TruthBook Religious News Blog

Jim Luce
Jim Luce writes and speaks on Thought Leaders and Global Citizens.
Posted: July 6, 2009

I left Wall Street unexpectedly following an appearance on the Phil Donahue Show in 1985. There, on the Oprah Winfrey Show of its day, Richard Yao and I discussed "religious addiction" - the first time that phrase had ever been mentioned on national television.

I explained to Phil the need for an "anonymous" organization to help those recovering from religious addiction, including followers of powerful TV evangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart - then riding high, broadcasting seven days a week, and raking in millions.

The response was so overwhelming -- with 17,000 people asking for help -- that I had to choose between responding to those I had said, "If you're hurting, call us!" and my Japanese banking career.

One woman who soon called us told us an unbelievable story, which turned out to be typical. She was financially unable to give, but was led to believe it was "God's Will" that she keep giving to a TV evangelist. Other stories - thousands of them -- were of emotional, sexual, and physical abuse.

These personal stories were so strong they were written-up, in article after article, by the Associated Press], Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Washington Post - even the London Observer and Toronto Star.

Never a Fundamentalist myself, I co-founded Fundamentalists Anonymous and -- with the help of Hank Luce and the Henry Luce Foundation -- raised $1.2 million from 1985 to 1989 to build support groups across the U.S. for recovering fundamentalists. Hank was Presbyterian and I, Episcopalian.

Recovering Fundamentalists, like members of my own family, are those who believed themselves to have been so damaged by their all-or-nothing lifestyle most could not even walk into a Mainline church without feeling nauseas.

This is a lengthy, and interesting article which can be accessed in its entirety by clicking on "external source," below

Labels: evangelism, fundamentalism, Fundamentalists Anonymous, Jim Luce, religious addiction

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Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Celebrate Darwin Day -- February 12

by Revolution Newspaper
Tuesday Feb 5th, 2008

Darwin Day, February 12 each year, is an international celebration of the birthday of Charles Darwin, who first developed the modern scientific theory of the evolution of life.

What would the world be like today without Darwin and the science of evolution?

It is no exaggeration to say that this world would be a much more terrible and impoverished place—in every dimension. There would be no modern medicine—no way to know that we could use tissue from animals sharing a common ancestry to fix a failing human heart valve. No chance to stop infections that evolve and grow resistant to treatments, or discover cures for viruses like AIDS. Moreover, we’d be deprived of the wonderment and exhilaration from learning how the natural world actually works. Conversely, because Darwin did make this contribution, his work also served to strengthen the scientific method and its role in modern society. And that is very important.

There is beauty as well as usefulness to the truth that Darwin discovered. As Darwin himself put it poetically in the conclusion of On the Origin of Species, the path-breaking book which first put forward his theory: “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. There is grandeur in this view of life....”

Evolution is true. There is evidence of it everywhere (and nobody has ever found evidence to disprove it). To take just one example, the book The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism—Knowing What’s Real and Why it Matters by Ardea Skybreak explores the evolution of whales: First, the earliest ancestors of all animal life on land evolved from fish and developed the capacity to walk on land, and then one branch of those animals, the ancestors of whales, over many generations, evolved to live in the sea again. From the sea, and then, many millions of years later, back into the sea! That’s why examining the skeleton of a baleen whale reveals the remnants of hipbones that once supported legs!

Evolution shows that—starting from simple forms of life—all living things transformed out of other living things in a tremendous branching tree, including humans and all their mental capacities. This has been firmly established by scientists from many different fields coming at this from different angles. And all this happened without any overall preset direction, let alone being orchestrated by a (non-existent) god (what kind of an inept god would create a whale with tiny skeletal hips?). The changes in life forms are driven by naturally occurring variations (changes) in the genes that make up living things. And many of those changes are then “sorted out” through natural selection, as different plants and animals confront and either survive, or die off, in constantly changing environments.

Today, with people agonizing about the future and feeling alienated and isolated, the core of the U.S. ruling class supports the most backward and outright obscurantist religious fundamentalism as a way to channel this anxiety into hard-core support for the system. And it supports this fundamentalism against science. Bush himself states that “the jury is still out” on evolution. Research into realms ranging from global warming to preventing the spread of AIDS to stem cell research for cures to tragic diseases is suppressed because it conflicts with political programs and ways of thinking that are integral to keeping people ignorant and enslaved.

As part of this war on science, the theory of evolution is suppressed, banned, distorted, and just not taught. Recently, an administrator in the Texas school system was forced to resign simply for forwarding an e-mail announcing a speech by a prominent scholar on evolution!

There is battle raging in society over epistemology—that is, over the nature of truth and how people come to know the truth. Is this to be done by seeking the real material causes of things in reality? Or, instead of that, by turning off critical thinking and seeking answers from some supernatural being that doesn’t even exist? Darwin Day contributes at this important time to supporting the understanding that we can and must know how the world changes through developing and testing theories in relation to the evidence of the real, material world.

There’s another dimension as well. An important aim of the communist revolution is to “free the spirit from its cell,” as the song the Internationale says. That is to say, to liberate people’s minds from the chains of ignorance and traditional ways of thinking—including the shackles of religious belief in non-existent supernatural powers (gods). These “old ideas” both justify oppression and foster a dog-eat-dog mentality, and also keep people from understanding, appreciating, and being inspired by the real world. In the case of religion, these ideas ultimately justify “the way things are” (“render unto Caesar”) and instill passivity and ignorance in people (“God works in mysterious ways”). Firmly grasping science, in all its rigor and wonder, is essential to the crucial rupture with that kind of thinking.

Correspondingly, in a revolutionary socialist society—and on a whole other level when humanity reaches the goal of worldwide communism—the method of scientific discovery will be taught in schools and promoted throughout society. Science, and a scientific worldview, will be made the common province of all society—including those who have up to now been locked out of that. Scientific research—including scientific inquiry that does not promise any particular immediate practical benefit, as well as research that is directed to the most pressing problems of the masses—will be unleashed on a level far beyond anything humanity has seen. Previous socialist societies have accomplished great things in this—and overcoming weaknesses and tendencies to narrow this sphere in those revolutions is a critical element of Bob Avakian’s re-envisioning of communism.

Finally, if we are to bring forward a real revolutionary movement, then it must involve people engaging in science and the scientific method. If we don’t understand the world as it really is— its underlying dynamics and driving forces, including as a key part of that where the possibility for big revolutionary changes can come from and how to seize on such potential opportunities—then we won’t be able to change it in the direction that it needs to go for humanity. Making that change—making revolution—will take millions struggling to figure out and grasp the truth and moving to act on it, decisively—not only from among the intellectuals, but also and especially from the brutally oppressed and exploited people who must and can be the backbone force of a revolution to throw off and put an end to all forms of exploitation throughout the globe. To emancipate humanity, we must emancipate our minds.

In this spirit, and from this perspective, we encourage all our readers to find and attend Darwin Day events, and to engage Darwin’s work in this annual celebration of a wonderful breakthrough in human understanding.

A list of Darwin Day events is available at darwinday.org. There are events all over the world—from Spain to Australia to Bangladesh. In San Francisco, people are being invited to an “Evolutionpalooza to celebrate Darwin Day with your fellow primates”; Darwin’s Bulldogs are gathering in Grayslake, Illinois; and a whole week of programs at Indiana State University includes “The Adventures of Darwin’s Chihuahua.” In the U.S. hundreds of religious congregations are planning to join in, with talks and sermons upholding evolution on Evolution Weekend, February 9 and 10.

Labels: Darwin Day, epistemology, evolution, fundamentalism, religion, socialism

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Research and religion can be a difficult mix

Muslims scientists analyze why the work of contemporaries fails to result in breakthroughs.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Staff Writer
Published January 27, 2008

In recognizing the top 50 scientific breakthroughs of 2007, Scientific American cites advancements in alternative fuels, treatment of Parkinson's disease and technology that would make consumer electronics easier to use.

Among those honored are researchers in Japan, Italy and the Netherlands, a country with a population of just 16-million. Yet the list does not include a single noteworthy breakthrough in any of the world's 56 Muslim nations, encompassing more than 1-billion people.

Dr. Essam Heggy has a reason.

"We don't live in an environment where we value science," says Heggy, a Muslim astronomer who left his native Libya and is working in Houston on NASA's Mars exploration program. "Science and intellectual presence have been seen as a real threat to governments that have no serious plans for democratic rule."

Why the dearth of scientific achievement in the modern Muslim world? Like Heggy, many critics blame authoritarian regimes that stifle independent thinking and limit contacts with the outside world. Most schools and universities in Muslim countries emphasize rote learning over debate and analysis. Defense budgets -- especially in the bellicose Middle East -- consume billions of dollars that might otherwise go to research.

And just as Christian conservatism in America has led to curbs on genetic research and pressure to teach alternatives to evolution, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has turned many Muslims away from science and toward religion as a way to view and explain the world.

"Religious fundamentalism is always bad news for science," Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani Muslim physicist, recently wrote in an article on Islam and science for Physics Today.

"Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought."

While the reasons are many and often controversial, there is no doubt that the Muslim world lags far behind in scientific achievement and research:

Muslim countries contribute less than 2 percent of the world's scientific literature. Spain alone produces almost as many scientific papers.

In countries with substantial Muslim populations, the average number of scientists, engineers and technicians per 1,000 people is 8.5. The world average is 40.

Muslim countries get so few patents that they don't even register on a bar graph comparison with other countries. Of the more than 3-million foreign inventions patented in the United States between 1977 and 2004, only 1,500 were developed in Muslim nations.

In a survey by the Times of London, just two Muslim universities -- both in cosmopolitan Malaysia -- ranked among the top 200 universities worldwide.

Two Muslim scientists have won Nobel Prizes, but both did their groundbreaking work at Western institutions. Pakistan's Abdus Salam, who won the 1979 physics prize while in Britain, was barred from speaking at any university in his own country.

Why? Salam belonged to what the Pakistani government had declared a heretical sect.

Vanguard of learning

Despite a popular myth, people in the Muslim world are not resistant to new technology. Even the poorest have cell phones, some with global positioning features that show the exact direction in which to pray to Mecca. Prayer rugs now contain computer chips that count the number of bend-downs. And as al-Qaida's frequent messages show, the Internet has been a valuable tool in spreading threats against the West.

But it is a far cry from Islam's early days when the prophet Mohammed said "the ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of martyrs."

As Islam spread from its birthplace on the Arabian Peninsula, Muslim scientists expanded on the knowledge gained from the Romans, Greeks and other cultures. The Golden Age of Islam, spanning the 8th through 13th centuries, saw major advances in mathematics, optics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine while Europe slept through centuries of intellectual darkness.

Over time, though, tensions grew between liberal Muslims, who had a flexible interpretation of Islam, and fundamentalists, who believed in predestination with all its chilling implications for learning and discovery. As reason bowed to faith, "science in the Islamic world essentially collapsed," Hoodbhoy writes. "No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now."

Today, many of the brightest scientific minds leave their countries to study in Western universities like Virginia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of which have sizeable Muslim student associations. By some estimates, more than half of the science students from Arab countries never return home to work.

"Science has now been replaced by religious thinking," says Heggy, 32, the NASA researcher who got his doctorate in France. "Logic unfortunately is a smaller and smaller part of society."

Muslim scientists who do work in their native countries often find themselves embracing -- publicly at least -- so-called "Islamic science." Popularized in the '80s as an alternative to Western science and its perceived lack of moral values, the Islamic version tries to mesh religion and science with curious results.

Instead, fundamentalists typically view science only of value in giving more proof of God or showing the truth of the Koran. One oft-visited Internet site reveals this "astounding scientific fact" -- the Koran anticipated black holes and genes.

'Silent note-takers'

While critical of fellow Muslims, Hoodbhoy thinks the United States is partly to blame for the dismal record of scientific achievement. Western support for unpopular secular governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries has fueled a rise in fundamentalism that in turn discourages academic and cultural freedom.

At Hoodbhoy's own university in Islamabad, Pakistan, almost all female students now wear veils and have become "silent note-takers" who are increasingly timid and afraid to ask questions, he says. Movies, dramas and music are shunned as un-Islamic. The campus has three mosques, but no bookstore.

The picture is not entirely bleak. Saudi Arabia, though home to one of the most intolerant strains of Islam, is building a world-class research university in collaboration with Cape Cod's prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Turkey -- whose founder, Kemal Ataturk, wanted to Westernize his country -- has more than tripled its science funding since 2003 while under a religiously conservative prime minister. Tunisia, another secular Muslim nation, has largely rejected "Islamic science" in favor of practical research. The number of laboratories there grew to 139 from 55 in six years.

But far more needs to be done, says Hoodbhoy, who argues that arrested scientific development in the Muslim world is contributing to the "marginalization" of Muslims and their growing sense of injustice and victimhood. Muslim countries will continue to stagnate scientifically -- and in other ways as well.

"The struggle to usher in science," Hoodbhoy writes, "will have to go side-by-side with a much wider campaign to elbow out rigid orthodoxy and bring in modern thought, arts, philosophy, democracy and pluralism."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

Notable modern Muslim scientists

Abdus Salam: Pakistani. Winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979
Ahmed Zewail: Egyptian. Winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999
Farouk El-Baz: Egyptian. NASA scientist involved in the Apollo moon program
Essam Heggy: Egyptian-Libyan. Planetary scientist in NASA's Mars exploration program
Lotfi Asker Zadeh: Iranian. Mathematician and computer scientist, founder of fuzzy logic, which recognizes more than simple true-or-false values. Used in artificial intelligence applications and some spell-checkers to suggest replacements for misspelled words
Habiba Bouhamed Chaabouni: Tunisian. Medical geneticist, winner of 2006 UNESCO Women in Science Award

Labels: Dr. Essam Heggy, fundamentalism, Muslim world, religion, research, science, Susan Taylor Martin

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Friday, September 21, 2007

Faith upon the earth

Sep 20th 2007 |
From The Economist

In many parts of the world, religious groups and environmental scientists are teaming up—albeit sometimes reluctantly

“THERE was a functioning bridge until 1470 AD,” says Praveen Togadia, a Hindu fundamentalist, smoothing out his dhoti. “Due to natural calamities, it was disturbed, and parts went into the sea.” To modern, secular eyes, at least, the “bridge” is a 30-mile (48km) chain of sandy shoals across the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. But millions of Hindus see the shoals as physical proof of their beliefs. The Ramayana, a Hindu text, says a bridge was built by monkeys at the behest of a Hindu god, Ram—who duly crossed over to wrest his wife Sita from a Sri Lankan demon. The shoals are known in India as “Ram Setu”, or “Ram's Bridge”.

Now take a deep breath and consider the conflict over a plan by India's Congress-led government to dredge the strait for a shipping canal. While Hindus loathe the project on spiritual grounds, ecologists have different objections. At the junction of the deep, cold Indian Ocean and the shallow, temperate Arabian Sea, the strait is an ecological prize. So far, 377 endemic species have been found in nearby waters.

On this issue at least, the devoutly religious and the greens are on the same side. But the former, it seems, have more clout than the latter. On September 12th the government told the Supreme Court that the Ramayana was not proof of the existence of Lord Ram; and that science suggested the shoals were made by sedimentation, not monkeys. On the same day, the World Hindu Council, headed by Dr Togadia, staged protests across the country. On September 14th the government, at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, the (Catholic) leader of Congress, put the canal plan on hold: a setback for a government which wanted to save ships from a 24-hour loop round Sri Lanka. With elections due next year, Congress feared giving its Hindu foes in the Bharatiya Janata Party a new slogan.

India's greens have little love for their accidental allies.

In many other parts of the world, secular greens and religious people find themselves on the same side of public debates: sometimes hesitantly, sometimes tactically, and sometimes fired by a sense that they have deep things in common.

One more case from India: ornithologists who want to save three species of vulture (endangered because cattle carcasses are tainted by chemicals) see their best ally as the Parsees, who on religious grounds use vultures to dispose of human corpses.

In China, organised religion is much weaker and conservationists also feel more lonely. But Pan Yue, the best-known advocate of green concerns within the Chinese government, says ancient creeds, like Taoism, offer the best hope of making people treat the earth more kindly.

This month, representatives of many faiths, including a local Lutheran bishop and a shivering Buddhist monk (see above) gathered in Greenland to talk to scientists and ecologists. Patriarch Bartholomew, the senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, led his impressively robed guests in a silent supplication for the planet.

Mary Evelyn Tucker, of America's Yale University, says secular greens badly need their spiritual allies: “Religions provide a cultural integrity, a spiritual depth and moral force which secular approaches lack.”

Martin Palmer, of the British-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation, says faiths often have the clearest view of the social and economic aspects of an environmental problem. In Newfoundland, he notes, conservationists put curbs on cod fishing—and left the churches to care for families whose living was ruined.

Still, one selling point often used by the religious in their dialogue with science—the fact that faith encourages people to think long-term—may be a mixed blessing. The most pessimistic scientists say mankind has a decade at most to curb greenhouse gases and fend off disastrous global warming; that doesn't leave much time to settle the finer points of metaphysics.

Labels: environmentalism, faith, fundamentalism, religion

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Monday, August 20, 2007

Amanpour's `God's Warriors' airs on CNN

By David Bauder, AP Television Writer
Mon Aug 20, 8:47 AM ET

NEW YORK - Christiane Amanpour's work on the documentary series "God's Warriors" took her directly to intersections of extreme religious and secular thinking.

She watched, fascinated, as demonstrators in San Francisco accused teenagers in the fundamentalist Christian group BattleCry of intolerance in a clash of two cultures that will probably never understand each other.

Understanding is what Amanpour is trying to promote in "God's Warriors," which takes up six prime-time hours on CNN this week. The series on religious fundamentalism among Christians, Muslims and Jews airs in three parts, 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday through Thursday.

"I'm not interested in drumming up false fears, or falsely allaying fears," CNN's chief international correspondent told The Associated Press by phone from France, where she added last-minute touches to the series. "I just want people to know what's going on."

Amanpour traveled extensively over eight months to work on the series. The trips to Amanpour's native Iran are most fascinating. She explored the ancient roots of the conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, and talked with one of the country's most accomplished female politicians about how Muslim women are treated.

Another segment tried to explain why so many devout Muslims are willing to give their lives to a cause.

"To the West, martyrdom has a really bad connotation because of suicide bombers who call themselves martyrs," she said. "Really, martyrdom is actually something that historically was quite noble, because it was about standing up and rejecting tyranny, rejecting injustice and rejecting oppression and, if necessary, dying for that."

Finishing the project didn't leave her with a sense of fear over the implications of stronger fundamentalist movements.

"I did come away with a sense that we — or those people who don't want to see religion in politics and culture — if we don't look into it and see what is going on, we're in danger of missing it and not be able to react to it properly," she said.

Amanpour was one of the last reporters to talk to the Rev. Jerry Falwell. She interviewed him a week before he died about the legacy of the Moral Majority, the organization that thrust evangelical Christians onto the political stage.

The segment on Christians explores BattleCry in some depth, digging at the roots of an organization that fights against some of the cruder elements of popular culture and urges teenagers to be chaste. In noting how girls at some BattleCry events are encouraged to wear long dresses, Amanpour asks the group's leader how it is different from the Taliban.

In a nonjudgmental way, she visits a family that is home-schooling its children and explores the influence of Evangelicals on the courts.

"There is so much nuance, so much information, so much to talk about, by no means were we able to talk about it all," she said, "and by no means do I claim this is the definitive project. It is one of the fullest, one of the most ambitious and one of the most complete."

Amanpour, 49, is no longer CNN's most visible reporter, as she was when skipping from one war zone to another. She received a lot of attention for her documentary "In the Footsteps of bin Laden" last year, and said she's enjoying the opportunity to put day-to-day news in greater perspective.

She's frequently criticized American television networks, including her own, for not spending enough time on international news.

Amanpour was recently named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She's leaving her home base of London to move to New York with her husband, former U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin.

"This is really a personal move for my husband,who has lived eight years out of his own country and wants to come back," she said.

Labels: BattleCry, Christiane Amanpour, Christianity, David Bauder, fundamentalism, Jewish, Muslims, politics, religion

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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Educated marry science, belief

Published: 07.17.2007
Diane Glass
Tucson Citizen

Science and religion may be mutually exclusive, but they can, and do, live happily married in the human spirit.

Most of the time. The rest of the time, there's a lot of bickering. Science demands proof, and literalist fundamentalism demands wholesale belief.

Not surprisingly, fundamentalists are increasing in number.

Wouldn't it be nice to wake up and know that the milk you drink is good for you and not a cancerous time bomb? And wouldn't it be nice to know that if you didn't accept Jesus as your savior, you wouldn't be sent to hell?

It would, but I'm not sure anyone will ever know the answers to those questions.
That's why you'll find a lot of families at church who don't share all the views of the church they attend.

The data show that the more educated the individual, the more he or she shies away from literalism. But in Volume 26 of the "Review of Religious Research," the data also show a positive correlation between a parishioner's educational level and church attendance.

It's possible to participate in the social aspects of religion without buying the horse and the cart.

There are sources of truth not found behind a priest's confessional door. And there is still room for magical thinking in a rational world.

But fundamentalism demands a moral imperialism that is unyielding to outside interpretation. It insists that those of us who cannot accept a single belief when interpreting the mysteries in life will miss the beauty of taking that giant leap.
I'd argue that literalists are the ones missing out. They miss out on the wonder of accepting the multiple truths that enrich our lives.

Someone who can embrace the unknown and science is someone who thinks independently, is more tolerant and more open and feels comfortable with real mystery.

Labels: Diane Glass, education, fundamentalism, religion, science