Robert Kaplan thinks that it would be a shame if the Fort Hood massacre led to recriminations against Muslims in the U.S. military, arguing we need more of them.

The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when I was embedded with a Marine battalion during the first battle of Fallujah. The battalion just happened to have in the ranks a corporal of Syrian descent who did double duty as the commander’s translator for his meetings with the Iraqis. The young Muslim corporal was arguably the most valuable member of the battalion: simply by his presence he was able to cast the battalion in a different, more positive light among the locals.

The United States military needs more troops of Muslim origin within its ranks. We need a military that looks like the larger world for the global challenges ahead, such as helping to protect the “commons,” the air space and sea lanes. Think of the Navy’s slogan in its new television recruitment commercials: “A Global Force for Good.”

Inevitably, a minute percentage of these Muslim recruits may be influenced by jihadist propaganda, which certainly seems to have been the case with Maj. Hasan. So what do we do?

Better security surveillance and background checks, as well as better coordination within the defense bureaucracy to ferret out troublesome individuals, make sense. But the Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, had it right when he said that he was fearful of a backlash against Muslims within the ranks. Behind the scenes the military needs to be extra vigilant; publicly the military needs to be even more welcoming to minorities.

There’s more to the piece but that’s the gist of it.  And he’s right.

But let’s not get too carried away.  Both Spencer Ackerman and Marc Lynch take the title of Kaplan’s post (”Responding to Fort Hood”) and twist the argument into Kaplan claiming “Fort Hood shows we need more Muslim soldiers.”  Which, of course, it does not.

Hasan is an emphatic datapoint against Muslims in the military.  The fact that the potential good that Muslim soldiers can do in our war against Islamic extremists far, far outweighs the danger of more Hasans hiding in our midst does not change the fact that Muslim soldiers are more likely to be sympathetic to the enemy than are their non-Muslim fellows.

Kaplan merely suggests that the proper approach to dealing with this threat is to quietly implement “Better security surveillance and background checks, as well as better coordination within the defense bureaucracy to ferret out troublesome individuals” rather than conducting a loud witch hunt.

Via Kevin Drum, I have learned that current Senate version of the health reform bill would provide for insurance payments for Christian Science prayer treatments–and probably other “spiritual” treatments as well.

Reporting from Washington – Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”

Ugh. You know, it’s bad enough that insurance companies are already wasting money paying for quack treatments like chiropractic “adjustments” and acupuncture, but this isn’t just the camel’s nose under the tent–it’s the camel in the tent, spitting and defecating over everything.

If we’re going to be serious about controlling health care costs, we have to stop covering quack treatments just because they might make people “feel better.” Chiropractors, acupuncturists, homeopathists, faith healers, reflexologists and the rest of that pseudoscientific lot are committing fraud: they claim they can heal, but they cannot.

It’s bad enough that we allow them to practice at all. It’s terrible that some insurance companies are idiotic enough to pay for such treatments. It is a derogation of the governments’ duty to its citizens that some states license these trades. But evolving a national health care system that preserves this quackery in law and ensures they get taxpayer dollars is absolutely criminal.

One of the few roles of government that I think folks from every political stripe can agree on is that the government should protect citizens from fraud. It’s not supposed to help people perpetrate fraud.

(cross posted to Heretical Ideas)

While I’m a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens as a writer, let’s face it, the man can be a jackass. And while I largely share his views on organized religion, I find his condescension rather mean-spirited. So when he penned a column for Slate articulating “What I’ve learned from debating religious people around the world,” I was expecting the worst. And was thus pleasantly surprised.

I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.

[...]

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can’t very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he’s marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don’t truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think. Every now and then I read reports of polls that tell me that more Americans believe in the virgin birth or the devil than believe in Darwinism: I’d be pretty sure that at least some of these are unwilling to confess their doubts to someone who calls them up on their kitchen phone.

To be sure, he gets in a barb here and there.  But what he’s discovered is that people of faith are often, if not usually, decent, intelligent folks with minds of their own.

Hitchens interprets this as a sign that religious faith is losing out to secularism, which he and I both consider “a wholly good development” and “part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  But I differ with him a bit in assessing the degree to which religiosity is withering versus simply evolving.   For a variety of cultural and psychological reasons, most Americans continue to be religious believers.  But they’re also children (or, perhaps more accurately, great-great grandchildren) of the Enlightenment and the Reformation.  So they hold onto the parts they believe or find comfort in and adapt the rest to fit the world they live in.

Dan Gilgoff passes on word of a new survey projecting that a quarter of Americans will be atheists or non-believers twenty years from now.

If current trends continue, a quarter of Americans are likely to claim “no religion” in 20 years, according to a survey out today by Trinity College. Americans who identify with no religious tradition currently comprise 15 percent of the country, representing the fastest growing segment of the national religious landscape.

While the numbers portend a dramatic change for the American religious scene—”religious nones” accounted for just 8 percent of the population in 1990—the United States is not poised adopt the anti-religious posture of much of secularized Europe. That’s because American religious nones tend to be religious skeptics as opposed to outright atheists. Fewer than ten percent of those identifying with no religious tradition call themselves atheists or hold atheistic beliefs, according to the new study. “American nones are kind of agnostic and deistic, so it’s a very American kind of skepticism,” says Barry Kosmin, director of Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. “It’s a kind of religious indifference that’s not hostile to religion the way they are in France. Franklin and Jefferson would have recognized these people.”

The new study found that, in addition to seeing relatively strong retention numbers, American nones are quickly gaining new members. “Twenty-two percent of the youngest cohort of adults self-identify as nones and they will become tomorrow’s parents,” according to the report. “If current trends continue and cohorts of non-religious young people replace older religious people, the likely outcome is that in two decades the nones could account for around one-quarter of the American population.”

Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan attributes the rise of the nones partly to “the intellectual collapse of Christianity under the leadership of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic theocons.” He adds, “The well-deserved inability of literalists to win many converts among educated people is also surely salient. The emergence of the politicized Christianist right – and its assault on Christianity as a freely chosen spiritual process – will surely lead to a continued and accelerating flight from organized religion.”

While I know many highly educated believers, they do indeed seem to be less than literal in their theology.  But Andrew believes this could lead to a renaissance of faith: “61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists. This is the fertile ground on which a new Christianity will at some point grow.”

Color me skeptical.  Religion without wild leaps of faith strikes me as almost pointless.  And I’m not sure the reluctance to jump from “none” to “atheist” is a pining for a more intellectual theology so much as wanting to avoid the cultural stigma that comes with the latter.

This is the view of PZ Myers who, naturally, is “disappointed” and contemptuous.  “I will not be content until the number is 100%. (OK, 95%. It’s not fair to demand rationality from people who are brain damaged or locked up in asylums.)”

Every article I see on this subject makes this desperate rush to reassure their readers that this growing cohort of Americans aren’t really those goddamned atheists — they’re nice people, unlike those cold-hearted, soulless beasts called atheists, and they aren’t planning to storm your churches and rape the choir boys and boil babies in the baptismal fonts, unlike the scary atheistic monsters. They’re special. And most of all, they aren’t French.

[...]

Oh, please. All the low frequency of self-reported atheists in the survey tells you is that the long-running campaign in American culture to stigmatize atheism has been highly successful — and it’s an attitude that we still see expressed in reports like this. The most important news they try to transmit is not the increase in unbelievers, it’s “Thank God they aren’t atheists! They’re just rational skeptics, instead!”

I suspect part of the reason that people are reluctant to call themselves “atheists” is a fear of being lumped in with the likes of Myers, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins.  Not satisfied to use their considerable brainpower to argue for scientific explanations over supernatural ones, they instead show utter disdain for the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens who were brought up in a religious tradition and cling to parts of it.  “Atheism” in this sense isn’t a mere belief that there is no supernatural overlord controlling our universe but a quasi-religion of its own, with many of the worst traits of organized religion.

Similarly, AllahPundit likes the trend but is baffled by the non-believers who have a “personal god” or otherwise quasi-religious beliefs.   But that strikes me as a cultural phenomenon rather than a purely religious one.  America is steeped in religious traditions that are followed even by non-believers.  Pretty much everyone celebrates Christmas, for example, and even Easter — a more purely religious occasion that doesn’t even result in an extra day off work — has a huge secular buy-in, what with Easter bunnies and the various fun traditions for kids.  Not only does Big Business glom onto these occasions but they’re also massive public rituals, as well.  The President lights the national Christmas tree.  He hosts an Easter egg roll.   We reflexively say “Bless you” when people sneeze and take the Lord’s name in vain when we’re angry, regardless whether we believe in said Lord’s existence.

A sizable number of America’s self-described “religious,” even those who attend church with some regularity, aren’t religious in the sense that their 16th Century forebears were.  They pick and choose from the teachings of their chosen faith at will, occasionally even choosing a new faith altogether for reasons of “comfort” and convenience.  It’s a communal experience from which many draw inspiration and comfort.

Image: SoulPancake

Former President Jimmy Carter quit the Southern Baptist Convention more than eight years ago because of its refusal to ordain women as pastors (rather odd, since the policy had been in place since the early seventeenth century origins of the Baptist faith based on the example of another follow with the initials J.C.).   To make sure people noticed — since he had long stopped having anything to do with the SBC — he sent out 75,000 letters.

Over the weekend, Carter apparently reckoned people forgot about this (and, I must confess, I had) he up and quit again, this time via op-eds in The Guardian and The Age. (The latter was published a week ago but, owing to the confluence of the International Date Line and a lot of famous celebrities dying, nobody in the United States noticed until yesterday.)

But I digress.  I bring this up not because I much care about Carter’s religion, having neither a dog in the fight nor interest sufficient to warrant exchanging a rodent’s hindquarters for his views on the subject, but rather because of the extraordinarily bizarre explanation given.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Now, I can’t vouch for Plains, Georgia.  But I’ve lived in plenty of communities where Southern Baptists predominated.  In all of them, prostitution and rape were against the law.  Girls went to school and the doctor.  Women had jobs and influence.  So far as I know, their genitals were intact.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.

But these aren’t countries run by Southern Baptists.  In rural Alabama and Mississippi, girls start and finish school at the same age as boys. Young women now outnumber young men in our colleges and universities.  Arranged marriages have never been part of our culture.  To the extent “their basic health needs are not met,” it’s because of poverty, not religious dogma.

In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is raped, she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.

In Southern Baptist towns in the United States, women show a hell of a lot more than their arms and ankles. They’re required to go to school up to age 16 and are strongly encouraged to graduate high school and go on to college.  Women work outside the home at tremendous rate.  Rape is abhorred and the rapist is severely punished, often in extracurricular fashion.

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

A goodly number of Western countries (although, granted, none with large Southern Baptist populations) have women prime ministers and presidents.  In the United States, including the South, women governors, senators, and other high office holders were quite common long before Carter quit the Convention (the first time).  We’ve had three female Secretaries of State, a woman National Security Advisor, a woman Attorney General, a woman Secretary of Homeland Security.  We’ve had two women as vice presidential nominees and one who came close to getting a major party presidential nod.   Sarah Palin, despite rather little experience or demonstrated expertise, seems to be the enthusiastic favorite for the Republican presidential nomination among Southern Baptists.

There are plenty of reasons to pick nits with the Southern Baptists.  But the depredations of radical Islam are not among them.

Baptist photo by Flickr users djking under Creative Commons license.

Apparently, a lot of people who use Yahoo! are searching for “Rumsfeld bible quotes” today.

This rather odd happenstance is apparently a function of a story that circulated earlier in the week about Rumsfeld putting bible verses on the cover sheets of “Worldwide Intelligence Updates” intended for President Bush.  Apparently, the story is largely untrue.

I see via Andrew Sullivan that secularist Andrew Stuttaford argues that atheists should bring their children up in a relatively innocuous church lest they wind up choosing a more radical faith on their own:

Belief in a deity (or deities), and the desire to worship it or them, is an almost universal aspect of human nature. This not something that can be wished or indoctrinated away, and it’s pointless and maybe even destructive to try. It’s far better, surely, to channel that impulse by giving children some sort of gentle religious grounding, preferably in a well-established, undemanding, culturally useful (understanding all that art and so on) and mildly (small c) conservative denomination that doesn’t dwell too much on the supernatural and keeps both ritual and philosophical speculation in their proper place. Better the vicar than Wicca, say I.

This strikes me as akin to giving your children powdered cocaine lest then try crack on their own.  After all, it’s natural to want to experiment with mind-altering chemicals!

It’s true that there seems to be a human instinct towards supernaturalism and seeking a Higher Meaning in life.  But most of Western Europe is quite secular these days, so presumably religiosity is not an immutable part of the human condition.

If one wishes to steep one’s children in art, why not take them to a museum or enroll them in classes?  If positive ritual is desired, why not Scouting or team sports?  And what is the “proper place” for philosophical speculation, anyway?

UPDATE:  Julian Sanchez weighs in with a lengthy response to Stuttaford.  He argues, persuasively, that the “desire to worship” is really a combination of a need for community and a means of coping with the challenges of a complex existence.   Many have found tools other than religion to satisfy those needs.

I glossed over yesterday’s news that the Vatican blocked Caroline Kennedy’s appointment as U.S. ambassador for a variety of reasons.  Regular commenter Tlaloc emailed me, though, making a good point:

[T]he Vatican refuses to accept any ambassador who is not explicitly pro-life including anti-ESC research (such as Doug Kmiec).  Various voices on the right have praised them for this principled stand.  But if we accept this criteria doesn’t it set a bad precedent?  What happens when China demands our next ambassador be an avowed Maoist?  Or Saudi Arabia demand someone who openly accepts sharia law (up to an including the whole acid in the face for uppity girls)?

Us Ambassadors are supposed to represent us, not their host country. Obviously we should make sure that our ambassadors do not inflame their hosts by their mere presence but that’s a world away from them being required to openly affirm allegiance to the host’s ideals.  Or to put it another way, if the Vatican has the right to demand a vocal pro-lifer be our ambassador to them can’t we demand their ambassador to us be a vocal pro-choicer?  And where does such petty brinksmanship get us except a total break down of diplomacy?

The right-leaning blogs memeorandum links on this one are universally praiseworthy.

RedState’s Moe Lane is “curious about how many times this administration plans to insult the Roman Catholic Church.”  His colleague mbecker908 dubs this “an Easter gift from the Vatican” and adds, ” Good for the Vatican. This pentecostal Baptist boy (OK, old boy) is standing with the Pope on this one.”  He agrees with Lane that “being so tone deaf as to openly and forthrightly make an effort to offend the Vatican is off the charts.”

Dan Riehl observes, “Obama just got done going out of his way to inform Islam he had no intention of insulting or threatening it as a religion. So why the continued insults to Catholicism? It’s as if he doesn’t care about it as a religion at all.” Even Michael van der Galien, a staunch moderate, agrees that, “Instead of giving the Church the impression its opinions do not matter, the Obama administration is wise to treat it as it treats enemies of the United States: with respect and understanding.”

Dan and Michael have the right take on this.  If we’re going to have an ambassador to the Vatican (and I’m sympathetic to Michael Stickings‘ view that we probably shouldn’t) then it behooves us to respect their sensibilities when selecting our representatives to them. It’s just good diplomacy.

Now, Tlaloc is right that our ambassador is supposed to represent us, not the country to which he’s sent.  Ron Chusid makes that point as well.

The Vatican might not like it, but support for both abortion and embryonic stem cell research is the position of the Obama administration and both are legal in this country. What if the Vatican were to also demand an ambassador who believes in creationism instead of evolution?

What of other areas where countries disagree with the views of appointed ambassadors? Do Muslim nations object to non-Muslim ambassadors from the west?  Should we go along if one were to insist that we only appoint an ambassador who opposes the existence of Israel?

During the cold war it would have been ludicrous for Communist nations to reject western ambassadors who did not support Communism. Imagine if the Chinese had refused overtures from Richard Nixon to begin diplomatic relations because Nixon and his potential ambassadors were not Maoists.

The difference, of course, is that, despite the legal fiction to the contrary, the Vatican isn’t really a country; it’s a church with a big yard.  States, even those that are theocracies (Iran) or close to it (Saudi Arabia), have traditionally operated on the principle of sovereign equality.  They either have diplomatic relations with a given state or not, on a take it or leave it basis.  Not so much with churches.

Now, again, that may be a reason to not send an ambassador.  For most of our history, we didn’t.  Ronald Reagan was the first to have a formal ambassador.  But if we’re going to have diplomatic relations with a church, it only makes sense not to go out of our way to offend it.

The problem with Kmiec and Kennedy, as I understand it, is not so much that they’re pro-abortion but rather that they’re pro-abortion Roman Catholics.  Sending them as our ambassador to the Holy See is the equivalent of sending a Soviet defector as ambassador to Moscow during the Cold War or sending an Orthodox Jew as ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

The conservative media and blogs have been having a field day parsing the bow that President Obama gave before Saudi King Abdullah in London last week. Some see it as a sign that he is submitting in fealty to Saudi Arabia. Others find ‘coded messages’ about how the US will submit to Islam. His act stirs up the canard that Obama is a ’secret Muslim’. Below is the start of an editorial in the conservative The Washington Times that takes Obama to task.

EDITORIAL: Barack takes a bow

In a shocking display of fealty to a foreign potentate, President Obama bowed to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London last week.

Mr. Obama later said in Strasbourg, France, “We have to change our behavior in showing the Muslim world greater respect.” Symbolism is important in world affairs. By bending over to show greater respect to Islam, the U.S. president belittled the power and independence of the United States.

The bow was an extraordinary protocol violation. Such an act is a traditional obeisance befitting a king’s subjects, not his peer. There is no precedent for U.S. presidents bowing to Saudi or any other royals. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt shook hands with Saudi King Abdulaziz in February 1945. Granted, Mr. Roosevelt was wheelchair-bound, but former President Dwight D. Eisenhower shook hands when he first met King Saud in January 1957. Mr. Obama’s bow to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques does not help his image with those who believe he is secretly a Muslim, and why he chose to bow only to the Saudi King and not to any other royals remains unexplained.
…

The fact is that Obama made a mistake. It is US diplomatic usage, dating from the days in which American broke away from the crowns of Europe, that Americans do not bow (or curtsy, as the case may be) to royalty, no matter who the American, no matter who the royalty. The thinking behind this is that an American, as a member of the Republic, is equal to any crowned or ennobled figure. It’s a custom; it’s a tradition; it’s a political statement. It is not a law, however.

Not bowing, however, does not mean that showing signs of respect are inappropriate. A ‘head bow’, inclining the head in the direction of the person being honored, is appropriate and is the norm in diplomacy. Obama over did it, perhaps, but he did not put the US in fealty to Saudi Arabia!

I’ll leave to the discerning student to analyze why a bow from the waist to, let’s say, a Japanese businessman is deemed perfectly okay while opprobrium and disdain are being heaped on Obama here. Correct answers should include hysteria, Islamophobia, and just plain loony-tunes thinking. Frank Gaffney, I’m looking at you…

Cross-posted at Crossroads Arabia.

Michael Spencer, a self-evowed evangelical Christian, predicts the end of his kind.

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

And he says it’s their own fault. By failing to rigorously enough instill core Biblical values in their children and foolishly trying to blend in with the secular world with such newfangled ideas as rock-and-roll music, they’ve corrupted their own tradition. And tying themselves in with conservative politics hasn’t helped, either.

Stacy McCain, a Baptist, and Rod Dreher, a follower of the Orthodox traditon, give takes from the perspective of a believer.   As an outsider looking in, though, I’m dubious.

The trends to which Spencer points have been with us since, oh, the Enlightenment.  Modernity is inherently hostile to religiosity, especially the more literal forms.   Yet, religion seems to have survived despite the pressures from the secular world.

Indeed, I would argue, precisely because of it.  People naturally rebel against the smarty pants set.  As I noted when Barack Obama created a backlash with his remarks about “bitter people who cling to god and guns,”

Class bias works both ways. Urban elites tend to view rural America, especially Southerners, as a bunch of yahoos. Rural Americans, meanwhile, think big city types are elitist snobs who don’t love America. There are similar resentments between rich and poor, educated and not, and even Ivy League – State College. In private gatherings, where people think they are among the like-minded, one hears shocking bigotry along those lines.

Will the elites become more openly anti-religion in the coming years?  Probably.  But that’ll just spur a backlash.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the ranks of the evangelical churches grew as a result.

Photo by Flickr user nika, used under Creative Commons license.

In a long essay, E.D. Kain defends his assertion that “Mormons are not, by any definition of the word, Christian.”  A brief excerpt:

Mormons are no more Christian than Rastafarians are, regardless of their Coptic heritage. Nor are members of the Baha’i faith Muslim, despite their roots in Islam, and despite the fact that many of them believe in Muhammad as a Prophet. Remember, Muslims believe that Muhammad was the Prophet – the last of God’s messengers – how then could Muslims believe in other prophets after him, as the Baha’i do? Sikhs can hardly be considered Hindu or Muslim, though both those religions played a definitive role in the birth of Sikhism. Similarly, while Mormons believe in Christ and have sprung from the Christian tradition, they have added on an entirely new set of beliefs to that one that change their faith entirely and distinguish it from Christianity.

I’ve always considered Mormons to be Christians since they’re believers in the divinity of Jesus Christ.  Kain’s argument is interesting, though.   Clearly, there are vast differences between various Christian sects, ranging from Roman Catholicism to the various Orthodox faiths to Pentacostalism.

Are the differences added by the Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price sufficient to transform them into something unique?  Certainly, the idea that Jesus visited North America after the Resurrection is a novel addition to the canon.

UPDATE: See also Steven Taylor’s December 2006 essay “On Romney and the Politics of Mormonism,” which outlines some of the theological issues.

Link via Andrew Sullivan. 

Saudi King Abdullah announced a major shake-up in his government over the weekend. Among the changes was the naming of the first woman to a high government office, Deputy Minister for Girls’ Education. The promotion of a woman in a country that generally treats women as second class citizens is indeed a big step.

More interesting–and important–were changes he made in the galaxy of the religious establishment. The most far-reaching change was to re-establish the Grand Ulema Council, the body intended to offer consensus opinion and advice on the religious aspects of law and regulation. Not only does the opening of this office deprecate the power of individual clerics, but its membership was expanded to include representatives of all Sunni schools of law, taking away the monopoly power of the Hanbali School, the foundation of Saudi Arabia’s conservative, ‘Wahhabi’ establishment. The expansion does not, unfortunately, include any of the schools of Shi’ism. That, however, might come in the future.

The ultra-conservative head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—aka, the religious police–was replaced by a more moderate individual who has already noted that his approach to the mission of the organization will be “innocent until proven guilty” and more forgiveness than punishment. Just how that plays out is yet to be known, of course, but it’s a marked change from past practice.

As conservative was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Council who most recently achieved notoriety through his statement that satellite TV broadcasters deserved to be tried and executed for the irreligious content of their programming. He was bounced from his position and replaced by Saleh bin Humaid, formerly head of the Saudi Shoura Council where he played an active role in promoting laws to protect women. Bin Humaid is himself a conservative cleric. Given his demonstrated moderation (as always, the term is used within a Saudi context), his religious authority should make it easier for him to force change.

The Supreme Judicial Council itself is about to undergo major changes. It is planned that it will be replaced by a Supreme Court that will serve to rule on the soon-to-be-codified new Saudi legal system.

It should be noted that the former head of the Supreme Judicial Council has been moved to head the Shoura Council. That’s not an unimportant position, but it holds considerably less power.

Longer-lasting changes–which will take longer to implement–were made in the Ministry of Education. A new Minister was named, this one a member of the ruling family with a long background in anti-extremist security operations. He has the clout to finally root out the extremist who have burrowed deep within the Saudi educational system, as well as having the resources to identify them. He has a new Deputy Minister, one who has led the King’s program for “National Dialogue”, intended to get Saudis publicly talking about things that had heretofore been relegated to private discussions. Top among these topics have been tolerance; dealing with differences in opinions, background, and sex; and facing up to the unexamined cultural issues that color politics and law.

Of course, the naming of a woman as a Deputy Minister of Education was something that has been highlighted in media reports. It is a big step and the first breach in a gender wall. Her remit is somewhat limited to Girls’ Education, but it is well past time that women had a say in how they were educating their daughters.

There’s no denying that Saudi Arabia has a lot of ground to cover just to catch up with international standards of human rights in the 21st C. These steps, however, do mark a clean break with the past and point to a different future. While the deficits should not be minimized, I think it important to recognize positive change as well.

You can find more information about the changes at Crossroads Arabia.

Heather Mac Donald asks,

Will Bill O’Reilly or anyone else who saw the hand of God in the safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549 this January please explain why God chose not to save Continental Connection Flight 3407, which plunged into a house outside of Buffalo last night, killing all 49 people on board and a resident on the ground?

She credibly disposes of the “mysterious ways” fallback, by the way.

The New York Times reports that the Catholic Church has begun reviving the practice of indulgences under Pope Benedict XVI.

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

The indulgence is among the less noticed and less disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.

For folks in my generation, the indulgence is primarily known as the means through which the existence of the entire universe is threatened in the movie Dogma, so I’m not sure I welcome its revival.

Still, given Pope Benedict XVI’s overall conservatism, I suspect that this is just the first of many old traditions that Catholics can expect to see revived. Other traditions I expect to pop back up include the Latin Mass, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and the Spanish Inquisition.

Just kidding on that last part, of course. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

I don’t think I’m the only one who noticed that during his invocation, Rev. Rick Warren used the phrase, “You, the merciful one; You, the compassionate one’. That phrase, the heart of the bismillah, was not accidental, I believe.

The bismillah is the prayer that is used to start nearly anything done by a pious Muslim, even appearing at the top of the page for official documents or personal letters and school work, even as a blessing before meals or the sacrifice of an animal. In full, it reads, ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate’: B’Ism Allah, Al-Rahman, Al-Rahim.

And no, I don’t think Warren is a ‘crypto-Muslim’…