Religion News Roundup (January 15 2010)

Hello readers,

Here's what's been going on in religion recently:

• The writing of the Bible may have started a lot earlier than scholars previously thought. (Haaretz)
• The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has recently been full of useful statistics about beliefs and attitudes in the U.S. 16.1% of US adults identify as "unaffiliated." Does this mean a lot of agnostics/atheists, or that a significant number of people are fed up with religious organizations?
• Also worth seeing: How religious is your state? (Pew) and the increasingly common mixture of faiths (Pew).
• The recent battle over gay marriage here in D.C. (my hometown) has been leaving many questioning whether the Catholic Church is too influential, or at least, trying to be. Now, a Washington Post guest columnist is asking the same question over a different topic: the healthcare debate. (WaPo).

Have a great Martin Luther King Day weekend!

Seeking Interfaith Understanding

Quick Housekeeping Note: I'm back and blogging it up again in 2010, so happy new year. With my current work schedule it's just to hard to keep doing the daily religion news summary, but I will make an effort to have at least one news summary a week from now on, as well as more regular in-depth commentary about religion stories I'm finding interesting. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

There's a piece online from TIME right now about Malaysia's High Court ruling that the word Allah is not exclusive to Muslims. This allows Christian (and presumably other faiths) to publish the word in their newsletters, and claim that Allah is their god as well, apparently a controversial statement because of the country's religious/ethnic makeup.

Some 60% of Malaysia's 28 million people are Malay Muslim, while the rest are ethnic Chinese, Indians and indigenous tribes, practicing various faiths including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and animism. Among Christians, the majority Catholics number about 650,000, or 3% of the population.

I know little about the Malay language but the Catholic Church in Malaysia has apparently been using Allah in its Bibles and otherwise for a long while, and in a court case in 2008 cited pre-Islamic use of the term.

But the point missed here by many parties seems to be that as Abrahamic faiths, there is a common god, regardless of names. As the latter part of the TIME article describes, the fact that the Muslim community is so strongly opposed is one of a series of worrying incidents of intolerance in Malaysia. It seems, to me, a missed opportunity for understanding and dialogue.