]The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has launched a campaign against what it calls a concerted attack on religious liberty. Not in Pakistan or Iraq, but right here in the United States.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, USCCB’s president, complains about a “drive to neuter religion,” intended to “push religion back into the sacristy.” He’s not claiming any violent assaults on worshipers, seizure of church property, criminalization of preaching, or discrimination against believers in housing or employment. What makes him see red is the government starting to treat Catholic organizations the same way it treats everyone else. The horror!

The bishops have two main complaints: laws allowing marriages of which they disapprove, and laws requiring healthcare plans to offer specified coverage, including contraceptives.

Marriage

Catholic God experts teach that sex for purposes other than procreation is sinful, thus ruling out all forms of homosexual sex. The logical next step is to rule out marriage between members of the same sex. Fine – if the church wants to tell people what it thinks God is against and urge them not to do it, it has every right to make that case. Duly elected and appointed government officials, though, in a growing number of jurisdictions, are changing laws to allow same-sex marriage for people willing to take their chances on the afterlife. With the right to marry comes the right to be treated like you are married, and the right to the same legal status as any docile Catholic in daily life.

“Conscience violation!” shrieks the church. Why? Catholic florists and caterers, they insist, must have the right to refuse to serve weddings they disapprove of. Catholic hoteliers must have the right to refuse accommodation to same-sex couples, who might perform unspeakable acts on their Catholic sheets. Catholic adoption agencies must have the right to refuse service to same-sex couples, and Catholic schools must have the right to expel children who commit the sin of having been adopted by people whose sexual habits are disdained by the church.

Here’s a fact you didn’t know. When you think about the organization calling itself “Catholic Charities,” do you picture an outfit that receives donations from the church and individual Catholics, using them to do good in the community? I always did, until I learned that an astonishing 62% of its funding comes from various levels of government, and only 3% comes from Catholic diocese funds controlled by the bishops doing the complaining. Truth in advertising would call for a change in Catholic Charities’ name, to something like “Taxpayer Funded Program to Make the Catholic Church Look Good.” A mouthful, I’ll admit; I’m open to suggestions for an accurate name that would yield a clever acronym. In any case, when whatever-you-call-it decided to stop helping all orphans altogether in order to make its political point against adoption by gay parents, the bishops pleaded for public sympathy for their injured consciences.

The Catholic argument is identical to that used by white supremacists, religious and otherwise, who demanded the right to refuse to serve black people during the Jim Crow era. There are people who earnestly believe in the inferiority of the black race, and that it is God’s plan for the races to live separately. That’s why, they say, God put blacks on one continent and whites on another. Their belief is every bit as sincere as the Catholic belief that homosexual activity is immoral. Sincerity aside, when duly constituted governments accountable to the people take a contrary view, then the same laws need to apply to everybody the same way. That’s what my conscience says, and my conscience is as good as theirs is.

Contraceptives

The new healthcare law requires insurance plans to offer at least minimum levels of coverage of basic medical needs, thus allowing consumers to compare apples to apples when they shop for insurance. Included on the list of minimum requirements is coverage for contraceptives, used by an enormous proportion of women in their child-bearing years. This, according to the bishops, is an attack on religious liberty, because it forces people who don’t approve of the use of contraceptives to pay premiums for the benefit of those who do.

I help pay for a lot of things I don’t approve of. Ethanol subsidies. The war in Afghanistan. An embassy in the Vatican. Weapons for Israel. John Boehner’s salary. Your list is probably different, but I’m sure there a lot of things you help pay for that you don’t approve of, either. Neither of us like it, but we know we’re part of a bigger group, and it’s not possible to make everybody in the group happy all the time. So we don’t demand special treatment, or an individual reduction in our tax payments for programs we don’t like, because we know government couldn’t function if everyone paid only for the things they like.

No one is requiring any Catholic to use contraceptives. The church has every right to teach that contraceptive use is immoral and to urge people to forego it in their own personal lives. No one is trying to suppress its right to make its case. When the church demands special privileges to allow its members to avoid paying for things that affect only people other than themselves, just because God is on their side, that’s different.

The same contraceptive issue arises in HIV prevention and other international development programs. One of the simplest, cheapest ways to prevent the spread of HIV is to encourage the use of condoms – a far easier task than encouraging people not to have sex at all. So, the U.S. Agency for International Development requires distribution of condoms in HIV prevention programs run by contractors using government money, just like any other organization that promotes techniques that work over techniques that don’t. Those who don’t follow the rules don’t get contracts. The bishops cry foul, whimpering that since the Catholic aid programs are the only ones mulish enough to resist distribution of condoms, this is “anti-Catholic discrimination,” “an unprecedented intrusion by the federal government into the precincts of religion.” This is no more anti-Catholic than it is anti-Semitic for a cop to give a speeding ticket to a driver who turns out to be a Jew. There’s one set of rules, they’re based on empirical data and common sense, and they need to apply the same to everyone regardless of religion. If Catholics’ conscience forbids them from distributing condoms, then they shouldn’t do it. But they shouldn’t get the contract, either. Jesus managed nicely without ever getting any government contracts.

Civil disobedience?

Now it appears that some eminent Catholic God experts are upping the ante, suggesting that Catholic civil disobedience may be necessary. The Vatican’s Zenit news service recently published a piece by theologian E. Christian Brugger claiming that the issue really isn’t about conscience protection at all, but about the fact that the Catholic view on contraception happens to be “truth,” and the rest of the world needs to acquiesce for that reason alone. Brugger concludes that:

We need to stand up and say confidently and resolutely to Kathleen Sebelius, her thugs at HHS and her puppet-master in the White House: Your view is false and untrue; it radically violates human good and is destructive of communal integrity. Forcing persons wrongfully to cooperate in actions they judge to be evil is evil. And no president, king or emperor rightly demands others to do what is evil. We won’t do it.

I’m not quite sure what he means by “We won’t do it,” but it sounds like he’s saying that Catholic employers should refuse to offer the type of health insurance mandated by law, or perhaps that Catholics should refuse to pay the portion of their premiums calculated to fund services the hierarchy doesn’t like.

This is not the first time Catholics have made such a threat. In the mid-20^th century, the issue was schools. Catholic parents were required on pain of eternal damnation to send their children to a Catholic school, if one was available. In some dioceses, the sin of violating this rule was so grave that it could not be forgiven by an ordinary priest in the confessional, but required a special appeal to the bishop for absolution. The problem was that Catholic parents also had to pay taxes to support public schools, which they could not use because doing so would violate their religious obligation – just like they are now being asked to pay for contraceptives they are not supposed to use themselves.

A pamphlet issued by the Jesuit priest Paul L. Blakely, S.J., sounded a lot like Mr. Brugger:

Our first duty to the public school is not to pay taxes for its maintenance. … Justice cannot oblige the support of a system which we are forbidden in conscience to use, or a system which we conscientiously hold to be bad in principle and bad in its ultimate consequences.

Catholic civil disobedience sometimes turned into violence. New Brunswick, Canada, is normally thought of as a pretty sedate place. Prior to the 1870s, its school system was run entirely by Anglican and Catholic denominations, who were generally regarded as doing a terrible job. Canadians envied America’s secular public schools, and elected government officials pledged to copy them. As the conversion moved forward, the Catholic hierarchy responded with cold fury, and a grassroots effort to discourage payment of taxes to support the evil of secular education. As Brugger puts it today, “Forcing persons wrongfully to cooperate in actions they judge to be evil is evil. And no president, king or emperor rightly demands others to do what is evil. We won’t do it.” On January 15, 1875, Catholic rioters in the town of Caraquet began trashing stores belonging to the forces of evil. The government recruited a militia to restore order, and the resulting violence ended with two deaths, one on each side.

Will today’s overheated Catholic rhetoric end in violence? Of course not. It couldn’t happen here. Any more than it could happen in, say, 1875 New Brunswick.

Luis Granados

Everything is breaking right for Mitt Romney this year, as his opponents do their best to imitate Joe Louis’ old “Bum of the Month Club.” Unless the same strategy that’s failed to revive our economy over the past three years suddenly starts working, it looks like America is about to have its first Mormon president.

Which is perfectly ok. Mormonism is no more bizarre than Christianity, Islam, or Judaism – it’s just newer. I wouldn’t disqualify Romney based on his supernatural beliefs – even though his bigotry would disqualify me. “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” he proclaimed in 2007. “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” He went on to condemn humanists in bitter terms:

It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong. … We are a nation ‘under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust. We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history.

That’s still not a disqualifier; humanists get the same middle finger from Obama, who insists that religious faith is “fundamental to human progress.”

There is one big Romney religious scandal that really ought to be a disqualifier, though – unless he’s big enough to issue an apology.

Mitt Romney volunteered to serve as a Mormon missionary in France from 1969 to 1971. He excelled at the work, becoming a zone leader in Bordeaux, then assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position for any missionary. Hundreds of French were baptized into the Mormon faith during his tenure. He has never claimed to have preached and disseminated anything other than standard Mormon doctrine during this period.

During Romney’s missionary period, standard Mormon doctrine concerning race was exemplified by the Juvenile Instructor, a publication for Mormon children: “We will first inquire into the results of the approbation or displeasure of God upon a people, starting with the belief that a black skin is a mark of the curse of heaven placed upon some portions of mankind. . . We understand that when God made man in his own image and pronounced him very good, that he made him white.”

Mormonism teaches that souls exist long before the humans with which they are associated are born into the world. The official Mormon doctrine was that souls who had sinned against God before physical birth were punished by being born with dark skin. Mormon President Joseph Fielding Smith described this in 1935:

Millions of souls have come into this world cursed with a black skin and have been denied the privilege of priesthood and the fullness of the blessings of the Gospel. These are the descendants of Cain. Moreover, they have been made to feel their inferiority and have been separated from the rest of mankind from the beginning.

Bruce McConkie, the leading modern-day Mormon theologian, wrote in 1958 that “The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord.”

When the Supreme Court began ending school segregation in 1954, the Mormon church was appalled. Apostle Mark Petersen stated that:

I think the Lord segregated the Negro, and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing – what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.

Mormon-sponsored Boy Scout troops even discriminated against black Boy Scouts, because they had to hold church positions in order to become patrol leaders, and they could not do so.

Mormon doctrine was especially vehement on the evils of miscegenation. Brigham Young, the Mormon leader after Joseph Smith:

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

Won’t it be juicy to watch Romney run against the world’s most famous miscegenation product?

The relative darkness of the skin of American Indians, at least in comparison with that of the Mormons, was also related to their sins, according to the Book of Mormon that Romney tried to plaster all over France. “And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.” [I Nephi 12:23].

There was hope for the coloring of Indians who converted to the true faith, though. Spencer W. Kimball noted in 1960 that:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today . . . they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people. . . . For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. . . . The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl – sixteen – sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. . . These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.

Kimball was rewarded for his powers of observation by becoming the 12^th LDS president in 1973, five years after Romney returned from France. Not until five years later did another LDS president have a “revelation” to allow black males into its priesthood, without officially changing Mormon teaching on the “pre-birth” evil of black souls.

Mitt Romney was 19 years old when he left for France, six years after Kimball spoke, and nearly 22 when he returned. He was old enough to think, to vote, to fight, and to supervise 175 missionary subordinates. Instead of saying “I am not going to try to promote any organization with teachings that obscene or that preposterous,” he did everything in his considerable power to try to extend the reach of that organization as much as he possibly could. Not only has he never apologized for any of this, he is still bursting with pride over the entire missionary episode.

People make mistakes, especially young people who have been brainwashed by elders claiming to speak for God. Mistakes can be forgiven, but only for people who acknowledge that what they did was wrong and resolve not to do it again. So is Mitt Romney ever going to apologize, not for being Mormon, but for spreading vicious and disgusting teachings on race? Unlike Joseph Smith, I don’t claim to be able to predict the future. I do know, though, that the title of the campaign book Romney published earlier this year is No Apology.

Luis Granados

Palestine is in the news, asking the United Nations to be admitted as a full member despite the fact that it is occupied by a foreign army and that its government exists only at the sufferance of neighboring Israel. This move causes great consternation, because it threatens to disrupt a 40-year old status quo with which most people (other than Palestinians) have grown comfortable. I happen to think it’s a terrible idea, for reasons other than the ones usually given by pundits. I suggest a Plan B, though, that might actually improve the situation for everyone other than God experts.

In 1948, the institution to which Palestine seeks to be admitted adopted a profound statement called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN’s founders had just concluded a bloody war, which the combatants had been promised was going to mean something – that victory would result not just in one gang of politicians replacing another, but a truly fairer, freer world. Two years of effort went into crafting the Declaration’s 1,800 words, and the final document was approved without a single dissenting vote.

Here are some relevant excerpts from the Universal Declaration:

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people …

Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status …

Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination …

Article 13: Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

Either these words mean something, or they don’t. If they mean something, then isn’t there a problem with admitting to the club a new member state that has already announced that its first act, once it has the power to achieve it, will be the expulsion of all of the people within its borders who’ve committed the crime of being Jews?

That is precisely what the would-be Palestinian government promises to do. “After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated,” said Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador to the United States, at a press conference on September 13. “We are trying to preserve the concept of a two-state solution,” he added, “and to make the Israelis understand there will be consequences for their actions.”

Consequences indeed. When a firestorm erupted over the ambassador’s words, he issued a “clarification,” which only digs the hole deeper. Jews would still be allowed to visit independent Palestine, he insisted; all he meant was that Jews wouldn’t be allowed to live there. And, as is typical of both sides of this conflict, he defended himself by arguing that the other side was even worse:

Jerusalem right now is restricted – Palestinian Muslims and Christians cannot visit it. Christians, Muslims and Jews must be able to visit their respective sites in both countries. This wasn’t even on my mind when we [sic] asked the question – I thought he was talking about settlers staying in Palestine.

So the bad news is, half a million Jews would have to pick up and move once the Areikat team is in charge, including thousands who were born there. The good news is, they can come back and visit the folks who stole their homes.

This is hardly a novel idea. The first expulsion of Jews was effected by the Roman Empire, back in the 2^nd century. After the second major rebellion in Palestine, which cost thousands of Roman lives and massive sums of Roman money to subdue, the frustrated Emperor Hadrian ordered the permanent removal of all Jews from Jerusalem, and even renamed the city.

A few centuries later, the early Muslim Caliph Umar expelled the Jews from western Arabia, quoting Muhammad as saying “Two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs.” Looking at a map, I don’t think one would say that Palestine is on the “peninsula,” but maybe Areikat flunked geography.

In the 13^th century, it was England’s turn. King Edward I, perpetually short of funds, extracted cash from his Jewish subjects by every means he could imagine, until they had very little left. They still owned property, though; Edward solved that problem by his 1290 “Edict of Expulsion,” removing every Jew from the country. This Edict was not repealed until 1656.

King Philip the Fair of France was only mildly impressed, because Edward’s inefficiency let a lot of money slip from his grasp. Philip thought that secrecy of preparation and suddenness of action were the keys. On July 22, 1306, every Jew in France was arrested. Within weeks, they were escorted to the borders and expelled – without any of their property, which Philip retained for himself. Just as importantly, all debts owing from the king to the removed Jews were cancelled.

There weren’t that many Jews in England and France to expel, but there were lots of them in Spain. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered them all either to convert to Christianity or leave. Many of them wound up in Ottoman Turkey, whose Sultan could not believe his good fortune: “Allah has struck the king of Spain with blindness, that he should impoverish his realm to enrich mine.”

In Germany, Jews were removed from Vienna and Linz in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 and again in 1450, and from cities in Moravia in 1454. Hitler spent his first eight years in power trying to expel Jews from Germany (after relieving them of their money), before getting frustrated and deciding to murder them instead.

It doesn’t take brilliant legal analysis to figure out that the Areikat plan is as contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as you can get. So the UN either ought to tear up the Declaration and say “Just kidding,” or it ought to refuse admission to Palestine.

The drawback to leaving things at that is that the Israeli government has routinely violated the same Declaration since the day it was founded, so acting against only one of the wrongdoers would be unfair. To pick only the most recent example from hundreds over the past 60 years, just last week, the Israeli government approved a plan to kick out 30,000 non-Jewish Bedouins living in “unrecognized villages” in the Negev, to make room for 10 new Jews-only towns. “Unrecognized villages?” Orwell must be smiling somewhere. How does this square with “entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law”? Not very well. Nor does the unrelenting Israeli campaign to evict non-Jews and not allow them back in that’s been going on since 1948, in both wartime and peacetime (if you can call it peace). Nor does the vast array of Israeli government benefits provided to Jews alone.

So here’s my Plan B. If you’re going to keep Palestine out of the UN, then kick Israel out at the same time. Tell both of them to call back when they’ve squeezed all the religion out of their governments, and started treating all humans the same regardless of what they do or don’t believe about the spirit world. Absolute freedom of worship for everyone; absolute exclusion of religious advantage or disadvantage for anyone, backed by meaningful international guarantees. When that happens, what will they have to argue about?

“Well,” you might be thinking, “if the UN kicked out every member nation that violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it could meet in a much smaller building – maybe a phone booth.” And you’d be right. What makes this case special is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most dangerous flashpoint in the world, that it has cost the rest of humanity trillions of dollars, and that it is by far the likeliest location for the next nuclear weapon detonation. If ever there were an occasion for an audacious experiment of actually sticking to principles by refusal to countenance “disregard and contempt for human rights,” as it says in the Declaration’s preamble, this is it.

Luis Granados

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg resisted intense pressure last week, refusing demands to include professional God experts on the official city program commemorating the attacks of September 11. The mayor’s explanation for this conscious omission was straightforward:

It’s a civil ceremony. There are plenty of opportunities for people to have their religious ceremonies. Some people don’t want to go to a religious ceremony with another religion. And the number of different religions in this city are really quite amazing. … It isn’t that you can’t pick and choose, you shouldn’t pick and choose. If you want to have a service for your religion, you can have it in your church or in a field, or whatever.

Simple enough. The point of the ceremony was to remind the families of the victims that America still cares about them and mourns their loss, not to provide a government-sponsored platform for experts to inform us about God’s will. Nothing on the agenda was anti-religion; the program was designed in coordination with victims’ families and included readings that were “spiritual and personal in nature,” along with six different moments of silence to allow personal reflection and prayer. The only thing that was missing was the showcasing of a publicity-hungry preacher. From the reaction Bloomberg generated, though, you’d think he was Caligula, feeding Christians to the lions.

“Offensive to the families of victims.” That’s how a petition circulated by the Family Research Council described the family-designed ceremony. FRC’s president Tony Perkins also called it “A deliberate defiance and insult to people of faith across America.”

Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention said the omission was “a shameful example of anti-religious bigotry,” reflecting the “mindless secularist prejudice of the political establishment on our nation’s Eastern Seaboard.” (Should California’s secularists be offended at the slight?)

Pastor Joel C. Hunter, an Obama favorite who spoke at the 2008 Democratic convention and serves on the official White House religion advisory board, whined that “The bottom line is, this is not how we were founded. This is not who we are.” The American Family Association called it an insult to “God himself.” If God himself complained, that wasn’t reported in the press.

So what did we miss? As the mayor noted, it was perfectly ok for churches to put on their own programs, and plenty of them did. Pastor Bill Hybels of Chicago’s Willow Creek megachurch laid the blame for September 11 squarely on Satan:

Some of us … are naïve to the reality of evil. We have never come to terms with what the Bible teaches about Satan and his power and how he organizes his accomplices to wreak havoc in this world and to wreak havoc in your life.

So the reality wasn’t humans deciding to use despicable means of making a political point; it was Satan, organizing his accomplices. Since the problem is in the supernatural sphere, the solution lies there as well. “I would think of our God who the Scripture says loves people even if they’re missing from His family and I would think of God kind of wandering around again figuratively with pictures of people who are still missing and just going ‘I wish this person would come home,’ ‘I wish this person would repent,’ ‘I wish this person were in the fellowship.’” So if more people would just “come home,” join the megachurch, and put money in the basket, Satan and his accomplices would be thwarted.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan was in full agreement on the Satan angle. “It’s a war where evil is against good, where death is versus life, lies versus truth, pride against humility, selfishness against selflessness, revenge versus mercy, hate versus love, Satan versus Almighty God.” Dolan claimed, though, that “The side of the angels, not of the demons, conquered. Good Friday became Easter Sunday. And once again God has the last word.” As evidence, he noted that a child of one of September 11 victims had gone on to become a priest. I admit to being a selfish Godless pig, but if I had lost a family member on September 11, I would not appreciate an archbishop telling me that it was ok, because my tragedy had inspired someone else to join his ranks.

Anne Graham Lotz, the unordained evangelist daughter of Rev. Billy Graham, decided to cash in by writing and promoting a whole book about God and September 11. “I’ve been convinced that 9/11 was our wakeup call. If that wouldn’t wake up the church, what would it take?” Lotz isn’t buying the Satan theory. She lays the blame squarely on humanists. “Foundations of godliness have crumbled; things sacred have come unraveled. We have also embraced pagan teachings while rejecting the Bible in our schools, courthouses, and government institutions.”

An interesting theory, but hardly new. Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, famously characterized September 11 as “chickens coming home to roost” because of America’s lack of his brand of godliness. More to the point, just two days after the attack, Rev. Pat Robertson invited Rev. Jerry Falwell onto his television show, to announce that:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say “You helped this happen.”

“Well,” Robertson replied, “I totally concur.”

I have a two-word response to that, but I’ll let it slide. I think Robertson may have been miffed because the attacks detracted attention from the 10^th anniversary of the publication of his best-seller, The New World Order, which hit the stores in September, 1991. There he made the same point as Lotz and Falwell: “There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?” The main thrust of The New World Order was that a centuries-old secret cabal called the “Illuminati,” backed by Jewish Rothschild money, was behind a Satan/secular humanist plot to dominate the world.

The New World Order was written in opposition to the international coalition against the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait in 1990 – Robertson saw the coalition as a scheme hatched by the Illuminati. He emphasized the story of the Tower of Babel, conveniently located in Iraq, which God viewed with animosity: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Indeed, humans working together, using acquired scientific knowledge, can accomplish tremendous things. According to Robertson, “The danger of such a plan to future generations and the threat of this man-made order to the people of faith was so great that God determined to stop it at its inception.” So down the Tower came.

Robertson, of course, was in the front ranks of last week’s offended. “I am frankly shocked that Mayor Bloomberg thinks that he is doing the city of New York a favor by eliminating the spiritual element at an event commemorating tragedy, grief, and heroic sacrifice.”

The truth of the matter is that it was religion that brought down the Twin Towers, as surely as the Bible tells us it brought down the Tower of Babel. It was the God expert Osama bin Laden who brainwashed 19 young men into sacrificing themselves and thousands of others for the sake of his own supernatural musings, guaranteeing them a place in heaven for their efforts. Who was it who called on Americans in 2002 to “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury” – Robertson, or bin Laden? It was bin Laden; but it wouldn’t be hard to find a Christian preacher making the same point at the same time, in nearly the same words.

It would have been grotesquely inappropriate for any speaker to use the 9/11 memorial as a platform for denouncing religion in general. Or for promoting it. Mayor Bloomberg got this one right.

Luis Granados

Last week the Vatican published an extraordinary letter, of the man-bites-dog genre. The letter was from Cardinal Tauran, head of the Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and addressed simply to his “Dear Muslim friends.” Putting aside 1300 years of bitter rivalry, Cardinal Tauran called on his Muslim friends to unite with the Church to combat a common foe: you, me, and everyone else who objects to God expert domination of society.

Cardinal Tauran warned Muslims to face up to “ a reality which Christians and Muslims consider to be of prime importance … the challenges of materialism and secularisation.” Then he got down to brass tacks:

[T]he transmission of such human and moral values to the younger generations constitutes a common concern. It is our duty to help them discover that there is both good and evil, that conscience is a sanctuary to be respected, and that cultivating the spiritual dimension makes us more responsible, more supportive, more available for the common good.

Christians and Muslims are too often witnesses to the violation of the sacred, of the mistrust of which those who call themselves believers are the target. We cannot but denounce all forms of fanaticism and intimidation, the prejudices and the polemics, as well as the discrimination of which, at times, believers are the object both in the social and political life as well as in the mass media.

There are more code words here than you can shake a stick at. “Conscience is a sanctuary to be respected” is a code word for placing God experts above the law, so they can ignore rules that apply to the rest of us because God’s commandments (as communicated by them) are superior to the common sense solutions devised by mere mortals. Thus, for example, religious organizations must be free to discriminate against Jews and same-sex married couples, whether or not the law allows anyone else to do so. “Transmission of such human and moral values to the younger generations” is a code word for taxpayer financial support for the religious brainwashing of children, teaching them that people like you and me deserve to be tortured in hell forever. “Discrimination in the mass media” is a code word for the free expression of views like those you are reading now, views which I would have a hard time publishing in, say, Iran – a state of affairs leaving Cardinal Tauran green with envy.

This is not the first time Christians have reached out to Islam for cooperation against a common foe. To appreciate the magnitude of the irony, it is necessary to remember that Islam burst out of Arabia in the 7^th century largely as a rebellion against a decrepit Roman empire of the east. The Arab barbarians who swept north as far as Hungary and west as far as Spain destroyed the institutions of Christian civilization as they went, replacing them with a desert offshoot of Jewish monotheism. Not until the end of the 11^th century did Christendom strike back, with its ultimately unsuccessful Crusades to recapture Palestine. By the time the Protestant Reformation broke out, a neutral observer might have predicted that Islam, not Christianity, would ultimately dominate Europe. Indeed, one of the principal reasons why the Habsburg emperor Charles V failed to crush the upstart Martin Luther like a bug was that he was too busy defending Vienna itself from an Ottoman Muslim siege.

The Reformation itself was in many ways a rebellion of those motivated by Godliness against a Catholic Church that had grown rich, decadent, and (worst of all) secularized. Protestant reformers sought to purify Christianity against the influence of the “Whore of Babylon.” There was low-level violence between Protestants and Catholics throughout the 16^th century, but the carnage commenced in earnest in 1618, with a dispute over whether a Catholic or a Protestant would rule Bohemia.

The resulting Thirty Years War, as it became known, was the greatest man-made disaster ever visited upon Europe, far worse than World War II. Things went poorly for the Protestant side from the outset. Not only was their man displaced from Bohemia, but the Jesuit-dominated Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II decided that this would be a great opportunity to wipe out Protestantism once and for all. Ferdinand’s generals piled up victory after victory, and it looked like he was going to succeed.

Then Protestant diplomacy kicked into gear. The 17^th century version of Cardinal Tauran persuaded the Ottoman Muslim Sultan, Murad IV, that if Ferdinand prevailed against the Protestants, the balance of power might be disrupted, and perhaps he might then turn to the east. The ploy worked, at least initially. Next thing you know, Muslim armies were drawn up alongside Protestant armies to face down a common enemy, just like the coalition the Vatican is trying to array against humanism today. In fact, the Protestant-Muslim alliance was not as farfetched as one might think; theologically, both believed in predestination of the elect, as opposed to the Catholic doctrine of free will.

People who speculate on the “what-ifs” of history have a hard time with what would have happened if the Muslim-Protestant coalition had destroyed the Habsburgs. My guess is that we’d all be praying to Allah today, since the Habsburgs were the only force that ever prevented the Muslims from overrunning the rest of Europe. What actually happened back in 1626, though, was that over on the other side of his empire Murad suffered an embarrassing defeat against the Persians, and thus hastily withdrew his armies from the Protestant camp. The abandoned Protestants then surrendered without a fight, signing a treaty at Bratislava giving Ferdinand nearly everything he wanted.

Ferdinand proceeded to squander his success, largely because the Jesuits persuaded him that his brilliant military commander wasn’t religious enough, but that’s another story. Today’s story is the travesty of Christians once again trying to ally with Muslims against a common enemy. When Cardinal Tauran gushes about the common “human and moral values” of Islam and Christianity, is he talking about polygamy? The Church prattles on until it’s blue in the face about marriage being between one man and one woman, yet is now delighted to ally with those who say no, it’s between one man and four women. Is he talking about genital mutilation? Al-Azhar, the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican, says it’s a critical part of Islam; when the Cardinal urges the rights of conscience to defy laws of the state, does he mean the anti-mutilation laws as well?

Is he talking about evolution? The Catholic Church, unlike many Protestants, today acknowledges the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. Islam most emphatically does not. Since this is all about cynical politics rather than moral principles, would the Church be willing to throw evolution over the side in order to cement a more perfect union against humanism with its Muslim allies?

For your sake and mine, let’s hope this latest Christian-Muslim joint venture turns out as poorly as the one back in 1626.

Luis Granados

Do you pay too much in taxes? Sure you do. Here’s a terrific way you can save a bundle, that’s perfectly legal.

First, figure out how much you pay in total expenses for housing – rent, mortgage, etc. Say it’s $20,000 a year, to pick a round number. Then, go to your employer and say “Instead of giving me $20,000 in something you call ‘salary,’ give me the same $20,000 in something you call a ‘housing allowance.’ That way, I won’t have to pay any taxes on that $20,000, which will save me many thousands of dollars a year!”

I know what you’re thinking: that’s too easy. The government would never let you get away with a scam like that, because it would say that being paid $20,000 of “housing allowance” is exactly the same as being paid $20,000 of “salary” – which it is. But the law is right there, in Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code. There’s only one catch: you have to be a “minister of the gospel”:

Internal Revenue Code Section 107. Rental value of parsonages

In the case of a minister of the gospel, gross income does not include –

(1) the rental value of a home furnished to him as part of his compensation; or

(2) the rental allowance paid to him as part of his compensation, to the extent used by him to rent or provide a home.

Here’s my first question: Why can’t rabbis get this? Or imams? Or Buddhist monks? Last time I checked, none of these guys had anything to do with the “gospel,” which is universally defined as the first four books of the New Testament. I guess this is what the fundamentalists are talking about when say America is a “Christian nation.”

Here’s my next question: Once I get ordained, can I get this boondoggle for more than one home? That’s an important issue, because these days with government promoting religion at every turn lots of God experts are making lots of money, and have homes all over the place. Recently the Tax Court came down with a definitive ruling: the sky’s the limit, and “ministers of the gospel” can get tax-free housing allowances for as many mansions as they can con their flocks into paying for. After all, reasoned the learned judges, when the tax code talks about exemptions for a “child” it allows the same exemption for multiple children; so when it allows an exemption for a “home,” it must mean multiple “homes.” The millions of Americans whose one and only home was lost through foreclosure in the past few years are free to go to church and be comforted by a God expert who has lots of homes, all provided tax-free.

The case is fascinating because of the taxpayer who was its subject. Phil Driscoll is a gifted trumpeter, who played with artists like Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, and Blood, Sweat & Tears in the 1970s and won a Grammy in 1984. Government taxes the hell out of entertainers, though, as the Beatles so eloquently described. [Do yourself a favor and clink on the link.] So Driscoll gravitated toward God, using his “Mighty Horn Ministries” not only to rake in bucks from believers but to do it in a way that supported a lavish lifestyle, all tax free. When he wasn’t flying his church airplane, he was driving his church Porsche, to and from his church homes at lake resorts. Unfortunately, he got a little carried away with the idea of following God’s law rather than man’s, and wound up getting convicted of conspiracy and tax evasion in 2006, and sentenced to a year in federal prison. (I’m not certain whether he tried to exclude the fair rental value of his cell from his income tax for that year.) When he got out, he still had all those homes, and our divinely inspired Tax Court now says he doesn’t have to pay tax on the “allowance” he receives for any of them.

Here’s my next question: Isn’t there a lot more than rental value involved in maintaining a home? “Minister of the gospel” Rick Warren, President Obama’s favorite pastor, knows there are lots of other costs, too. So a few years back he started excluding from his tax return items like insurance, repairs, utilities, new furniture, even his gardeners – gotta have gardeners, right? Not because he needed the money, mind you, but on behalf of all those other poorer pastors out there who couldn’t keep their heads above water if they had to pay taxes on the value of their own church-provided gardeners.

Rev. Warren won his case in Tax Court, jut like trumpeter Driscoll did. Then the IRS appealed to the Ninth Circuit, where a funny thing happened. IRS had no intention of questioning the constitutionality of Section 107, because that would step on way too many toes, and bring down the wrath of organized religion on the administration (at that time, headed by Bill Clinton). But the bad sports at the Ninth Circuit raised the constitutionality question on their own, as they have the power to do, and ordered both parties to write briefs on the issue. What’s more, since they (correctly) expected both parties to write briefs saying there was nothing at all wrong with Section 107, they appointed their own independent expert, a Southern Cal law professor, to prepare his own report on the issue. His conclusion: of course it’s unconstitutional! Slam dunk.

“Aaaack!” This was the official response of the IRS, by this point under control of the Bush administration. It was too late to withdraw the appeal, and they couldn’t stand by and let all those God experts start paying taxes the same way you and I do. So they went to Congress, where there is always tremendous bipartisan support for every penny doled out to politically influential clergy. With lightning speed, a law was enacted in 2002 letting Rev. Warren keep every penny of his prior tax-exempt income while clarifying that in the future only the “fair rental value” of the home (now “homes”) is tax-free. This took the case out of the hands of the court, and everyone (other than the rest of America’s taxpayers) breathed a sigh of relief.

The general counsel of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention tells us that for his 46,000 churches, “the housing allowance is critically important for making ends meet – it is not a luxury.” Besides, God experts provide an important service to their communities, so they deserve preferential treatment. That is a terrific argument. Let’s see: who else provides important services to their communities? Doctors? Yep. Nurses? Check. Teachers? Firefighters? Farmers? My personal vote would be for preferential tax treatment for plumbers, who solve more critical real-world problems every day than any black-robed charlatans ever have.

Rev. Warren still isn’t satisfied, though. Just a month ago he was in high dudgeon again, whining that “HALF of America pays NO taxes. Zero. So they’re happy for tax rates to be raised on the other half that DOES pay taxes.” I’m guessing he counts himself among the half that does pay taxes. I’m also guessing that his accuracy on the facts of what is happening in America today is about the same as his accuracy on the facts of what happened in Palestine 2000 years ago. Half of Americans don’t pay Social Security tax, Medicare tax, telephone tax, or tax on their beer? How can I get into that half?

Like clockwork, on August 11 the news agencies clicked on their coverage of the 10^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. What they’re skipping over, though, is the 10^th anniversary of an event that tells us far more about what’s truly wrong with Islam than what happened on September 11.

It is true, as Islam’s defenders maintain, that nothing in the Koran or the traditions of Muhammad sanctions the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, especially those Muslim civilians who died in the World Trade Center. There are concepts of holy war as part of a sustained campaign to spread Muslim rule over specific locations, but there is nothing to recommend killing thousands of innocent people outside the context of territorial conquest just to make a political point. This isn’t to say that religion can’t be blamed for the massacre; there are varieties of thought under the Islamic umbrella, some of them more violence-prone than others, and nearly all of them elevate doing the will of God (once you decide what that is) above mere laws designed by humans. Still, it is fair to conclude that the attacks fell outside the parameters of conventional, mainstream Islam.

Conventional, mainstream Islam, though, does quite explicitly provide for a death penalty for blasphemy. Muhammad himself authorized the execution of anyone “who reverts from Islam and leaves the Muslims.” Clearly this covers the offense of apostasy, i.e., deciding not to be a Muslim anymore. But Sharia experts over the centuries have concluded that the line between outright apostasy and blasphemy, normally defined as irreverent words or behavior, is too fuzzy to worry about, and thus in many jurisdictions extended Muhammad’s death penalty to blasphemy as well.

That’s certainly the view of the God experts who took over Pakistan in the late 1970s. Section 295 of the Pakistan Penal Code was amended to state that:

Whoever by words, either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.

Younus Shaikh was a medical doctor, teaching at a university in Islamabad. He had spent many years working in the United Kingdom, but returned home to give what he could to people who needed it most. He brought back with him UK Enlightenment ideas. After his return he founded a group fittingly called “Enlightenment,” affiliated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), the international umbrella group to which the American Humanist Association belongs. As Dr. Shaikh put it, “One of my reasons for returning to Pakistan was to campaign for Human Rights and civil liberties in Pakistan: to work for the Pakistan-India peace movement, to struggle for liberalism, secularism and humanism, and to counter the forces of religious extremism and fundamentalism.”

He was particularly interested in urging a peaceful solution to the troubles between India and Pakistan, especially after the Kargil War of 1999 that had both countries brandishing their newly-minted nuclear weapons. Even aside from the threat of nuclear war, Dr. Shaikh knew that from the first day of its existence, Pakistan had devoted a staggering proportion of its government spending to the military – as much as 80% – while shortchanging critical needs like medical care.

In a meeting of the South Asia Union in October, 2000, Dr. Shaikh expressed the shocking view that the 50-year old conflict between India and Pakistan should end, that both sides should start treating the de facto Kashmiri border like the real border, and that if Pakistan kept supporting terrorists inside India then perhaps the Indians might start doing the same thing inside Pakistan. Apparently, a military intelligence officer was in the audience, who threatened to “crush the heads” of people who thought like that.

Next thing you know, Dr. Shaikh is fired from his job, then thrown in jail. Not for being a peacenik, which is not a crime in Pakistan, but for blasphemy, which is. Since nothing he had said about the conflict with India was blasphemous, it became necessary to invent something. Thus, a student was found to allege that Dr. Shaikh had mentioned in class that Muhammad was not a Muslim before his chats with God in the cave, and that he probably didn’t even shave his armpits before then, since that was not a custom of his tribe. Dr. Shaikh was confined without bail for nine months; then, on August 18, 2001, he was tried before a panel of God experts, convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to death (plus a fine of 100,000 rupees, so his family would suffer as well).

What’s puzzling is why they didn’t invent something a little juicier. If I were trying to frame someone for blasphemy, I’d have him calling Muhammad a liar, or a pervert, or a commie. Hairy armpits would be pretty far down on the list; I guess I’m just not cut out for this sort of thing.

Pending appeal, Dr. Shaikh was held in solitary confinement in a filthy, tiny death cell, without access to books, newspapers, exercise, medication, or treatment for his worsening diabetes. His first appeal, before two mullahs, resulted in a split decision, which got him nowhere. On his subsequent appeal to the High Court, he was unable to find a lawyer willing to buck the establishment, so he represented himself, with the aid of law books smuggled into his cell. He chose not to attack the stupidity or inhumanity of the blasphemy statute, as an ambitious lawyer might have, but instead relied on a simpler “I didn’t do it” strategy. In fact, the school schedule showed that he wasn’t even teaching a class at the time the crime was supposed to have been committed.

Showing some courage, the High Court agreed that there was no evidence against Dr. Shaikh, and reversed his conviction. So they all lived happily ever after. Not in Pakistan, though. Dr. Shaikh soon realized that his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel in a land where God experts don’t like being shown up by smartasses, and have plenty of power to do something about it. So he took his family and decamped for Switzerland, a civilized country.

Dr. Shaikh’s case is far from an isolated instance. It is Exhibit A for why President Obama was so wrong to go to al-Azhar University in 2009 and proclaim that: “America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” Tell that to Dr. Shaikh. Terrorist bombing may not be a central principle of Islam, but blasphemy law undoubtedly is, as Obama could have confirmed with his al-Azhar hosts. So is the symbiotic relationship between God experts and the state, which America has resisted throughout its history but which is rearing its ugly head again, thanks in no small part to Barack Obama’s political ambition. America and Islam had better be in competition – and we had better win.

Luis Granados

You remember Terry Jones, right? He’s the pastor who found his 15 minutes of fame by threatening to burn the Koran, backing down when the United States government called him “un-American” for expressing politically incorrect ideas, then pulling off a sneak incineration a few months later when no one was looking. If you followed the story closely, you will also remember the people who were killed when Muslims rioted about the mere thought-crime of prospective scripture burning, and the somewhat more rational response of the Pakistani Muslim who retaliated by destroying a Christian Bible.

Now another Bible has been burned, or at least parts of one. In a man-bites-dog twist, this one was torched by a Christian minister, Rev. Geraint ap Iorwerth of St Peter ad Vincula Church in Pennal, Wales. It seems Rev. ap Iorwerth is a true expert on what God really said, and thus decided to burn “all the nasty bits” that misrepresented what he knows God is really like. Presumably, he’s referring to the parts of the Old Testament where God endorses genocide and slavery. Or maybe he burnt the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus insists that every “jot and tittle” of the Jewish law shall remain in force until the end of time, specifically including animal sacrifice at the Temple, while declaring it a sin for anyone to marry a divorced woman. I can’t tell you exactly what he burnt, because the article doesn’t say. Besides, he’s the one who can read God’s mind, not me. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Last month, a national convention of the United Church of Christ voted to delete a reference to belief in the “Heavenly Father” from its constitutional definition of a local church. Instead of belief in a male God who produced offspring, local churches now need only express belief in a “triune God.”

This change in the direction of political correctness is less than it first appears. The concept of “triune God,” in every modern flavor of Christianity, involves a deity known as “God the Father,” generally pictured with a long white beard, who is said to have fathered out of wedlock “God the Son,” even though God the Son is said to have existed as long as God the Father has. It gets terribly confusing, and can only be ultimately sorted out by “It’s a mystery.” What’s clear is that if they’re keeping “triune God,” then they’re keeping a male God, or at least a God who is two parts out of three male – while at the same time, shamelessly making headlines about being more gender-neutral. This is not a mystery; it’s a shell game.

Pretending to be hip has not served the United Church of Christ well in recent decades. Its membership has declined by nearly 50% since the 1960s. One of its biggest recent defections was the Obama family, who jumped ship in 2008 when UCC pastor Jeremiah Wright went from being a political plus to a political minus.

A question more interesting than the future of this fading denomination is “How did we get a male God in the first place?” If some unseen force created and guides the universe, why does it have to be thought of as either male or female? In fact, how can it logically be characterized as male, unless there is a female deity to go along with it? There can be no “left” without a “right.”

Earlier ages solved this problem by having multiple Gods. Even the Jews gave Yahweh a Goddess wife, named Asherah. Inscriptions to “Yahweh and his Asherah” have been found at Israeli archeological sites, and the Jewish king Manasseh installed a statue of Asherah in the Jerusalem temple.

In fact, according to feminist historian Barbara Walker, in many Pagan societies the feminine Gods were more important than the masculine Gods. They were revered as the mother who infuses all creation with the vital blood of life. The Islamic name for God today bears a striking resemblance to that of the Arabian lunar Goddess, Al-Lat, who was worshipped at the Kaaba in Mecca, and whose crescent symbol appears today on Islamic flags. Pre-Christian forms of what the UCC now calls the “triune God” involved three female deities, in places as diverse as India, Ireland, Italy, and Mexico, where “three divine sisters” gave birth to the savior God Quetzalcoatl. In some earlier forms of the trinity among Arabian Christians, the Holy Ghost was Mary rather than a bird, thus neatly paralleling the Egyptian nuclear family divine trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

That trinity variant never caught on, but throughout Christian history there has been a tension between God experts who sought to elevate Mary to near-divine status and those who sought to pull her back down again. The 8^th century Patriarch of Constantinople taught that God obeys Mary “through and in all things, as his true mother.” This view was echoed by the 18^th century theologian who wrote that “At the command of Mary all obey, even God.” A 14^th century Franciscan taught that

When we have offended Christ, we should go first to the Queen of Heaven and offer her … prayers, fasting, vigils, and alms; then she, like a mother, will come between thee and Christ, the father who wishes to beat us, and she will throw the cloak of mercy between the rod of punishment and us, and soften the king’s anger against us.

Pope Pius XII himself proclaimed in 1950 that Mary was the only person other than Jesus who was born without the stain of original sin, and was “assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory.” Yet his successor Pope John XXIII, who had the power to read Mary’s mind, warned that: “The Madonna is not pleased when she is put above her Son.” The Arabian Christians who put Mary in the trinity were persecuted as heretics, and the 13^th century Pope Nicholas III ordered a friar to burn with his own hands a tract he had written that went too far in expressing devotion to Mary.

Mary’s doing pretty well today, though. There’s a major movement within the Catholic Church to elevate her to the status of “Co-redemptrix,” which would seem to put her right next to Jesus. I’m not sure what she did to deserve that other than to have a son, as billions of other non-Goddesses have done. Anyway, it’s now officially ok to refer to Mary as “Co-redemptrix,” and petitions and conferences of God experts are urging the Pope to go even further and make that status an official “dogma” of the Church, non-belief in which will result in excommunication and eternal hellfire.

The folks who are best positioned to capitalize on a feminist trend in godliness, though, are our friends the Mormons. Unlike the Catholics, who feel somewhat constrained in making sudden changes by the burden of appearing consistent with 2,000 years of precedent, the Mormons haven’t the slightest compunction about turning on a theological dime whenever it suits their political purposes. They did that on polygamy in 1890 (sort of), and again in 1978 on the in-born evil of black people (sort of). Better yet, they already have a Goddess – a “Heavenly Mother,” no less – backstage and ready to make her debut at the propitious moment.

Mormon theology teaches that there are millions of male Gods in the universe, each one associated with a particular star or planet, who have a physical body just like earthlings. A main function of each of them is to father new souls by having sex, in the normal physical manner. That requires, of course, the involvement of a female deity, at a minimum in “Lie back and think of England” mode. In fact, such a personage exists in Mormon theology – there’s even a hymn about her, written by one of Joseph Smith’s dozens of widows:

In the heavens are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare.
Truth is reason: truth eternal
tells me I’ve a mother there.

The men who ran the Church, though, took as dim a view of Goddess worship as did the Catholics who shut Mary out of the Trinity. Early apostle George Q. Cannon, sometimes called “the Mormon Richelieu,” cautioned that “To worship her would diminish from the worship of heavenly father.” Gordon Hinckley, Mormon President from 1995 to 2008, added that Jesus himself commanded prayer to “Our Father,” not to “our Mother.” A professor at Brigham Young University who suggested praying to Heavenly Mother was fired for her efforts.

The real problem here is that those who earn a living being God’s mouthpieces know that their paying customers subconsciously see them as God, to a small but significant extent. That’s certainly how the Catholics position their Pope, and how the Mormons position their President. Diluting the maleness of God distorts that picture. Secularism is going to have to expand a lot further than it already has before these guys get desperate enough to copy this particular page out of the Pagan playbook.

Luis Granados

In the debate on caste between the Untouchable Ambedkar and the Hindu God expert Mohandas Gandhi 75 years ago, Ambedkar reminded readers what caste distinction meant in practice:

The Untouchable was required to carry, strung from his waist, a broom to sweep away from behind the dust he treaded on lest a Hindu walking on the same should be polluted. In Poona, the untouchable was required to carry an earthen pot, hung in his neck wherever he went, for holding his spit lest his spit falling on earth should pollute a Hindu who might unknowingly happen to tread on it.

Gandhi’s reply did not belittle the degradation of the Untouchables, but did attempt to shift the blame away from the Hindu religion. Ambedkar had cited extensive passages in the Hindu sacred scriptures mandating the separation of Indians by caste. Since he couldn’t dispute their plain meaning, Gandhi simply asserted that these particular scriptures didn’t count: “The Smritis for instance contain much that can never be accepted as the Word of God. Thus many of the texts that Dr. Ambedkar quotes from the Smritis cannot be accepted as authentic.”

Thus, following in the footsteps of Christian God experts who pick and choose which Bible passages are divine and which are not, based on their own personal preferences, Gandhi elevated himself to God’s level by sorting out the true God commands from the fakes. He also took pains to shield against the danger that a scholar might establish that the oldest and most authentic parts of the scriptures were those that contained the most objectionable parts:

Who is the best interpreter ? Not learned men surely. Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.

Thus it is the whims of “sages and saints” we must listen to, and not the actual words of the allegedly sacred texts. Gandhi’s particular whim was that “Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” Then, having admitted that caste was harmful, he proceeded to defend it anyway.

The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful, and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahmin – spiritual teacher – and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God.

What Gandhi called “the law of Varna” was the essence of caste: that we have a duty to be locked within the same life our ancestors had. Otherwise, the whole law of karma – rebirth in a particular caste based on how good a past life you had led – wouldn’t work right.

What Gandhi called a “scavenger” was an Untouchable who was required to live on the undigested corn kernels he picked out of cow manure. But since that calling was equal in the eyes of God to that of a powerful Brahmin, that made everything ok.

Ambedkar then published a rebuttal to Gandhi’s response in which he pointed out that Gandhi himself was born into the “Bania” caste of grocers and traders. Why, he asked, didn’t the “law of Varna” apply to him? Gandhi never sold so much as a carrot, but instead waltzed about like a wannabe Brahmin, going to law school and lecturing others on what God did and did not want them to do. Gandhi’s case is a perfect example of the economic lunacy of caste. It is hard to picture Gandhi surviving as a grocer without going bankrupt; yet his brilliant organizational and communication skills made him a natural for the profession he entered. In all the millions of words Gandhi wrote and spoke over his career, I am not aware of any instance when he offered an explanation of this laughable hypocrisy.

For all his sanctimony, Gandhi’s true feelings about the Untouchables may have been revealed when he criticized Christian missionaries for trying to share the Gospel with them: “Would you preach the gospel to a cow? Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in understanding … they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.” In the midst of Gandhi’s “Be kind to Untouchables” campaign, a bill was introduced in the Indian parliament to allow Untouchables to enter Hindu temples. Gandhi had vigorously opposed this idea a few years earlier. He now gave it lip service, but not enough to move even his own Congress party, so it failed.

Ambedkar made good on this threat to abandon Hinduism in 1935. The question became, where would he land? The most politically significant move he could have made would have been to Islam, which was already a powerful and militant minority. Islam also preached, and in many countries practiced, the equality of all people before God. But Ambedkar despised the rigidity of Islam, especially its shabby treatment of women. He also knew that Muslims had ruled India for centuries before the British arrived, never lifting a finger toward the abolition of the caste system. Besides, as an Indian nationalist, he much preferred to adopt a religion that arose in India, which is also why he never gave Christianity a second thought.

Thus he was toyed at length with Sikhism, an Indian amalgam of Hinduism and Islam, that played a critical role in the Indian balance of political power. Sikhs, though, insisted that men wear beards, a practice that Ambedkar didn’t want to follow himself, and didn’t think he could sell to other Untouchable men. Besides, Gandhi kept insisting that Sikhs were actually just a subcategory of Hindus. Even though the Sikh leaders vigorously disagreed, Ambedkar wanted to get as far away from Gandhi as he could.

Some historians argue that what Ambedkar really wanted was not to leave Hinduism at all, but to use the constant threat that he might do so and take millions of Untouchables with him as a political club to bring about true reform inside Hinduism. This may explain why he took 20 years to make up his mind. Ultimately, he settled on Buddhism, which satisfied his requirement for a religion of Indian origin. At a ceremony in October, 1956, Ambedkar and 500,000 other Untouchables formally converted to Buddhism. The mass abandonment of Hinduism would have been even greater had not Ambedkar died in his sleep two months later.

What seems to have appealed to Ambedkar is that Buddhism is the most flexible and diverse of the major world religions. There is variety within Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, but not as much as within Buddhism. At one extreme is the “Imperial Way” Buddhism of the Japanese military dictatorship, and at the other a gentle philosophy that barely qualifies as a “religion” at all. Ambedkar chose that latter extreme; as one of his admirers put it:

Buddhism does not believe in revelation; does not depend on miracles; does not lay emphasis on mystic or metaphysical abstractions; does not hold out a promise of heaven; does not believe in coercion. It stands for equality and unity. It has no rituals, no ceremonies, no priests with hereditary rights, no glorification ceremonies, no Shankracharya to dogmatize. In place of fear of God, there is morality. It is based on purity of thought, deed and action, compassion and love, self-respect and self-help.

Re-read that paragraph, replacing the word “Buddhism” with the word “humanism.” Reads pretty well, doesn’t it? So why didn’t Ambedkar go one step further, and stand by his original prescription that “You must destroy the Religion”? The best explanation I can come up with is simply that everyone makes mistakes.