Jesus As Reagan's Sidekick

You've got to love those hilarious folks who somehow manage to combine fanatical Christianity with Libertarianism. Of course, one must have no understanding whatsoever of both to believe that they can be upheld simultaneously. (If you are wondering what Jesus would think of free markets, then I'm wondering whether you know anything at all about Jesus.)

So here is a very inventive blog header whose hapless author is trying to resolve the painful contradiction between worshiping free markets and worshiping Jesus:

As we can see, this particular Reagan fan chose to put "Ronnie" first and Jesus second. I kind of feel sorry for Jesus because playing second fiddle to Reagan, of all people, is quite insulting.

P.S. In the very top post of this freaky blog, I found the following sentence that tells us all we'll ever need to know about such folks' scary brand of religiosity:

 I had a lot of sinful years without Christ but God is in the business of forgiving sins.

What I wonder is whether God is successful in business and whether he pays any taxes. I know that Jesus wants us to pay taxes, but does he pay any himself? This is what theologians need to be working on.

Osama's Porn Collection

No matter what religion a fanatical fundamentalist belongs to, he is still going to turn out to be a damn hypocrite. I'm sure that after all their sex scandals, Evangelicals are happy to know that they are not alone amongst the most fanatical representatives of world religions. It might even turn out that Osama's porn collection overlaps with the ones enjoyed by the most rabid preachers of Christian virtue. Here is an article about the porn that was discovered in Osama's compound:

The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

If bin Laden hadn't gotten himself killed, he could have easily run for office as a Republican candidate. The guy was obviously hypocritical enough for that. 

Yet Another Instance of Hatred Towards Women by Ultra-Ortodox Jews

We keep being told that Israel needs to be supported over Palestine because if Palestinians are ever granted independence, their treatment of women will be barbaric. That is undoubtedly true. Israel's attitude to women, however, is just as hateful and demeaning. The gall of the Haredim woman-haters is such as to allow them to erase female leaders from press release photos. 

This is how the photo initially looked

And this is the sanitized version
with the images of Hillary Clinton and Audrey Thomason
photoshopped out

I don't want to hear anybody come here to screech about the so-called religious sensibilities of the nasty freakazoids who insulted women in this way. If they find the photo hurtful to their fanatical feelings, they could have avoided publishing it altogether. However, in our Western Civilization women now play an important role in all areas of existence. It is extremely insulting to have our reality that we worked hard to create being manipulated in this way to satisfy a bunch of miserable woman-haters.

Today, on the anniversary of the USSR's victory over the Nazi Germany, I want to remind my Jewish brothers and sisters that a very short time ago somebody also found their very existence insulting and attempted to erase them all from existence. 

Slavic Paganism

On January 21-25, 1998, Pope John Paul II visited Havana. His visit elicited such a wave of popular enthusiasm that it became obvious how little the Communist Party of Cuba managed to achieve in terms of combating the religious feelings of the Cuban people. Things were very different in the Soviet Union where the majority of the population let go of their religious allegiances with a notable ease. In the 20ies and the 30ies, people whose families seemed to have been deeply committed to the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries happily destroyed cathedrals and burned religious images. 

One of the reasons for this difference in the religious attitudes of the Soviet people and the Cubans lies in the history of how they came by their religious affiliations. In Cuba, Santeria integrated Catholicism, Yoruba religion and the traditions of the indigenous peoples. The resulting mix helped people experience catholicism as their own, since most of concepts that have currency in Catholicism could be easily explained in Santeria terms.

The Slavic people came by their Christianity in a very different way. In the late Xth century, Vladimir the Great, the grand prince of Kievan Rus, started casting about for a religion to which he could convert his people. He approached not only Christians but also Muslims and Jews with a request to be told more about their religions with a view to a possible forced conversion of the Slavic people to one of them. Islam didn't work for him because, even though it allowed one to have several wives (a huge bonus for Vladimir), it prohibited alcohol, and that was definitely not going to be acceptable. The Jews were rejected because Vladimir didn't feel like allying themselves with people whose loss of their land signaled, in his eyes, that they had been abandoned by God.

So Christianity was chosen and mass baptisms of Slavic people were conducted. Of course, nobody made any efforts to explain to the people what was going on, why their pagan rites had to be abandoned, the statues of their gods destroyed, and a religious tradition that was completely alien to them had to be accepted and practiced exclusively. Slavs were converted to Christianity through mass killings. Entire towns were burned alive for refusing to accept this alien religion. Christian churches were purposefully built on the sites of pagan cemeteries. This, of course, made any genuine popular acceptance of Christianity quite impossible.

For centuries to come, Christianity would be a huge divisive force in society where the rich and the powerful accepted it as their religion while everybody else still practiced pagan rites and only went through the motions of Christian traditions to avoid persecutions. Paganism was not only a system of beliefs for the Slavs. It was a way of finding a shared language with the nature that surrounded them and the climate that wasn't making their lives easy. Forced Christianity took all that away and gave very little in return. Until the Revolution of 1917, Russian Orthodox Church was a profoundly oppressive force in society that celebrated its extremely expensive rites with great pomp and allowed its officials to live in incomparable luxury. (As we all know, these folks picked up right where they left off after the fall of the Soviet Union.) 

People, in the meanwhile, still retained a worldview that was deeply pagan even though they might not have remembered this word any longer. Prevented from venerating their pagan deities, they developed an attitude where the political leaders of the country were treated as such substitute deities. Today, this attitude towards politicians in charge of the country still persists in those of the Slavic countries where Christianity was imposed in this uninspired and violent way.

Communism As a Religion

"Religion is the opium of the people," Marx said in his Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right published in 1843. (I looked this up on Wikipedia and I'm not ashamed of confessing it.) The Communist leaders of the Soviet Union took this statement to heart and invested the Soviet brand of Communism with very obvious religious overtones.* This made it a lot easier to convert a very backwards, ultra-religious country to a new Communist religion.

Just consider the following facts:

Just look at this picture that in the
USSR we saw on a regular basis. Does
it remind you of anything?

1. Communist ideologues were always presented as a kind of a Holy Trinity where, instead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you had Marx, Engels and Lenin. 

2. Holy remains of saints were always central to religious practices of the most backwards denominations. When Lenin died in 1924, his body was embalmed and preserved in a mausoleum so that people could visit his remains and pay their homage. It was considered a duty and a privilege of every Soviet citizen to walk by Lenin's remains at least once. I've done it and I don't know any other person who grew up in the Soviet Union who hasn't. The Russian government still spends a significant amount on preserving Lenin's remains because there are too many people who oppose interring the poor guy's body (or whatever is left of it). Lenin's remains still have pride of place on the Red Square. When Stalin died, his remains were also embalmed and added to Lenin's in the Mausoleum.**

3. In a Russian Orthodox home, there was always a corner called "beautiful" (which carries the same meaning as the word "red") where religious images were located. After the October Revolution, religious images were removed from these right-hand corners and substituted with images of the Communist Holy Trinity. Just like with the holy images, people would light candles in front of the triple image of Marx, Engels and Lenin (or Marx, Lenin and Stalin.)  The number of "inspirational stories" we have read about young Pioneers (you do know what it means in the context of the Soviet Union, right?) removing an old grandma's religious images from the right-hand corner and placing Lenin's portraits there was overwhelming. And, come to think of it, very Derridian****, too.

4. In a profoundly Pagan culture that was forcibly converted to Christianity (as all Slavic cultures that still preserve their Pagan customs and allegiances were), it was important to offer people Communist equivalents of their Pagan deities and traditions. This was done very successfully in the Soviet Union. As we all know, Pagan  sexuality is very happy and exuberant***, while Christianity was always very repressive sexually. The official Communist ideology would snag people with their "a sexual act should come as easily as having a glass of water" propaganda of the 20ies, only to collapse into an extremely Puritanical culture of the 60ies and the 70ies.

The main reason that the Communist ideology was so successful with the backwards and ultra-religious people of the Russian Empire is that it managed to inscribe itself so neatly into the all-important belief system  promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church. It isn't for nothing that Stalin was so eager to turn the Church leaders into happy collaborators of the regime. For decades, the Russian Orthodox priests collaborated with the KGB and informed the authorities of whatever it was that people revealed in the confessional. Today, the Russian president and prime-minister flaunt their fake religiousness which is made easy for them because of their KGB credentials that they share with the top officials of the Russian Orthodox Church.

*If I somebody reminds me, I will one day blog about why this project failed so spectacularly in Cuba.

** I also want to write a separate post on how Stalin's death was perceived as an enormous tragedy even by the most intellectual and refined Soviet people. It is especially curious to examine the case of Jews who weeped over the death of a guy who was in the process of exiling them all into Siberia. There are so many topics to blog about that one feels overwhelmed.

*** I'm also dying to blog about Slavic Paganism in the hopes that a Western Pagan (Pagan Topologist, maybe?) will point out similarities and differences.

**** If I need to write a separate post about it, just say so.

The Benefits of Growing Up in a Non-Religious Environment

1. Your body belongs to you. You can do whatever you want with it and not what some guy in a confessional or behind a pulpit decides.

2. You can eat and drink whatever you like whenever you like without feeling the need to consult some incomprehensible ancient book by people who have been dead forever.

3. There is no need to wake up early on Sunday and schlep to a building where equally sleepy and annoyed people engage in weird rituals together.

4. The idea that there can be anything wrong or shameful about sexual pleasure sounds bizarre.

5. Activities like enjoying food, procrastinating and expressing emotions freely do not lead to intense feelings of guilt.

6. In your romantic relationships, you consult your desires, not dusty tomes.

7. You save a lot of money because nobody hits you up for a donation every week.

8. You don't have to waste hours of your life hearing some individual pontificate in a pompous and boring manner every week.

9. If you do kind and charitable things it's because that's what you want and not because somebody guilt-tripped you into it.

10. You don't have to make a fool of yourself by questioning the most basic advances of science.

11. If you fall out of love, you can split up instead of forcing yourself suffer through a loveless relationship.

12. If you are a woman, you don't grow up with constant reminders of how inferior you are.

13. If you are gay or transgender, you don't get demonized and rejected for that by a group of people who respect somebody's interpretation of some old book more than they respect actual human beings.

14. As an adult, you can evaluate all systems of belief and decide for yourself which one suits you best, which is always a lot more convenient than people having decided that for you when you were a baby with no will of your own. People who pontificate about the atrocity of arranged marriages forget how easily most of them contracted an arranged marriage with their own spirituality. Their parents decide for them on the basis of custom and tradition, and then they are condemned to be spiritual in a way that they might have never chosen if they had any say in the matter.

P.S. If you want to write a response on the benefits of growing up religious, feel free. All I ask is that you try to do it without mentioning the word "community."

Women Rights in Post-Mubarak Egypt

It turns out that I was right when I wrote that there was a deep vein of misogyny underlying the recent protests in Egypt. The reality of women in post-Mubarak Egypt looks grim: 

Only days into the post-Mubarak era, many women's rights activists have begun to feel suspicious that the national umbrella they rallied under, whose slogan was democracy, equality and freedom for all Egyptians, may be leaving them out. Their disillusionment began when no women were selected by the military council to be among the 10-member constitutional committee responsible for making constitutional revisions. Another disheartening setback that raises questions about the future of women's rights in Egypt is the return of sexual harassment to the streets.

Any country that does not have a "wall of separation" between the state and a religion that was created by men for men in order to subject women (any of the three major monotheistic religions fits this description) will always end up turning into an anti-women cesspool. A country that has "a state religion" is hopeless. No amount of street protests, revolutions, tweets, and quasi-liberal gushing will help it become any less anti-women. 

The first step on the way towards progress always consists of putting religion in its place and getting it out of state affairs. The place of a religion is in the mosque, the synagogue, the church, etc. A country that is not prepared to acknowledge this is doomed to barbarity.

Sermon Titles

Of all the weird things to collect, I collect funny sermon titles. The most recent one I saw was:

"God loves you. And I'm trying." It would have been funnier if it were "God loves you, and I don't," of course. But still, it's pretty cool.

Back at Yale, one of the churches in front of my department had a sermon titled:

"Think education is expensive? Consider the price of ignorance." Considering that our university produced Goerge W. Bush, I was somehow not convinced.

P.S. My students in all three courses are writing mini-quizzes today while I just sit there. So I'm blogging like crazy. There is nothing more fun than blogging during class time.

Misogynist Priests in Russia

Classes were cancelled today, and I also forgot to bring my external hard drive home. So now all I can do is blog and cook. Which wouldn't be that bad if it happened at any point in the semester. Well, I'll stop complaining now.

My reader Canukistani brought it to my attention that the most recent bizarre pronouncement by a priest of the increasingly radicalized Russian Orthodox Church has made the news in the US:

A top official for the Russian Orthodox Church on Tuesday proposed creating an “all-Russian dress code,” lashing out at women who leave the house “painted like a clown” and “confuse the street with striptease.” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has angered women’s groups recently with his comments about female modesty. At a December round table on interethnic relations, he said a woman wearing a miniskirt “can provoke not only a man from the Caucasus,” the predominately Muslim region on Russia’s southern border, “but a Russian man as well.” “If she is drunk on top of that, she will provoke him even more,” he said. “If she is actively inviting contact, and then is surprised that this contact ends with a rape, she is all the more at fault.”

This nice Christian priest is convinced that victims of rape are responsible for the actions of their rapists and has no problem with saying it in public. The same high-ranking Russian Orthodox Church official recently suggested that the way women dress today resulted in

to short-term marriages, which are immediately followed by ratlike divorces, to the destruction of children’s lives, to solitude and madness, to life-catastrophe.

It's easy to dismiss Chaplin as a crazed individual who is experiencing a very public psychotic break. However, to think so would entail underestimating the power of the Russian Orthodox Church in the country.

Russian Orthodox Church has a history that is nothing less than shameful. It collaborated with every oppressive regime that ever existed in the country. During Soviet times, Orthodox priests collaborated with the secret police. They routinely broke the seal of confession and informed on the parishioners who questioned the regime. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Church has been making money by engaging in untaxed sales of alcohol and cigarettes. Just think about it. The same Church whose officials blame destruction of lives on women's clothing thinks nothing of selling alcohol and cigarettes in a country where mortality rates due to alcoholism are sky-high.

Russian Orthodox Church uses its influence with the Russian government to promote discrimination against people of other religious persuasions in a country that is supposed to be secular. It routinely opposes all measures to promote contraception and introduce sex ed classes for high school students. The Church also promotes a profoundly nationalistic rhetoric that often borders on fascist. In short, it is one of many institutions that help turn Russia into a racist, fascist, misogynist state.

Censorship on Campus: Liberal or Religious?

The assault on the system of higher education in this country will stoop to any falsity, manipulation of facts or outright lie in order to hammer home the tired point that universities are evil. See, for example, this recent article that begins with the following alarmist statement:

The tendency of 1990s’ campus liberals to sacrifice free expression on the altar of political correctness has given way to even more insidious examples of fear and paranoia. Attorneys Greg Lukianoff and Will Creeley, in the pages of Free Inquiry (Aug.-Sept. 2010), argue this trend will leave America’s universities, once defined by the Supreme Court as “peculiarly the marketplace of ideas,” increasingly isolated, insulated, and intellectually sterile.

Sounds scary, huh? It would be if it weren't for the little matter of proof needed to substantiate such blanket accusations addressed to the US universities. The article's author has very little to offer in terms of proof. There is the case of Yale that censored a scholarly volume analyzing the cartoons that used the image of Prophet Mohammad and created a huge controversy in Europe (you can read the details of this case here). Ther is also the case of New York University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Chicago that also had some sort of an issue with cartoons featuring Mohammad.

The article shamelessly attributes these cases of on-campus censorship to "liberal thought police." But is it really a liberal trend? The only thing that all these cases have in common is the terror of offending the religious folk. Religious fanatics of every ilk abound in this country. After they put their fanatical president in office in 2000 and 2004, there is no stopping them from colonizing the public discourse to the extent where we are all terrified of offending their sensibilities. To give an example, nobody is allowed to hand out any propaganda, flyers, etc. on the campus of my public university. When the preachers descend on campus, though, nobody can stop them from doing what nobody else can withou a special permit. (I wrote about this here and here).

 

There is nothing liberal in this terror of the religious people. More and more often, religious fanatics in this country are attacking the separation of church and state. Now we are all terrified of saying, doing or thinking anything that will bring their wrath upon us. The word "religion" makes everybody cower in fear because religious fanatics (be they Christian, Muslim, or anything else) are capable of any retaliation. It's annoying that irresponsible journalists fail to assign blame where it's due: to the religious thought police.

Education and Barbarity: George Washington University

Do you know what a university's job is? According to George Washington U, it's to satisfy people religiously, whatever that means. The university will now have a certain hour in its swimming pool, during which the male students will be banned from using the facilities based on their gender. This will be done to accommodate religious preferences of some students:

Last week, the Muslim Students' Association and the University opened up "Sisters' Splash," a female-only hour at the pool. Every week, GW plans to close the HelWell pool to men and will cover the glass door with a dark tarp, giving female Muslim students the chance to swim at their leisure. The University also hired a female lifeguard to be on duty for each week's event. . . Rahiba Noor, a junior who serves as the community service chair of the MSA, said that prior to attending GW, swimming laps at a private pool was an important part of her health regimen. At school, however, Noor said she's resigned herself to staying away from the water and using a treadmill. "Religious values always define us," Noor said. "Although I wouldn't really mind, it would be satisfying to me religiously to swim only with girls."

I imagine that the next step will be to create male-only classes to satisfy religiously those students who don't want to be offended by female presence in the classroom. This kind of insanity is always unleashed whenever we allow people's personal religious preferences to dominate public spaces.

And then people come here asking me why I'm in favor of niqabs, burqas and Co being outlawed in public spaces in this country. Unless this pandering to any kind of religious fanaticism stops, I can envision the day when I will be required to put on a burqa to teach my classes because my Western clothes might be found offensive by some pseudo-religios fool.

Murdering in the Name of Christ

In my Hispanic Civilization course, we talk about the crimes perpetrated by Spanish Christians in the name of Jesus. The extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the crimes of the Inquisition, the fascist Catholic dictatorship of Franco (1939-75). My students look horrified (one was actually in tears when we read Bartolome de Las Casas's account of the destruction of the Indies.) How could they do that in the name of such a peaceful, charitable religion? they ask. How is it even possible?

I came home after this kind of discussion today and I watched recordings from the trial of Scott Roeder, the murderer of Dr. Tiller. He talks about his "conversion" to Christianity in a way that would make Torquemada listen up and take notes. This makes me want to bring these recordings to my students and ask them: "What have you done to stop this insanity? Nothing? Then keep your crocodile tears about the victims of Spain's militant Christianity to yourselves."

Jesus in the Supermarket

We went grocery shopping to a local chain. When we came back, we discovered in our shopping bags two sheets of paper (for each person doing the shopping) containing some weird story about a Chinese person who "found the Savior" and the words "Thank you, Jesus!" written on top of the sheet.

I thought I've seen every weird permutation of showy, ignorant religious fanaticism in the years I've lived in the Midwest but, apparently, I still have a lot to learn about the lengths to which some people would go to impose their insanity on others. The condescension of these proselytizers who have the gall to impose their superstitious and racist idiocy about magical pictures that convert Chinese people to Christianity is scary. It's also offensive that I come to their store to make a purchase, which helps them to make money, and they insult my intelligence and invade my personal space with this vile rubbish. If their need to persecute people with this idiocy is so strong that they can't help themselves, they could at least have asked me whether I want them to put these silly leaflets into my shopping bags. But apparently, their fundamentalist preachers don't teach them to have respect for other people's space and property.

This supermarket chain has been forced to close down several of its stores in our area because Walmart proved to be the kind of competition they can't beat. I'm not a fan of Walmart, to put it mildly, but at least nobody there ever tried to convert me.

SUNY Albany Is Dead

The following things become painfully clear from the letter I cite in its entirety at the end of this post:

1. The SUNY University system, which used to be famous for the high quality of its education and research, is now officially dead. If you've been trying to convince yourself that New York State is not the same as Southern Mississippi, think twice. It is now exactly the same in terms of a methodic destruction of higher education in both these states.

2. It wasn't for nothing that we've been reading all these articles in the New York Times and Co about the need to abolish tenure. Those articles marked a beginning of an official campaign to destroy scholarship in the US. Religious fanatics that came to power in this country 10 years ago hate secular education. Now they have proceeded to destroy the university, which is a place where their ignorant superstitions are ridiculed and where young people are taught to think for themselves.

3. A corporate takeover of the system of American higher education has now been completed. Uneducated crooks have made their way into college administration. They share the desire that drives the religious fanatics to stamp out every last vestige of intelligence and knowledge in their country. In their opinion, the great unwashed masses should serve their purpose by working themselves to death without complaining about their horrible work conditions, consume more overpriced junk, get into debt, and be extremely grateful to be allowed to lead this beautiful existence.

4. With the imminent death of the overwhelming majority of language programs in this country, the US will find itself even more isolated from other cultures. Americans already feel like pariahs who are hated by people from other countries for the atricities the American government keeps perpetrating abroad. Now, Americans will not be able to talk to foreigners and find out that, in spite of all the propaganda that Americans are brainwashed with daily, their work conditions are amongst the worst and their lifestyles are the saddest in the developed world.

While these changes have been taking place, we, the academics, have been doing nothing. We have been sitting there quietly, agreeing to fulfill our administrators' every whim, kissing our Deans' and Presidents' asses, and hoping that at least our own positions would not be cut just yet.

Hasn't the time finally arrived for us to break our pathetic and terrified silence and start doing something? It happened to SUNY today and it will happen to you tomorrow.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,


Today the seven members of the French faculty at SUNY--Albany (all tenured) were informed that by presidential decision, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, the French program has been "deactivated" at all levels (BA, MA, PhD), as have BA programs in Russian and Italian. The only foreign language program unaffected is Spanish. The primary criterion used in making the decision was undergrad majors-to-faculty ratio. We were told that tenured faculty in French, Russian, and Italian will be kept on long enough for our students to finish their degrees--meaning three years at the outside. Senoir faculty are being encouraged to take early retirement. The rest of us are being urged to "pursue our careers elsewhere," as our Provost put it.

Needless to say, the decision is personally devastating to those of us affected, but it is also symptomatic of the ongoing devaluation of foreign-language and other humanities program in universities across the United States. I'm writing to ask for your help in spreading the word about this decision as widely as possible and in generating as much negative media publicity as possible against SUNY--Albany and the SUNY system in its entirety.

There is much background to add about how this decision was reached and implemented, too much for me to explain fully here. Suffice it to say that the disappearance of French, Italian, and Russian has resulted from  an almost complete lack of leadership at the Albany campus and in the SUNY system. Our president, a former state pension fund manager, holds an MBA as his highest degree, has never held a college or university teaching position, and has never engaged in any kind of scholarship.

More disturbing still, due process was not followed in the decision-making process. The affected programs were not consulted or given the opportunity to propose money-saving reforms. Our Dean and Provost simply hand-selected an advisory committee to rubber stamp the president's decision. The legalities of the situation remain to be discussed with our union, UUP, but in the meantime I welcome any advice you may have.

best,

Brett

Brett Bowles
Associate Professor of French Studies

I found this shocking letter at a great blog you can find here.

Why Are Young Americans So Interested in Religion?

I was grading my students' essays yesterday and was taken aback by how many of them thought it necessary to mention that they are Christians. Believe me, I did not solicit this information from them in any way. They had to show an admirable degree of inventiveness to insert this information into an essay on a completely unrelated topic. This made me wonder why so many young Americans, especially in the Bible Belt where I happen to live for the moment, are so interested in religion.


In other developed countries, you will be hard-pressed to find anybody in their teens and twenties who would mention their religious affiliation with this degree of insistence. Most young people in Western Europe have no religious affiliation. Even in Spain, the country where a Catholic fascist dictatorship remained in power until 1975, you will not find anybody younger than 50 attending Mass. Even 50-year-olds are few and far between at religious functions. Most people who give any thought at all to religion in Spain are in their 70ies and 80ies. So why are young Americans so different from their European peers in this regard?
Part of the answer might be that if you don't go to church in this area of the country, there is nothing else to do, no other way to entertain yourself and spend time with other kids your age. Churches are the only institutions that organize activities for kids and young adults. Otherwise, life in the American Midwest is mind-numbingly boring. Young people here can't go to bars or night-clubs until they are 21. Even then, there are hardly any bars and night-clubs worth visiting. Most of them are geared towards a far older clientele. In the tiny college town where I live, there are quite a few pricey bars and restaurants where a university professor can go to partake of expensive wine and gourmet dinners. There is one sleazy looking place where one can go to dance and imbibe really horrible liquor. There are a couple of family-oriented bars/cheap restaurants. There is one tiny movie theater that is sold out pretty much every weekend. And that's all there is for miles and miles and miles. Mind you, our town is the liveliest place in the area. The rest of small towns here don't even have these paltry entertainment choices.

It isn't so surprising, then, that kids gravitate towards churches. This, of course, works to the advantage of the religious Right. These children and young adults can be brainwashed at an early age and turned into faithful Republican voters starting with their very first visit to the voting booth.

"Why Do You Hate Religion So Much?"

My posts about the unconstitutional encroachment of religion on college campuses prompted one of my readers to write in asking: "Why do you hate religion so much? Granted, there are many religious fanatics who pervert the true teachings of various religions. But religion can be a force for good and this is a truth that even an atheist or an agnostic such as yourself has to acknowledge."

Well, dear reader, actually, I am neither atheist nor agnostic. I am a religious person, a believer. I dislike talking about it because this is a profoundly intimate issue, which, I feel, is profanated daily by showy public exhibitions from all kinds of fundamentalists. My deep religious feelings are the reason why the insistent, loud screeching of religious fanatics and their attempts to push their religion on everybody else pain me so much. It is almost physically painful to observe how so many people use religion to achieve their unconscionable political goals, oppress others, and foster their own sense of fake moral superiority. Vociferating about how spiritual you are and lording it over others is easy. Trying to live quitely and unobtrusively according to the tenets of one's religious doctrine is hard. Christianity, which I know more about than any other religion, is supposed to be based on humility and quiet contemplation. If you say "I'm Christian" and don't immediately ask yourself "Am I? Do I lead a truly Christian life?", then you are nothing but a fake.

Christianity has been colonized by so many loud individuals who screech about how much better they are than anybody else that I don't even want to identify as Christian any more. So many atrocities have been and still are perpetrated in the name of Christianity that the best thing people who want to consider themselves Christian can do is just shut up already and turn towards themselves, their own souls. In the words of Jesus himself, prayer should not be a public affair. It should be done, privately, intimately, secretively. In the words of Jesus himself, don't count everybody else's sins, go count your own and concentrate on bettering yourself. This is a religion that is murdered when it is imposed on people by stealth or against their will. This is a religion that, according to the words of Jesus himself, should be kept separate from public and political life.

As I said, I don't want to talk about this issue much because it's very personal to me. This is pretty much all I want to say about this topic on this blog.

More Religion on Campus

What I find really annoying is that on this fine Sunday afternoon I have to be bombarded with chain e-mails from my colleagues about "the power of religion and prayer to bring inner peace." We have a service where you can e-mail every single professor at our university at once, which is useful for work related purposes. It's annoying enough that people use this service to find homes for kittens and puppies (accompanying each such e-mail with endless pictures of said dogs and kittens that make your mail-box crash), sell football tickets, houses and cars, and share their general dissatisfaction with the universe. (I'm sorry your students prefer checking their Facebook pages to listening to your ununspiring lecture, but how does it help to fill my mailbox with your complaints?) Inconsiderate as hell, that's what it is.

However, when this service is used to expose me - completely against my will, mind you - to religious propaganda coming from my workplace on my day off, that's simply unconstitutional. We are a state university. The US Constitution guarantees separation of Church and State. This means that at my state university I have a constitutional right to be protected from other people's religious rantings. I don't dump my religion on them, so why do they dump theirs on me? These are educated, well-read people we are talking about. Is it possible that they don't understand how offensive (let alone unconstitutional) their attempts to proselytize amongst their colleagues are?

Biblical Marriage: A Hilarious Video

While my students were writing their mini-quiz, I was surfing the Internet and discovered the following video. Only a super human effort of willpower helped me avoid roaring with laughter. Enjoy!

You Are Muslim? How Insensitive of You!

The opponents of Cordoba House (that they ignoranty refer to as "Ground Zero Mosque") have realized that their protests against its construction go against the constitution of this country. Unable to defend their opposition to the mosque on constitutional grounds, they have found another way to justify their bigotry. Now they refer to the decision to build a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero "insensitive." Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) was one of the first bigots to use the insensitivity argument. Now it is being gleefully picked up by every racist and Evangelical fundamentalist in the country.

The insensitivity argument is mind-boggling in its shamelessness. Americans wreaked unparalleled devastation on many areas of the world. To accuse of insensitivity a group of people who simply want to organize a place of worship is incredibly cynical. Equating Islam with terrorism is ignorant and simply wrong.

It has become painfully obvious that there will be no reasonable discussion about Cordoba House with these bigots. They don't dare to state openly that the only thing motivating their protests is hatred. So they keep coming up with convoluted arguments to explain why praying next to Ground Zero is wrong. Or, in this case, "insensitive."

Many Americans Think Obama Is Muslim

According to recent polls, the number of Americans who think President Obama is Muslim is growing:

Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 percent. . . Pew analysts attribute the findings to attacks by his opponents and Obama's limited attendance at religious services, particularly in contrast with Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, whose worship was more public.

The only reasonable answer to the question about the president's religion is, of course: "I don't know and I don't care." In the last few years, Christian fundamentalists have taken this country hostage to the extent where politicians are now required to participate in showy acts of piety in order to persuade fanatical and ignorant voters that they are worthy of being elected. As anybody even remotely familiar with the origins of this country knows very well, there is hardly anything more un-American than these attempts to conflate politics and religious fundamentalism. It's mind-boggling that people would be interested in how often a political leader visits a religious service.

The funny thing, though, is that people who are actually Christian (unlike fundamentalist buffoons of Sarah Palin's and George W. Bush's ilk) know very well that absence, rather than presence, at public rituals of worship makes one a true Christian:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. (Matthew 6: 5-7)

The words of Jesus on the matter of public worship could not be clearer. People who pray in religious buildings and in public are hypocrites and only do so to gain an earthly reward. Jesus exhorts his followers to engage in prayer secretly.

Spiritual matters are a deeply intimate affair. People who make a public show out of their presumed spirituality, in truth have none. It's sad that voters often prefer candidates who prostitute their souls by performing religion they know nothing about.

An interesting report on the issue from http://www.newsy.com/: