Miscellanea Agnostica

Dr George Tiller of Wichita KS, a famous “abortion doctor” who’s long been the target of the pro-life movement — I mean that literally, they’ve shot and bombed him as well has having taken other measures to destroy him — was gunned down this morning (as reported by the AP via the Hartford Courant):

Late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, a prominent advocate for abortion rights wounded by a protester more than a decade ago, was shot and killed today at a church in Wichita where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir, his attorney said.

Tiller was shot during morning services at Reformation Lutheran Church, attorney Dan Monnat said. Police said a manhunt was under way for the shooter, who fled in a car registered to a Kansas City suburb nearly 200 miles away. …

Hmm. Given it’s Kansas we’re talking about — the state which the Religious Right turned into a crucible of religionazism in the US over the last decade and a half — one has to wonder how much is being done to apprehend his shooter. We’ll just have to see who how this manhunt works out. Of course, pro-lifers have already tried to distance themselves from the shooting:

Anti-abortion group Operation Rescue issued a statement denouncing the shooting.

Uh huh. Riiiiiight! As if I’m supposed to believe that Operation Rescue (led by one of the most bellicose, determined and vehement religionazis in the country, Randall Terry*) is actually upset at Tiller’s killing. No way is that possible! And I’m not sure what basis they can claim for denouncing his execution, given that they’ve gone after the guy full-bore, and have called the man every name in the book and even some that aren’t, for over two decades. Seriously … what did they think the product of their vicious campaign against Tiller would be? Did they think their campaign against him can’t possibly have inspired murderous hatred? And now that he’s been executed, how can they claim not to have any culpability in the matter? Just how stupid do they think I am?

The article lists just some of the often-violent features of their long campaign:

National anti-abortion groups had long focused on Tiller, whose Women’s Health Care Services clinic is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.

In 1991, the Summer of Mercy protests organized by Operation Rescue drew thousands of anti-abortion activists to this city for demonstrations marked by civil disobedience and mass arrests.

Some abortion opponents had resorted to attacks against Tiller long before today’s shooting. A protester shot Tiller in both arms in 1993, and his clinic was bombed in 1985.

As I blogged a couple months ago, the pro-lifers had suffered a setback when Tiller was acquitted in a criminal case trumped up against him by the Religious Right. Perhaps this frustrated them enough to take the law into their own hands … yet again?

Let’s hear it for killing in the name of the “pro-life” movement! Folks … in case it’s not already crystal-clear to you … there’s nothing “pro-life” about the so-called “pro-life” movement. Rather it’s all about control … managing people’s lives for them, and using the state to force all of its citizens to live by one particular set of religious principles.)

* Correction: After publishing this post I realized Randall Terry is no longer head of Operation Rescue. See my follow-up post for more.

I blogged twice before (here and here) about the case of Madeline Kara Neumann, an 11-year-old girl who died of complications from diabetes, whose life easily could have been saved, but who hand’t been treated because her parents — knowing something was wrong — chose to pray about it instead. It was a young life snuffed out because of idiotic religiosity.

After a great deal of hand-wringing over “religious freedom” concerns, and seriously entertaining not doing anything about it, officials finally charged the parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann; Ms Neumann’s trial has just finished, and she was convicted.

Nevertheless, she remains in denial as to what she did wrong, as the Wausau Daily Herald reports:

Neumann: ‘I did what I thought was lawful’

Leilani Neumann, the town of Weston mother convicted of allowing her daughter to die while praying for healing, says in a written statement that her emotions do not hinge on whether the rest of the world approves of her actions. …

“I did what I thought was lawful,” Neumann wrote in a statement released over the weekend. “I didn’t realize it would be a crime to pray for my daughter.”

I’m not sure why Ms Neumann thought she faced a mutually-exclusive “either/or” choice, to only pray for Kara, or only get treatment for her. Lots of religious folks manage to do both. (That’s what hospital chapels and chaplains are for!) The Neumanns’ pathological denial goes further than that, however:

Neumann also was critical of the judicial system in her letter, writing that “this trial did not afford the opportunity to tell our side of the story.” Neumann’s attorney, Gene Linehan, chose not to call any witnesses during the trial. Marathon County Circuit Court Judge Vincent Howard did not allow a faith healer from Texas to testify at the trial, however.

“I believe the law should be more clearly written before any charges can be made against parents who pray,” Neumann wrote. “Where is the law written that we apparently broke? And someone make sure to tell everyone that this is no more the America we thought it was. Also, please tell them not to try to hide it behind ‘reckless homicide charges or neglect charges,’ because the real issue is our local and national government is turning more and more anti-God.”

For a second time the Neumanns reiterate the “either/or” choice to pray or get medical treatment, which as I said, does not exist. Moreover, they perceive the conviction as an “anti-God” thing, rather than as anti-manslaughter, which it is.

It’s a good thing this happened in Wisconsin instead of Texas, which offers explicit legal permission to harm, and even kill, people as a form of religious expression. (Seriously … I intend never to set foot in Texas unless it’s absolutely necessary … because in that state, anyone could do anything to me, and so long as they can pass it off as a religious rite, it’s permissible and I can do nothing about it.)

The moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Church continues to be revealed incrementally. The latest revelation comes from the memoirs of the former Archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (WebCite cached article):

Weakland says he didn’t know priests’ abuse was crime

In the early years of the sex abuse scandal in Milwaukee, retired Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland says in his soon-to-be released memoir, he did not comprehend the potential harm to victims or understand that what the priests had done constituted a crime.

“We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature,” Weakland says in the book, “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church,” due out in June.

Weakland said he initially “accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it.’”

Let me get this straight: A Roman Catholic archbishop didn’t know that child abuse is criminal? Really??? Does this guy honestly expect me to believe that?

This is unreal! And it’s absolutely inexcusable.

Weakland has more than a few skeletons in his own closet, independent of the priest-pedophilia scandal itself:

Weakland retired in 2002 after it became known that he paid $450,000 in 1998 to a man who had accused him of date rape years earlier.

How wonderful. He managed to remain in his office as archbishop for four years after paying off one of his own victims. How did the Vatican not know about this when the payment was made in 1998? Of course the Vatican knew … and it nevertheless left him there until he resigned of his own volition. This makes the Vatican nearly as culpable in his (mis)conduct, as Weakland was himself

Here’s a challenge to any and all Roman Catholics out there who may be reading this: What in hell are you thinking? How can you remain connected to this organization as it stands? If you want to stay in it, but reform it, what exactly are you doing to accomplish that goal (other than merely saying you’d like it to change)?

Or do you think that the Roman Catholic hierarchs are always right, no matter what they do, and that all their actions are automatically moral, merely by virtue of the office they hold?

If you accept that what the RC Church is doing is wrong, but do not remove yourself from it or work to change it, then you are in collusion with its immorality. If you accept that the hierarchy is always right, by definition and by office, then you are as morally bankrupt as they are. Either way it’s not a good reflection on you — and that makes me even prouder to be a lapsed Catholic (and therefore an apostate) myself.

The folks in Scientology have waged a cyberspace war against their perceived enemies almost as long as cyberspace has existed. The Internet has been their battlefield since the early 1990s. Over the last 10 years or so, the Internet has become too large, ubiquitous and unmanageable for the Church of Scientology to control; but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t focused on particular Internet venues to spread its gospel and lies.

CNN reports that Wikipedia has finally had enough of Scientologists defacing their pages:

The collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology from editing the site. The [UK] Register reports Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, or ArbCom, voted 10 to 0 in favor of the ban, which takes effect immediately.

Wikipedia’s innovative free-encyclopedia draws upon the knowledge of millions of users to create and edit articles on every conceivable topic. Edits appear immediately and do not undergo any formal peer-review process.

Wikipedia officially prohibits use of the encyclopedia to advance personal agendas — such as advocacy or propaganda and philosophical, ideological or religious dispute — but the open format makes enforcing such policies difficult.

While Wikipedia’s format is indeed open — sometimes too open (see e.g. this and this, and this parody too) — the site generally has tools that can be used to backtrack edits and find patterns among them. That many of these edits have been coordinated, appears to be the deciding factor; Wikipedia tolerates a lot of things, maybe too many, but organized and sophisticated “gaming” of their site by a tight-knit group is not one of them.

Naturally, the Church of Scientology is pleading ignorance, and insists there was no coordination:

However, Karin Pouw, with the Church of Scientology’s public affairs office, told me she is unaware of any coordinated effort to alter Wikipedia. Instead, she described the edits as individual attempts to correct inaccurate information by impassioned Scientologists and interpreted the ban as a typical Wikipedia response to arguments over content.

Ms Pouw is wrong about Wikipedia on this score. They rarely take such stern actions against groups of users. That they did so one other time — as they did with the US DoJ — in no way makes this a “typical” action for them.

That Scientology would lie about Wikipedia is no big surprise.

Something very odd happened the other day in California during a visit by President Obama. The Orange County Register reports on a Catholic priestess who also claims to be a reporter, who turns out merely to have been a troublemaker:

A self-proclaimed Catholic priestess from Anaheim was removed from a press holding area at Los Angeles International Airport Thursday morning minutes before President Barack Obama was scheduled to arrive.

Brenda Lee, 58, of Anaheim, was carried off by airport security after she refused to leave the area, saying that she wanted to hand the president a letter denouncing the California Supreme Court for deciding Tuesday not to annul gay marriages in the state.

There are probably lots of people who’d like to hand letters to the US president, but none are allowed to, unless it’s been arranged by White House personnel. It’s not something a president has time to do.

Nevertheless, this woman, Brenda Lee, presumed herself to be the exception to the rule. She claimed to have had press credentials:

She called the White House to request credentials for Obama’s arrival, citing her involvement with the Georgia Informer, an independent black newspaper in Macon, Georgia.

I have no idea how genuine this Georgia Informer newspaper is. It has a Web site, which at the moment features Ms Lee rather prominently (no surprise). But I have no idea if it’s recognized by the White House press office … and assume it doesn’t, since Ms Lee didn’t appear to know what she was doing:

At LAX this morning, Lee asked a Secret Service agent to take her letter to President Obama after learning that the president wasn’t scheduled to take any questions at the appearance.

The staffer came and asked to see the letter. “He said his name was Worly but I doubt that was his real name,” Lee said.

After “Worly” gave Lee the letter back, another staffer asked to see it, Lee said. Lee said that she’d rather give it to Obama herself when he walked by.

“‘I assure you, he’s not going to come by here,’” Lee recounted the man saying. “‘I don’t want you to yell his name. I don’t want you to do anything disruptive.’”

When Lee refused to surrender the letter, the man had security remove her, Lee said.

She had a chance to give her letter to someone who could have handed it to Obama, but refused — preferring instead to wait for him to go by, in a place where she’d been told he wouldn’t be going.

If that makes any sense to you, you’re doing better than I am.

She was, of course, dutifully outraged and accused the White House staff of discrimination:

Lee said she thinks she was being discriminated against for being a priestess, and that a priest wouldn’t have received the same treatment.

I hate to say it, Ms Lee, but you were run out of there not because you were a “priestess,” but because you were hanging around where you were told not to. A priest — or anyone else of any other profession — would also have been run off, under the same circumstances. While the reporters at the scene refused to help her out, the media since then have been rather obliging toward her. CNN, for example, interviewed her. Her performance was pathetic.

What I have not learned about Ms Lee are answers to these questions:

1. If she is a “Catholic priestess,” who ordained her, and when?

2. How is it possible that she’s a “Catholic priestess,” given the Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women?

3. If she’s a reporter by profession entitled to a press pass, how is she also clergy, which is another profession entirely?

4. How did a woman from Anaheim, CA get a job as a reporter working for a Macon, GA newspaper?

An even more pertinent question is … why are the mass media such as CNN now indulging her and taking her seriously? Why has she not, instead, been referred for the psychiatric help she needs?

This blog post is more light-hearted than usual but it’s something I found interesting, given my interest in early Church history and in linguistics.

Normally a spelling bee wouldn’t be something I report on. It just happens that the one that recently concluded included a reference to the early history of Christianity, something I’m an aficionado of (this report is by CNN):

Thirteen-year-old Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe, Kansas, spelled “laodicean,” Thursday night to take top honors in the 82nd annual Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The eighth-grader won $40,000 in cash and prizes for nailing the final word. Pronounced lay-odd-uh-see-an, the word means lukewarm or indifferent, particularly in matters of politics or religion.

This obscure English word comes from the name of a city in Anatolia, Laodicea. The association between this city and indecision or indifference is a result of the book of Revelation, specifically the letter Jesus dictated to the church in Laodicea, which is contained therein (Revelation 3:14-22). In it, Jesus accuses that church of being apathetic:

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth. (Rev 3:15-16).

Hence, anyone who’s apathetic … particular in religion … is “Laodicean” or “like the Christians of the church of Laodicea.”

Interestingly there is some Christian legend about an epistle written by Paul to the Laodicean church, first known by way of a reference in the epistle to the Colossians (in Colossians 4:16 to be precise). Exactly what this letter was, is unknown, especially since the epistle to the Colossians that first mentioned it, was itself not written by Paul but was an early- to mid-2nd century document. A forgery mentioning a document is not exactly the best testimony to its existence!

The Marcionites — an early quasi-Gnostic and therefore non-orthodox sect which, for a time, had a large following in Anatolia and in the central Empire — had an epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans, but its contents have since been lost. There is also a very-brief epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans, which exists only in Latin and not in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, or any other language used by early Christians. As a document it was considered inconsequential and for the most part never accepted as canonical. In modern times there have been “Epistles to the Laodiceans” written as religious literature.

A fraud trial is underway in France, against Scientology — specifically, its center in France and its Paris bookstore — which, depending on the outcome, and only after a long appeal process, could shut down this bogus religion in that country altogether. The Guardian (UK) reports on this case:

France’s Church of Scientology today went on trial on charges of organised fraud in a case that could lead to the nationwide dissolution of the controversial organisation. …

Six leading members, including the celebrity centre’s director, Alain Rosenberg, also face charges of illegally distributing pharmaceuticals.

The case is the second in six years to accuse the French church of fraud. It stems from the testimony of a French woman who filed an official complaint against the organisation in 1998. …

The investigating magistrate in charge of bringing the case against the church, Jean-Christophe Hullin, argues she was the victim of a deliberately manipulative system that exploits vulnerable people in order to make money.

In his indictment, Hullin said the church, which has been glamourised by Hollywood members such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, made a profit by placing individuals in a “state of subjection”. The organisation, he argued, is “first and foremost a commercial business” whose actions reveal “a real obsession for financial remuneration”.

Scientology has reacted with the same kind of sanctimonious outrage one might expect of a true religion:

The church denies any evidence of psychological manipulation, and decries what it has called a “carefully orchestrated campaign” by French anti-cult organisations to shut it down. “This is a sacrilegious trial,” said spokesman Danièle Gounord yesterday. Patrick Maisonneuve, a lawyer for the church, said he would fight every charge. …

This, of course, flies in the face of Scientology’s history in France:

While some countries, such as the US, consider Scientology a religion, France categorises it as a sect, and the country’s courts have convicted several individuals of fraud over the past decades — most notably its science fiction-writing creator, L Ron Hubbard, in 1978.

While the chance exists that Scientology could be banned from France if there’s a conviction, that would take some time:

However, commentators said yesterday such an outcome would be a long time coming as the church would undoubtedly appeal against a guilty verdict.

Scientology has historically had a lot of trouble getting itself accepted as a religion rather than as what it is — a complex, yet no less obvious, money-making scheme.

It was a collection of high-sounding and neologism-laced — yet trite and kooky — ideas when first written about by its founder, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, in a book titled Dianetics. Shortly after it came out, Martin Gardner revealed it to be fraudulent in his seminal Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, and all of Gardner’s critiques remain valid, more than 5 decades after that book’s last edition.

Since then, the late Lafayette Ronald and his followers have only continued to prove Gardner’s assessment correct. They’ve gone after critics using both legal and illegal tactics; have used lawsuits to silence or simply get revenge on detractors; their “treatment facilities” (I hesitate to call them “hospitals” or even “clinics”) have been host to mysterious deaths; they’ve trolled the Internet looking for criticism and gone after people and Web sites; and Lafayette Ronald himself had only marginal mental health.

In the decades since Gardner’s book was last updated, additional weirdness has been revealed about Scientology, including the business about some primeval cosmic warlord named Xenu. (This particular story would be hilarious, if not for the fact that there are people who actually believe it.)

One can only hope that as a result of this case, the French courts finally declare Scientology — with some legality and finality — the fraudulent organization we know it to be.

After the release of the devastating report on the abuse of tens of thousands of Irish children in their care over a period of decades, the Roman Catholic Church has done everything in its power not to accept responsibility for what it did; not to own up to the the actions of abusers and inaction of others; and to date it has refused to order the abusers still in their ranks to plead guilty to their crimes.

They have expressed sympathy for victims, yes … but words are meaningless. Anyone can mouth words. Real contrition, as demanded by Catholic morality, is harder than that, and much more concrete. They have failed to offer any.

What they have done, is dodge and swerve all over the place trying to avoid offering anything concrete. A great example of this can be found in the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, head of the RC Church in Britain (not Ireland). He made some remarks on British television (ITV) which are, in a word, inexplicable. The Irish Times reports on it:

The new head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has courted controversy after describing members of the clergy who admitted abusing children in their care as courageous for facing up to their past.

“It’s very distressing and very disturbing and my heart goes out today first of all to those people who will find that their stories are now told in public… Secondly, I think of those in religious orders and some of the clergy in Dublin who have to face these facts from their past which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at.”

Where, exactly, may I find the “courage” in a bunch of people who sniveled, whined, cried, rationalized, and — when all else failed — filed a lawsuit in order to stop the report?

That’s not “courage.” No way. Not even close.

If any of these people had any true courage, they’d be turning themselves in to Irish authorities and confessing to their crimes. That they are not doing so tells me there is no courage whatever, anywhere in the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church.

The brand-new Archbishop’s remarks haven’t gone unnoticed. Even so, rather than admit he might have stuck his foot in his mouth, Nichols insists he said nothing wrong (as reported by the BBC):

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live before his installation he defended his comments as “perfectly sensible” and insisted that perpetrators must confront what they did and be held to account.

“It is a tough road to take, to face up to our own weaknesses,” he said.

“That is certainly true of anyone who’s deceived themselves that all they’ve been doing is taking a bit of comfort from children.”

The next time anyone who’s part of the Roman Catholic Church offers you any advice on morality or ethics, ask him/her what s/he’s doing to get the Church to own up to its abuse of children in Ireland and call for the abusers to confess to their crimes and do jail time for them.

Go ahead. Ask. I guarantee you won’t get an answer, other than something like, “There’s nothing I can do about it.” That, unfortunately, is not a moral answer. Morality demands more than just swerving out of the way of the matter. What’s absolutely immoral is to give perpetrators credit for having done something that they haven’t, done and will never do. Archbishop Nichols has done this. It tells me everything I need to know about his character … which is that he has none.

There’s something odd going on in the worldwide Sikh community. (Sikhism, in case you didn’t know, is a Dharmic faith strongly influenced by Islam, particularly Sufic Islam.) It began in Vienna (Austria) and has already spilled over into Sikhism’s native land, India, as the AP reports (via Google News):

Sikhs wielding knives and a handgun attacked two preachers at a rival temple in Vienna in a brawl that left one of the victims dead Monday and at least 15 others wounded, police said. A related clash later broke out in northern India.

Witnesses said a group of bearded and turbaned men attacked the religious leaders at the temple in Austria’s capital on Sunday and their followers moved to defend them. …

Police spokesman Michael Takacs earlier said the scene was “like a battlefield.” Six suspects were in custody with more arrests possible, he said. …

In India, fighting between mainstream Sikhs and followers of the guru broke out in the northern city of Jalandhar several hours after the Vienna clash, in what locals there described as an apparent reaction to the melee in the Austrian capital. Sanjiv Kalra, a senior police official at Jalandhar, said that protesters had set fire to a number of vehicles and erected several roadblocks across the city. He gave no other details.

Reasons for this bloody attack are not all that clear, at least not to me. The AP report offers what explanation it can:

Witnesses said the perpetrators were fundamentalist Sikhs from a higher caste, who accused one or both of the preachers of being disrespectful of the Holy Book. Indian news reports said the attackers were incensed that one of the preachers was given a ceremonial shawl considered a high Sikh honor.

I can’t even begin to guess as to how, exactly, a savage mass attack like this is a reasonable response to being given a shawl. It’s also not clear to me how Sikh temples have managed to divide themselves along caste lines, since I’d thought that Sikhism denounced caste distinctions (see e.g. this Sikh-written Web page, and keep in mind that Sikhs have a ritual called Langar, in which free food is eaten by those of all castes, side-by-side. The ancient Hindu caste distinction — whose evils I blogged about before — appears to be inflicting yet more harm on people, even in the 21st century, and even in a religion which branched off from Hinduism centuries ago.

George W. Bush took a lot of heat for referring to the fight against terrorism — especially of the Islamic fundamentalist sort — as a “crusade.” Some Muslims reacted badly to that; for them the word “crusade” means “the series of western European military expeditions, ordered or endorsed by the Popes, which attacked the Middle East during the Middle Ages,” and thus carries a specific, and very-religious, connotation. (This is, of course, not a reasonable association, since the Crusades have been over for centuries, and the war on terrorism does not carry the Roman Catholic Church’s approval.) In the English-speaking world, the word “crusade” carries a much more generic and non-religious meaning; stern prosecutors, for example, might he referred to as “crusaders for justice.” So it might have been natural to view Bush’s use of that word in its generic — and decidedly secular — sense.

Of course, we all know that Bush was a religious man. Very religious. Obviously religious. In 1999, for example, he declared Jesus to have been his favorite political philosopher (even though Jesus himself disavowed politics utterly). He could hardly open his mouth without “God” or “Christ” coming out of it.

Well, it turns out that perhaps he had been viewing “the war on terror” as a religious expedition. GQ, of all outlets, reports that Donald Rumsfeld seasoned his intelligence reports to his hyperreligious president with Bible quotations (GQ has materials on its Web site, and this Boston Herald story explains it):

One passage plucked from the New Testament’s Epistle to the Ephesians instructs believers to “put on the full armor of God.” An excerpt from the Old Testament’s Isaiah directs them to “open the gates that the righteous nation may enter.”

As American soldiers fought in Iraq in 2003, these biblical verses and others reportedly prefaced intelligence reports approved by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. …

First reported last week by Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush,” dozens of biblical passages accompanied by images of soldiers knelt in prayer or marching across the desert adorned the covers of classified documents prepared for Rumsfeld and Bush. Although they have strongly defended the decision to go to war in Iraq, neither Bush nor Rumsfeld has commented on the GQ report.

Religious pundits have been quick to declare that Rumsfeld used these Bible quotations “improperly”:

Several clergy members say many of the biblical quotations used to condone war were distorted when taken out of context. Ephesians, for example, makes clear the armor of God refers to the virtues of truth, justice and peace.

It’s not just Bush and Rumsfeld who viewed the struggle as a religious mandate, as the Herald goes on to explain:

In 2005, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, then-deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence, compared the war against Islamic militants to a battle against Satan.

It turns out there was a religious subtext running behind the war, within the halls of power in Washington. Now, rather than just a couple of quotations (i.e. Bush’s “crusade” reference and Boykin’s “Satan” remark). GQ has added documentation that shows it was more extensive than that.

You know, it’s a bit odd that the Religious Right in the US is so bothered by the jihad or “holy war” concept to which the Islamic fundamentalists cling. They believe themselves to be “above” that. Unfortunately, some of them have been caught expressing an eerily similar sentiment. Could it be, they’re being hypocritical?

Answer: Yes, damn right they are! Hypocritical to the core!

Despite the usual, expected sanctimonious outrage by some paleolithic thinkers, the Church of Scotland voted to accept a gay man as a minister (as reported by CNN):

A gay minister at the center of a row about his appointment to a church in a Scottish city said he was “humbled” after the Church of Scotland upheld his appointment.

In a ground-breaking move, the church’s ruling body voted by 326 to 267 in support of the Rev. Scott Rennie, the church said in a news release Sunday.

This vote happened in spite of what might be characterized as extortion, by gay opponents:

The 37-year-old’s appointment at Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen, on Scotland’s northeast coast, provoked opposition from traditionalist members of the church and has led to fears it could cause a damaging split.

Threats of schisms are not unknown and have historically been used to prevent changes that “traditionalists” don’t like. Fortunately the Church of Scotland did not knuckle under, in this case.

This is one of those stories that has a backstory to it. The US military had to burn a batch of Bibles that had been sent to Afghanistan, and the Religious Right (such as the American Family Association) is furious about it. First, the story about the burned Bibles, as reported by CNN:

Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.

The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said.

US military personnel in Afghanistan are specifically forbidden to attempt to proselytize there. While one could suppose these Bibles were intended for the troops, it just so happens that they weren’t in English, so they would not have been used by US military personnel:

The Bibles were written in the languages Pashto and Dari.

This means they could only have been intended for distribution to the locals. That’s forbidden … hence the confiscation. The Bibles were then burned by the military for show, to demonstrate to the Afghanis that US military personnel won’t proselytize there.

The backstory to this is that the Pentagon admitted to this — it happened about a year ago — only after Al Jazeera English broke a story, a couple of weeks ago, about evangelical Christian personnel, led by their chaplain, whom they had video of, discussing how to missionize to the locals:

Note in the video the chaplain discussing “hunting men.” (What a fabulous way to win friends and influence people, in the heart of a country which can be hostile!) Also note that the soldiers specifically mention General Order 1, which among other things prohibits the proselytizing they plan to engage in, and cook up a rationale to get around it. Now nice!

By releasing news that the Bibles shown in the video had already been destroyed, the Pentagon hoped to quell the inevitable outrage in the Muslim world. Unfortunately this also kicked up the outrage among the Religious Right, here in the US, that I mentioned earlier. They’re actually lying about it, in fact, e.g. in the AFA report I linked to:

Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis (USA-Ret.) is a Pentagon adviser and military and national security analyst. He finds it mind-boggling to think that military officials would allow Al Jazeera to walk through the front gate of a forward operating base and videotape soldiers conducting a Bible study.

Unfortunately, Maginnis is in error. The video footage of the chaplain-led Bible study was not made by Al Jazeera personnel. Rather it was filmed by an American, who’d caught wind of what these guys were doing and taped them (covertly, I assume, but perhaps not).

I hate to say it but the Religious Right is, itself, directly responsible for this Bible-burning episode. Had an evangelical Church not shipped Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari — to their cohorts within the military in Afghanistan who knew about General Order 1 expressly forbidding this activity — it never would have happened. The R.R. needs to grow up and take its lumps on this one. Then again, the R.R. is not generally known for its maturity, so I suppose this would be too much to expect of them.

Of course, if the Muslims of Afghanistan were more mature about things, there would be no need for the Pentagon to have made such a big point of destroying the Bibles. Their sensitivity to the possibility of missionary activity by US military is entirely unnecessary and is itself and a product of their own insecurities and immaturity.

This whole compound story exemplifies what a colossal waste of time and energy all this metaphysics is. Haven’t you had enough of it, yet? (I know I have.)