Bartholomew's Notes

The Peru Tribune (via Religion News Blog) reports on Christian apologists going boldly where few have gone before, and asking the question:

What if UFOs were really angels and demons?

Actually, this idea has been around in Christian fundamentalist circles for a while, and one book on the subject has been promoted on WorldNetDaily (the opposite idea, that demons were actually aliens, inspired Spock’s ears in Star Trek; Leonard Nimoy baulked at a tail, though). But three Christian apologists (with a lot to apologise for) have produced a new presentation on the topic:

The movie is a companion to “Lights in the Sky & Little Green Men” by astronomer Hugh Ross, philosopher/theologian Kenneth Samples and national security expert Mark Clark.

…between one and five percent of UFO sightings or abductions cannot be explained…These the authors called residual UFOs. Ross said abductions are suspect because the experiments done on people are not based on good science and it does not appear the aliens are that much more technologically advanced, as they should be.

For example, in the 1950s people said they were visited by beings from the moon, Ross said. Later when more was learned about the moon the aliens were from Venus, then Mars and later Jupiter and Saturn.

So could it be that people were imagining stuff, based on sci-fi movies and pulp fiction? Nope:

“The intent was on deceiving us and the science knowledge was inaccurate,” Ross said.

…Samples believes alien abductions and UFO sightings have occult origins and only people who have participated in occult activity have these UFO experiences. Examples of occult activity can include involvement in astrology, using tarot cards or a Ouija board, being a medium between the living and the dead, divination or predicting the future.

The reasoning is brilliant: demons wished to deceive the world about science, so they decided that the best way to do this was to persuade some flaky New Agers that there are aliens on the moon. When that belief was shown to be inaccurate, that somehow served a masterplan of scientific disinformation. And although the news report does not spell it out, I think we can safely guess that this is all somehow leading towards an explanation for why PZ Myers gets more respect from intelligent people than Ken Ham. The credulous report concludes:

For more information on or to purchase the movie “The RUFO Hypothesis,” log onto www.reasons.org.

Reasons.org is Hugh Ross’s organisation. The trinity of space cadets behind the movie is also connected to NAVPRESS, which provides handy short biogs:

HUGH ROSS earned a B.Sc. in physics from the University of British Columbia and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto. He directs the efforts of Reasons To Believe, an institute founded to research and proclaim the factual basis for faith in God and His Word, the Bible. Dr. Ross has authored many books, including The Creator and the Cosmos and The Genesis Question.

KENNETH SAMPLES holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and social science and a master’s degree in theological studies. He is currently vice president of Philosophical and Theological Apologetics at Reasons To Believe and an adjunct instructor of philosophy and religion. Kenneth is also the founder and president of the Augustine Institute, a nonprofit educational center for philosophical and religious studies.

MARK CLARK received his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Southern California. He is a professor of political science and the chair of that department, as well as director of the National Security Studies program at California State University, San Bernardino. Mark is an adjunct fellow at the Claremont Institute and a consultant to TRW on strategic nuclear forces.

Mark Perakh discusses Hugh Ross here. Samples (or “Professor Kenneth Richard Samples, Founder”, as he prefers) actually runs the Augustine Fellowship Study Center – the Augustine Institute is an unrelated Roman Catholic organisation. And Mark Clark’s university page can be seen here, although links to his selected works and course syllabi are sadly broken (the page is still worth looking at, for the scary photo). I suppose it#s good that his presence must make the Claremont Institute look silly, but his association with TRW is somewhat worrying…

But I shouldn’t mock. As Criswell says in Plan 9 from Outer Space: “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”

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Not being completely obsessed with religious news, I sometimes find myself researching other items. Usually I restrain myself from going off-topic on this blog, but in this case the amusement factor is too high. From the AP, via Snopes:

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) – Orange County’s sheriff used driver’s license records to contact a woman who wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper criticizing his staff’s use of Taser stun guns and describing him as fat.

Some say Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary violated federal privacy law when he had his aides use the records to get the address of Alice Gawronski. He sent her a letter accusing her of slander.

…In her letter, she referred to a news conference when Beary allowed himself to be zapped with one to demonstrate its safety. Seeing Beary “in an obvious state of duress” convinced her the stun guns should not be used, she wrote.

Gawronski also wrote that Beary appeared overweight and suggested that if deputies were more fit, they might not need to resort to zapping suspects.

Such a delightful combination of arrogance, vanity and stupidity deserves maximum world-wide exposure, and I figured that as a Brit living in Japan I ought to do my small bit to make sure that this puffed-up bully is shamed globally.

But actually, it turns out that there is a religion angle after all, as we peruse the official bio from the Sheriff’s Office:

Sheriff Beary holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Liberty University and a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice from the University of Central Florida.

The former qualification is, of course, completely worthless: Liberty University is run by Jerry Falwell and is rabidly anti-science, as this advert for Liberty’s upcoming Creationist Mega Conference demonstrates. And this website, set up by someone who doesn’t much care for Beary or his department, gives us this very unexpected titbit (click on “Abuse of Power”), recounting events from 1996:

Two commanders have been fired, a volunteer reserve deputy resigned, and three other officers were suspended following an investigation by the Orange County, Fla., Sheriff’s Department into allegations that members of the department abused their power while working as security guards for televangelist Benny Hinn and his World Outreach Center.

The two members of Sheriff Kevin Beary’s “inner circle” fired were Commander I Rusty Smallwood and Commander II Roger Clark. They were fired for falsifying off-duty records while working at the World Outreach Center, lying to investigators and abusing their positions as commanders. Smallwood also was charged with destroying records he kept on the protesters. The officers would travel with Hinn to his out-of-town healing crusades while still on the county payroll. Smallwood also admitted that he would make an additional $4,000-$5,000 a night selling tapes of his music at Hinn’s crusades.

Reserve deputy Christopher Hinn, the televangelist’s younger brother, voluntarily resigned.

Space Coast Web Journal also recounts this Orlando Sentinal column:

Scott Maxwell, in his Taking Names column, (March 25, Orlando Sentinel,) recounts Orange County Undersheriff Malone Stewart’s characterizion of [rival Sheriff] candidate John Tegg as a “Judas Iscariot” and Democratic rival Rick Staley [sic – should be “Staly”] as “the Antichrist.”  Does this mean that Stewart believes that Sheriff Kevin Beary is Christ?

Staly’s website (still up, although Beary was reelected) has much more on Beary’s shenanigans, including his getting of federal cash for safety literature that went to a company owned by his parents. The Orlando Weekly News also has this profile. Seems that is well as doling out a debased science education, Liberty wasn’t even able to instil some basic Christian ethics…

UPDATE: Jesus’ General offers the good Sheriff some words of comfort.

UPDATE 2: The Sheriff denies any wrongdoing in an “apology“.

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WorldNetDaily‘s Jerusalem correspondent Aaron Klein has a follow-up to his earlier pieces publicising a plan by Israeli radicals to hold a mass rally at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Temple Mount is the site of the old Jewish Temple (destroyed in 70CE), and now the location of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque. Klein warns that Muslims are not happy:

Several thousand demonstrated Friday in Cairo against a plan by Revava, a Jewish organization with the stated mission of ”restoring self-esteem to the state of Israel by restoring national pride and values,” to bring 10,000 Jews to the heavily restricted Temple Mount April 10 to spark Israeli dialogue about reclaiming the holy site from its Islamic custodians.

i.e. “spark Israeli dialogue about whether Israeli forces should illegally invade and take over the sacred space of another religion despite the bloodshed and international strife that would follow, for the benefit of a bunch of religious fundamentalists who detest Israeli democracy and whose understanding of Judaism is widely rejected anyway.” But that’s just the start of Klein’s weasel-speak:

…The Palestinian media have been portraying the Revava visit as an attempt by Jews to attack the Al Aqsa Mosque to spark a confrontation that can be used to delay Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to vacate Jewish settlements this summer from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

That damned Palestinian media! But the moronic Klein then continues:

A police official said Israel also is concerned the Jewish visit will prompt an outbreak of violence, and said police are worried some Jews will use the visit to carry out an attack on the Temple Mount in hopes of disrupting the Gaza withdrawal.

“This visit cannot happen. It will cause violence on the Temple Mount and will result in a deterioration of the security situation in Israel,” the official said. “It is just an excuse by Jewish extremists to start a conflict and try to stop [the Gaza withdrawal].”

So, the way the “Palestinian media” has been “portraying” the planned visit has actually been confirmed by the Israeli police.

As I have noted on this blog previously, there is a gaping hole at the heart of Klein’s reporting on this issue: the very obvious way he declines to tell us anything about the background of Revava or of its leader, David Ha’ivri (or “David Haivri”). This is because that background is very unpleasant, and Klein knows that WND’s readership of Christian Zionists would rather imagine pious Israelis on a religious pilgrimage than the reality of thuggish fanatics (who, by the way, also hate Christians). Here’s a report from the New York Daily News, published last August:

Violence-spewing Jewish radicals are raising big bucks in New York even though they’re tied to groups identified by the U.S. as terror organizations.

…Among the pro-settler Jews raising thousands in New York is David Haivri, who has long ties to the movement founded by Meir Kahane, the radical Brooklyn-born rabbi slain by an Egyptian Islamist in New York in 1990.

Haivri denies that he advocates violence, and:

…Haivri, cited by Israel as one of the Kahane movement’s central figures, noted that his recent fund-raising was done under the auspices of a new group called Revava, which is not on the U.S. terror groups list.

But Haivri has long been affiliated with Kahane Chai and the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, two banned groups.

The two groups, and about 50 others, are aliases for Kahane Chai, the Treasury Department says.

The groups are linked to violence against Palestinians and have also been called terror groups in Israel.

“If you’re an American Jew, or for that matter a Christian evangelical contributing to them, you’re contributing to a group very likely to use violence against Israeli security forces,” warned Yossi Alpher, a former official of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.

Of course, a large chunk of Klein’s readership believe that Jews must build a new Temple as prelude for the return of Christ; if Israelis who fail to play along with this fantasy get hurt, that’s their own look out. But if Klein really believes that Haivri and his cronies are the good guys, why won’t he tell the whole story?

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The one-time actor Pope John Paul II bowed out with impressive timing. Ron Dreher of the Dallas Morning News on Saturday:

A few years ago [in 2000], Pope John Paul II canonized Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who died in 1938. St. Faustina was a mystic who claimed to have received apparitions and messages from Jesus in her lifetime. She kept a long diary in which she inscribed messages she allegedly received from Jesus. I hasten to say that though Faustina is a recognized saint of the Roman Catholic Church, no Catholic is bound to believe that her apparitions were real. Personally, I don’t know what to think about them, and I don’t really think about them.

Still, as we approach Divine Mercy Sunday, the feast that Faustina said Jesus asked to be established on the first Sunday after Easter, and which John Paul did in fact institute, I can’t help but recall this particular entry of Faustina’s diary. It comes from 1937, the year before she died. Faustina wrote:

As I was praying, I heard Jesus’ words: ‘I bear a special love for Poland, and if she will be obedient to My Will, I will exalt her in might and holiness. From her will come forth the spark that will prepare the world for My final coming.’

It does not seem likely at this point that the Pope will survive this day. But if he held on until Sunday, that would be, um, interesting.

Dreher is also reported on Get Religion as having noted that “Divine Mercy Sunday” had been popular in Krakow for some time – where, of course, the future Pope was Archbishop in the 1960s.

Faustina not only heard Jesus, but saw him as well; apparently the famous picture above was produced under her direction. It should be noted that Dreher’s quote comes from an English translation made in 1987; the Polish text itself was published properly only in 1981. A 2002 report by John L Allen has some further details (hyperlink added):

In 1959, the Holy Office (the Vatican’s doctrinal agency, today known as the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith) issued a cease and desist order against Faustina’s diary and the devotion to Divine Mercy, a ban that was to last almost 20 years, until 1978. Wojtyla had long been working to reverse the verdict, having launched the beatification process for Faustina in 1965 while he was archbishop of Krakow.

Officially, the 20-year ban [ended by Pope Paul VI] is now attributed to misunderstandings created by a faulty Italian translation of the Diary, but in fact there were serious theological reservations–Faustina’s claim that Jesus had promised a complete remission of sin for certain devotional acts that only the sacraments can offer, for example, or what Vatican evaluators felt to be an excessive focus on Faustina herself.

John Paul has pushed no devotion further or faster. His second encyclical, 1980’s Dives in Misericordia, was inspired by Faustina. He beatified her in 1993, and canonized her in April 2000 as the first saint of the third Christian millennium. He approved a special Divine Mercy Mass for the Sunday after Easter in 1994, and celebrated it himself in St. Peter’s Square before a crowd of 200,000 in April 2001. He assigned the Church of the Holy Spirit in Sassia in Rome as a headquarters for the Divine Mercy movement in 1994, and just this month approved a special indulgence for taking part in Divine Mercy Sunday.

A few extracts from Faustina’s 700-page diary are available on-line at this website (as well as a short history of the text itself). Here’s the “spark” passage in context:

Today I was awakened by a great storm. The wind was raging, and it was raining in torrents, thunderbolts striking again and again. I began to pray that the storm would do no harm, when I heard the words: Say the chaplet I have taught you, and the storm will cease. I began immediately to say the chaplet and hadn’t even finished it when the storm suddenly ceased, and I heard the words: Through the chaplet you will obtain everything, if what you ask will be compatible with My will.As I was praying for Poland, I heard the words: I bear a special love for Poland, and if she will be obedient to My will, I will exalt her in might and holiness. From her will come forth the spark that will prepare the world for My final coming.Welcome, hidden Love, life of my soul! I welcome You, Jesus, under these insignificant forms of bread. Welcome, sweetest Mercy, who pour yourself out for souls. Welcome, Infinite Goodness, who pour out everywhere torrents of Your graces. Welcome, O veiled Brightness, the Light of souls. Welcome, O Fount of inexhaustible mercy, O purest Spring from which life and holiness gush forth for us. Welcome, Delight of pure souls. Welcome, only hope of sinful souls.

Poland appears a few other times:

September. First Friday. In the evening, I saw the Mother of God, with Her breast bared and pierced with a sword. She was shedding bitter tears and shielding us against God’s terrible punishment. God want to inflict terrible punishment on us, but He cannot because the Mother of God is shielding us. Horrible fear seized my soul. I kept praying incessantly for Poland, for my dear Poland, which is so lacking in gratitude for the Mother of God. If it were not for the Mother of God, all our efforts would be of little use. I intensified my prayers and sacrifices for our dear native land, but I see that I am a drop before the wave of evil.

…My beloved native land, Poland, if only you knew how many sacrifices and prayers I offer to God for you! But be watchful and give glory to God, who lifts you up and singles you out in a special way. But know how to be grateful.

…I saw the anger of God hanging heavy over Poland. And now I see that if God were to visit our country with the greatest chastisements, that would still be great mercy because, for such grave transgressions, He could punish is with eternal annihilation. I was paralyzed with fear when the Lord lifted the veil a little for me. Now I see clearly that chosen souls keep the world in existence to fulfill [sic] the measure (of justice).

Faustina’s confessor, who instructed her to keep her diary, was Father Michael Sopocko, a former army chaplain. At the time of her messages, Poland had been independent for less than twenty years, and was a shaky dictatorship squeezed between Hitler and the USSR. I’m sure that an expert on the religion and culture of 1930s Poland would be able to make far more of Faustina’s writings than I (and my look at the subject has been very cursory), but it seems to me that Faustina is cautiously optimistic about Poland’s future; if Poland remains faithful, it will outshine the two totalitarian regimes. That seems to be what the “spark” passage is suggesting.

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“Religion: Conflict and Peace” was the theme of the International Association for the History of Religions’ 19th World Congress, which was held in Tokyo last week with participants from more than sixty countries. The IAHR is affiliated with UNESCO, and meets every five years in a different location. Despite the “History” part of the Congress’s name, scholars of contemporary religion are also included, and many of the top names in the Study of Religion were present. And since I currently live in Japan, I figured I ought to go along.

The Congress ran from 24-30 March, and met in the exceptionally plush Takanawa Prince Hotel. It kicked off with an opening ceremony; various speakers said the kind of things you might expect, mentioning religion’s return to the public scene, the need to deconstruct the dualism of east and west, and so on. There were few words from Prince Mikasa, the Honorary Congress Chair and 90-year old younger brother of the late Emperor Hirohito, and a (rather bland) message from Prime Minister Koizumi. There were also a couple of cultural elements, including a performance of Buddhist chanting.

The Prince

Things then got a bit peculiar, with four hours of keynote addresses that seemed somewhat…off-key. The themes were the need for dialogue between religions and cultures and for religious leaders to serve as “public intellectuals”. What this has to do with the serious analytical study of religion was unclear – one speaker even made a bizarre call for a “new religion” to counter ecological problems. Everyone clapped politely, but this weird sermonizing appeared to cause a certain amount of discomfort in some; at the closing General Assembly on March 30 a couple of scholars called for the IAHR to re-affirm that although it may be global, it is not “ecumenical”. Fortunately, these theological ramblings were eventually relieved by a pretty decent reception.

Business proper commenced the next day: a plenary meeting followed by dozens of panels in various conference and seminar rooms around the hotel. Naturally, the hundreds of papers on offer covered all kinds of topics, creating a dilemma: should I go to papers that dove-tail with my particular interests, or check out brand new subjects? Should I take the opportunity to see famous scholars, or go to younger researchers or those from less familiar countries?

As expected, with such a large gathering quality was variable (I, by the way, registered too late to present a paper myself). There were some complex and original papers presented with great eloquence; others were good, but undermined by poor presentation skills; others again were a bit vague and descriptive, but were nevertheless useful introductions to various subjects. Far from all the papers actually addressed the Congress topic.

Unsurprisingly, 9/11 and subsequent events formed part of several discussions: there was a plenary session led Mark Juergensmeyer (author of Terror in the Mind of God), and a lecture by Hans Kippenberg on the documents left behind by the 9/11 hijackers. Juergensmeyer, who has interviewed various terrorists and has visited post-invasion Iraq, had some interesting anecdotes and was congenial, but was slightly disappointing as he explicated the reasoning of religious terrorists in fairly obvious and general terms (it’s cosmic warfare, wouldn’t you know?).

Kippenberg’s presentation was meatier stuff, in which he went through the hijackers’ documents (described as a “manual”) and placed them in Islamic context. He also dealt with issues of authenticity which had been raised by Robert Fisk. Kippenberg discussed the hijackers’ “theology of fear”, in which their act of terror showed up the West as fearful of something other than Allah, and so as pagan and infidel. He also complained that while the American secret services present al-Qaeda as a hierarchical organisation, it is in fact bottom-up, with various groups and individuals making contact with bin Laden. The American reaction to Islamist terror thus tries to present the conflict as “a classic war”, but at the same time eschews the Geneva Convention. Kippenberg also called for al-Qaeda operatives in custody to be put on public trial, where the radicals would be obliged to defend their Koranic interpretations; presumably this would reveal to the Islamic world their shortcomings. Unfortunately, this fascinating presentation was followed by several rambling and grandstanding questions from members of the audience…

There was also a general consensus, made explicit in Juergensmeyer’s presentation but which popped up in various other discussions I attended, that Bush’s post-9/11 actions have been all wrong. Whatever my own views on that subject, I was troubled by the complacent way in which this assumption taken for granted and was dropped into the discourse as if there was no serious counter-view to be overcome. I saw one paper that briefly touched on Bernard Lewis, but that was about it.

But the conference was much, much more than a discussion of 9/11. Of course, with hundreds of papers being delivered there is no way I can give a comprehensive review of the event, but I have a few personal highlights: a paper on how rural Finns responded to globalisation with apocalyptic folk tales; a discussion of how various religions are currently faring in the Ukraine (apparently, the Crimea is now “Ukraine’s California”); a Study of Religions consideration of the medical Jerusalem Syndrome; a presentation on Nigerian Pentecostals in Germany. There was also an exceptional plenary lecture from Ibrahim Moosa that ranged from Muslim bio-ethics to Neil Postman, which much else in between (unfortunately, I missed a couple of other plenaries that might have been interesting, including one by Talal Asad). Nothing on blogs, alas, but I met loads of interesting people; it was the perfect opportunity for me “to keep abreast of my ignorance.”

UPDATE [this slipped my mind until now]: There was one unhappy and murky note at the end though; for political reasons that were not spelt out, the Taiwan branch of the IAHR was disaffiliated as a national affiliate, and made into a “corresponding member”

**********

My trip to Tokyo was not spent entirely in the hotel; on Sunday I went on an excursion, and on Monday I slipped away for a bit of tourism of my own (in the pouring rain). Naturally, I took in the two big shrines – the Meiji Shrine, where the Emperor Meiji and his wife are enthroned as deities, and the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. The Meiji Shrine is pleasantly located in a large park, although the buildings are not particularly distinctive.

The Yasukuni Shrine is more impressive, and you approach it by passing under a series of huge torii gates. Here the Japanese war dead are enshrined as deities. As is well known, these deified dead include several convicted war criminals; the shrine is also controversial for enshrining particular soldiers against the wishes of relatives. There is a museum attached, which has some moving items – in particular, there is a collection bride dolls which were presented for soldiers who had died unmarried. On the other hand, there is a fair bit of famously dodgy commentary (in English – I cannot read Japanese): Japan only entered Korea to rescue it from China. Roosevelt had to convince America to go to war against Hitler, so he forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbour. Peace offers from the Japanese were continually rebuffed. Japan was an inspiration for post-war anti-colonialism in Asia, particularly Gandhi. The only reference to Japanese war crimes in the whole building so far as I could see was a book for sale called The Alleged “Nanking Massacre”: Japan’s rebuttal to China’s forged claims. All a bit depressing, but I suppose most countries get by without really coming to terms with the crap things their ancestors did.

Torii at Yakusuni

Nationalist anti-American fly-post nearby

The conference ended on Wednesday. As I was leaving, I happened to pass by a crowd of young women with their cameras at the ready just outside the lobby. A limo pulled up, which I ignored, supposing it to contain a Japanese pop star. However, the screams that followed made me curious enough to look back; and there was Richard Gere, of all people…

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Ultra-Orthodox Shas Chairman Eli Yishai identifies a new terrorist threat against Israel: the Israeli Supreme Court and its recent decision to recognise gentile converts to non-Orthodox forms of Judaism as eligible for Israeli citizenship. As quoted in Haaretz, the ruling is an

explosives belt that has brought about a suicide attack against the Jewish people.

That was yesterday; in today’s Haaretz the statement is translated slightly differently:

…explosives belt that has formed an identity terror attack against the Jewish people.

Pretty lurid either way, but fairly commonplace stuff from the Israeli far-right – when I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem a few years ago I heard a guide say that Jews marrying non-Jews was “the second Holocaust”. Shas has previously railed against Russian Israelis, many of whom are nominal Jews whom local Shas leaders in Bet Shemesh characterised as

hundreds of thousands of Gentiles flooding the land with pork, prostitution, impurity and filth.

Haaretz also reports the reactions of the two Chief Rabbis to the new Supreme Court decision:

Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar said parents who want to make sure their children don’t marry people who are not considered Jewish by Orthodox standards will have to create their own lists of families that are “not suspected of intermarriage.”

…Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger said “it is hard for us to recognize those who turned into Jews in a leap, just as it is difficult to recognize a doctor who became a doctor in just one day.”

Hardly a fair description of the Reform conversion process, which can be read about here (and I assume the same can be said for Conservative Judaism). And perhaps Metzger ought to have a word with his predecessor Israel Lau, who had no problem with such “leaps”. As was reported back in 2002 (original gone; reposted here):

The Ha’aretz newspaper’s weekend magazine of July 19 carried a cover story about 90 Indians from villages tucked far up in the remote mountains of Peru who had been converted to Judaism in Lima in a record two weeks. They were then flown to Israel where they were sent directly to two Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Alon Shvut and Karmei Tzur, where they will study in yeshivah and pray, at the state’s expense, for the messiah to arrive.

The 90, constituting 18 family units, remarkably, were converted by an official rabbinical delegation sent from Israel with the blessings of Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Israel Lau.

Conversion is supposed to take one to two years; and as it happens, a court case involving fast-track Orthodox conversions concluded just last month:

The Tel Aviv District Court acquitted a rabbi yesterday who was charged with accepting bribes in order to speed up conversions…[Rabbi Binyamin] Bar-Zohar and Rabbi Michael Dushinsky, 59, of Petah Tikva, were charged three years ago.

…Dushinsky, the kashrut supervisor in the Labor Ministry, was filmed by a hidden camera on a Channel 2 TV program, allegedly accepting a bribe. He then allegedly passed some of the money on to Bar-Zohar, who used his connections to facilitate the conversion.

Dushinsky left the country and proceedings against him were stopped.

Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees who wish to exercise their legal right to return to their homes in Israel proper continue to be ignored…

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I’ve just got back from the 19th World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, which took place in Tokyo. No time for blogging just now, but as a stop-gap here’s a pic from the Kanamara Shrine in Kawasaki, where preparations are currently underway for the yearly festival. According to the English-language handout:

The festival traces its origins to the Edo period, when Kawasaki’s ladies of the night prayed for success in their business and protection from syphilis. At cherry blossom time they would gather baskets of bamboo shoots and other spring delicacies, carry the shrine’s phallic image through the streets, and then sit down on mats spread in the shrine courtyard to enjoy a merry banquet.

These days, people come to pray for “success in business, healthy progeny, a fertile marriage, wedded bliss, an easy delivery, or personal good health.” The shrine also runs a campaign to alleviate victims of HIV and AIDS.

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I’m going to be busy for the next seven days…see you all next week!

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The Thomas More Center reports on a court finding in favour of Rev. Austin Miles:

…a California state court has set aside a $1 million dollar default judgment [Michael] Newdow obtained against Reverend Austin Miles for libel.

The libel judgment was based on a news article written by Reverend Miles in which he opined that Newdow had lied to the court when he claimed his daughter was forced to recite the words “under God” as she was actually a Christian who willingly said the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

But that’s not quite what Newdow’s complaint was, as the AP reported at the time:

Newdow denied ever making the comments. “I never said that,” he said. “I only said she had a right to go to school and not be indoctrinated in religion.”

In other words, Miles accused Newdow of saying something which was a lie, while Newdow maintains that he never actually said any such thing. This distorted TMC press release has now formed the basis for other news reports, including one on Agape Press. Miles has also accused Newdow of being a traitor to the USA, since his lawsuit against the “under God” part of the pledge undermined America’s morale while the country was “still digging for bodies of loved ones buried under the rubble of the World’s Trade Buildings and the Pentagon”.

Newdow never expected to get the cash from Miles. But why has the latest court ruled in favour of Miles? Back to TMC:

After a lengthy hearing this past December, the court issued an order lifting the default judgment and allowing the case to proceed to trial. The court explained that Miles had made a sufficient showing that he lacked actual notice of the lawsuit to warrant the default to be set aside. The court explained that Miles’s lack of actual notice “was not caused by his avoidance of service or inexcusable neglect.”

That’s interesting. According to his profile on Blessed Cause, Miles had a very active 2003:

…even though felled by a stroke requiring some time off from duty, and dealing with “Pledge Atheist”, Michale [sic] Newdow who began stalking and harassing within a week after he learned about the stroke.

Miles wanted to have Newdow disbarred; it seems that when Newdow bit back, Miles suddenly became a frail old man being bullied by an heartless atheist (in the past, Miles has also been persecuted by the Assemblies of God, the FBI, and a deputy sheriff in California – see this entry). And in August 2003 WorldNetDaily reported:

The atheist activist whose lawsuit last year targeting the “under God” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance – a case that sent shock waves across America and elicited public condemnation from President Bush and dozens of congressmen – yesterday agreed to drop the $1 million libel lawsuit he filed recently against WorldNetDaily.

Michael Newdow’s lawsuit – “Rev. Dr. Michael A. Newdow vs. Chaplain Austin Miles; Assist News Service; WorldNetDaily.com Inc.” – was served on WorldNetDaily last Thursday.

…In fact, the article to which Newdow refers, and from which he quotes, was not written, authorized or published or in any way connected to WorldNetDaily.com, but rather was published by the ASSIST News Service, and written by Rev. Austin Miles, the other two defendants named in the complaint.

The ASSIST article appeared in July 2002, and a couple of weeks later ASSIST published a “right of reply” from Newdow. But, despite all this high-profile legal action going on, and Newdow’s “harassment” of Miles, Miles never received notice of the libel action against him, and so didn’t show up in court.

Miles was in the news on another matter just last month, as the source for a disputed and very unlikely quote attributed to James Watt.

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Ha’aretz has a bit more about the mass rally at the Temple Mount (site of the al-Asqa Mosque and Dome of the Rock) currently being planned by the Israeli far right. I assume this is the same proposed action that WorldNetDaily advertised just a few days ago, although WND gave April as the date, while Ha’aretz and the BBC both suggest July. And while WND’s Jerusalem correspondent presented the event organisers as simply a band of patriotic and pious Israelis, Ha’aretz’s Uzi Benziman offers an alternative description that more likely reflects the view of most Israelis:

The Temple Mount loonies…

The plan is to disrupt the Gaza pullout by creating the need for a massive police and army presence in Jerusalem; and Benziman objects that most of the diversionary protestors will not even be Israelis, but American Jews who will be going home afterwards:

…there is a huge difference between active Jewish involvement, including physical participation, in Israel’s internal affairs, and intervening in its international struggles. Israel is, first and foremost, the state of its citizens. And the right of these citizens to determine Israel’s destiny – including its borders and national security arrangements – precedes the emotional affiliation to Israel of the Jews of the world.

In other words, the Arabs of Umm al-Fahm are, of course, part of the public that will determine the fate of the disengagement; the Jews of Brooklyn are not.

But can some of the “Jews of Brooklyn” really be blamed if they fail to understand this? No doubt politicians on the Israeli far right have been lobbying them for support; MK Benny Elon has even managed to encourage a delusion among millions of American Christians that their views about Israel are more important than what actual Israelis think.

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