December 20, 2007 | 9:51 am

America’s ‘Holy Highway’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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From CNN:

DALLAS—If you turn to the Bible—Isaiah Chapter 35, Verse 8—you will see a passage that in part says, “A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness.”

Now, is it possible that this “highway” mentioned in Chapter 35 is actually Interstate 35 that runs through six U.S. states, from southern Texas to northern Minnesota? Some Christians have faith that is indeed the case.

It was with that interesting belief in mind that we decided to head to Texas, the southernmost state in the I-35 corridor, to do a story about a prayer campaign called “Light the Highway.”

Churchgoers in all six states recently finished 35 days of praying alongside Interstate 35, but the prayers are still continuing.

This sort of reminds me of this story.

December 19, 2007 | 7:18 pm

Ron Paul won’t return neo-Nazi donation

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Now it’s really hard to believe there actually is a group called Jews for Ron Paul.

(Hat tip: FullosseousFlap)

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December 19, 2007 | 5:08 pm

Cheryl Hines, ‘the accidental shiksa’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Cheryl Hines graces the cover of Heeb‘s annual goy issue. She’s certainly a worthy selection because if anyone has a right to be an anti-Semite, it’s Larry David’s fictitious wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” (And I say that as not only a devoted David fan, but an at-time-unintentional impersonator.) A nice feature accompanies the cover photo:

In the original HBO one-hour Curb Your Enthusiasm special, Larry David’s wife was supposed to be Jewish. “On the first day we were shooting the actual series,” says actress Cheryl Hines, “Larry turned to me and said, ‘You know, I don’t know if anybody is going to believe that you’re Jewish.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘do I have to be?’”

And so Cheryl David the TV shiksa wife was born.

But to the show’s credit, her ethnicity has never been manipulated to explore anxieties about class and race. The fictitious David marriage (separation at the time of writing) may be fraught, but that tension isn’t attributed to cultural differences as it might have been in decades past. The relationship is fraught simply because Larry is an a—hole.

Also inside, “The Secret Lives of Shabbos Goys.”

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December 19, 2007 | 5:04 pm

MacArthur: Wouldn’t lie to hide Jews from Nazis

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

On his blog, my former college pastor, Rhett Smith, recalls why he stopped reading and listening to John MacArthur, the megachurch pastor of Grace Community Church in the San Fernando Valley:

I used to read and listen to MacArthur on the radio all through college, but I stopped one night in about 1996 or 1997 after he said something to the effect of not lying to officials if he was hiding Jews in his house. The underlying idea being, that God is sovereign and doesn’t need us to lie to accomplish His will, etc. Which brings about all sorts of thoughts, but here is just two: 1) I’m glad I’m not a Jew hiding in his house; 2) God is Sovereign but seems to use us and all sorts of methods to bring about his way (i.e. lying being one of them, Rahab for example).  Here is that question being asked by a person and answered by John.

Rhett recommends that anyone looking for good Christian theology on fighting against Hitler and protecting persecuted Jews read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a refusenik Lutheran minister who died in a concentration camp.

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December 19, 2007 | 1:10 pm

A suspension of disbelief

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Also from UCLA, “End of Faith” author Sam Harris, who has quietly been pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at my alma mater, reports in the January issue of Annals of Neurology that fMRIs show clear differences in areas of the brain involved in belief, disbelief and uncertainty.

Noting that uncertainty differs from both belief and disbelief by not allowing us to settle upon “a specific, actionable interpretation of the world,” the authors suggest that the basal ganglia may play a role in mediating the cognitive and behavioral differences between decision and indecision.

Taken together, these data offer insight into the way in which our brains work to form beliefs about the world.

“What I find most interesting about our results is the suggestion that our view of the world must pass through a bottleneck in regions of the brain generally understood to govern emotion, reward and primal feelings like pain and disgust,” Harris said. “While evaluating mathematical, ethical or factual statements requires very different kinds of processing, accepting or rejecting these statements seems to rely upon a more primitive process that may be content-neutral. I think that it has long been assumed that believing that two plus two equals four and believing that George Bush is President of the United States have almost nothing in common as cognitive operations. But what they clearly have in common is that both representations of the world satisfy some process of truth-testing that we continually perform. I think this is yet another result, in a long line of results, that calls the popular opposition between reason and emotion into question.”

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December 19, 2007 | 12:37 pm

College juniors on deeper spiritual quest than freshmen

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

UCLA today reported the follow-up to its national survey of spirituality among college freshmen, which I wrote about here and here.

Compared to when they were entering freshmen, college juniors are more likely to be engaged in a spiritual quest, are more caring, and show higher levels of equanimity and an ecumenical worldview.  While 41.2 percent of freshmen in 2004 reported they considered developing a meaningful philosophy of life “very important” or “essential,” just three years later in 2007 a 55.4 percent majority of those same students agreed.  Additionally, “attaining inner harmony” was reported as “very important” or “essential” by 48.7 percent when they were freshmen in 2004, and jumped to 62.6 percent by 2007.

“Many students are emerging from the collegiate experience with a desire to find spiritual meaning and perspective in their everyday lives,” said UCLA Emeritus Professor Alexander W. Astin, Co-Principal Investigator for the project. “The data suggest that college is influencing students in positive ways that will better prepare them for leadership roles in our global society.”

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December 18, 2007 | 11:24 pm

Surprising religion mention in ESPN story about NBA trade value

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

In Bill Simmons’ annual column on the trade value of NBA stars, Dwight Howard comes in at No. 2, “completely and utterly untouchable,” right behind LeBron James. Makes sense. The Magic center is a physical freak who has two 30-20 games already this year. But here is a quality you don’t often hear mentioned in trade talks:

One other bonus with Howard that nobody mentions: Because he’s a devout Christian, even when he turns 35 in 2020, those will be Christian years—he won’t have any of that smoking-drinking-partying mileage on him, which means he could play at a high level until his early-40s (much like how Kurt Warner keeps chugging along at age 36).

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December 18, 2007 | 3:33 pm

The danger of being gay in Iraq

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The president of Iran might think his country is free of gays, but, for many years, gays and lesbians lived openly in Iraq. No longer, the NYT reports, largely due to increased sectarian violence:

In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe. They yearn to leave Iraq, but do not have the money or visas. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their last names not be used.

They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.

“We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists,” said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. “But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays.”

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December 18, 2007 | 3:22 pm

Hitchens’ right to oppose ‘a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Christopher Hitchens invokes Article VI of the Constitution in a rather virulent attack on Mike Huckabee, the Bible Belt former governor, minister and weight-loss extraordinaire, not to mention surging presidential candidate:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

 

As so often, the framers and founding fathers meant what they said, said what they meant, and risked no waste of words. A candidate for election, or an applicant for a post in the bureaucracy, could not be disqualified on the grounds of his personal faith in any god (or his disbelief in any god, for that matter). This stipulation was designed to put an end to the hideous practice of European monarchies—and the pre-existing practice of various American colonies—whereby if a man did not affirm the trinity, or deny the pope, or abjure Judaism (depending on the jurisdiction), he could be forbidden to hold office or even to run for it. Along with the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and the predecessor-language of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, it forms part of the chief glory of the first-ever constitution that guaranteed religious liberty, religious pluralism, and the freedom to be left alone by priests and rabbis and mullahs and other characters.

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is.

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December 14, 2007 | 4:16 pm

My interview with author Michael Chabon

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This was cool. God Blog readers know I enjoy the writings of Michael Chabon, and last month I got to interview him after the Celebration of Jewish Books at the American Jewish University. JTN put it on their Web site a few weeks ago, but we just got it up on YouTube for your embedded enjoyment.

I asked Chabon about his “frozen chosen” hit “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” about being called an anti-Semite and about being comfortable as a geek.

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December 14, 2007 | 3:57 pm

Interview with an atheist lobbyist

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I spoke with Lori Lipman Brown, Washington’s first lobbyist for atheists, last fall when I wrote about godless missionaries. Last week, Jewish Transcript News caught up with her in Seattle.

JTNews: How are you being received in Washington?

Brown: Better than any of the people who started this organization ever could have dreamed. There was so much fear that I wouldn’t get into any doors, that groups like Interfaith Alliance, the Baptists Joint Committee and even Americans United for Separation of Church and State might be hesitant to bring a non-theist voice into the mix. None of that happened. Day One, I was invited to a briefing by public education groups on vouchers. Day Two, I was sitting at the table, lobbying with the religious and other church-state separation groups. Even on the marriage amendment, when we lobbied against that, I was afraid that the

LGBT community might not want the non-theist voice in the mix. But that wasn’t the case at all. Bottom line, it’s been a wonderful reception.

JTNews: What about in the media?

Brown: Now in the media, there’s been a lot more interest from right-wing than [from] left-wing media, even though Mother Jones did a nice article about our coming on the scene. For television, it’s been Fox News and Bill O’Reilly. I’ve also gotten a lot of requests from right-wing or Christian radio, which I always find interesting because it may be the first time they’ve ever heard someone like me.

(skip)

JTNews: You’re a Humanistic Jew yourself. Where do you feel Secular Jews, or just Jews in general, fit in when talking about non-theistic rights?

Brown: When you look at issues like stem cell research, or sex education, there’s so much overlap both with Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism and Humanists, and even Conservative Jews, to a large extent. I think, also, if you look historically, Jews have often been allies in other people’s civil rights struggles. They were so active in labor rights, in civil rights for African Americans, in the LGBT equality movement. So even religious Jews understand that you can’t just stand up for yourself, you have to stand up for people who are not religious Jews. So I think they can overlap and be our allies because they understand tikkun olam and they understand that it’s important to have diversity. They’re a minority in a Christian nation, so they have that understanding.

JTNews: Aside from the Secular Jewish Circle, do you work with other religious organizations very often?

Brown: Oh yeah. We work a lot with the Interfaith Alliance. We work a lot with the Baptists Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Unitarian Universalist congregations. All of these groups lobby with us from time to time — we work well together, we share materials, we help each other, and that, I think, has made us really powerful.

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

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December 14, 2007 | 1:49 pm

Germany moves to ban Scientology

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’ve touched on Scientology here before. Yesterday, FaithWorld posted a good run-down of the movement to ban the half-century-old religion—some call it a cult based on the opportunistic teachings of a prolific science fiction writer—in Germany. Regardless of the merits of Scientology, there are, obviously, some bad parallels for this kind of thing in Germany.

Germany has sought to nurture tolerance as a national characteristic since World War Two, but it doesn’t stretch to the Church of Scientology. A new Forsa poll shows 74 percent of Germans think Scientology should be banned. The survey comes hard on the heels of a declaration from federal and regional ministers that the movement is unconstitutional. That announcement, the culmination of a row with Scientology dating back to the 1970s, opens the way for a possible ban.

Germany is not alone in refusing to recognise the Church of Scientology as a religion, but it goes further than many other countries in its rejection of the body. It see Scientology as a cult masquerading as a church to make money, a view Scientologists reject.

Agents of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a kind of German FBI, are already gathering information on Scientology and a whole chapter is devoted to it in the intelligence agency’s 2006 report. It describes the movement as having a “totalitarian character” because it seeks to exert control over its members. But the agency is not sure the government will be able to get enough evidence to ban it.

Read the rest here.

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