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These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness......

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A sophisticated human can become primitive. What this really means is that the human's way of life changes. Old values change, become linked to the landscape with its plants and animals. this new existence requires a working knowledge of those multiplex and cross-linked events usually referred to as nature. It requires a measure of respect for the inertial power within such natural systems. When a human gains this working knowledge and respect, that is called "being primitive." The converse, of course, is equally true: the primitive can become sophisticated, but not without accepting dreadful psychological damage.

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No reason to fear liturgy, Jews told Catholic prayer approved by pope disturbing to some
BY RACHEL ZOLL The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — The Anti-Defamation League was “deeply troubled” by the prayer.
    Conservative Jewish rabbis said they were “dismayed and deeply disturbed” by its language.
    But some veteran interfaith leaders — Jewish and Roman Catholic — say there’s no evidence that a revised Good Friday liturgy approved this month by Pope Benedict XVI is as threatening as some Jewish groups fear.
    “Rather than overreact, we need to look to the future of the Jewish community and this pope,” said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, U.S. director for interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, a leader in building Jewish ties with the Vatican.
    The prayer fueling the tension is infamous among Jewish leaders, but little known by the overwhelming majority of Catholics and Jews worldwide. It had historically been used as an excuse for violence and discrimination against Jews.
    The prayer is from the old Latin rite, also known as the Tridentine rite. The church had put tight restrictions on celebrating the rite following the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. A New Mass emerged from the council, which was celebrated mainly in local languages.
    But Benedict last year relaxed the rules on the old Latin rite, partly to mend ties with traditionalists and Catholic schismatics who had objected to the council’s reforms.
    But the old Latin rite contains a Good Friday prayer that asks God to lift “the veil” from Jewish hearts and deliver them from “blindness” and “darkness” so they might accept Christ.
    Earlier this month, Benedict answered Jewish concerns about the prayer. In a reformulation, he eliminated the most offending language, while still asking God “to enlighten their hearts” so that Jews — and all humanity — can be saved through the church.
JEWISH REACTION
    Many Jewish leaders reacted angrily. They feared it signaled a rollback in the church’s commitment to Nostra Aetate, the 1965 document that revolutionized Catholic-Jewish ties.
    Philip Cunningham, a member of the U.S. bishops’ Advisory Committee on Catholic-Jewish Relations, said he understands why Jews are upset. In his many talks with Jewish audiences, he is almost always asked whether the improvements in the church’s relationship with Jews are temporary.
    “My response is that there’s a body of teaching there that’s difficult to reverse,” he said.
    Regarding the revised Good Friday prayer, Cunningham said that “99 percent of the Catholic world” uses the New Mass, which has “no mention of Jews coming to faith in Jesus the Savior. There’s not even a hint of it.”
    Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, a training institute and think tank based in New York, was more blunt.
    “The Catholic Church, unlike some religions in the world, has come through its murderous period and is neither violent nor dangerous, so Jews should chill out,” he said.
    Some of the anxiety stems from the fact that Benedict is a relatively new pope.
    He was elected three years ago and Jewish leaders are only at the start of their relationship with him. His predecessor, John Paul II, did more than any other pope to build Catholic-Jewish ties during his 26-year pontifi - cate, including praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site.
    Benedict has made his own significant gestures. He became only the second pope, after John Paul, to enter a synagogue, visiting a Cologne, Germany, synagogue in 2005 during his first trip abroad as pontiff. He also visited Auschwitz the next year, although some Jewish leaders said they were disappointed that Benedict, a German who lived through World War II, didn’t make a more explicit reference to German responsibility for the genocide.
    Greenebaum said Jewish groups need to consider Benedict’s broader goals in reviving the old Latin rite: helping restore a strong sense of Catholic identity and promoting Catholic unity.
    “I think the Jewish community needs to always keep things in context,” Greenebaum said. “This is a pope who has a very strong sense of his own beliefs and his own philosophy and I know that he has made positive statements about Jews.”
    Jewish leaders will have a chance to air their concerns directly to Benedict, when he meets with them during his April visit to the United States, his fi rst as pope.
    Meanwhile, Auxiliary Bishop Richard Sklba of Milwaukee, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, is trying to reassure the Jewish community.
    “Central to the concerns of the Holy Father is the clear articulation that salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ and his Church,” Sklba said in a statement. “It is a faith that must never be imposed but always freely chosen.”
    “The Catholic Church in the United States remains steadfastly committed to deepening its bonds of friendship and mutual understanding with the Jewish community.”

PIER PAOLO CITO/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Pope Benedict XVI delivers his blessing as he enters the Pope Paul VI Vatican Hall for his weekly general audience.

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Our pursuit of faith is faithless

First published: Monday, March 3, 2008
Just below the text there was a Google ad inviting me to take a quiz. "Christian? Jewish? Muslim? Atheist? See which Religion is Right for You."
Aside from the eccentricity of listing atheism as a religion, I couldn't help wondering what my grandparents would make of this religious matching service. For that matter, what would they make of the idea that you could choose your religion at all? To them, religion was part of your identity, if not your DNA. You were born into it, grew up in it, and died with its prayers.
     
I noticed this ad because it was attached to the story of a new report on religion in America released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The researchers interviewed 35,000 Americans. Their figures show that Protestants now comprise a bare majority -- 51 percent -- of the population, and that the fastest growing group is the 16 percent now self-described as "unaffiliated."
But what is most fascinating is that 44 percent of Americans have left the religious traditions in which they grew up. They left the religion of their parents with the frequency that they left their old neighborhood.
FACTS:In my grandparents' day, Americans were divided between the big three religions, sort of like TV networks: Catholic, Protestant and Jew. Now they have fragmented across a spectrum more like cable TV with satellite radio thrown in. The researchers describe a "vibrant marketplace where individuals pick and choose religions that meet their needs." "We are shopping for everything else, why wouldn't we shop for religion?" asks religion professor Donald Miller of the University of Southern California. Pew's John Green adds, "It's not surprising that we have a marketplace in religious or spiritual ideas." What's qualitatively different these days, he says, is that we have much more religious diversity. "We have more places to move from and more places to move to."
For many Americans the idea of shopping for eternal truths is still jarring. The movement from one "tradition" to another may even suggest a kind of promiscuity -- a faithless pursuit of faith.
Yet the idea of religion as a personal choice seems thoroughly American, as American as religious tolerance.
America has long been regarded as the most religious of Western nations. Six in 10 of us say that religion plays a very important role in our lives. Polls tell us that Americans are more willing to vote for a woman, a black, a Jew, than an atheist. Secular Europeans who look at those figures regard Americans as unthinking believers, conservatives following orders delivered from the pulpit.
At home, the culture wars are often polarized between the religious right and the secular left. Leaders of both sides often characterize, perhaps caricature, religious members as people rooted in old ways and immutable ideas. But a huge number of Americans are mobile in pursuit of the immutable.
"We are, as a country, people who want to choose their own identity in a lot of areas of life and religion is one more part of it," says Alan Wolfe of Boston College.
There's a difference between an identity that's achieved rather than ascribed. Those who leave their childhood religions largely regard themselves as making their own individual choice. In this cultural context, even staying becomes an active decision.
When religion was cast in stone, it seems we were more likely to cast stones. The new pluralism and the framing of religion as a choice makes us more accepting."You are the artist of your own life when it comes to religion," says Miller. "This enables people to be more thoughtful about what they perceive to be true and right rather than inheriting what passes down to them."
FACTS:Indeed, if we've left our childhood traditions, if our children may leave ours, there is good reason to nurture what Wolfe calls "intolerance insurance." The Pew study also shows that 40 percent of all marriages are of mixed religious traditions, including "none of the above." We take coexistence pretty literally. I don't think Americans are just shopping for their beliefs in a trivial sense, trying on creeds like this year's vestment. But we are a people on the move.
Today, we may shop in a spiritual mall. But what good fortune to find the mall paved over the old religious battlefields. Ellen Goodman writes for The Boston Globe. Her e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.

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Vatican lists "new sins," including pollution
By Philip Pullella Posted Mon Mar 10, 2008 6:00am PDT

A faithful holds the cross during a mass at a Catholic church on the outskirts of Changzhi, Shanxi province December 23, 2007. The Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of 'new' sins such as causing environmental blight. (Stringer/Reuters)
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of "new" sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today's "new sins," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

"(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control," he said.

The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.

Girotti, in an interview headlined "New Forms of Social Sin," also listed "ecological" offences as modern evils.

In recent months, Pope Benedict has made several strong appeals for the protection of the environment, saying issues such as climate change had become gravely important for the entire human race.

Under Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, the Vatican has become progressively "green."

It has installed photovoltaic cells on buildings to produce electricity and hosted a scientific conference to discuss the ramifications of global warming and climate change, widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels.

Girotti, who is number two in the Vatican "Apostolic Penitentiary," which deals with matter of conscience, also listed drug trafficking and social and economic injustices as modern sins.

But Girotti also bemoaned that fewer and fewer Catholics go to confession at all.

He pointed to a study by Milan's Catholic University that showed that up to 60 percent of Catholic faithful in Italy stopped going to confession.

In the sacrament of Penance, Catholics confess their sins to a priest who absolves them in God's name.

But the same study by the Catholic University showed that 30 percent of Italian Catholics believed that there was no need for a priest to be God's intermediary and 20 percent felt uncomfortable talking about their sins to another person.

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Books look at belief in resurrection Jesus being raised physically or spiritually debated
BY RACHEL ZOLL The Associated Press

    On Easter Sunday, Christians will proclaim the message at the heart of their faith — “He is risen” — and will affirm the hope that God will raise all the dead at the end of time.
    But this belief is deeply misunderstood, say scholars from varied faith traditions who have been trying to clear up the confusion in several recent books.
    “We are troubled by the gap between the views on these things of the general public and the findings of contemporary scholarship,” said Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson, authors of the upcoming book, “Resurrection, The Power of God for Christians and Jews.”
    The book traces the overlooked Jewish roots of the Christian belief in resurrection, and builds on that history to challenge the idea that resurrection simply means life after death. To the authors, being raised up has a physical element, not just a spiritual one.
    Levenson last year wrote a related book, “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life.” Meanwhile, N.T. Wright, a prominent New Testament scholar and author of the 2003 book “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” has just published, “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church.”
    Debate about Christ’s Resurrection has focused on whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead after the Romans crucified him on Good Friday, or whether Resurrection was something abstract.
    Wright’s 2003 book was considered one of the most important recent arguments that Jesus was physically resurrected.
    The three scholars also have been challenging the idea, part of Greek philosophy and popular now, that resurrection for Jews and the followers of Jesus is simply the survival of an individual’s soul in the hereafter. The scholars say resurrection occurs for the whole person — body and soul. For early Christians and some Jews, resurrection meant being given back one’s body or possibly God creating a new similar body after death, Wright has said.
    Madigan and Levenson, among other scholars, also emphasize that resurrection for humankind is a belief that Christians and Jews share. Christians generally find it difficult to imagine that a faith that doesn’t believe in Christ’s Resurrection can believe in resurrection at all.
    But “as the early church was developing, rabbis were making resurrection an article of normative belief,” Madigan and Levenson said in e-mailed answers to questions from The Associated Press. “That is something many Jews do not know. Like many Christians, they are under the misimpression that resurrection is a uniquely Christian hope.”
    Jews in the time of Jesus believed that resurrection was bodily and communal — in that it brought justice to the oppressed and renewed creation, wrote Madigan, who teaches Christian history at Harvard Divinity School, and Levenson, who teaches Jewish studies there. That Jewish belief was absorbed and reshaped by the earliest Christians to form part of their religion.
    Most modern-day Jews don’t know this. Except for the Orthodox branch of Judaism, Jewish groups deleted belief in resurrection from the traditional prayer book during revisions that began during the 19th century in response to rationalistic, Enlightenment thought.
    Public understanding of resurrection has been influenced not only by modern rejection of the idea of miracles, but also by popular culture.
    Alan F. Segal, a Barnard College professor and author of “Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion,” notes that most Americans expect the afterlife will be a continuation of life on earth — “like a really good assistedliving facility.”
    He also said that belief in an existence beyond death persists among Americans no matter how little they observe their religion. In the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, 82 percent of respondents said they “absolutely” or “probably” believed in heaven. Nearly 71 percent said they “absolutely” or “probably” believed in hell.
    But their ideas have been molded by Western individualism, and scholars say many important teachings from early Christianity have been skewed as a result. Indeed, even debating the specifics of resurrection may seem far removed from 21st century life.
    Yet Wright and others say the church should teach what the first Christians believed. Wright also has argued that the physical reality of a future world after death shows “the created order matters to God, and Jesus’ more about their theological Resurrection is the pilot project bonds.
for that renewal.” Amy-Jill Levine, a New Tes-Madigan and Levenson have tament scholar at Vanderbilt an additional motivation. They University’s Divinity School, said they wrote the book to help said interest in resurrection — Jews and Christians understand along with reincarnation, ghosts and contacting the dead — has grown in recent years.
    “The more chaotic our world, with war and disease, hurricanes and famine,” she said, “the more many seek a divine response to the problem of evil.”

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Pope Benedict expected to emphasize core values
BY RACHEL ZOLL The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — In his visit this month to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI will find an American flock wrestling with what it means to be Roman Catholic.
    The younger generation considers religion important, but doesn’t equate faith with going to church. Many lay people want a greater say in how their parishes operate, yet today’s seminarians hope to restore the traditional role and authority of priests.
    Catholic colleges and universities are trying to balance their religious identity with free expression, catching grief from liberals and conservatives in the process.
    Immigrants are filling the pews, while whites are leaving them. Nearly one-third of U.S. adult Catholics are now Hispanic, and they worry about being considered a separate, ethnic church.
    Despite these divisions, Catholics across the spectrum of belief have been energized by the pope’s trip. The man who was once responsible for enforcing adherence to Catholic doctrine isn’t likely to do much scolding. Instead, he’s expected to recognize the relative vibrance of the American church, while emphasizing core Catholic values: the reality of absolute truth, the relationship between faith and reason, love for the faith.
    “I think he’s going to come in and try to inspire. As pope, he’s really taken the positive track on a lot of issues. I don’t think there’s any reason he wouldn’t continue to do so now,” said Dennis Doyle, a theologian at the University of Dayton, a Marianist school in Ohio.
    Benedict has traveled to seven other countries since he was elected in 2005, but a papal journey to the U.S. is like no other because of the church’s size and influence.
    In a nation founded by Protestants, Catholics comprise nearly one-quarter of the population. Catholic America is the biggest donor to the Vatican. The U.S. also is home to more than 250 Catholic colleges and universities.
    There’s an added urgency to this visit. While it will be Benedict’s first trip to the country as pope — he made five visits when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — it may also be his last. He turns 81 during his April 15-20 visit to Washington and New York, and he has less interest in travel than his globe-trotting predecessor, Pope John Paul II.
    Americans don’t know much about Benedict. But surveys conducted ahead of his visit found three-quarters of U.S. Catholics view him favorably. They are clamoring to see him.
    “I get 30 to 40 requests a day to get into the speech he’s going to give at Catholic University,” said the Rev. David O’Connell, president of Catholic University of America, where Benedict will address leaders of the nation’s Catholic colleges and universities. “There’s a fascination with Pope Benedict, perhaps it is because there is more mystery about him.”
    They have less enthusiasm for religious observance.
    About one-third of the more than 64 million U.S. Catholics never attend Mass, and about one-quarter attend only a few times a year, according to a 2007 study by the Center for Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. A majority never go to confession or go less than once a year.
    The generational split is stark: About half of Catholics born before the 1960s say they attend Mass at least once a week, compared to only 10 percent of those born since the 1980s.

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Debate about Christ’s Resurrection has focused on whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead after the Romans crucified him on Good Friday, or whether Resurrection was something abstract.

Quoted from Kevin March

Nope, they walked in, he wasn't there.  The body was gone.  End of story.  Amen.

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Atheist soldier files harassment lawsuit
Army specialist defending right not to believe
BY JOHN MILBURN The Associated Press

    JUNCTION CITY, Kan. — Like hundreds of young men joining the Army in recent years, Jeremy Hall professes a desire to serve his country while it fights terrorism.
    But the short and soft-spoken specialist is at the center of a legal controversy. He has filed a lawsuit alleging he’s been harassed and his constitutional rights have been violated because he doesn’t believe in God. The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
    “I’m not in it for cash,” Hall said. “I want no one else to go what I went through.”
    Known as “the atheist guy,” Hall has been called immoral, a devil worshipper and — just as severe to some soldiers — gay, none of which, he says, is true. Hall even drove fellow soldiers to church in Iraq and paused while they prayed before meals.
    “I see a name and rank and United States flag on their shoulder. That’s what I believe everyone else should see,” he said.
    Hall, 23, was raised in a Protestant family in North Carolina and dropped out of school before earning his GED. It wasn’t until after he joined the Army that he began questioning religion, eventually deciding he couldn’t follow any faith.
    But he feared how that would look to other soldiers.
    “I was ashamed to say that I was an atheist,” Hall said.
    It eventually came out in Iraq in 2007, when he was in a fi refight. Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said.
    “I said, ‘No, but I believe in Plexiglas,’ ” Hall said. “I’ve never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I’m worm food.”
    The issue came to a head when, according to Hall, a superior officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, threatened to bring charges against him for trying to hold a meeting of atheists in Iraq. Welborn has denied Hall’s allegations.
    Hall said he had had enough but feared he wouldn’t get support from Welborn’s superiors. He turned to Mikey Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
    Weinstein is the foundation’s president and a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate. He had previously sued the Air Force for acts he said illegally imposed Christianity on students at the academy, though that case was dismissed. He calls Hall a hero.
    “The average American doesn’t have enough intestinal fortitude to tell someone to shut up if they are talking in a movie theater,” Weinstein said. “You know how hard it is to take on your chain of command? This isn’t the shift manager at KFC.”
    Hall was in Qatar when the lawsuit was filed on Sept. 18 in federal court in Kansas City, Kan. Other soldiers learned of it and he feared for his own safety. Once, Hall said, a group of soldiers followed him, harassing him, but no one did anything to make it stop.
    The Army told him it couldn’t protect him and sent him back to Fort Riley. He resumed duties with a military police battalion. He believes his promotion to sergeant has been blocked because of his lawsuit, but he is a team leader responsible for two junior enlisted soldiers.
    No one with Fort Riley, the Army or Defense Department would comment about Hall or the lawsuit. Each issued statements saying that discrimination will not be tolerated regardless of race, religion or gender.
    “The Department respects [and supports by its policy] the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no beliefs,” said Eileen Lainez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense.
    All three organizations said existing systems help soldiers “address and resolve any perceived unfair treatment.”


CHUCK FRANCE/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
U.S. Army Spc. Jeremy Hall takes a moment to collect his thoughts at a local coffee shop Thursday near Fort Riley in Junction City, Kan. Hall, an atheist, has brought a religious discrimination lawsuit against the government naming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in the legal proceedings.

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May 30, 2008

Vatican says female priests and those who ordain them will incur automatic excommunication

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican is slamming the door on attempts by women to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church. It has strongly reiterated in a decree that anyone involved in ordination ceremonies is automatically excommunicated.

A top Vatican official said in a statement Friday that the church acted following what it called "so-called ordinations" in various parts of the world.

Monsignor Angelo Amato of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith says the Vatican also wants to provide bishops with a clear response on the issue.

The church has always banned the ordination of women, stating that the priesthood is reserved for males. The new decree is explicit in its reference to women.