[Vision2020] Religion and Morality

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Dear Chris:

You will not win any arguments on the dates of Zoroaster by referring to an article on the age of the earth (!) with a mention of Zoroaster only in passing.  Even the traditional dates antedates the Babylonian captivity.  You claimed to have evidence that Zoroaster came after.  Where is that reference?  Obviously, you cannot provide it. By the way, I will not dignify with a response your objection that the scholars who argue for an earlier date have an anti-Christian bias.

If one googles "Zoroaster date," you will find all sorts of authorities who no longer accept the traditional dates.  The consensus, led by Gherado Gnoli ("Zoroaster in History" [New York, 2000]), is that he must have lived in the 10th Century BCE.  There are two main arguments for this earlier date.  The first, the Gathas, the basic Zoroastrian scripture, are written in a language that is very similar to the Sanskrit of the Vedas, which have been dated to 1,000 BCE or before.  Second, the socio-economic picture of the Gathas indicates a much earlier time period, not the early 6th Century BCE.

By using a book dated 1899 on Japanese prostitution, you completely discredit your attempt to show that Japan's Buddhists support sexual immorality.  During that time many American cities were flourishing centers of prostitution (even our own Wallace, Idaho).  I once read that New Orleans was long known as the best place to find a virgin to deflower for a large fee. Equally weak is your mention of the Japanese military using Korean and Chinese women as sex slaves.  This was a criminal regime that most Japanese have totally rejected.

Using 1998 data, Americans murdered each other at a rate 6.32 per 100,000 vs. the Japanese rate of 0.58 per 100,000.  American assaults were 357 per 100,000 whereas that Japanese rate was 15.4 per 100,000. The violent theft rate was 169 vs. 2.7 per 100,000.  I don't think that these figures have changed much, and they  track very well with the very low crime rate for Buddhists in 1881 India.

Even though you want to say that statistics lie, using recent crime data, rather than anecdotes, is the best way to gauge the basic morality of a country.  I also want to add surveys on teen STDs, teen pregnancies, and extramarital sex as a way to test whether America's strong religious culture has a deterrent effect.  As I demonstrated in my column on abstinence (www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/TeenSex.htm), the U.S. is much higher in each category.

Using 2003 data, there were 5.7 violent deaths per 100,000 Americans vs. 1.17 for 9 European countries.  Using 1998 data drawn from the U.S. Justice Department, American rapes were 64/100,000 vs. 35 for Sweden; 29 for England & Wales; 22 for the Netherlands and Switzerland.  The European rate would be even lower if these countries used America's narrower definition of rape.  I see rape rates as crucial for my argument, because conservative Christians want to argue that feminism and secularism have caused widespread disrespect for women.

The foregoing makes me question your statement: "It is clear that Christianity elevates and protects oppressed women from such evils as prostitution, both directly and also indirectly by inculcating values conducive to the elimination of poverty."  Christian America has a much higher rate of spousal abuse than many, many other countries and our poverty rate of 17.1 percent is just above Mexico's. I'm sure that your pastor's proposal that only propertied males should vote would by viewed as a form of oppression by many, many Americans.
 
The decline in American crime during the 1990s was most pronounced for robbery and assault, lesser violations of Ten Commandments.  One should not be surprised about England and Wales, but I'm surprised at Sweden's high rate.  According to the same Dept. of Justice study using 1999 data, Swedes assaulted one another at an alarming rate of 546/100,000; England & Wales 416; the U.S. 336; The Netherlands 268; at Switzerland 189.  

I've looked at your links about your claim that Europeans have cheated on crime statistics and found no proof.  Theodore Dalrymple is not a criminologist; rather, he is a medical doctor who is a fellow at the far right Manhattan Institute. He gives anecdotal evidence about British police not reporting crimes, but I'm sure that American police do that as well.  His point about British Courts being lenient does not at all affect the fact that a crime has been committed, and again American courts have been slapped with the same charge.  If this were the problem Dalrymple says it is, then the criminologists that put together the 2004 Justice Department report cited above would have said something about it.

With regard to India, you want to focus on the caste system, which I admit is a great evil, but we had a racial caste system in Christian America until the 1960s and even you admit that race is still a fundamental problem.  Your pastor also said that a racial caste system that included slavery was the best multiracial society in human history.

I supported an Indian Christian student for his American graduate studies for five years, and it took me a long time to learn that he was a Christian Dalit.  In the church where he grew up there was a curtain down the center of the sanctuary so that the high caste Christians did not have to look at the Untouchables on the other side.  Christian missionaries made their first contacts with high caste people, primarily because of their literacy, and through them the evils of caste spread to many Christian congregations.  

I remind you of the 1881 British census data that show that 1 in 799 Christian Indians committed a crime, while only 1 in 3,787 Buddhists did. As the British official admitted: we made them less moral than they were. Let's face it: the Christian mission to Asia, in terms of converting great numbers, has been a stunning failure. 

As far as your suggestion that Indians have to accept Jesus, many Hindus will tell you that they already do: they have his statue at home and they worship him as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Buddhism died out in India by the 11th Century partly because Hindus were successful in their argument that the Buddha was Vishnu's 9th appearance on earth. 

Your condemnation of the Hindu religion undermining the advance of modern India has a certain irony to it.  I could say that conservative Christianity, especially the form that you embrace, is playing the same role in blocking American progress today.  Equal rights for women and minorities have been blocked by people such as you.  According to a World Economic Forum study on gender equity, the U.S. dropped from 23rd to 31st place among 115 countries, and we can thank the Religious Right for that.  Wilson's view that women should not vote (Wilkins, Grant, and he said it in "My Town") would set up a sexual caste system just as invidious as India's.  Just another example of chilling parallels between Christian, Hindu, and Islamic fundamentalism.

Finally, it is now clear to me that you are a Tritheist just as Wilson and Jones are.  When you say that God is a society of three persons, the very logic of a society of individuals undermines the basic principle of a unitary Trinity.  In any society individuals maintain their own integrity and will, but Augustine set the orthodox doctrine of Trinity in stone by saying that the Triune God has only one will.  You are making the same fundamental mistake that so many theologically illiterate Christians do: you are assuming that the "persons" of the Trinity are like ordinary persons, and orthodox theologians, always leaning towards modalism in doing so, have always rejected this simplistic, heretical idea of the Trinity. 

It is shocking to me that a church that is presumably so committed to sophisticated theological thinking could make such a basic mistake in formulating basic Christian doctrine.

I will save my comments on your inability to defend Calvinist libertarianism for a separate post.  The fact that other Christians claim to be libertarians does not at all mean that they have solved the basic philosophical challenge I have presented to you.

Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick Gier, proud Unitarian and religious liberal