March 18, 2010 | 11:52 am

You know who’s responsible for dogs—the Jews

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Ancient hunting dog

OK, so that headline is a bit misleading. Though fascinating new research traces the domestication of dogs to the Middle East, that history dates back to about 10,000 years ago, which is about double the age of Jewish history. The article appears in today’s issue of the journal Nature. The NYT reports:

A research team led by Bridgett M. vonHoldt and Robert K. Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, has analyzed a large collection of wolf and dog genomes from around the world. Scanning for similar runs of DNA, the researchers found that the Middle East was where wolf and dog genomes were most similar, although there was another area of overlap between East Asian wolves and dogs. Wolves were probably first domesticated in the Middle East, but after dogs had spread to East Asia there was a crossbreeding that injected more wolf genes into the dog genome, the researchers conclude in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The archaeological evidence supports this idea, since some of the earliest dog remains have been found in the Middle East, dating from 12,000 years ago. The only earlier doglike remains occur in Belgium, at a site 31,000 years old, and in western Russia from 15,000 years ago.

Humans lived as roaming hunters and gatherers for most of their existence. Dr. Wayne believes that wolves began following hunter-gatherer bands to feed on the wounded prey, carcasses or other refuse. At some stage a group of wolves, who happened to be smaller and less threatening than most, developed a dependency on human groups, and may in return have provided a warning system.

Several thousand years later, in the first settled communities that began to appear in the Middle East 15,000 years ago, people began intervening in the breeding patterns of their camp followers, turning them into the first proto-dogs. One of the features they selected was small size, continuing the downsizing of the wolf body plan. “I think a long history such as that would explain how a large carnivore, which can eat you, eventually became stably incorporated in human society,” Dr. Wayne said.

The full journal article can be read here.

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March 18, 2010 | 8:12 am

‘Jihad Jane’ pleads not guilty

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Breaking news from the AP:

Colleen LaRose, 46, of Pennsburg, appeared in court wearing a green jumpsuit and corn rows in her blond hair. A May 3 trial date was set.

The rest of the story deals with the background details surround LaRose’s October arrest:

She was accused of conspiring with jihadist fighters and pledging to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war. Authorities say she wanted to kill a Swedish artist who had offended Muslims.

Authorities say she grew acquainted online with violent co-conspirators from around the world. They say she posted a YouTube video in 2008 saying she was “desperate to do something” to ease the suffering of Muslims.

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From June 2008 through her Aug. 23, 2009, departure, the woman who also called herself “Fatima Rose” went online to recruit male fighters for the cause, recruit women with Western passports to marry them, and raise money for the holy war, the indictment charged.

She had also agreed to marry one of her overseas contacts, a man from South Asia who said he could deal bombs and explosives, according to e-mails recovered by authorities.

He also told her in a March 2009 e-mail to go to Sweden to find the artist, Lars Vilks.

“I will make this my goal till i achieve it or die trying,” she wrote back, adding that her blonde American looks would help her blend in.

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March 17, 2010 | 5:32 pm

Abortions that are Twitter-friendly

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

If you thought social connectivity had gone too far when churches starting having Twitter-friendly worship services, you’ll almost certainly find this story really reprehensible:

There’s a viral video out there that doesn’t involve Charlie biting his brother’s finger, Ok Go’s Rube Goldberg project, or a man on a horse. No, this one is much more serious. Angie Jackson’s video of having an abortion (right) has received more than 140,000 hits since she posted it a few weeks ago.

At four weeks pregnant, Jackson said in the video that Planned Parenthood helped her obtain her RU-486 abortion. “I want people to know that it’s out there, that if you need this, there’s non-surgical options available especially in the earliest stage of pregnancy,” she said. “Cramps are getting a bit more persistent,” Jackson tweeted. “Definitely bleeding now.”

Sarah Pulliam Bailey has more on the media coverage of this story at GetReligion. If you need me, I’ll be bent over the toilet.

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March 17, 2010 | 3:57 pm

Rioting continues in Jerusalem; a crisis in US-Israel relations?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

While rioting continues in Jerusalem and Hamas calls for another intifada—oh brother—US President Obama is on his heels, saying there is “no crisis” in the US-Israel relationship:

United States President Barack Obama said Thursday that there was ‘no crisis’ in ties with Israel, despite a high-profile diplomatic feud between the allies over the Netanyahu administration’s plans to build Jewish homes in east Jerusalem.

“Israel’s one of our closest allies, and we and the Israeli people have a special bond that’s not going to go away,” Obama said in an interview on Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier.

“But friends are going to disagree sometimes,” Obama said.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has his own problems.

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March 16, 2010 | 2:17 pm

If Cadbury made bacon-and-caramel eggs

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yes, I would like these dark chocolate eggs filled with caramel and bacon in my Easter basket. I’m pretty sure, though, that they’re not OU approved. The World’s Best Ever, via Heeb.

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March 16, 2010 | 10:44 am

Former Scientology insiders breaking free

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Whoops. This major story from The New York Times fell out of my blog immediately folder:

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years—in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a Kafkaesque journey that they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars it said they owed for courses and counseling, and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

“Why did we work so hard for this organization,” Ms. Collbran said, “and why did it feel so wrong in the end? We just didn’t understand.”

They soon discovered others who felt the same. Searching for Web sites about Scientology that are not sponsored by the church (an activity prohibited when they were in the Sea Org), they discovered that hundreds of other Scientologists were also defecting—including high-ranking executives who had served for decades.

Fifty-six years after its founding by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, the church is fighting off calls by former members for a Reformation. The defectors say Sea Org members were repeatedly beaten by the church’s chairman, David Miscavige, often during planning meetings; pressured to have abortions; forced to work without sleep on little pay; and held incommunicado if they wanted to leave. The church says the defectors are lying.

The defectors say that the average Scientology member, known in the church as a public, is largely unaware of the abusive environment experienced by staff members. The church works hard to cultivate public members—especially celebrities like Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Nancy Cartwright (the voice of the cartoon scoundrel Bart Simpson)—whose money keeps it running.

But recently even some celebrities have begun to abandon the church, the most prominent of whom is the director and screenwriter Paul Haggis, who won Oscars for “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash.” Mr. Haggis had been a member for 35 years. His resignation letter, leaked to a defectors’ Web site, recounted his indignation as he came to believe that the defectors’ accusations must be true.

It’s really worth reading the rest of this story, unusual for well-done critical feature on Scientology because it wasn’t written by a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times.

Is it a movement or just a few frustrated former members? Time will tell. The real question, obviously, is what does it mean for Beck?

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March 16, 2010 | 8:35 am

College group has Bibles-for-porn program

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A student group at the University of Texas, San Antonio did the opposite of handing out free Bibles at a porn convention. Well, they didn’t actually hand out porn at a Bible convention but ...

In the lobby of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s humanities building, a hand-drawn poster announces, “Free porn: Just trade in your holy books (Bible, Koran, Vedas) for porn.”

A student group at the university called The Atheist Agenda is reviving its Bibles-for-porn program, called “Smut for Smut,” for three days beginning March 1, according to a report from San Antonio’s KENS-TV.

“The idea is that religious texts are so appalling,” said Atheist Agenda group member Brian Talker in a 2006 interview with UTSA student publication The Independent. “They are so full of genocide, misogyny and ludicrous ideas that far overshadow any banal common-sense platitudes like loving thy neighbor, that you are better off having porn, which isn’t nearly as smutty.”

A current member of the group told KENS the program is also meant as a slap against religious leaders and the “hypocrisy” of their condemnations of pornography.

“They’ve been going and rallying against pornography for the longest time,” the unidentified student said, “and the disgusting, depraved acts that are within the Bible, Koran and Vedas completely outnumber any [faults] of any pornographic image.”

There is a lot more here from the WorldNetDaily. Maybe this was the logical leap missing from that “Mideast peace through porn” editorial in the Los Angeles Times a few years ago.

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March 15, 2010 | 4:00 pm

EEOC says NY discriminated against Muslim principal

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I last mentioned Debbie Almontaser two years ago, after she was forced to resign as principal of New York academy that would teach students Arabic. Now the EEOC has determined that Almontaser was discriminated against by the New York Department of Education. From the NYT:

Acting on a complaint filed last year by the principal, Debbie Almontaser, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the department “succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on D.O.E. as an employer,” according to a letter issued by the commission on Tuesday.

The commission said that the department had discriminated against Ms. Almontaser, a Muslim of Yemeni descent, “on account of her race, religion and national origin.”

The findings, which are nonbinding, could mark a turning point in Ms. Almontaser’s battle to reclaim her job as principal of the school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn.

The commission asked the Department of Education to reach a “just resolution” with Ms. Almontaser and to consider her demands, which include reinstatement to her old job, back pay, damages of $300,000 and legal fees. Should the two sides fail to reach an agreement, the dispute will end up in court, her lawyer said.

Not looking good for the education department. Coincidentally, I turned in this morning a final memo on a fictitious employment religious discrimination case. Unlike Almontaser, Hodge had a very weak case against the non-existence California Bureau of Crimes.

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March 14, 2010 | 1:02 pm

An homage to ‘hairy Hindustan’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I first gave my mustache a ride two summers ago. It reappeared that November when I participated in the facial hair version of a walkathon to raise money for prostate cancer research.

That’s a lot of play for the mo’ on a blog about religion. And today, only a few days after returning to my face, the mustache makes a return to The God Blog. My excuse: my classmates wanted to have a little fun with Mustache March. This blog’s excuse: an interesting story from The Washington Post about mustaches going the way of the buffalo in India.

Here goes:

For generations of Indian men, a mustache was a must—especially here in southern India, where fabulous facial hair has long symbolized masculinity. Among younger urban Indians, however, it’s the cleanshaven men whom women prefer to kiss, date or just hang out with, according to a recent AC Nielsen survey conducted in eight major cities.

“Our fathers thought they were not men without their mustaches. But ‘hairy Hindustan’ is over,” said Kumar, using a time-honored nickname for the subcontinent. “It’s old India. The mustache is for my father, not for me.”

The number of women rejecting facial hair appeared to surprise many Indian cultural commentators, but they were ready with explanations. Some considered the disappearing mustache an indicator of youthful city-dwelling Indians’ growing globalization. Others thought it was significant that the findings took women’s opinions into account.

The survey found that 72 percent of the women who responded in Mumbai and 83 percent of those surveyed in the southern city of Chennai said they were more likely to want to kiss a cleanshaven man. The numbers were similar in New Delhi, India’s capital, and in the eastern city of Kolkata, often seen as a center of tradition.

In “Hair India: A Guide to the Bizarre Beards and Magnificent Moustaches of Hindustan,” Richard McCallum and photographer Chris Stowers chronicle their travels among the camel-herding tribes of Rajasthan in the north and the backwaters of Kerala in the south to find India’s “facial foliage” before it becomes a part of history.

“The mustache represents all the aspects of old India—the corruption, the baddie cop in an old film, the government job for life—that the young generation want to leave behind,” said McCallum, a pogonologist, or student of facial hair. “Besides, no one wants to look like their parents.”

Read the rest here. And comment on my mustache, or see a higher-res picture, here. As you can imagine, I’ve had a really difficult time holding a serious conversation with anyone. Not really sure how my dad pulls it off.

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March 14, 2010 | 10:23 am

Pope touched by sex-abuse scandal in Germany

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Pope Benedict XVI has been been clear that the priesthood has no room for pedophiles. But Benedict has been touched by the ever-widening sex abuse scandal in Germany.  During an era when the church thought perverted priests could be treated, when the pope was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the archbishop of Munich and Freising, he approved a pedophile priest’s transfer for therapy.

From The New York Times:

A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he had no comment beyond the statement by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which he said showed the “nonresponsibility” of the pope in the matter.

The expanding abuse inquiry had come ever closer to Benedict as new accusations in Germany surfaced almost daily since the first reports in January. On Friday the pope met with the chief bishop of Germany, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the head of the German Bishops Conference, to discuss the church investigations and media reports.

Problems in the German church have already come close to the pope, whose brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, 86, directed a choir connected to a boarding school where two former students have come forward with abuse claims. In an interview this week, Monsignor Ratzinger, who directed the choir from 1964 to 1994, said the accusations dated from before his tenure. He also apologized for slapping students.

At a news conference following a one-on-one meeting with Benedict on Friday, Archbishop Zollitsch said the pope was “greatly upset” and “deeply moved” by the abuse allegations, and had urged the German church to seek the truth and help the victims.

An honest mistake or more? Regardless, Benedict has little to worry about. Look at how long Cardinal Roger Mahony lasted.

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March 11, 2010 | 2:31 pm

Court upholds ‘Under God’ in Pledge of Allegiance

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Those liberal Ninth Circuit judges are at it again:

The words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are an appeal to patriotism, not religion, and do not violate the separation of church and state, a federal appeals court ruled today - the same court that declared the pledge unconstitutional in 2002.

In a separate ruling, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel in San Francisco upheld the placement of the national motto, “In God We Trust,” on coins and currency. The language is patriotic and ceremonial, not religious, the court said.

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“The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our republic was founded,” Judge Carlos Bea said in the majority opinion.

He said “one nation under God” referred to “our founding fathers’ belief that the people of this nation are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”

“Congress’ ostensible and predominant purpose was to inspire patriotism,” said Bea, who was joined by Judge Dorothy Nelson. “The phrase ‘one nation under God’ does not turn this patriotic exercise into a religious activity.”

Check that.

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