Crackdown on Psychics

The obvious joke: They didn't see it coming.

Philadelphia police have begun to enforce an old law against fortune-telling. Now, Father A. holds no brief for these charlatans, and feels a confusing mixture of sadness and contempt for the deluded nitwits who actually make decisions based on this sort of mumbo-jumbo. (And yes, we are thinking of Nancy Reagan and her Vassar-educated astrologer).

On the other hand ... and we really hate to say it ... what about free speech?

Click the link to read a local report on the case. We are especially troubled by the guy who claims that Jesus was a fortune-teller, and that he is himself therefore just like Jesus. *Sigh* Paging Simon Magus.

And if these were the Middle Ages, or some theocratic hellhole like Calvin's Geneva or [insert modern Middle Eastern nation here], rousting a few spiritual quacks would be par for the course. (See under: Michael Servetus). But these are, or at any rate were until recently, the United States of America. Land of the .... you know. And this is Philadelphia, home of that bell. You know the one I mean. Big brass thing, crack on one side. That one.

But we live in a strange new world, in which reporters go to jail for refusing to tell which administration official lied about what; in which the President says "we do not torture," while organizing torture on an international scale; in which wiretapping and eavesdropping are so common that we don't know how common they may be; in which the fairly liberal mayor of New York organized his own nationwide infiltration of church and community groups, a la J. Edgar Hoover. The old verities -- that is, civil and human rights -- seem to be passing quickly away. So it is no surprise that Philadelphia would give up on the First Amendment.

And anyway, in a nation losing its way as quickly as this, fortune-tellers may really qualify as enemies of the state.

Buckley, Jr.: The War is Lost

The White House (joined, as always, by its friends at Fox) has been scathing in its responses to Senator Harry Reid's observation that "the war is lost." I wonder how the President and Mr. Cheney will respond to essentially the same observation from the pen of a man whose name is a byword for conservatism, William F. Buckley, Jr.?

In fairness, Buckley doesn't -- quite -- say the war is lost. Instead, he compares it unfavorably to Viet Nam, in which the enemy at least had a headquarters. And he seems to assume that we will remember that despite this tactical advantage, things didn't go well for us in Nam. (This nuance may be lost on Bush and Cheney, neither of whom had any personal experience of that war. Had they been replaced, at any stage, by combat verterans like Messrs. Gore, Kerry, Kerrey, McCain, Murtha or Hagel, we might not be quite so far into the Big Muddy by now).

Buckley also compares Iraq to Prohibition -- a effort to achieve by governmental force a goal to which the people were obstinately opposed. And most disturbingly, he talks about Christianity and the Roman Empire, when "The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state." That's right: in his analogy, we're the Romans and our opponents are the Christians. Making the current President either Tiberius or Caligula, I'm not sure which.

In truth, Buckley's comments -- made quite briefly, in a consideration of the new book by George Tenet -- are more forceful than anything Senator Reid or Representative Pelosi have said so far. We hope the Administration will also note that they are far more damning.

"He Didn't Get Killed"

That's a White House insider's verdict on the Gonzales testimony, as reported to CNN. He didn't get killed.

Talk about faint praise.

So, with senators on both sides of the aisle calling for his resignation, and Gonzales saying that he will only resign if the President asks him to, it looks like yet another opportunity for President Bush to show us what he's made of. Will he show here the same steadfast, rock-solid support for his most loyal soldiers that he showed for, say, Donald Rumsfeld? The same iron-willed refusal to give in to pressure that he has on Iraq?

Probably. And that's a disturbing thought, because Bush's stubbornness on Rumsfeld and Iraq will go down in history books as the defining failures of a head of state as dangerously out of touch with reality as anybody since Louis XVI.

Gonzales is a Weenie

We at the Egg spent some time yesterday listening to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testifying before a Senate committee. Now, granted, the senators were pretty hostile. But "hostile," in this case, simply means that they weren't giving him a free pass every time he lied.

Nor were they ready to accept his other tactic, which boils down to "Why, Senator, I've already admitted that mistakes were made [or: "that could have been handled better"]. Now can't we stop talking about all this and move on?

Gonzales genuinely doesn't seem to understand that the "mistakes" he is trying to blow past are serious. They consist of (a) collaborating in an attempt to turn the Department of Justice into a partisan political organization; and then (b) lying about it consistently, if not convincingly. Now, compared to his stirring defense of torture, this may not be so bad; but it is bad indeed. If we cannot trust the Department of Justice -- justice! -- to be impartial, then what hope for a free society do we have?

By the way, we can usually tell a weenie from a statesman by his use of the passive voice. Trapped in lie after lie, Gonzales can barely bring himself to say "I made a mistake," which is the very least of what he has done. Instead, he says, "Mistakes were made." How Reaganesque. Sadly, however, mistakes are not made in the abstract; they are made in the concrete, by real people. In this case, by Gonzales, as well as the people who pressured him to demean his office and ultimately the person who appointed him to that office. They have all made mistakes, and they should all be held accountable.

Later, talking to the PBS NewsHour, Senators Leahy and Specter seemed to describe the two different ways of looking at Gonzales' testimony. Leahy, a Democrat, suggested that it revealed a systematic effort to undermine democratic institutions. Specter, a Republican, thought this was overkill -- in his estimation, Gonzales merely showed that he was incompetent. While we are prone to side with Leahy on this, if "mere incompetence" is what it takes to remove Gonzales, then so be it.

And on a religious nore, enjoy the irony: the holier-than-thou Bush administration has ignored all those Biblical warnings about "perverting justice." (E.g., Prov. 17:23).

Administration in Flames

Think about it. In today's news alone, we learn that:

+ Paul Wolfowitz, architect of the Iraq disaster, has been caught providing an giant raise in pay to his own girlfriend. If he doesn't lose his job at the World Bank, it can only be because the Bushies simply don't see what's wrong with cronyism, nepotism and the abuse of power.
+ Four YEARS of Karl Rove's email is "missing" -- but may yet show up. Either way, it will prove that the Administration has never troubled to distinguish between politics and government.
+ Surge notwithstanding, America can't pacify Baghdad, or even protect the Green Zone. McCain, who weirdly chose to claim otherwise, now looks fatally out of touch, and will probably drop out in a few weeks.

No president -- not Harding, not Hoover, not Buchanan -- will leave behind a more disastrous legacy. America will be a weaker nation, and the world a more dangerous place, because of George W. Bush's incompetence and bad judgment.

Yoga Stalking

Clever piece in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum, on the "hostile New Age takeover of yoga." The highlight is Rosenbaum's common-sense recital of a yoga-magazine story about a woman stalking her ex-flame, and learning to "forgive" when he tells her to get a life.

Confession: While no real yogi, Father A. has done his share of Downward-Facing Dogs over the years. And he works mighty hard to screen out the blathering yogaspeak that some instructors use. ("I'm sorry," said a very fine teacher one time. "That was a such a goober-yoga-teacher thing to say.") The truth is that after years of trying, I still can't follow the direction to 'breathe into your hamstring" for the very simple reason that my hamstring has no lungs.

But far more to the point is this: Father A. spent some time studying in India, and even wrote a master's thesis on representations of the goddess Kali in art and literature. At one time in his life, he could fairly easily describe the differences between the Devi-Mahatmya and the Devi-Bhagavata. And nothing that I ever came across, either on the street in India or in the dusty Asian Religion stacks of university libraries, sounds much like the "philosophy" of the standard yoga class.

(There are exceptions, and I will even name one: a teacher named Tony Luttenberger, up in the Berkshires. He's got an old-hippie vibe, and sometimes seems half-cracked. But the man knows his ancient texts.)

Republican Family Values

Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against Bill Clinton over Monicagate. That is to say (for those of you who are keeping count) that he was cheating on his second wife with the woman who would eventually become his third.

Newt and Rudi are both serial adulterers. So, it certainly seems, is Bill; but at least he's managed to keep his marriage going, even if he has had trouble with the vows. McCain's first wife raised their kids while he was a POW; this did not keep him from cheating on her and divorcing her (for a drug addict beer heiress who later stole meds from a charity she worked for).

I've got a sense that the GOP isn't trying anymore. They figure that, if the public puts up with a recovering alcoholic who talks to God and hears that torture is okay, nobody much cares about traditional values anymore. And by gum, they may be right.

Heather Has Three Mommies

Nice Boston Globe opinion pice by Alex Beam, assessing Mitt Romney's chance of becoming president. Musing upon a PBS documentary, Beam considers the matters of polygamy, racism, homophobia and -- far more important -- the overall strangeness of Mormonism. Then he writes:

"By now, almost every newspaper in America has published an analysis of Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations titled "Can a Mormon Be Elected President?" The stories follow a preordained path to arrive at the politically and socially desirable answer: Yes.

"These set pieces serve mainly to make the not particularly religion-savvy political commentariat feel good about themselves. The writer appears unbiased, and the article inevitably validates the cherished American myth about our tolerance for diversity.

"Can a Mormon be elected president in 2008? No."

I guess we'll find out.

Inter-Atheist Kerfluffle

Atheism is on the rise!

Not that people are leaving Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism in droves -- quite the contrary, in fact. But over the past couple of years, the smallish number of people who believe there is no God have started talking, and writing, about their convictions with particular fervor. The much larger number of people who kinda-sorta don't believe, but aren't sure why, have been given considerable comfort by the recent writings of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et alii. Call it the New Atheism.

First off, let's be honest: Given the faith-based horror of the last few years, both in the Middle East and in America, it is hard to blame these guys. Neither Pat Robertson nor Moktada al-Sadr makes the notion of a transcendent being sound very appealing.

That doesn't mean that Dawkins and Harris are right as to the matter in dispute, God's existence. Naturally, the Egg joins with the vast majority of human beings, both now and through history, in affirming that God exists. But more important is this: the fact that one can appreciate the motivation of the the New Atheists does not mean that their actual arguments are any good. They aren't.

And proof of this is a series of rather savage reviews, written not by apologists for theism but rather by the Old Atheists -- scientific and literary types who have long disbelieved in God, without attempting to make a career of it. They are unsettled first by the efforts of the young Turks to assault religious faith without any particular knowledge of its content. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton begins: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

No less seriously, they point out that the New Atheists seem intent on blaming religion and its adherents for all the world's problems, in a manner that is surprisingly irrational and, well, bigoted. the old Atheists, even if they do not believe in God, can see the good that believers have done through the ages, and continue to do. (Don't believe me? Come visit my parish men's shelter.)

And the Old Atheists have been aropund long enough to recognize that there are plenty of problems caused not by religion but by its absence. H. Allen Orr writes, of his fellow biologist, “Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual fact that (1) the 20th century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.”

As we have said before, friends, the problem isn't God. The problem is human nature. And taking God out of the picture won't improve human nature. So even those who do not believe might find, upon sober reflection, that their own best interests are served not by railing against religion in the abstract, but rather by encouraging the world's religions to live up to their own high standards.

One More Thing ....

... about that letter from James Dobson and other Christianist leaders, calling for the removal of Richard Cizik from leadership in the National Association of Evangelicals.

The signers aren't members of the NAE.

This means they have as much authority to boot Cizik as I do to change the Pope. Or the Pope does to change the Archbishop of Canterbury. Or a US president does to change the leaders of other foreign nations. (Ooops. Bad analogy.)

Dobson Jumps on the Dust-Heap of History

In the last year or so, the National Association of Evangelicals (yes, Ted Haggard's group) has begun to use its considerable political clout in support of environmental issues, especially global warming. This is just a matter of common sense and good theology, and if the NAE is late to the game -- mainline churches got there decades ago -- it is still a welcome player.

Except to James Dobson and his ilk -- the "Christianist Right," as my man Sullivan calls them. A group of influential political figures with church connections (Dobson, Gary Bauer, Paul Weyrich) sent a letter to the NAE's leadership calling for the ouster of the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs. They accuse him of using global warming to " divert the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality."

Hmm. Fate of the earth on one hand, buggery on the other. Which one is more important? Really?

Of course, the signers argue that global warming isn't really a problem, human beings can't affect it anyway, and so forth. How very 1999 of them. At this point, nobody -- not even President Bush -- believes their line of data-denying dithering anymore. Evanglicals are no more stupid than any other people, and realize that global warming is a grave and immediate danger which requires prompt political action. That's why the NAE will keep Cizik on, and probably give him a raise. He's leading them in the direction than most Americans, including American evangelicals, know we need to go.

So whence the letter? Simple. Dobson and Company have made their bones (as the mobsters say) on abortion and homosexuality. They have become famous, powerful, and wealthy by flogging those two ponies. And they don't know what else to ride. So they'll keep doing what they know how to do, even as the world changes around them, and wind up pathetic old remnants of an ugly period in American social history.

I can't wait.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Conservapedia bills itself as (and we'll bet you had already guessed this) the conservative answer to Wikipedia. It looks very, very, similar. Similar enough that a semiliterate term-paper writer at a B-list school could mistake one for the other when trolling for stuff to plagiarize. Worse yet, the said young author might deliberately choose Conservapedia, as a salubrious antidote for Wikipedia's notorious liberal bias.

First off: we never thought that Wikipedia -- a colossal, user-edited online encyclopedia -- had any particular bias. How could it, we reasoned in our naivete, with so many contributors from all over the world? Fortunately, the Conservapedia editors set us straight. Their homepage features a clear analysis of Wikipedia's bias, including what they consider the obvious smoking gun: many articles feature English spelling. (You know: tyre, saviour, judgement).

Never mind that England, under Labour no less, has been Bush's closest, and indeed only, ally in Iraq. Never mind Edmund Burke and George Orwell and Maggie Thatcher. English spellings are a sign of liberal bias because, well, they aren't American.

And "conservative," in the mind of the Conservapedia editorial staff, seems to equal two things: American and Christian. In fact, virtually nothing else seems to matter to them. We at the Egg know this, because we checked. We searched for a few of our favourite -- omg! favorite -- things, and here's what we found.

Thomas Jefferson: The first two sentences describe his life and work. The rest of ther article, which is not long but still fourteen or so sentences -- is devoted to Jefferson's religious convictions, and especially to the thesis that although TJ is often called a Deist, he described himself on at least one occasion as a Christian. Whether this is true or false, we at the Egg are willing to gamble our immortal souls that Jefferson considered his role in founding the United States, doubling its geographic size, and exploring the continent more important than his religious convictions. Heck, he probably considered gardening, wine and Sally Hemmings more important too, and none of them gets a shout-out.

Benjamin Franklin: Flew a kite, invented a stove. And in the second sentence, we learn that he, too, is called a Deist but wasn't really. The rest of the article is devoted to his religious convictions, and the strong, but astonishingly ill-argued, assertion that they were not Deist.

George Washington: ran a country, won a war. From the second sentence, the article is devoted to proving that he was a Christian.

Do you see the pattern? (There are rather bad articles on Luther and Aquinas, but at least the editors didn't feel any need to prove that those two were Christians.)

As for the figures you might expect in something called Conservapedia: there is no article on Barry Goldwater. Or Patrick Buchanan. Or anybody named Buckley.

But all this would be okay if the articles were thoughtful, well-written and well-sourced meditations on the spiritual lives of great Americans. In fact, we would welcome such a wiki. But so far, this ain't it. Despite constant urging to cite sources, the articles are full of opinions, often ill-informed ones. And the prose rises, at its very best, to the level of a middle school expository essay. Consider this beautiful and apt instance, from the rousing conclusion of the entry on a well-known medieval poet: "The account of Hell is known as 'Dante's Inferno,' and it is frightful."

Frightful indeed.

Screwed Again

Oh, my. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Board of pensions is planning to switch members' health insurance from an Aetna PPO to Blue Cross/Blue Shield HMO coverage. That's bad enough; what really offends the Egg, however, is the grotesque flummery of the press release (q.v. with a click).

Others may complain, but Father A. has been quite pleased with his Aetna coverage over the years, and so have his physicians -- many of whom will need to be replaced when he can't afford to pay them out of pocket and they don't take Blue Cross. On the other hand, every ELCA pastor (or at least every one of us who serves a small church) knows that health-care costs are crippling our congregations. If this is what it takes, then so be it.

(On the third hand, one of the reasons that these costs have grown especially fast in metropolitan regions, where the churches are generally smallest and poorest, is that Board of Pensions' decision, some years ago, to stop equalizing costs without regard to geography. It was a bad, short-sighted decision, and many of us protested it at the time.)

Anyhoo, that's all background to the aforementioned flummery.

The press release describes this decision not as a cost-cutting move, but as the exciting! new! adoption of a "wellness plan." This means that if you exercise and eat right, they will give you some credit --up to $300 per annum. Fine idea, especially for those of us who do exercise and eat right. The problem is that the deductibles are going to escalate from $350 to $600. So there goes your wellness rebate.

And then there's this: "As a self-employed individual without these benefits, I am almost envious of the opportunity that this plan offers," T. Van Matthews, Simpsonville, S.C., told the trustees' products and services committee, which he chairs. "In my world, there seems to be only one incentive that the insurer considers and that is to simply raise rates," he said.

Wow. So a guy who doesn't participate in the plan, but wants us to, is recommending it. In fact, he's "almost" envious.
And he's so glad that our new coprporate overlords ... care about us. It's touching.

Honestly, the BOP health plan covers 50,000 pastors and lay staff at 11,000 congregations. That's a big plan -- you'd think Aetna would have negotiated down to something we could all live with. But what does the Egg know?

Magdalene = Ringo?

Click to read a sharp piece in Wired about the James Cameron ossuary film. (Regarding which, Father A. offers a contemptuous "ho-hum.") Money quote:

"If that's all Cameron has to go on, he's not going to make a very strong case to anyone besides the skeptics who want to destroy Christianity. Yet what will be so ironic about skeptical acceptance of such paltry evidence will basically be that it will involve cynics swallowing many basis Christian beliefs (such as the Bible's reliability and the existence of Jesus) that they have always sneerfully eschewed."

Akinola Threatens Canterbury

Most coverage of the Anglican crisis paints it as a matter of the Global South, led by Peter Akinola, versus the Episcopal Church, led by Katherine Jefferts Schori. But click the link to see a different perspective, from a Somali newspaper.

Briefly, Bonny Apunyu treats the South's ultimatum as a threat to break unity not only with the US province, but also with the Church of England itself. She quotes Akinola to this effect, although not in any detail.

Western reports have assumed that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will be able to negotiate some series of compromises, in which the unity of the Anglican Communion is largely preserved, even if the status of the American church is greatly reduced. But if, in the view of the Africans, even the English church is hopelessly corrupted by gay-tolerating liberal modernism, it is entirely possible that in the near future, there will be two international "Anglican" communities, not in communion with each other -- one led by England, the other by Nigeria.

This possibility raises any number of questions. Is it "Anglican" if it out of communion with England? But the one that piques our interst concerns the conservative Americans. If they are forced to choose between communion with the Mother Church and accommodation to theology they consider heretical, most will surely choose the latter. It is a matter of principle, after all.

But the residual Englishness of Anglicanism is no small matter, and one must suspect that many Episcopalians, perhaps even more in the pews than the pulpits, will be reluctant to surrender the formal connection to Canterbury. This means that the American schism -- predicted to involve something like a quater of the church -- could be considerably reduced. Or the schismatics might divide amongst themselves, both sides agreed that they can't live with the Episcopalians, but one nonethless able to keep its ties to England.

Our Favorite Nixon Staffer

In our misspent youth, it was Liddy. These days -- much as we like John "Worse Than Watergate" Dean -- it's Ben Stein. Why? Well, he used to be the host of a terrific, and funny, game show. That wins him points. But the main attraction is his Times business-section column, which we don't think gets nearly enough attention. Week after week, Stein applies his legal and economic smarts and his traditional (meaning pre-Reagan) values to the present world. Often, he does it with the mordant wit you remember from his show. But sometimes -- such as today's column -- he lets loose with a howl of moral outrage.

O tempora! O mores! Could Ben Stein be our nation's Cicero? You decide:

"Now, you remember how we were having those tax cuts for the very rich so they could invest more and make America grow? Remember that?

"Well, surprise! Some of that money is going to lavish Sweet 16 parties and $10 million bat mitzvahs, with Tom Petty and Kenny G and private jets flying the guests around. Five-hundred-thousand-dollar parties in New York and Malibu are no longer at all unusual. Even million-dollar parties for the rich are not out of the ordinary, according to the party planners on the [Donny Deutsch] show.

"...Is this what America is all about? We’re in a war and we cut taxes to stimulate the economy — and it probably did — and we are having million-dollar parties at home while our soldiers are paid starvation wages to offer up their lives in Iraq? We’re in a war and the government cannot afford to pay for adequate training for our soldiers, but the society at home is routinely having million-dollar weddings and bar mitzvahs?
"
"Can anyone say 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'?"

Neo-Nazi Fears Extraterrestrial Invasion

Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of France's ultra-rightist National Front, has begun to present himself as an environmentalist.

According to Le Monde, Le Pen has promised that, if elected, he will be "the president who ... goes to the UN General Assembly to boldly propose shared management of of planetary property," by which he means water, food, medicine and education.

On the surface, it sounds like typical French grandiosity -- a centralized economy for everybody! He goes so far as to say that this plan would mark a French "return to the global scene." Yes, we get it -- Old Europe still feels marginalized because Certain People wouldn't listen to them about a Certain Middle Eastern Country. But upon reflection, we think there is more going on here than meets the eye. Le Pen is following the advice of his advisors, including who Jean-Claude Martinez, who have asked for "a more planetary vision."

Internationalism and ecology aren't traditional talking points for the right wing in any nation, are they? What those guys care about is race or, in its new variation, immigration. So when Le Pen and his ilk start talking about a "planetary vision," it can only mean one thing: they want to protect our whole planet -- from immigrants.

I'm thinking Klingons. Or maybe Romulans.

George Bush, Sodomite

According to a new biography of Ariel Sharon, President Bush once told the former Israeli premier that, if he ever caught up with Osama bin Laden, "I'll screw him in the ass."

I hope that Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria never hears about this. His branch of Anglicanism has a very firm policy against ass-screwing.

Amazon Apes

In my youth, feminists were accustomed to argue that, if only women were in charge, there would be no wars or violence. After all, they argued, women are by nature pacific and nurturing, while men are violent and aggressive.

Needless to say, this argument depended upon a Victorian vision of women, dismissed by later versions of feminist theory as "essentialist." Apart from matters of theory, it would have been politically inconvenient to advocate for assigning female soldiers to combat duty while maintaining that they were genetically averse to violence.

Well, no problem. It turns out that women may have invented weapons.

Such, at least, is the hypothesis emerging from recent studies of some chimpanzee populations, in which the meat is scarce, and the males are disinclined to share what they kill. The female chimps -- lacking the brawn of their male competitors -- sharpen sticks with their teeth, and use them as spears. Apparently, the boys aren't bright enough to figure this out.

When is 100-Year Sentence Too Short?

When the crime is the gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by an American soldier.

According to his guilty plea, Sgt. Paul Cortez, of the 101st Airborne was one of five US soldiers who took part in the premeditated violation of the girl in Mahmudiya. His conviction is the second so far; two more soldiers are awaiting courts-martial, while the accused ringleader -- who has been dicharged from the military -- will be tried in Federal court.

Apart from the horror of the crime, the thing that pisses us off here at the Egg is that, under the terms of his plea-bargan, Cortez does not get life in prison, but a 100-year sentence. Under military sentencing rules, he could be out on parole in 10 years.

I'm sorry, Mister Cheney. Did you say we would be greeted as liberators?