INQUISITION NEWS

By John Thavis

Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If there's one clear conclusion that can be drawn from the Vatican-related WikiLeaks disclosures, it's that the United States takes the Vatican and its diplomatic activity very seriously.

In memo after memo in recent years, officials of the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See have reported back to Washington on the impact of papal trips, statements and documents; on the Vatican's behind-the-scenes efforts to head off conflicts; on church-state tensions in Latin America; on the evolution of Catholic teaching on bioethics; and even on the international repercussions of ecumenical affairs.

When a Vatican agency organized a conference on genetically modified foods, the U.S. embassy paid attention. When the Vatican condemned human trafficking, embassy officials met with Vatican counterparts to broaden areas of cooperation on that issue.

And when Pope Benedict XVI said in 2007 that "nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees," the embassy quickly objected, telling a high-level Vatican official that Iraq was experiencing positive developments and that the papal comments were not constructive.

Reading the cables, it's hard to imagine that before 1984, the United States did not have diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Today, the U.S. Embassy has five diplomatic officials and a support staff of 14, and is considered one of the busiest delegations accredited to the Vatican.

To anyone still wondering why so much attention is being paid to the world's smallest state, a U.S. Embassy cable of 2009 -- prepared for President Barack Obama ahead of his first meeting with Pope Benedict -- gave the answer:

"The Vatican is second only to the United States in the number of countries with which it enjoys diplomatic relations (188 and 177, respectively), and there are Catholic priests, nuns and laypeople in every country on the planet. As a result, the Holy See is interested and well-informed about developments all over the globe," it said.

Since that memo was written, the Vatican has established full diplomatic relations with Russia, bringing the total to 178 countries. That leaves only about 16 countries off the list, places such as China, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. The Vatican also maintains delegations to nearly 20 international institutions, including the United Nations.

The WikiLeaks cables have described Vatican diplomats as generally well-informed and as influential lobbyists behind the scenes. What's amazing is that the Vatican accomplishes all this with a relatively tiny diplomatic corps -- a few hundred bishops and priests who were hand-picked and trained at a little-known diplomatic academy in downtown Rome.

The academy has only 30 or so priest-students, who spend years studying papal diplomacy, diplomatic style, diplomatic history and international law. By the time they graduate, they are expected to be fluent in four languages.

Most of the graduates go on to serve at lower-level positions at a Vatican nunciature, or embassy, and are rotated to new posts after a few years. Some may be brought back for a turn at the "Second Section" of the Vatican Secretariat of State, a kind of international nerve-center where about 35 prelates keep tabs on the entire world.

Eventually, they may become papal nuncios, or ambassadors. The nuncio's job differs from that of a normal ambassador in several respects, however. For one thing, a nuncio acts not only as the pope's representative to a foreign government, but as the pope's liaison with the local Catholic population. Much of his time, therefore, is spent dealing with internal church affairs.

In a broader sense, unlike other ambassadors, the papal nuncio is promoting a moral agenda, not the commercial or political interests of his government. A primary focus of papal diplomats in recent decades has been human rights, peaceful resolution of conflicts and protection of core social values. Those concerns show up repeatedly in the WikiLeaks cables.

In Rome, the Vatican also communicates with U.S. diplomats through various agencies of the Roman Curia, in particular the pontifical councils that deal with justice and peace, migration, health care, charity work and the family. Embassy officials seek out experts who work at these councils for briefings on the Vatican's position and -- as one can now read in detail -- report it all back to the U.S. State Department.

Vatican officials, of course, also are reading the WikiLeaks cables with interest. So far they seem unsurprised at the content. Much of the U.S. Embassy's effort seems geared toward enlarging areas of U.S.-Vatican cooperation, which has never been a secret objective. The cables show the Vatican as open on some issues, such as human trafficking, but clearly wary of becoming too closely identified with the policies and initiatives of the world's biggest superpower.

Occasionally, there are frank assessments of differences, as in a U.S. Embassy memo from July 2001, which forecast continued problems with the Vatican over Israel, the death penalty and Iraq.

"The Vatican will continue to oppose U.S. efforts to isolate Saddam Hussein. We should recognize that the Vatican will not support our efforts in Iraq, and investigate ways to limit Vatican interference with our objectives," the cable said tersely.

The WikiLeaks cables often reveal U.S. diplomats as trying very hard to figure out the Vatican, as they deal with an institution that is both a sovereign state and the center of a global religion. One "confidential" cable boiled it down to the simplest terms: "The Vatican strives to translate its religious beliefs and its humanitarian concerns into concrete policies."

END

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Kansas Churches File Lawsuit Over 'Driveway Fee'

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Kansas Churches File Lawsuit Over 'Driveway Fee'

By Stephanie Samuel|Christian Post Reporter

Two Kansas churches sued the city for imposing a tax-like fee that levies charges on the number of trips attendees make to their places of worship.

First Baptist Church of Mission and the Archdiocese of Kansas City are both suing Mission, Kansas, to repeal the property tax attorneys say is disguised as a “driveway fee” to evade having to grant exemptions.

The “driveway fee” would cost the institutions over $1,000 in the coming year. The city council asserts that the fee is not a tax. However, others disagree.

“No one should be taxing church attendance, but that’s what this tax does: it punishes churches based on their attendance,” said Alliance Defense Fund Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley.

ADF will be representing both parties in court.

According to court documents, the Mission City Council established the Transportation Utility Fee in August. TUF charges properties based on the number of actual or estimated vehicle trips each property generates over a period of time.

Mission Mayor Laura McConnell says the goal of the fee is to address the city’s infrastructure problem without over taxing its budget.

“One of the reasons we like the Transportation Utility Fee is because it creates a separate pool of money that would be outside our general budget and it would be something that would be specific and it would be something identifiable and [would not] be something … co-mingled into our budget,” she shared at an August town hall meeting.

She also asserted the fee was fair because it would be spread out among all of the various entities that utilize Mission’s roads, including government agencies.

Churches are required to pay the fees despite the institutions’ non-profit designation because they are considered “developed properties.” Developed properties are defined as real property where improvements such as a parking lot, building or landscaping exist or were constructed.

First Baptist Church of Mission has church property and a parsonage within the city’s limits. Under this law, it faces fees of nearly $1,000 for the upcoming year. St. Pius X Catholic Church, a member of the Archdiocese of Kansas City, will likely face $1,700 in fees.

Stanley says the tax is “outrageous” and sneaky. The wording undermines the church’s tax-exempt status, he explained.

“The government should not attempt to disguise taxes as ‘fees’ in order to eliminate property tax exemptions, when that money could be better spent by churches in caring for the poor,” Stanley proclaimed.

Mission residents and business owners have also expressed outrage over not being allowed to vote on the fees.

“You guys just tried to ram this through as opposed to trying to bring it in a vote to the general public. Let us make our own decisions,” a meeting attendee expressed.

Mayor McConnell later explained that because the TUF is classified as a fee instead of a sales tax, the council approved the measure without bringing it to the people as a voter referendum.

The Alliance Defense Fund filed their lawsuit on Monday. It expects to argue the case in district court soon. Similar fees were overturned in Idaho and Florida supreme courts after judges ruled them to be taxes. Stanley is confident of a similar outcome in this case.
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Santa Claus with the Baby in Bethlehem (Part 1)

Revelation 2:6But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, which I also hate.

15So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, which thing I hate.

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Santa Claus with the Baby in Bethlehem (Part 1)

By Kevin DeYoung|CP Guest Contributor

Is there anything quite as tacky as making Santa Claus kneel before the manger? Is this a weak attempt at baptizing secular Christmas traditions? Or is it a subtle slam at secluarism (Ha, Ha! Your Santa bows to our Savior!”)? I’m not sure, but either way it seems a bit off.

But then again, maybe not.

If you know anything about the real Santa Claus, the man who has become the namesake for all that seems kitschy and consumerist about Christmas, I imagine he’d appreciate the chance to worship the little babe in the straw.

So who exactly was St. Nicholas? The unsatisfying answer is that nobody knows for sure. To quote one Nicholas scholar “We can grant a bishop of that name who had a great impact on his homeland. We can also accept December 6 as the day of his death and burial. These are all the facts we can hold to. Further we cannot go.” (Gustav Anrich quoted by Charles W. Jones in Saint Nicholas of Bari, Myra, and Manhattan).

According to the best estimates, Nicholas, was born around 280 AD in Patara, in Asia Minor. He later became bishop of Myra in modern day Turkey. Nicholas, it seems, died about 343 on or near December 6. That is the date of his Feast Day in the Catholic church.

There is no record of his existence attested in any document until the 6th century. By that time Nicholas, whoever he had been, was already famous. The emperor Justinian dedicated a church to him in Constantinople. Initially, Nicholas was most well known in the East (he is a hierarch in the Eastern Orthodox Church). But by 900, a Greek wrote “The West as well as the East acclaims and glorifies him. Wherever there are people, his name is revered and churches are built in his honor. All Christians reverence his memory and call upon his protection.” In 1087, Italian sailors stole his supposed relics and took them from Myra to Bari, Italy. This greatly increased his popularity in Europe and made Bari one of the most crowded pilgrimage sites. It is said that Nicholas was represented by medieval artists more than any other saint except Mary.

The Man and the Myth

Why was Nicholas so famous? Well, it’s impossible to tell fact from fiction, but this is some of the legend of St. Nicholas:

He was reputed to be a wonder-worker who brought children back to life, destroyed pagan temples, saved sailors from death at sea, and as an infant nursed only two days a week and fasted the other five days.

Moving from plain legend to possible history, Nicholas was honored for enduring persecution. It is said that he was imprisoned during the Empire wide persecution under Diocletian and Maximian. Upon his release and return, the people flocked around him “Nicholas! Confessor! Saint Nicholas has come home!”

Nicholas was also hailed as a defender of orthodoxy. Later sources claim he was in attendance at the council of Nicea. According to tradition, he was a staunch opponent of Arianism. Writing five centuries after his death, one biographer wrote “Thanks to the teaching of St. Nicholas, the metropolis of Myra alone was untouched by the filth of the Arian heresy, which it firmly rejected as a death-dealing poison.” Stories of his courage abound, one claiming that Nicholas traveled to Nicea and, upon arrival, promptly slapped Arius in the face. As the story goes, the rest of the council was shocked and appalled, so much so that they were going to remove Nicholas from his bishopric, that is until Jesus and Mary appeared to defend him. According to the same legend, this apparition changed the minds of the delegates who quickly recanted of their outrage.

As you might have guessed, Nicholas was also revered for being a generous gift giver. Born into a wealth family, he inherited the fortune when his parents died. Apparently he gave his vast fortune away. The most famous story involved three girls who were so destitute that they were going to be forced into a life of prostitution. But Nicholas threw three bags of gold through the window as dowries for the young woman.

Over time, Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of nations like Russia and Greece, cities like Fribourg and Moscow, and of children, sailors, unmarried girls, merchants, and pawnbrokers (the three gold balls hung outside pawn shops are symbolic of the three bags of gold).
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Christian Broadcasters Cite Problems in Net Neutrality

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Christian Broadcasters Cite Problems in Net Neutrality

By Katherine T. Phan|Christian Post Reporter

The nation's largest group of Christian broadcasters anticipate that FCC's passage of "net neutrality" rules will pose problems for communicating the Gospel on the internet and new media technologies.

In a 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday passed rules that would allow the agency to regulate how internet service providers manage their networks.

Under net neutrality, internet service providers must provide equal access to all legal Web content on their networks.

That's not such a good idea, Dr. Frank Wright, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, told The Christian Post.

The rules would prevent "tier-pricing," resulting in higher rates for bandwidth used by websites that have more digital-dense content like videos.

"This essentially says that no matter how much data that someone puts into the internet pipeline it can't be favored over somebody else who is putting less data," said Wright. "The industry should have the privilege of pricing the more digitally dense content differently."

Overregulation could also slow capital investment in the internet and prevent breakthrough innovations such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that aid NRB member organizations in their mission to spread the Christian message, he added.

"Half of the NRB association are content producers," said Wright. "The radio and television stations are increasingly using the internet as a way of a means of augmenting their terrestrial broadcast platform."

"These questions of whether our content is going be hindered because of lack of capital investment is a real concern to us."

The NRB is also worried that the new regulations will stifle free speech rights.

Although the FCC has yet to release the full text of the rules, key excerpts from the order leaves open the possibility of broadband providers blocking internet access on the basis of "reasonable network management."

Craig Parshall, senior vice president and general counsel of NRB, said Christian content could be at risk for discrimination since there is no explanation of what is considered "reasonable."

"Instead of creating a neutral platform for all comers, a neutral marketplace of all viewpoints, they've actually empowered internet service providers to censor out viewpoints they don't like as long it's 'reasonable network management,'" Parshall told The Christian Post.

He cited recent examples of censorship, including Apple's decision to block the Manhattan Declaration, a document affirming Christian values like traditional marriage. Facebook has also agreed with a gay rights lobby to remove or block anything that opposes homosexuality in certain kinds of ways.

Wright questioned whether the FCC has "legitimate statutory authority" in setting rules over the internet without Congress.

In April, a federal appeals court ruled that the federal communications agency had no legal authority to sanction Comcast for blocking traffic on a file sharing application.

"You can be sure that this regulation will be challenged in court," said Wright.

He said that once the FCC gets started on regulating Web traffic, it will eventually eject itself to control other aspects of the internet like controlling content.

In response to threats of anti-Christian censorship, the NRB recently launched the John Milton Project for Religious Free Speech. The effort will monitor the threats of anti-Christian censorship on new media platforms in both the public and private sectors.

Parshall said he and his team will be making formal reports and recommendations in the coming months on the dangers of these new media platforms and in regards to overregulation of the internet.

He said the only benefit from the FCC's decision is that it is making the public aware of net neutrality.

"It wasn't on the front burner and now it is," said Parshall. "Now the American public will have a dialogue on this issue."
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Government Yes, the gov‘t really does have a taskforce called ’WTF’

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Government Yes, the gov‘t really does have a taskforce called ’WTF’

Jonathon M. Seidl

Since our government wasn’t competent enough to stop Wikileaks from ever happening, at least they have a sense of humor about it:

The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks.

Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.

The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations.

For those unfamiliar with the term, WTF is a colloquial term for “what the fu**?”
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The Grand Design

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The Grand Design

Despite learning a great deal from Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow in their recent book The Grand Design, in the end I was disappointed.

It’s not that their book lacked clarity. In the introduction they do say that their explicit purpose is to explore “Not only how the universe behaves but why.” They posit three framing questions for their rather short book (188 pages from Bantam books for around $14.00 on Amazon): “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other?” (p. 9-10)

Perhaps I was simply put off by their rather glib dismissal of philosophy. On the very first page of their book they write, “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.”

And yet in the final chapters they end up doing a fair bit of philosophy. Not really philosophy but, if my count is correct, in the final two chapters the words, “luck,” “coincidence,” and “serendipity,” occur at least thirteen times in ways essential to their overall argument. For authors who are, according to their own assertion, completely dedicated to “scientific determinism,” this seems a rather odd way to finish up an argument.

Once the authors set out their framing questions, they introduce the reader to their methods. One essential element is called “model-dependent realism” which sounds to me a lot like post-modernism for physics.

We develop models of the world, say the authors, by interpreting “the input from our sensory organs.” We have the tendency to attribute to these models “the quality of reality or absolute truth.” But “there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation.” (p. 7) Thus, there may be multiple, credible, models that serve us well in our day to day lives. But not just any model will do. As it turns out there are “good” models for which the authors offer some criteria. (p. 51) Of course, by implication, there are also bad models.

The challenging new model for physicists is quantum physics. Quantum physics and classical physics are “based on very different conceptions of physical reality.” (p. 6) The push of quantum physics against our well established model of classical physics is, among other things, focused on the idea that there is a single history upon which we can gaze and ponder correct interpretation. According to quantum physics, “no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe, according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history….We will see that, like a particle, the universe doesn’t have just a single history, but every possible history, each with its own probability; and our observations of its current state affect its past and determine the different histories of the universe.” (p. 82-83)

While classical physics sought to find the single theory that would serve to unify everything we know about physics, the emerging model-dependent realism that embraces both classical and quantum physics will demand we alter our goals: “We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable. It appears that the fundamental numbers and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle….That may not satisfy our human desire to be special or to discover a neat package to contain all the laws of physics, but it does seem to be the way of nature.” (p 143-4).

Despite this re-imagination of our goals, the authors go on to posit the “M-theory,” as “the only model that has all the properties we think the final theory ought to have.” As it turns out, M-theory is a “whole family of different theories.” (p. 8) Although, “no one seems to know what ‘M’ stands for,” the laws of M-theory allow “for 10^500 different universes, each with its own laws.” (p. 118) And as so many media sources have noted in their hype of this book, none of these universes stands in need of a God to “light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” (p. 180)

In somewhat of an aside, I was interested in what the authors had to say about the idea of free will in humankind. They uphold their commitment to scientific determinism in declaring that free will is an “illusion” since it is our physical brain, “following the known laws of science that determines our actions.” (p. 32) But the authors introduce a rather useful tool in their bag of physics tools at this point. As it turns out something the y call “effective theory” serves to, in a sense, re-establish our free will.

Effective theory is “a framework created to model certain observed phenomena without describing in detail all of the underlying processes.” They hold that the determined nature of our behavior is so complex that we do not have the capability to actually chart it out. “We would therefore have to say that any complex being has free will — not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory.” (p. 178)

I am struck by the role this book plays in the so-called “culture wars” in our society. In this supposed war, there are believers and unbelievers who are at odds with each other about the essence of our culture and society. According to the believers’ side of the culture wars, these physicists are the bad guys trying to wrest individual and societal allegiance away from God and religious devotion to him. If one is drawn into these culture wars, which I am not, then the most pressing question to answer in the review of this book is whether or not the authors are atheists. Frankly, I couldn’t care less if they are believers or atheists. I’m interested in finding out how others answer the grand questions of life and this book was very illustrative in that regard.

I am not interested in engaging in the culture wars; not on a national basis and not on a denominational basis. It seems to me our church has observed the world and adopted its incessant need to fight. Rather than showing the world how to engage in decency and civility toward each other while focusing on important questions, we’ve apparently given up on that ideal and sunk to the level of our surrounding society; something the Apostle Paul might not be too pleased about (Romans 12). We’ve brought the culture wars from the world right into our church.

I think it is important to establish exactly what we are doing and how we want to go about it as we learn from each other. We ought to be engaged in dialogue rather than in apologetics or polemics. If the culture wars insist on using polemical attacks, I’ve no interest. For instance, why would I engage in a polemical attack on the science of physics or its practitioners in the culture wars? Why would I feel the need to offer an apologetic response to their work? I know who I am and the strengths and weaknesses of my models of reality. So I choose to engage in dialogue, seeking to truly understand the other and their model of reality.

Why would I expect anyone to be willing to listen to what I have to say if I refuse to truly engage in understanding them? Furthermore, why would I target physicists to fight with? Or geologists or biologists? As if their science is somehow more challenging to the credibility and viability of my faith?

Indeed, it seems to me that the science of psychology or sociology or even economics is as much if not more challenging than the sciences that we target in our church and national culture wars. Over the holiday season 2010 American consumers will likely spend over $440 billion dollars. This is elective, consumer spending and it is obscene! Do we not see the horrendous and corrosive effect of our consumer culture? Do we not see that our faith is taking a beating from the science of business that demands we be good consumers in order to be considered good citizens? If we are going to fight about something why don’t we fight about this?

How I go about this process of dialogue is, for me as an ethicist, even more important that what we’re doing. I posit four things that should serve to help guide how we engage the other, whether we are fighting within the confines of the church or on a national scale. We must hold respect for the other. It seems to me that the Gospel demands this (see 1 Peter 3.15-16). The people on the other side of any given issue are neither idiots nor devils. As I said above, reciprocity is essential in order to have a truly mutual dialogue. Finally, assurance (Phil. 1.2, 6) and humility (Mt. 11.29; 18.4; 23.12) are essential in how we engage in the culture wars within the church and nation. If Jesus really is our moral exemplar, if we really are supposed to model our lives after his example then these two character traits must take on more relevance than they have thus far.

And dare I say that these character traits ought to hold sway here within the Spectrum website?

Although body and soul he is an Alaskan, Mark Carr teaches at the Loma Linda University School of Religion in southern California where he led the Center for Christian Bioethics for a decade. In addition to ethics, he is interested in Islam and religion and science. After a year in France on a sabbatical, he taught LLU this past Fall in Saudi Arabia, Hawaii and Guam. Along with LLU professors Siroj Sorajjakool and Julius Nam, he is the editor of World Religions for Health Professionals (Routledge, 2009).

You may purchase this book and many other things in a way that benefits the Adventist Forum without increasing your Internet prices by using the Amazon box at this web site’s home page.
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FCC Ends Net Neutrality Debate (for Now) by Passing Its Open Internet Order

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FCC Ends Net Neutrality Debate (for Now) by Passing Its Open Internet Order

The controversial measure will let broadband providers prioritize Internet content, but detractors say the government is fixing something that is not broken

By Larry Greenemeier

NEUTRALIZED: The FCC voted Tuesday to approve the Open Internet Order, essentially giving the green light to its controversial "net neutrality" policy

Image: COURTESY OF BUBAONE, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

Members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) agreed on one thing at Tuesday's meeting: the Internet does not need to be fixed. Despite this shared sentiment, the FCC's commissioners are divided on whether the government should act in anticipation of potential problems as the Internet matures. The panel voted 3–2 in favor of the Open Internet Order, designed to ensure what has commonly been referred to as "net neutrality".

Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn joined FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in passing the order, whereas commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker strongly dissented, disagreeing with the government's involvement in enforcing conduct on the Internet.

Genachowski acknowledged that the Internet and the World Wide Web have blossomed despite minimal federal regulation, but he also expressed concern over a lack of enforceable rules to protect consumers from any emerging Internet-related practices that might divide users into haves and have-nots. "I believe our actions today foster an ongoing cycle of massive investment, innovation and consumer demand both at the edge and in the core of broadband networks," he said during the meeting in Washington, D.C.

The order addresses several key principles: Users have a right to information about the performance of their broadband connections as well as the way in which their broadband providers manage the network itself (in particular, how they prioritize different types of traffic). The order, which applies to both fixed and wireless broadband services, prohibits the unlawful blocking of content, apps, services and the connection of devices to the network.

The Open Internet Order's goal is to create a level playing field where the commercial market, rather than the government or some other central authority, picks winners or losers, according to Genachowski, who added, "That's the role of the commercial market and the marketplace of ideas." As such, the order does not permit pay-for-priority arrangements between broadband providers and businesses operating on the Internet that would produce so-called fast lanes for some companies' content but not for others. Such arrangements "would allow broadband providers to skew the marketplace by favoring one idea, application or service over another by selectively prioritizing Internet traffic," he said.

This does not, however, prohibit broadband providers from developing tiered-pricing models to help them manage the expansion of and help with the investment in high-speed networks. The key distinction here is that it would be up to broadband providers, not their customers, to decide which content is prioritized.

"The crux of the order we're adopting, which is based on a strong and sound legal framework rooted in the [Tele]communications Act, is straightforward," Genachowski said. The order establishes an Open Internet Advisory Committee to ensure that these rules are adopted and enforced.

Genachowski also indicated that his support for the order was influenced in no small way by the position of Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. The chairman cited a Berners-Lee article in the December issue of Scientific American at Tuesday's meeting, saying, "Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved."

The commissioners opposed to the FCC's new broadband rules indicated that industry groups had been successful in monitoring Internet fairness and questioned whether the federal government had the legal right to intervene. McDowell said the order suffered from "regulatory hubris" and added, "Fortunately, the cures for this malady are obtainable in court." In a Wall Street Journal editorial on Sunday, McDowell wrote, "Nothing is broken that needs fixing."

Baker concurred. In a Washington Post editorial on Tuesday, she wrote, "Discouragingly, the FCC is intervening to regulate the Internet because it wants to, not because it needs to."
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Bering in Mind: God's little rabbits: Religious people out-reproduce secular ones by a landslide

URL: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=gods...

The Bible tells us to be fruitful and multiply!

By Jesse Bering

What’s that famous quote, by Edna St. Vincent Millay? Oh, yes: "I love humanity but I hate people." It’s a sentiment that captures my normal misanthropically tinged type of humanitarianism well, but it roars apropos on some particular occasions. For example, making conversation at the pizza shop in my small village in Northern Ireland one recent evening, the topic turned to what I do for a living. Now, this simple query is usually a hard question for me to answer; when I say I’m a professor, inevitably I’m asked what I teach. When I say psychology, they giggle uncomfortably about their problems or say—as if it’s the most original line—that I’m in the right town for that. When I correct them and say I’m not a clinical psychologist, but a researcher, I have to explain what exactly I research. "Evolutionary psychology" tends to conjure up some bizarre ideas in the non-academic. And so it did on this occasion, as I struggled to articulate the nature of my profession in a cramped pizza parlor with about a half dozen locals eavesdropping on as I did so. Somehow or another, as conversations with me so often do, homosexuality came up as an example of a complex human behavior which evolutionary psychologists try to understand.

I wish I’d had a notebook in hand to scribble down the young employee’s comments word-for-word, so as to provide you with a proper ethnographic account. But here, in a nutshell, is what he very confidently said to me, flavored with the peculiar vernacular flourish found in this part of the world: "Aye. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothin’ against gay people. But what I don’t get is why they’d choose to be selfish and not ‘ave a family and kids-like which is what we’re here for, how’s you’s go against evolution by not continuin’ the line cause you’s can’t help the species without having kids. Just seems selfish-like to me." I replied that, as a gay man myself, it’s not quite as simple as ‘choosing’ not to breed; since women are as arousing to me as that half-eaten pepperoni pizza sitting on that table over there, I said, I couldn’t get an erection to inseminate a woman for the life of me. I do, however, I continued, get a mighty erection by seeing other men’s erections, so therein—I pointed my finger to the heavens for emphasis—lies the true Darwinian mystery! I then took my pizza and left. In haste. And now I’m writing this from Ohio.

But in any event, the exchange reminded me of my German colleague Michael Blume’s research on reproduction and religiosity. And it occurred to me that religiously motivated homophobia may be at least partially rooted in this assumption that gay people are shirking their human reproductive obligations. I detected a strong whiff of religious residue in the employee’s comments about homosexuality, which given the churchliness of Northern Ireland probably wasn’t my imagination.

In evolutionary biological terms, where natural selection occurs at the level of the gene, not at the species level, there are serious flaws in his conjecture about lineal reproduction. Modern technological methods helping gays to be parents aside, there are many ways that childless individuals can still be genetically successful, in some cases more so than simply being a biological parent, such as investing heavily in biological kin who share their genes. (In scientific parlance, this is known as kin selection or inclusive genetic fitness.) Having said that, he was not entirely wrong about the prime evolutionary significance of reproduction either. People really do need to reproduce, either directly or indirectly, for nature to continue operating on their genes. This is not the "reason" or "purpose" we’re here, as that would insinuate some form of intelligent design for human existence, rather it’s just a mechanical fact.

But where all of this gets really interesting, says Blume, an evolutionary theorist and religion researcher at the University of Heidelberg, is where the illusion of intelligent design intersects with a reproductive imperative—essentially the commonplace idea that God "wants" or "intends" or "demands" us, as faithful members of our communities, to have a litter of similarly believing children. You’ve been blessed with your pleasure-giving loins for a reason, so the unspoken logic goes, and that’s to get married to the opposite sex and to breed. By God, just look at the Old Testament. "Be fruitful and multiply" is the very first of 661 direct commandments. God doesn’t seem to be merely making a suggestion here but instead issuing a no-nonsense order.

Blume has found that those religions that actually put this issue front and center in their teachings are—for rather obvious reasons—at a selective group advantage over those that fail to endorse this stern commandment. He reviews several religions that are either already extinct or presently disappearing because they strayed too far from this reproductive principle. The Shakers, for example, hindered and even forbade reproduction among their own followers, instead placing their emphasis on missionary work, proselytizing and the conversion of outsiders. But this turned out to be a foolish strategy, evolutionarily speaking. "In the long run," Blume points out, "mass conversions happen to be the historic exception, not the rule. Most of the time, only fractions of populations tend to convert from the religious mythology handed to them vertically by their parents and they convert into different directions. [C]ommunities who start to lack young members also tend to lose their missionary appeal to other young people. Therefore, the Shakers overaged and deteriorated."

Some religious splinter groups have also tinkered a bit too much with God’s reproductive imperative, even exploring eugenics by attempting to "perfect" communal offspring. Such a calculated, deliberate scheme of human breeding may backfire, however, if it also means preventing couples from reproducing at their own personal discretion. This was part of the downfall of the Oneida Community of upstate New York, a 19th-century Christian commune that had a very practical—almost too practical—view of human sexuality. Reproduction was tightly regulated by a eugenics system known as stirpiculture. Over several generations, Oneida community physicians mated men and women that were carefully selected for their genetic health (I saw some of the handwritten medical records while going through the archives at the Kinsey Institute this past summer, and I can assure you that the breeding system was real and meticulous). Children born through this process of artificial selection were raised communally and maternal bonding was discouraged.

To prevent unplanned, non-engineered children, the Oneida members implemented a variety of controls, including encouraging teenage boys to have sex with postmenopausal women. This simultaneously stemmed both parties’ libidos and also, in forging personal alliances between the two, provided important ecumenical tutelage to the youth by the very devout older women. Adult men practiced male continence, a sexual "technique" in which males do not ejaculate during intercourse; given that Oneida also had polyamorous relationships, this was key for stirpiculture purposes. All of this may sound logical in theory, even unusually rational as far as religions go, but the tight regulations meant a quick death for the Oneida Community. After only about 30 years and peaking at just a couple of hundred members, the religious commune officially dissolved in 1881. Its members, presumably of good genetic stock but scanty in ranks, went into the silverware trade instead; today the Oneida Community is known as the hugely successful company Oneida Limited.

By contrast, similarly insulated, non-proselytizing religions that encourage their members to proliferate alleles the old-fashioned way—such as Orthodox Jews, Mormons, the Hutterites and Amish—and also emphasize "home-grown" faith in which members are born into the group and indoctrinated, are thriving. The story of the Amish is particularly impressive, having seen an exponential explosion in their numbers over a very short span of time. Emerging as a branch of the Anabaptist movement in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, about 4000 Amish fled Germany to avoid persecution and found refuge in the US and Canada during the 18th- and early 19th-centuries. Most people know that the Amish are extremely insular, shunning almost all contact with the non-Amish world—except during the brief "Rumschipringa" (transl. "jumping around") period, in which not-yet-baptized Amish youth flirt with the devilish goods outside before deciding whether or not to return to their family and faith. For boys, one incentive for retuning to the community is that if you want to have sex with (i.e., marry) a local Amish girl, you have to first be baptized, which is only for those who come home. Eighty percent do.

What you may not know is that the Amish population has been swelling since its New World inception. With growth rates hovering between 4 to 6 percent per year, their numbers double every 20 years or so. In 2008 they numbered 231,000; the year before, it was 218,000. Having children is a heavenly blessing but it’s also an official duty. With an average of 6 to 8 children born to each Amish woman, and with 80 percent of those returning to the group after Rumschipringa, this extraordinary growth rate—which continues to soar—is easy to understand. What’s especially ironic, points out Blume, is that like many increasingly secularized countries, the original Amish countenance of Germany has been succumbing to sharp population declines for decades. "The closing of churches has been followed by that of playgrounds, kindergartens, schools and whole settlements." At least in sheer numbers, then, it seems that the Amish—long-ridiculed by their European countrymen as the "dumb Germans" who wouldn’t give up their silly archaic beliefs—are getting the last laugh.

In fact, Blume’s research also shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically out-reproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there’s a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who "never" attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; "once per month," and the average goes up to 2.01 children; "more than once a week," 2.5 children. Those numbers add up—and quickly. Some of the strongest data from Blume’s analyses, however, come from a Swiss Statistic Office poll conducted in the year 2000. These data are especially valuable because nearly the entire Swiss population answered this questionnaire—6,972,244 individuals, amounting to 95.67% of the population—which included a question about religious denomination. "The results are highly significant," writes Blume:

… women among all denominational categories give birth to far more children than the non-affiliated. And this remains true even among those (Jewish and Christian) communities who combine nearly double as much births with higher percentages of academics and higher income classes as their non-affiliated Swiss contemporaries.

In other words, it’s not just that "educated" or "upper class" people have fewer children and tend also to be less religious, but even when you control for such things statistically, religiosity independently predicts number of offspring born to mothers. Even flailing religious denominations placing their emphasis on converting outsiders, such as Yehova’s witnesses, are out-reproducing nonreligious mothers. Hindus (2.79 births per woman), Muslims (2.44), and Jews (2.06), meanwhile, are prolific producers of human beings. Nonreligious Swiss mothers bear a measly 1.11 children.

Blume recognizes, of course, that these are correlational data. It’s not entirely clear whether being religious literally causes people to have more children, or whether—somewhat less plausibly but also possible—the link is being driven in the opposite direction (with people who have more children becoming more religious). Most likely it’s both. Nevertheless, Blume speculates on some intriguing evolutionary factors that could have resulted—and are still occurring through selection today—from the fact that religious people have more children. Since religiosity is to some degree a heritable trait, offspring born to religious parents are not only dyed in the wool of their faith through their culture, but Blume believes that they may also be genetically more susceptible to indoctrination than children born to nonreligious parents.

The whole situation doesn’t bode well for the "New Atheism" movement, in any event. Evolutionary biology works by a law of numbers, not moralistic sentiments. Blume, who doesn’t try to hide his own religious beliefs, sees the cruel irony in this as well:

Some naturalists are trying to get rid of our evolved abilities of religiosity by quoting biology. But from an evolutionary as well as philosophic perspective, it may seem rather odd to try to defeat nature with naturalistic arguments.

As a childless gay atheistic soul born to a limply interfaith couple, I suspect, perhaps for the better, that my own genes have a very mortal future ahead. As for the rest of you godless hetero-couples reading this, toss your contraceptives and get busy in the bedroom. Either that or, perish the thought, God isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

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