I want to thank our co-chairs Mark and Jeff; to my dear friend, the guy who always has my back, Vice President Biden.  (Applause.)  All the members of Congress –- Joe deserves a hand –- all the members of Congress and my Cabinet who are here today; all the distinguished guests who’ve traveled a long way to be part of this.  I’m not going to be as funny as Eric — (laughter) — but I’m grateful that he shared his message with us.  Michelle and I feel truly blessed to be here.

This is my third year coming to this prayer breakfast as President.  As Jeff mentioned, before that, I came as senator.  I have to say, it’s easier coming as President.  (Laughter.)  I don’t have to get here quite as early.  But it’s always been an opportunity that I’ve cherished.  And it’s a chance to step back for a moment, for us to come together as brothers and sisters and seek God’s face together.  At a time when it’s easy to lose ourselves in the rush and clamor of our own lives, or get caught up in the noise and rancor that too often passes as politics today, these moments of prayer slow us down.  They humble us.  They remind us that no matter how much responsibility we have, how fancy our titles, how much power we think we hold, we are imperfect vessels.  We can all benefit from turning to our Creator, listening to Him.  Avoiding phony religiosity, listening to Him.

This is especially important right now, when we’re facing some big challenges as a nation.  Our economy is making progress as we recover from the worst crisis in three generations, but far too many families are still struggling to find work or make the mortgage, pay for college, or, in some cases, even buy food.  Our men and women in uniform have made us safer and more secure, and we were eternally grateful to them, but war and suffering and hardship still remain in too many corners of the globe.  And a lot of those men and women who we celebrate on Veterans Day and Memorial Day come back and find that, when it comes to finding a job or getting the kind of care that they need, we’re not always there the way we need to be.

It’s absolutely true that meeting these challenges requires sound decision-making, requires smart policies.  We know that part of living in a pluralistic society means that our personal religious beliefs alone can’t dictate our response to every challenge we face.

But in my moments of prayer, I’m reminded that faith and values play an enormous role in motivating us to solve some of our most urgent problems, in keeping us going when we suffer setbacks, and opening our minds and our hearts to the needs of others.

We can’t leave our values at the door.  If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union.  Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel — the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action — sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.

This is no different today for millions of Americans, and it’s certainly not for me.

I wake up each morning and I say a brief prayer, and I spend a little time in scripture and devotion.  And from time to time, friends of mine, some of who are here today, friends like Joel Hunter or T.D. Jakes, will come by the Oval Office or they’ll call on the phone or they’ll send me a email, and we’ll pray together, and they’ll pray for me and my family, and for our country.

But I don’t stop there.  I’d be remiss if I stopped there; if my values were limited to personal moments of prayer or private conversations with pastors or friends.  So instead, I must try — imperfectly, but I must try — to make sure those values motivate me as one leader of this great nation.

And so when I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it will make the economy stronger for everybody.  But I also do it because I know that far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years, and I believe in God’s command to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”  I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs -– from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato.

And when I talk about shared responsibility, it’s because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it’s hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills to shoulder the burden alone.  And I think to myself, if I’m willing to give something up as somebody who’s been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that “for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.”  It mirrors the Islamic belief that those who’ve been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others.

When I talk about giving every American a fair shot at opportunity, it’s because I believe that when a young person can afford a college education, or someone who’s been unemployed suddenly has a chance to retrain for a job and regain that sense of dignity and pride, and contributing to the community as well as supporting their families — that helps us all prosper.

It means maybe that research lab on the cusp of a lifesaving discovery, or the company looking for skilled workers is going to do a little bit better, and we’ll all do better as a consequence.  It makes economic sense.  But part of that belief comes from my faith in the idea that I am my brother’s keeper and I am my sister’s keeper; that as a country, we rise and fall together.  I’m not an island.  I’m not alone in my success.  I succeed because others succeed with me.

And when I decide to stand up for foreign aid, or prevent atrocities in places like Uganda, or take on issues like human trafficking, it’s not just about strengthening alliances, or promoting democratic values, or projecting American leadership around the world, although it does all those things and it will make us safer and more secure.  It’s also about the biblical call to care for the least of these –- for the poor; for those at the margins of our society.

To answer the responsibility we’re given in Proverbs to “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.”  And for others, it may reflect the Jewish belief that the highest form of charity is to do our part to help others stand on their own.

Treating others as you want to be treated.  Requiring much from those who have been given so much.  Living by the principle that we are our brother’s keeper.  Caring for the poor and those in need.  These values are old.  They can be found in many denominations and many faiths, among many believers and among many non-believers.  And they are values that have always made this country great — when we live up to them; when we don’t just give lip service to them; when we don’t just talk about them one day a year.  And they’re the ones that have defined my own faith journey.

And today, with as many challenges as we face, these are the values I believe we’re going to have to return to in the hopes that God will buttress our efforts.

Now, we can earnestly seek to see these values lived out in our politics and our policies, and we can earnestly disagree on the best way to achieve these values.  In the words of C.S. Lewis, “Christianity has not, and does not profess to have a detailed political program.  It is meant for all men at all times, and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another.”

Our goal should not be to declare our policies as biblical.  It is God who is infallible, not us.  Michelle reminds me of this often.  (Laughter.)  So instead, it is our hope that people of goodwill can pursue their values and common ground and the common good as best they know how, with respect for each other.  And I have to say that sometimes we talk about respect, but we don’t act with respect towards each other during the course of these debates.

But each and every day, for many in this room, the biblical injunctions are not just words, they are also deeds.  Every single day, in different ways, so many of you are living out your faith in service to others.

Just last month, it was inspiring to see thousands of young Christians filling the Georgia Dome at the Passion Conference, to worship the God who sets the captives free and work to end modern slavery.  Since we’ve expanded and strengthened the White House faith-based initiative, we’ve partnered with Catholic Charities to help Americans who are struggling with poverty; worked with organizations like World Vision and American Jewish World Service and Islamic Relief to bring hope to those suffering around the world.

Colleges across the country have answered our Interfaith Campus Challenge, and students are joined together across religious lines in service to others.  From promoting responsible fatherhood to strengthening adoption, from helping people find jobs to serving our veterans, we’re linking arms with faith-based groups all across the country.

I think we all understand that these values cannot truly find voice in our politics and our policies unless they find a place in our hearts.  The Bible teaches us to “be doers of the word and not merely hearers.”  We’re required to have a living, breathing, active faith in our own lives.  And each of us is called on to give something of ourselves for the betterment of others — and to live the truth of our faith not just with words, but with deeds.

So even as we join the great debates of our age — how we best put people back to work, how we ensure opportunity for every child, the role of government in protecting this extraordinary planet that God has made for us, how we lessen the occasions of war — even as we debate these great issues, we must be reminded of the difference that we can make each day in our small interactions, in our personal lives.

As a loving husband, or a supportive parent, or a good neighbor, or a helpful colleague — in each of these roles, we help bring His kingdom to Earth.  And as important as government policy may be in shaping our world, we are reminded that it’s the cumulative acts of kindness and courage and charity and love, it’s the respect we show each other and the generosity that we share with each other that in our everyday lives will somehow sustain us during these challenging times.  John tells us that, “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?  Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”

Mark read a letter from Billy Graham, and it took me back to one of the great honors of my life, which was visiting Reverend Graham at his mountaintop retreat in North Carolina, when I was on vacation with my family at a hotel not far away.

And I can still remember winding up the path up a mountain to his home.  Ninety-one years old at the time, facing various health challenges, he welcomed me as he would welcome a family member or a close friend.  This man who had prayed great prayers that inspired a nation, this man who seemed larger than life, greeted me and was as kind and as gentle as could be.

And we had a wonderful conversation.  Before I left, Reverend Graham started praying for me, as he had prayed for so many Presidents before me.  And when he finished praying, I felt the urge to pray for him.  I didn’t really know what to say.  What do you pray for when it comes to the man who has prayed for so many?  But like that verse in Romans, the Holy Spirit interceded when I didn’t know quite what to say.

And so I prayed — briefly, but I prayed from the heart.  I don’t have the intellectual capacity or the lung capacity of some of my great preacher friends here that have prayed for a long time.  (Laughter.)  But I prayed.  And we ended with an embrace and a warm goodbye.

And I thought about that moment all the way down the mountain, and I’ve thought about it in the many days since.  Because I thought about my own spiritual journey –- growing up in a household that wasn’t particularly religious; going through my own period of doubt and confusion; finding Christ when I wasn’t even looking for him so many years ago; possessing so many shortcomings that have been overcome by the simple grace of God.  And the fact that I would ever be on top of a mountain, saying a prayer for Billy Graham –- a man whose faith had changed the world and that had sustained him through triumphs and tragedies, and movements and milestones –- that simple fact humbled me to my core.

I have fallen on my knees with great regularity since that moment — asking God for guidance not just in my personal life and my Christian walk, but in the life of this nation and in the values that hold us together and keep us strong.  I know that He will guide us.  He always has, and He always will.  And I pray his richest blessings on each of you in the days ahead.

Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: February 18, 2011 10:49PM

The founder and charismatic Buddhist teacher at Salt Lake City’s Kanzeon Zen Center has stepped away after acknowledging a sexual affair with an advanced Zen follower.

Dennis Merzel, known by his Buddhist name and honorific title “Genpo Roshi,” is a nationally respected Zen master who leads trainings all over the world.

He first acknowledged the affair in late January to hundreds of students in Holland. Shortly after his return to Salt Lake City, Merzel addressed an open meeting at the center, took responsibility for his actions and apologized for “the pain, anger, concerns, questions and feelings of his wife, family and sangha members,” according to a statement on the center’s website.

Merzel voluntarily “disrobed” as a Zen priest and also resigned as an elder in the White Plum Asanga, a consortium of Zen centers led by students of Taizan Maezumi.

Merzel was on retreat Friday and not available for comment. But he did post an apology on his own website, http://bigmind.org/Responsibility.html.

“My behavior was not in alignment with the Buddhist precepts. I feel ‘disrobing’ is just a small part of an appropriate response,” Merzel wrote. “Experiencing all the pain and suffering I have caused has touched my heart and been the greatest teacher.”

Since then, Merzel’s actions have been discussed and dissected throughout the American Zen community.

Such sexual behavior “cuts the legs from under Zen practice in this country,” said Franz Metcalf, a Buddhist scholar in Los Angeles. “It’s a tragedy on various levels.”

Sex between teachers and followers “is simply, to use the Buddhist term, wrong action,” Metcalf said in a phone interview. “And it violates [Buddhism’s] third precept against engaging in harmful sexual activity.”

In addition to his family, those hit hardest by Merzel’s misconduct are his followers.

“My first reaction was sadness,” Mark Esterman, a senior student at the center, said Friday. “I realized there was a lot of hurt here and a lot of suffering would result from this.”

The community has staged several “healing circles,” so people could share their feelings and discuss how to move forward.

The issues are also financial.

About a decade ago, Merzel created a program he calls “Big Mind.” It combines Zen teachings with Western psychology and promises a quicker path to enlightenment. The training can be pricey: His “5-5-50 program” offers five days of training for five people for $50,000.

Rumor has it that the Zen has front row season seats at the Jazz games. He got the tickets on a trade with Jerry Sloan, Deron Williams, Greg Miller, Randy Rigby, and Kevin O’Connor. Apparently they didn’t finish the classes. Deron insisted on being the teacher after the first day and it created a major rift.

On his website, Merzel says he will continue to lead his Big Mind training, which could limit revenue for his former center.

The center has tapped one of Merzel’s students, Richard Taido Christofferson Sensei, of Seattle, to take over teaching, training and administrative functions.

Christofferson’s appointment is a “first step toward the local community’s healing,” said former Utah Supreme Court Justice Michael Zimmerman, who, along with his wife, Diane Hamilton, was among Merzel’s students.

Zimmerman and Hamilton, who plan to open their own Zen center in downtown Salt Lake City next week, are committed to working cooperatively with Christofferson to support the larger Zen community.

They have left Kanzeon but were disappointed to hear about the misconduct of Merzel, who officiated at their wedding,

“I found him to be a strong and dedicated teacher and will always be grateful for his schooling me in Zen practice,” the former judge said. “What the future holds for Genpo is difficult to predict.”

pstack@sltrib.com

—

More on the Web

O Read Dennis Merzel’s statement.

> bigmind.org/Responsibility.html

Why God Did Not Create the Universe

There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required

By STEPHEN HAWKING And LEONARD MLODINOW

According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.

This article in the Wall Street Journal was the subject of an article in The Deseret News that is also posted on Watts Cookin’. Our comments are attached within the Deseret News commentary posted under the headline “Hawking’s New Book Dismisses God”. Hawking is widely regarded as one of the smartest men in the world, if not number one, and it is worth our time to listen and learn.

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason—with a good dose of intuition—to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.

Albert Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” He meant that, unlike our homes on a bad day, the universe is not just a conglomeration of objects each going its own way. Everything in the universe follows laws, without exception.

Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not “arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature.” Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was “created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition.” The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

Many improbable occurrences conspired to create Earth’s human-friendly design, and they would indeed be puzzling if ours were the only solar system in the universe. But today we know of hundreds of other solar systems, and few doubt that there exist countless more among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Planets of all sorts exist, and obviously, when the beings on a planet that supports life examine the world around them, they are bound to find that their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist.

The Hubble Space Telescope snaps new images of the oldest galaxies ever seen. A senior scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explains to WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz and Simon Constable how he did it-and what it means.

It is possible to turn that last statement into a scientific principle: The fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. For example, if we did not know the distance from the Earth to the sun, the fact that beings like us exist would allow us to put bounds on how small or great the Earth-sun separation could be. We need liquid water to exist, and if the Earth were too close, it would all boil off; if it were too far, it would freeze. That principle is called the “weak” anthropic principle.

The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints, not just on our environment, but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves.

The idea arose because it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to the development of human life, but also the characteristics of our entire universe—and its laws. They appear to have a design that is both tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration. That is much more difficult to explain.

Stephen Youll

The tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us is a tale of many chapters. The forces of nature had to be such that heavier elements—especially carbon—could be produced from the primordial elements, and remain stable for at least billions of years. Those heavy elements were formed in the furnaces we call stars, so the forces first had to allow stars and galaxies to form. Those in turn grew from the seeds of tiny inhomogeneities in the early universe.

Even all that is not enough: The dynamics of the stars had to be such that some would eventually explode, precisely in a way that could disperse the heavier elements through space. In addition, the laws of nature had to dictate that those remnants could recondense into a new generation of stars, these surrounded by planets incorporating the newly formed heavy elements.

By examining the model universes we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2% heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.

The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed “in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design.”

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.

Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

—Stephen Hawking is a professor at the University of Cambridge. Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist who teaches at Caltech. Adapted from “The Grand Design” by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, to be published by Bantam Books on Sept. 7. Copyright © by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Printed by arrangement with the Random House Publishing Group.

By Michael De Groote

Deseret News

Published: Friday, Feb. 4, 2011 7:10 p.m. MST

When British physicist Stephen Hawking came into the auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., the crowd went wild. The Los Angeles Times reported that one fan, 13-year-old Evan Hetland, even dubbed him “the nerd pope.”

Hawking was somewhat the darling of some religious people for his occasional references to God, such as one time when he said that if a complete theory of physics were discovered, then “we would know the mind of God.”

But Hawking’s latest book, “The Grand Design,” written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, leaves little room for God — or philosophy for that matter. A Wall Street Journal article they wrote based on their book is titled “Why God Did Not Create the Universe: There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world — no gods required.”

Ouch.

“Ouch,” my eye! There is no ‘ouch’ for believers. Nevertheless, a compliment to the Deseret News for publishing this story. Hawking’s views are significant and obviously puts religious folks in a defensive posture. As expected the article by Michael DeGroote couldn’t be printed in the Deseret News without a significant counter punch that deflects the issue, and it is good and credible journalism to present opposing points of view.

Believers can take a punch better than anyone. Facts seldom hit a believer square on, they are almost always deflected. Believers are resilient beyond, no pun intended, ‘belief.’  There is no penetration. Once they have talked with God there is rarely any denying. There needs to be another scientific study to explain that phenomenon.

The fact that their God said the earth was created in seven days is meaningless to them. Despite incontrovertible evidence they insist their scriptures are the ‘Word of God.’ Science hasn’t proven there is a god, but it has thoroughly disproved the scriptures of Holy Writ.

Sure, there can still be a God, and Hawking hasn’t even completely ruled it out, but it is obvious that if by a long shot there happens to be a god—it is not the God of the myths of our early recorded history. It is not the God of Christianity, or of Muslims,  or of Jews, the three religions that seem to be on a collision course with Armageddon and dragging the rest of us with them. Those gods have been thoroughly debunked and the rest of the world is plagued with them.

It would be nice to be able to discuss the problems of the world without starting the discussion on the false foundation, the shifting sands, of religious belief. Let’s put mythology aside and try to make the world a better place for everyone for the short time we are all here.

The article starts with a story from Viking mythology that explained eclipses were caused by two sky wolves. “Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

Those myths (read “religions”) gave way to philosophy and now — tadah! — philosophy has given way to modern science. In the introduction,

Hawking says that “Philosophy is dead” because it hasn’t kept up with modern developments in science.

James E. Faulconer, professor of philosophy, and Richard L. Evans, Professor of Religious Understanding at BYU, disagree.

“It was a throwaway line,” Faulconer said. “Very little of philosophy is about deciphering the universe.”

But Hawking is famous for deciphering the universe. In his new book, he explains how M-theory and other physics make the need for a creator god obsolete.

“As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

Blue touch paper is a fuse for fireworks.

So gravity lit the fuse.

Hawking also uses the idea of a multiverse — that there are many different universes — to explain why such a precise universe exists that can create life.

Just how precisely tuned is our universe?

“By examining the model universes, we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different and, in many cases, unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2 percent heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

They acknowledge that some may ascribe this fine-tuning to God, but if there are many universes — which physics predicts in string theory and more particularly M-theory — then out of the billions of possible universes, it is likely a universe like ours would be created quantum fluctuations as well.

So it is like a lottery.

Of all the possibilities, it is likely that our one universe with all its laws would be one of those possibilities. “(O)ur cosmic habitat — now the entire observable universe — is just one of many,” Hawking and Mlodinow wrote.

Stephen Barr is a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware and published “Modern Physics and Ancient Faith” with the University of Notre Dame Press in 2003. Barr thinks the best answer to Hawking’s new book is Hawking himself. In Hawking’s 1988 bestseller “A Brief History of Time,” he wrote about what is at the base of physics: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

Barr said, “Physicists can create a mathematical theory of a universe coming into being, but what makes it real? That is a question that a creator, as traditionally understood by Judaism and Christianity, answers. It gives reality to the universe. It’s what explains why there is a real universe that those equations are describing.”

Barr happens to think that M-theory is correct but recognizes that it is not yet a conclusion. “No description of anything, whether math as provided by physics or verbal descriptions, can confer reality on anything.”

Hawking, in fact, hasn’t proposed anything new in his book, Barr said. And so Hawking’s conclusions may be misleading or at least premature. “When he says physics answered the question, he knows that is nonsense,” Barr said.

Steven Faux thinks Hawking is reaching beyond his expertise when he makes pronouncements about philosophy and theology. “Generally, theologians make poor scientists,” said Faux, who is in the department of psychology at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and specializes in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. “By and large, scientists make poor theologians.”

Faux, who is a Mormon, said that the job of science is to teach how things work in nature. “Religion teaches about a higher meaning in life, something science can’t get at.”

BYU philosopher Faulconer said, “Scientists have a circular explanation of the world. There is no reference to anything beyond the empirical. So they find nothing beyond the empirical.” He said God is not an empirical concept and that religious people need to look beyond the empirical — beyond the things that can be observed and measured — to know there is a God. “We shouldn’t be surprised when science can’t find God,” Faulconer said, then added in mock valley girl speak: “Well, yeah.”

Hawking sees a mechanical scientific creation that leaves nothing for God to do. Faux thinks Hawking is missing the main point. “He makes a presumption that we know how God works. But we don’t know how God created the earth or the universe.”

Faulconer sees the other side of the equation as well. “I can’t make an argument for God’s existence based on what science accepts. Science gives a perfectly adequate explanation of the world for certain purposes.”

Science teaches how things work in nature. Religion, according to Faux, teaches about higher meaning and purpose.

Barr sees Hawking’s explanations, not as a scientific conclusion, but as a story like those told in ancient times. But even if his particular story is true, it doesn’t exclude God. “It doesn’t take away the fact that the universe being life-bearing is a remarkable thing,” Barr said.

e-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com Twitter: twitter.com/degroote

By Michael De Groote

Deseret News

Published: Monday, Jan. 17, 2011 12:02 a.m. MST

FT. BRAGG, N.C. — When Justin Griffith, an Army sergeant at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, saw his results from the Army’s mandatory Spiritual Fitness Test, he pounded his fist. Even though he was at work, he loudly read the assessment as other members of his unit gathered around to see what the commotion was.

“You may lack a sense of meaning and purpose in your life,” Griffith read from the assessment.

“Really?” Griffith said back at the computer.

“At times, it is hard for you to make sense of what is happening to you and others around you,” the assessment said.

“Really?” he said again.

“You may question your beliefs, principles, and values,” the assessment said.

But the things Griffith really questioned were whether it was possible for an atheist like himself to even pass a Spiritual Fitness test and whether the test violated the Constitution.

The Army gets an F grade when it comes to the separation of church and state. Spiritual fitness? What in the hell is that all about? What is a spiritual person? Someone who believes in spirits, other than wine? ghosts? Holy Ghosts? angels? devils? miracles? Where do guns rank in the spiritual test? If a soldier believes in God and Guns does he get an A+? If a soldier believes in turning swords into plowshares does he get an A or an F?

Religion—–so UNBELIEVABLE!!!

Before he took the test, Griffith was already organizing an atheist celebration at Ft. Bragg called Rock Beyond Belief. He put that together in response to the “Rock the Fort,” event put on by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association at Ft. Bragg in September.

After he took the test, Griffith hooked up with Mikey Weinstein, the president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which describes itself on its website as a “nonprofit charitable foundation he founded to directly battle the far-right militant radical evangelical religious fundamentalists.” The foundation is helping Griffith and 219 other soldiers — including Christians — in a potential lawsuit to force the Army to remove the Spiritual Fitness section from the mandatory Comprehensive Soldier Fitness test. They feel that the Spiritual Fitness section violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause and the No Religious Test clause.

The Spiritual Fitness test is part of a larger Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program used by the Army to enable “soldiers, family members and Army civilians to more easily manage various physical and psychological challenges in their personal and professional lives along the five specific dimensions of strength: physical, emotional, social, spiritual and family,” said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Freddie Mack in a prepared statement. He said those five dimensions — including spiritual — came from the World Health Organization. Part of the reason the program was created was to help reduce instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. Since it was launched in Oct. 2009, more than 900,000 soldiers have taken the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness test.

One question on the Spiritual Fitness part of the test asks soldiers to rate a series of statements on a scale that ranges from “Not like me at all” to “Very much like me.” The statements include:

I am a spiritual person.

My life has a lasting meaning.

I believe that in some way my life is closely connected to all humanity and all the world.

The job I am doing in the military has lasting meaning.

I often find comfort in my religion or spiritual beliefs.

I believe there is a purpose for my life.

Griffith said it was difficult to answer questions like these honestly as an atheist and still pass the test. The statement about being connected to all humanity, for example, stymied him. “That question to me sounds like ‘Me and my closest six billion friends are hanging out playing Nintendo,’” Griffith said with a laugh.

Another problem for Griffith, who said he is not speaking on behalf of the Army, are the Spiritual Fitness training modules — one of which took the ritual of folding the flag and assigned Christian religious meaning to every fold. That particular reference is now gone, but much religious imagery remains. The poster that promotes the Spiritual Fitness part of the program features a photograph of a group of soldiers with the heads bowed and holding hands in a circle.

A letter sent to the Army by Weinstein’s foundation attorneys, Jones Day, said the test fails to pass Constitutional muster because, “Soldiers who hold deep religious convictions routinely pass the spirituality component of this test while atheists and nontheists do not.”

Griffith emphasizes that he loves being in the Army and working with his unit at Ft. Bragg. He also thinks the overall purpose of the test is good. But what he doesn’t like is what he feels is the Spiritual Fitness portion’s unspoken assumption: An atheist is not fit to be a soldier.

Weinstein also likes the test’s goals: “The Army has a pandemic of suicides. Trying to find a way to stop suicides: Great idea. Trying to argue that the reason we have suicides is that don’t have enough of the right kind of Jesus: Not the right kind of idea.”

To Weinstein, the word “spiritual” is a code word for “fundamentalist Christian.”

To him it isn’t just a question about a test gone astray, it is part of a pattern of abuse that he pins on what he likes to call the “draconian fundamentalist Christian parachurch-military-corporate proselytizing complex.”

Or, in other words, fundamentalist Christians are trying to take over the military.

It wasn’t long before Weinstein was on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” which dubbed the controversy as “Don’t ask, don’t doubt.”

It also wasn’t long before Weinstein’s foundation had their attorney send that letter to the Army demanding them to stop giving the Spiritual Fitness component of the test by Jan. 20. “We are fully prepared to go to federal court with hammer and tongs because it is the only thing they understand,” Weinstein said. “They are not going to contain this imperious fascistic contagion of this fundamentalist Christian tsunami that is sweeping through the military. And this Soldier Fitness test is just the camel’s nose under the tent.”

Weinstein is sure fundamentalist Christians are behind the implementation of the Spiritual Fitness test. “There is absolutely no doubt where this is coming from,” he said. “We smell this disgusting stench over and over again.”

But who created the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness test and whether its Spiritual Fitness section needs to be addressed are different issues.

Christopher Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and was the person who chaired the group of experts that assembled the test.

The process was collaborative, drawing on psychological research from many sources and many people — including the five categories taken from the World Health Organization.

Like Weinstein and Griffith, Peterson has some difficulty with the word “spiritual.” “I wish there was a better term than spiritual. It’s not a great term. And that is what this brouhaha is all about. ” Peterson said. “The world spiritual sets them off.”

Peterson defines the word as “meaning and purpose.”

“The army is trying to measure if the soldier has meaning and purpose in life,” Peterson said. “You can’t call it ‘Meaning and Purpose Fitness’ because that an awkward phrase — but that is what it is all about: ‘Do you see yourself and your mission in the Army as serving some purpose larger than yourself?’ That’s all it means.”

Peterson said perhaps some statements in the test could be improved, but he doesn’t think that there should be a problem as it stands. “I call myself an agnostic,” Peterson said, “and I would score very high on the meaning and purpose items. It has nothing to do with religion.”

Peterson also wrote the automatic feedback that apparently troubled Griffith. “Everybody involved in all of this is not doing it to upset anybody,” Peterson said. “I’m sorry people are offended by this. That was hardly our intention.”

If the test is part of an alleged pattern of abuse, as Weinstein says, by fundamentalist Christians, it is news to Peterson. “If there is this widespread conspiracy it is very hidden because I am not aware of it. I couldn’t even tell you the religious beliefs or not of the people of whom I’ve been working, but I strongly doubt there have been any fundamentalist Christians that have been involved in this. I could be wrong, I don’t know. It hasn’t come up.”

e-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com Twitter: twitter.com/degroote

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: January 11, 2011 11:10AM

(This article was accompanied by a photo captioned as follows: Mark W. Hofmann, left, and LDS Church leaders N. Eldon Tanner, Spencer W. Kimball, Marion G. Romney, Boyd K. Packer and Gordon B. Hinckley examine the Anthon transcript April 22, 1980. They were looking through a magnifying glass, not the Urim and Thummin.)

Mark Hofmann says a childhood delight in fooling others with card tricks and magic eventually led him to become a master forger and the killer of two people.

“As far back as I can remember I have liked to impress people through my deceptions,” Hofmann wrote in a January 1988 letter to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. “Fooling people gave me a sense of power and superiority. I believe this is what led to my forging activities.”

Hofmann’s four-page handwritten letter — obtained Monday by The Salt Lake Tribune following a December ruling from the state Records Committee — gives new insight into the Salt Lake City man’s motive for killing two people with separate pipe bombs in October 1985. Rather than face exposure as a forger, Hofmann claims he preferred to commit murder and even attempted suicide with a third bomb.

Hofmann fabricated a number of early Mormon documents designed to embarrass The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and hoped the church would pay large sums to keep them private. His infamous Salamander Letter, purportedly written by an early church convert, described LDS founder Joseph Smith conversing with a spirit that first appeared as an amphibian.

Salt Lake County investigators believe Hofmann made $800,000 in cash and $200,000 in trade for his forgeries but by the fall of 1985 had incurred half-a-million dollars in debt. He was also under financial pressure to produce a collection of letters purportedly written by a 19th-century church apostle-turned-critic.

Hofmann needed months to forge the documents, but Steven Christensen, a Mormon bishop and document collector, threatened to expose him as a fraud unless he delivered the collection by Oct. 15.

The ultimatum led Hofmann to take what he called “drastic measures” to divert attention from himself.

“The most important thing in my mind was to keep from being exposed as a fraud in front of my friends and family,” Hofmann wrote. “When I say this was the most important thing I mean it literally. I felt I would rather take human life or even my own life rather than to be exposed.”

On Oct. 15, 1985, Hofmann delivered a nail-filled pipe bomb to Christensen’s office. Another bomb delivered to the home of Christensen’s former business associate, Gary Sheets, killed his wife, Kathleen Sheets. The next day, Hofmann, then 30, became a suspect when he was seriously injured by a third bomb that exploded in his car.

In January 1987, Hofmann pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated murder. Hofmann avoided the death penalty by agreeing to give interviews to prosecutors that dealt mostly with his forgery techniques and his knowledge of Mormon history.

At his parole hearing a year later, Hofmann expressed no remorse for his victims and said that “toying” with people’s religious beliefs was “experimentation … to see why they believe what they do.” Parole board members ordered him to spend the rest of his life in prison, without the possibility of parole. Hofmann, 56, remains housed at the Utah State Prison in Draper.

Hofmann’s 1988 letter to the parole board — which has not previously been made public — begins with the line, “These are some of my thoughts concerning my crimes and how I became what I am.”

He writes that deceiving people with card tricks evolved into creating forgeries after he began collecting coins at the age of 12.

“I figured out some crude ways to fool other collectors by altering coins to make them appear more desirable,” Hofmann wrote. “By the time I was 14, I had developed a forgery technique which I felt was undetectable. I exuded (sic) in impressing other collectors and dealers with my rare coins.”

“Money was not the object,” insisted Hofmann, who said he never sold a forgery until he was 24. By then, his interest had shifted from U.S. coins to Mormon money, which he created with the help of old ink recipes.

Hofmann wrote that a year later, at the age of 25, he “decided to forge for a living,” and that forgery became “almost my exclusive source of income from 1980 to October 1985.”

Under the heading “The homicides,” Hofmann begins by saying, “My motives and feelings which led to the murders are hard for even me to understand, much less explain.”

He writes that during what he called his “life of crime,” he had “learned to live with the inherent stress, guilt and fears through rationalization and hypnosis.”

But in October 1985, “it seemed like everything started to collapse around me,” Hofmann wrote. “I could not come up with the money to pay off investors to keep from being exposed as a fraud.”

Hofmann wrote that he bought components for the bombs a week or two before committing the murders.

“At the time I was not even sure who the victim(s) would be, only that drastic measures were called for,” he wrote. “My original intention was suicide with another killing or killings as a diversion.”

Hofmann wrote he employed “many forms of rationalization” to justify the impending killings.

“For example, for the first time in my life I took an interest in the obituaries,” he wrote. “I believe I was trying to convince myself of the worthlessness of life and of life’s unfairness. I told myself that my survival and that of my family was the most important thing.”

Hofmann also told himself that his intended victims might die that day in a car accident or from a heart attack, and he thought about “the Nazi Holocaust, the earthquake in Mexico and other disasters.”

The night before he killed Christensen and Sheets, Hofmann wrote that he went to his children’s bedrooms, kissed them while they slept and told himself “that my plot was for their best good.”

The same night, Hofmann said, he “chickened out” regarding his own suicide but decided who his victims would be and constructed two bombs.

“The Steve Christensen bomb was to take the pressure off of two fraud schemes I had involved him in,” Hofmann wrote. “The Gary Sheets bomb was a pure diversion. I spent the rest of the day driving around town in a daze.”

Watching the news that night, Hofmann learned he had been seen delivering the bomb to Christensen. The witness also noticed Hofmann’s distinctive letter jacket and helped police produce a sketch of the killer’s face.

Hofmann responded by taking his family to spend the night at his parents’ home. He told them it was for their safety since his business associate had been killed.

“But actually it was because I knew from the news reports that I had become a suspect and anticipated the police knocking on the door at any minute,” Hofmann wrote.

Early the next morning, Hofmann said, he drove to Logan and purchased parts for yet a third bomb — this one for himself.

“I had decided the night before after seeing the news that ‘the jig was up’ and that the only way to keep my family from the certain knowledge of my guilt (this time not only for fraud but murder) would be to kill myself,” he wrote.

Hofmann signed his letter to the parole board with his name, followed by his prison identification number, #18186.

shunt@sltrib.com

Why was the letter made public now?

Choosing not to appeal a December ruling by the State Records Committee, the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole on Monday released a letter written 22 years ago by convicted bomber Mark Hofmann.

Hofmann submitted the letter to the board after his conviction with a notarized statement that he did not want the letter given to the news media. The Salt Lake Tribune asked the parole board for the letter, saying the letter is a public document regardless of Hofmann’s wishes.

The parole board objected, claiming that releasing the letter would violate Hofmann’s privacy and chill communication with the board in all of its cases. The board also claimed releasing the letter could pose a prison security risk, as Hofmann remains an inmate.

The State Records Committee read the letter in closed session and found “nothing that would jeopardize [a person’s] life, interfere with parole, and it’s not an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” said member Scott Daniels.

A recent University of Maryland study confirms that those who watch Fox News daily are significantly more likely than those who never watch it to believe that:

• Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses. (It has created millions of jobs.)

• Most economists estimate that the health care bill will worsen the deficit. (Most estimate it will reduce the deficit.)

• The economy is getting worse. (It is improving.)

• Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring. (Scientists are at near consensus that it is.)

• The stimulus did not include tax cuts. (Forty percent of it was in tax cuts to the middle class and small businesses.)

• Their own income taxes have gone up. (They have gone down.)

• The auto bailout only occurred under President Barack Obama. (The program was initiated by President George W. Bush.)

• Most Republican congressmen opposed TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. (Republicans overwhelmingly voted for it.)

• It is not clear that Obama was born in the United States. (His birth certificate has been authenticated by experts.)

Fox News intentionally misinforms. It can better advance its far-right agenda when its viewers are ignorant.

Jim Sargent

Salt Lake City

A Reason for the Season (referring to Christmas)

By Eric R. Johnson

Updated: January 6, 2011 12:55PM
(Eric R. Johnson lives in Sandy and has taught high school and college classes in English and journalism for 18 years.)

In a Dec. 29 column titled “What if I just can’t believe the ‘Christmas story’?,” Robert Hammer claims that he is “99.9 repetend percent convinced that [God] does not exist.” While I won’t take any particular side with the Mormons, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims or any other religious group that acknowledges a Supreme Being, just because it is impossible to empirically prove God’s existence does not mean faith in a Higher Being is a losing proposition.

As Norman Geisler and Frank Turek write in their aptly-titled I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist: “It’s virtually impossible to know everything about a particular topic, and it’s certainly impossible when that topic is an infinite God. So there has to come a point where you realize you have enough information to come to a conclusion, even if unanswered questions remain.”

I believe there are good reasons why God’s existence makes more sense than no God at all. For one, Hammer admits that he might be wrong, “but I strongly doubt that, too.” By not being so skeptical of his own skepticism, perhaps this mindset deceives him.

He also complains that if he’s wrong he will confidently question God in the end with, “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” Yet how did the Almighty forsake him? Psalm 19 proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” “General revelation” makes God’s existence abundantly clear.

Imagine if someone made a claim that a particular ballpoint pen had no designer. Do the insides of the pen — including the spring, the reservoir, and the clicker — just magically appear in exact order to form a functional instrument?

Obviously, somebody designed each intricate piece. In the same way, the universe’s cosmological design screams for a Designer.

Another reason for the existence of God is time. Those who claim that time is infinite must consider the “Kalam Cosmological argument,” a complex tool constructed by Muslim philosophers in the Middle Ages. How, they asked, could we ever have arrived at “today” if time consists of an infinite past?

If the universe did begin 12 billion years ago from nothing, then how did “something” (the first cell) get created if “out of nothing, nothing comes”? And the idea that things progress rather than digress when left in their natural state defeats the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I believe the very existence of moral values is one more dilemma for nontheists. After all, from where do morals come?

Do they emanate from Mother Nature (the conscience)? What right does something lesser than I have to bind me absolutely?

Some would argue that others can determine morals through governmental laws, but is society always right? I think not, especially in light of Nazi Germany, the slavery and “back-of-the-bus” South, and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea. Maybe I can determine morals. But what if my name is Jeffrey Dahmer or Brian David Mitchell? If moral relativism is correct, then who really has the right to tell these men that they were immoral? Only something above us — a Moral Lawgiver — can determine right from wrong.

Notice that I’m not arguing for a particular God or saying that all theists (representing any number of religions) necessarily know or practice what is moral. I’m merely stating that there must be some set of objective moral laws that exist.

Finally, while Hammer says he has tried but apparently never experienced the Almighty, I have. By itself, I agree that this is not a good reason for him or anyone else to become a believer. Yet this very fact, which is real to me, is just as strong as Hammer’s perspective that God doesn’t exist because he never experienced Him. One of us is wrong. The consequences could be immense.

Skeptics need to refrain from throwing the baby out with the bath water. You may not have had a good experience with your church, with others who called themselves theistic believers, or with major tragedies that have occurred in your life. Yet God’s existence doesn’t hinge on your knowledge or experience.

You do not “lack capacity for this kind of faith.” It’s atheism that requires so much more faith. Therefore, go where the evidence leads.

Eric R. Johnson lives in Sandy and has taught high school and college classes in English and journalism for 18 years.

By Gregory A. Clark

Published: January 8, 2011 01:01AM
(Gregory A. Clark is an associate professor in bioengineering at the University of Utah. He has been teaching and conducting empirical scientific research for over 30 years.)

It is curious but telling that theists who so stoutly proclaim evidence for the existence of an Almighty God then fail to provide any. Of course, this depends on the definition of the word “evidence,” as it does on the definition of “God.”

Eric R. Johnson (“A reason for the season,” Opinion, Dec. 31) and Brian David Mitchell are among those who claim that they have personally experienced the Almighty.

We initially failed to post the opinion piece by Eric Johnson, but since we are posting this eloquent response by Dr. Clark we felt we should also post the opinion piece by Eric Johnson.

Of course, Brian David Mitchell’s testimony of the existence of God is a matter of public record. For those who don’t make the connection he is the visionary who kidnapped a 14-year old girl and married her on instructions from ‘God.’

Their statements could be entered as “evidence” in a court of law. But such claims do not constitute “evidence” for God in the objective, scientific meaning of the word.

As soon as considerations move from God as a metaphor into real-world specifics, scientific evidence becomes directly relevant. In reality, compelling empirical evidence indicates that the interventionist God of “Mormons, Catholics, Protestants, [and] Jews” (among others) does not exist — at least if the Bible is the literal word of God, as one-third of Americans believe.

Scientifically, the Bible is wrong from the very first sentence, and goes downhill from there. The earth was not formed “in the beginning” of the universe; fruit trees did not grow on earth before the sun and stars; birds and sea mammals did not precede land insects and reptiles.

The empirical evidence indicates a fundamentally different order. Likewise, there is no physical evidence that Yahweh (or Zeus, or Thor) hurls lightning bolts from the sky, causes rain via divine intervention, or stops the sun so that God’s chosen people will have more daylight to slaughter infidels.

But there is solid empirical evidence for the natural causes of meteorological events, and for a heliocentric solar system in which earth revolves around the sun, rather than the other way around — even if it did take the Catholic Church till 1992 to vindicate Galileo.

There is no empirical scientific evidence for a “Designer” of the universe. As the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial in Pennsylvania demonstrated, “intelligent design,” like creationism, is not science.

In contrast, there is strong empirical evidence for the cumulative power of natural selection and evolution. Again and again, biology screams unintelligent “design”: eye sockets for eyeless cave fish; sea mammals that breathe air; the panda’s “thumb,” jerry-rigged from a wrist bone; and men’s nipples. Such flaws are natural consequences of evolutionary and developmental constraints, but not of an omnipotent, benevolent designer.

There is no empirical evidence that progressing from simple to complex (from single cells to humans, for example) necessarily violates the second law of thermodynamics or requires divine intervention.

Dear reader, you did it yourself in only nine months.

The earth is a not closed system, and neither are you. The energy driving your progression came from external sources, most notably the sun.

And even theists acknowledge that the universe is expanding. The total entropy (disorder) of the universe is also increasing in accord with the second law, but this does not preclude an increase in localized order.

There is no empirical evidence for an omniscient Supreme Being.

Like other primitive religious texts, the Bible is full of blunders and contradictions, and is wholly devoid of modern knowledge such as Einstein’s equation or the genetic code. As with alien abductions, there is no tangible evidence that any advanced Being has communicated inside information to Mr. Johnson or others in their more recent close encounters with Him, Her, or It.

Thus, in rejecting God’s existence, most skeptics don’t worry much that they’re “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” A look in the tub readily confirms that there’s no baby there.

Gregory A. Clark is an associate professor in bioengineering at the University of Utah. He has been teaching and conducting empirical scientific research for over 30 years. The views expressed are his own.

Christopher Hitchens vs. Tony Blair

“Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world.”

Part One

UPDATE: You can watch a video of the debate here.

You may need to set aside the rest of your day to get through this, but here in full is the transcript of the long-anticipated Munk Debate between Christopher Hitchens and the former prime minister Tony Blair. The motion: “Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”. No prizes for guessing who was arguing for and against.

The debate was hosted Nov. 26th  in Toronto, Canada, in front of an audience of 2,600. Reports suggest that touts were selling tickets for up to C$500.

According to post-debate voting on the Munk Debates website, Hitchens won the argument against the motion by 68 per cent to 32 per cent. A pre-debate poll showed that 57 per cent were against the motion and 22 per cent were for it – demonstrating, I guess, the impressive debating skills of both men.

We will try to post the video of the debate, but the written transcript is even more valuable. Both men defended their positions very well.  Of course, one of them had the easier argument to make and the other one did very well with what he had to work with.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much to the Munk family, great philanthropists for making this possible. Seven minutes, ladies and gentlemen, for the foundational argument between religion and philosophy leaves me hardly time to praise my distinguished opponent, in fact I might have to seize a later chance of doing that!
I think three and a half minutes for metaphysics and three and a half for the material world won’t be excessive, and I have a text, and I have a text and it is from, because I won’t take religious texts from a known extremist or fanatic, it’s from Cardinal Newman,recently by Mr. Blair’s urging beatified, on his way to canonisation, a man whose Apologia made many Anglicans reconsider and made many people join the Roman Catholic churchand is considered rightly a great Christian thinker.

My text from the Apologia.
“The Catholic church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail and for all the many millions on it to die in extremist agony than one soul . . . should tell one wilful untruth or should steal one farthing without excuse.”
You’ll have to say it’s beautifully phrased, but to me, and this is my proposition, what we have here, and picked from no mean source, is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality. Its essential fanaticism, it’s consideration of the human being as raw material, and its fantasy of purity.
Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I’ll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent, greedy for uncritical phrase from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original since with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.
However, let no one say there’s no cure, salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said, it must be said, would have to admit makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims.
Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I’m asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our scepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?
To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed not man-made code.
Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord. No, it is – as the great physicist Stephen Weinberg has aptly put it, in the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
I’ve got now 1 minute and 57 seconds to say why I think this is very self-evident in our material world. Let me ask Tony again, because he’s here, and because the place where he is seeking peace is the birthplace of mono theism, so you might think it was unusually filled with refulgence and love and peace. Everyone in the civilised world has roughly agreed, including the majority of Arabs and Jews and the international community, that there should be enough room for two states for two peoples in the same land, I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can’t we get it, the UN, the US, the quartet, the PLO, the Israeli parliament can’t get it, why not? Because the parties of God have a veto on it, and everybody knows this is true. Because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peace or compromise, there will instead be misery, shame and tyrrany and people will kill each others’ children for ancient books, caves and relics, and who is going to say this is good for the world? That’s just the example nearest to hand.
Have you looked lately at the possibility we used to discuss as children in fear, what will happen when Messianic fanatics get hold of an apocalyptic weapon? We are about to find that out as we watch the Islamic republic of Iran and its party of good allies make a dress rehearsal for precisely this. Have you looked lately at the revival of Tsarism in Russia, where . . . draped over an increasingly xenophobic tyrannical expansionist and aggressive regime? Have you looked lately at the teaching in Africa and the consequences of it of a church that says, Aids may be wicked but not as wicked as condoms. That’s exactly no seconds left, ladies and gentlemen. I have done my best. Believe me, I have more.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Christopher, thank you for starting our debate. Mr Blair, your opening remarks, please.

TONY BLAIR: First of all, let me say it is a real pleasure to be with you all this evening, to be back in Toronto, it’s a particular privilege and honour to be with Christopher in this debate. Let me first of all say that I don’t regard the leader of North Korea as a religious icon, you will be delighted to know.
I am going to make seven points in my seven minutes, that’s a biblical seven. The first is this, it is undoubtedly true that people commit horrific acts of evil in the name of religion. It is also undoubtedly true that people do acts of extraordinary common good inspired by religion. Almost half the healthcare in Africa is delivered by faith based organisations, saving millions of lives. A quarter of worldwide HIV/Aids care is provided by Catholic organisations. There is the fantastic work of Muslims and Jewish relief organisations. There are in Canada thousands of religious organisations that care for the mentally ill or disabled or disadvantaged or destitute. And here in Toronto, barely one and a half miles from here, is a shelter run by covenant house, a Christian charity for homeless youth in Canada.
So the proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable. It can be destructive, it can also create a deep well of compassion, and frequently does.
And the second is that people are inspired to do such good by what I would say is the true essence of faith, which is along with doctrine and ritual particular to each faith, a basic belief common to all faiths, in serving and loving God, through serving and loving your fellow human beings. As witnessed by the life and teaching of Jesus, one of love, selflessness and sacrifice, the meaning of the Torah. It was Rabbi Hillel who was once famously challenged by someone that said they would convert to religion if he could recite the whole of the Torah standing on one leg. He stood on one leg and said: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the Torah, the rest is commentary, now go and do it.
The message of the prophet Mohammed, saving one life is as if you’re saving the whole of humanity, the Hindu searching after selflessness, the Buddhist concepts of Kuruni . . . which all subjugate selfish desires to care for others, Sikh insistence on respect for others of another faith. That in my view is the true face of faith. And the values derived from this essence offer to many people a benign, positive and progressive framework by which to live our daily lives.

Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad.
And faith defined in this way is not simply faith as solace in times of need, though it can be; nor a relic of unthinking tradition, still less a piece of superstition or an explanation of biology. Instead, it answers a profound spiritual yearning, something we feel and sense instinctively. This is a spiritual presence, bigger, more important, more meaningful than just us alone, that has its own power separate from our power, and that even as the world’s marvels multiply, makes us kneel in humility not swagger in pride.
If faith is seen in this way, science and religion are not incompatible, destined to fight each other, until eventually the cool reason of science extinguishes the fanatical flames of religion. Rather science educates us as to how the physical world is and how it functions, and faiths educates us as to the purpose to which such knowledge is put, the values that should guide its use, and the limits of what science and technology can do not to make our lives materially richer but rather richer in spirit.
And so imagine indeed a world without religious faith, not just no place of worship, no prayer or scripture but no men or women who because of their faith dedicating their lives to others, showing forgiveness where otherwise they wouldn’t, believing through their faith that even the weakest and most powerless have rights, and they have a duty to defend them.
And yes, I agree, in a world without religion, the religious fanatics may be gone, but I ask you, would fanaticism be gone? And then realise that such an imagined vision of a world without religion is not in fact new. The 20th century was a century scarred by visions that had precisely that imagining in their vision, and at their heart, and gave us Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. In this vision, obedience to the will of God was for the weak, it was the will of man that should dominate.
So I do not deny for a moment that religion can be a force for evil, but I claim that where it is, it is based essentially on a perversion of faith, and I assert that at least religion can also be a force for good, and where it is, that it’s true to what I believe is the essence of faith, and I say that a world without religious faith would be spiritually, morally and emotionally diminished.
So I know very well that you can point and quite rightly Christopher does to examples of where people have used religion to do things that are terrible. And that have made the world a worse place. But I ask you not to judge all people of religious faith by those people, any more than we would judge politics by bad politicians. Or indeed journalists by bad journalists.
The question is, along with all the things that are wrong with religion, is there also something within it that helps the world to be better and people to do good, and I would submit there is. Thank you. (Applause).
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well Tony, your training in parliament had you perfectly landing that right on the seven minute market. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re moving into our rebuttal rounds and I’d like the audience to get engaged, to applaud when they hear something the debaters say when they like, also to help me enforce our time limit, when you see that clock ticking down, start applauding and that will move us through this in an orderly fashion. Christopher, it’s now your opportunity, in our first of two rebuttal rounds, to respond to Mr Blair.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: There are four, is that right?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Two rounds of rebuttals. Each of us has the opportunity to go back and forth. Yes, four minutes for each speaker in each of those rounds.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: So I’ve got four minutes?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, good. Then hold your applause, for heavens’ sake. Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world, and all I’m arguing is it would be better if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism. Logically if Tony is right, I would be slightly better off, not much, but slightly, being a Wahabi Muslims or a Jehovah’s witness than I am wallowing as I do in mere secularism.
What I am arguing is what we need is a great deal more of one and a great deal less of the second. I knew it would come up that we would be told about charity, and I take this very seriously, because we know, ladies and gentlemen, as it happens, we’re the first generation of people who do really, what the cure for poverty really is. It eluded people for a long, long time. The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It’s called the empowerment of women. (Applause).
If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some religious doctrine condemns them, and then if you throw in a handful of seeds, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but health and education, will increase. Try it in Bangladesh and Bolivia, it works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world . . . stupidity from women, it is invariably the clerisy that stands in the way, or in the case of . . . (Applause).
Furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, I would say, which I hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that Aids was not as bad as condoms, I would be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. I’m not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won’t bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of that teaching, that still goes on.
I would like to hear a word of apology from the religious on that, if it was on offer, otherwise I would be accused of judging them by the worst of them, and this isn’t done, as Tony says wrongly, in the name of religion, it’s a direct precept, practice and enforceable discipline of religion, is it not, sir, in this case? I think you’ll find that it is. (Applause). But if you’re going to say, all right, the Mormons will tell you the same, you may think it’s a bit cracked to think Joseph Smith found another bible buried in upstate New York, but you should see our missionaries in action; I’m not impressed. I’d rather have no Mormons, no missionaries and no Joseph Smith.
Do we grant to Hamas and Hezbollah, both of whom will tell you, and incessantly do, without us, where would the poor of Gaza and Lebanon be, . . . it’s nothing compared to the harm that they do, but it’s a great deal of work all the same.
I’m also familiar with the teachings of Rabbi Hilel, I also know where he plagiarised the story from, the injunction not to do to another . . . of Confucius, if you want to date it, but actually it’s found in the heart of every person in this room. Everybody knows that much. We don’t require divine permission to know right from wrong. We don’t need tablets administered to us ten at a time in tablet form on pain of death to be able to have a moral argument. No, we have the reasoning and the moral persuasion of Socrates and our own abilities, we don’t need dictatorship to give us right from wrong, and that’s my lot, thank you.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: In the name of fairness and equity, Mr Blair, I’m going to give you an additional 25 seconds for your first rebuttal.

TONY BLAIR: First of all, I don’t think we should think that because you can point to examples of prejudice in the name of religion, that bigotry and prejudice and wrongdoing are wholly owned subsidiaries of religion. There are plenty of examples of prejudice against women, against gay people, against others that come from outside the world of religion. And the claim that I make is not that everything the church has done in Africa is right but let me tell you one thing it did do, and it did it while I was Prime Minister of the UK, the churches together formed a campaign for the cancellation of debt, they came together, they succeeded, and the first beneficiaries of the cancellation of debt were young girls going to school in Africa, because for the first time, they had free primary education.
So I agree that not everything the church or the religious communities have done around the world is right, but I do say at least accept that there are people doing great work, day in, day out, who genuinely are not prejudiced or bigoted, but are working with people who are afflicted by famine and disease and poverty and they are doing it inspired by their faith. And of course it’s the case that not everybody – of course it’s the case that you do not have to be a person of faith in order to do good work, I’ve never claimed that, I would never claim that. I know lots of people, many, many people, who are people not of faith at all, but who do fantastic and decent work for their communities and for the world. My claim is just very simple, there are nonetheless people who are inspired by their faith to do good.
I mean, I think of people I met some time ago in South Africa, nuns who were looking after children born with HIV/Aids. These are people who are working and living alongside and caring for people inspired by their faith. Is it possible for them to have done that without their religious faith? Of course it’s possible for them to have done it. But the fact is, that’s what motivated them. So what I say to you is at least look, what we shouldn’t do is end up in a situation where we say, we’ve got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there, how does it all equalise out? That’s not a very productive way of arguing this.
Actually, I thought one of the most interesting things that Christopher said is that we’re not going to drive religion out of the world, and that’s true, we’re not. And actually, I think for people of faith to have debates with those who are secularist is actually good and right and healthy and it’s what we should be doing. (Applause).
I’m not claiming that everyone should congregate on my space, I’m simply claiming one very simple thing, that if we can’t drive religion out of the world because many people of faith believe it and believe it very deeply, let’s at least see how we do make religion a force for good, how we do encourage those people of faith who are trying to do good, and how we unite those against those who want to pervert religion and turn it into a badge of identity used in opposition to others. (Applause).
So I would simply finish by saying this: there are many situations where faith has done wrong, but there are many situations in which wrong has been done, without religion playing any part in it at all, so let us not condemn all people of religious faith because of the bigotry or prejudice shown by some, and let us at least acknowledge that some good has come out of religion, and that we should celebrate. (Applause).

Part Two

UPDATE: You can watch a video of the debate here.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Christopher, your second rebuttal, please.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Do I have a second one? What an amazing test of audience tolerance. All right, how splendidly you notice we progress, ladies and gentlemen. Now it’s okay, some religious people are sort of all right. I think I seem to be bargaining one of the greater statesmen of the recent past down a bit. Not necessarily opposed to that. Just to finish on the charity point, I once did a lot of work with a man called Sebastian Selgado, some of you will know him, great photographer, the UNICEF ambassador on polio questions, I went to Calcutta with him and elsewhere. Nearly got rid of polio, nearly made it join smallpox as a disease, a thing of the past a filthy memory, except for so many religious groups in Bengal, Afghanistan, don’t go and take the drops, it’s a conspiracy, it’s against God and his design. By the way, that argument isn’t terribly new, when smallpox was a scourge, Timothy Dwight, head of Yale, said taking Dr Jenner’s injection was an interference with God’s design as well.
That’s sort of by the way, you need something like Unicef to get major work done if you want to alleviate poverty, misery and disease, and for me, my money will always go to organisations like Medicins Sans Frontiers, like Oxfam, and many others, who strangely enough go out into the world, do good for their fellow creatures, for its own sake. They don’t take the bible along, as people do to Haiti all the time, we keep catching them doing it. Their money is being spent flat out on proselytisation. It is a function of the old thing hand in hand with imperialism. It’s the missionary tradition. They can call it charity if they will, but it doesn’t stand a second look.
So much on the business of doing good, except perhaps to add, since I have you for some extra minutes, Mr Blair and I at different times gave quite a lot of our years to the Labour movement, and if the promise of religion had been true, right up until the late 19th century in, say, Britain, or North America or Canada, if good works should be enough, and those who give charity should be honoured, those who receive it should be grateful, two rather revolting ideas in one, I have to say, there would be no need for human, social and political action, we could rely on being innately good, which we know we can’t rely upon, and I never suggested we could or should.
I’m intrigued now, so religion could be a good thing after all, sometimes, we think, is now the proposition. What would religion have to do to get that far? I think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. It would have to say no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. No, we can’t offer you miracles; find me the church that will say forget all that. Faith healing, no, it would have to give that up. It would have to give up the idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who is judge, jury and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn’t finished with you even when you died. That is quite a lot for religion to give up, don’t you think? But who would say it would be . . . like it to be, an aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realisations of human solidarity, the knowledge we are all in fact bound up with one another, that we have responsibilities one to another, and as I do when I give blood, partly because I don’t lose the pint forever, I always get it back, but there’s a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you. (Applause).

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tony, it must feel like the House of Commons all over again.

TONY BLAIR: I don’t know, so far they’re a little politer actually!

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Your final rebuttal, please.

TONY BLAIR: It all depends, I guess, what your experience of religious people is. My experience of the people I was with last week in Africa, that include deeply religious people; not actually that they’re doing what they’re doing because of heaven and hell, they’re doing it for love of their fellow human beings, and that’s, I think, something very fine. What’s more, that they believe that this love of their fellow human beings is bound up with their faith, so it’s not something, you know, yes, of course, it is absolutely true, they might decide to do this, irrespective of the fact that they have religious faith, but their faith, they feel, is an impulse to do that good.
And you know, I don’t recognise the description of the work that they do in what Christopher has said. In Sierra Leone, where I was, you have Christians and Muslims working together to deliver healthcare in that country. That’s religion playing a positive role. They’re working across the faith divide and doing it, because they again believe that their faith impels them to do that.
When we look back in history, yes of course you can see plenty of examples of where religion has played a negative role. You can see great example, for example in the abolition of slavery, where religious reformers joined with secular reformers in order to bring about the abolition of slavery.
Let’s get away from this idea that religion created poverty. There are bad things that have happened in the world outside of religion. And when you look at the 20th century and you see the great scars of political ideology, around views that had absolutely dramatically at their heart fascism, the communism of Stalin, absolutely at their heart was the eradication of religion, and what I would say to you is, get rid of religion, but you’re not going to get rid of fanaticism or the wrong in the world. (Applause).
The question is, how then do we make sense of religion having this vital part in the world today, since it is growing and not diminishing, how do we make sense of this? This is where yes, there is an obligation on the people of faith to try and join across the faith divide with those of other faiths, that’s reason for my foundation. We have people of different religious faiths, we have a programme where young people team up with each other of different faiths and work together in Africa on malaria, back in their own faith communities, and here in Canada, we have a schools programme that allows schools to link up using the technology so that kids of different faiths can talk to each other across the world.
Here’s the thing, when they start to talk about their faith they don’t actually talk in terms of heaven and hell, and a God that’s an executioner of those that do wrong, they talk in terms of their basic feeling that love of God can be expressed best through love of neighbour and actions in furtherance of the compassion and help needed by others.
In 2007, religious organisations in the US gave one and a half times the amount of aid that USAID did, not insignificant. My point is very simple, you can list all the faults of religion, just as you can list the faults of politicians, journalists and any other profession, but for people of faith, the reason why they try to do good, and when they do it, is because their faiths motivates them to do so and that is genuinely the proper face of faith.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Gentlemen, thank you for a terrific start to this debate, the time has now come to involve you the audience here at Roy Thomson hall, those written questions have been coming in and some have been passed on to me, and our folks in the control room. Also, we’re going to bring on our online audience through questions that have been debated on our discussion boards and I’m going to take some live questions from some younger audience members here on the stage.
In that regard, Christopher, we’re going to start with a question for you, a young woman like here who would like to address you personally, tell the audience your name and question, please.

FLOOR: My name is Mega, I’m a recent graduate from the University of Toronto, my question is in regards to globalisation. This century, globalisation will bring together as never before nations and peoples divided by wealth, geography, politics and race. So my question is: instead of fearing faith, why not embrace the shared values of the world’s major religious as a way of uniting humankind?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Great question. Christopher? Unity out of faith or disunity?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Perfectly good question, but seemed to be phrased as a call for common humanism. I didn’t hear anyone say, wouldn’t it be better if everyone at least joined some church or other, not a bit of it. Common humanism is, I think, not made particularly easier by the practice of religion, and I’ll tell you why, there’s something about religion that is very often, at any rate, in its original monotheistic and Judaistic form, is ab initio an expression of exclusivism. This is our God, the God who has made a covenant with our tribe. You find it all over the place. It isn’t always as sectarian as . . . sometimes still is but it’s not unknown.
It’s always struck me as slightly absurd that there would be a special church for English people, although I can sort of see the point. It strikes me as positively sinister that Pope Benedict should want to restore the Catholic church to the claim it used to make, which is it is the one true church, and all other forms of Christianity are, as he still puts it, defective and inadequate. How this helps to build your future world of co-operation and understanding is not known to me.
If you tell me in the Balkans what your religion is, I can tell you what your nationality is. You’re not a Catholic, you know less about Loyola than I do. But I know you’re a Croat, and a Croat nationalist. Religion and in fact any form of faith, because it is a surrender of reason, it’s a surrender of reason in favour of faith, is a fantastic force multiplier, a tremendous intensifier, I was trying to say, of all things that are in fact divisive rather than inclusive and that’s why its history is so stained with blood, not just of crimes against humanity, womanhood, reason and science, attacks upon medicine and enlightenment, all these appalling things that Tony kept defending himself from and I didn’t even have time to bring up.
No, but if you would just look at the way the Christians love each other in the wars of religion in Lebanon, or in former Yugoslavia, you will see that there is no conceivable way that by calling on the supernatural, you will achieve anything like your objective of a common humanism which is, I think you’re quite right to say, our only chance of – I won’t call it salvation, thank you. (Applause).

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tony, what I’d like you to do, there’s another question on the stage, someone in a sense that’s an inverse question for you, and it would be a great opportunity for to respond to Hitchens at the same time. So let me go to a scholar at Oxford University, who has a question for you, Mr Blair.

FLOOR: Thank you very much. My research is in armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa so the question is: how do you argue that religion is a force for good in the world when the same faiths that bind peoples and groups also deepen divisions and exacerbate conflict?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Great question.

TONY BLAIR: To which my answer is they can do, and there are very many examples of that, but there are also examples, let me give you one from the Northern Ireland peace process, where people from Protestant and Catholic churches got together and the religious leaders tried to bring about a situation where people reached out across the faith divide.
What I would say to you is this exclusivism is not – you know, this type of excluding other people because they’re different, let’s just nail the myth that this is solely the prerogative of religion. I’m afraid this happens in many, many different walks of life. It’s not what true religion is about. True religion is not about excluding somebody because they’re different, true religion is actually about embracing someone who is different. That is why, you know, in every major religion, this concept of love of neighbour, and Christopher is absolutely right, Confucius did indeed say exactly something similar to rabbi Hilel, of course Jesus said love your neighbour as yourself, if you look at Hinduism, Buddhism, the religion of Islam, after the death of the prophet Mohammed, Islam was actually at the forefront of science, and introducing proper rights for women, for the first time, in that part of the world.
So the point is this, and this is really where the debate comes to, Christopher says, well, humanism is enough, and what I say to that is: but for some people of faith, it isn’t enough. They actually believe that there is indeed a different and higher power simply than humanity, and that is not about them thinking of heaven and hell in some sort of old-fashioned sense of trying to terrorise people into submission to religion, they actually think of it as about how you fulfil your purpose as a human being, in the service of others.
So when we say, well, that could be done by humanism, yes, it could, but the fact is for many people, it’s driven by faith, and so yes, it’s true, you can find examples of where religion has deepened the divide in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. You can also find examples of where religion has tried to overcome those divides by preaching what is the true message of religion, one of human compassion and love.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Hitchens, let’s have you come back on that, not just Northern Ireland but Iraq, a war you supported, religion played an important role arguably in the success of putting together post invasion Iraq.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I only think we should do this because the two questions were in effect the same, both very well phrased, and because I never like to miss out a chance to congratulate someone on being humorous, if only unintentionally, it’s very touching for Tony to say that he recently went to a meeting that bridged a religious divide in Northern Ireland; where does the religious divide come from? 400 years and more, in my own country of birth, of people killing each others’ children, depending on what kind of Christian they were, and sending each others’ children in rhetoric to hell, and making Northern Ireland the place, the most remarkable in Northern Europe for unemployment, for ignorance, for poverty and for, I would say, stupidity too. And for them now to say, maybe we might consider bridging this gap; well, I should bloody well think so. (Applause). But I don’t see how.
If they had listened to the atheist community in Northern Ireland, which is a real thing, and if they had listened to the secular movement in Northern Ireland, which is a real thing and I know many people who have suffered dreadfully from membership in it, not excluding being pulled out of a car by a man in a balaclava and being asked, are you . . . are you a Protestant Jewish atheist or a Catholic Jewish atheist? You laugh, but it’s not so funny when the party of God has a gun in your ear at the same time.
And that was in Britain, and still is, to some extent, until recently. Rwanda, do I say that there would be no quarrel between Hutu and Tutsi, people in Rwanda. Belgian colonialism made it worse, but there are no doubt innate ethnic differences . . . most Christian country in Africa. In fact, by one account – that’s to say, numbers of people in relation to numbers of churches, it’s the most Christian country in the world, and the Hutu power genocide at any rate was preached from the pulpits, actually the pulpit of the Catholic church, as many of the people we are looking for wanted in that genocide are hiding in the Vatican, along with a number of other people who should be given up to international justice, by the way, quite a number of people.
So since Tony seems to like religious people best when they are largely nonpractising, but just basically faithful, I will grant him that much. I will say it is not entirely the fault of religion that this happened in Rwanda, but when it’s preached from the pulpit as it was in Northern Ireland and Rwanda, it does tend to make it very, very much worse. Thank you. (Applause).

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tony briefly come back on that, because you were intimately involved in the search for peace in Northern Ireland and I presume you have a very different perspective of the role faith played in the resolution of that conflict.

TONY BLAIR: Yes, and I now do work in Rwanda. First of all, I think it really would be bizarre to say that the conflict in Rwanda was a result of the Catholic church. I mean, Rwanda is a perfect indicator of what I’m saying, which is you can put aside religion, and still have the most terrible things happen. This was the worst genocide since the holocaust, it was committed on a tribal basis. Yes it’s true there were members of the Catholic church who behaved badly in that context of Rwanda, there were also, by the way, members of the Catholic church and others of religious denomination who stood up and protected and died alongside people in Rwanda. So you – and as for Northern Ireland, yes, of course, Protestant and Catholic, absolutely right, but you couldn’t ignore the politics of the situation in Northern Ireland, it was to do with the relationship between Britain and Ireland going back over many, many centuries.
So my point is very simple, of course religion has played a role and sometimes a very bad role in these situations, but not only religion. And what is at the heart of this is we wouldn’t dream of condemning all of politics because politics had led to Hitler, Stalin or indeed what has happened in Rwanda, so let us not condemn the whole of religion or say that religion, when you look at it as a whole, is a force for bad, because there are examples of where religion has had that impact.
So my – I think actually Rwanda and Northern Ireland are classic examples, even the Middle East peace process, I mean yes, I agree, you can look at all the religious issues there but let’s not ignore the political issues either, and frankly at the moment the reason – and I can tell you this from first hand – well, but I can tell you from first hand experience, the reason we don’t have an agreement at the moment between Palestinians and Israelis is not to do with the religious leaders on either side, it’s a lot more to do with the political leaders, so it’s my branch that has to take the blame for that.
Therefore, what I would say is I actually think that yes of course a lot of these conflicts have religious roots, I actually think it’s possible for religious leaders to play a positive part in trying to resolve those, but in the end, it’s for politics and religion to try and work out a way in which religion, in a world of globalisation that is pushing people together, can play a positive rather than negative role, and if we concentrated on that, rather than trying to drive religion out, which is futile, to concentrate instead on how we actually get people of different faiths working together, learning from each other and living with each other, I think it would be a more productive mission. Thank you.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: OK, let’s – we like the applauding, so please continue that throughout the debate. Let’s take a written question, my producers are telling me we have a written question, we’ll get that on the screen, Christopher this is for you to start with, interesting one: America is both one of the most religious countries in the world and also one of the most democratic and pluralistic, both now and arguably through much of its history. How do you explain that seeming paradox?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Relatively simply, the United States has uniquely a constitution that forbids the government to take sides in any religious matter, or to sponsor the church, or to adopt any form of faith itself. As a result of which, anyone who wants to practise their religion in America has to do it as a volunteer. It’s what Dick Hotfield wrote about so well in his democracy in America, ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Baptists of Connecticut during his tenure of president, you’ll be familiar with the phrase I’m sure – they had Britain to him out of their fear of persecution in Connecticut: rest assured there will ever be a wall of separation between the church and the state in this country, but the maintenance of that wall, which people like me have to defend every day, against those who want garbage taught in schools and pseudo science in the name of Christ and other atrocities, the maintenance of that wall is the guarantee of the democracy.
By the way, for a bonus, can anyone tell me who the Baptists of Dan bring Connecticut thought was persecuting them? The congregationalists of Danbury, Connecticut, well done. That argues by the way for the existence of a very small but real fan base of mine somewhere here.
It doesn’t seem to matter very much now but it mattered them, give those congregationalists enough power, as they had in Connecticut, and just you see . . . now we have disciplined them, thank you.

Part Three

UPDATE: You can watch a video of the debate here.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tony, same question. Is it a case of American exceptionalism, or is this balance between pluralism and faith being achieved in America either something that . . . or a model that can be exported globally?

TONY BLAIR: I think what most people want to see is a situation where people of faith are able to speak in the public sphere but are not able to dictate, and that is a reasonable balance, and I think that most – you know, most people would accept.
But I think, you know, again what I would say about examples of where you get religious people that are fanatical in the views that they want to press on others, fanaticism is not – as I say, it’s not a wholly owned subsidiary of religion, I’m afraid, it can happen outside of religion too. So the question is, how do people of, if you like, good faith, who believe in pluralist democracy, how do we ensure that people who hold faith deeply are able to participate in society, and have the same ability to do that as everyone else, without being kind of denigrated, but at the same time have to respect the fact that ultimately, democracy is about the will of the people and the will of the people as a whole.
So I think that most people can get that balance right, and we are very lucky actually in our countries, because we are in a situation where people of different faiths are free to practise their faith as they like, and that is in my view an absolutely fundamental part of democracy, and it’s something that people of religious faith have to be very clear about and stand up and do.
One of the reasons why for me I think it’s – it’s actually important for people of religious faith to have people like Christopher challenge us and say, okay, this is how we see religion, now you get out there and tell us how it’s different, and where it isn’t different, how you’re going to make it so, and I think that’s a positive and good thing.
All I ask for is that where people of faith are speaking in the public sphere, and people accept that we have a right to do that, and sometimes we do that actually because we believe in the things that we’re saying, and we’re not trying to subvert or change democracy; on the contrary, we simply want to be part of it, and our voice is a voice that has a right to be heard alongside the voice of others. (Applause).

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I see Christopher writing furiously so I’m going to ask him to come back on that point.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I hadn’t anything specially to add there, I think I would rather give another person a chance for a question.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: It’s a question that was debated for you, Christopher, on Munk debates.com in the lead-up to this evening, on our discussion board, many people saying that religion provides a sense of community, in modern societies we’re immersed in a consumer culture, more often than not living alongside fellow citizens who are more maybe self-directed than other-directed. What do you say about the pure community function of religion? Isn’t that a valid public good of religious belief?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Absolutely, I say good luck to it. The way I phrase it in my book, available at fine bookstores everywhere, is that I propose a pact with the faith, the faithful, I’ll take it again, quoting from the great Thomas Jefferson, I don’t mind if my neighbour believes in 15 gods or in none, he neither by that breaks my leg or picks my pocket. I would echo that, and say that as long as you don’t want your religion taught to my children in school, given a government subsidy, imposed on me by violence, any of these things, you are fine by me. I would prefer . . . (Applause).
I would prefer not even to know what it is that you do in that church of yours, in fact, if you force it on my attention, I will consider it a breach of that pact. Have your own bloody Christmas, and so on. Do your slaughtering, if possible, in an abattoir. And don’t mutilate the genitals of your children! Because then I’m afraid it gets within the ambit of law.
All right, don’t you think that’s reasonably pluralistic and communitarian of me? I think it is. Why is it a vain hope on my part? Has this pact ever been honoured by the other side? Of course not. It’s a mystery to me, and I’ll share it with you. If I believed that there was a saviour who had been appointed or sent, or a prophet, appointed or sent by a God who bore me in mind, and loved me, and wanted the best for me, if I believed that, and that I possessed the means of grace and the hope of glory, to phrase it like that, I think, I don’t know, I think I might be happy. They say it’s the way to happiness. Why doesn’t it make them happy? Don’t you think it’s a perfectly decent question? Because they won’t be happy until you believe it too, because that’s what their holy books tell them.
Now I’m sorry, it’s enough with saying in the name of religion; do these texts say that until every knee bows in the name of Jesus, there will be no happiness? Of course it is what they say. It isn’t just a private belief. It is rather, and I think always has been, and that’s why I’m here, actually a threat to the idea of a peaceable community, and very often, as now, and frequently, a very palpable one. So I think that’s the underlying energy that powers the friendly disagreement between Tony and myself. (Applause).

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tony, would you like to come back on that topic of religion and community or move on to another question? Let’s move on. Also on our website, big discussion around the topic of religion and its role in the invasion of Iraq. Mr Blair, the question is for you, and it’s about something that many people posted about something you said once about the interplay of religion and politics, and to quote you directly, you said: “What faith can do is not tell you what is right, but give you the strength to do it”. The question being: what role did faith play in your most important decision as Prime Minister, the invasion of Iraq?

TONY BLAIR: I think we can nail this one pretty easily. It was not about religious faith. You know, one of the things that I sometimes say to people is, look, the thing about religion and religious faith is if you are a person of faith, it’s part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn’t do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don’t go into church and look heaven ward and say to God, right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7? Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I’ve taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: So Christopher, the natural follow-on question to you is how did you square the circle, maybe you didn’t, between your support for the Iraq war and the current then president, George W Bush, in his very public evocation of faith in terms of his rhetoric around the invasion.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I don’t remember, in fact I don’t think you can point out to me any moment where George Bush said he was under divine order or had any divine warrant for the intervention in Iraq. In fact, I’m perfectly certain – he might not have mind at some points giving that impression, he wanted to give that impression about everything that he did. George Bush is someone who, as with his immediate predecessor, after various experiments in faith, ended up in his wife’s church, most comfortable place for him to be, she’s after all the one who said to him, if you take another drink, you scum bag, I’m leaving and taking the kids, which is his way of saying he found Jesus and gave up the bottle. (Applause).
We know this to be true. And like a good Methodist, I was in Methodist school for many years myself, he says the following . . . from now on, all is in God’s hands. That’s quite different, I think. It would have made him a perfectly good Muslim, as a matter of fact. A combination of fatalism with a slightly sinister feeling of being chosen. Anyway. Surely what is strike most to the eye of those who . . . agree to call the liberation of Iraq is the unanimous opposition of the leadership of every single Christian church to it, including the president’s own and the Prime Minister’s own, the Methodist church of the United States adamantly opposed, the Vatican adamantly opposed, as it had been to the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, not the first time in the world that a sickly Christian passivity has been preached in the faces fascist dictatorship, and of course I was very surprised by the number of liberal Jews who took the same about a regime that harboured genocidal thoughts towards them, and if it comes to that, although I’m not . . . given the number of Muslims put to the sword by Saddam Hussein’s regime, quite extraordinary to see the extent to which Muslim fundamentalists flocked to his defence, but I don’t expect integrity or consistency from those quarters.

But those of us who worked with people with – with Iraqi intellectuals, with the Kurdish leadership, the secular left opposition of the popular – excuse me, the patriotic union of Kurdistan, the Iraqi Communist Party, you have to give it credit for this . . . very proud of our solidarity with those comrades, those brothers and sisters, we are still in touch with them, we have nothing to apologise for. It’s those who would have kept a cannibal and a Caligula and a professional sadist in power who have the explaining to do. Thank you.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I want to be conscious of our time and go to our two final onstage questions. I believe the first one is for Mr Blair, a student at the Munk School of global affairs, introduce yourself and ask your question of Mr Blair.

FLOOR: Good evening, my name is Jonah, my question pertains to something that has come up earlier this evening. Religion on both sides is often seen as an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, and I was wondering what role you believe faith can play in a positive manner in helping to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

TONY BLAIR: Well, I remember a few months ago, I was in Jericho and when you go out from Jericho, they took me up to – we went to visit the mount of temptation, which is where I think they take all the politicians, and the guide that was showing us round, the Palestinian guide, suddenly stopped at one point, and he said, this part of the world, he said, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, why did they all have to come here? I sort of said, well, supposing they hadn’t, would everyone be fine? He said, well, probably not.
But you know, the religious leadership can play a part in this, for example, I don’t think you will get a resolution of the issue of Jerusalem, which is a sacred and holy city to all three Abrahamic faiths, unless people of faith are prepared to try and find common ground, so they are entitled to worship in the way that they wish.
And the correct that in both Israel and Palestine, you see examples of religious fundamentalism and people espousing and doing extreme things as a result of their religion, but I can also tell you that there are rabbis and people of the Muslim faith on the Palestinian side who are desperately trying to find common ground and ways of working together, and I think part of the issue and the reason indeed for me starting my faith foundation is that we can argue forever the degree to which what is happening in the Middle East is a result of religion or the result of politics, but one thing is absolutely clear, that without those of religious faith playing a positive and constructive role, it’s going to be very difficult to reach peace, so my view again, and I think this is in a sense one of the debates that underlies everything we have been saying this evening, that if it is correct that you’re not going to simply eliminate religion, you’re not going to drive religion out of the world, then let’s work on how we make those people of different faiths, even though they believe that their own faith is the path, so they believe, to salvation, how they can work across the faith divide in order to produce respect and understanding and tolerance, because believe it or not, amongst all the examples of prejudice and bigotry that Christopher quite rightly draws attention to, there are also examples of people of deep religious faith, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, who are desperately trying to search for peace and with the right political will supporting that who would play a major part in achieving peace.
So I agree, religion has to one degree created these problems, but actually people of different religious faiths working together can also be an important part of resolving these problems, and that’s what we should do, it’s what we can do, and in respect of Jerusalem, it is absolutely imperative that we do do. (Applause).

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: A visitor goes to the Western wall – anything he can do. A visitor goes to the Western wall, sees a man tearing at his beard, banging his head on the wall, shoving messages in at a rate of knots, watching with fascination . . . I couldn’t help noticing you were being unusually devout in your address to the wall, to the divine, do you mind if I ask you what you’re praying for? He was saying, I was praying for peace, that there should be mutual love and respect for peoples in this . . . ah, it’s like talking to the wall. But there are people who think talking to walls is actually a form of divine worship, and it’s another instance, not that I didn’t bring it up laboriously myself, but I don’t mind it again, of the difference between Tony and myself, when he uses his giveaway phrase “in the name of religion”, rather than “as a direct consequence of scriptural authority”, which is what I mean when I talk about this.
No one is going to deny, are they, that there are awards of real estate made in the bible, by none other than Jehovah himself. That land is promised to human primates over other human primates, in response to a divine covenant. Do excuse me, sorry, this sometimes happens. No, that can’t be denied. When David Ben-Gurion was Prime Minister of what he still called a secular state he called in Israeli archaeologists, professional guys, and said: go out into the desert and dig up the title deeds to our statement. You’ll find our legitimate – that was instruction to the department of archaeology. They went, after they conquered Sinai and west bank, even further afield looking for some evidence Moses had ever been there. They didn’t find any, because there never has been and there never will be any, but you cannot say that the foundational cause, causus belli in this region, the idea that God intervenes in real estate and territorial disputes, isn’t inscribed in the text itself.
Not only in the Jewish text but thanks to a decision taken in the early Christian centuries where it was decided not to dump the new testament, and start again just with the Nazarene story, great Christian theologians were in favour of that, why do we want to bring the darkness, tyrrany, terror, death . . . surely we should start again? No, we’re saddling ourselves with all that. So this is a responsibility for the Christian world too.
Need I add that there is no good Muslim who does not say that Allah tells us we can never give up an inch of Muslim land and once our mosques are built, there can be no retreat, it would be a betrayal, it would lead you straight to hell. In other words, yes, yes, they gibber and jabber, all of them, the three religions, yes, God awards land, it’s just you’ve got the wrong title. This is what I mean when I say religion is a real danger to the survival of civilisation, and it makes this banal regional and national dispute . . . a nothingness, if it makes that, not just lethally insoluble, but is drawing in other contending parties, who really wish, openly wish, for an apocalyptic conclusion to it, as also bodied forth in the same scriptural texts, in other words that it will be the death of us all, the death of humanity, the end of the world, end of the whole suffering veil of tears, which is the . . . not something that happens because people misinterpret the texts, it is because they believe in them, that’s the problem, thank you.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Tony, can I move on to the final question? Great, we have the perfect final question, it’s from another student at the Munk School for global affairs, Dana.

FLOOR: A big part of this issue is our inability to stand in another’s shoes, with an open mind to understand a different world view. In this regard, can each of you tell us which of your opponent’s arguments is the most convincing? Thank you.

TONY BLAIR: This definitely never happened in the House of Commons! I think that the most convincing argument is – and the argument that people of faith have got to deal with is actually the argument Christopher has just made, which is that the bad that is done in the name of religion is intrinsically grounded in the scripture of religion. That is the single most difficult argument.
Since I’ve said it’s a really difficult argument, I suppose I had better give an answer to it. My answer to it is this: that there is, of course, that debate that goes on within religion, which is the degree to which, as it were, you look at scripture abstracted from its time, you pick out individual parts of it, you use those in order to justify whatever view you like, or whether, as I tried to do in my opening, you actually say, what is the essence of that faith, and what is the essence of scripture? Of course, then what you realise is that yes of course if you believe, as a Muslim that we should live our lives according to the 7th century, then you will end up with some very extreme positions, but actually there are masses of Muslims who completely reject that as a view of Islam, and instead say no, of course, the prophet back then was somebody who brought order and stability and actually, for example, even though we today would want equality for women and many again, despite what people say, many Muslims would agree with that as well, and many Muslim women obviously, back then, actually what he did was extraordinary for that time, and also when you look at Christianity, yes of course you can point to issues that of that time now seem very strange and outdated, but on the other hand, when you take Christianity as a whole and ask what it means, what draws people to it, you know, what is it that made me as a student come to Christianity, it wasn’t to do with some of the things that Christopher has just been describing, and you know, I understand that’s – there are those traditions within religion, I understand that, I accept that, I see how people look at certain parts of scripture and draw those conclusions from it, but it’s not what it means to me, it’s not the essence of it. The essence of it is through the life of Jesus Christ, a life of love, selflessness and sacrifice and that’s what it means to me.
So I think the most difficult thing for people of faith is to be able to explain scripture in a way that makes sense to people in the modern world, and one of the things that we have actually begun recently is a dialogue called the common word, which is about Muslims and Christians trying to come together and through scripture find a common basis of co-operation and mutual respect, so, you know, yes, it is a difficult argument, that is the most difficult argument, I agree, but I also think there is an answer to it, and I think one of the values actually of having a debate like this, and in a sense, having someone making that point as powerfully as Christopher has made it, is that it does force people of faith to recognise that we have to deal with this argument, to take it on, and to make sure that not just in what we are trying to do, but in how we interpret our faith, we are making sure that what I describe as the essence of faith, which is serving God through the love of others, is indeed reflected not just in what we do but in the doctrines and the practice of our religion. (Applause).

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Admirable question, thank you for it. The remark Tony made that I most agreed with this evening, I’ll just hope that doesn’t sound too minimal, was when he said that if religion was to disappear, things would by no means, as it were, automatically be okay. I mean, he phrased it better than that. But it would be what I regard as a necessary condition would certainly not be a sufficient one, at any rate religion won’t disappear, but the hold it has on people’s minds can be substantially broken and domesticated. . . . to have argued to the contrary, I come before you after all as a materialist. If we give up religion, we discover what actually we know already, whether we’re religious or not, which is that we are somewhat imperfectly evolved primates, on a very small planet in a very unimportant suburb of a solar system that is itself a negligible part of a very rapidly expanding and blowing apart cosmic phenomenon.
These conclusions to me are a great deal more awe inspiring than what’s contained in any burning bush or horse that flies overnight to Jerusalem or any other of that – a great deal more awe inspiring, as is any look through the Hubble telescope at what our real nature and future really is. He was quite right to say that, and I would be entirely wrong if I implied otherwise.
I think I could say a couple of things for religion . . . the apotropaic, we all have it, the desire not to be found to be claiming all the credit, a certain kind of modesty, you could almost say humility. People will therefore say they will thank God when something happens they are grateful for. There is no need to make this a religious thing, the Greeks had the concept of hubris as something to be avoided and criticised, but what the Greeks would also have called the apotropaic, the view that not all the glory can be claimed by primates like ourselves is a healthy reminder too.
Second, the sense that there is something beyond the material, or if not beyond it, not entirely consistent materially with it, is, I think, a very important matter. What you could call the numinous or the transcendent, or at its best, I suppose, the ecstatic. I wouldn’t trust anyone in this hall who didn’t know what I was talking about. We know what we mean by it, when we think about certain kinds of music perhaps, certainly the relationship or the coincidence but sometimes very powerful between music and love. Landscape, certain kinds of artistic and creative work that appears not to have been done entirely by hand. Without this, we really would merely be primates.
I think it’s very important to appreciate the finesse of that, and I think religion has done a very good job of enshrining it in music and architecture, not so much in painting in my opinion, and I think it’s actually very important that we learn to distinguish the numinous in this way, I wrote a book about the Parthenon, I will mention it briefly. I couldn’t live without the Parthenon, I don’t believe every civilised person could, if it . . . much worse than the first temple had occurred, it seems to me. And we would have lost an enormous amount besides by way of our knowledge of symmetry, grace and harmony. I don’t care about the cult of palace Athena, it’s gone, and as far as I know . . . the sacrifices, some of them human, that were made to those gods, are regrettable but have been blotted out and forgotten, and Athenian imperialism is also a thing of the past. What remains is the fantastic beauty . . . the question is how to keep what is of value of this sort in art in our own emotions . . . I will go as far as the ecstatic, and to distinguish it precisely from superstition and the supernatural which are designed to make us fearful and afraid and servile.

December 16, 2010|By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times

Children born to mothers who live close to freeways have twice the risk of autism, researchers reported Thursday. The study, its authors say, adds to evidence suggesting that certain environmental exposures could play a role in causing the disorder in some children.

“This study isn’t saying exposure to air pollution or exposure to traffic causes autism,” said Heather Volk, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the Saban Research Institute of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “But it could be one of the factors that are contributing to its increase.”

Reported cases of autism cases increased by 57% between 2002 and 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although professionals still debate whether rates have actually risen or a greater proportion of autistic children is being diagnosed. An estimated 1 in 110 children is diagnosed with autism today. There is no cure, although research has shown that various therapies can mitigate some symptoms, especially if begun early in life.

In the current study, published online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers looked at 304 children with autism and, for comparison, 259 children who were developing normally. The children, between the ages of 24 months and 60 months at the start of the study, lived in communities around Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento.

Each family was evaluated in person, and all of the children received developmental assessments. Researchers collected data on where each child’s mother lived during pregnancy and at the time of birth, and the proximity of the homes to a major road or freeway.

Children living about 1,000 feet from a freeway at birth — about 10% of the sample — had a two-fold increase in autism risk. The link held up even after researchers controlled for other factors that may influence development, such as ethnicity, parental education, maternal age and exposure to tobacco smoke.

The study did not find a link between autism development and proximity to a major road, as opposed to a freeway. That may be due to the type and quantity of chemicals dispersed on freeways compared with major roads, Volk said. In Los Angeles, some freeways carry more than 300,000 vehicles daily.

Gayle Windham, chief of the epidemiology surveillance unit with the California Department of Health Services Environmental Investigations Branch, said the study did not directly implicate air pollution as a risk factor for autism because it did not have a way of measuring how much pollution the mothers were exposed to during pregnancy.

“They are using a proxy measure for air pollution, which is distance to a freeway,” she said. “But you still don’t know how much time the women spent at home or working or commuting.” Windham was not involved in the study.

Windham was the lead author of a 2006 study, also published in Environmental Health Perspectives, that found that children with autism were about 50% more likely to have a birth residence in an area with hazardous air pollutants. The study was based on air pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency that was matched to birth records in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Research like this suggests environmental factors need more attention, said Clara Lajonchere, vice president of clinical programs for the advocacy group Autism Speaks. Lajonchere was not involved in the study.

“The implication could be very far reaching in terms of prevention and public health concerns,” Lajonchere said. “I think it’s pretty well established that genes play a huge role in autism. But there is something going on beyond genetics.”

Chronic exposure to air pollution during pregnancy is thought to have physical effects on the fetus. High levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter have been linked to a higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. Chemicals such as ozone, sulfur dioxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, have also been identified as harmful to a developing fetus.

“We know there are some chemicals in air pollution coming from diesel exhaust that might be a good forerunner to look at,” Volk said. “But right now we really don’t know what it is about air pollution that is associated with autism.”

Families residing close to freeways may have to wait for more research before scientists can issue advice or recommendations on what to do about this potential risk, Volk said. For one thing, this study requires replication, she said. In addition, future studies will attempt to identify the level of exposure to particular pollutants.

shari.roan@latimes.com

Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That’s a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.

By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn’t exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We’re looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age,” said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn’t part of the discovery team. “In human terms, we’re looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult.”

While Ellis finds the basis for the study “pretty good,” there have been other claims about the age of distant space objects that have not held up to scrutiny. And some experts have questions about this one. But even the skeptics praised the study as important and interesting.

The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas.

Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang for the most distant fuzzy points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at an astronomy meeting back in January.

In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen’s light signature, further pinpointing the age. Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provides confirmation for the age using a different method, something he called amazing “for such faint objects.”

The new galaxy doesn’t have a name – just a series of letters and numbers. So Lehnert said he and colleagues have called it “the high red-shift blob. “Because it takes so long for the light to travel such a vast time and distance, astronomers are seeing what the galaxy looked like 13.1 billion years ago at a time when it was quite young – maybe even as young as 100 million years old – Lehnert said. It has very little of the carbon or metal that we see in more mature stars and is full of young, blue massive stars, he said.

What’s most interesting to astronomers is that this finding fits with theories about when the first stars and galaxies were born. This galaxy would have formed not too soon after them.

“We’re looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects,” Ellis said. “One hundred million years to a human seems an awful long time, but in astronomical time periods, that’s nothing compared to the life of the stars.”

by Richard Dawkins

Was it for this that I broke the habit of years and accepted the Guardian’s invitation to listen to Thought for the Day [1]? Was it for this that the BBC, including the director general himself, no less, spent months negotiating with the Vatican? What on earth were they negotiating about, if all that emerged [2] was the damp, faltering squib we have just strained our ears to hear?

We’ve already had what little apology we are going to get (none in most cases) for the raped children, the Aids-sufferers in Africa, the centuries spent attacking Jews, science, women and “heretics”, the indulgences and more modern (and tax-deductible) methods of fleecing the gullible to build the Vatican’s vast fortune. So, no surprise that these weren’t mentioned. But there’s something else for which the pope should go to confession, and it’s arguably the nastiest of all. I refer to the main doctrine of Christian theology itself, which was the centrepiece of what Ratzinger actually did say in his Thought for the Day.

“Christ destroyed death forever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the Cross.”

More shameful than the death itself is the Christian theory that it was necessary. It was necessary because all humans are born in sin. Every tiny baby, too young to have a deed or a thought, is riddled with sin: original sin. Here’s Thomas Aquinas:

“. . . the original sin [3] of all men [4] was in Adam [5] indeed, as in its principal cause [6], according to the words of the Apostle [7] (Romans [8] 5:12): “In whom all have sinned [9]“: whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature [10] is transmitted to the child.”

Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his “sin” in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself.

That’s right. The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven’s sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn’t he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.

Ratzinger has much to confess in his own conduct, as cardinal and pope. But he is also guilty of promoting one of the most repugnant ideas ever to occur to a human mind: “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22).

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: December 18, 2010 08:14PM

The LDS Church has made subtle — but significant — changes to chapter headings in its online version of the faith’s signature scripture, The Book of Mormon, toning down some earlier racial allusions.

The words “skin of blackness” were removed from the introductory italicized summary in 2 Nephi, Chapter 5, in describing the “curse” God put on disbelieving Lamanites.

Deeper into the volume, in Mormon, Chapter 5, the heading changes from calling Lamanites “a dark, filthy, and loathsome people” to “because of their unbelief, the Lamanites will be scattered, and the Spirit will cease to strive with them.”

In both cases, the text itself remains unchanged.

Members of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe founder Joseph Smith unearthed a set of gold plates from a hill in upstate New York in 1827 and translated the ancient text into English. The account, known as The Book of Mormon, first published in 1830, primarily tells the story of God’s dealings with two Israelite civilizations living in the New World. One derived from a single family who fled Jerusalem in 600 B.C. and eventually splintered into two groups, known as Nephites and Lamanites.

Since that initial printing, millions of copies have been distributed throughout the world in more than 160 languages.

Changes to the Book of Mormon are always newsworthy because the Mormons believe the book to be Holy Scripture and its leaders have always taught that it is the ‘most correct’ book ever written.

The changes announced today are apparently in some of the summaries that begin each chapter, and so the actual text has not been changed this time. However, there have been previous changes to the text including the term ‘white and delightsome’ which was changed to read ‘pure and delightsome.’ That change was clearly an effort to obfuscate the previously held racist views of the church. The church made no public announcement of the significant change at the time and the church made no public announcement of the recent changes. The Deseret News is devoid of any mention of these recent changes.

Church critics view these changes as evidence that the Book of Mormon is not what the church claims it to be. Defenders of the church are helpless in response, but some make the effort and Peggy Fletcher Stack has given them plenty of space in this story to make their attempt.

The facts are clear, the LDS Church held firm and devout racist doctrines for the first century of church history and it was not until 1978 that the doctrine was changed. That’s when the church publicly announced to the world that it was changing its doctrine and henceforth would allow blacks to hold the priesthood.

The change came under enormous public pressure and if the church hadn’t changed its racist views it would today be a small backwater cult. It was a ‘revelation’ that saved the church, but it didn’t change the facts of history. At that point the church began ‘cleansing’ the racist language of the Book of Mormon. Why all these changes were not made at that time is nothing but baffling. When will they get it right?

Chapter summaries were added in the 1920s, then rewritten by the late LDS apostle Bruce R. McConkie in 1981. That same year, a verse that used “white and delightsome” to describe what will happen to dark-skinned peoples when they repent was changed to “pure and delightsome.”

Critics argued the change was made to address allegations of racism, since the Utah-based faith had a racial policy that, until 1978, barred blacks from being ordained to the church’s all-male priesthood.

Not so, said Royal Skousen, a linguistics professor at Brigham Young University, who has noted every change in the scriptural text from 1830 to the present. Skousen said Smith himself changed “white” to “pure” in 1840, but left it elsewhere in the book.

“Eight other verses still use the phrase,” Skousen said. “If the [church] was just responding to sensitivities, why wouldn’t they have changed all the other ones?”

A decade later, the faith’s governing First Presidency approved minor changes to some Book of Mormon chapter headings, explained church spokesman Michael Purdy.

The tweaks described above were made in several foreign editions, including Portuguese, Spanish and German translations. The original headings remained in most English editions until 2004, when Doubleday published the first trade version of the LDS scripture and implemented the editing.

Until this month, the 1981 headings remained in the church’s online version at lds.org. When the church upgraded its website, the Doubleday changes were included online. The former version will continue — for now — in the printed English versions.

“When these types of changes are made, they are rolled out to various online and print editions as they become available,” Purdy said in a statement. “A new English edition of The Book of Mormon is not scheduled to be printed at present. Since these changes are so minor, it is not necessary to include them until it is printed.”

Nathan Richardson, a BYU graduate student at the time of the Doubleday edition, noticed some changes and decided to do a side-by-side comparison.

Richardson, now a speech therapist and book designer in Orem, concluded that the changes were done for “clarity, a change in emphasis and to stick closer to the scriptural language.” (His study can be seen at ldsphilosopher.com)

Skousen, editor of a 2009 Yale edition of The Book of Mormon, sees the heading changes as a nod to contemporary readers.

LDS officials don’t want readers to focus on the kind of “overt statements about race that were in McConkie’s 1981 summaries,” he said. “There is a [personal] interpretation simply by what you choose to put in them. It’s not a question of dishonesty or trying to hide things.”

The online headings also change many words from a more archaic to a modern language, Skousen said. “Given our times, I think they did the right thing.”

To Grant Hardy, an LDS historian at the University of North Carolina in Asheville who edited a “reader’s edition” of The Book of Mormon in 2005, the changes are interesting.

“Headings do give readers a preview, a take on how to interpret what happens,” Hardy said. “The church is clearly downplaying the ‘skin of blackness.’ ”

Still, Hardy does not believe racist views are unusually prominent in the Mormon scripture.

“Even though this gets a lot of attention, there aren’t that many verses that talk about skin color,” Hardy said. “Race is not a main theme of The Book of Mormon. When it is talking about Lamanites, it is mostly cultural and spiritual differences.”

There is a “temptation to read ancient texts in terms of modern suppositions,” he said. “Probably everybody in history was racist in terms of modern America.”

Does Hardy think the Nephites were racist? Well, yes, he said, but that would not be surprising.

Downplaying that element, Hardy said, “probably fits The Book of Mormon better overall.”

pstack@sltrib.com

—

2 Nephi, Chapter 5

Before the change •… Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites are cursed, receive a skin of blackness, and become a scourge unto the Nephites.

After the change • … Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites are cut off from the presence of the Lord, are cursed, and become a scourge unto the Nephites.

Mormon, Chapter 5

Before the change • … The Lamanites shall be a dark, filthy, and loathsome people. …

After the change • … Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites will be scattered, and the Spirit will cease to strive with them. …

and NICOLE WINFIELD

The Associated Press

Published: November 23, 2010 04:10PM

Vatican City • In a seismic shift on one of the most profound — and profoundly contentious — Roman Catholic teachings, the Vatican said Tuesday that condoms are the lesser of two evils when used to curb the spread of AIDS, even if their use prevents a pregnancy.

The position was an acknowledgment that the church’s long-held anti-birth control stance against condoms doesn’t justify putting lives at risk.

“This is a game-changer,” declared the Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit writer and editor.

The new stance was staked out as the Vatican explained Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on condoms and HIV in a book that came out Tuesday based on his interview with a German journalist.

How to make sense out of religion? It is such a mystery that it survives.  The Catholic Church, like certain other dogmatic churches that claim to be God’s only true church, just can’t admit to being wrong.

They must think that their flocks will fly away if they actually speak the words that they already know and accept, “we were wrong.”

Now the Catholic Church has really split the baby in half. The church has in essence said that it is immoral to use condoms while having sexual intercourse, but if it will prevent AIDS then it is the moral thing to do, and oh, artificial birth control remains immoral. So now you can wear a condom to prevent AIDS, but not to prevent pregnancy. Divine that one!

There was also breaking news that a pill has been designed that will prevent HIV. Now the next step for science is to design a pill that will prevent HIV and prevent pregnancy at the same time. It will sell like hotcakes to Catholics the world over, because there is nothing better than having your morality and immorality come together at the same time.

The Vatican still holds that condom use is immoral and that church doctrine forbidding artificial birth control remains unchanged. Still, the reassessment on condom use to help prevent disease carries profound significance, particularly in Africa where AIDS is rampant.

“By acknowledging that condoms help prevent the spread of HIV between people in sexual relationships, the pope has completely changed the Catholic discussion on condoms,” Martin said.

The change came on a day when U.N. AIDS officials announced that the number of new HIV cases has fallen significantly — thanks to condom use — and a U.S. medical journal published a study showing that a daily pill could help prevent spread of the virus among gay men.

“This is a great day in the fight against AIDS … a major milestone,” said Mitchell Warren, head of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition.

Theologians have debated for years whether it could be morally acceptable for HIV-infected people to use condoms to avoid infecting their partners.

The Vatican years ago was reportedly preparing a document on the subject, but it never came out.

The groundbreaking shift, coming as it does from the deeply conservative pontiff, would appear likely to restrain any public criticism from Catholic conservatives, who on Tuesday insisted the pope was merely reaffirming the church’s moral teaching.

Conservatives have feared that a comment like this would give support to Catholics who want to challenge the church’s ban on artificial contraception in an environment where they feel they are under siege from a secular, anti-Catholic culture.

George Weigel, a conservative Catholic writer, said the Vatican was by no means endorsing condom use as a method of contraception or a means of AIDS prevention.

“This is admittedly a difficult distinction to grasp,” he told The Associated Press in an e-mail. What the pontiff is saying is “that someone determined to do something wrong may be showing a glimmer of moral common sense by not doing that wrong thing in the worst possible way — which is not an endorsement of anything.”

—

Africans commend pope’s suggestion

From clerics to AIDS activists, Africans applauded Pope Benedict XVI’s suggestion that condoms could be used in limited situations to protect partners — a shift that could make a dramatic impact in a continent that is both battling an HIV pandemic and is the fastest-growing region for the Roman Catholic Church. “I say hurrah for Pope Benedict,” exclaimed Linda-Gail Bekker, chief executive of South Africa’s Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya. She said the pope’s statement may prompt many people to “adopt a simple lifestyle strategy to protect themselves.”

Published: November 13, 2010 01:01AM

Re “Same-sex attractions can change, 44% say” (Tribune, Nov. 5):

So 55 percent of Mormons persist in believing that gays can change (but only 20 percent of non-LDS). No surprise there, considering Mormons’ proclivity for believing myths over facts.

From a people among whom many don’t believe in evolution, what do you expect? If Mormons lived in Galileo’s day, they would be one of the last people to agree that Jupiter has moons and the Earth revolves around the sun.

Science: the other form of revelation.

Mike Waters

Salt Lake City

The record that Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Mormon from is a token of God entering history, similar to Moses parting the Red Sea or Christ’s resurrection, Bushman said.

Still, Mormons are sometimes reluctant to talk about the Golden Plates.

“I want to show that they are a powerful, resonant, sacred object that can be (compared) to other sacred objects in other religions … and that it has profound religious meaning,” Bushman said Oct. 23 at Book of Mormon Lands Conference.

Bushman, author of “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling,” says people wanted to know what his next project was after he finished the biography on the Mormon Prophet. “Another book on Joseph Smith?” “Are you moving on to Brigham Young?”

“And I had no answer until suddenly, about a year ago it flashed into my mind the idea of writing a book about the Gold Plates,” Bushman said.

Bushman told a crowded ballroom at the eighth annual conference, sponsored by the Book of Mormon Archaeological Forum, that the Golden Plates are a “luminous, magnetic, irresistible object” in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

They also divide scholars more than any of Joseph Smith’s claimed visions. Bushman said the plates are the hinge of the great question of whether Joseph Smith was sincere or a fraud.

“Had Joseph Smith only seen visions, he could have been classed with Cotton Mather, Charles G. Finney, Ellen G. White, Ann Lee and scores of others who saw visions in his time along with hundreds of other visionaries down through the ages,” Bushman said.

Focusing our attention on the Gold Plates!? Wow! That ought to keep everyone busy.

Skeptics and rationalists can account for visions, Bushman said, as being merely psychological or cultural. This allows them to think kindly towards visionaries as people who sincerely believed, even though they were sadly mistaken.

Accepting Joseph Smith’s Golden Plates is another story.

“They are material, not visionary and psychological,” Bushman said. “They make the claim that the supernatural has entered the natural world. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, they are impossible.”

This, then, is the historical difficulty of the plates. Accounts of hiding the plates, wrapping the plates with cloth, showing the plates and translating from the plates become nothing more than one long attempt at fraud and make everything else Joseph Smith did doubtful. “Like a beggar claiming to have a diamond that he allows nobody to see,” Bushman said.

On the other hand, Bushman said, the plates can be the most convincing evidence of Joseph’s authenticity. “Joseph — or the Lord — came closest to offering concrete evidence of supernatural intervention in the provision for witnesses of the plates,” Bushman said.

Eleven people said they saw the plates and printed their statements in the Book of Mormon. Bushman said that normally Joseph Smith didn’t try to prove his claims, but this exception was like legal depositions in answer to skeptics.

“So in the plates we have joined the two characterizations of Joseph Smith,” Bushman said, “the fraud and the prophet, with the plates as the hinge between the two. This material proof for unbelievable claims causes (the plates) to hover on the boundary between chicanery and rationality, fantasy and reality.”

Bushman explored how the Golden Plates, if real, invite a look at the ancient world from which they purport to come. “I believe the plates cause us to reevaluate history as it is known to modern scholarship.”

The record on the plates stands for “the immense importance of history writing and record-keeping” at the time of their creation, Bushman said. The Book of Mormon is “a book about the importance of books.” The challenge for investigation is whether this record-keeping impulse can be found in the 7th century BC.

Bushman said this was the time period when historical writing was beginning to emerge. Oral histories such as the Homeric epics and Gilgamesh were written. “History writing was in the air in the Near East.”

The plates also challenge modern scholarship. “If it was known for sure that the plates existed, they could in theory turn the course of history,” Bushman said. That “course of history” is secularization. “Faith has to assert itself against a background of prevailing doubt,” Bushman said. “In the secular age, everything has a natural explanation or stems from natural causes; nothing is supernatural.”

But the Golden Plates stand against this view, he said. Their existence is a token of the transcendent: angels, prophets, miracles and God. If Joseph had the plates, Bushman said, “we would have a palpable token of the supernatural. All that had been discounted and dismissed in the secular age would suddenly enter into the mundane world.”

At the very least, he said, the plates can open up the possibility that there is more than just the immediate and the ordinary.

“They may not believe in it, but I want to show that those Gold Plates are rich and deep and it is a worthy emblem for a religion to place emphasis upon,” he said.

e-mail: mdegroote@desnews.com

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: October 15, 2010 01:15PM

Mark Hofmann’s name looms large in Utah history and Mormon lore, castigated as an evil genius and a fraud who deceived his church, his friends and even his wife. But 25 years after the master forger murdered two people with nail bombs and sent Salt Lake City into a panic, he remains an enigma.

Despite a trove of books and scores of newspaper stories probing the Hofmann saga, no one is sure what forces shaped him into a liar and a killer and how he could do both so proficiently.

Today, Hofmann lives quietly at Utah State Prison in Draper, where he is serving a life sentence. He hasn’t given interviews since Oct. 15, 1985, when a pair of explosions pierced the tranquil autumn day with bombs that reverberate still.

Outwardly, Hofmann was a mild-mannered family man and devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But, as he later confessed, by the time he departed on a religious mission to Great Britain in 1974, he was a nonbeliever who saw LDS Church founder Joseph Smith as a fake who dabbled in magic. Hofmann’s infamous Salamander Letter, among other documents, sought to undermine the Mormon prophet’s credibility, while making its real author a big chunk of money. The letter, purportedly written to an early Mormon convert, described Smith conversing with a spirit that first appeared as an amphibian.

During the first half of the 1980s, Hofmann gained notoriety for discovering, one after another, documents purported to reflect early Mormon history. The forger later conceded he created material that could be embarrassing to the LDS Church in hope that Mormon leaders would spend large sums of money to keep them private. He also produced items attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Boone and Emily Dickinson, among many others.

Hofmann had a dual personality — a friend compared him with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But he never confided in anyone. That helps explain why his wife, family and friends defended him so vehemently when police began to suspect he was a forger and the cold-blooded bomber who killed businessman and documents collector Steven Christensen, as well as Kathleen Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s business associate, Gary Sheets.

“It was like they were talking about someone else entirely. It was total disbelief,” said former friend and book dealer Curt Bench of the aftermath of Oct. 16, 1985 ­— the day a bomb exploded in Hofmann’s car, sending him to a hospital.

Hofmann said he was trying to commit suicide, but not everyone buys that.

“Who the real Mark Hofmann is is still a mystery,” Bench said. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for 25 years.”

—

A glimpse inside • But there are hints as to Hofmann’s real identity and how — at least for a time — he fooled everyone.

He didn’t testify in court. But in interviews with prosecutors at Utah State Prison — a condition of a plea bargain that allowed him to avoid the death penalty — he said he kept his real self hidden.

“It’s hard for a lot of people to accept, I’m sure, that my closest friends and even my wife did not know the extent of my fraudulent dealings,” he said. “But those people do not know my personality.”

The 10 interviews conducted in 1987 by Salt Lake County prosecutors Robert Stott and David Biggs provide a rare glimpse into Hofmann’s psyche. The 587-page transcript of those discussions deals mostly with the intricacies of his forgery techniques and his knowledge of Mormon history. But, occasionally, the pages provide chilling clues about the man who thought nothing of killing to keep his forgeries from coming to light.

In an April 22, 1987, recorded interview, Hofmann admitted that he liked manipulating people by challenging their deeply held beliefs.

“It’s not so much what is genuine and what isn’t, as what people believe is genuine,” he told Stott and Biggs. “I don’t believe in the religion as far as Joseph Smith had the first vision or received the plates from the Angel Moroni, or whatever. … To me, it is unimportant if Joseph Smith had that vision or not, as long as people believe it.”

He rationalized that his forgeries weren’t intended to defraud anyone.

“My view is, when I forged a document and sold it, that I was not cheating that person that I was selling it to because the document would never be detected as being a fraud.”

Although he contradicted himself on a number of occasions as to his motives, in a Feb. 27, 1987, interview with prosecutors, Hofmann admitted that he sought to alter Mormon history. But he also conceded he wanted to make money.

“I believe the documents I created could have been part of Mormon history. … In effect, I guess the question I asked myself in deciding on a forgery, one of the questions was, ‘What could have been?’ ”

—

No remorse for victims • A Jan. 29, 1988, hearing before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole allows further insight into Hofmann’s persona. A tape of the proceeding is filed at the Utah State Archives.

Then-Chairwoman Victoria Palacios probed his motivations for creating documents that seemed to question the origin of the LDS Church: “You seem to toy with the religious beliefs of others.”

Hofmann replied: “Toying with them was an experimentation on my part, to see why they believe what they do.”

Later, Palacios asked the soft-spoken inmate if he had any remorse for the murders.

“Part of my philosophy of life is that the victims are not suffering, at this point,” he said without emotion. “I believe their families are. I feel remorse for their families.”

Palacios pressed Hofmann about the second bomb he set as a diversion to make investigators believe Christensen’s murder was related to his business association with Gary Sheets, rather than Christensen’s dealings with the forger.

“When I made that bomb, my thinking was it didn’t matter who died from the bomb,” Hofmann said. “Mr. Sheets, a child, whatever.”

After deliberating less than an hour, the board ordered that Hofmann remain in prison for the rest of his life.

If his friends and family were surprised by the forgeries, they were dumfounded by his admission to the murders.

“As a practical matter, he isn’t knowable,” said longtime friend Shannon Flynn.

Something was missing from Hofmann’s personality, Flynn said.

“Most humans have bad thoughts from time to time and a control system that stops us from following through with them,” he said. “Hofmann didn’t have that. He wasn’t a bloodthirsty individual, but if he got in a jam, there is nothing to stop him.”

That hearing was the first and only time that Hofmann’s ex-wife, Doralee Olds, heard him admit to the killings. She filed for divorce later that year.

All these years later, she said she doesn’t know the real Mark Hofmann.

“I don’t know if I can answer that question. There was some kind of disconnect,” she said. “He was pretending to be someone else. Our life together was a fraud.”

—

Attraction to explosives • Hofmann’s past yields some clues to his pathological behavior, said Allen Roberts, who, with the late Linda Sillitoe, wrote Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders.

Hofmann had an early interest in explosives and felt empowered by fooling people with falsehoods, Roberts said. He also felt stifled by his authoritarian and religious father, who refused to allow his son to question the Mormon faith.

And Roberts noted that Hofmann read books such as The Word, by Irving Wallace Jr., and The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, both of which feature plots with forgeries surrounding religious texts leading to murder.

Roberts believes Hofmann’s background and his hubris allowed him to go beyond duplicity to murder.

“He fooled so many people at high levels for so long, he felt invincible,” Roberts said.

Hofmann’s run of famous document discoveries was glorious, if short — a little more than five years.

His first big “find” was the Anthon Transcript in April 1980. He traded the forgery to the LDS Church for a 5-dollar Mormon gold coin, several historic Mormon notes and a first edition of The Book of Mormon.

Salt Lake County investigators believe that, by the time of the bombings, he had made $800,000 in cash and $200,000 in trade from his forgeries.

But Hofmann weaved a web of deception that began to close in on him by mid-1985. Although he made a lot of money, he spent even more. By the late summer of 1985, Hofmann’s debts mounted to a half-million dollars, and several anxious investors, including Christensen, were seeking the McLellin Collection — an assemblage of documents that would take months and months to forge.

The Oath of a Freeman, which Hofmann claimed to have found in New York City’s Argosy Book Store and purportedly dated to 1638, was to be his ace in the hole. He figured it would bring $1 million. But his potential buyers, the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society, eventually passed on the document.

During a March 17, 1987, prison interview, Biggs asked Hofmann what would have happened if he had collected the $1 million.

“It would have relieved me from [the financial hole],” Hofmann said. “Hence, I guess, you want me to say the bombings would not have taken place. … I’ll say it’s true.”

But as October 1985 rolled around, the pressure finally pushed the baby-faced forger over the edge, according to one of his attorneys, Brad Rich.

Hofmann stared into the “amoral abyss and was cast adrift,” Rich told the parole board.

“The decision [to murder] was the product of the moment,” Rich said. “I think he doesn’t know why he did what he did. He is astounded that he did what he did.”

Hofmann hasn’t said whether that’s true. He recently declined an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.

But his one-time friends don’t let him off that easily.

“He knew exactly what he was doing. He killed to get himself out of a jam,” Bench said. “I don’t know how you could do that without remorse. It’s about as cold as it gets.”

csmart@sltrib.com

—

Timeline: Mark W. Hofmann

May 1973 • Graduates from Olympus High School in Salt Lake County.

January 1974 • Goes on LDS mission to England.

September 1976 ­• Enrolls as pre-med student at Utah State University.

September 1979 ­• Marries Doralee Olds in the LDS Temple in Salt Lake City.

April 1980 ­• Forges the Anthon Transcript, which Joseph Smith purportedly copied from the golden plates.

February 1981 • Creates the 1844 Joseph Smith III blessing, where Joseph Smith says his son will succeed him.

July 1982 • Introduces the 1831 Lucy Mack Smith letter that says God told her son to dig up the golden plates.

October 1983 ­• Finds the Josiah Stowell letter in which Joseph Smith talks about seeking treasure with a divining stick.

February 1984 • Sells the Salamander Letter, which describes Joseph Smith seeing spirits with great kettles of money.

March 1985 • Forges The Oath of a Freeman and attempts to sell it the Library of Congress for $1 million.

September 1985 ­• Investors become upset with Hofmann over his inability to produce the McLellin Collection.

Oct. 15, 1985 ­• Kills Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets in separate bombings.

Oct. 16, 1985 • Hofmann seriously injured when a bomb explodes in his car.

Feb. 4, 1986 ­• Prosecutors charge Hofmann with murders and 25 other felonies.

Jan. 7, 1987 • Hofmann pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder.

Jan. 29, 1988 ­• Utah Board of Pardons and Parole sentences Hofmann to life in prison.

Published: Sunday, Oct. 10, 2010 12:00 a.m. MDT

(This is an editorial published by The Deseret News one week after Elder Boyd K. Packer’s conference speech created a fire storm of criticism from gays and gay supporters. Comments from Watts Cookin’ are embodied within the Deseret News editorial.)

In recent weeks, media sources across the country have covered several suicides by young people wrestling with same-gender attraction. These heartbreaking accounts have brought national attention to the anguished lives of youths confused by strong feelings that can put them at odds with the expectations of friends, family, community or church. What has made these stories particularly horrifying is the brutal and belittling behavior that preceded each suicide.

To any affected by such tragedy, we express sorrow and we condemn the incivility that violated the dignity of these youths.

This week, activists for the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) community have attempted to raise our community’s consciousness about the challenges facing LGBT youths. This consciousness raising has been styled as a reaction to a talk by President Boyd Packer, president of the Quorum of the Twelve of The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints, given at the church’s 180th Semiannual General Conference last Sunday.

The LDS Church just doesn’t get it. It’s like the typical bully. Throw a punch and run for cover, once again hiding under the cloak of ‘civility.’

The last time the church begged for civility was after it went ‘no holds barred’ against gays on Proposition Eight in California. When gays didn’t meekly cower and instead responded in kind, the church begged for ‘civility.’

When it comes to treating gays ‘civilly’ the church just doesn’t get it. They don’t understand why gays are offended at being called ‘immoral.’ They don’t understand why gays are offended when the church goes on a mission to deny them their civil rights! And then the church has the gall to ask for ‘civility’ to protect their own tender feelings.

Gays are every bit as moral as heterosexuals. The church just doesn’t get that. Gays don’t need to apologize for their sexuality anymore than heterosexuals. Sexuality is part of being human. To deny gays their sexuality is to deny them their humanity, and for the first time in history gays are demanding their God given inalienable rights. The LDS Church stands fore square (as in oath) in denying them those rights.

The church is fully entitled to its moral beliefs, and if gays want to be members of the church they should abide the church standard and remain celibate. Otherwise they should leave the church.

The LDS Church can preach its doctrine from the pulpit all it wants, but when it brings it into the public arena it better be willing to put on the gloves. Gays have taken it on the chin far too long, and the church has been dishing it out unmolested far too long as well.

Elder Packer’s remarks were arrogant, misguided, and hurtful, and shows that while the world was growing in understanding about gays he remains stuck in the mud of four decades ago.

The idea that gays choose to be gay is old, old school, and Elder Packer is still the principal teaching the class. About the only people left who believe that unfounded dogma are religious people of Packer’s generation. The younger generations are enlightened and it is only a matter of time until the church will change. Sadly, the church, by virtue of its hierarchal structure, is always the last to change.

One would think that a church with a prophet who speaks with God would be leading change, but it works the opposite. A prophet has to defend his old dogmas to the very end in order to save face. By definition a prophet can’t admit to error without losing his title, and thus the embarrassment goes on.

The claim to infallibility is a strait jacket. Even God isn’t infallible. In fact, He seems to be experimenting with us.

This focused attention on the LDS Church is deeply ironic given the church’s shared condemnation of hate and violence toward gays and lesbians, its mutual support of anti-discrimination laws for gays and lesbians and its compassionate ministry to LDS Church members who have same-gender attraction.

This past week, the LDS Church re-emphasized “that there is no room in this discussion for hatred or mistreatment of anyone.” This is not new — it mirrors, for example, how the LDS Church helped to champion a Salt Lake City ordinance banning discrimination of gays and lesbians in housing and employment. And it is consistent with how the LDS Church has ministered to members with same-gender attraction.

In a 2007 article in the LDS Church’s Ensign magazine, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland relates a conversation with a self-described gay member of the LDS Church: “You are first and foremost a son of God, and He loves you. What’s more, I love you. My Brethren among the General Authorities love you.”

Interestingly, given the events of this week, Elder Holland spoke about other church leaders: “I’m reminded of a comment President Boyd K. Packer made in speaking to those with same-gender attraction. ‘We do not reject you,’ he said. ‘… We cannot reject you, for you are the sons and daughters of God. We will not reject you, because we love you.’ ”

While opposing all sexual relations outside of traditional marriage, the LDS Church has consistently reached out with understanding and respect to individuals who are attracted to those of the same gender.

Perhaps the focused attention has come because the LDS Church continues to assert principled opposition to same-sex marriage, a view shared by most Americans. Indeed, the majority of states have passed legislation clarifying that marriage is between a man and a woman. For activists in the LGBT community who reject what Latter-day Saints and members of other faith traditions believe to be the divine origins of marriage between man and woman, there may simply not be room for agreement on this important issue.

Because of our concern for civility and respect, we find common ground with those who, with dignity, wish to condemn hatred and violence against those who struggle with same-gender attraction.

Nonetheless, tactics used this week ostensibly to accomplish these purposes were counterproductive. Instead of seeking genuine common ground around issues of mutual concern, activists began this week with a grossly misguided caricature of the LDS Church’s support of traditional morality.

The tactic is now all-too familiar: take a statement out of context, embellish it with selective interpretation, presume hostile intent, and then use the distortion to isolate an entire group, in this case a church.

We encourage all to read President Packer’s talk rather than simply rely on the media interpretations and selective quotations. It stretches all credulity to find in President Packer’s pastoral counsel what some are calling a hateful message “that can lead some kids to bully and others to commit suicide.” Contrary to what some have written in provocative press releases, nothing in President Packer’s talk says that “violence and/or discrimination against LGBT people is acceptable.”

This distortion is not only misguided and political, it is dangerous. It frays trust that helps people of goodwill from different perspectives to constructively address the serious problems under consideration. By holding up a caricatured account of people’s spiritual leaders, those in greatest need of pastoral care may be mistakenly alienated from the very people who can compassionately help them get access to professional resources and counseling.

The challenges facing the families and individuals affected by same-gender attraction are poignant and real. Religion provides a unique perspective on how these challenges can be addressed that has every right to be heard and evaluated on the merits. Indeed, religious organizations provide the vital infrastructure for the economy of care that undergirds our community. For the sake of our youths and the health of our communities, we call for thoughtful and civil dialogue on this and all difficult conversations. That dialogue should respect context, should not prejudge motive and must work to include instead of isolate.

© 2010 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved