Evel Knievel rides into eternity

CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) -- Evel Knievel is dead.

That sentence probably should have been written in 1968, when Knievel crashed his motorcycle spectacularly as he jumped the fountains at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and wound up in a coma.

It probably should have been written in 1974, when his rocket-powered cycle failed as he tried to jump the Snake River Canyon and he almost landed in the raging water. Or the numerous other times when, while trying to jump something bigger than ever, he splattered.

Instead, it was written Friday. Natural causes. Age 69.

"It's been coming for years, but you just don't expect it. Superman just doesn't die, right?" said longtime friend and promoter Billy Rundle.

It's amazing he was only 69. Photos show a man much older. But then again, few lived life harder than Evel Knievel. The women, the alcohol, the broken bones.

Last Easter, Evel told the masses at Crystal Cathedral that he'd had a middle-of-the-night encounter with God.

"I don't know what in the world happened," Robert "Evel" Knievel said. "I don't know if it was the power of the prayer or God himself, but it just reached out, either while I was driving or walking down the sidewalk or sleeping, and it just—the power of God in Jesus just grabbed me. … All of a sudden, I just believed in Jesus Christ. I did, I believed in him! … I rose up in bed and, I was by myself, and I said, 'Devil, Devil, you bastard you, get away from me. I cast you out of my life.' … I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go."

Godspeed.

Not a real atheist?

Intra-faith divisions are certainly among the most dangerous elements of religion. Sunnis vs. Shiites. Catholics vs. Protestants. Orthodox Jews vs. secular ones. To outsiders, these factions look at best shortsighted and at worst fundamentally flawed.

I have heard several people who identify themselves as Christians say that because other people who identify themselves as Christians do not believe in such and such, or don’t agree with so and so, or haven’t done whatever, that they are not really Christians, and some even contend that these counterfeit or phony or somehow not qualified “Christians” (with their scare quotes) will burn in hell. Sometimes the differences they cite sound at least theologically significant, sometimes it’s too subtle or esoteric for me to fathom, and sometimes it sounds like they just don’t go to the same particular church.

To me as an outsider this is bizarre and ridiculous. On the news I hear Muslims dismissing other Muslims as “not good Muslims,” or “not true Muslims” for disparities only they can comprehend. How can theists of any flavor ever hope to attract outsiders when so many differences are cited as disqualifying all the others but their specific variety of religion, differences that seem indistinguishable to anyone not already inside their camp? From the eyes of the uninitiated, their micro-controversies discredit them all as a whole.

That's from Richard Wade at the Friendly Athiest. The question, Wade asks, is whether this is happening to non-theists amid the push for evangelical atheism.

We have several terms that non-god-believing folks use to identify themselves to emphasize other aspects they feel are important. Is there a looking down the nose from those using one term toward those using another? Do humanists look askance at freethinkers? Do skeptics roll their eyes about brights?

Has anyone ever been accused of not being a true atheist by another person calling himself or herself an atheist?

'A horrible example of Jews gone bad'

My post Sunday about why I work at The Jewish Journal got some traction in the blogosphere, much to Paul Almond's dismay. Almond was the name attached to at least one of the comments and, based on the writing style and substance, is presumably the identity of Jewboy. And he was none too pleased to learn that The Forward interviewed me last summer about my Christian beliefs and Jewish background.

paul almond said:

Great - first the "Jewish Journal" and now the Forward put forward this Christian with Jewish parents as someone to be lauded by the Jewish community, instead of someone who is a horrible example of Jews gone bad. I expect the next story will feature a JforJ type who is really a very good person and should be idolized by the Jewish community. Barf

To reiterate what I told The Forward last summer:

No, I’m not involved in Jews for Jesus. No, they have not slipped a mole into the Jewish Journal. I don’t have a special calling to baptize all of “those pagan Jews.” I think when people understand who I am, when they see the sensitivity of my reporting, and the fact that I am just a really curious journalist who does care about this community and is interested in the stories that are affecting it, I think it breaks down those walls.

Santa Claus, Harry Potter and Baby Jesus

Sometimes being politically correct is just so wrong:

DeFUNIAK SPRINGS — The annual Nativity creche on the Walton County Courthouse lawn will look a little different this year.

The County Commission decided this week to include secular items such as a snowman to the display after Americans United for Separation of Church and State sent the county a letter in July claiming that the creche is unconstitutional.

The article states that a snowman or Santa Claus might be added to the display. I see that, and raise the Walton County weaklings one Harry Potter statue, the complete cast of "Golden Compass" and Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.


(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

New Yorker on megachurches

The current issue of The New Yorker, which is always late to arrive at my place, has a story about one of the few New England megachurches. This is a photo of Faith Church from The New Yorker's online slideshow. The full article is not available yet.

Previously, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the success of the cellular church, the Orange County behemoth led by Rick Warren.

The religion of Dennis Kucinich

"I can only guarantee you five minutes."

In the middle of a park in Sierra Madre, on an absolutely perfect fall Sunday morning, Sharon Jimenez, senior adviser on the West Coast for U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich’s campaign for president, is laying down some ground rules. We are surrounded by volunteers, who busily set up chairs, sort placards and stack fliers for the congressman’s speech and fund-raiser. Twenty feet away, at a lopsided picnic table beneath a lopsided tree, sits Kucinich, wearing a ginger-colored blazer that immediately makes me wonder how many Winnie-the-Poohs had to die to make it. With his familiar squint and little-boy haircut that always appears as if it has been combed with a hot buttered roll, he nods in response to the conclusions of a Pasadena Weekly reporter.

“I thought you were going to get me a ride-along with him to the airport,” I say to Jimenez.

“Oh, well,” she says, smiling and shrugging her massive shoulder pads.

“But I don’t have any five-minute questions,” I say, holding up my notebook. “All my questions are conversational — they’re Bill Moyer questions.”

“Like I said, I can only guarantee you five minutes,” she says, looking at her watch. “The congressman goes on in about eight minutes, and then he has to be in San Mateo for a straw poll at 2.”

Jimenez’s uncanny resemblance to the band manager and lovable curmudgeon of The Partridge Family, Rubin Kincaid, allows me the grace to forgive her persnickety manner as having less to do with me and more to do with the character that I imagine her to be playing.

“Which airport is he going to?” I ask. “LAX?”

“No, Burbank,” she says, drastically shortening even the drive time I was hoping to get.

“Burbank?” I flip through my notes, looking for short-answer questions, wondering if I’m wasting my time and trying to remember why I came in the first place.

I can't tell you how many times I have been here lately -- not in a park waiting to interview the man-less-likely-than-Alan-Keyes-to-be-president, but at an event of my own choosing where all I am wondering is how I recover the half day I just wasted.

Though it seems for Mr. Fish, the reporter giving the first-person here, waiting for Kucinich wasn't such a waste of time. The resulting story is the cover of the current LA Weekly, and it offers some illuminating passages on America's wackiest politician. This one is particularly enjoyable.

“All right,” he says, looking at his watch again. “We got five minutes — do you have a short question?”

“Sure,” I say, taking a second to turn on my tape recorder. “What nonpolitical source material informs your idealism?”

I smile, waiting. He doesn’t answer me. “In other words,” I try again, “a lot of your ideas seem to stress the importance of peace and humanitarianism and, certainly, you can talk about those things as political ideals, but politics doesn’t really offer the best insight into those subjects. It’s like Richard Nixon’s peace sign, for example, meant something entirely different from John Lennon’s. Most people don’t look to politics to help them sustain their understanding of humanitarianism — they usually look to art and poetry and literature and philosophy. What are your cultural reference points?”

“Well, you know,” begins Kucinich, hunching forward with the melancholy of somebody who has just been handed cotton candy and asked to knit a cake, “you can talk about the 20th century and look at the writings of Erich Fromm, the work of Carl Rogers, [Abraham] Maslow, the humanistic psychologists. You can look at the English Romantic poets from centuries ago who had a sense of the perfectibility of humankind, of our deep connection to nature, of the importance of upholding a natural world. You can come back to Walden Pond, to Thoreau, to Emerson, to their understanding of intellectual integrity and of freedom. But you could go back thousands of years, too, to the basic structure of moral law that’s reflected in the teachings of all the great religions.” He stops. I wait. He stays stopped.

“What about more-modern influences?” I say. “Are you in touch with any of the artistic or cultural movements that are contemporary; ideas and artistic trends that excite and motivate people, particularly young people, to view humanity as a whole rather than as incongruent pieces, which is more what politics tends to do? I don’t guess that all the values that inform your political identity are as antiquated or esoteric as Thoreau or the Bible — you were a product of the ’60s, right?”

“Look,” he says, “my philosophical underpinnings relate to concepts that are really timeless, that go back to 2,000 years of Christianity, thousands of years of the Hindu religion, that go to the tradition of Buddhism, to the moral teachings of Judaism, to the peaceful expressions of Islam. All of these are tributaries of a spiritual understanding that I have.”

Muslim rumors hurt Obama

The Forward reported this month that presidential candidates and major Muslim American organizations were keeping each other at arms' length. Today, The Washington Post says questions about Islam keep dogging Barack Obama, who, in fact, is a member of an ultra-liberal Christian church.

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama's biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama's stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a "Muslim plant" in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.

In campaign appearances, Obama regularly mentions his time living and attending school in Indonesia, and the fact that his paternal grandfather, a Kenyan farmer, was a Muslim. Obama invokes these facts as part of his case that he is prepared to handle foreign policy, despite having been in the Senate for only three years, and that he would literally bring a new face to parts of the world where the United States is not popular.

The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, Obama was born and spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, and he talks more about his multicultural background than he does about the possibility of being the first African American president, in marked contrast to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who mentions in most of her stump speeches the prospect of her becoming the first woman to serve as president.

"A lot of my knowledge about foreign affairs is not what I just studied in school. It's actually having the knowledge of how ordinary people in these other countries live," he said earlier this month in Clarion, Iowa.

"The day I'm inaugurated, I think this country looks at itself differently, but the world also looks at America differently," he told another Iowa crowd. "Because I've got a grandmother who lives in a little village in Africa without running water or electricity; because I grew up for part of my formative years in Southeast Asia in the largest Muslim country on Earth."

While considerable attention during the campaign has focused on the anti-Mormon feelings aroused by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), polls have also shown rising hostility toward Muslims in politics. It is not clear whether that negative sentiment will affect someone who has lived in a Muslim country but does not practice Islam.

Why one UCLA soldier went to war

Lt. Mark Daily was the first UCLA alum to be killed in Iraq. (A plaque was recently hung in his honor in front of the Student Activities Center off of Bruin Plaza.) His death touched thousands upon thousands not simply because he was young and it was tragic, but because of the writings he left behind and a story in the LA Times that was e-mailed around the world.

One recipient was Christopher Hitchens, the atheist superstar and author who Daily credited with convincing him of the moral imperative of the war. In this month's Vanity Fair, Hitchens describes feeling ill upon learning this and seeking out Daily's family to clear his conscience.

In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E. H. Carr asked about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, drives it round a blind corner, and hits another man, who is crossing the road to buy cigarettes. Who is the one responsible? The man who had one drink too many, the lax inspector of brakes, the local authorities who didn't straighten out a dangerous bend, or the smoker who chose to dash across the road to satisfy his bad habit? So, was Mark Daily killed by the Ba'thist and bin Ladenist riffraff who place bombs where they will do the most harm? Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine, which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and with inadequate equipment? Or by the Bush administration, which thought Iraq would be easily pacified? Or by the previous Bush administration, which left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 and fatally postponed the time of reckoning?

These grand, overarching questions cannot obscure, at least for me, the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again, not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings, who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he couldn't stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit of humor and tough-mindedness. Here's an excerpt from his "Why I Joined" statement:

Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).… Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.

Rodney King shot

"Just wait. Every few years Rodney King gets in trouble."

That was my first city editor's response when I started working at The Sun in San Bernardino and discovered King was a down-and-out resident of Rialto. I too was a resident of the forlorn industrial town wedged between Muscoy and Fontana, and I wanted to write about my most notable neighbor.

I moved out of Rialto and off that beat, and later left the paper, before King made headlines (aside from this Charlie LeDuff piece). He's back with this one today:

One of Rialto's most well-known residents, Rodney King, was shot sometime around midnight.

San Bernardino Police Lt. Scott Paterson said the details were still fuzzy but that King may have gunshot pellets in his arm and back area. The wounds are not considered life-threatening.

"Early indications are that it very possibly could have been a domestic dispute," Paterson said.

San Bernardino police are still investigating what exactly happened and where, he said.

Rialto Police Sgt. Tim Lane said police logs showed the incident took place at 5th Street and Meridian Avenue in San Bernardino near the border of Rialto and San Bernardino. Lane said King made it back to his house in the 1100 block of East Jackson Street before calling police.

Do GOP candidates believe every word of the Bible?

Joseph Dearing, 24, of Dallas says you can tell everything you need to know about a person by what he or she thinks of the Bible.

He got a chance to get some answers during Wednesday's GOP CNN/YouTube debate when his question, No. 20, was asked: Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?

Dearing wasn't happy with the responses he got from any of the candidates, not Giuliani or Romney or even his homeboy Ron Paul. He felt they all answered, in this video, around the question.

'Stalking celebrities in LA's churches'

One of my favorite memories of living in Los Angeles was seeing David Hasselhoff looking for a seat at church. I attend Bel Air Presbyterian, where ever few months it seems Britney Spears is rumored to have been seen and where I once turned around during the greeting and shook hands with a pre-Newlyweds Jessica Simpson. Al from "Step by Step," aka Christine Lakin, also joined my college group on a trip to Mammoth and Ryan Starr -- OK, not a celebrity -- hung around for a little while.

But, really, it's a little sick to think about church hopping in hopes of another celebrity sighting. Still, in LA there is something for everyone, and Gridskipper has the dish:

1. Christian Science Church of Brentwood
2. Crystal Cathedral (think Evel Knievel)
3. Good Shepherd Catholic Church (beware the Hilton sisters)
4. Sinai Temple (Kirk Douglas, among other Jewish luminaries)
5. St. Monica's Catholic Church (the governor)
6. St. Nicolas Greek Orthodox Church
7. West Angeles Church of God (Denzel and Stevie)

They left a handful of good celebrity-sighting churches and synagogues off this list. But the list was stupid to begin with, so I'm not going to add to it.

(Hat tip: LAObserved)

'Refighting the Wars of Religion'

Pegged to the ascendancy of The New Atheists and Mark Lilla's "The Stillborn God," the current issue of Commentary looks at "Refighting the Wars of Religion":

The liberal Protestant cave-in to Prussian militarism and German nationalism in turn triggered a messianic or apocalyptic reaction among religious thinkers in the interwar period—a period deeply marked, Lilla reminds us, by a thoroughgoing disgust with modernity and a new quest for authenticity among many European intellectuals. Some, like the Jewish thinkers Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and the Christian theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pulled up on the reins before they came to the political brink. But others soon found a vessel for their fantasies in the man whom Winston Churchill once described as “a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast—Corporal Hitler.”

This whole sorry history, Lilla concludes, “served to confirm Hobbes’s iron law: messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics.” The Great Separation, to which we owe our very lives as the beneficiaries of liberal democracy, can never be taken for granted; and neither can the liberal-democratic order itself. Lilla formulates the task before us in terms different from those proposed by the new atheists but tacitly in tune with their agenda:

Rousseau was on to something: we seem to be theotropic creatures, yearning to connect our mundane lives, in some way, to the beyond. That urge can be suppressed, new habits learned, but the challenge of political theology will never fully disappear as long as the urge to connect survives.

So we are heirs to the Great Separation only if we wish to be, if we make a conscious effort to separate basic principles of political legitimacy from divine revelation. . . . This means vigilance, but even more it means self-awareness. We must never forget that there was nothing inevitable about our Great Separation, that it was and remains an experiment.

The article, by George Weigel, also adds another voice to the discussion, that of Remi Brague, whose "The Law of God" was recently published:

Like Mark Lilla, Rémi Brague is concerned about the fragility of our present political arrangements, about the protection of basic human rights, and about the future of the rule of law, democratically deliberated. But he will not concede that an effective defense of the Western democratic project requires the canonization of Thomas Hobbes and his Great Separation. Indeed, he points out that we might well wonder “whether that separation, which has received so much praise, . . . ever actually took place,” if for no other reason than that the “two institutions . . . never formed a unit.” Brague writes:

The political and the religious are two independent sources of authority; they have crossed one another’s paths more than once, but they never have merged in spite of efforts to fit them together, sometimes to the advantage of one, sometimes to that of the other. Although there has been cooperation between the two, there has never been confusion about which is which.

And if Brague parts company with Lilla on historical grounds, he also parts company on theological and anthropological grounds. Lilla and Brague have very different ideas of God and His revelation, and very different ideas of us; and in each case, the ideas are inextricably intertwined. Lilla urges unending vigilance in public life against the religious fevers that still inflame and infect our minds. Brague, at the end of The Law of God, suggests the conditions for a more modest approach to the “theoi-political problem”:

In the Bible and in Christianity . . . the presence of the divine does not comport an immediate demand for obedience. . . . The divine shows itself, or rather gives itself, before asking anything of us and instead of asking. . . . Although God does indeed expect something of his creatures (that we develop according to our own logic), He does not, in fact, demand anything, or rather, He asks nothing more than His gift already asks, thanks to the simple fact that it is given: [namely,] to be received. In the case of man, that reception does not require anything but humanity.

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By widening the historical lens, Brague also reminds us that the Western accomplishment of distinguishing in both theory and practice between religious authority and political authority, sacerdotium and regnum, was in fact a Christian accomplishment, which in turn drew on ancient Jewish convictions about the dangers inherent in the idolatry of the political. Without question, both the European wars of religion and the Enlightenment played crucial roles in creating the modern political forms by which we acknowledge the distinction between religious and political authority. But the arguments for such a distinction had been made long before, and in explicitly theological terms, by Augustine, Aquinas, and many others standing in the biblical tradition.

'Like hearing a well-dressed boardwalk preacher shouting that the world will end at midnight'

So USC is threatening to leave the crumbling Coliseum for the beautiful Rose Bowl unless they are offered a more favorable deal. I pray the Trojans do not come to call Pasadena home; that is our house, even if we couldn't beat hapless Notre Dame there. Weighing in on the likelihood of this happening, Bill Plaschke nails it with an apocalyptic analogy:

Hearing USC's threat to move its football team from the Coliseum to the Rose Bowl is like hearing a well-dressed boardwalk preacher shouting that the world will end at midnight.

You walk past, you shake your head, you know it's baloney.

But later that night, if only for a moment, you quietly check your watch.

Gangster Jews and the bid to defy weakness

A few weeks ago, I finished reading "Blood Relation," Eric Konigsberg's fascinating account of the mobster life of Uncle Heshy. The author's family was Jewish, so the murdering and racketeering of his uncle, Harold "Kayo" Konigsberg, was sort of frowned upon.

But, then again, Jewish mobsters have always had a taboo appeal -- think Murder Inc., Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

Barney Frank, a Massachusetts congressman who grew up with Kayo, voices this sentiment.

"We loved the fact that he was one of us. I mean, here's a guy who had -- you know, he wasn't just an accountant like Meyer Lansky. I remember teasing one of your father's cousins about him. She'd get upset, but most of the Jewish kids I knew were sort of worshipful of Kayo."

Anyway, the LA Daily News ran a story today from the Chronicles of Jewish mobsters. Only, this one, written by Tony Castro (Luke Ford's source on the Mayor Villaraigosa marriage split), is about a gangster who survived the Holocaust before getting caught up in organized crime.

"Spielberg! You've got to get me Spielberg!" Paul Gelb slurred as he bit off the words with the insistence of a Hollywood studio head.

"Spielberg has to come here. If he's a good Jew, he'll come here to see me. Do you know if he speaks Yiddish?

"And I need to talk to a rabbi. I'd like that. But a rabbi who speaks Yiddish.

"I need to see both of them before I die, ... and I'm dying."

But then, Gelb, 83, has been dying since he was 15 and was sent to a series of Nazi concentration camps with his family.

He survived the Holocaust, which is why he is so insistent this day on seeing director Steven Spielberg, who has created an archive of living testimony of survivors in the wake of his Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List."

"I'll bet you," Gelb says, "that Spielberg doesn't have a story like mine."

That's because to survive in America, Gelb became involved with the Mafia, running New York strip joints and a money-skimming operation that ultimately landed him in a California federal prison in the 1990s.

(skip)

For Gelb, the ultimate irony was having survived a Nazi concentration camp to wind up half a century later in a minimum-security federal prison camp in California, where he was inmate 10945-054, according to a federal report.

"There were no bars, no fences there, no gas chambers, no ovens," he says. "Some people tried to compare my experience in a concentration camp and prison, and I told them, `Don't even try to compare it. One was hell on Earth.' Prison wasn't heaven, but I'm not ready to go there yet, anyway!"

Christians who haven't seen the movies or read the books they profess to be evil

The "controversy" -- and I use that word very lightly -- over the unholy nature of "The Golden Compass" is heating up nicely.

Thought Harry Potter was blasphemous? That was kids' stuff compared to the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, in which God is an imposter, angels are sexually ambiguous and the Church kidnaps, tortures and assassinates to achieve its goals, one of which is stealing children's souls.

But try as the filmmakers might to take religion out of the equation in the first installment — "The Golden Compass," due December 7 — Christian groups are gearing up to protest and fans are urging New Line not to water down the provocative material in remaining films.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which most recently protested a picture of Britney Spears sitting provocatively in a priest's lap — the image appears in her new album, Blackout — takes this issue a little more seriously. The anti-defamation group accuses the film of "selling atheism to kids" and has produced its own booklet in response, "The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked," which it's been distributing to churches and other Christian groups.

The evangelical-activist group Focus on the Family, which plans to release a statement about the film early next week, says it's in agreement with Christian leaders and organizations on the issue. Adam Holz, associate editor of Focus on the Family's Plugged In magazine, told MTV News he fears the movie would "plant seeds" to "ultimately encourage some fans to reject God."

Also, Snopes.com, which typically debunks urban legends, claims that the assertion that the film has "anti-religious" themes is "true."

If the controversy economy remains strong, I might actually end up seeing this flick. The funny thing is that most those criticizing the movie won't.

Here, Religion News Service talks to a bunch of parents who are afraid the anti-religious movie will kidnap their kids' minds if not souls, and Bruce Tomaso of the DMN religion blog responds with three thoughts that just as easily could have been in reference to "Harry Potter":

1. I was struck by the fact that none of the people in the story who criticize the movie have seen it.

2. There is far more crap than wholesome entertainment produced by Hollywood, and one movie, more or less, isn't going to tip the balance appreciably.

3. I seriously doubt that watching "The Chronicles of Narnia" produced a single new Christian, and I doubt that watching this movie will turn anyone into an atheist.

'Hook-nosed, bloodstained Jews out to trick peaceful Arabs at Annapolis summit'

This is from my colleague Dennis Wilen, who runs JewishJournal.com and the blog Funny, you don't look bloggish:

OK, Olmert says it's no big deal the Saudis and their pals won't 'shake hands' with the Jews at the conference; at least they won't be trotting out shopworn stereotypes about conniving Jews hoodwinking the Arab world and the international community, right?

Or will they?

Yes they will, according to this batch of editorial cartoons from Mideast newspapers compiled by the Anti-Defamation League.

There was obviously far more from today's peace conference. Start here with the Jerusalem Post's home page. The liberal daily Haaretz also has wall-to-wall coverage, and American papers like the Washington Post and NY Times did their thing.

Now, let's see where this goes ...

Romney doesn't want a Muslim Cabinet official

Like I've said here and here andhere and here and here and here and etc., Americans have become far to fixated on religious representation in politics. From the blog that tells us all about God talk on the presidential campaign trail:

Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate most disadvantaged by his personal religious faith, said earlier this month that "based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified."

"But of course," Romney continued. "I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

You can read all about Romney's remarks today's Christian Science Monitor, in a not-to-be-missed op-ed by Mansoor Ijaz, a Muslim investor who asked Romney about Muslim appointees at a fundraiser earlier this month. Here's the Romney team's response.

Ijaz does a perfectly good job refuting Romney himself, so God-o-Meter will only state the obvious. How can a presidential candidate whose Mormon faith accounts for just 2-percent of the American population rule out a Muslim in his cabinet on the basis that Islam has too few American adherents?

Borat does Poland

Well, apparently American cultural phenomenons arrive in Poland quite late. But it's still comical to think of a half-naked irreverent Jewish comedian flaunting it on a billboard above an old Communist building.

I plugged the text into InterTran and it came up with this: "wherebyprzez co ubaw, this when armpits."

Thanks to David A. Lehrer, father of Jonah and president of Community Advocates Inc., for snapping the photo.

Hamsters as symbols of anti-Semitism?

The Philadelphia Weekly messed up on this cover image for it's holiday gift guide.

The only rodent in the entire spread is the critter on the cover.

Tim Whitaker, editor of PW, said that "it never occurred to us" that the front page could have been seen as offensive. Originally, he said, the idea was to use the dog on the sleigh as the lead image -- that is, until the hamster one was presented.

That animal is the pet of Liz Spikol, the newspaper's senior contributing editor.

Spikol said that once it was decided to have "cuteness" as the theme for this year's guide, cute animals came to mind. She immediately thought of her male hamster, whose name is, coincidentally, Tinsel, and whom she described as "super cute."

But why dress him as an Orthodox Jew? Why the overtly Jewish symbols to highlight the least religious of the religion's holidays?

Spikol said that the paper's art director created the "hat ensemble" for Tinsel to wear; it was geared to be "more graphically appealing" and "to make it readable as a Jewish observance."

She added that, as a Jew herself, she doesn't find the image offensive, and she doesn't "understand why Orthodoxy would be offensive."

"I just thought it was a fun image in context of our theme," said Spikol.

A rodent as a symbol for the Jew has a long and notorious history, which becomes apparent even if you do a rudimentary search on the Internet.

Nazi propaganda throughout the 1930s -- films, posters and other images -- depicted Jews as rats and other vermin; the point was to portray Jews as subhuman creatures who were unclean and in need of extermination.

The rodent family is a large and varied class of animals, replied Spikol. There is a huge difference, she added, between a rat and a hamster -- and hamsters, she said, were never used in Nazi propaganda.

Despite Spikol's reasoning, some are upset with the cover.

"Where did your art director receive her training?" wrote Solomon Moses in an angry letter he sent to PW and then forwarded to the Exponent. "At the Heinrich Himmler Academy of Design?"

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

'Abortion isn't a religious issue'

Gary Wills, whose book "Head and Heart: American Christianities" was just published, recently had an opinion piece in the LA Times arguing that "abortion isn't a religious issue."

But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

What surprises me is not that Wills, who is Catholic, believes abortion doesn't constitute murder, but that the LA Times would publish such an ancient argument and couch it as a fresh opinion. Wills' position is one of two long held on abortion: either life begins at conception and abortion is murder or fetuses are not yet people so it's permissable.

Also just because the church had a history of doing things one way or because 10 percent of evangelicals would allow abortion under certain circumstances doesn't mean they are in line or out of line with Christian teaching.

Wills is certainly an accomplished author and historian (I can only hope to be so lucky one day); it's just that I find this argument so weak and the topic so stale. For a more compelling read on choice, look to Dan Neil.

And let me know not whether you think abortion is a religious issue, but whether it should be.

(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

$100 Chanukah gelt box

No joke.

Peace: Now or never?

Regarding the Annapolis peace summit, which will be held tomorrow, Time magazine reports:

When Middle East adversaries meet in Annapolis this week, will it be a peace conference, or rather a conference that ends all peace? Nearly 60 years since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that may well be the stark choice that awaits the conference's participants.

Doomsday predictions, of course, have long been a staple of Middle East commentary. Every negotiation seems to be the "last chance" for peace. Every crisis seems to threaten the outbreak of a major war, if not the great apocalypse. But there's reason to pay attention to the warnings this time. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel planted the seed for resolving the core of the conflict: the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. But if the Annapolis conference fails to provide urgently needed nourishment, the two-state solution and its hope of peace may die forever.

'Personal foul, 69, offense; he was giving him the business'

Is this for real!?!

Friedlander's Holocaust memories

Saul Friedlånder, whom some have called a genius, has written an acclaimed two-volume tome on the Holocaust. It's a personal story for Friedlander, and one I'm eager to read, whenever I can carve out the time for some 1,360 pages.

Recently honored with Germany's highest literary award, the Holocaust orphan and UCLA professor was interviewed in Frankfurt by the LA Weekly. Not that revealing, but nonetheless:

You went from fighting with the Irgun [a quasi-terrorist Zionist paramilitary group] to joining the Israeli movement Peace Now. Many Germans feel inhibited when discussing Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinians, while others believe that embracing Palestinian rights masks a latent anti-Semitism. What’s your take?

What you’re talking about is more pronounced in Great Britain or France than in Germany. Criticism is legitimate. But what bothers me at times is a shrillness that gives you a feeling that it is not only based on an analysis of policy but on some deeper emotions — I don’t want to say hatred — which comes through acceptable political pretext.

What did the fall of the Berlin Wall add to Holocaust research?

A lot. The opening of Soviet archives gave us an enormous amount of new material because they were keeping for themselves a lot of German documents. Of course, it also exposed the tendency to say, “Look, we spoke enough about Nazis, now let’s see about the second barbarian system in the world, communism and communist dictatorship.” They are so concentrated on their own dictatorship experience that the past before that is already ancient history. It is often a kind of unintentional layering of the other past. So the answer is that you have to study this and you have to study that. You can’t replace one with the other.

I hear people say that if fascism ever came back to Germany, it would target the Muslims and not the Jews. Do you agree?

Well, it will not come again to Germany. Of that, I am almost sure. But it’s true there’s a kind of xenophobia and hatred, possibly more in the former East Germany than in the West, of minorities coming in, mainly from Turkey.

Do you think the U.S. is embracing fascism?

No. That’s Philip Roth’s book The Plot Against America, where Lindbergh was a metaphor, I think, for President Bush. I like Roth a lot and I am critical of the U.S. as well, but that’s much too overstated.

For more from the LA Weekly's Holocaust files, there is a story in the paper this week about accusations that famed Los Angeles author Charles Bukowski was a Nazi. Sunday, LA Times book editor David L. Ulin says he was just a bad writer.

Quote of the day

"Seventy-eight percent of all statistics are made up by pastors on the spot."

-- The Rev. Mark Brewer of Bel Air Presbyterian said that during his sermon last night.

My chance at stardom

Jonah Hill got the cover of Heeb magazine this fall, but it looks like I could have had it if I had played my cards right.

Jewfro -- check
Comic foil appeal -- check
Lumberjack beard -- check ... wait ... just shaved ... uncheck
Lubed bagel -- ummm, pass

More significantly, Hill says he met his sort-of sugar daddy Seth Rogen while sitting behind him during "The Life Aquatic" at The Grove. I was at that movie, at that theater, but probably not on the same night.

Oh well. I hated "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" anyway.

(For those doubting my cred, check out my "dancing" in N.E.R.D.'s "Rockstar" video.)

'Giving makes you rich'

This week I am going to try to post some of the stories I've had sitting in the queue for a little while. This piece from Portfolio is apt for the holiday season and plays into the idea of the prosperity gospel, meaning that the more you give, the more God gives you.

In John Bunyan’s 1684 classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, the character Old Honest poses this riddle to the innkeeper Gaius: “A man there was, tho’ some did count him mad, / The more he cast away, the more he had.” Gaius solves the riddle thus: “He that bestows his Goods upon the Poor / Shall have as much again, and ten times more.”

Less poetically, the idea is this: Giving makes you rich. A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but quite backward-sounding to an economist. You obviously have to have money before you can give it away, right? Or in the pithy words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions—he had money too.”

Well, it turns out that Gaius was right, and new economic research backs him up.

The rest of the article by economist Arthur C. Brooks reads somewhat like a balance sheet, but in it he explains that people aren't just giving more because they make more, but that evidence shows people give more before they become wealthier. In essence, the egg is laying the chicken.

This is a good thing, and a good reminder that charity does pay (oddly, it appears, literally). There could be a biblical explanation for this: If you give your resources back to God, He will reward you with even more.

But the gospel of wealth, something televangelists love to trumpet, takes this too far. Yes, I believe God wants us to give back (at least 10 percent), and yes, I have faith that I will never be fully without means (though I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being rich in spirit and poor in the world). But there is a difference between a place to sleep and a house in the Hollywood Hills. The church is not an investment plan.

Ole E. Anthony, founder of the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, a televangelist watchdog, said he knew people who had given the last of their savings to TV preachers, hoping for a windfall that never came.

"The people on TBN are living the lifestyle of fabulous wealth on the backs of the poorest and most desperate people in our society," Anthony said. "People have lost their faith in God because they believe they weren't worthy after not receiving their financial blessing."

Thomas D. Horne, of Williford, Ark., a disabled Vietnam-era veteran, said that in 1994 he was swept away by the rhetoric of TBN pastors and donated about $6,000 in disability benefits.

Time went by and he did not receive the promised surfeit of money. Last year, he found out that TBN had purchased a Newport Beach mansion overlooking the Pacific. He wrote to the network, asking for his money back.

"I want to recoup my hard-earned disability money I sent to these despicable people," said Horne. He said he has received no reply.

Philip McPeake is another donor for whom God's economy of giving did not deliver. Out of work and out of luck in November 1998, McPeake heard the Rev. R.W. Schambach make an impassioned plea for donations on TBN's Kansas City television station, KTAJ.

Schambach promised that if viewers sent $200 as a down payment on a $2,000 pledge, God would give them the rest within 90 days - with a bonus to follow.

McPeake sent in his money and waited for his luck to change. When it didn't, he complained to the Missouri state attorney general's office and the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites). TBN refunded his donation.

To see how the gospel of wealth can support the luxurious living of those at the top, read this and this.

"Mansions, big planes, money, fame. That's what it's all about now," said the Rev. Hector Gomez, a former Without Walls staff member who left in 2000. "There are prophets for God, and there are prophets for profit. That's the category they fit in."

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Saving Israel from Annapolis

Robert Avrech at Seraphic Secret has posted an impassioned piece about saving Israel from the Israeli prime minister and the peace summit he will attend with Arab leaders Monday.

Annapolis is coming up tomorrow and a stew of Judenrein Arab countries are going to show up in order to pressure Israel to, well, cease to exist.

Yep, let's face it, that is the end game.

Look, our friends the Saudis won't even shake hands with Jews. Now that's how to negotiate. And the left are so desperate for petro-approval they are willing to hand over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, expel something like 85,000 Jews from their homes, hey Gaza Redux, that worked out really well, and offer citizenship to like a zillion jihadist Arabs—all for a handshake, and some vague promises of recognition.

Gee, what a bargain.

If I was offered a deal like that in Hollywood—I'd fire my agent.

No handshake to the infidel Jooz. Not surprising from a country—well not really a country—more like a massively corrupt family corporation that officially does not allow Jews to set foot on its soil, and soaks its people in the most ghastly Jew-hatred imaginable.

But the Saudis have a peace plan.

These people who condemn a gang rape victim to be whipped .

Yes, we're supposed to listen to their geo-political wisdom.

Who else is coming to Annapolis?

Algeria.

Oh goody. Now there's a model of state craft. Not a Jew left in Algeria. You know why? Because after the blood-soaked Algerian revolution against France the Muslims murdered or expelled the entire ancient Algerian Jewish community. Any reparations ever paid for property and money stolen?

You have to be kidding.

Who else is coming to Annapolis?

He goes on to discuss Yemen, Syria and Sudan, and suggests that PM Ehud Olmert "can be counted on to give away everything but a strategic coffee shop or two in Tel Aviv."

Regardless of what Olmert offers, it's unlikely he or his equally unpopular Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, can implement anything.

On my employment at The Jewish Journal *

There have been a flurry of comments here lately attacking The "Jewish" Journal for employing a Christian to write about Judaism. The comments, which are coming from a few people, don't bother me. I have no delusions regarding my insider-outsider role in the LA Jewish community. But they warrant some clarification.

1. I was not hired to educate Jewish people about Judaism. Amy Klein, our religion editor, reports on that. I cover stories that affect the Jewish community, but often are more about Jewishness than Judaism. Think Commentary incarnate.

2. Secondly, Judaism is not a monolith. Particularly in the United States. And while I don't stake a claim to being a religious Jew, the ethnic history of the Jewish people is as much my family's story as it is for most other Jews.

3. I am not at The Jewish Journal to fulfill a Christian mission.

Because many of these comments have come from anonymous users, I have adjusted the settings to only allow comments from registered users. (Sorry, Siamang. I always appreciate your insights and hope you'll register.)

Additionally, I'd like to ask that comments remain germane to the post they are augmenting. If the business ethics of Thomas Kinkade spur you to write a nasty letter about how out of touch the JJ is with the Jewish community, please send it to letters@jewishjournal.com.

* Update: LAObserved linked to this post this morning, and when I read it I felt like I had left something out. So I sent Kevin Roderick this addendum:

One thing I probably should have added is that most people in the Jewish community are not concerned with my religious affiliation. It strikes many as a bit odd -- indeed, The Forward interviewed me about it for a Q&A this summer -- but, as a journalist would expect, most of the people I interact with are more concerned with the relevancy and accuracy of my reporting than with where I pray. For a few others, my employment has been an itchy scab.

'Only positive thing about Hitler's time on earth'

Whether we print journalists like it or not, we bloggers are here to stay. Here, Bill Conlin, a sportwriters for the Philadelphia Daily News, makes the mistake of trading ugly e-mails with a blogger.

The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth -- I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers.

Bad call Bill on any Nazi nostalgia. He continues:

In Colonial times, bloggers were called “Pamphleteers.” They hung on street corners handing them out to passersby. Now, they hang out on electronic street corners, hoping somebody mouses on to their pretentious sites. Different medium, same MO. Shakespeare accidentally summed up the genre best with these words from a MacBeth soliloquy: “. . .a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . .”

Time to hang the Christmas lights

Not for me, because there are scant places to string lights outside an apartment. But I know it is that time of year because "National Lampoon's: Christmas Vacation" was on TV all weekend. Let me know if you pull off a light show like this.

It's not about ethics, it's business

Everyone's favorite Jewish ice cream entrepreneurs, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield -- yes, that Ben and Jerry -- are currently locked up in a bitter battle with soured franchisees.

No religion angle here, except the shirt shopowner Alan Sherman is wearing in Newsweek's photo (right). But this reminds me of a story I wrote last year about accusations that Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light," had used his Christian faith to defraud investors.

Controversy has surrounded Kinkade for the past four years, after stock of the company he took public (Media Arts Group) plummeted from a high of $23 a share to less than $3. In 2004, he bought the company back at about $4 a share. Kinkade is now the sole owner.

His paintings are known for their vibrant colors and idyllic settings, their country cottages, chilly creeks, and glowing clouds. "The critics may not endorse me," the artist told CT in 2000. "But I own the hearts of the people."

Individual investors run some 500 Kinkade galleries worldwide, with the overwhelming majority in the United States. Signature Galleries, which sell only Kinkade art, cost upwards of $50,000 to open. Media Arts Group required that new owners attend a training conference called "Thomas Kinkade University." Yatooma said this is where his clients drank "the Kinkade Kool-Aid."

"Thomas Kinkade University had a revival-like atmosphere. They would close in prayer and join together in worship. Everybody would leave with their head spinning—now sign the dotted line," Yatooma said. "They thought they were going to make money by sharing the light."

Other investors told me that was nonsense, "comical" even, because they opened Kinkade galleries to make money, not spread the gospel. Which reminds me of that Mafioso axiom: It's not personal, it's business.

Two side notes:

According to my friends at Reel Intelligence, Kinkade's inspirations may soon be, ehem, gracing, the big screen. Or, because the movie is "Thomas Kinkade's Home for Christmas" and a release date has yet to be set, maybe they won't.

Anyway, my favorite flavor is far and away Half Baked.

Nice try Rudy, but you're no Jewliani

Loyal readers know I'm no fan of Rudy Giuliani. Sure he has been masterful at bridging the divide between liberal New Yorkers and social conservatives, both of whom agree the Republican front-runner is scarier them President Bush. And though Catholic, Giuliani has been trying to play up his Jewishness. But I'm not the only one not buying this schlock.

According to Ken Kurson, a top Giuliani aide, if Bill Clinton was considered America's "first Black president," then Giuliani would be the first Jewish one.

While Giuliani did make an appearance on Seinfeld, and although one could argue that for years his comb-over served as a decent makeshift yarmulke, he screwed up a key component of being Jewish: We want to marry our mothers not our cousins.

Vatican ambassador on Israel: 'Better when there were no diplomatic relations'

The Vatican's former ambassador to Israel has some frank words about his faith in relations with the Jewish state.

Italians have a wonderful phrase they use when things don’t work out as they had hoped: “It was better when it was worse.”

That was the thrust of controversial comments about the Catholic Church’s relations with Israel by Archbishop Pietro Sambi, currently the Vatican’s nuncio (ambassador) to the United States and formerly the papal envoy to the Jewish state.

Sambi, who was nuncio in Israel from 1998-2005, could not have been clearer about his discontent: “If I must be frank, relations between the Catholic Church and the state of Israel were better when there were no diplomaticrelations.”

He goes on in a long interview with www. terrasanta.net, an Italian on-line publication of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land. FaithWorld has more of his opinions in English.

I want to pause here and note how easy it would be to turn this into a watershed moment for Catholic-Jewish relations, a revert back to 1960 or, worse, 1492. Sambi, it seems, is not trying to incite a pogrom or propagating the blood libel. He is reflecting on his experience with the Israeli government. (Yes, this is certainly questionable timing considering the peace summit at Annapolis next week.)

The Catholic culture regarding Jews has significantly improved during the last two papacies. Pope John Paul II was, of course, beloved by Jewish leaders, not least for his memorable visit in 2000 to Israel and the Western Wall. The German-born Pope Benedict XVI, who served in the Hitler Youth, also has proven a better friend of world Jewry than many expected.

The concious rock

I have been fascinated by the relationship between neuroscience and the existence of God since reading Jonah Lehrer's "Proust was a Neuroscientist." Sunday, the New York Times added to this inner dialogue my mind has been having with the self. The article was titled "Mind of a Rock," and, no, it was not a profile of, say, Keanu Reeves.

How could the electrochemical processes in the lump of gray matter that is our brain give rise to — or, even more mysteriously, be — the dazzling technicolor play of consciousness, with its transports of joy, its stabs of anguish and its stretches of mild contentment alternating with boredom? This has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences” and even “the last frontier of science.” It engrosses the intellectual energies of a worldwide community of brain scientists, psychologists, philosophers, physicists, computer scientists and even, from time to time, the Dalai Lama.

So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant. Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.

The doctrine that the stuff of the world is fundamentally mind-stuff goes by the name of panpsychism. A few decades ago, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that it is an inescapable consequence of some quite reasonable premises. First, our brains consist of material particles. Second, these particles, in certain arrangements, produce subjective thoughts and feelings. Third, physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?) Now, Nagel reasoned, the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves — features that, in the right combinations, add up to our inner thoughts and feelings. But the electrons, protons and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.

Nagel himself stopped short of embracing panpsychism, but today it is enjoying something of a vogue.

(skip)

If you are poetically inclined, you might think of the rock as a purely contemplative being. And you might draw the moral that the universe is, and always has been, saturated with mind, even though we snobbish Darwinian-replicating latecomers are too blinkered to notice.

'Seinfeld' auditions

Because of the writers' strike, which may or may not be a Jewish issue, there have been no new episodes of the Daily Show or Leno or Conan. So here's one from the Conan O'Brien archives.

Is there really a superior race?

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on."

I wish these assurances were true. They aren't.

Gulp. Those are two powerful yet common words. And, man, Slate's William Saletan has some chutzpah for being able to write such a politically uncomfortable, if not incorrect, article. But facts are facts. And Saletan has sort of been down this road before with 'Jewgenics.'

More importantly, he isn't using this as a platform to bash blacks.

Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true. If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way.

He relates the mental-visceral struggle over racial genetics to the challenges Christians faced a century ago as Darwin's theory of evolution became the scientific standard.

Evolution forced Christians to bend or break. They could insist on the Bible's literal truth and deny the facts, as Bryan did. Or they could seek a subtler account of creation and human dignity. Today, the dilemma is yours. You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

I'm for reconciliation. Later this week, I'll make that case. But if you choose to fight the evidence, here's what you're up against. Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70.

The article continues with more studies, more evidence and an explanation. It gets a bit boring at that point, especially because I couldn't stop wondering whether God would actually not create all men equally. Maybe.

The Bible states that we are made in God's image, but we are all different-- physically, mentally, emotionally, etc. -- so clearly there is no standard. I just don't know the answer to this.

Today, Saletan offered his third article on this topic, a breakdown of what the evidence of intellectual inequality teaches us and what we can do to close the gap.

Don't tell me those Nigerian babies aren't cognitively disadvantaged. Don't tell me it isn't genetic. Don't tell me it's God's will. And in the age of genetic modification, don't tell me we can't do anything about it.

No, we are not created equal. But we are endowed by our Creator with the ideal of equality, and the intelligence to finish the job.

Kosher clothing

My colleague, Jay Firestone, aka Video Jew, has this short on a sweatshop-free fashion show. Yeah, that's his broadcast voice.

A controversy-free form of cloning?

Not likely. But look alive stem-cell-research foes, the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep has abandoned the widely used cloning method for one that creates stem cells without an embryo. This would, it seems, weaken the ethical argument against stem-cell research.

How do I know about embryologist Ian Wilmut's change of heart? Because I read about it on FaithWorld, a fantastic new blog from the Reuters religion desk that I added yesterday to my still-small blog roll. Here's the FaithWorld post:

I was intrigued by a line high up saying: “Most of his motivation is practical but he admits the Japanese approach is also “easier to accept socially.” If I read that correctly, it means that science — which helped create this moral dilemma by developing the embryonic stem cell technique — may solve it eventually with another breakthrough that looks equally (or more) interesting to the scientist. That could take care of this issue, but others are bound to pop up that cannot be solved with a technical fix. Wilmot discusses this on a linked page publishing an extract from a book that he and Highfield wrote called After Dolly: The Uses and Misuses of Human Cloning. He believes an embryo cannot be considered a person until it is about 14 days old because it has no nervous system. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, counts personhood from the moment of conception, since it considers the potential in the embryo just as important as the cells that are already there. It’s hard to see how a technical breakthrough can bridge that gap.

Science writers like Highfield can explain the details of the procedure far better than I, so please look their way (here’s a quick Google News search) for more. What interests me is the impact this may have on opponents of embryonic stem cell research. Will they embrace this as the moral alternative, or oppose this as well as “playing God”? Would those who say they want the often-mentioned benefits of stem cell research but oppose public funds for the embryonic type on moral grounds now campaign to have this new method bankrolled with taxpayers’ money?

Sleeping with his brother's wife

A colleague just sent me an email with this subject: "Pastor in Atlanta fathers child of his brother's wife 'His nephew is his son!' OY VEY." I did a Google News search and found this story from the Associated Press last night.

DECATUR, Ga. -- The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother's wife and fathered a child by her.

Members of Archbishop Earl Paulk's family stood at the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church a few Sundays ago and revealed the secret exposed by a recent court-ordered paternity test.

In truth, this is not the first — or even the second — sex scandal to engulf Paulk and the independent, charismatic church. But this time, he could be in trouble with the law for lying under oath about the affair.

The living proof of that lie is 34-year-old D.E. Paulk, who for years was known publicly as Earl Paulk's nephew.

"I am so very sorry for the collateral damage it's caused our family and the families hurt by the removing of the veil that hid our humanity and our sinfulness," said D.E. Paulk, who received the mantle of head pastor a year and a half ago.

D.E. Paulk said he did not learn the secret of his parentage until the paternity test. "I was disappointed, and I was surprised," he said.

Disappointed? Surprised? How about enraged and pondering violence against your birth father?

(Bonus: A snarkey piece from Wonkette)

Evangelicals 'over-committed to the Bible'

Ted Olsen writes about a talk by Biola's J.P. Moreland at the Evangelical Theological Society meeting in San Diego:

In short, to accuse evangelicals of over-commitment to the Bible at ETS would be like accusing environmentalists of talking too much about climate change at a Sierra Club meeting. But Moreland, who has gained some prominence as a philosopher and apologist, wasn’t pulling any punches.

“In the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ,” he said. “And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.”

The problem, he said, is “the idea that the Bible is the sole source of knowledge of God, morality, and a host of related important items. Accordingly, the Bible is taken to be the sole authority for faith and practice.”

Suppose an archaeologist discovered a portion of the ancient city of Jerusalem that was specifically described in the Old Testament, Moreland said:

Could the archaeologist have discovered the site without the use of the Old Testament? Once discovered, could the archaeologist learn things about the site that went beyond what was in the Old Testament? Clearly the answer is yes to both questions. Why? Because the site actually exists in the real world. It does not exist in the Bible. It is only described in the Bible and the biblical description in partial.

Likewise, Moreland argued, “because the human soul/spirit and demons/angels are real, it is possible, and, in fact, actual that extra-biblical knowledge can be gained about these spiritual entities. … Demons do not exist in the Bible. They exist in reality.”

This is parenting?

This is one of the saddest stories I've heard in a long time. I've had friends who have lost a child, and for some it has been an absolute breaking point in their life. It's no wonder Megan Meier's parents are separated and seeking a divorce.

But the worst part about the Meier family losing their daughter to suicide has got to be the complicity of an adult neighbor in the harassment of 13-year-old Megan. The neighbor helped create a fake MySpace account belonging to "Josh Evans" that was used to torment Megan with promises of attention and affection and then to deliver devastating messages.

Suburban Journals has a powerful narrative of the end and aftermath of Megan's life. Here are her final moments.

Monday, Oct. 16, 2006, was a rainy, bleak day. At school, Megan had handed out invitations to her upcoming birthday party and when she got home she asked her mother to log on to MySpace to see if Josh had responded.

Why did he suddenly think she was mean? Who had he been talking to?

Tina signed on. But she was in a hurry. She had to take her younger daughter, Allison, to the orthodontist.

Before Tina could get out the door it was clear Megan was upset. Josh still was sending troubling messages. And he apparently had shared some of Megan's messages with others.

Tina recalled telling Megan to sign off.

"I will Mom," Megan said. "Let me finish up."

Tina was pressed for time. She had to go. But once at the orthodontist's office she called Megan: Did you sign off?

"No, Mom. They are all being so mean to me."

"You are not listening to me, Megan! Sign off, now!"

Fifteen minutes later, Megan called her mother. By now Megan was in tears.

"They are posting bulletins about me." A bulletin is like a survey. "Megan Meier is a slut. Megan Meier is fat."

Megan was sobbing hysterically. Tina was furious that she had not signed off.

Once Tina returned home she rushed into the basement where the computer was. Tina was shocked at the vulgar language her daughter was firing back at people.

"I am so aggravated at you for doing this!" she told Megan.

Megan ran from the computer and left, but not without first telling Tina, "You're supposed to be my mom! You're supposed to be on my side!"

On the stairway leading to her second-story bedroom, Megan ran into her father, Ron.

"I grabbed her as she tried to go by," Ron says. "She told me that some kids were saying horrible stuff about her and she didn't understand why. I told her it's OK. I told her that they obviously don't know her. And that it would be fine."

Megan went to her room and Ron went downstairs to the kitchen, where he and Tina talked about what had happened, the MySpace account, and made dinner.

Twenty minutes later, Tina suddenly froze in mid-sentence.

"I had this God-awful feeling and I ran up into her room and she had hung herself in the closet."

Megan Taylor Meier died the next day, three weeks before her 14th birthday.

Later that day, Ron opened his daughter's MySpace account and viewed what he believes to be the final message Megan saw - one the FBI would be unable to retrieve from the hard drive.

It was from Josh and, according to Ron's best recollection, it said, "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."

Read the rest of the story and you will be dumbfounded regarding how the idiot mother who helped her daughter taunt Megan can still live just a few doors down from the Meiers. I know what you're not thinking, but in case you are -- yes, God commands us to forgive. That's a lot easier in the abstract, I'm sure. But, more importantly, this neighbor hasn't apologized or asked for forgiveness. So should it be expected?

Silverman on Silverman on blacks and Jews

The Jewish Journal's cover story this week was an essay about Sarah Silverman by her sister, Rabbi Susan Silverman.

"Bitch, bastard, damn, s—t." Okay, her menschiness has never taken a traditional form. But the crowds roared. The performer was 2-year-old Sarah. The stage was our living room. The set was our father's lap on one of our giant round sponges -- 1970s artsy chairs -- in orange and beige stripes, upon the bright green carpet of our living room. The audience was our house full of volunteers for the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, home at the end of a long day before the general election.

Sarah's ear-length, jet-black hair and pale skin emphasized her big brown eyes, and she smiled so that every tiny tooth sparkled. Who wouldn't laugh when this beautiful toddler -- all eyes and smiles -- swore like a longshoreman? A recipe for success? Our mother didn't seem to think so. She rolled her eyes in mock disapproval as our father beamed. We, her big sisters, couldn't believe our luck -- this juxtaposition of adorable and crude. It was genius. We couldn't get enough of it.

We had her perform for everyone. At large family gatherings, our Nana would say, "don't let her say that," but stood -- transfixed, smiling -- like the rest of us. Nana didn't always love what came out of Sarah's mouth and knew exactly whom to lay into when she went "too far" -- her son, our father. One Saturday afternoon, Sarah sat in the family room, tush on heels, her elbows leaning on the yellow plastic coffee table. Nana stood in the doorway and said, "Sarah, what are you coloring?"

Sarah (focused on her work): "A house."

Nana: "Guess what? I brought some brownies for you."

Sarah (still focused on her work): "Shove 'em up you're a—, Nana."

In light of that, I went searching on YouTube for the funniest Silverman moments. None of them were really God Blog, or even work, appropriate. But in the video above Silverman tells us the similarities she sees between elderly Jewish people and young black men.

Double the lashings for gang-rape victim

You read that headline twice, right? I must have made a mistake. Judges don't punish the rape victim. Right? Well, they do in Saudi Arabia. From Mere Rhetoric:

As predictable as it is infuriating as it is surreal:

The General Court in Qatif yesterday doubled the number of lashes for a rape victim... TA year-and-a-half ago in the Eastern Province town of Qatif, a seven men gang-raped a 19-year-old girl 14 times. Three judges from the Qatif General Court sentenced the rape victim to 90 lashes for being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape. The sentences for the seven rapists ranged from 10 months to five years in prison. The Appeals Court sentenced the victim to 200 lashes and six months in prison... A source at the Qatif General Court said that the judges had informed the rape victim that the reason behind doubling her punishment was "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media."

Open thread: Anti-Semitic or uncomfortably honest?

Is this cartoon by Zapiro, who is Jewish, anti-Semitic or uncomfortably honest?

Israeli commandos stalk Hollywood paparazzi

Rebecca Spence, The Forward's new reporter in town, had an interesting piece last month about former Israeli commandos serving security for Hollywood celebrities and oddities.

When Kevin Federline’s lawyer wanted to serve Britney Spears’s closest associates with subpoenas during the ill-fated duo’s recent custody battle, he hired a former Israeli commando to get the job done.

While this service may not have necessitated counter-terrorism expertise, the ex-Israeli operative who carried out the mission, Aaron Cohen, has built a career on the premise that protecting celebrities has more in common with nabbing Islamic radicals than may be apparent. Cohen, 31, is the founder of IMS Security — short for “Israeli Military Specialists” — a Los Angeles-based private security firm operating in the hostile territory of Hollywoodland.

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Guarding the likes of Brad Pitt, Jackie Chan and Eva Longoria, to name but a few, Cohen — with a minimum retainer fee in the range of $20,000 and a day’s work costing up to $1,000 — has applied the principles he learned detaining terrorists to keeping aggressive paparazzi and the occasional celebrity stalker at bay.

“Stalking is a form of terror,” Cohen explained in an interview in Los Angeles’s Fairfax district, sipping a cup of strong black coffee. “The formula is a lot like counter-terrorism, because you need to see who you’re dealing with before you freak out.”

Indeed, Cohen called the Spears subpoenas, carried out in mid-August, “pure counter-terrorism.”

Evangelicals takeover America

D. Michael Lindsay, a sociology professor at Rice University, interviewed some 360 evangelicals for his new book, "Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite," which seems to have inspired Christianity Today to interview him.

You examined four areas: politics, media, academia, and business. Where did you find evangelical leadership strongest, and where is it weakest?

The largest accumulation of evangelicals is clearly in the business world. And regarding their ability to make a difference, there is a pretty big difference between public companies, traded on the stock exchange, versus private companies. If you are the CEO of a private company run by you and your family, you have a lot of latitude.

The area with the least amount of influence would probably be in Hollywood. There's really only one evangelical in the country who has the resources to "greenlight" a project, and that's Phil Anschutz.

And he's not in the traditional power structure there.

You got it. He's an outsider who has clout; he's not working through the existing structures. The existing structures are dominated by secular people. That said, there are more entrepreneurial energies devoted to Hollywood than I see even in the political domain. So I fully expect we will see some dramatic changes.

You infer a palpable distaste among the elite for evangelical culture—for its music, for its Thomas Kinkade artwork, for its suspicion of intellectualism and science.

That's right. I would say two things go hand in hand that have the potential to cause deep divisions. One is the divide between mainstream cultural consumption and subcultural consumption—only listening to Christian radio, only buying your books from Christian bookstores. And then the other track is church versus non-church spiritual nourishment. Both of those have the potential to create deep divides in evangelicalism.

I think it's too early to decipher what is going to happen. I don't notice, for example, that this distaste for evangelical kitsch goes to a deeper level where there is distaste for fellow Christians. Many of the evangelical leaders would couch their comments in saying, "You know, these folks are so sincere about their faith." They talk about going to Christian conferences where there are the Peter and Paul salt and pepper shakers, and they are dismissive about it. Later on they'll come back to that as though their conscience is working on them. They'll say, "You know, I went to one of those conferences and the couple told me about how those salt and pepper shakers meant something very important to them."

What do you hope people will take away from your book?

There's been a lot of attention on the stewardship of financial resources, but practically nothing on the stewardship of power. I hope my book will stir greater understanding of how to deal with the issues of power. At this point, the evangelical movement desperately needs more thoughtful reflection on Christians' exercise of power. Because evangelicals have arrived. They have power that they didn't have 30 years ago.

What's so good about Judaism and the Boy Scouts?

"I see them as human values, not to say those aren't Jewish values also. But I think it would be unfair to credit them to a certain sect of humanity. Listen, I think there is great stuff in Judaism; I think there is great stuff in Christianity; I think there is great stuff in the Islamic faith. I think there is great stuff in the Boy Scouts and Little League, all these different manifestations of these value sets. At the end of the day, I think they are just logical principles that one would arrive at if one didn't know who they were going to be. It's like 'Alright, this is a basic set up for how to do right.' Which you could say is a stronger word than good."

Ben Goldhirsh, the 27-year-old millionaire behind GOOD magazine, told me that when I asked him if his company, which is aimed at people with a strong social conscience -- like Mother Jones or Sojourners from a more humanistic perspective -- was rooted in the Jewish values he learned as a kid. I profiled him in this week's Jewish Journal:

Goldhirsh sees the GOOD brand, which also includes Reason Pictures, a film company he started in 2004, as much more than a media organization. It's "a meta-company," he said, "a lifestyle brand" that appeals to the "reason-based sensibilities" of people like him. People who know privilege and yet want to change the world in a big way.

"It is a revolution of self-interest," said publisher Max Schorr, a prep school friend of Goldhirsh's who skipped law school to help start the magazine. "In the past, if you pursued your self-interest, it was considered selfish. For us, the process of pursuing our self-interest leads to more than ourselves. If we just pursued ourselves all the time, it would lead to a lousy life."

The timing for GOOD was not a month too soon. Not long before the first issue was published in September 2006, Al Gore (whose son, Albert Gore III, happens to be associate publisher) and "An Inconvenient Truth" made combating climate change fashionable; going green and being eco-friendly got downright trendy. Suddenly, it was cool to care not just about the environment but societal issues and the whole world around you.

"If doing good used to be a pejorative and kind of lame, or somehow was characterized that way by culture, which I don't know how the hell that happened, then certainly being ignorant and living an irrelevant life is now that way," Goldhirsh said. "An engaged life is where it is at, which is thrilling to me."

Personally, Goldhirsh is "cause agnostic," so he didn't want to encourage some passions and stifle others; he simply wanted to celebrate a social awareness, which is why the magazine's debut cover featured in white block lettering "_____ LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN."

"If this doesn't become the dominant sensibility," Goldhirsh said, "we are f---ed."

'How Hollywood saved God'

Hanna Rosin has an article in this month's Atlantic titled "How Hollywood saved God." This is familiar territory for Rosin, who just published "God's Harvard" and has written before about the evangelical Christian movement in Hollywood.

This month, New Line Cinema will release The Golden Compass, based on the first book in a trilogy of edgy children’s novels written by the British author Philip Pullman. A trailer for the movie evokes The Lord of the Rings, and comparisons have been made to The Chronicles of Narnia. All three are epic adventures that unfold in a rich fantasy world, perfect for the big screen. But beyond that basic description, the comparisons fall apart. In the past, Pullman has expressed mainly contempt for the books on which the other movies were based. He once dismissed the Lord of the Rings trilogy as an “infantile work” primarily concerned with “maps and plans and languages and codes.” Narnia got it even worse: “Morally loathsome,” he called it. “One of the most ugly and poisonous things I’ve ever read.” He described his own series as Narnia’s moral opposite. “That’s the Christian one,” he told me. “And mine is the non-Christian.”

Pullman’s books have sold 15 million copies worldwide, although it’s difficult to imagine adolescent novels any more openly subversive. The series, known collectively as His Dark Materials, centers on Lyra Belacqua, a preteen orphan who’s pursued by a murderous institution known as “the Magisterium.” Or to use the more familiar name, “the Holy Church.” In its quest to eradicate sin, the Church sanctions experiments involving the kidnap and torture of hundreds of children—experiments that separate body from soul and leave the children to stumble around zombie-like, and then die.

The point of Rosin's article is that after five years and a bunch of rewrites, not to mention $180 million in production, producers have taken the anti-religious out of Pullman's epic. I think.

See, I don't have a subscription to The Atlantic anymore. (I rarely enjoyed reading it.) So all I got for free online are the two paragraphs above. If any God Blog readers have a subscription, please, inform us of what the article is really about.

'Circumcision accident' from JTA

Bloggish warns you not to click through to this story.

Really, you can try and find out what's behind that provocative headline on our home page nifty JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Java [tm] news ticker, but why would you?

JJ editor: 'Writers Strike is a Jewish issue'

My editor at The Jewish Journal, Rob Eshman, disagrees with the premise of my Wandering Jew column last week, in which I argued that the writer's strike is not a Jewish story. Here's the nut:

Indeed, "Hollywood writer" is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn't a Jewish story. It's a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

In his column this week, Rob writes:

The Writers Strike is a Jewish issue.

How do I know that? Because everyone is saying it's not. The writers who are demanding a larger share of DVD rights and residuals for their work and the producers who refuse to give it to them both say, repeatedly, that despite the fact that so many of them happen to be Jewish, the strike is not -- as Jewish writers and producers told our senior reporter Brad Greenberg last week -- a Jewish issue.

To paraphrase a Clinton-era favorite, you can be sure that when everyone is saying it's not about being Jewish, it's about being Jewish.

Strip away the brand-name products and gossipy inside Hollywood milieu of this strike, and what you have is a question of fair compensation and just treatment of labor.

It is a question our sages wrestled with, beginning with a law laid down in Leviticus 25:14: "And when you sell something to your fellow, or buy from the hand of your fellow, don't oppress each other."

How shallow has our Jewish life become and how silent have our pulpits fallen when we blithely accept the idea that a 4,000-year-old ethical tradition has nothing to say about how we do business?

Certainly, Jewish ethics should not be dismissed in how the Jewish writers and producers treat each other in this labor dispute. But I don't think that makes it a Jewish issue -- that makes it an issue influenced by Jewish values. The same could be said for most of the things that happen in certain pockets of Los Angeles where Jews abound.

Sometimes, as in the ongoing case for and against expansion of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a controversy becomes a Jewish issue because it deals with more than just morals and ethics but actual Jewish interests and institutions. I just don't think the plight of TV and film writers -- even if it was once an almost entirely Yiddish operation -- fits into this category.

But, then again, Rebecca Spence at The Forward spoke with the same union leader I did, David N. Weiss, and got the exact opposite angle from very similar responses.

The Jews for Ron Paul

I do not understand why Ron Paul is so popular on the Internet, though I did once find him to be worth a good quote. Anyway, JTA has a story out about the few Jews backing the maverick Republican running for president. (That's Ron Paul, not Crazy Rudy.)

Paul's candidacy was dismissed early on due to his support from white supremacist, Libertarian and other fringe groups, but the campaign has begun to pick up steam on college campuses and on the Internet, in part due to his staunch anti-war stance.

A longtime Texas congressman, Paul raised $4.2 million on Nov. 5 from 37,000 individual donors who agreed to give as part of a "money bomb" on Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the failed plot of a British mercenary to kill King James I in 1605. In September, he announced that he'd brought in $5.2 million in the previous three months, putting him ahead of John McCain in the Republican money race.

Even as Paul makes headway in some circles, organized Jewish support for his Republican presidential bid is nearly nonexistent, thanks to the candidate's longstanding stance against providing foreign aid, including U.S. assistance to Israel.

And last month, The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) pointedly did not invite him to participate in its candidates' forum. His reported support from extremist groups hasn't helped win him favor among Jews.

Still, Paul commands a loyal, albeit small, Jewish following. This Jewish support has followed the same pattern as Paul's backing from other groups -- coming from out-of-the way places on the Internet and taking mainstream media and political organizations by surprise.

In addition to Perry's Jews for Ron Paul, there is Zionists for Ron Paul -- an outfit launched by Yehuda HaKohen, an American immigrant to Israel, and some of his friends back in the United States.

Some of Paul's Jewish supporters believe that it would be best for Israel if the United States kept out of Jerusalem's affairs. There are also those who believe that American aid to Israel is dangerous because it feeds the perception that Jews wield too much influence over U.S. foreign policy.

"Many of us believe the current relationship between the United States and Israel is a very unhealthy relationship, like that of a man and concubine, or a slave and master," HaKohen said.

'GOD STILL LOVES US'

Thanks to Jeff for sending this photo. It's, I imagine, from the diamond district in downtown L.A.

Comments?

In Israel, peace not now

U.S. diplomats are making a strong push for the American Jewish community to support the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian peace summit at Annapolis, which is silly because so few Israelis and Palestinians respectively support Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas.

Rick Richman at Jewish Current Issues says that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is still saying the same convoluted and unfounded thing:

Most Palestinians now believe that Israel will always be their neighbor and that no Palestinian state is going to be born through violence.

I'll tell you what, I spent my Sunday at a StandWithUs conference at Bnai David-Judea focusing on the prospects of peace, and optimism was not in the air.

Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian affairs reporter for the Jerusalem Post and NBC News, said it isn't -- Fatah is too weak, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas too unpopular to sincerely negotiate a solution.

"Even if he gets 100 percent, he can't implement it," Abu Toameh said. "He doesn't have the power."

Mitchell Bard, executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, followed with a similarly downtrodden tone. Muslims, he said, have time on their side, with a birthrate much higher than Israeli Jews and the hope of future nuclear weaponry.

"So you wait," Bard said. "Why would you want some crummy little state in Gaza and the West Bank, when all you have to do is wait?"

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"The gap between Fatah and Hamas is narrowing," Marcus said, pointing to soccer tournaments named after suicide bombers, textbooks approved by the Palestinian Authority that say the presence of non-Muslims on Palestinian land is an affront to Allah and an image used on Fatah TV that shows the Palestinian flag covering Israel on a map, with an emblem in the middle that states, "Palestine -- 2007."

For this reason, Abu Toameh said the time is not ripe for negotiations: "The Palestinian street is very radical, very bitter. I'm sorry to say it, but I don't see where we go from here."

"There are many Israelis who are prepared to give up large parts of Arab Jerusalem," the Jerusalem resident later added. "I think it is a mistake. If we had a really good government on the Palestinian side, I would say bring them in. But with Fatah and Hamas, I would run away."

Barry Bonds indicted for perjury

The feds couldn't have indicted Barry Bonds before he broke Hank Aaron's home run record? This just in.

A Christian responds to atheism

Stan Guthrie at Christianity Today offers this "Reader's Digest version" of why he's a Christian:

Let's face it: Atheism is in. Not since Nietzsche have disbelievers enjoyed such a ready public reception to their godless message—and such near-miraculous royalties. But even that hasn't put them in a good mood. Snaps Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (although not, presumably, the pronouncements of atheists), "Many of the teachings of Christianity are, as well as being incredible and mythical, immoral." A feuding Richard Dawkins suggests that believers "just shut up." Apparently, they didn't get the tolerance memo.

Other authors—including Douglas Wilson and Francis Collins—have quite capably refuted the new atheist shtick. But remembering Bertrand Russell's famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Christian," here is a Reader's Digest version of why I am.

Creation: The universe, far from being a howling wasteland indifferent to our existence, appears to be finely tuned through its estimated 13.7 billion years of existence to support life on this planet. ...

Beauty: Beethoven's Ninth, a snowflake, the sweet smell of a baby who has been sleeping, and a sunset beyond the dunes of Lake Michigan all point to a magnificent and loving Creator. And isn't it interesting that we have the capacity—unlike mere animals—to gape in awe, to be brought to tears, before them? Truly did David say, "What is man, that you are mindful of him?"

New Testament reliability: Compared with the handful of existing copies of seminal ancient works such as Homer's Iliad, the New Testament's provenance is far better attested. There are thousands of NT manuscripts in existence, some made within mere decades of the events they report. Scholar F. F. Bruce said, "The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar."

Scripture: Unlike other religious texts, the Bible gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly of its heroes: Abraham, Jacob, David, and Peter among them. Further, Scripture's message rings true. ...

Jesus: Christ's life and teachings are unparalleled in world history, as any Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim -- or atheist -- worth his salt will admit. Napoleon reportedly said, "I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man. ...

The trilemma: C.S. Lewis, commenting on Christ's claim to divinity, said: "You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Resurrection: ...

Progress: ...

Testimonies: ...

My experience: Finally, as a forgiven sinner, I testify to an imperfect yet growing sense of God's peace, presence, and provision since receiving Christ more than a quarter-century ago. Despite occasional setbacks, my faith has deepened and strengthened, whatever life brings.

And that includes the angry rantings of atheists.

OK, so even the Reader's Digest version was a little long for The God Blog. But his full explanations are worth a read.

One courageous Palestinian freedom fighter

I'm not a fan of the suicide bombers who consider themselves servants of Allah and the Palestinian cause. But Khaled Abu Toameh, he's the kind of Palestinian freedom fighter I can get behind (his mother was Palestinian, his father an Israeli Arab). Why? Because Abu Toameh is a journalist like me, only he reports on the inner workings and scandals of Fatah and Hamas. Better yet, he writes for the Jerusalem Post.

When I was in Israel last summer and saw his name in the paper, I wondered how he could possibly stay alive. Sunday, I heard Abu Toameh speak at a conference at B'nai David-Judea, and was blown away by his candid assessment of the pathetic peace process -- really, political theater -- that is leading two wildly unpopular leaders, Olmert and Abbas, to an upcoming summit at Annapolis. (More on that later today.)

"People often ask me, 'What went wrong with you? When did you change? Are you a Zionist Arab? You started out working for the PLO, now you're writing for a Jewish paper,'" said Abu Toameh, who began his career as a journalist for the party of Yasser Arafat. "I find it sad that as an Arab Muslim I have to work for a Jewish newspaper because that is the only place that will publish my stories freely."

'Mormon Robin Hood' robbin' banks

Julio Cesar Rodriguez says he stole from the rich, gave to the poor and got caught because he didn't cover his face when he tried to knock over the San Fernando Citibank.

Prosecutors charged the 32-year-old Arleta man with 14 counts of robbery and attempted robbery Tuesday in a string of bank jobs dating back to 2004. Though his arraignment was delayed until later this month, police said he has admitted his guilt and cooperated with the investigation.

The Los Angeles Police Department alleges Rodriguez snatched close to half a million bucks out of bank vaults throughout the northeast San Fernando Valley. When Detective Ursula Guillory of the Robbery-Homicide Division asked what he did with the proceeds, Rodriguez offered a shocking answer.

"He said, 'I spent a little on myself, then I went down to Skid Row and handed it out,'" Guillory said. "He went on to tell us about all the rest of the robberies."

She'd been tracking him for months, based on DNA evidence obtained from the scarf he used to cover his face in an earlier robbery in Van Nuys. He'd scribbled lines from the Book of Mormon inside alluding to 1st Nephi 3:7. Guillory asked him about the passage, and he said he belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"Now I've got a bank-robbing, Mormon Robin Hood," she said. "He was very cooperative and said he wanted to be responsible. He said, 'I don't want to waste your time, detective.'"

That's the top of an article in today's LA Daily News by the always excellent Brent Hopkins. A contributer to the It's A Crime blog, Brent sent me this note when I told him I liked his story:

Now I'm not an expert in all the tenets of the Mormon faith, but I'm guessing that "don't rob banks" fits somewhere in between "don't drink coffee", "don't smoke cigarettes" and "spread the word of the Joseph Smith and/or the Lord."

Catholic bishops turned away from Western Wall

Should crucifixes and other evocative Christian images be barred from the Western Wall? I just got off the phone with an Orthodox rabbi who wasn't so sure what the right response would have been when a group of Catholic bishops approached the Kotel yesterday in fall Christian regalia.

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch refused to give the bishops access to the site and avoided meeting the ecclesiastic delegation of approximately 20, led by Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schonborn.

Rabinovitch denied that the incident, which took place Thursday, smacked of religious intolerance.

"Crosses are a symbol that hurts Jewish feelings," said Rabinovitch who refused to elaborate on precisely how or why the crosses were so offensive.

"I feel the same way about a Jew putting on a tallit and phylacteries and going into a Church. I would be the first to rebuke such a Jew for not behaving like a mensch." Rabinovitch added that he was surprised the Catholic clerics refused to hide their crosses.

"They did not have to take them off, just hide them. I've never encountered a Christian who has refused, including the Pope."

This reminds me a bit of Ariel Sharon's military-led visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, only the bishops' visit, thank God, has not sparked a guerrilla war.

Georgia governor leads prayer for rain

ATLANTA -- Bowing his head outside the Georgia Capitol on Tuesday, Gov. Sonny Perdue cut a newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for rain to end the region's historic drought.

"Oh father, we acknowledge our wastefulness," Perdue said. "But we're doing better. And I thought it was time to acknowledge that to the creator, the provider of water and land, and to tell him that we will do better."

Hundreds of Georgians -- ministers and lawmakers, landscapers and office workers -- gathered in downtown Atlanta for the prayer vigil. Some held bibles and crucifixes. Many swayed and linked arms as a choir sang "What a Mighty God We Serve" and "Amazing Grace."

As Perdue described it, "We have come together, very simply, for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm."

"It's got to be worth a shot," said David Mais, 34, an Atlanta resident who is worried his carpet cleaning business could suffer from the drought. "I do think we need to do a lot more, but hopefully prayer will unite us."

As metropolitan Atlanta's water supplies drain to record lows, many across the Southeast have criticized Perdue and other Georgia officials for failing to introduce more stringent conservation measures.

The rest of this story from the LA Times is here. It's clear to me that God answers our prayers if we are earnest in seeking His help. But God doesn't reward poor stewardship, which reminds me of a story I wrote last year about a group that traveled far and wide to Hollywood to pray for lower gas prices:

The Rev. Beatrice Williams drove 110 miles to Hollywood on Wednesday to beg the Lord for lower gasoline prices.

"There is victory when we stand together," Williams said, after joining eight others in prayer. "We will overcome, and we will overcome this if there are enough people who believe that God cares."

Standing beneath the Gothic Revival tower of Hollywood United Methodist Church - and across from a Chevron station charging $3.43 a gallon for unleaded - the group asked God to comfort those paying more while driving less.

"We give you praise and honor and glory. You are king of all kings. You know our needs," Bishop Donald Downing, pastor of Heart to Heart Christian Center in Fort Washington, Md., prayed as cars zipped through the intersection of Highland and Franklin avenues, occasionally honking.

"These high gas prices, Lord, bring them down, oh Father."

These prayer warriors were hoping to induce the same miracle the effort's organizer, Pray Live, claims it brought about in Washington, D.C. After about 50 attended a gathering in late April, national fuel prices dropped a few cents.

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Gasoline experts have been offering advice for months on how drivers can reduce fuel prices: empty the trunk, combine errands, keep tires properly inflated, maintain a steady speed.

"People seek - what is the word I'm looking for? - relief in many ways," said Jeff Spring, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of Southern California. "We would recommend they continue to try to cut their use of gas to try to lower the prices. Reduced demand will lower their prices."

What about asking for help from above?

"I'll leave that question up to the theologians," Spring said.

I think Lance Warner, a 22-year-old history student at Georgia State University, hits the nail on the head in the Times article.

"You can't make up for years of water mismanagement with a prayer session. It's lunacy!"

What's in a name? More than you think

This one is from the Freakonomics School of Unconventional Studies:

The title of the paper, to appear in next month's edition of the journal Psychological Science, is entitled "Moniker maladies, when names sabotage success." Here's the abstract:

In five studies, we found that people like their names enough to unconsciously pursue consciously avoided outcomes that resemble their names. Baseball players avoid strikeouts, but players whose names begin with the strikeout-signifying letter K strike out more than others (Study 1). All students want As, but students whose names begin with letters associated with poorer performance (C and D) achieve lower grade point averages (GPAs) than do students whose names begin with A and B (Study 2), especially if they like their initials (Study 3). Because lower GPAs lead to lesser graduate schools, students whose names begin with the letters C and D attend lower-ranked law schools than students whose names begin with A and B (Study 4). Finally, in an experimental study, we manipulated congruence between participants' initials and the labels of prizes and found that participants solve fewer anagrams when a consolation prize shares their first initial than when it does not (Study 5). These findings provide striking evidence that unconsciously desiring negative name-resembling performance outcomes can insidiously undermine the more conscious pursuit of positive outcomes.

The last chapter of Freakonomics argued that people given "super-black" names, like the father who called his two sons Winner and Loser, or the girl named Shithead (pronounced "Shah-teed"), don't do worse because of their names but often because of life circumstances. But this study looks at a much odder phenomenon of name association.

So what does this imply for people named Moses or Jesus?

Former Pepperdine ballplayer the face of 'Crazy Robertson'

The religion angle here is tenuous -- the subject once played on Pepperdine's baseball team -- but the Wall Street Journal has a story today about one of L.A.'s most recognizable homeless men, John Wesley Jermyn. He's known as the "Crazy Robertson," and this year an overpriced clothing brand was created in his honor (that might not be the right word).

Among locals and online, there's much speculation about Mr. Jermyn's personal history, including one oft-repeated rumor that he's a secretive millionaire.

In a plot twist worthy of Tinseltown, Mr. Jermyn now has a clothing label named after him. Since it was introduced last month, "The Crazy Robertson" brand of T-shirts and sweatshirts, created by a trio of 23-year-olds, has flown off the shelves at Kitson, a haunt of tabloid stars like Paris Hilton. The clothes feature stylized images of Mr. Jermyn, including one design -- available on a $98 hoodie -- that has a graphic of him dancing and the phrase "No Money, No Problems" on the back. At the largest of Kitson's three boutiques on Robertson, shirts bearing Mr. Jermyn's likeness are sold alongside $290 "Victoria Beckham" jeans and $50 baby shoes designed by pop star Gwen Stefani.

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Mr. Jermyn's slide into homelessness is a painful subject for his sister Beverly. And so is the clothing deal. She believes "The Crazy Robertson" founders are exploiting her brother's condition to build their brand. "I think these guys saw an opportunity and they took it," she says. "I am not happy with the arrangement."

Ms. Jermyn, who lives close to the alley where Mr. Jermyn sleeps, says her brother has a form of schizophrenia. He refuses to take medication, she says, despite suffering from fits of shouting and cursing. In the years since his condition began deteriorating in the late 1970s, "he slipped through my fingers like sand," says Ms. Jermyn, 64, who manages facilities for Oracle Corp.

In the late 1980s she testified in court in a proceeding to force her brother to seek help, but psychological evaluators found him "lucid and gracious," according to Ms. Jermyn. She has made countless attempts to provide him with shelter and therapy, and she still visits him twice a week with food. She also pays for his cellphone and collects his Social Security checks on his behalf.

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Mr. Jermyn was raised in Hancock Park, a historic L.A. neighborhood that's home to some of the city's wealthiest families. His father managed one of L.A.'s largest Chevrolet dealerships.

A star athlete in high school, Mr. Jermyn was selected by the Kansas City Royals in the 1969 Major League Baseball draft. He attended Pepperdine University and played a season for a Los Angeles Dodgers' minor-league team in Bellingham, Wash. (He hit just .205 and made 12 errors in 63 games, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.)

Joel John Roberts, chief executive of People Assisting the Homeless, which provides shelters for L.A.'s street residents, says the branding of Mr. Jermyn is "like designing a line of clothing patterned after Iraqi refugees fleeing the war."

Here is a video of Jermyn's dance-skating.



(Hat tip: LAObserved.)

'Crappy-tipping Jews' cartoon

This cartoon from the University of Arizona's student paper caused a big stir out there last month. In case you can't read it, the "No Relation" sketch by staffer Joseph Topmiller depicted a restaurant credit card slip with a 7 percent tip from a Mark Goldfarb and this note beneath:

"Attention all crappy-tipping Jews!!! Just because you’re ‘screwing’ the server ... does not mean that it’s a mitzvah."

The paper eventually apologized for the cartoon, but the response from the student body was mixed -- many felt it was anti-Semitic; others that Topmiller had the First Amendment right to be a bigot; and some thought he was right.

Topmiller, who was soon fired and then rehired over the cartoon he thought was clever, emerged in the Tucson Weekly this month playing the victim.

"I was called so many names," Topmiller says. It was ironic to Topmiller when people started calling him homophobic, considering he is gay--with a nice Jewish boyfriend, no less.

"But that's the one thing I haven't done: I haven't called anyone names in my comic. I take certain stereotypes and certain situations and bring up something completely unrelated to (them). That's what the title was based on. And I thought it made people think."

To be fair, Topmiller's previous cartoons "took shots at Mormons, the LBGT community and even quadriplegics," which got him fired from the Daily Wildcat once before. But regardless of whether Topmiller meant to perpetuate an anti-Semitic stereotype or is just really naive, that is one crappy cartoon.

Heaven or Hell?

Over at his blog, Daniel Radosh runs a weekly contest to see who can write the worst caption to a New Yorker cartoon. This was a finalist for the cartoon above:

"You know, I'm beginning to think, the halos and clouds and so forth notwithstanding, that this isn't actually Heaven, but is in fact Hell. For one thing, the boredom here is so oppressive that it feels like we're being punished, not rewarded. For another, I was a rapist."

Jesus makeup and Wash Away Your Sins soap

Well, here's another tasteless attempt to make a few bucks. Among the Looking Good For Jesus products are a mirror compact, a coin purse and a mini kit that "redeems you in his eyes and takes the edge off sinning."

The company, BlueQ, also sells Wash Away Your Sins soap -- if only it were so easy -- and Kills A Kitten Gum, and this is funny, to remind men that every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten.

(Hat tip: GeekHeeb)

More sinful behavior

As you probably noticed, JewishJournal.com has been having more server problems, which this morning shut down The God Blog. We're back online now.

'LA is the apocalypse'

I'm taking off right now to interview Jonah Lehrer about his first book, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," so I saw it fitting to finally write about this post I saw on his blog a few weeks ago, a link to BLDGBLOG, a well-written architecture blog.

L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there – that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.

The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.

It says: no one loves you; you're the least important person in the room; get over it.

What matters is what you do there.

And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something; or maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura. Maybe that just means getting into skateboarding, or into E!, or into Zen, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism; or maybe you'll plunge yourself into gin-fueled all night Frank Sinatra marathons – or you'll lift weights and check email every two minutes on your Blackberry and watch old Bruce Willis films.

Who cares?

Literally no one cares, is the answer. No one cares. You're alone in the world.

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Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it's bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don't matter. You're free.

I used to hate LA. When I first moved here for college, I started referring to San Diego as the Promised Land that I once took for granted. But now I love it here. I don't feel as lonely as this writer implies most Angelenos do; I've never felt like I'm missing the neighborly support that other big cities supposedly offer. But, then again, I've got quite a few UCLA buddies still around, and I'm married.

What implications, though, does this psychological breakdown carry for religiosity and spirituality in the carefree city?

Pastor Hagee the gentile Maccabi

The Dallas Morning News recently profiled John Hagee, a megachurch pastor and the leader of Christians United for Israel. Hagee is a controversial figure in Christian and Jewish circles; his influence is important for Israel but his love for the Jewish state is clearly based on his understanding of the End Times.

Mr. Hagee said he is following the Bible's mandate to protect Israel. He espouses an end-times theology in which he connects Iran's nuclear threat with the Apocalypse, the final battle of good and evil on earth.

In his book, Jerusalem Countdown, he writes: "Before us is a nuclear countdown with Iran, followed by Ezekiel's war and then the final battle – the Battle of Armageddon. The end of the world as we know it is rapidly approaching."

His message fits neatly into the calls to strike a nuclear facility in Iran.

"Iran is Germany," he said, and its president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, "is the new Hitler."

"He intends to attack Israel first and then bring the nuclear fight to America," he said. "His terrorist-trained people are in Iraq right now killing a third of U.S. forces there. That's an act of war.

Biblical prophecy is not new. But Mr. Hagee, the nation's leading Christian Zionist, seeks to channel biblically inspired devotion to Israel into organized efforts to affect politics and public policy.

His group, Christians United for Israel, lobbies Congress on behalf of policies that support the state of Israel. The organization claims 50,000 members from churches representing 2 million people and conducts Night to Honor Israel rallies at Christian churches and hotel ballrooms – 75 cities last year.

Christians United's second annual Washington event in July drew 4,500 supporters. President Bush provided a welcoming statement, and speakers included Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Mr. Lieberman brought the crowd to its feet by comparing Mr. Hagee to Moses.

"Like Moses," the senator said, "he's become the leader of a mighty multitude – even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land."

The story quotes Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State saying that Hagee's influence is bad. That's clearly not a lone opinion, but I'm not sure why the reporter quoted Lynn here, who, as I've mentioned before, is really a fringe figure in Christianity.

The New Nostradamus predicts the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Imagine you could predict the future. With precision. And all you were doing was using a beefed up version of John Nash's game theory formula. Well, GOOD magazine (whose founder I profiled for an article in next week's JJ) has a cover story on a guy who can.

His name is a mouthful -- Bruce Bueno de Mesquita -- and he's being hailed as the New Nostradamus, making this lead quote oh-so fitting: "Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack."

The chairman of NYU's department of politics, Bueno de Mesquita (mmm, I'm hungry) has been more accurate in his predictions than the CIA.

“We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”

His method is more psychology than foreign policy. He determines the motivations of the players involved in a specific issue, applies those to a "rational-choice" model, which uses game theory as its backbone, and arrives at an expected outcome. He's had a lot of amazing gets, but this was my favorite mentioned in the article:

His model predicted that upon Khomeini’s death, an ayatollah named Hojatolislam Khamenei and an obscure junior cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would emerge to lead the country together. At the time, Rafsanjani was so little known that his name had yet to appear in the New York Times. Even more improbably, Khomeini had already designated his successor, and it was neither Ayatollah Khamenei nor Rafsanjani. Khomeini’s stature among Iran’s ruling clerics made it inconceivable that they would defy their leader’s choice. At the APSA meeting subsequent to the article’s publication, Bueno de Mesquita was roundly denounced as a quack by the Iran experts—a charlatan peddling voodoo mathematics. “They said I was an idiot, basically. They said my work was evil, offensive, that it should be suppressed,” he recalls. “It was a very difficult time in my career.” Five years later, when Khomeini died, lo and behold, Iran’s fractious ruling clerics chose Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani to jointly lead the country.

Anyway, with the much-anticipated peace forum at Annapolis coming up between Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, New Nostradamus offered this model for achieving piece in the most contested -- and holiest -- strip of land in the Middle East.

“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

Borats Anonymous

I'm always late to the viral videos. Borats Anonymous is sort of religious, right? At least it has a bunch of Jewish jokes, and "Throw the Jew Down the Well" makes a rousing appearance. As does Rick James. I must say, though, that most these impersonators look more like Casey Affleck than Borat.

WARNING: Each of these videos is offensive in its own way.

LA drug ring fronting for Hezbollah

A seemingly small-time drug ring busted this week in Los Angeles was actually targeted for funding the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, the Daily News has learned.

Prosecutors left out the terror tie when they announced Tuesday that federal agents and local cops had arrested a dozen people for allegedly peddling cocaine and counterfeit clothing in Bell, Calif.

But several sources familiar with the investigation said the predominantly Arab-American gang was believed to have smuggled its crime cash to the Iranian-backed terror group.

"This was a classic case of terrorism financing, and it was pretty sophisticated how they did it," a source close to Operation Bell Bottoms told The News.

There's not much more to the story, but you can read the rest here.

The Forward 50

The Forward 50 is out, and guess who again got snubbed after missing the Heeb 100. Seriously, though, there are some surprising picks and even more surprising omissions. No Hebrew Hammer? The Forward says this year's selections indicate a greater chasm separating Jewish innovators.

Pessimists have been warning for decades that as younger generations of Jews continued their acculturation into the American mainstream, those at the leading edge of the drift would float away from Jewish identity, leaving a smaller but more committed core. Optimists, if that's the right word, predicted that the younger, more acculturated Jews wouldn't disappear from the scene; rather, their Jewish identities would evolve in new and unpredictable ways, leaving the Jewish community as many small communities, with less and less identifiably in common.

This year's Forward 50 list shows what look to us, at least, like clear signs of continental drift. When we sat down to take a long look at the community, what we found was not a hardening core surrounded by an evanescent periphery, but numerous pockets of identity taking shape on the landscape, most showing clear signs of solidity, but most quite disconnected from ― even unaware of ― the others.

From Los Angeles only seven (and a half) people made the list:

Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow
Henry Waxman
Jimmy Delshad
Roz Rothstein
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin
Rabbi Laura Geller
Robert Wexler

Well, at least we didn't have Jack Abramoff on the list again.

Priest arrested for stalking Conan O'Brien

A priest has been arrested on charges of stalking late-night talk show host Conan O'Brien by writing him threatening notes on parish letterhead, contacting his parents and showing up at his studio, prosecutors said Wednesday.

"I want a public confession before I ever consider giving you absolution _ or a spot on your couch," wrote the Rev. David Ajemian, who signed the notes "Padre," said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney's office.

Ajemian, from the Archdiocese of Boston, was arrested last week while trying to enter a taping session of NBC's "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, near where other NBC shows are taped and the famous Christmas tree is put up, Thompson said.

Court papers say Ajemian referred to himself as "your priest stalker" in one note and complained of not being allowed in to see an earlier taping of the O'Brien show.

"Is this the way you treat your most dangerous fans?" the note said.

Well, at least Ajemian wasn't arrested for the other crime that in recent years has been attached to Catholic priests.

'Mario Bros' electric show

My GeekHeeb colleague put this up on his blog last night. I'm not sure how two Tesla cables and a fiber-optic cable running from a laptop create the theme to "Mario Bros," but this is pretty awesome, sort of like "The Prestige." (The Geek Group did a similar demonstration.)



Can someone explain how this works?

On the picket line with Jewish screenwriters

"Are you Jewish?"

With some discomfort, I asked that question repeatedly of the 300-plus picketers in front of CBS Studio Center in Studio City on Monday, the first day of the strike by the Writers Guild of America.

It was an awkward query not because I feared dismissal -- after accounting for noses and facial hair and eyeglasses, I was able to reduce uncertainty to about 20 percent -- but because I knew these TV and film writers did not see a connection between Yiddishkayt and the failed contract negotiations that spurred some 12,000 members of the WGA to go on strike at 9:01 p.m. Sunday.

"What's the Jewish angle?" Andrew Jacobson, a co-writer of "Not Another Teen Movie," asked me. "I don't see one except in the most stereotypical sense. This is an issue that affects people regardless of religion or race or gender. It's writers united."

Indeed, "Hollywood writer" is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn't a Jewish story. It's a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

This was probably the most challenging story I've reported since joining The Jewish Journal six months ago. I could not, for the life of me, find my angle, and then I labored long and hard over the wording of this 700-word story. I know, it doesn't show.

It just seemed like such an awkward topic, a story with characters so obviously Jewish but a theme and plot that has nothing to do with Judaism. And asking film and TV writers if they are Jewish is like asking someone in Vatican City if they are Catholic. When I asked Marc Alan Levy, who wrote the TV movie "Searching for David's Heart," he deadpanned, "Yeah. I'm the only one in line."

More aid to Palestinians means more murders

This stark graph from Mere Rhetoric shows that homicides in the West Bank and Gaza closely follow the amount of international aid flowing to Palestinians, adjusted for a one-year lag.

We found this CAMERA study through a Minneapolis economics blogger named Captain Capitalism. It looks at what happens to the number of people Palestinians murder in the year after an increase or decrease in aid. Hmm:

Every time aid increases, homicides increase. Every time it decreases, homicides decrease. There's a not uncompelling theory about how cultures degenerate into corruption and depravity when they have to rely on outsiders to literally feed and clothe them. That explains some of what's going on, but it isn't enough to explain such a strong and consistent correlation.

(Hat tip: Seraphic Secret)

Rabbi will pay for love

My editor got a lot of letters in response to a column a few months ago that said rabbis should encourage Jewish woman to date gentile men. I'm not sure if Rabbi Donald Weber read the column, but shortly after the New Jersey rabbi offered a unique approach to get Jews to marry each other.

Six weeks ago, in his Yom Kippur sermon at Temple Rodeph Torah, a Reform synagogue, Weber offered to personally pay for six-month memberships to JDate, the popular Jewish Internet dating service, for any singles in the congregation who asked.

JDate charges $149 for a six- month membership, and so far, nine people have taken the rabbi up on his offer. He and his wife, Shira Stern, initially pledged $1,000 to the effort but just donated a second $1,000 as more people came forward.

"All they have to do is claim it," said Weber, who received a slight group discount from JDate. "We'll do this as long as there's a need, and as long as there's a desire."

Well, considering the declining American Jewish population and the crisis of intermarriage that some Jewish sociologists have been crying gevalt over for decades, I hope Rabbi Weber and his wife have a large savings account.

The 'Jewish hustler' gets some real green

Dov Charney is a self-described "Jewish hustler," and today he hustled some real dough out of the deal that is buying out his clothing company, American Apparel. Mark Lacter, whose LA Biz Observed is my main source of financial news, has the info and reports that AA employees now sign a document stating:

“American Apparel is in the business of designing and manufacturing sexually charged T-shirts and intimate apparel, and uses sexually charged visual and oral communications in its marketing and sales activity.”

Lacter also linked to this New York Times article about Charney:

Mr. Charney has gained a reputation as the Hugh Hefner of retailing, decorating his stores with covers of Penthouse magazine and admitting in interviews to sleeping with employees. In lawsuits filed in 2005, several employees charged him with creating a work environment in which women did not feel safe. They claimed in the lawsuits, for example, that Mr. Charney conducted job interviews in his underwear and gave a vibrator to at least one female worker. Mr. Charney has denied the charges, and judges have dismissed some of the lawsuits against him. In the interview, Mr. Charney said that the media had “exploited American Apparel on certain issues,” adding, “I would never do an interview in my underwear.”

Sure, every know and then an AA ad is innocuous, even cute like that unauthorized billboard of Woody Allen as "der heyliker rebe." But Charney really has a knack for provocativeness. “I could pull my penis out right now," he told The Jewish Journal a few years ago, "and I guarantee you no one would be offended.”

When you're wealthy, you don't need God

Sometimes, the religious get rich because of their faith, and not always for wholesome reasons. But more commonly, the wealthier people are, the smaller a role God plays in their lives. This was the reasoning behind Jesus' famous aphorism that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

I've repeated this reasoning to my friends often because, being a fairly self-sufficient, not-poor American, it's easy to forget to say "Thank God" when people ask how I am doing. (I admire Orthodox Jews who are better about remembering this.)

Anyway, I'm a journalist, and for journalists a story becomes newsworthy when a new study that proves reality. Thanks Pew Research Center.

Pew found that there is “a strong relationship between a country’s religiosity and its economic status.” The poorer a country, the more “religion remains central to the lives of individuals, while secular perspectives are more common in richer nations.”

The United States is the “most notable” exception. Other exceptions are oil-rich, mostly Muslim nations like Kuwait.

There is no simple interpretation of the findings. Perhaps as “people get less religious, they get wealthier,” wrote Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog. “Or perhaps the other way around. Or perhaps there’s something else behind both trends.”

Mr. Drum concludes that it’s “probably a bit of all three.”

Correction of the ... whatever

Editor & Publisher calls this from The Telegraph in London the "Newspaper Correction of the Month (If Not Year)."

Our obituary of Lady Jeanne Campbell (Sept 22) said she had a daughter, Cusi Cram, 'possibly by a man called Guy Nicholas Lancaster.' In fact Mr. Lancaster is Ms. Cram’s brother-in-law and was only five when she was born. We apologise to all concerned for our error.

Pat Robertson endorses Giuliani -- who cares?

The New York Times, and their veteran reporter of the social conservatives beat, David D. Kirkpatrick, make a big mistake in today's story about televangelist Pat Robertson endorsing the Republican presidential candidate who has made most evangelicals so comfortable.

Rudolph W. Giuliani scored a coup today by winning the support of Pat Robertson, who, as one of the nation’s best-known televangelists, could help Mr. Giuliani reassure Republicans who are wary of his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

See, right there, they assume that Robertson, the same guy who said on air that the United States should seize the opportunity to assassinate Hugo Chavez, has any cultural currency. In the opinion of a twentysomething evangelical who reluctantly remains a Republican, Robertson's relevancy is deader than Jerry Falwell's.

Obama Girl's Coulter crush

This brilliant little ditty by Leah Kauffman seems to have gone viral while I was MIA (aka playing poker in Vegas last week; oy vey). Notice the Jerry Falwell cameo and the sound bites from other Ann Coulter memorable moments.



"New York City during the Republican National Convention. In fact, that is what I think Heaven is going to look like ..."

Giuliani's former police commish to be indicted

As if it wasn't bad enough that Rudy Giuliani's personal priest was accused of pedophilia, now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination can expect his former business partner and close adviser, Bernard B. Kerik, to be indicted for tax fraud, corruption and conspiracy.

The grand jury, sitting in Westchester, has been hearing evidence about Mr. Kerik for more than a year as part of a broad federal investigation into a variety of allegations, including his acceptance of $165,000 in renovations from a contractor who was seeking a city license.

If an indictment is voted up, as prosecutors are expected to request, it would remain sealed until Friday, when Mr. Kerik would be arraigned in United States District Court in White Plains.

Mr. Kerik served under former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and questions about the former police commissioner and correction commissioner have been troublesome for Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign. There have been concerns about lapses in the vetting of his background when Mr. Kerik was named police commissioner.

And don't forget when Giuliani got President Bush to nominate Kerik for head of Homeland Security. Michael Wolff at Vanity Fair thinks Giuliani's relationship with Kerik says a lot about his attitude toward accountability.

And Bernie Kerik. There is no circumstance under which a politician with any sense of vulnerability or accountability or merely the need to maintain a sense of appearances hires Bernie Kerik (no less as the police commissioner). Kerik is from Paterson, New Jersey, where I'm from. He came to live in a house in the suburb just down the road from where my parents lived. I knew or had heard the same stories everyone else—my parents and my parents' friends—had heard. Which it seems impossible Rudy would not have heard, too. And if, somehow, he hadn't heard them, we know now from Rudy's own grand-jury testimony that he was, in fact, officially told—though, he says, it didn't quite register. In other words, one of the most experienced prosecutors of organized-crime figures has spelled out for him what is widely rumored—that his corrections chief and prospective police commissioner might be Mobbed up—and he doesn't get it. Yup. And then goes on to become business partners with the guy. And then becomes his sponsor for high federal office.

Let's not even get into the nature of Rudy's tolerance for whatever Kerik was into, and just focus on Rudy's sense of impunity—he's got no sense of caution. (A likely implosion point for the Rudy campaign is Kerik's anticipated trial for tax fraud and providing false information to federal authorities when he was vetted for the job of homeland-security chief, which Rudy sponsored him for.) It's about getting away with it. It's waving the red flag. It's his assumption that everybody is a pantywaist, except him.

Wycliffe Hall under attack

Britain's leading evangelical college is at a breaking point.

Wycliffe Hall, a private seminary that matriculates its own students through Oxford, has seen the resignation of eight of it's 13 faculty members since a new principal took over last year and allegedly began narrowing the school's focus to a more conservative theological approach.

Adding to the pain, a review by the University of Oxford published this fall found that Wycliffe and the six other private halls were not providing an education in line with Oxford's liberal ethos. What happens next, God only knows. But I've got a short news piece about it in this month's Christianity Today.

"If the turbulence that is currently going on does settle down ... [then] this may be seen as a turning point at which Wycliffe went from one approach of evangelicalism to another approach that is just as well," said Justin Thacker, head of theology for the U.K.'s Evangelical Alliance. "When Paul and Barnabas split over the issue of John Mark … there were two missions instead of just one. There have been divisions -- and they have been painful divisions -- but I hope that at the end of the day, each group that splits off goes to do so in the service of Jesus Christ."

Jerry loses the funny

It saddens me that while Larry David has become so much funnier since "Seinfeld" ended it's nine-year run the show's namesake has become less so. Did anyone else see Jerry Seinfeld on "30 Rock?" He seems to have replaced comedy with crankiness. Case in point: This appearance on "Larry King Live."

Zell: 'Being Jewish means that you're vulnerable forever'

"I think that being Jewish means that you’re vulnerable forever. Was there a stronger Jewish community anywhere in the world—more intellectual, more successful—than Germany in the late twenties and early thirties, before Hitler? And seven years later they’re building concentration camps! So, do I expect something like that to happen in the United States? Of course not. Do I think it could? Absolutely."

Those are the words of billionaire investor Sam Zell. Last spring, when Zell bought the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Cubs baseball team, The Forward and The Jewish Journal ran articles about the "tough Jew" who was about to take over two former bastions of WASP society.

Atheism for baby eaters

The Friendly Atheist depicts a common complaint by atheists regarding how they are perceived.

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Surgery for Indian girl with 8 limbs

From CNN:

Surgeons in India said a mammoth 40-hour operation on a 2-year-old girl born with four arms and four legs was going according to plan.

"So far, so good," Dr. Sharan Patil, the head surgeon, told reporters after 10 hours of surgery to separate Lakshmi Tatma from her "parasitic twin."

Here's the video.

(Photo: Heeb)

The Heeb 100

Joel Stein, who auditioned for "The Apprentice" last year alongside me, made the Heeb 100, as did Ben Goldhirsh, who I'm profiling right now, and Jonah Lehrer, who I am interviewing Monday. It's not clear why anyone made this list from Heeb magazine, but, not surprisingly, I was left off.

Quote of the day

"The Christian right is one of my favorite things to focus on. No matter what I draw, they have to forgive me."

Joel Pett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist told Indiana Journalism students.

(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

Muslim massacre in Hindu India

This massive report in Tehelka on a 2002 massacre of Muslims in India will really make your stomach turn. Rampaging Hindu zealots -- yes, they come in all religious flavors -- left more than 2,000 people dead, some in the most gruesome ways possible.

Dozens of eyewitnesses who deposed before the Nanavati-Shah Commission recounted scenes of children being burnt alive and women being raped. “We didn’t spare any of them,” Bajrangi said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to breed. Whoever they are, even if they’re women or children, there’s nothing to be done with them; cut them down. Thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards.”

Kauser Bano, was nine months pregnant that day. Her belly was torn open and her foetus wrenched out, held aloft on the tip of a sword, then dashed to the ground and flung into a fire. Bajrangi recounts how he ripped apart “ek woh pregnant… b*******d sala”; how he showed Muslims the meaning of wrath—“If you harm us, we can respond — we’re no khichdi-kadhi lot”.

The MotherJones blog says it's long been known that the Indian government was complicit -- these kinds of sectarian slayings have been ongoing since the Indian partition -- "this time, it was all caught on tape."

The Brad A. Greenberg Blog by GOD

That bit of self indulgence is courtesy of my former colleague at the LA Daily News, the always insightful and incisive Patrick O'Connor. My favorite cartoon he did while I was at the paper was this one, inspired by a forgettable story I wrote about California's quality of life; seriously, what kind of phrase is "ends meat?"

JTA editor thinks NYT Magazine has a 'Jewish problem'

Ami Eden, the managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency -- the AP of Jewish journalism -- wants to know if The New York Times Magazine has a Jewish problem.

I wouldn’t normally put it that way, but the first troublesome item to catch my attention was the January 14 profile by James Traub titled “Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?”

Next was Ian Buruma’s February 4 “Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue.” And, finally, “Orthodox Paradox,” Noah Feldman’s much-discussed July 22 lament about being cut like a foreskin from his high school alumni newsletter on account of his marriage to a non-Jew.

All three articles contained a Jews-should-get-over-it-already bias: Traub’s piece was a critique of Abe Foxman’s crying “gevalt” over anti-Semitism, with the underlying message that the Jewish community in general needs to stop stifling debate on Israel. Buruma basically told American Jewish organizations to stop picking on Tariq Ramadan, a controversial Muslim scholar whose chance to teach at Notre Dame fell through because the State Department would not give him a visa. Feldman portrayed any effort by Orthodox institutions to uphold a communal taboo against intermarriage as a primitive obstacle to “reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity.”

Of course, harping on bias in the NYT Magazine is like complaining about chocolate chips in a Toll House cookie. If you expect straight cookie, then stick to the newspaper — the magazine is a place for writers to open up, both in terms of space and voice.

Still, creative freedom doesn’t mean creative license. Each of these stories either danced up to or crossed the line on pertinent facts — in a way that served to bolster the writer’s agenda. In at least one case, the journalistic misdeed was serious enough for the public editor to urge one Jewish organization to write a letter to the editor — which the magazine then failed to print.

The magazine is, of course, owned by the New York Times Co, which is led by the most famous dynasty in American newspaper publishing, the Sulzbergers. They are, mind you, Jewish, something anti-Semites love to point out in their argument of a Jewish world conspiracy and a heritage many Jews think Punch and the gang were always uncomfortable displaying. (See "Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper.")

I wouldn't agree with Eden at first blush, but he makes some decent points, even regarding the Foxman profile, which was one of the more entertaining articles I had read in a long time.

(Hat tip: Seraphic Secret)

IDF stripper assassins

I missed this last week, but it's another worthy story from the Palestinian propaganda files:

The Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida carried a story this week about IDF tactics that surpassed all previous accusations of supposed Israeli deviousness -- poisoned candies, hormone-laced gum, poisoned wells, magnetized belts -- in its bizarreness.

According to an Al-Hayat Al-Jadida front page report, the IDF has turned to using armed, female strippers in its war on upstanding Palestinian boys. The newspaper reports that when the Arab rock-throwing begins, IDF soldiers run for cover. Then, the story continues, after some time of hiding, an Israeli woman stands up on top of a barricade and begins to perform an alluring strip tease. Innocent Arab teenage boys, distracted from the business of rioting, are enticed to approach, when, according to the newspaper, the woman -- an IDF soldier -- shoots them with a pistol she had hidden in her underwear.

Alright, I don't want to be crass, and granted there are some very attractive IDF soldiers, but I don't know many men who would be drawn to a woman with a big lump her in undies.

An outsider's view on our unpopular president

George W. Bush was ranked 21st on the Daily Telegraph's list of influential conservatives, way behind leading men Rudy Giuliani, Gen. David Patraeus, Matt Drudge and most every Republican candidate for the 2008 presidency. Here's why:

In just over three months, Republicans will choose a presidential nominee who will become the de facto leader of the party and, by extension, of US conservatism. In a bid to attract centrist voters, he — whether it be Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain or Fred Thompson — will rush to distance himself from Bush.

By this time next year, many American conservatives may be asking: "George W. who?"

I can't say I'd be sorry to have Bush lost in our nation's history, even if we are dealing with his messes for the next few years. But Kevin Drum says we shouldn't let former Bushies off the hook.

They all loved him when he was riding high, and they'd love him still if he weren't polling in Richard Nixon territory.

Leading the liberals was Bill Clinton, Al Gore, strategist Mark Penn and Hillary Clinton.

An atheist turns to God

Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. Eighty-four years old and long retired, Flew lives with his wife in Reading, a medium-size town on the Thames an hour west of London. Over a long career he held appointments at a series of decent regional universities — Aberdeen, Keele, Reading — and earned a strong reputation writing on an unusual range of topics, from Hume to immortality to Darwin. His greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” Flew was a precocious 27 when he delivered the paper at a meeting of the Socratic Club, the Oxford salon presided over by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in dozens of anthologies, “Theology and Falsification” has become a heroic tract for committed atheists. In a masterfully terse thousand words, Flew argues that “God” is too vague a concept to be meaningful. For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved. Such powerful but simply stated arguments made Flew popular on the campus speaking circuit; videos from debates in the 1970s show a lanky man, his black hair professorially unkempt, vivisecting religious belief with an English public-school accent perfect for the seduction of American ears. Before the current crop of atheist crusader-authors — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — there was Antony Flew.

Flew’s fame is about to spread beyond the atheists and philosophers. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins, has just released “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese. “There Is a God” is an intellectual’s bildungsroman written in simple language for a mass audience. It’s the first-person account of a preacher’s son who, away at Methodist boarding school, defied his father to become a teenage atheist, later wrote on atheism at Oxford, spent his life fighting for unbelief and then did an about-face in his old age, embracing the truth of a higher power. The book offers elegant, user-friendly descriptions of the arguments that persuaded Flew, arguments familiar to anyone who has heard evangelical Christians’ “scientific proof” of God. From the “fine tuning” argument that the laws of nature are too perfect to have been accidents to the “intelligent design” argument that human biology cannot be explained by evolution to various computations meant to show that probability favors a divine creator, “There Is a God” is perhaps the handiest primer ever written on the science (many would say pseudoscience) of religious belief.

Flew’s “conversion,” first reported in late 2004, has cast him into culture wars that he contentedly avoided his whole life.

Read the rest from The New York Times Magazine here. I'll be commenting on this later.

Bloggers are journalists

The bloggers-aren't-real-reporters story seems to make for intermittent newspaper filler. I, of course, disagree with the premise, in part because so many mainstream reporters now also blog for their media outlet. I apply the same standards to blogging as I do to my stories that appear in The Jewish Journal or the magazines I freelance for. I credit sources that I pull information from and occasionally include reportage on The God Blog that appears no where else.

But plenty of my former colleagues in the daily business still think it's worth kvetching about the evolving definition of "journalism." Deadspin found it in the Detroit News.

Detroit News sports reporter person Chris McCosky was asked to fill space on the weekend, so he went with the "bloggers are not real reporters because they don't talk to people" story:

A lot of times these bloggers use the work of legitimate reporters. They will lift facts and segments of stories and cut and paste them onto their blog. Rarely, if ever, though, do they bother to credit the source.

...

Bloggers are having a field day speculating on how Joel Zumaya really injured his shoulder. Nobody believes a heavy box fell on him. So the Internet is rife with stories about how he fell off his dirt bike.

As a Tigers fan, I knew about Zumaya's untimely injury, but I didn't hear about the dirt bike angle. Unfortunately, McCosky didn't cite which blog said this, so I'll never know.

But because there is no accountability, because there are no repercussions for being wrong, because they will never have to look Zumaya in the face, who cares? Make up whatever you want.

Well, I wasn't gonna make stuff up, but ... oh why not.

One day Chris McCosky got piss drunk and stumbled into a day care, punching any children that got in his way. He stole seven vanilla cupcakes and three kids' blankies. He tied the blankies totogether, forming a cape, and pretended to fly out of the day care. Once he reached the sidewalk, he crashed into an unsuspecting Joel Zumaya, who was out walking his Yorkshire terrier. McCosky was unhurt, as Zumaya's right shoulder broke his fall. According to numerous reliable eyewitness accounts, McCosky promptly got up, stole a dirt bike that was parked on the side of the road, and drove to work.

Deadspin's Sussman forgot to mention in his fictitious reporting that McCosky kicked Zumaya's terrier before stealing his dirt bike.

Quote of the day

"I seen the devil a million times. And I beat him up and sent him back to Hell again."

That is what Albert Rosa, a rather colorful Holocaust survivor who lives in Los Angeles, told me yesterday.

The self-proclaimed Nazi hunter

To Nazi hunters, Aribert Heim is the most coveted target still at large. The German and Austrian governments, as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, all believe that the so-called Butcher of Mauthausen is alive, and they are offering $430,000 for information on him. They periodically send investigators around the world to find him, most recently to Chile.

There is just one small problem: Heim is now said to be dead, executed in 1982 in California by a secretive cell of Jewish avengers.

So, at least, says Danny Baz, a retired Israeli air force colonel who claims he was a member of The Owl, a covert Jewish death squad made up of former American and Israeli military and intelligence officials. Baz claims that the group spent years tracking down and killing Nazis who fled to the Western Hemisphere after World War II.

Baz’s sensational allegations appear in “Not Forgotten or Forgiven: On the Trail of the Last Nazi,” a memoir released last month by mainstream publisher Grasset in France, where it received broad media coverage.

Baz has been fiercely condemned by the Wiesenthal Center and other Nazi hunters since the book appeared in mid-October. The American government backs the critics.

“This is a bunch of baloney,” said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations at the U.S. Justice Department. “What is true is that there is a real person who calls himself Danny Baz and is trying to make some money with this book at the expense of the truth.”

Read the rest at The Forward.

Being drunk in the Spirit or just spiritually drunk?

Sam Harris, the atheist superstar, says Americans are living in a "God-drunk society."

America is now a nation of 300 million souls, wielding more influence than any people in human history—and yet 240 million of these souls apparently believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the world with his magic powers. This hankering for a denominational, spiritual oblivion is not a good bet, much less a useful idea.

And yet, abject superstition of this kind engorges our nation from sea to shining sea. Consequently, the rest of the developed world has learned to view America like a rich, southern auntie: She may be bumptious, bloviating, smarmy, and God-drunk, but she’s got all the money; everyone is in her debt, and everyone is hoping that she’ll just shut up and go to sleep.

This is one of many short essays in The Atlantic Monthly's 150th issue, out now, on "The Future of the American Idea." The complete essays are available online by subscription only.

Curiously, The Atlantic editors also invited "Left Behind" author Tim LaHaye to pen a piece about the religious beliefs of our Founding Fathers.

'The New Wars of Religion'

THE four-hour journey through the bush from Kano to Jos in northern Nigeria features many of the staples of African life: checkpoints with greedy soldiers, huge potholes, scrawny children in football shirts drying rice on the road. But it is also a journey along a front-line.

Nigeria, evenly split between Christians and Muslims, is a country where people identify themselves by their religion first and as Nigerians second (see chart 1). Around 20,000 have been killed in God's name since 1990, estimates Shehu Sani, a local chronicler of religious violence. Kano, the centre of the Islamic north, introduced sharia law seven years ago. Many of the Christians who fled ended up in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, where the Christian south begins. The road between the two towns is dotted with competing churches and mosques.

This is one of many religious battlefields in this part of Africa. Evangelical Christians, backed by American collection-plate money, are surging northwards, clashing with Islamic fundamentalists, backed by Saudi petrodollars, surging southwards. And the Christian-Muslim split is only one form of religious competition in northern Nigeria. Events in Iraq have set Sunnis, who make up most of Nigeria's Muslims, against the better-organised Shias; about 50 people have died in intra-Muslim violence, reckons Mr Sani. On the Christian side, Catholics are in a more peaceful battle with Protestant evangelists, whose signs promising immediate redemption dominate the roadside. By the time you reach Jos and see a poster proclaiming “the ABC of nourishment”, you are surprised to discover it is for chocolate.

(skip)

In fact, religious front-lines criss-cross the globe.

Most obviously, Americans and Britons would not be dying in Iraq and Afghanistan had 19 young Muslims not attacked the United States in the name of Allah. The West's previous great military interventions were to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croatians. America's next war could be against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Other conflicts have acquired a new religious edge. In the poisonous war over Palestine, ever more people are claiming God on their side (with some of the most zealous sorts living miles away from the conflict). In Myanmar (Burma) Buddhist monks nearly brought down an evil regime, but in Sri Lanka they have prolonged a bloody conflict with Muslims. If India has an election, a bridge to Sri Lanka supposedly built by the god Ram (and a team of monkeys) may matter as much as a nuclear deal with America.

The Economist, not often a magazine I'd turn to for religious reportage, just published this 18-page special report on "the new wars of religion," complete with nine stories and a disclaimer that concludes the main article:

First, many numbers in religion are dodgy: most churches inflate their support and many governments do not record religion in their censuses (in Nigeria the best source is health records). Second, in a field where many believers claim to know all the answers, it poses mainly questions. And lastly, given the emotion the subject arouses, the chances are that some of what follows will offend you.

I could hardly discuss all the stories here, but here's one of the sidebars "Holy Depressing."

SHEIKH Yazid Khader and Rabbi Yaacov Medan both live in the occupied West Bank. Both are devoutly religious men who feel they have been betrayed by secularists. The sheikh, a local Hamas leader, has just emerged from another bout of Fatah custody (depressing when the rival Palestinians, he says, should both be fighting “the Zionist enemy”). The rabbi, a leader of the settler movement, is still seething about the Israeli government's forcible ejection of its own settlers from Gaza. Both men are obstacles to any chance of peace in the Middle East.

Not that they see it that way. Both insist that their religions are peaceful ones and each has solutions to the current impasse. Of course Israel should keep its settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law), argues the rabbi: it is part of the land God gave it. But a system of tunnels could be constructed for the Palestinians to find their way round them. For his part, the sheikh refuses to accept Israel's right to exist: Palestine is a waqf, land placed by God in Muslim hands for eternity. But if Israel retreats to its 1967 borders, Hamas would generously grant the infidels a hudna or truce, initially for ten years.

If you are concerned about religion's effect on politics, there is no more discouraging place to visit than the tiny sliver of land that is Israel-Palestine. Forty years ago the trouble there amounted to a territorial dispute between two fairly secular tribes. Religious Zionism—as opposed to the traditional, secular kind—was a fringe movement. Many of the Palestinian leaders were Christians or Marxists. But the six-day war of 1967 set off a chain of sectarian reactions on both sides. Polls show that most people on both sides still want a two-state solution, but many of the growing number determined to stop such an outcome now enlist God on their side of the argument.

They're right: That will definitely offend some people.

The study of 'Jewgenics'

A regular topic on The God Blog is my quest to balance my Jewish heritage with my Christian beliefs. This has played out in posts about Jewish exceptionalism and that unanswerable question: Who is a Jew? Well, Slate takes on both those topics in this story about "Jewgenics":

Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?

If these notions make you cringe, you're not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don't even want to talk about it.

Actually, a bunch of us did talk about it, three days ago at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. He was joined by fellow AEI scholar Charles Murray and by Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn't but talks as though he wishes he were. "One of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew," he announced proudly, turning the old "some of my best friends" cliché upside down.

Entine laid out the data. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100. This gap and the genetic theories surrounding it stirred discomfort in the room. Zoloth, speaking for many liberals, recalled a family member's revulsion at the idea of a Jewish race. Judaism is about faith and values, she argued. To reduce it to biology is to make it exclusive, denying its openness to all. Worse, to suggest that Jews are genetically smart is to imply that non-Jews are inherently inferior, in violation of Jewish commitments to equality and compassion. My friend Dana Milbank, who's a better (if I may use that word) Jew than I am, watched the discussion, went back to his office, and wrote a column in the Washington Post poking fun at all the talk of superior Jewish intellect. The column, as usual, was really smart.

But what if Judaism as a genetic inheritance is compatible with Judaism as a cultural inheritance? And what if the genes that make Jews smart also make them sick? If one kind of superiority comes at the price of another kind of inferiority, and if the transmission of Jewish values drives the transmission of Jewish genes, does that make the genetics and the superiority easier to swallow?

Apparently so.

Scientology taught in church

Some Christian pastors -- particularly in lower income, urban areas -- are coupling Dianetics with the Bible.

Scientologists do not worship God, much less Jesus Christ. The church has seen plenty of controversy and critics consider it a cult. So why are observant Christians embracing some of its teachings?

Two pastors who spoke recently with CNN explained that when it comes to religion, they still preach the core beliefs of Christianity. But when it comes to practicing what they preach in a modern world, borrowing from Scientology helps.

Here's what is wrong with that equation: Scientology, which clearly fits the sociological definition of a religion, is proscribed by its officials as a complimentary belief system to any religious worldview. I watched a promotional video from Scientology's international headquarters in Hollywood in which the narrator talked about how good Christians and Muslims were using Scientology to improve their lives. (The narrator proceeded to say, and I paraphrase the gist, "Do you have to believe in Scientology? No. But you'd be an idiot not to.)

If the narrator was being sincere -- and if you believe everything you see on "South Park" then you know none of the leaders of Scientology actually are -- that would mean that these pastors that CNN interviewed are preaching something that looks a lot like L. Ron Hubbard's creation.

They say they are not scared off by programs with ties to a church that critics say has aggressive recruiting, secretive ways and rigid theology. As men of God rooted in Christian values, they do not see Scientology as a threat to their faith, but rather as a tool to augment it.

Scientology was founded in the 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer. Followers are taught that they are immortal spiritual beings called thetans. Although the church says there is a supreme being, its practices do not include worshipping God.

"I'm looking for solutions, and the people that I help, they don't ask me who L. Ron Hubbard is," said McLaughlin, who works with addicts. "You know what they say? 'Thank God.' "

Rick Ross, who runs a Web site that tracks cults and controversial religious figures, goes on to say that this the kind of mainstream acceptance Scientology's leaders desire. For more, read this excellent piece from Rolling Stone.

Hyperbole of the week

"He left the room less happy than Lincoln was when he left the Ford Theatre"

That is how Rep. Gary Ackerman, a NY Democrat, described former President Jimmy Carter's mood after Jewish leaders refused to attend a Mideast peace forum arranged by the author of "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."

LA 8 case over

Ending a controversial 20-year campaign to expel immigrants because of their ties to alleged Palestinian terrorists, the federal government has agreed to drop attempts to deport the final two defendants in the L.A. 8 case.

The Board of Immigration Appeals on Tuesday dismissed all charges against Khader M. Hamide and Michel I. Shehadeh, who had faced deportation proceedings since 1987, and approved a settlement submitted by the men's lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security, according to documents made public Wednesday.

The case, which placed seven Palestinian men and a Kenyan woman in legal and personal limbo for more than two decades, foreshadowed government efforts after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to ferret out potentially dangerous Muslim militants in the U.S.

But Hamide, Shehadeh and the other defendants were never charged with an act of terrorism or with any other crime. Rather, they were accused of supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical offshoot of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has taken credit for car bombings and airline hijackings in the Middle East.

Specifically, the government targeted the eight immigrants' efforts to distribute Al Hadaf, the Popular Front's magazine, a publication available in public libraries, on college campuses and even at the U.S. Library of Congress.

More from the LA Times.

The God-o-Meter gold standard

Get the God-o-Meter (pronounced like odometer) and know exactly how each 2008 presidential candidate is fairing in the campaign of holier faith. The measurement, created and calibrated by Beliefnet's Dan Gilgoff, "scientifically measures factors such as rate of God-talk, effectiveness—saying God wants a capital gains tax cut doesn't guarantee a high rating—and other top-secret criteria."

No surprise on Mitt Romney; he's faring worst among Republicans. John McCain, oddly, and Barack Obama are leading their parties.