As a Christian, I hesitate to criticize other religions. Nothing human is perfect, no culture is perfect, no religion (the root and heart of culture) is perfect. And pointing to others’ flaws has the double downside that it misdirects attention both from one’s own weaknesses and from others’ strengths. But faced with this question, I cannot avoid a few comments on Islam and violence: “A journalism student in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for distributing an internet article that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. Do Islamic beliefs preclude freedom of speech? What about other faiths?”

1.....I preface these remarks with what I said in prefacing my teaching of Islam in the University of Hawaii: "This is a noble religion of high contributions to humanity and with a high potential for contributing to global peace and prosperity." I am pained to have to speak of any downside of any religion. Would that we could speak of the downside each of one's own religion and only of the upside of all the others! But we can honor truth and hope only by admonishing as well as affirming one another.

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More and more as his youthful beard grew longer, Sergei Torop doubtless heard, “You look like Jesus!” He could step cleanly into a thousand paintings of Jesus as a strikingly handsome Northern European, the living image of a false face (since Jesus was Near Eastern). We should not be surprised that he spends much of his time painting.

If we don’t block our narcissistic tendency, what people think of us will become the mold into which we pour the liquid plastic of our self-perception. Sergei didn’t watch it, and inwardly became a plastic Jesus with the unbiblical character which that Northern European image entails.

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The reason secular ideas are “getting shorter shrift” in this year’s presidential campaign is that the people are scared and angry that secularism has taken over so much in American life, especially public education (beginning with the [1933] Humanist Manifesto campaign). Sang Wordsworth, “Let heart and mind, according well, make one music....” But the critical mind, honoring reason above faith, has sidelined God and religion.

A two-string lyre cannot be played on one string. The fundamentalists—on the right, religious; on the left, secularists—are wrong. The universe is two-string: computers [the digital age] and the human mind are binary.

Human beings need to be APART: we have individual minds, able to distance us from all else. This critical (no-saying) consciousness is secularism’s string on the lyre. But we need also to be A PART of some whole: we need to be together. This social (yes-saying) consciousness is faith’s string on the lyre. It is our trust, which makes possible both community among us and communion with the transcendent (“God,” for short).

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In thousands of Islamist madrasas worldwide, Muslim youth are being told that their fundamental choice is between going to hell or struggling (“jihad”) to cover the world with sharia governments.

No matter our respect for Islam as contributive to world civilization, and our recognition that the ummah (Muslim community) in the form of a political state is entitled to have its own laws (in the case of Muslim states, sharia), in Islamists’ hearts and hands sharia is not only the legal structure of Muslim states but also a programmatic sword for penetrating and conquering “dar es harb” (war territory, meaning all the world not presently under sharia).

Now to the question: “The Archbishop of Canterbury has suggested that English law must accommodate some aspects of sharia – the body of Islamic religious law. Do you agree? Should U.S. law make room for sharia?”

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We human beings are moved more by passion than by reason. Reason can only enlighten, it cannot touch our springs of action. No matter the elaboration of communications-technology, we cannot outgrow our need for oratory.

Among the surviving presidential candidates, Obama is the only orator. He will be our next president.

1.....Orators are trilingual. (1) They speak “mother-speech,” everybody’s first language, which has the shortest and richest words (e.g., mother/father/home/God). (2) Orators speak “communal,” the particular speech of their particular communities. (3) Orators speak “general,” the language enabling communication between communities (as the English language functions in multi-lingual India).
For short, we may call this three-layer cake of language “homey,” “sacred,” and “secular.”

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That “more than 4 in 10 Americans have switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group” is more “a mark of the health of American religion” than of its sickness.

1.....In the history of our land of freedom, religion is one of the social currents that ebb and flow. While Yale was founded primarily to produce Christian ministers, the student body of the year 1800 had not even one professing Christian. But after a series of “awakenings,” before century’s end Yale and America were overwhelmingly Christian. Today, dropping “out of any formal religious group” is the most noticeable phenomenon. Tomorrow?

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