St. Maximos' Hut

Casey Khan sends word that Thomas Woods will be on EWTN tonight on Ray Arroyo's The World Over at 8pm EST.

There are live and archived video and audio feeds for EWTN generally available here.

Woods' own post on it is here (not much beyond the info & links above).

Update: Thomas Woods thoughtfully emailed that his appearance was last night (Friday) but that the program will repeat at 10 a.m. and 11 p.m. Monday and 1 p.m. Tuesday (all times EST). He will also be the sole guest for a broadcast of EWTN Live on 12/28 at 8 p.m.

A new report on religion polling data from the American Enterprise Institute on "Important Trends in Religion".

A couple of interesting numbers:

"Do you happen to be a member of a church or synagogue?"
1937 Yes = 73 No = 27
2005 Yes = 63 No = 35

"Did you, yourself, happen to attend church or synagogue in the last seven days, or not?"

1939 Yes = 41 No = 59
2004 (Jun)Yes = 43 No = 57

So, membership may be down slightly (we don't have the numbers to know if this difference is statistically significant, but I'd guess it was likely to be if the polls are reasonably standard) but church and synagogue attendance is up. This might be an artifact of when the surveys were done in the course of the year, but it is an interesting difference between membership and attendance numbers from similar times.

There are other interesting numbers too.

Tech Central Station has an interesting column on a UK debate over a push by British Muslims for religious schools. The columnist, Josie Appleton, is fairly hostile to the claim that religious schools teach values better:

We need to put the spirit back into secular education. This means being proud to teach science and rational enquiry, rather than presenting it as a dodgy business. And we could also use a new secular morality: kids can be taught right from wrong without the fear of God hanging over them.

This seems like a typical secular critique of religion: religious people do right only because they are afraid of God, secular people are superior because they do right as a result of rational enquiry. This misses an important point - religious people do right nto out of fear but because they want to please God. Doing the right thing is one way to thank Him for His love. Moreover, doing right is what we were made to do. Fulfilling our nature is what getting our relationship with God correct is about.

Now, I don't know that this requires religious schools to accomplish it. I send my kids to a private, nonreligious school and I think they are getting a fine (albeit very expensive) education. But I didn't send them there because I thought the school taught morality - indeed, when it attempts to do so, it generally fails - but because it teaches math, science, writing, etc. well. I do think they are learning some morals there - because they are reading and discussing authors who raise moral questions (Shakespeare, Flannery O'Connor, etc.) but I hope that the moral learning comes more from the presentation of those works to them as a means for my kids to apply what they learn at church and at home.

Appleton concludes by saying

The best advert for secular education came not from the panel, but from a young Muslim man in the audience, who plotted a lone course away from his peers. “I went to a secular school, and I think it was a good education. It made me think about what I believe, and decide for myself what I think is right.” Amen to that.

This also seems illogical - the fact that one religious person went to a nonreligious school and had a good outcome because it informed his choice between religion and secularism is not data, it is a single data point. How many people have his experience and how many have negative experiences? How much do we weight the negative experiences? Would a 1:1 ratio make forced secularization worthwhile? 10:1? 100:1?

Moreover, the logical extension of Appleton's argument would seem to be that religious people's children should be packed off to secular schools to give them a chance to experience secularism and decide for themselves what they think is right, while secular parents' children should be hustled off to religious schools to get the same exposure in reverse. Of course, that raises interesting questions about which religion runs the school. Or whether Muslim children should go to Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Confucian schools for a few years each as well (and all those faiths' children to the others) to get exposure. And should Catholic children live an Amish lifestyle for a few years too? And so on. Which makes me think that leaving it to the parents might be the best guide - after all, parents are far more likely to love their children than bureaucrats are.

Some interesting thoughts by Amy Wellborn.

I found her blog via Kicking Over My Traces' link to a different post and wandered down to this one. Well worth a look - some very interesting thoughts on a variety of religious topics at both, particularly on the "Dark Ages" (check out the comments on Wellborn's post).

More Stuart, with a classic on "Happy Holidays." Say it and smile!

Stuart Buck has a link to a great post on how a militant view of Darwinism as "the destroyer" of religion might mean it can't be taught in public schools since the Establishment Clause guarantees neutrality between religion and irreligion.

Stuart's blog is one of my favorites.

Some members of St. Innocent doing are mission work in Albania. Some very inspiring stuff on their web page.

Albania suffered incredibly under a brutal, xenophobic Marxist regime for decades. It then suffered under terrible conditions after the fall of the old regime, with a series of efforts at looting the country. (P.J. O'Rourke used Albania in the immediate post-communist era as an example of "bad capitalism" in his excellent economics book Eat the Rich). The OCMC mission is doing some amazing things there.

I got to attend mass at Fr. Charles' church, Christ the King, in Washington, DC today while I was in town on business. Fr. C does a fine service and anyone in the DC area ought to stop by.

One of the arguments made by opponents of legal recognition of gay marriages and the extension of constitutional precedents on privacy (e.g. Griswold, Roe, etc.) to homosexual acts is that this would lead to pressure for recognition of polygamy and other relationships currently unrecognized. Sen. Rick Santorum made this point:

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything,"

Santorum drew a lot of criticism for his comments.

This story in the Washington Times suggests that Santorum was correct in identifying this as a slippery slope and that the sliding has already started.

As a libertarian, I can only shake my head in wonder here - government shouldn't be involved in anyone's marriage/relationship. Government involvement means we have to have an agreement about who gets the benefits of legal recognition of their relationships and who doesn't. Since we don't agree about this, we end up with political fights that never end. Marriage is a relationship that ought to be recognized and defined by private individuals. Those who believe in "traditional marriage" ought to be able to get a traditional marriage in a church, those who want some other form of relationship should contract for it. (Since I am off to work now, I'm going to dodge the "what about the children" point for now.)

Scary. As blogger Delta Mike Charlie (who had the good sense to save the web page in question) says

Do you need any more proof that if you’re religious (especially Christian) you’ve got an actively hostile foe in the Democrat Party? Seems pretty cut and dried to me... What other message could they be trying to send?

Scroll down here for some good commentary by James Taranto.

The Rev. Kenneth Chalker, of the First United Methodist Church in Cleveland, is doing so because of a recent ruling by the Methodist Church's judicial council reinstating a pastor fired over a dispute over the church's teachings on homosexuality.

And I thought the Church was the body of Christ! How can a Christian pray for the demise of religion?

Rev. Chalker's op-ed raises two interesting points. (I'm leaving the merits of the Methodists' disputes over homosexuality out of this because I am not a Methodist and am unfamiliar with how they deal with the topic).

1) Rev. Chalker writes

In these religious times, church organizations are forsaking their initial spiritual impetus and going over to the dark side. Employing labored, amplified heavy breathing, they have become religious institutions. Like most institutions, religious ones are very much interested in preserving their various ways of doing things. That is, in large part, why there are judicial councils. Their job is not to keep the faith. Their job is to keep the rules and make folks think that "the rules" and "the faith" are the same thing. Most often, they are not.

He argues that there is a distinction between "the faith" and "the rules". By definition, to have a body of coherent beliefs makes it is necessary to exclude beliefs which contradict the body of coherent beliefs. Thus one cannot be a Christian if one denies the divinity of Christ. It just isn't logically possible.

If the body of beliefs is beyond "everything is beautiful in its own way" (apologies to Ray Stevens), sometimes the substance of the existing beliefs will be in conflict with other beliefs. One or the other has to give and the organization in question will have to decide which set of beliefs it is keep and which it is discarding. The organization needs a means of doing this - the Roman Church ultimately has the authority of the Pope, the Orthodox church has a messier and lengthy process (which I earlier argued is Hayekian in many respects) involving the church as a whole, and so on. The Methodist Church has a judicial council. Assuming the procedures followed were appropriate, its decisions can only be attacked for not accurately following the substance of the church's teachings. Yet this is not what Rev. Chalker does - he attacks the idea of having "rules" apart from "faith" and having a body to adjudicate over those rules. Could the judicial council legitimately remove a minister who insisted that Christ was not divine? Perhaps that would fall into "faith," although there is no real principle evident in Rev. Chalker's essay to distinguish "faith" from "rules."

2) The core of Christianity seems pretty meager in Rev. Chalker's formulation:

I believe what all world faith traditions reveal. Namely, that God is Spirit and thus never captured in a picture, idea, book or creed. Rather, the Holy One is always mysterious, awe-inspiring, hope-raising and fear-relieving. Encounters with the Spirit are at once and always an amazing grace.

Religion, however, is what Satan devises as a way of confusing faithful people. Holy wars, suicide bombings and other religiously motivated killings prove the point.

In contrast, consider the Nicene Creed (the Orthodox version is here, the Western version differs slightly and is here.)

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, True God of True God, Begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made:

Who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man;

And was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried;

And rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures;

And ascended into the heavens, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father;

And shall come again, with glory, to judge both the living and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets;

In One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

I Confess one Baptism for the remission of sins.

I look for the Resurrection of the dead,

And the life of the age to come, Amen

This is quite different from Rev. Chalker's encounters with the Spirit. This is a set of specific beliefs (does that make them rules) and it most definitely excludes people who do not affirm them from the Church. You either believe it or you do not - no clever dodges about being "spiritual but not religious" permitted.