Hitler’s 1919 letter urging “removal” of Jews from Germany, an original copy of which was unveiled last week by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, launched his rise to political prominence in Germany. His progress was monitored nervously by Jews, labor unions, and lovers of freedom throughout the West. When he won the chancellorship in 1933, movements were launched in the United States and elsewhere for a boycott of German goods. The idea was to mobilize international pressure either to soften his threatened actions or to force him from power – exactly as international boycotts helped crush South African apartheid 50 years later.

Not everyone supported the boycott, though. In fact, many Zionist Jews not only actively opposed it, but welcomed Hitler’s victory, because it would accelerate the removal of Jews from Germany to Palestine – and teach them a lesson. The Zionist newspaper Hapoel Hatsair described Nazi persecution of the Jews as God’s “punishment” for having tried to integrate into German society instead of leaving for Palestine while it was still possible to do so.

The Zionist Federation of Germany welcomed the new Führer with a warm address:

Zionism recognized decades ago that as a result of the assimilationist trend, symptoms of deterioration were bound to appear, which it seeks to overcome by carrying out its challenge to transform Jewish life completely … Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life.

In Palestine, the Zionist labor magazine Davar affirmed that:

However, even if we suppose a return to the status existing before the Hitler revolution to be within the realm of political possibility, even then the Jewish democrat, liberal, socialist, assimilationist may perhaps be satisfied with his reinstatement in equal rights, but a Zionist cannot rest content with this, since he has a special conception, since this is not the ideal of Zionism nor the altar for its sacrifices. … Now we have a new goal and no longer content ourselves with “arousing world opinion.” Our ideal is not the obtaining of rights, citizenship rights or minority rights, for the Jews of Germany, but the obtaining of a Palestine visa for them, in addition to all that is necessary for such a visa so that it, too, may not become a mere scrap of paper.

In the ultimate “politics makes strange bedfellows” arrangement, Zionists actively collaborated with Germany’s Nazis, developing a scheme called “haavara” to facilitate legal movement of German Jews and a portion of their capital to Palestine despite restrictions on currency transfer, by selling German manufactured goods in Palestine. Haavara neatly undercut the international boycott by opening new markets for Nazi products. Once goods entered Palestine, it was then a trivial matter to resell them elsewhere; one pro-boycott Jew disgustedly described Palestine as “the official scab-agent against the boycott in the Near-East.” Businessmen fought over who would have the rights to skim profits from all the money movement; the winning firm was represented in Berlin by future Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.

From 1933 through the early years of World War II, the Hitler regime favored and actively promoted Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine. Hitler cynically remarked that he’d be delighted to see the Jews leave “on luxury ships.” At one point, the Nazis even despatched future Final Solution organizer Adolf Eichmann on a mission to Palestine, to work out loose ends of the haavara scheme. Eichmann was impressed; he wrote that “Had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.” Propaganda minister Goebbels had a medal struck to celebrate the collaboration: on one side a swastika, on the other a Zionist star.

In 1938, President Roosevelt convened a meeting of the Western nations at Evian, France, to promote alternatives for Jews wishing to escape Hitler’s oppression. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion was deeply concerned, telling his colleagues that he did “not know if the conference will open the gates of other countries … But I am afraid [it] might cause tremendous harm to Eretz Israel and Zionism. … Our main task is to reduce the harm, the danger and the disaster … and the more we emphasize the terrible distress of the Jewish masses in Germany, Poland and Rumania, the more damage we shall cause.” With no public pressure from the people it was trying to help, the conference produced few concrete results, other than an easing of red tape for German Jewish emigration to the United States and an offer from the Dominican Republic to take in 100,000 refugees – which the Zionists never seriously pursued.

Shortly after Evian, the Kristallnacht pogroms exploded across Germany; Ben-Gurion worried that “the human conscience” might induce more countries to open their doors further to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: “Zionism is in danger!” While the Holocaust raged, Ben-Gurion wrote that “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.” He later blocked plans to transfer thousands of child Holocaust survivors in frail health from wretched camps for displaced persons to safe havens elsewhere in Europe, for fear that such resettlement “might weaken the struggle for free immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine.” Even the Final Solution had not altered his view from the time that Zionists opposed the boycott in the early 1930s: “The Zionist role is not to rescue the survivors in Europe, but to rescue Eretz Israel for the Jewish people.”

Despite Ben-Gurion’s intensive efforts, though, far more Jews who escaped Germany in the 1930s chose to live in the Americas rather than in Palestine. According to some Zionists, that’s because they were bad Jews. “There is something positive in their tragedy,” Menahem Ussishkin said at a meeting of the Zionist executive, “and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.”

Zionists not only talked the talk; some of them tried to walk the walk. In 1941, the Zionist “National Military Organization,” whose leadership included future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, delivered an astonishing offer to German diplomats in Vichy France:

It is often stated in the speeches and utterances of the leading statesmen of National Socialist Germany that a prerequisite of the New Order in Europe requires the radical solution of the Jewish question through evacuation (“Jew-free Europe”). The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic boundaries. … The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East. …

Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side. This offer by the NMO, covering activity in the military, political and information fields, in Palestine and, according to our determined preparations, outside Palestine, would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon. … The cooperation of the Israeli freedom movement would also be along the lines of one of the last speeches of the German Reich Chancellor, in which Herr Hitler emphasized that he would utilize every combination and coalition in order to isolate and defeat England.

The Nazis never replied. The founder of the NMO, Avraham Stern, was honored by an Israeli commemorative postage stamp in 1978.

Luis Granados

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.

In an age of PSAs and the Vagina Monologues, many of us consider ourselves informed and educated about institutionalized female violence.  “It happens over there,” we tell ourselves, pointing to remote locations on a map, barely envisioning what “it” might entail.  But some forms of violence against women are disguised as customs, some of those customs have crossed oceans to arrive here, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has created a loophole that will keep those customs alive.  Read the rest of this entry &raquo

On May 4, 1970, several thousand students gathered at midday at Kent State University in Ohio to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the presence of National Guard troops on campus. The demonstration followed several days of tension and violence on campus and in downtown Kent following President Nixon’s April 30th announcement of a major incursion into Cambodia by American and South Vietnamese troops. In the days leading up to May 4, riot police used tear gas to disperse demonstrating students, the ROTC building was burned down, and the governor of Ohio ordered Kent State to be occupied by Ohio National Guard troops.

By noon the National Guard commander had issued an order for the demonstration to disperse, and guardsmen began to use tear gas to break up the demonstrators (some of whom had been throwing stones or throwing the tear gas canisters back). Oddly, by the time the actual killings took place, many of the students thought that the main action of the afternoon was over and had started to walk to class. But about a dozen members of Troop G of the National Guard suddenly turned and fired into the crowd of student demonstrators. Many bullets met their mark; four students lost their lives, and nine more were wounded. The guardsmen later asserted that they felt threatened by a mass of protesters, and no one was ever punished or held accountable for the killing of the four unarmed students, all of whom were several hundred feet away from the guardsmen who fired.

The killings at Kent State galvanized a national student protest movement, with demonstrations and student strikes on hundreds of college campuses across the nation in the following days. And over time the public support for the war in Vietnam and Cambodia crumbled.

Today Kent State University is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the attacks. A New York Times reporter spoke to freshmen on campus, and found that many of them don’t feel a strong historical connection with what happened at their university forty years ago.

Fourteen of 15 freshmen interviewed on the campus said they did not feel any connection with the lives of the students who were protesting the United States’ invasion of Cambodia at the time.

The university requires first-year students to watch a historical video of what happened that day and the events leading to it: the violent confrontation between protesters and local police and the burning of the R.O.T.C. building near the Commons.

Freshmen attribute their lack of interest to the time span.

“Our generation doesn’t necessarily really care because it happened so long ago none of us were alive,” said Ethan Moore, a freshman majoring in nursing. “Though it definitely shouldn’t be forgotten because they were people, too.”

Of course, the opinion he expressed was not universal; another student that the reporter spoke to said that had she been there forty years ago, she would have been out there with the Kent State demonstrators. Nevertheless, I wonder if freshmen at Kent State (or at any university) can truly conceive of what it must have felt like to students and antiwar demonstrators all over the United States to know that soldiers had used live ammunition on their fellow Americans, leaving four unarmed people dead. The division between state and civil society must have felt complete and irreconcilable—at least, that’s what I always thought Neil Young meant when he sang “We’re finally on our own” in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song “Ohio.”

Forty years have passed since the day the National Guard gunned down the students at Kent State. And yet, eerie parallels exist between 2010 and 1970. Today the United States is engaged in two intractable and long-asting wars on the Asian continent. But where is the anti-war movement? While there was a mass uprising in 2003 against the war, it climaxed during the February 15, 2003, pre-war demonstrations. Ever since then, the anti-war movement has gradually but surely diminished.

Why has this happened? Journalist Chris Hedges, who recently participated in an anti-war teach-in in Washington, DC, at the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill (an event that was co-sponsored by the Humanist magazine), believes that not enough anti-war liberals in the United States are actually affected by the wars. He writes:

The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military.

In contrast to 1970, when young men were being drafted to serve in the front lines of Southeast Asia, today a very small number of Americans are being called upon to actually bear the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as Hedges points out, many of those who do serve in the military come from the economic class that has less access to power, less visibility in the media, and less access to the institutions that can be used as a springboard into wider action against the war, such as universities. The result is a diminished anti-war movement.

I would suggest, too, that fatigue and confusion have both taken their toll. By fatigue, I mean that the war in Afghanistan has lasted nearly a decade, and the war in Iraq has lasted more than twice as long as American involvement in World War II. It is difficult to keep up the energy and momentum that the anti-war movement built up in its initial days for all of those years. And by confusion, I mean that the election of President Barack Obama has engendered a lot of bewilderment on the part of those who took strong stands against the wars over the last decade. After all, President Obama spoke out forcefully against the war in Iraq when he was a state senator in Illinois and the war was just on the horizon. He received the vast majority of the anti-war vote, and he promised to bring a more peaceful presidency. Yet even as we’re told that the war in Iraq is winding down, President Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan (an action that was also, contradictorily, part of his platform as a candidate). So the anti-war movement is left with a president who does not galvanize them like President Bush did, even as he takes actions that many still consider to be belligerent.

The anti-war movement today may be smaller, but that doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. For just one example of what we could be doing, right now, to make a difference, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), an outspoken anti-war member of Congress, made the call at the Capitol Hill event for a new series of teach-ins across the country to educate people about the wars and the need for peace.

Will we heed Rep. Kucinich’s call to challenge “the deficient orthodoxy that war is inevitable”? Let us rededicate ourselves to the idea that those four students gave their lives forty years ago today for a worthy cause, the cause of peace in this world, and honor their legacy by living our lives for peace.

A French lawmaker is stirring up controversy with a new proposal to ban women in France from appearing in public with veils or other coverings over their faces:

PARIS (AP) — A top lawmaker from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative party filed legislation on Tuesday to bar Muslim women in France from appearing in public wearing veils that hide their faces.

The bill by lawmaker Jean-Francois Cope, who heads the UMP party in the National Assembly, or lower house, has sparked criticism from some of his political allies. The speaker of the lower house, Bernard Accoyer, called Cope’s move “premature.”

Cope’s proposed law follows in the footsteps of a 2004 law that bans headscarves and nearly all other religious clothing and accessories from French public schools.

Why would such a ban be warranted? The Associated Press tells us:

Only a tiny minority of Muslim women in France wear the more extreme covering — which is not required by Islam. However, Islam is the No. 2 religion in France after Roman Catholicism, and authorities worry that such dress may be a gateway to extremism. They also say it amounts to an insult to women and to France’s secular foundations.

Even as I am a strong believer in promoting secularism in civil society and a strong wall between church and state, as a matter of principle I am opposed to laws restricting individual religious expression, especially one so wide-ranging as to ban a type of religious clothing from any public display whatsoever. This is an affront to religious freedom, which must be guaranteed in any democratic society.

But let’s consider a little more what the consequences of a ban such as this would be. French law enforcement officers would be empowered (and indeed required) to enforce certain standards of dress on the streets of French cities, towns, and villages. And who would be singled out? Muslim women. Picture for a moment the image of French police stopping a Muslim woman and giving her a citation for wearing a veil, which is an item of clothing that she either is being pressured to wear by her culture, religion, and family, or wants to wear under her own volition. And for this religious and cultural expression, whether or not it reflects her own desires, she receives a fine that the Associated Press reports could amount up to €750 (US$1,070).

How do you think that would make her feel? How do you think that would make other members of the French Muslim community feel? Would they feel welcome in France? Would they feel like that had a greater role to play in French society? Or would they feel singled out due to their religion?

I’m sympathetic to the argument that face coverings are a sign of the oppression of women within Islam. I think that this is frequently the case, and anyway, face coverings are fundamentally unequal because Muslim men do not have to alter their appearance in such a way to appear in public. But banning face coverings is not a helpful response, because it does nothing to empower women. It removes a visible sign of France’s growing Muslim population from the streets (which, in my opinion, may be one of the author’s chief goals), but what about directly improving the lives of women?

You cannot empower women by instituting a law telling them what they can and cannot wear in public. To be truly empowered, Muslim women in France need access to the educational, cultural, and economic resources that give them the opportunity to flourish as women of their own respective cultures, their own religion, and as members of the greater society and culture of France.

The Washington Post, on its On Faith website, recently asked panelists representing different religious points of view to address the question, “Is torture ever justified?” The responses are by no means representative of all religious viewpoints on torture (the humanist viewpoint of which I have addressed previously), but nevertheless it was enlightening for me to read some of the different viewpoints and how these commentators feel torture and religion relate to each other.

Christian theologian and philosopher John Mark Reynolds is initially direct on the question, writing, “Torture of any human being is incompatible with the Christian faith.” I hope he’s telling that far and wide, because it appears that not everyone has received the message. However, he goes on to spend most of his short essay wondering whether or not what the United States did actually was, in fact, torture:

A general condemnation of torture does not mean that we already know that what the Bush administration did was torture. Reasonable people can disagree about exactly what torture is and some believe that what the Bush administration ordered in prosecuting the War on Terror was not torture. They should be heard and not ignored, but so far the arguments advanced have not been persuasive.

He does believe, though, that John McCain’s condemnation of the techniques that were employed by the United States during the Bush years indicates that they were probably unacceptable. I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding how anyone can equivocate at all on whether or not pouring water into someone’s lungs, slamming a person into a wall, or any of the other methods that were approved constitute torture or not.

Another Christian theologian, Gabriel Salguero of the Princeton Theological Seminary, also condemns torture and says it is incompatible with Christianity. He points out that great people in history have chosen not to meet the violence of their adversaries with equal violence:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr never used violence although violence was constantly used against him, his home, and the many people in the Civil Rights movement. Did the millions of people who partook in the non-violent marches not understand terror? Nonsense. They chose a different way…Did Jesus not understand the way of terror when he was being crucified on an imperial cross? Nonsense. He chose a different way.

I find it very compelling that, in history, great figures and brave groups of people have stood up to injustice and tyranny without resorting to the techniques of their oppressors. They have held the moral high ground without conceding the battle. I wish that the USA had taken this approach in the face of terrorism rather than quickly employing torture and secret prisons, disregarding the rule of law as if it were an impediment to safeguarding our nation in the face of danger, rather than central to the task.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield wants everyone, on all sides of the issue, to examine it a little more closely:

It’s easy to say that torture is wrong and that whatever tradition we hold dear forbids it. I wish it were that simple. Imagine for a moment that you knew the life of someone you loved; your child for example, would be saved by information extracted by torture. Are you really certain that you might not suddenly find some justification which allowed it “just this once”? Anyone answering “no” too quickly is either kidding themselves or doesn’t know the meaning of loving someone close to themselves.

Although this sounds like he is defending torture, he quickly states that he isn’t; rather, he says:

I am more concerned about the endless moralizing around tough issues which makes them seem too easy too fast. In fact, that’s the style of argument which typifies those who defend the use of torture.

Their arguments pose the question about saving a life as if we could know with certainty beforehand that the torture for which they advocate would save a life in immediate danger. I wish it were that simple, but it rarely, if ever, is.

It’s true that the circumstances under which the Bush administration committed torture were ambiguous, something which the pro-torture side seems loathe to admit. No matter how many times the torture advocates talk about it, we have yet to encounter a so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario where the deactivation code to the bomb needs to be tortured out of some single suspect in custody before an entire city explodes (or something along those lines). Television shows like 24 aside, under the Bush administration torture was committed with much more dubious and certainly less noble goals than extracting the location of a bomb located under the city.

Rabbi Hirschfield’s point about these over-simplistic arguments being used to justify torture is well taken. Nevertheless, I feel that he is trying a little too hard to be balanced here with his consideration for why someone might support torture. Surely, if the life of my child was at stake, I would probably justify any number of horrible things to be done if it might save my child’s life; this hypothetical situation, however, doesn’t add very much to a discussion on human rights. It may provide some perspective on how we react to the idea of torture, but the actual laws that codify the preservation of human rights must be written under more level-headed circumstances than how you would feel if your child’s life was immediately at risk.

The preponderance of opinion from the different religious commentators on On Faith is that torture is wrong. But beyond that point is less agreement over what actually constitutes torture and how the United States should move forward from this point. This level of disagreement is indicative of why we need to rely on secular documents to guide how we move forward on torture. For all the room for discussion in the arena of religion, US and international law is not at all ambiguous on this subject.

Humanists are often accused of practicing cultural relativism because our morality isn’t grounded in either an ancient sacred text or an omnipotent and watchful god. This is untrue. Humanists recognize that ethical values originate in our experiences as human beings. And these values are, as the third version of the Humanist Manifesto states, tested against experience.

It feels a little ridiculous to me that many religious people are so insistent that an ambiguous and contradictory ancient text such as the Bible is necessary to live a good life. I don’t doubt that there may be some insight in there on the subject. But there is plenty of insight in Plato’s writings on Socrates too.

The truth is, this planet of 6.5 billion people has been patching together its ethics from a variety of sources over the centuries, and whether people recognize it or not, a lot of this comes directly from human need and experience. That most humanistic of ethical aphorisms, the Golden Rule (also known as the Ethic of Reciprocity), appears in ancient Greek philosophy and can be found in nearly every major religion. Its universality suggests that over the centuries, humans have tested it against experience and found it to be both useful and desirable.

Humanism historically has relied on the dictate that every individual human being must be treated as having “inherent worth and dignity” (a phrase also taken from the third version of the Manifesto). I read this phrase as having, on the one hand, some roots in the Golden Rule, because we would all like to be treated as having inherent worth and dignity; we would like our humane treatment of others to be reciprocated to ourselves. But treating people this way has a value in and of itself that needs no further justification. It is the recognition of the solidarity of the human species and a rejection of the very relativism humanists are often accused of. It’s like this: human beings deserve humane treatment by virtue of being human; we have no godlike powers to determine who is worthy of humane treatment and who is worthy of being treated as being less than human.

Unfortunately, the recent revelations about the depth of the Bush administration’s torture regime have been distorted through a lens of debate over whether or not the torture was actually effective at producing useful intelligence. The implication (often stated) is that if torture was effective–if any useful intelligence came out of it–then the program would be defensible, that the torture would have been worthwhile.

And people accuse humanists of practicing relativism!

International law is clear on the subject: torture is illegal. It comes down to humanist ethics–there is a way that all humans must be treated simply by virtue of being human. This is the foundation of liberal democracy. It is why the Bill of Rights and international human rights law both spend a great deal of time outlining how those accused of crimes must be treated. There is no provision that criminals (and terrorists) suddenly forfeit all of their rights as human beings because they are accused of a crime.

So debating over whether or not torture “works” is missing the point. The necessary information should have been obtained using lawful techniques of interrogation. The terrorists may behave in a brutal fashion, but isn’t that precisely why we oppose them? Is a world in which brutality is countered with brutality what we desire?

I take comfort in President Obama’s assurances that torture will not be practiced by his administration. But we can’t “move forward” (to use the president’s words) without ensuring that justice is delivered to those responsible for torture.

(Crossposted at Friendly Atheist)

When Andrew Sullivan posted this disturbing video on his blog last Tuesday with no real description, I thought it was a recent campaign. After some digging, it turns out to be a 2006 video from Answers in Genesis which is now resurfacing, perhaps in light of the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine Shooting coming up on April 20th.

Now that it’s getting attention again, it’s causing quite a stir among the nonreligious blogging community, quickly racking up over 50 comments when Hemant at Friendly Atheist posted it and 80 on Daniel Florien’s post on Unreasonable Faith. Daniel titled his post “AIG Points a Gun at Atheists”. I wasn’t sure how to take it; see what you think:

It turns out that AiG still has a page explaining it:

Every day we are inundated with evolution-based messages intended to remove the Creator from the fabric of our society, our lives, our thoughts. But if we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible can’t be trusted and life’s supposed billion-year history is one of continual death and struggle. If the Bible isn’t true, then why should we be fair and kind and love our fellow human beings, as the Bible teaches? After all, evolution relies on survival of the fittest—no matter who gets in the way.

It bears pointing out that while the history of life involves death and struggle, there’s so much more to it than that. There’s love and happiness and waffles!

So here’s where I get confused: Even if God told us how he wanted us to act, we still get to decide whether to obey. It’s often noted that if a person is choosing to act morally in an effort to stay out of hell, that’s not exactly altruistic. What I’ve heard more often is that people decide to obey because they feel gratitude and respect for God. Because of that gratitude and respect, they consider His will when deciding how to act.

Well, I feel gratitude to my friends, neighbors, and family. I respect the inherent worth of conscious, sentient life. Because of that gratitude and respect, I act in ways that take their feelings and their wellbeing into account. I don’t need an ancient book to “teach me” to be fair and kind.

The AiG page also says: “Those who feel that neither they nor their actions matter to God lose their motivation to care for the lives of others or for their own life.”

I can vouch from personal experience that they’re wrong. I suspect that most of you can, too.

Why do we care about the lives of others? There are different answers we can give: we have an evolved drive to care, we were raised to care in a social context, we get something out it. But the bottom line is that we do care. We don’t believe that our actions matter to God but we believe our actions matter to each other.

The Pope’s visit to Africa has already produced some interesting quotes for discussion, but in reading the Boston Globe today, I found other disturbing passages:

In his homily, Benedict expressed compassion for African children being kidnapped and forced to fight by rebel groups trying to carve up parts of Africa.

“God loves you, he has not forgotten you,” he said in a message to these children.

Child soldiers have been used by rebels in eastern Congo and by Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army. An estimated 3,500 children are still with armed groups in Congo alone.

Of course he hasn’t ‘forgotten’ them; the Catholic god isn’t anthropomorphized with human flaws like Zeus.  So what can we take away from the Pope’s message?  God is aware of the suffering children, loves them, and yet they are still suffering.  The more I think about it, the more I understand why the Problem of Suffering has caused theologians so much trouble over the years.

Many people act as if they believe that God intervenes in the natural world.  They credit God with countless wonderful occurrences like a medical recovery, an overwhelming emotional experience, or a hurricane sent to punish the sinful.  But anyone who believes God has ever taken action in the world must therefore believe that God chose to act in those situations.  He must choose not to act in the situations of suffering children.

The Pope seems to be telling the children: “You’re suffering intensely here in this world, but cheer up!  An entity in another world loves you!”  I suppose it’s better than when the Catholic Church did the reverse earlier this month.  A nine year-old girl was raped by her step-father and became pregnant with twins.  Carrying the pregnancy to term would have put her life in danger, so she had an abortion.  The church’s reaction to the whole thing?  Excommunicate the girl’s mother and the doctor.  It’s as if they were saying: “Your family is suffering intensely here in this world, but God is displeased with your decision.”

The church is ignoring suffering in this world – sometimes even exacerbating it, as with AIDS in Africa – because they have beliefs about another world.  I would love it if we all spent our energy focusing on this world, our opinions, and our suffering.  Thoughts about God’s opinion are distracting us.  He isn’t saving the poor and the hungry.  In his new book Losing my Religion, William Lobdell describes the reaction of a friend who came to the realization:

“It nearly drove him insane that no loving God was protecting his children.  I had the advantage of seeing too much on the religion beat.  I knew of many times when faithful Christian parents lost their children.  I hadn’t seen any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that children were safer with God watching over them.  It reminds me of a bumper sticker peddled by atheists that makes the point rather bluntly: ’20,000 children died of hunger today.  Why should God answer YOUR prayers?’”

He doesn’t.  If we stop holding mistaken beliefs about the supernatural, we can do a better job caring for this world.

“Out of sight, out of mind” goes the saying.

So many may think that because the 2009 presidential inauguration is history, a lawsuit brought by Michael Newdow, 30 other individuals, and 11 organizations to prevent the infusion of religion into the ceremony is over. Not so.

Newdow and I are now working on a brief – due February 23rd – to explain to Judge Walton why he shouldn’t dismiss the suit. There are so many reasons, including (1) the plaintiffs were in fact harmed and seek a declaration from the court that their Establishment Clause, Free Exercise Clause, and Religious Freedom Restoration Act rights were violated and (2) the unconstitutional practices (the Chief Justice adding “so help me God” to the presidential oath and the sectarian prayers in the invocation and benediction) are likely to repeated in 2013, 2017, and so forth if they aren’t enjoined by the court.

While there are a number of hurdles in this case, the inability of the judge and most Americans to recognize the “harm” caused by the religious practices at the presidential inaugural ceremony is most troubling.

In truth, this is a common human shortcoming. When things are going our way, we often fail to recognize that others may be suffering. (I’m trying to be nice by not calling it tyranny of the majority.)

The following is a description by Professor Christopher C. Lund of the harm caused by legislative prayers:

A government whose legislative prayers are acceptable to one religious group but not another makes the latter group feel unwelcome, and it ends up exerting pressure on the disfavored group to change their religious ways.

See Lund, Legislative Prayer and the Secret Costs of Religious Endorsements, page 25. This description applies equally to executive prayers (like the religious activities complained of in Newdow v. Roberts) and public school prayer cases. I encourage all Rant & Reason readers to read Professor Lund’s 56 page article for an excellent discussion of the issues.

Rather than rant on, I invite readers to express in your own words whether (and how) you felt harmed by the infusion of religion into the 2009 presidential inauguration ceremony, or not.