Pilgrims is the name commonly applied to early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts. Their leadership came from a religious congregation who had fled a volatile political environment in the East Midlands of England for the relative calm of Holland in the Netherlands. Concerned with losing their cultural identity, the group later arranged with English investors to establish a new colony in North America…Their story has become a central theme in United States cultural identity. [wiki]
This country was born because people desired the freedom to worship their God in their own way. To me, that is so American.
To have the freedom to be yourself, to be entitled to respect, to experience tolerance instead of persecution…these are the central themes with which I define my American identity.
What else is American? E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. One cultural identity, comprised of hundreds of influences, origins and traditions. If you take a step back and ponder it, America seems like a miraculous idea; you start to respect the safeguards put in place to protect people. One of the most significant? The separation between church and state. This is where things get complicated, but that’s not a bad thing. Everyone is complicated, why should we expect our nations not to be? Yes, there are religious words on money and everyone knows that there is a Judeo-Christian foundation to a lot of what is considered American…but there is also respect for other ideas. Or at least, there should be. At the very least, there should be the freedom for others to worship their God, in their own way, no matter what you or I think about it. There should be mutual respect. There should be.
A Hindu clergyman made history Thursday by offering the Senate’s morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors’ gallery.
Rajan Zed, director of interfaith relations at a Hindu temple in Reno, Nev., gave the brief prayer that opens each day’s Senate session. As he stood at the chamber’s podium in a bright orange and burgundy robe, two women and a man began shouting ”this is an abomination” and other complaints from the gallery.
Police officers quickly arrested them and charged them disrupting Congress, a misdemeanor. The male protester told an AP reporter, ”we are Christians and patriots” before police handcuffed them and led them away. [NYT]
No, you are Christians and fools. Way to make Team Jesus look awful, as you misrepresent everything that the man stood for and preached.
For several days, the Mississippi-based American Family Association has urged its members to object to the prayer because Zed would be ”seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god.” [NYT]
Yes, because the prayer he offered was SO offensive to actual Christians, agnostics or those who have been touched by a noodly appendage:
Zed, the first Hindu to offer the Senate prayer, began: ”We meditate on the transcendental glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of the heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.”
As the Senate prepared for another day of debate over the Iraq war, Zed closed with, ”Peace, peace, peace be unto all.” [NYT]
Let me tell you something about what that Uncle said– it was far kinder and more welcoming than a lot of what I heard in Catholic school, especially if the Pope was involved. For shame. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of his spiritual offering was its emphasis on peace?
Zed, who was born in India, was invited by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Speaking in the chamber shortly after the prayer, Reid defended the choice and linked it to the war debate.
”If people have any misunderstanding about Indians and Hindus,” Reid said, ”all they have to do is think of Gandhi,” a man ”who gave his life for peace.”
”I think it speaks well of our country that someone representing the faith of about a billion people comes here and can speak in communication with our heavenly Father regarding peace,” said Reid, a Mormon and sharp critic of President Bush’s Iraq policies. [NYT]
As several of you pointed out via email, news tab and flaming arrow, THIS is the money quote:
Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the protest ”shows the intolerance of many religious right activists. They say they want more religion in the public square, but it’s clear they mean only their religion.” [NYT]
What these Jesus-freaks are forgetting is that Christ was a man of peace. He didn’t surround himself with the pious and faux-righteous; he called those people out, as he deliberately and controversially chose to befriend the lowest of the low, tax collectors, prostitutes and the like. Was there ever a better example of tolerance in the Christian faith?
As I bitterly read the articles about this troubling, hurtful incident, I am reminded of those who persecuted Jesus, for what they perceived as his “blasphemy”. Two thousand years later, some of his so-called followers have become so drunk off of hate and fundamentalism, they cannot see straight, they cannot grasp that if this were two millenia ago, Jesus would be the man in the orange robe and they, they would be the hypocrites who attacked him and then cheered at his suffering.
very entertaining… agree with NVM (#278). Rahul I want your job (this is definitely not a criticism of you, by the way:)
no, im worse. im a savage atheist descended from cow worshiping hindoo muslim rag head bin ladens..
PindaUSA, you just dashed your hopes of being confirmed by Congress for the next SCOTUS vacancy. You’ve got to “keep an open mind” and decide things based on “the facts of the case” combined with “stare decisis”.
You should be willing to take on the lack of sleep that is apparently a side-effect of this addiction (as was recently pointed out).
i think do they violate the EC. if school prayers are such a violation, then you can easily apply the same EC tests to senate prayers with the same result. it is an endorsement of the institution of religion itself, even if all religions are given equal emphasis, which they are not (this also brings up the legal definition of religion, which arguably allows even religions constituting one follower to be considered a religion). i hate the idea that (organized) religion = morality. for those of us who do not choose organized religion, it is an implicit nod to our lack thereof.
i hate the idea that (organized) religion = morality. for those of us who do not choose organized religion, it is an implicit nod to our lack thereof.
I hate this shit too.
Orgiastic god-hating scatology-loving heathens!
#296, BC said
How can you say that? How can you hold an entire religious group in your country responsible for imperialist powers’ actions?
Five violations of our comment policy in two sentences, which were so painful to read, they could induce spontaneous ocular implosion– please troll elsewhere. You are banned and deleted.
As fun as it is for some of you, personal attacks on the author are not allowed.
People of all iq degrees take the Bible seriously, and church goers in the Bible belt are generally highly responsible, civic minded and family oriented. They’re not my type, (as I am not so responsible, civic minded or family oriented) but there’s a lot to admire (many eschew racism) and I feel sorry for many of them being so negatively labelled when they are some of the most decent people around. It’s very easy for smug yuppies and duppies living in urban environments with degrees on their walls, who don’t care about farming and manufacturing (not much left of either) to mock these types, but many would say they are NOT represented by pols (even the clerical kind) in Washington, DC. They know these pols mostly worship Satan.
NO. I seriously doubt that.
Most Americans are not fundie-christian-right-wing-nutso-fanatics, even if most Americans stem from some type of a christian background. However, there is a significant number of Americans who are.
The GREAT thing that is happening to Christianity today is, with the widespread availability to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, a very different type of “Christ” and early christianity is being exposed to the public. A christianity of meditation, fasting, non-trinity, non-church oriented mystics living ascetic lives in caves and hovels – something very similar to yogic practice. A mystic “Christ” and his possible consort/wife, but at least foremost disciple and leader after his death – Mary Magdalene. Now that these things are coming to light, there is a shift in consciousness regards Churchianity. Churchianity has kept these things from coming to common light for centuries. Now it’s out in the mainstream with several documentaries on History/Discovery channels.
Churchianity is just now trying to formulate how to deal with this sudden mass exposure of their coverups.
Isolated cases.
But Thomas did. And he is the root of Indian christianity which has been in India for around 2,000 years now.
The Indian Christians mentioned in the above comment are not those Portugese and British. Innocent people should not have to suffer in the now for what somebody else may have done in the past.
Still, pursecution of christians in India is miniscule.
Almost everywhere you go in India you will find people of various religious backgrounds living in the same towns together peacefully. Religious differences are not major issues in India, politicians use the differences to inflame people to their advantage, but really, in India the average Joe (or average Jyotsna), is not all that concerned with or interested in religious differences.
Granted, people of the same religious backgrounds will often cluster together due to cultural identification and “purity” issues, but it’s not like they work to convert others to their religions to anywhere near the same extent that American Christians do, if at all. Live and let live seems to be their motto.
American style evangelics have ALOT to learn from their example.
Instead of going into India to convert her, these people need to go into India to learn from her.
from 187: razib_the_athiest
probably not fundamentally, or least not problematically. judaism is tied to israel, but it has been americanized. catholicism has also been americanized. to a great extent that has involved being ‘protestanized.’ that seems to be happening to islam & hinduism (it has already happened to buddhism to a great extent).
Judaism and Islam have long traditions of practicing faith “away from home,” so to speak. Catholicism has an institutional structure that is at root all about propagation and assimilation at great distances from Rome. (Orthodox Christianity is in many ways even more “portable,” comparably to Buddhism — Korean Presbyterianism notwithstanding.)
To be clear, nothing about the idea of “Americanized” Hinduism seems problematic to me, but I’m not a Hindu, and white Judeo-Christians don’t listen to me (ah, if only…), so my personal view is somewhat beside the point. What has struck me is that I have never heard Catholics, Jews, or members any other non-Protestant faiths in the US articulate the view that I have heard from (for example) ex-Hindus who assert something along the lines of, “If you’re going to live in America you have to have an American religion,” or from still-practicing Hindus who (for another example) find it frustratingly difficult to have a wedding ceremony which is both properly recognized, and also in English.
So I still wonder, if even (some) American Hindus feel this way then perhaps American Christians will continue to problematize Hinduism long after the “normal” curve of acceptance would have played out. As Aanchal observes in 189, “[h]istory is non-linear and jagged in terms of attitudinal shifts.”
these fundamentalist nutjobs sound just like the people Michael Moore needs as fodder for his next film:
In terms of the history of public religion in the US, as several others have pointed out the use of explicitly religious phrases in currency and the pledge of allegiance are not at all foundational. In point of fact the pledge of allegiance originally went, “… and to the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
I don’t know about anyone else but I find it ironic that McCarthy chopped the phrase about the nation being indivisible in two in order to fit in “under God.”
But who knows, it may not have been ironic. The indivisibility in question was part of a triumphant post-Civil War Yankee nationalism, and it could easily have been the case that 3/4 of a century later sons of the South still resented it. (There’s a whole other story there, too, about the history of evangelical Christianity as being, sometimes explicitly, anti-American in the sense of wanting to see either a fundamentalist Protestant republic, or none at all — a cause which is very much alive in the US today.)
“In God We Trust” was similarly an artifact of that era, and deliberately added to the national currency by people who were worried (as was McCarthy) that they weren’t seeing enough assertions of Christian dominance in American public life.
The nation’s founders may very well have regarded their inalienable rights as endowed by their creator, but as sons of the Enlightenment they (or most of them anyway) would most certainly have condemned the idea of stamping national currency with religious slogans. Obnoxiously pious Christian hecklers they would likely have smacked with their canes, back when gentlemen were given greater latitude to do such things in Congress.
( Sorry to be OT ): I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find that the concentration of atheists on this discussion board, and the blogosphere in general, is a LOT, LOT higher than a random set you would pick up from every day life. If there was a polling feature on SM, I’m pretty sure this observation could be substantiated….
HUH? That was one ginormous leap!
All the fact shows is that inclusiveness is making its way into the senate, and if you accept the premise that the senate reflects the populace, into the population. The fact that this was not a major issue to all but a few nut-cases is a cause for cheer.
That said, I would LOVE to see and end to this prayer ritual in our government buildings. Like-minded senators should be free to gather in another conference room to gather and ask the Lord(s) for guidance, but not on the main chamber.
Actually, sodomy is spoken against in the Old Testament. Just sodomy, it does not specify male to male or male to female.
I recently watched a documentary on the gay and lesbian channel (logo) about homosexual orthodox jews and their struggles within their religions (orthodox and hasid).
One guy goes to a world renowned rabbi and jewish scholar in some other country. He discusses with him homosexuality and the rabbi says it is a sin to sodomize. The gay jew then says he does not sodomize. The rabbi asks him what he does. He explains touching, kissing, oral sex. The old rabbi had never heard of oral sex and asked him, “why in the world would you want to kiss a man’s penis?”. The gay jew asked, “why in the world would you want to put your penis inside a woman’s vagina”. In a moment of enlightenment the old rabbi chuckles and says, “yes. who can explain urges. they have no logic. they do not stem from reason and we are almost forced to indulge them”.
So basically, the rabbii was saying, “same difference”. And I guess the conclusion was that as long as sodomy is not being performed, any relationship between two consenting adults is ok.
would be interesting to know the demographics of atheists as opposed to the general population in the US. hat might shed some light on the situation….or…perhaps you tend to visit blogs dominated by atheists. im sure if yu go to a right wing blog, it will have a lot of christians on it.
But the thing is, nobody ever makes you say the National Anthem or the National Song in India. In the US every day we are forced to say that this nation is “under god”. Every single school day. My parents have never had to say the National Anthem in India, and have actually recited more Christian prayers in India since they went to Christian schools despite being Hindus. Thinking about it, I can’t imagine mainstream Christian Americans going to Mormon, Muslim, or Jewish schools.
Such poor writing by my in #315. Excuse madi.
There is absolutely nothing problematic about Hinduism being practiced in any country. Even in countries where only Islam is allowed public worship, well, just worship at home.
Sometimes Indians use moving from India to another country as an excuse to start eating meat (if they belong to a sect that is strictly vegetarian). Really, I see those types making no effort whatsoever to continue their veg way of life, and moving is just an excuse to eat the meat they wanted to eat in India but did not due to group stigmatation.
@317: “would be interesting to know the demographics of atheists as opposed to the general population in the US. “
This group at least claims that Atheists and agnostics comprise 10% of US adults nationwide. (2006) …
That seems really high. data with an agenda. bound to be bad data…
namantra, why don’t you go to a private school in the US where you do not need to recite the pledge. That would be the appropriate comparison with the schools in India your parents went to. Damn the extensive public education system in the US that forces you into these oppressive practices!
And why don’t you look at the links dubliner posted to get a sense of how many “isolated” incidents there are in India? Or maybe all those reports can also be nuanced into a delicate tizzy of religious harmony and kumbaya, it’s beyond my abilities to do that though.
I don’t believe it 🙂
Seriously, all my anecdotal experience says that this grouping of “atheists and agnostics” is heavily weighted towards agnostics. A lot of people might self-describe themselves as agnostics, as in they are undecided about the G question, but very few people identify themselves as atheists.
Where is Razib when you need him?
@322 and 324-
The figure seems to be too high in my opinion as well, but then, with all the taboo surrounding being an atheist, I wonder if an accurate survey is even possible. This thread has definitely brought out all the atheists on SM, though! 🙂 I wonder if there is an equivalent to the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’ for us ….
Randomizer, coming out of the closet might be appropriate, assuming the C. S. Lewis/Narnia allusion to the phrase 🙂
There’s no god like no god, is what I say!
I believe it’s called, “Shedding the god-head and getting some, mammalian style.”
LOL !
See you all in the meetup in hell, folks! It should be a rollicking time!
Now I need to go pray to my Dawkins effigy and my Darwin fish.
Just to be clear that the heckling isn’t an isolated phenomemon:
St. Louis Hindu Temple is attacked twice in a week with Molotov bombs
Maple Grove Temple Vandalized
These are just a few of the samples, abuse and denigration is quite common and supported by tradional Judeo-Christian strictures on “idol worship”. Most temples dont report these incidents, this is a result of being a recent immigrant community.
We should all condemn the attacks on Christians in India, but I dont see them being singled out for violence. India does have a governance issue with mob-violence used as a way to settle scores: sikhs, hindus, christians, muslims all are involved in this. Dominant or powerful intersts feel more and more free to attack groups demanding changes to the status quo.
Some the recent violence does have to do with aggressive proselytization — if I were to go to Texas with $5M in my pocket and begin a public “in-your-face” campaign based on the idea that Jesus is a devil, Christianity is satanic, everyone should worship Krishna otherwise they are forever dammed — we would see responses that parallel some of the violence in india.
but I find that the concentration of atheists on this discussion board, and the blogosphere in general, is a LOT, LOT higher than a random set you would pick up from every day life
I don’t know about you all, but the blogosphere IS my “every day life.” And I have yet to pick up any atheists, despite my best attempts.
ginkchak:
the quick answer is that the constitution does not call for this. it calls for the free exercise of religion and a ban on laws that would establish an official religion. the separation of which you speak appears in the declaration of independence and in various philosophical writings of the founding fathers (jefferson) as well as the enlightenment thinkers. it should be seen as part of a cornerstone of classic liberal thought that emphasizes a limited government, ie a general separation between the state and economics, state and art, etc. classic liberals generally believed that government intrusion into private behaviour was the first step toward tyranny, and discouraged it in the US constitution, though it was never explicitly banned, for various reasons such as: a strict wall of sep would mean church buses would not be able to use public roads. see the absurdity?
Masalai raised this interesting question @275. Since the Orthodox denominations are not the mainstream version of Christianity in the US, I think it would cause some discomfort if not also ‘outrage’. On the other hand, I can’t imagine the Senate getting to a Hindu priest without also, at some earlier time, also having gone through all the other Christian denominations first. So maybe an ‘Orthodox’ priest has already held a prayer at the Senate. I think a more interesting question to ask is: Would they have been less outraged if he had been an Episcopalian, Methodist or Baptist minister of Indian provenance?
There are actually a non-trivial number of those in the US. A number of ‘mainstream’ parishes have actually ‘imported’ their ministers from India – that is, these priests do not minister to congregations primarily composed of South Asians. And some of them even have radio and TV ‘ministries’. I’ve heard some of them, and they come complete with the ‘Indian accent’! Despite this, or maybe even because of this, as far as I can tell, their ‘acceptance level’ is quite high. Just like so many Americans have doctors of Indian origin (of course they’re usually ‘Indian doctors’ to them, not ‘doctors who happen to be of Indian origin’), many Americans also have ‘Indian priests’ and ‘Indian ministers’.
So, speaking hypothetically, if a minister or priest from India were to have said a traditional Baptist prayer at the Senate, my guess is it would have caused almost no outrage at all. For all I know, this has already happened. A significant number of African-American pastors and chaplains officiate at ceremonies involving white people, so that aspect of things has been quite normalized now. Of course, there will still be the racial bigots, and some of them will no doubt trot out some religious rationale – but I can’t see anybody disrupting Senate proceedings over, say, an African-American or South Asian chaplain who said the traditional prayer.
@Rahul #329 “See you all in the meetup in hell, folks! “
If you need to find me, I’ll be the one searching frantically through the pages of the God Delusion, going ‘But… but … it says so here that … ‘
Rahul and others, I can’t accept relativizing Indian tolerance away like this. Sure, you can point to incidents in poor and tribal areas caused in part by resentment against missionary activity. And yes, Gujarat riots were a problem; but did you take into account the reactions in the rest of the country?
And all this without taking into consideration the historical realities. Can you imagine what the state of Muslims would be in the US if there was a similar extent of Muslim-Christian animosities? and no, it CANNOT be stated too many times that India has had presidents and PMs of mult. ethnicities.
Give credit where it’s due.
Rahul and Aanchal, getting in on the commie (thats short for comment) action late but the Tamil Camel song from Gentleman that you mentioned was sampled by a French hiphop group very extensively (the original tamil version). i can’t remember the group’s name or give you a link but Vincent Cassel’s horror film Sheitan plays that song multiple times.
335 Hyperline
Keep in mind this is an american blog, run by americans albeit with indian origin parent(s). They have no direct experience of indian history and national narrative. So the nuances of the upsurge in religous quarreling of the last 20 years are unlikely to appreciated by them. At the same time, the christian complicity in new world slavery and extinction of indigenous cultures (if not outright genocide) is unlikely to be brought up. These aren’t part of the normative narrative of american history.
look, if that despicable Stalinist frida kahlo can appear on a US stamp, i think we can tolerate god on a coin.
Give credit where it’s due
Hypertree: it’s one thing to give India credit after “consideration of the historical realities,” but much of the discussion here has been a sort of pissing contest about whether the USA or India is “more tolerant.” Saying “the Gujarat riots were a problem” [well, yeah, um… sorta] really does minimize the issue, as Rahul points out. A Bengali professor laughed at me once when I told her in my young, naive days that I admired India’s history of tolerance — meaning the effort to incorporate tolerance into the constitution and the sheer number of groups living in close proximity with, yes, “relative” tolerance. The list of incidents Rahul enumerated, and trends like the rise of the BJP through the 90s really doesn’t lend much support to the “kumbaya” model.
I’ll give you this: the ‘average’ Indian probably lives in proximity to a greater number of diverse ethnic/religious groups than the ‘average’ American, and in light of this, we should probably be amazed that there’s not more conflict and violence than there is. However, I can’t back this up with hard data. Rahul and I just submitted our NSF grant proposal to study this subject, and we’ll get back to you with hard data after we
squander $40-$50K of fundingcomplete our empirical research.although there is no constituional provision prohibiting stalinists from being on coins. although god on a coin, well…one oculd argue that is a violation.
kusala, hey now, there is a lot of data. India has a long monsoon season and a lot of rain, ergo rainbows, and it has a lot more bees ergo honey. So it is quantifiably a land of rainbows and honey.
And both genders, although ppl like “Anna” prefer to focus solely on girl baby mishaps when it comes to India.
if god appears in the declaration of independence, how can it be unconstitutional for her to appear on a coin? the standard is “establishment of religion” not “separation” because strict separation would violate the free exercise clause. you don’t like god, i don’t like commies; but god and commies have an equal right to a government subsidy.
Manju, what if atheism is considered a “religion”? Then would it violate the establishment clause?
Trisha she is doing that to exact revenge on you for your “quote” mishaps. Can “you” “imagine” the “trauma” it “causes” “Anna” and even “others”?
At the same time, the christian complicity in new world slavery and extinction of indigenous cultures (if not outright genocide) is unlikely to be brought up.>>
I would be muy embarazada if I were you for youz speaks nonsense here. The Christian settlers in America were simply reacting to the fascist propaganda of the NRS (Native Raksha Sangh) who were hell-bent on protecting their culture as well as rewriting history textbooks. Besides these natives were divided into so many thousands of tribes. One tribe hated another in an endless cycle of hate and Im sure they must have driven a couple a tepee poles through their papooses as well. Christians simply managed to frag the whole corrupt tribal caste system by killing off the natives. It happened for the best otherwise where else would all the modern feminist papas send off their little daughters to? I will ban you if you doubt me.
The truth hurts so much, you have to troll and switch handles to keep making your inaccurate and meaningless point. She didn’t fabricate those stories, nor did she give in to sensationalism. All of you who continue with this petty spitefulness should be ashamed of yourselves, because babies were either buried alive or left to drown and you are in denial about such depravity; dismissing those as one-off events, because you are obsessed with a blogger, makes you complicit in the devaluation of girl children. What I don’t understand is, where do these specious contentions regarding her “India-bashing” emanate from, when she has never done anything of the sort?
Or are you so simple-minded and reactionary, that any negative light shed on your beloved India is treason of the highest order, and those who shine such a thing are automatically anti-Indian, Hindu-phobic enemies of the state you hallucinate? Seek help.
you mean the Kahlo stamp? good point. somebody once called communism the god that failed. now it vioaltes the establishment clause and violates my right to be free of communism. HELP! HELP! I’m being repressed! That’s what I’m talking about — did you see Kahlo repressing me, you saw it didn’t you?
I would be muy embarazada if I were you for youz speaks nonsense here.
terrorist tecumseh-
Why would you be very pregnant?
One sweet, RELEVANT, personal post and all of you brave, anonymous commenters throw it back in her face so proudly, like you’ve just articulated the most brilliant argument ever. Yes, she had a dad. He passed away. Those of you who mock him continuously are insensitive, disrespectful excretory openings at the end of alimentary canals.
And horrid debaters.