Atheism for Kids?

Whether it’s evangelical Christians banning their children from reading Harry Potter’s magical adventures, or extreme Muslims burning Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” religious fanatics the world over are hostile to books that go against their Books.

Religious intolerance to literature is positively medieval, yet quite common today. So pardon me while I invoke the inflammatory anti-religious fanatic Christopher Hitchens: Religion ruins everything. Especially children’s fantasy series.

This time around, it’s the Catholic League v. “His Dark Materials” series.

Normally Catholics tend not to jump on the culture-warrior bandwagon. We leave the puritan-abstaining/censorship-loving/bible-thumping to the Protestants.

But of course, most crazy Protestant antics barely hold a candle to the historical record of the Catholic Church. Catholicism is in many ways the O(riginal) G(angster) of religious censorship, or at least religiously-motivated folly. The Church is one of the most powerful institutions…ever. Just like a nation or an empire, the Church had waged wars, owned land, carried out mass killings, built monuments to itself, experienced power struggles between ruling parties, etc.

Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass, the first installment of “His Dark Materials” trilogy, sees the Church as a powerful state-like institution. His books take place during a pseudo-dark ages in a world similar to but not quite Earth, in which the Church is a looming authoritarian presence. “The Magisterium” (as the Church is called) persecutes heretics, controls the academy, and is in the middle of enacting an Inquisition-meets-eugenics campaign on little kids.

Indeed, Pullman’s books are anti-Church. More importantly, they are anti-dogma, and that is different from being pro-atheist or anti-Christian. But never mind those niceties. According to the head of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, Philip Pullman’s books ‘sell atheism to kids.’ The organization has called for Catholics to boycott the film version, which was released earlier this month.

The Catholic League calls the book bigoted, implies that any supporter of Pullman is a ‘Christian-hater,’ and declares that Pullman’s agenda is to do no less than to “seduce (children) into embracing atheism and rejecting Christianity.”

In step with the Catholic League, Catholic parishes in my Catholic town of South Bend, IN, have sent letters to parishioners denouncing the ‘agenda’ of Pullman’s books and warning against seeing the film. This was particularly horrifying to me since I bought “The Golden Compass” for my nephew last Christmas, and was afraid my brother and his wife would think I too was attempting to turn little Catholic Colin from the Church.

Actually, I was just introducing him to a fantasy series that is better-written and more thought-provoking than the Harry Potter books.

I would not be saying anything ground breaking if I were to explain that religious censors rarely understand the nature of what they are censoring, banning, boycotting, or burning. Nothing says “Dark Ages” like tossing books (or humans) into a heaping pyre of religious fervor.

What is particularly interesting about the censorship this time is that it is cloaked in the language of civil rights. “The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked,” the official document written by the Catholic League to educate parents about the books, frames the Catholic Church and Catholicism as a minority under attack from atheism on all sides. Criticism of the Church is not called heresy, but hate-speech.

The document attempts to frame anti-Church sentiment in the context of better known bigotry: “There is little doubt that if a movie were about to open that was based on a trilogy of children’s books that were undeniably racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or anti-gay, there would be an uproar from the civil rights organizations that represent these communities,” reads the conclusion of “Agenda Unmasked.” It is absurd to draw a connection between Pullman’s books and these forms of bigotry. There is not a strong or organized current of anti-Catholicism any where in the world, excepting the casual anti-Catholicism of a few other religious institutions. Anti-Semitism and racism, on the contrary, have been historically both strong and organized with historical manifestations like in genocide and slavery to prove it.

When it comes down to it, the Catholic Church is upset that they have been again confronted with their own bloody, corrupt, and bigoted history. Pullman and others are correct to warn about the dangers of orthodoxy from powerful institutions. The Church, unfortunately, only proves Pullman right when it (in the form of American parishes and the Catholic League) forbids any knowledge of ideas that contradict the Church’s authority. What is even more frightening, condemnation of Pullman’s books forbids any meaningful examination of the history of the Catholic Church as an institution.

If the Catholic Church ignores its past or glosses over the ugly parts, it has already become, like the god of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, irrelevant and dead.

A “fact” that more than likely is not even true could be the deciding factor in the Democratic presidential nomination process and possibly the presidential race as a whole.

Allegations have abounded – originating primarily from conservative magazines and chain e-mails – that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim, and he studied in a madrassa while living in Indonesia. He is also accused of being a “Muslim plant” acting as part of an elaborate plot to tear the United States apart from the inside. “What better way to start than at the highest level, through the President of the United States, one of their own,” reads one such e-mail.

Obama has had to go as far as having a letter written up and signed by members of Iowa’s clergy attesting to his Christianity.

In the immortal words of Bart Simpson, “That is wrong on so many levels.”

First of all, Barack Obama is not a Muslim. He is a Christian. He even wrote a book, “The Audacity of Hope,” the themes of which are based largely on his Christian faith. He did live in Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, as a child. That doesn’t mean he’s a follower of Islam, though – his mother is from Kansas and his father is from Kenya, and neither one was religious, though his stepfather was born a Muslim.

In the real world, Obama is a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, home of the “best choir in town,” according to Obama himself. He says that he was a skeptic until his 20s, when he converted after working with churches as a community organizer.

The rumors persist, though, thanks to people like Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, who evidently are still taken seriously by some people. The repetition of these rumors by talk-radio hosts and their followers via e-mail only makes them spread more, no matter how much Obama refutes them or how few real facts they are based on. Even spell-check has been brainwashed – it just told me to change “Obama’s” to “Osama’s.”

I have a question, though. Why should this be a problem? Why should Obama’s campaign be hampered by these allegations? Why would he be a less viable candidate if he were, in fact, a Muslim?

There seems to be a myth in contemporary American culture that Islam is evil and that Muslims are “the enemy.” I would assume that the pattern of thinking here is that since the people who were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were Muslims and claimed to be acting in the name of Allah, that all Muslims are therefore evil. That’s horrifying and just not true. It would be like saying that since Manifest Destiny – the will of “Divine Providence” for the United States to expand – led to the deaths of Native Americans, Christianity is evil.

The high level of intolerance and low level of rational thought in this country are starting to become an issue. Stop the hate, think for yourself and pay attention. Otherwise, this nation could be in for a rude awakening.

I speak to college activists when I say: In these coming months as we decide which presidential candidate to vote for, please, I beg of you, do not vote on one issue.

To be more specific: Feminists – my comrades – don’t vote for Hillary Clinton just because she’s a woman and pro-choice.

This is an appeal from my heart. While an undergraduate student, I was heavily involved in feminist activist groups on IU’s campus.

I know that college activism survives primarily by invoking ideology. The “ism” of feminism, environmentalism or labor activism implies a lucid, sexy set of issues, whereas a group called “Students for a Single Payer Health Care System,” just doesn’t inflame our revolutionary spirits.

Although “isms” are useful for maintaining group identity, organizing issues coherently, raising awareness about specific issues, and maintaining activists’ enthusiasm, getting too wrapped up in an “ism” can also obscure the political landscape.

Like all “ists,” feminists get wrapped up in a couple of central issues. Defending reproductive rights, raising awareness about sexual violence and expanding concepts of gender and sexuality are our main crusades. Perhaps our most visible issue, and the one that everyone seems to have an opinion about, is abortion.

Unlike many feminists, I do not believe that the legality of Roe v. Wade is teetering dangerously on the edge of a crazy pro-life cliff. True, abortion access is continually restricted, the Supreme Court is full of right-wingers, state legislatures propose bills that become voting initiatives to ban abortion (as in South Dakota in 2006), and the anti-abortion evangelicals have risen in policy-making power over the last seven years.

But I would still say that the legality of abortion has only been pushed a little closer to the cliff, and is not in danger of falling off. Most of this country still supports a woman’s right to abortion, and a lot right-wing judicial ‘activism’ would have to take place for Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

Still, some feminists would disagree with me, and base their vote on whether or not a candidate is pro-choice, and to what degree.

In terms of pro-choiceness, Hillary Clinton currently takes the cake. First of all, she is a woman, which, for some radical feminists, is a pre-requisite for having an opinion on abortion. Secondly, in the ’90s Clinton was the very image of a self-realized Second Waver. She was pro-choice, pro-woman and pro-social services. Thirdly, she normally uses feminist language when discussing the issue itself; for Clinton, abortion remains explicitly a woman’s choice, not, as even Obama has suggested, a woman‘s choice that also concerns her family and clergy.

But these are not reasons to vote for her. There are bigger issues at stake in this election than abortion.

That is why we must remove our “ism” blinders for a moment and look at the bigger picture.

Feminists: What does Clinton want to do with Iraq? Iran? Healthcare? Global warming? These should be our first questions. Abortion comes after.

The Spin Zone

Thomas Wachtel is a sophomore majoring in journalism and political science.

I’m not sure if I can speak for everyone (though I like to pretend I can), but when I was young, Christmas was solely about the acquisition of presents. That was basically the only aspect of the holiday season I had any interest in.

Today, I think it’s the last item on the list of reasons I enjoy the holidays.

This epiphany came to me in several phases over the past week. The first one was when I couldn’t answer when asked what gifts I wanted. I legitimately couldn’t think of any material goods that I wanted and couldn’t buy for myself easily and without fanfare. The second was when I had to work at a major clothing retailer on Black Friday. Watching the throngs of people battling over clothing, hunting down bargains and buying, buying, buying – it just felt to me that the people I was watching (and helping) maybe had the wrong idea.

The main catalyst for this epiphany, though, was a positive one. Since at IU we don’t have a fall break (which is great, by the way), Thanksgiving was the first time in months that I was able to see my family, as well as all of my friends who don’t go to school here. I hadn’t noticed how much I missed all of those people until I got to see them again.

For the past several years, it has been fashionable for TV pundits and gasbags everywhere to bemoan the effects of the “war on Christmas” that is supposedly taking place. Evidently businesses posting signage with “happy holidays” in an effort to relate to as many customers as possible qualifies as a war now. Personally, I’ve never had a person wish me a happy Rosh Hashanah or Eid-al-Fitr, so I don’t really understand why all people should have to bend to the will of Christmas when all people don’t celebrate it.

I don’t think that it’s really a “war” on Christmas, though, or even that the evolution of the holiday season is a bad thing. Christmas is, of course, first and foremost a religious holiday. It’s a time when Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus.

However, it has come to have another meaning over the years – aside from the birth of Jesus and the dubious commercial meaning – one that’s much more all-inclusive. The end-of-the-year holiday season has come to be more about togetherness and unity than anything else, primarily a time when family and friends can reunite and celebrate.

I feel the best way for the American people to celebrate the holidays is just to let each other do it as they prefer. There shouldn’t be so much unnecessary conflict at a time of year that is specifically set aside for happiness and peace. Christians can have Christmas, Jews can have Hanukkah and corporate CEOs can have Black Friday. However, the primary focus ought to be those we love. That’s the one thing that we can all agree on.