Craig, Brad, and the New Atheists

On February 10, 2014, Craig Hicks killed three young people. Hicks actions are abhorrent, criminal, and the deaths of his victims unequivocally tragic. Hicks is not in any way, shape, or form heroic; he is a criminal, a coward, a murderer.* My arguments against our "justice" system notwithstanding, he needs to be punished to the full extent of the law.

*I am not a journalist; I can pre-judge Hicks to my heart's content. I can live with certainly being excluded from sitting on his jury. If I'm wrong, I'll apologize.

Hicks is, among other things, an atheist, and his victims were, among other things, Muslims.

Thus, we do have to ask: did the New Atheist "community," however defined, contribute to this crime? I think the question cannot simply be dismissed; it needs to be asked, and we must answer it carefully and deliberately.

In Muslim Panic, Satanic Panic?, the Infamous Brad, presumably a NeoPagan, whom I've been reading for years, and for whom I have tremendous respect, answers in the affirmative: The New Atheist community is nothing "but an anti-Muslim hate group." If Brad's charge is true, then the New Atheist community definitely would bear substantial responsibility for Hicks' murders, even if it is true that Hicks is legally insane or has a serious medical mental illness.

But, uncharacteristically, Brad's argument is substantially flawed.

Brad first mentions the Washington Post article, "Chapel Hill killings shine light on particular tensions between Islam and atheism," where author Michelle Boorstein explores the possible relationship between New Atheism and Hicks' murders. Boorstein delivers a balanced piece, raising the question of the relationship between "public criticism and violence," in contrast with statements by spokespersons of notable atheist organizations decisively rejecting Hicks' kind of violence. Brad then contrasts Boorstein's article with The Baffler article, The Nuances of Nonbelief. In this article, Stuart Whatley argues that atheism, being simply the absence of belief, has no overarching ideology that could be a legitimate cause of Hicks' crimes.

Brad dismisses Whatley's argument out of hand first as a "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but this dismissal seems completely unfounded. A "No True Scotsman" fallacy is a fallacious move from an empirical claim to a definitional claim. As far as I know, no New Atheist claims empirically that all atheists are nonviolent (or even especially good people). Whatley's argument may be flawed — he ignores, I think, that atheists who speak publicly about atheism, and offer public criticism of religion, have formed at least a loose community, with some socially constructed cultural values — but Whatley does not seem to move from an empirical claim to a definitional claim. At best, we might define a "true" New Atheist is one who renounces senseless, infantile, and socially illegitimate* violence such as Hicks'; since Hicks does not meet the definition, he is not a true New Atheist. In just the same sense, I personally was born in the United States of French/Italian/English parents and have never lived in Scotland; therefore, I am not a True Scotsman. That argument would hardly be fallacious: even though the definition might be arbitrary, I simply do not fulfill any component of the definition.

*One does not have to be an absolute pacifist to be a New Atheist.

Inexplicably, Brad compares the New Atheists vs. Muslims to the #NotAllMen vs. #YesAllWomen controversy. I know absolutely nothing about the details of the latter controversy, but on general principles, there's an obvious context there: the existence of a millennial, socially constructed hegemonic patriarchy, from which all men benefit, whether they like it or not. A man cannot simply use his personal attitudes to excuse himself from patriarchal privilege. But there is no such thing as a socially constructed hegemonic atheism. Furthermore it's not NotAllAtheists, it's exactly one atheist out of millions, who's also apparently a gun nut and an American chauvinist. (And furthermore, an atheist who had, according to Michael Nugent, written extensively on social and religious tolerance.) The comparison is especially inapt because Brad himself admits that "atheists are, in America, the single most hated belief group, with approval ratings on par with or maybe even below religious extremist terrorist groups." Hardly the stuff of hegemonic power.

Brad's main point is to compare the New Atheists to the NeoPagans' shameful participation in the prosecution of alleged "Satanic ritual abuse" in the 1980s and 90s. Again, this comparison seems entirely unfounded. In what sense at all are any New Atheists whatsoever endorsing the legal persecution of innocent people for public relations gain? Has a single even moderately prominent New Atheist said, for example, that we should not challenge the illegal imprisonment of innocent Muslims in Guantanamo Bay just because they are Muslims, because we want to curry favor with the authoritarian neoimperialist United States government? Brad seems to think too that criticism of Islam is somehow insincere, that New Atheists have latched onto Islam just because Muslims are a popular political target. I can assure Brad personally that this is not true: New Atheists criticize Islam because we are genuinely critical. We — or more precisely some authors, notably Harris and Hitchens — might have become more popular because the target of our criticism happened to match United States imperialist policy, but the motive for criticism of Islam rests on genuine disagreement, not simple opportunism.

Brad's main point, however, is not his worst point. His worst point is a paragraph literally libelous hate speech:

Not all atheists are bigoted anti-Arab, ant-Islam wannabe hate killers, but yes all Muslims have to fear New Atheists. After the New Atheist communities’ most prominent authors have spent the last half dozen years or so beating this drum, I don’t see how anybody can call the New Atheists anything but an anti-Muslim hate group. These are people who can’t be distracted from their message of anti-Muslim hate by oppression or violence from any other religious community, whether it’s the veto on public policy the Ultra Orthodox hold in Israel or the anti-gay secessionist rhetoric of Alabama’s fundamentalist Chief Justice or terrorist acts by Christian Identity groups or anti-abortion groups or anti-Islam terrorism by Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Nope. Try to bring any of that up, and they change the subject back to, “the Muslims are coming to kill us all!”

First, if public criticism of a group is "hate speech," then this paragraph is prima facie hate speech: whether or not his criticism is warranted, Brad is being publicly critical of New Atheists. Could some nutjob read Brad's criticism and that conclude that some New Atheists, whom all Muslims should fear, need killin'? The only alternative to public criticism is that everyone suck everyone else's dick 24/7.

But, more importantly, I know what hate speech is: it is saying literally that people are inhuman and deserve death. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." So... Sam Harris perhaps crossed the line when he said that Islam might, if they acquired long-range nuclear weapons, require a preemptive nuclear strike. Harris has defended this postion as entirely hypothetical, but I still don't like it one bit; it looks way too much like the "ticking time bomb" hypothetical to justify torture. And, of course the late Christopher Hitchens was notably in favor of a global war on Islam. And fine, if Brad wants to criticize Harris and Hitchens, he would have my support, but to generalize this criticism to all New Atheists is a blatant lie. Some New Atheists are also pro-imperialism, some, such as Jerry Coyne, are pro-Israel. — there's a considerable range of opinion in our "community" — but my sense (without a rigorous statistical sampling) is that pro-imperialists are a minority among New Atheists.

Brad asserts that New Atheists talk only about Islam, and refuse to discuss any other religious oppression. This is a flat out lie. We can't discuss everything, but New Atheists talk about a lot of stuff. Just look at the front page, for example, of Planet Atheism. There is a range of opinion and topics. Notably, the front page includes a story critical of the lack of the media coverage and the weak government response to a Christian terrorist intending to blow up mosques in Jerusalem. There's a lot of stuff critical of Christianity there too (duh). New Atheists have written about Irish blasphemy laws, Christian anti-evolutionism, Christian theodicy, etc. We also talk about race relations, anti-vaccination stupidity, and feminism.

All this from a cursory investigation of Planet Atheism and a few prominent New Atheist blogs. PZ Myers, has even written two thoughtful pieces on the responsibility that New Atheists really do have in Hicks' crimes: Own it ("I do not think that atheism compelled [Hicks] to kill Muslims, just as I don’t think Islam compels one to become a suicide bomber, or Christianity compels one to bomb abortion clinics. But I do think that the ideology must accept some responsibility for failing to teach people not to do those things.") and Beliefs have consequences ("I don’t think there’s a significant component of atheism that preaches for violence against believers, but there are a large number of atheists who seriously try to argue that atheism should include no moral component at all."). The New Atheist discourse is a lot richer than Brad would have his readers believe.

The only thing Muslims have to fear from New Atheists are our words: we will criticize Islamic misogyny, authoritarianism, superstition, and, yes, its scriptural and ideological support for political and personal violence, which goes far beyond any violence justified in resisting Western imperialism. The only reason Muslims have to fear imperialism from New Atheists is that, sadly, many New Atheists are embedded in an imperialist capitalist system that we did not create, a system bent on a conquest of the (oil-bearing) Muslim lands we did not begin: the proper criticism should be directed against imperialism, not New Atheism. And the only reason Muslims have to fear personal, individual violence from New Atheists is because writers like Brad and Luke Savage (see also my response) spread bigotry and vicious lies about us. That's hate speech.

Fuck this, I'll publish it

According to Barry Duke, Random House has refused to publish Sherry Jones’ novel, The Jewel of Medina, "a racy piece of historic fiction centred on the love life of Prophet Mohammed."

Stupid stupid stupid. If the book itself is any good, whoever publishes it will not only strike a blow for freedom but also make a shitload of money.

So I'll publish it. I might need some help, though. Contact me if you're interested in helping.

Ali Eteraz

The Pakistani Heretical Girl gives "moderate" muslim Ali Eteraz the business.

Money quote: Eteraz' "denial of Islam’s own part in the making of Muslim male mysogony and his blaming of local ‘culture’ rather than Islam sinks any claim to be a true reformer."

Structural violence in Islam

Fuck You - Punjab Medical College. The violent oppression of the Ahmadis demonstrates conclusively that the mindless intolerance and stupidity of Islam goes all the way to the official, legal and governmental expressions; it is not just a failure of a few outliers and fringe elements.

(h/t to The Apostate)

Islamic authoritarianism

The leaders of the Islamic world are on the case!

The imprimatur of truth

Leila Hussein — the mother of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, savagely murdered in an "honor" killing by her unrepentant father, Abdel-Qader Ali, for falling in love with a British soldier — died on May 17, murdered by unknown assailants in a hail of gunfire that also left two women's rights workers injured. [h/t to Pharyngula, twice]

The idea that the murder of young Rand was the aberration of a monster is obviously contradicted by the facts:

[A]s Rand was put into the ground, without ceremony, her uncles spat on her covered corpse because she had brought shame on the family. ...

Her mother, "screamed and called out for her two brothers so they could get their father away from her. But when he told them the reason, instead of saving her they helped him end her life." ...

The murdering father boasts, "The [police] officers were by my side during all the time I was there, congratulating me on what I had done."

And, of course, Abdel-Qader Ali did not himself kill his wife.

It is possibly the case that Leila's murder was incidental.

Police said the incident was a sectarian attack and that there was nothing to link Leila's death to her family. 'Her ex-husband was not in Basra when it happened. We found out he was visiting relatives in Nassiriya with his two sons,' said Hassan Alaa, a senior officer at the local police station in Basra. 'We believe the target was the women activists, rather than Mrs Hussein, and that she was unlucky to be in that place at that time.'

It is plausible. Campaigners for women's' rights are not acceptable to many sections of Iraqi society, especially in Basra where militias have partial control in some districts and impose strict laws on locals, including what clothing they should wear and what religious practice they should follow.

But that's no excuse.

Islamic apologists will (and probably already have) made the argument that it is Iraqi culture, not the Islamic religion, that is responsible for these brutal murders. They are, in a sense, correct. The Islamic religion is not responsible, because there is no such thing as the Islamic religion: there is no such thing as religion.

I mean by "no such thing as religion" that there are no gods. All religion lacks extensional meaning. Religion does not refer to anything at all in objective reality.

But of course there is some such thing as religion. Lacking extensional meaning, religion can have only intensional meaning. Religion refers to a set of ideas within our heads. And the ideas that religion refer to are invariably pernicious: social, cultural constructs that are falsely and fallaciously given the imprimatur of objective truth. And it is precisely this religious component of Islamic culture that is directly responsible for these brutal murders.

Very few people, I would imagine, would be willing to suborn murder, rape, segregation and marginalization on their personal preference. The guy who says, "Women who disgrace and dishonor their families must die because it's the truth that God wants it that way," sounds like a righteous paragon of morality; the guy who says, "Women who don't toe the line should be murdered just because I hate those fucking bitches," just sounds like a complete asshole.

Without the imprimatur of objective truth, when people are forced to take personal responsibility for their moral beliefs, the murderous misogyny of Islamic religious culture would have evaporated five hundred years ago.

The religious "moderates" aid and abet this extremism by supporting and endorsing the idea that there is some definite truth to the way God wants things, as opposed to the way we ourselves want things. It's completely irrelevant that the moderates claim that God wants all the same thing that sensible, civilized, empathic and feeling human beings want. It should be enough just that sensible, civilized, empathic and feeling human beings want something; there's no need to bring God into the discussion.

Worse yet, because this God is kind of shy, all the moderates have are the scriptures, delivered to ancients of a vastly different culture. And the scriptures — Jewish, Christian, and Islamic — are terrible, reflecting as they do the harsh prejudices of ignorant savages living on the edge of starvation and in conditions of brutal exploitation. The extremists have the fundamentals — the literal meaning of the scriptures — on their side. The moderates have to actually do more violence to logic and reason to read a modern, humanistic morality into these ancient mythologies.

People are still, by and large, creepy assholes. Basing our society directly on what people want, rather than what they believe God wants, is not a panacea, not a recipe for instant Utopia. But removing specifically religious belief from our society, undermining the imprimatur of objective truth religion gives to arbitrary social constructs, and forcing people to take personal responsibility for the moral beliefs they wish to impose on their fellow human beings, gives us at least a chance at improving our society.

Fitna, Islam and racism

Is criticism of Islam necessarily racist? No. Islam is a religion, which must be adopted. It's not an ineluctable characteristic of any person, much less a biological characteristic used to denote "race". Those who label all criticism of Islam as racist "Islamophobia" go wrong on this point.

Can criticism of Islam be racist? Per se, no; much depends, however, on the intention of the criticism, which can be inferred from the context and framing, and from what's not being criticized. A criticism of Islam can be used with racist intentions. This is where Hallquist and the Christianist neoconservatives go wrong.

If you criticize Islam, but not Christianity, I have to ask, "Why?" The hypothesis that you're engaging in differential criticism on the basis of race is at least live and deserves investigation.

In Fitna, Geert Wilders criticizes Islam as a politician explicitly endorsing restricting immigration, especially non-Western immigration. Again, the criticism per se is not racist, but the framing and context of the criticism can definitely be racist.

(I don't know that Wilders really is a racist, or that Fitna really is in a racist context. I really don't care much about Dutch politics, and I'm already convinced that Islam is as monumentally stupid and hateful as is Christianity. But raising the issue is not, as Hallquist asserts, prima facie an "Orwellian lie" by virtue of Islam being a religion, not a race.)

Consider the analogy: Suppose I were to talk about crime, or tyrannical dictatorships, or ridiculous superstitions. In my talk about the topic, I show only examples of black people: black criminals, black dictators, superstitions held in African countries, ignoring white criminals, white dictators, white superstitions. And suppose, for instance, that I were using the discussion to justify differentially affecting the rights and privileges of black people. Even though all of my facts were 100% accurate, even though I'm not explicitly talking about race, even if I never actually mention the race of the people I'm talking about, I could still be justly accused of the most egregious racism.

There are ways of framing the exact same facts, of putting those facts in context, that are not racist. It would for example be a non-racist framing and context for a black person to discuss black crime, with the intention of trying to help members of her own community live better lives (and to criticize the egregious racism of defining specific crimes and punishments that differentially and intentionally affect black people).

We are in that awkward stage regarding racism where explicit racism is almost universally deplored, at least in public, but racism itself is obviously (a few obtuse neocon fuckwits excepted) still around, still strong. Thus racists have to put a veneer of non-racism around their racist propaganda; they have to resort to implications, context, framing, dog-whistles and other forms of obfuscatory bullshit, while explicitly saying, "Racism? I don't see any racism. Nope, no racism here, by golly! wink wink"

Pat Condell on DVD

Pat Condell is coming to a theater near you! Well, it would have to be very near you, in your living room to be precise.

Here's an opportunity to support Pat Condell, Dawkins, and the scarlet A.

Or you can watch Condell on YouTube for free.

(h/t to PZ Myers; image stolen from Hemant Mehta)

The enemy of my enemy

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Conservative and neoconservative writers are among the most vocal and strident critics of Islam. My long-time readers will know that I'm no friend of Islam, but the neoconservative critique of Islam cuts no ice with me.

Any critique of Islam coming from a Christian, especially someone raised Roman Catholic such as Fitna creator Geert Wilders, cannot be considered a critique against religion in general, not even against irrational, violent, hateful or extremist expressions of religion; Christianity is every bit as irrational, violent, hateful and extremist as Islam. The neoconservative critique of Islam is similar to the Christian fundamentalist critique of Hitler. They don't condemn the genocide per se, (the Christian Bible explicitly condones instances of genocide), it's that Hitler didn't have the proper authorization to kill six million Jews. There's really no way to look at any neoconservative critique of Islam except as a complaint that these [brown] people are violent and hateful in service to the wrong imaginary friend.

The neoconservative critique is not necessarily racist, although not just neoconservatives but garden-variety conservatives rarely shy away from exploiting racism in the population. The neoconservative critique exists to justify American imperialism, especially the war in Iraq and the coming war in Iran. Islam has to be presented as not only an putrid example of human superstition (which it is) but as a terrifying threat to the very existence of the West (which it's not).

The neoconservative critique is not necessarily pro-Christian, but again, they rarely shy away from exploiting religious fundamentalism. The neoconservative critique also exists to justify political authoritarianism, necessary to turn back the onrushing hordes of stinky brown wogs Islamic extremists... while ignoring and excusing the clean, pure white folk Christian extremists who form the rock-solid base of the neoconservative movement and the Republican party they dominate.

I agree completely that Islam, like Christianity, deserves the harshest criticism. But when that criticism is employed to justify racism, imperialism, militarism, authoritarianism, Christian theocracy, torture, wars of aggression and the clear-cutting of our civil rights, I'm going to complain. Not to protect or demand respect for Islam, but to protect and demand respect for humanism, democracy and liberty.

Tolerance and multiculturalism

The comments on Stephen Law's response to Ibrahim Lawson [link fixed] have become a conversation about multiculturalism.

Steve Chester appears to argue that condemning any behavior under the umbrella of a religion is tantamount to totalitarian oppression.

The problem with that stance, though, is that nobody supports absolute tolerance. We don't tolerate murderers, thieves, rapists, people who don't pay their taxes, or even people who jaywalk. The Nazis presumably had some sort of prosaic law enforcement, but we are not Nazi-like just because we enforce prosaic civil law.

The question is not whether to be intolerant of anything, it's about what specifically to be intolerant of; not whether but where to draw the line.

It's one thing to argue that we should tolerate some particular behavior. It's a horse of a different color to try to protect some behavior by arguing that we should draw no lines at all. It's so patently false — precisely because we do draw entirely uncontroversial lines — that one wonders why the speaker wishes to distract attention from the specifics of the behavior.

"Multiculturalism" has been assigned so many incompatible meanings that it's been rhetorically bludgeoned into meaninglessness. It can range anywhere from tolerating varying styles of dress to racial tolerance all the way to permitting and condoning the murder and mutilation of one's own children for trivial or even imagined sexual misbehavior.

Part of the problem is that multiculturalism and anti-multiculturalism have been adopted as smokescreens by people with objectionable hidden agendas. Right-wing extremists have adopted anti-multiculturalism to justify naked racism, racial oppression, and to justify wars of aggression to get those damn wogs off of our oil. Religious extremists have adopted multiculturalism to shield abhorrent misogyny and a genuinely totalitarian political ideology from democratic criticism. (Islam is not necessarily totalitarian, but Islamic totalitarianism is hardly a fringe movement, as evidenced by Saudi Arabia, the Afghani Taliban, the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan, and any number of fundamentalist movements in other Islamic countries, even secular Turkey.

If people are going to live and work together, they need to establish some core values that are affirmed by everyone in that society. However, determining specifically what those core values are or should be is a nontrivial task, because it is also the case that beyond those core values, there is a considerable range of value that can be tolerated, and in many cases a range of values has value in itself.

It's a fundamental value of Western civilization from the dawn of the enlightenment that verbal criticism should never be suppressed. Although J. S. Mill makes the case most forcefully and coherently in On Liberty, it's arguable that freedom of speech is the sine qua non of Western Civilization. I view any attempt to suppress or condemn speech as speech on any basis — multiculturalism included — to attack the very foundation of my own values. Criticize the content of any speech to your heart's content, but to demand that anyone just absolutely shut the fuck up on any basis is beyond the pale.

Within my own (or other Western societies) if Muslims want to defend the practice of murdering their daughters, throwing acid in their faces, crippling their education, or restricting them from full civic participation and equal rights, let them argue the merits of these demands and submit them to full, vigorous democratic debate. To hide behind "multiculturalism" is nothing more than pure cowardice.

And if the racists and colonialists want to defend the practice of subjugating and denying full civil rights to brown people, if they want to defend wars of aggression and robbery on a national scale, if they want to enforce Christianity, let them defend those demands on their own merits. To hide behind "anti-multiculturalism" is equally cowardly.

Update: Here's an example of bullshit anti-multiculturalism (h/t to Political Crank):

Juashaunna Kelly, a Theodore Roosevelt High School senior who has the fastest mile and two-mile times of any girls' runner in the District this winter, was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet after officials said her Muslim clothing violated national competition rules.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for the past three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams: a custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard that covers her head, arms, torso and legs. On top of the unitard, Kelly wore the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

I'm no fan at all of Islamic dress codes for women. I think these codes are inherently misogynist and oppressive, and they deserve criticism. On the other hand, singling out Ms. Kelly in this manner is just egregiously stupid, and the supposed justification is just slavish, authoritarian adherence to a different arbitrary dress code. When multiculturalism vs. anti-multiculturalism becomes a heated argument over which kind of petty authoritarianism to enforce in society, we have entirely missed the point of liberal democracy.

Ancient copies of the Koran rediscovered

Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code

Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail. ...

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

It has long been known that variant copies of the Koran exist, including some found in 1972 in a paper grave at Sa'na in Yemen, the subject of a cover story in the January 1999 Atlantic Monthly. Before the Yemeni authorities shut the door to Western scholars, two German academics, Gerhard R Puin and H C Graf von Bothmer, made 35,000 microfilm copies, which remain at the University of the Saarland. Many scholars believe that the German archive, which includes photocopies of manuscripts as old as 700 AD, will provide more evidence of variation in the Koran. ...

Throughout the Internet, Islamist sites denounce the work of a handful of marginalized scholars as evidence of a plot by Christian missionaries to sabotage Islam. What the Muslim world cannot conceal is its vulnerability and fear in the face of Koranic criticism. In the great battle for converts through the Global South, this may turn out to be a paralyzing disadvantage.

Why I love Islam

There must be violence against women

Yes, that's the actual title of the article. No, it's not in the least bit satirical. If you're suffering from low blood pressure, reading it should fix you right up.

(h/t to Pharyngula)

Beelzebub, brooms, beauty parlors and the boy blasphemer

Yes, I'm resurrecting the Top Ten Religious Idiots theme. I'm going to be doing it in a slightly different way: Rather than updating a numbered list, I'll post the individual stories as I find them. When I get ten, I'll publish a list.

Also: About 90% of my religious idiots come from News of the Weird Daily and Fark. To save a little time and typing, I'll just be crediting them as NOTWD and FARK, without a link for each story. I'll continue to link to the primary source.

Today's first religious idiot is Pope Ratzo Benedict, who has decided to give the problem of demonic possession his full attention [NOTWD]. Ratzo is joined by Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic priests, who fought a pitched battle with brooms in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Prince of Peace [Himself].

Islam gets its turn with Iraqi Muslim extremists concerned with the existential threat of beauty parlors to Islamic society [FARK].

British headmaster Ian Davidson counters the growing threat of militant atheism by barring nine-year-old Douglas Stewart from his class Christmas party because the boy's mother removed him from religious education classes [NOTWD].

Update: PZ Myers has his own list. Himself puts his two cents in as well.

Benazir Bhutto killed

According to the BBC, Benazir Bhutto has been killed, apparently in a suicide bombing.

(thanks to Himself)

Humanism and the Hijab

In response to The Apostate's mighty rant, a muse u offers her personal experiences regarding the hijab:

my assumptions and western conditioning were challenged when I lived in a moderate Muslim country for several months.

I had the opportunity to experience cover as a westerner passing for local on a temporary basis. ...

When I returned to the states, NYC first, I missed the cover. I missed the freedom of not being hit on constantly, not having to think about who i was turning on. ... Now, in my western way, I fend off such advances with 30lbs of fat added to my frame.

I’m not defending Veils or Hijab, nor am I pretending we are as free as many may think we are here. I simply felt the desire to share a glimpse of an experience I had that challenged my assumptions.

Very central to this experience is that it was fundamentally voluntary. Even though it was taken to conform to a culture, the commenter was visiting voluntarily and could (and did) leave whenever she pleased without harm or loss.

In most Islamic cultures, the hijab is coerced, not just by social pressure, but also by legal and extra-legal violence. Conformance to an act enforced by violence cannot be in any sense "liberating". At the very best, such conformance is a tolerable submission, the sacrifice of a smaller value for a larger. (For example, by conforming to violently enforced laws against stealing, I sacrifice the lesser value of being able to arbitrarily take property for the larger value of protecting my lawfully acquired property. It is still the case that not stealing cannot be actually "liberating"; it is still a sacrifice, albeit tolerable.)

There's no evidence, no good argument, that women in Islamic culture acquire any larger value by their act of submission in donning the hijab. Actual sexual exploitation is prevalent in Islamic culture; it merely takes different forms than in the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh's film Submission dramatizes the submission of women's sexuality in toto in Islamic culture. It is clear that the stated instrumental value of the hijab — to protect women from sexual exploitation — is a hypocritical lie. It actually facilitates male sexual exploitation; we must conclude it exists in Islamic culture entirely to disempower and subordinate women, not only sexually but socially and individually.

That the commenter personally found it liberating and instrumental in avoiding sexual exploitation is due to the entirely different semiotics of the act in Western culture.

There is a deep paradox in social constructs such as the hijab. On the one hand, it seems intuitive that ideally everyone should be permitted to fully express his or her sexuality*; ideally one should not have to take any individual measures at all, much less measures that undermine one's own sexuality, to fend off unwanted advances or otherwise avoid exploitation. These measures should, in the ideal case, be entirely the responsibility of the legal system, not the individual.

*subject, of course, to the more general ethical constraints of consent and reciprocity. All further ethical assertions include this proviso.

On the other hand, people have the feelings they have — good, bad and indifferent — about sexuality; these feelings are just as much facts about a person's nature as any of their other genetically, socially or idiosyncratically constructed feelings.

Furthermore, there are a lot of people who behave in oppressive and exploitative ways, and it would be nonsense to demand for any reason that someone not protect herself against such behavior in whatever way she sees fit.

No one can fault an individual for trying to adapt and behave so as to maximize her own happiness and minimize her suffering, no matter how she happen to be, no matter how she constructs happiness and suffering. On the other hand, any time an individual appears to diminish himself to negotiate society, any person with a broader vision of human happiness than the purely individual must be concerned.

So, on the one hand, I don't fault at all any individual woman who wears the hijab, nor do I fault any individual woman for putting on 30 lbs. of unwanted fat to avoid unwanted attention. On the other hand, I definitely fault the social and cultural constructs that push women into making these choices which, to my mind, make them choose between how to diminish themselves and take away the choices which would augment themselves.

... to segue to more abstract theoretics...

It is entirely possible to have an entirely different judgment of an act at the individual level and at the social and cultural level. I have to presume that every individual's choices are taken to maximize her own happiness and minimize her own suffering; I can judge an individual's actions only on the direct and foreseeable effect of those actions on other people. But on a social level, I have to judge socially constructed actions on their effects on an idealized individual, on my opinion about how a person should be.

Without this standard, I cannot judge at all; I cannot make any comparisons at all. I cannot judge Nazi Germany, I cannot judge Stalinist Russia, I cannot judge the dystopian society of 1984. I cannot even judge the elements in my own society that lead to the commenter's own suffering: I can no more condemn the men who make unwanted advances than I can condemn her response. Without appeal to the ideal individual, I cannot say anything but observe that each person "legitimately" tries to maximize his own happiness and minimize his own suffering. I cannot even apply the provisos of consent and reciprocity.

All ethical judgments must reference some conception of the ideal individual, and that idealization is a matter of individual opinion, not truth. There is no other basis on which one can judge. All other bases reduce to this opinion. There is only more or less honesty in admitting and being explicit about this basis.

The difference between modernism and "good" (or coherent) postmodernism is the postmodernist admission that the basis of ethical judgment is individual. Good postmodernism differs from bullshit postmodernism in that the good postmodernist has the "existential courage" to actually make judgments on the authority of her opinion; the bullshit postmodernist just wraps his judgments in a flavor of bullshit different from modernism.

Because I am a human being, I make and express judgments. Because I am myself, I make the particular judgments I make. Because I recognize that my judgment reduces to my opinion (my opinion, moreover, about something, the ideal individual, that does not actually exist) I express my judgments in words rather than going around hitting people on the head when they do not agree with me.

Because I do judge, I judge Islam to be odious, which seems to piss off a lot of people who call themselves liberal. I'm very explicit: my ideal individual has nothing to do with being white, or Christian (ha!), or doing any of the cultural things I enjoy as an American. My ideal individual is happy, avoids physical suffering, and, most importantly chooses as she herself pleases. Full stop. It is against that standard and only that standard that I judge.

On the other hand, because I know my opinion is in fact an opinion, I don't support making war or violently repressing a culture I consider odious, which seems to piss off a lot of people who call themselves conservative.

Happily, I'm used to pissing most everyone off and it doesn't bother me in the least.

Sing-along DVD

British children targeted with terror sing-along DVD for would-be suicide bombers

A shocking sing-along children's DVD which glorifies suicide bombing is being investigated by anti-terrorist police after being found on sale in one of Britain's terrorist hotbeds.

The disc - part of an Egyptian-made series - is on sale in West Yorkshire, where three of the July 7 bombers lived, and is aimed at youngsters from the local Muslim community. [read more]

This is, of course, the religion that British Educator Ibrahim Lawson wishes to teach to children as unquestionably true.

This is the problem with teaching anything as unquestionably true. I have no real doubt that Lawson condemns suicide bombings. But if you teach Islam as unquestionably true, you have no guarantee that your own version of Islam is what the person will believe. You've created an "Islam-shaped hole" in a person's critical faculties, and anyone who can shape a belief to fit that hole will bypass the last, best defense a person has against being exploited or used for evil purposes.

The disease model of religion

We can view religion like a disease: In most people it causes a degree of discomfort, and many people can be carriers, entirely asymptomatic, but often the disease explodes into deadly virulence (h/t to Himself).

Furthermore, it's often not enough to understand and react to the immediate, proximate causes of disease; it's also important to understand the complex causal web involved in disease transmission.

For example it's strictly true that dirt, filth, and shit in the gutters is not the proximate cause of diseases such cholera: cholera is caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacterium. One could, in one sense, disclaim moral responsibility for permitting or encouraging unsanitary conditions by pointing out the true cause of cholera. "Filth doesn't kill people, bacteria do!" One could also truthfully point out that many people who live in sanitary conditions contract cholera, especially when it's endemic in nearby unsanitary conditions, denying even the indirect causality.

But of course unsanitary conditions provide a vector and a reservoir for many diseases. It's not physically possible to control cholera unless you control the vector and reservoir. Once you understand the scientific connection between sanitation and cholera, it becomes hypocritical to both denounce cholera but not take active steps to improve sanitation; any "moral" arguments to the contrary fall flat.

So it is with religion: Once we understand that religion contributes to death and suffering, we assume a moral duty to find and implement effective measures to break the causal chain of events not at the most aesthetically pleasing morally favorable points, but at the most scientifically effective points. For disease, this means that we raise taxes to clean up the slums, even though the dirt itself is not the proximate cause and those paying the taxes are not the ones who directly creating the unsanitary conditions. The only consistent alternative is to accept and embrace the consequences of not doing so: to say, effectively, "well, cholera is A-OK."

Accepting the disease model of religion entails a number of conclusions.

Religious "liberals" should be viewed as carriers, in just the same way that asymptomatic people can carry diseases such as typhus or tuberculosis. It's absolutely irrelevant that such people themselves do not act in extremist, violent or otherwise aberrant ways: they infect others, whose individual nature renders them more susceptible to symptomatic expression of the disease. Once you accept and propagate the idea that the literary interpretation of ancient mythology is a valid source of moral truth, you contribute to those whose interpretation leads them to embrace violence and extremism. The fact that your personal interpretation isn't violent or extremist is no more relevant than that you personally are asymptomatic when carrying tuberculosis.

The imperialism and colonialism of the West towards the Islamic world has to be seen as promoting and furthering "unsanitary" conditions. Let me be blunt: The proximate cause of Islamic extremism is Islam, and only Islam, not imperialism. But the oppression that results from imperialism and colonialism provides an environment where virulent and extremist strains of the disease of Islam can propagate, just as people shitting in the gutters provides an environment where cholera can propagate. It's not that removing imperialism and colonialism will immediately halt the disease of Islam. It's that we cannot halt the disease of Islam unless we mitigate this environmental factor in its propagation.

Under this model, the Iraq war must be seen as trying to control a cholera epidemic by dumping a million pounds of infected feces where the disease is epidemic, to indicate our "disapproval" of those who live in unsanitary conditions. The motivation is irrelevant; only causal efficacy is relevant.

(The war in Iraq — and especially its supporters' rhetoric — is a perfect example of the specific mechanism by which religion causes dysfunction: it breaks the connection between empirical observation and determination of truth. What becomes important is unfalsifiable assertions about "motivation" rather than empirically determinable causal efficacy. Opponents of the Iraq war are consistently labeled as "pro-Islam", as ridiculous as labeling those who oppose dumping shit into cholera epidemics as "pro-cholera". And religion is not the only cause of this disconnection, as Christopher Hitchens sadly demonstrates.)

One additional conclusion is that there are always unintended consequences to every ameliorative action. For instance, improved sanitation to control infections diseases such as cholera and typhus was indirectly responsible for the polio epidemic of the early 20th century.

Poorer sanitation [prior to the 20th century] resulted in a constant exposure to the virus, which enhanced a natural immunity within the population. ... [Improved sanitation] drastically increased the proportion of children and adults at risk of paralytic polio infection, by reducing childhood exposure and immunity to the disease. [Wikipedia]

These unintended and unforeseeable consequences are not an argument for doing nothing, but they are an argument for keeping our eyes open and our minds alert, so we can detect them and mitigate their effects.

Opus censored!

Here's the second censored Opus comic. Good grief! We're afraid of freedom of speech to save the Muslims from this?

Opus Censored!

The first censored Opus comic is available on Salon. It's sooooooo offensive (rolls eyes).

Read it. Watch the damn ad if you have to; it's worth it.

According to Editor & Publisher, "At least 25 of the 200 or so "Opus" client newspapers might not run the Sunday-only comic's next two episodes, which feature Islamic references and a sex joke." Is your newspaper one of them? If so, contact them and complain.

Opus censored!

According to his official website Berkeley Breathed's next two Opus comics will be censored from a large number of newspapers nationwide, presumably because they are "offensive" to Muslims.

While newspapers do, of course, have a right to choose what they print, I don't have to approve of their choices, and in this case I don't approve. I haven't yet seen the strips, but what harm can can a damn penguin do?

The strips will appear on Salon.com on August 26th and September 2nd; I'll be posting direct links on these dates. I urge all my readers to help embarrass these lame-ass cowardly newspapers: denounce their censorship (especially if your own newspaper censors them), publicize the issue, and read the strips.

(h/t to Fark.com)