Atheist Padres?

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner:

I’ve long suspected that, for some, atheism (as opposed, say, to agnosticism or simple indifference) has many of the characteristics of religious faith, so here (via the New York Times) is just a bit more confirmation:

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In the military, there are more than 3,000 chaplains who minister to the spiritual and emotional needs of active duty troops, regardless of their faiths. The vast majority are Christians, a few are Jews or Muslims, one is a Buddhist. A Hindu, possibly even a Wiccan may join their ranks soon.

But an atheist?

Strange as it sounds, groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military.

Joining the chaplain corps is part of a broader campaign by atheists to win official acceptance in the military. Such recognition would make it easier for them to raise money and meet on military bases. It would help ensure that chaplains, religious or atheist, would distribute their literature, advertise their events and advocate for them with commanders.

But winning the appointment of an atheist chaplain will require support from senior chaplains, a tall order. Many chaplains are skeptical: Do atheists belong to a “faith group,” a requirement for a chaplain candidate? Can they provide support to religious troops of all faiths, a fundamental responsibility for chaplains?

Jason Torpy, a former Army captain who is president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, said humanist chaplains would do everything religious chaplains do, including counsel troops and help them follow their faiths. But just as a Protestant chaplain would not preside over a Catholic service, a humanist might not lead a religious ceremony, though he might help organize it.

“Humanism fills the same role for atheists that Christianity does for Christians and Judaism does for Jews,” Mr. Torpy said in an interview. “It answers questions of ultimate concern; it directs our values.” …

I wonder, but to each his own

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Christopher Hitchens & the KJV (2)

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

More from that article by Mr. Hitchens on the KJV:

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”

And this:

The Tyndale/King James translation, even if all its copies were to be burned, would still live on in our language through its transmission by way of Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan and Coleridge, and also by way of beloved popular idioms such as “fatted calf” and “pearls before swine.” It turned out to be rather more than the sum of its ancient predecessors, as well as a repository and edifice of language which towers above its successors. Its abandonment by the Church of England establishment, which hoped to refill its churches and ended up denuding them, is yet another demonstration that religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts…

But it’s not just the churches that have been “denuded”, and it’s not just the C of E that has been doing this sort of thing, and it’s not only an English problem either. Just read, for example, what Heather has recently posted here about the proposed “Common Core” school curriculum.

On a related topic, an English friend recently mentioned to me that in one respect he sometimes found it strangely difficult to communicate with his teenage children. They are bright, well-informed and doing well at ‘good’ schools. At the same time, he believes that they are not being taught some of what he, or, for that matter, his parents, would have considered to be the essentials of English culture, from the KJV, to Shakespeare, to too much of the country’s history. The result is that the shared assumptions of shared knowledge necessary to underpin so many conversations are simply not there.

A traditionalist, but not an unthinking traditionalist, he recognizes that cultures evolve but this is, he reckons, something else. Heather, I suspect, would agree.

And so, I think, would Christopher Hitchens.

The machinery by which one generation transmits its heritage to the next appears to have been wrecked.

Read these words again:

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one.

Indeed. And not too much of it will survive for too long.

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Christopher Hitchens & the KJV

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via Vanity Fair, here’s a fine account from Christopher Hitchens of the—King James Version—greatest of all the English translations of the Bible.

As always with Mr. Hitchens, there’s room for a good anecdote:

After she was elected the first female governor of Texas, in 1924, and got herself promptly embroiled in an argument about whether Spanish should be used in Lone Star schools, it is possible that Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson did not say, “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.”

Those were the days.

And then there’s this:

Until the early middle years of the 16th century…torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale…Their combat fully merits the term “fundamental.” Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe. The cold and righteous More, backed by his “Big Brother” the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome story in such a way as to revise the shining image of “Saint” Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted upon others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself.)

One can only agree, pausing only to note that, during the course of his recent visit to the UK, the current pope had the gall to lecture the English on the virtues of the bleakly proto-totalitarian More.

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Mitch Daniels: Still Looking at 2012?

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Guess so.

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Less Church, More England

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Blogging about the royal wedding over at the Corner yesterday, I noted that the C of E needed a little less church and a little more England.

Via the Daily Telegraph, here’s the sort of thing I meant:

Jerusalem, a hymn which has been banned, been an official anthem of the England football team and was once chosen by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown for Desert Island Discs, was hailed as one of the triumphs of today’s royal wedding.

And quite rightly so, the twinning of William Blake’s madcap, lovely words with a majestic, somewhat martial tune written—in the middle of the First World War—almost a century later, makes ‘Jerusalem’ one of the finest of English hymns (and there are plenty to choose from) and, for, that matter, a pretty good alternative English national anthem. Under the circumstances we should not, I suppose, be surprised that some clerics have objected:

The verses were banned in 2008 from being sung by choirs or congregations at Southwark Cathedral because the words do not praise God and are too nationalistic, according to senior clergy. The Dean of Southwark, the Very Rev Colin Slee, advised guests at a private memorial service that the hymn would not be sung because it was “not in the glory of God”.

Jerusalem had been banned before by clergymen who do not believe Blake’s poetry to be Christian. In 2001 it was banned from the wedding of a couple in Manchester because the vicar deemed it to be too nationalistic and inappropriate to a marriage ceremony.

To repeat myself, less church, more England, please.

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Civilizational collapse, part 642: Studying the bus schedule in English class–for credit!

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Is soullessness a job requirement for “education reformers?”  I have never seen evidence to the contrary.  The latest travesty to roll out of the ER factory is the so-called “Common Core” state standards initiative, a voluntary set of learning goals for K-12 education developed by the “National Governors Association Center for Best Practices” and the “Council of Chief State School Officers ,” organizations whose very names start mountainsides of red flags a-waving. 

I have no objection to a national curriculum, unlike some conservatives, so long as it demanded that students master the greatest monuments of imagination and analytic thought that human beings have produced, without concern about widening the achievement gap or failing to bolster students’ self-esteem.   Predictably, these Common Core standards seem instead to favor the acquisition of “skills sets” and “modes of learning,” all the while encouraging vacuous group learning.  But these latest standards add a truly terrifying, heartbreaking detail that I have not seen before in the vast intellectual and cultural wasteland that is progressive pedagogy.   The English standards actually require that literature in English classes be gradually supplanted by informational materials, according to the New York Times:

While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from “literary” and “informational” texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70.

If ever there were proof needed that education professionals lack the slightest instinct for beauty or the Eros of learning, this is it.  The idea that a school literature class should squander its precious opportunity to immerse students in the grandeur of imaginative language in favor of, say, a debate on whether global warming is man-made or natural is simply breath-taking in its idiocy.  Students will have all of life to encounter “informational” prose, alas; they have little choice.  Few of them, however, will seek out literature on their own, or know what to look for.  Such guidance should be the unavoidable responsibility of teachers, who are fearless in declaring: This is a great book– whether Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Yearling, or Huck Finn –you must read it because your life will be poorer without it.  (E.D. Hirsch is almost alone in having the guts to name names in his core knowledge curriculum.) 

Moreover, as much as I do not believe that education in the classics needs to justify itself in terms of vocational skills, the implicit claim here that mastering Melville’s mind-bending language and majestic vision, say, does not develop useful mental skills shows utter ignorance of the richness of literature. 

It’s hard to say if this Common Core movement will actually catch on; scarily, conservative education theorist Chester Finn appears from the New York Times article to give it his imprimatur.   If this notion of a virtually literature-less English class becomes popular (and you can bet that there are plenty of ed-school grads cheering on the concept), we will have further betrayed our loving duty towards the geniuses of the past and impoverished our culture.

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Magical Thinking Watch: Endless Female Victimhood

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

You might have thought that as research accumulates on the biological aspect of human conduct, radical feminists would have lightened up a bit on their charge of widespread institutionalized sexism, especially since they have dominated the institutions that they finger as major sexist offenders for decades now.  Today’s front-page article in the New York Times claiming discrimination against girl athletes in college depressingly shows the opposite.  The evidence provided for ongoing violations of Title IX is even more tendentious than usual: astoundingly, the fact that schools are virtually kidnapping girls to get them to participate on sports teams is presented as proof of discrimination against females, rather than as discrimination in their favor. 

The schools can’t find enough girls interested in sports to create a proportional number of female athletes, and so instead, writes the Times in outrage:

many [colleges] are padding women’s team rosters with underqualified, even unwitting, athletes. They are counting male practice players as women. And they are trimming the rosters of men’s teams.

How does this demonstrate discrimination?  The Times provides not one example of a school stiffing eager female athletes.  And of course, college bureaucracies are now almost as female-heavy as the participants in Orgasm Night at the Womyn’s Center.  Yet the Times presumes some phantom source of sexism that never needs to be located but that explains why “women make up 53 percent of the student body at Division I institutions yet only 46 percent of all athletes.”  I’m actually surprised that the ratios are that close. 

It is long past clear: Title IX is by now nothing other than a powerful weapon in the male-hater’s tool chest.   This vapid article kicks off an entire Times series on Title IX; presumably they’re leading with their strongest suit.   Gird yourselves for further demonstration of the desperate intellectual condition of contemporary feminism.

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Eric Holder does not play the race card

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Heather Mac Donald

Federal district court judges are ignoring Congressional sentencing rules regarding crack defendants, but the Justice Department, to its credit, is opposing this judicial rewriting of the law, reports the New York Times’s Adam Liptak.  In 2010, Congress narrowed the disparities between federal sentences for crack and cocaine trafficking, but did not make the revision retroactive.  Some district judges are choosing to apply the 2010 revisions to defendants who committed their crimes before the law took effect, even though it is Congress’s prerogative, not the judiciary’s, to decide the scope of a law. 

Senators Richard Durbin and  Patrick Leahy, the principal sponsors of the revised sentencing law,  wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him apply their law retroactively in Justice Department prosecutions.  Not only did DOJ not take up their offer, it appealed a recent sentence imposed on a crack seller in Maine on the ground that it was too lenient under the relevant sentencing law. 

Whatever one thinks of the federal crack penalties, such adherence to the plain meaning of a Congressional statute is admirable.  If Durbin and Leahy erred in not making the revisions retroactive, they should amend the law through the usual procedures, not pressure DOJ into doing their work for them.  Perhaps, however, Congress did not intend retroactivity.  That Holder would buck their pressure is particularly admirable,  since there are few areas more susceptible to racial demagoguery than federal crack penalties.

Here, for the record, are some common misconceptions about the federal crack law: Continue reading →

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First Amendment Burned in Michigan?

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner:

On the face of it, the First Amendment does not seem to be in terribly good shape in Dearborn, Michigan:

DEARBORN, Mich., April 23 (UPI) — A constitutional law professor says a trial and the brief jailing of two Florida pastors who wanted to demonstrate outside a Michigan mosque is “bizarre.”

Florida pastors Terry Jones and Wayne Sapp were briefly jailed Friday in Dearborn after refusing to pay a $1 peace bond following a trial that found they would breach the peace if allowed to hold a rally outside the Islamic Center of America, the Detroit Free Press reported Saturday.

“The judge should have thrown out the case,” said Robert Sedler, constitutional law professor at Wayne State University.

Sedler said the entire process was “bizarre” and that “the whole thing is unconstitutional.” He cited U.S. Supreme Court cases backing up Jones’ right to protest. The Michigan ACLU also criticized the case.

“This is a complete abuse of the court process, and all those involved should be ashamed,” said Rana Elmir of the ACLU Michigan office. “The prosecutor’s office and the Dearborn court turned the First Amendment on its head. What happened today should never have happened. This is a true miscarriage of Justice.”

As so often with anything involving Jones, there’s plenty of confusion to go round. Volokh has more here.

Meanwhile in Indonesia, there is this (via the Daily Telegraph):

Islamic militants involved in a plot to bomb an Indonesian cathedral ahead of Easter celebrations planned to film and broadcast the inferno. Indonesian police said 19 suspects, who had planted bombs beneath a gas pipeline at the Christ Cathedral near Jakarta, were part of a new terrorist cell inspired by al-Qaeda.

The bombs, which were defused in a 10-hour operation on Thursday, had been rigged to go off just as services at the 3,000-seat Roman Catholic church were taking place for Good Friday. Maj. Gen. Anton Bachrul Alam, spokesman for the national police, said the 19 suspects who led authorities to bombs planted beneath a gas pipeline near the Christ Cathedral Church just outside of Jakarta did not appear to be part of any large, existing terrorist organisation. Other bombs were left in bags not far from the entrance.

“At this moment, it looks like a new cell,” Maj Gen Alam said, adding that the suspects, all in their 30s and many of them university graduates, told police they had been planning to film the fiery explosion.

“They wanted to make a movie and then broadcast it … that was the plan,” he said.

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Pachamama!

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Yes, yes, my bad; I’m late for Earth Day, but here, via Religion Dispatches, is a piece that discusses the ‘rights’ of the Earth, the eco-system and, well, just about everything. Yes, it’s an absurd premise, and one for which the writer clearly has some sympathy, but this extract from the new (2008) Ecuadorian constitution is still worth noting:

Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions, and its evolutionary processes. Any person, people, community, or nationality, may demand the observance of the rights of the natural environment before public bodies.

This somewhat sinister drivel presumably partly reflects the influence of the work of Bolivia’s somewhat sinister president Morales, the man who, in 2009, was declared by the president of the United Nations General Assembly, one Rev. Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, to be a “World Hero of Mother Earth”.

Doctor Who didn’t get the call, apparently

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