October 2, 2007 | 12:05 pm

The allure of atheism for a liberal Jew

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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“It’s hard to be a liberal religious Jew these days,” Jay Michaelson writes in last week’s Forward, heaping much of the blame on the rise of The New Atheists.

Unfortunately, the Jewish community’s religious writers have often replied with little subtlety and much defensiveness. Dennis Prager, for example, debating Harris in the online journal Jewcy.com, trotted out the old medieval proofs for the existence of God and then argued essentially that if so many people believe something, it simply has to be true. (Surely, by that reasoning, Christianity is right and Judaism is wrong, but I digress.) David Klinghoffer, in these pages, argued for ahistorical fideism: Forget the hard textual evidence about the authorship of the Bible and the Zohar, he said, we’ve got to stand up for what we believe — as though religion would become “indefensible” (his word) if the Orthodox claims of authorship ever turned out to be false.

But these are just the kinds of flimsy arguments that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens love to hear: faith, surrounded by fallacy. They validate the atheists’ claims that religion is for the soft-minded and thick-skulled. It’s either something you believe or something you don’t, and once you take away the preposterous truth-claims at its foundation (for example, the world is 6,000 years old, or that a self-contradictory text was authored by an omniscient deity), the edifice of religion crumbles.

These are also poor allies for real religious moderates — by which I mean the sort of people who don’t believe the fundamentalist myth but do cherish the power of myth; who keep the mitzvot as spiritual practices, not as commandments from a rewarding-and-punishing God; who have a notion of the Divine in their lives, but not necessarily the traditional image of judgmental Yahweh ready to strike down sinners. Where is a Jewish moderate to turn in a polarized world where our allies are so disagreeable and our adversaries speak the words we ourselves long to hear?

            Let’s admit it: There’s an attractive ebullience in the new atheism.

October 2, 2007 | 8:43 am

‘Aliens in America’ and ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Slate today reviews two badly panned sitcoms about being a Muslim in North America. Neither, beginning with Aliens in America on The CW (a program which the Muslim Public Affairs Council consulted on), fare well:

Because the show is sidling up to its premise very gently, it looks more like a sweet-natured high-school comedy than the risky riff on tolerance it teases us with. True, the pilot features an acute scene in which a teacher initiates a classroom discussion on “cultural differences” that lampoons American parochialism at its finest: “Raja, you are so different from us. How does that feel?” But next week’s episode finds Raja looking like a generic Other, as they might say on campus. Aliens prefers jokes about life on the lower rungs of the adolescent social ladder to ethnic-profiling gags or bits about religion—unless you count the moment when Justin’s dad, in a Homer Simpson swoon of porcophilia, is psyched to discover that he doesn’t have to share his bacon at breakfast.

For a friskier take on Muslim life in the middle of this continent, check out the Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. (Its second season begins this Wednesday on CBC, which apparently isn’t too particular about YouTubers picking up its shows.) Mind you, I said friskier, not edgier: Though set in a fictional Saskatchewan town called Mercy—where a classically bumbling Lebanese-born contractor and his classically ditzy Anglo wife are the leading members of the Muslim community—Little Mosque is so cozy and hokey that it feels as if its action unfolds on the Saskatchewan equivalent of Sesame Street.

The local right-wing radio host, supposedly a demagogic hate-monger, is no more threatening than Oscar the Grouch.

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October 1, 2007 | 6:19 pm

Swearing at work

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I had an editor once that tried awfully hard to sell me on writing a story about what people thought about cussing at work. I was never clear on why a newspaper reporter would write such a newsworthlessness topic, so I didn’t. If only I’d had this news peg from a lawsuit filed against Knicks coach (if you can call him that) Isiah Thomas, I could have turned this piece for New York magazine (warning: f-bombs to follow).

“Revolting profanity doesn’t have any place in the office,” says Peter Post, a director at the Emily Post Institute (and great-grandson of the priestess of politesse herself). “But occasional swearing? That’s no big deal if the culture of the workplace permits it.” The culture of the Garden (none of the bosses seemed troubled when Stephon Marbury had sex with an intern in a truck outside a strip club) would seem to be profanity-friendly. And it’s not the only one. Office cursing is so prevalent that pollsters haven’t even bothered to ask about it since 2002, when Public Agenda found that 44 percent of Americans hear foul language “often” in our daily lives. A 2004 British survey found that 76 percent of Brits swore regularly at work.

                                             

Workplace profanity is everywhere, starting with our elected leaders, like Eliot (“I’m a fucking steamroller!”) Spitzer and Dick (“Go fuck yourself!”) Cheney, and continuing to our unelected moral arbiters, like Golden Globe–winning Bono (“fucking brilliant”). In Fresno, California, former deputy mayor Roger Montero resigned in April after admitting that he used “coarse language” on the job but denying that his language constituted sexual harassment. And a Virginia dentist, Steven Afsahi, was fined $9,000 in 2004 by that state’s Board of Dentistry in part for using profanity in front of patients.

 

Indeed, religious beliefs aside, swearing seems to be workplace sensitive, acceptable at the opposite ends of the white-blue collar spectrum, but less so in the middle. This jogged to memory the story of a 15-year-old Indiana girl who last year e-mailed The Washington Post wondering if all journalists swear.

“Last year our journalism teacher showed us the movie ‘All the President’s Men.’ This teacher states that journalists all speak with lots of profanities as shown in the movie. I would appreciate some insight into this scenario from your point of view. I have wondered if it was a guys-only thing or perhaps a decade in time when people spoke with more abandon and less courtesy. I hope that this is not some sort of a prerequisite for joining the journalism field.”

Yes, Tori, many journalists curse. They curse when their computers break down, when people lie to them, when they make mistakes and when they’re on deadline. But usually, they’re nice to people and sometimes, but not always, to their editors. Please don’t think that cursing is a prerequisite to be a journalist.

Tori later told her local paper, in a 22-paragraph story no longer online, that she probably didn’t want to be a journalist anymore. Sad as that is, it seems most the reporters I’ve worked with over the past three years have reached the same conclusion. Only they were cursing a low-paying, under-appreciated job.

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October 1, 2007 | 4:18 pm

‘The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In honor of that hilarious “SNL” video skewering Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s profession that there are no gays in Iran, I’ve decided to embed a classic Andy Samberg digital shorts, “Lazy Sunday.” Enjoy.

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October 1, 2007 | 12:09 pm

LA Times learns ‘Evangelicals Split on GOP’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The LA Times this morning finally wrote about what I—and other media outlets—have been saying for months: “evangelicals split on GOP field.” Welcome to the party.

Barely three months before the voting for a new president begins, the religious right has yet to unite behind a Republican candidate, heightening concerns among evangelical leaders that social liberal Rudolph W. Giuliani will capture the party’s nomination.

The splintering of religious conservatives, if it endures, could ease the way for New York’s former mayor to emerge as the party’s first nominee to explicitly support abortion rights since the Supreme Court legalized the procedure in 1973.

But the lack of a consensus choice for president is only one of the troubles facing conservative evangelicals, a powerful force within the GOP for more than a generation.

“It’s low tide right now for our movement,” said Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Assn.

Opportunities for the religious right to press its agenda suffered a blow when Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress in last year’s midterm election.

Making matters worse are sex scandals besetting Republicans who have championed family values, most recently Sens. Larry E. Craig of Idaho and David Vitter of Louisiana. Their troubles—after the sex scandal last fall involving then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) that contributed to the GOP’s midterm losses—have diminished enthusiasm for the party among many social conservatives.

The article does a good job synthesizing other reporting—like that from the NY Times Sunday—and explains the implications for the once mighty conservative Christian political machine. But the article, written by a veteran politics reporter, makes that dangerous mistake of repeatedly referring to the Christian right as the “religious right.” Here’s why that’s a problem.

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October 1, 2007 | 11:16 am

The world of ‘classical Christian education’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is a so-called “classical Christian education” movement afoot in America. I’d never heard of it, but then again, I purposefully avoided attending an overpriced evangelical high school or college. Anyway, The New York Times Magazine said in a lengthy article yesterday that this movement is so, and, therefore, it must be. Here’s the colorful lede:

Every Friday afternoon in Moscow, Idaho, a strange commotion overruns Main Street. A stream of young men and women parade down the sidewalk, wearing black academic gowns that billow and flap as they walk. Some pore over Latin textbooks or thumb flashcards of ancient Greek vocabulary,  nearly tripping at the curb. They are students at New St. Andrews College on their way to disputatio, a weekly assembly held in a movie theater downtown.  The college itself has no room large enough to accommodate all 150 students at once: it occupies a single unassuming brick building a few blocks away, one that a stranger might mistake for the refurbished husk of an old savings and loan. Passers-by on their way to the Pita Pit or Hodgins Drug barely give the students a second glance. Not a few residents, however, have fought hard to keep them out of downtown. Founded in 1994 by the elders of a fast-growing and radically conservative church, New St. Andrews represents a new philosophy of evangelical education — one that has inspired a national movement and makes local liberals nervous.

    The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.”

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October 1, 2007 | 9:46 am

The first end zone prayer

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

PHILADELPHIA—The play was 48 Toss, and 30 years later, Dick Vermeil remembers it as if he called it last Sunday. Herb Lusk took a pitch from Ron Jaworski, headed around left end, and breezed unscathed 70 yards for a fourth-quarter touchdown. Four steps over the goal line at Giants Stadium, the Philadelphia Eagles’ running back rewrote the playbook. Alone in the end zone, with a crowd of 48,824 looking on, he celebrated with a gesture in what has since become a watershed moment in American sports.

With little ceremony and no advance warning, Lusk kept his eyes straight, dropped to his left knee, and bowed his head in prayer. A few seconds later, he stood back up and returned to the sideline, his legacy sealed.

 

The end zone prayer seems like such a football cliche now. But Lusk was an original, and his act garnered little attention. For a while.

The gestures went unremarked upon, for the most part, that Sunday, Oct. 9, 1977. A couple of reporters asked Lusk about it after the game, but didn’t make mention of it in their stories, instead focusing on how Lusk’s 117 rushing yards helped the Eagles win. Nobody, not even Lusk himself, thought such a seemingly quiet, personal moment would eventually become apparent today at every level of competitive sports, whether it be a pitcher pointing skyward after a save, a hitter offering thanks to a higher power after a home run, or a basketball team joining for a prayer at midcourt after a game.

While historians have pointed to prayer being fused with spectator sports as far back as the early 20th century, Lusk was the one credited with making on-field prayer a mainstream act 30 years ago, so much so, it earned him the nickname “The Praying Tailback,” according to Sabol and Lusk’s former Eagles teammates.

 

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October 1, 2007 | 1:08 am

Hersh: ‘Shifting targets’ in Iran

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When I called Seymour Hersh last month, he was rewriting his next piece for The New Yorker. That story is online now, and it happens to deal with the first question I asked in the interview: Does he still believe President Bush is gunning for Iran?

Yes and no, Hersh writes. The U.S. is no longer looking to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Instead, the attacks will be more tit for tat regarding Iranian meddling in Iraqi bloodshed and the killing of American soldiers.

Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Hersh was on Wolf Blitzer this morning, embedded below, talking about these “shifting targets.” As for handling Iraq, Hersh told me: “There are only two issues: Option A is to get out by midnight tonight, and Option B is to get out by midnight tomorrow.”

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