The Republican Party has lost its soul
The GOP Leadership Still Supports Trump 
though he is manifestly unfit to the President

Trump could falsely claim that Obama was born abroad, but that wasn’t enough to disqualify him. He could call Mexican immigrants “rapists,” but that wasn’t enough to disqualify him. He could lie repeatedly — about, for example, whether he had met Vladimir Putin and whether he had opposed the Iraq War — but that wasn’t enough to disqualify him. He could call for a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States, but that wasn’t enough to disqualify him. He could make degrading comments about women and mock people with disabilities, but that wasn’t enough to disqualify him. 

Who Was Behind the Coup Attempt in Turkey?
Mustafa Akyol JULY 22, 2016

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — The bloody coup attempt in Turkey last week, which cost more than 200 lives, brought the world’s attention to the group that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared responsible: the Islamic community led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since the late 1990s.

Mr. Gulen strongly denies the charges. Some in the West seem to think that this is yet another of the many bizarre conspiracy theories peddled by Mr. Erdogan. But this is not merely propaganda. There are good reasons to believe the accusation is correct.

The Gulen community is built around one man: Fethullah Gulen. His followers see him not merely as a learned cleric, as they publicly claim, but the “awaited one,” as I have been told in private. He is the Mahdi, the Islamic version of the Messiah, who will save the Muslim world, and ultimately the world itself. Many of his followers also believe that Mr. Gulen sees the Prophet Muhammad in his dreams and receives orders from him.

Besides Mr. Gulen’s unquestionable authority, another key feature of the movement is its cultish hierarchy. The Gulen movement is structured like a pyramid: Top-level imams give orders to second-level imams, who give orders to third-level imams, and it goes on like that to the grass roots.

What does the group do? Its most visible activities include opening schools, running charities that provide social services to the poor and maintaining “dialogue centers” that preach love, tolerance and peace. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. I personally have spoken many times at Gulen institutions as a guest, and met modest, kind, lovable people.

But, as one disillusioned Gulenist told me last year, “there is a darker side of the movement, and few of its members know it as it is.” For decades, the movement has been infiltrating Turkey’s state institutions, like the police, judiciary and military. Many believe that some Gulenists, taking orders from their imams, hide their identities and try to rise through these institutions in order to capture state power.

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When Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., came to power in 2002, they felt threatened by the hard-core secularists who have dominated Turkey’s military since the days of Ataturk, the father of the Turkish republic. Mr. Erdogan viewed the Gulenist cadres in the state as an asset, and an alliance was born. The Erdogan government supported Gulenist police officers, prosecutors and judges as they went after secularists. Starting in 2007, hundreds of secularist officers and their civilian allies were jailed.

This witch hunt was driven by Mr. Erdogan’s political agenda, but the Gulenists were even more aggressive than the A.K.P. More worrying: Some of the evidence turned out to be overblown. Two secular journalists and a police chief who exposed the fake evidence, and blamed the “The Imam’s Army,” were soon themselves imprisoned on bogus charges.

“How can they justify using fake evidence to blame innocent people?” I once asked my disillusioned Gulenist friend. “Since their end goal is so great,” he said, referring to the movement’s global, apocalyptic ambition, “they think all means are justified.”

It eventually became clear why the Gulenists had been so fervent in their persecution of the secularists: They wanted to replace them. Many of the officers who reportedly took part in last week’s coup attempt had been promoted thanks to a major purge of the military in 2009 that supposedly saved Mr. Erdogan from a coup.

By 2012, the old secularist guard had been quelled and the Gulenists and the A.K.P. were left more or less alone to run Turkey. It took less than two years before the two Islamist groups developed distrust and, ultimately, enmity. This tension came to a head in December 2013, when Gulenist police officers and prosecutors arrested dozens of government officials in a corruption investigation, most likely in the hope of toppling Mr. Erdogan, who condemned the inquiry as a “coup attempt.” At the time, this sounded like a self-serving exaggeration.

But the bloody plot of July 15 is far more destructive than anything Turkey has seen in recent years. Notably, the plot came as Mr. Erdogan was supposed to be planning a major purge of suspected Gulenists from the military. The military’s chief of staff, who opposed the coup, identified the rebellious officers as Gulenists. One plotter even reportedly confessed to acting under orders from the Gulen movement.

Given the Gulen community’s hierarchical structure, all of this makes Mr. Gulen a prime suspect. Of course, the truth can come out only in a fair trial. Unfortunately, Turkey is not good at those — especially given Mr. Erdogan’s control over the judiciary and the ferocious polarization in the country today. But the United States government can try to negotiate with its Turkish counterparts to extradite Mr. Gulen, as Turkey’s government is now requesting, on the condition of a fair trial.

That would ensure justice, improve Turkish-American relations and help calm the dangerous zeal in Turkey. It may even be necessary to help many of the innocent people in the Gulen community to know what they are really involved in — and to begin new lives as free individuals.

Mustafa Akyol is the author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty” and an Istanbul-based contributing opinion writer.
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/opinion/the-power-of-altruism.html

The Power of Altruism
David Brooks JULY 8, 2016

Western society is built on the assumption that people are fundamentally selfish. Machiavelli and Hobbes gave us influential philosophies built on human selfishness. Sigmund Freud gave us a psychology of selfishness. Children, he wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.”

Classical economics adopts a model that says people are primarily driven by material self-interest. Political science assumes that people are driven to maximize their power.

But this worldview is clearly wrong. In real life, the push of selfishness is matched by the pull of empathy and altruism. This is not Hallmark card sentimentalism but scientific fact: As babies our neural connections are built by love and care. We have evolved to be really good at cooperation and empathy. We are strongly motivated to teach and help others.

As Matthieu Ricard notes in his rigorous book “Altruism,” if an 18-month-old sees a man drop a clothespin she will move to pick it up and hand it back to him within five seconds, about the same amount of time it takes an adult to offer assistance. If you reward a baby with a gift for being kind, the propensity to help will decrease, in some studies by up to 40 percent.

When we build academic disciplines and social institutions upon suppositions of selfishness we’re missing the motivations that drive people much of the time.

Worse, if you expect people to be selfish, you can actually crush their tendency to be good.

Samuel Bowles provides a slew of examples in his book “The Moral Economy.” For example, six day care centers in Haifa, Israel, imposed a fine on parents who were late in picking up their kids at the end of the day. The share of parents who arrived late doubled. Before the fine, picking up their kids on time was an act of being considerate to the teachers. But after the fine, showing up to pick up their kids became an economic transaction. They felt less compunction to be kind.

In 2001, the Boston fire commissioner ended his department’s policy of unlimited sick days and imposed a limit of 15 per year. Those who exceeded the limit had their pay docked. Suddenly what had been an ethic to serve the city was replaced by a utilitarian paid arrangement. The number of firefighters who called in sick on Christmas and New Year’s increased by tenfold over the previous year.

To simplify, there are two lenses people can use to see any situation: the economic lens or the moral lens.

When you introduce a financial incentive you prompt people to see their situation through an economic lens. Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, “What’s in this for me?”

By evoking an economic motivation, you often get worse outcomes. Imagine what would happen to a marriage if both people went in saying, “I want to get more out of this than I put in.” The prospects of such a marriage would not be good.

Many of our commitments, professional or civic, are like that. To be a good citizen, to be a good worker, you often have to make an altruistic commitment to some group or ideal, which will see you through those times when your job of citizenship is hard and frustrating. Whether you are a teacher serving students or a soldier serving your country or a clerk who likes your office mates, the moral motivation is much more powerful than the financial motivations. Arrangements that arouse the financial lens alone are just messing everything up.

In 1776, Adam Smith defined capitalism as a machine that takes private self-interest and organizes it to produce general prosperity. A few years later America’s founders created a democracy structured to take private factional competition and, through checks and balances, turn it into deliberative democracy. Both rely on a low but steady view of human nature and try to turn private vice into public virtue.

But back then, there were plenty of institutions that promoted the moral lens to balance the economic lens: churches, guilds, community organizations, military service and honor codes.

Since then, the institutions that arouse the moral lens have withered while the institutions that manipulate incentives — the market and the state — have expanded. Now economic, utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world. We’ve wound up with a society that is less cooperative, less trusting, less effective and less lovely.

By assuming that people are selfish, by prioritizing arrangements based on selfishness, we have encouraged selfish frames of mind. Maybe it’s time to upend classical economics and political science. Maybe it’s time to build institutions that harness people’s natural longing to do good.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 8, 2016, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Power of Altruism. T
 
 
 
 
 
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/opinion/the-unity-illusion.html
The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Unity Illusion
David Brooks JUNE 10, 2016

Paul Ryan says it’s time for Republicans to unite with the presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Sure, Trump says racist things sometimes and disagrees with most of our proposals, but Republicans have to go into this campaign as a team. There has to be a Republican majority in Congress to give ballast to a Trump presidency or block the excesses of a Clinton one. If Republicans are divided from now until Election Day they will lose everything.

Unity will also be good for the conservative agenda. Congressional Republicans are currently laying out a series of policy proposals. If they hug Trump, maybe he’ll embrace some of them. Or, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it this week: “There’s no guarantee Mr. Trump would agree to Mr. Ryan’s agenda, but there’s no chance if Mr. Ryan publicly refuses to vote for him.”

These are decent arguments. Unfortunately, they are philosophically unsound and completely unworkable.

For starters, this line of thinking is deeply anticonservative. Conservatives believe that politics is a limited activity. Culture, psychology and morality come first. What happens in the family, neighborhood, house of worship and the heart is more fundamental and important than what happens in a legislature.

Ryan’s argument inverts all this. It puts political positions first and character and morality second. Sure Trump’s a scoundrel, but he might agree with our tax proposal. Sure, he is a racist, but he might like our position on the defense budget. Policy agreement can paper over a moral chasm. Nobody calling themselves a conservative can agree to this hierarchy of values.

The classic conservative belief, by contrast, is that character is destiny. Temperament is foundational. Each candidate has to cross some basic threshold of dependability as a human being before it’s even relevant to judge his or her policy agenda. Trump doesn’t cross that threshold.

Second, it just won’t work. The Republican Party can’t unify around Donald Trump for the same reason it can’t unify around a tornado. Trump, by his very essence, undermines cooperation, reciprocity, solidarity, stability or any other component of unity. He is a lone operator, a disloyal diva, who is incapable of horizontal relationships. He has demeaned and humiliated everybody who has tried to be his friend, from Chris Christie to Paul Ryan.

Some conservatives believe they can educate, convert or civilize Trump. This belief is a sign both of intellectual arrogance and psychological naïveté.

The man who just crushed them is in no mood to submit to them. Furthermore, Trump’s personality is pathological. It is driven by deep inner compulsions that defy friendly advice, political interest and common sense.

It’s useful to go back and read the Trump profiles in Vanity Fair and other places from the 1980s and 1990s. He has always behaved exactly as he does now: the constant flow of insults, the endless bragging, the casual cruelty, the need to destroy allies and hog the spotlight. “Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,” his brother Robert once said.

Psychologists are not supposed to diagnose candidates from afar, but there is a well-developed literature on narcissism that tracks with what we have seen of Trump. By one theory narcissism flows from a developmental disorder called alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self. Sufferers have no inner voice to understand their own feelings and reflect honestly on their own actions.

Unable to know themselves, or truly love themselves, they hunger for a never-ending supply of admiration from outside. They act at all times like they are performing before a crowd and cannot rest unless they are in the spotlight.

To make decisions, these narcissists create a rigid set of external standards, often based around admiration and contempt. Their valuing criteria are based on simple division — winners and losers, victory or humiliation. They are preoccupied with luxury, appearance or anything that signals wealth, beauty, power and success. They take Christian, Jewish and Muslim values — based on humility, charity and love — and they invert them.

Incapable of understanding themselves, they are also incapable of having empathy for others. They simply don’t know what it feels like to put themselves in another’s shoes. Other people are simply to be put to use as suppliers of admiration or as victims to be crushed as part of some dominance display.

Therefore, they go out daily in search of enemies to insult and friends to degrade. Trump, for example, reportedly sets members of his campaign staff off against each other. Each person is up one day and belittled another — always kept perpetually on edge, waiting for the Sun King to decide the person’s temporary worth.

Paul Ryan and the Republicans can try to be loyal to Trump, but he won’t be loyal to them. There’s really no choice. Congressional Republicans have to run their own separate campaign. Donald Trump does not share.
 

Should you watch the Super Bowl?

How Politics Has Poisoned Islam

Roger Cohen: Israel's Image

Muslims condemn Paris attacks

KC Interfaith Council on presidential hopeful Dr Ben Carson's and others' anti-Muslim rheteric  2015 October 1

Economic Voodoo - Krugman

No religious test in early Constitutional debates, a glimpse

Pope Francis on Interfaith Dialogue 2015 June 6

Brian Zahnd: For the Common Good

Karen Armstrong: Religion and Violence (Fields of Blood)
And the Women, They Bury the Dead,
     by Mark Matzeder (2014 May)  (my title)

LINKS  to Muslim leaders condemning violence
    So often the media fail to report the world-wide responses of Muslims to attrocities. Here are two examples of what so many uninformed people say does not exist: 
UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bd0Y6qWmlA?sns=fb
US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcTv2AW7tzU
 

The Brutal Bible  (my title)
    from the Jewish Forward

War of Choice
     by Roger Cohen

Bill Tammeus on Homosexuality

Israel's Image Issue
Roger Cohen JAN. 28, 2016 
 

This is an interesting moment in relations between the United States and Israel. Call it a poisonous lull. The vitriol around the Iran nuclear deal has subsided. But something is rotten in the special bond.

The American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, was recently dismissed as a “little Jew boy” by a former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying that “two standards” seem to apply in the way the law is applied to Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and that “too much Israeli vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked.”

Shapiro was stating the obvious. Israeli settlers are citizens entitled to the full protection of civil law. The 2.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank are not. Their decades-old limbo places them in a permanent state of vulnerability subject to Israeli military law. Israel, in turn, exercises corrosive dominion; hence the vigilantism.

What was interesting was that Shapiro chose to speak out — a reflection of the acute frustration of the Obama administration with Israeli policies that cement what Secretary of State John Kerry has called a “one-state reality.” That reality is one in which Israel cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state.

The situation was well-described in a Human Rights Watch report published this month: “On the one hand, Israel provides settlers, and in many cases settlement businesses, with land, water infrastructure, resources, and financial incentives to encourage the growth of settlements. On the other hand, Israel confiscates Palestinian land, forcibly displaces Palestinians, restricts their freedom of movement, precludes them from building in all but 1 percent of the area of the West Bank under Israeli administrative control, and strictly limits their access to water and electricity.”

It’s not only within the administration that frustration is running high. The American Jewish community has grown more divided. Increasingly, younger Jews are distancing themselves from Israeli policies seen as unjust, unlawful, immoral or self-defeating. On college campuses where movements like Black Lives Matter have focused minds on issues of oppression and injustice, it does not take much to draw a parallel with the Palestinian cause, however lacking in nuance that analogy may be.

A right-wing Israeli government, including illiberal ministers contemptuous of the Palestinian national movement, makes it harder to put the case for support of Israel. If Netanyahu is now an Israeli moderate, what does that say about the extent of Israeli Messianic nationalism?

Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The Jewish Week and a strong supporter of Israel, sent me an article he published recently whose first paragraph reads:

“Even as Israel endures daily ‘lone wolf’ attacks from young Palestinians prepared to die for the cause of spilling Jewish blood, American Jewish leaders confide that generating support for the Jewish state is becoming increasingly difficult these days — even within the Jewish community, and especially among younger people.”

“To be pro-Israel is being seen as more and more of a right-wing thing,” Amna Farooqi, the president of J Street U, the campus branch of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace Jewish lobbying group, told me. “It’s false. You can be pro-Israel and progressive, but American Jewish leaders must be transparent on the settlements. You can’t say you support two states if you don’t take a clear position, for example, against funding activities over the Green Line.”

Farooqi, a senior at the University of Maryland, is a Pakistani-American Muslim elected to lead J Street U last summer. Raised in an immigrant family critical of Israel, but also in a neighborhood — Maryland’s Montgomery County — that was heavily Jewish, she came gradually to a Zionist’s belief in Israel’s right to exist combined with the conviction that “you cannot support Israel without grappling with the occupation. Keeping quiet will not help.”

When she started college, she initially thought of getting involved with Students for Justice in Palestine, but found there was little interest in engaging people with different views. “My talking to people who already believed what I believed was not useful,” she told me. “I wanted to go to Hillel and talk to people who did not believe there was an occupation. Two-state advocacy was easier with J Street. There’s no point sitting in an echo chamber.”

Farooqi’s message, through her own many-layered identity in a time of growing polarization, is important. The current situation is unsustainable. As United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, remarked this month, “It is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”

Palestinian leaders also have a responsibility to curb that hate — to cease incitement, hold elections, overcome divisions and abandon their sterile retreat into victimhood. But nothing can excuse Israel’s relentless pursuit of the very occupation that undermines it.

Close American tax loopholes that benefit settlers. Label West-Bank products so that consumers can make informed decisions. Pressure businesses, as Human Rights Watch puts it, to “comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company 
 
 

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/KIN CHEUNG

Candles are lit as people gather in Hong Kong, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2015, to mourn for the victims killed in Friday's attacks in Paris. French President Francois Hollande said more than 120 people died Friday night in shootings at Paris cafes, suicide bombings near France's national stadium and a hostage-taking slaughter inside a concert hall. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Muslim leaders the world over are condemning the horrific terror attacks that struck Paris Friday night, expressing outrage and shock at an onslaught of shootings and bombings that left at least 120 dead and hundreds wounded.

The outpouring of support for the victims and and disgust for the attacks began even before ISIS, the militant terrorist group current terrorizing entire sections of Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the carnage. Muslim imams, scholars, commentators, and average Muslims expressed grief and horror using social media. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, an Islamic movement founded in British India in the 19th century, released a statement rebuking the “barbaric attacks.”
In Ireland, the Imam of the Al-Mustafa Islamic Centre and Chair of the Irish Muslim Peace ? Integration Council, offered prayers for the victims and dismissed terrorist’s claims to Islam.
“My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Paris and every other place on earth plagued by sick men with weapons and bombs,” Imam Umar Al-Qadri said. “Terrorists have no religion whatsoever. Their religion is intolerance, hatred for Peace.”

Shuja Shafi, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, repeated Al-Qadri’s rejection of ISIS.

“This attack is being claimed by the group calling themselves ‘Islamic State’,” he said. “There is nothing Islamic about such people and their actions are evil, and outside the boundaries set by our faith.”
The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, the thousand-year-old, highly influential center for Sunni Muslim scholarship, called the attacks “odious” and called on the world to “unite to face this monster,” according to French magazine Jeunea Frique.

There is nothing Islamic about such people and their actions are evil, and outside the boundaries set by our faith.

Leaders of several Muslim-majority nations also spoke out. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani called the attacks a “crime against humanity,” Qatari foreign minister Khaled al-Attiyah described them as “heinous,” and Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister declared they were “in violation and contravention of all ethics, morals and religions.” Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body also spoke out, saying “terrorists are not sanctioned by Islam and these acts are contrary to values of mercy it brought to the world.”

Joko Widodo, president of Indonesia — the largest Muslim nation population-wise — said “Indonesia condemns the violence that took place in Paris.”

In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim social justice group, quickly issued a press release rejecting terrorism — something they do regularly in response to such incidents. Their statement also made mention of a bombing in Beirut, Lebanon on Thursday that wounded 200 and killed 45. Three residents of Dearborn, Michigan lost their lives in that attack attack, which ISIS also claimed responsibility for.

“These savage and despicable attacks on civilians, whether they occur in Paris, Beirut or any other city, are outrageous and without justification,” CAIR’s statement read. “We condemn these horrific crimes in the strongest terms possible. Our thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of those killed and injured and with all of France. The perpetrators of these heinous attacks must be apprehended and brought to justice.”

CAIR is also part of a broad coalition of Muslim groups scheduled to hold a press conference noon Saturday to collectively condemn the attacks. The group is said to include representatives from CAIR, American Muslims for Palestine, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim Alliance in North America, Muslim American Society, Muslim Legal Fund of America, Muslim Ummah of North America, and the Mosque Cares.

Pope Francis appeared to echo their rejection of ISIS’s religious claims in a phone interview with the Italian Bishops’ Conference television network on Friday. Explaining that he sees the violence as part of a “piecemeal Third World War,” he said “there is no religious or human justification” for the attacks.

[The pope] said ‘there is no religious or human justification’ for the attacks.

“I am close to the people of France, to the families of the victims, and I am praying for all of them,” Pope Francis said. “I am moved and I am saddened. I do not understand, these things hard to understand.”
The Vatican seconded the pope on Saturday.

“We are shocked by this new manifestation of maddening, terrorist violence and hatred which we condemn in the most radical way together with the pope and all those who love peace,” said Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman said in a statement.
The response is expressive of the global Muslim community’s longstanding condemnation of ISIS in general, which faith leaders repeatedly insist is not Islamic.

Such responses are common after terror attacks, although many Muslims and non-Muslims have expressed frustration with being expected to condemn repeatedly the actions of small militant groups who commit violence in the name of Islam, whereas Christians and members of other religious groups are rarely expected to do the same. Other Muslims expressed frustration that leaders of some Middle Eastern nations condemned the Paris attack but not the sometimes deadly tactics used to silence political opposition in their own countries.
 
 
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/how-religion-can-lead-to-violence.html

I am surprised that Gary Gutting confuses religion with belief and fails to note that classical Judaism and Vedic Hinduism are also "revealed" religions. His historical presentation and logical argument fails because it does not recognize that various faiths at different times emphasize one or more of the "four c's" of religion -- creed, code, cultus, and community. Intolerance most often arises from social rather than theological forces, though they may be expressed or justified in language akin to belief; failing to see the real causes of violence is a critical defect in Gutting's argument.

From the beginning of their presence in Kansas City, I have been of two minds about the Gulen folk, and always honest with them; frustrated that it took so long for them to recognize other Muslims in KC and play nice with them, distressed by their use of the word "dialogue" in their name when it is clear there goal is monological; amused and at times puzzled at the political leaders they honored in order to insinuate themselves in the Kansas City cultural and political-governmental complexes (while ignoring those who truly deserved recognition for interfaith labors); the foolish emphasis on how we are all alike by many of their speakers;  deeply appreciating the trip to Turkey (while I was honest there about my concerns as well)  and the fact that their financial competence made it possible for them to arouse and engage folks in the community who otherwise might not have known about interfaith work here, even though CBS-TV, Harvard's Pluralism Project, and other groups were aware of what had been happening here before the Gulen folks became such a presence.

Anyhow, with mixed feelings and considerable discomfort, I've defended them among friends watching what has been unfolding in Turkey, and I stopped being a fan of Erdogon after the Istanbul park episode. His increasingly authoritarian rule is destroying Turkish democracy.

Nonetheless, I was taken aback by this from Akyol (left column). I do perceive something like an authoritarian structure generally and in one very specific case here in KC.

Nonetheless, they do mostly good work, whatever their motivations, and I hope it will be possible to continue friendships and to support their programs while maintaining my honest assessments, to which they never repond, even when I put them in writing.

Worship elements for 160710
at Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church

2016 June 3

Why does KCPT cancel important public affairs and news programs like Washington Week in Review? I hate missing KC Week in Review but I can imagine production constains. However, Washington Week was obviously broadcast on other PBS stations. Shame, especially in this important season when you should be helping to providing information for the citizenry. Time for local fundraising at the end of WWIR was provided. This is hardly the first time you have cheated Kansas City of important national broadcasts in favor of fluff.

I received this information:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter posted an op-ed in the Washington Post on May 31, 2016, expressing his disagreement with the human rights and public health organizations that are advocating for the complete legalization of prostitution and sex trade — even the most abusive aspects. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate says he agrees with Amnesty International, UNAIDS and other groups that say that those who sell sex acts should not be arrested or prosecuted — but he cannot support proposals to decriminalize buyers and pimps.

I admire Carter on many things. He is a most exemplary former President.

However, in the face of testimony of many professional prostitutes who have praised their work as non-exploitative and helped them advance with their lives, whose incomes would be limited by this proposal, and in consideration of my ignorance about what seems to be a very complicated question, I wonder about his opposition to full legalization and would be interested in what informed folks might say. One thing I am looking for is an explanation of why someone might sell his or her labor in legitimate sex therapy but not in other forms of sex work; it seems classist in favor of the privileged class. Why is engaging a psychiatrist's precious mind for an hour legitimate but engaging a prostitute's precious body necessarily evil? Other cultures do not see the world in this way. In our own country I'd want to know more about Nevada, for example. Of course I'm opposed to all "sex-trafficking" but I distinguish that from truly voluntary prostitution. Religious phenomenology, from ancient times to our own day includes temple or sacred prostitutes, and I would need to know more about how that works before I could come to a complete agreement with Carter.

No doubt I am unfair to the Human Potential Movement to associate it with those group sessions in the 60s where participants were instructed to write a term of identity or aspiration on their blank tee shirts. Yes, there was a time when tee shirts were blank. Sort of like the silence we never hear anymore. 

I've heard of selling one's soul to the devil, but now runner Nick Symmonds* auctions some of his skin to T-Mobile. If he wants to do something with his skin, why not donate the space to a charity? Visiting both coasts in ages past, I saw people wearing clothes with the manufacturer's name as part of the design, becoming an expression of the wearer's identity, a practice since invading the Heartland. Now you are known by your brand. Kids have killed for brand-name shoes. Despite Lady Bird Johnson's efforts to reduce billboards in America, we are now financially forced to call public buildings by the corporations who purchase naming rights. We move from advertisements, tweets, interruptions, bullet-points, passcodes, PowerPoint, and multi-tasking all the way to distraction and hell. With the bombast of our politics I rest my case.

Plain skin is space. Simple is sumptuous. Silence is sacred.

*Kansas City Star, 2016 May 13, page 11A

 "The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens" --Robert Maynard Hutchins. Implied, I think, is the notion that citizens cannot be resposible ules they know enough of the arts and the physical and social sciences to fully enjoy life participating in community, nation, and global culture and affairs.

http://globallee.blogspot.com/2008/05/remembering-garma-cc-chang-buddhist.html

I studied with Chen-Chi Chang at the University of Nebraska (visiting prof from Penn State) around 1965. He has shaped my life. 

One funny anecdote for those who remember typewriters and typing paper. He began one class session by saying that our assignment for the following session was to write a 20-page paper on "the Void." When he completed his instructions, I reached under my chair where I had a box of typing paper and produced 20 blank sheets of paper which I handed to him and said, "Here, Professor Chang, is my paper on the Void." He ceremonially thumbed through the sheets and when he finished, he said, "Ah, very good, Mr Barnet, and here is your grade" as he made a zero with his finger in the air.  The class applauded.

I learned to love the Vimalakirti Sutra from him. I still have notes from his lectures. 

After leaving the Univ of Nebraska, I studied at the Univ of Chicago Divinity School. My 500-page doctoral paper at the affiliated Unitarian Universalist seminary was on the Void.

Vern Barnet
2016/Apr/18

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=
35630153&postID=2284784837587314651&isPopup=true
 
 

An authority on Buddhist philosophy, born in China and educated at Kong-ka Monastery, eastern Tibet. Chang came to the United States after World War II and was a research fellow at the Bollingen Foundation in New York from 1955 onward. At the time of his death, Dr. Chang was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

He wrote a number of books, including The Practice of Zen (1959), The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa (1962), and The Essential Teachings of the Tibetan Mysticism (1963). He also wrote an important review of the book The Third Eye (1958), by Lop-sang Rampa, published in Tomorrow magazine as part of an exposé of the author. Chang showed that Rampa's knowledge of Buddhism and Tibetan occultism was "inaccurate and superficial" and characterized the book as "interesting and highly imaginative fiction." This review appeared alongside a second article, which noted that "Lopsang Rampa" had been born Cyril Henry Hoskins, son of a British plumber.

Sources:
Chang, Garma Chen-Chi. Esoteric Teachings of the Tibetan Tantra. Lausanne, Switzerland: Falcon's Wing Press, 1961.

——. Teachings of Tibetan Yoga. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1963.

——. "Tibetan Phantasies." Tomorrow 6, 2 (Spring 1958): 13-16.

Chang, Garma Chen-Chi, ed. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962. Re-print, Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1977.

Speaker -- Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Founder and Director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem, Israel

Moderator -- Ambassador Allan J Katz, Founder of American Public Square

This is not a review of the evening, which I attended in support of the wonderful efforts of the Faith Always Wins Foundation, and in memory of those who were murdered by an anti-Jewish fanatic April 13, 2014 in Overland Park, KS. Rather what follows is simply my emailed reactions. I post these reactions because good intentions alone often fail. Programs of informed quality will make the ripples we need to change the world. 
 

1. The program was disappointing to me.  If I had a flicker of interest in interfaith work, our speaker would have pretty much doused the spark. I was hoping an enthusiastic and committed account of his experience and vision. It sounded instead as if he wanted to do an academic analysis, but he did not seem well acquainted with work done in that arena, either. I did have some difficulty hearing, so I may have missed some good stuff. However, I didn't hear bubbling enthusiasm at the reception afterwards. You've been to many more recent "interfaith" experiences than I lately, so I wonder how valuable you might have found the program. I always think if you are going to talk about interfaith, you should do some interfaith. Even though the venue would not have made that easy, a simple exercise or two with audience members pairing up would have made the evening much more lively, given folks a chance to know each other more deeply, and created a context for the speaker's remarks. I hate to see opportunities wasted.

2. I was embarrassed by the program last night. The speaker achieved being both abstract and shallow at the same time. I think [--] was disappointed, too. There was no excitement I could detect at the reception afterwards. If I had a spark of interest in interfaith work before the speech, it would have been pretty well doused by the speech. The speaker failed to draw upon his own experience and clearly was not acquainted, on one hand, with the work of academics (which he seemed to want to be), and on the other, with how to move or motivate or cheer an audience. So whatever you did instead last night was a better use of your time. There were less than 100 people, I think, in that large auditorium. Such a shame to waste the occasion. 

3.  We all honor those whose lives were taken two years ago, and want to support the vision and efforts of SevenDays. But I would not be faithful without saying that I felt last night's program failed to meet the promise of the vision. . . .
     If I had a flicker of interest in interfaith work, our speaker would have pretty much doused the spark; he made it sound pretty boring. I was hoping an enthusiastic and committed account of his experience and vision. It sounded instead as if he wanted to do an academic analysis, but he did not seem well acquainted with work done in that arena, either, and in fact made factual errors. And I didn't hear bubbling enthusiasm at the reception afterwards. I always think if you are going to talk about interfaith, you should do some interfaith. Even though the venue would not have made that easy, a simple exercise or two with audience members pairing up would have made the evening much more lively, given folks a chance to know each other more deeply, and created a context for the speaker's remarks. I hate to see opportunities wasted. SevenDays deserved a speaker who knew his subject and knew how to move, motivate, and cheer an audience to make a ripple and change the world.
 

Many of my friends are lawyers. I admire the legal profession. But why do lawyers possess all the seats of the Supreme Court? The Constition does not specify lawyers for the Court.

The Supreme Court should be democracy's temple of justice, not a hothouse where, by acrane arguments, lawyers twist the law to their own ends, too often displayed when folks actually read divided decisions of the Court. Lawyers are not the only ones who can recognize justice. Groups of highly qualified people of diverse backgrounds working together often produce superior outcomes. 

Therefore I suggest that at least one Supreme Court Justice, the next one, be a non-lawyer smart enough to access and comprehend the history and technicalities of the law, with a heart beating to justice in the body of democracy, trained in some other profession such as medicine, education, social service, government, business, the arts, sports, science, the media, or religion. 

Kansas City alone has several such polymaths who would enhance the Court's work, and from the nation's talent pool we could easily find someone who would make the Constitution blaze anew with the light of justice for a democratic nation.
16.02.15
Printed in Letters to the Editor in The Kansas City Star 160223

RESPONSE TO DONALD TRUMP 

Ramesh Ponnuru concludes a recent column (Star, Nov 28) by saying that "Islam really is our enemy." Does he view Christian terrorists like the KKK to say Christianity is our enemy? No.

Scoundrels, fanatics, and terrorists -- and politicians -- may wrap themselves in the language of faith, but their deeds betray the very faiths they claim. Why would Ponnuru give any credit to what terrorists say when they claim they act in the name of their faiths? Why should he respect what deranged terrorists have to say about religion, rather than our respected fellow Muslim citizens, Muslim authorities here and around the world, and the millions of Muslims world-wide suffering and fleeing from the terrorists?

The best antidote to the disease of terrorism is Islam itself. Ponnuru plays into terrorists' plan by dividing good people of all faiths among themselves instead of focusing on the evil itself and its perpetrators.

Statement on a claim that Muslims and Christians worship different Gods.

In The Star's Voices of Faith column September 19, a Christian minister answered the question, "Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?" by saying that "a non-Trinitarian 'God' describes a false god, leaving mankind with no hope of salvation."

Muslims are not Trinitarian. But neither are Jews. What are we to make of many passages of Christian scripture which affirm that the Christian God is the God of the Jews? For example, in Matthew 22:32, Jesus himself makes this claim. In Acts 3:13, Peter makes a similar claim. In Romans 4, Paul justifies Christianity in terms of the God of Abraham, who was not a Trinitarian. James 2:23 says that Abraham was God's "friend." Apparently you can be God's friend and not be a Trinitarian. Other citations would be redundant.

Though their understandings of God's nature varies, Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. Even among Christians, how God is perceived varies greatly.

Misunderstanding another's faith can lead to much mischief, but friendships among folks of all faiths can bring surprising blessings.

Vern Barnet
Founder, the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council

submitted as a Letter to the Editor, The KC Star 2015 September 19, published in the Sunday edition, September 27.

Here is the original column, to which I object:
DO CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS WORSHIP THE SAME GOD?
   THE REV. SCOTT GORDON, First Baptist Church of Kansas City: My simple answer is “no,” an answer that apologists on either side should readily give.
   Others standing on the outside or those from within either camp wishing to compromise faithfulness to their tradition for various reasons might say, “Yes, but in different ways.”
   I am not saying that people do not have a right to believe what they choose, but let’s at least be honest about what Islam and Christianity teach.
   Christians and Muslims describe God in many disparate ways, most notably in our views regarding the Trinity. Islam depicts Jesus as merely a prophet of Allah, neither as being his son nor being one with Allah (Surah 5:75; 9:30; 19:34-35, 88-93).
   The Qur’an states Jesus denies any claim of divinity (Surah 5:116-117). In fact, Islam denounces the doctrine of the Trinity, though misunderstood as being God, Jesus and Mary rather than God the father, son and Holy Spirit, as blasphemy (Surah 4: 171-173).
   Christians, in contrast, hold to the doctrine of the Trinity, the understanding of God being eternally existent in one essence and three persons, as a core tenet of our faith (John 1:1-5, 14; 8:48-58; 18:3-8).
   So essential is this doctrine that Jesus describes himself as the only one who provides the hope of salvation to anyone (John 14:6). 
For a Christian, then, a non-Trinitarian “God” describes a false god, leaving mankind with no hope of salvation.
   While I readily admit a common history between our two religions, I see two very different Gods described and an important choice for all to consider.

Statement on “Laudato Si”

In his encyclical, “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis has beautifully and powerfully written about the moral dimensions and dangers of our violation of the environment. The cultural trance that makes us exploit and separate us from the environment, and from one another, deceives us like the devil himself. 

There are three dimensions in which the sacred is revealed: nature, personhood, and community. Gandhi used a single term “swaraj“ (self-rule) to unite the Asian understanding of managing one’s own personhood with Western-style social urges in the political Indian movement seeking independence from Britain. Now Pope Francis, by addressing the environment, approaches unifying all three dimensions of the sacred and offers us a fresh chance to see the underlying interdependence that is the fundamental character of all that exists. 

If Francis helps us wake from the cultural trance that has been disastrously deepened by greed and willful ignorance, we may yet escape the doom the signs for which are all around us. Instead we may come closer to sharing and celebrating the miracle of abundant life. 

Click for the Vatican site for the document.

Click for a Interfaith P?L Study Guide

Statement on Bishop Finn's Resignation  2015 April 21
     From the beginning of Robert Finn's tenure as Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, many Catholic friends were anguished over his totalitarian style and ill-advised and often mean decisions. The wreckage to ecumenical and interfaith relationships is staggering. Healing and repair will be slow, but now may be possible. A strong and vibrant Catholic presence in Kansas City benefits all faiths.

Published in The Kansas City Star 2015 Apr 24
as "Healing for church"

Submission to the KCStar for Lent

KCStar Letter about Yoder ? Citygroup (published 2014 Dec 16)

Post toKansasAllsFair about same-sex marriage,
(2014 June)  1. text only

Review of Hair and Together, Country Joe and the Fish,
Chicago Literary Review (Summer, 1968)

KCStar Letter about Teilhard(submitted 2014 June 7)

KCStar Letter about Ian G Barbour (puiblished 2014 Feb 3 )

NT Times comment on "Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal" about the US giving Israel unredacted information about individuals' private lives for political, not security, purposes.

Statement for the 2014 Gun Violence Community Forum
describing CRES

Response to KCStar Faith Walk for 2014 Nov 22 about the purpose of "the conjugal act."
 

Many Christians are observing Lent. It is a time of personal and group repentance. Repentance is something we Americans do not do very well. We sanitize our history and our present practices. Yet as we condemn extremism and terrorism, we would honor this season more fully by recounting some of our sins.
   We committed genocide against many of the American Indian tribes.
   We imported human beings from Africa and kept them as slaves.
   We denied full citizenship to women for most of our nation's history.
   We continue to deny full human rights to many minorities, including some who wish to marry those they love.
   The American economy often seems to be based more on profit and greed than on  the desire to serve.
   Our lust for oil led us to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and install the oppressive Shah, which in turn led to the revolutionary regime we detest.
   We waged war in the Vietnam based on deception by President Johnson.
   We destabilized the Allende democracy in Chile under President Nixon and supported the dictator Pinochet.
   We funded what became the Taliban in seeking to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
   We have supported vicious governments and groups such as Batista’s Cuba and the Nicaraguan Contras.
   We invaded Iraq based on fabrication from President George W Bush, Dick Chaney, and the Neocons including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Perle. The foolishness of Ambassador Paul Bremer and others generated the conditions for what is now ISIS/ISIL. The “enormous success story” Vice President Dick Chaney predicted has instead led to an unfolding disaster in the region. The human and financial cost to us is staggering.
   We continue today to support oppressive and corrupt nations with such strong lobbies and commercial interests in the US that I fear to name them. Our politics are visibly in their grip. Our Congress today is largely purchased by foreign interests who wish us to do their bidding and by domestic concentrations of wealth.
   This is the tiniest fragment of our domestic and foreign wickedness. We cannot be, or be perceived as, a just and peace-loving country without acknowledging and repenting of this part of our heritage and continuing practices.
   Let us exercise our tradition of self-criticism, recover our basic American values, and continue the work for justice and peace of which we are rightly proud, as an example to all nations. May repentance lead to reform so that we may be worthy of those who have sacrificed so much to keep the American ideals alive.

Brian Zahnd is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church in St Joseph, MO. He books include  Beauty Will Save The World,  Unconditional: The Call of Jesus To Radical Forgiveness,  and now A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor's Journey toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace.

used by permission, from Beauty Will Save the World, p219-220.
The Statement is on behalf of Ahmed El-Sherif,Samuel Nachum, and Zahnd,
united in working for peace and the common good.

For the Common Good
Brian Zahnd
 

We are Jews, Christians and Muslims.

And we are friends.

We seek to follow our respective religions faithfully.

We do not believe all religions are the same.

We recognize the reality of our religious differences.

But we are friends.

We are devout in our faith and respectful of our friendship.

Our faith and friendship need not be mutually exclusive.

We recognize that we share common space—the common space of a shared planet.

For the sake of the common good we seek common ground.

We do not share a common faith, but we share a common humanity.

In our different religions we do not practice the same rituals or pray the same prayers.

But in our shared humanity we hold to a common dream: Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

We hold to the dream that our children may play in peace without fear of violence.

And so…

We pledge not to hate.

We pledge not to dehumanize others.

We pledge to do no harm in the name of God.

As individuals we do not compromise the truth claims of our respective religions—

But we will not use truth claims to fuel hate or justify violence.

We will practice our respective faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

But we believe our faith can be practiced in the way of peace—

We believe our faith truly practiced need never be at odds with humanitarian ideals.

Our religions share a complex and intertwined history—

A history of interaction that has too often been tumultuous and bloody.

We believe there must be a better way and we seek that better way.

The way of peace.

We are Jews, Christians and Muslims.

And we are friends.

We seek common ground for the common good.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace.

   So though your record shop is apologetic about having only the first first recording, grab it and risk disappointing your friends because you failed to purchase the “unexpurgated” version. The stodgy New York  Times finds the second album superior to the first; but in fact, the second is heavy-handed, artificial, and grossly commercial, as only a commercial hippie product can be. It is unfortunate that James Rado (who with Gerome Ragni wrote the lyrics) replaces Walker Daniels as Claude in the new production. The title song “Hair,” for example, is a natural ornament for any 
head in the first recording; in the second, Rado sings as if his “Hair” were a compulsive toupee.

   Though the play is billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” composer Galt MacDermot has not written much genuine rock; he has mainly substituted guitars for the traditional Broadway orchestra. 

As a play about war (the Revolutionary, the Civil, the Vietnam), sex (all kinds), civil rights (including miscegenation), drugs, the draft, education, the generation gap, astrology, air and water pollution, Eastern religions, and space travel, Hair is a landmark in our generation’s attempt to escape a manifesto; as music, Hair, by recognizing recent folk and rock developments in popular music, simply legitimizes the use of “rock” in theatre and fails to reach the standard of innovation achieved by, say, Gershwin in Porgy and Bess.

   The best song is the hymn “Ain't Got No – I got Life” which begins the first album. The male leads sings what they ain't got (and the chorus comments): 

     no pot (busted!), 
     no faith (Catholic!), 
     no soap (dirty!),
     no job (lazy!) , 
     no good (good!), 
     no TV (honest?!), 
     no sleep (high!),
     no books (lovely!), 
     no sex (ugly). 

After an extended and pleasant catalog in this fashion, Mother 1947 asks, “What have you got, 1967, that makes you so damn superior and gives me such a headache?” The inevitable and cleanly optimistic and profoundly religious response: 

     I got life, mother; laughs, sister; 
     freedom, brother; 
     I got good times, man; . .
     I got headaches and toothaches 
     and bad times, too, like you. 
     I got my Hair, my head, my tits, 
     my ass . . . . I got life.

   The honesty, frankness, and openness of the play is joyously captured on the first disk, nowhere better illustrated than in Shelley Plimpton's disarmingly corny “Frank Mills:” “If you see him, tell him that I don't want the two dollars back, just him.”

   As the radio stations seem intent on playing original “original cast” album if you want to hear what Hair is really about.
 

   The cut that has been most aired is “The Harlem Song,” a commercial, much more successful as music and comment than the LSD advertisement in the first Fish album. David Cohen's spoken introduction is in flawless travelogue diction. He says:

Glorious, breath-taking, spectacular! Relax in the grandeur of America's yesteryear – Harlem, land of enchanting contrasts, where the romantic past touches the hands of the exciting present. First, the pleasure of being received with warmth and genuine hospitality, the easy adjustment to the comfort and style of superb meals, exotic beverages, colorful entertainment, and dynamite action.

    The music is in a pleasant Hawaiian-country style, broken with an interlude of conversation on the street, itself perfect in stereotypic dialect. “I was havin' a good meal of wat'rmel'n and hom'ly grits... “ The musical phrasing of “Harlem Song” is immaculate, as if to contrast with the mess suggested at the end of the ad: “If you can't go to Harlem, maybe you'll be lucky and Harlem will come to you.”

   The “Good Guys-Bad Guys Cheer” illustrates the futility of the good-bad guy polarity, and the consequent confusion that accompanies insistent and persistent side-taking. The “Cheer” leads into “The Streets of Your Town” (New York), in which the striking phrase, “The subway is not the underground” carries more weight the first time you hear the song than on repeated playings.

   The final cut, “An Untitled Protest,” is a rock recitative. The subject is Vietnam, and perhaps more effective in its quiet way than the earlier Fish “I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-To-Die Rag.” The new protest is conceived in personal rather than political terms; and, as in the quatrain below, the satire is not raucous but sad,

   Superheros fill the skies,
   Tally sheets in hand;
   Yes, keeping score in times of war
   Takes a superman.

   The new Fish record is the group's most successful album as social comment, but it falls short of the high achievement in the earlier “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” in purely musical terms. The new record has no music that can compare with “Flying High” or “Lorraine.” Instead, the emphasis on the novelty song rock of which the Fish are capable. “Waltzing in the Moonlight,” for instance, is a tortured flamenco with dull chord progressions and a bromidic use of the Spanish style. One vocalist’s  “Away Bounce My Bubbles” is often and indefensibly off-pitch. The electronic tricks in “Susan” are annoying. Some of the organ playing in this album is good, however, especial in “Bright Suburban Mr. And Mrs. Clean Machine,” where, before we get to the third floor, “underwear, Barbie dolls, war toys, plastic artificial flowers . . ,” we hear the gospel tabernacle sound – it never sounded as good! The most interesting song musically is “Catacean,” which has several distinguished solos. But the song is just beginning when it ends, “Open the door and love walks in; close the door and you're alone again.”

Mr. Barnet is a graduate student at the Meadville Theological School.
 

Thank you for the story about the Jesuit scientist and theologian, ("Tough Talk," June 7). As a religion-hater finishing high school, I first heard about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1960 when his book, The Phenomenon of Man, became available in English. Teilhard's reconciliation of science and religion led me into the ministry and ultimately into interfaith work. 

   The separate categories of science and religion are arbitrary historical accidents. To see the world and ourselves whole requires transcending the confines of ordinary human language which at best can only point to the Holy. 

   The world’s religions typically find the Holy in the realms of nature (primal religions), selfhood (Asian faiths), and the history of covenanted community (monotheistic traditions). Teilhard's vision, often stretching the language of science toward the divine, implies the congruence of these three realms. 

   The interfaith promise is nothing less than the restoration of nature, the recovery of the whole self, and the life of a community of love. To move beyond our overwhelmingly fragmented, oppressive, and exploitive secularism, we must see that these three realms are one, that our environmental, personal, and social disorders can be healed by the same unitive vision that enthralled Teilhard. 

By Elissa Strauss
Published May 25, 2014.
The Forward
 
 

You know what could use a trigger warning? The bible. If any book merits a note of caution it is the one that is colloquially referred to as good.

In the recent debate over whether colleges should warn students of material that deals with potentially post-traumatic stress syndrome inducing topics like war, sexual violence, racism, and anti-Semitism, I couldn’t help but think about how the raw and vulgar bible has sat warning-less for centuries.

Students at the University of California Santa Barbara and Oberlin College believe novels like Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” (for racial violence) and “The Great Gatsby” (for misogynistic violence) should be presented with a warning label, all the while the world’s most popular book, easily found at safe-seeming places like churches, synagogues and hotel rooms, is brimming with much worse.

The bible is a book without heroes or hagiography; there’s hardly a character who fails to misstep. Instead we get war, slavery, rape, deceit, plagues, smiting, apocalypses and, in some ways the most threatening of them all: soul-crushing doubt in the Almighty. And yet, historically speaking, how many soldiers, victims of sexual assault and believers have found comfort in its words?

For many of us today the bible is the stuff of myth or tribal tales, but in previous generations many took it as God’s word. Imagine the horror of reading about not just people but also God’s capacity for violence while also believing that God was the author.

So why didn’t the architects of the bible (you might believe it is God, I believe it was various people over time) try to do some damage control? If not by way of slapping a warning on the cover, at least in the editing of the text?

Thank God they didn’t.

The bible is a raw, sometimes bleeding text, pulsing with fear and bitterness and the crumbling of will in the face of temptation. I believe that this very rawness is responsible for its endurance.

Because what is raw is also tender, and it is in this tender place where real transformation happens. The bible does not shy away from our vulnerabilities, nor does it seek to accommodate them. Instead, when read with an honest mind (which is, regrettably, not a universal phenomenon), it exposes us to them, and ultimately ourselves.

It is this intrinsically unapologetic nature of the text, its refusal to soothe or conceal, which not so long ago took me by great surprise and ultimately drew me in.
 

Every year as new fellows come study with us, many of whom who have also never read the text, I see them go through the same experience of being caught off guard and shaken up by the piercing directness of the bible. They are triggered, and it is from that place that they are inspired to create.

I lack the vitriol some feel against those who are trying to make trigger warnings happen. Those students are well-meaning and want to protect the people among them who have experienced trauma. But the question is, what are they really protecting them from?

If it’s from reading something that might take them outside their comfort zone, that might cause more harm than good. (With exception, of course, of serious cases of PTSD.) As Los Angeles Times’ Megan Daum wrote in her column on the topic, we are already self-censoring enough: “Liberals stay away from Fox News. Conservatives shield themselves from MSNBC. We choose to live in particular neighborhoods or regions in part because we want neighbors who share our values. We rant away on social media, but we’re usually just talking to people who already agree with us. We call that an echo chamber, but isn’t it also a way of living inside one big trigger warning?”

If the ban is an attempt to shield some individuals from others’ insensitive comments, well this is what a good professor should help out with through the facilitation of nuanced conversation that makes everyone uncomfortable and not just those with a troubled personal connection. When everyone is vulnerable, everyone grows, through the development of empathy for others or a reckoning with their past. This is how we prepare students for a big bad world filled with wounded people and devoid of trigger-warnings.

The bible has long-served a similar role. Its nakedness pushes those of us who study it to strip down too, and contemplate just what is at stake for ourselves and those around us. It does not shy away from the dark matter of life, and so we should not shy away from it or any other of the good books that do the same, because reading them together is how we grow.

Elissa Strauss is a contributing editor to the Forward. Read more: http://forward.com/

In response, Martin E Marty writes 
Monday | June 9 2014 , in part:

Religious scholars . . . know that religious texts treat the extremes of existence, of life and death matters, of love and hate, care and brutality, and not only do they not shy away from discussing them but that they can also promote depth of understanding, care, solace, and healing. The human story gives unlimited illustrations of these.

Are science and religion really in conflict, or do they support each other? No person has explored this question with greater skill than Ian G. Barbour who died late last year at the age of 90.

      His books, and especially Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, comprehensively examine issues such as astronomy, evolution, quantum mechanics and human nature. He took a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago and an advanced theological degree from Yale. In 1999, he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, often compared to the Nobel Peace Prize.

     The year Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion was published,  I began working my way through graduate theological studies at the University of Chicago by running errands for scientists there, and the awe I felt from the interplay of these two fields leads me to write this tribute to Barbour.

     Folks with inadequate backgrounds in science and religion (that is, most of us) can penetrate the mysteries of science and faith a little more deeply because of Barbour’s work.

Vatican City, 6 June 2015 (VIS) - “Today’s meeting is a sign of our shared desire for fraternity and peace; it is a testimony to the friendship and cooperation that has been developing over the years and which you already experience daily. To be present here today is already a 'message' of that dialogue which everyone seeks and strives for”, said Pope Francis to the participants in the ecumenical and interreligious meeting held in the Franciscan international study centre of Sarajevo.

The leaders of the Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish communities of Bosnia and Herzegovina greeted the Holy Father, who recalled one of the fruits of this desire for encounter and reconciliation – the establishment in 1997 of a local Council for Interreligious Dialogue, bringing together Muslims, Christians and Jews – and congratulated them on their work in promoting dialogue, coordinating common initiatives and developing relations with State authorities. “Your work in this region is immensely important, particularly in Sarajevo, which stands as the crossroads of peoples and cultures”, he said. “Here, on the one hand, diversity constitutes a great resource which has contributed to the social, cultural and spiritual development of this region, while, on the other, it has also been the cause of painful rifts and bloody wars. It is not by chance that the birth of the Council for Interreligious Dialogue and other valuable initiatives in the area of interreligious and ecumenical work came about at the end of the war, in response to the need for reconciliation and rebuilding a society torn apart by conflict. Interreligious dialogue here, as in every part of the world, is an indispensable condition for peace, and for this reason is a duty for all believers”.

Francis underlined that interreligious dialogue, before being a discussion of the main themes of faith, is a “conversation about human existence”. “This conversation shares the experiences of daily life in all its concreteness, with its joys and sufferings, its struggles and hopes; it takes on shared responsibilities; it plans a better future for all. We learn to live together, respecting each other’s differences freely; we know and accept one another’s identity. Through dialogue, a spirit of fraternity is recognised and developed, which unites and favours the promotion of moral values, justice, freedom and peace. Dialogue is a school of humanity and a builder of unity, which helps to build a society founded on tolerance and mutual respect”.

For this reason, “interreligious dialogue cannot be limited merely to the few, to leaders of religious communities, but must also extend as far as possible to all believers, engaging the different sectors of civil society. Particular attention must be paid to young men and women who are called to build the future of this country. It is always worth remembering, however, that for dialogue to be authentic and effective, it presupposes a solid identity: without an established identity, dialogue is of no use or even harmful. I say this with the young in mind, but it applies to everyone.

“I sincerely appreciate all that you have managed to accomplish up to this point and I encourage each of you in your efforts for the cause of peace of which you, as religious leaders, are the first guardians here in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I assure you that the Catholic Church will continue to offer her full support and willingness to help”, the Pope emphasised. “We are all aware that there is a long way yet to go. Let us not be discouraged, however, by the difficulties, but rather continue with perseverance along the way of forgiveness and reconciliation. While we seek to recall the past with honesty, thereby learning the lessons of history, we must also avoid lamentation and recrimination, letting ourselves instead be purified by God Who gives us the present and the future: He is our future, He is the ultimate source of peace.

“This city, which in the recent past sadly became a symbol of war and destruction, this Jerusalem of Europe, today, with its variety of peoples, cultures and religions, can become again a sign of unity, a place in which diversity does not represent a threat but rather a resource, an opportunity to grow together. In a world unfortunately torn by conflicts, this land can become a message: attesting that it is possible to live together side by side, in diversity but rooted in a common humanity, building together a future of peace and brotherhood. You can live life being a peacemaker!”.

Following his discourse, and before asking all those present to pray for him and assuring them of his prayers, Pope Francis recited the following prayer “to the Eternal, One and True Living God, to the Merciful God”:

“Almighty and eternal God,
good and merciful Father;
Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is visible and invisible;
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,
King and Lord of the past, of the present and of the future;
sole judge of every man and woman,
Who reward Your faithful with eternal glory!

We, the descendants of Abraham according to our faith in You, the one God,
Jews, Christians and Muslims,
humbly stand before You
and with trust we pray to You
for this country, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
that men and women, followers of different religions, nations and cultures
may live here in peace and harmony.

We pray to You, O Father,
that it may be so in every country of the world!
Strengthen in each of us faith and hope,
mutual respect and sincere love
for all of our brothers and sisters.
Grant that we may dedicate ourselves
courageously to building a just society,
to being men and women of good will,
filled with mutual understanding and forgiveness,
patient artisans of dialogue and peace.

May each of our thoughts, words and actions
be in harmony with Your holy will.
May everything be to Your glory and honour and for our salvation.
Praise and eternal glory to You, our God!
Amen”.

By Chris Hedges

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories—required under the rules of American journalism—although we know they are untrue.

I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19 at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Gro?e L?ge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.

By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters. The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on the other. And in the uncommon cases when news of atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas.

The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays, wrote, is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a truth that would force them to examine their own racism and self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”

This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Papp?, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.

But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this assault began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions. The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant. There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.

“... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult that may be,” the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. “I have personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but we couldn’t strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We waited around, and when they didn’t leave we were forced to abort a strike on an important target.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the “Nobel Peace Prize …  a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.”

The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/why-israel-lies-1407246992. All rights are reserved.

I do not want to believe what Hedges has written. But over and over, throughout the years, otherwise decent people here in Kansas City have lied to protect Israel even when the matters are local and only tangentially related to Israel. Many of these are documented and some in local print.  So my personal knowledge and intimate experience require me to at least consider what Hedges has written, even as I detest the violence of Hamas. 

It is difficult to understand how Israel can continue to build settlements against international law and oppress those it occupies while claiming it wants peace.

Since Israel (through AIPAC) has purchased  the Congress, European govenments and the international community are the best hopes for a more balanced understanding of the requirements of justice,

The End of Liberal Zionism

Israel’s Move to the Right Challenges Diaspora Jews
By ANTONY LERMANAUG. 22, 2014

LONDON — Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads. The original tradition of combining Zionism and liberalism — which meant ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian state as well as a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority, and standing behind Israel when it was threatened — was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionists stand for is now in doubt.

The decision of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has cost the lives, to date, of 64 soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side, and nearly 2,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians.

“Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war,” wrote Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian’s opinion editor and a leading British liberal Zionist, for The New York Review of Books last month. He’s not alone. Columnists like Jonathan Chait, Roger Cohen and Thomas L. Friedman have all riffed in recent weeks on the theme that what Israel is doing can’t be reconciled with their humanism.

But it’s not just Gaza, and the latest episode of “shock and awe” militarism. The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals — and I was one, once — subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right — this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink.

In the United States, trenchant and incisive criticism of Israeli policies by commentators like Peter Beinart, one of liberal Zionism’s most articulate and prolific voices, is now common. But the critics go only so far — not least to avoid giving succor to anti-Semites, who use the crisis as cover for openly expressing hatred of Jews.

In the past, liberal Zionists in the Diaspora found natural allies among the left-wing and secular-liberal parties in Israel, like Labor, Meretz and Shinui. But Israel’s political left is now comatose. Beaten by Menachem Begin in the 1977 national elections, it briefly revived with Yitzhak Rabin and the hopes engendered by the 1993 Oslo Accords. But having clung to the Oslo process long past its sell-by date, the parliamentary left in Israel has become insignificant.

Diaspora Jewish politics has also changed. In the 1960s, when I was an enthusiastic young Zionist in England planning to settle on a kibbutz in Israel, some organizations had names virtually identical to Israeli political parties. This identification lasted only as long as the institutions that prevailed in Israel seemed to Diaspora Jews to reflect a liberal Zionist viewpoint.

Today, the dominant Diaspora organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as a raft of largely self-appointed community leaders, have swung to the right, making unquestioning solidarity with Israel the touchstone of Jewish identity — even though majority Jewish opinion is by no means hawkish.

Though squeezed by a more vociferous and entrenched right, liberal Zionists have not given up without a fight. They found ways of pushing back, insisting that their two-state Zionism held out the only hope for an end to the conflict and setting up organizations to promote their outlook. J Street in America and Yachad in Britain, founded in 2008 and 2011 respectively, describe themselves as “pro-Israel and pro-peace” and have attracted significant numbers of people who seek a more critical engagement with Israel.

I became an Israeli citizen in 1970, and I am still one today. I worked in the Jewish community in research and philanthropic capacities for 30 years, serving the interests of Jews worldwide. But in the 1980s, I began to rethink my relationship with Israel and Zionism. As recently as 2007, while directing the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an independent think tank, I still thought that liberal Zionism had a role to play. I believed that by encouraging Diaspora Jews to express reservations about Israeli policy in public, liberal Zionism could influence the Israeli government to change its policies toward the Palestinians.

I still understood its dream of Israel as a moral and just cause, but I judged it anachronistic. The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.

This mind-set blocks any chance Israel might have to become a full-fledged liberal-democratic state, and offers the Palestinians no path to national self-determination, no justice for their expulsion in 1948, nor for the occupation and the denial of their rights. I came to see the notion that liberal Zionism might reverse, or even just restrain, this nationalist juggernaut as fanciful.

I used my position at the think tank to raise questions about Israel’s political path and to initiate a community-wide debate about these issues. Na?ve? Probably. I was vilified by the right-wing Jewish establishment, labeled a “self-hating Jew” and faced public calls for me to be sacked. This just confirmed what I already knew about the myopia of Jewish leadership and the intolerance of many British Zionist activists.

Today, neither the destruction wreaked in Gaza nor the disgraceful antics of the anti-democratic forces that are setting Israel’s political agenda have produced a decisive shift in Jewish Diaspora opinion. Beleaguered liberal Zionists still struggle to reconcile their liberalism with their Zionism, but they are increasingly under pressure from Jewish dissenters on the left, like Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices.

Along with many experts, most dissenting groups have long thought that the two-state solution was dead. The collapse of the peace talks being brokered by the American secretary of state, John Kerry, came as no surprise. Then, on July 11, Mr. Netanyahu definitively rejected any possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state. The Gaza conflict meant, he said, that “there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan” (meaning the West Bank).

Liberal Zionists must now face the reality that the dissenters have recognized for years: A de facto single state already exists; in it, rights for Jews are guaranteed while rights for Palestinians are curtailed. Since liberal Zionists can’t countenance anything but two states, this situation leaves them high and dry.

Liberal Zionists believe that Jewish criticism of Israeli policies is unacceptable without love of Israel. They embrace Israel as the Jewish state. For it to remain so, they insist it must have a Jewish majority in perpetuity. Yet to achieve this inevitably implies policies of exclusion and discrimination.

They’re convinced that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic, but they fail to explain how to reconcile God’s supreme authority with the sovereign power of the people. Meanwhile, the self-appointed arbiters of what’s Jewish in the Jewish state — the extreme religious Zionists and the strictly Orthodox, aided and abetted by Jewish racists in the Knesset like Ayelet Shaked, a Jewish Home Party member who recently called for the mothers of Palestinian “snakes” to be killed — are trashing democracy more and more each day. Particularly shocking are the mass arrests — nearly 500 since the beginning of July — of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel for peacefully protesting, and the sanctions against Arab students at universities for posting pro-Gaza messages on social media.

Pushed to the political margins in Israel and increasingly irrelevant in the Diaspora, liberal Zionism not only lacks agency; worse, it provides cover for the supremacist Zionism dominant in Israel today. Liberal Zionists have become an obstacle to the emergence of a Diaspora Jewish movement that could actually be an agent of change.

The dissenting left doesn’t have all the answers, but it has the principles upon which solutions must be based. Both liberal Zionism and the left accept the established historical record: Jews forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes to make way for the establishment of a Jewish state. But the liberals have concluded that it was an acceptable price others had to pay for the state. The left accepts that an egregious injustice was done. The indivisibility of human, civil and political rights has to take precedence over the dictates of religion and political ideology, in order not to deny either Palestinians or Jews the right to national self-determination. The result, otherwise, will be perpetual conflict.

In the repressive one-state reality of today’s Israel, which Mr. Netanyahu clearly wishes to make permanent, we need a joint Israeli-Palestinian movement to attain those rights and the full equality they imply. Only such a movement can lay the groundwork for the necessary compromises that will allow the two peoples’ national cultures to flourish.

This aspiration is incompatible with liberal Zionism, and some liberal Zionists appear close to this conclusion, too. As Mr. Freedland put it, liberal Zionists “will have to decide which of their political identities matters more, whether they are first a liberal or first a Zionist.”

They should know that Israel is not Judaism. Jewish history did not culminate in the creation of the state of Israel.

Regrettably, there is a dearth of Jewish leaders telling Diaspora Jews these truths. The liberal Zionist intelligentsia should embrace this challenge, acknowledge the demise of their brand and use their formidable explanatory skills to build support for a movement to achieve equal rights and self-determination for all in Israel-Palestine.

Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, is the author of “The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.”
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/sunday/
israels-move-to-the-right-challenges-diaspora-jews.html?\
hp?action=click?pgtype=Homepage?module=c-column-top-span-region?region=
c-column-top-span-region?WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

A War of Choice in Gaza
SEPT. 8, 2014 New York Times
Roger Cohen

LONDON — Another round of violence is over in the Holy Land. More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians and many of them children, have been killed. More than 70 Israelis are dead. The grass, in that appalling Israeli metaphor, has been mown (and will now start growing again). Hamas, through its resistance, has burnished its reputation among Palestinians. Israel is angrier. Nobody is better off.

Periodic eruptions are intrinsic to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy of maintaining the status quo of rule over millions of Palestinians, expansion of West Bank settlements and maneuver to deflect American mediation. Oppressed people will rise up. Israel’s anemic embrace of a two-state objective is the best possible cover for the evisceration of that aim. Still, the question arises: Was this mini-war necessary?

I think not. Certainly it was not in Israel’s strategic interest. Much mystery continues to shroud its genesis, the abduction on June 12 of three Israeli youths near Hebron and their murder, now attributed to a local Palestinian clan including Hamas operatives who acted without the knowledge or direction of the Hamas leadership. (There has been no major investigative piece in the American press on the incident, a troubling omission.)

But enough detail has emerged to make clear that Netanyahu leapt on “unequivocal proof” 
http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/ForeignPolicy/Issues/Pages/
Behind-the-Headlines-The-Hamas-
kidnapping-of-three-Israeli-teens-
15-Jun-2014.aspx
of Hamas responsibility (still unproduced) for political ends. The prime minister’s aim was to discredit Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, for reconciling with Hamas; vindicate the collapse of the peace talks Secretary of State John Kerry had pursued; stir up Israeli rage over the fate of the teenagers; sweep through the West Bank arresting hundreds of suspected Hamas members, including 58 released under the terms of an earlier deal with Hamas; and consolidate divide-and-rule.

Assaf Sharon of Tel Aviv University, the academic director of a liberal think tank in Jerusalem, has a powerful piece in The New York Review of Books. It makes the important point that Hamas was beleaguered before the violence, isolated by the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. This weakness lay behind the reconciliation with Abbas. Netanyahu might have used this development to extend Abbas’s authority into a more open Gaza at the expense of Hamas, the very objective now apparently sought after so much needless loss of life.

For more than two weeks after the abduction, persuasive evidence that the teenagers were dead was kept from the Israeli public. A hugely emotional return-our-boys campaign was pursued while the recording of a phone call from one of those boys to the police in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping was not divulged. In it, shots and cries of pain could be heard. As Shlomi Eldar wrote, 
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/
misleading-kidnapping-almoz-hamas-vengeance-hatred.html
“It was a murder in real time, horrifying and monstrous.” After it, “Those who heard the emergency call recording knew that the best one could hope for was to bring the boys to their final resting places.”

The effect of this concealment, whatever its justification, was to whip up an Israeli frenzy. This was the context in which a Palestinian teenager was killed by Israeli extremists. It was also the context of the drift to war: air campaign, Hamas rockets and tunnel raids, Israeli ground invasion. Drift is the operative word. Israel’s purpose was shifting. At different moments it included “zero rockets,” demilitarizing Gaza and destroying the tunnels. “Lacking clear aims, Israel was dragged, by its own actions, into a confrontation it did not seek and did not control,” Sharon writes.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/
2014/sep/25/failure-gaza/

The only certainty now is that this will happen again unless the situation in Gaza changes. That in turn necessitates Palestinian unity and renunciation of violence. It also hinges on a change in the Israeli calculus that settlement extension, a divided Palestinian movement, and vacuous blah-blah on a two-state peace are in its interest, whatever the intermittent cost in blood.

Two other recent pieces are essential reading in the aftermath of the fighting. The first is Connie Bruck’s “Friends of Israel” 
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/friends-israel
in The New Yorker, an examination of the political sway of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby group. In it, she quotes Brian Baird, a former Democratic congressman, getting to the nub: “The difficult reality is this: in order to get elected to Congress, if you’re not independently wealthy, you have to raise a lot of money. And you learn pretty quickly that, if Aipac is on your side, you can do that.” She also quotes John Yarmuth, a congressman from Kentucky, on upholding the interests of the United States: “We all took an oath of office. And Aipac, in many instances, is asking us to ignore it.”

Finally, read Yehuda Shaul
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/08
/how-we-grew-israeli-veteran-dehumanising-power-military-control
 in The New Statesman on the corrosive effect of the occupation and his experience of military service in the West Bank: “We needed to erase the humanity of Palestinians along with our own humanity.”

COMMENT on the NY Times story about the US giving Israel unredacted information about individuals' private lives for political, not security, purposes --

Although I have many Jewish friends and have always supported the existence of the state of Israel, I have also sought justice for Palestinians. At one point, a leader in the Jewish community in line with the Israeli government here in Kansas City tried to damage my relationships with several prominent Muslims by intimating that I am homosexual. (The tactic backfired.) The lengths Israeli operatives will go to here on a relatively unimportant person (I merely founded the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council), makes Bamford's report credible to me.
 

CRES --the Center for Religious Experience and Study, founded in 1982, is a Kansas City area institute promoting interfaith understanding. In 1989, we created the Interfaith Council as one of our many programs. Our work has been recognized by Harvard University’s Pluralism Project, a half-hour CBS-TV special, and numerous awards.

By using the wisdom from the world’s primal, Asian, and monotheistic religious traditions, CRES seeks to reverse the endangered environment, the violation of personhood, and the broken community so that we may be restored with nature, the self made whole, community joined in covenant, and the sacred found afresh. 

We favor sensible regulation of guns and ammunition to reduce violence and accidents which destroy lives and damage the social fabric. 

Our website is www.cres.org.

2014/Nov/22
FAITH WALK | MICHAEL HAYES, OVERLAND PARK

FAITH AND REASON, 
FACTS AND BELIEFS

   Pope John Paul II once wrote that “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
   Faith and reason are faculties of the soul that are aimed at the same ultimate goal, and therefore faith and reason cannot contradict.
   Many tenets of faith cannot be adequately tested by reason — for example, no empirical or logical evidence can prove or disprove the belief that God loves us — but other tenets of faith can be placed under philosophical and scientific scrutiny.
   For those of us who put such faith in reason, we must recognize that discoveries of certain facts may force us to change our beliefs. For example, if it can be proved that Jesus never rose from the dead, then we must renounce Christianity.
   This puts us in an interesting position. If, through the use of reason, we discover a certain fact that conflicts with our religious life, we must change that life.
   This illustrates an interesting trend within our present culture. I subscribe to the traditional view that, when truth is discovered, one must respond to that truth by incorporating it into one’s life.
   The current trend seems to be the opposite: Nowadays many people respond to the facts not by changing their lifestyle, but changing the facts.
   I do not mean this in the Orwellian sense — such fact-changing occurs at a much less noticeable level. Take, for example, the traditional Christian teaching that contraception violates the natural law.
   It is a clear fact that artificial birth control is contrary to the natural result of the conjugal act, namely, the inherently good creation of a new life.
   But rather than change one’s life in response to this fact, the more common option in today’s world is to change the fact. Many people now claim that the production of life is not the natural result of intercourse.
   They do this even though this fact is a central assumption of contemporary evolutionary biology, and there has been new scientific discovery that has called it into question.
   I only raise this example because it gives us a sociological picture of what we deal with on a daily basis. Any time we enter into sin, it is because we would rather ignore the truth than look to God for the strength to change our lives.
   Of course, I struggle with this. We all do. But we must remember that we are created by God to respond to the truth through our faculties of faith and reason. When we ignore truth for the pursuit of our own desires, we fail to be the faithful and rational creatures God intended us to be.

   Michael Hayes may be reached at faith@kcstar.com
 

Thank you for writing well for The Star.

In reading your column for today, I wondered if you were curious about how others might see the "natural result of the conjugal act." Seeing this differently might lead to a different conclusion about whether "artificial birth control is contrary to the natural result of the conjugal act."

If you are curious, here is one of many possible different ways of looking at sex:
 

    The natural result of the conjugal act is pleasure. 
I believe biologists would say that this is true far more frequently than the creation of a new human being. And in two-thirds of those cases when the egg is fertilized, nature (or God) aborts the process by failure of the fertilized egg to implant in the uterus. Thereafter, miscarriages occur 15-20% of the time. So the case statistically is overwhelming that it is far more likely that the "natural result of the conjugal act" -- for both partners -- is pleasure, not the creation of a new human being. And of course there are couples who are infertile or simply beyond child-bearing years. Should they be denied the blessings of conjugal bonding because no child can result?

    Perhaps the "natural result of the conjugal act" is an emotional and spiritual bonding between partners. This might be called Love. Scripture says, "God is Love." One way of looking at the "conjugal act" is spiritually, and the expression and deepening of love through the divine gift of sexuality might be the chief "natural result of the conjugal act."

For couples who cannot afford another child, or who would face medical dangers in pregnancy, contraception may offer the security that enhances the expression of love, and therefore should be praised.

Thank you for your provocative column. I would be grateful for any thoughts you might have in response to my comments and questions.

Sincerely,
Vern Barnet
 

SUNDAY, NOV 23, 2014 05:59 AM CST

Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps”

Blaming religion for violence, says Karen Armstrong, allows us to dismiss the violence we've exported worldwide

MICHAEL SCHULSON
 

Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam. She has written a history of myth. She has written a history of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong studied English at Oxford, spent seven years as a Catholic nun, and then, after leaving the convent, took a brief detour toward hard-line atheism. During that period, she produced writing that, as she later described it, “tended to the Dawkinsesque.”
     Since then, Armstrong has emerged as one of the most popular — and prolific — writers on religion. Her works are densely researched, broadly imagined and imbued with a sympathetic curiosity. They deal with cosmic topics, but they’re accessible enough that you might (just to give a personal example) spend 15 minutes discussing Armstrong books with a dental hygienist in the midst of a routine cleaning.
     In her new book, “Fields of Blood,” Armstrong lays out a history of religious violence, beginning in ancient Sumer and stretching into the 21st century. Most writers would — wisely — avoid that kind of breadth. Armstrong harnesses it to a larger thesis. She suggests that when people in the West dismiss violence as a backward byproduct of religion, they’re being lazy and self-serving. Blaming religion, Armstrong argues, allows Westerners to ignore the essential role that violence has played in the formation of our own societies — and the essential role that our societies have played in seeding violence abroad.
     Reached by phone in New York, Armstrong spoke with Salon about nationalism, Sept. 11 and the links between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
---

S: Over the course of your career, you’ve developed something of a reputation as an apologist for religion. Is that a fair characterization? If so, why do you think faith needs defenders?

A: I don’t like the term “apologist.” The word “apologia” in Latin meant giving a rational explanation for something, not saying that you’re sorry for something. I’m not apologizing for religion in that derogatory sense.

After I left my convent I thought, “I’ve had it with religion, completely had it,” and I only fell into this by sheer accident after a series of career disasters. My encounters with other faith traditions showed me first how parochial my original understanding of religion had been, and secondly made me see my own faith in a different way. All the faith traditions have their own particular genius, but they also all have their own particular flaws or failings, because we are humans and we have a fabulous ability to foul things up.

The people who call me an apologist are often those who deride religion as I used to do, and I’ve found that former part of my life to have been rather a limited one.

S: Your new book is a history of religion and violence. You point out, though, that the concept of “religion” didn’t even exist before the early modern period. What exactly are we talking about, then, when we talk about religion and violence before modern times?

A: First of all, there is the whole business about religion before the modern period never having been considered a separate activity but infusing and cohering with all other activities, including state-building, politics and warfare. Religion was part of state-building, and a lot of the violence of our world is the violence of the state. Without this violence we wouldn’t have civilization. Agrarian civilization depended upon a massive structural violence. In every single culture or pre-modern state, a small aristocracy expropriated the serfs and peasants and kept them at subsistence level.

This massive, iniquitous system is responsible for our finest achievements, and historians tell us that without this iniquitous system we probably wouldn’t have progressed beyond subsistence level. Therefore, we are all implicated in this violence. No state, however peace-loving it claims to be, can afford to disband its army, so when people say religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history this is a massive oversimplification. Violence is at the heart of our lives, in some form or another.

S: How do ritual and religion become entangled with this violence?

A: Well, because state-building was imbued with religious ideology. Every state ideology before the modern period was essentially religious. Trying to extract religion from political life would have been like trying to take the gin out of a cocktail. Things like road-building were regarded as a sort of sacred activity.

Politics was imbued with religious feeling. The prophets of Israel, for example, were deeply political people. They castigated their rulers for not looking after the poor; they cried out against the system of agrarian injustice. Jesus did the same, Mohammed and the Quran do the same. Sometimes, religion permeates the violence of the state, but it also offers the consistent critique of that structural and martial violence.

S: Is it possible to disentangle that critiquing role from the role of supporting state structures?

A: I think in the West we have peeled them apart. We’ve separated religion and politics, and this was a great innovation. But so deeply embedded in our consciousness is the desire to give our lives some meaning and significance that no sooner did we do this than we infused the new nation-state with a sort of quasi-religious fervor. If you regard the sacred as something for which we are willing to give our lives, in some senses the nation has replaced God, because it’s now not acceptable to die for religion, but it is admirable to die for your country.

Certainly in the United States, your national feeling, whether people believe in God or not, has a great spiritual or transcendent relevance — “God bless America,” for example; the hand on the heart, the whole ethos. We do the same in the U.K. with our royal weddings. Even in our royal weddings, the aristocracy are all in military uniform.

S: Ah, that’s a great observation.

A: In your great parades, you know, when a president dies, there’s the army there.

The religiously articulated state would persecute heretics. They were usually protesting against the social order rather than arguing about theology, and they were seen as a danger to the social order that had to be eliminated. That’s been replaced. Now we persecute our ethnic minorities or fail to give them the same rights.

S: I’d like to go deeper into this comparison between nationalism and religion. Some people would say that the ultimate problem, here, is a strain of irrationality in our society. They would argue that we need to purge this irrationality wherever we see it, whether it appears in the form of religion or nationalism. How would you respond?

A: I’m glad you brought that up, because nationalism is hardly rational. But you know, we need mythology in our lives, because that’s what we are. I agree, we should be as rational as we possibly can, especially when we’re dealing with the fates of our own populations and the fates of other peoples. But we don’t, ever. There are always the stories, the myths we tell ourselves, that enable us to inject some kind of ultimate significance, however hard we try to be rational.

Communism was said to be a more rational way to organize a society, and yet it was based on a complete myth that became psychotic. Similarly, the French revolutionaries were imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and erected the goddess of reason on the altar of Notre Dame. But in that same year they started the Reign of Terror, where they publicly beheaded 17,000 men, women and children.

We’re haunted by terrible fears and paranoias. We’re frightened beings. When people are afraid, fear takes over and brings out all kind of irrationality. So, yes, we’re constantly striving to be rational, but we’re not wholly rational beings. Purging isn’t an answer, I think. When you say “purging,” I have visions of some of the catastrophes of the 20th century in which we tried to purge people, and I don’t like that kind of language.

S: Let’s try a different analogy: Perhaps our search for narrative and meaning is a bit like a fire. It can go out of control and burn people pretty badly. Seeing this destruction, some people say we should just put out the fire whenever we can. There are others who argue that the fire will always be there, that it has benefits, and that we need to work with it to the best of our abilities. And you’re sort of in the latter camp, yes?

A: I would say so … If we lack meaning, if we fail to find meaning in our lives, we could fall very easily into despair. One of the forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed about 500 people involved in the 9/11 atrocity, and those lone-wolves like the Boston Marathon people, has found that one of the principal causes for their turning to these actions was a sense of lack of meaning; a sense of meaningless and purposelessness and hopelessness in their lives. I think lack of meaning is a dangerous thing in society.

There’s been a very strong void in modern culture, despite our magnificent achievements. We’ve seen the nihilism of the suicide bomber, for example. A sense of going into a void.

S: In “Fields of Blood,” you explore how the material needs of people can give rise to more abstract ideas. So, speaking about nihilism as something particular to the modern era: Are there political or social conditions that underlie this sense of meaninglessness?

A: Yes. The suicide bomber has been analyzed by Robert Tate of the University of Chicago, who has made a study of every single suicide bombing from 1980 to 2004. He has found that it’s always a response to the invasion of the homeland by a militarily superior power. People feel their space is invaded, and they resort to this kind of action because they can’t compete with the invaders. [Suicide bombing] was a ploy [first] used by the Tamil Tigers, who had no time for religion. Of the many Lebanese bombings [in the 1980s], only seven of them were committed by Muslims, three by Christians. The rest, some 17 or so, were committed by secularists and socialists coming in from Syria.

I think a sense of hopelessness is particularly evident in the suicide bombings of Hamas, where these young people live in refugee camps in Gaza, with really very little hope or very little to look forward to. People who talk to survivors of these actions found that the desire to die a heroic death, to go out in a blaze of glory and at least have some meaning in their lives and be venerated and remembered after their death, was the driving factor.

S: There’s a line in your book that struck me: “Terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when other motives, religious, economic, and social, are involved. Terrorism is always about power.”

A: I think I’m quoting some terrorist specialist there.

Even when [terrorists] claim to be doing it for Allah, they’re also doing it for political motives. It’s very clear in bin Laden’s discourse. He talks about God and Allah and Islam and the infidels and all that, but he had very clear political aims and attitudes towards Saudi Arabia, towards Western involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The way he talked always about Zionists and crusaders rather than Jews and Christians — these are political terms. Since the early 20th century the term “crusade” has come to stand for Western imperialism.

In the Hamas martyr videos, the young martyr will segue very easily from mentioning Allah the Lord of the world, and then within a couple of words he’s talking about the liberation of Palestine — it’s pure nationalism — and then he’s into a third-world ideology, saying his death will be a beacon of hope to all the oppressed people who are suffering at the hands of the Western world. These things are mixed up in that cocktail in his mind, but there’s always a strong political element, not just a going towards God.

In fact, all our motivation is always mixed. As a young nun, I spent years trying to do everything purely for God, and it’s just not possible. Our self-interest and other motivations constantly flood our most idealistic efforts. So, yes, terrorism is always about power — wanting to get power, or destroy the current power-holders, or pull down the edifices of power which they feel to be oppressive or corruptive in some way.

S: How direct is the link between colonial policies in the Middle East and a terrorist attack in New York or London?

A: I think — and I speak as a British person — when I saw the towers fall on September 11, one of the many, many thoughts that went through my head was, “We helped to do this.” The way we split up these states, created these nation-states that ISIS is pulling asunder, showed absolutely no regard for the people concerned. Nationalism was completely alien to the region; they had no understanding of it. The borders were cobbled together with astonishing insouciance and self-interest on the part of the British.

Plus, a major cause of unrest and alienation has always been humiliation. Islam was, before the colonial period, the great world power, rather like the United States today. It was reduced overnight to a dependent bloc and treated by the colonialists with frank disdain. That humiliation has rankled, and it would rankle, I think, here in the States. Supposing in a few decades you are demoted by China, it may not be so pretty here.

Every fundamentalist movement that I’ve studied, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation.

S: So, when we in the West talk about religion as the cause of this violence, how much are we letting ourselves off the hook, and using religion as a way to ignore our role in the roots of this violence?

A: We’re in danger of making a scapegoat of things, and not looking at our own part in this. When we look at these states and say, “Why can’t they get their act together? Why can’t they see that secularism is the better way? Why are they so in thrall to this benighted religion of theirs? What savages they are,” and so on, we’ve forgotten to see our implication in their histories.

We came to modernity under our own steam. It was our creation. It had two characteristics. One of these was independence — your Declaration of Independence is a typical modernizing document. And you have thinkers and scientists demanding free thought and independent thinking. This was essential to our modernity. But in the Middle East, in the colonized countries, modernity was a colonial subjection, not independence.

Without a sense of independence and a driving force for innovation, however many skyscrapers and fighter jets you may possess, and computers and technological gadgets, without these qualities you don’t really have the modern spirit. That modern spirit is almost impossible to acquire in countries where modernity has been imposed from outside.

S: When you hear, for example, Sam Harris and Bill Maher recently arguing that there’s something inherently violent about Islam — Sam Harris said something like “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas” — when you hear something like that, how do you respond?

A: It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps in Europe. This is the kind of thing people were saying about Jews in the 1930s and ’40s in Europe.

This is how I got into this, not because I’m dying to apologize, as you say, for religion, or because I’m filled with love and sympathy and kindness for all beings including Muslims — no. I’m filled with a sense of dread. We pride ourselves so much on our fairness and our toleration, and yet we’ve been guilty of great wrongs. Germany was one of the most cultivated countries in Europe; it was one of the leading players in the Enlightenment, and yet we discovered that a concentration camp can exist within the same vicinity as a university.

There has always been this hard edge in modernity. John Locke, apostle of toleration, said the liberal state could under no circumstances tolerate the presence of either Catholics or Muslims. Locke also said that a master had absolute and despotical power over a slave, which included the right to kill him at any time.

That was the attitude that we British and French colonists took to the colonies, that these people didn’t have the same rights as us. I hear that same disdain in Sam Harris, and it fills me with a sense of dread and despair.

S: Is Islamophobia today comparable to anti-Semitism?

A: Let’s hope not. It’s deeply enshrined in Western culture. It goes right back to the Crusades, and the two victims of the crusaders were the Jews in Europe and the Muslims in the Middle East.

S: Right, because Jews along the crusaders’ routes would be massacred —

A: They became associated in the European mind. We’ve recoiled, quite rightly, from our anti-Semitism, but we still have not recoiled from our Islamophobia. That has remained. It’s also very easy to hate people we’ve wronged. If you wrong somebody there’s a huge sense of resentment and distress. That is there, and that is part of it, too.

I remember speaking at NATO once, and a German high officer of NATO got up and spoke of the Turks resident in Germany, the migrant workers who do the work, basically, that Germans don’t want to do. He said, “Look, I don’t want to see these people. They must eat in their own restaurants. I don’t want to see them, they must disappear. I don’t want to see them in the streets in their distinctive dress, I don’t want to seem their special restaurants, I don’t want to see them.” I said, “Look, after what happened in Germany in the 1930s, we cannot talk like that, as Europeans, about people disappearing.”

Similarly, a Dutch person got up and said, “This is my culture, and these migrants are destroying and undermining our cultural achievements.” I said, “Now you, as the Netherlands, a former imperial power, are beginning to get a pinprick of the pain that happened when we went into these countries and changed them forever. They’re with us now because we went to them first; this is just the next stage of colonization. We made those countries impossible to live in, so here they are now with us.”

S: How should one respond to something like the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, or the threat of terrorism that originates in Muslim countries?

A: Saudi Arabia is a real problem, there’s no doubt about it. It has been really responsible, by using its massive petrol dollars, for exporting its extraordinarily maverick and narrow form of Islam all over the world. Saudis are not themselves extremists, but the narrowness of their religious views are antithetical to the traditional pluralism of Islam.

We’ve turned a blind eye to what the Saudis do because of oil, and because we see them as a loyal ally, and because, during the Cold War, we approved of their stance against Soviet influence in the Middle East.

Fundamentalism represents a rebellion against modernity, and one of the hallmarks of modernity has been the liberation of women. There’s nothing in the Quran to justify either the veiling or the seclusion of women. The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce, legal rights we didn’t have in the West until the 19th century.

That’s what I feel about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. It’s iniquitous, and it’s certainly not Quranic.

S: Where do you, as someone outside of a tradition, get the authority to say what is or isn’t Quranic?

A: I talk to imams and Muslims who are in the traditions.

S: I think it’s easy to say, “Well the text isn’t binding” when you see something in there that you don’t like. But when you see something in the text that you do want to uphold, it’s tempting to go, “Oh, look, it’s in the text.”

Oh, it is. We do it with all our foundation texts — you’re always arguing about the Constitution, for example. It’s what we do. Previously, before the modern period, the Quran was never read in isolation. It was always read from the viewpoint of a long tradition of complicated, medieval exegesis which actually reined in simplistic interpretation. That doesn’t apply to these freelancers who read “Islam for Dummies” …

S: – and then do with it what they will.

A: Yes.
 

Yoder’s missteps

According to the Dec. 11 New York Times, “Furor over move to aid big banks in funding bill,” by Jonathan Weisman, Kansas Republican U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder inserted language, written by Citigroup, to eliminate the Dodd-Frank protection taxpayers have against having to pay for the banks’ mistakes in another financial crisis, as part of the spending bill decried by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

It sounds like Kansas’ financial irresponsibility is quite fashionable among Republicans nationwide.

Vern Barnet
Kansas City

ISTANBUL — We Muslims like to believe that ours is “a religion of peace,” but today Islam looks more like a religion of conflict and bloodshed. From the civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen to internal tensions in Lebanon and Bahrain, to the dangerous rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East is plagued by intra-Muslim strife that seems to go back to the ancient Sunni-Shiite rivalry.

Religion is not actually at the heart of these conflicts — invariably, politics is to blame. But the misuse of Islam and its history makes these political conflicts much worse as parties, governments and militias claim that they are fighting not over power or territory but on behalf of God. And when enemies are viewed as heretics rather than just opponents, peace becomes much harder to achieve.

This conflation of religion and politics poisons Islam itself, too, by overshadowing all the religion’s theological and moral teachings. The Quran’s emphasis on humility and compassion is sidelined by the arrogance and aggressiveness of conflicting groups.

A suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque in Sana, Yemen, late last year. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
This is not a new problem in Islam. During the seventh-century leadership of the Prophet Muhammad, whose authority was accepted by all believers, Muslims were a united community. But soon after the prophet’s death, a tension arose that escalated to bloodshed. The issue was not how to interpret the Quran or how to understand the prophet’s lessons. It was about political power: Who — as the caliph, or successor to the prophet — had the right to rule?

This political question even pit the prophet’s widow Aisha against his son-in-law Ali. Their followers killed one another by the thousands in the infamous Battle of the Camel in 656. The next year, they fought the even bloodier Battle of Siffin, where followers of Ali and Muawiyah, the governor of Damascus, crossed swords, deepening the divisions that became the Sunni-Shiite split that persists today.

In other words, unlike the early Christians, who were divided into sects primarily through theological disputes about the nature of Christ, early Muslims were divided into sects over political disputes about who should rule them.

It is time to undo this conflation of religion and politics. Instead of seeing this politicization of religion as natural — or even, as some Muslims do, something to be proud of — we should see it as a problem that requires a solution.

This solution should start with a paradigm shift about the very concept of the “caliphate.” It’s not just that the savage Islamic State has hijacked this concept for its own brutal purposes. The problem goes deeper: Traditional Muslim thought regarded the caliphate as an inherent part of Islam, unintentionally politicizing the faith for centuries. But it was not mandated by either the Quran or the prophet, but instead was a product of the historical, political experience of the Muslim community.

Moreover, once Muslim thought viewed the caliphate as an integral part of the religion, political leaders and Islamic scholars built an authoritarian political tradition around it. As long as the caliph was virtuous and law-abiding, Islamic thinkers obliged Muslims to obey him. This tradition did not consider, however, that virtue was relative, power itself had a corrupting influence and even legitimate rulers could have legitimate opponents.

In the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire, then the seat of the caliphate, took a major step forward in the Muslim political tradition by importing Western liberal norms and institutions. The sultan’s powers were limited, an elected Parliament was established and political parties were allowed. This promising effort, which would make the caliph the head of a British-style democratic monarchy, was only half-successful. It ended when republican Turkey abolished the very institution of the caliphate after World War I.

The birth of the modern-day Islamist movement was a reaction to this post-caliphate vacuum. The overly politicized Islamists not only kept the traditional view that religion and state are inseparable, they even recast religion as state. “True religion is no more than the system which God had decreed to govern the affairs of human life,” Sayyid Qutb, a prominent Islamist ideologue, wrote in the 1960s. And since God would never actually come down to govern human affairs, Islamists would do it in his name.

Not all Islamic thinkers took this line. The 20th-century scholar Said Nursi saw politics not as a sacred realm, but rather a devilish zone of strife. “I seek refuge in God from Satan and politics,” he wrote. His followers built an Islamic civil society movement in Turkey, asking only religious freedom from the state. Contemporary Muslim academics such as Abdelwahab El-Affendi and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im have articulated powerful Islamic arguments for embracing a liberal secularism that respects religion. They rightly point out that Muslims need secularism to be able to practice their religion as they see fit. I would add that Muslims also need secularism to save religion from serving as handmaiden to unholy wars of domination.

None of this means that Islam, with core values of justice, should be totally blind to politics. Religion can play a constructive role in political life, as when it inspires people to speak truth to power. But when Islam merges with power, or becomes a rallying cry in power struggles, its values begin to fade.

Mustafa Akyol is the author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” and a contributing opinion writer.

Is It Wrong to Watch Football?
UPDATED FEBRUARY 5, 2016 11:13 AM
INTRODUCTION

His body wrecked at 36, Antwaan Randle El regrets ever playing in the National Football League. After he died of an overdose of pain medication at 27, Tyler Sash was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Concussion diagnoses have increased by about a third since the league let independent medical officials assess players. And it seems that with each N.F.L. veteran’s death, another diagnosis of C.T.E. is revealed.

How can fans enjoy watching a game that helps ruin players’ lives?

[See http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/05/is-it-wrong-to-watch-football for all entries to this discussion.]

Do You Like to Watch Football? 
Then Watch What Really Happens.

Markus Koch

Markus Koch played six years for the Washington Redskins, including on their Super Bowl championship team in 1988. He is a holistic health practitioner.

Football is a spectacle of extreme athleticism, controlled mayhem and violence that entertains our thirst for domination. To really appreciate the glories of the game and what it does, though, maybe fans should watch more of it, and get closer to the real game.

Perhaps, to really show the game fully and augment the experience, telemetric technology imbedded in uniforms could inform viewers of the condition of the anterior cruciate ligament, broken forearm or separated shoulder of their favorite players. 

Helmets could discolor and ooze when the dura mater in a player’s cranium is damaged.

The N.F.L. could find yet another revenue stream with a downloadable app that could load metrics into a “game suit” featuring pneumatic devices allowing fans to feel every blindside sack by a 350-pound lineman, every “tremendous hit” experienced on the field.

So everyone should intensely watch that linebacker with the steel plate over the 14-day-old fracture in his arm as he throws himself into the fray, and really, really identify ourselves with our by our disposable Sunday afternoon hero.

Better yet, if we can stomach it, how about 24-hour coverage of what he’s gone through in the days leading up to his moments of fleeting glory? Did the screws go into his arm cleanly as the surgeon installed the plate? Is the Toradol and Novocaine kicking in?

My God, how brave and proud we must feel! Watch. Watch closely. See everything.

Nobody, outside of our families -- if they’ve been able to stick it out – gets to see the underpinnings of our bravery, our pride and perhaps our greed. 

Years later, when the cameras are gone, and our minds go “funny,” our legs don’t work, our backs are a contracted morass of inflexible knots that won’t let us sit in a chair with the kids at Christmas, we’ll resort to bottles and pills that we don’t want our kids to know about. By then, we’ll be on our own. 

Once, everyone wanted to watch us. Once, we wanted everyone to see us play. But now, unless a player is arrested after flying into a violent rage, or blows out his C.T.E.-infused brains under a highway overpass, there will be no televised coverage of our greatest challenges.

----
Vern opines: Football is addictive. It releases some of the same chemicals in the brain that are associated with drugs and other behaviors. It is a patriotic American addition. It corrupts cities, schools, and governments. Some of the folks I love have this addiction, and I know I am susceptible myself. Football weakens our social fabric (rapes and violence increase after games) and lowers the level of political discourse with far more competitive than cooperative (team) metaphors. 
 

Call to Worship – Minister and Members of the Congregation 
M. Into each other's company we gather after births, after deaths,
1. to search in the eyes of each other wider wisdom for our ways,
2. to give the hand that makes joy in the journey
3. to take our places in the cosmos with Buddha, Christ, Yahweh, Shiva, Zeus, Confucius,
4. and with Aton, Gilgamesh, Allah, Thor, Coyote, Kami, Br'er Rabbit, and historical inevitability;
5. with gods and demons, lobbyists and congressmen, with Socrates, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gandhi, 
6. with Malala Yousafzai, Jefferson, Susan B. Anthony, Lincoln, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King Jr, and Sappho;
7. with universities, legislative districts, multi-national corporations, the GNP and IRS; 
8. with the military-industrial complex, the National Rifle Association, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and J Street;
9. with ghosts of slaughtered millions, terrorist threats, and a heritage of nameless generations;
10. with exploitation and oppression here and abroad, and rising inequalities and prejudice;
11. with the Koch Brothers, Governor Brownback, and bullying and ignorance and money in politics;
12. with ids, egos, moieties, computers, and all sentient beings;
13. with unaccountable acts of understanding and compassion,
14. with the beauties of nature still unsullied, so overwhelming we sometimes gasp, 
15. with works of painting, music, architecture, theater, and dance so inspiring we sometimes become part of the art,
16. with communities of faith committed to service in love. 
17. In such a company we light our chalice and our way;
18. We illumine faces of anguish and ecstasy, apathy and energy, that hide the darkness of infinite being,
19. for the flame and the shadow create each other as we create ourselves:
20. Innumerable gods and goddesses are we, sporting in the universe, dancing in the stillness of the void,
21. carrying flames to the edge of the abyss,
22. and wondering together at the magnitude and multitude and mystery of creation.

Meditation spoken together
We who stand in the presence of holiness
Admit to ourselves and to each other--
That sometimes our joy is so great we lose self-consciousness and become one with the flow around us;
That our love is so expansive we accept with gratitude all that is, and practice compassion without limit;
That as a result we and others have lived fully with faith.
We also admit to ourselves and to each other--
That sometimes we allow ourselves to be distracted, losing sight of our center,
That we have done things we ought not to have done, 
And left undone things we ought to have done;
That as a result we and others have suffered brokenness.
We ask now from ourselves, each other, and Processes of cure,
that divisive thoughts be healed,
that harsh words may be forgiven,
that unwise actions may be redeemed,
As we resolve to see this day as a new Day of Creation.