Sheridan: Con-Law

CIVIL RIGHTS, RELIGION

Civil rights, or the religious right pushing its religious agenda, to lower the wall between church and state?

See the article below for the latest, an overview of how the Bush Administration, catering to its base, uses the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which previously went after racial discrimination in the workplace, in public accommodations, and in voting, but is now devoting its resources to making sure the fundamentalist message is pushed on listeners who were happy without it.

SCIENTISTS TALK TO GOLF BALLS

Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are two learned, clever, writers who take on religion, preferring to debunk it as irrational.

Which got me to thinking about why religion is so universally popular and non-religion, or non-belief is so universally unpopular.

Let me try this one on for size.  I think that the human brain is hard-wired to read order into a disparate jumble of facts.

We see faces in clouds.  In mountains.  We see stories in ink-blots.  It's called the Rorschach Ink-blot test.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, in "The Mind's Eye" (U.C. Press, 1995 +/-) postulates that we have in our brain a function which he calls "the interpreter," which impels us to tell stories that reconcile disparate facts or observations.  We have a need to tell a story that makes sense of any part of the world on which our attention is focused.  How does Gazzaniga know?  Because his study, in a field called, over the past few decades, cognitive neuroscience, tests individuals having, through disease or injury, the limited ability to use only one hemisphere of the brain.  These patients are shown pictures and asked to state what they purport to show, even when the objects in juxtaposition tell no tale to you and me.  The patients make up stories purporting to reconcile or explain them nevertheless.

How do we get children to stop asking questions we can't answer?  We make up stories about faeries and elves.  Goblins. Witches. Ghosts. Gods. Santa Claus. Saints. God.

I was reading the other day, I forget where, about sailors in the old days who believed that their sailing ships were living beings with personalities.  This goes beyond calling a ship "she."  This means talking to the ship, asking it to come through the storm, and speaking to the mast.  Please, don't interrupt; I'm addressing the hull.

One of the columnists, Rob Morse, wrote that his father was a scientist who liked to play golf with his friends.  "Get in the hole!" they'd shout at the ball, the way golfers often do.  You can hear it shouted by the gallery on the TV whenever Tiger Woods tries to make a putt.  Like the ball is going to obey.

The world is a complex place.  All sorts of bad things happen.  Accidents, natural disasters, competing murderous tribes.  Who are you going to place your faith in?  Some god that you have to make up?  Or nothing?  The Great Nothing just doesn't cut any ice around here.

Sure religion may be irrational, and certain people may be a bit off the deep end in believing that God gave them a patch of oil-less desert instead of the middle of North America, but that's the way people are.  Given a choice between believing in something or nothing, which would you choose?  Well, that's what they chose.

The problem of the world is to reconcile irrationality with this wonderful tool that we also use to survive, rationality.  Rationality helps us to recognize how to avoid getting killed yet again by that tiger hiding in the grass, and not to be fooled by the various disguises and deceptions adopted by those who would do us in, including ourselves.

Rationality provides all the new technology.  Fantasy sells it to us.  They have new cars now that park themselves.  Mirrors and infra-red or other waves, I understand.  Do you know how many automobiles have been manufactured since the Model T?  A lot.  Do you know how many drivers have learned to park properly?  A lot.  Do we need a car that will propel itself back and forth into a parking space?  No.  But they're selling it to us.  Suddenly, the ads say, you can't live without it.  I can live without it.  Even if God did the parking, I hate back seat drivers.  I'll park the car myself or quit driving.

What do you do if you find faith in supernatural beings a bit irrational?  Lecture the believer?  That is even nuttier.  What you need to do is to engage in a little paradoxical intervention.  You accept the belief and put it to work to achieve a sane result.

Here's paradoxical intervention.  Mental patient believes he's Napoleon and won't clean his room.  Yelling at him won't help.  Telling him that all great generals keep a clean room just might work.

God can be a force for good or evil.  "No, young man; God says you mustn't murder."  That's good.

Part of the problem for people such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett is that people want to believe what they want to believe.  No amount of mere reasoning is going to persuade a committed religionist that he's misguided.  Religion is his friend and salvation.  Much better to encourage this person to behave in a morally acceptable manner.  This is the problem of course.  What's morally acceptable to a suicide-bomber who thinks he's going to Paradise may be different than what a Jewish or Christian person thinks will earn his way into Heaven.

I get tired thinking about it.

Perhaps we should spend more effort in learning how to leave each other alone better.

MENORAHS & OTHER CHRISTMAS PARAPHERNALIA ON GOVERNMENT PREMISES

When Christians want to put Nativity scenes at City Hall, or Crosses on hills overlooking cities, or the Ten Commandments in the lobby of courthouses, I just figure they want to show everyone how wonderful Christianity is, and look, even the government agrees, because look where we've put our symbols.  Therefore you, too, should consider adopting Christianity as your religion because, look, if we're all for it, and the government is, too, then why do you want to be different?  Is there something wrong with you?  Don't you support your country?  Aren't you patriotic?

I grew up during the Cold War when the enemy was a man called Joe Stalin and he was truly the devil incarnate.  He told President Kim of North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950 and Kim did.  Next thing you know, we were at war to stop, or contain Communism.  In the meantime, we had our hands full in Europe trying to build up NATO to prevent Stalin from marching his divisions west to take over Germany, as he had Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.  But France wouldn't let us re-arm divided Germany, the part which went to the West, because France had troops in Indochina (Vietnam), and didn't want a Germany which had more troops in Europe than France.  NATO existed on paper at that time, a treaty with no troops.

Communism was Godless.  We had God on our side.  That's why they changed the Pledge in 1954, to make us school-kids say "under God" when we said the Pledge in school every day.  "Under God" busted up the meter.  The U.S. was suddenly a religion, a church.

Jewish kids didn't like to sing all the hymns we sang in public school.  It seemed unfair to make Jewish kids sing Christian prayers.  They didn't make Christian kids sing Jewish hymns.

Later, to make things seem fair, they'd have a minister, priest, or rabbi say an invocation at graduation each year, taking turns.  This was supposed to make things all right, but it only made it worse.  There's nothing like having an audience which is 98% Christian, or non-Jewish, hold still while a rabbi chants an invocation in Hebrew, followed by the translation.  Everyone is on their best behavior, keeping respectfully silent, and, I suppose, hoping, can't we get on with it?  But we had to balance the ticket, just as in politics in New York, the Democratic party had to run a slate consisting of an Irish name, an Italian name, and a Jewish name.  That way you got the vote of the three biggest ethnic groups in New York City.  Lord knows what they did upstate, but I doubt it was that.

When activist, or what I call militant Christians succeed in placing their religious symbols in public places, it seems to me that they are overstepping the Constitutional guaranty that prohibits the establishment of religion by government.  Our historical and constitutional tradition, which extends back to the religious wars in England (Protestant vs. Catholic), the religious wars on the Continent (ditto), and into Old Testament territory (Pharaoh vs. the Jews, the Babylonians vs. the Jews, and the Romans vs. the Jews), give all of us in the western tradition object lessons in religious repression, which we do not wish to repeat, for all of the slaughter.

So we have good reason to call fair and foul when any religious sect seeks to enlist the government on its side to the exclusion of others, or even if others are not excluded.  If it is wrong for Christians, militant or activist variety, to place their symbols on public property as though obtaining a religious or political advantage, it is just as wrong, silly, and foolish for other religions, sects, or denominations to seek the same advantage.  Instead of having one violation of the non-Establishment clause, we have two violations.

Which brings us to Fort Collins, Colorado, where, since the activist Christians have succeeded in placing their symbols at City Hall for Christmas, activist Jews have said, what about us?  We've got this menorah that we'd like to put up, too.  Our holiday falls around Christmas and what's sauce for the goose, right?  Wrong.  If you don't like the militant Christians playing fast and loose with the non-Establishment clause, why follow suit?  The rabbi's attitude ought to be, imho, let the Christians play their games, we're not falling into that trap.

But maybe the rabbi wants to let the community know that Christianity isn't the only game in town, that Jews live here too. 

Then put up a sign that says, Jews live in America, and Ft. Collins, too.  We stand up for the Constitutional guaranty of no establishment of religion.  We don't need the United States, or the City of Fort Collins to endorse our faith.  We were here before the U.S. got started, and we'll probably be around after it has become history.  Five thousand years in business is nothing to sneeze at.  This is the year 5767 according to the Hebrew calendar, incidentally.  I didn't mean to shortchange God's chosen people by over seven centuries, but I'll take it up with the big guy when I'm trying to sneak through the line.  I wonder whether he'll let me put up an American flag over the pearly gates.

I do expect Jews to be a bit cleverer than what I'm seeing in Ft. Collins.  A tip of the hat to the bar owner, however.

Below is the article on Fort Collins from today's Sunday N.Y. Times.

The menorah, incidentally, winds up on the grounds of a bar, where you can go in, have a beer, and cogitate on such things, which, I suggest, is a much better place, and thing to do, than to have it over at City Hall, where people get stirred up over such things.

CHRISTIAN NATION...ILLUSORY WORLD

The key to creating an illusory world is

a biased selection of facts

according to

a preconceived notion.

                                            Thomas Sowell

"Through a Glass Darkly, How the Christian right is re-imagining U.S. history," by Jeff Sharlet, in the December, 2006, Harper's Magazine examines how religious fundamentalists look for signs that their God influences our history.

The first question I'd like to ask is why large groups of people in this day and age have the need to understand the world in terms of God causing wars, or being on our side (never the other guy's), or getting the credit for winning them.

What these folks do, actually, is to look for signs of God's influence and once they've made them up, they credit God with the victory or accomplishment.

By reinterpreting our history as an act of God, and not of men, the religious right hopes to control the future.  This is not just some abstract theological discussion because the fundamentalists, as many of them are also called, support private schools, Sunday schools, and try to get their religious beliefs into the public schools.  They mount efforts to require the teaching of evolution as science.  Until the mid-term election of November, 2006, resulting in a debacle for Bush, the war in Iraq, and the religious right as a political movement, or so it appears, Bush's fundamentalist base had the power to influence judicial selections and government policy on abortion and stem cell research.  With the Democrats in control in both houses of Congress, we may see a different wind blowing.

Why does the religious right reinterpret history in terms of God making his presence felt?  According to the author, they cite Orwell's 1984, "Those who control the past control the future."  The corollary is that those who control the present control the past.  This is an example of the victor writing history.

After the Whigs in England succeeded in beheading Charles I and overthrowing his too Catholic successor James II, in 1688, replacing him with the Protestant William of Orange, an import from the Netherlands, they wrote up the story as though it were inevitable and God's will that all history until then were pointing in the direction of this victory.  Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England  is the great example.  As a result, to call a historical study no better than a piece of "Whig history" is to call it false, i.e. based on a logical fallacy.  It assumes that history is a thing which has a mind of its own and is capable of moving in one direction or another.

History, I believe, comes from the same root as "story."  History is the story we tell of our past in order to make sense of what otherwise would be a chaotic mess of facts.  Wars are messy and can be lost, or won, as much by chance as planning.  The winner of a war is the side which comes better prepared and makes fewer mistakes.  Both sides in a war make mistakes.  Supplies don't reach the front, soldiers don't get fed, ammunition fizzles, leaders do stupid things, intelligence is wanting, soldiers lose heart, panic, and flee, etc.  The list is endless.  It must seem an act of God when enough things go right that your side actually wins. 

Putting victory on God is like the person who survives a bad automobile or airplane crash.  "Thank God I survived, this person says.  Where was God before the crash, I wonder?

"Providential historians," is how the author terms those who see the hand of God in the committee and war work required to found this nation.  Christian history makes for a Christian, not a secular, nation.

The problem is that there are so many willing to put their faith in the supernatural.  I think they believe that God lives in the White House, where George W. Bush and the others talk to Him.  The problem with this is that if Bush gets it into his head that we need to invade another country, well, then this must be the right thing to do because, well, doesn't he get the straight word from God hisself?

Relying on God to justify policy choices is usually a bad thing.  God was in favor of Negro enslavement.  I don't know why, but he was.  All the ministers in the South and almost all the ministers in the North before the Civil War believed and taught that slavery was the will of God.  Even Jesus didn't protest against slavery.  What was the matter with Jesus, I wonder?  The Abolitionists out-Jesused Jesus.  Beat him at his own game.  Imagine.

Does God live down at the tax office, you know, the I.R.S.?  Over at the U.S. Attorney's Office?  The U.S. Post Office? The F.B.I.?  The D.E.A.? The C.I.A.? This would be a surprise, indeed.  Is God winning the war for us in Iraq?  How come we didn't find the WMD?

Are these signs that God doesn't control our policy, our destiny?  Isn't God on Bush's side?  Any longer?  When did He split for the Democratic Party, otherwise known as the party of the devil.

Maybe we really are, as the Iranians like to call us, the Great Satan.  As though God, or Allah, were on their side.

I don't geddit.  Didn't Nazi soldiers have "Gott Mit Uns" embossed on their belt-buckles?  They did.  "God is with us."  They lost to the Godless Americans.  Or semi-Godless.  Not all of us was fighting for God and country when country alone was enough.  Pearl Harbor, after all, was an attack on warships, not churches.

The key to finding God in human events is a biased selection according to a preconceived notion.  This is Thomas Sowell's quintessential illusory world.

We live in an illusory world to the extent we regard it as controlled by the god of the Christians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else for that matter.  Regarding Israel, Jews believe that God promised them this land 5,000 years ago.  Great, say the Palestinians, but not our land.  The result is the Middle East, where it is said that if Jerusalem were obliterated by a nuclear bomb, leaving a big hole in the ground, the fight would be over who controlled the wholly holy hole.

Religion is a wonderful thing, properly confined.

Religion can be one of the most powerful, and dangerous, world-views if we aren't paying attention to what its adherents are trying to accomplish and how they go about it.

So much for Christian history, Whig history, and religion-directed history.

How should we understand the story of our creation as a nation and as the descendants of a long line of other humans who didn't have the benefit of the tribal and other gods of the Christians (2006 years) and of the Jews (5,700+ years)?

If you're going to write history, to tell the story, you might just try telling the truth about how things happened.  Tell the good stuff and the not so good.  Once you start telling the story according to your preconceived notion, you're lying already.

Richard Feynman, the god of investigators, reminds us that doubt is a good thing.  It inspires us to look further.  The first principle, he says, is that you must not fool yourself, but remember, you are the easiest person to fool.  Why is that?  Because you want to believe, on some level, whether you admit it or not, and as soon as you favor one result of investigation over another, guess what?  You're a sitting duck to be duped by someone else, or, more likely, yourself.  No one else may be able to fool you, but that still lives one big opening.  You.  You are more likely to fool yourself than any other person.  That's why there are so many divorces.  Too many bought the sizzle, not the steak.  Romance, we call it.  Fantasy.  Advertising, Hollywood, and Politics are built of it.

But you knew all this, right?

So be careful what you believe, and don't take any wooden nickels, as a wise old dad used to tell us kids.

GOD DOESN'T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN GOD DO

If the world weren't run by people who say they believe in God, the question whether he/she or it is actually responsible for all the atrocities occurring in he/she/its name wouldn't be worth blogging about, but they believe and we need to think, to survive.

Why don't I see any movies in which the fate of the world depends on whether the hero uses his noodle as opposed to rubbing his plaster saint?  Maybe the role of Han Solo in Star Wars was as the rational being.

Richard Dawkins doesn't have anything nice to say about God in his works, which you can get a sulferous taste of here.

NAILING IT

The New York Times Letters-to-the-Editor section today (Oct. 10, 2006) contained some observations on religion in America that I've copied below not only because they're so perceptive, but because they are stated so well.  If you'd like to give yourself a challenge, think of some problematic situation in the nation, or world, that you're unhappy with, and describe it in writing as briefly and clearly as these folks, below.

ZARATHUSTRA

The Freedom of Mind Amendment, also called the First, includes the free exercise of religion and the non-establishment of religion.

Religion is a huge part of the human condition.  Has been for a long time.  We're no exception.

So we think about religion a lot, and note the interesting news reports.

What do you know about Zoroastrianism?  A lot?  Good.  I didn't.

But I saw the article in the Times this morning and couldn't resist posting it here.

This was a Persian religion from before the time of the Muslims, the Christians, and the Jews.  Old.  It's an old religion.  All the ancient Persians, the people who spoke Parsis, or Pharsee, you know, what they speak in Iran (modern Persia) and parts of Afghanistan, today.

Some say that the Jews borrowed the idea of one God from these folks.  That's BIG.

Today we measure your worth by whether you worship one God, who you sleep with and what you eat.  Can you imagine a gay Frenchman who worshiped multiple Gods?  You'd have an Italian.  Or a Brit.

There are people who still follow the Prophet Zarathustra, or as the article notes, Zoroaster in Greek.

What strikes me is not that a small number of people still follow an ancient religion, but that it is in danger of dying out, like the ancient Greek gods, that everyone, in one place, believed in at one time.

What does that say about religion and God?

How can a religion and its God die out?

Do Americans worry about their God dying?

I don't think so.

Time Magazine once ran a cover story proclaiming "God is Dead."  You'd have thought something happened.  Nothing happened, except that people got upset.  "Santa Claus is Dead," might've been worse, disappointing the kids.

What I don't understand is how God can let his religion die.  And why he needs missionaries.

My God can't die.  I've imbued Him (it's a him this week because I'm a sexist pig) with immortality, no matter what the editors over at Time say. 

My God doesn't need missionaries, either.  My God writes in lightning.  Has his own Internet.  He wants to get message out, he smites something.  We get the message.  Don't fool with Ralph.  That's his name around here.  Elsewhere you can call him anything you like, hurl invective at him, take his name in vain, the works.  I've given him a thick skin.  Also his followers.  We don't care what you do, you can't hurt Him.  He's impervious.  And deaf, like a stone.  I don't talk to Him, he doesn't talk to me.  He'd think I was nuts talking to a god creature.  The rest of us think it's normal, so I'm keeping my mouth shut.

How come Zoroaster/Zarathustra didn't know he was going to die out, I wonder?

You think that could happen to the Baptists or the Presbyterians?  The Lutherans?  The Church of the Latter Day Saints?  Talk about your missionaries.  I don't think so, not this year.

I guess that clinches it.  Gods need missionaries.

My idea is that any God who needs missionaries is no real God.

A God who needs missionaries is like a Gypsy who tells fortunes but wonders whether she's going to get any real money from you and not get arrested for theft.  Why go through the process if you already know the future?  Going through the process is like denying the reality of what you profess to believe, or believe in, isn't it?

So I was sorry to hear about Zoroaster, and the folks who are left believing in what he stands for.  He stands not only for one God, but a view of the world that says it is divided into good and bad AND a final day of judgment.

Judgment day!  That's Zoroastrian.  Cor blimey!  I didn't know that.  Did you?

That's terrific.  He is us.

The world isn't divided into good and bad.  It's divided into sane and insane.

I'm sane.  It's you I'm not too sure about.

Sanity, like credibility, is always in issue, as the evidence teachers like to say.  They say that about credibility.  Other things may be irrelevant in court, but never credibility.

I prosecuted a rape case.  The defense attorney asked the young woman whether she believed in marriage.  I objected to the question.  Of course she didn't believe in marriage.  She was French.

The judge, who was Greek, and an old friend of the defense attorney, overruled the objection.  He wanted to hear the answer.  He must've thought the defense attorney was onto something.

She said she didn't.  Oops.  There goes the case, I thought.  The jury convicted the defendant of rape.  The judge gave him probation.  All the other rapists went to prison. Not him.  Raping a woman who didn't believe in marriage wasn't as bad as raping one who did, I guessed.  He picked his victim.  Lucky.  Lucky as to the judge and the defense attorney, too, come to think of it.

It's important what you believe in, eat, and sleep with.  You could lose your case, you don't watch out.

So, believe in what you want, but watch what you say.

Otherwise they'll call you an Al Qaeda, or a Commie Pinko, or a Liberal with a capital "l".  Right here, in America.  Rumsfeld called his critics Fascists the other day.  Here's a guy who has critics like Gibraltar has barnacles.  And they're all fascists.  Very good, Rummy. 

Both parties are gunning for Rummy.  This is a mistake.  Rummy isn't the problem.  It's the people holding up Rummy.  Bush, Cheney and Rice.  Rummy is just one leg of the chair.  You want to get rid of the chair you don't get rid of one leg, you get rid of all four. 

Rummy has more staying power than Zoroaster.

The article is below.

My consolation is that if the God of Zoroaster knew how it was going to all turn out, he wasn't disappointed.  Neither should his followers.  We have other religions.  Same ideas.  Is this a big loss?  Like a species dying out?  Maybe there's something else to religion about whether your God is real or not, or what powers you give him or he gives you.  I wonder if he was related to Zorro.

The God I really liked the best wore a red suit and landed next to chimneys on Christmas Eve, handing out presents.  I was disappointed when a big kid told me I was nuts to believe in that.  How was I to know he was right.  I never did like that kid.

USING GOD PROPERLY FOR NATIONAL PURPOSES

Discussing the mis-use of God in national life in the post below, I referred to Lincoln's invocation of God in a way that is very different than the way George W. Bush uses God to rally the troops.

America is a bit of a church, it seems, and our president is a bit like the Pope, the chief spokesman for the God of our church. 

The attributes of God generally are those which the audience reads into the word, which means that there can be up to 300 million versions of God, which the president doesn't care so long as you support his efforts with votes, money, and warm bodies to destroy the enemy. 

The American God rocks, and God works to win elections and wars.  With a God like that, you can't lose, except perhaps when you win.

Our God out-nukes our nukes, and sometimes guides them.

Lincoln didn't act like this.  He was a most religious man in the best sense.  He was humble before his lord, and didn't try to lord it over others. He didn't ask God to continue to uphold Lincoln's winning side in the ongoing Civil War.  Lincoln told both sides they'd been wrong and were paying for their sins.

Lincoln's words are carved into the right wall of his monument in Washington.  I have a nice photo of my son Ted reading them during a visit.

...Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"

If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.

Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Father Abraham, as the northern troops referred to President Lincoln, as the Chief Spokesman for, and to, the Almighty, for the nation, is recognizing that both North and South have erred badly in tolerating slavery.  Lincoln's God, the nation's, is a just God, otherwise why have God?  No just God could have permitted this American Holocaust. 

The Civil War was a most terrible war.  Israel lost eight soldiers the other day in its fight against Hezbollah, and this is a national tragedy for Israel, a tiny country where people are connected to each other and each soldier is a national loss.  In our Civil War we would lose 20,000 soldiers in a day, call up another 500,000 draftees, and keep fighting.  Six-hundred thousand deaths, all told, both sides, soldier and civilian, in a country much less populated than today.

Lincoln was war-weary.  He'd had a terrible war.  His son died in the White House of disease.  His wife was mad.  He was lonely.  He'd lacked the support of his generals in defeat after defeat.  He was unpopular.  Half the country walked out when he was elected.  His own party was split.  But for Atlanta falling at the last minute, he was ready to be voted out.  He'd aged terribly.  He'd experienced terrible depression. He knew the country he led. And he didn't become a saint until after he died, a few weeks after this address, the victim of assassination by a Southern die-hard.

Lincoln the mortal man said these words about God and about this nation's proper relation to God.  Lincoln didn't brandish God like a sword, the way Hitler did, engraving "Gott Mit Uns" on soldier belt buckles, God is With Us.

Lincoln tells the country that if God wants every lash with the slaver's whip repaid in the country's blood, well, God is a just God and we must have it coming for our sins.

In the meantime, let us do right as we understand what is right (because God isn't telling), let us end the war, and then bind up the nations wounds and care for the widow and orphan of the soldiers who fought the battles.  Despite great malice between foes, Lincoln, the arch-priest of the land, says we must have malice toward none and charity for all.  We must try to achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and all nations.

As the uses of God go, this is the best.  Lincoln is trotting out no idol, no plaster saint.  You can still imagine the God you wish, but he is not an angry, partisan, capricious tyrant, not as Lincoln wants you to envision him.

Just as you, as a citizen, have the right to define what you mean by justice, liberty, freedom, due process of law, equal protection of law, so do you have the right to determine what you mean by God.  You can believe in an evil tyrant Superman of a God, or you can shoot for something a lot better, something that works.  I don't think any serving president has any greater right, or insight, into who, or what God is, than do you or I.  To the extent we let ambitious political leaders re-define God in any image that suits their purpose, we have abdicated our sense of who we are as individuals and as a nation, just as the imams who preach suicide bombings in a mosque anywhere in the world. 

We wonder how the mullahs can persuade the faithful to blow themselves and innocent people up.  They tell them that God wills it.  And the listeners pay attention to the mullahs, for they have given up their power to think for themselves who, or what, God is and wants.

This is not something we want to do ourselves, is it?

Remember that in a democracy, we get to write our own laws.  Well, now it seems that unless we take control of the idea of God, our own mullahs and imams will do it for us.  So perhaps we should wake up and take God back, rather than leave him in the hands of our own Taliban leaders, of whom we have plenty, every bit as dangerous as those leading Al Qaeda if given their way.

In a democracy run as a theocracy, we'd better take care of God, meaning we must control what attributes we think are good and let the rest go to the enemy.

Your choice is Lincoln's God, or Bush's God.  Bush tends to favor the God of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. 

Why not list the attributes you want to see in God to see how they stack up. 

You might find out what you really believe.

You can do this, you know.  It's what preachers do for you all the time.  They tell you what God is like and what he wants.  But God is in you.  You control whether God will tell you to behave in a just manner or an unjust manner.  This is why so many evildoers say that God told them to do it.  Why don't you say what a just God tells you and the nation to do.  I'd prefer to trust you than some evildoer, wouldn't you?

WHY DON'T WE JUST CALL OURSELVES A CHURCH?

Wouldn't it be simpler to just call ourselves the First National Church of Christ Scientist or something instead of pretending that God isn't running the show?

Under God

In God We Trust

All Others Pay Cash

Jesus Saves

Moses Invests

We're a nation of bumper-stickers, only they're being stuck in our schools, on our money, and spread as graffiti on our walls.

I recall overhearing a conversation in high school between a couple of students, about Jewish people.  Jews as you know have the unfortunate practice of maintaining their identity by adopting manners of dress, eating, prayer, expression, humor, and thought that set themselves apart from the general run of white-bread humanity, such as the students I was hearing as a bunch of us walked to the bus stop on Staten Island a heartbeat ago, or a little more.

"Why do they have to be different?  Why can't they be like everyone else?" one girl asked another.

"Good question," I thought.

Why can't Jews be Christians and indistinguishable from the rest, I wondered.

Maybe it's because they want to.

Maybe it's because in America, Jews have the right to.

Maybe it's because to become indistinguishable from the other idiots is a fate worse than death.

Maybe it's because Jews have been subjected to this sort of so-called reasoning for a long time, and have more or less successfully resisted, some becoming martyrs to their identity, faith, culture, religion, or however one characterizes this large group of mothers, fathers, kids, workers, farmers, business people, artists, writers, prophets, etc.

These high school girls were giving voice to a not uncommon frustration, based on an argument that must run something like this:  "We're Christian.  We run the world.  The world is a pretty terrific place, in the place where Christians run the show, that is.  Why wouldn't everyone want to be just like us?  They should be like us.  Let's encourage them to be like us.  Let's make them be like us."

Isn't that how it goes unless and until someone says, "Wait, stop, you can't do that?  That's the Hitler road, not America's road?  We've seen this before and it is not a very good idea at all?"

The problem with that sort of thinking is that it is self-centered, arrogant, thoughtless, proud of something  not created by you, ignorant of the many bad roads down which this thinking can lead, and of the many good roads alternative thinking encourages, plus all of the reasons you can add to this list.

Had I been part of the conversation among the students, and the presence of mind, it might have been good to ask what made them think this way, and what they thought the implications were.  Probably just as well I kept my peace.  But I've remembered the incident for close to half a century.

Meanwhile, I've seen the new Woody Allen movie, Scoop, starring Scarlett Johansson, which I enjoyed because I get a kick out of funny guys from Brooklyn and beautiful actresses like Ms. J.  "I was born into the Hebrew persuasion," he says in the movie, "but I converted later to narcissism."

Meanwhile in Seattle yesterday, a lone gunman entered a Jewish Community Center and shot five people, with a woman dying.  People go to the JCC to use the pool, the gym, to send their kids to summer day camp, or to sit around and talk or listen to a discussion.  The gunman, it is said, was unhappy with the war between Israel and Hizbollah. 

Seattle, Lebanon.

It doesn't take much, does it, before the guns come out.

The First Amendment Center has an article on the "In God We Trust" motto on our coins, added fifty years ago to teach those Godless commies that they can't mess with God-fearing Americans who know what's right.

I wonder what the Commies put on their coins.  In Marx we trust?  Lenin?

Well, you can see who won that battle, so I guess God is on our side, as well as our coins.

What a great idea.  What a country!

And of course there's Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady," singing his paean to male supremacy, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?  Why can't a woman be more like us?"

Which is a helluva question, now that I think about it.

PREACHING IN PUBLIC SCHOOL

We have freedom of religion in America, right?  Not so fast.

You can send your child to public school and not have to worry about religious people making him feel bad by preaching some other religion, right?  Not so fast.

Suppose you don't live in a major metropolis such as New York City where this sort of think is at a minimum but in a small town in the Bible Belt where the whole town is Southern Baptist, say, and the parents, teachers, school administrators and students are all that religion.  Must your kid, assuming that you are of a different faith or no faith, put up with what you consider this illegal superstition or nonsense?

And what are you going to do about it?

I can tell you that among your choices is to be run out of town.

That's what happened to Mrs. Dobrich, in Delaware, who was forced to flee from Georgetown to Wilmington, Delaware, when the prevailing Christian group acted, like, well, Christians and brought their evangelizing into the public schools.  Mrs. Dobrich is orthodox Jewish and so are her kids.  It wasn't comfortable for them to be ridiculed by students and left unprotected by the administration as the student ceremonies such as graduation went forward in the name of the lord of some, Jesus.

This is the sort of symbolic activity that the First Amendment's Establishment of Religion clause is supposed to protect against.  But the Christians in town feel that they are guaranteed the Free Exercise of their religion, including in 'their,' meaning the public schools.

There's a whole series of cases on this from Everson v. Ewing Township, New Jersey (1942), to Schempp v. Abington School District, to Lee v. Weisman, to Simmons v. Zelman-Harris, which try, not very successfully, it seems, to get the Christians, mainly, the major trouble-makers in this regard, to please cut it out. And let's not forget the two recent Ten Commandments decisions, Perry and McCleary.  You can find these cases either by going to the Supreme Court page of Findlaw.com or by Googling this site on those names.

The Christians, however, see it as their religious duty, commanded in their New Testament, to preach, evangelize, and otherwise promote the good-word, the good spiel, the good spell, the word a' God, the gospel.  Missionaries!  In the public schools.

Do we have police officers whose duty it is to keep separate church and public school?  No.  You have to complain to the school authorities who have to check the political pulse of their voting supporters in the district.  There are always more religious missionaries in small towns than people seeking protection.

When the school board fails to respond according to law, you get lawsuits like the Dobrich case in Delaware, below.  The school district could have consulted counsel for advice early in the game, but now will have to pay the price of litigation.  This is a piecemeal process reminiscent of our experience with racial segregation.  As long as blacks had to sue to gain admission to the better all white public schools, which is how Thurgood Marshall made his name in the 'Fifties and earlier, leading up to Brown v. Board (1954) (See Richard Kluger's "Simple Justice," for the account.) there was little progress.

It was not until 1957 when the first Civil Rights law since Reconstruction passed under the leadership of  Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, Democrat of Texas, and presidential hopeful, that a Civil Rights Division was established in the U.S. Department of Justice to put the government behind the people who had the civil rights and were being deprived of them that any teeth were put in the constitutional right of equal protection of law.  Now the government could bring the lawsuit, not some poor black parent struggling to make ends meet.

Do we have a federal office of religious rights empowered to receive complaints, approach offending school districts, and bring federal lawsuits, or must we rely forever on the American Civil Liberties Union to carry our water?  I thought that the United States was the original American civil liberties union.

Maybe we need to get cracking to get religion out of the public school arena, and that includes the before and after school activities using school property, the athletic contests, and the graduation ceremonies and assemblies.

The USDOJ Office of Civil Rights does take some interest in policing alleged religious violations where access to benefits of federally funded programs are denied on the basis of religious discrimination, but suppose cases like that of Mrs. Dobrich arise out of schools not receiving federal subsidies?  Then she's on her own and must approach the ACLU.  No, I'm not suggesting that the government purchase the ACLU.   I'm suggesting that it start its own.

to be empowered and funded by Congressional legislation to police the districts.

Do I expect this to happen right away?  Let's see, it's been 50 years since Brown v. Board and we're told that there is more racial segregation now in the public schools than there was then.  So the answer is no, I don't.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do the right thing.

It is of interest to me how we compartmentalize constitutional law such that we cherry-pick the doctrines we prefer to the exclusion of the rest.  The South loved the so-called 'states rights' doctrine that reserved undelegated power to the states under Art. I, Sec. 8, Clauses 1-18, and the Ninth Amendment. 

Some folks love the Second Amendment mis-interpretation which they think gives them the right to keep and bear arms outside of joining the state militia. 

And others think that religious freedom for them is hunky-dory, but not for you, heathen that you are and deserving of no legal consideration whatsoever.

Welcome to America!