Santorum Burning with Religious Bigotry

Religious tolerance took another blow recently when a Hasidic Jew in New York City decided a neighbor wasn’t praying with the rest of the community and decided to do something about it.

Spitzer

Shaul Spitzer set the neighbor on fire, but only after stuffing stuffed gasoline-soaked shirts into a bag, lighting the bag and throwing it on the porch of the neighbor's home while the family slept inside.

The problem was, Spitzer told the court, that the neighbor had disobeyed an order from an important rabbi to pray in the community’s main synagogue.  The neighbor had already received several threats and his property was vandalized before Spitzer got really fired up.

Is Spitzer the first person to get all hot and bothered over some inane religious precept?  Hardly.

He initially reminded me of a would-be teenage saint in the Middle Ages who chastised people for laughing since, he noted correctly, the New Testament does not depict Jesus laughing.  The Catholic Church stopped just short of making the very serious young man a saint. 

Santorum

Then, I realized that Spitzer was no different than today’s politicians sure that one religious approach fits all.  Take Rick Santorum, an overly pious Republican presidential candidate.  He dislikes abortion.  Good for him.  However, making the sweeping assumption that because he dislikes abortion, no one should get an abortion, he proceeds to try to impose his thoughts on everyone else via his legislative status.

Spitzer merely tried to kill a neighbor.  Santorum would prefer to condemn millions of women to risky healthy decisions that, in the past, left many women badly injured either at the hands of ill-trained “backyard butchers” or through their own desperate efforts.

Nor, if elected, does he plan to stop there.  Religion, Santorum stressed to a group of pastors shortly after his victories in the western primaries, will guide his decision making.

“I have seen the interaction with faith and public life and to me the bounds there are not boundaries at all," Santorum said. "I can't and I won't check my faith at the door because it motivates me to do things that I believe are best for our country. It motivates me to stand up for those that are the most vulnerable. It motivates me to stand up not just for the unborn child but for that working guy who doesn't have the kind of job that can support his family."

Ironically, as he preaches religious bigotry, Santorum has the chutzpah to foist that view on others. 

“The intolerance of the left, the intolerance of the secular ideology, it is a religion unto itself, it is just not a biblical based religion, and it is the most intolerant," Santorum said. "Just like we saw from the days of the atheists of the Soviet Union, it is completely intolerant of dissent. They fear dissent. Why? Because the dissent comes from folks who use reason, common sense, and divine revelation and they want no part of any of those things.

"They want their world view to be imposed without question, and if you question them, you're haters, you're bigots, and you should be as a result of that ostracized from the public square," he added.

Wrong.  Secularists support freedom of religion and dissent.  It’s ideologues like him who want to stifle it.

In fact, it’s the secularists who gave him the freedom to speak out as he is doing.  Thank God the Constitution prevents people like him from imposing his religious views on everyone else.  The concept developed because some of our Founding fathers wanted their Christian belief to be the required religion.  However, in a fledgling nation already composed of a multitude of faith, leaders recognized such an attempt could lead to the kind of religious wars many had fled Europe to escape.

 

The solution: this is not a Christian nation or any kind of religious nation.  It’s a nation with freedom of religion, which makes it possible for people to worship Charlie Brown, Superman and whichever other god they choose.  And, it prevents someone like Santorum from silencing them.

After all, as men like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Madison recognized, no one “knows” what the truth is.  As such, no one has the right to impose his “truth” on anyone else.

That’s true for Spitzer, who faces at least five years in jail.  It’s equally true for politicians like Santorum, the former senator who wants to impose his religious views on the rest of us. We saw what happened when George W. Bush let his religious beliefs push faith-based initiatives at the expense of trained professionals. 

Once is too much, whether we’re talking about setting fire to neighbors or to the American Constitution.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers. 

A Cup of Coffee for God

Do you want a cup of Starbucks coffee?

Personally, I don’t drink coffee – Starbucks or anyone else’s java – but it might be a good time to start, if for nothing else to see how God reacts.

Andrew

He is supposedly concerned that Starbucks has supported Washington State’s decision to approve a bill permitting same-sex marriage.  At least, that’s what Steven Andrew, an evangelical pastor and president of the USA Christian Ministries in California, said.

The all-knowing pastor reported that "Christians are upset with Starbucks for turning against God ... Starbucks can follow Satan if they want to.  Are you on the Lord's side? Will you help the USA be blessed by God?"

The way to do that, he said, is to boycott Starbuck’s.

Maybe Pastor Andrew has had too much caffeine lately.  He might have noted that Washington is now the seventh state in this country to endorse same-sex marriage.  In addition, a California court just rejected a ban on same-sex marriages in that state.  God seems not to have noticed.  Meanwhile, Starbucks continues to post healthy revenues.  According to the 2011 annual report, Starbucks earned record annual revenues that year.  Operating income was up, costs fell, and earnings per share jumped.

Not only that, but at least 100 companies have also supported the Washington State bill, including such heavyweights as Google, Nike and Microsoft. No hint of an economic plunge in any of those companies either.

Maybe God is their customer.

Here are some other thoughts for the good pastor to sip on:

Gay people have been around since humanity began.  How is that possible?  They don’t have children.  That’s the most important aspect of being gay.  They avoid the opposite sex.  Nevertheless, somewhere from 8 to 11 percent of all children are gay.

That means they are born that way.  There’s no other choice.  It’s not like a sizable chunk of the population decided to choose a lifestyle that earns them only abuse and ridicule from people like the pastor and his minions.  Besides, scientists – another segment of the population despised by the conservative wing of the Christian faith – have already demonstrated factors in the brain that affect sexual choice.

Next question:  Where do children come from?  In Pastor Andrew’s belief, from God.  In that case, God must be sending down lots of gay babies.

Of course, Pastor Andrew and his coreligionists firmly believe every child has the right to live and are anti-abortion.  Or is that only for straight babies?  How can anyone tell?  Shouldn’t women having abortions be thanked since, on average, about one in about 10 fetuses that are aborted are gay?

Actually, Pastor Andrew isn’t doing anything unusual.  He’s evoking God to support his own views.  That’s a common trait of a lot of religious leaders who confuse their ideas with God’s.  Not having any logical arguments, they turn to God as their trump card.

That’s what happened around the time of Jesus, for example.  Jews desperate to end Roman rule decided God would have to act, since their puny arms didn’t have the ability to overcome Roman might.  God wasn’t much help then either – Jews lost three successive wars against the Romans, saw the Temple destroyed and Jerusalem razed, and they were banned from the city for centuries.

Nothing so drastic is likely to happen now.  God has many positive traits, but His best one is patience.  He patiently sat through something has horrible as the Holocaust.  He’s very like to watch meaningless humans huff and puff over a law that simply gives equal rights to a neglected segment of society.

Maybe He’ll ponder what to do over a cup of coffee.

Long- time religious historian and author Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers. 







Christian pastor is asking customers to boycott Starbucks due to the company's support of a bill to legalize gay marriage in Washington state, King 5 News reports.
The call for the boycott was released Tuesday, a day prior to the bill's passage in Washington's State Senate Wednesday night, according to Reuters.
USA Ministries is also asking for Christians to stop serving the brand at their church facilities and events.
The Seattle-based coffee chain joined more than 100 other firms in backing the same-sex marriage bill.
Half Moon Bay Patch notes.
If the bill passes in the state house of representatives next week, Washington will become the seventh U.S. state to recognize same-sex unions.

Religious Clothing Encounters Ignorance

In Maryland, a teenager wearing a Jewish skullcap (called a yarmulke or kippah) was told by his principal to get proof that he’s Jewish and entitled to wear one or face suspension.

The young man, who was born in Israel, was offended.  So were his parents.  His mother had knitted the kippah for him.  The father said, “I feel singled out in a discriminatory manner. I honestly feel that because he was white and Jewish, he was singled out.”

Actually, the probable reason is ignorance.

The vast majority of Americans know something about their own religion and virtually nothing about anyone else’s.  Most are Christian, a belief that claims to be the only true faith.  That’s not an unusual boast: Islam says the same thing.  On the other hand, the vast majority of Americans are Christian.  Many have never met a Jew or a Muslim in person.

They couldn’t possible know that a kippah was developed in ancient times and has been the accepted norm in Jewish dress for more than two millennia.  In this case, that was clarified by a local rabbi, Rabbi Shlomo Buxbaum, who told the principal, “The kippah demonstrates a sense of pride in who we are and a modesty in humbling one’s self before God.” 

In fact, head coverings go back thousands of years with multiple purposes.  The psalmist wrote about having his head “covered in the day of battle.”  (Psalm 140:7) Jeremiah, who lived in the 6^th century B.C.E., said plowmen “covered their heads in shame” when there was no rain (14:4) 

They probably are unaware that a kippah is also worn by the pope.  It's just given a different name:  zucchetto.

Religious teachings also buttress the Muslim niqab, the face veil worn by Islamic women.  The dictum comes from the Muslim holy book, the Koran, which essentially calls for women to be modest.  That has led to the widely accepted requirement that Muslim women are not permitted to show any bodily hair to men whom they are not related to.

Lack of understanding led to the French law banning such veils, also called a burqa.  President Nicolas Sarkozy got the French legislature to approve the law on the basis that it would “increase security and would liberate Muslim women from the oppression of their veil.”

The fact that many Muslim women may choose to wear such clothing had no bearing in that thinking.

In Western ideas, women should want to be unrestrained in their dress.  In Middle Eastern culture, however, that’s not true.  As one French Islamic woman noted:  “It is not up to the government to meddle in my private life and my beliefs.”

Good luck getting any officials to listen.  When any religion predominates, government early proscribes private decisions in the mistaken effort to create a homogenized society. In the U.S., that means it conforms to Christian ideals – whatever they are.  With so many Christian sects, no one actually agrees on anything.

So, zealous figures poke their noses into private bedrooms and any place else that defies their sense of probity.

They would might be less intrusive if they had some sort of religious education background.  Instead, zealots have forced public schools to shy away from teaching about religion.  That has been reserved for parochial schools that continue to isolate members from the realities of alternative faiths.

Even today, some Catholics refuse to enter a Protestant church for fear of some kind of contamination.  The reverse is probably true, too, considering the kind of heated rhetoric spewed about some politician’s religious views.  That was in plain view during the 2008 presidential campaign when the rival Obama and McCain camps attacked each  other over their respective choices of chaplain.

These days,  a debate rages over when Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is really Christian.  Who cares?  Only people who somehow think his religious views will somehow dictate his actions.  Those are the same ones who decried John Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith and insisted the pope would dictate to the president. 

A little religious education would go a long way to resolving that absurdity.

By the way, religious fanatics might consult their own book regarding head coverings.  According to the New Testament, “If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off; and if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut or shaved off, she should cover her head.” (1 Corinthians 11:16)

Then, of course, they would have to stop harassing people of other faiths who are merely doing the same thing.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.

Wrong Way to Use the Bible

There are lots of uses for the Bible.  It makes a great doorstop.  It fits nicely in a bookcase.  The Gideons know it’s perfect for a hotel desk.  In a pinch, you can open it and read stories about people who are integral to our culture.  You might even get a moral lesson or two.  With 66 books, the Bible is a massive storehouse of ancient ideas and culture.

It just isn’t very good for negotiating teacher salaries.

Naturally, that’s what one politician is trying to use it for.  Alabama state Senator Shadrack McGill reportedly told a group of people at a prayer meeting in the Heart of Dixie that increasing teacher pay goes against "a biblical principle."  His reasoning (if that’s the word) is that God calls teachers, and higher pay might attract people who didn’t hear God whisper in their ear.

"If you double a teacher's pay scale, you'll attract people who aren't called to teach ... and these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em,” he is quoted as saying.

Odd, I started teaching when I was 4 years old.  My younger brother wanted to learn how to read, so I showed him.  No one actually said a word to me, not even my parents.  No one has since.  I have always been a writer, but found teaching was a great way to earn extra income or to get a paycheck when writing was in the doldrums.   

No “still small voice” has ever said a word to me, unless I count my brother’s request.  I doubt he saw himself as God’s messenger.

Of course, McGill’s comments are hardly new for a Bible Belt politician.  After all, they were the same folks who used the Bible to endorse racism and slavery before the Civil War.  They are descendants of the ilk who 60 years attacked women’s rights with quotes extracted from various biblical pages.  And, today, they now use the Bible to attack gays.

What a versatile book.

It even has some comments about knowledge and education, something McGill probably knows by heart.  For example, in Psalm 78:5, we are told that God “decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children.”  

Proverbs encourages education:  “Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding. (3:13)   Students are encouraged to learn:  “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding. “(Proverbs 4:7) “Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise.” (Proverbs 19:20) 

The book of Daniel notes that “To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning.” (1:17) That should mean something to McGill, whose first name is the same as one of the four friends God endowed with knowledge.

 

To get that knowledge, children need teachers to help guide them through the bewildering amount of information that inundates us regularly.  Those teachers need to be paid a decent amount of money, so they can afford to educate the next generation.

Alas, the Bible does not say a word about how much teachers should be paid.  However, it should be noted that that the Bible doesn’t even hint at how much a state senator should take home either.

In this case, I would suggest McGill is definitely overpaid – unless, of course, he was “called” to be a politician.  I doubt even McGill could pin that one on God.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.

The Bible Vise

As noted in a previous essay, during one of my Stetson University continuing education classes in religious history, an elderly male student in the front row simply got up and walked out.  Later, I asked him what the problem was.  He was angry because I said Christianity was founded 2,000 years ago.  He cited the Gospel Book of John, which starts: “In the beginning, there was the Word.”  The student insisted that meant Jesus existed before all time.

I didn’t argue with him. What was the point?  However, I did note that while Jesus may have lived before the world began, but he only manifested himself in a particular time and place.

The student’s reaction may have been a bit strident, but hardly unusual.  In 15 years of teaching these classes, I’ve discovered that many participants freely quote the Bible to support their arguments regardless of known facts or contrary information.  They believe what they read; any historical and/or scientific research is simply ignored or rejected.

I only wish the people who founded the Catholic Church were around to argue with them.  They recognized that the biblical texts reflected the faith of the authors, not the facts.  Besides, the final version was not codified until the end of the fourth century C.E., although the Gospels were originally written from 70 to 110 C.E.  That left plenty of time for revising.  Over those decades, editors made hundreds of thousands of changes in the texts, a process historian Paul Johnson called “pious editing.”  If a later reader thought an earlier author missed something, he simply added it.  As beliefs mutated -- or evolved to use a term abhorred by Bible zealots – a sacred account was changed to reflect the new tenet. 

The examples are endless.  To note one: the book of Matthew, which contains Jesus’ family tree, was changed after the book was written:  Joseph is no longer Jesus’ father; the words “who was thought to be the father” were wedged in after Joseph’s name to reflect a later belief in a virgin birth. 

Actually, the sacred writings were often seen as allegories to help guide readers, rather than lessons in history.  St. Augustine stressed that point in his writings.  Protestant leader Martin Luther was no different: he rejected the Epistle of James as a work of “straw.”  In doing so, these enlightened religious leaders were following in the footsteps of Jewish sages who did not hesitate to analyze and reinterpret their sacred scriptures to match changing mores and ideas.  They had no choice: the Bible contains at least three versions of the 10 Commandments, not to mention two distinct and contradictory stories of creation, Noah’s flood, renaming of Jacob to Israel, rise of David and so on.  Such diversity forced interpretations and allowed room for new understandings and appreciation of the texts.

 

After all, the Bible does not mention dinosaurs.  Does that mean they didn’t exist?  There’s no mention of the telephone or computer.  How are they to be viewed for proper Sabbath observance?  Not locked into the text as written, Jewish leaders have found the answers they need.

Because the texts had to be interpreted rather than blindly followed, the Catholic Church restricted access to the Bible throughout the Middle Ages to avoid misunderstandings.  That worked until the 1500s when Luther launched the Protestant Reformation.  A monk, he discovered that the Church had developed some of its tenets, such as several sacraments and papal authority, without biblical endorsement.  He recommended a return to the Bible as a guide.

His leadership launched the move toward biblical inerrancy, which is a hallmark of modern times.  Successive Protestant leaders urged stricter reading of the texts and faithful obedience to every single word until many modern Protestant sects base all of their thinking on the Bible, an approach that would have appalled the founders of Christianity.

After all, there are two, contradictory Christmas stories in the Bible, multiple versions of when Jesus said, how he was perceived by the population and more.  Protestants straitjacketed into one reading are forced to combine stories – the magi join with shepherds, for example, in Christmas, even though they actually appear in separate, irreconcilable accounts of Jesus’ birth -- or ignore those stories which defy such simple solutions.   The Catholic Church has no problem conceding that the texts are not historically accurate and provides interpretations to be accepted on faith. However, rigid Protestant sects cannot be so flexible.  Their parishioners rely on strict readings to buttress their religion.  Any evidence that undercuts the statements in Scripture also cracks that bedrock belief.

I saw that reality firsthand, too.  Another student, a Rev. Brown who was an active Protestant minister, argued with me daily in class several years ago.  On the last day, however, he stood and announced to the other students that everything I had told them reflected the latest research in religious history.  He said he had studied the subject to eliminate the mythological aspects and to strength his belief.  I asked him whether he had shared his new knowledge with his parishioners.

“Oh, no,” he gasped.  “They come to church for faith, not history.”

Such faith may move mountains, but has no power against a single, tiny historical and/or scientific fact.  Walking away from the truth with the Bible in hand only takes a believer in the wrong direction.

Bill Lazarus has been research and writing about religious history for decades. You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.

 

Knowledge Would Temper Religious Fanaticism

In Afghanistan, what must be a complete moron reportedly strangled his wife for giving birth to a third girl instead of a boy.  The moron’s mother helped him.  The husband fled when police came.  The mother was arrested.  Her explanation: the wife committed suicide over guilt.

The husband and mother should do the same over stupidity.  Women do not determine the gender of a baby.  Men do.  The wife had three daughters because of her husband.

Why didn’t the husband know that?  Because his version of his religion teaches that women are responsible.


While the tragedy is limited to one person in this case, this is hardly the first time religion has generated dreadful consequences. Anyone who has studied history knows about the various religious wars during the centuries, the people burned at the stake because they dared to believe something different than the ordained faith and so on. The battles continue today, such as between Sunni and Shiite sects in Iraq.

People just don’t know about their religion and accept blindly whatever they are told, regardless of the consequences.

I see it regularly on a much smaller basis in my religious history classes.  I’ve been studying religious history since I was a kid and teaching the subject for some 30 years.  I am appalled regularly by the abject ignorance by my students in what should be a very important subject.

They profess a belief.  They read the holy books.  They talk about their faith.  And they know nothing about it.

I had one student who walked out of class because I didn’t say the Bible was written by God.  It may have been divinely inspired, but there’s no question man put stylus to parchment.  The many missing words, strange phrases, puns (in Hebrew), and the multiple conflicting ideas and faulty attempts at history clearly indicate that.

Another man left angrily because I said Christianity was about 2,000 years old.  He said Christ lived for all time.  I told him that may be true, but he only manifest himself two millennia ago.  That didn’t appease him.

The reality is that all of our religions today grew out of existing faiths and were affected by the events of their time. For example: Hinduism is the last of the ancient pagan faiths with the multiple gods that once populated everyone’s household.  Judaism is the last of the ancient Middle Eastern faiths whose gods interfered in daily life.  Christianity is an amalgam of Judaism and Greek paganism. Mormonism is a combination of Christianity and ideas circulating through upstate New York at the time.  Some religions – Buddhism and Zoroastrianism come to mind – only endured because some would-be military leader needed a new religious banner to fight under.

Religions influenced each other.  Buddha wanted to purify Hinduism.  His followers generated a new religion. Jesus wanted to rid Judaism of what he considered onerous elements.  His followers instead created a vastly different belief. Muhammad wanted to bring monotheism to his pagan countrymen.  He saw himself as the new Paul.  His followers saw him as the last prophet from God.

That’s how the system works.

We know that because records still exist, particularly for more recent faiths like Christian Science, Latter Day Saints and Scientology.  However, there are plenty of documents that help historians piece together the origins of religions like Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism.  For older faiths, like Judaism and Hinduism, historians can only speculate and rely on archaeology.

None of that means the faiths in any of the religions are misplaced.  No one can “prove” any belief is wrong, no matter how absurd it sounds to someone else.  I don’t believe my late uncle has been reborn as a cow, but I can’t prove he isn’t.  All historians can do is show how such a faith developed. 

That’s’ enough to demonstrate that all religions have been created by man in a desperate effort to understand what is not understandable. They are avenues to reach the divine.  There is no one avenue.  There is no one truth.  The existence of so many flourishing faiths is evidence of that.

If believers would start accepting the facts and stop insisting they alone own the secrets, then morons in any country will stop trying to impose religious tenets as facts.  Maybe we’ll have fewer inane murders and more peace.

We don’t have to follow John Lennon’s advice in “Imagine:” 

“Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace….”

 We just have to learn a lot more about why we believe what we believe.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.