Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  If three Americans were stranded on a desert island, it seems likely the one thing they wouldn’t agree on is religion. They’d each believe something different. Even within one church, individual members usually hold their own beliefs. Church members are often very loyal to their denomination. However, a loyal Baptist would have a hard time explaining the difference between what he believes and what the Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians in town believe.

  Worldwide, there are something like 2 billion Christians and more than 1 billion Muslims. There are almost 800 million Hindus and 325 million Buddhists. After those big four, the numbers drop off sharply. For example, there are about 20 million Sikhs and 14 million Jews.

  The percentage of people in the United States who say they are Protestant has dropped in the last twenty years from about 63 percent to 51 percent. Statisticians say the drop has more to do with people who no longer claim they are affiliated with any religion than because of the influx of Catholic immigrants. Islam is the fastest growing major faith in the U.S., but Muslims still make up only about 4 percent of our population. It will be interesting when the Muslim population in a big city reaches the level that adherents want to put up a plaque in a public school with excerpts from the Koran.

  Most Americans know that Muslims accept the Koran as the word of God the way Christians accept the Bible. They know nothing at all about any Buddhist, Sikh or Confucian holy books. I certainly don’t.

  Over the years, religions have adapted themselves to the people who believe in them more than people have changed their lives to conform to their churches’ rules. When I was young, the Catholic boys I played with wouldn’t eat a hamburger on Friday, and the Jewish kids in school wouldn’t eat a ham sandwich on any day of the week. Things change. These days Catholics who practice birth control, get divorced, and eat meat on Friday no longer worry about going to hell.

  TOO MANY CHURCHES

  Any time the subject is religion, there’s a good chance that anything anyone says will offend someone.

  They closed 300 Catholic churches in Ireland in 2006 because of the number of priests who’ve been accused of molesting young boys, but I’m going to ignore the issue of young boys and Catholic priests and say something else that might be offensive to most churchgoers. There are too many churches.

  I think it might strengthen all churches if they closed half of them, tore down the buildings and sold the property for money they could use for other purposes. They might sell the property to someone who would put up a useful residential or business building on the site.

  There are about 300,000 houses of worship in the United States. Many occupy huge pieces of real estate in prime locations in every major city in the country. They pay no taxes. On many Sundays, even during the main service, the pews at thousands of churches are at far below capacity.

  Many of the clergy, ministers or priests address their prayers and remarks Sunday after Sunday to a few dozen people in buildings that could hold several hundred. For the rest of Sunday, and for all twenty-four hours of the other six days of the week, many churches are deserted. It seems like such a waste, and while we don’t think of it when we see empty churches, they cost every one of us a lot of money over the years.

  There are some beautiful churches in every city that should be preserved, but there are even more ugly, empty churches that should be torn down. You don’t have to be an atheist to believe that.

  I’m not knowledgeable enough about the differences in the beliefs of a Southern Baptist and a Presbyterian to know for sure, but it seems to me the various Christian sects have enough in common that they could worship as well together in one building as apart in several.

  Even if they didn’t want to convene at the same hour, there would be plenty of time for each group to meet separately with just its members. Is there something members of one of these churches believe that would offend members of any of the others? Why can’t they pray together in one building?

  I grew up in a city with a population of 125,000. I still visit there occasionally, and the population is about the same. In the phone book, there are 775 listings for churches.

  This excludes a lot of church-related listings.

  If these figures are accurate, my old hometown has one church for every 167 people. If half the population went to church, it would be one church for every 84 people. If one quarter of the 125,000 attended services, which seems like a more realistic number, there would be one church for every 42 people.

  When I lived in town, there was a Baptist church across the street, a Catholic church on the corner, and my mother sent me to the Presbyterian church a block and a half away.

  We were never short of churches.

  Today, I live in New York City within a block of a church that’s doing what all churches should be doing. It’s called a United Methodist Church, but the building is also home to Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and the Iglesia Cristo Vivo.

  On Sunday morning, the Methodist pastor speaks to about 200 of the church’s 400 members in a room that holds 1,100.

  On most week nights, the room is used for meetings by a wide variety of neighborhood groups for (or against) an equally wide variety of issues.

  The church has a huge kitchen in its basement that provides meals for hundreds of homeless people who come there from all over the city. It is an unusual church.

  There are estimates that about a hundred million Americans attend church regularly.

  That figure seems high and was probably made by some church organization but even if the figure is true it means there are 333 churchgoers for each of the 300,000 churches.

  The fact of the matter is, very few churches in America have 300 parishioners who attend regularly and most churches are less than 25 percent occupied on Sundays.

  They could all use business managers to work out their problems, which would almost certainly involve some real estate deals and consolidation.

  THE KORAN IS THEIR BIBLE

  I’ve been reading the Koran. The word “Koran,” or “Qur’an,” is from an Arabic word meaning “reading” or “recitation.” Most Americans do not readily accept any religion other than Christianity, but there are more than 1 billion Muslims in the world and they take Islam so seriously that we should get to know more about their religion.

  Muslims believe the Koran contains the words given or revealed to Muhammad by God, Allah. Muhammad was born in 570 A.D. and had a difficult early life because both his parents and grandparents died when he was young. His life improved when he went to work for a wealthy widow named Khadijah. She was impressed with how well he was handling her affairs and, although she was fifteen years older than Muhammad, they were married and lived happily together for many years. They had seven children.

  Muslims believe that Muhammad was a contemplative man who often went off alone to meditate in a cave. It was there that he said he heard the voice of Allah telling him that he, Muhammad, was the messenger, or Apostle of God. The voice of Allah is said to have given Muhammad words of wisdom. It told him to spread those words. Muhammad passed these sayings on to others and developed a following. Their beliefs formed the religion Islam.

  In case you’ve never read the Koran, I’ve chosen a few samples to give you an idea of its style and content. There are 114 sections called “surahs.” The first ones in the Koran are short and they become gradually longer. Like the Bible, every translation of the Koran is different and, also like the Bible, some of the Koran is not readily comprehensible to an ordinary person.

  Serious Muslims say the only legitimate Koran is the Koran written and read in its original Arabic. Its rhythmic beauty cannot be replicated in any other language. These excerpts I’ve chosen are from three versions I have:

  There are some similarities between Christianity and Islam but many differences. The Koran, for example, says:

  “Never has God begotten a son nor is there any God beside him.”

  The Koran has its own ideas about marriage and
divorce:

  “If a man divorces his wife, he cannot remarry her until she has married another man and been divorced by him; in which case it will be no offense for either of them to return to the other if they think they can keep within the bounds set by God.”

  The Koran is hard on those who don’t believe in it, condemning them to burn eternally in hell. It speaks of unbelievers frequently. For example:

  “The unbelievers say, ‘Pay no heed to this Koran. Cut short its recital with booing and laughter so that you may gain the upper hand.’ ”

  In another translation of the Koran, that same paragraph reads, “Those who disbelieve say, ‘Heed not this Koran and drown the hearing of it; haply ye may conquer.’”

  Allah is all-knowing to Muslims. Of those who pretend to believe but don’t really, he is quoted as saying, “They utter with their mouths a thing which is not in their hearts. Allah is best aware of what they hide.”

  There are many passages that explain the willingness of Muslims to touch off bombs tied to their backs if they believe they are dying for Allah.

  “If you are slain in the way of Allah or you die, certainly forgiveness and mercy from Allah is better than the worldly goods they amass.”

  Muslims, like the worshippers of any faith, are not open-minded about religion. The Koran admonishes: “Believers in Islam, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends. They are friends with one another.”

  MURDER MOST VILE

  Where do all the murderers come from? I don’t know any. You can’t pick up a newspaper or watch a news broadcast without having the details of a murder in your face. I don’t ever remember a time when there were so many nasty crimes:

  After killing his grandfather and a woman friend at home in Minnesota, a sixteen-year-old boy went to his school, where he killed five students, a teacher and a security guard. Then the boy killed himself.

  In Wichita, Kan., Dennis Rader was arrested and charged as the so-called BTK killer. Rader was accused of picking victims at random, binding them, torturing them and then killing at least ten of them.

  In California, Scott Peterson was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, and dumping her body, along with the unborn infant, into San Francisco Bay. At the trial, Laci’s brother, Brent Rocha, said he’d bought a gun with which to kill Scott but decided he’d rather see him go through the agony of being found guilty and executed.

  A previously convicted forty-six-year-old sex offender, John Evander Couey, is said to have confessed to kidnapping nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford, raping and killing her in Homosassa, Fla. Couey allegedly told four people that he had killed the girl but they didn’t report him to police.

  Brian Nichols was being taken into a court in Atlanta to be tried for rape. Authorities allege Nichols grabbed the gun of a deputy and shot her in the face, then shot and killed the judge, Rowland Barnes. As Nichols ran from the courtroom, he allegedly killed another deputy, hit a reporter with his gun and took the reporter’s car.

  In Chicago, an unemployed electrician who had unsuccessfully sued just about everyone, killed the husband and mother of a judge who dismissed one of his lawsuits.

  I don’t know whether there are more bad people, or whether newspapers are just covering more murders, but you can’t escape them.

  I hear people saying, “There’s so much bad news that I don’t read the newspapers anymore,” or “I never watch television news.” Well, real-life crime gets my attention. I find these stories interesting and educational. It’s not just the crimes but the consideration of the motives of the people who committed them. Ten years ago, I was fascinated by the details of the O. J. Simpson trial. It was interesting because it proved you can get away with murder. The not guilty verdict in the case charging Robert Blake with murdering his wife confirmed that opinion for me. Reading the paper alone, I do not have to be fair and unbiased.

  Half of these murders were committed by people with some kind of mental disorder. If someone murders another person and then takes his own life, chances are the murderer was not really sane. (Fewer than 10 percent of murders in the United States last year were committed by women.) In reading about crime, I’m harder on the chairman of the board of a company who steals $200 million than I am on a sixteen-year-old boy who grew up in a dysfunctional family and ends up a sick kid who murders his classmates. The chairman thought it all out and decided to be dishonest. The boy was, in part, a victim.

  There’s no way to tell whether our murder rate is lower now, in 2006, than it was in 1706. Statistics indicate the murder rate has gone down recently but you wouldn’t think so. In the United States last year, there were approximately 16,000 murders. In Japan, there were about 1,500 murders. Great Britain had about the same number as Japan. Are we kidding ourselves when we think we’re the most civilized nation on earth?

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT

  When world leaders met in Scotland for the G-8 Summit, several years ago they decided to double the amount of money they’re giving to desperately poor African countries.

  President Bush did not approve of the increase and neither do I, but for a different reason. Most aid money goes for food, clothing and housing. I’d like to see more of it spent on reducing the number of Africans we’re trying to feed. Their biggest problem is not a shortage of food, but a proliferation of people.

  The annual birthrate in the U.S. is 14 per 1,000 adults. France, Belgium, Norway and Great Britain have birthrates around 12 per thousand. Scotland is 11 per thousand. Last year, Russia was 9.8 per thousand.

  I didn’t know the rate for African countries until I looked it up. In Nigeria, a country of 130 million people, the birthrate is 40 per 1,000. In Zambia, it’s 41 per 1,000. Ghana is practically progressive at a mere 24 per 1,000. The birthrate in Africa is a disgrace, and birth control information and condoms should be handed out before the food.

  The rest of the world feels sorry for Africans and has a genuine desire to help. In 1985, a lot of popular musicians got together for the Live Aid concert. It raised millions of dollars “to stamp out African poverty.” It was a noble effort, but you could hardly say it “stamped out poverty in Africa.”

  Too many Africans are behaving as if they don’t know or don’t care what produces babies. They ought to be told with literature accompanying every pound of food we give them. Unfortunately, some of the organizations trying to win Africans to their own cause oppose birth control in any form.

  The African states are often called “developing nations,” but they are not developing. Many Africans are poorly educated and are having more children than they can feed or take care of. Children are often considered an asset in poor countries. They go to work at an early age and contribute to supporting their parents. The average African family has more than five children, and a lot of them have fifteen.

  The organizations doing good work in Africa are divided on birth control. President Bush has decided to cut off our contributions to the United Nations Population Fund because of his opposition to birth control.

  God is quoted in Genesis as having said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Were the Lord to look around our planet today and see the problems in Africa, I think He’d revise that and say, “Enough already!”

  PART THREE

  On Food and Drink

  Milk without fat is like non-alcoholic Scotch.

  WAR ON A FULL STOMACH

  There are things about your life it seems as though you ought to remember but cannot. I spent four years in the Army but don’t recall much about Army food. This comes to me now because when I see pictures of U.S. soldiers, I wonder what they have to eat.

  In almost a year with the 17th Field Artillery Battalion before I was reassigned to the Army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, I must have eaten close to 1,000 meals and I don’t remember a single one of them. It’s probably because the food was forgettable.

  I remember being seated at the end of a table in a mess hall one day when other soldiers were in line with their trays,
waiting to get to the steam table where the food was laid out. No matter what they were serving, they always gave you either coffee, tea or cocoa for a hot drink. You filled your pint-sized canteen cup with whatever it was that day. One of the men standing in line looked down into the cup of the soldier sitting next to me and asked, “What do they have today—coffee, tea or cocoa?”

  My friend looked down into his cup, which was almost empty, then looked up at the questioner and said, “I don’t know. They didn’t say.”

  And that’s the way the food was, too. One dish tasted pretty much like another.

  After I was shipped to England and transferred to the newspaper, I no longer ate Army food on a regular basis. I got what was known as “per diem.” It amounted to about $30 a week and with that I paid for my rent in a London apartment and food. I often ate in an Indian or Chinese restaurant because I preferred what they served to British food. An average meal cost me the equivalent of about $1.35.

  Because I regularly visited the air bases outside London to report on what the 8th Air Force had bombed that day, I often saved money by eating in the mess hall at the base. As a correspondent, I ate in the officers’ mess even though I was a sergeant. The food was much better than in the enlisted men’s mess hall.

  After the D-Day invasion, I ate the food provided by the First Army press camp. It was like the food in the officers’ mess. However, we had one creative mess sergeant who often swapped Army staples like sugar, flour, bacon and, of course, cigarettes, with local farmers in Normandy, for fresh eggs, milk, cream and vegetables.