Irshad Manji discovers Muslim love

I would probably not like this book; in fact, from reading the summaries and reviews, I would probably actively detest Irshad Manji’s Allah, Liberty, and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom — there might be much to admire in her work, as she’s another theist who has taken a step away from the dogma and tribalism of fundamentalism, but she hasn’t yet had the courage or intellectual integrity to take another step and free herself of the folly of faith. I could imagine writing a review of the book that was negative or mixed.

But you know what I could not do? I could not imagine instigating a riot over it, or demanding that she be executed for writing it. I would not demand that the book be banned. But that’s exactly what she got at her book launch in Amsterdam.

Next time you see an atheist accused of militancy or stridency, show the accuser this video. That’s what militant, strident fundamentalists look like.

The Bible is the Bad Book

Jonathan Kay is some conservative Canadian columnist who doesn’t think much, but has nonetheless managed to write something that amused me. It’s an article in which he proposes his solution to just about everything: Everyone should read the Bible (especially atheists). I know already that a lot of you are already giggling: we have read the bible, that’s why many of us are atheists. But as you’ll see, it’s not just the title, but the whole article has this smugly unaware air — he hasn’t thought at all deeply about this subject, but he can wag his finger and lecture us sternly on the conventional wisdom with blissful pomposity.

You might be wondering why he’s taking special pains to hector the atheists. It’s because we’re especially annoying — he was driven to write his article because some damned atheist, Michael Arsenault, is campaigning against the Gideons invading public schools to hand out bibles.

Religious extremists often frighten me, offend me, disgust me. But in terms of provoking irritation, none compare to the militantly godless.

Wait…the Gideons are the ones pushing their faith on schoolkids; Arsenault is only asking them to stop doing that. How is it he’s the irritating one? Kay’s logic is awesome: it’s because religious fanatics believe that the omnipotent lord of the universe has told them to do that, but atheists do it all on their lonesome, without that excuse. Atheists using their brain = massively irritating. Christians slavishly obeying ranting preacher = well that’s all right then.

But there’s even more cluelessness! We are apparently supposed to worship the bible, no matter what our religious beliefs, and Mr Kay obligingly gives us an abbreviated summary of the basic Biblical concepts we must master.

I am not a Christian. But I still keep on my National Post desk a well-thumbed copy of the King James Bible I received from my Moral & Religious Education teacher in 1979. I can’t claim to have read the whole thing, but I have read enough of it to understand basic concepts, such as the genealogy of Abraham’s immediate descendants; the flight of the Israelites from Egypt; the description of Jesus’ life and death contained in the Gospels; and the eschatology of Revelation. Even atheists must understand these concepts if they are to have an educated understanding of our world, for they have a direct bearing on everything from the modern Middle East, to the popularity of Rick Santorum, to the plot of Justin Cronin zombie novels.

So one of the important things we atheists should learn is Abraham’s genealogy? Why? I also suspect some blithe ignorance on Kay’s part: the notorious begats of Genesis 5 are the descendants of Adam; the further begats of Genesis 10 are the descendants of Noah. There are some complicated summaries of Abraham’s descendants, for instance in Genesis 25:

Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Ketu’rah.

And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Mid’i-an, and Ishbak, and Shu’ah.

And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were As’shurim, and Let’ushim, and Le’ummim.

And the sons of Mid’i-an; Ephah, and Epher, and Hanoch, and Abi’dah, and Elda’ah. All these were the children of Ketu’rah.

And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac.

But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country.

So what, exactly, is the basic concept here? Are we supposed to memorize these names? What is the relevance of Ishbak, Let’ushim, and Elda’ah? Would Canada be a better place with a greater appreciation of the unimportance of Abraham’s many nameless concubines?

Does Mr Kay know that the flight of the Israelites from Egypt was a myth of an event that didn’t happen? There is no archaeological evidence to support the story in Exodus. And again, spell out the relevance, please. It’s a scrap of pseudohistory.

Similarly, vague umbly-mumbly about Jesus’ life is nonsense about a god-man who did not exist, a collection of legends with no primary sources, and no reason to trust the veracity of the authors, who were all religious fanatics with motivation to inflate the grains of truth in the story. We’d be better off throwing that garbage on the trash heap.

And seriously, we’re supposed to know the eschatology of the book of Revelation? I’ve read it for laughs — that stuff is insane. All we need to know is that there is a body of deranged literature which deluded fanatics use to justify violence and a hope for the imminent destruction of the universe; there are no truths in the prophecies at all, and the only people who really need to know them in detail are the experts in psychopathology who are trying to untangle the delusions that drive dangerous human beings.

Here’s the one great truth you need to know. The bible is a bad book. It’s a nearly unreadable mess of contradictory stories, ancient political propaganda, arcane tribalisms, bizarre rituals, and the bragging of petty provincial bullies. There are occasional scraps of genuine literary quality imbedded in it, but it is 95% shit…and unfortunately, the book has been granted such extravagantly unwarranted reverence that people refuse to recognize the shit and worship it all uncritically. Which leads to columnists telling us to read the bible for the genealogies and Revelation, rather than Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, and whole American industries striving to replace all of science with a few paragraphs from Genesis.

Kay also makes the tiresome argument that the King James Bible is full of idioms that have common currency in the English, therefore…what? I would not deny that the bible has been influential in Western history, but then, so has cholera — I think recognition of the importance of both is essential for an educated person, but I do not endorse being inoculated with either.

In his 2010 book, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal concluded that the King James Bible alone created twice as many modern English idioms (think “fly in the ointment”) as all of Shakespeare’s work combined. And even these are only a small fraction of the thousands of idioms given to us by predecessor Bibles, such as the Tyndale, Bishops’ and Geneva variants. The English we speak today and the English of the Bible are inseparable. A common phrase such as “brother’s keeper,” for instance, loses its meaning to someone ignorant of the story of Cain and Abel.

This is a false argument. You certainly can understand that simple phrase without reading the Bible, and you can read the Bible without understanding the phrase. How often have you heard “Am I my brother’s keeper?” used by Christians as an excuse to avoid responsibility, vs. recognizing that it was a transparent rationalization by a murderer? I’d argue instead that many of these well-worn idioms have acquired meanings independent of their sources, and that trying to tie them to Christianity or Judaism ignores their modern usage.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there is a great deal of our modern language that arose from the Bible — evolutionary biologists do not deny the significance of antecedents! But that is not sufficient cause to demand that everyone must learn from the archaic and often irrelevant original source.

That more idioms arose from the Bible than Shakespeare is no virtue. Imagine a table with two books: a copy of the Bible, and the very least of Shakespeare’s plays — say, Troilus and Cressida. Which do you think will be better written, more interesting, more humane, and more coherent? Shakespeare, hands down. Shakespeare was an author who was certainly informed by the Bible, but he was also a literary genius who used the clever 5% and left out the 95% shit, plucking the gems out of the dungheap and giving us a better story and a better morality.

Kay ought to recognize this fact; he even gives an example that ought to have alerted him that his thoughtless assumption that the Bible was a good book was wrong.

My children are too young for the Bible (as I learned from an unsuccessful and unintentionally terrifying experiment at bed-time reading with Robert Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis) — so I had to explain concepts like “wickedness” to them as they arose in Montgomery’s text. [He was also reading them Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables–pzm]

I love Crumb’s Genesis — most people have not actually read the Bible at all, and translating it into a different medium — especially a particularly faithful translation — can jar them into looking at it more closely. And what you learn from Genesis is that it is a truly awful, evil, wretched little book. Kay’s children could see that. Now why can’t Kay himself?

Indonesia does make Rhode Island look relatively sane

Yeah, I went there and made fun of Rhode Island again. It is our latest national example of fuming ignorance, you know.

But let’s put it in perspective. Nowhere in the US is as awful as Indonesia.

An Indonesian man could be hit with a five-year jail term after posting “God does not exist” on an atheist group’s Facebook Page.

The civil servant, described as a 31-year-old named Alexander, told the Jakarta Globe that an angry mob had accosted him and beat him up on Wednesday, after reaching his office at the Dharmasraya Development Planning Board.

The man moderates a Facebook Page for the Minang Atheists, and says that in addition to his impromptu punishment at the hands of a baying mob, he’s also facing dismissal from his job and a prison sentence under strict blasphemy laws. Furthermore, Dharmasraya Police Chief Chairul Aziz said Alexander is currently in “protective custody”, adding that Alexander was afraid of physical assault.

Hmmm. I’m scratching “visit Indonesia” off my bucket list.

Alain de Botton is right about one thing

At the end of this video, he suggests that both sides will be out to shoot him. Yes, they will…well, I’m wielding a great heavy two-handed sword, but I’ll accept the general equivalence in intent of pointy sharp nasty weaponry and projectile-flinging guns. In this TED presentation, he advocates just adapting religion to atheism, something he calls Atheism 2.0, but which is actually just Religion 0.0 again.

This is not what the New Atheism is about. It’s the antithesis of what we’re after. We’ve had a few thousand years of the godly shuffle: here’s a temple to Zeus, he’s out so we swap in Jupiter; he’s not exciting, let’s try Isis; now Mithras; Jehovah; Jesus; Mohammed; back to Catholicism; on to Protestantism; oh, you’re atheists, eh, here’s a fine altar, hardly been used, we’ll just rededicate it to your god Athe then. New gods same as the old gods, right?

Wrong. It’s that the whole structure of religious thought is wrong, that we’ve been spending these few thousand years digging the same old pit, deeper and deeper, maybe putting a little more gilt on the shovel and roofing it over with ever fancier architecture, but now we’re saying maybe it’s time to climb out of the hole and do something different. I don’t want a new label, I want whole new modes of thought.

de Botton wants to pick and choose from religion and keep the good parts for atheism, which is a nice idea, but he seems to be totally lacking in sense and discrimination in what the virtues of religion are. And then, unfortunately for him, he picks a few examples of something he thinks religion got right, and one of them is education. Fuck me.

He suggests looking at how churches teach the ‘facts’ of their faith, and is quite enthusiastic about the importance of repetition. Repeat things five times, he says, and then you’ll master it; he just suggests replacing God and Jesus with Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Has de Botton ever been anywhere near a classroom?

Let me give an example from my teaching; I’m familiar with what he proposes. For instance, I teach genetics, and one of the big concepts there is linkage and mapping. I’ve stood up and lectured on Sturtevant’s original mapping experiments; I’ve given the class the numbers from his observations, and had them do the calculations themselves; I’ve then had students come up to the whiteboard and show everyone how it is done; and then I’ve gone through it again on the board, step by step. The students nod and smile, they understand, give ’em these numbers and they can trot through the calculations without hesitation.

Then on the test I give them the same problem, but I change the names of the alleles, swap in a zebrafish for a fruit fly, and half the class is totally stumped. “But you didn’t teach us how to do that problem,” they whine.

Repetition doesn’t work. It’s great for memorizing dogma, but it’s awful for mastering concepts. Students don’t understand, they just learn to robotically reiterate.

What I do is very different. I give them the Sturtevant data and we work through that problem, sure, but then we try other angles. Here’s data on the recombination frequency between pairs of loci; assemble them into a map. Here’s a triple-point cross, and the phenotypes of the flies we get back; calculate a map. Here’s a problem; work it out in groups. Here’s a problem; teach your partner how to solve it. Here’s a map; work backwards and predict the frequencies of phenotypes of a cross. You invent a problem, give it to me, and let’s see if I can get the right answer. Here’s how the problem is solved in flies, and fish, and nematodes, and humans, and tissue culture. Here’s how we do it with molecular biology techniques rather than genetics. What if the traits are all sex-linked? What if this locus interacts epistatically with that other locus? What if the two alleles at this locus are codominant?

The whole purpose of what we do in the science classroom is to get the students to understand that you can’t master the concept by rote memorization. You have to understand how someone came up with the idea in the first place, and you have to appreciate how understanding the concept gives you the mental toolkit to grasp novel instances of related phenomena. I could just show them a fly gene map and tell them to memorize it, I suppose, and teach them this idea that genes have locations on the chromosome, and leave it at that, but then they haven’t really learned anything deep, and haven’t learned how to integrate new observations into the concept. They’re also going to be totally unprepared for going off to grad school, reading McClintock’s papers, and learning that sometimes genes don’t have fixed locations on the chromosome.

So you can imagine how appalled I was listening to de Botton tell us that one thing society could benefit from adapting from religion is their approach to education. That’s simply insane. If you want to improve people’s understanding, we should model learning more on those secular, progressive, well-honed methods you find in good college classrooms, not church. Church is where you go to learn how to hammer dogma into people’s heads.

That is not what the New Atheism wants. Apparently, it’s what Atheism 2.0 wants, though.

His approach to art is about as horrifying — “religions…have no trouble telling us what art is about, art is about two things in all the major faiths; firstly, it’s trying to remind you of what there is to love, and secondly it’s trying to remind you of what there is to fear and hate…it’s propaganda”. To de Botton, that is a virtue. He suggests that museums ought to adopt the approaches of the churches, and organize their art by themes and tell everyone exactly what it all means. Jebus. Can you imagine a van Gogh hanging on the wall, with a little checklist next to it telling you what it is supposed to mean, and everyone dutifully reading the museum’s imperative and making sure they’ve got exactly the right interpretation? Some excited little girl makes the mistake of looking at the painting not the placard and telling her mother, “Look at the light and color shining through the confusion!” and the guard has to tap his stick on the wall and tell her, “No, it says CONFORM and OBEY or suffer. Can’t you read?”

Worst TED talk ever — well, it’s competitive with that horrible drivel from Elaine Morgan, anyway. de Botton is one of those superficial atheists who hasn’t quite thought things through and has such a blinkered optimistic perspective on religion that he thinks faith provides what reason does not.

This is getting ridiculous

All right, this is getting ridiculous. Now Rhys Morgan is getting hassled by his school because he put Jesus & Mo on his facebook page. What started it seems to have been an idiot whining at length that Morgan can’t mock Islam, presumably complained to school administrators, and now the school is threatening to expel him over it.

Listen, loons: there’s a difference between a person and an idea. We have to be able to criticize bad ideas freely, because we hope to change them and make them better. You get to criticize atheism; we get to criticize religion; that’s central to the debate. You don’t get to unilaterally declare your crap exempt from ridicule or disagreement, much as you’d like to.

I understand why you’d like to though, because damn is that Mohammed/Jesus/Buddha/Xenu crap crazy.

Talk cancelled. Threats of violence found persuasive

A talk on Sharia law and human rights was about to begin at Queen Mary, University London, when someone made an announcement.

Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said ‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Muhammad, I will hunt you down.’ He then left the room and two members of the audience applauded.

The same man then began filming the faces of Society members in the foyer and threatening to hunt them down if anything was said about Muhammad, he added that he knew where they lived and would murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, seemingly there to support him. We were told by security to stay in the Lecture Theatre for our own safety. On arriving back in the room I became aware that the doors that opened to the outside were still open and that people were still coming in. Several eye witnesses reported that when I was in the foyer a group of men came through the open doors, causing a disruption and making it clear that the room could not be secured. Unfortunately, the lack of security in the lecture theatre meant we and the audience had to leave and a Union representative informed the security that as students’ lives had been threatened there was no way that the talk could go ahead.

This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate. Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.

Guess what? Cowardly extortion works! The talk was cancelled.

I guess we’re not supposed to say anything against holy Prophet Muhammad, but he didn’t say we couldn’t talk about his benighted followers. So…fuck you, rabid Islamicists. I hope people in the audience snapped open their phones and got pictures of angry ranty threatening guy and his followers, and that the police will be giving them a few lessons in the rule of law and how to live in a civil society real soon.

The ultimate insult

I’d be furious, too, if someone called me a “fundamentalist Christian”. That’s just sinking too low.

A blogger who characterised anti-porn activist Melinda Tankard Reist as a ”fundamentalist Christian” says she has been asked to apologise – or be sued.

Tankard Reist – who briefed lawyers to warn off liberal blogger Jennifer Wilson – says it’s not being called Christian she objects to, but the claim that she is ”deceptive and duplicitous about her religious beliefs”.

Tankard Reist is apparently some fairly big-name anti-abortion, ant-porn activist in Australia, who is driven at least in part by her conservative religious background…a background she’d really rather nobody brought up. She also doesn’t want to discuss anything with her critics, she wants to use the legal system to silence them instead. Right there she loses all my sympathy.

Her rationale doesn’t hang together very well, either.

The two statements I made that offended Tankard Reist, according to her lawyer’s letter, are 1) I stated she is a Baptist, which he claims in the letter she is not, and 2) that I expressed my opinion that MTR is duplicitious and deceptive about her religion.

I would think that the easiest way to refute point 2 is by addressing point 1 thoroughly, explaining what her religious beliefs are. The fact that she can’t, and that her paper trail shows her to be rather evasive about her beliefs tends to confirm point 2. It’s very strange, too: you’d expect most Christians to be proudly Tebowing to get off the hook. At least, that’s what American Christians would do, maybe Australian Christians have a sense of shame.

Apparently Tankard Reist has been consorting with right-wing religious crusaders for some time. The association is suggestive, if nothing else: she’s been waddling and quacking, and now takes offense when someone says “It’s a duck!” by protesting, “No, I’m not, I’m a … how dare you claim I’m evasive about what I am!”

A little comparative religion would do Ken Ham a world of good

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a Christian give a series of stupid “proofs” that his religion is the One True Faith, but it never fails to surprise me. They’re always so blindly oblivious, and they always say exactly the same things. So here’s Ken Ham, answering a child’s question, “How Do We Know Other Religions Aren’t True?”, in one crazily breathless paragraph.

No religion other than Christianity has a book like the Bible that tells us about the origin of everything, and who we are, where we came from [The Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the Talmud, the Tao-te-ching, the Upanishads, and the Vedas are all books that lay down a code of ethics, make assumptions or explanations about the nature of the universe, and in many (but not all) cases explain the origins of everything. This is pretty much what holy books do], what our problem is (sin), and what the solution to our sin problem is[Other religions have different systems of ethics; each one is unique. The question isn’t which one is different, because they all are, but which one is true]. No other religion has a Savior who is alive (He rose from the dead)[Dead gods that rise again are dime-a-dozen; it’s a common theme in seasonal/agricultural deities]. All other religions require people to do something to work out their future—only Christianity has the solution that we can’t save ourselves, only God can do it[Again, that some interpretations of Christianity have this weirdly psychopathic and nihilistic delusion does not make them true, only different]. So how can we know if other religions aren’t true? Well, if they don’t agree with the Bible they are not true![Circularity!] There are two main tests I want you to use though. First of all, any religion that claims to be true MUST believe that Jesus is God![More exclamation marks does not make it truer!] Remember, Jesus Himself told us that He and the Father are one. Many religions talk about God a lot . . . but if they don’t believe in Jesus and that He is God, and they don’t believe that Jesus’ death on the cross and His Resurrection results in our sin being forgiven if we will receive it, then it is not the truth![OK, this is just silly. Saying over and over again that your religion is true because your religion says it is true does not make it true. They all say that.] The other test is to find out if they believe that salvation is given to those who trust in Jesus. There is nothing you can do to save yourself. We could never do enough good works to get us to heaven, but Jesus did it when He died for us![This villainous attitude that living life in a virtuous and worthy way is futile is one of the reasons I despise Christianity, but that’s irrelevant, too. Restating the dogma of your faith is not a way to argue for its truth] Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.[Yeah? Prove it.]

You know, I have this crazy idea that if you’re going to say that something is objectively true, you ought to have some source of evidence external to the something; otherwise it’s just hamster-wheel logic. Internal consistency would also be nice (Christianity doesn’t even have that), and some kind of empirical way of validating truth claims is kind of essential. The wackos at Answers in Genesis even have some vague understanding that those are good ideas, since that’s the whole raison d’etre of creationism, is to contrive the appearance of having evidence for their beliefs. If that weren’t the case, they could just declare Noah’s Flood a miracle, an event and its associated consequences that were conjured together by an omnipotent being, free of our restrictions of cause and effect and evidence and even contrary to reason, and not fuss over their fallacious rationalizations.

But this whole business of responding to evidence for the truth of claim X by simply repeating claim X endlessly…it’s stupid. Maybe it works as a kind of brute-force psychological hammer when abusing the mind of an 8-year-old, but as an example of rational thought, it falls flat.

Well, aren’t we an optimistic bunch?

First we had Steven Pinker writing about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, with the thesis that we’re getting more peaceful over time.

Now John Horgan has declared the potential for The End of War — that we have the ability to stop fighting and cooperate.

Horgan makes the point that human nature requires us to fight, and that many people make this fatalistic assumption that it cannot end. It’s a reflection of the usual argument for futility that claims the status quo is thus because it must be so.

It’s also the argument that is made to defend the inevitability of religious belief.

(Also on FtB)

Meddling bishops

Catholic-affiliated universities are often very good academically — I can think of a couple of estimable Catholic universities in my area. But I would never recommend that anyone attend one, for this reason.

Bishop Bambera of the Diocese of Scranton has recently requested that the University of Scranton – a Catholic and Jesuit university in Pennsylvania – withdraw its invitation to a women’s rights activist and former United States House of Representatives member, Majorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who is scheduled to be the keynote speaker for a January 28 event at the University of Scranton encouraging women to become active in politics and learn more about the political system.

Why would anyone want to get an education under the thumbs of superstitious medieval clowns in gilt robes? Especially when they’re prone to silencing dissent? (I remember MMM well — she was my representative when I lived in Pennsylvania, until she was defeated by that Gingrichian wave. She’s good. She’s also pro-choice, so of course the Catholic Church hates her.)