Two Religion Related Items

(I) As reported in detail here by Scarecrow at Fire Dog Lake, Jim Wallis hosted a round-table with the three leading Democratic candidates on the issues of faith and public policy (should you go to Faith in Public Life.org, they have a video of it, plus follow-up articles). My shorter response is that I agree with Scarecrow on this one; this is a bad precedent, and adds little to the Presidential debate, and opens up the Democratic candidates to the charge of pandering.
The real culprit here, besides the candidates themselves who are willing to prostitute their faith, is Jim Wallis. Unlike Scarecrow, I do not nor have I ever like Wallis. He is a publicity whore, and has stated quite openly that he desires nothing less than to be for the left what Jerry Falwell was to the right. Rather than serve the Gospel, he wants to lead a movement. By hosting a forum such as this one, Wallis has shown that he has no desire to discuss issues of public policy on their merits, offering candidates a place instead where they can say all sorts of irrelevant things about their private lives rather than give serious responses to serious questions. This does not mean that issues of faith are irrelevant to matters of public policy; rather, it is a further erosion of the constitutional ban on religious tests for public office, with Wallis being the chief offender. I make no friends among religious progressives with my disdain for Wallis, but I just can't help myself - I think he's a fraud, and I think what he did in hosting this forum is a bad precedent.

(II) President Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, James Holsinger, is, like me, a United Methodist Lay person. In the late 1988, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church - our chief law-making body - created a study-group on the question of homosexuality and the church. Its mandate and task was broad, and its membership was diverse. My academic adviser in seminary was a member, although he left before the study was completed for health-related reasons. Holsinger was among a group that offered up a minority report, due to an ideological split within the study commission. As reported by Think Progress, part of Holsinger's initial contribution to the minority report was an oddly-homoerotic discussion of gay sex (and I say that as a straight man). Part of Holsinger's report, discussing the supposed history of disdain for male-male anal-genital copulation is so woefully ignorant, one wonders how stupid a man with the title "Dr." could be to have penned it. He insists that anal sex is "unnatural" because "everyone knows" the difference between the sex organs and the "alimentary canal" (some of these men were, apparently, quite well-endowed if he is worrying about the alimentary canal rather than just the rectum). Why, even children are aware of the difference!
Should Dr. Holsinger be interested, there are some pieces of Greek pottery he should peruse, in which Greek men are pictured fervently in flagrante. He should also read Plato's Symposium on the joys of man-boy and man-man love. Or perhaps he and other fans of the film 300 should remember that the the Spartans, in direct defiance of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", encouraged sexual liaisons between and among their soldiers as a way of increasing their solidarity and willingness to sacrifice themselves for one another.
Just for the record, the whole "tearing" thing is true, of course, but such tearing also occurs in vaginal intercourse. It also occurs to men; no amount of lubrication, natural or artificial can prevent microscopic breaks in the skin. As a doctor, he should know this, probably does know this, but he would rather put the onus on same-sex copulation for all sorts of horrors rather than discuss the issue seriously.
I would apologize to the rest of the world for Holsinger as a member of the UMC, but, alas, he is just one of many quite silly and bigoted people in our church.
BTW, his rampant and public ignorance (not to mention bigotry) should automatically disqualify him from consideration as Surgeon General of the United States (unlike another UM layperson, the late C. Everett Koop, who was an early advocate of safer sex practices and didn't discriminate based upon sexual orientation). Of course, in a sane world, his name wouldn't even crop up, so my hope is slim . . .

Is Religion Evil? Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife, Just Answer Yes or No . . .

In the latest round of soft-headed believer versus verbose but nonsensical non-believer debates, captured here, a somewhat sober Christopher Hitchens debates religion with a somewhat scatterbrained Chris Hedges. While perhaps intellectually stimulating and exciting - Hitchens is nothing if not well-read and erudite, always fun to watch even when he is at his most annoying - like a previous debate between torture-loving atheist Sam Harris and mind-numbingly stupid Rick Warren, I just wonder at debates like these. What purpose do they serve? How do they move us forward to a better understanding of the role of religion in our lives right now? How do they guide us to a better comprehension of the religious roots of much of the current conflict (especially when they are devoid of any discussion of Islam and its history with the west)?

I know that there are many secular folks out there who just get all whoozy when the topic is religion. I can even see Democracy Lover's words flashing across the screen - "evidence", "rational", etc., etc. - as he gears up to show just how silly believing in God is. Like Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris (kind of the atheist version of Tinkers to Evans to Chance, I suppose), however, none of this is any longer of the remotest interest to me. Debating the efficacy of religious belief is a bit like debating the dangers of traveling on an interstate highway. People believe in God, for good and bad reasons, and do good and bad things with those beliefs. People drive on interstate highways, sometimes safely, sometimes not. Debating whether it's a good idea to drive on interstates misses the point that people actually do so drive, and it might be better to discuss how they actually drive rather than try to debunk the idea that driving on interstate highways is a good idea.

I am no longer interested in discussing whether or not religion is good, or a force for good. Of course it is. It is also a force for evil. I am much more interested in discussing what believers of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and variations actually do with their beliefs than with whether or not their beliefs are justifiable. Most beliefs, even in the efficacy of scientific rationality, are impervious to such scrutiny, and it wastes time and energy which could be much better devoted to figuring out what is actually happening. Religion in some form or another will always be with us, just as skepticism and non-belief will be. Neither is superior or inferior to the other, and each contributes to the sum total of both human evil and greatness, and perhaps we should be figuring out ways to use all our intellectual and moral resources to help us survive our current predicament rather than casting aspersions upon those whose intellectual and spiritual views are different from ours? That was a terrible run-on sentence by the way, but I let it stand.

Since we are on the subject, I shall just make this statement. Many thousands died at the hands of religious fanatics across Europe and the Holy Land during the centuries of the crusades - Jews, women, Muslims, religious protesters such as Cathars in the south of France and Waldensians up and down the mountainous spine of the Italian peninsula. Yet, in the 20th century, just to name two individuals, Josef Stalin and Mao-Tse Tung both are directly responsible for the deaths of millions of their fellow human beings in the name of atheistic, scientific socialism. While I can hear the "But . . . But . . ." stammering in the background, these are facts - indeed, among the thousands dead in both countries were priests, nuns, hierarchy, and laity of various religious groups, Christian, Buddhist and whatnot as religion was purged from the societies (it was only Stalin's decision to use the nationalism of the Russian Orthodox Church that saved the lives of the Primate of that church after Hitler invaded) - and while it might be gratifying to progressive secularists to argue about the religious status of the beliefs involved, the truth is this: millions died in the name of no God at all.

I say this not to play, "Gotcha!", but only to remind us that we human beings kill each other for a variety of reasons. Our hands are bloody and we would be better served if the energies used in pointless debates such as these were directed towards figuring out how me might all live together on this little blue planet of ours, rather than deciding who's right and who's wrong about questions for which there is no such answer.