Reason Magazine - Topics > Religion

Monumental Terror

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:24:00 EST

In a case the U.S. Supreme Court will hear tomorrow, followers of Summum, a 33-year-old sect that (per The New York Times) "contains elements of Egyptian faiths and Gnostic Christianity," are fighting for the right to erect a monument listing their Seven Aphorisms alongside a Fraternal Order of the Eagles monument displaying the Ten Commandments in a city park. Last year a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled that Pleasant Grove City, Utah, violated Summum members' First Amendment right to freedom of speech by rejecting the monument they proposed to donate. The government "may not take sides in a theological debate," the church argues. Critics of the decision, including the Bush administration and various cities and states, say it would require governments that accept any donated displays on public property to approve virtually every other proposal, no matter how hideous, offensive, or idiotic. "Accepting a Statue of Liberty," the city says, should not "compel a government to accept a Statue of Tyranny." Tenth Circuit Judge Michael McConnell, who unsuccessfully urged the full court to rehear the case, has more in the same vein:

This means that Central Park in New York, which contains the privately donated Alice in Wonderland statue, must now allow other persons to erect Summum's "Seven Aphorisms," or whatever else they choose (short of offending a policy that narrowly serves a "compelling" governmental interest). Every park in the country that has accepted a VFW memorial is now a public forum for the erection of permanent fixed monuments; they must either remove the war memorials or brace themselves for an influx of clutter.
Significantly, the religious nature of the donated monuments is not relevant to the free speech question (though it would be to an Establishment Clause challenge). These cases happen to involve Ten Commandments monuments, but it could work the other way. A city that accepted the donation of a statue honoring a local hero could be forced, under the panel's rulings, to allow a local religious society to erect a Ten Commandments monument—or for that matter, a cross, a nativity scene, a statue of Zeus, or a Confederate flag.

The Summum church says governments that want to avoid such problems can decline to accept donated monuments (thereby creating a "public forum" where viewpoint discrimination is constitutionally suspect) or explicitly adopt the donors' message as their own (thereby transforming private speech into government speech). It does not mention park privatization as a third option.

In the June issue of reason, Jesse Walker noted how a similar controversy in Crossville, Tennessee, led to just the sort of monument proliferation McConnell fears.

Satan's Faces

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

If you head to a Halloween party tonight in a devil's mask and a flowing red cape, you'll embody an array of ideas that might seem mutually exclusive: the allure of a Devil's Food Cake and the fear of the demon within, the cosmic enemy in a Jack Chick comic and a camp figure on South Park. Over the last two millennia, Satan has worn many masks. In the pluralistic postmodern era, he wears them all.

The most thorough account of Lucifer's many guises may be A History of the Devil: From the Middle Ages to the Present (2000), a sweeping chronicle by the French writer Robert Muchembled. An historian at the University of Paris XIII, Muchembled is spending this semester as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan; his most recent tome, Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the 16th Century to the Present (2005), will make its American debut at the end of the year. If you think there might be some thematic overlap between the two books, you're correct. "I still had this question, after so much research: Why did you have people thinking some women had intercourse with the devil?" Muchembled says. "The problem of pleasure is also important here, because in the trials the judges were asking the witches, 'Did you get pleasure from the devil?' The answer would always be, 'No, not at all! It was very painful, it was ice cold.'"

By Muchembled's account, our shifting visions of Satan are closely linked to some of the central events and trends of the last millennium: the wars of religion, the rise of the modern state, the regulation of sexuality, the ever-present search for scapegoats. He draws on a rich variety of cultural artifacts to make his case, from medieval sculpture and painting to modern movies and comics, from the "devil books" of 16th century Germany to the canards of 17th century France.

The first major change in the European conception of the devil, he argues, took place at the end of the Middle Ages. Before then Satan was seen as a small-scale, almost comic figure, cursed with a shrewish wife and regularly outsmarted by ordinary peasants. Tales along those lines persisted in Western folklore for centuries afterwards, but as new forms of sovereignty emerged on Earth a similar process took hold in Hell. Lucifer grew larger, and so did the number of demons at his command. In the art of the 14th century and afterwards, Muchembled writes, "The signs of Lucifer's power are now heavily emphasized: he is bigger than the other demons, seated, and even, exceptionally, wears a crown." The threat of an afterlife in Hell, meanwhile, reenforced the power of the earthly authorities. If the rise of powerful monarchs allowed a new model of Satan to take hold, the new Satan in turn proved advantageous to the monarchies.

A similar coevolution was at work in the witch-hunting mania of the early modern era, which spread with the wars that pitted Protestants against Catholics. "Contemporaries," Muchembled reports, "were impatient for the return of social harmony, not through tolerance, which was hardly a functioning concept at the time, but under a firm hand that would ensure that every transgression was vigorously punished." It was a worldview in which both Satan and the state were, in effect, arms of God, punishing deviants both on Earth and in the underworld.

Meanwhile, the number of deviants deserving punishment was multiplying. In cultures that increasingly prized obediance and conformity, the authorites found fresh ways to ask their subjects to obey and conform. "The diabolic discourse," Muchembled notes, had already begun "to refer to the human body as it ought not to function," an association that over time would take in everything from legends of human-animal chimeras to new efforts to control sexuality. In 16th century France, it would mean a wave of moral prohibitions intended to strengthen the state by enforcing a particular family structure. Royal edicts buttressed the authority of men over women and of parents over children; there were crackdowns on sodomy and adultery, and an "increasingly close supervision imposed on women."

Muchembled draws the obvious connections between this repression and the misogyny of the witch hunts. But the cultural effects did not stop there. The era's intolerant attitudes applied to actual knowledge as well as carnal knowledge: It is in this period that we see the first legends of Faust, the scholar who traded his soul to Mephistopheles for a quarter century of power, pleasure, and enlightenment. In that day, Faust's ends as well as his means were considered suspect. "To know everything, to do everything and to taste everything"—Faust's dream—"was now seen as a rebellion against God," writes Muchembled.

With the end of the wars of religion and then the dawn of the Enlightenment, Hell's power waned. It became possible for young Romantics to openly identify themselves with the devil, taking an idea nascent in Paradise Lost and transforming it into a full-blown commitment to Satan as a rebel angel. Superficially, this may look like a growth in Lucifer's strength—actual Satanists, publicly parading their infidelity!—but in practical terms it meant he was being tamed. Baudelaire famously told us that the devil's greatest trick was to persuade us that he does not exist, but you could as easily argue that nothing deflates his power, on Earth if not afterward, like an encounter with his terrestrial representatives. Compare the Luciferian conspiracies of the witch-hunters' imagination to the pathetic reality of a suburban Satanic coven. We may have our periodic panics over heavy metal murders or ritual child abuse, but there's nothing like the loser who spent every math class carving the words "Iron Maiden" onto his desk to keep our worst fears in check. That's the Dark One's minions?

Today, advertisers have embraced a mild Satanism of their own, with candies pitched as "sinful" and demonic figures appearing on hot sauces and beers. In some ways we've come full circle. South Park, the most Rabelaisian entertainment on TV, offers a throwback to the devil of a thousand years ago: henpecked, fallible, easily outwitted, more an object of burlesque than a figure of fear.

Unfortunately, Muchembled's discussion of the modern era is the weakest part of his book. He offers insightful comments on texts ranging from the tales of H.P. Lovecraft to the films of Val Lewton, but he tries to force them into an oversimplified dichotomy between the cultures of Europe and the United States. This requires a less-than-nuanced view of both the contents of American pop culture and the ways different audiences receive it; there are no references here to Jack Chick parodies or to South Park, no hints that a Pentagram-sporting Middle American metalhead might bring some ironic distance to that occultic imagery. (Instead, we get the usual European disapproval of American firearms.) When I spoke with Muchembled, he granted that he had painted the U.S. with a broad brush, but he suggested that you could still divide modern attitudes toward the devil, both in America and elsewhere, into "two sides. One saying the devil exists. The other saying no."

Not that there's any shortage of secularized Satans for people who've given up on formal religion. The fear of the devil within us certainly persists, though Freud and others have given us a different vocabulary with which to discuss him. And external Satans? They're as close as the cocaine in your cousin's closet or the pedophile living under the bridge into town.

For Halloween tonight, revelers will dress as witches and ghosts, vampires and aliens, zombies and werewolves and Old Nick himself. It will be lighthearted fun, an evening of collective play-acting that nearly everyone involved will recognize as make-believe—a throwback of sorts to the old medieval carnivals.

At the same time, fearful families across America will be on the lookout for razors in their apples and poison in their candy, for serial killers and child molesters. The Texas blogger Scott Hanson has pointed out that there's only one known case of a trick-or-treating child being abducted by a stranger; it happened 35 years ago, and the criminal in question "had no prior record and wouldn't have been on any sex offender registry even if it had existed." This shouldn't be surprising, given that young trick-or-treaters generally go out with adult supervision. Nonetheless, state and local governments will put on their annual show of protecting children against everyone on the local registries, whether or not the offenders' crimes involved minors. In a move that seems excessive even in the current climate, New York has made it illegal for sex offenders to possess Halloween candy. And in Texas, the San Antonio Express-News reports, they're "required to turn off their porch lights and are prohibited from having any exterior decorations between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m. on Halloween, with parole, probation and police officers checking to see if they comply."

Call it a protective ritual against an unseen enemy. In our terrors, like our joys, we might not be so different from our ancestors after all.

Jesse Walker is the managing editor of reason and the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America.

Edible Googly Eyes Undermine Faith in God

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:32:00 EDT

The New York Times food section is always a joy, with its declarations that a $65 sushi prix fixe is "affordable" dining, its demands that we schlep to Brooklyn for the authentic experience of drinking beer made in Utica, and articles titled things like "Vinegars Hear Muses of Long Ago." (All this, just in yesterday's edition!)

But the good people at the NYT have let me (and Serious Eats) down. In an article about food-based science projects, they failed to property identify a flying spaghetti monster, captioning it: "Malted milk ball eyes atop a noodle monster."

Here at reason, we know anti-creationist humor when we see it. Jesse Walker explains:

Behold the Flying Spaghetti Monster, noodle-god of the Pastafarians....The monster was created—or revealed?—by Bobby Henderson when Kansas decided to teach “intelligent design” alongside evolution. “I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster,” he wrote to the state board of education in 2005, urging that this theory receive equal time.

For an brilliant, obsessive account of how to make your own edible googly eyes without a single drop of divine intervention, go here.

For a comprehensive source on flying spaghetti monster sightings, go here.

Devils on Your Radio

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:20:00 EDT

I'll be hosting/mixing a special Halloween edition of my weekly radio show today: a three-hour Celebration of Fear, with music, theater, and found sound devoted not just to traditional ghosts and monsters but to conspiracies, extraterrestrials, and a host of social anxieties. It's airing from 12 noon to 3 pm, eastern time, on WCBN-FM; listen live here.

Does Religion Make People Nicer?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

In his new movie Religulous, comedian Bill Maher makes wicked fun of the religiously credulous. But it turns out that the folks who believe in talking snakes and seventy-two virgins per martyr may be on to something. As whacky as some dogmas are, religions do appear to encourage generosity and honesty. At least that is the claim made in a fascinating review article, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" (subscription required) published in the current issue of Science.

Evolutionary biologists argue that there's nothing surprising about genetically related individuals making sacrifices for their kin: They are helping some of their own genes get passed along to the next generation. But what might cause people to make sacrifices for the good of unrelated strangers? Here, according to University of British Columbia social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim F. Shariff, religion plays a key role.

The authors have winnowed three decades of empirical evidence looking for examples of religious prosociality, which they define as "the idea that religions facilitate acts that benefit others at a personal cost." Specifically, their hypothesis is that religion encourages people to sacrifice their individual fitness for the benefit of unrelated individuals or for their group. For example, young men may risk sacrificing themselves in war to protect their tribe. So how does religion encourage prosociality? The answer is that being watched by a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky tends to make believers nervous about being selfish.

This observation accords with numerous studies showing that people behave better when they think that someone may be watching them. For example, one remarkable study in 2006 found that just being under the gaze of eyes on a poster nearly tripled the contributions to an office coffee kitty. Exposing participants in a laboratory economic game to computer-generated eyespots while they played made them twice as generous as those who were not. Another study found that participants in a laboratory economic game were nearly four times stingier with other players when they thought they were anonymous than when they thought they were being observed. In other words, watched people are nicer people. Why should that be? It's because we want to have the reputation of being cooperative and prosocial so that other people, especially strangers, will want to cooperate with us.

"The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocial reputational concerns among believers, just as the cognitive awareness of human watchers does among believers and non-believers alike," hypothesize the authors. But supernatural oversight is even better because it "offers the powerful advantage that cooperative interactions can be observed even in the absence of social monitoring."

So does religion work, in the sense of encouraging prosocial other-regarding behavior? It depends. In one famous 1973 study, degrees of religiosity did not predict which students would stop to help someone lying on a sidewalk appearing to be sick. However, in another experiment, two players would simultaneously decide how much money to withdraw from the same envelope—if their combined withdrawals exceeded the amount in the envelope, neither would get any money. Systematically, less money was withdrawn when the game was played at religious kibbutzim than when it was played at secular kibbutzim. This finding supported the researchers' prediction that "men who participate in communal prayer most frequently will exhibit the highest levels of cooperation."

So why do religious believers tend cooperate more? In one illuminating study cited by the researchers, volunteers were given the option to raise money for a sick child's medical bills. Some would-be volunteers were told that it was very likely that they would be asked to help, while others were told that there was only a small chance that they would be called on. "In the latter condition, participants could reap the social benefits of feeling (or appearing) helpful without the cost of the actual altruistic act. Only in the latter situation was a link between religiosity and volunteering evident," claim Norenzayan and Shariff. Religion played a role when it appeared that volunteering would improve one's reputation without much personal cost.

Even more interesting are studies that find that invoking an unseen watcher enhances moral behavior. In one amazing experiment, when participants were told that the ghost of a dead student was haunting the experimental room, they cheated less on a computer test. Other researchers report that when experimental subjects were primed with religious words, they cheated significantly less on a subsequent task. Similarly, Norenzayan and Shariff found that subjects in experimental economic games were more generous when God concepts were implicitly activated before play.

The authors hypothesize that the belief in morally concerned gods who keep track of who's been naughty or nice helps create and stabilize large-scale societies. "Large groups, which until recently lacked institutionalized social-monitoring mechanisms, are vulnerable to collapse because of high rates of freeloading. If unwavering and pervasive belief in moralizing gods buffered against such freeloading, then belief in such gods should be more likely in larger human groups where the threat of freeloading is most acute," suggest the authors. In fact, a cross cultural analysis of 186 societies confirms this prediction: The larger a society, the more likely its members believe in deities that are concerned about human morality.

In small hunter-gatherer bands or subsistence farming villages, it's pretty easy to keep track of just how cooperative your neighbors are. But when groups grow to encompass thousands and eventually millions of strangers, a Big-Brother-in-the-Sky can watch how your fellow citizens behave when you can't. And even better, Sky Big Brother can punish them with eternal damnation if they swindle you. One big downside is that groups have different Sky Big Brothers, which means that "the same mechanisms involved in ingroup altruism may also facilitate outgroup antagonism." In other words, kill the infidels!

Shariff and Norenzayan note that while religion remains a powerful facilitator of prosociality in large groups, modern societies have devised secular replacements for Sky Big Brother, including courts, police, and other contract-enforcing institutions. Also, the modern world is headed toward a transparent society in which social monitoring will be nearly as omnipresent as that of a hunter-gatherer band. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies will enable anyone to assess your reputation for prosociality with a few mouse clicks. Sky Big Brother is being outsourced to the Web.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

'Mickey Mouse Should Be Killed in All Cases'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:51:00 EDT

Sheikh Muhammad Munajid, a Muslim cleric and former Saudi diplomat with a show on Iqra TV, deplores the influence of cartoon mice such as Mickey and Jerry, who encourage children to believe the filthy rodents are benign and lovable:

According to Islamic law, the mouse is a repulsive, corrupting creature. How do you think children view mice today—after Tom and Jerry?
Even creatures that are repulsive by nature, by logic, and according to Islamic law have become wonderful and are loved by children. Even mice.
Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.

Don't even get him started on Porky Pig.

Is this the real reason Farfour had to go? If so, what should we make of the fact that he was "beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land"? Perhaps fictional rodent eradication is a cause that can unite Muslims and Jews.

'Gratuitous Insults Must Be Punished'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:49:00 EDT

A prosecutor is threatening Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti with a five-year prison term for telling a joke about Pope Benedict XVI in Hell, "tormented by great big poofter devils," at an anti-government rally in July. According to the London Times, Rome prosecutor Giovanni Ferrara claims Guzzanti violated the Mussolini-era Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Vatican, which "stipulates that an insult to the Pope carries the same penalty as an insult to the Italian President." (I gather that Italians also can go to prison for insulting their president, currently a former senator named Giorgio Napolitano.) Ferrara has to get permission from the Ministry of Justice for the prosecution, which Guzzanti's father, a member of Parliament, called "a return to the Middle Ages." One of his colleagues, Christian Democrat Luca Volonte, either disagrees or pines for the days of the Inquisiton, saying "gratuitous insults must be punished." The pope, meanwhile, already has forgiven Guzzanti, or so a Jesuit scholar speculates.

[via The Freedom Files]

Turkey Bans Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins' Website

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:48:00 EDT

Creationism is not just for certain fundamentalist Christians anymore. Monsters and Critics is reporting:

Turkish internet users have been blocked via a court order from accessing the site of prominent British biologist Richard Dawkins after complaints from lawyers for Islamic creationist author Adnan Oktar, the website of Turkish television station NTV reported on Wednesday.

A court in Istanbul ordered that Turk Telekom block access to the site and since the weekend Turkish internet users seeking the site have been redirected to a page that says in Turkish 'access to this site has been suspended in accordance with a court decision'.

NTV reported that Oktar complained he and his creationist book 'Atlas of Creation' had been defamed by comments made by Dawkins on the site.

'I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content,' Dawkins, a distinguished advocate of the theory of evolution, wrote on his website in July referring to the Atlas of Creation.

The book has caused controversy not just through its advocation of creationism but also through how thousands of copies of book were distributed to schools in a number of European countries.

Thank whatever deity (or none) for the First Amendment which protects both free speech and religious practice.

Hat tip to Eric Jon Magnuson.

It Usually Begins with Roger Williams

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:29:00 EDT

Roger Williams is one of the all-time greats when it comes to truly liberal (read: libertarian) thought: the articulator of fully secular government; humane and equal treatment of Native Americans; and toleration of all—Jews, Muslims, atheists, even Catholics!—in a time when none of that was in fashion.

Now the apostle of peace is at the center of a very entertaining imbroglio. Frequent Hit & Run commenter and blogger and movie critic extraordinaire Alan Vanneman reviews Martha Nussbaum's recent New Republic review of a new collection of Williams' writings (take a breath to catch up) and comes out swinging:

Like Martha, I'm a big fan of Roger Williams, and her article, which largely consists of quotes from Roger, makes good reading. (It's also a great way to pad your word count.) Martha also has some very good things to say about the categorical imperative, of which I am a very big fan. So where's my beef?

Well, first of all, Martha starts off with the observation that "the struggle to create societies that protect religious liberty and show respect for religious difference is never-ending." I can agree with that, but then she starts pushing. "When we consider the current uproar over Muslim immigration, particularly in Europe, we can see that the allegedly enlightened societies of the West still have a lot of learning to do."

Really? The problem is with the "allegedly enlightened societies of the West"? How about the aggressively unenlightened societies of Islam, societies that are deliberately seeking to emulate, and even exaggerate, the ruthless intolerance of the medieval past? Martha coyly does not say exactly what "we" are doing wrong. She doesn't say whether we should allow Muslim men to have seven wives, whether she's down with stoning adulterous women to death, whether Salman Rushdie should have been handed over to Iran for execution, whether we should ban Dante for speaking ill of the prophet, or whether we should execute living translators of the Comedy. She doesn't say anything other than that it's "our" fault....
I don't like the idea, which Nussbaum is pushing, that anything "religious" or religiously inspired is in fact sacred, because I don't believe in "the sacred." Nussbaum is pushing this idea, of course, because she wants to use it as a stick to beat us Enlightenment types who tend to turn up our noses at, well, medieval fanaticism. I doubt very much if Nussbaum is supportive of the proposed "freedom of conscience" regulations being sponsored by the Bush Administration that would allow employees of pharmacies, hospitals, and other institutions the "right" to refuse to provide contraceptives to those requesting them.

Well worth reading in full.

NY Gov. David Paterson Is Really Anti-Markets and Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland Is Really Stupid

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:39:00 EDT

Democratic New York Gov. David Paterson was on The Colbert Report the other day. Here's what he had to say about free markets:

The free market would destroy health care as we know it. It has been a problem in terms of the deficit. We've run up $490 million in this year alone. I think it hasn't helped in terms of business because jobs have been offshored and sent overseas. So I think there are two different theories [of government] but we've seen the example of one of them after the last eight years and we probably wouldn't want four more years of the same thing.

More here (I can never get Comedy Central links to embed properly).

I'd love to see the destruction of health care as we know it—especially given that the public sector spends a majority of the money for it, and George W. Bush blew the doors out with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, etc. Paterson's sort of anti-market demagoguery strikes me as stupid, but it's really not a good sign for the Empire State if its chief executive is still talking like Mario Cuomo.

Also on TCR, a hilarious interview update with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.), who really should be kept away from heavy machinery and cars. Westmoreland is the idiot who called Barack and Michelle Obama "uppity" and famously couldn't name the 10 Commandments despite sponsoring mandated displays of same. A snippet:

Colbert: You have not introduced a single piece of legislation since entering....This has been called a "Do-Nothing Congress." Is it safe to say you're the do-nothingest?
Westmoreland: Well, there's one other do-nothingerer. I don't know who that is, but they're a Democrat....
Colbert: You co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the 10 Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate....What are the 10 Commandments?
Westmoreland: What are all of them?
Colbert: Uh-huh.
Westmoreland: You want me to name 'em all?
Colbert: Yes.
Westmoreland: Mmm...Don't murder. Don't lie. Don't steal. Uhh...I can't name 'em all.

Vastly entertaining video here.

It Takes a Nation of Whiners to Hold Us Back

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:05:00 EDT

Jonathan Chait's latest column defends Obama against the charge of messianism. Most of his points are valid. This one is a little too valid:

Now, it's certainly true that some enthusiastic Obama fans have displayed unusual zeal for their candidate. Yet it was only a few years ago--before President Bush's approval ratings tanked and conservatives decided that he wasn't actually a conservative at all--that the right had its own personality cult. There was DC 9/11, the Stalinist-style propaganda film reimagining Bush as an action hero boldly defying the terrorists on September 11. National Review, which has published innumerable articles in recent weeks decrying Obama's personality cult, was running advertisements for bronze busts depicting Bush in his "Mission Accomplished" fighter-pilot getup.

After September 11, James Merritt, then-president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Bush that he had been chosen by God. Bush nodded. (Fred Barnes reported this encounter in The Weekly Standard, concluding, "The stage was set for Bush to be God's agent of wrath.") As Time reported, "Privately, Bush even talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment." Claiming you've been chosen by God to lead the world in a titanic clash of good versus evil is pretty much the definition of messianic.

The short-lived cult of Bush, in fact, merely reprised the cult of Reagan that lives on to this day. Reagan kitsch has never gone out of style among Republicans. Numerous conservative pundits have suggested that any public policy question can be solved simply by asking "What would Reagan do?" The Heritage Foundation has a dedicated wwrd website. If, say, Brookings had inserted Obama's name into a phrase usually reserved for Jesus, you can only imagine what conservatives would make of it.

This is, actually, what bothers me most about Obama's cultish followers: They remind me of Bush and Reagan's cultish followers. It's silly for anyone who screamed like a Beatlemaniac watching the "Mission Accomplished" speech to greet Obamamania with a superior dance. But some of us would prefer a little more ... what's the word? ... change.

Elsewhere in Reason: Gene Healy on the real problem: the cult of the presidency.

Still No Right to Holy Smoke

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:32:00 EDT

Church of Cognizance founders Dan and Mary Quaintance, whose case I discussed in my June 2007 reason story about religious use of drugs, are scheduled to be tried in Albuquerque this month on federal marijuana charges. The Quaintances, who were caught near Lordsburg, New Mexico, in 2006 with 172 pounds of marijuana, tried to get the charges against them dismissed by arguing that prosecuting them for possessing cannabis, their church's sacrament, violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). A federal judge rejected that claim, concluding that the Quaintances' belief system—unlike, say, that of the peyote-consuming Native American Church or the ayahuasca-drinking Uniao do Vegetal—does not qualify as a bona fide religion, an outcome that illustrates the peril of inviting the government to assess people's religious convictions. It now seems inevitable that the Quaintances will be convicted, in which case they will each face a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

Another member of the church, Daniel Hardesty, also has been unsuccessful in pressing a religious freedom defense. Arrested in 2005, Hardesty challenged his conviction for possessing marijuana and drug paraphernalia, citing an Arizona law similar to RFRA. On July 31 the Arizona Court of Appeals rejected his argument. Unlike the federal judge who heard the Quaintances' case, who questioned whether they really believed what they claimed to believe, the state court conceded Hardesty's sincerity. But it said he had failed to show that the burden on his religious freedom was not justified by a compelling government interest:

This statute [banning marijuana] does not provide any religious exemptions nor does it contemplate an exemption for the use of marijuana that would be "consistent with public health and safety."...By imposing a total ban, the Legislature has deemed that the use and possession of marijuana always pose a risk to public health and welfare.

The court was troubled that marijuana use by Church of Cognizance members is not restricted to particular times and locations, concluding that "an accommodation of Defendant's unlimited use of marijuana would severely hinder the State's ability to enforce the law." At the same time, the court left the door open to future challenges:

Our holding...does not mean that a defendant can never pursue a religious freedom defense against marijuana-type possession laws. Even in circumstances in which the case law and legislative history demonstrate the existence of a well-established compelling governmental interest and that the government has chosen the least restrictive means to achieve its interest, a defendant may successfully assert a religious freedom defense if he can present independent evidence that negates existing authority. Also, in areas in which case law and legislative history are not so well developed, the State must introduce evidence to support a restriction of a religious practice. Here, however, precedent is overwhelming, and Defendant has failed to proffer any evidence to counter that precedent establishing the dangers of marijuana.

Here is a PDF of the opinion.

[via the Drug War Chronicle]

Monument to Aesthetic Imperialism

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:06:00 EDT

The Third Church of Christ, Scientist, at the intersection of 16th and I streets in Washington, D.C. (a few blocks north of the White House), is a hard building to like, as even its admirers admit. Designed by Araldo A. Cossutta, a former associate of I.M. Pei, the 37-year-old structure exemplifies brutalism, which Christy MacLear of the National Trust for Historic Preservation concedes is a "challenging style to defend largely because its foundation is grounded in philosophy, as opposed to aesthetics; people simply don't think it is good-looking." You can judge that for yourself. But among the people who don't much care for the church are its owners, who want to replace it with something friendlier. "This brutalist, unwelcoming, bunkerlike building is not a proper representation of our practice or our theology," says church spokesman J. Darrow Kirkpatrick.

Too bad, says Washington's Historic Preservation Review Board, which in December declared the building a landmark. Never mind the persistent mildew, the expense of heating the building and changing light bulbs in fixtures that can be reached only by scaffolding, the cavernous atmosphere of the 400-seat sanctuary, or the sheer ugliness of the exterior. The board has deemed the building historically significant, citing its "amazingly high integrity (in all respects: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling and association), down to the original carpeting and seat upholstery in the church auditorium." This sort of architectural diktat is in some respects worse than using eminent domain to transfer land from its owners to politically favored developers, since in this case there's no compensation, just or otherwise. Why collect donations from fans of brutalism, or even allocate taxpayers' money, to buy and preserve this "rare Modernist church" when you can force the current owners to maintain it as a monument to aesthetic imperialism?

Last week, with help from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the church challenged the historic landmark designation in federal court, arguing that it violates the First Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Since the Supreme Court has said that "neutral laws of general applicability" do not violate the Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom even if they ban a religion's central rite, the First Amendment argument probably won't succeed. The statutory argument looks more promising: The law cited by the Christian Scientists says a land use regulation that imposes "a substantial burden" on religious freedom is permissible only if it's the "least restrictive means" of serving "a compelling governmental interest." Much hinges on whether preserving the church building counts as a compelling interest; the plaintiffs should hope the case is not heard by a brutalism booster.

A better approach would be to recognize the restrictions that accompany historic landmark designations as a kind of "taking" for "public use" that requires "just compensation" under the Fifth Amendment. If taxpayers were compelled to pay for the maintenance of modernist monstrosities, they might start to object, and this safeguard would protect property owners regardless of their religious beliefs. In 1978 the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the designation of New York City's Grand Central Terminal as a historic landmark qualified as a taking, but that was before a string of cases in the 1980s and '90s establishing that land use regulations, if severe enough, can amount to a taking. The Christian Scientists might not fare very well under those precedents, since they still have use of their church. Yet it's clear the government has taken something of considerable value from them, allegedly for the benefit of the general public. Even assuming that historic landmark laws are justified in principle, why should the church alone bear the burden of its building's forced preservation?

Brian Doherty noted the dispute over the church's future back in December.

She Had a Dream

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:28:00 EDT

Newsweek has published the best profile I expect to read of the woman who may or may not have had John Edwards' baby. It leaves out the American Psycho connection, but it does mention her obsession with daytime TV favorite Eckhart Tolle:

I would soon learn that there was no such thing as small talk with Rielle Hunter. She told me that she'd felt a connection to me when we'd first met, that she could tell I was a very old soul. This meant a lot to Rielle. Her speech was peppered with New Age jargon—human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness. A seminal book for her had been Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now." Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.

Her latest project was John Edwards. Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential. The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world. If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less, he had the power to be a "transformational leader" on par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "He has the power to change the world," she said.

If this saga becomes a tawdry TV movie, I hope the director casts Ben Kingsley as the candidate. And with Tolle in the picture, I hope the film doesn't neglect the possibility that the whole affair was a complicated covert op orchestrated by Oprah to help her candidate get the nomination. (*)

* Stop giving me that look. This country needs a better class of anti-Obama conspiracy theories, and I'm trying to do my part.

Q: And When There Were Still Two Sets of Footprints in the Sand?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:19:00 EDT

That was when I made you keep walking, so as to comply with the Archdiocese of Cincinnati's new guidelines regarding inappropriate behavior for Catholic priests:

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has issued a detailed list of inappropriate behaviors for priests, saying they should not kiss, tickle or wrestle children.
The newest version of the archdiocese's Decree on Child Protection also prohibits bear hugs, lap-sitting and piggyback rides.
But it says priests may still shake children's hands, pat them on the back and give high-fives.
Victim advocates who have criticized the Roman Catholic archdiocese for its handling of abuse cases say they support the new measures as a step toward better protection of children.
The Cincinnati archdiocese says it updates the rules every five years. The latest version, issued last week, also mandates background checks for contractors working with children.

More here.

Am I just being too pre-Vatican II to suggest that any priest who high-fives anyone should be excommunicated and remanded immediately to the custody of Jack T. Chick?

Perhaps it's Cincinnati's proximity to Covington, Kentucky, site of the biggest priest-abuse scandal payout (yes, the worst damage was done not in liberal coastal towns, as Rick Santorum would have you think), that makes the Queen City so touchy about touches. Then again, if you need to make an explicit rule against priestly piggy-back rides, you should do it sooner rather than later. Unless you're carrying the babe Jesus through a river or carting someone from a burning building, it just doesn't like the sort of thing that Pat O'Brien would even consider doing.

In any case, here's reason Contributing Editor Thomas Szasz on pedophiliac priests. And reason columnist Tim Cavanaugh took the measure of the hype around the abuse scandal (including convictions based on shaky recovered-memory testimony and what he took to be the real scandal—the CYA mentality of Vatican higher-ups) here.

Ezra Levant Is off the Hook That Never Should Have Been Hung

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:20:00 EDT

After a year-long investigation that never should have happened, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission has rejected a complaint against Ezra Levant, former publisher of the now-defunct Canadian magazine the Western Standard, over his decision to reprint the controversial Muhammad cartoons that originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Levant declined to celebrate:

This censor approved what I wrote. His decision is not that I have freedom of speech. His decision is that I have his approval. I'm not interested in his approval. The only test of free speech is if I can write what he disapproves of with impunity. That's what freedom of speech is, to piss off some second-rate bureaucrat like Pardeep Gundara [the commission official who recommended against a hearing on the complaint] and know that you have the right to do so, because you're in Canada, not Saudi Arabia.

Yasmeen Nizam, a director of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, which brought the complaint, told the National Post:

We thought this was a good way to bring our concerns to the attention of the public. Obviously we didn't want this to continue, so [another goal was] perhaps to discourage people from further maligning our prophet and our religion... We wanted this to have a deterrent effect.

Presumably the "this" she does not want to continue is speech that offends Muslims, and she may get her wish. Even without a hearing or a formal penalty, this sort of investigation, which costs the target time, effort, and money, is indeed apt to "have a deterrent effect."

Matt Welch noted Levant's case in January. I wrote a column about it in February and followed up in a post a couple months ago.

[Thanks to J sub D for the tip.]

Does Disease Cause Religion?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:45:00 EDT

University of New Mexico biologists Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill are proposing the idea that religions proliferate as a way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. As the Telegraph reports:

Religions thrived to protect our ancestors against the ravages of disease, according to a radical new evolutionary theory of the genesis of faith....
[The researchers] come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas.
"Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask.
The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests.
Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus.
Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time.
" If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity," they say.

So can we conclude that as we control more infectious diseases, secularization will spread? Or does correlation necessarily mean cause in this case?

Whole Telegraph article here.

Elvis Needs Goats

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:55:00 EDT

News from India:

Allies of India's ruling Congress party performed a massive goat sacrifice for the "well-being and stability" of the government to time with a confidence vote last week, a report said Thursday.

The regional Samajwadi party, which propped up the government after its left allies withdrew support, sacrificed at least 267 goats and 15 buffaloes in a prayer for the longevity of the government, the Times of India reported....

Samajwadi party politician Kishore Samrite apparently spent 1.2 million rupees (28,000 dollars) on the sacrifice that saw priests and temple devotees gifted with packets of consecrated goat meat, his aides and temple sources told the paper.

An assignment for the amateur anthropologists in reason's readership: List the equivalent rituals in American politics.

Who Says Materialism Is a Bad Thing?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:09:00 EDT

From National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner:

Observation: The last time I've seen as many smiling people as I saw at Tiffany's earlier this afternoon, I was at St. Peter's in Rome in the spring.

I doubt this is what she meant, but here's my conclusion: Why go for Catholicism when Tiffany's can make you just as happy? Perhaps Diamonds ≥ Jesus.

Discuss.

This interesting data point also raises the question of what Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is really venerating in this photo.

This Polygamist Thing of Ours

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:53:00 EDT

At a Senate hearing yesterday, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) described polygamous sects such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) as a "form of organized crime," saying they have created a "web of criminal conduct that includes welfare fraud, tax evasion, massive corruption and strong-arm tactics." Reid, who has introduced a bill that would establish a Justice Department task force on polygamy and "assist victims of crimes committed by polygamist groups," added: "I am not saying that they are the same thing as the crime syndicates that used to run Las Vegas. But they engage in an ongoing pattern of serious crimes that we ignore at our peril."

This is the same sort of indiscriminate accusation that led to wholesale removal of children from the FLDS' Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, last April. It may well be that some members of the church married and/or had sex with underage girls. This week a Texas grand jury indicted FLDS leader Warren Jeffs (already in prison for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin) and four followers on sexual assault charges. A sixth FLDS member was indicted for failing to report child abuse. But as the Texas Supreme Court concluded, evidence of some underage marriages does not mean every FLDS parent is guilty of child abuse. Likewise, the fact that some members of polygamous groups have committed welfare fraud or failed to pay taxes does not mean every member has, let alone that membership in such a group is enough to make one a criminal.

Reid, a Mormon, should understand why it's a bad idea for the federal government to start picking on unconventional religious groups. Instead he seems eager to persecute heretics.

Guess the Divinely-Inspired Politician

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:37:00 EDT

Splashed on the AP wire today, these words from a prominent national politician:

"Lord—Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

The words are Obama's. As is traditional, he placed a small scrap of paper bearing the prayer in the cracks of Jerusalem's Western Wall on his visit there this week. In an act that might be called warrantless wiretapping on a phone call to God, someone pulled the note and handed it off to an Israeli paper, which published it.

So far, coverage has been very low key, with most stories emphasizing the serious party foul involved in stealing someone's prayer. My question: What if the same note had come from George Bush's pen? One can only imagine the headlines: President Sees Self as "Instrument" of God's Will!

Pope Down on This World; Favors Next

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:46:00 EDT

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church speaking at a youth conference in the country that produced Midnight Oil:

The world's natural resources are being squandered in the pursuit of "insatiable consumption," Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday in a speech urging followers to care more for the environment and reconnect with the principle of peace
Benedict, speaking to more than 200,000 pilgrims gathered for the Roman Catholic church's youth festival, expanded on a theme that has led him to be dubbed "the green pope." The crowd, massed on a disused wharf in Australia's largest city, regularly erupted in cheers that gave the event the feel of a sporting event.
"Some of you come from island nations whose very existence is threatened by rising water levels; others from nations suffering the effects of devastating drought," the pope said, referring to global warming.
He noted that during his more than 20-hour flight from Rome to Sydney he had a bird's eye view of a vast swath of the world that inspired awe and introspection.
"Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world's mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption," he said.
Types of "poison" are afflicting the world's social environment, he said, such as substance abuse, along with the exaltation of violence and sexual degradation, for which he blamed television and the Internet.

I'm sure there's nothing like a 20-hour first-class flight over the planet to give a fella real perspective about how much the Intertubes are degrading everything.

More here (not that you need it).

Pope Benedict slags gay marriage here.

Would You Believe Five Underage Mothers? How About Two?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:38:00 EDT

In a column about the child custody case involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), I noted:

[Texas Child Protective Services] claimed 31 underage girls at the ranch were pregnant or mothers. It later conceded that at least 15 of them were in fact adults while a 14-year-old on the list was not pregnant and had no children. The Associated Press reported that "more mothers listed as underage are likely to be reclassified as adults."

After the column (which ran in the August/September issue of reason) went up on Friday, a couple of readers pointed out that the official tally of underage mothers has fallen to five, meaning the initial figure was off by a factor of at least six. According to a June 15 Salt Lake Tribune story, three of the remaining five girls "were 16 when they gave birth last year," "one girl was 17," and "the fifth girl, who turns 17 in August, is pregnant." Since the minimum age for marriage with parental consent in Texas is 16, in only two of these cases was there prima facie evidence of underage marriage, and even in those cases only because the state legislature raised the minimum marriage age from 14 in 2005 with the FLDS in mind. So based on two cases where where it looks like the law was broken, the state seized 468 FLDS children, including babies, toddlers, boys, and prepubescent girls as well as the teenaged girls who allegedly were at risk.

The egregiously erroneous information provided by CPS reinforces the wisdom of the Texas courts in concluding that the wholesale removal of these children was unwarranted. It also should encourage greater skepticism about self-serving claims by bureaucrats seeking to justify their actions, even— perhaps especially—when the targets of those actions are far outside the mainstream. When this story first broke back in April, how many people thought it was the weird, creepy polygamists who were basically telling the truth and the government-appointed child rescuers who were wildly misleading the public?

No Child Left Behind

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Creators Syndicate

Two weeks before the Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected the wholesale removal of children from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, a spokesman for the state’s Child Protective Services (CPS) insisted the case “is not about religion.” If you believe that, you may also believe that a community of hundreds is a single household, or that a 27-year-old is younger than 18, to cite just a couple of the whoppers CPS has told about the largest child custody case in U.S. history.

To justify seizing 468 children from the ranch, which is owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), CPS argued that the church’s teachings are inherently abusive. CPS did not bother to present evidence that particular children were in immediate physical danger, as required by state law, because it thought membership in the polygamous sect was enough to make parents unfit. The state asserted that a “pervasive belief system” at the ranch, which it raided on April 3 in response to what seems to have been a fictitious abuse report, encouraged underage marriage. “They’re living under an umbrella of belief that having children at a young age is a blessing,” the lead investigator testified. “Therefore any child in that environment would not be safe.”

But as the appeals court ruling upheld by the Texas Supreme Court noted, “The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the [state’s] witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger. It is the imposition of certain alleged tenets of that system on specific individuals that may put them in physical danger.”

CPS claimed 31 underage girls at the ranch were pregnant or mothers. It later conceded that at least 15 of them were in fact adults while a 14-year-old on the list was not pregnant and had no children. The Associated Press reported that “more mothers listed as underage are likely to be reclassified as adults.”

In any case, as the appeals court noted, “teenage pregnancy, by itself, is not a reason to remove children from their home and parents.” In Texas the minimum age for marriage with parental consent is 16—raised from 14 in 2005 with the FLDS in mind—and “there was no evidence regarding the marital status of these girls when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant.”

By the state’s count as of late May, underage mothers represented no more than 3 percent of the children it seized. Even if the other girls who had reached puberty were likely to be married off soon (a matter of dispute), there was no evidence that the boys or the prepubescent girls were in danger of abuse. Half the children forcibly separated from their parents were 5 or younger.

CPS glossed over the lack of evidence by treating the entire 1,700-acre ranch as a single household. If there had been even one instance of abuse in the community, it argued, no child should be left there. This assumption of collective guilt was not only contrary to law; it was contradicted by the state’s own witnesses, who conceded that FLDS members, only some of whom practice polygamy, disagree about the appropriate age for marriage.

The first parents to be reunited with their children after the appeals court’s ruling were Joseph and Lori Jessop, both EMTs in their 20s. The monogamous couple’s children—two boys and a girl, ages 1, 2, and 4—became ill during their state-imposed separation and had to be hospitalized.

When the kids were released from the hospital, caseworkers literally pulled the two older children from their mother. Until a judge intervened, CPS threatened to take the youngest child as well, saying nursing babies older than 12 months were not allowed to remain with their mothers.

Not surprisingly, the Jessops’ older children were anxious in the days after they were returned to their parents, waking up repeatedly during the night and displaying regressive behavior. There was never any evidence that their parents abused them, but there’s plenty that the state did.

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum writes a weekly syndicated column.

How Do You Keep the Magic?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:19:00 EDT

I'm a little late in noting this, but last week the Journal of Psychopharmacology published a follow-up to the 2006 study in which Johns Hopkins researchers found that psilocybin triggered "mystical-type experiences" in experimental subjects who had never used psychedelics before. The first report described the 36 subjects' impressions two months after the experiment, when a large majority reported meaningful, generally positive experiences of lasting significance. The new report says the general picture remained the same after another year:

At the 14-month follow-up, 58% and 67%, respectively, of volunteers rated the psilocybin-occasioned experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; 64% indicated that the experience increased well-being or life satisfaction; 58% met criteria for having had a "complete" mystical experience.

The sense that the psilocybin sessions had lingering positive effects on the subjects' attitudes and behavior was confirmed by "community observers." The persistence of these feelings is not surprising, inasmuch as Rick Doblin found that the good vibes from Walter Pahnke's classic 1962 psilocybin experiment involving divinity students at Boston University's Marsh Chapel were still felt a quarter century later.

Although these results may not seem startling to anyone who has tried psychedelics, it's interesting that psilocybin commonly elicits quasi-religious feelings even in a secular environment (albeit with subjects who reported "regular participation in religious or spiritual activities"). The most important aspect of the study probably is the publicity it has attracted to the possibility that something good might come from using politically incorrect drugs. My favorite part is that some of the funding for the project came from the prohibition-boosting National Institute on Drug Abuse.

I considered the legal status of religious drug use in a 2007 reason article that was accompanied by a sidebar discussing the Johns Hopkins study. Last July I reviewed Andy Letcher's history of magic mushrooms.