Crucifixion

Muddle-Headed Pope on Arms Manufacturers

From the Huffington Post:

TURIN, Italy (Reuters) - People who manufacture weapons or invest in weapons industries are hypocrites if they call themselves Christian, Pope Francis said on Sunday.

Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.

“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics after putting aside his prepared address.

“It makes me think of ... people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.

He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today ... they say one thing and do another.”

Francis also built on comments he has made in the past about events during the first and second world wars. He spoke of the “tragedy of the Shoah,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”

That’s right. In one and the same speech, he condemned arms manufacturers, and lamented the fact that the Allies did not bomb the railway lines to the death camps.

And with what were the Allies supposed to bomb the rail lines? Bombers. Built by weapons manufacturers. Most likely B-17s (built by Boeing) or B-24s (built by Consolidated).

Has the Pope even noticed the contradiction?

As Marc Livecche has noted:

With what, precisely, did he intend the allies to bomb the rail lines? The 20th Century ought to have convinced us, including us Christians, that those kinds of folks who enjoy genocide cannot usually be talked out of their malevolence with prayers or harsh language – they most often have to be forced out of it. If soft power cannot get those who are murdering the innocent to stand down then hard power is necessary to knock them down. Such business is about more than “hate, fratricide, and violence.” If stopping genocide is a good thing to do then those who have done it – and those who supply the tools to help them do it – have, well, done good. To be sure, the motives of some who sell arms might be mixed. But while this might, in those cases, marble our moral evaluation, we oughtn’t allow the marbling to eclipse the good nor to forget that, just as soldiering can be a Christian vocation, so too can be making the tools of their trade.

Livecche then deals with the notion that Christians can somehow opt out of war and violence:

It will do no good to claim, as some have, that this is the business of the government and not of Christians. To claim that God ordained the sword for the government to maintain just order but that he has called Christians away from such business in order to provide an alternative, peaceable kingdom is, in my judgment, the true hypocrisy – not the notion of Christians providing weapons of war. If the peaceable kingdom were a viable alternative to hard coercion then, surely, God would have ordained such a kingdom instead of, rather than alongside, the government’s sword. Given that God has ordained the sword, I stand among those who infer, therefore, that the sword is necessary. And if the sword is necessary then that makes the peaceable kingdom parasitic – because it cannot remain in a world in which the good do not bear arms. The idea that Christians should allow their neighbors to dirty their hands while keeping their own souls clean is, frankly, morally abhorrent.

Obama Takes Action

Religion, Polling and the Presidential Primaries

From Christianity Today:

This was supposed to be the year the Democrats got religion. Too bad somebody forgot to tell the pollsters. One of the big untold stories of the Iowa caucus is that only Republicans were asked about their religious affiliation.

The problem isn’t just that we don’t know how many Iowan evangelicals voted for the various Democrats (it would be interesting to see, for example, if Edwards scored as well among evangelicals as he did among conservatives). The problem is that we don’t know whether Democrats as a whole have succeeded in attracting more evangelical voters. (Usually somewhere between one quarter and one third of evangelicals vote Democratic.) I’m told we’ll see some Iowa caucus poll results soon (not from Edison Media Research, the company that does most of these entrance and exit polls) that may shine some light on the religion questions.

The good news is that Edison Media Research has repented, and today’s New Hampshire exit polls (via CNN [Rep Dem] and MSNBC [Rep Dem] )had many religion questions for both Republicans and Democrats.

Clinton, it seems, took the moderately religious (those who attend church monthly or a few times a year), while Obama took the devout (weekly attenders) and the nonreligious (those who never attend church). Roman Catholics (the largest religious group among New Hampshire Democrats, with 36% of voters in that primary), overwhelmingly chose Clinton (43%) over Obama (28%). Those who said they had no religion supported Obama (47%) over Clinton (28%), and that formed a remarkable 22 percent of Democratic voters.

Unfortunately, voters in the Democratic primary were not asked if they consider themselves evangelical or born again.

Republicans were, and 22 percent said they were evangelical or born again. One third voted for Huckabee, 30 percent voted for McCain, and 24 percent supported Romney. But McCain had a very strong showing among among those who said they were not evangelical: 38 percent. (Romney had 32 percent, Huckabee 7 percent).

That pollsters fail to ask Democrats questions about religion that they ask Republicans reflects an important reality of American politics -- the Democratic Party is the party of secular people.

But if Democrats did make progress among those calling themselves evangelical or born again, it would be good to know. Church attendance is well worth asking, but there are Unitarians who go to church quite regularly.

Moyers Misreported Rove Religion -- Taken to Woodshed by Chris Wallace

We earlier reported the partisan screed in which Bill Moyers asserted that White House operative Karl Rove is an agnostic, and that therefore “you have to wonder how those people on the Christian right feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.”

Our view was that it doesn’t much matter what Rove’s personal religious views are. He helped sell George Bush to Christian conservatives as a Christian who shared their policy preferences. Since Bush is a Christian who shares conservative Christian policy preferences, there was nothing wrong with that.

But it seems that Moyers simply got Rove’s religious views wrong. Rove told Chris Wallace that he was an observant Episcopalian who reads a devotional every day.



Hat Tip: Badger Blogger.

BBC: Anti-Christian Double Standard on Religiously Offensive Posts

From the Daily Mail:

The BBC has been forced to remove statements from its website referring to Jesus as a “bastard.”

It is the latest in a string of offensive comments that BBC editors have allowed members of the public to post.

The remarks have been allowed to remain for weeks, despite complaints from religious groups.

It has led to claims that the BBC is allowing its output to be hijacked by extremists while censoring anti-Muslim sentiment.

The remarks about Jesus were left as part of a discussion of the death of the Archbishop of Paris.

The debate had descended into an argument about the merits of Christians, Jews and Muslims when a writer, known as “colonelartist,” posted: “Are you a christian? You do know that jesus had to hide all his short life he lived in those promised land because his tribesmen used to call him fatherless, ridiculed him for being a B-A-S-T-A-R-D. . . .”

He added: “Jesus . . . was also persecuted because the jews would never accept as their Messiah a person whose father was missing . . . .”

The comments were allowed to remain for a week despite complaints. But after The Mail on Sunday contacted senior BBC officials, they were deleted.

Colonelartist is a regular contributor to the BBC site.

He has also written: “The jews in much remembered concentration camps had even better qualitity [sic] of freedom that these palestinians have . . .”

One website user wanted to see if BBC editors were allowing these offensive remarks to remain while blocking others. He wrote: “No one can surpass the Muslims for denial of their role in Terrorism and Suicide bombing.” The remarks were almost immediately deleted.

The BBC has also been criticised for allowing allegedly anti-Semitic posts from a contributor called “Iron Naz.”

In a message left on the site for more than a month, Iron Naz says: “Zionism is a racist ideology where jews are given supremacy over all other races and faiths. This is found in the Talmud . . . which allows jews to lie as long as its to non-jews.”

The remarks brought complaints from the Board of Deputies, the organisation that represents Britain’s Jews and its Community Security Trust. They say the post draws on a discredited 19th Century text, the Talmud Unmasked, which is still distributed by neo-Nazi booksellers.

However, the BBC said the remarks did not merit removal.

A spokesman said posts were taken down if they were considered likely to “disrupt, provoke attack or offend others or are considered racist, homophobic, sexually explicit or otherwise objectionable.”

The Board of Deputies intends to pursue its complaints. Mark Gardiner, of the Community Security Trust, said: “The BBC obviously no longer recognises anti-Semitism. The BBC is a public body, funded by the British taxpayer. It has legal obligations.”

A spokesman said: “Discussion - including robustly critical discussion - of any faith’s doctrines and practices is an important feature of civilised discourse.

“But deliberately or recklessly offensive denigration of those doctrines and practices is unacceptable.”

This, of course, is what always happens when somebody sets out to censor “offensive” speech.

Certain politically correct groups get protection. Other politically incorrect groups inhabit a free-fire zone.

In the world of the politically correct left, gays and Muslims are to be protected from slurs. But Christians -- and now apparently Jews -- have to tolerate attacks.

Of course, free speech allows private individuals to set up any kind of discussion board they want, including one where attacks on Christianity are rife.

But the BBC is owned by the British government, and supported by a tax on all broadcast consumers. So Christians and Jews are being forced to subsidize hate speech directed at them.

Bill Moyers Attacks Karl Rove as an Agnostic

An ill-tempered partisan rant from Bill Moyers is no surprise.

But what is interesting about this one, from a forthcoming PBS special, is that he attacks Karl Rove for being (supposedly) an agnostic.

One would think that liberals would be tolerant of agnostics, but they aren’t tolerant of Karl Rove.

According to Moyers, “you have to wonder how those people on the Christian right feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.”

Of course, Moyers, like liberals generally, believes that Christian conservatives are stupid people who could not make a rational vote choice, which is why Rove was able to “manipulate” them.

Yet somehow he “manipulated” them into voting for a candidate (George Bush) who shared their policy preferences about things like abortion, the homosexual agenda and taking “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Rove may or may not be an agnostic, but Moyer’s argument is a singularly stupid one.

Rove did not sell himself as a devout Christian. He sold George Bush as a Christian, and as somebody who agreed with Christians on key social issues.

No misrepresentation was required.

Had Rove believed that Christianity is evil, then his selling Bush to Christians as a Christian candidate would be immoral. But there is no evidence Rove believes that Christianity is evil. Indeed, he has been quoted as saying he does not have the “gift of faith.”

Not exactly the words of somebody who thinks Christianity is an evil delusion.

We frankly would prefer an atheist president who agrees with us on key issues to a nominal Christian whose worldview is that of the secular left. And most real Christians we know (“real” defined as taking the Bible more seriously than the editorial page of the New York Times) agree with us.

But Moyers believes that conservative Christians are ignorant hicks, and voted for Bush in the belief that everybody with any connection whatsoever to the Bush White House must be a devout believer.

Of course, Christians would be ignorant hicks if they voted for people who think like Bill Moyers.

Tenured Bigots: College Faculty Dislike Evangelical Christians

Via the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the results of a study about the attitudes of academics toward different religions.

David French has known for years that college campuses are bastions of anti-evangelical bias. He knew it when he served on the admissions committee at Cornell Law School and watched his colleagues ridicule evangelical applicants as “Bible thumpers” or members of the “God squad.” He knew it during his tenure with an education watchdog organization that routinely challenged university speech codes bent on silencing evangelical viewpoints. He knew it when he shifted into his current role as director of the Alliance Defense Fund’s Center for Academic Freedom, a position from which he’s filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of victimized evangelical students.

But only now can French declare with certainty that his anecdotal observations accurately represent a widespread statistical reality. In a recently released scientific survey of 1,269 faculty members across 712 different colleges and universities, 53 percent of respondents admitted to harboring unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals.

“The results were incredibly unsurprising but at the same time vitally important,” French told WORLD. “For a long time, the academic freedom movement in this country has presented the academy with story after story of outrageous abuse, and the Academy has steadfastly refused to admit that the sky is blue—that it has an overwhelming ideological bias that manifests itself in concrete ways. This is another brick in the wall of proving that there’s a real problem.”

Unlike much of the previous foundation for that proof, this brick hails from a non-evangelical source. Gary A. Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, set out to gauge levels of academic anti-Semitism compared to hostility toward other religious groups. He found that only 3 percent of college faculty holds unfavorable views toward Jews. In fact, no religious group draws anywhere near the scorn of evangelicals, Mormons placing a distant second with a 33 percent unfavorable outcome.

Tobin was shocked. And his amazement only escalated upon hearing reaction to his results from the academy’s top brass. Rather than deny the accuracy of Tobin’s findings or question his methodology, academy leaders attempted to rationalize their bias. “The prejudice is so deep that faculty do not have any problem justifying it. They tried to dismiss it and said they had a good reason for it,” Tobin told WORLD. “I don’t think that if I’d uncovered bigotry or social dissonance about Latinos, women, blacks, or Jews, they would have had that same response.”

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told The Washington Post that the poll merely reflects “a political and cultural resistance, not a form of religious bias.” In other words, the college faculty members dislike evangelicals not for their faith but the practical outworking of that faith, which makes it OK.

If faculty were found to dislike homosexuals not for their sexual orientation but for “the practical outworking of that orientation,” the outrage would be overwhelming.

We would love to report that at a nominally Christian institution like Marquette, the situation is different. We haven’t done any systematic surveys on it, but it’s clear to us that the faculty and administration here feel pretty much the same way as academics generally.

A Tolerant Atheist

Via Heart, Mind & Strength, an account of an atheist who gave a major contribution to Catholic education.

According to the New York Daily News:

The wealthy philanthropist who gave $22.5 million to help Catholic schools doesn’t think much of theology - in fact, he’s an atheist.

But even though Robert Wilson doesn’t believe in God, he does believe in giving poor kids a chance at a quality education.

“I am an atheist, [but] it’s far more than about religion,” said Robert Wilson, who was raised as an Episcopalian. “It’s about getting an education. The donation has nothing to do with religion.”

The statement didn’t exactly sit well with Edward Cardinal Egan, who joked that Wilson might need a bit of an education himself about what goes on in Catholic schools.

“Mr. Wilson and I are going to [be] spending a lot of time together,” Egan quipped.

The donation - the biggest in Archdiocese of New York history - will help 3,000 kids from poor families pay for Catholic schools in New York City during the next five years.

Wilson, 80, suggested he would have considered supporting public education, but wanted to sink his money into what he considers a higher-quality school system.

The former Wall Street investor, who is listed among BusinessWeek’s “50 Most Generous Philanthropists,” blamed the teachers union for crippling public schools with what he termed selfish and greedy demands.

“They oppose any effort to help private schools,” said Wilson, who usually shuns the limelight. “They’ve opposed any kind of help to the Roman Catholic system.”

According to Bloomberg, Wilson said:

“Let’s face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization,” Wilson said. “Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent.”

As the culture war has heated up, expressions of venomous hostility toward Christianity on the part of atheists have been front and center in the media, and even in the local leftist blogosphere.

But people who simply don’t believe in God are not necessarily bigots, nor necessarily enemies of Christians.

As for people like Wilson: Christians are going to pray that they will find Jesus. But regardless of that, he’s a good guy, and deserving of love as a generous and compassionate fellow.

Christian-Bashing Democrats

From Opinion Journal, some observations on the bigoted anti-Christian rhetoric that two of the bloggers in the John Edwards campaign spewed forth, and the broader reality of the Democratic Party.

Heavens, it’s getting crowded in the pews these days--at least with Democratic presidential candidates. Here is Sen. Barack Obama in California’s Saddleback pulpit at the invitation of mega-selling pastor Rick Warren. There is Sen. Hillary Clinton with downcast eyes in Newsweek, praying before the cameras in New York’s Riverside Church. And there preaches John Edwards, also in Riverside Church, weaving his personal faith into everything from AIDS to the minimum wage. Clearly the push is on to show that, for now anyway, the Democratic hopefuls are just plain folks in the religion department.

All the more reason to plumb the curious episode of Amanda Marcotte, that blogger for the Edwards campaign who resigned on Monday and was followed out the door Tuesday by another technical consultant, Melissa McEwan. Both quit thanks to circulation by conservatives of some of these former staffers’ Internet musings. That is to say, in Ms. Marcotte’s case especially: scatological Catholic-baiting rants about “theocracy” marked by leering references to the pope and liberal use of the F-word.

So far, so unremarkable. Just being a bilious feminist with a potty mouth doesn’t much distinguish one in the blogosphere these days. What does matter is something else: We have here a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moment, in which the fate of bit players becomes emblematic of a larger drama.

For what the blogger tempest really illuminates is a fact that could come to haunt the Democrats as they vie for national office: namely, that their past few wilderness years have also been boom years for the church-loathing liberal/left punditry. As a result, anti-Christian invective now graces (or disgraces) many of the books, magazines, Web sites and blogs to which liberals, including the Democratic elite, habitually look for ideas. One motto of this cottage industry is that the most serious threat to the American republic can be found in, no, not those religious fundamentalists, the ones that first leap to mind after 9/11; but, incredibly, certain other believers--our nation’s Christians.

The cover of Damon Linker’s 2006 “Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,” for example, declares: “For the past three decades, a few determined men have worked to inject their radical religious ideas into the nation’s politics. This is the story of how they succeeded.” Again, he is not talking about al Qaeda. Other books in a similar vein include Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” praised on its cover by Katha Pollitt for exposing “the ongoing takeover of our country by right-wing Christians.” There is Kevin Phillips’s “American Theocracy,” which identifies in its subtitle “radical religion” as a “peril” facing the nation. Enter also Randall Balmer’s “Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament,” which opens with the unfortunate metaphorical notion that evangelical faith has been “hijacked by radical zealots” and closes with a vow about “taking America back.”

To repeat, this apocalyptic rhetoric is not being heaped on, say, bomb-toting Islamists but on your churchgoing neighbors next door. Some authors even argue that those neighbors and Islamic “fundamentalists” are joined at the hip. Mel White’s “Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right” is one; he warns that Christians want to “forcibly” take back the country.

Not to be outdone is the recent tome “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” by New York Times reporter Chris Hedges. It delivers more of the same, studded with that tonier F-word, “fascism.” Yet despite the book’s conflation of prayer groups and jackboots, Publisher’s Weekly awarded “American Fascists” a starred review and praised its attentiveness to a supposedly “serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society.”

Of course, whatever has been hurled against Christians in books and magazines has been positively restrained by the standards of the blogosphere. Like Ms. Marcotte’s more embellished arias, a lot of blog commentary cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

Sophisticates and secularists have always titillated themselves by despising the Bible Belt. But professional Christian-bashers have never been as “embedded” in the liberal mainstream as they are today. And therein lies a problem for Democrats. More Amanda Marcottes are not what the party needs as it scrambles to re-establish its religious bona fides with wary red-staters. No wonder so many Democratic candidates are in church. Now they really have something to pray about.

The author of this piece, Mary Eberstadt, politely fails to be explicit about the vitriol that Marcotte (and McEwan) posted.

But just to give a taste of the vile stuff she posted, here is a sample.

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

And via Sykes Writes, Michelle Malkin does a dramatic reading of Marcotte’s rants.

People like Edwards and Hillary and Obama may not, in their hearts of hearts, be anti-Christian bigots. But they are tolerant of anti-Christian bigotry. They will accept from their supporters and campaign operatives nasty rhetoric that they would never accept if directed toward blacks or homosexuals.

A lot of Democratic operatives and pundits claim that being a Christian and voting Democratic are perfectly consistent; that any notion that the Democrats are anti-Christian is some kind of misperception.

But it’s not a misperception. The Democratic party is the party of those who hate Christians -- and those who will tolerate hatred toward Christians.

“God Gap” Increased in 2006 Elections

From The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a summary of how religion affected the 2006 elections.

Bottom line: the polarization that separates religious people and secular people (the latter group including a fairly large number of nominally religious) increased. Particularly instructive were comparisons with 2002, the last national non-presidential election year.

The GOP held on to voters who attend religious services more than once a week, 60% of whom voted Republican compared with 61% in 2002. A majority (53%) of those who attend church at least once a week also supported Republicans. But less frequent churchgoers were much more supportive of Democrats than they were four years ago. Among those who attend church a few times a year, for instance, 60% voted Democratic, compared with 50% in 2002. And among those who never go to church, 67% voted Democratic; four years ago, only 55% did so. As a result, the gap in Democratic support between those who attend church more than once a week and those who never attend church has grown from 18 percentage points in 2002 to 29 points today.

In other words, there was a general swing toward the Democrats (obvious on election night) but those who frequently attend religious services moved hardly at all in a Democratic direction, while those who seldom or never attend religious services moved sharply in Democratic direction.

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Thus two things were going on. 2006 was a “deviating” election in which short-term forces favored the Democrats. But it also continued the “secular realignment” — here “secular” means it’s happening over decades — which is sorting out the parties.

The Mainstream Media spin on the election was that white evangelical voters voters were going to defect from the Republicans in large numbers, supposedly because of the “outing” of Republican Representative Mark Foley as a homosexual who exchanged obscene e-mails with a former page. This fit nicely into the Mainstream Media stereotypes of conservative Christians as homophobes would would go ballistic at learning that a Republican congressman might be gay.

In fact, evangelical Christians yet again calculated that, on issues like abortion and gay marriage, they are better represented by the Republicans.