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C.S. Lewis Gets it Wrong: Liar, Lunatic, Lord … or Legend?

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Some say that Jesus wasn’t divine but was still a great sage. C.S. Lewis has no use for this foolish argument. Here is his widely quoted rebuttal:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

“Patronizing nonsense”? We have no problem with wisdom taken from the Koran or the story of Gilgamesh or the Upanishads or any other book of religion or mythology despite their being wrong about the supernatural stuff. Assuming that the Bible’s supernatural claims are false, why must that invalidate its wisdom, too?
But let’s return to Lewis’s famous trilemma: Jesus must have been a liar (he knew that he wasn’t what he said he was), a lunatic (he was crazy, so that explains his wild claims), or … maybe all that he said was true. In that case, he must be Lord.
But this ignores the ferociously obvious fourth possibility, that the entire Jesus story is legend.
We understand that stories can evolve into legends with time—the Iliad, Merlin, William Tell, John Henry, the Roswell UFO story, and so on. I wrote about the legendary growth of the Angel of Mons tale here. Are we to set aside all that we know about nature and imagine instead that a supernatural God sent supernatural Jesus to earth to do supernatural things? We need a lot of evidence to make that jump.
The plausible natural explanation for the Jesus stories is that they were told orally for decades, and they grew with the retelling, changing to fulfill prophecy from the Law or to ensure that Jesus took on the traits of competing religions. Remember that Palestine was the crossroads of Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures.
As Jewish Christianity was reinterpreted through Greek culture, the recipients wouldn’t have just known about Dionysus and Friends, many would’ve been followers, all the more reason to expect an amalgam as the result. (I’ve written more about Dionysus vs. Jesus here.)
I’ve discussed this with Christians in the past and have some idea of the objections that they raise. In the next two posts, I will discuss and hopefully resolve twelve Christian objections to the Legend hypothesis.

Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings
which you can make nothing of, do not worry.
Leave it alone.
— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Final Thoughts on the Atheist Prayer Experiment

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I completed the Atheist Prayer Experiment, 40 days of prayer that ended October 26. Roughly 70 atheists prayed for several minutes daily in a nonspecific way. This was basically a “Hello, anyone there?” to the spiritual world.
I blogged about that experience here, here, here, and here. “Unbelievable,” the radio show and podcast that hosted the project, discussed the results with Tim Mawson, the philosopher whose paper formed its foundation, in two parts (part 1 and part 2). I was interviewed for part 2.
I’d like to touch on some ideas that came out of the experiment.
First, the big question: did I find God(s)? No, I did not. But you can tell me if God tried to speak to me.
I’ve already mentioned a couple of interesting coincidences during the experiment, but I should report on something interesting that happened the day after the experiment was over. I was vacationing in Hawaii, and I stepped outside our rented condo. I noticed a leaf driven by upcurrents, and I caught it in midair. It was a clump of bougainvillea, three white petals stuck together.
Remember Francis Collins’ conversion story, where he turned a corner on a winter hike and saw a waterfall frozen into three columns? That suggestion of the Trinity was enough to convince him that God was speaking to him. And here, with the Prayer Experiment just completed, the wind (or perhaps the Holy Spirit?) pushes into my hands three petals in a clump. Three, yet one. (And guess what floor our condo was on.)
As you can imagine, this initially struck me as barely noteworthy. With some work, I was able to make it into a curious coincidence, but I see nothing supernatural about it.
Here’s part two: that afternoon, there was a magnitude 7.7 earthquake in the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia that caused a tsunami that hit Hawaii about five hours later. We evacuated, though the tsunami turned out to be insignificant.
Some might say that God’s Hand calmed the seas. I say that it was an interesting adventure with a satisfactory natural explanation.
My conclusion: I’m glad I did the experiment so I can show that I’ve been open to the possibility of the supernatural, but it has only provided more evidence that it doesn’t exist.
(Maybe I wasn’t doing the prayers right? If every field has an associated particle—the famous Higgs boson is a consequence of the Higgs field, for example—perhaps prayers are conveyed by prayons, and I wasn’t capturing them properly. The photo above shows one view on how to improve the signal strength of prayer.)
A more substantive criticism of the experiment’s deist approach came from a commenter.

The “anonymous deity” profile you have in mind, which sort of uses comparative religion to abstract away all distinctives, seems to me scarcely even to allow for Zeus, but to allow for Zeus far better than YHWH. It seems like an exercise in averaging together the phone numbers of a lot of celebrities, coming up with the number 555-5555, and calling that. I don’t suppose anyone has that number, so I don’t suppose anyone will “answer.”

I come back to the simple, naïve, obvious question: why is the existence of God not obvious? Said from the other direction, why is the clear and plain absence of God insufficient evidence to show that he doesn’t exist? When you pray to a guy who desperately wants to have a relationship with you but get no reply, what can we conclude from that?
C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters explains it this way:

The Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of [God’s] scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.

Sorry, Lewis fans, but that’s utter crap.
I meet new people all the time. Their forcing their existence on me is no imposition on my free will. Why pretend that it would be different for God? This is simply a clumsy argument to support Christian presuppositions. I almost feel embarrassed hearing some of these rationalizations, like watching someone in a play who’s forgotten his lines.
One suggestion that I received during the experiment was to just walk the walk. Act like a Christian for a while and you’ll slowly believe. Yes, I suppose that might work. I could suppress Reason and act more on Faith … but why should I do that? Why do that any more than you’d walk the walk of a Mormon or a Hari Krishna?
Similarly, I could try out crack or heroin. If I gave them a try, I just might like them. But why would I want to do that? Isn’t using reason the best way to see reality? I’ll believe things the old-fashioned way: because there’s sufficient evidence to convince me that they’re true.
Maybe prayer is an avenue, not to God, but to atheism. Mawson says that atheists are logically obliged to investigate the possibility of the supernatural, but most of us who were raised in a religious setting have already conducted our own prayer experiments. That’s why we’re atheists. Some ex-Christians never got the sense that God was answering prayers. Some discovered that God just stopped answering and then realized God was never there.
Nothing fails like prayer.
Imagine a world without God, where prayers are unanswered, where prayer is just you talking to yourself, where you only imagined that a loving deity supported you in adversity, where bad things happen to good people for no reason, where only wishful thinking supports the ideas of heaven and hell.
Open your eyes, because that’s the world you’re living in.
But this isn’t an anarchist’s paradise—it’s a world where people stand on their own two feet, where they live and love and grow, where every day ordinary people do heroic and noble things for the benefit of strangers. Where warm spring days and rosy sunsets aren’t made by God but are explained by Science, where earthquakes and hurricanes happen for no good reason, and people pitch in to help clean up afterwards.
We’re like a kid learning to ride a bike. Picture the parent running alongside holding the bike steady. The kid feels confident, but then the parent lets go without the kid realizing it. He still pedals along happily, perhaps even talking to the parent who’s fallen behind. Suddenly he’s shocked to find that he’s on his own, maybe shocked enough to fall. That belief was reassuring.
We’re also on our own. Is that realization debilitating or exhilarating? I can’t fault anyone raised in a Christian environment for not wanting to give up that omniscient and loving deity, but society simply can’t support large fractions of people ignoring reality.
Training wheels are for children. C’mon in, the water’s fine.

Prayer must never be answered:
if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
— Oscar Wilde

Photo credit: Spiritual Science Research Foundation

Tips for Dealing with Creationists

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I hang out with Creationists occasionally and have seen many of the arguments they make. I’d like to tell you what I’ve found.
This isn’t a rebuttal against Creationist arguments (perhaps in a future post). Rather, I’d like to sensitize you to general errors that they make. Consider this a list of cautions when evaluating a Creationist presentation.
Check the speakers’ credentials. Almost no one who speaks as a Creationist or Intelligent Design proponent has credentials in the field he’s criticizing. I’m simply asking for speakers with doctorates in the field plus work credentials. That is, a biologist speaking about biology, a geologist about geology, a cosmologist about cosmology, and so on. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists. That this seems to be a lot to ask says a lot about Creationism and related dogmas.
There are journalists without scientific degrees who popularize science, but they follow the consensus. They don’t try to apply their own agenda to overturn it. Creationists attempting to overturn the biological consensus from outside biology—that’s something different.
Check dates of quotes or criticisms. Words can’t express how uninterested I am in what Darwin wrote or thought or did. Almost every Darwin quote that I’ve seen used by the Creationist/ID side has been taken out of context. Anyway, Darwin’s writings are not binding on evolutionary biologists today.
And don’t get me started about Darwin’s personal life—whether Darwin ate babies with barbeque sauce or plain (actually, he lived a pretty laudable life) says nothing about the question at hand: whether evolution is the best explanation for why life is the way it is.
Focus on the right bin. A popular complaint is to say that evolution led to eugenics, or that the teaching of evolution in public school correlates to the tragic downward spiral that society has made in the past 50 years, and it wasn’t like this when I grew up, and don’t get me started about the kids these days, and blah, blah, blah.
Evolution is science. Eugenics is policy. The scientists give society the best approximation of the truth, and the politicians decide what to do with this information. Don’t blame science for policy.
Watch for Hitler entering the conversation. Godwin’s Law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Whether Hitler embraced evolution or not (unlikely, since Darwin was on the Nazi list of banned books—more at “Nazi Soldiers Indoctrinated with Darwin? Yeah right”), what Hitler liked has no bearing on the accuracy of evolution.
Beware lists of Science’s errors. I’m thinking of lists such as the greatest hits of evolution’s mistakes—Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, “Flipperpithecus,” and so on. Or theories that have been discarded—ether, phlogiston, geocentrism, the steady-state universe.
Yeah, science makes mistakes. Get over it. And what process discovered the errors? No, not Christianity or Creationism or divine revelation, but science!
Science clearly delivers pretty good approximations of the truth. For one glaring example, consider the science underpinning all the technology by which I communicate to you right now.
Watch for lots of quotes. Lots of quotes by scientists (often with missing or old dates) is another bad sign. Quotes simply invite counter-quotes, where I try to trump your science-y quote with one of my own, back and forth. For discussions between non-scientists, it’s better to stick with the consensus, which needs a reference but not a quote.
Expect “We’ve seen that evolution is wrong, so Creationism must be right!” This is simply a false dichotomy. Evolution might be wrong (though the evidence is so overwhelming that this is hard to imagine), but even if we discarded it, that wouldn’t leave Creationism the victor.
Did some Creator put life on earth? Wow—that’s an enormous claim. Provide the evidence.
Beware the “Gish Gallop.” Duane Gish pioneered this underhanded debate tactic. When interviewed with a biologist, he would say something like, “Well, what about X? And Y and Z? Evolution can’t explain these things.” The biologist probably has explanations for these puzzles and so begins a tedious (for the audience) explanation of why these are nicely handled by evolution. But when the biologist stops for a breath, Gish is back, piling on more examples. If your goal is winning the argument rather than engaging with the truth, these kinds of games can make an effective approach.
What I find especially annoying is hearing an issue get properly rebutted but then used by the Creationist in the very next encounter. How many times has a biologist destroyed Ray Comfort’s “Where’s the crocoduck?” argument? And yet it pops back up like we’re playing Whac-a-Mole. Does he just value effectiveness over integrity?
Beware lying. Okay, that sounds harsh, but I don’t know what else to make of nonsensical claims from people who should know better.
In 2007, I attended a lecture by someone from the Institute for Creation Research, a young-earth Creationist organization. This lecture was remarkable because the topic was geology, and the speaker actually had a doctorate in geology. He described taking rock samples from an amphibolite layer in the Grand Canyon and getting various radioisotope dating results. Though the rocks were all from the same layer, the date estimates were all over the map. His unsurprising conclusion: this dating technique is flawed, and the Grand Canyon layers were laid down by Noah’s flood, thousands of years ago, not hundreds of millions.
Only after the lecture, after I’d done some research, did I realize that amphibolite is a metamorphic rock, and radioisotope dating is typically used only to date igneous rocks. You’d think that a geologist would’ve made that clear in the lecture.
Beware “Science backtracks all the time!” Science does find errors and correct itself, but don’t imagine that the next correction to evolution is as likely to be a small tweak as the overturning of the entire theory. Once a field is well understood, changes obey a power law, like with the magnitude of earthquakes, the frequency of word use, or the size of cities and towns. For every big earthquake we see thousands of tiny ones, and for every huge correction in a theory we see many small tweaks. The overturning of a well-established theory is very unlikely.

Debating with a creationist is like playing chess with a pigeon.
It jumps on the board, knocks all the pieces off, craps on the table,
and flies off to its flock to claim victory.
— Anonymous

Photo credit: FreeThoughtPedia

Christianity 2.0: Secular Christianity

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I remember, years ago, being startled by the idea that “Jewish” could be an ambiguous term. It might mean an ethnic identity, or a cultural one, or a religious one. In other words, someone could be a Jewish atheist, identifying with Judaism culturally but not religiously. Indeed, Israeli Jews are predominantly secular.
Christian belief within America has changed continuously, going through Great Awakenings and spawning new flavors of Christianity such as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Seventh-Day Adventist church, and the Christian Science church. At the turn of the early twentieth century, during the Golden Age of Freethought and decades after Darwin’s The Origin of Species, observers saw Christianity on the wane. But Christianity rebounded, with Pentecostal and other new charismatic churches. Today, Christianity continues to change, lately becoming more polarized within America while Europe becomes more secular.
Since Christianity will continue to evolve, might it follow the example of Judaism, creating secular Christianity as a viable position?
Consider what this might be like. A secular Christian—I could be a candidate, for example—might go to church for the beautiful or traditional or inspiring music. The church building might be a draw, whether it were awe-inspiring or quaint. Sermons about finding the right path or avoiding the shallow temptations in life or even Bible stories might be edifying. Services could mark the important events in life such as births, marriages, and deaths. Whether the secular Christian went weekly or only a few times a year, the community of good people, eager to help others, would be welcoming. It might give focus to good works, providing opportunities for volunteering and direction for charitable giving.
But—and here’s the interesting bit—secular Christians would reject the supernatural origin of Christianity, would be open about their atheism, and would be accepted within the church community. The Christian church has millions of members who are secular Christians except for the last part. They’ve lost their faith in the supernatural claims, they’ve admitted this to themselves, but they can’t come out to their church community. The concept of a secular Christian would allow these people to keep their community, charitable, and even family connections.
The Christian church isn’t pleased with these ex-Christians simply leaving the church, and this broadening of the church community, as is done in many Jewish communities, could provide a soft landing for many mainstream churches hurting for members. Conservatives will insist that a no-compromise position be taken, but the church is determined to evolve, and this direction seems to be a win-win.
Of course, keeping the good parts of Christianity and discarding the supernatural beliefs wouldn’t solve all the world’s problems. There would still be human folly. But perhaps there would be just a little bit less.

Even if atheists removed all religion from our planet,
it would still not mean that people are engaged
in more fact-based thinking than before.
I would argue that religion is a symptom of belief-based thinking,
but there is all sorts of New Age and superstitious thinking
that is just as damaging.
— Tyson Gill

(This is a modification of a post that was originally published 9/14/11.)

The Sin of Sodom was Homosexuality … Right?

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While on a business trip to Japan in the 1990s, I came across an interesting brand of bath salts. In bold letters across the top of the bag was the word “Sodom.”
Salt, Sodom—yes, I see the connection, but that’s not the happiest image to attach to your brand.
So what ought we think of when we think of Sodom?
On a recent Stand to Reason podcast (“The Bible and Homosexuality,” 9/2/12), Greg Koukl unsurprisingly thinks that the point of the Sodom and Gomorrah story recounted in Genesis 19 is that homosexuality is bad—bad enough, in fact, to get your city destroyed.
He kicks around an alternative possibility, that poor hospitality was really the sin of Sodom. Remember that Lot offered hospitality to the two visiting angels, but the men of Sodom threatened their safety.
Koukl rejects this option. And if the sin isn’t lack of hospitality, it must be homosexuality. Apparently, there are just two possibilities.
He concludes that “the scripture speaks clearly on this … don’t twist what it says.” I agree, both that the issue wasn’t hospitality and that we mustn’t twist the scripture to make it say what it doesn’t.
Koukl looks to other parts of the Bible for their interpretation. One cross-reference is in the book of Ezekiel. In chapter 16, the faithlessness of the Jews is portrayed with Jerusalem being analogous to an adulterous wife. Other cities are likened to wicked sisters, and one of these is Sodom.
What are wicked Sodom’s crimes?

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen (Ezekiel 16:49–50).

If homosexuality were Sodom’s crime, wouldn’t this be the only thing on the list? Instead, we have arrogance, lack of concern for the needy, and unspecified “detestable things.” This gives no tangible support for the Homosexuality Hypothesis.
In fact, it’s pretty clear from the Genesis story itself that homosexuality wasn’t the issue.
1. Lot makes this clear. Lot was a resident, and he understood the townspeople. If the men were all gay, he’d know it, and he wouldn’t bother offering them his daughters as a substitute, which he does in Gen. 19:8.
(As an aside: is it just me, or is it weird for the most godly man in the city to offer his daughters as if they were property? And if this is unthinkable today, why would it be an option thousands of years ago? Or does morality change with time?)
2. An all-gay city wouldn’t be sustainable. “All the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house” (Gen. 19:4). So “all the men” were gay? How could there be children if all the men were gay? Such a city would simply die out. And why wouldn’t that be an option for God? Just give Sodom a few decades and let the population fade away.
3. Seriously? A city with all men gay? Homosexuality wasn’t studied when it was taboo, but we now know that only a few percent of society is homosexual. Anyway, why would godly Lot stick around if the city was so detestable? Perhaps for literary purposes?
4. Can we assume that there were no women? There is no evidence that this is an all-male city. “All the men” makes clear that this is not everyone, and so some must’ve been left behind. The straightforward interpretation is that all the men came to Lot’s house, that the women stayed at home, and that the women were mothers, wives, and daughters as in any ordinary city.
5. We have a better explanation. Gang rape is less about pleasure than about humiliating or establishing dominance. That the local men wanted to bully or dominate the visitors seems a better explanation than that they were just eager for sexual pleasure.
As we study the story, however, let’s not dismiss the violence. No one can question that there was significant evil in Sodom (fictive or not) when visitors are threatened with gang rape. But what was the sin of Sodom? This is a story of attempted rape. Yes, it was homosexual rape, but the homosexuality isn’t highlighted as the crime.
Koukl is right that we shouldn’t twist the story, but he seems to be the one with the agenda. Only with a desire to find anti-gay messages in the Bible can we imagine one in the Sodom and Gomorrah story.
What’s also clear is that this has nothing to do with the loving, monogamous, homosexual relationship that is the subject of today’s discussion of same-sex marriage.
(Tomorrow is election day, and Washington’s Referendum 74 is a big deal. If it passes, it will be the first same-sex law in the U.S. directly put into effect by the citizens.)

Every time you see a rainbow,
God is having gay sex
(seen on a bumper sticker)

What? MORE on that 9/11 Cross?

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Fellow Patheos blogger Rebecca Hamilton has recently posted about the World Trade Center Cross. This is a 17-foot-tall, cross-shaped piece of rubble found in the World Trade Center aftermath of the 9/11 attack. Out of all that wreckage from buildings built of steel I-beams welded together at right angles, it’s not too surprising that the intersection of two beams had broken to make a cross-shaped piece of steel.
The cross wasn’t even found at the Twin Towers site but rather at 6 World Center, but it has become a religious relic for some Christians.
Rebecca is puzzled by the fuss from atheists and proposes two explanations: (1) atheists are thin-skinned whiners “set on harassing, insulting and attacking Christians at every turn in an attempt to drive us underground and silence us.” Or (2), atheists are vampires and are repulsed by the sight of a cross.
I’d like to respond with a tweaked version of a post that I wrote for last year’s anniversary of the attack. Perhaps we can clarify atheists’ motivations.
The cross shape could just be a coincidence (the explanation favored by atheists), or it could be a sign from God (what some Christians propose). If the latter, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the only evidence of God participating was his calling card. In the rubble. And this evidence of God-not-doing-anything is now highlighted as a holy relic.
Hmm—that it’s just a coincidence is starting to sound a lot better from the standpoint of the Christian.
This cross is now a controversial addition to New York City’s soon-to-be-completed National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
American Atheists and New York City Atheists are suing to have the cross removed. Their remedy is to return it to St. Peter’s Church, two blocks from Ground Zero, where it had been for five years until moved to the museum in July 2011. Since half of the museum’s financing has been provided by the government, returning it to the church sounds a lot easier than giving equal time to all the worldviews that don’t have a cross as their symbol.
There was another controversy associated with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011. New York Mayor Bloomberg declared that the commemorative ceremony would be religion-free.
Sounds good to me. There are plenty of secular reasons for the ceremony, and religious people can remember the event in their own way as best suits their religion. People of any faith (or even no faith) can feel pain. Why should only some get a publicly-funded platform?
And when you do try to include religions, there’s bickering over who was omitted.

Some evangelical Christian leaders said they were outraged that an interfaith prayer service planned by the Washington National Cathedral did not include a Southern Baptist or other evangelical minister.

The New York City ceremony, which has been held annually on the anniversary, is punctuated by moments of silence (six times in 2011), plenty of opportunity for prayer.
But for some folks it has to be more overt. Benjamin Wiker said:

Perhaps the mayor could have come up with an entirely innocuous prayer that all the clergy could offer without offending anyone, say something like this: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, and our country. Amen.”
Who could possibly object to that?

Oh, I dunno. Maybe atheists, not that they apparently are worth worrying about. Buddhists. Those who check “Spiritual” instead of a specific religion. The almost 20% of Americans who are “Nones” (those who don’t identify with any religion). And since this “God” is pretty obviously the Christian God (one person of the Trinity), probably the Jews and Muslims as well. And anyone else who’s not a Christian. And anyone who respects the Constitution enough to realize that the First Amendment helps all of us, the Christian and non-Christian alike, and bristles when it is insulted.
Aside from that, I think you’re good.
Back to that article:

Since Engel v. Vitale [the 1962 Supreme Court case that rejected school prayer] a series of court cases have struck down, one after another, any religious expression in the public square, thereby setting one clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) in direct contradiction to the clause that directly follows it (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”).

Not really. You want to express a religious sentiment in the public square? Knock yourself out. This is the essential distinction that is forgotten: the public can, within limits, say anything, religious or otherwise, in public. The constraint is on Congress (expanded beyond just the federal government with the Fourteenth Amendment).
And isn’t that the way you’d want it? Christians can send their children to public school and know that they won’t hear a Mormon or Satanist prayer. Christians can go to a City Council meeting and not see Allahu Akbar (“God is Great”) in Arabic script on the wall. Christians can go into a courtroom and not see a Shinto or Hindu god of jurisprudence glaring down at them. A win-win.

In disallowing any public appearance of religion in the 9/11 memorial “service,” [Mayor Bloomberg is] simply taking Engel v. Vitale yet another step. No prayer in public schools. No prayer in public period. The Establishment Clause (so secularists would have us believe) demands that religion be silenced.

Wow—what’s hard about this? Just keep Christianity out of the tax-supported part of society. Pray in private or in public, or encourage prayer all you want—just not in the official capacity as mayor. (Or president. But the National Day of Prayer is another story.)

The whole point, in historical context, was that the Federal Government should not positively sanction one Christian denomination over another (as England had established the Anglican Church as the state church), and also negatively should not interfere in the free exercise of any denomination (as England had persecuted both Puritans and Catholics).

Ah, so it’s all about Christian religion, you say? In your mind, perhaps, but that’s not what the Constitution says.

So it is that a particular New York mayor uses the Establishment Clause to root out Christianity, and the Free Exercise Clause to publicly affirm Islam.

Dr. Wiker is apparently still hot under the collar about that whole “Ground-Zero Mosque” thing (officially called Park51). Let me give my two cents on that.
(1) May a Muslim group build two blocks from the Twin Towers site? Yes. Assuming the city’s other requirements are met, the government can’t reject the project simply because Muslims are involved or that the building would have a prayer space.
(2) Should a Muslim group build there? No. In my opinion, the respectful course of action would have been to find another site far from Ground Zero. This is a missed opportunity for a prominent Muslim community to yield and show that it understands the issue and is sensitive to it.
This is the distinction that Wiker seems to be missing. If Mayor Bloomberg defended point 1 above, then he simply demanded that the law be followed. If he’s treading into religious favoritism, however, that would be a problem. Is he? I’ve seen no evidence supporting this.
But that’s the point. That’s where the Constitution helps everyone, including the beleaguered Christian. The government is forbidden to give preferential treatment to Islam (by favoring a Muslim group over others) or to Christianity (by including Christian prayers at the 9/11 anniversary commemoration or Christian symbolism in the Memorial Museum).
It cuts both ways. And that helps all of us.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/10/11.)