There is a systemic flaw that is endemic to the way the Roman Catholic Church operates and it is predicated on what the Church calls "natural law." Natural law is presumed to be immutable God given "truths;" most notably those which address ethical, moral, and theological beliefs the Roman Catholic Church believes are obvious via reason to the human person. Moreover, once identified and articulated by the Church especially if codified as Church dogma or doctrine, such "truths" are not only immutable but any new understanding of what that "truth" speaks to predicated on new information or interpretation must conform to the already existing body of natural law.

For example, consider the Roman Catholic Church's position on abortion. In the primitive Christian Church there was no consensus on when human life or ensoulment occurred. Most often individual bishops made the decision for their diocese predicated on Plato's comment in the *Republic* which was at "quickening," or a live birth, or imposed their personal opinion. Three early Church Councils: Elvira (303-309), Ancyra (314), and Trullo (692) all in what is now Spain, reached different opinions but these opinions were not accepted by the universal Church. Pope Sixtus V in 1588 declared that both contraception and abortion resulted in excommunication. However, his successor Pope Gregory XII lifted the ban on contraception and made abortion after "quickening" a sin but not one of excommunication.

It is clear from the above that until 1588 the Roman Catholic Church had discerned no natural law regarding abortion. However, that was to change in 1854 when Pope Pius IX declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born without "the stain of Original Sin on her soul" so that she could give birth to Jesus as both fully human and fully divine. Thus according to the Dogma there could be no question of when the fetus that would become the person Mary was conceived, became human, or was ensouled.

St. Augustine, the author of the concept of Original Sin in the late fourth century, stated that Original Sin is passed to the next generation by sexual intercourse that results in conception. As Mary was born without Origin Sin, the Roman Catholic Church declared that ensoulment occurred at the "moment of conception." Thus with the "moment of conception" now defined as the beginning of human life, human person hood, and ensoulment, the Dogma codified these "truths" as natural law.

Consequently, from the declaration of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, abortion is defined by the Roman Catholic Church as any human intervention that occurs after the "moment of conception" that in any way leads to a negation of the live birth of the fetus. However, what must be understood is that this definition of abortion and its subsequent ban is not predicated on the principle of first cause which has been central to Roman Catholic theology since it was established by St. Thomas Aquinas in the middle of the thirteenth century. This is because in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, contrary to its mantra of "right-to-life" from conception to natural death, "life" is not the first cause that prohibits abortion. The first cause that prohibits abortion is ensoulment because it is the belief that Mary was born without the stain of Original Sin and the Church could not prove when the soul entered the body that it chose the ambiguous phrase, "moment of conception." Consequently, "human life" and "person hood" are secondary causes that flow from and require a first cause which is the theological, not the science of human developmental biology, belief that there is a "moment of conception."

Where this brings us is that the "moment of conception" is a theological construct predicted on the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It is not predicated on the biology of conception.

While the Roman Catholic Church defines a "moment of conception" and bans abortion from this point on, developmental biologists reject the concept of a "moment of conception." This is because from the moment the sperm makes contact with the outer membrane of the ovum a complex transformational chemical process begins that takes at least 36-48 hours and up to 72 hours to complete. However even the completion of this window, not a moment, is rejected by most developmental biologists and ethicists including Roman Catholic ones as the beginning of human life and human person hood because there are other significant markers that they believe is the beginning of human life and person hood. These markers are too detailed to analyze here but include in addition to the genetic view cited above held by the Roman Catholic Church are the embryological view which requires the implantation of the zygote into the wall of the uterus which makes the splitting of the zygote into two or more individuals impossible that takes up to fifteen days from the completion of fertilization, the neurological view that cites the 25th week of pregnancy comprised of three distinct stages, and the ecological/technological view that states human life and human person hood do not begin until a fetus becomes a live birth and is a baby.

Why is it that when the "moment of conception" is a biological myth predicated on Church dogma and that most developmental biologists and ethicists use the neurological view as the beginning of human life, that the Roman Catholic Church does not revise its position on when human life and human person hood begins? The reason is that they cannot do so because the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception which in turn created a "natural law" regarding the "moment of conception" will not allow them to do so.

I have not written the above with the intent to change anyone's personal faith beliefs or personal belief regarding abortion. Rather, I wrote it to illustrate why the Roman Catholic Church once it takes a position on what it considers an ethical, moral, or theological issue predicated on natural law, finds it impossible to change that position even in the face of what any rational person using reason and logic considers irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

From this perspective I am reminded of the question raised when I was a seminarian at St. Mary's Roman Catholic seminary. The question was, "What does it take to be a "good Catholic?" In other words, what does it take to accept the teaching of the Magisterium in the face of reason and logic that debunks the validity of Catholic dogma and doctrine?

If we understand that faith, the faith that any religion or denomination requires is at its essence irrational and that human beings are rational beings, then for one to have faith they must deny logic, reason, and rationality. From this we may extrapolate that the person with the greatest faith, the one who accepts the most irrational dogma and doctrine as "truth," is the person who is most irrational in that they can suspend and deny reason and logic to a greater degree than can others.

In no religion more than Christianity and in no Christian denomination more than Roman Catholicism must one be irrational to accept the Church's dogma and doctrine as "truth." Why? Because it is not rational to belief that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. It is not rational to believe that there is such a thing as Original Sin that is transmitted via sexual intercourse from generation to generation to say nothing of the Church's claim that of all the human beings ever born Mary is the only one born without it. It is not rational to believe that a human being, the pope, has the ability to speak infallibly when he speaks in the name of all Christians on matters of faith and morals. It is not rational to believe that as the Church proclaims only it has the full means of salvation. It is not rational to believe that the bread and wine used at the Holy Eucharist is somehow transformed into the "Real Presence;" that is, Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ.

Yet, these and many other beliefs are required if one is to be a "good Catholic." From this perspective is easy to see how the Roman Catholic Church expects "good Catholics" to deny the facts of human developmental biology and instead believe there is a "moment of conception" predicated on the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Moreover, the Church believes that as "good Catholics" can deny logic and reason to accept other illogical and unreasonable dogmas and doctrines, they will accept the illogic and unreasonableness of the "moment of conception" and thus deny that abortion can ever be a licit medical procedure regardless of the damage to the fetus or danger to the woman's health or life.

It's been a big few weeks for mercy.

First, Paris Hilton was released from a Los Angeles jail, after being incarcerated for violating the terms of her probation on alcohol-related driving violations. While the LA sheriff was rebuked for his attempt to mercifully spare Hilton from weeks of incarceration, Hilton's divine guardian gave her a second chance at a life more worthwhile than "models and bottles."

When Barbara Walters interviewed Hilton from her jail cell, asking, "How are you different?" the young socialite waxed theological: "I'm not the same person I was," she said. "I used to act dumb. It was an act .... It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who looked up to me. I know now that I can make a difference, that I have the power to do that. I have been thinking that I want to do different things when I am out of here. I have become much more spiritual. God has given me this new chance."

Then on July 2, President Bush commuted the prison sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, convicted of perjuring himself to a federal grand jury during the investigation of the release of the classified CIA status of Valerie Plame. While defending the process that led to Libby's conviction, Bush considered the sentence of thirty months to be "excessive," and thus worthy of his (unusual) intervention.

Usually the president has argued for harsher punishments; the news analysis that has followed the commutation shows the inconsistency of Bush's treatment of "Scooter" with his handling of every other request for sovereign mercy that has come across his desk.

These two events have more in common than their timing. Both Bush's mercy toward Libby and Hilton's claim of a divinely awarded "second chance" operate on the principle that the individuals in question deserve special treatment from the sovereign.

In Hilton's case, her position as wealthy heiress and (may the gods save us!) role model for young girls everywhere means, in her mind, that God intends for her to put her life to better use, making a "difference" in others' lives. Presumably, she deserves this merciful second chance because of her prominent position and capacity to fund a life pursuing more worthwhile goals than constant partying. The jury is out on whether she'll put this opportunity to good use (perhaps she's another Darfur spokesperson in the making?).

But isn't there an arrogance in her declaration of special divine beneficence that runs counter to a long tradition in Western theology? The Western tradition is saturated with an Augustinian-inspired disdain for an individual's arrogant assumption that one is so important as to be essential to the unfolding of God's plan. Moreover, there is a deep biblical tradition that "God is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34). Unmoved by riches or earthly power, God is said to be interested only in our internal motivations: "For the Lord sees not as man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). Perhaps Hilton's God reads People and sees an opportunity.

But why does Hilton think herself privileged enough to get out of jail, reformed and tasked with a new mission, while her cellmates languish under the burdens of under-representation, poverty, disease, and despair? After all, the same lord who "gave" her the second chance implores us to remember that "the rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all" (Proverbs 22:2). Is she really that special?

These questions are more easily answered in Libby's case. While Libby has been silent, it is clear that the reason Scooter got special treatment was precisely due to his position as trusted friend. Unlike Yahweh, Bush does respect persons -- in this case the close confidant and right hand of the vice president.

Perhaps this is how it should be with the leaders of earthly kingdoms? We are, after all, humans easily seduced by our own powers. Friends of the sovereign win special favor. And, legally, the commutational power exercised by the president is unambiguously granted by constitutional authority. As Carl Schmitt argued, sovereignty is most transparent not in the routine moments of its exercise, but in the exceptions to the general rules. In this special case, the sovereign Bush decided that the friend Libby deserved an exception to the harsh sentences consistently imposed elsewhere. And there's not one thing to be done about this except try to shame a sovereign who seems to have forgotten how to blush.

We should ponder this order of justice and mercy. You and I would not receive such mercy from the seat of earthly or heavenly power. Justice for us is meted out through rigid application of rules, unless we are the favored chief of staff (or party girl) seated at the right hand of the ruler.

Likewise, most of us do not have the financial safety cushion to turn the lemons of incarceration into the lemonade of a new social mission. In fact, such incarceration would leave us indelibly tarred as convicted felons, unable to access many social and economic opportunities needed to seize our second chance.
A Hiltonesque jailhouse conversion, whether sincere or not, would not save us from a difficult restoration of our dignity in the eyes of others. No committee of political operatives will fundraise for our defense, nor will the media powers broadcast our conversion testimony. You and I, poor schlubs in a merciless world, are on our own.

As I intimated in a recent sermon, I am not convinced that heaven or hell, in the traditional Western Christian sense, really exist. Nonetheless, I am intrigued with other people's opinions about the afterlife.

The questions above were posed by Sally Quinn and Jon Meachem, two reporters for the Washington Post to some rather well-known writers and theologians. A few responses are posted below and more can be found here

I encourage you to visit the site for more opinions.

Oh, for heaven's sake. This question irritates the...inferno out of me. Of all the pointless, utterly childish notions associated with traditional religion, belief in eternal bliss in heaven or eternal damnation in hell surely tops the list.

Religions that have allowed themselves to be modified by secular knowledge downplay orthodox ideas of heaven and hell for the very good reason that such beliefs have been used throughout history to justify the most evil earthly acts imaginable. Christians slaughtered Jews and Muslims during the Crusades precisely because they believed that they were earning themselves a place in an all-Christian heaven, hemmed in by restrictive covenants.

In recent years, radical Islamists have embarked on suicide murder missions with the absolute conviction that they will be rewarded with a place in a Muslim paradise. The 60 percent of Muslim Americans who, according to a recent Pew Poll, do not accept the fact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslim Arabs, are deluded. Like the Christian Crusades, Islamist terror attacks are deeply involved with a form of religion that forsees an eternal reward for dastardly crimes against humanity.

I know that indignant readers will claim that none of these crimes have anything to do with the "real" Christianity or the "real" Islam. They don't have anything to do with modern, moderate forms of Christianity or Islam, but they have everything to do with retrograde expressions of religions that preach, among other things, the doctrine of eternal damnation for unbelievers and infidels. And these retrograde religious forms are on the rise in the world. They are every bit as "real" as religion based on earthly, loving kindness--something that promoters of religion as an unqualified good never want to admit.

Fear of hell has also proved notably inefficacious as a deterrent to evil human impulses; that is why we have man-made laws. Fundamentalists who want to post the Ten Commandments in courthouses have everything backward: we need courthouses precisely because some people just won't obey moral commandments unless they are subjected to earthly punishment.

In our godly nation, the most recent Gallup Poll (released on June 13, 2007) found that while 81 per cent of Americans believe in heaven, only 69 percent believe in hell. Approximately 86 per cent of American adults believe in God, but only 70 percent believe in the devil. We Americans really do like to have our cake (whether angel or devil's food) and eat it too; we seem to prefer the pursuit of happiness to the right to go to hell in our own way.

Because I am an atheist (and by the way, the percentage of Americans who believe in God has dropped by four percentage points--down from 90 percent to a minuscule 86 percent--during the past four years), I naturally do not believe in immortality in either heaven or hell. I say with Milton:

O Earth, how like to Heav'n, if not preferr'd
More justly, Seat worthier of Gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old:
For what God after better worse would build? (Paradise Lost, IX.100)

If I were a believer, though, I would definitely reserve my closest scrutiny for the devil's many earthly workshops, from the office of the current U.S. Vice President (described in such riveting infernal detail in the Post series on Dick Cheney this week) to the hellish refugee camps in Darfur.

There is a devil--not a supernatural being but the sum of the worst human impulses. The devil is in us. Or rather, the devil is us. And what so many people think of as a supernatural being called "God" can be understood in the natural realm as the human capacity for good.

I also reject the concept of limbo, and I send my kudos to the Vatican for finally changing its dogma that unbaptized infants can't go to heaven because someone didn't sprinkle water over their heads. This change truly epitomizes the Roman Catholic Church's commitment to dealing with humankind's most important problems. I am sure that every lunatic who actually believed in a deity cruel enough to deny his presence to sinless infants will be greatly relieved by the Church's change of heart.

But I certainly do believe in purgatory. Purgatory is wondering whether the human race in general, and my fellow Americans in particular, will ever grow up enough to realize that we ought to treat one another decently simply because of our common humanity--not because we are looking forward to being entertained by harpists among the clouds or are terrified of eternal flame.

Modern forms of religion tend to define heaven and hell in a somewhat abstract way--the former as perfect union with God, the latter as the absence of God. Whatever the concept of eternity, it is based on the demonstrably false idea that the hope of heaven and the fear of hell will prevent people from doing evil to one another here on earth.

Purgatory is the only state inhabited by reasonable grownups, never quite living up to our own moral expectations but always hoping to do better.

Heaven is important but it's not the end of the world: in the mainstream Christian tradition until the Platonists corrupted it, the ultimate destination is THE NEW HEAVENS AND THE NEW EARTH, which will involve an ultimate resurrection (bodily, of course) for God's people (in some versions, for all people).

The way the phrase 'heaven and hell' are used today implies you go straight to one or the other, ignoring the solid biblical testimony to an ultimate new creation in which heaven and earth are brought together in a great act of renewal (for those who want it, check out Ephesians 1.10, Revelation 21 and 22, Romans 8.18-27 and 1 Corinthians 15.20-28 -- though once you see this theme it's there everywhere). When Paul says 'my desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better', and when Jesus says 'today you will be with me in Paradise', the wider context of both indicates that this will be a TEMPORARY state prior to the eventual resurrection into the new creation. This means (by the way) that the 'second coming' is NOT Jesus 'coming back to take us home', but Jesus coming -- or 'reappearing', as 1 John 3 and Colossians 3 put it -- to heal, judge and rescue this present creation and us with it.

(b) The word 'hell' is a shorthand for several biblical themes which converge at the point where (i) God has promised to put the entire world right at last, showing up evil as what it is, the corruption and destruction of what is good, and the distortion of the good humanness which God made and loves, and therefore judging it so that it no longer has the power to infect his good creation; (ii) God will finally say to those who have persisted in their deliberate collusion with the powers of corruption, destruction and dehumanization (i.e. 'sin') that there can be no place for them in the glorious new world that he is making, so that (iii) God's new world will not have in it 'a concentration camp in the midst of a beautiful landscape', as some earlier visions of 'hell' have supposed, but rather the celebration (1 Corinthians 20.28) that 'God will be all in all'.

(c) There is a constant danger for contemporary western Christians of making a similar mistake at this point to first-century Jews. It appears that many Jews of, say, Jesus' and Paul's day supposed that when God acted to put the world right it would be the Jewish people who would be automatically OK.

The great breakthrough in Paul's thinking is that no, the one God of Abraham wants to reach out and welcome ALL people on the basis of faith alone. Similarly today many Christians think God is only interested in rescuing them, as saved humans, FROM the world, whereas the Bible is full of hints that those who know God and receive his salvation here and now are to be his agents in bringing that salvation to the wider world. Note how, even when Revelation 21 and 22 speaks of those who are in the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and those who are excluded from it, it also speaks of the river of the water of life flowing out to the world around, and of the tree of life growing on the banks of the river, with 'the leaves of the tree being for the healing of the nations'. What does that mean?

As everybody knows who had Dante forced upon her or him in high school, the Inferno is not only about sufferings in the afterlife, but is also an allegory about the politics of his own time. It is entirely believable to me that the spiraling conflicts of politics were Dante’s chosen vehicle for describing in exquisite detail all the circles of hell and the specific sins of which human beings are capable.

Yes, I believe in hell, and in heaven. I believe it because, like Dante, I see it here on earth. All the way down through each circle of hell in the Inferno, or up through the Paradiso, we are led on the same journey. We journey down into the worst of human nature, what we call hell, and up through the incredible capacity of human beings for redemption, what we call heaven.

I once heard Toni Morrison give a lecture about the thought process that led her to write her astonishing novel, Paradise. She read aloud from Revelation 21 in the Bible and the description of the heavenly Jerusalem in it. “[T] he city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every jewel…And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.”

Morrison asked, “But if heaven is not just high priced real estate, what is it?” This is the question she pursues in that novel. The protagonists, escaped slaves, certainly knew hell on earth in the conditions of their enslavement. They flee slavery and seek to establish heaven on earth. Instead as time passes there is a split in the community and they become engaged in a battle over existence that turns as murderous as the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis.

It has been suggested, in fact, that Cain and Abel are the same person. They are humanity, whole, with our capacity for infinite good and infinite evil. This is the dilemma both Morrison and Dante describe—we can be hell to ourselves and to one another, or the means of our own and one another’s salvation. And sometimes we can be both. This is the freedom God has given us in existence it is the source of the very depth and height of what it means to be human.

Yes, I believe in hell, and in heaven.

I believe in heaven because I believe that God loves us so much that he would not let us simply disappear. I believe in hell because I believe we are free to reject God.

Meditating on our place in the universe as taught to us by science should make us humble. We live for a brief time on a small planet spinning around a sun that is one star in a galaxy that is only one of the millions of galaxies in the universe. How insignificant we are. As a result, I sometimes think that the hardest act of faith for a modern person is believing that God cares about us.

Believing that God loves us—that we are not just a blink of an eye in the history of the universe—is at the core of religious faith. For Christians, that is what the incarnation and the resurrection are all about—God loves us so much he became one of us and raised Jesus up as a sign of our everlasting life. Heaven is everlasting life with God.

Who goes to heaven? Those who choose love, those who love.

Matthew 25 makes this explicit: “Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.”

But we are free not to choose God; we are free not to love. God does not condemn us to hell; we go there freely. Hell is not a place of fire. Hell is the absence of love, the absence of God who is love.

Do only Christians go to heaven? No, anyone who loves can go to heaven.

“Are there dogs in heaven?” someone once asked Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of several wonderful books celebrating the pleasures of life with dogs. “Of course,” she replied; “otherwise, it wouldn’t be heaven.” And she’s right.

Heaven is a place onto which we project our ideas of what a perfect world might be, and so it must contain everything that we hold dear. Yudhishthira, the ethically tormented king in the great ancient Indian poem, the Mahabharata, would also have agreed with Ms. Thomas; he refused to go to heaven unless he could bring his dog with him, challenging the Hindu view of dogs as polluting and hence banned from any holy place.

For some people, heaven is just a metaphor—heaven is dancing cheek to cheek, or heaven is in your eyes, and so forth. For Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, earth itself “is hell, nor am I out of it.” Jean Paul Sartre agreed: hell is other people. But others would say that heaven is other people—it is, above all, the place where they hope to be reunited with loved ones who have gone before. For such people, heaven is much more than a metaphor; it’s a hope and a fear. A fear because, if there is a heaven, there must be a hell, a place without dogs (pace the widespread ancient myth of the Hounds of Hell).

The unquenchable human thirst for life and for justice is what creates heaven. The observable fact that justice does not reign on earth (or that, as Tolstoy nicely put it in the title of a short story, “God Sees The Truth But Waits”), combined with the fact that we do appear to die, though we cannot imagine a world without us in it, gives rise to the hope that after death we will live on, rewarded for our virtues while other people will go to hell and be tortured for their sins.

The tenacity of the hope for heaven is demonstrated by the fact that when the Hindus invented a much more complex and satisfying response to the problems of both death and justice, the theory of reincarnation, they still kept heaven, simply adding on reincarnation. They said that first you went to heaven, then to hell (or the reverse, first hell, then heaven: counter-intuitively, people who had done more good than ill went to hell first, to pay for their small record of evil, and then to heaven, to enjoy their rewards; whose who had done more evil than good went to heaven first, then to hell), and then you got reincarnated anyway, still according to your just desserts. Indian hells, both Hindu and Buddhists, are brilliant evocations of punishments that fit the crimes; adulterers spend eternity crushed and impaled within red hot Iron Maidens. In the Hindu heaven, however, enemies are reconciled, and imperfections of the body are healed.

The fact that cultures all over the world have imagined some sort of heaven shows how deep a human longing it is, and the fact that they all describe it differently strongly suggests that no one has ever seen it (“that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,” as Hamlet so nicely puts it) and that there is therefore no evidence that it actually exists.

For some cultures, paradise is a garden (which is what the word “paradise” originally meant in Greek and Persian); when Voltaire’s Candide ended up deciding to cultivate his garden, now, here on earth, he was implicitly denying the possibility of cultivating it anywhere else. If there were a heaven for me, it would have to be the kind of garden in which no one minds when your dog, in hot pursuit of rabbits, tramples down the peonies.

But I can’t believe in heaven, because I no longer believe in the possibility of justice; I cannot even imagine a world in which there is perfect justice. Even if there were a heaven, all the wrong people would get to go there, just as all the wrong people down here get to go to the Italian Riviera. I do still cherish some hope of an afterlife, but more like reincarnation than heaven, a recycling of what we know life to be, with all it flaws, a living on in memory, a rebirth in people whose lives we have touched. At best, perhaps, rebirth in a world in which, as in heaven, we are together with the sorts of people whom we have loved and who have loved us—perhaps, indeed, rebirth as dogs.

Ten Things Christians and Atheists Must Agree On
by David Wong

1. You Can Do Terrible Things in the Name of Either One

We’re putting aside the question of which belief system has killed more people by percentage of population, or whether a hypothetical world without religion would have seen fewer or more genocides than ours. We’re not going to open a spreadsheet and try to count which belief system manufactures more murderous sociopaths per capita.

All I need from you is agreement that it’s entirely possible for either an atheist or theist world to devolve into a screaming murder festival. The religious leader sends his people into battle because he thinks God commanded it, the Stalins and Maos of the world do the same because they see their people as nothing more than meaty fuel to be ground up to feed the machinery of The State. In both cases, the people are equally dead.

Yeah, yeah, I know the Christians are saying that the guy who fights an unjust or needless war is violating God’s law, and thus isn’t a good Christian. Meanwhile, the atheists are saying that Stalin was merely bloodthirsty, separate and apart from his disbelief in a higher power. Both believe, then, that it is a corruption of their belief system that allows unjust slaughter to happen.

But for this project, All we need to agree on is this: it happens in both cases. And if the opposing belief system vanished tomorrow, war and bloodshed and terror would still take place.

And can we further admit it’s actually physically impossible to calculate whether, if your side had its way, the volume of terrible things happening would go up, or down, or stay the same? I know you have an opinion on that, and I can guess what it is. But we don’t know, and can’t state it like it’s fact. Right?

Everybody still on board?

Good. Can we now also agree...

2. Both Sides Really Do Believe What They’re Saying

Christians do this thing that drives atheists nuts, where they talk like God is patently obvious to all mankind, and that atheism is therefore just petty, intentional rebellion against Christians. In other words, that atheists don’t honestly believe what they say, and just say it because they’re jerks.

But atheists do something very similar, particularly when a Christian says:

“Only the saved go to Heaven!”

...and what the atheist hears is:

“I want everyone else to go to Hell!”

It’s the same thing, thinking that deep down Christians don’t really believe this is the law handed down by a creator, and therefore Christianity is just a petty, intentional rebellion against the non-Christians of the world. In other words, that Christians don’t honestly believe what they say, and just say it because they’re jerks.

But all that is just a way to make cartoon villains out of the people who disagree with us. And if we stop and think about it, we’ll see it’s asinine.

Atheists, you know that Christians have freaking died because they refused to walk away from what they believe. That goes beyond simple human stubbornness. I mean, I can tell you first hand. I was raised in a Pentecostal church (like the one they visited in the Borat movie).

I soured on the whole religion thing in my teens, as you can probably imagine, and then came back to it later kind of on my own terms. From that experience I can relay this fact: If there’s no God, then there is something in the human brain that can and does present an amazingly realistic impression of one. A gland, an artifact of environmental pattern recognition, whatever you want to pin it on, the result is, at certain times and in certain moods, as tangible and real and distinct as the person sitting across from you on the subway.

You can say they’re wrong. You can say it all day, you can etch “YOU’RE WRONG” into the surface of the moon with a giant laser. But you’ll have a lot less angst if you remember that the thing they’re wrong about is something they honestly believe, down to their roots. I guess you could just call them crazy, but it’s a little silly to use that word when believers are the norm in human population.

But either way, it’s not something they intentionally chose just to annoy you.

Christians, same deal. Every one of you have got friends and family who aren’t believers. And I bet some of them are good people. Earnest people, thoughtful people. Charitable. Kind.

So... doesn’t that kind of kill the premise that these people are avoiding God out of sinful rebellion or fear of having to live a godly life? After all, you’ve got people who are doing the hard part (self-sacrifice, patience, giving up all sorts of sinful pleasures) but are avoiding the easy part (praying and listening to a preacher talk for one hour a week). If God and the danger of Hell were that obvious, why wouldn’t they just go all the way with it?

No, if there is a God, it appears that some good people honestly don’t perceive him. For whatever reason. And there has to be some tolerance in God’s rules for the Honest Mistake. Has to be. Otherwise we’re all going to get screwed by that thing with the Sabbath being on Saturday instead of Sunday.

So, we’ve agreed that the other guy, no matter how irritating he or she is, is likely making an honest mistake. If we can agree on that, can we also agree that...

3. In Everyday Life, You’re Not That Different

You Christians, if the transmission in your Camaro explodes, are you going to use prayer to reconstruct it? No, you’ll call a mechanic. When your tooth hurts, you don’t assume it’s possessed by demons. You look for a cavity. Basic, everyday troubleshooting.

Well, at the very worst, the atheists are just applying the same common sense, real-world troubleshooting to the God question. At the creation of the universe and in the heart of mankind, they expect to find the same physical, tangible answers they’d find inside a burnt transmission. If they’re wrong about God, they’re only wrong in that they’ve taken the tried-and-true troubleshooting we all practice one step too far.

On the other hand...

Atheists, even if you reject the idea of God completely and claim to live according only to the cold logic of the physical sciences, you all still live as if the absolute morality of some magical lawgiver were true.

No, wait. Don’t go away.

When some guy hustles you out of eighty bucks in an E-bay scam, you don’t nod and say, “Interesting! This fellow lacks the genetic predisposition toward equitable dealing that generations of sexual selection in favor of social behavior has instilled in the rest of us! A fascinating difference!”

No, you think what that guy did was wrong. You want justice. You think he should have acted differently.

Even though there’s no “wrong” molecule floating in the air and there’s no “justice” element on the Periodic Table. You don’t think of the swindler as just a fellow animal who happens to behave differently than you. You think he should have acted some other way, according to an invisible ideal that everybody is aware of and knows they should obey.

When that “boob at the Super Bowl” incident happened a while back, I constantly heard atheists making fun of Christians and their puritan silliness over sex. “Come on! It’s just meat! We’re all just mammals! Sex is natural! What are you afraid of?!?!?”

Yet, the moment you find out that while you were on vacation, your girl got drunk and slept with the entire Chicago Bears...

...Suddenly sex is something to get upset about. Suddenly it’s not just meat slapping against meat. Suddenly the exclusive sexual bond between you and your girl was important, was to be protected, was almost... sacred.

Again there’s this invisible rule that was supposed to be followed, that everybody was supposed to be aware of, that can’t be proven by logic. Whatever it is, wherever you think it came from, you can’t deny that it’s there. Your own behavior would make you a liar.

Well, at the very worst, the Christians are just taking that same moral impulse and applying it to the God question. At the creation of the universe, they expect to find the same invisible hand that pushes us to be fair and loyal and kind. If they’re wrong about God, they’re only wrong in that they’ve taken that absolute morality and put a face on it, made an idol out of it. Taken it one step too far.

You think of it that way, and the amount of overlap between the two of us is actually pretty striking. Right?

4. There Are Good People on Both Sides

This is an easy one. I shouldn’t lose anybody here. All you need is examples.

Atheists, you can despise a Falwell or the gay funeral protesting guy, but you’ve known Christians who did it right. Famous ones like Martin Luther King Jr., or just common ones you’ve run across who seem to have an inexaustible well of generosity and good cheer. You know how many charities have crosses on their logo.

Christians... look. The church loves to phrase it like:

“The faithful will be joined with their father in Heaven, while the liars, the murderous, the treacherous will be cast down with Satan and his hordes.”

See the gap there, between the first part of the statement and the second? What about all the people in between? The atheists and Muslims and Buddhists and Scientologists who aren’t murderous or treacherous or liars?

I understand the concept, that all morality comes from God and thus those on the outside are vulnerable to temptation and the devil and all that. But you know good people who aren’t believers. I know you do. You can’t miss them. Therefore:

If God alone can deliver us from temptation,

And,

Some people who don’t believe in God are also able to resist temptation,

Then,

God must offer his protection against temptation even to some who don’t believe in God. One could even say that God aids the atheist’s honest desire to follow one of God’s rules... even while he continues to deny God.

But all that is speculation. In order to move on, we only need to agree that such good people exist. Easy.

Next...

5. Your Point of View is Legitimately Offensive to Them

Now, this says nothing about whether or not it’s true. For this, I only ask that you understand why they get offended.

Everybody is aware that something can be both true and offensive, right?

You see a friend holding a newborn baby and you say, “You know, there’s a chance he’ll die tomorrow.” Or you stand over the casket at your uncle’s funeral and say, “He’ll definitely be consuming fewer of the world’s natural resources now.” Both statements completely, 100% factually correct, and can be defended to the end of time by cold, undeniable logic. And both are incredibly offensive.

To say such things, and to be surprised when the hearers take offense, would show such a profound misunderstanding of human nature that everyone will assume you were raised by wolves.

So Christians, knowing what we just said about how it is possible to be a true, honest atheist, that people walk around every day and truly see no evidence of God, can you understand why it’s offensive to them to hear that they, and their family, and their children, and their friends, are going to burn for eternity for it?

Especially if you, as most modern churches do, imply that people born into other cultures who honestly follow other faiths, are also going to burn? Because they were fooled by Satan?

And that if the hearer of this news hasn’t had the aformentioned religious experience, and doesn’t have that tangible feeling of God as a real presence in their lives, that they’ll find this to be incredibly unjust?

Nobody hates the idea of a creator, or of there being some kind of ultimate justice in the universe. That’s not what has these people in such a bad mood. They despise the clique-ish, militant exclusion of it.

Again, I’m not asking you to stop believing that people, or even these people, are in danger of Hell. I’m simply asking you to accept that, if the situation were reversed, you also would be offended. After all, don’t you get offended when a Muslim says you’re going to Hell?

Atheists. Same deal. It’s irritating to you when they say you and your friends aren’t going to Heaven because of your beliefs. But it’s just as irritating to them when you say they’re not going to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. And the irritation happens on the same grounds, which is, injustice. You hate the idea of all non-Christians burning for eternity, but you’re telling them that the mass murderer and kindly grandma will draw the same eternal reward (or lack of).

Now, again, both of you are saying, “But I’m factually right in what I’m saying!” And that’s fine. For this, all we’re doing here is understanding why they’re offended by what you say. That’s it. Putting yourself in their shoes. Basic human empathy. That’s all.

Everybody still on board my theological peace train? Sweet. Now I want everybody to stand up together and admit...

6. We Tend to Exaggerate About the Other Guy

Cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson wrote in one of his books - and this was probably just moments before the character was split in half by a robot weilding a samurai sword - that the only real sign of intelligence was the ability to detect subtlety.

Anybody can memorize facts. But you remain a clumsy, intellectual oaf of a person as long as you keep looking for sheer black and white in every situation. That’s what’s so frustrating about politics, the way everybody wants to paint the two parties as angels vs. devils. And if you just said to yourself, “Yeah! Those evil ________ are always trying to polarize us that way!” then, guess what, you just did the same thing.

So please, please, please, when we get into these atheist vs. Christian arguments, can the atheists stop acting like Christians want to abolish all science and live in grass huts? Just because some Christians reject the science on evolution, doesn’t mean they reject all science.

I mean, give me a break. America has been full of Christians since the day we invaded it, and has been a scientific and technological freaking superpower. So please stop waving your arms and warning that if Christians get their way, we’ll all be sacrificing virgins on altars and replacing surgeons with priests.

And Christians, will you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop implying that the atheist lifestyle is one long drug-riddled blood orgy? You take a country like Japan, where just 12% of the people say religion is important to their lives and yet have some of the lowest crime rates in the world.

Okay, so maybe Japan is a bad example. But it doesn’t matter. To move on, we only need to agree that rejecting science on one subject doesn’t mean you reject all science on all subjects, and that rejecting Christian morality doesn’t mean rejecting all morality.

And if we agree that we tend to exaggerate about the other guy, can we also agree that...

7. We Tend to Exaggerate About Ourselves, Too

If you’re like me, there’s this weird process that happens when you encounter somebody who believes the opposite as you, especially when they’re really pushy about it. You actually go the other direction. I secretly think the Yankees are good enough to win 80 games this year and maybe make the playoffs, the other guy snorts in my face and tells me they’ll be lucky to finish last. I roar back that they’re going to win 100 and take home the title.

It’s like that other guy is so irritating, I want to position myself further away. Or maybe it’s like haggling over the price of a used car, you start low so that once the compromise happens, you’ll be closer to your end than his.

It’s often the same thing here. It looks like this:

“I believe the Bible is true.”

“There is no evidence that this one religious text is any truer than other texts like it.”

“EVERY LETTER IN THIS BOOK IS ETCHED DIRECTLY FROM THE HAND OF THE ALMIGHTY AND ANY ONE SYLLABLE CAN REDUCE ALL OF THE WORK OF ALL THE WORLD’S SCIENTISTS TO RUBBLE!”

“YOUR BRAINWASHED DEVOTION TO A RIDICULOUS BOOK OF SUPERSTITIOUS LIES HAS DESTROYED CIVILIZATION AND KILLED BILLIONS!!!!”

In reality, there are very few Christians who do or even try to follow the Bible exactly, including all the obscure rules about church women staying silent and hatted. Word of God or not, the faith changes, adapts with the times. That is, in fact, the entire point of Christianity. Jesus was a reformer, and set that precedent. It continues to this day, it’s what I like about it.

Now Christians hate to admit that, because it opens the door for the other guy to say, “See! If it’s not the word of God then you admit it’s all a big pile of fly-ridden crap and that atheism is the one true belief system!” So, the Christian digs in and pretends they’ve never experienced a moment of religious doubt in their lives.

Conversely, atheists like to pretend they’re islands of pure, rational thought in a sea of wild-eyed craziness. But we all have a little crazy in our world, and we all depend on some fantasy that floats outside the boundaries of cold reason.

Atheists still tell their girlfriends they “love” them, and not that they simply feel a psychological artifact of a biochemical bond generated by the mating instinct. They still refer to their “mind” as if it’s something more than chemical switches. And remember what we talked about with “justice” and “right” and “wrong.” None of it is scientific.

Even weirder? Free will. Remember, to a neuroscientist, free will is every bit as real as the Tooth Fairy. They can watch your neurons light up at the moment you make moral decisions, can trace the exact electrochemical pathways. If there is nothing beyond the physical, then your ability to choose your actions vanishes along with God and Heaven and the angels. It was an atheist professor who told me that, in a class on ethics.

Two days later, he told me if I was ever late to class again, he’d knock 100 points off my grade.

To deter me from being late in the future.

As if I had the free will to be late or on time.

So we all got those contradictions, that’s my point. None of us are 100% on board.

You don’t have to admit this one out loud. I know you lose debate points for it. Just keep reading if you agree.

8. Focusing on Negative Examples Makes You Stupid

That guy, the “God Hates Fags” guy who runs the protests I mentioned back on the first page? Fred Phelps? His church (Westboro Baptist) has become world famous for those dickish demonstrations.

Which is amazing, considering that the “church” is made up entirely of Phelps’ family and a few friends. That’s it. And they’re world famous, mainly because atheists looooooove to hold them up as an example of what dicks Christians are. When you need an icon of intolerance, they’re as useful to have around as Hitler.

And please don’t come at me with the, “Christians hate Phelps because they know he’s saying out loud what they’re secretly thinking! They secretly hate homosexuals just as much!”

Please. The White House and Congress and the Supreme Court are full of Christians, always have been. If all Christians thought like Phelps, American gays would be in concentration camps. There’d be nobody to stop it.

Smearing all Christians with Phelps’ bile is a cheap shot, like saying all atheist schoolkids are potential Columbine shooters. At worst, that kind of stereotyping is dehumanizing and divisive. At best, it’s a recipe for mediocrity.

I compare myself to the worst so that I don’t have to try to be the best. I can spend all day on my sofa, playing Wii Boxing and helping no one, and I’ll still be a better man than Phelps. But I think we’ve got to shoot higher here.

It’s just another form of hypocrisy, and if there’s one thing we can agree on, it’s that hypocrisy sucks.

We’re almost done here.

Now, if only we can agree that...

9. Both Sides Have Brought Good to the Table

Okay, bear with me here.

Christians, I’m not saying that atheists have brought good things to the world by telling people not to believe in God. I’m talking about the thing that drives atheism, the philosophy behind it.

I’m talking about rationalism. I’m talking about the philosophy that started saying, centuries ago, that it’s not demons that cause disease. It’s microbes, and genetic defects, and chemistry. And that we can find those causes and we can find cures. Cures in the physical world, without consulting the priest, without going through a ceremony.

Think about what I said before. If atheism is wrong, it’s only wrong in that it takes rationalism too far, beyond the edges of the universe. But you don’t have a problem with the rationalism itself. There are people you love who would not be alive without it. You can pray that grandpa’s heart holds out for another year, but rational thinking invented the pacemaker.

So even if you detest atheism, you can at least agree that it grew out of something good.

Atheists. You hate wars. You hate genocide, you hate iron-fisted dictators who line up peasants and jump over them with monster trucks. You hate it when corporations steal your money, and when fat suburbanites will let a million Africans starve before they’ll donate. You hate guys who treat women like lifeless sex dolls, guys who lie and leave.

You hate all of that, because you know that the ability to have empathy for other humans (even those who don’t benefit us) is the only thing that separates us from the cockroaches. And when that fails, it’s terrifying and awful in countless ways.

In the middle of a religious debate, you may say that religion and superstition are the prime evil in human society. But you look behind it, and you’ll find that other monster is bigger. Humans doing the opposite, acting like animals. Treating other humans as nothing but engines for their own pleasure.

Religion - whether it was handed down by God or just invented by a bunch of guys- serves mainly to fight that. It makes humanity sacred, and the moral law more so. You can hate the methods it uses, you can say that there are other ways, you can say that it only replaces one cancer with another. But most of what it’s trying to get you to do - treat other humans as sacred and put morality above your own impulses - you already do. And you criticize religion mainly for not doing it.

You’re going to come back here and say that you’re not criticizing that part of religion, the concept of things being sacred, or morality, or any of that flowery stuff. It’s the intolerance and manipulation and superstition and ignorance you hate, the zealots demanding evolution be stripped from the textbooks.

But from the Christian’s point of view, when you attack one, you attack the other. The story of Christianity (or mythology, if you prefer) is bound to the morality. Humanity is sacred because we’re planted here in a six-day act of divine intervention. Lying is wrong because God said so. You should work to preserve a marriage because God made that bond sacred with Adam and Eve.

So when you attack that mythology, Christians hear you attacking the morality along with it. And that is why they fight so hard for it.

Seriously, what did you think the Creationism thing was about? It’s about keeping humanity sacred. They think that once you dash the idea of a created humanity, then there’ll be nothing to stop strong humans from treating weak ones as cannon fodder.

And logically, there won’t be anything. You can’t defend morality with logic. Once you explain it away as an artifact of the genetic herd instinct, well, hey, we’ve got the genome mapped out, right? Couldn’t we just cut that morality gene right out of there?

If you’re saying, “But that would be retarded! The world would go down the toilet if we did that!” Guess what, that’s just your morality gene talking. Your objection is merely based on a genetic disposition toward social behavior, and can be ignored with the proper genetic changes.

Do you see how weird this gets? There’s no logical conclusion to it, it just gets more and more strange. So what’s their motivation to go that way?

After all, you know as well as I do that there are two kinds of people who attack Christianity: those who love rationalism, and those who just have a knee-jerk reaction to being told what to do. You’ve got people who are right for the wrong reasons, and others who are wrong for the right reasons, and some who are right for the right reasons and others who are wrong for the wrong reasons.

It’s like all my friends are with me on the beach, looking out at the ocean. Half of them look at the water and say:

“This is Oceanis, the living Blue God! He is sacred!”

While the other half say,

“Here is a convenient place to dump our sewage.”

The truth has to be somewhere in between.

Right?

Whew. Last one, for the people who are still reading. Can all zero of you agree that:

10. You’ll Never Harass the Other Side Out of Existence

Remember when I said that, when somebody comes on too strong, no matter what they’re selling, we tend to run the other way? I mean, sure, the “God Hates Fags” guy has changed tens of thousands of minds. But not in the direction he intended.

People are not convinced that way. The sarcasm, the disdain, the laughter. It makes you feel better, and rallies your friends, but it does exactly nothing to change minds on the other side. Conservatives may like to read Ann Coulter, but nobody else does.

No, in reality, if changing minds is your thing, there’s only one way to do it:

Lead by Example.

There’s a thing the church has been doing for centuries, that I don’t think it can do any longer. It goes like this:

“Jesus is the son of God.”

“How do I know that?”

“Because if you don’t know that, then you will burn in Hell for eternity.”

No. Uh-uh. If you want people to live their life in a certain way, based on a certain fact, you can’t substitute a threat for evidence.

You have to lead by example.

Atheists, same thing. you want to show me that atheism is the key to a balanced, satisfying, confident life? Show me.

Trust me, if they introduce a new energy drink tomorrow and I observe that everybody who drinks it suddenly can dunk a basketball from their knees, I’m going to notice. So will everyone else.

That drink will be unstoppable.

So if you want to criticize the Christians’ intolerance, then be tolerant. Show them how it’s done. Shame them with your tolerance. You won’t have to say they’re awful. They’ll look awful by sheer comparison to you.

And don’t show up in a room full of Christians and start making fun of their taboos, immediately talking about boobs or whatever, as if the only reason people adhere to a rule is out of fear of experiencing the awesomeness of breaking it. You’ve got taboos, too. All of you. Things you don’t like to see or hear in polite conversation. I can show you the pictures.

Be tolerant. Lead by example.

Both of you.

And don’t think of it as a tactic to win converts. Think of it as common courtesy.

Well, yes, I've been saying that for a long time. Since 1997 when the programs were first proposed to be exact.

But a just released evaluation study, funded and directed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that students who took abstinence-only-until-marriage education programs were no more likely to abstain than students in the control group. They also had the same average age of first intercourse and the same number of partners.

Ten years into the program, and a billion dollars expended, the federal evaluation study confirms what those of us who are sexuality educators knew all along -- that telling teenagers to "just say no" was not effective education.

The press releases from organizations that support abstinence-only education are trying to find the best spin on the story. One said that it doesn't matter that the programs aren't effective because they offer the right moral message.

But, they don't. As our "Open Letter to Religious Leaders on Sex Education" says we have a Scriptural and theological commitment to truth-telling. And programs that lie or deny young people life saving information about their sexuality are wrong.

And immoral.

And now we have clear evidence that they are ineffective.

I'm sure that there is a Biblical prohibition about gloating that I am violating right now. But young people's futures, indeed, their lives have been at stake because of this program. One can only hope that the Congress and the Bush administration will pay attention to their own report.

It's time we offer America's young people education that works -- education that helps them abstain from sexual behaviors until they are physically, emotionally, and spiritually ready and education that helps them protect themselves from pregnancy and disease if they become sexually involved. Those programs have been shown to be effective -- and to this minister, they are the moral response as well.

Watchers of the intersection of religion with policy and science are likely aware of the vaccine that protects against Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Since HPV is a chief cause of cervical cancer, this vaccine appears to be the first to prevent cancer. About 50 percent of sexually active adults will contract HPV at some point in their lives. The American Cancer Society estimates over 9,700 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2006, and about 3,700 American women die from this cancer every year.

HPV is the leading sexually transmitted disease threat facing women, and the Center for Disease Control reports that over $2 billion is spent annually on treating cervical cancer. Mandatory vaccination of all school-aged females before they are exposed to the virus would dramatically decrease their risk of facing this dangerous cancer. Tests on 11,000 females have revealed no serious side effects. So why are some Christianists -- that is, Christians who have appropriated faith for political power to pursue moralistic policy trends -- vehemently opposing use of the vaccine?

There are indeed coherent arguments favoring caution in mandating the vaccine. Natural right arguments address the issue honestly, weighing health benefits versus loss of individual autonomy. And as with any new vaccine, there is the desire to gather more long-term test data. But these are not what motivate the most strident Christian opposition to a mandatory vaccination scheme.

Rather, the opposition voices what I take to be an unscrupulous moral argument. A spokesperson for the Family Research Council stated that "giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." By a twisted logical progression, then, some extremist Christians believe that protecting women from a cancer that happens to arise from an STD amounts to condoning permissiveness, effectively encouraging girls to be promiscuous. This is their argument: "Sally, if you don't have this vaccine, you could get cancer from sex. Sex is bad outside of marriage, so you won't get this vaccine: You will be playing carcinogenic Russian roulette with sex." On this basis many Christian groups are promoting opt-out policies, so parents can use this health issue to control their children's moral choices.

But in my opinion, this argument itself is immoral, in part because it is logically baseless -- a clear example of argumentum in terrorem, an appeal to fear. Apparently some of us Christians (and I am a Christian) do not believe our moral arguments against premarital sex. Instead, we terrorize girls by threatening them with cancer. Keep the maidens pure through the denial of health care and the risk of serious medical injury. Of course this is justified because we know sex is the worst sin one can commit. Putting your daughter's life in jeopardy is thus permissible -- because even if she dies of cancer you have saved her soul.

Thus does the extreme fringe oppose the vaccine with this problematic "moral" argument. But even if the arguments of the extremists were valid, they would still be ignoring the plight of women who are exposed to HPV through no action of their own -- for example, through a philandering husband who contracts it from a mistress. Moreover, HPV can remain dormant for years; a monogamous married couple could be exposed if one of them was sexually active prior to their relationship.

To extend a traditional argument of American justice, if the HPV vaccine causes a hundred women to feel sexually liberated, it is still morally justified if it protects just one "innocent" woman from contracting HPV or cancer. And statistics prove that this protection is certainly possible if states adopt a uniform scheme for HPV vaccination. This moral argument defeats the Christianists' claim, and gains strength from the medical evidence in favor of vaccination. Fortunately, the Christian base is not united in opposition to the vaccine. For instance, Texas governor Rick Perry -- a committed Christian -- should be commended for ordering vaccination for all school-age girls.

The argument against HPV vaccination belies the Christianist camp's failure to effectively communicate their message of abstinence on rational moral grounds. The history of religious extremism shows that when reasonable arguments fail, appeals to fear come close behind.

References:
For more information about the HPV vaccine, please visit the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/STDFact-HPV-vaccine.htm.

Nancy Gibbs's article "Defusing the War Over the 'Promiscuity' Vaccine" (Time, June 21, 2006) can be read at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1206813,00.html.

The Family Research Council addresses "sexual disinhibition" and the HPV vaccine at:
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=LH07B02.

By now we've all heard the latest about Ted Haggard, former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and former head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Brother Haggard -- and, as a fellow Christian, he is my brother -- was found to have been having sexual relations with a male prostitute in Denver. He resigned in disgrace, and has since been in counseling.

According to the February 6 issue of the Denver Post, the four pastors in charge of overseeing New Life Church in the wake of this disaster made a surprising -- to some, an astonishing, and to others, an absurd -- announcement. One of them, Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur, Colorado, was quoted as explaining Haggard's three-year relationship with the man in these terms: Haggard "is completely heterosexual. That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

Columnists have had a field day with this recent announcement, of course, with many wondering what stresses could possibly drive a "completely heterosexual" man into the arms of a male lover. Others have simply gotten the story wrong, saying that Haggard is claiming to have been "cured" of homosexuality in just three months, rather than the years that might be expected for rebuilding such a basic component of one's personality -- if indeed such a thing is possible at all. The media circus continues.

In all of this, I am reminded of the late Henri Nouwen, the superb spiritual writer who taught at Harvard and Yale before spending his last years in pastoral service at L'Arche, Jean Vanier's community for the developmentally disabled. Nouwen also wrestled with homosexuality -- "wrestled" with it because his religious beliefs, like Haggard's, diagnosed it as a deformation of the personality.

Also like Haggard, Nouwen maintained a position of spiritual advisor to many. His sexual difficulty did not disqualify him from offering his considerable gifts to others -- nor should Haggard's have kept him from pastoral service.

Unlike Haggard, however, Nouwen refused to engage in preaching or public activism against homosexuality. He avoided, that is, any risk of incurring the taint of hypocrisy, which is a far more serious problem -- in the Bible and in the public eye -- than is homosexuality.

Nouwen gave us the lovely phrase, the "wounded healer." Some have exploited this term -- as all lovely things are vulnerable to exploitation -- to suggest that you can be entirely comfortable with all manner of sins and still be a spiritual leader. You can be proud, you can be lustful, you can be greedy, you can wrathfully dismiss dissenting colleagues, and on down through the seven deadlies -- but hey, you're a "wounded healer" and darned popular -- in other words, "blessed in your ministry." So it's okay, right?

No, says Nouwen, by word and by example. Serve, yes, offering your God-given talents to make God's beloved world a better place. But serve out of consciousness of your wound, which means to serve in humility, in compassion, in patience. "There but for the grace of God go I."

Nouwen's insight is that, clergy or not, we must not wait to become perfect before we help others. We can help them, that is, precisely as fellow sufferers, with genuine fellow feeling -- but also with a strong and clear sense of our limitations. And even if you've never been a fan of Ted Haggard, nor of the populist celebrity-evangelicalism that he exemplifies, you can still cultivate sympathy for him, for his family, and for his church.

And, thanks to Brother Nouwen, we can also better recognize that our wounds may not be healed right away, nor even over months or years.
According to Nouwen's theology, God may well allow some of those wounds remain a while -- for as we endure their pain, their shame, and their debility, we may be given the gift of remembering just how needy each of us is, and how great the possibilities of restoring love.
--

John G. Stackhouse, Jr., is Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Banners currently hanging from several Australian churches feature the words "Jesus Loves Osama" against a camouflage background. These splashy "advertisements" have been generating headlines, stirring the public, and drawing comment from political and religious leaders. Prime Minister John Howard claimed to "understand the Christian motivation" of churches hanging this banner, but urged parishes to "understand that a lot of Australians, including many Australian Christians, will think that the prayer priority of the church on this occasion could have been elsewhere."

Presumably this priority should be with the neighbor and the stranger -- two other categories of people Christians are called upon to love and serve -- and not with the enemy. But these banners market one of the gospels' most radical theological claims, Christ's love for all humans, and they call on viewers to follow suit. Beneath the emblazoned words, the banners feature a proof text from Matthew 5:44, where Jesus speaks in the imperative: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

Terrorism, like these banners, functions as advertising, a jolting spectacle to publicize the specific message or point of view of its perpetrators. The burning cross or bombed clinic shares this purpose with Super Bowl ads or Burma Shave signs. A witty hook, a catchy jingle - these are meant to surprise and to lodge themselves in the memories of those who witness them. But in both forms of discourse, the medium surpasses the message. These Australian church banners have gotten attention, but what have they actually communicated?

Peter Jensen, the Anglican archbishop of Sydney/New South Wales, feels the signs are "misleading." The basic theology is correct, but without some nuanced explanation, the statement itself can be read as implying approval for terrorism. "What we've got to say is, 'Jesus doesn't approve of Osama.' It makes it sounds like, 'Oh, Osama's doing the right thing.'"

The banners, linking the terse contemporary theological mandate, the scriptural imperative, and the colors associated with desert conflict, certainly can be seen as direct, if ambiguous, commentary on the current wars. How one is to interpret the relation between loving one's enemies and war is unclear, though surely some will read the signs as denunciations of war in general, while others will associate them with specific critiques of the situation in Afghanistan or Iraq. Moreover, linking the words of Jesus with military symbolism may spur readers to consider the situations of subjugation out of which many of Osama's supporters emerge. While it is outrageous to see these signs as condoning acts of violence, they could certainly suggest zealous resistance to oppressive political forces.

"If I were a relative of one of the victims of Osama's activities, I might take affront at this," said Archbishop Jensen. Indeed, relatives and surviving victims of the 2002 Bali bombing have been among the most widely heard critical voices. David Stewart, who lost his son Anthony in the attack, asked, "What is the world coming to?" "That bastard killed 202 people, and hundreds and hundreds more and now we're going to forgive him? Š. That is ridiculous."

Yet according to the logic of these signs, "Osama" is merely an extreme stand-in for any of us. While New South Wales Baptist Union spokesman Alan Soden paraphrases the sign's message as "Jesus loves us all, no matter who we are or what we may've done," Melbourne's Anglican Archbishop, Dr. Philip Freier, takes things further, claiming that no matter the body count or publicity on Osama's sins, the daily, ubiquitous sins of society matter just as much in the eyes of God. While "we are all loved by Jesus," says Freier, "Jesus does not love terrorism, acts of violence, sexual abuse, stealing, lying, greed or any other selfish acts." Jesus, this suggests, doesn't approve of Osama's actions, but Jesus doesn't approve of many of our actions, either.

This shock-advert tactic, by hijacking headlines, has provided broad media platforms for voices which would otherwise be -- literally -- preaching to the choir, and has, through its discomforting juxtaposition of the worldly and the divine, forwarded the gospel message as an indictment of, and a challenge to, all people. Reverend Neil Harvey of Wangaratta had some reservations about hanging the banner, because "Osama is a very provocative name to put there, but the message of the Christian gospel is that Jesus does love us even though we don't deserve it." Ultimately, such believers suggest, the gospel message is that repentance and redemption are universal options, "even for you and for me and Osama."

Good news? Certainly a radical alternative to this "ridiculous" world. As Archbishop Freier says, if people were to take on the words of Matthew 5:44, "the world would be a different place. It would be a place of tolerance, not terrorism." And shouldn't that be everyone's priority?

Spencer Dew is a PhD candidate in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

One week after I explained why I don't always pick the "topic of the week" for comment, I find myself commenting on the "topic of last week," Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic outburst. I'll pass the whole controversy by except to lift out a sub-theme. From the Chicago Sun-Times " Wires," a short item, replicated many places, explaining Gibson's anti-Jewish remarks: "He follows the Catholic doctrine of 'Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,' which contends that followers of all other religions will go to hell." That was supposed to be that.

A few decades ago, a Father Feeney of Boston was disciplined and kicked out of the priesthood for forming a kind of cult which gave this sort of Gibsonian spin to the "Extra Ecclesiam" formula, which is as old as Cyprian in the early church. It is likely that if Gibson were in the Roman Catholic Church today -- as defined as being obedient to the Pope, etc., which Gibson's Catholic "sect" is not -- someone would at least reprimand him. He said that his wife, though a "saint" who believes in God, knows Jesus, and all "that stuff," is hell-bound. Though "it's just not fair if she doesn't make it" to heaven, she won't, because "Extra Ecclesiam is a pronouncement from the chair," and on that subject Gibson "goes with it."

The "chair" can take care of his own affairs, and does not need me to defend him/it. Admittedly, the Extra Ecclesiam formula has been used ruthlessly, and many Gibsons through the years have either blithely or in torment kissed their loved ones off to burn in hell forever. Patient folk who consult the larger tradition and its present unfoldings find many "softenings": purgatory, baptism of desire, and countless others. Vatican documents like "Nostra Aetate" are generous in their interpretation of how God acts beyond the narrow channels the church has often cut.

What I want to pick up on is what the blitheness of the championing of the doctrine of hell and checking up on those who make too little of it must mean. Now and then I've been criticized, not for being a "universalist" or a sentimentalist about salvation, but as someone who points to the inhumaneness of most (= all?) people who are literalists about the flames of hell and how some get there, but who then go about their lives.

Here's the simple Marty test. When someone wants to assess your orthodoxy by seeing how much you insist on and relish teachings about fiery hell, do this: Take him or her to dinner, where there is a candle on the table. Have the other pass a hand through the candle's flame. Now ask that it be held there two seconds. Now more. Now for all eternity. Now imagine this in all parts of the body. Then ask: Do you believe this will happen to every person who does not believe as you do, or does not belong to the right Christian group, or is not "born again"?

If that person says "yes," you are licensed to holler: "How in hell can you be sitting here having dinner instead of being out there passing tracts, giving away all your possessions, tripping people on the sidewalks, and hollering in their ears? -- things which even the most ardent "pro-hell" advocates do not do. That person, otherwise humane, who would do anything to rescue someone from the burn of one candle on one finger on one evening, is blithe about people suffering that torment forever?

If my finger-in-the-flame test doesn't do it, try another. Such tests are not about religious orthodoxy, but about human imagination. Under God.

When I pointed out to Randy that indeed, the world did revolve around the middle east, he replied, "As long as we focus on the 'energy' which is there in the middle east we may not be able to see the multiple alternatives which exist elsewhere."

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I am upset.

I am upset how the belligerence of a region, fueled by millennia of injustices, tries to co-opt my energies, the energies of my nation, and the energies of the world.

The entire Semitic world, Arab and Jew alike, have long fashioned identities of victimhood as a means for attracting energy from other sources. In defining themselves as the divinely ordained but humanly deprived people of the earth, they manipulate others into patterns of allegiance and support. All sides in the middle east are also adept at using guilt ("Give guilt--the gift that keeps on giving!") to recruit others to acts of passion beyond any rationality. In the course of those millennia, such an identity has evolved into an almost manic dependency on the attention of others.

But then, we all play the game. We feel sorry for the poor, set-upon ________s (fill in the blank with your chosen identified group in the conflict) and vilify the "others." In doing so, we fall right into line with the attention/energy needs of these now heavily dependent groups. They wink, they flinch, they kidnap, they retaliate, they re-retaliate . . . and we energize the lot by keeping alive their dependence and their victimhood.

What if we were to say, "No more," and mean no more of this game playing? What if we were to see these nations and groups behaving like the worst of elementary school children ("I'll get you for that!" "If one of your group does that, you all are going to suffer!") and not do anything?

What if we chose a course of denying them the energy to keep this foolishness going?

What if we provided no financial support? No resolutions of support? No big attention to their bickering?

What if, instead of focusing on two soldiers (people already committed by their roles to acts of violence) who are kidnapped or on the dozens of civilians who are being injured or killed in retaliations, we were to focus on the thousands of children worldwide who will die today because of preventable hunger and disease?

What if we let two wannabe bullies in the middle east fight it out while we get on with the more important business of the world?

Hey, middle east - the world does not revolve around you! Maybe if we got over it, they could get over it.

Or, at least, it wouldn't be our energy (money, goods, commerce, psychic, spiritual, attention) fueling the conflict.