Religion

It sounds like the beginning of a joke," writes The Guardian. "What do you get when you put a Muslim imam, a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk and 10 atheists in the same room?" I initially thought the answer had something to do with light bulbs, but it turns out this is part of the premise of a new Turkish game show:

Viewers of Turkish television will soon get the punchline when a new gameshow begins that offers a prize arguably greater than that offered by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Contestants will ponder whether to believe or not to believe when they pit their godless convictions against the possibilities of a new relationship with the almighty on Penitents Compete (Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor in Turkish), to be broadcast by the Kanal T station. Four spiritual guides from the different religions will seek to convert at least one of the 10 atheists in each programme to their faith.

Those persuaded will be rewarded with a pilgrimage to the spiritual home of their newly chosen creed – Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for Christians and Jews, and Tibet for Buddhists.

The programme's makers say they want to promote religious belief while educating Turkey's overwhelmingly Muslim population about other faiths.

"The project aims to turn disbelievers on to God," the station's deputy director, Ahmet Ozdemir, told the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review.

What kind of spiritual guide is this show going to be using? With each week's suspense inherently built off of contestants' conversions, I look forward to quotes like "yes, my son, you may come forward to accept Jesus... but please, wait until after these commercials."

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Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who is currently visiting Italy, has agreed to meet with members of Rome's Jewish community -- many of whom were forced to leave their homes in Libya by anti-Jewish pogroms decades ago  -- but says he will only meet with them on Saturday.

Will there be shrimp cocktails, too?

Madonna was bad enough, but this is really beyond the pale.

Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, currently imprisoned at the Hague awaiting trial for war crimes in Sierra Leone, has apparently decided to convert to Judaisim, one of his wives tells BBC radio (my transcript):

Q. So he's now a practicing Jew?

A. He's now a Jew. He's practicing Judaism. 

Q. Tells us about that? What led him to that?

A. Because of the difficulties, he always wanted to know God in a very diffent and special way. From a very small boy -- because we talk about his childhood a whole lot -- he asked himself questions about Christianity. Too many questions about why certain things happened. And why, this one and that one. Just too many question in Christianity and the whole thing about Christ because he does believe in Christ. When he got to the Hague, he got to know that he really, really wanted to be a Jew. Wanted to convert to Judaism. And that...

Q. Does that mean he has rejected Christianity then? Because that's quite a radical departure.

A. No, no, no he hasn't rejected Christianity. He has always been a Christian. He just decided to become a Jew. He wants to follow the two religions.

Least. Welcome. Convert. Ever.

I also can't help wondering if he got this idea from George Bluth on Arrested Development.

(Hat tip: Shelby Grossman via Chris Blattman)

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The new book "Sex as you don't know it: for married couples who love God," written by a franciscan friar named Ksawery Knotz is flying off the bookshelves in Poland, selling out its initial print run within weeks. While Knotz's message, that even godly married couples should enjoy sex, is all fine and good and probably a smart move for the struggling Polish catholic church, isn't there something a little strange about taking sex tips from a guy who's celibate?

He also dismisses those that have questioned the competency of a celibate monk to write about sex, saying his experience comes from counselling married couples and from running a website giving sexual advice for almost a year. 

The website is here. Maybe he could sign up Alberto Cutie and Fernando Lugo as bloggers.

There's an interesting quote from the Post's account of Pope Benedict's visit to Israel's Holocaust memorial:

Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev said he considered Benedict's remarks a "serious and important" acknowledgment of what the Holocaust represents, but said he also found the language "a bit restrained." He and other officials at the memorial said they were expecting a more personal expression of empathy, rather than the general remarks Benedict delivered. "Maybe our expectations were too high," Shalev said.

If Shalev was expecting a Larry King-style expression of remorse for Benedict's youthful involvement with Nazism or his pardon of Richard Williamson, he was definitely expecting too much. If this pope has demonstrated anything so far, it's that he has little patience for the ritual expressions of "humanity" demanded by the modern news cycle. (And Benedict's spokesman probably did him no favors by denying that he was ever a member of the Hitler Youth, even though the pope had admitted as much himself in his autobiography.)

For even the most media-savvy public figure, this trip would hae been a tough act to pull off. Some had hoped that the pope could use his spiritual authority to make a positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but at this point, Benedict probably has too little credibility with either Jews or Muslims to pull that off. Any non-platitudinous statement he made on behalf of Palestinian rights would just reinforce Jewish skepticism of him and vice versa. 

As for doing damage control, the Holy Land actually seems like the worst possible place to reach out to Jews or Muslims (particularly if you're trying to reach out to both.) As Marc Lynch noted in his discussion of why Jerusalem would have been an ill-advised choice for Barack Obama's address to the Muslim world, it "would have been a security nightmare, a political football, and at any rate would have turned it into an 'Israeli-Palestinian' event instead of a Muslim world event." 

The pope must have realized this all too well when he had to leave a conference in East Jerusalem yesterday after a Palestinian began railling against Israeli crimes. It would have been difficult enough for this pope to pull off a high-profile conciliatory gesture to Jews, or to Muslims. But trying to do both at once while standing on top of the world's most volatile political-religious fault-line is damn near impossible. 

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