Religion

The LaClair family and the Kearny Board of Education have settled their dispute regarding David Paszkiewicz’s proselytization in U.S. history class, as reported in the New York Times: The Kearny Board of Education in New Jersey and the parents of Matthew LaClair, a 17-year-old junior at Kearny High School, settled their dispute on Tuesday night about a teacher who proselytized in class. The settlement will include training for teachers and students about the separation of church and state and a public statement by the board praising Matthew for bringing the matter to its attention. ...

Bruce Flamm points out that another reason to doubt the authors of the dubious Journal of Reproductive Medicine prayer study has surfaced, with one of them being charged with plagiarism: In summary, the man who designed and supposedly conducted the prayer study resides in federal prison, and the man originally listed as lead author admits he knows nothing about the alleged research. The only remaining author has now been charged with plagiarism. . . This may be the first time in history that all three authors of a randomized, controlled study have been found guilty of fraud, deception, and/or plagiarism. Even more remarkable is the fact that the JRM has steadfastly refused to retract its physics-defying paper.Taner Edis has more at the Secular Outpost.

The series “America at a Crossroads” commissioned a series of films about Islam in America that will air next week. One of the films, “Islam v. Islamists: Voices From the Muslim Center,” by Martyn Burke, will not be shown. Burke, who was previously the producer of “Pirates of Silicon Valley” and “The Hollywood Ten,” says that his film was dropped for political reasons (including the fact that two of his co-producers, Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev, are neoconservatives from the Center for Security Policy) after “tampering” by PBS and managers from WETA Washington D.C. He listed these examples of tampering: • A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish “parallel societies” in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts. • After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects. • WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an “unparalleled breach of ethics,” Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.PBS claims that Burke’s film was not completed on time, had “serious structural problems” and was “irresponsible” and “alarmist, and it wasn’t fair." Burke’s film featured Phoenix medical doctor Zuhdi Jasser, head of the Islamic Forum for Democracy, a non-profit that advocates “patriotism, constitutional democracy, and a separation of church and state.” Jasser, a staunch Republican and former U.S. Navy physician, was an internist at the Office of the Attending Physician at the U.S. Capitol in the late nineties. There are more details and a short clip of Jasser from the film at the Arizona Republic (from which the above bulleted points are quoted). ...

Various newspapers (including the Arizona Republic) are covering the story of Cosimo Cavallaro’s life-sized statue of Jesus made out of 200 pounds of milk chocolate. All are giving prime coverage to the typical over-the-top rantings of William Donohue of the Catholic League, claiming that “this is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever." This Jesus, titled “My Sweet Lord” and hanging in a crucifixion position, is sans cross or loin cloth. For this reason newspapers are only showing it photographed from behind, so you can’t see how anatomically accurate it is. A photograph of the work from the front can be found at the artist’s website. ...

An anti-Mormon Christian ministry, “Concerned Christians,” has distributed 18,000 DVDs to homes across Arizona, mainly targeting areas with high Mormon populations such as Mesa and Snowflake. 15,000 DVDs were distributed to homes in Mesa, Tempe, and Gilbert, 2,000 in Snowflake, and 1,000 in Tucson. The DVD, titled “Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith,” argues against the latter but not the former. The DVD was apparently produced by and distributed nationally by Living Hope Ministries of Brigham City, Utah, a Christian church that criticizes the Mormon religion. [UPDATE (July 6, 2007): My cousin and his wife inform me in the comments that this is not correct, contrary to the statement from the Arizona distributor in the Arizona Republic’s report, and that this was produced and distributed by TriGrace Ministries and GoodnewsfortheLDS.com.] That name was familiar to me–I suspected, and verified, that this is the same church that previously produced a DVD about how DNA evidence disproved Mormon claims about Native Americans being descendants of the lost tribe of Israel. In 2001, the pastor of Living Hope Ministries was Joel Kramer, who was the officiant at the wedding of my cousin Aaron Lippard, which I attended at their storefront church in Brigham City. Kramer, a former Tucson resident, has authored a book, Beyond Fear, which tells the story of how Kramer and my cousin Aaron traveled across Papua New Guinea solely under their own power. I read the book after seeing my cousin present a slide presentation about his harrowing trip (and show off his septum piercing, which was pierced by a New Guinea aborigine with a bird bone, by sticking a meat thermometer through it). I found the book enjoyable, though preachy and annoying in spots. Kramer’s voice as a writer struck me as arrogant and condescending towards my cousin, portraying himself as a Christian real-man and my cousin as an inexperienced, naive fellow who had much to learn about becoming a mature Christian male. A film Kramer has produced is called The Bible vs. the Book of Mormon, which is reviewed here by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. This review makes a point that I’ve made about Living Hope’s Mormons & DNA DVD and about Richard Abanes’ One Nation Under Gods–they don’t seem to apply the same standard of criticism to Christianity that they apply to Mormonism. I’m sure the same is true of “Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith.” ...

That’s the title of an opinion piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, which I borrowed for a comment of my own at the Secular Outpost. Check it out.

“Oprah’s ugly secret” at Salon.com. “There Is No ‘Secret’" at The Simple Dollar. “The Secret Behind The Secret" at eSKEPTIC. “Shame on Oprah” at Pharyngula. Here’s a quote from the Salon story, which pulls no punches on this nonsense: Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite – positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles – and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth.Unfortunately, the author made somewhat of a hash of his statement about magnets. He should have said either that like magnetic poles repel and opposite magnetic poles attract or that like-charged particles repel each other and oppositely-charged particles attract. The effect of magnets on charged particles is the same regardless of charge (and it’s not attraction or repulsion–remember the mnemonic device of making a fist with your right hand, with your thumb pointing up, representing the direction of the current from positive to negative and the other fingers showing the direction of the magnetic field?).

This YouTube video is of a talk by Daniel Dennett at the TED conference in 2006, following (and commenting on) Pastor Rick Warren. jpbenney (2007-07-08): The idea that religion is a natural phenomenon is very reminiscent, oddly, of Jared Diamond in books like Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, as well as Phillip Longman. The idea of subjecting religion to serious social study, too, is nothing new. Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet versus the Goddess is a flawed if highly enthralling example.Daniel does seem an interesting person, I must say. He is very articulate and lively, so one imagine him to be a very convincing speaker. ...

Alberto Santos, the mayor of Kearny, New Jersey, has spoken out on the David Paszkiewicz affair, with a cogent statement. Historical Comments Einzige (2007-03-09): I note with some dismay (but no real surprise) that the Mayor's recommendations don't seem to include any sort of disciplinary action against Mr. Paszkiewicz.

Glendale Community College philosophy professor Victor Reppert posted at his blog, Dangerous Idea, about whether there is a secular argument against homosexuality. He concluded that there doesn’t seem to be a plausible case (at least, not based merely on evolution), which prompted this comment from ex-Jehovah’s Witness Derek Barefoot: I agree with you partly. However, people who defend homosexuality from a naturalist perspective almost without exception also see nothing perverse about transsexulaity. That one is baffling. It is one thing to dislike some feature of one’s body that falls short of a societal ideal. A person with an unusual nose may want a usual one. A shorter than average person may understandably wish they were taller. But for someone to feel that he or she has literally been “born into the wrong body,” as transsexuals often put it, is naturalistically unfathomable. Perhaps a wasp has by mistake been born into the body of a mouse. Perhaps the tomato plant yearns in some inarticulate vegetative fashion to be an oak. Transexuality is literally a rebellion against nature, yet somehow it is included (commonly) with homosexuality. So perhaps the argument that homosexuality is just an expression of nature is called into question by the related phenomenon of transsexuality.The problem with this response is that Barefoot is making erroneous assumptions about sex in nature. There are not always well-defined boundaries between male and female. I responded in the comments: I think that Darek Barefoot’s analogies of tomato/oak and wasp/mouse are inapt–sexual differences within a species are commonly smaller than genetic and morphological differences across species. There are human individuals whose genetic makeup puts them into categories which are outside of or span the normal male/female boundaries. For example, those with XXY chromosomes may visibly appear to be male or female, and there are those who have both male and female genitalia. Further, there is far more variety to the sexes than mere duality within the animal kingdom. I recommend Olivia Judson’s book, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation for an entertaining look at some of that variety. Transsexuality, like homosexuality, is evidence against an oversimplified view of sex in nature, not against naturalism itself.And I followed that up with another comment: I was looking for but unable to find a set of online forum postings I came across a year or two ago from an intersexed individual who was a Christian, and honestly had no idea what was appropriate dating for her. I believe the church she was involved with took the position that she was not permitted to date or have sex with anyone. It seems to me that most Christians have a real problem with the existence of such individuals, and have a very poor record of inhumane response to them. I did find this post from an individual raising the question of how religious views can make sense of such individuals. It’s an excellent and interesting question. Here’s a brief quote from that post (rest of this comment is quoted from it): The english language has no gender terms we can use for intersex people, instead why try to force them into either female or male which may not be appropriate. Here is a run down of only some intersex conditions: Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) XX (female) fetus ovaries produce a masculising hormone that results in ambigious external genitals . normally the ovaries do not produce hormones as the female is the default sex, none are needed to create a female fetus. the addition of the masculising hormone therefor creates a female with some male charactistics Testosterone Biosynthetic Defects an XY(male) fetus does not produce testosterone, therefor,as female is the default setting it is born with full female parts, or parts rudimentary malformed female parts, despite being genetically male. Androgen sensivity syndrome Testes in the abdomen, external female parts. they also grow brests but do not have cycles (note: im trying to avoid using catch words here, as im not sure what is allowed and what isnt!) Klinefelter Syndrome Genically 47 chromosomes XXY and classed as men. They are males with a female chromosome attatched, small male parts, my develop female characteristics in teenage years. Turner Syndrome 45 chromosomes, XO. Turner women have female external parts but illformed ovaries and no estrogen. “Hermaphroditism” can be EXACTLY one ovary, one teste a small penis AND a female genitalia. Their genetic makeup can be a mosaic of XY and XX genes, they truly are not male or female, but both. Roughly one in a thousand births is an intersex child. so it isnt that rare. The issue this presents to religion is that here we have a group of people who are neither here nor there and will grow up with issues to do with their sexual aurientation. What is the view of religions on say an XXY male, who looks mostly male but wishes to date other men? What is the view on a XY female who feels she is a lesbian (after all she is genitcally male) These are issues many people with intersex come up agaisnt. often their parents assign them a gender at birth and corrective surgery is given to make them into a gender (usually female) This quite often results in the girl growing up feeling male and later on reqesting a sex change. Its a tricky issue. Many Intersex people wish they had not been assigned a gender and feel their body is their right and they should have been left to choose a gender when they were older. But anyway, To me,(I am theist, not religious and very firmly rooted in science) it shows how our gentically evolved bodies can and do go wrong, for a religious person I think it presents an issue worth thinking about. I dont know of any biblical reference to intersex, nor what the christian take is on people who are not male or female but are a bit of this a bit of that, netiehr here nor there or exactly half of each gender. What is their take on how these people should “morally” behave? Heres what I think it boils down to. 1 God doesnt exist 2 God exists but is fallable and makes mistakes 3 god exists and does not make mistakes, therefor, he wishes intersex conditions to exist , but condemns them to hell if they choose the wrong aurientation later in life to what they look like externally 4. He wishes intersex to exist, either because he has no issues with gender and sexuality . ….feel free to add more…There are some further comments at Victor’s blog. ...