Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘church and state’

Since this story about a Chabad Rabbi who threatened to sue the Seattle-Tacoma airport unless they took down their Christmas trees has been getting so much media attention, I figure I’d better weigh in with my two cents.

My opinion? Quite simply, Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky is a first-degree horse’s ass. Why?

• Displaying a Christmas tree is harmless. It’s not forcing anyone’s faith on anyone else. It’s merely displaying it. It’s no more a threat to me as a Jew than a display of a menorah would be to a Christian. And if Rabbi Bogomilsky is so threatened by a friggin’ tree, then perhaps he ought to re-examine his personal faith rather than rallying against the world.
• I’ve always been uncomfortable with Chabad’s campaign to display menorahs everywhere at Chanukah. To me, it’s propagating the myth that Chanukah and Christmas are somehow related, or in competition, or have something to do with one another. Chanukah, as Rabbi Bogomilsky ought to know full well, is not a major religious holiday, and the fact that we’ve allowed it to become part of the generic “holiday season” and a symbol of gift-giving, commercialism and one-half of the semi-merged “Christmakah” is bad enough. This is worse.
• It’s not a competition. It shouldn’t be a competition. This isn’t about “my symbol is bigger than your symbol”. If people are proud of something, they should be allowed to express that pride without some other group feeling the need for one-upmanship. Judaism shouldn’t be about one-upmanship at all.
• Rabbi Bogomilsky is claiming to speak for all Jews with this stunt, which I personally resent an awful lot. Who voted him spokesperson of North American Jewry, anyway?
• I like Christmas trees, okay? I think they’re pretty. I think the lights and decorations are pretty. I enjoy looking at them. I know it’s not my holiday, and I’m not going to run out and get a tree for my living room or anything… but why shouldn’t I be allowed to get enjoyment out of someone else’s holiday?

Bottom line? I’m glad the trees are back, and I hope everyone learns to chill out and enjoy whatever holiday or holidays they choose to celebrate.

For more on the subject, see last year’s rant about the whole “Happy Holidays” / “Merry Christmas” debate.

Something Damian Penny wrote the other day came back to me just now: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Damian was, of course, referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial. However, I think the quote is a good one, and it popped into my head when I read about today’s ruling against teaching creationism in schools:

A federal judge on Tuesday banned the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution by Pennsylvania’s Dover Area School District, saying the practice violated the constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

[ . . . ]

The school district was sued by a group of 11 parents who claimed teaching intelligent design was unconstitutional and unscientific and had no place in high school biology classrooms.

Before you jump down my throat, I’m in no way implying that Holocaust denial is comparable to creationism. What I am saying, however, is that there’s a clear difference between fact and invention – as in the case of Holocaust denial – which I think we all recognize fairly easily. What many people fail to recognize, however, is that we must also make a clear distinction between fact and belief.

Evolution is a scientific fact. Creationism (repackaged as “intelligent design” or whatever you rename it) is a belief. It is based on faith, not evidence, and cannot be proven for the simple reason that it cannot be disproven.

Today’s ruling banned the teaching of creationism because it violates the separation of church and state. I think the real reason it ought to be banned from science curricula is because it isn’t science. After all, there is no constitutional ban on teaching Holocaust denial in history class, and yet I’m sure we would all call for the dismissal of any teacher who tried, simply on the grounds that it’s wrong.

I have no objection to the teaching of creationist theory in a course about religion, humanities, or cultural studies. But high school biology teachers who teach creationism as scientific fact are muddling fact and belief. People are entitled to hold a belief, but when teaching science, they need to stick to facts.

And so, to restate Damian’s point, everyone is entitled to his own beliefs, but not his own facts.

I was watching an old repeat of the West Wing the other day, from back when the show was good. And I couldn’t help but think of it when I saw this news item:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that putting framed copies of the Ten Commandments in county courthouses violated church-state separation, but it allowed a commandments monument in a larger display on a state Capitol grounds.

The two 5-4 rulings on the politically charged issue of displaying the Ten Commandments on government property came in a pair of cases regarded as the most important of the court term concerning constitutional separation of church and state.

Display issues aside, I can’t help but wonder what the Ten Commandments are even doing in a courthouse in the first place. To quote the West Wing episode:

Sam: There is a town in Alabama that wants to abolish all laws except the Ten Commandments.
Tobey: That’s odd.
Sam: Well they’re going to have a problem.
Tobey: Because the Constitution prohibits religious activity in any form connected to government?
[ . . . ]
Sam: I just mean, some of those Commandments are pretty hard to enforce [...] Coveting thy neighbor’s wife, for example. How are you going to enforce that one?

Yeah, I’m not sure how a court of law would prove coveting. Do you get witnesses to comment on longing glances?

No disrespect intended here, but isn’t idol worship prohibited by Christianity?

A Ten Commandments monument at the center of a bitter dispute over the constitutional separation of church and state was removed from public view on Wednesday in Alabama’s state judicial building.

[ . . . ]

Some protesters were distraught over the removal of the monument. One protester screamed “Put it back, put it back” as others in front of the judicial building tried to calm him down.

I mean, it’s a monument. It’s a piece of granite. And while I believe that separation of church and state means that it has no place in a judicial building, normally I can see the other side of the argument too. But in this case, it’s people worshipping a big rock. That’s their right, of course, but I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that it went against their religion too.

Josh pointed me towards this great article by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times on the issue of school prayer in the U.S. In it, Ebert argues that while he has no problem with personal prayer, the problem comes with public prayer aimed at either recruiting others or else making them feel excluded. He defines the distinction as “vertical” and “horizontal” prayer:

This is really an argument between two kinds of prayer–vertical and horizontal. I don’t have the slightest problem with vertical prayer. It is horizontal prayer that frightens me. Vertical prayer is private, directed upward toward heaven. It need not be spoken aloud, because God is a spirit and has no ears. Horizontal prayer must always be audible, because its purpose is not to be heard by God, but to be heard by fellow men standing within earshot.

To choose an example from football, when my team needs a field goal to win and I think, ”Please, dear God, let them make it!”–that is vertical prayer. When, before the game, a group of fans joins hands and ”voluntarily” recites the Lord’s Prayer–that is horizontal prayer. It serves one of two purposes: to encourage me to join them, or to make me feel excluded.

[ . . . ]

This simple insight about two kinds of prayer, which is beyond theological question, should bring a dead halt to the obsession with prayer in public places. It doesn’t, because the purpose of its supporters is political, not spiritual. Their faith is like Dial soap: Now that they use it, they wish everyone would. I grew up in an America where people of good breeding did not impose their religious convictions upon those they did not know very well. Now those manners have been discarded.

I agree with all of that so far. Individual prayer is fine. After all, I went to a religious school most of my life, where daily prayer was just part of the routine. But of course it wasn’t compulsory for me to have gone there – I could have gone to a public school where religion wasn’t forced down anyone’s throats. Prayer aimed at excluding those different from oneself is another story.

And here’s the kicker:

Because our enemies are for the most part more enthusiastic about horizontal prayer than we are, and see absolutely no difference between church and state–indeed, want to make them the same–it is alarming to reflect that they may be having more success bringing us around to their point of view than we are at sticking to our own traditional American beliefs about freedom of religion. When Ashcroft and his enemies both begin their days with displays of their godliness, do we feel safer after they rise from their devotions?

Good question.