In 2007, Louis Theroux from BBC2 spent some time with the people of the Westboro Baptist Church who gave him considerable access to talk with all their members. The resulting documentary called America’s Most Hated Family provided for some absorbing and informative television that I wrote about earlier.
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People who choose not to be affiliated with any religion are the fastest growing segment of the population in the world. In contrast, all religions are in decline except for Islam which seems to be in a growth mode largely because of its high birth rates. When Islam goes into decline, as it surely will like all the other religions, it will in large part be due to actions like those of the murderous fanatics who rampaged in Afghanistan and killed over 20 people (even beheading some) in retaliation for the burning of a Koran in the US.
Such an atrocity cannot help but cause acute discomfort to any Muslim who likes to see himself or herself as part of the modern world. While murdering people (like blasphemers or apostates) who commit an act that is offensive to your religious beliefs has a barbaric logic to it that presumably makes sense to the appropriately insane, killing innocent people who just happen to be nearby because you cannot lay hands on the people who did the offensive act is so outside the bounds of reason that no one who has any pretence to being part of the modern world will even try to find justifications for it. Doing so immediately brands one as being outside the pale of normal human society.
And this is what Muslims who aspire to modernity have to confront. The people in Afghanistan who committed that atrocity claim to be acting in the service of their god. It is no good for so-called ‘moderate’ Muslims to say that these people are misguided and that ‘true’ Islam (i.e., their own version) would frown on such acts. People will be forced to ask themselves what it is about their religion that makes people even consider the possibility that killing innocent people for the actions of others is noble and that their god will look favorably on them for doing so.
I have noticed recently that religious believers no longer try to argue that belief in god is justified in itself but have settled for trying to put religion on a par with disbelief, as purely a matter of choice.
For example, religious believers who are disturbed by the argument made by atheists that belief in god is irrational sometimes respond by saying that since we cannot prove that there is no god, then atheism involves as much a ‘belief’ religion, and thus both are equally rational or irrational. Ricky Gervais provides a good response to that by pointing out that “Atheism isn’t a belief system. I have a belief system but it’s not “based on” atheism, it’s just not based on the existence of a god. I make none of my moral, social, or artistic decisions based on any god or superstitions. Saying atheism is a belief system is like saying not going skiing is a hobby. I’ve never been skiing. It’s my biggest hobby. I literally do it all the time.”
He is right but I want to expand on that idea a bit in my more pedestrian style.
Atheism does not automatically provide one with a philosophy or a system of ethics or morals. But that does not mean that atheists have none of those things or that there are no behavioral consequences for being an atheist. They just come from sources other than a belief in a god.
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While India is emerging as a powerful and modern economy based on science and technology, it still suffers from religious superstition, especially the phenomenon of ‘god-men’, frauds who prey on the gullible to fool them into thinking that they are avatars of god. It seems like all you need to do is wear orange robes, grow your hair long, utter some religious mumbo-jumbo, and perform some cheap magic tricks for people to start worshipping you and, more importantly, give you money that they can ill-afford to part with.
This video shows a heartening effort to counter these frauds, by the Indian equivalents of James Randi.
The biggest such fraud is, of course, the man who calls himself Sai Baba, who is famous in that part of the world. He has devotees from all walks of life, including politically powerful people. Three families of my own acquaintance are devotees of his, making pilgrimages to his place and, most important, giving money. When I expressed skepticism, one of them gave me a book that she claimed would convince me of his authenticity. It did not.
This video exposes the tricks he uses to impress his followers.
Exposing god-men in India is not without risk because religious nutters hate having their faith exposed as worthless and can resort to violence, so these debunkers have to be commended for their courage.
In the west we do not have god-men but we do have our equivalent frauds, evangelists and faith healers who claim to be channels for god’s actions. To be successful in this con seems to require fast-talking, ostentatious living, and a TV or radio outlet.
But while all these frauds differ superficially, the goal is the same, to separate fools and their money.
Some non-religious members of the US military at Fort Bragg in North Carolina have formed a group called MASH (Military Atheists and Secular Humanists) and applied for official recognition so that they receive the same benefits as religious groups. There are 20 similar unofficial groups of non-theists in US military bases around the world, according to the president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers.
This is not a trivial development. The US military has long had a ‘God and country’ mindset that is hostile to nonbelievers. These developments show that more and more atheists feel comfortable declaring their nonbelief. The numbers are potentially large. A Pentagon report “concluded that about 20 to 25 percent of military personnel have no religious preference. Up to 3.6 percent identify themselves as humanist — a catchall that can refer to a nonreligious ethical philosophy.” Religious non-preference, like saying one is ‘spiritual’, is often (though not always) a temporary refuge for those who seriously doubt the existence of god but are uncomfortable coming right out and saying so.
We are rapidly approaching a critical point when religious beliefs will collapse because their lack of any rational basis will become increasingly apparent as people in every walk of life begin to point it out.
Israel has a long history of awful treatment of the Palestinians, treating them in a way that has been compared to the apartheid system used by the white minority in South Africa to oppress the blacks. But Israel has got even worse in recent days. Ran Ha Cohen describes the rise of outright racism in Israel. Israeli police are even reported to be illegally arresting arrest five-year old Palestinian children.
The occupation of Palestinian is becoming so ugly that New Yorker editor David Remnick calls for it to end and has led even strong supporters of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg (who has served in the Israel Defense Forces) to speculate that Israel could soon no longer claim the label of being democratic. Ilan Pappé, a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK and director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, goes further and says:
Israel is definitely not a democracy. A country that occupies another people for more than 40 years and disallow them the most elementary civic and human rights cannot be a democracy. A country that pursues a discriminatory policy against a fifth of its Palestinian citizens inside the 67 borders cannot be a democracy. In fact Israel is, what we use to call in political science a herrenvolk democracy, its democracy only for the masters. The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is useless and meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the State, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level from official legislation through governmental practices, and social and cultural attitudes, Israel is only a democracy for one group, one ethnic group, that given the space that Israel now controls, is not even a majority group anymore, so I think that you’ll find it very hard to use any known definition of democracy which will be applicable for the Israeli case.
The growth of outright racist views often voiced by rabbis, and its tolerance by the Israeli government and higher echelons of society, is causing some concern within that country amongst people who fear the emergence of a theocracy: “Hundreds of rabbis sign a manifesto prohibiting Jews from renting or selling apartments to non-Jews, yet no response is heard from the justice minister. The chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliahu, continuously incites and no criminal or disciplinary procedures were commenced against him.”
As Juan Cole points out, the racism in Israel is already quite overt as can be seen in the restrictions on interfaith marriage.
Israel, like Lebanon and some Muslim countries, for the most part makes no provision for civil marriage, requiring individuals to marry within the religious law of their sect. Israel’s rabbinate opposes civil marriage in part out of fear it would encourage inter-faith marriage. At the moment, couples of different faith heritages in Israel must go to Cyprus or elsewhere abroad to marry, and have the marriage recognized on their return. Such a marriage cannot be performed in Israel itself.
It is no secret that Israel, and its lobby in the US, have been urging a military attack on Iran. US leaders routinely threaten Iran with the possibility of a nuclear attack by saying that ‘the nuclear option is not off the table’. Israel makes sure everyone is aware that it can and will attack Iran at a moment’s notice if given the green light by the US, and both countries have repeatedly and recently invaded other countries in that region. And yet it is Iran, which has not attacked any neighbor for over a millennium, that is portrayed in the media here as the dangerous extremist nation, while the US and Israel are the ‘moderates’.
I have been puzzled by Israel’s preoccupation with Iran since the leaders of Iran are not stupid and are not likely to use any nuclear weapons it manufactures because of certain and overwhelming retaliation. It seems pretty obvious to me that if they seek nuclear weapons at all, it is as a deterrent to attacks on them by the US and Israel. I am more fearful of the Israeli or US governments using nuclear weapons because they refuse to deny that they are willing to use them (and the US has used them in the past) and there is no deterrence to their use.
Juan Cole provides a possible explanation for Israel’s preoccupation with Iran, based on cables released by WikiLeaks. Apparently Israel is concerned that the rate of immigration is slowing down and that its demographic edge over the native Arab population might soon disappear.
The Jewish Agency, which was created to promote the immigration to Israel of Jews all over the world, has conceded that the era of mass immigration by Jews is over. This peaked in the 1990s when hundreds of thousands of Jews — and many non-Jews — flooded into the country after the Soviet Union collapsed.
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This year, the Jewish Agency expects around 18,000 Jews to move to Israel from the United States and elsewhere and the number is likely to dwindle.Israel’s demographic makeup has undergone dramatic change in recent years. Out of a population of around 7 million, one-fifth are Palestinian Arabs. Another large minority is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are non-Jews as defined by Jewish religious law, or Halaka.
The rise in power of right-wing orthodox Jewish religious groups and their attempts to impose their absurdly restrictive lifestyle on the still significantly large secular population is causing tensions within the country. What is happening is that the new immigrants from Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries seem to be more anti-Arab, pro-settlement, and hard line nationalists. The Israeli government may be fearful that if Iran did manage to produce nuclear weapons, then its Jewish population that has been made so fearful of Iran would emigrate in even larger numbers, worsening the demographic problem. The government’s own polling says that one-third of Israelis would emigrate if Iran developed a nuclear weapon. The people who are most likely to leave are the more secular modernist elements, leaving the country even more firmly in the grip of its religious extremists. If this happens it will result in an Israel that looks like the Jewish equivalent of mullah-dominated Islamist states in which the religious nutters impose their crazy rules on everyone, whether they are believers or not. One Israeli Minister warns that Israel is already turning into Iran.
Whenever religion gains influence over a government, the results are bad. Religion is a menace and we would all be better off without it.
I am not a fan of April Fool jokes. While they may be tolerable when practiced by very small children, I find the adult fascination with them peculiar.
The ones in the media are usually only mildly amusing. I never note the special day except that NPR usually does hoax stories on it that are so weird that I realize that something is off and remember that it is April 1. This year it was a story about eye surgery to allow people to see 3D films and TV without special glasses (on Morning Edition) and another about a coffee shop that provides old-time slow internet via modems as part of a movement to get people to slow down the pace of life (on All Things Considered).
The only people who enjoy such hoaxes are the perpetrators. While most are harmless and usually merely a waste of time, some people’s ideas of what’s funny can be dangerous and trigger the “What on Earth were you thinking?” feeling.
For example, this year the Plain Dealer had a story about a woman, a Cleveland city government employee, who called her boyfriend and said that she was hiding under her desk at work because a gunman had entered the building and was firing shots. He naturally called 911 and they sent out police and SWAT teams that swarmed through the building searching for the gunman before uncovering the hoax. Someone could have got hurt or even killed if the SWAT team misinterpreted an innocent action as threatening.
Having said all that, once in a while the extra latitude allowed on April Fool’s day allows some creative people to indulge in a piece of inspired whimsy, such as this one by the BBC in 2008. This is an example of where the victims also enjoy the joke because of the ingenuity involved and the beauty of the result.
You can see how it was done.
Unfortunately most hoaxes come nowhere close to that level of cleverness and are merely annoying.