The most popular article at the NYTimes.com right now is about Muslim women in Europe getting their hymens surgically re-stitched so as to simulate virginity.

Why Go Under the Knife: when you can be a born again virgin?

Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are seeking certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

“If you’re a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe, you can easily end up having sex before marriage,” said Dr. Hicham Mouallem, who is based in London and performs the operation.  “So if you’re looking to marry a Muslim and don’t want to have problems, you’ll try to recapture your virginity.”

First of all, the idea of “recapturing” virginity is a little silly. Makes it sound like the virginity ran away of its own accord, which is clearly not the case.

Beyond semantics, the whole idea is depressing. Is faking virginity really the best way to deal with a young woman’s sexuality? And perhaps more importantly, why are Muslims placing such a high price on virginity? Not that this issue is a particularly Muslim one—an article in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago addressed the procedure in the context of a spa and cosmetic-surgery center in Queens. That article talks about New Yorkers getting the procedure to spice up their sex lives (doctors say it probably won’t work), and women from South America getting it because their Catholic upbringing places a high premium on marriage to a virgin.

Traditionally, virginity is associated with virtue and modesty, though I can name twenty friends who are virtuous, modest, and sexually active, and I know more than a few virgins who are horrible and slutty. In Jewish law, being a virgin means you’re worth more in your ketubah, but the text of a ketubah generally refers to the woman as a betulah, a virgin, unless she has been previously married. And since ketubot are rarely—if ever—used to sue for money, it’s a moot point.

I know of at least one Jewish text that seems to separate sexual experience and a broken hymen. There is a question as to whether one can have sex with a virgin on Shabbat, because it is assumed that during the act of sex the hymen will be torn, and it is forbidden to tear on Shabbat. The rabbis mention that there are some who are “precise in their positioning.” That is, they can have sex with a woman without breaking her hymen. These people, in theory at least, can have sex with virgins on Shabbat. (Ketubot 6b) This implies that an intact hymen wouldn’t necessarily mean that the girl in question is a virgin. Which makes the whole idea of hymen replacement pointless in the eyes of Jewish law.

Nishmat, the Jerusalem Center for Advanced Jewish Study for Women, addresses the issue of hymen replacement and Jewish law more fully here. A nice highlight:

On a purely theoretical level, it would also seem that a return to virginity is not to be strived for. Breaking of the hymen within the framework of marriage is viewed as a completion of the woman and the contract between the husband and wife, not a detraction (see for example, Encyclopedia Talmudit sv Be'ilat Mitzvah).

It’s frustrating that some women see lying to their communities and spouses at great personal expense as the only way to deal with their pasts. If only we spent more time teaching people to make good choices, and value honesty, and less time coming up with ways to get around the rules. In that vein, evangelical Christians may have beat us to the punch—they’ve been promoting a kind of mental revirginization for a while. Instead of a surgical procedure, one just re-declares him or herself a virgin. It’s a little flimsy, but somehow better than needlessly going under the knife.

Say 'Virgin!': Creepy, right?Is it just me, or are purity balls really creepy? The New York Times has a crazy story this week about a big purity ball in Colorado Springs at which more than 60 girls and their fathers dressed up and danced late into the night to celebrate their purity. The girls do a dance (in tutus with a huge wooden cross), the fathers stand up and recite a covenant, and then two men walk up to the cross and hold swords in an arch over their heads.

Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross.

I’m all for fathers spending quality time with their daughters and being a good influence on their kids, but something about this seems a tad overzealous and inappropriate. For one thing, what about the sons? Every time I turn around I see a newspaper or magazine article about how boys these days are doomed. But I’ve never heard of any mother-son galas, and while these fathers all pledge to guard their daughters’ purity none of them seem to acknowledge that if their girls are at risk for surrendering their purity it probably has something to do with how boys are being raised as well.

And it bothers me that men are the ones entrusted with these girls’ purity. Shouldn’t some of this be coming from the girls’ mothers? Aren’t they better suited to warn the girls against the perils of the ‘hook-up culture’? Why aren’t the girls being empowered to make their own good decisions about sex and purity, rather than allowing that authority to be taken over by their dads?

I’ve never been crazy about the Orthodox community’s stance on relationships, but at the very least they have women talking to women, encouraging them to make good decisions, and helping them to see the values of modesty and dignity.

In contrast, purity balls seem to infantilize the girls and inflate their fathers with a false sense of authority. Because what we need more of now is girls who can’t grow up, and men with oversized egos.

It is the question. It is the reason for Jewcy. The question's celebrated and undeserving cousin -- What will become of Judaism? -- gets all the attention and money. It's surely not as important, but its tacit implication of crisis has just the right pizazz, creates just the right amount of fear, to get the checkbooks out.

Confronting the question of what value Judaism will offer its adherents and the world at large is too complicated, creating so much fear that questions start getting asked while the checkbooks remain closed.

Judaism's rasion d'etre surfaced in an online forum of that shadowy and exclusive Jewish non-profit, Reboot (it's really quite innovative and filled with fine folks). Everything Judaism seems to be about these days - intermarriage, antisemitism, who qualifies as Jewish, the silly political machinations of this or that denomination - is so uninspiring. Tell me, the questioner pleaded, that there will be something more.

What exactly that addition will be strikes at the heart of this transitional, and one hopes transformational, moment in Judaism's history; a moment encapsulated by the shift of the central question facing the non-Ortho Jewish community of the last 100+ years from how to why be Jewish.

I'm optimistic. From monotheism to civil rights to socialism, you'd be hard-pressed to identify a social movement that Jews weren't somehow involved in or directly responsible for, including the American evangelical movement of the last 20 years (see Jewcy's story, The Jewish Jihad for Jesus).

In those movements, in the advent of monotheism itself, I see the answer in Judaism's utopian imagination. We need to reignite that imagination - on a conceptual level, in the conversations we have communally, and on a practical level in how we live our lives. We need to apply that imagination from 30,000 feet - creating movements or getting behind existing ones -- and then, on increasingly granular levels -- to our country, our states, our neighborhoods, our homes, and in our selves.

The challenge will be to get beyond the organizational rot that has made many of our institutions useless; to get beyond the scarcity of effective leadership, religious or otherwise; and finally, get to a place where we can revive Judaism as a viable conceptual technology that provides the tools and language to make good on those utopic impulses.

Paulo Coelho’s novels have sold 100 million copies in 67 languages in 150 countries. In books such as The Alchemist, Coelho’s narrative engagement with questions of faith, spirituality, and identity have inspired millions. He also sits on the board of the Shimon Peres Institute for Peace.

In this interview, Jewcy contributor Khatchig Mouradian submitted six questions to Coelho: two from Khatchig himself, three from Jewcy’s Joey Kurtzman, and one from Maro Krikorian, a Jewcy reader and Coelho devotee from Beirut, Lebanon.

Literary alchemist: CoelhoJoey Kurtzman—In the Jewish community, we have a serious problem with our religion: the large majority of young Jews do not find the religion to be spiritually insightful or appealing. Your novels are profoundly spiritual, and some Catholics have criticized you for taking unacceptable liberties with the tradition. Why do you think mainstream traditions are failing to meet the spiritual needs of modern life, and what would you recommend young ethnic Jews should do about it?

Paulo Coelho—In my opinion, the Jewish community faces the same problem Christianity faces. As a Catholic, I totally disagree with the Pope on several issues, both political and social. Benedict XVI said that “Catholicism is the ultimate truth.” Can I accept that? Of course not. He condemned the use of preservatives. Shall I follow his orders on that issue, because he is the spiritual leader of my church? No.

I think that traditional religions face this backlash because they overlook the necessity of personal faith. To follow rituals is extremely important for the cult, but religious leaders should understand our individual faith, our need for actions that truly stir the souls of the men and women. Because these institutions have been ineffective in doing this, we have been seeing a gradual disinterest in all segments of society.

I always say that religion and faith have to be thought of separately—mainly because faith is sometimes at odds with the cult. You can find this difference in other realms, including politics. We all know that laws are different from rights. We all know that certain laws may be unjust and that we have the right to oppose them if we think they are unfounded. The same goes for religion: individuals don’t accept rules that are no longer tied to their personal lives and questionings. People need meaning and only life and faith can supply this, not merely rules.

Joey Kurtzman—Along the same lines, as we try to remake our faith so that it can serve some purpose for us, how careful should we be about violating the "authenticity" of the tradition?

Paulo Coelho—First you need to be clear about the “authenticity” of tradition. In my eyes, personal faith is the beating heart of this authenticity. This is the living fabric of all religions.

True, traditions have survived many centuries and certain rituals are long-lasting. But one should not be too quick to oppose changes to the tradition. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have known changes throughout their history. Certain changes were dictated by practical reasons and others by prophets. Traditions weren’t violated but enriched and perfected. We should keep this process in mind whenever we start to question if traditions are truly being violated.

Life-changing: Coelho's best-sellerKhatchig Mouradian—In conversations with your readers, I often hear comments like, "Paulo Coelho changed my life" or "Paulo's novels have had a profound influence on me." What are your thoughts about the influence you have on your readers and what is the influence your readers have on you?

Paulo Coelho—I can’t explain why people feel the way they do after reading my books. It’s personal to them. What I can say is that all my characters are mirrors of my own soul. I’m constantly trying to understand my place in the world and I have found that literature is the best way to see myself.

I don't have a ready-made formula to apply when I embark on a new book, but my guiding principles are discipline, compassion and a sincere eagerness to understand myself.

It’s a lonely process but thanks to the internet I’ve been able to open up more and more of my experiences and thoughts to my readers.

I decided to publish ¼ of my book in my blog so that I could get to better know my readers (I have a Hebrew page, as well). I wanted them to make up their own mind about the book but also to interact with each other. This experience with them is priceless. I’ve also invited readers from my blog to a party I gave in Spain: I got to know readers to whom I’d been talking for years. I’m doing the same thing this year with another 15 readers.

Why do I do this? Because it’s pure magic. A powerful moment, when I look into the eyes of the reader, and I can see how he or she experienced my novel.

A writer is always lonely. But in that moment—which doesn't happen very often—when you see yourself in a reader’s eyes, something magical happens. Thoughts vibrate, thoughts transfer. The internet is a new way of connecting to one another.

Khatchig Mouradian—In The Alchemist, you write: “When you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Can the motivation of ordinary people really change the world?

Paulo Coelho—Some people don’t want the things they claim to want, or want things that won’t truly help them. The Universe is merely an echo of our desires, may they be constructive or destructive ones.

There is a difference between dream and obsession—the same difference that lies between a Personal Legend and a Zahir. When you follow your personal legend, you walk your path and learn from it. Your objective doesn’t blind you to the road that takes you there. On the other hand, obsession is what prevents you from admiring the teachings of life. It’s like trying to get to your objective without overcoming the obstacles.

I think that individual change is the very motor of evolution in this world. Governments and their institutions have their own inertia, which explains why some communities are left behind and their voices left unheard. These are the scenarios where ordinary people take the lead. They can, since they are individuals or small structures, adapt themselves and find new solutions.

Recently I read about Dina Abdel Wahab, who founded in Egypt the “Baby Academy” for Children with Down syndrome. She says the following about ordinary people’s role in society: “It is easier for me as an individual to take the risk and do something, than for the government to do that on a mass scale.” I couldn’t agree with her more.

Yet the actions of these people shouldn’t pass unnoticed by governments. On the contrary, governments should create a favorable environment for businesses that have social awareness in their top agenda—which can be reached through fiscal initiatives, grants, etc…

Joey Kurtzman—You are on the board of the Shimon Peres Institute for Peace. I love Israel, but I also recognize that it's easy for the dominant party to support "peace." How can we ensure that calls for "peace" in the Jewish community are not used as a means of invalidating the needs of the Palestinians?

Paulo Coelho—As Indira Gandhi once said: "You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist." We can all detect (Jews, Palestinians, as well as the international community) when a call for peace is simply a bluff.

The best insurance then is a call for peace that both parties will lose something, but at the end everybody will win. A deal is a deal. It may not be the better deal, the win-win situation, but nevertheless it is a deal, and must be pursued. At this very moment, the only winners are radicals on both sides, and this is not the ideal scenario.

Maro Krikorian—Tell us about one dream in your life that you would like to achieve?

My personal legend has always been to become a writer. I’m glad I can say that I’m fulfilling my dream. But this must not the interpreted as “the end of the line”—on the contrary—I have to commit everyday in order to stay in this path that I’ve chosen. One is constantly challenged—even by success. As for a dream that I still did not fulfill: to lock myself in a monastery for 3 months—with no Internet access.

Last year, Jewcy received an invitation to the 3rd Annual Broadway Purim Shpiel. At the time, Jewcy couldn't afford any real reporters, and both our editors, Weiss and Izzy, were indisposed.

Jewcy's editor-in-chief Raz called me into his office. "Leinoff!" he bellowed, ashes from his fat cigar dropping into his lap, "I need you to cover the 3rd Annual Broadway Purim Shpiel at the Hudson Theater on 44th Street!"

So I went, and I had a right good time. I met Doctor Ruth, Seth Rudetsky, an Israeli guy, and even some other people! Naturally, I had to go back for this year's performance.

Sadly, the 4th Annual Broadway Purim Shpiel was notably less fun than the 3rd Annual Broadway Purim Shpiel. I did enjoy the opening performance -- wherein a woman pretended to be wealthy entrepreneur and friend of Jewcy Michael Steinhardt (later in the evening, Steinhardt had someone put a bullet in her head from 1800 yards away) -- but host Jackie Hoffman was a little trying for my tastes. She came out strong, but soon her act degenerated into a series of rimshot-inducing puns on Judaism and JAPs and what-have-you. When is one time too many when it comes to "Jewish mothers cook a lot of food" jokes? Never, if you're the Broadway Purim Shpiel.

The musical numbers were the highlight of the show, but a three-piece band couldn't totally do them justice. The spoken bits were more of a chore in general. Although Iris Bahr's excerpts from her spoken off-broadway show, DAI (enough) were impressive, improv group "Don't Quit Your Night Job" failed to deliver the goods with two painful experiments in Broadway-themed comedy.

In the end, I'm glad I went. They served free dessert! (But where were the hamantaschen?) Still, the highlight of my evening shouldn't have been chasing around the same photographer who snubbed me last year, trying to snap a photo of his elusive face. But maybe that says more about me than the show.

Here's a photo gallery commemorating all the fun times we had.

Nosh Pray Love: What does this book have to say to Jews?If not for the Dalai Lama, I wouldn’t be in rabbinical school. And if not for a decade-long affair with Buddhism, I wouldn’t be a Rabbi-in-training, and certainly not a practicing Jew.

So I understand where Elizabeth Gilbert is coming from in the “Pray” section of her wildly popular bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. In “Pray,” Gilbert—a nominal Protestant from New England—moves to an ashram in India where she becomes a devout student of a Hindu guru and has moments of pure bliss and communion with God.

Maureen Farrell at The New York Post and other critics have complained that the spiritual activity Gilbert recounts in “Pray” proves only that she’s self-absorbed, vapid, and irresponsible. Her record of her passage to India, they say, is the height of American self-help narcissism—a self-involvement distinctly at odds with ‘true’ religiosity.

This is a fast and dirty critique – and I don’t buy it. Buddhist practice, in my experience, doesn’t make us more self-involved, but less. If there’s any reason to be critical of Gilbert’s time in India, it’s not because she’s engaging with another faith —but because she doesn’t engage with the world around her. Which is why the Buddhist in me loved Eat, Pray,Love, but the Jew couldn’t get behind it.

I lost my religion at age 13. A bad cocktail of too much Holocaust literature, masculine God language in prayers, and lousy Hebrew school teachers made me, the Rabbi’s daughter, an apikores – an apostate. And so in college, when all of my high school friends were heading East to Israel for the year, I boarded an Air Lanka jet to Sri Lanka, where I would spend the next five months studying Buddhism. My last month in Sri Lanka – and the one I remember best – was spent in a mountain-top nunnery in the jungle with a group of Buddhist nuns who kept trying to convince me to renounce the world and shave my head.

My response never changed: “That sounds great, and I’m flattered that you’d ask, but I don’t think my parents would like it. Also, I’m a Jew. We don’t renounce. I’m just visiting.”

I thought a lot about what exactly I meant by “just visiting” as I read the “Pray” section of Eat, Pray, Love. I thought about how my forays into Buddhist practice and Vipassana meditation have taught me to swerve from self-regard to a concern for others’ happiness, how they have increased my compassion for others and myself. I thought about how Buddhism has shown me that an awareness of my own suffering must lead to compassion for others. But mostly, I thought about how those months “just visiting” made me a much, much better someday-Rabbi.

Super JewBu: Ayya Khema was born Jewish in Germany, escaped Nazis and became a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka They also put me in tune with American religiosity. An “iPod” approach to spiritual life is par for the course in our current American cultural climate. We pick and choose the pieces we want from any religious tradition, and ignore the rest. There’s definitely something problematic about this approach to religion, but it’s not Gilbert’s problem alone.

Neither is it entirely inconsistent with the history of Judaism. Jews have a storied tradition of borrowing from religious trends in the surrounding cultures. In the 11th century, Jewish mystics began delving deeply into Sufi practices and philosophies to deepen their own experiences of God. Bahya Ibn Paquda, one of the greatest Jewish philosophical mystics of all time, was deeply shaped by Sufi ideas about God, Truth and Love. In the 13th century, Abraham Ben Maimon, the son of Maimonides, was a leader of the Sufi order in Cairo. And in the second half of the 12th century, the extreme ascetic practices of the Jewish group known as the Hasidei Ashkenaz were believed to have their provenance in Medieval Christian penitential literature.

In other words, drawing on other traditions’ spiritual successes to create a meaningful religious life is nothing new, and hardly outside the bounds of traditional Judaism. Which is why I think that it’s unfair, at least from a Jewish perspective, to dismiss Gilbert’s time in the ashram as a cop-out because she’s exploring what she wasn’t born into.

Nor is her ashram experience evidence of laziness. As anyone who’s ever spent time on a meditation cushion will tell you, there’s nothing easy about it. You try waking up at 3:30 every morning, sitting perfectly still for six hours, observing and quieting your mind, and then engaging in hard physical labor for a few more hours. Easy? Not quite. Fun? I don’t think so. Good for the world, and the Indian people living in hunger and poverty in the town where the ashram is located? Well, not necessarily, and from a Jewish perspective, that’s the question that ultimately matters.

Jewish mysticism learned a lot from guys like these: Sufi whirling dervishes The theistic and of-this-world Judaism I was raised with answers to a God and prophets who demand unremitting engagement with the world, insisting on the moral imperative to try to help fix everything broken, and help those who are in need. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. In Judaism, you only get one day a week off from engaging fully with the world (Shabbat, for those of you who weren’t paying attention in Hebrew School), and even then, you’re still bound to provide Shabbat meals for the needy and visit the sick.

Biblical and Rabbinic texts are shot through with the moral and ethical imperative to do more than navel-gazing (however transformative and healing said gazing may be for you personally). So are 19th century Hasidic parables and the 20th century thought of Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emmanuel Levinas. To be a truly religious person, all these texts, stories and thinkers tell us, is to be a person engaged with others, and responsible for them. (Judaism does have intensely contemplative strains – both philosophical and mystical – but they have been less emphasized in my Rabbi school education, and in the Reform movement I was raised in.)

I have no doubt that Gilbert’s guru would advocate for this as well. And many—if not most—folks meditating in ashrams and Buddhist retreats believe that they are cultivating compassion for self and others. For them, meditation is engaged. But for Christians and Jews raised in less contemplative, activist traditions, that can be dissatisfying and incomplete, and is, I think, what lies behind the many of the critiques of "Pray."

Here’s a personal story, offered up as illustration: My best friend has spent the last three years in a silent Tibetan Buddhist retreat in the mountains of Northern California. When I say silent, I mean silent. Once every four or five months I get a nice long letter from her, but in the interim: nada. She started her retreat about the same time that I started Rabbinical School, and when she called to tell me what she was about to do, I was living in Jerusalem, in an apartment facing the Knesset. It was just after Arafat’s death and just before the withdrawal from Gaza. My roommates were student-soldiers. And one afternoon the phone rang and she told me she was going into silent retreat for three years and that I wasn’t allowed to call her or email anymore. She told me that when I wrote letters, I couldn’t write anything at all about current events.

Deep in contemplation: A Thai Buddha statue And you know how I felt? Pissed off. Angry that she didn’t feel more responsible for the world. Then sad, of course, because I was about to lose my best friend for three years. But on the deepest level, jealous. I was jealous because I knew I could never do what she is doing, as much as I might want to. The Jewish values I was raised with tell me so, as does my chosen vocation. A few months of silent retreat? Maybe. A few weeks? Sure. But Judaism is not world-renouncing, even when I wish that it were otherwise, even when the world feels too much to bear. I can have my contemplative time, of course, and I do, every day, when I meditate on my own (and every Tuesday, when I meditate with Sharon Salzberg in downtown Manhattan), but it’s not the same.

And sometimes I still get angry, and jealous, and I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not. And this May, when she comes down the mountain from her retreat, she will live in my apartment in Brooklyn for a few days, and we will talk and eat and catch up and I will tell her what she has missed of the world in the three years she has been on the mountain-top. I will tell her what it has been like down here. I will tell her everything.

And maybe I will even decide that she’s been in a different kind of seminary for the past three years, and that’s OK – that’s as it should be. And maybe I won’t.

Because recently I’ve begun to realize that it’s a lot easier to take pot-shots at other people’s spiritual lives than to do your own inner work. It’s easier still if that person is Elizabeth Gilbert and she has a sweet book deal and the bravery or freedom to do things you won’t or can’t. As Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote: “To paraphrase a parable of Brother Kierkegaard’s, if you put a bunch of people in a lobby and give them two doors to choose between – one that says ‘transformation’ and another that says ‘lecture on transformation’, then most of them are going to line up for the lecture.”

Not So Fast, You Two: You've still got some hoops to jump through Here at Jewcy, Izzy has been keeping us in tune with all the gruesome details of wedding planning, from how to not look like a total square in front of your Indie-rock loving hipster guests and how to pick up a dress that gives you a Jewish amount of cleavage.

However, it wasn’t until this article was released by the New York Times that we realized an additional check box must be added to every Israeli’s wedding to do list: prove that you and your spouse-to-be are both Jewish. Okay, so it’s a little unusual, but totally doable, right? As it turns out, not so much – especially if your mother is American.

In his essay “How to Prove You’re a Jew?” reporter Gershom Gorenberg documents one woman’s struggle to get married in Israel, her country of origin. Even though the woman, a thirty-something named Sharon, was raised on a kibbutz, has a Jewish mother, and has “Jewish” printed on her birth certificate, it was not enough to satisfy the demands of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Before any wedding was to take place, the rabbinate wanted some proof that Sharon’s (Jewish) mother was actually Jewish.

The problem? The Israeli Chief Rabbinate expected Sharon to produce her mother’s birth and marriage certificates as evidence for her membership to the tribe. But since Sharon’s mom was born in America, where nationalities are not printed on birth certificates and people can be married by a court official rather than a rabbi, Sharon and her hubby were left royally screwed. They were told no ketubah, no dice.

So Close, Yet So Far: All that stands between these two is a ketubah

Lucky for Sharon, a few phone calls led her to Seth Farber, the Veronica Mars of Israeli marriage. Seth, rabbi and founder of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization dedicated to making Judaism as accessible to all Jews as possible, worked his magic on Sharon’s case and came through in the clutch, digging up (literally) an acceptable link to Orthodox Judaism for Sharon’s mother.

But the article definitely raises questions, and eyebrows. Between the old-world mentality of the Israeli rabbinate, growing rifts within the Orthodox movement, and increased skepticism as a cause of people falsely claiming to be Jewish, it seems that without a change in policy, it will be impossible for many Jewish couples to be married in the holy land. As Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary points out, this situation is especially discouraging for young American Jews, who will not be able to ever develop a passion for Israel when, if they ever decide to live there, will be treated with discriminatory and insulting policy.

So save your ketubahs and start lobbying. The future of your children may depend on it.

On Saturday, Mike Huckabee told a cheering crowd that he’d majored in miracles, not math. With all the religious rhetoric being thrown around this election season, we voters need a guide to understanding the volatile relationship between religion and politics in America. Fortunately for us, Dr. Jacques Berlinerblau, Associate Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown, has written the informative and often humorous Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics. I spoke with him about church, state, and of course, the Jews.

Continue reading...

I can personally vouch for David F. Smydra's insightful post into the reasons mainstream media fails at substantively covering religion. It was the summer of 1999, a year after graduation, and in the pre-millennial madness that enveloped God's city – the sanatorium averaged two messiahs a month the years before, it was getting seven a week at the time – I lost my bearings somewhere around the Damascus Gate. Only in Jerusalem can one feel so lost.

It happens to most at some point, my editor at the Jerusalem Post explained, "The book of psalms calls Jerusalem the City of God and Zechariah calls it the City of Truth – but which God and whose truth?"

The city and the country itself forces one to wrestle with these eternal questions. And without answers, the lines between fact and faith, religion and politics, the sacred and the secular blurred, leaving behind a conflicted and confused young reporter.

My parents are Israeli-born, but raised their children in America. I've been straddling borders religious, national or otherwise all my life. I thought I was as well equipped as anyone to deal with whatever Israel threw at me: a degree in philosophy from Vassar, a thesis on Kierkegaard and Jewish thought, and a six-month research and ethnographic study at Hebrew University.

It wasn't enough to cover religion in Israel. While interviewing a Sufi mystic in Ramallah, the man leaned over and whispered, "Hamas will some day live by the words of Rumi and not the sword of Allah." If I had known then that he was referring to the 13th century poet Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, who preached tolerance, I would have recognized the importance of his statement. A Palestinian religious leader was, in effect, condemning his own. It didn't make the paper, because I didn't realize what was meant till much later.

Many of my colleagues had similar experiences. The American Press, by and large, lacks a critical perspective informed by knowledge. To a journalist, skepticism is the pillar in which all else is built. But how can one honestly question doctrine or deed without an understanding of either?

In Israel, my experience as a journalist begged the question of how religion is covered. In America, it's why religion isn't covered enough.

After a year, I left the Jerusalem Post to help start a media venture started by CNN executives targeting Baby Boomers, a demographic in hot pursuit of 'what it all means.' I interviewed Deepak Chopra, Rabbi Harold Kushner, leading academics and other figures in the spiritual marketplace, and I came to understand that you cannot grapple with America, its history and contemporary forces, without understanding the nature and history of its religious life.

Spotty religious reporting isn't a new thing. Louis Cassels wrote a much-read syndicated religion column from 1959 to 1973 for United Press International. He admitted that the worst error he remembered making was repeating the historically discredited claim that Islam was spread forcibly by the sword during religion's years of early growth, "My error stemmed from plain ignorance rather than malice."

Faith matters, and not only within the walls of a church, synagogue or mosque. There is Bible study at a Houston oil and gas company. Weekly yoga at dot-coms. Torah class at Microsoft and Islamic study at Whirlpool. In this year's presidential elections, there are relentless invocations of the Almighty. So why isn't coverage better? Why do editors show such a disregard when pitched with a religion story?

A media and religion survey by the First Amendment Center found that 76% of religion writers felt that formal training in religious studies is either helpful or essential. Sadly, 6 out of 10 writers said they had no such training.

Much of the media views religion suspiciously, or worse, as irrelevant. Journalists deal in matters of fact, religion in matters of faith, and rarely the twain shall meet. When they do, it's usually because religion intersects with politics or scandal. The latter usually determines the treatment of the former and as a result neither is dealt with wisely. So it's not just a question of giving religion more prominence, but encountering it with more understanding.

More important than the sort of knowledge one gains in the academy is what you might call religious street smarts or pew-level understanding. Contending with the powerful convictions and lofty ideas inherent to the beat require an intellectual grounding supported by a naive narrator's immersion into the experience of faith -- what journalists covering a war call "embedded." The "small" stories, the quiet, daily influence of religion on people's lives are as important as the larger issues that arise from covering belief systems or religious philosophy.

Is anyone doing a good job? There are a handful. Jeff Sharlet, editorial adviser to Jewcy, may be among the finest. His investigative reports from the evangelical front lines appearing in publications like Rolling Stone and Harpers are the very embodiment of pew-level reportage that are also intellectually grounded. His daily review of religion and the press, called The Revealer, is one of the better religion sites on the Web.

Here's a snapshot of what Sharlet, and his colleagues at The Revealer, find worthwhile elsewhere on the Web:

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion looks at "religion in the news" from a perspective that's not so much liberal as relentlessly skeptical of absurdity, and intrigued by belief.

Casing the Promised Land offers an intelligent roundup of religion news from a center-left perspective.

Christianity Today's blog is a superb resource regardless of your faith or lack thereof. Regular blogger Ted Olson roams far and wide and has the wisdom to bring back more than just the controversy of the day.

DeepBlog: Not a God beat blog itself, but a good directory to the blogosphere with a growing list of "Spiritual Blogs."

Direland, a sharply written politcs and media blog by journalist Doug Ireland, occasionally runs a "theocracy watch" colum

On Religion is an excellent newsclipping service -- terrific links to the hot topic of the moment and good finds from the lesser-known press.

OpEdNews's Religion and Politics page publishes a fine collection of original, politically progressive religion essays as well as links to other noteworthy religion articles.

The Raving Atheist, "An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief [on] How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics," is an intensely intelligent, often funny, and all around well-made blog that's good enough for true believers as well as godless folk.

Relapsed Catholic is a fierce godblog without mercy for liberals or unbelievers, by Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian journalist and poet with a sharp eye for the absurd and compelling.

Brian Flemming is the man behind Bat Boy: The Musical, and his blog is everything you'd expect from a man with such interests. Which, naturally, include religion, commented on from a smart, liberal perspective. Mostly limited to the news of the day, you'll find original ideas here, and, if you care to do some free associating with Brian's other interests, genuine inspiration.

Makeout City's Jay McCarthy understands the art of linking and the collage possibilities of threading together fragments from around the web -- whether they're his own thoughts or collected ideas from others, his posts are always essays. Jay is a man who gets the Montaignesque potential of blog. He often comments on religion, a subject in which Jay has read widely and eclecticly.

The Claremont Review of Books, put out by the conservative Claremont Institute ("a new, reinvigorated conservatism, one that draws upon the timeless principles of the American founding, and applies them to the moral and political problems that we face today") is an interesting, intellectual read, whether or not you agree with their purpose, to help conservatism "understand its own majestic purposes, and become a more effective political force."

Nth Position is a webzine that advertises "high weirdness" in all areas of inquiry; investigate their "strangeness" category for manifestations of the divine. Excellent writing and surprisingly good reporting (given that there's limited cash behind this fine endeavor).

Oliver Willis bills himself as "kryptonite to stupid," and we can testify to that slogan's truth. Hey, wait -- does that make us dumb? Nah. It just means Oliver is really smart. His popular blog is mostly political talk from a "center-left" perspective, but we think it's relevant to Revealer readers because Oliver gets the role of religion in American politics. That is, he gets that it has one, whether we like it or not, and that Dems and liberals in the U.S. are blind to its full influence and importance beyond the borders of New York and L.A.

One Inch Ahead features an interesting confluence of spirit and flesh--in the occasionally religious musings of a long distance runner.

Give the appalling Mitt Romney a little credit. The Big Speech of ten days ago contained one striking image for which I hope someone on his payroll got a bonus:

I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired ... so grand ... so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer.

He is, of course, right: church attendances in many European countries have declined to the extent that in Britain, for example, there are now more regular attendees at mosque every week than in our churches - fewer than 10% of the population are regular churchgoers and that is expected to halve in the next generation.

Romney chose to attribute this to the state establishment of religion(s) in European nations (but then, as the adherent of a minority faith, he would, wouldn't he?), but there are any number of equally plausible theories which might explain falling attendances, not least the rise of empiricism and the development - primarily, but not exclusively, in Western Europe - of the scientific method, which in turn allowed us to build an explanation of the world around us that did not rely on a God, gods or Flying Spaghetti Monster to make it tick.

Irrespective of the reasons for the different outlooks Europeans and Americans have towards religion in the 21st century, my problems with Mitt Romney have nothing to do with Mormonism and everything to do with moronism. Suspicions were first aroused back in May - which for a foreigner, I reckon, puts me in on the ground floor - when Mitt contributed this razor-sharp analysis of the jihadist menace facing the West:

"They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And they've come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."

To say that this is an analysis which would shame a Fox news anchor is not just an easy shot, because Brit Hume doesn't have the nuclear codes. Either way, I began to wonder if there was anything between this guy's collar and his haircut. But I still didn't have much to go on, until a few weeks later from the Boston Globe came the infamous tale of the family dog Seamus, whose carrier Romney had attached to the roof of their Chevy station wagon for a 12-hour drive to Ontario, entirely oblivious to the possibility that bombing along the Interstate at 70 mph might terrify the mutt:

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway.

This, the Globe hilariously opined, was "a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management." To me he just came across as a wanker. Say what you like about Brit Hume, but to the best of my knowledge he's never driven 12 hours with a dog strapped to the roof of his fucking car. (Fortunately, dog lovers have a means of redress.)

But the more serious issues cannot be ignored. As many commentators pointed out, not least Jewcy's own Michael Weiss on these pages, Romney's supposed disavowal of a "religious test" for the Presidency was as disturbing as it was self-serving, because it was phrased carefully to be inclusive only of people of faith (such as, er, Mitt Romney and GOP primary voters) and made no mention whatever of those of us who profess none, or even whose faith does not inform their political decisionmaking. The crass crescendo of his speech - "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom", which will be news to the people of Sweden and Saudi Arabia respectively - only served to underline the distance that separates modern American politics from its European analogues.

In Britain we have a slightly different kind of ‘religious test'. Tony Blair phrased it best in an interview aired some time after he stepped down last summer; "you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter". His Rove-esque media handler, Alistair Campbell, famously said to reporters that "we don't do God", because there was real terror within the Blair camp that any overt mention of religious faith, no matter how carefully spun, would alienate far more voters than it would impress.

When it comes to religion, British people really do play up to your stereotype; it's not really something we like to discuss in polite society - indeed, something slightly embarrassing. To the vast majority of Europeans - including those, like me, who count ourselves as being of the Right - a statement such as that of Mike Huckabee that "if anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it", would be grounds for instant dismissal as a serious contender for public office at just about any level.

No doubt Team Huckabee congratulated themselves afterwards on finding a formula that allowed them to sidestep a potentially tricky question but, as with the ridiculous Romney, I could only marvel at how close this dolt is to being the Republican nominee for the White House. (Hitchens gives him both barrels in Slate today, and as ever with the Dude it's an unqualified joy.) Indeed, Huckabee said later on in that same debate that "it's interesting that that question would even be asked of somebody running for president". Well, they wouldn't have to ask it if they didn't suspect that you'd have such an off-the-charts barking mad answer, would they, you twat?

I don't mean to come across as a militant atheist in the Dawkins-Hitchens mould, because by and large I am not. Powerful personal faith has a range of corollaries, many of them very positive - and there are times when I envy the certainty that religious belief can bring. Nor do I write this in a spirit of transatlantic mockery or superiority, because God knows - if you'll pardon the phrase - that when I look at the politicians in my own country I am filled with unutterable despair.

Is the British religious test - requiring of politicians that any religious belief be kept firmly private and in the background - healthier than the American position, particularly but by no means exclusively the preserve of the GOP, that candidates must wear their faith on every shirtsleeve in a frantic effort to assure the voters that they are people of moral solidity who can be trusted with the great seal of office? Yes, I think it is, but that's not to say that you're wrong if you disagree. And that, finally, is the point; I have no intention of forcing my moral code, such as it is, on you, but I naturally suspect all politicians of wanting to force their beliefs on me. And when those beliefs have the force of God's hand behind them, I start to get very nervous indeed, irrespective of the purity of His servants' motives.

Steve Chapman has a nice piece at Reason dissecting the flagrant and transparent hypocrisy of Mitt Romney’s call to religious voters to put aside their misgivings about his creed in order to unite behind him in a popular front against godless heathens.

Chapman devotes some space to debunking Romney’s preposterous claim that “[f]reedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” writing

Romney's theory that faith is essential to liberty suggests he has yet to visit the modern world. He doesn't try to explain countries like Germany, France and Norway—free democracies where most people no longer believe in God. Religion is not exactly synonymous with personal freedom in, say, the Muslim world. Organized Christianity once coexisted comfortably with, and often sponsored,
oppression in Europe and elsewhere.

Which is all quite right, and explodes Romney’s assertion in the context in which almost everybody has interpreted it. I want to make a small analytic point, though, that there is a tradition of deploying, with terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’, a concept or concepts that very few of us would associate with freedom or liberty, but which makes the “freedom requires religion” claim a conceptual truth. For example, you can see in Kant’s claim that “we assume that we are free so that we may think of ourselves as subject to moral laws," and that we "think of ourselves as subject to moral laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of the will,” the potential move to a position that action predicated on rejecting the concept of morality Kant proffers (which is a deduction from the nature of practical reason) also rejects the concept of freedom, “an idea of reason whose objective reality is in itself questionable.”

The upshot would be that an irrational actor cannot be said to be free --- so it is only by accepting the dictates of morality, which may include God on some pictures of morality, that one can be free. (Not that this is necessarily Kant’s position, but it is a direction one could go, and some people have gone; I read Hegel as advancing a view very close to that one, for example.)

This treatment of freedom becomes a bit easier to grasp, and looks all the more idiosyncratic, when viewed on a global and political, rather than individual scale. Kant possibly, and Rousseau definitely, promise a republic of free citizens --- whose freedom consists in assenting to a “general will,” which only reflects their preferences if their preferences reflect the structures of rationality, as construed by Kant and Rousseau. As Julian Sanchez puts it:

What this means in practice, of course, is that the legislator can simply do whatever he thinks is best, and still claim to be following "the will of the people" in some suitably abstract, hypothetical sense. Recall this the next time some pol or flack confidently declares what "the American People" want, demand, value, or won't stand for. There's a fair chance they're referring to the ideal Platonic "American People" in their head—a population that, miraculously, seems always to hold the same views as the speaker.

The parallel to this line of thinking, which incorporates religion explicitly, and therefore touches on the contents of Romney’s speech directly, is the quasi-tradition within Catholic philosophy --- which is essentially a Talmudic approach to reading Aquinas, who in turn was recapitulating Aristotle for a Christian audience, and several other church fathers --- according to which human freedom is parasitic on man’s telos, such that action deviating from that telos cannot be said to be free. And what is man’s telos? Well, medieval philosophy isn’t my specialty, but from what I know it involves being a sincere and devout member in good standing of the Roman Catholic Church.

You can see this view reflected in the premium placed on a religious concept of free will in Catholic teaching, juxtaposed with denunciations of liberal freedom and freedom of choice as we understand them, from Cardinal Ratzinger inveighing against the “liberal-radical ideology of individualistic rationalistic hedonistic character,” to Daniel P. Moloney’s suggestion that “the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally.” [Ed note: Moloney should give Ratzinger an iPod and ask him which venue is more congenial to forgetting about God --- but I digress.] The basic idea is that God gives people free will in order to glory in His commands, so that turning away from God means turning away from freedom too. Deviating from one’s telos can be freely chosen, but in some idiosyncratic sense, by so deviating one ceases to act freely.

Adapting the Ratzinger-Moloney line to Romney’s everybody-but-the-atheists ecumenicism, it’s easy to see what Romney might have been asserting (though he probably wasn’t): Freedom is conceptually contained within religious belief --- any religious belief at all, it doesn’t matter which --- so those who do not submit to God lack a concept of freedom, and therefore can’t experience it.

Or as someone else once said, freedom is slavery.

"Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin."

Had Mitt Romney simply left it at that, he'd have passed the biggest sniff-test on his religion by giving the public a sworn commitment to which it could hold him. This is what JFK did, greasing the wheels for his own galloping folly of an administration.

Yet I can't see how Romney's speech, taken as a whole, doesn't come off as anything other than a verbal and philosophical disaster. Take this fatuous remark:

"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

There is no such thing as the "religion of secularism." It ranks not as even a cute form of semantic jujitsu. An atheist who goes to the Supreme Court asking that his son be excused from delivering a pledge of allegiance with the words "Under God" in it is an atheist who chooses not to be anesthetized by warm consensus and to hold the First Amendment to its own clear language. There is nothing "religious" in this. Laws exist either to be broken or upheld. Although it is refreshing to see the faithful using the term pejoratively, sneeringly for a change -- if only they followed this line of thought to its logical conclusion.

"The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

"Under God" was a phrase used by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. It was then added, at the bullying insistence of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 as way of underscoring our providential mission in the cold war. In neither case is this meaningless preposition a gift from the founders.

But what should really set one's teeth on edge is this bit from Romney's speech:

And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.

A fine follow-up sentence would be: "So do those Americans without belief." Alas, too bad for Mitt. I wasn't voting for him anyway, but now I count him a political enemy.

In the climate of our postmodern culture, few things are less "post" than defending science and rationality against superstition and wooly thinking. With most engaged in the hysterical bid to adopt the correctly "nuanced perspective" and a "wide reaching respect for difference" combined with an "open mind" that is "resistant to totalizing," it seems as if today one needn't look far to find the next public conversation where cognitive dissonance is celebrated and clear thinking is dismissed as "arrogance." Last night's King's College-sponsored debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza at the Center For Ethical Culture was only another such event.

Debate roundups for these scenarios can be every bit as useless as the book reviews of Hitchens and D'Souza's respective diatribes against and in favor of religion. Both debaters make their cases about as well as they can be made. Whether you prefer the acerbic anti-theistic style of one or the pulpit punditry of the other is a matter of taste. Whether you think one was more right than another, however, depends on your basic understanding of rational argumentation and the scientific method as well as the limitations of both.

What's most interesting in this regard is not D'Souza, who essentially regurgitates theistic errors and rhetorical sidesteps, but those in the audience who applauded his points. But this isn't to say they were all idiots. D'Souza himself is a well-spoken fellow, with a decent enough command of the history of science and the ins-and-outs of certain philosophical problems. It is precisely what he upheld in spite of intelligence and knowledge that becomes the most intriguing/disturbing. D'Souza knew the speed of light off the top of his head (easy enough, but still uncommon), he knew the legacy of seminal geneticists, and a few basics about Einstein (even if he tried underhandedly to pass him off as a theist). The majority of the great scientific minds throughout history, he said, were religious, therefore science is proof of religion's truth. He had the auditorium's Christians alight with the notion that their camp had been responsible for the majority of scientific accomplishment throughout history. But for the things he did know, did he not know that the majority of minds throughout history have been religious due in no small part to the threat of death for proclaiming any other worldview--a threat that has been with most humans for most of their years on this planet?

D'Souza's compartmentalized his thinking and is thus so unaware of what it feels like to stand on solid argumentative ground, he couldn't possibly be aware how much he's leap-frogging. What do I mean by leap-frogging? One example: in his opening statements, he proposed to prove the value of religion on the basis of evidence with no recourse to superstition. For the remainder of the discussion, he proceeded to remind everyone that certainty was problematic, thus negating the atheist's adherence to evidential argument. Furthermore, he consistently reproached Hitchens for not presenting evidence, meanwhile failing to live up to his initial promise. Instead, he reiterated the impossibility of evidence-based certainty. Whatever lily-pad will keep you from sinking, I guess...

But Hitchens could have done more to educate the folks who were getting off on his opponent's bullshit (and I mean that in the most Harry G. Frankfurt sense of the word). Not once did he remind Dinesh that atheism is not a firm belief but rather a stance with regard to knowledge. In fact, D'Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I'd have like to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one's unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity and disqualifies him as one worth paying any attention to when he speaks about the universe and the human mind operating according to a rational set of laws.

But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws--laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist's argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a "mind" who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as 'compassion') then what's happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person's brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist's notion of the "I" that makes choices that bear on "my" eternal soul. If I'm a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it's electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver's seat for the soul--the site where "you" make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the "I" that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain's interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the "I" isn't aware of and couldn't control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the "I"s will someday go because of things they did or didn't do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human "I" in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D'Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist--not the atheist--to explain, one that isn't unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the "I" come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world's increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren't hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D'Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.

People can throw around things like "nuance," "respect for difference," "open mindedness," and "resistance to totalizing schemes" all they like. To be sure, each quality is desirable. But what's undesirable is when these catchphrases are taken as gospel by smart people and turned into smokescreens for scientific illiteracy. This is precisely where the collusion of the faithful and the post-modernists takes place--it's an alliance soldered together by these kinds of platitudes that make an enemy out of evidence, should evidence possibly create some friction. It would even appear to arise from a need, common to both the post-modernists and the faithful, to be just a little more clever than science. A little more current. A little more du jour. The Christians want to be so far ahead of their time they're always extending the timelines. Death? Nah, they're ahead of the game. End of Earth? Ahead. End of the universe? So five minutes ago. They're livin' forever.

But really, the most difficult thing to swallow is these are mostly smart people. To quote Frankfurt, this is the essence of bullshit--the bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." Plenty of that going around courtesy of King's College last night in New York City.

[Watch the Hitchens/D'Souza debate here.]

Headlines were made in Britain this week when it emerged that some checkout workers at one of our largest supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s, are refusing to handle alcohol products because of their Muslim beliefs. The supermarket has pronounced itself happy to accommodate their sensibilities, and so if your cashier objects to the bottle of wine you’ve got in your basket, you’ll have to wait for another member of staff to come across and ring the purchase through for you. There has been some pleasingly acerbic commentary from the blogosphere as a result, notably Scottish schoolteacher Shuggy, who’s now on the lookout for a new posting:

Quite. But a private retailer is perfectly entitled to make whatever arrangements it sees fit with its employees; if my local Sainsbury’s has long lines at the checkout, maybe next time I’ll take my custom elsewhere. The consequences of allowing people to pick and choose which parts of their jobs they are happy to perform, however, go much further than queuing to buy booze. Some Muslim doctors in the British National Health Service are going so far as to purposely avoid lectures on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases, because it offends their religious beliefs. From the Sunday Times:

Nor, of course, is this solely a Muslim issue. In the US such religious considerations are more often voiced by Christian doctors, particularly in the context of emergency contraception and fertility treatments. Notable cases have included a lesbian woman in California was refused artificial insemination because of her sexual orientation, and a doctor in Washington refused to fill out the prescription that would have put lead in a gay man’s pencil.

Religious groups argue that individual physicians and pharmacists should be allowed to choose what procedures they will perform (being pro-choice isn’t always bad, then, eh?). And some degree of accommodation for religious sensibilities does seem sensible – no doctor is forced to perform abortions, and indeed many on both sides of the Atlantic do not, and this is surely right.

But abortion in the US and UK is, by and large, freely available. You schedule an appointment to have the procedure done and it is done; you don’t give a damn if someone has passed on performing it. And, despite the best efforts of activists, time limits are generally fairly generous; a delay of a day or two is seldom of much consequence. But not all medical situations have time on their side.

Picture the case of the woman who has been raped and goes to an emergency room to try and get the morning-after pill, only to be turned away on religious grounds. It’s been claimed – by a pro-choice Catholic group – that only 167 of 597 Catholic hospitals in the US offer emergency contraception to women who have been raped. Quite apart from the emotional distress involved in having to go from hospital to hospital to find a non-judgemental pharmacist (“I sympathise, honey, but you don’t have the right to kill that baby”), emergency contraception is more effective the quicker it is taken. (Nor, by the way, is this a mere debating point. It’s estimated that there are 25,000 pregnancies in the US every year as a result of rape. Read that sentence again.)

Freedom of religion is an important right and, in the sphere of private worship, inviolable, but it seems to me that if you take the Hippocratic oath then you don’t get to turn patients away at the door because you don’t approve of their lifestyles. I say this as a libertarian who believes, strongly, in an individual’s freedom to believe whatever he likes and practice his religion accordingly. But when we have a situation where doctors are not even willing to learn about diseases like gonorrhea, or cirrhosis of the liver, simply because they disapprove of the lifestyle choices that hasten their onset, then those choices are putting lives at risk, and that’s just not acceptable. Refusing to show up for those bits of the course you don’t care for just shouldn’t be an option.

And who’s to say it ends here? What about white supremacists that don’t want to treat black patients? Are we to permit Christian fundamentalists to refuse treatment to drug users? Democrats? Jews? (If so, that’s Aaron Sorkin fucked.) And if you think that’s ridiculous, exactly what is the bloody difference? If you call yourself a doctor, and you’re tempted – even for a second – to pass on treating a patient with liver damage because your religion forbids you from drinking alcohol, you might want to stop and ask yourself if you aren’t in the wrong profession. Wouldn’t you be happier cutting hair or running a dry cleaner’s instead? 

Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what religious garb you dress it in. It’s a shame so many people are willing to make excuses for it.

A.J. Jacobs spent the past year living according to the Bible as literally as possible. That meant no pork, no sitting on a chair on which a woman has previously perched (you never know if she might be menstruating), and no mixing fibers. In this excerpt from his book, The Year of Living Biblically, he wades gingerly into the world of Biblical punishment.

* * *

Everybody must get stoned: PebblesThey shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them.
—Leviticus 20:27

The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that. It wasn’t just for murder. You could also be executed for adultery, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, perjury, incest, bestiality, and witchcraft, among others. A rebellious son could be sentenced to death. As could a son who is a persistent drunkard and glutton.

The most commonly mentioned punishment method in the Hebrew Bible is stoning. So I figure, as the very least, I should try to stone. But how?

I can’t tell you the number of people who have suggested that I get adulterers and blasphemers stoned in the cannabis sense. Which is an interesting idea. But I haven’t smoked pot since I was at Brown University, when I wrote a paper for my anthropology class on the hidden symbolism of bong hits. (Brown was the type of college where this paper actually earned a B+.)

Instead I figured my loophole would be this: The Bible doesn’t specify the size of the stones. So…pebbles.

A few days ago, I gathered a handful of small white pebbles from Central Park, which I stuffed in my back pants pocket. Now all I needed were some victims. I decided to start with Sabbath breakers. That’s easy enough to find in this workaholic city. I noticed that a potbellied guy at Avis down our block had worked on both Saturday and Sunday. So no matter what, he’s a Sabbath breaker.

Here’s the thing, though: Even with pebbles, it is surprisingly hard to stone people.

My plan had been to walk nonchalantly past the Sabbath violator and chuck the pebbles at the small of his back. But after a couple of failed passes, I realized it was a bad idea. A chucked pebble, no matter how small, does not go unnoticed.

My revised plan: I would pretend to be clumsy and drop the pebble on his shoe. So I did.

And in this way I stoned. But it was probably the most polite stoning in history— I said, “I’m sorry,” and then leaned down to pick up the pebble. And he leaned down at the same time, and we almost butted heads, and then he apologized, then I apologized again.

Highly unsatisfying.

Today I get another chance. I am resting in a small public park on the Upper West Side, the kind where you see retirees eating tuna sandwiches on benches.

“Hey, you’re dressed queer.”

Dreaming of GMILFs: Recent studies confirm that people's sex lives don't end once they hit 70 I look over. The speaker is an elderly man, mid-seventies, I guess. He is tall and thin and wearing one of those caps that cabbies wore in movies from the forties.

“You’re dressed queer,” he snarls. “Why you dressed so queer?”

I have on my usual tassels, and, for good measure, have worn some sandals and am carrying a knotty maple walking stick I bought on the internet for twenty-five dollars.

“I’m trying to live by the rules of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers…”

“You’re stoning adulterers?”

“Yeah, I’m stoning adulterers.”

“I’m an adulterer.”

“You’re currently an adulterer?”

“Yeah. Tonight, tomorrow, yesterday, two weeks from now. You gonna stone me?”

“If I could, yes, that’d be great.”

“I’ll punch you in the face. I’ll send you to the cemetery.”

He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.

I fish out my pebbles from my back pocket.

“I wouldn’t stone you with big stones,” I say. “Just these little guys.”

I open my palm to show him the pebbles. He lunges at me, grabbing one out of my hand, then flinging it at my face. It whizzes by my cheek.

I am stunned for a second. I hadn’t expected this grizzled old man to make the first move. But now there is nothing stopping me from retaliating. An eye for an eye.

I take one of the remaining pebbles and whip it at his chest. It bounces off.

“I’ll punch you right in the kisser,” he says.

“Well, you really shouldn’t commit adultery,” I say.

We stare at each other. My pulse has doubled.

Yes, he is a septuagenarian. Yes, he had just threatened me using corny Honeymooners dialogue. But you could tell: This man has a strong dark side.

Our glaring contest lasts ten seconds, then he walks away, brushing me as he leaves.

Teaching kids that violence doesn't pay since 1971: Meathead and crew When I was a kid, I saw an episode of All in the Family in which Meathead— Rob Reiner’s wussy peacenik character— socked some guy in the jaw. Meathead was very upset about this. But he wasn’t upset that he committed violence; he was upset because it felt so good to commit violence.

I can relate. Even though mine was stoning lite, barely fulfilling the letter of the law, I can’t deny: It felt good to chuck a rock at this nasty old man. It felt primal. It felt like I was getting vengeance on him. This guy wasn’t just an adulterer, he was a bully. I wanted him to feel the pain he’d inflicted on others, even if that pain was a tap on the chest.

Like Meathead, I also knew that that this was a morally stunted way to feel. Stoning is about as indefensible as you can get. It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality? Later that week, I ask my spiritual adviser Yossi about stoning. Yossi was born in Minnesota and calls himself a “Jewtheran”— Jewish guilt and Lutheran repression mesh nicely, he told me. He’s an ordained Orthodox rabbi but never practiced, instead opting for the shmata trade— he sold scarves to, among others, the Amish. He’s tall and broad shouldered with a neatly trimmed beard. In his spare time, Yossi writes wry essays about Jewish life, including a lament about how his favorite snack, Twinkies, recently became nonkosher. I met him through Aish Ha Torah, an Orthodox outreach group.

He isn’t fazed by my question at all.

We don’t stone people today because you need a biblical theocracy to enforce the stoning, he explains. No such society exists today. But even in ancient times, stoning wasn’t barbaric.

“First of all, you didn’t just heave stones,” says Yossi. “The idea was to minimize the suffering. What we call ‘stoning’ was actually pushing the person off the cliff so they would die immediately upon impact. The person getting executed was given strong drink to dull the pain.”

Plus, the stonings were a rare thing. Some rabbis say executions occurred only once every seven years, others say even less often. There had to be two witnesses to the crime. And the adulterer had to be tried by a council of seventy elders. And, weirdly, the verdict of those seventy elders could not be unanimous— that might be a sign of corruption or brainwashing. And so on.

I half-expected Yossi to say they gave the adulterer a massage and a gift bag. He made a compelling case. And yet, I’m not totally sold. Were biblical times really so merciful? I suspect there might be some whitewashing going on. As my year progresses, I’ll need to delve deeper.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY

A.J. Jacobs kept a Jewcy blog last week in which he wrote about

• how his project worked
• the Biblical injunction against mixing wool with linen
• visiting a Creationist museum
• observing Shabbat by spending four hours in the bathroom
  

Jon Papernick tried a similar experiment in observance as "The Perfect Jew," in which he embraced Jewish rituals such as

• wearing a kippah for a week
• bathing in a mikvah
• negotiating like a macher
• keeping Shabbat

After finding out that the cutest boy she'd ever seen in real life was sending her dirty text messages from his honeymoon, Tamar Fox looked into Jewish laws around adultery.

Speaking of religious literalism, stoning still happens in some parts of the world. Ali Eteraz discusses America's role in promoting Iraq's new, not-exactly-woman-friendly constitution.