DeMint’s Witch?

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

No, of course not, but Republicans hoping for a GOP win in Delaware do now have to deal with this:

O’DONNELL: I dabbled into witchcraft — I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. … I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do. […] One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that. … We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.

I suppose this could be the moment to post something terribly, terribly brows-furrowed about the rather interesting role that witchcraft and Satanism play in the modern American evangelical drama (small ‘e’ in O’Donnell’s case: she was certainly raised a Roman Catholic, and then I believe became an evangelical before eventually returning to Catholicism), but that is to make more out of this particular ‘confession’ than it (or her Democratic opponent) deserves.

I suspect that Ann Althouse’s response is (more or less) the correct one to take:

…Did O’Donnell ever practice witchcraft? I doubt it. Even in the out-of-context clip, I’m seeing a young woman trying to get the hipper kids to believe she isn’t really a complete square. In the story she tells, she went out with someone who, she thought, was into Satanism, and they had a picnic. A picnic! Even when she’s straining to sound cool, she’s square.

4. But she “dabbled into” witchcraft — doesn’t that mean she did some witchcraft things? Frankly, I don’t think she knows what “dabbled” means. The use of the wrong preposition is a hint. I think she means something more like she stumbled into witchcraft. She knew some people who did such things, and I’ll bet the point she was making was that she was able to be friends with them, that she hasn’t spent her whole life cocooned in squeaky clean conservative religion and she’s able to relate to a wide variety of people.

5. Even if she had participated in some witchcraft, she’d only be like thousands of other young people who dabble in such nonsense. Do you want to string them all up? It’s typical pop culture junk these days.

I wouldn’t be quite as quick as Professor Althouse to dismiss witchcraft as “typical pop culture junk”. It can be that, and it’s certainly nonsense, but the revival of interest in Wicca (and the like) is too interesting a phenomenon to be dismissed as just a mere fad. But so far as O’Donnell’s apparent “dabbling” in witchcraft is concerned, the good professor is right, move on, there’s nothing to see here.

Posted in culture | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

DeMint’s Choice (2)

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

From O’Reilly (Nov 16 2007):

O’DONNELL: They are — they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they’re already into this experiment.

Via National Review:

Krauthammer: You don’t stop [the Obama] agenda by nominating an O’Donnell in Delaware and turning a Senate seat from safe Republican to safe Democratic. If DeMint and Palin want to show that helping O’Donnell over the top — she won late and by six points — wasn’t a capricious spreading of fairy dust, perhaps they should go to Delaware now and get her elected to the Senate. You made it possible. Now make it happen. I would be happy to be proved wrong about O’Donnell’s electability — I want Republicans to win that 51st seat. Stay in Delaware and show us you were right. The beaches are said to be lovely in the fall.

Via Politico

Gingrich: “Sen. Jim DeMint and Gov. Palin deserve enormous credit [for O’Donnell’s win]…”

Perhaps Newt could go to Delaware too.

Posted in science | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Godwin’s Pope? (2)

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

One of the pleasures (really) of blogging away on an interesting topic is when a reader alerts you to an angle or a source of which you were previously unaware. That brings me to a book called The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-45, by Richard Steigmann-Gall (Cambridge University Press). To say that it appears to be relevant to my earlier post concerning the pope’s curious comments on the “atheist” Third Reich is an understatement.

Here’s part of the publisher’s blurb:

Analyzing the previously unexplored religious views of the Nazi elite, Richard Steigmann-Gall argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it. He demonstrates that many participants in the Nazi movement believed that the contours of their ideology were based on a Christian understanding of Germany’s ills and their cure. A program usually regarded as secular in inspiration – the creation of a racialist ‘people’s community’ embracing antisemitism, antiliberalism and anti-Marxism – was, for these Nazis, conceived in explicitly Christian terms. His examination centers on the concept of ‘positive Christianity,’ a religion espoused by many members of the party leadership. He also explores the struggle the ‘positive Christians’ waged with the party’s paganists – those who rejected Christianity in toto as foreign and corrupting – and demonstrates that this was not just a conflict over religion, but over the very meaning of Nazi ideology itself.

The work of a crank? Well, when one reads extracts from reviews like this one by Richard Evans (Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge), you are inclined to think not:

‘There has been a huge amount of research on the attitude of the Christian Churches to the Nazis and their policies, but astonishingly until now there has been no thorough study of the Nazis’ own religious beliefs. Richard Steigmann-Gall has now provided it. He has trawled through a lot of very turgid literature to show that active Nazis from the leadership down to the lower levels of the party were bitterly opposed to the Catholic Church, but had a much more ambivalent attitude to Protestantism and to Christianity in a wider sense … Far from being uniformly anti-Christian, Nazism contained a wide variety of religious beliefs, and Steigmann-Gall has performed a valuable service in providing a meticulously documented account of them in all their bizarre variety.’

The book’s introduction is online here, and it concludes with these words:

“For many of its leaders, Nazism was not the result of a “Death of God” in secularized society, but rather a radicalized and singularly horrific attempt to preserve God against secularized society.”

I’ll have to actually read the book (of course!) before coming to any judgement. On the basis of its introduction, however, it seems that some of my own assumptions about this whole topic may well not emerge unscathed. Much more importantly, to the extent that the author’s arguments hold up, they will (again) raise the question of what the pope, who must be assumed to be well-versed in these matters, thought he was doing when he described Nazism as an atheist creed.

I note, incidentally, that among the reviews extracted by the publishers is one by Michael Burleigh, a fine historian of the Third Reich, a great historian of ‘political religion’, a conservative and, I should add, a devout Roman Catholic. The extract reads as follows:

‘The Holy Reich is both deeply researched and thoughtfully argued. It is the first comparative analysis of the religious beliefs of leading Nazis and a timely reminder of the intimate relations between liberal Protestantism and National Socialism. This is an important and original book by a talented young scholar that deserves as wide a readership as possible.’

So many books, so little time.

Posted in history | Tagged , , , , , | 15 Comments

Taking the Western side in religious history

Posted on September 17, 2010 by David Hume

A reader recently asked me about a history of Islam which did not exhibit the strong biases evident in Karen Armstrong’s body of work. I don’t know what to recommend really because I don’t read too many popular works of Islamic history with a broad sweep, almost all of them are too weighted down with extraneous ideological garbage (mind you, I am able to filter it out pretty easily, but in many of these books the garbage is too much to dig through). But, I would recommend all readers to Philip Jenkins’ histories of Christianity. I have just finished The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died, and can recommend it. Jenkins is an Episcopalian, and generally seems to have sympathy with religious traditionalists, though not necessarily of the fundamentalist stripe. I don’t agree with him on everything, but his biases and theoretical agendas weigh relatively lightly and transparently through his narratives. Additionally, it is obvious that Jenkins’ has particular sympathy with Christians and Christianity, though he does a good job of evaluating the scholarship without letting his own sentiments cloud his assessments too much. I know some readers may be attracted to Rodney Starks’ most recent polemics, such as God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, to counteract the anti-Western bias in the popular historical literature (e.g., The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain). If Philip Jenkins is Hugh Hefner, Rodney Stark is Larry Flynt. I know that a Hustler “spread” fits the bill on occasion, but in the end something a bit more tasteful and understated (and frankly, accurate) is more edifying to all.

Posted in culture, history | Tagged | 3 Comments

Godwin’s Pope?

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

Here’s a curious passage from the first speech that the pope made on arriving in Britain:

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society…As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’ (Caritas in Veritate, 29).”

Why curious? Because of this phrase:

“a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society”

The pope is not only a clever and highly-educated man, he is also someone who grew into adolescence under the Third Reich. He will thus know perfectly well that the Nazi attitude towards religion is a highly complex topic. It is true, of course, that a number of leading Nazis were atheists. It is also true that the Nazi accommodation with Germany’s Christian churches was largely a matter of cynical political calculation (at its core National Socialism was profoundly anti-Christian), but if and when the time came to replace Christianity the best guess is that the regime would have adopted some form of neo-paganism rather than the nominal atheism of the Soviet or Communist Chinese states. At the same time (and as discussed before on this site), Hitler himself does not appear to have been an atheist, and atheism was not something required of those in his inner circle.

None of this would be news to Benedict, so why then did he say what he did?

Posted in history | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

It isn’t always about the mean

Posted on September 16, 2010 by David Hume

‘Draw Muhammad’ cartoonist changes name, goes into hiding at FBI’s insistence:

Seattle Weekly announced Wednesday that it will no longer run Molly Norris’s artwork. The newspaper is also reporting that legally, there is no more “Molly Norris.”

Norris — the Seattle-based illustrator whose cartoon sparked “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!” earlier this year and a subsequent fatwa against her — has gone into hiding and changed her name at the guidance of the FBI, reports the Seattle Weekly, which says:

“The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor.”

Well, sometimes you can predict different odds coming out of “extremistan”. How fat is that scary tail? That is the question….

Posted in culture, history | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Islam and HBD

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Bradlaugh

A friend writes concerning Mr. Hume’s post Islam, generalizations, barbarism, and structural conflicts:

The tone of Mr. Hume’s essay is, in your terminology, a “culturist” one, of a “Blank Slate” kind.

Example:

“Moving specifically to Muslim perspective the experiences of Muslims of their religion is rich, and reflects the full totality of their social life within a community and family. At the other extreme, imagine a white Protestant who lives in rural Kansas. Their experience of Islam would be mostly through television news reports, perhaps the random Muslim they encounter but are not acquainted with, and the literature and material they seek out on their own. The experience of the two individuals would radically differ, and implicitly color their perspective on what Islam is.”

It is as if the only difference between these two subjects (in the cited part) is in their experience, with no biological difference. Sure, Mr. Hume is quite knowledgeable in genetics and HBD [i.e. Human Bio-Diversity — Bradlaugh], and does not make directly incorrect statements, but here he pretends not to notice HBD.

He also writes:

“So, moving on to generalities I would have to say that Muslims are barbaric. But not all Muslims are barbaric, and most of the Muslims who I know personally are not barbaric.”

It reminds me of the lady from NYC, who said “I do not believe Nixon won the elections. Nobody I know personally has voted for him.” [i.e. Pauline Kael — Bradlaugh]

I leave that for Mr. Hume to respond to. It is of course the case that Islam is a religion, and that anyone of any ancestry might take up Islam. It is also the case, however, that the overwhelming mass of actual Muslims belong to half a dozen distinct common-ancestry populations, each one fairly coherent for several centuries. It is therefore not unreasonable to consider broad heritable human group differences a factor at some level in Muslim/non-Muslim conflicts.

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

DeMint’s Choice

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

One reason that Delaware’s best-known GOP candidate will have such a mountain to climb in the general election is the emergence of fresh embarrassments like these comments (via New York magazine today) from a 1996 debate on whether creationism should be taught alongside evolution:

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL, Concerned Women for America: Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned, evolution is a theory and it’s exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put — that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it’s merely a theory.

Yes, but…Oh, never mind. Well, how about creationism, then?

CHRISTINE O’DONNELL: Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.

Okey dokey.

You can bet your bottom taxpayer dollar that O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent will do everything that he can to keep voters focussed on the Republican candidate’s more exotic, uh, issues. After all, it sure beats talking about government bloat, rising taxation, a faltering recovery and all the rest of those topics that the Democrats would much rather avoid.

And we can also be sure that O’Donnell’s triumph has made it easier to portray Republicans elsehere in a similar light.

As I said, DeMint’s choice.

Posted in politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 12 Comments

The irrelevancies of the sects

Posted on September 15, 2010 by David Hume

Update: Ignore this post. I was wrong, it looks as if Christine O’Donnell had an evangelical phase, and if my chronology is correct she was an evangelical Protestant Christian when this video was made. She later converted back to Roman Catholicism.

The Economist points out the strangeness of Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for the Senate from Delaware, of promoting Creationism, when as a Roman Catholic there’s no religious necessity for her to do so. Now, there’s no reason that a Catholic can’t be a Creationist, but I think Christine O’Donnell’s attitude makes more sense when you listen to her inveighing against masturbation:

She speaks like a Protestant, making explicit reference to the Bible many times. Intellectual American Catholics are wont to observe that while Protestants believe in the Bible (at least Low Church Protestants), Catholics believe in the Church (granted, Catholics obviously believe in the Bible as well, but do not adhere to the notion of sola scriptura). I think O’Donnell’s idiosyncrasies are totally understandable in light of the assimilation of American religionists to specific subcultures, whatever their notional sect. American Roman Catholicism has long been “Protestant” in its orientation on a de facto level. While liberal Catholics align with mainline Protestants and use the language of social justice, conservative populist Catholics like Christine O’Donnell use the language of evangelical Protestants, for whom everything is “Biblically based.”

Posted in politics | Tagged | 6 Comments

Sacred is a state of mind

Posted on September 15, 2010 by David Hume

In regards to the Koran burning, Randall Parker says:

When someone says it sickens them to take some position I figure they are just striking a pose and signaling.

Very few non-Muslim people are truly sickened by the idea of burning Korans.

Polinchello says:

The thing is, in a secular society, there is something upsetting about book-burning. It’s an act of vandalism. True, the pastor in question owns the books, but it’s still a viscerally disturbing act.

As some of you know I jumped on a Koran three times at the age of seven. I was not ever much of a religious believer, and wanted to “test” if God would strike me down. I obviously am not sickened by the burning of a Koran, or any book. What I am sickened by is the loss of genuine knowledge, and the burning of one book is an act of symbolism without a great substance consequence, at least in the age of mass printings. Perhaps it is ironic that I have read more books than 99% of humans, but am less discomfited by the idea of physical destruction of precious books than most humans.

But I don’t extrapolate my own psychology to others. I think there is something somewhat off about people like me, at least in relation to the modal human. The readers of this weblog are mostly nonbelievers in gods, and also of a libertarian bent. The set of these individuals tend to be overwhelmingly male, and often of a technical orientation. We’re not representative humans, and extrapolation after introspection is a dangerous game for the likes of us. Dangerous at least if we want to model how the world of human psychology and sociology is as opposed what we’d want it to be. We are the sort who are not gifted with the full range of powerful visceral emotions that others are.

Posted in culture | Tagged | 14 Comments