Daily Archives: April 27, 2011

Proposed mosque in Sun Prairie turned down by planning commission

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Here’s the article from today’s Wisconsin State Journal. The reason for refusal was parking–the proposed mosque is in a commercial development that has issues with parking and traffic. The commission’s decision is only advisory and the proposal will come up for a vote at City Council on May 3.

I don’t know the site, I’m not very familiar with Sun Prairie, but I do know from experience that proposed mosques, Buddhist or Hindu temples, even Mormon temples, are often opposed by neighborhood groups because of parking and traffic issues. Such issues are often cover for religious bigotry–one famous example of that was the proposed Mormon Temple in Nashville, TN in the 1990s.

In Greenville, the Masjid shared parking with a church. It worked out quite well, because the church didn’t need its parking lot on Friday afternoons.

I’m not going to cast aspersions on the members of Sun Prairie’s planning commission but I should think that instead of a blanket denial, one might come up with creative solutions to potential problems.

The Harvard Pluralism Project tracks such issues nationwide.

The Royal Wedding–Sorry, I couldn’t resist

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Commentary on the nuptials:

From Theo Hobson:

I am a rather keen Christian. The tradition of my upbringing is the Church of England, the established church. But it became clear to me about ten years ago, that this tradition contained the hugest structural error. It shouldn’t be established: Christianity and establishment are incompatible. The case for disestablishment is probably too obvious to restate, especially for American readers. The interesting question, though, is how Anglicanism manages to dismiss this case, how it justifies its refusal to reform.

He concludes with this:

I wish William and Kate all the best: they seem like the nicest sort of posh folk. But I also want to tell this young man that his future job is religiously problematic, that his funny family is unwittingly stifling the renewal of Christianity in my land.

And did you know that Ms. Middleton had to get confirmed quickly?

I cannot help feeling that if Kate Middleton had been serious about her Christian faith, she would have been confirmed in the Church of England at a somewhat younger age than 29. Having attended such expensive private boarding schools as Downe House and Marlborough College, she would have been offered the chance of confirmation while still in her teens. Prince William, for example, was 14 when he was confirmed. Of course, I know nothing of Kate’s views on religion, but neither she nor other members of her family appear until now to have been regular churchgoers. And while sources “close to Kate” are quoted in the Daily Mail as insisting that she went through the ceremony in St James’s Palace because of a “personal journey” of a religious nature and not in order to avoid the awkwardness of being denied Holy Communion when married to a future Defender of the Faith, it is hard to relinquish the suspicion that she did it more for convenience than from conviction.

The relationship between educational level and religious involvement

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The Episcopal Cafe asks: More education = less religion? It points to a study of Canadian religiosity by Notre Dame economist Daniel Hagerman mentioned on Freakonomics.

But perhaps it’s not just higher education, but what one majors in. Rosalynde Welch concludes from another study that Humanities and Social Science majors are less likely to be religious after graduating than Science majors. She blames it on postmodernism, the encounter with pluralism, and methodological doubt. Of course, as one commenter on the Episcopal Cafe thread pointed out, members of the Episcopal Church are much more likely to have college and graduate education than the wider public, including the wider religious public.

Hell, continued

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The cover article in Time on Rob Bell and Hell stirred up some stuff in the blogosphere. Here’s Matt Yglesias’ response:

But without hell there’s no reason to think of good and bad, right and wrong as a question of getting over some hurdle of minimum standard of conduct.

Kathryn Gin on why hell still matters:

Whether or not we agree with the issues they champion, the majority of Americans who continue to believe in hell can’t simply be dismissed as fanatical relics of a bygone age. Controversies over hell keep recurring because to its believers, hell stands for more than fire, brimstone, and worms that never die. Hell also represents a backstop on the slippery slope to social chaos in a nation founded not on ethnicity or religion, but on the premise of a virtuous citizenry.

Ross Douthat’s “A Case for Hell.”

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

Atheism and Agnosticism–Some Links

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Martin Amis wrote an appeal to Christopher Hitchens that he should convert from atheism to agnosticism. In a marvelous essay that provides fascinatin detail about Hitchens’ life in addition to anecdotes about his skill as a debater, Amis attacks Hitchens’ atheism (as well as atheism in general):

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a “higher intelligence” – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Here is Mark Vernon’s response. His take:

For me it’s as much, probably more, the immensity of our inner, rather than outer, space that makes agnosticism so appealing. We are the creature who can plunge into the depths of existence; life at its most real comes to us as a troubling, glorious excess. It’s why we suffer and love. It’s surely something of that energy that Hitchens so powerful channels too.

A thoughtful review by Eric Reitan of Vincent Bugliosi’s Divinity of Doubt: The God Question. Reitan finds the premise of Bugliosi’s book lame: that we simply don’t know whether God exists. For Reitan, that’s obvious, perhaps especially to devout Christians who use language of faith rather than knowledge when talking about God’s existence. Reitan sees the interesting question to be: What do we do in the face of such uncertainty? Bugliosi doesn’t answer that question and Reitan marshalls arguments from Kierkegaard and James to argue his point.

An interview with A.C. Grayling, author of The Humanist Bible: How can you be a militant atheist? It’s like sleeping furiously’.

And then there’s this.