Elf Sternberg

The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian organization dedicated to the maintance of Christian privilege within our multicultural United States, has put out guidelines about what students may and may not do and say during school hours.

They recently put out a statement about student's rights, in an attempt to convince their followers that they should speak up in school about their beliefs regarding homosexuality on the Day of Silence. Regardless of how you feel about the issue of bullying, the issue of proseltyzing is still settled law: kids can proseletyze each other all they want. That's what freedom of speech and freedom of religion grant us in this country, and kids no more leave their beliefs and rights and the school door than do adults.

The pamphlet at that link is a slick, graphically rich re-write of Bill Clinton's Memorandum on Religious Expression in Public Schools (and reminding them that, of the presidential hopefuls they've ever had, their best friend was Bill Clinton, is a worthy cause all its own). In it, the writers say about religious gatherings in public school:

Students are free to discuss any issues and engage in any religious speech they desire. The school does not have control over the content, even though the meeting takes place on the school's campus. The school is obligated under the Equal Access Act to provide equal access to all recognized student clubs, regardless of the content of their meetings, unless they "materially and substantially" disrupt the educational process.

The only restrictions here would be on teachers or coaches who attend meetings. Since teachers and coaches are employees of the school, there is concern that what they say may be considered speech endorsed by the school. This could violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (discussed in greater detail on pages 16–20). Students who participate in the meetings are not employees, and, therefore, there is no concern that their speech would be misunderstood as government or school speech.

So whenever you hear that "We're being silenced!" in school, remind Christians that the Christianist Alliance Defense Fund, and the Department of Education, fundamentally agree on the rights of students in schools to express their religious beliefs however they wish, without restrictions on content or conscience.

Christians in leadership positions do not deserve extra priveleges, not even when they are in the majority: they don't get to dictate curricula, or coerce students into attending matters contrary to their faith. When someone complains about Christians being "suppressed," that is what they're complaining about: the suppression of their long-held but still illicit privilege.

Beck has another interesting article that touches on a subject that has been buzzing around in my head for some time. In a review of Christian Smith's book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, he writes:

[The main idea is that] the meaning of the bible is clear and transparent to open-minded readers. The implication of this idea is that when people sit down to read the bible a broad consensus can be reached about the will of God for any number of issues or topics.

Empirically speaking, the bible does not produce consensus. Empirically speaking, what we find, to use Smith's phrase, is "pervasive interpretive pluralism." Even among biblicists themselves consensus cannot be reached.

Smith's take is to tell people to get comfortable with ambiguity, to accept that the Bible is a mess, but just as you can't make out what one man in a crowd at a football stadium is screaming, you know that he and the crowd together are rooting for their team. Smith says that the Bible is "pointing to" God, and you'll just have to accept that the people who wrote the book made of hash of getting their story straight.

Beck doesn't have a take, except to say that Smith's is a recipe for madness and despair. But here's the one point that bothers me: if Smith is right, where is goodness in the Bible? How does one read it in order to "be a decent person," the take of Beck's other essays? Indeed, the entire question of Biblical interpretation is nothing more than Euthyphro's dilemma writ small: Can you take up the Bible and, from it, learn how to be a decent person? Or do you have to come to the Bible as a decent person first, and take from only those parts that edify and enlighten your quest for decency and dignity? If the latter, why need the Bible at all?

I have long suspected that the latter is the case. Smith seems to think so.

One of the big differences between Stoicism and Buddhism is about engagement with the world around you. Buddha taught that the world was full of suffering, and that every human being had a duty to understand the suffering, to let go of the source of the suffering, to realize the cessation of suffering, and to go forward. The four noble truths are usually written as a diagnosis, you know: "All is suffering," "suffering is caused by desire," etc, etc. I prefer them the way the Buddha intended: not merely a diagnosis of the problem, but a prescription for solving it. To achieve these ends, Buddha taught about disengagement, about "letting go" and so putting an impenetrable wall between yourself and the sources of suffering. One of those sources of suffering was, of course, selfhood, and even that was to be eventually extinguished in the quest for enlightenment.

The Stoics, on the other hand, held fewer mystical beliefs. All was suffering, they believed, and like the Buddha they argued that suffering came from desire. But desire itself wasn't wrong, and good men could desire justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance. The Stoic philosophy posits that we're here, and other men are here. We must engage with our world, for good and justice whenever possible. "We have come into the world to work together," Marcus Aurelius wrote, reminding himself privately. It's because of this that the Stoics, despite their temptations to chuck it all, stayed in the world and stayed involved: they saw a nebulous supernatural state, what the Buddhist would call nirvana, as a waste of what little time we had.

Why I still read Andrew Sullivan:

A church with more confidence in its own doctrine would not need to lean upon the law. Imagine a church that reacted by saying that it disagreed, but that Christianity was the real counter-cultural force and it would rededicate itself to encouraging, nurturing and helping opposite sex married couples in its own pews as role models for the rest. Since gay marriage is obviously a sham, it will surely die out and we are confident enough in our own doctrines to be indifferent to, if saddened by, it.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The Malik ibn Anas writer of sharia law has the belief that all muslims share in common that islamic law is the best form of law, which should be spread to all the world. The varying factions of tribal conflicts we see in iraq are those who want to implement this law. Sharia Law. Which would you prefer for our government: Women without basic representation against an abusive husband in a court case. Or a government (current one) that believes in a womens right to testify and have others testify against him?; that does'nt believe in dismemberment of body parts for stealing; in religious tolerance and tolerance towards liberal...oh I'm sorry I hurt your feelings...progressives.

Would you argue that all Christians share in common the belief that Biblical Law is the best form of law, which should be spread to all the world? There are plenty of American Christians who believe exactly that. Judaism is famously insular and not evangelizing, but the American Levirite and Torat HaMelech Orthodox movement argue that Talmudic law is the best form of law, and attempting to influence Jews to other forms of legal thinking is a declaration of war.

Most Americans, regardless of what religion they hold, don't believe any of the above. They believe that our liberal legal system, amenable to change as cirmustance and expedience demand, is better suited to their lives and their futures than those derived from ancient books. In Christopher Hitchens' formulation, one of the major chores of civilization is to tame and domesticate religions. We've mostly done it with Christianity and Judaism, at least in the United States, and I would argue that we're doing it successfully with Islam. Most of the Muslim Americans I know-- which is only a handful, and probably not those who pray five times a day-- are more Americanized than radicalized. Even the one who regularly wears a dhul fiqar ("Sword of the Prophet") pendant listens to profanity-laced hip-hop and worries more about his son's kindergarten than he does Islam.

Our safety and security as a nation depends upon our continuing this trend: of subverting respect for all forms of religious law, for making secular law, with all of its messy legislative and executive issues, the only law we pay any attention to whatsoever. And that ideal, of subverting and subjecting all religious laws to critical analysis and rejecting them as necessary, is a conservative value. The Ten Commandments and the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution are completely incompatible, and they must remain so.

I'll say it again: Anjem Choudry's claim that "The Flag of Islam will fly over the White House someday" is a component of a fantasy ideology. Muslims make up less that 2% of our population. In my lifetime, and that of my children, and even grandchildren, it will never happen, and after that, I think we should let the future deal with itself, and not try to have veto power over it, just as I don't think the generation of Herbert Hoover ought to have veto power over what I think and do.

Christians, in contrast, are 88% of the American population. We're in much greater danger from our own, Christianist fantasists who believe that someday a giant cross will be erected above the White House, and are outraged that it is not already there.

(I'm still trying to figure out why Anonymous Coward thinks "liberal" would hurt someone's feelings. Has he never listened to liberal radio? Does he still think "fag" is a useful epithet after high school?)

In today's news, Americans don't know much about religion. Out of 32 questions about religion, atheists got an average of 21 correct, while mainline Christians got an average of 16 correct.

For the record, I got 31 out of 32. I missed the "Great Awakening" question. I knew Charles Finney was a major figure in American Christianity in the early part of the 19th century, but so was Jonathan "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" Edwards. I guessed wrong.

At least I know the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist. 74% of atheists and Jews got that right, compared to 45% of Christians. But really, 43% of Jews don't know Maimonides was Jewish? WTF? (6% of Jews don't know when the Sabbath begins; 6% of atheists don't know the definition of atheism. 6% of the population is just dumb.)

And I would disagree vehemently with the wording for the atheist question. The wording reads, "An atheist is someone who does not believe in God." An atheist does not believe a god or gods exist; it's a binary state. An agnostic is someone who believes we cannot know whether a god or gods exist. I can't help it if some of you are confused on this point.

The reason why privileged classes are more hypocritical than underprivileged ones is that special privilege can be defended in terms of the rational ideal of equal justice only by proving that it contributes something to the good of the whole. Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions. ... The educational advantages which privilege buys, and the opportunities for the exercise of authority which come with privileged social position, develop capacities which are easily attributed to innate endowment.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, pg. 79.

In their opening arguments to the court, [The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] argued before the court that Pagans are not deserving of equal civil rights as are provided adherents of the preferred faiths. In one of their first arguments to the court, the defendants said that certain traditional faiths are first tier faiths and that those faiths were meant to have equal rights and protections under the United States Constitution, but that all of the other faiths were second tier faiths, and were not meant to have the same equal rights and protections under the United States Constitution as the first tier faiths.

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to decide if paganism and witchcraft were ever intended to receive the protections of the Religion Clauses.

One of the interesting things about Kouryou-chan's ballet class is the sheer number of extremely Christianized people who participate in it. It's not just the way the head of the school always leads every performance in a prayer "in Jesus's name, Amen," (which always reminds me of the Porcupine Tree song, "Intermediate Jesus," which has snippets from some evangelical sermon that ends with the minister laughing in a dark and frightful way, shouting, "That's the only way you're gonna survive, is on your knees! Muahahahahah!"), or how so many people there know each other from the local churches.

No, what particularly caught my attention was that there are whole classes for homeschool students only, and even more particular is that one of the students left her textbooks on the floor during the performance. The book was Understanding The Times, part of a multimedia "educational" series in social studies from Summit Ministries. The series promises:

This curriculum outlines the differences betweet Christianity and other prominent worldviews vying for allegiance in Western culture: Islam, Postmodernism, Secular Humanism, Marxism, and the New Age. In a time when more than half of all Christians lose their faith in college, no other curriculum so effectively prepares its students to defend the Christian worldview against all its competitors.

Even more disheartening is the list of contributors, including:

• Ken Ham, a chronic liar for Jesus who repeatedly pretends to understand the science of biology in order to misrepresent the state of the art in evolution,
• David Barton, a man who repeatedly cherry-picks the writings of the Founding Fathers in order to prove America is founded as a "Christian Nations", and make it seem like the lack of mention of Christianity or Jesus in the Constitution was not because the Founders believed in freedom of religion, but because they assumed it so overwhelmingly that it didn't need repeating,
• Ray Comfort, the bizarre little man who so homoerotically caressed a banana to "prove" it was intelligently designed for the human hand, and who regularly asserts that Hitler was "inspired" by Darwin,
• Josh McDowell, the "Campus Crusader For Christ" and another anti-evolution nitwit,
• Kerby Anderson, another "All the Founding Fathers of America were Christians as only evangelicals understand Christianity today!" maroon,
• Along with many others.

There's an entire population in my comfortable Seattle suburb that reads, believes, and even pays for their children to absorb this pernicious and mendacious nonsense. These are people who are training their children to be unaccustomed to being confronted with dissonance-causing information. At best, another entire generation of children will not grow up to cure cancer^[1] or feed the planet^[2]. At worst, well, I'm reminded of this t-shirt: Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

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^[1]A model of the evolution of cancer implies novel treatment strategies.

^[2]Many comments in the NYT obituary for Norman Borlaug suggest that he should not have saved the billions of lives he did, because his actions led to an industrialized agricultural system, and enriched the petrochemical industry. None of those commentors are from the Indian subcontinent.

Apparently, Twitter is a tool of the devil, but Christians still need a place to Tweet Chirp.

As a public service, I hereby point you toward Open-Mindedness, one of the absolute best explanations of what "open mindedness" really is, and how to communicate with those who insist you be "more open minded" about the things they can't explain.