HBO’s 'Going Clear' Is a Perfect Scientology Primer

BY KIRA BINDRIM 3/25/15 
http://www.newsweek.com/



It would be difficult to overstate the number of batshit insane anecdotes that appear in Lawrence Wright’s 2013 book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, or in the HBO documentary adaptation that premieres on March 29. There’s the time David Miscavige, the current leader of the church, conducted a game of musical chairs among officers—to the soundtrack of Queen’s greatest hits—telling them that all but the winner would be shipped off to remote Scientology bases. There’s the time L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, claimed to have access to an underground space station north of Corsica. And, of course, there’s Tom Cruise. So much Tom Cruise.

Born of interviews with 200 current and former Scientology members, Wright’sGoing Clear details Scientology’s 1950s origin story through its present-day troubles, and earned him "innumerable" threatening letters from lawyers representing the church. HBO's documentary, directed by Alex Gibney, covers a decent portion of Wright’s book, and features interviews with ex-Scientology members that include screenwriter Paul Haggis (35 years in the church) and actor Jason Beghe (13 years), as well as former Scientology higher-ups like Spanky Taylor, a member for 17 years who was John Travolta’s onetime point person; Mike Rinder, church spokesman from 1982 to 2007; and Hana Eltringham Whitfield, a founding member of the Sea Organization (Scientology’s clergy of sorts), who left the church in 1982 after 19 years.

"My goal wasn’t to write an exposé," Wright tells Gibney early in the documentary. "It was to understand Scientology…. I was interested in intelligent and skeptical people who are drawn into a belief system and wind up acting on those beliefs in ways they never thought they would."

Both iterations of Going Clear outline the church’s creation myth, which is always worth repeating: Seventy-five million years ago, according to Hubbard, people lived in a world very much like 1950s America, save for Xenu, the tyrannical overlord of the 76-planet Galactic Confederacy. Xenu sought to solve a burgeoning overpopulation problem by freezing people with glycol injections after luring them in under the auspices of "tax audits." The frozen bodies were then shipped in boxes via space planes to the prison planet Teegeeack (Earth), where they were dropped into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. Being immortal, these disembodied spirits ("thetans") were then trapped in an electromagnetic ribbon and placed in front of a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days, where they were forced to look at images called R6 implants. "These pictures contain God, the Devil, angels, space opera, theaters, helicopters, a constant spinning, a spinning dancer, trains and various scenes very like modern England," Hubbard wrote. "You name it, it’s in this implant."

Since then, thetans have been inserting themselves (often in multiples) into newborns on Earth, where Hubbard believed them to be the source of individual fears, neuroses and insecurities. Through Scientology—more specifically, through one-on-one auditing sessions using an Electropsychometer—these thetans can be dispelled. (The church says an e-meter can detect the "mass of your thoughts," while Wright describes it as "a third of a lie detector test.") This progression through what are known as "Operating Thetan levels" (OT levels) is called "The Bridge to Total Freedom." To "go clear" is to have rid oneself entirely of body thetans and their related "engrams" (traumatic memories).

While the book does a more nuanced job of explaining Scientology’s appeal, both versions of Going Clear suggest a certain grandiose altruism at play in constituents’ decision to join the church. Scientology, as envisioned by Hubbard, aims to create a world without war, criminality or insanity and that emphasis on global salvation has helped draw in thousands of converts. "I know of no other group that their goals are that clear," Travolta says in an interview shown in Going Clear. "I was deeply convinced that we were going to save the world," echoes Whitfield in an interview with Gibney. "I considered myself tremendously fortunate to be in that position." In footage from a Scientology gala shown in the documentary, Cruise, wearing a comically large "Freedom Medal of Valor" awarded to him by Miscavige, asks the assembled crowd, "So what do you say? Want to clean this place up?"

On a more individual level, Going Clear highlights the church’s promise of self-improvement, and its initially limited emphasis on dogma. "I can say that I understand [Scientologists] now," Gibney said at a Going Clear screening in New York this week. "Through auditing, Scientology offers a kind of therapy that's not that different from Freud's talking cure. You get things off your chest. You talk to somebody who provides a kind of empathetic ear."

The Guinness World Record holder for most published author, L. Ron Hubbard wrote more than a thousand (mostly science fiction) books in his lifetime, including Scientology’s canonical text, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Hubbard had a brief military stint—he was dismissed from the Navy after accidentally shelling a Mexican island—and then a brief magical one, having once been involved with the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a magical order dedicated to the teachings of British occultist/magician Aleister Crowley.

In 1946, Hubbard married Sara Northrup and moved to New Jersey, where he began writing Dianetics in 1950. "He said the only way to make any real money was to have a religion," Northrup says in a first-person account that appears inGoing Clear. "That’s essentially what he was trying to do with Dianetics—get a religion where he could have an income and the government wouldn’t take it away from him in the form of taxes."

In 1966, Hubbard named himself commander of three ships and for eight years dodged an IRS investigation by sailing the Mediterranean with his crew—the original Sea Org—in search of treasure he had buried in past lives. During this nautical period, Hubbard also developed "Ethics Technology" as a means of doling out punishment for perceived thoughts or actions against the church. On board his "fleet"—the Enchanter, the Avon River and the Royal Scotman [sic]—punishments could include hard labor or being literally thrown overboard.

Current Sea Org members, according to Going Clear, sign billion-year contracts to "get ETHICS IN on this PLANET AND THE UNIVERSE" (emphasis theirs), and are subject to punishments that include disconnecting from so-called Suppressive Persons (SPs for short, this includes anyone considered a detractor of the church) and spending months or even years in "the Hole," a pair of unfurnished double-wide trailers on Scientology’s Gold Base in California. While the church emphatically denies any physical abuse at the hands of Scientology leadership, both Wright and Gibney also document firsthand accounts of Miscavige personally doling out beatings, and Wright’s book contains numerous examples of the church going after journalists, critics or members who have "blown" (left Scientology).

"What I have received is nothing compared to what's happened to the people who are in the film," Gibney said earlier this week (his lawyer receives near-daily letters from the church). "I know that some of them have received physical threats, I know some of them have received threats that their homes and financial stability would be taken away. I know they're followed by private investigators."

In a five-page letter to the The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month, the church—which has set up dedicated websites to discredit both the film and those interviewed in it—called Going Clear "a bigoted propaganda piece" and said it includes "at least one major error every two minutes." The letter goes on to question the trustworthiness of nearly everyone interviewed in the movie, but does little to address specific criticisms of abuse.

Although its founder died in 1986—Miscavige characterizes Hubbard's death as attaining an OT level "completely exterior from the body"—Going Clearsuggests that Scientology is still rolling in money. The church now holds some $3 billion in assets, despite a membership that has dwindled to fewer than 50,000 people. Much of that wealth is tied to real estate holdings, but Scientologists must also pay for coursework and auditing sessions needed to move up on The Bridge.

"The best traps, you get a guy to just keep himself in jail," Jason Beghe says in a 2007 video shown in Going Clear. "That's what Scientology does."

There’s so much to unpack in Scientology that to even give an overview of its 65-year history is a heavy burden. Wright’s Going Clear is a dense book with mountains of detail and Gibney’s documentary just doesn't compare when it comes to small colorful portraits of life in the church, like Miscavige making special Sea Org Captain vests for his five beagles and demanding that members on Gold Base salute them. Rather, HBO's Going Clear paints with broad strokes, and it is stronger as a corollary to Wright’s text than a stand-alone film. Mostly, its scenes lend humanity to some of the people involved. Here's a young Travolta calling Hubbard a "brilliant" man he’d be honored to meet. There's a defected Haggis laughing about the first time he read the story of Xenu. "I remember for one fleeting second thinking, Well, maybe it’s an insanity test," he says. "Maybe if you believe this, they kick you out."

Neither version of Going Clear is particularly sympathetic to the church, and both suggest that Scientology is more insidious than a kooky religion with good intentions and off-the-rails execution. As Gibney puts it, those speaking out now are "telling people the kind of damage that can be done by a group that puts itself above the welfare of the individuals within it."

But for all the church's bizarre doctrines and disconcerting scandals, some of the most interesting portions of Going Clear—book and movie—have to do with Hubbard himself, a man who seems to veer between magnetism and mania. "Do you ever think that you might be quite mad?" a reporter asks Hubbard in 1968 footage shown in the documentary, one of the few times he ever appeared on camera. "Oh yes," Hubbard answers without hesitation. "The one man in the world who never believes he’s mad is a madman."

Related:

L. Ron Hubbard’s Secret Self

Newly discovered tall tales from the scientology founder...

A damning view of Scientology in HBO’s ‘Going Clear’

By Sarah Rodman

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/television

March 26, 2015

A still from “Going Clear,” the HBO documentary in which Alex Gibney examines the Church of Scientology. (HBO)

Near the end of the new documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” longtime members who decided to leave the church struggle with their emotions. “Maybe,” muses one, “my entire life has been a lie.”

The guilt, disillusionment, shame, and pain is etched on their faces. To a person, they are incredulous that they once believed in the more offbeat aspects of the religion — including the idea that prehistoric spirits inhabited their bodies. And several speak of a kind of willful suppression of their better judgment to avoid the possibility that, at best, they wasted their time and, at worst, committed terrible transgressions against others, including their own family members, in the name of their beliefs.

This is but one compelling vignette in the fascinating documentary from Oscar- and Emmy-winning director Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”), which premiered on television Sunday at 8 p.m. on HBO. (The two-hour film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January and recently had a limited theatrical release.) The film combines interviews with former members, reenactments, and footage of Scientology events. It also includes archival interviews with celebrity Church of Scientology members and founder L. Ron Hubbard himself; no one currently involved in the church would speak to Gibney for his film.

Scientology has long been a subject of interest to many — if you want to go down an Internet rabbit hole of its critics and defenders, just Google “Scientology” and “cult.” That’s thanks to Hubbard’s pre-Scientology career as a prolific science fiction writer, de facto spokespeople like John Travolta and Tom Cruise — both of whom figure into the film — and to outspoken former members denouncing the religion. These include Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis (“Crash”), who details his journey from true believer to apostate in the film.

Is Scientology a religion that leads its followers to higher planes of spiritual understanding? Or is it a long con meant to bilk people out of their money and a tax scam perpetrated by Hubbard that devolved even further into a toxic corporation after his death? Could it be all of these?

The former members who speak out in the film are conflicted in some ways, saying that they benefited from the church’s teachings but ultimately couldn’t abide some of it practices. And when they chronicle what they claim were routine occurrences inside the organization — physical and mental abuse by leader David Miscavige, a harsh prison camp for the outspoken, separation of parents from children, retaliatory bullying of former members, even espionage, including the tapping of Cruise ex-wife Nicole Kidman’s phone — Gibney’s film paints a lurid picture indeed.

Gibney also delves into the IRS’s decision to grant the church tax-exempt status. The film draws a connection between that decision and a Miscavige-led campaign to file 2,400 nuisance lawsuits against the IRS and individual agents. The film implies the agency simply caved, forgiving the church its $1 billion tax debt. When Scientologists celebrated that decision, the victory party included fireworks.

The early part of the film — adapted from the 2013 bestseller by Lawrence Wright, who appears on camera and served as a producer — functions as something of a primer. It outlines the central tenets of Scientology, the “auditing” process — in which members confess their deepest fears, traumas, and secrets — and the dizzyingly elaborate levels on the church’s “bridge to total freedom,” each of which apparently comes at a financial cost, ultimately allowing a Scientologist to be deemed “clear.” It also delves into the life of the church’s late founder, Hubbard, a shrewd and imaginative man who, according to his first wife, founded Scientology for a single reason: “He said many times the only way to make any real money was to have a religion.”

For those who have read Wright’s book, there isn’t much new here, but Gibney skillfully weaves the stories and visuals, particularly an extended passage about Cruise, into an engrossing narrative.

What the film doesn’t have is the voices of current members, beyond old footage of people like Travolta extolling the church’s virtues. Gibney notes at the end of the film that he reached out to several people, including Cruise, Travolta, and Miscavige, and either got no response or was declined an interview. The Church of Scientology disputes that claim.

In addition to a letter written to the Hollywood Reporter by a spokeswoman — who claims the film is rife with “falsehoods, errors, embellished tales and blatant omissions” — the church has launched an online counter-offensive in hopes of “exterminating Gibney’s propaganda.” The site dismisses the “tiny group” of “embittered obsessed zealots” he interviewed and then systematically attempts to discredit each one with accompanying videos featuring titles like “a violent psychopath” and “the home wrecker.”

Who knows if viewers would feel differently had Gibney’s film included responses from Scientology’s defenders. But by focusing on the powerful and damning stories of the church’s most destructive practices, including the forced “disconnection” of members from family and friends, Gibney has made a forceful and memorable case.

Sarah Rodman can be reached at srodman@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeRodman.

Still More of President Obama’s Moral Equivalence

By  Victor Davis Hanson

February 5, 2015 1:34 PM

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

President Barack Obama bows his head towards the Dalai Lama as he was recognized during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015.

President Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, said: 

Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

This is banal.  

The problem with all such high-horse declarations by Obama is his continual omission of historical context and, in this case, his conflation of the frequent with the rare. The Crusades began in 1095, almost a millennium ago; the Inquisition in 1478, now over 500 years past. When the president says “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he should remember that all religions at the time committed terrible deeds that shock the modern sense of morality — given the savage wars between Christendom and Islam, and the religious purifications and civil discord common to all the religious factional strife that played out, violently, in accord with the ethos of the times. 

Slavery was outlawed in the U.S. in 1865. Jim Crow ended officially a half-century ago. Indentured servitude, however, continues, almost exclusively among some Islamic groups in the Middle East and Africa. The caste system and ethnic and religious tribalism that institutionalized discrimination and second-class status, quite akin to Jim Crow, persist in places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I doubt today whether a Jew of any nationality would be allowed to immigrate and buy real estate in too many corners of the Islamic Middle East. Outside of the West, women and homosexuals are often treated no differently than in the Seventh Century.

In fact, Christian countries were the first to legally end the age-old human sin of the slave trade, and the first to outlaw slavery’s continuance. The president, is fond of historical sloppiness and moral equivalence (cf. the Cairo Speech). But what is the point of citing sins of 1,000, 500, 150, or 50 years ago, without acknowledging 1) that such pathologies still continue today outside the West, especially in the world of Islam, and 2) that Christianity had a unique role in ending these wrongs?

So the question for the president is, why does such medieval violence persist to a much greater degree among so many Islamic extremists in the present world than among most zealots of other religions? (This is an empirical statement. Cf., for instance, the nature of recent global terror attacks in resources such as the Global Terrorism Database). And why search the distant past for examples of moral equivalence, unless the present does not offer suitable data?

Did Churchill point to the excesses of Oliver Cromwell, or did Daladier to the French Revolution, to remind their contemporaries that National Socialism in Germany was not doing anything differently in the 1930s than had their own countries in the distant past? Those of the 1930s who sought to make such facile comparisons between their own past and Germany’s present were written off as appeasers.

Areas of Central and Latin America are as poor as the Middle East, but Christian liberation theologists, unlike the Islamic State, are not beheading and burning prisoners alive to advance their redistributionist cause. Chinese imperialists and colonialists have absorbed Tibet, but the Dalai Lama is not sending suicide bombers into China. The children of East Prussians expelled from 1945-47 are not suiting up with suicide vests to attack Poles. Impoverished Hindu extremists, angry at centuries of British colonialism, do not hijack planes and ram them into high-rises in British cities. Jews are not blowing up cartoonists and satirists in Paris and Germany who deny or caricature the Holocaust.

No one has easy answers to the dilemma of contemporary violent Islamism; for brief interludes in the recent past, secular ideologies were more likely than radical Islam to be the expressed popular driving forces in the violent Middle East (e.g., fascism [1930s], Communism [1940s], Baathism and Pan-Arabism [1950s], which produced the Grand Mufti, Nasser, the Assads, Arafat, Saddam, and Qaddafi). The president and his advisers should be investigating why radical Islam is currently terrorizing the globe, rather than denying it entirely, hiding it by euphemisms, or excusing it by citing morally equivalent examples from the past.

Finding God in the Mirror

How Ayn Rand, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roe v. Wade made me a Christian 

By Jason Scott Jones

http://www.nationalreview.com/

January 22, 2015

The first rule in living introspectively is to avoid falling into rapt contemplation of ourselves. I’m sure you’ve met the kind of person, or seen him in Woody Allen movies, who treats life as fodder for his therapy or his autobiography. Breathe easy — I won’t do that here.

But what I would like to do is recount the story, as best I can understand it midstream, of how grace has worked on me.

I am a filmmaker and an activist, a husband and a father of seven, a worker on behalf of the most embattled, most important cause on earth: the dignity of the human person. By “dignity” I don’t mean harrumphing self-importance, and by “human person” I don’t mean some dry philosophical abstraction.

I mean that I see something very unusual in the people whom I encounter in my areas of activism: a 57-year-old ex-factory worker living on the streets of Los Angeles; a 15-year-old girl who was sexually exploited by a 30-year-old drug dealer and is now carrying a child that the culture tells her to abort; an eleven-year-old Christian living in southern Darfur, whose community is being deprived of water because his family will not convert to Islam.

What I see in these people is the image of the infinitely powerful eternal spirit Whose essence is His existence, the God who strung the cosmos with galaxies. This is not a hallucination, a superstition, or a pious wish. It is something I see, as clearly as I can see the screen in front me now while I’m typing. And it’s my entire task in life to help more people, and finally the culture at large, to see this reality, too.

I was led to this epiphany by the nose, on the string of my own narcissism, through the medium of a murder.

I grew up with no particular religion, unless you count the influence of my grandfather, a zealously heterodox Scientologist. That left me a default agnostic and an unreflective relativist. I never studied the books we were assigned in school, and I paid the price in terms of my grades.

But I did read, and one work I came across was Kurt Vonnegut’s classic short story “Harrison Bergeron.” This pithy story imagines a future where absolute equality is imposed by a total State — which comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, weighing down talented athletes with sandbags, equipping intelligent people with brain-buzzing headgear to dumb them down, and hiding beautiful faces with hideous masks. The story’s hero, the teenager Harrison Bergeron, is handsome, brilliant, and rebellious, and at the climax he seizes a television studio to stage a magnificent, doomed revolt: He sloughs off the weights, tears off the mask, and issues a proclamation:

“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook. 

“Even as I stand here,” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened — I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

Harrison uses his moment of absolute power not to harm anyone or avenge himself. Instead, he chooses a beautiful dancer, frees her of her weights and mask, and together they perform a single, exquisite dance — before the forces of equality seize the studio and shoot him dead.

I didn’t want to be Harrison Bergeron. I looked inside and knew that I already was. I was the Emperor. My sovereign self rejected the stale conventions that society tried to hang on me like crippling weights.

So I did the next logical thing: I started to read Ayn Rand. What I loved most among her works was the novella Anthem, whose suffocating, stagnant dystopia was surely an influence on Vonnegut’s (not to mention more recent young-adult classics such as The Hunger Games and The Giver). Anthem’s hero casts off the name imposed upon him, Equality 7-2521. He rejects the collectivist hive society that has abandoned progress and knowledge, and has forbidden the use of words such as “I,” “me,” and “mine.” He rediscovers electricity, renames himself Prometheus, and goes off into the wilderness with a beautiful spouse and fellow-rebel to found a new future in freedom.

My own life plan was starting to take its shape. I would use the mighty gifts with which fate had entrusted me in defense of freedom. I knew that the collective, the mob, was my mortal enemy — as was the God who allegedly said that I should sacrifice my reason and my ego.

Then something appalling happened. My unborn daughter was aborted without my knowledge or consent. (Or her mother’s consent — my teenage girlfriend’s father dragged her to the clinic.)

And everything changed. This person, who had been carelessly, recklessly murdered, had all the same dignity, grandeur, and significance that I had seen only in myself. Her death opened up for me a whole new moral world, one where every human being shone with radiance. And demanded protection. So I dived into human-rights work. I would avenge her death by promoting life — in every form. Each human being I saw now shone as a kind of mirror, reflecting the glory that I had seen first in myself, and then in my daughter.

I wanted to better understand this amazing thing, the human self, to know its powers, limits, and structure. I knew that its power and importance transcended the mere limits of matter. Rand had called this truth “axiomatic,” the self-evident starting point of moral reasoning. For me, it was more of a fact that I had experienced firsthand. I was an accidental, reluctant eyewitness to human dignity.

To learn more, I started reading Sartre. His plays’ heroes reject the stifling orthodoxies that press down from the past. They turn their backs on the herd and strike off boldly to face the truth. But as I read more deeply, I saw something disturbing. The following passage in Existentialism and Human Emotion cut me to the bone:

The existentialist . . . thinks it is very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him. There can no longer be an a priori Good since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there is only man. Dostoevsky said, “If God does not exist, everything would be possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.

Rand’s axiom — that man is unique and important — was merely a dogma, the fruit of an act of faith. For Sartre, the self is really nothing — nothing at all. It is a crack or void in the vast, unconscious stuff of Being. Its vaunted dignity and freedom are only boasts made in a vacuum, where no sound can resonate. Even the freely chosen relationships of one self to another are really a dance of sadism and masochism, a power game whose stakes are finally zero, since “hell is other people.”

Sartre’s individual is an intrinsically lonely, power-hungry monad. No wonder that Sartre could make excuses for Joseph Stalin. The death of a million Sartrean selves really would be just a statistic, the winking out of nothings into Being, like matches dropped in the ocean. Such selves might as well be organized, equalized, collectivized, and rendered uniform, as the villains had done in Vonnegut and Rand. There was nothing sacred or special about anyone — not me, and not the girl whose death still haunted me.

And that was intolerable. The nonexistence of God was an insult to me. I could not reconcile it with my fundamental experience, the passionate joy I took every day in simply existing, the sense of purpose and joy that got me up in the morning — or the mystery of dignity that I saw in other people.

So I determined to find the One who was patiently leading me home. I was no longer merely an individual. I had blossomed into a person. And I knew what I had to do.

— Jason Scott Jones is a filmmaker, human-rights activist, and co-author of The Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a Culture of Life.

Duke University Chapel to Broadcast Muslim Call to Prayer

Posted By Susan L.M. Goldberg On January 14, 2015 @ 4:12 pm In Culture,Education,Islam,Middle East,News,Religion,Terrorism,Uncategorized | 31 Comments

http://pjmedia.com/tatler

HuffPo reports:

The chant, known as “adhan,” will resound from the Duke Chapel bell tower every Friday beginning Jan. 16, echoed by members of the Muslim Students Association, the university announced via Duke Today. The chant will sound for three minutes at a “moderately amplified” level to announce the Jummah prayer service, held Friday afternoons in the chapel basement. 

The Adhan will be sung in Arabic, then followed by an English translation, according to a Facebook event announcing the call. 

“This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission,” Christy Lohr Sapp, the chapel’s associate dean for religious life, told Duke Today. “It connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation.”

The announcement comes one day after the White House clarified that their anti-terror summit would not cover acts of radical Islamic terror, having determined that those acts are only part of a greater War on Muslims.

The chapel that will broadcast the Islamic call to prayer also hosts events for Christian and Catholic groups on campus. Duke’s Muslim students pray at the chapel despite having their own Muslim Life at Duke center on campus. Jewish students, who comprise more than ten percent of the undergraduate and graduate student populations, hold events at the privately funded Freeman Center for Jewish Life located on campus.

For the private university’s 700+ Muslims, the decision is being praised as a sign of their acceptance into the Duke community.

Roughly 6,500 undergraduates and 8,300 graduate and professional students are enrolled in the prestigious private university that maintains “a historic affiliation with the Methodist Church.” The Methodist Church haspublicly supported divestment, pulling pension investments from companies tied to Israel as a method to pressure Israel to cease settlement expansion.

In 2004, Duke University granted $50,000 in funding to the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) to demonstrate on campus. The conference was so volatile that Commentary magazine announced in 2005 “The Intifada Comes to Duke.” Motivated by the PSM, award-winning student journalist Philip Kurian published an anti-Semitic op-ed in the student newspaper titled “The Jews.” Loaded with conspiracy theories, Kurian argued against what he termed Jewish “privilege,” writing,

What’s worst is that the ‘Holocaust Industry’ uses its influence to stifle, not enhance, the Israeli-Palestinian debate, simultaneously belittling the real struggles for socioeconomic and political equality faced, most notably, by black Americans.

Richard Brodhead, whose decision it was to fund the PSM on campus, is the current president of the University.

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URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/01/14/duke-university-chapel-to-broadcast-muslim-call-to-prayer/

Book Review: 'The Soul of the World' by Roger Scruton

A first kiss is more than the mating ritual of gene-perpetuating machines. It summons 'the consciousness of another in mutual gift.

By 

IAN MARCUS CORBIN

May 15, 2014 7:03 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com/

The English philosopher and writer Roger Scruton might receive more grudging admiration than any other living thinker. My aesthetics tutor at Oxford—a self-consciously Wildean character with long hair and puffy sleeves—once assigned a text by Scruton with a caveat: There is, he explained, a little known but valid form of argument called argumentum ad Scruton: "If Scruton says p, p is necessarily false." This "argument" has what currency it does because Scruton is defiantly conservative, and he wears that designation on his (decidedly unpuffy) sleeve. But to the irritation of bien-pensants everywhere, his philosophical work is simply too sharp and cogent to be ignored.

"The Soul of the World" is an example of what conservatism can be, at its best—a clear-eyed, affectionate defense of humanity and a well-reasoned plea to treat the long-loved with respect and care. This kind of conservatism comes into being when something good is threatened: Here Mr. Scruton aims to conserve "the sacred" in the face of threats from scientific reductionism, an ideology that asserts that all phenomena—including things like love, art, morality and religion—are most accurately described using the vocabulary of contemporary science.

Viewed through the lens of scientific reductionism, all existence is fundamentally the bouncing around of various material particles, some arranged in the form of gene-perpetuating machines we call humans. Mr. Scruton almost agrees—we are, in fact, gene-perpetuating machines, and the finer, higher aspects of human existence emerge from, and rest upon, biological machinery. As he points out, though, it's a long jump from this acknowledgment to the assertion that "this is all there is." The jump, according to Mr. Scruton, lands us in "a completely different world, and one in which we humans are not truly at home." A truly human outlook involves the intuition of intangible realities that find no place in even our most sensitive systems of biology, chemistry or physics.

Philosophers and theologians have traditionally understood that certain things transcend our abilities to fully perceive, comprehend and articulate them and that the way we incorporate those things into our lives is through the experience of the sacred—the irruption of the transcendent into our mundane reality. The sacred stands, as Mr. Scruton puts it, "at the horizon of our world, looking out to that which is not of this world" but also "looking into our world, so as to meet us face-to-face." While sacredness is most commonly associated with religious actions and artifacts—such as sacraments, scriptures and holy places—it is not limited to these. Mr. Scruton argues that our encounters with one another, and indeed with nature, are experiences of the sacred as well. He makes his case with bravado and sensitivity, exploring the role of the sacred in such realms as music, city planning and moral reasoning.

Enlarge Image

The Soul of the World

By Roger Scruton
(Princeton, 205 pages, $27.95)

Happily, it is entirely possible to embrace the findings of science without rejecting the older vocabulary of the sacred, even if one finds oneself (as Mr. Scruton does) unable to fully embrace the claims of any metaphysical doctrine, religious or otherwise. The reductionist leap is unnecessary, in the first instance, because the idea that "this is all there is" could never be substantiated by science. What experiment could possibly prove that there is no such thing as a soul or that God doesn't exist? But perhaps all science needs to do is present a complete explanation for reality that eliminates any need for nonmaterial explanations. This will not do, according to Mr. Scruton. Even if the guild of scientists produced a million-volume tome that comprehensively tracked the tortuous series of causes and effects that led from the pinpoint origin of material existence through the Big Bang and the earliest wrigglings of life, all the way to our own wedding vows and Pachelbel's Canon in D, we would still need more. We would need the sacred.

In making this case, Mr. Scruton employs the concept of Verstehen borrowed from the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (roughly, this means the kind of understanding that is the product of human interpretation and interaction rather than scientific measurement). To take an example, the moment of a first kiss is not experienced simply as the mating ritual of complex gene-perpetuating machines. To describe it thus would be to take leave of the human perspective. Our actual experience is better captured by more emotionally, spiritually freighted language. As Mr. Scruton writes, "the lips offered by one lover to another are replete with subjectivity: they are the avatars of I, summoning the consciousness of another in mutual gift."

The interface between I and You is, for Mr. Scruton, the defining human perspective. In terms of religion, he writes: "People who are looking for God are not looking for the proof of God's existence . . . but for a subject-to-subject encounter, which occurs in this life, but which also in some way reaches beyond this life." Myriad other examples abound. When we make a vow to our lover, we do not—or, Mr. Scruton says, we had better not—understand ourselves as signatories to a provisional, mutually beneficial contract but rather as willing parties to a binding, eternal, even transcendent pledge, something stronger and more substantial than our momentary desires.

Viewed through the lens of science, we may be the products of genes and chance. But viewed as people, we are free, responsible and creative—and kisses are richer phenomena than any scientific analysis can capture.

Mr. Corbin is a 2013 Novak Journalism Fellow and doctoral candidate at Boston College

Guillotine, Gulag and Gas Chamber: The Glorious Gifts of Atheism to Humanity

by Joseph Pearce

http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/

March 2014

Flowers adorning John Lennon memorial, Strawberry Fields, Central Park

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

 - John Lennon (Imagine)

There are lies, damned lies, and neo-atheist polemics. One of the most egregious examples of such godless mendacity is the claim that religion has been the cause of most of the wars that have blighted humanity throughout its blood-stained history. In a world with “no religion”, so the argument runs, there would be “nothing to kill or die for”. Such nonsense is only believable if we remain willfully ignorant of the lessons of history.

Almost all wars have been the consequence of human selfishness (a synonym for godlessness) and have been carried out according to the principles of that proto-secularist and incorrigible atheist, Nicolo Machiavelli. Although secular rulers have sometimes used religion as an ethical and ultimately ethereal veneer to justify their actions, war has almost always been the consequence of Machiavellian realpolitik. This includes the so-called wars of religion, most of which were fought by power-hungry princes eager to impose their egocentric wills on their neighbours.

Yet even were one to accept an element of religious culpability in the wars that ravaged Christendom, such culpability pales into relative insignificance when compared to the terror carried out in the name of atheism.

Let’s take a look at atheism’s track record.

The first great atheist uprising was the French Revolution, which sought to dethrone God with godless “Reason” and sought to replace the Holy Trinity with the atheist trinity of liberté, egalité et fraternité. The man who is traditionally attributed with coining this triune revolutionary war-cry, which would later be officially adopted as the motto of the French Republic, was Antoine-Francois Momoro, a rabidly anti-Christian radical who advocated the eradication of religion. He played an active and bloodthirsty role in the crushing of the Catholic peasants of the Vendée and was a key figure in the notorious Cult of Reason, an anthropocentric alternative to religion, which effectively enthroned self-worshipping Man as the Lord of the “enlightened” cosmos. In 1793, Momoro supervised the nationally celebrated Fête de la Raison (Festival of Reason) in which his own wife was dressed and paraded as the Goddess of Reason, surrounded by cavorting and costumed women. In a wild and licentious liturgical dance, the Goddess of Reason processed down the aisle of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, surrounded by her female entourage, to a newly-installed altar to Liberty, the Christian altar having been desecrated and removed. All across France, Christian churches were desecrated and re-established as Temples of Reason.

The Cult of Reason metamorphosed into the Reign of Terror in which the streets of Paris literally ran red with the blood of its victims. The Goddess of Reason made way for Madame Guillotine who was omnivorous in her bloodlustful appetite, devouring Christians and atheists alike.

A little over four months after Momoro’s triumphalist Fête de la Raison, Momoro was himself a victim of the Reign of Terror that he had helped to create. Accused by his erstwhile comrades of being an enemy of the revolution, he was guillotined on March 24, 1794, a timely reminder of the words of the French political journalist, Jacques Mallet du Pan, that “the Revolution devours its own children”.

Having experienced this incestuously cannibalistic debauch, any genuine age of reason would have rejected atheism’s Cult of Reason and sought more humane ways of solving the problems of modernity. Not so. The nineteenth century saw a plethora or revolutions, inspired by atheism and anti-clericalism, which paved the way for the Russian Revolution of 1917, a godless monstrosity that would dwarf even the Reign of Terror in the sheer scale of the secular fundamentalist horror that it unleashed. Throughout the Soviet Union, thousands of labour camps were established in which political dissidents, enemies of the State, were literally worked to death. This system of camps, dubbed by Solzhenitsyn the Gulag Archipelago, would claim tens of millions of lives before the communist tyranny finally crumbled under the dead weight of its own corruption.

Meanwhile, in Germany, another form of Socialism, both anti-Christian and anti-Semitic in inspiration, ushered in a period of genocide, adding the ghastliness of the Gas Chamber to atheism’s legacy of mass destruction.

Guillotine, Gulag, and Gas Chamber. These are the glorious gifts that atheism has bestowed on a world grown tired of God. Such gruesome realities should come to mind whenever we hear the new generation of atheists asking us to imagine that “there’s no heaven; no hell below us; above us only sky”. Where there’s no heaven, there is only hell. And if we won’t have hell below us, we must have it with us and within us, and also above us, in the form of the hell of political atheism that crushes us underfoot in the name of “reason”.

Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.