Link Banana

I strongly suspect this is months old, but it’s none the less fascinating.  The USA Today offers a great Flash presentation of some data from the latest Pew Religion Survey. A few things that really struck me (unfortunately, it being Flash, I can’t link straight to the relevant charts):

• Jehovah’s Witnesses are truly exceptional. They seem to be outliers on just about every question in the set.
• Catholic’s acceptance of homosexuality is much higher than I’d expected. (58%, higher than the general population, which is at 50%. Still nowhere near the 80ish scores for Buddhists, Jews, and “Other Faiths.”)
• Belief in heaven is most common among Mormons and historically black churches. Who knew the two would have so much in common?
• Jews pray about as much as the unaffiliated.

(via Robin, who offers other portraits of the United States)

The Boston Globe ideas section has some interesting details about Americans’ beliefs about heaven and hell. For myself, I’d always thought each necessary for the existence of the other.

The Pew survey, significant for the breadth and depth made possible by its unusually large 35,000-person sample, found that 74 percent of Americans say they think there is a heaven, “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” while just 59 percent think there is a hell, “where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished.”

…there are peculiarly American characteristics to this emerging hell gap: an insistent optimism, perhaps a kind of cultural self-contentedness, and a tolerance born of diversity that makes damning the other more problematic.

… Mormons are the most likely to believe in heaven, but just average in their belief in hell. The biggest believers in hell are evangelical Protestants, African-American Protestants, and Muslims.

For some reason, I’ve watched this video every time it’s shown up in my feedreader (which has been a lot). There’s something great about it.

(originally via Kottke)

Think of it as a post-Rapture Christian gloating service. As Threat Level snarkily points out:

The e-mails will be triggered when three of the site’s five Christian staffers “scattered around the U.S.” fail to log in for six days in a row — a system that incorporates a nice margin of safety, should two of the proprietors turn out to be unrepentant sinners or atheists.

(via Waxy)

Your daily “Whoa! Really?” is an excerpt (from a fascinating excerpt) from Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready!:

“Ladies,” announced Dillow, “sensuality in marriage is godly. Just as a husband and wife experience deep joy as they lose themselves and merge into oneness at the moment of sexual climax, we experience ultimate joy as we become one with Jesus Christ in a union that leads to incomprehensible joy. Sexual intercourse mirrors our relationship to God and causes us to worship him for giving us this good gift.” Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence, she added with a wink, that there is no better time than a long Sunday morning in church to practice your Kegel exercises.

The Economist did a recent survey about political positions in the two countries with a number of interesting results.

The gap between Britain and America is widest on religion: no surprise there, as Britain is famously a post-Christian society and Americans are, if anything, rediscovering the faith of their fathers. But the difference in views is so wide that even British Conservatives are a great deal more secular than American Democrats are. The two are a bit closer on social values (abortion, homosexuality and so forth), and they overlap on ideology (mainly, how active the state should be), with Britain’s Tories to the right of America’s Democrats.

They overlap again on how free their countries should be to intervene militarily (both the Tories and Labour are more hawkish than the Democrats). Britons are more international than the Americans, keener on free trade and globalisation. Views coincide most nearly on climate change—ironically, the area where the two governments have been least in step.

It worth giving the first graph in that article a look (as it summarizes the findings well), the more comprehensive second graph is here.

Making it through Kelefa Sanneh long New Yorker piece about visiting Trinity United Church of Christ did nothing to increase my affinity for the publication, but he did make an interesting point.

Across the street from Trinity’s main entrance is a small building with a sign that says, “St. Matthew Gordon AME Zion.” Its presence, for anyone who notices it, is a reminder of the scrappy little church that Trinity used to be, and of the scrappy little churches all over the city, each harboring dreams of fruitful multiplication. For Wright, black Chicago’s highly competitive religious market was a challenge and a spur; for a different preacher, in a different era, it could be a threat. The media frenzy has obscured, and postponed, the real test facing the church. Bad press does no real harm to a church that relishes an air of opposition, and that relies on cheerful givers, not on mainstream sponsors. (On the contrary, Moss told NPR, the controversy “has brought the entire church together.”) But the next challenge will become increasingly clear. After thirty-six years with Wright at the helm, an idiosyncratic megachurch is trying to change its leadership without changing its identity. Once Wright’s moment in the media spotlight is over, his church will have to figure out how to get along without him.

I didn’t follow “Waco” when it happened (in my defense, I was seven) and haven’t learned much about it since. Thus I was rather fascinated by Pamela Colloff’s excellent — though sometimes hard to follow — compilation of accounts of the events by those who were there, both Branch Davidians and law enforcement. 

(via brijit)

I was to post this yesterday (that being Easter), but never got around to it. But it turns out the last Soviet premier is and was a Christian.

Mr Gorbachev’s surprise visit confirmed decades of rumours that, although he was forced to publicly pronounce himself an atheist, he was in fact a Christian, and casts a meeting with Pope John Paul II in 1989 in a new light.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

EDIT (3/29/2008): A different report says that Mr. Gorbachev is an atheist. I don’t know what to believe. (via AS)

If you’re interested, Popped Culture assembled (for last year) a pretty interesting run down of pop-culture takes on da Vinci’s infamous last supper.

(via Neatorama)

Sarah Vowell’s written the best tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. that’s likely to come out of this day of memory.

…there’s a pleasing symmetry in Reagan forking over a day to Dr. King. Both men owe their reputations to the Sermon on the Mount. The president’s most enduring bequest might be a city-smiting drug war, but thanks to a nice smile and a biblical sound bite that’s not how he’s remembered. Reagan cribbed from the Gospel of Matthew via the Puritan John Winthrop to dream up his “shining city on a hill” legacy. And Americans in general and Republican presidential candidates in particular still believe in it, probably because they’re not watching “The Wire.”

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”