TruthBook Religious News Blog

Wesley G. Hughes, Staff Writer
04/05/2009

I've had a hankering in the last few years to be an ethicist, not one of those ivory-tower or mountaintop kinds of guys but sort of a shade-tree, back-of-the-envelope kind of thinker on things right and wrong.

I'm not sure what impels the thinking of those other ethicists with the letters behind their names but what gets me going is the evil that men do or allow to be done to the weakest, meekest and most innocent among us.

And it's usually not something I've been thinking about for a long time. It's as though someone slapped me in the face with it like a big wet fish. It gets your attention.

A good example of that kind of attention grabber is when I learned of the festering outbreak of child prostitution going on right here in this county and just to the west in the Pomona area. It's not just there and in Ontario and Claremont. Those seem to be the only cities that have acknowledged it and are attempting to do something about it.

It seems unlikely that ethics and war go hand in hand but I promise I'm going to wage war against child prostitution and the evil merchandisers and users of these child slaves in every way I can. And I'll be talking about the enablers who allow it to go on under their noses.

Another example of one of those fishlike epiphanies occurred a couple of years ago. I remember it well, not the exact date but the moment.

It was probably a Saturday. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking my coffee and reading the paper, looking forward to working the crossword puzzle.

I turned the page and the wet fish got me. There before me was a large photograph of a beautiful child, whose face was disfigured by a cleft palate and lip. It caught me so by surprise that it brought tears to my eyes.

The photo was in an ad placed by The Smile Train...

The Smile Train became my favorite charity and I've written about it in this space before and I wear and never remove one of those rubber wristlets - what do they call those things anyway? - bearing The Smile Train name. There's a pang of guilt that goes with that. It's been too long since I sent a contribution. It's time.

The final fish I'll use today occurred Saturday.

I don't usually stick my nose into religious issues but I'll make an exception for the story that I read in Saturday's New York Times. It was about a 17-year-old girl, who was publicly flogged by a Taliban commander in the Swat region of Pakistan. Someone caught it on video.

Why this incident affected me so, I don't really know. Over time, I've witnessed and read so many vile things done in the name of God that I should not be surprised. That includes the religions granted freedom of worship by our Constitution right here at home.

Fortunately, they don't have completely free reign here. If my neighbors dragged my daughter into the street and flogged her for missing Sunday school, they'd have more than just me to deal with.

They would be prosecuted and punished (if there was anything left after I got through but then of course, I'd be prosecuted too. We have a good system).

This final item came together in my mind Saturday with the children, who are prostituted ...They too are beaten and abused and have no power and no choices. It doesn't matter whether it's done in the name of commerce or the name of religion. It should be stopped.

It extends beyond children to women everywhere. A woman should have every right to live her life with the same freedoms as any man, no matter where on the planet, the color of her skin or the name of her religion, or if she chooses, without religion.

Those are my ethics.

Labels: children, ethics, exploitation, persecution, Wesley G. Hughes, women

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Friday, September 14, 2007

US Religion Report Faults Iraq, China, But Commends Vietnam and Saudi Arabia

By David Gollust
State Department
14 September 2007

A U.S. State Department report said Friday that political violence in Iraq has significantly impaired religious freedom there. But the annual world-wide survey cited improvements in conditions for religious adherents in, among other places, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. VOA's David Gollust reports from the State Department.

The annual report, which this year covered 198 countries and territories, is required under an act of Congress, and countries found to be significant violators of religious freedom are subject to U.S. sanctions.

U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom John Hanford said the past year saw progress against religion-based discrimination in a diverse list of countries including Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Bangladesh and India.

But he said half the world's population continues to live under persecution or serious restrictions of religious freedom in many countries, among them Iran, Eritrea, Burma and China.

The report says conditions deteriorated sharply in Iraq though Hanford said that was not due to government policy but rather insurgency-related violence targeting all faiths but especially religious minorities.

Hanford stressed continued progress in expanding religious freedom in Vietnam, which last year was taken off the State Department list of "Countries of Particular Concern" because of strides made in several areas, including the official recognition of once-banned Protestant congregations.

The U.S. envoy said the Saudi Arabian government, which officially recognizes only the Wahabi branch of Sunni Islam, has undertaken to curb incitement against other faiths and allows at least private observances of non-sanctioned religions.

The report says despite senior-level U.S. appeals, China continued to repress Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and the Falon Gong spiritual group.

Ambassador Hanford said foreign religious activists have also been denied visas or expelled from China in what could be a crackdown related to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Eight countries - China, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan - were designated as "Countries of Particular Concern" by Secretary Rice late last year.

A revised list is expected to be issued in November based on the new report. The delay is intended to give countries facing the designation and possible U.S. sanctions an opportunity to undertake reforms.

Labels: David Gollust, Iraq, persecution, religion, religious freedom, US State Department

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

Iraq attack strikes ancient religious sect

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 3:23 PM
By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent

For Iraq's small and secretive Yazidis community, Tuesday's attack was one of the worst massacres in the living memory of a community that believes they were the first people God created.

"We want the world to know us better," the sheikh known as the Prince of the Yazidis told me in northern Iraq well before the war when his diminishing community decided that they could no longer afford to be known as devil worshippers.

That label is believed to be part of the reason for the simultaneous suicide bombs that have killed 250 people - many of them women and children - in what will likely be deadliest suicide attack since the war began. Officials say the Yazidis, members of a secret pre-Islamic religion considered infidels by fundamentalist Muslims, received letters from al-Qaida in Iraq telling them to leave.

Ancient culture

There are likely fewer than a million Yazidis in the world - by some estimates as few as 400,000. They are believed to be ethnically Kurds but they don't consider themselves Kurdish. Almost half of the entire community has become refugees in Germany and other parts of Europe.

They've been persecuted for centuries because they're mistakenly considered by many Muslims to be devil worshipers - a perception fueled by the secrecy of their ancient religion.

Visiting traditional Yazidis communities is like stepping into another world. Their temples-have cone-shaped roofs - the same shape as the wool felt hats worn by religious elders, who wear locks of hair in long braids. The ceremonies include elements of Zoroastroanism, the ancient Persian religion, and include the worship of fire and sun. At a temple in the Sinjar Mountains before the war, I watched the keeper of the temple light an oil lamp with four wicks and pray to each direction of the flame. In one of the temples, there was an etching of a serpent – in another the moon and the stars.

Like the religion, the temples are often hidden. The Yazidis elders have long worried that as young people become assimilated into Western culture, their religion could essentially disappear. It's an unforgiving faith - Yazidis are only allowed to marry other Yazidis.

In April, police say, members of one Yazidi community stoned to death a teenage Yazidi girl who had converted to Islam to marry a Muslim. Dozens of Yazidis were killed by Muslim extremists in retaliation.

Secretive religion

In northern Iraq a few years ago, the "Prince of the Yazidis" a sheikh who spends his time in Germany when he's not in northern Iraq, told me they had decided that they could no longer be as secretive - that they had to persuade the world that they were God-fearing people. They translated their secret "black book" and even opened some of their ceremonies to outsiders.

Still, every time I asked what they believed I got somewhat different answers. While they had decided they needed to make their secret religion less secret, some were not so convinced.

I watched a ceremony in a village in the Sinjar Mountains surrounding a brass peacock - one of the seven the Yazidis believed God handed the first Yazidis directly - a representation of the archangel Michael in his form as the peacock angel. It's an oral tradition in which many of the rituals and beliefs are entrusted only to males - and only when they come of age. But one thing they firmly believe is that they were the first men.

Even more than most religions, they have a complicated relationship with God - the bottom line is that they know God is forgiving but Satan is not - and while they don't worship him, they make clear that they respect his power. So much so that Yazidis don't ever say his name or utter words starting with the letters 'sh' - the same sound that begins the word for Satan. They also don't wear the color blue, eat lettuce or wear ties with collars - all going back to their beliefs about the fallen angel to whom they pay homage.

"Science is our enemy," one of the elders told me. In some of the most traditional of Yazidi communities, education is discouraged. A 14-year-old girl in one village I went to told me she'd never been to school. It was considered "shameful" for girls to be educated, she said.

They've been persecuted for centuries and in times of trouble they retreat to the mountains and the caves. During the war near Dohuk, close to the Turkish border, when I was looking for Yazidi communities,

I found some had literally moved underground - in caves underneath villages that had been leveled by Saddam Hussein's forces during his attacks against the Kurds.

Under Saddam Hussein they survived by not making waves. Saddam, whose Baath party was originally secular, didn't care what religion they were as long as they weren't a threat to him. Now there's a new threat to these people practicing a religion they believe is as old as man.

Labels: God, Iraq, Jane Arraf, persecution, Yazidis, Zoroastroanism