Faith and Reason: A conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics

Catholics, health care reform and federal funding of abortion: The debate goes on

The debate goes on -- and we're not just talking about in Congress but within the Catholic Church.

Should Catholics support a health care reform bill if there's even a chance that it might result in federal funding of abortions?

A number of Catholics this week have been disputing the view of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops that the Senate bill would subsidize abortions -- and a study in today's New England Journal of Medicine could bolster those arguments.

The study "shows that abortion rates declined during the first two years that Massachusetts implemented a near-universal health coverage program much like the nationwide plan currently before Congress," writes Politics Daily columnist David Gibson, a convert to Catholicism.

Among those who reject claims that the Senate bill would finance abortions are the head of the Catholic Health Association and a coalition of Catholic sisters who are heads of 60 religious orders, many of which are directly involved in running hospitals and providing health care.

Gibson writes that the New England Journal study:

Read more »

Happy New Year (if you believe in Baha'i)

This Saturday at sundown marks Naw-Ruz, New Year's day for people of the Baha'i religion.

Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Schrute on The Office, is perhaps now the best known adherent, though actress Carole Lombard and songwriting/music duo Jim Seals and Dash Crofts can be counted among Baha'is as well.

Wilson has even created a website, soulpancake.com, where people are invited to "chew on life's big questions" without any "airy fairy" treatment of spirituality. Hyperion is publishing a book by Wilson and other Soul Pancake editors due this fall.

Baha'i began in Iran in 1844; some of its tenets:

• There is one God and all major religions come from God
• Men and women are equal
• Racism is destructive and must be overcome
• Sex is reserved for marriage, and marriage is between a man and a woman
• Baha'is should not be part of a political party or campaign, but may vote
• Nature is a reflection of the divine and humans should protect its resources and biodiversity

There are Baha'i houses of worship around the world, including one from 1953 in Willmette, Ill., but demographics even within the USA are difficult to pin down; the American Religious Identification Survey groups it under "eastern religions" and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life lumps it under "other affiliations." Many keep in touch via e-mails and listservs to plan gatherings, Alice Kroll, who converted from Episocpalian to Baha'i, tells the New Haven Independent.

Bahai's say there are nearly 170,000 in the USA and 5 million worldwide -- for them, this weekend won't just be the beginning of spring, but the end of their annual month of sunrise-to-sunset fasting which began March 2, and, fittingly, the start of a new year.

DO YOU or anyone you know follow Baha'i? What do you know of the religion? What do you think of its beliefs?

--Anne Godlasky, USA TODAY

Having a more saintly St. Patrick's Day?

St. Patrick's Day: green beer, green cupcakes, green clothes; parades, corned beef, soda bread and shouts of "Kiss me, I'm Irish!" Hard to believe it used to be a holy day.

Even the Times Online's Faith Central blog doesn't mention anything religious until the seventh of its 10 tips to celebrate the day:

St. Patrick's Day falls in Lent, when in the old days, abstaining from drink was a given. If you really want to be trad, go to Church. March 17 was originally a Holy Day in the Church calendar, marked by Mass-going in the morning, and a feast ... in the afternoon.

Jesuit Rev. James Martin on the Huffington Post calls for people to put the Saint Patrick back in St. Patrick's Day, telling the story of how Patrick was enslaved in Ireland from the age of 16 to 20, yet after he escaped and became a priest, still chose to return there to spread Christianity.

In his 40 years in Ireland he attracted numerous followers, baptized thousands, and built churches -- for the people who had previously enslaved him. "I never had any reason," he wrote, "except the Gospel and his promises, ever to have returned to that nation from which I had previously escaped with difficulty."

For the Christian, Patrick poses an important question: would you be willing to serve a place where you had known heartache? And how much is the Gospel worth to you? For everyone, he offers a challenge: can you forgive the people who have wronged you? Could you even love them? Think about that over your green beer.

Many traditional Irish blessings mention, if not forgiveness, at least kindness to strangers: "May you always have a kind word for those you meet," ends one. "May your heart glow with warmth, like a turf fire that welcomes friends and strangers alike. May the light of the Lord shine from your eyes, like a candle in the window, welcoming the weary traveler," implores another. Beliefnet lists eight Irish prayers, including that of St. Patrick.

Read more »

Rediscover the Sabbath on 'National Day of Unplugging'

Do you ever give your Blackberry a day off? Fast from Facebook? Take a time-out from Twitter?

If not, you probably need to read this.

The nonprofit group Reboot is launching a new project called the Sabbath Manifesto designed to get overworked and overstressed young techies to rediscover the novel Biblical concept of a day of rest.

It kicks off March 20 with a "National Day of Unplugging" -- not using computers, cell phones, or any technology from sundown on Friday, March 19, to sundown on Saturday, March 20.

"The last few years, I've had a growing feeling that my connection to technology was getting to be more like an addiction," says Dan Rollman, 36, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who came up with the Manifesto idea. He says he's never been a particularly religious person, but the idea of the Sabbath always appealed to him.

So he took the idea to Reboot, a growing network of more than 300 young Jewish technology entrepreneurs, writers and others who want to "reboot" the culture, rituals, and traditions they've inherited and make them more meaningful in their own lives.

The resulting Manifesto includes a set of 10 recommended principles to guide your weekly Sabbath day:
-- Avoid technology,
-- Connect with loved ones,
-- Nurture your health,
-- Get outside,
-- Avoid commerce,
-- Light candles,
-- Drink wine,
-- Eat bread,
-- Find silence and
-- Give back.

A video on the Sabbath Manifesto website features Rollman and other Rebooters, including Jill Soloway, executive producer of Showtime's United States of Tara, and Greg Clayman, executive vice president of digital distribution and business development at MTV Networks, talking about what it was like when they first unplugged.

As the saying goes: "You don't have to be Jewish" to appreciate the concept.

"While this project has come out of a Jewish think tank, it was important to us that we create a set of rules that are not for Jewish people only," says Rollman. "Many religions have this tradition of the Sabbath."

The principles, he says, are "meant to be added to your life in a way that is positive for you. There is no wrong or right, and no penalty for not observing them properly."

Rollman, the co-founder and president of Universal Record Database, which tracks self-reported "world records," says that like most New Yorkers, "my life goes a mile a minute ... I have come to cherish my Friday nights and Saturdays," which he spends exploring and enjoying New York -- museums, parks, theaters, going to brunch.

Do you keep a weekly "Sabbath" day? How do you honor the spirit of a day of rest?

-- Leslie Miller, USA TODAY

Evolution and morality: Are we born selfish or altruistic?

Are we evolutionarily programmed to be selfish or to be cooperative? To care primarily for self, kin and survival or to sacrifice for the strength of survival of our "group?'' Can science be truly neutral in this discussion? Or are the findings of science fair game for political and social policy ammunition?

Such questions -- and contesting answers -- date to Charles Darwin, August Comte (who invented the term "altruism" in 1881) to Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and on up to contemporary critics of both, says historian Thomas Dixon, a professor at University of London and author of The Invention of Altruism.

Dixon gave one of the concluding lectures at this weekend's seminars on the brain and morality at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion. He also highlighted authors who look at cooperation through the lens of a social or political agenda and conclude, as Joan Roughgarden does in The Genial Gene, that "cooperation is every bit as natural and obvious as competition."

Darwin did indeed give credence to the ruthless competition model of nature dictating organisms to "multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

And yet, he also concluded in The Descent of Man, that love and sympathy and cooperation also exist in the natural world, like the way pelicans might provide fish for a blind pelican in their flock. Communities with the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and produce more offspring" and, Darwin wrote, in an outburst of Victorian moral emotionalism, "virtue will be triumphant."

Dawkins flips this in his work to say that the visitors of evolution are the selfish ones and that altruism must be taught. If we serve each other it's a "blessed misfiring" of genetics.

So, who's telling it like it is? Perhaps no one.

Science is, after all, done by scientists, by people shaped by their times or speaking to their times, people with social, religious or political agendas, either unconscious or deliberate, says Dixon.

This doesn't mean we cease doing science. It means that we must ask ourselves whether what is being presented as natural is truly ethically and politically neutral.  He says,

Science is the systematic study of the natural world but it takes place, inevitably, in a social and religious context ... All sorts of behavior is natural but it doesn't tell us if we should do it or organize society in order to achieve it."

Do you think Darwin is right, that virtue will triumph? Or is it a world where virtue is an artificial add-on? Will the claims of science take over from the claims of religion in deciding public policy?

Who killed John Lennon? Science looks at the brain and the law

Who killed John Lennon?

Mark David Chapman, a psychotic, pulled the trigger, assassinating the musician/peace activist in December 1980.

So who killed Lennon, the person or the brain?

That's the kind of question neuroscientists, lawyers and judges are wrestling with today, says Michael Gazzaniga professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and head of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind.

He's leading a project examining brain studies and the law -- the norms of society that are the basis of our rules. Gazzaniga "What is the brain for? It's there to make decisions," he said at a seminar on neuroscience and morality, sponsored by Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion where I'm attending lectures and scooping up sources this weekend.

He mused about whether brain scans be accepted in court. What's the veracity of eyewitness testimony? Do we need to revisit the 166-year-old definition of the insanity defense, given what we're learning now about free will and culpability?

After all, most people with brain diseases and conditions, from schizophrenia to people afflicted with tumors and lesions, do not commit crimes and are able to grasp and follow social rules, he says.

However, the brain acquires information and makes decisions well before we are consciously forming choices. Gazzaniga says, "We're all on a little bit of taped delay between unconsciousness and awareness. But none of us believe it. We think we are in charge."

But can we be in charge of punishing others and not acknowledge what our own brains tell us about who deserves punishment and what severity is "right?" Neuroscience also shows us to be provably biased toward our own ethnic, racial groups, and inclined to favor people more like ourselves or our kin for example.

Read more »

Art, ethics evolved in the same way, time, biologist says

How do we know we evolved to be ethical when "morality doesn't leave any fossils?"

That question, from Martin Redfern of the BBC, was just one of many on the origins of ethics and morality at seminars this weekend. I've invited F&R readers to join me here at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion where the ideas are flying among scientists, theologians, philosophers and the reporters who cover them.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, traced humanity's evolutionary development and linked the capacity for ethics to advanced intelligence, the development of language and the unique-to-humans concept of self-awareness.

"If I know I exist, I know that I am going to die," said Ayala, professor of biology and philosophy at University of California, Irvine, who then linked this to the rise of religion. Humans are the only ones who practice ceremonial burial of the dead, he said,

We develop anxiety over our life ending so we try to look for answers beyond our life. This is likely why religion emerges in every society -- as a way to relieve this anxiety.

He thinks ethics -- which can also exist apart from religion in his view -- evolved at the same time as aesthetics, the awareness of beauty. Art and aesthetics, like human altruism, require value judgments and the ability to compare.

The talk made me think of the cave paintings found in France. Today we call them "art" but they may have been created instead for ritual reasons: Art as an expression of the our striving to survive.

Do you think our ethical systems are handed down by divine authority -- by God -- or by our own inner need to make sense of society and establish patterns that will enable our own survival?

'Is God dying?' Questions on morality, evolution and the mind

Are we evolving away from belief in God? Why did thousands of intelligent people let themselves be deceived by investment fraud king Bernie Madoff? Is morality really in decline in the West and can it be reconstructed?

Such questions are in the air at a seminar on science, morality and the mind at Cambridge University, this weekend sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. I've participated in the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowships in Science & Religion since 2005. And for the next few days, I'd like to bring you along for a taste of the lectures and discussions.

It all starts with questions. Fraser Watts, a professor of theology and science, and Director of Studies, Queens' College set the program off with a wave of his own: What can science tell us about the origin and workings of morality? How did moral capacity arise? Is it all evolutionary? What's the role of neuroscience? What goes on in the brain when we're making moral judgments? Can we use this knowledge to reconstruct morality?

Michael Reiss, Professor of Science at the Institute of Education University of London, a specialist in evolutionary biology (and an ordained Anglican priest) walked us through the history of theories on altruism as an evolutionary phenomenon (like vampire bats who support each other by offering up blood if a mate didn't succeed in his own hunting) and the advantages of being good at deception (think Bernie Madoff).

Even so, just knowing something has an evolutionary origin "tells you nothing about whether it is valid or useful," Reiss says.

So understanding how the mind can evolve to do mathematics is separate from deciding if a particular theorem is good. Translated to evolution, biology and society, it means it might have been safer in some times and societies if you thought there were gods. "But that doesn't answer the question of whether there actually are Gods."

"Is God actually dying?" mused Barbara Bradley Hagerty of National Public Radio.

"I'm not a prophet," quipped Reiss. "I have absolutely no idea." Still, he observed, human conceptions of the divine are very different today than in the past, different often than their own parents, and that it would not be surprising if they continued to change.

Whose idea of God is the definitive one, the one that can be said to be living, dying or changing?Where do you think God came from and if our idea of God vanishes, does God?

Is abortion your moral bottom line on health reform?

The conflict over the Catholic church's influence in U.S. health care reform is intense: Will the church's efforts to shut off all access to insurance coverage for abortion, even if people want to pay for it themselves, trump its strong desire to offer more care and better care for the poor and working Americans?

The abortion issue puts it all on the table for Catholic health programs, the leading non-governmental care providers in the USA. Running the table is Richard Doerflinger, lobbyist for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

NPR's Laura Parker's profile of him says,

He and John Carr, who also works for the bishops... helped craft the final wording of the anti-abortion amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., that cleared the way for House passage of the health care bill by five votes.

"He's a real smart guy," says Stupak, referring to Doerflinger. "Pretty detailed guy who does his homework ."

Now Stupak is back with an effort to cut off access to individuals to purchase insurance for abortion services, even if they pay for it themselves.

The Christian Science Monitor, looking at the abortion issue, points out:

In sum, when it comes to coverage for abortions, in the House version you'd need two different policies. In the Senate version you'd just need to write two checks and anti-abortion House members think that's getting awfully close to federal funding for the procedure. (Monitor report: House Democrats scramble to find a majority to vote for the Senate's healthcare bill.)

The Senate bill language "basically says that your federal tax subsidies can be used to pay for abortion coverage," said Rep. Stupak in a March 4 interview on National Public Radio (NPR).

Laura Parker goes on to say,...

...critics say it would be a colossal mistake to kill universal health care for an incremental victory on abortion. "The difference between the two bills is pretty thin," says Michael Sean Winters, a liberal Catholic author. "Doerflinger is so dug in, he's missing the point on the Senate bill, which is also pro-life."

Not to Doerflinger. His bottom line, he tells Parker:

If the bill attacks life itself, in our view, it's not health care reform.

Other people have different "bottom lines." What's yours? Do you see a provision in the proposals that you think is essential to see passed or defeated because of your faith or ethical point of view?

Obama relies on a 'spiritual cabinet' for prayer, inspiration

President Obama, who rarely attends public church services, turns often to a wide range of Baptists, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews for prayer and spiritual and moral discussion, according to a new report.

Obama prays on the phone with ministers from around the country, speaks often of the role of faith in public life, and quotes Christian theologians "to frame his policies in moral terms," says Daniel Burke, writing for Washington, D.C.- based Religion News Service.

And he doesn't only call on thinkers who are well-known, Burke says:

Like previous presidents, he regularly seeks the counsel of longtime Washington insiders, including Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, Reform Rabbi David Saperstein and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington D.C., to shape decisions about the Iraq war, health care reform and the economy.

But Obama has also turned to a group of fresh -- and relatively unfamiliar -- faces to manage religious issues in his administration. They are recalibrating America's engagement with Muslims, revamping the White House faith-based office and tending to the president's own soul. A year into Obama's presidency, each of the following seven people has become an essential member of what might be called his "spiritual cabinet."

Burke profiles the seven members of this "spiritual cabinet:

-- Joshua DuBois, a Pentecostal pastor, head of Obama's Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, who sends daily devotionals to Obama's Blackberry.

-- Denis McDonough, a Catholic who serves as deputy national security adviser and chief of staff of the National Security Council. Burke says he's "a crucial player in Obama's quest to engage Muslims, find common cause with the Vatican, and restore the country's moral authority."

--Rashad Hussain, a White House lawyer and a hafiz (someone who has memorized the Quran) who Obama has named as his envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

-- Melissa Rogers, chairman of the director of the Center for Religious and Public Affairs at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. She chaired the faith-based office's advisory board, which this week released 60 recommendations for revamping the office.

--Rev. Joel Hunter, head of an Orlando, Fla., megachurch pastor, who Burke says, is "pushing to broaden the evangelical agenda to include issues like poverty, immigration and the environment.

Read more »

Continue reading older posts »