Category Archives: Judaism

Islam and respect, continued ….

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I want to begin with something that The Philosophical Primate said in a comment on yesterday’s post, and I hope I will be forgiven for quoting all of it:

I honestly do not believe that Islam is intrinsically worse than any other faith-based religion. Rather, it is merely trapped — for the moment — at an earlier stage in religious development. Islam is currently as Christianity was in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages — oppressive, totalitarian, theocratic, and violent, not least to its own adherents, especially women. So too was Hinduism not so long ago (many remnants of which still remain), shoring up the caste system and demanding (or at least reinforcing) such quaint and charming traditions as suttee. So too was Mormonism until the Mormon patriarchs decided that the benefits of Utah’s statehood outweighed the benefits of their quaint traditions of murder and child-rape/slavery/marriage. So too are any and all religions based primarily on faith (and indeed, faith-based political ideologies like the various forms of Communism), because unsupportable claims are the ideal tool for rationalizing unconscionable actions.

No faith-based religion is worthy of ANY respect whatsoever, at any stage in its development. The fact that broader cultural forces of enlightenment and progress can force reform on backwards traditions does not alter their inherent backwardness, it just makes them more neighborly. That neighborliness is certainly important, but it is not worthy of respect: Rather, it warrants only wary tolerance. Tolerance, not respect — and always wary, because faith remains intrinsically perilous, easily exploited to rationalize any reprehensible nonsense believers invent.

While I largely agree with The Philosophical Primate here, I want to make some qualifications. It does not seem to me helpful to say that Islam is ”trapped at an earlier stage of development.” It is not clear to me that there is any measure of development for religions. However, it does seem to me that Islam has reached a particularly difficult stage in its trajectory at which it feels trapped by circumstance into becoming, along some of its axes, a particularly virulent form of itself, at a time when Christianity (in particular), under pressure from the Reformation and the wars of religion, has been forced to become more liberal and tolerant. I agree that no religion is deserving of our respect, and that about them all we should be warily tolerant. But I do think — and I do want to say this with tolerance and respect for those Muslims who have been able to make the transition to modernity without abandoning those things which they consider to be of spiritual value in their faith – that there are aspects of Islam which make it particularly dangerous, and largely inhospitable to significant revision, at least on a large scale. It is perhaps worth mentioning those features here.

First, there is no central authority in Islam, so Islam is how it is interpreted by any number of different “authorities”, and this tends to produce a kind of competition to the most literal reading of the religion. Where authority is dispersed in this way, the tendency is to try to outdo others in faithfulness to tradition, to the words of sacred texts, and to severity of interpretation. (The same tendency can be seen at work in evangelical Christianity.) And this dispersed authority is further intensified by using the street as a way of enforcing the conclusions of the “scholars”.

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Not all Muslims are rampaging through the streets

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This post is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks once more to Malgorzata.

It is only fair to point out, as Tim Harris said in a comment the other day, that there are some people, at least in Libya, who are protesting against Muslim violence, and are opposed to terrorism. Of course, I had no doubt that there were, but there have been public demonstrations to this effect, and Elizabeth Reeve, over at The Atlantic, has reported on them. There are pictures too.

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The Ottawa Citizen asks the “Religion Experts” about Assisted Dying and the Sanctity of Life

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Now available in Polish at Racjonalista.

Thanks to Veronica Abbass we have the delight of reading a bunch of tripe from some so-called “religion experts” giving us their take on what the “renewed debate” tells us about the sanctity of life. According to Helga Kuhse, the Australian bioethicist, the Sanctity of Life Principle can be expressed as follows:

It is absolutely prohibited either intentionally to kill a patient or intentionally to let a patient die, and to base decisions relating to the prolongation or shortening of human life on considerations of its quality of kind. [The Sanctity of Life Doctrine in Medicine, 11; italics in original]

Now, the Ottawa Citizen (here) thinks that asking a group of “religion experts” how the debate over assisted dying is affecting our conception of the sanctity of life would be a useful exercise. In general, of course, you might as well just ask the pope, because so-called “religion experts” are not likely to stray very far from the usual religious line that life is sacred. Indeed, while not all of the Ottawa Citizen’s “religion experts” are actually religious experts at all, in general all of them are reluctant to stray away from things they take to be revealed. Almost all of them return a firm non placet so far as assisted dying is concerned. We are not surprised. (It is perhaps worth adding, parenthetically, that the contributors are not really “religion experts” at all, a form of words which suggests expertise in the study of religion. One of the contributors (Kevin Smith) does not seem to have any religious affiliation at all. The rest are supposedly “religious experts”, that is, religious believers whose religious faith gives them moral prejudices of one kind or another based on supposed revelations or authoritative religious texts.)

What is more surprising, perhaps, is that the Ottawa Citizen should end its article with the words of a Roman Catholic priest:

We can do better as a society than killing those who suffer but that requires  that we begin with the awareness that all human life is sacred.

At least I think these words come from the priest contributor. Whether these are the words of the last person on the Citizen panel is not altogether clear, but since the Citizen deemed it appropriate to ask only one apparently nonreligious person to comment, there seems to be an underlying assumption that religious people are in some sense moral experts, whose views not only need to be heard and respected, but are the principal sources of our moral understanding. As such this doubtless expresses the editorial position of the newspaper itself. The Citizen has a long history of printing Margaret Somerville’s obiter dicta on the subject of assisted dying (and other ethical issues, but especially those emphasised by the Roman Catholic Church) from time to time. I assume these views are concordant with its own editorial position on the matters in question. But to suppose, as the Citizen apparently does, that “religion experts” have anything pertinent to say on the matter is simply to accord to religious leaders an expertise that they do not possess. Religions think they have insight into the minds of their gods, but there is no reason to think either that what supposed gods think on moral issues should concern us, or that we should pay any attention to those who think that they know what their gods think. It’s time to rid ourselves of the uncritical respect paid to religions and their leaders.

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Freedom and Identity

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Now available in Polish at Racjonalista.

A few days ago a very silly woman by the name of Ayesha Nusrat published an op-ed piece in the New York Times (and the Times printed it!) with the title “The Freedom of the Hijab.” In this piece Nusrat, a privileged Indian Muslim woman, has the audacity to claim that wearing the hijab is liberating:

It’s been over two months since I decided to become a hijabi — one who wears a head scarf and adheres to modest clothing — and before you race to label me the poster girl for oppressed womanhood everywhere, let me tell you as a woman (with a master’s degree in human rights, and a graduate degree in psychology) why I see this as the most liberating experience ever.

What complete idiocy and tommyrot! The New York Times should be censured for publishing such nonsense. As one blogger over at Oh, the humanity of it all! says:

Clearly, to Ms. Nusrat, the hijab is merely a few yards of cloth. For far too many women in far too many countries (for instance, the Middle East, North Africa, Far East and the Southeast of Asia, not to mention, Europe), the hijab is an obligatory article of indenturement [sic] that permits no choice, but is to be worn on pain of punishment and/or death; to them, it is a symbol of systematic oppression.

People can do the most terrible things — things that others are forced to do — and call it liberating, but it is only liberating if you can choose not to, as Nusrat can. She chose to be “hijabi”, and so it is liberating. But if she were like the German girl who wore the hijab because, if she did not, her father or brothers would kill her, it is the clothing of tyranny:

Bahar a young woman living in Germany wrote: When you see me on the street I am veiled but do not think I am a Muslim. I have been forced to veil by my father and brothers; they will kill me if I don’t. [Maryam Namzie's blog over at Free Thought Blogs]

Bahar is neither Muslim nor free, just a woman being forced to wear something for the modesty that Ayesha Nusrat finds so liberating. What is perhaps as troubling is that she came to the decision to become “hijabi” after her experience with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, where she was — there’s that word again — a Faiths Act Fellow. But while she may have come to a fresh conception of the faith of her birth through that experience, being a Faiths Act Fellow did not help her to think more rationally. Indeed, while I don’t know how rational she was before the experience, she seems to have lost the faculty of critical thinking while undergoing it. This, given Tony Blair’s rather Pollyannaish conception of the value of faith — any faith — is unsurprising; but it provides some justification for thinking that his faiths initiative is likely to do more harm than good. Are we surprised? Of course not!

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Slavery in the Sacred Texts of Christians and Jews

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Available in Polish at Racjonalista.

Since the matter came up in a recent post, it is worthwhile adding something to what has already been said about the practice of slavery in the Bible. The Christian Old Testament, Jewish Tanach, is easiest mined for such evidence, but as I said the New Testament is just as complicit. In the New Testament slavery is simply accepted as a fact of life, and no moral implications are drawn from it, except that in the letter to Philemon, Paul expects (whether or not the expectation was borne out in fact) that Christian slave owners will treat their slaves as brothers in Christ). There is nothing in the Christian scriptures which can justify the claim that Christianity, at its foundation, threw a critical light onto this most serious of human moral failings — namely, the ownership of other human beings, and their use as living instruments. Here, for those who are interested, are some passages in which biblical slavery is expressed and condemned picked out and commented on by the author of evilbible.com:

Except for murder, slavery has got to be one of the most immoral things a person can do.  Yet slavery is rampant throughout the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments.  The Bible clearly approves of slavery in many passages, and it goes so far as to tell how to obtain slaves, how hard you can beat them, and when you can have sex with the female slaves.

Many Jews and Christians will try to ignore the moral problems of slavery by saying that these slaves were actually servants or indentured servants.  Many translations of the Bible use the word “servant”, “bondservant”, or “manservant” instead of “slave” to make the Bible seem less immoral than it really is.  While many slaves may have worked as household servants, that doesn’t mean that they were not slaves who were bought, sold, and treated worse than livestock.

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Religion as Hate Speech

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Every morning, over my coffee, I go through a number of online newspapers, reading the headlines, and the odd article that captures my attention. I tend to spend more time on the opinion pages, for they deal not only in quickly changing news stories, which have their ten or fifteen minutes of fame and then sink below the attention horizon, but with things of more critical interest. Today, in the National Post, Allan Gould speaks of The Eichmann Effect, on the fiftieth anniversary of the hanging of Adolf Eichmann (31 May 1962), the SS officer (Obersturmbannführer, or Lieutenant Colonel) who made sure that the death trains moved Jews and others to the killing factories in the East, where the Nazi genocide was carried out. Although he was himself too squeamish to watch the killing of Jews himself, he made sure that the death transports were priority traffic, even during a time when, from the standpoint of German war aims, military traffic ought to have been given a higher priority. But the murder of Jews was more important to Hitler and his band of mad men than carrying on the war, which was effectively lost anyway.

One of the things that struck me about Allan Gould’s article is something that has nothing at all to do with Adolf Eichmann, though it is, I think, closely related. He begins his article by saying that he grew up in Detroit, his parents having moved from Toronto because of the regnant antisemitism there:

In the mid-30s, “No Jews or Dogs Allowed” signs were posted along old Highway 2 (now the route of the 401), and along the beaches of Lake Ontario. Many jobs were closed to Jews, as well. My family’s memories of those experiences were what propelled me to attend Eichmann’s trial — a watershed in the history of the fight against antisemitism.

The odd thing is that, though I was born in Canada, I grew up in India in complete ignorance of antisemitism; and although there were fundamentalist Hindu groups in the India I grew up in, and even though I arrived in India as a child shortly after the massacres of Muslims and Hindus during the partition of India into a largely Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan, and shortly before Gandhi was murdered in New Delhi early in 1948, religious animosities played virtually no part in my life. My father was a Christian missionary, and though I never heard any outright condemnation of another religion, the only reason for being a missionary is because you believe the people among whom you work are burdened with religious error and blindness, and are likely, without a change of faith, to suffer the just punishment of God.

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Okay. Now what?

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Over the last week or two I have been writing posts which some people have responded to with the claim to know that something is a revelation from a god. This is a baseless claim, as I said in a recent comment, and it is time to address it straight on, because this claim is at the root of most of the evil of which religion is a source — an amount that is not small. In a fairly well-known essay, Richard Rorty once pointed out that religion is a conversation stopper. As soon as God is introduced into a conversation, there is nothing more to be said. In a comment on the last post, Bob Wheeler has this to say:

The human race cannot simply go on, century after century, ignoring God’s Law and exploiting each other for our own selfish purposes, and expect that nothing will happen to us.  The fact that God is a God of love does not mean that He simply ignores evil.  At the end of the day someone has to pay the piper.

You see? Conversation over! All it takes is the claim that there is a law that we are ignoring, and that there is a price to be paid for this ignorance, and what more can be said? It is as if Bob is sitting on the papal throne, and he is speaking ex cathedra. He knows, and so he gets to tell us all what is true, period, end of story.

What possible basis could he give for making this claim? He would have to refer immediately to a tradition  in which such a claim might be made, a tradition which, in turn, would be countered by someone from a different tradition, who has received a different law, and walks humbly with a different god. What could either possibly say to the other which would be convincing? The Muslim refers to the Qu’ran, a book which is largely a pastiche of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian sayings, only partly assimilated, and often poorly understood. The Jew refers to the Tanach, but especially to the Torah, and its commandments, a loose assemblage of different writings spanning centuries, or, as Tom Thompson suggests, is a very late collection deliberately used to define a people who were to occupy Palestine for Persian colonial interests, no doubt incorporating local myths and stories to add plausibility. The Christian then refers us to Jesus, and to the words and stories about him contained in the New Testament, a book which has that name because of the Christian belief that the Jewish covenant (or testament) is now null and void — though it is plausible to think that Christians misunderstood their Jewish predecessors (as well as their contemporaries) very badly. And try as they might, Christians cannot simply expunge that meaning from their sacred text. And the stories about Jesus are so worked over that they only doubtfully refer to an historical person, even if there was someone at the begining of the story-telling around which the stories cystallised. So, limiting ourselves to these three monotheisms, we have first, the Jews, to whom God’s promises were made; we have, second, the Christians, who hold themselves to have received God’s new promises in Christ, and who also hold that those promises were sealed in the blood of God’s son, Jesus Christ, whom, by their perfidy, the Jews killed; and then we have, third, the Muslims, who believe that they have received a final revelation from God, and that God’s word to Jews and Christians is no longer a living word of the only god, whether or not this is the same god who encountered the Christians and the Jews.

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Faith is a Cognitive Sickness

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I’ve been listening to some of Peter Boghossian’s public lectures about the nature of faith. Here are a couple of examples, and they’re worth watching straight through. Here’s the first — entitled “Jesus, The Easter Bunny and Other Delusions: Just Say No!”

That is quite long, and there is a shorter version, dealing with roughly the same things, accessible here — entitled “Faith: Pretending to know things you don’t know”

Now, as most of you will know, when philosophers and others begin to criticise faith as believing things, people of faith will immediately turn round and claim that faith has nothing to do with believing. They will begin, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did with Richard Dawkins, talking in poetic language, which, no matter how you read it, simply cannot be understood as belief about things “out there,” but become, instead, about things “in here” — “in my head,” “conformable to my feelings,” and so on.

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We are puzzled along with Dawkins. What could Rowan Williams actually mean by nature “opening itself up to its own depths”? But by slipping off into poetic language it seems as if he is no longer talking about things “out there,” and so the language of faith seems to escape the epistemic conditions necessary for us to be talking about “the same thing,” about something that could claimed with justice to be true.

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Did Jesus Exist?

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The existence or non-existence of Jesus is not an issue with me, and I still find it hard to understand why it should be an issue with anyone else. I spent years talking about the Jesus of the gospels, his teachings, his life and death, and, believe it or not, his resurrection — which was the hardest part of all — and for a while Robert Funk and his Jesus Seminar interested me strangely, and I attempted to understand the basis upon which the Fellows of the Seminar distinguished between the actual words of Jesus from words put in his mouth by later myth-making and tradition. Of course, the latter exercise has to presuppose Jesus’ real existence as an historical person who not only said things of interest and importance, but whose actual words can be distinguished from sayings that are not reliably attested and cannot be ascribed to the apocalyptic preacher from Galilee.

But still this didn’t lead me to wonder whether Bart Ehrman’s HuffPo article “Did Jesus Exist?” had anything of importance to say. If there is no god, and it makes no sense to speak of god in the absence of its existence — contrary to people like Don Cupitt and Jack Spong — then Jesus, whether as an historical or a mythical figure, must lose traction in the mind of anyone who has said farewell to god. So, when Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne (here and here) and Richard Carrier showed such keen interest I was mystified, and, I suppose, I still am. After all, if there is no god, then, whatever can be said about Jesus, there could not have been a Jesus who was more than an apocalyptic prophet who carried on a ministry of some kind in Palestine, and who anchored a number of mythological beliefs which are not directly related to anything that he said and did. Anything else, besides the sheer humanity of the man, and his wit and wisdom, if any, must be a mythological construction — must be, because there can be no sons of god if there are no gods. The most that the gospels can be is special pleading either for a mythological figure at the centre of a new religious movement, or the myth-making writings of people whose real human leader either died by crucifixion as a pretended messiah figure or even royal pretender, about whom stories were composed that supposedly reflected not only his wisdom, but his wonder-working powers and divine transcendence.

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Shaken to the Very Core

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After a week when Islam has been in the news because of its tendency towards violence and intolerance of free speech, Karen Armstrong has once again entered the lists on behalf of the religion, telling us in rather mawkish tones that our prejudices about Islam will actually be shaken by the British Museum’s exhibition on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are supposed to make at least once in their lifetime. She tells us, eyes all agog, that

The ancient rituals of the hajj, which Arabs performed for centuries before Islam, have helped pilgrims to form habits of heart and mind that – pace the western stereotype – are non-violent and inclusive.

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living.

Even supposing that it is true that violence of any kind was forbidden in the holy city, and that pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, or even, taking the prohibition of violence to absurd lengths, to swat an insect, it scarcely follows that this would be enough ”to form habits of heart and mind … that are non-violent and inclusive.” Habits develop only with long experience and constant repetition. To suppose that one trip to the holy city will embed these habits deeply in a personality is wishful thinking. A number of commenters on Armstrong’s piece in the Guardian have not been slow to point this out. Indeed, she has received scarcely any support for her exaggerated and unfounded notion of Islamic toleration and non-violence. As one writer, quoted by Ibn Warraq in his book Why I am not a Muslim, asks: “In short, Muhammad had to conquer, his followers liked to conquer, and his deity told him to conquer: do we need any more?” (122)

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