So, I’m a blogger, so I guess I should do this. It’s about change, about lots of changes through history and what that means to us now. I might seem a bit annoyed. If you want to get a teenager to read this, preferably one who doesn’t want to, they might get the proper tone of voice for it.
Everybody is talking about change. Of course we will change. Hasn’t every President run on that platform for the last 50 years? Make America Whatever or Hopey Changey, I don’t care. Throw the bums out. That’s a desire for change. But there is always tension, against the fear. Too much rapid change to greater rights for more people and a move toward socialism resulted in populism, on the left and the right. I have watched the constant battle between the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the good old traditions since I was born in 1960. Look at what’s happened in the last 100 years since the 1918 flu pandemic. That’s in your parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime if you are older, so hopefully you talked to them. If you are younger, hopefully you know someone in the next generation up. They might have an old recording or at least some pictures.
They went through:
Nuclear weapons
Invention of vaccines
1918 flu
World War I (1914 to 1918)
Despite the pace of change having increased in the recent centuries, we haven’t developed new ways to cope with it. I don’t have much to suggest for that, but for me, getting some perspective on how much has happened, how far we have come in a short time, and how it has always been the people pushing leaders to change. That has helped me understand it.
My Public Education history spent too much on the days before the Revolution in this country, that’s my opinion. I always wanted to get to the World Wars and why those happened.
It was a major change in how the world worked. Before then, we were a world of royal families. Generals road on horses with colorful uniforms and battles lasted for a few days. With the arms buildup of the late 19th century, a result of the industrial revolution, these in-bred idiots who had no idea how to live in a time of electronic communication and world travel, put a match to the powder keg they built. To defend against heavy artillery, they created trench warfare, to breakthrough that they invented tanks, and on and on.
Going back through the 19th century further you had:
The Industrial Revolution, steam engines, mechanics, oil. Horses were no longer the best source of power, but we still use the term “horsepower”.
Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859.
Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, advanced our understanding of electromagnetism. That’s kind of important to whatever device you are reading this on.
Pause for a moment on this guy. He discovered the mysterious energy floating around that we could use to move things and to communicate across miles. Click to see David Tong giving a lecture in the same hall where Faraday gave his. Tong is talking about the newly understood forces of quantum physics, that we now understand are the fundamental forces behind all things. He’s giving that lecture in the same hall, with the same desk, that Faraday did. It’s like we just figured out stone tools yesterday, and now we all have scalpels in our medicine cabinets.
While Faraday was alive, we were finally throwing off the last myths about race and changing laws so we could no longer justify slavery. There are still slaves in the world, I know, but most people know that’s wrong now. What will be commonly thought of as wrong by end of your lifetime?
Change takes a little longer in the centuries before that, but let me connect just a few more things. Once the empires that grew out of ancient history started bumping into each other and “discovering” each other, we started accumulating our knowledge, sharing it actually, but not always in a nice way. You might have heard of Thomas Aquinas, who tried to reconcile the Catholic religion with Greek philosophy. He had a little help from the Muslims by the way. Not too long after that, we had Protestant kingdoms, so there was a lot of fighting with the Catholics.
At the end of all that fighting, after the Thirty Years War, 1648, a treaty was signed called the Peace at Westphalia. It took away powers from the Pope and created a new type of nation. That’s what you live in, a Westphalian nation-state. Sure, your way of life is rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization/Constitutional Republic/Democracy/melting pot, sure. But the basic structure of our politics has only been around for 400 years, and it was formed under duress, and it’s not working. A bunch of morons from the Middle Ages made it up to get the Pope out their business and we can get the billionaires out of our pockets if we create the next system.
Something else happened once the European Princes and Bishops quit making us kill each other. It was the British Royal Society, founded in 1660 to promote scientific thought and learning. It was the fertile ground where Isaac Newton flourished. Newton created the mathematics that got us to the moon (along with some of those other folks above). Computers were first put to the test during that work. That pretty much brings us up to where we are now.
To have that sort of creative energy, to allow the brilliant people of the day to discover something, you have to first have some degree of peace. You have to have a little extra left over at the end of the day to give to the general welfare, to build some roads, to have some nurses ready to take care of us instead of working overtime to pay off student loans and a mortgage from that house they bought before the bankers destroyed the economy.
What gets left out of historical discussions like this is none of it happens if we don’t care about people that we will never meet; people on the other side of the world and people who are not born yet. If we aren’t keeping the world clean and free from violence and filled with beauty, if we aren’t nurturing the people who grow our food, or who are sitting in a room somewhere coming up with formulas that who knows what they will do, but we can bet they will do something, then none of this happens. Then we slip back into using those stone tools to harm each other and take whatever we can just because we can. None of this happens if we don’t realize we need each other.
A note on the present: We aren’t purposely crashing the economy by shutting it down, just so we can save a few million lives. The economy would have crashed if we didn’t do anything because the hospitals would have been overrun. People would have chosen to quit interacting with others after it was far too late. Services would be much more disrupted because the closures would be random; we wouldn’t be choosing to keep groceries open as opposed to restaurants, we would be choosing from far fewer options.
It would not be some simple math of 2 or 3% more people dead. We would be surrounded by sick people and no one would want to touch them for fear of getting sick themselves. This would multiply the problems. Any normal illness or regular medical attention needed would be almost impossible. We would have new priorities, like disposing of the bodies.
The stock market selloff was recognition by those who understand how their system works, that it is not working, that it is not designed to respond to a problem like this. It is not designed to take care of the people that actually create the wealth that they accumulated. Ironically, it created the problem by changing the environment, putting workers under stress, and prioritizing profits over health. It put messaging over science. They know this, they saw it coming. They didn’t tell us until they cashed out. But cashing out is a strategy of the dying system. I don’t know what the next system will be, but it won’t be the current leaders who create it.
To understand this search for who we are and how what we
think of ethics and morals has evolved, it helps to look back to the time when
religion still dominated. If you go back too far it gets impossible to know
just what people were thinking, not that it’s possible to know what anyone is
thinking at any given moment even in the present, but at least we start to find
more articulate writing sometime around the 12th century. To get
to those early Humanists, I’ll first tell what I think is the fascinating story of how Western ideas
traveled east then returned over the course of a millennium.
As Rome fell, Plato and Aristotle fell out of favor. And
when you fall out of favor in a warring ancient empire, it’s a lot worse than
having your facebook account revoked. Anything written that contradicted an
emperor could be burned, sometimes along with its author. Much of their works
were taken east to Istanbul, which became Constantinople, the center of the
Byzantine Empire. This was a Christian empire so they weren’t too interested in
what the writings said, but they kept them. Language was also changing so even
if someone wanted to read them they would need special training.
When the walls of Constantinople were finally breached by
the Muslims, the writings were passed on to that Empire. They didn’t do much with
them either, other than create copies and translate them into Arabic. Four
hundred years later Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), schooled in law,
theology, medicine, physics and more was commissioned to figure out just what
those men were trying to say. He had to do this while maintaining his position
in a theocracy. That is, he tried to balance the godless world of reason with
his employers who were working to spread the word of Allah throughout that same
world.
By this time, the Muslim Empire had reached its peak and was
beginning to fall apart because it’s just plain difficult to maintain an empire
that size and they continued to choose emperors based on the inheritance of
kings instead of any merits of those kings. Also, the theologian Al-Ghazali had
become popular with his Revival of the
Religious Sciences, saying they needed to get back to their spiritual
roots. He sparred with Averroes, writing Incoherence
of the Philosophers and Averroes responding with Incoherence of the Incoherence. Averroes spent much of his last
years in prison, so you can see how that went. In the next century, the Mongols
sacked Baghdad and the Muslim Empire has never recovered. Fortunately, they
survived long enough to ally with European Christian armies and prevent the
spread of the Mongols further west. Not only did we never send them a thank you
note, we took the works of Averroes and other translations and philosophy and
made it our own.
With the works of the Greeks now reunited, it fell on the
likes of the Christian Thomas Aquinas and the Jewish scholar Maimonides to take
another stab at unifying the ancient with the modern. The 13th
century version of "modern" anyway. Teaching of Aristotle’s works was already
under the watchful eye of the religious leaders. They were fine with logic and
biology but wary of the metaphysics, psychology and anything touching on
values. Professors had to stop teaching these subjects at the University of
Paris or move to Oxford or Toulouse. These debates continued on to 1277 when a
somewhat hastily thrown together list of Condemnations
was published.
The idea of churches controlling what universities teach
seems ridiculous today, so this is often seen as a horrible period of suppression
of knowledge. It is also seen as the beginning of science since the result of
the Condemnations was to divide the areas of the study of religious matters,
like who or what ultimately controls the universe or what is or isn’t a miracle
from areas allowed to be studied methodically like the motion of objects in
space or the workings of living creatures. There was also dogmatic adherence to
Aristotle and these bans forced the professors to develop proofs of his ideas. There
is no one point of the beginning of science. Applications of scientific
principles can be found in pre-Christian Rome and throughout the Muslim Empire
as well as India, China and the Americas; however 1277 was a turning point in
human history. At least Aquinas got sainthood not long after he died, which
meant the Condemnations pertaining to him had to be adjusted. The world was
changing quickly from then on.
Early Humanism
Not much was going on in the development of philosophy for
that thousand years, but then voices like Erasmus began to emerge. His training
was in the priesthood because that’s pretty much what you did if you wanted an
education, you studied the Bible, in Latin. Hardly anyone spoke it, but it was
the language of the Vulgate Bible, the one that was assembled in 382. It remained The Bible until scholars tried to
reconcile it to the original Greek and began to question the meaning of words,
verses and whole books. This scholarly work grew out of the Renaissance and it
has direct parallels to the work being done today to rescue Christianity from
the hands of the Fundamentalists. With his reinterpreted version of the New
Testament, Desiderius Erasmus hoped to restore and rebuild the Christian
religion. He did not care for the 4th century theology of St.
Augustine preferring that of the earlier Origen of Alexandria who only garnered
the title of Church Father, not sainthood.
Augustine
wrote extensively on what horrible creatures we are and how we can be nothing
but sinners due to our fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Wikipedia
summarizes his text titled On the
wretchedness of the human condition thus; The text is divided into three parts; in the first part the wretchedness
of the human body and the various hardships one has to bear throughout life are
described; the second lists man's futile ambitions, i.e. affluence, pleasure
and esteem, and the third deals with the decay of the human corpse, the anguish
of the damned in hell and the Day of
Judgment. Origen and then Erasmus did not see it that way. Reading
critiques of Christianity today, you would never know this debate ever
occurred. You would most likely be familiar with Pope Innocent III who launched
one of the crusades. Innocent was a fan of Augustine. But most likely you have not
heard of the response to it On the Dignity and Excellence of Man by the early humanist and Christian
writer Giannozzo Manetti.
Manetti and
others developed the principles of Christian humanism; every person is sacred
and autonomous, we are participants in our salvation, not passive actors
waiting for the end times, and religious pluralism. Pluralism was also being
expressed by Sufi writers at the time like Ibn al-Arabi who said god is not limited
by any one creed. With all of these men, a connection to their traditions was
still maintained. Al-Arabi famously said, “So for wherever you turn, there is
Allah.” He may have seen the divine in every face, but the divine was the god
he grew up with. He did not relinquish his faith. Since their ability to get
published was highly dependent on maintaining a faith statement, they may have
hid their private thoughts.
An art
historian who believes he has uncovered some evidence of this dynamic between
artist and patron is Antonio Forcellino. While cleaning a sculpture made by
Michelangelo he found a flaw and theorized that in the middle of making the
piece, it had been changed. His theories about Michelangelo might be wrong, but
they are interesting to consider. In 1505 Michelangelo was commissioned by
Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel. In 1513 Julius dies. Michelangelo has
been paid to sculpt statues for his tomb but this is a time of contention among
Catholic leaders and they pull him into other work. His work continues to be
pulled in two directions by Popes and Cardinals.
They are
also vying with each other to either split off the newly forming Protestants or
work on reform within. Some of them, including Cardinal Reginald Pole, start a
society called the Spirituali. Michelangelo is known to have attended some of
their meetings. They eventually had to start meeting in secret when Pope John
Paul III established an official Congregation of the Inquisition. When Michelangelo
finally completes the tomb of Julius II it appears he may have included
symbolism indicating his leanings toward that group, rather than the Church that
was actually paying him. He included a torch, which could be a symbol of the
power to enlighten and the Protestant belief that works alone can’t bring you
to Christ, and Moses is looking to the left, not at the altar where the church
leader is but instead searching for the light and contact with God. When Michelangelo
died, his body was whisked away by his Spirituali friends and many of his papers
went with it, so we may never really know
We all know the verse that Linus recites at the climax of Peanuts Christmas. Charlie Brown is questioning what Christmas is all about. Linus ends his reading with “Peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” That’s great, and by 1965 when that was made, most Christians throughout the world agreed this is the meaning of Christmas. Trouble is, this was written before there was the modern version of Christmas and it originally said, "Peace on earth for those whom God likes." You need to understand a bunch of Greek and Latin to understand that, but simply, you drop one Greek letter and you have to also change the whole subject/object stuff of the sentence and that’s what you get.
I heard this a few times, and it just sort of passed by me. It’s an interesting artifact of history from a time when there were no copy machines. A simple mistake. No real harm done. Except, when you start digging through the various copies throughout history, it was not a mistake at all, it was quite deliberate. This didn’t just happen in the third century and now, with better tools of historiography, we are discovering it. This has been known throughout the history of Christianity by the few people who had control of these books. Just like now, where we have neighbors who are happy to break bread at their ecumenical gatherings and multi-denominational dinners and also fundamentalists who want holy war, there were people who said they wanted peace in the world and others who knew their scripture said only some of them should see that peace. Sometimes it was the same people, saying one thing while knowing the other.
The difference between now and then is the balance of power. For the most part, those who truly believe in tolerance and peace are in power. But every day we see signs that it is still a struggle. Mainstream religion may appear to hold these values, but the facts of these discrepancies in our manuscripts raises some questions. If you accept the expert opinion on this, if you accept that people who spend their days pouring over these fragments of paper and studying the ancient languages actually got it right, then why don’t we change the Bibles? That is, correct them to what they originally were. Even if we don’t change the Bibles, why don’t preachers tell us this is only what modern people believe, not the people who first wrote the words. Those were the people who were closest to the events that inspired the words. If we are saying that we should listen to what they say, that their ancient wisdom has value, why shouldn’t we be listening to what they really said?
There are a few ways to go from here. We could believe that peace should be for only a select group. We can believe that something from outside of the physical universe somehow guided these hands and created these words on paper once, then had another hand erase it or misspell it and somehow that series of changes was slowly revealing this truth to us. We can believe that the original authors had some special vision, maybe divinely inspired or maybe just some special set of circumstances that they observed that helped them tap into this wisdom. Or, we can believe we are creatures with the ability to reflect on the past and future, trying to figure out what to make of our existence on this lonely planet. There may be millions of other planets like ours, but the universe is rather large, and we can calculate the odds of contacting one of those other planets, and they aren’t good. We might want to figure out how to get along with just each other for the time being.
To put it simply, we need to say that whoever wrote the gospel according Luke, was wrong. And when I say “we”, I mean it needs to come from the people who make a living interpreting this book. Those authors were wrong on this account, and they were wrong about some of the other things they said. We have fought wars based on religion. That includes Christians fighting over the meaning of words like these. We have had Kings anointed by gods and we have died for them. We have believed that the world could unite under one set of laws, inspired by some spirit, and experience a thousand years of joy. We were wrong.
We have found that allowing for borders and respecting the sovereignty of others is a way to deal with our differences. We found we have universal values despite theological differences and tried to create international laws, and sometimes we even got it right. Sometimes, nations put aside their differences to keep one nation from getting out of control and imposing its will on weaker people. It’s rarely pretty, but we muddle towards a world where we talk more than fight.
Instead of looking to something that was said hundreds or thousands of years ago, we look to what can be demonstrated by our senses. We extend our senses with tools created by an understanding of basic principles that have been tested over and over again. We know the sun has come up every day regardless of what sacrifices were made, so we don’t make ritual sacrifices anymore. We know the earth compressed the organic material from millions of years ago to give us fuel to light our universities so people can work late into the night curing what was once called a curse. To make that happen, we also know that we need to have some degree of peace with the people who are sitting on a lot of that organic material. The same goes for copper and materials needed to create more sustainable energy infrastructure. What is important is, so far, we just have this one planet.
You can accept what I’m saying or not. You also have the tools to research this yourself. The manuscripts with these words on them have been cataloged, numbered, digitized and are available to you free right now. The 1% of today only have power over us because we don’t do this work. The 1% in the time of Luke had a much easier time of it because they were the only ones who could read at all. The fact that I learned these things is the result of the accumulated knowledge I mentioned above and the cooperation of people across borders. The internet began as a way for scholars to share their work. It has become a way to avoid the lines during the Christmas rush. How it will be used tomorrow is our choice.
Still thinking about that bad piece of data manipulation I saw last week. (See previous post)
As I pointed out, it took a percentage of people who answered certain questions, averaged it (whatever that meant), and multiplied by the entire world Muslim population. It concluded 345 million Muslims believe in honor killings for apostasy. Besides using regional statistics to make assumptions about a world population, the global number includes babies. You can't ask a baby to do a poll, so the poll does not include them. Babies also can't form those types of beliefs.
According to the video, there are 345 million jihadis sneaking in through our borders via the refugee program. Even using most of the bad math they did, you have to cut that in half, unless you care about an infant or old and infirmed jihadi, which you shouldn't.
Let's use their math and look closer to home and abuse some numbers. The US is 70% Christian, that's 225 million. 23% say Jesus WILL return by 2050 and 18% say "probably". That's 92 million people in the US who aren't worried about their grandchildren's future and have no reason to recycle or clean up their local watershed or read a book.
It's hard to get numbers on things like, "do Christians believe in stoning", but we know some do, because they write books and preach about it. The Barna Group, a highly respected polling organization that polls questions like that, says 50% of adult Christians believe the Bible is accurate in all its teachings. That's 160 million who accept Exodus 21:20.
Why aren't we worried about this? Because we know we have a rule of law in this country and if people start stoning their neighbors or taking slaves, we'll stop it.
Much the same way that the entire world is working together to stop a 100,000 or so rag-tag military that is currently breaking universal rules of moral and ethical behavior. We've dropped a lot of bombs on that area, and sent a lot of weapons and a lot of soldiers. They can see where those things come from, but don't have the broad perspective that we have, or at least should have if we are watching our news and checking our facts.
We also know that people answer poll questions in a certain way, but actually mean something else. It's easier with US Christians, because we also know they don't know their Bibles, so the question is flawed from the beginning.
The Pew poll tried to get at some of this by not only saying "apostasy", but asking about whether the law should apply just to Muslims, or just to Muslims within the majority Muslim country or majority area. (None of this is mentioned in the video, FYI, use the link) If you could design the poll properly, I suspect you would find that very few people get up every morning and want to kill everyone who doesn't believe like they do. The ones who do, aren't going to answer your poll honestly anyway and they aren't wondering around at the mall to be asked in the first place, so getting that number is almost impossible.
The Pew poll was not able to follow-up and clarify that cutting off someone's hands for stealing should only be done by an official government agency after due process and only for repeat offenders. Sure, we know some people are taking this law into their own hands, but we have some guys in Oregon right now who think they are above the US law. There's always going to be some of those. We (the USA) have a lot of people who still believe in the death penalty, something I consider particularly barbaric. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, something we can actually do something about by participating in our local government.
Really, we have much better ways to spend our time than with videos like this.
I came across a YouTube the other day. Usually I stop
watching things like this when they say “politically correct” then a minute
later say terrorists are coming disguised as refugees, but someone I know
wanted my comments on it, so here goes.
It starts out with statements from major politicians saying
Muslims are peaceful and we are not at war with Muslims as a group. This
culminates in Obama saying 99.9% of Muslims are “looking for the same thing
we’re looking for”. This is put in quotes on the screen in case, I don’t know,
you are deaf or something. The narrator then asks, “is this true?” So that’s
the theme. I don’t expect much from this since “99.9%” is a colloquial phrase,
not a statistic. Asking if it’s true is like your mother asking if it’s true
that “everyone” at school is doing whatever it is you want her to let you do. The
narrator then asks, “what would you say if scientific polls by major
organizations have repeatedly shown a very different picture?”. I knew right
then that picture was going to be blurry. Different than what? It’s going to
take 10 minutes to get to those numbers, so get comfortable.
She identifies the problem as “violent, radical, extremists
Islamism”. Okay, “violent, radical, extremist” anything is a problem. It
shouldn’t be too hard to make a case. In fact, there’s no need to make that
case at all. And she doesn’t. What she goes on to do is equate “Islamism” with
violence, radicalism and extremism. And, in my opinion, she only equates them.
She makes almost no real case for it. I’m not disputing the correlation, but
this video doesn’t make any case for any actual causes or help us to find
solutions to the problem.
She starts off saying most of the terrorism is committed by
Muslims, so we need an open and honest conversation. Why that fact about
Muslims leads to us needing to be open and honest, I don’t know. Shouldn’t it
be a given that we need that for any conversation?
Although she will go on to say that political correctness is
a problem, she stops and clarifies that “this is not a conversation about
Islam”. She has some other news broadcaster say “there is a cancer WITHIN
Islam”. It’s hard to tell what her theme is here, but what this video becomes
for me is one long statement of “I’m a Muslim, but I’m not one of those types of Muslims.” When she gets
to the circles of influence, the one she leaves off is herself, the moderate
religious person. Moderates can’t talk about how any irrational, superstitious
thinking is dangerous and leaves the door open to radicalism. That’s a much
larger conversation that I’ve covered elsewhere, for now, just notice that she
never touches on it. She doesn’t explain how a Jihadist becomes radicalized and
she doesn’t explain how her version of Islam would keep someone from becoming
radicalized.
Actually I’m fine with this delineation of “Islamism” or
“Radical Islam”, distinct from the larger Islamic culture and historical Islam,
but she doesn’t stick to that or at least she doesn’t further define it or the
causes of it. She just asserts it and wants you to know she’s not in it. Finally
at one-minute and 45 seconds, after priming you with ideas about how everyone
else is wrong, she says, let’s begin.
The next bit of sophisticated fear mongering is to introduce
the idea that Rajid Nawaz calls “regressive liberalism”, or as a Bill Maher
clip says in the video, fear of being called a racist. It’s sophisticated
because that part is true, people are afraid of that. Really you should
be afraid of being called a racist if you make a racist remark. Maybe what you
should work on is how words come out of your mouth, and how to explain the
difference between a racist remark and a fact about a culture (like not abusing
poll data as we’ll see later). What makes it fear mongering is they cut to
images from the San Bernadino shooting. Then they cut to neighbors who
“apparently noticed suspicious activity, but didn’t call the police.” And they
said they didn’t because they didn’t want to appear racist.
Really? What’s the usual story? Usually it’s “oh they seemed
like a nice couple, I never would have guessed”. Or, it’s a story of mental illness that was
known by professionals who are barred by ethics from talking about private
medical issues. But for this one shooting, out of the 400 shootings in 2015,
it’s, “hmmm, I thought they looked suspicious.” Next cut to the ugly display by
Ben Affleck, shouting at Sam Harris on the Bill Maher show. You can google that,
there was a lot of internet discussion about it. Ben called Sam racist. That’s
all we need to know for now.
Again, the sophisticated Raheel Raza says, that’s nice of
Ben to defend her, but what she REALLY needs defending from is the radicals in
her own religion who want her dead. This is that ironic moment where she is
both defending Islam but agreeing with the atheist that it’s dangerous. Let’s
see how she climbs out of that, or if she does. To put a fine point on it, she
lists some atrocities, with images, and says THOSE Muslims are… “murdering
people in the name of MY God.” Then she shows a few leaders of the extremists
saying they want to take over the world. Was that necessary? Was this build up necessary? We could have
just started there.
What she did in the first 3 minutes is connect the dots from
a random shooting in America to political correctness to radical Islamist
terrorists. No mention at all of the problems of guns in America. A problem
that affects the rest of the world and everyone is aware of. No mention of the
lack of education about Islam and how Imams with an agenda fill that void. No
mention at all of decades of bi-partisan support for war in the Middle East.
Just the particular dots that she wants to connect.
So, we finally get to what she said she was going to do,
look at numbers.
1.6
Billion Muslims in the world.
But wait, we don’t want to confuse you with too much math,
let’s have Sam Harris explain this to us slowly. Sam breaks down what he calls
the “circles of influence”. This part is pretty good. I’ve read Sam’s recent
book with Majid Nawaz (a liberal/moderate Muslim) and Majid agrees with this
analysis. It goes like this:
Jihadists
Islamists
Fundamentalists
But not so fast, Raheel wants to show us some more violent
imagery. And here’s where she starts her numbers magic. There are 40-200,000
“fighting for ISIS across the world”. Just what “fighting for” means is not
clear since ISIS is very geographically isolated. A few random acts of
terrorism have occurred “across the world” and ISIS has claimed responsibility,
but that is a loose connection. But, okay, we can all agree that the numbers
are difficult, so let’s move on to the real obfuscation.
Other groups are
equally difficult to pin down. Al-Qaeda and a group called IRCG might number up
to 100,000, so Raheel says, “the hundreds of thousands fighting for…” these and
other groups. You can look at that chart and see the exaggeration for yourself.
Raheel casually includes the lone wolves in that first group
of the circle, the Jihadists, and lists nice peaceful towns and cities where
they have murdered people, just to make sure you get it that you should be
afraid, replete with images of buildings blowing up and people in business
attire hitting the ground. And the Twin Towers for good measure.
At 6:00 minutes she says another of the great ironies. It
doesn’t matter how big or small those numbers are since “a handful of
terrorists” can cause great disruption. Umm, that’s what terrorism IS. As
George Carlin said (back when it was the Palestinians), what they are doing is,
trying to win. They don’t have infrastructure, or an air force, or bases around
the world like we do, but they think they are right and are willing to die for
their cause, just like any soldier. But Raheel isn’t trying to be funny, or to
explain geopolitics, she just wants to scare you.
I’m not taking sides here. I’m acknowledging terrorism is a
strategy. When the Palestinians hijacked planes back in the 70’s they gained
recognition that they were being oppressed by Israel. The world got involved.
It’s still messy, but their strategy was effective. If you look at the tactics
of George Washington compared to the British Army, you could say those were
terrorist acts. I’m not equivocating or defending the ideology of ISIS or their
desire for world domination, but if you only focus on their tactics, it is
unclear what you are defending. Noam Chomsky is notorious for simply counting
bodies and bombs and calling the US guilty of state supported terrorism.
Regardless of your politics, it’s a matter of perspective. In this case, Raheel
misses the big picture.
Since she’s got you pretty worked up by now, it’s a good
time to show a picture of a horde of refugees streaming across the countryside
and again, connect some random dots. I’ll give her credit that she doesn’t
actually tell you to call your congressman and tell him or her to build a wall,
but I’m not sure what else she wants you to get from that image. She spends
another minute talking about “home grown” terrorists, meaning those born in
Western countries. Perhaps she is trying to say that the problem is not regional,
but she never addresses the vast differences in the regional data. It does
nothing to make a case for why they become terrorists. If anything it
complicates the reasoning. But, at least we can move on from that first circle
now. Back to Sam Harris:
Islamists
– radical thinking, but willing to work within peaceful means, within a
government.
That definition uses the words Sam uses, but compare that to
what Raheel says, “instead of engaging in terror themselves, they use the
political and cultural system to further their aims.” Holy crap. How the hell
does she know what’s going on in these people’s heads? You can remove the
second half of that sentence since anyone who participates in a democracy is “using
the cultural system to further their aims”, that’s what democracy means. But
she implies they’d rather be engaging in terror, but you know, it’s too messy,
so they’ll manipulate your government instead.
To make her case, she picks the two worst instances of votes
for terrorists in the history of Islam, when Hamas came to power in Gaza in
2006 and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012. The news plays in the clip
that “they” wanted to “limit the rights of women and they were not
pro-American”. Okay, no country is required to be pro-American and plenty of
America politicians are not doing so great on women’s rights either. But let’s
not mention that. She also ignores votes like Tunisia in 2014, against
the ruling conservative party with Islamist roots. (See the Pew data, linked
below)
Next she talks about CAIR. A Muslim group in America. I
don’t know much about them and will save that for another day. I’m interested
in this film Raheel was in and how it got “shut down”. That will have to wait
for another day. Back to our video, and the next circle:
Fundamentalist:
according to Raheel, their values are “very disturbing” but they are “not
working to overthrow governments like the Muslim Brotherhood”.
Wait a minute, didn’t the Muslim Brotherhood participate in
a democratic election a couple paragraphs ago? Anyway, they never received more
than 25% of the support of that country, something Raheel fails to mention. As
we’ll see in a minute, the 25% range is not that different than the numbers she
eventually gets to, so I’m not disputing the numbers at all, they are
problematic. My problem is she manipulates them in a way that distorts their
meaning.
So “let’s do the numbers thing”, we’re finally there. This
is her entire case, but she has spent 10 minutes showing you violent images and
calling you “politically correct”, so it’s going to go by quick, don’t blink.
The poll was a poll of Muslims around the world. Of course, she starts with the
worst, countries like Afghanistan where 79% say apostasy is a crime worthy of
execution. Pause if you want to see that Indonesia comes in at 18%. But she
doesn’t do that, she takes an “average” of all of them. I’d like to see her
math on that one.
BTW, one click to the “next page” from the above gives you a
chart showing “Support of Religious Freedom” within the Muslim community. It is
nearly 100% for most countries. As Raheel keeps asking, do you think that is a
radical belief?
The next bit of math is her biggest error. She converts that
average percentage into a number of people. It’s a lot and I don’t dispute that
it’s problematic. There are two problems of methodology; 1) it doesn’t take
into account the problems of getting good data from Muslims who live in
oppressed situations, 2) she is working toward this case for a “cancer within
Islam”. This is a survey of Muslims, but it does not demonstrate a “cause and effect”,
that being a Muslim leads to these behaviors. From this data, that is purely
correlation, not causation. A survey of people with brown skin in the South
side of Chicago that shows high gang membership does not tell you that brown
skin causes kids to join gangs. I know you understand that last sentence, now
apply that understanding to this video.
At 12:00 minutes she makes another one of those idiotic
statements. That this Pew research paints a picture of an Islamic world that is
increasingly out of step with the modern world. If you didn’t know that Islam
is out of step with the modern world when Khomeini was rising in Iran, you
already missed the boat. The historical factors that led to Khomeini are a
little more obscure, but this blog is already going pretty long. Look up where
the Shah came from for more on that. Islam
was the modern world in the 13th century. They were overrun
by Mongols and then lost the battles of East against West. In 1492 Columbus
sailed the ocean blue, and Christians “reconquered” Spain. The locus of the
modern world has remained shifted in that direction since.
Once again, she picks some extra scary stat about 18-29 year
old Muslims within “modern” countries. I’m getting bored with this now. There
will be some more violent images in a minute, I’ll skip those too. But wait, my
favorite part, 53% of Muslims surveyed want Sharia to be the law of the land.
Raheel is counting on you not knowing what “Sharia” means. Simply, it can mean
a lot of things. This is mentioned in the glossary of the Pew study from which
this video cherry picked its data. Different Muslim countries implement
different aspects of it, aspects that ISIS wouldn’t recognize and openly
denounces. Sharia does not equal “what ISIS wants”. Note also the old circuit
rider preacher trick she uses of repeating, “Do you think that’s a radical
belief?”
You might be thinking that I skipped over the most important
part, the very data that makes the case. My point in writing a 3,500 plus word
blog on this video is that the data doesn’t support the case. First of all,
what’s the case? That ISIS is bad? That Muslims are bad? She’s a Muslim, so it
can’t be that. She never tells us what we should do, other than join her and
support her in having this conversation. What conversation? That ISIS is bad?
Did you need a video to know that? Did you need a video to know that support
for terrorism is coming from Afghanistan? This is how videos like this work,
they spend a lot of time telling you what’s coming, and that they will prove
it, then insert lots of violent images and frightening numbers, then they spend
a few seconds of bad logic where it’s unclear what they’re saying, then they
tell you they just told you and make sure the questions they raise have the
obvious answer they want you to repeat.
That’s it. The only thing left is to send you to the
website. At no point did she say what parts of Islam she wants to keep and what
parts are the “corrupted” parts. She never mentioned that the religion she
claims as hers was begun as a military operation and her holy book is full of
instructions on how to conquer. She never talked about how there is no central
authority of Islam and Imams have been arguing about it since the Quran was
completed. (Use the footnotes in the Pew link to see the more violent ideas are
in the hadiths, not the Quran.)
As Sam Harris said in the Bill Maher interview (but not
included in any clips in this video), “it (Islam) is the mother lode of bad
ideas”. What’s very different about Sam is, he has since corrected that and
wishes he had said it is “A mother lode of bad ideas”. He recognizes
that many religions have violent passages and promote the oppression of women,
and are even pro-slavery. They are out of date, historical documents. They have
a few good ideas and those are the ones we still talk about and implement.
Following those documents as if they apply to the modern world leads to half of
your population not participating in anything except making babies and puts the
focus on vague values that don’t lead to progress instead of modern values that
do. Harris also knows his Quran and CAN make a case for how simply reading it
can lead to radicalism. I suspect Raheel avoids doing any of that analysis
because it is a threat to her religious beliefs. Or it could be simply that she
is lazy and does not want to sort out why terrorism is currently a problem in
certain regions and has not been a problem in other regions and other times.
Raheel had 14 minutes, and never covered these basics. She
never mentioned that you create child suicide bombers by teaching them in
complete isolation. If you think you can’t isolate a kid right in the middle of
suburbia, you need to get out and meet some of your neighbors. It is not a
challenge to teach kids simple answers, the hard part is getting them to look
up history themselves and understand that it was only a century ago that women
in America did not have the vote. Luckily they “used the political and cultural
system to further their aims” and changed that. People being born now will have
to be taught that there was a time when gay people were strung up to die on
barbed wire fences, not allowed to shop for matching kitchen sets at Target. We
need to be careful about how arrogant we get about being a “modern” country.
I have only glanced into this Clarion Project that Raheel
works with, but so far I see no reason to look further. She provided no
solutions, and skipped over all of the historical and political factors,
focusing merely on the number of terrorists, the potential damage they can
cause and what she believes is massive support for them. She never asked why
there are many terrorists in the Middle East and very few in the big Muslim
majority countries of Indonesia and India. If it is a simple matter of
averaging out those Pew numbers and applying them across the board, how do you
explain the democratic and capitalist progress in those countries?
Don’t get me wrong, if Raheel is trying to say that her
Islam is a religion of peace, I don’t have a problem with that. Any religion
that has a place of worship in a peaceful country and has people who go to
those places within a pluralistic free society, is a religion of peace. They have become that because the world
demanded it , and I include people of any religion and the non-religious in
that world. People demanded rights and stopped fighting for Kings and Popes and
Caliphates or any other form of despotic leader that thought they had the only
right way. Our despotic leaders have different names now and they have figured
out how to get votes, or we vote for them with our dollars and Euros. We should
be just as worried about them as we are of terrorism.
Just as Raheel doesn’t need Hollywood actors defending her
religion, I don’t need Raheel telling me ISIS is a problem. I know that. I know
it just like a peasant who’s King had gone crazy knew it was wrong. But crazy
is not always so easy to identify and now it has a vote that is equal to mine. There
are complex factors causing the problems of the world today and picking out a
few statistics and claiming the problem is “hundreds of thousands” of Muslims,
tells me nothing. When you have data like that, the next appropriate question
is to ask “why”. Why those particular Muslims? Why Muslims in that area? What
happened in that area 10 years ago? What happened 500 years ago? What happened
in the rest of the world that DIDN’T happen there? Is death for apostasy
directly related to ISIS and a desire for Sharia or it is rooted in other
cultural norms? Is FGM in the Quran or does it come from tribes that preceded
Mohammad? How do you bring education to
an area where girls are shot for advocating for it?
Show me where Raheel looks into those questions, and I might
be interested in what she’s found.
This is a short speech I gave to the Lake Superior Freethinkers this morning. It's something we do before the main presentation. We call it the reflection.
I'm sure you all have been
watching the news lately. We have Syrian refugees and terrorist bombings around
the world and our own wonderful political reactions to it here at home. In looking
for to help sort this out, I've found some impressive voices from people who
call themselves progressive Muslims. Progressive religious voices fascinate me
because I don't understand how they remain true to their specific religion
while speaking so well on universal human rights. One of them is Irshad Manji.
I watched her in an interview and one minute she was speaking about her right
to openly identify herself as a lesbian and in the next she was expressing her
love for Allah and her voice was cracking and her hand went to her heart.
What does this devoutly
religious person have, to tell us, the people in this room? I also saw her
respond to a conservative Imam, who asked her if she thought the Muslim
community should change it's stance on gays. Her answer was "no", but
she would like it if they stopped saying gay people should be killed. And she
has the knowledge of the Quran to back up her stance on that. To bridge these
seemingly unbridgeable groups, she placed the value of coexistence, that is, not
killing each other, over a requirement that all Muslims completely accept her.
This is her version of
freedom of religion. In this country, we
have freedom of expression, which includes the freedom to express the idea that
religion should be eliminated. Or, short of that, the tax advantages it enjoys
should be eliminated or closer scrutiny should be given to how children are
taught religion. It includes the freedom to make jokes about religion. But
people still have the right to call themselves whatever they want and claim
their holy book means whatever they want it to. We're all free to do that, as
long as it doesn't come into conflict with any other laws and rights.
Keeping this in mind is to
everyone’s advantage. If you live by this rule, it is reasonable to ask others
to do the same. You can challenge those who say, they are doing their religion “correctly” but
those terrorists or those skin-heads are doing it wrong. This usually leads
down a path where you find their "correct" version also has something
you consider a human rights violation. But, you can avoid all that religious
justification and go straight to the values of not harming innocent people.
This approach also opens us
up to partner with people who are using ways of thinking we would
normally not consider valid or reasonable. The author I mentioned has the
challenge of being a Muslim in a Western country and within that she has the
challenge of being a gay person within that community. For her, it is a double
oppression. It is her very unique seemingly incompatible circumstances that
fostered her ability to identify an approach to bridging them.She looked to the
underlying value, what makes us human, not simply what makes her a Muslim.
I call these underlying
values "liberal", but I'm not talking about "liberal" as in
"voting for Bernie Sanders", I'm talking about the idea of liberal
that grew out of the Peace treaties after the wars between the Protestants and
Catholics, when the power of the Pope over most of Europe was taken away and
people were allowed to think for themselves about what was right and wrong
without the threat of a torture chamber. One of those values is recognizing
when people are marginalized, discriminated against and oppressed. If you are
in a position to do something about that, it benefits you and everyone else to
do something. When you look at issues from that perspective, I believe you will
find that people who call themselves Muslims or Christians and even people who
call themselves Conservative, see the world in much the same way.
Now, I'd like to end on
that high note, but I want to be clear that my rose colored glasses are off. I
realize there are very few religious people who are reaching out to the rest of
the world in the way I just described. I'm not suggesting that people here
simply need to turn around and recognize that the world is full of tolerant,
pluralistic, LGBTQ organizing regular folks who just happen to also like
football and using hunting rifles in a responsible manner. I'm aware of how the
world works. I'm suggesting the promotion of tolerance and pluralism is our
responsibility and that it is work, work that requires self-reflection as much
as it requires speaking up about what others are doing.
Here’s a different way of looking at how the world has changed
since 1950. It’s a bit circuitous, but I think it illuminates something.
Malidoma Some experienced a very direct effect of the colonialism as an African
in a country occupied by the French and their missionaries. The colonial period
was ending and he ended up attending the University at Sorbonne. Western
countries now frown upon such colonial practices.
Western countries still do enforce their power over less
developed nations, but it’s much more subtle. How those less developed nations
respond is also complex and varied. I’m not going to attempt to sort out all of
those factors, but I will make a broader comparison from the old Western
colonialists to the current super powers. They are acting differently and how
they are opposed has evolved.
Malidoma talks about the value of indigenous culture and how
it can be applied to the modern world. I’m taking that and applying it to the
relationship to the Muslim world. Hopefully I explain enough of his story to
make this blog coherent. This is the story I’m referring to:
This book describes a major shift in the relationship of the
1st and 3rd world that occurred in the middle of the last
century. It does it by telling the story of one man, from his perspective, as
he experienced that shift. He was a boy in an African village and was kidnapped
by a French missionary and forced to go to their school. The French would train
these boys to be priests who would then return to their native villages and
attempt to convert more souls to Christ. First, imagine that happening today,
and what the world’s reaction would be.
Compare this indoctrination to the indoctrination happening
in the Madrasas today. Those African boys in Christian missionaries received a
complete education, the actual history of France, all of the corruption and
political problems. Young boys in Afghanistan get a very limited view of the
world. When they graduated from the French missionaries, they were given the
choice of becoming a priest or not, they were not given orders. The Syrian boys
might graduate to suicide bomber. The indoctrination was effective enough for
most of them. But Malidoma was smarter than average and saw that his teachers
could not make good arguments for continuing the French occupation. He saw the
changes coming. He escaped back to his village and asked them to teach him their
traditional tribal ways.
The closest equivalents we have today to people who have
escaped are moderate Muslims. People like Majid Nawaz who once recruited people
to the cause of Islamist power but are now progressive and speak against “Islamism”.
But people like that learned about Islamic history from “Westernized” “modern”
means. There are no traditional villages of Muslims because that religion was
born in an empire and it expanded that empire to one of the most successful in
history. Islam is not some quaint indigenous culture with ideas about living in
harmony with the land. It’s a defeated empire with memories of being defeated
by empires that are currently expanding.
The recruiters of terrorism have learned from the history of
the colonialists. They aren’t going to teach actual history. They aren’t going
to encourage democracy or equal rights or tolerance. They have been training
Imams and sending them into the modern world and slowly bringing their version
of their religion to the forefront. But they would have lost the battle of
ideas if they would have continued to only have a battle of ideas. After a few
failed attempts, they have managed to build an army to be reckoned with.
Most of us are not soldiers. But all of us have ideas about
what peace is, about what place religion should take in the modern world, about
how women should be treated. We can fight those battles every day. We do that
by acting peacefully and treating people with dignity. We do that by welcoming
strangers and helping those in need. These world-wide struggles for power will
continue, but we will always have each other.
In case you aren't aware of how children are indoctrinated into terrorism:
After my not so flattering posts about
Irshad Manji, I thought I should take a closer look. I ordered her episode from PBS series “America at a Crossroads”, titled “Faith Without Fear”. It was a very personal documentary, featuring some
intimate moments with her mother. Through that she helps you explore
the ideas of faith and tribalism. I can't find it for free anywhere,
but it was only $9 and had lots of extras.
Here are her closing thoughts. Although
this was done in 2006, they are very timely.
I began my mission wanting to learn how
we Muslims can change for the 21st century. Here's what
I've discovered. We can no longer live by 7th century
tribal culture. It distorts Islam today. I've also discovered that
being offended is not the same as being oppressed. In a diverse
world, offense is to be expected, so is debate. And we've got a
tradition of debate, ijtihad. By honoring it, more Muslims could
speak their minds and bust out of tribal conformity. My fellow
Muslims, I have faith in our potential to change.
One of the extras is her doing a Q &
A after a screening in a very Muslim neighborhood in Detroit. As I
mentioned in the earlier blogs, she talks about something called
ijtihad, a philosophy of exploration and learning and acceptance of
the ideas of other cultures. Someone questions that if this becomes a
new ideology of the Islamic world, couldn't it be misused in the same
way Osama bin Laden has misused other teachings of Islam.
She completely agrees. But she says,
let's do it anyway. Let's let those ideas flower and see what comes
of it. I can't know what else she said since I wasn't there and it
could be that she was very aware of the somewhat hostile environment
she was in at the time. I hope she would have a more subtle or even
more critical response to that question if she were in a different environment.
A tribal and cultural
ideology that is open to interpretation and can be used to manipulate
is one thing. An idea that can be expressed in different cultures but
carries with it universal values of love, peace, tolerance and the
promotion of human flourishing and the understanding of the needs of
all creatures and the whole planet is something else entirely. I
think ijtihad is intended to promote the latter.
Ideas like this address not only religious fundamentalism, they address any oppressor or aggressor. They address the guy in Montana with guns in his basement waiting for the infrastructure to collapse. They address Pol Pot who answered to no god. They address any form of empiralism, no matter what ideological claims of righteous are behind it.
I went looking for more on Irshad
Manji, the author of the book review that I responded to last week.
That led me to the interview below. If you would, read what I have to
say, then see what you think about her idea of “reclaiming God's
good name.”
The more I listen to so-called moderate
believers, the more I find that we are in almost total agreement.
They are saying that their prophet, Jesus, Mohammad or Buddha or
whomever challenged the earlier prophets. That the religion they
created was a step forward for human progress, a movement of love and
inclusion and forgiveness that did not exist before they came along.
They then use that to justify continuing to study their prophet's words and
actions thousands of years later.
I agree, almost. When the New Testament
was written, Jews were enslaved, they had no homeland, no army. Rome
was a brutally oppressive society with a pantheon of gods and
emperors who were claiming to be born of a virgin and claiming they were gods. When
the Koran was written, female babies were killed and tribes traded
off enslaving each other as power shifted back and forth. Gautama
Buddha was born into a wealthy family that kept him isolated from the
horrors of the caste system. When his eyes were opened to it, he knew
it had to change.
The story of Jesus challenged not only
the Romans and their gods, but it directly spoke to the corruption
within Judaism. This can be found in the early chapters of the book of
Mark, as well in the character of Herod, a puppet Jewish King who cut
deals with the Romans and of course Judas selling out to the High
Priests. Even ignoring the scripture and just looking at how the
early Christians acted shows a break from traditions. They held small
meetings in homes where women studied alongside men and they took
care of their neighbors, regardless of their backgrounds.
I hear words and passages thrown around
when moderate Muslims talk about the Islamic golden age, between 800
and 1200. They may use ijtihad, which has to do with reasoning, or
falsafa, meaning philosophy. I'm not sure where exactly these are in
the scripture, and when I've seen them, they are mixed with praise
for Allah. I don't really care. I note that they are explicitly
honored in Islam as opposed to the way philosophy and thinking are
denigrated in the Bible, but words from history only matter if they
did indeed influence a culture. We know that Muslims built libraries,
improved their infrastructure, their agriculture, wrote poetry and
generally flourished while Europeans were 99% illiterate and worrying
about the end of times.
But of course all this ended. We know
more about the tribal aspects of Islam that are left over from before
Mohammed than we do about the progressive movement that people would
have actually embraced at the time. Conquering was the normal course
of events at the time, so the fact that they swept across North
African “converting” people was partially due to their military
power, but just as important was that the conquered people accepted
them as leaders because they did a better job than the idiots they
overthrew. And they allowed people to practice the religion of their
choice, with restrictions, but it was allowed.
When I say I “almost agree” with
these moderates about how their religions are based on peaceful and
progressive ideas, I'm not not sure where we actually disagree
because they won't talk about why those progressive movements failed.
Once you start talking about how the Catholics eventually partnered
with the Romans and started burning pagan churches or how the Islamic
golden age ended and Jews were expelled from the universities and the
death penalty for apostasy was actually enforced, the discussion
becomes irrational. You get accused of bringing up the worst aspects
of religion or of cherry picking history. This is ridiculous of
course because it is they who are refusing to discuss that history
and only want to discuss the times and the players in history that
promoted what we now think of as modern ethical behavior.
I don't bring up Augustine or
Al-Kahzali as proof that religion will always fail, I bring them up
to ask the question of why did the progressive movements fail? For
that matter, why are they failing now? Right now, we are all hoping
that the leaders of the Westboro United Baptist Church will just die
and no one will replace them or continue on with that work. They
don't allow anyone to have a reasonable conversation with them and I
don't know of anyone interested in trying. Once someone has chosen
the Bible as their only guide for how to act in the world, it is not
possible to use that Bible to change their minds. But just because you aren't a Bible thumping fundamentalist, it doesn't automatically make you reasonable. What is the progressive movement doing to directly address the problems created by fundamentalism?
The first century was a time when Jews changed how they looked at their
own laws by bringing in a new way of relating
to god. Slavery ended because the world grew to where
more people could see that no single tribe had a special place in the
hierarchy and that thinking that way was toxic to the world. Homosexuality is gaining more and more acceptance
because we are gaining a better understanding of the mind and we know
that just because we don't have certain impulses that doesn't mean
other people don't. We have learned to examine right and wrong by
examining the whole world, all living things, the entire eco-system
and the future of the planet. Soon we will be considering the future
of other planets.
Those religious movements failed
because they couldn't incorporate new information fast enough. The
Islamic movement is the last time in history that a new world view
took hold and united enough people to become an empire and last for
generations. Cultures were already mixing and oddly enough, Islam
accelerated that by taking paper making from China and translating
and copying knowledge from all over and spreading it further West.
When they got to translating not only the words but the ideas of the
ancient Greek texts they reawakened philosophies that had been lost
due to the barbarism of the 4th and 5th
centuries. After that, people had tools to question why they were being forced to worship a god. They began to expect a logical argument for it.
Where I agree with these moderates is
on the amazing work some small groups of people in history have done
to bring reason and progress into cultures that were literally
killing babies and promoting horrendous acts we would never allow
today. What they don't want to discuss is that those same small
groups also had some backwards ideas about where the universe came
from and how to deal with meat products or what clothes we should
wear. We've dealt with many of those beliefs and they don't seem to
mind that we all break most of the rules every day, but if you
suggest something like their prophet does not deserve to be worshiped
or that prayer doesn't work or the resurrection didn't happen, they
lose the ability to form a coherent argument, sometimes to form a coherent sentence. If you suggest we
shouldn't teach children these things until they are old enough to
think critically, they bring up ethics and traditions and community
and other issues that to me are completely unrelated.
My suggestion, and I have brought this up with pastors, friends and whomever cares to engage me, is that their prophet had something to say, and so did a bunch
of other prophets and philosophers. Why not just include them all?
Why fight over which character in a story is the coolest and instead
really dig into which ideas can actually bring about progress right
now? I have as yet not received an answer.
This blog won't make much sense if you don't read this article first. It's a review of book that is a discussion between an anti-religion atheist and a progressive Muslim. It just came out so I haven't read it yet, but I'm familiar with one of the authors. I’m not familiar with Irshad Manji, or her TED talk, but I don’t deny she’s accurately describing uncivil behavior. I’m sure her positive assessment of Harris’ new book, co-authored by Maajid Nawaz is also accurate.
The article begins where the book does and where the world is at, that is “interpretation is everything”, and there are a lot of people who believe their interpretation is the only correct one. They don’t even accept that their's is an interpretation, but simply a statement of truth that has been revealed and is beyond question. A world with enough weapons to destroy all living things can’t survive with that sort of thinking.
It falls on non-Muslims from secular nations to understand all the distinctions of political, revolutionary and militant Islam and how discrimination exists even in liberal Democratic states and how that affects Islam. I’m less qualified on Muslim culture, but don’t think it is beyond reason to expect Muslims to understand how their own culture is incubating the misinterpretations that lead to what Nawaz calls “Islamism”. Harris, a product of a secular liberal democracy, has no problem pointing out the influence of religious beliefs on a group like the Islamic State, and wonders why more liberals don’t join him.
At this point, Manji goes a bit off the rails of reality and says Harris and other atheists don’t make enough noise about hatred toward Muslims. From what I know of Harris, he has standards and values and he applies them evenly. When Manji says, “The caricature of faith to which some atheists resort is proof positive” (of the irrationality of humans), I think she is pulling the cover back over Islamist extremism. That cover has been used to gain sympathy for decades. It’s one thing to get sympathy for oppressed people, yet another to expect sympathy of cultural differences that break universal norms.
There are clear differences between a violent act that draws attention to the plight of the oppressed and the acts of an oppressor attempting to gain or maintain power. People use faith to justify violence, that’s not a caricature. Manji needs to clarify what she is talking about, because it doesn’t work as support for her argument here.
Manji really fails in her analysis of Nawaz’s solutions. She says “ideas are abstract, a feeble bulwark against the emotional comfort of belonging to tribes”. The “ideas” of human rights and democracy, are much less abstract than believing in a savor or worshiping a prophet. She admitted it’s all about interpretation earlier, but now seems willing to say that’s fine as long it’s comforting. Se commits the fallacy of caricature that she just put down when she says by “secular” Nawaz meant “American separation of church and state”. That is hardly unique to America and hardly the definition of secular. Again she needs to explain what the problem is here, beyond simply saying it can become dogma.
Manji attempts to explain herself using quotes from Jonathan Sacks, a poor choice in my opinion. The quote from him, “no society has survived for long without either a religion or a substitute for religion,” ignores the historic context of what religion has been and why it has had such staying power. There are many people finding meaning and identity and participating in something larger than themselves without reciting a creed that they don’t fully believe every Sunday or Friday or whatever their holy day is. Society has not just survived, it has thrived because we stopped allowing Kings to tell us who to worship and who to kill because they worshiped differently.
She goes on to explain Sacks’ new rereading of Genesis. Something I have grown so tired of I can no longer find the energy to even address. A rereading of ancient scripture does not erase all the other readings. It doesn’t remove the more obvious meaning of the words. Whether or not the obvious meaning is the correct interpretation is not the point. If you continue to treat an ancient story of unknown origin, passed through multiple languages as if it contains a truth that overrides more contemporary philosophy, we’ll continue to have the same problems we’ve always had. We’ll continue to have these cryptic messages lying around waiting to be misinterpreted.
Somehow, Manji admits this while saying Harris is missing the point. She quotes Sacks, “fundamentalists and today’s atheists” both ignore “the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that it’s meaning is not self-evident.” Trying to interpret the Bible better is not a solution, that’s the problem. The problem is a rabbi can obfuscate a discussion about being civil by saying we should read the Bible, but we should read it the way he says instead of the way a million other people say, and that should end the argument. I don't know why Manji doesn't see this is just starting a new argument.
And that is not the low point of the article. I hang my head when I read stuff like this. Manji continues to say Sacks has the solution, which is teaching more people about his interpretation of the Bible. Although she (Manji) admits, “But as he (Sacks) admits early on, ‘decades of anti-racist legislation, interfaith dialogue and Holocaust education’ have not prevented the mess we are in. Why would it be different now?” What messes are they talking about? The Berlin wall is down, more and more people can vote, I can travel to Iran, there are whole organizations where Jews and Palestinians work together, and fundamentalists are increasingly disparaged. Perhaps the problem is Manji is doesn’t know what success looks like.
If people are reading scripture and finding peace in it, great, but they should do it on their own time and make no demands of others to participate in their study beyond the normal marketplace of ideas. That is, their ideas should stand or fall on their merits. They don't get special considerations because of their age, their cultural acceptance, and certainly not for their claimed divine source.
She does end on a positive note and reminds me to be respectful of her ideas, so I’m open to feedback. I have seen other more supportive statements from her of Harris and Nawaz's work. She also reminds us of how Western Christianity went through brutal wars before it was reformed. That’s a lesson that I think we have forgotten and are learning it again alongside our Muslim brothers and sisters. We can sit idly by and hope they work it out or we can share our stories and work together toward a more peaceful world.
