Over the weekend, the number of people killed or hospitalized by a falling tree branch in Central Park increased to three so far this year. This is in addition to several individuals who were lucky enough to escape serious injury from falling branches. And it’s only June. At this rate, the park’s trees could easily claim a dozen victims by the end of the year. The public—understandably filled with anger, fear, and questions—is unlikely to be satisfied by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s response, who, quoted in the New York Times, called this weekend’s incident that killed a six-month-old girl “an act of God.”

This statement can be interpreted in two ways. The first is that the mayor was being imprecise. While its’ not entirely uncommon for someone to refer to a natural disaster euphemistically as an act of God, doing so assigns blame to an unseen entity rather than stressing the accidental nature of an event. If every mandated precaution is taken and still an unavoidable accident occurs, then one should say so rather than offhandedly blaming a God who will not speak out to explain. If, however, the accidents in Central Park were due to negligence then the situation needs to be investigated and the guilty parties should be held responsible.

The phrase “act of God” is often used in reference to life or death situations. At best it describes a wonderfully unlikely occurrence like winning the lottery or even the welcomed death of a suffering loved one. At worst the phrase is used hatefully to indicate God’s punishment for certain behaviors like blasphemy or homosexuality. In both cases the person who says it seems to believe in its literal meaning. Did Mayor Bloomberg believe that God himself used a tree to kill an innocent baby and destroy a young family? If that’s the case, I have to ask, where are the Christians on this one? They say that God is perfect and that we are made in his image; our national motto tells us to trust in Him. So when the newspaper headlines quote Bloomberg calling an infant’s death an act of God, why aren’t more people defending God? Especially given the park’s recent history, it seems that the accusation uses God as a scapegoat, portrays him as violently irrational, and suggests that no matter how innocent you are you could be struck down at any moment.  

Say that God doesn’t exist and you’ll be met with an angry mob but say he’s serially killing zoo goers and you’ll be met with a shrug.

I think the mayor’s statement should offend everyone. If you believe in God, he’s perverting your religion. If you don’t believe in God, he’s insulting you with false answers and may as well be blaming the boogeyman. Even if you don’t take his words literally, he’s still brushing off the issue and taking it less seriously than he should. Rather than looking to console the families, comfort the public, and prevent future incidents, the mayor is clearly more focused on the political aspect of absolving various organizations of guilt and directing blame away from officials. To convince the public that this incident was beyond human control makes it easier not to examine current protocols or make changes to prevent similar accidents in the future.

Bottom line: when an atheist cries, “don’t blame God!” perhaps it’s time to listen.

Yesterday was the last day of the US Supreme Court’s 2009-2010 term, and it was a busy one. Among the four decisions reached was one of the most important church-state separation cases in recent history, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

The case concerns a public university, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, a campus of the University of California system. Like all colleges, Hastings allows students to form organizations and officially register them with the school, which in return gives them access to certain resources, including preferential meeting room space, campus communication tools, and access to student activity funds. In return for this official status, however, Hastings requires registered student organizations to adhere to the university’s nondiscrimination policy, which forbids discriminating on a basis of, among other things, religious beliefs and sexual orientation, and requires student organizations to accept any Hastings student as a member.

And therein was the problem for the Christian Legal Society, a national organization that asked in 2004 that its Hastings chapter be exempted from the nondiscrimination policy because all its members are required to sign a statement of faith that, among other things, would forbid him or her to be gay or lesbian. Hastings declined to issue such an exemption and denied official status to the Christian Legal Society chapter, and a lawsuit shortly followed.

The Christian Legal Society’s argument that it had been discriminated against by Hastings College didn’t seem to hold any water with the lower courts: both the US District Court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Hastings, finding that there had been no discrimination against the Christian Legal Society. And so it came to pass that the US Supreme Court heard the case on April 19th, 2010 and issued its 5-4 ruling in favor of Hastings yesterday, on the last day of the court’s term.

In the ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority (PDF) that (emphasis added):

In requiring CLS—in common with all other student organizations—to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations. CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy. The First Amendment shields CLS against state prohibition of the organization’s expressive activity, however exclusionary that activity may be. But CLS enjoys no constitutional right to state subvention of its selectivity.

In other words, as the nondiscrimination policy applies to all student organizations, what the Christian Legal Society was actually asking for was preferential treatment that Hastings was not obliged to give.

In a succinct concurring opinion, retiring Justice John Paul Stevens wrote:

Although the First Amendment may protect CLS’s discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them.
…
As written, the Nondiscrimination Policy is content and viewpoint neutral. It does not reflect a judgment by school officials about the substance of any student group’s speech. Nor does it exclude any would-be groups on the basis of their convictions. Indeed, it does not regulate expression or belief at all.

In other words, the real issue here isn’t whether or not Hastings allows the CLS to discriminate, but rather, whether or not Hastings must endorse that discrimination by making the CLS an officially registered student organization, with access to all of the university and student funded benefits therein. And the answer to that question from the five justice majority was a resounding “no.”

Divided as the current court almost always is, the three other conservative justices on the court joined Justice Samuel Alito on his dissent, in which he stated:

The proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”…Today’s decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.

But it is not at all clear from the case just how the freedom of expression of the CLS was hindered. At no time was freedom of speech denied for the CLS or its members. The organization was even allowed to meet on campus and hasn’t been inhibited from sponsoring events. But it will have to do so with less access to the resources provided by Hastings to official student organizations. The key is that Hastings College applies its anti-discrimination requirement equally and across the board to all student organizations, not just to the CLS, so if they refuse to comply with it, how can they then claim that they have been unfairly singled out?

Secular and civil liberties organizations all over the nation, including the American Humanist Association, Americans United, and the ACLU, applauded the ruling and celebrated this victory in such a vital separation of church and state case. To understand the significance, consider for a moment if it had gone the other way, and if the Supreme Court had ruled that Hastings was discriminating against the CLS by requiring them to adhere to the university’s anti-discrimination code. This would actually set aside religious student organizations as a special class that did not have to adhere to regulations that apply to other student organizations. It would have been a disaster for the separation of church and state, because students at Hastings would have been forced to support, through their own required student activity fees, an organization that would not even necessarily admit them as members!

Given the nature of the Hastings anti-discrimination policy, which is described as an “all-comers” policy, meaning that student organizations must accept as members all Hastings students who wish to join, rather than the more common university policy of disallowing any student group to discriminate based on certain criteria, it is not clear if this ruling will have far-reaching implications for universities across the United States. Ultimately the court stuck to the “all-comers” policy in its ruling, which it found to be viewpoint neutral when applied to all student organizations at Hastings, and the court did not rule on the broader question of other types of anti-discrimination policies.

Yesterday’s ruling was a great victory for the separation of church and state, and it was also a high note for the end of the final term of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is now retiring after a nearly 35-year long distinguished career of defending the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. He will surely take his place in history alongside other heavyweight rights-defenders of the Supreme Court, including Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall. He is truly a great American, and his presence will be sorely missed on the nation’s highest court.

Just over a week ago, Muhammad Parvez, and his 29-year old son, Waqas Parvez, were sentenced to life in prison by an Ontario court for the murder of Muhammad’s daughter and Waqas’ sister, Aqsa Parvez. Aqsa was a rebellious 16-year old, the youngest of 8 children. She objected to her father’s demand that she wear a traditional Muslim hijab, and wanted to get a job so she could have the money to lead a normal teenage life. After she ran away from home and then returned, she told her friends she feared for her life, because her father had sworn on the Koran that he would kill her if she ran away again. She was right. Three months later, after another battle royale over her disobedience in attending her first movie, Aqsa ran away again. Her brother picked her up from a school bus stop and took her home; half an hour later, she was dead.

In an interview with police, Aqsa’s mother, Anwar Jan Parvez, said her husband told her he killed his youngest child because “My community will say, ‘You have not been able to control your daughter.’ This is my insult. She is making me naked.” This evidence of what he called “a twisted and repugnant mindset” led Judge Bruce Durno to find it “profoundly disturbing that a 16-year-old could be murdered by a father and brother for the purpose of saving family pride, for saving them from what they perceived as family embarrassment.”

Nevertheless, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations refused to admit that this was a Muslim “honor killing,” saying it was just a case of domestic violence that can happen in any family.

Domestic violence happens everywhere, including the most secular of families. What Canadian CAIR and other defenders of Islam deliberately choose to ignore, though, is that a substantial body of Muslim scripture and tradition teaches people like Muhammad and Waqas Parvez that it is God’s will for them to impose this kind of punishment on disobedient daughters.

It is true that there is nothing in the Koran or the traditions of Muhammad that flatly states “Thou shalt kill thy unruly daughters.” There are even some passages in the traditions that can fairly be interpreted as encouraging lenience and mercy in cases of violations of the sexual code. The trouble is, the Koran and the traditions are a jumbled mess of conflicting commandments, and there is plenty of ammunition there to turn a case of wounded pride into homicide.

First, there is the extensive Muslim authority that females in general are subhuman; their testimony counts as half the testimony of a male [Koran 2:282], their inheritance rights are half those of males [Koran 4:176], and they need to be covered up and kept inside as much as possible to avoid tempting males into sin. Men can have multiple wives, but women cannot have multiple husbands. [Koran 4:3] God said in the Koran that “Men are in charge of women, because God hath made one to excel the other,” while ordering back-talking women to be scourged. Muhammad is reported to have added that: “Women are naturally, morally, and religiously defective.” You don’t see many alleged honor killings of males; daughters and sisters are the principal targets.

Then there are the laws commanding death for illicit sex. Sharia is a mass of contradictions on this point, but there is plenty of support for Muhammad’s saying that “For a fornicator, there is stoning.” Sometimes the punishments for men and women are equal, but sometimes they are not. In one notable case, Muhammad ordered an adulterous man to receive 100 lashes and exile for a year, while the woman was stoned to death.

Then there is the teaching on apostasy. Here Muhammad did not mince words: “If a Muslim discards his religion, kill him.” Even closer to the honor killing point is the Koran’s approving discussion of the murder of a boy by a God expert, in order to prevent the boy’s apostasy from corrupting his parents. [Koran 18:74-80] According to tradition, Muhammad himself opposed the killing of children, except where the killer knew that the child would grow up to be a non-believer. The evidence is pretty strong that the sum of Aqsa Parvez’s actions were tantamount to abandoning her religion; what’s a devout father to do?

A 12^th century Muslim legal manual of Umdat al-Salik, certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, today’s most respected authority in Sunni Islam, carries the logic one step further. It notes that normally “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” The province of Ontario is thus being highly un-Islamic in imprisoning Muhammad and Waqas Parvez.

All these ingredients make it easy for Muslim God experts to justify honor killing as divinely ordained, as many of them do. Savitri Gooneskere has carefully documented the honor killing teachings of imams in Pakistan. A Gaza journalist was refreshingly candid:

Deep down, we know that when a woman has disgraced her family, nothing will restore honor except by killing her. This is understood in Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, the Gaza strip and the West Bank. So why are we Arabs telling the Western press that honor killing is cultural, that it is not really part of Islam? Our way of life is based on maintaining our honor. And make no mistake about it: a woman does tarnish her family’s honor by engaging in pre-marital sex, or by getting herself raped, when she seeks divorce and when she marries against her family’s wishes. And keeping our women pure is a big part of our honor. So there’s no point saying honor killing isn’t really part of our religion. Honor and Islam are inextricably bound; they are what give our life meaning. A strong religion demands we choose to maintain our honor.

So was the Islamist President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Commenting on the discovery of the bodies of seven women found by a roadside last year, he explained that they had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives in honor killings. “If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them are killed,” he said, adding for good measure that “No one can tell us not to be Muslims. If anyone says I cannot be a Muslim, he is my enemy.”

Honor killing is not an isolated phenomenon. A United Nations study estimated the number of honor killings at 5,000 per year. Many arise from a daughter’s resistance to an arranged marriage, as occurred in Atlanta last year. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali went on a one-woman crusade to get the Dutch police simply to keep track of the number of honor killings in Holland, she was scorned for exaggerating the problem – until a pilot program in just 2 of the country’s 25 regions found 11 such killings from October 2004 to May 2005. After we “liberated” Iraq from the secular Baath Party regime and handed it to the Shiites, there were 47 documented honor killings in 2006 in Basra alone. Ayman Udas was killed by her brothers in Pakistan for bringing disgrace on the family by singing on television. A 4-year old Palestinian girl who had been raped by an adult was allowed to bleed to death, to preserve the family’s honor.

In Jordan, the Penal Code states flatly that “he who discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery and kills, wounds, or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty.” A proposal to repeal this law failed when Jordan’s Islamic Action Front issued a fatwa saying that doing so would “destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity.” Syrian and Egyptian law also permit judges to reduce penalties in honor killings cases.

People like Muhammad and Waqas Parvez may or may not be able to cite any of these passages, much less traditions that lean the other way. That’s not the point. The point is that the God experts who do study these things and who have a stern paternalist view of the world spread the message, explicitly and implicitly, that a God-fearing father does not allow his daughter to run wild, and does whatever it takes to keep her in line. Putting the stamp of God’s approval on a dark impulse drives the Parvezes of the world over the edge. The ultimate answer is to wear down the credibility of the God experts themselves, so fewer and fewer people like the Parvezes care about what they say, leaving common sense and the common values of human society as their only guides.

The American Humanist Association (AHA) voiced disappointment yesterday in a US District Court verdict allowing a council of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) to occupy a building owned by the city of Philadelphia rent-free, despite the city’s attempt to end the lease because of the BSA’s discriminatory policies. The verdict was handed down after the scouting council sued the city for attempting to end the lease due to BSA’s discriminatory practices.
 
“The AHA is suggesting that everyone step back for a moment to consider how aggressive the BSA is willing to get in imposing its discriminatory policies on the public,” said David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association. “This shows that the BSA not only wants the right to discriminate, but that it still expects special treatment despite its unfair prejudices.  As the scouts sue the public to obtain special privileges that other groups don’t enjoy, we see in many ways that the BSA is no longer an example of model citizenship.”
 
The BSA has historically remained unapologetic and deliberate in its exclusion of gay youths and troop leaders, and has also banned the participation of atheists and agnostics. Many groups, including the AHA, have urged the BSA to adopt inclusive policies, such as those of the Girl Scouts of America, that would allow participation by gays and nonbelievers. 
 
The BSA argued that the city’s eviction attempt, which was based on a disagreement over the BSA discriminatory policies, was a violation of the BSA’s own constitutional rights. The BSA further protested the city’s offer to allow the group access to the building on the condition that rent be paid. 
 
“The BSA should be ashamed to demand free rent while at the same time continuing policies that discriminate against nonbelievers and gays,” said Niose. “If they want to discriminate, they should have enough decency to pay their way like everyone else.  As a defiantly discriminatory organization, the BSA has lost its exalted status.”
 
Though the city of Philadelphia cannot force the local BSA chapter to renounce the organization’s policy banning homosexuals, reports state that the possibility of negotiation still remains as the city decides what step should be taken next. 
 
“We believe that the City of Philadelphia’s non-discrimination policy fully comports with the American principle of equality and expect that the jury’s decision will be reversed on appeal,” said Bob Ritter, staff attorney and legal coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. “It is totally indefensible for the Boy Scouts to discriminate against atheists and gays and receive substantial governmental benefits for doing so.”

Oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for two months now, and there still isn’t an end in sight. And day by day, the news seems to keep getting worse.

Faced with what very well may be the worst environmental disaster in US history, it is understandable that people feel frustrated, angry, and helpless, especially those who live on the Gulf Coast and are watching their livelihoods sink into the black muck that is lapping at their shores. And even as the black blob grows in the satellite photos, most people have nothing to do in response but wait as BP and the Coast Guard work to counteract the oil flowing out of the hole a mile below the surface of the ocean.

So I cannot sit here and tell people how they should or shouldn’t react to the spill and what actions they should take to try and do something about it. But still, there is something about this that rubs me the wrong way:

A resolution encouraging people to pray for an end to the BP oil spill crisis has been approved by the Louisiana Senate.

Sen. Robert Adley, a Republican from Benton, won unanimous approval of the resolution last week. The resolution made this past Sunday a state-designated day of prayer in Louisiana, during which people of all faiths in the state and around the nation will be encouraged to seek divine intervention to end the crisis.

As Senator Adley explained after the measure passed:

As the resolution details, “citizens are urged to pray for a solution to this crisis, each according to his or her own faith, to pray for God’s continued guidance and protection and to join in the observance of a day of prayer, seeking God’s blessings upon both our state and nation.” The resolution also calls upon the people of Louisiana to join together to pray for an end to the crisis which is threatening our environment, our culture and our livelihoods.

And here’s the real kicker:

“Thus far the efforts made by mortals to try to solve the crisis have been to no avail,” Adley explained. “It is clearly time for a miracle for us.”

It is true that all that mortal humans have attempted so far has failed to fully quell the massive leak from the seafloor. I can see how a believer might decide that it’s time to pray for a miracle. And while I object to state legislatures passing prayer resolutions, because I think that they’re an unconstitutional endorsement of religion, that’s not even the point I want to raise here.

Rather, I think that this prayer resolution, and other similar calls for prayer, are removing focus from where it needs to be. In short: God didn’t do this. Humans did. And only humans can fix it.

What’s happening in the gulf is not like an earthquake. It’s not a natural disaster, no matter what anyone says. The evidence for BP’s inadequate safeguards, negligence, and even recklessness, is growing. And beyond the specific instances of negligence that caused this particular disaster, it is reckless to risk such a spill occurring when it is clear that neither BP nor the US government had the tools and means to contain and control it after the well suffered a blowout.

So this call to prayer is really a request for God to save us from ourselves. And as he’s made clear in the past, all too many times, God is unable or unwilling or unavailable to do that.

So people may pray, if it makes them feel better, but at this time, it is vital that we remember what I would call one of the fundamental tenets of humanism: we should never gamble with the health of our planet, and we can’t count on anyone but ourselves to save us if we do. There’s nothing in this universe worth trading the Gulf of Mexico for, and if it is to be restored, humans will have to do the hard work (and BP better pay for it!). Over the decades ahead, we might be able to finally sop up most of the oil from the shores of the Gulf, but let’s never forget the lesson of just how much destructive power we hold in our (unclasped) hands.

As noted a month ago, the Texas Board of Education voted 8-7 against adding James Madison to a short list of thinkers who influenced the American Revolution, while adding Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin instead. Had they included Madison, Texans would have had a special opportunity to celebrate yesterday’s 225^th anniversary of one of his (and America’s) most important documents: the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, which first appeared on June 20, 1785. But don’t let its age deceive you; many of its arguments appear to have been freshly written about issues facing America today.

James Madison was America’s most powerful exponent of the separation of church and state. He even tried, without success, to add a condemnation of officially established religion to the Declaration of Independence. As a member of the Virginia legislature at the height of the war in 1779, Madison supported Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which, among other things, would have eliminated taxpayer support for the Anglican Church in Virginia. Virginia’s legislature felt it already had its hands full opposing the British crown, and was unwilling to antagonize anyone else while the battle raged.

After Jefferson left for diplomatic duties in Europe, Madison became the bill’s prime sponsor. But even after the victory at Yorktown in 1781, legislators were still reluctant to step on the clergy’s toes – until, that is, Madison took his case, in the form of the Memorial and Remonstrance, directly to the people.

What moved Madison to action was a counter-proposal by his fellow revolutionary Patrick Henry, who disliked the Anglican establishment as much as Madison did. But instead of simply cutting off its funds, Henry proposed to have the taxpayers finance its competition. Under Henry’s proposal, a small tax for the support of the Christian religion in general would be imposed, and each taxpayer would be able to designate which Christian denomination his funds would support. Non-Christians, of course, would get nothing.

To Madison, this moved government in exactly the wrong direction. As he expressed so eloquently in the Memorial and Remonstrance, the proper function of government was not to promote fairness of division of spoils among the sects, but to keep out of the God business altogether.

The Henry-Madison fight generated intense interest throughout Virginia. More than 13,000 people signed petitions about it, in a state with fewer than 100,000 eligible voters. That would be the equivalent of nearly a million petition signatures in the state today – at a time when communication and transportation were exceedingly difficult. Among the petitioners, opponents of government support for religion outnumbered supporters by 12:1, and Henry’s proposal was defeated. The momentum generated by the defeat of the Henry bill carried over into final passage of Jefferson’s Statue of Religious Freedom:

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

What makes Madison’s argument even more compelling is that it applies to so many issues of church and state that we confront today:

• “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” Did the Texas Board of Education have this in mind when it ordered school children to begin studying Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin?
• “The Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.” We now have a president who insists on opening all of his appearances with a prayer, pre-vetted by a White House bureaucrat, who occupies the position of “competent judge of religious truth,” precisely so that the p Read the rest of this entry &raquo

It’s not that often you can find Anglicans, Catholics, and Muslims presenting a united front. It takes a truly threatening common enemy to achieve that. This week in Australia, such an enemy arose: ethics.

Students in New South Wales, the nation’s most populous state, have been offered classes in the scriptures of a variety of religions for many years. The classes are not compulsory, out of respect for the wishes of families who do not want to have their children brainwashed with supernaturalism. There has been a stiff price to pay, though, for those willing to buck societal pressure and pull their kids out of religion class. For the only alternative offered to religion class has been no class at all. Children of humanists who opt out of religion class have been given only empty time, which they undoubtedly fill with exploring innovative ways of getting into trouble.

Someone in the New South Wales school bureaucracy decided that this was unfair, and that the same amount of taxpayer resources ought to be devoted to the children of humanists as to the children of supernaturalists. So they devised a class in ethics, in which students are encouraged to engage in discussions about fairness, honesty, care, rights and responsibilities. The class is now being tested in ten schools before being rolled out statewide.

From the reaction of the churches, you would think Satan himself was running the education department. The Anglicans are now even trying to stack the local Parents and Citizens Associations (equivalent to our PTAs) with people who otherwise wouldn’t participate, in order to get the trial cancelled. Why? Anglican Bishop Davies put it best:

It’s not about ethical instruction at all. It’s not about distinguishing between right and wrong. It’s more about ethical inquiry or metaethics. It’s a philosophy of ethics, and if you’ve seen clips of children in classes, they’re trying to express their point of view and they’re welcome to their point of view, but there is no education of right and wrong. It’s just what I think in my situation.

In other words, there is no catechism! There is no top-down instruction, for example that huge families are RIGHT and oral sex is WRONG. How are children supposed to figure out for themselves what is right and wrong unless they read God’s instructions in 2,000-year-old books?

God experts are especially outraged because students previously enrolled in scripture classes were allowed to switch to the new ethics class, contrary to what they claim was a promise when the program started. Free choice? Where in scripture does it say that’s a good idea? As the representative of the Australian Catholic Church put it, “They’re offering something in competition with SRE [Special Religious Education], and we don’t think that’s fair.”

Worse yet, the class actually encourages “thinking” about what is right and what is wrong in a given situation, rather than obediently following the dictates of the God experts. What could be better calculated to undermine the public’s willingness to pay God experts for answers than the realization that they can provide these answers for themselves? If children cannot be forced to sit through scripture memorization classes, far better to let them smoke in the lavatories than to encourage habits of probing and questioning on matters that God has already decided.

Australia is not the only country where this issue comes up. Four years ago in Bolivia, President Evo Morales introduced a proposal to replace Catholic religious instruction in state-run schools with ethics courses. Though Morales succeeded in implementing other radical ideas, he could not defeat the power of the Church, which threatened to take to the streets – supernatural brainwashing remains firmly planted in Bolivian schools. Two years ago in Quebec, compulsory religious instruction classes offered separately by each denomination were replaced by a generic “Ethics and Religious Culture” class, dealing even-handedly with all of the province’s major religions. The specter of young people being given the information with which to make their own choices about what, if any, set of supernatural beliefs they ought to adopt was so horrifying to Catholic authorities that they encouraged a boycott of the classes, even though it meant suspension from school. Even Rome got involved: Cardinal Grocholewski of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education fumed that “Talking in the same way about all religions is almost like an anti-Catholic education, because this creates a certain relativism.”

Here in the United States, the tradition of ethics education in the public schools goes back a long way, even if we didn’t call it that. Public schools in the 19^th century had more of a Protestant flavor than 21^st century humanists would prefer, but compared to the rest of the world they were quite tolerant and secular. Though they didn’t have a specially constructed course in ethics, they did have the McGuffey reader, which was explicitly intended to communicate moral values at the same time it taught children to read. (This used to be called “efficiency.”) We can argue about the relative merits of the moral values taught and omitted by the McGuffey readers, and I certainly wouldn’t agree that they ought to be resurrected in their original form. But that’s just the point: we can ARGUE about them, we can improve them, we can use our gray matter to see what works and what doesn’t and steer things in better directions over time. That’s exactly what happened with the McGuffey readers; scholars write books about how their moral messages evolved in a more humanist direction over the decades. We don’t have to let experts inform us what God’s will is on every ethical issue that comes up.

Of course, the leading opposition to the McGuffey reader concept was – you guessed it – the Catholic Church. Canon law made it a grave sin for a Catholic family to send its children to a public school in a place where a Catholic school was available. Archbishop John T. McNicholas, general president of the National Catholic Educational Association, explained that: “There must be no wall of separation between God and the child. The secularistic educators who raise this wall are, in reality, fascist educators, who, perhaps without realizing it, are planning to give our country millions of uncontrolled juvenile criminals.” For decades on end, Catholic congressmen blocked the idea of federal aid to education on the grounds that under our Constitution, Catholic schools would be excluded from it. In 1953, the Church even encouraged Catholics to violate the law by refusing to pay taxes to support public schools that did not include Catholic religious instruction:

An example in our land of what might be called an unjust law opposed to a human good insofar as it burdens a special group excessively is the legal tax arrangement whereby Catholics contribute a large amount in taxes for educational purposes but do not receive anything from these collected funds for the support of their own parochial schools. … Since these laws are unjust, Catholics could not be held bound in conscience, in light of the demands of legal justice, to pay the excessive taxation, except in order to avoid scandal or disturbance. … If because of the injustice a particular Catholic should refuse to pay a portion of his taxes, his portion of that set aside for schools, and as a result be brought before the court in contesting the law, the Catholic judge should do what he can to show the law’s injustice and to avoid its application.

One novel idea the Australians might want to consider would be to let the voters have a voice. In 2006, the city of Berlin approved a program in which ethics became a compulsory subject for all high school students. God experts hated this, for all the usual reasons, and last year won the right to a referendum on their alternative plan of offering separate classes for Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims, who would each get their own particular supernatural flavor. The referendum was supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, and generated intense coverage by the press with lots of paid advertising on both sides.

Under Berlin’s referendum rules, it is necessary for a proposal to win both a majority of the votes cast and at least 25% of the total registered voters in order to pass. Thus, staying home was almost the same thing as voting “No.” Even though this referendum was held on a Sunday, when churches could most easily maximize their turnout efforts, staying home is exactly what 70% of the Berliners did. Even among those who voted, a majority opposed introducing religion classes into the schools. American politicians who think that kowtowing to God experts is always smart politics should take note.

Luis Granados

Last week, heavily armed forces attacked a defenseless convoy of ships in international waters, temporarily seized its cargo, and stole the cash and personal effects of some 500 passengers. In the process, dozens of passengers were wounded, and at least nine were shot at close range and killed. A number of other passengers remain unaccounted for; some report that several persons were thrown overboard.

The convoy was carrying medicine, medical equipment, food, and toys for the people of Gaza, now suffering through their third year of an Israeli blockade. After a thorough search of the ships, the “weapons” the Israeli attackers found were kitchen knives (in the kitchen) and a safety razor.

Among the passengers who were tasered, shot in the face with paintballs at pointblank range and generally roughed up were two women journalists from Australia, whose cameras recording the mayhem were then confiscated.

One of the passengers who was shot through the forehead and killed was an American citizen, 19 years of age. Other Americans who were injured before being arrested included a retired engineer who planned to help rebuild private homes destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers. Another humanitarian aid ship that was seized by Israel on Saturday was named the Rachel Corrie, after a fearless young American woman crushed to death by Israeli bulldozers in Gaza in 2003. Read the rest of this entry &raquo