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Bias against religious differences
The very fact that Brit Hume felt free to evangelize Tiger Woods on Fox News Sunday shows that media bias against Christianity is not as pervasive as some would claim. More to the point, Brit Hume has reminded us that the real issue is not bias against Christianity, but bias against religious difference.
If taken in isolation as a simple description, there is nothing particularly objectionable in Brit Hume's statement that Buddhism does not offer "the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith." It is true that Buddhist doctrines of "no-self" differ from Christian understandings of self-hood. It is also true that Buddhist conceptions of salvation differ from those posited by Christianity. As someone who teaches religion, I always challenge the notion that all religions say the same thing.
But I doubt very much that Brit Hume is offering a thumbnail sketch of his forthcoming dissertation in comparative religions. In his apparent sympathy for Tiger Wood's plight, Hume does not seem to realize that Buddhism offers its own compelling redemptive path. Indeed, Buddhist understandings of "craving" and "attachment" could be quite powerfully applied to explain Tiger Wood's current predicament. It might be very interesting to use Tiger Wood's travails as a focal point for discussing differing religious approaches to understanding the human condition. But by curtly dismissing Buddhism, Hume shows us that he is really not interested in the broader context in which his comments might provoke interesting discussion and reflection.
It is obvious that Buddhism is merely a foil for what seems but to be a theological claim about the exclusivity salvation through Jesus Christ. This is a doctrine that not all self-described Christian denominations embrace. Those denominations who do affirm the proposition that "Jesus is necessary for salvation" often interpret that statement in ways that would allow non-Christians to be saved. And so, when Brit Hume says "the Christian faith" he really means his "Christian faith."
Oddly enough, Brit Hume is contributing to the prejudicial dynamic that he himself identifies. The issue is not Christianity per se, but religions and religious commitments that seem different or challenging. The reason why Hume characterizes Buddhism as he does is because he takes his own convictions and worldview as given and self-evident. Other commentators, who cannot or will not understand religious commitments to authority and obedience, might well fail to appreciate the diversity and complexity of Evangelical Christianity or Roman Catholicism. Of course, religious traditions that seem foreign to conventional American sensibilities, like Islam or Hinduism, are routinely reduced to stereotype in most media reporting. Part of the difficulty is that public figures are most comfortable speaking of religious faith in sound bites suitable for mass consumption. If commentators can only parrot back these same sound bites, the media will never be able to engage religious belief and practice in a serious and substantive way.
By
Mathew N. Schmalz
|
January 11, 2010; 8:18 PM ET
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Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | January 15, 2010 7:28 AM
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U.S. Court Rejects Vatican Bank Lawsuit
Holocaust Survivors from Several Countries Sued Bank for Taking Property Stolen by Nazis
(AP) An American appeals court on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by Holocaust survivors who alleged the Vatican bank accepted millions of dollars of their valuables stolen by Nazi sympathizers.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower court ruling that said the Vatican bank was immune from such a lawsuit under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally protects foreign countries from being sued in U.S. courts.
Holocaust survivors from Croatia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia had filed suit against the Vatican bank in 1999, alleging that it stored and laundered the looted assets of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies who were killed or captured by the Nazi-backed Ustasha regime that controlled Croatia.
They sought an accounting from the Vatican, as well as restitution and damages.
The court didn't rule on the allegations. In its decision, the court said the Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for the Works of Religion, or IOR, was a sovereign entity entitled to the protections of the foreign sovereign immunities act, and that therefore U.S. courts had no jurisdiction.
The pope himself has been granted such protections in U.S. courts hearing clerical sex abuse cases.
Jeffrey Lena, who represented the Vatican Bank in the case, said he was gratified with the ruling since the court decided not only that the IOR was a sovereign entity but that as such it was immune from U.S. jurisdiction.
Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | January 15, 2010 7:22 AM
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Continued:
"In defending the lawsuit, the IOR did not challenge the allegations of the plaintiffs that they had suffered terrible losses at the hands of the Ustasha," he told The Associated Press. "Rather the challenge was simply to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts over the IOR."
Jonathan Levy, who represents the survivors, said he thought he had sufficiently shown that the Vatican bank engaged in commercial activities in the United States, which can serve as an exemption to the protections granted by the immunities act.
"The reason we're disappointed is the court found that dealing in gold teeth from concentration camps was not a commercial act," he said.
In its ruling, the court said that the Vatican banks' U.S. commercial activities were "too tangentially related to their legal claims to be considered the basis for the suit."
Levy said he didn't plan to appeal the judgment. The victims are also suing the Franciscans, the Roman Catholic order, on identical charges, and that portion of the lawsuit is going ahead, he said.
The survivors filed suit against the Vatican Bank a year after Swiss Banks agreed to pay some $1.25 billion to Nazi victims and their families who accused the banks of stealing, concealing or sending to the Nazis hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Jewish holdings.
Many of the survivors named as plaintiffs in the suit live in the United States.
Posted by: Farnaz1Mansouri1 | January 15, 2010 7:21 AM
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Mr. Scmaltz,
As a Catholic, I would be interested in your opinion regarding the article I've posted below. Two hundred (200) Utase Nazi Priests owned, managed, and "worked in" Concentration camps. They tortured to death Jews, Serbian Orthodox, and Roma, cutting living people to pieces with scissors, ripping the babies out of the bellies of pregnant women, impaling people in the water and watching them drown.
They then deposited the loot they'd stolen in Vatican Bank, which refuses to settle with the surviving victims and their heirs. Because the Vatican is a Sovereign Nation, the Appellate Court upheld the lower court ruling that Vatican Bank could not be sued by American citizens.
Now, aside from what all this tells us about the Vatican, I wonder how if the Vatican is a Foreign Nation (which, of course, it is, with UN representation), the RCC can have nonprofit status in this country.
And do we want such an entity, that stood by and watched its Nazi priests torture and murder, that stole the money of the victims, that continues to have Nazis in its employ, that refuses to release its WWII archives, do we want such an entity in the United States?