The bodies of the three young Muslims who were murdered in Chapel Hill were barely cold before the finger-pointing began. Predictably, the religious, including some Muslims, expressed absolute assurance that this was a “hate crime” motivated by Craig Stephen Hicks’s animus towards Muslims.
What was almost as predictable but, perhaps, more reprehensible, was the eagerness of some atheists to blame this crime on the “militancy” of New Atheists. Indeed, some atheists accused people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss of creating a climate of hatred and “dehumanization” of Muslims that gave rise to the murders, and even of being complicit in the murders themselves. Those same accusatory atheists sneered at explanations, like mental illness, a parking dispute, and so on, that didn’t involve New Atheism and “Islamophobia” (see here, here, here and here for examples). In the rush to judgement, the facts were either unknown or ignored.
Well, the grand jury that just indicted Hicks didn’t indict him for committing a “hate crime,” which they could have done. As PuffHo says of hate crimes in the state:
To win a hate-crime conviction, however, legal experts say prosecutors would have to prove Hicks deliberately targeted those killed because of their religion, race or national origin.
North Carolina does not have a specific “hate crime” statute, though its laws cover such acts of “ethnic intimidation” as hanging a noose, burning a cross or setting fire to a church.
In the absence of strong evidence that there was religious animus behind the crime, a grand jury indicted Hicks on three counts of murder and one count of discharging a firearm in an occupied building. That, of course, won’t stop those with an ideological agenda to continue calling it a hate crime—one motivated by atheism, “Islamophobia,” or both. But the evidence of an anti-Muslim animus is virtually nonexistent in this case. In the only analysis I know that minutely dissected Hicks’s motives, at least from his writings, Michael Nugent, after thoroughly analyzing Hicks’s Facebook page (see his posts here and here), concluded this:
It may be that [Hicks] murdered them because he was an atheist and they were Muslims, and that he simply did not reflect that part of his personality online. But the available evidence does not support that idea, and those who are engaging in speculation should take into account the available evidence.
I agree. Speculation not only outran the facts in this case, but is now obdurately against the facts. Unless and until Hicks or someone else provides evidence that he killed the Muslims in the name of atheism, I won’t accept that as a motive, and until I see evidence that he killed them because they were Muslims, I can’t bring myself to call this a hate crime. That, of course, is in distinction to the actions of those like the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, who told us their reasons for killing.
One of those accused of creating a climate that led to this murder, Sam Harris, produced an eloquent 24-minute audio response on his website, a response called “The Chapel Hill murders and ‘militant’ atheism.” It is a calm, reasoned, and eloquent piece in which Harris not only abjures responsibility for the crime and the climate that supposedly created it, but indicts those like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald, who, by being quick to accuse New Atheists of complicity in the murders, actually endanger the safety of those New Atheists. I know, for example, that Sam gets hate mail in Arabic after these accusations get into the Twi**ersphere. That would scare the bejeesus out of me.
Click on the screenshot below (or the link above) to go to Sam’s podcast:
Sam begins his piece with an expression of horror at the murder of these three young people, and ends with a plea addressed to those of us who want to maintain our rights to speak freely and publicly about what we need to express, including the dangers of faith, and yet not fear for our lives by doing so. Harris asks us to push back on social media against the distortions of people like Greenwald and Aslan who, using the Chapel Hill murders as an excuse, demand that we give up criticizing religion.
As Harris says:
“If you care about our ability to notice, and criticize, and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn this behavior. You have to condemn the deliberate manufacture of lies designed to make it unsafe to have honest conversations.”
Lest we forget that what’s getting lost in these ideological battles is the inexpressible tragedy of people whose lives were snuffed out before they had much of a chance to live them. Here are the victims:
The dead have been identified as:
- Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, of Chapel Hill
- Yusor Mohammad Barakat, 21, of Chapel Hill
- Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh
Barakat was Mohammad’s husband; Abu-Salha was her sister.
Barakat was a second-year student at the UNC School of Dentistry, who was raising money on a fundraising site to provide dental care to Syrian refugees in Turkey.
He had been married for just over a month to Yusor Mohammad, who was planning to begin her dental studies at UNC in the fall, according to the school.
The Foundation Beyond Belief has been raising funds in honor of the victims. People can contribute here.
Thanks you.
Yes, I put that on my FB when I saw your link & I pointed it out to a Muslim friend who likes Greenwald and calls this a hate crime. Ever since I had that conversation, I’ve felt a bit glum as my friend is one of the nicest people I know and it pains me that 1) he takes it personally when people criticize Islam 2) he doesn’t understand how hated atheists are, especially in the US (I pointed this out with a link to the Pew survey 3) clearly he has experienced racism (in fact I know he has because we went to school together) which pisses me off because I hate racism.
First thing I thought of when reading about your friend is – I must be very difficult for him to revise his thinking. I think it might take some time to absorb the significance of what he is learning.
Yes, I think if we were to talk face to face, he could see where I was coming from and he might at least consider a different perspective. I think for him,meh feels that Canadians are accusing him of up it sharing their values and he takes it personally when Islam is called out as causing issues.
I get why he does. He hasn’t had it sprays when it comes to racism and it isn’t easy to separate out criticism when you’ve been treated badly.
Being treated badly can cause deep damage. Many of the leaders of the jihad movement suffered racial discrimination and humiliation – often being tortured (re: Egyptian prisons, Abu Ghraib). I can see how even a period of being ostracized has got to be soul crushing for some.
That ‘s the relationship I h with my brother. He thinks I’m a bigot. A big Greenwald fan. It has pretty well trashed our relationship.
Jezuz, I wis WordPress worked better on iPhones.
Is your iPhone serving up the mobile version? If so, you may be able to force it to give you the full version. I’m not sure how but I forced it on my BlackBerry and I get the full version on my iPad so I probably did it there too (but forgot how).
If you remember, let me know!
There should be an option at the bottom of the site to switch between mobile/full view. I think full is better.
Indeed there is. But the edit field still acts wonky.
I don’t remember doing it this way, but this site tells you how – basically you click the address bar then pull it down (it is hidden) and select “request desktop site”. I thought there was a more permanent way….maybe this way is.
Your brother may be unwilling to listen to your arguments. Is he willing to read some critiques you send him? Such as, Jerry’s discussion of Greenwald? Sometimes the indirect route is needed.
No. He’s too locked in to the position. Sadly.
Sad indeed. I hope he will eventually repair the relationship between you two.
It’s absolutely absurd that liberals are fighting liberals on things like this.
I don’t know if I’ve heard Sam speak as eloquently as this. His condemnation of Aslan and Greenwald is right on the money, and though I had low expectations for them, I have now lost any glimmer of respect.
This, in The Times today, by Daniel Finkelstein, is really good and recommended:
“Charlie Hebdo and friends may not be to your taste but they have a duty to challenge pernicious, self-perpetuating laws”
Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall. 🙁 But here’s a snippet or two:
“Naturally, blasphemy is used as a weapon of oppression against minority ethnic groups and religions — Christians, Jews, and Shias and Sunnis against each other. These laws are also self-perpetuating. It has become common for western liberals to argue that what is needed is a reformed Islam that reflects the reality of the lives and views of millions of ordinary Muslims. Blasphemy laws are perhaps the most important reason why such an Islam struggles to be born. Any departure from orthodoxy can be portrayed as blasphemous, the work of an apostate. Even to begin the journey to reform is dangerous.”
“Declaring that something is blasphemy against Islam is not an ordinary claim that something is offensive. It is asserting the right of oppressive authorities to determine the boundaries of debate and free exchange. It is supporting the power grab of these oppressors as they seek to extend their rule internationally.”
You can read it through the cached version provided by google. Hopefully this link works:
webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MVQt-TPzBYUJ:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4357296.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
When I first read about this and learned that the killer was an “anti-theist” I assumed the worst. This was a hate crime directed against Islam. My assumption was partly based on what I’d personally seen online from many anonymous atheists in comment sections in news outlets and, occasionally, websites or blogs. There is indeed a strain of atheism which skips over the emphasis on Enlightenment values and speaks the language of violence.
I figured Hicks was that kind of atheist, the kind who has responded to stories involving Muslims with “THESE PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS YOU CANT REASON WITH THEM WAKE UP” and the like. I figured the infamous “anti-religion” facebook page would reflect that. So I was eager to read Nugent’s analysis and see if it confirmed what I was predicting.
I was surprised. Not what I expected. It really didn’t. He was a liberal who championed human rights. These murders directly contradicted what he espoused. The only relevant part seemed to be the harping and gloating on pro-gun rights.
So out of all the people in the complex he just happened to kill the Muslims? It seems like way too much of a coincidence — until the erratic history and laser focus on IN MY SPOT starts to stand out more than his thinking it’s stupid to pray and okay to say so.
My guess is that the authorities wanted to help out the grieving family and tell them that these wonderful young people died for their beliefs. But those who actually deal with hate groups and bigoted individuals on the legal level have a higher bar than “sneers that religion is irrational.”
> like way too much of a coincidence
Coincidences don’t mean much when the raw data has already filtered through media attention. It is the pattern of possible hate crime by an anti-theist that caused media attention. Senseless shootings like that are otherwise sadly commonplace.
What surprises me is that real incidents are not more frequent; obviously atheistic terrorism is a high-selling theme, so if there were actual occurrences you would think the media would be able to come up with better examples.
With the sheer number of atheists out there, I’d have expected a sizable handful of them to be complete homicidal nutters, same as in any large sample. But if the media is actively, hungrily looking for such, and the best they can come up with is Hicks, that’s not just absence of evidence but also (Bayesian) evidence of absence.
So in a way that’s a good sign. Lemons, lemonade, etc.
I’ve been on YouTube since before there was an atheist YouTube community. I’ve seen those comments as well, but I can honestly say I can’t recall one coming from someone I could identify with any degree of certainty as an atheist. If they are in fact atheists they are using anonymous accounts which they never use to do anything other than make such comments, and they never have video’s, and rarely even have favorites on their channels. My point is I would know them beyond such comments if they were actual contributing members of the community, and not just trolls. I’m not saying such atheists don’t exist, but I believe they are exceedingly rare compared with the general, mostly Christian, public.
I mentioned YouTube specifically because it’s what I know best, and the place that has been branded by many as the worst of the worst.
I agree, I have seen very little too.
Sub
In light of the grand jury failures in the cases of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths, we need to be careful about using the grand jury results in this case as proof of what did or did not occur. Do we know what evidence was presented to the grand jury? Do we know if a social justice expert was called to testify? Do we know if the DA even put the question to the grand jury? Even if the case presented was tilted to show a race or religion biased case, would a grand jury in North Carolina find such a verdict?
My personal suspicion is that the killer’s internal justification included all of the possible motives. We may never know how much was about race issues versus a parking spot. We are unlikely to ever get consensus on how much was due to mental instability versus too easy access to firearms. We will never be able to know what part the possible tension of atheism versus Islam played.
To be clear, these killings were wrong. There could never be a justification for them. They were senseless and the killer needs to be put away for a long, long time.
What is a “social justice expert”? I knew that people would immediately begin questioning the grand jury’s decision if it went against their preconceptions.
Have you read Nugent’s analysis of the only written data we really have: the killer’s Facebook page? So far I have seen or heard no evidence that atheism or “anti-social justice” atheists helped cause this crime. If your suspicions are based on ANY tangible evidence about that, and not just on your gut feelings, do let us know what it is.
It was? A grand jury considered the testimony of 60 some people, and an FBI investigation came to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to indicate that Wilson violated Brown’s civil right.
Quick, get a social justice expert on the case so we can hear about the evil white people, because they’re clearly the source of all problems in the world and no one else has any agency!
How could it be about race?
Well it _could_ very easily have been about race. Just there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of it in this case.
It really depends. Are we talking Indy 300, Formula One or Nascar here?
Quite a few people think that the Wilson grand jury prosecution was biased to get the outcome they got. From what I read of it, and listening to people like ‘LiberalViewer’, I believe that.
I don’t know if it was racial, but the process was dubious.
Witnesses say different things, but I’ve read that the blood trace from Michael Brown’s wounds indicated that he in his last moments was walking towards Wilson. With this piece of physical evidence, I don’t see how the grand jury could have indicted Wilson – or, if they had, it would be just to have him acquitted at the trial.
Walking , charging, stumbling, surrender.
He was shock, so why was moving, in some undetermined manner, toward Wilson, with as many said, hands in the air.
How about the lack of procedure as far as the gun and questioning of Wilson after the event.
My point, and that of others is that the process was well biased for Wilson.
I thought the OP was pretty careful about that. In fact my initial impression as I was reading the OP was that the OP consciously attempted to avoid that interpretation. My interpretation was that it was yet another piece of information that does not support the hate crime claim.
Why? What if the killer described in great detail his desire to kill Muslims? [No evidence for that option yet, but logically possible.] What if all the evidence that comes to light shows a pattern of hostility and threats toward all of his neighbors regardless of belief? [What seems to be the case at this point.]
Saying we’ll never know because of grand jury manipulation in St. Louis strikes me as a bit paranoid.
My personal suspicion is that the killer’s internal justification included all of the possible motives.
That’s why you would be an unsuitable candidate to sit on a grand jury. You are exactly the kind of knee-jerk idiot the system is designed to weed out.
I think it is way beyond rude to call someone an idiot. Particularly on this site that type of comment is not allowed. If Jerry spots it I wouldn’t be surprised if he takes action. Please be respectful of others. In addition, I think Mark Perew has a point. It is too simplistic to argue that the parking dispute motivations is exclusive of a motivation based on dislike of the three students being muslim. We have to ask ourselves if the same parking dispute with three students that Hicks knew were openly atheist would have led to them killed.
None of us has a clue what motivated him. None of us knows what his interactions with he three victims were (except the shooting). Motives come from interactions.
None of us knows whether Hicks was high as a kite or off his meds or having a moment of panic attack or mental lapse.
Or maybe he is a vicious killer.
Or maybe he hates Muslims in general enough to off his neighbors.
WE DON’T (YET) KNOW.
To say we don’t know yet is rather different than saying we don’t have a clue. We do have clues. They just aren’t conclusive at this point.
That’s true.
And I’ll retract my statement that we don’t know anything.
Looking at the Wiki site, there seems to be a lot about him and the incident.
Seems like he is an angry, stressed, unhappy man. And one with lots of guns.
Seems like plain old ordinary murder, like many, many of the 14,000+ per year in the USA.
“It is too simplistic to argue that the parking dispute motivations is exclusive of a motivation based on dislike of the three students being muslim.”
Is anyone posting here (so far) perfunctorily excluding the dislike-of-Muslims connection? Or does a reasonable and appropriate regard for evidence constitute exclusion?
“We have to ask ourselves if the same parking dispute with three students that Hicks knew were openly atheist would have led to them killed.”
Is anyone so far posting here not for asking about and considering that? May evidence for that (and also for murdering in the name of atheism) pour forth in great rivers, if it exists.
But if one is compelled to speculate about it, do you consider it any less legitimate and obligatory to speculate whether an angry, disaffected non-atheist or a-atheist or anti-atheist – of any religious stripe anywhere on the planet – knowing that three students were openly atheists (or not of his own religioso zealot persuasion), would have led to them being killed in the same circumstances? And would you reasonably and consistently say that that would no less legitimately constitute hate crime?
I’ve already asked Shatterface to apologize (see below). If he/she doesn’t, I’ll ban the person.
I can brush off the “idiot” comment. That’s hardly the worst thing I’ve been called. So “Te absolvo” to the Shatterface.
Sorry, but I’m the only one who can absolve people. I don’t want that kind of name-calling between readers on my site.
Hey, Shatterface, we don’t call other readers names here. Please apologize for the “knee-jerk idiot’ comment STAT.
Although it’s conceivable that someone on the brink may be tipped over by a feature they didn’t like, like religous clothing.
If someone really was ‘anti – islamic’ to the point of killing, wouldn’t it make more sense to target a cleric or someone who has actual points against them, rather than ordinary people who happen to be Muslim.
It doesn’t make sense to me and I doubt if any tension between atheism and Islam played apart.
Here we have another example of a situation that almost certainly would never have escalated beyond a heated argument in the absence of a firearm. (Jordan Davis comes to mind.)
Perhaps all of the other mitigating factors here are subordinate to the fact that Mr. Hicks possessed the ability to snuff out three lives with an impulsive decision.
Re: Hitch’s remarks on half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee, insufficient prefrontal lobe development, overactive adrenal glands.
The NRA must be laughing themselves silly over this one.
Three people murdered by a gun nut – “Hey look! Atheists!!” and everyone goes scampering off in the opposite direction.
Blame everything except for easy access to deadly weapons. Bill Hicks with his trademark sarcasm once said there is no correlation between having a gun and shooting someone with it and not having a gun and not shooting someone, and you’d be a fool and communist to make a connection there.
A funny bit, but it sadly sums up the gun lobby’s position pretty succinctly.
At approx. 20:30 in his reflection, Harris plays a recording of a speaker, followed several seconds later by the gunfire, at the Copenhagen gathering of a few days ago, taken from BBC radio coverage, which is worth a listen.
I look forward to Reza Aslan turning double-backward somersaults in his analysis of this situation. Has he yet posted a tw**t of wisdom about it?
Yes, I’d never heard that before and it really shook me. So apparently a woman was right in the middle of defending freedom of speech … when the guns go off and all hell breaks loose?
Seems an apropos example of the very critical distinction between “I’m right, you’re wrong; let’s talk” and “I’m right, you’re wrong; You must be shut up.”
I hope some of the media pick up on this audio and give it a wide audience. The problem becomes real as the gun bangs off 10, then 20 shots and on and on. It is a vivid reminder that in the end, there is no place to hide.
That startled the hell out of me too.
One of the best twitter bits on this:
Cousin Avi @cousinavi_
“When crowds of atheists rejoice in the street in response to violence, do let us know.”
Add, “and shooting guns into the air (apparently not caring whether they hit/kill someone).”
And don’t forget to include the children in the festivities, candy for all.
Sam was excellent in this podcast.
It is unfortunate that an underlying issue in America, that of impatient hostility, will undoubtedly receive little attention that it deserves.
Shooting people because of a parking space? Even shouting or threatening someone is insane, let alone taking someone’s life.
People need to be kinder to each other: in cars, in grocery stores, in bars, and in schools. People need to lose the attitude that they deserve some privilege.
What’s the hurry? People need to be reminded life’s a journey, it’s an adventure. That is what makes life worth living, not the destination. There is no need to run over everyone else just to get to the TiVo on time.
And once again these pictures bring me to tears.
“American Exceptionalism” (and profound sense of entitlement) runs amok collectively and individually across the fruited plain.
Or maybe in this case it’s just anger. Or roid rage. Or mental issues. Or…who knows?
Not everything that happens in the USA or is perpetrated by an American involves nationalistic exceptionalism.
This impatience became evident to me when I moved from the Midwest to the Northeast. In Michigan social interactions such as being served in a restaurant typically begin with a few cordialities. Here in New York, the clock is always ticking. Initially, I thought people were being rude, and they often were, but, it with time I learned the locals were so used to it and didn’t give it a thought. I would have thought NC would be more like MI.
In what part of NC do you reside?
Poughkeepsie, NY. I think the name was a favorite of W.C. Fields.
I initially noticed the rudeness effect in the Boston area. I really don’t know if a certain roughness in manners from one area of the world to another is decisive or predictive of more extreme violence. We’d need to do a study.
I identify, rick.
I moved from Oregon to New York for grad school, back in the day. I wasn’t off the airplane more than half an hour before the rudeness had me in tears.
I ended up living in NY for 7 years and MA for 5 and developed a bit of a thick skin, though it wasn’t always enough.
Even if it was a “parking dispute,” this was not an example of “impatient hostility.”
Hicks entered their home, forced them to kneel, knocked Deah Bakarat’s teeth outb(remember Bakarat was studying to be a dentist), and then shot them each in the head.
Oh, and no one was parked in the spot in question at the time.
K,
First, I wish all the best to the families of Deah, Yusor and Razan.
I’ve served in combat. I suffered a mild traumatic head injury and had severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Thanks to years of medical treatment, its down to mild PTSD.
One of the worst PTSD symptoms I suffered was severe anger. Someone could cut me off on the drive to work and I would be enraged instantly, and angry all day. Sometimes I’d still be angry when I woke up the next morning. And if someone almost hit me or another car, I could be angry for days. Just as in combat, my brain would automatically form a plan to respond to the perceived threat because that was what I was trained to do. At the time, in the heat of the anger that lasted for days, my plans seemed perfectly rational. Today, when I think back on those incidents, I’m horrified. Thankfully, I never acted out violently. I credit that to my military training, that you must always take control of the situation. But the military did allow for yelling at people. I did a lot of yelling and screaming at people for really petty things.
I’m not aware of the Hicks having any military training or combat experience. But judging by his own Facebook posts he did have quite a bit of firearms experience. Like most firearm owners, I’m sure he probably trained to the point that using his weapon was automatic – muscle memory. Drawing it, releasing the safety, firing it, reloading it. If one of his gun owning intentions was self defense, then this is a must. If you panic in a crisis situation you could shoot yourself drawing/holstering the weapon or someone you don’t intend to. For your own safety, drawing and using a weapon must be automatic, smooth and thought free. Thought free.
A few things I’ve read in the various accounts in the media:
1) Per CNN, his wife was in the the process of divorcing him. Divorce is a very stressful event.
2) Per CNN, his neighbors complained about his angry outbursts. Last year they even organized a meeting to discuss how his angry confrontations made them feel unsafe.
To me it sounds like the man had severe anger issues. This may have been a lifelong problem, or it could have been brought on by the stress in his marriage prior to the divorce began.
I know from personal experience that anger feeds upon itself. One thing makes you angry, and you may not even know you are angry. Then every little thing throughout the day that you would normally ignore, adds to it, and feeds it. Some things get saved away in your subconscious so that it takes less to make you angry later.
I think that Hicks was just angry. The victims did something tiny, petty little thing, like give him a sideways look or maybe didn’t respond fast enough when he said hello and that set him off and he stewed and stewed, until he snapped. It easily have been anyone that set him off. It just happens to have been his neighbors who were Muslim. I honestly think they were just unlucky.
Mental illness can be a lifelong event or something that can be defeated with proper medical attention. But each case is different. Mental illness needs to be de-stigmatized and treated as any other injury or disease. If so, then more people would be aware of when they were having problems and seek medical treatment.
Seems like he had plenty of stress: Unemployed, penniless, 2-1/2 times divorced, plenty of anger.
None of which has anything to do with atheism or anti-Muslim sentiment.
That was all very interesting, aiaf, thank you for the descriptions. I’m so sorry for your injury and glad that your PTSD has been improved. I’ve felt anger was the most plausible motive here, but your input certainly adds to that possibility.
K, I had not heard those details. I had formed an image of Hicks blasting away as soon as they opened their door. I wouldn’t have thought this incident could get anymore chilling, but now it has.
This was Sam Harris at his normal best.
Regarding the guy jumping the gun in his comments about “grand Jury”, it is clear that any real knowledge of the legal system is not understood here. You have to wait for an actual trial to take place before getting all lathered up on evidence or opinion. In other words, do not make judgments about guilt or why and how from a grand jury. That is not what they are for.
While recent examples have shown that a grand jury is not perfect, it is true that the rules of evidence are extremely relaxed for grand jury proceedings. What this means is that evidence which wouldn’t see the light of day in the courtroom during the actual trial is presented to the grand jury. This has to be weighed against the fact that as time moves on, more information will come to light. Ultimately, if the grand jury worked as intended, any smidgen of evidence available at this point in time that the crime was a hate crime would have been presented, whether that evidence would be admissible in court or not (a presumably wider set of evidence than could be presented at trial). While this is in no ways conclusive to whether or not this was a hate crime, it is not for nothing.
Perhaps evidence that is gathered from this point forward will demonstrate that the crime was a hate crime. Perhaps evidence will come to light that there was shenanigans with the grand jury procedure. All of this is possible. BUT, to continue to argue that this was a hate crime AT THIS POINT IN TIME, goes agains all CURRENTLY AVAILABLE evidence, and is nothing more than supposition that is being used for political purposes that, as Sam Harris points out, could lead to violence as well.
Exactly. The grand jury’s job is to simply look at the evidence to determine whether there is enough to proceed to trial. In this case, there was insufficient evidence of a hate crime, so they did not recommend that charge.
Well, as far as I am concerned, as a matter of principle, it doesn’t matter that much that this was not really, really a hate crime. To Obviously, it may be important as matter of fact, but, again, in principle, let us face the possibility that someone actually kills some muslin people explicitly invoking anti-theist tendencies, even invoking the names of well known ‘militant’ atheists authors. I submit that it wouldn’t change anything, because what is missing is a logical equivalence between words criticizing ideas (what Sam Harris and company do) and words straightforwardly inciting to violence against people (what the koran and other scriptures do). If a democrat kills a republican yelling ‘take that, filthy conservative; long live [insert any democrat leader’s name here]’, does it mean that democrats should ‘reconsider’, change their discourse and stop criticizing republicans? It would be absurd in that hypothetical scenario and it is absurd in the case of the Chapel Hill murders.
In contrast, when an islamist beheads an infidel quoting a sura of the koran… well, he is doing exactly what that text is telling him to do.
By the way, there is another thing about definitions. To me ‘atheist’ as such doesn’t mean much. Of course, it is used as a shorthand, like ‘we in the atheist community…’ But we usually mean something more and it is important to spell it out when the context requires it. I guess most of us here think of themselves a atheists, but also as ‘humanists’ and ‘free-thinkers’ and ‘secularists’. Now, it is important to note that you can be an atheist and lack any shred of humanism. And you can be an atheist and be a dogmatic person. For instance, Stalin could very well have been an atheist, but would anyone call him a humanist? A free-thinker? He was every bit as dogmatic as any religious zealot. And that’s the main point in my view: being dogmatic leads easily to violence. Atheism, per se, may or may not be dogmatic. In my ‘club’, so to speak, you need to add more layers to it (again: free-thought, humanism, etc) for an entry card. However, religion, at least the big Abrahamic trio, is dogmatic by definition.
Apologies for the rant.
P.S.: The audio of the Copenhagen attack is so terribly illuminating: a woman is talking about those who claim to support free speech while accompanying that with a “but”… and the shooting starts. It is so well timed in a sinister way.
“Obviously”, not “To Obviously”. I forgot to delete that word. Obviously.
I am afraid that for me you over think the term atheist. It may not mean much to you without lots of other definition but to me it is simple non belief in any religious faith. For simple folks like me, it’s all I need.
I got the impression that that was what rc was saying, too. That “atheist,” alone, doesn’t imply anything about life philosophies.
“what is missing is a logical equivalence between words criticizing ideas (what Sam Harris and company do) and words straightforwardly inciting to violence against people (what the koran and other scriptures do).”
This, to me, is the crux of the matter. Hicks, motiviated by his personal beliefs/lack thereof or not, is guilty of attacking people, not ideas. Which is exactly what most of us are arguing AGAINST doing.
“Hate crime” matters for the trial because it matters for the punishment. It’s a question of the intent behind the murder. Somethat analogous to (but not the same as) the difference between first degree and second degree murder.
JAC:
That’s a good position for a jury member to take: you have to prove a hate crime beyond a reasonable doubt before convicting him of hate crime. Though I should point out that in typical public conversation, its acceptable to opine that someone ‘did it’ without meeting that standard of evidence. For example, if I say I think OJ killed his wife, most people will not insist I back such a claim up with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt or else withdraw my statement. The same sort of conversational leeway applies to this case (IMO).
But that’s a quibble, nothing more. My opinion on the substance of this particular case is that I’m happy to punt on it. IOW, I will likely accept the jury’s outcome as being more credible than my own personal opinion on the matter. If they come out and say it was a hate crime, I will be inclined to think their opinion on the matter is more credible than mine…and if they come out and say it wasn’t, I will be inclined to think they are more credible (than me) in that instance too.
Am I the only one who’s surprised at the lack of coverage of the Copenhagen killings? I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere but in Britain it just about made it to the front page the day after and essentially disappeared from view after that. My impression is that people are starting to get used to the murder of blasphemers in the name of Islam, which is just too depressing.
And Jews too. Not just blasphemers. If I were Jewish I would be very, very concerned. Yesterday I watched a YT clip of a Jewish journo walking around Paris with a camera as various onlookers spat at and abused him. The footage wasn’t the thing that shocked me – it lasted 2 and a bit minutes and was edited down from 10 hours. It was the stream of absolute, open loathing that literally every second comment displayed towards the guy in the video and Jews in general. I know the YouTube comments’ section is a cesspit. It’s the place you go to lose your faith in humanity. But even by its worst standards the volume of anti-semitism, and the gloating pride of the commenters, was disturbing. It’s been ratcheting up recently, I’d swear to it.
There’s something so absurd in watching a clip about, say, David Bowie, or The Olympics, or tory welfare policy, and nevertheless coming across someone who’s managed to shoe-horn their hatred for Jews into the comments’ section. You read the comments for QI and Stephen Fry is a Zionist sock-puppet. The Charlie Hebdo atrocity was a Mossad operation to implicate Muslims. NBC’s reporting on the primaries is not to be trusted because they don’t admit to their audience that the holocaust never happened. It’s everywhere.
The other side of the coin is the amount of straightforward calls for the genocide of all Muslims. No subtlety, no couching it, just outright invocations of mass slaughter. And I think that at least part of the problem is that society is just not talking honestly about religion. In terms of criticism of Islam, the left has completely ceded the ground to the right. Any criticism from the right is essentially tainted-by-association and as a result dismissed by exactly the people who need to hear it. The left go on sheltering Islam from criticism, with good intentions I’m sure, and Islamic ‘moderates'(who are normally nothing of the kind) have co-opted the thin-skinned language of offence from their liberal allies and use it to neutralise the arguments made by the few progressives who have the gumption to talk honestly. Arguments from the right are dismissed out of hand of course.
There is a desperate need for the left to get its fucking act together. I am not prepared to tolerate extreme illiberalism in the name of liberalism and nor should any reasonable person. When it comes to Islam the left needs to conduct the equivalent of an intervention. After all, criticism is that much harder to reject when it comes from friends. And the right needs to admit that the left’s terror of offending Islam is just a specific instance of the same prissy cowardice that stops conservatives from criticising Xtianity. It’s the doting, mush-brained indulgence of religion as a whole that is helping inspire the anti-semites and the Muslim-haters. When no-one has the guts to call a spade a spade the haters take over, and some of them will want to do a lot more than just criticise. These people look around and see themselves as the only people who know ‘the truth’ – they see every western politician deny that Islam is a problem and they presumably want to supply their own distinctive corrective to that view.
Well said.
Sam Harris has some good things to say on this subject:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/on-the-freedom-to-offend-an-imaginary-god
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/on-the-mechanics-of-defamation
Well said!
But I have seen continued attention to the Copenhagen tragedy, at least in the NYT.
Most disturbing have been the calls by Israel and by some French Jews themselves that they should all migrate to Israel. What does it mean for the world if we’re already at the point where some Jews again feel it’s necessary to flee for their lives? What is with the persistence of anti-Semitism in Europe? (Yes, we have some here in the States, too, but not nearly as obviously as in some places in Europe.)
Because I don’t hear a message from European politicians and lawmakers to Muslim fundamentalists that anti-Semitism will not be tolerated, I don’t think Jews are safe in Europe.
Of course Jews in Israel are also victims of hate crimes but at least, there is a sincere effort to protect them and general agreement that Jewish lives matter. This agreement is absent in Europe and, at least until Pres. Obama’s mandate is over, it seems to be absent in the USA as well.
I’m sure this sounds terribly naïve, but how has Obama diminished our efforts to protect Israel?
I was wondering that too.
Well said indeed. The sentiment has led to some real actual suffering.
The awful Rotherham child abuse scandal has some roots in a toxic PC rear of being labeled racist or islamaphobic.
“doting, mush-brained indulgence of religion”, exactly. It’s time to stop.
I am working up a comment on Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, who’s vacuous opinion I have just become aware off.
The strategy of New Atheist critics to call Sam Harris a “Militant Atheist” is stunning in how badly it backfires to anyone paying attention.
The critics acknowledge that, yes of course on one side of the extreme views of religion, we have religious extremists – e.g. Militant Islam – but then we have THE OTHER EXTREME, the other side, new “militant atheism” represented by Sam Harris. We are to reject both those “extremes.”
Where this is supposed to act as some condemnation of what Harris represents, it couldn’t be more supportive.
On one side, those representing “Militant/extremist religion, e.g. Militant Islam” are carrying out atrocities, beheadings, burning people in cages, blowing up children, raping, enslaving people, threatening those who disagree with death, etc.
On the other representing the face of “Militant Atheism” we have the horrors perpetrated by……Sam Harris. Oh wait, no we don’t have any horrors perpetrated by Sam Harris. We have a calm, reasoned guy suggesting that dogma and faith aren’t terribly good approaches to understanding reality, and that we should examine or challenge one another’s beliefs through discussion and argument, not through violence…and his actions have all been an example of his admonitions put into practice.
Geeze, which “extreme” seems to be worse, I wonder?
If THAT is what “Militant Atheism” looks like compared to Militant Religion, then it’s just about the greatest denunciation of the effects of religion, and the best advertisement for moving toward atheism that one could hope for.
It’s a total “own goal” by anyone using this hilarious strategy to defame new atheists.
Well said! (I’m saying that a lot in this thread I guess–can I help it if y’all are so eloquent?)
Sam said in his podcast the importance of our responses in blogs and comment threads. It is helpful to him and others in the firing line and of course ourselves.
I feel like throwing a lot of well said’s too. As a lot is well said.
It needs to be said and acknowledged.
This is another example of why those on the rational side can’t win these arguments. If you use a rational process to arrive at your conclusion, you must obey the rules of logic. The other side ignores those rules and says whatever they want to be true — “militant atheists are no different than islamic terrorists!”.
If one side plays by the rules and the other doesn’t, there is no point to playing the game.
“If one side plays by the rules and the other doesn’t, there is no point to playing the game.”
One can at least have created a documentable public record of having made a good faith effort to play by the rules, and of the other side’s bad faith effort to not play by the rules.
Sure there is: to show bystanders who is playing by the rules and who is cheating.
As Eric and Filippo say, that’s to ignore the onlookers.
Ya. I wonder how many onlookers are looking at this thread right now?
I think a lot of kudos are due to our host, by the way, for (among a lot of other things, of course) visibly posting so many pictures of the victims — underlining that these are PEOPLE, whose deaths are a tragedy no matter what the motives of the killer.
We attack ideas, not people. This message can’t be repeated often enough — maybe eventually it will even sink in.
+ a large number. Seeing the photos really moved me. (I tend to avoid “the news”.)
Yes.
As a parent of young adults, I get that awful gnawing in the pit of my stomach looking at these pictures, my swallowing becomes labored…one just despairs!
Wow those pictures of the family are just heartbreaking 🙁
It’s a good reminder of the real human story that can sometimes get lost in the rhetoric and debate over these general issues.
Yep. Why can’t it occur to gun-worshiping murderers to simply shoot themselves and leave the rest of us alone?
I wrote about Chapel Hill on my site back on 13 February. My take was similar to Jerry and Sam Harris. One commenter thought it was “irresponsible” to criticize Islam which, of course, I didn’t agree with. Another mostly agrees with him. We’ve been arguing about that ever since. (People agree with me too.) I’ve found that people will go a long way off topic to find arguments in support of their case.
I just don’t get the logic of letting people like DAESH have their way. The idea that anyone who speaks against them is the one with blood on their handssis simply stupid imo.
I can’t help wondering if the American prejudice against atheists is part of the story. As has been pointed out on this site often, many American atheists seem to feel the need to apologize for their lack of belief.
There seems to be a growing adoption of the dreaded phrase ‘I’m in favour of free speech but…’. Uh oh.
I seem to remember most liberals being pretty unyielding about free speech in the(recent) past yet there’s an awful, creeping, purse-lipped consensus that in the grand scheme of things the freedom to criticise the most important, influential and powerful institution humans have ever known isn’t that big a deal.
I swear, most of the intelligentsia is so cut off from the effects of proper, invasive religious belief that they no longer think it’s much of an animating force at all. I have personal experience of people who simply don’t accept that anyone actually believes in god. They are so ensconced in secular society and culture that the idea of someone believing in a heaven with 72 virgins in it is literally incredible to them.
So they obviously don’t believe the jihadists when they tell us their motivations, and they therefore think it’s just unnecessary posturing to criticise religion. And criticising a religion whose votaries kill people for doing just that is simply irresponsible and pointless(I suppose if you think jihadists are killing blasphemers for political reasons alone, and they’re just pretending to be religiously motivated, criticising religion must indeed seem unnecessary). This almost total disconnect between secular non-believers and hardcore believers leads the former to massively underestimate religion.
So you get legions of morally responsible, intelligent, socially concerned people who turn on the cartoonists and the critics of religion rather than the killers themselves.
Funny how when confronted with the Kurdish women soldiers they get really scared and run away. (If reports are true) Not because they are physically afraid but because they won’t get into their just reward in heaven.
Other than overall context of the evil going on it really pleases me that women fighting back will turn these creeps to water.
The point I’m getting at is that there is plenty of evidence that the religious element is the main motivator.
I’d never heard that particular story. That’s a very pleasing image isn’t it?
There must be plenty of koranic peccadillos and quirks that ISIS’s enemies can take advantage of. After all, this is an enemy that in many ways has been transplanted from the middle ages complete with the requisite ridiculous superstitions. I’d imagine it’s only the fear of causing offence to moderate muslims that stops anyone from taking advantage of ISIS’s scriptural fealty.
I had wondered that. One would imagine that there would be psychologists or whoever does that sort of thing would analyse all the weaknesses possible.
Although the Kurdish women aren’t used ‘because’ of that, they are soldiers because of the philosophies of the Kurds but it turned out to be a handy side effect.
Middle ages indeed.
As one who’s been following that conversation, Heather, I am amazed at your forbearance.
An important point that you left out Jerry, is that people kill others over silly disputes in almost every city on earth every single day of the year.
There’s only 1 ‘set’ of instances in recorded history where people have been killed for cartoons that had no direct effect on anyone. The prior probabilities here are hugely skewed against the religious.
The Danish publications resulted in deaths as well, just not of the cartoonists themselves (yet), to the best of my knowledge.
I really think it’s not good to get defensive one way or another. Maybe he was motivated by religion, maybe not. No one sensible should be claiming that atheists never commit crimes of prejudice. The vast majority of us are as appalled by this as the rest of society. Whether he was an atheist or a Baptist is not really significant.
The other thing that we should not get into debating is the ‘creating a climate..’ argument. More often than not, this is used basically as a form of shutting down debate. If someone doesn’t like what you’re saying, you’re “creating a climate where they feel threatened”. “Climates”, short of, perhaps, mob violence, do not kill people. In many cases the alternative to “creating a climate” is self censorship.
While we certainly stand together in our horror at this act, we as atheist have nothing to apologize for.
I am seeing many public statements that Hicks was a “terrorist”. How does he fit the definition of a terrorist? (I’m not seeing anyone here saying this; this is a rhetorical question.)
This was not a random act of destruction against a group. It was a very personal action against individuals (it seems to me — can’t be sure yet).
Comparing his actions to the shooter in Copenhagen is just an act of obfuscation.
There are a lot of similar murders in the USA every year.
I’m guessing (from reading the entire Wiki article on the crime) that this was plain old murder. Attacking a free-speech meeting with an assault rifle and firing dozens of rounds into a group of strangers is a completely different sort of crime. It seems to me anyway.
Seems to me too.
I’m still not sure what his motivations were but the weight of current evidence points away from the killings being hate-crimes(quite what it would mean to say they had been motivated by his atheism I don’t know).
On the way home today, I heard Obama saying that linking ISIS to Islam is a lie. WTF?! Obama is not helping any of this! How can we have an honest conversation by denying the truth and worse, calling the truth a lie?
I did hear opposition to what he said, which was nice but it just frustrates me to the point that I feel sapped of energy.
I do give some credence to the POV that he needs to be careful not to alienate the inhabitants of the middle eastern countries we need to encourage to fight IS themselves.
There’s no way on earth he believes everything his scriptwriters hand him – but he’s the most powerful man on earth, at the head of a country that’s already widely loathed by Muslims. He’s got to be incredibly careful. I think his approach to international diplomacy has been pretty good so far. The right would have disagreed with him even if he’d flown to Syria in a cowboy hat and declared war with Assad entirely through the medium of John Wayne quotes(there might be the hint of a caricature in there I admit) so I don’t take them too seriously, and the state of world politics is unprecedentedly precarious. I’m glad we don’t have a ten-gallon fuckwit like Bush galumphing around the middle-east. Can you imagine…? He certainly got out of office just in time didn’t he? And what a mess he left behind. It’s like the aftermath of a toddler’s party.
These are depressing times, so thank you for that chuckle.
Flown to Syria in a cowboy hat…
As a European, I realize that I am selfish to wish a US president who would do what is possible for the freedom, peace and prosperity in the whole world. Now, the world is in a free fall and we are having wars south and north (I mean Ukraine and Syria/Iraq). If Obama at least expressed decent opinions, I’d say that he may be a good man who has just reached his level of incompetence. But he didn’t come to Paris (chicken? or careful not to offend the Islamists?). Instead, he went to the funeral of king Abdullah, without saying a word about Raif Badawi. He called the four Jewish victims in Paris “a bunch of folks killed randomly” and threatened Israel. I am counting the days till Obama gets out of office.
I subjectively construe your comments to be an endorsement for an amendment to the U.S. constitution changing the president’s term in office to one six-year term. Once elected, the president, to the realistic extent possible, can speak and act in a straightforward way, let the chips fall where they may. During those six years, every representative is up for re-lection, and every senator once, so they will have to continue to genuflect before their respective constituencies.
If you are counting the days until Obama leaves office, I gather that you were even more so fervently counting when George II was in office.
For whom do you recommend the U.S. citizenry vote in the 2016 presidential election?
Perhaps you’re right – perhaps Obama’s pragmatism is playing into the hands of ISIS, Putin, etc. I can see the arguments for a firmer American stance and my mind is by no means made up on the subject. I am pretty ignorant when it comes to American politics. If you are counting the days though, all I’d say is just be careful what you wish for.
I thought we’d had a ‘firmer American stance’. It was called, if I recall rightly, Iraq…
And that worked so well…
Well, I’d say there’s probably a middle ground between current foreign policy and all-out war. And as I said originally I think Obama’s doing pretty well, especially considering how unprecedentedly precarious world politics is at the moment. So, whilst I can see the arguments for a firmer hand(which to me isn’t actually synonymous with ‘military invasion’:)) I’m tentatively supportive of Obama’s approach.
yes, agree, politicians have to be pragmatic.
Matt Dillahunty at the ATHEIST EXPERIENCE broadcast this past Sunday had a brilliant take on the situation. The video is not available yet but you can listen to the audio here –
http://atheist-experience.com/archive/
It’s available on USTEAM.
“//www.ustream.tv/recorded/58869531”
STREAM.
There’s a small > Matt’s excellent monologue about the recent news.
which appears on the right window.
For anyone wanting to salvage a useful lesson from the murders, I would have thought the obvious ones would be the importance of anger management, and gun control.
With regards the first, I doubt Hicks thought he’d get so carried away with a petty grievance that he would actually kill someone.
With regards the second, even if you have some libertarian reason for not supporting public gun control (and this is where I part company with Sam Harris), there’s still private gun control. Maybe some people might realise that it’s against their own interest to have a gun within easy reach.
“some atheists”…
Jerry, you should always name names, you know.
With respect–have you been paying attention? For instance, to previous posts here? Perhaps Jerry chose not to name names in this piece so as not to distract from the focus on the victims themselves.
Diane, my comment was tongue-in-cheek, and an obscure reference to an infamous Myers blog post.
It was not meant to be taken seriously, and I should have tried to convey it, maybe with a smiley.
For the record, I applaud Jerry for his position and dedication.
OH, Phil, I’m so sorry!
I should have realized that without needing any smiley.
Mea culpa.
No culpa to be mea’d whatsoever. I should have been clearer.
Yet another example of written medium run amok. I blame tw**ter (because why not?).
😀
(And thank you, but I still feel bad about it. I should have recognized you.)
I feel badly for those young people and their families and friends.
I feel badly for Sam et al who are being demonized. Just terrible.
I feel concerned that Sam et al will be targeted and murdered. I am concerned, as well, for his family and the families of Dawkins, Krauss, et al.
I’m always worried about Richard Dawkins. When I saw him in Toronto, I was a bit surprised that he has no detail of body guards. Not that we Canadians typically rush people (we think it’s rude to annoy famous people) but he probably is just less anxious about these things.
I saw Richard, Sam and Ayan Hirsi Ali in Melbourne a few years ago.. Sam and Richard seemed fairly relaxed, security wise, Ayan Hirsi however, I happened to see being quietly escorted from the back of the venue. There were 4 or 5 security people around her and a black windowed limo wating.
Melbourne is a pretty gun free place but I wonder how Richard and Sam may approch things now.
Probably been discussed already but – If a Muslim had killed three atheists over a parking dispute, atheists would be quick to blame religion. Of that I have little doubt.
Not necessarily. Some atheists might, but not this one. There would have to be some evidence that they KNEW he was an atheists, and killed him because of that. Look, Muslims just beheaded 21 Coptic Christians because they were Christians. They said that. The Muslims would have to say that they knew the guy was an atheist, and that he deserved murder because of that.
I gather your comment is accusing us of having a double standard. That won’t wash, because in all the terrorist killings in which I, at least, have implicated religion, the terrorists explicitly give a religious motive. The guy in North Carolina didn’t.
I reject your implicit accusation of double standards.
I think you should work on cultivating the capability for more doubt. Especially if you want to consider yourself a skeptic. Your scenario doesn’t seem to me to be anything like a foregone conclusion. I certainly wouldn’t jump to that conclusion.
“If a Muslim had killed three atheists over a parking dispute”…I’d blame the parking dispute. Your example explicitly tells us it was over a parking dispute so I’d be unreasonable not to(and by the way, Muslims kill atheists fairly frequently – off the top of my head I’m pretty sure at least a few of the CB cartoonists were non-believers).
The central asymmetry in your argument is that atheists don’t have a holy book that enjoins us to “strike off” the heads of those who disagree with our worldview. That kind of quote rather lingers in the mind, and I can imagine it influencing my immediate beliefs about whether these hypothetical believers of yours had killed on theological grounds. Nevertheless I’d still try and wait for some actual evidence to come through.
That comment makes no sense to me. If it was over a parking dispute how could Islam be to “blame”? Unless there’s some tenet of Islam, of which I’m unaware, that calls for killing people who take your parking spot.
I guess political activists like Greenwald and Aslam don’t get many opportunities like this. So they really have not much choice to use this tragedy for their means.
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig?
What to say?
I found her article despicable.
I have been wondering how to respond. There was lot to respond to.
I will only say this. Any one who has studied philosophy and then volantarily stuck with christianity and then come up with that vacuous understanding of New Atheism, has a limited intellect.
Why does she have a voice, she was as bad as, if not worse than Aslan?
I’ve just had a look at her rather plush website and a few of its ineffably tedious platitude-essays(I’ve always thought there was an inverse relationship between the amount of words someone uses to express themselves and the number of actual ideas they have to express).
She seems like one of those typical liberal believers whose theological views are so diffuse and neutered that they never, ever have to engage with any real arguments against their position. These people tend to be about as substantive and interesting as a fine mist. There really is very little difference between them and the RS/RE teachers who so skilfully avoided saying anything engaging when I was at school.
Nicely said.
Further thoughts. I now think it is extremely unfair to posting all these pictures of the happy smiling murder victims, not just here but everywhere.
It is pandering to our ’empathy’ circuitry and in a way manipulating our moral considerations.
I understand the sentiment we want to seem empathetic and show that we do care and see them (Muslims as people).
Paul Bloom has an article ‘Against Empathy’ warning of the peril in using empathy as a moral guide. There are others in agreement as well (as well as those who disagree).
We don’t get to see the happy smiling faces of millions of other ‘victims’ in the world.
We are not being presented with happy smiling pictures of Craig Hicks (should we?)
Just a quick thought. I may be wrong?
You are arguing against emotional manipulation. That’s not wrong.
Pictures are meant to both satisfy curiousity and put a face on an otherwise abstract entity, to make it register as human in our brain circuits.
You are right about the effect of emotion on that face in the picture: smiling or not…
Perhaps, there’s a balance between the two, somewhere.
Finding the balance, if only we could.
I believe you are quite wrong. Grasping the full meaning of an emotional incident requires that our emotions be triggered as well. In order to have a fully human response we need to be informed emotionally as well as intellectually.
Also, there’s likely to be quite a bit more coming out about Hicks as things move to trial. I don’t think we need to fear losing sight of him, or not hearing more about his life story and what he has to say for himself.
That’s a good point, we probably won’t lose sight of Hicks.
Yes, you may be.
Using just empathy and instinctive reactions as a moral guide is a terrible, terrible way to go about things(Julian Savalescu(?) talks about the ‘yuck factor’ in one of his essays, which is the factor that really underpins every Christian argument against homosexuality, and hundreds of other pointless, immiserating societal injunctions), but not using them at all is even worse. Although I’m pretty sure you’re not advocating either approach…
I do think there is something dodgy about the family of a murder victim having an influence on the sentence that the murderer receives(I’m not referring to Chapel Hill here – there’s a custom in Britain whereby the family of the victim can make a plea to the judge to lengthen his sentence and it sometimes feels rather like emotional blackmail from the people who are, frankly, least qualified to give an objective, unbiased summary of the situation) so there’s an argument for perhaps trying a little harder to disentangle our emotional, instinctive reaction from our reasoning. But in the end empathy is utterly crucial(and if ever there were a slippery slope argument this would be it). Get rid of it and we really do become those atheist caricatures you read about on Christian fundamentalist websites – you know the ones.
I am going to check out Julian Savulescu, I hadn’t heard of him
I was going to mention Peter Singer ( who some might claim to be close to one of those caricatures) somewhere in these ponderings and it turns out that Savulescu was influenced by Singer, who in turn was influenced by the Chair of my philosophy department when I was at school.
Australia has victim impact statements but i don’t think they can petition for sentencing consideration. Although victim groups and the like may push for that, claiming judges are out of touch.
I am looking into restoritive jstice as a concept at the moment. It might be ineresting.
Empathy is important, in its place, but seems to be biased and highly exlusionary.
I am still studying the area though.