Why we separate church & state

Steven Waldeman, founder of BeliefNet and author of Founding Faith, has a lot of interesting stuff to say about the separation of church and state (which he supports) and the place of religion in public life (which he also supports). In a recent interview in National Review Online, he says:

Modern evangelicals often argue for more religion in the public square and often argue that separation of church and state is a myth concocted by liberal 20th-century judges. Actually, it was the 18th century evangelicals, mostly Baptists, who led the charge for religious freedom and separation of church and state. They rallied against Patrick Henry’s proposal to have tax dollars help religion in general, arguing that the idea was “founded neither in Scripture, on Reason, on Sound Policy; but is repugnant to each of them,” as one petition declared. The 18th-century evangelicals might be puzzled how their theological descendents ended up wanting more government entanglement with religion.

So when we hear people arguing that we need Christian Sharia in this country - a conformity in action and belief to their (usually) narrow interpretation of religion, we should pause to thank God that we have had freedom OF religion and freedom FROM religion all these years. It easily could have been different, but perhaps they were close enough to Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil Wars to realize that entanglement of religion with the state was bad for the state, bad for religion, and most importantly, bad for people.

Can you learn altruism?

BusinessWeek reported this study from the UW-Madison in the current (March 27) issue:

Meditation Can Wish You Well, Study Says tests suggest compassion and empathy can be learned traits
By Amanda Gardner

THURSDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that qualities the world desperately needs more of -- love, kindness and compassion -- are indeed teachable. Imaging technology shows that people who practice meditation that focuses on kindness and compassion actually undergo changes in areas of the brain that make them more in tune to what others are feeling. "Potentially one can train oneself to behave in a way which is more benevolent and altruistic," said study co-author Antoine Lutz, an associate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Unfortunately, that's contrary to my meditation experience back when I was practicing zen sitting. It made me jumpy and irritable (OK more irritable than normal), which is why I ultimately gave up zen. But there's good news. Puppy training has changed my life. We have just started taking Neesa to puppy class and it reminds me that positive thinking leads to positive feeling.

Puppy class is all about positive feedback. Catching your dog doing the right thing and praising her. Isn't that what we all want? Isn't that really the way to raise happy and responsible dogs, horses or children? And it makes you feel good instead of jumpy and irritable (OK less irritable than normal).

You can train your brain to be happy, to see things positively and to expect the best, even when the worst happens. The first step: turn off the radio.

Updated reading list

I've lately been trying to reconstruct our historic reading list and figure out when the Drinking & Reading Society began. The former has proven easier than the latter. The pretty much complete reading list is posted in the Oct. 26, 2007, entry, but I thought I'd bring us up to date with all of 07 and thus far in 08 here, keeping in mind that some months we just couldn't decide on a single book and read whatever came to hand.

The Searunners, Ivan Doig (March 08)
Decade of the Wolf: Returning the wolves to Yellowstone, Smith & Furgeson (Feb. 08)
Tent Life in Siberia, George Kennan (Jan. 08)
Dec. 07 ?
The Book of Yaak, The Lost Grizzlies, The Ninemile Wolves, Rick Bass. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; Coyote’s Canyon, An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, Terry Tempest Williams. (Nov. 07)
Of Moths & Men, Judith Hooper OR After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou
 (Oct. 07)

The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan, Sept. 07

The Land Remembers, Ben Logan July 07

A Natural History of North American Trees, Donald Culross Peattie June 07

Audubon, The Making of an American, Richard Rhodes, May 07

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan, Mar./Apr. 07

My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir, Feb. 07

The Making of the Fittest, Sean B. Carroll, Jan. 07



For a guy who doesn't believe in evolution, Mike Huckabee is no dope. Consider his response to the Jeremiah Wright flap:

"... One other thing I think we've got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would, too. I probably would, too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."

And speaking of evolution the Drinking & Reading Society's next selection is Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade of the NY Times.

Publishers Weekly says: Scientists are using DNA analysis to understand our prehistory: the evolution of humans; their relation to the Neanderthals, who populated Europe and the Near East; and Homo erectus, who roamed the steppes of Asia. Most importantly, geneticists can trace the movements of a little band of human ancestors, numbering perhaps no more than 150, who crossed the Red Sea from east Africa about 50,000 years ago. Within a few thousand years, their descendents, Homo sapiens, became masters of all they surveyed, the other humanoid species having become extinct. According to New York Times science reporter Wade, this DNA analysis shows that evolution isn't restricted to the distant past: Iceland has been settled for only 1,000 years, but the inhabitants have already developed distinctive genetic traits. Wade expands his survey to cover the development of language and the domestication of man's best friend. And while "race" is often a dirty word in science, one of the book's best chapters shows how racial differences can be marked genetically and why this is important, not least for the treatment of diseases.

See, the post did come back to race after all.

Back in the USA

Where cars are big, roads are big, houses are big. The home of the freeway, which is a wonderful word - a typically American word. Free. The Motorways imply the right to drive, and probably to drive - motor - better than Americans do, or at least more mindfully, but that don't say freedom. In America, a car is freedom, even though financially it's a ball and chain. Americans want to go where we want when we want. In that sense, America is big; we imagine big.

But one of the things we haven't imagined is edible labels. Bread in England comes with edible labels baked right into the crust to certify that the bread is organic. So when you order a sandwich on organic bread - and every pub has organic bread - you know you are getting what was promised. Go into any English supermarket and the labels on the food not only tell you what it is, but where it came from, which farm produced it and whether it meets organic standards. That way, you can make an informed choice with your dollar - or pound - whether to buy local or not. Whether fruit from Holland is preferable to fruit from Algeria. So while there are a great many things in England that don't seem to make much sense - like store opening and closing hours that bar ordinary working people from actually shopping - it is possible to know exactly where your food comes from. Try that in the USA!

Darwinism

You have to love a country that puts Charles Darwin on the 10 pound note and you don't hear any squeaking about it. I didn't even notice it until today when I was putting some money in my pocket and thought, "hey, I recognize that guy!"

What's natural?

Wilderness is clearly nature. The glacier and the grizzly, sand and scorpion. But how much nature does it take to make nature? We went hiking (really just a short ramble) in the Cotswolds on a fine sunny cool spring day yesterday using public right of way paths that date back to prehistoric times. These paths, the shortest way between little villages nestled in rolling hills not unlike Wisconsin, were paved during the middle ages, but the stones are now lost beneath the agricultural fields. Yet the right of common passage is jealously preserved and guarded. You see muddy boots in the nicest restaurants, the reddish clay turning slick and sticky at the slightest provocation. Mud and wind, sun and sky haven't changed since thousands of years ago, but all the rest has. I have no idea what originally grew here, whether grass or trees. Now it's sheep and hay and vegetables. It's outdoors, and there's an elemental freedom to it all, but is it nature?

On a different natural note, these folks are way ahead of us in the department of whole, fresh and local food. Organic everything in the market. Local foods in the restaurants. Organic cheese in the quick mart. Organic local flour. You don't have to ask. Remember how hard it was to find local flour for the 100 mile dinner! Amelia had a box of food delivered this morning - carrots, broccoli, parsnips, banana, apples, salmon, pork, bacon etc., etc., all organic. Expensive yes, but delivered to her door on order.

From the country that invented nature

Blogging from the Midlands of England. Sunny! Sunday morning in Solihull a suburb of Birmingham. There's not much left of "nature" in this industrial (formerly pastoral) flatland. When they built a new football (soccer) stadium in nearby Coventry, they had to limit the capacity because the underground is so riddled with abandoned coal mines that they couldn't be sure the ground wouldn't collapse. Nonetheless, the English can be credited with wrenching the concept of nature from its Bibical context and setting it on its feet as an independent entity, an idea that Thoreau, Muir and Leopold expanded to involve a worship and finally a stewardship of nature. And that we are trying to expand to figure out how we can live as part of nature, not something outside of it. This place could use a little more stewardship. But they do a lot better job of honoring their human heritage than we do. The village of Warwick is still built around its Midaeval gate and shops from the 15th Century are still in use. Looks like the original glass in the windows, but I'm sure that's not true.

The Obama trend

There’s a trend going on in America – has been for some time. Let’s call it the end of the ME generation. For nearly 30 years, America was increasingly about ME and less about US. Everyone was out to get what my niece used to call “their deservement.” But a funny thing happened after 9-11. It turned out that a lot of people really did care about US. They wanted to do right for the country. But GWB put a damper on that public spirit. Instead of asking, “what you can do for your country,” he admonished us to “go shopping.” Well, it turned out that Americans were ready for a bigger challenge. We really do want to make the world a better place. We have come to realize that bigger houses and bigger cars don’t make us happy. Cocooning didn’t make us feel safer, just more isolated. We’re still scared. And we still might elect John McCain if some new trauma makes us scared enough. But we’re ready to stick our heads out and look around, and we don’t think the America we see really represents the America we believe in. It doesn’t make us as proud as it used to.

Selfishness will be with us always, but the über-trend today is a new reconnection with our communities and the rededication to bigger ideals. That’s why the green movement is gaining such strength. That’s what the local foods movement is all about. People are yearning to take individual steps toward making the world a better place and they yearn for leadership that will tell them how they can use their talents and energies to realize the better country and the better world that they just know has to be out there. Paul Hawken wrote about this new movement in Blessed Unrest. You should read it.

That’s where Barack Obama comes in. He didn’t invent the trend. Maybe he wasn’t even really aware of it. But he has tapped into America’s a desire to do good -- to be better -- that has been suppressed for the past seven years. The question of this election is, are we ready to be real Americans again?