ones and a devastated set of parents prepare to lay to rest their nine year-old daughter. I wonder how Palin feels now that the hate she has been so perkily spewing has landed on her doorstep in an awful way. I don’t believe that she is solely responsible for this tragedy, but her words, along with the cacophony of other angry voices, have helped to bury six people and put others in the hospital, fighting for their lives. Rewriting her Facebook page like a seventeen year-old won’t make her look better, now that she’s shown America how shallow a leader she is.

It matters not whether the shooter was a tea partier, a libertarian, a Democrat or a Republican. It is clear that he is a troubled young man. What matters is that people like Palin, Beck and others can’t take time to figure out that this time is not about them, but about those who have lost loved ones, and their incredible hubris in not owning up to their own sideshow of hate. Palin and Beck tout their faith as a badge of honor, but it is in moments like these that their shallowness belies the God they claim to believe in.

Visit Religion Dispatches to read more articles by Anthea Butler.

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By Dennis S. Ross, Religion Dispatches

In one of the greatest overstatements of 2010, Lord Nicholas Windsor of England argued recently that abortion is a bigger threat to Europe than al-Qaeda. The reality is that when a woman believes she needs an abortion, not being able to get one poses a significant threat to her health and safety. And any member of the clergy can tell the tale.

Clergy tell stories. It’s a tradition as old as the Bible. And it’s a common practice when someone dies.

I just finished leading a burial service for a man I didn’t know and a family I’d likely never see again. The son of the deceased, a grandfather himself, scanned the nearby graves and pointed to an inscription for a 23-year-old woman who died in 1931. “My aunt passed before I was born. She had an illegal abortion,” he said as if our unfamiliarity gave him permission to unearth a family secret.

“What a shame,” was all I could muster, having heard the start of a story I did not expect to hear.

“It should never happen,” was the curt response. He quickly thanked me for the service, got into the rental with family and drove back to the airport. And I was left with questions.

Who told him about the botched abortion? How was it explained? What did he think at first? Was the abortion self-induced or performed by a quack? Did she die of a hemorrhage or infection? What did the rabbi say at the funeral? What would I have done were I the officiant standing at an open grave with a bereft family?

I think of these questions because I’m a rabbi at a synagogue. I also work for Planned Parenthood as a religious advocate for access to sex education, contraception, and abortion. When people ask about the connection between the two, I tell a story, perhaps how I learned about a man whose aunt died of a botched abortion and how I hope that never happens to any woman again.

Clergy hear stories, including ones about pregnancy, happy stories and ones that are not: A woman finally became pregnant after many tries and many years, only to have the baby arrive prematurely and die after a few days. A pregnancy seemed to proceed normally until a sonogram revealed a catastrophic developmental anomaly that ended in tragedy. And everything went perfectly in another case until the final moments of birthing when a hemorrhage threatened the woman’s life until the doctor took heroic measures to save her. These stories teach clergy not to take any pregnancy for granted, that nothing is guaranteed when it comes to pregnancy.

Going back years before the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, rabbis had heard enough sorrowful stories that my denominational professional organization, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, endorsed access to birth control in 1929 and cooperation with Planned Parenthood in 1947. As the decades passed, we, and clergy from other religious groups, demanded access to reproductive health care, including abortion. We weren’t dismissive of the woman’s pregnancy. Rather, we affirmed that the moral high ground is in a woman’s decision whether or not to become pregnant and whether or not to carry her pregnancy to term; we put her judgment first. And we maintained that access to safe reproductive services is a matter of a woman’s health and safety. Counseling women in need changed us; telling their stories changed people’s lives.

I retell that cemetery story from time to time, as I did during a meeting with a legislative staffer who asked me and the other clergy in the room to explain what brought us to advocate for abortion rights. After I told the story of the man and the aunt he never met, the staffer, in his 60s, stared back at me and said, “I was a little boy in Bronx when my friend’s mother died. A few years later, I learned that she died of an illegal abortion. I don’t want that to have to happen to anyone, ever again, either.”

He understood. And then I remembered another story, an old legend told of a rabbi in Europe: When a problem in the community confronted the rabbi, he went to a hidden place in the woods to light a fire and pray. The rabbi would finish the prayers and return home to find that the community had made peace. The story continues by pointing out that the rabbi of the legend is long gone and the place in the woods and the words of the prayer are long forgotten. All that’s left is a story. And when there is a problem in the community, the story’s retelling should itself be enough to restore the peace. So like many clergy, I tell the stories of these women with the hope of making peace for them.

For the aunt is buried in that lost place and the forgotten words are the funeral prayers spoken at her graveside. As for the fire, it burns when telling a story of an aunt, a friend’s mother, a daughter, a wife, or any woman who suffered because she couldn’t get competent medical care; stories that move people to come forward to advocate for protection for the woman and continuing to live in health and peace.

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By Samantha Kirby, Tikkun Magazine

My grandmother was many things: a piano teacher, a Chicagoan, a coffee aficionada — and a pioneer.

I added that last part after she passed away, when I learned that she had graduated from Northwestern University in 1944, about twenty years before NU removed its quota for Jewish admissions. By the time I was an undergraduate shivering through my years in Evanston, it was hard to believe that the campus, with its thriving Jewish community, had ever tried to restrict its number of Jewish students. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother walking the same streets as I had but feeling like a second-class student.

In September, I went back to my alma mater to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. I don’t know how my grandmother would have reacted, but imagine my surprise when the last thing I saw before entering was this vile sign: “Your Rabbi is a Whore.“

A hateful group with a hateful message had chosen to picket services that night, during a special time of celebration and renewal.

The saddest part of this story is that when I came into work at Interfaith Youth Core (a nonprofit working to build interfaith cooperation) the next day, I realized that I understood on a visceral level something my Muslim colleagues had been discussing — how nervous they felt to celebrate Eid, the end of Ramadan, just a few days later. They were anxious about going to their mosques for prayers. They were worried their kids were going to be terrorized on the playground for missing school for the holiday.

I wondered what else we could expect, when the news was dominated with stories like a Muslim cab driver being stabbed in the throat; arson to a proposed mosque in Tennessee; and protests at Islamic centers across the country from California to New York. We have national figures such as Newt Gingrich saying, “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington…. There is no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center,” as if being a Nazi could possibly compare to someone trying to build an interfaith community center.

It was all a crystal-clear sign of what we’re getting wrong in America right now — the “us” versus “them.” Let’s remember that the “us” is everyone, all Americans, of every faith and no faith at all, and the “them” are those who seek to destroy the very values we are surrendering now as a country — freedom, pluralism, and the American ideal of equality.

Part of my call to heal the world is to restore these values, using inspiration deeply rooted in the Jewish principles of social justice, to continue drawing America’s great arc of inclusiveness bigger and broader. In other words, tikkun olam is working toward a future in which the same arc that enveloped American Jews envelops all of our neighbors. And for me, that means building interfaith cooperation: bringing together diverse people to both understand one another better and serve the common good.

It’s the only way that I’ll be able to say never again with an honest heart.

Samantha Kirby is Interfaith Youth Core’s Communications & Policy Specialist. The Youth Core is a Chicago-based nonprofit building interfaith cooperation around the world.

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It was not until recently that I learned the full story behind the annual festival that is Hanukkah, and the story fascinates me. I learned that its overarching theme was one of “traditional” vs. “progressive” Jews in ancient Palestine. I then got to thinking: Had I been alive at the time, would I have joined the Maccabee revolt? Probably yes, at least in spirit. In fact, I most probably would have been a Jew.

This stems from my deep devotion to Islam. I believe the message of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was the very same message of Moses, although the particulars may be different. Since Moses was a prophet of God, and his Law was sent by God for me to follow, I would have been bound to follow it. Therefore, I would have strenuously opposed the Greeks who believed that all the gods should be worshipped at the Jerusalem Temple.

Those gods, I believe, were inventions of man, and their presence defiled the Temple erected for the worship of the One True God of Abraham, just as the various deities of the Arabs defiled the Holy Temple in Mecca.

I would have also stood against those Jews who, seeking to advance themselves in Hellenistic society, wanted to make nudity acceptable, wanted to burn the books of the Torah, made circumcision–the mark designated by God to be the symbol of His Covenant with Abraham and his descendants–a capital offense, and wanted to sacrifice a pig on the Temple altar. At that time, these actions would have seemed to me–just as for the other followers of the Maccabees–direct contraventions of the Law of Moses.

This is what the Law of Moses says: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God [is] one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” (Deuteronomy 5:4-5). And, further, the Law says: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3).

In the particulars, the Law forbade being naked, and it forbade the consuming of the flesh of swine. So these actions by the Jewish “reformers” would have seemed to me an attempt not to not reinterpret the Law for modern times, but to discard it completely.

So it seems obvious that in my constant struggle to be a devout servant of the God of Abraham, I would have been in the Maccabees’ camp–although I do not know if I personally could have taken up arms against my fellow Jews.

These reflections should come as a surprise to no one: As a Muslim, I worship the God of Abraham, the very same God who was worshiped and honored in the Temple in Jerusalem. As a Muslim, I honor and revere the prophet Moses, Aaron, and all the other Hebrew prophets.

Also, my holy scripture speaks with honor and reverence about King David and Solomon. The Quran says: “We believe in God, and in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, and that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus; and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction between any of them. And it is unto Him that we surrender ourselves.” (2:136)

As Jews wind down their annual commemoration of the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem, I would remind them that American Muslims honor and revere the very same holy figures they do. In their hearts, as they navigate their daily lives in America, Muslims carry the love for God and all His prophets. In their houses of worship (which, recently, some Americans have attacked in misplaced “revenge” for the acts of extremists) verses of the Quran that honor Moses, Jesus, Mary, and Abraham are sung out each and every day in ritual prayer.

Yet these are the people who are attacked by some as “terrorists.” These millions of faithful Muslims have nothing to do with the criminals who act in the name of their faith.

We have much more in common than in distinction, and if more people knew that, we would go a long way toward fighting those forces who seek to divide us by hatred and fear. Those who divide us by hatred and fear must not be allowed to win.

Hesham Hassaballa is a doctor and writer. His latest book is “Noble Brother,” the story of the Prophet Muhammad told in poetry. © 2010 The Nation–distributed by Agence Global

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By Joshua Stanton, Huffington Post

Simon Wiesenthal was an inspiration to me as a Jewish kid growing up in America. Who in my place wouldn’t have been inspired by him? My large European-based family lost something on the order of fifty members during the Holocaust, and Wiesenthal hunted their killers — or at least those who had gotten away.

When I learned about the center that bears his name, I was equally impressed. How couldn’t I support an organization “that confronts anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism, promotes human rights and dignity, stands with Israel, defends the safety of Jews worldwide, and teaches the lessons of the Holocaust for future generations”? It brought together the hard-nosed fight for justice with a love for teaching and an investment in the future of Judaism.

I still profoundly admire Wiesenthal and the Wiesenthal Center. But I worry that a recent op-ed written by two of its leaders, Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, goes against the very pursuit of justice that the center so firmly embraces. Entitled “Presbyterians Against Israel: Liberal Protestants are engaging in historical revisionism concerning Jews and the Holy Land,” its strong suit is certainly not understatement. But by labeling an entire Christian denomination “anti-Israel,” it may prove far more damaging.

The Presbyterian Church has over 2.3 million members in the United States. Its members are diverse, as are its leaders. To claim that “Presbyterians” — and all the more so “liberal Protestants” more broadly — are “against Israel” is provocative, unconvincing, and even ironic.

One of the worst dichotomies propagated by Israel’s critics (and an unfortunate number of its supporters) is the very idea that you can be “anti-Israel.” Besides undermining any hope for nuanced discussion, it suggests that you can be against the very existence of a country, rewrite history, and should devote time to counterfactuals rather than peace-building.

If there is a lesson to be derived from problematic and disproportionate criticism of Israel, it is not to oversimplify. It is appropriate to criticize the policies of a given country and support alternatives; it is unacceptable to tarnish the image of an entire country based on policies that only some support.  Something similar may be said of denominational bodies and their policies, as well.

Most tragically, we find that Israel’s staunchest supporters within the Presbyterian Church are those most hurt by Hier and Cooper’s piece. They are now seen as being in bed with true opponents of the Presbyterian Church — rather than simply holding different aspirations for its internal policies….. Click Here to finish reading this article at Huffington Post. 

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Controversial biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan finds in Jesus’ words an evocation for ‘distributive justice,’ making sure all are cared for.

By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Santa Rosa — “Our father …”  Most Christians can fill in the words that follow: ” … who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done …”

But wait — let’s rewind. John Dominic Crossan, a renowned, if controversial, scholar of Christianity, says the essence of the Lord’s Prayer can be found in those first two words, in fact, in the single word “father,” which, he believes, encapsulates an entire 1st century worldview lost to modern churchgoers.

“After that,” he says, “everything would follow.”

Crossan, a former Catholic priest who teaches at DePaul University, is an old hand at challenging contemporary Christian assumptions. A slight man with a thick Irish accent, a deep spiritual well and an impish sense of humor, he is one of the founders of the Jesus Seminar, a liberal Christian organization that is devoted to the study of the history of Jesus and early Christianity.

The group, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with a gathering in Santa Rosa, is respected in some circles for its scholarship, and in others, viewed as heretical for its skepticism. Among its more controversial declarations are that many of the miracles attributed to Jesus did not occur, at least not as described in Scripture, and that Jesus did not physically rise from the dead.

Crossan has written several books about the historical Jesus. In a sense, he said in an interview, each one has helped lead to his latest book, “The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer” (HarperOne 2010).

In it, he dissects the Lord’s Prayer (also known as the Our Father), line by line, word by word. There is nothing new about this: Most faiths do the same with their important liturgies, and there is a long tradition in Christianity of parsing the Lord’s Prayer for its deeper meaning.

But Crossan’s interpretation is not exactly conventional.

“Let’s say it’s a fresh and defensible reading of the prayer text, though definitely not the traditional interpretation,” said Clay Schmit, a professor of theology at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and academic director of its Brehm Center for Worship, Theology and the Arts.

“The traditional interpretation focuses on the relationship between the Father … and the individual,” Schmit said. “It seeks an alignment between the will of the person making the prayer with the will of the Father.”

Crossan calls the Lord’s Prayer “a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of Christianity for the conscience of the world.”

To understand it, he said, it is necessary to comprehend the culture in which it was written, that of 1st century Judaism. The prayer appears in the New Testament twice, in slightly different forms: In Matthew 6:9-13, and in Luke, 11:2-4. In both cases, it is delivered by Jesus, which helps explain the revered status it holds.

When Jesus’ disciples heard the prayer, Crossan said, they would have responded differently than a modern churchgoer. To begin with, he said, the term “Father” — “Abba” in the original Greek or Aramaic — connoted a “householder,” one who oversaw the affairs of a family.  A householder, he added, would have been judged by how well he provided for everyone.

When the prayer continues with “hallowed be thy name,” he said, what it means by “hallowed” is “a fair distribution for all, the justice of an equitable household.”

In other words, Crossan said, the prayer is about “distributive justice,” about making sure that all are cared for.

“It is revolutionary,” he writes, “because it presumes and proclaims the radical vision of justice that is the core of Israel’s biblical tradition.… It dreams of an Earth where the Holy One of justice and righteousness actually gets to establish — as we might say — the annual budget for the global economy.”

Not everyone agrees.

“That sounds to me like a very agenda-driven interpretation,” said Steven Porter, who teaches the Lord’s Prayer to graduate students in his theology classes at Biola University, an evangelical Christian school in La Mirada. He said he would challenge any student who made that argument in class.

“While I might very much agree with a lot of the points there about distributive justice, and might think there are plenty of passages in Scripture that do seek justice for those who are oppressed and so forth, to find those in the Lord’s Prayer seems like a stretch to me,” he said.

He did agree with Crossan on another point, though: That this is Christianity’s greatest prayer.

“I think for the Christian tradition, this prayer of Jesus’ has to be the greatest,” Porter said. “It has to be seen as kind of the foundational prayer of our faith. This is the founder of our faith teaching us how to pray.”

To read more articles by Mitchell Landsberg and others  visit Los Angeles Times 

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By Nehemia Stern

Anthropologists love to harp on 19^th century sociological principles. Contemporary anthropology has taken aim at everything from cultural evolution to biological plasticity. In this esteemed scholastic tradition, I’d like to offer my own two cents on another principle known as the Scala Naturae or The Great Chain of Being.  This was a medieval concept (though with roots in antiquity) that categorized the world into a hierarchical scale.  At the bottom rested the lowliest of objects such as minerals or plants, at the top of the ladder resided the loftiest of creatures, such as the angels and of course God himself. Humanity rested somewhere between the animals and the angels. The key to social theory, however, was that humanity was also divided into a hierarchy, most infamously with primitive Savages at the bottom, and civilized Europeans at the top.

Not surprisingly, anthropology with its current brand of cultural relativism has had a grand old time critiquing this conception of social reality. In truth, this is not without good cause.  Popular media continues to make the mistake of organizing the world into hierarchies of worth. This is particularly true with popular understandings of the Middle East that are regularly advocated in the news media, and even at times, by those in academia. In this view, Middle Eastern states are placed on a spectrum, with extremists on one end, and moderates on the other.

The goal for many would be to strengthen the moderates, thereby weakening the extremists. No less than the great luminary Queen Rania of Jordan has advocated for this idea. In a postmodern vein, I would like to complicate this perspective. The moderates may not be all that moderate and this should force us to rethink who the extremists might be.

Queen Rania

A good example would be that haven of moderation, Queen Rania’s Jordan. An article recently appeared in Yedioth Achronot English which reported on the confiscation of Jewish religious articles by Jordanian border authorities. The Jordanian authorities had nothing but altruistic intentions in mind. Apparently, it’s simply safer for a Jew not to look Jewish in Jordan. While Queen Rania is lambasting her neighbor state of Israel over its http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7y0Be6QMC4

in Gaza, a few yarmulkes east of the Jordan River is simply taboo.

The irony here would be worthy of a sitcom if it wasn’t so serious. The late King Hussein of Jordan killed thousands of Palestinians in one day of Black September. One wonders how he would have dealt with Hamas in Gaza. Queen Rania (a Palestinian herself) is his daughter in-law. Abdullah, the current King of Jordan, has suspended the parliament for the past year. If you thought November 2^nd in America was a cliffhanger, elections in Jordan are to be held on November 9^th , with the consent of his Highness of course.  

We tend to think of certain states in the Middle East as being wonderfully ‘moderate’. Of course it helps when their first families are young and attractive. We think of other states as being ‘extremists’. Of course their construction of secret nuclear facilities (Syria), or genocidal rants (Iran), aids us in making this determination.

We should pause for a moment to consider the meaning of ‘moderation’ in the Middle East.  A Jewish looking Jew is such an unpleasant site for this ‘model of interfaith dialogue’ that it confiscates Yarmulkes at its border, its king arbitrarily suspends legislation, and it massacres its own refugee population. If this is our bar for moderation, then Middle Eastern extremism is truly frightening.  Unlike most anthropologists, I am not arguing for cultural relativism, but rather for critical thinking (which is a much more useful concept). Rather than constructing a political ‘Great Chain of Being’, we should give an unforgiving look at actions. If a Jew cannot walk down a street in Amman in religious dress, the term ‘moderation’ loses its meaning, and extremism becomes the norm.  

We find ourselves in a political era where liberal well intentioned moderates are apologizing, and offering excuses for Islamic extremism. There are a plethora of excuses, from capitalism and imperialism, to Israeli settlements and the Jewish Lobby. In fact for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNXMdst437Q

Rania the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one excuse that fuels extremism in the entire region (the entire region!).  Good people need to stand up, and look beyond the thin veneer of relativism, political correctness, and even the look of attractive royal first families. Good people need to point out hypocrisy, and unmask the masquerading ‘moderates’.  If they don’t, the few Yarmulke clad Jews walking down a street in Amman will be only the first ones to suffer.