The Season Of Religious Nuts

Some religious fanaticism just begs out for serious mockage. CNN reported today about a group of fundamentalists who believe that Interstate highway 35 (I35) is a holy road as predicted in the simiarly numbered Isaiah, chapt. 35. The Biblical quote is: "A highway shall be there, and a road and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it..."

So these nuts have started a campaign to wipe out any sign of sinners along the length of I35. After all, so sayest the Lord, n'est pas? You have to see the video at the above link to appreciate the true madness.

A saner response to Biblical injunctions from the primitive societies of 3000 years ago is to be found in the opening lines of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited", below. Abraham says, "say what?" when ordered by God to kill his oldest son.

Agnostics Need Not Apply

According to Mitt Romney's recent speech on religion and the Presidency, which was widely praised, only followers of some, any, mainstream religion can serve in the White House. Presumably the same standard would apply to any elected position.

David Brooks has it exactly right in today's Times:

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

In Romney’s account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?

Jesus Is Just Alright With Me

David Brooks writes about the new sociological rise of Catholics.

According to Lisa Keister, a sociologist at Duke, non-Hispanic white Catholics have watched their personal wealth shoot upward. They have erased the gap that used to separate them from mainline Protestants.

Or, as Keister writes in a journal article, “Preliminary evidence indicates that whites who were raised in Catholic families are no longer asset-poor and may even be among the wealthiest groups of adults in the United States today.”

How have they done it?

Well, they started from their traditional Catholic cultural base. That meant, in the 1950s and early ’60s, a strong emphasis on neighborhood cohesion and family, and a strong preference for obedience and solidarity over autonomy and rebellion.

Then over the decades, the authority of the church weakened and young Catholics assimilated. Catholic values began to converge with Protestant values. Catholic adults were more likely to use contraceptives and fertility rates plummeted. They raised their children to value autonomy more and obedience less.

The process created a crisis for the church, as it struggled to maintain authority over its American flock. But the shift was an economic boon to Catholics themselves. They found themselves in a quasi-religious sweet spot.

He concludes:

In fact, if you really wanted to supercharge the nation, you’d fill it with college students who constantly attend church, but who are skeptical of everything they hear there. For there are at least two things we know about flourishing in a modern society.

First, college students who attend religious services regularly do better than those that don’t. As Margarita Mooney, a Princeton sociologist, has demonstrated in her research, they work harder and are more engaged with campus life. Second, students who come from denominations that encourage dissent are more successful, on average, than students from denominations that don’t.

This embodies the social gospel annex to the quasi-religious creed: Always try to be the least believing member of one of the more observant sects. Participate in organized religion, but be a friendly dissident inside. Ensconce yourself in traditional moral practice, but champion piecemeal modernization. Submit to the wisdom of the ages, but with one eye open.

The problem is nobody is ever going to write a book sketching out the full quasi-religious recipe for life. The message “God is Great” appeals to billions. Hitchens rides the best-seller list with “God is Not Great.” Nobody wants to read a book called “God is Right Most of the Time.”

The Chocolate Jesus Controversy

I don't particularly get upset when people who fashion themselves artists take great pleasure in poking a sharp stick in the eyes of people they hate and call it "art". It is part of whatever anger issues they have not resolved with their parents and I take it as such. Additionally, I firmly believe in free speech and the freedom of expression. I also think that religion, given its basis in faith and not fact, must accept that it will be the target of non-believers. It is part of the deal.

But Michelle Malkin does, I think, make a good point. What would the MSM, who generally refused to reprint the infamous Danish cartoons on the grounds that they were offensive to Muslims, do if another "artist" crafted a chocolate Muhammad during Ramadan? It does seem clear that they certainly wouldn't publish photographs of the thing. After all, they did refuse to show the offending cartoons.

This raises the question: are the MSM afraid of offending religious groups across the board, or only afraid of offending religious groups that have a history of violent reactions when offended?