2011 RNA award entry for Tom Breen:
From July 27, 2011
BC-US-REL--Moorish Science-Impostors, 1st Ld-Writethru<
^Bogus court filings spotlight little-known sect<
^Followers of Moorish Science push back against 'radicals' using group's name for bogus claims<
^By TOM BREEN=
^Associated Press=
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) _ From New Jersey to California, police, courthouse officials and real estate agents are being confronted with a baffling new problem: bogus legal documents filed by people claiming to follow an obscure religion called Moorish Science. Their motives range from financial gain to simply causing a nuisance.
No one is more exasperated by the phenomenon than the leaders of the century-old Moorish Science Temple of America, who say the growing crop of "paperwork terrorists" has nothing to do with their faith or its teachings.
"It's just distressing that some individuals would take something as pure and righteous as this organization and try to tarnish it," said Christopher Bennett-Bey, grand sheikh of the group's temple in Charlotte, one of more than 30 located around the country.
It's not clear why the flimflam artists are invoking the group. But one expert said divisions dating back to the death of the sect's founder have resulted in small pockets of people who claim to be followers but have little understanding of the faith.
The bad filings include deeds, liens and other documents, often written in confusing pseudo-legal jargon and making outlandish claims about being exempt from U.S. law. In some cases, filers have actually moved into foreclosed houses and changed the locks. Other times, people seeking to slip their mortgages have used bogus documents to waste the time and money of their banks. Fake liens have also been maliciously filed to target enemies.
"The ideas are particularly attractive to people who are hurting economically, although let's be candid: For some people it's just pure greed," said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.
Law enforcement can pursue theft or fraud charges if a case warrants it, but states' laws vary on whether filing sham paperwork is a crime in itself. Lawmakers in North Carolina failed to pass a law making bad filings a crime this year.
National numbers on the scheme aren't available, but the area around the largest city in North Carolina has been a hot spot. In 2011 alone, more than 200 bogus legal documents have been filed with Mecklenburg County by people claiming to be followers of Moorish Science, with another few dozen in neighboring Union County.
As long as a legal document is properly formatted, county officials have to file it alongside valid paperwork, according to Mecklenburg County Register of Deeds David Granberry. The content, however, is often outlandish and includes strange punctuation and capitalization or lengthy digressions about the 14th Amendment, the Constitution or maritime law.
"If we can legally reject it for some reason, we'll do that. But as soon as they figure out how to correct it, we'll get a stream of these documents because word gets around," he said.
Having a bogus lien or deed legally purged requires the county _ or the subject of the lien _ to go through a potentially lengthy process that often involves hiring lawyers. A document with a $50 filing fee can easily end up costing the county $2,000, Granberry said.
The tactics being used by the Moor impostors originated with tax-dodgers and white supremacist groups in the 1980s, experts said.
"These are people who engage in the most bizarre leaps of logic. They literally believe that if you lowercase the `u' in the phrase United States, you will break the bonds of government tyranny and become a free man," said Potok, the expert with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The occupation of foreclosed homes appears to be a new wrinkle, Potok said. Such cases have been recorded in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, California and elsewhere. They often end in the arrests of the squatters.
Joe Pipitone, a realtor in Vineland, N.J., encountered the problem earlier this year. After selling a home that had been foreclosed on, he got a call from the new owner to say that someone was already living in the $300,000 house. Pipitone was baffled to find that a deed had been filed claiming ownership by a woman saying she was a member of the Moorish Science Temple. Police said the woman, who was arrested and held on $85,000 bond, had changed the locks and put the utilities in her name.
"I've been selling real estate for 15 years, and I've never seen anything like this," Pipitone said. "You'd think nobody would be stupid enough to try something like this."
Leaders of the largest Moorish Science group are baffled by the tactic.
"I don't understand the underlying motive," Bennett-Bey said. "I think it's just out of convenience, or they're looking for some status."
Moorish Science followers trace their faith back to 1913 and revere its founder, North Carolina native Timothy Drew, as a prophet. They call him the Noble Drew Ali. The faith blends aspects of Islam with elements of other faiths and philosophies, and has its own scriptures, generally called the Holy Koran or the Circle 7 Koran. The Moorish Science Temple taught that the people called blacks were actually the descendants of "Asiatic Moors" or Moroccans who had been in North America for hundreds of years.
Establishing a base in Chicago, the group aimed to instill a sense of pride in its members, decked out in fezzes and bearing identity cards proclaiming "I am a citizen of the USA!" at a time when blacks were legally relegated to second-class status. To make an explicit link with their proclaimed Moorish heritage, members of the group added "Bey" or "El" to their names. At its height, tens of thousands of people belonged to the organization.
"The Moorish Science of Temple of America was founded for the express purpose of uplifting fallen humanity," said Azeem Hopkins-Bey, the group's national spokesman. "We teach that our members must learn to love instead of hate."
After Ali's death in 1929, the group suffered a number of schisms and lost followers to groups that included the Nation of Islam.
Today, numerous groups claim affiliation with Moorish Science. Some consist only a handful of members and in many cases have little understanding of the faith, said Spencer Dew, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
"There are folks who call themselves Moors or Moes without knowing anything about the history of Moorish Science," said Dew, who teaches a summer class for the Chicago Police Department on religious groups and crime.
The Moorish Science Temple of America is working to distance itself from the people filing bogus legal claims, calling them "radical and subversive fringe groups" in a recent statement. Moorish leaders are looking into legal remedies, and Bennett-Bey has been advising authorities on how to distinguish registered members from impostors.
"It's like coming to this country and saying you're an American citizen," he said. "If you haven't gone through the process and gotten the proper documentation, you can call yourself whatever you want, but that doesn't make it true."
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From March 24, 2011:
^BC-US-REL--Hell? No, 1st Ld-Writethru<
^Who's in hell? Pastor's book sparks eternal debate<
^Is Gandhi in hell? Pastor challenges familiar notions about Christian eternity, prompts debate<
^By TOM BREEN=
^Associated Press=
DURHAM, N.C. (AP) _ When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.
The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.
Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.
"I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don't think that means an eternity of torment," Holtz said. "But I can understand why people in my church aren't ready to leave that behind. It's something I'm still grappling with myself."
The debate over Bell's new book "Love Wins" has quickly spread across the evangelical precincts of the Internet, in part because of an eye-catching promotional video posted on YouTube.
Bell, the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., lays out the premise of his book while the video cuts away to an artist's hand mixing oil paints and pastels and applying them to a blank canvas.
He describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: "Reality check: He's in hell."
"Gandhi's in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?" Bell asks in the video.
In the book, Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell.
"This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear," he writes in the book.
For many traditional Christians, though, Bell's new book sounds a lot like the old theological position of universalism _ a heresy for many churches, teaching that everyone, regardless of religious belief, will ultimately be saved by God. And that, they argue, dangerously misleads people about the reality of the Christian faith.
"I just felt like on every page he's trying to say 'It's OK,'" said Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler at a forum last week on Bell's book held at the Louisville institution. "And there's a sense in which we desperately want to say that. But the question becomes, on what basis can we say that?"
Bell argues that hell has assumed an outsize importance in Christian teaching, considering the word itself only appears in the New Testament about 12 times, by his count.
"For a 1st-century Jewish rabbi, where you go when you die wasn't the most pressing question," Bell told The Associated Press. "The question was how can you enter into the shalom and peace of God right now, this day."
Bell denies he's a universalist, and his exact beliefs on what happens to people after death are hard to pin down, but he argues that such speculation distracts people from an urgent point. In his telling, hell is something freely chosen that already exists on earth, in everything from war to abusive relationships.
The near-relish with which some Christians stress the torments of hell, Bell argues, keep many believers needlessly afraid of a loving God, and repel potential Christians who might otherwise be curious about the faith's teachings.
"The heart of the Christian story is that God is love," he said. "But when you hear the word 'Christian,' you don't necessarily think 'Oh, sure, those are the people who don't stop talking about God's love.' Some other things would come to mind."
About the only thing everyone agrees on is that this is not a new debate in Christianity. It stretches to antiquity, when Christianity was a persecuted sect in the Roman Empire, and the third century theologian Origen developed a theory that contemporary critics charged would mean that everyone, even the devil himself, would ultimately be saved. Church leaders eventually condemned ideas they attributed to Origen, but he has had a lasting influence across the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.
Those traditions often disagree, even internally, on what awaits souls after death. The Catholic Church, which has a formal process for identifying souls in heaven through canonization, pointedly refrains from saying that anyone is without a doubt in hell. Protestants reject the concept of purgatory, in which sins can be atoned for after death, but disagree on other questions. The lack of consensus is enabled partly by ambiguities in the Bible.
Evangelical opposition to Bell is exemplified in a succinct tweet from prominent evangelical pastor John Piper: "Farewell, Rob Bell."
Page Brooks, a professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, thinks Bell errs in a conception of a loving God that leaves out the divine attributes of justice and holiness.
"It's love, but it's a just love," Brooks said. "God is love, but you have to understand you're a sinner and the only way to get around that is through Christ's sacrifice on the cross."
Making his new belief public is both liberating and a little frightening for Holtz, even though his doubts about traditional doctrines on damnation began long before he heard about Rob Bell's book.
A married Navy veteran with five children, Holtz spent years trying to reconcile his belief that Jesus Christ's death on the cross redeemed the entire world with the idea that millions of people _ including millions who had never even heard of Jesus _ were suffering forever in hell.
"We do these somersaults to justify the monster god we believe in," he said. "But confronting my own sinfulness, that's when things started to topple for me. Am I really going to be saved just because I believe something, when all these good people in the world aren't?"
Gray Southern, United Methodist district superintendent for the part of North Carolina that includes Henderson, declined to discuss Holtz's departure in detail, but said there was more to it than the online post about Rob Bell's book.
"That's between the church and him," Southern said.
Church members had also been unhappy with Internet posts about subjects like gay marriage and the mix of religion and patriotism, Holtz said, and the hell post was probably the last straw. Holtz and his family plan to move back to Tennessee, where he'll start a job and maybe plant a church.
"So long as we believe there's a dividing point in eternity, we're going to think in terms of us and them," he said. "But when you believe God has saved everyone, the point is, you're saved. Live like it."
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From April 1, 2011:
BC-US-REL--Atheists in Foxholes, 3rd Ld-Writethru<
^Army group says there ARE atheists in foxholes<
^No atheists in foxholes? Fort Bragg soldiers beg to differ, seek recognition from Army<
^By TOM BREEN=
^Associated Press=
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) _ The cliche notwithstanding, there are atheists in foxholes.
In fact, atheists, agnostics, humanists and other assorted skeptics from the Army's Fort Bragg have formed an organization in a pioneering effort to win recognition and ensure fair treatment for nonbelievers in the overwhelmingly Christian U.S. military.
"We exist, we're here, we're normal," said Sgt. Justin Griffith, chief organizer of Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, or MASH. "We're also in foxholes. That's a big one, right there."
For now, the group meets regularly in homes and bars outside of Fort Bragg, one of the biggest military bases in the country. But it is going through the long bureaucratic process to win official recognition from the Army as a distinct "faith" group.
That would enable it to meet on base, advertise its gatherings and, members say, serve more effectively as a haven for like-minded soldiers.
"People look at you differently if you say you're an atheist in the Army," said Lt. Samantha Nicoll, a West Point graduate who in January attended her first meeting of MASH. "That's extremely taboo. I get a lot of questions if I let it slip in conversation."
The decision on recognition goes first to an Army agency called the Installation Management Command and may be reviewed after that by the Army Chaplain Corps. Neither agency returned calls for comment. MASH members said chaplains at Fort Bragg have been supportive of their effort.
Similar groups of non-theists at about 20 U.S. military bases around the world are watching the outcome at Fort Bragg in hopes it will lead to their recognition, too, said Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers.
MASH, whose name conjures the 1970s movie and sitcom about an Army field hospital in the Korean War, formed in January, partly in reaction to a concert called Rock the Fort that was sponsored by an evangelical Christian organization and held on base last fall. Griffith, an atheist when he joined the Army 4 1/2 years ago, said he tried to organize an atheist festival but called it off because higher-ups were not providing the same support they had for the Christian event _ a claim Fort Bragg officials deny.
Griffith said MASH has about 65 members among more than 57,000 active service members who live on and off the post. Bragg is the home of the 82nd Airborne Division and headquarters of the Army's Green Berets.