HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- About 2,000 Muslim volunteers helped victims of Hurricane Katrina at the city's downtown convention center Sunday, the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"We're not trying to prove anything, other than what our faith requires us to do," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American Society. "What goes with our faith is to help others, to respond and show compassion when people need it, and I'm glad we can do it."

I remember sitting in my office at work on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Natalie had IM'd from London to see if I was okay, employees were clustered in the break room watching flames and horror on CNN, O'Hare airport was closing down a few minutes from my building, and the world stopped making sense for several hours.

In the days following the attacks, I remember the strange chill and the awareness that things were changing. Rumors spread about Muslims being beaten, mosques being defaced. Thankfully, there was no major backlask in the streets of American cities. Still, in the years since the attacks, the othering of Muslims has become a common thread. In many ways its easy: every day brings images of violence in Muslim countries, sometimes involving our military, sometimes involving Israel, sometimes between various factions of Muslim political groups... Sometimes, it's just inexplicable. We don't have time to sort it all out, but the message often comes through: When there's bad stuff going on, Muslims are often at the center of it.

The problem becomes more serious when it's combined with the minimal knowledge of Islam most Americans have. Most of Joe Average's knowledge about Islam's theology comes from two sources: terrorists and their extremist leaders, and Muslim apologists trying to patch up the PR damage. A word like 'Jihad' gets thrown around by a guy who blows up children. A talking head appears on TV, saying that 'jihad' really just means some sort of personal struggle to overcome evil, and it smells of excuse-making, neh? Then, compare and contrast assorted passages from the Koran that call for infidel-killing, and the case for Islam is starting to look pretty bad.

I know a number of people who've come to the conclusion that "real Muslims" are morally obligated -- compelled by their beliefs -- to reign death and destruction on anyone who doesn't convert. The folks who live peacefully with us -- the guy down the street who goes to his mosque and prays and fasts, or Amir, who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, or the aid workers in the article cited above -- they might be a nice people, but only because they're willing to abandoned the true tenets of their faith.

The Quran certainly does say some grim things about those who don't follow Allah. So does the Bible about those who don't serve Yaweh. Our reasons for taking some commands quite literally while ignoring the command to, say, stone blasphemers to death, are certainly well developed. But we can't say that the Bible, taken as a free-standing work of literature, doesn't promote, advocate, and even command violence of believers.

Christianity has evolved a lot over the past 2000 years or so. We've left behind The Crusades, the Inquisitions, and so on. But doing so required -- at the time at least -- rethinking our understanding of Scripture and stepping out of a lot of preconceptions. I believe that Islam is also evolving in similar ways -- it's 700 years younger than Christianity, and unlike our faith, theirs doesn't have the luxury of a New World to colonize in its agressive teenage years.

I think it's fair to assume that the Muslims in the CNN article above aren't from the same theological camp as Bin Ladin -- as an outsider looking into Islam, I think it's tricky for me to say that Bin Ladin is 'the real thing.' After all, an outsider could say that I'm not a *real Christian* because I help friends when they are down, even if they're atheists, wiccans, or technopagans. People like those volunteers believe, honestly and truly, that their faith demands service, charity, and kindness of them rather than anger and murder. They act on this belief, and it's a good thing.

Islam has many different communities and theological 'schools.' The radical violent Islamic theologies, like those influential in Saudi Arabia, have shaped Bin Ladin and other terrorists considerably. The challenge for us in the coming years and decades is to learn how to combat those violent strains while embracing the less radical, less reactionary schools of theology.

Pat Robertson's recent comments about Hugo Chavez have bloggers buzzing and a lot of folks I know asking how such a wingnut got into a position of influence. It's seen, in many quarters, as a reflection on the inherent craziness of Christians that he would have any influence at all if he goes around demanding assassinations and so on.

I grew up in North American Protestant Subculture (NAPS, we'll call it), and while I don't like Robertson, I think the situation is a bit more complex. Not his statements -- they're manifestly un-Christian, in my opinion. Rather, the subculture in which he has a voice and the history of how he got there. For those friends baffled by it, I'll attempt a bit of backstory. I'll probably be updating and finessing it with more links to external resources, but for now it's a personal recollection of how Robertson has been presented and perceived in the Protestant subculture.  Continue reading...

America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

Harpers has a fascinating article on America's uniquely Christian Culture, discussing the core religious tension at the heart of our country's social engine. Seventy-five percent of the population, for example, mistakenly attributes Ben Franklin's proverb "God helps those who help themselves" to the Bible, even though it directly contradicts other Scriptural principles. Metafilter has a discussion gearing up on the article, but it's likely to devolve into "religion: pros and cons" within a few hours.

Meanwhile, over on Kierkegaard Lips, my friend Rachel is grappling with some genuinely profound questions about faith and love.

...I got to thinking about how hard it is to love. How hard it is for me to even think about loving my dad. How hard it is to love people that I think are stupid and mean, or on the other hand those who try too hard to flaunt their giant pulsating brains filled with logic and graphs and boxes and charts. I spoke with a few people lately who told me that their own faith is based largely in logic, and that the more "spiritual" aspect of their faith is virtually non-existant. Sometimes I feel like I have the opposite mentality; my faith largely supported by my dreams, visions, and strange conceptual leaps that I make between Biblical idealogy and manic delusional thought processes based in my own excessive existentialism...

I wonder if she might be talking around the edges of this great divide between our stated 'religion culture' and the way we as Americans tend to think and live and truly believe. But then, it's not just a head versus heart issue -- most Americans are as confused about the logical theology as they are about the 'heart' of Christianity. I've been pondering the country's Revivalist history for a while, partially inspired by Catherine's research about Emily Dickinson. I wonder if these sorts of cracks and inconsistencies in the American religious experience are part of our heritage as much as the First and Second Amendments, etc.

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 is a bad piece of legislation that's floated around for years. It's a complete wet dream for the Credit Card Industry, and it raises the hackles of consumer advocates all over the country. Put simply, it makes it much much more difficult for individuals to file for bankruptcy when they're caught in the doom-spiral of debt.

The rationale for the bill (unchanged since the first versions were floated in 2003) is that lots of people, scandalous libertines that they are, enjoy lives of wanton excess. They run up bills with caviar and furs only to leave poor, overworked credit card companies with the check -- escaping the consequences of their actions via bankruptcy laws. Clearly, eliminating the loopholes and preventing these abuses is essential! *cough*welfarequeens*cough* This is horse shit, plain and simple. Others have dissected the flaws in the bill's various incarnations, and its record should speak for itself. While irresponsible spending is bad the recent increase in bankruptcies our country has seen since the 90's has little to do with irresponsible consumers and a lot to do with the credit industry's eagerness to extend credit to risky people, then hit them for exorbitant fees when they can't pay the debts back. This is generally known as "predatory lending" and as a Christian, I find it especially troubling. Scripture condemns the process (remember "usury?") and even the Old Testament, hardly a progressive document by today's standards, mandates regular economic redistribution to prevent cycles of poverty and indebtedness.

The Washington Post published an interesting little anecdote on Sunday that highlighted the problem:

For more than two years, special-education teacher Fatemeh Hosseini worked a second job to keep up with the $2,000 in monthly payments she collectively sent to five banks to try to pay $25,000 in credit card debt.

Even though she had not used the cards to buy anything more, her debt had nearly doubled to $49,574 by the time the Sunnyvale, Calif., resident filed for bankruptcy last June. That is because Hosseini's payments sometimes were tardy, triggering late fees ranging from $25 to $50 and doubling interest rates to nearly 30 percent. When the additional costs pushed her balance over her credit limit, the credit card companies added more penalties.

"I was really trying hard to make minimum payments," said Hosseini, whose financial problems began in the late 1990s when her husband left her and their three children. "All of my salary was going to the credit card companies, but there was no change in the balances because of that interest and those penalties."

Punitive charges -- penalty fees and sharply higher interest rates after a payment is late -- compound the problems of many financially strapped consumers, sometimes making it impossible for them to dig their way out of debt and pushing them into bankruptcy.

The industry makes its money on people who run up large balances and have trouble paying them off. Whether this is due to dumb spending patterns, emergency medical bills, a broken marriage, or identity theft is irrelevant: the industry wants to make a profit, and high-risk people are the best way to make a profit. Rather than changes its lending patterns, the industry has lobbied congress for years to make credit card debts unprotected -- in other words, they want credit card debt to be bankruptcy-proof, following debtors around until the sun burns out.

That's exactly what the ironically-named "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005" does.

The real beauty of it, though, is the bill's sponsor, Chuck Grassley. He's got a conservative voting record on moral issues like gay marriage, abortion, and sex education. He talks a strong game on this front -- he's a member in good standing of The Family, a creepily named Washington group that melds Christian language with conservative nationalism and hides itself behind a veil of media-hostile secrecy. With this strong moral foundation, Grassley should be very sensitive to concerns about Biblical standards, right? Not quite.

This gem just in from the Des Moines Register:

A national group of Christian lawyers is appealing to church leaders to join them in lobbying against the bankruptcy reform bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

The lawyers say the legislation runs contrary to the forgiveness of debt and charity required by the Bible.

"As Christian attorneys, we strongly believe that it was never God's intention to create a society where indebtedness was a crime or a badge of dishonor," Christian members of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys wrote in a letter sent Feb. 26 to hundreds of church leaders across the nation.

The lawyers note that in the Old Testament, God did not outlaw borrowing and lending, but provided that loans would become discharged every seven years.

In response, Grassley said Congress could not be bound by biblical mandates because "the Constitution does not provide for a theocracy."

"I can't listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population," Grassley said. "I'll bet those lawyers wouldn't want us to impose the principles of forgiving debt every seven years. If that were the law, nobody would loan them money."

This isn't shocking to me. Despite Grassley's moral fortitude on popular Christian hot-buttons, he's jumped at every chance to screw individuals since he was elected in 1980. He's voted against eliminating the "marriage penalty" for married taxpayers. He's voted to repeal safety standards for assembly-line workers. He's voted to limit appeals in death-penalty cases, even when new evidence may prove the innocence of those on death row. He voted against minimum wage increases. He... well. You get it.

Grassley is quite happy to demolish Church-state lines when it favors his political career. He's thrown his support behind new legislation that would allow churches to endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. But when it comes to bankruptcy legislation, he knows which side his bread is buttered on. The credit industry, and MNBA in particular, is one of the GOP's largest campaign donors, and when they come calling Grassley answers. When their exploitative business model is threatened, society's morality and compassion runs a distant second. "I can't listen to Christian lawyers," he says, "because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population."

Remember this, Christians. Remember this moment and remember it good.

You are tools in a political game, and you are fools if you believe otherwise.