Samba To That Holocaust Beat

When I think of the holocaust, it makes me feel like ... dancing!

Or so it seems with the Unidos do Viradouro samba school, one of Rio's big samba schools and a primary Carnival participant. The group built the pictured float to be one of three in its presentation for Carnival, which starts this Sunday.

The Jewish Federation of Rio de Janeiro got a court order today prohibiting Viradouro from entering the float in the parade, but there are still a couple days available for the legal case to flip and even flop.

BBC quotes Viradouro's creative director saying the float is designed to be "a reminder that such an atrocity should never be repeated." No dancers were going to be around the float, the group says.

That may be a noble motivation, if true. But a noble motivation in an inappropriate venue cannot remain noble. File this under "What were they thinking?"

Throwing Baby Moses Out With The Bathwater

What is it about some regulators that make them so simple-mindedly, bone-chillingly stupid?

Here's a case in point, from the other CSM:

Earlier this year, chaplains in federal prisons removed thousands of religious materials from federal prison libraries nationwide. Perhaps this government-ordered purge won't cause concern outside of prisons, because it affects only convicts, and because it's to fight terrorism. But it should.

The issue is not whether prison literature is censored, but the degree to which it is. US law and the Constitution allow government to restrict religious freedom in prisons as long as it has a compelling interest and uses the "least restrictive means" to pursue its interest. Making sure prisons don't become recruiting grounds for terrorists certainly is a compelling interest.

But the [Bureau of Prisons (BOP] has overreached.

Before this summer, screening was done by BOP chaplains. They culled material sent to the libraries and pulled mostly hate literature – a lot of it white supremacist citing a Christian basis – that could endanger prison security.

The new policy instead uses religious experts to select a list of approved materials. The list is long, allowing up to 450 titles for each of 20 religions or religious groupings, and will be periodically updated. But many titles that the BOP admits "may be very worthwhile" aren't on the list and were removed from chapel libraries.

In the Otisville prison, according to the suit, hundreds of books were taken from shelves, including such "fundamental" works as Maimonides' Code of Jewish Law, as well as the Christian bestseller, "The Purpose-Driven Life." The Muslim collection, small to begin with, amounts to the Koran and two other titles.

The BOP's move stems from a 2004 Department of Justice inspector general review of religious services for Muslims in federal prisons. One recommendation was to take an inventory and rescreen chapel libraries. It also said the BOP should consider a central registry of appropriate titles to avoid duplicating review efforts.

But the BOP never conducted the inventory. A BOP spokeswoman says the list is the "most effective" way for selecting material that is "consistently available," provides "religiously reliable teachings," and does not discriminate or promote violence or radicalization.

We all know the purpose of this move: To get control of Islamist radicalization of the prison population, plain and simple. But the Muslim collection -- the Koran and two books -- is the only group of books that went unchanged, and once again the stupid bureaucrats are punishing the Christians and Jews for the sins of the Muslims.

This foolishness that equality equals fairness and wisdom is the regulators' way out. Two kids fighting in school? Throw them both out; don't worry about trivialities like "wrong" and "right." Worried about Muslims recruiting bomb my way to paradise crazies from the population of devout child molesters, welfare cheats and wife murderers? Throw out all religions.

Two prisoners, a Christian and a Jew, have sued. They face a 50/50 chance of getting a mind-numbingly stupid judge who is no better than the BOP buffoons who set this policy.

Here Come The Atheists

I know not all atheists are silly; in fact some of the smartest people I know are smart without acknowledging the helping hand of God on their shoulder.

But when I posted about the CNN special, God's Warriors, and its efforts to equalize Islam, Christianity and Judaism as warriors all, equal opportunity zealots, I was introduced to a few polite but less thoughtful atheists/agnostics, Nathan, Reema and Brian.

Nathan started it off:

You are right about the incompleteness and superficiality of CNN's report, but some of this is due to CNN's production style rather than Amanpour's reporting. Dramatic music, flashy video techniques, interview bites, rapid scene and topic changes. Ordinary TV stupidity. And you are dead wrong in your judgment. This isn't only about terrorism. It's about religiously sanctioned violence. Think George Bush, his crusade, the right-wing Christian support of it, and the 100s of thousands of dead Iraqis--oh, yeah, and the tortured and maimed and raped and homeless ones, too. A little clash of civilizations. And Amanpour also covered Israeli state violence against Palestinian and Lebanese people--also supported by the religious right in Israel and by the Christian and Jewish right in the U.S. "God's Warriors" is about some people believing that God has given them sovereignty over other peoples lives, bodies, freedom, dignity. Islamic warriors tend to do this without the instrument of a state or its army, just because God tells them to. Chrsitians and Jews tend to work through states, the ones God has chosen to do this purifying, this unspeakable work.

Nathan misses the point entirely. We are not fighting a religious war; we are fighting against religious warriors who attacked us. George Bush's "crusade" is for democracy, not for Christianity.

His compassion extends, apparently, only to the dead Iraqis attacked by our very secular military, not to those killed by the fundamentally religious Islamist jihadists. This is anti-Americanism, not anti-religion-ism.

Then Reema:

It seems sad to me that people (so easily I might add) defend their own religion as though there is nothing wrong with it. Cruelty is equally suggested by all three religions in their supposedly HOLY book. When you're going to comment about a religion that you don't know anything about it's probably best to be conservative on your views. In the eyes of Arabs; Muslims and many other people every Jewish "God Warrior" in the occupied lands is a terrorist. I am an Atheist and I'm proud that I have outgrown such superstitious beliefs. But as much as it's stupid to you when Muslims talk about jihad It's stupid among them when Christians talk about Muslimification of Europe or Jews right to the holy lands because it has been said so in the old testament. The root of all three religions are the same and each of them is as dangerous to the science and reasoning as the other one. I suggest you watch Richard Dawkins - The Root of All Evil; Not because it will change your view but because it will give you a new perspective.

The roots of Islam are quite different than those of Judaism and Christianity. It came later, the revelation of one man. He borrowed lightly from the established religions of the time, but built his own framework above them which is fundamentally different -- from the definition of his god on.

Reeba's points about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are interesting, if old. Yes, Israel sees a Biblical right to the land, but beyond that there is a very real-world process of getting it -- of U.N. resolutions, of purchases of land from the people who lived there, of ancient roots to the land that were disrupted by brutes who kicked them out. All that is forgotten.

The Muslimification of Europe is a real demographic issue. In secular Europe it is not seen as a religious issue but a cultural issue, so Reeba's point is off.

Now Brian, the most confused of all:

Thought [God's Warriors] was excellent. I'm sorry, but all 3 religions have been responsible for most of the wars in the world and yes I am saying that as an agnostic and a sceptic of religion, which I consider superstitious, resistant to science, and divisive. I also say it as a European of Catholic upbringing.

The Old Testament is full of wars fought on the basis of religions. The Christians all the way back to Charlemagne fought "Crusades" against first European Pagans (he massacred thousands of Saxon Pagans) and then Muslims and so-called "heretics" like the Cathars in southwestern France. The Catholic Inquisiton burned thousands at the stake for being of the wrong religion or saying the world was round. Galileo was locked up in his home for life for the latter 'offense'. After the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant European countries fought countless wars - up to 13 million may have died in the German Thirty Years War. Catholic and Protestant European countries passed penal laws to oppress their religious minorities. It was not until 1788 that France lifted its persecution of Lutherans and 1791 was when the general toleration for Protestants and Jews stopped. In Ireland, Catholics were denied parliamentary representation by the British until 1829.

You may argue I am going a bit far back in mentioning this. But depending on your viewpoint of issues like the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it could be argued - despite the denials - that these also constitute wars fought in the name of religion. When I hear US politicians constantly citing "God" to justify such wars, I get suspicious of some of their motives. We in the West have to find a way of living in peace with the 1.1 billion people in this world who are Muslims. And with our Christian history on this matter, I think it is a bit rich for us to start giving lectures.

Brian's history, like the history of many anti-religious zealots, is trite and dangerously distorted. In recent history, and probably throughout all history, it was the atheists that did most of the killing. Pol Pot was not a religious man, nor was Adolf Hitler; neither fought religious wars, yet both were responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of souls.

Roosevelt routinely asked for God's help in fighting the Germans, which is a good thing for the president of a nation primarily of Christians to do, but he never posed these prayers as a call to God for victory in a Holy War; he just prayed we would win, and our fighting men would be protected.

If Brian's theory of the religious basis for war were right, he should be able to point to the great atheist nations of the 20th and 21st centuries and show them as beacons of what man can achieve if he is not burdened with a cumbersome God.

He can point to Stalin and the Soviet killing machine, which killed millions of Russian Christians and Central Asian Muslims in the name of the Godless state. He can point to today's North Korean and Chinese deliberately Godless governments that carry out killing on a massive scale in the name of the atheist state.

There are no "Christian wars," and have been none since the Crusades (a defense against Islam's bloody expansion into the Holy Land) and the executions of the various convulsions of the Inquisition era. Northern Ireland's troubles were economic much more than religious.

Today's religious wars brought by the Islmaists against all non-believing societies is an aberration in modern times. If we are to learn from history, it is the atheists and agnostics that the world has to fear.

These commentors appear to have accepted wholeheartedly the teachings of our fiercely secularist, anti-Faith universities. It is a sad thing to see, the spouting of their religiously anti-religious doctrine, just as they got it from the pulpit in the front of their classrooms.

Rather than laugh at us for our faith, I pray they look within and find the emptiness of their faith. There is still time for them to find the Joy that comes from humble surrender to our compassionate God.

God's Warriors?

Christiane Amanpour, that pinnacle of tolerance and objectivity, is going to spend three nights this week looking at what she calls God's Warriors. No, not the jihadists who are killing thousands of innocents every year -- although they are in the six-hour special -- but also "God's Jewish warriors" and "God's Christian warriors."

She uses those phrases throughout the preview clips, and it's disgusting. There's hardly a Christian alive who would call an abortion clinic bomber "God's warrior," nor do Jews use "Jewish warrior" to describe the few in Israeli society who resort to a little terrorism in the face of an overwhelming terrorist threat.

In Islam, "God's warrior" has an entirely different meaning; an acceptance that their god does in fact require bloody war of them, and a use of exactly that phrase as a praise to particularly devout and committed Muslims, who are willing to kill themselves to take out a few innocent others.

This is, in short, a festival of secular relativism, and an anti-Jewish and anti-Christian show, since any attempt to equate these two religions with the abominations carried out in the name of Islam is blasphemous and unsupportable.

To find warriors in Christiandom, Amanpour showed a complete lack of originality and turned to Jerry Falwell, interviewing him during his last week of life. She is, of course, equating the fight against abortion to a Holy War, which of course it is, but much different from the war Islam is raging.

She is able to assemble a few deaths from the most radical years of the anti-abortion fight, now decades in the past, and waves them around as if there is some sort of equality of scale between the killing of a few abortion doctors and abortion clinic personnel -- the front of a force that is killing millions of innocent babies -- and Islamists who are not targeting the killers, but the innocents, creating a bloodbath that in many years surpasses even that of the abortionists.

On the Jewish side, she profiles the founder of the Jewish Underground, a small and largely unsuccessful Jewish radical group. The group injured three Palestinian mayors and had big plans, and were motivated by the Torah's teachings on God's gift of Israel to the Jews. So yes, like an abortion clinic bomber, they were warriors on behalf of their religion -- but as the only example given, there terror is a mere shadow of a wisp, compared to al-Qaeda.

The preview on the Islamic side focuses on the murder in the Netherlands of Theo van Gogh by a radical, home-grown Islamist. Rather than go to the mosques to find out how van Gogh's murderer was influenced by the teachings of Islam to shoot a man off his bicycle and nearly decapitate him in a throat-slitting, Amanpour goes instead to the Netherlands Parliament to bait a white parliamentarian who has proposed laws to limit immigration and ban burkhas and certain Islamic practices.

I suppose CNN has found that it can cobble together an audience large enough to attract a few indiscriminate advertisers by combining those who hate religion with those who hate what CNN says about religion.

But like I said yesterday, just because we have the ability to poke someone's eye out doesn't mean we should do it.