If you haven’t yet heard of it, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the Ravel/Unravel project.  “Unravel your assumptions” is their motto.  And they’re asking you to help them ravel your unraveling into something wonderfully new — “a multimedia exploration of the tapestry of religious and spiritual identities that make up our communities and our world.”  (See the video below.)

Begun a year ago by Project Interfaith in Omaha, Ravel/Unravel is an invitation:  “We’re exploring the tapestry of religious and spiritual identities that make up our communities and the complexities of how we construct and deconstruct identity.  We invite you to view the stories that make up RavelUnravel and add to the movement by sharing your own.”

Close to a thousand people have taken up that invitation so far.  And it’s fun to do.  Just turn on the camera in your phone or your computer, follow the prompts on the website, and upload your answers.  Yes, I’m already there, part of a rainbow gathering of age and gender, ethnicity and nationality, faith and spirituality, including (but not limited to) Christians, Muslims and Jews of all denominations, Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs, agnostics and atheists and secular humanists, Native Americans and pantheists.

The questions you’re prompted to speak to (reasonably briefly!):

1. What is your first name?

2. What is your religious or spiritual identity and why do you identify as such?

3. What is a stereotype that impacts you based on your religious or spiritual identity?

4. Have you found your community welcoming of your chosen religious or spiritual path? Why or why not?

5. Is there anything else you would like us to know about you and your religion or belief system?

My advice:  don’t overthink it, just do it.  And enjoy it.  As the director of Project Interfaith says here:  “This isn’t about theology;  this is about community.”

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[youtube=http://youtu.be/PEZ2-otmWdU]

Last month, Town Hall Seattle ran a program called ‘Three Lives,’  originally touted as eulogies of three public figures — Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-Il, and Vaclav Havel — linked by the sole fact that they’d happened to die within four days of each other in December.  I was asked to speak about Hitchens.  “No way,” I said.  “Not unless you’re ready for an anti-eulogy.”

They were.

Here’s the video, in which I start at about the 4.45 time mark, running to 23.10.

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But if you want to see a really great presentation, go back to the video and start at the 57.35 mark, where ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie and actors Bob Wright and Tom Carrato deliver a stunning tribute to Vaclav Havel, inspiring me to go out and buy a copy of ‘Disturbing the Peace’ the next day, when I also read this moving assessment by his long-time translator, Paul Wilson.  I’m only sorry Havel had to die for me to pay closer attention.  But then that’s kind of Wilson’s point.

Can a sense of irony be essential to a sense of religion?   Kent Hayden, a newly graduated and entirely non-accidental theologist, argues exactly that today over at the Huffington Post (full article here).

Taking off from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s October 30 Rally to Restore Sanity — which seems to have made a lot of people feel quite good, despite the fact that its small-format TV-studio brand of irony was clearly an uncomfortable fit on the large open stage of the Washington Mall — Hayden ends up with this mini-manifesto:

Stewart and Colbert exploded the absurd in our political discourse so that a satirical generation can take the future of our country seriously. It is unclear what exactly that will look like going forward, but in the moment, it felt like a quarter-million people smiling broadly in the October sun.

If we were to explode the absurd in religion, if we exposed the fallacy of our reductive handling of systems of understanding the deep questions of life, would the same kind of sincerity emerge from our irony?

If Generation Irony came to our houses of worship carrying satirical signs that read “God Hates Figs,” and we laughed at clips of the simplistic and divisive rhetoric that makes us ashamed to call ourselves Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists or whatever, and if we sang familiar songs together and listened past the demonization of the other, what would happen? If we exposed all the things that make our religious discourse absurd — all the squawking about other peoples’ sins, all the fighting about which language to use to describe the ineffable, all the simple-minded conflation of poetry and prose, and the universalizing of the particular — I suspect that there would be enough sincere goodwill floating in the wake of our laughter to give us goosebumps again, and to help us take seriously the future of our religious traditions.

Never mind for now that Hayden seems to imagine that satire and irony are the same thing.   (Satire attacks from the outside, while irony works its effect from within, subtly subverting the false premises of its target.)   He still has an excellent point.

The subversive power of irony applied to what passes for religion in these televangelist Bible/Quran-thumping times can help us see past the kindergarten caricature of the divine in which God is cast as the class bully dictating what we should love or hate — a small-minded god for small-minded people.   And once we’re past that caricature, we might be more open to the idea that what we so casually call ‘God’ is merely a reductive shorthand for something that is, by definition, beyond human comprehension.

Just about every religious person I respect — and there are many of them — comes equipped with a healthy sense of irony.  How else can one be both religious and intelligent in today’s polarizing world, where slogans pass for thought and certainty replaces humility?  How else escape the dehumanizing trap of hating people in the name of loving God?

The fact that humorless bigots loudly proclaim their piety is no reason to cede religion to them, just as there’s no reason to cede the United States to Tea Partiers loudly proclaiming their crude sense of patriotism.   If some people like their religion small and petty, I pity them.  For the rest of us,  it’s time to polish up our sense of irony and admire the accidental theology of a sign that reads ‘God Hates Signs.’

Okay, so it’s hard not to crow in ironic delight about this one:  turns out atheists and agnostics score higher than religious Americans on a test of religious knowledge.  Howzat for un-believable!

A new survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that one of the most deeply religious countries in the world — the US — is abysmally ignorant when it comes to the most basic facts of religious belief and observance (though I suspect that the survey could have been about anything — geography, history, politics — and the results would have been equally abysmal).

Before you start in with the crowing, however, consider this:   Even atheists and agnostics averaged only 67% correct answers.  Yup — a basic test of 32 pretty basic multiple-choice questions, and they got only two thirds of them right.

How basic?  Well,  is Ramadan part of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam?   Or does the Jewish sabbath begin on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?  Or what are the names of the four Gospels?

You can take an abbreviated fifteen-question quiz here (it’s slow, as though it assumes you need time to say a quick prayer before selecting an answer) and  read the summary of the Pew report here.  But to get the full impact of the depth of ignorance, if you can stand it, scroll though Appendix B (a pdf file whose link is at the end of the next-to-last paragraph here).   Make a quick stop at question 34b — have human beings existed in their present form since the beginning of time, or have they evolved over time? — and note that 40% chose “present form since the beginning of time.”

As Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

Of course the survey was skewed by the choice of possibilities in the answers.  The question “Where was Jesus born?” gave only four options:   Bethelehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Jericho (yes, all four got votes) — a limited range of options displaying a distinct lack of imagination.

Imagine if the Pew researchers had given a few other possible answers to where Jesus was born:   Rome, Eden, Damascus, or Constantinople,  for instance (oh hell, let’s add in Heaven for good measure).  Or if they’d gone political and asked for a choice between Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran.  I’m willing to bet that every one of those options would have received plenty of votes too.

You have to kind of admire Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, for keeping his crowing volume in check.  Asked for a response to the survey, he replied succintly:   “Atheism is an effect of knowledge, not a lack of knowledge.  I gave a Bible to my daughter.  That’s how you make atheists.”

That’s quite a brilliant concept:  reading the Bible as an atheist conversion tool.   What if all those people so piously quoting phrases and snippets from holy books actually sat down to read them in their entirety?  You think the Quran advocates violence, for instance?   Read Deuteronomy,  and the Quran morphs into a pussycat by comparison.

Books are dangerous things, as fundamentalists recognize.  And none more dangerous than holy books.  Who knows what’d happen if people were to start reading them instead of misquoting them?  Maybe we should start burning Bibles too.

I think of them as H2D2 — not the name of a techno-punk band, but the two H’s and two D’s of the ‘new atheism’ quadrumvirate (that’s a triumvirate plus one, or at least it is now) consisting of Hitchens and Harris, Dawkins and Dennett.  One of my first posts here on The AT was Is Christopher Hitchens Running for Pope? and I’m far from the only one to suspect his evangelical fervor.

Now Reza Aslan, author of Beyond Fundamentalism and No God But God, by far the best general introduction out there to the history of Islam, is tackling both the fervor and the astounding simplicities of H2D2 thinking.  In a post over at the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith,’ he starts by talking about an atheist ad on the side of a London bus (what is this thing with buses and religion?), but quickly gets to the point.  The H2D2 movement, he says, is:

… a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism–an atheist fundamentalism.  The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling:  The conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege —  the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.  This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).  Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer.  This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.

Read Aslan’s full piece, posted on the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith’ blog, here.

Meanwhile Hitchens’ new book Hitch-22 is, to quote the Hitch himself, Not Great.  I opened it expecting an extended fireworks display of wit, and instead found a self-conscious memoir written in the pompous style of a member of some musty gentleman’s club in St James’ Square, musing aloud while nursing a glass of port and a gouty foot.   All the “good bits” had already been quoted in the reviews (yes, all of them — that’s how many there are), which obligingly glossed over the far more extended sophomoric sections.  But he did finally get me to laugh out loud when he makes the belated discovery that one of his grandmothers was half-Jewish (the shock!  the awe!), impelling the great atheist to go haring off to eastern Europe in sentimental search of his Jewish roots.  Oy vay.

Is it rational to believe that peace is possible in the Middle East?  Sometimes it seems not.   A good friend in New York, a long-time Middle East peace activist, confided that the Israeli use of deadly force against the Gaza-bound flotilla had brought her close to despair.   Yet historian Tony Judt in an op-ed today sees some form of peace as inevitable:

As American officials privately acknowledge, sooner or later Israel (or someone) will have to talk to Hamas.  From French Algeria through South Africa to the Provisional I.R.A., the story repeats itself:  the dominant power denies the legitimacy of the “terrorists,” thereby strengthening their hand; then it secretly negotiates with them;  finally, it concedes power, independence or a place at the table.  Israel will negotiate with Hamas:  the only question is why not now.

I respect Judt’s historical certainty — he’s right, of course — but do I believe it?    I should, since I know how blindly mistaken despair can be.

I was close to despair when Menahem Begin was elected prime minister of Israel in 1976, yet just a few months later came the phone call from a well-informed friend telling me to turn on the radio for the next newscast, since Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was about to announce that he was coming to Jerusalem to visit Yad Vashem and talk to all 120 Members of Knesset.    I thought he was joking .  Sadat?  The arch-enemy?  No way.  And then I turned on the radio.

I remember staring at the plane as it landed in November 1977, as the door opened and then, for a long while, remained blank:  an empty black space against the white of the airplane body.  An unwanted part of my mind whispered that Egyptian commandos were about to burst out and gun down all of Israel’s leadership gathered on the tarmac at the bottom of the stairs.  Or that worse still, nobody at all would appear — that the opening would remain blank and empty, and it was all a cruel hoax.

I remember the heavy sinking feeling of September 1978 when after so much hope, it sounded as though the Camp David summit convened by Jimmy Carter between Begin and Sadat was going nowhere.  There was a blackout on news of the negotiations, and as they dragged on, commentator after commentator confidently declared that they were doomed.   Yet the Camp David accords were signed, and the following year, a full peace treaty.

So I need to remind myself that if even I can’t muster Tony Judt’s certainty,  hope is not irrational.  In fact it may be the only rational response to the seemingly ever-worsening mess in the Middle East.

My model is Pascal’s wager, an early form of game theory applied to the existence of God, and on my mind right now because I recently rented Eric Rohmer’s classic 1969 movie My Night at Maud’s, which includes the kind of Pascalian discussion that could only take place in a nouvelle vague French movie (worth a look, if only to instantly burnish your artsy credentials, let alone your philosophical pretensions).

Since the essence of the divine is “infinitely incomprehensible,” Pascal argued in  his Pensées, reason can neither prove nor disprove the  existence of God.  Basically, it comes down to a coin toss:  on the one side, reason, and on the other,  the possibility (given that he was in Catholic France) of eternal afterlife happiness.

(This doesn’t quite work for me, of course, since eternal life seems to me at best a nightmare and at worst a curse — as it was for the creators of the legends of the Wandering Jew and of Dracula and of Frankenstein — but I’ll bear with Pascal for now.)

To believe in the existence of God, he argued, demands no cost (sic) but results in high possible gain (the infinite happiness bit).  That is, the reward for belief is infinite if it turns out to be justified, and there is no penalty if it does not.  It makes no difference how slim the possibility of that reward might be.   “If you gain, you gain all,” he concluded,  “and if you lose, you lose nothing.”    Thus the only rational option, per Pascal, is to be irrational, and believe.

Why focus on this when the whole idea of betting on the existence of God seems to me an exercise in absurdity?   Because while I may not be a big fan of Pascal when it comes to God or not-God, the principle behind his thinking strikes me as extraordinarily apt when the subject is Middle East peace.  So let me try it out here — a kind of minimalist Pascalian argument, as distorted by myself, for hope:

If you give up hope and assume that peace in the Middle East is impossible, you essentially render it impossible.  That is, you stop envisioning peace or anything remotely approaching it.  You accept the status quo, which is in fact not a status quo, but an ever-downward spiral.    This appears to be the assumption of the current Israeli government, and the use of deadly force in the assault on the Gaza flotilla is yet another result of such an assumption.    It is the penalty for not believing in the possibility of peace.

If you follow Pascal’s logic, this is irrational.    Deny all possibility of peace, and you doom yourself to unending conflict.  To assume that peace is possible, no matter how slim the chance appears to be,  is thus the only rational option.    (And yes, this applies as much to Hamas as to Israel.)     The fact that you cannot see how to make peace does not mean that it’s impossible.   It may merely mean that you can’t see.

In  those months leading up to Sadat’s announcement of his visit to Jerusalem, when everything seemed so dark and no rational observer would have predicted anything remotely resembling peace, quiet negotiations were going on far from the public eye.  Does that mean such negotiations are going on now?   I seriously doubt it, though I obviously don’t know.   Nevertheless, for my own sanity, let alone for the future sanity of the Middle East and everyone in it, I have no option but to believe not only that negotiations could be going on, but that they should be — to believe, that is, in improbability instead of impossibility.   Or hope instead of despair.

Next post:  what peace really looks like.

If the headline read “Pat Buchanan:  Not Enough Muslims on the Supreme Court,” that’d be something.   Instead, what we get is the utterly predictable:  “Pat Buchanan:  Too Many Jews on the Supreme Court.”

Surprise surprise, Pat’s been Jew-counting.  Those damn Jews are taking over our most sacred institutions.  When all else fails — and the lesbian “smear” campaign against Elena Kagan is clearly faltering (amazing that it’s 2010 and we still talk of “accusations” of lesbianism) — there’s always good old antisemitism to fall back on.   As Jean-Paul Sartre put it:  “If Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would have had to invent them.”

Count ’em, says Buchanan from his current perch as a commentator on MSNBC.  Three of ’em if Kagan gets the nod!  Out of nine.  It’s a calamity for Christian America — a separate little cabal there on the bench, out to corrupt the purity of Christian values.  What do you mean, Judeo-Christian?  Nobody pays any attention to that Judeo bit.  That’s just another sop to the Jews, adulterating Christianity.  We have to put a stop to them.  We have to stand up to this canker in our society.  Who the hell do they think they are?

None of the three are religious?  Ha, you don’t believe that, do you?  It’s in their blood — the stain, as Philip Roth put it, the fatal flaw, as bad as being black.  And hey, if they’re not religious, that makes it even worse.  What do they believe in?  Abortion?  Gay marriage?  Civil rights?  The Antichrist?

Thank God (as it were) we have no less an authority than Richard Nixon’s assurance that Buchanan is neither an antisemite nor a Jew-hater (the precise distinction clear only to Nixon), but “a good patriotic American.”  The Nixon seal of approval is always reassuring.

Is it worth pointing out that only four Jews have sat on the Supreme Court before?  That a third of all justices have been Episcopalians, who are 1.7% of all Americans?   That the Constitution upheld by the court forbids discrimination on the basis of religion?   No — that’s only stooping to the level of Buchanan demagogery.

Come on, Obama:   rock Buchanan’s world and  nominate a Muslim next time.

Or even — gasp! — an atheist.

“New atheists” Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are having a ball with the pedophile priest scandal — it seems to prove everything they’ve ever said about the evils of religion.

It’s disturbing enough that anyone at all is having a ball with this ghastly issue, though maybe that’s inevitable when the Hitchens-Dawkins style of atheism has all the hallmarks of being a religion of its own.  But worse is that their call for the Pope to resign smacks more than a little of… well, to be kind, disingenuousness.  To be less kind, hypocrisy.

If you don’t believe in medicine, you’re hardly going to call for a better doctor.  If H and D really believe all they say about the evils of religion, then there’s no way they could imagine that a change of Pope could make any difference, especially when nobody in the upper reaches of Churchly hierarchy seems capable of plain human feeling — capable, that is, of expressing pure unadulterated outrage that such things have been done under the guise (literally) of priestly robes.

I don’t question H and D’s outrage,  but while most of us are watching this unfold with horror, they can barely contain their glee.

I wish I could feel that glee, but I’m with Nick Kristof on the Op-Ed page of today’s New York Times, talking about “the other Catholic church.”  This is the “grass-roots church” of nuns and priests working with the poor, the sick, and the needy both in the States and worldwide.  “Their magnificence,” writes Kristof, “lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness.”

Maybe H and D could learn just a bit from that selflessness.   They’ve leapt on the bandwagon of scandal with no apparent purpose other than self-promotion.

Or maybe Hitchens is running for Pope?