Religion

I really wanted not to comment on the Terri Schiavo case. I really wanted not to comment on it because I don’t think our comments matter. In the end, this is a personal, family matter that has been blown out of all proportion. (Yes, there are larger issues here, but what is happening to Terri Schiavo is happening across the United States right now with other patients and we haven’t been paying attention to them.) So, why am I commenting now? No good reason, other than to get it out of my head. ...

A pastor asks why so many churches urged their members to go see The Passion of the Christ but aren’t urging them to see Hotel Rwanda. Having seen neither movie yet, I couldn’t tell you what their relative merits are. However, I can make a guess as to two reasons why: First, The Passion had a truly amazing marketing push behind it. To talk about it as a purely grassroots hit movie is to ignore the accomplishments of Mel Gibson and the distributor in promoting this film as a must-see for Christians. There is a common mistake made when talking about evangelical Christians. Despite the talk about cutting ourselves off from the world, we are very much aware of it and are exposed to the tools used in the rest of culture. In other words, it’s hard to separate “religious” church and/or school life from the “secular” world of working and shopping. The evangelical community has always had a large community concerned with marketing to it, just like any other niche market with special interests. ...

The Christian Science Monitor describes a novel approach to dealing with Al Qaeda in Yemen. “If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle,” Hitar told the militants. “But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence.” I like the idea of the theological contest. I hope it continues to be effective. ...

Another writer makes the mistake of assuming faith is only present in religious belief and gets called on it in a review by Reason. If faith is “belief in things unseen” — the definition I grew up with — it’s not hard to see that we run a substantial portion of our lives on faith. And if that is the case, it’s pretty obvious that just because some people do bad things because of their religious faith doesn’t somehow mean it is qualitatively different when others do bad things because of their faith in a utopian system, a strong leader, or Jodie Foster finally noticing them if they just assassinate that president. ...

Ron Suskind writes in The New York Times Magazine about Bush’s “faith-based” presidency. While the article runs on the anti-Bush side — Suskind isn’t coy about what he thinks of “Bush’s faith” vs. the world of reason and picks and chooses the worst quotes, as most folks do when they are trying to prove a point — it brings up an interesting point: Is faith without doubt good for a fallible human being? Even — or perhaps especially — as a person who respects faith as much as I do, and who has and probably always will be a Baptist at heart, the idea of having certainty that your words are the voice of God bothers me a great deal. ...

A recent Spiked article has some interesting things to say about modern terrorist movements and their globalist, as opposed to nationalist, backgrounds. I don’t agree with the main thesis — that Western humanitarian intervention weakened the concept of state sovereignty so much that terrorist movements no longer have nationalist aims — because I don’t think the weakness of the state is a new thing. Internationalism has eroded state sovereignty for quite a long time, but a large part of the weaknesses of the state system are the same ones that it has had all along. (A reliance on national identity for legitimacy, for instance, makes it very hard to fill the entire world with brand-new states, which was the one of the effects of decolonization. Former colony space simply could not remain “empty” of states when the powers of the world were states themselves. After all, with whom do you set trade rules?) ...