| FAITH
and RELIGIONS
12/26/04 <link>
Church-State
Separation in the United States:
Religion in Public Schools and the Legal/Off-Courtroom Strategies of
the Christian Right
Detailed coverage is here.
11/27/03 <link>
Number
of Americans identifying with no religion in particular doubles in the
last decade or so
via Atrios
Some highlights (bold text is my emphasis)...
Their numbers have more than
doubled in a decade, to nearly 30 million. Organized as a
religious denomination, they would trail only Catholics and Baptists
in members.
They are the "nones," named for their response to a question
in public opinion polls: "What is your religion, if any?"
Some nones are atheists, others agnostics, still others self-styled
dabblers in a variety of faiths and philosophies. Despite their
discomfort with organized religion, many consider themselves quite
spiritual...
Nones are especially prevalent in the Pacific Northwest. In Oregon and
Washington, where 21 percent and 25 percent, respectively, claim no
particular faith, nones outnumber any single religious category...
Whatever the reason, nones grew from 8 percent of the U.S.
population in 1990 to more than 14 percent in 2001.
That's the conclusion of religion experts who compared results of the
National Survey of Religious Identification, conducted in 1990, and
the American Religious Identification Survey, which in 2001 sought to
update the earlier poll.
"That makes nones the fastest-growing religious group in the
United States, if you think about them as a religious group,"
said Patricia O'Connell Killen, a professor of religious history at
Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. "We're just coming
to grips with the reality that this group even exists."...
Young people are more likely to profess no religion. One in three
nones is less than 30 years old compared with one in five of all
survey respondents. More are single (29 percent) than the adult
population as a whole (20 percent). Fifty-nine percent are male. Their
education level (23 percent college graduates) is virtually the same
as the national average for adults. Seventeen percent are Republicans,
30 percent are Democrats, and 43 percent are independents.
Many nones believe in God. Nearly half "agreed strongly"
that God exists. "It is more accurate to describe them as
unaffiliated than as non-believers," said Ariela Keysar, study
director of the American Religious Identification Survey...
6/14/03 <link>
U.S.
House of Representatives' Flag-burning amendment and God
We came across this interesting commentary via Making
Light and Electrolite.
We reproduce the article in it's entirety here. The significance
of this article is probably best summed up by a comment by Copeland
Morris to Electrolite's posting of this article: "...Setting the State above God; indeed,
placing the the flag in an apposite relationship with the Divine, is
one of the tenets of fascism."
Flag
Amendment Violates 10 Commandments, Not Just Free Speech
Commentary, Andrew Reding,
Pacific News Service, Jun 12, 2003
Editor's Note: By
elevating the flag to sacred status with the word
"desecration" and by creating a First Amendment
loophole for the flag, a proposed amendment to the
Constitution puts American civil and religious liberties at
risk.
By a lopsided vote of 300 to 125, the House of Representatives
has again approved a constitutional amendment that would grant
Congress "the power to prohibit the physical desecration
of the flag of the United States." The proposed amendment
has gained new momentum in the aftermath of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks.
There is an obvious irony in responding to a threat to freedom
by restricting freedom. But it is not just the First Amendment
that is under assault. So is the First Commandment of the
Jewish and Christian faiths, and the First Pillar of the
Muslim faith.
By elevating the flag to an object of transcendent veneration
-- an untouchable idol -- the proposed amendment strikes at
the core of Jewish, Muslim and Christian belief systems.
The Ten Commandments apply to Jews and Christians alike.
Heading the list is the commandment to have no other god,
meaning no other absolute allegiance. The Second Commandment
extends that prohibition to veneration of material objects --
it forbids "bowing down to" or worshipping graven
images of any kind. The point of all this is that no temporal
power is worthy of the veneration that must be reserved for
God alone.
A virtually identical prohibition applies to Muslims. The
First Pillar of their faith, repeated daily in prayers, is
"There is no God but God and Muhammed is the messenger of
God." The greatest sin for a Muslim, comparable to
idolatry for a Jew or Christian, is "shirk," which
means associating something with God. That includes
associating a state or nation with God, or assigning
transcendent importance to a symbol of that state or nation.
There are two ways in which the proposed amendment violates
the prohibitions on shirk/idolatry. One is the use of the word
desecration, which, according to the American Heritage
Dictionary, means "to violate the sacredness of."
The amendment would in effect declare the American flag
sacred. Efforts to use a less loaded term were explicitly
rejected by the amendment's sponsors.
But more than semantics is at play. As it presently stands,
the First Amendment forbids Congress from passing any law
"abridging the freedom of speech" or
"prohibiting the free exercise" of religion. The
proposed amendment would create an exception for the flag. It
would become the only object in America that could not be
subjected to symbolic protest. Not even the Cross, Crescent
and Star of David merit such protection.
The great danger of turning the symbol of a nation-state into
a sacred object is that it implicitly deifies the nation-state
itself. The Pledge of Allegiance is taken to the flag
"and to the Republic for which it stands." If the
mere symbol of the state is made sacred, surely the state
itself must be sacred. The right to protest the actions of
government is placed on shaky ground.
That stands the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence
and the Bill of Rights on its head. The Declaration states
that governments are not ends in themselves, but mere
instruments for "unalienable rights" to "life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The government is
supposed to protect liberties, not restrict them.
The First Amendment was adopted to prevent the government from
limiting dissent in any way. It is inherently anti-idolatrous.
As Gen. Colin Powell wrote to Sen. Patrick Leahy in 1999,
"The First Amendment exists to insure that freedom of
speech and expression applies not just to that with which we
agree or disagree, but also that which we find outrageous. I
would not amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a few
miscreants. The flag will still be flying proudly long after
they have slunk away."
Should the amendment be passed by the Senate and then
ratified, it would for the first time incorporate religious
language into the Constitution. The great irony is that it
would do so to venerate a secular object -- the symbol of an
often exemplary but still fallible nation-state -- violating
the most fundamental tenets of the three primary religious
faiths of the American people.
As it has done on four prior occasions, the Senate should
shelve this most dangerous and idolatrous assault on our civil
and religious liberties.
Andrew Reding is a senior fellow of the World Policy
Institute in New York. |
5/25/03 <link>
Embrace
of Religion in the U.S. significantly higher than in other wealth
nations, according to a Pew Research report
The Pew report has this leading title that indicates the remarkable
findings: "Among Wealthy Nations …
U.S. STANDS ALONE IN ITS EMBRACE OF RELIGION".
The report says, "...Religion is much
more important to Americans than to people living in other wealthy
nations. Six-in-ten (59%) people in the U.S. say religion plays a very
important role in their lives. This is roughly twice the percentage of
self-avowed religious people in Canada (30%), and an even higher
proportion when compared with Japan and Western Europe. Americans’
views are closer to people in developing nations than to the publics
of developed nations..."
We reproduce below two charts from the report that tell the story
graphically. Let's hope there are at lease some sane heads in the GOP
who pay attention to Samuel
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.
1/12/03 <link>
The
sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church
Owing to lack of time, we had not covered the sex-abuse
crisis in the Catholic church for a long time. The New York Times
has just completed a survey to get a sense for the extent of this
crisis. A quick summary of the findings is available in this chart
from the New York Times. Comments are added below the chart.
Key comments from the article (bold text
is our emphasis):
"The sexual abuse
crisis that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church in the last 12 months
has now spread to nearly every American diocese and involves more
than 1,200 priests, most of whose careers straddle a sharp divide
in church history and seminary training. These
priests are known to have abused more than 4,000 minors over the
last six decades, according to an extensive New York Times survey
of documented cases of sexual abuse by priests through Dec. 31, 2002...It
counted 4,268 people who have claimed publicly or in lawsuits to
have been abused by priests, though experts say there are surely
many more who have remained silent....Most of the abuse occurred in
the 1970's and 1980's, the survey found. The number of priests accused
of abuse declined sharply by the 1990's....Every region was
seriously affected, with 206 accused priests in the West, 246 in the
South, 335 in the Midwest and 434 in the Northeast...although the
problem involved only a small percentage of priests, it was deeply
embedded in the culture of the Catholic priesthood. Many priests
began seminary training as young as 13, and all of them spent years
being groomed in an insular world in which sexual secrets and
transgressions were considered a matter for the confessional, not the
criminal courts...The Times survey counted priests from dioceses and
religious orders who had been accused by name of sexually abusing one
or more children. It determined that 1.8 percent of all priests
ordained from 1950 to 2001 had been accused of abuse...Over all,
256 priests were reported to have abused minors in the 1960's. There
were 537 in the 1970's and 510 in the 1980's, before a drop to 211 in
the 1990's. The numbers do not prove that the upheaval in the church
and society in the 1960's and 70's caused the abuse, but experts who
reviewed The Times's research said it was important to consider the
historical context in which the scandal occurred..The
decline in priest cases in the 1990's parallels a 40 percent decline
in the sexual abuse of children generally, Dr. Finkelhor said. There
are many reasons, he said: more offenders are incarcerated for longer
periods; children are more closely supervised; and there is more
awareness about identifying and reporting sexual abuse. But
many say that the real reason for the decline may be simply that the
victims of the 1990's have not surfaced yet..."
10/28/02 <link>
U.S. public opinion about Islam
ABC
News reporting the results of a poll of public attitudes about
Islam. ABC News highlights some of the negative developments (e.g.,
"...last January 22 percent said Islam
doesn't teach respect for other beliefs; today it's 35 percent. And the
view that Islam encourages violence is up by nine points, to 23
percent....while 42 percent of Americans express an overall favorable
opinion of Islam, this is unchanged in the last 10 months, while
unfavorable views are up by nine points, to 33 percent....").
However, we want to highlight the positives:
- 53% of Americans believe Islam does not teach violence
- 42% of Americans have a favorable view of Islam
We find that a reflection of the progressive nature of the majority of
Americans. After 9/11 and the string of negative news about Islamic
terrorists over the last year, we are amazed that many Americans have
the presence of mind and the thoughtfulness to separate their views
about criminals' and terrorists' misuse of religion and the religion
itself.
10/14/02 <link>
Practitioners of Islam and Judaism in America
Appears to be several million each but the numbers are facing some
controversy, at
least in the case of the Jewish population. Here's the LA Times article
on the Muslim population.
10/12/02 <link>
Most interesting survey on religion!
In this Los Angeles Times report, ~ 44% of respondents in the U.S. felt
that the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon essentially say the
same things, and 38% did not. Some wacky responses include this one
- "...Respondents also were divided about
whether a person who 'is generally good or does enough good things for
others' while on Earth will earn a place in heaven. Fifty percent agreed
and 42% disagreed [our emphasis!]..."
and this one: "...Americans are divided over
whether Jesus sinned when he lived on Earth, with 42% saying he did [our
emphasis!] and 50% saying he did not..."
9/18/02 <link>
Growth
of conservative churches in the US
Conservative churches grew the most in memberships in the 1990s. Not
surprising, since the trend for conservatism seems to have been
generally a widespread phenomenon during this time period.
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