Monica

Dear SCOTUS,

Let me see if I have this right: A corporation that has a small number of shareholders, like a family, is a "person", and a corporate "person" can reject at least one legally-required expenditures it objects to on religious or moral grounds, and thus Hobby Lobby doesn't have to follow Obamacare's requirement to fund contraception. Got it.

A corporation, while maybe a "person", is clearly no more of a "person" than an actual, real live person, like me. There are legally-required expenditures that apply to me that I object to on religious or moral grounds too. So, dear SCOTUS, could you please clarify which of those I can opt out of? If Obamacare or contraception is somehow unique, please specify how. If you say that I can't opt out, why not? Surely you're not saying that, for example, Hobby Lobby has more rights as a person than I do?

(Quite aside from how you feel about any particular law, while it's a law it should apply equally -- or there should be a clear reason that cases aren't equivalent.)

Why, oh why, is tulip season so short? It feels like they just showed up not long ago, and now they're fading. Oh well... on to something else, I guess! (I think the lilac bush is next to bloom, but I'm not sure.)

This weekend Dani and I joined some friends for a last-minute gaming get-together. We played La Cita (my third time, I think), which split interestingly: the winner had 35 points (would have been 40 if he hadn't starved his people in the last round), another player and I had 32 and 33, and the other two were in the high teens. It didn't look like that in play. (I thought I was doing worse and those last two better.) Then we played Rum and Pirates and all clumped within a few points of each other (something like 62-70). I like both of these games and will happily play more.

A few weeks ago I ordered a used DVD set via Amazon Marketplace. (I decided to see what all the Heroes fuss is about.) I chose a seller who had only a handful of ratings, all positive, figuring that someone like that is motivated to give good service. (Also, I noticed that the DVD would ship from PA.) A few weeks passed with no DVDs, so I sent email a couple days ago. This morning the seller wrote back with profuse apologies; he (she?) had accidentally sent my order to someone else who'd ordered on the same day, but now had the set back in hand -- "so I'll drive it over this afternoon". It turns out the seller is in the greater-Pittsburgh area. As promised, the DVDs were waiting for me when I got home from work, so everything worked out just fine. (I never order anything from third-party sellers that I actually need in a hurry.)

Speaking of TV, the BBC might bring back Blake's 7 (link from caryabend). Woo hoo! I trust that this will eventually find its way to DVD and, thence, my TV. Since it's been more than a quarter-century, I do wonder what they'll do for casting. Of course, they could well do a "25 years later..." story, even though the final season left things on a cliffhanger.

(Anonymous) quote of the day, after interviewing a job candidate: "He has a lot of learning to do, and I don't want to pay the tuition".

This sign in a shop made me laugh.

Reusable printer paper looks like an interesting idea; I wonder if it can be developed economically. I'm surprised by the claims about what it costs to (1) manufacture and (2) recycle a piece of paper.

Quote of the day #2 brings some much-needed context to the flap over Obama's ex-minister. Excerpt (compiled by dglenn): "No one likes to hear someone, especially a preacher, criticize our good country. But Donna Potis [...] and so many others who decry presidential candidate Barack Obama for having attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church while he preached prophetically have very selective memories." The whole thing is worth a read; it's not long.

Somewhat relatedly, osewalrus pointed me to this post pointing out that all the candidates and the voters have a bigger religious-leader problem than this. Excerpt: "[I]f I wake up and find that I'm in an America where certain pastors and certain churches are openly denounced from the White House's presidential podium, I will suddenly get even more nervous about freedom of religion in America than I already am." Yes.

I found this speculative, alternate timeline of the last ten years by rjlippincott interesting.

Question for my Jewish (and Jewish-aware) readers: Thursday is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust rememberance day), so instead of my usual "daf bit" in the morning service, I'd like to do something on-theme. It has to be a teaching, something that would qualify as torah study, which rules out most of the readings that tend to show up in special services for the day. Any suggestions? I could probably find something in Lamentations, if that's not cliche, but I'm not really sure. And naturally, I do not wish to offend with a bad choice people who are old enough to remember.

dmnsqrl linked to this sermon from a UU minister about what theists and atheists can learn from each other. I found it an interesting read.

Excerpt:

Last year I heard this riddle: Why do so many UU’s go to divinity school? Because they can’t talk about God in church.

I think this is unfortunate, because theists and atheists experience life differently, and learn some very different lessons from their experiences. Probably any particular bit of wisdom can be learned on either path, but some bits are easier to learn on one path than the other. Which is why I think that theists and atheists could teach each other a lot if they could only sit and talk calmly. Today I hope to give that conversation a nudge by pointing out how much there is to gain and how to avoid some common dead ends.

The Underwater Railroad is up and running. (Ok, it's been up for a while, but updates are easier and thus more timely now.) Please pass this URL around to places where you think it'll do some good.

Martin Luther, Diet Coke, and Canned Soup is just one example of why I enjoy reading Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed).

How to cook an egg with two cell phones (link from dvarin). If it's true, I'm not sure I wanted to know that. :-)

I realize that spammers believe they need to misspell in order to get past filters (and look, it worked!), but how many people are likely to bite on "fw: Deerges Baesd On Yuor Kgwonlee"? My "kgwonlee" includes basic spelling.

siderea is right; anyone interested in group dynamics and/or religious communities should read Why Strict Churches Are Strong. As I become more involved in synagogue leadership these are certainly issues to pay attention to.

And it could apply just as well to other organizations, too -- I've heard siderea and others say many of the same things in SCA contexts, for example.

I'm reading torah tomorrow, and my portion starts in the middle of a paragraph. Finding the beginning is usually a challenge in that case (remember: no punctuation), so I asked if I could look at it after minyan last night so I wouldn't be fumbling with it at the last minute. My portion begins a new column -- first word of the column is my first word. From a navigational perspective it doesn't get much easier than that!

velveteenrabbi wrote an interesting article, Blog is my Copilot: The Rise of Religion Online. (It's fairly short.) I had not previously heard the term "godblog".

This morning I found myself behind a police car that made several turns without signalling. While it's naive, I prefer law-abiding behavior from those who enforce the law.

A woman who had a baby at a gas station was driving herself to the hospital immediately after when the police stopped her. The part that got my attention was that after they cleared up the traffic stop, "Officers sent Coleman on and let the hospital know she was coming". Um, isn't this the point where many officers would have offered to drive her there? *boggle*

April Fool's comment from mortuus: "may your pranks be merry and may your victims not sue". Ah, life in America. :-)

I was reminded recently of some LISP limericks that I saw, by either Guy Steele or Scott Fahlman I think, in the early 80s. They were limericks in code, though some creativity in reading them was called for. This was long before I had a personal hard drive on which to lose such stuff, and Google isn't turning them up for me. Does this ring any bells with anyone else?

What's wrong with this statement? "The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts." (story)

A story about reports of missing Americans in south-east Asia offers this gem: "Some callers were unclear on geography as well, reporting missing Americans in China, South Africa and even Vermont." Vermont?! From people who haven't noticed that New Hampshire is still there?

Some parents in Orange County are upset because a Catholic school allowed children of a gay couple to enroll. They are arguing that this violates church teachings. The school has so far refused to budge. It seems to me that, quite apart from any issues of gay rights or open-mindedness, the parents have it all wrong; educating those kids is precisely within church teachings. Shouldn't they be welcoming the opportunity to teach those kids their doctrine, rather than letting them go off to the Godless public schools? I thought a key component of Christianity was ministering to people who haven't yet accepted their message; here they have people they consider sinners delivering their kids up for education in the church, and they're turning down the opportunity. Sounds like a missed opportunity to me. (I am not endorsing this, merely observing.)

Why I am considering staying in the Methodist Church, written by a committed member of the church who is a target of their discrimination. (Link via kayre.)

Thomas Jefferson on church and state, posted by dglenn in honor of the national day of prayer.

For Pittsburghers: Panim el panim, a discussion/panel with my rabbi, someone from the Islamic Center, and an Episcopal reverend. May 15, 4pm.

Tomorrow night's Shabbat service is another musical one. This will be the third; I really liked the first two. It looks like we are going to do this after the summer, too; Tuesday night we held auditions for an in-house band. Got a dozen people, which is great! (I wasn't there, so I don't know what skill levels we're dealing with, but I know we've got some good musicians in the congregation. I decided I'm too busy right now.)

This summer there will be one Shabbat when both rabbis will be away (and the cantor will be two weeks past her due date, so if she's still pregnant she'll probably be grumpy). So the worship committee will lead that Friday's service. Usually when groups (committees, brotherhood, etc) lead services, someone in the office assigns parts and mails out annotated photocopies ("tell them to stand here", "read this in Hebrew", "read this responsively in English", etc). That kind of bugs me, so at last night's meeting of the worship committee I said: Look, we're the worship committee; if we can't just lead a service out of the siddur, there's something wrong. So if you want to participate in this service and you don't normally come on Friday nights, you should come a few times in the next two months. At the next meeting we're going to look at the siddur and assign parts. I expected at least a little griping, but got none. Yay.

Alabama isn't the only place with controversies over judicial monuments to the 10 commandments; there's a local case of this too. But ours doesn't weigh 2.5 tons; it's just a plaque and thus easy to miss in the political and media circus.

An article in yesterday's paper described what happened when a reporter stood near the courthouse and asked random people to list the commandments. The average hit rate was three. I do wonder, and the article didn't discuss this, how they handled different interpretations of this list. We don't all draw the lines in the same places. Jews and I think some Protestants say there's one commandment against coveting, for example, not two like the Roman Catholics say.

Quite aside from the legal and social issues surrounding these public displays, I find myself wondering where all the emphasis on these ten commandments really comes from. It's my impression that Christians focus on this a lot more than Jews do. Jews focus on the revelation at Sinai, of which this list is a part, but we have 613 commandments (and all the derivatives), so these ten aren't anything like a complete list. Yes, there are talmudic arguments that say that the 613 reduce to these ten, but some of the contortions are, um, challenging.

But Christians have more commandments than just these ten, too. After all, the ten commandments don't include anything that Jesus added, and at least "do unto others..." and "love your neighbor" are every bit as important as honoring parents.

So do we all just like neat, tidy lists with nice round numbers, or what? Why have these few verses been pulled out of scripture and given elevated importance?

Aside: At Shavuot we read the revelation at Sinai. In some congregations it's customary to stand for the ten commandments. In others, it is custom specifically not to stand for them, because that elevates them above the rest of the Torah.

I objected to the pledge of allegiance from a fairly early age. Or rather, I objected to being required to say it every day in school. I had problems with "under God", but more importantly to me at that time, I had problems making that kind of commitment. I remember asking how a 10-year-old could be expected to make such an open-ended promise. I got told to just do it.

Some teachers (and maybe my parents?) told me to just cover my heart with my hand and stand there silently. This was dishonest, though; I didn't think I should be giving the impression that I was saying it when I wasn't. But mostly that's what I did, because I wasn't aggressive enough to really push the matter. I valued my grades and I was told they would suffer if I made a big deal out of this.

So I don't really buy the argument that no one is forced to say it so it's not coercive. Of course it's coercive; many things done in the name of public education are. This doesn't mean it's automatically wrong; there are areas where I not only accept but expect coercion in school, such as to instill minimum standards for interpersonal interactions. But I think it's silly to say that the pledge isn't coercive when it often is.

I do object to this particular coercion, though. And beyond the general objection, I have a problem with "under God" being included in anything that's required (or nearly required). It's not just the pledge, either; I'm uncomfortable when being "sworn in" (I say "affirm") as a juror ("...so help you God"), and I was startled when I was asked to swear an oath ("...before Almighty God") when applying for a marriage license. All of these are inappropriate, and all of them are functionally if not technically coercive.

I am not an athiest. I believe in God. And the God I believe in shouldn't be trivialized in this way. The hordes of school children who say these words every day do not, for the most part, have any real understanding of what they're saying. If that's not taking God in vain, I don't know what is.

And it is not for the state to give some religious views precedence over others. This isn't a constitutional argument; that only restricts Congress. This is a moral, or perhaps ethical, objection. No one has a pipeline to The One Truth here; what is right for me is not right for you, and what is right for you is not right for me. This does not change if you get yourself appointed as school superintendant, or governor, or president. (In this case, you don't even have the weight of historic precedent; "under God" is a MacCarthyism, not original text, and I gather that the author of the original would be displeased if he were capable of rendering an opinion.)

From what I understand of the court ruling (not being a lawyer or scholar), the ruling is goofy in one way: they seem to have said that this particular text is forbidden in the abstract. Forbidding "under God" in an arbitrary piece of text is as offensive as requiring it; the problem, either way, is in how the text is used. The judge who said that there's a problem with the athiest's kid even hearing "under God" is way out in left field, assuming he hasn't been quoted out of context. What they should have done is to forbid schools and the government from requiring anyone to take this pledge as it is currently written, and left it at that.

One of these days maybe I'll get around to school prayer. :-)

Today was Thaddeus' wedding. It had the feel of an SCA event; they wanted to do a "medieval" wedding and invited guests to come in garb, and they arranged for some very good SCA cooks to do the food. It was extremely tasty, even though the cooks had to contend with more dietary issues than normal. Thaddeus is allergic to wheat, and Dana is lactose-intolerant, as are some other members of her family. This made the cake especially challenging, but they pulled it off. (Rice flour, they said.) Johan told me I should go ahead and eat meat, as the dairy was sparse and well-segregated. It's been a long time since I've eaten meat at an SCA feast.

The wedding itself started off with an exchange of gifts and each of them having to satisfy witnesses that they were suitable partners. It was schtick, but fairly well done. They said this was based on medieval (or renaissance?) Polish customs. This then led to a fairly normal wedding (with the traditional vows except for "obey"). There was a very short mass done for the benefit of the couple only -- that is, the couple got communion but no one else did, and it took about 10 minutes. Apparently this, too, is in keeping with whatever they were modelling the ceremony on. Aside from some verbal responses in which I did not participate, there was no congregational involvement. (Not like Isabella's funeral a few years back where I got broad-sided by the "let's all take hands and sing to Jesus" thing that made me bolt from the room. That was embarrassing; fortunately, the family concluded that I was overcome with grief and didn't bother me about it.)

The priest was Father Klukas (Robert's priest), who is a very cool person. He has a tasteful sense of humor that he applied during the wedding. (Rabbi Gibson is the only other person I've heard pull that sort of thing off during services.) Father Klukas has a degree in medieval history (or maybe medieval liturature, I forget now) and is very friendly with the SCA. A couple of times when we've had events at his church, he has done a historical mass (strictly optional attendance) as part of the re-creation. Pretty neat. (He preceeded them with short lectures about the liturgy of the particular period he was doing, and produced good handouts. In other words, he was definitely in teacher mode more than priest mode, though of course he was doing real masses.)

The modern Episcopalian (sp?) mass is very similar to what I remember of the Roman Catholic mass. There are extra words at the end of the "our father" prayer (I think Protestants do those too), and I think there were some minor wording differences elsewhere (less significant). I couldn't see whether communion included wine.

I find that masses can be interesting from a liturgical-anthropological point of view, when I am comfortable being present. (I was today.) We all know that Christian liturgy was derived originally from Jewish liturgy; it's interesting (to me) to see what they kept, what they changed, and what they discarded. At one point today I remember thinking "hey, that's the Kedusha"; it was very close to the text we say, until it veered off to talk about the trinity. (Christians will know this as the "holy holy holy, all the earth is filled with God's glory" part, if I'm remembering the mass text correctly.) At the time I couldn't remember clearly what had led off this section, so I asked Father Klukas later whether this was modelled on the Amidah (the prayer set that includes Kedusha), or if that part was just a noticable borrowing. He said the latter. It's times like this when it would be really handy to have a copy of the generic Catholic or Episcopalian text to refer to.

I also got an answer to a minor question: the bells that get rung twice during that service are there to get the attention of people who are either lost in prayer or just not paying attention. This apparently isn't much of an issue now, but was when masses went on for much longer and in Latin. The two points are at "this is my body" and "this is my blood"; I wonder if that is the point where they are actually consecrated (and, if you believe in transubstantian, are altered). I guess it makes sense that you would want people to witness that rather than being lost in their own thoughts at the time.