eChurch Blog

Initially I was in two minds whether to post on this as my sources are – shall we say – not friendly towards Islam. However, having read earlier today of the petrol bombing of a French satirical paper (Charlie Hedbo) following their decision to appoint Mohammed as its ‘guest editor’ in order to mark the victory of an Islamist party in the Tunisian elections, I’ve decided to highlight two recent incidents.

The first is a report that Muslims have attacked Christians attending a Catholic celebration in Nîmes, Southern France, with stones:

The Joyeuse Union Don Bosco [Joyous Union Don Bosco] takes place in Nîmes, at the Sanctuary of Our Lady the Virgin of Santa Cruz.

After a day of welcoming and reunions, around 7 pm, the participants were leaving in their cars and vehicles when “young Arab immigrants” from the city started to throw stones at the vehicles descending from the sanctuary.

The local police, whose station is in this area, were immediately notified and the event organisers had to arrange a diversion to another route to protect the occupants of the vehicles from the savage attacks which continued.

As a word of caution, this is mainly being reported on anti-Islamic and far-right websites and is based on one media report in the La Provence. An image of the article is available here in French. As I don’t speak French I can’t corroborate the media report and if anyone can do this for me I’d be grateful.

The second report is that of an Algerian Muslim hacker taking control of hundreds of French websites, many associated with the Catholic faith, and replacing their normal content with a boastful graphic and this text:

“Algerian never forget revenge 1 Nov 1954/1 Nov 2011″. This commemorates the 50-year anniversary of the outbreak of the Algerian revolution.

Below the graphic appears a list of 475 websites the hacker claims to have control over, including the main website of the Catholic church in France. A message also proclaims:

No God But Allah and Mohammed is Messenger Of Allah
Isalm Is Real Way
www.discover-islam.net

If these reports are accurate, and I do again urge caution, then this would represent a disturbing escalation in Muslim-Catholic tensions in France.

UPDATE: Blonpidge has informed me that the La Provence report:

Translation was slightly exaggerated. Stones were thrown by youths from neighbouring cities, says nothing about race

They had to detour, but there’s nothing about them being followed and attacked.

Article more about the event. It doesn’t state that the attackers were Muslim.

UPDATE II: Cheradenine Zakalwe of IslamVerusEurope has been kind enough to make the following clarification:

That is not the article I translated.  The link to the article I translated is given at the bottom of at the bottom of my original post:

http://www.petitsechodoran.com/l-immigration/l-immigration,r369828.html

The other article has less detail. Of course it doesn’t describe the attackers as “Muslim”. In many European countries, there are laws and trade regulations that prevent journalists honestly describing ethnic minority perpetrators of crime. Often, you have to read between the lines. The article I did translate is less restrained.

That’s the headline emblazoned on the Richard Dawkins website (Thoughts of God Make Us Slackers, Study Suggests), which has been lifted verbatim from the LiveScience website.

As usual things are a little more nuanced than first appear and the excellent Tom Rees of Epiphenom has written up the study; which I’ll reproduce here under his Creative Commons License:

According to some new research, your ideas about gods can significantly affect your approach to life. Lead researcher Kristin Laurin (at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada) and colleagues Aaron Kay and Grinne M. Fitzsimons (Duke University) ran a series of priming studies, in which the subjects had to form sentences from scrambled sets of words or read a passage about god as part of a bigger study (so they didn’t cotton on to the fact that they were being primed). By carefully choosing the words, the researchers could subliminally prime the subjects (all undergraduate students) with different ideas about God.

What they were interested to know was whether reminding people about God can make people less interested in actively pursuing goals (perhaps because they think that God will take care of everything for them) or better able to resist temptation (perhaps because they think God is watching them and will frown upon moral weaknesses!). What they found was that both things can happen, although which effect you see depends upon the type of God that you prime.

So, for example, when they primed the students with a passage describing a controlling God who “understands what it is like to be in our shoes”, they found that the students subsequently expressed less interest in signing up to additional study to attain career goals (such as becoming a lawyer, nurse or stockbroker). However, other students primed with the same god concept declared that they were more able to resist the temptation to hang out and have fun with their friends on an evening when they should be studying for an important exam that was a required step in attaining that career.

In other words, if you pump up people’s idea of god as controlling, then they feel more able to resist temptation, but less inclined to work hard to achieve their goals!

In other studies, they dug into other facets of this relationship. They found that students primed with the idea of god valued achieving just as much, it’s just that they were less inclined to put the effort in.

Participants who had read a short passage about God subsequently ate fewer cookies than did those who had read a control passage about a topic unrelated to God. Resistance to temptation was particularly strengthened in students who read passages describing God’s omniscience.

The researchers conclude that reminders of God can influence real world goals in both positive and negative ways. What the overall effect will be will depend on what exactly the task in hand is – whether it requires self control or the drive to achieve. It also, they say, depends on what kind of God you have in mind:

If, on the one hand, a person is reminded of God, and this activates the representation of an omnipotent, but not omniscient, external force (whether as a result of features of the reminder itself or as a result of how the person represents God), the net influence on the person’s self-regulation might be negative. If, on the other hand, a person is reminded of God, and this activates the representation of an omniscient, but not omnipotent, external force (whether as a result of features of the reminder itself or as a result of how the person represents God), the net influence on the person’s self-regulation might be positive.

During the recent hacking scandals that beset Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, and more specifically the ‘News of the World‘, it came to light that Rupert Murdoch publishes and controls great swathes of Christian literature, through HarperCollins Publishing -  a division of NewsCorp – who bought out Zondervan in 1988.

As an example, the New International Version of the Bible is published by Zondervan, and here’s what Zondervan say about it:

According to Zondervan, publisher of the NIV, the translation has become the most popular modern English translation of the Bible, having sold more than 215 million copies worldwide. It continues to be one of the top ten selling Bibles

Given the control over Christian literature publishing Rupert Murdock already enjoys, coupled with the questions raised over the NewsCorp hacking allegations, and their general standards of ethics and morality; I’m not sure how comfortable I feel in NewsCorp consolidating their grip over Christian publishing yet further:

Publisher HarperCollins reached an agreement Monday to buy fellow publisher Thomas Nelson, a move that will bring the two largest religion book publishers in the country under one corporation.

Lyn Cryderman, a former Zondervan publisher, said the move makes “HarperCollins the largest Christian publisher in the United States.”

Brian Murray, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, cited Thomas Nelson’s wide reach into “books, Bibles, e-books, journals, audio, video, curriculum and digital applications” as a reason for the acquisition.

HarperCollins is the parent company of Zondervan, a Bible publisher whose Christian authors include megachurch pastor Rick Warren.

“Thomas Nelson adds further balance to our existing publishing programs,” Murray said in a press release. “Its broad inspirational appeal is a good complement to Zondervan, which will continue to publish books consistent with its mission.”

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of News Corporation, a multinational media company headed by Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate who earlier this year was plagued by hacking and phone-tapping allegations at some of his publications in the United Kingdom.

During the hacking scandal, some of Zondervan’s authors questioned how a company who owns the rights to the world’s best-selling English bible, the New International Version, could be associated with ethics violations.

Zondervan distributes books to over 100 countries.

…..continue

The communion of saints is something I never tire of meditating on. The thought that you and I are saints by virtue of our membership of the Church is always uplifting. Weak, fallible, crotchety creatures that we are, there is something about us that is infinitely more important than the sum of our failures. Add to that our fellowship with the saints in heaven, and you can see why the Church regards the Solemnity of All Saints as one of the most important feasts of the year. With the celebration of All Souls tomorrow, this great feast of the Church will be complete: the Church in heaven, the Church on earth and the Church in purgatory, awaiting the resurrection.

SOURCE