c. 2007 Religion News Service

Muslims Urge `Code of Honor’ to Heal Sunni-Shiite Rift

(RNS) Muslim leaders from California are urging fellow Muslim Americans to sign an “Intra-faith Code of Honor” to help prevent sectarian violence in Iraq from souring relations between Sunnis and Shiites in the United States.

Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite strife “magnifies the limited area of theological differences, while reducing the vast sameness and the extensive common ground on which we all stand,” reads the code, which also urges the two groups not to judge each other.

Signatories include Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council; Shiite Imam Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini, founder and imam at the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, and several other Muslim officials from California.

Because of their shared status as minority religions here, Shiite and Sunni Muslim have for the most part enjoyed good relations. But those relations have been tested as Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq erupted into what many observers are calling a civil war.

In late January, several Shiite mosques and businesses in Detroit and Dearborn, Mich., were vandalized. Police have yet to make arrests, but Shiites believe Sunni extremists are behind the vandalism.

Sunnis and Shiites have also hurled insults at one another on Web sites and clashed on college campuses. At the University of Michigan, for example, the Muslim Student Association adopted rules that prevent Shiites from leading prayers. These and other incidents have many Muslim American leaders worried.

“We have to prevent this tragedy from spilling over to our Muslim society in the United States,” the code, adopted last month, reads.

The code urges Sunnis and Shiites to respect each other’s religious figures, to keep hate speech and hate literature out of mosques, and to express theological disagreements without hostility. Perhaps most important, the code calls on Muslim Americans to abstain from “takfir,” the act of declaring someone else a non-believer _ something Sunni extremists have done towards Shiites.

The Shiite-Sunni rift is traced to a dispute over who was the designated successor to the Prophet Muhammad after his death in 632 A.D. Sunnis believe Muhammad was succeeded by four “rightly guided caliphs,” while Shiites believe the prophet’s descendants were his rightful successors.

Shiite reverence for these descendants is the main theological difference between the two groups.

_ Omar Sacirbey

Pope Says Darwin, Intelligent Design Can’t Explain Origins of Life

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Benedict XVI says Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution fails to explain the ultimate origins of life, which lie in God’s “creative reason,” yet insists that religious faith is no substitute for scientific inquiry.

The pope’s remarks, made last September in a seminar with his former doctoral students, appear in a book, “Creation and Evolution,” published Wednesday (April 11) in Germany.

The pope also seems to distance himself from the idea of “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution.

“Both popular and scientific texts about evolution often say that `nature’ or `evolution’ has done this or that,” Benedict said in the book, according to translations by the Reuters news agency. “Just who is this `nature’ or `evolution’ as (an active) subject? It doesn’t exist at all!”

Natural selection _ the process fundamental to the theory of evolution _ cannot be the result of mere chance, the pope said.

“The process itself is rational despite the mistakes and confusion as it goes through a narrow corridor choosing a few positive mutations and using low probability,” he said, arguing that this observation “inevitably leads to a question that goes beyond science … where did this rationality come from?”

Benedict’s remarks seemed to echo the views of Vienna Archbishop Christoph Schonborn, another contributor to the book, who has written elsewhere that the “immanent design evident in nature is real” and that “scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of `chance and necessity’ are not scientific at all.”

Many have interpreted Schonborn’s words as an endorsement of intelligent design, an idea with strong support among conservative Christians in the United States, which posits that the world is too complex to have been created by random events alone.

But Benedict disowned another idea commonly associated with intelligent design, the so-called “God-of-the-gaps” argument, which attributes unexplained phenomena to divine authorship.

“It’s not as I wanted to stuff the dear God into these gaps _ he is too great to fit into such gaps,” the pope said.

According to Benedict, science plays an essential role in explaining the origin and development of life. “I would not depend on faith alone to explain the whole picture,” he said.

_ Francis X. Rocca

Churches Applaud Agreement Between McDonald’s, Tomato Pickers

(RNS) Religious groups are welcoming an agreement between McDonald’s Corp. and a migrant workers’ advocacy group that will raise wages for Florida tomato pickers.

The agreement between McDonald’s and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) will cost the fast food giant a penny more per pound for tomatoes and will effectively double the wages of harvesters.

The Florida-based CIW has been working with McDonald’s to call attention to wages and working conditions for tomato fields workers. The group reached a similar agreement in 2005 with YUM! Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell.

The Presbyterian Church (USA), a supporter of CIW’s arrangement with Taco Bell, said the company had “laid the foundation for socially responsible purchasing” and was glad that McDonald’s had “followed suit.”

“This important agreement today just may be the tipping point for the entire fast-food industry in a real move toward human rights and fair food for everyone,” said the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

The National Council of Churches, which also endorsed boycotts with Taco Bell prior to the 2005 agreement, applauded the McDonald’s decision as “good news” but only “a start.”

“There are many thousands of other workers _ our brothers and sisters who pick the food over which we say grace at our dinner tables _ who must still settle for poverty level wages, deplorable living conditions and unsafe working conditions,” said the Rev. Bob Edgar, NCC general secretary.

“Jesus might tell us he’s pleased and remind us that it is just a start.”

In a joint statement, the CIW and McDonald’s also agreed to a develop a new code of conduct and include a third-party verification system to ensure the extra wages are paid to the tomato pickers, according to Presbyterian News Service.

_ Melissa Stee

Study Says Churches Should Focus on More than Abstinence

WASHINGTON (RNS) The promotion of sexual abstinence in faith communities limits the impact faith-based groups and religious institutions could have in curbing the spread of HIV and AIDS, according to a new national study.

RAND, the nation’s largest independent health policy research firm, surveyed 1,421 people receiving medical care for HIV and found that those with religious ties are less likely to spread the disease through high-risk sexual behavior than non-religious people.

However, the study said religious organizations are “untapped resources” in preventing the spread of the epidemic because “the main focus of many faith communities is sexual abstinence,” and not how a person’s religious beliefs could help prevent the spread of HIV.

Those religious groups are missing an opportunity, said Frank Galvan, the lead author of the study. They “have these core belief systems that do have a positive impact on the lives of people who are HIV-positive and who are sexually active,” he said. But, he added, the religious communities aren’t promoting a message that is going to help end the spread of the deadly epidemic.

The moral beliefs of religious people with HIV will lead them to alter their behavior so as not to spread the disease, said David Kanouse, a RAND senior behavioral scientist. The study suggests faith communities should tap into those beliefs rather than focus on abstinence.

Blacks made up nearly a third of the survey population in the study. Gay and bisexual men made up more than half the study sample.

Evangelicals and Catholics with HIV reported fewer sexual partners than members of other mainline Christian denominations, and they also reported being less likely to engage in unprotected sex.

The study also found that Catholics were just as likely as any other group to use condoms, even though the church considers use immoral, whether as birth control or to stop the spread of disease.

“Although the pope may issue a proclamation on some aspect of sexual behavior, Catholics are increasingly inclined to consider their individual consciences as sources of moral authority,” the study reports.

_ Philip Turner

Quote of the Day: Florida Baptist Leader James B. Sampson

(RNS) “We can say what we want to say about the Rev. Dr. Henry J. Lyons. In my opinion, he is still one of God’s anointed.”

_ The Rev. James B. Sampson, who was elected president of the Florida General Baptist Convention April 4, defeating Lyons, the former president of the state convention and the National Baptist Convention, USA, who resigned in 1999 as the denominational leader after being convicted of grand theft and racketeering. Sampson, a Jacksonville, Fla., pastor, was quoted by the St. Petersburg Times.

KRE/LF END RNS