God Experts

The split among America’s Episcopalians took a giant step forward a week ago when dissidents convened near Dallas, Texas to found the “Anglican Church of North America,” as a rival to the official “Episcopal Church in the United States of America.” The new church, which hits the ground running with over 100,000 members in 700 parishes, differs from the old primarily in its non-acceptance of homosexuality. ACNA’s God experts have never forgiven the older church for ordaining an openly gay bishop in 2003, and for tolerating church blessings of same-sex unions. ACNA also refuses to allow women to become bishops.

Barack Obama’s favorite evangelist, Rick Warren, was on hand to bless the launch, encouraging the schismatics to stick to their Biblical guns. “Don’t ask God to bless what you are doing. Do what God is blessing.”

Secession is not a new phenomenon in American Christianity. Its consequences can be greater than you might imagine. In the 1830s and 1840s, the three largest denominations in America split apart over the issue of slavery; many observers both then and now regard this as the critical turning point that led America down the path toward the carnage of the Civil War.

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Last Wednesday was St. Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec. This provides as good an opportunity as any to recall North America’s most prominent theocratic government: Quebec of the mid-20th century.

St. Jean Baptiste Day was proclaimed as Quebec’s national day by the St. Jean Baptiste Society, originally founded in 1834 to promote the interests of French-speaking Canadians. There is a reason why the group named itself after a Catholic saint, rather than calling itself something like the “French-speaking Canadian Society.” The reason is that the divide between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians exactly paralleled the divide between Catholic and Protestant Canadians. The Catholic Church exploited the “beleaguered minority” self-perception of French Canadians to enhance its own position of power in Quebec.

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The evidence powerfully indicates that the results of Iran’s recent election are fraudulent. It is not implausible per se that the preferred candidate of the religious right, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, might have gotten 63.3% of the vote. It strains credibility past the breaking point, though, when we are told that Ahmadinejad got very close to 63.3% of the vote in every district of the country, urban and rural alike – including the home city of his principal opponent. Anyone who has studied election statistics knows things like that just don’t happen. When we are also told that the counting of 35 million paper ballots took only a couple of hours to complete, and that the nationwide total for the principal reformist candidate other than Mir Hossein Mousavi was less than 1%, we see an attempted swindle that is downright clumsy.

The one shining truth to emerge from the whole farce was proclaimed on Friday by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: “This election showed religious democracy for the whole world to see.”

“Religious democracy.” Now there’s an oxymoron to treasure. Democracy was an idea invented in Pagan Greece and revived by Enlightenment humanists, in which the people decide for themselves how they will be governed. Religion is its polar opposite: the people are ruled by a handful of experts who carry out God’s will.

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The 200th anniversary of the death of Tom Paine passed by last Monday almost completely unnoticed in the press. Count the demise of his memory as one more in a long series of deaths.

There would be no reason for killing him off so many times had he not lived such a remarkable life. Born in a small town in England, he emigrated to America at the age of 37. When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, he found many colonists deeply distressed over misrule from London and their inability to do anything about it.

Perhaps because of his own unhappy experience with the British government, Paine saw clearly what most Americans were unwilling to confront: that government based on the alleged divine right of kings was a fatally flawed idea, and it made no sense to expect any good to come from it. People should figure out for themselves the best way to impose taxes and deploy the resulting revenues, and not rely on the conspiracy of God experts and military men called “monarchy” to do it for them.

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The liberal media is agog over President Obama’s speech in Egypt last week about the wonders of Islam. A peek below the surface, though, reveals some troubling details.

First, the backdrop. From all the available choices, Obama settled on Al-Azhar University as a co-sponsor of the event, because as he put it, “For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning.” Al-Azhar is indeed the Islamic equivalent of the Vatican curia.

And what learning emerges from Al-Azhar? For starters, there is female genital mutilation. In fairness, Islam gets something of a bad rap here; there is actually nothing in the Koran or the traditions of Muhammad to support it, and most Muslims find it abhorrent. Not Al-Azhar University, though. Gad al-Haq, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, adamantly endorsed the practice until his death in 1996, in defiance of the secular government of Egypt’s attempts to ban it. The current Grand Sheikh, rather than condemning the practice as barbaric, says only that it is “not a must.”

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The timing of Rev. Alberto Cutié’s big switch couldn’t be sweeter.

Father Cutié was no ordinary Catholic priest. He was a big fish. Since 1999, he has been America’s leading Catholic televangelist, first with a daily talk show, then a weekly program on Eternal Word Television Network Español that is shown throughout the world. On radio, he served as President and General Director of Radio Peace, the Archdiocese of Miami’s 24-hour station available via internet around the world, where he hosted two regular programs. His 2006 book, Real Life, Real Love, was a best-seller in the Spanish language market.

So when an 8-page spread of pictures showing Father Cutié making out with a babe on Miami Beach was published earlier this month, it was a big deal. “Real Life, Real Love,” indeed.

His first public response was to ask for forgiveness, since he had broken the solemn vow of celibacy he had made to God and to his employer when he became a priest. Upon further consideration,

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In the new Tom Hanks movie Angels & Demons, the Illuminati are portrayed as a secret society of scientists and mathematicians bent on revenge against the Catholic Church for having burnt several of their members back in the 17th century. Today’s Catholic League, which can’t stand the film even though it is in truth quite pro-Catholic, has mounted a publicity campaign about how “false” the movie is. The Illuminati, they claim, was nothing at all like its film portrayal; even the dates are all wrong.

The League is correct in this nitpick. The Illuminati had little to do with science, and did not exist in the historical era described in the film. There was, however, a powerful international secret society that fought the Church tooth and nail to promote its humanist values, including a respect for science. It still exists today, though it has lost its original edge. It is called the “Freemasons.”

The origin of Freemasonry is lost to history. Legends attributing it to the builders of Solomon’s Temple are certainly fantasy. Other legends linking the first Freemasons to

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The Pope spent last week in Israel and Palestine. Amidst all the predictable blather, one actual event occurred that explains all you need to know about what has gone so terribly wrong in that part of the world.

On Monday, the Pope attended a conference held in Israeli-occupied east Jerusalem, on the topic of “inter-religious dialogue.” He wound up with a little more dialogue than he had in mind. A local Muslim cleric named Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi, who was not on the officially approved schedule of speakers, somehow made it to the podium and gave the audience an earful about the Israeli occupying forces.

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When I first read the news article about the new anti-evolution court decision in California, I assumed the reporter had simply gotten it wrong, and that no federal court in America could possibly have ruled the way the article described. As usual, my optimism was misplaced. The case of Farnan v. Corbett holds, flat out, that a public school teacher who criticizes the doctrine of creationism in class – as every teacher of evolution implicitly or explicitly does – violates the First Amendment to our Constitution.

James Corbett has taught at Capistrano High School in Mission Viejo, California for the past 20 years. One of his students, a fundamentalist Christian, sued him on the grounds of promoting a “religion of secularism” in his class. The federal district court threw out all but one of the student’s complaints, but Judge James V. Selna held as follows on the creationism count:
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A 500th anniversary is a big deal. This month marks the 500th anniversary of the battle of Agnadello, at which a French army fighting at the behest of the Pope defeated an army of the Republic of Venice. That in itself would not be a big deal, but for the fact that the refugees who fled the French advance and sought shelter within the islands comprising the city of Venice included over 5,000 Jews.

Most of these Jews already had experience as refugees, having recently been expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella. The citizens and Christian clergy of Venice, though, did not welcome them. Jews were Christ-killers. According to the Gospel, they were proud of this fact: “His blood be on us, and on our children,” Matthew 27:25 has them say. Jews had been punished by Christians for this crime ever since the time of the Emperor Constantine. The 5th century Greek theologian St. John Chrysostom, whom today’s Catholic Encyclopedia calls “the greatest preacher ever heard in a Christian pulpit,” delivered eight famous “Sermons Against the Jews” at Antioch, setting a pattern that has been followed ever since. Some of the eloquence that led to his consecration as a saint:

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