Student, school district reach settlement over proselytizing

The saga of Kearny high school student Matthew LaClair is over for now.

The Kearny Board of Education in New Jersey and the parents of Matthew LaClair, a 17-year-old junior at Kearny High School, settled their dispute on Tuesday night about a teacher who proselytized in class.

The settlement will include training for teachers and students about the separation of church and state and a public statement by the board praising Matthew for bringing the matter to its attention.

The training was already in the works, so mostly what happened here is the district agreed to recognize Matthew's actions as proper, not troublemaking. Which you'd think would be obvious, but bureaucracies act in reflexively self-protective ways sometimes.

So another educational kerfuffle appears to be over. Or is it? There is at least one loose end still hanging:

The settlement does not address the status of Mr. Paszkiewicz, 39, who has remained a history teacher at the high school. Mr. Paszkiewicz, who is also a Baptist youth pastor, had his classes switched in the middle of the school year so as not to have Matthew as a student.

Paszkiewicz's lawyer, commenting on the settlement, said, "there are people who think my client is the victim." In addition, it's not clear if the school's "no recording" rule remains in effect. So perhaps there's another chapter or two yet to come. But for now, common sense has prevailed.

religion, education, New Jersey, politics, midtopia

Atheist sets up post-Rapture postal system

Okay, this is both funny and practical. It's the Post-Rapture Post.

For as little as $4.99, Witter offers to deliver your letters to friends and loved ones left behind after the Rapture, when some Christians believe they will be whisked up to heaven while everyone else — the "Left Behind" of the popular book series — suffers a series of tribulations.

As Witter sees it, it will fall to the unsaved to serve as the postmen of the Apocalypse.

It's a joke, of course, but he actually provides the service -- although he has only 11 takers so far. He also gets a lot of hate mail -- which seems a bit unChristian, but is perfectly understandable from a human point of view.

(h/t: Sad-Sav)

humor, religion, politics, midtopia

Sharpton slams Mormons?

That's the gist of the YouTube snippet above, and an AP story about it.

During a debate on religion with atheist Christopher Hitchens, Sharpton said: "As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don't worry about that; that's a temporary situation."

Sharpton says he wasn't questioning Romney's faith, but was instead contrasting himself with Hitchens.

His words came to light in a New York Times blog entry that provides a little context to the remark, noting that Hitchens first referred to past Mormon support for racial segregation. So that was what Sharpton was responding to.

It still leaves open the question of who he was contrasting himself to with his "those who really believe in God" comment. The word "really" is the key: It's hard to read that as referring to anyone other than Romney and Mormons, since it wouldn't be necessary to use the word "really" when referring to atheists.

That said, I really hate controversies that revolve around careful parsing of single words, especially words spoken off the cuff at a live event. "Really" could have been verbal filler, unneeded emphasis -- the kind of lazy grammar and word patterns that differentiate spoken words from written.

Further, Sharpton's tone is jocular. So while it certainly appears to be a slam on Romney, it feels more political than religious and there's no heat to it. Arguably he's joking, like a sectarian version of "Your mama" insults.

I have little use for Al -- I consider him largely a publicity seeking bomb-thrower. So let's just agree that if he was slamming Romney's religion as somehow "inferior" to his own, he was wrong. And if he was joking, he was still wrong -- not for the joke, but for his lame excuse afterward.

Curiously, though, such a "my religion is the One True Religion" stance parrots that of many on the religious right. Which leads us to the most interesting thing about Sharpton's debate with Hitchens: Much of what he said during it could just as easily have been spoken by a conservative Christian.

Mr. Sharpton, who had listened to Mr. Hitchens’s presentation with a sober expression, offered a calm response.

“You made a very interesting analysis of how people use or misuse God, but you made no argument about God Himself,” Mr. Sharpton said. “And attacking the quote-wicked-unquote use of God does not at all address the existence of God or nonexistence of God.”...

Mr. Sharpton offered two other arguments in defense of religious belief. He argued – as he would throughout the evening – that without God, all is morally relative.

“If there is no God and if there is no supreme mechanism that governs the world, what makes right right and what makes wrong wrong?” Mr. Sharpton asked. “Why don’t we just go by whoever is the strongest in any period in history?”

He added, “On one hand, we’re going to argue God doesn’t exist; on the other hand we’re going to call people wicked. Wicked according to whom, and according to what? It would be based on whoever has power at that time.”

Further, Mr. Sharpton suggested that the marvel of human creation – including evolution – implies the existence of a divine creator.

Something tells me you won't hear many of Sharpton's detractors pointing that out.

The debate itself is far more interesting than the brouhaha over Sharpton's comment. I encourage you to give it a read. Hitchens is quite well-spoken, and while I'm not sure I would have picked Sharpton to defend the believer's side, he does well enough. If you want to listen to the whole thing, you can find the audio here.

Update: A writethru to clarify some points above, and some pointers in the audio. At around the 24:30 mark Hitchens starts discussing church actions, and around 25:00 brings up Mormonism. Sharpton starts responding at 28:10, and makes his Romney comment around 32:00.

politics, midtopia

Pocketbook Christianity

I got a really unusual letter in the mail today.

On the front it said, "Two homes are about to be blessed.... then it must go to another dear friend."

Odd, I thought. I'd never gotten a Christian chain letter before.

On the back it said: "Dear Jesus, We pray that you will bless someone in this home spiritually, physically & financially. And please dear Lord, bless the one who's hands open this letter. Make good changes in this one's life and give them the desires of their heart. We pray over and bless this letter in your holy name. Amen."

Well, of course I had to open it.

Inside was a cheap paper "prayer rug" and very specific instructions: I was to kneel on the rug, pray for what I wanted, put the rug on a Bible open to Philippians 4:19 ("And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus"), then mail the rug back to them the next morning along with a form on which I was to check off everything I wanted them to pray for me to get.

Among the choices: A new car, a better job, and a fill-in-the-blank option with the words: "Pray for God to bless me with this amount of money."

I've always been alternately amused and disgusted by the peculiar subset of Christians who follow "prosperity gospel" -- who believe that not only is it appropriate to pray for material things, but that God will actually reward them with a big-screen TV or a new car or what have you because they did so. But this was a new one for me: don't just pray for money yourself, but have an entire church pray for you, too!

As an extra bonus, the eyes of Jesus on the rug are closed, but on the eyelids are painted, very faintly, a pair of open eyes. So if you stare at the rug long enough it will appear that he opens his eyes. Apparently cheap optical illusions are evidence of divine presence.

Finally, the letter included a "sealed prophecy" for me and me alone. It was generic gobbledygook that didn't actually contain a single prophetic word.

By this time I knew I was not reading a Christian chain letter; I was reading Christian spam.

Turns out it was from a group known as Saint Matthew's Churches. While it appears to be a real church (and finally owns a church, too, having bought the former Memorial Baptist Church in Houston in 2004), it also appears to be a longstanding mail scam.

That dubious distinction hasn't stopped the founder, James Ewing, from advising various televangelists on how to scare up donations. The church uses a Tulsa lawyer, J.C. Joyce, who has represented Oral Roberts and the disgraced Robert Tilton.

Many Christian groups have condemned Ewing, and he and his ilk do not represent mainstream Christianity. But they do provide a stark example of how religion is not an absolute good. It is a tool, and as with any tool it can be abused to bad ends. Ewing's pitches debase Christianity in order to prey on the poor and the elderly. For me, it was an amusing bit of absurdity that helped color my day; but for others it has serious negative consequences.

I still haven't decided what to do with my prayer rug. I should just throw it out. But I'm tempted to do something a little more splashy than that. Problem is, it contains a picture of Jesus. And while I don't subscribe to Christianity, my gripe is with Ewing, not Christ. So some of the more obnoxious possibilities -- like using it for a dartboard -- don't seem appropriate.

Perhaps I'll ask God to smite Mr. Ewing. That ought to cause some metaphysical difficulties back at church headquarters.

scams, religion, politics, midtopia

Wow. Impressive.

This has been a big week for religious open-mindedness.

First, the Vatican decided that kids who die before they're baptized aren't necessarily doomed to an eternity in Limbo. Very big of them, I must say. I always find religions that punish the innocent to be particularly attractive, but I suppose it was time for them to finally move out of the 12th Century. And it only took them 800 years.

Okay, Limbo wasn't official church doctrine and has been informally repudiated for decades. And Limbo itself was an improvement on the thoughts of St. Augustine, who decided that such luckless kids ended up in Hell instead. But come on.

Then today, the Veterans Adminstration yielded to a lawsuit and decided Wiccan veterans could have their own symbol on their tombstones.

For nearly a decade, the department had refused to act on requests for the pentacle, without a clear reason. VA spokesman Matt Burns said that approximately 10 applications were pending from adherents of Wicca, a blend of witchcraft and nature worship that is one of the country's fastest-growing religions.

In yesterday's legal settlement, the VA agreed to grant all the pending requests within two weeks and to approve new ones on an expedited basis for 30 days. The department will also pay $225,000 to the plaintiffs for attorneys' fees.

How big of them, letting soldiers choose which religious symbol they would like to have on their own grave. I realize there have to be limits -- otherwise I'd want a pirate suit on mine, to honor the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- but it's hard to deny that Wicca fits whatever criteria you could name for a religion. So one is left with the notion that the opposition was based on simple prejudice.

In that regard, this is interesting.

The settlement stipulates, however, that the plaintiffs must not keep or disclose any documents handed over by the government during the discovery phase of the lawsuit. Lawyers familiar with the case said that some documents suggested the VA had political motives for rejecting the pentacle.

So the VA goes to discovery, then capitulates completely -- and wants the evidence kept hidden. Nah, nothing going on there.

And people wonder why majority religions are sometimes looked upon sourly by nonadherents.

religion, politics, midtopia

Gays and abortion caused Virginia Tech shootings

At least, that's what Donald Wilmon and the American Family Association are saying.

Bleh.

Hopefully the video works; it's my first attempt to embed a YouTube link.
(h/t: No More Mister Nice Blog)

Update: Wilmon has company. Rush Limbaugh said the shooter had to be a liberal, while both the American Thinker and Newt Gingrich say liberalism is to blame.

crime, religion, politics, midtopia

Moderate Muslims, Part III

In two previous posts (here and here), I've highlighted words and deeds by moderate Muslims as a favor for people who claim they don't exist.

Here's another: Author Irshad Manji, a Muslim (and lesbian) who writes about the intersection of faith and freedom. She participated in an online chat where she answered questions about Islam. Notable excerpts:

Simply put, we don't need to change Islam. That's because Islam itself contains the raw materials to be both humane and reasonable. What we need to do is change the Muslim mindset to bust out of tribalism (strict hierarchies that equating debate with division and division with crime), and recognize that Islam's own scripture, the Quran, contains 3 times as many verses calling on us to think/reflect/analyze than verses telling us what's forbidden/acceptable. In short, re-interpretation is not just permitted; it's encouraged.

Yep -- an Islamic Reformation.

As to the imams, why are they the arbiters? I wish that non-Muslims would stop investing these guys with the authority to approve or disapprove of other Muslims. They're not the only creatures who count. Especially before the eyes of God.

This, too, goes back to tribalism, not Islam itself.

The Quran vigorously defends religious pluralism, including those who convert or choose not to believe AT ALL. When some Muslims wage war on converts - as many of many mullahs in Afghanistan recenty did - they are following a SELECTED and REPORTED saying of the Prophet Muhammad (known as the hadiths). Problem is, the Prophet reportedly said many things that contradict each other.

Which is why Islam needs the equivalent of a Council of Trent or the like, where they separate the "true" Hadiths from the suspect ones. Or else the Hadiths need to be demoted in importance.

The Quran contains plenty of pro-women passages. One could argue that women have many more rights according to the Quran than according to any other scripture before it. But the reason for such anti-women interpretations is tribal culture; in the case of Islam, ARAB tribal culture. (I know that's politically incorrect to point out in the age of multiculturalism; so be it.) In particular, the tribal tradition of honor requires women to give up their individuality in order to maintain the reputation of the men in their lives. This turns women into communal property. The way in which Islam has been propagated for the past several hundred years, the code of honor has become enmeshed in religous practices. Bottom line: Although this problem didn't come FROM Islam, it has become a problem FOR Islam.

From the point of view of the nonMuslim world, we need to learn to separate the Quran from the Hadiths, and Islam from the tribal cultures that dominate its membership in the public consciousness. Only then can we come up with realistic strategies to engage moderate Muslims, isolate the extremists and help the Islamic Reformation along.

religion, Islam, politics, midtopia

MAC puts hammer down on cabbies

One of the Muslim accomodation issues I wrote about last month has reached a resolution of sorts.

On an 11-0 vote Monday, Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) members voted to crack down on drivers refusing service, making Minnesota the first place in the country to decide how to treat Muslim cabbies who decline to transport alcohol- toting riders on religious grounds.

Starting May 11, any airport taxi drivers who refuse riders will face 30-day suspensions. Drivers will have their licenses revoked two years for a second offense.

This isn't a full resolution because some cabbies are considering suing on the grounds of religious discrimination.

One might ask what's the big deal, especially because the problem is rather small: Just 27 refusals of service out of 120,000 total rides during the holiday travel season. Why not just use the existing rules, in which a cabbie who refuses to accept a fare must go to the back of the taxi line and wait all over again?

The answer lies in another number: 75 percent, which is how many airport cabbies are Somali Muslims and thus likely to refuse an alcohol-carrying fare.

In some ways, this is the reverse of the Minneapolis Community and Technical College situation in the earlier blog entry. And the logic is the same: a minority can often reasonably be accomodated; but a majority must be watched lest it impose its views on the rest of us.

In the MCTC case, providing a footbath for Muslims is reasonable because it benefits everyone and Muslims are such a small minority of students that it cannot reasonably be argued that they are imposing their views or practices on nonMuslims.

In the taxi case, however, Muslims make up a strong majority of cabbies. Allowing them to discriminate against passengers carrying alcohol benefits only the cabbies and could make it very difficult for such passengers to get a ride, which makes it an unreasonable accomodation.

I suspect, however, we'll get to find out what a court thinks.

civil liberties, Minnesota, religion, politics, midtopia

Religion and politics

They often make strange bedfellows. But some mixtures are more toxic than others.

You've probably heard about James Dobson telling U.S. News & World Report that he didn't think Republican Fred Thompson was a Christian.

That was silly enough. But following Thompson's angry rebuttal, the clarification was even more obnoxious.

Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger said Dobson "use[s] the word 'Christian' to refer to people who are evangelical Christians."

Oh, yes, that makes it all better. In Dobson's formulation, 90 percent of the Christian faith -- Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, what have you -- aren't actually Christian. How charming.

What you might not have heard about was something that took place at the same time: 40 members of Congress calling for a "prayer wall" around the United States.

Mr. Forbes and about 40 other members of Congress from both parties and 19 states will gather outside the Capitol today at noon to issue what they are describing as a call to bring "America back to prayer."

The group has even set up a web site where people can sign up for five-minute slots to pray for the United States.

There's plenty to comment on there. Particularly this:

"If we have several thousand people praying for five minutes for the future of our country, that creates a spiritual fire wall around America that is pretty significant," he said.

"Spiritual fire wall"? Besides sounding goofy, this seems like really bizarre theology, conflating religion with nationalism. What part of the Christian faith would lead one to believe that God would favor the United States over, say, Belgium or Italy or India or Singapore? It's like praying for a sports team to win: it cheapens and distorts the very idea of prayer.

That said, the reaction by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State was completely over the top:

Said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, “Lawmakers should stick to their constitutional duties and leave religious decisions to individuals. Congressional meddling in religion is an affront to the First Amendment principle of church-state separation. Religion is too important to become a political football.”

Their weblog went further, stating: "For lawmakers to call Americans to their knees and insist that religious worship is the only way to solve our many problems is insulting, divisive and, frankly, unconstitutional."

Excuse me?

American citizens don't give up their right to free speech when they get elected to Congress. They are as free as you and me to express their opinion on any subject whatsoever, including belief.

What they are not free to do is use their office to compel compliance, or use the levers of government to promote their faith. But the group has not attempted to do so; they have simply expressed their view that the country needs our prayers.

Americans United is laudably vigilant on church-state separation issues. But their willingness to declare simple speech unconstitutional is, frankly, more violative of the Constitution than the behavior they decry. And their shrillness on this incident suggests a religious intolerance that is the mirror image of what they oppose.

Criticize what members of the Prayer Caucus say. But do not deny them their right to say it.

religion, politics, midtopia

Minnesota and Muslims

This weekend, the Star Tribune ran an article summarizing recent efforts to accomodate -- or not -- our growing Muslim population. Since then I've been noodling on it, trying to figure out where I stand on particular instances of accomodating minority practices.

First, the background. A while back we had a brouhaha over airport cab drivers refusing to transport alcohol. Then there were the Muslim cashiers at SuperTarget who didn't want to touch (or scan) packages of pork, and now this:

Minneapolis Community and Technical College is poised to become the state's first public school to install a foot-washing basin to help the school's 500 Muslim students perform pre-prayer rituals. "We want to be welcoming," MCTC President Phil Davis said, noting a student was hurt trying to wash in a regular sink.

First, let's put things in perspective. Listing each case like this makes it sound like the Twin Cities are awash in such controversies. They're not. Each of these is an essentially isolated incident in a metro area with a population close to 3 million. We have a sizable Muslim population, so we have more such incidents than cities that don't. But you're still talking about a small number of conflicts.

That said, let's address the philosophical and practical aspects raised in the article.

In each instance, you have a tension between customer service and religious belief. The question is how far do we go to accomodate belief? I'm perfectly willing to make reasonable accomodations. But what constitutes reasonable is a matter of opinion.

Let's take them one at a time:

Taxi drivers. They don't have a leg to stand on. They are licensed (and their numbers limited) by the city to provide transportation services from the airport. If they don't want to carry people who have alcohol, they need to get another job.

Cashiers. It's not that they refuse to sell pork; it's that they don't want to touch it. So they ask a co-worker and sometimes the customer to scan it for them. As a customer, that wouldn't bother me too much, so for me this falls into the "reasonable accomodation" category. But mostly this is a private concern for Target Corp. If it decides accomodating such requests aren't worth the hassle -- or are harming customer relations -- then they can choose to change it. If enough people complain, you can be sure they will.

Foot washer. At first glance this one seems easy. MCTC is a taxpayer-funded two-year college, and so the answer seems obvious: no taxpayer money spent for an explicitly religious purpose.

If students are hurting themselves trying to wash their feet in the sink -- and frankly, I'm having a hard time visualizing how this could be a problem except for the very, very clumsy -- then a cheap and constitutional solution might be to simply educate students on alternative foot-washing methods like, say, carrying an empty water bottle with them that they can fill up and wash with.

But it turns out to be difficult, because there are additional considerations.

As an adult educational institution, MCTC is supposed to accomodate a range of students -- and has a competitive interest in doing so. Would it make competitive sense to turn off potential students simply because of inconvenient lavatory facilities? Building a mosque or a chapel would clearly be both unreasonable and unconstitutional. But a sink? Why not?

In the end, though, what persuades me is another relatively simple argument: A foot washer doesn't just serve Muslim students. Yes, they get a convenient place to wash their feet; but the rest of us benefit by keeping feet out of the regular sinks. Not to mention avoiding the lawsuits from the Clumsy Muslims Student Association.

I strongly support separation of church and state. But remember that the main point of that separation is to prevent a particular religion from exerting undue control over the state, or using the levers of government power to promote itself or force its beliefs on others. Absent such coercion, religion should be treated the same as other interest groups -- not better, but not worse, either.

America remains an overwhelmingly Christian nation; Muslims aren't going to be running things anytime soon. So providing a reasonable accomodation to a minority religion should be just fine, especially when the accomodation is small and benefits all students, not just the minority.

Accomodation is a case-by-case thing, as the mosque example demonstrates. And it's a two-way street as well: members of minority groups have an obligation to adjust their practices to the larger reality of American life as much as practicable before demanding special consideration for their situation. But assuming that has been done, then minor accomodations are not PC run amok or cultural surrender: they are a recognition that Muslims are a part of the American fabric, not a burr stuck upon it. And as that fabric changes, so too will some things that we have "always done" and never thought much about.

Which is a good thing, because that ability to change is one reason the United States has remained a vibrant nation through two centuries of global and social upheaval. Our foundation is strong because it is not overly rigid. And it's why the country will survive this wave of immigrants just like it survived the Italians and the Irish and the blacks and giving women the vote and all the other things that people at the time feared would destroy us. We will survive, and we will remain American in all the ways that matter -- and made stronger by the additional weave brought from overseas.

Just as long as the cab drivers don't give me a hard time for the wine bottle I brought back from vacation....

Minnesota, Islam, politics, midtopia

The evolution of religion

As a follow-up of sorts to my genetics of altruism post, The New York Times magazine had a fascinating, thought-provoking piece on the evolutionary advantages of belief.

Turns out that some scientists have been studying religion from an evolutionary perspective, trying to figure out why religion is universal when it is seemingly maladaptive to survival: usually, believing in nonexistent things and expending energy on nonproductive pursuits will make it harder to survive, not easier.

First the science, then my two cents.

The science is split into two camps. There's the "byproduct" school, which says religion is not in itself an evolutionary advantage, but is a byproduct of a complex and imaginative brain that is. Then there's the "adaptionist" school, which argues that religious belief is in fact advantageous by promoting trust and cooperation within a group.

The byproduct folks have some fascinating bits of data to work with. Their main ones are three recognized human traits:

Agent detection: The ability to infer the presence of organisms that intend to harm us. If we see motion out of the corner of our eye, our mind tends to assume it is a potential hostile organism and react accordingly. We assume the motion is guided by a mind rather than assuming benign causes like wind blowing leaves around. This makes evolutionary sense: If we're wrong about it being hostile, we're still alive. If we're wrong about it being benign, we're dead or injured. But it predisposes us to see intelligent agents behind every observed phenomenon.

Causal reasoning: The ability to "impose a narrative" on seemingly unrelated events. I tend to describe this as "pattern detection", the ability to see patterns even where none exists. Again, this is evolutionarily advantageous: it helps us solve puzzles and figure out cause and effect even with scant evidence, and is largely harmless when applied incorrectly. But it, too, predisposes us to see order and causation where there is none.

Theory of mind: This is simply the recognition that other people have their own viewpoint and do not know everything we know; it's the ability to imagine yourself in other people's heads. It lets us anticipate the actions of other people based on our knowledge of their knowledge. The survival advantage is obvious. The link to religion is a little more complex. Experiments show that children do not develop "theory of mind" until they are 4 years old or so. Until then, they believe others -- and especially their parents -- are omniscient. In other words, we are born believing in omniscient, invisible minds, which paves the way for a belief in God.

Then come the adaptationists. They argue that while the byproduct school might help explain some of the biochemistry of belief, belief itself is also favored by evolution. Some of my thoughts on altruism closely reflect adaptationist arguments. Religion can make people feel better by worrying less about death, letting them focus on living and the future. By reinforcing desirable behavior, it helps them attract better mates. It makes groups more cohesive, allowing them to outcompete nonreligious groups. It makes individuals more willing to sacrifice themselves, again increasing the survivability of the group. Such advantages outweigh the evolutionary costs of religion, which is measured in the time and resources devoted to ritual.

Adaptationists also note that this doesn't have to be an either-or thing. All species contain a range of various traits: height, strength, speed, disease resistance, etc. Why should belief be any different? In that view, theists and atheists aren't enemies; they represent a socially healthy mix. "What seems to be an adversarial relationship between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel," to quote the article's paraphrase of David Sloan Wilson.

Me, I don't see the two schools as necessarily being in conflict. Humans are social creatures by design, and the idea that we're wired to view the world in a certain way makes sense. Further, anything that promotes social cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous. Religion is an effective tool to that end, so it's easy to see why it would be so ubiquitous.

I would add that belief is advantageous for a reason not cited in the article: because it gives us a sense of control. Early humans were surrounded by deadly things they didn't understand. That could be debilitating to a mind imaginative enough to envision all the horrible things that could happen. But if we think we know why lightning strikes or earthquakes happen or people die, then we can develop rituals and practices to control or appease them. If we think we know what the stars are, we can use them to store our hopes and dreams. Belief is just one more tool to help us order our surroundings, giving us a framework that lets us live our lives more successfully by explaining away the unexplainable.

Believers may be offended by this whole discussion, as if God can be reduced to a particular brain structure or random chance. But that's not necessarily the case. Knowing the mechanism by which humans experience God does not prove God doesn't actually exist. To quote Justin Barrett, a prominent member of the byproduct school and a practicing Christian:

"Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people. Why wouldn’t God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?”

This is a variation of "evolution is the tool by which God created humans" argument. And it works just as well. We believe because God gave us the ability to believe when He created us.

Anyway, it's a fascinating article, far more interesting than I can do justice to here. Give it a read before it disappears behind the Times Select wall.

evolution, religion, politics, midtopia

Social conservatives in action

From opposite ends of the country, two stories that will either make you laugh or simply shake your head.

First, from North Dakota:

North Dakota's House has agreed to repeal the state's anti-cohabitation law without a vote to spare, and Gov. John Hoeven is expected to sign it.

The law, which makes it illegal for a man and woman to live together without being married, has been part of North Dakota's code since statehood. It is listed as a sex crime among the state's criminal laws.

Okay. Sounds simple enough. Another outdated law removed from the books.

Except:

Representatives voted 48-41 on Thursday to repeal the law. It takes a minimum of 48 votes, which is a majority of the House's 94 members, to approve any measure in the state House.

That's right, the measure barely passed. Forty-one legislators voted to keep it a criminal offense.

The mind boggles.

Next we head south to sunny Largo, Fla., where the city found itself having to make a decision about whether to keep its city manager of 14 years. The sole reason? He wants to have a sex-change operation and become a woman.

City commissioners ended one of the most tumultuous weeks in Largo history Tuesday night by moving to fire City Manager Steve Stanton following his disclosure that he will have a sex-change operation.

A total of 480 people packed City Hall for a four-hour meeting during which one activist was arrested after police told her not to hand out fliers.

After listening to about 60 speakers, mostly from Largo, a majority of commissioners said they had lost confidence in Stanton's ability to lead.

That's right, fired for wanting a sex-change operation. It'll be interesting to see if the decision survives an anti-discrimination challenge, although his status as a manager makes him more vulnerable to such things, as the "ability to lead" argument shows.

I love the logic of some of the residents who wanted him fired:

"I don't want that man in office," she said. "I don't think we should be paying him $150,000 a year when he's not been truthful. We have to speak up. Of course, we don't believe in sex changes or lesbianism. They have their rights, but we do, too."

He wasn't "truthful" because he hadn't revealed his gender issue until now. Of course, if he had revealed it, he would have been attacked for "flaunting" his sexuality.

But this one takes the cake:

"If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated. Make no mistake about it."

The speaker? Ron Sanders, pastor of Largo's Lighthouse Baptist Church.

Update: Churches from around the Tampa Bay area staged a 350-person rally in support of Stanton. I think they were motivated as much by revulsion at the words of Ron Sanders as anything.

civil liberties, morality, gay rights, politics, midtopia

You call this persecution?

The Supreme Court recently refused to hear a case in which Christians claim they are being discriminated against.

At issue in Skoros v. City of New York was whether the city's public school system is impermissibly promoting Judaism and Islam while conveying a message of disapproval of Christianity. School rules allow the Jewish menorah and the Muslim star and crescent in multireligious holiday displays but not nativity scenes depicting the birth of Jesus.

Sounds pretty bad, right? But wait:

The city says its policy treats all religions consistently by excluding "depictions of deities, religious texts, or scenes of worship such as a Christian nativity scene," says Leonard Koerner, a lawyer for the school district, in his brief to the court. "As the Christian nativity scene explicitly depicts the Christian deity [the baby Jesus] as the center of a scene of worship, it falls on the wrong side of the line."

In other words, Christians are free to display Christian symbols, but not a depiction of Jesus or the Bible. The same restrictions apply to all religions. Ergo, no discrimination.

This exposes the general hollowness of the "war on Christmas" charge. While it is possible to find instances where Christian expression is in fact suppressed while other religious expression is allowed, they are isolated and rare. And they usually arise out of a simple-if-bungled desire to be sensitive to minority religions, inasmuch as the people doing the suppressing are often Christians themselves.

It gets even sillier when activists claim that Christians are "persecuted" in this country. That's just nonsense; in a democracy, it is essentially impossible for a majority to be persecuted. Name a single Christian who has been jailed, tortured or executed simply for being Christian. Name a single Christian who has been prevented from attending the church of their choice.

What *is* happening is that the unquestioned Christian domination of cultural life in America is being questioned, and pushed back in some areas. There is increasingly vocal opposition to Christians using the levers of governmental power to promote their religion, and some longstanding practices are being revised as a result. But that's not persecution. Some of us would say it's a long overdue correction.

The sad thing is that Christians are, in fact, persecuted in other countries, sometimes horribly. By trying to claim such victim status here, Christians do their overseas bretheren a disservice by cheapening the meaning of the word.

I'm sympathetic to the plaintiffs on one score: the district allowing Christmas trees to be a symbol of Christianity. The plaintiffs don't like that because Christmas trees, while associated with Christianity, are not actually Christian symbols. Fair enough. Christians should be able to choose the symbol that represents their faith, as long as it doesn't violate the district policy in other respects. There are plenty of choices: A cross should do the trick, or rosary beads for Catholicism or a communion cup or a fish symbol.

There is another worthwhile question here: As long as the district is allowing religious displays, why restrict the content at all? I can understand banning content that explicitly attacks other religions or threatens nonbelievers with eternal damnation or the like, but if you're going to have a Christmas display alongside the Hannukah display, who cares whether there's a nativity scene in it or not?

But that's a separate issue. Having decided to write standards for such displays, the district's obligation is to make the standard objective and apply it fairly. They appear to have done so. And so the plaintiffs' complaint is without merit.

religion, civil liberties, politics, midtopia

The genetics of altruism

Are humans innately good, or innately selfish?

That's a fundamental question when it comes to discussing morality, law and society. If humans are innately selfish, then the only way society functions is by the majority forcing everyone to behave, through tools of social control like government, religion and culture. Without such control, the argument goes, society would disintegrate into a Darwinian anarchy where the strongest reigned through force and cruelty.

In addition, this worldview lends weight to the idea that only an extrahuman authority -- such as God -- can effectively impart a moral code, for if humans are naturally immoral or amoral they simply would not bother to develop one. In such a view, religion is not merely a tool for enforcing whatever society defines as morality; it is an essential source of morality that transcends society.

If humans are generally good, however -- if they are hardwired for altruism, for example, or if our social nature makes us seek approval, and render cooperation and compromise common and successful survival strategies -- then the importance of religion and tradition and government all shrink. They are still useful as founts of distilled wisdom and as a way to enable or compel group behavior. But they are not in and of themselves a necessary component of virtue.

The reality, of course, is as variable as the human experience. Like any other distribution, human behavior follows the bell curve. So even if most humans are innately good, there will be some that misbehave. And if our natural state is despotic anarchy, there would still be a few selfless saps trying to help others. Throw in other considerations, like love of family or economic ties, and the picture becomes more muddied still.

That said, a couple of recent developments shed some interesting light on the subject.

Last year, molecular researchers identified what they called an altruism gene that is present in almost all living things. It's not a gene that makes people give to charity; it's a gene that appears to explain why some cells in a multicellular organism give up their ability to reproduce -- and thus commit genetic suicide -- in order to help the organism as a whole function better. Their conclusion? The function arose for a separate purpose -- letting cells shut off temporarily useless processes to conserve energy -- and was then co-opted by evolution in multicell organisms, in something of a biological bait-and-switch. The resulting combination was so successful that all later organisms retained it.

Another study around the same time found that altering a single gene in a species of bacteria turned resource "cheaters" into cooperative organisms. Further, the genetic change occurred naturally in response to environmental stress. In other words, the stress apparently promoted a genetic change that favored cooperation.

Couple that with demonstrated examples of altruism in the animal kingdom, and it's clear that altruism is compatible with evolution.

If altruism can arise spontaneously on the cellular level and among lower animals, it seems obvious that it can arise naturally at the behavioral level of intelligent species, which have an advantage that bacteria do not: the ability to calculate the costs and benefits of cooperation.

It could start out as loyalty to a family group, wherein a parent, for example, sacrifices itself to save its mate or offspring and thus protect its genetic legacy. As populations grow that definition could be expanded to include clan or tribe, based on a reciprocal economic calculation: I'll come to your defense if you come to mine, increasing our overall chances of survival.

Society would eventually develop ideals and traditions that enforce such altruism, allowing it to apply to larger and larger groups. It would confer approval, admiration and reproductive success on those who are generous or take risks in its defense. As social creatures we are especially susceptible to "doing what is expected" and seeking the approval of our fellows.

And that, in fact, appears to be the case, as a more recent experiment shows.

The experiment hooked up college students to MRIs and had them make decisions about whether or not to give money to various charities. What they found was that deciding to give money produced activity in two different areas of the brain: the part responsible for social attachment, and the same pleasure centers stimulated by food, drugs, money and sex. In other words, acting altruistic made them feel good, as well as involving a bit of social calculation.

Such altruism may be learned rather than innate; the study doesn't attempt to establish a root cause. But it demonstrates that good behavior does not necessarily need ongoing external enforcement. People do not have to be coerced or scared into doing good; they simply need to be attached to a society or family group that prizes such behavior.

This also demonstrates that altruism can in fact be quite selfish. Altruistic acts can lead to very real individual benefits, such as increased reproductive success, enhanced social stature or simply feeling good about oneself.

But such benefits must be weighed against the potential cost. At the extreme, altruism is detrimental: the warrior who is killed in combat never gets a chance to enjoy the fruits of his sacrifice. He may still consider the risk worth it, but how can we explain the person who deliberately sacrifices himself to save others, like the soldier who throws himself on a grenade?

In some cases, even such extreme decisions can be selfish, genetically speaking. A suicide bomber, for instance, knows that his family will probably be taken care of. A soldier's family gets a government pension and the thanks of a grateful nation.

But absent those scenarios, I think such examples demonstrate the power of societal expectations. People raised in a given society often internalize that society's values. The stronger their attachment to the society, the stronger the internalization. Further, people who live when others die often experience "survivor's guilt." Many people talk about how they "couldn't live with themselves" if they behaved in a way society disapproves of. The cost-benefit analysis is different for every individual, of course, but many people would apparently prefer to risk near-certain death than live with the knowledge that they chickened out, or let others die so that they could live.

So it turns out the question I posed at the beginning of this article is a bit misleading, because in many cases being good and being selfish are the same thing. But overall I think the evidence points to morality and altruism being biologically based but socially defined. Religion is a part of society, and thus contributes to defining society's morality just like any other philosophical system. Religion is also a singularly powerful social tool for enforcing that morality -- though like any tool it can also be used for ill. But morality can flourish absent religion, just like religion can flourish absent morality.

evolution, ethics, genetics, morality, religion, politics, midtopia

A threefer: Creationist Jew-bashing Republicans

It started in Georgia....

The Anti-Defamation League is calling on state Rep. Ben Bridges to apologize for a memo distributed under his name that says the teaching of evolution should be banned in public schools because it is a religious deception stemming from an ancient Jewish sect.

Bridges (R-Cleveland) denies having anything to do with the memo. But one of his constituents said he wrote the memo with Bridges’ approval before it was recently distributed to lawmakers in several states, including Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” the memo says. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools because it is “a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen.”

It gets better.

It also directs readers to a Web site www.fixedearth.com, which includes model legislation that calls the Kabbala “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism.” The Web site also declares “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.”

It gets better.

The letter was written to Texas lawmakers, and one of them -- House Appropriations Chairman Warren Chisum -- distributed it to colleagues.

In his apology, Chisum (like Bridges) says he didn't bother to read the memo distributed under his name.

That should play well. "I'm not anti-Semitic; I'm just stupid!"

evolution, politics, midtopia

Iran: Behind the caricature

The New York Times Magazine may be the best weekly publication in the country, bar none. It's the reason I buy the Sunday New York Times. It's ability to make me interested in things I didn't know I cared about -- or provide fresh, relevant perspectives on things I already do -- is unparalleled, in my opinion.

With all the talk about Iran, it's hardline president and its nuclear ambitions, informed perspective is largely absent. So naturally, along comes the magazine with an article from a correspondent who traveled around Iran before and after the Dec. 16 elections there.

It's well worth a read, even if it's now behind the Times Select wall. We'll start with a section discussing the immediate aftermath of the elections, in which president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's slate of candidates was soundly defeated.

By mid-January, Ahmadinejad's isolation even within his own faction was complete: 150 of 290 members of parliament, including many of Ahmadinejad's onetime allies, signed a letter criticizing the president's economic policies for failing to stanch unemployment and inflation. A smaller group also blamed Ahmadinejad's inflammatory foreign-policy rhetoric for the United Nations Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on Iran. As if that were not enough, an editorial in Jomhouri Eslami, a newspaper that reflects the views of the supreme leader, accused the president of using the nuclear issue to distract the public from his failed policies. Ahmadinejad's behavior was diminishing popular support for the nuclear program, the editorial warned. The Iranian political system seems to be restoring its equilibrium by showing an extremist president the limits of his power.

Iran isn't a full democracy, of course. While elections are held for lower positions, ultimate power is wielded by the unelected council of clerics headed by Ali Khamenei. But that just demonstrates the limits of Ahmadinejad's influence. He is not aligned with Khamenei. His faction is populist and hardline -- often called "neoconservative", in fact. The clerics, while conservative, have grown pragmatic during their years of rule. And they know they are riding a delicate balance between using limited democracy to avoid unrest and allowing too much democracy and losing control.

Iran also faces the same problem that Israel does: trying to decide whether it is a democracy or a religious state.

A hardline cleric known as Ayatollah Crocodile, Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, is one of Ahmadinejad's main allies. He has famously inveighed against democracy, free speech and women's rights. He has called public execution and flogging "a basic principle of Islam." Islam is the only right way and "the people are ignorant sheep." He also complained about the need to break the "unnecessary" taboo on violence in order to properly confront Islamic reformists.

Swell guy, and the article contains even more outrageous statements by him or his followers. But his main point, for my purposes here, is that Islamic rule and democracy are incompatible.

And he's right; they are. Even reformists agree with him.

"In a sense, many people, including myself, we believe that Mesbah is right," Sadegh Zibakalam, a reformist Tehran University professor, reflected when I visited him at his mother's home in north Tehran in December. "Trying to make an amalgam of Western, liberal, democratic ideas and Shiite theology is nonsense. It doesn't work."

Later, he added: "Either Khamenei is infallible, or he's not. If he's not, then he is an ordinary person like Bush or Blair, answerable to the Parliament and the people. If he is, then we should throw away all this nonsense about Western values and liberal democracy. Either we have Western liberal philosophy, republican government and checks and balances, or we should stick to Mesbah."

Unfortunately, both democracy and Islam are enshrined in Iran's constitution. So Iran, so solid-looking from the outside, is actually engulfed in an ongoing crisis of legitimacy -- and one that cannot easily be solved.

To this day, the structure of the Iranian state remains too liberal for the authoritarians and too authoritarian for the liberals, but the traditional conservatives at the center of power cannot resolve this obvious paradox at the republic's heart without relinquishing their own position.

And there are other weaknesses.

The Iranian economy has been mismanaged at least since the revolution, and to fix it would require measures no populist would be willing to take. Under Ahmadinejad, inflation has risen; foreign investors have scorned Iranian markets, fearing political upheaval or foreign invasion; the Iranian stock market has plummeted; Iranian capital has fled to Dubai. Voters I talked to pointed to the prices of ordinary foodstuffs when they wanted to explain their negative feelings about the government. According to Iranian news sources, from January to late August 2006 the prices of fruits and vegetables in urban areas rose by 20 percent. A month later, during Ramadan, the price of fruit reportedly doubled while that of chicken rose 10 percent in mere days. Housing prices in Tehran have reached a record high. Unemployment is still widespread. And Ahmadinejad's approval rating, as calculated by the official state television station, had dipped to 35 percent in October.

Catch that? Ahmadinejad's approval rating is about as high as President Bush's. So on one level, when it comes to Iran, we have two unpopular leaders rattling swords at each other in an effort to rally support for themselves. It's almost a cooperative venture.

The article goes on to note that Iran is relatively wealthy, urbanized, educated and modern, with a large middle class. All of these things encourage moderation when it comes to meaningful politics and international diplomacy. Which is why Ahmadinejad's fiery rhetoric helped his faction get stomped in December.

Secor closes:

For a Western traveler in Iran these days, it is hard to avoid a feeling of cognitive dissonance. From a distance, the Islamic republic appears to be at its zenith. But from the street level, Iran's grand revolutionary experiment is beset with fragility. The state is in a sense defined by its contradictions, both constitutional and economic. It cannot be truly stable until it resolves them, and yet if it tries to do so, it may not survive.

Don't get me wrong. I still think Iran is a poster child for "countries that should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons." They are still more despotic than democratic. But as with most things, and especially with regards to things in the Middle East, the reality is far more complicated than the reductionist labels and rhetoric imply. And that is why dialogue and engagement with Iran is likely to produce more results -- both in Iraq and in the nuclear arena -- then confrontation. Oh, military power and economic sanctions are part of the dialogue. But they should not -- really, cannot -- be the only tools.

Understand your enemy if you wish to either defeat or co-opt him. We failed that lesson miserably in Iraq. Let's not make the same mistake in Iran.

nuclear, Iran, politics, midtopia

First step, get rid of the witnesses

Back in December, I wrote about a New Jersey student who recorded his history teacher engaging in lengthy religious harangues. I'll repost part of that story here:

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

"If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong," Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. "He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he's saying, 'Please, accept me, believe.' If you reject that, you belong in hell."

Classy, no?

After hearing one such harangue, one of his students, Matthew LaClair, tape-recorded eight subsequent classes, then complained to the school district.

At the time, the district said they had disciplined Paszkiewicz, but declined to say how. Now the other shoe has dropped.

After a public school teacher was recorded telling students they belonged in hell if they did not accept Jesus as their savior, the school board has banned taping in class without an instructor’s permission, and has added training for teachers on the legal requirements for separating church and state.

Training? Fine. But banning the tape-recording of classes? Besides obstructing learning -- some students record their classes to aid in their studying -- it seems an odd thing to do after a recording documented a problem that needed to be addressed.

The school board's stated rationale is privacy:

After several students complained to the school board that their voices had been broadcast on the Internet and on television news programs without their consent, the board adopted a policy in mid-January that requires students to request permission from an instructor to record or videotape a class.

Beyond the question of whether anyone has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a classroom (answer: probably not), the problem would seem to be with the act of broadcasting, not the act of recording. So the school board's ban seems unnecessarily broad -- and raises the question of whether they simply want to avoid any more embarassing revelations.

Especially because whatever disciplinary action they took apparently didn't work:

Meanwhile, Matthew said that Mr. Paszkiewicz recently told the class that scientists who spoke about the danger of global warming were using tactics like those Hitler used, by repeating a lie often enough that people come to believe it.

Context is everything here. Schools are supposed to be about intellectual inquiry, which can include lively debate on controversial topics. And at least this isn't religious proselyzation. But it's difficult on the surface to see what relevance global warming has to American history, Paszkiewicz's assigned subject.

That's not necessarily a problem; off-topic discussions should be allowable. So if this was an open debate, fine; if it was a teacher subjecting his students to a political diatribe, it's a problem. For my money, it's difficult to imagine a teacher legitimately invoking Hitler in such a discussion.

It's up to the school district how they want to handle the teacher. But banning recording devices strikes me as a poor decision intended more to shield the district from scrutiny than to protect legitimate privacy concerns.

education, politics, midtopia

Another made-up scandal

I've been ignoring this one for a couple of days, but hot on the heels of the "Paul Pelosi owns Del Monte stock" fabrication, we get a twofer: accusations that Barack Obama was raised Muslim -- and that the accuser is Hillary Clinton's campaign.

The dual claims were raised in an unsigned, anonymously sourced article in Insight Magazine, a publication of the Moonie-owned Washington Times that was so unsuccessful as an actual magazine that it went online-only a couple of years ago.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.

"He was a Muslim, but he concealed it," the source said. "His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign." Sources said the background check (was) conducted by researchers connected to Senator Clinton.

Let's note that even if the claim were true, the writer is suggesting that attending a madrassa between the ages of 6 and 10 somehow makes one a fundamentalist Islamist and terror supporter -- never mind that Obama has been a Christian for his entire adult life.

Fox News picked up the story repeatedly, first on "Fox and Friends" and later John Gibson, who had the flair to bring on a Republican strategist to discuss the issue -- who promptly said the effort could be a "despicable act by an absolutely ruthless Clinton political machine."

But the story isn't true. CNN actually sent a reporter to Indonesia to visit the school. Turns out that while the student body is predominantly Muslim -- hardly a surprise, because so is Indonesia -- it's a secular, public school with a mixed population and no religious curriculum.

That didn't stop the usual right-wing suspects from spreading the fake news -- from the Freepers to, again, Rush Limbaugh.

And Insight Magazine itself? Its response to CNN's story was a classic duck -- "We didn't say it -- we simply reported that Hillary's people were saying it." Well, actually, it appears you just made it up. How morally reptilian.

For their part, the Clinton campaign denies any involvement and Obama ripped Fox and Insight a new one.

And in any case, this whole thing fails the logic test. Why would Clinton's people even be talking to a nutrag like Insight? Even if Clinton wanted to smear Obama, why would she choose a little-known partisan website to do so? Further, Clinton is presumably trying to weaken Obama in the Democratic primary. What part of this story would do so? I just don't see Democratic primary voters giving a rat's ass that Obama spent a few of hs younger years at a Muslim school.

On the other hand, it makes perfect sense for an amoral conservative publication to run such a story. Even if the specific accusation is debunked, it reminds voters that Obama has a Muslim background and quitely reinforces the idea that Hillary Clinton is evil, even if she can't actually be traced to this particular brouhaha. Tada! Both Democratic frontrunners tarred.

If Insight has any actual evidence to back up their story, now would be the time to provide it.

Coupled with the Pelosi smear, I think we're seeing a resurgence of the bad old days of conservative commentary, one marked by conspiracy theories and rumor-trafficking. Such fare occurs on both the left and the right, of course, most notably the left's fascination with Karl Rove and the belief that Bush controls oil prices. But it is usually most marked in the side that is currently out of power. What is disheartening is that it has taken just two months of minority status for the right wing's old habits to emerge.

Shame on them, and shame on conservative commentators and media outlets for their unquestioning acceptance of complete rubbish.

Update: John Gibson remains cartoonishly unrepentant. Just for example, Gibson assumes that the CNN correspondent involved is Indonesian, "probably went to the same madrassa", and thus is probably lying. Except that if he had bothered to actually read the CNN story, he would have known that CNN sent John Vause, an Australian, from their Beijing bureau. Idiot.

ethics, Clinton, Obama, politics, midtopia

The Bible in Legos

This guy has too much time on his hands (Hmm. As a blogger should I really be throwing stones like that?). But he's created a fabulously funny site with it.

Check out the visual index of Old Testament laws. The best sequence is "Why to Keep the Law," in which we discover in graphic Lego detail what happens if you don't follow God's word.

Legos, religion, politics, midtopia

About Keith Ellison's swearing in....

.... he'll be using Thomas Jefferson's Koran.

Jefferson's copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson's collection and has his customary initialing on the pages.

Jefferson wasn't Muslim, of course; he was simply a widely read intellectual. Still, pretty funny. Good to see Ellison keeping his temper and playing this perfectly.

religion, Keith Ellison, politics, midtopia