Templeton Prize

Posted on April 11, 2011 by Bradlaugh

[Cross-posted from The Corner at NRO]

Astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees, who has a walk-on part in We Are Doomed (and who is properly written of as “Lord Rees,” though nobody seems to bother any more) has been awarded the Templeton Prize  “for career achievements affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

Previous winners of the prize, which seeks to promote better understanding between science and religion, include Catholic nun Mother Teresa, U.S. preacher Billy Graham and Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as many leading scientists.

This will be good for some rhetorical fireworks from the more militant kind of atheists. In those precincts, unbelievers who accept the  Templeton Prize are regarded as wishy-washy “accommodationists.” Richard Dawkins has already harrumphed.

Sir Martin has described himself as “an unbelieving Anglican who goes to church out of loyalty to the tribe.” I’d suspect that this position is utterly incomprehensible to anyone not (a) raised an Anglican, (b) in England, and (c) more than 50 years old. Compare George Orwell’s oft-quoted remark — it’s in Jeffrey Meyer’s biography  somewhere — that “I like the Church of England better than Our Lord.”

My NRO review of Sir Martin’s splendid gloomy look at the human race’s near future (he doesn’t think we have one) is here.

The converse of an unbeliever who goes to church is a believer who doesn’t. The Audacious Epigone has crunched some numbers from the General Social Survey on this (though I think that “less than” in his penultimate paragraph should read “more than”).

Posted in Religion, science | 14 Comments

Fiscal priorities, never mind

Posted on April 10, 2011 by David Hume

Congressional Republicans may have been willing to sell social conservatives down the river, but not so the Republican party of Tennessee. Creationism Gains Ground in Tennessee:

Tennessee House Bill 368, the creationist friendly legislation that we have previously covered on FrumForum, has passed through of the Tennessee House on a vote of 70-23. The Senate is expected to take up the bill for a vote on April 20th.

As many observers had feared, the bill passed successfully on a near-party line vote. 8 Democrats joined with 62.

That being said, I tend to be of the opinion that a human nature and evolution friendly Zeitgeist can reinforce and add vigor to some of the truths of social conservatism. Alas.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 9 Comments

What Happened to Those Fiscal Priorities? (2)

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the New York Times (emphasis added):

The state budget plan that moved toward enactment on Wednesday calls for 10 percent cuts in aid to public colleges and universities, but it would add about $18 million a year in tuition assistance for students attending some private religious schools.
The added money would be available to any theological student who met a new set of criteria for the state’s so-called Tuition Assistance Program grants. The major potential beneficiaries would be an estimated 5,000 men who attend dozens of Orthodox rabbinical schools in New York, state officials and religious leaders said.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat whose Brooklyn district includes a large Orthodox population, called the additional financing “a matter of equity, to rectify the fact that New York State has denied rabbinical college students tuition assistance for all these years.”

Mr. Hikind and other lawmakers have sought unsuccessfully for about 10 years to adopt the new criteria by amending the Tuition Assistance Program rules, eliminating a long-established ban on state tuition assistance for undergraduate students who attend religious schools, like yeshivas, that are not chartered by the state Board of Regents.

In negotiations this month, Republican leaders in the Senate asked that the new rules be included as part of the 2011-12 budget agreement. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Democratic leaders in the Assembly have agreed, said Jeffrey Gordon, a spokesman for the State Division of the Budget.

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What Would Jesus Cut?

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Bradlaugh

Lunchtime mail brought my April copy of The Dominion, “News of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.” The front page leader was by my local prelate, The Right Reverend Lawrence C. Provenzano, Bishop of Long Island.   Titled “Budgets, Leadership, and Public Service,” it is an angry broadside against the cutting of public services — any public services.

The approach to addressing the fiscal crisis in New Jersey and in a host of other states across the country appears to be to assault those who do the public’s work as state employees, to imply that they receive benefits and salaries that go far beyond what they deserve and that they immorally avail themselves of these benefits.

His Grace recommends that his parishioners join in a new initiative from the religious left under the slogan “What Would Jesus Cut?”  If you join in, you can get a WWJC bracelet!

Would Jesus cut Head Start — a bureaucratic extravaganza of no proven value whatever?  Would he cut foreign aid — correctly described by Peter Bauer 30-odd years ago as “The transer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries”?  Where would the Saviour have stood on defined-benefit vs. defined contribution pension plans?  We know what he thought of tax collectors (e.g. Matt. 18:17), but where did he stand on tax payers vs. tax eaters?

We hear so much about the Religious Right, far too little about the Religious Left and its maleficent works — it is, for example, the main motive force behind the refugee resettlement rackets.  From the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the Right Rev. Lawrence Provenzano, what I mostly see in the pulpits are lefties. 

The pity of it is that elsewhere in The Dominion and its national-level equivalent, Episcopal Journal, I read of good and commendable works by church groups in, for example, relief for victims of the recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan.

Do these Christian lefties not see the contradiction between encouraging voluntary charity and demanding that ever more of the work of comforting the afflicted be transferred to government functionaries whose benefit packages are written into their state constitutions?

Posted in economics, Religion | 22 Comments

Norman Tebbit, 80

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted over at the Corner:

The Daily Telegraph is running an interview with Norman Tebbit, one of the Thatcherite greats, who turned 80 this week. You don’t always have to agree with him (I don’t, not always) to find it a cause for celebration that he is still around and about, busy blogging (a must read) and constantly doing his best to remind David Cameron of what a Conservative party should be.

Contrary, perhaps, to his somewhat feral reputation (one infuriated Labour politician famously described him as a “semi house-trained polecat”) and obvious delight in provocation, Lord Tebbit is a thoughtful man even if he would probably be embarrassed to admit it. I had the honor of hosting one of the first (possibly even the first) of his public engagements after the hideous IRA Brighton bombing that nearly killed him and left his wife paralyzed. The pair of them had spent hours trapped under the rubble. He had had there, he told me quietly, “plenty of time” to think. And then he changed the subject. His wife, the Daily Telegraph writer notes, quickly realized that she had been paralyzed (she was a former nurse), “but she did not want to worry her husband so she made no mention of it. When they were finally pulled out on live television, her condition became clear. Lord Tebbit, often described as the greatest prime minister we never had, left mainstream politics to look after her.”

Some extracts:

It is not a surprise that Lord Tebbit cannot find it in himself to forgive Magee [the Brighton bomber]. Does he think God exists? “I’m not sure. He ought to. Things would work better. I said to someone the other day that it’s up to God whether he forgives him [Magee], not for me. All I’d like to do is accelerate the time of the interview…”

… Lord Tebbit has been cast as a T-Rex, but, as he points out, Tories do not tend to be right-on youths. “They tell me that Conservatives are dying out, that we need to modernise, but we keep burying old people and funnily enough there are more the next year. It amuses me that when I go out people will come up to me and say, ‘When I was 20 I loathed you and everything you stood for. Now I find myself thinking, My God! I am getting just like him!’  ” Lord Tebbit argues that the priorities of government are defence, enforcing law and looking after the economy and infrastructure, and that it should not get involved with social mores. “Attitudes change a lot over time, go back and forth.”

…He says he is more of a Conservative than David Cameron. The Big Society is just a “buzzword. It’s a logo looking for a product”. He wants to turn the party back to being nationalist and jokes that he would like it to go into coalition with the UK Independence Party…

…What does he feel Mr Cameron really believes in? “I’m not sure what he believes in. Let me put it tactfully like that.” Later he quotes Corinthians: “ ’If the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall follow?’ David was more concerned about being prime minister than what he was going to do as prime minister. I think that’s the heart of it.” Lord Tebbit does concede some admiration for Mr Cameron for getting the UN resolution over Libya. But even this comes with a caveat.

“Whether it was wise to do so is another matter. I have the gravest doubt that what follows Gaddafi will be sweetness and light.” Of the rush to war, Lord Tebbit says that “it was thoughtless”.

“Sometimes one has to ignore the call of ‘do something’ in favour of sitting down and working out what it is that needs to be done.”

Many more years, please.

Posted in politics | Tagged , | 2 Comments

What happened to those fiscal priorities?

Posted on March 30, 2011 by David Hume

Well, different things come to the fore in state houses, Creationism Makes a Comeback:

The irony is that in the past, creationist institutions and advocates used to be allies of laws and reforms which would give a stronger role for a parents choice in their child’s education, whether through voucher programs, charter schools, or even homeschooling. There is a logic to this approach: rather than tear towns and communities apart over protracted and agonizing legal battles, simply give parents the power to choose what education their child can have.

Laws such as HB 368, and other “academic freedom” bills are not about giving parents more options about where they can get their children educated. They are about empowering and protecting those creationists who are already in the public education system and are waiting to be given the legal cover to evangelize and teach bad science.

I’m a conservative who is passionate about science. I can tell you from personal experience that the American right-wing’s periodic love affair with Creationism, whether through genuine sincere belief or political opportunism, is a major reason for the alienation of scientists from any engagement with American conservatism. I do not believe that scientist are by their nature lovers of the Leviathan, nor are they often died-in-the-wool cultural relativists. But often they have a hard time taking seriously a movement whose stated aim is to replace established science with science-inflected religion. I don’t know if it is amusing or sad, but many of my scientist acquaintances are very skeptical that I really can be a conservative. I don’t fit their image of a right-winger, and I am of course pro-science. Now, there are obviously orders of magnitude more American evangelicals than scientists. For politicians they are a substantial voting block which needs to be wooed. But for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Posted in Religion | Tagged | 23 Comments

Whoaa!

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via Politico:

SAN ANTONIO — Newt Gingrich stood before thousands of evangelical churchgoers Sunday night to deliver a dire warning that nation’s Christian roots are under attack.

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9,” Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

The former House Speaker held up his own faith (he converted to Catholicism two years ago) as proof of his undying patriotism.

Sigh.

Posted in politics | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

Honors for Sale

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

A traditionally British form of fundraising appears to have been given a fresh twist. The Mail on Sunday reports:

One of Britain’s most high-profile Catholic priests has admitted arranging papal knighthoods for wealthy businessmen for money. Father Michael Seed, who regularly celebrated Mass for Tony Blair and his family in Downing Street, now faces questions from his religious order… Papal knighthoods are awarded to lay men and women for conspicuous service to the church and society. They are among the highest honours the Pope can bestow. Tonight a source close to Fr Seed’s order, the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, said his superiors were ‘appalled’. Although he failed to solicit funds from Mr Bezalel [an arms dealer mentioned earlier in the story], at least four wealthy Britons were impressed by his overtures. Fr Seed admitted they made donations to an Archbishop friend’s charity in Serbia to become papal knights.

It was unclear last night if the four, who are each understood to have contributed between £25,000 and £50,000, had done anything else to merit their honour… Fr Seed, who has taken a vow of poverty, denied profiting from any of the deals…

…Fr Seed is honorary chaplain to the International Committee on Human Dignity, based at the European Parliament in Brussels. But it was as unofficial Catholic envoy to Parliament that he acquired many well-connected friends. He was praised by Cherie Blair for turning ‘the great into the good’ and helped to convert Tony Blair…

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 5 Comments

Forget 2012, The End is Even More Nigh…

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the Independent:

The end of the world is nigh; 21 May, to be precise. That’s the date when Harold Camping, a preacher from Oakland, California, is confidently predicting the Second Coming of the Lord. At about 6pm, he reckons 2 per cent of the world’s population will be immediately “raptured” to Heaven; the rest of us will get sent straight to the Other Place.

If Mr Camping were speaking from any normal pulpit, it would be easy to dismiss him as just another religious eccentric wrongly calling the apocalypse. But thanks to this elderly man’s ubiquity, on America’s airwaves and billboards, his unlikely Doomsday message is almost impossible to ignore.

Every day Mr Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, speaks to his followers via the Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded entirely by donations from listeners. Such is their generosity (assets total $120m) that his network now owns 66 stations in the US alone.

Those deep pockets were raided to allow Family Radio to launch a high-profile advertising campaign, proclaiming the approaching Day of Judgement. More than 2,000 billboards across the US are adorned with its slogans, which include “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!”. A fleet of logoed camper vans is touring every state in the nation. “It’s getting real close. It’s really getting pretty awesome, when you think about it,” Mr Camping told The Independent on Sunday. “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”

Mr Camping, who makes programmes in 48 languages, boasts tens of thousands of followers across the globe, with radio stations in South Africa, Russia and Turkey. After 70 years of studying the Bible, he claims to have developed a system that uses mathematics to interpret prophesies hidden in it. He says the world will end on 21 May, because that will be 722,500 days from 1 April AD33, which he believes was the day of the Crucifixion. The figure of 722,500 is important because you get it by multiplying three holy numbers (five, 10 and 17) together twice. “When I found this out, I tell you, it blew my mind,” he said

.

If that was really the case, his mind may not have been in the best condition in the first place, but I’ll let that pass.

This, however, is too entertaining to overlook:

Critics point out that this isn’t the first time Mr Camping has predicted the second coming. On 6 September 1994, hundreds of his listeners gathered at an auditorium in Alameda looking forward to Christ’s return.

“At that time there was a lot of the Bible I had not really researched very carefully,” he said last week.

Ah yes, there’s always that next time…

Posted in Religion | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Secular Celebration

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Bradlaugh

From this weekend’s Radio Derb (transcript here):

As an unbeliever, I have naturally asked NRO to give me paid leave for the entire month of May so I can celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of David Hume, taking a trip to the great philosopher’s birthplace in Scotland and devoutly attending the four-day public reading of the Treatise being planned by my colleagues at Secular Right.

Have we fixed a location for the party yet?

Posted in Conferences | 4 Comments