Religion isn’t the ‘Opiate of the Masses’ – Athletics is

Forget everything you learned about Marx in school (assuming you actually did learn about Marx in school, you probably didn’t) – it’s not religion that is the opiate of masses, but rather athletics.  Of course the Roman Empire knew this thousands of years ago “bread and circuses” is how you keep the hoi polloi in check.

Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month’s collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.

Not that I would try to stop anyone from root, root, rooting to his or her heart’s content. It’s just that such things are normally done by pigs, in the mud, or by seedlings, lacking a firm grip on reality — fine for them, but I am not at all sure this is something that human beings should do. In desperation, if threatened with starvation, I suppose that I would root — for dinner. But for the home team? Never.

And so says the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Recession Made Real

Boston.com has a … gallery? photo essay? of pictures that bring a certain grim, beautiful reality to the recession.  It’s worth a look, and a few moments of quiet meditation.  It’s just begun, my friends, and we shall all feel it.  There are tent cities in Sacramento, even now and we must remember that all these statistics and numbers are real people with real lives.

Scenes from the Recession | Boston.com

Is ARIS Seeing What It Wants to See?

The ARIS report continues to get a lot of play in the religious news circuit, but what caught my eye was this piece on Religion Dispatches that discusses how bias affect statistical data (and certainly it’s interpretation!)

…the survey run out of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion reveals how ideology can make its way into statistics. Funded by a grant from Templeton and carried out by the Gallup Organization, the Baylor study reports, contrary to ARIS, that religion is on the rise in America. “That is a clearly sectarian institution,” says Kosmin. “It’s not that I’m insinuating that they’re fiddling with the statistics. But there is a little bit of a skew there.”

Good or bad, of course, such studies do not begin to give us a real view of religion in America or anywhere else.

For all the ARIS’s merits, though, neither it nor any other study can claim to capture a complete picture of American religiosity. As Gary Laderman pointed out in these pages a few days ago, the very meaning of the sacred for people is a moving target. Various definitions of what religion is in the first place compete just as religions themselves do. Consequently, these surveys don’t stand above the fray of religion in America; they are a part of it.

Seeing What They Wanna See: Religion Survey Reflects Surveyors | Religion Dispatches

“Defense of Marriage Acts” as Religious Violence

Religion Dispatches has a very strong article on Defense of Marriage Acts:

Defense of Marriage laws, now in place in over thirty-seven states, are actually a form of religious violence; they violate sacred texts, are idolatrous, and scapegoat a powerless group.

You should read the article, so I’ll not paraphrase it here, but it does an excellent job systematically explaining what is wrong with these sorts of laws in a very tangible way.  To find out more about these laws, and which ones may be being passed in your states, you can visit domawatch.org.

The Religious Violence of “Defending Marriage” | Religion Dispatches

Ignorance is a Much Better Boogeyman Than Secularism

The more entrenched I become in the online discussions around all things religious, the more I find myself driven half-mad by the rather exceptional amounts of ignorance involved in these conversations. One of our goals here at The Xenia Institute is a clarification of difficult subjects and an acceptance that almost all human issues have a daunting level of complexity; and more to the point, that we’ll only make progress on these issues if we accept this complexity. Discussion of religion in this country, however, couldn’t be further from the case.

The one I run into the most is the atheist/secular conversation. This is the conversation that results in “religion is evil” or takes some extreme example of religion and treats it as typical, completely ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It’s a fun one because the people who often make these arguments are otherwise fairly bright people that see religion as a cause behind a lot of the evil in the world and learn just enough to think they know what they’re talking about.

Unfortunately, such problems run amok even from the places we get our information as journalists rarely know enough about the topic to discuss it intelligibly. Religion, especially religion, is terribly complex, folks. Complex on the level of politics and economics – sufficiently so that if someone is making a blanket claim about it, you can almost be certain they are ignorant on the subject. (Other than, of course, that it’s complex!)

In the spirit of this problem, Religion Dispatches has a very interesting article (well, a review really) by Jeffrey Feldman regarding our journalists not getting religion, and the impression that this ignorance creates of a vast secular conspiracy.

One of the crankier complaints heard during George W. Bush’s presidency was the grouse about ‘secularism’ being a threat to American society. Unfortunately, it seems this beef will be sticking with us for a while as we transition to the newest phase of the culture war.

Is it true, though? Does America—or the world, for that matter—suffer in any noticeable way from an overzealous, institutionally entrenched, and otherwise unchecked worldview based on Enlightenment notions of progress rather than faith in a supreme being? The easy answer is: no. Or, as one anonymous source put it to me the other day: “Are you kidding? Of course not.”

….

Marshall describes a journalism that habitually ‘misunderstands’ the world it describes to the public due to a serious and long-held ignorance of all things religious, resulting in a culture of journalism that remains deficient in both its descriptions of and its explanations for key political and social events in a rapidly changing, often dangerous world. The three-pronged moral of the story: (1) you can’t understand the world if (2) you don’t know religion, and (3) most journalists don’t know anything about religion.

The book he’s reviewing is Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion (Oxford University Press) and it looks pretty fascinating but even it only begins to scratch the surface of the issue.  Feldman wraps up the issue well:

As John Dewey often argued, the longterm danger of not forcing ourselves to wrestle with the full details of knowledge is not just an ignorance of religion or science, but an oversimplifying of the idea of democracy. When evangelical Christians do not push themselves to understand the moral underpinnings of secular culture, when secular leaders block scripture or theology from the conversation in the public sphere, and when all of us pass up the opportunity to learn the details of Iraqi and Iranian Islamic traditions—it is our understanding of democracy that suffers.

As these problems are ongoing, so too will be their solutions, which are not hard to imagine. We need to get started with listening and learning. After that, all that remains is finding the will to keep it going.

Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blindspot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion | Religion Dispatches

The Formula That Sent Us to the Poor House

The Consumerist (referencing an article from Wired) is sharing some of the details that led to our current “situation.”

Now if your kids ask you why they have to learn math, you can tell them, “Because if you don’t, you could ruin the global economy, you little beast.” Wired has just published an article that traces the entire clusterfrak back to a formula published in 2000 by a mathemetician working for JPMorgan Chase.

For a quick breakdown you can check out the article at Consumerist, and for an extended meditation on the mathematical source of all our woes, check out the Wired story.  And for a fun, if depressing, explanation of the current situation you can watch this series of animated videos on the credit crisis.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wallstreet | Wired (via the Consumerist)

Pope Lifts Excommunication of Holocaust Denying Bishop – People a Bit Peeved

There’s been a lot of news this week and last over the Pope’s decision to end the only modern schism in the Catholic church by lifting the excommunication of a group of ultra-traditionalists.  One of which (Richard Williamson) has made quite a name for himself denying the existence of the holocaust, saying the U.S. staged 9/11, and advocating that women not attend a universities.  A real charmer, across the board – clearly.  However, as (understandably) angry as many people are it’s important to understand how these things work.

Having abhorrent views is, unfortunately, not grounds for excommunication.  It probably should be, but it isn’t.  At least when those views aren’t on issues the Vatican deems relative to such matters.  So, we’re in a pickle.  We have a terrible person who hasn’t done anything to deserve, theologically speaking, excommunication (now, he did 20 years ago, I guess).

So the church has to bring them back in, if they are reconciling the theological issues around the excommunication (which was largely, as I understand it, centered around Vatican II.)  And since the new Pope doesn’t seem to have much interest in the changes of Vatican II, the schism can now be ended.

So yes, it’s terrible that this man should be any sort of religious leader – but the excommunication is a big deal and the Catholic church has to deal with that issue as it is, which doesn’t preclude someone being a a bit of a jerk. There is a gravity involved (it does involve someone’s immortal soul from the Church’s perspective).

That doesn’t mean we don’t get to be angry and it doesn’t warrant a response from the church in regards to having someone like Williamson in their organization (if they retain their rank and it isn’t only the excommunication that is lifted).  The Catholic church has a LONG history of not doing the best by some of the people Williamson is talking about and his sort of ideas need to be repudiated quickly everytime they come up.  As the Washington Post puts it (in the words of Rabbi Gary Greenebaum):

But many faith leaders say the Vatican has stated for decades that anti-Semitism is a sin and that the episode questions Catholic thought on the validity of other faiths. “These things are inextricably tied together,” said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

And So It Begins…

The first moves of the Obama Whitehouse has been the dismanteling and investigation of the anti-terror aparatuses put in place by the Bush administration.  Like so many, I took a great deal of exception to these tactics – imprisonment without trial, illegal wiretapping, etc.  These are big deals.  Big enough deals that they made it to the constitution.  And sure, these rights have been ignored before during times of trial but in no way excuses it any time it does happen.

But, of course, there are fans of these practices.  Some people feel, and it is understandable, that we should sacrifice some of this freedom for our protection.  Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post Thursday had this to say:

President Obama has inherited a set of tools that successfully protected the country for 2,688 days — and he cannot dismantle those tools without risking catastrophic consequences. On Tuesday, George W. Bush told a cheering crowd in Midland, Tex., that his administration had left office without another terrorist attack. When Barack Obama returns to Chicago at the end of his time in office, will he be able to say the same?[2,688 Days]

And it’s true… these apparatuses may have protected us to some extent, it may have saved some lives.  It may have saved mine, or my families.  But that’s not the point.  Freedom entails a certain risk.  When we live in something that isn’t a police state we take a gamble on bad things happening.

But here’s the dirty little secret…  Police states have terrorism, too.  We will be hit again.  That will happen no matter what we do.  We may be able to prevent some of it, we may be able to make it less often, but we will be the victims of another terrorist act no matter who is in office and no matter what policies we pursue.  It’s the unfortunate fact of our age, the unfortunate fact of our capacity for destruction, and an unfortunate fact of the political-cultural environment we live in.

So, I’m going to take my chances with that risk.  Because while we may and will be hit, maybe today maybe not for another decade, I want to live in a country I can be proud of.  A country that does not torture, that does not wiretap its citizens without cause, that does not jail without access to a lawyer or reprieve.

We will be attacked.  But in the meantime we can choose to break our very ideals out of that fear, or try to be a nation that has the ethical integrity to go on even after we are attacked.

Wired Collects the Inauguration Through Flickr

Flickr, the photosharing site, is pretty much the best place to go for pictures of any public event from the eye of those attending.  Wired magazine’s online site has collected some of their favorite images from Tuesday in a gallery that gives you the ground floor experience.

The Inauguration Through The Eyes of Flickr | Wired.com

MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Still Speaks Today

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Read the rest of this stirring letter here.

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