Bartholomew's Notes

Interfax reports:

The Orthodoxy excludes a possibility of existing extraterrestrial intelligence, the famous theologian and professor of the Moscow Theological Academy Alexey Osipov said.

According to him, such position is based on the fact that “the New Testament lacks” allusions to extraterrestrial forms of intelligent life.

“Secondly, there have been very many people in the Church who reached highest degree of God-likeliness and sanctity but no one of them has ever mentioned them (extraterrestrial civilizations – IF), though they pointed out to many other things,” Osipov said.

…Besides, the professor said that modern astronomy “advancing into the depth of the Universe still hasn’t found any planet with the life similar to that on Earth.”

This is, of course, a response to the recent claim made by Vatican Observatory head Jose Gabriel Funes that aliens may exist. However, while the Orthodox Church is dismissive, other religious groups in Russia agree with Funes:

“According to the Holy Koran, the Almighty speaks about creation of various worlds. We know the world of people, jinns, plants and animals. Perhaps, we don’t know everything. The Creator can create anything. Other creatures may inhabit the worlds out of our reach,” the chairman of the international department of the Muftis’ Council Rushan Abbyasov was quoted as saying by the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily on Thursday.

…Rabbi Zinovy Kogan said that “the Lord is the first cause for everything existing in micro and macro worlds.”

“It couldn’t be excluded that other creatures similar to man exist in other worlds,” he stressed.

Meanwhile, a recent entry on Billy Graham’s website tells us that

There may be life on other planets, but I believe man is unique in the sense that he was created in the image of God.

Some time ago Graham suggested (in Angels: God’s Secret Agents) that UFOs are actually angelic in origin, noting similarities between the theophany in Ezekiel 10 and accounts of UFO sightings. This was a weird inversion of Erich von Däniken’s idea that such religious accounts are actually records of alien visitations; both interpretations are equally mind-numbingly unscholarly, but Graham faced most opposition from co-religionists who believe that such phenomena are demonic. One such text (inevitably available from WorldNetDaily) explains that demons want us to believe in the existence of aliens as a ruse to make us accept the theory of evolution; this was an idea I blogged here.

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MediaWatchWatch notes that the Turkish newspaper Yeniçag has taken offence to the publication of a photograph of a seventeenth-century Dutch church sculpture of Muhammad being trampled by angels. The photo appeared in the conservative Brussels Journal blog back in 2006, but only now has the Turkish paper taken the obvious anti-Muslim bait. The Brussels Journal crows:

Last Friday the Turkish newspaper Yeniçag reprinted our picture on its front page with the caption “Stop this hideous insult.” Yeniçag demands that Belgium remove the pulpit. The paper writes that “We have had the crusades and now they are still trying to humiliate us. This is as bad as the Danish cartoons and Geert Wilders’s Fitna movie in the Netherlands. Even Pope Benedict does nothing to stop these humiliations.”

Since Friday, we have received threats while the authorities in Belgium, which has a large population of Turkish immigrants, fear that the pulpit and the church may be attacked. The Belgian press reported today that the police is guarding Dendermonde’s Our Lady church to prevent vandalism to church and pulpit.

…According to the Belgian press the pulpit controversy has been deliberately caused by this website, which is being described as “pretending to be neo-conservative” but run by “neo-fascists.” Piet Buyse, the mayor of Dendermonde, told the media that he deplores that the pulpit “figures on websites which aim to provoke negative reactions from Muslims.” The mayor said that the depicted man represents an unbeliever and may also be Luther or Calvin.

Given that the figure does not resemble either Luther or Calvin Buyse’s explanation is not credible; the artist, Mattheus van Beveren, was also at one point the court sculptor to the famously Protestant King William III in London. The sculpture was reportedly made shortly after the Battle of Vienna.

However, if the editors of Yeniçag want the Pope to intervene over offensive church art, there’s a queue; a couple of years ago I noted Magda Teter’s book Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland:

One…controversy centered around a painting, formerly known as Infanticidia or “Ritual Murder by Jews,” in the cathedral church in Sandomierz…Following the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Poland and Israel in the 1990s and the appointment of a Jewish-Catholic committee on reconciliation, a demand arose that this painting be removed from the church, as other paintings of this sort had been in Poland, as in Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, near Pope John Paul II’s hometown of Wadowice.

Meanwhile, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has a good example of a once-popular Christian theme:

Scholar Henry Claman explains:

Ecclesia (the Church) on the left is a nice-looking young woman with a halo, a crown, a cup (the Holy Grail) and a staff and banner. On the right is Sinagoga (representing Judaism) stooped (seductive?) and older, without a halo. Her crown (the symbol of her former authority) has fallen to her feet, her staff is broken, and she cannot see. What is wound around her head and in front of her eyes is a snake, the symbol of evil. The blindfolding of Sinagoga reflects the blindness of the Jews who could not see the truth of Christianity.

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The New York Times has a strange piece by Edward Luttwak explaining why voting for Barack Obama would be a bad idea:

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason.

…At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

In the UK Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph enthuses that “Luttwak is on to something”, although various other blogs have managed some critical thinking and pointed out the shortcomings of Luttwak’s argument. The most detailed response has come from Ali Eteraz, who observes that as a child abandoned by his secular Muslim father and Muslim relatives it is unlikely that Obama could be regarded as an apostate. He also notes that

Luttwack’s [sic] affirmation of Islamic law over and above international law should raise concerns, not only about his expertise, but also his allegiances.

This seems to me to be pretty obvious. How does it help “the fight against terrorism” to reject a candidate who is (allegedly) unacceptable to foreign Islamists? Why is this not the “appeasement” that conservatives are constantly denouncing? We might also ask whether Luttwak would have raised such a concern about an ex-Muslim-turned-Republican firebrand running for president, or whether Thompson would be so keen to agree. If not, then we must conclude that this is a case of bad faith.

However, while Luttwak is unable to give us any actual examples of Islamists who want Obama dead (and indeed, much of the anti-Obama rhetoric has been based on the assertion that organisations like Hamas would prefer him as president), it is that case that the adherents of one particular ideology have threatened to kill him, and they are based in the USA rather than the Muslim world. Jesus’ General has a quote from a certain racist radio host named Hal Turner:

…I’m starting to come to the realization that it may be up to a sole person, acting alone, to make certain this guy is never allowed to hold the most powerful office in the world. Sorry it may have to be that way, but it may.

Probably this kind of thing already “complicates the security planning” of Obama’s movements.

(Hat tip: Islamophobia Watch)

PS: Stupidity comes in diverse forms; this blog reported in January that

On my way to church, I was listening to KIRO 710 on the radio and an Obama supporter calls in and said Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president because having a woman in charge would offend Muslim countries (I don’t believe that this person is representative of the vast majority of Obama supporters).

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A new book debunking Mahatma Gandhi puts Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on its cover; WND is loving it:

Gandhi’s name has come up repeatedly in the Democratic presidential race – with both Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., outspoken admirers of the Indian independence leader – perceived as a virtual 20th century saint thanks to mythologizing books and movies.

Yet, the real Gandhi was not the little man revered by the U.S. cvil rights leadership for his commitment to non-violence, according to the authors of “Gandhi Under Cross-Examination,” which, using the India leader’s own words, portray him as an anti-black racist, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, a critic of George Washington and a man who believed Jews should not have resisted Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate them.

The book was written by G.B. Singh, who is a US colonel (apparently he’s a periodontist in the US Army Medical Department), in collaboration with Timothy Watson, author of The Ethics of Timelessness, a philosophical book which argues that “metaphysics is a science of immunology for the human spirit” which “reunites philosophy with its roots” (the PhD thesis version can be seen here). This is Singh’s second anti-Gandhi book, following Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity, which was published by the sceptical publishing house Prometheus Books. Singh explained his motivation in an interview when that book came out:

…in February 1983, I saw the film Gandhi which reinforced the story of Gandhi I had learned in India. In March 1983, I read the article, The Gandhi Nobody Knows by Richard Grenier. This article brought about fundamental changes in me especially dealing with asking probing questions and there I started to pay more critical attention to Gandhi while at the same time I was actively pursuing research into Hinduism.

These two areas of research eventually converged. The tragic events of 1984 in India against the Sikhs, painful that they were, were no surprise to me. Just following the attack on Golden Temple and other gurdwaras, Mrs. Indira Gandhi justified her bloody actions by invoking one of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings-that event in itself forced me to conduct a thorough research on our mahatma.

Singh’s earliest thoughts on the subject were published by the newsletter of African Americans for Humanism. However, Thomas W. Clark published a critical review of Gandhi: Behind the Mask of Divinity in The Humanist in 2006:

For those who relish the debunking of religious impostors, Singh’s contentious litany of Gandhi’s real and imagined faults may provide some satisfaction, but for most readers his conclusion that Gandhi was a “thug” no better than Stalin or Hitler (pages 308-309) will seem overwrought and unnecessarily inflammatory. B. R. Ambedkar’s 1945 classic, What Gandhi and the Congress Have Done to the Untouchables, offers a far more substantial and balanced account of some of Gandhi’s shortcomings.

Gandhi under Cross-Examination is published by Sovereign Star Publishing, which is based in New York. According to its website:

Sovereign Star is dedicated to providing accessible books written to stimulate intellectual and historical enlightenment. We are quickly developing a reputation for publishing bolder and more though-provoking materials than many others in the field.

However, given that Gandhi under Cross-Examination is the only item listed on the catalogue page, it’s difficult to assess on what exactly this “developing reputation” is based.

The book is available on special offer from WND, with some issues of Whistleblower inevitably thrown in. This is a rare endorsement by WND of this kind of religious debunking, and it should be noted that Singh also recalls that when he read the New Testament he “recognized so many holes in the story of Jesus Christ”. Perhaps we’ll see Christopher Hitchens’ attack on Mother Teresa on offer as an encore?

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Here’s one I missed from a couple of weeks ago:

Between April 29 and May 1, a series of meetings were held in Berlin and Dresden between Israeli and German public figures. The meetings were scheduled around the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorating the catastrophe of European Jewry.

The Israeli delegation included Knesset members Rabbi Benny Elon (leader of the National Union opposition) and Shai Hermesh (member of the Kadima ruling party), Josh Reinstein (Director of Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus) and Dr. Dmitry Radyshevsky (Director of the Jerusalem Summit). The visit included meetings with members of the Deutsche Bundestag (German Parliament), representing different parties, and with senior officials of the German Foreign Ministry.

The visit included meetings with members of the Deutsche Bundestag (German Parliament), representing different parties, and with senior officials of the German Foreign Ministry.

…The Israeli delegation spoke at the biggest Christian pro-Israel event in Germany called “Saxon Christian Friends of Israel”, timed to commemorate the Holocaust Memorial Day. The event was organized by approximately a dozen pro Israel Christian groups based in Germany.

The report – and a short piece in the Jerusalem Post – tells us that Radyshevsky impressed upon the Germans the need “to check radical Islam, which is a reincarnation of Fascism, and the regime of Iran that openly prepares a nuclear Holocaust”.

One wonders if Radyshevsky also expounded some of the strange ideas he outlines in his bizarre book Universal Zionism, which I blogged here, and which goes far beyond opposition simply to Islamic extremism. Or whether far-right politician Benny Elon repeated his call for Palestinians to be expelled into Jordan.

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Various news sources are reporting on an archaeological find in Ethiopia. Here’s how the DPA tells it:

Archaeologists believe they have found the Queen of Sheba’s palace at Axum, Ethiopia and an altar which held the most precious treasure of ancient Judaism, the Ark of the Covenant, the University of Hamburg said Wednesday. Scientists from the German city made the startling find during their spring excavation of the site over the past three months.

Meanwhile, a Bloomberg report has a slight – but somewhat significant – difference (emphasis added):

A team of archaeologists from the University of Hamburg said they discovered the Queen of Sheba’s palace and an altar that may have once held the Ark of the Covenant in Axum, Ethiopia.

Back to the DPA:

The Ethiopian queen was the bride of King Solomon of Israel in the 10th century before the Christian era. The royal match is among the memorable events in the Bible.

Actually, no – as various other blogs have pointed out (see here and here), the story does not appear in the Bible at all. However, there is a much later Ethiopian legend (collected in the Kebra Negast) concerning how Solomon used that famous wisdom of his to get the Queen of Sheba into bed, and how their son later took the Ark of the Covenant away to Ethiopia. As is well known, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to have it in a church in Axum, where it is hidden behind a curtain and guarded by a monk. The DPA continues:

The University said scientists led by Helmut Ziegert had found remains of a 10th-century-BC palace at Axum-Dungur under the palace of a later Christian king. There was evidence the early palace had been torn down and realigned to the path of the star Sirius.

Bloomberg adds the detail that the original structure “probably didn’t survive for very long”, which gives us a better idea of when the original structure was destroyed and the realignment occurred. The DPA again:

The team hypothesized that Menelek had changed religion and become a worshipper of Sirius while keeping the Ark, described in the Bible as an acacia-wood chest covered with gold. Remains of sacrifices of bullocks were evident around the altar.

The research at Axum, which began in 1999, is aimed at documenting the origins of the Ethiopian state and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

“The results we have suggest that a Cult of Sothis developed in Ethiopia with the arrival of Judaism and the Ark of the Covenant and continued until 600 AD,” the announcement said. Sothis is the ancient Greek name for a star thought to be Sirius.

That’s quite some hypothesizing going on there. A few questions from a layperson, if I may:

(1) What actual evidence links this site to Sheba, which may in fact have been in Yemen?

(2) What actual evidence is there that the altar was designed to hold an ark?

(3) Even if there is evidence of some kind of an ark-like object, why assume that it was the Ark? The Biblical description of the Ark suggests a cult object based on models from Egyptian religion – might that not apply to any cult object at this site?

(4) How is it sensible to speak of Menelek “changing religion”, even if we accept a historical Menelek? Just because there are supposed signs of correspondence with Israelite religion at the site, that hardly means that Israelite theology was ever adopted wholesale, or (to return to the point above) even that the correspondences derive from Israelite models. Further, even if Ziegert is correct in his hypothesis about the Ark and the adoption of Israelite beliefs, according to the Bible there were all kinds of religious practices and ideas being assimilated into Israelite religious life during the early First Temple period. Of course, the Biblical authors were appalled by most of these, but their appearance does not amount to “changing religion”. In the same way Menelek (or his successors) could have simply added veneration of Sirius to religious practices.

However, such caveats are unlikely to bother many people; WorldNetDaily’s top story is currently “Ark of the Covenant altar found in Sheba’s palace”, and various US discussion threads are pondering what this means as regards the Last Days and the building of the Third Temple.

Ziegert’s website can be seen here, although there isn’t currently anything there about this story.

UPDATE: WND has belatedly added some quotation marks around “Ark of the Covenant altar” in its headline.

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The Guardian reports:

A long-standing and prominent Iranian opposition group must be struck off the government’s list of proscribed terrorist organisations, the appeal court ruled yesterday.

In a move attacked by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and by senior Iranian officials, the court dismissed ministers’ claims that the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) was “concerned in terrorism”.

Three judges led by Lord Phillips, the lord chief justice, refused Smith leave to contest a decision by the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission last year that to proscribe the group was “perverse”. Smith “could not reasonably have formed the view” then that the PMOI “intended in future to revert to terrorism”, they said.

…Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the Iranian Resistance movement, said the terror label had inflicted enormous damage on the Iranian people. “The United Kingdom and western governments owe the people of Iran an apology over this shameful designation,” she said.

The AFP adds:

The United States will be under pressure to stop banning an Iranian opposition movement as “terrorist” following a court ruling Wednesday in Britain, a former opposition spokesman said.

…Encouraged by the ruling was Alireza Jafarzadeh, who was spokesman for the National Resistance Council of Iran (NRCI), the PMOI’s political wing, until the State Department banned both as a “foreign terrorist organization” in 2003.

…”Congress, which was putting pressure before, is going to doubly put pressure on the State Department,” Jafarzadeh said.

He claimed public opinion opposed the designation in a political climate in which Washington accuses Iran of supporting Shiite militias in Iraq and of pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

PMOI is also known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), and concerns about its activity are long-standing. Liberal hawk blog Harry’s Place listed these last July:

The MEK is led by a husband and wife, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, it “has increasingly come to resemble a cult.” During the 1970s, the Council adds, MEK supported “killings of U.S. military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran” as well as “the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries.” In 1991, MEK assisted “Saddam Hussein’s suppression of the 1991 Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish uprisings.” In other words, the group collaborated in genocidal massacres.

The MEK claims to seek a secular and democratic Iran; it promises free elections. The truth is much more sinister. Elizabeth Rubin emphasized the cultist nature of the organisation in a detailed report (New York Times Magazine , July 13, 2003)…

That report can be seen here. Highlights:

…the Mujahedeen operates like any other military dictatorship. Mujahedeen members have no access to newspapers or radio or television, other than what is fed them. As the historian Abrahamian told me, “No one can criticize Rajavi.” And everyone must go through routine self-criticism sessions. “It’s all done on tape, so they have records of what you say. If there’s a sign of resistance, you are considered not revolutionary enough, and you need more ideological training. Either people breakaway or succumb.”

Salahaddin Mukhtadi, an Iranian historian in exile who still maintains communications with the Mujahedeen because it’s the strongest armed opposition to the Iranian regime, told me that Mujahedeen members “are locked up if they disagree with anything. And sometimes killed.”

Afshari, who fled the group 10 years ago, told me how friendship was forbidden. No two people could sit alone and talk together, especially about their former lives…Though Maryam and Massoud finagled it so they could be together, they forced everyone else into celibacy. “They told us, ‘We are at war, and soldiers cannot have wives and husbands,'”

Rubin’s piece also quotes Maryam Rajavi as having allegedly advised her fighters in 1991 to take “the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards”.

MEK was also the subject of a damning Human Rights Watch report which made the same complaints. MEK’s response has been to suggest that such critics have either been hoodwinked by, or are in collusion with, Iranian security services. PMOI officially renounced violence in 2001, and in the USA members of the neo-conservative right have been lobbying on its behalf; the above Harry’s Place posting was written in opposition to a pro-MEK piece by Daniel Pipes. However, in the UK support for PMOI has been cross-party, and in January Labour peer Robin Corbett wrote a piece in which he asserted that the government’s motivation for the ban was to placate the Iranian government. Of course, a group may indeed be non-terrorist and the enemy of something harmful while still remaining very dodgy. MEK believes that it should be supported because of the repressive acts and belligerence of the Iranian government, and we should remember that new people joining a group or internal dissent can have a moderating effect. However, we should also bear in mind factors such as the following:

(Hat tip: Ruth Gledhill, who judges the government’s opposition to PMOI to be a form of religious persecution)

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Letter claims investigation motivated by media opposition to “evangelical teachings and socially conservative policy positions”

American Christian Right leaders have come together to decry the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation into the finances of several “mega-ministries”. The leaders have written a letter, which is available on Townhall (I’ve reformatted the signatories to save space and for ease of reading):

United States Congress

U.S. Capitol

Washington, DC 20002

May 2, 2008

Dear Senate Finance Committee Member:

We write respectfully to let you know of our concerns about the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation into the finances of several churches, all of which share the same branch of evangelicalism, and all of which promote socially conservative public policy positions such as support for the traditional definition of marriage.

While we recognize that some evangelical teachings and socially conservative policy positions are controversial, and that these churches have been the subject of sensational investigative journalism, we are nonetheless concerned that this would possibly justify an investigation outside the normal confines of the Internal Revenue Service and established administrative and judicial procedures.

Congress passed the Church Audit Procedures Act in 1984 specifically to discourage politically driven audits of churches. The Act prevents the Internal Revenue Service from initiating an investigation into a church’s finances unless a “high level Treasury official” concludes that there is reasonable cause for such an investigation. The Act also protects a church under investigation from politically motivated leaks during the course of the examination.

We are unaware of any finding by a high-level Treasury Department official that there is reasonable cause to open an investigation of any of these ministries.

We are concerned that the Senate Finance Committee may be setting a dangerous precedent that may be difficult to reverse.  For one thing, controversy will always be a part of religious teaching.  And religious controversy is something the media will inevitably strive to exploit, since the media feed on controversy and have demonstrated a bias against evangelical Christians.  The Committee’s reliance on media reports in targeting subjects for its investigation would therefore only seem to reinforce this unfortunate bias, however unwittingly.

We cannot recall instances in the past where a congressional committee has targeted major ministries under threat of subpoena. The ministries have been asked to produce financial records and internal documents in what appears to be an exercise in disproving their alleged guilt.

Congress has a legitimate role to play in oversight of our laws, including tax laws governing churches. And ministries have the obligation to be transparent in their financial accounting. But the targeting of specific ministries by a congressional committee would seem to intrude on the free exercise of religion guaranteed under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We believe this is why churches are properly exempt from taxation in the first place — to prevent governments from using their power to tax as a way to limit the free exercise of religion.

We respectfully ask that investigations into the finances of specific ministries be left with the Internal Revenue Service, overseen and approved by a Treasury Department official who has affirmed that there is reasonable cause for such an investigation, in accordance with the Church Audit Procedures Act.

Signed,

Paul Weyrich, Chairman, Coalitions for America; Donald E. Wildmon, Founder and Chairman, American Family Association; Ken Blackwell, Chairman, Coalition for a Conservative Majority; William Murray, Chairman, Religious Freedom Coalition; Rev. Bill Owens, President, Coalition of African American Pastors; Victoria Cobb, President, The Family Foundation of Virginia; Dr. Gary Cass, Chairman/CEO, Christian Anti-Defamation Commission; Pastor Craig Polston, Kingdom Baptist Church, Fredericksburg, Virginia; Pastor Bob Emrich, The Maine Jeremiah Project, Emmanuel Bible Baptist Church; Dr. Carl Herbster, President, AdvanceUSA; Anthony Verdugo, Christian Family Coalition; Deal W. Hudson, Director, InsideCatholic.com; Rev. Rick Scarborough, President, Vision America; Star Parker, President, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education; Colin Hanna, President, Pennsylvania Pastors Network; Dr. Danny Forshee, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Lavaca, Arkansas; Sadie Fields, State Chairman, Georgia Christian Alliance; Pastor Jack Knapp, Sandston, Virginia; Larry Cirignano, Founder, CatholicVote; James Martin, President, 60 Plus; George Landrith, President, Frontiers of Freedom; Mathew Staver, Dean and Professor of Law, Liberty University School of Law; Rev. Rob Schenck, National Clergy Council

The investigation, as is well known, is being overseen by Sen. Charles Grassley, and he is focussing on Without Walls International Church, Benny Hinn Ministries, Joyce Meyer Ministries, Kenneth Copeland Ministries, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and World Changers Church International. Media reports have, in recent months and years, highlighed a number of financial controversies involving these and other ministries: questions have been raised about Kenneth Copeland’s private use of a ministry jet, and concerning Benny Hinn’s penchant for luxurious hotels. Morris Cerullo, Mac Hammond, and (from Canada) Paul Melnichuk have also faced negative publicity over the use of money. Grassley clearly has a personal distaste for the “Prosperity Gospel” and for the lavish lifestyles enjoyed by certain ministry leaders (who often receive donations from vulnerable people hoping for some kind of miracle from God), but to claim that the investigation is driven simply by media bias against “evangelical teachings and socially conservative policy positions” is disingenuous.

However, the letter does raise a legitimate issue, and concerns about Grassley’s approach appeared in Christianity Today in January:

…take this comment, published on Grassley’s website: “As a Christian myself, and a person who believes in tithing, I feel I have a right to know where my money goes.”

But the law allows churches not to disclose their finances, even to their own members. Indeed, it was Grassley himself who introduced the Church Audit Procedures Act in 1983, which significantly limited irs investigations into church finances.

…Several of the ministries targeted by Grassley (and others not targeted) appear to provide excessive compensation to their celebrity leaders. So we encourage them to disclose their finances. We welcome irs investigations into allegations of mismanaged funds, and we don’t oppose a Senate query into whether further legislation is necessary. At the same time, it’s hard to see how further legislation would be helpful. It would only amount to more government intrusion into church governance.

…But churches—even ones that spout heresies like the health-and-wealth gospel—are protected by the First Amendment in ways that the Nature Conservancy and Smithsonian are not. Grassley was on dangerous ground when he told reporters, “Jesus comes into the city on a simple mule, and you got people today expanding his gospel in corporate jets. Somebody ought to raise questions about [whether] it’s right or wrong.” There’s an important theological question here, but a Senate investigation is not the place to ask it.

Meanwhile, Grassley’s investigation has been noted in other countries; Ghana has many prosperity preachers, and a recent opinion piece in the Accra Public Agenda observed that

…In the USA, a Republican senator, Charles Grassley of Iowa has recently begun a crusade against these so-called prosperity preachers. Grassley is asking the ministries for financial records on salaries, spending practices, private jets and other perks…However, what is important is the pervasive nature of the extent of exploitation that is going on in many churches.

…It appears the modern church has been characterized by a new wave of corruption that is unheard of in religious circles. Rather than instill hope, they are making poverty widespread. Rather than strengthen families, they are tearing them apart; it looks as if people will tear down as many good livable housing to build these huge churches, multiplying the homeless problem in record numbers.

(Hit tip: Melissa Rogers)

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Bruce Wilson at Talk to Action has posted some interesting photographs of apocalyptic Christian Zionist mega-church pastor John Hagee hanging out with some rather well-known people.

Hagee has featured on this blog before (see search function), and his recent endorsement of John McCain has caused some controversy. The video below presents a typical Hagee sermon, although someone else has ornamented it with pictures and music.

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Stronger Russian Church Presence in Israel-Palestine Decried by Greek Patriarch

From Interfax:

Professor of the Moscow Spiritual Academy Deacon Andrey Kuraev said that the Moscow Patriarchate should begin actively preaching among the Russian-speaking Jews of Israel…He noted that the Russian Jewish community in Israel consisted mostly of intelligentsia (middle class), but he doubted that the “local Greek Patriarch” had enough resources to communicate with this group which “shows a great interest in Christianity”.

There are many Russian Israelis whose links to Judaism or Jewish identity are rather tenuous, but who have taken advantage of Israel’s “right of return” to move to Israel. If they are religious at all, their religion is likely to be Russian Orthodox Christianity. The consequences of this population shift (as I’ve blogged before) were the subject of a 1999 academic article by Ian Lustick, entitled “Israel as a non-Arab State”. Roger Owen briefly summarized the findings in Al-Ahram in 2000. Among them:

…First, no meaningful debate on the question of the Jewishness of the Russian immigrants can be carried on without raising the whole notion of the Right of Return and so, by extension, one of the main rationales for the Zionist project in the twentieth century. Second, given the demographic struggle between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians, the Jewish Israelis would be unhappy about any diminution in the numbers they claim for their side. This also makes sense if one considers that the non-Jewish Russians are just as likely to be anti-Palestinian as their Jewish compatriots.

Seen from this point of view, the construction of Russian Orthodox churches in the communities where there is a heavy concentration of Russian immigrants makes perfect sense. So too does the increasing unwillingness to question people’s religion and ethnic origins. According to Lustick, the 1995 census was the first in Israeli history not to ask questions about what is obviously becoming an increasingly contentious, but also increasingly blurred, situation regarding individual religious and ethnic identity.

The ultra-Orthodox political party Shas is particularly opposed to this development, and has referred to the immigrants as “hundreds of thousands of Gentiles flooding the land with pork, prostitution, impurity and filth”. Given the noises currently being made by rightwing Israeli anti-missionary organizations (discussed yesterday) against Messianic Jews, a plan to “preach” to Russian Jews is not likely to be well received in certain quarters.

However, Kuraev’s jibe about the “local Greek Patriarch” being unable to missionize suggests that the Russian church has another priority: extending its influence in the “Holy Land”. As I blogged a year ago, the Russian Orthodox Church has over the last decade or so been reclaiming property in both Israel and the Palestinian territories which it had lost during the Communist era, and the re-unification of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia has doubtless made this process easier. Just a few weeks ago Interfax reported the return of an Orthodox compound in Jerusalem:

An Orthodox compound in Jerusalem, Segiyevskoye Podvorye, will be handed over to Russia in the coming months, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s official spokesman Eddi Shapira told a delegation of Russian journalists in Jerusalem’s City Hall.

…”The process should be over by the end of June,” the ambassador said, adding that the compound would be handed over to Russia.

According to a report in Russia Profile, the compound, also spelt as “Sergievskoe Podvorye”, is

a two-storey, 4000 square meter house with a spacious green courtyard, which was completed in 1879 as a hotel for the nobles and the headquarters of the [Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society].

This building was not included in property sold off to Israel by Khrushchev in 1964, as it was a private residence registered in the name of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. It became an Israeli ministry building, but is now “in decay”, and its return to Russian control was the subject of talks between Putin and Ariel Sharon in 2005. Russia Profile sees such property restorations as the resurrection of the nineteenth-century infrastructure for pilgrims known as “Russian Palestine”, but the compound would no doubt also become a symbol of the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, the organization which Time has described as Putin’s “main ideological arm and a vital foreign policy instrument”.

Meanwhile, tensions between the Russians and the Greek Orthodox Church are highlighted in another Interfax article:

The Union of Orthodox Citizens thinks unfounded accusations of Russians in “nationalism” and “aggressive policy” in the Holy Land expressed by Jerusalem Patriarch Theofilus III during his meeting with Russian media before Easter.

“The problem of failure to perform by the Greek clergy of their missionary obligations to the Orthodox Arabs and Eastern Christian unions correctly stated by the founder of the Russian spiritual mission Porfiri Uspensky is still important,” said the Head of the Moscow department of the Union Kirill Frolov to Interfax-Religion.

Theophilos had apparently accused Uspensky (1804–1883) of bringing racism to Palestine; Frolov in turn accuses Theophilos of preferring the “degraded, dependent, and inactive but unclouded materially position of the Jerusalem Church under unorthodox rule”.

A dispute with the Russian Church is just one more pressure for Theophilos: Israel has made it clear that it prefers his deposed predecessor, Irineos, who, although anti-Jewish (he’s on record expressing his “disgust and disrespect” for “the descendants of the crucifiers of our Lord Jesus Christ”), was at the helm when church property in East Jerusalem was leased to an Israeli settler group (I’ve blogged on this at some length, e.g here) – the deal was annulled by Theophilos. As well as this, Palestinian Christians have been agitating for some time for a greater presence within the clergy and decision-making processes, and a year ago Theophilos promised that things would be improved by now (I’ve no idea if Palestinians are now in fact more satisfied). And if all this wasn’t enough, he recently retained the law firm Carter-Ruck to pursue a libel claim against a British-based Arabic newspaper through the London courts.

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