Dreamer Easy

An impressive call for tolerance and interfaith dialogue from a Christian religious leader in Dayton, Ohio. I want to quote two bits of it here:

"America is not a 'Christian nation.' It is but one family in the 'world house.' During the time of the Apostle Paul, the Christians of Rome did not live in a Christian society, either. He wrote to them in Romans 12:18, 'Live in peace with all if possible, to the extent that it depends on you.'"

"To live together in lasting peace, tolerance is not enough. Respecting others does not mean "leaving them alone." It means taking an active interest in them."

Some cheering news from World Youth Day: Australian Muslims offer prayers for WYD. Quoth Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Ikebal Patel: "I take this opportunity on behalf of the Muslims of Australia to also extend our good wishes to all Australians of all faiths on this auspicious occasion of World Youth Day and pray for peace, harmony and goodwill among all Australians and peoples all over the world. We also take this occasion as Australian Muslims to welcome His Holiness Pope Benedict as well as all other pilgrims to Australia." It's not just words; an Islamic school is hosting hundreds of Catholic visitors.

ETA: The kids have been asked to leave home their iPods and mobile phones and stuff. (How sweet is this guy? Hee hee hee hee hee.)

Rational Atheism: An open letter to Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens from the September Scientific American

Two great entries from HarrangeMan:

Firstly, he went to a lecture by an expert on suicide bombings. The take-home message: suicide bombers are motivated by politics, not religion.

Secondly, he offers an amusing solution for Muslims living in the West who are constantly called on to denounce terrorism.

A SMH opinion piece questions the PM's faux feminism when it comes to "respecting women". (It's clear that Australian Muslims have been chosen as the government's scapegoat in the leadup to the next election.)

A relative - whom I love, but who is perhaps not the world's leading critical thinker - passed on an unpleasant chain email comparing the number of Jewish Nobel winners to the number of Muslim Nobel winners. Apparently this proves something about Israel, but I know not what; only 33 of 758 Nobel winners have been women. What comes to mind when I think of Muslim culture are the same things that come to mind when I think of Jewish culture: learning, artistry, civilisation. (I confess I think Islam has the edge when it comes to food. :-)

As a retaliatory mitzvah, I plan to read one of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's novels - the library has several.

ETA: I just found out that Mahfouz passed away just yesterday. That is weird.

We're caught between the terrorists on the one hand, and our own governments on the other. A column in The Guardian about the raids brought home to me the danger we face from the latter.

( Read more... )

Something I should have made clear in yesterday's posting about brights, and which a couple of commenters have reminded me about, is that the bright movement isn't representative of atheists et al. Many have reacted negatively. The Skeptic Society's email newsletter solicited responses from readers which were overwhelmingly against the term - a copy of their report is archived here. Chris Mooney of CSICOP described how the movement backfired.

OTOH, it is a movement: The Bright's Net, a non-profit organisation, claims a potential twenty-nine million members, although they're not forthcoming about the actual number of brights who've registered with them. (They claim over 3800 responded to a recent poll of members.) Nor has the movement been marginalised by the non-religious community: the Web site BrightRights.org describes itself as "a project of the American Humanist Society".

Found a ripping 2003 Guardian article on religious scientists. And here's a pointer to the Science and Religion Forum it mentions.

New Scientist recently (8 October 2005) ran a series of articles about Fundamentalist* religious belief. The articles were courteous about those beliefs and their adherents (and one piece discussed scientists' tendency to overestimate their omniscience), while still strongly challenging moves from some Fundamentalist quarters to get rid of science. I want to summarise a few key points here.

Three crucial things to know and my suggestions:

- Studies find few differences between Fundamentalists and the rest of us. They are no less sane, smart, sincere, and happy than the average person. Many of them hold comparatively "liberal" political views. Treat them with basic courtesy.

- Fundamentalist theology is not accepted by mainstream religions. Don't equate "religion" or "Christianity" with Fundamentalism or Creationism.

- There is a well-organised, well-funded political Fundamentalist movement, trying to have Intelligent Design taught as science and climate change dismissed as "superstition", with the ultimate goal of replacing science with "faith-based reasoning". Religion should be respected and taught - but not in science classrooms.

( In more detail )

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* A note on terms: some folks prefer to be called evangelical Christians, Bible-believing Christians etc. (There may be Islamic equivalents of which I'm ignorant.) I mean no offence by using the catch-all term "Fundamentalist".

Recently, the County of Los Angeles changed its Seal. ACLU had protested that the inclusion of a Cross on the Seal violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, but the County agreed to remove the cross. (They replaced it with a church, which IMHO rather misses the point.)

Then someone spotted that the Seal also contained a prominent image of the ancient Roman goddess Pomona, patroness of gardens and fruit trees. At first, officials couldn't take the complaints about Pomona's presence seriously, but they agreed to remove her as well. Not only were certain Christians claiming this as persecution of their downtrodden faith ("Didn't Pagan Romans feed Christians to lions? Is that why the ACLU of Southern California wants her to stay on the seal?" spluttered one commentator*), but even some Pagans were miffed at the implication that we don't count.

Now, when the goddess was incorporated into the design in the late fifties, there probably wasn't a single Pomona worshipper on the planet; she was a wholly abstract symbol, like Lady Liberty. With the rapid growth of Neo-Paganism in recent decades, however, there could well be a few thousand followers of Pomona in the US. One group, the Numinists, have adopted Pomona and her consort Vertumnus as their patrons, and there are Neo-Pagans attempting to reconstruct the religion of ancient Rome. Plus there's the gallimaufry and ferment of individual Pagan beliefs, in which (to pick an example entirely at random) Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Celtic deities may find themselves cheek by jowl. (Of course, most Pagans don't worship Pomona and have probably never heard of Her)

It's no use protesting that Pomona is merely a historical symbol, as this is also one of the arguments for keeping the cross on the Seal. In fact, a lawsuit claiming that the removal of the cross showed hostility to Christians failed because the plaintiff also argued the cross on the Seal was not a religious symbol.

So the County made the right decision in taking poor old Pomona off the seal. (She's been replaced by a Native American lady who reminds me unavoidably of Land O' Lakes margarine.) But it seems slightly unbalanced to equate a deity with a handful of followers in world terms with one who has about two billion adherents. The solution? Create more Pomona worshippers! It's the only way make this tempest in a teacup worth all the trouble. As deities go, you could hardly find a more inoffensive one.

But through Her involvement in this imboglio, Pomona has taken on fresh meaning. She is no longer just a demure numen of avocadoes. She is now the Goddess of the Separation of Church and State. She is now the Goddess of the Peaceful Co-Existence of Faiths. She calls for people of different religions to make each other welcome, to speak and listen to each other with respect. She calls for respectful dialogue between believers and non-believers. She calls for an end to the misuse of the tools of the state, including education and the law, to force others to conform to any religious worldview. In fact, in her new incarnation, She would be the first to require the removal of Her likeness from a government symbol. She represents the way of the future - a secular state in which religions flourish in friendship.

Spread the word.

(To really mess things up, of course, what someone needs to do is to start worshipping Pearlette the cow.)

Feel free to repost this message, unedited, to any appropriate forum.
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I shall do more research on Pomona and her historical worship and present it here. In the meantime, some further reading:

The County of LA Seal

The California State Seal. Heh heh heh. >:-)

The Faith-Based Perspective for a Non-Sectarian Seal, by two Rev.s from All Saints Church, Pasadena

A little article about Pomona from the strikingly named Fruit Explorers of North America

Vertumnus and Pomona from Bullfinch's Mythology

Vertumnus woos Pomona from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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* He further warned, "The Republican Party has been moving ever leftward". Others remarked: "What we have here is an American version of the Taliban," and "Don't speak of paganism as a dead religion. It is simply a tolerated religion, unlike Christianity."