Freedom of Religion: the Right to Choose

Freedom of religion is based on the right to choose your faith community, that is, to associate with those who share your spiritual journey.

Freedom of religion is not something that began with the U.S. Constitution. The Roman Empire generally accepted the right of its subject populations to practice whatever religious beliefs they chose, so long as they did not appear to threaten the empire.

The Jewish Jehovah God was intimately bound to his people, caring for them and demanding a certain standard from them. Prophets tied the worship of God to justice and special concern for the vulnerable. God required his people to worship him and him alone, but the rest of the world could go its own way, as long as no other nation interfered with the Jewish worship of their God.

With Christianity and Islam, a different outlook emerged. At first, Christians saw the gospel as good news to be proclaimed, but they sought no political power. Only later did political leaders try to fuse Christianity with governing authority. This joining led to a perverted view of Christianity as simply one more lever of power.

Islam, the other evangelistic religion, conquered lands for their religion but generally allowed Christians and Jews to live in their own religious communities so long as they paid a tax for the privilege. Unlike Christianity, Islam was from the beginning a state religion.

Lands influenced by Christianity began to see the value of individuals choosing their own religious communities or no community. Christianity was a religion of the heart, not of an external state. Christianity shook off the shackles of Christendom.

When a religion—any religion—begins to force itself on those who wish to believe otherwise, that religion begins to lose its moral authority. When religion must force itself onto a society, it has failed.

Our New Science: “Science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

Observers have noted the removal of the term “climate change” from certain government websites. According to reports on CNN (December 8, 2017), even a story about progress made by the Environmental Protection Agency in their use of renewable energy has been scrubbed.

Are we to conclude that the use of renewable energy is some kind of harmful practice?

Apparently, many terms are joining “renewable energy” as forbidden words.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “evidence based” or “science based” are also verboten. (Lena H. Sun, Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post, reported in The Seattle Times, December 17, 2017)

Findings of the CDC now aren’t “evidence-based” or “science-based.” Its recommendations are based “on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”

Does that mean even if scientific studies point to a certain practice being harmful, they are not going to be reported if they offend a community? Whether something offends “a community” is now going to be our standard?

And which communities will be considered?

If reports citing harm caused by the burning of fossil fuels offend the community of oil and gas companies, are those reports not supposed to be published?

Might we suspect that communities of the biggest political donors will be the ones considered?

Holiday Libations

Writers and other artists have a reputation for drinking a lot. Maybe the artistic culture has more drunkards or maybe its members just write more about it.

Szilvia Molnar, a publishing professional, wrote about the importance of drinking within the writing/publishing world. ( “On Book Publishing’s Drinking Culture,” Literary Hub, 6 December 2017)

Though Molnar has no problems with drinking per se, she said she recently recognized “while it’s not been difficult for me to turn down a drink when I’ve not wanted one, it’s only recently that I don’t feel embarrassed by not drinking at all.”

It’s a high school mentality, she writes, that one must have a drink in order to fit in.

She indulges in a few whimsical imaginings: “ . . . what if we incorporated a little nonsense juice-bonanza into our social events? What if we performed delicate tea ceremonies or got really wild and crazy about latte art? Or ended a reading with a meditation rather than an open bar?”

Caveat: Like Molnar, I don’t have a problem with responsible drinkers. I don’t drink alcohol for a number of reasons, one being that breast cancer has appeared in many females on my mother’s side, and studies indicate that drinking alcohol may increase the odds of developing it.

Besides, I fulfill two services to society. One: Recovering alcoholics don’t have to stand out for refusing to drink if I’m around. Two: I’m always available as the designated driver.

How Many Pieces of the Economic Pie Do You Get?

Among rich nations of the world, “The top 1 percent in the U.S. own a much larger share of the country’s wealth than the 1 percent elsewhere.”

Christopher Ingraham quoted that statistic in a Washington Post article. (“Wealth gap widens between rich, everyone else,” reprinted in The Seattle Times, 10 Dec 2017.)

To aid our understanding, Ingraham proposed an illustration: Represent all the citizens of the United States as 100 people, divvying up an economic pie that is cut into 100 equal pieces.

Most Americans do not want a society in which everyone receives exactly the same amount—each receiving one piece of the pie. Most want more rewards going to those who work harder, for example.

Ingraham quoted a survey to find out how people thought such a pie should be divided. The survey asked respondents to divide the population into five groups by descending order of income. Then they divided the 100-piece pie among the five groups according to what they thought was fair.

Results: The wealthiest 20 percent of society would get nearly one-third of the pie; the next group about a fifth of the pie; the third group also would receive about a fifth; the next group would get 13 percent of the pie; the bottom group would get 11 percent.

In other words, “. . . the most productive quintile of society would amass roughly three times the wealth of the least productive.”

In fact, Ingraham writes, the top 20 percent of Americans own 90 percent of the pie, not 33 percent, as suggested by survey respondents as ideal.

The next 20 percent divide eight slices among all their members.

The middle 20 percent split the last two pieces of the pie.

The next group gets no pie.

The last group owes pie—they are pie debtors.

Do our tax policies favor or discourage a fairer division of the pie?

War on Newspapers

Can Americans be led to doubt responsible journalism? One group’s aim is to make it as hard as possible for traditional newspapers to do their job.

James O’Keefe is the founder of Project Veritas. The organization’s purpose appears to be the decapitation of mainstream news media through feeding them false stories and hoping they will accept them.

Recently, a woman tied to Veritas tried to peddle a false story to The Washington Post about her supposed sexual relationship to Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. The paper performed checks on the woman’s stories, found them questionable, and refused to publish her accusations. That is what responsible news media do.

Being human, they do sometimes make errors. When brought to their attention, however, they admit their errors and correct them. They are not in the business of spreading rumors but of bringing truth to their readers.

It is doubtful our representative government can survive without them.

Play Nice with Dictators

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary has veered in the direction of dictators, including those in the former Soviet Union. Taking a page from their books, he has attempted to control Hungary’s independent news media.

When an official of the United States embassy in Hungary, David Kostelancik, criticized such actions, a former Florida congressman, Connie Mack IV, complained that Kostelancik was interfering in the affairs of a U.S. ally.

According to Thomas Melia, writing in The American Interest (“The Diplomat vs the Lobbyist,” November 23, 2017), Mack appears to be a lobbyist for the current government of Hungary. His attacks could be another example of attempted foreign influence on U.S. policies.

Two other congressional representatives, Andy Harris of Maryland and Dennis A. Ross of Florida, have begun a draft letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with complaints similar to Mack’s about Kostelancik.

Writes Melia: “After most of a year during which the President has consistently denigrated the State Department, our diplomats and diplomacy itself (‘I’m the only one that matters,’ he told Laura Ingraham this month) . . . it is time to celebrate the patriotic Americans who are serving on the front lines abroad—people like Dave Kostelancik, who speak for our nation’s values and interests, not for dollars and cents.”

Capturing Time; Freeing Time

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

We walk a fine line, some of us do, between wasting time and constricting time.

A properly scheduled life boots us from too much laziness. On the other hand, a time too constricted prevents us from the idle moments we need to wander and imagine and recuperate.

I’m a morning person. I spend a lot of the morning writing. Then the afternoon traps me. Neglected tasks stare me in the face, the tasks I need to do but hate.

Well, why not work on those tasks in the morning when I’m more enthusiastic about life in general and save writing, which I love, for the afternoon?

Because I end up bypassing the writing. By afternoon the demands of life have captured me, and I can’t return to morning’s freshness, when my imagination leads.

So, I set out an afternoon schedule: a group of chores from which I can pick one, or on good days, two. Enough time for exercise.

But—some days, or afternoons, I laze and do what I want. No hard and fast rule about them.

Perhaps I can incorporate the quote attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr: “Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

In other words, to know when to push and when to let go.

Taxes: It’s Complicated

My economic training is limited to one basic economics course I took in college. I think it was part of the core curriculum, like Algebra I and World Lit.

I, like many Americans, struggle to understand our economic system. How do we collect the taxes we need for supporting our military, and protecting us from harmful drugs, and running air traffic control systems, and guarding cyber security and social security, and a thousand other programs needed by a developed society?

I turn to studies and articles by economists who’ve studied our taxing systems. A number express concern, even alarm, at the steadily widening differences between the income of a wealthy few and everyone else. (Thomas Piketty, Wealth in the Twenty-First Century, among others.)

Tax plans now before Congress call for tax cuts. But, according to a former official of the Reagan administration: “There’s no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth.” (Bruce Bartlett, “Reagan Adviser: Tax cuts, set the stage for an all-out attack on welfare state,” The Washington Post, 19 November 2017).

Other economists, such as Paul Krugman, agree. They warn against the tremendous deficits the currently proposed plans would cause.

Bartlett questions why those politicians so concerned in the past about deficits now seem unconcerned with prospects of massive deficits. Those deficits seem likely if one of the current plans passes, calling for cuts to many taxes paid by the wealthy.

Exactly because of those deficits, Bartlett says, the plan will create “a deficit so large, something must be done about it.” With deficits growing, politicians then can insist on cuts to the government programs they despise, including Social Security and Medicare.

It’s a back door way to eliminate programs popular with the American people. The wealthy, of course, don’t need those programs.

Chills from Prague Winter: a Story of Nazi and Soviet Takeovers

Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, is a memoir by Madeleine Albright. She chronicles the atrocities of Hitler’s rise to power in Europe, followed later by the Soviet takeover of her birth country. She reminds readers of the need for constant vigilance against demagogues.

Albright is the daughter of a former Czechoslovak diplomat, serving his country before, during, and after World War II. Albright’s family immigrated to the United States following the takeover of Czechoslovakia by Soviet communists. Albright later was U.S. Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton.

She tells of Hitler’s ascent in Germany and his unexpected rise to power. Hitler “transformed his country from a tottering democracy into a tightly organized dictatorship with a skyrocketing military budget and an aggressive international agenda.”

Konrad Henlein, a Czechoslovakian of German ethnicity, was used by Hitler in his conquest of the country. Henlein, Albright tells us, “was motivated less by Nazi ideology than by the lure of power and fame. His skill as a politician stemmed from his gift for lying with apparent sincerity.”

In paving the way to World War II, Albright quotes Winston Churchill’s assessment of Hitler, explaining why Europe was so desperately duped by him: “ . . . the world lives on hopes that the worst is over, and that we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”

I could not help but be reminded of expressed hope in the early months of Trump’s presidency that he would become “presidential.”

Czechoslovakians of German ethnicity had valid reasons for contention with the Czech government, but their complaints were grossly exaggerated by Hitler to justify his occupation of their region. Similar to today’s “fake news,” Hitler spun the story his way.

I am reminded of Americans with valid complaints about their status—workers who have lost jobs and wages while digital newbies barely out of school become wealthy, or evangelical Christians who are sneered at. Unfortunately, they too often allow themselves to be used by politicians interested only in the advancement of their own fortunes or political agendas.

Yes, Albright’s memoir chilled me. We are never home safe. Democracies have fallen. Constant, sober vigilance is always needed.

Vacations by the Inch

My husband and I once took an Alaskan cruise. We felt like gilded age tycoons. We could relax on the deck or in sheltered salons with ocean views. Feasts were provided, all kinds of food, in myriad settings: buffet, sit down, café. Art sales. A library.

We decided this type of vacation, besides being too expensive, didn’t suit us. For the first day, it was okay, but after that, the luxury seemed artificial and unsuited to our frugal mind set. Besides, it was fattening.

If we ever wanted to experience life at sea again, we decided, we would sign up for a tramp steamer. Meanwhile, we opt for short vacations—a weekend at some out of the way (and affordable) lodging, close to hiking, for example.

Plus, after a time of intense activity with obligations and meetings, sometimes we take a day off. Eat out for lunch. Read all afternoon.

Almost every day, we stop in the late afternoon, enjoy tea, play scrabble, and read.

Vacations by the inch.

Convinced Against Our Will

“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

–old saying, used by Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People

The newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts explored a few fake news items of the recent past (“Truth, sadly, is not something we all value,” The Seattle Times, Oct 8, 2017).

One fake story led to a shooting in an innocent pizza parlor by an individual who believed ridiculous stories about the business, repeated on propaganda sites.

The fact that Barrack Obama has a legal birth certificate from Hawaii or that his birth was reported in a verifiable news item does not stop birther stories that he wasn’t born in the United States.

Pitts lists reputable groups (newspapers, schools of journalism, fact checking sites) all attempting to bring discernment to our decisions on what we read and believe.

He’s a pessimist, pointing to research suggesting that people tend to “double down on the false belief” when facts prove them wrong.

Our worth seems tied to what we believe. We find it difficult to think that we can be imperfect, that we can be duped. We seek, not truth, but validation of our perfection.

We are in need of listeners. We need to listen, not just to what our neighbors say they believe, waiting impatiently to argue our side. We need to understand why our neighbors believe as they do, to be touched by the needs they express. If we understand each other, we may be able to move closer to finding truth.

Iran Is Persian, not Arab

For many Americans, Iran is barely on the radar screen. They confuse Iran with its neighbor, Iraq, and they tend to think of Iran as an Arab country.

In fact, Iran is not an Arab nation. Iran is the descendant of ancient Persia. The official language of Iran is not Arabic but modern Persian, also known as Farsi.

Though Iran is a Muslim majority nation, most Iranian Muslims are Shia Muslims, a minority in Islam. It differs from nations like Saudi Arabia, where the majority are Sunni Muslims. The division goes back centuries to disagreement over the successor to Mohammad .

American feelings about Iran are mixed with the horror of 9/11 and other terrorist activities. While Iran is certainly implicated in upheavals and bloodshed in the Middle East, none of the 9/ll terrorists were Iranians. Fifteen were Saudi Arabians and the others came from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon.

Columbia University professor Gary Sick served under President Jimmy Carter while American diplomats were hostages in Iran (1979-1981). In writing my novel If Winter Comes, set during that period, I read his book, All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran, during my research.

In a recent article in The Foreign Service Journal, Sick highlights Iran’s unique culture, going back 2,500 years. Also unique among most Middle Eastern nations, “Iran has experienced at least five major political upheavals in just 100 years” and has “a remarkable record of political activism.” (“Iran Inside and Out,” October 2017)

Religious leaders exert outsize influence over who competes in Iranian elections. Nevertheless, Iran has a more active record of political engagement than many of its neighbors. All Iranian citizens can vote. Regular elections are held for presidential, parliamentary, and municipal offices.

Reform minded candidates do manage to make it through the process. The current president, Hassan Rouhani, is a reformist, though he does not hesitate to stand up for his country in verbal battles with President Donald Trump.

Americans would profit by a deeper understanding of this fascinating country and the complex negotiations that led to the Iranian nuclear deal. Iran, more than many Middle Eastern nations, holds promise of change. We should not lightly dismiss our agreement with them.

Opioid Plague: Searching for Spiritual Answers?

Dr. Thomas Andrew, at age 60, is changing his profession from medical examiner to that of minister. As medical examiner for New Hampshire, he’s appalled by the mushrooming number of deaths from drug overdoses for which he’s had to perform autopsies.

He’s planning to enter the ministry as a chaplain under the United Methodist Church. After watching the drug toll mount, Dr. Andrew, in the words of a newspaper article, “wants to try, in his own small way, to stop it.” (The Seattle Times, “Opioid deaths are taking a toll on medical examiners’ offices,” October 8, 2017).

Maybe Dr. Andrew has hit on an answer too little tried in our horror at what can only be called a moral epidemic. We plead with young people and others to save themselves from drugs, to enter rehabilitation programs, to think about what the drugs are doing to them.

Maybe getting people off drugs is not merely to keep drugs from harming them. Perhaps it’s also because, if they destroy themselves, they deprive their communities of their gifts.

Their job is to find their purpose in life, to discover their particular talents and skills, to explore ways to serve. In other words, to understand that they don’t exist for themselves alone.

Removing “Servant” from Public Servant

“ . . . the federal workforce has the same number of employees in 2017 as it did during the Kennedy administration, despite the creation of the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and various agencies, as well as a roughly 40 percent increase in the total U.S. population during that interval.

“And yet one popular narrative is that the federal workforce has become too large, and must be pruned. But the work still has to be done by someone.” (Paul Verkuil, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, quoted by David Thornton, Federal News Radio, October 20, 2017, “Federal Workforce in Jeopardy”)

The work that must be done, Thornton goes on to say, is often picked up by contractors. Verkuil points out two differences between government workers and contractors:

“‘For me, the first reason is the oath of office. You may not think about it, it may be just a symbolic act, but … it means something,’ he said. ‘It differentiates you, it separates you. It should; you took an oath to uphold the constitution. It’s meaningful. … If you don’t take the oath, you’re not in the same club, if you will. It’s an important club.’

“And that speaks to another difference Verkuil pointed out: motivation. Federal workers overwhelmingly point to the mission of public service as one of their primary motivations for what they do. Contractors don’t.”

After swearing the oath to protect the Constitution and defend my country when I joined the U.S. Foreign Service, I was assigned to a U.S. consulate in the Middle East. Contractors came in for a few weeks to set up a new computer system. As far as I know, the contractors did a good job, and certainly fulfilled a vital need for expertise not available at our post.

They left at five o’clock in the afternoon. I stayed to finish my work, which seldom could be done in an eight-hour day. I was available for any American citizen who suddenly ended up in a foreign jail. If danger threatened from terrorism, I came in no matter the hour and sent off a warning to our American wardens to pass to all American citizens in the district for which we had records.

The contractors, as skilled they may have been, were there for the money. For them and their companies, it was the bottom line. I and the other officers had been assigned there to serve.

War on Coal; War on the Planet

Until I moved to the Pacific Northwest, most of the salmon I ate came from cans. I was not fond of it. Then one day I ate fresh salmon and became a salmon lover. An added plus is salmon’s contribution to a healthy diet, one of those foods you can enjoy that is good for you.

Salmon fishing also provides jobs. One of the greatest habitats for wild salmon is Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Salmon harvesting provides jobs for 14,000 Alaskans, according to Timothy Egan, columnist for The New York Times. It’s a clean and sustainable industry.

However, the Trump administration has recently reversed protection for the bay, favoring a mining conglomerate’s proposed plan to mine copper and gold there. Previous findings indicated the mine could send tons of toxic waste into the bay, harming the salmon habitat.

Scott Pruitt, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, met with leaders of the mining company before the reversal of protection,

In addition, Pruitt has termed President Trump’s intention to end the regulations curbing greenhouse gas emissions as the end of the “war on coal.”

Some thought of those regulations as the war on polluted air.

Egan refers to Trump’s reversal of many formal environmental protections as “the war on the planet.”

Born on Third Base

Chuck Collins, heir to a wealthy trust fund, decided at age 26 to transfer his wealth to four grant-making foundations. He made this decision after working with a group of mobile home owners struggling to raise money to buy the land where they parked their trailers.

Collins could no longer justify to himself his advantages over the “99 percent” (including those mobile home owners) because he was born wealthy. He had paid his college expenses out of his trust fund, yet had seen that fund double during his college years.

He likens being born wealthy to being Born on Third Base, the title of his book. He did not earn the education or the upper class home or the security and safety that would forever give him an advantage over the 99 percent, even if he gave away his money.

However, Collins is not interested in shaming the wealthy. His goal is to convince the wealthy to become partners in building a more just society.

He points out the benefits reaped by Americans of a few decades ago which grew the economy of the country: GI education bills, cheaper college tuition, affordable mortgages for homes, workers’ wages that were not so unequal to those of their bosses, higher taxation on the wealthy.

He believes some redistribution of income is only fair, since the wealthy have themselves benefitted from subsidies for years: tax breaks, for example, which amount to a subsidy for the more well off. He favors a “GI Bill for the next generation.”

He wants the help of the rich in creating a tax system in which the wealthy pay their fair share. He hopes to persuade them to understand “the shortsightedness of an economic system that funnels most income to the few.”

Getting Rid of the Editors

Most of us use at least one of them, even if we harbor uneasiness about their power. We log on to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other digital helpers. We connect with friends and families, carry out research, express our opinions, and follow the latest breaking news.

Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, acknowledged the good things digital media helps us accomplish. At the same time, he warns, it’s easier to abuse them because no one is judging their output for accuracy. (The Seattle Times, “Hold social media accountable,” October 12, 2017.)

The business model of the digital media, Friedman writes, aimed “to absorb all of the readers of the mainstream media newspapers and magazines and to absorb all their advertisers—but as few of their editors as possible.”

Some enjoy the freewheeling ride of social media. Some don’t like editors who tell them they can’t write certain things—demeaning those different from themselves or spreading false stories.

As Friedman reminds us, “An editor is a human being you have to pay to bring editorial judgement to content on your website, to make sure things are accurate and to correct them if they’re not. Social networks preferred to use algorithms instead, but these are easily gamed.”

Social media has connected us with different viewpoints and given us freedom to explore. They’ve also given us greater ability to spread untruths. Fake news was not invented in the digital era, but it spread its wings there.

To cope requires what is so often lacking in these times: self-discipline. Self-discipline curtails our temptation to treat news as entertainment, an attitude tailor-made for social media. Instead, if we are wise, we will exchange some of that time for reading hard news and analysis, gathered by journalists who are paid to investigate and kept to strict standards of what is true.

Today’s Glorious Autumn; Echos of Another Fragile Season

In western Washington State, we are enjoying one of the most beautiful autumns in several years. The maple tree across the street has retained that brilliant scarlet, known only in autumn, far longer than I thought possible.

I hold on to the beauty a bit tighter because of several novels I have read recently, set around the First World War. The years 2014 to 2018 mark one-hundred-year anniversaries of events in that war. Today’s authors have written a number of novels in that time frame.

A Fine Summer’s Day, by Charles Todd, is one of them, set mostly in the months just before the war began. The book sets the stage for the post-war Ian Rutledge detective novels about a shattered veteran returning to work for Scotland Yard after his traumatic service in that war.

Todd captures the bitter-sweetness of the spring and early summer of 1914, before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, archduke of Austria-Hungary, began the blood-letting.

Young men and women fall in love and plan marriage. Fields are planted as they have been for millennia. Times seem as golden as the trees of this autumn.

Then the war came, a surprise to many Europeans, who thought the modern world had given up that sort of thing. Many of them were positive it would last no more than a few months. They believed their leaders were too wise to allow a prolonged conflict.

Unfortunately, a refusal to understand the limits of human wisdom and an inability to corral national pride contributed to an inhuman slaughter. It did not stop until an uneasy armistice came into effect over four years later.

I hope we do not take our blessings for granted. Humans still make foolish decisions.

Business and Politics: A Match Made in Hell?

We have sometimes elected business people to legislative bodies, but not generally to the U.S. presidency. For that job, we have tended to go for politicians already holding elective office at the state or U.S. congressional level or else military leaders.

Donald Trump is the first president I can think of, at least since the twentieth century, of one elected to the office directly from a business career. Some of his supporters reasoned that a business person practices efficiency in order to make profit. Thus, Trump could drain the inefficient swamps of the U.S. government.

The problem is that a business leader is more like a dictator. Business experience does not necessarily prepare a person for heading a representative government.

As he took office, Trump appeared to think that members of the U.S. congress were his board of directors, beholden to him to carry out his wishes. In fact, they are not beholden to him; they owe their jobs to the people back home who elect them.

As a business leader, Trump could fire any underling who disagreed with him, free to make absolute loyalty to him a primary requirement. This appears to be his style as president.

Like the French king, Louis XIV, he has assumed the role of Sun King. He takes criticism personally, spewing unverifiable insults on anyone, even a supporter, who dares intimate that he isn’t the greatest president who ever held office.

Sad.

Ann Gaylia O'Barr

Culture and World Events from a Christian Perspective