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[Editors Note: We are revisiting this part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli. Mr. Carnicelli has been on an extended sabbatical in recent months are we eagerly await his return to this Sunday morning blogspace. I have chosen to report this piece, originally published early last year, because i think it is pertinent to the discussion and decision we are facing now and in the coming months about leadership. What leadership is, what it is not, and how we come to choose our country's leaders will be critical to our future. A serious examination of how leaders have been chosen in the past six years is necessary to expose the lies and careful crafting that has gone into creating the "false gods" of politics in the past. ]

In the third chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse begins by touching on two seemingly unrelated ideas that actually hover around a central axis. Let us initially explore each thought separately.

If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.

In this first sentence, Lao Tse is in my view describing our tendency to put inspirational leaders – like Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, for instance – on a pedestal, to make them seem as imposing and larger-than-life as a father or mother must appear to a small child.

President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers ignited a firestorm on the right this week. Fearful that another Supreme Court nominee of a Republican President might eventually be transformed - though exposure to "elite opinion" from more liberal colleagues - into a voice of moderation and reason, many conservative pundits and politicians were uncharacteristically blunt about their lack of enthusiasm for Miers. Some were even calling for her nomination to be rescinded.

What these unhappy conservatives are seeking is an established judicial fundamentalist or, to use the term that Bush has often used, strict constructionist. What would a judge who adhered to strict constructionist judicial philosophy believe?

Americans witnessed a startling juxtaposition this week. On Wednesday, a vote at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention made it more likely that gay marriage will become a permanent institution in that state. On Thursday, The New York Times revealed that Pope Benedict XVI has begun a purge of homosexuals, and faculty that disagree with official Vatican teaching, in American seminaries. As Laurie Goodstein reports in her September 15th story, Vatican to Check U.S. Seminaries on Gay Presence:

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for "evidence of homosexuality" and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching, according to a document prepared to guide the process.

The Vatican document, given to The New York Times yesterday by a priest, surfaces as Catholics await a Vatican ruling on whether homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.

In a possible indication of the ruling's contents, the American archbishop who is supervising the seminary review said last week that "anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity or has strong homosexual inclinations," should not be admitted to a seminary.

Edwin O'Brien, archbishop for the United States military, told The National Catholic Register that the restriction should apply even to those who have not been sexually active for a decade or more.

There's a ceremony taking place this morning at Ground Zero: a commemoration of the fallen of September 11th. For the families of the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, the arrival of this day will always be the cause of profound anguish. I wonder, however, if it’s possible that there will come a time for the rest of us, both here in New York and across America, when this day will become less an occasion of grief and anger, and more a day of thoughtful reflection?

So long as Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants remain free, this day must remind us of our unfinished business. Treachery cannot be allowed to go unpunished. We owe it to our dead to see that justice is done. In a very real sense, by focusing United States' efforts on occupying Iraq, rather than dismantling al Qaeda, President Bush has only exacerbated the pain and suffering of New Yorkers.

Yet, at some point, once Bin Laden and his lieutenants have been captured or killed, Americans are going to have to at least consider the possibility of closure. Again, perhaps not the friends and families of those who lost loved ones that day. We cannot, and should not, expect that. But the rest of us are going to have to come to grips with an equation: at what point is enough, enough? At what point does a thirst for vengeance become, to borrow a phrase from Mohandas Gandhi, “an eye for an eye, making the whole world blind?”

In March of 1776, as momentum built for the historic events that were to come, Abigail Adams wrote her husband John of her belief (quoting Shakespeare) in "a tide in the affairs of men".

If there is indeed a tide in the affairs of men, then this nation is as adrift today as the swollen, abandoned bodies of the floating dead of New Orleans.

The waters of irrational religious emotion and radical political ideology rise around us. They threaten the once invulnerable hill upon which Abigail's husband and his contemporaries took their historic stand.

The Revolutionary Generation built their shining city out of the bricks of hard won, carefully sifted, human experience and history. But today so many in this country see experience and history as a hindrance.

They throw caution to the wind, advocate preemptive war over the construction of secure levees and defenses, and treat their ideological fantasies as a set of magic bricks. These bricks appear so potent that our ne'er-do-well President imagines that he can use them to build the empire of his fevered imagination - and even fancies that God wills it so! As if God’s will could ever be known by mere mortals, except as through a glass, darkly.

I fear that we are fast becoming the kind of monster that John Adams and the Founders rose up to oppose; but there is still time enough to reverse that terrible tide.

Oh God, may the awful sight of our dead bring us back to our senses.

May the shock of their untimely deaths jar our collective memory.

May it reawaken in us the wisdom of men, whose sacrifice, commitment, and courage gave birth to this nation - and with it, a spontaneously generated, still unfolding, ever expanding tide of freedom, dignity, and democracy.

May the loss of so many innocents put an end to our delusions.

May it sear in the mind's eye these three lessons:

- that a well-funded, energetic government is the foundation of contemporary civilization;
- that concern for the physical safety and survival of our communities must forever trump ideological insanity;
- and that there are times when a nation's greatest impact, on this tide in the affairs of men, can only come through cultivation of their own garden.

Ever the cockeyed optimist, President Bush continued to insist this week that progress is being made in Iraq. Yet, as of Sunday morning, August 28th, it appeared increasingly likely that Sunni negotiators will urge their supporters to vote "No" on the flawed Constitution that Shiites and Kurds have agreed on. Their decision to oppose ratification could not only lead to rejection of the document at the polls, but also add fuel to the raging insurgency.

If that prospect were not enough to wipe the perpetual smirk off the President's face, one would think that two harrowing stories by Timothy M. Phelps, published on Thursday and Friday in New York Newsday, were more than enough to do the trick. These reports chronicled the rise of sectarian violence, and palatable loss of religious and intellectual freedom, in Southern Iraq.

As Phelps reported in his August 26, 2005 piece, “In new Iraq, a shaken faith”:

“For Yousef Lyon and other Christians in Basra, the downfall of Saddam Hussein has meant a terrible loss of religious freedom.”

"The social club where Lyon and his friends would gather in the evening to play dominoes, where families danced or listened to live music on holidays, is closed. Wedding celebrations are held quietly at home.”

"Of course, during the Saddam regime it was better," said Lyon, 40, a member of the city's small Armenian community. "Now we are afraid from the religious parties that maybe they will throw a bomb at us."

[Editors Note: This article appears as part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

The controversy surrounding what students are taught about the origins of life was reignited this week when President Bush endorsed an approach that would place the teaching of Intelligent Design on equal footing with the widely accepted Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.

As Bush explained on Tuesday, while recollecting his experience with the issue as Governor of Texas, "I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught." In response to a reporter’s follow-up query, pressing the President to clarify whether he believed that Intelligent Design represented a valid alterative to Evolution, Bush replied: "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."

As an advocate for the “spiritual and secular” left, I've been thinking a lot about this “origins” issue as of late.

[Editors Note: This article appears as part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

With Chapter Six of his Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse seeks to again remind his reader of the luminous power of the Tao. In this section, however, his focus is expressly on its feminine or “yin” dimension.

The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.

“As I go to a prison cell for a lifetime, I know that I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

These are the words Eric R. Rudolph, son of a former Catholic nun, and unrepentant American jihadist, upon being given two life sentences on July 18th for the murder of Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer. Rudolph pleaded guilty in April to the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama abortion clinic, and three bombings in Atlanta, including that of a gay club and the 1996 Olympic Centennial Park incident.

In a statement that accompanied his plea-bargain in April – a deal that allowed Rudolph to escape the death penalty – he offered the following rationale for his faith-based activism.

“Because I believe that abortion is murder, I also believe that force is justified in an attempt to stop it. Because this government is committed to maintaining the policy of abortion, and protecting it, the agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly.“

Navy Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt has a complaint. As noted in Laurie Goodstein’s July 12, 2005 New York Times story, Evangelicals Are a Growing Force in the Military Chaplain Corps, Klingenschmitt is one of fifty chaplains from Evangelical churches who have filed a class action suit against the United States Navy. This suit charges that these chaplains were unfairly dismissed from the Navy or denied promotion.

Klingenschmitt, a minister in the Evangelical Episcopal Church, first drew the ire of his Commanding officer during a memorial service for a fallen Catholic sailor. In his sermon, he warned everyone who had yet to accept Jesus as his or her savior that “God's wrath remains upon him". The chaplain was subsequently advised that his pastoral style was insufficiently inclusive, and after several such incidents, it was recommended that he not be retained.

Klingenschmitt has another view. As he argues in Goodstein’s story:

"The Navy wants to impose its religion on me. Religious pluralism is a religion. It's a theology all by itself."

Author’s note: I originally offered a version of this column in response to the events of September 11th, at Human Potential Left. In the aftermath of the London bombings, and the troubling religious rhetoric of the 2004 Presidential Campaign, its themes strike me as being as pertinent today as it was back then.

Humanity has yet to arrive at a collective conception of God. Each and every day, from Rome, to Calcutta, to Kyoto, to Mecca, to Manhattan, to Missoula, men and women offer praise to radically different conceptions of a Creator. This astonishing divergence of approach is both a testament to the richness of the human experience and the cause of extraordinary confusion. This confusion has a price.

For instance, the men responsible for the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon actually believed that the murder of innocent civilians in the name of Allah would result in their immediate installation in Paradise. While the clerics who endorse this deliberate misrepresentation of Islamic theology must bear the brunt of responsibility for the carnage that was the result of this teaching, they are not alone in the practice of "spinning" a conception of God to inspire dubious or crudely nationalistic action.

When Jerry Falwell inserted foot-in-mouth on the September 14, 2001 broadcast of the 700 Club, he was betraying a consciousness not far removed from that of hate-filled, terror-inspiring clerics.

God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.

[Editors Note: The next part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

On July 01, 2005, a date that marks the 142nd anniversary of the First Day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced that she was retiring from the Supreme Court. O’Connor has long been one of the so-called “swing” Justices on the current Court, and one of four Republican appointees (the others are Souter, Stevens, and Kennedy) who have supported the position that Roe v. Wade should be considered settled law.

In selecting Justice O’Connor’s successor, President Bush will have an unique opportunity to demonstrate his ability to lead. At a moment when America is already at war in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and still pursuing the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, will he choose to unite the American people in this hour of great peril? Or, will he instead choose to impose his subjective religious convictions on a spiritually diverse people, through choosing an ideologically extreme conservative nominee, regardless of the consequences? And make no mistake: if President Bush chooses unwisely, the consequences will be dire.

In the Fifth Chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse offers his thoughts on an old controversy that has been receiving renewed attention as of late.

The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.

Never has the sage’s wisdom in this verse been more pertinent than in our era of sacred madness. For while President Bush is apt to describe the terrorists as “evildoers”, we do well to remember that they see themselves as holy warriors striking a blow against the imagined enemy of God. They expect their ultimate end to be an eternity in Paradise, not the Inferno.

Editor's Note: Matthew Carnicelli, the author of the Democracy Cell Project's exclusive series examining the intersection of religion and politics, returns from sabbatical this Sunday with an open letter to New York Times columnist, David Brooks. This letter was composed in direct response to Brooks' June 12, 2005 column: "The Wisdom We Need to Fight AIDS".

The URL for Brooks' original column is:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/12/opinion/edbrooks.php.

Dear Mr. Brooks,

In his 1958 novel, "A Mixture of Frailties", Robertson Davies offered a contemporary definition of chastity as "body in soul's possession". Whether one is describing the tragedies of AIDS devastation in sub-Saharan Africa or that of the bare-backers of Fire Island and Key West, Davies' definition strikes me as one that is as relevant as any in our time.

People of good will - be they straight or gay, or politically liberal or conservative, or be they traditionally religious, or spiritual and secular, or secular and ethical - are largely in agreement that the hyper-sexuality of our era is simply unsustainable. But the vexing question we must answer is how we go about transforming this situation.

[Editors Note: The next part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

Tom Delay’s House of Representatives passed legislation on Wednesday night that foreshadows the future of reproductive rights in any era after Roe v. Wade is overturned.

The bill, the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, would make it a Federal crime for any adult to accompany a minor across state lines in order to have an abortion without parental consent.

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

This week brought yet another example of the confusion that arises from any attempt by the Federal Government to become involved in the sanctioning or regulating of religious practice. As Linda Greenhouse reported in the April 19, 2005 edition of The New York Times, in an article entitled Supreme Court to Hear Case of Dispute Over Religious Group's Use of Banned Drug:

The Supreme Court added an important new religion case to its docket on Monday, agreeing to decide whether the government can ban the importation of a hallucinogenic tea that is central to the religious rituals of a small Brazil-based church.

The case raises the broader question of how the court will interpret, in the context of an illegal drug, a law that ordinarily requires the federal government to refrain to the maximum extent possible from interfering with religious practices.

In this next installment of The Tao of Politics, I intend to use the arrival of Earth Day (on April 22) as an opportunity to apply Lao Tse's wisdom to one of the critical issues of our time. That issue is the urgent need for the development of environmentally friendly, renewable sources of energy.

In the Fourth Chapter of the Tao Te Ching, the sage invites his reader to contemplate a cosmos of infinite possibilities.

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

In one of the seminal moments of the 1960 Presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy sought to assure the American people that he would not take orders from a Pope. In a famous address to Southern Baptist leaders, Kennedy affirmed:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source – where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

Battles between American freethinkers and religious traditionalists are nothing new in our nation’s history. What is new is that we’re witnessing the emergence of the next generation of freethinkers on the political scene. And their experience mirrors the journey of the Founders and Framers in several key ways. This group is best described as the “Spiritual Not Religious” or “Secular and Spiritual” bloc in American politics.

Mel Gibson’s celebrated/infamous The Passion of the Christ returned to movie theatres this week in a sanitized version. This latest cut of the film is about six minutes shorter than the edition that appeared in theatres in 2004. The cuts largely come from the lengthy scourging scene that disturbed many viewers who otherwise enjoyed the film.

Given its recent return to theatres, Easter Sunday strikes me as the perfect day to raise a few knotty questions about the film, and its continuing popularity. Two thousand years later, why make a passion film at all? Why emphasize Christ’s suffering, and the violence done to him, to such an extraordinary degree – as opposed to the teachings that Thomas Jefferson described as “more pure, correct and sublime than those of the ancient philosophers?” And inasmuch as torture and hideous forms of execution haven’t exactly disappeared from the world stage, and that senseless brutality and violence are a staple of Hollywood blockbusters, why exactly is the film’s graphic violence having such a powerful impact on Catholic, evangelical and fundamentalist audiences?

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

In the third chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse begins by touching on two seemingly unrelated ideas that actually hover around a central axis. Let us initially explore each thought separately.

If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.

In this first sentence, Lao Tse is in my view describing our tendency to put inspirational leaders – like Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, for instance – on a pedestal, to make them seem as imposing and larger-than-life as a father or mother must appear to a small child.

[Editors Note: This is the next article in our ongoing series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

As a follow-up to last week’s column on the Ten Commandments, my focus this week will be on the political and economic implications of one of those Commandments: Thou Shall Not Steal. Assuming that one accepts it as being applicable to a 21st Century world, what would adherence to this moral imperative require of us?

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

The United States Supreme Court heard arguments this week in two cases – Van Orden v. Perry, 03-1500, and McCreary County v. ACLU, 03-1693 – that challenge the constitutionality of displays of the Ten Commandments on government property. The presentation of oral arguments in these cases provides an excellent pretext for a further exploration of the complex role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in early United States history. My task of historical excavation is complicated by the fact that the Ten Commandments held by Catholics, Protestants and Jews are not identical. So, for the sake of clarity, I refer exclusively to the Protestant version in the following analysis.

As I have noted earlier, the Founders and Framers were an intellectually diverse group. Some were Christians of one denomination or another (and differing degrees of conviction), while others were Deists. They drew their inspiration from a wide range of authors and sources – from the historians and orators of Greece and Rome like Polybius, Plutarch, Sallust, Tacitus, and Cicero, to contemporary thinkers like Locke, Hume, Hutcheson, Montesquieu and Beccaria. As we saw with Thomas Jefferson, some of these men might also have been inspired by the philosophical tenets of Jesus, but were not believers in his divinity.

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

In the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse turns to the inevitable problems introduced through human beings’ tendency to unnecessarily compare and contrast things, to judge them - often as a means of bolstering one’s own self-esteem, or imagined standing in God’s eyes, or reputation within a community.

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

So, for instance, with regard to a form of human expression like homosexuality – which scientists increasingly tell us represents a genetic disposition, and not the impact of inappropriate parenting or a character defect – it is my view that Lao Tse here is suggesting that it is our need to rigidly define “beautiful” and “ugly” that unnecessarily sows disharmony in a nation, and within the larger human family.

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

I became a political activist on September 11, 2001. As I watched American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the World Trade Center's twin towers here in New York, I was overcome by a sense of dread. I feared that the planet was in danger of being been overrun by yet another wave of collective insanity. I groped for a few days for something that I could to do that might make a meaningful difference; and after the initial shock and numbness had worn off, I began to write. My subject then, as today, as I expect that it will be for the rest of my life, was the impact of consciousness, spirituality, and psychology on human affairs.

I hadn’t heard of the Council of the Parliament of World’s Religions back then. I didn’t know that eight years earlier, in 1993, in the aftermath of the first World Trade Center bombing, representatives of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, numerous indigenous spiritual traditions, and a host of other religions, had sounded a clarion call for global change and transformation – the Declaration Towards a Global Ethic – a declaration that might, had it been heeded, have actually prevented events like 9/11, or the later Madrid Train Station bombing, from ever taking place.

[Editors Note: Part of our ongoing Sunday series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

Unlike our current President, I often wonder how it is that I could have lived this long and yet still know so little. Take as a case in point my complete ignorance until just recently of a remarkable volume entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth – better known to posterity as The Jefferson Bible.

I wonder how is it that, despite years of Catholic education, knowledge of this uniquely American distillation of the four Gospels could have escaped me? This omission strikes me as both substantial and problematic.

[Editors Note: This is the first article in an ongoing series examining the intersection of religion and politics and its relationship to our present state of democracy, written exclusively for the DCP, by Matthew Carnicelli]

With the very first lines of his Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse sets the stage for the journey to come by reminding his readers of a profound mystery that underpins all spiritual exploration.

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

On a planet where men and women of good will evoke God by different names, and honor His existence through different customs and rituals, the “self-evident” conclusion one necessarily arrives at is that the ultimate truth of God’s nature is truly beyond all human understanding. Lao Tse's observation in this regard mirrors the Apostle Paul's later reflection (in his First Letter to the Corinthians) that:

For now we see as through a glass, darkly.

This realization has profound political implications, and let me suggest that these implications did not escape the attention of the Founding Fathers.

Lao Tse continues in this first chapter with the following observations:

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

The problem of “naming” is acute with regard to the search for spiritual understanding. For instance, when we choose to refer to God, what should we call Her? And which set of doctrines and scriptural revelations, if any, should we consider definitive? The Founding Generation confronted this thorny issue in their own era, the period that historians describe as “the Enlightenment”. The response of quite a number of these Founders and Framers (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Paine, among others) was their adoption of the religious-philosophical perspective of Deism.