Saskatchewan museum cancels fundraiser after objections from religious groups

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 2:44 PM - 0 Comments

The Western Development Museum in Moose Jaw, Sask. has cancelled its Halloween fundraiser after religious groups objected to the event. “We don’t think a seance is what the people of Moose Jaw want to be associated with,” said Pastor Larry Gerow of Victory Church in Moose Jaw, one those who objected to the museum’s plan to hold a presentation on communicating with spirits, which would have been followed by a demonstration. After provincial legislators and the museum’s directors were bombarded with complaints, museum officials finally decided the fundraiser wasn’t worth the trouble and canceled the event outright.

News Talk 980

Vatican official speaks out against Nobel winner

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments

Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, says giving the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Robert Edwards, who pioneered IVF treatment, is “completely out of order,” the BBC reports. Nearly four million babies have been born using the fertility treatment since 1978, which he said has led to the destruction of human embryos. Without the treatment, there would be no market for human eggs “and there would not be a large number of freezers filled with embryos in the world,” he told Italy’s Ansa news agency, adding that in-vitro fertilization represents “a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction.” His statements were his own personal view, he said. According to the Nobel medicine prize committee, Edwards’ work brought “joy to infertile people all over the world.”

BBC News

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 1, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

A big week for Hillary’s hair
“Oh Hillary, that hairstyle just doesn’t cut it,” carped the U.K.’s Daily Mail, bemoaning U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “lanky locks.” “Hillary Clinton wears hair clip to the UN: ‘Do or don’t?” asked the Huffington Post. Hill’s hair, object of fascination throughout Bill’s presidency, had the fashion police on high alert at the UN. Meanwhile, its owner quietly intensified U.S. efforts in the fledgling Mideast peace process.

Not so big in Iran, then
When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stirs trouble abroad, it’s a safe bet he faces problems back home. This week, the Iranian president was in full diversionary mode, suggesting the U.S. played a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, then mocking Western media for spotlighting cases like that of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman sentenced to death for adultery. (Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger, also faces the death sentence for creating online forums Tehran considered a political threat; a similar campaign is building in his favour.) The uproar over Ashtiani, complained Ahmadinejad, is far greater than that over the plight of Teresa Lewis, a borderline mentally challenged woman executed in Virginia on Thursday. His remarks didn’t stop U.S. media from looking past the bluster to the real story: growing divisions among Iran’s conservatives over the election 15 months ago that gave Ahmadinejad his second term. No wonder he wants to change the channel.

C’aan the man do no wrong?
What does K’naan have to do to be criticized? After organizers of a Vancouver-area charity concert fell short of his $40,000 fee, the Somali-Canadian musician refused to take the stage, leaving fans and the charity in the lurch; Simon Fraser University, where the benefit was being held, reportedly offered to pay the difference, to no avail. Yet event organizers, including charity chief Clement Apaak, fell on their swords, accepting full blame, and offering refunds. The Teflon star’s cred is unblemished by even a summer spent touring for Coke, to whom he sold his hit, Wavin’ Flag, for its World Cup marketing campaign, the corporate giant’s biggest ever.

A homer odyssey
If you hadn’t heard the name Jose Bautista before this fall, don’t feel bad. The Toronto Blue Jays slugger had hit fewer home runs in his three previous seasons combined than he has in 2010, and there was nothing to presage the power surge that this week lifted him into the company of legends like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Having surpassed the Jays’ team record of 47 dingers, Bautista cracked his 51st and 52nd over the weekend, giving rise to inevitable questions about the source of his unaccustomed power. Bautista swatted aside queries like so many hanging curve balls. “I understand because of the [sport’s] history,” he said when asked if he’d used performance-enhancing drugs. “But those days are gone.”

The devil is in the details
With his bald head, sinister black Van Dyke beard and dark sunken eyes, it’s hard to forget that Scott Robb, who’s running for Edmonton’s city council, is a practising Satanist. Still, religious issues aren’t a big part of the message for the founder of the Darkside Collective. Rather, the 31-year-old security guard’s platform focuses on opposing a plan to shutter Edmonton’s City Centre Airport, and proposes to run downtown light-rail transit lines underground. Robb eschews political donations and is spending his own money—$400 so far—on his campaign. Which would mean his name isn’t the only eerie similarity he bears to Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford.

Close Sesame
Elmo loves Katy Perry—but not inappropriately. “We had a good time,” the Sesame Street puppet told Good Morning America. Elmo’s talk-show appearance was meant to help defuse reaction to his onscreen play date with the pop singer, whose low-cut, cleavage-revealing costume irked parents and led the show to cut the segment. “We’ll have another play date,” Elmo told host George Stephanopoulos, who until recently hosted ABC’s Sunday political show This Week, where he interviewed powerful world leaders. In other news Perry- and puppet-related, the pop queen will appear in a special live-action episode of The Simpsons this Christmas. “In the wake of Elmo’s terrible betrayal, the Simpsons puppets wish to announce they stand felt-shoulder-to-shoulder with Katy Perry,” said Simpsons executive producer Al Jean.

How many women does it take to make a cabinet?
With the election of Simonetta Sommaruga to the Swiss cabinet, the conservative country crossed an unlikely threshold: with Sommaruga, a Social Democrat, as transport minister, Switzerland, which until 1971 barred women from voting, now has a majority-female cabinet—three men, four women—what Social Democrat chair Christian Levrat called an “essential, decisive step.”

A real guitar hero
Vancouver’s Don Alder entered the sixth annual Guitar Superstar competition on a whim—the top 10 finalists, he’d heard, get a nod in Guitar Player magazine, the enthusiast’s bible. Not only did the 54-year-old win, he earned the night’s only standing ovation. Judges deemed his performance “flawless” and “transcendental,” with one adding: “The world needs to hear you.” Alder took up the guitar at the urging of Rick Hansen, a childhood friend (they were together when Hansen was injured after being thrown from the back of a pickup). They were out fishing eight years ago when Hansen said, “Why don’t you get back to your music?” Alder told the Vancouver Sun. “He told me failure is not trying—ever since it’s taken me down this amazing journey.”

Do as he draws, not as he does
What began as a campaign against plagiarism ended as a lesson in irony. Taiwan’s “Protect Copyright” contest launched last year, soliciting entries for a poster campaign. Judges were particularly fond of Wu Chih-wei’s dramatic entry, “Work—Shattered,” featuring a plunging paper plane, words trailing its wings like smoke. The entry earned him a medal and a cash prize, and his poster went up all over Taiwan. Only problem: he’d ripped off Dutch artist Dennis Sibeijn. Wu was stripped of his prize and faced up to three years in jail, but Sibeijn declined to press charges. He would like an apology, though.

Aafia got her gun
Aafia Siddiqui is a 38-year-old Pakistani neuroscientist with degrees from MIT and Brandeis University. Arrested in Afghanistan in 2008, she was found to carry bomb-making recipes and a list of American tourist attractions. When U.S. officials visited her for questioning in jail, Siddiqui grabbed a discarded rifle and began shooting, saying in exquisite English: “I want to kill Americans.” The FBI called her a terrorist. Yet during her trial Siddiqui’s lawyer argued she’s mentally ill. Siddiqui disagreed. So did the judge, who gave her 86 years in prison. That led to riotous protests in Pakistan, where PM Yousaf Raza Gilani called her a “daughter of the nation.”

He hasn’t got a wife to spare
Maybe Ndumiso Mamba figured a man with 14 wives would take a philosophical view of infidelity. But Mamba lost his job as justice minister of Swaziland this week after he was found under a hotel room bed with his king’s 12th wife. Rumours of an affair between Mamba and Nothando Dube, a former Miss Teen Swaziland, had run rampant in the royal court for weeks. Dube reportedly disguised herself as a soldier to sneak out for their trysts, but officials loyal to King Mswati III cottoned on and set up a sting operation to catch the pair. Some predicted Mamba would be allowed to flee. But a long prison term seems more likely. “Mamba knows too much,” said one expert. “If he flees into exile with the royal secrets, that would be a major problem.”

Too mad for Mad Men?
He’s still a contender for Hollywood’s greatest train wreck, but things are looking up for Mel Gibson. News that he’s in danger of losing his house—and his church—to unpaid construction bills didn’t stop Jodie Foster from rising to his defence. “When you love a friend, you don’t abandon them,” she said. Her vote of confidence came as details of Gibson’s ugly split with wife Oksana Grigorieva trickled out: he was apparently willing to cough up $1 million for tapes of his foul-mouthed tirades. But some were buzzing about a comeback. Last week’s hot rumour from Liz Smith had him signing on for a role in the hit series Mad Men, though she retracted after producers demurred.

Catch and release
Captains of Chinese fishing trawlers don’t often trigger diplomatic crises. But that’s what 41-year-old Zhan Qixiong did when, on Sept. 8, while poking around islands claimed by both Beijing and Tokyo, he allegedly rammed Japanese coast guard cutters—twice. Arrested and jailed in Okinawa, he sparked the most serious standoff between China and Japan in recent memory, a dispute closely watched by a world concerned about a rising China. The incident sparked nationalist fervour in both countries, with some in Japan complaining after Qixiong was released on Saturday. Japanese PM Naoto Kan maintained that Tokyo would issue no apologies.

Buck stops here
Last week, Linda Buck, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who studies how the brain processes odour, retracted two journal articles because they don’t pass the smell test. That makes three times Buck has disavowed papers co-authored with her one-time post-doc Zhihua Zou (who conducted the experiments), because she couldn’t duplicate the findings. Zou, who has reportedly returned to his native China, agreed to the first retraction, but not to last week’s.

Atheists know more about god than believers do: survey

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Atheist and agnostic Americans know more about religion than their religious fellow citizens, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. A survey found that self-identified non-believers answered questions about Christianity with better results than participants who identified as religious. For example, a majority of Protestants did not know who started the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther), and 40 per cent of Catholics didn’t understand the concept of transubstantiation. Asked for his comment, Reverend Adam Hamilton told the LA Times, “I think that what happens for many Christians is, they accept their particular faith, they accept it to be true and they stop examining it.”

The Telegraph

LA Times

Burning Qurans and Ground Zero mosques: when is it reasonable to take offence?

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Phil Sandlin/AP

For one mad moment, it seemed as if the standoff over the burning Qurans and the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque would both be settled at one go—with a trade. Terry Jones, the deranged Florida pastor threatening to burn 200 Qurans to protest Islam’s responsibility, as he sees it, for the Sept. 11 attacks, announced to a waiting world he would call off the bonfire, in return for a promise by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the slightly saner cleric behind the proposal to build a mosque in downtown Manhattan, near the site of the attacks, to move it further uptown.

It soon emerged that the deal existed only in the pastor’s crowded head. And a good thing, too: such an exchange would not only have rewarded Jones for his threats, but implies a false equivalence between the two events, the one involving the destruction of a religious symbol, the other the construction of one. Yet for all their differences, both raise essentially the same question: when is it reasonable to take offence, and when to give it? A civil society, it is often forgotten, imposes mutual obligations: not to give offence needlessly, certainly, but also not to take offence too easily.

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Should the Pope face charges?

By Brian Bethune - Saturday, September 11, 2010 at 8:23 AM - 0 Comments

Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images

God in the Dock, meaning God on trial, is a familiar concept in Britain, both from the title of a famous collection of essays by C.S. Lewis and as a general term for skepticism about religious belief and doctrine. But Pope in the Dock? Literally? Perhaps not in our lifetimes, as British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson concedes in The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, a book set to appear just one week before Benedict XVI makes the first-ever papal state visit to Britain. But, Robertson argues, the once unthinkable idea that Benedict or a successor could be charged with obstructing justice or for “harbouring pedophile priests” is now very thinkable, and—given evolving trends in international human rights law—may soon be practical.

The plain facts of the case to be answered are horrific and undeniable. Since the dam crumbled around the turn of the decade, a cascade of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy has come tumbling into the open. So many cases emerged that the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference commissioned an expert study, which concluded in 2004 that, since 1950, 10,667 individuals had made plausible allegations against 4,392 priests, 4.3 per cent of the entire body of clergy in that period. The total bill in settlements with victims is spiralling toward $2 billion and won’t stop, Forbes predicts, this side of $5 billion. Depressingly similar stories from other First World countries, including Canada, soon emerged; the situation in Latin America and Africa, where no investigations have ever been made, can only be imagined.

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Can doesn't imply ought, but tit might imply tat

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 5:52 PM - 0 Comments

Angela Merkel has weighed in on the Islamophobia sweeping the US right now. Short version — Koran burning is wrong, but Mohammed cartoons are ok. I pretty much agree with that, though one thing she said struck me, in her defence of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard:

“It is about whether or not he can publish his cartoons, yes or no,” said Merkel. “Whether they are necessary or helpful or tasteful or not doesn’t matter. Is he allowed to do it? Yes, he is.”

It’s maybe worth pointing out that this is the exact same argument that some muslims have made in defence of the “ground zero” mosque.  American law gives them the right to do it, end of story. In response to which, conservatives have responded with that obnoxious line that was being passed around: “That we allow them to build the mosque says a lot about us; that they’ll build it says a lot about them.”

Again, muslims said pretty much the exact same same thing back when the Danish cartoons were published. It went something like: “Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should, especially if it causes great offence.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone to find muslims shoving that argument back in the face of the people who told them to get stuffed in 2005.

As always, the best-case solution to all of this would be for people to just stop believing in God. Religious intolerance is the proximate cause of the strife, but religious belief is the ultimate source of the problem. As Richard Dawkins likes to point out, religious people shouldn’t find atheism all that difficult. After all, every believer already doesn’t believe in a great many gods — the trick is to just go “one god more” and stop believing in the one god you’ve settled on.

But that’s not going to happen. The second-best solution would be for everyone to exercise a bit of religious toleration.

But that’s not going to happen either. So what to do? I think it is incumbent on all Christian groups, this Saturday, to burn a big stack of Bibles. In such heated times, a show of solidarity amongst all of Abraham’s children would go a long way.

Spreading the holy word—and fuelling Islamic extremism

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 19 Comments

G. Paul Burnett The New York Times/ Getty Images/ Tim Wimborne Reuters

Canada’s Muslim community is reeling again after the arrests of three of its own last week in another alleged homegrown terrorist plot. In particular, the case of the dancing doctor, Khurram Syed Sher, has raised some serious questions, not only for those who practise Islam but for those who make their living from identifying threats to Canada’s security. How does an educated, Canadian-born Muslim and Canadian Idol aspirant with all the apparent hallmarks of moderation allegedly turn to violent jihad?

That question has become central to the discourse on the future of jihad, in Canada and among Muslims around the world. Canadians, who have already witnessed the case of the Toronto 18, are not alone in their concern over the radicalization of young Muslims previously considered immune to violent ideologies. In Pakistan, a spate of attacks over the past year has focused attention on a growing trend of radicalization among educated young people. One attack, in December 2009 near the capital of Islamabad, on a mosque frequented by Pakistani military officers, led to the arrest of a group of middle-class Pakistanis who had studied at some of the top universities in the country, and hailed from families with addresses in the posh, tree-lined laneways of Islamabad. They certainly did not fit the typical militant trope: the madrasa-educated fanatic out to cleanse the world of the infidel.

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High-tech nuns

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 4:56 PM - 0 Comments

Ross Parry Agency LTD

The Monastery of Poor Clares on Lawrence Street in York, England, is home to just over a dozen nuns.

Most are over the age of 80 and, having taken vows of poverty, chastity and enclosure, haven’t left the convent in 30 years but for doctors’ appointments. And yet their prayer must be “pertinent,” because practical prayer is part of their mandate to bring the world closer to God. So the nuns listen to the radio, surf the Internet and answer letters and emails from people requesting prayers. Now, they have another tool to keep their prayers up to date: Goldie, an electronic device that displays rolling headlines from 25 news sites, including the BBC, the New York Times and Reuters.

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Richard Dawkins compares burqa to garbage bag

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 0 Comments

The world’s most famous atheist and author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, compared the Islamic burqa to a “full bin-liner thing” in an interview with magazine Radio Times magazine. He was discussing his distaste for faith-based schools. In a later interview with the Daily Mail, Dawkins stood by his comment, saying, “I do feel visceral revulsion at the burqa because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.” Some Muslims condemned the remark as ignorant and Islamophobic. “It’s a woman’s choice is she wishes to wear a burqa, a niqab or not,” said Seyyed Ferjani of The Muslim Association of Britain.

The Australian

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, August 6, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Silvio Berlusconi’s very bad week
Italy’s PM is on thin ice after a party revolt led by long-time ally Gianfranco Fini, and now come fresh allegations of scandal. “In the bed there was me, two girls from Rome, and Berlusconi,” Maria Teresa De Nicolo, an escort, told prosecutors in a corruption inquiry, according to the daily La Repubblica. Could it end with a snap fall election?

The camera doesn’t lie
France’s stunning first lady should be used to the lure of cameras. And yet, during filming for Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris, in which Carla Bruni plays a bit part as a museum curator, the former model and pop songstress couldn’t nail the simplest of scenes. Bruni needed a whopping 35 takes to film a dialogue-free scene that required her to walk in and out of a grocery store, clutching a baguette. In fairness, it had probably been a while since she’d done her own groceries.

Easy, rider
One moment Gregor Robertson was Vancouver’s clean, green mayor; the next he was a scofflaw on wheels. The avid cyclist—he’s pumping $25 million into new bike infrastructure in Vancouver—was caught blowing a red light on his bike on July 22. He didn’t even slow down to check for traffic, bus driver Michele MacDonald told the Vancouver Province, after nearly flattening him. Only a quick, hard stomp on the brakes saved him, she said. “When he looked up and said he was sorry, I thought ‘Oh my God: it’s Mr. Gregor Robertson.’ ” The near miss was a “good lesson—and a reminder to everyone to use caution and follow the rules when out on the road,” said Robertson, whose poster-boy image took an another drubbing earlier this summer when a mike was accidentally left on at a council meeting, revealing a raunchier, more partisan, F-bomb-dropping mayor.

And he knows from silly
Long after the World Cup, the fallout continues. Argentina’s soccer association has dropped superstar Diego Maradona as coach of the national team, after it was sent packing in the quarter finals in a humiliating 4-0 defeat to Germany. Maradona was greeted by cheering fans on his return from South Africa and President Cristina Fernandez urged him to stay on, but the soccer association concluded his best days were behind him. Meantime, Paul the psychic octopus was roasted by Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The eight-legged sea creature (no risk of a hand ball there) is credited with predicting the outcome of all seven German World Cup matches—a silly bit of decadent Western nonsense and superstition, Ahmadinejad thundered in a recent speech in Tehran. “Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection,” he said.

The Mel Gibson of the left?
It’s one thing to blame Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust, Oliver Stone said in an interview last month, but whom do we blame for Hitler? “German industrialists, the Americans and the British,” the film director told the Sunday Times of London. “He had a lot of support. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.” Stone went on to lament “the Jewish domination of the media” and the way Israel has distorted U.S. foreign policy “for years.” He did apologize, calling his comments “glib” and “clumsy,” adding “Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry.”

Now comes the tough part
“From strippers to ministers,” blared the Russian headline that propelled Georgia’s new economy minister, Vera Kobalia, to the heart of an international scandal. Russian media—who love a chance to needle Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and seldom let the facts get in the way—based the accusation on a racy Facebook photo of Kobalia in what they call a Vancouver strip club, but turned out to be a nightclub. Kobalia grew up in B.C.; she met Saakashvili at the Vancouver Olympics, is all of 28, and has no political experience. It’s not the only challenge she’ll face in her new job: running an economy that shrank a whopping seven per cent last year.

It’s a black thing, and I understand
In a big week for racial politics in America, Essence, the bible of black fashion, caused a sensation for hiring Ellianna Placas, a white woman, as fashion director. “It’s a dark day,” said former editor Michaela Angela Davis, who noted the industry has long been a tough place for black women. Not everyone objected. “Kudos—for having the . . . courage to elevate a qualified and talented white woman, in a time of such racial tension,” said Sophia Nelson, a black lawyer. Andrew Breitbart, ever mindful of reverse racism, could perhaps get behind it too. The conservative activist, who posted a video clip edited to make fired black civil servant Shirley Sherrod look like a racist, will “definitely” be sued, Sherrod declared last week. Breitbart reacted to the news saying, “As difficult as it probably was for her, it’s been difficult for me as well.”

They get around
Utah’s predominantly Mormon Brigham Young University has added a new prohibition to its long list: no motorized couches. Students Nick Homer and Stewart Clyde spent months combining an old couch with a motorized wheelchair as a comfy means of transportation around campus. It was a sensation, until administrators instituted a law banning couch-based transportation systems. When campus police pulled them over, Homer says, they “basically congratulated us on being awesome.” Yes, if awesomeness is a crime, Neil Rideout of New Waterford, N.S., must also plead guilty. He was stopped by cops last week while driving his motorized drink cooler to a convenience store. He was fined $222 for driving on the sidewalk after police said the street was off-limits. The cooler, in addition to being cool, has jacks for an MP3 player, a 5.5 hp motor, a radio and, naturally, cup holders.

Spoken like a Lady
When you’re Lady Gaga, it must be hell deciding what to wear. So, for her cover shoot for September’s Vanity Fair, she threw in the towel, and every other bit of clothing, save for a floral tattoo and a tasteful choker necklace. Art is a cruel taskmaster, she said in an interview; she’s perpetually lonely, even in relationships. Of course that may also have something to do with celibacy. “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” She credits her mom and grandmother with getting her mostly free of drugs, but for the occasional toot of cocaine. If the Lady is overexposed now, wait until the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 12. She has a record-breaking 13 nominations. God put her on Earth for three reasons, she says: “To make loud music, gay videos, and cause a damn raucous [sic].”

Careful what you wish for
It’s gotten so one almost feels sorry for Tony Hayward, the ousted CEO of BP—almost. It’s now clear that Hayward, recently replaced by Bob Dudley, failed miserably at containing the public-relations fallout from BP’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—smug and indifferent before Congress, appearing at a yacht race in England and telling reporters he “wanted his life back”—but he may have done as well as could be expected when it came to stopping the leak from the Deepwater Horizon rig. “I understand that people find it easier to vilify an individual more than a company,” the career oilman recently told the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps. But CEOs are paid big bucks to take responsibility during times of crisis and expected to know when they’re in over their heads. Or at least when to hire image consultants.

Spreading the good word
Asked how he’ll protect constituents from the Muslim “threat,” Tennessee gubernatorial hopeful Ron Ramsey questioned whether religious freedoms should even apply to Islam. It’s arguable, he told a Chattanooga crowd, if the world’s second-largest religion is actually a religion—or “a nationality, a way of life, cult.” In nearby Florida, pastor Terry Jones announced plans for “International Burn a Quran Day,” on the anniversary of Sept. 11. His church, the Dove World Outreach Center, will host.

It’s what Uncle Earl would want
A man peddling Ansel Adams photos purchased at a Fresno, Calif., garage sale may in fact be selling pictures taken by 87-year-old Oakland resident Miriam Walton’s Uncle Earl. When Richard Norsigian announced experts had authenticated the negatives he bought for $45 and valued them at US$200 million, Walton recognized a photo of the famous Jeffrey Pine at Yosemite National Park from the news footage. “I keep thinking that perhaps that box of negatives belongs to Uncle Earl,” she told a local TV station. Undeterred, Norsigian is selling copies at a hefty markup: $7,500 for darkroom prints, $1,500 for digital reproductions.

A bit too N-Sync
Rumours dogged punk singer Plastic Bertrand for decades that the voice on his 1977 hit Ça plane pour moi isn’t his, but producer Lou Deprijck’s. Late last month, the singer (real name Roger Jouret) admitted the ruse to a newspaper after a linguistics expert told a Belgian court the vocals are indeed Deprijck’s. Plastic says he was promised a small share of the rights to the song if he agreed to “keep his mouth shut.” According to Deprijck, the reasoning for the Milli Vanilli-esque bait-and-switch was simple marketing. “I was even prepared to shave my moustache,” he told the Guardian, “but the record label preferred this guy with his punk look.”

A new scandal for the church

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

GIULIO PISCITELLI/AFP/Getty Images

On June 11, before about 15,000 priests gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI apologized for the clergy sex abuse scandal.

On June 28, the Church issued another mea culpa of sorts on a different matter—corruption charges. The Vatican admitted to potential “errors” in the handling of real estate, following accusations that a top cardinal has been implicated in a public works scandal. And it’s got one expert wondering if a “diplomatic tussle” could result over the powers of church and state.

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Religion, no. Magic, yes.

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

The Czech Republic is the least religious of the former Communist publics, and widely regarded as one of the most secular nations in the world. But while few Czechs go to church, a new form of spirituality is taking hold: magic.

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Castro faces a higher power

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

JAVIER GALEANO/AP/CP

Hopes are high that the Cuban government will release political prisoners following the visit to Havana last week of Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican’s foreign minister. And the trip, along with a Cuban cardinal’s negotiations earlier this month that resulted in the release of an ailing political prisoner and the transfer of about a dozen more to be closer to their families, signals the increasingly political role of the Catholic Church in Cuba.

The transfer of the prisoners was only the latest in a series of minor concessions attributed to Cardinal Jaime Ortega’s talks with the regime of Raúl Castro, which are expected to continue. While the Church maintains that it is not pressuring the government, Ortega, the man behind the talks, has been openly critical of the regime. After Castro faced international criticism because of the deaths of two prisoners on a hunger strike (U.S. President Barack Obama called the situation “deeply disturbing”), he spoke out in the April issue of the Church’s magazine, Palabra Neuva (“New Word”). Accusations of human rights abuses, along with economic woes, Ortega said, have placed Cuba in the “most difficult situation of the 21st century.”

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Nailing the story right

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 28, 2010 at 4:46 PM - 34 Comments

A Swedish theologian argues that the idea of Christ’s crucifixion comes from a misinterpretation of the original Biblical account. In it there is no specific mention of a cross—two pieces of wood lashed together—but only of a “staurus,” which, Gunnar Samuelsson claims, is not necessarily a cross but can also mean a pole, and no mention at all of nails. Adds Samuelsson, who has written a 400-page thesis after studying the original texts: “The problem is descriptions of crucifixions are remarkably absent in the antique literature. The sources where you would expect to find support for the established understanding of the event really don’t say anything.” The absence of nails in the Scripture is true enough, although Christ after his resurrection shows the nail wounds to Doubting Thomas, and Christians have always portrayed him as nailed to the cross. That was a long-running dispute between believers and skeptics who pointed to overwhelming evidence that the Romans usually tied their victims to crosses and watched them die from slow asphyxiation, but the discovery, in 1968, of the skeletal remains of a crucified man, complete with iron nail driven through his heel bone, considerably bolstered the Biblical story. Samuelsson’s other claim, that no one at all was crucified, however, is new, and liable to startle other scholars. According to the theologian, ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew literature from Homer to the first century CE describe an arsenal of suspension punishments but none mention “crosses” or “crucifixion” and therefore, “the contemporary understanding of crucifixion as a punishment is severely challenged.” But most experts argue that crucifixion was the general term for those deaths by suspension whether or not crossbeams were involved. Particularly when the victorious Romans were engaged in mass executions—some 6,000 followers of Spartacus were crucified along the Appian Way in 71 BCE after his revolt was put down—a shortage of wood could lead to single poles being used.

Telegraph

The lesson of a Jewish cemetery

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 402 Comments

A Jewish cemetery in Cracow, Poland (Tobias Gerber/Laif/Redux)

Thanks to the wonders of globalization, I’m writing this in a fairly decrepit salon de thé off the rue de la Liberté in Tangiers, enjoying a coffee and a stale croissant grilled and flattened into a panini. What could be more authentically Moroccan? For some reason, the napkins are emblazoned with “Gracias por su visita.”

Through a blizzard of flies, I can just about make out the plasma TV up in the corner on which Jimmy Carter, dubbed into Arabic, is denouncing Israel. Al Jazeera doesn’t so much cover the Zionist Entity as feast on it, hour after hour, without end. So here, at the western frontier of the Muslim world (if you don’t include Yorkshire), the only news that matters is from a tiny strip of land barely wider at its narrowest point than a rural Canadian township way down the other end of the Mediterranean.

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Re-branding Muhammad

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 5:03 PM - 44 Comments

The “Inspired by Muhammad” poster campaign was launched in London this week in a bid to improve the religion’s image among Britons. Images that will be spread around the city include the “eco-Muslim” poster featuring the blonde Kristiane Backer, a former MTV Europe host and convert to Islam. It reads: “I believe in protecting the environment. So did Muhammad.” A YouGuv poll released last month found half of Britons associate Islam with terrorism, 69 per cent believe the religion encourages the repression of women, and 41 per cent don’t feel Muslims have a positive impact on British society.

The Globe and Mail

'It is a democracy at the end of the day'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 12:54 PM - 43 Comments

Steve Paikin comes perhaps as close as anyone is going to get to having a rational televised discussion about the fact that people with religious beliefs might wish to participate in the democratic process.

Do atheists care less?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 177 Comments

Colin McConnell/Toronto Star

These are not the brightest days for organized religion. Pope Benedict XVI has come under sustained scrutiny for his role in the investigation of sex abuse scandals tarring the Catholic Church. The practices of fundamentalist Muslim women are being attacked by the Quebec government as uncivilized. And, more broadly, many traditional and long-standing congregations across the country must face the reality of their own worldly demise due to substantial declines in Sunday attendance.

Despite all this bad news, however, there remains much to celebrate about religion and its relationship with society at large. Not the least of which is that those who attend religious services are the most charitable in their donations and the most eager to volunteer. Without organized religion, the world would be a much poorer and less comfortable place for those less fortunate.

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Memo from British Foreign Office mocks Catholic Church

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 11:48 AM - 35 Comments

An ill-advised memo by Britain’s Foreign Office about Pope Benedict XVI has left officials in the country red-faced and contrite. A document detailing a brainstorming session by a committee called the Government’s Papal Visit Team included suggestions that mocked the Church’s teachings. Among the proposals were to have the Pope open an abortion ward, preside over a gay marriage, and launch a range of “Benedict” condoms. Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, who’s been playing a leading role in the planning of the visit, called the document “despicable” and said, “on behalf of the whole of the United Kingdom, we’d want to apologise to his Holiness the Pope.”

The Telegraph

BBC News

Pope pledges action on sex abuse

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 3 Comments

Pope Benedict XVI promised today that the Catholic church would take action against sex abuse in the clergy, offering the clearest sign yet that the pontiff will confront the burgeoning scandal head-on. But his remarks, made during his weekly public address in St. Peter’s Square, gave no hint as to how the Vatican plans will deal with the all-important issue of clerical cover-ups. The Church has been rocked by evidence that bishops and other senior prelates protected known abusers by moving them from parish to parish, where they continued to work with young people. Such allegations have reached all the way up to the pope himself, who as an archbishop was informed of sex abuse cases involving priests, and as a cardinal was in charge of the Vatican office that oversaw discipline of clergy members. The Vatican officials are expected to make a formal announcement tomorrow outlining their response to the scandal.

Associated Press

Pope meets with abuse victims

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 4 Comments

Pope Benedict XVI met with a small group of victims of sexual abuse by priests in Malta on Sunday. According to a statement from the Vatican, the Pope “prayed with them and assured them that the church is doing, and will continue to do, all in its power to investigate allegations, to bring to justice those responsible for abuse and to implement effective measures designed to safeguard young people in the future.” It was the third time the pope met with sex abuse victims but the first since a scandal broke last month in which the Church was accused of covering up accusations against pedophile priests. Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said after the visit he doesn’t think it set a precedent under which the Pope would have to visit abuse victims in every country to which he travels.

New York Times

The politics of IQ

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 5:41 PM - 19 Comments

Grubby as it can be, politics remains at bottom a contest of ideas. One side claims the superiority of its program and values. The other responds in kind, and voters decide which they like best.

Or, in Canada’s case, which they dislike least.

What happens, though, when someone suggests members of one political group are themselves smarter than the folks on the other side?

A recent study out of the London School of Economics did just that, purporting to show among other things that atheistic liberals boast higher IQs, on average, than their religious and conservative counterparts.

Author Satoshi Kanazawa, an “evolutionary psychologist,” then went on to draw some incendiary and fanciful conclusions from his findings: conservatism, he explained, is a very human predisposition based on self-interest—a bred-in-the-bone inclination to care about family and friends rather than the wider world that is genetically unrelated to us. Liberalism, meanwhile, reflects a more evolved willingness to embrace novel ideas and to care about those we don’t see or know, he said; it springs from greater intelligence and awareness, and takes brains to pull off comfortably.

As such, he said, liberals are less likely to need such psychological crutches like God to get through life. “More intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists,” Kanazawa wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

At first glance, the findings looked like a gift to the non-religious left, which in the U.S. at least has a history of claiming intellectual superiority. It is a peculiar form of identity politics, grounded in the notion that brainy sorts are most likely to join a club that would have themselves as members (apologies to Groucho Marx).

Consider the reaction six years ago, when the launch of Air America moved progressive commentators to predict that this liberal answer to right-wing, open-mouth radio would fall flat. Liberals, they theorized, are too smart and open-minded to be Ditto-heads, of course. If that meant sitting still for a daily pasting at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, well, that’s the price you pay for being progressive (they were right: Air America shut for good in January, though its demise probably had more to do with poor management and in-fighting than the IQs of its listeners).

Why then, are liberals running so hard from Kanazawa’s study?

Possibly because the armchair statisticians who lurk the digi-sphere have done such a great job rubbishing both its design and logic. Shockingly, some of these clever people are conservatives, like the Canadian libertarian Neil Reynolds. Others are what Margaret Thatcher might have called squishy, and proud to be so.

These critics are quick to point out that the purported spread between the IQs of progressives and reactionaries is only six points—within the margin of error of many IQ tests. How, they ask, can one draw conclusions about human development over a few millennia based on a sample of 15,000 Americans surveyed in the late 1990s—and adolescent Americans at that?

Liberals may also be troubled by the checkered history of this sort of inquiry. Quite apart from its eugenic overtones, past claims that liberals were brainier than conservatives generally have been proven unfounded or been exposed as hoaxes. Five years ago, the Economist printed a graphic indicating people from U.S. states that voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election were on average dimmer than those from states that went Democrat. Alas, the venerable British magazine was forced to print a correction, admitting it had been sucked in by an internet hoax.

Other studies based on the findings of the U.S. General Social Survey have found virtually no statistical difference between the IQs of people who vote Democrat and those who vote Republican (this blog suggests the “advantage” has been see-sawing back and forth, with the Dems inching ahead by a half-point in ’04).

But most of the suspicion boils down fear over how the theory plays into more deeply cast political identities. That old eastern-intellectual label remains an enduring problem for Democrats in the U.S.—and to a lesser degree large-L Liberals in Canada. The perception isn’t so much that they are smarter than everyone else as that they think they are—and thus feel entitled to tell others how to run their lives.

Small wonder then, that a sworn enemy of the religious right like P.Z. Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist who has waged war against proponents of intelligent design, is warning his blog readers to “stop patting yourselves on the back over this study,” and advising them to “ignore anything with Kanazawa’s name on it.”

Liberals may not be all that much brighter than conservatives, on average. But they’re smart enough, evidently, to know trouble when they see it.

Making their bed

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 45 Comments

Photograph by Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press

The British Columbia government’s decision to test the legality of Canada’s 120-year-old polygamy law led to a shocking revelation for Karen and her two male partners. The 37-year-old Winnipeg-area mother, her husband of 15 years and a second male partner concede their arrangement is unconventional. She calls it a plural union based on equality, not religious ideas of male dominance. What she didn’t realize, until the B.C. court reference drew attention to the issue, was that they’re breaking the law by sharing a home. “This has been a real learning experience,” she says.

Karen, who doesn’t want her surname used in order to protect her children, is part of a constituency of polyamorists, one of many groups seeking standing in the B.C. Supreme Court. The case will determine if the polygamy law—Section 293 of the Criminal Code—is constitutional. It was triggered by the province’s failure to prosecute two polygamous bishops in the fundamentalist Mormon community of Bountiful, B.C., but its outcome could affect the rights of thousands.

Some 16 groups have submitted affidavits seeking permission to argue for or against 293 when a trial date is set—proving, if nothing else, that polygamy creates strange bedfellows. Some groups see the polygamy law as the foundation of the traditional family and a defence against the exploitation of girls forced into multiple marriage, as the province alleged happened in Bountiful. Others argue the law is unenforceable, does nothing to help the women of Bountiful, and that it imposes a moral code out of step with Canada’s modern, multicultural society.

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