Greg Sanders

Dublin – St. Patrick’s and Temple Bar

We visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral twice during our trip.  The first time was just walking the grounds after arriving on an early morning flight.  The second time we paid to go in.  The donation required was a bit steep, particularly since the store had closed and for various reasons that was one of my main reasons for going.  Oh well.

The cathedral itself was rather unique.  In addition to a plethora of statues and various other pieces of art, it had no small number of flags, usually martial in origin, that in many cases were so old they were quite threadbare.  Seeing them like that had a definite power to it, almost like viewing a ruin.  I do think that American memorials should probably make more use of ruins when the commemorate the victims of some destructive act.  Symbolism can be powerful, but it is very difficult to match the psychology effect of seeing that which remains and not an abstract version of it.  I am a definite fan of the Vietnam memorial, but for 9/11 I think we would probably have been better served by keeping more of the remains of the buildings themselves.

On a less portentous note, two interesting fact about St. Patrick’s.  First, unlike the one in New York, it is not a Roman Catholic cathedral.  St. Patrick far predated the breakaway of the Church of England, so this isn’t a huge surprise really if you think about it.  Second, the most famous deans of the cathedral was Jonathan Swift.

After visiting the cathedral we wandered around Temple Bar and had dinner at a crepe place.  There were a fair number of buskers in Temple Bar as well as at the pedestrian mall at Grafton street.  Generally speaking they were all pretty good and got a few coins from me.  There were also a fair number of homeless people around, not more than I see in DC but more than I expected.  They also tended to look younger than I typically see back home.  Also, as a quick factual footnote, we actually rode the light rail after seeing the cathedral, but I don’t think this chronological aberration is really a huge deal.

Muslim Brotherhood will be at Obama’s Speech in Cairo

This excellent news was comes from Al-Arabiya via the Project on Middle East Democracy.  Here’s the summary by Max:

Al-Arabiya has just reported that, under pressure from the United States, the Secretariat-General of the lower house of the Egyptian Parliament invited ten members of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc to attend Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo on Thursday.

The delegation will include Dr. Saad Al Katatni, leader of the bloc, who said that the invitation “came as a compromise solution between the American administration and the Egyptian government, considering that there is increasing pressure on the administration from the American press on the necessity of meeting with all members of opposition and other influential forces…”

In other good news, Brotherhood members are being allowed to return to the legal bar.  Katatni credited the administration’s actions to pressure from the U.S. press.  Regardless of the motivation, this is excellent news.  The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist movement, as one might expect, but a non-violent one despite oppression from the government.  I don’t think that even with 5 billion some dollars in aid a year to Egypt we’re really in a position to suddenly democratize the country, but we could do a lot more to work by getting over fears of Islamists. 

I’m now much less worried about the Cairo speech.  If this is how they’re setting it up, than the administration might find a way to balance dignity and democracy support after all.  We’ll know for sure on the fourth.

Legends of the Fall

Douthat has been doing some ruminating on Christianity and Darwin.  The short version is that evolution’s greatest challenge to Christianity isn’t that it explains the origins of humans.  Instead, the problem is the extent of violence and suffering inherent in the mechanism.  Also, for any that put even symbolic weight on the Garden of Eden myth, the creative destruction of evolution precedes the ‘Fall’ of humanity. 

I tend towards subversive readings of Eden, though not to the extent that I feel the need to write stories in which my protagonists constantly eat apples or travel to Earth-like planets to destroy their apparent utopias.  That said, as was the case with David Plotz, I found that reading a good chunk of the Hebrew bible (and Revelations) was more than sufficient basis to completely undermine the idea that evil was something unique to fallen humans.

In any event, Douthat goes on to discuss how this gets handled in Christian fiction, notably by C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.  First he quotes a reader summarizing later Tolkein writings:

Tolkien says that Morgoth -- the original Satanic figure responsible for the fall of the elves and (implicitly and off camera) the fall of humans -- imbued the physical world with a large part of his evil essence: "Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus 'the whole of Middle-Earth was Morgoth's Ring'". This explains why, from the elvish point of view, death is the "gift of men" because it gives them a ticket out of the fallen, Morgoth-tainted world. The problem with this from a orthodox Christian perspective is that death is supposed to be the punishment for the Fall and not part of the solution for the Fall.

Douthat provides the C.S. Lewis example:

C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's fellow Christian fantasist, developed this theme in The Magician's Nephew, by having Jadis, Queen of Charn (and the future White Witch) consume the Narnian equivalent of the fruit of the tree of life, which comes equipped with the warning that anyone who eats of it under the wrong circumstances "will find their heart's desire and find despair." When Aslan is asked, later on, about the fruit's effect, he answers: "She has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery...."

This particular tact is perhaps one way to reconcile with death, it’s a way out of this troubled world.  That’s actually a view I associate with Buddhism more than anything else, enlightenment as a way to overcome suffering.  Buddhism, or at least some variants, are often thought to be one of the traditional religions that’s easiest to reconcile with scientific findings.

However, that interpretation, regardless of Christian or Buddhist origin, tends to leave me cold.  I love life.  I’ve experienced enough suffering to begin to understand why the day may come when I don’t feel that way.  But really, immortality mainly seems to be a curse when you’ve got the depredations of aging and no friends to share it with.  An outright evil heart may preclude that later but most of humanity manages.

Opposition Addition: The American Scene

The American Scene is a group blog, my favorite writers on it are Noah Millman and Reihan Salam (I also read a fair number of Peter Suderman's reviews).  Since it's a group blog with a changing cast it's no surprise that it can be a bit uneven at times, so caveat emperor there as with any group project.

I'd been meaning to add them for a while and a Millman piece I liked just came up, so now's as good a time as any.   He's responding commenting on the debate resulting from a Damon Linker post:

Linker’s whole project – “the liberal bargain” – rests on the proposition that absent a neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments you inevitably get social conflict. I pretty much disagree with that proposition whole-hog – I don’t think liberalism is (or can be) a wholly neutral arbiter without metaphysical commitments (indeed, I think this partly because I agree with some of liberalism’s metaphysical commitments); I don’t think such an arbiter would enable you to avoid social conflict (what would compel the loser to abide by the verdict?); and, for that matter, I think you can have devastating social conflict without any real disagreement about metaphysical commitments (those metaphysical commitments themselves may in many cases be “superstructure” rather than “substructure”).

Myself, I would like to see a liberalism that is both more confident and more humble about its own truths. More confident: don’t defend the sexual revolution by saying, “why not?” but by saying, “here is what we have gained – here is the positive good, here are the virtues of the life we now lead.” Don’t attack creationism by saying, “that’s smuggling sectarian religion into the public square” but by saying, “science is a magnificent human achievement that you are defacing, and science matters too much to me to stand idly by while you do that.”

I tend to agree with this in no small part because Linker's argument cuts both ways.  Here he is criticising the particularly argumentative brand of new athiests (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.):

The most thoughtful atheists--let's call them liberal atheists--have always understood that the impossibility of negative proof is a crack through which the gods, no matter how ruthlessly banished from the human world, forever threaten to return. These atheists--whose ranks include Socrates, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Albert Camus, and Primo Levi--responded to their lack of certitude, to the invariably provisional character of the beliefs by which they oriented their lives, in a supremely philosophical way: with equanimity. Accordingly, they did not go out of their way to act as missionaries for unbelief.

I'm no fan of Dawkins or Hitchens because I disagree with some of their arguments and because they're fraking obnoxious.  However, I can't see why athiests evangelizing is any worse than any other set of beliefs seeking to spread itself.  They can obviously go to far, but so can everyone else and everyone else has a longer tradition of being obnoxious.  I think the need to exclude such evangelism comes from having a pluralistic civil religion as the neutral arbiter Millman refers to above.  I think that approach has its uses as kind of a shorthand that saves us from having to argue from first principles every time.  Nonetheless, we must be able to make those arguments; I rather strongly believe Millman's closing point:

Cultivation of skepticism and doubt will never be enough; you’ll need actual alternative certitudes to push against to be sure that you actually know anything. And, if you’re really a liberal, you have to leave open the possibility of being convinced that one of your liberal truths is actually, well, false.

That's part of my rationale for having an opposition blogroll.

Solidarity

If you believe in that sort of thing, do you think people from a range of religions can get into heaven?  As a recent Charles Blow op-ed in the NY Times discussed, at least sixty five percent of Americans do (Hat tip Dave C. for sharing this).  I’ve actually discussed this Pew study before, but subsequent to the initial results they went back to determine what people meant by other religions.  Here’s the results to that query.  Short version, some 60% of Americans first and foremost think that Catholics, Protestants, and to a slightly lesser extent Jews are covered.  At around 50% Muslims, Hindus, and Agnostics are also good to go.  I’m actually a bit surprised Muslims didn’t do a bit better given the whole monotheism thing.  Happily even Atheists get more than 40% of the population, presuming they’d be interested in heaven were it an option.

I like Blow’s analysis:

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus…

Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.

Having been through Sunday school, I’m well aware of the range of views regarding justification.  The short version of the official Lutheran view is justification via faith alone, but that good works are the fruit of such a faith.  The simplest way of reconciling that view is probably just to consider faith sufficient but not necessary, it still disagrees with some of the verses but doesn’t undercut the doctrine of forgiveness. 

In any event, Douthat had an eloquent post up where he argues on the meaning of Christmas and the larger Christian story:

It recounts a series of events that, if real, tells us something profound about the nature of God, and His relationship to His creatures, that we couldn't have been expected to understand or accept in precisely the same way without the Gospel narratives.

Of course a philosopher could have come up with the formulation that God is Love without the assistance of the Gospel According to Saint John, just as Aristarchus of Samos could draw up the heliocentric hypothesis without the assistance of a telescope.

Similarly other people duplicated the invention of the telescope and a love centric philosophy similarly doesn’t require a god at all.  Nonetheless, this, and the specific prominence of forgiveness, is the core appeal of Christianity for me.  Douthat correctly points out that the emphasis on love enhances the critique that there is too much suffering in the universe for good omnipotence.

In any event, for all of these flaws, the emphasis on love seems to have convinced a large percentage of those surveyed that good people will basically be okay, regardless of what the official theological line is.  I for one take that as a tiding of comfort and joy.

Follow-up to charitable comments

Got a few comments on my “more charitable” post. Since I’m content light, and I fell asleep before managing to reply, I’ll just address them in a new post.

First, my finacee helpfully pointed out that my linking scheme made it seem as if the book was titled: “"Who Really Cares, Here's Ezra Klein Summing Up the Results."  I actually wouldn’t be shocked to see a blogger book with a title like that, I’d be surprised to see it sell though.

On a more serious note, first Mecha quite effectively zings the blood comment: “I wonder what would happen to the ratio if, say, a certain class of people who just happened to trend liberal could not give blood. Like, say... people who have had gay male sex and are willing to admit it.”  Err… yes, I blame the influence of hospital prescribed narcotics for not thinking of that myself. 

I don’t know if it would be enough to sway things, but the Kristof article already mentioned that homosexuals ranked high in terms of giving, so they’d probably have a disproportionate impact and should certainly be mentioned when citing that factoid in any event.  I’m presently blood banned from surgeries and had been for a year because of visiting the province with Ping An village in China which is apparently a malaria risk.  But those, unlike the restrictions on gays, are fair enough.

Next point key line, summarizing a bit: “'Conservatives are more likely to be pushed to give money to their churches' as a metric of 'good', which certainly might want to be weighted against all of the bad things that societal pressure can cause.”  I’d acknowledge that but we’ve already won the ‘all in’ argument as it were.  More liberal counties, states, and countries are generally better places to live if you’re poor (albeit with serious affordable housing problems).  Going by charitable giving vs. charitable giving, liberals are taking on a tougher fight.  But I think it’s a worthwhile one to consider, if we can win this one, then we can completely destroy the argument that regardless of moral merit of the restrictions, traditional social controls lead to better behavior.

Last point: “Finally, on the religious point, charity is giving to others for their benefit, and not yours. Not, essentially, paying dues.”  I know I’ve given on occasion to non-religious causes I support with not so much a happy heart as one that just wants to pay my bit and have the fundraiser go away.  Similarly from personal observation I think that bigger regular donors to Churches often are not those motivated by fear of punishment or the like (Not sure if that’s true of massive one time gifts).  I would buy that probably those that put the most emphasis on tithe or go to hell are probably the least like to be charitable with intakes, but I’d generally just prefer to measure charitable output. 

s a person who generates because they love so much a better person than one who gives because they think what goes around comes around?  Probably, but I’m a bit too utilitarian to really care.  My ideal measure would be to see how much the charity directly helped people, but that’s pretty hard to judge, let alone across categories.  That said, it would be interesting to see some data on why people think they give and as you say to cross-reference motive with the output.

Image of offering tray by Daniel Hoye used under a Creative Commons license

Purity is obsolete

I’ve been watching an interesting fight between libertarian Will Wilkinson and conservative Ross Douthaht. They’re fighting over Jonathan Haidt’s concept of five pillars of morality: harm/care; fairness/reciprocity; in-group; authority; and purity. Liberals tend to like the first two, conservatives go for all five. Wilkinson gives a great quick summary of Haidt’s larger argument:

As Jon notes, many liberals wonder why the in-group, authority, and purity dimensions of the moral sense count as moral at all. Why doesn’t harm/care and fairness/reciprocity just exhaust the moral field? With characteristic ecumenism, Jon cautions us against underestimating the function of the conservative sentiments in a successful society. “The great conservative insight,” Jon says, “is that order is really hard to achieve, it’s really precious, and really ready to lose.”

However, Wilkinson doesn’t buy it:

The lesson, it seems to me, is that it is dangerous to become too thoroughly liberal, for that way chaos lies. What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest–that is, the most imbalanced–are by and large the best places for human beings to live...

If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.)...

But I think he’s making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It’s pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren’t in them.

Douthat, unlike a lot of the commenters on Haidt’s presentation, does buy the moral breakdown and not surprisingly disagrees with Wilkinson. He buys that there’s some evidence that we may be moving in that direction, but that on the whole it’s too soon to tell. In an earlier argument, he also noted that if we diminish the role for family, community, and religion we’re likely opening the door to a larger state.

Anyhow, I’m not a libertarian, I tend to think there is some utility in in-group and authority although I certainly thing they’re far less important than harm-care or fairness. However, I do agree with Wilkinson on Purity. I think purity has a few uses: preventing self-harm, avoiding getting on a slippery slope for harming others, avoiding disease and food poisoning, and . However, the first two are just functions of harm/care and can be treated as such. The third is where the evolutionary advantage of purity comes in, but we have science now to tell us what’s actually healthy, it’s time to put away childish things.

To be fair to conservatives, Haidt does note that liberals can go for purity when it comes to organic food or not watching television or such. When these things have a basis in health, fine; but I’m quite willing to say that while it’s fine to argue about what we should eat or watch, don’t get self-righteous about it. Most of us have our guilty pleasures and in moderation that’s fine.

Interestingly, I think Christianity makes a partial break with purity rules. Jesus is constantly breaking purity restrictions, sometimes even foolishly so; sorry Jesus, but we should actually wash our hands before eating. Not a moral thing, but a good idea nonetheless. I think a lot of Christian theology gets at the idea that none of us is really pure, so we should stop judging others for lack of purity. However, Jesus as the perfect sacrificial lamb brings those issues back to the fore. I should also note that I’ve heard that the Gospel depiction of Judaism’s purity rules in practice is rather exaggerated.

More on Iraqi government calls for withdrawal

Both Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman note that Iraq’s national-security adviser, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, is echoing Maliki’s statement on withdrawal.

"There should not be any permanent bases in Iraq unless these bases are under Iraqi control," Rubaie said. "We would not accept any memorandum of understanding with [the U.S.] side that has no obvious and specific dates for the foreign troops’ withdrawal from Iraq."

That quote is from the a Post article by Ernesto Londono and Dan Eggen, and Ackerman adds that al-Rubaie has been national-security advisor under the past three premiers. Wacky. Anyways, in addition to other Arab governments and the Iraqi people, according to some perhaps sketchy sources serious pressure is apparently now coming from the top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Sadr is a top rival to Sistani, even to the extent of allegedly having some of the Grand Ayatollah’s people killed, but they seem to come down on the same side on this one.

I rather doubt the Bush administration would sign on for an agreement that had firm withdrawal conditions. Instead they’d probably try to renew the U.N. authority. That’s actually a perfectly reasonable option as it will leave the decision in the hands of the next administration,possibly one more willing to consult Congress. Alternately, Kevin Drum notes that they may just have an easily fudge-able set of withdrawal guidelines. That’ll depend on whether this timeline talk is genuine or merely a response to outside pressure to be slipped out of at the first opportunity.

Dogma, good God y'all, what is it good for?

So an interesting study on American religious beliefs came out the other day. The most widely discussed finding is that one in five American athiests believe in a higher power and thus are in all likelihood agnostics. On the other hand it sounds like more people don’t believe in God than identify as atheist so there’s some confusion both ways. 92% of the population believes in some sort of God or spiritual force but only 51% are fairly certain said God is a person one can have a relationship with. Also, apparently 20% of the Christian population speaks in tongues from time to time, which surprises me. Political findings were about what you’d expect.

For the Curious here’s the full report. Anyhow, I personally was raised Lutheran (we’re classified as mainline protestant) and not surprisingly have the basic demographics of that group. I’ve stuck with that religion although as long time readers can guess I tend to be pretty open about such things and tend to get rather angry when people start saying that religion is necessary to be a good person or a good American.

Happily the survey found the American population is less dogmatic than I might have guessed:

Most Americans agree with the statement that many religions – not just their own – can lead to eternal life. Among those who are affiliated with a religious tradition, seven-in-ten say many religions can lead to eternal life. This view is shared by a majority of adherents in nearly all religious traditions, including more than half of members of evangelical Protestant churches (57%). Only among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon groups (57%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (80%), which together comprise roughly 2.4% of the U.S. adult population [are exceptions].

I’m curious whether people mean other denominations or other religions but the question did say religions. There are similar trends in whether there can be multiple interpretations of their religion. This post is long enough already, so I’ll wrap it up saying that I think arguing over whether religion is good or bad is asking the wrong question. I do believe that some aspects cause more harm than good: belief in exclusive access to morality, obsessions with purity, orthodoxy, anti-empiricism, etc. The aspects aren’t just introduced by big bad "organized religion," at least with Christianity I’m betting some of them were there in Jesus’s original teaching and not just incorrectly attributed to him. Happily it seems that many Americans are at least in part rejecting these aspects, whatever their source.

BSG thoughts

I am feeling way too lazy to put up cuts (I really need to do a macro to handle the LJ-cut part automatically), so I’ll keep this basically spoiler free.

The most recent Battlestar Gallactica episode was most pleasing, and it came on the heels of another episode that had my favorite guest star. This is quite good, as I was worried by when two episodes ago one of my favorite characters did something both massively stupid and in my view quite out of character. That sort of thing is quite common when you’re dealing with prophecies, which is why I tend to worry about fate driven plotlines. Anyways, based on these last two eps I’ll forgive you BSG.

Anyhow, in extremely vague spoilers, my idea of the Cylon master plan was that they were trying to essentially set up a narrative by which human and Cylon would ultimately live together. I’m going to modify that view to say that it also appears that that this exodus is also meant to be a time of hard testing to judge the worthiness of humanity and perhaps Cylons as well.

Also, I approve that Baltar is now not just trying to sleep with most any available female but that he also attempts to subvert anyone given the opportunity.

Science and Mysticism

David Brooks drew some attention with an op-ed arguing that science’s biggest challenge to religion will not be atheism but instead what he calls neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Andrew Sullivan is up for the challenge and focuses on the bit about love, sounds like he’ll find ways to incorporate this into his faith. Over at the American Scene Michael Brendan Dougherty is not sure about the science but isn’t particularly worried:

On the cultural side, I don’t agree that “neural Buddhism” represents some new great challenge to religious belief. It will undermine the faith of people whose spirituality relies exclusively on their ecstatic feelings – and that is a good thing for religion. If science can describe those feelings, it is likely that it can soon induce them in people...

If neural Buddhism comes, it will be an invitation for American religion to move away from its emotionalism (and obscurantism) and back to serious theological reflection. I can’t wait.

I disagree. I’m skeptical that any mass-movement is based primarily on intellectual pursuits such as "serious theological reflection." Elite movements are happy to do that sort of thing to be sure, but emotionalism is a sounder base for a mass movement. As an example, I’d cite the Christian holiday of Pentecost where the disciples were accused of being drunk rather than of stretching their attempts to connect Jesus with past prophecies for example.

Instead I’m betting that religions not compatible with these ideas will focus on social/cultural aspects. There’s some mystical tie in there too, rituals aren’t just included to fill time. However, on the whole I think the social dynamics will be harder to study and thus won’t be included in the earlier versions of reproducible neural Buddhism.

Neat theology post by Douthat

Ross Douthat has a neat post on whether natural selection undermines some concepts of Christianity.

The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous. The idea that the mechanism of natural selection, in which the development of man requires millions of years of strife and suffering and death in the animal kingdom, poses a specific challenge to Christian beliefs about the nature of God is more plausible, and warrants a more serious response than the "hey, evolution is too compatible with a belief in designer God" rejoinder that some Christian apologists, D’Souza included, often employ.

Specifically he thinks it challenges the idea of "the fall" and offers three retorts: 1) animals don’t matter, 2) sin affected animals on a fall prior to human’s (apparently C.S. Lewis’s favored belief), 3) the fall ran both backwards and forward in time.

I personally am not attached to the concept of the fall and only tend to like the story in a subversive freedom isn’t free way, but nice to see actual logical engagement. As with most everything else, I don’t tend to find concepts that interesting unless they’re falsifiable and Douthat has rather different views than I do but may be similarly inclined on that point.

Anyways, several commenters also point out that through natural selection and other means the idea of a omnipotent+benevolent god is both falsifiable and fairly obviously untrue. I’m willing to write-off silly paradoxes but even then it’d be possible to design a universe with both freedom and much less suffering than in our present one. On the other hand my main problem with a lot of liberal theology is that it just tends to take all the falsifiable statements away which often just leaves mush behind, nice friendly mush to be sure, but still mush.

Anyways, I’m going to continue to mostly avoid theology on this blog, but I reserve the right to occasionally comment on articles or posts I like.

Romney's big speech

As some of you know, one of the U.S. Republican candidates, Mitt Romney, is a Mormon. I’m personally willing to consider them a sect of Christianity, but many evangelicals don’t. And, unlike me, evangelicals often vote on dogma.  So, he’s making a speech to try to convince Evangelicals to move

So here’s a quote from his speech:

I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end -- where all men and all churches are treated as equal -- where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice.

Wait, no, that was JFK’s speech where he was trying to deal with the ’Catholic issue.’  Here’s Romney’s speech:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom....Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

....Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests.

I nabbed these quotes from Kevin Drum who goes on to say:

I know, I know. He’s just doing what he has to do. Evangelical base and all that. But I’m not religious, and yet, mirabile dictu, I still
manage to support freedom, have a conscience, and understand the law.  I’m tired of people implying otherwise.

Ezra Klein similarly goes after Romney and notes the dividing line between the good parts of the speech and the bad.

After the cut, my take and a clip of part of JFK's speech.

Event Write-Up: Muslim Integration: Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Europe and the United States

[Download the Report]

This discussion covered some differences between American and Europe. It basically went along the lines I thought: American Muslims tend to be better integrated and more prosperous than European Muslims. This can drive radicalism. One difference a questioner pointed out is that Americans might think more of integration in a more pluralistic sense while Europeans may think of it more in a complete assimilation sense. 

That said, this can't entirely be credited to the American model, as Matt Yglesias (not finding the post) has noted the Mexican-American population is more comparable to the Muslim European population in terms of often being brought in on menial labor.  For perhaps a better analogy, one questioner, Michael Werz from Georgetown, made an between second generation radicalization in Europe to African Americans and Islam in 1968 with the Nation of Islam and such. Where the issue was really one of civil rights and affirmative action and not interfaith dialog.  Similarly, the bombers in the UK were from secular families and while radicalized in Europe had little association with local mosques.

Enough context.  Here's some interesting raw data from Ceri Peach, the specifics are often hard to get as governments often don't track religion or even ethnicity.  The Muslim population is about 21 million with a third being 'old Muslim' groups that date back to the Ottoman Empire.  The other 14 million are more tied in to the guest worker phenomenon.  The Muslim population is also younger than Europeans in general.  Not surprisingly, the population is also heterogeneous: by size there's the most Turks (mostly in Germany), secondly North Africans (mostly into France), finally South Asians into the U.K. 

After the break, more from Ceri Peach and some highlights from the other speakers: