Author Archives: Eric MacDonald

There’s always a proof text when you need one

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Dan McPeek has very kindly suggested – some time ago – a link to a HuffPo article by an atheist Muslim. It’s entitled “An Atheist Muslim’s Perspective on the ‘Root Causes’ of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia,” and it gives good reasons for thinking that Islamism is not a product of American imperialism, as is often suggested. It refers to a treaty between the United States and the Muslim Barbary states of North Africa signed into law in 1797, based on original negotiations by Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France. This is, just to put it in a historical context, before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the building of the Suez Canal, the British and French carving up of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War: events which are often thought to be flashpoints for the current relationships between the Muslim world and the West. It’s worth reading just to get things into perspective.

It is also only fair to point out (in a bit of potted history) that Imperial Islam engaged in capturing and selling European slaves in the slave markets of North Africa and the Middle East, and had a lively trade in African slaves long before Europeans became embroiled in the slave trade. Whole villages from parts of the British Isles, including Ireland, were captured and sold in the slave markets of Algiers. According to Wikipedia, the Crimean Khanate had a brisk slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process known as “the harvesting of the Steppes” Slav people were captured and sold in Muslim slave markets. (Memories of these markets still exist in the Yemen, where recently it was proposed that captured women be sold for use as concubines, which would solve the problem of infidelity by Muslim husbands! It would be hard to make this stuff up!) Thousands were taken from Moscow itself for use in this trade.

The frequent accusation that European colonialism is responsible for the present evils of the world ignores completely the fact that for hundreds of years Muslim imperial ambitions gobbled up the entire territory of Eastern Christianity in the Middle East, as well as Persia, Afghanistan and India, Christian North Africa, Spain, and Sicily, and, eventually, Constantinople and the Balkans (including Greece), before Muslim imperial adventures were halted in France (at the Battle of Tours in 762), and at the very gates of Vienna (in 1529!), and that Imperial Islam engaged freely, not only in colonial expansion, but in the capture and use of slaves from conquered peoples, as well as from raiding parties in continental Europe as well as the British Isles.

While not justifying the bitter hatreds and the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, it must be remembered that for centuries Muslims comprised the dominant power in the Balkans, to whom the Serbs and others were subservient. Indeed, an example of this subservience can be seen in the practice of scouring the Sultan’s Christian subjects for strong boys who would, at the age of 12, be given to Muslim families, where they were indoctrinated into Islam and trained as Janissaries, an elite corps of the Sultan’s bodyguards. Many Janissaries rose to high position in the Ottoman Empire, but they were still a sign and symbol of subservience and the status of Christians and other religious minorities as al-Dhimma, the people of the Dhimma, that is, contract status as tolerated aliens in return for payment of a tax (essentially, protection money). The bitterness of the war in Chechnya is partly the result of the long period during which Russians paid tribute money and provided slaves for the Muslim Tatars, and their eventual victory over them and their subjection to Russian rule. Such historical memories run very deep.

Foregoing added on Friday, 24th May, at 20.36 Atlantic Time ——————-

I was going to ignore the outrageous beheading of a British officer soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, on the streets of London by Muslim fanatics, a form of “individualised” jihad which seems to be becoming more attractive to Muslim radicals who seem no longer to have large jihadi organisations able to organise and carry out more ambitious attacks on infidels. However, Medhi Hasan — he of the encounter with Richard Dawkins who scoffed at Hasan’s belief in winged horses (or mules) and Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem and then through the seven heavenly realms — who is now the political director of Huffington Post UK, decided to weigh in with the declaration that the men who carried out the atrocity in Woolwich were acting contrary to Muslim teachings. For it says, Hasan tells us, in the Qur’an, that he who kills one man is as if he had killed all mankind, and he cites chapter and verse in doing so, concluding with the ringing pronouncement that:

Thus, the two supposedly Muslim men suspected of killing and mutilating an unarmed, off-duty soldier in the middle of a London street, while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”), were violating the injunction of their own holy book.

Hasan goes on to approve Prime Minister Cameron’s declaration that

Wednesday’s barbarism was “a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country”.

But we have a right, I think, to ask whether it is plausible to suppose that what these “barbarians” did was in fact contrary to the teachings of Islam, a religion which, historically, is blighted by events such as this, and continues to issue in barbarously cruel acts designed (so it seems) to terrify people into submission to the dictates of God’s last messenger.

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Campaign for assisted dying gains ground, but is still widely misunderstood even by those who are campaigning for it

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The campaign for assisted dying gains ground around the world. In Australia, the legislature in New South Wales is debating assisted dying legislation; some British religious leaders (Christian and Jewish) have come out in opposition to the position of their leaders and their religions’ official stand on assisted dying; in Vermont the Governor has signed an assisted dying law into force that went through the normal legislative procedure. All these are good signs, and to be encouraged.

However, I am still troubled by the idea that assisted dying for the terminally ill is a satisfactory form of assisted dying legislation, and I am dismayed that organisations like Dignity in Dying in England, and Compassion and Choices in the United States, are content to consider, as sound, assisted dying legislation in which a terminal prognosis of 6 months to a year is required before someone is eligible for assistance in dying. (I wrote a note to Sarah Wootton regarding this, but have not received a response.)

There are two major problems with such legislation, and it is high time that people recognised them for what they are.

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Radical Islamic Violence or Anomie and Self-Radicalisation?

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I find that, despite myself, I cannot remain entirely silent, so if there are still some of you out there still interested, I will doubtless add slowly to the sum of my posts after all! Blogging gets into your blood, and when you can no longer express yourself, it seems that the urge to do so is overwhelming!

I am still concerned about Islam, and the misunderstanding that seems to be widespread about the dangers of this religion. Of course, I understand that some people, like Rahman, will immediately say that Islam is made up of as many different belief systems as there are Muslims, but this is a way of avoiding the subject of the religion itself, as some sort of a unity, despite its lack of a centre of authority. Indeed, the fact that it lacks a central authority, aside from the central role that the Qur’an, the Sira and the Sharia play in Muslim life and belief, may serve to make Islam more, and not less dangerous, precisely because there is no way of controlling the most extreme forms of the religion, forms which are, in fact, endorsed by those central texts and traditions. And while Rahman and Paxton continue to struggle over the proofs for the existence of God — a completely hopeless task which has no end, and no very clear parameters either — Islam carries out its nefarious business in the world.

Now, someone will doubtless suggest that speaking about Islam’s “nefarious business” is itself Islamophobic, but this would be simply to misunderstand the religion itself, which obviously includes a significantly large fundamentalist radical dimension, whether all Muslims share it or not. It has to be remembered that Muhammad was a warlord, and not a particularly nice one at that, commending all sorts of wicked acts against his unbelieving neighbours, and that it is this man who represents, for Muslims, an ideal of humanity. It should therefore occasion no surprise that this ideal is used by some Muslims to justify acts of suicide bombing and the contemptuous use of “kuffar” women. Indeed, one imam in Oxford states the problem with unusual clarity when he points out that in many mosques, this kind of treatment of “kuffar” women is actually commended by many imams. This is reported in the Telegraph:

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The Last Post

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After much thought, I have decided, for the time being at least, to suspend operations on the blog. The blog posts will remain much as I have left them, although I have deleted some pictures, mainly of Elizabeth. This has been a labour of love, but it is not a permanent memorial to Elizabeth, and was never meant to be. So, for the sake of privacy I have decided not to include pictures of Elizabeth in what remains behind.

I want to thank everyone who has read and followed the blog, and the many who have made the discussions so rich and rewarding. Over the last two years and six months (or so) I have written something over 840 posts. I have backed up all the posts which I wrote myself, including the quotes which were included in them. The words come in total, to 1, 386, 095  words. That is surely enough for now. I do need to do other things, which constant attention to the blog has prevented me from doing, including, if it is still possible for me to do this at my age, to write a book about assisted dying. I have already mentioned my renewed interest in photography, and we will have to see where this leads me. I suspect that the reason that I found my transfer to Freethought Blops so distressing was the fact (although I did not know it at the time) that I was coming to the point where I did not want to be committed in the long term to the blog.

Once again, my thanks to all those faithful readers who have followed the blog over the last couple of years. You have been a great community of people, and have shown yourself to be intelligent, alive to the difficulties facing us in the world today, willing to think passionately and clearly about issues that concerned me, and I am grateful for your participation, without which this would have been a very lonely exercise in talking to myself. I offer you my heartfelt thanks.

I do this with great trepidation, striking off in a completely new direction, and my hands are trembling as I type these words. I feel a great sadness, but I do feel the need, nevertheless, to move on towards an unseen and unknown destination. I would like to thank, especially, Ophelia Benson and Jerry Coyne for their encouragement and support. In adding the military last post as a closing flourish, I do so full in the knowledge that this is a major ending of sorts in my life. It is remarkable how blogging can define a person. I hope those of you who are disappointed will not feel any sense of betrayal at my decision to move on. Thanks, once again, one and all.

The Last Post


Sunset and waves

The Design Argument

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The following is deliberately short, punchy, and unqualified. Perhaps it will help move the discussion along, since it seems to have got bogged down.

On an earlier post two commenters have been duking it out over the argument from design. I do not intend to repeat their arguments and counterarguments here. There is a simple reason for this. The design argument cannot prove what it sets out to prove, and anyone who has thought about it for a moment must know why. According to one of the discussants, Rahman,

There must be a reason why the numbers are precisely aligned for life.

And, of course, no doubt there are — reasons, that is. But there is no obvious reason why we should think that there must be a — that is, just a single, quite overwhelming — reason why the numbers are precisely aligned for life. This is an illegitimate step in the argument.

Take the argument that the other discussant, Paxton, uses, to show that the argument from design is simply irrelevant to an explanation of how things are. AC Grayling uses this argument in his new book, The God Argument, and it basically goes like this. If you go back into the past and try to determine the reasons for things being as they are, you will come upon an entire series of quite contingent events. For instance, why are you here? In order to answer that question you will be taken on a long search though an unimaginably long series of quite contingent events, people being in the right place at the right time, being in the mood (or not) for sex, plus the completely chance occurrence of the sperm that resulted in you being born fertilized the egg instead another of the hundred or so thousand or million that might have, and that perfectly contingent event was in turn dependent upon similar quite contingent events going back, in an unbroken line, to the first denizens of early organic environments.

The problem is, quite simply, that the whole endeavour of a search for roots and reasons wouldn’t have started off unless you were here to set off on it. In other words, you are here. There are reasons why you are here, possibly many millions of them, and all of them quite contingent. You might well not have been here had one of the links in the chain have been slightly different. Someone else, or no one, might have been here in your place, and it would then be that person who would be (or perhaps not, since he or she might have different interests) setting off on the search for the …. Snark — is it?

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Trying Out a New Camera

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I have been absent without official leave for the last while, trying to deal with several things, not least was a fall that I took, prompted, I think, by a drug which was prescribed for a chronic condition that has plagued me for some time now. I have in fact debated with myself whether to continue with the blog or not, and the jury is still out on that. But one thing that I did decide to do was to buy some new camera equipment — at the cost of a small car! — and try to get back into photography again. Yesterday I was out trying out one of my new camera bodies — which has so many bells and whistles it’s hard just to take a picture without a degree in photography — a trip which resulted in some of the first scenic pictures I have taken since Elizabeth died, so it was a big move for me. I put a few of them here for those who might be interested. Since I was trying so many new things, and playing with different picture controls, some of them are less than stellar, but they did amuse me, and I hope they will amuse you too. They were all taken along a stretch of Nova Scotia coastline, most of them at Peggy’s Cove (though none of the Peggy’s Cove light), a famous tourist destination for visitors to Nova Scotia, and a place where Elizabeth and I used to go when we were first in love, so it has a special resonance for me. It’s the first time I have gone there by myself since May 2007, when we made a last nostalgic journey shortly before going to Switzerland. (Since I may take up photography more seriously I have attached copyright to the pictures, and will do so more regularly in the future, if I can get myself back into photography again.) The original files are a bit over 100 mb apiece, so these are drastically reduced in size.

Atlantic Thrasher Returns with the Catch (Lobsters)

Atlantic Thrasher Returns with the Catch of Lobsters (she had just come out of the fog bank)

Atlantic Thrasher at the Wharf

Atlantic Thrasher at the Wharf

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Existential Blasphemy

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As anyone who has read here on choiceindying.com will know, I do not have a great deal of respect for Andrew Brown, who writes for the Guardian. So of course I was not surprised to read his little piece about Katherine Welby’s (the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter) depression. As a small taster, take the following words:

Katherine Welby’s remarkable blog post and interview about her depression rings true to anyone who has ever been ill in this way but it also illuminates the complex ways in which religious belief can twine round the condition, providing either a vine to tangle your feet in or a beanstalk to climb out on.

Now that, gentle reader, is all just puffery, nor is it clear in what way Katherine Welby’s “remarkable” blog post or interview (both linked in the quote from Brown) really does illuminate the complex ways in which religion helps or hinders those with depression. And that, I think, is perhaps the most telling thing about this. I certainly don’t wish Katherine Welby any harm, and hope she gets the help she needs for her depression, and if she finds hope in religion, well and good. But let’s not build this up into something of earth-shaking significance, please!

For the daughter of a priest, then bishop, then archbishop (a man who came to his religious vocation later in life), who herself read theology at university, it should not surprise anyone that Katherine Welby thinks in religious categories when she considers the ins and outs of the depression that has blighted her adult years. Having episodically suffered from depression myself, and even thought seriously about ending my life on several occasions, it does not surprise me that she has sought solace in religion, and in religious community. But the anodyne things that Brown says about Katherine Welby’s way of dealing with her depression — all of them gleaned from her blog – through Bible, faith, and church community, is pathetically shallow. Welby herself says that “the Bible is key,” because, as she justly points out, the Bible isn’t a story of perfect human beings in perfect accord with their lives, who go about praising god all day long. The Bible is unquestionably allzu menschlich, to use Nietzsche’s phrase — all too human. Entirely human in its questioning, doubting, failing, despairing … And to the extent that this can allow people to recognise and accept their humanity without condemnation, that’s all very well, of course. That’s a source of strength for Katherine Welby, as she says, and doubtless it can be.

But she acknowledges another side to this particular coin. If the Bible is all to human, it is also all too religious as well, and so it is not at all surprising that she has met with the shadow side of religion, where the accusing finger points at those who have not been able simply to fall back confidently into the supporting arms of Jesus. And, as Welby notes, this is not something that church people are particularly good at, that is, at being screwed up and depressed, without a rosy disposition and confidence in the future. But she doesn’t seem to see that she does the same thing, and her own words could easily be turned to the same purpose, and to box people in. Listen:

The bible is my key. Reading the psalms (that oh so regularly quoted ‘you can yell at God, look’ book) I find that I don’t need to have hope every second of the day. In my hopelessness I just need to acknowledge that God is bigger than my illness and he will come through – eventually. Not always easy, but always possible.

“He will always come through — eventually.” And that’s simply not so. Just because the book of Job ends up with Job being restored to health and good fortune, with daughters even more beautiful than the ones killed at the beginning of the story, doesn’t mean that Job ever sees a smidgeon of justice. Wealth is not an answer to disaster, nor is the declaration, ”I’m bigger than you — where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” a particularly comforting response to the fact that I am finite, fallible and faulty.

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Assisted dying and the failure of community — or how to be an idiot by following the rules

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I get so angry when people misrepresent assisted dying in the way that Giles Fraser does in his latest op-ed in the Guardian that I could scream! Why is it that something that is, for some people, a matter of urgent concern should be dismissed with lightweight and completely inapropos remarks from someone who simply misunderstands, and, from the look of things, will go on misunderstanding until the time comes for him to die. It’s a Christian (and generally religious) determination to look at irrelevant things and then suggest — for that is what he’s doing, after all — suggest that he’s been there, done that. He’s like a tourist who breezes through London in a day and then says he’s “done London,” as if you could do more than glance at one or two things of interest in the time allotted. But Giles Fraser is especially guilty, because, not only does he get it wrong; he hasn’t even begun to understand why people are asking for help to die. And he calls himself a loose canon! This is not loose. This is positively stupid.

He entitles his piece:

I want to be a burden on my family as I die, and for them to be a burden on me

Well, bully for him! That’s clear then, and his children will no doubt, when the time comes, appreciate the burden they have to bear. Of course, he may go out like a light, especially if he insists on flying so near the sun like this — or is it just the heat from his rhetoric simply melting the wax on his wings? But it’s all the usual stuff. Misdirection not to find directions out, but simply to mislead. The Anglican Church of Canada plays the same game, suggesting in its coy words that assisted dying represents a failure of community — which means, of course, abandonment, by those who can read between the lines. Here’s the key:

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other.

But it’s not called “looking after each other” if what the person who is suffering is asking for is help to die. It’s called coercion, then — which has a very different resonance — and if someone is being coerced into being a burden, then Fraser has simply has missed the point about what looking after each other is all about. Moreover — and this, coming from a priest, is inexcusable — it simply papers over the cracks with regard to how people die. Sometimes the burden, if Fraser really wants to know, is borne by those who are dying, and if those who are watching someone die in misery doesn’t notice this, then they are simply not watching closely enough!

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The problem of the interpretability of sacred texts

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[I apologise for the long silence. My "little" fall seems to have taken more out of me than just my broken rib and its attendant discomfort, and I have been feeling, as a consequence, a general sense of "unwellness". However, here is a post I had almost finished before I decided to "take it easy," which you may find interesting in the mean time. I do not expect to be back "full time" for a little while yet. Thanks for your patience.]

It has been said that a translation of the Qur’an is not the Qur’an, but an interpretation of the Qur’an. So Pickthall’s “translation” of the Qur’an is called The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation. For that, after all, is all that it can ever be. The Qur’an is in Arabic, which is, in some sense, though Rahman denies it, the language of God. Evangelical Christians often say that the Bible is inerrant in its original text. Both Muslims and Christians, although they acknowledge the existence of both translation and interpretation, deny that it applies to the sacred text in (at least) its sacred meaning, as though text and sacred meaning are somehow miraculously conveyed merely by reading the text in a certain frame of mind.

Some Christians have got themselves into a bind by supposing that the true meaning of scripture is hidden from those who are unworthy. But how is worthiness to be characterised, so that we know who indeed has grasped the true meaning of scripture, the original meaning intended by God, whatever, presumably, its human “authors” thought? This is what I call the “hermeneutic auction,” and it is a defeater for any sense of sacred truth. Why those who believe that God speaks through texts, do not recognise the problem, is itself a problem, for there are clearly dynamics at work that tend to send interpretation spiraling out of control.

Take, for example, issues of ethics in the Roman Catholic Church concerning the end and the beginning of life. Similar things might be said, as well, about Islam and Judaism, since Christians, Jews and Muslims (inclusive) tend to hold that abortion is forbidden, and that suicide is a grave moral error. It is occasionally acknowledged that people who kill themselves sometimes do so because they are mentally disturbed, and so allowance is sometimes made for this possibility. But abortion, which is a conscious choice by someone, is apparently never justified under any circumstances, if the practice of the Roman Catholic Church is anything to go by. Protestants, on the other hand, sometimes provide some latitude for choice in the matter of abortion as well as in the matter of self-deliverance, though it is not quite clear how these exceptions get through the fine mesh of the Protestant moral conscience. Latitude is sometimes allowed as a matter of “compassion,” but it is hard to see how compassion can make a difference. If abortion is contrary to the will of a god, then presumably there is an ultimate, indefeasible prescription which it would be wrong to ignore. Compassion could cover a multitude of sins, and if obedience to a god is the issue, that is obedience to a being than which nothing greater can be thought, whose writ is universal and absolute, where is the room necessary for raising doubts about this or that individual case?

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The growing religious challenge to Enlightenment values

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I hate to harry this subject like a dog with a bone, but I think more needs to be said. It has been suggested that I am biased. Rahman wrote, in a comment on an earlier post:

This bias is I’m afraid, reflected in all your opinions – muslims bad, westerners good.

This, however, is not the case. But I would say, without reservation, that the Enlightenment (one of whose principle founders was Benedict de Spinoza (or Baruch de Espinosa), a Dutch Jew of Portuguese stock) is better than Islam and Christianity, or any number of other religions put together. Not only that, but it is worth defending against the incursions of religious beliefs and practices from whatever quarter. What troubles me so much about the growing presence, in the heartland of traditions whose sources lie within the history of the Enlightenment struggle with religion, and its partial liberation from religious prescriptions, of pre-Enlightenment religious traditions which are striving to roll up the Enlightenment and put it back into the box from which it came.

Indeed, I have been at pains to point out, over the last two years and a few months that I have been writing this blog, that not only is the presence of a very conservative Islam putting increasing pressure on what might be called “the Enlightenment settlement” in Western democracies, but, in part, I believe, prompted by this presence, Christianity, in its various forms, but especially in its Roman Catholic and evangelical forms, has been making increasing demands to public recognition in law and cultural practice. The recent signing into law, by the conservative Governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback, of a bill that defines life as beginning at fertilisation, is an example of this increasing intrusion of religious belief into the political sphere, which is a direct challenge to the Enlightenment principle of the separation of religion from the political realm. The Governor said, on the occasion of signing the bill into law:

All human life is sacred. It’s beautiful. With this, we continue to build this culture of life in our state.

This is not only a violation of the privacy and liberty rights of women; it is a direct challenge to the Western tradition of Enlightenment values of individual liberty and rational discourse. The sanctity of life principle is essentially religious, and, however valuable we think life is – and it is, in general, justly considered to be a great good – we cannot impose on women an obligation to bring each pregnancy to its “natural” termination, whether in spontaneous abortion or birth; nor may we impose on every person in states that they consider to be conditions of intolerable suffering the duty to live until their “natural” death. Both of these prescriptive attitudes are religious in origin and function, and have no place in liberal democratic jurisdictions.

Enlightenment values have priority, not Western or Eastern, Christian or Muslim, Sikh or Hindu. And the priority of Enlightenment values is such that they should provide protection for the freedom and equality of all. Practices which abridge this freedom and equality should be prohibited, especially when they may be seen as deliberate challenges to the possession of such freedoms and such equality. This is why I believe that the burqa should be banned in all free societies, and why, in general, religiously distinguishing dress, and practices, should be reserved to private space.

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