Faith

via Andrew Sullivan, truthdig has an interesting interview with Sam Harris, who it calls the most prominent atheist in America. He wrote the book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in which he argues that faith is the most dangerous element in modern life. A thesis like that may sound a bit shaky a first...but not so much after you think about all the misery in the world today that is associated, for example, with conflict between different religions...but then begins to seem to be on shaky ground once more if you suspect that faith may actually be just one possible convenient mode/excuse for conflict, the existence of which wouldn't be jeopardized by the absence of religious conflict and would probably just find another convenient pretext for expression of the underlying thirst in human nature for conflict itself or as a means to an end to other desirables like wealth, for example. Here's the quote that got Andrew Sullivan's attention and also mine along with a bit more:

But what about the tradition in Islamic societies of consulting with Mullahs or Imams before acting on a directive in the Koran? Don't those people tend to moderate the harshest edicts of Islamic law? It's not that there's not a wealth of discourse about what the Koran actually says. There is a lot of Muslim scholarship out there. The problem is that there really is no basis for what we would call a moderate and genuinely pluralistic worldview to be pulled out of Islam. You really need to do some seriously acrobatic theology to get an Islam that is compatible with 21st century civil society. This is witnessed virtually every day we open the newspaper now, the latest case being the apostate in Afghanistan who converted to Christianity. The basic message of this episode should be clear: this is a government that we came in and reformulated and propped up, and the fact that it had to have a constitution that was in conformity to Islam, opened the door to the true face of Islam, which is: apostasy is punishable by death. That is a fact that no liberal exegesis of Islam is going to change. We have to find some way to change it, of course. Islam needs a reformation. But at present, it's true to say that the real word of God in Islam is that if you change your religion, you should die for it. Isn't that also the case in the Bible? Don't we see similar edicts and punishments for apostasy? Yes. There's nothing worse than the first books of the Hebrew bible: Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus, these are the most barbaric, most totalitarian, most Taliban-like documents we can find. But there are a few loopholes, and these loopholes don't exist in Islam, to my knowledge. One loophole for Christians is that most Christians think that Jesus brought us the doctrine of grace, and therefore you don't have to follow the law. While it's true that there are other moments in the New Testament when Jesus can be read as saying that you have to fulfill every "jot and tittle" of the law (this is in Matthew)- and therefore you can get a rationale for killing people for adultery out of the New Testament-most Christians, most of the time, don't see it that way. The Bible is a fundamentally self-contradictory document. You can cherry-pick it in a way that you really can't the Koran, even though there are a few lines in the Koran that say, "Allah does not love aggressors"-if you hew to just those few lines, you can say things like, "Osama Bin Laden is distorting the true teachings of a peaceful religion." But the basic fact is that Osama Bin Laden is giving a very plausible reading of Islam. You have to split hairs to find a basis for what we would recognize as real moderation in Islam.

From a press release from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center:

In a study comparing the associations between faith and health, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) physician has shown the improvements in life expectancy of those who attend religious services on a weekly basis to be comparable to those who participate in regular physical exercise and to those who take statin-type medications. These findings are published in the March-April issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. The study uses life expectancy tables to compare the impact of regular exercise, statin therapy and religious attendance, and shows that each accounts for an additional two-to-five years of life, suggesting that the real-world, practical significance of weekly religious attendance is of similar magnitude to this other widely recommended therapy or health behavior. "This is not to say that religious attendance should replace primary prevention such as exercise, or a proven drug therapy, such as statin therapy, but it does suggest that regular religious attendance is associated with a substantially longer life expectancy, and this warrants further research," cautions study author Daniel Hall, M.D., who is a resident in general surgery at UPMC and an Episcopal priest.

via kendallball.net, an opinion piece from a couple weeks back by Kevin Philips in The Washington Post makes the argument that:

The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews. When religion was trod upon in the 1960s and thereafter by secular advocates determined to push Christianity out of the public square, the move unleashed an evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal counterreformation, with strong theocratic pressures becoming visible in the Republican national coalition and its leadership. Besides providing critical support for invading Iraq -- widely anathematized by preachers as a second Babylon -- the Republican coalition has also seeded half a dozen controversies in the realm of science. These include Bible-based disbelief in Darwinian theories of evolution, dismissal of global warming, disagreement with geological explanations of fossil-fuel depletion, religious rejection of global population planning, derogation of women's rights and opposition to stem cell research. This suggests that U.S. society and politics may again be heading for a defining controversy such as the Scopes trial of 1925. That embarrassment chastened fundamentalism for a generation, but the outcome of the eventual 21st century test is hardly assured. These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.

There's a tempest brewing over Bill Hobbs. A former Lipscomb student, Hobbs is best-known as a conservative political commentator and blogger. From an article by Travis Loller in The Tennessean, Bill:

...has resigned from his job at Belmont University after posting a cartoon he drew that depicts the Muslim prophet Muhammad holding a bomb. Bill Hobbs, who ran BillHobbs.com, wrote yesterday on another site that his resignation from Belmont's marketing and communications department would be effective Monday. His announcement came two days after the cartoon, representing Muhammad as a stick figure, was the subject of a Nashville Scene story. Hobbs posted a message about the controversy at 3:55 a.m. Thursday on another blog, NashvilleFiles.com, apologizing for the cartoon, which he called "appalling." He said it was drawn in a "moment of personal weakness." The drawing was posted in late February, after caricatures of Muhammad first appeared in a Danish newspaper and caused a worldwide furor among Muslims.

The Nashville Scene article is online and includes a screenshot of the cartoon. From the Nashville Scene article:

To kick things off, he posted a stick-figure drawing of Mohammed holding a bomb. Underneath the cartoon, in crude lettering, he wrote, "Mohammed Blows." Mike Kopp, a longtime Democratic politico, unearthed Hobbs' failed attempt at satire and posted about it on his blog, tennesseepoliticalpulse.com. "I have no quarrel with a person's right to free speech, but as a Christian, I believe this kind of expression goes against all the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament," Kopp wrote, claiming the faithful high ground. He then rhetorically challenged Bryson and Belmont to defend their affiliation with Hobbs. In the comments thread, Hobbs replied. "I posted that cartoon, and invited others to draw their own cartoons, as a way of protesting both American media cowardice and Islamist attempts to suppress free speech via threats of bombs and bullets and burning and beheading," he wrote. Then, he added an apologetic afterthought: "But then I never publicized the site and, quite frankly, forgot is was up until today." From there, the comments thread descended into a series of recriminations, marked by several quick posts in which Hobbs defended himself a little too vociferously. One might say nervously. Oh, and he deleted the cartoon.

The Bill Hobbs situation has drawn the attention of top dog conservative blogs like Malkin and Hewitt. Hobbs had stopped posting to his BillHobbs.com blog in January of this year, but today he added a post titled "It's A Brand New Beautiful Day" that included a photo of cherry blossoms and the following quotations:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. - Romans 8:28 - God's in his heaven - All's right with the world. - Robert Browning

In reading about this stuff, I came across an interesting blog post from last September on BillHobbs.com in which he called on Lipscomb to give back $3 million that it got from the government to pay for a parking garage so that the money could go to Gulf Coast hurrican victims instead:

I haven't done much on the Porkbusters initiative that's sweeping the sensible side of the blogosphere, but I agree heartily with John Hutcheson and Bob Krumm about this: As politicians look for federal spending to cut in order to pay for rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Lipscomb University - where I was enrolled for three-plus years back in the mid-1980s - ought to step up and give back the $3 million it is getting from the government to build a parking garage. There are a lot of people who lost everything and need help more than Lipscomb University, a private Christian university, needs a taxpayer-funded parking garage. As a bonus, the $3 million was put in the most recent congressional transportation bill at the request of the previous president of Lipscomb, who left to take a job in the corporate world. His successor could set a new tone right away by canceling the project and asking Congress to redirect the money to Katrina and Rita relief and reconstruction. As Krumm says, it would be a very Christian gesture. Lipscomb touts on its website that it wants to collect stories for the alumni magazine about how membrs of the Lipscomb community are helping out with Katrina recovery. "With service and missions being a part of Lipscomb's core values we know you are praying, donating and volunteering to help the victims of Katrina. We would like to collect your stories. The Torch magazine is planning to highlight and honor the servant heart in an upcoming issue." A wonderful page-one story would be one that announces Lipscomb has asked Congress to take back the $3 million and use it for Katrina relief and reconstruction. If you agree - and especially if you are a Lipscomb alum - you can contact the school's administration via email addresses on this webpage.

From our good buddy Chris L. at the kyivmission blog:

It seems to me almost all of us are generally pretty close to betraying Christ for 30 pieces of silver. May we learn to recognize Mammon for the spiritual force it is and resist it with all our might.