This Wednesday will be the 10^th anniversary of a bizarre and regrettable moment in American history: the enactment of the “Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000,” or “RLUIPA.”

RLUIPA’s origins trace back to an earlier law, called the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993,” or “RFRA.” The name itself raises an eyebrow. What was being restored? Haven’t we always had religious freedom? Especially in 1993, at the peak of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority? In fact we did, but that did not stop politicians from wanting to play games. Democrats, then as now, envied the power of the religious right, and then as now deluded themselves into thinking they could win over a fair share of evangelical voters by sucking up to organized religion.

A 1990 Supreme Court case called Employment Division vs. Smith gave them the opportunity they sought. Two employees at an Oregon drug rehab clinic, of all places, decided to experiment with using an illegal drug. They were caught, and fired; then they applied for unemployment benefits. The agency turned them down, because of a straightforward rule against using the state’s limited unemployment funds for persons who lost their jobs because of their own criminal activity. “Ah,” said the ex-employees, “but we’re different. We used the drug in a ‘religious ceremony.’ So the rules that apply to everyone else shouldn’t apply to us, because God experts should get special treatment.”

The Court, in its long-winded way, decided that no, they shouldn’t get special treatment. Freedom of religion meant that a particular set of religious beliefs couldn’t be singled out for harsh treatment, but it did not mean that government was prevented from enforcing a religiously neutral law that applies to everyone equally, like a speed limit, or a law against using hallucinogenic drugs. The Court added that if religious users of particular drugs wanted to be exempt from the generally applicable rules, they could try to get the Congress to give them an exception, as in fact it later did; but this was a job for elected officials, not the courts.

To hear the howl that went up from the religious right, you would think that Stalin and Mao had taken over the American government. This was “The End Of Religion As We Know It.” So shortly after the Democrats took control of the White House in 1993, Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy teamed with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to ram through one of the most breathtaking statutes in our nation’s history. RFRA, to put it bluntly, invalidated every federal, state, and local law in the country as it applied to anything claiming to be a practice of religion, unless the government could demonstrate a “compelling interest” in its enforcement. For example, it would (probably) be ok for a government to enforce murder laws against the religious practice of human sacrifice. But if the world isn’t going to come crashing down because a couple of government employees get high in their spare time, then they can blithely ignore the laws that apply to everyone else by claiming that they are communing with God.

RFRA sailed through the Congress with virtually no debate and no opposition. With both Kennedy and Hatch assuring their parties that ingratiating the God experts was politically clever, no one paid the slightest attention to whether there was any real loss of religious freedom that needed to be restored, or what the impact of such an extraordinarily broad law might be. It didn’t take long to find out.
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Freedom took a hit last week. When a pastor wanted to express his disapproval of a set of religious beliefs with which he profoundly disagrees by burning copies of the Koran, the whole weight of the United States government came crashing down on him. Having the president and the secretary of defense on your case is bad enough. But when the official spokesman for the State Department went so far as to call his free expression “un-American,” he crossed a line we should be worried about.

Pastor Jones did not invent the idea of burning religious books. According to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his Christian predecessors did that, when they burnt the Great Library of Alexandria around 391 AD. The Great Library was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, said to house tens of thousands of scrolls. The Christian patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, became agitated at the existence of so many works of Pagan authors in his jurisdiction, so he finally decided to do something about it, by destroying the Great Library and everything in it.

The most interesting thing about the burning of the Great Library is that even though they didn’t actually do it, the Muslims were so taken with the whole concept of destroying distasteful ideas that they tried to claim the credit for themselves. In the 11^th century, official Muslim teaching about the companions of Muhammad insisted that it was Caliph Umar, the second Caliph after Muhammad on whose watch most of North Africa fell to Arab raiders, who had burned the library in 641. This could not be true, since the library was already long gone; nonetheless, the logic attributed to Umar has fueled Muslim antipathy to science ever since: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God [i.e., the Koran], they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.”

Burning a book simply to express disgust for its contents, as Pastor Jones had planned, mimicked the tactic employed by the first Protestant, Martin Luther. When Luther decided to ignore the solemn vows of obedience he had taken a few years earlier, the Pope excommunicated him. Luther then chose to show his contempt for the Pope by publicly burning not only the actual bull of excommunication, but an entire set of the canon law, then the most important body of law uniting Europe. Unlike previous burners, Luther wasn’t trying to prevent people from reading the canon law, he was simply expressing in highly dramatic form his opposition to a set of ideas he deemed offensive. Naturally, it was okay for Luther to do that, but it is not okay for Pastor Jones to do it, because Luther was a good guy, and Jones is a bad guy.

My favorite book burning story takes place in the 12^th century when a Jewish philosopher named Maimonides began publishing works in which he attempted to reconcile Jewish law with reason and with the philosophy of Aristotle.  The taboo on pork, for example, was said to promote health.  Circumcision was a means for reducing male sexual pleasure. 
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In the nick of time, America’s second most famous mad pastor decided to cancel his plans to hold a public burning of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, as a twisted commemoration of the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks. But will his cancellation hold? Says the New York Times:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — First, Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who set the world on edge with plans to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11, said Thursday that he had canceled his demonstration because he had won a promise to move the proposed Islamic center near ground zero to a new location.

Then, hours later, after learning that the project’s leaders in New York had said that no such deal existed, Mr. Jones backed away from his promise and said the bonfire of sacred texts was simply “suspended.”

It seems that Pastor Jones may be misrepresenting the circumstances of how the event came to be canceled in order to, as the Times characterizes it, save face. Or maybe he is just confused. In any case, Imam Abdul Rauf, one of the principal leaders of the Cordoba House Park51 project in New York City, said that no such deal has been brokered or even discussed.

Regardless of whether Pastor Jones is a liar or just mistaken, one thing that is clear is that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a phone call to him yesterday afternoon to ask him to cancel the event in the interest of national security. Indeed, this echoes public statements made by General Petraeus and President Obama, both of whom had spoken out against the burning. As CBS News quotes the president at a press conference today:

“We’ve got an obligation to send a very clear message this kind of behavior or threats of action put our young men and women in harm’s way…

Mr. Obama also said today that he wants to “make sure we don’t start having a bunch of folks across the country think this is a way to get attention.”

He continued, “This is a way of endangering our troops… who are sacrificing for us to keep us safe. You don’t play games with that.”

In light of the fact that the actions of Pastor Jones were inevitably going to reflect poorly on our entire nation, especially in the eyes of many people in the Muslim world, it’s not unreasonable that President Obama spoke out on this. He is free to attempt to persuade Americans to do the right thing, even if the Constitution strictly forbids governmental interference in a clear case of the exercise of free speech. (As a spokesperson for the ACLU told CBS news, in reference to the potential danger to the troops and US interests abroad, “you can’t censor speech based on hypothetical outcome.”) Therefore, I don’t agree with P.Z. Myers when he called President Obama a “damned fool” for weighing in on the controversy. Had the president not said anything, then many people around the world may have taken his silence as apathy or even consent to the idea that the U.S. is in fact at war with the entire religion of Islam and endorses this display of hatred against the religion.

But I surely couldn’t disagree with Myers when he said this:

[T]o suggest that some guy burning a book in a remote land will incite more anti-American sentiment is absurd. We’ve got drones buzzing over Iraq and Afghanistan killing people with a push of a button; we’ve got an armed force occupying those countries; we have bombed their infrastructure into rubble. We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. And now we’re to believe that their love of the West will be suddenly devastated by a video of paper burning on youtube? Get a grip, man.

This is an important piece of context that is left out of so much of the news reporting on the Florida book burning: in the event of angry and violent protests against the burning, U.S. soldiers would physically be in harm’s way precisely because, as Myers pointed out, we invaded and continue to occupy those countries. That’s why the soldiers are there. And that might have a little more to do with anti-American sentiment encountered in many countries with predominantly Muslim populations.

I certainly don’t want a single soldier to be harmed in any way by people angered by the images of burning Qurans in Florida. But freedom of speech does not have a national security exception, and frankly, I find the idea that Secretary Gates personally called Pastor Jones to ask him not to hold the event a little, as Glenn Greenwald said in his astute piece at Salon today, “creepy.” Greenwald wrote:

I find the reflexive, intense condemnation of speech on the ground that it will “harm the troops” to be quite creepy and dangerous… This “endanger-the-Troops” theme has been used to justify everything from demonizing war opposition as vaguely Treasonous to re-writing FOIA to suppress torture photos… What actually endangers the Troops by spawning anti-American hatred is what Ted Koppel described: sending them to invade other countries, dropping bombs on civilians with robots from the sky, imprisoning the invaded populations without due process and torturing them, etc. etc. Those who claim to be so concerned by the welfare of Our Troops would be well advised to oppose those policies rather than demanding that American citizens refrain from expressing their views on U.S. soil. Burning Korans is a repellent thing to do because of how bigoted and hateful it is, not because it harms our war efforts.

That final point is key when discussing why this event should be opposed. It’s a bigoted and hateful act, obviously designed to sow anti-Muslim attitudes. In a time when we should be promoting peace and mutual respect, when we should be celebrating global diversity and working towards creating a cooperative future, publicly burning books that well over a billion people hold as sacred does nothing to advance these goals. It’s a deliberate attempt to spit in the face of people who have done nothing wrong. It’s a deliberate attack on beliefs that they hold very dearly. While no governmental entity can Constitutionally prevent this act from taking place (although the local fire department, which denied the church’s request for a burn permit, could possibly levy a fine if the burning were to proceed), the rest of us should use our freedom of speech to speak out against the burning and show the rest of the world that the United States is not a country that brooks bigotry.

Even if Pastor Jones has backed down (for now), this has still been a wake-up call for America to remember that bigotry continues to thrive here, and we must do whatever we can to counteract it. By ripping the mask off of the ugly anti-Muslim sentiment that still lurks and lurches in many corners, you might even say that Pastor Jones did us a favor (of course, this isn’t the only recent controversy that has illuminated widespread anti-Muslim sentiments around America). The onus is on the rest of us to show a different face for our country to people around the world. We can’t let the Pastor Joneses among us define us as a country.

The news from Egypt this week is about what could be a new case of clerical kidnapping to save a soul. Camillia Shehata, age 24, is (or was) the wife of a priest in the Coptic Christian church named Thaddeus Samaan Rizk, and the mother of one child. In July, she disappeared from the family home in Minya, a town about 150 miles south of Cairo, and was missing for five days. Egyptian police found her, and returned her to her home.

What was she doing during the five days? Trysting with a lover? Hiding from an abusive husband? Egyptian Muslim organizations are claiming that she was undergoing a spiritual experience, in which she decided to convert from Christianity to Islam. After she was returned home, the story goes, the Coptic Pope Shenouda III was terribly upset about this, and decided to lock her away in a monastery until she returns to her senses. A dramatically different version of the story is that Camillia was kidnapped by Muslims and subjected to five days of abusive brainwashing to force her to convert to Islam, and that the Coptic authorities are now giving her some privacy to help her recover from the trauma.

One response to this would be to storm the monastery and liberate Camillia by force. The Muslims are not doing that. Instead, they are bringing lawsuits, against both Pope Shenouda III and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak (who has the power to appoint and remove Shenouda) to obtain her release. Those of us in the legal profession believe that the more lawsuits there are, the better.

If you’re looking for an answer here as to what really happened to Camillia, you can stop reading now, because you won’t find one. What you will find instead is some background on the concept of kidnapping someone in order to prevent him or her from making the terrible mistake of believing what the wrong God experts say, instead of believing what the right God experts say, as both sides here are claiming happened to Camillia.
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Stephen Hawking, the famed cosmologist and former holder of a chair once held by Isaac Newton at Cambridge University, is releasing a new book (with co-author Leonard Mlodinow) that explores the origins of the universe. Entitled The Grand Design, the book is already courting controversy with one of its central assertions: that the presence of a god is not necessary to explain the universe. In a widely quoted advance excerpt, the book states:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to … set the Universe going.

This promises to be a fascinating book! I look forward to reading it. It’s release date in the USA is set for September 7.

Already, leaders in the UK’s religious community are speaking out against Professors Hawking and Mlodinow’s assertion that a god is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe. Per CNN:

Writing in the Times, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said: “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation … The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.”

A couple of comments about that: first, I’m not so sure that I agree with Rabbi Sacks and his assertion that the Bible leaves the question of the origin of the universe alone. As a piece of evidence to the contrary, I would like to introduce Genesis 1:

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And so on. In the Biblical worldview, this is how the universe and the Earth were formed. God did it. End of story.

I don’t doubt for one minute that Chief Rabbi Sacks is well acquainted with the Book of Genesis and its rather prominent location at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible. I think he may have been alluding to something else, something rather remarkable: when it comes to the macroscopic explanation of how the universe operates, science now provides the dominant narrative, and most people, even religious leaders, accept it.

I grant that there are some big exceptions to this, but to a great degree science as it is practiced in the world today is accepted by Western religions. In the USA we still have problems with creationism, theocratic politicians, and charlatan faith healers who can cost people their lives. These conflicts continue to have serious consequences and represent a threat to religious freedom and science. But even so, many major religious denominations embrace science now rather than stand in its way. This is a monumental change for any denomination that continues to hold particular texts, such as the Bible, to be inerrant or sacred.

Nevertheless Chief Rabbi Sacks is defining religion down when he acknowledges that the Biblical creation story of Genesis is no longer necessary as a cornerstone of religious belief. There was a time when all the mysteries of the universe were perceived to be explained by the Bible. Pioneering scientists such as Galileo were recognized as threats not only because they gave information that contradicted the teachings of the church but also because they had a method of obtaining knowledge, a scientific method, that is, that circumvented the prevailing religious methods such as studying the Bible.

And when Sacks states that “religion is about interpretation,” he also reveals something very problematic, for indeed, religion is about interpretation, and as it stands now we have thousands of different religious interpretations for how the world works, many of them contradictory. Which is correct? The only method of interpretation that is self correcting and informed by the systematic work of thousands of people dedicated to advancing knowledge is science. That doesn’t mean that science always gets it right, but when it’s wrong, it is eventually corrected, and it must always be based on evidence.

Another religious critic of Hawking, as quoted in the same CNN article, argues:

“The ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing,” said Denis Alexander, director of The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

“Hawking’s god is a god-of-the-gaps used to plug present gaps in our scientific knowledge.

“Science provides us with a wonderful narrative as to how [existence] may happen, but theology addresses the meaning of the narrative,” he added.

He is defining religion down as well, as he has completely let go of the fact that religion once provided the overall explanation for the world around us. Like Rabbi Sacks, he acknowledges that science does, in fact, have most of the answers in hand already about the mysteries of the universe, and he even preempts the possibility that Professor Hawking will fill this picture in even more completely with his book, stating that “theology addresses the meaning of the narrative,” and therefore there is a continued necessity for religion in a scientific world.

But is this true? Does theology really address what science means to the rest of us? Or does it merely assign meaning? With so many contradictory and conflicting religious narratives, it’s hard to see the overall value in any single given narrative vis-a-vis science or even secular humanism, which does not layer supernaturalism onto that which is naturally observed.

I’m not arguing that Stephen Hawking has somehow made religion obsolete with this book; in my less diplomatic moments, I might make the argument that science as a whole has been working on this over the last several centuries, and this new book is another brick in that wall. But I do wish to point out that theologians such as those quoted here are stretching farther and farther to show that religion still has a unique purpose in the world today. And when they have already conceded such a substantial part of the battle, admitting already that science is capable of solving the greatest questions of how the universe operates, then is it so far-fetched to imagine that they may concede the rest someday?