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   Scientific American's Bad Religion Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins takes the hard sell approach to promoting science to skeptics (that is, the faithful): Religion is bad science, he says, just plain wrong and rather stupid. Physicist Lewis Krauss goes for the soft sell: "Teaching is seduction," he purrs, with believers in mind. But lost in Scientific American's lengthy conversation between the two are the soft sciences that study religion. Krauss and Dawkins speak of "religion" as if the nature of the beast were a settled affair; but their colleagues in anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and other disciplines know that Religion with a capital R, an entity prone to the admonitions of Science with a capital S, is a mythical creature. Which makes the Krauss/Dawkins debate an excercise in bad faith.  The Sacred Secrets of Saddam's Super Secret WMDs Why do people still believe Saddam had WMDs? Because Jesus tells them so. Well, not Jesus, but his modern disciples. Rod Parsley, a rising star of charismatic fundamentalism who's had a heavy impact on national politics, features on his "Breakthrough" program tonight Dr. Perry Stone, an apocalypse scholar who claims top national security sources and Israelis assure him that inspectors discovered enough WMDs in Saddam's bunkers before the war to destroy the world three times over. Why didn't he? Because he wanted to give them to his mortal enemy of Iran, using special airplanes -- with the seats torn out to make room for more nukes! It'd be easy to dismiss this kookiness as just that were it not for Parsley's flock -- they're ordinary Ohioans. His megachurch is one of the most racially-integrated in the country. His followers aren't classic fundamentalists, but in large part people who might have been liberals once -- before Pastor Parsley delivered them the news. Fundamentalism's Colonial Drag Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce makes her Newsweek.com debut with an account of "The Other Jamestown Party," an ultra-right Christian celebration of the colony's 400th anniversary: Fifteen miles from Williamsburg, Va., in Charles City County, on a country road dominated by plantations turned bed-and-breakfasts, 4,000 ultra-conservative, largely home-schooling Christians gathered to correct a month-old mistake: to do Jamestown right. The women wore hoop skirts, bustles, bonnets and mob hats. The men wore tricorn, feathered "Musketeer" or top hats; they carried swords. "Maidens," that is, girls, wore aprons, while "heroes"—boys—donned armor or coonskin caps.It should come as no surprise that I'm a fan of this story by my friend and sometimes collaborator. It's funny, scary, fascinating, and weirdly empathetic -- the perfect combination for journalism about the far right, especially the far right in colonial drag. But what should challenge the assumptions of both Christian conspiracy theorists -- those who think "the culture" is out to get them -- and lefty media nihilists -- who think mainstream media is always a total wash -- is the way Kathryn's story is both fair and revealing.The event's organizers get their say and then some -- there can be no complaining that this is a hit piece. At the same time, "their say" gives readers all the information they need to understand the ideological position of a group that considers those who don't share their faith "Infidels and Savages." A lesser writer would have been content to mock or to shriek theocracy -- but Kathryn tells the story calmly, neither relegating the event to the fringe nor declaring it a sign of the democratic end times. I have only one criticism -- how could she have missed Chuck Norris? Read event organizer Doug Phillips' blog. Visit Doug Phillips' Vision Forum store to outfit your son as a Christian warrior. My two cents on Vision Forum and the fundamentalist historical imagination.
--Jeff Sharlet
[ Continue reading: ]  Reporters, Report Reporters, report: The Fall/Winter 2006 edition of Christian Leader, a publication of Pat Robertson's Regent University, declares that 30 % of new school teachers nationwide receive their licenses through an "alternative route to licensure," according to the National Center for... [ Continue reading: ]  Goldilocks Colson The man sometimes referred to as the Christian Right's "movement intellectual" -- Watergate felon Chuck Colson -- tested out a new meme for a pre-convention meeting of Southern Baptist leaders last night. Part one is the invocation of a familiar enemy for the Christian Right, "Islamofascism." But Colson's upping the ante: "Islam is a vicious, evil," he started to say, before remembering to qualify Islam with "fascism." When Franklin Graham called Islam evil several years ago, even most Christian Right leaders denounced him; will anybody notice when Colson, a more influential figure, declares a third of the world Christendom's enemy? There's more: Christian Right speakers used to pair "Islamofascism" as the threat abroad with "the homosexual agenda" as the threat within. Now, according to Colson, it's Islam and... "a virulent strain of atheism." To review: Islamofascists believe too much, and therefore must be eliminated; atheists don't believe enough, and therefore must be eliminated; but Chuck Colson believes just the right amount, and therefore gets his porridge.  Sacred Spaces, Unholy Real Estate Two stories from opposite sides of the globe point to the problem of turning sacred spaces into holy real estate. In Tennessee, a Methodist pastor rejects a proposed Bible theme park as an encroachment on his congregation's view of God's creation (as shaped by a few hundred years of farming). In Australia, the Anangu people are suing the nation's telecom giant Telstra for turning their sacred space -- the rock formation known as Uluru, Australia's most famous landmark -- into virtual real estate on Second Life. At issue in the Tennessee is the physicalization of scripture, making the Bible stories of believers' imagination into plastic displays subject to the weather. At issue in Australia is the virtualization of the physical, making the mysteries of place, ritual, tradition, and belief into so many digital 1s and 0s. [ Continue reading: ] Creationism in Canada Homegrown anxieties for Canada's secular media By Alexandra Boutros
Canada is getting its first Creation Science Museum in the small town of Big Valley, Alberta. The Big Valley Creation Science Museum opens its doors to the general public this week, offering displays of fossils, DNA strands and, the big draw, dinosaurs. These displays are meant to validate a literal interpretation of the Bible that posits the earth was created in 6 days 6000 years ago. When the inevitable media interest followed, a friend emailed me with the subject line, “Creationism is coming to Canada.” But while creationism garners much attention in the U.S., creation science has also been visible in Canada for some time—chapters of a loose association being found in each province, including French-Canadian Quebec
—and has been making headlines since the late 1990s...
[ Continue reading: ]  Faith Forum Farce Sharlet: I'll be discussing last Monday's CNN/Sojourner faith forum for the top 3 Dem. contenders on the "Your Call" weekly media roundtable, KALW 91.7 FM, San Francisco, 10-11 am Pacific Time, Friday, June 8. Webcast here. Preview of my comments: What's YOUR biggest sin, Soledad? A Biologist's Book of Revelation "Munir Virani is a biologist, the name of his field spawning from the Greek root word for life. And yet he and many others in his field have become the equivalent of hospice workers..." Revealer alumnus Meera Subramanian writes about the slow, sad apocalypse of biolgists who are "monitoring to extinction."  Jim Webb's Never-Ending War Sharlet: From my latest story in Rolling Stone: "As night settles between the two mountain ridges that rise on either side of Lebanon, Virginia, a rough little strip of a town in the state’s southwestern corner, Senator Jim Webb’s people assemble in the Russell County Courthouse... [ Continue reading: ]  The Mother of All Atheist Bestsellers Britannica Blog, published by the Encyclopedia Britannica, speculates on the mother of all atheist bestsellers... The Da Vince Code! It's a provocative thesis, but we're not sure it holds up. The average Da Vinci fan didn't think of the book as an attack on religion, but as a thriller. Those who considered its "philosophy" at all would find it more in line with new age spirituality than atheism. But maybe there is a connection there -- how many Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens fans are really atheists, as opposed to "spiritual but not religious"? How many read their books not out of antagonism toward all religion, but toward particular manifestations -- militant Islam (Harris and Hitchens) or fundamentalist Christianity (Harris and Dawkins)?  Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams That's just one of the strangely ambivalent bits of wisdom in display in Doree Shafrir's illustrated essay on the history of church marquees. The Abstinence Gluttons Here's a news story for the "timeless" file, the sort of hardboiled investigative reporting on an overlooked corner of government that the press doesn't do enough of: "Following the money swirling around [Bush donor Raymond] Ruddy," writes Michael Reynolds in The Nation, offers an eye-opening glimpse into the squalor at the heart of the abstinence-only project... [ Continue reading: ] Daniel in the Dino’s Den Why it would be a sin not to include dinosaurs in illustrated children’s Bibles. By John D. Spalding [ Continue reading: ] God Squads Face Off! Sharlet: On NPR's "On the Media," I join the show's Brooke Gladstone and "Media Matter"'s Paul Waldmanto discuss his new study for the liberal media watchdog organization in which he argues that the news media inflates the importance of religious conservatives and ignores the strengths of religious progressives. It's a valuable study for the data it collects about the talking heads who talk the most, and its premise -- that the media's characterization of the right as religious and the left as secular is misleading -- is sound, but I can't follow Waldman further than his diagnosis. My problem? "Media Matters"' prescription, which seems to be to match the Right's talking heads with talking heads from a mythical land known as the "center." [ Continue reading: ] |