30 replies to this topic

[advancedatheist]

Something for christians to consider:

I can prove that religious behavior isn't normal. You may have seen on the news a few weeks back some Shia Muslims in Iraq slashing themselves with swords as they lamented the "martyrdom" of the prophet Muhammad's second cousin (or some such relative) Husain, whom they consider a kind of Islamic saint.

Did this behavior seem "normal" to you?

If the worship behavior in someone else's religion strikes you as weird or creepy, what basis do you have for claiming that your worship behavior is any more sensible? From my perspective, "praying" is just as absurd as slashing yourself with a sword. Secular Humanism efficiently dispenses with such foolishness.

[AdamLink]

I agree, it is silly to continue such pactices that led to no value. That form of morning for the dead is very old, and we should focus our attention on the living. Think about it.

Edited by AdamLink, 26 May 2003 - 04:19 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

Aside from ritual rites we should look at a few of the practical aspects of prayer too.

1. It is a form of (oral/mental) repetition that reinforces specific learned behaviors and attitudes; like reciting a formula or poem over and over to memorize it. Such incantations function as both suggestion and mental exercise.

2. It is a practiced and reinforced period of focused mental reserve (conscious thought) by ritualized contemplation. By the way this appears to be another universal human characteristic regardless of cultural bias: The "be quiet and let me think" moment for complex problem solving and the search for intuitive awareness.

3. Psycho-physical synchronicity. Here I refer to a heightened trance or meditative state that is also a Universalized experience for humans but IS supportable by MRI scans of cerebral activity as occurring along with other metabolic responses and an associated release of neurotransmitters and changes to the immune function for our bodies. But this "process" can also be subverted to drive a murderer into "frenzied state" prior to the execution of a crime, or conversely a common soldier prior to a battle that provides the individual ability to face the highest forms of stress possible and go beyond any self conceived limits.

This state may in fact have significant importance BOTH psychologically and physiologically to strengthen an individuals "resolve & conviction" mentally while also subtly reinforcing the body's immune system and develop an "energy well" (reserve) from which many a person draws from while performing acts involving profound stress that are survival threatening. It is the process of achieving a personal "balance".

The first two are like basic education and the third is the result of a higher education but I am fascinated that like the "smile" and a few other word's like "ma" (mother) & denial (na) the practice is one that is celebrated by monks in Tibet, to the Eskimo, from the most ancient examples imaginable, to the manipulators of the rapture effect in modern cults, even in the lure of some psychotropic drug usage like psilocybin, mescaline and LSD.

4. A fourth aspect became apparent in a discussion Omnido and I were having separately about overlapping issues. The third stage is also psychologically important in the purely cognitive process of “introspection.” This is a critical thinking aspect both for problem solving, self evaluation, and transformation (growth & adaptation). This reasoning process is at the very core of memetic influence over evolution and an application of the Natural Selection for intelligence and reason over mere physical ability.

While it is easy to find the petty and pedantic practices of this or that group spurious and trite, there is none the less something important going on that is reflected beyond the simple ritual candle lightings against the darkness of death, something that coalesces hope into reality and is very much about what it is to be human.

Edited by Lazarus Long, 27 May 2003 - 12:48 AM.

[Mind]

The practical aspects/benefits of prayer/meditation can be achieved without believing in myths. Therein lies the problem. It is likely religious people get a physical and mental benfit out of their beliefs and actions (prayers), but those same beliefs can cause a world of hurt to the people around them.

I do not care if people want to pray and meditate, as long as their beliefs do not cause harm to me (ie. suicide bombers, those who oppose all medical research...etc)

[Lazarus Long]

This Op-Ed piece from today's post blackout NY Times caught my attention. Yes, it is from Kristof and so what? It is disturbingly funny, more so in that it is true and may shed a bit of light on why so many around the world squint when they look at people from the United States; like they are trying to clarify a double image.

I would love to hear your take Bruce on the wonderful sideshow that is developing in the Alabama State Supreme Court system over this little gem of a ruling. That Thou Shalt not take the Word of the Federal Supreme Court in vain. Should we expect another Waco? Or treat this as just another wacko dressed in black robes on a hot summer day?

Ala. AG Won't Help Judge in Federal Fight
http://story.news.ya...en_commandments


http://www.nytimes.c...ion/15KRIS.html
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Believe It, or Not
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Today marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

So this day is an opportunity to look at perhaps the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith. Religion remains central to American life, and is getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view. (For details on the polls cited in this column, go to www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds.)

The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth actually rose five points in the latest poll.

My grandfather was fairly typical of his generation: A devout and active Presbyterian elder, he nonetheless believed firmly in evolution and regarded the Virgin Birth as a pious legend. Those kinds of mainline Christians are vanishing, replaced by evangelicals. Since 1960, the number of Pentecostalists has increased fourfold, while the number of Episcopalians has dropped almost in half.

The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.

Some liberals wear T-shirts declaring, "So Many Right-Wing Christians . . . So Few Lions." On the other side, there are attitudes like those on a Web site, dutyisours.com/gwbush.htm, explaining the 2000 election this way:

"God defeated armies of Philistines and others with confusion. Dimpled and hanging chads may also be because of God's intervention on those who were voting incorrectly. Why is GW Bush our president? It was God's choice."

The Virgin Mary is an interesting prism through which to examine America's emphasis on faith because most Biblical scholars regard the evidence for the Virgin Birth, and for Mary's assumption into Heaven (which was proclaimed as Catholic dogma only in 1950), as so shaky that it pretty much has to be a leap of faith. As the Catholic theologian Hans Küng puts it in "On Being a Christian," the Virgin Birth is a "collection of largely uncertain, mutually contradictory, strongly legendary" narratives, an echo of virgin birth myths that were widespread in many parts of the ancient world.

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Yale historian and theologian, says in his book "Mary Through the Centuries" that the earliest references to Mary (like Mark's gospel, the first to be written, or Paul's letter to the Galatians) don't mention anything unusual about the conception of Jesus. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke do say Mary was a virgin, but internal evidence suggests that that part of Luke, in particular, may have been added later by someone else (it is written, for example, in a different kind of Greek than the rest of that gospel).

Yet despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars, America is so pious that not only do 91 percent of Christians say they believe in the Virgin Birth, but so do an astonishing 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians.

I'm not denigrating anyone's beliefs. And I don't pretend to know why America is so much more infused with religious faith than the rest of the world. But I do think that we're in the middle of another religious Great Awakening, and that while this may bring spiritual comfort to many, it will also mean a growing polarization within our society.

But mostly, I'm troubled by the way the great intellectual traditions of Catholic and Protestant churches alike are withering, leaving the scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic. I worry partly because of the time I've spent with self-satisfied and unquestioning mullahs and imams, for the Islamic world is in crisis today in large part because of a similar drift away from a rich intellectual tradition and toward the mystical. The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the brain.

**************

I would add this little footnote. The "heart" as the author refers to it is a fiction and not an organ, though what he is describing is also a part of the brain and therein lies the problem. This argument is like discussing the difference in men between using the "big head" and the "little head." For humans of all gender persuasions the issue is one of utilizing the entire mind and not just our wishful thinking.

LL/kxs

[DJS]

Stats like these boggle my mind...

believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral.

Maybe it's because I live in the Northeastern United States. Maybe it's because your friends are a reflection of you. Maybe it's because I have a hard time conceptualizing beliefs that are so far outside of my way of thinking. I don't know. But what I do know is that stats like these boggle my mind. And quite frankly, depress me. What a crazy world we live in.

Edited by DonSpanton, 24 January 2004 - 04:57 AM.

[Bruce Klein]

Yes, I also felt this way earlier. Yet, I rarely feel such thoughts now because somehow my mind has wrapped it up onto a larger context. I'm starting to see humans, myself included, (for only a short time, hopefully) as for the most part reactionary and conditioned balls of biochemistry. Bundles of complexity with software that's mostly fried by short circuit programming. Ah, well I’m mixing bio and mecha here.. but the imagery is relevant.

I see all of us designed by evolution to see the world *not* as it really is.. but as what is most advantageous to our DNA. We see a pretty girl and that's much more attractive than an objectivist rational though process. We hear a good story about a guy being nailed to a cross, and that's much more interesting than talking about a potential Singularity.

Thankfully, I see most of us here are as extreme outliers on the bell curve. Not only in terms of raw intellect, but more importantly in a world views without parallel. Brilliant!

[advancedatheist]

Stats like these boggle my mind...

believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).

Why do people who believe in virgin births also tend to advocate sexual abstinence as a form of birth control?

[advancedatheist]

We hear a good story about a guy being nailed to a cross, and that's much more interesting than talking about a potential Singularity.

I've never understood the appeal of Jesus. He's like some way-overhyped celebrity I have no interest in learning about and watching. It's like the way I felt about Elvis Presley, who died in 1977 but still has an enormous, vulgar and obnoxious following.

Indeed, if it weren't for all the cultural brainwashing about Jesus' alleged importance, would people spontaneously express interest in his personality and adventures? Harry Potter's celebrity among children has arisen spontaneously and unplanned, and often to the exasperation of the kids' parents. Children seem much more willing to learn about Harry than Jesus, even though Harry is explicitly make-believe.

[John Doe]

Religious behavior is quite normal and probably adaptive.

Thankfully, I see most of us here are as extreme outliers on the bell curve. Not only in terms of raw intellect, but more importantly in a world views without parallel. Brilliant!

I do not disagree but perhaps we could be more modest?

I've never understood the appeal of Jesus.

I never understood the appeal of Jesus or the symbolic cross until I learned of the human death wish. Jesus was a virgin suicide. He did not resist his execution and asked for the will of his father to be done. He died a painful death. Christianity appeals to those who are suicidal and hate this life. Their hatred of this world is confirmed by their belief is an imaginary Heaven.

[Bruce Klein]

Modesty, yes of course. An intelligent man should know not to wear his peacock's tail out in public least to have his feathers plucked by a football player. Likewise, an intelligent woman need not boldly aspire to greatness, least she be labeled a bitch by the world.

It's an interesting group dynamic phenomenon. Highly social primates, like humans, have within their brains, highly developed social mapping models which are extremely sensitivity to any perceived selfish behavior. Declarations about one's self importance can be devastating because it will agitate this sensitivity in other humans.

I resolve to do less of it, but what the hell, it feels so good! I'm addicted to spouting off self-importance proclamations because my brain loves the release of chemicals.

This all really comes back to humans trying to impress their peers. Our urge to compete and win is also a powerful motivating factor. A check of Keith Henson's Sex, Drugs, and Cults: An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects, is instructive here.

[AgentNyder]

Modesty, yes of course.  An intelligent man should know not to wear his peacock's tail out in public least to have his feathers plucked by a football player.  Likewise, an intelligent woman need not boldly aspire to greatness, least she be labeled a bitch by the world.

It's an interesting group dynamic phenomenon.  Highly social primates, like humans, have within their brains, highly developed social mapping models which are extremely sensitivity to any perceived selfish behavior.  Declarations about one's self importance can be devastating because it will agitate this sensitivity in other humans.

I resolve to do less of it, but what the hell, it feels so good!  I'm addicted to spouting off self-importance proclamations because my brain loves the release of chemicals.

Interesting how I see a self-reflection in your statements. In fact I see it a lot on this forum, maybe that's why I (or we) go here. I (or we) are practicing a form of verificationism of our own beliefs. Anyway.. [sfty]

Declarations of self-importance may be somewhat of a problem for me. You see, I just get too enthusiastic and can't help myself. I get so wrapped up in my ideas and knowledge that perhaps, I tend to alienate other people. So withdrawing from presiding over other people with my idiosyncratic belief systems seemed to be the best option. The only thing is, that means that you (or I) [huh] has to keep it all to themselves....

NOW - people who believe in religion. They may be construed as delusional, yet religion can have a worthwhile purpose in the future for some people.

What I tell people who believe in God, though, is this: God, like leprechauns, cannot be proved or disproved. Science on the other hand, can be disproved (to an extent). For example, the earth was once believed to be flat - yet this was disproved and created a paradigm shift.

On the other hand, the concept God has remained much the same for many centuries. There is no evolution with this paradigm. No evidence has been brought to light to disprove the existence of God - because this would be impossible. If you wanted to disprove the existence of leprechauns, you would have to search everywhere on earth and underground (leprechauns live under ground according to legend - don't they?). That is impossible, yet even if you could - that is still not evidence that they do not exist.

Yet unlike leprechauns, religion is a philosophy. It has it's place, for those who wish to follow 'positive values'. Unfortunately we live in parliamentary democracies, and these religious beliefs will effect us all until the system is irrevocably changed. [":)]

[Lazarus Long]

John Doe says:
Religious behavior is quite normal and probably adaptive.

There is a difference qualitatively between common, and normal. True, normal can mean ordinary but that does not predicate healthy, sane, or even "common sensible". "Normal" is another of our dual use words that people love to engage in confusing debate. Now you may point a finger at me and I must admit in this case "I am guilty as charged". )

So "listen" to me (another very treacherous dual use word) the majority is by no means always right. They (we actually) are like a giant computer and can be manipulated through GIGO as if a machine and this is what the documentation of political reasoning is all about from the pre-Socratics through and past Machiavelli to (ahem) Kissinger.

Controlling information, as well as primary resources are two of the principle methods of exerting and maintaining social control. Religion isn't just the opiate of the masses (we should be so lucky) religion is the meta-conscious web that functions interactively with our evolutionary psychology to form the practical linkage, or at least one of the strands, of the "tangible" web of culture.

I have never found most religious icons very appealing so I am no one to judge, but I do find it interesting today to notice that I can tell a lot about individuals by what icons they claim to admire. I try to always take the time to get them to be specific about their version (sect) of thought in this respect to distinguish the nature of their personal love/hate balance and never to respond with an automatic attitude of revulsion or offense lest I trigger a confrontation. But I do not ignore threatening behavior either; far from it but I insist on picking my own battles and I am long past trying to disabuse fools adrift from sinking ships of their salvation rings.

To those castaways like myself that do hear, hearken well the Sun; for knowledge and determination along with cooperation will make our best opportunity to reach the nearest shore. It is by action, not passive acceptance that we stand our best chance of survival. Still never forget that chance is a fickle lover and even the most passive retain a small measure of hope.

[DJS]

Controlling information, as well as primary resources are two of the principle methods of exerting and maintaining social control.  Religion isn't just the opiate of the masses (we should be so lucky) religion is the meta-conscious web that functions interactively with our evolutionary psychology to form the practical linkage, or at least one of the strands, of the "tangible" web of culture.

I agree.

I have never found most religious icons very appealing so I am no one to judge

Why? How are people like us created? I can only speak for myself, but I never bought it, not for one minute. I think that religion is one of those mind infections that never goes away, once you have it you are always susceptible to it. Why do some people find religion so appealing, while others brush it off as...nonsense?

I am long past trying to disabuse fools adrift from sinking ships of their salvation rings.

Me too. But isn't this a problem? I mean, we can try to avoid confrontation because of the futility of it (people of deep religious conviction do not change their minds), but isn't our world view in direct conflict/competition with that of the theist majority? What are we going to do, try to sneak our world view past them? Some how I don't think they are that stupid.

I would like to know the real numbers for religious persuasions. I've read articles that say some people consider themselves Christians even though they don't believe in God. And you know what, I have tried to find these numbers, they're just not out there. I guess its hard to make quantitative measurements of something as subjective as faith. Nonetheless, I can't believe that more than 30% of the United States is what I would term "crazy Christians". If their numbers were more than 30% the US wouldn't have progressed as far as it has already, and more specifically Roe-v-Wade would not still be standing.

I think, and this is my opinion, that maybe the reason 83% say they believe in the virgin birth of Jesus is because they don't want to be social pariahs. There is a great deal of social pressure to be "normal". Second, how could this figure be as high as 83%. Isn't at least 10% of the country non-religious? Plus add in Jews, Muslims, Hindi, and all of the other minor religions. That has to total up to more than 17%! But hey, maybe I'm wrong.

[Cyto]

Well you can read the entire article or just read the bolds and chuckle along. Oh, and this reinforces that even a board of people can 'not so quite understand evolution so good.'

Worland to allow evolution teaching

WORLAND, Wyo. (AP) - School board members want theories other than evolution - such as creationism - taught in science classes and only sexual abstinence - not how to use contraceptives - taught in health classes.

The board voted this week to present the policy changes to the district's Policy Committee for consideration. More than 100 people attended the meeting.

The recommendation for sex education reads: "It shall be the policy of Washakie County School District No. 1, when teaching sex education, the curriculum shall be based on abstinence only."

Also endorsed was a recommendation for teaching biology: "It shall be the policy ... when teaching Darwin's theory of evolution that it is only a theory and not a fact. Teachers shall be allowed in a neutral and objective manner to introduce all scientific theories of origin, and the students may be allowed to discuss all aspects of controversy surrounding the lack of scientific evidence in support of the theory of evolution."

Board member Tom Ball, who opened the discussion on the proposed changes, said he thought the evolution recommendation should use the word "required," rather than "allowed."

Several people addressed the board, including Pastor Bud Surles who said "evolution is more a product of Hollywood movies than based on real science." He also said the district should teach that "sex is safe only in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship" and that abstinence until marriage should be the message delivered by the district.

Another pastor, Mike Brush, quoted scholars whom he said "understand the misconception of evolution" and are more inclined to accept the "intelligent shaping of matter."

"Intelligent design is not religious-based. I would not want you to teach religion in any way, shape or form," he said.

Worland High School health instructor Dawn Bellis, who told the board that she teaches the "controversial part" of sex education, said she was disappointed that no one on the board contacted her, health instructor Jackie Pike or Principal Hal Johnson to find out what was being taught before going about changing policy.

"It seems backward to change a curriculum and policy without knowing what is being taught," she said.

"Sexuality is a three-week portion of my semester's class. Children cannot make decisions without being informed and that includes knowing the consequences of their decisions."

She said her class ultimately is "totally based on abstinence."

High school student Charity Ward told the board she took one of Bellis' classes. She urged the board not to teach "abstinence-only," saying she found it helpful to learn about sexually transmitted diseases and other potential consequences of having sex.

"Without that information I probably would have made bad choices," she said.

Kitsy Barnes, head of the high school science department, said Wyoming teachers are mandated by the state to teach the state science standards.

"Science teachers are prohibited from teaching creationism due to the Supreme Court ruling Edwards v. Aquillard, which states that teaching creation science is a religious idea and thus an illegal violation of the church-state separation.

"Science is a way of understanding the world, not a mountain of facts. Before anyone can truly understand scientific information, they must know how science works. Science does not prove anything absolutely - all scientific ideas are open to revision in the light of new evidence. The process of science, therefore, involves making educated guesses - hypotheses - that are then rigorously tested."

School district attorney Bill Shelledly cautioned the board that every time they write a new policy, it is like putting up another lightning rod that can get hit. He held up a blue binder containing the board's policies and said, "I don't want one more page put in this policy book."

Pointing to the crowd, he said, "This is only part of the community. You are elected to represent the entire community."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yea, its funny.

[DJS]

Actually, religous behavior is quite normal in the sense that it is prevalent. Most human beings the world over are religious beings. Hence, the human condition is normally a religious one. We are the abnormal ones. Fortunately, as I am learning of late, the popularity of an idea/ world view does not increase the chances of its validity.

To describe religion as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contempuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to "organized religion". My first response it that I am not exactly friendly towards disorganized religion either. As a lover of truth, I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence: fairies, unicorns, werewolves, any of the inifinite set of conceivable and unfalsifiable beliefs epitomized by Bertrand Russell's hypothetical china tea pot orboting the Sun. The reason religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's tea pot, religion is powerful, influencial, tax exempt and systematically passed down to children too young to defend themselves.

Richard Dawkins
A Devil's Chaplain

How many here, in their heart of hearts, feels the same way??

But even if this is how you feel, you must remember to remain vigiliant in speaking against religion itself, not the people who are religious. It is not their fault. Their minds have been developed by evolution to favor super natural concepts.

I have recently finished reading Religion Explained which was recommended by Dawkins as a book which took off where he left off regarding religion as infectuous mind viruses, or memes. I have recently begun to explore the implications of evolutionary psychology, and I must say... it makes a lot of sense to me. Religion is simply a biproduct of how our brains work. One of the main points of Religion Explained was that religious concepts gain much or their appeal from counter intuitive violation of ontological catagories.

Rather, our brains compartmentalize mental representations into different catagories without any conscious thought. A deer goes into your animal file and has certain inherent characteristics that all animals have (they sexually reproduce more deer, they eat, they react to external stimuli, they die, etc. You would be very surprised if a deer came up to you and started singing.

Humans, although they enjoy a completely separate catagory from animals also get stored using a generic "person" template. This template, designed to help the human brain more easily understand the world around it, also assumes certain characteristics about the object in question. Example, if you a saw a guy on the street barking like a dog, surely there would be a better chance of remembering that man in the future than the chance of you remember a normal man walking down the street not barking.

My examples are probably flawed and I should look to the book to provide better examples. However, the point remains.
It seems that the violation makes the object in question more memorable. Appyling this to religion, it is not surprising to find that virtually every religion has counter intuitive violations. A virgin birth violates our human template for the biological proccess of reproduction. How about a human being that possess no physical body ( a very common super natural concept)? Once again, this is a counter intuitive violation.

I also liked 1) Boyer's description of supernatural agents with full access to strategic information. This would obviously have an effect on their significance in a person's life and make them more likely to be remembered. 2) The book is also helpful in explaining why man tends to anthropomorphize abstract concepts.

At first I became rather down trodden when I began to think of religion as a bi product of our evolutionary psychology. How can rationality win over mysticism when our minds aren't built for it? After a while however, my doom and gloom gave way to hope.

Maybe the answer lies in us.

Kissinger

[darktr00per]

Religion is a primitive form of law first of all. Secondly, its one of the most smartest forms of law back in the day. You abide or you perish to an eternal damning. Who can question what you cannot see? With religion also comes control of the invisible. Man has always seeked to have a sense of control. When you are faced with something you cannot control your mind as well as body goes through many self destructive patterns. Just my thoughts on religion.

[Cyto]

Now why would I put this in here? Mmmm.

NEW PLAN: KILL ENDANGERED SPECIES TO SAVE THEM

Brought to you by: The Bush Administration

Lets allow hunters, circuses, and pet industries to kill, capture and import organisms on the brink of extinction.

Their "american reasoning" is that this would allow the US to have all the creatures it wants. Also it would allow "poor nations to pay for conservation of the remaining species." Of course the US doesn't need to do this because we have money so we are exempt.

That is insane. The money will not go to preserving species, it will go to fat-cats who can rustle up the creatures. You can't trust the other countries, which have enough problems already, to actually abide by such a flaky promise. Last thing we need is to bring an organism that has no known predator in the US, to the US.

Why do I put this here? Its no secret that the Bush Admin is religious Xains who are hot dog popping simplistic screw-ups of modern society. On top of the proposed SUV tax-cut for being a gas hoarder.

Let the specicide begin.

Edited by CarboniX, 14 October 2003 - 03:25 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

This article is so important that I am going to post it in its entirety because in two weeks the link will go dead and I think that the issues contained within are too important to our analysis of religious behavior to be allowed to forget.

In fact I am going to post a second article from the same issue of the NY Times that contrasts the religious experience in First World Nations and by doing so contrast not only the two but I suggest the reader should add a read of a third article on the debate going on inside the Anglican Church over homosexuality that threatens to divide this group as the Reformation divided Catholicism.

http://www.nytimes.c.../14CHUR.html?hp

THE CHANGING CHURCH
Where Faith Grows, Fired by Pentecostalism
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and LARRY ROHTER
Published: October 14, 2003

ON THE LAGOS-IBADAN EXPRESSWAY, Nigeria — For many, this highway leads to the future of the Christian faith, and at 9 o'clock on a Friday night, traffic is heavier than a Los Angeles rush hour.

Hundreds of thousands of Nigerians, from street vendors to computer consultants, sit through the exhaust and the squealing horns to reach evangelical campgrounds with churches as large as airplane hangars. The names are as spectacular as the hopes they sell: Mountain of Fire and Miracles, Deeper Life, and the largest and oldest, the 12,000-acre Redemption Camp.

The worshipers are drawn by a program of rousing song and dance and by an eminently practical gospel promising health and prosperity. They come seeking quick fortunes or protection against mundane maladies, from hunger to arthritis to armed robbers. They shout hallelujahs until close to daybreak, when the highway, famous for accidents and bandits, is safe to make the crawl back to Lagos.

Here nobody, it seems, can afford not to pray.

"In countries where everything is very O.K., where they take care of their citizenry, people are very lethargic when it comes to religion and God," said Oluwayemisi Ojuolape, 27, a lawyer in Lagos, who attended this all-night vigil, called Holy Ghost Service. "They are not encouraged to ask for any help. They seem to have all of it."

Not so in the developing world, where Christianity is drawing followers as never before.

That growth is changing the complexion and practice of the Christian faith and other religions in a fervid competition for souls, generating new tremors in places like Nigeria, which are already marbled with ethnic and political fault lines, and causing schisms between the old Christians of the north and the newer ones of the south. It is also beginning to be felt in the political life of these countries.

The new Christian expansion is particularly striking in Pentecostalism, a denomination born only about 100 years ago among blacks, whites and Hispanics in an abandoned church in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a direct line to God, its boisterous, unmediated style of worship employs healings, speaking in tongues and casting out demons.

Spreading Pentecostal congregations — a quarter of all Christians worldwide — are bumping up against established Christian churches and Islam in Africa, and chipping away at what has long been a virtual Roman Catholic monopoly in Latin America.

In Brazil, where the national identity has been intertwined with Catholicism since the Portuguese landed 500 years ago, the emotional services at thousands of Pentecostal churches amount to a religious revolution in the world's largest Catholic country.

In the 25 years of John Paul II's papacy, Brazil's Protestant population has quadrupled, with the biggest surge coming in the 1990's among evangelical and Pentecostal groups. More than 25 million Brazilians belong to such churches, leaving pastors like Ezequiel Teixeira of the New Life Project Church in Rio de Janeiro so giddy that he predicts, "In another 25 years, Brazil will have a Protestant majority."

By some estimates, more than a third of Guatemala's population is now Protestant, and Pentecostal churches are making significant inroads in Argentina, Colombia and Chile, where Catholics account for 70 percent of the population.

Across the tropics and the south, Christian worship, especially Pentecostalism, has captured hearts and minds in countries where the precariousness of ordinary living — blackouts, robbery, disease, corruption — makes rich and poor alike turn to divine intervention.

"It allows for spiritual or divine agency, so that God has the power to fix and heal and also to protect you," said Lamin Sanneh, a professor at Yale Divinity School who specializes in West Africa. "You might fall into a ditch, or you might be in a car accident, roads such as they are. You are always in present danger. Pentecostalism speaks that language very well."

In Africa, a big part of the success of Pentecostal movements, scholars say, rests on the ability to tap into traditional cosmology, in which gods have long been solicited in pursuit of specific, worldly favors.

"God has become a modern-day juju God," said Chichi Aniagolu, a Nigerian sociologist and a Catholic who, by her own admission, dips into Pentecostal services. "You appease him. You bring him yams, goats, make sacrifices, and you get what you want. Today, you're not making sacrifices. You're giving tithes."

Churches have become formidable economic empires. Most troubling to critics is the enrichment of enterprising preachers, who say their fine cars and expensive suits can convince others of what God's grace can provide. Critics accuse them of duping the poor and doing little to ease poverty or repair endemic corruption.

Yet their appeal has been seemingly irresistible. Worship today is a far cry from the rituals once imposed by European missionaries. Services are conducted in Swahili and Igbo. Most of all, services can be much livelier than their European antecedents.

"I was in Rome the other day and I found the way they celebrate the Eucharist a bit boring," said Bishop Anthony Ireri Mukobo, of the Archdiocese of Nairobi.

A Gospel of Success

From the stage at the Redemption Camp outside Lagos on a recent evening came a gospel of success.

"There will be no more sickness," sang Pastor Enoch A. Adeboye, the general overseer of the vast empire known as the Redeemed Church of Christ.

"Yes, Lord, I believe," the worshipers, more than 100,000 of them, sang back.

"There will be no more failure," the pastor sang.

"Yes, Lord, I believe," answered the crowd. "Yes, Lord."

Like other proponents of prosperity theology, the pastor likes to remind his congregation that God multiplies what the faithful give to the church. "If you don't sow, you don't reap," he says.

"I have heard God speak," the pastor went on, "and I can tell you, I have heard the sound of abundance."

Abundance certainly has come to the Redeemed Church. There are no fewer than 5,000 parishes worldwide, about 4,000 of them in Nigeria, Mr. Adeboye said.

A former mathematics professor close to the Nigerian president, Mr. Adeboye could only estimate the total membership at around two million. Asked about church revenues, he demurred, saying only, "By the grace of God, we are able to take care of our ministers."

There are some 40,000 of them. The church has built a school and a health clinic at Redemption Camp. A university is under construction.

The congregants are by no means all in need. Emmanuel Dania, a tall, fit, British-educated computer consultant, rolled into the V.I.P. parking area of Redemption Camp in an air-conditioned white Toyota pickup truck, then high-fived a friend who had arrived in his own chauffeur-driven BMW. A beggar was quickly turned away.

Mr. Dania regularly worships at an affiliated church in a stylish section of Lagos, where he has found a network of like-minded, upwardly mobile young Nigerians. Some months ago, Mr. Dania said, he had bid on a project with the Central Bank of Nigeria. The official in charge of the contract was a member of the same church.

"He said he was so happy he was dealing with a man of God," Mr. Dania recalled. "You can actually do business in the church. You don't have to go anywhere else. There's a lot of prosperity in the church."

Many traditional Christian theologians, particularly Catholics, dismiss the message that faith will bring wealth and success.

"They're preaching Cross-less Christianity," said the Rev. Iheanyi Enwerem, of the Catholic Secretariat in Lagos. "The idea of everything joy-joy, prosperity-prosperity, well-well. In life, there are certain things we can't have because God doesn't want it. For them, everything is Easter joy, no Good Friday. We say it's totally un-Christian."

But for the poor, the very presence of the rich in the same sanctuary serves as a powerful lesson, much like the testimonials that those who say they were miraculously healed deliver: If God answered their prayers, maybe he will answer mine.

Iwalola Adebusoye, 40, sells rice at a Lagos market. At Redemption Camp, she stood from her seat, closed her eyes, put her hands on her hips and spat her prayers in rapid-fire Yoruba, as though shouting at a no-good deceiving husband.

Uneducated herself, she said she had put three children through school on her earnings selling rice. She was now praying for an opportunity to expand her trade, maybe sell eggs. "To move forward," she said in halting English. "No helper," she said of her predicament. "Only God. And Jesus."

A Fervent Response to Rigidity

Such predicaments are also widespread in Brazil. Like many Brazilian Pentecostals, Manoel Ferreira was born in the poverty-stricken interior into what he calls "a fervently Catholic family," but converted after migrating to a large city, São Paulo.

While being trained to join the state police in the early 1950's, Mr. Ferreira was accidentally shot by a fellow cadet. The wound became infected, he remembers, and he feared he was going to die.

"In those days, only Roman Catholic chaplains were allowed into hospitals," he recalled during an interview in a working-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. "But a male nurse who was an evangelical preached clandestinely to me, and as soon as I was released I made my way to the Assembly of God, and never left."

Today, the denomination that Pastor Ferreira heads as bishop of the Assembly of God is the largest of its kind in Brazil, with 8.8 million members, according to the Brazilian census of 2000, and more than 100,000 churches.

Founded in 1910 by missionaries from Chicago, the Assembly of God in Brazil now sends missionaries abroad and has spawned dozens of other denominations with colorful names like Church of Christ's Spit.

These Pentecostal churches have made a special effort to appeal to women, who often complain of being limited to a supporting role in the Catholic church. The Pentecostal movement, in contrast, encourages them to be more than wives and mothers: deaconesses, missionaries, even pastors.

"I thought that it was my destiny to suffer, because I had been taught as a Catholic to accept the fate God had for me," said Josefa Barros de Sousa, who migrated from Paraíba, a poor northern state, to Rio de Janeiro to work as a nanny. "No one recognized me or my suffering, until I got here and learned that I could talk to God myself and didn't need a priest or saints to do that for me."

Pentecostal churches have been quick to exploit the potential of television with innovative programing, like that of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Brazil's fastest-growing denomination.

Begun in a funeral parlor in Rio de Janeiro in 1977, the church has grown from 200,000 members at the start of the 1990's to more than two million today. It owns a leading television network and substantial real estate holdings, and has worked to elect 22 of its members to Congress.

Belatedly, the Catholic Church is responding with a movement that has come to be known as Charismatic Renewal, borrowing Pentecostal thunder, including speaking in tongues.

Services that incorporate rock-style hymns and intense devotion to the Virgin Mary have made the Rev. Marcelo Rossi, 36, of São Paulo, a pop star who sells millions of CD's. In October he is starring in a movie in which he plays Archangel Gabriel.

But the Pentecostal movement continues to grow. Besides Catholicism, it aggressively challenges Brazil's traditional animist cults like candomblé, macumba and umbanda, which have many of the same African roots as Caribbean voodoo and santería and are practiced by millions of Brazilians who consider themselves Catholics.

Yet part of what draws followers may be a certain stylistic resemblance: the trance-like state of Pentecostalists speaking in tongues resembles that of macumba adherents when they are "receiving a saint."

The chief appeal, however, appears to lie in preachers who offer rural newcomers advice on adjusting to blighted, violent urban neighborhoods, and a gospel of self-esteem, a message of empowerment.

"Don't let anybody tell you that you are nothing," Silvio Pereira, a 30-year-old Assembly of God preacher, told worshipers at a small church on the outskirts of Salvador da Bahia, in northern Brazil. "Raise your head high because God wants to use you. You are dynamite in the hands of God."

Bringing Change to All Creeds

The expanded Christian following in the developing world has translated into increasing power, both within developing countries and within mainstream denominations.

As church attendance has withered in Europe, senior Vatican officials and Roman Catholic leaders recognize and look to the developing world as fertile ground for conversions and growth, a place where the faith takes firmer root than it does in Europe or North America these days. Indeed, the successor to Pope John Paul could be a Latin American or African cardinal.

The growing assertion of the Christian south is provoking fierce doctrinal arguments, too, often over their preference for literal readings of the Bible and a conservative view on social issues. The Anglican Communion meets in October in London in an attempt to heal an unprecedented rift over homosexuality, a charge led by the head of the Church of Nigeria, which, with 18 million congregants, is the largest member of the Anglican Communion.

Tensions extend to the political sphere. The proliferation of Islamic law in northern Nigeria, which has set off rioting that has killed hundreds, is widely seen as the Muslim elite's response to Nigeria's new, hard-line Christianity.

Throughout Africa, the rivalry between Christianity and Islam, from Sudan to Ivory Coast, is growing.

In Nigeria, a nation of 130 million that accounts for one-fifth of Africa's population, the rivalry is so intense that it has been impossible for the government even to conduct a census to know the numbers of each group.

Christian missionaries have been dispatched to open schools and parishes in northern Muslim strongholds. Church leaders have spoken out loudly against the re-introduction of Islamic law into several state penal codes. Rioting has divided cities where Muslim and Christian neighbors once lived side by side.

In the view of critics, the flourishing of Christianity has only added to Nigeria's poverty and corruption.

"The movement is clearly reflective of everything that's wrong with Nigeria," said Nosa Igiebor, the outspoken editor of Tell, a weekly newsmagazine. "Poor people are forced to pay these tithes, and by doing so, every problem they take to the pastor will be solved. The pastors know it won't be. Just the same way our political leaders deceive people, by making promises they have no intention to keep."

Under the rule of President Olesegun Obasanjo, himself a born-again Christian, church sermons are broadcast all weekend long on state-run television. So too is the presidential chaplain's Sunday service from the presidential villa in the capital, Abuja.

In response to Muslim complaints, the television also broadcasts clips from Friday Prayers at the National Mosque in Abuja.

The Christian resurgence has led a group of young urban Muslim professionals to create a Pentecostal-style movement of their own. On Sunday mornings in a downtown Lagos parking lot, men and women sit in separate tents. Volunteers collect prayer requests, just as at Redeemed Church.

On a recent Sunday, the requests themselves were remarkably similar, too. One man wanted the congregation to pray for his visa interview at the United States Embassy that coming Thursday. A young woman wanted blessings for her university entrance exam.

"If you have belief, if you have courage that it is Allah that grants everyone's desire, then within a short time of coming here, your prayer will be answered," said Oriyomi Musbau Hussein, 31, the civil servant who asked the congregation to pray for his visa application.

The group calls itself the Nasrul-Lahi-Il-Fathi Society of Nigeria, or Nasfat. What began eight years ago at a banker's house today boasts 80 branches in Nigeria and 3 in the United States and Britain.

Koranic prayer books are translated into English, as well as the main Nigerian tongues. These Muslims do not sit and listen to an imam preach in a language they do not understand.

Nasfat's efforts are in direct response to what its leaders see as the encroachment of the new churches. "Now you see young folks deflecting to Christendom," said Saminu Oki, an American-educated official of Lagos State, who serves on the group's executive committee.

"They've been able to attract the young ones," he said of the Christian churches, who have received Muslim converts. "They made it so simple. You don't even have to read the Koran. They poisoned them. If you read verses of the Bible, all your problems will be solved."

Nasfat has purchased 100 acres of land on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway as well, where the group intends to build a retreat and a university, not unlike Redemption Camp.

"We are pace-setting," Mr. Oki said. "We don't want to do it the old way."

Chart: Faith and Commitment

Graphic: A Christian Worldview

Audio Slide Show: Changing Chuch

Slide Show: The Changing Church

[Lazarus Long]

Here is the view from the First World and the contrast is one that should be seen as important and it will overtake numerous socioeconomic issues that surround not only the direction of emerging technology but concerns of International Law and the growing clash of cultures that is driving the human race to a dangerous precipice with respect to issues of war and peace.

BTW, after reading this articel some of you may find yourself asking a question that is flippantly asked by serious sociologists and anthropologists: Is the united States really a First World Nation or is it just a rich, poweful and technologically advanced Third world Nation?

What is becoming impossible to misconstrue is that the United States is in the midst of major identity crisis.

http://www.nytimes.c.../13CHUR.html?hp
THE CHANGING CHURCH
Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: October 13, 2003

ROME, Oct. 12 — Like many Italians in decades and childhoods past, Giampaolo Servadio used to go to Roman Catholic Mass every week. He even served as an altar boy.

But last Sunday morning, as church bells tolled around this city of storied cathedrals, he followed a different ritual: he went running. It struck him as a more relevant use of time.

"The church seems really out of step," said Mr. Servadio, 39, mentioning issues like birth control and questioning the very utility of prayer. "I don't see how something like a confession and a few repetitions of the `Hail Mary' are going to solve any problems."

He wondered if he should call himself Catholic: "When you realize that for 20 years you don't do this — you don't even go to church — what kind of Catholic are you?"

A fairly typical one, at least in Italy and much of Europe, where the ties of Christianity no longer bind the way they once did — and often seem not to bind at all.

This week Pope John Paul II is to celebrate his 25th anniversary as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, which is both Europe's and Christianity's largest denomination.
It has been a quarter century of enormous changes, and few have been more significant, for his church and mainstream Protestant denominations, than the withering of the Christian faith in Europe and the shift in its center of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere.

Christianity has boomed in the developing world, competing successfully with Islam, deepening its influence and possibly finding its future there. But Europe already seems more and more like a series of tourist-trod monuments to Christianity's past. Hardly a month goes by when the pope does not publicly bemoan that fact, beseeching Europeans to rediscover the faith.

Their estrangement has deep implications, including the prospect of schisms in intercontinental churches and political frictions within and between countries.

The secularization of Europe, according to some political analysts, is one of the forces pushing it apart from the United States, where religion plays a potent role in politics and society, shaping many Americans' views of the world. Americans are widely regarded as more comfortable with notions of good and evil, right and wrong, than Europeans, who often see such views as reckless.

In France, which is predominantly Catholic but emphatically secular, about one in 20 people attends a religious service every week, compared with about one in three in the United States.

"What's interesting isn't that there are fewer people in church," said the Rev. Jean François Bordarier of Lille, in northern France, "but that there are any at all."

Debates Over Gays and God

While France is an extreme case, its drift from Christian institutions and disparity with the United States hold true throughout much of Europe, where faithful attendance at Christian services, be they Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the province of a small minority of people.

They show up to mark crucial milestones in their and their loved ones' lives. But they pay minimal heed, between those visits, to their churches' exhortations and admonitions.

The tension between contemporary attitudes and traditional church teachings has forced an emergency meeting this week of the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

They are expected to debate the acceptability of openly gay bishops in their church. Representatives from congregations in the developing world have threatened to break the church in two if their Western peers head in a permissive direction.

The preamble of a new, unfinished constitution for the European Union omits any mention of Christianity or even God among the cultural forces that shaped Europe, although the pope and other Christian leaders raised vehement objections.

"My own view is that there is a form of secular intolerance in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious intolerance was in the past," said John Bruton, a former Irish prime minister who was involved in the drafting of the document. He lobbied for God's inclusion.

Mr. Bruton's vantage point is Western Europe, but many Eastern European countries — with a few exceptions, like the pope's native Poland — are no more demonstrably devout. Having gone through religious outbursts after their emergence from Communism, they too seem poised to pivot in a secular direction.

Christianity's greatest hope in Europe may in fact be immigrants from the developing world, who in many cases learned the religion from European missionaries, adapted it to their own needs and tastes, then toted it back to the Continent.

In cities like Paris, Amsterdam and especially London, there are many thriving independent black churches, packed with newcomers from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other African countries.

A recent report by Christian Research, a British group, determined that blacks and, to a lesser extent, Asians represent more than half the churchgoers in central London on a given Sunday, though they represent less than a quarter of the area's population.

By some estimates, more than 25 million people in England identify the Church of England as their denomination. Only 1.2 million actually go to one of the church's services every week.

Other Protestant denominations are in the same shape.

"In Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails," wrote the Rev. David Cornick, the general secretary of the United Reformed Church in Britain, in the June-July edition of Inside Out, a religious journal. "The fact is that Europe is no longer Christian."

Believing vs. Attending

That is something of an overstatement. Despite a recent influx of Muslim immigrants and the rise of mosques in countries like Britain, France and Germany, an overwhelming majority of Europeans who profess religious devotion consider themselves Christian. But for most, Christianity has evolved into an amorphous spiritual inclination rather than an exacting creed.

Stéphanie Vercamer, a 31-year-old florist in Lille, wears a gold cross around her neck and said it saved her from injury in a car crash several years ago. "There is a God," Ms. Vercamer said. "I wouldn't be here today if there wasn't."

But she said that she almost never sets foot in a church and that while she wanted to arrange a Roman Catholic baptism for her daughter, who was born out wedlock, she had not been able to yet. The little girl is 3 years old.

At the Saint Sacrement church in Lille, attendance at Mass often drops below 50 but rose above 125 on a recent weekend. The Rev. Émile Reyns, a priest there, gladly reported that he had recently done prenuptial counseling for six couples: proof, he said, that young adults still wanted Catholic weddings.

But he sadly conceded that all the couples had been living together for a while.

"They say it without blushing," said Father Reyns, 66, who added that he did not expect to see the couples much once they moved on to their honeymoons. At Saint Sacrement, like many other congregations, the regulars tend to be much older.

"In terms of religion, Europe is very complicated," said the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, the author of "Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium," which was published this year.

Sizable majorities of people in most European countries believe in God, and sizable majorities believe as well that some kind of religious service is important when a person dies, according to the European Values Study, a sweeping survey conducted in 1999 and 2000 and published this summer.

But they are less familiar with, or tethered to, the specific rituals and roots of Christian worship. "If you ask the average European the basic credo or statements of the Christian church, most of them don't know," said Grace Davie, a sociologist at the University of Exeter and the author of several books about religious trends in Britain and Europe.

That assessment is supported by the caretakers of the faith themselves.

Last month Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, the archbishop of Milan, said at a news conference, "The parishes tell me that there are children who don't know how to make the sign of the cross."

"At the elementary schools, they don't know who Jesus is," added the cardinal, who is widely considered to be a strong candidate for the papacy.

According to the European Values Study, only about 21 percent of all Europeans said religion was "very important" to them. Although the methodology was not precisely comparable, a Gallup Poll this year showed that 58 percent of Americans defined religion that way.

Even in Italy, where 33 percent of respondents described religion as "very important," the percentage of Italians who go to church every week is as low as 15 and no higher than 33, according to various polls.

Most Italians seem not to listen to the Vatican, even though about 85 percent identify themselves as Roman Catholic and the pope resides smack in the middle of their country.

John Paul has exhorted them to be fruitful and multiply, forbidding artificial birth control. But Italians have had one of the world's lowest fertility rates for a quarter century now.

In a 1981 referendum, Italians defied an aggressive campaign by John Paul and other Roman Catholic leaders and voted by a margin of two to one in favor of legal abortion. Abortion is now readily available and commonplace in most European countries, as it is in the United States.

Europeans are moving well ahead of Americans — and more aggressively challenging traditional Christian teachings — by providing civil recognition for same-sex couples. Despite stern opposition from the Vatican, the French, Belgian, Dutch and German governments have granted same-sex couples legal entitlements and protections, and Britain is considering it, too.

But the diminished sway of Christianity is evident in more than low fertility rates and bold new legislation.

Public schools throughout Western Europe have removed crosses from walls. Many congregations have been forced to close or combine operations, to make do with part-time ministers or to import pastors from the developing world.

On this continent, ministry has lost much of its luster.

"In Western Europe," said Archbishop Giuseppe Pittau, the secretary of the Vatican congregation in charge of seminaries, "it's been almost a tragedy. A diocese that once had 10 priests ordained every year might have two, or one, or less."

The desperation is evident. In September, when a group of Catholics in a rural town near Rome heard that the local monastery would be closed and the monk would be sent away, they kept him there for several days by bricking up and barricading the entrances.

Urban Stresses, Wider Choices

There are many suggested reasons for Europe's drift, which happened gradually, over decades, as the continent grew wealthier and better educated.

One is a modern European cynicism about big institutions, grand ideologies and unfettered allegiances, manifest not only in partly empty churches but also in weakened support for labor unions and political parties.

"It's an overarching thing, a diminishing trust," said Rüdiger Noll, director of the Brussels-based Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches, an interdenominational group.

The process of urbanization moved Europeans from quiet places where the church was at the center of life to chaotic bazaars where it got lost in the din.

The Rev. Enzo Bianchi, a Catholic theologian in Italy, said that in today's heterogeneous and often hedonistic European capitals, "there are more and more morals and ethics on the market."

"There's Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spiritualism, consumerism," Father Bianchi said. "With all these competitors, it's harder for the church to sell."

But in the United States, to name one country, many of the same dynamics have not prompted a similarly pronounced estrangement. Some experts say that in Europe, suspicion of major denominations may run higher because religious leaders directly wielded political power in the past. Others say the unchallenged supremacy of state-blessed faiths in Europe — like the Lutherans in Scandinavia and Anglicans in Britain — perhaps turned out to be a curse.

"Monopolies damage religion," said Massimo Introvigne, the director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin and a proponent of the relatively new theory of religious economy. "In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true for cars."

It also has reverberations well beyond the pews.

"I've been struck by the way in which religion now serves to underpin the divergence between Europe and the United States, and where I particularly saw that over the last year or two was in attitudes about the Middle East," said Philip Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is a British scholar who teaches history and religious studies in the United States and wrote "The Next Christendom" (2002), about changing patterns of Christian worship around the world.

"Americans still take biblical and religious arguments very seriously, and therefore give a credence to the Zionist project that Europeans don't," Dr. Jenkins said.

He said that for many Americans, the frequency with which President Bush invoked morality and religion in talking about the fight against terrorism was neither striking nor discomfiting. "But in Europe," he added, "they think he must be a religious nut."

The president's brand of certainty and fervor is not easily found here. But it exists, if one knows where to look for it.

`Hallelujahs' and Pragmatism

At least 3,000 people, some clapping, singing and swaying from the moment they left their cars, turned out on a recent Sunday at the Kingsway International Christian Center in East London.

That was just for the first of three scheduled services.

Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo could not welcome each of the worshipers personally, but his face beamed from screens and monitors scattered throughout the gargantuan assembly hall. His voice thundered over loudspeakers. His message was a blend of Corinthians and Hallmark, gospel truth and pop psychology, rendered in the style of a convention center motivational speech.

"If you don't change your thinking from stinking thinking, your life will stink," he told the parishioners, who shouted "Hallelujah!" and "Amen!"

"Turn the dream machine on," he said.

Pastor Ashimolowo, a Nigerian immigrant, started Kingsway 11 years ago, and it now claims about 10,000 members in East London, along with thousands more elsewhere. Many are from Africa, or their parents were.

They belong to a stream of European newcomers who were already Christian when they arrived in Britain — or France or Switzerland or Holland — but did not find in the Protestant and Catholic churches of Western Europe what they remembered and relished from home.

They wanted excitement, spontaneity and a kind of inspiration that spoke directly to them. Throughout many European cities, independent Pentecostal churches that are unaffiliated with traditional denominations sprung up to deliver that.

London today is full of them. Some are gigantic, like Kingsway. Others inhabit narrow, indistinct storefronts in working-class neighborhoods.

Worshipers often speak in tongues and take part in faith healings, practices that have begun to crop up as well in more traditional settings, like a United Reformed congregation in East London. A decade ago, that congregation had dwindled to fewer than 10 members, some white and some black. Then the Rev. John Macauley from Sierra Leone took over. He gambled that the future of the parish was in a more ebullient style of worship.

"I was the only one clapping my hands back then, like I was from Planet Cuckoo," he said.

But that sound and sensibility, which soon led to a drum kit and baptismal pool on the altar, tugged new congregants into his orbit. His church now has more than 250 members. Both it and Kingsway deliver more than an adrenaline rush. They strive to be practical, and they market themselves that way.

At Kingsway, glossy brochures for a new religious seminar promise advice on "how to be entrepreneurs," "mastering your finances" and "managing your relationships."

There is emerging evidence that the promise of a tightly knit community and a certain intensity of experience can lure more affluent, established Europeans into church as well, especially if those Europeans are young.

Some sociologists say new data suggest a possible reawakening of Christian interest in people under 30, and Christian movements throughout Europe are reaching out aggressively to them. The Emmanuel Community in France has wooed hundreds to gatherings like one in Paris on a recent Saturday night, where scores of well-dressed professionals nibbled quiche and sipped wine in a courtyard under the moonlight.

Then, around 10 p.m., they hurried across the street to a centuries-old cathedral where they titled their heads backward, lifted their palms heavenward and rocked back and forth, in thrall to a religious ardor that most of Europe has lost.

BBC World News
Gay issue splits world bishops

[DJS]

Will the day come when there is a mass migration of secular humanists from the US back to Europe claiming political asylum? And moreover, will Europe's secular tendencies give them an advantage in the emerging technological fields (by being more progressive about things such as stem cell research)?

Until now, the US has managed to maintain its competitive advantage, but for how long? Could Europe be the "wave of the future"?

Finally, I understand that the US is a very religious nation. I won't delude myself about that. But up here in the Northeast I think people's attitudes are much more in line with that of Europe. The real problem here in the states is the South, ie the Bible Belt. One of these days I need to find some statistics on this matter.

[Cyto]

This is a good place to stick this. Evangel's with guns and power. DO we have another crusade popping up? (chuckle)

----------------------------------------

Updated: 04:55 PM EDT
General Says He'll Tone Down Rhetoric
War on Terror Framed as Religious Battle; 'Enemy Is a Guy Named Satan'
By PAULINE JELINEK, AP

WASHINGTON (Oct. 17) - A top Pentagon general has said he will tone down his rhetoric after being criticized for casting the war on terror as a religious battle, officials said Friday.

But Defense Department lawyers, public affairs officials and others were meeting Friday to try to figure out whether that would be enough to calm the storm of criticism surrounding Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, who has said the counterterror war is a battle with Satan.

His comments came in speeches - some made in uniform - at evangelical Christian churches.

Critics said the remarks could undermine a more than two-year Bush administration effort to promote good relations with Muslims in America, as well as play into the hands of those who have fanned anti-Americanism abroad by casting the counterterror war as an attack on Islam.

Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary for intelligence, has told Pentagon officials that he will curtail his speechmaking, officials said. He was expected to issue a written statement Friday.

A decorated veteran of foreign campaigns, the three-star general said of a 1993 battle with a Muslim militia leader in Somalia: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."

He did not respond Thursday to a request for comment.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday he had not seen Boykin's comments, but he praised the three-star general as "an officer that has an outstanding record in the United States armed forces."

Despite repeated questions at a Pentagon press conference, Rumsfeld declined to condemn Boykin's statements or to say whether he would take any action.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had spoken in uniform at prayer breakfasts, adding he did not think Boykin broke any military rules by giving talks at churches.

"There is a very wide gray area on what the rules permit," Myers said. "At first blush, it doesn't look like any rules were broken."

But Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, R-R.I., said that if media reports accurately quoted Boykin, the general's comments were deplorable.

And a Muslim rights group called for Boykin to be reassigned from his job, which includes evaluating and providing resources for the intelligence needs of military commanders.

"Putting a man with such extremist views in a critical policy-making position sends entirely the wrong message to a Muslim world that is already skeptical about America's motives and intentions," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Awad's statement noted that a verse in the Quran says Muslims believe in the same God as Jews and Christians.

Boykin's church speeches, first reported by NBC News and the Los Angeles Times, cast the war on terrorism as a religious battle between Christians and the forces of evil.

Appearing in dress uniform before a religious group in Oregon in June, Boykin said Islamic extremists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian. ... And the enemy is a guy named Satan."

Rumsfeld on Thursday repeated the Bush administration position that the war on terrorism is not a war against Islam but against people "who have tried to hijack a religion."

The defense secretary said he could not prevent military officials from making controversial statements.

The Bush administration has gone to some lengths to court Muslim organizations since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks set off the U.S. war on terror. Muslim leaders have been invited to the White House, and President Bush declared late last year that Islam is a peaceful religion, seeking to distance himself from remarks by conservative Christian leaders Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

10/17/03 12:00 EDT

[Mind]

And moreover, will Europe's secular tendencies give them an advantage in the emerging technological fields (by being more progressive about things such as stem cell research)?

Don, the exact opposite is happening in Europe. They already ban GM crops, the U.S. does not. In fact, the EU is trying to ban most genetic manipulation in animals and plants, not because of religion but because the Green/Environmentalist influence. The Greens would rather have us all die in order to preserve their percieved "natural" state of the earth...I am not exaggrating.

Besides, whatever happenned to religious freedom? That is why this country was founded in the first place. Is the national religion of the U.S. going to be Secular Humanism? The founders of the U.S. wanted to create a country without a national religion. Why is there such a push to install Secular Humanism as the national religion?

Whether its Boykin, Chomksy, or Jesse Jackson, I feel they should all be free to express their religious or non-religious views.

[Cyto]

I missed that.

Yea, Australia is a good place (2 year supply of embryos), Singapore (their 100% for it - with $ and all), also Canada.

"Last summer the European Union released guidelines that contemplate allowing funds to be used for research with stem cells from frozen human embryos, the Associated Press reported July 9. The proposals published by the European Commission added that "the EU will not fund human embryonic stem cell research where it is forbidden." A final decision on the proposals has not yet been taken."

http://www.zenit.org...phtml?sid=43036

Edited by CarboniX, 18 October 2003 - 05:55 PM.

[DJS]

Don, the exact opposite is happening in Europe. They already ban GM crops, the U.S. does not.

Very true Mind, but banning genetical modified foods is of little importance to my quest for immortality (you could argue this point, I am sure). In fact, I believe that caution in the case of GM foods is warranted. We should be very careful with what we put into our bodies. However, I also feel that the a total ban on GM foods was over reacting a bit. The individual should have the choice/freedom to determine whether GM foods are safe enough to consume. What the government should have done is required GM foods to be labeled and let the consumer make the decision. I will not disagree that there are also obstacles to our cause in Europe.

My whole point was that Europeans seem less inclined to invoke arguments such as "human dignity" and other ambigious moral/religious terms. I view religion as more of a threat than secularization. This is not to say that secularization also doesn't have its negatives.

Don

PS -- I know you hate big government so I can understand your criticisms of the EU. I also don't like big government, but I find myself coming back to the "lesser of two evils" delimma. I'll simply say this: I firmly believe that without religious objections, utilitarian objections to life extension do not pose as great of a threat. It will be interesting to see over the next ten years which nation/economic bloc comes out in the lead.

[imminstmorals]

You should talk to priests,


excess religious behavior is act of suffering and life misconduct
thus abnormal

=D
Priests noe all, wish to forgives and redeems such suffering!!

[Cyto]

And so it keeps going. And going. And going. And going.
-------------------------------------------------
Biology book fight unrelenting
Are texts full of errors, as some contend, or is censorship the issue?

10:18 PM CST on Thursday, October 30, 2003

By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Critics of proposed biology textbooks for Texas students said Thursday some previous "errors" in the books have been corrected but insisted there is still "a lot of work to be done" in their coverage of evolution.

A week before the State Board of Education considers adoption of the textbooks, the Discovery Institute, a national research organization, said it will ask the board to demand more changes from publishers, including a listing of the flaws in the theory of evolution.

But a Texas-based group aligned with science educators praised publishers for not giving in to demands by conservatives who they say want to "censor" content of the books and their explanation of how animal and plant species evolved over millions of years.

"In keeping with their commitment to provide students with the best possible science education, biology textbook publishers have stood up to political pressure," said Samantha Smoot, president of the Texas Freedom Network.

"We applaud publishers for doing what's right for Texas kids, despite the demands of far-right interest groups."

Ms. Smoot said her organization and other groups such as Texas Citizens for Science will fight a "last-ditch campaign next week to force the rewrite or rejection" of the biology books. She said the Discovery Institute, social conservatives and creationists are behind the effort.

The State Board of Education will vote on the biology books next Thursday and Friday. The books will be distributed to schools in fall 2004.

John West, associate director of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, said publishers made "some modest progress" in correcting errors pointed out this year by his group and other critics. Revisions to the books were made public by publishers this week.

"For months the publishers said there were no errors, but now, lo and behold, they have made some changes," he said, citing as an example the decision of two publishers to drop diagrams of the so-called Haeckel's embryos. The group criticized the long-used illustrations as overstating similarities of the embryos of humans and other animal species.

"They have made about 20 corrections that are substantive, but there is still a lot of work to be done," Dr. West said. "There are still a number of false factual claims."

He said there has been "little progress" in covering the weaknesses in the theory of evolution, something that he noted is required by state law. The law provides that students be exposed to scientific evidence that supports and challenges existing scientific theories.

"We will be seeking more changes in the textbooks," Dr. West said.

Rhetoric has intensified since the first public hearing on the textbooks in July. Publishers have been required to cover evolution in science books since 1991.

Because of its status as one of the largest textbook purchasers in the nation, Texas exerts influence on publishers and the content of their books, which are marketed across the nation. Only California buys more textbooks in the $4 billion-a-year market.

Critics of the biology books have directed their attacks at alleged errors in the materials. The presence of errors is an important concept in textbook selection in Texas because under existing law, board of education members may reject a book only if it has factual errors, does not cover the curriculum or is manufactured poorly.

Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science and a college educator, has accused critics of the books of trying to water down coverage of evolution so they can eventually pressure publishers to include religious-based explanations for the origin of life.

His primary criticisms have been directed at the Discovery Institute, which he calls a "creationist organization."

The institute promotes "intelligent design," which holds that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an unknown "intelligent cause" rather than by undirected processes such as natural selection and random mutation – key components of theory of evolution.

Dr. West and other Discovery Institute leaders, however, respond that they have never asked that intelligent design be taught in Texas schools.

"The Discovery Institute is not asking that intelligent design be included in textbooks or the curriculum," Dr. West said, arguing that intelligent design "is a scientific theory and not a religious belief."

E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com

[nefastor]

Food for thought : (or at least for a few good laughs)

http://www.christianburner.com

THE site advocating that religious behavior isn't normal. You can also buy T-shirts.

Jean

[Cyto]

By all means I will not be one to tell you we have all the answers on evolution of "whatever you choose." But these are supposed to be educated people. And i'll also use this time to point out my EvolutionCustom Page. [B)]
-----------------------------------------------
Christian medical students want anti-evolution lectures
Here

Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper Universitas reports.

"The theory of evolution doesn't stand up and does not present enough convincing facts. It is one theory among many, but in education it is discussed as if it is accepted by everyone," Johannessen said.

Johannessen is a believer in creationism, based on the biblical account.

"Of course one has to know the theory of evolution, it is after all part of the curriculum. But certain lecturers demand that one believe it as well. Then it becomes a question of faith and not subject," Johannessen said.

Johannessen told the newspaper that he and his fellows are often compared to American extremists. Besides not being taken seriously or being able to debate the topic relevantly, Johannessen said that 'evolutionists' practically harass those who do not agree with them.

Dean Per Brodal said it was regrettable if any university staff were disparaging to creationists, but that there was no reason to complain about a lack of relevant evidence. Brodal also felt that evolution had a rather minor spot in medical education.

Biology professor Nils Christian Stenseth argued that instead of indulging an 'off-topic' debate the medical faculty should offer a course in fundamental evolutionary biology, saying that nothing in biology could be understood out of an evolutionary context.

The Christian Medical Students Circle want three basic points to be included in the curriculum:

1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.

2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.

3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.

[Cyto]

Yea, I know, why waste the space? Well I have a need for this type of humor (im addicted to the talkorigins.org monthly feedbacks). But the real point is that anti-evolution training is really happening (co-worker decided to yell at my g/f how "his sources are credible") bla bla bla. I'm increasing my Evolution custom page...

---

Evolution under fire? -- Part 7

By David F. Dawes

IN THE FINAL installment of CC.com's series of interviews on evolutionary theory, we hear from George Pearce, head of the Creation Science Association of British Columbia (CSABC).

CanadianChristianity.com:: Does the general public realize the extent to which evolutionary theory is being severely critiqued by people with legitimate scientific and scholarly credentials? What is being done to increase this awareness?

George Pearce: I don't think the general public realizes the extent to which evolutionary theory is under attack.

There are many creation museums in existence, or being built by various people -- for example, Answers in Genesis in Kentucky; Carl Baugh in Texas; Kent Hovind in Florida; and Vance Nelson, whose home base is Red Deer, Alberta. Seminars are being held in churches around the world. Book tables are being set up at universities. Some debates are happening in universities.

CC.com: Creationists tend to agree that there is scientific evidence for 'micro-evolution,' the idea of variations within a specific species. But they contend that there is no concrete evidence for macro-evolution, the concept of transformation from one species into another. Are evolutionists simply afraid to admit this to the public -- and perhaps to themselves?

GP: I think that most scientists are aware of the lack of evidence for macro-evolution. Evolutionists are afraid to admit this to the public -- and probably to themselves.

Micro-evolution may be scientifically provable, but what is it really? The changes are so hopelessly 'micro' that it is an affront to intelligence to call it evolution. For example, National Geographic had an article entitled 'From Wolf to Woof.' It described the evolution of the domestic dog from wolves. The article admitted that there was no difference genetically between wolves and dogs and that a skeleton could not be distinguished as a wolf or a dog.

CC.com: Why does the scientific establishment (in a general sense) seem to be so determined to cling to evolutionary theory? How did this theory become so deeply entrenched as 'scientific' orthodoxy?

GP: Evolution makes it intellectually possible to be an atheist. Most of the outspoken evolutionists are also atheists. It seems to them that, if evolution is true, there is no need to have a creator. Being vocal and sounding scientific, they are able to convince others that evolution is viable.

People worship scientists -- and most people would like to live their lives without God. As Psalm 10:4 says: "The wicked in his proud countenance does not seek God; God is in none of his thoughts."

CC.com: Are a significant number of scientists now open to alternatives to evolutionary theory?

GP: A significant number of scientists are open to alternatives to Darwinian evolution, but not to six-day creation.

CC.com: Are a lot of schools and school boards showing increasing willingness to give a platform to origins theories other than evolution?

GP: No!

CC.com: To what extent has the Intelligent Design (ID) movement given added credibility to Creationist views?

GP: None.

CC.com: Is the ID movement making serious inroads into the scientific, educational and philosophical establishments?

GP: No. Most scientists view ID-ers as 'creationists in disguise.' A person who so much as questions evolution is branded at least a creationist -- or, at worst, a religious fanatic. I don't think much is happening with ID in Canada.

CC.com: Some critics have raised objections to the ID concept of origins. Also, some creationists have mixed feelings about this movement. What is your view of ID?

GP: ID is presenting excellent and compelling evidence for design. Creationists are making great use of this. The problem, as I see it, is that ID-ers will not openly and officially say who the Designer is. This has become an obvious problem recently -- since the Muslims are picking up on this and saying that ID is from the Koran, and that Allah is the designer.

CC.com: You may recall that politician Stockwell Day was publicly ridiculed sometime ago for his belief in Creation. What do you think this says about Canadian society, mass media, and the general public's view of origins?

GP: It says it all! As I was telling someone about creation and mentioned that I have a masters degree in science, he replied, "You should know better." Canadian society, mass media and the general public would rather do without Christianity -- i.e. Jesus Christ.

CC.com: Is belief in evolutionary theory crumbling, in a general sense? Can you speculate whether it will finally be publicly discredited -- and if so, whether you think that may happen in the near future? ([g:)] I'm sorry but these people really do have something wrong with their brains.)

GP: Belief in evolutionary theory is not crumbling. I don't think that the scientific community will ever be willing to discard evolutionary theory. They will criticize and actually reject Darwinian theory, but not evolution. Note that Philip Johnson writes against Darwinism. Michael Denton, author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, has said that he wishes he had titled his book "Darwinism: A Theory in Crisis." The world is committed to evolution, and will continue to modify the theory to make it as acceptable as possible.

Notice that Darwin taught gradualism, i.e. that organisms gradually evolved. He expected that the fossils would be found to show all the intermediate steps. The lack of transitional fossils has not convinced scientists to reject evolution. Instead, Gould and Eldridge came up with the idea of 'punctuated equilibria,' in which evolution is supposed to have occurred by 'rapid' changes which involved no transitional forms.

CC.com: Can you share an anecdote involving an encounter you've had with someone who believes in the theory of evolution, and their response to creationist concepts and materials?

GP: A teacher in a very independent -- not Christian -- high school came to a CSABC book table, curious about the books we were displaying. I shared with him some of the data that Michael Denton uses to show that Darwinian evolution is in crisis. This teacher replied, "That is not very convincing."

I find that people don't want to know that there is evidence against evolution -- until the Holy Spirit prepares the heart.