September 5th, 2010
Camillia Shehata
The
news from Egypt this week is about what could be a new case of clerical kidnapping to save a soul. Camillia Shehata, age 24, is (or was) the wife of a priest in the Coptic Christian church named Thaddeus Samaan Rizk, and the mother of one child. In July, she disappeared from the family home in Minya, a town about 150 miles south of Cairo, and was missing for five days. Egyptian police found her, and returned her to her home.
What was she doing during the five days? Trysting with a lover? Hiding from an abusive husband? Binge drinking? We don’t know. What we do know is that Egyptian Muslim organizations are claiming that she was undergoing a spiritual experience, in which she decided to convert from Christianity to Islam. After she was returned home, the story goes, the Coptic Pope Shenouda III was terribly upset about this, and decided to lock her away in a monastery until she returns to her senses. A dramatically different version of the story is that Camillia was kidnapped by Muslims and subjected to five days of abusive brainwashing to force her to convert to Islam, and that the Coptic authorities are now giving her some privacy to help her recover from the trauma. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Intolerance, Judaism | 3 Comments »
August 29th, 2010
The Dalai Lama and his troops, 1959
Last week we looked at the Indian half of the
Dalai Lama’s claim that China had a lot to learn about religious harmony from its neighbor to the southwest. Try to find stories about recent events in China similar to India’s Gujarat massacre, India’s burnings of Christian churches, India’s Muslim bombings, India’s continuing religious warfare in Kashmir, India’s heavy-handed Puritanism of Hindu Taliban thugs. You won’t find much. In a country of 1.3 billion people there is a little bit of almost everything, but “infinitesimal” would be a good word to describe the level of religious violence in today’s China.
The 20th century revolutionary movement in China started at about the same time it did in India, but against a historical backdrop of theocratic violence that young intellectuals were determined not to repeat. In the 1850s, a lunatic Christian named Hong Xiuquan persuaded followers that he too was the son of God, sent to save the East as his brother Jesus had saved the West. The tale of what became known as the “Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping” is far stranger than fiction; Hong conquered most of southern China, ruled as its emperor in the old imperial palace at Nanjing for many years, and was ultimately overthrown only at the cost of some 20 million lives. That’s a lot of bodies, even for China. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Eastern Religion, Free exercise | 1 Comment »
August 22nd, 2010
The Dalai Lama was spouting off again a few days ago, this time recommending that China should learn about religious harmony from India. “When I see conflicts in various parts of world I try to tell them that people belonging to different races and following different religion can live in harmony.” He boasted that India was known all over the world for non-violence and religious harmony, adding that “People in China very much need to know this.”
What on earth is he talking about?
Is he talking about the Gujarat riots of 2002, where Hindus enraged over what turned out to be an accidental train fire killed an estimated 2,000 Muslims and drove another 100,000+ from their homes, with the connivance of the local government? Only 11 people have been punished for this so far – they must have been awfully industrious. That’s fewer than the 14 people handed life sentences for the slaughter of another thousand Muslims at Bhagalpur in 1989, but that process took 17 years to complete.
Is he talking about the mass violence directed against Christians in Orissa at Christmas in 2007? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Eastern Religion | 6 Comments »
August 15th, 2010
Two candidates for “Man Bites Dog” headline of the year surfaced last week.
“Town Protects Tavern from Church.” No, this is not a typo. In Hampshire, Illinois, just west of Chicago, the Faithway Baptist Church sought permission from the village board to open a youth center. Normally, that would be a no-brainer, but in this case the youth center would have been across the street from The Kave, a comfortable neighborhood watering hole offering karaoke, shufflebowl, and Cubs baseball. Illinois law prohibits issuing a liquor license to any establishment operating within 100 feet of a church. Although it doesn’t prohibit a church from opening near a tavern, the village board realized that if The Kave were to change ownership in the future, it would be unlawful to grant the new owner a license, so The Kave would be gone. In a stunning display of common sense, the Board decided that would be unfair, and told Faithway Baptist to look elsewhere.
That decision probably violated federal law, as we’ll see in a minute. But first the other headline: “Strippers Protest Church.” The Foxhole is a business establishment in Warsaw, Ohio, offering entertainment a little edgier than karaoke and shufflebowl. For the past four years, though, Pastor Bill Dunfee of the New Beginnings Ministries Church – which is not across the street, but four miles away – has led a campaign of harassment against The Foxhole, its employees, and its customers. Dunfee and his congregation would show up outside The Foxhole, sometimes with bullhorns, snapping photos of customers and their license plates to violate their privacy online, and berating them for being evil as they entered and left the premises. Dunfee has also been pursuing legal remedies, including zoning laws, to throw The Foxhole employees out of work. “You can’t share territory with the Devil” growls Pastor Dunfee, who says he is intent on glorifying Jesus. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Free exercise | 3 Comments »
August 8th, 2010
The reaction of the Catholic Church to last week’s court decision striking down California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 was swift and to the point. Speaking for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George mourned that “It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage.” On the Protestant side, Focus on the Family chimed in that “Judge Walker’s ruling raises a shocking notion that a single federal judge can nullify the votes of more than 7 million California voters.”
This sudden Christian solicitude for the will of the people should make anyone familiar with the history of Christianity gag.
Democracy was invented by the Pagan Greeks; there is some reason to believe that Pagan Germanic tribes practiced a rough form of democracy as well. It certainly isn’t found anywhere in the Bible; when 250 “men of renown” complained to Moses that he was being overly autocratic, God obligingly opened a pit in the earth to swallow them up. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »
August 1st, 2010
Warren Jeffs
The Utah Supreme Court this week reversed the conviction of Warren Jeffs for his role in the statutory rape of a 14 year old girl. Viewing the facts of the case through the prism of Utah’s religious history reveals an ugly picture indeed.
Warren Jeffs helped run a small Mormon sect called the “Fundamentalist” LDS that is not a part of Utah’s dominant Mormon establishment, the LDS. Elissa Wall spent her entire childhood being brainwashed by this sect; recordings of Jeffs’ teachings were broadcast throughout her home on a speaker system. When Elissa was 12, she discovered what happens to people who defy the FLDS prophet: her father’s disobedience was punished by having his family stripped from him and sent to another city, where her mother was “married” to an FLDS leader who already had several other wives.
When Elissa was 14, Jeffs ordered her to marry her 19-year old first cousin, Allen Steed. According to the opinion, Elissa was aghast, and flatly refused to go forward with the wedding. Even her older sisters, who were already married to the reigning FLDS prophet, tried to plead her cause, but to no avail. At the time of the wedding, a devastated Elissa refused to say “I do” – Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Brainwashing, Sex | 3 Comments »
July 25th, 2010
On Friday, the Israeli Knesset postponed action for six months on a controversial bill to revise the procedures for officially determining who is and who is not a “Jew,” which guarantees at least six more months of bickering about them. The question is one of supreme legal importance, because Israel is a state whose raison d’ être is to favor “Jews,” which implicitly means disfavoring “non-Jews” – so you really need to know which is which.
Israeli law singles out Jews for special treatment in myriad ways, such as marriage. Jews can legally marry in Israel, as can Christians and Muslims. But since Israel does not recognize the concept of civil marriage, persons who think of themselves as Jews, but are not officially Jews under the law, cannot get married in Israel, period. (Nor can humanists who affiliate with no religion – but who’d want them to procreate anyway?) They have to travel to another country, typically Cyprus, marry there, and then return – a foreign marriage will be recognized by Israel under international law.
This is not an isolated problem, especially for hundreds of thousands of Israelis who Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Church & State, Judaism | 1 Comment »
July 18th, 2010
There was outrage in Chile last week when the Catholic Church petitioned the government for pardons for those convicted of human rights abuses during the 1973-1990 regime of General Augusto Pinochet. According to official statistics, 3,065 opponents of Pinochet’s regime were killed and 1,200 more “disappeared.” The deaths are just the hard cases at the tip of the iceberg; unofficial estimates show another 30,000 tortured, 80,000 imprisoned, and 200,000 exiled, voluntarily or otherwise, in a country 1/20 the size of the United States.
Why the solicitude for perpetrators of these crimes? Mercy is admirable, but why mercy for these guys rather than for, say, marijuana dealers? This isn’t the first time the Vatican has taken an interest in Chilean thugs. In 1998, when General Pinochet was on trial for torture in England, Pope John Paul II himself begged for his release, which was ultimately granted. Why? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Brainwashing, Money, Politics | 1 Comment »
July 11th, 2010
We just passed the 175th anniversary of an episode, inconsequential in itself, that kicked off a fascinating chain of events that may well have an impact on the 2012 election.
On June 30, 1835 a traveling showman named William Chandler rolled into the little town of Kirtland, Ohio. Chandler had purchased from the estate of a French adventurer named Antonio Lebolo a collection of genuine Egyptian mummies and hieroglyphic writings on papyrus, that Lebolo had stolen during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. Chandler’s investment was profitable, as Americans were willing to pay good money to gawk at such exotic artifacts. The problem with the hieroglyphics, though, was that no one knew what they meant. Except for one man: Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, who claimed to have a divine gift for translating “Reformed Egyptian.” So Chandler made his way to Kirtland, where Smith was then operating, to see if Smith had any interest in his collection.
Chandler hit a gusher. Smith instantly pronounced the writings to be the work of the biblical prophet Abraham himself, written in his own hand, and yes indeed he could translate them if given a little time. Shrewd businessman Chandler wanted cash; Smith raised the then-staggering sum of $2,400 from his congregation to buy the entire collection, including the mummies.
It took Smith several years to complete the translation, during which time he was occupied with other matters such as establishing a fraudulent bank, marrying dozens of wives, and touching off a minor civil war in Missouri. But when it finally was published in 1842, The Book of Abraham had a huge impact on Mormon theology. Among other things, it firmly established Mormon teaching on race. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Fraud, Politics | 2 Comments »
July 4th, 2010
The Catholic Church is baring its teeth.
The first snarl came from the Pope himself. Feeling his oats after a victory against gay marriage in the European Court of Human Rights, the Pope slammed the door on glasnost in the sex abuse scandal, ordering his subordinates not to speak ill of their colleagues. Ironically, the target of the Pope’s wrath had actually been defending the Pope himself. Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna had been sticking up for Benedict, telling reporters that long before Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, he had sought a full investigation of the allegations against Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who was widely suspected of sexual abuse of young seminarians. Ratzinger’s initiative had been squashed, though, by Cardinal Angelo Soldano, who then served as the Vatican Secretary of State, and who is now dean of the College of Cardinals. So was Benedict pleased that Schoenborn was defending him? He was not; he sternly reinforced the chain of command, growling that “only the pope has the authority to accuse a cardinal” and that Church officials need to “show due respect” for one another. An institution genuinely committed to reform might encourage its members to go public when internal procedures fail to produce results; the Catholic Church censures them.
The Church slammed another door as well, filing a brief in a Kentucky case to prevent plaintiff’s attorneys from taking depositions of the Pope and three other senior Vatican officials. The Church’s two arguments are downright silly. First, they say there has never been an official Vatican policy of hushing up sex abuse cases. But how can the court know what the Vatican policy is unless the plaintiffs are allowed to complete their discovery? The second argument Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Church & State | 2 Comments »
